by D J Enright
A paper in the north of England ran an advertisement on its ‘Lonely Hearts’ page which read: ‘Professional man, 45, head on a stick, seeks similar woman.’ When readers asked what freakish practice or rare condition was encoded in ‘head on a stick’, it emerged that a secretary in the office had taken the message over the phone, and what the man had intended was ‘hedonistic’.
Publishers’ statements grow increasingly long, detailed, and hard to decipher. However, it appears that during the past twelve months my books have earned not a penny. Balances are negative, largely owing to minus sales. (You mean you can sell fewer copies than none? Yes, when ‘returns’ trickle in. A friend sending a birthday card jokes uneasily about wishing me many happy returns.) They say that writing is like putting one’s soul up for sale. That would explain things.
Ten per cent of what? I’ve been thinking of calling my agent and suggesting she drops me from her list of clients. We’ve been together for around fifty years. She’s kind-hearted, and no doubt would reply with something bracing – about things picking up, let’s not be hasty, wasn’t I working on some sort of journal … Being averse to melodramatics, I hadn’t got round to it.
Until last night, that is. I stammered out my sad, noble piece, and silence ensued. Not a word of protestation or dissent. The silence grew so painful that I offered stumblingly to stand her lunch one day soon at an Indian restaurant in town, when we could discuss the matter. Still no response. I awoke, feeling foolish. Dreams can be most disobliging.
A week later, to test the dream, I invited my agent to lunch. She accepted. (One up on the dream.) We met at an Indian restaurant, spacious and broad-minded. Should a tear fall, it could be put down to the curry. Fortified by a poppadom and a pint of Kingfisher lager, I said my say, proposing to withdraw on the grounds of earning her no more than – well, a rare curry lunch.
Good heavens, no! Never mind the money, think of the prestige … How flattering. How humiliating. But what a pleasant occasion. It even turned out that a couple of anthology fees had just been paid into my account.
The chief, recurrent difference between William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1534 and that of the forty-seven scholars responsible for the Authorized Version of 1611 lies in the former’s ‘similitude’ and the latter’s ‘parable’.
‘All these things spake Jesus unto the people by similitudes, and without similitudes spake he nothing to them.’ (Tyndale)
‘All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; without a parable spake he not unto them.’ (AV)
A comparison between the two versions makes the Enrights’ tinkering with the Moncrieff-Mayor-Kilmartin translation of Proust’s novel look like a major overhaul.
‘And he spake many things unto them’ – in similitudes or parables. Tyndale is a shade more direct on the cryptic incident of the unfortunate fig tree in Matthew, employing the active voice rather than the Authorized Version’s passive, ‘this which is done’: ‘If ye shall have faith and shall not doubt, ye shall not only do that which I have done to the fig tree’ – namely caused it to droop and die – ‘but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, take thyself away, and cast thyself into the sea, it shall be done.’
Jesus followed this with a conditional assurance: ‘And whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer (if ye believe) ye shall receive it.’ Faith can move mountains: it was as well that the disciples didn’t take the promise literally and try it out. Perhaps Jesus’s spoken parenthesis held their hand. (Brackets can emphasize as well as marginalize.) Or possibly the saying about faith and mountains was already a figure of speech.
*
Suddenly, and over a period of several days, my dictionaries let me down. Not that I was striving to write anything profound or difficult. On the contrary, it was something simple. This sounds twee, but there was nothing affected about my bewilderment and alarm over so protracted a lexical collapse. Had my spelling melted away, or my sense of alphabetical order evaporated?
I only wanted to be clear. ‘My love of clarity,’ Brecht wrote in his Journals, ‘comes from the unclear way I think.’
My horoscope announces: ‘As Mercury, planet of communication, links with both the Sun and Mars this week, you won’t find it hard to get your message across. Your words will be short and to the point and anyone who doesn’t get it must be very dumb.’ So far, so good. ‘But don’t waste time on those of limited intelligence – you should be using this period to learn more about a subject that intrigues you and one day could earn you money.’ One day: that’s spoilt it.
Was tiring of Clarice Lispector’s garrulous newspaper pieces, until coming on a postscript asking the kind person who translated her columns into Braille to omit one describing a visit to the Botanical Gardens, since she had ‘no desire to offend eyes which cannot see’.
It is said of young Henrietta (eleven years of age) in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris that her character ‘was a mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice’. This had come about because Henrietta was anxious to be someone, and never failed to be greatly impressed when anyone uttered a prejudice in her hearing. She ‘had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be a someone without disliking things.’
How demeaning, that you can only be a somebody by virtue (virtue?) of disliking things, a lot of things. To achieve identity on the strength of liking things (not everything of course) – wouldn’t that be more pleasing, and result in a nicer identity? ‘I like Shakespeare’ (or Mozart). So does practically everybody. ‘Very well, I like Fauré’ (or Cavafy). A little better, but on the precious side, don’t you think? And what about Wagner? Try again. ‘I like smoking a pipe, I like gin and tonic, I like reading, I like cats, I like some people …’ You don’t say! What a wishy-washy nobody you must be.
June 2002: a letter from the British Council concerning that body’s publications carries a postscript: ‘You have a right to ask for a copy of the information we hold on you, for which we will charge a fee.’ Does this mean an identity may cost you money? Not only can identities be bought and sold; it appears they can be stolen, too. We have this on the best authority, that of the Home Secretary: ‘Each year, thousands of people have their identities stolen by criminals, often without their knowing about it.’ (It turns out that Mr Blunkett was talking about credit card fraud.)
It appears we are better at disliking than at liking. When at last we get what we wanted, we don’t want it. In Between Security and Insecurity (1999), the Czech writer Ivan Klima refers to a speech he made at the Writers’ Congress in 1967, regarding the evils of censorship and calling for its abolition. ‘That was the main reason why I was not allowed to publish in my country for twenty years.’ Others spoke out similarly and suffered similarly, or worse.
Now that the totalitarian state has crumbled, and writers and publishers enjoy freedom of expression and distribution, Klíma is appalled by what he sees around him: degrading commercial trash, violence and brutality on the television screen and in print, pornographic magazines aimed at the young. At least such material wasn’t available when his children were growing up: ‘For the first time ever it occurred to me that the Communist censor may have caused me plenty of worries in my life, but here was one that it spared me.’ He has come to the conclusion, embarrassing in a minor degree perhaps, that the goals prized by Western civilization often bring neither satisfaction nor happiness, and ‘on the contrary, in difficult situations one discovers values neglected by modern affluent societies, such as solidarity, self-sacrifice, friendship and love’.
One thinks of a traditional picture of hell, with its exquisite arrangement whereby the damned, immersed in fiery furnaces, cry out for coolness, and are then delivered into lakes of ice, where they beg for warmth. ‘How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?’ ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’
On a lighter note. When young, Montaigne coveted the Order of St Michael, at that time the highest mark of honour among the French nobility, and very rarely a
warded. Eventually Fortune granted it to him. But ‘instead of raising me up so that I could reach it, she treated me even more graciously: she debased the Order, bringing it down to my shoulders, and lower still.’
We have never been very good at envisaging heaven. The Pope has recently been reduced to describing it tout court as an after-death state of being characterized by close communion with God. Given the paucity of rewards both adequate and imaginable, it is no surprise to come across an old and mean-spirited theory that the blissful souls in heaven enhanced their bliss through contemplating the miseries of those condemned in the other place.
Even without the contributions of ingeniously sadistic theologians, hell has furies enough. In a short poem of his, Marin Sorescu suggests that the worst torment of all is that the inhabitants of hell are forced to endure their pains with complete calm – they cannot avoid hearing how in paradise the just are growing fat; they are deprived of that last impeccable human right: weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die.
*
While poets have succeeded better in depicting hell than in portraying heaven (‘at least humanity is there, and the torments of the guilty remind us of the miseries of our life’: a consideration the Romanian poet cited above would have had in mind), Chateaubriand claimed that purgatory offered literary people richer opportunities. For its inhabitants there was – uniquely – a future still undecided and in prospect, while the gradation of feelings and ‘the confused sentiments of happiness and of misfortune’ coming together ‘could furnish the pen with touching subjects’. Purgatory sounds not unlike a remand centre.
The Abbé Mugnier, a witty, fashionable priest and acquaintance of Proust, apparently scandalized a lady by some careless remark. She exclaimed indignantly, ‘In that case, M. l’Abbé, there would be no hell!’ To which the Abbé replied reassuringly, ‘Oh yes, Madame, there is a hell. Only there is nobody in it.’ The thought – perhaps reinforced by the sight of buildings standing empty and derelict in our cities — has been repeated by a Swiss theologian said to be close to the Pope: the place exists, but a God merciful by definition couldn’t sentence a soul to squat eternally in it.
We all have our professional notion of hell. There is a tale of a writer who died and was allowed to choose between going to heaven or to hell. Cannily, she asked St Peter if she might tour both regions before deciding. Led down into hell, she saw row after row of writers chained to desks, sweat running down their torsos, while demons lashed them with barbed whips. ‘Dear me, let’s go and look at the other place!’ Ascending into heaven, she met with the sight of row after row of writers chained to desks, running with sweat, and lashed by demons wielding barbed whips. ‘But this is just as dreadful as hell!’ ‘Oh no it isn’t,’ said St Peter. ‘Here, your work gets published.’
April 2000, The Oldie has a cartoon of more general import. In hell, a senior devil brings a novice up to date: ‘We don’t call them “the damned” any more – we call them customers.’
*
Relativities. A charitable appeal bears the word ‘TORTURE!’ stamped askew on the cover. We know what that forebodes. We have read the reports and looked at the pictures before. Still, we open it. It comes from an organization set up to help sufferers from tinnitus.
Having complained of frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, idle and extravagant stories in verse, and the degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation (a feast for any Minister of Culture!), Wordsworth concluded with a muted but indispensable flourish of trumpets: ‘Reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind …’
In The Uses of Literacy (1957), dealing with ‘changes in working-class culture during the last thirty or forty years … with special reference to publications and entertainment’, Richard Hoggart quoted this last passage – an old consolation that many of my generation invoked scores of times in private thought. Largely Hoggart had in mind the people he grew up among. That’s ancient history. How much longer can this faith, this ‘comfort serves in a whirlwind’, survive in our technologically speeded-up age?
If it can truly be said to survive. For an account of electronic entertainment and computer role-playing games, see John Sutherland in the London Review of Books, 29 July 1999 (or, if you have the courage, read the book he is reviewing). It appears that virtual reality (VR), where a little imagination goes a long way, promises to overtake and stifle real life (RL), where a lot of imagination goes a little way.
The changes between Hoggart’s time and the present have been far greater than those between Wordsworth’s time and Hoggart’s. Wordsworth talked of ‘outrageous stimulation’; more temperately, understandably loath to sound portentous, Hoggart spoke of ‘invitations to a candy-floss world’. These days, nothing but mumbled demurrals.
‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ By and large, the media have been busy correcting this hasty judgement.
An Oldie cartoon. Elderly wife scolds elderly husband: ‘I would never have agreed to getting this computer if I’d known you were going to spend morning, noon and night on it! What on earth are you doing, that’s so important?’ Husband: ‘Trying to turn it on.’
Our grandchildren were at home with computers before they could tie their shoelaces. Yet they go on reading books, quite naturally, carrying them with them wherever they go. Ah, the pessimist will say, they can’t carry computers with them – yet. But I have no desire to display any honourable or dishonourable melancholy, or even feel it. A measure of anxiety is another matter, also quite natural.
Literal translation of answer in French baccalaureate examination: ‘Jacques Prévert wrote Paroles because he was going out at night and had things to say.’
It is well known or at least believed
That belief is our very backbone
A human property or privilege or right or duty
I have believed my share or more in my time
I have believed this and that
And have not believed (which is also belief)
That and this
But now I have somehow spurned the privilege
Relinquished the right and shirked the duty
Perhaps there is simply too much belief in the world
Though I strive to remain polite on the point
For it is a comfort no doubt to believe or (a form of belief)
Not to.
A thing had better be this or that
To me it is this and that and other things besides
I shall lose my citizenship, my passport will refuse
To recognize me
The baker does not deign to sell me a loaf
Unless I avouch my faith in the staff of life
The vintner insists I should trust in vintages
The newsagent withholds the daily paper
Till I promise faithfully to read the headlines
With intent to believe
But who or whom have I the honour of addressing
I don’t believe I know you
(‘Beyond belief, believed to be after J. Prévert)
Writing about his early years in A Double Thread, and about wanting the best of both worlds, John Gross observes that the word ‘ambiguity’ took on blessedness: ‘the fact that so many things contained their opposite was on the whole a comfort’. In one’s later years too, and maybe more so. Sweet things are bad for you, sugar is good for you. Pain is a sign that something’s wrong, feeling pain shows you are still alive. Staying indoors saves money but enfeebles you, going out is invigorating but you may be mugged. Smoking damages health, but you don’t have much health to damage. Ambiguity keeps your mind open and your mouth shut. Which is – ambiguous, but on the whole not unhelpful. ‘Without contraries is no progression.’
Musical be
ds. The soap operas don’t go in for ambiguities, or for marriage (there just isn’t time for it). As it is, practically every character of one sex has slept with every character of the other. Grant Mitchell, of EastEnders, was called on to bed both his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law. What to do? Introduce new characters, or – memories are short – start all over again from scratch. VR or RL?
Herodotus was much impressed by the marriage mart, a custom followed by the Babylonians. At a public gathering, rich men in need of wives bid for the prettiest girls, the auctioneer beginning with the best-looking and continuing down the scale. Then came the turn of the plainest girls: the auctioneer asked who would take each of them along with the smallest sum of money. The money came from the sale of the beauties, who in this way ‘provided dowries for their ugly or misshapen sisters’.
Unfortunately this ‘admirable practice’ had fallen into disuse at the time of writing, and the Babylonians resorted to another scheme: the prostitution of all girls of the poverty-stricken lower classes.
Hardly less ingenious than their marriage mart, Herodotus considered, was the Babylonians’ method of coping with health problems. And of greater interest to us, given the finances of the NHS and the reduction of worn-out GPs to split-second diagnosis and routine prescription. The Babylonians had no doctors, and simply stationed their sick in the streets, where those coming along would stop, discuss whatever ailment it was, and suggest measures which they, their relatives or friends, had found beneficial. Nobody was allowed to sidle past in silence; all had to stop and carry out their civic duty. A democratic, community medicine, free from the delays and expense of bureaucracy.