The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  He loved Celtic, Greek, Hebrew and Roman myths, he loved rewriting the Gospels, or Homer, or (rather disastrously) the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. But as he grew older he fell in love more and more desperately with muses, who all betrayed him with younger lovers. Rather tiresome for Beryl was the fact that two of the muses were keen gold diggers; he never failed to provide whatever money they demanded.

  Surrounded by family, friends, admirers and hangers-on, Graves was the emperor of his village, Deya. Even in the 30s it had been an artists’ colony (dread thought) and needless to say in the 60s it became a haven for hippies with their joints and guitars. The police began looking for, and finding, drugs everywhere, and Beryl wisely threw away Robert’s little store. He was far from averse to an artificial paradise, experimenting with magic mushrooms and the like.

  Graves was awarded various gold medals, some of which turned out to be base metal. He was offered a CBE, but like Evelyn Waugh he declined. The end of his life was beyond words; frightful. For years he suffered from senile dementia and sat staring into space. He lived to be 90, if living it can be called. Beryl looked after the helpless carcass as Nancy had once looked after the neurotic, shell-shocked soldier.

  The most balanced account of his life is Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography. Martin Seymour-Smith takes the reader through Graves’ poems, showing that in them can be found his whole emotional history. For someone who wants every single detail year by year, Richard Perceval Graves is the man; The White Goddess is the third volume of a vast trilogy. William Graves has described his father’s wild superstitions and his love of Deya. Most importantly Carcanet has published poems, essays and lectures. These are what Robert Graves, with his inborn Puritanism and his goddesses, must be judged by.

  Robert Graves: His Life and Work, Seymour-Smith, M.; Robert Graves: The White Goddess, Graves, R.P.; Wild Olives, Graves, W.; A Life on the Edge, Seymour, M. Evening Standard (1995)

  Minimal Effort Required

  There have been many biographies of Bernard Shaw, but none more quirky than this. Most people think of him as an old sage with a white beard who wrote splendid plays, as well as hundreds of letters and postcards, whose wise words made such excellent ‘copy’ that he was constantly besieged by newspaper men wherever he went. How he would have loved television! He would have been ‘on’ nightly, worldwide.

  Shaw’s sexual life was minimal, but his beard had not always been white. When it was red he behaved like most young men, flirting and sometimes going to bed with his flirts, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm. He was a hopelessly bad lover, didn’t enjoy sex, and greatly enjoyed teasing. He liked beautiful people, both men and women, especially if they were connected with the theatre.

  As this book is by way of discovering hitherto unexplored aspects of Shaw’s sex life, it naturally begins with his unhappy childhood in Dublin. The drunken father, the uncaring mother, along with the mother’s singing teacher, get close attention and plenty of psychoanalytical jargon. Shaw had the good fortune to be familiar with great music from birth. He loved music, it was the joy of his life. Otherwise his education was patchy, but when at 19 he followed his mother to London he educated himself in the British Museum Reading Room. The uncaring mother gave him a room in her flat, and never seems to have complained that for a decade he got no paid work.

  He became a socialist, anti-vaccination, vegetarian, teetotal, and wore natural wool Jaeger clothes. He was, in fact, a crank of the first water, but such a charming, amusing, clever, courteous crank that he won everybody’s heart, from Ellen Terry’s to Sidney Webb’s. He spoke at socialist meetings, wrote articles for the Fabians, all for nothing. His music and theatre criticism earned little, but he got free tickets for concerts and plays. When he wrote novels and plays his ideas and paradoxes and jokes made him famous. There were reams of love letters to actresses, but he wished neither to receive nor bestow caresses.

  Shaw contracted a white marriage with a kind, rich lady; a great success. Sally Peters makes a valiant effort to weave some sex into his relations with men, in particular Harley Granville Barker, of whom he was very fond. To look for sex in Bernard Shaw is like looking for beauty at Shaw’s Corner, his ugly little house which is now a place of pilgrimage. Neither is worth looking for, they are non-existent. His genius lay elsewhere, as is perfectly demonstrated by Michael Holroyd in his masterly life of the old magician.

  Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman, Peters, S. (1996)

  Diaries 1953-1960

  The Vélodrome d’Hiver is an enormous circus situated in the factory-filled district west of the Eiffel Tower. As we went in, on a warm June evening, the smell of wild animals and damp straw hung in the air, although the place contained many thousand Christians and not a single lion.

  All the best seats were already taken, and we climbed an iron stair to an upper balcony; a hymn was being sung by choirs massed behind the platform. We stood above the steep bank of seats in the balcony, and could see both performers and audience.

  Either side of the platform were a piano and a harmonium, between them a dozen or so men, in front a smaller, raised platform, tastefully draped in red and gold. Among the group of men was Mr Billy Graham, fresh from his Scotch triumph and now for the first time trying his luck in Paris.

  Two speakers in turn mounted the podium and addressed us in French. The first said that le docteur Beelee Grum had no financial backers. The loudspeakers blurred his voice and one could not hear much, though the name Beelee Grum recurred several times. The second introduced the boys in the ring, to my left the pianist, to my right the harmonium player, a singer—all Mr Somebody or other from somewhere in America. Each rose from his seat when his name was called, but we had been warned not to applaud. We were then told to get ready for Dr Beelee Grum’s MESSAGE, and people wandering about the hall were ordered to sit still and keep quiet (the wandering, in fact, went on the entire evening; it appeared to have some thing to do with the loudspeaker arrangements).

  Another hymn, and Mr Graham himself began to speak. I had never heard him before, and he was gravely handicapped by having to pause after each staccato sentence while the French pastor beside him translated his words. There was something unfairly comic about this proceeding. Mr Graham, a well-set-up youngish man with guinea-gold hair like his predecessor Miss Aimée Semple Macpherson’s, held out his hand with a book in it:

  ‘You all know this book; it’s the bible.’

  The French pastor held out his hand with an identical book:

  ‘Vous connaissez tous ce livre: c’est la bible.’

  ‘You all know the bible is a good book.’

  ‘Vous savez tous que la bible est un bon livre.’

  A finger is pointed at the audience:

  ‘In the bible you will find an answer to every one of the problems in the world today.’

  Another finger is pointed:

  ‘Dans la bible vous trouverez une solution pour tous les problèmes dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.’

  Mr Graham called for repentance, and told a story to illustrate the urgency of taking steps to be saved. An aeroplane at an airport is ready to take off for America. I have my ticket and my seat reservation. The passengers are being called, but I feel there is plenty of time. I go to the bar for a cup of coffee. While I am there the aeroplane leaves. I have missed the plane!

  ‘L’avion décolle! J’ai raté mon avion!’

  He told us to hurry along the path to heaven, warning us that God is not an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud. One step along the path au ciel would be taken, if we came from our seats and stood humbly beneath the platform and dedicated our lives to God.

  Surprisingly, hundreds of people did this, at first in twos and threes, then in a constant stream from all over the hall. While they left their seats and made their way to Mr Graham, the choir hummed celestial music. When all were assembled, the rest of the audience was told to go and wait for friends outside the hall; meanwhile the self-elected were
shepherded into a curtained-off space behind the platform, where they were presently joined by Mr Graham.

  From my high perch I could see everything. A prayer was said, and the speech began again, much as before. I had half hoped (since Mr Graham is a Baptist) that he would lead them all into the Seine.

  ***

  In the Irish Times of 30 January 1956 there was a photograph of a portrait of the English Prime Minister made out of pieces of damp-looking fur, ‘the work of M. J. Laroche.’ It is a speaking likeness of the face that looked out recently from the television screen. This artist, of whom I had never heard before, has cleverly hit upon the perfect medium in which to portray Sir Anthony Eden. Marble for Roman emperors, bronze for eighteenth-century statesmen, oil paint for Victorian politicians, wet fur for Sir Anthony. How odd that such a man should be the son of the squire who, waking up on a shooting morning and seeing it was pouring with rain, was heard to exclaim furiously, ‘Oh God! How like you!’

  ***

  The Figaro is much annoyed by a report that Gaston Dominici* was recently given a dish of filets de sole Normande to eat in his prison cell. Far too delicious for him, says Figaro, which is also indignant because the yellow press calls the old man le patriarche.

  When we were first in gaol in conditions of unspeakable filth and discomfort, during the summer of 1940, certain newspapers described the luxurious circumstances of our way of life in H. M. Prisons. We were said to call for alternate bottles of red and white wine; the dustbins of the gaols were supposed to be stuffed with empty champagne bottles, and so forth. For in venting and printing these lies the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial had to apologize in open court, and pay an agreed sum. I bought a fur coat with my share of the money, which kept me alive through bitter winters in unheated cells for the next three years.

  Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins; envy is another. The mere notion that somebody is indulging in the former sin causes many people to fall into the latter. The clever, if untruthful, journalists who wrote the fantasies about our champagne orgies reckoned, possibly correctly, that the thought of all the fun we were having in the middle of a war would infuriate many of those who were suffering privation and danger.

  Unfortunately our opponents subsequently used less crude methods. They instituted a ‘whispering campaign’ and were careful to avoid libel. A friend, who hoped to hear an actionable slander uttered by one well-known ‘whisperer,’ asked, ‘Why are they in prison? What have they done?’ He received the answer: ‘I know what I know.’

  About Dominici and his sole, perhaps the Figaro need not worry much. Prison is a grim place, even for a tough old peas ant, and he has been there a long time now.

  * Serving a life sentence for the murder of three tourists.

  ***

  A buyer, described as a French bibliophile, paid 3,020,000 francs for the manuscript of M. André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine. At another sale a few months ago the manuscript of The Moon and Sixpence, by Mr Somerset Maugham, fetched almost as much: £2,600. On the other hand, a lot consisting of a tooth and a lock of hair of Napoleon’s, with the Legion of Honour he wore, only made £38 at a recent auction.

  ***

  In the Daily Telegraph Late News column I read: ‘A tourist boycott of Spain by German Protestants urged today by the annual congress of German Protestant pastors. Resolution adopted by five hundred pastors from West and East Germany said Protestants should make no holiday trips to Spain as long as a “hostile attitude” against Protestantism prevailed there.’

  Poor things… But there is not much point, perhaps, in being a Protestant unless you occasionally protest against some thing or other; the pastors are merely fulfilling their function.

  It is their loss, and I doubt if they will be much missed. German Protestant pastors in Andalusia, where song and dance and music and gaiety and sunshine are part of life, or in the Alhambra where every scented garden, every gushing fountain, is a symbol of love and pleasure, would, to say the least of it, be out of place.

  ***

  It is only surprising that Conservative and Labour politicians should not have guessed long ago that nobody wants to listen to them. When they hire a hall to speak in, it always remains half empty. This has nothing to do with politics; simply they themselves are too dull.

  A good speaker can attract huge audiences; crowds of people will go out on bitter, foggy evenings and sit on wooden seats to hear Sir Oswald Mosley, for example. But oratory is the rarest of gifts, and not one bestowed on the Edens, Macmillans, and Morrisons. It is not their fault, nor does it necessarily make them less good administrators; on the other hand they have the sorrow of knowing that they bore.

  ***

  When the last war began, among a thousand horrors and inconveniences great and small there was one blessing: the newspapers dwindled in size so that all the six dailies I took in weighed no more on the breakfast tray than The Times alone had done a few days before. Now they seem to be growing fatter every week, stuffed out with just the same nonsense one remembers from the 30s. The cheap papers fill up with photo graphs, gossip, and strips, while The Times gives full rein to the terrible whimsies of the fourth leader which have now spread over onto other pages, and has found in ‘Oliver Edwards’ the Mrs Miniver of literary criticism. It is all very well for people with dustbins, but what can country dwellers do about getting rid of kilograms of newsprint? A periodic bonfire is the only solution; a very unsatisfactory one, since burnt newspaper transforms itself into a fine light, black confetti and floats all over the garden.

  ***

  The Eden government had a wretched press for their Egyptian outing. Except for one or two papers which rather overdid it—VAST ARMADAS NEARING CANAL—was a headline in the Daily Sketch they were scolded by right and left in England just as they were by Mr Eisenhower and Mr Bulganin in the unfriendly outside world.

  The weeklies were unanimous in their condemnation of Eden’s police action. The most damaging attack on the Prime Minister was a cartoon in Punch which I saw reproduced in Paris-Presse: ‘Eden, or the lamb in wolf’s clothing.’ A well-fed lamb with Sir Anthony’s unfortunate physiognomy, badly disguised by a mangy wolf’s skin, is taking a flying leap in a desert landscape. The expression of wild and meaningless excitement in the eye, the silliness of the teeth and chin, must be frightening enough to Eden’s friends to contemplate, what ever emotions they may arouse in his opponents.

  Presumably the picture of Port Said after the police action, flattened and burning, cannot do the government much good, although I notice that the Tories, between the storms of applause for one another with which they keep up their spirits in the House of Commons, pretend that nothing much happened when the ‘police’ landed. According to The Times unbroken windows still glint in the evening light, but French reporters see things otherwise. J’ai vu le visage d’une ville frappée à mort’ [I saw a town trampled to death] was the headline in France-Soir; ‘l’eau manque totalement à l’hôpital incombré de blessées’ [no water at hospital full of wounded]; and another reporter described the all-pervading smell of cadavres.

  ***

  On the Hungarian revolution against Communism

  English people are giving huge sums of money to the Lord Mayor’s Fund for Hungarian refugees; in Paris the Humanité* building was wrecked; these are two characteristically different ways of demonstrating European solidarity, but both of them are effective.

  * French Communist daily.

  ***

  The English have so often told the world that foreign visitors think their policemen are ‘wonderful’ that they appear to have convinced themselves that the police force is one of the most alluring attractions the British Isles have to offer. Not long ago in the window of a Paris travel agency I noticed, incongruous among posters from many lands—snowy Alps, sunny islands, Spanish dancers, noble temples—an English poster: it was a picture of a policeman. A coloured postcard on sale in London shows the outside of 10 Downing Street; the agr
eeable, unpretentious old house is almost hidden by the large policeman in the foreground.

  A police force is a necessary evil, but it is a strange notion to imagine tourists planning a journey and saying to themselves, ‘Shall we visit the Norwegian fjords? Or Sicily when the almonds are blossoming? Or Paris in the springtime? Or best of all shall we go to England and see the police? Let’s.’

  ***

  The note of complaint in the writings of television critics gets shriller every week. How they must envy Lord Beveridge, who said that he and Lady Beveridge looked at TV for a few days and did not enjoy it, and that they would not accept a television set as a gift. I suppose someone capable of writing a readable article about it is not likely to be capable of getting full enjoyment from viewing.

  Nobody who had anything amusing or interesting to do, or to think about, would dream of abandoning it for the sake of tiresome TV. Therefore the wretched critics, who view for a living, become more and more censorious and governessy as they describe the ghastly boredom of the programmes, and the way the BBC is obliged to compete for silliness with ITV. Before we know where we are there will be an attempt to stop people wasting their time watching it. There is a lot of pleasure to be got out of interfering with the way other people waste their time.