Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  It was only one of the anomalies and contradictions that complicated his entire life, testing his relationships not only with his country and his fellow citizens, but with his family, his vocation, and even his God.

  I GOT TO know him later. When he was already famous he came to be the rector of a small coastal town, Aberdaron, near my own home in Wales, and after his retirement he lived nearby until his death in 2000. It is an impertinence to say so, of a notoriously inexplicable character, but I think I understood him, for like many other Welsh persons, we had both reached the conclusion, or perhaps the device, that we could glimpse the divine in the matter of Wales—not Wales as it is today. but a Wales with its language unthreatened, its landscapes unspoilt, its people serene in their own beliefs and loyalties. It was an old, old dream, embodied in the medieval fancy of “Abercuawg, where the cuckoos sing”—an existential sort of Wales, a virtual Wales of our imagination and our longing.

  In our lifetimes Abercuawg has been theatened as never before by the inexorable influx of English settlers from over the border, changing the fabric and the style of Wales day by day, year by year, until before long Abercuawg will be unrecognizable in it. Thomas pulled no punches in his opposition to this tragic progression. His enemies called him intolerant, chauvinist, racist, and hostile publicists printed ogre-like photographs of him, glaring wild-eyed and unkempt out of his cottage door: but he did not care, and he spoke out loud what people like me were generally too cowardly, or too ashamed, to enunciate.

  He detested, for instance, the vowel sounds of immigrants from the English Midlands, and so do we. He hated tourism in almost all its forms, together with electric pylons and all manifestations of the game-show-and-celebrity civilization. He believed it was perfectly justifiable to be nasty about the English, if it would make them go away. When he looked through a Welsh window, and declared the beauty outside to be “for the few and chosen,” not for the crowd that “dirty the window with their breathing,” we know just what he meant.

  He never thought of himself as a mystic, because unlike his Welsh predecessors among the Metaphysical poets, he did not claim direct contact with the divine. He was a visionary, certainly, but the outer limit of his vision, I think, was nature, not the God his priesthood required him to serve—he thought of the Almighty as a poet, as a mathematician, and above all as the grand presence of life itself.

  COULD ONE WONDER, as he grew old, if his convictions weakened? He married twice—first, for half a century, to a gifted artist who died when he was eighty, secondly to a merry Canadian who cheered and comforted the last five years of his life: some of his last poems were love lyrics of profoundest poignant beauty. But despair, he said, was the prime snare of maturity, and he surely despaired of his own vision as he saw all around him, and far, far beyond, his values crumbling and his faith apparently betrayed.

  In his later years he spent more and more time communing with the most accessible of the wild creatures, the birds, and the last time I set eyes upon him he was standing all alone beside our coastal road gazing silently into an adjacent wood, as though communing with the crows and blackbirds in its branches. Tourists driving by, I noticed, stared at him without much interest, or perhaps with a giggle, for he was a strange gaunt figure there. When I got home I wrote a little poem about the encounter, and it turned out to be my own irreverent epitaph to a good man and a great poet:

  He stood there like an old idol,

  Raised from a stony bed.

  The strangers sneered, and would be no wiser,

  If ever they read

  What he said.

  But the birds in the wood understood him,

  And shat reverently

  And affectionately

  On his head.

  Bouillottisme

  IN MY VIEW, dedicated as I am to the proposition that nothing is only what it seems, many inanimate objects around the house have their own mystiques, inviting us to stroke them (oak beams), fondle them (golf balls), abuse them (recalcitrant can openers), throw them across the kitchen (recaltricant milk cartons), marvel at them (wall clocks controlled by radio waves from distant nuclear establishments), or simply cherish them as dumb friends (almost anything sufficiently old, shabby and no longer manufactured).

  No other object, though, possesses the transcendental allure of the hot-water bottle, which combines within itself the primary elements of fire and water, the virtues of comradeship and the reassurance of the ages. The French call it la bouillotte, and those homely but resonant syllables suit it well. The hot-water bottle speaks to us out of the earliest of mankind’s yearnings—out of the womb itself, one might say—but it also expresses an organic tingle of danger and reproach, for it can scald you if mistreated or get its own back on you by bursting among the bedclothes.

  There may be some, of course, who have never experienced the presence of a hot-water bottle. Many more, while perfectly familiar with the fact of the thing, do not begin to grasp the complex inner meanings of this marvellous contrivance, and place it on about the same emblematic level as the corkscrew, say. This, then, is an essay in an unfamiliar literary genre: Bouillottisme.

  MY OWN FIRST hot-water bottles were of an antique ceramic kind, brown and cream, with a round screw knob in the top. Long ago I graduated to the rubber sort, but even in the most old-fashioned pharmacies this can be hard to buy nowadays in a size and form suitable to serious aficionados like me. All too often it is intended specifically for babies. I don’t mind at all that it is infantile in size, but even I am reluctant to go to bed with a bottle dressed up as an Easter bunny or disguised as the cow that jumped over the moon. Like the worldly book buyers who instantly throw away their dust jackets, I deal with this annoyance ruthlessly: with a large pair of scissors I mutilate those rabbit ears, disembowel the cow, and rip off the woollen cover to reveal the minimalist and altogether functional shape of the bottle beneath.

  A cold bed is essential for the true understanding of the hot-water bottle, because part of its appeal is masochistic. It is essentially a device for the single sleeper or the lonely traveller. It is like an unaccompanied Bach fugue, whose ordered phrases, part emotional, part mathematical, fall so magically upon the bored silence of the concert hall. All around you, beneath the sheet or duvet, is loveless cold, but in one small patch, beside your thigh perhaps, under your back, on your stomach, soft, yielding and lubricious lies a nucleus of consolation. The colder the rest of the bed, the more humane is that champ de la bouillotte. It is reunion after parting, home from distant parts, solvency when you’re broke, love in a cold climate.

  THE HOT-WATER BOTTLE is not, as is vulgarly supposed, merely an instrument of snugness and security. Irony, menace, surprise, sexiness and humour are all mixed up in its ethos, and to those who really understand it the coziness is incidental.

  It is ironic because it thrives upon its opposite—without a cold bed it is useless. It is menacing because it may burst. It is surprising because in its own frigid context it is a kind of anomaly. It is sexy because it is often a substitute for a more human partner. It is so funny that one has only to name it to raise a laugh or a simper. And its true glory is this: that in all these various attributes it is entirely individualistic. How could I write such an essay as this about a can opener, a milk carton, a golf ball, or a clock regulated by nuclear transmissions? I can write about the hot-water bottle because it is, so to speak, entirely its own artifact, sui generis, and thus defies a world that is increasingly slavish to conformity.

  “You don’t mean to say,” people often observe to me, “that when you travel you take a hot-water bottle with you?” Proudly, almost arrogantly, I assure them that I sometimes do. It is my modest equivalent of the grander eccentricities our forebears flaunted. It sets me slightly aside, I like to think. It displays my contempt for every kind of trend or fashion, for all lickspittle, copy-cat sycophancies, for all dullard bureaucrats and safety experts, for the whole miserable world of authority and counselling and suit
able precaution. It gives me some lingering sense of spirituality. It amuses me. It is one in the eye for pretence and hypocrisy. It distances me at once from the package tour and from the rafting adventure. It makes a free cosmopolitan of me.

  Vive la bouillotte! I feel like crying. Viva la borsa dell’acqua calda! Heil der Wärmflasche! Up the Hot-Water Bottle! You couldn’t say all that about a corkscrew.

  Conceptual Travel

  I PLANNED TO make a figuratively European journey, and having a taste for symmetry, resolved to travel from the Irish Sea to the Adriatic to make a tenuous connection between two outsider places, so to speak—at one end Gwynedd, on the north-western coast of Wales, equivocally attached to England, at the other end the seaport of Trieste, out on a limb at the north-eastern extremity of Italy.

  FEELING A LITTLE like Anna Karenina, through hissings and white steam I boarded a train of the Ffestiniog Railway Company at the old Welsh slate port of Porthmadog. The company was one of the oldest railways in the world, and the engine was one of the oldest working steam locomotives, the Merddin Emrys, built in 1879. This stalwart veteran would haul me away from its terminal beside Bae Ceredigion (Cardigan Bay to the English) into the mountains high above, and hand me over to a neat little railcar of the Conway Valley Railway Company. So I would reach Llandudno Junction, on the other side of the mountains, and there I would join a main-line express to London.

  We puffed our way heartily up from the coast, and on the way I experienced a kind of idealized diorama of the matter of Wales. Here are some of the things I saw from my windows that morning: misty mountains, of course, fields speckled with sheep, the odd castle on a rock, herons, slate quarries, woods of oak and fir, buzzards, ancient bridges, rivers placid and torrential, wild hyacinths, slag-heaps, cormorants, ponies, racing sheepdogs and knobbly farmers in cloth caps—all rather stagily displayed as we trundled through the valleys, passes and frequent tunnels.

  This was a western frontier land of Europe, far from the centre, and no less telling than what I saw was what I felt that day. The two little railway lines, though catering largely for tourists, still possessed enough workaday reality to remind me that Cymru, the Welsh name for Wales, signifies a comradeship. All along the line local people got on and off, most of them apparently knowing one another, talking voluble Welsh and giving the whole journey a comfortable family feel. This was one of the world’s anomalies, still different from anywhere else—despite all the pressures of the age, ethnic and cultural, spiritual, political and historical, still more a society than a State.

  On one of the two little trains the ticket-collector invited us to pay our fares twice over, because he had a hungry cat to feed. The guard on the other turned out to be a grandson of one of my oldest friends in life.

  THE SECOND LEG of my journey was less entrancing. It should have been romantic. The train I joined had come from Holyhead, the ferry port for Dublin, and was a late successor to the Irish Mail which had, for generations, carried the Anglo-Irish to and from their estates and imperial duties over the water. What’s more it was one of Virgin Rail’s Pendolino trains, the sort that lean on curves, and was elegantly modern with frightingly high-tech lavatories. But it was not the train that let me down. It was the route, for once we got into England all was dull.

  Dull? England the sceptred isle, England of the kings and the cathedrals and the storied rivers flowing to the sea? Shakespeare’s England? Churchill’s England? Yes: but all those splendours were out of sight and mind as we swept through the dingy flatlands and run-down railway towns of the Midlands—they were almost beyond my imagination, indeed, as I masticated the Penn State Sour Cream and Chive-Flavoured Pretzels with which Virgin Rail sustains its first-class passengers. This was certainly not the superb island kingdom of legend, and it was only half-cock Europe.

  The Pendolino system makes for a gently soothing ride, and I spent the four-hour trip dozily hoping to see something interesting outside my windows. I was rather excited by a long line of brightly painted narrow boats, redolent I thought of gypsies and pipe-smoking bargees, until the man in the opposite seat told me they were only for tourist rentals. I noted two despondent-looking swans in an orchard, and half a dozen anglers beneath umbrellas fishing in the drizzle on the banks of ponds. I tried to make sense of the inescapable cyber graffiti, those weird ornamental inscriptions that seem to have been left behind by nocturnal hordes of aliens. But I was scraping the barrel of attention, and presently I succumbed to the lull of the Pendolino, and achieved oblivion instead.

  UNTIL, BANG ON time, we arrived at Euston Station, London. By presenting my Euro-ticket at a barrier lyrically called the Elgar Gate I was admitted to a trans-London underground train of the Bakerloo Line. Apart from ethnological changes this seemed to me like a re-enactment of a World War II tube train, but it got me safely through my figurative blitz anyway, and in no time I was showing my passport to the totally uninterested customs officers at Waterloo International.

  Smooth as silk, then, the Eurostar glided through the frenetically cyber-graffiti’d purlieus of south London, with occasional glimpses of the Houses of Parliament, and immediately opposite them, in the very heart of the kingdom, that tell-tale triviality of contemporary England, the London Wheel. Next stop Paris! Was this, I wondered, a French train or a British one? I really wasn’t sure. Nor was the steward who brought me my sauteed pork in apple and parsley sauce. The food was certainly French, the steward evidently so, but the equipment, the engineers, the system, the ownership? A bit of each, somebody suggested, and about then I began to wonder which country we were in. Were we still within the sceptred isle, or had we, when I wasn’t thinking, passed sub-aqueously from the Garden of England to the Pas-de-Calais?

  No, a look out of the window showed me cars still driving on the left. I should have known. Once we really were through the Channel Tunnel the train seemed to shift its rhythm, shift its language even, and declare itself unequivocally French. It was as though it felt a new freedom in the air, the liberty of France, the space and the style of it, away from cramped off-shore insularity. The canal barges really were barges now. There were basilicas on hilltops, and I saw a solitary deer bounding in glory across a meticulously ploughed field. No doubt about it, we were in France now—and in Europe!

  And sure enough, when I arrived at the Gare du Nord several classic symptoms of European travel displayed themselves. There was a memorial to the thousands of Jews who had been transported in trains from this very terminal into exile or death. There was the endearing old rascal, bless his heart, who lured me into his pirate taxi (his wife knitting in its front seat) and shamelessly overcharged me for my few hundred yards’ journey from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de l’Est.

  And most symbolically of all, awaiting me there was Train 263 of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, bound for Strasbourg, Munich and Vienna: for this was that epitome of European raildom, the Orient Express.

  “MUST WE DRESS for dinner, d’you think?” I heard two elderly English ladies hilariously laughing, as they fastidiously surveyed their sleeping accommodation on this fabled mechanism. For it was by no means the fancy Orient Express from London to Venice, beloved of lottery winners, anniversary celebrants and footballers’ wives. This was successor to a much older legend, and looked the part: age-worn, weather-beaten, with poky sleeping quarters and unshaven foreigners prowling corridors.

  The sleeping-car was Austrian, with a kindly stewardess to look after it, and soon she squeezed into my compartment to welcome me. I had heard the Englishwomen ask where the restaurant car was, so I already knew there wasn’t one, but she gave me a slightly melted bar of chocolate, a kiwi fruit and two carrier bags containing towels and cartons of drinking water. Later she sold me a plate of black bread, some Austrian cheeses, and a little bottle of white wine, and very good it was.

  Ah, said I to myself as I folded myself into shape to lie down on my bunk and eat my cheese, this is the way to travel! The creaking of the b
ody-work! The passing and repassing of footfalls in the corridor outside my door! The erratic shaking of the old coach, the sudden spurts of speed and inexplicable silent halts—this is the only route, thought I, into the heart of Europe!

  For to my mind the core of the continent must always be Vienna. To people like me, born to an imperial aesthetic ourselves, Vienna is still the capital of the Dual Monarchy that once gave half this continent a semblance of unity—cruelly autocratic in the fact, homely in the memory. For us it is still Franz Josef, and The Man without Qualities, and The Good Soldier Svejk, and Klimt, and the Strausses, and Jugendstil, and the parade grounds and yellow barrack blocks that once disciplined so much of Europe.

  Oh, and Gemütlichkeit too—bags of Gemütlichkeit. Inside the Orient Express, the motherly charm of our attendant; outside, trim toy-like houses, and neatly tended woods, and small family swimming-pools, and a lovely snow-white Samoyed on a lawn, watching the train go by. Even the mighty Danube, when we crossed it in the morning somewhere near Enns, was in tamed suburban mode.

  An hour late and gasping rather, I fancied, the train pulled into the Westbahnhof at Vienna, down the road from the pomposities of Ringstrasse and Hofburg. I had an hour or two to kill, so after my night in the nostalgic but less than soporific allure of the Orient Express I treated myself to a bath and a martini at the Grand Hotel Wien, before catching my next connection in the evening.