Reports in the sewer press suggest that Kimberly Quinn grew frightened of him towards the end of their relationship, pulled back from the intensity of his attentions. Cruel if correct, since there could never have been a moment when intensity was not what was on offer. By all accounts she was a vivacious socialite – Kimberly Fortier when Blunkett met her – and you can hear in the contrasting poetry of their names something of what must originally have drawn them to each other: the international effervescence of a Kimberly Fortier, the northern asperity of a David Blunkett. Think Wuthering Heights – ‘My love for Blunkett resembles the eternal rocks beneath . . .’ Think Blunkett hammering in the Yorkshire night at Kimberly’s closed window.
And then there was, there is, the blindness. The moment this story broke I found myself reaching for a sentence I half remembered from Nabokov’s sadistic fable Laughter in the Dark. Going looking for it, even as Blunkett himself was talking about ‘dark’ forces being out to get him, felt like a grim descent into an unaccustomed seriousness. The sentence itself, describing the effects of a sudden blindness, tells of precisely this descent. ‘The impenetrable black shroud in which Albinus now lived infused an element of austerity and even of nobility into his thoughts and feelings.’ Though that offers to delineate the blind man’s inner world, it gestures the more at the effect of blindness on those outside it. Our sense – the sense of the seeing – that there attaches to unseeing a dignity we do not customarily possess. Blindness solemnises the air around, and commands, whatever the dangers of special pleading, our reverence. It recalls us to the gravity of things. Not for nothing does mythology give the blind unusual powers of prophecy and wisdom.
That Blunkett would not thank us for our exceptional attention, I have not the slightest doubt. But we must own to what we feel. I recall hearing a radio programme some years ago about a blind woman, Judy Taylor, recapturing her sight. It is of no relevance that the producer of that programme is the person with whom I now live, except for the fact that when she recounts the making of it an austerity attaches to her too, as though it is an effect that can be passed on by association. Judy Taylor was at pains to deny any specialness, but everything she said about sight – how previously she felt that people were ‘looking in on her’, how now she felt that she could take the husband she had never seen ‘captive’ with her eyes – brought to mind ideas of invasiveness and power, of sensual trepidation and exchange, that we do not normally consider. By virtue of what she knew of blindness, and now of sight, she restored a sense of tremulous gravity to activities – to love especially – about which we otherwise galumph.
David Blunkett no more lost his heart for our edification than for our entertainment, but in an age of triviality it is good for us, however terrible it is for them, to regain a glimpse of something epic in our emotions.
Porn for Royals
So am I the only man in London whose baby Princess Diana did not want to have? Like one of Bateman’s misfits I cower before the finger of derision – The Man Who Didn’t Get The Call. A shame. I think I could have interested her in the criticism of F. R. Leavis. It might have been the saving of her. For myself, at any rate, I swallow the indignity and try looking on the bright side. At least she would not have been sending her butler off to buy my son pornography.
Ignore that last remark. I am pretending to a pudeur I do not feel. In fact my first response, on reading that one of Paul Burrell’s duties was bringing home Men Only and the like for William, had more of surprise in it than horror. I’d always imagined that royals had their own pornography. Well-bred girls in unzipped jodhpurs falling off polo ponies. Debs curtsying in rubber wellingtons and tiaras and nothing else. And the Palace was surely full to bursting with photographs of bare-breasted Tongans and Tanganyikans, snapped by Philip on royal tours.
The point about pornography is that even at its most fantastical it must approximate to what’s familiar. Readers’ wives must look like readers’ wives. So where would be the point in our future king getting off on commoners disporting themselves commonly? All that inelegance of limb. All that bad skin.
Unless that was Diana’s plan, the people’s princess peddling the people’s filth to democratise the monarchy and bring it down.
No wonder they had to get rid of her.
As for the morality of it, parent to child, I am not sure. At one level it showed great emotional maturity. Not every mother is able to accept the sink of iniquity which is her son. Great consideration, too, since she understood that William couldn’t be popping into WH Smith himself every time the fires of his young manhood needed stoking. And tact. She didn’t involve herself, but got the butler to do it, man to man.
She seemed to learn from what she saw, Diana. And she was better placed than most women to observe how sexual reticence in the boy breeds catatonia in the man. In a trance, they seemed, those guardsmen of hers. Unawakened, like so many sleeping beauties. So in her own way she was a pioneer of mental health among the aristocracy.
But there was one aspect of the mental life of boys and men she didn’t understand. The imperative to be furtive. Only think of what William missed out on by having Burrell deliver him his daily fix on the crested breakfast tray, along with the boiled eggs and soldiers, the Coco Pops, and the malted milk. No listening to the libido as it shapes its promptings, no mustering of the forces of resistance, no argument between the Jekyll and the Hyde of one’s sexual nature, which argument Jekyll will always lose, but only after the libido has flooded the whole system with those chemicals to which we give the simple name of desire, but which in fact also encompass self-loathing and self-destruction and insanity. Merely to accede mentally, merely to acknowledge that you will shortly do what you know you should not do, and scarf your face, and flee the house, and scour the streets for familiar faces to avoid, and push open the door of the newsagent whose bell rings louder than the plague bell – Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! – merely to be thus embarked, reader, on the ethical maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won’t of porno purchase, all this Diana denied her boys.
And then the scrutiny. The newsagent eyeballing you, you eyeballing the newsagent. And the other customers, fellow ethical maybe-I-willers perhaps, people of weak character like yourself, who therefore know your secret (and it is no consolation whatsoever that you in turn know theirs, for your shame is unique and indivisible) and who therefore resent you because they know how long you are going to take before you actually approach the shelf you’re blocking, how long you’ll be pretending it’s Yachting News or Macworld you’re interested in, until your hand accidentally knocks Bestiality for Boys off the top shelf and you think, oh well, in that case, since it’s found me, and I won’t be yachting this weekend anyway and I don’t own a Mac, oh well, all right, why not – always provided the newsagent has a padded bag with steel locks to pop it into, though not so unobtrusively as to be obtrusive, just casually, like burying a dead body, but without a priest, while looking at you and yet not looking at you, and having regard to your complete indifference to change, although it’s true that the expenditure is part of the illogicality, part of the reason you do it, because it’s all to prove you are somehow engaged in hostilities against your own best interests.
As for getting the stuff home, it’s the identical procedure only in reverse, though you must add the fact of your parents being awake now – for the above was of course a dawn raid, while ordinary humanity slept – which immediate logistical difficulty is nothing compared to the long-term problems associated with storage. Do not ever, reader, discount storage. Once porno enters a boy’s bedroom we are in Edgar Allan Poe territory, where the bloody truth will always out, where dismembered corpses announce their whereabouts to the suspicious, and lewd material beats louder, no matter where you conceal it, than a torn-out heart.
And it is degradation on such a scale that I would wish Diana to have gifted her sons? Yes, absolutely. For it is in this forge of demoralisation that our characters are hammered out. What tolerance
of the weakness of others we finally possess, we owe to this. What sense of our own ridiculousness, and what affection we bear to women, in pursuit of whose distorted image we have shamed ourselves so contemptibly. Thus does mortification make a man of us at last.
Poor William, missing out on that.
Like-Mindedness
There’s a moment of stillness that follows every triumph, when the history and meaning of the conflict are weighed in the balance and victory is felt to be no less bitter, no less futile even, than defeat. There is, perhaps, a reason in nature for this philosophic disappointment. Pity may be born of it. Or it may commemorate the hour when barbaric man learned finally to desist from savagery, heaven peeping through the blanket of the dark to cry ‘Hold, hold!’ For it could be that that’s all that ever stops us, our own dissatisfaction with bloodlust and revenge. ‘My rage is gone,’ observes Aufidius, having delivered Coriolanus to the mob, ‘And I am struck with sorrow.’
A bit late for that, old sport; but then again, without the futility which accompanies remorse, how could nature ever clean the slate? I have always thought this to be the only adequate explanation of post-coital tristesse, that sudden and profound disillusionment with the means of production without which there’d be no end to the pounding of the male machine. Though I accept that that might just be masculinist wishful-thinking.
Such a moment of muted regret followed, for me at least, the final public demolition last week of David Irving’s murderous scaffold of denial. Down it crashed, every beam and board and girder of it. Not a rack left behind. And I’m with those who think there aren’t enough cheers in Christendom to celebrate its annihilation. But after annihilation, that cold wind of wondering. Not remorse – don’t misconceive me: never has a remorseless dismantling of one man’s reputation been more justified. And not pity: it is hard to imagine an instance in which pity could be more wasted, however true it is that any broken piece of humanity is a broken piece of us. In the completeness with which he has been refuted, though, in the comprehensiveness of his defeat and the comprehensive vindication of his conquerors, is there not the sort of too-muchness that makes all go cold about our hearts, because we know that meaning is forever eluding us and only in equilibrium do we find our part in the harmony of things?
The still, sad music of humanity and all that. Don’t knock it in a harsh and grating world. What Wordsworth was angling for in that famous phrase was the ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’. A pregnant verb, in this context, ‘interfused’. Something mixed or permeated with something else. And while we may want to argue, in the heat of battle, that truth is never more itself than when it is not interfused with David Irving, isn’t it just as important to remember that truth is not truth unless it is permeated with everything, including that which on the face of it may seem to be truth’s deadliest foe.
A decisive no to all neo-Nazi revisionism, but no as well to letting the Holocaust set as incontestable as stone. How will we adequately understand what it was, how it came about, what it goes on being in men’s minds, unless we are forever asking questions of it? Irving cannot by any perversion of meaning be turned into a champion of the enquiring intelligence because his historical methodology, vis-à-vis the Holocaust at least, terminates enquiry, because his interpretation of what constitutes proof is ignorant and slanted, because he is insensitive to testimony, and because his mind has closed. Good riddance to him in the particular, but in the general we are the poorer for every disagreement not voiced, every dispute not pursued. It is not only history that will seal over if we let it; all around us, every day, we see the triumph of like-mindedness, and like-mindedness is scarcely to be distinguished from closed-mindedness, even among those who would be astonished to hear themselves called bigots.
Take, for example, if you don’t mind stepping down from ill will to bad taste, the capitulation of British film judges to that pleasant but unexceptional film, American Beauty. Nowhere can you have a better illustration of the truism – and if it wasn’t a truism before, it should be now – that just because a lot of people agree about something, it doesn’t mean they’re right.
Of course American Beauty carried everything before it in America. The self-flattering title alone was worth half an Oscar. And the other half was in the bag by virtue of the film’s cunning cantilevered uplift. All for the best, give or take, in the best of all possible Americas. But English judges are meant to be less susceptible to the sprinkling of stardust. Where was Happiness, the movie that truly took the lid off happy families? Or Topsy-Turvy, which did Beauty all ends up both as tragedy and comedy, laying hold of life and therefore loving it more as a consequence?
In the end, what’s important is not that the British Academy got it wrong – right will never be watertight, anyway – but that it was unable to think for itself. The moral infection of seasonal like-mindedness had laid it low.
Uniformity kills. And uniformity is the price we pay whenever an argument is comprehensively lost. I almost wish Irving had acquitted himself better, though he could have done that only by being a better historian, in which event he would not have denied the Holocaust. As it is, I’m left wondering how it helps to have the field of conflict silent, and heaven hushed beneath its blanket, when we know that God Himself has always needed the devil to contend with.
Mind Your Own Business
Watching the last episode of Peter Ackroyd’s television series on Charles Dickens last week, I came over all queer suddenly with a thought. Not the thought that in the course of his researches into Dickens Mr Ackroyd had grown (I speak merely of appearance) to resemble someone only Dickens could have created – I had that thought the week before – but the thought that maybe we have no business being quite so curious about Dickens’s or any other artist’s personal life, and that historians of illustrious persons’ privacy ought not to indulge or even excite that curiosity to the degree they do.
That the work’s the thing, and the life a mere accidental irrelevance, is one of those truisms old-fashioned academics of my sort were wont to iterate in the days before intertextuality came along, refusing to see the work for the trees, and eventually finding the trees more interesting. There was a time we would have called such a position philistinism, but we chose instead to call it theory.
Taking the critic Sainte-Beuve to task for his attachment to the methodologies of history and biography – knowing everything about the writer as necessary preparation for knowing what he wrote – the novelist Milan Kundera observes that Sainte-Beuve ‘thereby managed not to recognise any of the great writers of his time – not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire’.
‘By studying their lives,’ Kundera goes on, ‘he inevitably missed their work.’ Since Kundera throws into the pot what Proust had to say on the subject as well, I will help myself likewise. ‘A book is a product of a self other than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices . . . the writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone.’
Thus, while perfectly understandable at the level of gossip and idle curiosity, the impulse to unravel a work in an attempt to discover the circumstances that occasioned it – to find the truth behind the fiction – is necessarily inimical to art.
I have no such complaint against Peter Ackroyd’s telly series. Telly must do what telly does. And while the base metal out of which Dickens’s great novels were made was of necessity Ackroyd’s subject, he never failed to marvel over the transformation. Indeed, what made me go over all queer in that last episode was more humanitarian than aesthetical, not so much the Sainte-Beuve in Peter Ackroyd as the Miss Marple – in particular the sight of him excitedly going through old ledgers proving not only that Dickens was living secretly with the actress Ellen Ternan, but that he was doing so, because he was desperate not to be discovered, under a sequence of assumed names. What the writer has gone to great lengths to hide, let the biographer go to even greater lengths to uncover! Not on account of any sin against Dicke
ns the novelist did that suddenly strike me as callous, but on account of the trespass against him as a man.
We do, of course, take it for granted now that the wishes of the living, let alone the dead, confer no obligation on us when we scent a scandal. This being the case, what some dead writer wanted is bound to cut no ice. Did not Max Brod, faced with Kafka’s dying instructions that ‘all this, without exception, is to be burned’, refuse to commit ‘the incendiary act’ his friend demanded of him, and is not the world a richer place as a consequence? They know not what they ask, that is our justification. We know better what will serve their memory.
A person’s squeamishness dies with him – that’s our assumption. Dickens did not want to be found out, for reasons of local delicacy which no longer apply. Those he did not want to hurt are dead. The morality he wished to be seen to live by has changed. Therefore there remains no reason why the facts he chose to conceal should stay concealed. More than that, applying the model of political chicanery, we believe it is in the public good that everything should come to light. We have a right to know.
But do we? Dickens has not been shown, despite the zealousness of historians and biographers, to have whispered state secrets into the ear of a Prussian spy. So what end is served by our right to know? Not any understanding of the art, we have established that. And why should our right to know enjoy paramountcy over Dickens’s right to insist we don’t? Who are we to deny his wishes or to quarrel with the ideal of dignity by which he tried to live? Who are we to assert that shame does not live on beyond the grave? The heart must have its secrets, D. H. Lawrence said.
And now it’s the turn of the other – not D. H. but T. E. Lawrence. Nice, for his shade, to be reminded whenever his name crops up (forgive the ‘crop’) of the scars across his buttocks, maybe administered, maybe not, by a Turk hell-bent on rape. Having experienced and even courted notoriety, Lawrence chose to live the second part of his life in obscurity. When a ‘film merchant called Korda’ proposed a biopic, he did what few of us would do today, and said no.
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 18
