Category Archives: Culture

To Hell With Community

02 Sunday Feb 2020

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‘Big skies and tough people’: Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930 (Public Domain)

In his maiden speech to the House of Commons on 29 January, Danny Kruger, the newly elected Conservative MP for Devizes, extolled the virtues of tradition, Christianity, patriotism and strong local roots.

‘Brexit is about more than global Britain,’ he argued. ‘It is a response to the call of home. It reflects people’s attachment to the places that are theirs… The main actor in our story is not the solitary individual seeking to maximise personal advantage… [it] is the local community.’

With its lyrical evocation of his Wiltshire constituency’s ‘big skies and tough people’, the speech has been hailed as heralding a new ‘post-liberal’ politics. But when he goes on to say that ‘We are children of God, fallen but redeemed,’ it sounds not so much post-anything as pre-modern. There’s nothing new about the rhetoric of blood and soil, either: it is just what Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński have advocated in Hungary and Poland – not to mention a few other politicians in the first half of the 20th century.

Red Tories and Blue Labour

Nor is the reaction against modern liberal values, and nostalgia for the sense of security afforded by old-fashioned communities, new in British politics. Communitarianism is an idea that first gained traction in the 1990s in response to the effects of economic neoliberalism. Since then, the idea has been co-opted by politicians of all shades. David Cameron was once taken with the ‘red Tory’ ideas of Phillip Blond, while Jeremy Corbyn’s election defeat last December, and the attendant loss of the party’s northern heartlands, has given new impetus to the ‘Blue Labour’ faction championed by Frank Field, David Goodheart and Stephen Kinnock.

In a post on Unherd last year, the clergyman and columnist Giles Fraser argued that social mobility was the enemy of social cohesion and the family itself; people should stay in their home towns to take care of their elderly parents rather than expecting the state to do it.

The New Statesman, meanwhile, found a poster boy in the French urban geographer and social commentator Christophe Guilluy.  Sympathetic to the gilets jaunes and to Brexit, Guilluy makes some valid points about growing economic inequality and the way people on ordinary salaries are being priced out of the city centres, but there is a chilling undercurrent to his ideas which, though he writes from a left perspective, has found favour with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Français

Know Your Place

Theresa May, in her notorious speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 2016, asserted that ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’ Leaving aside the fact that this was rich coming from someone whose husband was a former fund manager for Deutsche Asset Management and that, having just done my annual accounts, I find the idea that I am part of some international elite pretty laughable, why on earth shouldn’t I feel more in common with a creative, broad-minded artist or entrepreneur from Lisbon or Ljubljana than with some wilfully ignorant old bigot who happens to have been born down the road from me? Freedom of association – to choose the people with whom you wish to make common cause – is protected by Article 11 of the Human Rights Act.

Traditional communities are invariably viewed through a lens of sepia-tinted nostalgia: ‘You used to be able to leave your door open round here,’ ‘A neighbour would always pop round to see if you were all right…’ ‘Robbed of their most go-ahead young people,’ Fraser lamented, ‘working class communities become ghost towns.’ What he omitted to mention is that there is a push factor away from such communities, as well as a pull factor towards the cities, which forces anyone with any get-up-and-go to… well, get up and go. As Lou Reed and John Cale put it in Songs for Drella, their elegy for Andy Warhol, ‘There’s only one good thing about a small town, You know that you want to get out.’

Close-knit communities, where everyone knows your business and thinks they know your place, can be oppressive, an impenetrable fortress against those outside and a prison for those within. They preserve themselves by the exclusion of others – those who look different, act differently, and think differently. They enforce social conformity and punish those who step outside their norms through stigma, ostracism and abuse, stifling enterprise, creativity and social mobility. Try being LGBT or an unmarried mother in one of these warm-hearted, neighbourly societies. Immigrants are seen as a threat, and Jews will never really belong. No wonder that since the Second World War young people have fled these communities in huge numbers, not just to seek work or to go to university, but simply to be themselves, free of wagging fingers and twitching curtains.

Freedom of the City

How many people, having moved to the big city to escape the censorious tongues of the Ena Sharples of this world, actually live in a state of alienation and anomie, as if there were no moral values? In my experience the great majority are as concerned and caring as their forebears – if not more so. But their values, and the objects of their concern, have evolved. They care less about people’s ethnicity or sexual orientation and more about whether someone is unhappy or in need. This is as is should be, and our world is the better for it.

Of course we all need communities of some sort, but I would argue that we need more open, tolerant, flexible and inclusive communities. Such communities may be local, but they may also transcend locality, based on a shared interest, workplace, voluntary association or leisure activity. Those who – bewildered and threatened by the complex choices of the modern world – wish to force us back into foetid, claustrophobic small-town lives are choosing passivity over progress, comfort over courage, fear over hope.

Do we seriously want to go back to the world of Angela’s Ashes, to huddle together in the frowsty warmth of the extended family, with its rancid stew of frustrations and resentments bubbling away for generations? Do we want to go back to a world of curtain-twitching, suspicion and malice, where decent, ordinary men lived in fear of blackmail, imprisonment and ruin because of their sexual orientation, where healthy women were locked up in mental hospitals for having children outside marriage? Where’s the humanity and compassion in that?

So, two cheers for heartless Western individualism. Of course the modern city can be a lonely place, and our competitive society can be unforgiving to those who fail. People’s lives are still too much determined by their background. But that is not because we have gone too far in our pursuit of individualism and social mobility. It is because we have not gone far enough.

What our ‘lonely’, ‘alienated’, ‘atomised’ society offers – as no other has done – is the opportunity for people to escape the stultifying expectations of their families and communities, to use their talents to the full and to forge their own destinies. It’s called progress, and we should never, ever apologise for or be ashamed of it.

 

Remembering Deborah Orr

04 Monday Nov 2019

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DOStB

One of the most striking passages in Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk describes the memorial service for her father, a press photographer, at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street. The scene resonated with me: although the press has long since decamped from the area, Wren’s wedding-cake church remains its spiritual home, to which we return when one of our number has died. I was there just a few months ago, when the place was packed with journalists from the Guardian and the Independent who had come to remember our friend and colleague Simon Ricketts.

Now, on the journalists’ altar, there stands a tribute to another departed friend: the brilliant Scottish writer, editor and columnist Deborah Orr, who died a fortnight ago of cancer, just a few weeks after her 57th birthday.

As the tributes poured in, it became clear that many people who had never met her felt that they knew her through her columns, and her rebarbative comments on Twitter, where she had more than 62,000 followers. In a way, they were right, because the woman and her writing were of a piece: fiercely intelligent, sharply funny, disconcertingly honest and deeply humane.

I had the privilege of sub-editing Deborah’s column in the Independent for several years, and her professionalism made work a pleasure. She filed beautifully crafted copy, on time, and usually slightly over-length because, as she said, it was easier to cut than to fill, so she always included a few lines that could easily be removed without injury to her argument. I soon learned to tell which they were.

Her professionalism wasn’t just a matter of taking pride in her work, though she had more grounds to do so than most. It was born out of consideration for her colleagues. She knew we were under pressure, and no columnist was so important that they could turn in a shoddy job and expect others to tidy up after them.

Having been an editor herself, she thoroughly understood the mechanics of production journalism, and was never precious or defensive about her copy. She once told me that she never read her articles in print because life’s too short (ah, who could have known?) to worry that someone had moved a comma. It was a fib, but kindly meant – she was letting us know that she trusted us with her words.

Deborah was a model of journalistic integrity. In 2007, she steadfastly refused to join the voyeuristic media frenzy over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, despite pressure to do so. In the absence of further evidence, she wrote, ‘These commentaries add nothing to anyone’s understanding of what has happened, or to anyone’s sense of what might happen differently in future, because they do not educate, inform or entertain – except, perhaps, the dissociated or the ghoulish among us.’

A few days later, a duty editor came up to me and asked if I found Deborah difficult to work with. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’ Apparently he had phoned her on her day off, when she was in Selfridges looking for a birthday present for one of her sons, to ask her to write just such an article. She had given him a piece of her mind.

In the spring of 2008, she was sent to Afghanistan to write a feature on the country’s rug-makers, who were incorporating symbols of modern warfare into their traditional designs. I remember her storming into the newsroom on her return, furious that the photographer she’d been assigned had insisted that it was too dangerous to travel to the carpet-weavers’ village and that she, as a mother, should not put herself at risk by going. Her rage at his sexism in using her motherhood as a smokescreen for his cowardice, as she saw it, and the fact that he had endangered the lives of the weavers by obliging them to travel to Kabul for the interview, was volcanic.

Deborah did a magnificent – and magnificently funny – impression of being a cynical, hard-bitten hack. You could compile a book of her withering put-downs. I remember the (then) rising young star of the Indy Comment desk standing by my computer wondering why, when (for once) he had written only the 850 words asked of him, his copy was still over-length. Deborah stalked over and said, ‘Not a lot of people know this, Johann, but there are short words, medium words and long words. And 850 long words take up more space than 850 short ones.’

Colleagues who did not know her that well sometimes fell for this act and found her intimidating, even scary. Behind that seemingly fierce exterior, however, she was the kindest of people and the most loyal of friends. Since she died, I have found myself recalling her many small – and not so small – acts of kindness towards me, and I know that many friends and colleagues have similar memories of her.

In March 2009, I agreed to take redundancy from the Independent. I had been there ten years, had other projects I wanted to pursue, and I suspected that the generous severance package would not remain on the table much longer. (It didn’t.) Less than an hour after the redundancies were announced, the phone rang. It was Deborah. Was I all right? How did I feel about it? What was I planning to do next?

My leaving do took place at the Gun, an old riverside pub on the Isle of Dogs. Deborah wasn’t in the office that day, so she came all the way from her home in southwest London to be there. We sat out on the terrace, overlooking the great bend in the River Thames and the O2 dome on the opposite bank, talking. As was the custom, I had put money behind the bar, and she insisted, very forcefully, on contributing. Naturally I refused, but when I finally crawled out of bed the next day I found, in the top pocket of my jacket, a crisp, neatly folded £50 note, which she must have put there when I wasn’t looking.

Gore Vidal famously remarked, ‘Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies.’ Deborah was the exact opposite. She wanted her friends to succeed and be happy, and would go to great lengths to help make it happen. She was there to cheer them on when it did – and to commiserate when things didn’t go so well.

It is all the sadder, then, that she did not live to celebrate the publication of her memoir Motherwell: A Girlhood, which will appear in January. Fortunately her publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, printed advance copies, so she was able to see and hold the book, and take pleasure in the glowing early reviews by Tracey Thorn in the New Statesman and Caroline Sanderson in The Bookseller. Her last-ever tweet was a photo of that double-page spread, with the message, SO HAPPY!

Deborah’s creativity, charisma and rare gift for friendship blaze through the moving tributes by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, Simon O’Hagan in the Independent, and Louisa Young on Radio 4’s Last Word. Her untimely death leaves an aching void in British journalism, and in the hearts of her many friends.

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There is no such thing as ‘The People’. Only people

24 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Within minutes of the Supreme Court ruling that the Prime Minister’s prorogation of Parliament was unlawful, the hard-core Brexiters predictably swung into action, brandishing their favourite slogan, the ‘Will of the People’. Leave.EU launched a digital campaign of personal attacks on individual Supreme Court judges, while the columnist and clergyman Giles Fraser posted on Twitter that ‘The establishment will do everything in its power to frustrate the will of the people. These are dark days indeed.’

Dark days, perhaps, but not in the sense Fraser means. It would seem that Boris Johnson and his puppet master Dominic Cummings are gambling that a sufficient number of voters will applaud him for cutting though red tape and pettifogging legalistic objections to ‘just get on with it’ and implement the ‘Will of the People’. Despite the judgment, they may well succeed. A Hansard Society survey recently found that 54 per cent of voters agreed with the statement, ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’.

We’ve seen it all before, of course, with the Daily Mail’s notorious 2016 front page that branded High Court judges as ‘enemies of the people’ after they ruled that the government needed the consent of Parliament to invoke Article 50. Since then, we have heard a great deal about the ‘Will of the People’.

I am deeply sceptical about the very existence of such a thing as ‘The People’, a homogenous mass with one will. This is the language of totalitarianism: of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. When James Madison and his colleagues began the preamble to the US Constitution with the words “We the People’, they didn’t include the slaves on their Virginia plantations. They didn’t qualify as people.

If Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, what does that make those who oppose it? Unpeople?

But then the phrase ‘the people’ has always been exclusive. It means ‘people like us’.  If Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, what does that make those who oppose it? Enemies of the People? Unpeople? Untermensch? Modern representative democracy is not the same as crude majoritarianism. The philosopher John Stuart Mill made this clear back in 1859, in On Liberty:

  • The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

You cannot have a healthy society when almost half the electorate – or any sizeable minority – is effectively disenfranchised. That is why it was necessary to have a power-sharing agreement to end thirty years of bloody civil conflict in Northern Ireland, where a slim majority was able to overrule a large minority for decades. Modern democracy cannot be a matter of winner-takes-all. It depends on a complex system of checks and balances such as parliamentary procedure, an independent judiciary and the rule of law– the checks and balances that Johnson and his supporters deride as arcane, legalistic pettifogging.

It will come as a surprise to some to learn that the function of a representative democracy is not to enact the ‘will of the people’. That way totalitarianism lies. Its function is to reconcile the conflicting interests of as many people as possible. MPs are not delegates, mere mouthpieces for the views of their constituents, however ill-informed, prejudiced or contradictory.

MPs are representatives. Their job is to represent the interests of all their constituents, not just the majority

They are representatives, and their job is to represent the interests of all their constituents, not just the majority, not just the ones who voted for them, and certainly not just the most vociferous. Sometimes the interests of different groups may conflict, and then MPs must exercise their judgement as to how far the interests of one group may be satisfied without too much detriment to those of another.

That, on a much larger scale, is what is meant to happen on a national level. The results will not always be popular. They will not be exactly what anybody wants, but what most people are least unhappy with. No unicorns, no sunlit uplands, no utopia. Just the patient, tedious horse-trading that keeps society functioning tolerably well and prevents us from killing one another.

If the result of a referendum defined as advisory by the legislation that established it can be considered a mandate for anything, a narrow majority of less than 52 to 48 percent can only be a mandate for a middle course.

That may not be good for the blood pressure of the ‘just get on with it’ brigade, but sounding the car horn repeatedly doesn’t get the traffic moving. Life is complicated. Get used to it.

There is no such thing as ‘The People’; only people, in all their maddening, exhilarating diversity.

The Unbearable Lightness of Brexit

19 Monday Aug 2019

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I have been struck recently – somewhat belatedly, I admit – by a curious aspect of the campaign to leave the European Union: a refusal to take seriously things that are demonstrably serious, creating an air of almost hysterical frivolity in the tradition of ‘Up Yours Delors’, ‘Allo ‘Allo and the Carry On films. A consistent theme in the rhetoric of Leave campaigners, for example, has been to compare the European Union to a totalitarian state or occupying power. For Jeremy Hunt, it was the USSR; For others, it was the Third Reich; and most recently, they have invoked the Chinese crackdown on the democracy protests in Hong Kong. The political and moral irresponsibility of such comparisons is only matched by the disrespect for those who have lived, or are still living, under real political oppression. But of course, it’s a figure of speech, an exaggeration, a joke. Where’s your sense of humour?

‘Who Do You Think You’re Kidding, Mr Juncker?’

Another comparison trundled out ad nauseam is the Second World War, the Blitz, Dunkirk… We heard it from Theresa May in her negotiations with the EU last April, prompting the Danish PM to whistle ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Back in 2017, Michael Howard even suggested that Britain would be prepared to go to war with Spain over Gibraltar. Those who wish to remain in the EU have been branded traitors, and just last week, Boris Johnson accused MPs seeking to avoid a no-deal Brexit of ‘collaboration’ with the EU. Collaboration? We are not – yet – at war with our European neighbours, as far as I know.

Here again, the lack of proportion and self-awareness would be astounding had we not been drip-fed this nonsense for decades. Few people who actually experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to relive them; even half a century later, many could not bring themselves to talk about it.

The sabre-rattling reached a new decibel level in an article by Rod Liddle in The Times  last week, arguing that ‘a peaceful, easy life hasn’t made us happy,’ and that war ‘increases social cohesion and integration’. Liddle is of course a professional wind-up merchant, and it wouldn’t do to take him too seriously, but he shrewdly tapped into a strain in the Leaver mentality, which might best be summed up by Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ Not all the Doctor’s contemporaries would have agreed; John Scott of Amwell certainly didn’t.

Oh! What a Lovely War

But perhaps we have grown bored with 75 years of peace and prosperity, and forgotten how lucky we are. It has happened before. Until now, the longest interval of peace in Europe was from 1871 to 1914, when the imperial rivalries of Britain and France, Russia and Germany were fought out in far-off places at the expense of far-off people. It seems inconceivable now, in the knowledge of the catastrophe that followed, but towards the end of that period, people started to tire of peace and yearn for war. Politicians, the press and artists such as the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti began to argue that society had grown decadent, and that war would be cleansing, heroic and regenerative. As the title of a pamphlet published by Marinetti in 1909 put it, war is ‘the world’s only hygiene’.

Melodramatic stuff, but there is a strong element of narcissism, self-regard and self-pity to the current national psychodrama. ‘There seems to be an ingrown psychological thing about it,’ the writer Lawrence Durrell noted in an interview with the Paris Review  as long ago as 1959. ‘You can see it reflected even in quite primitive ways like this market business now – the European Common Market. It’s purely psychological, the feeling that we are too damned superior to join this bunch of continentals in anything they do.’

We don’t seem to have advanced much since then. The idea that we could be an ordinary, decent, middle-ranking country on amicable terms with our neighbours, sitting on boring committees painstakingly working out the humdrum details of food standards, workers’ rights, fishing quotas, Regional Development Grants and the Common Agricultural Policy – let alone the huge challenge of climate change – is just not grand, glamorous or exciting enough for the Leaver ego.

Carry On England

Instead, ever since the referendum campaign, Leavers have called for a return to Britain’s ‘buccaneering spirit’. Let us think for a moment what this actually means. The Collins English Dictionary defines a buccaneer as ‘a pirate, esp. one who preyed on the Spanish colonies and shipping in America and the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries’. Buccaneering, then, is simply a romantic word for demanding money with menaces. Is this how a supposedly civilised country ought to conduct itself in the modern world? Even taken metaphorically, it glorifies a predatory mode of doing business that would not meet any current standards of ethics and corporate governance.

But then it’s not meant to be serious. Just like the Irish border isn’t serious, the shortage of medicines isn’t serious, the haemhorrage of capital and skilled workers isn’t serious, the spike in hate crimes isn’t serious. British pluck will see us though. Chin up, what ho!

Of course, some of the actors in this farce are serious – deadly serious. For Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon, Arron Banks and the financial speculators who have already made fortunes short-selling the falling pound and the shares of struggling British businesses, this is a cold, calculated exercise in self-interest. But what characterises their cheerleaders and puppets, the little men like Nigel Farage, Mark Francois and yes, Boris ‘Bananas’ Johnson, is the fundamental lack of seriousness of their Carry-On vision of history. But they will not be the ones to suffer the consequences of their jolly japes.

From Generation unto Generation

11 Monday Feb 2019

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Kim Sherwood: Testament (Riverrun)

Joseph Silk, a world-famous painter, has died. His grand-daughter Eva, the custodian of his legacy, travels to Berlin, where the Jewish Museum has obtained a questionnaire – the testament of the title – that the young József Zyaad, as he then was, completed on his release from a concentration camp.

But having reinvented himself on arrival in postwar Britain, Silk had no desire to revisit his traumatic past – a stance that brought him into bitter conflict with his Zionist brother László, who devoted his life to memorialising the Shoah.

Moving skilfully between past and present, London, Budapest and Berlin, Testament is a hugely ambitious first novel. So assured is its control, so rich its frame of reference, and so sensitive its handling of unspeakable horror, that is hard to believe it is a debut, let alone the work of an author under 30. The prose is spare, precise, elliptical and richly evocative, and has a resonance and power that makes much contemporary fiction seem flat and lifeless on the page.

The novel is clearly founded on extensive research: into the Hungarian labour divisions of the Second World War, the Lake District refuge for young Holocaust survivors who became known as the ‘Windermere Boys’, the ‘University of the Ghetto’ that flourished at the Passmore Edwards Library in London’s East End, and the groundbreaking 1945 exhibition of American Abstract Expressionists at the Whitechapel Gallery next door. Yet however fascinating in itself, the historical background always supports and drives the narrative forward, and is never allowed to overwhelm it.

There are, perhaps inevitably, echoes of Sebald, particularly The Emigrants, which also deals with a painter-survivor, and Austerlitz, which is haunted by the ghosts of Theresienstadt, but Testament is a strikingly original achievement with its own singular insights.

With great psychological acuity, the narrative explores fundamental issues of identity, survivor guilt, and the way trauma extends down to the second and third generations. As Eva’s search for the truth leads her inexorably towards her estranged and embittered father John, we discover how he in turn was damaged by all that remained unspoken in the shadow of his father’s overpowering personality and unhealed psychic wounds – and a startling family secret is revealed.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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I was delighted last week to receive a copy of A Country to Call Home, an anthology of specially commissioned short stories, poems and flash fiction responding to the experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers. Edited, like its predecessor A Country of Refuge, by Lucy Popescu, it is published by the crowd-funding pioneers Unbound.

The brilliant array of contributors includes Hassan Abdulrazzak, David Almond, Moniza Alvi, Simon Armitage, Adam Barnard, Tracy Brabin, Tony Bradman, Sita Brahmachari, Eoin Colfer, Brian Conaghan, Kit De Waal, Fiona Dunbar, Miriam Halahmy, Peter Kalu, Judith Kerr, Patrice Lawrence, Anna Perera, Christine Pullein-Thompson, Bali Rai, Sue Reid, S.F. Said, Jon Walter and Michael Morpurgo. The former Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell has provided haunting illustrations for every piece, while the beautiful painting that forms the cover is by Haymanot Tesfa.

There are stories of home and of homesickness; about people trafficking and life in the refugee camps; about persecution and imprisonment; about prejudice, indifference and official inhumanity; and about the fortitude needed to survive these experiences.

Written for Alan Kurdi, the Syrian Kurdish boy whose body, washed up on the shore of Turkey, momentarily aroused the conscience of many in the UK, Kit de Waal’s ‘Did You See Me?’ imagines the dreams, aspirations and day-to-day reality that preceded a life lost at sea. Simon Armitage’s darkly poetic reworking of the passage in Virgil’s Aeneid on the crossing of the Styx evokes the grim sea journeys undertaken by many refugees, while Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Locked Up’ chillingly depicts the gratuitous brutality of the UK’s immigration officers.

Difference can be the source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared

Brian Conaghan’s poem ‘Just Another Someone’, with its parallel voices juxtaposing the experiences of refugees from Nazi Germany with those of today’s asylum seekers, reminds us that exile is not a new phenomenon. The comparison is reinforced by Popescu’s interview with Judith Kerr, the celebrated author of the Mog stories and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, who came to this country as a child in the 1930s. Kerr’s recollection that ‘people were so kind to us during the war’ chimes with my own father’s experience, and makes one wonder what has happened to this country in the intervening decades.

Aimed at both children and adult readers, this courageous book counters the negative stereotypes propagated by some politicians and sections of the press to demonise the most vulnerable people on the planet, which is why I am proud to have supported it. Instead, it challenges us to look, to see, and to recognise our common humanity.

In his contribution to the anthology, S.F. Said, author of the best-selling children’s novel Varjak Paw, recalls his delight as a child reading Watership Down to discover that the mythical rabbit hero El-ahrairah had an Arabic name with which he could identify.

‘Children’s books can be bridges connecting people,’ he reflects, ‘showing them that however different someone else might be, the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us. And that difference can be the source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared.’

A Country to Call Home: An Anthology on the Experiences of Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers is published by Unbound, price £9.99

A Winter’s Tale

12 Monday Feb 2018

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Ian Bostridge: Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber & Faber) 

I have only recently caught up with Ian Bostridge’s penetrating, erudite and wide-ranging exploration of Schubert’s greatest song cycle, Winterreise, though it was published in 2015. I once had the privilege of hearing Bostridge perform the ‘Ur-Winterreise’ – the 12 songs Schubert set first before he discovered the rest of the poet Wilhelm Müller’s cycle and expanded his work – in the atmospheric setting of Wilton’s Music Hall in Limehouse.

Composed in 1827 during the last full year of Schubert’s brief life, Winterreise is considered the pinnacle of the Lieder repertoire. The almost unremitting bleakness of this 24-song cycle, in which a rejected lover stumbles through ‘the blinding, blank, hallucinogenic whiteness’ of a frozen landscape, has been no obstacle to its enduring popularity.

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’

For many listeners, the cycle is a tale of lost love, or an expression of existential alienation in a hostile world. Müller’s poems offer no clue as to the background or occupation of the anonymous protagonist, but it is clear that his position is an insecure, marginal one. The very first song, ‘Gute Nacht’, begins with the lines, ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen/ Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus’ (I arrived a stranger/ As a stranger I leave). Bostridge plausibly suggests that he may have been an itinerant tutor, who, like Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloïse, has fallen in love with a pupil of higher social rank; the second song, ‘Die Wetterfahne’, refers to her as a ‘rich bride’.

The wanderer’s exclusion from society is most explicit in the 17th song, ‘Im Dorfe’ (‘In the Village’), in which he imagines the villagers smugly snoring in their warm beds, dreaming of material gain, while their dogs rattle their chains and bark at the intruder. Appropriately, the song features prominently in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film of Elfriede Jelinek’s chilling novel The Piano Teacher.

In this light, Schubert’s wanderer can be seen as the ancestor of the outcasts of literary modernism such as Camus’ L’Étranger and Wilson’s The Outsider. I had not known, before reading this book, that Samuel Beckett was a great admirer of Winterreise, though given the mordant humour of Müller’s poems and Schubert’s settings, it comes as no great surprise. As Nell remarks in Endgame, ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.’

A winter of discontent

To this personal and social alienation, Bostridge adds a political dimension, locating the cycle amid the clampdown that followed the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, in which demands for democratic reform were ruthlessly put down in both Austria and the fragmented German states – a repression satirised by Heinrich Heine in his 1844 poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale).

Müller’s political sympathies are well attested. In a prefatory letter to the second volume of his travelogue Rom, Römer und Römerinnen, he lamented ‘the great Lent of the European world’, in which ‘he who cannot act… can only mourn.’ Similarly, his wanderer, ‘so wild and daring’ in battle and storm, feels his weariness and pain when, in the 10th song, ‘Rast’ (‘Rest’), he lies down in a charcoal burner’s hut.

Speculating why Müller chose a charcoal burner’s hut (as opposed to, say, a shepherd’s), Bostridge embarks on an invigorating discussion of this ancient industry, a topic that particularly drew my interest as I had come across it recently while researching my film on the Great North Wood that formerly covered much of South London. The trade, which once provided much of Europe with fuel, had always been a marginal, disreputable one, conducted at a distance from human habitation because of the smoke and soot it generated; with the Industrial Revolution, the ready availability of coal had also made it an obsolescent one.

Graph showing changes in fuel use in England, 1561–1859

Changes in fuel use in England, 1561–1859, from Ian Bostridge, ‘Schubert’s Winter Journey’

Bostridge finds a further political resonance in the reference. Müller was an admirer of the Italian revolutionary society that his hero Byron had joined, the Carbonari – whose name means ‘The Charcoal Burners’. The Carbonari had been the driving force in a series of uprisings in 1820–21, and among their objectives was the overthrow of Austrian rule in Italy. For a German poet and an Austrian composer, this was incendiary stuff.

To what extent did Schubert identify with Müller’s radicalism? In 1820, he was present when the police detained his friend Johann Senn for seditious activities; Senn was imprisoned for 14 months while Schubert, accused of using ‘insulting and opprobrious language’ to the arresting officers, spent a night in the cells, from which he emerged with a black eye. And when he first encountered the Winterreise poems, it was in the radical journal Urania, which had been banned by the Viennese censors. For both poet and composer, then, the cycle may have been a lament for the political winter that had engulfed Europe.

The undiscovered country

When Müller decided to expand his cycle from 12 to 24 poems, he interspersed the new verses in between the old. Schubert left the 12 songs he had already composed in their original order, altering the key of the last, ‘Einsamkeit’ (‘Loneliness’), to avoid a sense of closure at what now became the mid-point of the journey, and setting the new ones in the order they appeared. The result – whether by accident or design – places the most extreme states of mind towards the end of the cycle, intensifying the feeling that the wanderer is moving ever further from everyday life – and even from sanity.

The 20th song, ‘Der Wegweiser’ (‘The Signpost’), resumes the steady walking pace of ‘Gute Nacht’ and ‘Einsamkeit’: ‘Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege,/ Wo die ander’n Wand’rer geh’n?’ (‘Why do I shun the paths/ Where the other travellers go?’). Like many others, I imagine, I have often asked myself this question in the course of both my literal travels and my journey through life. Such is the resonance of Winterreise almost two centuries after its composition.

The last lines of the song, repeated in a whisper over a relentless, tolling G and followed by a cadence of sombre finality, are: ‘Eine Straße muß ich gehen,/ Die noch keiner ging zurück’ (‘I must take a road,/ From which no one returns’). Given that Müller was steeped in English literature and had translated Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, it is not far-fetched to suppose that he intended to echo Hamlet’s ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’.

From here on, there is no going back: the wanderer is irretrievably lost, and the songs become increasingly hallucinatory. In the hymn-like ‘Das Wirtshaus’ (‘The Inn’), he mistakes a lonely graveyard for an inn where he might find shelter – but the rooms are all taken, and he must trudge onwards. In a fiery burst of ‘Mut’ (‘Courage’), the singer declares, ‘If there’s no God on Earth/ We must be gods ourselves!’ anticipating, as Bostridge notes, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, almost word for word, by half a century.

A parhelion, or sundogs, over Fargo, North Dakota

A parhelion, or sundogs, over Fargo, North Dakota

This hysterical bravado collapses into the numb resignation of ‘Die Nebensonnen’ (‘The False Suns’). Against hushed, awestruck chords, the wanderer observes three suns in the winter sky – an optical illusion caused by sunlight refracted through ice crystals, and known as a parhelion. Oddly, Bostridge’s absorbing discussion of the phenomenon – and its appearance in literature – makes no mention the ‘three glorious suns, each a perfect sun’ that appear before the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3.

‘Die Nebensonnen’ is the cycle’s tragic nadir, in which the singer parts company with all hope as he watches two suns set, and wishes the third would do so too, leaving him in darkness.

The turn of the screw

Then, over a monotonous open-fifth drone on the piano, the wanderer meets the first human being he has directly encountered on his journey, an organ grinder, or Leiermann. The German Leier is cognate with the English word ‘lyre’ – but this is not the elegant instrument of classical antiquity that graced the Biedermeier furniture of the early 19th century, but a clapped-out, tuneless hurdy-gurdy.

A hurdy-gurdy

The instrument, its strings sounded by a wheel operated by a crank handle, was already outmoded by Schubert’s day; like the charcoal burner, the Leiermann is a practitioner of a dying trade.

Who is he? Death? Or is this most impoverished and broken-down of itinerant musicians the wanderer’s alter ego? (Not long after completing Winterreise, Schubert composed his terrifying setting of Heine’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’.) The old man’s fingers are numb with cold, his collection bowl is always empty, and no one listens to his tunes. Dogs snarl at him, as they did at the wanderer in ‘Im Dorfe’, marking him as another outsider. The singer addresses him as ‘Wunderlicher Alter’ – the adjective wunderlich translates as strange, odd, but it can also mean wondrous – and asks him to accompany his songs. (Matthias Loibner, a virtuosic champion of this disparaged and underrated instrument, has done just that to great effect.)

And so ends Schubert’s great song cycle, with this bleak, enigmatic little ditty. Yet despite the desolation that Winterreise evokes, its stark beauty and depth of human feeling makes it one of the most uplifting experiences that any art has to offer – and Ian Bostridge’s absorbing book contributes significantly to our understanding of its many subtle resonances.

What a difference a little word makes

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Culture, Writing

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Time, I think, for a spot of pedantry. There is a usage I keep seeing everywhere that drives me round the bend: ‘Yesterday, artist John Smith announced that his new show…’; ‘American author Truman Capote…’

I suspect the practice of omitting the definite article started with newspaper headlines where, given the font size and column width, every letter counts. Fair enough, but since then it has trickled down the page to infect the body copy, and has even spread, sadly, to otherwise well-written and edited books.

Unlike Russian or, I am informed, Mandarin, the English language requires an article: you have to write ‘John Smith, an artist…’ ‘The American author Truman Capote…’ Artist and author are not titles, as in King George V or Baron Corvo – they are descriptions of a person’s trade.

This is not just a matter of grammatical rules, but of craftmanship: it’s the difference between a well-carpentered joint and one that’s crudely nailed together. Also, it fails the speech test – would you ever say, ‘artist John Smith’ out loud? No, you wouldn’t.
 Worst of all, it’s simply ugly, betraying a tin ear for the language.

When I worked at the Independent, the usage was strictly banned, and the Guardian style guide agrees:

‘Leaving “the” out often reads like official jargon… Do not use constructions such as “prime minister David Cameron said” … If it is thought necessary to explain who someone is, write “Nigel Adkins, the Sheffield United manager, said” or “the Sheffield United manager, Nigel Adkins, said”.’

Capital offences

Then there is the question of when to capitalize the word. When the definite article is part of a title, it is perfectly clear that it should be capitalized and set in italics: The Divine Comedy, The Portrait of a Lady, etc. The titles of newspapers are more problematic. Traditionally, only The Times was afforded a capitalised, italic The, in recognition of its status as the newspaper of record. At the Independent, we made the decision on the basis of whether the article appeared in the paper’s masthead: so, The Guardian, but the Daily Mail. The drawback to this system is that it requires checking – and newspapers do change their mastheads from time to time.

The Guardian itself says: ‘lc for newspapers (the Guardian), magazines (the New Statesman…’

The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (Odwe to those of us in the trade) finds an elegant way round this dilemma: ‘Preceding definite article to be roman and lower case exc. in one-word titles (the New York Review of Books, The Economist)’.

So The Times keeps its capital T, but so do The Guardian and The Independent. That seems like a sensible solution, but I’m entirely in agreement with the Guardian style guide when it continues, ‘lc for… pubs (the Coach and Horses), bands (the Black Eyed Peas, the Not Sensibles, the The), nicknames (the Hulk, the Red Baron), and sports grounds (the Oval).’

To write, ‘We went for a pint in The Dog and Duck’ or ‘He used to get off his face listening to The Smashing Pumpkins’ is a capital letter too far. It’s naff. It’s as uncool as wearing socks with sandals.

Capitalisation in general seems to be getting out of hand. In the 18th century, capitals were scattered merrily to emphasise any word the writer or printer considered important. The Germans, true to stereotype, systematically capitalise every noun. But in modern English we use capitals very sparingly, for proper names and little else. And for goodness’ sake, don’t use them to big up your job title. The Daily Telegraph’s style book is clear about this: ‘Job descriptions such as managing director, chairman and chief executive all take lower case.’

If ‘prime minister’, ‘foreign secretary’ or ‘chief executive’ sit comfortably in lower case, then a capped-up ‘Assistant Stationery Buyer’ looks comically self-important. When it comes to capital letters, less really is more.

While I’m wearing my sub-editor’s (metaphorical) green eye shade, I’m also going to protest against a couple of pretentious buzzwords that seem to be cropping up everywhere: curate and iteration. The word curate belongs to the world of museums and galleries. You can’t curate a book – you edit it. And where on earth has ‘iteration’ come from? I’m seeing it everywhere these days. ‘The latest iteration of Microsoft Word…’ There’s a perfectly good word for this already – version. But that doesn’t sound impressive enough, does it?

 

The War on Silence

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Culture, Politics

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During the recent spell of warm weather, I have enjoyed a few pleasant summer evenings contemplating our garden from the patio with a glass of chilled white wine. All too often, however, I have been driven indoors to escape the sound of radios blaring from open windows and balconies. I don’t want to listen to saccharine soft-rock ballads and the vacuous, patronising banter of the presenters under any circumstances, but I particularly don’t understand why people need this aural backdrop when surrounded by birdsong and the sound of the breeze in the trees. These are music enough for me.

I rarely feel any need for background music, or any other aural diversion. When my car radio packed up recently, my initial annoyance was soon replaced by pleasant surprise at the time it gave me to think. Did I really want to listen to a repeat of Moneybox Live anyway? I suppose I’ll get it fixed, but I’m in no hurry. I appreciate that music may enliven repetitive manual tasks, and even improve one’s efficiency in performing them, but when writing or editing, it can only be a distraction from the close attention needed to do the job properly. And the idea that anyone might want background music while reading is utterly incomprehensible to me. Just why?

The problem seems to be not just the scarcity of silence in the modern world, but an active hostility to it. Fearing silence, many people seem to feel a need to surround themselves with an incessant flow of sounds – in restaurants, bars, in their cars, on their phones, in parks and public spaces. For others like me, this constant bombardment by unwanted music is an invasion of our personal space – and it’s getting harder and harder to escape it.

I used to love pubs; these days, I tend to avoid them. Do hospitality and catering colleges teach that speakers should be placed on every wall and in every corner, no more than five feet apart, lest any unfortunate customer miss out on the full volume – or any dissident evade the aural brainwashing and enjoy the now almost mythical ‘quiet pint’? Combined with the vogue for not having any soft furnishings, this causes the sound to ricochet around the bare walls, forcing customers to shout and creating a strenuous, almost aggressive atmosphere more appropriate to a gym than a place of rest and relaxation.

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‘All the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been
thrown into the current assault against silence.’
Aldous Huxley, ‘The Perennial Philosophy’
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More than 70 years ago, Aldous Huxley noted in The Perennial Philosophy (1946) that ‘all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.’ He understood the connection between this constant barrage of noise and the consumer economy. ‘Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose – to prevent the will from ever achieving silence… The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving.’

Huxley was writing just over a decade after George Owen Squier established the Muzak corporation (named by analogy with Kodak) in 1934 to deliver piped music to factories to increase workers’ productivity, and subsequently to shops to manipulate consumers’ moods and increase their spending.

In Manifesto for Silence: confronting the politics and culture of noise (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Stuart Sim argues that ‘Noise is used extensively as a marketing tool (bars, restaurants, public spaces in general, radio, television, film), as a way of stimulating consumption… Such marketing techniques work to homogenise behaviour and restrict individualism; thus to resist them is to make a political statement.’

The problem is compounded by the fact that – like the soma-numbed denizens of Huxley’s Brave New World – we have internalised this consumerist agenda and come to accept it as the norm. We have grown afraid of the silence within ourselves, so that whether at home or on the move, our reflex action is to fill every moment with aural distraction by resorting to the radio, television or Smartphone. Having trained the public to expect constant aural stimulation, commercial interests can now claim that they are merely giving them what they want. Why else pipe music into spaces where we are not expected to linger for more than a few moments, such as hotel lobbies, lifts, corridors, and even lavatories? The assumption would appear to be that just a few seconds’ silence is liable to generate unease.

I’m not a total purist in such matters. There are bars and cafés where well-chosen background music is an agreeable part of the ambience. At least you can choose whether to go into a particular café or not. But canned music has become all but ubiquitous: in banks, shops – including, unbelievably, bookshops –and practically every other public place. In Belgium they even pump it into the streets from little loudspeakers attached to the lampposts. Canned music in hospitals, GPs’ waiting rooms and dentists’ surgeries is particularly invasive, as you have no choice but to be there, and are unlikely to be feeling your best in the first place.

Canned music colours our experience, imposing an irrelevant – and at times jarringly inappropriate – mood. A perky song playing in a café when you’re breaking up with a lover, or in a motorway service station on the way to a funeral, offends by its grotesque inaptitude; a steroid-pumping dancefloor mix is hardly conducive to a reflective cup of coffee in the morning. And where do you go for a quiet drink after a concert or recital when you want to linger in the afterglow of the music you’ve just heard, and not have the experience dissipated immediately by someone else’s choice of aural wallpaper?

Pipedown, the campaign against piped music that numbers Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Alfred Brendel, Lesley Garrett, Philip Pullman, Simon Rattle, Mark Rylance and Prunella Scales among its supporters, points out that many illnesses and disabilities – including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, tinnitus, ME and general hearing difficulties –can be aggravated by exposure to canned music, and that its use therefore contravenes the Disability Act of 1995 and the Equality Act of 2010.

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‘I refuse to die to this music.’
André Previn
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For me, listening to music – including recorded music – is an active choice. I give it the full and undivided attention I would give a book, a play or a film. I can therefore understand why musicians of all genres dislike canned music, since their training and instincts dispose them to listen rather than to screen it out. ‘I can’t close my ears,’ Daniel Barenboim said in a 2006 Reith lecture in which he mounted a scathing attack on this ‘absolutely offensive’ practice which, he argued, degrades music and encourages people not just to neglect the ear but to repress it. On board an aircraft when it ran into turbulence and the crew piped ‘soothing’ music through the public address system, his fellow conductor André Previn complained, ‘I refuse to die to this music.’ And Alex Kapranos, of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand, in his entertaining gastronomic travelogue Sound Bites, opines that the only appropriate soundtrack to fine dining is the gentle murmur of conversation and the quiet clink of glasses and cutlery.

But nowhere, it seems, is immune. Even in libraries, canned music is recommended because people, we are told, find silence alienating. In October 2008, Andy Burnham, then Culture Secretary (now Mayor of Manchester), remarked that ‘solemn and sombre’ libraries should be ‘a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home.’

What Burnham failed to recognise is that libraries have long been an engine of the social mobility his government claimed to support: one of their principal purposes was to make the pursuit of learning available to children – and there are still many – who could not afford to buy books and whose homes were too crowded and noisy to allow them to study without distraction.

Burnham’s association of silence with the sombre and noise with joy is revealing. In A Book of Silence (2010), the writer Sara Maitland describes her own personal quest for silence, and examines our society’s ambivalence towards it. As she points out: ‘We have reached a point in contemporary Western culture where we believe that too much silence is either “mad” (depressive, escapist, weird) or “bad” (selfish, antisocial)…’

Noise is equated with sociability – but the noise with which we now surround ourselves is not that of human interaction, but of withdrawal: the television that precludes the need for conversation in the home, the canned music that makes it impossible in the pub, the headphones clamped to ears in public places…

Real, intense communication is punctuated by periods of silence and reflection, rather than the constant babble of what anthropologists call phatic communication – small talk to you and me. Of course small talk has real value in making strangers feel at ease with one another, but we only establish proper friendships when we move beyond it. Taken too far, phatic communication becomes nervous chatter, a substitute for communication.

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‘Silence is the element in which great things
fashion themselves together.’
Thomas Carlyle
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Silence is also essential for contemplation, reflection, and creativity. As Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus (1836), ‘Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.’ During the 1950s, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor found it necessary to retreat to the Benedictine Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle in Normandy to finish a book with which he was struggling. In A Time to Keep Silence (1957), he records how at first, he found the silence of his cell oppressive, and suffered from insomnia, nightmares and daytime drowsiness. Then, as the ‘hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life’ fell away, he experienced a renewed energy for reading, writing, and exploring the surrounding countryside.

Fermor and Maitland’s rigorous, quasi-mystical pursuit of silence, which arose in both writers out of personal crisis, is probably not something that many people will either want or be able to put into practice, but what Maitland calls the ‘bits and pieces of silence woven into the fabric of each day’ are to be cherished, not feared and obliterated.

Our inability to tolerate silence for even a short time is, I believe, a symptom of neurotic anxiety; it is almost as though we are suffering from a mass outbreak of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is not merely our addiction to noise that is at issue here, but a wider craving for constant stimulus. Consumerism has infantilised us, and we can go nowhere without our toys. Travelling on the East Coast Main Line from London to Leeds recently, I was struck as I walked along the train from the quiet coach to the buffet car how almost every passenger was hooked up to some device: laptops, iPads, DVD players, Wiis, each in their electronic cocoon, oblivious to the afternoon sunlight slanting across the fields outside the window.

At what cost? ‘I see patients deafened by inner and outer voices and sounds and just the sheer perennial pollution of irrelevant stimuli,’ writes the philosopher and psychotherapist Piero Ferrucci in Psychology Today. ‘If we lose our inner silence, we lose our very self.’ He suspects that we fear silence because it ‘reminds us of solitude and death’. But, he suggests, ‘how about facing the fear? We might find out that, instead of fearing silence, we enjoy it.’

Silence should be the default position, music a conscious choice, to be enjoyed in all its richness because it is not commonplace; increasingly, background music is the default position, and silence an extreme, eccentric – and usually expensive – choice. I believe we should be looking to build intervals of silence into our everyday lives, and to restore respect for silence in public spaces. Resist the temptation to turn on the radio first thing in the morning, just as you might resist the temptation to light up a breakfast cigarette; hold on to the silence as long as you can. Turn off the TV unless there’s something you really want to watch.

And maybe we should all have at least one ‘unplugged’ day a week. Switch off the iPhone, put the iPad away in a drawer, turn off the radio, and listen to the wind in the chimney, the sound of the rafters settling, the rattle of rain on the window, the foxes barking in the garden, the hoot of a train in the distance… and the silence.

What have we got to be afraid of?