Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

The invalids of whom the author is talking are the cream of Russian society, highly educated and cosmopolitan. Before we laugh too loud at such pitiful ignorance even of the best-educated, perhaps we should try to imagine what remedies we should be prepared to try ourselves if we were attacked by a slow wasting disease for which there was no indubitably effective or scientifically proven treatment.

  Provincial Russia is not a political book, a fact which is itself very revealing. Politics, where touched upon at all, are mentioned en passant, not as being the main interest or purpose of life. By contrast, no book about Russia published after 1917 could be other than political, obsessively so. Every author took a political stand, for or against. The landscape disappeared from view. The Revolution politicised existence itself.

  In Stewart’s book, the landscape is still important. He quotes physical descriptions of it by Gogol, Aksakov and Chekhov. The customs and beliefs of the peasantry are more important to him than their economic arrangements or the politics of the land question. The autocracy is not mentioned once. The many pictures that accompany the text are by an artist called Frédéric de Haenen (1857–1928) are folkloric, even those that depict a convoy of prisoners, not necessarily political, heading for Siberia. The hunt for an escaped prisoner is indistinguishable in spirit from the hunt for a bear, and is almost a form of sport. The peasants in the pictures are often shown dancing, but not in the way they are shown dancing once the Soviet propaganda state had been established: there is no implication here that they dance because they are so happy with the political and economic state of affairs.

  There is no sense of impending doom or catastrophe in the book, no intimation that a regime is soon to be established in the country that will regularly kill more people in a day than its predecessor in a century. On the contrary, if anything the march of progress, of ever-increasing wealth, education and enlightenment is taken for granted, as being more or less inevitable and unstoppable. Little did the author guess that it would take many years for Russia once again to reach the level of production of the year of publication of his book.

  I do not wish to ridicule the author when I say that in his pages appeared one of the least prescient prognostications I have ever seen in print. Here is the passage:

  Since the emancipation [of the peasants in 1861] the peasants have made immense progress. And now the rate of improvement can only accelerate with the influence of education, the breaking up of the commune, which was a heavy drag on rural enterprise, the political franchise, and the increased facilities offered by the spread of railways for disposing of surplus crops and developing the internal resources of the country. A great future assuredly lies before this remarkable people, with its physical and mental powers, it vigour, elasticity and youth. This may be a question of time, but it can scarcely be a matter for doubt.

  I do not need to point out the inaccuracy of this prediction, unless being the victim of one of the greatest and most vicious political experiments in history be counted ‘a great future’ for a people. Yet the author is not a fool, quite the reverse; he is not a liar; he is not blind; he is not ill-intentioned; he is not blinded by ideology. By all accounts he learnt the language of the country very well, sufficiently well to be able to describe the variation of its dialects with authority; he travelled extensively within the Empire. He was well-versed in Russia’s literature and history. Nor were these his only qualifications or accomplishments; as a classicist he was acquainted with historical precedent and the fate of empires.

  He made the cardinal mistake of confusing a projection with a prediction. It is a mistake that I doubt many of us have altogether avoided in our lives. He thought that because immense progress had been made in the recent past in Russia it would continue indefinitely into the future, along the same line of the graph as it were. He was like the man who thinks that because he has driven safely at 150 miles an hour for a hundred miles, he can continue at that speed without danger.

  The prescient man is not the man who knows most. He is like the chess-player who takes in the situation on a board at once, the result of much study and the possession of instinct. The man who has not studied is blinded by prejudice; the man who has studied, but has no instinct, is blinded by learning.

  35 - Of Horlicks and Heroism

  When I was young there was a milky drink called Horlicks that some people took just before they went to bed to assure themselves a good night’s sleep. I knew that it was disgusting even without ever having tried it—one was able in those days to know many such things without experience—and that it was consumed (at least in my opinion) mainly by middle aged, middle class insomniacs with indigestion. I believe that the drink is still sold today and is produced by a giant pharmaceutical company, one of the largest in the world.

  In those days it was advertised with a slogan that stuck in my mind: ‘Prevents night starvation.’ I intuited from the first that this was balderdash: I didn’t know much human physiology, but the concept of night starvation, of people going to bed well-fed and waking up skeletal, seemed to me intrinsically absurd. But clearly it was an effective slogan, at least in the sense of sticking in my mind if not that of selling me the product, for here I am, more than fifty years later, remembering it vividly, as pupils a century and a half ago remembered Latin tags.

  At any rate, it was one of the advertising slogans that first alerted me to the fact that advertising was not intended to inform but to influence, and not necessarily to the advantage of the person influenced. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have been completely uninfluenced by advertisements ever since—I vaguely remember reading Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders a few years later, and no man can claim to be utterly impervious to the wiles of publicists—but I think I am less influenced by them that average. No advertising campaign has caused me to buy something I would not otherwise have bought.

  Actually the slogan about Horlicks was already old by the time I first heard it. It was devised (as I learned recently) in 1931 by a man called Norman Cameron. The latter was an advertising copywriter who, as it happened, was a poet, much admired by his contemporaries though he has never been accorded much popular recognition.

  Cameron (1905–1953) was a distant relative of Lord Macaulay. His father was a military chaplain to a Scots regiment in India, who died at precisely the same age, 48, as his son was to do, and of precisely the same disease, hypertension leading to cerebral haemorrhage. At Oxford, where he scraped a degree, he knew Auden and others who were to become famous. For a time after graduation he went to live in Majorca, with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, whose disciple he was. On returning to England, having tired of discipleship, he found work with an advertising agency, but kept up his literary friendships and acquaintances. He was a heavy drinker and counted as Dylan Thomas’ best friend, though he wrote and published a scabrous poem about him called The Dirty Little Accuser:

  Who invited him in? What was he doing here,

  That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout?

  When he quitted a sofa, he left behind him a smear.

  My wife says he even tried to paw her about.

  Why, then, the dirty little accuser? The next verse makes this clear:

  What was worse, if, as often happened, we caught him out

  Stealing or pinching the maid’s backside, he would leer,

  With a cigarette on his lip and a shiny snout,

  With a hint: ‘You and I are all in the same galère.’

  In other words, cleanliness, honesty etc. are but a veneer thinly disguising our true nature, which is similar to Thomas’s.

  Even if this is the metaphysical message of the poem (that after all ends with the line that ‘We shall never be able to answer his accusation’), I am not sure that I should be entirely pleased if my best friend described me as leaving a smear on a sofa when I got up from it, especially if I knew that there was some t
ruth in it. I have seen it written that Cameron’s poem was affectionate, but if so I should not have cared to be the butt of his contempt.

  Cameron’s fame, such as it is, rests upon about seventy published poems, none of them very long. He was also a translator from the French and German, including of Hitler’s table talk: but no one remembers or long honours a translator, however good. His complete poems make a slender volume, my copy of which, bought second-hand, smells ferociously of smoked tobacco: I imagine it was previously owned by a pipe-man of considerable literary culture, who read it closely, always smoking, in his book-lined study. The tobacco must have done for him in the end, for no one who would buy such a book would sell it before his death.

  No one, I suppose, would claim that Cameron was a major poet: apart from anything else, his oeuvre is far too slender. But Robert Graves said that many more of his lines stuck in the mind than those of more celebrated poets: and surely part of the purpose of poetry (this is me, not Robert Graves, speaking) is to furnish the mind with allusions.

  His poetry is relatively straightforward but not therefore shallow. The Thespians at Thermopylae, for example, raises an important question about the nature of courage, and no doubt by implication of other virtues. At the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans, led by King Leonidas, fought a desperate rearguard action against the huge invading Persian army of Xerxes and were annihilated. The Spartans were not alone, however: they were assisted by the Thespians, not actors but citizens of the city of Thespiae. The poem begins:

  The honours that the people give always

  Pass to those use-besotted gentlemen

  Whose numskull courage is a kind of fear,

  A fear of thought and of the oafish mothers…

  … in their rear.

  In other words, their bravery, if it deserves the name, is unreflecting and customary; it is habit rather than choice. The Spartans are brave because they are afraid to be anything else; it is little else but a different kind of cowardice. Only what is freely chosen can be a moral quality. The poem ends (conflating the hoplites of Thespiae with the followers of Thespis, allegedly the first actor:

  But we, actors and critics of one play,

  Of sober-witted judgment, who could see

  So many roads, and chose the Spartan way,

  What has the popular report to say

  Of us, the Thespians at Thermopylae?

  Posterity does not always award its medals according to merit.

  Cameron took part in the war in the North Africa theatre and also lived in Vienna during the first years after it, the Vienna of The Third Man. Cameron had been an anti-Nazi from an early date, travelling in Nazi Germany, an experience that persuaded him that the German populace knew far more about the evils of Nazism than it claimed after the war was over. But unlike many anti-Nazis, he was not tempted by communism. He was suspicious of too-great attachment to abstract causes, which he accounted ‘hysterical,’ that is to say forced and false.

  One of his poems was inspired by post-war Vienna in winter, when the city was still under four-power occupation, and is called Liberation in Vienna. Its first line is memorable:

  Totalitarian Winter, Occupying Power!

  Winter is made to stand for totalitarianism. Its effect is everywhere and inescapable, and the poem continues:

  Like savage troops in grimy battledress

  His piles of dirty snow sit there and glower,

  Holding the streets in terror and duress.

  But winter does not last forever, of course. Luckily the seasons change:

  But now the glorious legions of the sun

  Assault the roof-tops – their El Alamein!

  The formed platoons of Winter break and run,

  Their dingy corpses tumble down the drain.

  But no victory of summer over winter is final, just as no political victory is final, no triumph over totalitarianism or other type of political pathology complete, no better political arrangement proof against degeneration back into something horrible. Cameron warns us that, celebrate the return of summer as we might, we cannot rest assured:

  Heap grapes and roses high on Summer’s altar:

  Winter is gone, with all his dreadful crew.

  Yet still they have the words to make us falter:

  ‘Wait, citizens, till Winter comes anew.’

  By all accounts Cameron was a modest man who did not obtrude himself upon the world by self-advertisement (Horlicks he advertised, but not himself). He did not inflate the size of his corpus in order to impress it with his industry or the fecundity of his mind. When asked whether he intended his poetry to be useful to himself or others, he replied, ‘Neither: I write a poem because I think it wants to be written.’ It was almost as if something that existed was speaking through his mouth rather than originated with him. At any rather, this was not a boastful way to describe either his method of composition or his purposes. In this he was the polar opposite of the woman, Laura Riding, whose disciple he had once been. She thought that poetry would one day usher in the new heaven, the new earth. It is curious how sensible men may sometimes attach themselves to crazed gurus, as if immodesty were a hook to catch the modest.

  Cameron was also asked what he thought distinguished him as a poet from the ordinary man. To this he replied that it was a: ‘Lack of interest in ordinary human, masculine activities, such as sport, learning and making a career.’ But ‘in so far as I am interested in these, the less I am a poet.’ In fact, Cameron was not completely uninterested in these; he liked good clothes and was not indifferent to good food, the kind of things with which only a tolerably successful worldly career could provide him. Moreover, he said that compassion was a finer quality, and more important to him, than any literary quality. I suppose that literary achievement of the highest level usually demands a certain ruthlessness, a willingness to sacrifice everything else on the altar of literary art, though the contrary examples of Shakespeare and Chekhov come to mind. So cool a character as Cameron could not, therefore, have been a major poet.

  But advertising? Surely nothing could be more antithetical to poesy, or indeed compassion, than that. Nothing could be less poetical than to sell a sweetened, fattening drink to the gullible (though did any of them truly believe in night starvation?), a sales pitch that involved more or less persuading them to go to bed on a full stomach.

  Yet there are elective affinities, perhaps, between publicity and poetry. In the first place, the copy writer must be a master of concision. He must imply, connote, as much as possible in very few words. Perhaps there is no finer training in concision than copy-writing. Hegel, for example, would never have made it in the advertising world, and that is not necessarily a compliment to him.

  Advertising slogans must be rhythmical as well as concise. And no copy writer can afford to ignore euphony, as so many prose writers can or at any rate do. I remember, for example, a slogan for an analgesic called Anadin: Nothing acts faster than Anadin. (The wits among us responded, ‘Take nothing, then. It’s cheaper.’) Rhythm and euphony: perfection of its type.

  If the poet wants to furnish us with allusions, so does the advertising man. He wants his slogan to explode in our minds and then remain there, like shrapnel. I remember—and have never forgotten—an advertisement for the beer called Guinness: ‘I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.’ It is a brilliant line, worthy of a great poet.

  Adverts are such stuff as dreams are made on: Come to Marlboro country, We are the world. The poet-copy-writer must at least be au fait with the dreams of his fellows even if, in his poetry, he does not subscribe to them, indeed punctures them.

  36 - The Art of Automutilation

  On my way to lunch in Paris the other day I passed the Sciences Po, that is to say the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, France’s foremost academic institu
tion of its kind. I noticed that all the cars parked in the vicinity had been posted with a sheet of white paper, clearly not the usual type of advertisement for night clubs or other resorts of entertainment. At the head of the sheet of paper, in very large print, were the words:

  L’ART EST UN MENSONGE

  Here was something intellectual, so I took the sheet and read it.

  It was written by Andrés Mediavilla, of whom I have been able to discover nothing except that he is Spanish; that he has attended universities in both Spain and France but without graduating because he believes that the important things are to be discovered by people rather than taught them; that he was once fined 3000 francs for distributing a tract he had written (I think with the modest title The Earth Cannot Be Saved Except by Justice) without Dépôt legal, that is to say without first registering it at the National Library of France, though he says on the internet that when he tried to do so he was told that it was not the kind of publication that required or was qualified for such registration, so that in effect he was fined for not registering what was not capable of being registered, a Kafka-esque situation if ever there was one; and that for quite a number of years he has distributed his little tracts, gratis, in the environs of the Sciences Po. Of course, it may be that their recipients, who seem to have no choice in the matter, might not want them, but if that constitutes aggression it is so minor that it hardly counts. How otherwise he keeps himself, finds food and lodging, I do not know, except that his parents supported him during his abortive university studies; but having discovered all the above about him, I cannot but feel that a world without Andrés Mediavilla would be a slightly poorer one. He is a kind of street-Nietzsche, who writes things such as ‘Life is beautiful but it is in a complete mess. In fact, life is horrible.’