by D J Enright
I am reminded of a poignant comment by a Thai student of mine: ‘Poetry makes the world, the nature, have more technique colour than it really was.’
Two new books bear titles that the New Puritans won’t be alone in deprecating: Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes and Sleeping with Jane Austen. The former is poetry, less than Donnean, concerning the complexity of women’s undergarments in nineteenth-century America; the latter is a novel whose protagonist keeps one of Jane Austen’s books under his pillow to save it from being nicked.
In a poem about the London suburb in which I live, these lines occur: ‘If I told my neighbours, We must love one another or – ,/ I would die of shame. Or else they would kill me.’ Am tickled to find the implied quote in Robert Conquest’s list of resounding pronouncements which don’t sound so fine once you pause to think. ‘Among the century’s most quoted lines/ Are some that don’t send shivers up our spines.’ For instance:
Clearly the writer forgot
In the end we must all of us die if we love one another or not.
To do Auden justice, when he next went through it
He gave it a questioning look, and then he withdrew it.
Conquest’s other impostors are ‘April is the cruellest month’ (Eliot), ‘The Lord survives the rainbow of His will’ (Lowell), ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (Dylan Thomas), and ‘A terrible beauty is born’ (Yeats).
‘Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto’ (Terence): another of those noble declarations that bring a nice warm glow to the heart. But then – unless ‘human’ is to be set sharply apart from ‘inhuman’, in which case the claim has little meaning – it may strike us that there are quite a number of human things which are alien to quite a number of us. Including the killing of babies. Dear me, Blake!: ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ Today that would get you put away, not without reason.
‘So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing; at least we exist.’ Eliot’s manner here, in his essay on Baudelaire, is urbane and knowing, impellingly logical. It instils in us the agreeable feeling that we are perfectly at home in elevated circles. The matter, once you grasp it, is pretty dreadful, comforting in its creepy way (‘sooner murder an infant …’). Some assumption, some paradox!
The essay is dated 1930, when Eliot was forty-two years old, and at least no death camps were in unquestionable evidence. And after his account of the miserable state of affairs he sees around him, the world of electoral reform, sex reform and dress reform (a motley assemblage of ogres), no doubt the theoretical possibility of damnation came as some sort of relief, as ‘an immediate form of salvation from the ennui of modern life’. As a sixth former I chose the Selected Essays for a school prize, and was much taken with Eliot’s analogy between the cheery modern idea of ‘sexual operation’ and Kruschen Salts, a popular fizzy pick-me-up I was partial to.
Coat-trailing? Some coat, some trail! The passage is reminiscent of Rupert Brooke, finding peace a frightful bore and thanking God for furnishing a war and a timely opportunity to turn away, ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’, from ‘a world grown old and cold and weary’. Both Brooke’s rhetoric and Eliot’s are self-regarding: the fate of other people counts for little beside the condition of the speaker’s soul.
‘It is this, I believe, that Baudelaire is trying to express’: so Eliot is merely helping the Frenchman out? The most striking moment in Journaux Intimes, an English version of which Eliot was reviewing, runs thus: ‘True civilization doesn’t lie in gas, or in steam, or in table-turning. It lies in the diminution of the traces of original sin.’ The tendency of Baudelaire’s thought is clear, says Eliot, though ‘it is not quite clear exactly what diminution here implies’.
By the nature of original sin, its diminution must seem an impossible happening. And equally, we suppose, any diminution of its traces, its workings in our life. And we might suspect that Eliot wouldn’t consider the phenomenon especially desirable. Yet with God all things are possible. And the idea that true civilization would or could consist not in material inventions or spiritualist superstition or religiosity but in some reduction in the burden of sin, of innate depravity, we all carry and suffer from – that idea is at least a decent one. Baudelaire could be insufferable, but he wasn’t sanctimonious; there was no soul-snobbery about him.
(A puzzle here, maybe, for that mysterious academic discipline known as Practical Theology to work on.)
It has been said that the full rehabilitation of the Marquis de Sade began only after 1945, ‘with the discovery of the evil which humans are capable of organizing’. This, I take it, means that in comparison with the agents of the Holocaust the Marquis was indeed practically divine.
In a piece in the London Review of Books Richard Davenport-Hines mentions some of the tricks Sade got up to. In Paris in 1763 he was charged with blasphemy and sodomy after offering money to a fan-maker and requesting her to whip him while he masturbated with the aid of a crucifix. In 1768, during Easter as it happened, he subjected an indignant middle-aged working woman to an ordeal of flagellation. In 1772 he fell foul of a Marseille brothel-keeper and was accused of sodomy and of poisoning two prostitutes by administering candies soaked in Spanish fly. After eloping with his wife’s younger sister in 1777 and organizing a more than usually ambitious orgy at his château, he was arrested under a lettre de cachet issued by Louis XVI. ‘His calvary of thirteen years’ incarceration began.’
His what?
We perceive that the Holocaust as a yardstick of acceptability, serving to absolve or mitigate lesser evils, hasn’t let Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale or Father Damien off the hook, or even your mum and dad. In any case, they are insufficiently exciting to warrant or indeed afford a ‘full rehabilitation’. A book denouncing or exposing Florence Nightingale is to say the least publishable. Not so a book defending her.
A couple have had to move church because the Vicar of Cheadle would not tolerate the singing of ‘Jerusalem’ at their marriage ceremony. The objections to this hymn or song or poem (words by William Blake) were (a) it was nationalistic, invoking ‘England’ three times; (b) it failed to praise God: a reference to ‘the Countenance Divine’ cut no ice (the Marquis was divine); and (c) it had nothing to say about love or marriage: a mention of ‘arrows of desire’ was best left unexamined.
Further objections might include the Holy Lamb of God as seen on our pleasant pastures: atrociously bad taste at a time of foot-and-mouth; the misplaced sneer at heavy industry: ‘dark Satanic mills’; incitement to violence: ‘Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’; and above all the speaker’s crazy resolve to establish Jerusalem in some English green-belt area – as if we didn’t have trouble enough already, what with the IRA, asylum seekers, fulminating imams and multiculturalism.
But the Vicar recognizes the gravest objection: ‘What the words are actually saying is, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus lived in England?”’ Not in his backyard; it wouldn’t be nice at all: for one thing, a lot of clerics could lose their jobs.
Look! Is it Superman? Is it Batman? Is it Spiderman? No, it’s Jesusman!
How good the Church is at driving the faithful away.
Churchgoers are being urged to deposit cards carrying the image of a cross and the words ‘What would love do now?’ inside telephone boxes. The cards, described as ‘prostitute-style’ and ‘pimp-sized’, are produced by the Churches’ Advertising Network in preparation for the Christmas season. No phone number is offered, no vital statistics are revealed, no intimation is given of what love might do, and (thanks be to God) the campaign makes no mention of Jesus.
A clergyman, formerly an advertising executive, explains: ‘The problem with the way churches communicate has been this reliance on traditional imagery.’ Call-girl communications pasted in phone boxes are not traditional if only because phone boxes are not
quite traditional yet. (Of the status of call-girls one is not wholly sure.) As for Jesus, if you wish to spare your weak stomach, maybe you can take him out of Christianity, but watch your nomenclature: take Christ out and what you are left with sounds much like inanity.
(This news item appeared in the issue of The Times dated 12 September 2001 and mainly devoted to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of the previous day. Which made it look all the sillier – but at least agreeably unalarming in marking the limits of the Anglican Church’s daring, dedication and desperation.)
Again, that vocabulary of religion which one might have supposed lost to sight and hearing … President Bush’s talk of a ‘crusade against terrorism’ would provoke hardly a glimmer of recognition (let alone a twinge of unease) in the West, where ‘crusade’ is current only in the secondary sense, ‘a vigorous campaign in favour of a cause’, but has angered Muslim commentators, who have longer religious memories and detect in this ‘Freudian slip’ a desire in the West to resume those ancient wars against Islam.
The Bush Administration’s high-flown battle-cry, ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ made matters worse, since infinite justice is something only Allah can administer. (Odd that this consideration hadn’t occurred, mutatis mutandis, to Christians.) ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ was later downgraded, losing much of its divine flavour, to ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’.
As the poet wrote in one of his more pensive moods: ‘In life we barely choose our words even,/ Only those we hurt will still recall them.’
Poetry is generally the second or third casualty when war draws close.
We will not waver,
We will not tire,
We will not falter,
And we will not fail.
Peace and freedom will prevail.
– George W. Bush
As the last lights flicker out and the hubbub sinks into silence, a recorded mantra patters on unheard, mankind’s elegy or eulogy: ‘wwwdotearthdotorgdotends’.
‘The smell of a hospital,’ Wislawa Szymborska confesses, ‘makes me sick.’ ‘Language, the oldest but still the most reliable guide to a people’s true sentiments, starkly reveals the intimate connection between illness and indignity. In English, we use the same word to describe an expired passport, an indefensible argument, an illegitimate legal document, and a person disabled by disease. We call each of them invalid’: Thomas Szasz. And then, I suppose, there’s the demeaning word ‘patient’.
When Dr B. announced, more in anger than in sorrow, that the ‘carpet of tumours’ he had removed from my innocent bladder was directly caused by smoking, I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, and proposed a bargain: if he would go on excising whatever tumours might turn up, I would renounce smoking – after sixty-two years. That was in early June of 2001. And so, rather to my surprise, I did. There were bad moments, but I have not smoked since that day – except in dreams, when to my horror, I find myself puffing happily away while chatting with old friends, and cry out in an access of shame more overpowering than anything in waking life could engender in me. Awake, I have to convince myself that it was only a dream, for which I accept minimal responsibility.
Now Dr B. has transferred to another London hospital. Must I continue to honour the agreement? – which I’m not absolutely sure Dr B. was ever aware of, he being eager at the time to follow the consultant closely round the ward rather than hobnob with exigent patients. Does it matter whether I smoke or not, given my age, etc.? These are insidious considerations: get thee behind me! My friend Petra Lewis, a former smoker, reminds me that the first six months are the worst, and it would be perverse to capitulate now. A more vulgar, more powerful argument against back-sliding is that I’m saving money. Vulgar it may be, but the thought provokes a rare, rosy glow, makes me feel undilutedly virtuous.
Let us have medicos of our own maturity,
For callow practitioners incline to be casual
with a middle-aged party.
Doctors in their thirties are loath to labour
over sick men in their sixties.
Such are near their natural end: respect nature.
To save us suffering or them their pains,
physicians in their fifties
Are prepared to surrender us senior citizens.
Let our medical attendants be of compatible years,
Who will think of us as in certain respects their peers,
Who know what we possibly still have to live for,
Why we are not unfailingly poised to withdraw.
Yet for the giving of enemas or injections,
let there be youthful nurses
With steady hands, clear heads, and other attractions.
Whether physicians or patients, we all can appreciate
A pretty miss, or (it may be) her male associate.
Then permit us to be appreciative and appreciated
A little, in our final fruition, however belated.
What goes in had better come out, and fairly promptly. A jug measures your productivity, and a nurse keeps a strict account. If output falls, you’ll be kept in hospital for another day or two. Getting out of bed, jug in hand, I have a brief dizzy spell and spill a little of the precious fluid. The curtains drawn, I top up the calibrated jug from the water jug. It’s not really cheating. In any case, a bleeping scanner, shaped like a mole, will announce the persisting presence of so many millilitres of urine in the bladder. I promise the nurses, to whom the doctors defer on this point, the nurses being closer to the patient, that I’ll do better in the privacy of my own loo. Finally – ‘if your wife wants you back’ – they let me go home.
There’s a large poster in the ward detailing in vivid colours the various kinds of urological cancer – kidney, bladder, prostate, testicular – to which men are particularly or solely heir. One takes a quick glance at it on the way to the lavatories. Thank you – it’s enough to know about what one knows one has.
To check for testicular cancer one should feel for an untoward lump. Since many of us men are squeamish for some reason, it is suggested that one’s partner might (more pleasingly?) take on this little service. Enough to put one right off partners!
In St George’s again, for further probing and removing of tissue for biopsy. My neighbour is Eric, old, shrunken, lugubrious, bent double as if about to topple forward, but able to shuffle along at speed, his feet moving like pistons, even though he can’t possibly see where he is going. Last night he had a strenuous nightmare and fell out of bed, waking us all up. Nurses and patients alike tease him, just a little. He sees it as a compliment.
Eric has his moments, usually powered by simple indignations. A new, motherly nurse asks him, ‘Have you opened your bowels, Eric?’ He can’t understand the question, or pretends not to. ‘Wha’?’ She repeats, slowly, clearly: ‘Have you opened your bowels today?’ ‘Opened my bowels?’ he says incredulously. ‘I can’t bloody close them!’ We could have told her that.
‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’ Sonorous words, but not the whole story. The coward keeps on ‘dying’ – that is, not quite dying – and tasting the freshness of life regained, feeling a rush of affection for the everyday, or a touch of triumph at walking out of hospital under one’s own steam. And this many times perhaps. But for the valiant, afraid of nothing, not even once. Valour, a bit of a bore, even (dare one say) a wet blanket, must be its own reward.
‘A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers’: Richard Selzer.
Voluntary euthanasia had apparently been legalized, under certain strict conditions, and we were taking advantage of it – with what were surely sound and sufficient reasons.
We checked in, as arranged, at an establishment recognized for the purpose and managed by a middle-aged lady of dignified and slightly severe mien. The chamber into which she led us was spacious and elegant, aside from the double fu
ton on the floor, rumpled as if the previous occupants had left in a hurry. It would have been petty, or unwise, to complain. The lady manageress declined to discuss the mode of operation; it was a subject her well-bred clients never broached. Most likely it involved a deadly gas. Just for a moment I felt sick with dread. But there was no going back, no thought of it. We were presented with a tasteless meal, and grew drowsy – the gas beginning to work? – and soon drifted off, hand in hand as the prospectus had suggested.
Before long we were both awake again. A cylindrical gauge on the wall at my back, I noticed, registered a bright red, indicating maximum intensity; the corresponding gauge behind my wife showed nothing. The manageress failed to hide her chagrin. It seemed we would have to be taken to the local post office, a mile or two away, where the facilities, if less comfortable (‘no frills’), were more reliable, the deadly gas presumably deadlier. We were loaded into the back of a small van, but on arrival found the post office closed: not surprisingly, it being by now the middle of the night. So back we went to the original establishment, where we were grudgingly given another meal. (I began to worry about the state of my bowels: the idea was to achieve a reasonably dignified exit.)
At some point my wife left the room, and returned in daytime garb. I remained in my pyjamas. The manageress’s mood had changed to petulance: somehow the unprecedented fiasco was down to us, specifically to me …
There being nowhere further for it to go, the dream stopped. I woke up – it was a little after 2 a.m. – asking myself why there should have been such a discrepancy between the reading on my gauge and that on my wife’s (I was tempted to rouse her), wondering bemusedly whether we would get a rebate from the establishment, telling myself there could be no interrogating dreams, and it was, was it not, no more than a dream. At the same time dead tired and wide awake, I had difficulty in getting to sleep again.