Two greats unexpectedly meet
One of my favourite books is Robert Musil’s massive The Man Without Qualities. The other day, Shane pointed out that Eamonn Fitzgerald had written not only about that, but also about the utterly superb TV series The Wire, whose fifth series got under way in the states last week. By chance he embedded a video of one of my favourite scenes - McNulty and Bunk doing their CSI thing in the most anti-CSI way you can imagine.
These are two niche things, and two of my favourites. It’s a strange coincidence that someone should blog about these things on consecutive days. I’ve been thinking about re-reading The Man Without Qualities. Now I have to.
One small quibble: Kakania was so called in Musil’s novel because it was a disparaging way to refer to the Austo-Hungarian Dual Monarchy - a contraction of the words ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich‘ - ‘Imperial and Royal’. So the book is not ’set in a country called Kakania’, but in Austo-Hungary.
Anyway, I recommend both greats unreservedly.
The Damned United (David Peace)
David Peace is the author of several Yorkshire-based novels, most notably the ‘Red Riding Quartet’, a sequence of novels about the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. He was chosen as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British’ novelists in 2003.
The Damned United concerns Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days in charge of Leeds United. As a kid I grew up hearing how great ‘Cloughie’, as he was universally known, was from my mother, inexplicably a Derby County and Nottingham Forest fan. What we’d today call a ‘glory chaser’. If a context in which the word ‘glory’ and those two clubs could now be used seems difficult to imagine, that’s more of a testimony to Cloughie’s genius than anything else. Both clubs were minnows before he became their manager, and both have returned to mediocrity since.
Derby County beat the Leeds of Don Revie, whose presence looms over this novel, to the league championship in the 1971-72 season and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup the next year. Something that Derby County fans, then resident at the Baseball Ground rather than the new base of Pride Park, can never expect to experience again without a seismic shift in the way that football works.
Clough was known as ‘Old Bighead’. And what a bighead he was! Quotes include: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager, but I’m in the top 1′ and, on debating tactics: ‘ we sit down for ten minutes, have a chat, and agree that I was right in the first place’. Roy Keane, the recently appointed manager of Sunderland, who was signed by Clough at Forest, quoted his simple tactics: ‘pick up the ball, pass it to a red shirt and move’. It was good enough to win Forest the European Cup.
But despite his headstrong persona (which included him once punching a fan of my club, QPR), one always suspected that beneath everything was a deeply troubled man. His alcoholism cost him his job at Forest, and in later years, took its toll on him physically.
Peace’s novel seems to come as close as possible to getting inside Cloughie’s head. He intercuts scenes from his final match as a record-breaking striker for Sunderland and as a manager of Hartlepool (which Clough inexplicably refers to throughout as Hartlepools) with his brief tenure at Leeds.
The narrative treats the events at Elland Road (the Leeds ground then as now) as being in the present, while the time at Hartlepool and Derby are told as an interior monologue. Throughout the narrative, both before and during the Leeds episodes, Clough is obsessed with his nemesis Don Revie, his predecessor at Leeds. It is this obsession and the hatred of Leeds that it breeds that ultimately destroy Clough’s job at Leeds. His opening speech to the team is:
Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now, you lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.
As that extract shows, the book is full of footballer’s language, and is all the more entertaining for it. It is the first time I’ve seen the world of football adequately described fictionally, either on the page or the screen. This is a million miles away from a Kevin Costner baseball movie.
Ultimately, The Damned United is a book for people who know about and love football. And it’s pretty entertaining if you dislike Leeds United as much as the average football fan in this country (Elland road regulars and my mates GT and Ayaz notwithstanding).
While it’s not a great novel in my view, it is surely a better portrait of Cloughie than any biography could be, and it’s certainly an entertaining read. More to the point, it’s better than several of the books on this year’s Booker shortlist (reviews of all of them forthcoming). If you love football (the real football they used to play, not today’s Harlem Globetrotter variety) and are in the least interested in Brian Clough, you should read it.
The Class (Hermann Ungar)
Hermann Ungar was completely unknown to me until I read a review of this translation, I think in the Guardian book review, and added it to my list of books to read. I’m glad I did.
Ungar belongs to the generation of novelists who wrote between the wars, in German. He was a German speaking Jew from Moravia, and so, unsurprisingly, attracts comparisons with Kafka.
Ungar’s concerns in this novel seem closely related to Kafka’s in his three (all unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime). The Class was published in 1927, a year before the author’s death, and two years after the publication of The Trial. I don’t know whether Ungar was aware of Kafka’s work, although one must suppose that he was, even in its bowdlerised form as it was then published.
The Class concerns Josef Blau, a school teacher from inauspicious origins who imagines himself to be persecuted by his class of young boys. There are some striking scenes of strange beauty, such as his fainting fit on a school outing after which he hides from a pupil, although it later transpires that the pupil had known where he was.
Blau’s jealousy of his fiancee is such that he believes her to be conducting an affair with his kindly colleague Herr Leopold, even though they have barely exchanged a word and she is pregnant with Blau’s child.
There is the grotesque Uncle Bobek, a drunkard, glutton and sponger who has formed an attachment to the fiancee’s mother with whom they all live. There is the sinister and unfathomable Modlizki who was a friend of Blau’s as a child but who has not benefited from the same social elevation. He is the eminence grise of the piece.
For those who love Kafka, and who can never hope to unearth any further masterpieces of his, however unfinished, fragmentary or otherwise flawed they may be, I recommend the work of Hermann Ungar: his novel The Maimed is somewhere on my never-ending list of future reading.
