ANOTHER VOICE
Beginning to waver towards the idea of indolence
AUBERON WAUGH
atching The Cocktail Party on Thursday night at the Theatre Royal, in Bath — it moves to the West End this week — I found myself growing alarmed at the audience's reaction to the character of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, Eliot's all-knowing God-like psychiatrist. Admittedly, he is beautifully played by Alec McCowen, and the whole production, starring Simon Ward, Rachel Kempson and Sheila Allen, makes a magnificent job of the play which shows Eliot at his silliest, most pseudish and second-rate. But the audience was eating out of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly's hand. Gusts of sycophantic laughter greeted his every sally, such as one usually hears only when Clive James scratches his face on television. Whenever one of Sir Henry's gnomic utterances was recognised as achieving the level of wisdom normally found in a road safety slogan, he was actually applauded. The audience was pre- sumably composed of what must pass itself off — by a process of self-selection, at any rate in Bath — as the English intelligentsia. Listening to the laughter and the applause, I felt depressed, Suddenly I understood the general deference accorded by the London intelligentsia to such richly absurd figures as Professor Karl Miller, Dr Jonathan Miller and the American Mr Arthur Mil- ler. The truth would appear to be that the English intelligentsia, like nearly everyone else in this country, yearns for a Mussolini- figure in which it can repose its loyalty and trust. If the voice speaks with sufficient confidence no matter what it says or how fatuous its message may be, it will be received with rapturous applause.
I had thought that Private Eye might have cured the intelligentsia of this, but even the Eye now defers to Bob Geldof and the Idea of Youth. Lower down the intellectual scale, among politicians, news- paper editors and leader-writers — let alone among retired Somerset majors one has always expected to hear idiot, sado-masochistic cries for the 'firm smack' of good government. Is it my imagination or are these cries — particularly those for the savage punishment of offenders beginning to swell into a crescendo?
Wednesday's editorial in the Standard discussed the latest threat to human civi- lisation as we know it, the mixture of cocaine with baking powder known as `crack'. It was headed 'No holds barred':
since crack came on the market, that one in six schoolchildren arc [sic] estimated to have tried it . . . . Turning the judicial screws on drug-pushers is proving to be a painfully slow process. There are promising measures afoot, like the move to sequestrate the assets of drug-pushers until such time as they have been proved innocent, but sentencing for a crime which many people would consider worse than homicide, is still on the lenient side . . . . This is a war against the worst evil to invade Britain since the Black Death. It cannot be fought with the gloves OR.
One's first reaction to that extraordinary passage is to say that any private citizen needs his head examined who regards it as a 'promising measure' that police will be able to 'sequestrate' private property on suspicion alone. No sooner had this asinine suggestion been made — and greeted with rapturous cries by the 'opinion formers' of the popular press — than the Home Office started thinking of other offences which might be amenable to the same deterrent. Now they are arming customs officers. As `crack' spreads among schoolchildren, Lol- lipop women will have to be armed. No doubt it will be greeted by cries of delight, especially if the Home Office can somehow include child molesters on the list of those whose property can be sequestered. It is true that nobody has yet suggested castra- tion as a suitable punishment for drug- dealers but it cannot be far off; and by the time the wimmin's movement gets hold of the idea, there will be cries for the immedi- ate castration of any man accused of soliciting from a motor-car, let alone sus- pected of child molestation or rape.
Let us look at the problem of drug addiction in its historical perspective. In the 19th century, opium was cheaper than beer or gin at 30 grains for ld, sold in every grocery store and used by all classes, especially in industrial towns. The form in which it was sold — in alcoholic suspension as laudanum — added other toxic prop- erties to the existing morphine toxin, and its effects, as described by De Quincey and, more recently, in Molly Lefebure's excellent biography of Coleridge — A Bondage of Opium — were quite horrify- ing. In 1859, home consumption was 61,000 lbs. The Pharmaceutical Society made regular attempts to corner the mar- ket, but opium continued to be sold by grocers until 1908. Even after the pharma- cists had cornered the trade, there were no restrictions on the sale of dangerous drugs, apart from a requirement to sign the Poisons Book, until the Great War. Even heroin could be bought on any general practitioner's prescription until 1968, when James Callaghan, as Home Secretary, put a stop to it.
I am not saying he was wrong. Up to now, at any rate, I have not taken the Wheatcroft line that the dangers of drug enforcement — in terms of greater powers for politicians, police, other government agencies and mafia-style gangsters — out- weigh the dangers of libertarianism. It is true that anti-drug legislation makes all these people very happy and inflicts such monsters of self-advertisement as Mr David 'Dave' Mellor on the public scene. But Molly Lefebure's latest biography, of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Bond- age of Love (published this week by Gollancz at £15.95), argues my case well enough, pointing out the injustice which drug addiction inflicts on wives, children and friends, as well as encompassing the destruction of the addicts themselves. This is not a spurious point, like the arguments against tobacco based on the claimed danger to 'passive' smokers. It seems to me crucial in discussion of what is the undeni- ably anti-social habit of drug-taking.
But the judgment is relative (or margin- al, as we used to say). If politicians and policemen are allowed to ride on the back of public concern about drugs to create a world where they can enter any private citizen's home at will and confiscate his property before he has been convicted of an offence, then we must simply decide that our concern for the friends and rela- tives of drug addicts has gone too far. There is everything to be said for prefer- ring that the sale or possession of drugs in large quantities should remain illegal. There is nothing to be said for accepting a police state, or a society controlled by populist leader writers and politicians, in order to establish this preference.
In the 19th century, people referred to the opium habit euphemistically as 'the indolence'. Coleridge's equivalent of `crack', the notorious 'Kendal Black Drop' laudanum, cost a shocking 11 shillings for 4 oz and eventually ruined him, as well as destroying his mind. He blithely assured his wife that she and the family could eat potatoes. There is much to be said against taking a relaxed view of the problem, but I am beginning to feel that indolence may be preferable to its alternative.
Previous page
