72 Books and arts The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
2 wife and became a man of letters. He con-
tributed to the Spectator and the Observer
and was commissioned to write a second
book, this time about extreme swimmers.
He flew to Slovenia to interview an athlete
who had swum the Amazon. But he never
completed it.
His ensuing decline is, at a simple level,
a familiar tale of the trials of age. He con-
tracted throat cancer; then, says Clare Bur-
leigh, one ofhis daughters and an artist
who drew the sketches that open each
chapter of “Haunts”, he began to show
signs that something else was wrong. “It
was little thingsat first, just forgetfulness,”
she says, “then itsuddenlybecame much
worse. He couldn’t stay in his flat any
more.” That flat is a small, book-filled bach-
elor pad up a stairway so steep it is almost a
ladder. At the end of 2016 he picked up an
infection that led to hallucinations. He has
been marooned in hospital since.
“All he wants”, says Ms Burleigh, “is to
be back in hisflat, writing again.” To pay for
the home care needed to spring him from
what he calls his “incarceration”, his re-
maining friends tried to secure a grant from
the Royal Literary Fund, a 200-year-old be-
nevolent organisation established to help
writers in financial difficulty. Its represen-
tatives visited him in hospital but, in the
end, they turned him down—because he
had published only one book, and “quan-
tity is a consideration as well as quality”.
This idea—that leaving behind only a
single book, if a beautiful one, is not
enough—poses interesting questions
about literary posterity. Emily Brontë, Har-
per Lee and J.D. Salingersuggest a lone clas-
sic is indeed sufficient to secure a reputa-
tion. But it also points to the difficulty of
distilling the essence of a life. Mr Sprawson
always saw himself as a writer, and still
does, “Haunts” being only the outward ev-
idence of that identity. Others saw him the
same way, but only for a while.
Still afloat
Since last yearMr Sprawson hasbeen
moved to another ward. His room is under-
ground and looks onto a sunken court-
yard. Some of the other patients are able to
talk. “They’re really quite interesting, some
of them,” he says. Mr Sprawson himself,
though, has grown worse. He is still visited
by his daughters and by Margaret Vyner,
his lover for the past 15 years. But he has
stopped reading. He spends much of his
time wandering the corridors looking for a
swimming pool, opening broom cup-
boards in the hope that one will reveal the
dapple of shimmering water.
He remains desperate to go home, to re-
turn to the manuscript of his second book,
which is half-finished and sits submerged
in a drawer in his flat. “I’m tired at the mo-
ment,” he says, looking out at the wintry
view. “Much too tired to write. But I’m get-
ting better.” 7
Reinventing opera
Rope, knife, rose
G
IRL meets boy, they fall in love, girl
dies: the morbid plots of many op-
eras are an obvious target for feminist
revisionism. A new production of “Car-
men”, in Florence, duly ends with the
exasperated heroine fatally shooting her
jealous lover (instead of being stabbed to
death herself). For Barrie Kosky, an Aus-
tralian director whose own “Carmen”
opens at the Royal Opera House in Co-
vent Garden on February 6th, that ap-
proach is far too literal. “Opera is the
ritualisation of emotion through the
human voice,” he says, “which has noth-
ing to do with realism.” He insists that
“Carmen” is not merely a retrograde
celebration of machismo. Rather, it is “a
tango between Eros and Thanatos”;
Carmen herself “wants to self-destruct, to
meet her death”.
Mr Koskysees opera as the art form
that brings audiences closest to the the-
atre of the ancient Greeks—if it is present-
ed with sufficient intensity and visual
restraint. The stage for his “Carmen” will
be stripped back to bare essentials: a
huge staircase and just three props (a
rope, a knife and some rose petals). “I
love empty space,” he says, “because
with singers the stage is never empty.” If
his taste in sets is austere, however, in
other respects it is exuberant. In his crazi-
ly stylised production of Handel’s “Saul”,
soon to be revived at Glyndebourne, the
biblical monarch emerged as a super-
deranged King Lear.
Brought up in Melbourne, the son of
Jewish immigrants, Mr Kosky has culti-
vated the image of (in his words) a “gay
Jewish kangaroo”; as the intendant of
Berlin’s Komische Oper he has an influ-
ential power base. Everything he directs
is in some way extreme. His production
of Rameau’s“Castor et Pollux” for the
English National Opera (ENO) outraged
purists. Its most abiding image involved a
young woman lying on a dunghill and
working herself to orgasm with the aid of
a disembodied hand. He describes his
production of Shostakovich’s surreal
comedy, “The Nose”—to be revived in
Sydney later this month—as “a phantas-
magoria of paranoia and eroticism”. It
featured a tap-dancing chorus-line of
giant schnozzles.
Yet an acute political awareness un-
derpins his pranks. In his view Vienna is
“still full of unexorcised Nazi ghosts”. In
Berlin he staged a version of “West Side
Story” in which the star-crossed lovers
were a German and a Turk. With his final
show at the Komische Oper in 2022 he
intends to realise a long-held ambition: “I
want to do an operetta, in Yiddish, in
Berlin.” When his contract expires he is
likely to stay in Germany, which—with its
generoussubsidies and low seat
prices—is opera’s utopia. “Going to the
opera in Berlin can cost less than going to
a film,” he notes. “That deals with the
elitism charge in one fell swoop.”
In America, with its unfillable 4,000-
seat houses, opera’s condition is “cata-
strophic”. In London, meanwhile, the
ENO’s future is precarious. How can such
struggling houses recover? “You have to
be really radical,” Mr Kosky reckons.
“Take things round the country in a big
circus tent.” In hisview only Philip Glass
and Andrew Lloyd Webber have recently
composed anything truly new in the
genre. “I want a brilliant jazz composer to
come to me and say he wants to do an
opera,” Mr Kosky pleads.
A radical opera director strives to invigorate an embattled form