When we use the word human in an attempt to confer dignity on ourselves, I suspect we are actually alluding to an idea of something not human at all. Something ethereal. Soaring up and away, as far as we can get from ourselves. God, as we used to say. Or spirituality, if God’s coming it a bit thick. Some art critics, worn out by Tate triviality, have resurrected the word spirituality. What we’re looking for, they say, are ‘spiritual values’ in art, and you know the game’s up with them as soon as they say it. It’s too futile a gesture towards gravitas in a feather-light universe. Maybe it’s the ‘values’ part of the phrase, in both instances, that lets us down. You only use the word values when you don’t have any.
As always, it’s the feebleness of our language that shows the trouble we’re in. We can’t make a claim for substance without our words drifting away on the wind like the puffball of the dandelion – sugar-bobbies, as we used to call them in the north. Fine spores of sweet nothing.
I’m musing upon all this as I relocate my library. It is about the tenth time I have done this since I began collecting books a hundred years ago. Manchester to Cambridge to Sydney back to Manchester to London to Wolverhampton to Cornwall back to London . . . Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Bunyan’s Holy War, Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men, the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, all in crumbling dirty green editions, their pages glued by time and neglect, back and forth, back and forth, a renewed reproach, with every move, to my lack of industry and resolution. Still unread, still unopened, so many of them.
Few things convince a man of the vanity of life more than relocating his library. What am I carrying all this lumber around with me for? Into boxes, out of boxes. Why am I breaking my back for them? Throwing away money on removalists, on shelves. Why am I repeating patterns of ownership that have served me only fitfully in the past?
Some of my friends have sold their libraries now. They have that preternaturally fresh-faced look of people who divorce late in life, or on the spur of the moment give up a job they’ve toiled at for forty years. They look free suddenly, disencumbered, not quite themselves. It’s terrific, they tell me, having got rid. It’s a liberation. And I incline my ear to their lips, letting the poison drop, wondering if I am capable of such treacheries myself. Although I know I’m not.
‘Not more books!’ my father used to complain when I came back from the second-hand barrows of Shudehill, weighed down under another filthy cardboard box, excited by my finds. A complete Thackeray for five bob, for God’s sake! The Caxton illustrated Balzac in a translation by Anonymous, incomplete but only sixpence a volume . . . !
‘Bargains!’ I cried.
‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘And the bargains you got last time? How many of those have you read?’
How do you explain to somebody who doesn’t understand that you don’t build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.
Sentimental, of course. That’s what my friends who have parted with their libraries have finally rejected in themselves – the sentimental idea of being a man of letters, of being made good through books. ‘Human values.’ A pity I wasn’t clearer about my motives for buying books in the days when my father twitted me. ‘Not more books?’ ‘No, Dad. Not more books. More human values.’ Me and Vince.
In fact, books worth owning speak to us of our humanity as vexedly as the drunk returning to his vomit in Ibiza. It’s trouble, being human. It’s bad for us. In the days when my first marriage was breaking up, my then father-in-law knew where the blame lay. ‘It’s all those books,’ he said. I took offence at that at the time. My books? How could you lay a failed marriage at the door of literature? But he was right. Books had made a bastard out of me. As they’re meant to.
Girls Will Be Girls
Question of the week: ‘An accomplished woman, who can find?’
Cadences sound a bit stereotypically . . . how shall we say . . . Old Testamentish? An accomplished woman – oy gevalt! – who can find already? You’re right. An accomplished woman blah blah is the first line of a poetical reflection on womanhood recited by the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah boy – the bat chayil girl – on her coming-of-age day. In my time girls knew their place and left the whole rites-of-passage business to the boys. We were the ones suffering the sudden fluctuations in body temperature and voice range. Girls had always been women about to happen. We became men in a sudden rush. We needed a ritual to mark the change. Today there’s a bit of a fad for female bar mitzvahs, on quasi-feministical grounds I suppose, though it’s interesting that you don’t see any equivalent rush for female circumcision. Can’t have the one without the other has always been my position, and that position has hardened since the weekend when I watched a couple of sweet girls with plastic daisies in their hair make a dog’s breakfast of a solemn ceremony.
You will understand if I don’t say where exactly I attended this double bat chayil, but I can tell you that the rabbi’s name, as if he didn’t have his hands full enough already, was Portnoy. Now in any altercation or difference between a rabbi and his congregation I am invariably on the side of the rabbi. I like rabbis. I am easily persuaded that a beard and a long jacket are earnests of moral seriousness, and I am a sucker for sophistical theology. ‘Ah, but do the words actually say that?’ they have only to ask, and I am theirs to do with as they please. In its essentials, being a rabbi is like being a literary critic: you pick at texts, affect a deracinated Central European accent and tell people how to live. I would be one if I could. Failing which I see everything entirely from their point of view, not least the uncontrollable giggling of two schoolgirls called up to address Hashem, the one and only, the dark and nameless warrior god of Israel.
So I’m the rabbi and I’m sitting behind the girls, stroking my beard, giving them time to come to their senses, reorganise their expressions, and remember the awfulness of the occasion. I am a man of wisdom so I know that giggling is something you do when you are nervous and self-conscious and need not mean you have a disrespectful nature. But the giggling won’t stop – the girls even giggle over the name Hashem itself, an offence which brought a visit from the angel of destruction in the good old days – and the generosity with which the congregation at first greeted their girlish hysteria has turned to embarrassment, to shame, and in some hearts to anger.
In my heart, for example – mine, not the rabbi’s – it has turned to boiling rage. Funny that, for as a rule I welcome a seasoning of blasphemy. Or maybe not so funny, since to be a blasphemer you must understand belief, whereas to be a giggler you need understand nothing.
I am surprised, too, by the weight of tears behind my eyes. I have been softened up by the cantor’s exquisite sobbing to the God who never shows His face. But it’s the indecorous girls who finally make me weep. For they are loosed from themselves, and to be loosed from oneself is a sort of madness, and the sight of madness is always desolating.
I am the rabbi again and I know what I think. I think an accomplished woman, who can find? I remember that I didn’t giggle during my own bar mitzvah but suspect that I might if I were doing it today, because a contemporary child is given over to popular influences so disinheriting that he is neither the owner of his face nor the familiar of his nature. Are the girls unable to confront solemnity because they are, at this very moment, dreaming of David Beckham? Probably not. The links are less direct. But triviality will have its way. Here a trickle, there a droplet. Until the human soul is worn smooth by banality and nothing of consequence can ever find a sticking place.
We are as one on this, the rabbi, as I imagine him, and me. We wish woe to those who make slop buckets of the minds of children. But where I suspect we differ is over the accomplished woman-who-shall-find of the panegyric to ideal femininity. ‘Strength and ma
jesty are her raiment, she joyfully awaits the last day.’ Between living only to die and living only to watch another Spice Girls documentary on Channel 4, is there nothing?
Rabbi Portnoy has now decided it is time to put an end to the fiasco. Enough is enough. He rises with imperious calm, addresses the girls in words of fire, opens his palms as though he can part the Red Sea with his fingers only, and chases the imps of inconsequence from their hearts. Thrilling. I am so excited by the spectacle I can hardly speak. Someone older castigating someone younger in our time! Isn’t this what rabbis and literary critics are for? To impose authority on an uncultivated populace? To clear a channel for seriousness in the intelligences of the young?
The girls recover, do well, even manage to say ‘her hands she stretches out to the distaff’ without collapsing into mirth again. But they waver when the rabbi embarks on one of those interminable shtetl parables about two communities, one free to read Torah, one not, the moral of which – surprise, surprise – is that the one that’s not tries harder than the one that is. This is what I hate about rabbis – no sooner have they got your attention than they treat you like a moron.
But it was fun being religious while it lasted.
Me Ol’ Bam-Boo
Of the sorrows that afflict the writer, none are less likely to win him sympathy than those that attend the publication of his latest book. Ill-positioned reviews, unflattering publicity photographs, being mistaken on the Underground for someone else who has a book out – who cares! He who would be a writer must take the kicks with the halfpence.
I accept this callousness myself as the price I pay for an easy and opinionated life. But just once in a while we writers have to go to such extremes to drum up notice – agreeing to read and review another writer’s book, for example, in return for some fleeting mention of our own, or attending, on the same principle, a West End show we would ordinarily suck ratsbane rather than sit through – that it is only common humanity to feel for us.
Spare a passing thought for me, then, penned into a seat at the London Palladium, surrounded by a species of person – part grown-up, part child, part I cannot tell you what – for whom the appearance onstage of a toy motor car called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the occasion for such delirious ovation that I fear the balcony in which I am imprisoned will come crashing down, that the rubble of the London Palladium will be my final resting place, and that the words ‘Oh you pretty Chitty Bang Bang / Chitty Chitty Bang Bang / We love you’ will be the last I ever hear.
There is an upside to this. In the course of accepting that you must sing for your supper and be willing to discuss work other than your own, you are occasionally forced to reread something wonderful, such as, to take one example from last week’s labours, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. And guess what? A remarkable coincidence, I grant you, but the subject of Nineteen Eighty-four turns out not to be dictatorship and the tyranny of orthodoxy as I’d remembered, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In fact, the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang first came out in 1968 not 1984, but all that proves was that Orwell underestimated the rapidity of our decline. Otherwise he foretells it with great accuracy, charging particular departments at the Ministry of Truth with the production of exactly that genre of proletarian musical entertainment to which Chitty Chitty Bang Bang belongs. We need not concern ourselves here with the ministry’s other responsibilities – the ‘rubbishy newspapers’ stuffed with nothing but ‘sport, crime and astrology’, the sensational novelettes or the pornography for the masses put out by Pornosec; sufficient to our purposes are the ‘sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator’.
That the Sherman Brothers, Richard M. and Robert B., would not care to think of themselves as mechanical versificators I do not doubt. They did, however, write regularly for Walt Disney, who knew the sentimentality he wanted and kept repeating it, to the detriment of children’s imaginations the world over. What I heard in the Shermans’ contribution to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, anyway, was a musical banality that made me want to vomit, and an emotional vapidity that made me want to vomit over them.
Take ‘Me Ol’ Bam-Boo’, a knock ’em dead, slap it around, do it again and again song-and-dance number for men dressed in a loose-crotched ethnic olde worlde version of long johns. Quite what these ersatz morris men had to do with anything that one might call Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s narrative or musical integrity, I have no idea. They just appeared, carrying their staves, with the sole intention, as far as I could tell, of cockneyfying the occasion. I don’t think I need to remind readers of this column that cockneyfication in any of its manifestations is an abomination to us. We didn’t like it when Tommy Steele or Max Bygraves did it, we like it still less when Young British Artists and Young British Telly Chefs do it, but when Americans who wouldn’t know a cockney if he brained them with his ol’ bam-boo do it, we are ready to go to war.
Of the host of unwarrantable cultural assumptions in this utter wasteland of a song, I draw just two to your attention. The first relates to punting on the Thames. Someone should have told the Sherman Brothers that punting on the Thames, with or without a bamboo, is the equivalent of riding your horse into a saloon on Fifth Avenue.
The second assumption is that morris dancing, as it is normally performed, is effete and needs energising. Now I happen to be a great admirer of morris dancing. Forget the real ale and the hairy polytechnical jesting; what can be marvellous about the morris dance is the fearful mockery of it, the joshing lightness of those burly men, hinting at other sorts of agility, and the rasping knowingness of the music.
As far from rural innocence as any activity could be, the morris dance teases you with its ambiguities, making your heart stop, sometimes, with its unexpected reversions to violence. Done well, the morris dance puts you in touch with the vital force of the English themselves; yet it is this, the power of their own lungs and intelligence, the depth and complexity of their own passions, that they are prepared to see diluted into the perky pap of ‘Me Ol’ Bam-Boo’. Prepared? Reader, they stomped and roared for the joy of it.
‘What could possibly become of such a people,’ Orwell asked, ‘in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells remained?’ Except it wasn’t Orwell who asked it, it was Lawrence. Proving that once upon a time there was more than one man who took our aesthetical degradation seriously. Never mind whether Chitty Chitty Bang Bang inspires kids to dream, or teaches them the wrong attitudes to foreigners. The thing is ‘prolefeed’: an aesthetic offence. And as Orwell showed, whoever would ruin us, ruins us aesthetically first.
Travis
If you are reading this in bed mid-morning it’s unlikely you’ll be making it over to Selfridges in Oxford Street in time to catch a glimpse of Travis in what Gaywired.com calls his ‘tightie-whities’. Shame. I think you’d have enjoyed it. But if it’s any consolation, I’ll be there.
Hard to imagine there’s anyone who does not know who Travis is. But should you be living out of town, for whatever reason, there’s a chance you won’t have seen the poster campaign. So, for you, allow me to explain that Travis is Calvin Klein’s latest underwear model and that he’s been pointing his package at the rest of us – ‘package’ being another term I’ve picked up from Gaywired.com – for weeks.
Funny old world, ours. We do what we can to rein in our appetites in public places, try not to bare our teeth when we are angry, or our behinds when we are aroused, putting distance between ourselves and the primeval forest where we originated. Civilisation, we call this: the finest tracery of etiquette and reticence, having regard to our own self-respect as upright beings, and the feelings of our fellow citizens whom we must regard as capable of embarrassments and compunctions as exquisite as our own. And yet we accept as normal a hundred thousand photographs, positioned where it is impossible to miss them, of a young man showing us his penis, or at least intimating the presenc
e of his penis (its shape, weight, configuration) at a three-quarters diagonal slant, neither coming up nor going down, neither pendulous nor protrusive, in soft clinging cotton tightie-whities.
It could be argued that for a man of the slackie-blackie generation to have paid quite so much attention, something about the promotion must have worked. I don’t doubt it. When you prick me, do I not bleed? When you hit me over the head with a club, do I not faint?
I recall visiting Perth, in Western Australia, for the first time and being unable to escape the magnetic influence of a billboard which dominated the town, partly by virtue of its size, partly by virtue of its subject – a woman unsuccessfully holding down her unruly skirts – but mainly because it said LOOK, NO KNICKERS. I am squeamish about this sort of thing. I do not care for the word knickers. Panties neither. Should some alien power wish to extract secrets out of me it would do well to forget thumbscrews or Chinese water torture, and simply order me to say knickers or panties a hundred times onstage at the London Palladium. Rather than say knickers twice, or panties once, I’d tell them everything they wanted to know and a little more besides.
My peculiar fastidiousness apart, it is impossible to take a city seriously when the only thing you see on raising your eyes to its skyline is LOOK, NO KNICKERS. Thereafter, in my estimation, Perth was forever in dishabille, a frisky, tarty little town with a bubbly personality, but only a fool would marry it.
And my fear is that Travis is doing the same to London. Forget the National Gallery, St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey – welcome to Dick City. That Travis is himself an Australian only makes it worse. Not from Perth, as it happens, but from Melbourne, where civic solemnity is of no small account. It’s because they won’t have Travis flashing himself in Carlton or St Kilda that he’s doing it here. I say ‘he’ but there is a girlish look to Travis, soft pleading eyes, easily bruised skin, a waifish twist of leather (‘Find me a home, Daddy’) round his swansdown neck. For reasons buried deep in its national psychology, Australia throws up this appearance of androgyny effortlessly. Take my word for it if you haven’t been there, every third person in Australia is a girl with a penis.
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 9