Castle Kings of the Mild Frontier

I went to the Castle in Macclesfield yesterday afternoon, which had been voted best pub of Mild Magic, the annual sticker trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, and extended to the former Cheshire silk town for the first time this year. The owner of the Black Country brewery Sarah Hughes was also there to pick up the best mild award for their 6% beer Dark Ruby.

I haven't been to the Castle for a decade, since when it's shut, changed hands and been refurbished. Having the same name, it always brings to my mind the final, unfinished, novel by Franz Kafka, especially as its historic multi room interior mirrors that of the village inn where the young surveyor arrives late on a winter night at the beginning of the book. The dark strong beer we were drinking wouldn't look out of place in Kafka's native Czech land of Bohemia either.

I've only been to the Beacon, the pub in Sedgley where it's brewed, once, back in 2012, but that too is something of a time capsule, especially the front room on the right where I sat, which is essentially unchanged since the twenties.

Dylan's blues

The poet Dylan Thomas famously wrote that people should "rage against the dying of the light" when approaching death.

BBC2 marked the centenary of Thomas' birth last night with a drama about his own final days in New York, where he died aged 39 in 1953, allegedly after drinking eighteen whiskies in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Although I haven't been to the White Horse, I have walked past the Chelsea Hotel where he collapsed after his supposed alcoholic bout.

Tom Hollander, who played Thomas, apparently had to put on two stone to play the role and he did look quite like him but his performance reminded me somewhat of Chuck Berry's remark to the Rolling Stones when they recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago: "You nearly got it." I'm also not sure why an Englishman was cast as Thomas when there are plenty of Welsh actors who could have played the role such as the superb impressionist Michael Sheen.

True Grit

I'm reading True Grit at the moment, the 1968 novel by Charles Portis set just after the American Civil War in which the teenage daughter of a murdered Arkansas rancher sets out to track down her father's killer.

Like most people who read the book, I've seen the film based on it in which John Wayne plays Rooster Cogburn, the U.S. marshal she hires to help her apprehend the wanted man in the Indian Territory. The film only hints though at the extent to which Portis manages as a first-person narrator to imitate the voice of the determined and independent Scripture-quoting Mattie Ross.

True Grit seems to be overlooked as a literary work because it falls into the category "Western". I've also just read the novel Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, about the role of the slave trade in the industrialisation of Britain in the late eighteenth century. Apparently when it won the Booker Prize in 1992 there was criticism that a "historical novel" had been given the award.

As Bo Diddley sang, you can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

VS Naipaul at eighty

The Trinidadian novelist VS Naipaul is eighty today.

Naipaul is a bit of a cariacture these days, the English gentleman making reactionary remarks and pursuing literary feuds over whisky at his club, but I still find his 1961 masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas with its Dickensian range of characters as funny now as when I first read it twenty or so years ago.

This piece written by the eponymous hero when he's working as a journalist always make me laugh:

"Less than a year ago Daddy - George Elmer Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer - left home to explore the Amazon. Well, I have news for you, kiddies. Daddy is on his way home. Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin."

Grass, poetry and slanders

The publication of a poem by the German writer Günter Grass, following the delivery of a submarine to Israel by Germany, has led to the Israeli government banning him from travelling there.

I should first of all declare an interest: Grass is probably my favourite writer.  That is mainly based on his earlier writings  - from The Tin Drum in 1959 to The Rat in 1987. I find his later novels a bit artificial and have never been a fan of his poetry (which appears throughout all his novels). What Must Be Said is aside from literary considerations politically unbalanced in its approach to Israel and Iran.

Having said that, it is a slander to claim - as the Israeli government has in banning him from the country - that Grass, a longtime supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, is a Nazi or anti-semite because he served in the Waffen-SS in World War II. Grass was also accused of hypocrisy after he spoke about his war service in 2006 ahead of the publication of his memoir Peeling the Onion. But to say that he is in the same category as the ex-Nazi officials who became politicians and businessmen in post-war West Germany because as a seventeen year old he was conscripted into a Waffen-SS tank regiment and fought as a gunner on the Eastern Front is ridiculous.  Criticise his latest poem by all means but don't argue that he has got anything to admit or atone for because of what he did as a teenage soldier.

Politicians and beer

When politicians are photographed drinking or pulling a pint, the motive is normally to appear "of the people" and attract votes. None of the charlatans above actually enjoy drinking beer as far as I know: Blair as PM drank whisky, Johnson as an ex-member of the Bullingdon Club is surely a champagne drinker and Livingstone in an interview last year admitted that his enthusiasm has shifted over the years from Newcastle Brown Ale to wine.

With the ex-Czech president Václav Havel who died yesterday, it was surely different.  While he doubtless benefitted from a beer drinking image given the Czech Republic has the world's highest per capita beer consumption, like politicians across the border in Bavaria I'd guess he actually liked the stuff too. 

The right-wing Labour chancellor of the 70's Denis Healey once criticised Margaret Thatcher for having no hinterland, that is interests outside politics (his were opera and photography).  Václav Havel's hinterland was pretty extensive, encompassing beer, politics, drama and poetry.  One of the most famous photos of him was taken in 1994 by Jiri Juru in the Prague pub U Zlatého Tygra, alongside the US President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and fellow writer and regular Bohumil Hrabal.
















h/t to White Beer Travels for reproducing the photo.