Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (28 page)

Did I read that one of the prisoners who has been let back into the community to reoffend was not sent home to Somalia because Somalia was not considered safe? Is that possible? Though I'm sorry for anyone who has to bear the burden of being a bloke, I am not so sorry for a Somalian thug that I think we have a moral obligation to protect him from his own.

‘I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,' says Will Ladislaw in George Eliot's
Middlemarch
. He is talking about Dorothea's inability to enjoy anything she feels others are excluded from. But he could be referring to our concern for the welfare of impenitent foreign criminals when we return them to the bosom of their culture. Myself, I see something shapely in their having to fear back home (assuming that they in honesty fear anything) the very violence they inflicted on us. Is that not the beauty of deportation when the deportee is a rapist and a murderer and the country to which we return him is similarly inclined – that we expose him to the brutality of values he recognises as his own? Is that not
just
?

Which brings me to John Prescott, or rather to John Prescott's mistress Tracey Temple for whom I am invited on all sides to feel sympathy. Not enough my heart bleeds for Dott and Rooney, I am now – though her metatarsal is, as far as I know, undamaged and no one, by way of comment on her stature, calls her Tiny Tracey – required to bleed for her as well. She has, in the words of Labour MP Geraldine Smith, been ‘taken advantage of'.
Droit de seigneur
and all that. A boorish, fat old Labour goat reached out his podgy fingers and what they groped for, Wee Tracey in her toothy, cream-skinned innocence had no option but to give. ‘She was poor but she was 'onest . . .'

Remind the outraged that she is a professional woman in her forties who chose to work for a boss by all accounts notorious for his lechery, who looked willing enough, in the photographs for which she plentifully posed, to be seen canoodling and otherwise galumphing with him – an equal party in whatever you want to call it, a modern liberated woman exercising her right to fornicate where and with whom or what she pleases – and they think you're advocating harassment in the workplace.

It is poor sociology to suppose no woman in a subordinate position ever chased her boss or saw securing him as a step up the ladder to her own preferment. And it is poor psychology to read sex only as a story of the strong taking advantage of the weak; or to think that because a man is not Orlando Bloom, or even Graeme Dott come to that, a woman will surrender to him only under duress and with the lights out. Not all women like to roll around with uncouth men, but some do.

Poor Prescott – there, you've heard it! Two words you never thought you'd see conjoined. Poor and Prescott. We employ him to be an incorrigible Old Labour sort of chap but when he gets embroiled in an incorrigible Old Labour sort of escapade – a bit of groping but also, let there be no mistake, a bit of being groped – we suddenly stop seeing the joke. What's he to do – turn New Labour overnight?

But yes, I am sorry for Tracey Temple too. I'm sorry for everybody. It isn't easy being a bloke and it isn't easy not being a bloke. You can't control your fate either way. That's the lesson of snooker: it's all to do with how the balls lie.

It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing

 

A brief disquisition on rhythm this week. Occasioned by the wonderful Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern, by Harold Pinter's appearance on
Late Night Review
in conversation with the Scottish Person (it's bad luck, in my business, to speak her name), and of course by England's progress in the World Cup. Rhythm explains the success or failure of them all.

In Kandinsky, more than in any other painter, I think, you see why abstraction is the logical conclusion of painting. For the ‘pure working of colour' to be felt – and these are Kandinsky's own words – a form of expression must be found that excludes the ‘fable' we are always so keen to read in a painting – its ostensible references to objective reality – in favour of the ‘inner meaning'. And for Kandinsky the inner meaning is the music of colour. Rhythm. Anyone who finds that hard to grasp should hurry on down to Tate Modern and take in Kandinsky room by room, then pause – for eternity, if you have eternity to spare – before one of the great
Compositions
of 1913 or thereabouts, in which feeling, thought and colour become indistinguishable by virtue of the rhythm that unites them.

You could say that Western art – Christian Western art anyway – has always been abstract in the sense that the God in whose service art was made was never Himself paintably there. The artist can represent the symbols of belief, but not belief, or the reason for belief, itself. Remove even that abstraction and you have art with no subject or
raison d'être
but the spirituality of its own form. In a secular age the holy of holies becomes colour. And what unifies one colour with another is rhythm.

As is the case – to keep it brief – with the plays of Harold Pinter. Even as unmeaning is piled upon unmeaning, the rhythm of apparently ordinary speech, wrenched from its inconsequence, keeps us in the picture. Brutal, broken and more often than not malign, but ultimately pleasing, as art must be pleasing, by virtue of the harmony with which Pinter invests it. This is what strikes one about Pinter himself. Though to listen to him is often like being caught in the sights of a sniper – his delivery machine-gun abrupt, his thoughts flying about your ears like pellets – and though he sometimes seems to be in an argument he does not intend to lose with language itself, the overall effect of his speaking is minimalist-symphonic. Never mind the politics, which on their own are simplistic; just give in to the music, which is not.

The Scottish Person knew to do just that. Well briefed, skittish, neophytic, and now and then Hibernianly incomprehensible – try saying Hibernianly incomprehensible with an orange in your mouth if you want to know how hard pronouncing English words can be for her – she tended dutifully the fiery flame of Pinter's discourse. But Pinter wasn't put on earth to cosy up to television presenters. His conversation is with the unseen powers. Gripping to watch, for that very reason. And proof, were further proof needed, that what television does best of all is serious talk, though you wouldn't expect BBC executives, with their devotion to the tunelessness of demotic, to agree with that.

It is a pity no one has thought of sending Sven-Göran Eriksson a tape of
The Caretaker
, even more of a pity there isn't time to fly him back to see the Kandinsky exhibition before England play their presumably final game today. ‘Rhythm, Sven. You want to know why players who perform with such adroitness and athleticism for their clubs can't stay on their feet for you? – rhythm! You don't have any, so they don't have any. You're a man who loves fancy dining; you know what it's like when you find yourself in a restaurant that's badly managed. The individual dishes might be good but no course converses with another; the service doesn't flow; food comes at the wrong time; the wine doesn't come at all; waiters have no feel for what it is you want and when you want it. From first to last the evening is discordant. That the same holds true of an orchestra, I do not need to remind you, for you love music too, as I recall. No conductor with a sense of rhythm, no musicians with a sense of rhythm. Von Karajan on an off day and there was no Berlin Philharmonic. You on an off day and there's no England. The trouble is – you are always on an off day.'

You can tell Eriksson has no rhythm from the way he speaks. He has a staccato personality and presumably a staccato mind. He talks as though he is belching. For all I know he is belching. His is a job, after all, that would put stress on anybody's digestive system. But then what did we think we were doing employing a Swede as England manager in the first place?

I intend no disrespect to Swedes, a people I am otherwise disposed to admire, but rhythm is not their strong suit. I know there's Abba, but Abba is rhythm for the hard of hearing and credulous of tempo. It was Swedish gaucherie in the matter of rhythm that led them into the trap of supposing that sex could be uninhibited. This is the sixties I'm talking about, when Sweden was invented. And when I speak of rhythm in this context I do not mean whatever Swedes call jiggy-jiggy, or rhythm in the birth-control sense, I mean aesthetic rhythm – that coalescence of the material and non-material that Kandinsky aimed for and achieved. As in painting, so in sex – that which seems to come naturally is in fact the result of labour. Only a people with no instinct for rhythm would suppose that if you are easy and open about sex you will enjoy it.

What hell it was going out with Swedes in those days. My first Swedish girlfriend laughed before, during and after. My second Swedish girlfriend wept in exactly the same places. I accept that in both instances this could have had something to do with me. I was a dissonant boy myself. But none of my friends reported differently. Sex with Swedes was a washout. You banged into them, you fell over them, you interrupted each other's conversation, and in the end you interrupted everything else. No rhythm, you see. You might as well have been in bed with Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Next time we appoint a national coach, might I suggest an abstract painter. Or Harold Pinter, if he has nothing else to do.

If It's ‘Readable' Don't Read it

 

I'm not usually in favour of electrodes. Not on the brain, I'm not. And certainly not on
my
brain. It's possible I'm frightened of what they will detect. What if it's not as busy in there as I like to think? What if everyone's asleep? Or what if it's a cesspit and the electrodes turn blue? But mainly it's a decorum thing. Like the grave, the brain's a fine and private place and I don't want strangers looking into mine.

I have, however, just learned something that changes my attitude to electrodes entirely. Vindication, I call it. For word is coming out of Liverpool University, where the distinguished English Professor, Philip Davis, has been working with a group of eminent neuroscientists, that electrodes prove what some of us already knew but had either lost the confidence to argue, or grown commonplace in arguing – namely, Shakespeare is good for the brain.

And not for any of the usual high-flown Coleridgean/Arnoldian, Hegel/Schlegel/Schmegel reasons. Not because Shakespeare ‘acts and speaks in the name of every individual', not because he is ‘the Spinozistic deity – an omnipresent creativeness', not because ‘Others abide our question / Thou art free', not because he makes his characters ‘free artists of themselves'; nor, indeed, because, in the words of our less exalted, prole-mad times, he wrote bloody good stories and would have been at home writing a weekly episode for
EastEnders
had he been alive today. No, the reason Shakespeare is beneficial to the brain is that his syntactical surprisingness, to limit ourselves only to that, creates something like a neural flash of lightning, a positive wave or surge in the brain's activity, triggering a ‘re-evaluation process likely to raise attention' at the time and stimulate new pathways for the brain thereafter.

If I understand the science correctly, what happens is as follows. When electrode-fitted subjects are shown passages of Shakespeare in which, say, there are parenthetical distractions (e.g. ‘that which angled for mine eyes – caught the water though not the fish –'), grammatical violations and compressions, nouns doing the job of verbs and vice versa (e.g. ‘He childed as I fathered'), and other examples of apparent misshapenness of expression, the electroencephalogram to which the subjects are wired notes modulations indicative of the brain's leaping about, quickly adapting itself to surprise, rethinking its normal processes, priming itself to look out for more difficulties, in other words performing, measurably, those very feats of intellection which we Eng lit people have always claimed, though in fancier language, to be what we go to literature for. Hoorah!

Forgive my jubilation, but I have been waiting for this scientific proof a long time, both as a teacher of books and a writer of them. Of all the attacks the common-minded make on any book that can't be started and finished on a Tube ride from Waterloo to Stockwell, the most usual is that it is ‘hard going', that is to say fails to meet the contemporary criterion of unputdownableness. ‘Then thank me for it,' I always say should the charge of ‘difficulty' be levelled at one of my novels from the front row of a blowy tent in a muddy festival of letters field. ‘Struggling with a book has more of reading in it than flicking through it at a predetermined rate,' I remonstrate. ‘And laying it frequently aside to scratch your head does greater justice to a book's contents than never laying it aside at all. They also read who are not turning pages.'

Why people who gauge the quality of what they read by the speed and ease with which they read it always sit on the front row, I can only guess. Because they would find it too difficult to navigate their way any further back, is one explanation. Pertness, is another. The ruder readers of this sort mean to be, the closer they like to sit to you. It's as though they are half offering you sex. Beneath your imperspicuities, their dull eyes say, we know what it is you really want.

Now I can add science to my denunciations. Nothing will ever stop the pert believing that a difficulty unnecessarily clothes a simplicity, and that the hard writer therefore has something devious to hide. But at least they can now be shown that if they want to register some sign of brain life on an EEG machine they'd better knuckle down to grappling with what is not straightforward.