The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  In women’s prisons books bound in red cloth used to be the favourites, because the prisoners contrived to transfer some of the red dye from the bindings onto their own lips. This is one of those brilliantly clever things, like splitting a match into ten parts each of which will light a cigarette, that convicts learn in a trice. Probably they no longer have to trouble about the shabby old red books; I saw in a paper some time ago that they are allowed to keep ordinary make-up in their cells now. I wonder whether peroxide is also available to them; one of the saddest sights in a women’s prison was the piebald heads, with a few inches of golden, crimped hair hanging down below the black, brown or sometimes grey.

  I once borrowed a rather pretty leather-bound edition of Racine’s plays, printed about 1840, from Holloway Prison library. The presiding wardress had written on the fly-leaf: Wonderful language; dull. If she considered Racine dull, whom would she find brilliant? It is anybody’s guess.

  Prison has a very special effect on one’s taste in reading. Where the surroundings are so desperately degraded, ‘realism’—which generally means the description of disagreeable happenings against a sordid background—is not much cared for. The need is for either beauty, wit and elegance, or else for what Germans call ‘das Erhabene’ (which can be more or less translated ‘the sublime’).

  This accounts for the fact that St John of the Cross was a best-seller to prisoners of war, or so at least I was told by somebody who worked in a bookshop. I wonder if they read him much now that they have returned to the world. There is no doubt that a very light diet, or in other words semi-starvation, combined with a completely sedentary life, tends to direct the thoughts of even a pleasure-loving and worldly person towards contemplation and mysticism. And the untempting temptations of St Antony as imagined by Bosch might be any light-headed prisoner’s dream.

  ***

  Lord Berners used to send me his books as they came out when I was in prison. They gave me great pleasure, but they were distressingly short; a prisoner wants to look up from a book and discover that several hours have gone by unnoticed—just the opposite of ordinary life when one never has time for all the myriad things one would like to do. We only had permission to write two letters a week, and mine were always mortgaged up to the hilt to go to children and other near relations. But for writing to a Member of Parliament it was possible to obtain special leave from the prison governor; many prisoners took advantage of this with the idea that an MP might summon up courage to raise the whole question of Regulation 18B in general, or of some constituent’s case in particular, in Parliament. (One or two courageous MPs actually did so). I used to get permission for an extra letter to thank Lord Berners for his gifts by saying that I must write to a member of the House of Lords. As a matter of fact he never took his seat or went near the place; his excuse was that the only time he had been there his umbrella was stolen by a bishop.

  The day my arrest was reported in the newspapers he wrote to ask whether he could help me in any way; should he, for instance, send me a little file concealed in a peach? This letter was only given to me months later; it had meantime been the rounds in the Home Office and was riddled with pin holes.

  ***

  On a raw November morning at Waterloo station a woman exclaimed in an indignant way to the world in general but also to me in particular because I happened to be near by:

  ‘Look at that man! It’s a shame! He’s dressed in nothing but a blanket and his bedroom slippers!’

  I looked. ‘I think he’s a friar,’ I said. She calmed down a bit. ‘Oh, is that what they call it, dear,’ she murmured doubtfully.

  ***

  The committee which formed itself in Mahatma Gandhi House has appealed for money to help it save liberty in France. I long to know 1. whether money is pouring in, and 2. how it will be spent. I suppose the committee will have to come to Paris on a fact-finding expedition. Rather a clever idea of theirs, really; but how surprised the French will be! English people enjoy giving money to ‘save’ some country or other. I remember at the end of the war ladies went from house to house in every village collecting ‘for China.’

  ***

  English pacifists certainly pick their weather for demonstrating with a noble disregard for their own comfort. The Aldermaston march took place in a snow storm; the attack on the concrete mixer at a rocket-launching site in Norfolk was made in bitter December fog. Climbing over barbed wire entanglements and rolling in icy mud, the demonstrators accurately reproduced for themselves conditions in the front line in the war before last.

  I suppose the demonstrator called ‘Arrowsmith’ was compensating for an ancestor who, in medieval times, was an armaments manufacturer hammering out arrowheads on his anvil.

  ***

  I see that the memorial designed by Mr Lynn Chadwick, to commemorate the crossing of the Atlantic forty years ago by the airship R.34, is not going to be erected at London Airport after all. Lord Brabazon complained that it looked like a diseased haddock.

  Sculpture arouses much more furious controversy than painting because, I suppose, being set up in a public highway, it is seen by many more people. When I was a child, the target for angry denunciation was Epstein’s Rima, a rather inferior work which we all felt obliged to defend because those who attacked it were art-haters.

  The Sudanese have hit upon a rather original idea. Instead of unveiling statues in Khartoum they now veil them preparatory to removing them out of sight. A statue of General Gordon riding a camel and one of Lord Kitchener on horseback have recently been veiled, to the accompaniment of ceremonial music and military parades.

  This is an idea Londoners might with advantage copy. My first choice for veiling would be Nurse Cavell. But I hope London will offer to purchase the Khartoum statues; I feel sure they would be popular, the camel in particular would give great pleasure.

  What an excessively odd animal a camel is; the sight of General Chinese Gordon riding his across Hyde Park would beguile countless Londoners from now till doomsday, art-haters and art-lovers alike.

  ***

  A doctor told a friend of mine that 700 different chemicals are used to preserve food. He said that nobody knows what effect they may be having on the human body. He added that of course food must be preserved if vast agglomerations of populations are not to starve. The same argument is used about chemical fertilizers. As the poor little suicide boy in Hardy’s novel said in his farewell note: ‘because we are too menny.’

  Possibly we need a Bertrand Russell of chemistry to point out the dangers in our foods; in any case, patient research is required. Maybe the 700 chemicals do no harm at all to A but give B the permanent stomach-ache which makes his life such a bore. I suppose it is on the cards that if the brains and energy which are lavished on satellites were given to medical research, and if an equal international prestige attached to healing the sick as now accrues from the conquest of space, preventions and cures would in fact be discovered and mankind would suffer less.

  Is the Devil at work in the world, or is it just the dark side of Nature which forces men to struggle on, trampling and discarding the weak as they go? Who knows?

  ***

  A correspondent informs me that it is not the Sudanese who invented the veiling of statues, but Max Beerbohm; he thought of it in 1911. Ah, but did it just stop at being a clever notion, or did Max Beerbohm actually succeed in veiling any? And if the answer is that he did, was there a military band and an ambassador at his veiling ceremony? The Sudanese veiled so stylishly.

  The veil itself, on the Kitchener statue, looked like an immense ballet skirt, with the horse’s legs playing the parts of Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn in a pas de deux.

  ***

  Sir Frank Medlicott, National Liberal and Conservative MP for Norfolk Central, is reported as saying: ‘Imprisonment without trial is anathema to British people. We are getting slack about this.’ Apparently they had nabbed a couple of foreign seamen and omitted to charge them. I agree with Sir Frank
Medlicott about the slackness, but I do not feel too sure about the anathema. I don’t believe the British people give a button for habeas corpus, though I suppose they might if they were nabbed themselves. I do, for example.

  ***

  When I was at Holloway, concerts were occasionally given for the prisoners by well-meaning and philanthropic visiting musicians. They took place in the chapel. Although architecturally this chapel naturally could not compare with a Gothic country church, it was rather pleasant in its way. In the dirty, smelly, dark old prison it seemed clean, well polished and brightly lit. (I once asked permission to be allowed to buy a stronger bulb for my cell because I could not see to read—the answer was NO).

  One such chapel concert I went to I shall never forget. There was a man who sang folk songs and at the end of each line of verse he raised himself on tiptoe and poked his head out first to the right and then to the left. I began to laugh and couldn’t stop—something that had never happened to me since childhood. I buried my face in my hands and tears of laughter ran through my fingers. Terrified that he might see and be deeply hurt, I did everything I could think of including biting my tongue; but still I shook with laughter which became more painful with every ‘Hey nonny no’ from the singer, who had so kindly come to Holloway to amuse the prisoners but had not meant to amuse them quite as much as that. It was agony; back in my own cell I was overcome with extreme exhaustion. I hope he did not notice; perhaps he thought that I was like Mme Verdurin, who demonstrated her sensibility by listening to music with her face in her hands.

  ***

  President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is apparently considered such a good idea (The Economist calls it a ‘noble experiment’) that other countries may imitate it. But The Economist admits ‘there is a good deal of scepticism in Washington about these “innocents abroad.” Will they be mainly rich men’s children hungry for adventure? Will pampered young Americans prove tough enough and humble enough? How many are likely to know or to learn quickly the obscure languages they will need later?’

  I have been wondering just the same thing. Of course all foreign languages seem obscure until one has managed to learn them. But it might be better in some ways if the Peace Corps refrained from foreign languages altogether. It is so much easier to annoy people if they can understand what you say. And the under-developed will already be highly tried by the noble experimentalists sharing their homes and eating their food.

  There is a brighter side for them (the under-developed peoples) however. They can get a bit of their own back. For ‘President Kennedy does not rule out similar corps in the slums and depressed areas of the United States.’ Well done him! It will be most instructive to observe the reactions of the American unemployed to a highly-powered team of, for example, Congolese, living with them, eating the same food, and speaking heaven knows what language. This will certainly deserve to be called an Experiment, though how Nobly it turns out remains to be seen.

  ***

  ‘… but not on us, the oysters cried…’

  The English love for dumb creatures is famous, and also their fondness for oysters. There was an outcry during the dock strike when it was feared that several hundred thousand oysters might die of thirst unless they were unloaded and given a refreshing drink of sea water. Like the Walrus and the Carpenter, people began shedding bitter tears over them. The dockers relented; the oysters were saved. For what? To be swallowed alive by fat business-men?

  ***

  England ought to have a ‘Day’ like America’s Fourth and France’s Fourteenth of July. Like them, it should be in the summer, a whole holiday for everyone with fireworks and dancing in the streets.

  It is true we have got Guy Fawkes Day, but it is a bit grim when you come to think of it—gunpowder, treason and plot, ending in hanging, drawing and quartering. In fact it is a wonder Guy Fawkes Day has not been forbidden by the life-peeresses; I expect delinquents galore result from this concentration of minds on horrors, and the burning of the guy is anti-social.

  In any case, November is a hopeless month for a Day. Last Guy Fawkes I drove round Trafalgar Square at midnight to see the fun. Through a fairly dense fog it looked as though a sporadic fight was going on between boys armed with fire crackers and police armed with batons, and although this is some people’s idea of an amusing evening, the Day I envisage would have a more universal appeal.

  What date to choose? It must commemorate something unchanging. ‘Empire Day’ would never do; it would upset people right and left, as well as laying us open to ridicule. Oak Apple Day would not commend itself to Cromwellians, nor the anniversary of Waterloo to enthusiasts for united Europe. The safest choice would probably be Midsummer Day, at present celebrated only by lunatics at Stonehenge.

  ***

  What has become of Mr Kennedy’s brother-in-law’s Peace Corps? There was news six months or so ago of idealistic young Americans who were to be sent to countries all over the world where they planned to speak the same language, eat the same food, and live the same lives as the natives.

  It is very strange that they have faded out of the news. Two explanations occur to me: either they are stuck at the language fence, or else they have arrived at their under-developed and under-privileged destinations and have all been eaten by their hungry hosts. One never knows. If the latter, they will have made their contribution to solving the world’s problem of under-nourishment, particularly in respect of protein.

  Unfortunately, in the present state of affairs people seem to be more concerned with Mr Kennedy’s War Corps in Vietnam, and this, as far as one knows, is not being run by any of his relations.

  ***

  To smile or not to smile? American politicians treat us to miles and miles of smiles. On the whole, I am in favour of less smiling; we got very tired of poor Ike’s gums, and we have had just about enough of Mr Kennedy’s teeth. Public figures who do not smile are rare and precious; Queen Mary, for example, was delightfully glum.

  When the world is in such deadly danger from its politicians as it is at the moment, they might at least pretend to be serious. At a cinema recently I saw a news-reel of Mr Kennedy conferring with his advisers on the world crisis. It would be comforting if they could be persuaded to confer without being filmed at all, but this is too much to ask, I suppose. Did they settle down in a quiet room for their momentous conference? Of course not, because that would not seem a modern and young way to behave; the image is so important. The film showed them all climbing self-consciously into a little boat belonging to the President, while Mr Kennedy gave a fine tooth-display. I am not at all sure that this boat is a good exchange for last year’s golf course.

  ***

  All through the summer holidays, while the Berlin crisis has loomed, the politicians have indulged in their habitual fantasies. Mr Macmillan pretended to believe the whole thing has been invented by the newspapers. I was surprised at the intense irritation, not to say fury, caused by his Gleneagles utterance, for it is exactly in line with his usual fatuity, just the sort of thing he has taught us to expect. Life may or may not be better with the Tories, but when it comes to being fatuous they certainly beat all.

  ***

  Hurricane Debbie interfered with the unilateralist anti-American demonstration at the Holy Loch. The anti-German demonstrators in Wales were pelted by the locals. And in London hordes of actors and actresses and clergymen sat in the streets and were carried away by the police.

  Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have sitting-streets, like the play-streets in populous areas of London which are reserved for the children to play in? If the sitters were shepherded into specially reserved streets, they could be left to sit quietly until their beards grew down to the ground, or until they got bored with sitting.

  But perhaps their fines come in useful. One can never be sure of the motives of the Home Office.

  ***

  I have been experiencing the joys of British Railways. I examined my train with interest, to see whether Dr Beeching is ear
ning his keep. It was rather a horrid train. It went from Glasgow to Oban, stopping innumerable times. There was evidence that people had been smoking in the no-smoking carriage, and apart from that it was excessively grimy. The lavatory door not only had no lock: it would not even shut but swung about as the train lurched.

  It is a good rule on British Railways to avoid luncheon and dinner and to eat breakfast and tea instead. They lavish a lot of thought and love on breakfast and tea, while the others are generally disgusting beyond belief. But even at tea a repressive spirit reigned in the dining car of my train. Two harmless ladies sat down at a table and were immediately ordered by the waiter to move. When they mildly asked why, he replied angrily: ‘It’s not laid up. You can see it’s not laid up.’ (Why ‘up’?) He spoke as though a banquet was involved. The ladies moved. I should have felt inclined to stay and make enough fuss to get the table of my choice ‘laid up’—i.e., a plate and cup put upon it.

  I experienced another example of tyranny in Glasgow. I climbed into the airport bus, and the driver came hurrying along and said furiously that no one was allowed to get in his bus until the flight was called. He was about to try and make me get out again when our argument was cut short by (to use BEA jargon) a flight being called. One of the most tiring things about travel in the British Isles is the strange and perverse delight the employees of the railways and airlines take in making everything as difficult as possible for the traveller.