The Hours

  A note on The Hours,

with a preliminary aside on the art of  Robert Altman

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

I have only just seen Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours, three years after its release in the UK, and liked it a lot. What immediately strikes a viewer is the interwoven storyline, the cross-cutting and multiple narrative style. That led me to think about the films of Robert Altman, who has recently died after a long and distinguished career in the cinema.  He, too, often employs a technique that favours juxtaposing scenes and situations in order to present a kind of kaleidoscope effect. Indeed, there’s little new here, Akira Kurosawa practised it years ago in his 1950 film Rashomon, not to mention 1940’s Citizen Kane, and there are many examples in literature before that of multi-layered story telling. Also, the disjointed manner of telling a tale, in the so-called stream-of-consciousness genre, comes to mind, particularly favoured by Virgina Woolf. Perhaps this idea influenced Michael Cunningham’s novel and also affected Daldry’s directorial approach.  The Hours legitimately has an affinity with Altman’s work but that’s about as far as the connection goes for the film is quite different from anything Altman ever did and is a kind of film quite beyond his vision or ever part of his intention.

For Altman, life can be compared to a bitter joke without rhyme or reason, which could only have been imposed on man by a malicious god with, possibly, a twisted sense of humour. In his best films, like M*A*S*H, he appears to be saying that the most that can be expected of human action is to perform it within a very dark satire that allows only a glimmer of decency to rise above the imbecilities that govern people’s behaviour.  Such a stringent view of mankind, mainly taken of his own American citizenry, does indeed lead him to portray life as a mishmash of culture within communities, well demonstrated in Nashville, and probably at its most effective in The Player.  His fragmented manner of telling a tale, notably in Short Cuts, for example, where he uses the quite beautiful low-relief engravings of some of Raymond Carver’s short stories, tends to end up as a series of quite unconnected and random happenings and results in his having little to say by the end of his career.  In Gosford Park, much over-rated by critics, he takes a rather silly, melodramatic story, in order to portray a display of dud characters that could only exist in the tired mind of a puppet master who has learnt that if he pulls hard enough on the strings something like life appears to energise the creatures at the other end.

INSIDE IVY LEAGUE

There are some critics who will defend Altman, while at the same time recognising, and giving low marks to, the kind of adverse view of his films that I state broadly in the paragraph above. One such critic is Robert T. Self, an English professor, who has written an article for the admirable Senses of Cinema based at the University of Melbourne and which can be found on http://www.sensesofcinema.com. I quote a chunk of Professor Self’s article below as a way of illustrating his view, one I consider to be misguided not only in its assessment of Altman but of what really should grab our attention when we look at and attempt to evaluate films as genuine artistic artefact.

“Classical narrative cinema,” he writes,  “assumes the possibility of social discourse and asserts a unified social identity grounded in the secular humanism that optimistically posits ‘man’ as the position of intelligibility, meaningful action, and ethicality. Modernist cinema presupposes on the other hand the world as splintered and centre-less, meaning as imprecise and indeterminate, morality as divisive and illusory. It asserts that the human being is neither an autonomous individual nor a meaningful unity, but a process of divergent and contradictory forces, both internal and external. It suspects the power of communication in the face of human greed, alienation, estrangement, and self-destruction. Rather than encouraging viewer identification with a coherent character psychology, it delineates a variety of contradictory subject positions that critique privileged intelligibility.” Self goes on to speak of Altman’s idiosyncratic, pessimistic, ironic, exuberant and experimental films. He claims they simultaneously define the emergent style of American Art cinema and systematically display a poetic mode of story telling.

OUTSIDE ACADEMIA

It is one thing to support the contentious idea that life consists of a series of largely meaningless random acts, the premise of directors like Altman and “modernist cinema”, and quite another to imply that a coherent art form can be created through mirroring that formlessness.  I believe it to be the rôle of the artist to give a discrete shape to a very wide range of impressions and experiences falling within his orbit and thereby to make a meaningful whole, one to be admired, enjoyed and taken in by others. That there are many ways of doing this and that by indirection we often find our way, cannot be denied. The idea, however, that by thrusting confusion into the scene, “a variety of contradictory subject positions”, the artist is not only challenging our “privileged intelligibility” but is also making a new kind of art cinema seems to me not to hold up to the facts. For a start, what does it mean to call Altman’s direction “poetic”?  Is it to say little more than he knows quite a lot about film technique?  I find too many of his films to be factitious, even tedious, rather than poetic.

If “experimental films” occasionally give us hope in believing that something different, more intelligent, even more “real” than the run of films now emerging from the mainstream industry, that appear to be aimed at an immature audience with a liking for the far-fetched and a cosy “unified social identity”, they do little in the end to reveal the real cultural crisis that confronts nearly all modern societies.  To take cinema as a reflection of the mood of the people for whom the films are made is to come to a very gloomy picture of contemporary existence.  On the one hand we are subjected to the stereotypical and conventional form of story telling, mostly conveyed through thrillers and far-fetched yarns, with ever increasing doses of superfluous violence, or we have tales of shocking infidelity, disharmony and wretchedness that paint a picture of family and social collapse.  There is, I suspect, among the population at large a weakening of what can best be described as a grip on individual reality that extends out not only to other individuals but also encompasses those who have gone before and will come after. I mean, in short, that there are ominous indications that we are losing hope of being attached to a continuous lifeline that transcends finite existence and links us into a sustainable, ongoing history. 

Religious bodies offer consolation and promise of the eternal but for the artist, whether believer or not, the proof of the pudding always has to be in the eating, i.e. in the realities of his or her own existence.  If we see a film that manages to create imaginatively and intelligently some of the glaringly obvious breakdowns in relationships and within communities and presents us with truths about contemporary life and ourselves that we often conceal and/or ignore, then we should celebrate it.  The Hours, I contend, is a work of art, a minor rather than a major one but still quite remarkable given the current state of cinema.

ART MAKING IT REAL

In the linking of three, four actually, central characters in an overlapping time sequence, that both separates and brings them together, and in posing a continuous personal identity crisis of each one, a remarkable narrative form unfolds. The time span extends over seventy odd years but the action is synchronous, giving the impression of having happened within a few short hours, namely in the course of the film itself.  One of the characters, the writer Virginia Woolf, lacks any physical contact with the others, who do interrelate at a personal level, but her novel, Mrs Dalloway, informs the living spirit of them all.  This spirit engenders and additionally reflects a feeling of desolation, bewilderment and despair in the face of the lives they live. In the case of three of them, Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman), the housewife, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) and her son, Richard, later to become a published poet (Ed Harris), suicide is seen as a solution, two of them succeeding in the act, one not choosing to do so. The fourth protagonist, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) not only shares her first name with Mrs Dalloway but is also given the full title by Richard. There is a further link in that all four characters show homosexual tendencies, latent in two of them, explicit in the other two, who choose openly gay and lesbian relationships.

 

The film benefits from many sources, not least the prize-winning book on which the script is based and a first-class job done by David Hare in the screenplay, plus the directorial brilliance of Stephen Daldry. The acting of everyone taking part is just terrific, a whole series of rounded, wonderful performances from the more minor characters to those playing major roles. Everything seems to come together in the film, dialogue, acting, cinematography, Philip Glass’s soundtrack, direction, each aspect contributing towards the unfolding of a tale that has thematic and narrative unity. One small example of how effectively and sparingly the dialogue works is to cite the first words between Virginia and Leonard Woolf. As he greets her descending the stairs, he asks, “How did you sleep?” “Uneventful,” she replies, an oblique reply that tells us so much about her. Then when Clarissa Vaughan tells Richard Brown she is holding a party to celebrate his writing and adds it will be for his friends, he quips “It’ll be a small party, then.” There are some precisely timed silences in between what characters say that speak as tellingly as the spaced-out words. The nuances of facial expression and body language of the actors works so effectively because they are interpreted on the basis of real meaning that informs the whole film.

    

PAINTERS AT WORK

A number of motifs are slowly planted in the viewer’s mind, like the flowers for celebratory events in each household and in the way these different parties take place and by the breaking of the eggs in preparation of food to be consumed. We know that flowers convey a beauty and delicacy, which qualities are connoted in The Hours primarily by feminine sensibility. We also know that flowers rot all too quickly and may become a symbol of both beauty and death at funerals.  In preparing food, the cooks break eggs, which reminds us that you rarely go through life, or make omelettes without a few breakages. Richard, dying from Aids, tells Clarissa, that there will be the hours after the party and the hours after that. He stays alive for her, since “that is what people do, stay alive for each other.” In fact, he reneges on the promise because he has had enough of partying, finding life unbearable, and will endure no more hours. As we accompany Clarissa Vaughan across the icy pavements to the front door of his downtown home, ascend with her up darkly twisted staircases and along slanted corridors to his squalid apartment, we have all the intimations we need of a life askew and out of kilter.

When Richard sits on the window sill just moments before he tumbles down to his death, we hear police and ambulance sirens wailing from the streets below, the sound of traffic deafening, the twenty-first century intruding. Virginia Woolf, living in leafy Richmond in the 1930s, not far from London, cannot bear her surroundings and tries to escape. Confronted on the railway station by Leonard, she tells him, “I am living a life I have no wish to live,” and he agrees to take her to the city, although there is no escape there either.  Laura Brown finally says to Clarissa, “What does it mean to regret when you have no choice. My life was death so I left and chose life.”  For her, that meant abandoning her family and going to Canada to become a librarian, not a great choice, perhaps. For Virginia Woolf, who, we are informed, has a history of attempted suicide, there remains “the need to look life in the face and then put it away.”  She also says the poet, the visionary, has to die in order that new life is sustained. In fact, no such kind of rebirth is ever hinted at in the film, its overwhelming mood elegiac and melancholic.

DIE HARD

It is possible to be deeply moved by The Hours and to lament profoundly the destructive process that assails the lives of all the characters.  More importantly even, the film serves up a truth about contemporary existence by showing that where relationships are precariously maintained and where consciousness and self-awareness are finely spun, life might be found to be unsustainable. The idea of death, of people as finite beings, is present throughout, quietly stated but made explicit in the discussion between Virginia and her little niece. While observing a dead thrush, Angelica asks, “What happens when we die?”  The aunt says we return to where we came from and the girl responds by saying she can’t remember where she came from and then Virginia admits the same.  From this scene, we cut to the forlorn Laura Brown who has rejected suicide as a solution but who remains severely depressed by her unfulfilled marriage and unsatisfactory family life. Her decision is to run away and in crucial respects this is what the other suicides do, only a reluctant Clarissa Vaughan accepting her tried, weary existence and its relationships.

  

NOT QUITE DEAD

 Even though The Hours leads inexorably to the idea that nearly all the main characters find it difficult to sustain an enduring spirit in the face of personal problems I would not say that this produces an insupportable pessimism.  Such is the creative act, we are drawn into the dilemmas facing each character, our sympathies deeply engaged.  The film is truthful, which means we feel convinced that the protagonists are real and that their experiences are valid ones. Some viewers, and I include myself among them, are confronted with ideas and types of behaviour for which we find little correspondence in our own personal lives and outlooks. In that respect, this film, and any distinctive art for that matter, is asking us to examine what we believe is its function and what we hold it is doing for us. How good an art form is cinema? In my view, any significant artist is creating from the raw materials of personal experience an artefact that is passing out of or coming into existence within the cultural life of society. The more fully alive and more fully extended the consciousness of the artist the greater will be the manner of our involvement, in this instance those of us who watch films. In important respects, The Hours weaves for us  an opalescent yet consistent and coherent narrative form, which enhances the lives of the characters involved and which engages the viewer. This happens despite a certain passivity and even negativity present in the tale. There is no sword fight, no discernible enemy, apart from egregious modernity, no driving spirit to scare off the black dog of despair. It’s certainly not Hamlet but it’s not a confusing or confused film either, which I regret to say is not true of many of Altman’s films despite his undoubted major contribution to cinematic history.  Above all, for those of us who love cinema, The Hours gives us hope that creative intelligence still exists.

Day the Leader Died

The Day the Leader Died

A stone’s throw from the house and George Stringer turned around and went back. Had he left the gas on, the fridge door ajar, the upstairs’ window open? He could never throw off this lurking fear of disaster waiting to occur the instant he departed. A premonition of extinction following on from separation, he faintly recognised the underlying anxiety symptoms but couldn’t change old habits. After a careful check, he found all in order and started out again. He had enough time, about half an hour, to walk to the station. Good to take regular exercise, the doctor told him, but not to overdo it. A perfect spring day in May, he snapped along briskly, shadows lifting off the pavements in bright sunlight. People looked contented, one or two familiar faces, heads nodding as they passed by. Checking his watch, he decided there was no need to change the walking pace. Shouldn’t have wasted time, though, returning to the house. When he was some four hundred yards from the station, he began to trot, arriving breathless three minutes before the train was due.

Third in the queue at the ticket office, he held a twenty pound note in one hand, his senior citizen’s card in the other. A foreign lady with limited English was having difficulty explaining to the clerk about her travel requirements. The bored official behind the glass screen waited impatiently for the woman to state her precise requirements. Eventually, she slid some money into the tray, the clerk on the other side turning the table and then giving it another spin with ticket and change included. George heard the swelling sound of a train pulling into the platform. On time, it was the one he’d hoped to catch, missing it meaning an hour’s wait. He breathed out noisily.

“You go next, I’m in no hurry,” the man in front said.

“Thanks a lot,” he replied. “Day-return, London, please,” he said to the clerk.

The ticket clenched between his teeth, fingers gripping loose change, a carrier bag containing a book and some sandwiches in the other hand, he dashed for the train. Still waiting but with the doors closed he expected it to draw away. Instead, when a guard opened a door for him, he stumbled in. He felt grateful to the fellow as the train pulled out of the station and he slumped into the first available seat.

A lady, about his own age and sitting opposite, smiled. He made a gasping sound, shaking his head from side to side in exasperation. She nodded, still smiling. A trickle of sweat running down his neck and when he stroked the hair on the back of his head it felt warm and extremely damp. He patted his face with a handkerchief, still sweating.  As the train picked up speed, the sensation of acceleration comforted him, a thumping inside his chest rhythmically uneven. Gazing out of the window, he caught a glimpse of glittering sea before the train entered a tunnel.

The coach rattled violently, cool air rushing through an open window taking his breath away. Old rolling stock, all the upholstery looked stained and worn, graffiti marking every carriage wall. Someone, a youth no doubt, had succeeded in scratching a message on the window. It read, “no dope, no hope”. George ran his fingernail across the lettering, thinking a special tool must have been used to make such deep incisions. The train emerged from the tunnel, sand dunes and sea on one side, high cliffs on the other. Breathing in and out steadily, feeling more relaxed, he read his book.

They clattered through miles of rural Kent, oast houses and thatched barns scattering the landscape, before pulling into a main-line junction. A few people got out and a few got on, plenty of vacant seats. The wait seemed interminable, the train silently still along the platform. Finally, a voice crackled over the tannoy, “All change, please. This train is terminating here. All change. Make sure you leave no possessions behind.”

“What the hell’s going on?” George said. The lady opposite began to collect her things together, apparently quite unperturbed. “Are you going to London?” he asked.

“Not today,” she said gently, smiling. He picked up his carrier bag and followed her out. The passengers, hardly more than a couple of dozen, waited listlessly on the platform. A rather scruffy railway official turned up. He wore a braided cap but that apart might well have been one of the cleaners. “There’s been a points failure further down the line,” he explained, wearily. “For how long?” George asked.  “About two hours, I think,” the man replied. “Two hours! Why didn’t they tell us before we got on?”  “I dunno,” he said.

They had to proceed to Platform 3 for the next train, which would stop at all stations before reaching London. The line of passengers trailed up a steep set of stairs, across a bridge and descended to an empty platform the other side, a further wait of fifteen minutes in store. When the train arrived, it proved to be even more ancient than the first one, rattling into the station like a huge bag of loose metal parts. It was already three-quarters full.

George found a spare seat in a single compartment near the guard’s van. Two other seats remained vacant until an elderly couple arrived. The man, supporting himself with walking sticks, was accompanied by a lady, who looked almost as frail. She asked if the places were free. A West Indian woman leaped to her feet and moved position so that the incomers could sit side by side.

“Come on, darlin’,” she ordered him, “this way.” Putting an arm around the invalid’s shoulders, she manoeuvred the gentleman into position. They thanked her. “Weren’t nothin’,” she said. “I’m forty-three and still pretty young. You gotta ‘elp the old folk, haven’t you.”

“We’re not that old,” the elderly lady said grimly. She stared in front of her, watery eyes, deep creases down the side of her face, much loose skin beneath the chin. Their tweedy clothes hung about the old pair like the cerements of the dead, apparel waiting final interment with the corpses.

“You gotta ‘elp the old folk,” the Jamaican lady repeated, turning her head and nodding at each one in turn inside the carriage. Her voice rich and throaty, she wore dark glasses that gave her face both anonymity and authority. A row of dark beads hung down a purple jumper, revealed by an open, very worn black topcoat. The ebony skin, the crimped inky hair with the odd grey streak, the large rings and bracelets on her fingers and wrists created a smouldering presence. The coolest thing about her was her gleaming white teeth.

“The trouble today,” she now announced, “is that the young people don’t do nutthin’ for the old folk. I was always taught to respect my mum and dad. They don’t anymore, do they?” George nodded, convinced the eyes behind the sunglasses were staring directly at him. “I’ve always looked after my old dad but he’s gone back to Jamaica. If he was still here I’d be taking care of ‘im. Young people should. I’m forty-three but I can still ‘elp the old.”

Apart from a shuffling of shoulders and an almost imperceptible tremor of lips and twitching of cheek muscles here and there, no one in the carriage made further response. The invalid looked the most impassive, his very wide mouth with thin pink lips fixed in a kind of smile, except he wasn’t smiling. He wore a sporting cap, pulled well down across his forehead, just above a pair of spectacles with thick lenses. Gnarled and arthritic, he sat very still, clutching the sticks between his knees. His trousers were pulled up high and not far short of his armpits, held there by a strong pair of braces. The drama of the
one-sided conversation ending, a somnolent silence took over, the train’s lullaby rocking everyone to drowsiness. 

*****

Despite all the delays, by the time George Stringer arrived in London he still had over an hour to spare before his appointment at the hospital. He decided to visit the National Gallery, a habit he’d formed whenever coming up to town, and always to look at the same picture, Georges-Pierre Seurat’s Bathing at Asnieres. Coming out of Charing Cross Station, he made straight for Trafalgar Square.

On the way, his eye caught a newspaper placard with three words in large letters on display. He read John Smith Dead and couldn’t help thinking of his school days, about a friend with the same name, the most familiar one in the country. The last word, too, was one of the most common in the English language. Later, he decided, he would buy a ‘paper and read about it.

The airless gallery rooms were full of visitors as he hurried through. When he came to the Seurat, the crowds had thinned. He stood and stared at the painting for about ten minutes and then left. Twenty-five years had passed since his son’s death. At the time, he’d grieved heavily but now had to make an effort to recall what he’d once felt. That was the point about coming to see Bathing at Asieres, to keep the boy’s memory alive. It was easy to be shocked and saddened by someone in the public eye dying. More difficult to mourn for your own kith and kin as the years rolled by.

The red-haired boy in Seurat’s picture looked about fifteen years old, the same age as……..   It had been his idea to give him a bike for his birthday. The accident happened on the way to school. George’s wife, who had not approved of such a present, worried about the traffic, never forgave him. She herself died not long afterwards. One daughter remained, now living in Australia. George had spent a few weeks with her last winter, enjoying a sunny spell on the other side of the globe.

The boy in the picture looked so thoughtful, the weight of youthful concerns heavy on his bowed shoulders. Yet he appeared determined, the future his, the portrait keenly truthful. If only George could meet Seurat and ask how he came to know things that were too deep for ordinary mortals to fathom. The painter had created life in its daily flux of common appearance. The boy in the frame lived on and looked remarkably like his son, that red hair, the blade-like nose, a sullen adolescent, the whole posture exactly right

Out in the street again, a lovely day in May, he watched the people hurrying by. Again, he saw the fatal news headlines and bought a newspaper. Many others must have done the same and everyone by now would know. Why, then, did they carry on as if nothing has happened? What are they all rushing about for? Why no mourning?  Why no protests?  There it was, the writing on the wall, and no one took any notice.

*****

He arrived well in time for his appointment and didn’t have to wait long. If he hadn’t collapsed, in the first place, on a London bus, he wouldn’t have had to travel all this way. The hospital they’d taken him to insisted, after discharge, that he return for further checks. Really, they were very nice and he trusted them. This time he got a good report, the specialist saying it was unlikely that he’d need a by-pass. Just watch the diet and take plenty of exercise, that’s all.

A little later, in Soho Square, in the gardens, he sat on a park bench to eat his sandwiches. A group of winos sat on the grass, a bottle wrapped in brown paper passed around, each taking a swig in turn. A young woman with them, she had so much metal inserted into her scalp, lips, nose and ears a strong magnet might easily have forcibly dragged her out from the throng. She didn’t look well. None of them did yet they talked animatedly, like friends sharing the intimate knowledge of arcane matters.

George liked the little garden, didn’t even mind the tramps, who did him no harm. It was comforting to be among people who appeared to be in no hurry to go anywhere, just relax. Even the traffic seemed distant in this quiet oasis right at the heart of busy London. As pigeons jerked around, inches from his feet, he threw them a few crumbs. His lunch eaten, he closed his eyes, lifting his head to feel the warm sun against his face. When he looked again across the patch of grass, the winos had left. The Colley Cibber statue now in view, it reminded him that an artistic colony once gathered here. Then the idea came to him that he might go to the theatre.

Having checked his newspaper, he saw that there was a matinee show at a theatre nearby. He managed to purchase a cheap concessionary ticket and get in just before the play began. A seat in the stalls gave him an excellent view of the stage and the actors. During the interval, a handsome woman beside him, wearing a bright red silk scarf around her neck, asked if he were enjoying the performance. Very much, he told her. She then confided that this was her third visit because she so much admired the male lead. After writing to him, he’d sent her a signed postcard, which she kept at home, on the mantelpiece.

The play was really very good. A drama based on a tale by the writer,  Turgenev, it told a simple but sad story of the family lives of upper class Russians living in the nineteenth century. The unfulfilled desires of even the most mighty and richest in society were shown to be pitifully human and, therefore, quite recognisable by poor mortals like George Stringer. He left the theatre feeling very contented, having thoroughly enjoyed the drama. Talking to the handsome lady had been nice, too.

*****

At the main line terminus, he only had a few minutes to wait before catching the train home. Then he noticed a group of people staring at the electronic notice board. A message flashed on and off saying there had been a points failure. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Another bloody points failure! The weather perfect, what the hell was going on! No one else seemed the least put out, unlike him all hardened travellers. Instead, everyone waited and watched.  Soon, a message on screen told them to go to London Bridge.

One stop up the line, they arrived there shortly, plenty of trains. At London Bridge, confusion reigned, hundreds of passengers in search of direction. No announcements, no officials around to ask, the crowds swelled first in one direction, then in another, George propelled along with the mob. Finally, when it turned out that the coastal train would leave from Platform 8, a silent and hurrying procession took itself off in the general direction.

A packed platform, passengers waiting three deep, an empty train slowly pulled in. George, finding himself being buffeted forward, managed to get in and take a seat. Catching the eye of another passenger sitting opposite, he said, “I thank God I don’t have to do this journey every day.” The gentleman, a commuter type with a small black travelling case, murmured that it could be very tiresome. Then he added, “Perhaps we shouldn’t complain about trivial matters, today of all days,” before reading his evening newspaper.

George took the man’s comment as a mild form of rebuke, but didn’t mind. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the open pages of the commuter’s ‘paper displaying a large, recent photograph of the political leader who had died so suddenly that very morning. Then, observing the face of the reader, he was startled into realising that his features were remarkably similar to the picture of the deceased leader of Her Majesty’s opposition in Parliament.  The same pale skin, dimple cheeks, moon-shaped spectacles, owlish face, high domed forehead, perhaps the gentleman belonged to the identical political party.

Left to his own meandering reflections, he looked out of the window as the train picked up speed, taking him home. Soon green fields, rows of trees and little running streams came into view. George loved the light evenings, the prospects of more to come and lots of fine summer weather. He was doing well, they’d told him at the hospital. He felt very contented and glad to be alive. The day had gone well, for him.
 
 
 
 
 

Zipped

Advice to Men:
Button Up.

Recently, I bought a pair of lightweight trousers from the clothes’ section of a large supermarket for a paltry ten pounds. They were very likely made in China or Pakistan and I wondered how they could be sold so cheaply. Possibly, the store took 33%, the manufacturer ditto, the transporters the same, leaving the workers who made the garment with what was left, probably about tuppence.

If at first I felt a measure of guilt at being part of the exploiting process it soon evaporated once I tried them on and decided I’d made a bargain. The previous lightweight pair I’d bought cost nearly four times as much and looked only half as good.  What delighted me most was that the flies were fastened by buttons, not a zip. Indeed, there were four stout buttons that secured the opening very nicely and in addition some pretty twine that could be tied to a neat bow at the top, a belt optional.

I go back a long way, to a time when buttons along the flies were the normal, no danger then of boys being rushed off to the local hospital’s A & E department because of tender flesh becoming enmeshed in zipper jaws. It may be nostalgia for a lost childhood that makes me appreciate how a slow fastening or unfastening at the openings is preferable to the quick zip up and down. In my lifetime, things have speeded up incredibly and everyone now rushes around at breakneck speed. For example, I had a friend, Reggie, whose dad owned a horse and cart and delivered to local shops. On an average day, the vehicle covered fifteen miles and unloaded goods weighing little more than two or three hundred weight at most. Compare that with the monsters that thunder along our roads day and night and do hundreds of miles. Everyone’s in a hurry. One minute you’re twenty and the next, zip, you’re sixty-five.

Novels once depicted seduction scenes tenderly as couples quietly unbuttoned.  Now lovemaking is a quick zip, often described and enacted brutally. That’s sex, and it’s over. Zip, find someone else. Zip, that’s over, too. Zip, you’re dead.

The zipper was invented in the U.S.A. in the nineteenth century but could not be used on clothes until a tab at the top enabled it to be fastened firmly. The device made its universal debut post-1945 and after the first atom bomb had been dropped. Europeans soon incorporated it into their own tongue, called a zip fastener in the U.K., a Reissverschluss in German, a cerniera-lungo in Italian and a fermeture-éclair in French but, interestingly, the Arab world took longer to catch on, their word rarer and difficult for some of us to pronounce.

Essentially part of the nuclear age, the zipper closes down rather than opens up a new period of history.  A masculine symbol, the man stands legs apart, thumbs inside his belt, the silver zip on his jeans there for all to see, no evidence of buttons and braces.  A sign of power, it matters not who is wearing the trousers. Men and women are equal, provided the female imitates the male and everyone flies the flag of feminism. Soon, we will all have shaven heads, tattooed bodies and zips in our noses.

Since we have discovered to zip up our clothes we have also learned to do the same to the human body. Zip, open the chest and put in a new heart. Zip, rip out your bowels and replace them with plastic tubes. Zip, crack open the head and insert a new brain.  Zip, get cloned and live forever.

The buttons of a more leisurely past began to come loose as the skills of using needle and thread declined. Once people become accustomed to rely more on machinery than on the use of their hands, they easily turn into victims of the manipulators.  Western leaders in the twentieth century confronted the public with flies undone, everything exposed. Unable to stitch things together in peace they tore people apart in wars. Then came the devastation of victory followed by a standoff where it was more important to look rather than be tough. Zip, you wanna fight me, comrade?  Zip, my bombs are bigger than yours. Zip, get your tanks off my lawn, or else.  When the Soviets’ trousers fell down they decided they, too, had to have zip fasteners, with a little help from the financial markets.  Soon, everyone started to look good and prosperous, with zips on pockets, zips on pullovers, zips on frocks. We were urged to pull up our socks, with zips, of course. Tragically, not everyone wanted to.

In the world of Islam, they don’t go in for zip fasteners. The Qur’an insists on modesty in dress. You must not show off or accentuate your physical shape, hence no zips. Instead, the men wear long flowing robes called thobes and sometimes baggy pants, held up by belts, perhaps. These were the garments worn in Arab countries, a style of dress than went back hundreds of years and has persisted through to modern times, apart from  a significant number of poor folk who left their homes and migrated westerly, to more prosperous lands. Some, mainly the men, particularly young men, began to dress like the indigenous inhabitants, but they did not forget the lands of their forefathers and the peoples left behind.

Really, they didn’t much like western dress, especially that of women, and although they wore zips like everyone else, slowly their minds zipped up as well.  Everyone in such apparel, including themselves, should be destroyed, they decided. Zip, the bombs went off, killing men, women, children, Muslims, Christians, atheists and those of no address, or redress.  An ancient culture in turmoil confronting a flourishing but newer, albeit decadent one, sees suicide as the only solution. It used not to be like this.

It’s become a sad fact in the West that only the old remember the past.  It wasn’t better then, of course, and even if it was you can’t go back. In that we have no choice but in other respects we do. Somehow, the idea has become prevalent that for our ancestors life was short, nasty and mainly brutish.  We would do better, however, to feel the cloth not measure the length if we wish to know how people coped in the past. The idea that everyone was oppressed, miserable and exploited is a particularly distorted version that derives largely from those in the present who feel unhappy with their current lot and possibly want modernity to hand them out on a plate an easy life.

If we express the way we feel about ourselves and others in the style of attire we wear, perhaps we should begin to wrap ourselves round with clothes that suppose delicacy, tenderness, privacy and intimacy are the norms and not cut loose in order to let everything hang out.  The zip, like convenience food, lacks proper taste; it opens and shuts with an awful finality, quite exclusive of anything subtle. 

Was not always thus. Indeed, where now the ubiquitous zip rules supreme there was once far greater variety. The lederhosen of the Bavarian hunting fraternity, for example, their knickerbockers were made of stout leather kept up by buttons, made of rough-hewn Elkhorn, leather braces ditto, what they call suspenders in the USA.  Or consider the kilt which folds around the legs in swathes of pleated cloth, not even a button required, just a belt or buckle round the waist.  As for buttons themselves, they come in all shapes and design, the Pearly King’s costume a good example, and can be made of many kinds of exquisite material.  A row of pretty buttons or bows on a lady’s dress can look much more alluring than broad stretches of exposed flesh. Once upon a time soldiers would array their tunics with a display of the most gloriously shaped and coloured buttons as a sign of their manliness and charm. Possibly the Victorians gave buttons a bad name; their tight-fitting jackets from waist to neck are now seen as a sign that they were too buttoned-up, a state diagnosed as being without spontaneity and dash.

The Victorians were not all that bad but have suffered a rather bad press. For example, we forget they favoured good manners. This meant people were polite to one another and courteous in relationships. It is said they were hypocrites, not practising what they preached, or rather hiding from sight many of their darker practices. Not like us who go zip and seal ourselves off so completely we can’t even pass the time of day with each other. Zip, lonely inside our cars we race around the country, encased within little boxes. Same at home, becoming more like Plato’s cave, as we stare constantly at flickering pictures on the walls. Zip, you are free to do and be what you like and I am free to hate you for it.  Who lives next door? No idea and don’t want to know. What do we think of each other?  Zip, “All politicians are out to feather their own nests.”  Zip, life is unfair because we are oppressed, abused, discriminated against, cheated and not told the truth. Zip, we all want to be famous and rich and then enjoy a state of schadenfreude when those who enduring this unhappy state become exposed as cheats and liars.

Can we, then, really put down all the ills of society to the zip fastener?  Absolutely. No matter if, like me, you have arthritic fingers and find it time-consuming to button up at the start of day. Carefully push the button on the shirt or trousers into its buttonhole, knowing that fresh air circulates between the gaps, and you are fit to face the world. Say “Good Morning,” to your neighbour when you meet him along the street, even if he is wearing cufflinks. With a button on your cap, raise the headgear to his lady wife as she smiles upon you. Make sure that three buttons are required to fasten your jacket but leave the top one undone.  Above all, insist that your tailor places buttons along the flies and keep them well secure, except in an emergency.  By all means, use a belt or braces and when you see a pretty button adorning a lady’s blouse always compliment her. As for zippers, leave them to be used to fasten the lips of those who say and do ugly things.

Conquering Heroes

CONQUERING HEROES AT TABLE

In these days of much junketing among VIPs at summit conferences, readers might be amused to read what one writer thought about such a gathering taking place in the early months of 1944. The Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte, (born Kurt Suchert), narrates how, as liaison officer operating between the Italian Liberation Corp and the Allied Supreme Command, he was invited to dine with a group of American Generals and senior officers. Malaparte in his early days supported the fascist regime in Italy, then went to live and write in Paris and was confined in prison for five years by the regime on his return home.  Here, a meal is prepared at the old palace in Naples once occupied by the Duke of Toledo and is given in honour of the lady commander of the WACs, recently arrived from the USA.  One has to bear in mind that this meal was taking place while American soldiers were fighting and dying on Monte Cassino. It might be considered bad taste for Malaparte to sound so snobbish at such a time.

Our conversation was interrupted by the sudden presence of waiters dressed in full livery and carrying huge, solid silver trays. First we ate creamy carrot soup, with chlorine tablets and Vitamin D added. The main course arrived, a disgusting dish of slices of purple pig meat called SPAM, the pride of Chicago slaughterhouses, which had been piled on top of a heap of boiled polenta. I recognised the breeding of the waiters, old hands at this kind of work, more by the look of disgust on their faces than by the way they displayed themselves in blue livery with red lapels. I have never seen such distinct signs of disdain quite like theirs. They conveyed the highest, oldest, most obsequious and freely bestowed expressions of scorn by Neapolitan servants long accustomed to kow-towing to uncultivated foreign potentates.

A people that has an old and noble tradition of service, and much experience of hunger, cannot respect masters who lack refined taste and civilised manners. There’s nothing more humiliating for a servant class than to be governed by those who have scant discernment for the fine things of life and whose appetites are gross and crude. Of the many foreigners who have come to rule in Naples, the most acute memories are preserved for the Frenchmen, Robert d’Anjou and Joachim Murat. The first knew what fine wines went with choice sauces and the second could mount and dismount from a horse elegantly, and not just because it had an English saddle. What is the point of crossing the seas to win a war, place the laurel on the victor’s brow, and not know how to dine at table? What kind of heroes were these Americans who ate food only fit for chickens in the farmyard?

Fried spam and boiled polenta, displayed on the finest chinaware and delivered on solid silver trays, were brought in by waiters with noses in the air as if they’d been ordered to serve up Medusa’s head. The reddish, violet look of the fried spam had all the signs of rotting meat left out in the sun. The wan, yellow appearance of the polenta, cooked to a mushy heap, resembled the swollen goitre of a chicken whose neck had just been rung. Around the walls of the hall hung gilded Murano mirrors and ancient Sicilian tapestries. This noble dining room of the Duke of Toledo, with its antique furniture and golden-framed portraits of Spanish monarchs, Luca Giordano’s “Triumph of Venus” painted on the ceiling, now celebrated a meal in honour of Mrs Flat, commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army’s WACs.  Strangely, the atmosphere in the palace had become completely coloured by the violet light suffused from the spam and polenta, like the dead reflections given off by the moon. The old honour and glory of the House of Toledo had never known such mortification.

In this room others had celebrated the “triumphs” of the noble families of Aragon and Angevin, feasting in honour of Charles VIII of France and Frederick of Aragon. It had been customary for there to be much junketing, dancing and tournaments of courtly love before the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was to fade away sweetly in the opaque light of a bleak dawn. Now, as the waiters served the honoured guests from silver trays and the awful royal feast began, I fixed my eyes on them, fascinated by the utter look of disgust and disdain in their faces. These servers, attired in the livery of the House of Toledo, knew me and gave me a special, knowing smile. I was the only Italian sitting at table and I was the only one who could fully understand and divine the humiliation of the lackeys having to serve fried spam and boiled polenta!  Their disgust was displayed in the manner by which their white-gloved hands moved in placing the plates on the table.

Translated by Jack Dale from the novel, La Pelle (The Skin) by Curzio Malaparte.

The Happy Garden State

The Happy Garden State

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find.

Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.  

From Andrew Marvel’s poem “The Garden”

The year 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, turned out to be a momentous time also for me. I moved house and job and became divorced. Feeling the need for renewal I decided to go Vegetarian. The display of gory chunks of animal anatomies on show in supermarkets, the faint aroma of blood hanging around in butchers’ shops, the occasional glimpses of the chopped-up remains of sheep and pigs in friends’ freezer compartments had finally become too distressing for me in my tender condition. Also, before I moved, I lived near an abattoir and occasionally saw reluctant sheep being dragged to their doom.

I like food and even enjoy a spot of cooking. To be frank about my conversion, I never entirely gave up meat or fish and the truth is that then and now I can eat such fare without much of a conscience about the processes of production that caused the meal to arrive on my plate. Could I personally kill an animal to eat it?  Yes, if I had to, but I admit I prefer others to do that rather nasty job.

What going veg meant for me was trying out all kinds of non-meat dishes I’d never eaten before. This made me much more considerate of animal welfare. If I eat eggs now I have to know that they come from chickens given the freedom to roam around the farm. I never eat farmed fish and choose meat cut from animals reared humanely and without drugs. In fact, nowadays, I eat very little fish or meat at all.

When I delved into the literature concerning the diet and cooking of Vegans and Vegetarians I was amazed to discover so much variety. That beans were pulses and their variety legion was news to me. If I’d always enjoyed spices and sauces I was now introduced to meat-free foreign riches never dreamed of in my former incarnation. The linguistic pot-pourri was equally flavoured and sensual, words like creamy, crunchy, pungent, penetrating, piquant and even aphrodisiac abounded in cookbook recipes. Above all, I found I could survive quite well as a Veggie.

The American writer Henry Thoreau wrote about how to live the simple life in his splendid book Walden. He describes how a farmer said to him, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely for it furnishes nothing to make bones with.” Thoreau noted that the man was “walking all the time he talks behind his oxen, which with vegetable-made bones jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”  For my own part, I took particular pleasure from the lost meals of childhood, like macaroni cheese and porridge. Wholemeal bread and brown long-grain-rice suited my bodily functions admirable. Experimenting, I felt I was thriving.

Most of the food I cooked and ate tasted all right but wasn’t much to look at. Nearly all meals tended to turn out as undistinguished mush that might have been eaten with a single spoon out of an all-purpose porringer. Above all, the meals didn’t come cheap as you might expect from a kind of peasant diet. Many recipes involved buying quite
pricey ingredients, especially herbs and spices, which might be used once only and then left to go mouldy in the larder. And nearly every meal resulted in many pans and dishes lying piled up in the sink.

The big test would come, I knew, when my sons visited. At that stage, two were at university and two about to leave school and follow suit. The eldest, Martin, became intrigued, even mildly enthusiastic at my conversion; two stayed neutral; the youngest, Peter, remained definitely hostile, his favourite repast hamburger and chips. Nearly twenty-five years later, Peter, his wife and two small children are all Vegetarian and claim they always will be.

I believe I impressed him and the others at the time with a few culinary surprises. For example, they loved the savoury-filled pancakes and artichoke flan, gobbled up the wholemeal pizzas and were delighted with Portuguese eggs and lentil rissoles. The one unmitigated disaster was marrow pudding, the delicious smells inviting them into the kitchen only to discover a soggy dish with no particular taste.

My sons now live in various countries across the world and I see them and their children infrequently. In the run of time, two became Vegetarian but now only Peter has kept to the diet. When they and their families came for the big Christmas feasts, some would eat the traditional fowl others nut-roast, tolerance shown all round. I admire Peter for sticking to what he believes is right but I couldn’t follow his example. What he and his family eat is reasonably balanced in terms of protein and healthy food. God knows, we’ve seen some pretty ghastly examples of malpractice in the rearing and butchering of animals in recent years, public health suffering as a result. For myself, occasionally I like eating fish and some varieties of meat.

Until and unless animals do what they did in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and parade with their own slogans and policies, I cannot bring myself to believe that they have any rights. To ill-treat dumb creatures will always leave a stain on the human character and it is right that we should enact laws to protect them. To rear and then slaughter animals for human consumption is not a crime, however. Moreover, of all the world’s major religions hardly any prohibit it. It is hard to conceive of a society where animal husbandry does not exist If it did disappear how many farm animals and species could continue to go on living among us?

The real issues reside in the area of consciousness, or philosophy, even. In one sense, the vegetarians are on the side of the angels, refusing to kill or cause suffering in order to eat. On the other hand, Mr Hitler was a vegetarian, not that that proves much. The point being made here is that what you think, or don’t think, can affect what you eat. The majority of people nowadays buy their food from supermarkets. Possibly many of them perambulate with large trolleys along the aisles of the stores piling up the goods indiscriminately. Everything neatly packaged, everything has a similarity, some wrapped pieces of chicken not looking all that different from a micro-wave oven to cook them in. The methods of production take place well out of sight of customers.

For quite a lot of children, the concept of living creatures involved in the process is actually difficult for them to grasp but a good few people, many of them young, have become outraged at the way we treat animals. As a result, life styles have changed and political action has followed.

A few years ago, political rallies were organised at the Port of Dover, where I live, as a form of protest against the transporting of livestock from England to the Continent in cattle trucks, resulting in much suffering on the part of the poor beasts. In between bouts of slogan shouting and banner waving, I succeeded in speaking to one or two of the protesters.

Generally, I found them civilised and highly articulate. One young anarchist tried to persuade me that shipping sheep abroad was related to capitalist exploitation, the police and the judges involved in the plot. I soon shook him off and listened to other, more reasoned arguments concerning animal welfare. With this I readily sympathised but when a young woman informed me that the treatment of animals was equivalent to the Holocaust I parted company.

If we argue that what we eat is very much a matter of chacun a son gout this it is not to deny that there will always be social, economic, political and moral questions involved in that choice. The culture of our particular environment, especially the culture of the early years of our upbringing, very much determines our daily diet. In former times, it was all much simpler. For example, the shops now offer us “organic” food. In my childhood, a good few years back, I confess, all food was grown organically. The industrialisation of farming began long ago but has accelerated phenomenally in the last fifty years with chemical fertilisation, not to speak of current methods like genetically modified crops. It behoves all of us to think about what we eat, but not think too much, possibly.

I quoted a few lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden” at the top of the page. It comes from wonderfully rich versifying, the whole poem celebrating a kind of paradisical world of fruitful and vegetable plenitude. In such a garden we live happily forever, that idea also strong in much medieval religious literature. For myself, I’ve always had difficulty in envisaging a heavenly state. I mean, what do you do all day if, like me, you’re not much of a gardener? I note particularly that the poet speaks of “annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.”

I can’t help wondering if that is what we do when we seek perfection – ie destroy everything except the one perfect ideal condition. The trouble is that if you do that you might not only sweep away injustice but also that very variety and freedom of choice that is somehow linked to our very imperfect human condition.

It is partly because I know a little of my own imperfections that I shall continue to eat food derived from living animals. I share the concern for animal welfare of those who choose not to eat any meat or fish at all but I somehow obstinately feel that I continue to live in the real world and that they don’t. 

Four for Christmas

Once More into the Breach

Christmas is always a battle, especially if you live alone and have four sons coming to stay. It seems I’ve only just put away last year’s decorations but in a few weeks’ time up they’ll go again. There’s all the tinsel and two tufted birds to go on the tree, one a chaffinch, the other a robin, both predating the eldest boy, now twenty-seven. The youngest is nineteen, the other two in between. They will all turn up sometime on Christmas Eve, stay for a week and then join their mother and her new bloke for New Year’s Eve celebrations. Since the separation and divorce, they have joined me for this major festivity every year.

It’s odd, really, my having sired four offspring, for I am by nature an isolate and perhaps should never have married in the first place. Taking Dr Johnson’s advice, I have not repeated the error, instead remained single and have recently retired from full-time employment.

The boys were still children when I first had them alone for Christmas and it amazed me how well it all went. Despite the hard work on the day itself, every year was a success and they enjoyed the repeats. The tough bit has always been the preparation, especially choice of presents. Each boy had at least twelve small items in his stocking and then four or five more substantial ones under the tree, to be opened after attendance at church. They tucked into the feast, traditional fare, with gusto and later played games, including cards, with me. In the evening, we’d watch a spot of Telly, usually a film.

Because they were memorable and quite uncomplicated times, all four still come, possibly in the hope of prolonging their childhood happiness. Nowadays, it’s less simple, despite my having convinced them that the stocking ritual can go. There are still plenty of presents under the tree but the major gift is now a personal cheque and much welcomed since three are impecunious students, only the eldest in full-time, paid employment. Even he likes being given a cheque, despite earning a good salary.

Working and living in London, with his current girl friend, he spends every penny he earns on having what he describes as a good time. It pleases me that they still come, possibly turning up with more separate selves than was the case in their innocent childhoods. Each his own man, they have become more than my equals.

If their arriving together separately is an oxymoron, they actually came with excess baggage last year. The eldest brought his partner, Annie, and a pet cat, which left a mess for me to clear up on Christmas morning. It wasn’t the only mess. Before very long, personal belongings were strewn all over the house. When I wander into the bedroom they occupy, to open windows and air the place, I have to tread very carefully for fear of stamping on possessions tipped carelessly out of suitcases.

In the bathroom, toiletries are lined up on every flat surface, like dandified soldiers in some exotic war. An array of sinuously shaped bottles and cans containing every kind of unguent, cream and scented liquid imaginable surround my solitary shaving bowl. As the days pass, I trail through the house collecting their refuse, scattered in the most unlikely places: apple cores and tangerine skins under the bed, even an empty French letter packet. Annie drinks coffee all day, half full cups left all over the house, one I found on top of the lavatory cistern. She chews chocolates non-stop, the wrappers let fall where they will. The box, with the lid off, bites taken out of a few in the collection, looks as if it has been rifled by a mouse.

The other boys enjoy Annie’s company and are sorry when both leave after Boxing Day to spend a few days in Paris, the cat remaining in my care. Son No 2 will also leave a day later, to visit his girl friend in Surrey. I haven’t met her but the others have, and don’t approve. They say she’s skinny – they mean flat-chested – but what they most dislike is her “posh” voice, preferring Essex glottal stops to RP English. Son No 3 told me that he has a girl friend, Meg, and she will also be visiting and staying, after Boxing Day. Like him, she’s a second year medical student.

She comes, is plump, rather quiet and retiring. In fact, although she stayed for three days, I didn’t see much of her or him, since they disappeared into any vacant room or place whenever they could get away from the rest of us. Finally, son No 4 announces that his girl, Becky, will turn up for lunch during the week. She’s still at school, in her final year and will become an undergraduate, like him in the autumn. This will be the first time I’ve seen her but have heard good things from the others, that she’s direct, lively and “original”.

When we meet, I am surprised to discover a shy schoolgirl who looks and acts rather like my own youngest offspring. They both have short, cropped and dyed hair. He wears an ear-ring, she has one like it plugged into her nose. The girl also wears big boots, laced well up to the ankles. This youngest lad plays the guitar rather well and has been “punk” for a few weeks, so their dress style strikes me as fairly normal. They have become vegetarian, along with Meg, so I prepare them a nut roast for lunch, a great success.

The cat owners return from Paris, mollifying me with a bottle of brandy for looking after the cat. Everyone seems to get on fine, a good time had by all. When they leave, I can’t say I am too sorry. I love it while they’re with me, a great festive atmosphere, but by myself I can listen to the music I like, read quietly and generally relax without having to think about the needs of the hordes. And that was last year.

The headache of buying presents and organising everything for their arrival is once more upon me. I always leave everything to the last minute but spend weeks worrying fruitlessly about how I am going to do it all. This time round, the eldest boy will not be here, for he’s gone to work in San Paulo, Brazil, having broken up with Annie. Son No 2 will be here with another girl called Marie. They are to marry next year. No 3 says he’ll arrive by himself, the youngest will bring Becky again. Let ‘em all come, provided they leave before epiphany. They can come when they like and do so on a fairly regular basis, and keep in touch at other times.

Son No 1 phoned me a few nights back, at 2 a.m., asking what he should do about sun burnt shoulders. Take an aspirin, I advised. I believe Christmas is special yet in the run up to it often wish it never happened. What is it going to be like when there are grandchildren! Only when it’s over do I fully appreciate its significance, but am glad it won’t happen again for at least twelve months.    

Contract Killing

CONTRACT KILLING

When my new neighbours moved in I warned them. “There’s a fox on the roam and he’s visited my garden and done some damage,” I said.

“Really?” the lady replied, looking quite delighted, her husband showing a mild interest. “Isn’t it lovely to have wild life on one’s doorstep,” she said, smiling.

Later I learned that the family, including a boy of four and a girl of six, were Vegans. They owned a fat cat and two overweight dogs and a tame rabbit. The rabbit lived in a hutch in the garden surrounded by a four-foot wire fence. One night, about three weeks after they’d settled in, the fox jumped over the fence and ate the rabbit. In the morning, when the family discovered only bits of fur and a couple of grisly pieces of flesh, they were all very distressed. The lady reported tearfully that although the children had become very fond of the little rabbit she’d explained that foxes, too, were fully entitled to their natural way of life. It was reasonable and philosophical of her to say so, I thought.

I felt much less benign towards the creature and couldn’t help reflecting on the notion of my neighbours’ tolerance of animal savagery. It appeared not to extend towards humans. I like the idea of vegetarianism but do eat meat, I admit. My own instinct in this case would be to kill the fox, but I didn’t say so. After all, he’d been doing mischief in my own garden for months.

I’d first seen the townie Reynard lollop across my lawn one afternoon in April. He appeared from behind the bushes, advanced a few paces before slowly retracing his steps, condescending to depart only after giving me a most insolent stare. In June and July he returned at night and began to dig up the grass. Every morning, from my bedroom window, I saw gaping wounds across the green sward. His paw marks had made three or four inch indentations into the soil. Each day I filled in the holes with fresh earth and scattered a few grass seeds on top. Every night he returned to dig afresh.  The lawn slowly began to resemble a crossword grid, squares of green here, squares of earth there.

By August, the new neighbours in place and their rabbit devoured, I began to hope that Mr Fox had changed tactics and would leave me alone, but guessed he’d be back. It was no real surprise when once again from the bedroom window I saw that the digging had resumed. I needed advice.

First, I described the situation to a friend, a retired engineer. “Put a mirror in the garden,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A mirror, you know, a looking glass. He’ll see his own reflection and think it’s another fox and run off. Territorial animals, foxes. They don’t like any competition.”

“Er… yes… I see. Worth a try, I suppose.”  My friend affirming with a vigorous nod of the head, I decided to give his little stratagem a go. For three nights running I crept out into the garden very late, once it had grown dark and not wanting my new neighbours to see me, and propped up an old shaving mirror in the centre of the lawn.  No Narcissus, my fox, so it didn’t work.

The engineer came up with another idea  “You’ll have to set a trap,” he said.

“What sort of a trap?”  I thought of those jungle films I’d seen as a boy, where Tarzan’s enemies dig big pits for him to fall in.  My friend’s plan was simpler.

“You construct a cage with some meat inside and a door that closes once the creature is inside. That way you catch the bugger.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You take the cage down to the Isle of Wight and release the beast.”

My son and his wife live there, as it happens.  I explained to my friend that they and others on the island probably wouldn’t think much of his proposal. “In that case,” he said, “you’ll have to frighten him off.”  How? Loads of electronic devices were available, which pick up anything approaching on four legs and proceed to emit high-pitched ululations. “The noise scares the pants off the animal and he runs away.”

I thought of the various animals I’d seen in my garden during the years I’d inhabited the house, including hedgehogs and squirrels, not to mention a load of cats. Somehow, I didn’t fancy the idea of alarming noises and possibly flashing lights in the middle of the night.

I decided to phone the RSPCA. The first response from one of their officers was to inform me that anybody poisoning a fox straying into his garden could be fined as much as £5000. I had no wish to kill the creature, I explained, but merely to deter it from digging up my lawn and, incidentally, eating my neighbours’ pets. There existed, he told me, a chemical called Reardine, which emits an odour very offensive to foxes. Dig a couple of the pellets into a shallow hole, cover with sand, and when the fox finds them he’ll get a nasty smell and won’t come back.

I tried six garden centres. Not one of them had heard of Reardine.

I popped into the local Veterinary Centre and asked if they’d heard of it. They hadn’t but advised me to get in touch with “Beryl”, a local lady who was an expert on foxy habits. When I phoned her, she was most supportive. The hungry fox was digging in my garden for edible roots, she informed me. If I were to provide an alternative fare, like peanut butter, it would satisfy him and he’d stop stripping the turf. “Peanut butter is very good for a fox’s fur and gives it a lovely gloss,” she said.  Alternatively, his coat might make a good doormat was my own unvoiced opinion.

Possibly, I’d become a little unbalanced myself at this stage for I actually followed Beryl’s advice. For three nights running, I put out slices of bread thickly coated with peanut butter. By morning not a crumb remained, but freshly dug paw holes were still there. I suspected that mice, maybe rats, too, were helping themselves. Also, I imagined the fox lying on his back and roaring with laughter at such imbecilic antics.

Finally and desperately, I asked a local farmer what to do. “Shoot it!” he said at once. I explained that I didn’t possess a gun and wasn’t it illegal, anyhow. At present, the law allowed those with proper gun licences to kill a fox, he told me.  “Reggie’ll do it for you. I’ll send him round and you can have a word.”

The following evening, Reggie arrived on the doorstep. A skinny, ginger-haired youth, he wore a coarse woollen jacket of the kind you see only in Charity Shops.  His eyebrows were so faint and thin they might have been drawn rather than grown. A long bony face with high cheekbones enhanced the ascetic look, thick lips the only evidence of anything sensual. All he said was, “You got a fox wants killing, right?” I assented to that, gainsaying Mr Reynard’s opinion about the matter.

I asked Reggie how old he was – he looked about fifteen. “Twenny,” he replied. Then he asked to look at the lawn. After a brief inspection, he told me he’d sit up all night inside my garden shed, with the door open. When the fox arrived, he’d shoot it.  The deal was I’d pay him fifty pounds. If he missed, I wouldn’t have to pay a penny. But he wouldn’t miss.  “See you later,” he said, leaving quickly.

Once he’d left I felt uneasy about the contract. I’m all for nature and even for foxes, provided they don’t enter my domain. I mean, he was digging up my handsome lawn. I like my lawn and I enjoy it when the grandchildren visit and we all sit out under a shady tree on a summer’s day and enjoy a picnic. The garden leads down to a row of Maple trees that border a disused railway track. It’s where the fox has his lair, miles of bushes and brambles snaking their way through an urban jungle. It is, I suppose, to his credit that Monsieur Reynard has learnt how to survive these modern times.

All the same, my dear friend, if you come into my garden tonight, you’re dead. 

Reggie arrived at eleven o’clock, my usual time for bed. He wore a thick jumper beneath his jacket, a wool beret over his ginger mop. Under his arm, he carried a long parcel. Unwrapped, he showed me the rifle, its long barrel and walnut stock looking quietly lethal. He displayed a single bullets in the palm of his hand, just this one between the eyes would do the trick, he claimed.  Inside the shed, he’d be undetected, little wind about, the fox unlikely to pick up his scent. Comfortably seated in one of my old wicker chairs, he oozed confidence. Alas, it rained and the fox didn’t come. He’d try again the following night.

This time, no clouds about, the sky dark except for myriad bright stars, Reggie waited once more. Around 4 a.m. I was startled from sleep by the sound of gunfire. Three distinct shots I counted. At the window, I observed Reggie standing in the middle of the lawn, the gun held lightly in one hand and pointing to the ground. In my dressing gown, I went downstairs. A warm autumn night, I found him much dejected. He’d fired and missed. Just when he’d come out of the shed to have a pee – had drunk three pints of beer before guard duty began – the fox arrived. He’d let go at the beast but Mr Fox dashed away before he managed to take proper aim. Reggie, not the fox, was mortified. He refused to entertain the idea of trying again.

Although I thanked him for his efforts, it gave little comfort. One solitary shot should have done the job, anything less an utter failure.

Suddenly, I had a thought and said I’d give him twenty-five pounds for his jacket.

“What you wanna if for?” he asked.

“I just fancy it, that’s all.”

He grinned, slipped the jacket from his shoulders and handed it over. After he’d pocketed the money he left, my offer of an early breakfast refused. I returned to bed and managed to doze off for a couple of hours.

In the morning, I went up into the attic to find a polystyrene model of a bust and head left there by the former owners, habersdashers by trade. I took the model into the garden and dressed it in Reggie’s jacket and then planted the assassin’s prototype in exactly the place where I’d seen the lad standing, gripping his rifle. By fixing a pole at the end of the model’s sleeve I made it look as if he were holding a weapon, a rifle just like the one the young man owned. When I looked out from my bedroom window, I felt immensely pleased with the construction.

Monsieur Reynard had already had a bit of a shock, bullets flying in his direction. I felt certain that if he returned and saw that menacing figure on guard, he’d scoot again.

And so it turned out, for the creature has never returned.  Moreover, I find it very reassuring to have a kind of doppelgånger out there to warn off hostile spirits yet be ready to share the secrets of the night with true friends.
 

The Sting of Culture

The Sting of Culture

What is it?

Culture is the distilled truth of organic existence over the whole of time.  In order that this truth is perpetuated it has to be continually renewed through change and development. Culture acts as a kind of yeast in the bread of civilisation. It makes rise those major shifts in human relationships by which we arrange our affairs and hold a view of ourselves. In this respect culture will often cause civilisations to sink and in the process create a crisis for those institutions that govern and regulate the manner in which we act and think. Civilisations are like fertile lands that eventually become arid because the rivers dry up. New springs begin to irrigate the soil as the river of culture runs through them once more. Sometimes the rivers form lakes that turn into fetid swamps but where a powerful current is flowing, the rivers start to flow strongly again until they find an outlet to join the great, eternal oceans of truth.

Civilisations may thrive for a time beyond their sell-by-date but a culture based on the truth of experience will not allow them to last for long. The period between a civilised society’s menopause and the pregnancy of a new one in the making can be very painful, confusing and misleading. Where culture and civilisation go along arm in arm, artists are often content to cohabitate, the best and most mature art flourishing in such circumstances. Where there is uncertainty and conflict about the state of art, the artists become subversive, throwing their critics into disarray. Without art, culture remains primitive, but without a sustaining civilisation artists cannot properly operate.

The poet, T S Eliot, describes culture as “a whole way of life” and that is so.  Art is in the vanguard of culture and particularly of cultural change but I believe it quite wrong to deify the artist or to put him apart as someone different from the rest of us. Artists are like servants in the big house, or palace, of a powerful ruler. They don’t own it, they don’t give the orders and they have no control over the finances that pay their wages but without them the whole edifice would collapse. The creation of original artefact is what the artist does and, therefore, falls within the compass of anyone from the carpenter to the sculptor. Civilisation is a kind of large vat that stores all the cultural ingredients necessary for viable human interaction within the family, the community and any kind of unified society, but is not the same as culture.

What does it do?

Art may be the highest expression of culture but is still its derivative and not the complete thing. The two great creative periods of modern, western history, the Renaissance and The Enlightenment, would not have brought forth beautiful paintings, sculpture, music and literature without huge steps forward in the advances of science and technology. The corresponding factors, i.e. in the economic, social, political and topographical field, accompanying such advances, effect fundamental cultural alterations in the way people work and live, and always involve losses as well as gains.  In this context, the artist presents a creative sensibility of a personal kind that, if it is to be of any worth, will reflect what many others know, think and feel not only in the present but will have done so basically in the past and will be repeated in the future. Indeed, the singular function of culture is to repeat in new forms what has already been created by former civilisations and this inevitably means creating great art. A society and its citizens which claim to celebrate the great art of the past but fail to produce anything comparable, then that society and its people can be said not to have properly understood and absorbed the art of the past.

The paradox that every generation and individual faces is the singular and finite nature of existence, which eventually causes to be addressed three basic questions:
1. Is life worth living?
2. Does it amount to very much?
3. Will it continue?

The artist’s answers, to satisfy himself and others fully, have to be primarily aesthetic insofar as it is his task to produce a beautiful work of art, but his understanding of reality has to extend far beyond that. Although the creative act is essentially an individual one, the true artist loses his individuality in the process (in the past he did this usually by being relatively obscure in his day or by dying young), thus allowing his art to be shared communally. Any attempt to make a culture out of syndicated activity will inevitably fail.  The only animal corporate art can produce is a stuffed one, not a living creature. This is a problem for a democracy as Alexis de Toqueville noted during his sojourn across America in 1831-32. 

In an oligarchy, high culture is largely determined by a few who have most of the wealth and, of course, all the political power. If they lack within their own ranks sufficient numbers of gifted people – they rarely do have enough – they can usually bring on board, through patronage and favour, the best creative minds. In a democracy, Toqueville argued, people can act collectively to improve radically their living conditions but it then become a much harder task for them to maintain the best of culture because the tastes of the majority will often flood the scene, making it difficult for individuals swimming against the tide to stay afloat. It was most perceptive of this French aristocrat to identify so early on and in the USA, the greatest democracy of modern times, the essential problem facing mass civilisation: the conflict between immediate satisfactions and the more enduring values, often demanding sacrifices, which have persisted since time began.  

Moreover, we appear to have become considerably more confused about how to relate the past and the present within a uniform cultural context. Such terms as lowbrow, highbrow, classical and modern, popular art and other kinds of art have been on the go for most of the past two centuries yet were unheard of in earlier periods of history. For example, if we could go back in time and ask a visitor to the Globe Theatre in sixteenth-century London into which of these categories he might cast himself, utter bewilderment would ensue.  In the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare much folklore and vulgarity have been incorporated, which reflect a culturally organic view of society. Somehow or other, culture later became hijacked by the rising middle classes. In the nineteenth century, the common people are practically lost sight of in the literature of the day, apart from some notable exceptions, like Dickens. In fact, it wasn’t until it began to disappear, that people became conscious that even such a thing as folk art existed.

Who has it?

The cultural dominance of the United States in modern times has fundamentally altered the balance between the tastes of the many and those of the few. In that country, particularly in the twentieth century, not only did the art of the common man flourish but all art, de facto, aspires to be popular art. This has created problems for those wishing to preserve the best of past, elitist cultures, while making them presentable to great numbers. Vast improvements in living conditions, paralleled with a public education system open to all, up to and including university training, not to underestimate the free access to art galleries and museums, have done much to enhance understanding of the achievements in painting, sculpture, music and literature inherited from older and very different civilisations. Possibly more importantly, many American artists have succeeded in bridging the gap between the “classical” and the “popular”. In music, Leonard Bernstein immediately comes to mind while other composers, writers, film directors and painters have made their mark not only in the USA but also world wide. 

Those who had the say so in the more class bound and caste systems, markedly in Europe, were much slower in embracing popular art forms, or what may justly be called the phenomenon of an urban folk culture created within a highly industrialised society and high density living. In Britain, for example, the music of Ira Gershwin, never mind mainstream jazz, took a long time to become accepted as a regular feature of classical music programmes broadcast by the BBC, including the Promenade Concerts. For years, the cultural impact of cinema was simply ignored by both academia and the intelligentsia and like pop music, also hugely enjoyed by many, never became “established” until the 1960s – films favourably reviewed in the posh Sunday papers were nearly always from Europe or what we now call art-house movies. Once bands like The Beatles were accepted right across the USA it became clear that Britain had at last signed up fully to the democratic club. Other landmarks in the 1960s, like the Lady Chatterley Trial at the Old Bailey, were also key occasions in a quite significant cultural re-ordering of values that would have all kinds of implications not only for art but for the general social life as well. 

What is significant in the west, more so in Europe than in America, is the loss of direction and confidence of those established authorities that previously ministered the cultural life of society, cant phrases like multicultural, world music and pluralistic values predominating. Everywhere, in broadcasting, in publishing, in newspapers, there is division, insecurity and uncertainty, epitomised by a failed sense of what is good, worthwhile and valuable to preserve.  Instead there is a constant clamour for success to show its face and reveal its secrets for all to embrace.  Often, the criteria for this success depend primarily on wealth, fame and notoriety. In the USA this has not been quite such a problem as it has for European countries where cultural values have traditionally been determined top down rather than bottom up. In the States, because it is such a rich society, some have managed to buck the trend, individual voices rising above the din of publicity and contributing uniquely to the cultural scene. Very importantly for the creative field, the growing sense of confidence in their living standards and way of life, which characterised America for most of the twentieth century and still persists today, though less strongly, has been utterly crucial for artists. A reversal of fortunes in Europe has had the very opposite affect, often resulting in a vulgarisation of what was once considered to be the best alongside an elevation of the tawdry to absurd levels of esteem.

Who wants it?

The conscious basis of significant art stems from its capacity to be aware of everything that is going on around its creation. In this, the trivial and the inconsequential will inevitably vie with the serious and the solemn, both sides capable of vitality. A viable culture is always broadly comprehensive where it expresses the social variety that constitutes real living experience. In this regard, the emergence of popular art in democratic societies is a healthy thing.  It is less healthy, however, if the scene becomes fragmented so that the idea of excellence is either ignored or becomes hived off into selective areas. To a certain extent, this has already happened in music. For example, in modern classical music many of its outstanding practitioners have their bases in universities and, indeed, find the bulk of their audiences within the same cloisters. Retreat – and that’s essentially what a university represents – might be comforting to those seeking seclusion and rarity but can never replace the world in which most of us are compelled to live. The itemisation of culture as an academic phenomenon has reached out to pop art, a subject for study in many colleges and universities in the USA and Britain.

A culture with a future has to be a unique blend of belonging and survival that can be shared by the great majority. Storytellers, poets and musicians most importantly, are rightly esteemed by those who value and understand the importance of creativity in the life of everyone. At the same time, it behoves everyone to try and speak intelligently about what it is that renders art significantly in establishing enduring human values. A great deal of popular art represents a distraction from what is actually going on in people’s lives and is often sentimental, simplistic, brutally sensational and even meretricious.  Perhaps large segments of popular entertainment, especially television, do little more than make people become somnolent and half comatose.  It is when we are woken up that we should take note and try to explain what pleases us.

I have always loved films in a kind of ambivalent way. It’s story telling I enjoy most but in the end I find literature much more satisfying. It continues to confound me that film appears so far to have failed to produce the masterpieces that can compare, or stand their ground alongside great novels, say.  Even the very best of films will not, in my view, endure for generations to come in the way that we continue to celebrate the works of great dramatists, poets and novelists of the past. Because cinema is very much the quintessential art product of democratic development, in certain respects our judgement of it is tantamount to a judgement of the cultural quality of modern life itself.  Painting and sculpture, for example, attracted the likes of Michelangelo and Leonard da Vinci in Renaissance Italy, dramatists like Shakespeare in sixteenth century England, novelists like Dickens and Tolstoy in the nineteenth century.  Where are their likes in cinema?  The story of popular art is far from over, however, and perhaps it is conceivable that the great artistic achievements of the past will be repeated in the present.  Some terrifically entertaining films have been produced, without doubt. I have chosen to examine one, which I consider to be among the best, the 1970s Hollywood film The Sting.

To view discussion of the film, The Sting and other articles on cinema go to http://www.avventura-press.co.uk/culture.htm

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