The actress Nicole Kidman is not, to my knowledge, kitted out in this way. But she is possessed of a freckled, hoydenish demeanour which ill-suits her for half the parts she’s given. Whatever else you ask an Australian woman to be, you don’t ask her to be a femme fatale, not even in jest. Every time I nipped indoors to escape an eyeful of Travis last week I had the misfortune to catch snippets of Nicole Kidman on television, vamping it up for the BAFTAs in Moulin Rouge. Now, I have admitted to strange sensitivities in the matter of the naming of women’s undergarments, but nomenclature has nothing to do with the pain I feel when I see Nicole Kidman in her Parisian stockings and suspenders. Few sights on this planet are sadder – not a wounded elephant, not a tiger cub separated from its mother – than a woman who does not fill or look seductive in a stocking. No time here to plumb the mysteries of it; whether it comes down to actual fleshliness, the voluptuous swell of thigh (or not), or simply to consciousness of sensuality (or not): the fact remains that some women can and some can’t, and those who can’t are desolating when they try.
I wish they’d ask me first. I wish that middle-aged lady novelist with a trampy name had asked me how she looked in fishnets before letting the newspapers snap her in them, extended on a chaise longue. ‘Heart-breaking,’ I’d have told her. But then fishnets become no one. In fishnets a woman only ever resembles a fish.
And tightie-whities are no better. Down to our drawers, we are all pathetic. If I’m killed in the crush to see Travis, I’ll admit I’m mistaken.
Loving the Inchoate
Lovely word, inchoate. Meaning incipient, barely begun, rudimentary, immature. Like Estelle Morris, who I’ll come to anon. I introduce the word – inchoate, not Morris – without ceremony on the assumption that you’ve been reaching for it in recent weeks, or maybe months, or maybe years, to describe the quality our age values above all others. I was in an argument recently as to whether we are acting the child or just acting dumb. Neither of your examples has anything to do with the child qua child, my interlocutors put in when I cited Channel 4 as the home of the moral infant and BBC2 as the home of the intellectual infant. What you’re describing in both instances, they insisted, is simply brute, opportunistic inanity. So here’s what’s so useful about the word inchoate – it bridges the two positions. And maybe tempers both with compassion, for that which is inchoate might be said to be struggling towards something better, like BBC2 with its use of words like ‘book’. Look, Mummy, book!
All of it, of course, whether in politics or the media or art, is just a variation of nostalgie de la boue, the yearning of civilised man to return to the condition of being uncivilised. Which is another reason I favour inchoate. You can hear the mud in it.
I take it as read myself that the glorification of the suicide bomber by normally peaceable people, people who are appalled by the yobs who throw peanuts at an illusionist, is actually glorification of the inchoate made active. That a suicide bomber might have a degree in sociology or racial hatred does not make her, or him, a jot less rudimentary. For it is a rudimentary response to events, however you interpret those events, to turn yourself into human explosive and once and for all close down argument in the act of blowing away as many other people as you can. It is psychologically retarded, an introjection of a grievance and a projection of your selfish will. It is not just the end of life, it is the end of the idea of life.
Whenever I voice this conviction, peaceably, I am bombarded by letters in little envelopes from, I suspect, widowed ladies usually living in Leicestershire. What they have to tell me is invariably the same. Suicide bombing is a legitimate defence against the new Nazis, the Israelis. Now I know, because I have been told enough times, that it is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel, but the gratuitous use of the word Nazi always does seem anti-Semitic to me (since there are many other less emotionally loaded but equally brutal and militaristic nouns we might use), as does the frequent recourse, in such little letters, to the subject of Hebraic genes. Might I be entitled to accuse of anti-Semitism those who put all our misfortunes down to some kink in the Jewish genome?
Anti-Semitism, too, it has always seemed to me, is yet another branch of devotion to the inchoate. Sartre said that the anti-Semite wanted to make himself as stone; I think the anti-Semite wants to make himself as mud. What the hater of the Jew fears above all else is articulacy, the Jewish project of giving voice to the reasons of belief, to codification of the law, to social justice – that latter articulateness so much despised by the democracy-despising Nietzsche – and, if you like, to the very basis on which we possess and refine our humanity. There are those who believe we can be too refined. I feel it myself, sometimes. All Jews do. It is a natural recoil of the bodily man against the mental man. Which is why Jews make better anti-Semites than anyone. But in the end you resist the suck of the inchoate or you go under. To hate is to drown; but to hate the mind for its powers of clarity, to hate lucidity of expression, to hate the strivings of language to know itself – none of which, let me make clear, do I think of as uniquely Jewish preoccupations – is to drown in mud.
But I am distracted, against my intentions. Observe the seduction of inchoateness. It maroons you in the incipient. In fact, the object of my attentions was meant to be Estelle Morris, Minister for whatever it is we call it now – Culture, Sport, Environment, Bingo, Popping Down to the Pub, Hymning Guns and Being Proud When Your Teenage Daughter Opes Her Maiden Treasure on the Telly. Estelle Morris spoke to the nation via the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week, demonstrating her bona fides as an arts and creativity person (‘a consumer, not a connoisseur’, in her own words) with such exercises in bathos as, ‘Creativity is becoming acknowledged as a key driver for economic growth and public service improvement.’ Which is just the sort of sentence you go to a literary festival to hear.
The burden of Estelle Morris’s talk – and I choose the word carefully (burden, that is, not talk) – was the artificial distinction between excellence and access, a distinction which she would like to see ‘our museums and our galleries’, and no doubt our epics and our symphonies, remove. ‘Is there an unwritten rule of life that says the more excellent a piece of art, the fewer people will be able to appreciate it?’ she asked, before triumphantly refuting her own question with the closely reasoned answer, ‘Of course there isn’t.’
That’s the spirit of the inchoate speaking. Because actually there is such a rule, and it is determined by the fact that appreciation of a ‘piece’ of art necessitates more often than not, unless it is itself inchoate, a sophistication of sensibility not to say an education of judgement which is not available to everybody. If we would have it otherwise, and I am one of those who would, then it is not for the art to stoop to the inchoate, but for the inchoate to rise to the art.
But it’s warm in the mud. And the idea of rising has grown inimical to us.
Bad Time of the Year
This is always a difficult time of the year for me – school broken up, summer climaxing in the arms of autumn, the trees heavy with whatever trees are heavy with. Maybe if I knew what trees were heavy with I’d be having it easier. Name a thing and you take away its mystery. Horticulturists don’t look as though their knees knock in nature. They pause, sniff, label and walk on. But because I don’t know what anything’s called or why anything is the way it is, I’m destined to wander summer parks and gardens like some sorrowing Werther or Melmoth, forever outcast from the consolations of green.
Who can ever trace beginnings? What made me a boy whose thoughts invariably turned to desire the moment school broke up and the trees grew heavy with whatever? Clearly there are biblical precedents for finding gardens erotic, but other boys at my school were able to read the Old Testament without it making them soft in the head about lawns and shrubberies. The Ritz, that was where they headed to find romance the minute term was over. Or the Plaza. Everly Brothers on the turntable, spinning balls of splintered light above your head, Gladys from Accrington’s head on th
e shoulder of your school blazer, and love followed as sure as day follows whatever day follows.
But not for me. School broke up and I was out haunting municipal parks. What did I hope to find? Truth, if you really want to know. But if truth eluded me, company. Someone sweet. Someone who smelt like grass. Someone I could thread dandelions with, which meant someone who could show me what dandelions looked like.
I was always between girlfriends in the summer holidays – that’s to say I was always between not having one and wanting one. And if nothing showed up locally, by the bowling greens and duck ponds of Cheetham Hill, then I travelled further afield. One of my friends, Malcolm Meggitt, carried lists on his person of towns that had the most girls in them: Leicester because of the hosiery industry; Aldershot for the reason that all the men were in the army; Dagenham on account of the all-girl pipe bands. I have no idea where he obtained this information or whether any of it was genuine, and we never got around to testing it – not in each other’s company anyway – I suppose because we didn’t want to suffer the indignity of failing where sociology showed it was impossible to fail. Besides, Dagenham and Aldershot sounded altogether too inorganic for my taste. And the people of Leicester were notorious floricides.
I had my own preferred list. Chester, where the Dee tinkled like fairy bells and the riverbanks were grassed like carpets. Harrogate, which threw year-long flower festivals and where even the main roads were laid to lawn. Buxton, where the fainting daughters of the northern aristocracy went to take the waters, and where the earth was so rich in health-giving minerals you had only to suck on a stick of hay – or however hay came – to be cured of every ailment. But Malcolm no more fancied Buxton than I fancied Leicester. So he went where his list took him, and I followed mine.
In order to compensate for the inherent ponciness of looking for love in orangeries and allotments, I wore dark glasses, a maroon hand-me-down smoking jacket, a yellow paisley cravat from Austin Reed and lovat-green suede shoes. Since I was wearing a smoking jacket I thought it behoved me to smoke. Stuyvesants in the squashable packet. Two a month in term time, but one every five minutes in parks. That my face blazed hotter than a blacksmith’s furnace goes without saying. It’s embarrassing to be an outcast in nature. Even the flowers know you’ve come to the wrong place. I must have been a fearful sight. It’s a long time since I made a public apology in this column, but I make one today to all those women – they will be grandmothers now, if they’ve survived at all, inpatients of sanatoria all over the north of England – who were unlucky enough to be surprised in a parterre of geraniums by a creeping red-faced boy with a voice as husky as the Boston Strangler’s and smoke coming out of his ears.
‘Excuse me, I don’t suppose you’ve seen a short fat man with ginger hair go by recently, have you?’ That was my line. Don’t ask me where it came from. It’s possible I was making an unconscious connection with Cain, the other wanderer, whose hair was reputed to be red. But I have no idea what advantage I thought would accrue to me, however they answered. ‘Yes, I have just seen a short fat person with red hair.’ Then what? Would you care to lie down with me among the sphagnum and swallow my smoke rings?
Mainly, the unfortunates I approached didn’t answer me at all. I suspect they were too shocked by my demented appearance to know what to say. That some suffered seizures I don’t doubt. That others would have miscarried on the spot, succumbed to hysterical blindness or gone instantaneously mad, I am also prepared to believe.
Perhaps I exaggerate the dreadful spectacle I presented. I was only fourteen. How dreadful can anyone look at fourteen? But it was the unwontedness of my presence that was so shocking – black desire suddenly showing up, like the carrier of plague, in the quiet of a late-July rose garden. The invisible worm that flies in the night, except that I was visible. The devil, stripped of all disguise, breathing Stuyvesants in Eden.
And maybe that’s all evil is: alienation from nature. Had I only known what trees were heavy with, I might never have turned bad.
Every Day Is Father’s Day
I wonder if you can have too much jubilation. You go to bed to the sound of crowds hosanna’ing the monarch and you wake to English football fans partying outside your bedroom window. Hurrah to Her Majesty and another hurrah to the boy with the Mohican. Next day you’re hurrahing again because the most fearsome boxer in the world has been flattened by a gentle giant with a British passport. Ropy accent and inane mannerism, acquired in some foreign place, of referring to himself in the third person, but a British passport’s a British passport. Still got a hurrah left in you? Then let’s hear it for the Irish, putting three past those footballing giants, Saudi Arabia. Huzza, huzza, huzza!
It’s like spending too much time at sea and finding, when you hit dry land, that everything’s still moving. Even when there’s no one cheering, cheering is all I can hear. A couple of days ago I thought I was being cheered in my shower. Just the pipes, but for all the world it was as though I had a hundred fans in there with me, roaring every time I soaped. The idea is not entirely preposterous. Though no longer athletic in the Leni Riefenstahl sense, I suspect I am still a sight of some ruined magnificence – like the tomb of Ozymandias – when I lather. Worth a shout or two, all things considered. But I am not a fool: I know when my ears are playing tricks on me.
It will be good when we revert to losing and can enjoy some peace and quiet again.
In the meantime the festivities are making me melancholy. My father, methinks I see my father. Maybe jubilation enjoins memories of fathers on men whose fathers are no longer alive, causing us to remember them with peculiarly fervent longing. Memories of being hoisted aloft on strong shoulders to see a cup presented or a royal personage drive by. Lift me, Daddy. We hug our male friends every time a goal goes in, and maybe that’s a substitute for our earliest same-sex embraces. Enfold me, Daddy. Mothers make the world safe for us, blinding us on the breast. A father’s grip might be just as sure, but he holds us out towards the naked flame.
I have a friend my age who heaves his six-month-old son on to his chest and takes him into the shower with him. It would seem the baby loves it. How could he not? I love it for the baby. ‘My mother groaned, my father wept / Into the dangerous world I leapt’ – no weeping in this instance. Into the dangerous watery world they leap together. Infinitely touching, not to say biblical, I find this – the patriarch Abraham, full of years, making a great feast of the unexpected gift of fatherhood. Age apart – and my friend’s not that old – it’s stirring. An elemental bond, sealed elementally.
But then as I’ve explained, when it comes to fathers I am myself all water at the moment. On top of everything else it is the tenth anniversary of my father’s death. Ten years, fled like a dream. Ten years in which much has happened for me, and nothing has happened for him. As always, my mother rings to make sure I know it’s yahrzeit, the day to remember him by, as calculated by the Jewish calendar. The Jews commemorate the dead with candles. Man is a flame, the flame is extinguished. You can’t fault the imagery. So we keep it simple, the yahrzeit candle a mere deposit of wax in a miserable Methodistical little glass, guaranteed to burn for twenty-four hours and then go out with a dead sizzle, like hot oil escaping down a sink. This at least you do not confuse with the sound of crowds cheering a penalty.
And would he have been a fatherly sort of father, my father, this last week or so? Hard to say. I doubt he’d have lifted me up to see the Queen, or bought me a flag to wave or had much to say about Rio Ferdinand. Lennox Lewis knocking out Mike Tyson, though, might have got him going. He’d have admired that final punch. ‘Sheesh – you wouldn’t have wanted to be on the end of that, eh, Howard?’ he’d have said, by implication returning the question – not what sort of companionably male father he, but what sort of companionably male son I. And we’d both have known the answer to that.
His one true sporting passion was wrestling. ‘For God’s sake, Dad,’ I used to jeer, catching him biting his knuckles in front
of the box, ‘they aren’t touching each other.’ ‘That’s how it looks to you,’ he’d say, ‘because you don’t understand the science.’
The science wasn’t all he was in it for. What he really loved was needle. In every wrestling bout, he reckoned, there was a moment when needle entered and the play-acting gave way to genuine anger. ‘Now it really is needle,’ he’d say, rubbing his hands, and had the house gone up in flames around him, he would not have noticed.
He had a weak heart, else he might have become a wrestler. He had the build for it. As it was, he settled for judo, buying himself what looked like hessian pyjamas and a square of coconut matting upon which, because he had no other opponent, he’d pin my mother. ‘That’s a waza-ari,’ he’d say. ‘Three points to me.’ It was her idea that he join a club. But then came his heart operation. ‘No more judo for you,’ the doctor warned. Just to be on the safe side my mother confiscated his outfit. But after he died we found a new one under the mattress, together with a fourth degree black belt – a yodan – three higher than the shodan he had when he told us he’d quit.
Briefer than a candle, man’s life. So you might as well burn yourself out as wait for the wind to do it. His philosopy. To which I’ll raise a cheer on Father’s Day.
In Defence of Melancholia
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 10