ON
RADICALS, FREEDOM, AND THE NEED OF BEING AWKWARD
An Open Letter to Alan Dent by way of continuing the discussion..
Dear Alan, we'd agree, wouldn't we, that these are bad times to be a
radical. Could we also agree that this ought always to be the case? And
could we therefore further agree that E.P. Thompson, with his usual
mixture of wit and pugnacity, spoke for us all when he said "One must,
to survive as an unassimilated socialist in this infinitely assimilative
culture, put oneself into a school of awkwardness. One must make one's
own sensibility all knobbly - all knees and elbows of susceptibility and
refusal." A good motto for the Penniless Press, even, though Thompson's
words were written just over fifty years ago, at the moment when,
following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he had decided to leave the
communist party, but to remain a committed socialist. One obvious token
of this commitment was the founding of The New Reasoner. Another
was the publication of his great study, William Morris: Romantic to
Revolutionary. Morris was, of course, famously wry about the left's
ability endlessly to fracture into schisms. As a sardonic political
commentator once put it, in times of crisis the Right does Loyalty, the
Left does Ideology. It sometimes seems as though for every radical there
is a distinct ideological position which contains elements that are
distinct from every other radical position, though to the naked eye
these aren't even visible as hairline fractures. This readiness to
fracture, which to bemused onlookers can seem like nothing so much as a
wish for immolation, is known to the sympathetic as integrity, although
a rather more caustic commentator might label it demagoguery, and it has
to be said that Thompson himself, brilliant intellectual and historian
and true radical though he undoubtedly was, possessed some decidedly
demagogic talons, which, once unsheathed, were liable to rip the flesh
of his political allies as bloodily as his enemies.
But internecine warfare seems somehow inherent in radicalism. "Up at the
League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational
discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution,
finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of
their views on the future of the fully-developed new society....there
were six persons present, and consequently six
sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but
divergent Anarchist opinions." This is how Morris's News From Nowhere
(1889) opens, and its quizzical glance at "integrity" makes evident
that although Morris thought of himself as a Marxist he wasn't greatly
given to the finer points of ideology. His socialism is a cobbling
together of what he had taken from the Communist Manifesto, together
with Ruskin's Unto This Last and the section on the Nature of
Gothic in the second volume of Stones of Venice, where Ruskin
talks about the difference between work as fulfilment and sterile toil,
plus various other radical writings on the effects and consequences of
industrial capitalism: in particular the working class and the cities in
which working men and women were forced to live. Engels' The
Condition of England in 1844 remains the classic account of the new
cities and their occupants, of class separation, of alienation of
working men from their labour, of the terrible, heedless despoliation of
natural resources, of indifference to communality. Morris was familiar
with Engels' work, and its influence undoubtedly has a part to play in News From Nowhere. But there is a huge difference, and it's this.
Engels, Marx's friend and partner, identified with the 1848 Manifesto's
statement that "Previous philosophers have only interpreted the world.
The point however is to change it", and even after that and the
following year's setbacks, he was confident that revolutionary change
would happen. Morris, however, projecting a Utopian novel of the future,
an imagined England of the late 20th century, has to assume that the
change has happened. The question is, when? And how?
Everyone who has written about Morris, including his most sympathetic
commentators, have felt he goes wrong at this point. Well, yes, of
course he did. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a Marxist Morris was
bound to feel that history was on his side. Chapter 17 of News from
Nowhere, where he tries to account for the revolutionary moment, is
called "How the Change Came", and although I can't possibly quote all of
it here, I at least need to say that Morris dates the change to the end
of the 19th century, "When the hope of realising a communal condition of
all men arose". This hope was opposed by the "enormous and crushing"
power of the middle class, "the then tyrants of society." And these
tyrants had to be put down not merely by strikes and lock-outs but by
"actual fighting with weapons." Writing when he did, Morris might well
have thought that he could detect enough signs of change to suggest an
imminent revolution — or perhaps by his writing to help encourage one.
(The great, and successful, Dock Strike of 1889 in particular seemed to
promise that working-class militancy could prevail over the bosses. And
there were anarchist incidents, there was the infamous "Bloody Sunday"
of 1887, there was the Match-Girls Strike, and a good deal else beside.)
History was on the move and the movement was in the direction of that
Change which, after the inevitable struggle, would in Britain bring
about a transformed society.
But it didn't happen. It didn't happen at the end of the 19th century,
and it hasn't happened since. An orthodox Marxist would say that this
was because it wasn't the correct "objective moment", which was after
all what Marx himself had said about the Paris Commune and its violent
suppression, hi an obvious sense, this is true, although it seems to me
less shrewd assessment than the ultimate get-out. Hegel, on whose view
of history Marx relied, was held to have argued that there was an
inevitability about change-as-progress, but that the "cunning" of
history often hid the moment when change would occur from those looking
for its appearance. Marx said that the world should be changed. What
happened when those who had most to gain from the change failed to
change it? Simple. They'd misread the moment. Then turned out not to be
the moment to intervene. Which rather begs the question, when exactly is
the moment? "If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me
without my stir." Macbeth's hope seems to me to point to a problem deep
within Marxism: that of Agency. Either human action is effective or
History decides. Marx didn't approve of the cult of Romantic heroes. Not
individuals but larger groups, even societies, were the effective agents
of change. You can see why from a Marxist point of view this must be so,
and it leads to the idea of the "average" hero — the representative man
— about whom Georg Lukacs wrote so persuasively in his studies of The
Historical Novel and European Realism, In News from Nowhere,
the man who conducts Morris through Utopia and explains how it came into
existence, is both hero and ordinary Joe. (Dick, actually, but
still....) But, Morris's critics argue, he is looking back on a change
that had in fact failed to materialise. So sucks to his Marxism. He
wasn't a revolutionary, after all. He was a Romantic dreamer.
I
don't agree. Or rather, while I accept that no violent revolution
brought about the Utopia Morris envisaged, I think that change had
occurred, even if it wasn't the change Marx anticipated or wanted. But
this is because I think change is always occurring, that it's
often not the change we want, but that radicals have the responsibility
of working for the changes they think desirable. They have to be agents.
They can't leave it to history. This is what Morris also thought. We
work for a victory, he said, and when it comes it turns out not to be
the one we wanted, so we must work for a further victory — which will,
of course, turn out not to be the one we wanted. In other words, to be
radical is to be permanently dissatisfied. And this is how it ought to
be. I was once told by a Greek friend that the reason why the future
tense of the verb "to come" "erxhoumai" is irregular — "I will come" is
"tha iltha" — is that it is derived from the same root as the word for
freedom, "elefteria", and in Greece, my friend said, "freedom is always
a state of becoming". I am reliably informed by another Greek friend
that there's no basis in fact for this etymological assertion
(speculation?), but it nevertheless seems to me a fit idea. Freedom
is a state of becoming.
It follows that freedom is unattainable. But this is too abstract.
Freedoms are daily won, threatened, taken away, fought for, recovered. I
want to touch on two, as I think, contrasting moments in the 20th
century over which the brooding shade of Marx might well have murmured
"not the correct objective moment", but which are instructive to
radicals and their necessary dissatisfactions. The first is that period
which Robert Graves dubbed "the long weekend," the years that stretched
between the two world wars, during which fascism and Marxism emerged as
opposing forces with something like the aim of world domination, and
which ended with the defeat of fascism, though not the triumph of its
enemy, a matter of the bitterest disappointment among those who fought
against fascism in the confident expectation that they were helping to
change the world, were in fact agents in the work of bringing about a
new, socialist society for which the USSR could stand as model.
Among them was my dear friend, Arnold Rattenbury, who died in April of
this year. (2007.) Arnold was in the same class at Methodist public
school as Thompson, and they became life-long friends, a friendship that
began when the two of them - together with another classmate, the future
great Shelley scholar and poet, G. M. Matthews -- tried selling copies
of the Daily Worker in their dormitory. The friendship continued
through their war experiences -- as soon as the Ribbentrop—Molotov
Treaty collapsed they all volunteered for active service, and it was
strengthened in the postwar years that, for all of them, I think, were
years of disillusion, of the erosion and disappearance of their early
hopes. Too young to fight in Spain, (Arnold, born in 1921, was 15 when
that war started), they nevertheless glimpsed its significance, which
was a good deal more than the majority of their countrymen did — or
dared to admit to themselves. But we should never forget that Franco's
invading forces were aided by Hitler and Mussolini, and abetted by
European nations such as the UK and France who chose to remain
non-combatants. (Franco himself had flown off from Luton airport to
gather the Falangist army together prior to his invasion of the
Republic.) One result of the non-interventionist policy was that the
British navy blockaded ships trying to get arms and supplies through to
the Republicans while waving through those arriving with help for the
Falangists. British volunteers fighting for the legitimate Spanish
government were thus shot and bombed by arms that had been given safe
passage by the British government and navy.
Whose side would you have been on? I don't mean you personally, Alan,
because I k now the answer. I mean more generally the question needs to
be asked because so often in the years since then, wiseacres have spoken
with amused disdain of the misplaced "idealism" of the left at that
time. But those who were for the Republic were mostly children of a
generation that had been caught up in and by the Great War - a war many
of the selfsame generation of wiseacres had helped to promote. In my
book The Radical Twenties I have tried to say something about the
anger, disillusionment and even contempt for western liberal democracy
that were features of those growing up in the aftermath of the Great War
and who rightly feared that "the war to end wars" had in fact made
further wars inevitable. Here, I will say only that I see nothing to
apologise for in the commitment of those who went to fight for the
Spanish Republic, and who, having been on the losing side, had then to
fight all over again, this time against a far more powerful and evil
enemy.
Evil. Now there's a word must give us pause. For wasn't Stalin's rule
every bit as much evil as Hitler's? So speaks the voice of disdain. And
wasn't the naive idealism of those who supported the Communist cause
hopelessly compromised by their refusal to recognise Stalin's readiness
to murder millions of his fellow countrymen on trumped up charges, above
all the accusation that they were enemies of the people? (We wouldn't
have lasted long in Stalin's Russia, Alan.) Cue Orwell's attack on "Mr
Auden's brand of amoralism [which] is only possible if you are always
somewhere else when the trigger is pulled". Well, again, whose side
would you have been on? (And again, the question is a general invitation
to consider.) I am not suggesting that to be a communist in the 30s and
40s was a matter of grim choice between two evils, because I don't think
those who joined the CPGB saw matters that way. Perhaps they should have
done so. In 1935 at the Paris Writers Congress, E.M. Forster remarked
that as far as he could see, the distinction between communism and
fascism was that the former did evil that good might come, whereas the
latter did evil than evil might come, but his was a lone voice. It is
hardly fanciful to imagine Forster speaking from the only occupied seat
in Thompson's school of awkwardness. And his remarks meant that he was
condemned on both sides. It is therefore worth noting that Forster went
to the aid of communists who lost their livelihoods when they were
banned from working for the BBC at the outbreak of war. He organized
meetings, spoke on public platforms and shamed the BBC into giving
people like Alan Bush their employment back. (His reward was further
vilification by communists at the end of the war.) Forster was in other
words an upholder of those freedoms and that liberty which Morris wanted
for his Utopia. This is important.
In many respects, perhaps in most, Forster's is an invaluable voice for
freedom. But I can imagine that had I been a young man in the later half
of the 1930s I would have thought change required the acceptance of
harder choices than he spoke up for in his essay "What I Believe". That
promoted private virtues. It seemed to ignore or anyway turn its back on
public responsibilities. And those who were on the left like Arnold
were, I think, aware of a responsibility to the future which entailed
making amends for a past that included the horrors of industrialisation,
of competitive capitalism and, most recently and appallingly, the war
and its aftermath. The war was a triumph of a modernity in which men
were ruthlessly fed to machines. Even if you put their position of
Arnold, Thompson and thousands like them at its most reductive and say
that they made a pact with the devil of Stalinism, it remains true that
their opposition to Fascism and the supine liberal democracies of Europe
was principled and in some ways mightily effective. I put this as
tentatively and modestly as I can. But the fact remains, that Fascism
was defeated, that in Britain a great, reformist Labour government came
to power, and that as a result the lives of millions of people were
decisively altered for the better. 1945 didn't usher in Morris's
dreamt-of Utopia. But nor did it mean a reversion to a pre-war England
where, in Graves's despairing phrase "it still goes on", where "it"
means the survival of all that the events of 1914-18 ought to have
discredited and brought crashing down.
Of course, the changes weren't enough. Of course, there was compromise.
Of course, every victory achieved turned out to be different from the
one envisaged. But I'm damned if I'll have it said that the causes
Arnold and Thompson and thousands like them committed themselves to
ended in failure, even though they ended in that dissatisfaction which
is integral to radicalism. "We are not what we are but what we do",
Arnold remarked at the end of one of his poems, and for him all action
--whether making a poem, staging an exhibition (at which he was a
genius), or simply going about his daily tasks — was part of his
socialism. Politics couldn't be put on hold while he did some living.
And if you think that this must have meant that he was some sort of
boot-faced, unsmiling apparatchik, then you never knew him. He was
endless fun to be with, and as well as being the wittiest man I've ever
known, was probably the most inventive, with in addition a full share of
that "insatiable curiosity" he attributed to Gilbert White of Selborne,
about whom he wrote in one of his magical Mozart Pieces. Often
enough I have complained that the dissenting spirit sits deeply and
depressingly within much English radicalism. There's a kind of
collective killjoy atmosphere about it, a joylessness, as though
pleasure is somehow irresponsible or an attribute of the right.
(Hawthorne's great story, "The Maypole of Merrymount", though set in
American New England, perfectly registers the unease with joy I have in
mind.) But Arnold bubbled with delight at the things of this world. I
think he'd probably have agreed with Kant that out of the bent timber of
humanity nothing straight can ever be made. His exhibitions of Clowning
and Bicycles were wonderful precisely because of his exuberant relish in
eccentricities of all kinds. This relish also fed into his poems about
'Trigger Makers", the working men and women who made lovingly crafted
and entirely useless objects for their own and others' delight. No
wonder he so valued Dickens, the supreme poet of "bent humanity".
But this raises a problem. After all, if what is bent can't be
straightened, can't "bear to rule" to use Dickens's phrase, doesn't this
mean that it ought to be sacrificed for the greater good? Certainly,
Eric Hobsbawm thinks along these lines. For how else explain his
horrific statement that the deaths of 20 million people would have been
justified if it brought about the desired change of an ideal communist
society. What: 20 million enemies of the people? Surely a number
like that suggests that the are the people. I'm reminded of Brecht's
poem about replacing the voters in order to get the government the
government wants. But that wasn't meant to be a satire on Stalin, was
it? Quite apart from the moral contradiction involved in sanction being
given to legalised murder as a way to achieve the society from which
legalised murder will be banished, such a statement gives all the
ammunition needed to those like John Carey who bang on about left-wing
intellectuals containing a mixture of fanatic and dreamer with absolute
contempt for the very "people" they claim to champion. I have some
sympathy with John Bird, the Editor-in-chief of Big Issue, who
wrote to the Guardian after Hobsbawm had there repeated his
appalling pronouncement, to ask: "How do we encounter the future when
most forms of progressive thinking and action have been undermined by
Stalinism? The confused left and the myopic liberalism of today owe much
of their crisis to what Hobsbawm and his ilk contributed to the 20th
century."
Against this, however, we need to remember that Hobsbawm "and his ilk"
have produced outstanding historical accounts of modern European
history, persuasive in their Marxist-inspired analyses of how and why
societies developed as they did. And that the "history from below",
rightly associated with the communist historians group — Thompson,
Raphael Samuel, Hilton, Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill etc — will always
matter because it uncovered and so recovered the lives of "the poor
stockinger" and his ilk, and so made them individuals rather than
statistics. Which of course then makes nonsense, to put the matter no
more strongly, of Hobsbawm's readiness to turn them back into
statistics.
If we ask what made him so able to think and speak in so brutal and
dehumanised a manner, the answer must, I am sure, be ideology.
Anthropologists argue that truth becomes myth once that truth is exposed
as untenable. Marxist ideology was once young. Now it is old. It was
once truth, now it is myth. This doesn't affect the brilliance of Marx's
historical analysis. It is surely instructive that a Radio 4 "Today"
poll — was it last year? — put Marx top of the list of the world's most
influential philosophers. I'm pretty certain that those who voted for
him were thinking less of Comrade Stalin, Chairman Mao or Pol Pot — or
of course Fidel Castro, for whom a case can be made as benevolent
dictator — than of Marx's account of the discontents of capitalist
society. There, he is for the most part unassailable. But the "objective
moment" of change. Ah, there he is altogether more vulnerable. Nor can
we dodge the issue. To repeat a point made earlier, though in slightly
different terms -- if change is inevitable — is the proof that history
is a progressive if locally unforeknowable unfolding — do we all roll
over and let it happen, or are we required to assist in bringing it
about. And if the latter, are "we" — the progressives, the radicals
—agents of change? And if so, is it inevitable that "we" must be ready
to murder thousands upon thousands of those who are in their different
ways preventing change? Yes, an old-style Marxist would say, as, if it
comes to that, would any sufficiently impelled idealogue: fascist,
islamicist, Christian.... the list is a long one. History is full of
examples of massacres committed in some cause or other. And has it ever
brought about the desired change? No, never. You can't get to heaven on
earth by first making a hell on earth. To think in abstract terms, the
terms of ideology, is to deny individuality. And to deny that is to make
impossible the existence of frigger-makers. The stupid, amoral and
utterly trivial post-modern take on this is of course to assert that a
belief in individuality is anyway ridiculous. The very idea of selfhood
is a discredited liberal concept. We are not so much divided selves as
multiple selves. The end game of this position, which I have heard
argued by an academic, god help me, is that we are all possessed of
"multiple personality disorders", so can't be held accountable for "our"
actions. "Did you commit this murder, Lucas?" "Not I. Or rather, it may
have been one of my many selves but certainly not the one you've hauled
in for questioning." This isn't to deny that at different times we think
and act differently. Pessoa's "To be one self is not to be" seems to me
obviously true. But this ought not to be news. It wasn't even news when
Pessoa came up with the epigram early in the 20th century. There was
Jekyll and Hyde, there was Prufrock's "You and I". There was Graves's
question, "Who was that I whose mine was you?" But what is new about
post-modernism, what makes it so much an expression of the capitalist
view of the world it would probably try to deny or treat with a knowing
wink, is its habit of avoiding or simply ignoring matters of moral,
social or political responsibility. "Hey, aren't we getting a little
heavy here. Lighten up. Chill out. Whatever. It's all style, man."
It's therefore a piquant reflection that as far as I know none of its
ardent champions is content with being anonymous. All press their claim
as individual authors of this or that argument. And it's a reasonable
guess that if ordered to jump aside from a runaway vehicle, none of them
would ask which "self was being addressed. Faced with the kind of
reality they try to shrug off as irrelevant, they exhibit the same
urgent egotism as "One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys."
Ideology — even the ideology of post-modernism — is endlessly upset by
the collision with empirical reality. This is why, in instructive
contrast to those who fought in Spain, the ideologues of the Left who
enthusiastically welcomed the evenements of 1968 were so wrong
and so quickly discouraged. Events having failed to go their way, they
mostly retreated behind the walls of academe where they fashioned ever
more abstruse, mind-numbing ideological explanations for 1968 not having
been the correct "objective" historical moment for the change they had
confidently predicted. But not one, as far as I can see, kept faith with
an empirical socialism, a way of working to make change happen. They
deserved all the obloquy Thompson threw at them in his essay on "The
Poverty of Theory".
I
am with Thompson, though I am even more of an empiricist. I distrust
idealism, whether philosophical or otherwise. In a famous essay in which
she championed realism in fiction, George Eliot argued against
idealising human beings. Idealisation leads to sentimentality which
means lying. You can't straighten wits any more than you can straighten
noses, she says. Agreed. But as an example of what she wants, Eliot says
that it is "important to accept the peasant in all his coarse apathy."
And I think, suppose George Eliot, having laid down her pen, went for a
walk and by chance bumped into John Clare. A peasant in all his coarse
apathy, hi other words, her realism turns out at least occasionally to
mask a kind of absolutism which smells to me of anti-empiricism. And
though she would never be like those medieval Schoolmen who not only
argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin but who
decided that without going to the horse's mouth they could establish how
many teeth it contained, there is an element of inflexible determinism
in her generalisations..
This comes from her commitment to Positivism, and like Marxism
Positivism sees history as progress. Human history moves through three
stages: from the theological to the metaphysical to the Positive.
According to Comte, Positivism's founding father-philosopher, the 19th
century would bring about the arrival of the Positive age, in which true
altruism would replace the different kinds of largely egotistic
preoccupations that had hitherto motivated people — and which had first
prevented and then held back those changes needed to usher in the
Positive Age. This would now be made possible by "Saints of Humanity",
by the actions of those agents who resolutely set themselves against the
distracting allures of the personal life (marriage, children, etc).
Saints of Humanity are to all intents and purposes secularised servants
of god: and there is a good deal of foggy mysticism in Comte. No wonder
Marx thought he was "theoretically utterly backward." Still, peasants in
all their coarse apathy have had a hard time of it under Marxist
orthodoxy, and at least Comte didn't think it alright to kill however
many millions of them might have to be wiped out to bring on the ideal
society. And even when they have been deified — think of Mao's cultural
revolution or Pol Pot's mass murders of intellectuals — they have been
equally seen in abstract terms.
George Eliot wrote her essay partly in order to criticise what she saw
as Dickens's undue "idealising" of peasants and working people. But
Dickens seems to me infinitely greater because he refused to accept the
kind of social determinism that is overt in Positivism and which
disfigures most Marxism. It's there from the beginning and not merely in
the mystification — as it surely is - about the nature of change and the
problem Marxism therefore has with Agency. The Condition of the
Working Class in England, great work though it is, nevertheless
takes for granted the brutality and "atomisation" of industrialised
society, and for Engels, as for Marx, class-consciousness can be formed
only on the factory floor. Not the home, not, please, the public house,
nor the music hall, nor popular theatre — none of those places where the
atomisation of society into separate units which he brilliantly analysed,
no doubt about it, is replaced by cohesion, togetherness, communality.
With atomisation it becomes fatally easy to take for granted individuals
as statistics. Marxism theoretically sets itself against reification,
against turning a person into a "thing". Reification is the prime evil
of capitalism. Men become "hands" or "operatives". But surely something
analogous happens when they become peasants? Or enemies of the people?
They can become then things to an end. Objects to fulfil someone else's
purpose. What after all is the essential difference between the British
transporting convicts to Australia to create the new world and Stalin
sending millions to Gulags to build the new Russia? When in Our
Mutual Friend Bradley Headstone encounters by chance Rogue Riderhood,
he thinks "here is an instrument. Can I use it?" And throughout the
novel, people are turned into objects to be used by others as they wish.
The novel's linguistic riches, its almost inexhaustible imagistic power,
take us to the heart of Dickens's angry realisation of what was
happening to a society in which people were, as they still are, harmed
and indeed wrecked by forces that took for granted, even took for good,
the unimportance of individual lives. That is what we need to
change.
A
last point, if I may. You were kind enough to speak well of my poem
"Meet the English" when you reviewed my last collection, Flute Music.
But to be honest, I don't think it's the poem you took it for. At all
events, it certainly wasn't meant to be a satire on English snobbery so
much as a wry observation on the ways in which "we" determine matters of
nationality and then history — change— undoes all those determinations.
I'd been reading David Crystal's The Stories of English and was
struck by the fact that when the Normans came they brought with them
their names for the farm animals they would slaughter for food. The
natives who served them kept their names for animals. And so: "I herd
cows./They broil beef." But in the early 21s century those Norman
invaders have become more English than the English, given that many now
eat international food and holiday abroad. And so: "They grow kale./I
order sushi." The poem is meant as a squib against claims of national
"purity", against, therefore, a form of ideology which deals in
abstractions and mystifications. But then all ideology, once it's known
to be ideology, seems to me both anti-empiricist and dangerous.
(Dangerous because anti-empiricist.)' "A nation?, says Bloom. A nation
is the same people living in the same place." That'll do.
With best wishes and, as old socialists used to say, fraternally,
John Lucas
CLOTH-EARED VULGARITY
Dear
Alan Dent
I
must deplore in the strongest terms that farrago of cloth-eared vulgarity
Goodbye
Denmark Road which appeared in Penniless Press 22 masquerading as an
homage to the superb Lindsay Quartet. The writer admits he can’t read a
note of music and adds to this impertinence quite disgusting vignettes of
hard-working academics. I feel especially besmirched since I am, I
believe, the Rita Hayworth look-alike of the back stage. I did often gaze
over Robin Ireland’s head towards seat CC5 and now recall the disgusting
old pervert who sat in it – usually fiddling under his mac which one on
occasion slipped to reveal something red and tubular.
I
am slightly acquainted with the eminent Professor Kemp (now retired) and
intend to draw his attention to this dreadful libel. I shall also write to
the distinguished poet Geoffrey Wainwright, professor David Fanning and
Tony Harrison. The poor, vilified unfortunates who occupied the seats
behind the author must make their own arrangements.
As
for the deceased, the idea that the country’s greatest composer,
Benjamin Britten, would have cavorted with Peter Pears and Morgan Forster
in the manner suggested is both incredible and deeply shocking. It is
quite beyond belief that the queen would award the Order of Merit to such
an unprincipled advocate of unbridled homosexuality.
I
have seen earlier odd copies of your once excellent magazine, left by my
cleaning lady. I recall a worthy and even noble organ of adamantine
radicalism. With the introduction of pieces such as this, however, you are
turning the Penniless Press into a tawdry simulacrum of Viz magazine.
Cyril Connolly once famously observed that little magazines rarely lasted
longer than ten years. Yours is now eleven. Far from a decline into a
dignified decrepitude we are witnessing a gibbering, obscene senility. In
God’s name stop at once.
|
Ms Sonia Treadgold (B.Ed) |
|
Flat 6, Ravenswood, Spath Road, West
Didsbury, Manchester |
HIS CUSTOMARY CARROT
Dear
Alan
Thanks
for passing on Sonia’s complaint. It’s not strictly true that I
can’t read a note of music. There were distractions during my early
education on the recorder – head lice, compulsory sour milk, power cuts,
powdered egg etc (I won’t bore you with the details) – but later I did
apply myself and I recall an evening in the pub a few years back when a
sceptical mate challenged me with an unseen score. I played, as I
remember, a halting, but accurate, version of ba ba black sheep on the
kazoo.
The
larger point surely though is what’s so important about score reading?
Wittgenstein was a clever sod by anyone’s standards, and was a good
sight reader too, but he soon gave it up and whistled instead. Friends
report he could whistle, note perfect, the complete St Anthony Variations
by Brahms. Also you won’t find Alfred Brendel and Murray Perahia peering
at grubby sheets. They can read but they’d rather not.
The
definitive rebuttal of score reading fetishism surely comes from the Guardian
of October 26th which describes the methods of Sir Paul
Macartney - some say the greatest song-writer since Schubert – to write his
oratorio:
"When
I say 'write'," my friend said, "I use the word very loosely. A
whole army of people were flown out to his place, and found themselves
staying up for 48 hours at a stretch while he wandered around, humming. It
was their job to turn this total arse-dribble into a score for chorus and
orchestra. He seemed quite pleased with it in the end. Of course, it's
never been played since.
Sonia should really get up to date.
To insist on score reading would be as barmy as suggesting good writers
need to learn spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocab. You’ll find the top jockeys
in this area, Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer, don’t bother with such
nonsense – they just have good ideas.
Concerning the red tubular object I
have to confess this was my customary interval carrot which had been
jabbing in my groin. Professor Wesley Sharrock (Sociology), a fellow
subscriber in row CC, had circulated a manuscript - Influences of
Common Fruit and Veg on Aesthetic Response. He championed the carrot
for most 20C works but thought Wagner best accompanied by the Senna pod.
In the whole of Tescos he’d discovered nothing to make Hindemith
tolerable. A few believers would meet in the foyer crunching communally.
We usually huddled in a corner - even by the standards of Denmark Road
carrot crunching was considered somewhat eccentric.
Wes remarked that Rita was looking
quite horny that night, better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (he has the
complete DVD boxed set). Professor Kemp, holding his carrot quite low,
wondered of she’d be interested in his new sonata for pink oboe.
Suddenly Wes’s eyes widened. I turned round to see Rita emerging from
the toilets. The door crashed noisily, her bag gaped open and disgorged an
empty half bottle of gin which clattered on the floor. The crowded foyer
fell silent. Rita lurched unsteadily towards the auditorium. As she turned
to push open the swing doors we could see that the hem of her beautiful,
pleated A line dress was still wedged into the top of her knickers.
“Poor cow!” said Wes “By the time the second half starts she won’t
know Scheidt from Shostakovich”.
|
Ken Clay |
|
Grappenhall, Warrington |
