Ever since Mary Beard responded to 9/11 by saying the Americans had it coming, that the ‘civilised world’ (her inverted commas) was paying a very high price for refusing to listen to ‘terrorists’ (again her inverted commas), that there were few people on the planet who ‘devised carnage for the sheer hell of it’ – thereby setting up a false opposition between mindless carnage and principled carnage – ever since then I have taken a dim view of the argument that very bad men must have a case or they wouldn’t be very bad men. What very bad men often have is an inflated sense of grievance, coupled with an unswerving conviction of rectitude, which makes them, if anything, even worse men than if they were acting for the sheer hell of it. May God save us all from terrorists – no inverted commas – with a cause.
It isn’t that difficult morally to sort out. A four-year-old can do it. If the killer is firing indiscriminately he’s a very bad man. If he’s firing discriminately – as in this case firing only at those who don’t subscribe to the Muslim faith – he’s a bad man doubly cursed. For Allah will no more forgive him than Jesus will. Marx on the other hand … but then that’s why no man of feeling should be a Marxist.
At the heart of one’s outrage on such occasions is a piercing sadness, like a voice from the whirlwind. The innocent die whenever guns are raised, and one could give one’s life over to sorrow, imagining how many have been ruined since time began in wars of ideology of no concern or value to anyone but the combatants. Dying in a just cause is cruel enough, but dying because some misbegotten sect misreads history in a way that flatters the ignorance of its members, is crueller still. I thought that was going to be the way of it for all of us after 9/11. And it might be yet. But certainly, at the time, I stood on the balcony of my apartment and saw towers topple before my eyes and waited for the fire to come roaring over the rooftops. And then the question was – did I want my wife to be with me as I burned or was it better for her to be far away, somewhere safe, if anywhere safe was left? Better to burn together, melded into one, rather than one be left behind to mourn?
Call me a melodramatist. Call me a sentimentalist, too, if you think that’s the word for me. But it’s always the lovers destroyed in an atrocity that I find myself grieving over first. They can be young lovers or they can be old lovers. Just-marrieds on honeymoon or grandma and grandpa taking a golden-wedding holiday in the wrong place. One still alive but as yet ignorant of the other’s death is hard enough to bear – how would you do it, you wonder, how would you fare at the moment of being told, or in the thousands of nights that follow, how would you survive a single one of them? – but a beloved pair going together wreaks havoc in me. I have only to discover that they died hand in hand and I’m finished. This time, I read of two who died huddled together, two become one for the final time. Like the Phoenix and the Turtle, either neither. So was there time enough for one to sorrow for the other or for both to sorrow for themselves? And if there was the briefest moment of clarity, each for each – ah, the pity of it – was there consolation in that? A last confession of devotion in the eyes? Can love do that?
I’ve been reading lovers’ goodbye stories since I was a boy, mooning over them in opera and operetta, as though a goodbye was the thing I had to work hardest on because I knew I’d make such a bad job of it when the time came. But there was a sweetness in the goodbyes I rehearsed with the lights out in my bedroom. The Student Prince kisses his Heidelberg barmaid farewell because duty calls, but at least both of them are left intact and beautiful to love another day.
To be gunned down together, though, is of another order of sadness. We all know love is fragile. Who’s to say that lovers who die in one another’s arms would even have been together ten years on? So in one way atrocity forces a sort of happy ending on them. But that fragility also measures the callousness of the killings. Love is the antithesis to the ideology in whose name everyone – everyone of the wrong faith on the day, that is – must die.
There are no bad men in the world when we flutter in each other’s embrace. And that is why love matters: it’s our last illusion.
The wages of indulgence is darts
Of arrows and the man I sing. It is expected of me. Just as no year can be considered over for Australians until the fireworks have illuminated Sydney Harbour, and no year can be said to have begun for Austrians until the Vienna Philharmonic has played the ‘Radetzky March’, so must my new-year column be a paean to darts and those who throw them.
Though I always vow to go along to Alexandra Palace to watch the World Darts Championships as it were in person and, who knows, sit at the same table as Prince Harry or Stephen Fry, I am invariably too clapped out to leave my chair. It’s partly this seasonal exhaustion that makes sitting in night after night to watch the arrows fly on Sky so pleasurable. My worldly task is done. I have survived the heat o’ the sun, I am wrapped against the furious winter’s rages, and I have, in the dying days of the old year, eaten more than twice my body weight in mince pies and drunk wine enough for Adrian Lewis and Raymond van Barneveld to have bathed together in – twice. Home I’m gone, and with my eyes too tired to read, my brain too charged to function, and nothing else that feels like just reward for all my labours to watch on television, darts are my wages.
There was a time when dozing in front of the box and waking only when the hoarse-voiced referee barked ‘One hundred and eighty’ marked one out as either a true philistine or a pretend one like those desperate-not-to-be-stuffy professors of literature who say they’d rather read Harry Potter than Proust. Today no apology is necessary. Televised darts is less vulgar than Strictly Come Dancing and more serious than Newsnight.
True, there remains the synthetic working men’s club atmosphere to negotiate. Although there are more clerkly, not to say studious, looking players emerging, the majority still resemble plumbers. I mean no disrespect by that. Given the frequency with which I call out a plumber, I’d be a fool to show the profession anything but the deepest respect. But there’s a pedantry incident to plumbing – how many times is it now I’ve had the mechanics of the ‘O’ ring explained to me – which is much like the numerological punctiliousness that inflicts darts players if you’re insane enough to ask them where they thought they won or lost a game. And it’s because something of the mundanely manual still adheres to darts that the players’ heroic walk of honour from the green room to the oche is so incongruous. The fanfare begins, the strobes go wild, the crowds roar, hostesses wearing the sort of tinsel dresses that drove me crazy when I was eighteen escort the gladiator into the arena, only he’s not a gladiator, he’s a plumber.
But change is on the way. In previous years, dancers who might have been on day release from Raymond’s Revuebar twerked onstage between matches; now they perform wholesome beach aerobics in order to suggest that this is a sporting event whose ultimate aim is the nation’s fitness.
If you think the bodies of the players themselves give the lie to this, you haven’t watched for a while. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that today’s best throwers are the most svelte throwers, but a beer belly is not the sine qua non it was. As is not the beer itself. However much is consumed by spectators, there isn’t even a sissy’s half-pint glass with a handle to be seen on the little tables where the players fuss with their flights and pour filtered water. It was axiomatic in my pub-darts days that one threw better pissed, but we were playing for fun not glory, and just how often, anyway, pissed or otherwise, did we hit 180?
The mistake which haters of televised darts make is not to see what lovers of it see. And vice versa.
Ambivalence is as essential to the appreciation of darts as it is to the appreciation of Wagner. ‘Was I really put on earth to do this?’ is a question it behoves humanity to ask, whatever it’s doing. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame was how Shakespeare described lust in action, but we don’t always wake up the next morning feeling that. We are most rational – as lovers, aesthetes, or just couch potatoes – when we clatter between extremes, p
unishing ourselves for squandering the gift of life one minute, glorying in the waste the next.
And that, reader, explains why some of us become engrossed in darts. Yes it’s trivial, no it isn’t. Or rather: yes it’s trivial, and therein lies its sublimity. Those tiny points of tungsten, like the light-as-air celluloid ball ping-pong players chase, like Jane Austen’s ‘little bit of ivory’, are metaphors for man’s ability to create something out of nothing, to see eternity in a grain of sand, to make a little dartboard an everywhere.
Whoever would be universal must first be particular. Even God had to create the world a bit at a time. The secret of infinity resides in the insignificant. And what could be more insignificant than narrowing one’s concentration down to a pinhead and aiming it at a strip of cork no bigger than an ant’s eyelash?
Though all darts players must be philosophers at heart, the one who most fully grasps the game’s fundamental equivocation is the sixteen-times world champion Phil Taylor. For all the titles he has won and all the studied bluffness of his manner, his eyes remain weighted with the terrible apprehension of defeat. It’s not falling from his pedestal he fears, but the chasm of nihilism waiting beneath him.
I follow his progress every year with mounting apprehension. I invest teleologically in his progress. If he loses, I lose; life is emptied of its transitory meaning and I am returned to uncreated matter spinning unavailingly in the void. It’s for us, you see – for the illusion of sense and order – that he throws. Pray that when you read this he will still be throwing.
What’s Hecuba to you?
Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan. Not the fan in the Lady Windermere sense. I mean the fan who is an abbreviation of fanatic, that self-abasing follower of a person or a thing whose ardour could in fact do with some of what fans of the other sort provide.
The queue and the fan are of course closely related, in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion. There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month – I’ve no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when – fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order – well, in order, I presume – to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning. Why don’t they just pop into Hamleys? Or walk?
The same occurs outside trainer stores (where they sell gym shoes – that really is the only way to describe them – that neither you nor I would want to wear), hotels (where someone you and I have never heard of is staying), bookshops (for books neither you nor I would want to read), clubs, theatres, and suddenly, even, town halls and similar buildings suitable for revivalist meetings in Labour constituencies. There is no let-up of excitement either, I am assured, outside the Barbican where Benedict Cumberbatch is being Hamlet, a person (Hamlet, not Cumberbatch) who wanted for nothing, was a fan of nobody, and therefore, we can fairly deduce, never queued in his life. Find all the uses of this world weary, flat, stale and unprofitable, and there is no designer skateboard you would hang around all night to buy, and no celebrity of either sex you are going to sit on wet pavements for two days to get a glimpse of. There’s a lot to be said for misanthropy.
I am stern in the matter of being a fan in the fanatic sense, and blame the parents. A proper dose of comic scepticism administered at the right age could stop all that. Listen to your parents shrieking ‘Him!’ or ‘Her!’ or, better still, ‘That!’ with sufficient derision each time you announce the worthless fame-phantom you’ve grown enamoured of – ‘What’s Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba – I’m speaking figuratively – that you should skip school to gawp at her? Fortinbras, you say? That speck of nothing? That stain of hyena’s vomit? That bowl of undiluted cat’s piss? A dog wouldn’t stop to rub his nose in that piece of shit’ – and there’s just a chance you will start to question your judgement, your self-worth, and your sense of smell. I say just a chance, but just a chance is better than no chance. And it beats having fathers who are still wearing Chelsea shirts in their middle fifties and mothers who queue all night themselves to get a ticket for Justin Bieber, whose name I might just possibly have made up.
I was a supply teacher briefly in another age and whenever I encountered an incidence of mass fandom – more moderate in those days with no social media to inflame it – I would get the whole class to write out ‘I am not a slave’ a thousand times. I don’t say it worked but it made them hate me, and that at least introduced the principle of resistance into their lives. Better to be surly than a serf.
So is this just a roundabout way of saying that I won’t be braving the frothing fans to see Sherlock metamorphosing into Hamlet? Not exactly, but no – no, yes, no, as they say – I doubt I will be going. I feel the play is too much mine to have it taken from me by yet another interpretation that might or might not be interesting, but which, for the moment at least, I have no mental space for.
When it comes to Shakespeare, I am a theatre-of-the-mind man. No production beats what you read on the page and go on seeing on the stage behind your eyes long after, though I doubt that Hamlet himself, a lover of plays and a connoisseur of acting styles, would have agreed with me. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue,’ he tells the First Player, not ‘Hum it trippingly to yourself’.
And I accept that what lodges a play like Hamlet in your imagination – to the degree that you can’t remember when you ever didn’t know it, or when you ever had a thought that wasn’t in some way Hamlet-influenced – is not only the attentive reading you give it. Just as knowing a text well will enhance the experience of watching it performed, so might an actor’s interpretation change the way you read it the next time. But you can allowably feel you no longer need or want to know how Hamlet strikes someone else. You can be as satiated with performance as you can with critical exegesis. Enough exposition. Enough acting. You can want the play to breathe quietly in your arms for a while.
I didn’t say expire in your arms. It doesn’t kill a work of art to want it left alone temporarily. ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’ was how Keats addressed a Grecian urn at the beginning of that ode that ends with the famous lines about beauty being truth, truth being beauty, and that being that. Which isn’t quite saying shut the fuck up, but it is a plea for quiet and reserve. Ours is a noisy culture. We see the bustle of the throng and the size of the queue as proof that’s all well in ‘the arts’, as we disrespectfully call them. But zest and numbers aren’t the measure of everything. A little unravished stillness, and not a trainer-wearing, skateboarding, bestseller-carrying fan in sight, can also be a mark of civilised appreciation.
In Leonard Cohen’s fedora you too can look like L. S. Lowry
Today: two lessons in how to wear a hat. My exemplars are the painter L. S. Lowry and the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Dr Johnson said of the metaphysical poets that in them ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. We don’t hold with violence in this column, nor do we mean to court the cheap controversy of heterogeneity. Lowry and Cohen might, on the face of it, make strange bedfellows, but both took London by storm this week – Cohen at the O2 Arena, Lowry at Tate Britain – and both define themselves by the way they wear a hat.
Leonard Cohen’s hat is well known. You’ll find sites on the Internet in which aficionados of the singer’s wardrobe go head to head, as it were, on the question of whether what he wears is a trilby or a fedora. To the literalists it comes down to the size of the brim and the nature of the crease at the crown, but I am of the party that thinks it’s how you wear it that determines what it is. If you are possessed of cool, you will turn a trilby into a fedora. Let’s face it, if you are cool, you will turn a knotted handkerchief into a fedora. And Cohen is nothing if not cool. Amazing that one can look cool at seventy-nine, bu
t if he knows how to wear a hat, then a hat knows how to wear him, and a good one can take years off you.
Cool is not a word even his most devoted admirers would use of Lowry. But a giant blown-up photograph of him in a capacious raincoat and a hat that is closer to a pudding than a fedora greets you at the entrance to the Tate show, and there can be no doubt that the hat is a statement of creative intent. Just so you know where I stand, I saw Cohen and Lowry last week, and while I had a good time with Cohen, I had an even better one with Lowry. Make no mistake, this is a magnificent – magnificently conceived and curated – exhibition. You could quibble about the paintings that aren’t there – the portraits, the seascapes and landscapes, the late, strange, corseted women – and you could take issue with the Marxist emphasis on him as a critic of industrialism. But to complain of anything is churlish given that it’s little short of miraculous that the Tate should have granted so unfashionable (and unfashionably popular) a painter an exhibition at all, given its scale, and given how convincingly, room by room, painting by painting, it makes the case for his genius. Visionary genius, I would say, allowing that you can be a visionary of godlessness, a seer of desolate, whited-out infinities – but that’s a matter for another day.
If there was a revivalist atmosphere at the Leonard Cohen concert – people singing along to songs they first heard before their now middle-aged children were born – there was a triumphalist feeling at the Lowry exhibition, where obscure enthusiasts and well-known collectors congratulated one another simply on seeing what they had never thought they’d live to see. ‘We did it!’ someone who’d been buying Lowrys all his life and didn’t own a single painting by anybody else told me, as though he – he and I – had finally come in from the cold. The difference between our enthusiasm and that of Cohen’s fans was that while we loved our man’s work as much as they loved theirs, we didn’t want to be him. Who wants to be a man that wears a hat like that? Whereas to wear a fedora like Cohen…
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