Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor? Thoughts on lost careers, opportunities missed
PAUL JOHNSON
Have you ever reflected that you might have led an entirely different life? Done something else? Dangerous thoughts. Sometimes I wish 1 had been an architect. They have more influence on our aesthetics than any other kind of artist. They determine the physical framework of culture. They enjoy extraordinary satisfactions, too. Can anyone have experienced such gratification as Wren when, in old age, he returned once a year to St
Paul's and sat under its dome his dome — for an hour? On the other hand, not even the greatest architects are fully in charge of their work. They are at the mercy of often ignorant patrons, committees, governments. The dome was not the one that Wren would have chosen. He hated the balustrade, which the city fathers (or their wives, as he suspected) made him put over the cornice. 'Women love a border,' as he put it. Michelangelo's experience at St Peter's was similar: the dome was not his either. Again, Lutyens was subjected to the posthumous insult that his masterpiece, the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool, was never built, apart from its ciypt. Architects lead stormy, frustrating lives, sandwiched between an exigeant client and a refractory builder.
My father forbade me — in 1934 — to become a painter, saying, 'Bad times are coming for artists,' and he was surely right I would have spent my entire working life in hopeless opposition to the prevailing ascendancy of fashion art. There can be no more agonising predicament for a gifted, well-trained and industrious artist than to be ignored while people such as Andy Warhol and Tracey Emin get the fame and praise, the prizes and the rewards. I might perhaps have made a living as a portrait painter, for the human race fascinates me, and getting it down in two dimensions is an exacting test of skill. I recently spent a week on Lake Como painting alongside that outstanding draughtsman David Hockney, whose total devotion to his art and astonishing hard work (there is never a moment when he is not drawing, or talking and thinking about the craft) taught me valuable lessons. His concentration when at work is total. While he was doing a drawing of me, I calculated that he looked up at me on average every three seconds, making 1,200 times an hour. But the trouble with portraiture is, again, the client (or wives, husbands, etc.). The artist must, to some extent, submit, even if it involves masking truth. That is why very few great artists have ever been content with a life devoted to portraits — the only one I can think of at the moment is Thomas Lawrence.
When I was learning the French horn and dabbling in orchestration in my teens, I thought of a life in music. But it was already far too late. Someone who is not acquiring skills by the age of five has little chance, though Wagner is a notable exception. But even he sometimes referred to himself as an amateur. It must be a tremendous thing to write the libretto of an opera and then compose its music, directing the production yourself. Much of my time at school was spent in light operas and plays. and I know the deadly appeal of the Green Room and backstage. But opera, for all its grandeur, is still showbiz with its horrid pitfalls for the personality: vanity and exhibitionism, envy and malice, sordid competition and bitchy gossip. All professions suffer from these evils to some extent, but in showbiz success is impossible without a certain degradation of spirit. Why did Schubert go to bed each evening, as he said, hoping that he would never wake again? Reading the letters of Edward Elgar is a sombre experience.
While studying constitutional history. which I enjoyed, I sometimes thought of turning to the law. It is certainly the road to wealth — today more than ever. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of lawyers now earn more than a million a year, and some of them acquire vast fortunes by attaching themselves to the big international companies. But who ever heard of a lawyer getting pleasure out of his money? I think of F.E. Smith, who hit the jackpot early and certainly derived much sensual delight from his success. But his tastes got him into growing trouble and he died comparatively young, heavily in debt. Most lawyers have to wait long, bitter years and work grindingly hard before the money comes. They become flinty and narrow, often cynical and coarse, as their trade asserts its mastery over their hearts and minds, and their skin thickens.
Polities t also considered in youth, and would certainly have tried it had I been lucky enough to be born early in the 19th century, when it was possible to take the field at Westminster without committing your whole life and time to the business. But the romance finally went in about 1938 or so when the young Edward Heath, asked by the careers tutor at Balliol what he intended to do, replied, 'Become a professional politician.' The tutor, dismayed, had never heard the expression before, and rightly thought it boded ill. Now they are all professionals, and mightily dull fellows most of them are, The women are, if any
thing, worse. I have known many politicians and find their obsession with themselves, and the details of the political process, ultimately repellent even if, to begin with, they seem to possess a certain charm or cleverness or whatever it was that enabled them to launch themselves in public life-. The kind of personalities that once fascinated or entertained me — Nye Bevan, Pierre Mendes-France, Enoch Powell, Adlai Stevenson, Konrad Adenauer — no longer seem to go into politics or flourish there. Politicians are like actors in important respects, much duller offstage than they are on it, and the decline of the Commons as an arena of power and a testing-ground for talent has removed their theatre, while the kind of skills now most required for success — the spinning and presentation — erode the spikiness and eccentricity that once gave some politicians their appeal. As for the quality of their lives, the best die young when they can still nourish hopes; the rest age slowly and painfully into frustration, bitterness and malice. There are exceptions, to be sure: among the most entertaining people I know are Peter Carrington and Norman Tebbit — past masters, I fear.
Writing, after painting, was my natural choice. But what sort of writing? Should I have been a novelist? 1 published two in what Byron called 'my hot youth', and might have earned a living at the trade. But most novelists, in my experience, become increasingly uneasy as time passes, as their stock of experience capital becomes exhausted: I am thinking of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. And for these two acknowledged masters of the genre, I could mention 20 who have gone on producing well-written and carefully crafted tales which have never really caught the public fancy and have brought them a bare living, if that. And look at poor Henry James. No one held the novelist's gift in higher regard — to him it was a supreme form of art which he practised with hieratic devotion. But few read him then, preferring Mrs Wharton or Mrs Humplity Ward, and today we would rather read about James than what he wrote.
As for me, I am baffled by thinking about my lost opportunities, or disasters happily avoided. There is something to be said for writing, and developing a knack of self-expression. Nothing I have done in my entire life delights me more than penning these weekly essays on any subject which takes my fancy and which may give readers 20 minutes or so of harmless amusement. So perhaps I found the right niche after all.
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