DIARY
A.N.
WILSON
My old tutor at Oxford, enlisted by David Cecil and others to express public support for the British and French inter- vention in Suez in 1956, happily signed a letter to the Times to the effect that the canal had to be kept open, Nasser had to be stopped, Israel had to be protected. The Conservatives who had drawn up this letter were dismayed to see another letter in a rival newspaper saying that the Suez cam- paign was a disaster, a morally unjustified outburst of imperialism, insufficient reason for loss of life, making Britain a laughing stock, etc. etc. My friend's name, which had proudly joined up with the Right on this issue the day before, was also appended to the list of lefties who had written the letter deploring the war. When challenged, he said, or is supposed to have said, 'But, David, I believed both!' This is my trouble about almost all issues of the day, and it is a fact which, I suppose, should disqualify me from journalism. This is partly because I am the political equivalent of 'AC/DC' and find myself ardently monarchist and scathingly republican in almost equal doses. It is partly because the alternatives present- ed by the politicians are artificial ones. Real, small-c conservatives like myself, who hanker after the days when England looked like the film Passport to Pimlico, but had a reasonably well-run social welfare pro- gramme devised by leftists, now have nowhere to go politically. Blair's charms faded for me even faster than those of Major. I can't vote for someone who wants to abolish the legislative powers of the hereditary peers who — in my observation — are the least foolish and least corrupt members of parliament we have. Nor do I think much of Labour's spiteful plans to remove the charitable status of private schools. On the other hand, one longs for any election result which would lead to the resignation not just of Major, but of the entire Cabinet.
The case of Mr Frederick West, who hanged himself in a prison cell on New Year's Day, awakens many unwholesome emotions. The mother of one of his sup- posed victims is reported to have said that his suicide was 'the only good thing he ever did'. His son-in-law, speaking of the hang- ing as if it were a Cup Final, said it was 'a great result. He will rot in hell for what he did.' Newspaper readers of refined moral sensibilities — if there are any such people left — will have been shocked by the strange vindictiveness of these statements and by the 'jubilation' said to have been felt by relatives of the young women found buried in the garden at 25 Cromwell Street. Parents of the dead girls might feel relieved that 'it is all over' — but what prompts feel- ings of 'jubilation'? Many of us, more dis- tant from the crimes, feel, if the truth is told, done out of a horrific and gruesome trial to which we were eagerly looking for- ward; at the same time, one feels that the death of a murderer is on every level a more satisfying conclusion to such a story than a mere life imprisonment. Society is not made up of decent or rational individu- als, and it is questionable how long it can attempt to apply pure decency and reason in matters of criminal justice. Murder excites and shocks us. Inevitably, we react to it in an excited and unreasonable way.
The debate about Myra Hindley reveals the extraordinary strength of feeling in society at large about such crimes. Hind- ley's fate makes us all miserable. The lynch mob — the huge majority — want her con- tinually punished and tormented, or actual- ly put to death. Esther Rantzen has called for her to be flogged 30 years after her trial. Meanwhile, the patient Christians working on Hindley's behalf have watched their campaigns for her release destroyed by an alliance of the tabloid newspapers and the politicians. As usual, if I examine my feelings truthfully, I have to say that I am on both sides about this matter. Civilised societies surely can't pander to the baser instincts of a vindictive mob? And yet would it not be better for all con- cerned if mass murderers — and indeed some other troublemakers who are not condemned murderers — were hanged? My mind is further muddled by the fact that I should far rather be hanged than go to prison.
In fact, I should place being hanged very high on my list of ambitions if such a thing were still possible in today's world. Of course it would be best to die in war, and failing that be murdered quickly and painlessly; but if neither thing were possi- ble, it would be a blessed thing to be hanged. Beryl Bainbridge gave me Sherwin Nuland's bestselling book How We Die for Christmas. One hesitates to say that every- one 'should' read any particular book. In a sense this catalogue of deaths — deaths by Aids, deaths by strokes, deaths by cancer tells us nothing we did not know already: the inevitable ignominy which awaits most of us as, incontinent from all orifices and torn with hideous pain, we gasp out our final breaths. Most of those who leave the time of their death to the Almighty and suf- fer what Dr Nuland has observed (in a per- fectly ordinary medical career) would beg to be hanged rather than endure the tor- ment of those last few months. And yet again this is nothing new, but how well Dr Nuland describes it again and again — one is struck by the extraordinary human capac- ity to be dignified and courageous, even in the hospital ward with all bodily functions collapsed. The 'hour of our death' seems to be a grand moment to which many of us are able to rise.
For those of us who enjoy human beings behaving ludicrously, anything is to be wel- comed which encourages authors to display their customary vanity and self-conceit. The current debate, started by a pseudonymous bookseller called Mark Chivers, about the deplorable quality of modern British books is a case in point. Chivers rightly states that modern books are bound with glue, printed on acid paper which goes orange in about a fortnight, and have small chance of surviv- ing into the next generation. Lord Archer, we are informed, pays to have his books printed on durable paper, prompting A.S. Byatt to remark that 'there are books that need to be preserved and his are not among them'. When one considers the utter worthlessness of almost everything printed in any one year, there is something farcical about the debate. While rubbishy British novelists pay to have their books — like American corpses — artificially preserved, and while hundreds of mil- lions of pounds of public money are spent on a new British Library to house the ever-swelling store of ephemeral printed matter, a German papyrologist, one Doctor Carsten Peter Thiede, claims that some fragments of Saint Matthew's Gospel, preserved at Magdalen College, Oxford, are indubitably of the first cen- tury. Whether he is right or wrong, the debate about his discovery puts the debate about book-production into a proper perspective. Many of the most interesting books in the world survived for centuries purely by chance, and with- out being printed at all. The human race will still be reading the words in the Mag- dalen papyrus (whatever its date) centuries after A.S. Byatt, Lord Archer and A.N. Wilson have been forgotten.
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