A Little Life in review

This review contains mild spoilers and carries the same content warnings as both Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel and its further adaptations.

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” is a brash and disagreeable reinvention of Finley Dunne’s 1890’s quote “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and as the year comes to a close and the melancholy of winter cocoons me, I find myself pondering whether Ivo Van Hove’s interpretation of A Little Life may be the only context in which I find such a quote agreeable.

Bruising and beautiful, visceral and eviscerating, Hanya Yanagihara's tome of a novel follows four befriended New Yorkers in a chronological narrative, with flashbacks frequently interspersed throughout. It is as equally magnetic as it is repellent, carrying elaborate and extensive content warnings not earned from merely a singular event or passage: lacerating depictions of suicide and self harm, lashings and child prostitution, addiction and rape all find themselves at the forefront of its plot and test the audiences trauma threshold repeatedly.

While the book found itself as winner of the 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and found itself a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, it’s possible that its acclaim has been overtaken by Ivo Van Hove’s monumental theatrical adaptation, but not without controversy.

Compared to its preceding novel, Ivo Van Hove’s staging of the colossal, and previously thought unadaptable, tale appears to be an arousing experiment in terror. The novel's more amiable passages, detailing the four friends' lives in Manhattan, are largely discarded, and, quite promptly, the ensemble recedes and Jude is swept hastily to the fore. With James Norton’s protagonist readied, we are soon introduced to his proclivity towards self harm and, through four hours of monologue, nudity and abuse flashbacks, are left suspended in a veritable atrocity exhibition as the nauseating brutality of Jude’s life unravels.

Koen Tachelet has done an undoubtedly phenomenal job at compressing Yanagihara's monumental work into a theatrical telling: While Yanagihara splinters extended portrayals of friendship and flourishing careers amongst monstrous abuse, Van Hove’s adaptation relies less on these tender moments of unionship and instead incorporates a visceral and agonising vulnerability to assure the audience never loses sight of the characters humanity. It is these moments, depicted frequently with monologue and intervals of nudity, that have been a point of contention amongst critics, but feel imperative to its telling, especially while the characterisation and context of Jude’s entourage have been stripped back and less well drawn.

The underutilization of the characters of Willem, Malcolm and JB are starkly detectable, at times disenchanting, but percase defendable when pondering Van Hove’s adaptation alongside its preceding novel. An unmention of Willem’s promiscuity could perhaps be explained to offset some of the script's abandoned romanticism, but with no mention of the relationship with his disabled brother, Hemming, allowed for a more shallowly constructed appearance. JB’s artistic depictions of the four friends, an integral part of his character and of equal importance in the observation of fluctuating dynamics over the plot's course, were relatively underwhelming. And even James Norton’s protagonist, of whom the script so desperately clings upon, finds himself professionally reduced to assure maximal emphasis on his victimhood: Jude’s career, first at the US Attorney’s Office and later at the corporate firm Rosen-Pritchard goes almost entirely unmentioned, despite the set design allowing for him, like other members of the quartet that frequently engaged in their own work at the stage’s periphery, to showcase this. While these tableaus of relative normalcy do emphasise their ignorance to Jude’s manifest abuse, the opportunity to demonstrate the authority and control Jude himself reclaims as a revered and often ruthless defence lawyer is disappointingly lost.

Another stark literary omission occurs in its transgression to stage adaptation when Lucien, a lawyer from Jude’s firm, and forgotten character within the theatrical performance, suffers a massive stroke and consequently, near total memory loss. When Jude reaches his eventual suicide, he injects an artery with an empty needle, causing a stroke and his subsequent death. Yanagihara’s novel details a heartfelt promise made to Harold, that Jude would not end his own life, and its left to be pondered whether his eventual method of suicide is, in some way, an attempt to honor that promise. Jude’s assurance to Harold becomes even more poignant in wake of Willem’s death as it is debatably the most painful endurance of all, in another testament to the sentimentality Yanagihara relies so consistently upon within the novel.

It’s true that alternative adaptations, such as a feature film, would offer opportunity for a more internal, naturalised telling, but Van Hove’s adaptation, with its expected theatrical constraints and stylistic tethers, allows for the story essentials to be condensed into a powerful and concise examination of barbarous abuse and its nauseating ramifications. While this has received scorn from critics, labelling it ‘torture porn’, I find myself more of a staunch defender of the novel’s adaptation than I am of the novel itself.

The novelist Garth Greenwell represents audiences' ardent attachment to Yanagihara’s writings and brings forth an important discussion surrounding its portrayal of gay male characters, declaring it “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years,” however I find myself wondering if the latter is too generous, and instead is merely a collision of audience and writer both infatuated with martyrdom. It is undoubtable that Yanagihara knows how to write devastation beautifully, but she doesn’t appear to know how to isolate that from perpetual victimhood. Her unforgiving depictions of queer characters seem to exist only in hospice, her writing unconvinced that life and its saving is a worthy or necessary outcome. Jude is force fed sentimentality, nauseating piety, and his vulnerability exaggerated to a grotesque humiliation and brutality without compassion; surely not the representation the queer community had hoped for.

Even when separated from its pedestal as a novel waving the flag of queer representation, there exists an authorial malevolence in such excessive and visceral depictions of torture masquerading under the pretense of realism. Further than its hollowing reports of savage abuse exists an implcation that the accumulation of abuse has a direct correlation to suicide and ones theoretical right to exist. It's a naive assertion offered by Yanagihara, and, in another format, Van Hove, seemingly without great consideration of its impact or even empirical cogitation that such undue and gratuitous amounts of suffering could border farce.

Ivo Van Hove and Koen Tachelet’s collaboration remains equally as graphic and disorientating, but, stripped bare of Yanagihara’s half developed romanticism and audience compensation, allows for a concise and poignant telling of the cruelty of abuse without sweetened literary palette cleansers. Van Hove’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist, nor is it included for mere shock or titillation. Jude’s suffering is so extensively and excruciatingly documented because it is the foundation of his character, and his characters abuse the foundation of the adaptation. This still doesn’t allow for its adaptation to be deemed palatable, with Jude’s self harm an enduring motif, his white shirt an increasingly bloodied externalisation of abuse, his tribulation remorselessly displayed without being forcefully dramatised, its telling remains guttural and grievous, but, unlike Yanagihara’s portrayal, not quite relentless.

So is this a performance infatuated with victimhood, or is this an accurate portrayal of what it may be to live an existence enduring such mistreatment and exploitation? Is the lack of Yanagihara’s written nuance problematic or efficacious? Could it be that Van Hove’s adaptation is a testament to a societal infrequency in consumption of harrowing and grevious travesty without a cloak of romanticism and consolation?

These lines of questioning borders on the political, and, quite perplexingly, this is a tale intentionally non-politicised: Both Yanagihara and Van Hove’s is a New York of privilege without politics. Aware of its modernity but uncertified in all aspects, we are forced to wallow in the tales eternal present day. There is no mention of the terror attacks within its own locale, nor is there reference to any recognisable cultural figure that could moor the tale to a particular year. The characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery and yet, its adaptation remains surprisingly subversive. Despite wealth’s rotten underbelly being left primarily underdeveloped and their privilege undiscussed, it demonstrates as a performance that uses the middle class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation of individuals under the influence of barbarity, abuse, destruction and pride.

To assure theatrical rendering of a timeless present day is wonderfully simplistic staging and lighting: an open plan apartment seamlessly transforms into monasteries and nightclubs, hotel rooms and hospital beds, with illuminating screens playing shots of New York acting as bookends to the stage, offering us perhaps our only tether to an otherwise unmentioned outside world. Jan Versweyveld’s set and the costumes of An D’Huys undoubted artistry in their own right, conceived and curated with poise and consideration. Similarly, the play’s sound design, although obscure, was a grand success, and the central acting performances a theatrical miracle.

James Norton offers an astounding performance as Jude: embodying both adult and juvenile side by side, often within the same scene and the same urbane and soiled costume. His performance of a collapsing past and present is a convincing and powerful theatrical representation of trauma’s ability to endure, and provides another layer of harrowing, tortuous vulnerability that could not have been achieved without such stellar casting. Equally, Jude’s multiple tormentors, portrayed by Elliot Cowan, are acted in a way that not only echoes Jude’s inescapable and visceral hardship, but forges an unshakeable nightmare from which us, the viewers, are unable to become untethered. Cowan’s ability to shapeshift between characters, sometimes oily and vicious, but always unredeemable and unsubtle in their brutality, is both exemplary and extraordinary.

Luke Thompon’s Willem emerges as an almost angelic figure in comparison to the latter and to Yanagihara’s written characterisation: his indomitable niceness, puppyish decency and unwavering devotion to Jude offer some of the only refuge and relief compensated to the audience, and despite my critiques of a half written character, Thompon assures a superlative portrayal. Omari Douglas and Zach Wyatt represent the remaining duo of the four protagonists, and although underutilised, do a superb job at engaging within their allotted positions.

Numerous critics have contemplated if it weren't for such spectacular and phenomenal showmanship, would the audience have remained in their seats for the near four hours of emotional terrorism, and I find myself pondering exactly why we did. Were we persisting out of sheer hope for a sunset and happy ending? Were we hoping to be offered consolation? Were we anticipating for Jude to emerge as a villain, with something tangible to tether to his character, making all its barbarity justifiable? Were we wanting to emerge from this a somehow more empathetic audience, more knowledgeable on the relentlessness of abuse and its lifelong ramifications? Or was it just a spectacle in morbid curiosity?

It was Parul Sehgal in an article for New Yorker that described Yanagihara’s writing as an “exemplary novelistic incarnation” of “trauma theory,” referencing theorist Cathy Caruth’s notion of traumatic events as not a simple, healable wound. If Yanagihara is accurately described in such complementaries, why, as an author so phenomenally capable of narrating wealth and misery, tenderness and devastation, was there no developed reference to psychology? Instead we are left with an onslaught of depredation and literary manipulation. It seems that Yanagihara’s relentlessness manifests not only in Jude’s excruciatingly detailed abuses, but in her exploitation of consumers' weakness through bloodied, barbaric, and cheap shock. If Van Hove’s adaptation is to be besmirched by critics as sadism, Yanagihara’s is nearer to Munchousen by proxy.

Her presumption of a credulous audience is apparent and distasteful, not once does it seem she considered the implications of her writing, or its potential to be received as farce. It takes a greatly skilled writer to so poetically avoid adequately addressing psychology for eight hundred odd pages, but not a good one. Martin Amis once famously queried, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” and the surprising answer is that, despite her efforts in misery, Hanya Yanagihara has. Yanagihara’s is a story of tenderness, both painful and adoring; hinging on sentimentality and bordering both exploitation and exhibitionism. Van Hove’s is instead a tale of abuse; coarse, simplified, harrowing and unabated.

Depictions of much of the mistreatment Jude suffers has long been cloaked in teary eyed romanticism, inchoate and exploitative in its portrayals; the ageing of childhood trauma packaged with a beautiful idealism, its effects only surfacing in ways that are palatable for audience consumption. It is an undoubtable rarity to find such graphic depictions of abuse within mainstream media, of that comparable to Van Hove’s resolute rendering. Within literary fiction, Nabokov’s lyrical prose cocoons the complexity and horror of monstrous paedophilia throughout his 1955 novel Lolita, the torture of Theon Greyjoy in A Game of Thrones, although repugnant, is still dressed in fantasy, and it seems the only sustained depictions of depravity remain within horror, where writers appear liberated to be less decorous and the audience subscribes themselves eagerly to witness whatever graphic and formidable onslaught is to be showcased.

Van Hove’s theatrical adaptation offers a whiplash-inducing bifurcation between Jude’s endurance of odious abuse in the present, existing to us in flashbacks and the stellar narratorship of Nathalie Armin, and the execrable ramifications that persist. It’s undoubtedly disorientating and uncomfortably graphic, but staunch in its dedication to realism under the constraints of a story oversaturated with barbarity. Showcasing this brutality with poise, Van Hove appears strikingly capable of articulating a tale of endurance and tortuous tribulation without undue exploitation: it remains close to the point, and adamant in its refusal to stray. He isolates Jude’s manifest abuse, quiets the external noise of his counterparts and curates a demonstration in terror, barbarity and its lifelong ramifications.

Too, Van Hove has assured that Jude’s tormentors exist further from the hollywood horror tropes of masked killers and violent gun men, and exist instead as both known and human. Cowran’s maleficent characters are vivid and emotionally exhausting, graphic and relentless, and not once envisioned as a misunderstood victim; a grand feat when presenting fictionalised abuse within the mainstream media. While Van Hove disregards audience comfortability in a way entirely necessary to unpick the unadulterated grotesqueness of abuse, due to the latter and various more subtle, storytelling marvels, there is still room for us as an audience to engage in these travesties without sacrificing our own vulnerability.

All too often we have bore witness to approaches, varying in their success but similar to Yanagihara’s; tales of abuse within the context of glorification, exploitation, artistry and sentimentality. It feels radical to suggest within lyrical prose, theatre, or further media that abuse, in all its materialised formats, is disturbing, unromantic, and unproductive. Trauma is not a personality trait, nor does it define a character's personhood, and there is worthy criticism of both Van Hove and Yanagihara within the latter, but it does endure, through decades and fictional storylines, through joy and through sadness; much like grief, the impact of abuse is often there to be grown around instead of shrunk.

Whether A Little Life has earned approbation as the first piece of media to successfully elevate depictions of abuse from exploitation and horror, or it merely proves as evidence that men are capable of lasting more than two minutes while conceiving something of passion, I find it undisputed that A Little Life is one of the most grievous, complex and divisive pieces of fiction to settle within the mainstream across the past decade, and likely for years to come.

Note: I thoroughly recommend Andrea Long Chu’s January 2022 article for Vulture as a detailed unpacking of Hanya Yanagihara's published novels, their themes and as a sensational example of literary critique focusing on A Little Life.

Mum, come pick me up, they’re out here separating art from the artist

Eric Gill and the morality of an artist

In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Eric Gill is described as the ‘greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter cutter and type designer of genius,’ but the only notable accolade I would adorn him with is ranking in my top ten list of artists I’d hit over the head with something hard.

Eric Gill’s statue outside the BBC in 2019. Image: Shutterstock/Willy Barton

One of the most acknowledged architects of modern British design, from his sculptures to his typefaces, which for decades shaped the visual style of publishing houses and imprints including Faber and Penguin, Eric Gill is not an irrelevant or underground name, nor has he ever been.

Born in West Sussex, England, in 1882, Gill’s work is held in permanent collections in museums across the country including Victoria and Albert, Tate and the British Museum, with his typeface one of the most commonly used in the Western world. His grand, burnished sculptures adorn Westminster Cathedral, the United Nations Headquarters, and, most relevant today, BBC’s Broadcasting House.

In short, Eric Gill’s work represents often ecclesiastical craftsmanship, his portfolio is littered with monumental, elegant iconographies, renowned for their precise linear simplicity, most of which preserved meticulously to this day. His lettering projects are nothing short of monumental in their respective field as well, however today it’s the artist, not his sculptures alone, that strikes concern, controversy and debate.

Throughout his lifetime, Gill kept personal diaries, these were first published by biographer Fiona MacCarthy in 1989 and, after being ignored by other biographers (Robert Speaight’s 1966 biography namely), revealed his sexual abuse towards his young daughters, incest with at least one of his sisters, numerous adulteries and sexual acts with his dog. The artists daughter, Petra Tegetmeier, who was alive at the time of the MacCarthy biography, was quoted describing that her father had an "endless curiosity about sex,” of which is made abundantly obvious when viewing his work.

Examples of his most conspicuous and therefore unsettling pieces include two wood engravings on paper, Girl in Bath II, 1923, and its former, Girl in Bath I, 1922, depicting his daughter, Petra, bathing, as the name would suggest. An Art Deco inspired nude sketch of Gill’s daughter, Elizabeth, from 1927 presents the same onerous viewing experience.

His perverted eroticism is demonstrated in his well endowed evangelical figures too. Gill was influenced heavily by simplified forms of early religious sculpture, and furthermore, the sexually explicit Hindu temple carving of India. The latter of which is believed to have inspired his carving, tentatively titled Ecstasy, 1911, in which he fastidiously sculpted his own rendition of copulating gods, using his sister Gladys and her husband Ernest as his models. It’s believed that their long standing incestuous relationship began around this time. A mere couple of years later, with the sculptors reputation ballooning and with no public knowledge of his sexual deviences, Gill was hired to carve the stations of the cross for Westminster Cathedral, a project that cemented his, at the time, recent conversion to Roman Catholicism and helped him express his avid Christian enthusiasm.

Gill’s work presents itself as magnificently unimpeachable, although that’s the antithesis of what it truly is. His nude engravings become poignant and distressing when provided with context, as does his more unobtrusive work, such as Girl Sleeping, 1925, or the wooden doll he carved for his daughter Petra in 1910, which, quite brashly, was quoted by an individual and documented in the Guardian as looking “just like a penis” after a discussion in which the object was described as “potent” and the doll was observed to have no neck.

There is something clean, yet primitive and repugnant about Gill’s work. When stripped of it’s context I find it falling visually alongside Jeff Koon’s balloon animals, if only Koon’s had maybe crafted a flaccid appendage to the stainless steel underbelly of his animals, or had been born a hundred years prior and therefore forced to work with equal materials.

In the same article from the Guardian, Nathaniel Hepburn, director of Ditching Museum of Art and Craft was quoted expressing that he did not wish to “censor which works we show because we don’t have the confidence of language to be able to interpret them properly.” However the work of Eric Gill is not only confined to gallery walls, and the conversation regarding the ethics of memorialising Gill in the preservation of his work is not reserved exclusively for elitist art collectors and highbrow museum curators; it is littered on religious and historic listed buildings stretching across Europe. It is engraved in our history.

The BBC monument, which depicts Prospero and Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is an ideal example of this, and sits looming above the buildings entrance in yet another egregious reminder of the BBC’s historical but likely irrevocable relationship with another one of the UK’s most infamous pedophiles, Saville.

The Prospero and Ariel sculpture was one of five hand carved works created for the BBC in the years 1931 and 1932 by the notable designer and sculptor, and until January of this year sat atop BBC’s Old Broadcasting House untouched. The piece was commissioned by Sir John Reith, who was the news organisation’s director-general at the time, and initially struck public concern regarding the “size of the sprites genitalia,” these concerns, it later emerged, were likely not vexatious. Gill relished in his odes to the unruly.

For years, activists have urged the BBC to take the sculpture down to no avail, and curators still battle with how to balance the artist’s glaring immorality with his enduring impact in England. In hindsight, it is surprising the BBC didn’t do more to preserve and protect the monument, of which is so public, accessible and controversial.

In January, Police were called to the central London address after a man had climbed onto the statue and began chiseling at the figures with a hammer. He attempted to detach the towering ten foot sculpture from its anchor to the historic offices, while infrequently shouting ‘pedophile,’ leaving little to be questioned regarding his motivation. On the pavement, another man was seen to livestream the event as the crowds of BBC officials and members of the public grew.

Katie Razzall, culture editor for BBC News noted that “with every loud smash, there'd be a moan or a shout of ‘stop’ from someone in the gathering crowd below. It felt brutal; an assault on beauty.” The word assault feels appropriate, however beauty not so much.

The damage to the Old Broadcasting House came mere weeks after a jury cleared four individuals of criminal damage after they removed a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth in Bristol and dumped it in the city harbour amid 2020’s George Floyd protests. They successfully argued that they had been making a sincere protest against the Colston statue in wake of the Black Lives matter movement, were exercising their right to free speech, and insisted it was a criminal offence to keep the statue up given its barbaric and offensive history. The result of this however was that the government has pledged to pass new laws to protect existing statues in public spaces from what Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, called “baying mobs,” arguing that it’s better to provide context, or in his words, to “retain and explain.”

The culture secretary’s narrative appears to me as ineffective and belittling. The Prospero and Ariel sculpture ornaments a historic, central national building. I fail to see, as with the Edward Colston statue, what inscription would reconcile a statue’s critics with the object of their understandable revulsion, or ultimately what justifies continued public memorialisation of such individuals? It’s no secret that monuments and statues have become increasingly contentious in this country and across the Western world, however Gill’s work happens to be unusual in this debate because the objection is to the artist rather than the person it depicts.

Alongside the latter mentioned, numerous other statues have been targeted and subsequently removed in recent years, and while I celebrate the removal of these iconographies, the defacing of Eric Gill’s work makes way to a wider question within the art world: what can we define as justifiable censorship within art and, maybe more importantly, can we ever truly separate art from the artist?

The latter falls under the same umbrella as what makes an artwork complex, and how necessary is this criterion to make an interesting work? Where is the value of art to be found: in the artist’s passion or in the eye of the public? The answer to this I of course do not hold, and furthermore is subjective; just as there is no universal morality, there is no universal standard as to what makes great art.

What I can be sure of however is that art does not transcend any human biography. Eric Gill was a depraved pedophile who abused, amongst others, his own teenage daughters. He spent his career lurching between extremes, merging his perversion and anecdotal experiences with sex into his religious works and beliefs.

The debate regarding whether we can separate art from the artist seems unfortunately resolved in various art circles, with the belief that to separate the two is to misrepresent the art, and to miss a vital aspect of its meaning, impact, and understanding. MacCarthy commented that after the initial shock of Gill’s sexual deviances and abuse, the sculptor “emerged as one of the twentieth century's strangest and most original controversialists, a sometimes infuriating, always arresting spokesman for man's continuing need of God in an increasingly materialistic civilisation, and for intellectual vigour in an age of encroaching triviality.”

There is a valid and imperative discussion to be had on the censorship of art, however in regards to Eric Gill, long dead and widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential British artists of the 20th century, there is no central concept or inspiration for his work that can be separated from his criminal sexual proclivities and abuse.

Gill was meticulous, a trait commonly expected from sculptors and artists, and, also, of pedophiles. The sculptor throughout his career had extensively noted the measurements of various parts of his daughters bodies. Adjacent to those he recorded his own measurements, including that of his penis size, flaccid and erect. There is no work that we can be assured stands separate from Gill’s perversion, no sculpted genitalia we can presume is not crafted after his own. No polished stone torso’s or breasts we can conclude were crafted without his daughters or siblings measurements in mind.

One defender of the sculptor was quoted writing to the Irish Sunday Tribune stating “what he believed in, how he tried to do his work and how he tried to live his life were, I think, far closer to the teachings of Christ than is shown” and I could not disagree more. He did such a meticulous and fastidious job at weaving a veil across his works, polishing and burnishing the pornographic and perverted to look saintly and controlled. Just as Saville did with his abuse, cloaked with charity work and with a deeply human character. Eric Gill did it all on paper.

There is no work of Eric Gill’s that doesn’t remind me of his historic abuse. His work will join the statues of slave traders littered across this country in city centres and public parks, and that of Egon Schiele, who its believed fashioned his nude figures with the life models of vulnerable underage girls, as integral reminders of what must be preserved for museums as historic relics. The Colston statue should have found its home in a museum dedicated to crimes against humanity long before it ended up at the bottom of Bristol Harbour, and the work’s of Gill and Schiele deserve preservation for a similar historic fate.

To respond once more to Robert Jenrick’s quote, to “retain and explain,” there is no moral obligation to assign context to a piece of art hung solemnly on a gallery wall. There is however an obligation to apprise the public when they are to view a representation or monument to criminal behaviour or abuse.

Context does not belong in art collections, it belongs in history museums, and I hope within my lifetime I get to witness Eric Gill’s work being displaced and his legacy and impact on our country frowned upon by the same highbrow figures that have lauded and misrepresented his work for decades.

I struggle to think of an artist more deserving of a swift and scrupulous fall from grace.