I remember when Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show was released, much of the publicity focussed on the idea that a relatively everyday scandal – the discovery in 1957-8 that a popular TV quiz show was rigged – marked the loss of the USA’s innocence. At the time, 20-year-old me could not have been more scornful. The idea that the innocence, whatever that meant, of 160+ million American citizens had somehow survived the relatively recent dropping of two atom bombs on civilians, the uncovering of the Holocaust and the filmed and widely publicised Nuremberg Trials, ongoing racial segregation and lynchings (Emmett Till, the last lynching victim recorded by the Tuskegee Institute – though not the last lynching, by a long way – was murdered aged 14 just three years earlier), the fighting of a war in Korea under the pretence of a ‘police action’ and the rise of and eventual disgust with McCarthyism; but that the scales then dropped from their eyes and the foundations of their way of life began to crumble when it turned out that the things they were offered as entertainment turned out to just be entertainment and not some kind of bastion of morality and fairness seemed laughable at best.
Quiz Show (1994)
I can still see my younger self’s point of view; it doesn’t take much consideration to realise that innocence, whether on a personal or a societal level, is a dangerous fetish. And innocence itself is less often a real state and more often an illusion or chimera – or just a point of view. It’s at best a slippery concept, whose opposite can be guilt, corruption or just experience, none of which are precisely the same thing. The final verse of Philip Larkin’s 1964 poem MCMXIV about the outbreak of World War One half a century earlier, is justly famous and has a kind of intuitive truth to it:
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word – the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber, 1964, p.28
enlistees in London at the outbreak of WW1 (Imperial War Museum)
Truth, because we know now (and Larkin knew then) what the young men lining up to enlist in the army in 1914 didn’t; that they were about to enter a modern world entirely different from the late Victorian one that they had grown up in. But illusion too, because the horrific brutality of WW1 was new only insofar as the people facing the onslaught of modern weaponry were white. There is the scale of it; but though tanks, explosive shells and machine guns firing 500-600 rounds per minute created unprecedented levels of slaughter, the question of whether two sides using such weapons against each other is ‘worse’ than people armed with guns attacking people armed with spears or swords or bows and arrows is one that doesn’t seem worth answering. It’s probably not un-worse at least.
Even leaving aside the Imperialism of the WW1 combatants, the innocence of the Britain that the enlistees were queuing up to leave was dubious at best. The previous few years had been marked by the fight for women’s suffrage and the brutalities inflicted on suffragettes by the authorities, not to mention (the usual) grotesque levels of poverty and inequality; there is more than one reason that so many young men were keen to join the army. Even on a smaller, more localised scale, early 20th century Britain was full of strangely archaic, Tintin-like episodes that also seem to have a quaint kind of innocence now which they definitely didn’t have at the time; Latvian anarchists, terrorism, gang violence, the Siege of Sidney Street. And these things were happening all over Europe: the First World War didn’t come out of nowhere.
In a famous riposte to George Orwell on the subject of weekly magazines for boys, Frank Richards, the author of the Billy Bunter series wrote,
Probably I am older than Mr Orwell: and I can tell him the world went very well then [in 1910]. It was not been improved by the Great War, the General Strike, the outbreak of sex-chatter, by make-up or lipstick, by the present discontents [World War Two], or by Mr Orwell’s thoughts upon the present discontents!”
(Frank Richards responds – Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1: An Age Like This (Penguin, 1970 p.532).
Fair enough, but when Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton) was 12 years old, the British Empire was at its height and Jack the Ripper was murdering prostitutes in London. Probably his parents were children during the period when Chartist protesters were being killed by the army, and their parents would have been alive during the period of Napoleonic Wars and the Peterloo Massacre. Which doesn’t make the First World War any less horrific, but you might as well say the sinking of the Titanic caused the loss of Britain’s innocence.
Advertisement for an account of the Peterloo Massacre
But I’m no better. Even though I wouldn’t use the phrase ‘loss of innocence,’ to me it seems like the world has never felt quite the same since 9/11. I’d be fooling myself if I said things were in any real sense better beforehand, and as with WW1, the events of that day didn’t come out of nowhere, it was as much a culmination as it was a beginning. But still, there’s a certain kind of low-level dread that emerged (in me at least) then and which, since then, always seems to be within easy reach. It came to the fore again in 2004 when the photos of the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were released and then again in the early 2010s with the violent rise of the Islamic State and the series of filmed beheadings of westerners that appeared online and on the news, and the murder of Lee Rigby in London. But it’s not a feeling that’s exclusive to Middle East-related matters, and it recurs like a migraine; every white supremacist rally, every attack on a mosque or synagogue, every time the media normalises far-right politics, every new announcement of US government policy brings with it a hint of that particular combination of heavy misery and pit-of-the-stomach dread.
Thomas Hoepker’s notorious 2001 photo of nonchalant 9/11 witnesses
Were things ‘better’ before 9/11? It depends on what you mean and who you are. For me, I was a teenager living in a peaceful and relatively prosperous country, so my specific worries, even the ones that felt existentially soul-crushing at the time, were probably pretty trivial. And it wasn’t entirely a new feeling; I had felt apprehensive and angry in the run up to the Gulf War in 1990, and before every general election, but that anxiety didn’t really linger in my day to day teenage life.
echhh
The same year as Quiz Show was released I remember watching the unfolding of the story of Fred and Rosemary West’s murders on breakfast TV for several days in a row with a sense of outraged horror, but it for me it didn’t have the lasting, polluting effect of 9/11. I remember watching with actual disbelief (I think the only time I’ve experienced that, apart from seeing 9/11 itself on the news) when breakfast TV broke the story of Princess Diana’s death and then with irritated disbelief in the days (or weeks?) that followed, at Britain’s reaction to it. Again, that was a different thing. In 1910, when the world ‘went very well,’ Paris flooded, the French government massacred protesters in Côte d’Ivoire, Albania revolted against Ottoman rule, Boutros Ghali was assassinated in Cairo, while in Britain King Edward VII died and George V was crowned, Dr Crippen murdered his wife and was caught and executed, 300 Suffragettes fought with police outside of Parliament and Captain Scott set off on the British Antarctic Expedition; but Frank Richards was a successful author who had established two very weekly papers for children for which he wrote humorous stories; probably life seemed pretty good.
This isn’t nostalgia, exactly. In middle age, when their time is poisoned by yet unforeseen anxieties, will the teenagers of today look back wistfully at a period when there were still Palestinian people living (however precariously) in Palestine, or when the weather was hot at one predictable time of year and cold in another and think of it as a better world they once knew, or just a different one? Who knows. At the moment, just catching up with the news every morning feels more and more like doomscrolling and the headlines feel increasingly like “The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing.” Around the time of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the internet was just beginning to be a normal presence in almost everybody’s home, long before it was something they carried in their pockets and their hands. Since then, everyone has access to everything and, in the words of British heavy metal stalwarts Saxon, innocence is no excuse. Or at least it’s a willed, deliberate choice. But maybe it always was. Is innocence anything to aspire to outside of a court case anyway? I don’t know.
A conversation from Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but one that was recently removed from some American schools, presumably to preserve some kind of innocence, springs to mind;
“Many younger Germans have had it up to HERE with Holocaust stories. These things happened before they were even born. Why should THEY feel guilty?”
“Who am I to say? But a lot of the corporations that flourished in Nazi Germany are richer than ever. I dunno… Maybe EVERYONE has to feel guilty. EVERYONE! FOREVER!
Art Spiegelman: Maus A Survivor’s Tale (The Complete Maus, Penguin Books, 2003 p.202)
Between me thinking about writing something about what home and belonging means and actually starting to do it, it’s become a far more topical subject than I expected, which seems to be how these things go these days.
the outskirts of Neskaupstaður, Iceland
The initial impulse to write it came from several unconnected things; some photos I took in Iceland over a decade ago; the lyrics to the R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville;” a beautifully evocative description of a rundown railway station in a dusty, remote part of Austria-Hungary in the 1900s. That description felt especially poignant because Austria-Hungary is a country (and the Habsburg Empire an Empire) that no longer exists, but which must have felt permanent in its day and which people in the 1900s felt just as patriotic and loyal towards or as ambivalent about as people now do towards the constituent parts of the United Kingdom or/and the UK itself. But all of that has retreated into the distance a little because as I write this, up and down the country – even in this little corner of rural Scotland – people are engaged in a protest of sorts. Unusually for a protest, it takes the form of doing something which has always been entirely acceptable to do and which no one has ever tried to discourage the protesters from doing; hanging up flags.
The seal matrix of Bishop William de Lamberton from the 1290s, the oldest extant physical use of the Saltire in Scotland
The flags that have made it onto the news – especially from the recent, ironically-named “Unite the Kingdom” right-wing rally in London, are mostly St George’s cross, interspersed with Union flags, but in this village the flag fliers tend, naturally to display the Saltire (St Andrew’s cross, reputedly the oldest national flag in Europe – which if its semi-mythical origins are correct actually predates the Kingdom of Scotland itself by a couple of centuries) and the Union flag. But although flags are simple and very easy to identify in a design sense, they are also kind of a blunt instrument when it comes to signalling. Other people in this area have been displaying the Saltire and the medieval Scottish flag (the Royal Banner; a rampant red lion on a yellow ground) with no Union flag. I presume this is some kind of counter-protest but I may be wrong; to be sure I’d have to ask the flag fliers, and who wants to do that? Whatever else they are, National flags tend not to be especially inviting, particularly when displayed in their country of origin. Nearby I’ve also seen – in a more obvious counter-protest – people displaying Palestinian and Pride flags.
carved wooden ceiling boss of a unicorn carrying the Saltire from Linlithgow Palace, c.1617
It’s a regularly remarked-on (and ultimately meaningless) irony that the historical St George was a Turkish man of Palestinian descent, but less remarked on (though similarly meaningless in this context) that St Andrew, who the saltire represents, was born in what is modern day (Israel-occupied) Syria. Lions (though not red ones) are native to sub-Saharan Africa and India. And yet, for the people waving, wearing, hanging, painting or generally displaying the flags, these symbols of Syrian and Turkish-Palestinian saints and these African/Indian mammals (1 for Scotland, 3 for England, though confusingly the English ones were historically referred to as leopards, which scans less well for a football song lyric) are symbols, I presume, of home. And therefore the people displaying them for patriotic, political or intimidating purposes mostly don’t care what their origins are, which is fair enough. It’s my home too, but although I have no special feelings about the flags of Scotland or the UK, seeing them all over the place, rather than just on official buildings or big hotels is oddly alienating, just like seeing the stars and stripes on every other street on a trip to the USA was.
The flags of your nation, displayed in that nation, tell you two things; firstly, where you are – which you already know – and secondly, that somebody wants you to be very aware of where you are, which you still already know. Theoretically, people are displaying them for themselves and not for anybody else, but a flag by its nature is a signal and for most of the time, the person who flies it outside their home or paints it on the street or on some historical landmark, or puts a sticker on a bus shelter can’t see it, but anyone passing by can.
Because so many of the people involved in the current protests are xenophobic (not really derogatory; many of these people are explicitly saying they are protesting against “migrants”. “I belong here,” is not a protest; and anyway nobody is disputing it. “You don’t belong here” is mostly what the protest is about) there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of symbols our flags are and what, beside dead saints, they represent. Obviously, flags themselves aren’t racist, or at least are only as racist as the people displaying them. There are possibly a few exceptions; most obviously, I feel like any Jewish or Romany person has the right to feel victimised if someone is displaying a black swastika in white circle on red ground; I wouldn’t think it was outlandishly sensitive if an African-American person felt offended by someone waving a Confederate flag at them. Still, it’s strange the extent to which seeing the flag of your country everywhere makes that country feel like a different place from the one you grew up in. But home is a strange thing anyway and ‘feeling at home’ in the comfortable sense of being where you are supposed to be, in the place that it feels natural to be, isn’t universal; clearly the protesters don’t feel it or they wouldn’t be protesting.
Philip Larkin in 1943 by Bruce Montgomery, looking like he should be on a Smiths album cover
The poet Philip Larkin – often seen as a definitively (I refuse to use the word ‘quintessentially’) English figure and sometimes derided as a ‘Little Englander,’ made some interesting observations about home that demonstrate how one-dimensional that (not unfair) assessment of him is. In The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), he argues (well, it’s a poem, not an argument; anyway, he says) that feeling lonely and out of place is a normal, appropriate and even a comforting response to being in alien surroundings (specifically Belfast) – “Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,/Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” The strangeness of the place itself “went/ To prove me separate, not unworkable.” On the other hand, feeling lonely and out of place in the place you come from and where you theoretically do belong does the opposite; and it possibly says unpleasant things about the place itself, too.
Larkin was right; for himself at least and therefore it’s not surprising to find that a slightly earlier poem (Places, Loved Ones, 1954) begins “No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground / Here I shall stay…..” A few years later, he obliquely questioned whether the idea of home is even desirable at all, since ‘belonging’ to anything can only ever be transitory – “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go” (Home is so Sad, 1958). Eventually and unexpectedly, he did find that place where he could say this is, etc, etc – which turned out to be Hull. He celebrated the city in a 1961 poem called Here – the title surely a self-referential one, looking back to that fourth line of Places, Loved Ones. Here is one of Larkin’s very few poems of belonging, but inevitably he celebrates the town for what would normally be considered its negative traits; inaccessibility, neglect and, if not actual unfriendliness, then at least a distant kind of reserve; “Here is unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” He really was the Morrissey of 20th century English poetry.
Coventry was where Larkin came from, but though he wrote about it several times, it was never in the sense of feeling at home there. But if “feeling at home” means some kind of existential peace and contentment, there’s no real reason why that you should have any particular connection with where you’re originally from, unless you happened to have an idyllic childhood. Equally, there’s no special reason why where you currently live should be where you feel at home, unless you are contented there like, presumably, the angry people with their flags and paint. But if they really love their country they certainly hide it well, not just because of their anger, but also how they treat the place and the mess they leave behind; they really do protest too much.
Morrissey with the American singer Phranc in 1992 by the great Kevin Cummins. Moz really is an unlikely right-winger
I’m loath to mention Morrissey again but a short side note seems relevant. Even though for all his apparently xenophobic Englishness, he doesn’t (in common with many xenophobic, wealthy ‘patriots’) love England enough to actually live there. Actually he rarely claims to love it at all; Morrissey is far more Larkin than Farage. The question of his (unusually complex but now undeniable) right-leaning politics goes back a long way, but when in 1992 he released the album Your Arsenal and alarm bells rang in the NME offices at the title of the song “The National Front Disco“, those NME scribes did him a disservice. He’s not foolish or racist enough to write a song glorifying the NF, though the song is definitely and maybe deliberately an uncomfortable one. In the lyrics he puts his finger (sympathetically or otherwise; it’s impossible to say) on the mentality of the kind of people currently waving placards telling foreigners to get out of “are country” (wish I was making that up). “There’s a country, you don’t live there / But one day you would like to / And if you show them what you’re made of / Then you might do.” That is really the essence of the march that happened last week in London and the smaller versions of it across the UK, including, dismayingly, one in Falkirk (one likes to think Scotland is above that kind of thing but realistically nowhere is, people being what they are).
‘Home’ is only on the most mundane level the place where you live, and the less mundane ideas of home are far more mysterious and often very personal. Without wishing to delve much into etymology, ‘home’ is a concept which even in its basic form as a noun (The place where a person or animal dwells, as the OED slightly creepily puts it) includes meanings that I don’t think I was aware of; “figurative. With reference to the grave or one’s state after death. Frequently with preceding adjective; ‘long home‘.” Apparently ‘long home’ was a common usage in Old English – and if you don’t belong in your grave then where do you belong? The long home is where the heart is; which makes me think of the last line of Wuthering Heights – surely one of the most beautiful endings to any deeply unpleasant novel:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847
And then there’s home as in ‘too close to home,’ ‘coming home to roost,’ the Home Office, a point being ‘driven home,’ ‘home truths,’ ‘Home Rule,’ ‘make yourself at home’ (I have vague memories of a comedian or comedy character introducing their act by saying something like ‘Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hotel in which case make yourself in a hotel.‘ Vic Reeves? Alan Partridge? No idea).
Relatedly, belonging is a strange, unpredictable and entirely personal sensation. Larkin seems not to have felt he belonged anywhere until he found somewhere suitably impersonal and forbidding. Morrissey seems to thrive as an eternal outsider in Los Angeles, though it’s hard to think of anyone who seems more like an embodiment of Manchester. Belonging (I don’t say this self-pityingly, I’m comfortable with it) isn’t a feeling I’ve felt especially often and when I have it’s been at random times and sometimes in unexpected and unlikely places. Just recently, out walking in the area where I live and mostly grew up, I had one aspect of it; the exact kind of weather I obscurely feel most at home in; mild, grey, windless, with a low, quilted-looking heavy sky that didn’t quite threaten rain and let no ray of sunshine through. I like muggy weather and have never yet met anyone else who does. It’s kind of the other side of Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere – if not feeling at home ‘at home’ makes you unworkable (as he puts it), maybe the conditions that you feel the most at home in equally say something, possibly something unflattering, about you? Enjoying blue skies and sunshine (which I do too, although less) just seems more positive somehow.
Baudelaire looking effortlessly cool & French in 1862 by Félix Nadar
Clearly for the protesters, belonging is as much about people – a homogenous group of people – as it is about place. That’s the opposite of the vague kind of belonging that I sometimes identify with, the kind of thing expressed (very romantically) by Charles Baudelaire when he writes about ‘the flâneur’ in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). “To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world […] The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito. … The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electrical energy. One might compare him, also, to a mirror, immense as that crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life, and the grace in motion of every element of that life.” Well, I rarely feel as enthusiastic as that, and I generally don’t like being in a crowd with a specific purpose, even a benign one like the audience at a concert. But on the other hand, though I rarely feel at home anywhere, I never feel like my home has been stolen or invaded, and I don’t feel threatened because I see or hear people who are different from me. So that’s nice.
Xenophobia is kind of stranger than misanthropy, which is at least understandable, because people can be destructive and unpleasant like no other species. But although humanity has apparently infinite variety on the personal level, that variety, though it seems to terrify some people, is on every other level, extremely limited. However many names we choose to give this geographical (rather than political) area; the British Isles, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Northern Europe – the population is, -whichever newcomers may arrive, and wherever they arrive from – pretty homogenous, because the human race is pretty homogenous. I was interested to hear my vague gut feeling given scientific validity by the archaeologist Dr Helen Geake (on the Time Team podcast of 9th September this year.) In response to a question about the diversity of the population of Anglo-Saxon England (following the discovery of a skeleton with African ancestry in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery) she said, “I’m not wanting to say ethnically diverse, partly because […] there’s so little genetic variability between humans that I don’t think we have anything like ethnicities or races or whatever. I just don’t think that makes any sense when you look at the science. I think it’s more of a diversity of appearance and origin.” When you consider the inter-species variation between, say a lion (since I mentioned them before) and a housecat, or a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, it’s clear that the gradations between human beings are far more subtle. And when it comes to people you feel an affinity with, you’re as likely to feel at home (that expression seems stranger the more you consider it) with someone you met by chance recently (or even met virtually online), as with someone you’ve known since you were a child. Interestingly (there’s a euphemism!) I read just this morning that a “Race Science Institute – ie debunked Nazi bullshit – funded by one of the world’s richest men is currently trying to be influential in UK politics.
mouldy football pitch by the fjord, Neskaupstaður, eastern Iceland, around 4.30 am
Randomly – although it’s the thing that made me think about writing all this in the first place – I don’t think I’ve ever had that ‘at home’ feeling more strongly than I did when walking in the outskirts of a small town in Iceland at 4.30 am one July, during a night where the ‘midnight sun’ felt more like perpetual dusk. Why should that be? I have no idea. The conditions were right I suppose – not unlike the flat grey day mentioned earlier. Iceland is very beautiful but although this stretch of road ran alongside a fjord at some points, it mostly wasn’t something picturesque that you’d put on a postcard. It featured details as apparently uninspiring (but weirdly loveable to me) as a mouldering football pitch, a school or some kind of municipal building. At one point there was a boat on a platform, which did give more of that sense of ‘elsewhere’. What did ‘at home’ feel like? You know it when you feel it I suppose a kind of contentment that may partly have come from having had a few drinks plus 24 hours or so without sleep; but although comfortable it didn’t feel like exhaustion.
that mildewed football pitch in more detail
If I tried to express that feeling to some of the protesters, quite possibly they’d say something like “If you like it so much why don’t you go and live there” (British people have a long history of telling people if they don’t like the country they can just leave, and yet they rarely feel like they themselves should leave if they don’t like the country). It occurs to me now that when racists, xenophobes or (popular current euphemism) “concerned citizens” scream at people to go back where they came from, when they wrap themselves in the flags of their own country and wield their identity at people, what they are doing may partly be asserting how they feel about their home, but what they really want is for everyone they oppose to not feel at home. And when, at the best of times, ‘feeling at home’ is a fleeting and precarious emotion, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do.
Ignore the senstionalist headline; there are no confessions here, and I’m not a heathen, I’m an atheist. When I was a teenage atheist, one of my main issues with the idea of god had been neatly summed up well over a century earlier by Shelley in The Necessity of Atheism (1811):
If God wishes to be known, cherished, thanked, why does he not show himself under his favourable features to all these intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and adored? Why not manifest himself to the whole earth in an unequivocal manner, much more capable of convincing us than these private revelations which seem to accuse the Divinity of an annoying partiality for some of his creatures? The all−powerful, should he not heave more convincing means by which to show man than these ridiculous metamorphoses, these pretended incarnations, which are attested by writers so little in agreement among themselves?
As an adult atheist I still think that, but I think a lot of other things too. I should possibly point out here that though I don’t believe in any deities, the god I primarily didn’t and don’t believe in was the Christian one, simply because that’s the one who most prominently didn’t and doesn’t exist in my own personal experience. My lack of any kind of religious belief is something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years and mentioned many times in passing on this website. I’ve never written specifically about it, but several things I’ve recently come across made me want to. One is the slightly dubious, clickbaity claim that (as one headline put it) “God is back” and that Gen Z (or some such amorphous group) is embracing the Catholic church. I’m sure that to some extent that’s true, as the Catholic church is just as evident as always, the choosing of a new Pope is TV news etc, but it’s also true that there have been other, substantially similar news stories about Gen Z embracing astrology and conspiracy theories and feminism and anti-feminism and fretting about world war three. None of those things are mutually exclusive of course (most of them should be; maybe feminism & anti-feminism actually are), and what it seems to add up to is that kind of end-times malaise normally associated with the end of a century or millennium.
I feel like it’s necessary to take those kinds of stories with a pinch of salt though, simply because over the years I’ve read all kinds of similar stories about Gen X which occasionally apply to me and often don’t, but in either case I’ve never been asked my opinion in order to gauge it and neither I presume have most people. And since every generation seems to spawn its own Nazis, centrists, communists and anti-fascists and everything in between, its philanthropists, misanthropes and bystanders, its religious zealots, libertines and atheists (etc, etc, ad nauseam), it seems fair to assume that any theory about a generation, just like any theory about a gender, race or sexuality is going to involve the kinds of generalisations which, once really examined, make the whole theory redundant. Presumably, church attendances are on the rise, but does that mean that belief is on the rise, or just that the desire for belief – quite a different thing – is? Or both? Who knows.
Alongside that, not coincidentally, more and more (inevitably right wing) politicians have been yammering on at first in the USA and now here, about “Judeo-Christian” values. It seems that this is mostly because they don’t like foreigners and Islam and are immune to irony. Because in insisting on the values of two ancient foreign religions from what we now in the West call the Middle East and denying the very similar values of another, very similar (though not quite as ancient) religion also from what we now call the Middle East does seem ironic, especially when one is tying it in with one’s national identity. There’s been a growing rhetoric (again, on the right) that suggests that Christians are becoming an oppressed minority in the UK, which is both tiresome and laughable but nicely (and again not coincidentally) complements the growth of a men’s rights movement that claims feminism (which, like atheism has arguably only recently began to have a fairly minor influence if any on the power structures underlying British society) has ‘gone too far’ and all that fun stuff.
Although my attitude has changed over the years, I don’t think my views really have. I genuinely think that it’s terrible and damaging that all over the world people are punished or ostracised or oppressed or killed or made to feel bad about themselves for offending arbitrary rules established in the name of imaginary beings. And in a way worse, the idea that there are omniscient, omnipotent beings who would be offended by actions which they must have foreseen at the moment of creation but decided to allow anyway, in order to punish them.
That kind of thing seems to be the basis of a lot of atheist polemic. Sometimes I find it entertaining and (depending on the writer) interesting, but, even while still believing every word of it, and feeling that it’s worth insisting on if asked about my views, as a middle aged atheist I wonder about the usefulness of saying it polemically at all. Because – for me at least – the opposite of religious faith isn’t science and logic (though I do believe in those), it’s simply non-faith. And I’m not sure there’s much to learn from that.
It’s not an argument that strengthens any cause, let alone mine, but I have come to think that lack of belief in a god or gods is just as instinctive, reflexive and fundamental as faith in them is. My mother was a Christian in her youth (in an atheist household, oddly for the 1950s) to the point where she considered becoming a nun. During her life, she wavered from various kinds of Christianity, to Taoism and Buddhism and a kind of vague paganism, but – and I think this is the most important point – although she lost her faith in many belief systems over the years, she never lost her essential faith in some kind of benevolent god or spirit at the heart of creation. For me it’s almost the opposite.
I have always been very interested in religions from Animism to Zoroastrianism in the exact same way that I’ve always been interested in mythology (I don’t really distinguish between the two) and I find pretty much all religions to some degree fascinating. I love churches and places of worship, I love the atmosphere of ‘holy’ places (even pre-historic places we now assume were once sacred) and I love the imagery and paraphernalia of religions, in the exact same way I love art and history. But it’s good that I’ve never wanted to belong to a faith or to become involved with those mythologies, because I can’t remember a time when I ever believed in even the possibility that a deity of any kind was an actual, real thing. Santa Claus either for that matter, although presumably at some pre-remembered point I did believe in him (Him?)
I have no idea where my lack of faith came from but I can pinpoint when I first became aware of it. I went to three ordinary Scottish primary schools, which in the 1980s meant reciting the Lord’s Prayer every morning before the class started. Not surprisingly, I still remember most of it, though mysteriously I can’t work out which bit I thought in my childhood mentioned snot; I was quite deaf then, but I definitely remember a snot reference, which always seemed odd. In my memory that daily recital was just part of a greater daily ritual which also involved (in the early years) chanting the alphabet and (through all of Primary school) greeting the teacher in monotone unison (The phonetic version of Mrs expresses it more accurately) “GOOD MOR-NING ‘MI-SIZ WAT-SON” or whoever the teacher happened to be – seemingly there were no male Primary School teachers in my day.
I have surprisingly sharp memories of looking round the class during the morning prayer to see who else didn’t have their eyes closed – there were usually a few of us, and sometimes we would try to make each other laugh – but a key part of that memory for me is the sureness of the feeling that I wasn’t talking to anybody. The praying itself wasn’t something I questioned or minded – if anything I quite liked it. It didn’t feel at all ‘bad’ or rebellious not to believe, it just never occurred to me at any point that god was real and might be listening, any more than I remember feeling that the notes put up the chimney to Santa would be read by an old man with a red suit and white beard, or that the carrot for Rudolph would be eaten by an actual reindeer.
At school we went to church (I think) three times a year – at Christmas, Easter and (an anomaly) Harvest Festival – and so folk horror-ish paraphenalia like corn dollies are always associated with church in my mind. The sermons were boring, as were some of the hymns, although others, the ones where the kids invariably sang the wrong lyrics, were fun – but I liked (and like) churches. I liked the musty, chilly smell and the wooden pews and the acoustics and the stained glass windows and especially the holiday feeling of being at school but not at school. And, though they only came into school life at these times of year I liked the Bible stories too. It seems funny now, but until well into adulthood the image that the word ‘Palestine’ summoned in my mind was an illustration of Jesus wandering around in pink and turquoise robes; I presume it’s from some forgotten book of Bible stories. But to me, stories – sometimes good ones (in the case of the early days of Moses and the last days of Jesus, very good ones), sometimes boring ones, are all that they were.
But where does lack of belief come from? The same place, presumably as belief.
Bowie in 1976 by Michael Marks
In Word on a Wing (1976), one of my favourite David Bowie songs – also I think one of his most deeply felt and certainly one of his most open and revealing songs – Bowie, then in LA and in the middle of a drug-fuelled existential crisis but soon to withdraw to Berlin to live a relatively austere and private life, sings: Just because I believe Don′t mean I don′t think as well Don’t have to question everything in heaven or hell
For me, that sums up (non-blind) faith perfectly. Essentially, it’s what Keats (those romantics again!) summarised as ‘negative capability’ (“Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” – from an 1817 letter to his brothers) but applied to one of the most fundamental human impulses. I completely respect it and see what both Keats and Bowie mean by it, but it’s completely alien to me. Well, not completely: I don’t need to know how a jet engine works to travel by plane, I do indeed have ‘faith’ in it, but what the (nowadays many) commentators who characterise scientific belief as a kind of religious faith seem to overlook is that I don’t believe it because a scientist says it’s true, but because I can actually travel on a jet plane, and even before I did travel on a jet plane I could see that other people travelled on jet planes, that planes really do fly and engines really do work. Which seems like the build up to some kind of New Atheism gotcha of the ‘if God is real why doesn’t he just prove it’ type popular in the 2000s (essentially a more sneery version of the Shelley quote). but that’s not really me either. Although I am definitely an actual ‘speculative atheist’ and I suppose even an ‘atheist fundamentalist’ and though I genuinely do believe that the world and humanity would be better off without religion, I’m just not sure how much better off it would be.
It’s not that the New Atheists were wrong (or even new, thinking again of Shelley). Most of the arguments that were raised against them are easily picked apart. The idea that there is no morality without religion is so obviously wrong that it seems pointless even to argue against it. The same basics of morality (murder and stealing and cheating and lying are bad, treat people as you wish to be treated etc) are and have been all but universal, though not without different nuances, throughout history and throughout world cultures.
But the problem with lack of faith as certainty (and for myself I really am certain about it) is that its arguments, though more logical – at least up to a point, as we shall see – have precisely as much effect on the certainty of faith as the arguments of faith have on the certainty of non-faith. Logic is no help here.
From my point of view, in the certain absence of a god or gods, religion is purely human and therefore many of the (in themselves solid) arguments against it are kind of a cop-out. It’s not unreasonable to find it laughable that a supreme supernatural being should care what food you eat on which days, or what you wear or how you like to have your hair. It seems bizarre that an almighty creator who could presumably do whatever it liked, would take the time to tell humans which crops they prefer to have planted where or that male masturbation is bad rather than simply preventing the possibility of rule-breaking ‘at source’. But the omnipresent invisible elephant in the room is that whether or not a god really felt or feels strongly about these things, whether or not a god had them written down in words, they really were written down in words, by human beings, some of whom definitely did want these rules to exist and to be enforced. And it’s human beings that still enforce them. Also, it’s just as true that primarily secular or entirely secular societies also have rules and customs regarding things like clothing, food, hairstyles and even names, although they rarely come with threats of severe retribution and never with the threat of ongoing retribution after death. And yes, many of these customs – like the acceptable length of women’s skirts in western society – ultimately derive from religious directives, but any authoritarian society, not only theocracies or weird, nominally religious ones like Nazi Germany, but even states where religion is completely anathema like Stalinist Russia, Communist East Germany or the North Korea under its current regime are hardly relaxed about the individual’s freedom of expression.
Religious wars and religious persecution are bad, not because they are religious per se, but because wars and persecution are bad. Wars and persecution may often be provoked by religion, but surely if like me you don’t believe in god, then blaming that non-existent creature for religious wars is just euphemistic buck-passing bullshit? The Crusades were horrific, bloody and unjustifiable, but to blame “Christianity” for them, rather than Christians, that is, actual European human beings, is like blaming, or giving credit to, Tengri for Genghis Khan’s conquest of vast tracts of Asia, or suggesting that Jupiter, Neptune and co enabled the Romans to found their empire. “Catholicism” didn’t create the Spanish Inquisition any more than the concept of Nazism created the Holocaust or Islam as a belief system resulted in 9/11 or the Taliban. Left to themselves, religions, ideologies and philosophies don’t do anything; they just sit there. And they all have one common denominator, and it’s not a deity.
This morning, I saw that the Pope had made a statement that some policy or other of the current US administration is “un-Christian and un-American.” Well. I am glad to see anyone with any kind of authority challenging inhumane, intolerant and fascistic regimes. But those actions are only un-Christian insofar as Christ himself wouldn’t like them, according to the Bible. But Christ was one single man-god who acted a certain way and said certain things. All manner of atrocities are entirely in keeping with the actions of two millennia of Christians. As for un-American, again, the acts the Pope condemns are not compatible with the statements made by the founding fathers of the Unites States of America; but they are probably no worse than the actions carried out by those same founding fathers in their lives or many of the successive governments of the USA. Or indeed many, many other governments in the world. And, to be all New Atheism about it, when it comes to the welfare of children for instance, it’s not like the Catholic church itself has an impressive record. Does that mean the Pope shouldn’t condemn things or that American people shouldn’t try to hold their government to account using the egalitarian rules set down when the country was founded? Of course not; but invoking some kind of imaginary, ideal standard of behaviour really shouldn’t be necessary to do so. There’s human decency after all
Another (non-conclusive, because none of them are) argument for the human, rather than divine nature of religion is that the religions that have survived the longest and strongest in the modern world are those which are most compatible with it. The paternalistic, to varying degrees misogynistic Abrahamic religions all defer their ultimate spiritual rewards (but more on the non-ultimate ones later) until after death. They have no in-built expectation of much material happiness or contentment on this plane of existence and to varying extents they actually value hardship, while prioritising men within the earthly realm. Well, the paths that led us to 21st century culture, especially imperialism and capitalism, are fine with all that. Work and strive now, happiness comes later, unless you are one of the privileged few. Communism in theory isn’t fine with that, but naturally, having been formulated during the Industrial Revolution, when the vast mass of people were already oppressed by a tiny ruling class (itself a mirror image of the earlier rule of Church & monarchical elite vs peasant majority), it is defined by its opposition to capitalism. Early Communism therefore took hardship as a given (there is no proletariat without it) and, in lieu of heaven, deferred the payoff of universal prosperity and equality to some future time when the world revolution has been achieved and all opposition to itself removed. It’s a cliché to say that communism is itself a kind of religion, but the parallels are unignorably consistent; trust the leaders, put up with the shit now, eventually if we’re true to our cause it’ll all work out, if those heretics don’t spoil it.
On the other hand, various older kinds of religions, animism and ‘earth mother’ paganism and so on, value (quite logically) the need to look after the world we live in. It’s not that the religions of the book explicitly say not to, but they aren’t primarily concerned with this world – and imperialism and capitalism and even communism, which have other uses for the material world than care and stewardship, have historically all been fine with that. It’s somehow not very surprising that the aspects of non-Christian religions that became most taboo during the age of imperialism, and therefore attributed to “savage” or primitive cultures – human sacrifice, cannibalism, idol worship and so on – should be parts of Christianity itself. Without human sacrifice, even if it’s only the sacrifice of one special token human, there is no Christianity. The divinity of Christ kind of goes without saying – that’s what makes it a religion. But his humanity is what makes him more than just the old Testament god. And insisting on his humanity inevitably made the eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood controversial. But seriously, whether someone believes they are literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of an actual human being or only symbolically doing so, it’s a cannibalistic ritual just as atavistic and visceral as any of the imagined horrors that the Christians of the crusading period or the Europeans who spread their faith across the world believed they had encountered. It doesn’t seem too fanciful to say that what really horrified those Christians was the discovery that things they saw as fundamental to their own civilisation might be just as fundamental to civilisations that they had to believe were inherently inferior in order to destroy them.
Monkey (1979) Buddhism & Taoism that was fun for kids
The fact that there are analogous stories to those in the Bible throughout history and world cultures (death, rebirth, sacrifice, enlightenment) suggests that whether or not one has any faith in these stories, they aren’t ‘just’ stories. In fact, a lesson that stayed with me (because it suits my personality I suppose) from the 70s TV show Monkey, based on Wu Cheng’en’s 16th century novel, Journey to the West – something like “winners make losers, therefore remove yourself from competitions” purports to be from a Taoist religious text. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge (I like to think a banana) and paying the unexpected price for it is, even as a mythological story, one that has real life analogies all through human history. I remember as a child when plastic coca cola bottles began to replace glass ones. It seemed futuristic and in a weird way utopian – lightweight like a can but resealable, far less risk to your drink if you dropped it than a glass bottle; less broken glass in the streets and parks. Whether or not scientists were already concerned with the problem of plastic’s lifespan or the sheer accumulation of it I don’t know, but kids weren’t, for a few years at least. Which has nothing to do with religion – but the attempt to do good turning out not only to be bad, but to be something that has to be dealt with and paid for down the generations is hardly an alien one. And in this case it was made worse not by religion, but by the inability or unwillingness of people under capitalism (myself included) to distinguish between convenience in the sense of people not having to waste half of their lives in drudgery and convenience in the sense of not having to get up to change TV channels. There’s probably a parable in there somewhere.
A favourite anti-atheist argument is the ‘intelligent design’/watchmaker one. It’s clearly an empty argument, but my counter arguments would only be convincing to an atheist – and not even to all atheists. The argument, put simplistically, that because a watch, or a computer, or anything human-made and complex didn’t just evolve on its own, but had to be consciously invented, therefore means that life, earth and everything else must have been consciously invented too requires an obvious leap of logic. The universe is not a machine, life is not the same as battery life.
The most complex things in our world seem to be human beings, and human beings also produce other human beings, often with no conscious thought and rarely with any kind of design at all. People are accidentally invented all the time. The idea that creation is accidental or ‘just happens’ is hardly a difficult one to grasp. The people that people produce are every bit as complex as their parents and grandparents, but only occasionally, and in the most superficial way, are they designed. Worse than that, logically, we know how humans are created, but even so it’s hardly unusual for them to be produced even when the people doing it very much desire not to do so. To look at the way that the most complex creations on earth are usually made and to label it “intelligent design” would be a strange thing to do, since it doesn’t necessarily include much intelligence or any actual design. Of course that doesn’t prove that things weren’t originally designed, but the gulf between organic living things and intelligently designed things as we experience them, even at the beginning of the AI age, is so fundamentally different that you might as well argue that a cat must have designed clouds because you once saw a cloud that was cat-shaped.
As mentioned in passing before, it’s popular among a certain kind of (usually, but not exclusively right-wing, American) Christian to compare ‘faith’ in science to faith in god, which is a false equivalence, for the jet plane kind of reasons mentioned above – but although I do believe science to be superior in every way to religion – because it learns from experience, for one thing – I do sometimes wonder whether it suffers from being (this sounds very different from how I mean it) homocentric (is ‘anthropocentric’ better? It sounds worse) in a similar kind of way. I remember learning (in a very basic way) about the big bang at school and asking the teacher, not unreasonably I think, *what* was supposed to have exploded and where that came from and being told “that isn’t a scientifically interesting question.” Well, quite possibly all the teacher meant is that at the current time any answer to that question must be pure speculation of a non-mathematical kind, but teen-me felt that it was basically “science works in mysterious ways” and he/I didn’t like that.
Somewhere in this article I had been going to say that Shakespeare was was as right as anybody when he wrote “Nothing will come from nothing” but now that I’ve reached this point I wonder whether being creatures that are born, who come from somewhere, who live for a while, who are subject to time and then who die and stop existing (or go somewhere else) shapes our understanding of everything. I do believe in the big bang because the evidence around us confirms its likelihood. The universe started, it expanded and at some point it will end. The idea of something that just is, forever, or that exists outside of time, whatever that would mean, seems as incomprehensible as non-existence does. That things, including human beings do stop existing is in one way obvious – but things breaking down, decomposing, changing from one form to another and (romantically) melding with the universe or (prosaically) enriching the soil or whatever is a process that is understandable. The personality and individual human consciousness switching off and simply not existing is the hard part to take in. As far as we can tell this isn’t a change in energy type, the electrical impulses that are us don’t seem go anywhere or do anything. But maybe that whole frame of reference; beginning, middle, end isn’t everything, it’s just the limits of human understanding. Which doesn’t, to me, imply the existence of any kind of creator or supreme being, just that there’s scope there for whatever you care to imagine but which you can never truly know. Keats would be fine with that.
Similarly, to apply logic to the existence of god will always be self-defeating, because logic is (as far as we know) a specifically human way of explaining the universe to its/our own satisfaction. The laws of physics and nature and mathematics do seem to work according to logic, which is very helpful for teaching and learning and science, but human beings themselves routinely defy logic in both profound and trivial ways. Many of the things that humans value most highly are completely resistant to logic, like art and god and love and money. Even something as humble as sports; one human being being able to run faster than another or play a game better than another is only dubiously something to celebrate, and if it is, then logically one might expect people to support only the best teams and athletes. If, alternatively it’s to do with identification with and loyalty to one’s own area, then fans might only be expected to support teams or athletes from the same geographical location as yourself, which is occasionally how it works, but just as often isn’t. There’s nothing especially logical about the enjoyment of a race or a game in which you aren’t involved for its own sake. Does that mean that logic is a faulty way of understanding the universe? I don’t know; but it is a faulty way of understanding human beings. The idea that god’s existence is a logical reality in a 2 x 2 = 4 way makes about as much sense as the position of the planets at the time of your birth dictating your future.
As Bowie implied, faith needn’t – and in many cases I’m sure doesn’t – preclude seriously considering the implications of one’s belief. But sometimes it does. I’ve never wanted to believe (I don’t really get why anyone would, if they don’t; which is my deficiency), but as an adult I have always wanted to understand people who do. And in general, I find it frustrating to try to do so, as two different but very similar anecdotes about my encounters with people of faith illustrate. I am aware though that these may say more about me than they do about the believers.
In my professional capacity I was once interviewing a prominent American black metal musician whose latest album went on about blasphemy a lot. Given that black metal encompasses everything from orthodox satanists to heathens and pagans and occultists and chaos magicians and nihilists, I asked what I thought was a reasonable question; what meaning does blasphemy have unless one believes in god? Doesn’t the concept of blasphemy essentially reinforce the religion it attacks by affording it some kind of legitimacy?* The musician’s response was the black metal version of these go up to eleven. I think what he actually said was “Everyone knows what blasphemy is.” And he was right I suppose, but he was also characterising his band as purveyors of simple shock and outrage to the very few people who are still shocked and outraged by blasphemy. Ho hum.*
The archetypal image of black metal, Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest, photo by Peter Beste
*this made me think of an occasion in high school where I muttered “of for god’s sake” or something like that and my maths teacher said “don’t blaspheme, William!” and I replied “it would only be blasphemy if god existed” and was given a punishment (lines). It was only years later than realised I deserved the punishment, not because of god, but because I was being a smart arse to a teacher – at the time I just felt righteously angry about the lines.
Likewise, a visit from some very pleasant Jehovah’s Witnesses left me with unexpected admiration for them, but also some frustration; they also left prematurely, which my younger self would have regarded as a victory. The respect was for their answer to the kind of question that seems like a typical smart-arse one, but I was genuinely curious. If there are only 144, 000 places in heaven in your religion (I had only recently learned that strange fact) and those are all spoken for already, why are you knocking on people’s doors trying to spread the word about your faith? I hadn’t expected their response, which was something like “Oh, we don’t expect to see heaven. Heaven is for god and the saints and angels, Earth is the paradise that god made for humans, it just needs to be fixed.” A version of Christianity that withholds the promise of paradise even after death was weird to me, but also impressive. Having a faith where you never expect to attain the best bit seems coolly ascetic, but also kind of servile, which it literally is. The fact that servility seems distasteful to me is I suppose my weakness not theirs.
I was less impressed with the response to what I felt and still feel is a serious question and not just a cynical gotcha; If god is all you say it is, all powerful, blah blah, then why create evil? There was a stock answer ready, which was to do with free will and choice, but even though there are holes to be picked in that too (the ‘free will’ of transgressors has nothing to do with the free will of their victims, what about their will?) – that wasn’t what I meant. What I was asking is, If you can do whatever you like, can see everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen, if you are capable, presumably, of endless satisfaction and happiness, why create ‘bad’ – or, more personally perhaps, why create even the concept of ‘things you don’t like’ at all? To that question, I got the Jehovah’s Witness version of “these go up to eleven” and a quick goodbye. But I genuinely wasn’t trying to catch them out, I really wanted to know what they thought about it, but apparently they didn’t think anything. Having said that, I can see now that I write about it, that interrogating your belief system for the benefit of a stranger who obviously isn’t going to be persuaded to join you is probably not all that attractive. Still, I didn’t knock on their door.
Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) – something to aspire to?
So much of religion seems to me to be saying that that, whatever the wonders and horrors and joys and pains of life, it’s not enough and they want more. But again, that’s not exclusive to religious people. I recently saw an unsettling but also unintentionally funny video in which the PA of a shadowy, influential and incredibly wealthy figure was talking about transhumanism and his master’s ultimate Roy Batty/Weyland-from-Prometheus plan not to die at all. Which feels very sci-fi, but also very late Roman Empire. At the same time, my generation grew up with the rumour that Walt Disney’s head is in a refrigerator, awaiting medical science until he can be resurrected when the technology catches up enough. Rebirth and resurrection; there really is nothing new in human history.
detail of the crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece (1512 – 6) by Matthias Grünewald
All a bit bleak, maybe; but if religion only offered oppression, judgement, condemnation and war then far fewer people would devote their lives to it. And if the negative aspects of religion all exist independently of religion, then so do the positive aspects, and without the same arbitrary punishment/reward structure underlying it.
Religion offers comfort to people in distress, it offers a sense of community and belonging, it offers contact to people who feel isolated. It offers various kinds of love. I can’t think of many artworks more moving than Matthias Grünewald’s crucifixion from the Isenheim altarpiece (1512-6), painted to comfort people who were suffering from skin diseases, by showing them the scourged Christ’s suffering, which mirrored their own. But just as the Quran didn’t issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Bible didn’t take babies from unmarried mothers and kill them and bury them in the grounds of institutions, neither do those books feed the poor, embrace the lonely, paint pictures or create a sense of community. Human beings do those things, and they do them regardless of religion. They do it in societies where religious beliefs aren’t based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and they do it in societies where religious beliefs are actively frowned on. After the dissolution of the USSR, few people were nostalgic about the food queues or the secret police, but many were nostalgic about the sense of community that came from masses of people being in the same situation together. And now that capitalism which, unlikely though it seems, is not always so far removed from Soviet communism, has created its own underclass and hierarchical power structure and pogroms and whatnot, people have also created their own communities, support groups, charities and friendships.
The one positive thing that faith offers that non-faith of my kind doesn’t, is a personal relationship with god – and that’s where we came in; you either believe or you don’t. I can completely understand that having a direct line to someone who knows you and understands you better than you know yourself, who accepts and forgives you could be nice and comforting. Maybe in pre-Christian or non-monotheistic societies that voice was the voice of the ancestors or the spirits of the trees and rivers. I can see how that would be nice too, but for myself I can’t imagine having such a thing or longing for it or even wanting it. For me, you either disbelieve or you don’t.
And maybe that’s really the strongest argument, not against faith, which there is no argument against, but against religions as institutions, as rules and directives of the kind that people are so keen to re-establish. Because if there’s one thing you can see, looking not just at the diversity of religions but at the diversity of beliefs within them, at the different ways that people relate to and communicate with their gods, it’s that god is just as personal and individual as any of its believers and disbelievers and so making an orthodoxy of it can only ever harm more people than it helps.
“Nothing was to be seen of the Castle hill; fog and darkness surrounded it; not even the faintest glimmer of light was present to suggest that the Castle was there.” Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Jon Calame & Seth Rogoff, 2014, Vitalis Verlag
“The Castle hill was hidden veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there.” Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa & Edwin Muir, 1930, my edition Penguin Modern Classics, 1984
The Castle (Penguin, 1984) vs The Castle, (Vitalis, 2014)
I have a possibly bad habit of buying multiple copies of books I love, if I see them for a good price with a cover that I like and don’t already have. Fairly often, I won’t ever read the new-to-me edition unless I happen to be in the mood for that particular book at the time of the purchase, because after all, it’s the same book. Or at least it usually is. I’ve had my 1984 Penguin Modern Classics paperback of Kafka’s The Castle for decades, though it was already second hand when I bought it. I first read the book at high school, a falling-to-bits old hardback from the school library. I have no idea which edition that was, but when I read it again in my early 20s, the novel seemed just as I remembered. That school version was almost certainly some edition the 1930 translation by the fascinating Scottish couple Willa and Edwin Muir, since they were the first translators of Kafka in English and theirs was and to some extent still is the standard version. Indeed, the couple introduced Kafka and his particular aura to the English-reading world; which is quite a big deal when you think about it.
Recently, in a charity shop, I came across a copy of The Castle that I hadn’t seen before, with a cover I was immediately drawn to. It’s from 2014 and though it’s in English it’s was put out by by Vitalis books, a publisher which, judging by its Wikipedia entry, sounds uniquely suited to the works of Kafka, a German-speaking Czech Jew who was raised in a Yiddish-speaking household:
Vitalis Publishing is the only German literary publisher in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1993 by Austrian-born physician and medical historian Harald Salfellner, it harks back to the cultural heyday of the fin de siècle before 1914, a period of shared German, Czech, and Jewish influence. The publishing program features Czech (Jan Neruda, Božena Němcová), German (Gustav Meyrink, Rainer Maria Rilke), Jewish (Oskar Wiener, Oskar Baum), and Austrian (Adalbert Stifter, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach) authors as common representatives of Bohemian literature.
My old Penguin paperback of The Castle, which features two chapters not included in the original 1930 UK edition (which were separately translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser), is from of my least favourite stylistic phase of the Penguin Modern Classics series. In that point in the early 80s, the spines, in a nostalgic nod to the classic early (orange and white) days of Penguin. It does have a nice cover illustration, by Elizabeth Pyle, but otherwise the design is a little drab. The book is 298 pages of fairly small but readable print. The Vitalis edition is far more stylish and the cover artwork uses a beautifully evocative photograph of (Bohemian?) “Peasant women” from 1918 and a photograph of Friedland (or Frýdlant) castle in Czechia. The type looks around the same size as the Penguin edition, but though the book is slightly bigger than the Penguin, it has 382 pages.
Even allowing for the fact that the Vitalis Castle includes nice, dark, moody and scratchy illustrations by Karel Hruška, it’s a noticeably longer book, and the reason for that is revealed in the two quotes at the top of the page. The Muirs’ prose – like Edwin Muir’s poetry – is terse and spare, but also flexible and evocative. It’s the “voice” that Kafka has had for me since I was a teenager. It also has the benefit – or at least I think it’s a benefit, more later – of having been translated close to Kafka’s own time. When that first British edition of The Castle was published and Edwin Muir wrote in his introduction “Franz Kafka’s name, as far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers,” he was talking about an author who had only been dead for six years, and the book itself had only been in print in Kafka’s own language for four years.
Calame and Rogoff’s writing is slightly more lyrical to my ears/eyes, a little more long-winded, but in its way just as precise. I very much appreciate the two semi-colons in the first sentence of the passage above. The cumulative effect of their translation is a book which feels familiar but gently different. Another comparison, this time the opening of chapter 10:
“K. stepped out into the windswept street and peered into the darkness.” (Willa & Edwin Muir) versus “K. stepped outside onto the wildly windswept steps and peered into the darkness.” (Calame and Rogoff)
Which is the better sentence is just a matter of taste; the Muir version doesn’t feel especially superior to me, but on the other hand it does feel more ‘Kafka-esque’ – but is it? And what about this, from the end of chapter 15?
“And he pressed her hand cordially once more as he swung himself on to the wall of the neighbouring garden.” (Muirs) versus “He was still pressing her hand fervently as he swung himself onto the fence of the neighbouring garden.” (C&R)
Well; ‘cordially’ and ‘fervently’ are two very different things aren’t they? To me, that word choice significantly changes the tone of the passage. And this time, it’s the modern version that feels more redolent of Kafka as I think of him; which isn’t the same as saying it’s a better translation of the original text.
I have no idea whether it impacted on Calame and Rogoff or not, but modern translations of Kafka are made in a world where ‘Kafka-esque’ is a thing, and where Kafka himself – both his image, with those big, dark, suspicion-filled eyes and the hypersensitive personality from his personal writings, prone to intense feelings of harassment and persecution – colour how we see his work. The Trial in particular feels like that persona, that image, shaped into a novel, and surely anybody embarking on a new translation of the book could be uninfluenced by its familiar Kafka-ness, regardless of how faithful or otherwise they were to the original text.
Faith and Faithfulness
witty (if dated) wordplay in Asterix
There’s a mystery to what faithfulness means in translation – Google translate and AI are perfectly capable of making word-for-word translations of texts, but they seem somehow unable to make living, readable prose out of them. When I think of books that I’ve only ever read in translation (and I’ve never read more than a few pages in any language other than English or Scots, alas), going all the way back to childhood and the Asterix (René Goscinny, trans. Anthea Bell & Derek Hockridge) and Tintin (Hergé – Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper & Michael Turner) series’, I realise how much of the character of those books is owed to their translations. In those particular cases the translations seem almost miraculously good. To capture witty wordplay, puns etc while also keeping the original narrative flowing is a formidable skill. I can’t help thinking that if I read literal translations of those books, or learned to read French myself (let’s not get carried away) and read the originals, I would only discover a new respect for both the translators and the original authors.
wordy whimsy in Tintin
Translating from one language to another seems like it should be a practical rather than artistic thing, but the extent to which Kafka’s work is ‘Kafka-esque’ in English is in some ways a choice, and as time goes on more and more choices are available to the translator of any text. The obvious choices – whether to be true, word-for-word, to an author’s text, or to their ‘voice’ and atmosphere, whether to provide a faithful translation or a ‘good read’ have always been there. But with the passing of time and arguably just as important, is the decision of whether to make a novel or piece of writing true to its time and place or to our own. This isn’t a small thing, it’s both the readability and the character of a book. The right thing to do presumably varies from book to book, but in my experience, you don’t really know what you prefer until you come across something you don’t like.
Dostoevsky presented as a trashy airport novel (with no translator credit)
With The Castle, although the more modern text felt different to me, it wasn’t a difference that spoiled or significantly altered my enjoyment of the book, it was just something I noticed. But those translation choices can be jarring. A recent example of this came when reading two novels by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna – The Year of the Hare (1975) and The Howling Miller (1981). Both were (which I find obscurely annoying) translated into English from French translations rather than from Finnish, but while The Howling Miller (which I read first) was written in straightforward, simple and clear English prose which felt a bit basic, but entirely appropriate to the subject, the translator of The Year of the Hare made the (completely valid) decision to translate the casual, slang-filled prose of the French translation (and presumably the Finnish original) into supposedly modern and slang-filled British English, which was deeply irritating and also damaged the integrity of the novel. Standard phrases like “bloody hell” or whatever are one thing; so familiar as to seem timeless and universal. But more slang dates quickly, is often generationally specific and can be weirdly embarrassing to read, if it’s not your slang.
Even worse in narrative terms, using regionally specific terms when you don’t change the distinctively ‘foreign’ names of characters or the setting of a book can give a feeling of unreality to the whole text. Quite possibly it’s just me, but reading a passage where a character called Kaarlo Vatanen, living in rural Finland, refers to having “twenty quid” in his pocket is kind of like reading Crime and Punishment and coming across something like “Shit! It’s the pigs!” hollered Raskolnikov. Don’t do that please.
But even though I didn’t like the idiom the translator used for The Year of the Hare, the arguments for doing it are pretty sound. When adapting a foreign, unfamiliar book for a new audience, making it accessible is clearly important. That novel was published in 1975 and implicitly set in that period, so there’s nothing technically wrong with writing it in modern, slangy English, except that it’s not set in Britain and so it feels wrong to pedants. Related but probably more difficult is translating a classic novel into modern English. I’m not really a Dickens fan, but when I think of the few books of his that I’ve read, his prose seems inseparable from his stories and from his period. Does that mean that Tolstoy or Zola’s works should be translated into “Victorian” English? Annoying as that might well be, I’m tempted to say that for me, the answer is yes.
Positives and negatives
It’s a different kind of translation, but making books into films brings these kinds of questions into focus. There have been several film adaptation of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, but for all of their virtues, if you return to Wells’s novel it seems obvious within the first few pages that though it’s eminently adaptable, a film of the novel set in 1898 would be far better (but presumably ridiculously expensive to make) than the existing versions. Similarly, no adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four has quite captured the stark, bracing post-war, entirely British greyness (in a good way) of Orwell’s prose. It’s that tone, as much as anything, that people think of as “Orwellian,” even though outside of Nineteen Eighty-Four and (to a far lesser extent) Animal Farm, it’s really not the usual tone of his writing.
The other dystopian novel frequently paired with Nineteen Eighty-Four is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but despite the relative closeness of age, class and education of Orwell (born 1903) and Huxley (born 1894), they could hardly be tonally farther apart. As someone who first read and loved Huxley’s earlier, satirical social comedies like Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), the thing that struck me most when I first read Brave New World (1932) is how similar it is in its prose. Although, unlike The War of the Worlds but like Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s set in the future, any film of it should really be set in a 1930s future and have a slightly old fashioned, ‘Boy’s Own adventure’ flavour which seems completely at odds with the book’s grim dystopian reputation. When reading the novel, its tone (which feels more post-WW1 1920s than pre-WW2 1930s), feels entirely natural and is a part of what makes the book so readable. But is it that tone there in modern foreign translations of the book? Possibly not, and when you think about it, why would it be?
The Bible and the Bloody Countess
John Donne: a portrait of the poet as a young dandy
As anyone who has had to “do” Shakespeare at school – or who likes reading him – will know, 16th/17th century writers had a respect for and love of puns that is far removed from their current status as vessels of knowingly lame humour (that said, ‘brave new world’ is from Shakespeare, isn’t it?). It’s sad that that love of wordplay has become so debased, because even though I personally do love puns even just as lame humour, it means we have to consciously think or analyse in order to appreciate the breadth of allusions and associations and therefore feelings that a writer could evoke in their readership (or a playwright in their audience) without having to labour a point.
Partly, it was easier to pun meaningfully before spelling was fully standardised. When John Donne wrote The Sun Rising* , it was risqué in the mild way it still is – the poet is complaining about the sunrise because he doesn’t want he and his girlfriend to have to get out of bed – but also in a far more daring way. To a Jacobean audience the sun (or sunne, or sonne) rising would automatically create an association with the son (of God) rising, a pun that transforms and strengthens the meaning of the poem, since, then as now (or more than now), the earthly representatives of God were not especially keen on young unmarried couples lying in bed together.
*published in 1633 but necessarily written earlier – he died in 1631 – and probably quite a lot earlier since he was known as a poet in his youth but a priest and preacher from 1615
And that textual richness just the intended meanings and associations – but as language evolves so does meaning, and so, whether one likes it or not, do associations. Since the 1960s, seeing the title The Sun Rising may well make people think of Rolf Harris’s 1960 novelty pop hit Sun Arise – a kind of well-intentioned but not unproblematic pastiche of Aboriginal Australian music that was a big hit all over the English-speaking world. Harris’s subsequent career as a popular children’s entertainer and, latterly, a hugely unpopular sexual predator make the already iffy song even more dubious, but even that creates its own set of unexpected cultural associations. Back in 1971, before settling definitively on a kind of bad taste, pantomime horror modus operandi, the American rock band Alice Cooper (then the name of both the singer and band) experimented with a kind of general absurdist, transgressive approach. To that end, on their third (but first commercially successful) album Love It To Death, alongside paeans to troubled teendom (I’m Eighteen, Is It My Body?) and old horror movies (The Ballad of Dwight Frye), the band recorded an amusingly straight-faced cover of Sun Arise, just to be smartasses. Only 40 years later did the song, turn out to be a masterstroke that unexpectedly fit in with their macabre and tasteless raison d’être after all; patience is a virtue, clearly.
But anyway, the idea of translating The Sun Rising, with even its intended meaning intact, into a language that doesn’t share common roots and words with English makes me think of Philip Larkin saying* (wrongly, I think) “A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.” It makes sense in a way – there can be an impersonal quality, especially when reading poetry in translation, that makes lots of translations feel the same, not that that’s always a bad thing necessarily.
*in a 1982 interview with Robert Phillips in the Paris Review (Philip Larkin, Required Writing, p.69)
Another Penguin Classics book I love is the 1965 collection Poems of the Late T’ang, in which A.C. Graham translates the works of seven Chinese poets whose lives span more than a century, from 712 to 858 AD. In his introduction, Graham stresses the differences between poets, contrasting the ‘bare, bleak style’ of Meng Chiao (751 – 814) with the ‘strange and daring’ poetry of Meng Chiao’s friend Han Yü (768 – 824) but although I love both, I don’t really find a huge tonal difference between them (just to quote the first examples of each that he publishes):
Above the gorges one thread of sky: Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords (opening lines of Sadness of the Gorges)
And
A frosty wind harries the wu-t’ung, (parasol tree) The crowded leaves stick wilting to the tree (opening lines of Autumn Thoughts)
It might just be me, but I don’t even detect major differences between the poetry of between Tu Fu, writing in the 750s or 60s –
The autumn wastes are each day wilder: Cold in the river the blue sky stirs (opening lines of The Autumn Wastes)
and Li Shang-Yin, who was writing almost a century later:
The East wind sighs, the fine rains come: Beyond the pool of waterlilies, the noise of faint thunder. (Untitled)
I wouldn’t expect poets in English to write this similarly, but of course the words I am reading are AC Graham’s and not Tu Fu’s or Meng Chiao’s. These are beautiful poems and if there’s a deficiency in them it’s mine, not the poets’ and certainly not the translator’s. In poetry that’s this compressed and distilled there must be a whole world of meaning, allusion and subtlety – the sort of thing I can see (when forced to think about it) in Donne – that AC Graham was aware of but could only explain in footnotes and appendices. And I’m sure that’s exactly what Philip Larkin referred to in his strictures about language – but if a writer can have only truly have one language, “if language is going to mean anything to him,” what about translators, who are almost always also writers in their own right? And what about unusual cases like JRR Tolkien or Anthony Burgess?
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite novels – it’s also the product, very obviously, of someone who could speak and think, fluently, in a lot of languages – ten is the number he usually gave, ‘with bits and pieces of others’. Burgess created the book’s slang, Nadsat, in order to write about ‘the youth’ in a way that didn’t date like real slang and it definitely worked. Rightly, I think, Burgess didn’t want a glossary of Nadsat terms in the book. Although some publishers have added one anyway, the book works far better if the reader just immerses themselves in the narrator’s voice and his disorienting world. But Burgess was only human, and in perhaps the novel’s weakest moment (because it takes us out of that world) he couldn’t resist pointing out that the language his young narrator Alex speaks isn’t just whimsy on the part of the author:
‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling, ‘the dialect of the tribe. Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?’ ‘Odd bits of rhyming slang,’ said Branom, who did not look quite so much like a friend any more. ‘A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.’ ‘All right, all right, all right,’ said Dr Brodsky, like impatient and not interested any more.
I’ve always felt that Brodsky’s impatience is really Burgess’s mild embarrassment at finding himself pointing out how clever he is, but who knows? How A Clockwork Orange works in translation I can’t imagine, especially in countries with the Slavic languages Burgess borrows from, but I can imagine it must be both a joy and a nightmare to translate.
I hope those for the sake of its readers that who tackle A Clockwork Orange come up with words as horribly effective as Burgess’s. When Alex and his gang (yes, I know they are his droogs) come across a rival gang attacking a child, Alex says that they were “just getting ready to do something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on,” The word “creeching” is clearly just “screeching” without the s, but somehow it seems harsher, more intense, implying a rawness related as much to a croak as a screech; Burgess knew what he was doing. So, in his very different way, did Tolkien, another linguist, who gives the cultures and places of Middle Earth their individual, believable textures via languages that draw on real prototypes in the same way as Burgess’s Nadsat does. It’s also worth comparing Tolkien’s beautifully translated Beowulf with Seamus Heaney’s very different, but equally beautiful one. Both writers have a reverence for the original text and their interpretations are similar enough to suggest fidelity to the original – but they are also different enough to demonstrate just how flexible language can be.
That flexibility suggests that no text is truly beyond translation, and the fact that fictional cultures can be realistically portrayed by the words they and their creators use hints at the power inherent in language. Like any power, it can be used in negative ways as well as good ones. Translations can, or at least could, be withheld when it was felt expedient to do so, though the internet has probably made that more difficult. It seems trivial, but something that was (up until the 1960s I’d guess) fairly common and which I’ve occasionally come across in older books, are translations of foreign texts where the narrative lapses into its original language – it even occasionally into French in books actually written in English – when the writing becomes ‘obscene.’
trashy 70s paperback of non-trashy 50s meditative biography
An example that springs to mind, because I have it, is the 1957 biography of the notorious medieval Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Bathory, by the surrealist poet Valentine Penrose (nee Hugo). In its English translation – by the also somewhat notorious Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi – Penrose’s text is rendered into sensual English, except, that is when Bathory’s predatory exploits against young peasant women in her orbit become too explicit, at which point the text falls back into French. No doubt the publisher, John Calder – who specialised in avant-garde literature and especially previously banned books – was wary of obscenity charges, which he would later fall foul of with Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book and Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Ironically, my 1970s NEL edition, though by design a trashy, titillating paperback, reproduces the Calder text, elisions and all. (It also features a lazy, sensationalist blurb on the cover which reveals that the publisher didn’t know that Valentine Penrose was a woman, which is unnerving).
But even if British publishers were self-censoring for mostly legal reasons, the clear lesson that comes from old editions of transgressive texts is that those with a classical education – that is, the upper classes, who routinely learned Latin, Greek and French at school, but only they – could be entrusted to read all the sex and violence they liked. I’m in two minds over whether the reason for that is the literally patronising one of ‘protecting the children’ or the more generally patronising one that the upper class could be trusted with that kind of thing but the more animalistic and irrational the lower classes might be led astray by it. Either way it’s kind of ironic, given that centuries earlier, the impetus for publishing anything at all in English was to allow the expanding literate population to read the Bible in their own language.
And if the translation of a modern text into modern English can create variations as different as a cordial vs a fervent hand-hold* imagine the pitfalls inherent in making the translation of an ancient text central to a modern civilisation. And not just ‘an ancient text’ but a collection of various ancient texts, partly written in obscure and difficult language. And add to that that key books of the text purport to be eye-witness accounts which are however written in Greek, but reporting on sermons and parables originally delivered in spoken Aramaic.
*if that seems trivial, imagine receiving an invitation to some kind of gathering that begins, “you are cordially invited to… versus “you are fervently invited to…” The second would seem a little alarming to me
We’re used to the fact that almost everything in the Bible is open to interpretation, partly because by now ‘the Christian church’ is actually hundreds of Christian churches, each with its own version of what the Bible means, and that’s just talking about the Bible as it is now, regardless of how accurately modern translations relate to the original text, or how accurately the original text relates to the events it describes. It doesn’t take much reading to discover that things as fundamental to the faith as the monotheistic nature of the Old Testament god, or the Virgin birth in the New Testament are dependent on translations which may be approximate rather than precise. Just as one example, writers – both scholarly and crank-ish – have observed that the word used to describe Mary’s state, “parthenos” in ancient Greek texts generally refers only to a young woman and not necessarily, not even usually, a virgin. Getting into murkier waters, it’s therefore been credibly suggested (by Jane Schaberg, among many others) that in the Gospels God therefore only blesses Mary’s pregnancy, rather than causing it himself. Credibly, that is, if one’s main issue with the story of Jesus is the Virgin birth, rather than the existence of God in the first place.
possibly less begetting and smiting in this bible
But however one chooses to interpret it, interpretation is required when looking at events which have come down to us in much the same way as Homer’s Odyssey, and with as many different voices involved along the way. Even if one takes the Bible at face value – notoriously difficult, in its contradictory entirety – and accepts it as truth, it’s a problematic text, to say the least. The Gospels were written down by followers of Jesus – who they knew personally, and worshipped – in the aftermath of his early death. For parts pre-dating their association with him, they are presumably relying for some parts on accounts given to them by the man himself. These would be based on his own memories of his youth and childhood, but for the circumstances of his own birth thirty-three years earlier, he presumably only had the accounts of his parents (whether earthly or divine) to rely on. Unless Jesus spoke Greek (I feel like they would have mentioned it if he had), those memories were then translated into a different language with different allusions and associations from his own, before being subjected to centuries of edits and deletions, only later being given ‘authoritative’ editions (different ones for different countries and sects), each of them offering its own, rather than the definitive truth.
So, whether we are reading Homer or Ovid or the Gospel of St Luke, or The Castle, or Asterix the Legionary in English, we are reading an adaptation, a work imagined into existence by more than one writer and if we’re lucky it’s Willa and Edwin Muir or Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. If we’re not so lucky we may end up inadvertently worshipping a false idol or something and, who knows, even facing eternal damnation if you believe in such things. It’s an important job.
credit where its due: the translators get (almost) equal billing with the authors
Remembering 1984 as someone who was a child then, I find that although the clocks didn’t strike thirteen, the year – as encapsulated by two specific and very different but not unconnected childhood memories, as we’ll see – is almost as alien nowadays as Orwell’s Airstrip One. Of course, I know far more now about both 1984 and Nineteen Eighty-Four than I did at the time. I was aware – thanks mostly I think to John Craven’s Newsround – of the big, defining events of the year.
Surely the greatest ever cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Stuart Hughes, for the 1990 Heinemann New Windmills edition
I knew, for instance about the Miners’ Strike and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but they didn’t have anything like the same impact on me personally as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Zola Budd tripping or whatever it was at the Olympics and Prince Harry being born, but they weren’t as important to me as Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd. Even TwoTribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood made a bigger impression on me than most of the big news events, despite the fact that I didn’t like it. My favourite TV show that year was probably Grange Hill – and here we go.
Grange Hill, essentially a kids’ soap opera set in a big comprehensive high school in London, ran for 30 years and I recently discovered that the era of it that I remember most fondly – the series’ that ran from 1983-6 – is available on YouTube. When I eventually went to high school later in the 80s, my first impression of the school was that it was like Grange Hill, and now I find that despite the silliness and melodrama, Grange Hill still reflects the reality, the look and the texture of my high school experience in the 80s with surprising accuracy.
But anyway, watching old Grange Hill episodes out of nostalgia, I was struck by how good it seems in the context of the 2020s, despite the obvious shortcomings of being made for children. Check out this scene from series seven, episode five, written by Margaret Simpson and aired in January of 1984. In among typical story arcs about headlice and bullying, the Fifth form class (17 year olds getting towards the end of their time at school) get the opportunity to attend a mock UN conference with representatives from other schools. In a discussion about that, the following exchange occurs between Mr McGuffy (Fraser Cains) and his pupils Suzanne Ross (Susan Tully), Christopher “Stewpot” Stewart (Mark Burdis), Claire Scott (Paula-Ann Bland) and Glenroy (seemingly of no last name) (Steven Woodcock). It’s worth noting that this was the year before Live Aid.
Suzanne: [re. the UN]:"It's about as effective as the school council."
Mr McGuffy: "Oh well I wouldn't quite say that. The UN does some excellent work - UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Peacekeeping force..." [...]
Claire: "What's the conference gonna be about?"
Mr McGuffy: "The world food problem. There was a real UN conference on this topic ten years ago..”
Glenroy: "Didn't solve much then, did they? Millions of people still starvin'"
Stewpot: ”Yeah that's cos they ain't got no political clout to do anything about it though, ain't it"
Glenroy: ”Naw man, it's because the rich countries keep them that way”
Suzanne: “The only chance a poor country's got is if it's got something we want”
Glenroy: “That's right - they got something the west wants and they'd better watch out because the west starts to mess with their government."
Mr McGuffy: "Well it's clear from what you've all said so far that you're interested in the sort of issues that will be discussed that weekend..."
Suzanne & Claire, 1984
It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that that is a more mature political discussion than is often heard on Question Time in 2025. Interestingly, it’s not an argument between left and right as such, but between standard, humanitarian and more radical left-wing viewpoints. Needless to say, if it was presented on a TV show that’s popular with ten year-olds nowadays, a certain demographic would be foaming at the mouth about the BBC indoctrinating the young with “wokeness.” But as a kid this sort of discussion didn’t at all mar my enjoyment of the show – naturally there’s also a lot of comedic stuff in the series about stink bombs and money-making schemes, but one of the reasons that Grange Hill remained popular (and watchable for 8 year-olds and 15 year-olds alike) for so many years was that it refused to talk down to its audience.
The way the writers tackled the obvious big themes – racism, sexism, parents getting divorced, bullying, gangs, sex education etc – are impressive despite being, quite broad, especially when the younger pupils are the focus of the storyline, but what makes a bigger impression on me now is the background to it all. It’s a little sad – though true to Thatcher’s Britain – to see through all this period the older pupils’ low-level fretting about unemployment and whether it’s worth being in school at all.
And maybe they were right. In 1984, when Suzanne and Stewpot were 17, a fellow Londoner who could in a parallel universe have been in the year above them at Grange Hill was the 18-year-old model Samantha Fox. That year, she was The Sun newspaper’s “Page 3 Girl of the Year.” She had debuted as a topless model for the paper aged 16, which is far more mind boggling to a nostalgic middle-aged viewer of Grange Hill than it would have been to me at the time. Presumably, some parts of the anti-woke lobby would not mind Sam’s modelling as much as they would mind the Grange Hill kids’ political awareness, but who knows?
Sam Fox in (approximately) Grange Hill mode c.1986, not sure who took it
Naturally, the intended audience for Page 3 wasn’t Primary School children – but everybody knew who Sam Fox was and in the pre-internet, 4-channel TV world of 80s Britain he had a level of fame far beyond that of any porn star 40 years later (arguments about whether or not Page 3 was porn are brain-numbingly stupid, so I won’t go there; and anyway, I don’t mean porn to be a derogatory term). Anyway, Sam (she’ll always be “Sam” to people who grew up in the 80s) and her Page 3 peers made occasional accidental appearances in the classroom, to general hilarity, when the class was spreading old newspapers on our desks to prepare for art classes. It was also pretty standard then to see the “Page Three Stunnas” (as I think The Sun put it) blowing around the playground or covering a fish supper. It wasn’t like growing up with the internet, but in its own way the 80s was an era of gratuitous nudity.
a nice Yugoslav edition of 1984 from 1984
Meanwhile, on Page Three of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith – who is, shockingly, a few years younger than I am now – is trying to look back on his own childhood to discern whether things were always as they are now:
“But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) P.3 – New Windmill edition, 1990
By contrast, some of the roots of 2025 are plain to see in 1984, despite the revolution of the internet that happened halfway between then and now. As the opposing poles of the Grange Hill kids and The Sun demonstrate, there were tensions in British society which would never so far be resolved, but they would come to some kind of semi-conclusion at the end of the Thatcher era when when ‘Political Correctness,’ the chimerical predecessor of the equally chimerical ‘Woke’ began to work in its unpredictable (but I think mostly positive) ways.
Most obviously, Page 3 became ever more controversial and was toned down (no nipples) and then vanished from the tabloids altogether for a while (though in the 90s the appearance of “lads’ mags” which mainstreamed soft porn made the death of Page 3 kind of a pyrrhic victory.) More complicatedly, the kind of confrontational storylines about topics like racism that happened in kids shows in the 80s became a little more squeamish, to the point where (for entirely understandable reasons) racist bullies on kids’ shows would rarely use actual racist language and then barely appear at all, replaced by positivity in the shape of more inclusive casting and writing. All of which became pretty quaint as soon as the internet really took off.
a very 1984-looking edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1984
So, that was part of the 1984 that I remember; what Orwell would have made of any of it I don’t know. It wasn’t his nineteen eighty-four, which might have pleased him. For me, it all looks kind of extreme but also refreshingly straightforward, though I’m sure I only think so because I was a child. It’s all very Gen-X isn’t it?
This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre
The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.
*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour
As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.
the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update
The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.
70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s
But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.
The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition
The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.
New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album
Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.
Stephen King’s Greatest Hits
Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.
80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)
Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.
the other Stephen of 80s horror
In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.
Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author
From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.
Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)
the poster for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988)
I don’t believe in the death penalty. In this, I’m in the majority, globally. I’m not sure when exactly I became against it; until at least the age of 12 I was pretty much a proto-fascist with an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ sense of justice, as boys tended to be in those days and for all I know still are. But I know that by the time I saw Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliantly grim A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) when I was 16 or so I was already anti-death penalty and have remained so ever since.
My reasons are, typically, kind of pedantic. There are many obvious arguments against it; there’s the ‘what if you accidentally kill the wrong person’ argument and that’s a pretty strong one – it has happened and does happen and is irreversible. There’s the fact that the death penalty seems to have a negligible effect on the crime rate. In fact, countries with the death penalty on the whole seem to have more rather than less murders (not that there’s necessarily a link between those two things). Even from the coldest and most reptilian, utilitarian point of view of getting rid of the problem of prison overcrowding, any possible benefit is negated by the fact that in most countries with the death penalty, prisoners spend years on death row being fed and housed, rather than being quickly and efficiently ‘processed.’ There’s also the Gandalfian(!) argument from The Lord of the Rings; “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” This wasn’t just a handy deus ex machina because Tolkien needed Gollum to survive in order to destroy the ring. It was that, but Tolkien was also a devout and serious Christian and that was his moral outlook. Thank the gods that unlike his friend CS Lewis, he deliberately left religion out of his books though! In the Biblical commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, the Christian/Jewish god doesn’t list any exceptions or mitigating circumstances – in that one instance. Of course elsewhere in the Bible there are many circumstances where humans killing humans is considered appropriate and even righteous – the ultimate irony being that Jesus, kind of like an anti-Gollum, has to suffer death through violence to achieve his purpose. Religion is odd; but I’m not a Christian or Jew.
All of those points are relevant, but for me personally, it’s far simpler than that; if you can be legally killed, that means that in the eyes of the state there’s essentially nothing wrong with killing people. I think there is, and I don’t think that it should just be a matter of having the right paperwork. In essence, to kill a murderer is not telling them ‘what you did is wrong‘ so much as ‘you did it wrong‘ which I don’t think is a minor difference. And on top of that, there’s the whole question of who you are handing this responsibility of life and death to. I have a lot of respect for some lawyers, attorneys, judges, police officers etc, but there are others that I wouldn’t trust with my lunch, let alone my (or anyone else’s) life. States have a character, and often it is institutionally biased regarding race, class, gender and sexuality. Giving that kind of power within that kind of framework seems likely to make far more problems than it solves. But even in non-death-penalty countries like the UK we routinely give people the legal right to take other people’s lives, all they have to do is join the armed forces.
British volunteers in the International Brigade, 1937
I’m no more consistent than anyone else and my attitudes have their exceptions and contradictions. I (predictably) don’t philosophically differentiate between the military and mercenaries, because what ‘serving your country’ means in practical terms is carrying out whatever the policy of your government is that week, with no certainty that it won’t be contradicted by a new policy (or a new government) the next week and if enemies suddenly turn out to be allies or vice versa, the dead remain dead. That said – here’s the contradiction – I’m not a pacifist absolutist either, and I think, or like to think that if an invading army arrived in my country I’d take arms against it. These things are particular though; everyone likes to think they’d fight for a good cause, but the Spanish Civil War stands out for the number of anti-fascist fighters from all over the world who took up arms in defence of Spain. But that happened partly because so many people were ready to – and wanted to fight. Many of those – George Orwell is a prominent and typical example – belonged to the generation who had been just too young to fight in World War One and whose feelings about war – including a considerable amount of survivor’s guilt – had been shaped by it. And the fascist attack on the Spanish republic gave them a clear-cut situation to intervene in, in a way that the more political rise of fascism in Italy and Germany didn’t.
But anyway, the death penalty. People of course do terrible things, but although lots of them are significantly more horrific than a lethal injection or the electric chair, the end result is the same. Being – odd, brief segue but bear with me, it’s relevant – a fan of black metal music, the subject of death and murder is one you come across in a different way from just being, say, a fan of horror movies. Because the poser-ish ‘darkness’ of black metal spills over (though less than it used to) into ‘real life,’ almost as if the kind of art you make bears some relation to the kind of person you are. I won’t go into the tedious-but-fascinating Lords of Chaos stuff about Mayhem & Burzum or Absurd because it’s not quite relevant here, but the story of Smutak (Pavel Selyun) who ran Morak Production record label in Belarus is.
In 2012 Selyun discovered that his wife, the artist and singer Frozendark (Victoria Selyunova) was having an affair with the artist, zine editor and musician Kronum (Alexey Vladimirovich Utokva). Sticking with the psuedonyms seems appropriate, so anyway; Smutak murdered both Frozendark and Kronum, dismembered them and was apprehended on the Subway three days later with Kronum’s head (or skull; same difference I suppose – some accounts say he boiled the head – I don’t need to know) in a bag. After his arrest, he was imprisoned in Minsk and after a confession gained under torture and the failure of various appeals he was executed two years later, by being shot in the back of the head. A horrible postscript that demonstrates how the death penalty punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; after the execution the authorities failed to hand over Smutak’s body to his mother or tell her where he’s buried, the case was handed to the UN Court of Human Rights.
Not many people (and certainly not me) would say that Selyun didn’t ‘deserve’ his treatment. But still. He possibly tortured and definitely killed people and then was tortured and killed. There is a kind of balance there, but it’s one in which the act of torturing and killing itself is made neutral. Whoever tortured and killed Smutak doesn’t need any kind of defence because they did it in the name of the law, but the idea that torturing and killing is morally neutral because you don’t have any emotional investment in the act is an odd one. Smutak had nothing to gain from his actions other than some kind of horrible satisfaction. The person or people who did the same to him got paid for it. Which is morally, what? Better? He reportedly felt the same kind of fear as his victims; well good, I guess, but that did nothing to benefit the victims. It may have pleased the victims’ relatives but I wouldn’t want to examine that kind of pleasure too closely.
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
But more to the point; why does the killer (assuming their motives are the ones that are being extrapolated from the crime) care anyway? If actually shooting someone dead in the street is okay, then surely being indirectly responsible for the misery and possible deaths of others is barely even a misdemeanour. It amounts to the kind of Travis Bickle movie logic I’m sure I’ve sneered about elsewhere; complaining about the decay of social values and then committing murder is not reducing the sum total of social decay, it’s adding to it. A society where evil CEOs are shot dead in the street is a society where human beings are shot dead in the streets and that becoming acceptable is not likely to be the pathway to a more just, equal or happy society.
Michael Haneke’s disturbing Benny’s Video (1992)
What the death penalty does do, and probably a key part of why it’s still used in some countries, is offer a punishment that seems (in the case of murder at least) to fit the crime. Interestingly, public executions – which counterintuitively seem to have no better track record as a deterrent than any other kind – are now vanishingly rare. Part of that is no doubt to do with public disgust and part with institutional secrecy and shame, but I imagine that part of it is also the fear that the public would enjoy it too much. I’m not sure if I would think that if it wasn’t for the spate of Islamic State beheadings that were so widely watched on the internet back in the early 2010s (was it?) I watched one, like most people seem to have, and still wish I hadn’t; but you can’t un-ring a bell. That was at the back of my mind when I wrote about saints and martyrdom for this site and I can bring images of it to mind horribly easily. But even before that it shouldn’t have surprised me – like many other teenage horror movie fans in the pre-internet era I watched exploitation videos like Face of Death that featured executions, accidents etc, and in doing so realised that I was a horror fan and not whatever fans of that are. I should have learned my lesson there, but it’s undeniable that these things have a murky kind of fascination; since then, thanks to one of my favourite writers, Georges Bataille, I’ve ended up reading about Lingchi (‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’) and looking at the chilling and depressing photos of it, been appalled by postcards of lynchings, seen revolting photographs of soldiers’ desecrated bodies and murder victims… I haven’t gotten used to those images and I hope I never will. Teenage me would no doubt sneer at that because he thought that things that are ‘dark’ are cool, but that seems like a laughable and childish attitude to me now, so I can take his sneering. I seem to be edging towards the point that Michael Haneke is making in Funny Games (1997), which I find a bit tiresome and preachy (even more so the remake), but I’m not. I disagree with the premise of that film because I do think there’s a difference between fictional horror and real horror, and that enjoying one isn’t the same as enjoying the other. I think his 1992 film Benny’s Video makes a similar but much more subtle and complex point far better.
Imprisonment (whatever your views on the justice system) is a pretty unsatisfactory solution for most crimes, but it’s difficult to think of a better one which doesn’t essentially exonerate the kind of behaviour we want to characterise as abnormal or criminal. Stealing from a thief is obviously ‘justice’ in the eye-for-an-eye sense, but as a punishment it’s laughable. Raping a rapist would be grotesque and double the number of rapists in the room every time it happened. But even so, it’s never going to be comfortable that the tax payer is contributing to the relative comfort of someone like (I’ll only mention dead ones, this isn’t a complaint about the legal system being soft on psychopaths) Fred West. A solution l think I might suggest is one which I’m very dubious about myself from lots of different humanitarian, psychological and philosophical points of view; why not offer (and that word alone would make people angry) ‘monsters’ – the kind of killers in a category of their own, who admit to horrendous acts of murder and torture and whose guilt is not in doubt – those who will never be allowed freedom – the choice of a lethal injection rather than life imprisonment? That’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but then so is paying for the meals and upkeep of someone like Ian Brady, especially when he essentially had the last laugh, exercising his little bit of power over the families of his victims and having his self-aggrandising bullshit book The Gates of Janus published.
Anyway, that last part was kind of icky and uncomfortable, but so it should be – the whole subject is. So for what it’s worth, those are my thoughts on the death penalty. Time for a shower; until next time, don’t murder anyone please.
Everybody has their comforts, but after trying to analyse some of my own to see why they should be comforting I’ve pretty much come up with nothing, or at least nothing really to add to what I wrote a few years ago; “comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worrying about external events.” But that has nothing to do with what it is that makes the specific things comforting. Like many people, I have a small group of books and films and TV shows and so on that I can read or watch or listen to at almost any time, without having to be in the mood for them, and which I would classify as ‘comforting.’ They aren’t necessarily my favourite things, and they definitely weren’t all designed to give comfort, but obscurely they do. But what does that mean or signify? I’ve already said I don’t know, so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger of a question, but let’s see how I got here at least.
I’ve rewritten this part so many times: but in a way that’s apposite. I started writing it at the beginning of a new year, while wars continued to rage in Sudan and Ukraine and something even less noble than a war continued to unfold in Gaza, and as the world prepared for an only partly precedented new, oligarchical (I think at this point that’s the least I could call it) US government. Writing this now, just a few months later, events have unfolded somewhat worse than might have been expected. Those wars still continue and despite signs to the contrary, the situation in Gaza seems if anything bleaker than before. That US administration began the year by talking about taking territory from what had been allies, supporting neo-Nazi and similar political groups across the world, celebrating high profile sex offenders and violent criminals while pretending to care about the victims of sex offenders and violent criminals, and has gone downhill from there. In the original draft of this article I predicted that this Presidential term would be an even more farcical horrorshow (not in the Clockwork Orange/Nadsat sense, although Alex and his Droogs might well enjoy this bit of the 2020s; I suppose what I mean is ‘horror show’) than the same president’s previous one, and since it already feels like the longest presidency of my lifetime I guess I was right. So, between the actual news and the way it never stops coming (hard to remember, but pre-internet ‘the news’ genuinely wasn’t so relentless or inescapable, although events presumably happened at the same rate) it’s important to find comfort somewhere. The obvious, big caveat is that one has to be in a somewhat privileged position to be able to find some comfort in the first place. There are people all over the world – including here in the UK – who can only find it, if at all, in things like prayer or philosophy; but regardless, not being so dragged down by current events that you can’t function is kind of important however privileged you are, and even those who find the whole idea of ‘self-love’ inimical have to find comfort somewhere.
But where? And anyway, what does comfort even mean? Well, everyone knows what it means, but though as a word it seems fluffy and soft (Comfort fabric softener, the American word “comforter” referring to a quilt), it actually comes from the Latin “com-fortis” meaning something like “forceful strength” – but let’s not get bogged down in etymology again.
But wherever you find it, the effect of comfort has a mysterious relationship to the things that actually offer us support or soothe our grief and mental distress. Which is not obvious; if you want to laugh, you turn to something funny, which obviously subjective but never mind. Sticking to books, because I can – for me lots of things would work, if I want to be amused, Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books and, less obviously, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson always raise a smile or a laugh. Conversely, if you want to be scared or disgusted (in itself a strange and obscure desire, but a common one), you’d probably turn to horror, let’s say HP Lovecraft, Stephen King’s IT or, less generic but not so different, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But as you might have guessed if you’ve read anything else on this website, I’d probably all of those things among my ‘comfort reads.’
not my comfort reads
But whatever I am reading, I’m not alone; people want ‘comfort reads’ and indeed there is a kind of comfort industry; these days. Not just these days, but over the years it’s developed from poetry anthologies and books of inspirational quotes to more twee versions of the same thing. I think of books of the Chicken Soup for the Soul kind (I don’t think I made that up; if I recall my mother owned a little book of that title, full of ‘words of wisdom’ and comforting quotes) as a 90s phenomenon, but that might be wrong. But at some point that evolved into the more widespread ‘mindfulness’ (colouring books, crochet, apps), Marketing-wise there have been phenomena like hygge (as far as I’ve seen books of the Chicken Soup type, but with more crossover into other areas, as with mindfulness) and, in Scotland at least, hygge rebranded, aggravatingly, as ‘coorie.’ In this context ‘coorie’ is a similar concept to ‘hygge’ but it’s not really how I’ve been used to hearing the word used through my life so something like ‘A Little Book of Coorie‘ just doesn’t sound right. But maybe a book of hygge doesn’t either, if you grew up with that word?
People take comfort in pretty much anything that distracts them, so often the best kind of comfort is being active; walking, running, working or eating, and I understand that; nothing keeps you in the moment or prevents brooding like focusing on what you’re doing. But, unless you’re in a warzone or something, it’s when you aren’t busy that the world seems the most oppressive, and while running may keep you occupied, which can be comforting, it isn’t ‘comfortable’ (for me) in the usual sense of the word. Personally, the things I do for comfort are most likely to be the same things I write about most often, because I like them; reading, listening to music, watching films or TV.
Comfort reading, comfort viewing, comfort listening are all familiar ideas, and at first I assumed that the core of what makes them comforting must be their familiarity. And familiarity presumably does have a role to play – I probably wouldn’t turn to a book I knew nothing about for comfort, though I might read something new by an author I already like. Familiarity, though it might be – thinking of my own comfort reads – the only essential ingredient for something to qualify as comforting, is in itself a neutral quality at best and definitely not automatically comforting. But even when things are comforting, does that mean they have anything in common with each other, other that the circular fact of their comforting quality? Okay, it’s getting very annoying writing (and reading) the word comforting now.
Many of the books that I’d call my all-time favourites don’t pass the comfort test; that is, I have to be in the mood for them. I love how diverse and stimulating books like Dawn Ades’ Writings on Art and Anti-Art and Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object are, but although I can dip into them at almost any time, reading an article isn’t the same as reading a book. There are not many novels I like better than The Revenge for Love or The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. They are funny and clever and mean-spirited in a way that I love and I’ve read them several times and will probably read them again; but I never turn to Lewis for comfort. But even though he would probably be glad not to be a ‘comfort read,’ that has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the content of his books. Some of my ‘comfort reads’ are obvious, and in analysing them I can come up with a list of plausible points that make them comforting, but others less so.
random selection of comfort reads
In that obvious category are books I read when I was young, but that I can still happily read as an adult. There is an element of nostalgia in that I’m sure, and nostalgia in its current form is a complicated kind of comfort. I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens but, as I’ve written elsewhere, I had previously had it read to me as a child, so I feel like I’ve always known it. Obviously that is comforting in itself, but there’s also the fact that it is an escapist fantasy; magical and ultimately uplifting, albeit in a bittersweet way. The same goes for my favourites of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy series. I read the Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric series’ (and various other bits of the Eternal Champion cycle) in my teens and though Moorcock is almost entirely different from Tolkien, the same factors (escapist fantasy, heroic, magical etc) apply. Even the Robert Westall books I read and loved as a kid, though they (The Watch House, The Scarecrows, The Devil on the Road, The Wind Eye, the Machine Gunners, Fathom Five) are often horrific, have the comforting quality that anything you loved when you were 11 has. Not that the books stay the same; as an adult they are, surprisingly, just as creepy as I remembered, but I also notice things I didn’t notice then. Something too mild to be called misogyny, but a little uncomfortable nonetheless and, more impressively, characters that I loved and identified with now seem like horrible little brats, which I think is actually quite clever. But that sense of identification, even with a horrible little brat, has a kind of comfort in it, possibly.
The same happens with (mentioned in too many other things on this site) IT. A genuinely nasty horror novel about a shapeshifting alien that pretends to be a clown and kills and eats children doesn’t at first glance seem like it should be comforting. But if you read it when you were thirteen and identified with the kids rather than the monster, why wouldn’t it be? Having all kind of horrible adventures with your friends is quite appealing as a child and having them vicariously via a book is the next best thing, or actually a better or at least less perilous one.
But those are books I read during or before adolescence and so the comforting quality comes to them naturally, or so it seems. The same could be true of my favourite Shakespeare plays, which I first read during probably the most intensely unhappy part of my adolescence – but in a weird, counterintuitive way, that adds to the sense of nostalgia. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are kind of in a category of their own. When I read the first one, Adrian was 13 and I would have been 11. And then, I read the second a year or so later, but the others just randomly through the years. I’m not sure I was even aware of them when they were first published, but the ones where Adrian is an adult are just as funny but also significantly more painful. It’s a strange thing to read about the adult life of a character you “knew” when you were both unhappy children. Although she had a huge amount of acclaim and success during her life, I’m still not sure Townsend gets quite the credit she’s due for making Adrian Mole a real person. Laughing at a nerdy teenager’s difficult adolescence and his cancer treatment as a still-unhappy adult is a real imaginative and empathic achievement. Still; the comfort there could be in the familiar, not just the character but the world he inhabits. Adrian is, reading him as an adult (and as he becomes an adult) surprisingly nuanced; even though he’s an uptight and conservative and in a way a little Englander and terminally unreliable as a teenager and loses none of those traits as an adult, you somehow know that you can count on him not to be a Nazi or misogynist, no small thing in this day and age.
But if Frodo and Elric and Adrian Mole are characters who I knew from childhood or adolescence, what about A Clockwork Orange, which I first read and immediately loved in my early 20s and which, despite the (complicatedly) happy ending could hardly be called uplifting? Or The Catcher in the Rye, which again I didn’t read until my 20s and have been glad ever since that I didn’t “do” it at school as so many people did. Those books have a lot in common with Adrian Mole, in the sense that they are first-person narratives by troubled teenagers. Not that Alex is “troubled” in the Adrian/Holden Caulfield sense. But maybe it’s that sense of a ‘voice’ that’s comforting? If so, what does that say about the fact that Crash by JG Ballard or worse, American Psycho is also a comfort read for me? I read both of those in my 20s too, and immediately liked them but not in the same way as The Catcher in the Rye. When I read that book, part of me responds to it in the identifying sense; that part of me will probably always feel like Holden Caulfield, even though I didn’t do the things he did or worry about ‘phonies’ as a teenager. I loved Crash from the first time I read the opening paragraphs but although there must be some sense of identification (it immediately felt like one of ‘my’ books) and although have a lot of affection for Ballard as he comes across in interviews, I don’t find myself reflected in the text, thankfully. Same (even more thankfully) with American Psycho – Patrick Bateman is an engaging, very annoying narrator (more Holden than Alex, interestingly) and I find that as with Alex in A Clockwork Orange his voice feels oddly effortless for me to read. Patrick isn’t as nice(!) or as funny or clever as Alex, but still, there’s something about his neurotic observations and hilariously tedious lists that’s – I don’t know, not soothing to read, exactly, but easy to read. Or something. Hmm.
But if Alex, Adrian, Holden and Patrick feel real, what about actual real people? I didn’t read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice until I was in my early 30s, but it quickly became a book that I can pick up and enjoy it at any time. And yet, though there is a kind of overall narrative and even a sort of happy ending, that isn’t really the main appeal; and in this case it isn’t familiarity either. It’s episodic and easy to dip into (Jon Ronson’s books have that too and so do George Orwell’s Essays and Journalism and Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, which is another comfort read from my 20s) The culture of Japan that Adelstein documents as a young reporter has an alien kind of melancholy that is somehow hugely appealing even when it’s tragic. Another true (or at least fact-based) comfort read, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I only read in my 40s after meaning to read it ever since high school, has no business whatsoever being comforting. So why is it? I’m not getting any closer to an answer.
Predictability presumably has a role to play; as mentioned above, I wouldn’t read a book for the first time as ‘a comfort read’ and even though I said I might read a familiar author that way, it suddenly occurs to me that that is only half true. I would read Stephen King for comfort, but I can think of at least two of his books where the comfort has been undone because the story went off in a direction that I didn’t want it to. That should be a positive thing; predictability, even in genre fiction which is by definition generic to some extent, is the enemy of readability and the last thing you want is to lose interest in a thriller. I’ve never been able to enjoy whodunnit type thrillers for some reason; my mother loved them and they – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Sue Grafton, even Dick Francis, were her comfort reads. Maybe they are too close to puzzles for my taste? Not sure.
So to summarise; well-loved stories? Sometimes comforting. Identifiable-with characters? Sometimes comforting. Authorial voices? This may be the only unifying factor in all the books I’ve listed and yet it still seems a nebulous kind of trait and Robert Westall has little in common with Sue Townsend or Bret Easton Ellis, or (etc, etc). So instead of an actual conclusion, I’ll end with a funny, sad and comforting quote from a very silly, funny but in some ways comforting book; Harry Harrison’s 1965 satirical farce Bill, the Galactic Hero. The book is in lots of ways horrific; Bill, an innocent farm boy, finds himself swept up into the space corps and a series of ridiculous and perilous adventures. The ending of the book is both funny and very bitter, but rewinding to the end of part one, Bill has lost his left arm in combat but had a new one – but a right arm, which belonged to his best friend, grafted on:
He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep.
Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero, p.62 (Victor Gollancz, 1965)
eh, Mel Gibson: but he played a good Hamlet (dir Franco Zeffirelli, 1990)
With apologies to Marcel Proust – but not very vehement apologies, because it’s true – the taste of honey on toast is as powerfully evocative and intensely transporting to me as anything that I can think of. The lips and tongue that made that association happen don’t exist anymore and neither does the face, neither do the eyes, and neither does one of the two brains and/or hearts* that I suppose really made it happen (mine are still there, though). In 21st century Britain, it’s more likely than not that even her bones don’t exist anymore, which makes the traditional preoccupation with returning to dust feel apt and more immediate and (thankfully?) reduces the kind of corpse-fetishising morbidity that seems to have appealed so much to playgoers in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era.
Death & Youth (c.1480-90) by the unknown German artist known as The Master of the Housebook
Thou shell of death, Once the bright face of my betrothed lady, When life and beauty naturally fill’d out These ragged imperfections, When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set In those unsightly rings: then ’twas a face So far beyond the artificial shine Of any woman’s bought complexion (The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606/7) by Thomas Middleton and/or Cyril Tourneur, Act one, Scene one)
*is the heart in the brain? In one sense obviously not, in another maybe, but the sensations associated with the heart seem often to happen somewhere around the stomach; or is that just me?
More to the point, “here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft“, etc. All of which is beautiful; but for better or worse, a pile of ash isn’t likely to engender the same kind of thoughts or words as Yorick’s – or anybody’s – skull. But anyway, the non-existence of a person – or, even more abstractly, the non-existence of skin that has touched your skin (though technically of course all of the skin involved in those kisses has long since disappeared into dust and been replaced anyway) is an absence that’s strange and dismal to think about. But then most things don’t exist.
Vanitas: Still Life with Skull (c.1671) by an unknown English painter
But honey does exist of course; and the association between human beings and sugary bee vomit goes back probably as long as human beings themselves. There are Mesolithic cave paintings, 8000 years old or more, made by people who don’t exist, depicting people who may never have existed except as drawings, or may have once existed but don’t anymore, plundering beehives for honey. Honey was used by the ancient Egyptians, who no longer exist, in some of their most solemn rites, it had sacred significance for the ancient Greeks, who no longer exist, it was used in medicine in India and China, which do exist now but technically didn’t then, by people who don’t, now. Mohammed recommended it for its healing properties; it’s a symbol of abundance in the Bible and it’s special enough to be kosher despite being the product of unclean insects. It’s one of the five elixirs of Hinduism, Buddha was brought honey by a monkey that no longer exists. The Vikings ate it and used it for medicine too. Honey was the basis of mead, the drink of the Celts who sometimes referred to the island of Britain as the Isle of Honey.
probably my favourite Jesus & Mary Chain song: Just Like Honey (1985)
And so on and on, into modern times. But also (those Elizabethan-Jacobeans again) “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite.” (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c.1595) Act 2, scene 6) “Your comfortable words are like honey. They relish well in your mouth that’s whole; but in mine that’s wounded they go down as if the sting of the bee were in them.”(John Webster, The White Devil (1612), Act 3. Sc.ene 3). See also “honey trap”. “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”You catch more flies with honey.
But on the whole, the sweetness of honey is not and has never been sinister. A Taste of Honey, Tupelo Honey, “Wild Honey,” “Honey Pie”, “Just like Honey,” “Me in Honey,” “Put some sugar on it honey,” Pablo Honey, “Honey I Sure Miss You.” Honey to the B. “Honey” is one of the sweetest (yep) of endearments that people use with each other. Winnie-the-Pooh and Bamse covet it. Honey and toast tasted in a kiss at the age of 14 is, in the history of the world, a tiny and trivial thing, but it’s enough to resonate throughout a life, just as honey has resonated through the world’s human cultures. Honey’s Dead. But the mouth that tasted so sweetly of honey doesn’t exist anymore. Which is sad, because loss is sad. But how sad? Most things never exist and even most things that have existed don’t exist now, so maybe the fact that it has existed is enough.
“Most things don’t exist” seems patently untrue: for a thing to be ‘a thing’ it must have some kind of existence, surely? And yet, even leaving aside things and people that no longer exist, we are vastly outnumbered by the things that have never existed, from the profound to the trivial. Profound, well even avoiding offending people and their beliefs, probably few people would now say that Zeus and his extended family are really living in a real Olympus. Trivially, 70-plus years on from the great age of the automobile, flying cars as imagined by generations of children, as depicted in books and films, are still stubbornly absent from the skies above our roads. The idea of them exists, but even if – headache-inducing notion – it exists as a specific idea (“the idea of a flying car”), rather than just within the general realm of “ideas,” an idea is an idea, a thing perhaps but not the thing that it is about. Is a specific person’s memory of another person a particular thing because it relates to a particular person, or does it exist only under the larger and more various banner of “memories”? Either way, it’s immaterial, because even though the human imagination is a thing that definitely exists, the idea of a flying car is no more a flying car than Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a flying machine was a flying machine or that my memory of honey-and-toast kisses is a honey-and-toast kiss.
If you or I picture a human being with electric blue skin, we can imagine it and if we have the talent we can draw it, someone could depict it in a film, but it wouldn’t be the thing itself, because human beings with electric blue skin, like space dolphins, personal teleportation devices, seas of blood, winged horses, articulate sentient faeces and successful alchemical experiments, don’t exist. And depending on the range of your imagination (looking at that list mine seems a bit limited), you could think of infinite numbers of things that don’t exist. There are also, presumably, untold numbers of things that do exist but that we personally don’t know about or that we as a species don’t know about yet. But even if it was possible to make a complete list of all of the things in existence (or things in existence to date; new things are invented or develop or evolve all the time), it would always be possible to think of even more things that don’t exist, – simply, in the least imaginative way, by naming variations on, or parodies of everything that does exist. So supermassive black holes exist? Okay, but what about supertiny pink holes? What about supermedium beige holes? This June, a new snake (disappointingly named Ovophis jenkinsi) was discovered. But what about a version of Ovophis jenkinsi that sings in Spanish or has paper bones or smells like Madonna? They don’t exist.
JAMC Honey’s Dead, 1992
Kind of a creepy segue if you think about it (so please don’t), but like those beautifully-shaped lips that tasted of honey, my mother no longer exists, except as a memory, or lots of different memories, belonging to lots of different people. Presumably she exists in lots of memories as lots of different people who happen to have the same name. But unlike supermedium beige holes, the non-existence of previously-existing things and people is complex, because of the different perspectives they are remembered from. But regardless, they are still fundamentally not things anymore. But even with the ever-growing, almost-infinite number of things, there are, demonstrably, more things that don’t exist. And, without wishing to be horribly negative or repeating things I’ve written before, one of the surprises with the death of a close relative was to find that death does exist. Well, obviously, everyone knows that – but not just as an ending or as the absence of life, as was always known, but as an active, grim-reaper-like force of its own. For me, the evidence for that – which I’m sure could be explained scientifically by a medical professional – is the cold that I mentioned in the previous article. Holding a hand that gets cold seems pretty normal; warmth ebbing away as life ebb away; that’s logical and natural. But this wasn’t the expected (to me) cooling down of a warm thing to room temperature, like the un-drunk cups of tea which day after day were brought and cooled down because the person they were brought for didn’t really want them anymore, just the idea of them. That cooling felt natural, as did the warming of the glass of water that sat un-drunk at the bedside because the person it was for could no longer hold or see it. That water had been cold but had warmed up to room temperature, but the cold in the hand wasn’t just a settling in line with ambient conditions. It was active cold; hands chilling and then radiating cold in quite an intense way, a coldness that dropped far below room temperature. I mentioned it to a doctor during a brief, unbelievably welcome break to get some air, and she said “Yes, she doesn’t have long left.” Within a few days I wished I’d asked for an explanation of where that cold was coming from; where is it generated? Which organ in the human body can generate cold so quickly and intensely? Does it do it in any other situations? And if not, why not? So, although death can seem abstract, in the same sense that ‘life’ seems abstract, being big and pervasive, death definitely exists. But as what? Don’t know; not a single entity, since it’s incipient in everyone, coded into our DNA: but that coding has nothing to do with getting hit by cars or drowning or being shot, does it? So, a big question mark to that. Keats would say not to question it, just to enjoy the mystery. Well alright then.
Klaus Nomi as “the Cold Genius” from his 1981 version of Purcell’s “The Cold Song”
But since most things *don’t* exist, but death definitely does exist, existence is, in universal terms, rare enough to be something like winning the lottery. But like winning the lottery, existence in itself is not any kind of guarantee of happiness or satisfaction or even honey-and-toast kisses; but it at least offers the possibility of those things, whereas non-existence doesn’t offer anything, not even peace, which has to be experienced to exist. We have all not existed before and we will all not exist again; but honey will still be here, for as long as bees are at least. I don’t know if that’s comforting or not. But if you’re reading this – and I’m definitely writing it – we do currently exist, so try enjoy your lottery win, innit.
Something silly about music next time I think.
Ancient Roman vanitas mosaic showing a skull and the wheel of fortune
My mother died just about a month ago, and I think she/her death is taking up too much space in my conscious mind to trouble my subconscious or unconscious self too much. It’s interesting to note that even though death is one of the central themes of much of the most important art ever created, and although I am someone with an interest in Art, in the capital A, “high culture” sense, what came into my mind in that room, while holding her hand was actually a line from a song which turned out to have an accuracy I didn’t realise until then; “it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead.”* Mum wouldn’t have liked that. And if she wasn’t dead I probably wouldn’t be posting what follows online, even though there’s nothing in it she would object to and even though, as far as I’m aware, she never read a word I wrote: which sounds petulant but it’s not a complaint. Our parents know us too well in one way to want them to know us in other ways, or at least that’s how I think I feel about it.
*Plainsong by The Cure, which luckily I’ve barely been able to stand for many years although I really do love it.
Max Ernst – Max Ernst Showing a Young Girl the Head of his Father (1926/7)
Anyway, last night, for the first time in what feels like decades, I dreamed about my dad. The dream was full of vivid, long forgotten details, most of which almost immediately receded back into the murk of subconscious memory on waking. Not all of them though; how could I have forgotten his strangely hissing laugh (less sinister than it sounds)? But waking up, what was lurking in my mind as the dream faded was, of all things – pop culture strikes again – lines from Stephen King’s IT (which mum read, but dad didn’t, he was squeamish about horror) and a feeling of dread that wasn’t terrifying or even upsetting, just somehow inevitable and in some way kind of comfortable.
That quote comes from a scene in the book when the young protagonists come across the monster, Pennywise, in an old newspaper clipping from 1945. I had no idea that I had absorbed this paragraph, or at least its final lines, first read when I was 14, completely enough to have known it almost word for word, but there it was (have included the whole paragraph for sense):
The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS – IT’S OVER! THANK GOD IT’S OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost.
Stephen King, IT, 1986 p.584 (in the edition I have)
Pietà or Revolution by Night (1923)
Which is not really fair; dad had his faults but he was not a shape-shifting alien clown that ate kids. And anyway, it wasn’t even a nightmare as such. Details are receding – and have almost vanished even since I made the original note this morning – but essentially, nothing bad happened, we were in a house, dad was there, my siblings were there, offering eye-rolling ‘he’s annoying but what can you do?’ support, but what lingers is the last phase before waking – an interminably long, drawn out scene where I was attempting, unsuccessfully, to make coffee for everyone in an unfamiliar kitchen, but couldn’t find the right spoon, with dad behind me watching with condescending amusement and laughing that hissing laugh. And then I woke up to a Stephen King quote. So thanks for that, brain. One of the hardest lessons to learn and re-learn is that other people are none of your business, or to put it less negatively, that you have no claim on any other human being and they have no claim on you. Except for your parents of course; but that’s that dealt with anyway.
My old Penguin paperback of The Castle, which features two chapters not included in the original 1930 UK edition (which were separately translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser), is from of my least favourite stylistic phase of the Penguin Modern Classics series. In that point in the early 80s, the spines, in a nostalgic nod to the classic early (orange and white) days of Penguin. It does have a nice cover illustration, by Elizabeth Pyle, but otherwise the design is a little drab. The book is 298 pages of fairly small but readable print. The Vitalis edition is far more stylish and the cover artwork uses a beautifully evocative photograph of (Bohemian?) “Peasant women” from 1918 and a photograph of Friedland (or Frýdlant) castle in Czechia. The type looks around the same size as the Penguin edition, but though the book is slightly bigger than the Penguin, it has 382 pages.
Even allowing for the fact that the Vitalis Castle includes nice, dark, moody and scratchy illustrations by Karel Hruška, it’s a noticeably longer book, and the reason for that is revealed in the two quotes at the top of the page. The Muirs’ prose – like Edwin Muir’s poetry – is terse and spare, but also flexible and evocative. It’s the “voice” that Kafka has had for me since I was a teenager. It also has the benefit – or at least I think it’s a benefit, more later – of having been translated close to Kafka’s own time. When that first British edition of The Castle was published and Edwin Muir wrote in his introduction “Franz Kafka’s name, as far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers,” he was talking about an author who had only been dead for six years, and the book itself had only been in print in Kafka’s own language for four years.
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite novels – it’s also the product, very obviously, of someone who could speak and think, fluently, in a lot of languages – ten is the number he usually gave, ‘with bits and pieces of others’. Burgess created the book’s slang, Nadsat, in order to write about ‘the youth’ in a way that didn’t date like real slang and it definitely worked. Rightly, I think, Burgess didn’t want a glossary of Nadsat terms in the book. Although some publishers have added one anyway, the book works far better if the reader just immerses themselves in the narrator’s voice and his disorienting world. But Burgess was only human, and in perhaps the novel’s weakest moment (because it takes us out of that world) he couldn’t resist pointing out that the language his young narrator Alex speaks isn’t just whimsy on the part of the author:
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
