PEOPLE OFTEN SAY childhood is the age of innocence. Don’t you believe it. There is nobody more cunning, more calculating, often more deceptive, than a human infant (except perhaps a cat, whose most companionable purr can mask a curse . . . ) Haven’t you seen that evil glare in babies’ eyes when, for the fifth time in a row, they throw their rattles out of their prams for the sheer devilish pleasure of making their mothers pick them up? That is the Rattle-Trick, the oldest in the game. Original sin originated in babies, and the seed of malice is innate in them.
I WAS RECENTLY spending an afternoon doing nothing in particular at an outdoor café in the Piazza Unità in Trieste. This is one of the great children’s playgrounds of Europe, where they can kick their balls about, push their toy prams, make their first attempts at skate-boarding, all among the memorials and pompous architecture of the city.
Two children particularly interested me that afternoon. One small boy of seven or eight had evidently acquired a new pair of Rollerblades, and was whizzing precariously but ostentatiously around the piazza pursued wherever he went by an adoring younger sister dying to play some part in the adventure. Wherever he whizzed, she tottered after. Whenever he fell over she was there to help. But did he appreciate her loyalty? Did he hell. He only wanted to humiliate her. He was seven or eight years old, and he only wanted to make her feel small. This is called the Squash-Device.
The other child I had an eye on could only just walk, being I suppose less than two years old. He had grown out of the Rattle-Trick technique. He was too young for Squashery. But from every staggering trundle around the square on the hand of an indulgent parent he returned, I noted, with a mordantly calculating look in his eye. Hardly had he settled then in somebody’s lap, barely had they taken a sip of their cappuccino, hardly had he accepted a snack of a sweet biscuit or a lump of sugar, than he was wriggling and squirming and fidgeting all over again, depriving his unfortunate parents of their brief and hard-earned moment of relaxation. This was the Walk-Ploy, and with a sigh they succumbed to it every time. All through the long afternoon they walked him, on and off, here and there around the piazza, until the sun began to sink into the Adriatic and it was time at last for little Angelo, kicking and giggling and pushing his baseball cap askew, to be taken victorious off to bed. He had won again. They usually do.
CHILDHOOD, LIKE THE past, is a foreign country. In China it is the sensible practice to lead parties of toddlers through public places tied together with string, and one of the fascinations of Chinese travel is to observe each little face, one after the other, looking up at you with a sweet smile as you pass. Sweet but oddly disturbing, for if you keep an eye on them, you will see that the simper of innocence vanishes instantly when you have passed— to be switched on, like an electric device, by the next child in line. It is as though they are one and all contributors to some collusive subversion—citizens of mischief from somewhere else, rather like goats.
Original sin it may not really be, but original mischief is organic in children (as in goats), and distinguishes them from us. It is their glory and their privilege. The most uncompelling of Christian icons, to my mind, are those that present the Christ-child as a paragon of demure behaviour, looking back at us from the Madonna’s lap without a thought of bawling for sustenance from her generous breasts, let alone giving her hair a pudgy tug. A purely divine baby might indeed have no such impulses in his head, but the Christ-child, after all, was human too.
Anyway, you may ask, why am I so conversant with these tricks and ploys of infancy? Because I have helped to bring up five sons and daughters, that’s why, and watched the manoeuvres of eight or nine grandchildren. Besides, I was once an infant myself.
I FOUND MYSELF late one night at a deserted spot ten miles outside Charleston, South Carolina. There a trio of angels, disguised as two sisters and a delightfully loquacious three-year-old called Graham, observed me morosely wondering how on earth I was going to find a taxi into town. Instantly they made room for me in their car and whisked me direct to my hotel. “Thanks for the ride, Graham,” said I when we parted. His reply was courteous, but not being fluent myself in three-year-old Carolinian American, for the life of me I couldn’t understand a word of it.
When I told a local acquaintance of mine about the angelic intervention, he said: “Oh that’s nothing unusual, we’re all very nice in Charleston.” Actually they weren’t always, as I remember too well from my first visit to the place, back in the 1950s heyday of segregation and southern racism, but now it did seem to be true that the most classy of American cities had found, as it were, niceness.
It was a Sunday morning, and its lovely streets were immaculate, its citizens all smiles, its very dogs fastidious, as I made my way to morning service at St. Michael’s Episcopalian Church. I should really have gone somewhere more extreme. I should have gone to a Catholic church and been told that it was a sin to vote for a pro-abortion politician. I should have joined an evangelical congregation and had a dose of right-wing fundamentalism. But I chose St. Michael’s sure that in that splendid eighteenth-century fane nobody would be very radical either way, and I was right. The service seemed to me a very exhibition of American restraint. There was a minimum of passion of any kind, politics were not mentioned, and the Reverend Richard Belser’s sermon was a model parable about marital relationships.
The congregation was discreetly dressed, of course, conversant with the ritual and not at all effusive during the Welcoming. The music was fine, and I was delighted to find tucked into my hymn book the printed programme of a recent wedding at the church, listing in antique italics the names of the seven Groomsmen, the Flower Girl, the two Greeters, the Grandmothers of the Bride, and the Ring Bearer (Howard Wilson Glasgow IV, whose daddy Howard Wilson Glasgow III had been one of the Groomsmen). Could anything be more reassuring?
When we emerged into the sunshine, too, Charleston seemed almost like a propaganda mock-up of an American city. The market brightly bustled, yachts raced off-shore, margaritas evidently flowed, and among the ambling crowds there were not a few inter-racial couples—imagine that, here in the greatest of the slave ports, within sight of Fort Sumter where the Civil War began! It was like a dream. I had an introduction to one of the most beautiful of the seashore houses, currently being restored, and found its owner and her mother awaiting me rather as in a Winslow Homer painting, all sunlit on their balcony above the glistening sea.
They didn’t mention politics. They didn’t mention the state of the Union. They said how delightful their inter-ethnic workmen were, and told me how skilful and dedicated were the Charleston craftsmen. They weren’t in the least surprised to hear about my rescuing angels. They had a blind dog called Chloe. They gave me iced tea, and they sent me away not exactly rejoicing, as the Reverend Mr. Belser might have put it, but decidedly comforted to find this enclave of the ideal in the midst of reality.
PROVERBS ARE, SO to speak, the catch-phrases of allegory. A favourite of Admiral of the Fleet Lord “Jacky” Fisher, an early twentith-century virtuoso of the catch-phrase, was “The British Navy always travels first class,” regularly quoted to himself as he checked into yet another fashionable spa. I was similarly conditioned during my adolescent years as an officer with the Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers of the British Army. At the end of World War II, when we were not getting messy in our dirty old tanks we were making sure that we ate at the best restaurants and stayed at the poshest hotels.
Nowhere did we honour Lord Fisher’s proverb more loyally than in Venice, where we happily made the most of our status as members of a victorious occupying army. Many of the best hotels became our officers’ clubs, the most expensive restaurants were pleased to accept our vastly inflated currency (which we had very likely acquired by selling cigarettes in the black market). And in particular, since all the motor-boats of the city had been requisitioned by the military, we rode up and down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, over to the Lido, like so many lucky young princes.
That was long ago, and I have been back to Venice at least a hundred times since. I have never forgotten Fisher’s dictum, and until one day in 2004 I had never once in my life so far neglected it as to take a vaporetto, a public water bus, from the railway station into the centre of the city. There no longer being commandeered motor-boats available, I had invariably summoned one of the comfortably insulated and impeccably varnished water-taxis which, for a notorious fee, would whisk me without hassle to the quayside of my hotel.
My partner Elizabeth had not been subjected to the same influences of adolescence. She spent her wartime years as a rating in the women’s naval service, decoding signals in an underground war-room, subsisting on baked beans and vile sweet tea from the canteen. But she had been to Venice with me dozens of times, and I thought that by now I had initiated her into my own Fisherian style of travel. However last time we were there she proved unexpectedly retrogressive. “O Jan,” she said as I hastened her towards the line of waiting taxis, ignoring the throbbing vaporetto at its pier, “O Jan why must you always be so extravagant? What’s wrong with the vaporetto? Everyone else goes on it. It’s a fraction of the price. What’s the hurry anyway? What are you proving? We’re not made of money, you know. What’s the point?”
“The British Navy always—,” I began to say, but she interrupted me with a proverb of her own. “Waste not, want not,” she primly retorted. Ah well, said I to myself, and to Lord Fisher too, anything for a quiet life: and humping our bags in the gathering dusk, tripping over ourselves, fumbling for the right change, dropping things all over the place, with our tickets between our teeth we stumbled up the gangplank on to the already jam-packed deck.
There we stood for three or four days, edging into eternity, while the vessel pounded its way through the darkness up the Grand Canal, stopping at every available jetty with deafening engine reversals, throwing us about with judderings, clangings and bumps, while we stood there cheek by jowl with a ten thousand others on the cold and windy poop. When at last we debouched on the quayside below San Marco, looking as though we were stepping onto Omaha Beach, Elizabeth turned to me with an air of satisfaction. “There you are, you see. That wasn’t so bad was it? Think of the money we saved! After all these years, I bet you’ll never take one of those exorbitant taxis again. A penny saved is a penny gained.”
But she spoke this meaningless maxim too late. Pride, I nearly told her, comes before a fall. Standing there upon the quayside slung about with bags and surrounded by suitcases, I had already discovered that on the vaporetto from the railway station somebody had stolen the wallet that contained all our worldly wealth, not to mention all our credit cards. Off we trudged to the police station to report the loss, and as we sat in the dim light among a melancholy little assembly of unfortunates and ne’er-do-wells, how I regretted ignoring that Fisherism! I bet Elizabeth did, too, although she was too proud to admit it.
I didn’t actually say “Penny wise, pound foolish.” I did not even murmur under my breath the bit about travelling first class. Never hit a woman when she’s down, I told myself. Virtue is its own reward—and as it happened it was rewarded. We never got that wallet back, but the carabinieri were terribly solicitous, and said how sorry they were, and assured us that no Venetian could have done such a thing—it must have been one of those Albanians—and sent us off feeling perfectly comforted, and a little bit sorry for them, actually, so palpable was their sense of civic shame.
And half an hour later, emotionally drained one way and the other, we turned up on the doorstep of Harry’s Bar, a hostelry I have frequented ever since those glory days of victory, when I was young and easy, as the poet said, and Time let me hail and climb. With Jack Fisher metaphorically beside us—he would have loved Harry’s Bar—we pushed our way through the revolving door and told our sad story to the people inside.
Lo! they gave us a free dinner (scampi and white wine, with a zabaglioni afterwards) just to cheer us up. For once our proverbs did not conflict. Every cloud, we agreed, as the three of us sat there in the warmth of our first-class corner, really does hide a silver lining.
COMPLEXITY, OF COURSE, is an aspect of allegory, which is why whenever I’m in France I try to stop off at Tournus. I like the name of it, for one thing—not one of your pinnacled place-names, but tough and stubby. I like the size of the town, with some 7,300 inhabitants. I like its position on the map, at the bottom end of Burgundy, half-way between Paris and Marseilles. But most of all I like the suggestive complexity of its Frenchness.
On the face of things it has only what one asks of any small French town. It has the Saône River, with the statutory river bridge, pollarded plane trees and idle anglers conventionally catching nothing on its quays. It has an autoroute close by, a celebrated restaurant, a properly pompous Hôtel de Ville, and the double-towered, many-buttressed, austerely arrogant abbey church of St. Philibert. Like so many others in France, the town stands at a junction, where immemorial trade routes converge. The river traffic is mostly pleasure craft nowadays, but often enough a hefty barge churns its way under the bridge, captain’s car stowed on its poop, to recall the water commerce of a thousand years. Every morning a majestic swoosh proclaims the passage of the TGV express on its way to Lyon, and along the autoroute, a couple of miles out of town, the trucks and cars swarm as the legions did before them.
But for me the fascination of this place is something more elemental than convergence—more a matter of metamorphosis, in fact. Tournus stands elongated along the west bank of the river, and when I contemplate it from the opposite shore at first it looks straightforward enough. At the top of the town, north of the bridge, the towering mass of the abbey quarter confronts me with its protective turrets, a self-confident enclave which once sheltered all the structures of a powerful Benedictine monastery, and still has a firm, privileged look, with ample villas and gardens down to the river. It is the scene one expects of Burgundy, fit to be embroidered by gentlewomen.
To the left, though, below the bridge, the town unexpectedly runs away down the river-bank in a much less adamant or tapestrian way, and that bold silhouette decays into a fretted jumble of roofs and chimneys, almost anarchic, as though one town, or one culture, has somehow been transformed into another.
THIS SENSATION IS confirmed for me when I cross the river and take a walk through the streets. I start at the abbey quarter, which is indeed remarkably disciplined (except when straggly bus-loads of tourists, or coveys of schoolchildren, are shepherded towards the great church). The shops are craft shops, antique shops, galleries, basket-makers; scholarly-looking men are deep in converse; that famous restaurant is there, and my favourite hotel in all France. I may perhaps hear restrained folk music issuing from upstairs practice-rooms—or even gentlewomen’s madrigals?
But south of the abbey, after the bridge, things are soon very different. Now rock music blares from cars at traffic lights. Women shake dusters out of windows. Prickly old codgers mutter to themselves in bars. Cafés abound, and kebab joints. In the middle of the Place Carnot a parked trailer serves crêpes all day long, and on Saturdays the whole length of the town is turned into a serpentine street market, the alleys smell of cheeses, sausages, curry and bunched flowers, and beyond the Hôtel de Ville a couple of costumed Peruvians play funereal Andean harmonies on their pipes.
The very structures seem to me to change, as they themselves meander down the streets. Surely something is happening to the architecture? The skyline grows more raggety, red tiles predominate, glass-enclosed verandas appear, bright blue shutters, external staircases and projecting eaves. A few black people are about now, and Arabs, and like the rooftops, like the colours, little by little as I stroll I feel myself altering too—relaxing, unclenching, perhaps whistling a melody as I walk.
What goes on? The publicists say of the Saône that as it passes through Tournus it surrenders itself to “l’appel du Midi.” Now, it seems, I too have crossed some invisible border, and am submitting to the liberating summons of the South.
SUCH IS THE piquant, or perhaps picaresque allure that brings me so often back here. Tournus is a kind of frontier town, but in the middle of a nation. Here one France kisses another! It seems to me that upstream from the bridge all is clear-cut and logical, but below it everything is aesthetically smudged—as though I have walked out of realism into impressionism. Those civic sentimentalists maintain that when the Saône overflows its banks here, as it often does, it is not punishing the town but embracing it: I prefer to think that when the river passes under the bridge it is celebrating, with a sensuous welling of its waters, just the complicated frisson that I am feeling too, as I walk out of one sensibility into another.
THERE ARE PROS and cons to the equivocal condition of hypochondria. On the one hand it is generally harmless, except perhaps in over-indulgence. On the other hand it is incurable, because there is nothing to cure.
It is really a kind of dreaming. In sleep one has no doubt that a dream is true, and similarly there is no possibility of a mistaken diagnosis of that nagging pain in the back of the hypochondriac’s neck—every reference book confirms it, just as every circumstance of a nightmare is utterly convincing.
In a sense both are true. The world of our dreams exists, if only in our minds, and a maladie imaginaire, though it may not be caused by microbe or decay, is quite genuine enough to its patients. In fact the sufferer may be genuinely rid of it, too, by a placebo—a dream may be consummated by a totally disfunctional orgasm, a non-disease banished by an entirely impotent pill.
Hypochondria certainly has its pleasures. Of course the seduction of self-pity is one, and the morbid fascination of pursuing one’s symptoms through the well-thumbed pages of those family medical encyclopedias. I am told that Hemingway habitually took on safari Black’s Medical Dictionary (probably its tenth edition, 1931), and doubtless spent many a fascinating hour communing with it over his whiskey and his hurricane lamp, while the wild beasts howled.
Like the end of a bad dream, too, a remission from hypochondria can be well worth its discomforts. It is marvellous to wake up, is it not, to discover that we are not after all in the hands of the Gestapo, or still looking desperately for those lost airline tickets; and equally, what a wry delight it is to realize that the stabbing muscular stomach pains of last week could not have been very malignant after all, because they’ve entirely disappeared this morning!
It is hardly surprising that hypochondria is notoriously a writer’s complaint. Writers live by their imaginations, and from Voltaire to James Joyce they have been fascinated by the diseases of fancy. Story-telling is their profession, and as they are often carried away by their own purely fictional characters, so they are all too liable to be infected by epidemics of their minds.
Which means, of course, that for people like me hypochondria is, almost by definition, chronic. Perhaps in extreme old age, when all our powers are fading, we shall lose the requisite imagination. More often, I suppose, the condition deletes itself by turning out to be not imaginary at all, but terminal. Then, if we are anything like Ernest Hemingway, we can put away our Home Medicine for All, pick up a gun and shoot ourselves.
But better still, we can spend our last days recalling our most frightful imaginary illnesses, and contemplating our happy recovery from one and all.
TO A TRAVELLER other people’s journeys are not always very interesting, but I was always fascinated by the wanderings of Wilfred Thesiger, the most celebrated explorer of my time, who made his own final journey in 2003, when he was ninety-three years old. I had never been his unequivocal fan, because I scorned his philosophies and thought his life dullened rather than enriched by his vehement rejection of anything modern, but I admired his two great books of travel, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, and I marvelled at the courage and dedication that sustained him in so many ghastly journeys in primitive places. He always seemed to me a figurative sort of traveller.
Thesiger concluded very early in life that for him travel was immersion in “colour and savagery,” which meant that he denied himself explorations of Europe, the Americas or Australasia, or even parts of Asia and Africa which were insufficiently backward. “Exploration” in his vocabulary meant the physical discovery of places mostly unknown to outsiders, and the more barren or arid the place, the better the exploration.
He was not, it seems, much interested in the visual arts, he claimed to be tone-deaf, he had no religious conviction and his taste in literature was conservative (like me, as it happens, he particularly liked the poems of James Elroy Flecker). Not for him, then, explorations into the glorious complexities of civilization. It was the clean hard matter of physical challenge that inspired him, and his rejection of all contemporary palliatives took on a semi-mystical character of renunciation.
During the Second World War he was obliged to travel the North African deserts by jeep, but he professed himself unable to change a wheel because he didn’t know which way to turn the nut, and he thought the very idea of mechanized desert travel so irrelevant that “had we stumbled upon the legendary oasis of Zarzura, whose discovery had been the dream of every Libyan explorer, I would have felt but little interest.” He seemed to think that humanity had reached its apogee in the days before the machine clanked in, and it was in the company of elemental tribal peoples that he found his happiness.
And also, I have to say, his fulfilment. Cynical as I am about his Luddite preferences, I recognize what an artistic unity he made of himself. It may have been distorted by his obdurate dislike of everything new, but within its limits it had true majesty. Thesiger never faltered in his prejudices (except in his willingness to use modern medicine). He believed in them absolutely, and lived and died faithful to them.
HE WAS NOT a handsome man (the writer Gavin Young once said he looked “like a cross between the ultimate Great White Hunter and Widow Twanky”), but from first to last his face looked movingly sad, reproachful and other-worldly—fated, perhaps. Above a great hook nose his eyes look out at us as though they are seeing something else altogether, and his mouth is tightly unsmiling. Even in boyhood it suggests a character impelled, intent upon a single destination, and that not an easy one.
So—speaking for myself—one discovers holiness. It is, I think, an aesthetic spirituality. Thesiger was loyal always to his own ideas of good and evil, simple ideas but genuinely transcendental. He never wavered in his belief that the modern mechanist, materialist ethos was bad, and for most of his life he had nothing to do with it. Almost until the end he lived partly in London, but generally in utmost simplicity in Kenya.
It was the faith of an ascetic, but he attached it to no divinity. One might have thought he would be seduced by the magnificent simplicities of Islam, but he appears to have shown no sign of it: nor did he withdraw into one of his deserts, like the Christian sages of old, to commune with an Almighty. It seems he was an ascetic purely for asceticism’s sake, and this conviction in my view attained a sanctity of its own. Thus his long life became something wonderful in itself—a vision, complete and absolute.
I met him only once, shortly before he died. By then he had declined into senility, and seemed only half-aware of the world around him. Perhaps that was a true condition for him. Perhaps all through the years we had been seeing in him a kind of Holy Fool, an instinctive artist in living, with the mind of an innocent and a hero’s heart. He would not like this judgement of mine, but then I did not like everything about him, either.
THE MOST PROLONGED and affecting of literary allegories concerns the day—June 16, 1904—when Mr. Leopold “Poldy” Bloom spent the day pottering around his native city of Dublin, and bequeathed to the world a celebrated peregrination—so famous that thousands of people still assiduously pursue the route, and June 16 is commemorated to this day as Bloomsday.
Of course Mr. Bloom meandered only through the pages of a novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, but that doesn’t make his day’s wandering any less real to countless aficionados. Whole books have reconstructed Bloomsday Dublin, and Bloom’s movements have been timed to the minute. Scholars have noted every shop he passed, every pub he dropped in at, and some of the pubs have prospered by his custom ever since.
It is perfectly possible to accompany Mr Bloom without setting eyes on Dublin—plenty of route maps are available, some even showing the manhole cover, opposite his house in Eccles Street, that he was obliged to avoid at the start of his day, not to mention the direction of the Glasnevin funeral cortège that he joined later in the morning. But there are thousands of readers in the world who feel the urge actually to walk the same pavements, prop themselves at the same bars, and a large proportion of them come to Dublin every June 16.
WHO CALLED IT Bloomsday? The word never appears in the book itself, but as a sort of literary logo it exactly suits the cult that surrounds Ulysses. Its knowingess, its in-jokiness, its hint of the T-shirt or the anorak, its commercial potential—all express the nature of this world-wide enthusiasm, which ranges from the academic (e.g., Ulysses and the Metaphysicals: A Comparative Bibliography) to the yobbo (e.g., Bloomsday bingeing by the Liffey).
Actually the cult has two epicentres. There is Dublin, of course, of which Joyce himself said his book would be a permanent model, and there is Trieste, where he wrote part of Ulysses, and which has a school of Joyce studies and an annual Joyce Symposium. Sometimes the passage of Joyceans between the two cities has a migratory air to it, as the flocks of devotees arrive in their thousands to roost temporarily at one or the other.
The author of Ulysses and the Metaphysicals is sure to be there, the man who can recite the whole of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy by heart, the couple who fly in every year from Hong Kong, scores of American D.Phil. thesis writers and dozens of earnest addicts, conversant with every last metaphor of the book, who remind me rather of train-spotters. If they are in Trieste they take their coffee-break at the Caffe Stella Polaris, where Joyce was a regular; if they are in Dublin, Davy Byrne’s pub is the place. In Dublin the Sandymount Martello Tower, where Ulysses opens, compels them one and all; in Trieste they can do the round of the Joyce family’s successive uninviting apartments (itineraries obtainable at tourist offices).
Have they all read the book, cover to cover? I very much doubt it. Most people who say they have are evasive when pressed, and all who claim to have read and understood it without a crib are lying through their teeth. Far from being an “accessible” work, as publishers like to claim, much of it is immediately incomprehensible. I myself started to read Ulysses in 1942, and I did not succeed in finishing it until 1989, by which time I had acquired Mr. Harry Blamires’ indispensable line-by-line commentary, The New Bloomsday Book.
For one thing Ulysses is, in my opinion, unnecessarily obscure—what’s the point? For another it is often tediously ostentatious, in learning as in language. It has so many separate themes, winding and unwinding around one another, that exhausted readers may feel as though they have had one too many at Davy Byrne’s—or one too few. And it intermittently purports to be related, episode by episode, to corresponding passages in Homer’s Odyssey—Bloom himself being its Ulysses, miscellaneous whores and bigots representing Circe, Cyclops, and the rest, and Mrs. Bloom revealing herself, at the very end, as a less than immaculate Penelope.
Joyceans are inclined to be touchy if you mention the opacity of the work, because half their pleasure comes from worrying out the meanings of Ulysses, matching texts, arguing about locations and following the Dublin street maps (though Joyce sometimes mischievously confuses even them—now and then he puts a shop on the wrong side of a road, or has somebody getting off a train at Lansdowne Road when the 10 a.m. train from Bray didn’t stop there . . .) .
AND YET . . . dear God, how often have I blessed Mr. Blamires, ever since he first enabled me to read Ulysses all the way through! However maddening this book can be, however boring or pretentious, I recognize it as one of the universal literary masterpieces. There! I have declared myself a Joycean, and as a matter of fact, when I opened one of my several editions of Ulysses today, out fell the packaging of a cake of lemon soap, bought years ago at the Sandymount Martello Tower, and sold in memory of the lemon-scented soap that Poldy bought for himself at Sweney’s in Lincoln Place (page 69, line 510, 1986 edition). I have kept it for seventeen years, and one can hardly get more Joycean than that.
Actually it was the protean nature of the book that finally convinced me of its greatness. I take nothing back about multi-themes and unconvincing Homerisms, and I still feel free to skip whenever I want to. But I marvel now at that tangle of themes which used to tire me so, because it means that the book is, so to speak, many books in one, conveying many parallel messages—and many morals, perhaps.
First and most obviously it is a book about Dublin. Lots of Dublin has disappeared since 1904, but lots hasn’t, and it is still a fascination to follow that famous meander through its streets, looking out for the Ormond Hotel where the barmaid-Sirens were, or Nichols the undertakers, or hoping to buy some kidney at Dlugacz’s butcher’s shop (not a chance, because it is one of the few purely fictional establishments in the book). There we go, we Joycean train-spotters, with our maps in our hands and dear Mr. Blamires in our capacious string bags—year after year, Bloomsday after Bloomsday, deploring still the demise of the Bath Avenue tram, rejoicing to find the coffee fragrant as ever outside Bewley’s.
Then Ulysses is also the portrait of a man—some critics say the most complete portrait of a man ever written. Bloom is a very ordinary person, except that he is a Jew. He feels an outsider always. He is more sensitive than most ordinary persons, more confused about himself sexually and socially, and as we accompany him around the city, all through the day, we seem to glimpse every last nuance of his character, admirable and pathetic, sad and hopeful.
Ulysses is a study in jealousy, too, because during the afternoon Bloom is cuckolded, and knows it. It is a comedy, sometimes aspiring to farce (but not often, for my tastes, very funny). It is a poem. It is a play. It is a sort of sex manual, because a multitude of sexual preferences and variations are observed, recalled or simply imagined; if Bloom exposes himself in many kinds of pornographic self-indulgence, Molly brings everything to a celebrated climax with eight pages of undiluted and unpunctuated literary orgasm. It is full of sorrows! It has a happy ending!
TO MY MIND the glory of the thing is this: that we can read it how we please (if we manage to read it at all). I choose to find in it an elementary lesson in morality, because I believe that at its core there lies a parable of goodness. “Poldy” Bloom is as fallible a man as ever lived, a lascivious day-dreamer, but he is good at the heart, and my favourite passage in the whole work concerns his passing over O’Connell Bridge at about eleven on Bloomsday morning. As he walks he scrumples up a piece of paper and throws it over the parapet, wondering if the seagulls fluttering around will think it edible. Of course they don’t, but a few moments later Poldy feels sorry for those birds, feels ashamed to have tried to deceive them, and buying a couple of Banbury cakes from a nearby stall (price 1d), he crumbles them, returns to the bridge, and makes recompense to the gulls.
One could not be basically bad and do that: and the grand allegorical lesson of Ulysses is perhaps that you can be an idler and a lecher, the most pretentious of writers, the most pedantic of scholars, the silliest of literary groupies, the drunkest of louts down at Temple Bar, and still be as kind a man as Leopold Bloom.
A SEMINAL EVENT of the late twentieth century was the death of Princess Diana, killed with her Egyptian lover in a Parisian car accident. It reverberated around the world for decades, so swarming was it with suggestion, innuendo, lascivious gossip, deceit, romance and anomaly—the beautiful English aristocrat, once married to the heir to the throne of England, embroiled in the end with dubious hangers-on and tuft-hunters. Who could have foreseen that a decade later a coroner would still be obliged to deny that her death had been engineered by the British secret service, with the connivance of the Queen of England’s husband?
It was a drama with an almost Shakespearian cast. There was the Queen herself, rigidly and honourably obedient to her God-given role as Head of State and Defender of the Faith. There was her notoriously tactless husband the Duke of Edinburgh, given to remarks of violent political incorrectness, and popularly supposed to detest his daughter-in-law. There was Diana’s divorced husband Prince Charles, dedicated to organic environmentalism, and his then mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles, dedicated in particular to horses. There were the two sons of Diana and Charles, one of them eventually to be King William V, if the kingship survived that long. There was Diana’s lover Dodi Fayed, last in a line of infatuates, handsome but unmemorable, who was to die with her in Paris. And there was Diana herself, a burr in the heart of the monarchy, lovely but sly, devoted to her sons but notoriously estranged from her husband and his stuffy relatives, given to insidious interviews with the Press and liable always, so it seemed, to blurt out some appalling revelation about the royal institution.
Her funeral was a famous display of kitsch—the entire English nation, it seemed, once universally celebrated for sangfroid and stiff upper lip, wallowing in excesses of maudlin emotion. An image of sharing and caring piety had been imposed upon her by the publicists, and the result was, in my view, that her memory was honoured in diametrically the wrong way. The nation mourned a martyr when it should have been celebrating a miscreant.
For everyone knew that Diana was really no Mother Teresa—it was doubtless a tacit part of her appeal for the tabloid masses. She always used to say, though, that she wanted to be an ambassador for her country. People sneered, but they should have taken her at her word. She should in my opinion have been given the all-but-superannuated royal yacht Britannia, which nobody knew what to do with, and invited to rollick her way around the world in the national behalf, living it up without inhibition, taking a new boy-friend to every port (or finding one there), and distributing a taste of outrageous English gaiety among all the nations.
THE WORLD WOULD have adored it. Diana was one of the loveliest women of the age, and left to her own instincts she might have been one of the most entertaining, too—a patrician Elizabeth Taylor, a seagoing Lady Hamilton. Wherever she sailed in her grand old vessel (built in 1953 and now a museum ship in Edinburgh), with its complement of elegant peccadillo sustained by all the splendour of the Royal Navy, she would have caused a cheerful sensation, and the idea of England itself would have been given a much-needed shot of glamour. Did any nation, ever, have a more fascinating envoy at large?
The elderly ship, of course, would have been completely redecorated, and fitted throughout with multi-phonic hi-fi and video equipment. The usual Royal Marine band would have been supplemented by a rock combo, and the crew, headed by a handsome young admiral, personally selected by the Princess with particular emphasis on good looks. The Britannia’s appearance would have remained unaltered, except for new and more startling paint colours, but the Royal Barge would have been replaced by a gorgeous Italian-built hydrofoil, together with the speedboats, swimming-pools and hang-gliders necessary to the Princess’s purposes.
I like to imagine her arriving at one of the remoter Mediterranean islands—Figesta, let us call it—in the course of her mission (defined by the Lords of Admiralty, in their most august antique prose, as “representing the dignities and furthering the interests of Her Majesty’s Kingdom by whatever means and devices She thinks appropriate”). The little port-city is awakened at dawn by the usual reveille gunshot from the Fort of St. Idiama, but this morning it is answered by a deafening 21-gun salute from the harbour. When the smoke clears from the saluting guns the crowds hastening in the half-light down to the waterfront, many of them still in their night-clothes, are astonished to discover in the very centre of the bay, dressed all over, lights blazing from prow to stern and huge standards at every masthead, the pink and gold presence of Britannia.
Enormously amplified there then sound from its loud-speakers a recording of “God Save the Queen,” but before its last chord has died away, merciful Heaven the rock combo is in full blast, twice as loud, twice as bold, and all around the town, bouncing from fortress walls, echoing from the mountains, bringing every last inhabitant out into the streets, hurrying the polizie down to the quay with guns already cocked, summoning the Provincial Governor himself and his portly wife amazed in their dressing-gowns to the balcony of their palace, the thump and squawl of punkism shakes the awakening dawn.
The visit to Figesta is a triumph—one long celebration, almost an orgy, embracing the whole island in an ecstasy of enjoyment. Diana, wearing a summer dress of flaming crimson and an amazing hat, goes ashore attended by the Admiral in full-dress uniform, and strolls merrily about the city streets blowing kisses to men old and young, embracing children, jollying along old ladies, tickling the chins of policemen, sometimes breaking into a few steps of a waltz and showered with flowers from upstairs apartments. Huge crowds follow her, singing and laughing, mock-saluting the Admiral and urging her to come inside, lady, come and have Figesta wine. By midday the whole town is in a condition of happy chaos, and even the stern carabinieri are parading arm in arm like chorus boys.
By the time they reach the Governor’s palace His Excellency and his lady are ready for them, and wait in full panoply (epaulettes for him, feathers for her) between the ceremonial stone dolphins at the door. Don Giorgio the elderly Governor falls to his knees, Signora Minelda sinks into a profound curtsey, but the Princess cries “Oh, you silly old things, let’s have none of that nonsense,” and pulls them both boisterously to their feet. She kisses each of them heartily on their cheeks, she tousles the Governor’s hair, she says ooh how smashing is his lady’s feather boa, and presently accompanies them into the state dining-room for a buffet luncheon—Diana giggling, the Governor in uncontrollable fits of laughter and Her Excellency already merrily dishevelled.
So it goes, all that day and through the night. There is non-stop dancing in the streets. Wine flows out of every fountain in town, and runs down the very gutters. The band is in full frenzied flow as the evening lights come on, and merrily drunken sailors from the Britannia rollick in squares, flirt in courtyards and enthusiastically whistle whenever they glimpse the Princess. At sunset the Governor and his party are taken on board the hydrofoil for a champagne whizz around the harbour before a shipboard dinner, which is extremely convivial, lasts a long time and concludes with a showing of the television show Dad’s Army, a favourite of the Governor’s wife.
“It has been fun,” Diana tells them as the gubernatorial party is piped ashore, the Admiral saluting and half a dozen hastily sobered ratings standing at attention. “Thank you so much—oops, mind how you go, Minelda dear—goodnight, Giorgio—lovely to have met you, and all your darling people—what a smashing place you have here! Buoa noche—is that how you say it? Mind how you go! Have fun!” And a few hours later, when the sun comes up, the people of Figesta emerge sleepily into the streets, and Giorgio and Minelda look wistfully out to sea from their balcony, Britannia has gone.
Could the Queen’s worst enemies have resisted such diplomacy?
THE ENGLISH TRIED to make Diana a patron saint, but she was much better suited to be a patron sinner. She was not a serene young novitiate at the altar rail, she was more a mixed-up kid, as they used to say in her time, a kid next door, in trainers and a baseball cap out on the town.
The mass British public adored Diana as it adored rock stars or footballers, with a hysteria that was stoked constantly by the tabloid Press, and she was presented as the very antithesis of everything that the British Crown represented, with its age-old traditions of pomp, protocol and imperial complacency. No matter that she was herself an aristocrat, from one of England’s oldest families. She was thought of as a young confessor to unmarried mothers, divorcees, night-clubbers, rockers and rebels everywhere. She consorted with showbiz celebrities. She was the epitome of populist glamour. Moreover, patrician though she was, there was something reassuringly common about her. She was less like the descendant of an ancient earldom than like the expensively educated though not very bright eldest daughter of a self-made billionaire. Undeniably beautiful though she was, she was better suited to a Dodi Fayed than to a Plantaganet.
St. Teresa of Avila is cherished because she often lost her temper with God. Churchill is beloved although he was a boozer and a reactionary, Nelson although he was an adulterer. Diana should be remembered not as a victim or a martyr, as her ageing fans remember her, but as a national emblem of risk and delight. Too late! Having dined at the Ritz that summer night in 1988, the poor girl died with her playboy in the back of a Mercedes limousine—far too soon, but not an unsuitable end for her. They should have given her Britannia while the going was good, and she might still be roaming the ocean waves with Dodi or another, refuelled by tankers at sea and admirers on shore, and taking with her something of Merrie England—remember Merrie England? —wherever she disembarked.