Monday, February 26, 2018

Studs Terkel’s Working / New jobs, same need for meaning



Dirty dancing … the Southwark Playhouse updated musical version of Working. Photograph: Robert Workman

Studs Terkel’s Working – new jobs, same need for meaning

Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral history Working became a Broadway musical. As an updated version opens in London, we ask: how has the nature of work changed?
Sarfraz Manzoor
Saturday 10 June 2017 12.00 BS

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In early 1970s America, in a two-flat dwelling on the edge of Chicago sits a man called Mike, a 37-year-old steelworker. “The day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a head shrinker,” he says. “How are you gonna get excited about pullin’ steel? How you gonna get excited when you’re tired and want to sit down?” We move to a production line at a Ford assembly plant. Phil is a spot-welder, 27 years old. “It doesn’t stop. It just goes and goes and goes,” he says. “I bet there’s men who have lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line. And they never will – because it’s endless.” In Manhattan, Roberta, a prostitute, is talking. “The way you maintain your integrity is by acting all the way through,” she says. “It’s not too far removed from what most American women do – which is to put on a big smile and act.”
Mike, Phil and Roberta are not fictional characters in a novel or film – they are real. They do not know each other but the one thing they all share is that in each of the above scenes there is another man. He is in his early 60s with a prominent nose, a shock of wavy white hair – and he has a tape recorder. Studs Terkel was by this time already a well-known radio broadcaster in his native Chicago and the author of two books, on the great depression and on his home city, that had forged his reputation as the master of oral history, where a theme is explored using the recorded testimony of ordinary people rather than the insights of academics and experts. For his next book, Working, published in the spring of 1974 in the United States and the following year in Britain, Terkel would talk to more than 100 men and women about what they did all day and how they felt about it. During the course of three years’ research, he listened without prejudice to waitresses and prostitutes, gravediggers and stonemasons, accountants and bookbinders.
When Working was published, Richard Nixon was months from resigning as president, The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford was the big movie in cinemas and the world’s slimmest calculator – by today’s standard was not very slim at all – had just gone on sale for $99.95. Rereading Terkel’s book is to be offered a glimpse of that lost world in which “airline stewardess” Terry Mason explains how at stewardess school she was taught the correct way to accept a light for a cigarette from a man. “You look into their eyes as they’re lighting your cigarette and you’re cupping his hand, but holding it just very light,” she says, “so that he can feel your touch and your warmth … it used to be really great for a woman to blow the match out when she looked in his eyes, but now the man blows the match out.” It was a time when a receptionist such as Sharon could tell Terkel “I don’t think they’d ever hire a male receptionist. They’d have to pay him more, for one thing.” It was a world where switchboard operators such as Frances still physically connected telephone calls. “The greatest thing is listening on phone calls,” she confides to Terkel, “when you’re not busy. If you work nights and it’s real quiet. I don’t think there’s an operator who hasn’t listened in on calls. The night goes faster.”
The book may lack a plot or a narrative but there is no shortage of human drama in Working. It was a bestseller on publication and among those who read it was the musical theatre composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who would later go on to win awards for Wicked. He was intrigued by the fact that Working shone a light on those who tend to be invisible. He flew out to Chicago and told Terkel he wanted to adapt the book into a musical. Terkel was bemused but gave his approval. The show opened on Broadway in 1978 and has since been restaged in revised forms seven times. It is currently on in an updated version at Southwark Playhouse.



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 Working at Southwark Playhouse. Photograph: Robert Workman


Terkel wrote that Working was “about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying”. Rereading the book, it is striking how often those who seem to find most meaning in their job are those most closely involved in work that is tangible – the dentist who takes pride in improving a patient’s appearance and the bookbinder who knows their work is helping preserve a 400-year-old book. There is a continual refrain in the pages, a plea for recognition. “Somebody built the Pyramids. Pyramids, Empire State Building – these things don’t just happen,” Mike tells Terkel. “There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see one side of it a foot wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say ‘see, that’s me over there on the 45th floor. I put the steel beam in.’ Everybody should have something to point to.” It is perhaps not surprising that a steelworker should find pride in having built the Empire State Building but others find it in less obvious areas. “When I put the plate down, you don’t hear a sound,” says Dolores, a waitress. “When someone says, ‘how come you’re just a waitress?’ I say ‘don’t you think you deserve to be served by me?’”
“I enjoy it very much, especially in summer,” says Elmer of his work. “I don’t think any job inside a factory or an office is so nice. You have the air all day and it’s just beautiful. The smell of the grass when it’s cut, it’s just fantastic.” Elmer is a gravedigger.
The world of work described feels altogether more stable and predictable than it does now. Working depicts a time just before great changes happened in the workplace – changes that no one in the book predicted. The concept of a work-life balance was decades away, as was the idea of a portfolio career; most of the men and women Terkel spoke to could expect to remain in one job until retirement. Few of the interviewees mention the potential threats that computers pose to their livelihood. The spectre of race loomed over much of the testimony, but not once in 589 pages does anyone express fear that their work might be outsourced to Mexico, India or China. The future was something to embrace rather than to fear. “The 20-hour week is a possibility today,” Mike told Terkel. The reality is that, four decades on, workers are expected to work longer, retire later and forgo many of their benefits and securities.

While revisiting the book is a reminder of how the world – with its e-jobs and virtual offices – has changed, it is also a reminder of what does not change: the desire for dignity and respect. “I’m a checker and I’m very proud of it,” says Babe, a supermarket worker who had been doing the same job for almost 30 years. “I’m making an honest living. Whoever looks down on me, they’re lower than I am.” Roy, a 58-year-old garbage man, tells Terkel “I don’t look down on my job in any way. I couldn’t say I despise myself for doing it. I feel better at it than I did at the office. It’s meaningful to society.”
Many of the specific jobs in Working may have disappeared, but in a world where calls from the US and the UK could both be answered in Bangalore, where we shop in the same stores, eat in the same restaurant franchises and shop online from the same behemoths, Working remains a timely read. The new musical adaptation includes characters in jobs that did not exist in the early 70s – an Indian call centre operator, a Deliveroo-style delivery boy and a hedge fund manager – alongside Terkel’s defunct 70s jobs.
In his introduction, Terkel wondered if “perhaps immortality is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.” For some, that immortality came through what they made. “Nothing in this world lasts forever,” says Carl, a stonemason, “but … Bedford limestone, they claim, deteriorates one sixteenth of an inch every hundred years and it’s around four or five inches for a house. So that’s getting awful close.” For others, such as firefighter Tom, immortality came through what they did. “You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real … It shows I did something on this earth.” Not everyone can be a firefighter, but all those who shared their stories and words with Terkel did give their lives meaning, and in return, through capturing them in his book, he conferred on them something very close to immortality.

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Sunday, February 25, 2018

School of hard knocks / The dark underside to boarding school books



REREADING

School of hard knocks: the dark underside to boarding school books


Violence, cruelty and sexual confusion are as much a part of boarding school literature as japes and cricket. Alex Renton surveys a troubled genre from Kipling to Rowling

Alex Renton
Saturday 8 April 2017 12.00 BST
“M
ichael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the headmaster’s sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa. The great man then gave him one terrific crack. After that there was a pause. The cane was put down and the headmaster began filling his pipe from a tin of tobacco. He also started to lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing. Soon, the cane was picked up again and a second tremendous crack was administered upon the trembling buttocks. Then the pipe-filling business and the lecture went on for maybe 30 seconds. Then came the third crack of the cane ... At the end of it all, a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.”
The writer is Roald Dahl, on his school, Repton, in the early 1930s. Apart from one fact, it isn’t remarkable: it echoes accounts of boarding school stories in the 19th and 20th century that tell quite blithely of extraordinary violence and psychological cruelty. These appear to have been as traditional an element of the curriculum for the privileged child as were fagging, rugby, chapel and Latin. The notable detail Dahl provides is that the “great man” was a clergyman named Geoffrey Fisher, later to become the archbishop of Canterbury.
Savage discipline, along with sexual confusion and formalised bullying, are so common in the schooldays memoirs of the British elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that you have to conclude that parents wanted and paid for their children to experience these things. To most of the class that used them, the private schools were factories that would reliably produce men and women who would run Britain, its politics, business and culture. Boarding school was a proven good investment. So thousands of men and women who had suffered awfully, by their own admission, sent their children off for just the same.
At St George’s school, Ascot, the eight-year-old Winston Churchill was whipped hard for damaging the headmaster’s hat and for taking sugar from a pantry. “Flogging with the birch in accordance with the Eton fashion was a great feature of the curriculum,” he wrote in My Early Life. Churchill’s headmaster was another clergyman, the Rev Henry Sneyd-Kynnersley. Another St George’s old boy, the artist Roger Fry, wrote in his private diaries of these “solemn rituals”, which sometimes resulted in not just blood but excrement splashed around the caning block; Virginia Woolf, Fry’s first biographer, censored this information, along with details of both Fry’s and Sneyd-Kynnersley’s sexual arousal during the ceremony.
What all the published memoirs, from Churchill’s to Christopher Hitchens’s and a host of others, share most obviously is their tone: wry, tolerant and rather proud. It didn’t do to make a fuss or – more important – betray the caste. There are few men or women who went through the boarding school system who were prepared to wholly deny the benefits of the experience, at least before the later 20th century. George Orwell and his schoolmate Cyril Connolly had a go, using – and in Orwell’s case, fictionalising – the baroque horrors of their south coast prep school, St Cyprian’s.
 ‘Lifeless prunes and spiritual vampires’ … WH Auden was scathing about his teachers at Gresham’s.
Photograph by Jane Bown

Among the intellectual left in the 30s, a perception grew that Britain’s social divides, and the peculiar psychology of its ruling class, might just owe something to the uniquely bizarre education the elite underwent. In a 1934 volume of reminiscences, The Old School, edited by Graham Greene, writers including WH Auden, the diarist Harold Nicolson and the novelist Eileen Arnot Robertsoncompared the bulldozing of children into conformity at their schools to fascism. Auden dubs the teachers at Gresham’s in Norfolk “lifeless prunes and spiritual vampires”. Robertson’s essay about Sherborne School for Girls – “The Potting Shed of the English Rose” – sums up the ethos: “Run about, girls, like boys, and then you won’t have to think of them.” It is a portrait of a prison-factory designed to machine the girls into spiritual clones – reliable spouses for rulers.
There are few negative accounts of the traditional boarding schools by women. That may be in part because physical violence was less common, though the emotional abuse and neglect they encountered could be just as damaging. These institutions were founded later – there were only five “public” schools for girls by the end of the 19th century, all of them quite deliberately aping the boys’ ones. But in the late 1960s, 150,000 British children were boarding, about a third of them female. By then, the girls’ schools had their own literature: the addictive, unambivalent stories of japes, hockey and simple social quandaries turned out by Angela Braziland Enid Blyton. Like JK Rowling, Blyton did not board and Brazil only did in her late teens. The only anti-boarding school novel by a woman in the first half of the 20th century is Frost in May, Antonia White’s fictionalised account of her rigid Catholic convent school, Woldingham. There, sexuality was so feared that the girls were not permitted to see their own bodies: baths were taken in tents made of calico.
Novelists were telling of the dark and brutal times to be had at boarding school much earlier than the essay-writers. Dickens sent Nicholas Nickleby to Dotheboys Hall and Charlotte Brontë put the orphan Jane Eyre into Lowood Institute: at both of them hypocritical, grasping adults set out to break the children, physically and spiritually. In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a heart-rending short story about little children dispatched – as he was, at five years old – from the colonies into the hands of uncaring adults back in Britain. Ten years later, he invented a school fiction subgenre with the rebellious schoolchild as hero, battling dictatorial and stupid adult teachers: Stalky and Co leads to Just William, to Molesworth and Down With Skool and finally to Harry Potter. The anti-authoritarian pranks of Stalky and his friends reappear again and again in subsequent English fiction – not least in the post-second world war tales of British officers in PoW camps, fooling dim German guards.
Having set The Longest Journey (1907) around his snobbish, militaristic school Tonbridge – called Sawston in the novel – EM Forster delivered the harshest of all one-liners about the products of the British public school. They go out into the world, he wrote in 1927, “with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts”. But by the 1920s, more of them were opening. To most Britons, possession of limited knowledge and not too much emotional intelligence must have seemed a sensible preparation for joining the club that ran the world. “They say that Eton taught us nothing,” crowed the first world war general Sir Herbert Plumer at a dinner of the school’s old boys’ society in 1916. “But I must say they taught it very well.”
The cricket field triumphs and the practical jokes, the floggings and the bullies of the traditional boarding school were by the 1890s the staples of a literary genre with an audience far beyond the class that used them, or even that aspired to them. The simple cast of brave, true sportsmen, of swots and of cowards, cads and bullies invented by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days marched on through hundreds of comics and novels for children; if you read accounts of British foreign policy before and after the second world war, it seems as though the playground precepts and stock characters of the schooldays novel have peopled the world. School and sport provided metaphors for proper Britishness. “Play up! and play the game!” – the refrain of Sir Henry Newbolt’s immensely popular poem “Vitaï Lampada” – was a guiding motto for everything from war to marriage.
It was clear that a stiff upper lip, loyalty to the team and a smile at adversity were the attributes most useful in life – and you obtained these at the right schools. By the 1920s, no crime, no brutality of those establishments was too much for their customers, or the wider public. Evelyn Waugh portrayed a shambolic prep school in his first novel, modelled on one at which he had taught. Decline and Fall features fiction’s first account of another traditional cast member of the boarding school drama, the predatory Captain Grimes. His actual crime is only hinted at in the novel; the BBC’s current rollicking TV adaptation is much more open about the “peg-legged pederast”. But the sophisticated reader would have had no problem understanding what Grimes did – and had been sacked from the army and many boarding schools for doing. Grimes is acclaimed as one of the century’s greatest comic creations. In his diaries, Waugh writes with loving admiration of Grimes’s original, the disgraced former army officer WRB “Dick” Young. A serial molester, certainly, but also, according to Waugh, a resourceful and witty man of “shining candour”, and they remained friends until Decline and Fall was published. Later, by way of revenge, Young wrote a school novel in which Waugh was the paedophile teacher.

 And so to Hogwarts. With all its gothic filigree, this most exclusive college looks very like the 19th century Fettes College. The series has the archetypes – sinister teachers and over-friendly ones, sporty heroes and school bullies. While the books don’t have any flogging in them, they do have other key elements, including the arcane ritualistic training to join an elite.
Harry and his friends may well have been the best advert for private boarding schools since the Duke of Wellington boasted that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. It could be coincidence, but the 30-year decline in numbers came to an end in 2000, just as the third Harry Potter novel was published. Since then, though average full-boarding fees are now around £35,000 per annum, the pupil count has been stable at 70,000, a third of them the children of wealthy foreigners. Later this month, when the Easter holidays end, more than 4,000 children under 10 years old will say goodbye to their families, shipped off to where there is the promise of adventure, but not love. Some of them – as one mother, “forced” by her daughter to allow her to board, told me – will pack Harry Potter wands too. Your heart breaks for them still.
• Alex Renton’s Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Classis published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.



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Saturday, February 24, 2018

Rereading / Primo Levi’s If This is a Man at 70

Primo Levi in the 1950s.


Primo Levi’s If This is a Man at 70



Ahead of a public reading, Philippe Sands explores the lessons of Levi’s humanity-filled holocaust memoir


Philippe Sands
Saturday 22 April 2017 10.59 BST
I
was 19 when I first read If This Is a Man, and the book filled a gap created by the shadows cast across an otherwise happy childhood home by Auschwitzand Treblinka: my maternal grandparents, rare survivors of the horrors, never talked about their experiences or those who were disappeared, and in this way Levi’s account spoke directly, and personally, offering a fuller sense of matters for which words were not permitted. His has not been the only such book – there are others, including more recent works such as Thomas Buergenthal’s A Lucky Child, Göran Rosenberg’s A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, and Marceline Loridan-Ivans’s But You Did Not Come Back – but it was the first. He was a messenger of detail, allowing me to see and feel matters of dread and horror: waiting for a deportation order; travelling in a cattle cart by train; descending a ramp for selection; imagining what it must be like to know you are about to be gassed and cremated; struggling for survival surrounded by people you love and hate.

Levi’s voice was especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity. If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages, whether a Häftling (prisoner) or Muselmann (“the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection”), a kapo or a guard.
Levi, a 23-year old chemist, was arrested in December 1943 and transported to Auschwitz in February 1944. There he remained until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. He arrived back home in Turin in October, unrecognisable to the concierge who had seen him only a couple of years earlier. This and more I learned from Ian Thomson’s nuanced biography, Primo Levi, which enriches our understanding of the author. On Levi’s return, stories were told and notes prepared, as he went back to work at a paint factory. By February 1946, he had completed a first draft about the last 10 days of his time in the camp, a section that would come to be the book’s last chapter, written “in furious haste”. Ten months later, there was a complete text, worked on “with love and rage”, reflecting a vow “never to forget”.

Primo Levi in 1940 … he was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz in 1944.

Extracts appeared in a local newspaper in March 1947. The full book was published on 11 October, by Franco Antonicelli’s small publishing house Francesco de Silva, with a print run of 2,500. The working title was Sul Fondo (In the Abyss), later changed to The Drowned and the Saved. The final title was taken from a poem by Levi that opens the book. Although it had been rejected by numerous publishers, including Einaudi – writers Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg, who had roles at the firm, thought it too early for such an account – reviews were generally positive. Italo Calvino hailed the work as “magnificent”, yet sales were poor (600 copies in a Florence warehouse were lost in the great flood of 1966). Five years later, it was out of print and Levi was working as a chemist, hopes of becoming a full-time writer frustrated.
In June 1958, Einaudi agreed to republish. Levi introduced alterations, including a new opening sentence, although none to distort, as he put it, the book’s “overall shape”. Attentive readers would have discovered new characters, such as three-year-old Emilia, gassed after being washed by her parents with the “tepid engine water [drawn] from the engine that was dragging us all to death”. The reviews were more numerous and even more positive, and the larger print run quickly sold out. By now, translations were appearing, at first in Argentina, in Spanish, then Germany and France (both in 1961), eventually an English-language edition in the US, and a translation by Stuart Woolf distributed in the UK by André Deutsch. A Hebrew translation had to wait until 1988, four decades after publication and a year after Levi’s death. There were stage productions and well-received adaptations for radio, including the BBC (with Anthony Quayle) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Republication transformed Levi’s renown as a writer, although the burn was slower in Britain and America. From Thomson’s biography it seems that the book would be a constant in defining Levi, running as a dark golden thread through the rest of his life. Many of those who appeared in the book, imperfectly anonymised, would re-enter his life. Some he loved, such as Jean Samuel (subject of the Canto of Ulysses chapter, written almost entirely in the course of a single lunch break), with whom he would remain in frequent contact. “Whether we like it or not, we are witnesses and we bear the weight of it,” Levi told his friend, signing some letters with “174517”, the number tattooed on his arm. Others he disliked, such as the French prisoner Paul Steinberg, who was horrified by his depiction in the book (“Henri”, as he is renamed, has “the delicate and subtly perverse body and face of Sodoma’s San Sebastián”, – “inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible like the Serpent in Genesis”). Yet others offered a greater anxiety, such as Ferdinand Meyer, a German scientist who oversaw Levi’s work at Auschwitz: letters were exchanged, but Levi was never able to agree to meet.


❦
When Ted Hodgkinson, head of literature at the Southbank Centre in London, invited the novelist AL Kennedy and me to co-curate a public reading of Levi’s account of his life at Auschwitz, we seized the chance. The reading, to mark the 70th anniversary of the book’s publication in Italy, offers an occasion to explore the connection between then and now. “Books are the opposite of death and silence, and Levi was literally writing against death in its teeth,” Kennedy explains, “so he’s all the more precious in our strange and hate-filled times.” My own interest is personal, of respect for a writer who deeply informed my views of human nature, power and the world.

Nina Brazier, who directs the forthcoming reading, explains that what touches her most is that Levi “manages to keep his heart throughout, removing all sense of bitterness, and he does so to an extraordinary extent, one that is almost unbelievable”.
A public reading offers a collective connection to his account, yet also one that is experienced individually. Kennedy crystallises what it means for 1,000 or more people to share a space for several hours to hear the words of a humanity-filled book spoken aloud, an experience that offers “a spell to drive back the dark”. “Listening for long periods to live voices lighting up fierce and urgent and necessary words is always a remarkable thing,” she says. “And it’s beautiful to be doing this at the Southbank Centre – somewhere partly built by postwar refugees, a place that welcomes everyone and that began as a physical testament to hope in the years after our first defeat of fascism.”
Each of our 15 readers – like each member of the audience – will arrive with baggage of their own. We the readers are writers and journalists, musicians and lawyers, actors, activists and a chemist. Among us are Susan Pollack and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, both of whom were at Auschwitz while Levi was there (Anita will be joined by her son Raphael and grandson Simon, who will offer short musical interludes under the direction of Tomo Keller, leader of the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields, including pieces performed by the Mädchenorchester of Auschwitz, to which Anita belonged). Kemal Pervanic survived the terrible Omarska camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, an experience he describes in his book The Killing Days. Liliane Umubyeyi, who was 15 at the time, witnessed the killing of her family during the Rwanda genocide, in 1995.
Niklas Frank spent some of his childhood in Kraków, close enough to Auschwitz to smell the smoke. His father, Hans, was governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, Hitler’s personal representative. Patrick Lawrence’s grandfather presided over the Nuremberg tribunal and delivered the sentence that condemned Hans Frank to death by hanging. What would Sir Geoffrey Lawrence have thought, I wondered, if he had read Levi’s account of the doomed man who is hanged towards the close of his book, as a band plays, crying out his final words? “Comrades, I am the last one.”



❦
In the face of horror and oppression, Levi offers the possibility that humans will not easily – or completely – be demolished. That such a sentiment might not endure was brought into focus by the manner of his death, in 1987, apparently at his own hand – falling into the stairwell of his apartment building. Have his books been read by a British prime minister who castigates those who feel a connection to the idea of global humanity as “citizens of nowhere”? Or by a US president who wants to prevent human beings from entering his country simply because they are nationals of Somalia or Yemen or other countries deemed to be undesirable?

 Levi knew where such sentiments lead. “I do not comprehend,” he wrote in the preface to the first German edition of If This Is a Man, “I cannot tolerate – that a man be judged not for what he is, but for the group into which he happens to belong.” His warnings are clear. “Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that every stranger is an enemy,” he continued in the preface to the English edition. It is a privilege to speak Primo Levi’s words, and to read them, and to hear them. For their experience, their hope and humanity.
THE GUARDIAN





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