PERSONAL COLUMN
This my son was dead. . . .
SASTHI BRATA
THAT of course was the bearded patriarch forgiving the Prodigal. And great need he had of forgiveness too. But consider for a moment that forlorn figure who scarcely gets a mention in any Times leader. The other son, you remember, was the one who stayed behind to look after the old man, who went to work every morning, didn't go boozing with the boys every Saturday night and stored away his pennies in a Post Office Savings account. While the dissolute young rascal was treated to champagne and caviar on his return, the elder brother had to make do with two lamb chops and a bottle of Guinness even on his birthday; no gold ring, no incentive bonus, not even any holiday pay for the man who did his job dutifully and well. The story ends with the party turning on to the Jimi Hendrix band, while the loyal son stands abandoned in the hallway.
There must be a moral in there somewhere and I am not at all sure that the sardonic Nazarene wasn't anticipating the most lucrative format of modern living —Professional Prodigalism. Now, before I am rapped on a charge of 'sour grapes,' let me confess that I have always had a secret desire to be a professional prodigal myself. But a basically unadventurous nature combined With a pathological fear of being an outcast, have kept me from the fatted calf. This has not prevented me however from making a detailed study of the modus operandi of the successful in this vocation.
One of the chief personality traits of the Professional prodigal is a healthy contempt for the staid and mediocre. He strikes out on his own, determined to make the most Of the one life he has, from the comfortable launching pad of an inherited fortune. He also has an insatiable lust for the arc lamps of notoriety and fashion. So if he is an illiterate teenager, he decides to call himself an avant-garde poet and win an Arts Council award; if he is a bad painter, he signs his name on soup tins and shoots into international prominence. Having established the objective , the technique must be sure and calculated: hit out against convention and then, having attracted sufficient notice, wait to be welcomed back into the status quo parlour under the flood lights of television tameras. If you are the Senator from Massachusetts, and there is a nasty odour of Martha's Vineyard in your back garden, then 'attack the Nixon administration for its Policy on Vietnam, make the front page of the New York Times and win favour as a liberal.' If you are Luther and suffer from virulent attacks of constipation, then nail your protestations on the church door at Wittenburg and let the wind blow your indigestion away to Rome. But if You wish to make the professional grade, YOU must keep a watchful eye on the return-ticket to the bastions of fame and power. Roam around with a much-married man by all means and tickle the romantic hearts of millions of desiccated spinsters but come the time marry the most aristocratic bachelor commoner and reenter the fold. Poke fun at board-room millionaires and stockbrokers but never turn down a 610,000-a-year job from Lord Thomson. Incite the peasants to revolt, but when the Princes extend their bejewelled hands, don't hesitate to ditch the poor and become head of a new church.
In all my researches I have found that the professional prodigal is extraordinarily adept at doing somersaults. The bourgeoisie, who were the ' progressive ' rebels in the feudal era, became in their turn the most sophisticated exploiters in a capitalist society. Socialists, of Harold Wilson's persuasion, relished their weekly Teas at the Palace far more than any Tory Prime Minister ever did. High moral principles are as effective a lever to power as the tool kit of the housebreaker; once inside the Hall of Fame however, they must be abandoned with alacrity to remove tell-tale traces of one's soiled and lowly past.
It was ironical and amusing to have a disused brothel in Soho converted into "London's first satirical night club," where the respectable elite (Anglican bishops and Princess Margaret) could jostle at the bar for a drink. But the boomerang returned to its point of origin some five years later when the bright young lads who ran 'The Establishment' became part of it themselves, appeared on television screens and colour supplements and told us how to run our lives. The crackling voice of thunder is arresting because it is transient; the storedup charges of frustration and envy flash across our social sky, raindrops fall and are absorbed in the forgiving earth. To adapt Connolly's memorable aphorism, inside every satirist there is a Foreign Office man struggling to get out.
Most native rulers of the newlyindependent nations of Asia and Africa have exploited their own peoples through graft, inefficiency and corruption far more than the white colonialists ever did. The underdog has always been a useful tool and stepping stone for the ambitious pretender to the throne. Bobby Kennedy was supposed to have expressed the unrealised hopes of the disaffected of his age . . . the faith of the outcast, the politics of salvation. But the prodigal must never forget that his ultimate goal is his father's gold ring, he must not overstep the mark, never contemplate living among the untouchables all his life. His revolt must be " . . . perfectly safe, his impulses never take him beyond the limits of accepted behaviour. He would not join a Peace march nor withdraw his account from a bank supporting the South African economy . . . " (Andrew Kopkind in the New York Review of Books, June 1, 1967). He must learn that the animal with the nonconformist fang minus the poison fluid is the highest-paid in the social menagerie.
If you start off as the author of Lucky Jim you must spurn the title of 'Angry Young Man' and translate yourself to the cordon bleu apartment of James Bond. From a wheelbarrow in Honey Lane to the antechambers of Buckingham Palace is a short ride if you look back angrily enough. Prince Hal was not the only rebel to become doyen of Establishment canons; the ex-Communist is the most notorious reactionary this side of the thirties.
The heroes of the Bible are Peter and Paul, not John, Luke or Matthew; Peter who denied Him thrice and Paul who was the most fire-eating anti-Christian Pharisee before the Damascus trauma. The authority of a St Augustine is not the least due to his debauched past; St Teresa did not offer virginity as her toll-fee to Heaven. Rebellion, followed by penitence and canonisation, has been the most sanctified ritual in Christian society.
When Malcolm Muggeridge (crusading agnostic and high living spirit in his youth) turns penitently religious and screams against the permissive society, and David Frost (the MC to preside over the first ever satirical sketches of the Royal Family on the box) interviews Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace, they do not represent unique phenomena. In his old age, Mahatma (Father of the Nation) Gandhi earned the right to condemn carnal intercourse per se, because at the age of twenty he was engaged in lustful copulation at the very moment his father lay dying in an adjoining room. Cambridge, which started as a radical revolt against Oxford, became in time the New Orthodoxy itself. The men who braved their lives across a hungry ocean to "be free and worship the God they liked" found a nation which spawned McCarthy. The way to become the favourite idol of a telly populace is not to be 'the other son '; sincerity and conformity hardly ever pay. In a dull and weary world, the only time one has a party is when the son that was dead comes to life again.
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