Look back in angst
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
The Neophiliacs Christopher Booker (Collins 42s)
Just about thirty years ago I was writing the last sentence of a book on the 'thirties: 'Fighting a war which might not have to be fought, defending what no more existed to defend, following campaigns which did not take place, mourning for the living and look- ing for strength to the dead, strangely, sadly and rather foolishly, the Thirties drew to a close.
I wrote it sitting on a bed in a barrack hut at Mytchett Hutments, Ash Vale--one bed among fourteen ; a thirty-six year old private soldier with already greying hair who well remembered the home fires being kept burn- ing only some two decades before, and won- dered with some trepidation whether he would be able to keep going on the long, long trail that he saw a'winding to the land of his dreams. A situation, anyway, perfectly and for ever portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in his splendid war trilogy.
In that false apocalypse we scarcely expec- ted anything to survive; least of all books. I really forgot the whole venture in the years that followed, spent mainly on Intelligence duties, which combine in one sublime amal- gam all the fatuities of peace and war ; bring- ing together service and civilian lunacy—like one of those dear eccentric colonels or rear- admirals, believers in the British Israelites or Joanna Southcott's Box, one used to find, in Bournemouth or along the Cote d'Azur.
Imagine my delight, then, when years later l learnt that one of the brightest minds of his generation—Christopher Booker—had as a schoolboy, in 1953, come across my book The Thirties, liked it, and decided then and there to do a similar job on the 'fifties and 'sixties. The result is The Neophiliacs. It would be absurd to suggest in these circum- stances that I can consider the book with the detachment requisite in a reviewer. Few things are more satisfying for the old— especially today, when the prevailing fashion is to regard just being old as a sort of aberra- tion or sickness, if not delinquency—than to find in the work of a much younger writer intimations of one's own views, sympathies and antipathies. How often I am told that any criticism I may offer of contemporary mores is due only to rancorous regret at being too decrepit to participate in their benefits and to malignant envy of those who can! It IS the more agreeable, then, to be able to retort that someone like Booker, not similarly incapacitated, takes a rather similar view.
Having thus declared my personal interest, let me say at once that, quite apart from any connection it may have with me, The Neo- philiacs is in its own right a remarkable book ; enormously stimulating, readable and Perceptive. One of those books which mark a phase in the unfolding of the zeitgeist, and are, therefore, in themselves, a part of the social history they recount. It challenges numerous basic assumptions of our time— for instance, the notion of progress through change and of liberation through self- indulgence—not just by counter-affirmations, but with a great wealth of evidence, patiently gathered, astutely assembled and brilliantly expounded. If (greatly over- simplifying) we were to regard Look Back in Anger as marking, in its petulant, immature way, the opening of a season of protest, then The Neophiliacs is likely to be seen as mark- ing the close.
Booker's thesis is that the essential characteristic of the scene he describes so fully and astutely is a sick love of the new, or neophilia, and that such an attitude is bound to result in an ultimate confusion between fantasy and reality. The neophiliacs, unaccountably overlooked by Dante, are accursed with this passion for the new, which leads them deeper and deeper into the dark forest of fantasy, until they are lost for ever there: sunk without trace in colour supple- ments, drowned in the telly, blind in the neon lighting, wafted away on the plastic wings of narcotic ecstasies.
The material is really too rich and too abundant. Booker handles it with masterly aplomb, though perhaps at times a trifle too solemnly. After all, it is opera bouffe, not Oedipus Rex, or even Petronius. This par- ticular apocalypse belongs to Sunset Boule- vard rather than the blood-red sky heralding the Last Day. Take just one scene among many, many others, which some future Gib- bon—how I envy him !—will have the joy of describing as a perfect miniature of the larger fantasy. Four brave and reverend signiors— the then Bishop of Woolwich, Lord Stow Hill (a former Home Secretary), Father Cor- bishly, si, and the editor of the Times— descend from a helicopter in a remote field, and advance upon the Rolling Stone himself, Mr Mick Jagger. There, before the television cameras, they solemnly question him about his recent entanglement with the judiciary over a marijuana charge, eliciting, to judge from the subsequent transmission, somewhat gruff and broken responses ; then depart as gravely as they came.
Booker himself, as is fitting, has been a participant as well as a spectator. One may imagine the young Christopher, CND badge in lapel, marching ardently behind the Canon in his belted cassock, a protest song on his lips. Or, as he describes, listening with rapture to the latest Beatle offering. (He quotes—and I treasure the quotation— Richard Buckle in the Sunday Times as observing that the Beatles are 'the greatest composers since Beethoven'.) Or, again, the first editor of Private Eye; and then knock- ing off sketches for Ned Sherrin and That Was the Week That Was, including—a sombre memory—a contribution to that most shaming of all their productions: the one
on the occasion of President Kennedy's assassination which suffered the ultimate in- dignity of being read into the Congressional Record. Or, yet again, campaigning for Young Liberals in the golden Orpington days.
Without this involvement he never would have been able to understand so well the nature of the fantasy, or to expound so excel- ly the moral and spiritual breakdown that behind it. As he shows, it is not so much that there are wrong values as that there are none. The Christianity of social protest and sensual indulgence is not a perversion of the Christian faith but its negation ; the love which we are urged to make instead of war has everything to do with sex and nothing with love ; the derelict youths and girls who occupy empty buildings and write four-letter words in excreta on the walls are not pro- testing against anything, but just relapsing `into the ways, not of the jungle, but the zoo.
It is the nature of fantasies to extend them- selves, as of shadows to lengthen. lf, for in- stance, an abortion law results in more abor- tions, then the answer is to have another law and yet more abortions. Likewise, after black and white, colour. Ah, colour! And then? There will, we may be sure, be other glories, and we who cannot see them are Sancho Panzas, who, as Don Quixote insists, have been bewitched into mistaking a glittering army for a flock of sheep and giants for windmills.
We may be grateful to Booker for assem- bling so splendid and hilarious an array of data in support of his thesis. As he indicates, the Quixotes are many and eminent (Mr Roy Jenkins who says we are more civilised than ever before, the ex-Bishop of Woolwich who says we are more mature. Mr Maudling who says that our moral standards are more elevated, to name but three) ; the Sanchos f6i and opinionated. He does not, however, leave matters there, but in his two particu- larly fine last chapters ('Fading Into Reality' and 'The Riddle of the Sphinx') considers an escape route back into reality. This, he says. as Christ taught, can only be achieved by a man 'dying in his fantasy self, in order to live in his real self—the real self which, be- cause it is part of God, goes on for ever and ever'.
In fantasy terms this is a doctrine of resig- nation ; in actuality, the only basis there is for hope here on earth. Once the inward reality of things has been grasped, then it becomes possible to learn to accept, 'not just with stoicism or resignation but with joy, whatever the unfolding of his conscious life may bring. Booker quotes the case of Beet- ; hoven who, in spite of everything, could yet say in the music of his last years: 'Muss es sein? Es muss sein.' In other words, 'Thy will be done' is the prayer of prayers, and. Booker concludes, 'ultimately, to overcome his fantasy self is the one supreme contrib'• tion a man can make to mankind'.
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