Teaching Jane Austen Handwriting
24/11/2015
The Hoggarts, well connected couple as they were, met the schools’ inspector (and later best selling writer) Gervase Finn at a Literary Dinner a few years ago. I remembered his name – people said, in the South Yorkshire town where we both lived, ‘You must meet Gerv..’ but have no recollection of doing so. Nor do I remember him sitting at the back of one of my classes. But he said to the Hoggarts that I was the best classroom teacher he had ever seen. If he’s got the right person I am grateful and should wonder more than I do about giving up teaching. I’m only, after all, the best I can manage as a writer. Glenda Jackson, who features in the introduction to these essays, was the supreme actress of her generation yet chose to become an M.P., just one of a number. I think she would claim, I doing so, to anticipate some of the difficulties older actresses have with a paucity of roles. But I think I was anticipating, too. More on that later. I continued, once I was established as a writer, to still teach (or ‘look after’), in an occasional way, younger writers at the Royal Court or National Theatre. It’s a role I enjoyed. One of them was so good my only use to him was showing him how to set out a film or TV script – a version of ‘A Skull in Connemara,’ if I remember rightly. In that respect - Martin McDonagh was the unknown’s name - I’m the equivalent of whoever it was (her clergyman father probably) who showed Jane Austen handwriting. I remember walking into the little room at the National Theatre Studio once and saying to Martin, ‘Well, I think you’ve written a masterpiece’ – it was ‘The Beauty Queen of Lenane,’ a typed copy, before it was staged in England. McDonagh – he would probably admit this himself – is not the easiest person to get along with, but he smiled and we talked about his play, and though I was meant to see him for a few more sessions I didn’t. There was nothing I could teach him. We had some desultory conversation about presenting yourself at an interview: he was very scruffy then (this is the Chesterfield School Head Boy coming out in me) and, the last time I saw him, he was dressed like a Regency buck, but that might have been simply a matter of his finances on the up. My brief from the Literary Manager was to quietly get him to write bigger plays than ‘Lenane’ but I think he knew that himself already. I couldn’t offer very much to Abi Morgan, either, except encourage her to write more in her own voice. Moira Buffini was brilliant and only wanted confirmation of her own best instincts: ‘I’ve got two plays I could write. One’s more problematic than the other.’ ‘Write that one,’ I said, ‘You’ve got eight weeks being subsidised.’ The play was ‘Silence’, which is astonishing in its first act and then peters out a bit. With a later RSC play of Moira’s which I saw as a workshop production (I’m not sure it moved beyond that) I gave her some detailed structural criticisms. She said, ‘But If I do these, Stephen, it will be your play rather than mine.’ The last two writers I looked after were David Eldridge and Roy Williams. Not a bad end to my ‘teaching’ career. They didn’t know it but the problem I had with these young tyros – one after another going places, dammit– was that I was seeing them when my own work (and life) was leading nowhere. I remember showing Jonathan Harvey a TV version of a play I had written about a wedding, again demonstrating the lay-out. The following day he had written his own – first?- TV script on the same subject. It was funnier and much more fluent than mine (if a mite more obvious – he was always heading towards sit-com and ‘Coronation Street,’ never snooty like me). But these youngsters were prodigiously talented and hungry. McDonagh once sat behind me at a Jez Butterworth play at the Court, ‘Mojo’, and took notes.
After fifteen years as a writer I had become ‘established,’ not quite a name – but that wasn’t what it was about. I have never had the overwhelming ambition to have a play at the National or get an Oscar. I just wanted to be a writer, hence jettisoning a decent career in the state sector – secondary school teaching. If I had started off hoping to be D.H. Lawrence, this had settled long since into wanting to be a television playwright (I had been brought up with television – theatre never quite ‘did’ it for me). I would watch a Jack Pulman adaptation – I remember ‘The Golden Bowl’ - or an original Colin Welland play (he died this week); I wanted to write for series like ‘Country Matters’ (adaptations of H.E. Bates and A.E. Coppard). And I had succeeded - in a great rush in the Eighties, adaptations, single plays, drama-docs. Only by the mid Nineties the market had dried up: they weren’t the staple of television. Othello’s occupation had gone. I tried theatre, encouraged by John Burgess and Nicky Wright at the National, who had liked a Royal Court play of mine, and at one time had simultaneous commissions from the RSC and the National, but neither – finally – came to anything. It isn’t my metier. But it went beyond a writerly inadequacy or competence. I remember a dinner party in North London I went to with – again - Hoggart. I can’t remember why it was just the two of us – his wife, Alyson wasn’t there. I later drove him home, (and he gave me his book on the States, mentioned in ‘The Wily Si’). We had known the host, an Observer journalist, and his wife, separately. I must have been on some kind of good form that night, because the following morning I had a call from the hostess, congratulating me on the way I had ‘sparkled’ – or whatever her term for it was – at the dinner. I remember feeling like some performing monkey, and thought, ‘I will never do that again.’ What I knew was I’d come to an end, was feeding off fat. There had been too many London media suppers. I was weary of London, weary, above all, of myself. It was the start of a downward slide. The cracks were beginning to show. I was due to go to a dinner with the Hoggarts – Colin Firth, no less, was there, I later learnt – but I didn’t turn up. Simon came looking for me the following day, worried at my unexplained no show. I hadn’t been replying to the the phone, didn’t answer the door, and made some – vague - lame excuse later: ‘Sorry, I was a bit depressed..’ There was also a (weekend) Kinnock restaurant meal at that time and, again, I stayed away, couldn’t face it. It left an empty place next to Mandelson, who later said – in his pantomime dame way - ‘Oh, I’ll never talk to you again,’ and never did. Kinnock, whom I had to meet on the Tuesday for his Fiftieth (in the Dinosaur Room at the Natural History Museum) tackled me: ‘Where were you?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ which was true – these bashes set you back thirty quid or so. There was a moment and he said, ‘In which case I’ll pay.’ It wasn’t just the money, of course. I was – or was becoming - depressed, without realising its full implications, or that it would be for some years a persistent state: grey, not black, but almost always grey. I started missing out on jobs I hadn’t even needed to tilt for a few years previously: it was an effort even to get to the producer’s office. I felt like ‘yesterday’s’ BBC writer (the BBC Drama Department was being dismembered). We were into multi channels, ‘shows that make a louder noise’; the newer producers I was meeting seemed like wide boys (and girls) and I felt stale. They smelt it. I’d been warned by Sheila, my agent, that I needed to shake myself up a bit, be less reliant on the single play or film, but took no notice, failed to keep up with what was happening round me, which was ‘Prime Suspect,’ basically. I simply didn’t want to write or contribute to serials. It was obvious I couldn’t continue the way I was. I had thought I was set on a continuing upward course. Read Sylvia Plath – that high achiever’s life - and you read of something similar. Suddenly the momentum stops. It’s terrifying. And, let’s leave it there. As Jane Austen (who had an inert, depressive period – pre- Chawton) said, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery..’
Well, I wasn’t going to finish up with my head in the gas oven. The great thing about depression is it shows you’ve come to an end. Of what? The media and social success wasn’t ‘me’ or what I really wanted to be. I’d lost touch with myself. All my instincts, in life and work are for quietness, contemplation. It’s why I’m happy in monasteries. What I like is a quiet, almost reclusive life, and to write what I want: quiet stuff, ‘quirky’? where I want to go, at least. I’m quite funny, not belly laughs, more wry. I like muted tones. I’ve written an essay on Ravilious in this sequence, whom I’d not discovered then. He’d be the painterly equivalent of what I’m attempting to describe (though am reluctant to label, pin down, in case it goes away again): water colour, not great dramatic oils. And I had to flail around for a number of years to get back to my instinctive habits and abilities. To live a life that’s sustaining, to write out of that.
So somewhere in the early Nineties I was seeking renewal. It didn’t lie on the dancefloor of ‘Heaven’ (see ‘Bad Company’) or in establishing more of a gay identity, though those experiences contributed. In 1996 I cast off, away from the capital, glad of having had a dozen years or so of a London life, but – symbolically? - convinced that I had to give it up, renounce. I went abroad (on my – Norman Tebbit? - bike) and the house described in ‘The House in France,’ and then, gradually, settled more quietly in Kent. I still visit London for long stretches – it’s where I type this – and rather envy the youngsters who buzz around the pubs and clubs and cinemas and theatres. Just lately, post operation, I’m incapable of living that kind of life anyway, but, make no mistake, very, very glad I once did it. I had a whale of a time. It just wasn’t sustaining, that’s all.
I’m aware of a larger pattern - it’s not just me and my trajectory. Hindus wandered off into forests in the third, late, age of their lives. I wish I had a settled faith to enter a monastery but my (at one time extensive) theological reading, without helping me find that faith, has certainly helped underpin my present way of life. I am never so happy these days as climbing the stairs at Mirfield at eight in an evening, between Evensong and Compline – to visit and chat with my friend John Gribben. He’s a former Prior of the monastery, Northern Irish, from a big working class family, very bright and sometimes waspish. We talk about writing a lot – he’s talented but claims he doesn’t get the time to rewrite. One of his current jobs is to collect stuff for auction (for monastery funds). His brother is an auctioneer and John’s room at the front of what was a Victorian mill owner’s mansion, is large and dark and cluttered with the latest acquisitions, (altar) silver candlesticks gleaming in the shadows. He says I would have made a ‘terrible’ monk: ‘You’re too used to suiting yourself.’
Back to teaching. Without regretting the choice I made to become a full time writer – near fifty performed plays later there is a sense of achievement - my first two years of adult employment as a teacher in a big comprehensive school might just have been the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life. After years of the me, me, me of a grammar School education and Cambridge University, I was in front of classes of ‘ordinary’ kids – a big South Yorkshire comprehensive. I had plunged straight in, with no teacher training, the way you could – just – then. I remember that first year and a particular thirteen year old trouble maker, part of one of the most difficult classes I taught (and ‘tamed’). ‘Where’s Beadle?’ I asked. ‘His dad’s dead,’ was the reply. He had been killed down the pit the previous night. Another member of that class went on to murder someone (deliberately, in a gunsmith’s shop, just picked up the weapon and shot). I attended his trial in Sheffield, just after I had given up teaching full time. But there were easier classes, less problematic kids. Because I have an unusual second name and am easily discovered on the internet, I still get communications from ex-pupils, some of whom I don’t recall (apart from their names). ‘I remember you reading “Great Expectations” and when I went home I (the pupil) would then read it to our next door neighbour’s son , who was at Junior School, in our garden shed…’
But what I knew and observed was that you can’t sustain – that word again – your energy and enthusiasm as a classroom teacher for too many years. Even the best teachers become jaded. Some become bitter. A number break down. I witnessed some of this in that huge school staffroom near fifty years ago – a staffroom full of the fag smoke that has now been abolished. However able I was, I wanted to escape teaching, finally. I had always wanted to be a writer, and remember, when my agent wrote to say my first play had been commissioned, showing her letter (with its free, bold signature) to one or two of my pals in the staff room. I was amazed I was being paid for something I so much enjoyed doing. There was a big decision to make in giving up teaching – and a head of department’s job – for writing. Later – why did I imagine it would be different? - there was an even bigger decision to be made in deciding to continue to write. I’ve detailed these things elsewhere, here and in the earlier essays. We have to reconstitute ourselves while staying true to ourselves – and live with the consequences. I’ve ‘lived out my passion’, as my student-relative at Durham University said to me recently. He’s called Tom Wakelam, and I hardly know him – (see ‘Genealogy’). I feel the need to qualify that encomium with baser motives, but that can wait till another essay.
After fifteen years as a writer I had become ‘established,’ not quite a name – but that wasn’t what it was about. I have never had the overwhelming ambition to have a play at the National or get an Oscar. I just wanted to be a writer, hence jettisoning a decent career in the state sector – secondary school teaching. If I had started off hoping to be D.H. Lawrence, this had settled long since into wanting to be a television playwright (I had been brought up with television – theatre never quite ‘did’ it for me). I would watch a Jack Pulman adaptation – I remember ‘The Golden Bowl’ - or an original Colin Welland play (he died this week); I wanted to write for series like ‘Country Matters’ (adaptations of H.E. Bates and A.E. Coppard). And I had succeeded - in a great rush in the Eighties, adaptations, single plays, drama-docs. Only by the mid Nineties the market had dried up: they weren’t the staple of television. Othello’s occupation had gone. I tried theatre, encouraged by John Burgess and Nicky Wright at the National, who had liked a Royal Court play of mine, and at one time had simultaneous commissions from the RSC and the National, but neither – finally – came to anything. It isn’t my metier. But it went beyond a writerly inadequacy or competence. I remember a dinner party in North London I went to with – again - Hoggart. I can’t remember why it was just the two of us – his wife, Alyson wasn’t there. I later drove him home, (and he gave me his book on the States, mentioned in ‘The Wily Si’). We had known the host, an Observer journalist, and his wife, separately. I must have been on some kind of good form that night, because the following morning I had a call from the hostess, congratulating me on the way I had ‘sparkled’ – or whatever her term for it was – at the dinner. I remember feeling like some performing monkey, and thought, ‘I will never do that again.’ What I knew was I’d come to an end, was feeding off fat. There had been too many London media suppers. I was weary of London, weary, above all, of myself. It was the start of a downward slide. The cracks were beginning to show. I was due to go to a dinner with the Hoggarts – Colin Firth, no less, was there, I later learnt – but I didn’t turn up. Simon came looking for me the following day, worried at my unexplained no show. I hadn’t been replying to the the phone, didn’t answer the door, and made some – vague - lame excuse later: ‘Sorry, I was a bit depressed..’ There was also a (weekend) Kinnock restaurant meal at that time and, again, I stayed away, couldn’t face it. It left an empty place next to Mandelson, who later said – in his pantomime dame way - ‘Oh, I’ll never talk to you again,’ and never did. Kinnock, whom I had to meet on the Tuesday for his Fiftieth (in the Dinosaur Room at the Natural History Museum) tackled me: ‘Where were you?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ which was true – these bashes set you back thirty quid or so. There was a moment and he said, ‘In which case I’ll pay.’ It wasn’t just the money, of course. I was – or was becoming - depressed, without realising its full implications, or that it would be for some years a persistent state: grey, not black, but almost always grey. I started missing out on jobs I hadn’t even needed to tilt for a few years previously: it was an effort even to get to the producer’s office. I felt like ‘yesterday’s’ BBC writer (the BBC Drama Department was being dismembered). We were into multi channels, ‘shows that make a louder noise’; the newer producers I was meeting seemed like wide boys (and girls) and I felt stale. They smelt it. I’d been warned by Sheila, my agent, that I needed to shake myself up a bit, be less reliant on the single play or film, but took no notice, failed to keep up with what was happening round me, which was ‘Prime Suspect,’ basically. I simply didn’t want to write or contribute to serials. It was obvious I couldn’t continue the way I was. I had thought I was set on a continuing upward course. Read Sylvia Plath – that high achiever’s life - and you read of something similar. Suddenly the momentum stops. It’s terrifying. And, let’s leave it there. As Jane Austen (who had an inert, depressive period – pre- Chawton) said, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery..’
Well, I wasn’t going to finish up with my head in the gas oven. The great thing about depression is it shows you’ve come to an end. Of what? The media and social success wasn’t ‘me’ or what I really wanted to be. I’d lost touch with myself. All my instincts, in life and work are for quietness, contemplation. It’s why I’m happy in monasteries. What I like is a quiet, almost reclusive life, and to write what I want: quiet stuff, ‘quirky’? where I want to go, at least. I’m quite funny, not belly laughs, more wry. I like muted tones. I’ve written an essay on Ravilious in this sequence, whom I’d not discovered then. He’d be the painterly equivalent of what I’m attempting to describe (though am reluctant to label, pin down, in case it goes away again): water colour, not great dramatic oils. And I had to flail around for a number of years to get back to my instinctive habits and abilities. To live a life that’s sustaining, to write out of that.
So somewhere in the early Nineties I was seeking renewal. It didn’t lie on the dancefloor of ‘Heaven’ (see ‘Bad Company’) or in establishing more of a gay identity, though those experiences contributed. In 1996 I cast off, away from the capital, glad of having had a dozen years or so of a London life, but – symbolically? - convinced that I had to give it up, renounce. I went abroad (on my – Norman Tebbit? - bike) and the house described in ‘The House in France,’ and then, gradually, settled more quietly in Kent. I still visit London for long stretches – it’s where I type this – and rather envy the youngsters who buzz around the pubs and clubs and cinemas and theatres. Just lately, post operation, I’m incapable of living that kind of life anyway, but, make no mistake, very, very glad I once did it. I had a whale of a time. It just wasn’t sustaining, that’s all.
I’m aware of a larger pattern - it’s not just me and my trajectory. Hindus wandered off into forests in the third, late, age of their lives. I wish I had a settled faith to enter a monastery but my (at one time extensive) theological reading, without helping me find that faith, has certainly helped underpin my present way of life. I am never so happy these days as climbing the stairs at Mirfield at eight in an evening, between Evensong and Compline – to visit and chat with my friend John Gribben. He’s a former Prior of the monastery, Northern Irish, from a big working class family, very bright and sometimes waspish. We talk about writing a lot – he’s talented but claims he doesn’t get the time to rewrite. One of his current jobs is to collect stuff for auction (for monastery funds). His brother is an auctioneer and John’s room at the front of what was a Victorian mill owner’s mansion, is large and dark and cluttered with the latest acquisitions, (altar) silver candlesticks gleaming in the shadows. He says I would have made a ‘terrible’ monk: ‘You’re too used to suiting yourself.’
Back to teaching. Without regretting the choice I made to become a full time writer – near fifty performed plays later there is a sense of achievement - my first two years of adult employment as a teacher in a big comprehensive school might just have been the happiest and most fulfilling years of my life. After years of the me, me, me of a grammar School education and Cambridge University, I was in front of classes of ‘ordinary’ kids – a big South Yorkshire comprehensive. I had plunged straight in, with no teacher training, the way you could – just – then. I remember that first year and a particular thirteen year old trouble maker, part of one of the most difficult classes I taught (and ‘tamed’). ‘Where’s Beadle?’ I asked. ‘His dad’s dead,’ was the reply. He had been killed down the pit the previous night. Another member of that class went on to murder someone (deliberately, in a gunsmith’s shop, just picked up the weapon and shot). I attended his trial in Sheffield, just after I had given up teaching full time. But there were easier classes, less problematic kids. Because I have an unusual second name and am easily discovered on the internet, I still get communications from ex-pupils, some of whom I don’t recall (apart from their names). ‘I remember you reading “Great Expectations” and when I went home I (the pupil) would then read it to our next door neighbour’s son , who was at Junior School, in our garden shed…’
But what I knew and observed was that you can’t sustain – that word again – your energy and enthusiasm as a classroom teacher for too many years. Even the best teachers become jaded. Some become bitter. A number break down. I witnessed some of this in that huge school staffroom near fifty years ago – a staffroom full of the fag smoke that has now been abolished. However able I was, I wanted to escape teaching, finally. I had always wanted to be a writer, and remember, when my agent wrote to say my first play had been commissioned, showing her letter (with its free, bold signature) to one or two of my pals in the staff room. I was amazed I was being paid for something I so much enjoyed doing. There was a big decision to make in giving up teaching – and a head of department’s job – for writing. Later – why did I imagine it would be different? - there was an even bigger decision to be made in deciding to continue to write. I’ve detailed these things elsewhere, here and in the earlier essays. We have to reconstitute ourselves while staying true to ourselves – and live with the consequences. I’ve ‘lived out my passion’, as my student-relative at Durham University said to me recently. He’s called Tom Wakelam, and I hardly know him – (see ‘Genealogy’). I feel the need to qualify that encomium with baser motives, but that can wait till another essay.