Two Slim Volumes

 Well, I have finished Helena, and an interesting reading experience it was. It felt to me like a novel of two halves, the earlier chapters, in which Waugh was pretty much free to make it up as he went along (the facts being so few), seeming much more like fully realised fiction, while the later chapters, as the more nearly historical Helena comes into focus, are more synoptic, seen, as it were, from a greater distance and in a broader perspective. Compared to the first half of the book, they also proceed at a much faster pace, telling the big story briskly and effectively – but in a very different manner from the presentation of Helena's early years. Helena remains a convincing portrait of the Roman world at the time of Constantine's conversion (if that is what it was) and confirmed what I have often thought about the astonishing success of Christianity in so easily overturning classical paganism – that it was little short of miraculous. 
  And now I've moved on to another slim volume, purchased from the same excellent charity bookshop – The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (of whom I have only read The Fountain Overflows, which I greatly enjoyed). The Return of the Soldier has an intriguing premise: a soldier returns from the (Great War) front with a form of shell shock that has obliterated his memory of the previous 15 years. He has entirely forgotten his beautiful, if somewhat chilly wife Kitty, and he remembers his devoted cousin Jenny, who lives with Kitty, only as a childhood playmate. The love he does remember and yearns for is one of which neither wife nor cousin had an inkling – an inn-keeper's daughter, now a dowdy lower-class housewife, with whom he was briefly but idyllically in love as a young man. And now, thanks to his strange fugue, he still is.  What will happen when they meet? What will the women who love him do about it? Cleverly, West tells the story through the eyes of the cousin who adores our shellshocked hero, which gives an extra dimension to the narrative. It has certainly been a gripping read so far.

There and Back

 Yesterday I was obliged to go down to the sprawling megalopolis that is modern London, and out again to Heathrow to see Mrs N onto a flight for (ultimately) New Zealand. Although on the face of it all went smoothly, it was a grim experience. London seems to get noisier, more crowded, more alien and confusing every time I see it – such hordes of people ('So many, I had not thought death had undone so many'), all seemingly hurrying about some urgent private mission ('The creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it,' wrote Keats of a very much less populous city), so much noise and hustle, everything so hard to make sense of: what is the business of London? What are these people doing? Where does the money come from? It used to at least seem to make sense to me; now I find more and more things about London quite incomprehensible.
The view from the Heathrow Express was of acre after acre of mysterious box-like warehouses and 'hubs' of unidentifiable purpose, interspersed with vast construction sites building who knows what. Not so long ago much of this was Middlesex countryside; now it could be the outer sprawl of any city in the developed world.  London, a city I once loved, seems to have become foreign to me, a kind of Abroad but without the excitement or the pleasure. Perhaps I have become provincial? Am I a Mercian now? All I know is that coming back to Lichfield from London last night felt like a return to civilisation. And this morning I was cheered to see my first Ringlet of the butterfly year, on a scruffy grass bank in front of someone's house. That wouldn't happen in London. 

A Radical Act?

 'Collecting Old Books Is Now a Radical Act.' This headline in the magazine Spiked Online naturally caught my eye. The author, Philip Kiszely, argues that, with so much of the literature of the past – from Beatrix Potter to Roald Dahl, by way of Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming (Wodehouse has so far escaped, but is on the naughty step)  – being bowdlerised by the woke morality police within the publishing industry, the way to ensure the survival of those books as they were originally published is to buy them in unbowdlerised form and hang on to them, thereby 'doing [our] bit to conserve the culture'. And it will cost us next to nothing to buy up all those cheap paperback reprints from recent decades. 'Buying books is now a political act,' declares Kiszely, who advises us to be ready to hide those books away securely should the need arise. 'Who knows? In three years' time the sensitivity police may well be empowered to enter your house and audit the contents of your shelves. No kidding.' 
  Well, I guess he's not kidding, just overstating the case to give his piece more impact, but he does have a point. If books continue to be edited to conform to contemporary sensibilities, that is serious literary vandalism, and it could ultimately lead to the original versions becoming at best hard to find. It's nice to think that by enjoying ourselves browsing the shelves of second-hand bookshops we might ultimately be doing something socially valuable. Good for us.
  Here is a link to Kiszely's piece – 
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/25/collecting-old-books-is-now-a-radical-act/ 

The Great Man and A Hospital Visit

 Lichfield memorialises its most famous son in various ways, of which one of the more unlikely is the naming of its hospital – the Samuel Johnson Community Hospital. The great man would surely be pleased: he had a lifelong interest in 'physic' and was a keen amateur physician (in an age when the professionals were often dangerously incompetent – witness Dr Slop in Tristram Shandy). As he was in himself a walking compendium of maladies, Johnson's interest is perhaps not surprising. Today there is a whole subgenre of Johnson studies devoted to his various medical conditions, and it is often said that, had he lived in our times, they could have been accurately diagnosed and effectively treated. But without his daily afflictions, mental and physical, would Johnson have developed the extraordinary moral fortitude and strength of character that made him the man, and the writer, that he was? 
  Anyway, yesterday I had an appointment at the Samuel Johnson Community Hospital, a large modern building that looks much like any other modern hospital (though happily the much smaller older building is adjacent, and that is more pleasing to the eye – diapered brickwork, gatehouse and gabled range in Elizabethan style, George Gilbert Scott's very first commission). At this point my post becomes yet another tale of NHS confusion/incompetence, so feel free to stop reading here...
  Back in May I went to my GP practice, more in hope than expectation, to see if I could get an appointment. The only option short of a month-long wait was to avail myself of the Saturday GP service at the Samuel Johnson. I turned up, was duly checked over and sent for a blood test, which, the doctor told me, would be arranged by my practice. Back to the practice I went, only to be told that all blood tests were done at the Samuel Johnson. When I queried this it was simply reaffirmed, so I duly embarked on the process (all online, of course) of securing an appointment, cunningly ticking the box for 'Urgent'. This threw up a date some five weeks in the future, and that was the appointment I dutifully turned up for yesterday – only to be told (by a very nice and sympathetic member of staff, who was as bemused as I was) that the practice should indeed have done the blood test, and the service at the SJ is only for testees referred by consultants. Hey ho, it's back to the practice on Monday, drawing on my scant reserves of moral fortitude... 

Helena

 I am reading what is probably Evelyn Waugh's least characteristic and most nearly forgotten novel, Helena (1950), his sole excursion into the genre of historical fiction – and, oddly, the novel Waugh regarded as his best work. So far, I've found that the most striking thing about it is how un-Wavian it seems: apart from the author's pugnacious Preface, it could have been written by almost any good historical novelist of the time, and I should think very few, reading it 'blind', would guess that it was Waugh. It tells the story of the Dowager Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, who is remembered chiefly for her great pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she found pieces of the True Cross, and built churches at Bethlehem and Olivet. Otherwise little is known of her life and origins – which gives Waugh scope to build his own version of her biography. Helena is of course elegantly written, and its portrayal of the period of what some historians call the Constantinian Shift – with the great Empire weakened, corrupted and a long way past its great days, and Christianity still inchoate but strangely potent – seems convincing. And there are occasional touches of wit, even satire (it's thought that Waugh's portrayal of Helena's husband, the chilly military careerist Constantius, is based on Bernard Montgomery).
  I particularly enjoyed this passage. Lactantius, the 'Christian Cicero', is talking with Helena, now divorced from Constantius, and Minervina, divorced from Constantine, in the Empress's court at Trèves, where Lactantius is officially tutoring Constantine's son Crispus (who will in due course by killed by his father) ...

'It needs a special quality to be martyr – just as it needs a special quality to be a writer.  Mine is the humbler role, but one must not think it quite valueless ... You see, it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing. Suppose that in years to come, when the Church's troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,' and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit. 'A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors. He might be refuted again and again, but what he wrote would remain in people's minds when the refutations were quite forgotten. That is what style does – it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers. It is not to be despised.'

What historian could Waugh possibly have had in mind?

Oases in the Unhuman World

 Lately I've been obliged to pay a few visits to my mobile phone providers' high-street shop. Each time I've been struck by the preponderance of bewildered oldsters (myself included) among the customers – and, thinking about it, I'm not at all surprised. These poor souls (myself included) are navigating a strange, recalcitrant and often downright incomprehensible world – that brave new one that came in with digital technology, the only technological development in my time that really did change things, often (as we're now discovering) very much for the worse. As no one could have failed to notice, more and more of the straightforward world we once knew and took for granted has gone, transplanted into the baffling, often inaccessible world of the 'online'. And as that process carries on inexorably, more and more of us are getting left behind, sometimes only in particulars, sometimes altogether.
  I am no stranger to the computer and mobile phone, but I find this new world hard enough to navigate – quite often impossible. For those older and even less tech savvy than me, and/or for those who simply don't have the technology and are living 'offline', things are far worse. These people are gradually being edged out, disenfranchised and rendered helpless in even the routine things of everyday life. A technology that was supposed to make life easier (aren't they all?) has made life in many respects very much harder, and for a growing number all but impossible. So much of the world we knew is now only accessible online: if you can't handle it, you're lost. All that was solid melts into air... Here's a simple particular: I've made several attempts to get my hands on a 'club card' for a supermarket in which I often shop (and which is full of good deals available only to cardholders). Initially I tried to get an actual physical card, but there now seems to be no way of doing that, so I resigned myself to getting 'the app' – except that that too proved impossible, as the website either refused to recognise me (or the password it had itself given me) or denied me access. I gave up, as I have given up on many similar online occasions: life is too short, and dealing with the online world too irksome. 
  This great migration to cyberspace is, it seems to me, part of an accelerating process of dehumanising – a process that was turbocharged by the great Covid panic and the inhuman measures imposed on us in that terrible period (to no good effect, as we now know). Today so much everyday business, often lengthy and unavoidable, can now be conducted without at any point making contact with an actual human being or hearing an actual human voice; indeed this is fast becoming the norm. Much business can only be undertaken it you have a mobile phone and/or computer; there is no other way. This is why there are so many of us bewildered oldsters in the phone shops: these oases are still, thank heavens, manned by living human beings. And, in the case of my particular shop, those humans are friendly, helpful and patient. The human world survives – but for how much longer? It's just as well that the rising generations seem to spring from the womb already armed with a formidable ability to navigate the online world. They're going to need it.

Swann's Way

 Talking of Flanders and Swann, Donald Swann – the bespectacled pianist with the agreeable tenor voice – had always struck me as an archetypally English figure, the specific English archetype being the amiable, bespectacled curate (C of E, of course). Then I noticed that his middle name was Ibrahim. How come? 
It turns out that Swann's father, Herbert Alfredovich Swann, was a Russian doctor of English descent – from one Alfred Trout Swan (the 'n' was doubled later), a Lincolnshire draper who emigrated to Russia in 1840 and married the daughter of the tsars' horologer. Herbert Alfredovich Swann was part of that expatriate English community in Moscow so memorably depicted in Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant novel The Beginning of Spring – a community that originated in the 16th century with the Muscovy Company. What's more, Donald's Russian uncle, Alfred Swan, was a composer and musicologist who wrote the first biography of Scriabin. As for Donald's mother, born Naguimé Sultán Piszóva, she was a Turkmen-Russian nurse from Ashgabat. Both parents fled the Russian Revolution, ending up in London, whence their son (born 1923) was launched on a very English education: Dulwich College Prep, Westminster School, Christ Church, Oxford. It was at Westminster that he met Flanders and the pair staged their first revue. They met again by chance in 1948, and by the 1950s their witty musical double-act was wowing audiences around the English-speaking world. 
So there you have it – an archetypal Englishman who, like many in the days of Empire and industrial/trade expansion, had a great deal more in his pedigree than might have been expected.