Dear friends,
First of all, I’d like to say a big thank you for subscribing! In this new monthly series of Desk Notes, I hope to share some of the things that I’ve been reading, watching and thinking about. Please feel free to comment and share some of the stories that have interested you during the last month too.
Recent weeks have been marked by global upheaval and distress, but also by demonstrations of unity, strength and hope. The last of the snow has passed here in England and spring has finally emerged — tulips have pushed their stems above ground and bright yellow daffodils are in bloom.
‘Second Place’ by Rachel Cusk
The last few weeks I’ve been reading Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, a meditation on male privilege and female identity. This was my first foray into Cusk’s work and it strikes me that her writing is best devoured slowly. Hardly a page in my copy has been left unmarked; the book’s beauty revealed in exquisite moments of acute observation. At times it felt like Cusk was leafing through my own thoughts and speaking them back to me.
“I do remember being unusually aware that I had never lived in my own beauty, to the extent that I possess any. It had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing - it had felt, occasionally, immanent, but I had never had the sensation of holding it in my hand. I see that I am suggesting, by saying that, that I believe other women do have that sensation, and I don’t know whether that is really true.”
The novel is an intimate chamber piece filtered through the lens of its self-reflective narrator: a middle-aged woman, M, who is deeply affected by the paintings of an older male artist known only as L. It is inspired by the memoir of Mabel Dodge Luhan who recollects the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos (a reference I would love to explore further). Introducing the theme of the male-gaze, M describes how L typically, “effaced,” the women in his work:
“In the portraits she usually wears some kind of mask or disguise; sometimes she seems to love him, at others merely to be tolerating him. But his desire when it comes, extinguishes her.”
M first encounters L’s work as a young mother, “on the brink of rebellion,” and is unable to fathom why its, “freedom, elementally and unrelentingly male down to the last brushstroke,” held her in thrall:
“It’s a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we got accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise. We get our dictionaries and we puzzle it out, and avoid some of the parts we can’t make sense of or understand, and some others we know we’re not entitled to and voilà!, we participate. It’s a case of borrowed finery, and sometimes of downright impersonation.”
It’s a skill that anyone from a group under-represented in popular culture is obliged to learn. I recall an eloquent article about the ‘Male Glance’ by Lili Loofbourow, written in the wake of a backlash against the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters and growing calls for more female-led stories in film and television. She quotes Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, who describes the unconscious lure of male-led stories in a culture where they predominate:
“I spent pretty much the first 10 years of my writing career focused entirely on men. I wrote about men, and I wrote for men. Whenever I wrote about women, either in fiction or in journalism, they were women interlopers in men’s worlds. This makes perfect sense to me in retrospect: during those years – I think I was truly confused about whether I wanted to be surrounded by men or whether I just wanted to be a man. My favourite moments during those years were when I would be with a group of men (on a ranch, in a bar, on a ship, on a trip) and they would seem to forget for a spell that I was a girl, and I could see their real faces, their true selves. That always seemed beautiful and magical to me.”
So much of M’s struggle in Second Place surrounds her desire to be seen - something L resolutely refuses to do when she invites him to stay at her ‘second place’ on the remote marshland property she shares with second husband Tony. What transpires is a battle of wills. In his desire to “destroy” her, L becomes the toxic male-gaze made flesh. But his art also provides a foil for feminine creation in the form of motherhood. In parallels with Sheila Heti’s 2018 novel on the theme, Cusk explores the dual sacrifice and expression of identity that occurs in both art and child-rearing. And, unlike L’s muses, M resists being effaced:
“‘You can’t just blot me out, because it makes you feel sick to see me - I’m just as untouchable as anyone else! I don’t exist to be seen by you,’ I said, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one that’s trying to free myself from how you see me. You’d feel better if you could see what I actually am, but you can’t. Your sight is a kind of murder, and I won’t be murdered any more.’”
Screens
‘Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime’ Channel 4
Strangeways Riot: 25 Days of Mayhem’ Channel 5
In 2007 a judge condemned ITV’s Jeremy Kyle Show as, “a human form of bear-baiting.” The ‘conflict resolution’ talk show took the staged confrontations of Jerry Springer to a new level. Back-stage, participants were stoked-up by producers and provoked into real-life, and sometimes violent, outbursts. Jeremy Kyle was well known for his ‘straight talking’ style, delivering ‘home truths’ to drug addicts, adulterers and absent fathers. In one extract featured in Channel 4’s documentary Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime, Kyle scolds a vulnerable woman struggling with heroine addiction, “You’re disgusting…Look at you. What are you?”
When the show first aired in 2005 I was in my early twenties and remember the negative attitude towards working class people in popular culture at the time. Many towns and cities were still reeling from the consequences of Thatcherism and de-industrialisation (including my home town in north-Nottinghamshire) and working class pride was coming under assault from malicious headlines about benefit-cheats, benefit-dependents and stay-at-home single mums. I’d recently graduated in Social Policy where the modish terms, ‘underclass’ and ‘social exclusion,’ seemed to uncomfortably recall the Victorian ‘Jago’s’ - a group of unemployed slum-dwellers whose very membership of that community disbarred them from mainstream society.
Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel, A Child of the Jago, paints a grim picture of life before the welfare safety-net that became so maligned by the right-wing press in the 1990s and early 2000s — a life of extreme poverty in overcrowded, squalid rental accommodation and dependence on crime. But it was popular, misguided beliefs about the ‘nanny state’ - which many believed was over-reaching and, in essence, the welfare state gone too far - that made it acceptable for Kyle to berate and abuse his participants without truly hearing their stories or asking them “why.”
Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime explores the cancellation of the show following the suicide of participant Steve Dymond in 2019 and reveals the exploitative behind-the-scenes production process. But it also questions why Kyle was so popular in the first place (the show ran for over 3,300 episodes). Its audience was largely working class, but while the show appeared to offer this under-represented group a voice on screen, it also contributed to their demonisation. One news clip shows commentators arguing that white working class people are, “the last demographic in this country whom it’s acceptable to mock, it’s actually the last remaining demographic people feel comfortable sneering at.” Another says their demonisation enables the government to sanction the poor - “to make it their fault.” A whistleblower and former cameraman on the show is clear that it:
“Is a production line, this is a factory. You feed emotionally vulnerable people in one end. It’s just like a meat processing plant, that’s all it is really. And the cruelty was engineered into it. It’s cruel to bring already damaged people somewhere, to make them absolutely distraught purely for public entertainment and ratings. This programme was manipulative on so many levels. It’s not just the guests who were victims, it’s the people working on it too because they were under such huge pressure to reach certain benchmarks. If you look at who was in the studio audience, who the guests were, the people who were at the lower levels making the programme, it was a largely working class programme but it was middle class people running it. They were using working class people to basically feed working class people to other working class people, there is no other way of saying it.”
The feature-length documentary Strangeways Riot: 25 Days of Mayhem reveals a similar capacity for voyeurism of the working classes in 90s Britain. This time, it provided public entertainment through inflammatory, ‘us versus them’ headlines, but also contributed to obtaining improvements in prison conditions. The protracted riot at Manchester’s Strangeways in 1990 provided some of the decade’s biggest headlines. It was born from the incompatibility of Victorian prison infrastructure with the modern social problems it was expected to contain.
Strangeways was designed in 1868 to house 970 prisoners but, by 1990, was coping with almost twice that. Prisoners were often three to a cell that was designed for just one (measuring just 13ft by 7ft), without proper sanitation and often locked up for 23 hours a day. Mornings involved a disgusting process of ‘slopping-out’ the buckets, used as toilets, into a communal drain. When prisoners violently took control of the corridors and gained the roof, press and public surrounded the prison to watch the spectacle unfold. Prisoners began using banners to communicate with journalists and were eventually given a voice for their cause through newspaper headlines and images.
Exploiting the so-called ‘underclass’ for entertainment is part of a long tradition. I feel it’s important to remember that Morrison’s own novel about the Jago fed a middle class appetite for sensational stories about a hidden London. And, despite showing empathy in his characterisation of the slum-dwellers, Morrison’s own attitudes towards them were less sympathetic. ‘Slum journalism’ had been emerging to document conditions in deprived urban areas for a curious middle class readership since the late 1840s. And, in parallel with the coverage of the Strangeway’s riot in 1990, it raised awareness, contributing to change, whilst simultaneously creating and reinforcing negative stereotypes.
The sight of tourists turning up outside the prison gates to watch and celebrate the riot, armed with BBQs and ice creams, is not so far removed from Victorian day-trippers, visiting London’s slums for fun. An article in an 1894 edition of the Daily Mail states that:
“You can now embark upon a ‘personally conducted’ tour of Darkest London for the sum of a guinea. But you must not wear a tall hat, and if you are a lady desirous of seeing life in a great city at its lowest ebb, you can only be conducted round in the day.”
125 years later, the same newspaper reports that:
“A tour around one of the world's biggest slums has been named by TripAdvisor as India's most highly rated tourist experience… it also came 10th in the list of the best tourist experiences in the whole of Asia.”
If you’re interested in reading more about the ethics of modern day ‘slumming’, I recommend this compelling essay from the National Geographic.
Sounds
‘On Charlotte Mew’ LRB Podcast
I couldn’t end this month’s Desk Notes without sharing a link to the London Review of Book’s fascinating podcast on Victorian poet, Charlotte Mew. Seamus Perry from the University of Oxford and Mark Ford from University College London explore how Mew’s proximity to mental illness and death influenced her work, reading aloud a number of important poems. Mew was admired by Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, focussing her work on damaged and marginalised characters. In the The Farmer’s Bride, Perry and Ford explore themes of unrequited love and desire as a young maid flees the farmer who chose her for a wife. In Madeleine in Church they describe the fleshy, bodily descriptions of religious figures that disturbed some contemporary readers, as a divorced woman considers her many lovers in church.
Mew employs rhyme in her poetry, making it quite beautiful to hear spoken aloud. I’ll sign off now, leaving you with her short poem, The Narrow Door, and encourage you to read it to someone.
The narrow door, the narrow door On the three steps of which the café children play Mostly at shop with pebbles from the shore, It is always shut this narrow door But open for a little while to-day. And round it, each with pebbles in his hand, A silenced crowd the café children stand To see the long box jerking down the bend Of twisted stair; then set on end, Quite filling up the narrow door Till it comes out and does not go in any more. Along the quay you see it wind, The slow black line. Someone pulls up the blind Of the small window just above the narrow door — ‘Tiens! que veux-tu acheter?’ Renee cries, ‘Mais, pour quat’sous, des oignons,’ Jean replies, And one pays down with pebbles from the shore.
Have you read or seen any of the stories featured in this month’s Desk Notes? Let me know your thoughts in the Comments and share the books, films and podcasts you’ve enjoyed this month.
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This month’s featured image is ‘The House that Jack built: with twelve cuts [A satire in verse on the sale of gin and beer]’ by George Cruikshank, 1792-1878, courtesy of the British Library. Print, screen, sound & post office banners are courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.
Hello, Natalie. Congratulations for the newsletter. Its so interesting. Almost like a mini blog through email. We do have slum tourism here in Brazil, but mainly in Rio de Janeiro. I must say its not something I feel like doing, because it can be quite dangerous. Most slums here are dominated by drug traffickers. Not everyone living in a slum are criminals and I believe some of them are ok with the tourists (its a way of making money for the community and perhaps growing awareness of poverty), still I'm not sure whether it is a positive thing. Aren't we just using the poor as entertainment just like Victorians did? Finally, I'm intrigued by Charlotte Mew's poetry and I'll definitely give a go to the podcast.
Such interesting and thought provoking articles. I look forward to reading the next issue.