SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

The grim saga of what is happening to New York has become one of, the great morality stories of our time. For four or five years now we have been accustomed to the picture

of a city gradually going to pieces under the concentrated impact of all the evils which modern society is heir to—its technology collapsing in traffic jams, pollution, power failures and a sea of garbage, its unfortun- ate people likewise in soaring crime, violence, drug addiction and neurosis of every kind. What makes it a morality story is the way in which each new twist of the nightmare comes as a direct fruit of that erst*hile dream of New York as the shining jewel of twentieth century technological civilisation.

This week we read of the city's proposed new power station—made necessary because the demand has risen at a colossal rate to power coloured TV sets, air conditioning, computers and all the other gadgets which advertising has urged on the citizens. And yet the urgency means that there is only time to build an old-fashioned power station which will pour out yet more thousands of tons of sulphurous fumes.

Of course this is not the first time that New York has acted out the morality of a city determined to escape into a dream. In one of his more powerful essays, 'My Lost City', Scott Fitzgerald chronicles the hysteria of the Roaring Twenties rising to the 'great crash'. In a brilliant conceit, Fitzgerald per- sonified New York's ultimate folly in the erection of the Empire State Building. Re- turning from Europe after the crash, he goes to the top, and all is explained—how the New Yorkers' bubble must finally have burst, when they looked out on the limitless blue- green vista .of sea and distant countryside, and discovered that New York was 'a city after all and not a universe'. One's fear today, of course, is exactly the opposite—that we may discover that New York is not just a city, but the exemplar of our universe as man has made it.

Unpopular truth

A man who would not have been surprised by New York's fate was Hugh Kingsmill. I have been particularly interested in Michael Holroyd's attempt to instate him as one of the major writers of our time, and for the past week absorbed in the, alas, absurdly expensive selection from his works, recently published.

I first came across Kingsmill's writings when staying in the house of his great friend Malcolm Muggeridge. By chance I picked up one of his books from the shelves, and could hardly rest until I had read all the eight or nine others available. I particularly admired his two on Dr Johnson, giving such a very different and rounder picture than Boswell's, and also his superb biography of D. H. Lawrence, which should certainly, like several others, be reissued in paperback. He was by no means unappreciative of Law- rence's 'genius'—but equally aware of how much it was part of a sickness in Lawrence (the absurd glorification of the will/sex /'the blood') which eventually got out of hand and destroyed him.

Possibly Kingsmill never produced a really great book—but the real reason why he is so out of favour today is that his central beliefs chimed so ill with the modish wishful thinking which is today's orthodoxy. He had seen through to that highly unpopular truth, so rare in any writer of the twentieth century (when our heroes are the pedlars or embodi- ments of dreams), that it is only by over- coming our egos and our capacity for living out dreams that we can begin to see the world make sense.

Statistical cricket

Sitting in the sunshine at the Oval last week, watching cricket of probably as high a stand- ard as one could have seen in fifty years, it was nevertheless hard to repress at least one regret for summers gone-by. What would have been made fifty years ago (or even twenty) of the fact that A. Buss of Sussex was the first man to reach 100 wickets this season—on 13 August! It was admittedly a long time ago that J. T. Hearne achieved this feat as early as 12 June—but on no less than five occasions, 'rich' Freeman had already reached 200 wickets by 14 August.

Again, it seems highly unlikely that any player this year will achieve the 'double' of 100 wickets and 1,000 runs, and it will be a close run thing for more than one or two batsmen-to score 2,000 runs—when John Edrich did so last year, it was the first time that only one man had reached 2,000 since 1919. It is hard not to think that this falling off (in two not notoriously bad summers) is due to the plethora of Sunday games: after all it is only nine_years since the summer of 1961, when seven men did the double, and not much more since Tony Lock was the last man to reach 200 wickets, twice in three seasons.

This lessening of statistical achievement runs all through English cricket. A total of over 500 in a county match (let alone 600) seems almost inconceivable-7the highest total in any game last year was 451, and that in a Test. There is something irresistible in the pleasure of seeing a really big score com- piled. I shall always treasure the memory of seeing Harold Gimblett knock up 310 for Somerset at Eastbourne in 1948 (even though I suppose I should record that he did not reach his treble century until, half way through the last afternoon of the game).

A biology project My note on butterflies last week was followed a day later by the letter to the Times from a Worcestershire reader claiming that 'never in the fifty years that I have been observing them' have butterflies been so common as this summer. His only plaintive note was a request for an end to the still amazingly prevalent practice of netting these creatures, often indiscriminately. I recollect a year or two ago coming across a group of school- boys on the Berkshire downs: each had a jar stuffed with dead and dying butterflies, almost all of the same species. I asked them what they were up to: 'Oh—we're on a biology project. Our science master told us to go out and collect as many as we could'.

Observerjokes

'Better Paid Workers Get Richer Faster'— Observer main headline, page 1. 'Massacre at South Cadbury' by Joanna Slaughter—/bid., page 3.