Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  The positive discoveries of Leslie Hotson, who seems to have had all the luck in the world (and, of course, the industry) were exciting when they were revealed – Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street, the Mountjoy marriage settlement. But I think much of The First Night of Twelthe Night has its implausibilities. Could Shakespeare, even on a Feast Day devoted to licence, possibly have made fun of the Comptroller of Queen Elizabeth’s household, Sir William Knollys, actually in the Queen’s presence? I can’t swallow this.

  But, among other interesting things, he has this extremely interesting one. When the Fool in Lear closes the first act with the couplet,

  She that’s a maid now and laughs at my departure

  Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter.

  This is absolutely meaningless, unless we accept from Hotson that Shakespeare must have written ‘deporter’, the word for a fool’s bauble, which could be made to represent an outsize phallus. (It would be interesting to know whether ‘deporter’ makes its appearance in any other Tudor-Jacobean writings.)

  Dr A. L. Rowse is a good friend of mine: a most stylish writer, with an inordinate appetite for voyages of discovery. He is so self-confident that he does induce other scholars to rise in their wrath. At the time of writing he is much under attack because, although he has undoubtedly unearthed a Dark Lady, he is dead sure that she was Shakespeare’s. I do not think there is sufficient evidence – unless he has something up his sleeve. His sleeves are capacious.

  But I do have a strong feeling that he is right about the dedicatee of the sonnets: that he was the purveyor, not the subject of, the poem. (W. H. Auden agreed with this.) That they are dedicated by the printer, Thomas Thorpe, to – according to Rowse – Sir William Harvey (who would, again according to Rowse, have been called ‘Master’ Harvey). Sir William Harvey was the second husband of the Countess of Southampton, and would have been a likely person to have the original manuscripts in his hands. This seems to me far more plausible than the attempt to reverse Southampton’s initials, to suggest that they meant quite a different golden lad, or to go into dithyrambic Wildean imaginings.

  I am not pretending the false humility of a Joey Bagstock – of which there are far too many in the population, and among writers in particular – by insisting on my ignorance. I have a right to my fun, and sometimes to be convinced by something. After all, scholars do not presumably write only for themselves, a sort of closed, tape-worm-like society. They write, in part, to put their ideas to people who care about Shakespeare, and who do their best to learn as much about him as they can. At least I hope so.

  When I am in Stratford, especially in the gardens of the New Place, I feel Shakespeare all around me. (Note: with a certain strained regret, I am not going to reply to any letters from Baconians. I have had too many of them already.)

  Did he sit under that mulberry tree? It is old enough, poor thing. It was once suggested to me by somebody – I forget whom – that if he had indeed inhabited New Place, his study would have looked out on to a blank wall. And very sensible, too. Who, when he is absorbed in writing, demands a view? In my youth, I knew a young man who had rooms overlooking the river at Rotherhithe. He couldn’t stand – being a writer – too much of that: he was constantly diverted by the shipping. This is why I sympathise with Proust, who chose to be encapsulated in a sound-proof room.

  I deplore the fact that the chancel of Stratford Parish Church is now only accessible by paying a fee, and a relatively high one. This puts it out of bounds to most schoolchildren. We are barred sternly off from the Clopton tombs and now, in fact, can scarcely see them at all. Fees needed for the upkeep of the church? I do not believe the world will allow it to fall down.

  On Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, I like to walk in procession bearing my flowers, from the theatre up Bridge Street, where the flags of the nation are unfurled, to the church, passing by (or through, if privileged) the birthplace on the way. (It must, anyhow, have been one of two or three houses.) Visitors who come from all parts of the world join in this exquisite ceremony. Flowers are heaped high above the grave, and below the Stratford bust.

  Of this, what nonsense has been talked! Janssen was obviously an able craftsman, but uninspired: nevertheless, this was roughly what Shakespeare must have looked like. Substitute, for those eyes of stone, bright-darting eyes, hazel or blue. Not like Shelley? Of course not. Why should he have been? He must have had a pretty mesomorphic component, in Sheldon’s terms, to have done all he did. There can have been no suggestion about him, of what someone, speaking of Shelley in an unkind mood, called a ‘faerie slug’. He was too busy writing, acting, travelling, becoming a partner in his companies, making his pile, moving between London and his grand house. He did not die at a particularly young age, by Elizabethan standards – especially considering the rigours of his life.

  I find it hard to write about him without understatement. It is especially hard, because he has been among the great joys of my life. But there is much more than this. He has the uncanny knack of hitting us where we live.

  There is scarcely a state of mind which disturbs us for which Shakespeare has not something to say. His human understanding is so vast that it may be dismaying – or a comfort.

  He knows where the nerve is, in its innermost centre. He knows where the heart misses a beat; and he fills the pause. And he knows how to make us forget, for a while, our ageing. There was a one-time pop-singer, Jim Dale, playing Autolycus at Stratford a year or so ago. He is an extremely talented actor, and has a sense of joy. He made me, for a while, oblivious of my years.

  The lark that tirra-lirra chants,

  Sing hey, sing hey, the thrush and the jay,

  Are summer songs for me and my aunts

  As we lie tumbling in the hay.

  No generation gap here. Shakespeare’s high spirits, a reawakened awareness of mine.

  Out from the theatre into the car-park, then down to the black river, where a few of the ghostly swans were still gathering, even so late at night, though most of them had returned to their residence on the island under the bridge, in a dormitory of feather-scattered grass.

  14. Crime and Punishment

  I have always been interested in crime. I don’t think this is morbidity: it is more an itch to find out why some people behave as they do, and to discover the point at which the thought of a deed becomes the doing of it. It seems to me that between this is a thread finer than a hair, but of enormous tensile strength. Somehow before, say, murder, can be committed, that barrier must be broken.

  I attended several days of the Moors Trial in Chester, perhaps the most appalling in British criminal history, in 1967, at the request of the Sunday Telegraph, to write about my general impressions. The impact of this led me to write On Iniquity, a series of reflections on, but mostly arising from, the trial; an attempt to see where it slotted into society. For it seemed to me that out of some root and bud sprang this poisonous flower.

  The Moors case was, if it may be so defined, a case of folie-à-deux, where two people are stricken with a kind of hysteria, mutually egging each other on, to do things that perhaps neither would have done alone. I was cynical enough at that time to suggest that the murderers might become cult-figures as the Manson ‘family’ have done in the U.S. A., and as Hitler has, to an extent done here. (I was revolted, in a magazine catering for teenagers, to see an advertisement for trench coats called ‘Stormtroopers’.) The Moors murderers, I am glad to say, have not yet. And perhaps they never will.

  But the worst part of the Permissive Society (which has many benevolent aspects also) formed the earth in which that flower grew. Obscene literature, the pervading idea that anyone is free to do anything – all this played its part.

  Crimes of violence are greatly on the increase, some of them, such as ‘mugging’, having duly floated across the Atiantic. Violence on the football terraces (mass hysteria) seems endemic. Our underground stations are by no means wholly safe: New York’s have been d
angerous for a long time. The courts seem powerless to deal adequately with the offenders when they are caught; and judges have given voice to this. Heavier sentencing might help: the Notting Hill Gate race riots were brought to an abrupt stop when Mr Justice Salmon gave the ringleaders four years apiece.

  I was elated when the hangman was put out of a job. It seemed to me a cleansing of our society: and I still think it was. But I now think that a life sentence, for the most savage of our murderers (there are, of course, gradations of murder which most of us will recognise) should mean life. That might be a real deterrent: most people have got it into their heads that everyone gets out after nine years, which is not true. (Incidentally, it is an anomaly of the law, and always has been, that property is valued more highly than life. See the sentences passed on the ‘Great’ train robbers. This calls for law reform at its very roots.)

  Don’t think I have not the slightest idea of how appalling many of our prisons are. During the war I often visited the Borstal Institute at Feltham (a decrepit building, apparently run with humanity, and the food was decent). After the war, I gave a lecture at Pentonville. The place was a horror, Piranesi’s Carceri seeming gay beside it. The greyness, the sound of the rattling keys, ugliness and malodorous age everywhere. The attendance for my not-very-interesting talk, ‘On Being a Broadcaster’, brought a full house; it was not compulsory to attend, but what else was there to do? I was younger then, and was greeted with wolf-whistles. After that there was quiet, but below this was a note of hysteria. Question-time brought dozens to their feet: I was hard put to it to cope with them. Some sensible questions, some grotesquely resentful ones.

  ‘You say they gave you a gin-and-orange. Who paid for it?’ ‘The Corporation,’ I said, adding feebly, ‘but there wasn’t much gin.’ (This was slander.)

  Later, I was stupefied to see, in the front row of prisoners, a friend of mine from the days of the Wardens’ Post. He was beaming cheerfully: he gave me a surreptitious little wave.

  As I was leaving I saw, going down the sad grey halls, a harmless necessary tabby cat. I hope the prisoners were allowed to pet it.

  So it appears that, if the punishment fits the crime (Gilbert’s appallingly sadistic lyric in The Mikado shakes me with repulsion as it would not have shaken a member of a nineteenth-century audience) we shall lay still heavier loads on the prison service. ‘Open’ prisons? More, I hope, but that makes the burden still heavier. I cannot believe that all prisoners will respond to reformation. This is just sentimentality. But I would urge that they have every opportunity to do interesting and productive work (payment to their victims, if you like) and have the opportunity, if they wish, for study. But remember, during a prison sentence, a man is metaphorically castrated. I believe the Swedes have a method of dealing with this, but I do not know enough about it to expand the matter here.

  Someone asked me the other day, whether I thought restoring the birch for crimes of violence might put a stop to it? (We have recently seen the introduction in Libya of Colonel Gaddafi’s penal code, which permits the mutilation of hands and feet, humanely performed in a hospital under anaesthetic, as though that did not make it seem nine times as horrible. Wyndham Lewis, in The Human Age, thought of something very like this – a kind of penal surgery. There is nothing new under the sun.)

  I had to think rather more hard than I should have done ten years ago. Then I replied, ‘Very probably it would. But me cannot do it’

  Society must not regress in these ways. Regression would soil us all.

  I have come to the tragic conclusion that violence, if met by judicial violence, might come to a sharp halt. But even if it did, still it would not do for us. We must cope as we may, and do it as humanely as possible. (See my remarks on that most admirable of prison reformers, Captain Alexander Maconochie, of Norfolk Island, in On Iniquity)

  Now I come to a more general matter: the effect of ‘the Permissive Society’, particularly in the cinema, and also though somewhat more rarely, on the television screen. It is here that the dread yell tends to arise – ‘Censorship!’ Yet we have censorship in all, literally all, countries now. (People object to censorship only when applied to things of which they don’t disapprove.) One form of our censorship, not the only one but in some ways the most stringent, is contained in the Race Relations Act. That was applauded by all liberal opinion. Would we repeal it? It is by-passed by many people, but there is no doubt that it must have spared a good deal of suffering.

  One of the effects of the Permissive Society has been to make sex ugly, and ‘love’, almost a dirty word. No, it doesn’t make sex beautiful in its freedom: it cheapens it. And as sexual activity is the most pleasurable activity known to most men and women it should not be cheapened. We might, as children, have liked liquorice allsorts. Is that a reason to make a staple diet of them? We might do better with the allsorts, as they could ruin the lining of the stomach, but would not be the cause of ever-spreading venereal disease.

  Pre-marital sex, after a certain age (not for children of fourteen) is permissible wherever the idea of love is, and may indeed, prevent certain difficulties from arising after marriage. No marriage? Out of date? Nonsense. Marriage is a mutually responsible affair. And we shall have to wait for a while before we see what the problems of illegitimate children bring about. For they need two parents, and the father’s role is of great importance.

  Abortion? Necessary, of course, when some silly young creature is likely to give birth to a child with whom she is too immature to cope. Or when some overburdened mother, having several children already, is in danger of bearing the straw, as it were, which breaks the camel’s back.

  Necessary, yes. I admit that the general idea fills me with repulsion. Life is there, for me, as soon as life is diagnosed. We must kill it, sometimes, the future circumstances being impossible. But do we know what we are killing? What that minuscule life might have become? Sometimes there are serious genetic reasons for destroying it, and these I accept: sometimes serious social ones.

  Birth control? Of course. It is essential on a wide scale, even if some doctors find it repellent to provide the pill or the diaphragm (too difficult the latter, though) to the miserably immature. And, if accepted by the rest of the world, the pill would, of course, be an immense blessing, and a check to mass hunger and poverty.

  Pornography? The flood of it makes us look, at worst, childish and dirty-minded, at best, silly. I feel strongly about pornography, if it is cruel – which it frequently is – and if it degrades women, which it almost inevitably does.

  For Lord Longford, I have respect, and admire his courage during a campaign of vicious ridicule; I can go along with him some of the way, but he is a Catholic, and I am not – which makes a difference. He said to me, one day, ‘I am visiting Myra [Hindley, one of the Moors murderers] this evening. May I give her your good wishes?’ What could I say but ‘yes’? Could I give her my ill ones?

  Mrs Whitehouse I also respect for her courage, though her views are all too often far too narrow for me: she subtracts from the real issues. The ‘Permissive Society’ has in some things, and not always bad ones, established itself already: no Mrs Partington can sweep it away with a broom. But Mrs Whitehouse occasionally has the right ideas, and, in any case, it is no joke to set oneself up as an Aunt Sally for the Trendies – especially the middle-aged ones. (Trendy? the word is beginning to have an old-lace and lavender aura already.) All Lord Longford and Mrs Whitehouse really have in common is a social conscience, and some of us are all too free from that. Can pure bravery ever be completely disregarded?

  When I wrote On Iniquity I was not infrequently praised for moral courage. In fact it was thoughtfully received, although one anonymous correspondent accused me of being as bad as Brady and Hindley. That seemed to me rather odd. But where on earth should lie the courage, in an avowedly ‘liberal’ society, in saying what one thinks? It makes nonsense of the whole conception. This ‘liberal’ society, not infrequently, howls down what it, itself,
doesn’t like. They call this being ‘liberal’, ‘permissive’? To do so is rubbish, if they cannot listen to some unpopular views. (In the thirties, we generally gave a quiet hearing to Sir Oswald Mosley – till the fights broke out. There was a capital old lady whom I once saw, in Chelsea Town Hall, defending herself and her views from the Fascists by the use of a chair – the seat against her stomach – its four legs forming something like a chevaux de frise.)

  I remain on the Left. But I know what happens when its fringes turn to anarchy. Anarchy never has produced a good society: what it has produced are the Hitlers. If things get bad enough, it may produce such phenomena again. For there can be no doubt that the complete destruction of a democratic society will not produce a tabula rasa upon which blessed wonders can be built: no more than I have ever met an anarchist who had the slightest idea how it could be done.

  Baudelaire, whom no one could possibly accuse of being a stuffed shirt, wrote, as an ideal, in ‘L’ Invitation au Voyage’.

  Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

  Luxe, calme et volupté.

  Notice which he put first: before beauty, luxuriance, calm, voluptuousness, he put ORDER. Without which, of course, the other four ideals could not exist.

  Meanwhile, on stage, cinema and sometimes on T. V., we are glorifying the Destroyers. In effect, the criminals. Those who ‘put the boot in’. Never mind whether or not they come to a bad end: the ‘heroes’ they are, in ultimate effect. Dr Frederick Wertham wrote to this effect; ‘When I see a couple of teenagers heading in my direction after dark, I hope to God that they have not seen Bonnie and Clyde.’