AND ANOTHER THING
Everybody needs to own something
PAUL JOHNSON
On Saturday, reflecting that there was now a real risk the socialists would come in, I decided to spend some money before they got a chance to confiscate it. So I bought a painting. It would not have occurred to me to buy anything else. In most respects I am the archetypal anti-consumer. If the major- ity were like me, the entire economy would seize up. Scanning the ads in a colour-sup- plement, my eyes glaze over. There is abso- lutely nothing they display which I want. If I walk down Oxford Street or Knights- bridge, I have not the smallest temptation to go into any of the shops. I have never bought a car in my life. Clothes do not interest me. Expensive restaurants merely try my patience. As my work takes me to distant places anyway, I never take holidays as such. All the things for which Rosemary Aberdour lusted, which drove her to steal £3 million from hospitals and landed her in gaol last week, I not only can do without, they actively disgust me. Hell is being trapped in a night-club with 'the beautiful people' and forced to live in a 'luxury pent- house flat'. I would be happier in a monastery, even a charterhouse.
But I could not do without paintings and books. And, when I have money, I buy them. The itch to own books is a disease, which in my case is chronic and incurable. There is no reason to it. As a young man I led a wandering life and, three times, was forced to sell my books before moving on. I argued that I didn't actually need them, that libraries were always available. But it was agony nonetheless, and once settled in a new place, the accretions began again. When we moved from our house in Iver, back to London, I sold two or three thou- sand books — massy historical sets, ency- clopaedias, bound runs of magazines, that sort of thing. I have never ceased to pine for those volumes. In any case, vast quanti- ties of other books have since been acquired so I now have more than before the Great Purge, revealed restrospectively as pointless. Handymen are constantly summoned to make more shelves, but still the rows of books insinuate themselves, like serpents, creeping upstairs and into bed- rooms, slithering along walls and into cup- boards, piling themselves in corners, stand- ing reproachfully in piles on tables, even under sofas. I buy them in Foyles or Water- stones, in grand Mayfair rare-book empo- ria, in dark junk-shops in back streets, even in those cut-price joints which spring up
like mushrooms whenever a shop space falls vacant. These last are not to be despised: last week I got in one of them, for virtually nothing, the Travels of Prince Ptickler-Muskau, which (oddly enough) I did not possess, and a life of that wayward, mad genius Gilbert Cannan, described to me vividly years ago by old Martin Secker, who first published him.
Anyway, one way or another the books continue to arrive, sometimes dozens in a week. So, more rarely, do the paintings and drawings. When I bought the latest, a mag- nificent rendering in oils of that favourite 19th-century white-water scene, 'The Falls of Clyde', by Thomas Spinks ('fl. 1872- 1880', according to Christopher Wood's Dictionary of Victorian Painters), my wife said, 'Yes, but where will you hang it?' It is true there is no room. I occasionally give a picture away, but never sell one, pietas obliging me to follow my father's maxim: 'Never try to make money out of a poor, dead painter, who probably starved.' So they accumulate, and the fresh arrivals have to fight for wall-space. But it is my superstitious belief that good, self-respect- ing paintings hanging in a room recognise a newcomer of quality, and contract them- selves to make way for him.
Besides, I feel a continuing sense of loss about the pictures I should have bought and couldn't, or didn't. There was the beau- tiful little Constable watercolour I was offered for £18, at a time when I simply did not possess such a princely sum and had no means of borrowing it. There was a more poignant moment, just after we were mar- ried (so it must have been 1957). I had just bought, for a few pounds, a superb oil by
Albert Moore, then held in little esteem. I was offered two more, smaller ones but a pair, for £45. As it happened, I had the money. But we did not then possess a refrigerator, and £45 was exactly the price of the new one we needed. So Mary had to yield to Martha, art to utility. There were other similar instances over the years, so that I feel there are a number of works missing from my collection, gaps to be filled, even though the walls are replete. That, at least, is my metaphysical rationale for buying more. But the truth is I am just acquisitive when it comes to books and paintings, if nothing else, I want to own. When I look around them in my house, neatly arranged on the shelves, well-lit on the walls, I feel emotions not unlike Archdeacon Grantley's when he shows his recalcitrant son, who wants to marry a pen- niless beauty, around the family woods and fields, in The Last Chronicle of Barset.
It is my view that such feelings, in moder- ation, are not only entirely proper but are a permanent, ineradicable response of the human spirit to the beauty, variety and richness of the world around us. The desire to own, like the urge to create, is God- given; indeed the two instincts are comple- mentary: one cannot long exist without the other. The belief that acquisitiveness is intrinsically and always wrong, taught by heretic theologians and orthodox socialists, is false and, if pressed, wicked. It is a great destroyer of happiness. Think of the nar- rowness of life for the millions who lived in communist Europe, denied for so long four decades in the satellites, seven in Rus- sia — the simple satisfaction of owning things, like gardens and fields and homes or little businesses, of making collections, of commissioning a craftsman or an artist to make a particular, treasured object.
Think of the beauty lost in consequence. And all because an arrogant, aggressive minority felt they had the right to try to transform human nature according to their gruesome secular faith. We do not exactly face the threat of such deprivation here, I hope. Nevertheless, I dread the prospect of
Neil Kinnock, ignorant, unreflective, almost unread, and just behind him a camarilla of would-be cultural commissars, TV litterateurs and showbiz riffraff, giving
us orders and imposing on us their repel- lent notions of moral, civil and artistic con- duct. The worst of all occupations by aliens is a cultural one.
Previous page
