Author: jamescalumcampbell

Parse, if you will, the following sentence:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not, when they encounter significance, grateful for it, and when it meets them in that insistent form where nothing is very engaging as “life” unless its relevance is fully taken, miss it altogether. 

This comes from the Analytical Note on Dickens’ novel Hard Times, in The Great Tradition, by the distinguished literary critic F. R. Leavis (Chatto & Windus, 1948).  The expectations referred to relate to the traditional critical approach to the English novel.  They are that the novelist should create a world, full of abundant life, and that the characters must be living, to the extent that they go on living outside the book.

Are these expectations unexacting?  Anyone who has written a novel, or tried to write a novel, will know that the attempt to breathe life into the novel’s characters, and their world, is the hardest thing of all.  But before I disagree with Dr Leavis’ opinion, I must try to understand what that opinion is.  What does he mean?  I’ve been gnawing away at that sentence all week, like a dog who buries a bone, and periodically digs it up again to worry away at it.

How did I embark on this thankless undertaking?  I picked up Hard Times in a “Yellowback” in WHSmith’s last week.  WHSmith sold these low price editions in railway stations during the nineteenth century, and now Smiths have recreated some of them to celebrate their 225th anniversary.  Earlier this year I read the literary biographer Claire Tomalin’s autobiography, A Life of My Own, (Viking, 2017), in which she took exception to the fact that F. R. Leavis had apparently said that Hard Times was the only novel Dickens had written that was worth reading.

So I took it upon myself to read Hard Times, and then Leavis’ Analytical Note.  Leavis thought the great novelists writing in English were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence.  Knowing his adulation of Lawrence I wasn’t surprised that he admired Hard Times so much.  It is Lawrencian in its deep suspicion of industrial progress.  It rejects the sterile world of “Facts” in favour of the life of the imagination, indeed, in favour of life itself.  In his analytical note, Leavis actually quotes at length a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a description of Tevershall which might have sat quite comfortably in Hard Times as a description of Coketown, another equally squalid and miserable industrial town of the nineteenth century.  Leavis thought Hard Times was a condemnation of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  He was implacably opposed to the quantification of human souls.  You feel the same sense of indignation in his merciless attack on C. P. Snow in his 1962 Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures?  I was minded to write a piece on Hard Times and on Leavis’ reaction to it, but I got side-tracked.  I became preoccupied by that single sentence.  So let us parse it.

The sentence consists of a principal clause in two parts joined by the conjunction and:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not grateful for it, and… miss it altogether.    

In addition, there are four subordinate clauses:

1. …when they encounter significance…
2. …when it meets them in that insistent form…
3. …where nothing is very engaging as “life”…
4. …unless its relevance is fully taken…

The great structural defect of this sentence resides in the fact that following the conjunction “and”, the subject of the sentence is no longer “expectations”, but “significance”.  Now “expectations” are plural, and “significance” is singular; that is the only way we know what “them” and “it” subsequently denote.  The “it” of the principal clause refers to the “significance” of the first subordinate clause, as does the “it” of the second subordinate clause.  It is less clear what the “its” of the fourth subordinate clause refers to; it might too refer to “significance”, but could also refer to “life”.  It might be clearer if we remove the pronouns and replace them with the nouns to which they refer.  Thus:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not, when they encounter significance, grateful for significance, and when significance meets expectations in that insistent form where nothing is very engaging as “life” unless significance’s relevance (or perhaps “life’s” relevance) is fully taken, miss significance altogether.

Can expectations be grateful?  Not really.  But this is a figure of speech, in which the gratitude (or in this case ingratitude) of the holder of the expectations is transferred to the expectations themselves.  I think Dr Leavis is trying to say something like this:

People who enjoy a good read because they like to enter an imagined world can be resentful if the writer chooses to explore a profound and serious matter.  If the reader loses interest because he can’t appreciate how the argument relates to the life of the book, then he will miss the whole point of the book.

But I’m not sure.  Let’s be frank, Frank.  It’s such a clumsy sentence that I’m not sure that it means anything.  Another literary critic, Philip Hobsbaum, another Cambridge man who sat at Leavis’ feet and rather admired him, was a great advocate of clarity of thought.  In his magnum opus, A Theory of Communication (Macmillan, 1970) he developed his concept of “availability”.  If the meaning of a sentence is not available to the reader, then the meaning is just not there.  This implies that the thought behind the language is incoherent.  The great experimental physicist Lord Rutherford of Nelson, who ran the Cavendish Laboratory, said something similar when he said that if you couldn’t explain your research to the person who cleaned the lab, then your research was probably flawed.

But to return to these unexacting expectations, Leavis puts them into quotation marks.  The business of the novel is, “you gather”, to “create a world”.  There must be “life”, “living characters”, and so on.  Leavis is being snooty.  The imputation is that these notions are clichés; that is why they are unexacting.  The effect on the readers who might cherish such expectations is to persuade them that their taste is rather vulgar.  Personally I would have much preferred it if he had removed the quotation marks from “life” and put them round that portentous word “significance”.  The whole futility of critical analysis – at least as she is currently taught in our schools – resides in that single, appalling sentence from F. R. Leavis.  You take an individual who has experienced a visceral and emotional response to literature, you cast aspersions on his, or her, enthusiasm, and then you take the life out of a work of art by recasting it in your own image, and interpreting it through the prism of your own prejudices.

Hard Times is fantastic.  Some of the individual scenes therein are unbelievably vivid.  As a matter of fact, Dickens has created a world that is full of life, and full of living characters.  That’s really all you need to know.  Read it yourself.

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenches there

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Wilfred Owen

 

Curious to know whether that punitive instrument from the Kingdom of Fife, the Lochgelly tawse, is still being manufactured, I consulted the web.  One particular firm of saddlers produced an especially robust two- and three-thonged heavy leather strap much sought after by Scottish dominies.  Some would tote this instrument under their collar and down a sleeve, to be drawn with the practised expedition of a sharpshooter from the Wild West.  Corporal punishment is now illegal in Scottish schools.  A mother sought reassurance from her child’s school that her child would not be beaten, and when she received no such reassurance, she took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, and won.  Belting ceased, by law, in Scottish state schools in 1987, and in private schools a decade later.  So the market must have dried up.  But it occurred to me that there might yet be foreign interest, and that booming belt exports might be an economically healthy subsidiary to the UK’s prosperous arms industry.  Why not?

Well!  I rather regretted my researches.  It appears that the tawse has become, in certain refined and sophisticated quarters, a sex adjunct.  I curtailed my researches, but no doubt for the foreseeable future I will be regaled on line with all sorts of curious advertisements, for “accoutrements”.

The infliction of the strap was an everyday occurrence when I was in school.  One teacher routinely belted you if you made more than two mistakes in a spelling test.  I don’t think the word “dyslexia” was known at the time, or if it was, it would have been regarded as some kind of precious nonsense dreamed up by a bunch of lily-livered, ivory-towered liberal wets.  Another teacher – his nickname was Moses, not because he was religious but because he had a huge black patriarchal beard – was the most ferocious belter I ever saw.  Our day started with a ten minute head count in Registration Class; on Fridays this was extended for forty minutes and the registration teacher was charged to offer us a period of Religious Education.  Moses’ idea of RE was to have us sit quietly and memorise two verses from a metrical Psalm.  At the end of the period, he would select somebody at random to recite the verses from memory.  Failure to do so resulted in the usual chastisement.

Most of us were rather fearful of the strap, and consequently the euphemistic warning, “If you don’t behave, I’ll warm your fingers” was sufficient to hold us in check.  There was however a small cadre of boys who were forever being belted.  On the surface it didn’t seem to bother them at all, and it certainly didn’t function to deter them from their aberrant behaviour, whatever it was.  Girls were seldom belted, particularly as they grew a little older, but the first person I ever saw being belted was a girl, in my infant class.  We were five years old.  The last person I ever saw being belted was a friend of mine, who for reasons best known to himself decided to carve his initials on the surface of his desk.  We were sixteen.  As he extended his crossed hands I remember thinking, “Is this really necessary?”

I was belted on a handful of occasions.  Mostly it was just for fooling around, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It taught me something about violence, which I observed repeatedly in my professional life, in the emergency department.  Most violence is very sudden; it seems to arise out of nothing, and therefore it appears to be completely unpredictable.

Violence is a culture.  When Germany started to rearm in the 1930s, one of the first things Churchill noticed from his vantage point in the political wilderness was that beatings in German schools were increasing in frequency and severity.  It has been said that the most difficult hurdle to overcome in training conscripted infantry recruits is to brutalise them sufficiently that they relish bayonet practice.

I learned a lot in Primary School.  I think I was lucky with my teachers.  It seemed to me a benign environment.  One of the first things I noticed when I went up to Secondary School was that the teachers addressed me by my surname and not my first name.  I was depersonalised and turned into a cog in some sort of enormous Heath-Robinson contraption whose mechanism, function and purpose I did not understand.  It all seems to me now like a wasteland.  Vast tracts of it I have obliterated from my memory.  I hardly learned a thing.  Fortunately I was already well grounded in the three Rs.  After all, if you can read, write, and count, you can pretty much do the rest yourself.  It’s just as well.  You can’t learn, if you can’t relax.  Intimidation is the great enemy of education.

It is odd to think now that teachers who could not maintain discipline in class, and who did not belt, were disdainfully regarded as weak, by fellow teachers and pupils alike.  I remember one such teacher who was summoned to the Headmaster’s office and was given a dressing down and told to toughen up.  The Headmaster brought in another teacher, one of the school heavies, an enforcement bruiser (it was the bruiser who subsequently told me this).  The Headmaster took out a tawse, threw it at the weakling, pointed to the bruiser, and said, “He’ll show you how to use it.”  It’s all a bit reminiscent of John Wayne’s advice to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance: “You’d better start packing a handgun, pilgrim.”

And yet, any teacher who resorted to the tawse now would go to jail.  Funny old world.  It would be kind of interesting if one of these poor thrashed souls of yesteryear, or perhaps a group of them, in a class action, pursued their ancient tormentors in court, for historic crimes of persecution and violence.  Like war criminals they might be relentlessly pursued, without statute of limitation, as by victims of a holocaust.  Perhaps we will yet see these decrepit ancients with their zimmer frames, frowning in a puzzled and demented way, playing the amnesia card, as they are led into the dock.  The wielders of the tawse may yet quake in their own shoes.

 

Unspeakable

The Autobiography

John Bercow

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020)

 

As somebody with the great good fortune to hold dual British and New Zealand citizenship, I’m very keen to figure out why it is that with respect to the pandemic, thus far, NZ has fared so well and the UK has fared so badly.  To date, the UK has recorded nearly 43,000 Covid deaths; NZ has recorded 22.  Now the UK has a population over 13 times as large as New Zealand (67 million people versus 5 million), but even allowing for that, if the UK had fared as well as NZ, the UK total would have been less than 300.

No doubt New Zealand has some inherent advantages.  The NZ landmass is slightly bigger than that of the UK (267,710 square kilometres versus 242,495 square kilometres), so social distancing must be easier to achieve.  Yet this advantage can be exaggerated.  Half the population of New Zealand lives north of Lake Taupo; there are 1.5 million people in Auckland.

New Zealand is a remote group of islands.  Her nearest neighbour, Australia, is a three hour flight away.  The UK is also a group of islands, but connected by the Channel Tunnel to the European Continent which at its closest point is only twenty miles away.  In addition, she has a land border with the Republic of Ireland whose porous nature is highly valued for a whole host of reasons.

New Zealand, like the UK, is a parliamentary democracy, but unlike the UK, has no second chamber.  (It was abolished in 1950.)  There are 120 MPs, a combination of constituency and list MPs in a system of proportional representation.  The UK have 650 MPs in a “first past the post” system, and the House of Lords has nearly 800 sitting peers.  In addition, there are devolved governments in Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh.  The four nations are at liberty, to some extent at least, to implement different policies with respect to controlling the pandemic.  It may be said that NZ is likely overall to be more nimble in its ability quickly to recognise a threat, debate a response, formulate a strategy, and put the strategy into practice.  However else you might characterise the Westminster machine, you would hardly call it nimble.

In the early part of 2020, New Zealand seemed to be more aware than the UK that a problem was looming.  I was in NZ in February and early March, and the newspapers, television and radio were full of reports of what was happening in Wuhan.  The New Zealand media are not normally renowned for their preoccupation with foreign news.  I flew out of Auckland on March 7^th and a couple of days later any visitors went into two weeks’ quarantine.

The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, then told New Zealanders what they needed to do, and New Zealanders by and large complied.  It seems to me that there are aspects of New Zealand society and culture that make such compliance easier to achieve.  There is a strong sense of nationhood in New Zealand.  That is not to say there are not tensions as in any multicultural society.  But they are addressed.  That is why the Treaty of Waitangi is so important.  New Zealand is very independent-minded and has a “can do” attitude that can analyse a threat and deal with it.  New Zealanders are very self-sufficient.  The gap between the rich and poor is far narrower than it is in the UK.  That is not to say that class, snobbery, and elitism don’t exist, but fabulous wealth or vast tracts of real estate are not hived off by a few individuals, and there really isn’t a discernible “establishment” sitting at the top of the pile.  All this contributes towards greater social cohesion and co-operation.

But what, you might ask, has this got to do with Unspeakable, the autobiography of the outgoing Speaker of the House of Commons, whose name adorns the top of these pages?  The short answer is, nothing at all.  The key words Covid, Sars, Coronavirus, or Pandemic, do not appear in the index to this highly readable book, and indeed none of them get a mention in the text, this, despite the fact that the book’s epilogue, The Next Decade, is an attempt to foretell the future – always a dangerous undertaking, especially in politics.  So Mr Bercow, like the rest of us, didn’t see this coming.  I don’t hold it against him.  He was not to know that his book would be evaluated from the lockdown perspective.  He was not to know that I would read – and enjoy – his book, close it, strike it with the back of my hand, and say, “That’s why we’ve made such a mess of it!”

Of this book, there is much to admire.  John Bercow is clearly a “people” person.  I was always struck by his ability to identify any one of 650 people by name.  (We always admire laudable traits in others that we ourselves do not possess.  If I have to introduce half a dozen people, even whom I know well, to one another, I panic.  It is a recluse’s nightmare.)

People – lots of them – are at the heart of this book, and it is the description of a host of individuals that is the book’s strength.  Mr Bercow is very outspoken.  Some people – Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, get a good press; others, David Cameron, Theresa May – not so good.  Actually “not so good” is an understatement.  I won’t say he sticks the boot in, for it seldom gets personal, but his assessment of Mrs May’s premiership is pretty damning.  And President Trump gets short shrift.

There are some odd lacunae.  9/11 gets scant attention – and yet 9/11 surely remains the defining moment of this century.  Remember Tony Blair – “The kaleidoscope has been shaken…!”  Also the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence.  I venture to say Mr Bercow has a Scottish blind spot.  You would have thought this avid tennis player and Roger Federer fan might have at least mentioned Sir Andy Murray.

So Unspeakable is sharp on detail, but perhaps does not take the long view.  I wonder if he has failed to see the wood for the trees.  While he has written a book in praise of an institution he evidently reveres, I wonder if he has unconsciously damned it.  The heart of this autobiography was always going to be the decade 2009 – 19 during which Mr Bercow occupied the Speaker’s chair.  And at the heart of his tenure lies that which he terms “The Brexit Imbroglio”.  An imbroglio is a confused mass, a tangle, an embroilment.  It is worth noting that we are still embroiled.  Covid has kicked the Brexit can further down the road.  Our institutions have not yet been able to “deliver” Brexit, and they have not been able to control Covid.  Why not?

You can see why not by observing Prime Minister’s Questions, the traditional PMQs as it took place before lockdown.  John Bercow cast himself as a reformer, but he certainly wasn’t able to reform PMQs.  It took Covid to do that.  Now we can hear Sir Keir Starmer’s forensic questions, and the Prime Minister gets exasperated because he doesn’t have the supportive wall of derisive cat-calling and booing from the backbenches behind him.  The House of Commons has always seemed to me to be like a school classroom in which the teacher has lost control.  All that infernal racket.  Any speaker serious about reforming the place would have cut it out.  I can think of a few teachers in my old school who would have accomplished such a task in two minutes, although I have to admit it would have involved a thrashing of the utmost severity.  So I can hardly recommend it.  Besides, it is the members, not the Speaker, who hold the power.  Any Speaker who seriously tried to discipline that lot would be out on their ear in a minute.

 

There is a splendid colour picture at the heart of Unspeakable, of a sitting of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which Mr Bercow chaired every year throughout his tenure as speaker.  It is supposed to be, and it ought to be, an uplifting vision of the future, but to be honest, I find the picture rather melancholy.  If I were a youngster and I wanted to learn how to conduct human affairs, I wouldn’t go to Westminster and the House of Commons.  I’d go to Wellington and the Beehive.

 

 

 

Whom does this describe, and who is the writer?

I had met (him) several times in England.  He knew that he was dying, and he did not want to die.  He asked me my age.  “You will see it all,” he said bitterly, “and I won’t, for I am going out.”  He gave me various pieces of advice.  One was to beware of the vain man.  “You can make your book with roguery,” he said, “but vanity is incalculable – it will always let you down…”

He impressed me greatly – the sense he gave one of huge but crippled power, the reedy voice and the banal words in which he tried to express ideas which represented for him a whole world of incoherent poetry.  I did not know him well enough to like him or dislike him, but I felt him as one feels the imminence of a thunderstorm.  But I did not realise the greatness of his personality until I had been some time in the country.  Then I found that in all sorts of people… he had kindled some spark of his own idealism.  He had made them take long views.  Common as their minds might be, some window had been opened which gave them a prospect.  They had acquired at least a fragment of a soul.  If it be not genius thus to brood over a land and have this power over the human spirit, then I do not understand the meaning of the word.      

This is John Buchan’s description of Cecil Rhodes, in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940).  In the same volume he wrote about the Empire:

I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands.  I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley.  I saw hope for a new afflatus in art and literature and thought.  Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people.  It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world.  As for the native races under our rule, we had a high conscientiousness; Milner and Rhodes had a far-sighted native policy.  The “white man’s burden” is now an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.

Now, with our 2020 vision, this seems to belong to a world as remote and alien as that of Greek Tragedy.  And yet these passages were written a mere eighty years ago.

Do I think the University of Oxford’s statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed?  I might not be the best person to ask because, statuary-wise, I am a complete philistine.  Ever since I read Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias at school, I’ve thought of statues as being inherently absurd:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal those words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Who would want to put themselves up on a pedestal?  Who would want to have all the complexities of their human character subsumed into an inert 3-D cartoon?  Clearly, looking around my home town, the second city of Empire, rather a lot of people!  Glasgow has always had an irreverent attitude towards its statues.  The Duke of Wellington sits astride his horse outside the Gallery of Modern Art, with a traffic cone on his head.  The Council periodically removes it but it always gets replaced.  It reminds me of the Union Flag that once flew on the hill above that far outreach of Empire, Russell, in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  The British Governor would put it up and the Maori chieftain Hone Heke would cut it down.  It’s still down.  I checked in March when I was there.  Russell is a beautiful and tranquil place and you would never guess at its wild, anarchic, and violent frontier history.  From the hill, you can see, across the bay, the treaty grounds at Waitangi.

Have you ever met a statue?  In the flesh I mean.  I once ran into – literally – Donald Dewar at the entrance to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, oddly enough a stone’s throw from the space now occupied by his statue.  He was effusively thanking a staff member for ordering him a taxi, and he nodded and smiled in my direction as I passed.  Nobody could have been less like Ozymandias than Scotland’s first First Minister.  Subsequently his statue’s glasses would be periodically vandalised, and I have a notion the Council increased the height of his pedestal, a strategy that seems to have worked.

There was, and there still is, a movement in Glasgow in favour of the removal of most of the statues from Glasgow’s epicentre, George Square.  Her Majesty’s Sculptor-in-Ordinary Alexander Stoddart wrote a lengthy epistle to the city fathers who occupy that grand edifice to the east, overlooking George Square, the City Chambers, defending the square’s statues as works of art, and attacking the philistinism of those who would wish to remove them.  It was such a devastating critique that I have a notion Mr Stoddart settled the argument single-handedly, at least for that time being.  Mr Stoddart does not go public very often, but when he does, the effect is usually overwhelming.  I remember at the run-up to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, it was mooted that the demolition of the Red Road flats be incorporated into the Games’ opening ceremony.  Mr Stoddart’s contempt for this idea was expressed in a letter, written in the high style, to The Herald, which remains for me the most powerful letter I have ever read in the Letters page of The Herald or, for that matter, in any other newspaper.  It seems fitting to remember it on this the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

If Oxford University chooses to remove Cecil Rhodes’ statue, I wonder if such an action would be somewhat akin to a university stripping somebody of an honorary degree because that person has become a pariah.  It happens from time to time.  The University of Edinburgh, for example, stripped the late Robert Mugabe of his honorary degree.  I’ve always thought of this as being, on the university’s part, somewhat self-serving.  The university wants to dissociate itself from a tainted brand.  So it chooses to rewrite history.  The university has not conferred a degree upon Mr Mugabe.  It is as if the university has never conferred a degree upon Mr Mugabe.  Let the record be expunged.

I’m not in favour of expunging records.  If I want to watch Warren Mitchell play Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part I really don’t need to be reminded that he is a bigoted monster.  That, after all, is the whole point.  We all need to move with the times, to revise our opinions and change our positions as we will.  But we should not do so by obliterating the past.  Our statements of belief should not be transcribed on to a palimpsest.

We look with horror upon some of the mores of past epochs.  What, about us, will horrify future generations?  What is our blind spot?  I think our age will be characterised as pharisaic.  Virtue signalling is the new bigotry.

 

 

 

This Week’s Composer – last week – on Radio 3, was Beethoven.  Actually this year’s composer – every other week – because it is the 250^th anniversary of his death, has been Beethoven.  The week focused on the late string quartets, and ended on Friday with Beethoven’s last work, the Quartet in F major, opus 135.

I heard the Amadeus Quartet play the Op. 135 many years ago at the Edinburgh Festival.  To start at the end, the final rendition of the rather chirpy theme of its final movement is played pizzicato, and I remember Norbert Brainin, the Amadeus’ first violin, made to play the theme arco, before remembering at the last minute that he needed to pluck rather than to bow the string.  I can vividly recall the look of self-disgust on his face as he berated himself.  Afterwards I went back stage and got the autograph of the Amadeus’ viola player, Peter Schidlof.  Shortly after that I actually played the Op. 135 myself in a chamber concert.  I mention it to say that, note for note, I know the piece pretty well; but to be honest I didn’t really understand it.  The inner movements, maybe.  The second movement, Vivace, with its syncopations and abrupt interjections, is astonishingly modernistic; the ensuing Lento assai, cantata e tranquillo, is one of these profoundly reverential and religious expressions, reminiscent of the Cavatina from the Op. 130, and, from the Op. 132, Molto adagio, the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart.  But the outer movements?  They are quirky; full of humour.  How does it all fit together?

Beethoven even draws our attention to the contrast between gravitas and quirkiness, by giving a title, and an annotated subtitle, to the last movement:

Der Schwer gefasste Entschluss:

Muss es sein?  Es muss sein!  Es muss sein!

The difficult decision: must it be?  It must be!  It must be!

Given that this is the final movement of Beethoven’s final work, the question arises: is this a portent?  Is it an intimation of mortality?

If it is, then it is as if the composer immediately mocks himself for being “portentous”.  Isn’t it interesting that the very word “portentous”, pertaining to a portent, carries with it a pejorative connotation of pretentiousness, just as does the adjective from “pomp” – “pompous”.  Maybe Beethoven had a sense that the Beethoven brand, the ill-temper, the Sturm und Drang, the seizure of fate by the throat, was vulnerable to parody.  The owners of huge personalities often turn themselves in later life into cartoon figures.  Think of Churchill with the polka-dot bow tie, the defiant jowl, the cigar, and the V-sign.  On Radio 3, Edward Dusinberre, the first violin of the Takács Quartet, said Muss es sein? was all tongue in cheek.  Beethoven was reminding somebody who wanted to borrow some music society’s sheet music that he hadn’t paid his dues to the society.  I’d heard previously that it was a remark about his laundry bill.  Enigmatic quotations at the head of music scores tend to be open to multiple interpretations.

A quality of self-parody is quite common in any artist’s late period.  We see it all the time in popular culture.  Elvis retired to Las Vegas, dressed outlandishly, and started doing Elvis impersonations.  Fleming mocked Bond; made him fight Count Lippé with the therapeutic accoutrements of a Health Farm while weakened by a diet of carrot juice.  Later he made him go mad, and try to murder M.  The Beatles sang “You know my name – look up my number.”  And lest we think this transition from farce to the surreal is restricted to popular culture, think of Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. 

The Tempest and Beethoven’s Op. 135 seem to me to be rather alike.  They share a fey quality.     Milan Kundera called the sense of the gossamer fragility of life, and its melting into thin air, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And in that book, he quotes Muss es sein? from the Op. 135.

The late Beethoven quartets are seen as part of Beethoven’s third, or late period; and musicologists often say that the Op. 135 might have been the start of a “fourth period”.  It’s nice to think that, far from being a statement of resignation, “Es muss sein” is all about embarking on something entirely new.                          

Somebody accused me the other day of being a cynic, when I opined that all the world’s a scam; that all human institutions are designed by the rich and powerful to ensure the preservation of the status quo, whereby those in charge retain their wealth and power.  Is that cynical?  Come to think of it, what exactly is cynicism?  I looked it up.

Chambers: cynic, -al adjs. dog-like: surly: snarling: disinclined to believe in goodness or selflessness, – ns. Cynic one of a set of philosophers founded by Antisthenes of Athens (born c. 444 B.C.), characterised by an ostentatious contempt for riches, arts, science, and amusements – so called from their morose manners: (without cap.) a morose man: (without cap.) a snarler: (without cap.) one who takes a pessimistic view of human motives and actions; cynicism surliness: contempt for and suspicion of human nature: heartlessness, misanthropy: a cynical remark. – adv. cynically, – n. cynicalness. (Gr. kynikos, dog-like – kyon, kynos, dog, or perh. From Kynosarges, the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught.)

Etymologically, I’m a bit sceptical (sceptical – a word to which I shall shortly return) about the dog.  I’ve never thought of dogs as cynics.  Cats, yes.  They’re always sneering.  But dogs?  Of course, as with human beings, there are a few vicious critters out there, but by and large I find dogs to be friendly and affectionate.  They wear their hearts on their sleeve and they presume we do the same.  They don’t have the cynic’s habit of looking for some sordid motive lurking beneath an act of kindness.

Clearly, to be described as a cynic is something of an accusation; the word is pejorative.  But is that fair to cynics?  After all, maybe their dim view of human nature is quite justified.   But I must say that I baulked at being labelled a cynic, and I protest that I am not cynical.  So what is it about the definition of cynicism that makes the adoption of the cynical attitude undesirable and, indeed, reprehensible?

It’s useful here to consider that relative of the cynic, perhaps a step-brother, the sceptic.  Chambers again:

sceptic, sometimes (and in U.S.) skeptic, adj. pertaining to the philosophical school of Pyrrho and his successors, who asserted nothing positively and doubted the possibility of knowledge: sceptical (rarely). – n. a sceptic philosopher: one who withholds from prevailing doctrines, esp. In religion: one who inclines to disbelieve: an inquirer who has not arrived at a conviction. – adj. sceptical of or inclined to scepticism: (now often) doubtful, or inclined towards incredulity. – adv. sceptically. – v.i. scepticise, -ize to act the sceptic. – n. scepticism that condition in which the mind is before it has arrived at conclusive opinions: doubt: the doctrine that no facts can be certainly known: agnosticism: sceptical attitude towards Christianity: general disposition to doubt. (L. scepticus – Gr. skeptikos, thoughtful, skeptesthai, to consider.)

Now unlike cynicism, scepticism, especially in the culture of the west, is seen as being rather a healthy trait.  The entire edifice of the modern scientific method is founded upon Cartesian doubt.  There is no certainty.  Any theory is only as good as its last experimental verification.  The theory remains vulnerable; perhaps the next set of results will topple it.  That is how science progresses.  Sceptics are open-minded.

In fact, open-mindedness is the quality that differentiates the sceptic from the cynic.  The cynic’s mind is closed.  He has made his mind up.  Once you adopt the mind-set of the cynic, there is no going back.  This is why cynicism is such a dangerous attitude to nurture.  The road to cynicism is a one-way street.  And what lies beyond cynicism?  Hopelessness, and then despair.  Don’t go there.

So when I hear people say that the coronavirus pandemic, if and when it subsides, is going to leave us a better and more caring and compassionate people, I hope my attitude is one of scepticism rather than cynicism.  The fact is that many of the people who were at the top of the heap, before it collapsed like a mountain of sludge on to the poor and vulnerable subsisting in the valley below, now want to reconstruct the heap exactly as it was before.  Yet surely the Covid Pause (assuming it is merely a pause) should make us alter our priorities, to value, cherish, and appropriately remunerate health care workers, carers for the elderly, farmers, crop gatherers, garbage collectors, and many other contributors to society who, the very antithesis of cynicism, aren’t just in it for the money.

At this point I was about to write (a) “I’m not holding my breath” or (b) “Well good luck with that” or (c) “It is what it is”.  But the Masters of the Universe want to hear us echo these sentiments because it means we have stopped challenging the world’s injustices.  So I abjure and renounce the threadbare clichés of the cynic.  I am chastened by this accusation of cynicism.  I hereby quit the cynical habit.  You can say to me, “Well, good luck with that” – but only if you really mean it.

About a year after I started to learn the viola at school, I started to vibrate; that is, I discovered the technique of vibrato.  But I concealed the fact from my viola teacher.  Now why would I do such a thing?  Why didn’t I say, “Mr Kinghorn, I’ve been practising vibrato.  May I show you?”  Was I scared that Mr Kinghorn might belong to the school of Sir Roger Norrington, and frown on such decadence?  I hardly thing so.  He was a delightful man, and a great viola player.  He played for the BBCSSO.  But I didn’t want to show him my newly acquired skill; I just thought it was too swanky.  At the time, I recall we used to call people who got too big for their boots ‘Psueds’.  You are liable to adopt the Caledonian Cringe early in life.

It’s all very well for me, with hindsight, to berate my younger self for such reticence.  But now, I find myself doing exactly the same thing.  In my Tuesday evening virtual German class, we have an exercise wherein we each describe to the class what we have been doing throughout the previous week.  It so happens that for the past six weeks my life has been completely dominated by the book I’ve been writing.  I have woken in the morning and with it already on my mind.  I have scribbled away from 8 am until 2 pm.  Then I have gone for a two hour walk.  Further ideas have come to me, without any conscious effort on my part, especially during the latter stages of the walk.  The spring broom has been in full bloom, and I associate these ideas with the experience of pausing before the gorgeous deep golden blossom and smelling that profoundly aromatic, marzipan scent.  Back home, I’ve jotted the ideas down before they are forgotten, and in the evening I have carried on scribbling.  The last thing on my mind, before sleep, has been the book.  The book at bedtime.

Now my German classmates don’t know anything about this.  I would never bring it up.  Writing a book?  It’s just too swanky.  And I wouldn’t dream of telling them I’ve published two novels, and the third is due out in the New Year.  Oddly enough, it would be okay if another class member brought it up.  “I hear you’ve written a book.”

“Ich verstehe, dass du ein Buch geschrieben hast.”

“Ja.  Drei Bücher.”

“Wie heißen sie?”

“Klickdoppelklick, Die Sieben Qualen von Alastair Cameron-Strange, und Schnelligkeitvogel.”

“Interessant!”

Anyway, I think the class will be spared this, as I’ve finished tome No 4.  So if I’m asked tomorrow what I was up to yesterday, maybe I’ll be able to say in truth that I practised my viola.  The latest tome is just shy of 65,000 words.  I’ve never had such great fun writing anything – not even as a child.  And as you can imagine, it has been a gift that it has come along during lockdown.  “Gift?” I hear you say.  “Are you saying you are a conduit giving expression to some higher power?  Who do you think you are?  Mozart?  Next you’ll be a guest on Private Passions.  Michael Barclay will have you read – portentously – a paragraph from your tome, and then you will choose Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations because it is ‘sublime’.  What a pseud!”

But I don’t care what you say.  It has been a gift.  This is how I know the book is now finished.  When I passed the gorgeous crotal bloom yesterday the fresh ideas I received belonged to something entirely different.

So, Dienstag Abend, what will I talk about in German?  With the lockdown, because each day is much like another, we’ve all been scratching our heads to come up with fresh material.  The difficulty of practising social distancing in supermarkets seems to be a recurring theme.  Maybe it was the experience of standing in line outside Sainsbury’s the other day that made me wake up this morning with the crazy idea that I would compose a limerick.  I will say to the class, “Don’t panic!  It is not rude.”  It’s not as daft as it sounds.  It is a simple form as verse forms go, and limericks tend to be written in the past tense.  That’s grand, though why one should leap fully formed into my head I have no idea.

There was a young lady from Crewe,

Who hated to stand in a queue.

She’d always decline

To join in a line

In case she met someone she knew.

Now, how’s that going to go in German?  Incidentally, here is my favourite limerick of all time:

A certain young lady from Crewe,

Got stung in the neck by a hornet.

When asked, did it hurt?

She said, not at all,

It can do it again if it likes.

But why do all these young ladies always come from Crewe?  I have this notion that this is why Crewe is a major rail junction.  People flock there in their thousands in the vain hope of meeting a certain young lady.

But to return to my German class:

Es gab eine Fräulein aus Crewe…

(Und so weiter…)

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to the next generation of CINCHONISM (Conference Internet Chat on Interactive Social Media).  Today, I give you…

Zounds

Actually, that should read Zounds!

The exclamation mark is important.  These unveilings are invariably relentlessly upbeat.  I am a fresh-faced Harvard dropout in jeans and T-shirt, pacing the stage of a large amphitheatre and addressing, through a tiny microphone that looks like a mole on my cheek, the shareholders of my company Bookcase, who, when the curtain goes up on the ensuing video presentation, rise to give me a standing ovation as lengthy as that bestowed upon the Politburo of any totalitarian state.

But I have to admit, we are not quite ready for the roll-out.  Still, stakeholders need to be kept in the loop going forward.  So I will make some predictions as to how Zounds! will evolve.

Consider where we are now.  I attend my German class, virtually, on a Tuesday evening (Dienstag Abend).  We use Microsoft Teams.  Who makes these titles up?  Teams?  It’s so corporate.  I guess I’m just not a team player.  But Teams, the package itself, is fine.  There are usually half a dozen of us.  I sit crouched over my Hewlett-Packard Stream and can see and wave to my classmates.  The sound is good, the class goes well, and there are few glitches.

But now take a look at Zounds!  Let’s say, again, that Zounds! convenes a meeting of six.  For this, you will probably sit at your dining table.  The other five attendants will join you, in hologram.  The ambience of the class, as it once was in reality, will be faithfully recreated.  You might even forget that you are not actually in a room full of people.

But there’s more.  The deluxe version will add in tactile software.  Aldous Huxley anticipated this in his dystopian Brave New World when he superseded the movies with “the feelies”.  Now you can shake everybody’s hand.  Next up, olfactory software.  Freshly baked scones and freshly brewed coffee will be favourites on the run-up to the break.  Attendants may wish to enhance their presence with a signature fragrance.  Bookcase intends to market Virtute perfume and Itplume aftershave.

Of course there will be teething problems.  These could be distressing to sufferers of synaesthesia.  A voice could become malodorous, a holographic representation of a hand might become a pressure on one’s knee.  There could be complicated and far-reaching misunderstandings.  The entire confection could explode in a puff of incense reminiscent of the heavily perfumed late compositions of Scriabin.  What a nightmare.

The real worry is that there actually will be people working on this stuff.  In the midst of our current predicament, there is a piece of received wisdom doing the rounds, that digital technology has been a godsend in our social isolation.  Personally, I don’t buy it.  Don’t get me wrong; I think it has a place.  Back in the 1990s when I was Senior Lecturer in Emergency Medicine at the University of Auckland, I ran video conferences with emergency medicine registrars in Waikato.  They worked well, and I was saved a 300 kilometre round trip.  But that was all I used it for, just as now, my German class is all I use it for.  The real threat of the digital age is that its purveyors try to convince you that the product on offer is indispensable.  A technology comes along, and its promoters get major organisations like the Police or the NHS to take it on, at vast expense, only to discover that it doesn’t work because it doesn’t fit the bill.  I stopped practising medicine just around the time when IT enthusiasts were pushing the idea that email and tele-consultations were better than a face-to-face encounter.  The irony is that, for the time being, they are right.  This feels to me like a grotesque practical joke, as if some malignant classical deity has inflicted a curse upon us.  We will become the stuff of myth, a people consigned to an eternity of remoteness.

I wonder if our governments have considered the really dark side of Covid-19.  Dame Vera says, “We’ll meet again”, but suppose she’s wrong.  Suppose there is no vaccine, no treatment, no spontaneous regression, and suppose every time we foregather, the R number goes up.  It is an unpalatable thought, but I hope our politicians have at least considered it.

Now let us suppose that a vaccine is produced by Big Pharma, but it is hellishly expensive.  Ten million dollars a shot.  The NHS cannot possibly look at it.  So the vaccine becomes the property of the super-rich.  Now you have a select group of individuals who are immune.  They can be issued with a Covid-free passport, and they can go anywhere they like, do anything they like.  You might suppose they might elect to use their immune status for the benefit of mankind, and volunteer as carers and home helps, secure in the knowledge that they are safe.  Or is it more likely that they will continue to mix with their own, in a club that is, literally, exclusive?  They will be inheritors of the earth.  Air travel will be impossible, unless you have a Covid-free passport and a private jet.  You can hop from one five star gated community to another, and life will go on.

Meanwhile the rest of us, vulnerable to viral infection and still in lockdown, must endure a circumscribed life of stay-at-home, take a walk, and go to the supermarket, with a mask, once a week.  The awful thought is that people, enthused with the latest digital technology, will think they’ve never had it so good.

Zounds!

 

In Primary School we were introduced to Leisure, a sonnet, of sorts, from the 1911 anthology Songs of Joy and Others by the Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871 – 1940):

What is this life if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when wood we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

 

Perhaps it is confabulation on my part, but I have a memory of being sharply reprimanded by the teacher, for looking out of the window, while we were studying this poem.  “Campbell!  What planet are you on?  Get your nose back into that book!”  Or words to that effect.  Even then, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

We also read W. B. Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree:

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the-honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

Recently, quite fortuitously, I have discovered my own Innisfree.  It is a lochan two miles to the north of my village.  No road leads there.  You can only go there, crossing the countryside on foot.  I went yesterday, stopping beneath the boughs to stand and stare, along with the sheep and cows.  In the woodland I saw no squirrels, but I saw deer, and hare.  Birdsong was ever present, and the steady hum of insects.  It was a sunny day, a little colder than it has been, but very bright.  The streams of fresh clear water were indeed full of stars.  Two thirds of the way to my lochan there is a hill which affords a wonderful view of my village.  From here, it looks rather continental European; I could be in Provence.  There was beauty all around.  I have to admit I didn’t observe any dancing feet, nor any bewitching smiles, because all the way out to the lochan I never passed a soul.  I was alone in my bee-loud glade.

Is it my imagination, or are there clear signs that nature has benefited from “The Covid Pause”?  The air seems fresher, the water cleaner, livestock more content, and wildlife more plentiful.  I wonder if our fellow creatures have an awareness that there is a new dispensation.  Surely they take delight in the silence.

Our politicians are in a bind.  They are being pressurised to provide a route map back to “normality”, but how can you draw a map when you do not know the contours of the terrain to be crossed?  There is no treatment for coronavirus, and no vaccine.  There is no firm evidence that immunity can be acquired, let alone retained.  We might hope that the pandemic spontaneously regresses, as most pandemics have done in the past; but there is no reason to assume that it will.  We don’t know whether April has indeed been the cruellest month.  We may have to live (or die) with this thing for the foreseeable future.

I heard a politician on the radio the other day say that the third runway at Heathrow is “on hold”.  And I thought, no, no.  The third runway at Heathrow is history.  Having touched Innisfree, why would we ever want to go back?  Surely our whole modus operandi has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Why would you want to get on a crowded train and commute large distances to and from work?  Why would you want to sit in a traffic jam on the M25 listening to the travel report on Radio 2 – “mayhem clock and anti”?  Why would you want to build HS2, at enormous cost and with enormous environmental disruption, just in order to shave half an hour off a train journey?  Why would you want to borrow millions of pounds to buy a cramped apartment in central London, and spend a lifetime paying off the mortgage?  Why would you want to send your children to a private school, so that they can “get ahead”?

Count me out.  I’m done with all that din.  I want to hear my lochan’s water lapping.

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In Primary School we were introduced to Leisure, a sonnet, of sorts, from the 1911 anthology Songs of Joy and Others by the Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871 – 1940):

What is this life if full of care,                                                                                                          We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs                                                                                                  And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when wood we pass,                                                                                                    Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,                                                                                                        Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,                                                                                                      And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can                                                                                                      Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,                                                                                                                We have no time to stand and stare.

Perhaps it is confabulation on my part, but I have a memory of being sharply reprimanded by the teacher, for looking out of the window, while we were studying this poem.  “Campbell!  What planet are you on?  Get your nose back into that book!”  Or words to that effect.  Even then, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

We also read W. B. Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,                                                                                    And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:                                                                Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,                                                            And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,                                              Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;                                              There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,                                                                And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day                                                                            I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;                                                                While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,                                                                 I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Recently, quite fortuitously, I have discovered my own Innisfree.  It is a lochan two miles to the north of my village.  No road leads there.  You can only go there, crossing the countryside on foot.  I went yesterday, stopping beneath the boughs to stand and stare, along with the sheep and cows.  In the woodland I saw no squirrels, but I saw deer, and hare.  Birdsong was ever present, and the steady hum of insects.  It was a sunny day, a little colder than it has been, but very bright.  The streams of fresh clear water were indeed full of stars.  Two thirds of the way to my lochan there is a hill which affords a wonderful view of my village.  From here, it looks rather continental European; I could be in Provence.  There was beauty all around.  I have to admit I didn’t observe any dancing feet, nor any bewitching smiles, because all the way out to the lochan I never passed a soul.  I was alone in my bee-loud glade.

Is it my imagination, or are there clear signs that nature has benefited from “The Covid Pause”?  The air seems fresher, the water cleaner, livestock more content, and wildlife more plentiful.  I wonder if our fellow creatures have an awareness that there is a new dispensation.  Surely they take delight in the silence.

Our politicians are in a bind.  They are being pressurised to provide a route map back to “normality”, but how can you draw a map when you do not know the contours of the terrain to be crossed?  There is no treatment for coronavirus, and no vaccine.  There is no firm evidence that immunity can be acquired, let alone retained.  We might hope that the pandemic spontaneously regresses, as most pandemics have done in the past; but there is no reason to assume that it will.  We don’t know whether April has indeed been the cruellest month.  We may have to live (or die) with this thing for the foreseeable future.

I heard a politician on the radio the other day say that the third runway at Heathrow is “on hold”.  And I thought, no, no.  The third runway at Heathrow is history.  Having touched Innisfree, why would we ever want to go back?  Surely our whole modus operandi has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Why would you want to get on a crowded train and commute large distances to and from work?  Why would you want to sit in a traffic jam on the M25 listening to the travel report on Radio 2 – “mayhem clock and anti”?  Why would you want to build HS2, at enormous cost and with enormous environmental disruption, just in order to shave half an hour off a train journey?  Why would you want to borrow millions of pounds to buy a cramped apartment in central London, and spend a lifetime paying off the mortgage?  Why would you want to send your children to a private school, so that they can “get ahead”?

Count me out.  I’m done with all that din.  I want to hear my lochan’s water lapping.

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.