Dearth of the Author.

 Stewart Lee has been in trouble recently. This not news. Stewart Lee is generally in trouble for something or other he is supposed to have said. When you are as articulate and intelligent as Stewart Lee and take your work with the same amount of seriousness; you are bound to upset people. The latest upset has been played out in the media as ‘Stewart Lee says comedians don’t write their own jokes’ (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/stewart-lee-accuses-highprofile-comedians-michael-mcintrye-jack-whitehall-and-frankie-boyleof-using-writers-8718101.html) with of course specific mention of Michael McIntyre. This led to a number of predictable rebuttals of something he never said “What about Frank Sinatra – how many songs did he write?” “Morecombe and Wise” etc.

You don’t need me to tell you that this is all the usual nonsense. The substance comes from a talk Stewart Lee (http://www.youtube.com/embed/IrXVaytvJtQ) gave discussing the idea of ‘Stand-up’ as a piece of writing. He gave a fascinating history of the art form and pointed out the difference between the Milton Berle/Bob Hope model of delivering a number of finely honed ‘zingers’ with a defined beginning and end, with the model pioneered by Lenny Bruce of  ‘riffing’ around a subject matter, in which presents a stand piece as unified whole, building throughout with a number of call-backs. In the UK, stand-up comedy up until the 70s seemed to rely largely on the ‘zinger’ model with working men’s club comedians drawing their material from a shared pool of jokes – when ‘The Comedians’ was filmed; jokes were written up on a blackboard so everyone knew which ones had been taken and which ones could be used. The ‘Alternative’ model drew its inspiration from the Lenny Bruce ‘riff’ model and featured comedians such as Alexei Sayle and Jerry Sadowitz giving what appeared to be an intently personal world view in a manner which was uniquely their own.

(Slight digression; there is of course a massive difference between form and content. As late as 1991, I remember seeing a comedian whose name escapes me delivering a five minute monologue on a daytime TV show and seeing the exact same monologue being delivered by Mike Reid on a late showing of his stand-up act. The monologue consisted of that kind of low-level endearing xenophobia common to the club comedian (“I see the Gulf War started – the Italians surrendered just in case…the Germans went in first..and put their towels on the beach) but were delivered in almost totally opposite ways. Comedian Whose Name Escapes Me delivered it with a huge grin and the implied complicity of his audience; Mike Reid with an embittered world weariness, angered beyond belief that the appropriate response to a sanction busting invasion would be to concentrate on beach wear, which arguably served the material better. Anyway, as my producer said to me…….).

The alternative ‘riff’ model seemed to depend on an almost puritan idea of the comedian as writer; every word out of their mouth had to have come from their own consciousness. Lee’s point is that throughout the eighties and nineties, Stand-up was almost the only ‘authored’ piece of theatre that could be found in a world where revivals and tribute acts seemed to make up most of what was passing for live entertainment. However, as comedy once again became more mainstream; the ‘zinger’ model became more prominent; comedians were expected to sit on panel games such as “Have I got News For You’ and ‘Mock The Week’ and pretend to instantly deliver finely honed bon mots. The constraints of having to generate amusing material week after week has led to the phenomenon of the ‘Programme Associate” – the writer who dare not speak their name. Lee’s point is that the idea of the stand-up comedian as author is once again being eroded rather than any shock horror revelation of a hitherto unspoken truth.

Of course the tension between the ‘writer’ and the ‘author’ of a piece is a long standing one. 19^th Century French literature saw two contrasting models of ‘authorship’ with Alexandre Dumas churning out reams of material with the aid of collaborators on the one hand; and Gustav Flaubert spending months on a single page of ‘Sentimental Education’ on the other. There is no doubt, however, that Dumas was able to speak with his own voice whatever the contribution of Auguste Maquet. Perhaps more controversially, the idea of ‘auteur’ versus ‘writer’ has seen many bloody battles fought in the world of cinema. In an essay ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’; the writer William Goldman sought to dismantle this idea by pointing out that a film is the creation of many different individuals; the actor, producer, cameraman. writer, editor, composer and designer as well as the director so how can the director possibly be referred to as the ‘author’ of a piece of cinema. However, Goldman’s undermines his own argument when discussing how the auteur theory destroyed the career of Alfred Hitchcock –

“Hitchcock, from ’54 to ’60 was on a truly wondrous streak; glorious entertainments. Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest and Psycho...Following Psycho in ’63 came The Birds. Some nice shock effects, period. And from then on it really got bad – Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy – awful, awful films”.

I am by no means the world’s biggest Hitchcock fan, but, at this point we need to reply

“Just a minute, when you say these films were awful, what do you mean? In each of them, was the editing uniformly awful? Did the script writer coincidentally take a downward fall along with Hitch? Was the photographer deciding to phone it in as well? If Hitchcock was not the ‘author’ of these films and film is just a group effort, is it a coincidence that all members of a group had a decline in their powers at the same time?”

Goldman appears to have confused the idea of the author as ‘sole begetter of all material” (and incidently with the idea of author as creator of material of consistent artistic worth).

Which is of course nonsense. Anyone who sets out to create anything creative is either implicitly or explicitly engaged in a dialogue with all that has come before them in that field as well as the environment in which they create. Try to write, draw paint or compose and you will find echoes of what is around and what has gone before entering your work; the question is whether to deny or openly acknowledge these influences. Much of the language of ‘Bed of Crimson Joy’ is taken directly from William Blake…but I hope I am doing something more than merely taking Blake’s lines and paraphrasing them. ‘West Side Story’ is quite definitely NOT Romeo and Juliet in modern language and with music; it is a specific 1950s American work addressing itself to 1950s American questions of racial versus national identity and youth culture…but of course it would not have been written without an awareness of Romeo and Juliet.

Which of course, brings me not at all neatly to the ‘Shakespearean Authorship Question’ (which has been partly responsible for my absence from this blog for the last few months). One of the most unintentionally amusing scenes in Roland Emmerich/John Orloff’s pisspoor Anonymous is that of the Earl of Oxford rummaging through a selection of neatly bound plays on his bookshelf only to hand Ben Jonson a copy of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The authorship question does depend in part on the idea of ‘author as sole begetter’ and if you are inclined to think of the author as sole begetter, sat alone in a garrett, going through a painful labour before giving birth to a whole work, then of course it will seem ridiculous that a shoe-maker’s son in a provincial Midland’s town could produce the Canon as we know it. Of course he didn’t. The contributions of writers such as Middleton, Wilkins and Fletcher to the works are now no longer a matter of controversy but the lesser contributions of comedians such as Will Kemp and Robert Armin (the lead clown in the later plays and a writer himself) may be a fruitful area for study. And of course, Shakespeare was engaged in a constant dialogue with those that came before him names such as Holinshed, Greene and Ovid. And of course Shakespeare was writing at the time of one of the greatest literary explosions in London with theatre becoming big business. Writers such as Fletcher, Dekker, Marlowe, Jonson and Beaumont (among many others) wrote either alone or in collaboration, communicating with, commentating on and attacking each other over their works. Allied to this, there was a scientific revolution in London, of which Holger Syme says the following

“Want to learn about botany? Walk over to Lime Street and talk to the Dutch And French apothecaries there, part of an international network of naturalists. Want to see what the rich and fashionable are into, or what exciting spices and luxury items can be had elsewhere in the world? Take a walk around Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange. Want to know more about fencing, or smoking, or speechifying, or what have you? Hang out in the aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral, swarming with hustlers and gossips — a veritable real-life Wikipedia of early modern pop culture. Need to know about Venice? Why not talk to one of the many Italians, some of them glassblowers from Venice, who lived and worked near Bishopsgate, where they would gather to gossip in the evening during what a visiting Italian observer described as their “Rialto hour”?
And want to figure out a bunch of legal terms? Why not talk to some of the legal professionals crowded into the neighbourhoods just outside the West gates of the city, Ludgate and Newgate — or chat to them before or after one of the many plays Inns-of-Court students liked to frequent?”
(http://www.dispositio.net/archives/538)

So how could a mere shoe-makers son know details about law, medicine or court etiquette? He asked someone.