Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

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  Poets seek an audience for poetry, and the problem now extends far beyond the preservation of manuscripts. It is time to get real. If people are to be tempted to read they need to be told something worth knowing or reminded of what they may have forgotten, and here the tattered tradition of Modernism in the Pound-and-Eliot style does not much help. Poets of that school were at best unhelpful in the search for knowledge and at worst destructive. They wrote as if truth was unattainable or could only be found (as Eliot argued in his Harvard thesis) at the end of a rainbow, like a pot of gold. He was not interested in intuitive knowledge, presumably, like the two-times table: it all sounded too easy. Some like Pound, Yeats and early Auden openly flirted with tyranny; Eliot made knowledge sound as arduous as learning Sanskrit or wearing a hair shirt, and in Thoughts after Lambeth in 1931 he announced that any secular society must fail; the best you could do was to ‘redeem the time’ and seek to do something useful while you wait. A quarter of a century later one of the last giants of Modernism, Samuel Beckett, wrote a play called Waiting for Godot (1955) where Godot never came. All that may have been music to the ears of the great dictators and to terror groups: it is a world away from Wordsworth’s ‘We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake’, but by 1803, when he wrote that sonnet, he believed in what came to be casually derided as the Whig interpretation of history. What poet would proclaim it now?

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  A world that abandons all sense of moral knowledge is one where poets humble themselves to the minor role of self-definition, and it is hard to see what indispensable role such a poet could ever lay claim to or possess. Reading becomes an attempt at self-discovery for those uncertain whether there is any self worth discovering; to look knowing feels like a better option than to know. So you are asked to entertain beliefs, at best, as in Larkin’s little poem ‘Water,’ which invites you not to accept a new religion but rather to smile at a happy conceit and pass on. But belief constructed on nothing beyond a whim goes nowhere. It trifles with knowledge. In his last book, Truth and Truthfulness (2002), Bernard Williams bravely confronted the modern dilemma of respecting truthfulness without acknowledging truth, and left it looking problematical, which it is. It is a dilemma still to be resolved.

  The solution for poets and philosophers alike is to give up moral scepticism and accept that virtue is more than opinion. That means a lot of giving up, and it will not be easy. It means courting danger. There is no comfort in moral certainty, after all, only hard deeds and a demanding sense of duty, of work waiting to be done. A century ago Rainer Maria Rilke told a story about a French poet expiring in a hospital who heard a nurse mispronounce a word and corrected her with his dying breath. ‘He was a poet, and hated the approximate.’ That is to hold the poet in bounden duty to get things right, which he is. But to accept that duty, and that responsibility, the poet would first have to recover a sense of what right is.

  5. The Privilege of Absurdity

  Should we take literature seriously?

  I mean without laughing. I remember teachers who made me laugh, and not much else about them, so laughter is undeniably memorable. Shakespearean comedy is ruled by professional fools like Touchstone and Feste, and Shakespeare was not alone with the idea. Half a century on, in Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes thought laughter marked us out from the beasts and called it sudden glory: ‘the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject but man only.’ Animals mourn, but only people laugh.

  Shakespeare’s greatest clown is Falstaff, in the history plays, but he showed his first theatrical strength in comedies. Critics do not now much respect the fact, however, though they once did. In his 1765 preface to Shakespeare Samuel Johnson remarked that his tragedy seemed to be skill and his comedy instinct, which sounds like an accolade, and it is hard to imagine anyone writing it now. Schools of literature have courses on tragedy but few on comedy, and they are mostly about how serious it all is. In 1955 I was shushed during the first London production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, though recent productions have rightly found it hilarious, and Shakespeare conferences can be little short of dire. I recall one in German in Weimar during the Soviet era, a few miles from Buchenwald concentration camp. The camp had ceased to operate a few years before, in 1950, having been used for five years after the war by the Soviets for its original purpose. Perhaps it cast a shadow. At all events there were no laughs.

  The serious mode has ruled for a century and more. In 1904 A.C. Bradley argued in Shakespearean Tragedy that the great tragedies show how character changes under the pressure of events, though that started with Falstaff; and more recently, in Shakespeare’s Language (2000), Frank Kermode gently deplored the great comedies for their fatal addiction to amorous banter and gave the palm to late, gritty plays like Coriolanus. Somehow the sunny side of Shakespeare is not much respected, and it is time to ask why it is not.

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  The likeliest answer is the sheer intellectual prestige of pessimism. In Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996) A.D. Nuttall grappled manfully with the problem, which relates to life, after all, as well as to the arts. Spectators do not look away at street accidents but crowd around to watch in sympathy, which leaves unanswered the question why anyone would want to watch at all. Nuttall cautiously concluded that mankind needs variety: ‘we can’t bear monotony.’ On the other hand tragedies are not necessarily pessimistic. They can exhilarate. Flights of angels sing Hamlet to his rest. Comedies, likewise, are not necessarily optimistic: Twelfth Night ends with Feste, that most melancholy and perceptive of clowns, facing a familiar world of deprivation and loss. ‘Gainst knaves and fools men shut their gate,’ and the hardships of vagrancy, as he knows, are his endless portion. ‘Heigh ho, the wind and the rain.’ The lovers are duly matched as the play ends, each to each. But that is cold comfort if your trade is making people laugh, like Feste. The world goes grimly on, as it always will – cold, hungry and wet.

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  There is no drawing a line around laughter or ordaining where it will end. It can happen at a feast or on the scaffold, and no human experience – not even the deathbed – is immune. Sydney Smith, a witty clergyman, once remarked that he and his brother Bobus had inverted a law of nature: ‘He rose by his gravity, I sank by my levity.’ Bob Hope died on a wisecrack: when his daughter asked him where he would like to be buried, he replied ‘Surprise me’. It pervades public affairs. When Clement Freud won a seat in parliament a reporter told him many had thought him a joke candidate, and he replied: ‘I thought I had the last laugh.’ Boris Johnson, mayor of London, maintains a wisecracking political tradition at least as old as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Charles James Fox; Wellington joked at Waterloo. People often joke about their convictions, and he went on to win the battle: so historians who imagine jokes cannot be serious need to think again.

  Laughter is not a minor element in great literature, even in tragedy. The Oresteia of Aeschylus begins with a joke. The great innovative masterpieces of fiction, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, are comic, and comic verse down the ages has been metrically more inventive than the epic or the lyric. ‘A concert pianist is allowed a wrong note here and there,’ Kingsley Amis remarked in his introduction to the New Oxford Book of Light Verse, but ‘a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate.’ Comedy dominates Shakespeare’s early career in theatre. He wrote no notable tragedy till 1595, with Romeo and Juliet, when he had already written four comedies: The Comedy of Errors, a Latin comedy after Plautus; The Taming of the Shrew, a knockabout farce; Loves Labours Lost, an academic play for a learned audience; and Two Gentlemen of Verona, a romantic comedy. All belong to the early or mid-1590s by an author around the age of thirty, a newcomer who will do anything for a laugh, who wants the world to know it, and who plainly thinks the classic rules of the game are there to be mocked, flouted and defied. In Hamlet, at the turn of the century, he would
mock schoolroom categories by putting them into the mouth of Polonius, who is a dotard – ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral’. You may laugh at Polonius whenever you please.

  That may explain the sudden flashes of laughter in the late tragedies, like the drunken porter in Macbeth or the gardener in Antony and Cleopatra who, in the last act, brings Cleopatra an asp. ‘I wish you all the joy of the worm.’ Even in death the tragic hero is not above laughter. Hamlet is a mimic, and like an actor he can play any role: out-rant Laertes, out-bore Polonius, and out-smart the Machiavel who has murdered his father. He can tell his mother how to behave, which she amazingly accepts, and in the last moments of the play he out-fops the foppish Osric. His straight-faced ‘The concernancy, sir?’ employs a word not otherwise known in the language, but there is no doubt what it means. It means ‘what has that to do with anything?’

  The play is at once a tragedy and a riot of laughter. No wonder audiences want it, no wonder actors feel deprived if they never get a chance at it. Sad that Alec Guinness, that comic genius among actors of his age, did not see it was meant to be funny; sad, too, if Laurence Olivier’s film version died the death of the glooms. It inserted a depressing announcement at the start about a man who could not make up his mind. Hamlet made up his mind when he heard the ghost speak. But he was having too much fun – teasing bores, producing a play, writing extra lines for it and telling his own mother how to order her life. He had no time to kill a king.

  There is nothing puzzling about that. Hesitation after all is among the commonest of human weaknesses, and among the most ridiculous. You wake and do not instantly get up. You think about working, and go on thinking. Writers hate to write, teachers to teach, students to learn, actors to act. Stage entrances are the perfect instance. Flora Robson used to say she liked to give herself a good shake in the wings; Humphrey Bogart spent thoughtful moments in the dressing room in front of a glass; and actors at first nights have been known to encourage each other with a mantra about breaking an arm and a leg. The one certain thing about life, apart from death, is that there are plenty of moments when the joke is on you: you do not want to do the thing you have spent years waiting to be allowed to do. ‘Be careful what you want in youth,’ Noel Coward used to say. ‘You may get it in middle age.’

  Which is absurd. But then absurdity is a privilege known only to mankind.

  6. The Best of British

  ‘One of the most inspiring stories I know,’ Michael Gove, an education minister, once called our national history, adding that one should teach the British to value the liberties they enjoy. The prime minister, meanwhile, called multiculturalism a failure. British food is back too, at least on television, and patriotism does not start or stop in the kitchen. Immigrants are taught about the British past.

  In academe, however, the response is largely suspicious and un­welcoming. Richard Evans, regius professor of history at Cambridge, dubbed it all ‘the wonderfulness of us’ and derided flag-waving as a Tory interpretation of history. Most people were brought up to call it Whig; but Whig or Tory, the battle-lines are drawn between patriots and professionals. Politicians invoke a national heritage; historians are revisionists who pore over archives. Either way they live here by choice and call it home.

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  Home, as they say in New York, is where the aspirin-bottle is. It is also where you do not feel an exile, wherever you were conceived or born. But patriotism can easily sound like a reactionary attempt to revive what Herbert Butterfield, another Cambridge historian, derided long ago, as a young man in 1931 and in his first book, as the Whig interpretation of history. It appeared a year after two Charterhouse schoolmasters called Sellar and Yeatman had written a bestselling spoof 1066 and All That. A coincidence, perhaps, though the books are akin in that, like all who loudly deny the certainty of moral judgements, they denied only the moral certainties of others. Sellar and Yeatman mocked bits-and-pieces of familiar school history – ‘and this was a good thing.’ But they plainly thought it was a bad thing if Magna Carta did nothing for the common people; and Butterfield, as a lifelong Wesleyan, undoubtedly had his moral certainties too.

  What is more, he recanted. In 1944, at the height of the war against Hitler, he wrote The Englishman and his History in which he dismissed his first book as ‘the misguided austerity of youth’, warning that a room swept clean cannot long remain empty. Some values are self-evidently precious and eternal, as he knew, like the liberty of conscience, and the historian who denies the objectivity of all moral judgements writes an open ticket for summer rioters, storm troopers and the secret police of Stalin and Hitler. It is a point to cherish; and there are other grave objections, often unnoticed, to the multiculturalist case.

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  The first is that multiculturalism demeans what it touches. If the best thing to say about a poem or a novel is that it was written in another region, another continent, by another gender or another people, then it is not likely to be much of a poem or much of a novel. Obvious as all that is, it is seldom said. The cult of Bongo-Bongo flourishes in many a literary department around the globe, and it does the Bongolese no credit and little honour. If it is accompanied by a threat to charge colleagues with insularity unless they submit, it does no credit or honour to those who make it.

  The second objection is that multiculturalism is inconsistent and capricious in what it chooses to defend. There are Gay Studies and Women’s Studies, not to mention Moslem and Jewish, Black and Asian. But the Brontë sisters are read, understood and admired without Yorkshire Studies. So not everybody is allowed into the game. Nobody, it is worth adding, thinks the less of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights for that.

  Some years ago there was a Cambridge seminar on Commonwealth literature, and a succession of writers from remote places like Australasia, India and sub-Saharan Africa insisted (independently and without consultation) that when writing in English they did not feel distinct because they came from overseas or lived overseas; and Wole Soyinka once challenged an audience to explain why a Nigerian boy should be thought to be any more remote from Euripides than an Etonian. Vikram Seth slyly began his novel A Suitable Boy with an intimate conversation in India between a mother and a daughter, lightly mentioning as the chapter ended that they had been talking (for no particular reason) in English. You are trapped if you want to be trapped; but English is a world language, and the bookish teenager often thinks his thoughts and dreams his dreams in English. So, down the centuries, with the mighty dead. Garibaldi was born in Nice when it was already French. Alexander was not a Greek, Stalin was not a Russian, Hitler was not a German, de Valera was born in New York of a Spanish father, and Napoleon was born in Corsica only a year after its annexation to France and brought up speaking a Tuscan dialect. They were all patriots.

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  Nevertheless no education secretary has an easy task here, and that is not because the Whig (or Tory) interpretation of history is incredible but because it is disarmingly and even tediously obvious. ‘It takes a very unusual mind,’ said A.N. Whitehead, ‘to undertake the analysis of the obvious.’ So let us be unusual.

  Britain is the only large state on earth to have achieved democracy and an industrial revolution without violence. If that is what Whigs are proud of, one might be proud to call oneself a Whig, though the party label does not matter. What is more, the British industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century was the first on earth, so it was achieved without a rehearsal. That astounding fact is not necessarily taught in schools. W.H. Auden, after becoming an American citizen, remarked that the British and Americans ‘cherish opposite fictions’ about their national history: Americans pretend a war of secession was a revolution, though it prolonged slavery, while the British forget that for two centuries after the 1530s the English survived a succession of bloody revolutions that included a violent religious reformation, the public execution in 1649 of a monarch, the arrival of a Dutch king (childless and charmless),
and a Hanoverian after 1714 called George I who spoke no English and arrived with two German mistresses known to the London crowd as the Elephant and the Beanpole. Unlike France and the United States, Britain has no national day with street parades, and it became a nation as recently as 1707, though the tercentenary passed uncelebrated in 2007. The tomb of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey suggests a paucity of national heroes, and the only outdoor statue of Shakespeare in London, copied from an eighteenth-century statue in the Abbey, has been there for little more than a hundred years, while the model of the Globe Theatre recently built on the South Bank was instigated by a Jewish-American actor called Sam Wanamaker.

  What other nation glories in its reverses as the British have long gloried in Dunkirk? Meeting your Waterloo always means defeat in common usage, as if we naturally side with losers, and the man who won at Waterloo was a witty Irishman who had wise-cracked his way through battles in India and Spain, though wisecracking was not all Wellington was good at.