I don’t know when I stopped believing in God, or even if I ever started, but had He wanted my allegiance, all He had to do was reverse decisions too egregiously unfair to be compatible with divine intention. The wrong line call or LBW decision, the catch that wasn’t caught, the low punch that wasn’t noticed, the gamesmanship that shouldn’t have been allowed, the penalty that should or shouldn’t have been given, the rain that shouldn’t have been permitted to fall.
How many times as a boy did I cry out against these miscarriages, not suffered by me personally, not necessarily suffered by a team or a player I supported, simply felt as wrongs that had to be righted. Truly I believed that, spurred by the force of irresistible universal outrage, a sort of Prague Spring of sport, this righting would somehow come about – Henman granted a rain-free rematch against Ivanisevic, Gatting given another chance to play Warne’s ball of the century as he wasn’t ready the first time, Zidane’s sending-off revoked in the light of the provocation to which he’d been subjected, Manchester United reinstated as winners, referee and linesmen executed.
At the best of times, we live a hair’s breadth from despair. The innocent die young, the good go unrewarded, the greedy go unpunished.
We love sport because of the brief illusion of equity it brings – so long as we can trust the judgement of those who officiate. Once they err, the entire edifice of fantasy crumbles and we are left with life as it really is, and there is too much of that already.
The Queen versus Edward Snowden
So who do you reckon won the great TV head-to-head of Christmas? Not Downton Abbey vs EastEnders, or Doctor Who vs Coronation Street, but the Queen vs Edward Snowden – Edward Snowden being the ex-CIA employee turned whistle-blower currently residing in Russia, and the Queen being the Queen, currently relaxing in Sandringham. Snowden was Channel 4’s choice to give its traditional bad-taste ‘up-yours’ Alternative Christmas Message – from which we might deduce that Ratko Mladic, Miley Cyrus and Mrs Brown and Her Boys were either unavailable or too expensive. In the event, it was no contest, the referee stepping in and stopping it in favour of the Queen after fifteen seconds. Cruel, I thought, to have let it go on that long.
In fairness to Snowden, the Queen has been giving Christmas messages for a long time. She knows where to get her hair done. She knows how to sit. She knows how to modulate her voice, how confidential to appear, how to address, without being controversial, the concerns we’ve shared since she spoke to us last. Above all, she understands that her job is not to be wise but to administer comfort, which is to say to speak to us in platitudes. ‘Who’s a good boy, then?’ we croon over our spaniel, tickling him behind the ears, and though he knows there’s nothing remotely good about him he luxuriates in the familiar sounds, confident that, for the time being, all is right with the world. Thus the Queen, on Christmas Day, to us. ‘Who’s a good subject, then?’
If there is a moment when she asks herself ‘Who’s writing this piffle?’ she conceals it well. But I don’t for a moment doubt that piffle is what she recognises it to be. This, too, however, she recognises: that we wouldn’t be tuning in to hear Wittgenstein after a heavy Christmas lunch.
The wisdom of knowing when wisdom is not required, and that the commonplace soothes as the recondite never will, is the wisdom that underpins our constitutional monarchy. It costs a lot to sustain but I happen to think it’s worth it. If Channel 4’s ruse of an alternative Christmas message has a virtue, it is to remind us how much worse off we’d be with a monarch chosen from the ranks of stand-up comedy, reality television, Holocaust denial, and that branch of snitching that comprises frightening the intelligentsia with stories that someone’s reading its emails. How to stay edgy and challenging has been a ticklish problem for Channel 4 ever since its inauguration as an ‘alternative’ broadcaster. There’s a limit to how ‘other’ you can be when you have to be it every night. But with the wheeling-in of that dead-eyed sanctity Edward Snowden, 4 has finally touched bottom; if this is what the transgressive looks like we might as well be watching the Disney Channel.
Don’t get me wrong – I take the point that Snowden has alerted us to an inordinate predilection for snooping on the part of government agencies. But one man’s inordinacy is another’s sensible precaution. There is nothing new about spying. It’s an impulse as old as humanity, and for good reason. People mean one another harm. Checking out our neighbours’ intentions is no more than judicious unless, in the fun of doing it, we forget what we are checking for. I would recommend each party to the inordinacy versus sensible precaution debate to heed the other’s fears, though there is no sign that Snowden can hear much above the sacral thrum of encouragement coming from his fellow travellers or, like them, has any interest in weighing abuse against needfulness.
He was no sooner on our screens on Christmas Day than he was invoking Orwell, a name bandied about more often by the vainglorious than the word patriotism is by scoundrels. Big Brother’s electronic arsenal, Snowden reminded us, was as ‘nothing compared to what we have today’ – which is frightening only if we confuse the Thought Police stamping us into servility with marketing men wanting to know what we buy and sell on eBay. No, I don’t want anyone to know what deodorant I use either, but that doesn’t make me Winston Smith.
Cliché number two was privacy. ‘A child born today,’ Snowden said – though the Queen would have said it with more feeling, not to say more consciousness of its Christian echoes – ‘will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought.’ Privacy is the current fetish of the educated classes, which might be explained by how little regard they show for their own, tweeting their every prejudice and perturbation, blogging whatever resemblance to cogitation passes through their minds, and distributing compromising selfies for a cruel world to snigger over.
As for the child for whose privacy Snowden expresses such heartfelt concern, he has long since abandoned all idea of an inviolable self, posting all there is to know about him on Facebook alongside a photograph of his naked girlfriend. A private moment of unrecorded thought! Reader, who wants it when you can have recorded fame instead?
With a naivety that wouldn’t shame a Miss World pageant, Snowden suggests that if governments really want to know how we feel, they should just ask, ‘for asking is always cheaper than spying’.
‘Forgive the intrusion, but what building is it you feel like blowing up? If you’d be so good as to send us an aerial photograph, together with dates and names of personnel, the gratitude of our government would know no bounds.’
It has been said by some more beguiled by Snowden than I am that there is no evidence that all this surveillance has thwarted a single terrorist attack. I bet the Queen is thinking what I’m thinking: doesn’t that mean they should be trying harder?
Into the digital darkness
Sometime in the early 1960s when my father was driving taxis in Manchester, he had that April Ashley in the back of his cab. For readers who don’t remember April Ashley, let me quote from her website. ‘My story begins in 1935 in a tough, working-class area of Liverpool where I was born as a boy … In Paris, I debated with myself the decision to have a sex change … I knew I was woman and that I could not live in a male body. I had no choice. I flew to Casablanca and the rest, as they say, is history.’
It must have been a short time after her operation in Casablanca that my father ferried her around in his taxi for a day. He liked her, found the story of her ordeal fascinating and moving – ‘An education’, he called it – and wouldn’t tolerate any sarcasm, weird as the idea of a sex change then was. To this day he stands guard in my imagination over any inclination I might have to judge ungenerously.
So in the matter of transgender politics I can be trusted to show respect. If Germaine Greer has upset people who might have looked to her for understanding, they have my sympathy. But since she hasn’t called for their operations to be re
versed, or for them to be physically harmed, not a single voice should be raised against her delivering a lecture on any subject she chooses at a British university.
Our country is in a censorious mood. The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own. Shake any institution of higher learning and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.
But it isn’t just the desire to silence dissenting opinion that should worry us. Let us say that Greer didn’t just happen to think differently from those she has distressed but intended, for whatever reason – because she’s Australian, say – to go out of her way to needle them. Why, even then, should she be denied the right to a platform?
It isn’t only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated – and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence – but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture. The loser, when silencers have their way, is not the provocateur but the provoked. To be easily offended is to be shut off from the invigoration of that argumentative give-and-take we call liberty; not to understand the poetics of provocation is to miss out on the joys of living in a literate and robust society that excels at satire and burlesque.
We hear too much of ‘phobia’. Attach ‘phobia’ to any cause you care for and you have ring-fenced it against the words of the critic and the devious antics of the clown alike. Nothing is to be mocked; everything – except the act of critical dissent itself – is sacrosanct. Thus have we created for ourselves an impoverished world of touchy fools who understand no mode of address other than the Internet’s yes/no, like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down discourse of the dumb.
Take some of the responses to Martin Amis’s splenetic and self-consciously snobby dismantling of Jeremy Corbyn in the Sunday Times last week. That the straight-faced of social media were going to throw a blue fit over this would assuredly have entered Amis’s calculations. It can be fun for a writer with a comic gift to drive the over-principled into an apoplexy. That’s part of what a comic gift is for. ‘Dance,’ says Martin Amis, and true to expectation, they dance their hobbled dance, outraged by his ridicule, sickened by the position of educational privilege from which he mocks Corbyn’s intellectual penury, primly unamused by the unashamedly ad hominem nature of his attack. (No matter that with Jeremy Corbyn – a man admired for nothing more substantial than ‘authenticity’ – ad hominem is all there is.)
It is a strange, cabalistic world out there in the celibate darkness of digital resentment forums, where people for good reason denied a platform of their own cling to the coat-tails of those published in the daylight, froth in envious rage, share one another’s small and bitter diatribes and as a matter of principle find nothing funny, not even when it patently is – as for example, Amis’s really rather fond description of ‘weedy, nervy, thrifty’ Corbynites each ‘with a little folded purse full of humid coins’. It’s that word ‘humid’ that does the trick and marks the writer his detractors will never be.
A bad habit has evolved, below stairs, of calling any writer with whom you disagree about anything a twat, and his or her books bollocks. As a tactic, this is poor. It weakens your argument if you can only admire art made in the image of your own predilections, and shows you have neither eye nor ear for art at all.
As for snobbish derision, it is of noble ancestry, going back to Hamlet twitting Polonius, Pope, Swift, Wilde, Waugh: a line of scurrilous mirth whose slithering ambiguities make a charlie of whoever can’t keep up. Equivocation is at the heart of literary insult, harnessing seriousness to comedy, earnestness to lightness, teasing the single-minded into taking offence. Sadistic? Yes, but then again no.
The impulse to irresponsible play is lost on the easily provoked who think a writer must mean what he appears to mean, say what he seems to say, or indeed say anything, because saying, reader, is the least of what a writer does.
Half the time, if it’s any good, writing is a wind-up, a trap for the unwary. To be wound up in the playground was always a humiliation; to be wound up on the page is no different. We must get off our high horses. We look stupid up there.
Nights in white satin; nuns in red nighties
You can’t blame Richard Dawkins for getting in early with his tweet. See it from his point of view: if you are of the conviction that organised religion encourages a dangerous delusion and that Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal’, then the announcement of his retirement is an opportunity too good to miss. ‘I feel sorry for the Pope and all old Catholic priests,’ he tweeted. ‘Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.’
It’s a cunningly laid trap. ‘A wasted life!’ I hear a chorus of old priests crying. ‘We’ve had more sex, young man, than you’ve had hot dinners,’ before it dawns on them that Dawkins has caught them with their pants down again. But this is not a column about Dawkins or the Catholic Church. It’s about sex. Or rather no sex. Imagine it, Dawkins says. So I’m trying.
Perhaps I am of an age to try. Any earlier would have been impossible. For the first forty or fifty years of your life there is only sex – the wanting, the waiting, the wondering, and then the greed for more. Other things distract for a day or so, but they are no more than an intermission. You take up chess or cycling, you try yoga, you bake your own bread and learn the names of foreign cheeses, you garden and croon over hollyhocks, but you aren’t fooling anybody, least of all yourself. The fires die down briefly only in order that they can roar back into life with ever more ferocity. We are on an errand, emissaries of the future, and we deliver or we die.
Up until the age of ten, I lived opposite a convent school. From my bedroom window, I could see the convent girls running around the playground and sharing one another’s lunch. Ten was too young for that to be an arousing spectacle. But it wasn’t too young to wonder about the nuns who taught them. My heart broke for those nuns. Something about the way they dressed and moved told me they were denying themselves that without which life was not worth living. And what was that? I had no idea, but I could read the abnegation, or the terrible consequences of that abnegation, on their faces. You can be a sentimentalist of sex, even at ten.
Years later, I supervised a thesis on D. H. Lawrence written by a nun whose quick intelligence, demure bearing and keen but forever downturned eyes beguiled everyone who taught her.
Her work was brilliant but we believed her religion dulled her natural vitality. Once she got her first, we hoped, she would renounce her vows. And she did. We threw her a renunciation party where she got comprehensively pissed, told lewd stories, flaunted herself disgracefully, and left us all wishing she’d never read Lawrence. Celibacy may have few pleasures but in this instance it beat incontinence hands down.
My sentimentality about nuns survives. My wife once told me that in the course of directing a television documentary she miked up a nun – it was not thought appropriate that the soundman should go rummaging through her habit – and discovered she was wearing scarlet underwear. The story touched my heart. Did she have a love outside the walls that could never be consummated, or a love inside them that dared not speak its name? Or was the lingerie her trousseau as a bride of Christ? In which case, I’m with Dawkins – what a waste!
To the worldly, this sense of waste is non-negotiable. It strikes us as against nature, an act of ingratitude, a crime against the body for which the body’s guardians – the ids, the egos and the rest – will exact a terrible price. We feel the sadness of it in those who blundered into self-denial without measuring its consequences, or were pushed by families hoping to find favour in the eyes of God through the sacrifice of someone else, but we are less tolerant when celibacy turns up its nose and brags of its virtue.
And so we laugh in advance of the action in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Ferdinand,
King of Navarre, reminds his followers of their oath to stand for three years against their own affections ‘and the huge army of the world’s desires’. Fat chance of that, we think, even without Berowne’s heartfelt cry that ‘these are barren tasks, too hard to keep: / Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’.
But celibacy’s self-righteousness is no laughing matter in Measure for Measure, where Angelo, who ‘scarce confesses that his blood flows’, boils over when he sees the conventual Isabella, a woman who sets higher store by her chastity than her brother’s life.
I wrote an essay on Measure for Measure at school, wondering that people should make such a fuss about getting their leg over. My teacher put a red pen through the lot and told me my imagination wasn’t up to the moral rigours of the text. He was right. Whoever denies his blood flows might be making a great mistake, but it’s not for someone who is drowning in his own semen to pass judgement. Freedom from the pesterings of nature ought not to be a contemptible ambition. And, yes, I can, now that I’m not a boy, imagine its consolations. A clear mind. Crystalline concentration. An even body temperature.
Kant railed against sexual intercourse because it made us ‘things’, and masturbation because it turned us into ‘loathsome objects’. Be honest – in our age of unremitting porn: the soft stuff of popular culture even more trivialising than the hard stuff the Internet pumps into the brains of already deranged boys – in such drossy, sex-satiated times, don’t we owe Kant a nod of recognition? No sex! Shouldn’t we at least try to imagine that occasionally?
Killing is a serious business
Not a subject ideally suited to a weekend consecrated to lovers, but it has been raised and I must address it. Murder, I’m talking about. The amount of it there is about. The sheer volume of bodies. Not in actuality – though God knows there are enough bodies there (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’) – but in books and on the stage, particularly in film and on television, and more particularly still in that genre known as ‘the thriller’, though I speak as one who has never felt the thrill of thrillers. But live and let live is my motto. If murder is your bag, bag it. Me – I go to art only to wonder whether Elizabeth Bennet will eventually get to lie with Mr Darcy, and when Gregor Samsa will come down from the ceiling.
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