Brooks Brothers

You almost had to make an appointment these days to see the old man. He had amassed a fortune from real estate, had a penthouse on the Upper West Side, a chalet in Aspen and a retreat in Martha’s Vineyard. Six cars, one a Bentley…

His older brother, Ben, had progressed quickly through Wharton Business School and was well placed to head up the dynasty. All charm, John Lobb, Brooks Brothers.  James, on the other hand had been something of a disappointment, flunked out of Princeton but holding down a lowly position in the company in spite of a couple of DUIs and arrests for possession.

“Good to see you, son”, said his father. “what can I do for you?” James took a deep breath. “Dad, I want out. I want my inheritance, or whatever it is that’s coming to me and I want it now. I want to make a name for myself, not under your shadow.” Father and son looked at each other for a long, long moment.

His father looked down, pondering. Then he reached into the drawer of his large rosewood desk, pulled out a checkbook, slowly unscrewed the top of his Montblanc Meisterstück and filled out a check. He took a deep breath, tore it off and held it out.

TWO MILLION DOLLARS.

James was on the next plane for Vegas. First stop, a car dealer. Twenty minutes later, he had the keys to a shiny red Corvette Stingray, 6.2 litres and fast as hell. Only sixty thousand…ha!

He set himself up in Caesar’s Palace – big suite, bathtub big enough for four – and headed for the craps tables. He soon gained the reputation as a big winner, an even bigger loser, but, hey, it’s only money. Night after night he was hanging out in lapdancing clubs, snorting coke between the girls’ breasts and enjoying the exceptional services provided by four thousand dollar a night hookers.

The fairground ride ended when the management ‘regretfully’ had to decline, he had overspent his credit limit by a considerable sum. He’d crashed the Corvette, only just escaping prosecution, after a drunken encounter with a fire hydrant. James found himself on the street, with just enough in his pocket for a trip back to New York City. Remorse was a tough pill to get down his throat.

The doorman didn’t recognise him. Bedraggled, unshaven, he looked like he’d slept in the same clothes for a week. He caught the elevator to the twenty third floor, standing sheepishly in the outer office. Secretaries looked at him, aghast, wondering whether to call security. Someone had called ahead. His father was in the boardroom closing an important deal. The door was flung open, his father almost ran toward him, closely followed by his elder brother, scowling. “Dad….” James managed, before the tears began to flow.  Ben just looked. “What the hell, Dad?” “Shut up, Ben” said his father.

James and his father embraced for a long time, both of their shoulders shaking.

Finally, his father spoke.

“Everybody! James is home! And we’re gonna throw the biggest party this town has ever seen! Now, will somebody go out and buy my son some clothes? Brooks Brothers.And a decent pair of shoes!”

 

 

A Parable Retold

Jim sat up at the bar in the King’s Arms, morosely sucking down his third pint of Stella. Why us? he thought. Why our kid? Sarah had been such a bright, vivacious child, good at school, popular, lots of friends. Then, nine months ago came the diagnosis. Terminal leukaemia. Months of radio, chemo and God knows what else. Endless trotting back and forth to bloody clinics all with solemn-faced, well-meaning doctors. Last week, they just said ‘take her home; let her pass away there’. We tucked her in, with her favourite toy – a pink elephant.
Mary was the religious one. She went to this happy-flappy outfit that met in a school hall. Jim wanted nothing to do with it – he thought it was all medieval nonsense. Mary had resigned herself not to talk about what went on, it only antagonised him.
Jim’s mobile rang. ‘She’s gone, love’. Mary’s voice was trembling. Jim heaved himself off the barstool and headed home on foot.
As he fumbled with his keys, Mary opened the door. Behind her was a tall man whom Jim had never seen before.
‘I’m from the church’, he said. ‘Please come with me’. Bewildered, Jim did as he was told, neglectful of the fact that who the hell was this bloke to order him about in his own house. The three of them mounted the stairs, Mary weeping softly, to Sarah’s room. She lay, quite peacefully, still in death.
The strange man walked over to the bedside, took the dead girl’s hand and said ’Time to get up now, lovey’. Jim’s jaw dropped as Sarah sat bolt upright, turned and smiled and said ‘Hello, Daddy’. It’s all fine now’. She cuddled her pink elephant and said: ‘What’s for tea? I’m really hungry’.
The tall man smiled, his piercing blue eyes seemed to illuminate the little room. ‘I’ll be off, then’ he said, a soft, mellow tone. ‘Don’t worry, I can see myself out’.
The following night at the King’s Arms, Jim bought the whole pub a drink, endlessly telling and retelling the whole story.
The church had a first time visitor the following Sunday.

With apologies for bad theology.

Grace

Life takes us down unfamiliar paths sometimes. Many of you who know me are aware that I am in process of a life change of seismic magnitude and the curious part is, the unexpectedness of it all, moving alone, as I now have, to Eastern Europe.

My new surroundings are congenial and, for the most part, really quite jolly, so I have much to be thankful for. How we deal with such events is a function of two things, our own inner resources and the depth and magnitude of the grace of God, as expressed through those who take the trouble to reach out and simply stand beside me. You all know who you are. The fabulously talented London pianist, the Turkish radiologist, the retired teacher in Paris, the overworked teacher from the Ukraine, the old friends from Kuwait, the doctor in Australia pushed to the brink of exhaustion, the wise lady from Montego Bay, the Anglo-Irish therapist, the only brother I know in the UK with a doctorate in theology, many friends in Jerusalem, including a rabbi and his wife – the calmest person I think I have ever met – Israeli and South African friends, family in New Zealand and the UK – the list goes on. If you do not recognise yourself, I do beg your pardon for sins of omission; you know who you are. The point? Grace is the point. Here, so many kindnesses have been extended to me for no apparent reason from strangers as well as friends. The Bulgarian dentist, his beautiful daughter, my young but spectacularly efficient cleaning lady, the journalist at his country house…without forgetting the Israeli lawyer and his wife, who, after five minutes’ conversation, quietly picked up my entire tab for dinner. One frequently feels quite undeserving and, rightly so, since grace is a free gift, given without reservation and at the point of need. The rich, those cushioned by society’s comforts rarely feel the need, thus never comprehend the benefits. It is the poor, the blessed in the sense of the Beatitudes, upon whom the waterfalls of grace are poured out. Christ did not have much truck with overeducated, opinionated rabbis, the rich and famous with sparkling dentition and a public persona. His focus was on all the rest of us, like strangers on the bus, trying to make their way home.

Gathering Storm

 

The Gathering Storm – detail (Georges Michel ca 1830s)

It must be the magic mushrooms. There’s been an otherworldly, surreal feel to the news in recent times, a watercolour wash gently dissolving in the rain which is a slightly poetic beginning to a singularly unpoetic phenomenon. The Jews here in France have been looking over their shoulders for almost a decade. Now, British Jewry is twitching, angry and, as a friend wrote to me, “snippy”, which understates a little bit, but, you get the idea.

The antisemitism saga seems unending. Every day, the skies get a little darker and the hallucinations of a gathering storm seem more gravelly and frightening. No, don’t accuse me of Project Fear until you have tried walking through certain districts wearing a yarmulke. One can almost hear glass shattering in darkened streets.

A man called Damien Enticott, a Labour councillor in Bognor Regis, of all places, has been suspended by his local party because on his Facebook page he invoked the ancient libel that Jews drink blood as part of their rituals. He went on to refer to “Talmud” Jews, as ‘parasites’, whom he has said ‘need executing’, alleging that they believe it to be quite OK to rape small girls. He further suggested – entirely correctly, as it happens – that Hitler would have found a solution to the Israel problem. With either careless inattention to detail or beautiful irony, in his defence he wrote “I am anti-Zionist, not anti semantic (sic).” He will refuse to attend ‘courses’ if asked to do so, suggesting a strong disinclination to modify his views.

Bragg and Corbyn

This is an extreme example amongst a welter of others. The singer/songwriter and left-wing activist Billy Bragg’s star is in the ascendant in recent times – his support for Jeremy Corbyn has hoovered up an army of new enthusiasts for the post-punk protest songs for which he has become known. The other day, he had the temerity to tell the Jews that they are “pouring petrol on the fire” and that they must “work” to “rebuild trust” with an extremist hard-left party stoking violent prejudice against them and who represent an existential threat should they ever gain power. Jeremy Corbyn cannot really escape either since his ideological hero is Karl Marx. Many have argued about Marx’s alleged antisemitism – this will do as a start: Marx’s position is essentially an assimilationist one in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity. According to the Jewish writer Dennis Fischman: “Jews, Marx seems to be saying, can only become free when, as Jews, they no longer exist.” This is at the heart of the Corbyn ambiguity and why his protestations of antisemitic innocence largely fall on deaf ears. Furthermore, calling Israel racist because it exists primarily for Jews is like calling a home for battered women sexist because it was set up for women.

Some people have tried to argue that Mossad is behind all the recent antisemitic allegations in order to destabilise the Corbynistas and their handmaidens in Momentum, in which case, they haven’t been doing a very good job. The great man himself has appeared in times past on Iranian television attempting to blame Israel for fomenting unrest in the Sinai. There isn’t much he can now do to repair the damage to either himself or the Labour Party since more and more of their collectively murky past is being dredged up. And the smell isn’t pleasant. And, it gets worse. Antisemitism has once again become a dark, poisonous stain which has spread far beyond the Corbynistas, indeed beyond the Labour party who are, it has to be said, the useful idiots here. I suggest that broad-brush pathological anti-Israelism is the leitmotif or the recurring theme of progressive politics, the oxygen of the chattering classes, fuelled by chic, trendy social science campus protest from Berkeley to King’s. Most people – even many of those who are generally benignly disposed towards Israel, including some Jews – have absolutely no idea of the extent to which the bad things they have been invited to believe about Israel are the polar opposite of the truth.

The BBC, once the comfortable political wallpaper of the nation, trusted by almost everyone, has become inexplicably malignant with its systematic demonisation of all things Israeli. Israel is directly responsible for Gaza having become a concentration camp, where millions are held in detention, Palestinians’ land is systematically looted by greedy, rapacious Jews, Ahed Tamimi who was jailed for assaulting an Israeli soldier replaces Malala Yousafzai as the new heroine, and is described, laughably, on leftist websites as a ‘political’ prisoner, and so on. Furthermore, and much more significantly, there are no opposing voices pointing out the exaggerations, misdirections and sheer, undiluted lies.

I used to listen to Radio 4 a lot when I lived in the UK. I found a way to listen again here, and, my, what a lot has changed. Rod Liddle of the Times wrote:

“The BBC and Radio 4 in particular are in the grip of what the American author Tom Wolfe called ‘radical chic attitudinising’. In other words, they are naive middle-class liberals who believe the Palestinian cause is unequivocally just and there is no real argument about that. Which is why, when Hamas rains 200 rockets and mortars down upon southern Israel, you hear nothing on the BBC. You hear about it only when Israel responds.”

He goes on to rail against ‘fashionable stupidity’ – I so wish I had thought of this phrase – and asks when it overbalances into racial hatred. The writer Ben Cohen distinguishes between quasi-intellectual ‘bistro’ and street-level ‘bierkeller’ antisemitism and how one is metamorphosing into the other. The former is favoured by the twitterati, the dinner party set, the middle classes in the wine bars and is mostly verbal. The latter, a much more muscular variety, favours the fist over the pen and thuggery over dialectic. This particular re-invention of antisemitism is well on the road to passing its bistro phase and becoming something much uglier.

People hold up placards and Union flags as they gather for a demonstration organized by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism outside the head office of the British opposition Labour Party in central London on April 8, 2018. (AFP/Tolga Akmen)

Oh, yes. And while we’re here, let the denunciations and stonings begin. Israel finally expressed in constitutional law the basic achievement of Zionism: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. Well, who knew? Didn’t someone say something similar in 1948?  It should, of course be pointed out that the State of Israel is not some kind of European colonialist experiment, it’s a lifeboat, a refuge. In the seven years since the new provision was first proposed, it has attracted a barrage of criticism from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Foreign politicians have demanded Israel do not pass the law, and they have not been mollified by the removal of most of its disputed provisions. A Monday headline at Foreign Policy warned that Israel was “debating democracy itself.” Arab Knesset members ripped up copies of the bill after its passage. One called it “the official beginning of fascism and apartheid.” which I suppose makes a change from all the other times that those two particularly inflammatory epithets have been directed at the place. Not.

For those who have taken the trouble to look, Israel’s Basic Law as worded would not be out of place among the liberal democratic constitutions of Europe, which include similar provisions that have not aroused controversy. The law does not infringe on the individual rights of any Israeli citizen, including Arabs, or indeed Druze; nor does it create individual privileges only for the Jews. If there is a curmudgeonly illiberalism, it lies with the law’s critics, those who for political reasons would deny the Jewish state the freedom to legislate just like everybody else. And, of course they’re allowed to be antisemitic, because it’s Zionism under fire, first and foremost, which is what the world hates more than anything else. Guess what. Israel is a Zionist country. Get used to it.

Letters…

I have been thinking in recent times about communication, how we, as human beings, share complex ideas and emotions. Billions of words pass through the ether that is cyberspace from one to another of us every hour of every day. However, one in four of us at least have not received a handwritten communication, a letter, in other words, for over ten years. Which is really quite sad. Young men used to read Keats then shamelessly plagiarise his love letters as their own before sending them to fortunate, trembling, winsome young lasses.

From Ernest Hemingway – a love letter to Marlene Dietrich.

Modern methods, although accurate, are mechanical, antiseptic, lacking any personal warmth. A neat emailed typescript is cold and rectangular, like a military order, friendly little emojis appended notwithstanding. “The battalion will advance” has so much more pitiless gravitas when it appears on a screen in formal Times New Roman than ever it could as a sweeping curlicue from a Montblanc on cream notepaper. Dropping a handwritten letter into a postbox carries weight. The physical heft of a letter gives the communication psychological ballast that email and texts don’t have. Digital communication is ethereal, almost ephemeral, throwaway and disposable, almost regardless of content and consequently lends itself to impulse and flippancy. No better proof is needed that a glance at the endless stream of tweets put out by the president of the United States. The moment they are released into cyberspace, the more scattered and insignificant they become. A letter, on the other hand, is tangible evidence that someone has put some thought into their writing. They’ve outlined, perhaps redacted and there have been several stages to the missive’s creation. To make sure the letter was received they did more than flick their finger over the ‘send’ button, the author had to take the time to get hold of an envelope, preferably matching, fold the paper with care and procure a stamp. They then had to check that the address was written correctly to ensure its safe arrival, put the lead on the dog and walk to the postbox. In short, a physical letter shows that someone took the time to give a damn. And that’s hard for the recipient to ignore.

Perhaps it’s a function of age, but I have found myself in recent times reaching out to people I knew years ago but with whom, as the axis of the years rolls forwards, I simply lost touch, as great ships do who slip their moorings and glide majestically away from each other, disappearing into a forgotten mist of antiquity as the Universe expands. Or, like travellers in airports who end up thousands of miles apart after sitting next to one another in Starbucks.

It took me a while, but I found him. We exchanged emails, the Bishop and I, a few times, crackling with awkwardness as if the ink had been too long dry on our former friendship. I heard his voice in my mind, vast, deep, always with a hint of challenge yet encouraging, as it had always been. Finally, I called him up. The sound of that familiar, changeless tone, with a huge, unfettered belly laugh, brought dew to my eyes and the years rolled up like a scroll. He was an Army officer, with a gift for leadership, that years later I knew I needed so much and how much I had learned from him yet never found the courage to tell him.

Perhaps I may even write to him. Not an email or blog post but a real letter, written with a fountain pen in strong, manly black ink.

“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls/For thus, friends absent speak.”

(John Donne, letter to a friend)

Working Together

It’s been quite the week. A quiet man wearing a blue waistcoat  has steered the English football team to its best World Cup placement for decades, the London mayor has demonstrated pusillanimity of the first water by allowing an inflatable blimp depicting the President of the United States wearing a nappy (or, if you prefer, diaper) to float over the capital during his state visit and the British Cabinet go for an away day at Chequers in a flurry of speculation over who might have to walk home.

Any blimp will do… (The Times of London)

The world is laughing at us – at least the Europeans are – since we seem unwilling, or, indeed, unable to come to any kind of workable consensus on how to leave our erstwhile bedfellows without making too much of a stink and without it costing the national debt of a small Caribbean island. While the British diplomatic head is buried in its hands, the rest are laughing behind their hands, since our Foreign Secretary has a particularly colourful turn of phrase from time to time. Describing the May Brexit option as being like ‘polishing a turd’ is an expression he might possibly have kept to himself. The Brexit strategy preferred seems to fall into the ‘cake and eat it’ camp which, mixing our food metaphors, is pie in the sky.  Jacob Rees Mogg, of course, takes a tougher stance. For example, he asserts that the UK does not want a hard border with Ireland, nor does Dublin. Brussels does. Article 24 of GATT, Rees Mogg points out, does not require hard borders of any kind between countries with contiguous frontiers that are in a free trade area and a customs union. Furthermore, he argues that there’ll be no money for the EU if there is to be no free trade. He is quite prepared to have a no-deal, in which case, Boris’ nicely polished turd will hit the political fan with some force. It might also hand the keys to No 10 to a bearded pensioner from Islington.

Leaving the competence of a football team and the incompetence of the British Cabinet behind, the real, can-do, nitty-gritty story this week has been the saga of the trapped children in an underground cave in Thailand. If ever was needed sound advice, high competence and flawless execution, it is here, not in Downing Street or on a Russian football pitch. One man has already lost his life and there may be others, such is the extreme risk involved. The fictional account of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher lost in an underground labyrinth in Mark Twain’s eponymous novel has a heroism about it that the Thai children must emulate as the waters recede enough to attempt an extraction from Tham Luang cave. The waters are murky and dangerous, and locals have described it as a ‘desperate ordeal’. Experts from all over the world have gathered to plan and execute a massively difficult operation deep underground. The team includes thirteen international divers and five Thai navy Seals – selected as being the best of the best to work with them. Reporters on-site describe even volunteer cooks who have turned up to feed battalions of helpers.

A relative prays in the rain at the cave entrance. (Guardian Media)

My prayers go with them, along with countless thousands of others. If they pull this off, it will be a miracle.

Working together makes a football team, a Cabinet, or a team of international experts greater than the sum of their respective parts. Working together gets the impossible done, whether it is winning the match, agreeing to leave Europe with our dignity intact or rescuing trapped children.

 

On the Move

Kurdish migrants , Kobani

Today is World Refugee Day. Having left Paris for warm and welcoming Southern arms, I have some sympathy with migrant populations and I have nothing but admiration for the strength and courage of those who flee from war zones. This post came about because my Bing wallpaper today was a dynamic graphic of refugee movement since the turn of the century, produced by Carnegie Mellon. The graphic showed two obvious and frankly frightening trends – a massive unidirectional exodus from the war zones of Iraq, Syria and Libya, also huge numbers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Far East and even northern Russia, an inexorable funnelling to the Shangri-Las of Europe and North America.

Migrant evacuation Porte de la Chapelle, Paris

Migration pattern. The European section glows redder with time.

Setting aside any pedantry over what constitutes a refugee or a migrant, the sheer numbers involved and over such a short timescale have never been seen before. Nobody is moving to Nigeria or Mozambique. No floods of ardent Muslims are being welcomed in Riyadh, Kuwait City, Bahrain or Doha. The Promised Lands are now Germany, Sweden, France, and the USA and Canada, rich with decadence, grown fat on the wealth accumulated over generations, with enough to spare for the pitiable hordes, the new Ellis Islanders swarming like desperate locusts over increasingly porous borders.

Europe has no answers; it is sophistry to suggest that she does. In the UK alone, there are estimated to be well over a million illegals, defined in one of several ways – entering the country undetected in a clandestine way, such as being smuggled in on a lorry from Calais. Or, entering the country legally for a short visit, for work, study or family visiting, then simply overstaying their visa and disappearing into the ethnic population to which they belong. Thirdly, if an asylum claim has been denied, the asylum seeker may simply fail to leave the country, again melting into obscurity within an ethnic ghetto.

Britain’s rather murky colonial past rarely hands her the moral high ground – activities in nineteenth century India, for example, opened the floodgates to large populations, most particularly after the Second World War. People arrived, impoverished and hungry, from Pakistan whose citizens provided a ready supply of labour for the engineering and textile industries, also doctors and other medical personnel. These second and third generation British citizens are roughly the same in number as the undocumented illegals.

In 2017, Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society wrote a seminal work :“The Strange Death of Europe”. He explores two factors that explain why European civilisation as we have known it will not, indeed cannot survive. The first is the combination of mass migration of new and often highly fecund peoples – many young and often male –  into the continent together with Europe’s negative birth rates. This was the underlying motive behind Angela Merkel’s open door policy – new blood means new labour and tax revenues to take care of an increasingly geriatric population. We are not supposed to make mention of the fact that a disproportionate number of refugees are Muslim, nevertheless it is a fact and it should be borne in mind that blindly opening Europe’s doors to those whose objective is to create parallel societies within it is naive and foolish. Switzerland has just rejected a proposed law preventing mosques from accepting money from abroad, and compelling them to declare where their financial backing comes from and for what purpose the money will be used. According to the proposal, imams also would have been obliged to preach in one of the Swiss national languages. This kind of laissez-faire is unlikely to prevent further ethnic and religious upheaval since most of the money for new mosques comes from those with well-defined Salafist – or expansionist – agendas.

The second factor Douglas Murray describes is “the fact that… at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy”.  These two ideas cannot be separated, one is responsible for the other. He holds up a flat, brutal mirror to her soul , exposing her as she plays fast and loose with modern values acquired at great cost, allowing the infidel hordes to just roll over her. She has become too exhausted and guilt-ridden about the colonial past she once fought so fiercely to develop and is now the great, obese albatross that would sink her under the weight of her own historical sins. I would add a third. Europe has not just lost her way in terms of historical religion, but there is now at her core a void, a black hole which engulfs culture, opportunity and the ethics of hard work as her galactic namesake devours stars.

It was not so very long ago when a failed harvest meant starvation right here in Europe; indeed in some parts of the world, it still does. We don’t make as many things to sell any more, we hawk our expertise, our services, our intellect, and we take our pleasure where we can, but the wave of accelerated consumerism, buttressed by the tidal pull of gigantic Amazon warehouses, on which we so precariously ride, unfailingly ends in economic disaster. Then, it is we who will be the new economic migrants. But, by then, there will be nowhere for us to go. 

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

A number of people predicted disaster as the two biggest kids in the world met up in Singapore for a little playfest the other day. Donny the Cheeseburger King met up with Kimmy the Basketball Fan, who has a really, really deep voice, so he must be past  puberty, I think. After Donny’s recent beasting at the G7 – somebody accused him of being ‘a toddler who put Lego in his mouth’ – everybody said “It’ll end in tears before bedtime. It’s a train wreck waiting to happen.”

Donnie gets a beasting from Auntie Angela and friends.

Turned out the kids got along famously and agreed that a few of the toys were a bit dangerous and Kimmy offered to stop with all that. Donny even suggested later on that the beaches up North were great, a missed real estate opportunity, even though he’d only seen missiles being fired from them. Which was nice. I can’t wait to see the plans for the Pyongyang Trump hotel, spa and golf course. Why am I talking about this today? Early this morning a train slid off the rails in the southwestern suburbs of Paris. No, I live in the west, quite a way away so I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Before dawn a landslip caused by heavy rains led three carriages of a Paris suburban train to slide gently off the rails and nearly overturn, slightly injuring seven people, according to France’s transport minister. Was that a train wreck? No, not really. This, on the other hand, was. In October 1895 a train crashed through the wall at Montparnasse and partially tumbled to the street, producing the most iconic picture of a railway accident in history. The cause? Both mechanical failure and human error. Most things are. As long as everybody minds their manners in the media and allows the children their wee moment of glory, chances are there won’t be a repeat of the second of these. Let’s hope so, shall we?

Bad Enough

People keep telling me I ought to write a book. But, am I nasty enough? And, will I need a morality clause? Just in case my work offends someone?

Many of the great and not necessarily good, in all fields of creative, scientific or mathematical endeavour seem not to have been ‘nice people’ in the usual sense. Unassuming, amiable types, attuned to the frequencies of their fellow-man, seem not to be so very numerous amongst those who excel. Perhaps to be able to create anything extraordinary makes one just a little bit of an outlier, a tad abnormal, and it is thus hardly surprising if creative types were not rather odd in other ways, too. Why would one expect an Einstein, a Bach, Pushkin or Dostoyevsky to be just like the man next door who dutifully mows his lawn and is pleasant to the postman and to those walking their dogs? Work which tends to get remembered, quoted and widely read is often the product of peculiar ways of thinking, so we might expect such people to be unusual in other ways, too.

Leo Tolstoy was the son of a rich landowner, losing both his parents when he was still a young boy. He was brought up by his aunts and was privately taught at home until he was sixteen when, as a wild and undisciplined youth, he entered Kazan University to study languages and law. His teachers described him as “both unable and unwilling to learn”… He wrote about his youth in a small book, published in 1882. “ I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder – there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man. So I lived for ten years. Fortunately, he was self-aware enough to turn his life around and after a profound spiritual awakening became a paragon of social kindness and virtue in his later years. After the phenomenal success of Anna Karenina, he gave most of the profits away to local beggars, to the absolute consternation of his wife.

Isaac Newton, whose cosy little anecdotes about apples that remind us all about gravity was an irascible, mean-spirited and vindictive man, not the rosy-cheeked, bewigged individual our teachers portrayed him to be. Cold, calculating, cunning and quick-tempered, he argued bitterly with contemporaries Leibniz and Hooke until their deaths. He was described thus in a biography of 1995: “Newton did not marry. He did not, with a single brief exception, form any warm friendships. Though generous enough with his time and money when he had both to spare, he did not give with tenderness – either to relatives or acquaintances. He lived the extraordinarily narrow life of a dedicated autodidact, hardly ever travelling outside London, Cambridge, or his father’s rectory at Woolsthorpe. He was not given to lightness of manner, nor did he show any capacity for self-irony. When angered, he became unbalanced and, it must be said, vindictive and petty.”

In his defence, he may have been on the autistic spectrum or a sufferer of bipolar disorder. Though his personality didn’t endear him to almost anyone at all, it served his career remarkably well; ruthlessness is a surprising bedfellow to success. In his later years he became Master of the Royal Mint and hanged people for counterfeiting, deaf to all entreaties for clemency. As a good Christian, he prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and one poor soul was not only hanged but disembowelled under his orders.

Roald Dahl, the much beloved children’s author, had a strange, stiff, Nordic childhood, beset with loss. He was beaten at Repton, perhaps by the man who became the Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning Queen Elizabeth in 1953. In adulthood he was appallingly promiscuous, by modern standards a racist, sexist, a bully and a liar. He was also one of the world’s most successful children’s writers. It’s not hard to imagine Dahl breaching his morality clause, especially with a Twitter account.

Being a good person, or even a tortured individual, isn’t the same thing as being a good writer.

The seraphically beautiful Virginia Woolf was once described as a genius whose mind, according to one of her biographers ‘acted in a way in which ordinary people, who are not geniuses, never let their minds run.’ She suffered a mental breakdown – perhaps an early bipolar episode – in the same year as her mother died, at thirteen years old. When she was fifteen, her surrogate mother also died. We might charitably suppose that this so scarred a sensitive adolescent that her subsequent behaviour was at least understandable. She was, it seemed, capable of extreme nastiness, snobbery and antisemitism. Her rival, Katherine Mansfield, was dismissed as “a civet cat that had taken to street-walking”. She objected to her mother-in-law’s “Jewish voice” and observed that her husband, Leonard, came from a family of “nine Jews, all of whom, with the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned, without the world wagging one ounce the worst”. She drowned herself in 1941.

The list goes on and in no particular order of depravity: Patricia Highsmith, whose mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine, was an alcoholic and an antisemite, Philip Roth was sexist, or at the very least, anti-feminist, William Burroughs was an occultist, a junkie who accidentally shot his wife in the head; she died shortly after. His subsequent wrestling with guilt and self-loathing was apparently the fuel for his creativity. The poet Philip Larkin is now widely viewed not just as racist, misogynist, porn-addled, two timing, alcoholic, foul-mouthed and viciously right-wing, but also, for good measure, just dreary. A morality clause would have deprived us of The Talented Mr Ripley, American Pastoral, Naked Lunch and The Whitsun Weddings. Unfortunately, nasty people make great art.

But good, and great, writing (or any art or science) isn’t the special preserve of the cads, the mountebanks and the rotters; not every author is Harry Flashman in disguise. Having a “beautiful soul” doesn’t shut down all talent, even genius. Chekhov and Keats were good, brave and noble men, along with many others.

There seems to be a thin blue thread of childhood dysfunctionality running seamlessly into adulthood that so many highly talented people suffered from, also, no doubt, so very many others whose accomplishments were more mediocre. Those who know me well will catch a faint resonance here. Adults often spend the rest of their lives trying to patch the gashes in their souls, the great gaping gunshot wounds suffered in early years. Shall I write a book? Perhaps. Not sure I’m bad enough. Yet.

Virtual Images

Jacques Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a towering figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he was an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explored the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. I frequently wonder if the virtual worlds of Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and all the rest have psychological parallels from which we can learn and Lacan was a man before his time. Reading and commenting online as frequently as I do reveals the dark side, snarky tweets and abrasive social media commentary, the shadowy flipside to otherwise socially well attuned personalities.  Who we are online is the painting in the attic, the mirror crack’d from side to side. We drink Agatha Christie’s poisoned cocktail every day and things we dare not say in the real world we have no compunction in dumping into cyberspace – the bottomless well, slowly filling with the world’s bile.

We have access like a mirror image to our own black arts and sometimes use them inappropriately, as children examining their own reflection.

‘The Mirror Stage’ describes a pivotal stage in ego formation: the recognition of one’s own image in a mirror. Jacques Lacan theorised that the child, in apprehending his own reflection in a mirror, is captured by that image, seduced by its apparent perfection, its immeasurable potential. A child is endlessly fascinated by their own likeness in a mirror in a way that they are not when shown a photograph of themselves. The mirror image exists in a separate domain to its originator. Reflected, it deflects. Howsoever the child may try, they cannot delete or ruffle the image. It feels no pain when she beats it. I look more knowingly, as an adult, with adult eyes, yet the image unforgivingly projects my own feelings pitilessly back to me. Of itself, it feels no envy, no isolation, no love, no hate. It feels nothing, except what I project upon it: my own fears – of ridicule, contempt, my own yearning, even love. It appears to see the arrow that has missed the mark, the aspiration unachieved, the weakness and failure to do better. Does it see my sins as I see them? It weeps when I do, it laughs in synchrony with me. When I post on Facebook, or blog, it is, as it were, a paradigm of the mirror, suited to volatile outbursts of anger, love or other strong emotions. It is a virtual, imaginary space where normal sanctions do not apply and conflictual emotions vie for supremacy. I am allowed to be enraged, deviant, uncaring and immoral within my self-created vortex. When I write, I am speaking to a screen upon which I have projected something of my own, my own literary libido or lack thereof, of individuation of self, my creative juices smear its surface, dirtily. The image in the mirror is cracked, reflected by a thousand shards. Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, the image speaks: “you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” Whether someone reads it subsequently is initially not relevant. Sometimes, we – I and my imaginary readers – may aspire to be a community but usually it is as a large, ill-disciplined family, shackled pitilessly to the algorithms of personalized advertising to which we offer infantilised and hopeful complaints, appeals for validation and affirmation to Mama whom we neither know nor understand.

 

 

 

 

Even Archbishop Michael Curry, who went spectacularly off-script at Harry and Meghan’s wedding yesterday reminded the two billion or so hearers of his message that ‘…fire makes it possible for us to text and tweet and e-mail and Instagram and Facebook and socially be dysfunctional with each other.’ Nobody laughed, because it’s true.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great technological discoveries of human history”. Reprogramming, replace ‘fire’ with the Internet and the virtual image is complete.

Taking his words entirely out of context, let us invert the metaphor. Today is Pentecost Sunday. Let the fire fall. Let’s try to be less ‘socially dysfunctional’, kinder, willing to touch instead of instant messaging, drawing a curtain over the mirror images, Faustian bargains all, the Dorian Grays we try so hard to hide.