Postscript
Testing time
P. J. Kavanagh 0 ne does try to like one's fellow humans, does one not? One also tries to like oneself. Both have been made difficult for me by the pattern of life I have recently fallen into, alone in London. In the inter- vals of being wafted at dawn to Elstree Studios in order to wander across the background of a film that is being made there, I lie alone in bed in lordly fashion and listen to the Today programme on Radio 4. Then I jump out of bed with a groan and an imprecation, turning off the radio, because there now comes a reading by a boy of the journals of Adrian Mole. You cannot escape him, the book appears on the top of the best-seller list week after week, he is in the theatre, is threatened on television and here he is, for at least the second time, on the radio.
The whole thing is the worst, most humourless, kind of joke imaginable. It is derived from an unnatural and non- existent belief in the sweet innocence of boys of that age, amused 'shock' at their being on the contrary rather knowing, and this is meant to be succeeded by a delight- ed relief that their knowingness is really rather 'sweet' after all. The whole is false from top to bottom, and that hordes of people presumably find it funny feeds my misanthropy to danger-level. W. H. Auden once admitted that he could never really like a man who preferred his steak well done, and I am afraid I would find it difficult to be on terms of confiding intima- cy with anyone who laughed at Adrian Mole. Perhaps I am therefore alone in the world, so be it, but I have to report that my own male offspring, not far from the Mole's age, cringe with disgust at the mention of his name.
Nevertheless, there may be something wrong with me — of course there is, bound to be — but I had to leave the Barbican theatre the other night because it has no aisles, or gangways, or whatever you call those occasional, blessed, gaps between rows of seats. 1 was in the middle of the Dress Circle (or Circle One as it is called there, as opposed to Circle Two or Three, appellations which sound more appropri- ate in Dante than in a theatre) and although Love's Labour's Lost is one of my favourites, and Christopher Benjamin was being good as Holofernes, I became in- creasingly aware that I was trapped among too many people: long rows of them stretched on either side of me, unbroken, and with so little leg-room there was small chance of being able to step past them. I have heard since that others in the Circles have been forced to leave because of vertigo. I left at the interval because of claustrophobia and walked the intermin- able Barbican underpass towards a hoped- for sky. On the wall of the underpass was a large advertisement, black, with one red balloon on it. Over the balloon was written — 'Wouldn't it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?'
Have advertisers, have designers of theatres, gone mad? When I returned home I had a telephone call from my wife, describing a delightful evening spent in Siena, with our younger son, Bruno, after the Palio. He has since come back and said it was indeed delightful, drummers still in their Renaissance costumes drumming into every bar, taking a drink (not getting drunk) and rat-tatting off — 'Everyone looked so happy.' No, it would not be good if all cities were like Milton Keynes.
So, misanthropy has been fed, at least here in London. And as for liking my- self. . . During this period I was invited to dinner by some old friends. For some reason — 'pressure'? Too many visits to Elstree, too much time alone and too much Adrian Mole? — I suddenly started leaping from the table, pouring myself beakers of whisky, chain-smoking cigarettes, telling too many stories (some, I have a fear, twice) until my kind hosts, both of whom had to be up in the morning to go to work, were forced gently to pour me into the night and into a passing cab; I was still, I recall with horror, talking. Oh, the shame of the memory. I must go and join my anchor in Italy, I am not safe to be allowed out on my own. I always knew I was only sane when muttering runes to the roots of a Gloucestershire hedge.
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