So what to make of the sensational news that during the time he was serving in the RAF under the name first of Aircraftman J. H. Ross, then as T. E. Shaw, he paid a Mrs Bryant of Newark two of the three shillings he earned a week? A closet heterosexual after all, was he? Or just an indiscriminate masochist, not fussy who did the flogging – a glistening Ottoman on a kilim in a tent in Wadi Safra, or a powdered married lady strapped for cash (sorry about the ‘strapped’) on the doormat of a two-up two-down semi in Newark?
Secrets of the human heart? Let the dead fret about the dead, the living don’t give a damn.
The Egotism of the Terrorist
There’s a moment in one’s attempt to understand the mind of a terrorist, or, if you prefer, freedom fighter, secessionist, let’s just say any active member of any armed resistance movement, when one’s imagination falters. More than falters, fails. No matter how hard you try, no matter how conscientiously you clear your mind of the clutter of prejudice and partisanship, you cannot make the next step to comprehension. Intellectually, the experience is like walking into a door you hadn’t seen was there. One moment you’re proceeding, however gingerly and distastefully, the next you’re on your back and everything is darkness.
The moment I’m talking about, of course, is when the terrorist or freedom fighter straps on his or her belt of exploding nails and boards the bus crowded with strangers, or kneels to hack off the head of a hostage – in the latest instance a Nepalese cook, but it could have been anybody – or promises, for even a promise can be an act of violence beyond our understanding, that ‘For every one of us you kill, we will wipe out fifty children’.
Yes, yes, I know that when you have a cause to further there are no innocents. The stranger is your enemy if he happens to be sojourning in the wrong place; and if your enemy’s child is his vulnerability then you must strike him there. This is no time for softness. The other party drops its bombs on children and you must fight fire with fire.
Such reasoning I can grasp. And you may say that if I can grasp the reasoning I must be able to grasp the deed wherein reason is converted into action. But I cannot. God withholds the hand of Abraham in the moment of his sacrificing Isaac. Of the many meanings of that story, one is that a line can be drawn between intention and fulfilment. There is a chance, even in the final instant, for anger to relent, for a different decision to be made, for consciousness of the sacredness of another life to strike you, no matter how sacred the cause in which you meant to take it.
That’s the door I keep walking into – the otherness of the other person. How are you able to convince yourself, in the moment of the deed, that whatever grievance has been visited upon you, you are justified in visiting upon someone else? Must there not be a flash of illumination in that arc of the knife which God prevented Abraham from completing, not only of the mysterious inviolability of a life that isn’t yours to take, but of the supreme egotism of your reasoning? Hold your weapon and think about it. Something terrible has been done to you. Let’s not argue the toss about how terrible, whether you had it coming, whether you’ve misread history, etc. Let’s grant you your outrage and even your despair. Something terrible has been done to you. Agreed, agreed, agreed. What must follow from that? That something terrible must be meted out in return? Why? Who are you to measure outrage against outrage? Who are you to say that your suffering is to have a higher value placed on it than someone else’s? In that split second when you are eyeball to eyeball with the divine equivalence of human souls, might it not be logical of you to conclude – never mind compassionate, forget compassion – might it not dawn on you with the light of reason that there is no righting your sense of wrong, not by you, not ever by you, because you above all people cannot be the judge of it, because resistance, retaliation, revenge – give it what name you like – cannot ever be anything but a privileging, that is to say a sentimentalisation, of yourself?
That’s a lot of reasoning, and perhaps reasoning never stilled any hand raised in murderous intent. But there is a distillation of reason that is meant to come to our aid at such a moment, a sudden impulse if not of beneficence then at least of self-disgust, whose very purpose is to turn us back from action. And before the idea of a person in whom such a distillation of reason is absent, my imagination fails.
To explain a blood-thirst we cannot otherwise get our heads round we point to religion. Indeed, the bloodthirsty often point to religion for us. Acknowledging responsibility for the beheading of the Nepalese cooks and cleaners, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna invoked their deity. ‘We have carried out the sentence of God against twelve Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . Believing in Buddha as their God.’ Where one person’s God restrains Abraham, another’s spurs him on. And it’s a giddy roundabout we jump on when we try to sort peaceful Gods from bloody ones.
Myself, I’m not sure I blame religion for busying itself with political resistance as much as I blame political resistance for enlisting God. Look for a universally fetishised figure and it is the freedom fighter not the priest. Cradle a child in the ideology of resistance and you will make him go where our imaginations cannot. Resistance is what closes the mind to reason. The assumption of a wrong, and the assumption that it is divine to fight it. Divine, today, to the tune of fifty children’s lives for that of every fighter. And divine, tomorrow, by virtue of calculations we cannot yet begin to make.
Of course, if we see capitulation as the only alternative to resistance, there’s no argument. We shoot traitors as a matter of course, and our heroes, whatever else we believe, are those who fight, hang on, resist with the last drop of their blood and that of whoever else happens to be to hand.
Don’t ask me where between craven capitulation and blind resistance we should pitch our tent. But after the events of last week, with warriors in their own cause making the earth fit for no one, my hero is the man who says shit happens, and walks away.
You Cannot Have a Margin Unless You Have a Centre
So it’s been decreed – the Commission for Racial Equality has spoken – multiculturalism is no more. Requiescat in pace. Except that to die you must have once known life, and for that you need a heart and brain. Multiculturalism had neither. It was always a word in search of a definition. A flag acknowledged by no country. Which you could argue was precisely its point. We waved it to say goodbye to the idea of country altogether. By this we stand: we stand for nothing.
We have said it often in this column – you cannot congratulate everybody on contributing equally to the family while you’re also proclaiming there is no family. You cannot rejoice at what is happening on the margins if you have no centre. And loving everybody else is not a virtue but a pathology when you cannot love yourself.
Of the various nationalisms Orwell identified as incident to the British intelligentsia, the most germane to our times is what he called ‘Negative Nationalism’, a sub-branch of which he further identified as ‘Anglophobia’. ‘Within the intelligentsia,’ he wrote, ‘a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory . . . In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.’ ‘Notes on Nationalism’ was published in 1945, but its characterisation of the Anglophobes has not dated. Perhaps ‘mildly hostile’ should be changed to ‘virulent to the point of hysteria’, otherwise the charge stands. To be a member of the liberal British intelligentsia in matters bearing on national identity is to be in need of a psychologist.
What did Daddy do to us that we should hate him with such vehemence? How did we come to feel so worthless in ourselves? Were we not applauded adequately for the productions of our bowels? Did the attention accorded to our siblings shape the shame that crippled us and made us liberal intellectuals in the first place?
And don’t tell me this is cheap psychology. Of course it’s cheap psychology. But that’s our fault for succumbing to a cheap distemper.
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sp; It’s possible, sick or not, that we could have bumbled along in this manner, disliking our own culture while marvelling at everybody else’s, so long as everybody else kept marvelling at ours in return. Historians will one day note that what kept us proudly British for decades was the enthusiasm, not to say the gratitude, for things British shown by generations of immigrants. We might not have cared much for what we had, but they liked it well enough. A good argument for immigration, would you not agree? – that it is a means of importing patriotism. Or at least was. Things are not now as they were. Hence the about-face by the Commission for Racial Equality. Now the children of those who arrived with love in their hearts for us dislike us every bit as much as we dislike ourselves. What is more, our lack of self-esteem is adduced as one of the justifications for their contempt. We don’t like us, therefore they don’t like us – boom!
So it’s back to Shakespeare and Dickens. That should settle things down. Always supposing, that is, that we can find someone who remembers who Shakespeare and Dickens were. Maybe we should try persuading immigrants newly arrived on these sceptred shores to teach us what they know about English literature. My own suspicion is that it will be more than we do.
But already the Commission for Racial Equality is under attack from the usual suspects, not for naivety but for promoting racism. Racism, it would seem, is a one-way street. If they blow us up there must be reasons in our society for their disaffection. If we teach them Shakespeare we are racist bigots. To these absurdities has the concept of multiculturalism reduced us.
In fact, it is not remotely racist to insist that citizenship entails a quid pro quo of obligation. Indeed, it is racist to argue otherwise. Racist to be indifferent to the culture which houses you. Racist to despise it. Racist not to accept that the act of incoming imposes an ongoing respect even when you cannot manage fealty or devotion.
There used to be a photograph on our mantelpiece of my grandfather and my great-grandfather in army uniform. Their gaiters struck me as particularly splendid, as did the bullet hole my grandfather used to show me, a neat little aperture below his knee, through which I could see the light of day. When people say go back to your own country, my parents told me, remind them that we fought and were wounded for this country in two world wars. As it happened, nobody ever did tell me to go back to my own country, partly, I suspect, because they didn’t have a clue which country that was. But we were always afraid they might, and anxious to show that whichever hell-hole we had fled from, we now called England home. For which stroke of tremendous luck we gave a little prayer of thanks each night.
True, some among our parents found it hard to forgive us when we married ‘out’, making it hard for us in turn ever to forgive them. But no one says it is a simple business retaining the essentials of your culture when you are a minority. Myself, I hate an over-anglicised Jew, who changes his name from Levy to Baron de Vere Leamington-Lysart and feels at home in the Athenaeum. But I am no keener on the Jew who thinks he should resemble a rhapsodic Polish tinker of the eighteenth century.
Get it right, boys. A little of this, a little of that. Don’t apologise for yourself, but be discreet. Honour those who moved over and made space for you, irrespective of their unwillingness to honour themselves. Be curious. It is as odious to care only for your own culture as it is to care only for other people’s. And remember that the racist in the equation might just be you.
God and Blokes
Much struck by the sadness of my sex this week. Poor George Best’s hollowed cheeks the abiding image, an old man before his time, the eyes bearing more disappointment than one could bear to look at, not angry, not surprised even, just apologetic in their forlornness. Saying sorry to whom? Us? His family? The gods who showered him with gifts? Himself? How to be, how not to be, a man. Haven’t seen it yet, but the film The Libertine depicts an even briefer life of what Dr Johnson called ‘drunken gaiety and gross sensuality’. The libertine in question being John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who died at thirty-three, having, again in Johnson’s words, ‘blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness’.
Well, who’s to say? A blaze is better than a fizzle, maybe. Or maybe not.
I fancied a life of blazing rakishness myself when I was thirteen but lacked the application. And was probably too sentimental about myself. Sentimental men fall in love too readily to make it as voluptuaries. Whether you’re falling in love with anyone in particular or just the vision of yourself saved by women who understand you better than you understand yourself is a question I leave to professional psychologists. But both sexes collude in this. Charlotte Brontë gives her Rochester – no accidental namesake – a second chance, redeeming him through fire and rewarding him at last with the devotion of that dirty-minded minx, Jane Eyre.
And Best was not short of women wanting to do the same.
So glamorous, these abbreviated lives, I’m not sure the women (or the surgeons) do anyone any service by prolonging them. It could be that Best would have been better, for his reputation’s sake at least, to have gone out in a blaze much earlier. A point I decided against putting to the Scottish painter Peter Howson at the opening of his new show at Flowers East the other day. Howson, too, nearly drank and drugged himself to death, until religion found him. A woman, a religion: same difference when it comes to being saved. In the middle eighties Howson was one of the hottest painters around – a real painter not a conceptualist, a shouter not an ironist, producing great masculinist murals of working-class vitality, Renaissance muscularity made phantasmagorical and transposed to Glasgow. Then the drink, the drugs and what he candidly describes in his catalogue interview with Steven Berkoff as the ‘debilitating and soul-destroying’ addictions of ‘pornography and lust’.
Rejuvenated, cleaned up, but no less muscularist for being found by God, Howson now transposes his gnarled heroic Glaswegian faces back into Renaissance narrative. But because I’m on male-sadness watch this week, I find myself drawn less to the dramatic central figures of the damned who dominate his new paintings, and more to those on the periphery, men hidden in the crowd, free of the sway of the artist’s grand intention, anxious, otherwise absorbed, pausing, wondering, confused . . . How to be, how not to be, a man.
Or, to put that question in another form, ‘How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?’ Forgive the second invocation of Bob Dylan in as many months, but it was going to see him at the Birmingham Arena last weekend that started me noticing the sad transience of my sex in the first place. There’s an example, if you like, of someone who might be said to have outstayed his welcome. Every time we thought he’d blazed himself out, there he was, rediscovered and newborn, now as a rocker, now as a Zionist, now as a Christian, and now as someone who plays a keyboard in a blues band and turns his back – I mean literally turns his back – on his audience. Not that I have strong attitudes to Dylan’s metamorphoses. You have to have been more interested in him than I was in the first place to care what he has become. The fans, though. Explain them to me – the fans. The tens of thousands of men my age as rapt as groupies, rushing to the stage to get a close look at their hero regardless of who they push out of the way and whose view they block, because nothing else matters, nothing else is except Bob and his music. Men! These are men I am describing!!
You acquire a measure of tolerance with maturity. That young girls must be allowed to scream and rend their clothing when they see a boy fingering his crotch to repetitive music I now accept. In the past I would argue that it wasn’t considered necessary for girls to behave like that in Jane Austen’s day, but someone was always at hand to point out to me that the absence of such release was precisely the reason Jane Austen’s heroines fainted whenever the sun came out. So now I understand that a passage of psychotic self-subjection to such mass-hysterical impudicity as would make the second Earl of Rochester blush is not only perfectly acceptable in a girl child but actually facilitates her progression to that condition of wisdom and propri
ety we expect of our wives and mothers. But to see grown men – men not only my age but who looked and dressed like me, men in beards and with sad eyes for God’s sake – clawing at the air, lost to themselves, all but prostrate before a scrawny arthritic guy who is bored with his own songs and doesn’t even fiddle with his penis – this I found shocking.
After the show I met an accountant who had been to see Dylan earlier in the week in Nottingham and was planning to see him again a few days later in Brixton. ‘It’s a passion,’ he told me, though he owed me no explanation. ‘Other men have football.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but they don’t go to watch the same game every week.’
His face shone. I recognised the refulgence. God. ‘Dylan is never the same,’ he told me.
Well, he was an accountant. But they couldn’t all have been accountants. So what excuse did the rest of them have – the irrational ecstatic devotees who turned the Birmingham Arena into a sort of church? I mean no disrespect to the music. Were Dylan, Keats and Schubert rolled into one there could be no justification for such extravagance of appreciation. A man is but a man. And men at their peril worship men.
What’s to be done about us? We don’t know what to do – blaze long, blaze briefly, or warm our hands at someone else’s fire. Where, as Besty used to joke, with a champagne glass in his hand and women lolling on his bed, did it all go wrong?
Thou Shalt Not Know What One Is Talking About
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 19