by D J Enright
Macabéa, the poor, ignorant, innocent, ugly girl whom no one cares about, in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star: ‘I shall miss myself so much when I die.’ Utterly unexpected, and so lucidly articulated for someone who could never find the right word.
Pascal talks about religion. Strange, then, that he should be so highly regarded by the laity and thought to be so astonishingly modern. But in many of his Pensées he does appear to be talking interestingly about quite other (and more ‘relevant’) things than religion. Why, some of his reflections might be addressed to critics and reviewers. ‘One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but still talk like an ordinary person.’ ‘Two errors: (1) to take everything literally, (2) to take everything spiritually.’ ‘Nothing written simply for the author’s benefit is any good.’ ‘When we read too quickly or too slowly we do not understand anything.’ ‘Continual eloquence is tedious.’ ‘If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him.’ ‘Nothing shows more plainly the absurdity of a bad sonnet than to consider its nature and its model, and then to imagine a woman or a house conforming to that model.’ ‘No one is allowed to write well any more.’
Having read Pascal in some such spirit, one may be inspired to go back and reread him more attentively, as a writer on religious matters. A certain bathos is apt to ensue. ‘I am one of those whom Pascal bowls over and doesn’t convert,’ said Albert Camus. To read him as seriously concerned with anything other than religion would have amazed Pascal (what could it be, this other to be seriously concerned with?) more than offended or distressed him. It should suffice that he had spoken sharply against those who misused Scripture by making the most of any passage which might dimly seem to support their erroneous views (or trivial concerns).
A nice title: ‘Literary Remains in my Lifetime’. It’s Musil’s, no less, but for once I don’t feel irresistibly disposed to steal it.
Epitaph: He trailed his coat, but nobody trod on it. (These days people are careful what they tread on.) Someone in the TLS ticks me off: ‘… is often facetious, which does not help in the difficult business of getting the English to like Goethe’. Was that what I was attempting? Serves me right, then.
A rise in the number of brutish-looking cars in the vicinity, with pet names like ‘Fatboy’, ‘Raider’, ‘Shogun’ and ‘Trooper’. The new aesthetic: ugliness as an end in itself. A minor manifestation of ‘Evil be thou my good.’
As also seen in TV commercials, increasingly ugly, coarse in a schoolboy fashion, postmodernly inconsequent or enigmatic. (Can it really pay off, leaving the viewer to work out what is being promoted?)
Schoolboy coarseness – I can’t recall very much of it. Perhaps we were more easily embarrassed. The outstanding exception – though coarse isn’t the word – was a boy at my elementary school, a combination of unwashed village idiot and serial rapist in the offing, given to gleeful flashing, not only in the playground where it might have passed (‘there aren’t any buttons on his pants’), but in the streets around. One day they (‘They’) took him away, and we didn’t see him again.
A tribute to its inexorable power, we might suppose, that even those lost souls who knew nothing else, barely their own names, knew about sex and its mechanics – more than most of us reckoned compos mentis did at that age. Ignorance on this score was largely what compos mentis implied.
The curious sense, after crossing a not particularly busy road, even an empty road, that one has been hit by a car and killed, and the mind, a creature of habit, assumes in its last working moments that one has got safely to the opposite side and is going about one’s intended business. The mark of a peculiarly glum nature, or of grotesque self-regard? I thought of this phenomenon, recurrent as it used to be, when reading a verse by Fergus Allen:
No time is allowed for practice or rehearsal,
There are no retakes and there isn’t a prompter.
There’s only moving water, dimpled by turbulence –
And no clambering out on to the bank
To think things over, as there is no bank.
Any small discrepancies – moving water and turbulent dimples – are accounted for in the poem’s title: ‘To be Read Before Being Born’.
That look of grim determination, followed by bemusement, on the face of an old friend in the early stages of Alzheimer’s: I’m going to get there if it kills me … but where is the there I’m going to get to?
To have gone through a lifetime believing that money wasn’t everything – and then finding it is. A bit much.
Their bull gendereth, and faileth not, their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf … Like so many before him, Martin Amis claims that ‘in the long term, literature will resist levelling and revert to hierarchy’. What matters is not what the ring of cattle dealers make out, but ‘the decision of Judge Time’, who constantly separates the sheep from the goats. (My mixed metaphor, not Martin Amis’s.) We must do our best to forget what ‘in the long term’ can signify, or the voice of the less refined among us will be heard: ‘I want it now.’
The magic word ‘psychology’! (With its spellbinding associates, psychoanalysis, psychotic, psychopath, psychedelic, psychosexual … ) A reviewer, himself famous in a similar line of fiction, commends Thomas Harris’s Hannibal for its revelations concerning the psychology of the – er – hero, Dr (Cannibal) Lecter. He also refers to the ‘high aesthetics’ of the book’s horrors – but who can be sure what the word ‘aesthetics’, high or low, is meant to mean here? With ‘psychology’, on the other hand, there’s no cause for alarm.
A couple of days later Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, tells us we shouldn’t be too downcast about the current decline in the popularity of marriage. We must remember that in the putative ‘golden age’ the death rate was much higher than nowadays, and marriages often didn’t last long enough for the question of divorce to arise. (From that day forward till, quite soon, death did them part. An audacious act of spin-doctoring on Mr Straw’s part.) So, as he says, no cause for alarm. The Government doesn’t want us alarmed, doesn’t want us to brood on the past. If we are encouraged to look back, it is only to make us look forward more keenly.
It is a mark of a caring society that the most outlandish practices are rendered safe. (Which can relieve pressure on the NHS.) Miss Cane, Miss Birch and the rest of the sorority, those therapeutic disciplinarians, are being urged to disinfect their whips after use. I doubt the thought crossed Nietzsche’s mind as he drew up his advice: when you go among women don’t forget to take your whip with you.
An actress whose husband has gone off with another actress, we hear, is suffering trauma. When was it – fairly recently – that the word ‘trauma’ suddenly soared into prominence, suavely invading our basic vocabulary? (In 1894 William James used the expression ‘psychic traumata’, between inverted commas, glossing it as ‘thorns in the spirit, so to speak’. In 1984 the Daily Telegraph spoke of manufacturing industry as recovering only feebly ‘from the traumatic experiences of the last five years’. Now, together with that ever-ready prefix, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has been validated at the highest medical levels.
For some while, with the German ‘Traum’ in mind, I had idly supposed that ‘trauma’ had to do with dreams or nightmares. (Our word ‘dream’, by the way, is reported to come from Old English, ‘joy, music’.) Straightforwardly enough, the dictionary defines ‘trauma’ as ‘pathol. physical wound, physical shock following this; psychol. emotional shock following a stressful event, sometimes leading to long-term neurosis’.
In my childhood we knew nothing of pathology, neurosis or (apart from vague report) stress, and there was no psychology around. Our vocabulary, befitting circumstances and expectations, was limited. But – cometh the hour, cometh the word. Or contrariwise.
A delightful letter from Josefina, a Spanish Ph.D. student working on Lisa St Aubin de Terán: ‘a hectic project of my mind’. She writes: ‘Psychology seems to be a required element to cla
rify the hidden motives in the lives and relationships of those female characters embedded in a malestream of traditional culture.’ (A rather splendid pun, ‘malestream’/‘maelstrom’, though I wonder about ‘embedded’.) Since, or so she has heard, I am ‘one of the poets who best ally the magic of social commitment to the charm and inspiration of aesthetics’ (cor!), she asks me to help her. I only wish I could. It would be nice to participate in the hectic project of someone’s mind.
‘This world cannot explain its own difficulties, without the assistance of another.’ I can’t recall the context of this resonant saying by the Revd Charles Caleb Cotton. Since it occurs in a compilation of 1820 entitled Lacon, it may well have no context, the Laconians (or Spartans) being famed for the terseness of their utterances. The suggestion appears to be that, if no other world is found to exist, we are inevitably beset by difficulties in explaining our difficulties – in any number of areas, if I may extrapolate, ranging across the good, the bad, the better, the worse, the best, the worst. Which in turn, considering our proficiency in explanation, suggests that there must be another world of sorts somewhere or other.
Have just undergone novation. Sounds like cosmetic surgery or a new, demanding medical test. But no, my contracts for books of poems have been novated; a term quite possibly minted for this very occasion by a handy classicist with the word ‘renovate’ at the back of his mind: that is, with empty ceremony and self-satisfaction on the part of Oxford University Press, my books have been transferred from OUP to Carcanet Press. After sitting in one warehouse awaiting death, they will now be sitting in another and no doubt more hospitable one awaiting life.
In publishing during the 1970s, ‘pipe-smoking fuddy-duddies’ (the picturesque opprobrium of a whizz-woman waiting in the wings) at least did a spot of editing on authors’ copy. Not, however on Iris Murdoch’s novels. When I remarked on the absence of accents from scattered snippets of French, Norah Smallwood, our leader at Chatto & Windus and Iris’s high priestess, would tell me not to intervene: this was sacred writ, all was meant. But perhaps the lady who typed the novels from Iris’s longhand simply didn’t have accents on her machine? Maybe, but ‘Leave it as it is. If there are any mistakes we can blame them on the printers.’ All the same, driven by some pig-headed, pipe-smoking vestigial sense of right and wrong, I quietly supplied missing accents and corrected any unmistakable mistakes. If I had transgressed, I could always blame it on the printers.
Jeremy Lewis indulges in hyperbole: so the severer type of critic might complain. The portraits in his memoir Kindred Spirits are surely exaggerated – heightened, let’s say – as in the most effective caricatures, where embellishment or amplification (in Lewis’s case, as good-natured as the facts allow, or more so) brings out plain truths.
‘… far too sceptical, far too aware of the long-term, and far too committed to the highest standards, to have made a publisher, as opposed to a cautious and meticulous editor; left to his own devices he would have published, perhaps, two or three books a year, which might have made sense sub specie aeternitatis – if erring on the side of excess – but would never have paid the bills’.
Essentially true, alas. (More undeniably so than the nicer – do I mean even nicer? – things he says about me.) Then how come I ever entered publishing? Chiefly because I had happy memories of ten years of teaching in Singapore and of the friendly, virtually confederate relations between students and staff, and wasn’t much taken with what I found in British institutions of higher learning. Immediately on returning in 1970 I did a couple of days a week tutoring first-year students in Leeds. It must have been on my first day there that one of them burst into my room, asking excitedly: ‘Do you have any dirt on the VC?’ I wasn’t sure who the Vice-Chancellor was. (It was the widely admired Lord Boyle.) This wasn’t my sort of war. Surely publishing would at least serve to keep sweet my memories of teaching literature, and see me through another ten years. Somehow ‘Do you have any dirt on the MD?’ didn’t sound half so horrid.
Some reviewers observed that, besides being very funny, Kindred Spirits had historical value. It ‘also says everything which needs saying about what has happened in publishing, and why’ (Diana Athill, in Stet, which likewise says a good deal, in tones more plangent, on the same subject). Inadvertently its author was writing sub specie aeternitatis. (Thanks for the Latin ornament. Lewis’s prose makes one’s own look austere to the point of parsimony.)
‘Everything was personalized and heightened: like a possessive, passionate parent, she bridled at any outside criticism of those within the fold and fought to defend her flock, but felt at liberty to cuff us about the head as briskly as she liked … One of Norah’s most effective techniques was to invoke the great names of the past, accompanied by a mournful shaking of the head and appropriate tut-tutting noises. Seeing herself as the guardian of a sacred flame, “Whatever would Leonard [Woolf] think of that?” or “Cecil [Day Lewis] must be turning in his grave,” she would intone.’
There is nothing over the top about Jeremy Lewis’s portrayal of Norah Smallwood. In fact, for all its vividness, it is decidedly temperate. A technique he doesn’t touch on was Norah’s propensity to enlist Freud, one of our old authors, in the course of rebuke or disagreement. This was especially saddening in view of her intelligence and knowledgeability in other respects – reasons why staff who could afford to move out still stayed put. When I indiscreetly betrayed a fondness for my mother, she wagged a finger at me: ‘Ha, ha, Oedipus!’ And when I voiced my abhorrence of an American novel about a hyperactive necrophile given to killing courting couples and detaching the female and conveying her to his harem in a conveniently cool cave, she professed surprise that so kind and understanding a person as myself (i.e. a known softie) should fail to feel for a poor unfortunate who had no other way of communicating with people. She could only suppose (a twinkle in her eye) that deep down I harboured similar but suppressed desires. What those desires were I doubt Norah fully realized: just something a bit peculiar and rather vulgar. She was, in a Bloomsbury manner, broad-minded and also innocent.
(I rejected the book on the same day as a colleague visiting New York took it on for us. His opinion prevailed. The author, whose first novel it was, is now famous.)
Woman as Managing Director: ‘She is wedded to convictions – in default of grosser ties;/ Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies’ (Kipling).
A curiosity touched on earlier … ‘Lloyd finished the last chapter of his library book, and closed it with relief, wishing that it was in his power to abandon books halfway through.’ However bad they were, ‘he was obliged by some natural law to finish them’.
This confession comes in a book borrowed from my local lending library, Redemption, by Jill McGown. What accounts for the phenomenon? Slavish obedience to some childhood maxim? – Always finish what you’ve begun, Waste not, want not, If at first you don’t succeed … A stubborn little feeling that the book should be given a second (third, fourth) chance? Nothing so rational can explain this perverse insistence on throwing good money (time is money) after bad. Something so unnatural must indeed be the outcome of a natural law. It casts light on that queer proverb, ‘Beware beginnings’.
A proud boast. ‘I don’t need other people telling me what I should or shouldn’t watch or read.’ The Video Appeals Committee, consisting of intellectuals, has lifted the ban imposed by the British Board of Film Classification on seven pornographic videos, among them Office Tart and Nympho Nurse Nanny, thus allowing them to be sold in sex shops. The Committee appears to have adopted Tennyson’s anguished cry as its slogan: ‘Oh yet we trust that somehow good/ Will be the final goal of ill.’
Eyes holding up pretty well (or is it one nail driving out another?). Unfortunately I can read the headlines. ‘Dying woman, 71, raped in hospital’.
‘Tall and slim, gay male, 31, with brown hair, green eyes would like to meet a genuine fun guy, 18-35, to spend quiet nights in and crazy nights out with. Call me o
n Voice Box Number …’ The two-page spread of dating ads in the local freesheet makes me think of an item in the Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, 31 March 1900, as translated by Edward Timms in his book on Karl Kraus:
Travelling companion sought
young, congenial, Christian, independent.
Replies to ‘Invert 69’ poste restante Habsburgergasse.
In those days you had to use your brains.
As one would expect, personal ads in the London Review of Books are culturally up-market – art galleries, theatres, bookshops and concerts of classical music feature prominently among the delights offered or looked for – and might well be written by would-be contributors with a measure of savoir faire and creative talent but insufficient earnestness or stamina to qualify for the other pages.
‘Charming, pretty, intelligent, professional woman (forties) seeks unattached male for London cultural outings.’ ‘Gay Oxbridge bookaphile, 25, available to be taken away by rich uncle to Alfred Brendel’s concert …’ ‘Clytemnestra seeks Agamemnon (40–45) with resolution to rewrite history.’ ‘Over-intellectual and bookish, passionate, pretty poet (male, 24) seeks over-intellectual, bookish, passionate older woman. Or anyone incredible.’ ‘30 cigarettes a day and counting: 64-year-old male on the slow train to self-destruction and loving it would like to meet blonde, Danish woman, early twenties. That said, intelligent woman to 65 could still raise a laugh.’ ‘Happen to be gay? 34-year-old man in the book business, reasonably solvent, happy. Smokes, drinks and reads, all to excess. Now looking for an independent man with ready brain, ready laugh and tangential take on life.’
Reaction was bound to set in. ‘I’m just a woman looking for love. Leave all this wordy wit …’ ‘Intimidated by George Eliot? With only half her intellect I’m still creative and wise, and much prettier.’ ‘Arty-farty, pretentious connoisseurs, intellectual wimps need not reply …’ ‘I used to be an idealist, now I’m just idle.’ ‘Bald art dealers are more sexy! London slaphead, 56, hates art (flogs imbecilic daubs to moneyed dolts), books (thinks Gutenberg invented a wine press), would like to meet semi-educated floozy half his age who delights in gin.’ A resident of Bicester, a believer in experience rather than night classes, offers practical advice on the laws of survival: ‘Don’t smoke in bed, don’t sleep in ashtrays.’