AND ANOTHER THING
No ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay this decade
PAUL JOHNSON
We are living in the Grey Nineties. The greyness oozes relentlessly out of the stratosphere, enveloping all five continents in its dingy murk, dimming colour, killing glamour, extinguishing adventure. Hun- dreds of millions are unemployed, the banks aren't lending, the big spenders are in low-profile mode, Trump is silent, Maxwell dead, Bond finished, Maggie and Lord King in huffy retirement, the Queen is wondering where her next yacht is com- ing from, and her daughter is moving into a flat in Dolphin Square. Communism is extinct, capitalism not feeling so good, Rus- sia is a black hole, America's broke, the curtain's come down on Sweden's welfare utopia, the European ideal buried in a sepulchre of bureaucracy and corruption, Africa's heart has returned to darkness, even the Japanese are retrenching.
Bill Clinton's mop has turned perceptibly greyer since he took over, as he piles on the ho-hum. He has his first 'human resource development session' with his staff at Camp David, to swap confessional stories about their inadequacies. The President admits `about how he was this fat kid when he was five or six, and the other kids taunted him'. His Human Services Secretary, Ms Donna Shalala, insists it was 'fun'. Our own monochrome man, John Major, defiantly proclaims his greyness down to the last jot and tittle. As one lady put it, 'I'm so sorry it wasn't true about Clare Latimer, it's the first interesting thing I've ever heard about him.' Striking a different grey note, the fall- en Arts Minister, David Mellor, argues that the De Sancha episode proves he is rather like Palmerston and Gladstone. Somehow, we don't believe him.
Even our children are being educated to grow up into a grey world where everyone is equal, no one fat, thin, tall, tiny, clever, stupid, poor, privileged, good, bad, blonde, brunette, black or white, lucky, unhappy or special. Little Black Sambo and Ferdinand the Bull are non-persons, pigs are unclean, lawns don't exist, and tales must be woven about small, good-tempered giants, huge, socially conscious dwarfs, benevolent witch- es, genial ogres and fairies who can't fly but take the bus to work like everyone else. `What shall we play today?"Gollywog- hunting."No, gender-bending.' Fascist!' `Homophobe!'
Looking back from our iron-grey decade, it's not exactly clear why the 1890s were called 'the Gay Nineties'. There were hard
times, stingy banks and countless unem- ployed then too. William Booth published In Darkest England, in case anyone thought it didn't exist. Across the Atlantic, the New York writer, Jacob Riis, wrote an equally sensational tract, How the Other Half Lives. It was a decade when high-minded, upper- middle-class youths from public schools and Oxbridge founded East End 'missions', when Hardy, Zola and Gissing were spreading literary gloom. It must have been the music-hall and the bal-dansant which supplied the note of gaiety. But Sickert's paintings of Katie Lawrence packing them in at Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Vari- eties evoke, if anything, plushy, flea-bitten discomfort, and Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, which began in 1891, show La Goulue, Yvette Guibert, Jean Avril and May Belfort hustling themselves not to Ely- sium but to TB, absinthe-poisoning and general paralysis of the insane. It is true that in 1892 one Lottie Collins had a sensa- tional London hit by bawling out the new wedding-march, `Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'. But what did it mean? What explosion of joy, what noisy intimation of bliss was Lottie announcing? The year before, just as Lautrec was finishing his earliest theatrical lithographs, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Wat- son made their first appearance. But when they stepped into their hansom-cab and clip-clopped off to London Bridge station, their minds were not on high jinks but on mayhem, murder and gruesome conspiracy. Who, exactly, was being gay? Even 'gays' had a hard time: in 1893 Tchaikovsky, with rumours circulating about him, convenient- ly died from drinking infected water, and two years later Oscar Wilde went to gaol.
I suspect that what made the decade of the 1890s exhilarating was not the absence
of poverty, horror, crime and despair, but the residual feeling that you could, at a pinch, get away from it all. My 12-year-old father, unhappy with his step-parents, sim- ply ran away to sea, something you were still allowed to do then, and sailed all over the world. The open spaces were still wide. He told me that, arrived in New York, he perched on a high stool in a bar which advertised 'Free Eats' and was served with hot corned-beef hash. 'And what'll ya have to drink, kid?"0h, I don't drink.' The bar- man's comment was: `Wa-al, I'll be damned!' In the 1890s, 3,000 immigrants poured into New York alone every week. They went straight to tenements in the Lower East Side, which had the highest recorded human density in history; but the average stay there was no more than two months — then they moved on to prosperi- ty and happiness, real or imaginary. When the 1890s opened, the frontier had not yet been closed, the Sioux were still fighting, you could still stake a gold claim in Col- orado's Cripple Creek, let alone the Yukon. At the other ends of the world, pio- neers were pouring into the Rand and Rhodesia, a few were starting to explore Kenya's Happy Valley, and Melbourne had the world's highest living standard.
What makes our planet such a grey place today is not just the recession but the feel- ing you are stuck with what you've got. There is nowhere else to go which is allowed, or is not the same, or worse. Shangri-la has disappeared under a pile of colour mags. Kathmandu is overcrowded. There are empty tins on the top of Everest and at the South Pole. California is a bust- ed flush. The Riviera is smeared with sun- tan and reeks of diesel. If you flee London, you run into crime waves in Cheltenham or Maidstone or Taunton. A Cotswold cottage is as likely to be burgled as a terrace in Kensington or Camden Town. New Wavers are despoiling the Brecon Beacons and the Mendips. Bath has been infested with the evil-smelling Crusties, who award seniority to those who have gone longest without a wash. We know there's nothing at the end of the rainbow: everyone has been there to look. The world has become a gigantic time-share, heading straight for bankrupt- cy. President Clinton, meet Premier Major; Hillary, meet Norma: if everything else is in short supply, there are plenty of grey days to go round and everyone is going to get his or her fair share.
Previous page
