(William H. Clarkson, Floods in the Arun Valley, Brighton & Hove Museums)
Two years after the end of the Second World War, Aldous Huxley wrote: ‘The most important lesson of history, it has been said, is that nobody ever learns history’s lessons.’[1] A decade on, in Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, she wrote of one of her young characters, ‘Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment, one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.’[2]
Those rising waters would not have struck quite the note they would today, when the human species seems uncertain of whether to burn the planet or to drown it. (Recently—18 November—was the anniversary of the day on which, in 1929, Jonathan Cape published 5000 copies of a book by Robert Graves, with the reassuring title of Good-bye to All That.)
Lessons, though. Trying to think of life lessons I’d learned over the years, I could only initially come up with two: first, if at all possible, do the washing up before going to bed; and second, take the time to empty your bladder completely (if you’ve had one urinary infection in your life, you sure as hell don’t want another one). There must be more, surely. But then, looking around at some of my fellow-creatures just now, I think even two is probably pretty good going. Thus prompted, I remember a third: actually knowing or taking the trouble to find out who is to blame. A great many people in this country and elsewhere are angry, many of them with good reason, but astonishingly often that anger is effortlessly exploited by grifters, charlatans, gangsters, snake oil salesmen and rabblerousers with their own agendas, and the anger diverted to scapegoats rather than focused on the actual culprits.
(Guercino, Saint Cecilia: ã Dulwich Picture Gallery)
I see that today is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, of whom I’ve written before—https://reconstructionarytales.blog/2019/11/22/camelot-and-st-cecilia/—John Dryden’s ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day 1687’ and its connections with Ford Madox Ford’s work—a day on which so many anniversaries jostle for position: the assassination of President Kennedy, and the deaths, on precisely the same day, of Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis and, three decades later, Anthony Burgess (who was born in the same year as Kennedy). More cheerfully, it’s the birthday of Benjamin Britten, George Eliot and André Gide.
I used to let such dates be prompts quite often when I was writing this blog frequently if not regularly, both birthdays and deathdays, letters or diary entries. I liked too the comforting examples of writers and artists breezing (or bruising or boozing or cruising) into their eighties. Today, of the seven named figures, only Gide comes up to snuff (so to speak) in that respect.
Infrequent, irregular—but still extant, looking and listening.
And yes, there are rumours—even recent claims—of ‘peace’. In The Agricola, Tacitus sets down, or even, as has been suggested, devises—a speech (‘the substance of what he is reported to have said’) by one of the Britons, a military leader named Calgacus, ‘a man of outstanding valour and nobility’, to the crowds of warriors ‘clamouring for battle’. Part of the way through come the phrases familiar to many people, some of whom are probably hazy about the context: ‘auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’, ‘To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.’[3] There are probably as many suggestions about the translation of ‘solitudinem’ as there are about the first word (‘maman’) of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger—usually rendered as ‘desert’ but ‘desolation’ seems even more actively desolate than that. The poet and artist David Jones, wrote of ‘all the desolation peculiar to things that functioned in the immediate past but which are now no longer serviceable, either by neglect or by some movement of events.’[4]
(David Jones via Apollo)
It is, to be sure, immensely tiring to find that the constant contemporary echoes and resonances of past events or states of mind or actions seem always to be of a maleficent or destructive or stupid kind rather than constructive, benevolent or intelligent. But we can hardly pretend to be surprised. I try to find a positive in the Labour government’s relentless efforts to prevent my ever voting for them again in a general election. I think the latest vicious policy announcements with regard to the immigration ‘crisis’ may have ensured that.
Otherwise, when not engaged with the reliable humanitas of Ford Madox Ford, I seem to be edging further from the arena and back in time, currently with the young William Hogarth in Smithfield. . .
Notes
[1] Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (1947), 32.
[2] Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958; London: Vintage, 2004), 163.
[3] Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania, H. Mattingly’s translation revised by S. A. Handford (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 81.
[4] David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937; Faber 1963), 21.
Reconstructionary Tales 