When Kingsley Met Roald

 One last dip into Kingsley Amis's Memoirs...
He is at a party at Tom Stoppard's house in Buckinghamshire when one of the guests arrives, long after everybody else – and, unlike everybody else, by helicopter. It is none other than Roald Dahl, the monstrously successful children's author, and a little later Amis finds himself reluctantly closeted with him. Dahl immediately steers the conversation onto the subject of money. 'What you want to do,' he advises, 'is write a children's book. That's where the money is these days.' To prove his point, he tells Amis the jaw-dropping size of the advance he was paid for his latest one. However, Amis protests, reasonably enough, that he couldn't do it: 'I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got no feeling for that kind of thing.'
'Never mind,' replies Dahl, 'the little bastards'd swallow it.'
That, Amis swears, is exactly what Dahl said, verbatim. 
  Later, however, Mr Dahl changes tack and tells Amis that, 'unless you put everything you've got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids'll have no use for it', and more along similar lines, before, 'with a stiff nod and an air of having asserted his integrity by rejecting some outrageous and repulsive suggestion, the man who put everything into the books he wrote for the kids left me to my thoughts.' 
Amis concludes:
'I felt rather as if I had been looking at one of those pictures by Escher in which the eye is led up a flight of stairs  only to find itself at the same level as it started at.
  I watched the television news that night , but there was no report of a famous children's author being killed in a helicopter crash.'
Somehow one gets the feeling Amis didn't take to Mr Dahl. 
  For myself, as long-time readers of this blog might know, I loathe Dahl and his works, and count myself lucky that my own children proved largely immune to their charm. However, I recently watched, with the grandchildren, the 2009 film of Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, and I enjoyed it. My pleasure, I'm sure, was due less to Dahl's story than to director Wes Anderson's imaginative re-creation of it (in fact much of the film is Anderson's own invention). In particular, it was a joy to see proper crunchy hand-made animation (mostly stop-motion) instead of the usual slick and soulless computer-generated capers – and there were some great songs on the soundtrack. Heaven knows what Mr Dahl would have made of it...


  

Early Disclosers

 Twice recently – and many, many times in the less recent past – people I have only just met have, within minutes, informed me, in no uncertain terms, of their political affiliations. The first of the more recent declarations came when the man who was guiding me through the intricacies of keeping a listening diary for RAJAR (the radio audience research outfit – I had rashly agreed to record my listening for them) suddenly informed me, quite out of the blue, that he was one of the few who had voted Green in the last general election. He then, unprompted, told me why. As if I cared, let alone agreed... On the second occasion, it was a near neighbour, who, almost in the same breath as introducing himself to me, informed me that 'we' (himself and missus) 'are very left wing'. As he expanded on this, it became clear that he is some kind of Christian Socialist, one who takes seriously the absurd notion that 'Jesus was the first Communist'. Perfectly nice chap, but why did he feel compelled to tell me his political opinions with such alacrity. Why does anyone? The least interesting thing about most people is their opinions, and the least interesting of those are usually the political ones. But those who are so keen to declare their affiliations have, I notice, one thing on common: they are invariably of the 'Left'. I think this is in part because, unlike anyone of a conservative bent, they act on the assumption that all decent, civilised-seeming people must agree with them – how could they not? I don't recall anyone who could be categorised as conservative ever treating me to their political opinions on first meeting – partly as a matter of good manners, and partly, no doubt, because they know they are unlikely to find a kindred spirit in any gathering of 'thinking' or 'creative' people.
  Personally, I work on the assumption that nobody present is likely to agree with me, and this doesn't bother me in the slightest; I'm quite happy to be in a minority of one, to stay quiet and avoid the unpleasantness and sheer tedium of political debate. And I'm never going to fall out with anyone over their political opinions (unless they are blatantly antisemitic). But maybe I'm taking the wrong tack: maybe I should join the early disclosers and loudly declare on first meeting, 'My name is Nige and I am, like my father before me, a violent Tory of the old school.'  Not that I am, but it's what that socialist hero John Ruskin declared himself to be, in the opening sentence of his autobiography, Praeterita. But no, I'll keep quiet.
  Meanwhile, I was pleased to read that the new leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, numbers among her inspirations Thomas Sowell and Roger Scruton. It looks like a promising sign, but who knows?

Another Country

 It was on this day in 1959 – 65 years ago, when I was rising ten years old – that Britain's first stretch of interurban motorway was opened, inevitably by publicity-hungry Transport Minister Ernest Marples (that's him in the picture, looking on the latest of his works, and no doubt feeling the hand of history on his shoulder). The section that was opened on this momentous day ran from Junction 5 (Watford) to Junction 18 (Crick/Rugby). It was a nice little motorway, with soft shoulders, no crash barriers, no speed limits, no lighting – and, by modern standards, virtually no cars. It was a popular entertainment in those days to watch what traffic there was going by on these startlingly wide (three-lane) roads. Yet again I find myself reaching for that well-worn phrase 'another world' – but it was another world, or at least another country, before the motor car finally took over, ruining many of our town and city centres, and clogging those once half-deserted highways with nose-to-tail traffic at all hours of the day and night. When I was at school, many, probably most, of the teachers didn't have cars, and came and went by bicycle or bus; nowadays not only the teachers but many of the older pupils drive to and from school – and many of the younger ones are picked up by parents in cars, an almost unheard-of thing in my day. 
   I remember 1959 for two other notable innovations – the unveiling of the first Minis (the Morris Mini-Minor and the Austin Seven – and mini they were, tiny by today's standards) and the first hovercraft. Both British inventions and both manufactured in Britain. As I say, another world... 

All Hallows' Eve

 With the Hallowe'en festivities in full swing – bigger, brasher and more ubiquitous with every passing year – who better than R.S. Thomas to spoil the fun? Here he is, in a poem collected in No Truce with the Furies (1995), celebrating the season in his inimitable style...

Hallowe'en

Outside a surfeit of planes.

Inside the hunger of the departed

to come back. ‘Ah, erstwhile humans,

would you make your mistakes

over again? In life, as in love,

the second time round is

no better.’

I confront their expressions

in the embers, on grey walls:

faces among the stones watching

me to see if this night

of all nights I will make sacrifice

to the spirits of hearth and of

roof-tree, pouring a libation.

 ‘Stay where you are,’ I implore.

‘This is no world for escaped beings

to make their way back into.

The well that you took your pails

to is polluted. At the centre

of the mind’s labyrinth the machine howls

for the sacrifice of the affections;

vocabulary has on a soft collar

but the tamed words are not to be trusted.

As long as the flames hum, making

their honey, better to look in

upon truth’s comb than to

take off as we do on fixed wings

for depollinated horizons.’

                

        Happy Hallowe'en, y'all!

 

An Orgy with Muggeridge, and a Missing Wallet

 Kingsley Amis's Memoirs – his self-described 'allobiography' – continues to be tremendous fun, and really not all that different from a conventional autobiography, except for being better written and much funnier. He largely skirts two subjects: his writing and his sex life – certainly not his drinking, which is omnipresent, but put in some kind of perspective by the even more heroic drinkers who feature in the memoir: John Braine, George Gale, Philip Toynbee... Sex, or Kingsley's participation therein, seldom rears its ugly head, but there is a memorable scene in which Malcolm Muggeridge (prior to his canonisation as St Mug) breezily suggests having an 'orgy' in his flat, though only the two of them and Sonia Orwell are present. In the event, both the men prove too comprehensively drunk to make the most of the occasion. 
  Elsewhere, Amis sings the praises of America (as it was when he was there), a country he loved so much he thought seriously of settling there, and he is good on the differences between Oxford, his natural home, and Cambridge, which he did not take to at all in his short residence there. While at Cambridge, he has a letter from another temporary resident, the now forgotten novelist Andrew Sinclair, who has been bombarding Amis with his novels as each of them comes out. 'The letter politely suggested we should meet "in this port and nuts of the soul", i.e., I supposed, Cambridge, a phrase showing signs of hard work, though perhaps not hard enough.' Sinclair invites the Amises to visit him and his wife, but it turns out that, alas, they 'have the builders in', so to the Amises they come. Next time, Sinclair insists, it's his turn – but, sure enough, they still have the builders in, so Amis suggests meeting in a pub:
'When the drinks came, Sinclair plunged his hand confidently into his top inner breast pocket. As in a dream I watched that confidence vanish in an instant, to be as quickly replaced by puzzlement, disbelief, consternation. Soon he was doing an imitation of a free-falling parachutist frenziedly trying to locate his unpulled ripcord. Finally his movements slowed, ceased, and shame possessed him. "I must have left my wallet in my other jacket," he said.'
A common enough scene in Amis's work, but surely never better described. 

Leeds

Venice again! I spotted this luminous painting of the lagoon on the walls of the Leeds City Art Gallery, where, in a room dominated by high Victorian bombast and sentimentality, it stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. The work of John William Inchbold, a favourite of Ruskin's, it was undoubtedly the picture I would have taken home with me, given the chance. But there were other goodies to be seen on this brief visit, including several by John Atkinson Grimshaw (a Leeds man), that master of moonlight and urban crepuscule, Lady Butler's high-impact depiction of the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo (read all about it here), and William Orpen's The Studio [below], a virtuoso exercise in light and shade, which, seen close to, turns out to be composed of surprisingly dry dabs of paint. 

John William Inchbold was also the painter of that magical evocation of the light of early spring, A Study in March [below], which hangs on the walls of the Ashmolean.

As for Leeds itself, a city I hadn't visited in many years, I was greatly impressed, particularly by the architecture – a magnificent array of Victorian work, including fine shopping arcades and grand municipal buildings, and plenty of good stuff from the twentieth century (particularly the Thirties), with only a scattering of the usual ugly multi-storey blocks from more recent times. I was even impressed by a modern shopping arcade, Victoria Leeds, which looked to me like seriously good architecture, but maybe I'm going soft. I'll stop here. 

Another England

 Here's an image from another time – 1956, to be precise (which, as I remember it, was indeed another time, and England another place). It's an advertisement for visiting England, produced by the New York-based British Travel Association, and it shows the Swan in Lavenham, Suffolk, the picture-postcard village where, some years later, Michael Reeves's classic (and deeply disturbing) Witchfinder General was filmed. At the Swan, American visitors are assured, bed and a hearty breakfast – 'orange juice and steaming porridge, eggs and crisp bacon, buttered toast and jam and coffee' – are to be had for $2.40 a night (around £1 sterling). What's more, for $5 a day, gas and oil included, the visitor could hire a 'little English car', perhaps a quaint half-timbered Morris Minor. After that 'gargantuan' breakfast, the advert suggests taking to the road and visiting some other ancient English inns. The itinerary is daunting, taking in  Kent, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and London – and Paradise, the location given for the Adam and Eve pub, and not to be found in any gazetteer. Probably they mean the Adam and Eve in Norwich, which would involve a northward diversion. The British Travel Association, it seems to me, have somewhat underestimated the size of England, and overlooked the clogged state of the country's roads in the 1950s, when you'd be lucky to average much more than 20mph. Still, you could always stop at yet more pubs and sample the beer – described, not very enticingly, as 'interesting and plentiful'. 'The talk is good,' says the BTA optimistically, 'and it's in English. You'll be welcome to play darts and skittles and shove-halfpenny with the natives.' Well, it's a lovely idea of England, even if it bears little relation to reality, even in that far-off world of 1956.