Injury Time

by D J Enright

  ‘A dream, the other night, that the world had become dissatisfied with the inaccurate manner in which facts are reported, and had employed me, with a salary of a thousand dollars, to report things of public importance exactly as they happen.’ A rather fine, civically responsible dream, which Nathaniel Hawthorne must have found gratifying, but others are likely to consider less than thrilling.

  It’s no wonder that people flinch away when you set out to tell them your dreams. All those powerful emotions lacking (to use Eliot’s coinage) any ‘objective correlative’, without a factual context, situation or chain of events which would account for, bring alive, and define those emotions – and thus enable the teller to convey them authentically to the listener.

  Hence the temptation, when relating a dream, to point up, embellish, elaborate ‘interestingly’: adding to compensate for what, inevitably it seems, is lost in the telling. But in my dream, as soberly described above, the one and only intense emotion, the access of sick dread, short-lived yet piercing, is amply justified. It has its objective correlative: a planned and imminent suicide.

  Given that feeling of fear and dread, no matter how fleeting, reason would suggest that the suicide, explicitly voluntary, should be abandoned. But then, as we have all seen, dreaming has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. There are things in dreams that the dreamer recognizes as unquestionable, irrevocable; there is no quarrelling with them. In the present case the assumption is that euthanasia has been legalized; and, like it or not, or having no feelings either way, there is, in the dreamer’s mind, ‘no going back’.

  The disordered futon is noted in passing, and similarly the falling asleep hand in hand; the latter touch is represented as officially recommended, thus fending off any hint of what the literary critic might consider ‘hideous sentimentality’.

  The dash to the post office, through the dark night in the back of a darkened van, and the ignominious return – comical in retrospect – have been played down, if anything, in my account. These events too were undergone patiently, without surprise, consternation or resentment. To the best of my knowledge, only the figure of the ‘manageress’ has been tampered with: made a slightly larger, more intimidating presence than she actually was. Perhaps I have it in for her because she appeared to have it in for me? Or so I think – and think less certainly as the days go by and the dream settles and sets into its written record, as though it were no dream but a minor piece of recent history.

  Schopenhauer has claimed that when in some ghastly dream, we reach the moment of maximum horror, it awakes us, thereby banishing all the monstrous shapes born of the night. The moment of plainest comedy or ludicrousness can have the same effect.

  In a later dream my son-in-law, Toby Buchan, persuaded me to join him in a rugger match. I was aware that playing rugger in one’s eighties was unusual, but I felt perfectly fit. The only difficulty was getting hold of suitable footwear. The weather was ideal, the game went well. The ball came into my hands, I pretended to punt it over the heads of advancing adversaries, then dashed forward, feinted again, making more progress, and passed the ball expertly to one of our side. Afterwards I tried to find out who had won. Otherwise accommodating as well as salubrious, the dream was disinclined to say. What mattered was the game, not who won, who lost.

  ‘I am worn out with dreams’: W. B. Yeats. A ridiculous idea! As for sex – you must be dreaming!

  ‘It’s only a game!’ Of games and gamesters … Musil’s Ulrich, the brilliant so-called man without qualities, having been put in his place by hearing about ‘geniuses of the football-field or the boxing ring’ (1930), would have been rendered speechless by the news that a footballer had been offered a £2 million contract for his autobiography (the title already written: My World). Young Mr Beckham, reported as extremely excited by the project, says that much of the book will concern the World Cup of 2002 – a competition, as I remember, in which the England team performed abjectly: footballers with feet of clay. There needs no ghost-writer come from Grub Street to tell us this.

  Incidentally, after England’s goalless draw with Nigeria, a cheery BBC pundit assured us, in case we hadn’t moved with the times: ‘It’s the scoreline that matters, not the game.’ And no doubt it’s the £2 million and the author’s name that matter, not the book.

  David Beckham is recorded as divulging apropos of his first son: ‘I’ve a definite sense of spirituality. I want Brooklyn to be christened, but don’t know into what religion yet.’ Somehow spirituality has leaked out of the word ‘christen’. It seems the ghost-writer will be kept busy earning his ghost-living. A ‘Key to all Religions’ would come in handy all round.

  More and more I must sound like the old dodderer in Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues: ‘Let me tell you, sir, that I knew tricycles when they had only three wheels.’

  Sir Antony Jay puts a brave face on the lack of respect computers show for proper names, though he wonders what the postman will deduce from the monthly statement of the knight’s joint account with his wife addressed to ‘Sir Antony Jay and Lad’. Next he learns he is paying an annual subscription to an esoteric organization named Friends of the Ear.

  Three sayings I can’t chase out of my head, and cannot see why. ‘… like the man who preferred reading the dictionary to any work of fiction — not much story, but at least he could understand every word’ (Paul Bennett, 1998); ‘a radical theory I had always held but dared not openly formulate: that boredom in the arts can be, under the right circumstances, dull’ (Gore Vidal, 1968); ‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’ asks Louisa, to which Mrs Gradgrind replies, ‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it’ (Dickens, 1854). Admittedly the last serves as a negative description of rheumatoid arthritis, where the pains move around unpredictably but the sufferer always knows exactly where they are at any given moment.

  ‘I hope that you may be prepared to speak on the telephone soon to one of our current University students, and to use that opportunity to discuss with him or her the latest developments in the Faculty of English, including our plans for the new building.’ This comes from a personal letter signed by Professor Dame Gillian Beer, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Fair enough. What I take amiss is the closing (and not too elegantly phrased) paragraph: ‘As someone who has studied, and I hope enjoyed, English at Cambridge, your support of the Campaign is crucial in this final phase.’ I was a student at Cambridge and writing for Scrutiny (remember it?) when the future Professor Dame sported rompers.

  The current student, he or she, hasn’t materialized as yet. Perhaps the word has got around at last that I’m a cantankerous old skinflint.

  A reader of The Times confides that a children’s charity has sent him a single chopstick. He can’t manage a pair of them, and wonders what he is meant to do with one. An answer comes nine days later from a Chinese gentleman living in Hong Kong: the Chinese are served with single chopsticks whenever they eat crab, using the chopstick to push out the meat in the claws and the legs. Somewhere there must lurk a charitable thought, or a childish one.

  Whether in acknowledgement or as inducement I cannot recall, but one charity sent me a sheet of address stickers. Undeniably useful, though a pity the name was rendered as E. N. Right. Have accumulated quite a stock of aliases: of less avail to me nowadays than even a widowed chopstick.

  When we were living in Alexandria in the late 1940s we had an arrangement with a young beggar-girl strategically stationed in the vicinity of our flat. For a regular and modest donation, she chased away any other beggar who accidentally intruded on her territory, uttering savage cries. Apart from the latter – ‘Those who beg in silence starve in silence’, cited in Kipling’s Kim, is said to be a native proverb – her behaviour was impeccable.

  Quite the opposite of what happens here and now. Give to one of our highly organized charities and you are a marked man, you will find scores of others snap
ping at your heels, you are a certified soft touch.

  As your afflictions mount up, some of them decidedly weird – is there no end to them? Well, yes, there is – don’t lose heart. Think of those who are worse off. If that doesn’t work, contemplate the American basketball star: ‘I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.’

  In The Devil’s Dictionary Ambrose Bierce observes that ‘die’ is the singular of ‘dice’, and that we so rarely hear the word is due to the prohibitive proverb, ‘Never say die.’

  A reader of The Times, describing himself as being of a generation for whom grass was for cutting, coke was kept in the coal-shed, and a gay person was the life and soul of the party, tells how relieved he was to find in a certificate of insurance issued by Lloyds TSB that some things hadn’t changed. Under the heading ‘Words with special meanings’ came the gloss: ‘Death means loss of life.’

  That this was indeed a special meaning was confirmed by other readers, one of whom had bought an insecticide which she supposed would lead to the death of fleas, only to learn that one application would kill ‘all adult fleas for up to three months’, while another mentioned a can of fly-killer bearing the notice that it had not been tested on animals (‘No wonder it did not work’). A third, in possession of a can of fly-spray that ‘kills bugs dead’, was left wondering what other state could possibly result.

  Later we hear of a tin of paté offering the advice: ‘Best pressed on bottom’ (some variety of Gentlemen’s Relish, perhaps?). And – a sign no doubt of our compensation culture – a sewing kit bearing the warning: ‘Please be careful. This kit contains a small component with a sharp point (needle).’

  Have passed the festive season, from Christmas Eve through to New Year reading and reviewing a heavy-hearted study of suicide. Quite invigorating. Enhanced by a bottle of light tongue-tingling Clairette de Die (pronounced ‘Dee’, please note).

  In a lecture of 1864 Ruskin expressed the hope of seeing before long libraries stocked with ‘chosen books, the best in every kind, … broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, and strong.’ This fine sentiment is quoted in Tim Hilton’s John Ruskin: The Later Years, a book I persuaded Southfields Public Library to acquire, pleasant and beautiful and strong, of 680 pages, which I can only with pain support in both twisted arthritic hands.

  The Broadcasting Standards Commission has ruled that it was (and is) not offensive to call the Queen a ‘bitch’ provided the epithet comes from a black man – since ‘bitch’ is acceptable street slang referring to a woman, and HM is a woman. The BBC confirms that the black comedian in question ‘was using the term as it is used in rap music to mean “woman”, and not as a term of abuse’. Some black community leaders are surprised to learn that rap is empowered to transform the long-established meanings of words, while the comedian himself, insufficiently appreciative of the intricacies of political correctness (and perhaps of the pre-eminence of his human rights), now states that he ‘made an error’. How daring, how heartening, if the illustrious bodies mentioned above could also have second thoughts. But they can hardly be said to have had first thoughts.

  In a different context – Times journalists being clever about social class, a supposedly dead horse that runs and runs without a touch of the whip – the Queen is described as ‘a German who likes small dogs’. Given that we aren’t all mad keen on the Germans, and some of us incline to treat small dogs with nervous derision, the expression might seem likely to cause offence. But no, it simply constitutes a non-judgemental class indicator acceptably articulated by a quality journalist in a quality broadsheet. (Off with his head!)

  ‘Crumbly’ and ‘wrinkly’ aren’t very pleasing – compliments to the mother who countered by referring to her children as ‘pimplies’ – but preferable to the euphemistic ‘experientially enhanced’. (As the man said, let’s have some new clichés.)

  ‘Words ending in –ess should be used with caution,’ Chambers Twenty-First Century Dictionary tells us. (‘Spineless’ for instance?) Also ‘Avoid using man’. That’s something of a handicap, isn’t it? But ‘Avoid the term handicap’. Or just avoid this dictionary.

  In 1926 H. W. Fowler objected to the use of ‘their’ in lieu of the logical ‘his’ or ‘her’. The issue remains unresolved, says Burchfield in the New Fowler of 1996, but ‘their’ now passes unnoticed except by those trained in traditional grammar, ‘and is being left unaltered by copy editors’.

  ‘Inaccuracies can be subsumed as an inevitable part of postmodern uncertainty, or play, one or the other or both,’ asserts the narrator of A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000). In the same novel: ‘I told her quite truthfully that I was helping someone with their research.’ The someone is another woman. ‘How useful the increasing acceptability of the slightly incorrect use of the plural possessive.’

  The Penguin Literary Guide to London informs us, of Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, that ‘Labour politician Hugh Gaitskell (whose wife ran off with Ian Fleming), lived in No. 18’. In fact it was Gaitskell who had an affair with Ann Fleming. No sweat – libelling the dead doesn’t count as libel.

  In The Times of 23 September 2000 a picture of a skimpily clad, pouting young woman is captioned ‘Sir George Young, who resigned from the Shadow Cabinet, at home in Wiltshire.’ Sir George didn’t resign because of … ; he resigned in order to stand for the post of Speaker in the Commons – as reported on the facing page, which carried a picture of him, looking just like himself, at home in Wiltshire.

  There was a time when people working in the world of print sought to get things right, factually, semantically, grammatically. No one remarked on this, it was taken for granted, it didn’t enhance the sales of books or the reputation of newspapers. The logical conclusion, I imagine, was that getting things wrong wouldn’t have any effect either: no one remarked on it, it was taken for granted.

  ‘Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden,’ Goethe noted: passion brings suffering. Psychologists in the United States have discovered (how?) that passages such as ‘he undressed her slowly … then took her gently over the crest’ greatly reduce a woman’s will to practise safe sex. (Not, as you might have thought, to practise sex.) Now, it appears, publishers of romantic fiction are facing calls to print health warnings on book covers. By leaving out details such as the rustle of a condom packet, writers of romantic fiction, it is claimed, ‘create negative attitudes towards the use of contraception and perpetuate the myth of being “swept away” by romantic love’: thus the Independent on Sunday, 22 October 2000.

  Mills & Boon hasten to plead that their books are ‘more about romance rather than sex’ (the passage quoted above makes one think of water-skiing in the nude), and that ‘being too explicit is not something we encourage’ (the rustling of condom packets is all too explicit). Joseph Brodsky has commented that ‘Schmaltz is flesh of the flesh – a kid brother indeed – of Schmerz.’

  It is rather saddening to learn that being swept away is a myth, but good that details are given their due weight, and even better to hear that what we read affects what we do, or do not do.

  In an essay, ‘That our desire is increased by difficulty’, Montaigne reflects on the enjoyable and arousing verbal games that spring from the decent, even bashful language we use when speaking of amorous matters. In Proust, Swann’s ‘do a cattleya’ is an example. Even the jaded roué, says Proust’s narrator, finds a fresh pleasure if the woman in the case is – or is thought to be – ‘difficult’, and one has to initiate proceedings by rearranging the orchids pinned to her bodice. Something Edenic there, the very first love-making, in a prospect of flowers.

  ‘Bashful’: Montaigne’s word is ‘vergogneuse’, which survives in modern French only in the substantive ‘vergogne’, generally preceded by ‘sans’. In English, ‘shame’ – that discomfiting word – exists chiefly in such phrases as ‘no sense of shame’ and ‘what a shame!’, and in the adjectives ‘shameless’ and ‘shameful’. Perhaps a trace
of a lost meaning, an almost lost virtue, lingers on in ‘shamefaced’, originally ‘shamefast’.

  Finding his young son in the hayloft with the milkmaid, the farmer berated him: ‘Next you’ll be smoking!’ An old joke which the Zeitgeist has rendered unfunny and even unintelligible. The point is neatly confirmed by Simon Leys in The Angel and the Octopus (1999) where he cites an English magazine as reporting that in a crowded railway compartment, ‘a couple who had been engaged in passionate kissing for some time eventually came to perform full sexual intercourse under the impassive eyes of the other passengers’. It was only when the satiated couple pulled out their cigarettes that their hitherto silent co-travellers reminded them firmly that it was most improper to light up in a non-smoking compartment.

  ‘I was the palace whore’: Times headline, 9 September 2002. In the Observer Parisoula Lampson describes her life in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, ‘where she was lavished with jewels, cars and clothes’. And to hell with grammar.

  *

  It must be a dream, a bad dream. ‘A masterpiece … it has wit, erudition, golden dialogue’ (Observer); ‘Beautifully written … there is not a single ugly or dead sentence here’ (Sunday Times); ‘A great popular novel and a plausible candidate for the Pulitzer Prize’ (Guardian); ‘The work of a real writer, following his own path, despite the pressures of fame. He’s not doing it for money’ (Evening Standard); ‘Sentence for sentence there is nobody to match him … an incredible achievement’ (Mirror); ‘If there’s a better book this year, with truth, fantasy and a touch of erudition combined in prose which really does leap off the page, I’ll eat my hat’ (Express); ‘A fine novel, deep and intriguing, worthy of its bald, bold language and biblical allusion … a literary evocation of the diabolical to compare with Goethe and Gogol’ (Times).

  Page after page of panegyric, all to do with a novel rhymingly entitled Hannibal, by Thomas Harris. I must be dreaming, it can’t be real, can it? Then, ‘The most significant sequel since Paradise Regained’ (Independent) – that clinches it, it has to be a blackly comic dream.