Newsweek - USA (2019-11-08)

BOOKS

Nineteen

Eighty-Four

By George Orwell

(1949)

Orwell’s vision-

ary masterpiece,

written on the

remote Hebrid-

ean island of Jura while its author

was terminally ill with tuberculosis,

recast the gray, bomb-ravaged London

of Bowie’s childhood as the capital of

Airstrip One, a province within the

greater superpower of Oceania. Bowie

remembered watching The Quater-

mass Experiment as a small child, so

it’s possible he discovered Nineteen

Eighty-Four through watching Qua-

termass author Nigel Kneale’s cele-

brated BBC adaptation of the novel in

December 1954, starring Peter Cush-

ing as hero Winston Smith. It certainly

left a vast psychic imprint on him. In

1973, with the chutzpah of the newly

famous, he showed his love for it by

hatching a grand plan to develop it as

a stage musical, then as a television

show. But Orwell’s widow, Sonia, who

controlled the rights, wasn’t having

any of it. This was a major inconve-

nience for Bowie, who was left with

a load of half-recorded material he

wasn’t sure how or where to use.

The result was the album Diamond

Dogs, into which he decanted songs

like “Big Brother,” “We Are the Dead”

and “1984” while subtly changing

the emphasis until the project felt

more like Oliver Twist as rewritten by

William S. Burroughs. Airstrip One

became Hunger City, and Diamond

Dogs a portrait of disaffected youth

running wild in gangs and living on

rooftops—an echo, perhaps, of the

stories Bowie’s father Haywood Jones

used to tell him about the displaced,

war-damaged children he met in the

course of his work as a publicist for

the children’s charity Barnardo’s.

Silence: Lectures

and Writing

By John Cage

(1961)

One of the biggest

influences on

Bowie’s music-

making from the

mid-1970s onward was the former

Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno.

And one of the biggest influences on

Eno was the American composer and

pioneer of post-war experimental

music John Cage, born in Los Angeles

in 1912. That Cage’s father invented

an early type of submarine is one

of the factoids scattered through

Silence, a loose collection-cum-man-

ifesto-cum-memoir whose playful

layout (multiple columns, tiny text,

lots of white space) mirrors Cage’s

scorn for conventional concepts of

harmony and notation. Mushrooms,

an obsession of the composer, crop

up repeatedly. Ditto Vorticist-style

sloganeering (“I have nothing to say

and I am saying it”), lists of questions

(“What is more musical, a truck pass-

ing by a factory or a truck passing by

a music school?”) and abstruse the-

orizing about the nature of sound

which anticipates Eno’s mid-1970s

invention of ambient music.

Dictionary of

Subjects and

Symbols in Art

By James Hall

(1974)

Thanks to Hall’s

dictionary, non-

specialist art lov-

ers can understand why a pig with a

bell around its neck beside a monk

identifies that monk as St. Antony

the Great and can work out what the

skulls, jugs and grapes in Dutch paint-

ings mean. Bowie loved the potency of

traditional art symbols. They crop up

throughout his shows, album art and

videos. But he used them in a more

careful, concentrated way in the vid-

eos for “Lazarus” and “Blackstar.” With

Hall’s help, we can deduce that Button

Eyes, the blindfolded beggar character

Bowie plays in both, is either a saint

about to be executed or a symbol of

spiritual or moral blindness. Although

in the “Lazarus” video, it’s all too clear

what the skull on the desk means as

Bowie scribbles frenziedly, desperate

to commit his final ideas to paper.

Ơ From bowie’s bookshelf by

John O’Connell. Reprinted by permis-

sion of Gallery Books, an imprint of

Simon & Schuster.

Culture

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44 NEWSWEEK.COM