Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (27 page)

Actions have their consequences, that too is what a Commandment teaches. And in those consequences we need not, if we do not care to, see the unsmiling face of God. Let a man be the most confirmed atheist who ever held a chair in the Public Understanding of Science, he will still know the anguish of adultery if he is its victim, or the alternating joys and woes if he is its instigator, unless he is without feeling altogether. God, it seems to me, need hardly enter into it. Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers whom Dante comes upon in the fifth canto of the
Inferno
, entwined in an embrace of eternal weeping, are in a hell of their own making, not God's.

‘
Amor condusse noi ad una morte
,' Francesca tells the poet – ‘Love led us to one death.' Forever together – that is the consequence of their adultery; not a finger coming out of angry clouds, but their consummation itself, repeated and repeated and repeated. Not only is this not a story of divine retribution, it is not a morality tale either. Adulterous loves works out its logic, that is all there is to say. And before the sadness of it, Dante falls, ‘
come corpo morto cade
' – ‘as a dead body falls'.

A solemn business, then, adultery. As is all fornication, no matter what the circumstances. Eroticism has a terrible potential for tragedy. We take it lightly at our peril.

So what is Professor Dawkins's take on these exhilarations and sorrows, their todays, tomorrows and eternities? What is his alternative Seventh Commandment, emptied of the interferences of a non-existent God? Reader, believe me when I say I have not made up the words I am about to quote. And do not think me callous: what follows is not my doing or my fault.

Here then – and you can always look away if you can't bear it – is ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery' in Dawkinsese. ‘Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.'

As a reader, I look for one thing above all others in a writer, whether that writer is a poet, a novelist, or a scientist on a polemical errand. I look for language with deep roots. The better the writer, the deeper into the soil of thought and imagination does his language seem to reach. The poorer the writer, the more scattered on the surface, as though pulled out and discarded long ago, are his words.

This is not simply a matter of aesthetics. When Nietzsche – no lover of God himself – finds in the Old Testament ‘men, things and speeches of so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to set beside it', he is not admiring mere expression. ‘One stands in reverence and trembling,' he goes on, ‘before these remnants of what man once was.'

What is revealed in the grandeur of the writing is the grandeur of man's conception of his being. We don't have to like it or approve it, we just tremble. As we tremble before that dread injunction, brought down from a burning mountain – ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.'

Words strike us as commonplace when the thoughts they express are commonplace. Or when they are inadequate to the complexities of the subject. ‘Enjoy your own sex life' might pass muster as an expression of easy-going liberalism in the company of unexacting friends, but as a guide to behaviour it dishonours us. It assumes there's nothing to us.

Do not mistake me. I am no more censorious of other people's inclinations or their acting on them than is the Professor. Indeed, the more outlandish their inclinations the better, I say. So it is not in the name of divine prohibition or prudery that I diss Dawkins. His Seventh Commandment is feeble not because there is no God in it but because there is no human in it. The man writes as though he has never lived.

And never read, come to that. Would ‘Enjoy your own sex life' (so long as no one gets hurt, naturally) have been helpful advice to Madame Bovary, who if anything enjoyed it too much when she could get it? Was an enjoyable ‘sex life' all that stood between Anna Karenina and happiness? Is it true that our actions have neither value nor repercussion in themselves, but acquire them only by the harm we do or don't do to others? Does sex resist all philosophic and ethical enquiry beyond the requirement to have fun but practise damage limitation?

‘Thou shalt not commit adultery' is a Commandment most of us will disobey. But it shakes us to the core. There is reverence and trembling in it. ‘Enjoy your sex life' makes sex sound like a good breakfast. A thing necessary to our well-being but uncomplicated and soon forgotten, like Dawkins-man himself.

It is not God that Dawkins cannot find, it is us.

Alida Valli and the Eroticism of the Raincoat

 

The death of the Italian actress Alida Valli, obituarised in this newspaper last week, compels me to confront a long-dormant preoccupation, if you will allow that a preoccupation need not be a constant burden to the conscious mind. There is something my soul appears to have been busy with, let's leave it at that, and the name Alida Valli has awakened it. That something is rainwear.

Alida Valli, for those who can take rainwear or leave it, played the part of Anna Schmidt, lover of Harry Lime, in the film
The Third Man
, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene. She did not, in that film, have a lot to do – by and large Graham Greene's women don't have a lot to do – though what she did no one who saw it could forget. Essentially she had to look empty of feeling or passion. It was from Alida Valli's portrayal of a woman empty of feeling and passion that I formed my earliest impression – my mother and my grandmother aside – of woman in general.

That this was not unconnected with Anna Schmidt's being Czech, having to survive the Russian quarter of an edgy post-war Vienna, and being the lover of Harry Lime who lived in shadows and only ever showed his face when he could be certain there would be no light on it, I understood. Even at the early age I saw the film I grasped its cold-war cold-heart politics. But I nonetheless believed it depicted something eternal – allow me to say eternally irresistible – about women: they were disillusioned and unhappy, and they never looked better than when disillusioned and unhappy in a raincoat.

If it did depict something eternal there is a question to be asked, I accept, as to why women, at least as represented by film stars, are unable to look that way now. Tailoring is one explanation. The youth cult is another. You cannot be disillusioned and unhappy when you're dressed in a rah-rah skirt. But I suspect the real answer to the question lies in aerobics. The whole point of Alida Valli in
The Third Man
is that she has no zip. Get women bouncing about and that's their desolation shot.

Though Alida Valli, as we have said, does not have a lot to do but look beautifully unhappy in a raincoat, it is not for nothing that she is given the film's final say, that's if you can have a say without saying anything. I will let Tom Vallance, Valli's obituarist for the
Independent
, describe that famous finale. ‘After Lime's funeral, Anna is seen in the distance walking towards the camera down a long lane in the cemetery. [The long lane in the cemetery of my soul, reader.] Waiting to one side is Lime's former friend Holly who has fallen in love with her. [As of course had I.] Her face emotionless, Anna continues walking straight past him with no acknowledgement as, to the accompaniment of Anton Karas's zither music, the film ends.'

That a zither never failed to play in my head every time I fell in love thereafter, I ascribe to the power of that scene.

But something is missing from Tom Vallance's description. The raincoat. How, in his otherwise attentively detailed account, can he leave out the most salient detail of all – Alida Valli walking towards the camera and then past it into a loveless future in a
raincoat
?

So puzzled have I been by this omission these last few days, yet so unwilling am I to see the film again, for fear it will not stand up to memory, or that someone has airbrushed Alida Valli's raincoat and put her in jeans and trainers, or worse, left the raincoat but made her wear something under it – for surely we were always to understand that she was naked beneath that raincoat, that having to go without hope had reduced her to actual no less than spiritual nudity, that desolation in a lovely woman expresses itself in a raincoat and nothing else – so fearful of the distorting hands of censorship and time was I, in short, that I consulted an Internet site called, succinctly, Rainwear Films.

As Rainwear Films is specifically for those with a ‘rainwear interest' I did not intend lingering long in it. It is one thing to like an unhappy woman in a raincoat, it is another to have a ‘rainwear interest'. I did, however, expect the site to yield what I was looking for. But guess what? Though it mentions Lana Turner in ‘yellow storm gear', Pier Angeli ‘inside a period trenchcoat', Anita Ekberg in ‘translucent plastic', Sophia Loren in ‘British style rainwear', Suzy Parker in a ‘Burberry', Greta Garbo in an ‘oilskin slicker', Joan Crawford in a ‘wet, shiny cape', Myrna Loy in a ‘white rubber', Virginia Bruce in a ‘typical 1940s cut semi-transparent knee-length hooded mackintosh', and countless more, there is not a word of Alida Valli in
The Third Man
. It is only when I come upon reference to
Les Yeux Sans Visage
, a film about a surgeon who transplants faces, and whose leather-coated assistant Alida Valli plays – in one scene dragging a dead girl, nude in a man's mackintosh, across rough terrain – that I wonder whether my unconscious has been transplanting raincoats unbeknown to me.

I am not aware of seeing
Les Yeux Sans Visage
but men my age are not aware of most things. Could it be that in
The Third Man
Alida Valli is simply wearing a coat full stop, and I have, so to speak, undressed and transposed her into a belted skin-grazing raincoat for reasons my psyche alone can understand?

It wouldn't surprise me. We misremember and misplace what we read and see routinely. Because art is collaborative, our engagement with it is a species of interference. We cannot read or watch anything without new creating it. There is no reason to get excited about this process as a contemporary phenomenon, the way Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, did in a speech last week, frothing about the new audience that ‘doesn't want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share'. Portals, platforms, interactivity – these are just punch-drunk terms for what we've been doing since we sat in circles and moved characters from the
Iliad
to the
Odyssey
. You make the programmes, Mr Thompson, our imaginations will do the rest. All your techno brave-new-world-speak, confusing matter with mere medium, is hooey. You can dress up your unculturedness in all the jargon of electronic opportunity you like – we know when someone is naked under their rainwear.

Dott and Sympathy

 

Been feeling very sorry for my sex again this week, what with one thing and another. Rooney, Prescott, Clarke, Dott, even Zacarias Moussaoui denied the satisfaction of being executed by his enemies and having to face his own angry company for the rest of his life instead. It isn't easy being a bloke.

It was Dott who started me off. It's possible not every reader of this column knows who Dott is. Only some of us sat up until the early hours of Monday or was it Tuesday morning watching Dott grind out the World Snooker Championships. Seems a lifetime ago now. The year dot. And that's why I am sorry for him, having the name Dott when a dot is exactly what he looks like. Wee Dott they call him in his native Scotland where all the snookers players come from who do not come from Wales, and he is truly the weest of men. I gave up watching snooker on television four or five years ago precisely because of Dott. His name, his wan appearance, his fragile self-esteem, the way he barked like a seal before every pot, blowing chalk from his cue tip – my life was ebbing away and there I sat in the familiar telly-snooker stupor for hours on end, watching a dot. Enough. And then last week I got hooked on him again. Don't ask me why it's him I'm sorry for. He's just become World Snooker Champion. The person I should be sorry for is me, staying up to will him on, counting every frame, the attention of my soul concentrated on a dot.

And while I'm worrying for the dot my mother-in-law is fretting over Rooney's metatarsal. She rang me the morning after the dot's triumph to say she believed Rooney would be well advised to abandon all efforts to get fit for this World Cup and to conserve his strength for the next. She had broken a metatarsal herself a few years earlier and knew that the best cure was rest. ‘But the nation wasn't hanging on your fitness,' I reminded her. She didn't see the relevance of that. ‘Never mind the nation,' she said, ‘it's the poor boy I'm sorry for.'

Me too. Poor Dott. Poor Rooney. Poor Charles Clarke even. I know, I know, but there's something about Clarke's face that has always appealed to me – that look as of a very rare breed of sheep, conscious, as rare breeds are often conscious, of the burden of their rarity, and of course lonely because no other sheep anywhere looks like them. And what has he done wrong anyway? Allowed a few criminals who shouldn't be here to disappear into the community, when it was only a few weeks ago that we were accusing him of not allowing a few criminals who shouldn't be here to disappear into the community.