Jake Arnott on John Gay

0:00This is the BBC. On an autumn evening, a dumpy, rather pale, middle-aged man sits down to write a letter to a friend. He's been trying for years to make it as a writer, but every time he seems close to success, it's been snatched away from him. And he's just had bad news of one final knockback. He's broke and he can't see a way to carry on. I begin to look upon myself as one already dead, he writes. If a stone should mark the place of my grave, see these words put upon it. Life is a jest and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it. Your father's perp receipts for the escape of prisoners must amount to a considerable sum in a year.

0:43Money, well-timed and properly applied, will do anything. If you at an office solicit your due... Within a year, he's the most successful writer on the London stage. His next play, The Beggar's Opera, set partly in Newgate Prison and with a cast of thieves, prostitutes and corrupt jailers, is the hit of 1728. The theatre's crowded every night, souvenir portraits of the leading lady sell like hotcakes, and at last, the money comes pouring in. So how did this man, John Gay, it's he, go from total failure to being the writer of what's been called the most popular play of the 18th century? And 300 years later, why should we still be talking about it?

1:23I'm Ian Hislop, and here to help me answer that question is novelist Jake Arnott, who's nominating John Gay as his great life. Jake, you're a writer. Did you ever feel that sense of despair? I still do. I still do. No, I mean, it's the wonderful thing about John Gay is he had that capacity to speak for us as writers about how we can constantly be complaining about our lot for no reason. I mean, no-one's forced us to do this. Yes, it struck me that he's the original crime writer and that is your field and it's how you came to notice. Was he the first person to really do crime? Well, his work, it comes out at the same time as this notion of what was often called the rogue narrative.

2:08Although I'm often seen as a crime writer, I often don't fit into the kind of mystery crime genre. I don't have detectives that solve things. I don't have things neatly sort of tied up and a clear idea of who's good and who's bad. And actually, when you go back to Gay's time, it's much more modern than what came later in a strange sort of way. It's certainly not cosy crime with him. It's not cosy crime, it's noir, actually. It's noir fiction, you know, before its time. In 1928, two centuries after the Beggar's Opera created a sensation, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht adapted it into the Thrutney Opera, keeping most of Gay's original plot, but bringing in new songs based on German ballads.

2:49Once again, it captivated audiences, running for hundreds of performances, and some of the songs, most notably Mack the Knife, had become standards, known and sung right up to today. Oh, the shark has pretty teeth there And he shows them pearly white Just a jackknife has MacEthere And he keeps it out of sight. And, of course, I came to Gay via McKeith, you know, his wonderful creation. And I rather foolishly, like most people, imagined that Bertolt Brecht made up McKeith, because it's such a wonderful song, you know, Mack the Knife. There's an epigram for my first novel, The Long Firm. I took it from the opera where McKeith says, what's robbing a bank compared to founding one?

3:48It's wonderful. But actually, John Gay gets it even better. This is McHeath in Newgate as he's waiting to be hanged. He sings. I'm not going to sing it. I think it's to the tune of Greensleeves, actually. Oh, go on, sing it. Since laws were made for every degree, to curb vice in others as well as me, I wonder we hadn't better company upon Tyburn Tree. But gold from law can take out the sting, and if rich men like us were to swing, toward thin the land such numbers to string upon Tyburn Tree. Of course, Tyburn Tree is the gallows, you know, and this is what I, Gay became the big influence on my last novel, The Fatal Tree.

4:30When I started writing The Fatal Tree, I knew that there would be a writer in there somewhere because it was such an interesting time in terms of literature and journalism. And for a while I thought it might be Daniel Defoe, but more and more Gay started to sort of tap me on the shoulder and say, oh, what about me? He seemed such an interesting character, such a beguiling character, quite mysterious in lots of ways because he did seem to have, there was something hidden in his life. We have with us here in the studio, Dr Rebecca Bullard from Trinity College, Oxford. Rebecca, can you give us a quick idea of what The Beggar's Opera is about?

5:09Yeah, absolutely. Well, as Jake has said, its central character is Mackeith the Highwayman. and before the story begins, McKeith, we learn, has married Polly Peacham, the daughter of Peacham the Thief Taker. And Peacham is horrified and his wife are horrified by this because they had expected Polly to do much better. They had expected her to sell sex rather than to give it away for free to her husband. So they're horrified by the fact that she's gone and married. and they're also worried because they realise that now Polly is under McKeith's control and she can do the dirty on her parents. So there's a kind of fight for control and they decide that in order to deal with this situation they're going to have McKeith strung up and more than that they're going to claim the£40 for his reward.

5:57So the rest of the play is a kind of chase with Peacham and then Lockett, the jailer of Newgate, chasing McKeith through brothels and gaming houses and other places in low-life London to have him arrested and then eventually hanged. And along the way, we see MacHeath's adventures and we see him betraying Polly with Lucy Lockett, daughter of the jailer of Newgate. But I suppose the thing to say is that you don't really watch the beggar's opera for the plot. The plot's quite straightforward. It's just a sort of chase of MacHeath. What you watch it for are two other things. you watch it for the songs, which punctuate this narrative.

6:35They're amazing songs all the way through every couple of minutes. And I'm sorry, Jake, that you didn't give us green sleeves because I think that would be wonderful. I should point out that the songs, the words are new, but they're used old songs. Exactly that. They use smash hit songs. So it's kind of, some people have called it a bit of a jukebox musical and it's sort of like that because all the tunes that have been familiar, Some of them are taken from Purcell and Handel and from actually quite more refined sources. And some of them, like Greensleeves, are folk tunes, ballads. But all of them would have been really familiar.

7:08And Gay gives them new words to fit the narrative that's going on. So you might watch it for the songs, but you also watch it for the satire, for this kind of inversion of high and low, for a sense that the people who are in charge are just thieves and rogues and highwaymen and are no better than the rest of us. He was also basing it on real events, which was the appearance of this incredibly corrupt thief-taker, Jonathan Wilde. I mean, we think we have trouble with the Metropolitan Police now, but Jonathan Wilde was this astonishing creation. He set himself up as a thief-taker general, at the same time running all the criminal gangs and organising all the fencing of stolen property.

7:44And so there was this drama that people knew about, and it kind of extended into politics as well. There'd been this big collapse of global capitalism. The South Sea bubble had burst. there'd been a big clampdown on crime because there was fears against crimes against property. And there was a feeling that actually the rich get away with it and the poor get the blame, you know, that familiar refrain. Obviously, I want to think it was the satire that got the bums on seats, obviously, because it's hugely popular, this point, that the thief-taker is, in fact, the leader of the country. It's Walpole.

8:19And he's the person who's playing both sides of the system. Do you think that's why people went? Yes. Well, that's very cheery. Yes, you can come again. And at the end, you have this moment where they impose a happy ending. So Mark Heath is about to be hanged, and he's there under the fatal tree at Tyburn, and a poet comes on stage and says, no, no, no, stop, stop. This is an opera. This is an opera for heaven's sake. You're turning it into a tragedy. It's got to have a happy ending. And then the beggar says, you want a happy ending? Of course. I'll give it to you. You want a happy ending? Have your happy ending.

8:58Call a reprieve. And so there's this sort of deus ex machina, this kind of machine that comes on and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat from Mackeith. And he's transported instead. Of course, it's very convenient for Gay because it means he can write the second part. Can we talk about him in terms of his, up to this point, more successful friends? He's part of a gang of people who sit in coffeehouses and make jokes. obviously. Strikes me as an incredibly good way to spend your time. But Pope, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift are better known satirists, more successful and Gay's sort of also there, but he's their friend.

9:38Is that what appealed to you to start with? Absolutely and I think what's really interesting about Gay in that coterie is that I think there's an element of class here. I think what's really interested me about Gay is that he'd been an apprentice. Actually, he was an apprentice to a silk mercer. He'd been in the fashion world, actually, when he was young. And he was always struggling. He was always struggling for bits of patronage. And he was always seen as the one that they sort of had to look after a little bit. But I think it was this instinctive comedy that he has that you don't really get in Swift and you certainly don't get in Pope.

10:16It's the humour of the person that knows what it's like to be a servant. that knows what it's like to be on the other end of it. And so it's heartfelt. In your book, you say at one point that Swift was quick, Pope was rather pompous, and you're about saying gay was gay, but you don't quite say that. Do you think that is important? I know you like to reclaim people. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to be careful imposing a modern identity on people from the past. Yeah. we also have to be careful of an assumption of anything, particularly heterosexuality. But I think with Gay, he's quite mysterious.

10:57There's certainly no real evidence that he had any real relationships with women. He had very close friendships, and he was astonishingly camp. And you find that in his letters, particularly to Henrietta Howard, who became the king's mistress. And in his work as well, It's camp and it's sometimes very arch. And I think that's what he was able to do. And I think that's what inspired me, almost without knowing it, because when I was writing the long film, my first novel, I had sort of a McKeith-like figure who is very ambivalent. He's in a very butch male world, but he might not necessarily be straight.

11:40I think that's what I find interesting in Gay's work. People are really conscious of same-sex relationships, and it's very much part of their language. But it's a hanging offence for a man to have an affair with another man in this period. And certainly for someone like Gay, who always lives with other people, he never has his own establishment, he is in a financially pretty precarious place, he's in a culturally pretty precarious place, it would have been more or less unthinkable for him to have active relationships with other men. It would have been very difficult in a world where you're always observed.

12:14but he's really interesting on heterosexuality and on the kind of performed nature of heterosexuality. You know, Mac Heath does this amazing performance of what it's like to be, you know, a man who has a kind of bevy of women around him. Including the very good joke at the end that when even more women come in and say they want to live with him, he says, oh, all right, you hang me. Take me to the gallows, yeah, exactly. Particularly with Pope and Swift, They almost always joke about what a womaniser gay was. And this is sort of imposed on him. They probably knew it was a joke, but I think it was also a way of protecting him.

12:53Can we talk about being patronised, as it were, having to have a patron, which again seems very alien. You'd think, you know, why can't you just write better and sell some more copies? Why are you sucking up to these ghastly aristocrats? But it is something he consistently does in his life. This is the period that invents the idea of writing as a profession, as something that you can actually earn your living from. Gay's automatic assumption would be that in order to write, you have to have a patron. And he does court lots of patrons over the course of his career, actually quite successfully. For all he says that he's been disappointed again and again, you know, he lucks in with Burlington.

13:32And then the Duke of Duchess of Queensbury become massive patrons of his through the later part of his career. But what's interesting about Gay is that he tries every which way to make money out of writing. And patronage is only one of those things. I think what's important to remember about this period is that there's no such thing as royalties. You don't publish your work and then get more money depending on how successful it is. If you want to publish work, then you sell it to a bookseller and they give you a lump sum payment. And that's what you get. So really, the best way to make money as a writer in this period is to write for the stage.

14:08And it's certainly interesting that I think Gay makes about£700 from performances of the Beggars Opera, lots of money, but only£90 from actually publishing it. So it's hard to overstate what a spectacular success this play was. It ran for 62 nights straight. In the early 18th century, you might expect a really successful play to go for maybe, you know, nine, ten, maybe as many as 12 nights. And the way in which playwrights were paid was that on the third night, the author would get the takings on the sixth night and on the ninth night. Well, by the 62nd night, they've given up the reckoning. He's obviously struck a struck a deal with John Rich, the very appropriately named the manager of Lincoln's Infield Theatre, where this play went on.

14:58And there's a report in the newspapers shortly afterwards that the wags do say that the Beggars Opera hath made rich very gay and is like to make Jean Gay very rich. And indeed it does. But is he happy? No, of course he's not. Of course he's not. Partly he's not happy because it gets his patrons into quite a lot of trouble. Robert Walpole, who by this time is the Prime Minister, takes great offence. The effect of the Beggars Opera was so large that his next work was banned. Tell me about that. What did he do next? He writes a sequel to the Beggars Opera. He calls it the second part. It's called Polly and it follows the story of Polly Peacham, who has been married to MacHeath.

15:40It's not actually as politically acute as the Beggars Opera is, but Walpole was terrified of the idea of a sequel to the Beggars Opera. It was bad enough. Don't let's have another one. So he puts his attack dog, the Duke of Grafton, onto it. And the Duke of Grafton is a kind of censor in this period. And the Duke of Grafton stops Polly in rehearsal and pulls it, at which point Gay really puts a masterful move and decides, well, if you're not going to have it performed, I'll have it published. And he publishes it at his own expense, which is a very unusual thing to do, has 10 ,000 copies printed.

16:19That's more than ten times a normal print run. And it's an absolute smash hit and it makes Gay much more money than The Beggar's Opera ever did. We've talked a lot about The Beggar's Opera. What about the rest of the stuff? He's often seen as a bit of a one-hit wonder and I know how that feels. But one of the reasons I'm really happy to champion Gay here is things that have been overlooked. One of the great things I came across was a mock heroic poem called Trivia. The Art of Walking the Streets of London. And now, in the last couple of decades, there's been no end of books about walking around.

16:58And it's often called psychogeography. And boy, have I got bored of psychogeography. As if this is something new. As if we have to talk about the flammeur. This is something John Gay was doing 300 years ago. There's even a moment of, I think, probably the first time football hooliganism has been observed of the apprentice boys playing football in the piazza at Covent Garden. It's a wonderful piece. I mean, as I say, his early work, The Mohawks, is this astonishing story of the street gang. They kidnap the constables of the watch and then arrest them as Mohawks and become the constables themselves.

17:35So power... It's how power works, I think, is interesting to me. It can become very topsy-turvy. One of the themes of his life is he's useless with money. I love the moment where he gets quite some of money from, is it a book of poems? It is a book of poems. Yeah, poems on several occasions. And he's advised to buy South Sea stock. And so he buys a lot of this and he keeps buying it. And at one point, a lot of people around him think this might not be going the way it should be. And he's advised to put some aside. So at least have a hundred a year. And he doesn't know even what a hundred pounds a year would mean.

18:13and it's explained to him, well, it would be like a shoulder of a mutton and a fresh shirt every day. Yeah. That's how he understands money. That's how I understand money. Yeah. I think sources vary about how much he lost in the South Sea bubble. Even his friends were saying this isn't going to happen. And yet he, like all the other very canny satirists, didn't spot it. Well, they said with the last big crash back in 2007, 2008... This is for listeners who may be listening in the future and there's been another couple of financial crashes. This is the one we're on about. Somebody said nobody questioned this when everything was going up.

18:51And I think that's the thing you realise again about how modern this period does seem. Nobody really sort of questions corruption when people are getting away with it. A lot of the time, even when it goes well for gay, then it immediately goes wrong, doesn't it? Yeah, that's a real... It's a keynote of gay's career, the kind of success followed by humiliation. So very early on in his career, he comes to London and he's pleased because he gets a writing job at last. The writing job is as secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth. But he has to wear this extraordinary outfit, this livery of blue velvet with silver tassels, which is incredibly embarrassing.

19:27And it kind of happens again and again. Imagine how funny his friends found the outfit. Oh, yeah, hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. in 1714 things are going really well and he dedicates a really good book of poems the shepherd's week to uh by carl Bullingbrook who is one of the chief ministers in the government this is a really good move unfortunately four days after publication Queen Anne dies and Bullingbrook is exposed as a traitor and has to flee to France so not not such an astute political move after all. Another time later on in his career, this is 1727, he at last gets his court post. He's been waiting and waiting for a kind of post at court.

20:10There's a new king and queen, he's going to get this court position. He's dedicated his book of fables to Prince William, to one of their young children, and they offer him a post at court and he's really excited, but then it actually turns out that the post is his gentleman usher to Princess Louisa, who's two. So he doesn't fancy being gentleman usher to a two-year-old and he has to turn it down. And that happens again and again and again, this sense of things about to go brilliantly and then abject humiliation following. We talk about patronage and patrons, but I mean, how close were they involved?

20:43Gay lives with the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury, certainly after he loses his Whitehall lodgings because the government's so cross with him for publishing the Beggar's Opera. He goes to live with them in their house in Amesbury in Wiltshire. And his conversation is really important to them. Kitty Douglas, who's the Duchess of Queensbury, is young. She's 15 years younger than Gay. He meets her when she's about 20, and so she's about 27 by the time Gay moves in with them as a permanent house guest. And in this period, conversation is a really important part of entertainment. So it was very attractive for the Queensburys to have someone like Gay in their household, connecting them to literary London, particularly actually when they have to move out of the court and they have to move into the countryside.

21:27Gay provides a link to people like Pope and to Swift. So Gay obviously gets something out of the relationship. He gets a place to live and a roof over his head and he doesn't have to spend his own money on keeping a home. But the Queensburys get something out of it as well. They get his conversation, they get his wit, they get his fun. And clearly that relationship was as valuable to them as it is to Gay. In fact, when he dies, they set up a really lavish monument to him in Westminster Abbey as a kind of permanent testament to this friendship. What does the epitaph say? It's his own epitaph that he put in his letter to Pope, in big letters.

22:05Life suggests and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it. And underneath that, there's an epitaph that Pope writes on him, which has been really important in crystallising, I suppose, his reputation. And Pope describes him as, in wit, a man, simplicity, a child. and there's something ever so slightly passive-aggressive about Pope's characterisation of gay like this. I'm not sure that Gay literally did want those words on his tombstone and it's kind of like Pope's last joke at Gay's expense or at least you could read it like that. Actually, I think Pope is a little bit jealous of Gay, more than a little bit jealous of Gay, when he starts to have this huge success with Beggar's Opera because Pope has always treated Gay as his eleve, he calls him, his pupil.

22:51He literally patronises him as well as kind of offering him patronage. So he's a bit cross, I think, when Gay has this smash hit success. And he's deloved it. Your friend's been successful. Exactly. Nothing worse. Nothing worse. I think as well because Pope had been so successful. I mean, he kind of invented the subscription system whereby he made a huge fortune out of his translations of Homer. And for all this time, he was relying on the fact that he'd have someone like Gay to look down on. That's right. So early on in his career, Gay sort of serves a second apprenticeship, if you like. He's been apprenticed to a draper, to a silk merchant, very early on in his career.

23:30But he serves a kind of second apprenticeship to Pope as a bit of a Pope's hack writer. And Pope is really happy for Gay to do some writing for him and also to take the rap when things go wrong. So if Pope gets into trouble, then he says, oh, it was Gay, Gay did it. And Gay's happy to be scapegoated, as he says. Just to be part of the gang. Just to be part of the gang. And that's been the dynamic between them for almost 20 years by the time Gay suddenly becomes the dominant force. And I can see that appeals to you. Because he's not top dog. This whole thing, again, about what is lovely looking at that age is you see these incredible writers.

24:08I mean, Swift was writing Gulliver's Travels at the same time Gay was writing Beggar's Opera. But you think, yeah, but how are they feeling about each other? Gulliver's Travels is really, really important for Gay. Gulliver Travels published in 1726, Gay was probably the person who delivered the manuscript to the publisher. We don't really know who did it, but it was probably Gay who jumped out of a stagecoach and dumped it on the publisher's doorstep and scarpered off into the night. For Gay, this is really, really important because I think it gives Gay a sense of what writing can do. Personally, his relationship with Swift is gorgeous, actually.

24:42It's really lovely. It's one of the only times when we really see Gay kind of being quite domestic. When Swift comes back to London, Gay's got some lodging. at Whitehall where he's staying and he wants Swift to come and stay with him but he doesn't have any sheets so he has to go and borrow some sheets from Charles Jarvis and when Swift leaves to go back to Ireland Gay writes in these really poignant letters about how he's had to take the sheets back but he's had them mended so it's alright and actually what he's going to do now is go out and buy some more sheets in case Swift should ever come again and he writes I really miss you he was an extraordinarily good friend Do you think that the satirists made any difference?

25:23What do you think, Ian? What do I think? I don't know. It's irrelevant what I think. I mean, you've been at it for a while. Do you think it does make a difference? At the very least, I believe it would be worse if one didn't make the effort. And I think the fact that you go on doing it means you're allowed to go on doing it. And there are a lot of countries now where, you know, if you live in Turkey and you make jokes, you're in jail. I feel the attempt is in itself enough. But that's me being pompous. In this period, it does make a difference because it creates an opposition. And actually, success doesn't necessarily mean getting into power.

26:03All the opposition politicians want Jonathan Swift on board. They make a great fuss of him in the mid-1720s and they desperately want him to come and write for them because they recognise that literature does have a power not necessarily to affect immediate political change, but in cultivating that sense that there is an alternative to what we have now. And without that, there's no hope. So I think that's what the satirists in this period do. They cultivate that sense of opposition. We're 100 years on from Brecht and Weill's version. Is it time for another? What do you mean there's the Beggars' Opera, then there's the Flopny' Opera, then there should be another version?