SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
- Perhaps it's the shabby grey -of the decor at
Burlington Housi; more probably it's the per-
Opportunity
After last week's PEP report on the colour bar, someone ought to do a survey of coloured immigrants' reactions to the way the report has been received. Admirable liberal sentiments have been published by the yard. But apart from an amendment of the law against dis- crimination, which is only a formal beginning, will anything happen? Sir William Carron's sneer this week at immigrant 'spongers,' coming as it did from a senior union leader, indicates the real problem. I would like to see a cam- paign by influential liberal employers to get coloured men and women into prominent (by which I also mean obvious or visible) jobs. They would have to be properly qualified, of course, but the whole point about discrimination is that it discounts qualifications. My own trade of journalism is perhaps well placed to make a start.
There is in London now, as it happens, an exhibition of work by Gordon Parkes, a distinguished negro photographer for Life magazine. Yet one large group of British news- papers, which has been printing high-minded editorial condemnations of intolerance, em- ploys, so I'm told, precisely one coloured man —as a messenger.
Holy Russia?
After some apparent initial clumsiness by the Americans, Svetlana Stalina seems to have achieved her escape to the United States satis- factorily. Even so, I dare say she will need all the cheerfulness and poise which her persona, as transmitted by television from New York, suggested; and-I hope she escapes exploitation, both commercial and political.
Meanwhile, of all the ironies inherent in this strange episode, the greatest is that Stalin's daughter should have travelled to a western ebuntly, and one which has made fashionable the question 'Is God Dead?,' to announce that vading sense of diminished glory, of time running out; whatever the reason, a visit to the Royal Academy invariably stirs in me a feeling of melancholy which this year's abrupt espousal of fashionable modernities does nothing to dispel. Indeed, as I inspected the display of works aggressively. declaring their claim to be above all else modern, I felt a sense of embar- rassment mingling With • the gloom. A ton-up vicar, clad in black leather and busy with a programme of pop- music in his church, would possibly produce a similar doubt. Is all this done with conviction? Otherwise, are not the motives rather second-rate? And if an academy is merely to assemble all the fashions of recent decades (with most of the significant artists un- represented), it is hard to see wherein lies the academic nature of the institution.
The trouble is, as Wyndham Lewis observed years ago, that nowadays the RA is completely unacademic. I suppose, though, that it has at least been true to its nature in electing to be- come part of Swinging London just when every- one else had agreed to acknowledge the demise of that unmourned myth. she herself had turned to God, and in Moscow. A Russian friend tells me this rejection of the atheist orthodoxy is bound to have a big effect inside Russia, where there has been a rising level of interest in religious ideas ever since the post-Stalin collapse of faith in the infallibility of the party. Khrushchev tried to stamp this out ruthlessly (he closed down religious institutions wholesale) but this repression has been 'softened somewhat:The anti-religious propaganda Cam- paign continues however. Typical of this is a film currently showing in Russia, in which inmates of A seminary are seen as monsters of vice. However, Soviet papers repeatedly • carry articles complaining that the propaganda isn't getting results. Pasternak was a significant force in rehabilitating religion in the.eyes of a generation of Russians; it seems possible that Stalin's daughter will prove to be aR even greater influence.
Business as usual
Another small communique from Fleet Street's farflung Business News battle-line. The struggle for advertising is growing fiercer. The Times Business News men started out hoping to sell enough space to justify a twelve-page issue every day, but they haven't been able to keep it up. However, they were gloating his week. A fat full-page advertisement from Kleinwort, Ben- son (announcing a new share issue) was cap- tured by much high-pressure work after it had been originally destined for the Daily Tele- graph business pages. The Telegraph city editor took a very cool view of the shares in his com- ments on Monday. 'Not an offer for readers of the Daily Telegraph,' he concluded sniffily. In Printing House Square it's frivolously sug- gested that this should have read, 'Not an offer to readers of the Daily Telegraph.' Ah well, that's the Business business.
Memorial
I used to have the annual privilege of helping Vicky to select enough of his Evening Standard cartoons to make a book. Of all the great car- toonists, I believe his work was the most per- sonal and the most deeply felt. Yet the hours spent choosing the cartoons which together represented his view of the past year were always hilarious. Vicky saw the world with a sense of anguish but with wonderful gaiety too. The two qualities were the essential ingredients of his art.
All this I remembered when I looked through the memorial volume published this week by the Penguin Press. In a sense it is the last of that series of Vicky collections, with the range extended from his juvenile work in Berlin to the last statement of disillusion finished just before his death last year. But it is more, because it also contains a perceptive study of Vicky by James Cameron. This exactly depicts the improbable human mixture—Hun- garian, Jew, Berliner, refugee, socialist, anglo- phile, deep student of English ways and English politics, comedian, and tragedian—which amounted to Vicky. It is a good memorial to him. And with entire appropriateness this book is published (at 35s) in aid of Oxfam. I can only recommend it without reservation.
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