And, back to school: languages. I remember begging one of my primary school teachers to let us learn French instead of wasting time digging around in the classroom sandpit. Fifty years later, I’m left neither able to garden nor to speak French. Two equally fluent languages should be the norm for any child entering secondary education. This is the case in many countries, except the English-speaking ones.
Still at school, I would require an hour once a fortnight of music (classical, I’m afraid) appreciation. A gentle but systematic journey through music history, unlocking the treasures of the greatest composers and their masterpieces. And every child would have to learn a musical instrument. Why would this be a priority, other than for this world ruler’s self-interested prejudices? Well, in the West one of the greatest curses in a mostly blessed age is distraction and boredom amid plenty. Learning a musical instrument is one of the best ways to discipline the mind to do something for more than a minute’s duration, a plunging rather than a surfing into an activity requiring skill and involving purpose. It engages the whole person in something physical, mental and (at its best) spiritual. Concentration, or ‘attention’ as Simone Weil put it, is part of living a civilised life, with happiness derived from well-being rather than mere well-feeling. Paying attention, to people or to ideas or to ourselves, is oxygen for the soul. A constant flitting from gimmick to fad to video clip is to attempt to grow the tree of life in an inch of soil. Learning a musical instrument is not the only solution to the problem but it’s one good one – and an easy one to implement.
As I jot down these thoughts I’m reminded how frightening this business of power is, how easily ruling the world morphs into re-creating the world in our own image. What courage it takes to leave things undone; what wisdom is involved in refusing to meddle in other people’s private lives. If youth is wasted on the young, how much more dangerously is power entrusted to the powerful. Few people hunger for power who hunger for the good things it can achieve. Power should always be handled as if on short-term loan, or as if it could explode in our faces at any moment.
So I’m not really enjoying this hypothetical ‘being the boss’ business. I know that every day I ruled the world I would be looking keenly to find someone to take over from me as soon as possible. But before they did, I’d make sure I had secured a nice flat overlooking the water somewhere warm, Sydney perhaps, from where I could relax, read, sip leisurely on a glass of wine and think about what I would do if I ruled the world.
Pleasure
Pleasure is like a magnet guiding our every move in life. It was the evolutionary path that led all of us to the place where today we live and move and have our being. It’s the carrot guiding us to do what’s good for us and avoid what’s bad for us. Food and sex, to take two obvious examples, are pleasurable because they ensure our existence. Pleasure is simply the way our bodies are designed to function, whether that pleases us or not.
And yet, if someone said to us, ‘All I live for is pleasure’, I think we’d find it rather strange, even a little disturbing. I don’t think we’d entirely trust that person, or take him or her seriously. We’d have the sense that anything or anyone that got in the way of their pursuit of pleasure would quickly become dispensable. ‘All I live for is … music or money or justice or my family’; these might seem limited by themselves and we might have different reactions to a life built on any of these categories alone, but at least they somehow make sense. We might be hardwired to live guided by principles of pleasure, but it has to be as the fruit of something else. If we pursue it as an abstract ideal, outside the tangible goods (important word) that bring it to us, it will most likely turn bad. To reach out and grasp the bubble of pleasure is to pop it. To enjoy those bubbles requires us to let them float past. To shape our lives by pleasure alone would be like forming the rooms of our house with sheets of wallpaper but no walls on which to hang them.
Pleasure is an essential part of being human and, therefore, has within it a spark of the divine. Even though as a Catholic I believe that all things created are essentially good, I’m only too aware that religion has probably been the main force trying to root out pleasure across our planet, across the centuries. Let’s not even talk about sex, which has been fenced around and poisoned within an inch of its life … despite the fact that we sort of need it to keep this show on the road. Music has been banned in some Islamic cultures, and dancing has been banned in some Christian cultures – so many things that flavour our lives with joy and ecstasy have been the subjects of suspicion and repression.
And yet, understood correctly, fasting or celibacy are not about despising pleasure, but rather acknowledging its importance, its value … and its potential corruption. When a monk gives up food he is voluntarily giving up something good, something to be treasured, something to be grateful for. When a nun gives up family life it’s similar, or should be; she wants to offer God the most precious gift possible. And beyond this life, it is only by some analogy with pleasure that the promise of life after death (heaven) has made any sense – eternal pleasure: if we deny ourselves pleasure now we can have it later for ever and ever, another kind of carrot. Of course we need a taste of it now to tempt us to its permanence later – but this is not the time or place to explore such a conundrum.
I think the important issue is the pursuit of pleasure rather than the pursuit of the good things that carry pleasure in their trail. The roots of pleasure are the acts of a good life – well-being rather than well-feeling. Avoiding pain at all costs will not give us pleasure, but conquering our fear of pain might well help us along the way. And sharing pleasure (or making others happy) is one of the surest ways of experiencing pleasure or happiness ourselves. All this leads us to consider one of the main paradoxes of pleasure: we grasp it either as an anticipation of the future or as a reflection of the past, but it grasps us (usually without our control) in the present. We often look forward to a holiday or look back on a birthday party with greater pleasure than in the moment of experiencing it. We savour pleasure in the past or in the future; the present moment of its visitation flies past too fast.
And so to music. It is the perfect example of this pleasure principle in the arts. Whereas with a book or a painting we control the time in which we experience the beauty, with a piece of music the beauty is carried along in the passage of time itself, a ‘passing’ (a journey and a decay) which is the pleasure. The notes vibrate past our ears, into our ears, in a sequence of sounds. Music does not have a ‘moment’ like the first bite of a rhubarb crumble, or the climax point of lovemaking, or the very last day at work before the holidays; music’s magic evaporates in front of our ears, leaving only an echo, a memory behind. Yet the very handicap of its transience is its greatest asset because it enables us to enjoy it over and over again. It creates its own time-frame of relish, unlike books or paintings … or buildings, as I discussed in an earlier reflection. And even though the sounds disappear, in classical music the score remains, the formula that can be mixed into potency once more – musicians as the witch doctors of these ‘controlled frequencies’.
Related to this is one of the reasons I believe music needs tonality. It is part of the internal swing of pleasure and pain mirroring that of our lives. We desire, we crave the pleasure of concord after the pain of discord. And to refuse to resolve is to prevent the future repetition of the very pain that in turn allows the resolution. It is to freeze-frame something that has meaning only in ebb and flow. It is to halt the intangible ‘procession’, the journey that is music. For me (although I readily admit that others have an opposite and perfectly valid viewpoint), music that is irresolvably atonal has nowhere to go. It is a hamster on a wheel instead of a horse galloping freely in the fields. I love a lot of atonal music but it no longer excites me when it is no longer creating tension against its opposite. Take away tonality from atonality and you are left with … A.
Music is intangible. The existence of the vibrations is real of course – measurable as sound wave
s and controllable as such; but these waves are beyond touch in the way the music they create touches us. And here music is related to perfume, another art form existing for the purpose of pleasure. Perfume requires a chemist’s expertise and it isn’t literally intangible, of course – from bottle to spray we see and feel the liquid – but its effect on us is indeed unseen and mysterious. It awakens memories and it alters moods in a very similar way to music. It is also a ‘time traveller’ – passing, evaporating and changing with us, as it blooms and then dies on our skin. Perfume is as ‘useless’ as music, but it has been said that great art, by definition, has to be useless. The minute we harness it, try to use it for a purpose other than to appreciate its intrinsic value, we de-struct the magic … and undermine the pleasure.
Holy smoke
I always wanted to be a tobacconist. From my childhood I liked to collect cigarette boxes, and my favourite game was to prop them up and pretend to sell them. ‘Twenty Capstan Full Strength? Certainly, sir!’ Of course, I would have been unemployed by now. In my youth many more people smoked, and there were many specialist shops. Apart from glamorous cigar stores such as Davidoff, do any outlets thrive or even survive today by selling only tobacco-related products?
I’d messed around with smoking quite early in my teens, puffing at some of my father’s Burma cheroots, sneaking one or two of my mother’s Benson & Hedges Gold. I even bought some ghastly herbal cigarettes, which, when lit, smelt as if the wastepaper basket had caught fire. But my real joy was to go into those old tobacconist shops with their brass scales and burnished-oak counter-tops and look up at the shelves stacked with different cigarette packets: Senior Service, Sobranie, Black Russian, Woodbine, St Moritz. I would ask people about the old brands – Passing Clouds was my favourite, in its pink packet. I loved the smell of the silver foil-covered paper that lined the cardboard boxes with light-brown dust caught in the folds. And then to open up the wooden tobacco jars filled with virtual hair-clippings of aromatic delight: the bitter Latakias, the fruity blends, the vanillas, the spices.
Then my coming of age. On my seventeenth birthday my father took me to a tobacconist near Albert Square in Manchester to buy my first pipe and my first ounce of tobacco. I chose a rough-finished black briar with a flat bottom and some rather sweet-smelling tobacco, the sort that makes people say, ‘Oh, I like the smell of pipe smoke.’ I also needed a pouch, of course – soft leather on the outside and rubber inside, which would keep the tobacco moist and fresh. Then there were pipe cleaners and a reamer, which would scratch off the burnt charcoal from inside the bowl. I had one with a tamper on the end, which saved using my forefinger to press down firmly but not too deeply on the smouldering nest. I remember my teacher, Gordon Green, having a yellow pad on his right forefinger from tamping down endless bowls of Gold Block.
One pipe is not enough for even the occasional smoker. The wood needs to rest and breathe between smokes. By the time I stopped smoking I had between thirty and forty pipes. People forget that the pleasure of pipe-smoking is not just in the taste or the narcotic fix of tobacco. A beautifully polished bowl with a straight grain that balances perfectly in the palm is a work of art and something to caress with pleasure. Much wood is discarded in the factory before the best pipes are finished. Mouthpieces too are important. Plastic is totally out; it had to be vulcanised rubber. And then there are the racks on which to keep them, and the travel packs. Because I was smoking when touring in the earlier part of my career I had quite a few leather zip-up bags, which would store four to six pipes and all the kit. I used to smoke constantly while practising and I learned a lot of my concerto repertoire while clenching a pipe between my teeth. Rachmaninov Third’s racier passages would shower hot ash onto my trousers if not carefully judged. No wonder I’ve never liked wearing shorts at the piano.
And then I stopped. I don’t really know why. I never had an addiction to tobacco and could go for days without thinking about it, even though it was always pleasurable when I relit my pipe. Occasionally my tongue would burn after my third bowl of the day, and I did think that my teeth and breath would not improve over the years if I continued smoking. Today buildings all over the world are completely smoke-free and the sight of smokers huddled outside doorways is common in most cities. I get an occasional twinge of regret when I think of the old days. There is no easier way to relax than to sit down in a comfortable chair with a book and a pipe. And my pipes sit there still, filled with dust now rather than ash. My silver Dunhill lighter is in a drawer somewhere too, black with tarnish.
I hope smoking never completely disappears, even though I now hate the waft of cigarette smoke in those restaurants that still allow it. But for me the passing clouds have passed for good.
Beef Stroganoff and a bag of bones
New York is more than a second home to me. I’ve lived in Manhattan longer than anywhere else, although not always in the same apartment. I began at the YMCA on West 64th for about a week, then moved to West 79th to the (at the time) dingy Imperial Court Hotel for about a month; then, as I settled into my studies at the Juilliard School (1981–3), I found a sublet at 235 West 71st Street, a room with bathroom in the formidable Anna Borsuk’s spacious apartment.
Madame (as I had to call her) Borsuk was a relic of another age, in her case pre-Revolutionary Russia. When she arrived in the United States she had a brief career as a silent film actress, but then married, left Hollywood behind, and entered into the samovaric world of pre-war New York. ‘Rachmaninov signed my piano … Chaliapin used to come to visit and would always sing for us,’ she told me, her arms gesturing, her painted eyebrows arching as if the rattle of a cinema piano were accompanying her exaggerated movements. By the time I knew her she was truly a bag of bones, held together with sinews of memory, make-up, henna and the hauteur of an older world – but a great lady nevertheless.
One evening she decided to cook for me: Beef Stroganoff. It was absolutely delicious.
‘Madame, this is wonderful,’ I exclaimed. ‘Could I possibly have the recipe? I’d love to try to make it some time.’
‘Well, dear,’ she replied. ‘I don’t like to give it to people. You see, it all goes back to when I was in Paris. General Stroganoff wrote it out for me himself.’
I can’t verify the facts of this (I never saw the handwritten recipe), but it’s one of the best name-dropping stories I know from a distant world where so many things seem like one more, perfectly enchanting fairy-tale.
Electronic books: the end of one kind of intellectual snobbery
We might not judge a book by its cover but we do often judge people by the books they read. I have to confess I usually try to see what my neighbours on a flight or train are reading, and I will sometimes categorise them by the titles in their laps. Like most people I have a history of intellectual snobbery. My (hardly read but much handled) copy of Finnegans Wake found a resting place in my school satchel for many months alongside my sandwich box. I even started setting it to music – although its ‘riverrun’ dried up abruptly after a dozen or two uncomprehended words. But with ebooks all of this changed. No one can know whether we are reading Homer or Harold Robbins as we swipe the screen to change pages. In fact, one of the drawbacks to these electronic devices is that we can actually forget the exact title of the book we are reading because it no longer passes before our eyes each time we pick it up.
Throughout my youth I remember seeing paperback copies of A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. It was omnipresent on bookshelves in bed-and-breakfasts, in dentists’ waiting rooms, on dusty tables in junk shops next to the faded figurines and cloudy salt cellars. Library copies of it were well borrowed and smeared with many dated stamps. It was there on shelves waiting to be checked out, and it was there on trolleys wanting to be reshelved. I would never have read it myself then. My reading was the books kept in Warrington Library’s back room, marked with an ‘A’ in the card catalogue – meaning ‘adult’: Tropic of Cancer, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Naked Lunch, Lady Chatter
ley’s Lover. They were not on the open shelves but had to be requested and Constance Trimble (Miss) with her grey tweed skirt, tight bun and half-moon glasses would bring them back to the counter with a highly disapproving look. ‘You do know what sort of books your son is reading, don’t you, sir?’ she said cuttingly to my father on one occasion. I think he felt that this fourteen-year-old was better left to roam free than to be subject to censorship.
Then I came across A Town Like Alice in an online advertisement just a few years ago. I was instantly taken back to my childhood, to this book I had avoided, and I couldn’t resist clicking on the link to read the synopsis. I bought it instantly and started reading it (hidden behind the Kindle screen) with great pleasure. Apart from the exotic interest of war-time Malaya and the post-war Australian outback, its domestic scenes seemed to me more fascinatingly old-fashioned than Dickens. Pre-1960s Britain: rationing, gentleman’s clubs, homburg hats, offices with leather-top desks, telegrams, fountain pens, the colonies, smoking, always smoking. I think Miss Trimble would have been surprised at my choice, but approving.
Good Americans
I was leaving Nashville Airport one September afternoon in the lashing rain. We drove up to the airport’s exit barrier and there was one of those wonderful, strong, glamorous old ladies you meet in America, seated calmly in the booth, waiting to take the toll money. It’s a fairly mundane job at best, but she managed to make it something dignified and memorable with her feisty charm. In fact she was really as much onstage as I would be later that week in my concerts with the orchestra – and she knew it. In fifteen-second slots during her shift she has the undivided attention of maybe thousands of drivers a day. She was unhurried but efficient, hair perfectly styled, face carefully but subtly made up, clothes understated but well chosen, movements graceful. She assured us that the rain would continue. I believed her.
Rough Ideas Page 31