Unless we are insensate, to be modern almost requires that we aspire to the condition of survivor ourselves. At its most innocuous the ambition resembles a sort of fellow feeling, an entering too vividly into other people’s anguish. At its most offensive it is spiritual ghoulisness. In between, it reflects a proper conviction that Auschwitz represents, in Adorno’s words again, a ‘caesura or irredeemable break in the history of civilisation’. And after such a caesura only a fool would suppose he can live a life no different to the one he might have lived before.
(Half the country’s kids have never heard of Auschwitz – there being no band of that name – but they exist in the darkened knowledge of it, their nihilism a direct consequence, the oblivion they seek in artificial stupefactions a confirmation of Adorno’s expectation of non-living.)
Laurence Rees’s series about Auschwitz, currently being shown on BBC2, refuses to indulge any of the vicariousness which often mars Holocaust documentaries. It moves meticulously, at a sort of moral snail’s pace, resisting melodrama or hyperbole, and resisting metaphysics too – so far, at least, not seeking to explain ‘evil’ – allowing the evolution of the most ambitious act of diabolism ever to have been brewed in the mind of man to unfold matter-of-factly, as it must have done for many of those who little by little became its active agents. If it’s understanding we want – and I sometimes wonder why we want it, or imagine it is somewhere other than under our noses – then this is the painstaking course it should take: one brick laid upon another.
‘The compelling objectivity of these photos,’ Günter Grass wrote, ‘the shoes, the spectacles, the hair, the corpses – spurns any dealing in abstractions; it will never be possible to comprehend Auschwitz, even if it is surrounded with explanatory words.’ This series allows the shoes and the spectacles to do the explaining.
None of which, of course, will stop the revisionists and deniers taking the edifice apart again. If evil is gradual literal-mindedness, the final triumph of the bureaucrat, then the mind of the revisionist historian is its consummation. He is in perfect harmony with the very event he denies, proving its slow accretion of malignities in the slow accretion of his own. Scales and tape measures are his tools, architects’ plans and memoranda his elements, pedantry his mindset. You will see him on a roof, looking for the hole through which Zyklon B could have been deposited; you will find him in a gas chamber, calculating the number of people it could have held, then multiplying the answer by how many chambers in how many camps, by how many days in the week, by how many weeks in the year.
There is a philosophical desperation of nitpickery in revisionist historians which would make them fascinating to study if one could bear the proximity. For theirs is the greatest flight from existence imaginable – the ultimate proof of Adorno’s contention that life after Auschwitz is untenable: measuring away the truth, seeking a mitigation now by an inch, now by a yard, imagining that they can weigh what was into something that it wasn’t if they can lose a hundred here, a thousand there, chip chip chipping away at the millions until they can show that not a hair on a single head was harmed.
Where is the man who with his own eyes saw or with his own lungs breathed a gas chamber? they ask. To which the answer is, gassed.
‘No one will believe you,’ the Nazis said.
That’s the sole lesson of Auschwitz. Believe.
Gay in the Judy Garland Sense
I too went through an anti-gay phase once. I must have been in my late twenties – somewhat younger than the Anglican Church, but then we each age at our own speed. My problem was that all my friends had suddenly decided to come out, come clean, cross over, whatever you call it, and I was afraid of being left to stew in solitary heterosexuality. I saw my future stretching out before me: companionless in Straightsville. And loneliness can make you say terrible things.
Not that I went as far as the primates we’ve been hearing from in recent days. I never, for example, said, ‘Homosexuality is just filthy,’ like the Most Reverend Remi Rabenirina (no doubt known to his fellow primates as Irene) of the Indian Ocean. I’ve always been more careful, for a start, about the way I use the word ‘just’. If homosexuality is ‘just’ filthy then what’s the fuss about? My accusation was more temperate. I just thought homosexuality – and I blush now to recall it – was unnatural.
A woman friend – because women friends were all I had left – took me to task. ‘So who are you to be a champion of nature and naturalness all of the sudden?’ she asked. ‘You don’t have a natural bone in your body. You have never wanted to propagate. You have never wanted a family life. When you were presented with a child by your first wife – and you marry the way other people get on and off a bus – you ran screaming from the house the minute you saw a nappy. You will not go on a date with anyone who has less than three inches of make-up on her face, you invite the women you love to whisper depravities in your ear, you dress them like street prostitutes, you beg them to perform lesbian acts in your presence, you suggest sexual variations that would make a strumpet blush, to my certain knowledge you have never been against buggery between the sexes, you refuse to go to Denmark or Sweden on the grounds that Danes and Swedes consider copulation a healthy activity – natural, you? Don’t make me laugh! If you’re so in favour of nature, tell me why you never leave the house. Tell me why you’re so frightened of weather. Tell me why you fumigate the lavatory every time another person has been in it. Tell me why you fumigate the lavatory every time YOU have been in it. Name me a park you’ve ever visited, Mr Nature Man, name me a tree, name me a fucking flower!’
What can you do when a woman talks to you like that, short of asking her to perform a lesbian act in your presence? You think, that’s what you do. You ponder. You consider. And then you accept the justice of her every word. Thereafter I did not allow a single reference to nature to pass my lips again.
I would humbly urge the Anglican Church – if urge is not too inflammatory a word in this context – to do likewise. Forget hetero or homo – any appeal to nature, using scripture as a guide, is hypocritical. Strip away the refinements of theology and what does religion exist to do but subdue the natural man? 2 Peter 2:12 (the only way to talk to Anglicans is in numbers) – ‘But these, as natural brute beasts . . . shall utterly perish in their own corruption.’ Nature equals brute equals beast equals unregenerate. And the unregenerate cannot receive the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 2:14 – ‘But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.’ That from the mouth of Paul the Apostle himself, Paul the prime source of loathing of those who ‘abuse themselves with mankind’. Count the ways in which homosexuality is unnatural and Paul, were he consistent, ought to have seen each of them as a positive recommendation.
But at least Paul is even-handed in his abhorrences. No one is spared, not the adulterers, not the fornicators, not the incontinent of either sex, not even the marriers. Better to marry than to burn, but best not to marry at all, for it is ‘good for a man not to touch a woman’. In other words, Most Reverend Remi Rabenirina, it is all filth, man on woman, man on man, woman on woman, beast on beast, you name it.
This is my position: whoever has looked into the deep dark abyss which is heterosexuality cannot be bothered or surprised by what the homos do. Since it is all filth, it makes no sense to discriminate. And please don’t shy from the filth word, remembering the beauty of love, the exaltation of the feelings you have sometimes experienced in your bed of lust. Of course you have. We are an extraordinarily idealistic species and find poetry everywhere. Good for us, until the poetry fails, whereupon there follows disappointment, infidelity, heartache, violence, separation and every other sort of calamity until we can restart the engines of idealism and find poetry in lust again. Whether sex is even natural in the unregenerate beast sense I am not sure. Observe dogs locked in passion and you will see that they look abashed, look away, have an air of creatu
res doing something else altogether, as though they neither understand why they are occupied as they are, nor ever wish to repeat it. Shame and confusion, even in the animal kingdom. Shame to be driven to such filth. And dogs don’t have to reconcile their actions with God.
Filth without exception, bodies entering bodies through the unlikeliest corridors and porches, putting this here and that there, unless you happen to be numbered among the subtle who put this there and that here. Poor Dr Jeffrey John, or Jennifer as I believe he’s called, having to assure us he’s stopped all that and is now gay only in the caring, Judy Garland sense.
Pity: a little less care and campery and a little more unapologetic sodomy would do wonders for believers and doubters alike.
Wherefore Art Thou Charlie?
Three cheers for mature love, I say. If we are to have marriages then let them be between mature peoples only. Marriage, like love, is wasted on the young. If we were sensible we would make it illegal to marry, or indeed to fall in love, the baby side of fifty.
Seeing the famous newsreels again of Charles and Diana answering the question of whether they are in love – of course we are, says Diana; whatever in love means, says the Prince – it is hard not to shake one’s head in sorrow over both of them. Since then, and with hindsight, we have come to see a terrible duplicity in Charles’s prevarication; and it may well be that he was thinking of someone else even as Diana was flushing and starting by his side. But the truth is, they were so unevolved when they underwent the ordeal of declaring their love on television – mere embryos of people they look now, not a wrinkle of knowledge or understanding between them – that neither could have had an inkling of what love meant.
Whether Diana ever did get a better handle on the word or the thing it denotes is open to debate. She certainly enjoyed deploying the language of love for everyone to hear, and no less willingly unpacked her heart for everyone to see. That was a hot night for most men when she looked out of our televisions with fire in each cheek and said ‘Oh yes, I adored him’ about somebody the world has since forgot. But it always looked like an emotion in search of an object, which is the way of it when you’re young, before experience yields or, in some lucky cases, confirms a choice.
It’s for this reason that I have never been able to read or watch Romeo and Juliet to the finish. I cannot attach sufficient value to their protestations of devotion to care how things turn out. Badly – how else were they ever going to turn out? Now act me a play about grown-ups.
This is not to say I doubt the young experience intensity. I loved like a tornado when I was a boy – if you can imagine a tornado that bites its pillows and sobs into handkerchiefs. For a girl whose hand I held for five minutes in a field in Chester, but who insisted on wearing a woolly mitten while I was holding it, I was prepared to sacrifice my education. For a girl with her leg in plaster who asked my name on Oswestry market, then laughed when I gave it to her, I would have cut my mother’s heart out. I can see neither of their faces now, for all that I was not able at the time to imagine a life worth living without them. Write a tragic drama about that if you will, but do not call it a tragedy of love, however much like love it felt to the soppier of the parties.
That we can feel so powerfully when we are young, and feel it almost without a cause – without what T. S. Eliot with leaden infelicity called an ‘objective correlative’ – is shocking for what it presages. A child with a seeming broken heart is among the saddest of sights. But it is sad not least for telling us how the seasoned heart will crack when the hour for making practice runs has passed.
The young of course will put their fingers down their throats at the spectacle of middle-aged lovers gazing into each other’s eyes. Yuk! Myself, I put my finger down my throat at the spectacle of anybody younger doing it. Those creamy little unmarked moon-calf faces, those uncertain coagulations of puppy fat, that exchange of entirely second-hand sentiment and inarticulacy wrapped in baby fluids – yuk, yuk! Three cheers for mature love, I say. Give me Antony, long out of boyhood, and Cleopatra, no longer green in judgement, any time. It’s not just because Shakespeare himself was older when he wrote it that Antony and Cleopatra is a greater play than Romeo and Juliet. It’s because in the wisdom of his years he chose to write of wiser lovers.
Yes, Antony and Cleopatra are still as irresponsible as children when it comes to prosecuting their ardour, but the foundations of that ardour are deeply planted. They have knocked about the world, separately and together. They know what else is or is not on offer. And they are not embarrassed by their own sexual maturity. Very bold of Cleopatra to speak of herself as one who is ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time’. No Botox, for a start. No concern about her complexion. And rather witty, wouldn’t you say, to imagine the ravages of time as ravishments, the bites and bruises given her by the sun god in the diurnal course of their embraces?
I don’t know how much of Cleopatra Camilla Parker Bowles has in her nature. It’s hard to imagine her making the winds love-sick in a burnished barge in Clarence House, I grant you. But hopping forty paces through a public street might not be beyond her, would protocol allow. She is, after all, reputed to be a sporty woman. The mistake – a mistake commonly made with regard to English countrywomen – is to suppose that horsiness must be at odds with sensuality. I have seen photographs of Charles laughing with Camilla at the opera, where he unmistakably sees her as a morsel for a monarch. Conversation is the key to it. Enjoy the conversation and there is no extremity of love you might not reach.
I have always thought it, among other things, heroic, that in the days when he had for wife a woman thought to be the most beautiful in the world – the nonpareil of women in a ball gown – Charles would rather be tramping through the mud with Camilla in her scarf and jodhpurs.
And if you don’t understand why that should be, you are definitely not old enough to marry.
Nates
Beware the curse of the acronym, I say. An auntie, gifted with the needle, sewed my initials in flowery embrace on to everything I wore when I was eleven – HEJ, which no sooner became Hedge than it became Hedgehog. And no boy wants to go through school with a hog in his name. The National Association of Teachers of English, all of whose members must have been to school themselves, should have been mindful of the Commonness of Acronym Contumely and Abuse (CACA), and found an alternative way of describing itself. NATE is hardly a dignified title for so distinguished a body as the National Association of Teachers of English, bearing in mind that the nates are the buttocks.
Inexplicably, I recall looking nates up in our school library’s Oxford English Dictionary, round about the time that my nickname Hedgehog was catching on. Equally inexplicably, I still remember one of the illustrative quotations. It was taken from a book on diseases of the bladder by the nineteenth-century American surgeon Samuel David Gross, and read, ‘A piece of oil cloth, placed under the nates, will more effectually secure this object.’ Perhaps I was baffled, as I still am baffled, by what, precisely, ‘this object’ was. And by how a piece of oil cloth, placed under the nates, could possibly secure it.
The reason the National Association of Teachers of English – NATE – is on my mind is the report it has just issued recommending the scrapping of English literature as a discrete A-level exam. Sounded exciting at first. Not because I want A-level English literature scrapped – in my view everybody should be made to study A-level English literature – but because the proposal bore the promise of free and frank discussion of what A-level English literature comprised, and how it was being taught.
Out of that frank and free discussion, I dared to hope, would come a demand for the study of literature to be a trifle more exacting, not to say a trifle more precise, in that by literature we should mean literature, and not simply any old book or poem whose sole recommendation is that the ink is not yet dry upon its title page and that it appears, by virtue of its subject and expression, to be ‘relevant’ to the students’ own expe
rience, as though our inner ‘experience’ is quantifiable in relation to where we live and how we pass the time. Even supposing you could show (which you can’t) that a pupil is closed to Macbeth because the play is about an eleventh-century Scottish king and he’s a twenty-first-century commoner from Bethnal Green, you would not be justified in giving him a play about commoners from Bethnal Green to study for A-level English literature, unless it happened to be a work of uncommon distinction. And even then you might argue that it would serve him better to take his mind to somewhere else.
Would be good, too, I thought, to scrutinise the curriculum’s submissiveness to the fads of critical theory. When we did A-level English literature, back in the Hedgehog days, it was all ‘Discuss the use of dramatic irony in Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, dramatic irony being what happens when a character says she couldn’t be more happy at the very moment the President of the Immortals is preparing to fell her with a thunderbolt. Then theory came along with such equally mimsey concepts as it all depends who’s reading (which it doesn’t), and ‘cultural context’, as though you need to check Shakespeare against what others say about Elizabethan England to be certain he’d got it right. Tosh! The cultural context of a Shakespeare play is a Shakespeare play. And while you might have to look up a word or allusion here and there, you won’t learn how either resonated for Shakespeare from anyone but Shakespeare. This, my dears, being what we mean by reading.
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