Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  Stultitia Polycephala, or populist imbecility, is the English slime mould. Large tracts of the landscape have already been covered by it. Nourished on the porridge of resentful prejudice, it smothers thought under a jelly of servile national unity.

  The mould exuded by the Sunday Times is a highly instructive specimen. It is at first sight surprising that this emanation of highly-paid Murdoch journalism smells so strongly of social envy. We read that this disaffected ‘intelligentsia’ moves aimlessly between Islington and the Groucho Club, that it surrounds ‘the country’s more fashionable dinner tables,’ that it consumes Montrachet at ‘favourite watering-holes.’

  Only yesterday, the intellectual enemy was held to be grubby products of the polytechnics, inhabiting the social work departments of provincial cities, typing out their hatred in grotty little houses crowded with snotty, neglected children, and in general constituting a threat to the ‘civilised heritage.’ But now the Right has adopted the envy-fantasies of the old Left. This is the language of – say – a Labour militant during the first Wilson government, imagining disloyal capitalists trotting to their clubs, swooshing about in Bentleys and drinking champagne without taking their top-hats off.

  It takes some mental adjustment to find the hated eggheads in this new location: identified as well-off, ‘fashionable’ and exclusively London-based. They are somehow on top, while underneath – or ‘out of kilter’ with them – are the aspirations of ‘plain folk.’ I had thought that ‘plain folk’ had finally died out of journalese, or had been laughed out, but here it comes again: England’s equivalent to the Nazi gesundes Volksempfinden- healthy folk-instinct.

  The suggestion that the most powerful critics of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain are a clique of Armani-clad pinkoes based in London’s club-land is too silly to contradict in itself. But what is happening here supplements Mrs Thatcher’s larger project to abolish socialism as a significant element in Britain politics.

  The intention is to ‘denationalise’ the intellectual Left, by contrasting its discontent with the happy, dynamic Golden Age which the mass of the nation is alleged to be entering. Those critics are presented as an irrelevant élite, self-excluded from participation in glorious times as religious reactionaries or those with bourgeois hankerings excluded themselves from the French or Chinese revolutions.

  The truth is that those who have the most cogent things to say against the way we are governed are – as they always were – scattered across the country, addicted to anoraks and bicycles, on the whole ill-rewarded, and stimulated by Bulgarian wine and the odd whisky. But that makes them hard to marginalise in propaganda terms, so they are replaced by a fictional metropolitan coterie of ‘internal émigrés’ which is a more suitable target for envy and contempt.

  We read that the intellectuals are ‘increasingly divorced from the land (they) live in,’ and that ‘the nation is not listening to them.’ Much of the thinking and artistic community takes ‘a low view of Britain,’ refusing to rejoice in the spread of house-ownership, the distribution of shop-floor shares, the ‘job-creating 4 per cent growth of the economy’ or the ‘steady decline of unemployment.’ Instead, this elegant but alienated fringe ‘is content to be smugly negative,’ because ‘devising constructive alternatives is too much like hard work.’

  It’s worth adding up this language for a moment. The target group is being described as deficient in patriotism, rejected by national opinion, unjustifiably rich and hedonistic in lifestyle, workshy and … negative. Anyone who has ever sampled the language of the Soviet media towards dissidents and the recalcitrant young, especially in the Brezhnev period, will recognise this stuff at once. It’s the old call to get your hair cut, stop listening to foreign broadcasts, and start writing positively about life in new towns or the personal conflicts of factory managers. It’s the voice of the populist boor through the ages.

  What, though, of the charge that the carping intellectuals have nothing to offer – no alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s programmes? One retort is that – so far – the issue of carping licences does not require a pledge to positive ideas. Why should it? But is it true that the disarray of the Left, inside and outside the Labour movement, is so total that no coherent alternative exists, no appeal beyond the call to unite against That Woman?

  I think that remains true. The initiative is still with Mrs Thatcher’s ‘modernisation’ drive, rushing forward in this third administration with renewed energy into yet another programme of sweeping legislative change. Labour rolls about in the slipstream, its counter-suggestions still more of an incoherent wish to restore fragments of the past than a competing vision of the future.

  But it will not always be true. In two respects, both of course unintentional, ‘modernisation’ is slowly creating a new landscape in which it will be easier for Labour – or its ruling coalition behind Neil Kinnock – to operate. The changes in housing, nationalised industry and the trade unions reduce Labour’s crippling obligations to blocks of organised power on the Left, leaving the party’s hands freer and its mind more open. Secondly, the breakneck centralisation of Britain and the increase in police and State power since 1979 invites a public backlash, in which democracy at every level is seen to be in danger.

  And the alternatives are beginning to appear. Professor Eric Hobsbawm, bestriding Marxism Today as usual, calls for a ‘social coalition’ crossing class divisions which would accept a more privatised economy but would invest in a genuine reconstruction of industry and infrastructure. Hilary Wainwright, a leftist wary of social coalitions, writes in her book ‘Labour, a Tale of Two Parties’ that the correct programme now is ‘democratic reforms aimed at the main centres of power,’ including devolution, electoral reform, control of the secret services and the City, a Bill of Rights … in short, the sort of programme long associated with the Alliance and derided by conventional socialists.

  Interesting ideas, fertile seedlings of a convincing competitor to Thatcherism. Best of all, they do not flee from new realities but proceed from them. These intellectuals fear and detest much about this regime, not least its spreading slime mould of national-unity rhetoric. But they are building within its walls, not ‘sniping from outside.’ In a few years, even plain folk may take them seriously.

  Dracula in Britain

  The Romanians are growing fed up with the Dracula cult. Gone are the days when – as Dan Ionescu remembered the other day on Radio Free Europe – ‘an off-duty cook from a hotel in the Carpathians used to pop up out of a coffin to thrill foreign tourist parties.’ That was profitable but demeaning. And it got in the way of Romania’s fiercely possessive attitude to its own history.

  As most people know, Bram Stoker’s novel ‘Dracula’ was a cheerful Victorian fantasy. The trouble is that he took a real person’s name in vain. I quote the late Constantin Giurescu: ‘There ruled in Wallachia Vlad the Impaler (1456-1462), also called Dracula, son of Vlad the Devil… He distinguished himself as a dreaded enemy of the Ottomans …’ Vlad the Impaler is now being built up as a mighty patriot who ‘favoured economic progress and the establishment of order,’ a predecessor of President Nicolae Ceausescu. This makes it rather urgent to establish that he did not flap around biting women in the neck.

  A recent article in Contemporanul by Adrian Paunescu stated that the Dracula myth was ‘one page in a vast output of political pornography directed against us by our enemies.’ Paunescu was replying to a letter from Mrs Hoggett, a Romanian living in Britain, objecting to a programme about Dracula with Vincent Price which she had seen on television. Mrs Hoggett complained that it made all Romanians look like vampires.

  For Paunescu, this was part of a concerted campaign by ‘reactionaries of every colour’ to slander ‘the very idea of being a Romanian, as well as the eternal idea of Romania.’ In subsequent issues of the magazine, some suggested that Paunescu had gone over the top, while others implied that it was a dirty Hungarian plot to tarnish the glory of the Impaler.

  Vampires, incidentally, do e
xist, even if Vlad was not one of them. I well remember the Hamburg Vampire in the middle 1960s. He climbed into a flat and drank the blood of a young woman, who asserted that before he came through the window she had felt a deadly chill and become unable to move. The sceptical police took her off to hospital, where the Vampire was actually caught halfway up the creepers on the wall, on his way to have one more for the road. He ended up in a mental clinic. The victim and the police officer in the case ended up telling their story in convincing detail on German television.

  In Britain, many will chide the Romanians for not having a sense of humour, for spoiling a piece of harmless nonsense. But I think that they are basically in the right. Paunescu may be an ass; Romanian official history is itself burdened with a thick fringe of chauvinist garbage about ‘the glorious civilisation of the Thracian-Dacians’ and their King Decebal (sic). But the Dracula cult does raise real questions about stereotypes of other countries, and about the stereotype a country wants to present to itself.

  We need Dracula, because it means we don’t have to take Romania seriously or see the reality of Transylvania – one of the loveliest places in Europe, but also the site of Europe’s worst minority conflicts. We needed Idi Amin and the Emperor Bokassa, because they obscured the boring fact that not all black African States are grotesque tyrannies.

  We also need all the stories we can get about cretinous and brutal Russians. This explains the venomous attacks by the Spectator on Martin Walker, the Guardian correspondent in Moscow – ‘the authentic sound of tongue licking boot.’ Walker’s crime is to write about nice Russians who are neither Communists nor dissidents, and to observe that the KGB is often more open-minded than the Party (an elementary truth about most Communist regimes). But such talk makes it harder to kill Russians, when the moment comes. For imbeciles, this is spiritual treachery.

  But what about Britain’s own Draculas? Could it be that we, too, maintain displays of nonsense about ourselves and our past which draw flocks of foreigners, leaving them with an impression which includes both affection and derision? Yes, we do.

  Scotland’s Dracula appears annually in the Edinburgh Festival’s Military Tattoo, kilted and twirling a huge silver poker as he struts in front of the massed pipe bands playing ‘Scotland The Brave.’ To the coal miner from Midlothian, the unemployed youth from Easterhouse, this is about as remote from normal experience as a New Orleans funeral jazz band, but both know that this is the show that is expected from them.

  England has its pageantry, but its true Transylvania lies increasingly in its ‘stately homes.’ In November last year, the Prince and Princess of Wales opened in Washington the ‘Treasure Houses of Britain’ exhibition, a selection of the contents of these houses. Writing in this paper last week, Dr David Clark, Labour’s environmental spokesman, pointed out that the National Trust now owns 188 houses open to the public, with ‘scores more that the public never see.’ He protested that the Trust had become so preoccupied with acquiring and preserving historic houses that it had lost sight of its original purpose of preserving the countryside.

  Stone and brick last: wood and mud do not. This is a problem first of all for archaeologists. The first settlers in Britain are classified by their flint tools, although almost everything they used must have been wooden. Soon this becomes a social divide. The Romano-British establishment leaves brilliant mosaic pavements and huge foundations behind: the common people leave only postholes, almost imperceptible shadows in the soil where once a wooden pile rotted away.

  The contrast grows worse in more modern times. The English ‘heritage’ which is thought worthy of preservation becomes largely the palaces and manors of the rich. It is not just that visible history is one-sided. It is that the national effort of ‘preservation’ accentuates this one-sidedness. As Patrick Wright wrote the other day in New Socialist, ‘if we define history only in terms of its grandest remains, an acutely impoverished image will emerge.’

  He quotes the example of Castle Drogo in Devon, ‘the last castle in England.’ This gloomy place, built to the design of Edwin Lutyens, was completed in 1930. Its owner was Julius Drewe, magnate of Home & Colonial Stores, who was advised that the Norman-French version of ‘Drewe’ was ‘Drogo.’ The original name of the place, I believe, was Piddledown Common.

  If the National Trust had taken over Castle Drogo to make an example of how the English commercial classes yearned for the rural life-style of the old aristocracy, one might sympathise. But the result is merely to reinforce the impression that English history is the history of the wealthy and powerful.

  So an absurd process begins. The more England moves away from the world of the ‘stately homes,’ disabling their owners by taxation, the more these houses are flung on the mercies of the National Trust and distort the image of the ‘English heritage.’ In the end, the National Trust is driven to display the precise antithesis of modern times, implying that everything which is now built or done is a betrayal of tradition.

  This is a sick outcome. It would hardly be more unreal if the Duke and Duchess of Transylvania welcomed National Trust coach parties by emerging from coffins and advancing on them with protruding fangs. But, given that society through the Trust now keeps and maintains them in their old homes, they scarcely need more blood to suck. [1986

  Greater Privilege Hath No Man …

  The sense of privilege has aspects of virginity. Its loss, a surrender to experience, is irreversible. I’m talking here not about privilege as the hustings debated it during the election. The politicians meant advantage bought by wealth and defended by organised selfishness. I mean something else: the feeling of awe and gratitude over inherited superiority.

  When I was a child, I used to ponder the miracle which had located me in the fortunate classes of the strongest and most virtuous nation upon earth. The groan of the odd German raiding plane scarcely disturbed our nights at school; the trembling of earth and heaven as the American bomber streams passed overhead did not disturb our happy, wondering complacency. We munched our macaroni cheese and paid attention to an atlas that still seemed mostly red. The privilege of Britishness appeared absolute, though we sometimes asked each other if the grace of being born here and now was luck or destiny.

  I remember the first dent in that certainty. The headmaster used to gather senior boys, a docile little group in brown dressing-gowns, to sit on his study floor and listen to Mr Churchill on the wireless. But one day, he unexpectedly called the whole school together and said this: ‘You ought to know that the United States Navy is now larger than the Royal Navy. That is all.’

  So we were not, after all, the strongest. Gradually we resorted to a more evasive, snobbish definition of British privilege. The Americans had more ships, but ours were stronger. Their fighters were faster, but ours more agile, German armaments had technical perfection – Vorsprung durch Technik – but would always be outdone by British soldiers with wonky tanks and a sense of humour (how comic, this month, to see the same defensive contempt for German thoroughness in London reviews of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert at the Festival Hall!).

  In this, if we had known it, we were at the end of a long British tradition of what might be called ‘jingoism with a human face’: the habit of teaching war as a game in which the display of character was at least as important as its outcome in victory or defeat. The National Army Museum has opened an exhibition of the work of Lady Buder, the nineteenth-century ‘battle painter’ whose work was so much admired by Queen Victoria. Lady Buder was not, with exceptions, interested in painting martial triumph, or even sabre-flashing courage. ‘The Roll-Call’ shows guardsmen after a battle in the Crimea, wounded, shattered with exhaustion, scarcely able to drag themselves to attention, and yet – except for one who has just fallen dead -still upright and answering to their names.

  Courage in endurance, suffering rather than victory, were her favourite themes. Nobody at the time thought her work defeatist, or ‘anti-war.’ She was displaying war as an examinat
ion in selflessness and character, patriotism as an expression of moral virtue. It was held that the British would always pass that examination well. So they often do. But, in the real world, so do others – even the enemy.

  ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ In the war years, these words were endlessly repeated to us, mostly by people who were neither soldiers nor priests. It was not until long afterwards – no doubt through inattention at Bible classes – that I realised that this was part of the leave-taking of Jesus from his disciples. I had vaguely supposed that some past Prime Minister or Poet Laureate had made the pronouncement. It did not occur to me that this was not a British adage for the British.

  And then, one day, I saw a man do that. I was a National Service officer engaged in the so-called ‘Malayan Emergency,’ the guerrilla war launched by the Malayan Communist Party against continued colonial rule by Britain. We hunted them; they hunted us. We seldom collided. But the morning came when, as we lay in ambush among the rotting logs of a clearing, six Chinese guerrillas emerged from the jungle wall and came towards us.

  When the storm burst at them, the first three staggered and fell at once. The others bolted for the trees. Two made it; the third folded to his knees a few yards from sanctuary. I saw, and still see, his clothes tattering under the bullets. And then a man ran back from the jungle and, taking his comrade under the armpits, began to drag him towards safety.

  Within a few seconds, he too was dead. Afterwards, all was confusion: the sight of what we had done, the truck bumping up for the bodies, the rubber planter’s wife squealing with delight and wishing she’d brought her camera. This was, it seemed, success. But inside my head, imprisoned by the whistling deafness of gunfire, a voice repeated the old words about greater love. Now I had seen a man give his life for his friends. But I had helped to take that life, and he was not British but a Hokkienese boy, the son – as it turned out – of a village bicycle dealer somewhere in Pahang.