Flyting, it’s called in Scotland – where poets would formalise the loathing they felt for each other into a contest of invective strictly governed by the laws of poesy. ‘Come kiss my Erse’ was how the sixteenth-century poet Montgomerie began his assault on the poet Polwart. ‘Kiss the Cunt of the Cow,’ Polwart retorted in kind. We can perhaps look forward to a resumption of such well-honed hostilities when the campaign for Scottish independence begins in earnest.
At carnival time in Trinidad, some of the country’s smartest poets, singers and comedians take to the stage to compete in Extempo War, an off-the-cuff battle of wits in which the grosser they are to one another, the more the audience likes it. Whether the dozens – the game of dissing, snapping and toasting played on the streets of Harlem and St Louis – is an offspring of Extempo War I don’t know, but it seems likely. It values the same qualities of quickness of wit and coarse discourtesy.
Another name for it is Ya Mama – unmannerliness to one another’s mothers being part of the fun. ‘You wanna play the dozens, well, the dozens is a game. But the way I fuck your mother is a goddam shame,’ rhymed the comedian George Carlin.
Which is a bit ripe even for the Gabba where the Australian captain, Michael Clarke, was heard to say to say to an English player, ‘Get ready for a f****** broken arm.’ I resort to asterisks, not because Clarke did, but because that was how most of the papers reported it. Myself, I think asterisks make what he said even worse. Clarke himself has a baby face, so his outburst appeared doubly shocking, but some among his team look as though they were born with asterisks in their mouths.
What concerns me most about this incident, however, is the placing of the expletive. What Flyters, Extempo Warriors and kids in the school playground all know is that word order matters. Put a fucking where a fucking shouldn’t be and you take fatally from the affront. ‘Get ready for a fucking broken arm’ doesn’t work for two reasons. 1: It doesn’t scan. And 2: The epithet’s misaligned; it’s not the ‘broken’ you’re meant to be cursing but the ‘arm’.
I haven’t played much cricket myself. Table tennis was my game. But I was always careful at the table to be precise when I swore. Attentive to both the music and the meaning, I’d have said to my opponent, ‘Get ready for a broken fucking arm.’ Except that I wouldn’t, of course, have said that because it’s pretty difficult to break someone’s arm with a celluloid ball measuring 40mm in diameter and weighing 2.7g.
This could be the reason so few words are exchanged between players in the course of a game of ping-pong. You look ridiculous issuing threats when you don’t have the equipment to carry them out. Or the will, come to that. Somewhere at the back of every table-tennis player’s mind is the knowledge that your opponent is as sad as you are. Why compound the lack of self-esteem that made him a table-tennis player in the first place?
So humanity comes into the equation after all. To sledge with style requires a ripe vocabulary, an ear for cadence, a fastidiousness as to the positioning of epithets and respect for your opponent. You want to topple him from high estate to low. You don’t want him down and out to start with. Australians don’t always get that.
Wasp watching
Of bicyclists and buffoons I sing. I don’t yoke the two by violence together. They yoke themselves. Together they appeared, night after night on the news last week – sometimes separated by a story about football or the latest brutality in the Middle East, but never so far apart that we could miss the vital connection between them. That connection is boredom. Only boredom on a near-universal scale could explain the attraction of either. So it isn’t only of bicyclists and buffoons I sing. I sing of bicyclists, buffoons and boredom.
Let’s start with the buffoons. The popular-culture paedophile buffoons I’m talking about, who hoodwinked us, in the course of their predations – indeed, as a necessary preliminary to their predations – into finding them diverting. The degree to which buffoonery links them only occurred to me while watching old clips of Cyril Smith hamming it up. A politician, it’s true, but he made of politics a popular-culture plaything, just as he made of himself a joker, never off our screens, cropping up in order to mouth fridge-magnet platitudes on chat shows, interposing his bulk between entertainment and the serious business of politics – and how frightening that bulk must have been if you were the unfortunate child who had to cower from it – deploying his lovable Rochdale accent to put an end to nonsense, and laughing all the way to the boys’ lavatories like the clown in a fun palace.
We all knew there was something not right about him. All that public doting on his mother. Who else was it who did that? Oh yes, Jimmy Savile. Was it code? I now wonder. Was doting on your mother an earnest of shared interests, a sort of Masonic handshake (meaning no disrespect to Masons), a perverts’ Polari for paedophilia? My mother’s fine, thank you, nudge nudge. How’s yours?
But shouldn’t we have been able to do better than just feel something wasn’t quite right? You can forgive a child thinking that mirth is always innocent, but it is not forgivable in an adult. Men whose shtick is a rollicking, avuncular, ma-mad incorrigibility, who are more children than adults themselves, men who pull silly faces, emit foolish noises and make themselves friends of the family – isn’t it time we woke up to what all that is likely to denote?
I recall a television adaptation of Stephen King’s It that played with our deep-seated terror of clowns, and I often confuse it with Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a film which attributes that terror to the fact that clowns are aliens who long ago invaded and brutalised our planet. Forgive me if I’m confusing both those films with a third that might not even have been made but which plays only in my head. In that one it’s the devil who’s the clown. Things aren’t as they seem with clowns, anyway. We know in the depths of our psychologies that the impulse to make people laugh is close to the impulse to laugh at people, and that both are sadistic. Was Jimmy Savile laughing at us? Was Rolf Harris? Was Cyril Smith?
We will never know, but it’s enough to be going on with that they footled with the nation’s attention and we let them. Did we have nothing better to do? No. We were bored and so we laughed at Jimmy Savile who wasn’t funny and smirked when Rolf Harris swung his extra leg and nodded in amused agreement at the chucklesome Cyril’s Smith’s sinister sagacity. Life was dull. They brightened it.
That there is no end to what people will do to relieve their boredom was proved by the millions who came out from their cottages in the Yorkshire Dales to watch cyclists in horrible clothes whizz past. It would be easier to understand why people would line the roads to watch a swarm of wasps. I’m told the Yorkshire tourist board is rubbing its hands in anticipation of next year’s invasion of visitors who, thanks to the Tour de France, have now seen how beautiful the Dales are. Rivers, valleys, scars, stone cottages, carbon cycling helmets, luminous bib shorts, Oakley Jawbone goggles with scarlet lenses – ah, reader, the loveliness of nature, where every aspect pleases and only pedestrians are vile.
Cyclists think I have it in for them, but I don’t. I love cyclists – in their place. That place being France. If every cyclist were to join Le Tour de France, foot soldiers like me would have only buses and juggernauts to worry about in town. No more being told to ‘Fuck off!’ when you remind a cyclist that red lights are for stopping at and pavements are for walkers. I would make it compulsory: whoever would ride a bike must spend half of every year riding it from Besançon to Pau.
None of which, however, solves the mystery of spectators. More people lined the roads of Yorkshire to see the Tour de France than live there. Cambridge to London the same. And along the Mall the crowds were denser than on VE Day. I don’t complain that you could barely move in London if you had other business. I’m used to it. And it would be churlish to put one’s own idle interests as a compulsive non-participant before those of athletes who are said to add to the nation’s gaiety.
But here’s my question: where exactly, if you aren’t competing, is the gaiety? Reader, ther
e is little enough to see in a marathon, but in a cycle race there is nothing to see at all. A thousand men indistinguishable except for the colour of their helmets and the tautness of their Lycra speed past, and if you happen to blow your nose they’ve gone.
But still the crowds gather, wave flags, point phones and cheer. So what are they cheering? There can be only one answer to that. Themselves. They have secured an unrivalled view of something not worth seeing simply for the sake of securing it. They can tweet they were there. At the event. What event? Any event. Because being at an event beats not being at an event.
Oh, boredom, boredom, you old tyrant!
Steady on, Lawrence
One of the more enigmatic statements on the British economy made by Mervyn King before he bowed out was that Jane Austen was waiting in the wings. Anyone not paying full attention – as I wasn’t – might have supposed that King had finally lost his marbles: were things really that moribund in the City that his best replacement as Governor of the Bank of England was a long-dead novelist, no matter how alive her prose? It turned out that what Jane Austen was waiting in the wings for was the chance to have her face on the £10 note.
Alien as such a conjunction of literature and filthy lucre is to an old idealist like me, I applaud the choice. But if that’s the tenner sorted, may I put forward D. H. Lawrence as the new face of our fiver? This year is not only the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice; it is also the 100th birthday of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence didn’t like Jane Austen much, and she probably wouldn’t have cared for him, but there’s no law that says the people on our currency have to get on. As for the conjunction of filthy lucre and literature being even more inappropriate in the case of Lawrence, who scarcely earned a penny from his work and scorned materialism – ‘Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t,’ he wrote in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – well, there have been stranger marriages. I once owned a D. H. Lawrence Medal for Promptness that came as a reward for signing up without delay to a book society and agreeing to take six volumes a year, and who has ever thought of Lawrence as notable for promptness?
We don’t, it seems to me – promptness apart – value Lawrence as highly as we should. He wrote two, maybe three, of the greatest twentieth-century English novels, countless very fine short stories, some of the sharpest literary criticism (find me something to beat Studies in Classic American Literature), much original poetry, wonderful travel books, essays, journalism, letters, and forget about the paintings. All this before his forty-fifth year. If Jane Austen had genius – and I yield to no one in my admiration for it – then we need another word again for what Lawrence had. It’s no surprise he had recourse so often to language whose mysticism makes our prosaic times uneasy: when the well of your creativity is so deep, you must wonder who is speaking inside you and what impulses you are answering. Of such bemusement are prophets made.
Lacking deep wells of creativity ourselves, we scorn the wild words and warnings of such visionary writers, mistrust their fluency and vehemence, fear their long grey beards and glittering eyes, preferring the reserved, spare, well-shaved demeanour of those who work the surfaces of things.
Lawrence is not, for these and other reasons, the ideal writer for a reading group to tackle. This is not the first time I have addressed the phenomenon of the reading group. If anything should give one hope for the continuing vitality of our culture, it’s the reading group. People giving up their time, willingly, to exchange informed, animated judgements about works of literature over wine and canapés – reader, I can think of nothing better. It’s what passes as informed, animated judgement that’s the problem.
Chairing the Guardian Reading Group’s assault on Sons and Lovers recently, Sam Jordison, author of Sod That!: 103 Things Not to Do Before You Die, ventures to suggest that reading D. H. Lawrence might be one of them. ‘We’ve already developed quite a rap sheet against Lawrence here on the Reading Group,’ he writes, ‘and to that growing list … I can also add being silly, tedious and sloppy.’ Not great critical terms those, I would venture to suggest in return, not least as you must wonder why, if the faults of this novel are so glaringly obvious, readers as astute as Philip Larkin, who found ‘nearly every page of it absolutely perfect’, and Blake Morrison, who only the other day described it as ‘momentous – a great book’, failed to spot them.
I don’t say we must bow before authority; in the great democracy of reading, our first duty is to report what we find. But we must also face the fact that sometimes all we find is ourselves. That which we call tedious might be no more than the echo of our limited capacity to be interested; that which we call silly no more than a prim refusal to let a writer take us where we are unwilling emotionally or unable intellectually to go.
Jordison cites the following passage from Sons and Lovers as evidence of Lawrence’s silliness and sloppiness. ‘She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in his hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment. She gripped the rope, almost swooning.’
‘That’s a description,’ says Jordison, ‘of Paul pushing Miriam on a rope swing. Steady on!’ Steady on, Turner, it’s only a bloody sunset! Steady on, Wagner, it’s only a ring! But it’s not necessary to pursue the Michael Winner Calm Down Dear school of criticism to its philistine conclusion, because Jordison is doubly wrong in this instance – the passage is not a description of Paul pushing Miriam, it’s a description of Miriam being pushed. The drama of quivering sexual fearfulness is entirely hers. To accuse Lawrence of overwroughtness when overwroughtness is his subject is like accusing Shakespeare of jealousy for creating Othello.
Reading is a two-way activity: some books fail us, but it happens just as frequently that we fail them. There’s silly, sloppy writing out there, but there’s silly, sloppy reading too.
Conformity kills
‘We need a counter-narrative.’ How often have we heard that since 7/7? We need to tell a better story to those young British Muslims for whom bombs and beheadings hold a greater allure than anything we have to offer. Someone’s seducing them away with a narrative of lies, so we must seduce them back again with a narrative of truth.
There’s a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. And while we like to think it’s stories as subtle as Ulysses or humane as Middlemarch that drive civilisation along, in fact what quickens the popular imagination are simpler tales of goodies and baddies, in which the baddies are always someone else. Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
The government’s proposed hymn to British values is equally naive. Man wakes up, kisses wife (but not in a homophobic sort of way), reads chapter of Magna Carta aloud to family, goes bareheaded to work, eats humanely killed pork sandwich, practises sundry acts of tolerance, returns home to gin and tonic, prays unfanatically to secular god, and goes to sleep thinking of the royal family. Indubitably, there are worse ways of getting through the tedium of existence, but as a narrative this one’s unlikely to prevail against millenarian fantasy and a plentiful supply of virgins. In a battle of facile narratives, the one with more action wins.
But why must it be a choice, anyway, between blowing people up on buses and a docile embrace of British values to which very few Britons of any faith or temper subscribe? Extreme views can kill, but disagreement is the breath of life. Nonconformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes nonconformity to things British. The terrorist isn’t a problem because he doesn’t conform; he’s a problem because he does. It’s what he conforms to that makes him dangerous.
That the thing he conforms to is not the spirit of Islam any number of commentators, Muslim and otherwise, have been arguing since 7/7. The point is taken. But that leaves open the question of where, then, we go to understand
this particular form of terrorism’s nature and motivation. If you’re the softly spoken Jeremy Corbyn – and beware softly spoken men, I say; beware the snake who doesn’t rattle his whereabouts in the undergrowth – you will argue that the barbarism of the terrorist can only be understood as a response to the barbarism of Western foreign policy. This is the pin-the-tail-on-the-wrong-donkey narrative in which the person who really planted those bombs on the London Underground was Tony Blair.
The writer Mehdi Hasan similarly sprays guilt around and, for good measure, suffering as well. If we think 7/7 was a terrible time for the victims, he wants us to remember who else got it in the neck. When the bombers were identified as British men with names like his, ‘a knot tightened at the pit of my stomach’, he wrote in the Guardian. ‘We’re screwed,’ he told a Muslim friend. Beware the grammar of narrative. Self-concern appears to come too quickly here, trumping the horror of the moment. You’re screwed, Mr Hasan? There are dozens dead and hundreds injured and bereaved, and you’re screwed?
I’d be lying, however, if I didn’t admit I understand the reflex. Let a Jew commit an atrocity and I, too, dread the communal consequences. Jews and Muslims share this knowledge: they know how the one is immediately made to stand for the all.
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