Notebook
The house in which I have lived for a number of years in a friendly part of Wales is up for sale (very cheap). The shortest poem written by Christopher Logue was addressed to someone who had lust moved to Wales. It goes:
`When all else fails Try Wales.'
Now there is a television advertisement Which takes the magnificent Welsh hymn `Bread of Heaven' and substitutes the words 'Made in Wales', while the names of various large companies appear beneath Pictures of superb Welsh scenery. This was Parodied the other day by Not the Nine O'Clock News, which used the same names, the same sort of film, but the words, 'Failed 41 Wales, Failed in Wales, and there's room for plenty more.' A friend suggests that I Might adopt this as a slogan for selling my house, but I can't see it.
Travelling through Monmouthshire and Herefordshire one notices the great
be of fruit in the orchards. It seems to ne a particularly good year for plums, ap- ples and pears. In view of the current cold spell, the spring drought and the last hard Winter this may appear surprising, but we had no late spring frosts and that accounts for the fruit glut. Farmers of course are just as depressed by a glut as they are by a scar- city, since the former means falling prices. And this year they are murmuring in Wales about a new horror. The Great Spruce Bark Beetle is reported to be loose in Radnor- shire. On reflection it is hard to join in the Moaning about the arrival of this little Chap. It confines its attentions to the evergreen Christmas trees which the Forestry Commissioners plant wherever they can get a root in. If only this beetle could inflict the same damage on the spruce that Dutch Elm disease did to the native elm. Then the Forestry Commissioners 'night be forced to replant with mixed native hardwoods. Even now boffins are Preparing a genocidal campaign against this Well-disposed beetle. Perhaps the Animal Liberation Front (instead of releasing ranch Mink, which find their way back to their hutches at the first mealtime) could make itself useful for once.
Some months ago the Atticus column of the Sunday Times carried a most in- teresting story about the activities of the W.H. Smith-Doubleday group of book clubs. This is called Book Club Associates and includes the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild. According to At- ticus, this vast organisation had been sug- gesting to publishers that they raise their cover prices by one or two pounds. This would enable the book clubs to maintain their 'discount' price and lead the book buyers to think that the book clubs were offering them a better bargain. It is a disreputable practice which the book clubs have frequently denied that they indulge. The Atticus story caused a certain amount of consternation at W.H. Smith. A letter arrived from some .rather grand solicitors, Slaughter & May, referring to a 'thoroughly dishonest' piece of journalism and deman- ding a swift retraction. In reply the Sunday Times was able to produce two letters writ- ten by Book Club Associates to the publishing house of Hutchinson which ap- peared to confirm every detail of the story. No more was heard from Slaughter & May, but W.H. Smith continued to squeak about their grievances and earlier this month they sent a director round to the Sunday Times. Mention was made of the 'close relation- ship' between the two organisations, based on Smith's position as major newspaper distributors — as well as the millions of pounds BCA spends in advertising with Times Newspapers. But the story has a hap- py ending. No retraction has appeared or will appear. And Smith's man was finally and politely shown the door.
Idling away a rainy afternoon in Tegucigalpa some weeks ago I came across this passage in The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly.
'It had got to be done; the machinery, obsolete, cumbrous, rusty, by which one got into somebody's bed for a few minutes had to be brought into use again, the noisy gears had to be engaged.'
There seemed something familiar about this extended metaphor, and I have now discovered what it was. In Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, first published in 1931, five years before The Rock Pool, one finds the following:
`Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronised '
When The Rock Pool was published Ed- mund Wilson remarked that it owed `something to South Wind and to Compton Mackenzie's novels of Capri'. Connolly and Powell were contemporaries both at Eton and Balliol, Connolly being two years the senior.
In a meticulous public relations exercise the Israeli government has discredited a picture said to be of a seven-month old baby who had lost both arms in an Israeli bomb- ing attack on Beirut. According to the Israelis the child did not lose its arms and was injured by Palestinian shelling rather than Israeli bombing. All this effort was made because President Reagan kept a copy of this picture on his desk and waved it at the Israeli foreign minister, the former ter- rorist, Yitzhak Shamir, during a recent meeting. If the Israelis are to be believed their investigation is an interesting illustra- tion of the way in which the truth sometimes becomes rather elusive during war. Beyond that the investigation is pointless. The fact remains that thousands of non-combatants have been killed in the Lebanon by the Israeli army and air force, and tens of thousands have been made homeless. There must be hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian infants in a far more pitiful condition than the baby in the photograph. That sort of thing tends to happen when a modern air force bombards a crowded city for weeks on end. I myself saw the (unphotographed) corpses of Jor- danian children who had died from wounds inflicted by Israeli fragmentation bombing of a village in the north of the Jordan in the winter of 1968. No doubt the Jordanian baby, looking more like seven weeks than seven months, which had had the top half of its skull neatly removed, had fallen out of its pram.
Asmall lottery was arranged some weeks ago among several of his warmest ad- mirers as to which of his favourite topics Mr Auberon Waugh might first choose to discourse on during his annual eating holi- day in Provence. Last week the matter was decided with the publication of the memor- able meditation on the martyrdom of St Lawrence. That leaves the unattractiveness of the massed naked female breasts as view- ed by Mr Waugh on the beach; the ex- cellence of the Daily Telegraph airmail edi- tion; the account of conversation, usually of a military nature, at a dinner party with several well-connected and well-informed French neighbours; and the robust use of CS gas and other such weapons by the paramilitary Compagnie Republicaine de Securite. Any of these may appear in the ar- ticle we hope to receive in time for next week's issue. I confess to a slight preference for the dinner party; but they are all delightful, quite delightful.
Patrick Marnham
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