by D J Enright
Ministers of (or for) Culture used to be figures of fun or of fear, known for their bumbling pronouncements or their close association with the secret police. Nowadays they are as respectable as other Ministers, neither made sport of nor trembled at. Their company is eagerly sought by a multitude of citizens concerned in one way or another with the hazy, low-ranking but sometimes pleasurable responsibilities grouped together as ‘culture’, and ranging from poets looking for patrons to aspiring pop stars with relatively undemanding sports persons in the middle. What might this phenomenon portend? The onset of a golden age?
It is reported in the press that a spokesman for the Hell’s Angels has a Ph.D. in motorcycle culture from Warwick University: presumably an aspect of the ‘car culture’ and ‘philosophy of road traffic’ about which we hear so much. Also in the news is the ‘drug culture’, the ‘culture of violence’, the ‘teenage knife culture’, the ‘culture of cover-up’, the thriving ‘compensation culture’ (as the television jingle goes: ‘Where there’s blame there’s a claim’), and the ‘credit-card culture’. Recently an American spokeswoman, on the defensive, has insisted that al-Qaeda fighters held in the US prison camp in Cuba are being served ‘culturally appropriate food’, while Mr Duncan Smith, Tory leader, accuses the British Government and National Health Service doctors of joining in a ‘culture of deceit’, and Oxford University Press publishes a scholarly volume entitled The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
The clear majority of these cultures are less than unequivocally desirable; we don’t hear of a ‘culture of kindness’, or of ‘teenage fellowship’, a ‘savings bank culture’, or a ‘culture of openness’. It’s all a long way from Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture as that which aspired ‘to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’.
‘I’d like to know whether epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all, or used it’: thus the young Adrian Leverkühn, in Mann’s Doctor Faustus.
The Age of – what? Of Bad Causes, since all the Good Causes seem to have gone off. ‘I put it down to these officious Modern Communications,’ says the old fellow. ‘In the old days we didn’t know so much about other people. We took them as we found them, those we did find, not all that many. It sort of helped.’ God help us, he added hopefully. All that poncing around on the telly! Worse today, but not altogether new. He thinks of two defining moments in the history of (that word again) culture. Ulrich was more or less used to hearing about ‘geniuses of the football field or the boxing ring’, but was still taken aback by the phrase ‘the racehorse of genius’ (Robert Musil, 1930). And ‘We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us. Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces’ (Wallace Stevens, 1942).
A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement has remarked on my addiction to ‘dreadful puns’. Surely ‘one of the most excruciating’, he says, is the doubt as to ‘whether one exorcizes one’s fears by writing about them, or exercises them’. He could have done better than that, for I have certainly done worse. After all, it’s not an egregiously disembodied, gratuitous piece of word play; the thought may not be gloriously original, but it’s clear and, where ‘meaning’ is concerned, plausible. (Ah, but ‘plausible’ is synonymous with ‘glib’ and ‘specious’.)
Now, some six weeks later, I see in the Hampstead and Highgate Express a review of André Dubus’s Dancing After Hours: ‘With these stories he seems to be exorcizing demons. Or, rather, exercising them.’ Well done, Guy Somerset! I hope you get away with it.
The electronic notice-board reads ‘WELCOME TO ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY’. Below: ‘WAITING TIME MAJOR INJURIES 4 HOURS … MINOR INJURIES 4 HOURS’, followed by running information, broken by occasional lacunae, about the more serious cases being treated before the less, and on how to procure food and drink while waiting and a taxi to take one home. The Coca-Cola dispensers are built like tanks; many of the foam-rubber seats have suffered major injuries.
‘Welcome to Accident and Emergency.’ One might wish to respond with the Psalmist’s words: ‘Give ear unto my cry, for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.’
No trouble with the hospital computer this time; no vain search for an Enwright. Thanks no doubt to the BBC’s Dublin reporter, Leo Enright, whose genial face, subtitled by his name, is often seen on television these days.
I was pleased that Anthony Burgess spelt the name correctly in his novel, Earthly Powers. Even though he gave it to a catamite. (The latter word deriving from a Trojan prince called Ganymede, beloved of Zeus.)
In fact there isn’t a long wait. The electronic notice-board was on the blink, waiting for treatment.
‘Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get out of bed and shoulder the day’s burden.
‘“What’s been the matter?” they ask.
‘“Oh! senile decay – general histolysis of the tissues,” I say, fencing’: W. N. P. Barbellion, 1914, aetat. twenty-five. His doctor tells him these waves of ill health are quite unaccountable, unless he is leading a dissolute life, which he doesn’t appear to be doing. ‘Damn his eyes.’
‘Beware of desp’rate steps. The darkest day! (Live till tomorrow) will have pass’d away’. William Cowper, that educated hypochondriac, on ‘The Needless Alarm’.
At my age, every trivial twinge seems a harbinger of dissolution. Yet there is a sort of safety in numbers. Variety is the spice of life? More certainly, variety is the spice of death.
The most overblown understatement of the week: ‘One could call Swift the Peter Mandelson of his day, but that is only half the story’ (Daily Telegraph).
The mystery of market values. A hairdresser in Florida is offering Monica Lewinsky $100,000 for her blue cocktail dress allegedly bearing traces of President Clinton’s semen. (Remember that sweet song, ‘These foolish things remind me of you’?) And $100,000 would buy a lifetime’s supply of condoms.
People had a strange feeling that they were more than they seemed, or could be better than they were. And so religion came into the world. Now religion is going out of the world, our world. We understand that we are less than we seem, and can easily be worse than we possibly are.
The book is sickening. I try to put it down, the cover sticks to my hands. I have to wash them. The book shouldn’t be read, it shouldn’t have been published, it shouldn’t have been written. It’s making money – there’s no more to be said.
Which won’t prevent us from saying more. There are books – novels, ‘the one bright book of life’! – that one hurries through, spending time that ought to be spent on other things. Not that one is enjoying them, far from it. The going is sickening, one has to see it through to the inevitably nauseating end, and get rid of it, in accord with some perverse notion of readerly honour. Not transported – transfixed. ‘I couldn’t put the book down’ sometimes means ‘I wish I hadn’t picked the book up.’
David Hume was far from supposing that ‘all those, who have depreciated our species, have been enemies to virtue’. He was aware that ‘a delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of the world’. However, he was of the opinion that ‘the sentiments of those, who are inclined to think favourably of mankind, are more advantageous to virtue, than the contrary principles, which give us a mean opinion of our nature’, for if a man holds ‘a high notion of his rank and character in the creation, he will naturally endeavour to act up to it’: ‘On the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’, 1741. (I now see that William James was of a like opinion: there are cases where faith creates its own verification.)
True, believing something may help to make it come true. It’s harder, no doubt, to think favourably of mankind. You don’t need a splenetic temper, merely
access to the media, whose servants know that vice has far more to offer than virtue. Even so, one must detest and dissent from those who, in the manifest absence of any delicate sense of morals, prosper by promulgating a low opinion of our species and a disgust of the world. Believing something can help to make it come true.
One of the alarming considerations that arise in age … Sydney Smith calculated that between the ages of ten and seventy he had eaten and drunk forty four-horse wagonloads of meat and drink more than would have served to keep him in good health. The cost of this surfeit came to £7,000. And it struck him that by his voracity he must have starved to death at least a hundred persons. A cheque to Oxfam seems indicated.
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‘Ah, Doctor, gout – the only enemy I do not wish to have at my feet.’ It is unwise to joke with the medical profession. On the first occasion you may escape with a blank look, and on the second with a cold one. On the third you risk being struck off the doctor’s list. When Smith was unwell, his doctor told him to take a walk on an empty stomach. ‘Whose?’ he asked. To get away with such impertinence, you will need to be the privileged patient of a private practitioner.
Smith found his friend Lady Grey guilty of anti-egotism because she would never speak of her health. ‘When I am ill,’ he said, ‘I mention it to all my friends and relations, to the lord lieutenant of the county, the justices, the bishop, the churchwardens, the booksellers and editors of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews.’ A sign of rude health, I’d say.
To promote a visit by the Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra to Dorking in early 2002, the proud local council sent out a mailshot to 25,000 residents. Sydney Smith’s witticism concerning gout may conceivably have inspired the PRO responsible for the wording: the concert promised to be ‘the only time you want to see 100 Gypsies on your doorstep’. Twenty-five thousand apologies followed.
The soaps are in a lather – EastEnders has featured homosexuals and a bisexual, but now Coronation Street acquires a transsexual! – and the water grows ever murkier. Sweet Sally Webster is having an affair – or is it an optical illusion? (Actually the transsexual is an outstandingly decent and likeable character. May she stay the course.)
Have written just one sentence this fine day. (This sentence.) Feel lazy. Pick up ‘Real Life’ section of newspaper. Eye falls on horoscope: ‘You are working too hard.’ Hastily discard newspaper. (Still, have written six, no, seven sentences now, albeit rather short ones.)
Abandoning belief, Emily Dickinson wrote, made behaviour small: ‘better an ignis fatuus than no illume at all’. ‘All Faith, they say, is like a jewel,’ Gavin Ewart has observed, ‘but why is it so bloody cruel?’ Ugo Betti has submitted that to believe in something you also have to believe in everything necessary for believing in it.
The Lambeth Conference, 1998: an unseemly spat develops between the African bishops and their Western colleagues – one of whom describes the former as ‘just one step up from witchcraft’. The Africans hold certain beliefs. They believe that homosexuality is wrong, ‘a white man’s disease’. (They may well believe – I don’t know whether the point was made explicitly – that gay rights don’t count for very much beside the right of black children not to die of starvation.) The Bishop of Newark, defender of a different faith, believes himself to be ‘a twentieth-century person’ (nothing, one might think, to boast about), free of superstition (the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection), and claims to have thirty homosexual priests in his diocese. (No nonsense there about one’s belief requiring one to believe in everything deemed necessary to believing in that belief.) In a separate development, we hear of a Nigerian missionary who has come to Britain to rescue the country from ‘the dark forces of humanism’. (At last someone is taking humanism seriously.) As the last English gentleman is expected to be an Indian, so it seems the last Anglican bishop is likely to be an African.
Compromises are arrived at, however, and temporizing takes precedence over eternalizing. The Conference votes to change the recommendation of ‘chastity’ for unmarried couples to ‘abstinence’. (Which makes the heart grow fonder?) Homophobia is to be deplored, but active homosexuals are not to be ordained. Naturally, not everybody is happy. The Bishop of Edinburgh complains that he is ‘gutted, shafted and depressed’ (a peculiar choice of adjectives: perhaps the Bishop is a twentieth-century person), and fears the Church is on the path to fundamentalism. (The trouble with belief is that if it isn’t fundamental, it’s not much of a belief.)
But the Church still stands, and with luck it will be ten years before the next Lambeth Conference. Who knows what will happen once the Africans are safely back in their native bush?
In a report of an Indian statue in the dubiously legal possession of a Birmingham museum, The Times Diary, 17 August 1998, is so irrationally pleased with its headline, ‘Bhudda hell!’ that it repeats the solecism a moment later.
The other day I asked our local florist to send flowers by Interflora to my sister, recovering from an operation. The girl in charge took the address down as ‘Bomont Ward’ (Beaumont), ‘Warick Hospital, Warick’ (Warwick). The crucial word came out ‘bowkay’ (bouquet) – crucial in that the only other option on offer was a wreath. Obviously the young lady, undeniably a true-born Briton, was a champion of spelling reform, and desirous of overthrowing the allegation made by Kurt Tucholsky, German satirist, that English is ‘a simple but difficult language consisting entirely of foreign words mispronounced’.
‘Both life and death are necessary factors of each other.’ (For instance.) The moralizer goes on moralizing, the aphorist aphorizing, the ironist ironizing, the poet poetizing. News comes of a flood here, a drought there. Moralist, aphorist, ironist, poet go on doing what they do. The rescuers rescue, the aiders aid, the doctors doctor, the cobbler sticks to his last, the penman to his pen. Quite right, one says, life goes on. In fact one can think of some things that might be called life, and which ought to go on. But is writing – whether moralistic, aphoristic, ironic or poetic – one of them? Well, what can’t be cured must be endured, writes the writer. (A bomb goes off in Omagh, for instance.) And feels rather pleased with himself or herself. Scraps of age-old wisdom can sound quite original when there’s nothing new to say.
Whatever he did – Samuel Butler resolved – he must not die poor. Examples of ill-rewarded labour were immoral since they discouraged those who could and would write good things so long as they didn’t fear it would ruin them and their families. Can’t say the thought had ever entered my head with much force. Butler said that such examples led people to ‘pamper’ foolish writers out of compunction. Which may account for the ingenious and disinterested acclaim that reviewers bestow on plainly inferior books.
Of course, footballers, models, pop stars and so on didn’t exist in Butler’s day – all that gang, in no need of more wealth to keep them and their families from ruination, and hardly deserving it. A ghastly lust for ‘knowing about’ the famous, famous for no matter what, has reduced the call for compunction. As for discouragement, long banished.
Years back, in the Sunday Times, I volunteered the suggestion that the Arts Council should think of awarding bursaries to selected persons to enable them to give up writing. This drew a vicious letter from a man who assumed I was a Jew grown rich from contributing to what he termed the ‘Sunday jewspapers’.
When Q. D. Leavis heard that I and the fellow undergraduate with whom I shared rooms had complained about the food dished out by Downing College, she rebuked us sharply: we came from working-class families and were used to our mothers’ cooking, whereas if we had been sent away to public schools, we would be grateful for what Downing provided. I was reminded of this incident when reading D. J. Taylor’s novel, Trespass, where a posh girl tells the narrator: ‘It’s not our fault, darling, if we weren’t born with your disadvantages.’
A small, sad insight into Grub Street, in a footnote of Barbellion’s: he once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave him great pleasure and led
him to hope that the editor was going to open the pages of his magazine to him. But three weeks later the editor committed suicide by jumping out of his bedroom window.
Janet Montefiore alerts me to Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery (1840), and her recipes for a Poor Author’s Pudding (breadcrumbs and a few currants) and a Publisher’s Pudding (soaked in cream and brandy, with crystallized fruit).
When Collins backed out of publishing The Journal of a Disappointed Man, Barbellion surmised that the reader who recommended the book had been ‘combed out’ and replaced by a godly man, solicitous for the firm’s reputation as a publisher of schoolbooks and bibles. ‘My malignant fate has not forsaken me.’ A year later Frank Swinnerton took the book on, and Barbellion urged his brother, whose wife was pregnant: ‘If it’s a boy, call him Andrew Chatto Windus. Then perhaps the firm will give him a royalty when he is published at the Font.’ When would the book come out? He was dying, but ‘I’m digging my heels in awaiting those two old tortoises, Chatto and Windus’. The book arrived the next morning: ‘the sun is shining’. Barbellion had tried for the ‘candour and verisimilitude’ he admired in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, but it was no use. Chatto had cut out ‘two splendid entries about prostitutes and other stuff’. The book wouldn’t leave his widow a rich woman.
One of the ideas for unwritten stories proposed by Samuel Butler stars a free-thinking father who has an illegitimate son (which he considers the proper thing). Then the son takes to immoral ways. He turns Christian, joins the clergy, and insists on marrying.