ANOTHER VOICE
An appeal for all the nation's madwomen to congregate under one banner
AUBERON WAUGH
Awoman in Hove wrote to Alexandra Artley (Diary, 17 October) saying that she keeps the last little buff book of Child Benefits in her bureau 'as a constant reminder of how grateful I have been for the money'. She reveals that her daughter 'is always telling me how grateful she is to have a few pounds in her purse'.
Plainly, it is a very pleasant thing to be able to call in at the post office from time to time and collect a little extra money. Many mothers will be genuinely sad to see it go — and surprisingly few mothers actually pay income tax, owing to the peculiar method of assessment preferred by the Inland Revenue on joint incomes. So they are in no position to balance the convenience of having a few extra pounds in their purses against the inconvenience to tax-payers of having to produce £4,700 million a year to make it available.
As soon as one puts it like that, we learn that the women were not thinking of their own advantage at all, but about the poor. When we point out that the poor already have 57 varieties of discretionary grant and supplementary benefit amounting to three or four times the £7.25 paid out on each independent child, we are told that they were anxious about those among the poor who, for one reason or another, never get around to applying for their entitlements. It is altogether more humane to pay all mothers £7.25 per child so that they can put it in their purses and be grateful.
I am not, of course, pretending that all or even most of the women now assemb- ling under the banner of the Save Child Benefit Alliance (4th Floor, 1-5 Bath Street, London EC1) are greedy hypoc- rites. Many genuinely believe that they could not manage without these payments, although nobody who has listened to the jokes made in the queue at Taunton Post Office on a Monday morning, when mothers turn up to collect five-or six months'-worth of Family Allowances at a time can suppose that such mis- apprehension is universal or even very widespread.
But it was in conversation with a Save Child Benefit Ally, when I noticed how the argument tended to slip between middle- class convenience and unemployed indi- gence, between the rights of mothers not to work and the right of working mothers to employ nannies, between health cuts, the dignity of the poor, the odiousness of the rich and general male insensitivity, that I found myself wondering whether the Save Child Benefit Alliance goes far enough.
It has already been supported, we learn, by the National Federation of Women's Institutes,. the Catholic Child Welfare Council, the Central Council for Jewish Welfare Service, as well as perhaps a hundred other welfare and public bodies. I found myself wondering whether it would not be a good idea, for these people to exert their maximum pressure, if they did not join together in one gigantic organisa- tion, along with Women Against Rape, National Collective of Prostitutes, CND and Mothers Against Drunken Drivers, to march under a single banner. The banner I have in mind is called Nomad — National Organisation of Madwomen — but they might well prefer another.
Lest this be thought a cheap anti- feminist (or, even worse, misogynistic) gibe, I should explain that what I have chosen to label the Madwomen's Injury Syndrome — Maisy — is by no means confined to women. In fact I found the best description of it in an account of Nijinsky's Diaries which appears in Roy Porter's A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (Weidenfeld, £14.95) which I was reading this week. Nijinsky starts with a statement which sums up the basis of what I have chosen to call feminine philosophy: `I do not like Shakespeare's Hamlet be- cause he reasons. I am a philosopher who does not reason — a philosopher who feels.' Perhaps I should explain that this is indeed Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer of Diaghilev's ballet, rather than some obscure Russian thinker I have disco- vered:
The world, as he saw it, is an out-and-out hypocrite. It worships at the shrine of reason. But this reason is crazy. Worldly reason sanctions greed, materialism and violence. It divides people because it is enamoured of the distinction between mine and thine. The love of property and the abuse of power go hand in hand. Avarice for possessions has turned art into a commodity, has reduced it to an object of consumption. Art is thereby degraded to become the plaything of the rich, emasculated and prettified within polite society. Love too is turned into a commodity, given cash value. It takes the forms of lust and lechery. It is symbolised by meat-eating, the slaughter of innocents to support carnality. The collective expression of these values and actions spells annihilation.
I can hear people asking: what is so very mad about that? It is no more than the sort of speech one hears from unhappy, slightly drunk wives at middle-class dinner parties on many evenings of the week. Nijinsky continues in this vein for some time: science is the disease of thinking too much. Science understands nothing: 'I am simple, I need not think.'
Nothing wrong with that of course. Where Nijinsky gave himself away, for all his repudiation of reason, was in taking this `philosophy of feeling' to its logical conclu- sion. Such a philosophy, repudiating reason, and even empirical evidence, in favour of 'feeling' is viable only under one particular circumstance — a claim seldom made by distracted, middle-class women. From the discovery 'God is in me' Nijinsky advanced to: 'I am God's present . . I am God in flesh and feeling.'
To the eternal credit of her sex, it was his wife, Romola, who finally shopped him to the alienists in 1919. Once in the Kreuz- lingen asylum, his condition rapidly de- teriorated. He withdrew into himself and recovered his sanity only intermittently.
Porter, to be fair, uses this story to illustrate the error of segregating and confining lunatics. It is part of his great polemic against psychoanalysis, therapeu- tic detention and most other forms of treating the insane. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Porter shies away from con- fronting what might be called the 'dustbin factor' in dealing with the problem of the incurably insane. Far from supporting my point he — or perhaps I should say the feminine side of Porter — tends to regard Nijinsky's 'philosophy of feeling' as an intelligent approach to analysing the hu- man condition. Not being a philosopher, or much interested in philosophy — in fact being interested only in social attitudes to the insane — he does not consider the possibility that this 'philosophy of feeling' can be viable only if the philosopher is God. Nor would any of the nation's mad- women, at their various stages along the same path, accept such a proposition. But Porter would agree with me, I think, that the assumption of divinity is an unfailing symptom of madness. If all those mad- women (of both sexes) who found them- selves nodding in agreement at Nijinsky's earlier ravings could congregate under one banner, the rest of us would at least have some idea of the problem we face.
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