Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  The English behave as if intellectuals were unicorns: if you see one, you know it isn’t one. The word is often prefixed by ‘pseudo-.’ The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition, dangled with distaste between finger and thumb: ‘a person possessing, or supposed to possess, superior powers of intellect.’ It quotes the Daily News (1898) on ‘the so-called intellectuals of Constantinople who were engaged in discussion while the Turks were taking possession of the city.’

  I first heard the word in the summer of 1940, as a small child picking up snatches of grown-up talk. ‘Pseudo-intellectuals,’ one gathered, supposed that Hitler had won the war and were bolting to the United States, not even waiting to engage in discussion while the Turks took possession. Later information described a round-shouldered, querulous tribe in spectacles, apt to argue with orders and as messy in their laundry as in their personal relationships. As Auden wrote:

  ‘To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,

  Is a keen observer of life,

  The word ‘Intellectual’ suggests straight away

  A man who’s untrue to his wife.’

  To English distrust of the egghead, the Anglican Prayer Book provides a clue, Queen Elizabeth, sick of divisive theologians, ordered her priests to give Communion with the words: ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ … take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee.’ This skewered together two irreconcilables: the Catholic doctrine of a sacramental change of essence from bread to body, and the Zwinglian view of the Eucharist as a mere rite of commemoration.

  It was as if, today, a party proclaimed that ‘All property will be nationalised within the framework of a free market economy.’ It said to the Reformation intellectuals: ‘Shut up, in the name of national unity, or tell your clever ideas to the axe!’

  From this was born what we now call ‘the English genius for compromise/the distaste for those who drive ideas to their conclusions without bothering about their usefulness or the mess they may cause. It wasn’t born with much dignity. But it survived the intellectual upsurge of the English Revolution in the next century, to become the ideology – rather, the anti-ideology – of the nation as a whole.

  Victorian England was crowded with universal minds. But it did not evolve the European intellectual caste of the nineteenth century and our own times: the thinkers and bards as judges and tribunes of the nation, natural spokesmen for its aspirations. Englishness seemed to need no such defence.

  English intellectuals in the Thirties who tried, mostly on the Left, to claim for themselves this shamanic authority were treated with derision. The old antagonism between ‘aesthetes’ and ‘hearties’ played its part. But so did what I would call ‘the London Effect’ – the law that any vehement defence of an idea makes the defender irresistibly comic.

  London, indeed, is a pretty hostile environment for the ‘intellectual life.’ Its vast distances and slothful transport impede the gathering of ‘circles’ to dine together, like the Goncourts and their friends, or to sit chattering in coffee-houses like writers in Central Europe. English writers and painters, let alone thinkers, loathe being lumped into ‘movements’ with their colleagues. Efforts to construct ‘circles’ soon fall apart out of sheer self-consciousness, or in the heated arguments over sorting out the restaurant bill for which English literati are famous.

  And any fair deal for women also assorts badly with traditional intellectual life. Edinburgh still has a life of this kind; one may go to this pub or that, knowing roughly who may be there and what ideas are being preached or spluttered. But behind each noble male mind, there waits somewhere a woman who is supposed to be ready to get up in her curlers at 1 a.m. and fry egg-and-chips for the excited genius and the pals he picked up at the Abbotsford or the Southsider.

  I think it was the Countess of Eglintoun who, in Edinburgh’s verminous Old Town, grew tired of the men of wit and spirit whom she used regularly to feed at her table. She eventually threw them out and took to entertaining rats instead. She found them more grateful, and with better manners.

  Ingratitude, all the same, is a necessary trait in the intellectual. The fight against tyranny and stupidity, whether it is the struggle of Russia’s ‘superfluous men’ in the time of Nicholas I or of the Polish intellectuals against the occupier and the autocrat, instils mistrust of every government, every ideology which puts ‘national unity’ first – as, in its mild way, the English ideology does.

  But regretting the weakness of English intellectuals, as a group, might then come close to an absurdity: to regretting that England has never known occupation or state terror. A country which has never feared the extinction of its language and culture, which sees no need for a lay priesthood of men and women to keep the candle of truth burning through dark times, is simply a happy country. There are few of them left. Why spoil this one by importing the poisonous self-doubts, the savage mockery and the polemics of total rejection, which are proper to unhappy nations?

  There is no full answer, except to say that the conditions for that happiness are coming to an end. English institutions no longer guarantee freedom and justice as they once did; worn out, they offer only a pretence that all is still well. State power grows, while recourse against it shrinks. There is a retreat from kindness and tolerance, a new sense of public unfairness.

  The English, in short, are no longer sure that they know what they are like. Those who lead are no longer sure of why they act, or of what will happen in this unfamiliar society when they do – witness the babble of confusion emitted last week by the hierarchy of the BBC, supposed to be custodians of a few simple old principles.

  It’s time that England raised a mirror to itself, and tried seriously to recognise this changed, present face which the past has been fashioning. Journalists can give only glimpses. It takes intellectuals to make a mirror.

  [1985

  The English Bourgeoisie

  Think of a great, sere countryside. Scattered over its surface, there lives a peasantry divided into two races. There are those – the mass of them – who inhabit ordinary cottages and bothies, managing adequately in good seasons but at the mercy of the drought. There are, however, others who stay in stone houses passed on from generation to generation, living sometimes austerely but after good rains with a mysterious ease and opulence.

  This is on its surface a dry country. The mass live on land irrigated only by rainfall. Here and there, the air traveller sees the twinkle of dams, some built by the State in recent years and many more by private people, which mitigate times of drought and pass on stored-up rainwater – often at a price -to the ordinary peasants. But deep under that surface there lies a subterranean lake, a buried water-table.

  And the stone-housed people have wells. This is their secret. In the yards of their farms stand old Victorian headworks of iron, covering the shaft which reaches down through the beds of light soil and clay to the geological depth where the water lies. It is not the most modern equipment; only a trickle of water reaches the surface, enough to keep a few beasts alive and to irrigate the vegetable garden but still more than anything which can reach the rain-dependent majority. When times improve, though, and long rains or heavy winter snow have raised the water-table closer to the surface, the crops around the house grow with a richness and variety which the rain people cannot achieve.

  This is a simile for traditional English middle-class wealth. The rain people are the wage-earners, directly subject to the fluctuations of employment, inflation, pay-packets. The dams are the accumulations of wealth which are immediately visible on the surface of society: the fortunes of the speculators and the resources of the Welfare State. And the stone-house dwellers are those, whether they are themselves active capitalists or in the salariat or merely rentiers and maiden aunts or even well-spoken tinkers flogging cheesecloth blouses down the Portobello Road, who have access to the accumulated wealth of the ancient English middle-class.

  ‘Access’ is the important word. It isn’t so much a
matter of outright possession. We know that England is still a country of spectacular inequality in the matter of actual ownership of money and property, so far as this heavily private matter can be discovered and measured. While 90 per cent of the land in England and Wales was still tenanted (i.e. in estates) in 1880, no less than 50 per cent was still tenanted in 1975. Estimates of total wealth held by percentages of the population swing about a good deal (the ‘7:84’ formula is one of many), with J. R. Revell calculating that the top 5 per cent in Britain as a whole owned 75 per cent of wealth in 1960, and the Open University’s ‘Patterns of Equality’ course suggesting that the top 25 per cent own 70 per cent of wealth. But beyond this lies the question of who – beyond the titular possessor – has a standard of living or way of life which is dependent upon that money.

  How does the old British élite so serenely survive? How – to put it another way – is it possible for a married couple aged about 35 and earning, say, £5,000 a year to own a house in Islington or Chelsea worth ¿35,000 and send two children to private schools charging at least £1,000 a year? In some ways, it is better to go back a few years, before the explosion in London house prices, and to ask how in 1960 a young married man earning £1500 could set about buying a house which then cost £7-8000?1

  To call upon Charles and Melissa Heigho wouldn’t have told you much. Rush matting, a few nice rugs, one or two small but very good bits of antique furniture, a ‘daily woman’, quite likely no car ‘because we can’t afford one.’ Television by Radio Rentals, underpants by Marks and Sparks. ‘Wealthy’ is obviously the wrong word. Inspecting Charles’s bank account would probably show a small but painful overdraft, no more than a hundred quid or so but the subject of much remonstration at home, and possibly a few hundred in a deposit account or building society.

  Yet this is where the English ruling class is reproducing itself, discreetly ensuring another generation of security and privilege within the Secret Garden whose key no fumbling socialist Chancellor has yet discovered. The bulge under Melissa’s gingham smock is another little Public Schoolboy, destined for the administrative grade of the Civil Service, a place in a merchant bank or a Headship of Chancery in some embassy. And he too will grow up without much cash but with things which only substantial money can buy: more of them if capitalism is thriving and fewer if there is a season of social-democratic austerity.

  We all know that the age of the mighty private entrepreneur is gone. Charles’s grandfather built railways in South America, beating down Indian insurrections with a golf club. His great-uncle patented a new chemical bleach and poured sulphurous torrents of waste into Yorkshire rivers. Melissa’s great-grandfather was a Cornish tin-miner who rose to marshal diamond-mining Kaffirs in Griqualand West. All that is over. Nobody in either family, it’s probable, is creating wealth in that way now. The male descendants earn salaries, good or less good, with a larger farmer here or there and perhaps the odd owner of an advertising agency. What we are dealing with is the most discreet, sophisticated and effective system of wealth transmission the world has ever seen.

  The fortunes of the Gründerzeit have gone into family trusts. Capital is invested in stocks and shares. Often a part of this investment remains in the shares of private companies, that secret and unquantified sector of British capitalism whose shares have only a nominal value in public but which represent infinitely higher sums if they should ever be realised.

  As far as possible, this capital must remain intact and undistributed. Primogeniture helps here. When Charles’s father dies, he will leave his share of old ‘Venezuela’ Heigho’s money in a will-trust, the income of the investments to support his widow while she lives, and his children will receive only token sums at his death. When Charles’s mother dies, the capital may be subdivided among the children but most of it will probably stay with the eldest son who may decide to spend some of it – against the frantic advice of family lawyers and the bitter opposition of his relations – but is expected to transmit the main capital once more through his own will-trust. He does not have to do so: English law permits him to leave his money to a cat’s home, especially if he has no children, or to the Symbionese Liberation Front. But convention usually wins.

  Three peculiar features of English middle-class mores arise from this. The first is the common spectacle of relative austerity in the midst of unrealised wealth. The income from shares in such a trust may often be quite small, and in the case of private family companies, exiguous. Outside conditions matter too. In the post-war period, very little water was reaching the surface: income from shares was slight, the trappings of wealth were scarce and exceptionally costly, and the possibilities of actually making money through buying and selling – the sale of houses or land, for instance – were bleak. In these circumstances, with the water-table intact but exceptionally difficult to bring up to ground-level where it could be used, the English upper classes presented a picture of impressive dilapidation. ‘Poor as church mice’, they used to say, ‘the Brondesburys are eating cold rice pud off gold plates …’

  Matters had become very different by the mid-Sixties. Americans who had sent the Brondesburys CARE Parcels and Hershey bars in return for a look at the Muniments Room now scratched their heads: how could the church mice be driving two new cars, paying Eton fees and flying to Rhodesia for Christmas? The answer lay of course in the revival of share income and the lavish possibility of capital gains. To borrow from a family trust against prospects, a request once rejected with outrage by trustees and solicitors, was now frequently tolerated.

  The young must still, in general, do without ‘their’ money. But even in the worst times, the spirit of the trust is respected: a certain standard of living is essential. Somehow the odd few thousand to put down on a house is almost always forthcoming, the trust offering large sums at very low rates of interest on security of the house itself – no bad deal for posterity, as it turned out. A third of the price of Charles’s first house will have been provided in this way, possibly more, although he must raise a mortgage to provide for the balance.

  The second feature is the arrant sexism of the system. This isn’t merely the habit of primogeniture in favour of sons. It is the moral pressure laid upon widows, whose survival – often on an income stingy in proportion to the capital involved -denies ‘my money’ to impatient children and beneficiaries. Alienated money becomes a monstrous fetish impossible to propitiate: the woman who persuades the trustees to disgorge in favour of her children is betraying the Mosaic law of English class maintenance, while by refusing to permit a distribution she may make her children wish her dead. Literature has spread the notion that old women ‘enjoy’ power of this kind, one of the crueller sexist myths.

  And thirdly, there is the importance of death, the Spring Festival of rentier capitalism. Birth is an event of slight importance, save for the clan’s responsibility to take out insurance policies guaranteeing the boy’s fees at a public school. Marriage matters little more, especially now that the ‘marriage settlement’ (that tribal arrangement which created a new trust whose income was to supply the young couple, but which would be broken up if the marriage were dissolved) has become so rare. Death, however, brings about the creation of new trusts, the distribution of money, the casting-off of old investment patterns and older family advisers. In the office of the Heighos’ solicitors, one more black tin box stuffed with papers is added to the stack, the name of the corpse painted carefully in white on the side. Another will drags towards probate: another baby trust is born.

  Abstinence, fear of women, the celebration of death. No wonder the English middle class took over the Druid legends as their myth of origin. The transmission of wealth, so beautifully articulated to the maintenance of domination in the professional and State élites, remains proof against almost any disaster save social revolution or a sustained hyperinflation. But the kindness and tolerance of the English middle-class (rather less impressive than the kindness and tolerance they have contrived to mediate to
the English masses who put up with them still) is born of the confidence of an Order, a melancholy Druidic caste, and not from a sense of individual vigour. Just as their huge reservoir of wealth is used largely to maintain social identity rather than to generate production, so well-born English businessmen will convey that they make money out of reluctant duty rather than because they want to be rich.

  The great eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley got it right in his poem ‘The Druid’:-

  ‘From grinding care and thrift secure,

  Arrived at years of life mature,

  Unenvy’d for a Fortune great;

  Above contempt for low estate,

  Let the remainder of my days

  In private life serenely pass.

  Unnotic’d I would chuse to dwell,

  Yet in a house, and not a Cell…’

  [1976

  The Spreading Slime

  Last week, the Sunday Times delivered one of those onslaughts on whingeing left-wing intellectuals (it called them ‘intelligentsia,’ using the Russian word incorrectly as usual) which have become a regular feature of Conservative journalism. The phrase ‘moaning Minnies’ was not employed. Instead we got ‘erudite moaning,’ ‘left-wing laager,’ ‘sniping from the sidelines,’ and ‘ideals out of kilter with the aspirations of plain folk.’

  This kind of English stupidity is an organism so primitive that it is apparently impossible to kill off. It reminds me of Physarum Polycephalum, the gigantic slime mould recently bred by scientists at Bonn. Bright yellow and about two millimetres thick, this monocellular creature – neither plant nor animal -grew to a size of 10 square yards before the scientists took fright and froze it. It can smell its favourite food, and move towards it at a speed of up to two centimetres an hour. This favourite food is porridge.