The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  How should leisure time, ideally, be spent? On winter evenings, at any rate, one cannot very well be out of doors taking healthy exercise. A good book? I have recently been engrossed, not for the first time in my life, in the memoirs of Saint Simon. My edition is in thirty-eight small volumes published in 1840 and printed in a neat 8-point type. It is very trying for the eyes, more so than even a speckly television. I can not pretend that it does me, or anyone else, the slightest good to read, for example, a long description of lunching with Louis XIV when he was with his armies, of how everyone kept his hat on at table unless addressed by or speaking to the King when he would doff it; of how dukes were invited to luncheon but cardinals were not, and so forth. But it happens to amuse me, it does no one else much harm, and in fact all the same arguments apply to it, as to television.

  On the other hand, I can do without a critic’s commentary, and so I daresay can viewers. The critics should beg to be excused and write their witty pieces about something they find more congenial.

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  The League Against Cruel Sports protested to the Bishop of Southwell because, in a churchyard in his diocese, a fox’s brush was thrown into the grave of a M.F. H. It was ‘more reminiscent of a beastly pagan rite of a bygone age than the modern conception of what is seemly behaviour in the consecrated area of a burial ground belonging to the Church of England.’ The British Field Sports Society made a snappy rejoinder: ‘Placing a fox’s brush on a huntsman’s coffin… is certainly no more pagan, as the League protests, than the firing of a volley at an Army burial.’

  Very true; and what about an officer’s sword, carried ceremoniously at his funeral? What are swords for, except to run people through? Do modern soldiers have tiny model bombs carried in their cortèges? ‘Firing a volley’ sounds more like the Crimean War, so very old-fashioned.

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  ‘You have probably never heard of George Howard, who farms outside York. But it won’t be long before all America has heard his name and knows about his home. For that home, Castle Howard, has been chosen for a British Railways poster to be displayed in America in an attempt to encourage American tourists to come here. This castle was last in the news half a century ago, when that amazon of temperance and suffrage, Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, had the complete stock of beer there poured into the lake.’ This curiously-worded paragraph from the Sunday Dispatch gossip column was headed ‘Beery fame.’

  It is wonderful what the popular press can do in its ardour to reduce everything to the proportions of common mannishness which is deemed appropriate. It would not be easy for an ignorant but art-loving foreigner, keen on sight-seeing, to guess that the ‘home’ of Mr George Howard, who farms outside York, is the magnificent masterpiece built for his ancestor by one of our few architects of genius, Sir John Vanbrugh, and set in ‘the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon’ as Horace Walpole described it.

  The ‘complete stock of beer’ which Rosalind Lady Carlisle poured into the lake was, unfortunately, the contents of a glorious cellar of vintage wines. As a child I remember hearing one of my uncles tell the story of this wanton act; he described it as sadly as though it had been the burning of the Alexandria library.

  In London the battle of Albert Bridge is raging; in Paris the battle of the rue Barbet de Jouy. Well, perhaps not exactly raging, but at least Mr John Betjeman and M. Gérard Bauer are doing their best to rouse public opinion against senseless destruction of old buildings and their replacement by hideous new ones.

  Albert Bridge is a delightful and unusual Victorian bridge, and it seems that the people who want to pull it down have got a plan to spoil Cheyne Walk as well while they are about it. The rue Barbet de Jouy is a pretty little street where several of the old houses have gardens; here it is proposed to build a nine-storey block. The old districts of Paris are supposed to be protected by law from desecration, but since it is a ministry which threatens to build, there is an interminable shadow boxing between departments; while this is going on it is feared the monstrous block may quickly be built and the damage irreparably done.

  M. Bauer writes that this affair is symptomatic of an evil which all France is suffering from. Mr Betjeman has the same story to tell about England, each week in his Spectator column.*

  * Albert Bridge and Cheyne Walk were saved. The rue Barbet de Jouy was irrevocably spoilt.

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  In Paisley the building of 255 new houses has been brought to a halt by teddy children, who pull down the houses as quickly as they can put them up. Although a fence costing £200 was erected round the building site it only lasted a week. ‘Watchmen were stoned by bands of youngsters and forced to take refuge, with the result that the men left the job…. Half the glass in the windows of the houses had been broken, fresh brick-work had been knocked down repeatedly, and bricklayers had left their jobs as a result. It would often take bricklayers until midday to rebuild work knocked down during the night. Ceilings had been damaged by people walking through the roof space above and putting their feet through each plaster panel… piping and electrical fittings torn out… a child was seen to smash a panelled door with a pick, but could not be caught….’

  I suppose it is too much to expect the dignified inhabitants of the 7th arrondissement or of Cheyne Walk to defend their districts in this spirited way, but might it not be possible for them to harness the local teddy-power? In Paisley it appears that the bricklayers became so discouraged that ‘they left their jobs as a result.’ If Chelsea and St Germain des Prés cannot muster suitable children, might it not be possible to import some from Paisley? I expect the Paisleyites would love to see them go; they might even buy them single tickets. The child who smashed the panelled door would be perfect for special tasks, the sculpture on the Ecole de Médicine, for instance.

  ***

  According to the New York Herald Tribune, Lord Strathmore said that if he had a gun he would shoot Lord Altrincham.*

  What are we coming to, when a Scotch landowner, in August, has not got a gun?

  * As BBC Court reporter he had derided the Queen’s style of public broadcasts.

  ***

  A letter to the New Statesman from Professor Gilbert Murray’s son shows that the great Hellenist died, as he had lived, outside any church. It appears to have been his gentle and courteous manner towards a visiting priest which gave the latter an excuse to say that he was reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church into which he had been baptised ninety years ago. His ashes lie in Westminster Abbey; the Church of England is not particular about the outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.

  The successes claimed by priests sometimes remind one of the strange successes of modern doctors. One of the recent triumphs of medicine was the case of the man who died, had his heart re-started, and ‘lived the “life of a vegetable”’ for twenty three months, unconscious, in convulsions, being tube-fed by nurses once an hour day and night.

  When Forain, the famous draughtsman, was dying, his doctor called a second opinion. After examining him from top to toe and making every imaginable test this specialist declared that every part of the patient’s body was functioning normally. Forain, as he drew his last breath, said: Je meurs guéri [I die a healthy man].

  ***

  Just as the Russians, or rather the Soviet Government on their behalf, always claim to have invented everything from jet aeroplanes to washing-up machines, so Miss Elsa Maxwell* likes to say she has invented all kinds of rather well-known resorts. Her latest claim is that she ‘invented the Lido in 1919.’ When one surveys the beach today, where thousands of people are enjoying the sun and sea, one feels as grateful to her for her clever invention as I suppose the Russian public feels towards its government when climbing into a tram or writing with a fountain pen.

  ‘There was nothing here,’ Miss Maxwell is reported as saying, ‘until I made it. You can say I am the Lido.’

  Nothing here? Does she mean that she constructed the sandy shore, so conveniently adjac
ent to the loveliest city in the world? Hardly, for Lord Byron used to gallop his horse by the edge of the sea on the Lido when he lived in Venice. Or did she build the Moorish Excelsior, in 1906? Or make the place fashionable? She cannot quite mean that either, for it has always been used as a bathing beach by Venetians, and by anyone else sensible or fortunate enough to go to Venice in summer, since long before Miss Maxwell left her native America, even before she was born.

  One hundred and thirty eight years ago Lord Byron, who had left Venice to be near Countess Guiccioli, wrote to a friend: ‘A journey in an Italian June is a conscription, and if I was not the most constant of men I should now be swimming from the Lido, instead of smoking in the dust of Padua.’

  * Elsa Maxwell—the ‘hostest with the mostest’—an American career gossip.

  ***

  When Chairman Mao referred the other day to certain intellectuals and others who maintain a critical attitude to the régime, he said with characteristically Chinese euphemism that these people have ‘uneasy thoughts’.

  It is difficult not to have uneasy thoughts about some of our rulers. When, like the present Minister of Education, they expose themselves to our uncomfortable gaze in a weekly poem our thoughts get uneasier and uneasier. Mr Graham Greene, in a letter to the Spectator, the paper which favours its readers with Hailshamia, wondered whether Lord Hailsham purposed to add Wilhelmina Stitch’s poems to the curriculum in State schools. The implication seemed to be that Miss Stitch has served Lord Hailsham as a model for his own verse. Admirers of Miss Stitch’s rhyming sermons may resent this. Her work was so polished, neat, and cleverly contrived, the moral so aptly pointed. A poem of Lord Hailsham’s, recently published, called Hopes and Fears, beginning

  Is the fragile bark that’s me

  Tossing on the stormy sea,

  At length to harbour drawn?

  had, doubtless, something in common with Wilhelmina Stitch’s verse as regards spiritual content, but technically the poetess was in another class. Stitch fans may care to know, if they are not satisfied with the hebdomadal offering of the Minister of Education, that the Irish Independent daily employs a delightful poet called James J. Metcalfe.

  ‘Some would do anything they could… To live another day… While others wish to go to sleep… And quickly pass away… Both attitudes are wrong because… Our time upon this sod… Is only by the holy will… And by the grace of God.’ This is an extract from one of Mr Metcalfe’s recent poems; it bears an undeniable resemblance to some of Lord Hailsham’s verse as to subject matter but Lord Hailsham is hardly Mr Metcalfe’s peer as yet, when it comes to a really original rhyme.

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  An ex-Minister about whom some people may have had uneasy thoughts is Lord Salisbury. He was reported in the Daily Telegraph on the 16th March 1957 (when he was still in office) as having opened the ‘Atoms and Health’ Exhibition at the Royal Society of Health with a speech that ‘could not have been more soothing’. ‘He assured us’ wrote the Daily Telegraph reporter, ‘that future generations had nothing to fear from atomic radiation.’

  The very next day the Observer (which never stops treading on the toes of members of our Tory Government) published an article by its scientific correspondent, Mr John Davy. ‘One thing is certain,’ he wrote; ‘every additional bomb test will do some damage. It will cause some people to die of bone cancer who would not otherwise have done so. It will also produce genetic changes, the majority of which are likely to be harmful. These will affect not us but our descendants…. The trend of recent expert reports—such as that produced for the World Health Organisation last week—indicates that the hazard is more immediate than earlier estimates suggested.’

  Since Mr Davy is a scientist, while Lord Salisbury is not, his article unfortunately must be taken more seriously than ‘No need to be nervous’ (the heading in the Daily Telegraph). It might be better, in some ways, if Ministers left poetry writing to the poets, and scientific forecasting to the scientists. The English love of amateurishness and dislike of professionalism is sometimes carried almost too far.

  ***

  Amateurs of the saga of America’s golden age, those, for example, who enjoyed the biography of Harry Lehr (‘King Lehr’ as with apt literary allusion he was called), will love Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt the Fifth’s book about his family: The Vanderbilt Feud, The Fabulous Story of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt.

  The author’s father, son of a multi-millionaire, was an extremely clever engineer who patented his many inventions and sold them all over the world. But his mother was America’s top hostess for fifty years; a very arduous and expensive career.

  The older generation of Vanderbilts loathed the beautiful Grace at first sight, and forbade Neily the Fourth to marry her. They more or less cut him off, so that Neily and Grace were obliged to rub along on fewer million dollars than they might have expected. Nevertheless, it was not long before Grace knew all Europe’s crowned heads and the King of Siam, as well as everyone else who ‘mattered,’ and she never stopped inviting them to her brownstone 70-roomed mansion on Fifth Avenue or her seaside house at Newport. Her son says she was considered very exclusive; he also says that she entertained 37,000 guests in one year, which might appear almost conclusively inclusive, when the number of days she spent in ocean liners, cures and nach-cures (sic) is subtracted from the number of days in a year.

  Reading this book one quickly forms the habit of adding and subtracting. Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt is very strong on figures and statistics; he knows exactly how much everything cost, from mansions and yachts to long-stemmed American Beauty roses for the dinner table. He also knows exactly how much everyone is ‘worth’ and what the dead ones left in their wills.

  The secret of Mrs Vanderbilt’s success as queen of society was a combination of money, snobbery, energy and attention to detail. Not only did she remember the individual tastes of her thousands of guests, but ‘Mother was always careful to silence potentially envious tongues with small acts of thoughtfulness and gentility.’

  Mrs Grace Vanderbilt had two lovely sisters, Belle and May. May’s daughter, known as Baby May, married the Duke of Roxburghe. ‘Silly old May,’ I remember Lady Cunard saying one day, referring to Baby May, ‘no wonder she’s tired, sitting up all night playing with her valves.’ (The Duchess was a keen wireless fan.) An almost exact contemporary of Mrs Vanderbilt, Lady Cunard was also American and a hostess; but there the resemblance ends.

  Neily did not take kindly to the role his wife assigned to him of man-about resorts, as his son calls it, and dinner party host. Eventually this talented man took to the bottle: ‘Poor darling Neily is continually drunk,’ wrote Grace to her sister. He cleverly designed a lift which could be entered through a door concealed in the boiseries of their New York dining room. Sometimes in the middle of meals, when Mother became more than he could bear, Father disappeared into this lift and was not seen again for quite some time.

  ‘My sister and I were given lessons in proper table settings. Followed by the butler bearing various dishes and condiments on a huge silver tray, Mother led us around and around the gleaming sixty-foot mahogany table. Before I was nine, I knew precisely which dishes remained and which disappeared during a complete seven-course dinner,’ writes Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt.

  English children, of course, were never allowed near the dining room. A congealed egg in the schoolroom was the best they could hope for.

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  The fuss about the new kind of advertising, where the name of a product is flashed on a cinema screen for a split second, so that though not consciously reading it the subconscious mind is supposed to register it and store it up for future use, seems rather exaggerated. If it persuades housewives to buy soap Y rather than soap Z (which is the most that is claimed for it), presumably Z could advertise in the same way; perhaps then the subconscious mind would get into such a muddle that housewives would give up buying soap altogether.

  The idea that it could be politically dangerous and induce
people to vote for A instead of B is far-fetched, and if A advertises himself in this way, B only has to look sharp and follow suit. Personally, I am very much in favour of advertisements which are invisible to the naked eye.

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  Ever since I happened to mention in this Diary how greatly I looked forward to the poems which Lord Hailsham used to contribute to the Spectator, there has been a stony silence—as far as poetry goes—from conservatism’s bathing belle. He probably imagined that his photograph in his bikini on Brighton beach, which I saw in France-Dimanche, will carry more weight with the party than ‘the fragile bark that’s me’ and that Conservatives will be more impressed by physical heroism (France-Dimanche says the sea was icy) than by the courage he showed in publishing his verse. This had unlucky results, for The Times reports that he introduced a hysterical note into the proceedings of the Tory Conference.

  Small wonder; bathing in the English Channel in October would be enough to make anyone hysterical.

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  According to the Star, the Bishop of Chelmsford has appealed to people ‘to queue up outside a church before service so that they would attract other people to see what was going on.’ What a quaint idea of the Bishop’s. Can it really be that people so love queuing that they have only to see a queue and they are impelled to join it? Has the Bishop considered what will happen when finally, with the ringing of the five minute bell, the queue moves out of the rain to lose itself among the deserted pews of an empty church? Might not even the most ardent queue-lovers then wonder whether the churchgoers had not taken leave of their senses?