The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  Perhaps the reason why the newspapers give the Pope’s visions so much less prominence than they give to a railway smash or a royal romance is that unbelievers do not believe in them and believers find them perfectly natural. Nevertheless, when a man of Pius XII’s intellect and experience sees visions it is more interesting than when children guarding their flocks on the hillside, or nuns, or hermits, see them; from whatever point of view one considers it, it is news of the very first importance.

  ***

  The case against the gamblers has failed. It turns out that what the policeman saw (when he climbed a fire escape and peeped into a London drawing-room) was not forbidden by law. Grown-up men and women who amuse themselves by transferring their own money from one to another in a private house, are not committing an offence. How farcical the English gambling laws must be if it could ever have been imagined that they were!

  ***

  The prettiest town I have seen for ages is Alençon. Towns which have given their name to lace should be attractive, but a visit to Valenciennes soon demonstrates that they are not always so. Alençon had the good fortune to be rich in the eighteenth century and less rich subsequently; for this reason it has remained lovely, with hundreds of charming houses and many old streets and squares.

  Climbing some stone steps in order the better to see the fine seventeenth century palais de Guise, I found myself at the door of a chapel dedicated to St Theresa, the Little Flower. Apparently she was born in the next-door house.

  In the chapel there is a grille through which one can see St Theresa’s parents’ nuptial bed, a Second Empire mahogany bed hung with red curtains; and behind these curtains, a printed notice relates, the saint as a child used to hide when she wanted to think about God.

  Round the top of the chapel walls are some delightful frescoes, depicting scenes from her life. In one of them she is shown, as a little girl, ‘courant seule vers l’église malgré la pluie’ [rushing to church despite the rain]—an act of courage which could, I daresay, be paralleled in many an Irish village on almost any Sunday. It probably rains more in Ireland than it does at Alençon.

  ***

  A museum of costumes is being arranged in Paris. French royal personages were surprisingly short; Louis XIV measured 5 ft 2½ inches, but made himself several inches taller by wearing very high heels and a very high wig. And not only royalties were small; the robes Josephine wore when she was crowned are so tiny that in all Paris, it appears, there is not a mannequin who can fit into them. So these historic dresses will be displayed on dummies used nowadays for the clothes of boys and girls of fourteen.

  ***

  However wrong-headed the Aldermaston marchers may have been, however wickedly irresponsible their demand for unilateral disarmament, it was impossible not to feel sorry for them as they trudged along in the snow and slush and wind. Luckily, most of the men had very long hair and some of them beards, which must have been a great comfort; and I suppose the parsons could pile plenty of vests and jerseys on underneath their cassocks. But what about the poor women, in their thin tight trousers?

  On Good Friday they kept the blood coursing through their veins by jam sessions of rock and roll; there was a spirited photograph of this in The Times. But by Holy Saturday they must have been too footsore for that kind of sport; and it snowed. Feeling worried about their fate I rushed to the French newspapers, but the march was not mentioned, and there were no English papers to be had. As so often happens, however, my sympathy turned out to be completely misplaced. For, according to the left-wing weeklies, it appears that the marchers loved their march and arrived at their goal after three days of it with heads (and presumably beards and cassocks as well) held high.

  They were all a bit tired at the end, no doubt, which accounts for their behaviour to an Oxford geneticist, who, exercising the old English right of free speech, criticised the notion of unilateral banning of the H-bomb. It seems that on hearing his words some of the girls broke ranks, and tried to pull his motor car to bits. Only when the lady leader of the march, calling above the surrounding din, reminded them that they were supposed to be pacifists, did they resume their dignified progression.

  ***

  The most amusing of all spectator sports in England now is television. Not the second-rate plays and films nor the actors and actresses, but the news, and the real people, heroes and heroines who voluntarily exhibit themselves under a merciless magnifying glass for the public to gaze at.

  ***

  What is the vote? A right, a privilege, a duty. If to have the privilege of the vote is the right of every adult citizen, to exercise it is a duty. And since, of course, everyone has a duty to do his duty, voting should be made compulsory. This is an argument which is being put forward in the French press at the present time.

  I imagine, if ever we have the compulsory vote in England, a new sort of suffragist or suffragette will appear; there are bound to be people who conscientiously object to voting; they will probably chain themselves to railings and have to be carried struggling into the polling booths. But though you can carry a man to the poll, you cannot make him vote—not, that is, if the ballot is to remain secret. How can you make sure that he will not ‘spoil’ his paper? And if a policeman, or a WVS lady, or a boy scout, stands over him while he puts a cross in the right place—well then, no doubt, the fur would fly. Tiresome though it must be for people with a highly developed civic sense to see good votes going to waste, the alternative seems too difficult.

  Perhaps it might be arranged otherwise; the electoral roll could be checked and a fine imposed on non-voters. In England now, when between a third and a half of those enfranchised abstain from voting, a rich harvest could be expected from a fine of, say, a guinea a head. Enough would be collected to pay for something popular, another ‘fly-over’ or two, for example, like the one being built at the beginning of the Little West Road, which is apparently costing nine millions.

  ***

  I have never voted in a parliamentary election in my life, not that I am a conscientious objector to voting but simply because I have never been able to face the idea of sharing responsibility for sending either of the pair of troglodytes standing, in any constituency where I happened to be on the register, to the House of Commons. They were all the stuff of which back benchers are made; vote-fodder for the Tory or Labour whips; unwavering supporters of their disastrous leaders.

  I once voted in a local council election in the depths of the country, but that was for a special reason. My vote went to the Independent candidate, just in order to help keep out a particularly fatuous Tory do-gooder from the next village. Others must have had the same idea: my man won.

  ***

  One of the great advantages of age is that you begin to know by experience the kind of thing you are likely to abominate. International exhibitions I long ago learned to avoid. The newspapers are so clever at making them sound wonderful that after a bit the most unlikely people suddenly announce that they are off to, for example, Brussels. A nightmare day-trip from Paris is highly recommended by the railways; it allows many weary hours for seeing all the sights.

  Nothing would induce me to go; I have never forgotten how, as a child, I longed to see the Prince of Wales in butter at Wembley, where this original piece of sculpture was the high-light of the Empire exhibition. Having waded through dust and crowds to reach my objective in either the Australian or the Canadian pavilion, I forget which, I found the butter Prince slightly less lovely than I had pictured it in my imagination. From that moment of disillusion dates my aversion to these exhibitions: what you see is almost never worth the struggle involved.

  At Wembley the amusement park quite made up for the disappointment, but now I should not care much for that either.

  ***

  Attacks on Teddy boys continue to fill the newspapers, and an MP, Mr James Dance, is reported in the Daily Mail as having suggested in Parliament that if they have been found guilty of insulting behaviour, unless they pay their
fines on the dot they should have their ‘revolting curls’ cut off. Some people might think that, however much insulting behaviour is to be deplored, this is scarcely the way to persuade a group of people to be more civil. Of course nobody would have dared to suggest that Louis XIV’s curls, or even Charles II’s or William III’s, were revolting, or that a single ringlet from all those cascading locks could possibly be spared. If I were a rich Ted I would grow longer and longer curls, or even get myself a wig like theirs, just to tease Mr Dance.

  For, according to the newspapers, the Teds are very rich indeed; much richer than public school boys, who, as a result, are inclined to give up their ‘missions’ to the East End of Lon don. A good thing too, I should imagine. No self-respecting Ted wants ‘missionaries’ from public schools, foisting cricket, scouting and other distasteful games upon him. On the other hand (in order that contact, supposed by the do-gooders to be so valuable, should not be lost between the East End and the public schools) a few of the more affluent Teddy boys might well take a day off from work occasionally and send themselves on a mission to Harrow or Eton or some other suburban school. They could give the school boys a good feed (often much needed), and lend them their Elvis Presley records. As a special treat they might bring a pin-table, or even a few girls, along with them.

  A mission of that sort would have an enormous success; the school boys would learn to look forward eagerly to a visit from the Stepney Mission, or whatever it might be called. Probably life-long friendships would be formed. And the Teds would enjoy the glow of self-righteousness, knowing how much they had done to brighten the drab term-time lives of their less fortunate contemporaries.

  ***

  The art critic of a French newspaper complained (in connection with the Biennale exhibition at Venice, which is apparently even more ghastly than usual) that everyone now suffers more or less from what he called the Cézanne complex. Those with a Cézanne complex are terrified lest by laughing at or ignoring some ugly daub of abstract painting in 1958 they may be earning themselves the despised niche in the history of art which we now allot to the people who failed to recognise the greatness of the Impressionists.

  Personally I do not care in the very least whether my grand children’s generation despises and rejects my choice of pictures, or whether they themselves will blame me for not having bought a bunch of twisted iron arranged by a ‘sculptor’ whom they consider a genius. I suppose it is different for art critics, who are by way of ‘knowing’ something or other, but I cannot understand why anyone else should mind what future generations think about their taste. Yet it undoubtedly worries some people, even those who pride themselves on their indifference to contemporary judgment of their knowledge, opinions, good nature, or whatever it might be.

  It is one of the strangest evidences of human vanity that a person should care about the opinion of posterity; the opinion, that is, of descendants of the crowds milling along Oxford Street, or the Boulevard des Italiens, or in and out of St Mark’s on an August afternoon.

  ***

  The following appeared in ‘Comment’ in the Observer recently: ‘When General Serov was asked about the Press references to his forced deportation of thousands of citizens of the Baltic States by cattle trucks to Siberia, he replied that we had done as much to the Fascists. Some papers commented that we had, in fact, treated Sir Oswald Mosley and others well. That is perfectly true: and we can be proud of the restraint shown to them, in war-time, as political prisoners.’

  Lady Redesdale* tells me she wrote to the Observer:

  The writer of ‘Comment’ thinks that we can be proud of the restraint shown to Sir Oswald Mosley and his followers in war-time as political prisoners. This restraint consisted in imprisonment in the ordinary London prisons of Brixton and Holloway for 4 years, without charge or trial. During this time I often heard or read of politicians boasting of the great freedom enjoyed in this country, where according to Magna Carta, no Englishman may be kept in prison without trial. It was hard at the time to read without a bitter smile the effrontery of those words when compared with what was happening in actual fact… Sir Oswald and his followers were imprisoned because they opposed the war with Germany, on which our politicians were resolved, and for no other reason at all.

  The Observer did not print her letter. A few weeks ago the same newspaper published a ‘profile’ of Mr Arthur Koestler, and stated that he had been imprisoned by Vichy France. I wrote pointing out that in his autobiography Scum of the Earth, Mr Koestler describes how he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp by the French authorities during the winter 1939-40. He had managed to secure his release, and was living in England, by the time the Vichy government was formed. The Observer did not print my letter.

  * Diana’s mother.

  ***

  I have been reading the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna’s letters to her husband, the last Tsar, written during the war between 1914 and 1917. They are love letters, but they are also full of advice about the conduct of the war, the appointment of ministers and so on, handed on from ‘our Friend’, the Holy man of God, Rasputin. She wrote in English, signing herself Wify, Sunny, and sometimes Girly. She continually urged the Tsar to assert himself, be more of an autocrat, make people tremble—the last thing poor ‘Boysy’ was capable of doing. He spent most of the time at General Headquarters, where ‘Baby’ (the Tsarevitch) often accompanied him. Do not allow Baby to put his elbows on the table, or throw bread pellets at meal-times, writes the Empress.

  Knowing the end of the story, and that in a few months ‘our Friend’ is to be poisoned and shot, and not long afterwards the whole imperial family taken to Siberia and murdered, it is pathetic to read of the optimistic prophecies about her children’s future happiness, the four Grand Duchesses married, Baby reigning over all the Russias—in which the Empress tried so hard to believe.

  Her bitter hatred of the Grand Duke Nicholas, much the ablest member of the royal family, dated from his telegram to ‘our Friend’ when the latter proposed visiting the troops: Viens, je te ferai pendre [Come and I’ll have you hanged].

  Deeply religious, she firmly believed in the power of prayer. When Goutchkov, a minister whom she particularly disliked, was going on a tour of factory inspection, she went to church and prayed that his train would he de-railed and he alone killed; but, as so often happened, prayer remained unanswered.

  ***

  Air travel can be exasperating. Years ago I was travelling to England from Spain and landed at Hurn because there was fog in London. With other passengers arriving from everywhere imaginable, we were herded into a hangar furnished with some straw chairs, locked in and told to wait. Every few minutes the door was unlocked and another twenty or so stranded travellers were pushed in. The hangar soon filled up: people began sitting on the floor. Outside the window several charabancs could be seen, their drivers chatting together and smoking. Luckily, my companion,* an impatient man, soon wearied of the dull situation. He threatened the officials with a writ for unlawful detention, and thus we made our escape. I expect the others are there still, their bones whitening….

  * Oswald Mosley.

  ***

  A study of English and German archives apparently shows that, on both sides, there was often a disparity between the number of aeroplanes claimed to have been shot down in the Battle of Britain and the true figure. A Mr Alan Brien has discovered the reason for this. Writing in the Daily Mail he says: ‘Both the British and German Air Forces exaggerated—the RAF through careless checking and wishful thinking; the Luftwaffe through arrogance and a lying propaganda service.’ So now we know.

  ***

  Mr Arthur Koestler, in his autobiography The Invisible Writing, describes the Budapest of the 20s, where he says there was a group of first-rate writers who would have been world famous had they been born in London, Berlin or Paris, but who were condemned to write for each other and a relatively small public because their language was Hungarian. Translation? Of course it is possible,
in theory, though much gets lost in the process.

  Certain words and idioms are untranslatable. In another category are translators’ howlers, the Englishman who gave lac du Japon as Japanese lake (instead of lacquer), the Frenchman who turned Alexander Pope into le pape Alexandre.

  General Spears, in his book Prelude to Dunkirk, says that Madame de Portes, a lady who had an influence on pre-war politics in France through her friendship with a member of the Government, was known as la porte à côté, the side door. He does not add the other meaning of à côté—common, a person one does not receive—which is the whole point of the joke. A German once told me that in a prisoner-of-war camp in America he was classified as a rabid Nazi—kaninchen Nazi, he said, laughing. Had he really confused rabid with rabbit?

  ***

  Who has not, when learning a foreign language, read a book and laboriously noted down all the unknown words in order to look them up afterwards in the dictionary? And who has not felt rather depressed, when, having more or less mastered the language, he comes across dozens of words in as many pages which he has never heard of?

  Personally I never mark books. The only point of doing so is to emphasize something for future reading, and as I dislike reading books where words and sentences have been scored and underlined this, for me, would defeat its own end. But I notice that lending library books often have remarks written in their margins by people who cannot contain their furious irritation or disagreement with the authors’ opinions.

  In small libraries the librarian sometimes makes a note, to refer to when giving advice to borrowers. This had been done, for example, in Holloway Prison library, where the librarian was a wardress and not exactly what my father used to call ‘a literary cove’. Yet I suppose she had to know vaguely what the books were about; it would never do if a new prisoner managed to borrow an exciting novel during the very first week. The wardress goes from cell to cell accompanied by a prisoner carrying a tray of books; only boring or at any rate edifying books are supposed to he offered to a prisoner during the early part of a sentence.