Allegorizings Read online

  What goes on? The publicists say of the Saône that as it passes through Tournus it surrenders itself to “l’appel du Midi.” Now, it seems, I too have crossed some invisible border, and am submitting to the liberating summons of the South.

  SUCH IS THE piquant, or perhaps picaresque allure that brings me so often back here. Tournus is a kind of frontier town, but in the middle of a nation. Here one France kisses another! It seems to me that upstream from the bridge all is clear-cut and logical, but below it everything is aesthetically smudged—as though I have walked out of realism into impressionism. Those civic sentimentalists maintain that when the Saône overflows its banks here, as it often does, it is not punishing the town but embracing it: I prefer to think that when the river passes under the bridge it is celebrating, with a sensuous welling of its waters, just the complicated frisson that I am feeling too, as I walk out of one sensibility into another.

  Hypochondria

  THERE ARE PROS and cons to the equivocal condition of hypochondria. On the one hand it is generally harmless, except perhaps in over-indulgence. On the other hand it is incurable, because there is nothing to cure.

  It is really a kind of dreaming. In sleep one has no doubt that a dream is true, and similarly there is no possibility of a mistaken diagnosis of that nagging pain in the back of the hypochondriac’s neck—every reference book confirms it, just as every circumstance of a nightmare is utterly convincing.

  In a sense both are true. The world of our dreams exists, if only in our minds, and a maladie imaginaire, though it may not be caused by microbe or decay, is quite genuine enough to its patients. In fact the sufferer may be genuinely rid of it, too, by a placebo—a dream may be consummated by a totally disfunctional orgasm, a non-disease banished by an entirely impotent pill.

  Hypochondria certainly has its pleasures. Of course the seduction of self-pity is one, and the morbid fascination of pursuing one’s symptoms through the well-thumbed pages of those family medical encyclopedias. I am told that Hemingway habitually took on safari Black’s Medical Dictionary (probably its tenth edition, 1931), and doubtless spent many a fascinating hour communing with it over his whiskey and his hurricane lamp, while the wild beasts howled.

  Like the end of a bad dream, too, a remission from hypochondria can be well worth its discomforts. It is marvellous to wake up, is it not, to discover that we are not after all in the hands of the Gestapo, or still looking desperately for those lost airline tickets; and equally, what a wry delight it is to realize that the stabbing muscular stomach pains of last week could not have been very malignant after all, because they’ve entirely disappeared this morning!

  It is hardly surprising that hypochondria is notoriously a writer’s complaint. Writers live by their imaginations, and from Voltaire to James Joyce they have been fascinated by the diseases of fancy. Story-telling is their profession, and as they are often carried away by their own purely fictional characters, so they are all too liable to be infected by epidemics of their minds.

  Which means, of course, that for people like me hypochondria is, almost by definition, chronic. Perhaps in extreme old age, when all our powers are fading, we shall lose the requisite imagination. More often, I suppose, the condition deletes itself by turning out to be not imaginary at all, but terminal. Then, if we are anything like Ernest Hemingway, we can put away our Home Medicine for All, pick up a gun and shoot ourselves.

  But better still, we can spend our last days recalling our most frightful imaginary illnesses, and contemplating our happy recovery from one and all.

  The Traveller

  TO A TRAVELLER other people’s journeys are not always very interesting, but I was always fascinated by the wanderings of Wilfred Thesiger, the most celebrated explorer of my time, who made his own final journey in 2003, when he was ninety-three years old. I had never been his unequivocal fan, because I scorned his philosophies and thought his life dullened rather than enriched by his vehement rejection of anything modern, but I admired his two great books of travel, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, and I marvelled at the courage and dedication that sustained him in so many ghastly journeys in primitive places. He always seemed to me a figurative sort of traveller.

  Thesiger concluded very early in life that for him travel was immersion in “colour and savagery,” which meant that he denied himself explorations of Europe, the Americas or Australasia, or even parts of Asia and Africa which were insufficiently backward. “Exploration” in his vocabulary meant the physical discovery of places mostly unknown to outsiders, and the more barren or arid the place, the better the exploration.

  He was not, it seems, much interested in the visual arts, he claimed to be tone-deaf, he had no religious conviction and his taste in literature was conservative (like me, as it happens, he particularly liked the poems of James Elroy Flecker). Not for him, then, explorations into the glorious complexities of civilization. It was the clean hard matter of physical challenge that inspired him, and his rejection of all contemporary palliatives took on a semi-mystical character of renunciation.

  During the Second World War he was obliged to travel the North African deserts by jeep, but he professed himself unable to change a wheel because he didn’t know which way to turn the nut, and he thought the very idea of mechanized desert travel so irrelevant that “had we stumbled upon the legendary oasis of Zarzura, whose discovery had been the dream of every Libyan explorer, I would have felt but little interest.” He seemed to think that humanity had reached its apogee in the days before the machine clanked in, and it was in the company of elemental tribal peoples that he found his happiness.

  And also, I have to say, his fulfilment. Cynical as I am about his Luddite preferences, I recognize what an artistic unity he made of himself. It may have been distorted by his obdurate dislike of everything new, but within its limits it had true majesty. Thesiger never faltered in his prejudices (except in his willingness to use modern medicine). He believed in them absolutely, and lived and died faithful to them.

  HE WAS NOT a handsome man (the writer Gavin Young once said he looked “like a cross between the ultimate Great White Hunter and Widow Twanky”), but from first to last his face looked movingly sad, reproachful and other-worldly—fated, perhaps. Above a great hook nose his eyes look out at us as though they are seeing something else altogether, and his mouth is tightly unsmiling. Even in boyhood it suggests a character impelled, intent upon a single destination, and that not an easy one.

  So—speaking for myself—one discovers holiness. It is, I think, an aesthetic spirituality. Thesiger was loyal always to his own ideas of good and evil, simple ideas but genuinely transcendental. He never wavered in his belief that the modern mechanist, materialist ethos was bad, and for most of his life he had nothing to do with it. Almost until the end he lived partly in London, but generally in utmost simplicity in Kenya.

  It was the faith of an ascetic, but he attached it to no divinity. One might have thought he would be seduced by the magnificent simplicities of Islam, but he appears to have shown no sign of it: nor did he withdraw into one of his deserts, like the Christian sages of old, to commune with an Almighty. It seems he was an ascetic purely for asceticism’s sake, and this conviction in my view attained a sanctity of its own. Thus his long life became something wonderful in itself—a vision, complete and absolute.

  I met him only once, shortly before he died. By then he had declined into senility, and seemed only half-aware of the world around him. Perhaps that was a true condition for him. Perhaps all through the years we had been seeing in him a kind of Holy Fool, an instinctive artist in living, with the mind of an innocent and a hero’s heart. He would not like this judgement of mine, but then I did not like everything about him, either.

  Messages of Bloomsday

  THE MOST PROLONGED and affecting of literary allegories concerns the day—June 16, 1904—when Mr. Leopold “Poldy” Bloom spent the day pottering around his native city of Dublin, and bequeathed to the world a celebrated
peregrination—so famous that thousands of people still assiduously pursue the route, and June 16 is commemorated to this day as Bloomsday.

  Of course Mr. Bloom meandered only through the pages of a novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, but that doesn’t make his day’s wandering any less real to countless aficionados. Whole books have reconstructed Bloomsday Dublin, and Bloom’s movements have been timed to the minute. Scholars have noted every shop he passed, every pub he dropped in at, and some of the pubs have prospered by his custom ever since.

  It is perfectly possible to accompany Mr Bloom without setting eyes on Dublin—plenty of route maps are available, some even showing the manhole cover, opposite his house in Eccles Street, that he was obliged to avoid at the start of his day, not to mention the direction of the Glasnevin funeral cortège that he joined later in the morning. But there are thousands of readers in the world who feel the urge actually to walk the same pavements, prop themselves at the same bars, and a large proportion of them come to Dublin every June 16.

  WHO CALLED IT Bloomsday? The word never appears in the book itself, but as a sort of literary logo it exactly suits the cult that surrounds Ulysses. Its knowingess, its in-jokiness, its hint of the T-shirt or the anorak, its commercial potential—all express the nature of this world-wide enthusiasm, which ranges from the academic (e.g., Ulysses and the Metaphysicals: A Comparative Bibliography) to the yobbo (e.g., Bloomsday bingeing by the Liffey).

  Actually the cult has two epicentres. There is Dublin, of course, of which Joyce himself said his book would be a permanent model, and there is Trieste, where he wrote part of Ulysses, and which has a school of Joyce studies and an annual Joyce Symposium. Sometimes the passage of Joyceans between the two cities has a migratory air to it, as the flocks of devotees arrive in their thousands to roost temporarily at one or the other.

  The author of Ulysses and the Metaphysicals is sure to be there, the man who can recite the whole of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy by heart, the couple who fly in every year from Hong Kong, scores of American D.Phil. thesis writers and dozens of earnest addicts, conversant with every last metaphor of the book, who remind me rather of train-spotters. If they are in Trieste they take their coffee-break at the Caffe Stella Polaris, where Joyce was a regular; if they are in Dublin, Davy Byrne’s pub is the place. In Dublin the Sandymount Martello Tower, where Ulysses opens, compels them one and all; in Trieste they can do the round of the Joyce family’s successive uninviting apartments (itineraries obtainable at tourist offices).

  Have they all read the book, cover to cover? I very much doubt it. Most people who say they have are evasive when pressed, and all who claim to have read and understood it without a crib are lying through their teeth. Far from being an “accessible” work, as publishers like to claim, much of it is immediately incomprehensible. I myself started to read Ulysses in 1942, and I did not succeed in finishing it until 1989, by which time I had acquired Mr. Harry Blamires’ indispensable line-by-line commentary, The New Bloomsday Book.

  For one thing Ulysses is, in my opinion, unnecessarily obscure—what’s the point? For another it is often tediously ostentatious, in learning as in language. It has so many separate themes, winding and unwinding around one another, that exhausted readers may feel as though they have had one too many at Davy Byrne’s—or one too few. And it intermittently purports to be related, episode by episode, to corresponding passages in Homer’s Odyssey—Bloom himself being its Ulysses, miscellaneous whores and bigots representing Circe, Cyclops, and the rest, and Mrs. Bloom revealing herself, at the very end, as a less than immaculate Penelope.

  Joyceans are inclined to be touchy if you mention the opacity of the work, because half their pleasure comes from worrying out the meanings of Ulysses, matching texts, arguing about locations and following the Dublin street maps (though Joyce sometimes mischievously confuses even them—now and then he puts a shop on the wrong side of a road, or has somebody getting off a train at Lansdowne Road when the 10 a.m. train from Bray didn’t stop there . . .) .

  AND YET . . . dear God, how often have I blessed Mr. Blamires, ever since he first enabled me to read Ulysses all the way through! However maddening this book can be, however boring or pretentious, I recognize it as one of the universal literary masterpieces. There! I have declared myself a Joycean, and as a matter of fact, when I opened one of my several editions of Ulysses today, out fell the packaging of a cake of lemon soap, bought years ago at the Sandymount Martello Tower, and sold in memory of the lemon-scented soap that Poldy bought for himself at Sweney’s in Lincoln Place (page 69, line 510, 1986 edition). I have kept it for seventeen years, and one can hardly get more Joycean than that.

  Actually it was the protean nature of the book that finally convinced me of its greatness. I take nothing back about multi-themes and unconvincing Homerisms, and I still feel free to skip whenever I want to. But I marvel now at that tangle of themes which used to tire me so, because it means that the book is, so to speak, many books in one, conveying many parallel messages—and many morals, perhaps.

  First and most obviously it is a book about Dublin. Lots of Dublin has disappeared since 1904, but lots hasn’t, and it is still a fascination to follow that famous meander through its streets, looking out for the Ormond Hotel where the barmaid-Sirens were, or Nichols the undertakers, or hoping to buy some kidney at Dlugacz’s butcher’s shop (not a chance, because it is one of the few purely fictional establishments in the book). There we go, we Joycean train-spotters, with our maps in our hands and dear Mr. Blamires in our capacious string bags—year after year, Bloomsday after Bloomsday, deploring still the demise of the Bath Avenue tram, rejoicing to find the coffee fragrant as ever outside Bewley’s.

  Then Ulysses is also the portrait of a man—some critics say the most complete portrait of a man ever written. Bloom is a very ordinary person, except that he is a Jew. He feels an outsider always. He is more sensitive than most ordinary persons, more confused about himself sexually and socially, and as we accompany him around the city, all through the day, we seem to glimpse every last nuance of his character, admirable and pathetic, sad and hopeful.

  Ulysses is a study in jealousy, too, because during the afternoon Bloom is cuckolded, and knows it. It is a comedy, sometimes aspiring to farce (but not often, for my tastes, very funny). It is a poem. It is a play. It is a sort of sex manual, because a multitude of sexual preferences and variations are observed, recalled or simply imagined; if Bloom exposes himself in many kinds of pornographic self-indulgence, Molly brings everything to a celebrated climax with eight pages of undiluted and unpunctuated literary orgasm. It is full of sorrows! It has a happy ending!

  TO MY MIND the glory of the thing is this: that we can read it how we please (if we manage to read it at all). I choose to find in it an elementary lesson in morality, because I believe that at its core there lies a parable of goodness. “Poldy” Bloom is as fallible a man as ever lived, a lascivious day-dreamer, but he is good at the heart, and my favourite passage in the whole work concerns his passing over O’Connell Bridge at about eleven on Bloomsday morning. As he walks he scrumples up a piece of paper and throws it over the parapet, wondering if the seagulls fluttering around will think it edible. Of course they don’t, but a few moments later Poldy feels sorry for those birds, feels ashamed to have tried to deceive them, and buying a couple of Banbury cakes from a nearby stall (price 1d), he crumbles them, returns to the bridge, and makes recompense to the gulls.

  One could not be basically bad and do that: and the grand allegorical lesson of Ulysses is perhaps that you can be an idler and a lecher, the most pretentious of writers, the most pedantic of scholars, the silliest of literary groupies, the drunkest of louts down at Temple Bar, and still be as kind a man as Leopold Bloom.

  A Patron Sinner

  A SEMINAL EVENT of the late twentieth century was the death of Princess Diana, killed with her Egyptian lover in a Parisian car accident. It reverberated around the world for decades, so swarming was it with suggestion,
innuendo, lascivious gossip, deceit, romance and anomaly—the beautiful English aristocrat, once married to the heir to the throne of England, embroiled in the end with dubious hangers-on and tuft-hunters. Who could have foreseen that a decade later a coroner would still be obliged to deny that her death had been engineered by the British secret service, with the connivance of the Queen of England’s husband?

  It was a drama with an almost Shakespearian cast. There was the Queen herself, rigidly and honourably obedient to her God-given role as Head of State and Defender of the Faith. There was her notoriously tactless husband the Duke of Edinburgh, given to remarks of violent political incorrectness, and popularly supposed to detest his daughter-in-law. There was Diana’s divorced husband Prince Charles, dedicated to organic environmentalism, and his then mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles, dedicated in particular to horses. There were the two sons of Diana and Charles, one of them eventually to be King William V, if the kingship survived that long. There was Diana’s lover Dodi Fayed, last in a line of infatuates, handsome but unmemorable, who was to die with her in Paris. And there was Diana herself, a burr in the heart of the monarchy, lovely but sly, devoted to her sons but notoriously estranged from her husband and his stuffy relatives, given to insidious interviews with the Press and liable always, so it seemed, to blurt out some appalling revelation about the royal institution.

  Her funeral was a famous display of kitsch—the entire English nation, it seemed, once universally celebrated for sangfroid and stiff upper lip, wallowing in excesses of maudlin emotion. An image of sharing and caring piety had been imposed upon her by the publicists, and the result was, in my view, that her memory was honoured in diametrically the wrong way. The nation mourned a martyr when it should have been celebrating a miscreant.