SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
As Graham Greene said in his excellent tele- vision programme on Sunday. the thrill of Russian roulette diminishes with familiarity. When he tried it as a boy, he found that after a time he had to pull the trigger twice instead of once if he was to recapture the original frisson of playing with suicide. I wondered while watching this whether Mr Enoch Powell was also watching (I dare say he spent much of that day reading newspapers and looking at television) and, if he was, whether he had caught a glimmer of an allusion to his own dangerous political game. It is a kind of politi- cal Russian roulette that he has taken to playing, after all. The first time he does it, we are aghast : the second time, rather less so: later, we may even shrug off the spectacle as the familiar folly of an eccentric who has cried 'Wolverhampton' too often in the past. Moreover, taking one's political life in one's hands is a less clearcut business than playing with revolvers. It is not so easy to tell, there and then, whether the gun was fired or not. Quite possibly Mr Powell last weekend killed off for good his career as a front-rank public man. That would mean a sad and wilful waste of talents, but such a thing has happened before to politicians who lost their sense of perspec- tive. It happened to Sir Oswald Mosley. Mr Powell, however, will not, one must assume, be starting a new movement of blackshirts. Whiteshirts, possibly.
Blake power
Then there's the question of William Blake. It's always rather disarming when Mr Powell decorates his speeches with lines from the poets, but he ought not to summon 'England's green and pleasant land' in support of his extremely unpleasant thesis. It invites the response that Mr Powell should return to the works of Blake and learn their message afresh. Before he next delivers one of his speeches in 'rage, fury, intense indignation/In cataracts of fire, blood and gall,/In whirlwinds of sulphurous smoke' (The Book of Urizen), he might profit- ably spend a short time reflecting upon 'The Little Black Boy' in Songs of Innocence ('And I am black, but 0! my soul is white'); there's food for thought, too, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ('One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression'—a prevision of the Race Relations Bill?); the pages of Blake, in short, may be ransacked to support many a cause, but surely never the cause of intolerance. This, too, is by Blake:
'His whole life is an epigram smart, smooth and neatly penn'd, Plaited quite neat to catch applause, with a hang-noose at the end.'
Sound and fury
A remarkable document reached me this week from a body called the Chelsea and Kensing- ton Action Committee on Aircraft Noise. It is remarkable because it represents an impres- sively thorough piece of research by a volun- tary group, and also because it portrays a dreadful situation. All the people who live in
Chelsea, and to a lesser extent those Ken- sington, are plagued day and night by the din of aircraft using Heathrow. This report (and I hope it will be read by legislators, civil ser- vants and Mr Peter Masetleld's alarming gang at the British Airports Authority) is an examination of the extent of the nuisance, with figures, and of the response of the victims, full of words like 'appalling' and 'intolerable: It is a pretty picture of the torments human beings inflict upon themselves. As the report notes, for every linear mile of this district overflown by a single aircraft (often carrying fewer than a hundred people) some 18,000 people on the ground are subjected to nuisance, often severe. The statistics suggest that at the worst times the noise is virtually unbroken: with a low-flying plane passing overhead every two minutes, there is scarcely a pause between them. This goes on for hours at a time. This document, in itself a cheering indication that some will to fight back remains in people, asserts that the inquiry has found no evidence whatsoever to indicate that people are 'learn- ing to live with the jet': on the contrary, many who were prepared to tolerate the din two or three years ago now 'resent it bitterly.' That's good news, anyway. It is only if people refuse to be subdued into accept- ance that there is any hope of a future that isn't sheer and uninterrupted tech- nological hell.
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake's death this week has produced some appreciative tributes. I remember his 'Gothic' novel Titus Groan making its appear- ance soon after the war. It seemed then an astonishing work in a way perhaps no longer obvious: only a talent of singular power could have created so complete a world of the imag- ination during those dismal years when 'reality' shoved everything aside. Presumably the trilogy which that book initiated will be what Peake is best remembered for; although his drawings are more widely known at present, and are in any case unmistakably the products of the same vision. The trilogy, in fact, is at present in the course of being republished. Illness had im- prisoned Peake for some years, but all the time his reputation continued to grow, and he has died with a secure place among that precious line of originals (Thomas Love Peacock, for example) who resist classification and fashion, and go their own ways.
As broad as it's narrow
Mr Wilson's language in public is becoming a shade worrying again. I suppose this may be an outward sign of stress or tiredness. There was a peculiarly Wilsonian remark last Thurs- day about Rhodesia—that the differences 'while narrow, are very deep'—the sort of phrase which hints tantalisingly at meaning but never quite gets there. Perhaps it's better in reverse: 'while shallow, are very broad.' Well, no. Broadly narrow, narrowly deep, deeply narrow —I don't know. But I do know that in his Guildhall speech last week the Prime Minister spoke up for the Commonwealth 'however deep and wide the issues that divide us.' Are deep and wide issues better than those that are narrow but very deep? Or worse?
Previous page
