The Senecans

by Peter Stothard

  David was also knowledgeable about sixteenth century Italian sex manuals, the woodcuts and prints known as I Modi that were destroyed in their original form by the Vatican but survive in variously disputed copies. He could recite some of their accompanying sonnets. He admired their writer, the courtier and pioneer propagandist, Pietro Aretino. He used the words cazzo and culo for cunt and arse. He was always going on about the right positions, on tax reform and strategic defence but I Modi were The Positions that he liked the most, he said. He turned to sex whenever the talk in our Latin lessons of 1987 turned to an election topic on which he did not have a position. Wapping to him meant The Times and Jack the Ripper. Sex was his “default”.

  Miss R sees a Position on the floor and frowns. It is a grey image of fornication, not one of a too outrageous kind. But I forget that in a woman of her age a liberal tolerance and an acute sensitivity to the appropriate sit unpredictably side by side.

  Some of I Modi show vigorous sex from the front, some from behind, positions with one, two, three or four feet on the floor, ‘sixteen pleasures’ in all. They are sometimes known as ‘Shakespeare’s pornography’, notable more for the muscled equality between the sexes than for erotic charge, nothing that would shock or arouse in the internet age. Miss R seems unhappy at these ‘buttocks of the night’ nonetheless.

  ‘Were these David Hart’s own copies?, she asks.

  ‘Copies of his copies’, I say.

  ‘David liked to tell the story of their original creator, Giulio Romano, who avoided Papal persecution when his engravers did not and is the only contemporary artist named in a play by Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale. He said he liked the later versions of The Positions best, the ones in which the ‘cocks and cunts’ belong to Greeks and Romans, gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, Mars and Venus, Antony and Cleopatra, false names designed to deceive the censors. While Woodrow’s introduction to the court of Nero came from Robert Graves, Ronnie’s from King’s College, Cambridge and Frank’s from a Wapping skip, David’s came from the image of Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, taking up a not especially adventurous position in a Roman brothel.’

  Miss R ensures that the Position is hidden before cupping her ear that I should continue.

  ‘David loved to claim expertise. He “offered” obscure types of nuclear technology, Middle East security, polling statistics, property tax reform, Moscow bank accounts, most of which, said Ronnie, were hardly known to him at all.’

  ‘Ronnie did concede sometimes when David made a sound literary point, about D. H. Lawrence’s admiration for Petronius on one unlikely occasion. David had a fierce dislike of Lord Byron, which Ronnie shared, and for any other “subversive of the Left” wearing the label of the Romantics. An early appeal of the classics for David was that in many books it is deemed the Romantics’ foe.’

  ‘Ronnie accepted, too, David’s knowledge of I Modi, the imminent publication of a first English edition, the secret ownership of a single surviving sixteenth century copy, while adding in his haughtiest manner that the “insatiable prostitute” calumny against Messalina was false propaganda from Nero’s mother, her successor in the imperial bed. He asked questions about The Winter’s Tale designed to show that David, while knowing one abstruse fact about the play, had probably not seen or read it.’

  ‘Woodrow Wyatt, walking second in line today, saw David hardly more favourably. Woodrow was quietly jealous of libertines and liked only the rich who, in his view, deserved to be rich, a group that did not include the sometime bankrupt son (yes, that was true enough) of a Jewish banker, a phrase he was not afraid to use in 1986.’

  ‘Seneca was harsh on bankrupts, those who deliberately did not return what they had taken. That was a Roman position to which Woodrow would from time to time return. He thought that David’s mysterious influence with Margaret was absolutely to be resisted in an election when she was beset by far too many pedlars of novelty.’

  David’s face is wholly shrouded in cloud. Miss R looks blankly into the same cloud.

  ‘Woodrow used to joke that David looked like Lord Lucan, one of Woodrow’s aristocratic acquaintances, who disappeared from Belgravia in 1974 leaving behind a dead nanny. He joked about this resemblance so often that he seemed to be trying to make it more than a joke. Ronnie, whom David called Rondino, used to reply that David was no more like Lord Lucan than he was like the poet, Lucan, Seneca’s nephew.’

  Miss R calls a halt. ‘Two Lucans?’

  ‘The ancient Lucan was the greatest writer of Latin epic after Virgil. Like his uncle he was implicated in a plot against Nero and forced to commit suicide, declaiming his own works as he died. But Woodrow wanted nothing of Lucius Annaeus Lucanus. One Roman writer at a time, he thought, was quite enough.’

  Frank, the backmarker but walking now the fastest, was the Senecan who was the most suspicious of David. He had good reasons, he said. He did not elaborate what these suspicions were, preferring to be strictly factual except when he was writing his sketches.

  ‘To Frank, David was mostly as David saw himself, an avant-garde film producer, property speculator, seigneur of country estates and writer of various fictions; but also Mrs Thatcher’s unacknowledged ruffian, insecure conspirator, alert conspiracist, agent, spy, man of enormous wealth that he justified for the public good, wordsmith and a monger of mashed ideas. All of this was true.’

  Woodrow stumbles and raises his hand like an umbrella to steady his fall. He is squashed flat against the black walls by wind but, despite the swirling smoke, he seems today the man most comfortable in his ghost walk to The Old Rose.

  ‘Woodrow was always the Senecan most comfortable in Wapping, the man without whom the plant might never have produced a newspaper, the Labour MP turned Thatcher-loving lord, whose links to the anti-communist Electricians Union were vital in allowing the plant to produce newspapers without printers.’

  ‘Woodrow was the most practical about the threats from “the Left”. In the late 1980s, once the coal miners were conquered, that meant most of all the dismantling of trade union controls over the press. He was suspicious of us all as dilettantes just as we were suspicious of him.’

  After ten minutes all four figures have turned the corner towards the Highway and our unlikely place of learning. Miss R watches me watch the scene.

  She bites her lip. I feel anxious. It is not easy separating the then from the now when the then is obscured by time and the now by dust and thistledown.

  The men on her list are sketched in barely more detail than an alphabet, expressionless today in the dusty distance except in soft charcoal outlines, Hart as a bulky letter H, feet splayed and grounded as though for a fight, Millar as willowy letter T, a tall man taking inspiration from the upper air, Wyatt as a lop-sided L-shape, sniffing the slightest breeze, Johnson, a slim and compact J. But there is no doubt to me who they are.

  10. 7.14

  ‘H was for Hart, not because it was his initial but because he looked like an H. T was for Millar, L for Wyatt, J for Johnson. This alphabet trick was one I learnt early from Ronnie. It was a variety of abstraction, an everyday discipline of his art. Look at that one, he used to say as we sat in my office. His target could be anyone, a sub-editor, a sportsman, a lawyer, a man filling the drinks machine, almost always a man. What letter is he, an O, a P, a Q, an X?’

  ‘We had a vantage point in the Rum Store roof, a gallery mocked as “the Mezzanine” by those who worked on the news desk below. From there Ronnie could see almost as far as the distant Sports department (“surprisingly full of O and B, don’t you think?”) and over the partition walls to Fashion and Arts (“lovely I and T”). One day we visited the cellars where every copy of The Times since 1785 was bound and caged, where pale librarians (“barely semi-colons”) kept our cuttings in buff envelopes and readied us for the digital age by issuing books with no insistence on return. There was everywhere less alphabetical order than he expected.’

  ‘Yes, Miss R, Ronnie was
in every possible way a man of letters. In his youth he was grateful to a family whom he called the Ks who had helped him to Cambridge from his birthplace in Reading (“a town in southern England that, if conceivably possible, one should try not be born in”). I told him about my Vs.’

  ‘We had a mutual friend called Mr G who lived on the Isle of Dogs.

  It’s out there under the farthest cloud to the right, the one shaped like a submarine’.

  ‘G had also migrated from Heath to Thatcher in search of continuing influence. My first visits east with Ronnie then were to G’s house, flat-fronted yellow brick beside swirling water, where around a circular table of Chinese food the ambitious men of the Tory Left, Messrs M and B and F, traded tactics for their journeys to the Right.’

  ‘There was much tasting of wines to lend legitimacy to these evenings of plot. Ronnie’s favourite party piece was about letters, letters as people, letters excluded from names as courtiers fear exclusion from court, a recitation of some feeble scraps by Alexander Pope, lines from a comic poem about the characters of the alphabet excluded from the name of the fashionable playwright, Thomas D’Urfey. It was absurd but, once it had been explained to her, he told the munchers of sweet-and-sour, it made Mrs Thatcher laugh.’

  Miss R does not laugh.

  Pope’s excluded courtiers were the P and the C. They were characters both alphabetic and human. They fear to be ignored. They want to be close to their master, to be part of him. They profane and protest. I can still remember the lines even though I can’t roll them out like Ronnie did, making his points to his Margaret with all his theatrical authority.

  P protested, puff’d and swore,

  He’d not be served so like a Beast;

  He was a piece of EmPeror,

  And made up half a PoPe at least.

  C vow’d, he’d frankly have releas’d

  His double share in Caesar Caius,

  For only one in Tom Durfeius.

  And so on. I have to keep the lines silent in my head this morning. Miss R is in no mood to be amused. Are they funny? I thought so at the time. Pope was a bit of a Senecan himself and when he saw discord around him wrote that it was merely a failure to see the secret harmony. Was that a survival strategy at court or the sound of a man burying his head in the sand?

  14.7.14

  Today it is Miss R who is dressed for a funeral, long skirt, too long, almost trailing on the ground, black shoes, stockings, no nail varnish, black sweater and jet stone around her neck. I ask her.

  ‘I hope it’s not someone you were close to.’

  ‘Now for the Latin lessons’, she says, ignoring me as though I had made what was once known as ‘a personal remark’.

  ‘Surely all that Senecan study was just another cover for your plots?’ In church she would be like a mourner disbelieving the encomium to a departed crook.

  ‘No. I can see how our Latin lessons might seem. In the summer of 1987 there were many Tory plots, and many journalists on the trail of them, all more or less cleverly concealed. But the main point of our meetings at The Old Rose was to study Latin. This was not a cover story.’

  ‘Who suggested the lessons first?’

  ‘The class was Frank’s idea. He and I had good times and bad times but he has to get the credit for that.’

  ‘We were never close in the way that Ronnie and I, or even David and I, were close. We shared a space on the Mezzanine. We had sometimes shared assignments too. We were together on the morning after the Brighton Bomb, I with a hangover, he writing with high style of that “great and terrible thing”, of silk pyjamas on the sea front and the bright moon in the dark blue sky.’

  Frank Johnson

  ‘More often we were in different places. We were very different kinds of journalists, more different than in some respects either of us wanted to be.’

  ‘As others occasionally pointed out, we shared a similar background in the lower reaches of the English class structure, I from my Essex housing estate, he from the London East End, Shoreditch, not far from here. But this did not make cooperation any easier. The biggest difference was that I had taken the then available “direct grant school” route from Essex to Oxford, a free education among fee-payers for the academic poor, and he had failed his Eleven Plus exam and missed university altogether.’

  ‘He was not proud of his Minus Eleven, as he called it, but he had proudly missed what he learnt to see as the ubiquitous Whiggism of academe. He had worked his way through newspapers from the messengers’ floor, speculating about which senior women journalists he would most like to fuck, teaching himself, and being taught later by the then Tory intellectuals of the Daily Telegraph. He wanted the Latin that he thought they all had.’

  ‘Frank liked to argue, as much as possible from first principles or from classic texts, ideally those that were somewhat obscure. He first mentioned his lack of Latin to me when talking about one of his favourite history books, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, written in the 1850s by the American anglophile, John Motley, full of aphorisms, drama and a deep suspicion of Catholics. Frank wanted to read for himself the language of Cicero and Tacitus that had kept the brave tribes of north Europe, the Batavi and the Nervii, “after almost twenty centuries still fresh and familiar in our minds”.’

  ‘I knew nothing of Motley then and little now, an ignorance that in his mind helped to counter my Latin advantage. His head was full of the failings of Charles the Simple and Philip the Good, names with clear meanings, generalisations of the sort not now allowed, “the German who was as loyal as the Celt was dissolute”, the funerals of the Gauls that were “pompous” while the Germans stood “unambitious at the grave”.’

  ‘Free Hollanders were good, Tyrannical Spaniards were bad. This was the style and certainty that Frank, as describer and commentator, appreciated most. The Dutch Republic was unfashionable, studied by few of his friends, a field on which he was safe from surprise attacks. He saw in Motley a dramatist of the kind that in miniature he had become.’

  ‘But he still wanted Latin. When he decided to begin the lessons he had missed by missing university, he thought, reluctantly and only for convenience, that I might be the one to teach him. He wanted classics for wisdom – but also for adornment, for its help in creating the illusion of what was wise, one of the commonest of all uses of classics in those corridors where the powerful prowl, primp and preen. He wanted the Latin of the more learned characters in his parliamentary cast.’

  ‘It was Frank who first found our textbooks. It was he and I, in fact, who saved the entire Times classical library from fire and shredder. We rescued every book from a skip just like the one that is now there again, taking away dust and iron and plaster. It was our first joint enterprise. We sweated side by side in that loading-bay. Neither of us could resist the lure of the Loebs, reds and greens, those useful student texts with English on one side and the ancient language on the other, valuable both to those who read Latin and those who would like to and do not.’

  ‘That was a triumphant day, probably the best time we ever spent together. Against the yellow of the skip the red Latin books looked like tomato ketchup on the yolk of eggs, the green Greeks like salad on mayonnaise. Geer’s Diodorus, Watts’s Pro Archia, Sir James Frazer’s Fasti, Warmington’s Laws of the XII Tables and, the one that came to matter most, Seneca’s De Beneficiis, On Giving and Getting, as he elegantly called it, translated by John W Basore, all of them once considered essential to the Times library, but in the new era deemed not even a luxury.’.

  ‘Frank and I saved those texts that day like antiquarians at the dissolution of a monastery. As soon as he could read a Latin sentence, and I encouraged him that this need not take long, he wanted to begin with Cicero. He knew already of the Pro Archia, now available to us in the 1923 Times ex-library copy, Cicero’s struggle to win citizenship for his poetry teacher Archias. This was a founding document for the history of the Renaissance, he insisted, daring me to challenge him. For the history of Cordo
ba and of flatterers too, I might have said but didn’t. Cordoba was not then so important in my mind and I tried not to enter unnecessary contests with Frank.’

  ‘So yes, Miss R, Frank genuinely wanted to begin his assault on accusatives and the pluperfect. He genuinely wanted to move his Cicero in English to a Cicero in Latin, from the right-hand page of N. H. Watts’s edition to the left. And I was the one to help him.’

  ‘But in the meantime we had troubles. His other reason for urging me to a petrol-polluted pub in the spring and summer of 1987 was ]political, to stress my responsibility (not yet being met) to help Mrs Thatcher’s re-election. He did not like the necessity of this either.’

  ‘Nothing with Frank was ever easy except his appearance, plain, handsome, saturnine, self-consciously without show. It was only by unfortunate accident that we were on the same Mezzanine at the same newspaper. Life would have been much quieter at The Times in Mrs Thatcher’s third and most fraught election campaign if Frank had remained a writer, outside the office and responsible to someone else. But his position had turned into that of an editor and suddenly he was responsible to me.’

  ‘How exactly?’ She is twisting her jet beads as though in genuine mourning.

  ‘All newspapers liked to mount “talent raids”. Frank was a Telegraph man at heart. Mr Black from Canada had by this time completed his skyline ambition to buy the Daily Telegraph, our main commercial rival and the traditional voice of Tory England. Frank’s old home and school wanted him back.’

  ‘My Latin pupil was made easily insecure by stories elsewhere in the press, often and transparently in the Daily Telegraph itself, that his Times bosses were about to be fired. On this latest occasion he had been offered a ‘safe haven’, as he described it, as editor of the Telegraph’s comment and leader pages. He would have accepted had not, against my advice, The Times made him the offer of exactly the same job with us – and for more money.’