Centrepiece
Lamentations
Colin Welch
The sparkling wit and percipience of what I wrote for you last week is known to me alone, so far as I know its only reader. In it I expressed my extreme astonishment at the appointment of Mr Jocelyn Stevens to be Rector of the Royal College of Art. Someone else had described the appointment as `dotty in a way'. Conor O'Brien might call it a `gubu' — his acronym, may I remind you, for the strange incidents which have from time to time disfigured Mr Haughey's administrations in Ireland, characterised by Mr Haughey himself as 'grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented'. For the whole process of making such strange appointments I coined two possible words of my own — `ealigulation' or 'protopopovism', without suggesting, of course, that Mr Stevens is in reality a horse or suffering from the same incapacitating combination of hallucina- tions, eccentricities and social diseases which rendered Nicholas II's last interior minister so noteworthy. For the appoint- ments themselves I coined the word 'discos', which seemed to have a modishly jazzy ring to it — 'dotty, imaginative, sur- prising, controversial, odd'. Nureyev to take over the Coal Board? Lord Matthews to be a professor of classics at Oxford? Mr Derek Jameson to be Slade Professor of Fine Arts (a predecessor, Lord Clark of Civilisation, produced a book on The Nude, for which experience on the Daily Star may have fitted Mr Jameson to produce a sequel)? I invited Spectator readers to dream up better discos of their own, packed the arti- cle in my shoulder bag to bring to London, reported Parliament for the Mail, went home to my basement in Shepherd's Bush, Paid off the taxi: when suddenly, as the editor sympathetically noted last week, a tall, high-stepping young black swooped gracefully like a seagull down on my cases and Pranced off with them, heels twinkling, into the orange night. I gave chase. If I had been younger, if it had been earlier, if I had not dined well with Michael White, the Guardian's kind, wise and witty sketch- writer, the story might have had a happier ending, It may still. As it is, all gone — eases, article, credit cards, shirts, driving licence, trousers, files of papers, all those Personal 'effects' which it is hateful to think of strangers picking over and, worst of all, the commonplace books in which for more than 40 years I have inscribed what- ever seemed to me unusually wise, shrewd or amusing (or sometimes fatuous, like Bakunin's raving: 'The chariot of revolution
is rolling, and gnashing its teeth as it rolls') in what I read.
. It was like seeing valued old friends and teachers brutally abducted: I could almost hear them screaming, roaring or bleating in a variety of tongues, as if I'd betrayed them. Or worse, as if I were undergoing without anaesthetic a horrible operation, a sort of lobotomy by which part of my memory, and that the most precious part, was being roughly excised. Or was it perhaps a tiny revolution, a little outburst of socialism in the street, Marx in miniature, whereby an expropriator was
himself expropriated, his wealth redistributed? Some of this wealth might be of value to its new proprietor, credit cards, for instance, till stopped; and I believe there is a market for driving licences. But most of it is presumably, alas, of infinitely less value to him than to me. I imagine tan, his wool- ly ly head haloed with newlY Walkman headphones injecting
its vacant recesses, puzzling over `dis or
Mistah Josselan Stevan', reggae into
ploughing bewildered through the wit and wisdom of Goethe, say, or Peacock — 'who dis Reb- bren Dr Fulliutt? And who dis Goydah? A dictum of Coleridge might elicit from him unfavourable comment. It said in effect (I quote perforce from memory) that the negroes, instead of prating about the wrongs of slavery, should rather thank God for the destiny which had put them within the reach of grace. Well, I must concede that whatever tiny grain of truth may lie within that cruel saying should have been better expressed, with overriding qualifica- tions. Perhaps the poet was under the in- fluence of ganja at the time.
Of course I may do my thief a frightful injustice. His first perusal of my jottings may have been for him like opening Chap- man's Homer: an ode may be on its way. Yet I reflect mournfully, not for the first time, that redistribution, violent or legalistic, often (though not always) takes from those who value and understand, use, care for and increase what is taken, and gives to those who value it not at all, may neglect it, or even throw it away in baffled contempt. Of what is redistributed, so much is inevitably squandered. A's loss is not always B's gain — indeed no.
Damn the cards and licences and trousers and so forth. Damn even the article, which might be deservedly forgotten by now. It's the commonplace books which keep me gloomily awake at. nights. I am sorry to burden you with them, but self-pity has on- ly to be expressed to vanish like a ghost at cockcrow. As nanny used to say, tell us all about it: it'll make it better.
What has befallen my dear friends and teachers? Have they already been consigned to death by fire or water? Are they already in whatever hell ties behind the grinding jaws of the borough dustcart? If not, I can't help wondering how they're all getting on together in their new home, without the pacific chairmanship of the commonplace man who chose and cherished them all, and found in them all virtues not perhaps readi- ly apparent to each other. Does the monotonous thump of the transistor drive them mad? Are delicate nostrils offended by the prevailing reek of curried goat and fiery Jamaican patties?
Of course the old boys mostly and mer- cifully have some things in common to comfort them in exile. (Old boys? Some old girls are among them, — Jane Austen, George Eliot and Nadezhda Mandelstam, others.) Most are of a conservative temper, rebutting by their example any notion that conservatives are too stupid, or perhaps too clever, to think, write or argue. Many of them have an intelligent mistrust of in- telligence, like old Goethe at his Tisch: `When a clever man commits a folly it is not a small one.' Goethe also says (is there any genius normally more down-to-earth and serviceable?) that disorder is worse than in- justice. Most of my old boys would agree, especially Carlyle, who quarrels with many but never with Goethe, and Taine, whose inspired outbursts against the failure of the old regime in France to keep order and against the excesses of the Revolution have the piercing insight sometimes conferred by rage and disgust. (Taine has recently been discredited, I note, but only by Marxists, from whom discredit is no faint credit.) An anonymous medieval Frenchman soberly warns:'Par requierre trap grand franchise, chet-on en servete'. Most of my old boys would agree with him and Burke too: 'Liberty must be limited to be en- joyed.' I suppose you could also call most of my old boys liberals, but liberals of that cautious, limited, disillusioned sort, with optimism kept under a tighter rein than pessimism, which is characteristic of the British-American tradition rather than the French-Russian continental millennial revolutionary tradition. Of this British- American tradition de Tocqueville and. Taine, though French, are just as ex- emplary as Burke, Adam Smith and Maine; so are the Austrians von Mises and Hayek. All seven are in my commonplace books in extenso, along with countless others I hope to mourn next week.
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