Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (34 page)

‘No,' I told him, ‘I catch planes.'

Funny, but they never believe you. Walk the cliffs from Eastbourne to Beachy Head and you'll find a proliferation of wooden memorial benches, all facing out to sea, all bearing melancholy inscriptions, all heartbreaking if you're the memorial-bench fanatic that the hero of my latest novel is. Some reviewers have doubted their existence. Too unlikely. Too convenient. Too much of a coincidence that he should find them while out walking, looking for sorrow. But the truth is that's exactly when I found them, while out walking, looking for sorrow. God is good to novelists. He puts things where they hope to find them. Such as Sikhs with literary ambitions at Heathrow. Or a place called Noe-Beaver, plumb in the middle of homoerotic San Francisco.

The Last Cigarette

 

I feel there must be some Shakespearean line out there, to the effect that death does not come singly, that when one person dies another person dies, by association, with him. I'm not thinking of the Donne metaphor, that we are none of us islands, that any man's death diminishes us because we are involved in mankind. It's not the universality of loss I'm speaking of but of the way a living man might stand in, in some way, for a dead one, and that we only finally register the death of the first with the death of the second. Forgive the clumsiness. It is possible I am seeking consolation in abstruseness because I cannot bear to write what I feel.

My friend the writer Simon Gray died last week. Though he had been ill and had written about his illness without illusion, his death was unexpected. It was to me, anyway. We have been reading Simon Gray's
Smoking Diaries
for some years now; the damage caused by his excesses has become part of our experience; we look forward to each new volume, fully expecting him to be clinging perilously on, for us, for the joy and relief that making merry with calamity brings, for another thirty years. But he won't be.

The person whose death he has reawakened – making me relive it, if that's not a tasteless paradox – is Ian MacKillop, academic, author, biographer of F. R. Leavis. We were, you see, all Leavisites together, though MacKillop and Gray were five or six years older than me, friends of each other at Cambridge, beyond my reach when I encountered them, in the way that prefects are out of reach when you first turn up at grammar school. To my jealous northern eye they had an air of aloof sophistication, to do partly with their being handsome, tall, southern, well spoken, fiercely articulate and attractive to other men – no Mancunian was ever attractive to other men, not even to fellow Mancunians. Simon appeared the more worldly of the two, partly because he was a bachelor, on the qui vive, and Ian was married young, with a baby that cried while he was supervising Leavisian neophytes like me at his home. The minute the crying started he would turn pale and tear his hair, sometimes pulling himself up by its roots, like a character in Dickens. But conversationally, out of the house, he shared with Simon Gray an edge of wit which I took to be disdain – I had always wanted to be disdainful myself – and an intellectual curiosity that gave the lie to the supposed narrowness of the Leavis cult.

In time, the influence of F. R. Leavis will be appraised more generously than it is today. He stifled his pupils, critics who know nothing say of him, consigning them to a cramped evaluative hell of mean-spirited judgementalism and non-creativity. Here is not the place to list the diverse achievements of Leavisites, but the briefest look at Simon Gray's output alone disproves the charge of narrow unproductiveness: over thirty plays for stage, television and radio on the most diverse subjects – the spy George Blake, the relationship between Duveen and Bernard Berenson, Stanley's rear column left behind in the Congo in 1887, academia, language schools, etc. – plus five novels and seven volumes of those magnificently splenetic but tender memoirs which won him a second and more than ever devoted audience. Ian, too, though he was less prolific (unless we allow that teaching is its own prolificacy), wrote with extraordinary variousness – a book on
The British Ethical Societies
, a study of the real-life trio of lovers that inspired Henri-Pierre Roché's novel
Jules et Jim
, the biography of Leavis, essays on all manner of non-canonical subjects such as new wave French cinema and Kingley Amis, whom he taught me how to appreciate, and a sadly unfinished annotated edition of Keats's letters.

Simon wrote touchingly about the span of Ian's interests in his recent volume of diaries,
The Last Cigarette
. ‘He knew so much about so many unexpected things – horror films, pulp fiction, westerns as well as thrillers, early Agatha Christie, every poet alive writing in the English language . . . He seemed to have a completely uninhibited mind. I can't remember him being shocked by any subject or event. His curiosity was limitless, willing to go through endless byways for the pleasure of the journey.'

It takes one to know one. Simon's mind was no less uninhibited. Read him on Hank Janson in
The Smoking Diaries,
Vol.
1
, and then, to get his range, turn to what he has to say about the novels of Mahfouz in
The Last Cigarette
. As for ‘the pleasure of the journey', that, in a nutshell, describes what it was like to know and read both men. You never knew where they were going to take you, only that the articulateness would be all the company you needed. It was briefly fashionable to berate Simon's plays for their ‘cold detachment'. Articulacy is not always in favour. It frightens people. But the mistake was to confuse it, as I had confused it in 1962, with disdain. In fact, articulacy is the tragic core of his most famous plays –
Butley
, for example, and
Otherwise Engaged
, which depict men trapped in the dazzle of their own intelligences.

Ian MacKillop died four years ago. Again, suddenly. The night before he died he rang to say he could not make it to a publication party I was giving. I was disappointed. I wanted him to be there. It would be wrong to say he was a father figure to me – he was a touch too spectral to be that – but I did seek his approval and admiration. He told me he was not feeling well, but not to worry for him. It struck me as a strange thing for one man to say to another. ‘Don't worry for me.' It was almost feminine, like a caress. And those were the last words he spoke to me.

‘He made a calm comedy,' Simon wrote, ‘out of the worst events in his life.' Simon the same. Calm comedy bound them. I wanted to make them both laugh, though Simon said his smoke-ruined lungs were making laughter difficult. ‘Anyone who wanted to murder me,' he wrote, ‘would simply have to say three funny things in a row.' I hope I didn't want to murder him.

His last words to me were as a caress too, though they were for my wife. ‘A protective hug for Jenny.' He didn't say what he was protecting her from. The sadness of it all, I suppose – our calm comedy.

Savage Torpor

 

We don't use the phrase ‘dumbing down' in this column. We believe it exemplifies – maybe even connives in and encourages – the very sin it offers to decry. Say ‘dumbing down' and you're dumbing down. There are other words beginning with ‘d' to describe the will to destroy a culture. Denigrating, disparaging, dishonouring. And then there's defeatism – the faint-heartedness of intellectuals in that battle for language and meaning in which they have a sacred trust, if not to lead the charge then at least to man the battlements.

I am sitting on a pretty hotel terrace (speaking of battlements) looking out over Windermere (where I have come to unwind), still fuming about a Radio 4 programme I listened to about ten days ago.
Word of Mouth
it was called, and its subject was, in that fair-minded Radio 4 way, ‘dumbing down', for and against.

Since there is no ‘for' I am not sure why I went on listening. Fair-mindedness on my own part perhaps. Or maybe I was unconsciously calculating that I'd be winding down in Windermere shortly and would need something to fume about. I don't recall whether someone on the programme mounted the usual defence of complacency: namely that people have been complaining about falling standards since the beginning of time – as though the longevity of a complaint proves its fallaciousness, or the fact that someone said we were getting sillier three thousand years ago must mean that we aren't. But if no one actually said it, I could hear it in the voices of the guests hauled in to dumb up dumbing down – Angela Leonard and Ziggy Liaquat, a pair against whom, like the would-be Tarzan Dudley Moore's one leg, I otherwise have absolutely nothing.

Both Ms Leonard and Mr Liaquat are employees of Edexcel – the former being chair of examiners for history, the latter managing director. Of what again? I believe you heard me the first time. Edexcel – a privately owned examination board, the concept of which I find hard to grasp, though I guess I'm going to have to get used to it now that we have a government that believes in the virtue of privatising everything. But it isn't just the ‘private' I'm having trouble with, it's the barbaric comp0und.
Edexcel
. Oughtn't that to hurt the ear of anyone for whom educational excellence (I assume that's what they're getting at) is a priority, and to whom linguistic euphony therefore matters? Edexcel. It sounds like a cross between a laxative and a substance for sticking stuff to stuff; all right, a substance for sticking stuff to stuff in a specifically educational context, say for sticking presentation accessories to whiteboards, or pupils to their desks.

That something that goes by the name of Edexcel can assess and mark, offer qualifications and award certificates, make judgements and set standards, bothers me to the degree that the word ‘Edexcel' is itself a barbarism to anyone for whom language has dignity. I can't imagine Angela Leonard or Ziggy Liaquat, however, having time for such verbal squeamishness, their first concern being clarity in the setting of examination questions, or what they call ‘keeping the threshold low'. The great obstacle to keeping the threshold low, in their view, is unnecessary difficulty or ‘inaccessibility' of language in the examination question. One example of this was the word ‘salient', which reputedly floored an examinee with its obscurity, thereby preventing him from showing what he knew, though I would have said it made a very good job of showing what he didn't. Another was ‘expediency'. And a third was ‘perfect'. Come again?
Perfect
. Is that the verb or the adjective? Well, there, reader, you have the nub of the problem, if nub isn't too great a bar to comprehension.

Let me set the scene as Angela Leonard set it. The subject is history and there is a question relating to the trial of the Rosenbergs in the 1950s. The question cites the ruling of Judge Irving Kaufman who told the Rosenbergs: ‘You put into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb.' Clear enough if you read it out, Angela Leonard conceded, but picture the consternation of the candidate who ‘probably' – her word – would read the verb perf
ec
t as the adjective p
er
fect. In order to avoid which confusion the examiners changed ‘would perfect' to ‘would be able to perfect'.

If it says little for the candidate that he'd be unable to work out how that word ‘perfect' was operating in the context, it says even less that the chair of the examiners for history positively expected him to flounder. But that might be the consequence of years of sitting Edexcel exams if you're the candidate, and years of working for Edexcel if you're the examiner. Low threshold expectations all round.

How a person ignorant of the different ways of reading the word ‘perfect' can pass an exam on any subject requiring a working knowledge of the English language – as history assuredly is – I do not know. But more bizarre still is the idea that he will have grasped the political and ideological subtleties of the Rosenbergs' defection. Presumably he will have been spoon-fed the requisite information and the accompanying received opinions. Spoon-fed by Edexcel itself, I don't doubt, which won't want its efforts stymied by some pesky little word that is both adjective and verb. It was at this point in the conversation that Ziggy Liaquat reminded us there had been a great deal of investment in education, ‘so you would expect a return of some kind'. Chilling words, the only meaning of which I could deduce was that examinees have to pass as a matter of economic necessity, which amounts to saying that the only thing that is actually being tested is Edexcel's ability to create the conditions for passing, and whatever stands in the way of as many examinees as possible getting through – such as ignorance of the most basic English vocabulary and word usage – has to be Edexecelled out of existence. Thus does dumbing down, though we don't use the phrase, brazenly declare itself to be the handmaiden of commerce.

The last I heard was Angela Leonard citing another difficulty-in-waiting – ‘wicked'. A word we must be careful of using because it no longer means what it used to mean. So that's the end of ‘Richard III was a wicked bastard – discuss'.

Looking out over Windermere, I think of Wordsworth writing about ‘the multitude of causes' combining to reduce the human mind to ‘a state of almost savage torpor'. Now why would I be thinking of that?

Pinteresque