Kindness

Flicking through the news section of the internet I come across this reprinting of this famous rat-race speech given by Jimmy Reid, in 1972 following his appointment as Rector of Glasgow University the year before.

I remember Jimmy Reid as a figure quite clearly. I was in my early twenties when I became aware of him as the man who led the work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipyard, but that's all in the brief Wiki article I link to above. The point was, he seemed to be the epitome of a good man looming out of what I felt was a dark period.

In the speech he begins by describing alienation in simple human terms; moves on to criticise what was perceived by many, and certainly presented, as normal society, along with the idea of the rat race and the profit-at-all costs motive; considers its effects on the powerless and the unemployed; talks about what might constitute a better society including leisure and education, and ends by quoting Burns's revolutionary poem, 'Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime:

The golden age, we'll then revive, each man shall be a brother,
In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,
In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,
And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature.

It is the language of the time (Hungarian readers of Petőfi will recognise it immediately), full of confidence and idealism. It is the last line that has always presented difficulties. 'And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature.' We point, as we most often do, to the terrible cruelties of humanity and can scarce believe humanity to be 'good by nature'. Even if we suggest that we start off good then become bad we are left with the problem of how this happens, in other words, how evil enters the world and why, as a popular book had it, 'is everything shit?'

Clearly I am not about to answer this, but want to look at it another way.

I finished reading Sheena Iyengar's book The Art of Choosing (I featured a video clip of her lecturing earlier) and thought it very interesting and intelligent as well as playful, and, finally, deadly serious, but it was her Acknowledgements at the end that led me to this post. We are used to the corny thank you speeches at the Oscars and regard them - well, I do - with a certain weary horror, as if something genuinely valuable were being presented as glitter. Iyengar's thanks are not like that. They are long and detailed - they are specifically for specific kindnesses she has received at the hands of various specific people who had helped her in her research. They are genuinely touching without being sentimental.

I have been the recipient of a great deal of kindness in my time - I don't mean from people doing what they are professionally obliged to do, though I am grateful for that and some have far exceeded their obligations - but from people who were not obliged to do anything. The reasons for their kindness were mysterious. They owned those reasons and may hardly have known the reasons themselves. We can do good things for perfectly selfish reasons. Maybe we just like the idea of ourselves as generous-spirited persons in a position to dispense a little patronage now and then. Who doesn't like a little self-flattery, which always sounds much better coming from others? Maybe we expect thanks for our kindness, chiefly from those who have received it, but also, perhaps, from God, or our pacified guilt or superego. Maybe kindness is self-interest after all.

Actually, it doesn't matter. The benefits of kindness to those who have been kind are theirs to work out. The point is the effect on those who receive, or, as Bob Geldof once put it:' Give us your fucking money.'

We may then go on to argue that being a regular receiver of kindness is a form of humiliation, eventually breeding resentment, or- if we are of a Gradgrindish disposition - that receivers of kindness become uselessly dependent and a drain on the hard-working, charitable rest (the hard-line Tory argument, and the bottom-line hunch of the privileged generally).

Yes, but that is all by the by. It may be so, it may not be so. Both motive and effect are complex. The miraculous good thing is that kindness exists at all. For my part, as a receiver of kindness, I did not only receive the advantages that the kindness of others bestowed on me, but also - far more importantly - I received a model of the world.

Kindness exists as a model, a pattern in the mind (and heart if you want the full mind-and-heart set) that may be chosen. I don't mean charity, if by charity we understand simply the rich giving to the less rich, either as sop to conscience under strain or as tax incentive. Kindness is simply the possible that may be chosen at any time for whatever reason. It is a willed gesture and has to be so. It is the point at which the imagination may move towards Burns's line by an active effort of the will.

Acting kindly will not prove Burns's contention, but it shows the contention is important. How do you become brave? people have asked, often to receive the perfectly sensible and practical answer, By acting as though you were.. How do we prove that man is good by nature? By acting as though we were.

Nothing else required. Except courage - which you acquire by...

The two greatest virtues in the world: courage and kindness, either of which is diminished without the other. Solzhenytsin has it somewhere in Cancer Ward, where I first read it. It's a difficult model, but what other model is worth having? Or at least aspiring to?

In any case, RIP, Jimmy Reid.

Picasso at the Gagosian

This is an absolute joy, but first a brief observation.

It's the Mediterranean, post war Picasso, the family's own collection on show in London, and it confirms an earlier, slightly dormant feeling of mine that the formal set-pieces of the period - in other words the paintings - tend to be an assembly of what, by then, were mannerisms; the compositions still bursting with energy, but in much the same way each time and therefore a little dull, a little dutiful (one must make Art!) a little easy, sitting too contentedly in a visual language he could master without effort.

Maybe he was feeling a little trapped by his own language.

It would be easy to be trapped in his colour. His colours and his paint texture have never been anything to write home about. He isn't nor ever has been a colourist: frankly I don't think he cares about colour. He keeps slapping on the same reds, blues greens and yellows, with a patch of grey here and there, just to push his patterns forward or back. Colour is, of course, secondary to drawing. He is one of the greatest masters of drawing that has ever lived. He can't draw bad lines. Things look clumsy but balance perfectly. His abbreviation-language for limbs and torsos has nothing to do with actual proportion, but the bodies have grace and weight and completeness beyond academic precision.

As for texture, he slaps paint on flat, probably straight from the tube, and stirs it around a without great enthusiasm. Texture, in Picasso, is secondary to pattern, of which he is also one of the great masters. He loves stripes and dots and splodges and cross-hatching, and little frilly edges. They mix languages through spikiness or curviness or frantic activity or silence. They are a world of comedy to him. And delight above all.

But the greatest delight is to be found in the small throwaway fribbles (the cardboard masks, the tiny blobby statues, the splodgy ceramics) and in the magnificent assemblage sculpture. Picasso seems happiest playing against the odds with materials that have no great artistic tradition. He wants to draw in space and to discover what happens when he does so; he wants, in effect, to be less portentously Himself, less what he already knows 'Picasso' to be; more fantastical, more formally mobile. The material of the wooden, cardboard and bronze assemblage statues tease him by resisting. Line, which is Picasso's domain par excellence rediscovers itself through laughter, just as his actual caricatures do.

Someone will tell me, most earnestly, that his art shows him to be mysogynistic - his women being sexual objects cut into violent shapes and that what this means is that he, like all men, genuinely wants to violate women and tear them limb from limb. The same people tend not to say this when the male figures are cut up in the same way, but maybe they'll get round to that. When informed of these solemn facts, I will reply with the greatest pleasure imaginable:

I don't give a damn.

Let me repeat that:

I don't give a damn.

Pleasure is what I take from this exhibition. I have never smiled so much in an art gallery. Smiled? Almost laughed. Life is funny and majestic and savage and childlike and spectacular. Absolute joy.

England versus Hungary

A match report from your Anglo-Hungarian correspondent, the man at the pitch side.

It turned out to be pretty good-humoured as affairs go. We were 18 rows up on the East side (enclosure B if you want to know) about half way between the half-way line and the goal, with the main body of Hungarian supporters just to our right. We made the bad mistake of being hungry before the match at about 6.30 or so and bought two hot dogs plus a cup of tea inside the stadium which set us back about £10.50. Service was friendly (almost everyone on the stadium staff seemed to be Asian) but the hot dog was a sausage in a piece of dry roll that I would normally have paid someone to take away. The tea was overfilled and as we were getting to our seats a couple of people were wondering if we had taken their seats - we hadn't, they couldn't read the numbers on their own tickets - the paper cup simply crumpled in my hands and I had a scalded left hand that threatened to swell into nasty blisters. I found my way back to the food stall and they gave me a cup full of ice that I nursed for an hour or so.


To boo or not to boo
That might have been the most heroic act of the night, but then - somewhat later - along came Gerrard to score two goals that snatched the glory from me. The Hungarians were far more vocal than the home crowd throughout. Our row was half Hungarian as was the one in front of us, and they kept up a steady intermittent chanting. The English girl and her partner on the other side of C were of the subdued, occasionally-booing persuasion.

When the teams were announced there was a mixture of cheers and boos for each individual player. Ranking them in order of disapproval, Ashley Cole undoubtedly topped the boo-list in terms of unanimity and decibel count, followed closely by John Terry, then a little further behind, Frank Lampard, with Stephen Gerrard, Wayne Rooney and Gareth Barry vying for the wooden spoon. Indeterminate little boos for them, as though no-one really wanted to boo them but felt they ought to, the boos, however, roughly equalled by the cheers. Cole was the only player to receive the distinction of being booed every time he touched the ball in the first half an hour.

Half-time was generally greeted with boos, though England were bright in the first twenty-five minutes or so. Changes in the second half brought cheers and some confusion. No Cole, no Terry, no Lampard? What was the point of coming to the match if you couldn't boo them? Were there other players on the pitch? Why couldn't they get off and let the guilty simply stand there in the centre circle a while or do a few laps of the pitch so you could concentrate on the boos? What is football coming to?

When Rooney left the pitch he received a few more half-hearted boos but some cheers too. The fact is people rather like him. When Gerrard finally left he was given a standing ovation - but he had scored two great goals by then.

The couple next to C were dutiful booers but their hearts weren't in it. The girl was in ecstasies when Gerrard scored his first. She was generally smily throughout whenever I looked her way, so the whole thing was a kind of pantomime that had to be got through. She - like most of the crowd including the main, more determined booers - really wanted to like the team, though it is obvious they find Cole and Terry particularly hard to like.

Lots of girls and children at the game. Over 72,000 people.

*


The papers seem to be saying 4-3-3 but the truth is Rooney was up front pretty well on his own in the first half. He didn't look particularly happy there, or at any time. He wasn't particularly mobile either, though that improved as the first half wore on. We thought he'd scored after three minutes but it turned out to be offside so his mood didn't lift. I am not at all convinced he is a spearhead centre forward - he is much better moving onto a defence rather than with his back to it, and that became clear once Zamora was introduced in the second half. Rooney was moving freely and was almost enjoying himself. He wants to be active and involved and is a marvellous passer of the ball. I would always play him just behind a big, strong, fast, or alternatively small, nimble, fast centre forward. Rooney and Zamora looked a good combination. My impression was that Rooney wasn't looking forward to this game but it had to be done and over. Life will go on from here for him

Zamora did extremely well when he came on. He had control, was fast and threatening, could hold the ball up, and drew the defence whichever way he went, clearing space for Gerrard when Gerrard's own position changed in the second half. Zamora was a definite plus. Persevere with.

Gerrard was decent in the first half though stuck out on the left (!) to leave Lampard and Barry holding the middle. Once moved into a more central advanced position in the second half he looked far better. The first goal was a long range curler into the top right, the second was hard to see from where we were but looked damned clever. But he was buzzing in the area about ten yards from the box, picking up loose balls and passes. I hardly dare say it but he looked better once Lampard was off and he no longer had to stick to the left-sided plan.

It was hard to tell about Adam Johnson as he was generally on the far side of the pitch. Missed a good chance early on and that might have affected him. He took all the dead balls and was not wonderfully impressive, but grew into the game as it went on and looked ever more confident and dangerous. Another one to keep and persevere with. I think he has terrific potential.

Kieron Gibbs took the place of Cole and was remarkably impressive. He won his tackles, made good runs, was fast, beat people and linked very well with both Young and, later, Milner. I wouldn't worry about the left back position for a while. He is slighter than Cole but looks just as gifted. Definitely to persevere with.

Theo Walcott was wonderful much of the time. He clearly had the beating of his man, moved inside or outside with ease, was fast and dangerous. Potentially a great player. I suppose he had to be replaced with Ashley Young if Young was going to get a game, but Walcott is the more gifted. Young was good though not quite as good as Walcott had been. Lacks confidence.

Jagielka looked comfortable with or without Terry beside him. He got into a bit of a muddle with Dawson once or twice once Dawson had replaced Terry (who had been all right, but then he wasn't up against a particularly fast forward line). The Hungarians did threaten in the second half and the defence came under strain. Glen Johnson, who seems a rather mercurial player, now wonderful, now dangerously poor, did well enough. but once the Hungarian team started switching positions and running off each other, it wasn't out of the question that they'd score again - and almost did when Gera, the best of the Hungarians, got through one on one but Hart saved.

Hart looked fine though there wasn't much for him to do. He has to stay there now and be number one.

Who have I missed? Milner was busy when he came on, Wilshere had seven minutes. Barry was good enough as a defensive midfielder. For me, the most memorable performances were Walcott, Gibbs and (second half) Gerrard's. General conclusion? I would play as follows, first choice then alternatives in brackets:

Hart
G. Johnson (?)- Jagielka (Ferdinand)-Terry (Dawson /Ferdinand)-Gibbs (Cole)
Barry (Lampard /Wilshere)-A. Johnson ( Lampard /Young)
Gerrard-Rooney
Walcott (Young)-Zamora.

That is a revolutionary 4-2-2-1-1, in other words a form of Christmas tree based on 4-4-2, that becomes 4-3-3 when either Gerrard or Rooney move right up. Occasionally, on very confident days, even 4-2-4. Play Gerrard central high up the park, Rooney switching with him, just in front of him ideally, one wide player high, another wide player moving back. I think Adam Johnson is potentially better than Milner.

When they appoint me as the next England manager I will put the plan into action with alacrity and success (or vice versa). There is the basis for a very good young team there without the baggage.

The Hungarians could be proud of themselves. A little weak in the tackle, a little too easily pressurised. but some nice fast skill in attacking midfield, moving into advanced positions when necessary, a couple of fairly tricky wingers (they've always got those) and an excellent captain figure in Gera. What they need is a more solid defence and one or two more substantial, confident, intelligent and aggressive midfielders. They have great travelling support so things may be looking up.

This from London, from Tom's flat. Off to Picasso at the Gagosian later in the morning before heading for home.

No blisters on left hand and England formation solved for the immediate future. A good day on the whole, and much better than expected. Thank you Tom, Helen and Rich!

The booing? The whole thing was a lot milder and more amiable than I had anticipated. But that is the England crowd at Wembley. It's a family occasion, as they say, a day at the Panto. Nothing too vocal. Not in front of the children or the ladeez. Very much a twenty-first century crowd. The Hungarian support has an air of potential Seventies about it. A touch of the New Nationalism that I have yet to get a feel for in the football context.

To boo or not to boo is a terrible question

So today we are off to London to see the match, and last night's late radio and this morning's early radio has ben busy discussing whether to boo the team or not.

First off, I loathe lynch mobs. Others clearly enjoy them. I never will.

Some say they have paid so they have a right to boo. Well if they paid to see the earlier matches before the world cup then they had no reason to boo. Maybe, if they happened to have paid to be in South Africa they were entitled to boo - then. Even so I would not have joined them, not if I had paid twice the sum.

Some think the booing is a punishment. Fine. The booers punishment will be that ever fewer people will want to play for the national team. Why should they? Several have withdrawn already. On this occasion a few young untried players will be playing for the first time. Their first taste of playing for their country will be to be booed or greeted with silence. They didn't play in South Africa and they will not be encouraged to play now. Best get them off on the right foot.

Those players who remain in the team are the main core of the team for the next few years. Perhaps they should be punished by never being invited to play again. So take out Gerrard, Lampard, Terry, Cole and Rooney. Do without them. Then live with it. Gerrard, of course, has said he too would boo if he were in the crowd. Fine, then boo Gerrard. My already low respect for him diminishes by the day, which does not mean he is not an outstanding footballer or that I would not pick him.

And Fabio, of course. The press have turned on him as they do on everyone in the end. They torture, chew, then spit out the managers one by one in rapid succession. The press are only interested in triumph or disaster. Nothing in between is interesting. Second is nowhere, third is even more nowhere. They don't want a 'successful' or 'respected' team. They want World Champions or European Champions. The rest is nothing. Capello was great before South Africa - he is a pathetic dolt now.

The press has always been contemptible, so I'll let that go. Frankly, I think booing is contemptible too. It is also abysmally stupid. People sometimes perform badly. They will not play better for being booed. They never do. They are destroyed or damaged by it. It is a very rare player or person who survives it, David Beckham being the most obvious example.

If booing is what you like doing then you will have plenty of opportunity to get used to it. It's the bed you have made. Lie there. No need to get up. It's a work of art! It's the full Tracy Emin!

The contemptible thing is that those who boo profess to support but actually prefer to indulge in a display of their inflated sense of being 'wronged'. That sense - the sense of entitlement - is one of the most horribly corrupting elements to gnaw away at any psyche, and God knows, the national psyche is in a pretty sick way.

Tonight's experience might well turn out to be more sociological than sporting. It will, I imagine, be interesting to have been there.

The reign of clear surfaces (2)

Two days down of the thousand years reich of my personal lebensraum and all is well so far, in fact becoming clearer and clearer- with only some 363,000 days to go to keep it that way.

Discoveries: unanswered letters; projects vanished into the past with not even a skid mark; postcards from the unknown and the dead; a greater order among certain of my papers than I had remembered; on the other hand a greater disorder among other of my papers than I had remembered; books I had forgotten I had; photographs of self thought suitable for public use cached in plastic wallets; first class postage stamps (ten of them) in two partly used booklets; magazines containing my work in terms of poems; magazines containing reviews by others of myself and by myself of others; magazines I seem to have kept for no reason; newspaper clippings of things I must have thought interesting; conference and festival packages complete with notes; small notebooks with names addresses notes remarks and unused lines of poetry; poems by others photocopied for use in classes or workshops elsewhere; letters received that ought to have been filed elsewhere (Cambridge University Library has the letters but there are more here, still some files of them); picture postcards unsent (three postcards I bought at the Serpentine Gallery have just gone up on my university office door, including a pure black one with the legend 'spot the dog'); some cassette tapes and some old floppy disks for old computers; brochures and maps referring to travels; one old etching by me, dated 1981, of Perdita in The Winter's Tale handing out flowers...

And then my father's things, now stowed upstairs waiting for new shelves and cupboards...

And then the cassette tapes that we have just stored on our brand new cassette shelves (lots of old radio programmes of mine, but also some fine recordings of Plath and Hughes and Betjeman and Larkin reading, all used for educational purposes - and forgotten pleasure)...

And the miscellaneous old maps and paperbacks, some in Hungarian, more books I had forgotten I had, a couple with corners that look as though they'd been gnawed by mice or possibly rats, but just as likely by Pearl who eats paper and card by way of revenge...

*

I imagine life as some kind of sea-going vessel of reasonable size hauling behind it a series of ever more leaky boats full of such odds and ends, the last ones fading off into the distance in the fog. Once could cut them loose. One could simply cut loose. That is always a notional choice.

But that is the given condition of life anyway. Why turn it into a willed gesture? Let the poems be the things that are cut loose. Let them cross whatever seas they happen to be floating on, trailing whatever they trail. One arrived yesterday to be edited today. Go little... whatever you are.

England v Hungary: the Tebbit test

Our kind children have combined to buy C and I tickets to Wembley for the England versus Hungary match on Wednesday. It will be our second visit to the new Wembley, the first being the U-21 international between England and Italy, which was in fact the first game to be played there after its opening. That was a 3-3 draw, the first goal scored by Italy so quickly we missed it, but the views were good and the noise perhaps a little forlorn, but not without the odd pulse of support.

The match is, of course, my Tebbit test, a test I properly claimed to have passed in a poem called Preston North End (from An English Apocalypse, 2001). It was an important point of difference between my father and his Hungarian refugee friends. My father preferred England: his friends stuck by Hungary. Neither my father nor my mother were in the least patriotic as far as Hungary was concerned. Sometimes, I thought, it was with them as it was with Larkin and Coventry ('You look as if you wished the place in Hell'), but my father's closest friends were Hungarian, and whenever he asked about my latest literary exploits it was the Hungarian aspect that really interested him.

Maybe it was a kind of cussedness that made him dig his heels in about Hungary. The place had treated him very badly in the thirties and in the war - in effect the Hungarians did not regard him as Hungarian, it was the country cast him out, not the other way - and he never looked forward to going there. Though he did, with us once, and later. Not that he was the only exile to cast an angry eye back. There is a prose poem of the great expatriate Hungarian poet, Victor Határ that begins with an arraignment of the poet as a traitor to his country which he turns immediately round, wittily but with real fury, on Hungary.

The Hungarian football team of the last thirty years or so has been a shambles. I follow it to a degree and wish the team well, but the extraordinary Fifties, as well as the very good Sixties and early Seventies are long gone. I would like Hungary to have more pride and self-respect, though pride doesn't always suit it. The fascist right are the chief proponents of national pride and they are on an aggressive high there now. I can't regard going there as a pleasure while that is the situation - though dear friends and some literary business will always draw me.

In spite of myself I still feel an odd surge of something when I see the team in their red-white-and-green, the colours of the national flag. How deep these symbols go! All the deeper when you really don't know what sort of atavism they conjure or symbolise.

The heraldic: like the sound of the czimbalom.

Even the sound of the national anthem.

And then there is the colour of the soil. Things you can do nothing about.

But it is the England team - threadbare, rebuilding, wounded old-young England - I shall want to win. 'I know King Priam. I have lived in Troy.'

Sunday Night (and Morning) is... Max Wall

I only saw Max Wall's act on telly once or twice near the end of his career, but I have seen him do Krapp's Last Tape on film. An extraordinary career. This is from Wiki:

He is best remembered for his ludicrously attired and hilariously strutting Professor Wallofski. This creation notably influenced John Cleese, who has acknowledged Max Wall's influence on the creation of his own Ministry of Silly Walks sketch for Monty Python. After appearing in many musicals and stage comedies in the 1930s, Wall's career went into decline, and he was reduced to working in obscure nightclubs. He then joined the Royal Air Force during World War II and served for three years until he was invalided out in 1943.

Wall re-emerged during the 1950s when producers and directors rediscovered his comic talents, along with the expressive power of his tragic clown face and the distinctive sad falling cadences of his voice. He secured television appearances and, having attracted Samuel Beckett's attention, he won parts in Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape. In 1966 he appeared as Père Ubu in Jarry's Ubu Roi, and in 1972 he toured with Mott the Hoople on their "Rock n' Roll Circus tour", gaining a new audience. His straight acting gained him this review in 1974:

"Max Wall makes Olivier look like an amateur in The Entertainer at Greenwich Theatre...." (The Guardian, 27 November 1974)

I don't know about 'hilariously'. He is funny and something else. He is a figure from nightmares too. He is the Scissorman, The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, the Child Snatcher and Dr Caligari. He doesn't only make Olivier look like an amateur, he makes Peter Cushing look a pale imitation of Max Wall.

His last film appearance was in 1989 in the 12-minute movie A Fear of Silence, a dark tale of a man who drives a stranger to a confession of murder by answering only Yes or No to his questions; those two words, repeated, were his only dialogue. The film won a gold award in the New York Film and TV Festival. (Wiki)

Appeared with Mott the Hoople AND (apparently unsuccessfully) with Ian Dury who also had a touch of Max Wall about him.

As much poetry as comedy, I think.