SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
General de Gaulle's ability to act in a way that is both surprising and logical evidently con- tinues undiminished in his retirement. His descent upon County Kerry is a priceless bit of gaullisnie for the last phase of his career. Altogether, the old man has carried off his exit from the stage in exemplary fashion—the cor- rect silence after his terse farewell, the reflec- tive days in his own countryside, and then this engaging notion of an Irish jaunt. He probably worked it all out months ago. Why Ireland? Well, it's a Catholic country; a country which has freed itself from the Anglo-Saxon yoke; and one, moreover, which, although European, owes no deference to the tedious functionaries of Brussels. An elegant solution to the problem of how to pass the awkward time while the new president is being elected.
Whatever else he has done or failed to do, de Gaulle has at least reminded the world of the value of a certain originality and style in political leaders. This is not something to be rated low; indeed, events tend more and more to support the view that it can be among their most valuable qualities. Give them a practical problem to solve—sorting out a faltering eco- nomy, say, or introducing 'one man, one vote' —and at once it's made plain that the diffi- culties are immense and probably insuperable. It is at least a compensation when they fail in a stylish way. And it won't have escaped the General's notice that the south-west of Ireland is famous for, among its other natural beauties, the splendour of its sunsets.
Unfashionable views
Unlike most of the critics, I found this year's Royal Academy show rather more pleasant than of lute. It seemed to me to have relaxed a bit and come more to terms with its own limitations. The hopefully up-to-date abstracts have been segregated in one smallish section, and the rest of the galleries' immense wall space is given over to the things which the Academy, one feels, really believes in—portraits and landscapes. Of course, the critics say that the standards in these two departments are regret- tably low, and I wouldn't quarrel with that. But they seemed to be selling pretty well.
I was thinking, as I went round, of Sir Kenneth Clark's words about landscape paint- ing in one of-his recent BBC 2 lectures on civili- satiOn. Straightforward, naturalistic landscape painting was the popular style of painting for a hundred years, he observed, 'and would be still if any modern painter could do it with con- viction.' He gave the usual explanation that photography bad destroyed the form. No doubt this is right, but I have never quite seen why. Very few people, after all, hang photographs of landscapes on their walls; yet an enormous number hang painted landscapes, or reproduc- tions of them, there; while the prices paid for eighteenth and nineteenth century landscapes are reaching an appalling level.
I know that most modern artists disdain to accommodate mere public demand, and I quite understand that, for them, painting a landscape is 'irrelevant' when compared with, say, weld- ing pieces of metal. All the same, the existence of so great a public taste for the pleasures of landscape might have led to at least a little brit-class painting of this kind, and to a whole school of decently competent • minor work. However, it hasn't, on any appreciable scale, as is obvious at Burlington House. So for- gotten minor topographical painters of a cen- tury or more ago will continue to be dug out of obscurity; while the knack of doing what those often humble craftsmen did in the ordinary way of trade has almost vanished.
Mies in the City
Mies van der Rohe has such a lofty reputation among the world's architects that it is some- thing of a shame that this country has no important building of his yet—and he is eighty- three years old. The plan to put up a 290-foot tower block designed by him raised hopes last autumn that at last the gap would be filled. What I learned from the City of London plan- ning authorities this week, however, suggests that an awkward hurdle has yet to be sur- mounted. The developers wanted to put up the Mies skyscraper at once, alongside the Mansion House, and follow it up with a new open space in 1986 when certain leases fell in. This, the planners are going to recom- mend, should not be approved. They want the whole scheme to be carried out as one opera- tion. So either London waits until the year when Mies is due to celebrate his hundredth birthday before it acquires an example of his work or the developers find a way of speeding up the acquisition of buildings for demolition.
I hope they do. The buildings of Mies van der Rohe are usually singularly beautiful in themselves, and you can't say that about many modern buildings. I remember waking up in a New York hotel room and seeing across the street his marvellously cool and elegant Seagram Building, then almost brand-new. It was a most impressive introduction to a city. The fact that it was also somewhat mislead- ing hasn't dimmed my admiration.
Far from Holmes
I have received a complaint from a much- travelled academic about the decline or even disappearance of the detective story. On the frequent air journeys which he has to make, it is his habit to pass the time by reading such a story, having bought it from the display of paperbacks at the airport. What he now finds, increasingly, is that there are no detec- tive stories to be bought. Instead he finds on offer a wide choice of pornography or near- pornography or quite possibly pseudo-porno- graphy: but no detective stories. Being a liberal-minded and tolerant man he makes no complaint about other air travellers whiling away their tedious travels with such material; all he wishes to see is a small enclave of detec- tion amid the seduction. I am happy to pub- licise his grievance: what sort of permissive society is it, after all, if it engenders recurrent bouts of frustration within blameless travellers? It does occur to me, though, that he perhaps ought to scrutinise the bosomy paperbacks more closely. Some of them may contain vir- tuous detective stories within sinful covers. The comedian Mort Sahl used to have a joke about a throbbing paperback called Take My Flesh =originally published in hardback under the title, An Introduction to Home Accountancy.'
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