JONATHAN MEADE S
The lop ears is my shelter; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pasta: he leadeth me beside the still watchmakers. He restoreth my soubrette: he leadeth me in the patents of riff for his naiad's sail. Yea. though.. . . 'I'm presently writing a telly film about Surrealism, its precursors, its epigoni, its example. With a tyro's enthusiasm (but not much else), I am ransacking Oulipo's larder of compositional prescriptions and mathematical constraints, devices originally proposed by Raymond Queneau and most famously employed by Georges Perec in his protracted lipogram La Disparation. Despite Gilbert Adair's rewriting of that book as A Void, despite Lewis Carroll, despite Setgeant Pepper and The White Album, despite such current practitioners as Glenn Baxter and Graham Rawle, there exists in this country a resistance towards this tradition, a sort of post-Protestant, postLeavis hangover which equates seriousness with meaning, which depreciates such work by labelling it 'nonsense' and relegates its makers to the status of children's writer, children's artist, which dismisses the pursuit of the irrational unless that pursuit be sanctioned by some or other Church. The irony, of course, is that a strong Church which gets 'em young, which insists on the literality of its mumbo-jumbo and teaches that its myths are unquestionable, creates an aptitude for extracurricular research into irreason which today's milk-and-water Anglicanism could never achieve. It is not by chance that so priest-ridden and superstitious a country as Spain should have fomented the tradition of Goya and Bunuel; nor is it by chance that Dodgson/Carroll was a creature of the single brief period in England's post-Reformation history when the Church's hold was as potently ubiquitous as it has routinely been in Catholic Europe.
Surrealism's failure in this country may have had something to do with the hardly propitious cultural climate of the mid1930s. But, equally likely, it was occasioned by the same national imperviousness to extravagance, the same mistrust of 'unnecessary' display which has left us without artnouveau and pretty much bereft of the baroque — how different things would have been had the Old Pretender claimed the throne and built himself in Hyde Park the distended palace which the Earl of Mar, also exiled at Urbino, had designed for that happy eventuality. As it was, this country's artists rendered the admittedly self-parodic Delvaux toothless, and the admittedly autoplagiaristic Dali doubly impotent, by appropriating their mannerisms and conventionalising them even further for interior decoration, for paintings of the Bayswater Road Sunday School and for advertising. That
vogue in decoration is long past. But all along Hyde Park's railings near Lancaster Gate, among the Gordon-Fraser-meetsMurillo urchins and the Big Bens fashioned from clock parts (an idiom whose origin and persistence prompt idle wonderment), are infinite horizons, blood-orange sunsets, mackerel clouds. Tanguyesque geomorphic shapes. And where would advertising be without the cosmetic tics of more than half a century ago? — they are that industry's vernacular, its quotidian language.
Hyde Pork — as cabbies (Sam Kydd) called it in old films — or, precisely, the view from it and the 'integrity' of the skyline excites louder admissions of aesthetic timidity and self-deception than any site in London other than St Paul's. Why should Richard Rogers's tower at Paddington Basin have been truncated by 75 per cent in order that it should not be visible from this patch of deserted verdure? When Simon Jenkins and Lord St John go trysting there, do they really believe that they're in the country? In which case. they must ask themselves, where's the slurry, where are the wretched executive homes, where are the breezeblock piggeries? The point is, nis in urbe is just that: in urbe. It's not rus in ntre. The greatest city parks — Buttes Chaumont. Central Park, Parc Guell — are artifices which are enhanced by their refusal to deny their urbanity and civility; and they are used. There are, however, brighter prospects on the future horizon. According to Building. the Corporation of
London's policy chief is in favour of six new towers in the City. And beyond these, in my backyard at London Bridge, there will — with luck — arise Renzo Piano's 306m pyramidal spire. It's a sure thing, of course, that the views-of-St Paul's argument will be rehearsed yet again. But it's tired, it's threadbare, it's discredited, it's wrong.
Iquit Psalm 23 at that point because 'the valley of the shadow of death' is not to be tampered with. The words chill me now as they did when I was nine. I believed then that I had identified its location: a steep, dry valley, bobbly with blackthorns, in the north-eastern corner of Cranborne Chase, where one dazzling summer's day the sun was so precipitously occluded by cloud that night might have come. I knew what that shadow was. In France such a valley, without a watercourse, is called tine vallee mane. Maybe I was on to something.
Rural shops, haulage and tour companies, hotels, historic houses, sporting estates, racing. . . . We're all familiar now with the multitudinous endeavours in the 'still open' countryside which are afflicted by the stubborn insistence that the future potential to export livestock should take precedence over everything else. I dare say we've even shed an occasional tear for hunt sabs who, deprived of their habitual dialectic, can get on with a spot of useful laboratory torching. But has anyone spared a thought for the toilers in the bestial pornography industry? How is foot-andmouth touching them? Are films having to be cancelled because of the imposition of movement orders? Or merely postponed in the hope that the quadrupedal stars will, like more conventional actors undergoing detox, be raring to go in a few weeks? And, although the disease is said to be only atypically transgenic (heard that one before), is there — taking into account the special nature of the husbandry involved — a danger to the artistes who are Pasiphae's heirs? Well, there's only one way to find out and that is to call the People's Pornographer, Mr Richard Desmond, who, as we all know, 'doesn't do animals' but may, such is the esteem in which he's held by Toni and Guys, already be advising the government on this aspect of the affair. But Mr Desmond was being uncharacteristically shy. His office referred me to a company called Maclaurin, Consultant Specialists in Reputation Management who represent Nick Leeson and Captain Pugwash: 'We are first and foremost a people business. . . . 'But you represent Sooty. 'By prioritising powerful and close relationships. . . . 'Not with me they didn't.
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