The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  If the Bishop of Chelmsford were to cross the Irish Sea he would find churches so full that queues are formed, not as a stunt but from necessity. Most Irish towns and villages have two churches, one old and charming, often eighteenth-century Gothic, the other ugly and modern. The pretty ones are empty and the ugly ones are full of worshippers. It always appears to me that it would be a generous, Christian and logical act on the part of the Church of Ireland if it were to give at least half of its empty churches to the Catholics. It will take more than the attraction of imitation queues, or even the musical comedy ditties of clergymen popularising dogmas (‘can anyone tell me an original sin?’) to fill Anglican churches.

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  Last time I was in London two foreigners stopped me and asked, ‘Where is Knightsbridge?’ I replied that it was the very street we were in. They seemed rather doubtful, and said they had walked twice up and down looking for a shop called Harrods, but couldn’t find it. When I told them that, though Harrods may call it Knightsbridge, the street it adorns is Brompton Road, they were puzzled. It is one thing to have your shop in a ‘good address,’ but very strange to muddle customers by giving a good address and then not being there.

  ***

  This is the moment when the dozen or so best known literary folk of the Establishment are invited to state which book they consider has been the Best Book of the past year. As they are either authors who sometimes do reviews, or else reviewers who are occasionally authors, they naturally all choose each other’s books in an orgy of love and harmony.

  Personally, I see no harm in this. Many of the books chosen will have been well worth reading. The French system, where by young writers have to spend months every year making love to old ladies and gentlemen in the hopes of winning one of the famous literary prizes, an activity which leaves them little time for writing, is much worse. In their case, of course, the after noon calls, flattery and petits soins they bestow get them into training for the lobbying which, in middle age, will land them safely in the Académie Française.

  Apart altogether from back-scratching (and after all, even writers must live), how much is one influenced in one’s opinion of a book by friendship for the author? In my own case, I think it prejudices me a little in the book’s favour. But on the other hand personal dislike, or dislike of a writer’s politics, would never make me think, or say, that a good book was a bad one.

  ***

  The winter collections, shown in August, and the new motors a few weeks later, are the terrible twin temptations for women and for men to indulge in dis-saving (as Mr Roy Harrod called it in an article in the Financial Times). Most men think it unnecessary to dissave on a new winter coat when last year’s is as warm as ever, and most women think it absurd to want a new motor when the old one still runs along. If women follow the fashion this time their spindly legs may be cold, but their heads will be beautifully warm. Anyone wishing to steal a hat will have quite a job to hide even one; to take five at a blow, as in the days of Nina hats, would be an impossible feat.

  ***

  A French friend who visited London for the first time for a number of years said that he found English newspapers had become a great deal sillier during the interval; in fact, he said he could not make out from them what the news might be because they were filled with stories and photographs of actresses, dogs, runaway lovers, and other trivialities. Mr Randolph Churchill, in What I Said About the Press, scolds most of the cheap news papers (though not, of course, Lord Beaverbrook’s) for making money and degrading the public taste with pornography. Mr John Osborne, in his contribution to Declaration, complains that they contain too many articles about the private lives of members of the royal family.

  The obvious answer to all these grievances is that if these three gentlemen had bought The Times or the Guardian they would have found plenty of news, no pornography and not a word about the private lives of members of the royal family.

  While I have every sympathy with the Frenchman who did not know where to turn to find the news of the world (no capitals intended here), I have not so much for Mr Churchill and Mr Osborne, who were born and bred in London and should know by now how tiresome and stupid most English newspapers are, and avoid reading them. It may be, though, they are both fired with reforming zeal, like so many puritanical English people, and in that case they will naturally want to read more and more about their bêtes noires because it is no fun reforming if you have nothing to fulminate against.

  In view of this possibility, perhaps the good idea I have had will not help them much, though it would be a boon to those genuinely seeking news. It is this. Newspapers should be obliged, like patent medicines, to print a formula on the front page giving a rough idea of the contents. If the formula reads as follows:

  Police court reports:

  Sex crimes 27%

  Other crimes 18%

  Sport 22%

  Gossip and fashion 12%

  Royalty 7%

  Cheesecake 6%

  Domestic news 5%

  World news 3%

  those who bought the paper would know what they were buying. It should not be forgotten that some people love reading about crime and looking at photographs of girls in bathing gowns; there are even people, millions of them apparently, who greatly enjoy the Daily Express. Rather harmless tastes, one might think, even if one does not share them. It is easy not to read what annoys or bores. Personally, I dislike all ball games, but it does not worry me that large wads of newspaper space are devoted to describing them; I skip those pages.

  A very good formula is that of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. It has eight pages, of which three are news, two leading articles and feature articles, leaving one each for Wall Street, comic strips and sport. The sport page is mostly about American games, with lovely headlines like ‘Lakers Trampled by Knicks’, and ‘Wings Nip Hawks’, or ‘Buckeyes Edge Oregon’, or ‘Navy Mauls Rice’. The words ‘win’ and ‘lose’ are seldom seen.

  ***

  There is a new revue at the Lido in the Champs Elysées, where the famous Bluebell Girls are dreams of beauty. As they dale about sparkling with sequins and nodding plumes it is hard to imagine that in a few years they may be startling people by their inside knowledge of what is going to be done to the Bank Rate. Yet that is the way the world goes.

  ***

  I once knew a man who was acutely sensitive to embarrassment. At the cinema, for example, if a child actor appeared on the screen, he had to cover up until it was no longer there. He kept a large white handkerchief for this purpose, which he threw over his head; he only removed it when one told him: It’s all right, you can uncover now. A man of this sort would know better than to read the fourth leader in The Times, though I doubt whether he would go so far as to wish to forbid its appearance, even if he were a dictator instead of just a Tory minister. Similarly, Mr Churchill and Mr Osborne should cultivate the art of skipping, which is indispensable for newspaper readers.

  A little further up the street there are queues outside The Bridge on the River Kwai, a war film in which all the English are incredibly brave and idealistic gentlemen and the Japanese rude, brutal, stupid (about the siting of the bridge) and not even as tough as one might suppose. Outwitted by the incredibly brave and idealistic English colonel, the Japanese colonel, who has been torturing him in vain for some days, feels so annoyed by what has happened that he has a good cry by himself in his steaming jungle study. The film was photographed in Ceylon, which seems to be the most beautiful country on earth. Although there are moments when the friend mentioned just now would have had to ‘cover up’—the whistling for example—excellent acting and the odd jokes make it worth seeing.

  ***

  It is too late for the Society to save John Nash’s Gothic castle, Shanbally, a pale grey house like a child’s toy fort set in a park in County Tipperary with a view across to the Knockmealdown mountains. When I visited it lately on a cold afternoon the empty knocking of demolishers’ hamme
rs filled the air.

  The castle was surrounded by an impenetrable barbed wire entanglement, as if they were ashamed of what was going on. At least I thought so at first, but perhaps they are really afraid that lumps of battlement will fall on the heads of the curious—not that there can be many visitors to this desolate and melancholy spectacle.

  On arrival in Dublin I saw a poster: WHY NOT RE-BUILD TARA?

  Well, why not? ‘Tara’s halls, where the harp that once…’ No particular reason, I suppose, except that the reconstruction of a dark age monument might be frightfully ugly. It would be a puzzle to know what to do with it when it was finished (or what to do with them, if there were several halls). Harp recitals, of course, spring to mind.

  Meanwhile it is not so much new building that should concern people in Ireland as the demolition of fine old houses. Just as in England, planners have only to see a well-proportioned, agreeable Georgian house, to hurry with their pickaxes; before you know where you are it has disappeared, leaving a gap which is quickly filled either by something hideous and ‘contemporary’ or else by a villa of the cosy cot variety.

  The Irish Georgian Society has just been formed* with the object of preventing, where possible, this unnecessary vandalism, and preserving the eighteenth century character of Dublin and other towns.

  In any case the Irish Georgian Society can hardly be expected to save country houses which have failed to find a buyer. Too many roofs to keep in repair… It occurred to me that television might be the answer to the problem. A homeless dog, shown on TV, attracts thousands of people to clamour for it, people who had never thought of keeping a dog before. If country houses, in danger of demolition for want of an owner, could be shown for a few moments each week, who knows what might happen? Some rich Surrey-dweller, who follows his local hounds through the rhododendrons of suburbia, might suddenly feel an irresistible desire. Even if every house did not find an owner (and I believe many would) such a weekly programme would surely arouse widespread interest in the beauties that are being thrown away in England and Ireland.

  * By Diana’s son Desmond Guinness.

  ***

  Mr Emrys Hughes says of his short life of Sir Winston Churchill: ‘This is not the sort of admiring biography of which we have had so many in recent years.’ He begins two hundred years before Sir Winston was born, pointing out that the great Duke of Marlborough was a great scoundrel, and going on to Lord Randolph, his American wife, and their son. ‘Had young Winston been sent to an elementary school it is probable that his academic education would have ended there, for he did not show the abilities that would have won him a scholarship,’ writes Mr Hughes. ‘He had been nursed, waited upon, pandered to, mollycoddled, tutored, dragged through examinations, and had become accustomed to the world of wealth, rank, privilege and snobbery.’ It is not at all clear whether Mr Hughes looks upon this upbringing as having conferred an unfair advantage on the young Churchill, or as an obstacle which he subsequently managed to surmount. But, in fact, nineteenth century public schoolboys were not waited upon, pandered to or mollycoddled; these early chapters should be omitted from an English edition of the book because they are rather misleading and wholly irrelevant. When it comes to Sir Winston’s political career, however, it is well documented and fair. Mr Hughes quotes at length from Churchill’s speeches, and shows how often in his life he changed not only his party but also his opinions.

  ***

  Among the members of the Labour government in 1945, first as Minister for Fuel and Power and subsequently as Minister of Defence, was Mr Emanuel Shinwell, whose autobiography is called Conflict without Malice. Mr Shinwell is the son of a poor Jewish tailor who had come to England from Poland as a little child in 1868. His account of his own childhood and early life is the best part of the book; his father singing ‘As I walk down the street each friend I do meet, says, there goes Muldoon, he’s a solid man’; he himself buying a dish of hot peas for a farthing; collecting a library of books from junk barrows; marrying at 19 a girl with a wonderful feathered hat.

  In 1919 he was sent to gaol for incitement to riot in Glasgow; he vividly describes prison conditions and food: the latter was unchanged twenty years later and is probably much the same to this day. Mr Shinwell could not and did not eat it; nor could he eat the food cooked in rancid oil given him by the Spanish reds when he visited their civil war. In the first case he lived on bread, in the second on oranges.

  Perhaps the rest of the book suffers from too little malice; but it is interesting for its account of the early days of Labour, when those who came to break up their meetings were chucked out in a very rough way, and also for a chapter on Ramsay MacDonald.

  Mr Shinwell refused to join the Churchill government in 1940; he was often critical of it in Parliament where he and Lord Winterton, another critic, were called Arsenic and Old Lace. Once Brigadier Harvie Watt, Churchill’s PPS, reproached him for attacking his chief during a difficult moment of the war, and added: ‘You mustn’t forget the P.M. has great military gifts. His ancestor was the Duke of Marlborough’, to which Mr Shinwell replied: ‘My ancestor was Moses’.

  ***

  Women this spring have achieved a really new look, especially about the head. Neat and tidy hair has had a long innings of just forty years, ever since the birds’ nest bun coiffure was superseded by the shingle soon after the first war. Now the fashion seems to be for a large purple or orange chrysanthemum with a slender stalk, set on a tall thin body and spindly legs. These shaggy heads are not easily come by; it is no use thinking that to drag the hair through a hedge backwards will get the proper effect—only a hairdresser can artfully arrange the artless disarray. A bell-shaped hat would add to the horticultural effect: a huge flower under a cloche.

  ***

  The 42nd Salon de l’Automobile at the Grand Palais has drawn more than a million visitors. The most expensive motor was a very glamorous Rolls Royce, the prettiest, a Cadillac which looked like a brilliant, poisonous flying insect. The new Citroen is very cleverly made, you can go to bed in it, and put twelve suitcases in the boot—both very useful innovations, as anyone knows who has tried to get a room in a French hotel on one of the roads to the South in August will know.

  ***

  On a newspaper placard in Dublin I saw the following:

  BALENCIAGA

  ARD RI FAISIUN

  which made me wish I understood Irish. Has M. Balenciaga given an Irish periodical what he has, it seems, denied to Vogue—news of his spring collection?

  ***

  English parents continue to be greatly harassed by the 11-plus exam, which, they feel, divides the children unfairly and prematurely into sheep and goats. It is, no doubt, admirable that they should set such store by education. But the fact is, once a child has learnt to read he can learn two-thirds of the subjects taught in grammar schools by himself. Who wants to be ‘taught’ history, for example, by some prejudiced school master, when he can read all the great historians, and any number of memorialists and biographers as well, in a school library or a public library? Latin and Greek, mathematics and science—they must be taught if they are to be learnt; but not English literature, history, geography, and so on.

  I have been reading the autobiography of an Eton master, M.D. Hill, published thirty years ago. His subject was biology.

  ‘With a few exceptions,’ he writes, ‘only the duller boys are allowed to specialize in science… the truth is that many masters in the year AD 1927 believe that there is something a little “odd” or ungentlemanly in the pursuit of science, though it is better than nothing for a dull boy…. There is no shadow of doubt that valuable recruits have been lost thereby. I have known several cases of boys who would gladly have taken up science con amore if their tutors had allowed them. More than once boys have said to me: “My tutor hates science, he always laughs at it in Pupil Room.”’

  That was Eton in the 20s. It was just the same in the 40s. Of the 50s I cannot speak.

  ***

&n
bsp; Mr Hill was before his time in many ways. He thought the birch and cane would soon be as out of date as the rack and thumb screw. I believe at Gordonstoun the boys are punished by having to run for a mile; something that many people do for pleasure. The latter objection, however, also applies to being beaten; so perhaps one punishment is as good as another—who knows?

  ***

  Eton may not shine when it comes to the teaching of hard subjects such as physics, but in what a scientist friend of mine calls the BBC subjects it excels, and the masters also excel in writing wonderful end of term reports which keep the parents quite amused and happy. Not for them the humdrum ‘fails to concentrate sufficiently on his work,’ or ‘has made a real effort this term’ type of report, which, they no doubt realize, is unreadably dull. One of my sons got this from an Eton master: ‘He is an incorrigible oddity, and is fast becoming a museum piece here.’

  Mr Hill relates some of the sallies of another master: ‘His courage in tackling questions of which he does not know the meaning, much less the answer, is worthy of the highest praise.’ And: ‘His self-esteem is commendable, for while he believes that he has learnt something up to me this Half, I am quite sure he has not.’

  ***

  The strangest event (it happened in December 1954, but has only just been published) was the Pope’s second vision. This time, Christ visited the sick-bed of his Vicar on earth, which is perhaps less wonderful than that the sun should turn round in the sky, which the Pope saw after a three-day fast as he walked in the Vatican gardens four years ago.