‘Seneca was a good man to think with. Ronnie recognised his territory as his own. Frank observed. Woodrow exploited. David depended absolutely on the place where, more than any other courtier, he needed the queen or king to be. Dogged adherence to the Poll Tax was the last error of her political life but it was important that she be replaced by another believer.’
‘David was certain that she herself could not be saved. Ronnie still disagreed. More importantly, David feared that he would never be even half accepted once she was gone. Ronnie, Frank and Woodrow knew that this was true.’
Miss R picks out a white card with wishes for a Happy New Year. She smiles a silent question.
‘As 1987 came to an end, David sent that out with a quote from Ecce Homo, the last book that Nietzsche wrote before he became insane. He described its recipients as Argonauts, the name that some of Margaret Thatcher’s earliest supporters had given themselves, the characters central to Seneca’s impossible “Medea, M’dear” play, pioneers in uncharted waters, journeying to a land beyond all known lands.’
‘He offered “Best wishes for 1988” from his latest libertarian base of protest, the Committee for a Free Britain. Frank showed me his copy at the bar of The Old Rose, tore it into four pieces and filled an ashtray.’
‘David needed a new court where conviction was again the currency, the more contrarian the better, a court where power was pulled to the centre and could be swayed and moved there. David wanted new days on which he would resign in the morning and be welcomed back as irreplaceable in the afternoon. He wanted the tools for swaying and moving to be those not used routinely before. He wanted novelty and the advantages that novelty brought.’
‘To play the Thatcher game had long required the player to be alert, to recognise rules and arguments not learnt at every school. Virtues were good and good intentions from good characters were virtues. A virtuous intent was a Stoic idea very attractive to David. He noted how Stoics liked to set the moral bar high, sometimes ridiculously high, in the confidence that a high aim missed through human frailty was better than a low aim successfully achieved.’
‘He did not want this spirit to die.’
Miss R has scribbled a large blue line and turns a page. ‘Next!’, she says, as though she is casting a role in a film.
She writes “RM” and a question mark. She has ceased to be helpful. She is as impatient as on her first day here. She kicks a pile of texts that tumble around her feet, challenging an answer to come directly from the books themselves so that she no longer has to listen to me.
I answer her as best I can.
‘Ronnie saw Seneca as a subtle source of philosophy, a studied transformer of obstacles into advantage, of enemies into allies, a man skilled in survival, from an ancient time which was, like the Thatcher time, still adjusting to concentration of power. Seneca was a pioneer writer of speeches for the source of that power, a political adviser who had to curb power’s recurring mania, an artist who saw politics as theatre, and image, his own image, as his greatest legacy.’
She rolls her eyes and turns her head, circling her chin across her neck as though she has been shot. She checks her recording machine.
‘Ronnie’s Seneca was not a thinker who brought solutions. He saw problems. He understood problems. He helped others see and think and understand. He saw the need for the artist in politics, the difficulty of the artist in politics, the absurdity of the politician who prefers to be an artist. He implemented compromises while calling for steadfastness to principle. His success was always underlined by doubts about what success really was. He stuck by a mad leader in hopeless attempts to make the madness less.’
‘Ronnie knew enough about Seneca to talk about him as an historian would. Woodrow yearned for I Claudius. Frank pronounced the virtue of making the bad in a state less bad, but he was practising Latin translation at the time, a code that allowed him to disavow anything he said. David began asking technical questions about Senecan drama for the small stage. He had plans for a “Tragedy of Margaret Thatcher” at Coldham Hall.’
‘Virtue was the word they all liked the best. Their time was a time of high moral tone, the tone that Margaret Thatcher bequeathed to Tony Blair, the heir under whose thoughtless stewardship it died.’
Miss R is startled. ‘Tony Blair?’ I have opened a new door into a time where she may not want to go. She continues the exercises for her neck. She reaches down to the floor. She starts filling a box of her own with books and papers I have said I no longer need. I am wondering if this might be the last time we talk.
She keeps a tight hold on her SENECA notebook, the SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT from Foyles. She pushes it towards me and puts on her ‘question face’, a lip and eyebrow different from her ‘quotation face’, different from her many expressions of impatience.
‘Yes, Seneca did try to do good. He was most of all a servant. He served the Emperor Nero before he took power. He helped Nero to present himself as a man of power. He helped him to outwit his enemies. He did not help him to kill his mother but he did help to clean up the mess afterwards. He was a big help.’
‘Yes, there was his self-serving justification of extreme wealth and serving revenge cold. He could be cruel. But he had to live his life under three autocrats, three unlikely heirs to the throne, the last leaving no one in his family alive to succeed legitimately at all. The appearance of stability was essential, its reality hardly being required, its images requiring to be constantly made and remade.’
‘Would Seneca have liked the Senecans?’
Miss R sometimes still surprises me with a different kind of question, the sort that seeks merely an opinion, unanswerable in any truthful way.
‘He would be pleased to be remembered by successors in his trade. He would not have minded charges of inconsistency, still less hypocrisy. Life at the top was difficult, difficult for a thinker most of all. He was a realist about politics. He tried to resign. He failed. He tried to make Nero a well remembered monarch and he failed. He would have been well satisfied to be any example at all. To leave an “exemplum vitae”, a lesson of his life, any lesson at all, was his last wish when, as a result of a plot that probably did not involve him, his pupil’s soldiers came to tell him it was his turn to die.’
Miss R continues her packing of plays and prose, noting titles and dates of publication. Each one of my Senecans had something in common with Seneca. Each was something of an artist in politics, a much better role than being a politician in the arts. They wrote stories. They passed on truth and lies.
August
Tell me. What are you doing, Seneca?
Are you abandoning the party?
—SENECA On Leisure
If you know what another should not tell,
then tell it not yourself.
—SENECA Phaedra
5.8.14
We are not long now for this place. A hot, grey day is keen to bid us all the more swiftly goodbye. Sweating clouds squat above the men in yellow who are doubling the thickness of the grey steel fence down below. It is as though they too, like Miss R and I, are back in the Thatcher years.
On the side of the plant the red steel gallery that once looked down on Advertising Sales is ever more sharply exposed. The cream atrium roof above it is spattered blacker. Soon, like a pleasure balloon or hang-glider, it must all soar away with the birds.
Yes, all the birds. When Miss R first mentioned that she’d seen budgerigars and parakeets in the churchyard I thought she was exaggerating from ill temper with the heat. She was not. From what I saw there this morning she was understating the invasion, underestimating the escape. Singly, and in groups, there are dozens of parrots in the trees above the graves, not all small, some of them of proper value to a zoo or pet-shop, I would guess, vivid examples of creatures who live wild even in captivity, and when free shout ‘pay attention, pay attention’ while not wanting any attention to be paid.
Only an expert (or more likely a fraud) would say precisely what types
of parrots they are. Psitticids, as Mr V used to say with learned realism, have ordered their parrot family very little over the millennia, sometimes troubling to differentiate their males from their females, their young from their old, their individuality over that of another, but mostly not. Birds of every sex and size wear the same black-and-yellow or white-and-blue, like families in their favourite football club strip. For once I wish that he was here, just to see them.
Or to hear them. From every group comes a uniform cracking of che-chek, che-chek, che-che or ruh-ruh-rah, killing the efforts of any bird with pretensions to sing its own song. A scarlet-rumped parakeet, one of Mr V’s favourites and one of those very few parrots that can hold a tune, would have no chance in competition against these black-fronted, green-bellied, ring-necked screamers.
There is no space for the birds that once flattered Roman lovers in Indian dialects and Greek. This is an urban mob in urban skies over urban trees. The higher shit on the lower. That is just the way it is in this air today full of noises.
Meanwhile on the ground below, the crows are wise and stately, ruffed and gowned, deep-thinking that with effort and patience they might become ravens of the Tower. They stare at the workmen and the workmen stare back – for hours on end if they wish.
Where is Lord Wyatt when I need him? Woodrow would have appreciated these hot and hopeless black wings. He would have had pink silk around his neck and pink champagne in his hand. He liked to see himself as something of an ornithologist. He always liked both to look at birds here and to bait protesters, baiting protesters perhaps the more so.
Even up here on the sixth floor there are green wings beating beyond the glass. The heat drives the parrots either to high windows or the shade of churchyard shrubs. The temperature is not what even a tropical bird is used to in England. It has, however, improved the mood for me and Miss R.
A call comes from Reception. She has returned. I was wondering if she would not. Four months after her first arrival, there is still space for misunderstandings. I know little about her work. I don’t ask her enough. I am too content to be asked. Sometimes I feel I am being interviewed by a pedant historian, at other times facing an analyst, a doctor, a casting agent, or a patient.
When she walks through the door I am assembling boxes for the books I used to care about the most, not those on the Seneca shelves but novels most of them. Miss R again offers to help. She is not dressed for removals. She is wearing a pink silk suit with short skirt and jacket. She looks as though she is on her way to the last garden party of the season. Instead she makes and stacks boxes.
‘You must have been mad to keep all these’, she says.
‘It was a long time ago.’
Together we skim across the paper surfaces, scraping dust onto our thumbs, finding evidence of me and against me, the price-tagged reminders, embarrassments now, of the three decades in which I suffered from a book-collecting disease.
She opens each title page and checks for dates.
She is looking for books from 1992, she says, ‘the next year on my list’, the year that John Major had his much alleged ‘breakdown’, Ian McEwan, Black Dogs, Proof, Mint (£275); Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, First Edition, Fine (£110); Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger, Edited Typescript, Slightly Foxed (£400).’
I remember well both the books and the ‘breakdown’. ‘This was a year when Margaret Thatcher’s successor won an election and lost his power just as she had done. It was becoming a pattern. The Booker Prize judges were as indecisive as the new Prime Minister. There was a tie between Unsworth and Ondaatje. Indecision has been banned at the Booker since then.’
‘My mother is mad about books’, she interrupts. ‘Hers are like useless antiques, like all that brown polished furniture you see in country shops that no one wants. Yours are not even all read. You must have been even madder.’
‘Mine was only ever a modest mania’ I protest. ‘I did not see myself as abnormal, no more abnormal than is a collector of stories about politicians.’
‘Yes, I kept books that I rarely read, never read. You are right about that. I kept catalogues of words and kept them dead in cabinets, their covers “mint”, which means perfect, “fine”, which means as perfect as any healthy eye can see, or “good”, which means good enough only for reading.’
‘No, it never struck me as odd. Reading is very bad for dead books. It reduces their value and risks bringing them to life. It was a while before I recognised that this might be a disease.’
‘Exactly when?’, she asks.
‘Only around the turn of the millennium, long after the time we’ve been talking about. By then I was both Editor of The Times and seriously ill. There was a question whether one anomalous condition would die before the patient died of another. By 2001 I had survived my peculiar case of cancer but the bibliomania died and stayed dead.’
‘All that is left now are some 10,000 novels divided between wherever I have shelves. I cannot pretend that I have read them all. No, that is not true. I can pretend. I have often pretended.’
Miss R picks up again her grey-black copy of Winter Garden.
‘And look at these too. As though to please Woodrow’s ghost, I have a full set of Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, from two editions of A Weekend With Claude (1967 and 1981) to According to Queeney (2001) whose beginning is a picture of a corpse, Dr Johnson’s, whose corporeal legacy, I see now, includes withered kidney testicles bubbling with cysts and a varicose spermatic vein.’’
‘I was supposed to have stopped collecting by 2001 but Beryl must have been an exception. I have even The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2011), her novel about the assassination of Robert Kennedy which she left unfinished when she died. Another thirty days for thirty pages, she said, and it would have been done.’
‘And look at this one.’
She is friendly today and she does look.
‘A full set of the Australian double Booker winner, Peter Carey, including the short stories (1981), published in aluminium foil, the first Faber cover, its publisher once said to me, in which you could cook a chicken. Somewhere there is Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998), about the mind of an editor of a newspaper.’
Miss R puts this one in her pile.
‘See. David Storey’s golden Saville (1976) sits six volumes away from the far superior blue-brown Flight Into Camden (1960), once one of my favourite of all novels. I used to think that I had, in a certain sense, flown into Camden myself, from Nottinghamshire via Essex, Oxford and Islington. But I would hate to think I liked the book for no better reason than that.’
She is patient with my collector’s enthusiasm, often so irritating to others, and surveys the different sections on the shelves. Between A-for-Atwood and B-for-Bainbridge, R-for-Rushdie and S-for-Storey are assorted other relics, a balsa car and radar dish, a nineteenth century guide to Rome, a set of postcards of parrots, all examined surprisingly slowly as she puts them away, nothing that anyone else would want to keep.
‘The books were a collection that I once thought might last. I afterwards ceased to think so. In the year 2000, when the doctors said that my last living months were close, I took some time to arrange each one in alphabetical order, each with an Ex Libris bookplate showing a seabird, a little tern, with a copy of The Times in its mouth.’
‘From a collector’s interest this was an act of lunacy, a systematic removal of “mint” status with every sticky label. Even for someone wanting to leave something behind it was a feeble gesture but, at the time, that was the only kind I could make. I still have the books. The only difference is that I have stopped adding to them. The bodily disease killed the mental obsession even as it let the body escape.’
‘So, you are still a collector?’, Miss R asks. ‘Everything is electronic. Even my mother has stopped now.’
‘No, but not because of what is electronic. It’s just the absence of a sickness. Look at these. Never again since the year 2000 have I formed the words Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1
st Edition, 1972, in paper-bag brown dust jacket; £1500) or The Rachel Papers (1st Edition, signed, 1973; slight tear to end papers; £350).’
‘While I was a Senecan I collected like a miniature emperor, ordering for the brief thrill of the order, not always even opening the parcels. Whenever I tired of politicians and their courts (and even more with why I cared about them) I would pick out some Ben Okri or a bit of Julian Barnes.’
‘I would maybe read a few pages, sometimes even finish a novel in a fierce defiance of dullness. Then suddenly the need was gone. Two years after I escaped cancer I left The Times too. I joined the TLS. My office was suddenly empty of politics and filled and refilled with what I wanted to be within it. And now it is time for a new office.’
‘Have these books been worth their space?’
‘See this. In his essay On Tranquillity of the Mind, Seneca offers to a friend his top tips for mental peace: disregard riches, control all passions and restrict one’s book list to a few classic texts. Whenever Seneca begins such an argument he is about to lay himself open to some of the most damning counter-charges later made against him, excessive wealth, sexual and other hypocrisies. But on book-collecting he is right.’
7.8.14
I thought maybe that Miss R had finished with the Senecans but she has not.
‘Tell me more about your mother’s books’, I ask, politely but clumsily, stumbling into where she does not want to go and easily keeps me at bay.
‘Are David Hart’s novels in the shelves?’, she asks. ‘Should I add them to my pile?’
She is most welcome to turn the pages of The Colonel (First Edition, good, 1983, £2) and Come To The Edge (First Edition, signed ‘with love’, mint, 1988, £1). She will be one of the few to have ever done so. Neither is a collector’s item to collectors of books.
‘In those Poll Tax months what happened to David Hart?’
The Senecans Page 17