‘When there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.’ Samuel Johnson
Philosophers have thought about the difference between shame and guilt and about the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture. For my part, I haven’t been able to get beyond the untutored view that shame is likely to be a result of the public exposure of an act experienced by the actor as wrong, but that the two states are often indistinguishable. Mortifications have been defined as shames or ignominies, but they needn’t be public. They can be felt in unrelieved secrecy, in the silence of your room.
One of mine came early and lasted for the rest of my life. I was in the Army at the time, doing my basic training as a National Serviceman and a sapper, a Royal Engineer. I was to be seen lying on my bed, or standing by it to attention, in a creosoted hut or ‘spider’ near Farnborough in Hampshire, or sallying out to march up and down and stamp my feet. My platoon was ruled by two men rather more unlike one another than shame and guilt tend to be. The lance-corporal was gentle, lean and elegant, nothing like the raving bullies among the parade-ground NCOs. He was an East Anglian waterman in civilian life, and would tell us what it was to be rowing or poling the Fens. The corporal was the bad cop, not given to reminiscence, miles less endearing than the man from the marshes, but with a hint of these in his looks: an old young man with thinning hair, a round, muddy, doughy face, piercing brown eyes and a croaking wire-cutter voice.
There arose this issue of weekend passes, which took you for thirty-six hours out of your spider, bound for the brief encounter. You had to queue and sue and plead for a pass. This particular weekend, one savourless Saturday morning in a camp deserted save for a few left-behind conscripts and their minders, I was still hoping, with time running out, for a trip to London to see a woman old enough to be my mother. I set myself to argue my case, which clashed with the claims of another sapper, a shy man. The corporal let go with a fiercely moral diatribe about cutting in and jumping the queue, every word of which I believed. I felt guilty and ashamed.
The corporal hated me and my brief encounter, hated me for trying to parlay a respite at someone else’s expense. And I hated me for it too, though I’m not sure that shoving someone aside had been a feature of my conscious intention. I apologize for an unhappy lack of the lurid in this confession, and hope to do a bit better presently. I have certainly performed many worse actions. Why then have I held on for so long to this memory of the Farnborough disgrace?
I think it was a device for not thinking about what was worse, an ongoing worse. None of my early mortifications shows me in a very bad light: they are more like embarrassments than disgraces, revealing inexperience and, in this case, a less than Hitlerian will to power, and their reverberations are like a cover story for actions that came later. But this durable memory may also testify to an idea of fairness which is always around but was especially cogent during the war and after it. I was not shamed for this action before the other soldiers, and the shy sapper didn’t seem to mind. They recognized that you had to stick your neck out and push your luck, at times, under the Army’s regime of insult and frazzling punctilio. But there was also then, more than now, a sense that you shouldn’t take advantage, or steal a march, and it was this sense that stung me, and stung me. Advantage became more of an option for people in the years to come. Ahead lay a familiarity with the chief executive who receives a salary of millions and a proportionate bonus when he brings down his firm.
No one would expect an unclouded fairness from custodians of good order and military discipline, and this was as true then, in the Forties, as it is now. But I remember Farnborough as a better place than the camp at Deepcut, with its recent bullyings, mysterious deaths and attempted cover-up. There were only two deaths not caused by enemy action during my days as a soldier, one of them the reported stamping on a homosexual man by Scottish Territorials on the spree at a summer camp.
In the Scotland where I grew up there was plenty of room for the survival of a guilt culture whereby pleasure was hard to excuse and homosexuality an outlandish evil. Hostility, contempt, violence of the tongue or boot, were accounted less deadly than the sexual sins, in parts and patches of the country, and there were those people by whom poverty was considered a disgrace. An earlier mortification, suffered at the age of fifteen, made me aware of the importance of sexual misconduct. A teacher summoned me to his classroom to ask what I knew of homosexual behaviour rumoured of one of the school’s sportsmen. I don’t believe I knew anything; this was the time when I’d had to look the word up in a dictionary, after a reading of Aldous Huxley. But I felt guilty about being consulted, and about feeling grave and consequential during the interview. A year or so before this, a teacher, with a sad and swampy dough face quite like the corporal’s, had chosen to sew a fly-button on my shorts. I seem to recall that this was experienced as a shame, on social grounds, because of that missing button, by the kindly ‘guardians’ with whom I lived – my parents had been separated at birth, my birth. My guardians felt, I think, that we had been shown up. I was not amused, and not aroused, by the sewing session. I was bemused. I couldn’t even look it up in the dictionary.
Guilt has receded in a world where there is more to be guilty of. War is even worse, more unprincipled in its execution, than it was when I narrowly missed waging it. Guilt has become unpopular, can be thought ugly, unhealthy, with the splendours of the Victorian conscience long since seen as shams, and so on. It seems to me that it’s worth enduring if it helps you, though it often doesn’t, to be unto others ‘as you’d have others be to you’, in the words of my grandmother Georgina’s sampler. The poet Auden had words to say (before he softened them) about a ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. This description of Auden’s eventually renounced histrionic political Thirties might lead one to consider the bullying unelected American President of the present day, who can look like his worst enemies – full of blame and bad at feeling guilty. But he can also look as if he is capable of it. And guiltiness can reasonably be suspected of a degree of complicity in the ‘necessary murders’ of the past.
There was a nineteenth-century admiration of Thomas Carlyle which rushed to agree with him that ‘we are all wrong and all like to be damned’. Feeling, and blaming others for being, guilty as hell has given guilt a bad name. But let’s just go on feeling it. It can appear to be a way of trying to find the plot, to know what you are doing, and have been driven to do. Not the only way, though. The waterman I met in the Army seemed to know what he was doing, where to steer his boat and how to weather the Army. But I don’t suppose he was ever to make much use of the rudder of self-incrimination. I hope you are still with me.
While writing this piece, I dreamt that my mother had died in some sort of car mishap on the doorstep of the house of one of my sons. Round I went to kiss the blood that stained the pavement. There’s a possible Scots mortification or compunction here, to do with telling such a dream, confessing the kiss. But I don’t feel that, or approve of that. For me, the mortification is not being able in old age, when your middle years are apt to vanish, to remember my mother’s death.
I notice that my piece on mortification has turned into a family matter. The ability to be pained by what you’ve done has many faces, a touchingly capacious repertoire, ranging from compunction to contrition and the drama of remorse. They seem to include the guilt of the elderly child of parted parents.