by D J Enright
It is an ancient belief, or assumption, that a genuine, serious writer shocks the public; he lives in a permanent mode of oppugnancy, at war with the prime dogmas of the status quo. Latterly that noble stance or ambition is losing its substance. Nowadays the serious writer will, as ever, decline to meet expectations – he is still a rebel, and oppugnancy endures, but by seeking not to shock the public. Or, that is, he will shock them by not shocking them. The public may not appreciate this very much.
Somebody said recently, ‘As a writer, I want to make people look at things they don’t want to.’ His book has headed the bestseller list for six months running. ‘Know that our great showmen/ Are those who show what we want to have shown’: thus Brecht (‘Deliver the Goods’). Our great shockmen are those who shock us as we want to be shocked.
Liber Amoris (1823), a high-falutin, highly inaccurate or crudely ironic title: the subtitle, ‘The New Pygmalion’, the best thing around. (Compare ‘The Modern Prometheus’, subtitle of Frankenstein, five years earlier.) The torments and ignominies of adolescent infatuation, yes, one understands all that, even though a little later it grows incomprehensible. But Hazlitt was forty-two, and (which may be beside the point) had been married for twelve years, when he met Sarah Walker, his landlady’s daughter. Something of a tease, Sarah, with the uneasily self-righteous, pathetically defensive air of her station in life: ‘I am but a tradesman’s daughter’, and the gratification of getting her own back on the clever-clever gentry. Clearly no ‘angel from Heaven’, and not exactly ‘a practised, callous jilt, a regular lodging-house decoy’ either. Certainly not a patch on Richardson’s adroit and pertinacious Pamela (subtitled ‘Virtue Rewarded’), but more authentic, I’d say, truer to ordinary life.
How could Hazlitt bring himself to set down and (albeit anonymously) publish such a frightful mishmash of mawkishness, hurt pride, abjectness, nagging lust and spite, almost as if he were a contemporary of ours? Did he think it would shock? (So unmanly, and Hazlitt the famously ‘manly’ writer!) Because frankness is a virtue, and cannot be exercised too often? Because the story demonstrates how carnal desire can interfere with a great literary and philosophical mind? (Or the other way about.) As ‘a document in madness’ (a fin de siècle view)? Or (a modern view) because Hazlitt was attempting – no doubt a commendable aim – to ‘reach a democratic erotic moment’?
‘There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body’: Hazlitt, ‘On Disagreeable People’, 1827. I wish I hadn’t read the book. Or that I had read it in what is considered the proper way of reading – without feeling anything in particular.
A new novel, Anne Haverty’s The Far Side of a Kiss (a subtitle might have come in handy), tells the story from Sarah Walker’s point of view: ‘He has put me in a book. He had but a frail steel nib for his weapon but he has destroyed me by it.’ As well as stabbing himself in the foot. Ungrateful young madam, one is tempted to exclaim, considering he made her a celebrity. But what damage they could do in their day, when not everyone yearned to join the celebritocracy, those frail steel nibs.
A lengthy letter arrives from the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, urging me to consider making a gift to the Cantab Fund, and wanting to share with me his thoughts about Cambridge. He is still pleased to say he studied there, and he feels an instant rapport whenever he meets a fellow graduate. Supporting the Fund with a personal gift is his way of repaying a debt. ‘You alone can quantify the value of your Cambridge education’, but a typical donation of £500 plus reclaimed tax will amount to … The Vice-Chancellor says I shall shortly receive a telephone call from a current student who will ask for my response to the present letter.
Ten days later I receive a call from a current student. The conversation goes like this. I ask whether he knows anything about me:
– Well, he knows my name, address and telephone number, and year of matriculation.
– Nothing else?
– He gathers I am a freelance writer.
– Good, but I advise him not to become a freelance writer.
– Oh no, no chance of that, he’s an economist.
– Doesn’t he feel that this arm-twisting is a shabby trick, unworthy of the great institution in question? How could he lend himself to it?
– He says: ‘We are paid.’
An utterly disarming reply. Any method of making money is good. Money launders itself. I make my excuses and put the phone down.
Would you believe it? (Why not?) Four days later a similar letter arrives from the Master of Downing College. Like Cambridge University, Downing College is a great success, but being successful costs money. The Master reveals that ‘a bright and intelligent Downing student’, he or she, will contact me by phone and ask me to consider making a gift of £25 per month through a five-year deed of covenant which, plus reclaimed tax, will yield … Happily you can tick a box on an enclosed card if you don’t wish to be phoned.
Also enclosed is a brochure drawing attention to Downing celebrities, a mixed bunch including Trevor Nunn, John Cleese, Michael Winner, Mike Atherton, F. W. Maitland and F. R. Leavis. I have an uncomfortable feeling that the proceeds of an earlier appeal to which I contributed were spent on a new boathouse.
No book about China, however slim or rudimentary, fails to mention Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien), early first-century BC moralist, prose stylist and official court historian. While engaged on his much admired Historical Records he fell foul of the Emperor for defending a friend, a defeated general, who had been unjustly punished. Sima Qian was sentenced to death, but chose castration – a fate considered worse than death – since this allowed him to finish his monumental work. A scholar and a gentleman, and a true writer.
Books have their fates. Quite recently offers to schools of free sets of the Everyman Library were rejected on the grounds that there wasn’t room for them, and anyway they were not ‘relevant’. It appears that some of us – once you would have said the least expected of us – have the strange ambition to start all over afresh. In 213 BC the then Emperor of China, desiring to wipe out history and establish himself as the First Emperor, ordered all books to be destroyed except for those on ‘relevant’ subjects such as medicine and agriculture. Scholars who resisted the edict were burnt together with the books. The idea was ‘to make the people ignorant’ (and therefore respectful) and prevent ‘the use of the past to discredit the present’ (for example by suggesting that the present Emperor wasn’t really unique). However, books have a way of returning from the dead, of popping up in time’s backlist. Sufficient documents survived for Sima Qian to record the doings and the death of the ‘immortal’ First Emperor.
At first Dorothea Brooke found Mr Casaubon ‘as instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel”’. (A master of exposition, Raphael was instructive at considerable length – ‘affable’ comes from the Latin ‘speak’ – and admonitory to little purpose.) Mr Casaubon’s ‘Key to all Mythologies’, had it lived up to its name, would have opened some interesting doors.
A poor student passed the Chinese Imperial Examinations with flying colours, and was to receive his due reward from the Emperor himself. Alas, he was so unprepossessing that the Emperor declined to meet him. In despair, he threw himself into the sea. A kindly aquatic dragon took pity on him and bore him up to heaven. Set among the stars, he was appointed the God of Literature.
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Always captivating, the irruption into fantasy of the strictly reasonable and realistic. Haitian zombies clump heavily along, performing menial tasks for unscrupulous plantation owners, whereas in Chinese accounts reanimated corpses proceed in a series of little hops. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Rigor mortis prevents them from bending their limbs. Comparable arguments for inducing much-needed credibility are found throughout society, especially among the ruling classes.
Italo Svevo has noted Proust’s perfect vision of reality: ‘And when this reality of his becomes satire, it becomes so almost without his intervention. Reality can someti
mes make itself heard solely through precision.’ That’s the way to do it. Let things speak for themselves. (With just a little help: see Swift and his Modest Proposal.) Yet some things, no matter how actual, defy our sense of reality, defy satire. What to do then? Apart from ranting and raving and gnashing of teeth, ambitious to emulate Pope, but stuck with Sporus’s ‘florid impotence’, frothing at the mouth, a surly, superannuated, senile mouth. When it seems most difficult not to write satire, it can prove impossible to write it.
Postmodernism defines itself, enacts its (absence of) meaning. You hardly understand that you don’t understand it. In other matters one understands fairly precisely what one doesn’t understand, and perhaps one tries to understand (and possibly succeeds at times). But here one does not understand even that. One isn’t really meant to. This, if I understand correctly (which I probably do not), has to do with the presence of relativities: i.e. the absence of absolutes. One cannot conceive clearly of relativities because one cannot visualize them clearly; they are all equally cogent or not, determinedly indeterminate, and innumerable in number. In the past you may have distrusted absolutes, and broken the rules that attend them. But they remained there, absolutes and rules, they didn’t suddenly drop out of sight. They, and the departing and deviating from them, gave meaning to you and your actions. Postmodernism is the evacuation of absolutes and – not the loss (which would be noticed) – the non-existence of meaning. Naturally it is not as simple as this sounds. If it were, you might understand it, and then it wouldn’t be what it is.
Perhaps one thing one might come to conjecture is that postmodernism is distinctly premodern, not to say primeval, and associated with the turgid pre-academic soup (unhurried matrix of the brain), before thought came into the world, the long, dark ages of relatively blissful un-understanding, when life was grounded in a scattering of simple relativities: hot, cold, empty, full, pleasing, displeasing. Sophisticated persons love to play at the primitive, fancying themselves as First Emperor of some pristine dominion of organized entropy, expunging the past, breaking images when to do so brings plaudits rather than persecution. (Paul Hoggart, television critic, has observed that ‘Iconoclasm is our most popular spectator sport’), dipping their toes in moral vacuity while keeping handy the telephone number of the nearest police station. Impossible though it be to understand postmodernism, it is not hard to understand postmodernists.
A character in John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, pressed by the narrator to provide a distinction between modernism and postmodernism, proposes that ‘Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out. Postmodernism is about how much you can get away with putting in.’ Something so comprehensible, so sweetly reasonable, deserves to be true.
A man of his time and equally of ours, Montaigne wrote: ‘When you hear such grammatical terms as metonymy, metaphor and allegory, they seem to signify some rare, strange tongue, don’t they? Yet they are concepts that bear on the prattling of your chambermaid’ (‘On the vanity of words’).
‘I like making puns myself,’ confessed Margaret Drabble in a radio talk back in the 1970s, ‘but some of them are so obscure that nobody ever notices them.’ Her favourite pun among her own occurs when one of her characters – he is left-handed – describes his skill at card tricks as ‘a sinister dexterity’. No one else, she added, had admired the pun.
No doubt I have mentioned elsewhere my favourite home-made pun. When Faust is lamenting the disappearance of his paramour, Helen (lately of Troy), Mephistopheles suggests, with the flippancy he deploys to belittle human ambitions and emotions, that she has gone to Paris for the weekend. So?: (a) fashionable ladies like to take a short break in the French centre of fashion; or (b) if the putative reader is informed in Greek legend, Helen is visiting her former lover, Prince Paris. Easy, I’d think, not to notice any pun. To the best of my knowledge, only one reader spotted the two meanings – a Germanist – and he recoiled in horror. Still, the worst puns are often the best.
When the headmistress in Winifred Holtby’s novel, South Riding, declared, ‘I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin’, no doubt every reader caught on and, far from taking offence, smiled appreciatively.
A friend tells me of a double pun that pleased him. He was present at a wedding when for some reason the proceedings were held up, and he remarked brightly, ‘Ah, a technical hitch.’ The bridegroom taught at a technical college. It’s to be hoped that this pleasantry eased the embarrassment, and bride and groom got successfully hitched.
Permanent Secretary Tuzzi, in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, held that while one couldn’t quite manage without them in witty conversation, puns should never be too good, because that was middle-class.
Apparently unaware of a convoluted incident recorded in The Golden Legend, Christina Rossetti wondered that the association of fire with St Blaise had not been accounted for. A pun on his name had been suggested as the link, but at least ‘one author of repute’ had branded this as absurd. ‘Yet let us hope,’ she wrote, ‘that this particular pun if baseless is also blameless.’ Mind you, ‘puns and such like are a frivolous crew likely to misbehave unless kept within strict bounds’. St Paul came out strongly against ‘foolish talking and jesting, which are not convenient’ (unlike a straightforward ‘giving of thanks’). Thus the entry in Time Flies: A Reading Diary for 3 February 1885. All the same, in the entry for 13 March, Christina Rossetti said she felt ‘neither excited nor helped to observe Lent’ by being referred to the German root of the word. It was a false etymology – or a pun – that came to her aid, linking the word with ‘loan’: ‘that which is lent’ rather than ‘bestowed’, ‘forty chances to be used or abused’, and so forth.
Christina Rossetti had a more robust sense of humour than she is commonly credited (or discredited) with. On 13 February she declared that tact is a gift and ‘likewise a grace’. True, tact has a weak side: its love of conciliation and dislike of quarrelling may ‘incline it to overstep the boundary of truth’ or distort it. Yet the daily, practical value of tact can scarcely be exaggerated. This she illustrated with a far-fetched, hardly ‘daily’ tale of a certain man who was challenged to fight a duel, and consequently was entitled to choose the weapon. ‘Javelins,’ he announced. But whoever had heard of such a weapon in this connection? ‘Well, that is mine.’ And the duel never came off.
‘Pornography is a highly emotive word, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder’: thus the editor of Desire Direct, an introductions magazine on the Internet. Highly emotive indeed: prostitutes plus writing. It has been complained that the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 offers no definition of ‘deprave and corrupt’. True, some words are difficult to define at all effectively by means of other words. Thesauruses just don’t help. For example, Please define the following: ‘pervert’ and ‘degrade’, ‘debauch’ and ‘debase’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘deprave’. Every definition involves us in further definitions. This happens whenever common sense, the eye of the beholder, the ear of the listener, have been ousted.
Back in the early 1970s I wrote in an account of childhood and growing up that after the main entry in Latin and Greek (‘pulmonary neoplasm’), my father’s death certificate read ‘Contributory Cause of Death: Septic Teeth’. I may have glimpsed those words in 1934, before the certificate was hidden away, but how could I have remembered them? Probably made it all up, oh dear. Now my sister has unearthed the document, and reads it to me over the phone. I had got it absolutely right. There’s something rather reassuring about that. Also the reverse: these days I would have forgotten the wording of my own certificate forty-eight hours after it was made out.
This notebook (‘Feint’ and ‘Discontinued’) has a marbled cover; it looks dusty even if it isn’t; it probably is. Never before have I gone so long without writing anything. (Or being asked to write something.) Most depressing. Can always read, of course, but that may be mortifying. Some people don’t go long without writing a lot.
Or put it this way. The ageing scribbler feels glum. He tells himself: Your raison d’être has disappeared. But then, it occurs to him, his être is about to disappear. This cheers him up, briefly.
Latterly the terms senility and dementia have yielded to Alzheimer’s disease – though Alois Alzheimer first described the disease as far back as 1906. A more scientific term, one supposes, free of tendentious secular associations. But was it, with its vague approximate suggestions of old and home, old home, home for the old, just a little euphemistic or softened in its beginnings? Not any longer, now that it’s on everyone’s lips, even those normally shy of foreign names. In this field, euphemisms soon mutate. Our preoccupation with matters of health and ill health is narcissistic and debilitating. Without it – on television, hospitals compete with kitchens for first place – we might be healthier and we would be happier (for a while). Last things are best left until last, or last but one.
In age there is an insidious temptation to write about age, its discontents and its dark comedies. Old people don’t much care to hear about this, they know the discontents (and if they’re lucky they know the comedies), but are usually happy to share their experiences with other old people. As for the young, age is a foreign country, its denizens mumbling treasonably in a foreign tongue. ‘Growing old is, of course, a crime of which we grow more guilty every day’: Penelope Fitzgerald, in ‘The Axe’, 1975.