Another voice
To the funhouse
Auberon Waugh
One of the comforts of an English writer for the civilised man is that if he waits around long enough he will secure a copy of the Arts Council's Annual Report and Accounts for the previous year. My own copy arrived several weeks ago and I have spent most of MY spare time chuckling over it ever since. This year it is sub-headed 'The Arts in Hard Times,' a sentiment which is celebrated by the innovation of a glossy, illustrated cover and four expensive pages in full colour including a beautiful Arthurian scene by Burne-Jones to introduce the Accounts. These show increased expenditure of £5,702,320 or over 34 per cent on the previous year. They also reveal that the !candalous subsidy to the New Review was Increased by £3,000 to the shocking total of Q2.000 last year. This is despite a cautionary note sounded in the Secretary-General's rePort : 'The Council believes in the value of a variety of magazines to provide outlets for writers, but it would like to spread its subsidies across as wide a field as possible. In the light of this policy it was decided to continue its subsidy to the New Review anlong other magazines, subject to close scrutiny of their finances and performance.'
As wide a field as possible? The New ,i?.'vietv takes up nearly half the total allocation to literary magazines, and with Mr Charles Osborne's other pet, the London Itagazine, which is run by his former eMPloyer, accounts for more than 62 per cent of the total. And one can find clues to 0ther, hidden subsidies: 'Public libraries have featured in another sc,heme, now being implemented, for the distribution to interested libraries of free Copies of literary magazines subsidised by the Council.'
In other words, unsold copies of these funsaleable magazines are now being sent .ree to public libraries in a pathetic effort t,t) Justify circulation claims. At least the tone has changed since last year's report. wtishere an incredulous public was assured "at the New Review's circulation, 'at Present a modest 5,000, is increasing from nlonth to month.' Of course it is all very well to rail against sgovernment subsidy of the written word and brIeer at the talentless hacks who accept it, thlit now that a handful of exhibitionists on 'tie back benches has stopped Public Lend1,4 Right, the outlook is extremely gloomy. wnblic Lending Right, I should emphasise, not another government subsidy to be Istributed by a committee of homosexualback-scratchers to each other and ipeir friends; it was belated reparation for a ivelthood seized by the government and by
librarians—surely the most abject and contemptible people in the story—and payable to anyone whose book was borrowed from a library.
The names of the five exhibitionist MPs have been marked down, and every writer in the country will concern himself to see that they are hounded out of public life and into early, dishonoured graves. But the evil they have done lives after them, and one of those evils is to increase the importance of Arts Council Literature Grants. It would be absurd to pretend that every recipient of Mr Osborne's largesse is unworthy, although most of them undoubtedly are. Encounter receives a subsidy, although infinitely smaller than the New Review and smaller even than Alan Ross's worthless London Magazine. In the current issue of Encounter there is an article on equality by Professor Robin Nisbet which would alone justify the entire literature allocation of £226,800 for I975-6—a year in which Encounter received nothing. It is tempting to list all the sums wasted by Mr Osborne— the £26,000 given to New Fiction Society Limited and the £28,000 to the Poetry Society—but it is more important, surely, to concentrate on the positive harm done by Mr Osborne and his cronies. None of us can really feel indignant at such a minuscule waste of government money, even if all the £226,800 were wasted which, as I have said, it is not. But the damage to English letters is another matter.
My main charge here is the familiar one relating to lame ducks. By encouraging people to write what nobody wants to read, you discourage them from trying to write what might be read. More particularly a vast proportion of state patronage of letters —and there can be no doubt it would be the same whether it was administered by Mr Charles Osborne or by some less odious literary buccaneer—is spent on forlorn efforts to revive the dead carthorse of the modern movement. Now, there need be nothing wrong with that, and one might find something rather touching in the sight of so many old men and younger pseuds scrabbling over the poor dead animal in their anxiety to administer the kiss of life. None of the old men and few of the pseuds are much good for anything else, and even if the money seems wasted, at least it keeps these people happy. But the doubt remains whether a few of them might not be more usefully employed. Last week I was reminded of one, when I received the new edition of Bananas.
Bananas, I should explain, is a literary publication edited by the Honourable Emma Tennant, a former wife of my cousin Alexander Cockburn and of various other people. She is also a novelist of small output but reasonable quality. The magazine is published, as it dutifully proclaims, 'with the generous assistance of the Arts Council of Great Britain' and specialises in whatever is too recondite, too incomprehensible or too boring and badly written to be printed elsewhere. In the current issue there is a 'Tokyo Diary' from Angela Carter. Miss Carter is a novelist and short story writer known to me only by name, and probably not known to many Spectator readers even by that, but I have read all her novels and nearly all her short stories and can only offer my word for it that she can write like an angel and has one of the livelier and more robust imaginations of her generation. Yet her 'Tokyo Diary' is pretentious rubbish. If she were writing for Spectator or New Statesman no doubt the words would sparkle and glitter on the page.
The same number of Bananas has an eight-thousand-word Manifesto by the preposterous Martin Seymour-Smith. It sets out to identify Gnosticism, the first heresy of the Christian era celebrating the original urge to perversity, with Modernism. described by St Pius X as 'not a heresy but the summation and essence of every heresy.' This would be an absorbing study, if Smith had the slightest knowledge of theology or interest in ecclesiastical history beyond the lone, puerile anti-Catholicism which enables him to write of the author of I Corinthians xviii: 'The psychopathic, epileptic. lumpenastralist Paul tries, with a terrible degree of success, to reimpose an order: a sick lie: rigid, closed, an obscene mixture of opportunistic pragmatism and false piety, whose origin is sexual guilt.'
As it is, the Manifesto soon degenerates into the usual string of wild babyish assertions about world literature, crowned by the discovery that Smith's hero, Wyndham Lewis, was a Gnostic, along with Jesus Christ and Shakespeare. It also marks his attempt to introduce a new vogue word into pseudish debate: Esperpento. Esperpento, I should explain, is what Modern Art is All About. 'The best English translation,' Smith reveals, is 'funhouse distorting mirroi.' Gosh, I wonder what the less good translations are.
Why on earth, I found myself wondering, does a nice, intelligent, attractive girl like Emma Tennant waste her time with this trash? Then, from the recesses of my memory, I started turning the pages of Smith's ludicrous Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature. Yes, here it was, under Tennant, Emma (1937) where one of her books is described as 'ingenious and intelligent,' 'a powerful dystopia.'
Dystopia is not a word which has any meaning in English, so far as I know, and it certainly never existed in Greek, but you can tell the poor booby is sucking up, in his strangulated way trying to be polite. So another lady novelist is beguiled and seduced and another coterie is born. God damn the Arts Council of Great Britain.
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