Notebook
The last week has been a sombre one for those professionally concerned with the laws of libel, that is for those more likely to be on the defendant's than the plaintiff's end of libel proceedings. On the next page Auberon Waugh comments on the Appeal Court's ruling over one of the multifarious actions between Sir James Goldsmith and Private E.Ye (the King Kong versus Godzilla of the day). On Monday Paul Foot and the Socialist Worker took a pummelling from kr Clive Jenkins and his union. It is easy to display, or feign, stupefaction in these n 'rases; but it is certainly too simple to blame It all on judges. Mr Justice Stevenson asked the jury in the Foot case to decide if the Socialist Worker had literally meant that Jenkins's union would provide ringside seats at the garrotting of socialist militants. Apparently, that is just the meaning which thejury understood. Journalists are prone to see themselves as martyrs in the law courts, Christians thrown to the lions by 'them,' the authorities, the Establishment, the rich. The metaphor would be apt if we remember that . ,Te Roman arena was always thronged by ',Re Public, baying for blood: in this respect Juries are no doubt a good cross-section of the Public. At least, that is the best explanation I can think of for the eagerness O. f* juries to award extremely high damages ro such people as television actors whose Professional reputations have been slighted. lfl other words journalists make a mistake if they identify with the public and expect it to Ide ; nr.fY back. Evelyn Waugh (who did not 'flare his eldest son's stern disinclination to sue for libel) understood this. After he had WO n substantial damages from the Daily press he acutely observed: 'The simple `act is that all four million readers of the E'xPress detest the paper, are ashamed of reading it, and feel that any damages they can impose on it slightly exonerates themselves., John Biffen's very sad departure from the Tory front bench underlines a point that has been made in these pages before: the Shadow cabinet is a nonsense. It is quite enciugh that politicians should have to cope With the burdens of office (which are, of course, largely self-imposed) while they are actually ua,ly in office. It is absurd for Opvcisition naen to try and fellow ministers'
political movements, as though they were footballers marking one another. There ate, besides, other disadvantages in the system,
such as serious inflexibility, for the Leader of the OPposition. The policy which Mrs Thatcher should adopt is that recommended by Mr Macmillan, after Churchill's example: no shadow cabinet, but a weekly business meeting of Opposition Privy Councillors to decide .upon who is to speak in which debates.
Blacklegs of the world unite! There is something poignant in the fact that the 'crew' which has seized the Globtik Venus was recruited in the bars of 'Grimsby, lately Anthony Crosland's constituency. Of all middle-class socialists Crosland was the keenest on the Labour Party's proletarian legitimacy. There is always Schadenfreude when an idealised picture of 'the people' comes up against them in reality. I particularly recall the performance at the Coliseum in 1975 of Henze's opera The Bassarids, conducted by the composer, which ended halfway through with a backstage strike. What did Henze, nowadays a devout and dewy-eyed Marxist, make of this display by the British masses, perhaps uncharacteristically represented by the stage-hands' union ?
'Bravery's a treasure in a lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I'm thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitch-pike on the flags of hell.' Listening to lines like that —by no means the most extravagant—at the National Theatre's stylish revival of The Playboy of the Western World brought to my mind not so much the riots at the Abbey when the play opened seventy years ago as Myles na gCopaleen's scathing aside that 'nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is comparable with Synge.' The Playboy reinforced the suspicion that l felt last autumn when I saw the Abbey company itself playing The Plough and the Stars in Cork. That isn't much of a play either; and I never saw anything in Behan. The truth is that the Irish
national theatre has been a failure. It is a paradox, since Ireland has produced, in my humble, grovelling, fawning opinion (Myles again) the greatest European poet and the greatest European novelist of the century; and since the list of outstanding Irish playwrights—rather than writers of Irish plays— is endless: not only Wilde and Shaw, Sheridan and Goldsmith but recent 'rediscoveries like Boucicault and O'Keeffe. This failure is no doubt a significant episode in the tragic story of the Irish language.
On Monday the Spectator's little backwater of Holborn made front-page news. London taxi-drivers boycotted the northern railway termini in protest against Camden Bor'ough's blocking off Doughty Street and Lamb's Conduit Street. It is a topic which inflames passions, in this office as much as anywhere. The division of opinion is on obvious lines: cars-owners are enraged by traffic barriers, one-way systems and parking meters. Non-motorists, like myself, openly welcome anything which impedes the flow of traffic and makes life in London harder for the car. Road lobbyists like Mr Philipson of the British Road Federation are quick to point out that only 41 per cent of the population of London uses railways or tube. Trying to be helpful, as always, I make a suggestion for placing rail and road competition on more even terms: end all subsidies to British Rail but at the same time amend the criminal law. Causing death by driving would be punishable by a minimum sentence of twenty years hard labour, which in the case of a commercial vehicle would apply to the directors of the company owning it. Would Mr Philipson object ?
The recent survey in Vogue on what books various fashionable people have beside their beds was good for a few days' public merriment. Only fractionally more seriously, it reinforces one of my favourite theses: the Myth of the General Reader.
The general reader—that 'limp and amorphous creature,' in Nabakov's phrase—is a pet of publishers and middle-brow editors.
have long maintained that he does not exist: there are only individual readers (as far, that is, as there are any nowadays), each with his stronger or lesser interests. As the point is still obscure, here is a list of some of the books by my bed at the moment, in no particular order: Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Emma, two volumes of Wisden, Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, Summer Lightning, Racehorses of 1975, Rosen's The Classical Style, Szasz's The Manufacture of Madness, The Hard Life, Ruff's Guide to the Turf, Cranford, Taylor's The Habsburg Monarchy, Jim Quick's Trout Flies, Andrew Devonshire's Park. Top, Scoop, and the latest issues of Opera, the Book Collector and the British Racehorse.
Am I a general reader?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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