Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Returning to France some time after my sojourn in Nottingham, I was surprised to see appear in the nearby village or small town of St Paul le Jeune notices advertising a performance with live reptiles, to be held one evening in the village hall or Salle des fêtes. So even in France I am followed by a rising tide of reptiles. (We have wild reptiles near our house in the form of lizards, some of them bright green and eight inches long, slow worms and even snakes, but I am not speaking of these. These reptiles are unavoidable; I speak only of what one might call voluntary reptiles.) A friend and I decided to attend the performance.

  The Salle des fêtes turned out not to be a very festive place in atmosphere, but rather the kind of dismal utilitarian space that one might have expected municipal bureaucrats with limited funds to have planned. And my friend and I were, in fact, the only adults to have turned out without small children in their wake. In all, the audience was about fifty or sixty, with three or four children to every adult.

  The performance was conducted by two travelling Germans, Dieter and Uschi, the former to handle the animals, the latter to provide the commentary in good, but not native, French.

  Dieter was, to judge by his appearance, an aging biker. He wore jeans, highish-heeled boots (necessary for the performance, as I shall relate), and a strongly patterned shirt. He had the long, uncultivated beard of bikers; I should guess he was in his mid-sixties, but I might be wrong; certainly he had the look of a man who had knocked about the world a bit.

  Uschi was considerably younger, but still not in the first flush of youth; she was tall, lithe and slender, but with the thinness that spoke of cigarettes rather than natural metabolism or dietary self-control. She wore very tight jeans, a cut-away shirt, and long boots with snakeskin bands and long leather tassels. She wore her hair nearly to her waist. She stood to one side with a microphone in her hand while Dieter displayed the animals.

  Before the performance began, as the audience trickled in (I thought that le tout St Paul le Jeune would be there, but I was wrong), heavy metal guitar music, not unskilfully played, was relayed over a stereo system: this was Dieter’s music, and the audience was invited to buy a CD of it. Parked not far away from the Salle des fêtes was the large white camper van in which Dieter and Uschi lived and worked and took their being.

  Dieter came into the hall and stood behind a small and battered white metal table. Behind him were ranged boxes of various sizes containing his creatures. I could not help but notice that the end of one of Dieter’s middle fingers was missing, and of course I jumped to the most obvious conclusion about the fate of the missing portions.

  Dieter started with the giant scorpions, taken out of a Tupperware-like box. The audience gasped. With swift and practised movements, Dieter provoked the vile creatures into activity, and then brought them close to the audience for their inspection.

  Next came the giant spider. I was at this point strongly reminded of a film I once saw high on the Bolivian altiplano, in the Teatro municipal of Uyuni, called The Invasion of the Giant Spiders, in which the eggs of vast spiders fell to earth from outer space to hatch and take over the world. The only thing that stood between the giant spiders and world domination was the US Air Force, and the audience cheered the spiders on to victory which, however, was not in the end theirs, though it very nearly was.

  Dieter put the giant spider on his bald head, wiping it afterwards because, said Uschi, the hairs of the spider, with irritant chemicals in them, might otherwise get in his eyes. And then came the snakes, in ascending order of dramatic quality, starting with corn and coral snakes, ascending through a boa constrictor and ending in a reticulated python, the species that grows to the greatest length known of any snake, though the anaconda can weigh more, up to 400 pounds in fact, and Colonel Fawcett, the bestselling South American explorer who disappeared in the jungle in mysterious circumstances, spent many years searching for the Dormidera, the legendary or mythical 80 feet long anaconda that was believed in inhabit the swamps of the Chaco. This particular python had more than ten feet to grow to equal the record, but it was only twelve years old and still it was, in its own way, a splendid beast. It wrapped itself round Dieter’s leg not from affection but, so Uschi told us, to steady itself while Dieter held its pea-brained head aloft. One of the smaller snakes, Uschi also informed us, always sought cover and shade, and Dieter proceeded to demonstrate this. Standing in the middle of the floor, he released the snake on the floor, and it at once found the dark gap between the sole of his boots and the high heels.

  For a small fee, Dieter and Uschi allowed the children to be photographed with the boa, much smaller than the python, which could easily have swallowed some of the smaller children. As such constrictors go, the boa was a small one, but even to touch it—as Dieter encouraged us all to do—was to feel the formidable strength of its musculature. Of course all the children wanted to be photographed with it, and from this natural desire Dieter and Uschi derived a considerable part of their income.

  The show ended with the exhibition of a caiman, a crocodilian only a yard long, but nevertheless when seen up this close a formidable beast. Uschi told us that the caiman was intelligent, though added that this was only by comparison with snakes. Dieter allowed the caiman to walk in our direction, pulling it back when it was almost within lunging distance of those tasty morsels, our legs.

  The show over, Uschi went round with a hat, asking for voluntary contributions in addition to the entrance fee if the performance had pleased us (we gave generously). She described her and Dieter’s itinerary in the days to come, to other small villages, that is if the councils would agree to let the village hall to them, and asked us to recommend the show to anyone we knew, again if it had pleased us. Dieter and Uschi’s existence was clearly a hand-to-mouth one.

  During the show, Dieter had fixed his face in a smile, or a rictus rather; but he gave the impression of being a kind and gentle man, and he was very good with children. A man who can persuade six or seven year olds to wrap snakes round their necks that are as large as they must inspire confidence, after all, and, for all his beaten-up look, Dieter obviously knew what he was about. The posters that had appeared in St Paul le Jeune proclaimed that one of the purposes of the show was to reduce the unreasoning fear that reptiles inspired, and to replace it by love and appreciation. How much more educative this show was than another night of television!

  There were many questions that I should much have liked to ask Dieter and Uschi after the show. How did they embark upon this strange life, how long had they kept it up, and did they now do it because they liked and enjoyed it still, or were they trapped into continuing it because they could do, like Luther, no other? Did it bore them to repeat the same performance over and again in out of the way places, before small audiences of utter provincials? (Uschi gave no hint of boredom, quite the reverse, but I suppose a professional can hide or disguise his or her boredom.) I did not approach them to ask, being too shy.

  Whatever the answers would have been to my questions had I asked them, I warmed to Dieter and Uschi, a warmth not untinged by admiration, for they were undoubtedly courageous in following their own path. Oddly enough I found their performance reassuring, in that they were still free to take it wherever their desire—and no doubt their linguistic abilities allowed them. It could not have been an easy life, but it was a free life, and contrary to what I might previously have thought regulation had not yet made it completely impossible. I began to see why Dickens (to say nothing of Hamlet) had such an admiration and affection for strollers.

  Dieter and Uschi were fine people, despite their probable membership of a subculture that I do not in other circumstances much admire, for they brought to the faces of the children expressions of happy wonderment in a world in which premature disenchantment is so often taken as evidence of maturity and sophistication. If only there were more Dieters and Uschis! The world would not be tidier, but it
would be more enchanting.

  6 - A New Squirearchy

  It is likely—and here I speak from personal experience—that most journalists, who know full well that what they write will be forgotten even before the reader has finished reading it, harbour the hope of some kind or measure of immortality, in other words that at least something of what they have written will continue to be read after their death. And so it is not at all comforting for them to have to remember that by no means all good books survive, except in the sense of mouldering on remote shelves in the ever-fewer second-hand bookshops of the world; mere merit is no guarantee of other forms of survival.

  There is a small compensating pleasure, however, in this melancholy thought: that all around us are books that are worthy to be read but that nobody does read; and that once we have found such a book, we can hug to ourselves the knowledge that we have been clever and perceptive enough to have found it. We are then in an exclusive club of one.

  Recently I had the pleasure of finding and reading Essays at Large by Solomon Eagle. I would be surprised if you had heard of Solomon Eagle, even under his real name, J C Squire, though he was famous enough in his time. The book was published in November 1922 and reprinted a month later (I possess this recondite knowledge because the verso of the dedication page tells me so). Nobody who likes the English language could fail to enjoy it.

  The book consists of thirty-nine short essays that are literary but also rooted in everyday life, making precisely the kind of connection between life and literature that I think it is one of the purposes of literary criticism to make. The essays continually bring to mind—at least to my mind—experiences not dissimilar from those of the author himself, who is often so funny that I am afraid I laughed out loud in the quiet coach of the train in which I happened to be reading his book. As the public announcement at the beginning of the journey had asked passengers to be wary of suspicious behaviour and to report it, my outbursts of mirth—we are in the middle of the worst economic crisis in eighty years, for God’s sake, even those of us in the quiet coach—caused people to eye me oddly. I wanted to read them passages of Solomon Eagle to prove to my fellow passengers that, really, I was quite normal, and they would have laughed too if they had been reading Solomon Eagle, but I decided in the end that discretion was probably better than full disclosure, and no one reported me.

  Let me take as an example Eagle’s, or Squires’, reflections on Rail-roadiana, that is to say an auction catalogue he had received from an American auction house which contained a collection of items having to do with the history of rail, including books but also ephemera such as time-tables. At first Squires appears rather sniffy at this, but gradually leads the reader to see that actually it is a worthy and useful goal to preserve these things.

  As it happens, I had just flown from Amsterdam to London when I read this essay. On the plane next to me was an Englishman to whom I smiled when he sat down, but who did not return my friendliness. I think I soon found out why. Around his neck were some binoculars, and I assumed he was a birdwatcher (I assume there are birds in the Netherlands other than in factory farms, but I don’t recall seeing any). But I was wrong. From out his pocket he took a moleskin notebook and opened it. I quickly saw what he had been doing: he had been collecting the registration numbers of airliners, and of course Schipol Airport is a rather good place to do that. People who collect aircraft registration numbers as a hobby are strange.

  I was in the window seat and he peered across me trying to get yet more numbers as we taxied out. He managed to note a few more numbers before we were airborne.

  When we arrived at Heathrow (presumably another aircraft number-collector’s paradise) I noticed that, on the way to baggage collection he picked up all the little leaflets on offer: concerning, I think, everything from the precautions taken by customs to prevent the importation of the Colorado beetle into Britain to cheap British Airways holiday breaks in mid-November. I have little doubt, judging by the kind of man that he was, that he would preserve these leaflets in pristine condition to the day he died (he was much younger than I).

  Needless to say, I felt infinitely superior to this man, I really looked down on him: that is, until I read Solomon Eagle. He says in his elegant prose style:

  I doubt if a man who is willing to take really long views and can trust his children to obey the terms of his will, could do better [from the point of handing down valuables to his descendants] than to lay down in dry, warm bins, not to be disturbed for two centuries, a complete file of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.

  For, as he has said earlier in the essay, ‘The more ordinary and common the literature was in its own time the more likely it is, as a rule, to be scarce; yet it is from this kind of thing that we are likeliest to get a peep into the minds of our ancestors or a notion of their day-to-day lives.’

  I began to feel – too late – less contempt for the man who had sat next to me on the plane, less pride in my own superiority; for the whirligig of time certainly does bring in its revenges.

  Another of Eagle’s essays on this theme is the one about literary relics. He writes hilariously of Henry Festing Jones’ collection of the relics of Samuel Butler, the nineteenth century rationalist writer, which he gave for display to St John’s College, Cambridge (Butler’s college). Jones, who was also Butler’s companion, wrote a biography of Butler that makes Boswell’s Life of Johnson seem like a mere preliminary sketch. The collection includes the menu of a dinner given to Henry Festing Jones on completion of his Memoir [of Butler]. ‘Here,’ says Eagle, ‘we are distinctly coming down to details.’ He then lists a few of the items on display: a sandwich case, a pocket magnifying glass, an address book, two pen trays, a bag for pennies, two small Dutch dolls, a matchbox that his brother gave him. I cannot forbear from quoting to demonstrate Eagle’s humour, wisdom and humanity—as well as literary skill in providing an extremely powerful last line:

  It [the collection] is pretty thorough. I missed Butler’s pyjamas, which are totally unrepresented; and no collection of the kind can be deemed quite complete without some sample nail-clippings, some boots, a piece of toast incised by the hero’s teeth, and some few [collar] studs. There is not even a lock of Butler’s hair here. Nevertheless, as I said, it is as varied a collection of its kind as exists. And it is strange that these relics should have been brought together, placed in a Cambridge college, and dedicated to the memory of one who spent his whole life attempting to reason people out of what he considered their absurd sentimentality. On Butler’s own principles his relics should have been buried with him. But disciples will be disciples, and his disciples were wiser than he.

  There could hardy be a more devastating criticism of a man’s work than this, and all done with good humour and without insult.

  Squire was a brilliant parodist. In an essay on The New Style of Memoir, Squire protested against what was then a new phenomenon, that of relaying tittle-tattle about living persons in books. He was a gentleman; he thought that the abuse confidences and the reporting of private conversations were shameful, and this was so even if they were interesting.

  But he was not therefore in favour of eternal blandness; he would not have wanted malicious gossip never to have found its way into print, and certainly did not believe in the rather fatuous injunction, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. If this were adhered to, he wrote, biographies would go something like this:

  So Henry VIII died, as he had lived, in the odour of sanctity, beloved by his wife (Catherine of Aragon) who was his first and only romance, and revered by his people. His spare features and sympathetic deep-sunken eyes, so vividly preserved for us on the canvases of Holbein, attest the unworldly character of the man and the austerity of his life.

  Or:

  Napoleon, Emperor of the French, a man distinguished for the sacredness which he attached to human life and the implicit trust which he put in human nature, died at St. He
lena in 1821. He had abdicated in 1815 owing to failing health, and chose that sunny island on the advice of his doctors, finding a great solace during his last years in the congenial conversation of an Englishman, Sir Hudson Lowe, who exiled himself in order to be near his invalid friend.

  His essay, then, is an implicit plea for decent respect for the exigencies of civilised social intercourse while maintaining realism about life as it is actually lived: and the balance requires judgment and the exercise of virtuous restraint.

  His essay on Christmas card poetry is hilarious:

  It is amazing that every publisher of Christmas cards should have ‘on tap’ a bard so skilful that he can turn out hundreds of these poems without ever introducing a touch of individuality or novelty. For somebody must write them, even if it is only the chairman of the manufacturing company or the compositor who does the type-setting. Who are these mysterious people? Are they scattered amateurs everywhere? Or is it here that we find the explanation of how our professional and justly celebrated poets earn their living? Or is this one of those industries which are the hereditary monopoly of a few families like flint-knapping, violin-making and gold-beating?