The academies of Laputa TABLE TALK

DENIS BROGAN

I spent exactly a fortnight out of my native land and have discovered how quickly one sets isolated from the centre of things, that is Britain, and begins to forget the existence of. important persons and important problems and, on returning, how quickly one forgets the important persons and important problems one concentrated on while in foreign parts.

Last weekend, for instance, I was deeply involved in the activities of General de Gaulle.

I had the great pleasure of reading in many papers in various countries of the approach- ing devaluation of the French franc, and later the great pleasure of learning that the General had again pulled the rug from under various political speculators. (Whether he had also pulled the rug from under the financial specu-

lators is part of the arcana imperil of which I have no knowledge, aid on which I do not propose, to comment.) One of my liveliest memories of the crisis at Bonn,. Paris and London was the fact that it was extremely in- Convenient for one who was running short of iiie and could not exchange either francs or sterling for any immediately useful currency.

Without blaming anyone, I found this ex- tremely irritating as well as a nuisance. Gone were the days when English travellers' cheques were received with gratitude by everybody. Gone were the recent days when the French franc was one of the hardest of currencies. To think that, for nearly a century. up to 1914. the great currencies of the world changed their parities so slowly, and usually for highly pre- dictable reasons, and then suddenly the light went out all over Europe : that is to say, sterling. francs, dollars, marks, etc, indulged in musical chairs of the most fantastic type.

My mother never got quite accustomed. to this system, and with great prudence hoarded gold, a precaution which I thought absurd until I benefited by it in the city of Milan well over forty years ago. Last week I found myself again in ,Milan in serious financial disarray and without any of my mother's gold.

But I must say the feeling that pounds are not accepted, that the prestige of the British government is not very high. that willingness to listen to sermons on the refinements of eco- nomic theory from Mr Douglas Jay was in short supply, irritated me and shocked me... Perhaps my children, who have already been caught in various inflationary and deflationary crises in many parts of the globe, are not shocked at the discovery that the City is no longer the effective centre of the financial world or, perhaps, by the more startling dis- covery that there is, in. fact, no centre of the financial world.

think what startled or shocked me most was the number of extremely prosperous:. Japanese I saw around. They seemed to be doing a great deal of business in Milan. and,. later I found them in considerable numbers_ in the airports of Marseilles and Paris, and I suspect that the Japanese, who were ruined irretrievably in 1945, must be observing our own state with some oriental irony. A world in which by far the biggest vessel has been built in Japan and is based on Bantry Bay is not the world I grew up in on the Clyde.

It was, as I always find, remarkably easy to stop reading the British papers even when they could be got. Thus I missed a great many pieces of important news: e.g.. of a very

lively Scottish murder trial that was going on, and of the deaths of public figures like Upton

Sinclair, Gerald Barry and Enid Blyton. I also found when I got home that I was missing the seizure of the University of Birmingham by embattled students, and this startled me less

than it might have done. as I had been living peacefully in Bologna where part of the Uni-

versity of Bologna, one of the oldest and greatest in Europe. had also been seized by students, but I can no longer remember why or how or whether it is still seized.

Of the numerous student strikes raging around me (raging with great calm I must say), the most interesting was at the School of Architecture at Florence. It seems that the students there have decided to abandon the old tedious exercises of traditional architectural learning and are going in almost entirely for the sociological aspects of architecture, leaving the actual practice of building to other people or to divine providence. Professors are busy discussing with their students problems of urbanism. problems of the development of Tus- cany, problems of the development of various. other areas of north and central Italy in which architecture, in the old sense, seems to play quite a small part. If this revision of the role of schools of architecture is extended, future disasters like Ronan Point will be attributed to bad sociological planning and not to technical difficulties. The Ronan Point tenements may, in fact, have been sociologically badly planned, as I think many of the Glasgow slum sky- scrapers are, but it was not bad sociology that brought them down, but bad architecture in the old, archaic, traditional sense.

Apparently only one Florentine professor had the courage to refuse to take part in these discussions, on the ground he knew nothing about these problems: what he did know- about was the problems of civil engineering which he was paid to teach. He suggested that his colleagues who had devoted no previous time to the study of these problems were, in fact, wasting their own and the students' time in endless, pointless discussions. He asked, it seemed to me with some acuteness, did any- body really want to 20 into a hospital entirely staffed by doctors who had been trained in the sociology of public health but had never learned any anatomy or physiology? I learned later that. in a great French institution calling for a very high degree of technical specialisa- tion, a part of exery week is now devoted to discussing the sociological meaning of advanced technology when it is applied by some of the teachers, and indeed students, at this institu- tion. We may soon, at any rate on the benighted continent of Europe. enter into a new world of Swift in which the academies of Laputa will appear :is paradigms of the new learning and the countrymen of Leonardo da Vinci. of Galvani. of Volta. of Marconi will all be busy discussing what they should be doing, without perhaps teaching or doing anything in par- ticular.

I am told that the students in Italy and France are all busily waving the works of Chairman Mao but are, of course, mainly in- fluenced by the reflections of that great if remote revolutionary leader, Professor Herbert Mar- cuse. Whether they really know much about Professor Marcuse is open to question. Oddly enough, one of the places which did teach something about Professor Marcuse was and is the University of Cambridge. For this activity; I. Lord Annan and others have some responsi- bility. I do not want to put it more strongly than that. Professor Marcuse, who himself as' a revolutionary leader seems to me .rather a type from the Academy of Laputa, was, when List heard of by me. in hiding somewhere ih thei. state of California--California being a spiritual home for thinkers of all kinds from Gerald Heard up or down.

However, there is something in the Italian temperament which makes Italians less willing perhaps than comes naturally to Germans to swallow Marcuse en bloc. Thus, snooping around for children's books, I bought, natur- ally enough, a new Italian translation of some of the collected works of Charlie Brown and, his 'cohorts' Linus,etc. The latest anthology has as its.,Italian title Un .Bambino di una Dimen-• sione. Unless my memory fails me, this is a deliberate and impudent parody of the title of a celebrated work by Professor Marcuse. Professor Marcuse is, I understand, not de- s oted in any fanatical way to the principles of free speech in the old liberal fashion, and 1 think he might well consider this an irreverent attempt to make fun of his doctrine.'

Coming back to 1.ondon with a really power- ful dose of what is in Italy called Chinese 'flu, I at once plunged into a new world, but one which has many things in common with Milan, Aix-en-Provence, the Sorbonne, etc. etc.

lei'rned, for example, from an English col- league on the plane who had been to a con- ference at Aix. that the doors and windows of the house of the Dean in the Faculty of Arts at that celebrated university had been covered by protesting students with human excrement (this is not the word the French students had used). I did not find this either amusing or hopeful.

I also find it rather alarming that a great banking consortium now advertises: 'DO million invested -who do they trust?' I do not think I should trust an eminent firm whose command of English grammar is so shocking, and therefore, if I did invest anything, I should rather put my money in the custody of Lloyds than of Westminster, Hambro, etc. I don't take grammar very seriously. but English grammar may be the only asset we have left in these dark days.