LOOK TO THE FUTURE NOW – IT’S ONLY JUST BEGUN…

Look to the Future Now - It's only Just Begun...

Thursday, 23 June, 2016

I went to a brass band concert last Saturday evening. It took place in a heritage centre down the hill from our village. I think this probably makes me a bad person.

But wait - I should begin, as Kenneth Williams probably said in that lost 1975 masterpiece Carry On Up the Referendum, by laying out my credentials.

I’m old, white, male. A husband, father and grandfather. A card-carrying member of the Labour Party.  Not Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A lifelong Guardian reader.

I heard my Dad talk repeatedly in the early ‘70s about the theoretical virtues of world government. Like millions of others, he had served for six years in World War II. More singularly than most, he had reached the conclusion that the only way to avoid such conflicts in future lay in making common cause. He voted enthusiastically in Harold Wilson’s EEC referendum to stay in Europe - and so did I.

I’m a Remainer to this day.    

But I’ve been much struck throughout - and particularly lately - by the desolate, threadbare nature of debate on both sides of the argument. So great a matter. Such a puny level of engagement and leadership by the politicians. So many lazy lies and venomous half-truths.

Most journalism has been like trench warfare. Predictable and fruitless, rancid with the smell of space-filling gas and the echo of foam-flecked orders from proprietor-generals behind the lines we read. The BBC and other media have been hobbled by the arid demands of impartiality. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to publish pictures of cats and Twitter has demonstrated that sewers can be electronically pure but still horribly unclean to the nth human degree.

All of this – and a shattering added component of jaw-dropping tragedy – has produced a harsh dislocation among us which to me looks possibly beyond repair, regardless of who wins today. I’ve recently seen the divide described like this: -

Leavers are xenophobic, insular, narrow-minded, self-regarding, racist, confused, brainless, extremist, hateful, economically-illiterate, un-Christian Little-Englanders and swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists.

Remainers are sneering, aloof, arrogant, vicious, supercilious, evil, unhinged, hypocritical, ageist, lying, duplicitous, cavalier, collaborators, traitors and bullies.

Charles Sorley, a little over a century ago, was strangely prescient: -

And some are mounted on swift steeds of thought

and some drag sluggish feet of stable toil.

Yet all, as though they furiously sought,

twist turn and tussle, close and cling and coil.

Odd, therefore, in the midst of this mighty threshing about that I find myself irritatedly hung up on the transient words of a low-level one-trick newspaper columnist (the trick is, as someone had it, “passing insults off as wit”) – A A Gill of the Sunday Times.

Two middle-aged youngsters on my Facebook timeline have posted and commended as admirable a recent longish piece by him on the virtues of Remain.  A A Gill is 62 and therefore not an obvious poster-boy for the fading young. He’s the man who wrote that Mary Beard’s physical appearance put her “this far from being the subject of a C4 documentary.” He meant The Undateables. He’s the man who referred to Clare Balding in a television review as “the dyke on a bike.” He’s the man who is Jeremy Clarkson’s best friend. Just a bit of context there…

But old A A is actually in my camp and boy, did he tear into those pesky Brexiteers. Here’s a taste: -

“We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.”

“This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.”

“There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.”

You begin to see how A A has made me start to doubt myself. After all, I’m demonstrably old. I quite like the odd bit of nostalgia. I kind of do think it’s unlikely that rivals to Shakespeare and Dickens will emerge anytime ever. I revere the memory of Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, not to mention Richard Todd playing Guy Gibson, not to mention the Dam Busters March. And to me, cottage gardens are beyond beautiful. A A doesn’t mention brass bands in his roll of infamy but the Grimethorpe Colliery boys and girls did play Nimrod on Saturday evening, and it’s likely that Elgar is somewhere on his little list.  And then he hits me with these killer left-right combinations; peak Blighty; Bisto nostalgia. No hope for me. I’m on the floor, crawling brokenly towards my saviours, my true buddies, in Brexit, where I obviously belong. I clearly don’t have any right to love Europe and want success for the EU.

He’s vicious and funny, contemptuous and dismissive in the default mode which is his trademark. Clearly he makes some Remainers – like my two wrinkled semi-youths - feel warm inside. After all, Brexiteers are all like Farage, aren’t they? Braying, angry hate machines, none without a semi- coherent Nazi thought, all definitely thinking that If is the best poem ever written and each one needing to be shovelled aside with no afterthought as Remain advances to sunlit glory.

Gill’s writing is symptomatic of a deepening tendency in politics in favour of the laddish bludgeon. But I don’t believe this kind of cheap hustling for a cause is useful. It’s not useful because it makes simplicity from complexity. It kills the possibility of dialogue in favour of irreversible hammer blows and abuse. It sets up ingrained enemies and denies the possibility of understanding and reconciliation. It’s a version of demagoguery as rancid as anything Farage produces but the difference is that Farage is, for good or ill, serious. Gill is a bully who does it for a laugh.

I suppose the lesson is that both sides have pernicious bombasticos among their cohorts and that full-throttle campaigning will always produce scraped knees and bruised knuckles. But I think we need to overlay the referendum question with another. How will we calm ourselves down and get back in tolerant step together after Thursday? Whatever the decision, it’ll stick. And we have to live with it – and one another.

So I’ll keep with my nostalgia and brass bands and Barnes Wallis if you don’t mind. And quite out of A A Gill’s expectation, I’ll vote Remain today with an ancient, wizened heart – valuing the past but looking to the future.

Any passing hipsters fancy a sesh with the DVD of Brassed Off and a flagon of Sanatogen over ice?

John Le Carre - High Spy

John Le Carre - High Spy

The wave has broken. The opinion-formers have stepped ashore, raising their surfboards to the sun. It’s a long way from Islington to Mallorca but they made it! Thumbs are up. High fives have never been higher or fivier. Time for cool wine on a marble terrace and a complementary seat next to a gently-dozing old party called David Cornwell. Apparently the set crew forgot to wake him when they moved on. But he’s here. And he’s a seer, all-knowing when it comes to spies and tradecraft. Plus, of course, The Night Manager is an unqualified triumph. And the cast – well my dear! Perfect in every way. A true television event and cheap at £3M an episode.

John Le Carre has been doing this sort of thing for decades.

     David Cornwell is smarmed by Pine, post-Corky

How did it happen that a moderately competent spinner of yarns, which uncomfortably suggest that Britain was post-war and remains today in thrall to a clique of sex-terrified public schoolboys, came not only to be revered but actually believed? And that a structure devoid first of credible women and then of any semblance of humour in particular and real life in general was accepted as historically sound and admirable?

Perhaps it was the alias that did the trick. Or pen-name, as it would be called were any less self-avowedly mysterious figure involved. Maybe it was the gagging credulousness of generations of reporters who bought his qualifications as an “insider” and believed the shadows he cast were cool shade indeed. Then again, why blame journalists alone when the high-end literary world has conspired so enthusiastically in the Le Carre elevation? If Philip Roth, no less, announces that 1986’s A Perfect Spy is “the best English novel since the war,” it must surely be true. Peak Le Carre was reached in that year and he has been roaming unfettered in the uplands of approbation ever since.

Of course I exaggerate. A little. There is the Le Carre whose reputation as a writer is based more on TV adaptations and Alec Guinness than true literary worth - but is still undoubtedly and fairly rooted in the virtues of his best book, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. And there is the Le Carre, as we have seen, accepted by lazy journalists and come-day media types as the go-to guy for spy lore and far-sighted power prophecy. The man who designates the baddie without challenge as “the worst man in the world” and who decides that the MI6 building at Vauxhall Bridge is known in government circles as "The River House."

    The worst man in the world

Which brings us back to The Night Manager. When David Cornwell played Hitchcock, sitting at lunch as an extra in that terrace restaurant scene, suffering a tongue-lashing from Corky and then a soothing smooth-over from Pine, even he could scarcely have anticipated the unlicensed critical salivating which the series would provoke. No matter that the sharp angles of Tom Hiddleston’s face and his ultra-exquisite pronunciation raised a hint of Kenneth Williams. Irrelevant that Olivia Colman turned in another in a long line of Olivia Colman performances, this one as Connie Sachs reborn, improbably pregnant and even more questionably at large in a twenty-first century office with 1950s-style broken radiators. Forget the impossible prospect of Hugh Laurie, immortal leader of the Trinity College Tiddlywinkers, being menacing. And, above all, overlook the fact that absolutely none of what happens in The Night Manager is remotely based on real power, real espionage or real criminality.

This would be fine were it not for the fact that Le Carre imposes upon his flimsy inventions the veneer of certainty-via-experience. 
It is, as it has been for fifty years, Le Carre’s truth.  And therefore to an extent both alarming and risible, our history

Philip Larkin - Right Angle and Wrong Angle

What Trigger and Philip Larkin had in common

When Trigger was awarded a medal for services to road sweeping in Peckham, it came out that his broom of 20 years had had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. “How the hell can it be the same bloody broom, then?” croaked Sid from behind the caff counter. “Well ‘ere’s a picture of it – what more proof do you need?” said Trigg.

Though he had just described it, Trigg probably didn’t know about Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus paradox. Well let’s say he definitely didn’t know.  

   

  

Of course there’s no reason at all why John Sullivan shouldn’t have read his Plutarch.

Theseus. Founder of Athens.  Fought many sea battles. Ship preserved after his death for centuries as a memorial.  Every part of the ship renewed or replaced as the wood rotted over the years. Was it or wasn’t it the same ship at this point?

But I wonder whether some echo of another source might have filtered through to Sullivan as well. This one for example - recorded in a letter from Philip Larkin to an old love, Winifred Bradshaw, in November, 1976:-

Anyway, it’s hard to afford both drink and petrol. Yes I have a car (though I don’t talk about it). I learned to drive in 1964 – long after your few patient lessons on the outskirts of Lisburn! I’d forgotten the Mrs Beeton: I’m writing with a pen they presented me with in 1955, except that it’s had several new nibs and barrels and caps since then. But in spirit it’s the same.

Later, maybe, Larkin made one of his rare London forays and sat down for lunch and booze with his oldest friend, Kingsley Amis.  Might Sullivan have been at the next table? Perhaps, as you do when deep philosophical writing tool-related topics are gnawing at you, Larkin brought up the pen nib/cap/barrel issue in conversation as he had in his letter - a bit like this:-

PL

You see, Kingsley, we have an old saying that’s been handed down by generations of university librarians – “Look after your fountain pen!”

(Pause)

KA

 (hopefully) And your fountain pen will look after you?

PL

(blankly) No, Kingsley. It’s just “Look after your fountain pen!”

And maybe he sat on it, thought about it until the ‘80s and Only Fools and Horses - and ultimately gave Trigger one of his best lines and finest moments.

So did Sullivan draw his inspiration from a 2,000 year-old Plutarchian Paradox or a restaurant-based Larkinesque Coincidence?

I know which option I prefer…

And what Jimmy Savile and Philip Larkin didn’t

In 1993, Alan Bennett wrote for the London Review of Books a long and brilliant review of Andrew Motion’s recently-published biography of Larkin. There was a great deal of tough love in Alas! Deceived. Bennett’s analysis gave full reign to his fondness for Larkin but sharply challenged and debunked many of the then-prevailing Larkin mythologies. Talking about Larkin’s 1965 Monitor film in which he was interviewed by John Betjeman, Bennett wrote:-

Striding down the library in the Monitor film, Larkin thought he looked like a rapist. (The producer) reassured him, but walking by the canal in the same film there is no reassurance; he definitely does. Clad in his doleful raincoat with pebble glasses, cycle-clips and oceanic feet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Reginald Halliday Christie. Haunting his cemeteries and churchyards he could be on the verge of exposing himself and whether it’s to a grim, head-scarved wife from Hessle or in a slim volume from Faber and Faber seems a bit of a toss-up

.

This is hilarious in an uncomfortable way - more so when Bennett links it with Larkin’s supposed   binocular-snooping on the courting couples in Pearson Park from the high

windows of his flat.  

Late in the review, Bennett talks about Larkin’s obsession with and terror of death. He separates himself from the general approval given to the last despairing major poem, Aubade. And here a major jolt of retrospect from our later vantage point occurs. Shortly after Larkin died in 1985, Bennett had taken part in a commemorative event at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. Recalling it years later in the review, he quotes his diary entry:-  

We finish at half-past ten and I go straight to Great Ormond Street, where Sam is in Intensive Care. See sick children (and in particular one baby almost hidden under wires and apparatus) and Larkin’s fear of death seems self-indulgent. Sitting there I find myself wondering what would have happened had he worked in a hospital once a week like (dare I say it?) Jimmy Savile.

What we know now about what Savile did in hospitals provokes a shudder from that closing sentence. Bennett, like almost everyone aware of Savile at the time, took his activities as based in a benign if eccentric will to help others. Now that we know differently (and I don’t doubt that Bennett would agree), it seems reassuringly bizarre, even with the spread of phobias, misogyny and racism revealed in his letters and diaries, to suggest that Larkin should have looked to him as a role model.  Larkin may have looked like a rapist but certainly wasn’t one. Savile looked like one (we all missed it) and was.

As for death itself, I can’t see that pushing trolleys round a hospital would have done much to salve Larkin’s horror at the prospect of extinction. And think of the effect on patients of waking from anaesthetic torpor to find Larkin’s lugubrious dial looming over them. Larkin knew hospitals after all. He’d written about them often – for example in this vein:-

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

and somewhere like this. That is what it means,

this clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

the thought of dying, for unless its powers

outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

the coming dark…

Somehow, the road to cheeriness by true good works did not lie there.