Notebook
The Italians have surely got the right idea. As a country staggers and reels towards economic decay, domestic upheaval, international impotence and, eventually, state bankruptcy, the psychologically apt thing to do is to increase the physical size of its Money. The larger-value Italian bank-notes, even though they may buy less and less, are fine, comforting things. Instead of which our Government rubs in the slow death of the currency by letting the pounds in our Pockets shrink visibly. The latest pound note is, I estimate, fully a fifth smaller than the last (itself decidedly smaller than the One before). It is also hideous: a sickly colour, nearer olive than green, with a particularly feeble likeness of Isaac Newton on the back. It seems we can't even have that minor compensation of minor powers, Pretty money and stamps. The new 'power' series of stamps — oil, electricity etc — does indeed reach a new low. The designs are almost incredibly coarse and vulgar: more So than the 'games' series of last year, more even than the infamous 'great social reforMers' of two years ago. I always thought it Was a black day when the chaste, modestly Proportioned simplicity of our old stamps — the Queen's head and no wording — was teplaced by a variety of outsize pictorial or decorative themes: a sure sign on the path to banana-republicanism. So far we have at least avoided embellishing stamps with living, non-royal personages. There are, I think, only two cases of stamps with living British subjects represented: Joan Sutherland (strictly, an Australian), in a Nicaraguan series of 'Great Opera Singers'; and Harold Wilson as one of the United Arab Emirates' notion of 'Great Statesmen'.
The 'Daily Mirror' has been campaigning vigorously for the Government's 'blacklist' Policy of surreptitious pay restraint (as the Mirror says, `If Labour wins the fight against inflation it could well win the next election). Whatever view is taken of the blacklist, there is no dispute that what the Penalised companies — John Lewis or Sun Alliance — are accused of raising their employees' pay openly and honestly. By contrast Mirror Newspapers are scrupulous about keeping within the guidelines on the face of it. But they have developed a mastery of surreptitious, underhand pay rises, even by the standards of Fleet Street, where compositors are paid extra for correcting their own mistakes. Some of the Mirror Pro-Government propaganda must have been 'originated' (in NUJese) by those Journalists who recently went on strike, not for more pay, but for a wide range of 'allowances': hardship allowances for having to get up in the morning or having to go to bed at night; newspaper allowances for the publications every conscientious Mirrorman studies (Le Monde Diplomatique, Far Eastern Economic Review, British Journal of Medical Psychology, Byzantinische Zeitschrift); clothing allowance for annual trousseau from Huntsman, Harvie & Hudson, Lobbs; and so forth. Perhaps I exaggerate — they didn't demand hardship money for an irregular sex life, as the Nottinghamshire miners have just done — but not all that much. At all events it does not seem a very strong moral background from which to 'fight inflation'.
If you are a graduate of Oxford University there are two good reasons for taking the MA. Firstly, there is no damned merit in it. At other universities the Master's degree requires further academic endeavour, further examination. At Oxford there is a simple, small cash transaction. Were this admirable principle more widely applied it would take us a little nearer Mark Pattison's ideal of a university open to all without qualification, with voluntary examinations, whose degrees conferred no social or professional cachet: whither students came simply from love of learning.
As well, an Oxford MA is a franchise. MAsmembers of convocation — can vote for the Chancellor; more importantly they can vote in the quinquennial election for Professor of Poetry. In recent years the Chair has usually gone to a grand old man of the poetic trade (and the election itself has become the occasion for a set-piece of University politics). This produces a mixed bag: Auden, perverse but brilliant; Graves, as I recall, barely comprehensible; Roy Fuller bluff and blokey; and latterly big John Wain, which was in itself quite, but only quite, a good joke (in one of his lectures he confessed that'! cannot think of anyone 'except himself I who has scored a triple, who had been poet, novelist and playwright', which neatly combines petitio principii and ignorance). Professor Wain steps down this year. I don't know whether my vote will go to James Fenton or E. J. Thribb, but, even with the election nine months away, there is a keen thrill of anticipation at the prospect of voting against Stephen Spender, Adrian Henri or Francis Warner.
In his 'Memoirs' A. J. Ayer charmingly describes seeing, at the time, the great French films of the Thirties — by Clair, Renoir, Came — and adds, 'this series of films still seems to me to outdo anything that the French cinema has been able to produce in any subsequent decade'. I remembered, with assent, that judgment after seeing for the first time Carne's and Prevert's Dr6le de Drame of 1937 (showing at Academy One). Even by the standards of those films it is perfectly elegant, and stupefyingly funny. The scene of mistaken identities between Michel Simon and Barrault is alone worth crossing London for. Dr6le de Drame is set. in London and has the usual French received ideas about the English (there is even a drunken journalist, Monsieur Monnington of the British Mail), In La Grande Illusion the three heroes, in German hands, pass a squad of British POWs all carrying tennis rackets, as if this were a piece of equipment British officers would normally be carrying when captured in action.
Ben Fischer died a fortnight ago. He was thirty-one, and unknown outside a circle of friends and acquaintances, but he will be mourned. Brought up as an orphan, he went to Winchester and Oxford where he fell, as the saying goes, into bad company. After being sent down he spent several dark years in London. His Viennese father had been a close friend of Karl Kraus, whose residuary legatee Ben became, giving him a substantial private income. This may have encouraged, and undoubtedly paid for, a tendency — unusual in someone of Jewish intellectual background — towards dissipation (though he eventually managed to give up hard drugs). And although exceedingly clever, quick-witted and gifted with language — no one I knew could do
Times crossword faster — he never put his gifts to any purpose. Perhaps he might have done. I did not know him intimately, but I found him particularly good company: having a drink with him always brought a lift to the spirits. I shall miss hint.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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