Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (17 page)

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 experience, 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.

Three cheers for NATE, then, if their proposal is that all the pandering should stop. Only trouble is, it isn't. More pandering, not less, is what they're after. At the heart of the report, a suggestion that A-level English literature should merge with A-level English language, in order – though I don't see how this follows – that students be given a broader understanding of current culture, by which NATE has in mind ‘the thriller, the romance, the crime novel' and, of course, the media. In other words – and still in line with the pious infractions of theory – the crap but who are you to say it's crap.

Why we want to give students a broader understanding of current culture when half of them are already dying of the stuff I cannot imagine. You might as well propose taking schoolchildren choking on the fumes of Wolverhampton for a holiday to Walsall. As for the media – well, my own view is that whoever employs the word ‘media' forgetful that it is the plural of ‘medium', which is an intermediate agency and therefore a possible conduit for literature, not some alternative to it, needs to take an exam in A-level English literature.

Besides which, no good ever came the media's way by people who studied it. You want to know when telly went down the tube? Take a look at the first influx of media graduates.

As for ‘current culture', only its slaves assume its value. One of the supreme justifications for the study of literature is that it enables us to know a culture when we see one, and not to think of it as merely the value-free agglomeration of all we do. Out of the study of those alternative modes of thinking and feeling we call literature evolve the dreamers, naysayers, visionaries, revolutionaries, idlers, necessary for our freedom of mind. Far from liberating us from some imagined elitist tyranny, NATE's proposals would make cultural consumers of us all, enslaved to whatever pap happens to be pumped out to us.

I think I know now what that piece of oil cloth, placed under the nates, was for.

The Full Monty

Sitting in a tapas bar in mixed company the other evening, minding my own business, I suddenly came to one of those understandings of life which the religious call a revelation. What was revealed to me was nothing less than the anguish of being a man; and what followed from it, though not a conversion exactly, was a profound conviction that no woman is worth the love we give them.

We had reached that tetchy stage of dinner in a tapas bar when you realise you've had nothing but half a cocktail sardine and a chickpea to eat, and dark suspicions are beginning to gather as to who it was who hogged the squid. It is always about now that the floor show starts. Don't misunderstand me – I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for flamenco. But all that yelling and stomping on an empty stomach! And then the fear – if you are a man – that the flamenco dancer is going to brush up against you with her skirt, fall laughing hoarsely into your lap, place the Carmen flower of gypsy allurement behind your ear, or click those ivory Andalusian knackers of hers suggestively in your face. There is cultural confusion here, I grant you: flamenco is not cabaret, and a malagueña is no Las Vegas torch singer. But that's part of the anguish of being a man – you know the rules but you can never be dead certain that they do.

While we men exchanged apprehensive glances with one another (will it be you or will it be me?), the women at our table yelled and stomped along with the musicians. No empty stomach problems there, notice. (If you're a woman you wolf the octopus first and stick your finger down your throat later.) But no shame either – that's my point. No embarrassment. No modesty. None of that excruciating anticipation of humiliation to which the delicate tissue of male self-consciousness is forever subject.

Hard to believe that bashfulness and pudeur were once held to be attributes of women. Show me a bashful woman today. When did you last open a newspaper and
not
read about some sad sack of a Sunday-school teacher reduced by the concupiscence of women to taking his pants off in the local church hall every Friday night to earn the necessary extra shilling? Ask yourself why he needs that extra shilling. So that he can pay for the mother of his children to go out on a Friday night and watch some other sad sack of a Sunday-school teacher take his pants off to fund
his
children's mother's weekly snatch at the posing pouch, that's why.

Sounds innocuous, doesn't it, the full monty? Sounds almost decorous. Just off to cop a full monty, my sweet. Sounds no more unbecoming than an evening of bingo or a George Formby singalong. You can even tell the kids. ‘Mummy won't be able to read you
Thomas the Tank Engine
tonight, my little sugar plum. She's running an itsy bit late for the full monty.'

‘That's all right, Mummy, have a lovely night. And blow Monty a kiss from Teddy.'

But who's to tell them the real reason they're going to bed storyless and cuddleless for yet another Friday night – that Mummy is out screaming herself hoarse in the hope of getting a total stranger to poke his dick in her eye?

Yes, yes, I know that men have been frequenting lap-dancing etablishments for as long as they have had laps to dance on. When I was twelve I spent an entire year's pocket money on strip joints. My friends the same. By the time we were thirteen we were on first-name terms with every stripper in the country. Some of us collected their autographs. Or their tassels. I myself had the best collection of sequinned nipple pasties in north Manchester. But that was different. We behaved ourselves. We didn't grab. We didn't exhort to lewdness. We sat red-faced and silent in the darkness, our mouths full of burning rocks, our shirts stuck with all the flaming secretions of shame to our chests, appalled by our own neediness, disgusted by our natures.

Take a look at any man coming out into the light from a house of sexual extortion. He is always blanched, furtive, guilty. A creature who would make himself invisible if he could, for he knows he is not worthy to be looked upon, least of all by himself. Nothing is more plain to him than that having traded in his virtue he has forgone his immortal soul.

And how do women disport themselves when they leave the scene of their disgrace? With mirth. Always with mirth. Unable quite to decide which was the more risible, their own temerity or the sight of the genitals of a man.

Women! They steal your tapas, they uncover your nakedness, and they laugh. Only apes and sparrows have so little sense of sin.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

So now we know what ‘minded' Jack Straw to give Mr Pinochet back to Mrs Thatcher. The general is reported to be deficient in memory of both distant and recent events, has a limited ability to understand complex sentences or questions, has lost the wherewithal to express himself succinctly, and suffers long periods of fatigue. In other words he is middle-aged. Case dismissed. Pack the old fart off to Spain tomorrow. Else we'll never again be able to hold a person over forty guilty of anything.