Notebook
rr he TUC has enjoyed the wide publicity given to the 'Jobs for Youth' campaign, so it was perhaps as well that there were no reporters from the national press at a party given in Islington for the 400 young people who had come to London on the 'Jobs Express' special train. The party was given last Friday by the Islington branch of the campaign, a fight started, several of the jobless youths were stabbed, the police were called and ten people were taken to hospital, some of them with quite severe injuries. According to one account the fight was along racial lines. When the organisers of the party tried to find a TUC official to take an interest in the jobless youths who were in hospital, they failed. They were told that what the youths did in London was their own affair.
This lack of concern was mutual. Al1 though the campaign is always referred to as 'the TUC's', many of the young marchers clearly considered that the chief obstacle was not the present Government but the TUC and the Labour Party. When 200 of them went to the House of Commons to lobby Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock this became patently obvious. According to the TUC press release the marchers were there to 'hear from' Mr Foot. In fact his antique style of oratory and jerky mannerisms were greeted first with bemusement and then with mild hilarity. There was some hissing and one group walked out. Then when Mr Kinnock launched into his standard impassioned harangue he was told to stop talking because the marchers were there to tell MPs what was going on, not to listen to speeches. Throughout the campaign, and contrary to the smoothly organised publicity, the main target of the marchers have always been the organisers of the march. They have long since given up any idea of influencing Mrs Thatcher. What they want is a national union of the unemployed, financed by the TUC, and this is of course deeply unpopular with the existing unions which would lose membership and funds.
rr he excellence of Brideshead Revisited is even gaining converts among that elite group of people who very seldom watch television. In America this group is now so rare that it should be listed as an endangered species. It has recently been reported that the average American male viewer will have watched television for 3,000 days, or nine full years of his life, by the time he is 65. During the weekday winter evening nearly half of the population of the United States are to be found at any given moment gazing silently at the flicker
ing screen. Americans receive more of their education from television than from schools, and by the time the average child enters an American kindergarten it has already spent more hours watching television than the hours it will eventually spend in school and college up to the level of a BA degree. Very few people indeed can have spent so much time reading, even in the heyday of the printed word. Not even the most rabid television enthusiast can argue that all this time is well-spent. In this country the average viewing hours may be slightly lower, but with the impending arrival of break fast television they will certainly increase. I have always had severe reservations about the good sense of television as a machine. As a child I was firmly convinced that the people on the screen could see me whenever 1 could see them, and at one time I used to insist on holding all private conversations behind the television set if it was switched on. Even now on the rare occasions when I 'watch' television I find myself after about five minutes arguing aloud with the voices in the machine. There may be some individual variation, but is seems increasingly obvious that no one can spend most evenings of their lives watching television without eventually going mad. This should be a matter for urgent research, starting perhaps with television critics.
This week the feminist publishing house 'Virago' celebrated its fifth birthday. Its success should certainly be celebrated for by concentrating on reprinting forgotten novelists of the last hundred years it has provided readers with an extraordinarily high standard of writing. Virago is staffed by women and almost all of its authors are women and it is a curious fact that the more successful the firm becomes the more eccentric this bias begins to seem. At the party there were congratulations from all sides for Carmen Callil and Ursula Owen. During one of the speeches it was said that a distinguished British publisher had been
asked to account for Virago's success and after long thought had replied, 'Women are a good gimmick'. I thought Tom Rosenthal, the chairman of Heinemann looked rather uneasy at the reaction aroused by this story.
T t is customary when one retires from the
postion of literary editor to give 'an overview' of the publishing scene. Not having gained the eminence necessary for such an exercise I will not attempt it. But I have been asked to read some books with rather odd titles. Last month Croom Helm published Controlling Women: the Normal and the Deviant. This turned out to be a collection of sociological essays which argue that 'controlling women' is a daily operation carried out by men all over the world. The essays include 'Normal Motherhood, an exercise in self-control?' and 'Women, Alcohol and Social Control'. The latter wonders why women drunks are thought to be less socially acceptable than men drunks and concludes that this attitude is a concerted male attempt to 'constrain women's drinking behaviour'. (Well we do not want them to get drunk, do we?) Perhaps the best definition of the difference between those who support the Women's Movement wholeheartedly and those who have certain reservations about it is whether you think that one half of the human race has even a remote chance of controlling the other half, or whether you think that men do this all the time without even giving the matter conscious thought.
Another remarkable publication is a leaflet produced by Ta Ha Publishers Ltd (a little-known firm) which argues that King Offa of the Mercians (Offa of `Offa's Dyke') was a practising Muslim. The evidence offered is a gold coin in the British Museum bearing the inscription, 'La Illaha 11-ALLAH wahido la shareeka laho' — (`there is no God but Allah and there is no assoc:ate unto Him'). The leaflet goes on to argue that King Offa came near to uniting the English within one kingdom as part of a completely forgotten Islamic crusade. The evidence for this theory may seem rather slight, but Islam is largely untroubled by the insistance on rationalist argument which has wreaked such havoc among Christians for the last 200 years. In Islam a trifle can still grow quickly into a powerful symbol. How else can one explain the decision of Sandia, the national airline of Saudi Arabia, to redesign the lettering which is its trademark? At present the S and the first A in the word 'Saudia' are drawn in such a way that the space between them forms a Cross. It is hard enough for the most fervent Christian to puzzle out this unintentional reminder of the Crucifixion, but it is apparently sufficiently obvious to the Saudi eye to have caused deep offence at Jeddah and Riyadh airports. Saudia's entire fleet of aircraft is now being repainted.
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