Allegorizings

  Besides, our traditions are full of places that have sunk without trace, or are temporarily invisible. Castled islands irrevocably subside into lakes, remembered in a bubbly way only by subaqeous chimes of bells at midnight. Swathes of land are swallowed by the sea—if you are suitably constituted, like me, you may still distinctly detect them shining on the western horizon. Lord bless you, in proper Welsh weather it often feels as though the country is about to be submerged anyway, and it doesn’t discourage us—good for the character, we say.

  For of course the prospect of elimination has been with the Welsh nation for generations—if not extinction by drowning, then expungement by history. Removal from the rest of the United Kingdom, which the EU visionaries apparently foresee, is for many of us no threat at all. I myself often love to dream that we have somehow been geologically detached, and have drifted south-westward into the Irish Sea, to a location somewhere between Cornwall and Cork.

  FOR MANY ENGLISH people too the disappearance of Wales from the map would be no disaster, although to be fair to them they are generally thinking of political rather than physical maps. As the London Daily Telegraph observed in 1860, it was only “a small country, unfavourably situated, with an indifferent soil and inhabited by an unenterprising people.” The Prime Minister Herbert Asquith once said that he would rather go to hell than visit the western flank of the kingdom, and it is well known (though apocryphal, I fear) that the entry for Wales in the Encyclopaedia Britannica used to read simply: See England.

  It was not always a joke, and isn’t now. English policy was for centuries directed towards the absorption of Wales into England, and has repeatedly been nearly successful. The ancient Welsh culture, which is unique to itself, has been at one time or another almost overwhelmed by the sheer presence of its insatiable neighbour, the mightiest cuckoo in all the nests of history. Heirs to the English throne were impertinently dubbed Princes of Wales, when as often as not they seldom came near the place if they could help it. English bishops and clergymen swarmed over Welsh parishes. English landowners occupied huge estates, living ineffably English lives.

  Above all, the English tried to stifle that essential inspiration of Welshness, Cymraeg, the Welsh language. In churches, in schools, in courts of law, in every aspect of Government, the language was ignored, despised or where possible extinguished. Nothing is more bitterly remembered among Welsh patriots, to this day, than the humiliating “Welsh Not,” the sign that was hung around the neck of any pupil heard speaking the Welsh language in nineteenth-century Welsh schools.

  It is a miracle that it has never happened. The most determined of the Welsh remain just as Welsh still. The language remains indestructible. Few English people, I think, would now wish Wales to be struck from the map, and on the whole, as far as I can make out, few of them care much about Welsh independence from the United Kingdom. The worst attitude they display towards Welshness is one of frivolous contempt, expressed in adolescent humour by comedians and journalists: this is due, as we all know, to their national sense of inferiority, and is best dealt with by a proper noblesse oblige.

  I LAUGH, BUT that map may well come metaphorically true. Welsh patriots know that even now the Welsh identity is maintained only by a ceaseless resistance to every inroad from across Offa’s Dyke—assaults made immensely more powerful nowadays by England’s subservience to everything American. Anglo-America, or rather Amer-England, is the threat to their survival now, and as all its manifestations pour insidiously and inexorably across our defenceless frontier, Wales may yet disappear by sheer force of osmosis.

  There are people in the Welshest parts of Wales who are made so profoundly unhappy by the whittling away of their language, their values and their ways of life that they are driven to alcoholism, driven to nervous breakdown. It is not only incoming ideas and examples that are doing it to them: it is incoming people. They may be accused of racism, but as they see whole villages, whole districts virtually taken over by newcomers, with the best will in the world (and the Welsh are the kindest of people) they can only wish to God the English would stay at home in Wolverhampton or Basingstoke. “Welcome to Wales,” says the slogan of one resistance movement. “Enjoy your Stay, Then Go Away.”

  In Wales tourism, the badge or front of almost any country nowadays, is already very largely in the hands of English people, from the country pub to the allegedly posh hotel (not very posh, actually). Nearly every corner shop is gone. Half the post offices are in English hands. And the vast tide of English families means that even the schools, where the Welsh language is part of the curriculum, become more Amer-anglicized every term—for every incoming child who becomes Welsh, half a dozen Welsh-speaking children no longer speak Welsh in the playground. Every day of the year another few hundred Welsh houses of the Welsh countryside are sold to English people for prices that very few Welsh country people can afford, more often than not to become bridgeheads of cultural corrosion.

  FOR MYSELF, HALF Welsh, half English, I am certainly no racist, and I am only just a nationalist nowadays, because I no longer believe in nationality, or in the cursed Nation-State. I am however a culturalist, and I fear that peoples must achieve Statehood if they are to preserve their very selves. To my mind it would be a dreadful tragedy if small peoples like ours were in fact to disappear from the map—not the geographical map, which probably won’t happen for a million years or so, but the political map, which might happen anytime.

  But I dare say those cartographers of the Eurostat Political Compendium were subconsciously expressing a truth when they consigned Wales to oblivion. In a way ours is already an invisible country, or at least a hidden country. “As soon as we came into the pub,” say English raconteurs when they get home again, “those people started jabbering in Welsh.” Nonsense. They were jabbering in Welsh long before you came in, before your forebears even crossed the Severn, and believe me, they will be jabbering still when you are gone.

  For much of the Welsh culture is private. Countless poems are written, innumerable tales are told, songs are sung, customs honoured, jokes enjoyed, loyalties upheld, beyond the observation of visitors. Beneath its surface ours is a strong society still, commanding the love, no less, of hundreds of thousands of its people, whether they speak Welsh or not—for if they do not speak it on the tongue, most of them speak it in the instinct.

  So go ahead, you map-makers of Europe. Strike us off, let us drift off your margin. We know you mean no harm, and have probably just pressed the wrong button on your computer. Anyway, if you come to Wales now you will find it half-submerged already: by the end of the century it may all be flooded. Listen, though, whenever you come, listen hard, dream a bit, and down there in the waters you will hear those bubbly bells still ringing.

  Dreaming Dreams?

  THIS IS WHAT I dreamed one night. It was a short dream. I dreamed that Elizabeth said to me, casually over our coffee, “By the way, when you held the paper up before your face before supper, was it because you were picking your nose, and didn’t want me to see?”

  I had to admit that it was. “I have to admit that it was. It’s such an ugly thing to do, isn’t it, but sometimes I find it necessary. My nose gets so stuffed up. Do you suppose everyone does it? Does the Queen pick her nose when nobody’s looking?”

  “I’m quite sure she does,” Elizabeth said, and there the matter dropped.

  But it was a dream that was not entirely a dream. Was it a dream at all? Elizabeth tells me that we had never had such a conversation, but I have to admit that I had in fact picked my nose before supper, and had indeed hidden myself shamefaced behind the paper. It is such an ugly thing to do, isn’t it, though sometimes necessary even for the most fastidious. What has disturbed me about the little experience is its blending of sleep and wake, its accuracy so exact in some ways, so blurred in others, which has made me wonder where hallucination ended and memory began. Perhaps this overlap is true of most dreams: but I am beginning to wonder how much of it is true of life itself, and
if the peculiarly easy, frank, inessential, glancing but conclusive nature of our exchange over the coffee is what dying is going to be like.

  Why, I wonder, should this particular inconsequential dream lead me to such portentous speculation? Something out of childhood, you will doubtless say. It is true that I have one or two deeply ingrained phobias—for example, anything to do with candles, like candle-light dinners, or candle wax—which I can only explain to myself by supposing they were planted by some experience in infancy. And it is also true that one of my most vivid memories, not a dream at all, concerns picking one’s nose.

  WHENEVER I LIKE, if I close my eyes and think hard, I can feel myself to be back within the few square feet of space, part light, part shade, that lies beneath the archway of Tom Gate at Christ Church, Oxford. I have known it all my life, and whenever I please I can transport myself there. I’ll do it now. Sure enough, here I am in that shadowy archway, beneath the majestic tower, and even now its bell Great Tom reverberates around me, striking the hour. On my left is a fluttering notice-board, and the usual jumble of bikes. On the right a stately porter in a bowler hat sits in his glass-windowed cubicle—the very same man, I swear it, who sat there in the 1930s, except that now he may be black. Students, dons and tourists sporadically pass through, and their progress in and out of the shadow of old Tom is like crossing a frontier.

  For on one side the gate opens on to the tumultuous St. Aldate’s Street, where the tide of the world thunders by, but on the other it admits its visitors to Tom Quad, one of the most magnificent quadrangles in Europe, regally serene and private. As I stand there half-way between the two it is like sniffing two drinks, a Heineken, say, and a burgundy, whose bouquets seep in from opposite directions but never quite blend. They used to call this dichotomy Town and Gown, but nowadays it is a confrontation more subtle.

  “Can I help you?” says the porter in a meaningful way, seeing me loitering there, half in and half out of the shadows of the gate. Christ Church is a decidedly authoritarian establishment, founded in the first place by a cardinal and a king. But it is authority from the other side, the St. Aldate’s side, the interference of the great world, of politicians and bureaucrats, of tabloids and ideologues, that I associate most pungently with Tom Gate. When I was eight or nine years old I was passing through the arch one day when I felt a tickle on my cheek, and scratched it with my finger as I walked.

  At that moment there paraded down the pavement, walking in line ahead towards the police station along the street, half a dozen policemen, burly and helmeted in the manner of those days. They marched along, as they did then, in a semi-military way, and, with their antique helmets and their big boots, struck me as homely and rather comical. As they passed me, one of them spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t pick your nose,” he said.

  I wasn’t picking my nose! I was scratching my cheek! But I had no chance to remonstrate. The constables went clumping on, and seven decades later, as I meditate now, the resentment of that moment lives with me still. The unfairness of it! The arrogance! Perhaps it really is the emotion of that distant injustice, the latent dislike of authority that I feel to this day, which has obscurely linked the matter of nose-picking with the matter of mortality, via a short dream. Even if I had been picking my nose, what business was it of Mr. Plod? And why shouldn’t I pick my nose now if I want to, whoever is watching, in my own house, at my age?

  BUT I PROTEST too much. Shame enters my introspections. The habit of picking my nose only seized me, in fact, long years after that episode at Tom Gate, when a minor operation on my nose left it slightly disfunctional—unable to clear itself by the normal processes of blowing or, I imagine, natural dissolution. Ever since I have had to help it along by the unlovely process of picking it.

  It’s such an unlovely thing to do, isn’t it, but d’you suppose everyone does it? I expect so, but since I am obliged to do so more often than most people, I am profoundly ashamed of it. As a matter of fact it is my only guilty secret, this unlovely habit. There have been times when I have been detected in the act. Passing motorists have caught sight of me picking my nose at the wheel, or at least I have thought they have, and although I have hastily scratched my cheek instead, and tried to persuade myself that they could not really have seen me, and will never see me again, and probably don’t in the least care anyway, and are perhaps even gratified to find that somebody else does it too—even so, when they have flashed by, I am left ashamed of myself. It is such an ugly habit, isn’t it?

  I am not actually ashamed of shame, if you follow me. Shame can be a saving grace, and certainly a consolation. We feel better ourselves if we are ashamed of something we’ve done, and with luck a show of shame can reduce the sentence in the courtroom, where slower-witted justices can be persuaded that shame is synonymous with regret. “My client is truly ashamed, m’lud,” counsel often successfully pleads, and he would have to be a moron to add “but, m’lud, he doesn’t in the least regret it, and it would give him the greatest pleasure to do it again.” Shame and regret are certainly not the same things: je ne regrette rien, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins.

  Shame can operate as a prophylactic, too. I first heard the word “prophylactic” when, with my batch of innocent recruits to the wartime British Army, I was given a welcoming lecture about the pitfalls of sex. I confused the word in my mind with the little scrolls of sacred texts, phylacteries, that used to be carried in leather pouches around the foreheads of rabbis, until my cruder comrades made songs and jokes out of it, and it was years before I realized that it had nothing specifically sexual or Jewish about it, but merely meant a technique of preventive medicine.

  The prophylaxis of shame can prevent bad behaviour before it happens. Often enough, like many another coward, I have been brave because I am ashamed to be frightened—or ashamed to look frightened perhaps, an even less admirable motive. Perhaps it’s true of everyone. Buzz Aldrin, when he landed on the moon, may have been ashamed to look frightened on the Houston TV screens (but it would have been hard to judge, wouldn’t it, through the little window of his helmet). I notice that shame, though it prevents me from picking my nose in public, does not invariably bring out my better self when I am all alone.

  BUT HERE’S A thought. Perhaps I was picking my nose that day, when the policemen walked past Tom Gate! I remember with absolute clarity that I was only scratching my cheek, but what if I wasn’t? It has been a dogma of my life that truth and imagination are not simply interchangeable but are often one and the same. Something imagined is as real, to my mind, as something one can touch or eat. A fanciful fear is as alarming as a genuine one, a love conceived as glorious as a love achieved. A virtual reality may only be in one’s own mind, imperceptible to anyone else, but why is it any the less true for that? Music exists before its composer writes it down.

  It is easy for writers, even writers of non-fiction, to think like this. Every sentence we create we have created from nothing, and made real, and every situation has been touched up in our memory. For years I remembered clearly how the roofs of Sydney Opera House hung like sails over the harbour when I first visited the city, until it was drawn to my attention that the Opera House hadn’t been built then. Every place I ever wrote about became more and more my own interpretation of it, more and more an aspect of myself, until in the end I determined that I was the city of Trieste, and Trieste was me, and decided it was time for me to give up.

  I realized then that my dreams and my realities were merging. Could it be that much of what I had experienced in life I had not really experienced at all, except in my imagination? This was not at all an unpleasant conjecture—oddly soothing in fact, and it is what made me think that my dream about picking my nose, my shame about it, my secrecy, my denial, my realization that half was a dream and half wasn’t, the easy resolution of the conundrum, the sensation that it didn’t much matter anyway—all made me think that such a cloudy transition from one condition to another, or vice versa, might be
what death will be like. If this essay is a muddle too, with its inconsequential repetitions—not at all my waking style—that is because I have allowed it to float along with the stream of instinct, among the weeds and little whirlpools, like Ophelia.

  I always used to think that the most frightening words in literature were Hamlet’s “perchance to dream”—

  To die—to sleep.

  To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub,

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . . .

  For years I laughed at Ivor Novello, who used the phrase as the title of a frothy operetta. But now I think the dreams of death may turn out to be much like my dream of life, mysteries gradually dispersing, shames forgotten, truth and fancy reconciled, drifting downstream through the weeds and the reeds—lazily, as Lord Salisbury once said of British foreign policy, “and only occasionally putting out a boat-hook to avoid a collision.”

  O Manhattan!

  “WHAT’S NEW?” I ingratiatingly asked the cab driver who picked me up at JFK. I had arrived to celebrate my fifty-odd years of acquaintance with Manhattan, and was making the conventional opening ploy. Answer, however, came there none. Either the driver spoke only Ruthenian, or he couldn’t hear me above the rattle of his vehicle. I tried again. “How are things?” I said in my most fulsome Transatlantic, and this time he replied.

  “Traffic is lousy in the tunnel, we take Queensboro and 59th, OK? You just sit back comfortable, right?”