England

Up at university during the day, chiefly reading a PhD dissertation and setting up teaching material for next term. At lunch met young Vietnamese poet, Phuoc-Tan Diep, who came to England at the age of three with his family. He is now a doctor at the hospital. He spoke very warmly of the family's reception in England, which was pretty well my experience too. This can be uncomfortable reading for those who prefer to present the country as an unfriendly, xenophobic, exploitative host, and no doubt, at different times, with different people, it can be. But when it is not so - and I think we could summon up a fair crowd of witnesses here - it is worth saying as much.

Apropos of which I have been invited by Radio 4 to write a piece about our own family's flight from Hungary and arrival in England. It'll have to be written fairly fast in the middle of a great deal else. The poems in An English Apocalypse, even those that remark on the grotesque or declining aspects of England are, in a way, love poems. Realistic love poems, if you like, not idealisations or whitewashes. I am as capable as the next immigrant of seeing blemishes, but I can't forget that the face that was turned towards us was a welcoming, efficient, generally kindly face. Life here can be stupid, brutal, dull and craven - as it can in all places - but it has never been barbaric, oppressive, deeply corrupt, or hopeless.

And England beat Croatia 4-1 tonight, in Croatia. I read some of the pre-match views and John Terry's confession that the England team had no confidence. The response of press and public? Kick them in the teeth again. Croatia was 3-1 down and their supporters were bouncing up and down, actually supporting their team. Unlike England supporters - and that is even when England aren't losing. As I say: stupid, brutal, dull, craven it can be, and oddly gutless. But it doesn't last. And in an odd way I almost prefer it to a patriotic orgy.

Better still is irony. As I once heard a Spurs supporter answering his son on the way into White Hart Lane. It had been a bad season so far. Boy (looking at programme) asks: Is this the team we put out last week, dad? Dad; Yes, son, you don't want to change a losing combination. Then they go in and cheer the team on.

I don't have Setanta but I watched the goals here. Nice things.

And Linda is on the Booker short list! A very very good day.

Briefly 2: Furniture

5. A late addition (late to Democratiya too) is this piece by David Clark in which he reviews the western liberal response to the Georgian situation. Here are a few passages:

[Rather than making comparisons with the cold war of the 20th century]...A more revealing historical comparison is perhaps 1848 – the so-called Springtime of Nations – a year of revolution for national and political freedom that engulfed Europe only to succumb, within a few months, to the forces of counter-revolution and reaction. The leaders demanding self-determination for the peoples of Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania and the Czech lands, among others, were a mix of constitutional liberals, democrats and republicans; their opponents, the autocratic continental powers of Austria, Prussia, Russia and the Ottomans...

...It might seem odd in an age of political cynicism in which the fruits of past struggles are taken so casually for granted, but Guiseppe Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth, Stanislaw Worcell and other leaders of 1848, who came together as exiles in London to form the Central Committee for a Democratic Europe, would have recognised in today's Europe the fulfilment of some of their highest ideals. They struggled for national liberation, but their instincts were deeply internationalist and they assumed as a matter of course that a Europe of free nations and peoples would come together in fraternal and voluntary union. Mazzini was among the first to call for a United States of Europe...

...There have always been those on the right astute enough to see through Putin's sly appropriation of Stalinist symbolism and recognise him as an archetypical nationalist strongman. A generation earlier, the same sort of people lauded Pinochet, Zia and Marcos. ..

He then cites writers on both right and left who defend the notion of spheres of influence, particularly Russia's sphere of influence, then goes on:

...Even the Guardian's editorial writers fell into this trap when they described NATO expansion as a 'sphere of influence' project comparable to Putin's, as if there could be any equivalence between a voluntary association of democracies and an authoritarian hegemonic block constructed by means of military intimidation and energy blackmail. The way to avoid conflict, apparently, is for NATO to 'stop rearranging the furniture on Russia's sensitive southern border' (Guardian Editorial 29/8/08). Discounted in this assessment is any recognition that people living next to Russia have the right to determine their own international alignments, especially if they conflict with the preferences of leftwing journalists and pundits living safely in the UK.

This presents obvious problems in relation to the professed democratic values of the people making this argument. The way round this is to question whether the western orientation of former communist countries is really democratically based at all. According to Milne:

American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions.

This is an astonishing distortion of what has been happening in Eastern Europe since the end of the Soviet era. These governments haven't been 'installed'; they have been elected in almost every country where the people have had a free and fair opportunity to decide from themselves. It is from the demands made by these voters that the clamour to join NATO and the EU has come, often in the face of disinterest or scepticism from western elites. There has been no American plot or even a consistent and coherent American policy, as the confused and disjointed response to the Georgia War amply shows.

Yes, I am generally in agreement with this. I want to to be true. One part of me though fears that the claims of realpolitik generally overrule the claims of virtue. It is, after all, my own, and any Hungarian's, experience; and it is in fact precisely what happened in the nineteenth century. I do not doubt that Russia is a paranoid state. Its war losses were enormous after all. It has just lost an empire based on what it broadcast to be virtue.

Clark is right though: there is no 'equivalence'. Those who claim there is do so because their ideas of the politics of virtue are based principally on hatred of the west, and of the USA in particular. Anything the west / USA does must then be opposed. Anyone who opposes, not even what it does, but what it may support, must therefore be in the right. For me, if I had to choose, it would be the west every time.

But Clark does simplify a little in support of his argument. The politics of virtue are rarely purely virtuous. Hands are never absolutely clean. Russia does feel walled in, and whatever regime had been in power there, it would have acted just as Putin's mafioso-Russia acted. We know this, and so did Georgia. Encouraging Georgia was the easy part. It was The Voice of America that encouraged the revolution in Hungary in 1956 then failed to deliver anything.

The west can't "rearrange the furniture" in other people's houses of course, or 'install' anything, but it can approve or advise, especially it is asked to lend some of its own furniture. The art and psychology of such advice is complicated, not so much flag-waving as brain surgery.

As students in Leeds we lived in a block just below an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter, both of them neurotic, depressive and undergoing treatment, some of the treatment electro-convulsive. A previous tenant had left an old piano in our flat and I was longing to play it. The women asked me not to, or if I was going to, to let them know in advance. And even then I was to play quietly and for no longer than half an hour at a time. I did not think these were ideal circumstances for making music. It wasn't convenient and one couldn't just do it when in the mood, but, slightly resentfully, I still played the piano in the way they asked so as not to drive them to more sessions of ECT. I did not bang on my rhetorical drum all through the night.

Briefs - Things Read

1. The first of a series of discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict in 'a cool hour' by Samuel Fleischacker at Norm's. I'll keep reading this. Almost anything said calmly in the arena is worth listening to.

2. Christopher Hitchens on Sarah Palin at Slate. I have said nothing about Palin because I have no real idea what to think of her. I would sooner have a Democrat in and would be happy if that Democrat were to be Obama, but Hitchens is right about the kind of attacks launched on her. I can see that a pretty, fiery, straight-speaking, hockey-mom makes a useful iconic figure and counter-weight to Obama for the Republicans. On the other hand the anti-abortionist, creationist, global warming dismissalist (I don't mind global warming argument providing it comes from intelligent well-informed sources, but simply shouting It's rubbish! is not an argument) side of her don't tally with my folk back home. Actually, the Democrats wouldn't be attacking so hard if they weren't scared of her. Ironically, of course, the more they attack the more reason they have to be scared.

3. This report in The Guardian on the argument for GM foods. It follows from an earlier guest post by Prof Anne Osbourn, about which I wrote a further post here. I am deeply suspicious of pious, wealthy, foodies imposing their superstitions on the starving. If that's what it is.

4. And lastly, back to Hammershoi, the ever-readable Ms Baroque I know we cross-refer each other but I think she is excellent and am flattered when she occasionally quotes from here.

God on Trial revisited

I am returning to this because I said I would and because I have been prompted by an artist friend's email. He agrees with my general assessment of the play, only pointing out the possible redundancy of the device of the contemporary visitors with which the play begun and ended, and which served as a brief interlude between scenes.

Yes, that's interesting, and probably right. It may be that, because the trial itself was a matter of rumour and legend rather than historical record (but what would historical records have made, if they did exist, of the conversations in those terrible huts!) it was felt necessary to frame it quite clearly as drama, as imagined, as something detached from, even distanced from, that which is known.

So what we had was a play within a play, something entirely the product of a writer's imagination. One might argue - and it wouldn't surprise me if Cottrell Boyce did argue this with himself - that imagining this specific trial ran the risk of trespass; that entering those huts with impunity, with, if you like, immunity, was a complex, awkward, intrusive act. When I was writing my own long poem Metro, I took my mother to the gates of Ravensbruck, but did not follow her in. There were places I did not feel entitled to go.

The delicate line Cottrell Boyce would have had to tread was the one between a realm that was specifically, temporally, Jewish, and the existential realm that pertains to anyone, in which the intensity of suffering becomes a pressing but open metaphysical question. He had to keep just on the latter side while feeling the presence of the former.

The fact that he succeeded as well as he did says much for his skill and tact. There were only two moments when the play threatened to spill out of the existential into the intrusive.

The first was when the following argument was put: If (ran the argument) it is the best of our kind who are being sacrificed for some future good, that would surely leave only the worst as survivors. The danger of this is reasonably clear. As put by an outsider it can be read as pejorative to those Jews (not Catholics like Cottrell Boyce) who did survive. The current lot are sneaks and thieves. The worthwhile ones are all gone.

It's a risk but had to be taken because, having imagined the trial, the thought was not only possible but - given the premise that many great minds and spirits perished in the camps - it was inevitable. The argument does rather suppose that those who are not regarded as great minds or great spirits are less valuable and that goes against the grain with me, as it will with many others. It was, let me put it this way, a delicate moment in the trial.

The other point was the Anthony Sher speech, the speech of the rabbi at the end. The charges laid at Yahweh's door are indeed terrible and not to be gainsaid, all the evidence being to hand in the Bible. How plead you, God? Guilty, as charged. End of story, or so you'd think. But when God is, most notably, accused by Job in the Bible, he does not deign to answer, responding instead with another question: Canst thou pluck out Leviathan with an hook?***

That was not offered as an answer in the play. All that happened was that, when summoned to death, the rabbi and the others covered their heads with their bare hands to indicate reverence and prayer.

What one asks - what I assume the writer asked of himself - was whether the rabbi's list of accusations was being levelled at the metaphysical God or, specifically, at the God of the Jews. For the rabbi it was clearly the God of the Jews. That, after all, was the whole point of his speech: Yahweh is, or rather was, our bastard.

What level of identification was being invited there? Who is included in that our? Is the outsider / trespasser / to be included? Or was the outsider being invited to say: So they were just as bad, serve them right, good riddance. Because this is the argument employed by the neo-fascist anti-Zionists.

Israel = Nazi Germany. Palestine = Auschwitz. That means it's all quits. Back to square one. Back to 1933.

I don't think Cottrell Boyce was implying that. I have no reason to think it. The quality of the play was the guarantee that no such implication was intended. Or so I think. That, of course, assumes that artistic integrity acts as a guarantor. It's the Lady Chatterley defence on another plane. The art project allows questions that would be impossible elsewhere.

As an artist I have to believe that. I have to believe it or I could not operate in the realm. But one eyebrow is always raised. It is, sometimes, an effort keeping it raised, but there's no choice.

*

*** As 1066 And All That used to say: Do not attempt to answer this question.

Sunday Night is...

Dion...



Runaround Sue. With the Del Satins backing.

There is something touching now about early white rock 'n' roll, about the simplicity of it, the predictable chord structure, the entrance of the backing chorus and the grin of the clean-looking boy with the quiff and his otherworldly Pepsodent freshness.

This was Dion before I was properly conscious of such music as a presence, when it was just a noise elsewhere. There I'd be at the age of twelve, practicing Mendelssohn or Beethoven or one of the simpler Chopin waltzes at the piano like a good Central European (and, I now realise, Jewish) boy from an aspiring middle-brow family of not quite categorisable class - for what could you do with a mixed-class set of refugees in a working to lower-middle class suburb of London, who hailed from the Red East where even the working class were more properly bourgeois than the suburbs of London imagined - aspiring to books, to classical music, to G-plan furniture, to radiograms, to televisions, all of which added up to a kind of heroic ascent to the world as it should be, which, somehow, would still be just and socialist, the whole impossible idyll about to be ruined by boys like Dion, and by the about-to-be forbidden, decadent Radio Luxemburg.

One day I must get hold of some Mantovani. My brother's first violin teacher, Mr Shane, played in Mantovani's orchestra. He was actually on telly. Clearly an important man, I thought. Was it about him the Andrews Sisters were singing in Bei Mir Bist Du Schön. My Dear Mr Shane... Please, let me explain....

And, of course, what was shortly to be missing from my life was Runaround Sue, or her equivalent. Or any Sue for that matter. Any equivalent.

From Sebald Conference at UEA

Just catching an odd 20 minutes before my own reading with Lavinia Greenlaw and Matthew Hollis. Plenty of rich food for thought, keynotes from Will Self, Dame Gillian Beer and Adam Phillips, a lot of other presentations in between. Like a good boy - a good enthusiastic boy - I have attended everything so far and being very tired, have in fact re(tired) to my UEA office, making my own cup of tea and consuming my own 900 year old biscuits.

The biscuits have a Sebaldian look and taste to them: melancholy, I would say, but with a certain humorous, gently humane core, though one cannot quite forget the tragic forces in history that have driven them to the obscurity and darkness of my desk drawer, leaving them a little like Derek Mahon's mushrooms, reaching, as it were, for light, crowding to a non-existent keyhole, reminiscent of the lost people of Treblinka or, indeed, Pompeii, in a Sebaldian state of being, between two or more conditions, that is to say fresh and stale, but approximating closer to the latter, the third, most hypothetical, of the conditions existing on a somewhat metaphysical level that Thomas Browne describes in his Urne-Buriall or Hydrotaphia, a work composed even as barges from Cathay, laden with silk, muslin, cotton, rayon, denim, PVC and teflon drifted silently down the Wensum and Yare, a fact I myself contemplated with a certain nostalgia while in the act of disinterring and setting my teeth to the biscuits (McVitie's Rich Tea manufactured by Seebohm and Co, Dusseldorf), vaguely aware of the approach of an acute headache that like the vibrations of a distant train could be felt, distinctly, through the soles of my feet, beneath which...

C on Rain

I am borrowing this from a passage in one of her emails to a friend who had also been writing about rain. It's with C's permission of course. This is her Malaysian rain.

...I was caught by your description of the open window and the rooks, the rain falling. Then I had a very strong flashback to my childhood - in Malaya, the monsoons bringing very heavy rain for days and weeks, my head hurting from the pressure of the thundery conditions, but the sound of the rain, fat drops falling on large tropical plants. The banana tree in particular, is a sound that I could listen to for a long time. I thought of you and your mother by the window together and the rain falling in straight lines downward splashing in pools under the plants. The dark rain and the leaves, the shining drops on shining leaves in the dark seemed to go so wonderfully with the shine on rooks feathers, the disquiet, the rustling and murmurings of bird and rain and trees, the room darkening behind.

When the monsoon arrived it broke the terrible stifling heat and we would all, my father, myself and my sister (funny that my mum didn't join in) rush out into this warm downpour in just our knickers (not dad, he had shorts!) feeling the rain drum into our skin like soft needles jumping into puddles like Gene Kelly in the film 'Singing in the Rain holding our mouths open to fill up with warm fresh water, being hit by the pungent earthy smell from the ground or the perfume being released by the large exotic flowers that were lying bedraggled in the borders. I remember reading a Somerset Maugham story set in Malaya many years ago where the smell of the flowers was so well described that I could almost physically smell them. I think it was a type of orange blossom.

If anyone wants to send me a short passage on rain, you're very welcome. Remember, short. Perhaps I will compile that Book of Rain.