RosieBell

The Two Georges (II)

I recently wrote a post about the two Georges, Eliot and Orwell.  I have read them both over and over again since I was about thirteen.

Conor Cruise O’Brien had this to say about Orwell:-

GEORGE ORWELL
Orwell disliked Catholics much more than he did Jews; he always tried to be fair to individuals in both categories, often in a grumpy and dispirited sort of way. The categories, indeed, overlapped to some extent in his mind: political Catholicism, like Zionism, is a form of digested "nationalism" in his system, and he writes in a 1932 essay of "the Hebrew-like pride and exclusivity of the genuinely Catholic mind". It is all very Protestant. Jews and Catholics who love the English language and value honesty and decency must admire Orwell, but from a certain distance.
5 September 1982

I didn’t note that those two were Protestant atheists but Protestantism is what I was brought up in so it would appear as natural and unremarkable to me as the fact that they wrote in English. I would like to be told more specifically how this Protestantism declares itself. 

Lament for the Makers

The last few days have seen the death of significant figures:- Conor Cruise O’Brien, Bernard Crick,  Davy Graham and Adrian Mitchell.

They all made their mark.  They left something they created behind, which is why they are mourned by people who never met them.

Here’s an extract from a poem about the necessity of creation in the face of nihilism. 

So, Fanfare for the Makers: who compose
A book of words or deeds who runs may write
As many do who run, as a family grows

At times like sunflowers turning towards the light,
As sometimes in the blackout and the raids
One joke composed an island in the night,

As sometimes one man’s kindliness pervades
A room or house or village, as sometimes
Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades

Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes
At midnight means to share them as one man
In old age plants an avenue of limes

And before they bloom can smell them, before they span
The road can walk beneath the perfected arch,
The merest greenprint when the lives began

Of those who walk there with him, as in default
Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite
Of all assaults conscripts counterassault,

As mothers sit up late night after night
Moulding a life, as miners day by day
Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite

In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play
Their fish, as workers work and can take pride
In spending sweat before they draw their pay,

As horsemen fashion hoses while they ride,
As climbers climb a peak because it is there,
As life can be confirmed even in suicide:

To make is such.  Let us make.  And set the weather fair.

From Autumn Sequel by Louis MacNeice

Christmas Quiz

It’s that time of the year when you get bumper issues of magazines, the reviews of the past twelve months and, of course, the Christmas quiz.

So here, for Christmas, is our special quiz.

ARE YOU A CLERICAL FASCIST?

Answer the following 10 questions to check your clerical fascism credentials!

1. Before being published a book should be:-
a) Vetted by a board of clerics for blasphemy
b) Vetted by academics for offensiveness
c) Eh?

2. Putting a bomb in a rucksack and blowing up your fellow citizens:-
a) Sends you to Paradise
b) Sends a message to Tony Blair and George Bush
c) Sends a lot of people to hospital and the morgue, you morons!

3. Women should:-
a) Not go out in public unless escorted by a male relative
b) Not have their rights made into a shibboleth
c) Kick ass! Or crotch!! Or someone’s head in!!! For fuck’s sake

4. Apostates should be:-
a) Executed
b) Regarded as Uncle Toms or neocon pin ups
c) Hey!  What fucking century is this?

5. Atheists should be:-
a) Killed
b) Refraining from militancy or abrasivenes or insensitivity
c) Biting the carpet in a rage.  For Chrissake!

6. Israel is:-
a) An abomination that will be wiped off the map
b) The new South Africa, Nazi Germany, or any other unquestionably evil state
c) There are other fucking countries, you know

7. A body of men who if they came to power would place women under house arrest; enforce rules on dress; ban music, games and harmless pleasures generally and compel total religious observance are:-
a) Holy warriors for God
b) A heroic resistance movement
c) What bollocks is this?

8. Jews are:-
a) Responsible for all revolutions; destroyers of science; controllers of imperialist states; behind every war that was ever fought; secret rulers of the USA; controllers of the media.
b) As above, but could you change Jews to Zionists?
c) Jesus wept!

9. The holocaust:-
a) Didn’t happen, which is a shame
b) Happened, but denying it is an understandable response, and should be contextualised
c) Aaargh! Aaargh!  Aaargh!

10. The Golden Age was:-
a) 8th century, Baghdad
b) 1917 USSR – there was something to hope for
c) 10 September 2001 – though there was plenty of crap around, it wasn’t this particular kind of crap

Check your answers here:-

Answers to Quiz Here

See answers in comments box

Talking Head

I’ve just finished We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. It was a best seller, and I can see why. It reminds me of two other best sellers, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  When you read these novels you unwrap layer after layer of suspense, until near the end you get to the big glittering secret.   You and the first person narrator also share an emotion which is familiar and shameful. In Rebecca, it is the sense of inferiority towards a rival, of being second best, in The Secret History the desire to belong to the in-crowd, the exclusive set, in Kevin, the anger that a woman feels when her children steal away her husband’s attention. Kevin is knowingly filled with the outraged vanity of the narrator.

Kevin deals with the nuclear family when the graphite rods are pulled out from the core, and the violent heat and power that generates, culminating in a huge explosion. It’s quite a long novel – 468 pages – but there are really only four characters in it, compared to the number a Victorian novelist would have had in the same space. The outside world comes into the suburban house via television, internet, work, some friends and the school, but these only seem to exist as morsels of food brought into the family burrow, over which they claw and bite each other.

Lionel Shriver used to write a column for the Guardian, and there are op-eds running through the book:-

Irony. I have thought about you [the narrator’s husband whom she is writing letters to] and irony. It always got your back up when my friends from Europe would come through and dismiss our countrymen as “having no sense of irony”. Yet, (ironically) in the latter twentieth century, irony was huge in the U.S., painfully so. In fact, I was sick of it, though I didn’t realize that until we met. Coming into the eighties, everything was “retro”, and there was an undercurrent of snideness, a distancing in all those fifties diners with chrome stools and oversized root-beer floats. Irony means at once having, and not having. Irony involves a prissy dabbling, a disavowal. We had friends whose apartments were completely tricked out in sardonic kitsch – pickaninny dolls, framed advertisements for Kellogg’s cornflakes from the twenties (“Look at the bowlfuls go””) – who owned nothing that wasn’t a joke.

You wouldn’t live that way. Oh, to have “no sense of irony” was supposedly to not know what it was – to be a moron – to have no sense of humour. And you knew what it was. You laughed a little, at the lamp-bearing cast-iron black jockey that Belmont picked up for their heart, to be polite. You got the joke. You just didn’t think it was that funny, really, and in your own life you wanted objects that were truly beautiful and not just a laugh.

The op-ed is a popular form of reading and almost any literate person thinks they are capable of writing one and many do, on their blogs. Lionel Shriver’s columns in The Guardian were acute and well-written, and a cut above most of the others writing there. She creates op-ed personae, the wife and narrator, who is the Europeanised American democrat and her husband, the all-American patriot Republican. Together they produce the figure of nihilism and anomie, the demon Kevin, full of “disinterest” (as she says, not making it clear whether she means “impartiality” or “boredom”). Everything is grist to this op-ed mill.

It is a seductive novel with its structure of being written in letters by the ravaged narrator to her (supposedly estranged) husband; its background of that American mystery, mass shootings on some small pretext; the fear of the strange hostile tribe of teenagers; the sense of the decadent Empire about to fall, the barbarians inside. It’s the op-ed writer’s novel – the facts exist for a thesis. This novel knows itself to be of the Zeitgeist.

It was serialised on the 7:45 slot on Radio 4, and it made a good, suspenseful story. I’m not dissing it any more than I diss Rebecca or The Secret History – excellent books if you are in bed with a cold, what Orwell would call “good bad books” – and I’ll read her other novels if I come across them. It’s a highly readable novel by an intelligent and observant op-ed writer. I hate to think what a novel by Seumas Milne or Madeleine Bunting would be like.

One of the Great and Good

I’m sorry to hear that Bernard Crick has died.  His biography of Orwell is excellent and so are his essays – a clear vision and a liberal and humane voice.  I met him a couple of times and he seemed a nice, amiable guy.

Crick had fierce views about most political subjects, from the Falklands and Iraq to Northern Ireland and presidential prime ministers. His view of politics did not accommodate watered-down consensus. He used to quote Ernest Gellner: "socially tolerant always, intellectually tolerant never". He maintained that no progress of any kind is possible without political argument, political education and political participation, and that to achieve these the political class had to stop talking to itself and engage with citizens, however uncomfortable, messy and less than ideal that may often turn out to be.

Update:-

Kenan Malik and Bernard Crick exchange views on multi-culturalism here:-

You are obviously sensitive to my point that Scottishness within Britishness is an overwhelming illustration of the fact that we have been - and are - a multicultural society without fragmentation. For you make the historically preposterous assertion that 'much of what passes for Scottish identity today was actually invented by English administrators in the nineteenth century'. In fact, ever since the Act of Union in 1707 Scots administered Scots - a classic example of English indirect rule, not cultural assimilation.

But I like your phrase about multiculturalism as 'a small number of organic cultures dancing around each other', only I would accept it gladly - with the obvious caveat that we dance within the tent of a common set of values (mostly universal, as in human rights and democratic concepts), and a common set of overarching institutions (parliamentary government, the crown, the rule of law).

Only a few extremists - and their racist counterparts - think that multiculturalism means separation: group rights as sovereign rights. I am a pluralist. We all have different identities, often expressed in different circumstances. Intermarraige is growing healthily. I simply do not recognise Britain as disintegrating. There are lots of things wrong with the consumer society predominating over old ideas of public service and mutual responsibility. But these are all too solid flesh, alas. No disintegration.

To me variety is the spice of life. And we are secure enough in our Britishness and values not just to tolerate but to enjoy variety. You think I am complacent; perhaps a little. I think you are feeding a press panic; perhaps a little.

Kirsty MacColl

After the death of the Princess of Wales in an accident, there was a clip that was often played of a woman saying, “We have lost this clever, witty something or other.” Clever! Witty? There was no evidence given of any of the cleverness or wit of the well-born clothes wearer. But in the year 2000 we did lose a clever and witty woman in a stupid accident. That woman was Kirsty MacColl.

Hen party version here:-



Kirsty MacColl 10 October, 1959 – 18 December, 2000

Unsocial Climbing

North Face was a bit of a disappointment.  It is a feature film about a failed attempt by a German team to climb the North Face of the Eiger in the 1930s, which  had been covered in the very good documentary The Beckoning Silence.   Here the whole thing was framed by a pointless love story.  A girl from Bechtesgarten in Bavaria works in Berlin in the offices of a newspaper.  She gets her big break as photographer covering an attempted ascent of the north face of the Eiger, since she happens to know the climbers involved.  Her boss is the usual cynical newspaper hack, given to saying, I look at you, and see myself in you when I was young.  

Climbers are obsessive people. Their dreams are climbing routes.  The world outside is an obstacle to or an opportunity for climbing. Climbing films should be about climbing, as war films should be about fighting, and detective films about detecting.  The private life is unimportant.  So the scenes at the hotel of the waiting girl photographer, in love with one of the climbers, and pursued by the cynical hack, plus a bit of political decoration (Anschluss, a Jewish guy making remarks about racial purity) were extraneous. What absorbed me, and had me sick with tension at some points were the guys climbing.  Their concentration is absolute as they go from foothold to foothold, as they swing around buttresses to find a ledge, as they bang in pitons, all on a high vertical slipperiness,  a hair line between life and death.  I cowered as the noise of the blizzard and the avalanche surrounded us in the warm theatre.  The faces and hands frozen black and the sense of the Eiger being a relentless giant attacking the climbers as enemies, that was beautifully done.

So it was a pointless distrcation that when the climb went horribly wrong the photographer girlfriend had to be there to whip up the rescue party, to wave torches in the snow, to climb the mountain herself, to muse about how to love is to live at the end. 

Let them read Shakespeare

I've noticed that Islamist terrorists tend to come from a scientific or technological background rather than from arts or the social sciences.   There's an interesting piece by Victoria Clark in The Independent on that theme:- 

We were kidding ourselves if we ever allowed ourselves to believe that Islamist fundamentalist activism was confined to the marginalised, unemployed members of our Muslim community. [Some of us didn't kid ourselves for 3 seconds on that point.] One look at the backgrounds of the al-Qa'ida leadership and the masterminds of 9/11 should have been enough to dispel any illusion that al-Qa'ida is just a toxic by-product of ignorance, irrationality and poverty. . .

A link can be made between an exclusively scientific education and religious fundamentalism of any kind, as I discovered recently while researching American Christian fundamentalism. Such Christians – "the Armageddon crowd", as they are popularly known – were reading their Bibles as they would computer manuals, in expectation of finding exactly the same quality of factual information. No allowances were being made for the political context in which the text was written, and nor was there any understanding of the uses of metaphor, symbolism, poetry or propaganda.

In her book The Battle for God (2000), the religious historian Karen Armstrong accounts for this phenomenon. She identifies a failure to differentiate between two modes, between the "mythos" and the "logos" – between the language and uses of poetry, and those of a medical student's text book, for example – as lying at the root of every religious fundamentalist's error.

It seems to me that behind this cardinal error lies not stupidity, material disadvantage or lack of education, but a deep yearning for control. If the American Christians I met expect their literal reading of Bible prophecy to make them feel securely in-the-know about the future, the likes of Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed dream of wielding as much power to change the world as they do to heal a patient or design a machine.

Those of us who studied the arts always knew those dull tossers who spent their time in labs were barbarians.  Education is supposed to be a civilising process, not the acquirement of artisan skills plus the humanist knowledge of a Baptist bible basher.

The Two Georges

The British moralist George Orwell noted in the 1930s that an authentic British fascism would come reassuringly clad in sober English dress.

From The Anatomy of Fascism

I’ve never seen George Orwell encapsulated before as “the British moralist”.  I would say, “the English political writer” if I had to summarise him in a few words, yet he certainly was a moralist, like that other George that I have read and re-read, George Eliot.

Mary Anne Evans and Eric Blair both used “George” as pen names.  Both were part of the advanced intellectual movements of their times, Eliot of the new sociology and free thinking, Orwell of socialism, yet both were conservative at heart, loving and honouring tradition.  Both were rooted in the English countryside.  Eliot, after years of living in London, would look at the weather and think of the harvest and the farmers, Orwell loved the surface of the earth.  Both were critical, scathingly so, of their native country, but were affectionately attached to it.