I am no student of the psychology of suicide, but to choose hanging is surely, at some deep level, to ally yourself with criminals. Or, if not that, it is to inflict a final indignity on your person – in your own eyes and in the eyes of those who find you. To choose hanging feels to me like compounding shame with more shame. If all I am is a cadaver, then let it be as a cadaver that I leave life.
But death, as evidenced by the images released by Islamic State – I have not nerved myself to watch the videos – has further ignominies in store for us yet. I say ‘us’ because faced with such horror we are one human family. Whatever we feel the rest of the time, no man is an island now. Today, the bell tolls for everyone.
So many ignominies here, indeed, that it simultaneously turns the stomach and breaks the heart to itemise them. The preceding torture of your body and your mind; the knowledge of the agony caused to those who love you, for you can be sure they will never know a quiet night again; the public nature of the execution; the vileness of the instrument employed; the anonymous, flat-vowelled barbarism of your executioner, as though he means the act to be at once grand and common or garden, a mockery of itself.
Before Steven Sotloff was executed, there was a picture of him disseminated on the accursed Web, a sideshow to the decapitation of James Foley, which shows one of his captors grabbing him by the back of his shirt, as though he is dead meat already. Yes, let a war start and all life is cheap. And whichever side we are on, we label the other remorseless.
But there is a difference between being one of the casualties of war, no matter how terrible or unforgivable your death, and being a trophy dragged about and held aloft by someone for whom you are as offal. Death is the end of it in all cases, but the ultimate ignominy for any living human being is to be reduced, while the blood is still warm in the body, to a carcass. Forget, for a moment, the politics. There are times when politics are incidental, and the agents of cruelty seem to be answering more a metaphysical necessity than an ideological one.
‘Aye, in the catalogue ye go for men,’ says Macbeth to those he has hired to murder Banquo – his disgust for them impersonal, almost a disgust for ‘bounteous’ nature itself. Some bounty that can yield such men!
But I am reminded still more of the shocking final chapter of Kafka’s The Trial. ‘On the evening before K.’s thirty-first birthday,’ it begins, ‘two men came to his lodgings. In frock-coats, pallid and plump, with top-hats that were apparently uncollapsible.’ To himself, K. admits that he expected different visitors. He is disappointed by fate. ‘Tenth-rate old actors they send for me,’ he reflects. ‘They want to finish me off cheaply.’
We should not be misled by the farcicality. It is integral to the horror. A death at the hands of tenth-rate executioners becomes tenth-rate itself. But what other sort of execution is there?
‘Why did they send you, of all people!’ he asks as they are escorting him through the streets. More a cry, Kafka notes, than a question. But a cry to whom? God? In this novel, there is no God to cry to. No Judge to meet, no High Court to penetrate. K. thinks of resisting but is instantly reminded of ‘flies struggling away from the fly-paper till their little legs were torn off’. Not the only time a character in Kafka is compared to an insect.
The sentences that lead almost laconically to K.’s senseless death are among the most cruel in literature. The tenth-rate actors force K. to the ground, with his head against a boulder, and pass a knife there and back across him in ‘an odious ceremonial of courtesy’. Then finally it happens – the knife goes into K.s heart where it’s twisted twice. ‘With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act’ – the final act of a farce that is crueller than any tragedy.
K., too, is in the audience, watching himself die. ‘Like a dog!’ he says. ‘It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.’
The shame of the American journalists dying like dogs will outlive us all. If there is or could be a more potent image of the insults our mortality is heir to, of the godlessness of this pitiable planet, may we not live to see it.
Calm down, dear
Of the pleasures incident to the literary life, one of the most innocent is being able to say – not boastfully, just with quiet satisfaction – that you’ve read everything a writer has written. It’s easier, of course, with some writers than with others. Read Wuthering Heights and a few poems and that’s Emily Brontë done. Jane Austen isn’t too trying either, but don’t forget the juvenilia which gives you the opportunity to see that Tristram Shandy was important to her only until she grew up. My best effort is every novel by Charles Dickens and ditto, almost, Thomas Hardy. Where I fell down with Hardy was over A Laodicean. There were two reasons I stumbled. The first was that I had never heard a good word said about it. The second was the title. A Laodicean, for God’s sake! A Laodicean, as Hardy intends the term, is someone who blows hot and cold in his convictions – Laodicea having been a byword in the early Catholic Church for religious tepidity. Another title for Hardy’s novel, therefore, could have been The Lukewarm. Quite a grabber, that. ‘If you read no other novel this year, read The Lukewarm. It will leave you quivering with indifference.’
It’s an unquestioned assumption of our society that lack of enthusiasm is a vice. What we look for in our politicians and sportsmen and thinkers – indeed, in all branches of what we might as well call show business – is zest. Post your attractions on a dating site and you won’t get far describing yourself as Passionless from Plumstead. Even ‘cool’ doesn’t really mean apathetic. It isn’t cool not to care about anything much, nor is it cool to be a waverer. The cool care passionately, to take just one example, about the sunglasses they wear.
But as an overwrought Wimbledon draws to a close, and World Cup fever reaches its climax, and cruelly misinformed Muslim boys pour out of Swansea hell-bent on avenging something that someone has told them the West has done to them, only to end up killing other Muslim boys similarly misinformed, isn’t there a case to be made for half-heartedness? Reader, it isn’t just the planet that’s overheating. It’s us.
I don’t speak as one who understands nothing of ideological zeal. As a young academic I waged holy war against colleagues who thought the novels of George Meredith superior to the novels of George Eliot. And when it comes to sport, I am capable of something which, if you can’t exactly call it fervour, is in the ballpark of passing interest. For at least two hours after Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor was knocked out in last year’s World Darts Championships I couldn’t bring myself to uncork the bottle of expensive Shiraz I’d been saving. But no one actually died in the George Meredith vs George Eliot wars, and I don’t wear a shirt with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor’s name on the back. There’s interest and then there’s interest.
Why, for example, must those commentating on Wimbledon routinely put the word ‘adoring’ before the word ‘fans’? Not everyone lucky enough to be at Centre Court is a fan of any particular player, let alone an adoring one. Many will simply be enjoying high-quality tennis. Yes, a few will grab gratefully at the sweaty towels or putrid armbands that some players throw into the crowd when they’ve won, but I saw one of these distasteful items drop into the lap of a dispassionate spectator the other day and his disgust was every bit the equal of what mine would have been in his position. Who are you to suppose I will be grateful for your largesse? his expression said. Who? Well, the commentary team could answer that. ‘Royalty watching royalty,’ the most sycophantic of them genuflected vocally, as Federer cast an eye in the direction of William and Kate. I am no republican, reader, but do we really need more royalty than we already have?
It was fervour of this servile sort, anyway, that deluded the nation into thinking Andy Murray was going to win Wimbledon again this year after three no more than workmanlike performances against untesting opposition. A cooler appraisal would have told us, and maybe even told Murray, that he was up to his old play-safe, pat-a-cake antics again and would buckl
e as he used to when the going got tough. Thus does hyperbole, when it’s not in the service of scepticism, make fools of us all.
There was, you would have thought, sufficient scepticism about English football not to lead us into a comparably false optimism, yet still ‘adoring’ fans carted themselves all the way to Brazil wearing shirts with their heroes’ names on their backs and expectation agitating hearts which, for all I know, had been calibrated to beat at the same rate as Rooney’s. Leaving aside the question of how they could find anyone in the English team to heroise, what is any grown man doing in a football shirt? Come to that, what are adults doing painting their faces the colours of their national flags? Hasn’t slavery been abolished? Does the excitement of sport justify subservience?
‘Too hot, too hot,’ mutters Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. He isn’t watching sport, unless you call imagining your best friend overdoing appreciation of your wife a sport, but he could be describing the current condition of our vocabulary. Just as Murray on form is called ‘Magnificent!’, so his defeat is greeted with the word ‘Surrender!’. Our prime minister, too, cannot suffer a setback that isn’t ignominious. ‘Humiliation!’ the front pages blazed when he was Junckered. Is it no longer possible simply to lose?
Let me be clear: contest excites me too. I am loving watching Wimbledon and the World Cup. I deny no man his gifts. I deny no man his religion either. But the world would be more sensible, the words we use more rational, the wars we fight less unremitting, if we cared a little less. Tomorrow, after watching the men’s final on television, I will start Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean.
The New Barbarism
Welcome to the New Barbarism. I say the New to distinguish it from the Old, whose destructiveness was primarily confined to habits of mind, slips of the tongue, proper nouns, pronouns, modes of address and works of literature that omitted to mention slavery. And I could talk about Our Barbarism to distinguish it from that of ISIS and the Taliban, who have set the standard for thoroughness and celerity when it comes to removing evidence that others think differently from them.
Our Barbarism is more shocking than Their Barbarism because we make a show of difference and tolerance and they don’t. And the New Barbarism is more brutal than the Old Barbarism because the words and attitudes policed were hurried out of sight, whereas what faces us now is the blood-stirring spectacle of falling bronze and concrete. Welcome to the Cultural Revolution, Britain 2016, and we don’t even have a revolutionary government in power.
Last year looked to be shaping up to be one of the most culturally brutal years in living memory, but it already has a tame look about it. Perhaps we will look back on 2015 as the year of the practice run. What would happen if we tried to get rid of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist on charges of gender facetiousness? Would anyone stand up to us? Nope. What would happen if we tried to ban lectures by people whose views we didn’t share? Would anyone stand up to us? Nope. In preparation for the Great Barbarism, the Great Pusillanimity.
Thus empowered, let’s turn to Cecil Rhodes, architect of empire, diamond miner, white supremacist and benefactor to Oriel College. You might think the benefactor part would make it tricky, but colleges are soft touches today. We shall see. But the wind is behind those who with a huff and a puff would blow Rhodes down.
Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. In this case the monomania is racism. I don’t minimise it, but it isn’t mankind’s only story. What about destroying statues of the sanctimonious and the censorious, the sectarian and the dogmatic, the ideologically driven and the lily-livered? Down, down, with the lot of them.
I am not concerned to salvage Rhodes’s reputation. Let him be as bad as those who want his page torn from the book of life insist he is. Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. Use every man after his desert, and who would ’scape whipping? There’s a case for erecting no statues of mortal men at all, though I would argue in their defence that they constitute monumental history lessons and in that regard are of more associative interest than such exercises in conceptual trivia as get a plinth in Trafalgar Square. Speaking of which, how much longer must we tolerate that vainglorious adulterer Nelson on his phallic column? Down with him, too.
That a nation’s statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances it doesn’t at all imply a continuing reverence. A healthy culture doesn’t memorialise only those it agrees with. So when the journalist and broadcaster Bidisha weighs in on the side of the statue-breakers, lecturing the West on its unthinking racism and furiously declaring herself unwilling to see ‘our educational institutions decorated with plaques worshipping white racists’, she loses the argument. ‘Worship’? Does she really mean ‘worship’? How many adherents of the cult of Rhodes, one wonders, has she seen lighting candles or genuflecting before his name or image? It tells you something about the fanatic mindset which is revisionist iconoclasm that it must invent an opposing mindset of fanatic reverence to justify itself.
In such cranking up of injury we can detect the influence of Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, who ransacked works of Western art for inscriptions of cultural condescension and contempt and single-handedly turned the study of literature into grievance soup. The day Eng. Lit. morphed into post-colonialism was the day the Lit. part died. Though I suspect even Said would have blenched before the latest expression of aesthetic recoil in which ‘survivors’, as they melodramatically describe themselves, complain of the ‘oppression’ of having to walk past an offending statue in a college or a public street. In addition to their original injuriousness, such statues, it is argued, go on revisiting their offence on the injured, forcing them to bear again ‘the burden of violence committed on them’.
But soft! By this logic mustn’t I, a Jew, tremble every time I pass a place of Christian worship? ‘Worship’ in its proper meaning, reader – incense, candles, prayers, in service of a religion that for two thousand years has done Jews violence. How long can I be expected to tolerate altar paintings and murals depicting Jews as deicides, baying for the blood of Jesus, or filling their purses with silver earned by betraying him? Why, unless a Jew covers his eyes, he will even see a Judas – the Jew whose name means what it sounds it means – sitting knees parted at the Passover table, failing to conceal that hard-on Jews are known to get whenever they turn a profit. Whoever would look for the inscription of racial stereotyping or evidence of misappropriation in a faith’s or culture’s artefacts will surely never go home empty-handed, but imagine the burden of violence I bear every time I visit Canterbury or Chartres, knowing I’m in the vicinity of a gargoyle that’s the spitting image of my uncle Solly.
My oppression cries out! Must my pain not trump these monuments of stone and plaster? Down with them, I say. The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, and finally the great globe itself. Down with everything that isn’t me.
Shoot the highwayman
Our subject today is Dr Johnson’s hypothetical highwayman. For readers who have forgotten him, here’s a reminder. Boswell and Johnson are drinking tea at the home of Dr Taylor, Prebendary of Westminster. Johnson is uncharacteristically silent, ‘reading in a variety of books’, according to Boswell, ‘suddenly throwing down one, and taking up another’. Twenty more triumphant years of Kindling and we will wonder how that would be possible.
Johnson mentions that he means to go to Streatham that night, probably to call on Mrs Thrale. This might explain the agitation of his manner. ‘You’ll be robbed if you do,’ Dr Taylor warns him, ‘or you must shoot a highwayman.’ Perhaps catching a murderous glint in Johnson’s eye, he goes on to say he would rather be robbed than shoot a highwayman.
Human rights hindering direct action, even then.
Johnson is more pragmatic. ‘I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me,’ he says –
raising the interesting side question of whether the author of Rasselas and Lives of the Poets went about with a pair of pistols concealed in his waistcoat – ‘than afterwards swear against him at the Old Bailey.’ There is less chance of mistaken identity, that way, he explains. Shoot him in the act and you can be sure you have the right man. ‘Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury, than to do it at a distance of time, by an oath, after we have cooled.’
‘So, Sir,’ puts in Boswell, taking the role of Shami Chakrabarti, ‘you would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of publick advantage.’
Comes back Dr Johnson, never a man to miss a joke that punctures high-mindedness, ‘Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.’
I would have that line framed and placed behind the chair of every judge in the land.
It will now be apparent that while I evoke the hypothetical highwayman, I am looking at Abu Qatada. Not that mistaken identity, or fear that there might be mistaken identity, has played any part in this long-running smash hit comedy of errors – ‘The funniest play on in London: don’t miss it!’ It’s to his credit that he has made no attempt to disguise or soften his appearance. He looks what we accuse him of being. Indeed he looks so what we accuse him of being that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he means to mock us with our melodramatic imaginings.
I trust I will not be construed as suggesting that someone should have taken Abu Qatada’s life when he was caught in the act, whatever the act was. But it would certainly have saved time and money. And maybe made the world a safer place. Whoever chose the quick way of silencing Osama bin Laden made a wise decision. It was not a moral decision, but sometimes wisdom must prevail. It could even be argued – and Johnson is on the way to arguing it – that there are times when wisdom, all things considered, seizes the high ground from morality. Whoever saves mankind by an immoral act performs a greater good than he who would see it perish in the name of principle.
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