As a birthday present, I received a copy of gay playwright Joe Orton's last novel and first (and only) screenplay, bound together in print: Head to Toe and Up Against It. This omnibus (of sorts) was particularly useful, as Orton had cribbed generously from the earlier, then-unpublished Head to Toe in writing the latter screenplay -- which he'd written for the Beatles.
Yes, those Beatles.
It's been a interesting read; certainly bizarre, but then so are Douglas Adams's books. They both have a very British sense of humor (or should it be "humour"?), but Orton's work seems written more with a gay, free-gendered sensibility; first time I've ever read something of that nature, but that's fine with me -- it's good reading, and there's a first time for everything.
To be fair, I ought to provide links, to give you all a proper sense of background; here's one: http://heydullblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/vision-of-joe-orton.html
...and another: http://www.beatlesagain.com/breflib/joeorton.html
...and still another: http://byneddiejingo.blogspot.com/2005/10/up-against-what-might-have-been.html
If you're looking for synopsis, here's one of Head to Toe:
The setting almost has sort of a Discworld vibe, where the world is on an enormous giant, holding a club, who stands on a rock placed on the back of a bull that rests on an enormous fish... except, whereas Terry Prachett has had thirty years to expand on Discworld with his series of books, Joe Orton only did the one-off when he was a struggling writer, and it was only published posthumously. I sort of wish Orton had expanded upon the world he'd created, because it's heady stuff.
Parts of the book are a strange mix of Gulliver's Travels and On the Road; I know, you probably can't imagine a mix of that sort, but Orton goes for it. There's a length interlude in prison, where the main character, Gombold, is sent to increasingly worse cells every time he complains about them, finally ending up in a bathroom stall; there, he delves deep inside his own mind (in what feels almost like a forerunner to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but then quickly gets involved with an old man planning escape that plays out like a parody of the Abbé Faria section of The Count of Monte Cristo.
There are violent revolutions against all-female government (one of the plot points reused in Up Against It), various recurring characters Gombold, and the people he joins up with, meet on their journey down to the nether regions of the giant, and a bloody civil war raging between the Left and Right Buttocks that reads as something of a proto-How I Won the War -- but there are also numerous classical references, like the Trojan horse inexplicably being found somewhere between the giant's navel and groin. There is a sequence where Orton pokes fun at the windiness of literary criticism (mainly by having Gombold and co. crash a book reading), and, at one point, a woman picks up the three of them who almost comes off as a hippie before there were hippies; this was written in 1959, mind you, and the woman doesn't sound anything like a Beat type.
It's a very episodic type of novel, even more than, say, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels were, but I don't mind; I'm a big fan of that series, the plot developments here are really engrossing, and Orton's prose is excellent.
There's a few clues, however, that the novel is a rougher draft than Orton had probably intended for publishing; in the middle of Chapter Four, there is a mention made of (and a subsequent scene featuring) Gombold's mistress Beatrice, who has never been mentioned before in the novel. It is especially puzzling, considering two things: One, Gombold already is the kept man of the city's police chief, Connie, and two, he's only just arrived in the area -- it is revealed later on that he fell off of his own world onto the giant's scalp. One could assume that is is meant to be a one-off parody of the typical "tearful-reunion-before-leaving-for-prison" scene that melodramas so often go for, but Beatrice is mentioned several times later, and the first baffling mention is subtly introduced, as thought we're expected to know her.
Another clue is the abrupt segue between the end of Chapter Six, where Gombold has just been taken by a large eagle through most of the length of the giant and is now descending above the main city between the navel and groin, and Chapter Seven, which opens with Gombold arriving at the city's shopping center -- there's no proper transition between them, which makes me wonder if Orton was between drafts when he stopped working on the novel.
Well... I suppose I must continue:
After their sojourn in the military, Gombold and his pals end up prisoners of war with the Left Buttocks side, which bizarrely requires being kept in cages and categorized like zoo animals, forced to act for gawking spectators -- it gives off a "Tralfamadore from Slaughterhouse-Five" sort of vibe, except a hell of a lot more hilarious. They are broken out of by a sympathetic person they met in their travels, and are passed down a sort of underground resistance railroad, all along the intestines, from a retired-great-white-hunter type to a house where they're forced to stay for a large family's wedding (almost like a parody of the "retaining culture in time of war"-type narratives), and end up crated in barrels of fish offal when they're dropped off at a high-class brothel; at this point, there's an odd shift -- I don't know if it's an error of changing the drafts on Orton's part or a printer's error, but we suddenly cut from the brothel to an underground bunker in the giant's mouth... and there's not even a paragraph break -- it just changes.
Rejoining with this new part of the narrative, Gombold and co. are now fighting under the command of rebel leader Offjenkin, who engages in preposterous guerrilla attacks even after the fighting has officially stopped. Soon, Offjenkin has pissed off his platoon enough to oust him from his position; he subsequently rejoins society and marries an unnamed "modernest woman in the world", who constantly wears a placard to that effect.
Soon, the group launches a new offensive, relying entirely upon the power of words and slogans, on the government at the "Money-Box Lodge", in what feels almost like the climax of The Dirty Dozen as viewed through the lens of The Prisoner (yes, I know that's odd, but it's the closest I can get to how it actually reads); they are betrayed, and only Gombold manages to escape. The rest are put through an absurd trial involving their beliefs in the length of bananas, and are subsequently hanged; soon, however, all falls apart, as the giant the entire populace lives on unexpectedly dies, leaving them stranded on his decaying corpse.
The government attempts to cover everything up, of course, but it is not long before everything begins collapsing into the giant's rotting flesh; chaos reigns, and Gombold, in one final, futile act, goes into the house of a detestable rich man he continually interacted with throughout the story and burns it to the ground. He then finds a hole nearby and crawls into it.
Depressing way to end, you'd think, and I'd agree with you, except the rest of the novel was so enjoyable -- even up to the end -- that I didn't really mind. Regardless of this roughness, the novel is still excellent -- it's like nothing I've read before, and probably like nothing I'll read since. Orton could have become a great novelist, but, alas, success was not to be found in that venture for him; he turned to plays, and struck gold.
Now, Up Against It:
First off, we're provided with an introduction to the circumstances behind Orton writing the screenplay, written by his biographer, John Lahr; it's very explanatory and helpful, but also disabuses me of several mistaken notions.
One, that the published draft was written for the Beatles; it wasn't, but an earlier draft was. The published version is the version Orton revised when Brian Epstein and the Beatles rejected it; producer Oscar Lewenstein bought the script, and Orton was due to meet with director Richard Lester to discuss filming options when his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, beat him to death with a hammer and then killed himself. Their bodies were discovered by the chauffeur sent to pick up Orton and bring him to his meeting with Lester.
Two, that the George and Ringo parts were originally combined; they weren't -- Orton pared down the four parts to three. You can't even tell there originally were four parts, that's how well he did it... and also, possibly, how redundant the extra part was. Either way, it's easy to see why one would think George and Ringo played one part, but the cover page of the draft Orton sent to the Beatles, kept as part of the Joe Orton Collection at the University of Leicester, definitively disproves this: http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery48.html
It lists four McTurks (the original concept pitched to Orton was that the four Beatles were four aspects of a single man, but Orton didn't like it, so he disregarded it, but this looks like a remnant of that original idea), instead of three; in the published draft, there are three main boys -- Ian McTurk (see how the name carried over?), Christopher Low (speculated as the combined George/Ringo part), and Jack Ramsay.
Many story points, though not all, are reused from Head to Toe, though in a slightly more light-hearted way; there's less of an On the Road feel, and more of a Tom Jones flavor to the proceedings. It's neither better nor worse than the story it's based on; it's merely, despite the same basic plot points, something of a different experience... and I think it'd have worked very well as a film.
There's a fairly in-depth plot summary at that first link, way, waaay up above, but it doesn't quite get into the strengths and weaknesses of the script in a way I'd recommend. While the script is wonderfully comic and cultured (and it is, don't misunderstand me; it's glorious, at times), for such a supposedly big-budget production, there's far too much of what's happening to the secondary characters being told entirely through dialogue; that's understandable in a smaller production, but when Orton's also describing riots in the streets of London, being lost in a squall at sea, and a full-scale guerrilla battle sequence... well, it kind of took me out of it, slightly.
Not to say the sequences described aren't bad, themselves; the script climaxes with this wonderful gag that keeps on going and going and going involving crew upon crew of ambulances continually coming onto the battlefield and colliding with each ambulance before it, and it reaches... no, transcends the heights of gag-dom. It's worthy of some of the best Richard Lester films; not in a Superman II way, but more of a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the... no, sorry, it's better!
I fear I may have given away too much, already, so... if you can, buy it! If you can't, have someone else buy it! Read it! It's great!
