Leeds United : Twilight of the gods

David Peace had a good idea, to take on the old Leeds, indeed so good that the phrase “the Damned United” has entered the language, but in imagining wild stuff about real people he was too cheap to do the phenomenon justice. As a Hollywood lawyer called Fred Leopold used to say, “If you have real people as characters they can have lattes and muffins but they can’t say, ‘Let’s go for a f**k in the bushes’.”

John Giles, for one, was duly compensated, financially and textually, for Peace’s excesses, and I’ve heard him say on Irish radio (I closely paraphrase here) that the book might impress the arty-farty crowd but it portrayed Brian Clough as a maniac and to football pros it was rubbish. (Elsewhere Giles has given samples of the creative nonsense, like holding up to ridicule the notion of Clough destroying Don Revie’s managerial desk.)  

Giles was probably right on that audiences score. At the same time, I’ve never bought his self-serving spin on the old days, like blaming the goalkeeper Sprake (discarded years before the Leeds fire blew out) for so many near-misses. Both times they were English champions, it’s striking that there wasn’t a narrow margin involved, and Leeds even lost the 1971 play-off for permanent possession of the Fairs Cup, after having won it twice.  

Neither did I ever buy Giles maintaining that the carry-on markedly associated with Leeds was a case of kill or be killed. Eamon Dunphy’s contemporaneous description of Leeds in the Seventies actually doesn’t contain any kicking or elbowing but is full of what is nowadays euphemistically known as playing on the edge. 

What’s rather poignant and almost Shakespearean, in contrast, is Giles’ account of visiting a dying Don Revie, who confessed,  

I should have let you lads play a bit more.  

In other words, it seemed like Revie knew the negative soul of his rule had been in the end a distraction, maybe even a tragic flaw, that usually kept Leeds from getting the benefit of the doubt in a tight finish (it’s what people like to call luck, when it’s not called cheating) and thereby from winning twice as many trophies as they did win.  

Last night, the Dickie Guy heroics for the then very lowly Wimbledon at Elland Road in January 1975 formed a memory revisited online (and now in colour) from when I was ten and soccer was something in black and white. On this occasion, two moments from the second minute of injury time stood out, particularly. The first was Frankie Gray having a wild kick at some poor non-league player as the ball ran out of play. Gray may just have been warming up for his fateful Paris challenge on the future tax dodger and jailbird Uli Hoeness, later that year, in the European Cup final. (Hoeness had to retire a few years later at just twenty-seven.) That incident has been overshadowed in the history of the game, and of that sordid (from all angles) match, by Terry Yorath’s earlier godawful foul on Björn Andersson, which was clearly captured on camera.  

One can fairly say that, apart from his failure to punish Leeds with a flurry of cards, Paris witnessed a masterly refereeing performance by Franz Beckenbauer. As for the lone Frenchman on the field, the man in black, if der Kaiser had told Monsieur Kitabdjian to eat a lump of dog shit that night, he would have said, Bien sûr! At any rate, the person I feel sorry for is the German TV employee who lost an eye thanks to a missile thrown from the Leeds crowd.

European football competition is often a cesspit and it has sometimes seemed to flourish on a German-Italian axis, as in the lifetime ban given too late to the Greek referee who saw off Leeds on behalf of AC Milan in the 1973 Cup Winners’ Cup final, and in the comically sinister touchline anecdote involving Helmut Haller, Clough’s sidekick Peter Taylor and a German ref, when Derby County were in Turin the same year. That story appears in Jonathan Wilson’s biography of Clough. 

Anyway, against Wimbledon, and despite the younger Gray’s kicking practice when the ball was gone, Leeds got the injury-time throw-in, from which Duncan McKenzie got on the end of a header from Yorath. McKenzie would be left on the bench in Paris (“The manager’s indecision is final”) but he scored thirty times in his two years at Leeds (1974-76) and, in this moment, he brilliantly set up the ageing Johnny Giles, whose legs couldn’t do anything with the late, late chance.  

Long afterwards I heard Giles on Irish radio dismissing McKenzie as “not a real player” but the latter had already got in a humorous dig at the reinvented grandfatherly pundit. It came in an interview with Danny Kelly on Channel 4’s short-lived Nineties show, Under the Moon. 

Broken bones, they’d laugh at things like that… (interruption by Kelly) … Gilesy of course…

McKenzie’s ghosted autobiography (The Last Fancy Dan (2009)) furthermore suggested that Peace had got the mood and atmosphere at the club right, in Clough’s brief spell in nominal charge (1974), whatever about the details. Unfortunately just at the point (p. 79) where he is giving his verdict, a spot of word salad breaks the train of thought (“The film has in a number of errors in to turn it back into a novel…”).

Be that as it may, to me this clip with McKenzie, Giles and F. Gray has all the elements of the twilight of the gods. 

Noël Coward’s Diaries

2022

27 September, Tuesday 

Wet day. Still in the Forties in Noël Coward’s bizarre diaries. A lot of the lunches and dinners should have been cut. England may have been dreary then but that didn’t apply to his plate. Luxury abounds, and arse-licking the royals, and playing the piano for such bigwigs when the dinner conversation dies. 

The mention of the 1946 death of David Niven’s wife, who fell into a Hollywood basement in a game of hide-and-seek, recalled Hurd Hatfield telling me these people were not sophisticated (Hurd hung around with “the musicals crowd” instead, at the time). His point is backed by a passage from the autobiography of Oleg Cassini (Jackie Kennedy’s frock fancier), who was at the fatal dinner party. 

The problem was that everyone was in the same line of work, a very insular business. They worked very hard, all the successful ones, and there wasn’t time to know much beyond industry gossip. And so, when conversation waned, we often engaged in party games, especially at smaller dinners: charades, hide-and-seek, anything to pass the time. 

29 September, Thursday 

The story of the connection between Noël Coward and Peter Collinson is touching. A lost boy of twelve finds a father figure who sticks by him and with whom he reunites twenty years later to make a classic film, The Italian Job. 

14 October, Friday 

Noël Coward – usually sensible, often wise but only rarely deep (e.g. on Churchill and Beaverbrook as old men). He was on this earth to enjoy himself. Of his posse, it’s clear Marlene Dietrich was best appreciated in small doses. 

16 October, Sunday 

Very wintry. I was thinking of W. S. Maugham in the South Seas and the contrast with Coward. What sticks in my mind about A Writer’s Notebook is the appearance of so many marooned white men drinking themselves to death and/or retirement, whereas Noël was only out there to enjoy himself. A few pages later it becomes clear how Coward in the early Sixties grew to despise Maugham and his legal antics v. his only child, despite the old man having already appeared occasionally as a benign old codger. It inspires N. C. to reread Cakes and Ale (“Much malice and no heart”). 

23 October, Sunday 

In my first remarks on Coward’s diaries, I used the word “bizarre” and that has returned with a bang in two places after six hundred pages. In 1965, he was in for a minor spot of plastic surgery but his surgeon collapsed and died after it. Twenty pages later he discovers he died himself, on the table, for forty-five seconds, a most unpleasant period in what was left of the surgeon’s time on earth. Noël even imagines the embarrassing headlines that must have gone through the poor man’s mind as those seconds ticked by. 

24 October, Monday 

N. C. found success early, in his mid-twenties, and on New Year’s Day in 1961 he concedes he’s had “a wonderful life” but it’s strange that there is just a single mention (the same number devoted to his father) to any struggle or hardship involved up to the point of making it. (Having been a child actor, he had known enough of “bedbugs and cheap digs and squalor”.) As a man always keen to avoid literary and actual squalor, he must have wanted not to reflect on that too much, not to mind write about it.  

13 November, Sunday 

I forgot to note his 1964 note about Nureyev’s table manners. He actually bit me during dinner, but it was only on the finger and didn’t draw blood. 

P.S.

What is also worth keeping here is a passage from a letter he wrote in late 1959, which acts as a preface for that year.

As one gets older one doesn’t feel quite so strongly any more, one discovers that everything is always going to be exactly the same with different hats on… Looking back… my personality only really changed once, and that was when I was twenty-four and I became a star and a privileged person.

The Low Life Highs of Jeffrey Bernard

Dr. John Flynn

I was walking along Cleveland Street the other day in a cold drizzle when I suddenly came across an amazing collage on the pavement which just about summed up the human condition to perfection. It comprised a pool of vomit, an empty beer can, some dog shit and a sprinkling of confetti.

– 3 January 1987

My favourite English writer finally got his name in lights in 1989 with the hit play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. It was largely based on his long-running column for the Spectator magazine. That column was also published in three collections – Low Life (1986), More Low Life (1989) and Reach for the Ground (1996) – though some notable omissions mean these are not the collected pieces.

In these books the style changes over time in one important respect. The earliest is perhaps the most uneven. Presumably written in more of a hurry, it…

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Isaac Newton

Historians of science often refer to the year 1666 as the annus mirabilis… It was during this year that Isaac Newton, returned to the protection of his mother’s house in Lincolnshire by the Great Plague of 1665… formulated… most of the basic concepts that transformed physics into a serious quantitative science. (Bernstein 1973:132).

In eighteen months, according to Bernstein, Newton drew up his basic laws of mechanics and the calculus, differential and integral, for working out their consequences, as well as the law of universal gravitation and his optical discoveries, of which the most celebrated is his observation that ‘white light’ from the sun is dispersed by a prism into a rainbow.

Time-wise it was not that simple, however. Westfall (1994:38-40) shows that the notion of an annus mirabilis is mythical (i.e. false history); that Newton came and went from Cambridge in that period, chiefly to get money it appears; and that, more importantly, a focus on the Plague distracts from the continuity of his development, before and after 1666.

Why then the myth (i.e. sacred tale) of an annus mirabilis? We can readily identify the theme of the mythic hero (see Campbell, 1993) obtaining revelation in a wilderness from the image of Newton’s enforced retreat to Lincolnshire. That Woolsthorpe constituted a wilderness is proven well enough by Newton’s alienated behaviour when stuck there, especially as a youth. As for the trials suffered in this wilderness, Rankin (1993) gives us a graphic description of the route leading to discovery. Isaac does not spare himself in researching the phenomenon of colour. His practical experimentation is carried as far as staring at the sun (until he almost goes blind) and sticking blunt needles in behind his eyeball to see the effect. He finds that everyone else has misunderstood the fundamental nature of light (Rankin 1993:91). Newton instead finds it is the colours themselves which are pure, and they are seen not by modifying white light but by splitting it into its components.

Nonetheless it is the story of the apple which is of most interest from the Plague period. The most famous mythic element, it is also the overriding and often the only association the general public makes with Newton. According to Westfall (1994:51) the story of the apple is too well attested to be thrown out of court. He interprets its mythic meaning as a vulgarization of universal gravitation by its treatment of it as a bright idea, a flash of insight, the effect of which plays on the Judeo-Christian association of the apple with knowledge.

Nowhere, though, does he mention the aspect of the anecdote which seems to have overtaken our consciousness as the story has evolved. Rankin (1993:88) literally gives us a graphic representation of this aspect with his drawing of an apple hitting Newton on the head. No matter what the origin of this distortion, therein perhaps lies the key to the story’s resonant appeal, which resembles that of the death of Aeschylus when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise on it.

The moral of each story seems to be circumspection. The very discoverer of universal gravitation gets caught out by its operation when the real world makes its presence felt once more. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud gives us a plausible explanation of why such a situation may be found comic.

Under the heading of ‘unmasking’ we may also include a procedure for making things comic with which we are already acquainted – the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs. The unmasking is equivalent here to an admonition: such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me. (1991:263)

Freud also states that the ‘comic of situation’ is extracted from the relation of human beings to an often over-powerful external world (1991:257). Bodily needs of course include the need to avoid falling objects and Newton’s discovery of the way this phenomenon works may be perceived to be prompted by a failure to keep that in mind. Hence the existential need for circumspection.

At this level, the extent of Newton’s discovery is thus of secondary importance. The image of the apple hitting Newton’s head suggests to us something about mass assimilation. It is slapstick in the history of ideas – the banana skin route to discovery, if you will. It would of course be absurdly superficial to restrict our analysis to examples of Newton’s symbolic resonance which derive only from such anecdotes, for there is also the metaphorical meaning(s) of the actual science, and this is just as important as the echoes caused by Newton’s persona.

At this point let us turn to the Principia of 1687. Mass, force and motion are therein defined. The whole is constructed in Euclidean fashion with a rigorous logical structure of Definitions, Axioms (laws), Propositions, Lemmas (assumptions), Corollaries and Scholia (explanatory notes) (Rankin 1993:120).

Perhaps the only example from the above group to have entered everyday speech is the third axiom which commonly appears as the statement, To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is what we may term Newton’s proverb.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud asserts that superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble (1975:323). The partial nature of this equation suggests that unfounded belief, however judged so, can often coincide with (and obscure) the existential expectation of hassle but, at the same time, allow the latter to find autonomous expression in statements such as Newton’s axiom. If so, the proverb can be seen to appeal to the same level of consciousness as the story of the apple.

Concerning the gigantic leap made by Newton in the Principia with regard to understanding the mechanics of the universe, let us first outline the materials he had to work with, in terms of pre-existing scientific knowledge. From Copernicus he took heliocentric theory; from Kepler the Three Laws on the motion of the planets, the concept of gravitation and the cause of tides; from Galileo the behaviour of falling and projected bodies; and from Descartes the concept of rectilinear inertia in motion. We can take Kepler’s laborious discovery of the Mars ellipse as an example of the limitations of pre-Newtonian developments. Kepler’s result was essentially an empirical observation. It had little predictive power. There was no way, for example, to account for why the planets moved in ellipse or account for why other objects, like projectiles, did not (Bernstein 1973:30).

Through his invention of the differential calculus, Newton could define velocity and acceleration at any point along an orbit. This acceleration is caused by the force(s) acting on the orbiting object and Newton thereon produced the ‘differential’ equation F = ma, relating force to mass and acceleration. In order to specify the force, Newton produced a mathematical expression for the force of gravity. This is the law of universal gravitation which states that every mass attracts every other mass with a force that is proportional to the product of the masses involved and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Newton inserts this expression into F = ma and solves the equation by ‘integration’, which he also invented. Integration enables a summing up of the effects of the infinitesimal pieces of the orbit. The solutions yield the particle orbits and Newton was able to show, with his expression for gravitation, that the only possible orbits are conic sections: ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas.

Newtonian mechanics was devised to describe motions of objects that move much more slowly than the speed of light and, for such objects, it gives almost the same results as the special theory of relativity. Its huge practical success, combined with the fact that the apparently ‘fixed’ stars, the motions of which are very slight when viewed from Earth, provide a stationary frame of reference adequate for most of its problems, meant that its theological underpinnings with regard to absolute (i.e. fixed) space and time (i.e. in the consciousness of God) tended to be ignored by Newton’s successors.

All we are left without then is a set of relative motions. Absolute space, motion and time are metaphysical (i.e. attribution of meaning) notions which derive from earthly experience but clearly not in the crude sense by which the earth seems flat and the sun appears to travel across the sky.

Before we explore further the implications for symbolization of such technical detail let us bring in another anecdote which also appeals to the empirical mindset but again at a much less technically sophisticated level. Westfall (1994:197) grants that this incident may have really occurred but it is Rankin who describes it more succinctly. It concerns Newton’s position in the aftermath of the overthrow of King James II in 1688. Newton was rewarded for his anti-Catholic stance with a seat in the Parliament which decided the Revolutionary settlement. He had an impeccable voting record but spoke only once. Feeling a draught, he asked an usher to close a window (1993:139).

One does not have to think hard to recall other anecdotes which act as parallel metaphors employing bathos. There is Plutarch’s image of Diogenes the Cynic’s sole request upon receiving a visit from Alexander. I would have you stand from between me and the sun (1939:473). In Plutarch’s account, such a reply only prompted Alexander to say, Were I not Alexander I would be Diogenes.

Then there is Samuel Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley’s view that the world exists only to the extent that we perceive it. Kicking a large stone, he said to Boswell, “I refute it thus” (1979:122).

Thirdly, there is the celebrated reply of Dr Jowett’s unknown Oxford undergraduate to the question, in the course of a lecture on the Stoics, as to if a man could be happy even on the wrack. Perhaps, sir, a very good man, on a very bad wrack (Gellner 1985:86).

In comparing and contrasting the temptations faced by Buddha and Christ, Campbell (1991) identifies in the Christian image of Jesus being urged to throw himself from the roof of the Temple the danger to the mystic of what Jung (1990:146-47) calls “inflation” i.e. the temptation to believe one has surpassed the earth and its physical demands. Herein may lie the shared source of the resonance of these anecdotes, which all assert the primacy of bodily needs over mental functions, no matter how exceptional the human figure.

We can now begin to draw together the common mythic implications of the physics and the stories. In an important sense the practical success of the technical detail is of less interest here than the flaws. The sheer comprehensiveness of the physical and mathematical discoveries had a deep, convincing appeal in terms of explanatory usefulness but the retention of notion of absolutes points us towards the limits of that spirit of empiricism which Newton embodied.

In other words, it is as if Newton represents the pinnacle of achievement of a type of outlook in which material reality is viewed as something based on the earthly perspective. Thus the empiricist’s most basic task is to specify and analyse earthly conditions properly, by which, say, Aristotle will be shown to be wrong and Newton right.

To illustrate exactly what is meant let us borrow Plato’s simile of the cave (1987:255-59) in which he portrays the ordinary run of humanity as prisoners chained with their backs to the light, taking the shadows on the wall of the cave to be reality. Now, instead of having one of the prisoners (i.e. the philosopher) leave the cave and enter the light, as Plato asks us to envisage, let us instead picture another (the ‘empiricist’) being freed to examine the properties of these shadows, which have previously either not been remarked upon and simply accepted without reflection, or viewed as divine portents, or the work of providence, or even seen in terms of Aristotelian physics.

The empiricist determines that they are mere shadows and names them thus and attributes the cause of the phenomenon to the movements of bodies beyond the cave. Nevertheless, since our subject cannot leave the interior, he never directly experiences the perspective to be gained from entering the light. More significantly, he does not leave in imagination either and assumes that he has determined the true nature of reality from his collection and interpretation of data available from the cave, when it is really only the reality of his perspective he has uncovered, despite his identification of the source of the shadows as lying in another realm.

In this situation, for the empiricist to tell his companions that it is simply all God’s plan (teleology) is ultimately less misleading than his assumption of the universality of the cold and damp conditions of the cave, of which his companions are only too well aware, if ignorant as to their real causes. Indeed this awareness may well be expressed in cave anecdotes among the prisoners which become fondly quoted in a manner equivalent to the honour accorded by Plato’s prisoners to “those best able to remember the order of sequence among the passing shadows and so… best able to divine their future appearances”. Moreover, the attribution of the workings of physical phenomena to supernatural causes at least admits an alternative, if ineffable reality, whereas the assumption that observation is ‘pure’ does not because it neglects to admit to being a mere perspective.

It would be wrong, though, to try to imprison Newton’s scientific imagination in induction, but, rather than employ his Unitarianism or his devotion to alchemy to make him look less uniform in his means of apprehension, let us quote instead his well-known late summation of his life.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Westfall 1994:309)

To what does this passage correspond, symbolically? According to Campbell (1991) the first of four essential functions of mythology is to elicit and support a sense of awe at the mystery of being. More practically, Freud states that among tendentious jokes the rarest class is that of the sceptical joke, which attacks not a person or institution but “the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions” (1991:160-61).

Whereas the relatively common cynical joke or anecdote denigrates inflation and abstraction by an emphasis on the primacy of material needs over mental functions, the sceptical joke has as its “more serious substance… the problem of what determines the truth”. Outside Western culture there is an example from Chinese philosophy which metaphorically expresses this dilemma as vividly as any. It concerns the sage who, when asleep in his garden, dreams he is a butterfly, and is prompted by his experience to wonder is he really a butterfly who dreams he is a man?

A common thread links the appeal of anecdotes such as the story of the apple to the assumptions underlying the English empiricism of which Newton was the outstanding figure. This connection centres on the primacy given to the earth’s conditions and both degrees of apprehension parallel each other in two ways.

The popular wisdom reflected in the appeal of Newton anecdotes is analogous to the scientific wisdom inherent in an empirical approach to the gathering of knowledge. Empiricism is an outlook that stresses the priority of the accumulation and analysis of data. Nevertheless, just as popular wisdom can combine practical representations of problematic contexts with superstitious explanations of their meaning, so empirical methods can mask insidious and unwarranted metaphysical assumptions.

In other words, cynical popular wisdom and empiricism as a theory share strengths and weaknesses and differ from each other really only in the degrees of their technical sophistication and metaphysical explicitness. Thus Newton’s references to God are more scientifically harmless, in a God-made-everything-but-this-is-how-it-works sort of way, than the in-built metaphysics whereby the physical has become the metaphysical, even though that too depends on one’s perspective.

Therefore to reconstitute one’s material circumspection in terms of a fear of divine retribution or caprice, or plain bad luck – which is usually a euphemism for some injustice or else denotes failure by a narrow margin – is actually quite ingenuous, as is Newton’s alchemy and Biblical chronology, on which Bernstein quotes from J.M. Keynes’ essay Newton the Man.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. (1973:135)

Though Keynes rightly demolished the then-reigning image of Newton as the ‘complete’ empiricist, two important points need to be made. Firstly, Westfall (1994:154) shows that alchemy helped Newton to conceive of action at a distance which, though since shown to be technically untrue, was essential for his theoretical structure. More importantly, it is clearly wrong of Keynes to imply that metaphysics in science ended with Newton, when it never ends as long as observation continues.

We have also argued that the less commonplace ability to transcend in imagination the effects and implications of the earth’s physical conditions is evident not only in mystics but also in diverse phenomena such as sceptical jokes and Newton’s boy-on-the-shore simile. In the end then we are left with a conception of Newton as still the greatest savant of the way this world physically works, yet in the end also as one capable of at least metaphorically representing the possibility that he had got hold of the wrong end of the cosmic stick, so to speak. In other words, he is the chief symbolic embodiment of ‘hard’ reality in our intellectual history and yet his example also pushes us to grasp the limitations of such reality.

Bibliography

BERNSTEIN, Jeremy (1973) Einstein Fontana, London.
BOSWELL, James (1791) The Life of Samuel Johnson Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979.
CAMPBELL, Joseph (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces Fontana, London, 1993.
CAMPBELL, Joseph (1964) Occidental Mythology Arkana Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991.
FREUD, Sigmund (1905) Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991.
FREUD, Sigmund (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1975.
GELLNER, Ernest (1985) The Psychoanalytic Movement Paladin Books, London.
JUNG, Carl G. (1990) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology Routledge, London.
NEWTON, Isaac (1704) Opticks Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1979.
PLATO The Republic Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987.
PLUTARCH Plutarch’s Lives (Vol. II) J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1939.
RANKIN, William (1993) Newton for Beginners Icon Books, Cambridge.
WESTFALL, Richard S. (1994) The Life of Isaac Newton Cambridge UP.

Dawson and Dickens

She would never know the anguish of that smut-faced child, as kiddie after kiddie was chosen by the adults living in the evacuation area, leaving him alone on the pavement with a shabby holdall… Eventually a policeman and a grim-faced official almost bullied a couple into taking him…

It may be another piece of Freud apocrypha that no one ever lost money on a different kind of smut. Still, even on the strength of mime and mimicry, Les Dawson’s art was far more than double entendres and fossil gags, although the “policeman’s boots type of joke” (Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill) turns up in his autobiography A Clown Too Many in the form of a tanked-up Les getting sick on a policeman’s trousers.

Yes, the book is sometimes a bit flowery and now and then the descriptions are padded with mother-in-law material. It’s a life that’s dog rough in places. But it’s never dull. It’s also epigrammatic, surreal, macabre, hilarious and moving.

For Raymond Chandler there was no complete man without at least a touch of vulgarity and Orwell thought the smutty postcards of his essay gave necessary expression to the “Sancho Panza” or “worm’s eye” view of life, which he saw as a mood that had been suppressed in English literature early in the nineteenth century.

His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures.

Though each of these itself is paradise, when taken in a moderate amount of moderation, this remains a rather tame understanding on Orwell’s part. Of turning a spiritual and professional corner onstage one night in the Sixties in Blackpool, Dawson writes

I glared at the unfeeling audience, and I went on glaring at them with something akin to hatred. After what seemed an aeon, somebody chuckled, and then somebody else. I made as if to see who was at the back of me… “Who the hell’s come on?” The laughter began to grow … “Dawson’s the name, I’m about as famous as Lord Godiva.” … “Do you think I care?” … It was my night… I was one of them. Fed up, sick of society, I belonged to them… I don’t recall driving home at all, but I do remember stopping once on the moorland road… urinating into a bush and shouting, “I bloody did it.”

Les Dawson was born into grime, an only child in the Manchester of the early Thirties. As for the seemingly effortless reproduction of comical Yorkshire speech on the page, the Mancunian Les must have enjoyed that, when giving ink to his stories about their nightclubs. On his mother’s side the family was entirely Irish and, whenever his grandmother had “me tipple” of drink taken, she would end up singing, They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.

In early adulthood he had a string of perversely inspiring Dickensian day jobs. One story sees him trudging through snow to a smelly hovel in order to fix a rusty washing machine but then finding a lost Christmas pay packet that’s stuck in a knackered vacuum cleaner. These jobs he combines with years of night slogging on the northern club circuit, with the attendant awful digs thrown in for any man who cannot get home.

Yes, yes, there I am on the bill at just about the height where dogs find it easy to urinate…

The swirling fag fug…

… the nights when club audiences had booed me off; I remembered the time bottles were thrown at me; the times when I’d stood… with sweat dripping down my suit as I battled to be heard…

Several other thespians were sitting glooming over their fate in what passed for a living room, and when the landlady introduced me, they merely grunted and turned back into statues.

The curious fact that Orwell never stresses the comedy in his long essay on Dickens, nor all that is allied in the macabre and grotesque, is typified when he mentions Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. This is made without any reference to the obvious conclusion that the relevant chapter is played for laughs.

“‘Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place tonight,’ Mr Weevle rejoins. ‘I suppose it’s the chops at the Sol’s Arms.’ (…) Mr Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; ‘I don’t think… they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.’”

Les himself ends several portraits with a coda about how a person died, usually unnaturally. He makes much mention too of his own “cowardice” yet, like many an unwillingly tough man, he imposes himself only after extreme provocation. Comedy meets desperation, as in when the grown Les is forced into gallantly tackling a pair of burglars on behalf of a female neighbour.

… we grappled in silence with only fear as the referee.

Having subdued one, he uses a foot to trap the other, who is hiding in a closet. The most significant fight has, however, come at the age of eleven but, like the account of the school fight in Camus’ The First Man, it leaves him more than anything disgusted by this awful world.

Again and again the fists rained upon my face and chest, and I did not retaliate… I tried to back away, only to be pushed by the crowd into the path of my adversary. Then I hit Dunn with one punch and it was over… Nobody said a word to me, the crowd about-turned and left the scene. Dunn staggered to his feet and shook my hand; he, too, remained silent, and at last alone, I sat and cried.

Some people have presumed a lot of the book’s material (e.g. the Paris job, tinkling on a piano downstairs in a brothel) had to be at the very least embellished but one should note the style and tone never vary between incident and reflection. His extraordinary German experiences alone, thirty years apart, would make a fine play or film. His first stint there, as an army conscript in 1950, makes life in Germany then seem almost as dodgy as it was in wartime. For his second, in West Berlin, the only notable addition was the presence of TV cameras.

The audience was in an uproar; they… thought it was part of the act; little did they know it was a fight to a flour and water death. (…) Kenny Ball staggered on in a cloud of alcohol and wailed into a jazz number…

Les fared better at the other end of the Axis while in Hong Kong. In response to the appearance of his character Cosmo Smallpiece, a crowd of silent Japanese tourists exploded, then rose to their feet en masse to copy his gestures and facial expressions.

As for triumph and disaster, the hard-drinking Les had his own characteristic take on both of Kipling’s impostors.

… if disaster was inevitable, why not meet it with a tum full of the blender’s art?

Triumph in its turn meant all those years on TV when somehow he could hardly put a foot wrong, while attracting audiences of nine or ten million.

The following week I hired a penguin from a zoo, and all it did was waddle on to the stage and stand next to me. I ignored it completely and the audience fell about.

PS

Though generous with his time, his encouragement and his share of the limelight, Les gives an honest Dickensian nod to his meanness with money (outside his family) when recounting a list of his crimes and bungles as an apprentice electrician.

That he did cheat his workmates of two pence per person by buying meat pies cheaper from another shop.

Peter Scott, as in Gentleman Thief

Photo © PA

Peter Craig Gulston AKA Peter Scott (1931-2013)

1995

24 November, Friday

Peter Scott was on the Late Late Show, on a different level altogether from Gay Byrne, the audience and the idiots who rang in to give out. As Scott replied, you don’t get rich from robbing prefabs in Catford.

2001

13 March, Monday

I think John Aspinall died last year. First I ever heard of him was when Peter Scott (Gentleman Thief, I must get that book) described his great pleasure in “robbing that bastard Aspinall”. He’s easiest to refer to as “the guy with the zoo” but, reading Alan Clark, I see a footnote on p. 85 says he actually had two of them. Clark was friendly with him and James Goldsmith. Remember that pathetic ‘artist’ who topped himself after Goldsmith pronounced a sentence of social death on him for drawing a picture for a paper showing the Mayfair set i.e. Goldsmith and Lucan at the same table. Dying of cancer at 64 must have been such a blow to Goldsmith’s pride. 

2015

12 June, Friday

Lyon

In the garden of the Musée des Beaux Arts I came to the part of Gentleman Thief where he robbed “that bastard” Aspinall (the one with two zoos). In L’Antidote last night I realised it’s one of those books that, a quarter into it, I regret there are only three quarters left…

I’m just past the half-way point of Gentleman Thief, having finished the chapter where he impaled himself on a railing. It’s an extraordinary book, even allowing for the odd sleazy sexual episode. His fondness for fellow Irish people is a constant; he has rejected* the bigotry in his Northern Presbyterian background. More importantly, the book is constantly exciting, constantly surreally funny.

When I got back to the hotel a bunch of Americans were trying to check in. A woman among them turned to me and asked was there a lift, as they had “boxes and boxes” of wine outside. I said there wasn’t but didn’t bother adding that I was in the wrong room. Transporting a sensationally heavy cellar up a winding stair was their own daunting mission, should they choose to accept it and not just leave the wine shop where they parked.

14 June, Sunday

By three I had fewer than a hundred pages of Gentleman Thief to go. Of course he was mad; he looked more depraved the older he got. The photos confirm that much, though I liked him when I first saw him, on the Late Late Show twenty years ago. The madness went beyond having the soul of a clown. He suffered some terrible injuries at it but it’s clear too he had extraordinary energy and toughness, whatever drove them. It involves a tweak to Nietzsche. Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself – and/or the “fleshpots” he made his life’s work. Yet he wasn’t a violent criminal, though capable of fighting. Who in his right mind makes a base of a tennis club? In his own words, every man has his own game.

16 June, Tuesday

A small by-line under a picture of Peter Scott reveals his was the Daily Telegraph’s most-read obituary of 2013. He would have liked that corroboration of his assertion that millions had secretly cheered him on.

2018

15 October, Monday

A chapter into the memoir of the Bolton Forger since last night (“a one-man Renaissance” according to Waldemar Januszczak). Early on, Greenhalgh mentions visiting the Manchester Museum in 2004 with nothing in particular in mind and this reminded me of Peter Scott, except that the former was generally looking for something to fake, the latter for something to nick.

*At one point in the book he tells a finger-pointing Belfast uncle that becoming a thief had been a small price to pay to escape them.

It was something I read in a book

For me at least, the best moment of all in Inspector Morse is the last line of the 1992 episode Happy Families, in which he’s hounded for his lack of ignorance by the tabloid scum, who then want to know how he has solved the case.

“It was something I read in a book.”

“It was something I read in a book.” – Morse – YouTube

That moment always takes me back to the same year (1992) and to London…

31 July, Friday

I called to see an agent called David O’Leary at Lansdowne Court near Holland Park. He’s a gentleman who went to Trinity and he’s aged about sixty. He agreed to read my stuff. When I left his place I just had to walk so I headed down Holland Park Avenue under the shade of the plane trees on a glorious morning. I’m satisfied with having chanced my arm. (He praised me for doing just that.) He said he would even write an appraisal.

13 August, Thursday

O’Leary doesn’t want it. He wrote that despite some good writing and accurate observation, he found the overall effect to be rather depressing.

Anyway, that was still a kinder review than that produced by three charmers (of my unfortunate acquaintance) in a Dublin flat, a little later in the Nineties.

When stuck for toilet paper, they cut up a typescript that had been left there, in order to wipe their arses.

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Brodsky in Rio

What made me stick with Joseph Brodsky’s On Grief and Reason was the enjoyable description of how he was ingeniously robbed in Rio while on a Seventies culture junket. There was a dog involved. It was trained to distract gringo sunbathers by tugging at their pants.

There is a pattern among Russian oracles – at least those sheltered in the West – in that they seem incapable of imagining how the world looks to the more circumspect, little-guy countries. It isn’t only Russians either but anyway, there was even a time, back in Leningrad, when Brodsky shared Solzhenitsyn’s (and Nabokov’s) deranged enthusiasm for the Vietnam War but, by the time of this book, there was merely the condescension of a crackpot scheme set out in an open letter to Václav Havel. It was envisaged that Havel would enforce by decree (“although I don’t think your parliament would object”) the serialization of the following writers in Czech daily newspapers.

By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may turn at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people.

It now seems a little easier to answer the question as to what on earth Brodsky was doing with “four hundred bucks” on him at the beach in Rio. It remains a minor mystery why he had taken off his watch. (Did he not want a tan line on his forearm?) He wasn’t going for a swim, as the German consul had warned all these cultural gringos that two Hungarians had been eaten by sharks there the week before. Where did he think he was? At home in (non-Latin) America?

The other really instructive piece in this light is the strange meander around Kim Philby, about whom he openly confesses his ignorance.

A country, especially a large one, gets only two [options]. Either it’s strong or it’s weak… Who cares what country one grows up in…

Of Philby’s life… I know only the bare bones… intuition will suffice.

Why Philby did it is the most interesting question, not least from an Irish perspective. By that I mean asking what it really was that repelled Philby about Britain. That kind of concern however sails over the head of Brodsky who only offers a few trite remarks about English diffidence.

Brodsky’s hero was English. It was Auden, about whom Beckett occasionally voiced his irritation. For example, Beckett reasonably queried a well-known Auden line from the Thirties, about Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”).

What in the blazes is that supposed to mean?

The last piece in Brodsky’s book was written in memory of Stephen Spender but his hero and the “truly transatlantic texture” of his speech also feature prominently in it. As it happens, in Spender’s Journals there is a memorable line about Auden’s standing in Oxford in 1955, given the latter hid out in the States during the war.

I think that Auden has a hard time in the Common Room at Christ Church, where several of the dons twit him about being an American.

In other words, they were pulling at the pants of his post-war credibility, like that dog on the Copacabana. In their humour there was also a recognition that Britain no longer knew it all and had come down in the world, as America had risen, to be followed by Germany. It is the same humour evident in Jeffrey Bernard’s later vision of paradise, which sounds like somewhere not too far from Rio.

Sitting beneath the palms… I can hear the fizz of frying prawns, the dying hiss of a lobster and the rattle of a cocktail shaker and, with luck, the scream of a German tourist treading on a sea urchin.

A West Briton in Paris

The 2011 Guardian obituary for its own Peter Lennon included remarks on the making of the documentary for which he remains best known, at least in Ireland. It mentions “the not unkind but at the same time agonizing record of two days spent with a priest nominated by the archbishop’s office” and that line recalled the time the film was finally exhibited on Irish television, as a curious relic.

2006

16 May, Tuesday

I’m watching Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1968), which was heralded by a documentary on its making and reception last night. Just watching Michael Cleary sing The Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy to a ward of young women serves to remind one of something basic but not mentioned by Lennon – the sheer surrealism of life here (whether priest-ridden or in a time when priests are becoming extinct). Right now, Cleary is spoofing to some gravediggers. There was something rotten in the State indeed. But television lifted the veil of ignorance a long way.

As did the reduction in grinding poverty. By Lennon’s own later account, Samuel Beckett had told him not to bother with the film, as “they” were not “serious people”, which admittedly we are not. Why we are not is the subject of a different essay on this site, Blueshirts in Spain (see the link below).

In pandering to the laziest of misconceptions that exist among the English, Lennon interpreted Beckett’s advice to mean “when it comes to tough issues, my countrymen can be bafflingly skittish and unreliable” (in describing patriotism as a “truculent fever” it is only the patriotism of the colonized at which he sneers).

Though foolishly described by Emil Cioran as a complete Anglo-Saxon, Beckett in fact had not lost his Irishness, even to Lennon’s extent. Then again, he wasn’t writing for the English. His warning implied a wise Irish maxim (‘Don’t draw them on you’) but there is no sign that Lennon ever grasped his message about not inviting unnecessary hassle.

Any genuine understanding or portrayal of Ireland, kind or unkind, first requires a surreal eye, plus a grasp of a principle that is largely alien to the Saxon cultures. Reality should not be taken too literally. There are to be sure flickers of the surreal in Lennon’s memoir Foreign Correspondent (1995). One is his early description of Longford, which, given the resilience of local differences on this island, is unlikely to upset anyone who is not from Longford.

On Fair Day the main street ran with shit. These midlands people were not so much slow as disinclined ever to get started. In my short stay… my main source of insight… was the courtroom. It was in Longford that I discovered why… my mother regularly prayed that we be protected from ‘schemes’… Judging by the courts, the people of Longford were a collection of feuding, barn-torching, spell-laying, litigious rascals very high in the art of scheming.

It has long seemed evident, here at least, that the greatest cultural division in Ireland is really between east and west. (Longford is closer to the west.) At the time of writing, the nation is keeping an eye on a popular scandal starring two indiscreet Galway college lecturers. Bamboozled by the buttons involved in a video call, they were recorded meanly and slanderously bitching about their students. Even the Guardian has covered the story.

At this juncture I must confess to finding the west of Ireland somewhat depressing and somewhere to be rarely visited. My favourite experience in the retelling stakes happened in a pub in Clare. It was a night in the wake of a wedding and the bride asked the best man to sing a song, according a tradition known as the noble call. She then made the diplomatic error of telling them I was from Waterford, on the south coast. Booing by the classy patrons ensued, thanks to a disputed hurling match (which Clare had won) five years earlier.

In general terms, if it isn’t something cheaply comical in the news from the west, it’s yet another medical ‘misadventure’ costing the State a fortune in the courts or it’s the burning down of some premises the most agitated among the locals would have preferred to remain derelict.

Before my re-reading of Foreign Correspondent after a gap of twenty years or so, the only elements I could consciously remember therein were (a) that a large part of it was devoted to the Algerian war’s bloody impact on Paris and (b) that there was a row in a bar between the author and Peter O’Toole, that the row was provoked by Lennon, and that Beckett had to intervene. That was not the only time Lennon caused hassle in the Falstaff. It turned out Beckett also had to step in after Lennon had incensed Jackie MacGowran with a (revealingly) “priggish” review of a one-man show.

Occasionally misleading about historical facts, this sloppily written memoir is mostly devoted to Paris in the Sixties. My favourite howler is a reference to Buster Keaton turning down “the part of Godot” but anyway, it was there Lennon lived after leaving Dublin (and Longford) behind. On his way he took a ferry from Newhaven on the English south coast. Heading to France (sometimes known as the Continent) he then refers to “the white tumbled wake of the ship stretching away softly to the mainland” at another low point of the pandering. It shows the reader early on that, in more ways than the nautical, he does not know his arse from his elbow.

Though he may not have been a resourceful chancer, he too was one, not that he ever acknowledges that archetypal Irish category as directly applying to him. In Paris, a man from Kilkenny tells him of a lifeline opportunity to work as a school assistant, which was available to British college students. Telling him not to worry about the British bit, the man then asks, in an incredulous manner, if he has no one at home to forge a student card for him.  

I remembered that Dublin abounded with chancers… and supposed I could find someone. “For God’s sake… can’t you chance it?”

Lennon got a student card back from Dublin in ten days, accompanied by an unsought fake professorial reference containing “a final masterly touch” in that it was written in green ink. In a contortion of logic, Lennon decides the French clerks processing his application thought Dublin was in the North and that the reference was thus the work of an eccentric professeur britannique.

Had he been capable of more profound reflection on his origins and compatriots, he would have seen the green ink for what it was. A flourish of exaggeration added just for the craic.

Blueshirts in Spain – Dr. John Flynn (wordpress.com)

Graham Greene in Kenya

Noël Coward found Graham Greene to be a somewhat disturbing character and humorously summed up his writing m.o. as follows.   

Sex, Catholicism, sadism, and back to sex.  

Greene went to Kenya in 1953 to report on the Mau Mau revolt. Is anyone else repelled by the turd-polishing of British colonialism evident in the Kenya chapter in his 1980 memoir Ways of Escape? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough time to reflect on the experience. Would he ever have similarly glossed over the activities of the Americans or the French?

Just look at this selection of quotes :

“The liberal administrator… had been honestly planning a land in which the position of the African would gradually, very gradually, improve…”

“…the old settler… surrounded by sixty thousand acres of his own ranching land…”

“The Kikuyu were not savage, they made good clerks and stewards…”

“Now the margin of profit was threatened… The Mau Mau stole and slashed, the best labour disappeared.”

“They had been settled, in some parts of Kenya, a third as long as the Kikuyu.”

The British land grab in Kenya had begun in the 1890s. The nature of this invasion prompted Winston Churchill to write privately in 1908 … “It looks like a butchery. If the House of Commons gets hold of it, all our plans… will be under a cloud. Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.”

“…unused land would one day have to be sequestered…”

“Even though the extreme conservative farmers were dying out they could not avoid all responsibility for what had occurred.”

“…somewhere… there must have existed that archetypal figure who would slap his servant’s face if he replied to him in English.”

The white settlers in Kenya were notorious for flogging their employees, as was their judiciary for turning a blind eye to it.

“… neither the trigger-happy East African Rifles, the European police nor the Home Guard came out of the struggle unstained.”

Even the right-wing Daily Mail (12/04/11) can elaborate starkly on this last Greene quote.

“The British crackdown was brutal and almost certainly what today would be termed a disproportionate response. Thousands of Kenyans died in the guerrilla fighting. A thousand were convicted of capital offences and hanged. Many more – perhaps up to 300,000 – suspected of being Mau Mau or even just associating with the insurgents were detained in camps where sanitation was rudimentary, food inadequate, and discipline often brutal and unrelenting.  Beatings are said to have been a daily occurrence. According to evidence in long-concealed official documents now being produced for a compensation court case in London, inmates were tortured, castrated and raped.”

The true moral of colonial war is only hinted at once by Greene, perhaps as flippantly as when he likens the conflict to Jeeves taking to the jungle, having sworn to kill Wooster. He touches on it when he quotes a priest being asked an awkward question by an African. Didn’t God… put the sea between us so that we shouldn’t interfere with each other?

The same moral is unfortunately absent from the American Apocalypse Now with its ending that echoes the way Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War makes Pericles sound like Hitler. It is because your resolution is weak that my policy appears to be mistaken.

At least it is crystal clear in one of the Rambo films, of all things, where Richard Crenna tells it like it is to a Russian in Afghanistan. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam. Now you’re gonna have yours.

In other words, get out.