GIVE ME A BREAK:'BEAUTY IS TRUTH; truth, beauty' – that is all, Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The poet who wrote those lines 190 years ago had never encountered our celebrity-obsessed world. Because as all ye know, beauty is money, the truth is negotiable and today John Keats would be a reality TV star with an untimely death orchestrated by Max Clifford and chronicled in OK!
If Keats were to parachute into 2009 and could stomach our artificial, media-engineered reality, where nothing is what is seems, he might type into his Blackberry: “Beauty is digitally mastered, truth is spin-doctored; there is no beauty worth believing in. If ye all don’t know that, you’re losers.”
He might have young, beautiful, fake-tanned teenage daughters with eating disorders who think they’re ugly and fat, or a beautiful Botoxed wife living a fantasy sex life via e-mail while redecorating the house in faux 17th-century fashion, or a son auditioning for Big Brother, or Keats himself might obsess over his own Facebook page in an attempt to be resurrected like the Wispa because the 21st century’s profit-focused multinational publishers have rejected his Ode on a Grecian Urn due to its lack of humour and sex.
Then, his mouth agape and eyes open wide, with his finger on the mouse, he might have seen Susan Boyle on YouTube and, with his spine tingling, muttered or shouted or sung out loud: "Finally, they get it!" On Britain's Got Talentand then YouTube, Susan Boyle – a 47-year-old, never-been-kissed, "fat", virgin karaoke queen, a "freak" who we assumed would be a joke with her 1920s-style dress, her ill-matched tights and flat shoes and grey roots covering a slightly balding scalp – embodied truth. Watching her lumber on to the stage, we laughed uncomfortably – because being "old, fat and ugly" is our greatest fear, due to the beauty oppression in which we live. Then, within seconds of Boyle beginning to sing, we rose to our feet and cheered. "Shrek came to life," as one US television host, Rosie O'Donnell, described it. Yet Boyle, a ninth child who had given up singing to look after the ageing mother who gave birth to her at the age of 47, now says she knew all along that the Britain's Got Talent competition was "not a beauty contest".
She was the only one who knew that, but how much we want to believe that life isn’t a beauty contest. I try to tell my daughters this and they don’t believe me. Despite their talent and brains, they’ve been brain-washed into thinking that talent and brains run a poor second to beauty. As for me, I saw myself in Susan Boyle, if I’d “let myself go”, and when she was singing, I wished I had.
She sang from her well-earned soul, from humility, from a technique honed with a teacher now revealed as great, and despite heavy-browed eyes and jowls made for radio, Susan Boyle became beautiful in performance in an unearthly way that only true artists achieve.
She reminded me of Rosa Ponselle, who I was lucky to meet and hear sing in her retirement when I was a music student in Baltimore, Maryland. The heavy-browed Rosa was persecuted not just because she was ugly and very large (her slim sister was regarded as a better bet), but because she started out in vaudeville, the 1920s equivalent of karaoke and Britain’s Got Talent. She never felt truly accepted by the operatic world and was denied the chance to sing with Enrico Caruso – who regarded her as the soprano’s soprano – because he was on a different record label.
How little things change. Boyle will be managed within an inch of her life by people who see her as a cash cow. Fortunately for us, we witnessed the audition. We know how great she is and we want to see her do well out of her lucky – though brilliantly stage-managed – break.
But we may be disappointed. Forty-plus women aren’t allowed to be beautiful in our airbrushed world. There’s more than a risk that Boyle will be a freakshow voice who makes millions in the short-term but in the long-term won’t become Elaine Paige nor have the respect of her peers. In my view, though, Boyle in her innocence is more attractive than crotch-displaying Madonna, artificially reconstructed Cher and hard-working Tina Turner with her age-defying thighs and wigs.
As for my daughters, when I hold Boyle up as a role model, they say: “You’re saying we’re talented but fat?” They saw through it from the beginning.
So did Keats. His Grecian urn was a container for how the audience sees art. It’s up to us to fill the urn with our own expectations. For one glorious YouTube moment, we watched it fill with beauty, but the tawdry Britain’s Got Talent is no Grecian urn. It’s a circus. Let’s hope Boyle survives and that when they dress her up, they don’t over-pluck her eyebrows or force her into a corset that constricts her diaphragm and gives her a hernia. Let’s hope she gets to sing opera in Veron and Milan.
