DIARY A.N.WILS ON
As the author of a profile of Alastair Forbes, which he terms 'preposterously inaccurate', it is an honour to take on his baton from last week. If I were trying to emulate my predecessor, I should be run- ning round the page, dropping as many names and dangers as possible. I visited him in hospital last week for a briefing. He was awaiting a painful examination by the heart specialist in the morning, and quoted Belloc to good effect - I said to Heart 'How goes it?' Heart replied 'Right as a ribstone pippin.' But it lied.
Undeterred by the label NIL BY MOUTH which had been suspended from his bed, he was allowing a torrent of characteristi- cally Forbesian observations to fall from his lips. An orderly entered the room and found Forbes discoursing in one polypho- nic breath about the poetry of Lermontov, the politics of Andreotti and the charms of the Literary Editor of The Spectator. Upon the arrival of the orderly he broke off and tried to 'place' the woman's accent. Having decided it to be Polish, I could see that he was ready to treat her to a disquisition on Lech Walesa, Chopin, Mrs Derwent May and the late Auberon Herbert, but seeing the NIL BY MOUTH sign the woman had made off, wishing us good night in (I thought) unmistakably Irish tones. Ali has a great tendency to believe people to be Polish. I remember a lunch in Fortnum's with him when my children were young in which he tried to share with our waitress his views of Lords Grimond and Bonham- Carter. Because they were of a somewhat racy, pas devant les enfants variety, he broke into Polish whenever we reached an exciting bit — much to the waitress's bafflement and consternation.
Graham Greene, who died on Wednesday, had a long association with The Spectator. Although he had been ill for some time, and he was extremely old, it is hard to imagine the world of English letters without him. A friend of mine visited him not long ago in the South of France and asked him if he believed in the punishment of the wicked in the after-life. He replied that he did not personally believe in hell, 'Aren't Catholics supposed to?' asked my friend. 'They're supposed to believe in hell, but they do not have to believe that anyone is in it,' he replied. 'Would Evelyn Waught have believed that there was any- one in hell?' my friend persisted. Greene put back his head and laughed loud and long. Evelyn Waugh himself was once asked by Greene's old school-friend Peter Quennell whether he considered Graham Greene to be a good Catholic. The reply was in the affirmative. 'How does Gra- ham,' asked Peter Quennell, 'reconcile his Catholic beliefs with his association with Catherine Walston? — his then mistress. Evelyn Waugh replied that in the Middle Ages there was a Pope who was so holy that, once a year, he behaved like a buffoon in order to prevent the people from revering his sanctity too slavishly. He paraded himself through the streets of Rome wearing a ridiculous paper hat. `Catherine Walston', said Waugh, 'is Gra- ham's paper hat.' Whether or not there is an after-life, Greene will achieve immor- tality through his works. One is always grateful to authors who write a lot, because even if it is impossible to like everything they write, there will always be something in the oeuvre which one can appreciate. I do not like many of his novels, but love Monsignor Quixote, in which Greene gent- ly juxtaposes the two great creeds of his life — Marxism and Catholicism — and shows that the quirks and oddities of human character are stronger than both. He never short-changed his readers. All his books are well-made, and painstakingly crafted. But how addicted that generation was to points of view. An intelligent young man said to me not long ago, 'Surely only stupid people have points of view?' That is what most people of his (25ish) age-group believe. I thought immediately, when he said it, of Graham Greene and his contem- poraries — Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden — all dabbling with opinions in the way that subsequent gen- erations would have experimented with drugs. I suspect that Greene's preoccupa- tions with ideology, religious and political, have already 'dated' him but the quality of his writing will guarantee his survival.
Iam writing this diary in South Wales. It has been the most beautiful Easter that I remember. Lambs frolic in the brilliantly green fields. The air is loud with birdsong. And I am bored to distraction. The most memorable moment of Easter Day was sitting in a Siop Coffi in Newcastle Emlyn and watching two all-female teams emerge from the Clwb Rygbi. The butchest girl in the red team took it upon herself to massage the neck, and then the elephan- tine thighs of a bosomy front row forward and they made a beautiful sight, with the Cenarth Falls babbling in the background.
The Union Hall pub in Llaregyb, the village where I grew up, has changed a bit in the last 20 years. The two bars have been knocked together to form one anonymous area where Hot Chocolate blast out their din through loudspeakers and teenagers play pool with varying degrees of skill. In days gone by, Welsh pub-goers preferred to sing to themselves rather than listen to CDs of pop stars. Some of the old regulars have photographs of themselves on the walls, but I wonder how many people remember them. It is stylish of the publi- can not to have displayed a picture of Dylan Thomas who quite often drank here. Instead, we have a picture of Dai Thomas (no relation) whom I knew quite well. He was a drinking pal of Dylan's. He would drive the poet back to Laugharne when a tiresome stage of drunkenness had been reached. Unlike Sir Kingsley Amis, Dai had nothing but good to say of Dylan, perhaps because he steered clear of the poems. As well as being our local taxi and garage man, Dai used to organise our local otter hunt. I sometimes followed it, run- ning up the Towy towards Carmarthen, but the otter always got away. Dai was a merry, hard-drinking man, enormously kind. The same has been true of most people I have known addicted to hunting. Perhaps the inherent cruelty which exists in most human beings is drawn out of the system by chasing wild beasts. I should rather a man be 'cruel' to salmon, wild boar or hares than to his fellow human beings. Iris Murdoch disagrees and quotes Kant, to the effect that cruelty to animals demeans us as well as hurting them.
Before they became an 'endangered species', however, the otters in the Towy and the Taf were a menace, eating the young salmon and sewin as they swam upstream from the estuaries. It is years since I fished in either river. I lack the patience and the cunning to be a Compleat Angler. Danny Morris was my companion on those jaunts up the Taf a quarter of a century ago. He caught such miraculous draughts of sewin that he was always thought to be up to some tricks. He said the secret was 'ground bait', which I dare say is considered unsporting by those who fish merely for fun. There were at least two other fishermen in the village then. Fishy Evans and Fishy John sold their catch around Llaregyb before taking the remain- der to Carmarthen market. The last time I asked a fishmonger in Carmarthen where he obtained his fresh fish he said 'Grimsby' — hundreds of miles away.
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