It (review)

It takes a lot of chutzpah to give a book the same title as a best-seller by Stephen King. In King’s horror novel, “It” is a malignant force, often taking the alluring shape of a circus clown, to draw children to their doom. In Joseph Roach’s exuberant jeu d’esprit, “It” is the allure itself, attracting to less dire effect. Roach has chutzpah to spare, although he does not name it when he lists such components of the elusive quality as sex appeal, star power, and moxie. He provides a working definition early on: “‘It’ is the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them” (8). Later, he adds the more mystical pairing of stigmata and charismata.

The inquiry is timely. In our age, “idol,” implying worship through ritual, has been supplanted, no doubt under the influence of word-processing, by “icon,” implying worship through seeing. Roach points out that public intimacy is “synthetic experience,” which impels a desire for still less vicarious intimacy (44), but what we deplore as a product of modern publicity methods and mass media has its roots deep in the past.

Instrumental to the working of the It-effect are accessories, and Roach devotes most of the book to exploring clothes, hair, skin, flesh, and bone. Although the “Gloriana” aspect of Good Queen Bess is apposite here, he prefers to seek It’s origins in the restoration of the Stuarts, as witnessed by Samuel Pepys. Pepys’s diary-entry experiences are then channeled through the Titian-haired arbiter elegantiarum Elinor Glyn and her sister, the interior designer “Lucile” (Lady Duff-Gordon), and their surrogates Clara Bow and Lillie Langtry. This is because Roach sees the invention of a new kind of theatre, fueled by female sex appeal, in the seventeenth century as prefiguring the rise of Hollywood celebrity culture. The 1660s and the 1920s are the magnetic poles of his study, between which the It factor crackles and sparks.

Roach proclaims his alignment to the current liberal comprehension of performance. “The theatre is central to the study of performance . . ., but it does not by any means stand alone or even supreme in the capacious category of synthetic experience” (192). A bookseller might shelve this work under Cultural Criticism of Performance Studies, but for all the catholicity of his interests, Roach keeps being drawn back to the theatrical anecdote, the star actor as the exemplar of It. Sarah Siddons and David Garrick share the limelight only with royalty.

Chapters are organized symphonically. A theme is launched, often gradually; then minor themes, especially scherzi, are brought in, interwoven and repeated in different keys. The tone at times becomes rhapsodic. So, in the chapter on “Flesh,” the major theme is Covent Garden, which allows divagations on John Gay, Hogarth, Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle, and, more surprisingly, Frankenstein and Ira Aldridge. (The flow of Roach’s prose often resembles a stream of consciousness, impelled by free association.) The chapter on “clothes” strikes up with the Jersey Lily, then introduces Charles II and the Duke of Buckingham, centripetally digressing on rakes, sympathetic magic, and effigies, all of which are neatly tied together. The theme of tragedy queen is the leitmotiv of “Hair,” winding up with Margaret Thatcher and her helmet-like coiffure. Here, though, are missed opportunities to mention Mary Queen of Scots, whose decapitation left the headsman holding a wig, or to discuss another headstrong monarch, Marie Antoinette, and her hairdresser Léonard, who left fascinating memoirs. The chapters rarely end in a grand coda; Roach prefers the dying fall. This is true of the book as a whole: there is no summing-up.

“The French have developed a middle language somewhere between the smell of the sewer and the smell of the lamp, which in English is mostly unavailable,” wrote the poet Richard Howard. The English of Roach, no Valjean he, never descends into the sewer, but he does visit the catwalk and the photo...