The Trappings and the Suits of Woe

John Gielgud was the perfect Hamlet. He'd have told you so himself if you'd asked him when he was alive.

Why not? It was true.

He wasn't particularly modest about it, nor should he have been. He not only played Hamlet on stage from 1929-30 in such a revolutionary, quicksilver way that the damned part was his but he directed it again and again with others -including Olivier and Richard Burton, whom he more or less discovered - until, like Kenneth Brannagh now, when he came into a room the first thing your mind muttered was "Oh. It's Hamlet".

Yes, that's him from a publicity still, over there.

It's hard to think of him as a young man, lithe and springy with a full head of hair since, at least in this country, it seems he's always been old. Playing old or older men like Arthur's butler or Pope Pius XII or Edward Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. His Hamlet was never filmed, by the way. He refused the offer and played mostly character parts (in films anyway), with some exceptions, the rest of his life.

But he was very young once. And a stunningly strong leading Shakespearean man. Some of his personal correspondence, written over nearly a 70-year span, has been distilled into a series of readings by the BBC and I've been listening to them for the last few nights on my iPod. Read by Derek Jacobi - he of I, Claudius fame and yet another actor made famous playing Hamlet - they paint a fascinating, if at times gleefully bitchy, picture of Sir John the actor and Johnny G. the Gossip Diva.

Cast as Cassius in the 1953 version of "Julius Caesar", he vents on Brando's vocal style while gushing over Marlon's musculature. Lawrence Olivier, his protege he watched supercede him as the archetypal Shakespearean lead, gets mixed notes on his technique (too stiff) while Vivian Leigh, Olivier's wife at the time, is found hopeless as a stage actor.

It's all very catty and at times, cloying. It also helps that the BBC puts some context into the quotations so that those unfamiliar with Gielgud's herculean efforts to revive classical British theatre in the 30s can understand what the devil he's talking about. His letters to Lilian Gish are uber-gossipy while the ones he writes to Paul Antsee, his longtime lover, dither between asking for forgiveness (Sir John was a bit of a rover in those days) and extended pillow talk.

Gielgud, a consummate professional in his stagecraft, was generous to his friends and colleagues and must have been a bit of a sly tyrant as a director. But, unlike most actors, he wanted everyone around him to be better than he was.

Imagine that. Being better than Gielgud. On stage with Gielgud. Boggling, really.

Acting, for those who've never been on stage, is a sort of elaborate confidence game you play on people: your director, your fellow cast mates and best of all, the audience. It is deliciously fun and backbreaking-ly hard work but you need to have a certain mad quality to be really any good at it. You also have to be able to memorize enormous amounts of script, have the patience of Job and the ego of Napoleon, be born with the spatial awareness of a house fly and after all that be able to shuck the person you are offstage to become an utter stranger. Then be able to toss the stranger off like a worn shoe at the end of the show.

Gielgud wasn't just good at it, he was nearly the perfect actor. His speeches in Hamlet were tossed off at such speed and yet with such grace that audiences were given little choice but to pay rapt attention to him whenever he came on stage. In one of his letters he confesses that the speed of his delivery did not always allow him to understand or care what he was saying.

It didn't matter. Try saying this bit from Act 1, Scene 2 [you're all alone on stage, by the way, so the house is yours] without tripping on your tongue:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Uhuh. I thought so.

And he could sing, too.

The Thin and Thankless Dead

Safe behind a wall of glass, she stares out from a shelf in Room 71 of the British Museum. That's the Etruscan Room. Room 71 is a kind of blind extension of the Wolfson Gallery, Room 70 [Things Quite Roman] which flows, without too much fuss, right into Room 72 [Cyprus Was Important, Too]. The upstairs Gallery Rooms don't have inner doors, per se and run one into another like so many wondrous, if sometimes puzzling, gifts set before the King of Arts upon his birthday.

Yes, yes, everything is delightful but the average person's capacity for delightful by the boxcar-full isn't anywhere near boundless. Which would explain the grim faces and forced knee-steps of Those Dragged To A Museum.

Mr. Jurgens: Oh, God, not another room full of pots, Susan.
Mrs. Jurgens: Yes, another room full of pots. Be quiet. There's no pouting allowed in the Etruscan Room.
Mr. Jurgens: That's because the Romans killed them all and stole their lunch money. None left to say boo.

This isn't entirely true, of course. The Romans didn't - or couldn't - kill them all - they Romanized them. This is somewhat akin to being Simonized, except without the messy wax buildup. Some would say it was vice versa - that the rube, scruffy Romans were Etruscanized, and there's certainly a lot to support that theory. Rome's last kings were Etruscans and bequeathed much to their subjects: the Cloaca Maxima, a civil service and the Temple of Jupiter. Still, the Etruscan Tarquin the Proud was kicked out of town and the Romans, having had their fill of kings, went republic.

The Rasna [Etruscans did not call themselves Etruscan just as Nova Scotians don't call themselves Dread Northern Barbarian Cod-eaters] flourished in the nicer parts of pre-Roman Italy and Corsica for a very long time but we know crap all about what they were really like other than they were deeply superstitious about the Gods, threw swell parties and took funerals very, very seriously. Their language was isolate, like Basuqe, and is only now being - albeit very, very slowly - deciphered. I wouldn't hold out much hope of it ever really being fully understood since there aren't any more ancient Rasna around and they did not leave much to work with [except tomb inscriptions, which don't say much more than Here Lies Someone], unlike, say, Norman Mailer. Who died atop a groaning midden of his own printed babbling.

By the time I got to the Etruscan Room, on a rainy, miserable Sunday morning [just like today - blowing storms, spatters, low scud...all the weather of London and none of the charm here], I was ready for a bit of a break. You can only go "wowowowow" so many times before "wowowowow" loses some of its psychic punch. Admittedly, my camera-work wasn't exactly world-class but to be fair it's not always very bright in the Brit and I was in a hurry to see as much of as I could before meeting my wife for lunch, bedazzled and jet-lagged into a kind of shuffling, overloaded-on-antiquities stupor. Europe will do that to a man, if he lets it.

Back to the pot. She's hollow, terra-cotta and looks a lot better than this in person, of course; she's about the height of a standard poodle dog, maybe 8 or 9 inches across at the base. I think she's some sort of huge booze jug but since I took such terrible notes and can barely read the ones that survive from this trip...boy. Who knows? Elaborately painted once, a bit faded now as are these two Etruscan heads [right inset] which sit in the same case. Found in a tomb, etc.

The Etruscans were bibulous old sots and are believed to have introduced grapes to Italy from Arabia somewhere between 1,000 and 900 BC. Their pottery - the ubiquitous amphorae in some abundance, of course, but plenty of other sorts of vases, unguent jars, mixing krater, drinking cups and such - survived them. Their tongue, not so much.

If you think about it, you might want to thank the moody, long-dead Etruscans, quiet in their rattlebone graves now, for that bottle of Chardonnay in your fridge. Without them, it might have been a lot longer time coming.

But I doubt you'll think about it.

Whim City

This is what a whim looks like.

Or a worry.

Or, perhaps, good advice. I'm not adverse to hearing good advice and neither should you be, but still, it's a bit like someone else looking at your plate and thinking "perhaps he'd be healthier with a bit more kale instead of cake".

Says you, lady.

Still, you know they're probably right - providing you aren't hit and killed in the near future by a city bus or falling space debris or the angry fist of a Leukemia Devil in which case you really should have had another drink. However well-meaning, corrective, marmish advice has a sour, gritty bite to it. Like steamed kale in clam water.

So a very good friend says this: Why don't you, you know, blog? Me? Whatever for? And who would read it?

I would.

And then this nudge from "The Poison Pen", the Sisters in Crime newsletter:

...are now discussing blogs and Web pages. Most agree an author needs one or the other to get noticed or when asking for representation from an agent. Some say their blog or Web site brought an agent to them...

Hm. Alright then. Worth a try, anyway.

It's a bit empty, like a newly rented terrace house (but without the ghosts of dead servants and that vague cooked cabbage odor), but that'll fix. With time and a bit of typing.

Today's curiosity: I found a dollar in my pocket this morning, folded over and tucked inside a few other bills. Change from a $20 spent on yesterday's lunch at a burger joint. My wife, off to a movie with her co-worker, asked if I had any loot and discovered that one of the dollars, a limpid thing worn elderly by thousands of whispery fingertips, was covered with writing. Well, the back, anyway.

Around the green plate engraving on the reverse of the $1 was written, in creakily printed blue ballpoint pen, the following:

San Jodas tadeo, la Persona que reciba esta billete y escriba lo mismo en 12 billetes nunca le fultara la Salud, el dinero y la prosperidad.

At least that's what I think it says. Babel Fish (my own Spanish is of the 'mi casa no es rojo, Miguel' variety) translates this as:

San tadeo Jodas, the Person who receives this ticket and the same writes in 12 tickets never him fultara the Health, the money and the prosperity.

Well. Right. It's one of those St. Jude prayer chits. I thought they only lived in the Classified tabs of newspapers, somewhere between Free Puppies and Happy Birthday, Jerome Nifflinger.

You have to wonder about people who take the time to carefully sit inscribing prosperity prayers around the borders of paper money only to release them back into the wild.

Was it a whim? Or a worry?

Or was it advice?