Spike Milligan - Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (1985)

 

I'd drifted away from funny books into more po-faced territory by the time this, the fifth of Spike's war memoirs, was published; but having read the first four, and feeling I owe it to my younger self, here I am again. The previous volume closed in harrowing fashion with Spike binned up in Italy with shell shock and an attendant absence of jokes and one liners. I was assuming this volume might represent a deeper descent into the psychological twilight, but no. Spike recovers despite the best efforts of the British Army, who arrange for him to continue his convalescence at a medical facility in close proximity to Mount Vesuvius just as it's about to blow; but in sunnier news, the war is over with Mussolini hung upside down in a garage somewhere. Somehow, this doesn't end the memoir because rather than being sent home as one might expect, Spike and pals continue to bum around Italy for another year, mostly entertaining the troops while playing in a variety of jazz bands, or possibly swing bands - something you dance to anyway. I assume the British Army hung around in Italy after the war as part of some clean up operation, or maybe getting the country back on its feet - Spike doesn't go into detail on this or even much else of the bigger picture unless I blinked and missed it.

Not that it matters because the author clearly never intended to bump heads with A.J.P. Taylor, instead delivering a worm's eye view of the war as many of us working classes would have experienced it - as something too vast and remote to comprehend except when the bombs are dropping directly onto our heads. Now, as the fighting retreats and dribbles away to nothing, our man catches up with himself and the job of existence, torn between the loss of all that was familiar and the pleasures of sun, sea, a different country, and not being shot at on a daily basis. The barrage of jokes and zingers is tempered with pleasantly reflective interludes of the kind experienced when realisation dawns that you've been through hell and survived. It's conversational and with an impressionist grammar that's more or less its own thing, which can be frustrating for anyone wondering why we're suddenly in Florence, or Naples, or wherever else, but is probably the only way to capture this kind of history. That said, the notes and letters reproduced solely as photographs - leaving us to struggle with Spike's handwriting or a typewriter which obviously needed a new ribbon - seem more trouble than they're worth, but your own mileage may vary.

Also, Harry Secombe finally shows up, in case anyone was wondering, and is a lot more funny on the page than I'm afraid I remember him being in real life. It isn't War and Peace*, but it's pleasantly substantial and satisfying compared to at least one of Spike's earlier, scrappier memoirs.

*: I haven't read it either.

Marvel Firsts: the 1960s

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & others
Marvel Firsts: the 1960s (2011)
This collects all those first issues or first appearances and is therefore where it all began, assuming we can agree on what it is. I've been engaged in an attempt to understand the evolution of caped adventures and this seemed a better gamble than collected editions of any single title, running as it does in chronological sequence from the  1961 debut of the Fantastic Four through to the first issue of the Silver Surfer in 1968, and with a lot of the stuff we've forgotten about in between.

The Marvel revolution is generally characterised as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby combining existing comic book genres into a single continuity, then having everybody turn up in everyone else's books. The existing (and failing) genres which went into the mix included romance, horror, humour, superhero, and monster comics. The first issue of the Fantastic Four pushes most of those buttons, not least the cover featuring a giant and vaguely reptilian thing smashing its way up through the asphalt, gargantuan claws reaching out to ensnare the puny surface dwellers - duplicating the cover of pretty much every issue of Tales to Astonish prior to Hank Pym discovering he could talk to ants. Inside we get super-science, rocketry, the hot-rod loving teenager, wisecracks, and the Invisible Girl ticking all of the usual chick boxes in requiring the protection of the lads.

Most surprising for me has been the realisation of just how shaky were the first stirrings of the Marvel universe, because Stan Lee telling me how the first issue of the Fantastic Four was at least on par with War and Peace to a monthly schedule apparently wormed its way into my subconscious. Unless War and Peace - which I've never read - is actually fairly ropey, in which case fair play.

Fantastic Four #1 has all sorts of wonderfully screwy things going on, but it has the rhythm of hesitant first steps with Stan and Jack - but mainly Jack - making it up as they go along, jamming disparate elements together and hoping it will work. It doesn't feel confident and lurches along much like the strips of the thirties and forties, as does the first allegedly pulse-pounding issue of the Avengers, in case anyone was wondering. This isn't really a criticism given the likelihood of anything living up to Stan's hyperbole, but it's engaging for reasons besides those promised by the cover, or at least was to me. Further clues as to the balance of the Lee and Kirby partnership may be found by comparing Lee's typewritten synopsis for Fantastic Four #1 - also included here - with what was published, and it looks a lot like Jack was doing his best to give the thing a bit of a dynamic, a quality which isn't conspicuous in Lee's vague, even apologetic stage directions.

Stranger still, the wild west comics running contemporaneous to the early superhero stuff are by far the best material in at least the first half of the collection, their obvious confidence presumably deriving from established traditional styles. However, as the years pass, we can see our caped pals catching up and cohering into something which seems to know what it's doing, and Silver Surfer #1 is legitimately a masterpiece of the form.

This has been less exciting but more educational than I expected, which is nice.

Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin Intercourse (1987)
Intercourse is the tract wherein Andrea Dworkin famously stated that all men are rapists and that heterosexual sex is rape, just like the joyless dungaree wearing dyke she was. However, bothering to read the book reveals that she never said anything of the sort, and that her argument as set forth herein is not actually unreasonable. That being said, it's no walk in the park either. Dworkin is not an easy read. She's absolutely uncompromising and unwilling to soft soap, prettify or simplify her argument. The reader is expected to shut the fuck up, pay attention, and no fidgeting if they know what's good for them; and actually, it is good for them, certainly potentially educational.

Essentially it's nothing less than the history of sexual politics mapped out in our changing, evolving attitudes, at least for the last five-hundred or so years, as revealed in the fiction of Tolstoy, Lawrence, Hemingway and others. Dworkin pulls apart established models of human intercourse, social and sexual, with surprising deference reflecting her genuine appreciation of at least a few of these authors, but she pulls no punches and is very good at revealing that which has been staring us in the face all along and which suggests we, as the testicular half of a species, might like to think about growing the fuck up.

To be specific, Dworkin doesn't say anything as blunt or stupid as all sex between men and women is rape, but rather that it can't be anything but rape within the context of the patriarchal structures which inform society; and she's unfortunately right. The revelation is just how much is tied in with those structures, in which respect she's also very thorough, extending her analysis to the extremes of the Nazi death camps and how even there we find echoes of the man sticking his thingie in because he believes it to be his due. It's a solid argument, but one of such composition that there's not much point trying to break it down. Intercourse is, by some definition, an academic narrative, but the dialogue by which it sets forth its argument seems partially intuitive and therefore possibly of such complexity as to defeat being broken down into anything bite-sized.

Intercourse is intense but incredibly rewarding, and if you haven't read it, there seems a reasonable chance that it probably isn't what you think it is. If you're not already on board, it may be time to get over whatever has been holding you back and listen to what the woman had to say.

Also - for what it may be worth - I found Dworkin's filleting of Bram Stoker's thoroughly mediocre Dracula highly satisfying because I was beginning to think it was just me.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Alan Dean Foster Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978)
Yes, I know, but I used to gaze at this as it sat on the shelf amongst all those other lurid science-fiction titles in the little room with the books at the rear of Martins newsagent, from which I dispensed my paper round. This was the pre-VHS age, back when it was only really possible to relive the moving image by reading the book. I was twelve or thirteen and my mind boggled at the possibility of there being a book comprising an as yet untold tale of Luke and Leia and the rest, something which wasn't a film but seemed more legitimate than a comic strip, particularly when that comic strip involved a giant green rabbit; but being a novel and therefore short on pictures, it was War and Peace so far as I was concerned, as were most books not featuring the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor. Splinter of the Mind's Eye was for bigger boys, and so I never bought it or read it; and found it difficult to resist when I saw this copy more recently, seeing as how I am now myself a big boy.

Rummaging around in the February 1980 issue of Amazing Stories, as you do, I find an article on Alan Dean Foster in which Tom Staicar writes:

George Lucas contacted Foster to work with him on the story to be used as the sequel film. At that time, Lucas had to be cost-conscious about special effects requirements as it was not yet known whether Star Wars would break even or not. The writer was told to keep expensive starships and planetary vistas to a minimum and, with this in mind, Foster and Lucas developed the story.

So this would have been the second film had the first one gone tits up. I read The Empire Strikes Back as a comic book adaptation, and I'm almost certain that I've seen the film several times, but I still can't remember a fucking thing about it beyond lots of snow and freeze-dried Han Solo, so I'm not sure this wouldn't have been the better film; although of course all of this is predicated upon one regarding Star Wars as something other than a steaming pile of horse shit in the first place, and I go back and forth on that one.

One consideration which becomes apparent whilst reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye is that Star Wars is fine as a film, and it really doesn't need to be a book. I still think it's a shame how its arrival more or less killed off the thoughtful, largely dystopian science-fiction movie of the seventies, replacing it with a Dorito-chugging blockbuster narrative amounting to Flash Gordon with knobs on, condemning us all to forever experience mainstream culture as something aimed at a twelve-year old; which was never really the fault of Star Wars itself which, as a film, promised only certain specific things and did them extremely well. It was Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon treated as a biblical epic of the fifties or sixties. As such, it never really needed to be deep or meaningful with well-rounded characters, because epic was the whole point.

This, I would suggest, is why it doesn't quite work on the printed page, or at least doesn't for me. Splinter of the Mind's Eye is pretty much a sword and sorcery quest narrative, much like Star Wars itself, in which Luke and Leia hear about a powerful gemstone which amplifies the Force, and set out to obtain the gemstone only to be thrown in prison by the local big imperial cheese on this swampy, jungle planet, but he throws them in the same cell as these big, hairy monsters, hoping the big, hairy monsters will either eat or shag them, but Luke used to read about big, hairy monsters when he was growing up on Tatooine and so he knows their language and so they team up and the big hairy monsters bend the bars of the cell and they get away and go to look for the gem, and they have roughly the sort of adventures which befell Frodo Baggins before locating the gem, but someone has grassed them up to Darth Vader who decides that he also wants the gem, and some other stuff happens. Luke occasionally looks at Leia's bum as she's bending over to pick something up and thinks Cor! I wouldn't half like to have a snog with her because he doesn't yet know she is his sister, and Leia occasionally complains about getting her princess clothes all muddy, and the little, fat robot makes an electronic farting noise and the English robot says that he shouldn't have to put up with it, and I realise I probably should have read the thing when I was twelve and better able to appreciate it.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye isn't bad, although it may be significant that I'm left without any real idea of why it should be called Splinter of the Mind's Eye. By the time he came into the orbit of George Lucas, Alan Dean Foster had acquired a reputation as someone who wrote fast and who understood the moving image. I suspect it would be unfair to call him a hack, just as it would be unfair to term Star Wars mass-produced generic science-fiction landfill, given that both date from an era in which some level of craft was still required. The narrative of the book was familiar even back in 1978, and as a novel it attempts to squeeze characterisation from characters with no real depth, but at the same time it's tightly written and efficient if lacking in surprises. Strangest of all, Splinter of the Mind's Eye has made me want to watch Star Wars again, which I suppose must count for something or other.