Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  The Hero

  THANK GOD NELSON died at Trafalgar! Can’t you imagine the bathos of the hero in his old age, absurdly vain, increasingly testy and hypochondriac, drinking too much, plastered all over with decorations, forever trying to avoid poor Lucy Nelson and recalling old victories in the arms of his grotesquely obese and fulsome mistress Emma Hamilton?

  But then again, thank God for Emma! If there were more Emmas, as the Admiral said himself, there would be more Nelsons, and certainly without her the most operatic of England’s national romances (at a Verdian rather than a Wagnerian level) would hardly be a romance at all—just the career of a fighting admiral whose principal merit, so Lord St. Vincent thought, was mere animal courage, and whose lovelife followed a familiar naval pattern of humdrum wedlock punctuated by distant and transient infatuations.

  Without Emma’s husband Sir William, too, the tale would lose much of its charm. What a thoroughly agreeable old cuckold he was, and what an artistically important part he played in the ménage à trios! He was more than just a foil, but a dramatic mirror to the passions of the spectacle, for he loved Emma almost as besottedly as Nelson did, and made the perfect Dr. Watson to Nelson’s Sherlock—or, one might perversely say, a Horatio to his Hamlet.

  And what would the grand opera be without its chorus? Behind the virtuoso stood his Band of Brothers, worthy understudies one and all, steady bald Hardy, impetuous Berry (“Here comes that damned fool Berry! Now we shall have a battle!”), Foley always in the van, Beatty the gentlest of surgeons, “good dear little Parker”—and behind them again the rough, bluff, cosmopolitan company of seamen, half of them distinctly reluctant recruits to the Royal Navy, who threw themselves into Nelson’s service with a devotion worthy of football crowds or rock fans, and “cried like wenches” when he died.

  The real allure of the scenario lies in its theatrical antithesis between life at sea and life ashore. What a perfect ass the Saviour of Europe could be, when he was away from his ships! How preposterously he swaggered around with his stars and his medals and his sashes and his scarlet pelisse and the chelengk on his cocked hat, given him by the Sultan of Turkey, whose diamond centre revolved when you wound it up! And what kind of a hero was it who, receiving a letter from the loving wife he had so shamelessly deserted, sent it back it to her with the despicable inscription “Opened in error. Returned unread.” Surely, one wonders, no amount of animal courage, no number of annhilations, could make up for Nelson’s failings?

  But the glorious denouement of the performance does it. The Duke of Wellington, at his only meeting with Horatio, thought at first what a coxcomb and charlatan he was, only to discover that after a time his conversation became of matchless interest. Never had he known, recalled the Duke, such a complete metamorphosis; and never did caterpillar mutate more marvellously into butterfly than when Nelson the vainglorious landsman turned into Nelson at sea, and set sail for Trafalgar.

  Of course we always know it’s coming: the swooning farewells from Emma, the adoring crowds on the promenade at Southsea, the dinners with the captains off Cadiz, the touching small kindnesses to midshipmen and sailors, the last letters, the noble prayer before battle, the fatal blaze of decorations on the quarterdeck, the heart-broken officers around the cockpit, Hardy himself, having kissed Nelson goodbye at the admiral’s command, kissing him again to show that he meant it. . . .

  However often this libretto is worked in the end Nelson always gets us cheering in the aisles. One aria in particular sticks in my own mind, and perhaps reaches the truth about his character. He was, wrote Victory’s chaplain Alexander Scott, “the greatest and most simple of men—one of the nicest and most innocent . . . an affectionate, fascinating little fellow.”

  He remains, I suppose, nearly everyone’s romantic ideal of that lost paragon, the true-born Englishman, so brave, so fallible, so bashed about by war, so heedless of precedent or convention, so gloriously sure of himself. Can you imagine him living in our own day, obliged to serve out his time as second in command to some dullard born-again acronym?

  Sneezing

  TO MOST BODILY evacuations there is, I think, a certain pleasure, if only of relief. I choose my words delicately, but you will know what I mean. Getting rid of fluids or substances which are surplus to our requirements, or have fulfilled their purposes, is generally a satisfying process—as a celebrated Himalayan climber of my acquaintance put it to me long ago, buttoning up his trousers as he emerged from a nearby gully, there’s nothing like a good shit.

  Actually, though, in my opinion there is nothing like a good sneeze. Among all these clearances, the sneeze stands alone. Even its English name owes its derivation, I gather from the Oxford Dictionary, to a mishearing—it used to be fneeze. I surmise that people understandably didn’t believe there was such a word, and gave it an opening s instead. Even in its reformed version it was quite unlike anything else, and so it has always remained a bit of a laugh in itself, vaguely representing the noise a sneeze makes.

  In many languages the word for sneezing really is more or less onomatopoeic, which adds to its innate suggestion of comedy. The Serbo-Croats call it kijati, the Hungarians tüsszant, the Welsh tisian, the Fijians suru and the Italians starnutare. I don’t know how all these various verbs conjugate, but I suspect that in any of their languages we might understand that the speaker was talking about sneezing. Even the few hundred people who still speak the Cornish language might just make themselves understood when they apologize for strewy. Even the Hawaiian kihe must sound, I would imagine, rather like atishoo.

  For in the common view, at least in the English-sneezing world, atishoo is how a sneeze transliterated appears, and I often find that when I sneeze it does sound exactly like that, as if I am acting in amateur dramatics. The sound of a sneeze can be downright majestic, especially if it is one of those convulsions that take a long time to reach fulfilment, keeping everyone in suspense, not least the sneezer, until the moment of explosion arrives. But in general most of us, I suspect, find it rather funny. It goes with red noses and seaside postcard humour. It is a Falstaffian evacuation. There was a time when writers of farce could with impunity make fun of stuttering. No longer, and I have a feeling sneezing may go the same way. Like passing wind, we cannot always help it, but I suspect social custom will make it less and less permissible. It used, after all, to be a stock constituent of music-hall comedy: the stout florid man flourishing his enormous spotted handkerchief across his face in order to catch the effluence of a gigantic sneeze. I have not seen it for years, though—perhaps it went the way of music-halls themselves—and that may be a portent for sneezing itself.

  For I fear the sneeze is dated. It is like whistling, or the yo-yo. We seldom see it on the stage nowadays. We seldom hear a frank atishoo on the subway. That fat man with the spotted handkerchief seems to be extinct. We have tolerated it because it makes us laugh, but soon it will be politically incorrect to make jokes about it, and socially unacceptable even as an involuntary method of nasal hygiene. So, like the fart, it will wither away in polite society, fainter and fainter in the public memory, to be replaced by evacuative symptoms altogether more discreet, more elegant, and less likely to raise horse-laughs in the stalls.

  A Night at the Seaside

  A NIGHT AT the opera at Llandudno, on the holiday coast of north Wales! The idea might make Groucho smile, but for most of the world it probably sounds a contradiction in terms, like caviare at Coney Island, say. For most of the world the name of Llandudno goes with dated seaside pleasures, donkeys on the beach, pier-head concert parties, and men with handkerchiefs knotted over their heads, together with the odd party political conference and steamer trips to the Isle of Man.

  But I went there once to hear the Welsh National Opera sing Rigoletto, and found that Llandudno on the right day can be just Verdi’s style.

  IN THE FIRST place its setting is almost operatically beautiful. To my mind its topography makes it one of the most surpassingly lovely coastal resorts
in Europe, on a par with Opatija on the Adriatic, which was formerly Abbazia, and where the patricians of old Vienna used to flock for their summer holidays. Mountains in a distant ring behind it, a wide bay in front, a high bare hill rising in the very centre of the place, with a tea-garden half-way up and a shimmer of light off the sea—time and again on my visit I was reminded of the garden villas of Opatija, clustering at the water’s edge for the gratification of dukes.

  Architecturally, too, Llandudno is rather like a stage-set, relatively untouched by modernist notions of theatrical design. The waterfront retains a classic Victorian unity. Its two parallel streets around the bay were built in the mid-nineteenth century more or less at a go, obeying strict precepts of scale and proportion, and they have been miraculously preserved ever since, hotel after hotel along the promenade, shop after shop behind, with glass canopies over their sidewalks. The world expects tatty boarding-houses and run-down once posh hotels, but in fact the whole ensemble is bright with new paint, and looks indeed as though it might all be whisked away on a revolving stage, to make way for Act Two.

  For Llandudno’s Act One, like Opatija’s, was rather grand, and has left its traces to this day. The ancient Mostyn family were its chief patrons as a commercial venture, and gave the project social cachet from the start. It never caught up with Brighton, so close to the English metropolis, but still it attracted diverse swells who have never been forgotten, at least in publicity brochures. Princes and emperors came here, as they went to Abbazia, and there was a time when Llandudno boasted more businesses By Appointment to Royalty than anywhere else in Britain except London. One such visiting swell was Queen Elizabeth of Romania, whose judgement of the town as a beautiful haven of peace, translated into Welsh, promptly became the town’s official motto.

  Think of it! Wartski’s the Llandudno jewellers, 93 Mostyn Street, bought most of the Czar’s jewelry when the Bolsheviks sold it! John Jones along the road supplied Royal Sandringham Sausages to Queen Victoria! Queen Rambai Barmi of Siam lived at the Imperial Hotel until, during World War II, she had to make way for requisitioners of the Inland Revenue! And in a house called Nantyglyn, 59 Church Walks, for years there resided the missing last staves of Mozart’s Rondo in A Major (K. 386), whose pages had been scattered across Europe since 1791.

  Sufficiently operatic? But the second act is still to come.

  IT WAS THE railway, in the long run, that turned the reputation of Llandudno into honky-tonk. It meant that, just as Brighton became a kind of suburb of London, this town was half-annexed to Liverpool and Manchester. The railway brought the chorus in.

  The holiday crowds of Llandudno are much like British holiday crowds anywhere else. They contain their fair share of the obese, the yobbish and the raucous. The same thump of rock music blares from passing cars with shirtless youths in them. Countless caravans park in their field around the bay, and hundreds of tourist coaches roll in from Merseyside. The outdoor cafés proliferate with beers, ice-creams and tattoos. If there are no men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads, there are hundreds in baseball caps.

  But there is a difference in Llandudno. There is an unexpected wistfulness to its crowds, and this is because so many of its holiday-makers are old. It is a resort of the elderly. Age takes the edge off the fun of it, and makes the town only intermittently boisterous, with a tinge of the sedate, the regretful, even the tragic perhaps. So many old couples, arm in arm along the promenade—so many elderly folk being helped out of coaches—such a prevalent glint of false teeth and anxiety about lost luggage!

  “Keep going, chief!” shouts the young blood cheerfully, stepping from his deafeningly souped-up Mini as a pensioner hobbles by: but is he expressing kindness or mockery? The motley Llandudno chorus is rich in suggestion, ambiguity and anomaly, as an opera ought to be.

  IT WAS AN idyllic evening for Rigoletto. The theatre was full of happy enthusiasts. The performance seemed to me quite perfect. In the interval helpful neighbours taught me how to extract my plastic spoon out of the ice-cream container, and at the end we spilled out into a twilight as headily romantic as Verdi could have wished, or La Scala or the Met could have provided.

  It was very quiet out there—hardly a sound of traffic. Around the wide bay strings of light were shining. Along the promenade people strolled in twos and threes. The pier was a gentle blaze of illumination, and beyond it part of the bare hill was floodlit. There was a murmur of conversation in the air, and a strong suggestion of melody.

  A night at the opera! A night in Llandudno! I had a Guinness and a prawn sandwich, and went to bed with “La Donna è Mobile” in my head, interpersed with “Oh, I Do Like to Be beside the Seaside.”

  Four

  As gods and heroes might be

  The Cruise of the Geriatrica

  IT WAS FOR convalescent reasons that I lately undertook a resolutely up-market Mediterranean cruise, with a Greek classical bias, and since I thought of such a cruise generically as being a kind of packaged ageing process, at first I decided for literary purposes to rename our ship the Geriatrica. Later I changed my mind.

  It was perfectly true, though, as I had foreseen, that we formed a venerable passenger list, and sunset intimations were soon apparent. Hardly had we left the quay than a charming American Senior Citizen approached me as I stood at the rail, and said that since she heard I wrote books, she thought I might be amused by her favourite quotation from Groucho Marx. “It goes like this,” said she. “‘Next to a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, but inside it’s too dark to read anyway.’ Isn’t that hilarious? I just love it.” I laughed politely, but I could not help thinking that with the passage of time the tale must have lost something in its telling.

  Of course the passage of time had to be a preoccupation on board such a ship as ours. “Facing Up to Rheumatism” was one of our first educational lectures, and for myself I felt that the ancient seas through which we passed, seas of glory, seas of fate, seas where young gods fought and heroes died, were themselves allegories of mortality’s challenge. “Facing Up to Decay,” in fact, might have been a more apposite mantra.

  HALF OF US faced up to it cockily. Vivid combinations of lipstick and wrinkle could be observed at the Captain’s Gala Dinner. Nautical-looking veterans with binoculars were up at crack of dawn to sail into Istanbul. Loud accents of the English 1950s reverberated over gins and tonics through the Whaleback Bar. Proudly muscular old couples marched their obligatory exercise around the promenade deck (fifteen circuits to the mile) before, having dressed formidably for dinner, they joined their friends for cocktails by the pool.

  The other half of us preferred resignation, and more often sat in discreet twos or fours over fruit drinks with flexible straws. They were very likely looking at maps of tomorrow’s classical site, or discussing the recent lecture about Theban mosaics. Some of the ladies wore shawls. Few of the gentlemen wore white dinner jackets. Unless there was a bridge game going, they usually went to bed early.

  But the odd truth is, the two categories blended. The metallic bray of the Home Counties was subsumed into homelier vernaculars, a generally club-like air prevailed, and when the time came for the fancy-dress dance at the Seafarers’ Lounge, it was hard to tell which of my fellow passengers represented Defiance, and which were Resignation. This was because, I gradually came to realize, they were united in toughness, in resolution, and in enthusiasm. They were all there to enjoy themselves, and even the oldest among us, even the ones with Zimmer frames, even the palest convalescents, were out for a good time. They were docile in their obedience to the ship’s rules, but it was a willing suspension of liberty.

  By Zeus, how terrific was their energy! Nothing dissuaded them. With earnest diligence they listen to the spiel of the tour guide. Like aging gazelles they spring up the tiers of the Epidauros theatre. We see them vivaciously haggling with Anatolian souvenir-sellers, courageously experimenting with the effects of ouzo, returning to the ship loaded down with toys for the grandchildren, talkin
g nineteen to the dozen and ending the day with an enormous multi-course meal in the Geriatrica’s dining room, for which they boisterously thank the Filipino waiters like old friends and shipmates (which, after half a lifetime of cruises, many of them are).

  BY THE TIME we reached our port of disembarkation, I was quite won over. The sprightly enthusiasm of it all had seduced me: the fertile mix of Carnival and Palm Court, and the determination to make the most of everything. On our last day aboard, that delightful old American lady approached me again. “I knew I’d got that Groucho story wrong. I’ve been thinking about it all this time, and this is how it should go: ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, but inside it’s too dark to read anyway.’”

  This time I really did laugh. I marvelled that throughout our voyage, in museum, taverna, and Seafarers’ Lounge, she had been assidously worrying out that joke: and even as she spoke my eyes strayed to the Sunshine Promenade above her head, where the passengers were seizing their last chance of seaboard exercise around the measured mile.

  There they were in silhouette, as those gods and heroes might be on a Grecian vase: the mad sinewy sprinter overtaking everyone, the scholarly couple deep in talk, one or two young bloods from the entertainment staff, an old man bowed over another’s wheelchair, several solitary energetic ladies, a few game military men forever arthritically on the march.

  I had grown to be proud of them—to be proud of us!—and as I laughed at the Groucho story, and admired that living frieze above us, there and then I renamed our ship. The S.S. Indomitable, I dubbed her then, and all who sailed in her.