In Youth is Squalor
The main bid for originality seemed to lie in the use of soliloquy, by which means the hero was enabled to give the story a shove when needed and also to promote his own philosophy. It worked beautifully: but then so, if anyone cares to remember, have very similar techniques on sound radio; while for the matter of that Homer himself was no stranger to the device, though I grant you he tended to reserve it for Odysseus's exhibitions of self-pity.
As for complaints about squalor, words fail me. This is the diary of a young man (Joe), and youth is by nature cruel, greedy and hot. Since Joe, as well as being young, is under-privileged and on the make, we might have expected some- thing positively fetid. Not a bit of it. A single evening in a prep-school dormitory, a mere five minutes in a hut full of recruits, ten seconds flat in some officers' messes, would make the senti- ments and adventures of this pang slt-,e seem, by comparison, !il;-.3 it -sterilised version of Little Lord - Fauntleroy. If Joe is grimy, others are scrofulous; if Joe is unchaste, others are bestial; if Joe is shifty in time of hunger, others cheat the flesh off their mothers' bones for the sheer fun of the thing. Taken along with Basil Seal, for example, Joe is the most pitiful beginner; among Petronius's young men he wouldn't have lasted a single page. As the picaresque tradition goes, poor Joe is simply a nice, kind gull who is let down rather lightly. There is more 'squalor' in a single flea on the rump of Apuleius's ass.
Caryl Brahms's The • Long Garden Party (BBC-1, August 27), described as 'an Edwardian Essay around the popular songs of the reign,' was in truth a savage piece of morality. The piano tinkled and the chorus capered, Tum-Tum, Rex et Imperator, brooded breathily in the back- ground, and a series of cleverly clicking rhymes and nicely modulated double-entendres cele- brated cakes, ale, concupiscence, and a great big lovely red map. 'Safe, silly and sunny,' as the compere summed it all up. But behind Turn- Turn's amiable figure one could almost see the Furies gather; each tune was plonked out with more desperate gaiety than the last to drown the whirring of their wings. Oh dear me, yes: the Scissor-Man was on his way to deal with that little lot, to snip up their pretty red map and confirm the most ghastly of Nannie's bed-time warnings.
`Safe, silly and sunny... .' That is how, despite everything, I at least have felt throughout August.
And the Scissor-Man, who must always come to close the Silly Season? Not a serious threat this year, I think. Let us say, rather, that with the general election will come a crowd of little scissor-manikins, snipping and snapping at us from our screens but also flattering and cajoling, like so many barbers trying to cut the hair of wayward children. No danger just yet. But how those scissor-manikins will grow, fed with votes and self-importance, until they threaten the
fabric of the very sky with their monstrous shears. Some of them are growing apace already, at any rate in the more favourable climate on the other side of the Atlantic. Reports on the Democratic Convention (BBC-1, August 27 and 28) should have been enough to cure us all of politicians for good; a salutary warning, I trust, against the time when, in a few weeks, our own gang will start preening and mouthing over here.
SIMON RAVEN
Previous page
