Tag: History

Pound Punning on Talbot

CloisterWalkLacock-NT
(Lacock Abbey cloisters: National Trust)

On 30 September 1920, in a letter to his father Homer, Ezra Pound reported that he and his wife Dorothy had spent four days at Lacock Abbey, ‘14th century cloisters , charter of Henry III left there in 1225 still in the tower room, etc. Family name Talbot, vide works of Wm. Shx. et al. Got a little tennis, etc.’[1]

Talbot-2

In October 1945, Pound sent two extracts from the Pisan Cantos to Dorothy, one of them from ‘To watch a while from the tower’ to ‘attic rafters’.[2] ‘“My aunt took me there a couple of times”, Dorothy told Hugh Kenner in 1965, “and once Ezra and I crawled over the roof to a turret to see a copy of the Magna Charta, kept there in a glass case. Cousin Charles left the place to his niece, a Scotswoman named Maud Gilchrist-Clark on condition she take the name Maud Talbot.”’

The emblem of the Talbot family was a dog: Kenner mentioned that Omar Pound possessed ‘a beautiful gold seal of the Talbots’, once owned by Dorothy’s father, ‘their dog emblem both as handle and in imprint.’[3]

Maud Gilchrist-Clark needed to sell some valuable possessions to raise the funds necessary to maintain the property (‘more pictures gone to pay taxes’ and, in 1944, she presented the Lacock copy of the Magna Charta to the British Museum. She gave the abbey to the National Trust in the same year.

Talbot

Canto 80 is always, for me, the English canto, certainly in its last two-thirds. Of the lines just quoted, Donald Davie writes that here is part of what Pound loved in Dorothy, and that his ‘feelings for and about England were, right to the end, not much less tormented than any English reader’s can be.’ He adds that, ‘the English reader who does not understand that the punning on “Talbot” is painful and all but hysterical, like the punning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, does not understand Pound at all.’[4]

‘All but hysterical’? Yes, perhaps, it’s like the riff on similar-sounding words that we play with just a little too long; and, certainly, some of those rhymes, almost doggerel-like, are unusual for Pound in the context of the Cantos. Yet, rhyme, particularly simple, declarative monosyllables, often serves as a mnemonic device. Rhymed poetry is generally easier to recall than unrhymed. And here? Out and doubt, nation’s and patience, slide and hide, the tangle of Talbots and tall butts, left it and cleft it. But then the whole canto is ‘about’ memory, as is the whole Pisan sequence (to pause at that boundary).

Pound had lived through an extraordinary twenty years, more, since he left England, first for Paris, then Rapallo. Yet England, his time in England, was ineradicable, inescapable. He arrived in 1908, young, derivative, inexperienced; he left as the author of Cathay, Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the early Cantos. He had met and married Dorothy Shakespear in London. He was centrally involved in Imagism and Vorticism. He had known, encouraged or learned from almost every writer of importance then at work there, spending three winters in Ashdown Forest with Yeats, consulting with Ford over the latter’s Collected Poems and his book on Henry James, close to Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. How could England not have lodged in his body and mind, impossible of removal?

In early 1946, Dorothy wrote to him from Rapallo and mentioned a book by Douglas Goldring – this was South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle (1943). His biography of Ford would not emerge for a couple more years. In April, Pound wrote to Eileen Lane Kinney from St Elizabeths: ‘Weeping over Goldring’s memoir “South Lodge.”’ He said it brought back his ‘jeunesse, 1908-1920 à Londres. An honest book in a flurried world.’[5] And Charles Olson recorded: ‘Goldring’s SOUTH LODGE, on Yeats, Pound, Ford. P: “It was the high period of my life . . . . (or something like that, a sort of apology for his sentimentality about it, as he is reading it).’[6]

The copy of the Magna Charta given by Maud Talbot to the British Museum was sent to Washington as part of an exhibition while both Pound and Dorothy were there. It was not then ‘still there if you climb over attic rafters’. Its still being there was, perhaps, the crucial point: continuity, a fixed point, however specific or even personal, in a world—quite literally, to a considerable extent—blown to pieces: ‘and God knows what is left of our London/ my London, your London’. Earlier in the sequence, the poet identified himself ‘As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill/ from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor’ (76/458) and in the same canto, asked: ‘and who’s dead, and who isn’t/ and will the world ever take up its course again?’ (76/453).

Unanswerable questions – or answers that won’t keep still for the space of a single heartbeat. Pound’s own final answer was, essentially, silence.

 

References

[1] Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 471. Pound must be referring to Henry VI, Part I, which features Lord Talbot, afterwards Earl of Shrewsbury, and his son, John.

[2] Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, editors, Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)101, 100-101fn.2.

[3] Hugh Kenner, ‘D. P. Remembered’ (1973), reprinted in Mazes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 292-293. The essay mentions ‘a magnificent old abbey in Yorkshire’, when Wiltshire is meant. I assume this error was also in the original Paideuma piece but can’t lay hands on my copy just now to check that. The Talbot Magna Charta was not the original 1215 version but that of 1225, technically ‘An Exemplification of Henry III’s reissue of Magna Carta, 1225’, as Carroll F. Terrell explains: see A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, one-volume edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 447.

[4] Donald Davie, ‘Ezra Pound Abandons the English’, reprinted in Studies in Ezra Pound (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1991), 234.

[5] Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 243, 242n.

[6] Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths , edited by Catherine Seeley (1975; New York: Paragon House, 1991), 86.

 

Mayday, or Mayday!

Hayman, Francis, 1708-1776; Mayday (The Milkmaids' Garland)

Mayday (‘The Milkmaids’ Garland’): Studio of Francis Hayman. English Heritage: Marble Hill House, Twickenham.

‘To Westminster, in the way meeting many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them, and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury lane in her smock-sleeves and bodice, looking upon one – she seemed a mighty pretty creature.’ Samuel Pepys makes a Mayday note, 1667.

Nell_gwyn_peter_lely_c_1675

(Nell Gwynn by Sir Peter Lely)

May Day! Or, given the state we’re in: Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Although—newsflash—the cavalry will not be coming. It’s up to us, which may be good news or bad, depending on your perspective.

The cavalry often didn’t arrive in the past, or almost not. ‘And suppose the cavalry had not been able to ford that river? They almost did not, almost, almost. It is in the region of Almost that the blood sings.’[1] So Anthony Burgess, alluding, surely, to the conversation between his most admired author, James Joyce, and one of the best writers on that author, Frank Budgen, to whom Joyce is reading:

“After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke . . .”
“Almosting!” I said.
“Yes,” said Joyce. “That’s all in the Protean character of the thing. Everything changes: land, water, dog, time of day. Parts of speech change, too. Adverb becomes verb.”[2]

Budgen-Joyce

The settled conviction that the cavalry were, and would continue to be, the trump card in the British land army was slow to recede; and sceptics were regarded with wariness or hostility. Barbara Tuchman recorded that, ‘In the Russo-Japanese War an English observer, the future General Sir Ian Hamilton, reported that the only thing the cavalry could do in the face of entrenched machine guns was to cook rice for the infantry, causing the War Office to wonder if his months in the Orient had not affected his mind.’[3] In the event, of course, ‘The first and last British cavalry charge on the western front took place at Audreques on 24 August 1914.’[4]

By the Second World War, the cavalry had fled the scene but heroes were still in evidence, riding—or sailing—to the rescue: ‘There was high drama in May 1941 when a parachute mine went through the roof of the London Palladium, and hung entangled and unexploded in the flies. The Naval officer who successfully defused the mine (since these were sea-mines they were the responsibility of the Navy) was given free tickets to the Palladium for life.’

The envy of his colleagues, no doubt. Elsewhere on the cultural spectrum, ‘The Tate Gallery was hit in September, October and December, and again once a month from January to May 1941, but the only painting damaged was Richard Wilson’s Destruction of the Children of Niobe, which had been brought to London to be cleaned. The British Museum suffered damage to the Pediment Hall in November, and much more serious damage in May 1941, when 150,000 books in the Library were destroyed.’[5]

In fact, the cavalry occasionally call here, to take away a few boxes of books, sift them for items of personal interest, then pass the rest on to Good Causes. Against such occasional and partial thinning, logic demands that we set occasions like this last weekend, when the Librarian, glimpsing a few days off on the horizon, made a compelling argument for the whole of the 2018 Women’s Prize shortlist.

NewBks-290418

A few rogue titles have evidently slipped in here: there’s probably a reasonable explanation for that but I’m unable to access it just at the moment.

References

[1] Anthony Burgess, Napoleon Symphony (London, Jonathan Cape, 1974), 24.

[2] Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and other writings, enlarged edition (1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55. Joyce is reading from the third chapter of Ulysses, ‘Proteus’.

[3] Barbara Tuchman, in The Guns of August (1962; edited by Margaret MacMillan, New York: Library of America, 2012), 214.

[4] Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (London: Penguin Books, 1980), 289.

[5] Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 29.

 

Talking hats

 

kensington-high-street-royal-celebration-1903-rchm-copy

( via https://rbkclocalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/kensington-high-street-royal-celebration-1903-rchm-copy.jpg  )

An abandoned hat on a garden wall reminded me again of how visible an indicator of historical periods hats are. In old film footage of cinema audiences, the most glaring feature is the fact that almost every man and quite a few women are smoking. In old footage of urban street scenes, everyone is wearing a hat – not only workmen, cardinals and private detectives.

Bogart-Marlowe

(Humphrey Bogart as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe)

Useful to raise when meeting a female acquaintance, to remove when a funeral cortège passed, and on Remembrance Day. Some people still wear them—I have three myself, two that don’t fit while the third is a faltering Panama—but it’s a positive and individual choice these days. As to why such a widespread habit died out – suggestions include changes in social class, baldness and increased car ownership. A few years ago, en route to a crematorium, I saw a youngish man, sitting down on the kerb at a bus stop, catch sight of the cortège and emphatically make the sign of the cross on the frayed jacket buttoned over his chest. Religion was a complicating factor there but a hat to doff would have simplified matters. Philip Larkin, famously, ‘hatless’, took off his cycle-clips ‘in awkward reverence’.[1]

In one of his autobiographical volumes, David Garnett remembers his friend Ralph Wright, who had fought at Gallipoli and had one of his brothers killed beside him; then fought in France. Once, on a bus, passing the Cenotaph, he was deep in a book ‘and an old gentleman tapped him angrily on the shoulder. “Take your hat off, young man. Why don’t you pay some respect to our glorious dead?”

“I am one of our glorious dead,” replied Ralph in a mild voice. Mark Twain would have called this a gross exaggeration but there was a truth in it which applied to thousands of survivors of the war. It was not only the body and the brain that could be killed or wounded, but the spirit.’[2]

A hat is a minor plot device in James Joyce’s story, ‘Counterparts’, when Farringdon is slipping out to the pub – again. ‘The chief clerk glanced at the hat-rack but, seeing the row complete, offered no remark. As soon as he was on the landing, the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety stairs.’ Farringdon is soon in the snug of O’Neill’s shop, downing a glass of porter – and a caraway seed to take away the smell of the alcohol.[3]

M00968701

(Rose Macaulay via Times Literary Supplement)

Penelope Fitzgerald thought that Rose Macaulay was ‘most characteristically English’ in part because she was ‘given to wearing flat tweed caps, or hats like tea cosies’.[4] By the early years of the Second World War, Mollie Panter-Downes was commenting that Englishwomen ‘have never looked prettier than they do these days when they are dressing more simply, often going hatless, and working so hard that sleep comes easy at night, bombers or no bombers.’[5]

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 1786-1846; Wellington on the Field of Waterloo

(Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wellington on the Field of Waterloo: Walker Gallery)

The Duke of Wellington seems to have been very attached, sentimentally as well as (usually) physically, to his hat. Benjamin Haydon had borrowed it because he was painting the Duke’s portrait (the last of several). On the morning after Haydon had shot himself, not very successfully, having to finish the job by cutting his throat, Wellington sent a servant round to Burwood Place to recover his hat, having seen the news in The Times.[6] I find this strongly reminiscent of the Tommy Cooper joke about the man calling round to his neighbour’s, being told he’s died the previous night and, after a lengthy pause as if digesting the news, asking the widow: ‘Did he say anything about a pot of paint?’

The Victorian clergyman and diarist Francis Kilvert recalled that, ‘when people were going to market on Thursday mornings they would exhort one another to come back in good time lest they should be led astray by the Goblin Lantern, and boys would wear their hats the wrong way lest they should be enticed into the fairy rings and made to dance.’[7] (Is this why so many men still wear baseball caps the wrong way round? Get into those fairy rings and dance!) Julian MacLaren-Ross wrote of an acquaintance called Nott: ‘He had one of those faces that once seen is never remembered. In London I used to identify him only by a green tweed hat: of such a shape that, in order to wear it correctly, he’d been obliged to print “BACK” and “FRONT” in ink on the lining, afterwards adding “SIDES” (at my suggestion) to preclude any possibility of error.’[8]

William Gaunt writes that, in the 1830s, ‘The intellectuals of Paris wore the steeple-crowned hats and sinister cloaks of Italian brigands and cultivated disdain for the law-abiding citizen.’[9] This image fed into the various versions told of Wyndham Lewis’s first encounter with Ford Madox Ford, then editing The English Review:

‘He seemed to be Russian. He was very dark in the shadows of the staircase. He wore an immense steeple-crowned hat. Long black locks fell from it. His coat was one of those Russian-looking coats that have no revers. He had also an ample black cape of the type that villains in transpontine melodrama throw over their shoulders when they say “Ha-ha!” He said not a word.’

The mysterious stranger establishes himself ‘immovably against the banisters’ because the editor is attempting to push him down the stairs, and begins ‘fumbling in the pockets of his cape. He produced crumpled papers in rolls. He fumbled in the pockets of his strange coat. He produced crumpled papers in rolls.’[10]

These crumpled rolls of paper resolve themselves into ‘The Pole’, Lewis’s first published story, which appeared in The English Review in May 1909. Opening his book on Lewis with the tale of this encounter, Hugh Kenner comments that, ‘The magician’s gestures owe their meaning to the fact that the rabbit from the hat—like the story from the cape—has no history.’[11] Yes, a man with no history appearing to another man, Ford, who was carrying a great deal of it, some of which he sought to shed.

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth) c.1876 by James Tissot 1836-1902

(Tissot, The Gallery of H. M. S. Calcutta (Portsmouth): Tate)

From hats to hatters. James Tissot (born Jacques Joseph in Nantes in 1836 – he changed his name to signal his fondness for England and English things – moved from Paris to London in 1871, partly to avoid possible trouble following his participation in the defence of the Paris commune. His mother designed hats, a background that surely influenced the content of many of his paintings: women, often society women, in gorgeous clothes and hats, with details expertly rendered.

The Mad Hatter is inextricable now from Lewis Carroll, who never actually refers to his Hatter as mad, though the chapter is called ‘A Mad Tea-Party’. The phrase ‘as mad as a hatter’ preceded Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as did ‘mad as a March hare’. T. H. White wrote confidently of the man who was, he said, the original of Lewis Carroll’s Hatter, a seventeenth-century eccentric named Robert Crab, ‘a haberdasher of hats at Butterbury’, who subsisted on a diet of dock leaves and grass, and gave all his goods to the poor. Martin Gardner refers to Tenniel basing his drawing on Theophilus Carter, who owned a furniture shop in Oxford, though also detailing other candidates. Carter was mentioned in a letter to The Times from the Reverend Gordon W Baillie: ‘All Oxford called him The Mad Hatter. He would stand at the door of his furniture shop…always with a top hat at the back of his head, which, with a well-developed nose and a somewhat receding chin, made him an easy target for the caricaturist.’[12]

Tenniel-mad-hatter

(John Tenniel, ‘A Mad Tea Party’)

Sharing with William Maxwell another helping of hat lore, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to him: ‘Your bedroom fireplace should have had a fire in it. When family pews meant anything, they had fireplaces in them, and the eldest son of the family poked them up before the sermon. At that date you never saw a gentleman on his knees. He remained seated & prayed into his hat. My poor father couldn’t, because if he went to church it was to the school chapel, dressed as such; and for some deep mystical reason you can’t pray into a mortar-board.’[13]

Talking into your hat, that is, rather than talking through it.

 

 

References

[1] Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite (East St Kilda: The Marvell Press and London: Faber, 2003), 58.

[2] David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955), 236.

[3] James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; introduction and notes by Terence Brown, London: Penguin Books, 2000), 84.

[4] Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘A Student of Obliteration’, an introduction to Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, in A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 299.

[5] Mollie Panter-Downes, London War Notes (1971; edited by William Shawn, new preface by David Kynaston, London: Persephone Books, 2014), 29.

[6] Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965; London: Robin Clark 1992), 103-104.

[7] Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, edited by William Plomer, Three volumes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, reissued 1969): I, 247.

[8] Julian MacLaren-Ross, Bitten by the Tarantula and other writings (London: Black Spring Press, 2005), 155.

[9] William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (1945; revised edition, London: Sphere Books, 1975), 10.

[10] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 407.

[11] Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1964), 6.

[12] T. H. White, England Have My Bones (1934; London: Macdonald Futura, 1981), 42; Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000), 72-73; The Times, March 19, 1931.

[13] Letter of 9 January 1972: Michael Steinman, editor, The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978 (Washington: Counterpoint, 2001), 227.

 

A Turn around the Cemetery

Arnos-Vale-1

2 October. Taking time away from news bulletins detailing mass murder, police brutality, terrorism and gross political irresponsibility, I take a turn around the cemetery, where the dead seem quite peacefully disposed.

They were calmer times in Westmorland, even though Britain and France were at war, when Dorothy Wordsworth recorded details of her day (and William’s) that Thursday, 2 October 1800. ‘A very rainy morning. We walked after dinner to observe the torrents. I followed Wm to Rydale, he afterwards went to Butterlip How. I came home to receive the Lloyds. They walked with us to see Churnmilk force and the Black quarter. The black quarter looked marshy, and the general prospect was cold, but the Force was very grand. The Lychens are now coming out afresh. I carried home a collection in the afternoon. We had a pleasant conversation about the manners of the rich—avarice, inordinate desires, and the effeminacy unnaturalness and the unworthy objects of education. After the Lloyds were gone we walked—a showery evening. The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.’[1]

In Arnos Vale, I can hear, from far off, the workmen busy at the end of Sydenham Road. Wind buffets the trees. A woman in dark glasses walks three dogs towards me, one black, two matching white. We exchange half-smiles, nothing too risky.

Arnos-Vale-2

The wind pauses and the birdsong is more audible. Two, three Red Admirals in as many minutes pass me. The wind was only drawing breath. Gathered again, it gusts, leans, stills. There’s a sudden rush of children’s voices as the doors of the nearby school slap open and they spill into the playground.

On another 2 October, 1940, into the second year of another war, Josie Brinton wrote from Alexandria to her mother in Tennessee, ‘I know how worried you must be and it’s useless to tell you not to be but what else can I say. If you saw the carefree life everyone leads here you’d wonder what all the excitement was about’. Italian troops had crossed the border from Libya into Egypt three weeks earlier. Josie went on to recount the story current in Alexandria that ‘in the Mediterranean now all the English sailors had to do was lean over the side of their ships and shout “waiter” to have an Italian submarine come to the surface!’[2]

Alexandria-1940

(Alexandria, 1940 via histclo.com)

I used to be friends with a man who drove a Volkswagen Beetle. Drivers of this car would salute—or at least, acknowledge—one another, hooting, flashing their lights or simply waving. As a consequence, the whole world seethed with Beetle drivers: they were everywhere. Just so, romantic love will narrow all the people in the world to women with red hair or blue dresses, to men with slight stoops or yellow scarves. Now the streets are full of men of about my age, all equipped with rucksacks exactly like mine, all walking purposefully (when I am) or sauntering unhurriedly, without direction (when I am).

But there are no such men in the cemetery today: men with matching dogs, yes, but nothing more (I have no dog to match). And I notice again how often here the magpies are in pairs, as though companionship were more necessary, or at least a little more desirable, in the company of the dead.

References

[1] Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 41.

[2] Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (Yale University Press, 2004), 180.

 

Autumn comes but once a year

Branch

The season turns. I wear a jacket for the first time in months, with a faint but definite sensation of relief. Strolling around in a shirt is fine—but where do you put things? In summer, I always have to carry a bag, not least because a good many shirt makers seem unacquainted with the concept of pockets. In any case: book, phone, notebook, memory sticks, black pen, red pen, pencil (rubber, pencil sharpener), tissues, sugar free sweets? What you need, my man, is a jacket.

We have had a week of uneasy, rather schizophrenic weather, some of it quite lively—though even the reported 70 m.p.h. around Avonmouth would likely seem a soothing breeze to the poor, battered Caribbean and southern United States. Yesterday, though, when I walked through the park, everything was so calm, bright, untroubled, so normal, that I experienced one of my apocalyptic moments. Unsurprisingly, these occur more often these days, given the last fifteen months or so and tend to consist of images of mayhem overlaying the scene in front of my eyes, the mown grass, trimmed flowerbeds, relaxed adults, playing children, gambolling dogs somehow provoking and evoking their opposite. That opposite is, of course, the ‘normal’ for a great many people: if not barrel bombs, snipers and nerve gas, then insufficient food, filthy water, inadequate shelter. And, always, the fear.

But in Bath, again, there are crowds of people at their ease, tourists from every part of the world as well as locals revelling in what may be one of the last really warm days of the year. We thread our way through, reach the bookshop, head directly home again.

New-Books

I revisit George Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the Whale’, looking at his explanation of why the young British writers in the thirties had turned to Communism, one of which was ‘the softness and security of life in England itself’. ‘With all its injustices,’ Orwell went on, ‘England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality.’[1] This is still true, of course, though Orwell would find the current state of the country rather more worrying than he did then, I suspect, even though his essay was published in March 1940. The ordeal of the Blitz was still to come yet, bad as that was, other countries—Poland, Japan, China, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and, of course, Germany itself—fared far worse.

Yes, we have been lucky: but that luck has had its negative effects. One is an enduring fixation on the Second World War and a largely mythical version of our country’s role in it. This oddly skewed version of history, with its inflated view of our current relative importance in the world is constantly reinforced by the virulently anti-EU and anti-immigration sections of the press. Yet we also see, on an almost daily basis, a markedly tangential relation to reality displayed by some senior politicians, including cabinet ministers. Elsewhere, there seems a curious sense of paralysis and exhaustion, as if a period of extreme complexity and challenge were ended, rather than barely begun. Almost a century ago, John Maynard Keynes, in the aftermath of the First World War, wrote:

Keynes_Consequences

‘In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us.’[2]

There are dreadful anticipations enough. But, as the saying goes, we must bet: we are in the game. Okay, not actually a saying: this is Pascal on the ‘wager’ of whether or not God exists. (The comments that ‘Reason cannot decide anything. There is an infinite chaos separating us’ seem worryingly topical.)[3]

It is this we learn after so many failures,
The building of castles in sand, of queens in snow,

That we cannot make any corner in life or in life’s beauty,
That no river is a river which does not flow.[4]

 

References

[1] George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A Patriot After All: 1940-1941, edited by Peter Davison, revised and updated edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 2000), 103.

[2] John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919), 278.

[3] Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, translated by Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 154; the English phrasing is more that of John Fowles, in The Aristos (London: Pan Books, 1968), 220.

[4] Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal’, in Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 102.