AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
Every major scandal, particularly a scandal that has been presented in any way salaciously by the press, inevitably leaves behind it various underground myths that tend to linger on in people's minds long after the actual details of the case have become blurred and indistinct. After the Druggie Rumpus at Chichester it is almost impossible to spend an evening without being told one of two standard works of under- ground fiction. One concerns a Mars Bar, the other the presence at the party of the younger son of a well-known politician. As I was not in fact present on the afternoon in question it is probably foolish to try to deny them alto- gether, but on the grounds that the police would almost certainly have made tasteful allusion to the first in court in order to discredit the defen- dants, and that no self-respecting pop group would tolerate the presence in their midst of so socially undistinguished' a person as the aforementioned younger son, it does seem likely ' that they are both fabrications.
But the fact that the underground anecdote is untrue does not usually stop it being passed on, and if past scandals are anything to go by it should raise the last banshee chuckle of folk mirth in the Orkneys by about the end of September. What makes the process interesting in any case is not the content but the form, and the romantic survival in our sophisticated news- paper-reading, television-watching society of a living folk-art of story-telling by word of mouth, with the saga travelling slowly and with variations out along the trade routes, borne by travelling merchants.
It could perhaps be argued that people are learning to put less faith in the official news they are given in the papers and on television, and that they are more ready as a result to believe and pass on news that reaches them through unofficial sources. The Prime Minister's own use of the unofficial leak, as a man always shrewdly conscious of the public mood, might be used to support the argument. But it 'still does not explain why, after the Profumo scan- dal, a lot of normally sceptical folk seriously believed both that one of the public figures involved could only achieve sexual satisfaction by dressing up in a policeman's helmet and that another still prominent politician could regu- larly be seen flitting about the stews in a lace- trimmed black mask and frilly pinny, lisping his outrageous demands in the ears of all and sundry.
What is disturbing is the literary standard. Other fairy stories, if they originate from an authentic folk culture, at least have some unity and inner truth. In this case anyone who had any knowledge of the main character would feel an instinctive frisson of incongruity about his wearing a policeman's helmet when he was obviously a natural for a long evening dress and black gloves, and would also have been uneasy about accepting tales of the red light district when they knew him to be more than exhausted from his incessant assaults on those nearer to him. We are clearly dealing with a flawed oral tradition, and it is perhaps interesting to examine its direct literary development, and to recognise that far from being a true folk culture it is in fact a debased form of the courtly epic.
Fleet Street gossip, like Shepherd's Bush gossip, is unquestionably the strongest literary influence in these stories and that is where the form is developed to perfection. For one thing it always has at that stage still the authentic flavour of the underground source, doomed never to see the light of day or to be enjoyed by the general public, only available to the social potholers who have climbed down to the darkest abysses of degradation in order to obtain it. Next to alcohol and work on an unfinished novel, gossip remains the journalist's greatest comfort, to be enjoyed like an illegal drug in the smoky back rooms of pubs and exchanged secretively on street corners. Know- ing the subjects of every story intimately, he is always ready to embellish and enrich it at every telling, enorusting it with jewels of invention and studding it with precious insights, working it patiently in the fire of personal enmity until it rolls evenly and inevitably towards the final slapstick collapse of the hero as a result of his own characteristic action.
Under normal conditions no layman has access to this treasurehouse of rich fable. For one thing the layman continues—perhaps as a form of psychological self-defence against the dread horrors of reality—to regard figures in public life as pictures on the wall, perhaps as literary figures, whose heroic public activities, he can watch on television, and whose deeds he reads about in the newspaper. Their private lives, if he believes they have any reality behind the public image, have little meaning for him. What is more, nothing he thinks or knows about them can ever topple them, except by some mysterious and indirect process at election time if they are politicians. If they topple they topple, but the layman has no hand in it. He therefore ceases to regard his relationship with them as either social or even political and thinks of them instead simply as heroic literary per- sonages, having their existence in a different world of flashlights and television cameras, and for his own peace of mind behaving in a rational and discreet manner.
The moment a crisis develops, this placid acceptance is shaken. He watches them topple, and is dimly aware of the stresses and weak- nesses that have brought about the toppling, but having always experienced them in primitive literature rather than in life, he fails to analyse their shortcomings as living characters and looks instead for their continuing literary exis- tence. A demand is created for more literature, just as a demand is created by intellectuals at other times for more information on any topical crisis, and in the absence of any more authentic. material the public figures find themselves fitted as mere Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen ciphers into fragments of Fleet Street sagas, confused with already existing folk jokes that may have been floating about in the air for generations, but which are suddenly distilled by the crisis. The tales are ritually told, and the stock of British culture is once again curiously enriched.
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