Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  Here’s Your Jersey, Boy!

  I AM RATHER fond of graffiti, at least in emblematic roles. I like ornamental initials cut in the flanks of ancient statues by poets or conquerors, just as I like being mystified by the extraordinary sort of cyber graffiti which ornament walls, tunnels and railway coaches throughout the Western world. What do they mean? Who does them? When? It’s as though some posse of aliens has swept through our streets at dead of night, leaving its weird signatures behind. Anyway, as I say, I am interested in graffiti, and one day not long ago was I particularly struck by one I saw in Trieste.

  Trieste is a city with a complex history. It was founded in its present form as a southern seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It then became part of the Kingdom of Italy. The Nazis declared it an integral part of their Reich. The British and the Americans occupied it after the Second World War, and Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed it, and for a time it was an independent Free Territory under UN auspices. Sixty years ago it went back to Italy again, but it is still rather like a multi-ethnic City-State, in which Latins and Slavs and Teutons have all mingled, and people have been tossed about from one sovereignty to another down the centuries. There are people there who have been governed in their own muddled lifetimes by Austrians, Italians, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs and Slovenians. You never know, looking at the war memorials of Trieste, which particular army the poor fellows died in the service of, and you certainly can’t tell from their names.

  The graffito I liked that day reflected this confusing pedigree of allegiances. It was perfectly simple. It just said, in a large white emphatic scrawl on a rubbish bin: FUK NATIONS.

  I THINK IT expressed a considered historical opinion, and I sympathized with it because I have myself developed over the years doubts about nationhood. However I don’t think that whoever wrote it really meant Nations. I think he meant Nation-States. The Nation-State, so the dictionaries tell me, is an organized political unit, and to my mind that is where trouble begins. The concept of the State muddles and perverts the concept of the nation, and is what has given me my doubts concerning nationhood. It is partly just semantics. I dislike the word “nationalist”; I dislike the ungenerous, niggling, mean sound of it. In my mind it goes with wars and squabbles and prejudices and old historic quarrels best forgotten.

  But I am sick to death of nationality, too, and I think it is a dying concept anyway. The earth is becoming just too small for political nationalities. To my mind they will one day seem as absurdly primitive as dynastic wars, or the divine right of kings. In Wales you can play rugby for the country if just one of your grandparents happened to have been born within its frontiers! Just think. Here comes a likely lad wanting to wear the red jersey for Wales. Born in Oswestry it says on his application form. Oswestry? Oh buzz off, lad, you can’t play for Wales, that’s five miles the wrong side of the border. Anyway, look at all this here on your form, mother from Finland, grandparents from Mongolia, Chile, Malaysia, father from England? Oh, I’m sorry, son. Hang about though, what’s this here? Your Mam’s father was born in Llanelli? Well, croeso, boy, come on in, here’s your jersey!

  You can change your nationality at the drop of a hat, or the scratch of a notary’s pen—one minute you are a Dutchman born and bred, the next minute you’re a full-blown Australian! You can be French without speaking a word of French! If you can find the right crooked broker you can probably become a Tahitian, or an Uzbekistani, without going near the place! Nationality is an invented condition, riddled with absurdities, and it is my view that when it comes to nationality, you are what you want to be.

  For the moment at least you have to carry a passport issued by some Nation-State, but that is just a matter of form. It is what you feel that really counts. I am told that in the early years of the Israeli State anybody who turned up there and said “I am a Jew,” was a Jew. I can’t think it is still true, but my opinion is that if you feel you’re a Jew, or an Arab, or a Japanese, or an American, or a Scot, then in a deeper sense you are one. If I were the dictator of a Welsh Republic, I would decree that anybody who claimed to be Welsh, who shared Welsh values, and would accept Welsh ways, was Welsh. Here’s your jersey, boy.

  SO I THINK nationality is inorganic nonsense, referring not to nations, but to Nation-States. Nation, State, race, country—they’ve all got mixed up, and the confusion has tainted public emotions of loyalty and community. “My country right or wrong,” that vulgar American mantra, did not express loyalty to a nation, a people, or even a cause, but simply to a political organism, and that is the sort of thing that gives a bad name to nationalism—even to patriotism.

  Genuine patriotism is something nobler. The English, whose patriotism has so often developed into imperialism, have long recognized a profounder relevance to it. It was Edmund Burke who dreamed of an England “not amusing itself with the puppet-show of power, but sympathetic with the adversity or with the happiness of mankind, feeling that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her.” And it was one of the most fervent Welsh nationalists, Saunders Lewis, who said that in his view true patriotism was “a generous spirit of love for civilization and tradition and the best things of mankind.”

  But there is bad to patriotism too, God knows. Dr. Johnson said it was the last refuge of a scoundrel, and of course it often is. Those pipes! Those symbolisms! We’re nearly all suckers for it. I was in Berlin some years ago for the two hundredth anniversary of the Brandenburg Gate, a structure which is in itself a triumph of German vainglory, a very fulcrum of nationalism and patriotism and Nation-Stateness, a place of victory parades and plumed pageantries and military triumphs. Of course the celebrations ended with the German national anthem, which we all remember as “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles.” I knew very well what the anthem had meant to the Nazis, and I knew what it must still mean to thousands of the Germans there that evening, but nevertheless it brought the tears to my eyes to hear it. It was not just that it is a most beautiful tune, and was played by a string quartet in Haydn’s original version of it. It was because, despite myself and all my instincts, I was moved by the power of patriotism. The “Marseillaise” would have done it for me just as well, or “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” or “Scotland the Brave!,” let alone “Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau—Land of My Fathers.”

  SUCH ARE THE seductions of patriotism, of nationalism, of the Nation-State, but the nation is a different thing. The word has a different resonance. During Franco’s dictatorship in Spain the Basque independence movement was officially proscribed and also belittled, the Government always making out that it was just a small minority craze of nuts and discontents. I was writing a book about the country, and one day I met by chance a Basque activist actually at Guernica, the centre of everything Basque, a place I assumed to be crawling with secret policemen. I asked this man to explain to me, confidentially, what the Basques really did consider themselves to be, and he turned out to be not in the least inhibited. He would first tell me, he said, what the Basques were not: and if he began quietly enough he ended in a bellow that I thought, rather nervously, might be audible in Madrid itself. “We are not a region,” he said, “not a group of provinces, not a language, not a folk tradition. We are a NATION, EUZKADI, THE NATION OF THE BASQUES!”

  He made the word sound ecclesiastical, or ritual, but what is the true meaning, or purpose, or definition of the nation? I don’t think any of us, even that patriot of Guernica, is really sure what a nation is. The Oxford Dictionary says it is “an aggregate of persons so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people.” Chambers Dictionary suggests an aggregation of people or peoples of one or more cultures, races, etc., organized into a single State, or alternatively a community of persons bound by common descent, language, history, etc., but not constituting a State. Webster’s American dictionary says it is “a community of people formed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory.” The Macquarie Australian dictiona
ry says it is “an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family, speaking the same language.” The French historian Ernest Renan defined it as “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.” Disraeli thought the Rich and the Poor formed two separate nations, and London another one. The poet Dryden apparently believed fish constituted a nation.

  I myself feel that a nation is more than anything an idea. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that France was a nation, England was a country, but America was an idea, and as I see it the American idea really has made a nation out of all the myriad peoples who have settled there. It may be, at the moment anyway, an unlikable State, but it is undeniably a grand nation, because of its idea, which nearly all Americans share, and like to call the American Dream. Consider my own country, Wales. It is not an aggregation of people forming a single State, because it isn’t a State. It is not an aggregation of persons who form a distinct race, because we’re all multi-ethnic now. It is not a community of people of several nationalities, because in Wales we are all officially British. It is not an aggregation of persons speaking the same language, because we have two. It might perhaps confirm Renan’s definition of nationhood, but it is certainly not a fish.

  Yet it is, to my mind, an idea—or perhaps an allegory. I dislike all sorts of things about Wales, but what I love about it is Cymreictod—Welshness—which is a kind of idea. Gerard Manley Hopkins stopped off at a Welsh house once, and wrote afterwards:

  Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,

  All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.

  It wasn’t just the woods and the waters themselves that enraptured him; it was “all the air things wear” that build the world of Wales.

  For me that is our Nation. And in my view the preservation of nations is the highest purpose of a State. The Nation-State is a transient device in my opinion, destined to wither away, as Karl Marx thought and the anarchists still do. But at the moment, in our time, it is the only instrument we have to enable a culture, a civilization, a way of life, an Idea to survive.

  BUT ANYWAY WE all know really that devotion even to a nation is not enough, and it can be downright evil. Even the Oxford Dictionary offers, as another definition of the word, “the peoples of the earth, the population of the earth, collectively,” and of course that is the greatest nation of all, humanity itself. You don’t have to be elected for membership of it, and you can’t be blackballed either. I like to imagine a world in which the things that are rightly Caesar’s, like war and foreign policy and higher economics, are left to Caesar, at the centre of things; but the things that are rightly God’s, the way we think, and behave, and talk, and believe, and organize our private lives, are left to the nations.

  As for the Nation-States, which have done so much evil in their time, and bring out the worst in us still, fuck ’em all.

  Americans on a Train

  DURING THE IRAQ WAR, in 2003, when I was naïvely trying to determine the condition of America, I went down to the South aboard an Amtrak train, in pursuit of vox populi. Everyone talked to me, but during our prolonged conversations, when my mind wandered, my eyes sometimes strayed to the tattered newspapers that lay all about, and thus from time to time I extracted items of what was happening in the America outside our windows.

  I generally began with the withering of liberties in America. Nearly everyone I asked felt strongly about that, although a lady from Baltimore was too excited to discuss the issue because she had never been on a train before, and couldn’t take her eyes off the landscape. A schoolteacher, on the other hand, felt it in his bones that a politico-military cabal, colluding with what one might call—or would have called, when one was younger—the Establishment, had patently shown—

  Item: A 74 year old man, suffering from multiple cancers, was executed for murder by lethal injection in Alabama: his victim’s son witnessed the execution, and complained that he’d passed away too peacefully.

  —that it was directly behind the Patriot Act of 2001, which, would you believe it, even allowed the spooks to discover what books you had taken out of the public library. Hell, what was wrong with that? demanded a retired realtor. There was a war on, the whole country had to fight it, he’d been in the service himself and he knew what war was like, you didn’t go into the ring with kid gloves on. “Look at your own Winston Churchill, look at Margaret Thatcher, d’you suppose they . . . ?”—

  Item: Letter to the Editor: “Sir, I was in the service and in my view there is no substitute for 90,000 tons of cold-steel US diplomacy.”

  I moved on to America’s place in the world today. The schoolmaster said that it was truly awful, what had happened to our reputation. The realtor said it was more important to be respected than to be liked—had anyone liked the Romans? The lady from Baltimore said my, Oh my, whatever they say about us, I’m sure there’s nowhere more beautiful than this America of ours, and on that all were agreed.

  Well now then, said I, what about this same-sex marriage business? On this they all talked at once. It was against the will of the Lord, it was only humanity, my cousin Doreen lived with, I was brought up to believe, I was in the service myself, how would you feel if—

  Item: Staff-Sgt. Christopher Ward, testifying before an abuse hearing in Iraq, said it was his conception that military intelligence was “trying to create an uncomfortable environment to try to facilitate interrogations.”

  —what about the unfortunate children, think what the lawyers will make out of it, the Bible tells us straight out, sometimes it’s cruel to be kind, oh, just look at those trees out there, don’t they make you think of happier things?

  Item: After 58 years the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan has moved to new premises. It will have more room, said its owner, for its hundreds of thousands of books, belovedly disorganized, plus Tom the resident cat.

  So we chugged on, deep into the South, and I was none the wiser about the condition of America when we got to Tennessee.

  Marmaladeness

  I AM AN Anglo-Welsh hybrid. My chief loyalties are to Wales, but I cherish nevertheless the old traditions of Englishness. They are fast fading now, as the English deliberately discard many of them, and as England becomes ever more multi-ethnic and multicultural. Coffee rivals tea as the national drink, curry is more popular than roast beef, they serve California chardonnay in pubs and for every spectator at a cricket match a hundred are down the road watching the soccer.

  Still holding out as a national talisman is Marmalade. I give it a capital M because I am not thinking of the sweet sticky stuff served up in plastic packages at freeway cafés, but of the dark tangy marmalade, preferably made of oranges from Spain, which possesses in my mind a figurative quality—Marmaladeness, perhaps. I once saw a film clip of the last of the aristocratic British Prime Ministers, Alec Douglas-Home, eating his breakfast before attending some vital conference, and was almost converted to Toryism by observing bang on the table in front of him, with a spoon in the top, a proudly labelled pot of Cooper’s Original Thick Cut Oxford Marmalade.

  I myself like marmalade just as much with a dinner beefsteak as I do on a breakfast slice of toast. But then for me it has become as much a symbol as a preserve, and wherever I go in England I scour the marts for good examples. All too often I am offered fancy hybrids or substitutes: orange-and-lemon marmalade, marmalade with whisky or brandy in it, or elder-flower flavouring, jam-like marmalade imported from France, supermarket marmalade with artificial colouring or numerical additives, marmalade more like fruit jelly, Ye Olde Teashoppe Marmalade made in an industrial estate somewhere . . .

  But I remember Sir Alec at his breakfast, and I persevere. Sometimes I buy Oxford Marmalade for the sake of its unaltered label. Sometimes I stock up with unpretentious marmalade from Women’s Institute stalls. And there is a farm shop on the M6 Motorway to which I make regular pilgrimages because of its range of staunch northern marmalades and wholesome organic products from the Prince of W
ales’ estates in Cornwall.

  Mostly I fail in my quest, and in the end my Welsh half calls me home, away from the princely pots and the Teashoppe muck alike. Happily at certain times of the year, when the oranges from Seville are available, this is no sacrifice, because then the very best Marmalade of all is made in my own house deep in the heart of Wales: so dark, so rich in shred, striking such a perfect balance between the sweet and the sour, the set and the runny, that whenever I eat it (hedonistically with my sausages, austerely with apples), I raise an ironic glass to the other half of me, still searching for the real thing on the English side of the border.

  The Poet

  IN THE 1950S, when I was writing a book about Oxford, my family and I lived in an eighteenth-century former rectory, a type of housing then becoming increasingly available to the public as the Church of England began to lose its consequence, and moved its clergy into less Trollopian premises. We loved it, so I was delighted one day to come across a lyrical poem concerning old rectories by a clergyman named R. S. Thomas.

  I had never heard of him, which was not surprising, because almost nobody else had, either—the poem had just been published in his first collection, Song at the Year’s Turning. I wrote to him care of his publishers, and asked if he would consider writing out the piece for me, so that it could hang in his own hand on a wall of our own Old Rectory. He did so at once, and his spindly calligraphy has been with me ever since, fading gradually over the years, but still in my imagination radiant with his strange genius.

  For a genius Ronald Thomas turned out to be, presently to be recognized as one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century—in the English language. This is a paradox, because he was also one of the famously iconic defenders of the Welsh language, the Welsh culture, the Welsh landscape, and above all, perhaps, the Welsh idea. But thoroughly Welsh though he was himself, he had been brought up to speak English, and had learnt the Welsh language only as a young adult. From first to last he never felt able to express himself poetically in the Cymraeg he so passionately loved and defended.