Wednesday 22 February 2012

How to murder Liberty

Filed under: people,politics — Tags: , , , , — Peter Monro @ 2:09 pm

taken from
politics

Scene at the signing of the Constitution of the United States
George Washington presiding the Philadelphia Convention
Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin & others.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

notes taken from  “When Democracy murders Liberty” by Paul Gottfried  (Taki’s Mag)

parts marked in bold, are some of the topics examined.

Germany and Europe, ever on the alert for the “man from Branau [Hitler’s Austrian birthplace] to rise from the grave.

Our notion of “democracy as a way of life,” which may be as totalitarian as what the communists attempted but is also more successfully liberticidal. !!! Contrary to our self-congratulatory bromides, modern democracy is neither in favor of true diversity nor particularly peace-loving.

In 2003, on my return from an anti-discrimination “learning session” at a nearby college – a measure that both state and federal authorities required, I learned that we Americans and our British fellow-democrats had just invaded Iraq to bestow on its inhabitants the blessings of democracy and human rights. We now enjoy government social engineering coming through the woodwork and wars of national liberation modeled on Bolshevism.

This is not a distortion of our democratic system but fully compatible with democracy’s emphasis on universal rights, equality, and in recent decades, the grand project of modernizing the rest of the world with what Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind” praised as “democratic education”.

Older American institutions and traditions have prevented this development from producing more harm. The American Constitution was a pre-democratic eighteenth-century exercise in what James Madison called “the physics of government.” It was an ideologically neutral governing document which allowed for a high degree of decentralized power.


We are true to our democratic character by forcing our human rights and political peculiarities on those living in different cultures. And we are morally required to aggressively bring them our state-of-the-art democracy

The end effect of modern democracy, as Kenneth Minogue observes in The Servile Mind and as I try to show in After Liberalism, is growing submissiveness to the state as a source of both financial support and imposed morality.

Democratic regimes do not encourage individuality as much as they socialize their subjects. This priority becomes established and accepted as older centers of authority are weakened and the overriding goal of overcoming inequality and discrimination takes center stage. Although this egalitarian goal can never be reached, the endless journey toward it becomes democratic government’s justification for existing. Compensatory justice for once-scorned minorities is not a departure from the egalitarian ideal but is instead its perfect expression.

Today democracy means the promotion of equality at home and abroad. Redistributing income, overcoming discrimination, and forcibly implementing “human rights” in our foreign policy are now our democratic ideals.

Those who question this ideological consensus who don’t belong to it, should not blame politicians. They should indict democracy itself.


Paul Gottfried is the Raffensperger – there’s a name - Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and the author of nine books, most recently an autobiography, Encounters, as well as several tons of essays on European social and intellectual history and the history of political movements. He contributes to Taki’s Magazine, per request of his physician, as a means of releasing pent-up bile and vexation.

notes
true, ‘up to a point lord Copper’ – or both ?  your opinions on the points (in bold) Gottfried makes.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

The way things are

Filed under: Britain,places,writing - the tops — Tags: , , , — Peter Monro @ 1:41 pm

taken from
writers 

notes
John Lanchester talks about his new book Capital, set in London, to Bryan Appleyard

JL – someone overheard a banker’s wife saying her husband was working for free this year – this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.

psychosis – any form of severe mental disorder in which the individual’s contact with reality becomes highly distorted

the banker’s wife – a vision of such cold nastiness, such inhuman savagery, such entitled selfishness, if there were any justice, her very existence would cancel bonuses across the City.

in Capital there is a clear feeling that there is something wrong with this society that goes well beyond the crash.

JL – We have returned to almost 19th century levels of  inequality. There’s also something quite disturbing about small breakings of  the rules. Teenagers on the bus playing music so loud it infuriates others.

These small incivilities are quite consequential for everyday life. You get the feeling we are very precisely not in this together. Politicians talk about communities,  but urban life is one vast demonstration that there are no such things. Britain is losing its manners and returning to its violent, piratical pre-Victorian state.

It’s odd when you see the things that have disappeared from British culture.I remember vulgarity being quite an important negarive quality and restraint being an important virtue. There used to be something morally wrong about public displays of wealth and consumption, flaunting things. All  that has vanished.

When we use the word ‘technology’, we mean things that don’t quite work. Hence his Mercedes which can’t be fixed because the fault is lost  somewhere in its computers. When technology does work – spectacles, books – it ceases to be technology

 Bryan Appleyard

 

postscript
The interview is done in a small club lost down a narrow, dark, Dickensian alley in the West End. As they leave, Appleyard asks Lanchester how long he has been a member.

‘I’m not – I thought you were.’

We stare at each other baffled, once again, by the dark city.

‘How the f***,’ we say simultaneously, ‘did we get in ?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday 10 February 2012

Leni by Freddy

Filed under: film,history,people,writing - the tops — Tags: , — Peter Monro @ 4:18 pm

taken from
film, directors

Leni Riefenstahl with chums

by Frederic Raphael – who can write some and is not one to hold back, verbal demolition by a master.

Freddy

By claiming that her first and last allegiance was to art, managed to mount a sustained post-war campaign of self-acquittal. Her one abiding loyalty was to her own myth. Splicing effrontery with self-pity, duplicity with imposture, she edited herself into eternal innocence.

Like many Germans, she did not, as Rebecca West put it, ‘know enough to come in out of the rain, even when it turned to blood’. She did, however, open a wide umbrella afterwards, when she claimed that she had been too ‘busy’ to perceive what villains her producers were (an excuse not unknown, in diluted doses, in the film world at large).

She used doomed gypsies (such adorable kids !) as extras and, after the war, claimed that she had saved all their lives. In fact, once finished on her interminable picture, they were shipped to Birkenau or Auschwitz, where almost all her little darlings were murdered. Their faces remain, impersonating Spanish peasants, in an epic pieceof kitsch entitled Tiefland, on which Leni worked from 1940-1945, an alibi endlessly funded by Goebbels, on the Führer’s instructions

There was nothing she couldn’t do, it seems, apart from tell the truth.

 


Genius, bully, documentarist, fabulist, whiner, egomaniac, embezzler, Riefenstahl was the archetypal film-maker. Never before the 20th century had the means of recording events so commandingly shaped the events themselves. ‘The Triumph of the Will’ advertised the 1934 Nuremburg rally, with rigged footage and preconceived camera-placing, but then the rally itself was factitious, a staged show with beer-bellied extras disguised as Teutonic knights and Hitler as Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician topping the bill.

Film was Hitler’s natural accomplice; it glorifies fraudulence and, whatever its qualities and seductions, it cannot think. Hitler’s close-ups were his apotheosis. His director was almost as important to his vanity as he was to hers

Whether or not Leni was ‘really’ a genius is hardly worth debating; she was indefatigable (film-making too is a marathon) and, by the insolence of her ambition, she turned photo-opportunism into the art form of our time, the triumph of emotion over thought and of shadows over substance.


notes
rodomontade boastful or inflated talk or behaviour

ponder – film was Hitler’s natural accomplice, it glorifies fraudulence, it cannot think.  ‘twas ever so  ?

write a line half as good as – did not know enough to come in out of the rain, even when it turned to blood.

Her one abiding loyalty was to her own myth.  some thoughts.     

 

                                 

write a caption – and not the correct one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday 9 February 2012

In silence and tears

Filed under: film,people,poetry,theatre — Peter Monro @ 11:13 am

taken from
actors, poetry 

Brian Cox  

notes & questions

A Dundonian, he has been around a long time and whenever he appears is a joy to watch and especially hear.He paid his dues, on stage for 30 years which is what he thinks acting is all about:

“Theatre’s based on reality, it’s not based on some kind of illusion. People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre – the notion of the ‘theatrical’ meaning something separate from life. If it doesn’t relate to life, it doesn’t relate to anything.”

why is theatre not ‘based on illusion’, is cinema, what’s the difference between them ?

“Our culture is theatre, not cinema, never has been.”

is it, how so, because theatre is older ?

Wily, authoritative, gritty, seen-it-all fatigue; his presence is to be reckoned with.

He bumped into Nigel Hawthorne on a plane, at a time when Hawthorne was disillusioned with being offered only supporting roles. Cox reminded him of a famous Michael Powell line, that in cinema there are no small parts or big parts, only short ones and long ones.

“When you look at it that way, it doesn’t make any difference, because you can make as much impact in a short part as you can in a long part”

He has no time for the term ‘character’ actor, everyone is a character actor, that’s what acting is.

name some ‘character actors’ and say why  they are so much more than this meaningless term.

As to his voice, listen to him with Charlie Rose, a couple of others talk before him –Annette Benning is one – but you get a good chance to hear his amalgam of Scots, English, American.

But it really comes into its own, when blended with the words below. It is on a CD Words for You, in which people read poetry with music added on – sometimes it works – and his reading of Byron’s poem is a marvel:

It is, read alas by someone else but no less fine for all that.

 

When We Two Parted
George Gordon, Lord Byron

 When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow -
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.

 They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me -
Why wert thou so dear ?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: -
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

 In secret we met -
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee ? -
With silence and tears.

 

 

The poem was written about the supposed affair between Lady Frances Webster (whom Byron was attracted to) and the Duke of Wellington whose lady friends were legion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday 8 February 2012

So it goes

Filed under: people,places,war,writing - the tops — Tags: , , — Peter Monro @ 2:17 pm

taken from
writers, war

Kurt Vonnegut

notes on Slaughterhouse-Five

“So it goes.”  a constant refrain, it appears 106 times, to explain the inexplicable…a cosmic sigh of futility ?

He had been trying to shape the material that became Slaughterhouse-Five for twenty years. Rare for writers – rare for anybody – this most formative experience may have befallen him not as a child, but as a young man.

In World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and with another 100 POWs was locked in the cellar of an abattoir beneath the city of Dresden, ”the Florence of the Elbe.”

Historically, Dresden had been northern Germany’s cultural centre, an exquisite city filled with museums and historic buildings.

Vonnegut and the others were underground on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies fire-bombed Dresden in a massive air attack. Filled with refugees and 26,000 Allied prisoners, the city was razed arove them. As a result of the firestorm it was impossible to count the dead – 25,000…over 100,000 ?  A place of irreplaceable beauty, a landmark of no military significance was destroyed in the biggest massacre in European history.

He emerged the next morning to find the whole city transformed into a slaughter house.

As if his refuge had somehow expanded overnight to swallow what was left of the world. The experience haunted him, not least because he must have suspected he had found, early on, by far his most important material.

You don’t have to be broken by misanthropy; Finally you just get too tired, and the news is too awful, and humour doesn’t work any more.

Making jokes is just a way of dealing with life. But finally I’ve reached a state – and Mark Twain reached it and I think all humorists do – that suddenly it isn’t funny any more because it never was funny.

 

During the war my whole division was destroyed and the Germans took those of us who had survived to this prisoner-of-war camp called Stalag 4B.

The camp was full of British officers, who were incredibly kind and welcoming. We were hungry and cold and filthy and they fed us and put on this play to cheer us up. The play was Cinderella, with a male Cinderella of course. I still remember a line from it – it was one of the best things I’ve ever heard in my life. When the clock struck 12, Cinderella turned to the audience and said,

Goodness me, the clock has struck !
Alack a day and fuck my luck !

Although I can’t explain why exactly, that made me feel that life was worth living again. Suddenly, despite everything, human beings really seemed rather wonderful.

Some people ask me about my literary influences, but I don’t think I had any.

 

 

Tuesday 7 February 2012

Andrew Roberts

Filed under: history,interview,war — Tags: , , — Peter Monro @ 9:48 am

taken from
historian, war

The Storm of War:
A New History of the Second World War
by Andrew Roberts

notes:
from interviews with Charlie Rose  and Peter Robinson .  Roberts has an extraordinary grasp of numbers and statistics, which he can pull out at will.

“Britain provided the time, Russia the blood, America the money and the weapons,”

The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.’

Churchill understood the menace of Hitlervery early on, much earlier than anyone else. He was making speeches before 1933 when H came to power, of the threat of this man. In 1931 W went to Germany to research the book on his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.

Christopher Soames showed Roberts how Winston would ‘diagram’ his speeches; it made clear the importance  of his pauses and was called ‘psalm form.’ Every word of his wartime speeches was written by him and him alone.

he came up with 100 ideas a day – his chief of staff Alan Brooke, said ‘Winston has 12 ideas every day, only two of which are good ones, and he doesn’t know which ones they are !’  ed

At the beginning of 1941, Hitler was master of Europe.

Hitler allowed his political views to prevent the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force. We originally calculated that the Dunkirk operation could save at most 45,000 troops. Thanks largely to Hitler’s  interference, between dawn on Sunday 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday 4 June 1940, 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued, the largest military evacuation in history.

AR was given access to the Ian Sayer archive of 25,000 volumes, a previously unknown private collection of thousands of papers, letters and orders from the war; here he found a letter from Jodl, director of operations at Hitler hq; it showed that Hitler was expecting to capture all of the BEF & before Dunkirk. Instead he put his panzers above the town of Dunkirk and held them up for 4 days, allowing the men on the beaches to escape.


Russsia – H said to Goebbels, ‘if we kick in the door the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down’;  for every 5 Germans killed in combat, 4 died on the Eastern Front.

It seemed an easy target. The Germans destroyed 1,200 Soviet war-planes on the ground during the first morning of their invasion. They went on to kill 27 million Russians, and took 5.7 prisoners, 3.3 million of whom (58 per cent) died in captivity.

But the Russians kept on coming, and soon their production of tanks outstripped Germany’s. In the two-month battle of Kursk in 1943, the biggest and largest tank battle in history, the Germans lost 500,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 aircraft. The Russian losses were 50 per cent heavier but could be absorbed, and the Germans lost the battle.

On the Eastern front: more than 2m Germans were killed, over ten times the number who died fighting in the west.

Stalin – Between Hitler’s invasion in June 1941 and October, Stalin had 26,000 Russians arrested, of whom 10,000 were shot. He still had 4 million in the Gulags even in 1942. During the Battle of Stalingard, the NKVD shot 13,500 Russian soldiers. The men were ordered to undress before execution so that their uniforms could be reissued ‘without too many discouraging bullet-holes’.

Altogether, says Roberts, Stalin had 135,000 of his own soldiers shot, the equivalent of 12 divisions. A further 400,000 were in ‘punishment battalions’ which were a sentence of death.

The greatest general of WWII (according to AR) was marshal Zhukov !! ed  he won the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin.  some discussion here: ed


North Africa – had H taken 80% of Britain’s oil which came from Iran and Iraq; he could have could have gone up through Palestine and Syria to the Caucasus where Stalin had  80% of his oil; he could have come in from the south, instead of  marching across thousands of miles to take Stalingrad which was madness.

Franco didn’t join H, because he was an extremely wiley operator, negotiating with him was in H’s words ‘like having your teeth pulled’.

The speed with which America switched to, and accelerated, war production was astonishing. Soon all their aircraft losses at Pearl Harbor amounted to only two days’ production. By 1944 America was producing 98,000 war-planes a year, to Germany’s 44,000.

By the war’s end, the USA had built 296,000 aircraft at a  cost of $44 billion, produced 357 metric tonnes of bombs, 88,000 landing craft and 86,333 tanks. Her shipyards launched 147 aircraft carriers, 952 other warships and 5,200 merchant ships. America put nearly 15 million people into uniform and multiplied her prewar defence budget 20 times.

hence Roberts’ summing up:

‘If Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the money and the weapons.’


Japan lost the Pacific naval war in five minutes in 1942 at the Battle of Midway: four of their nine carriers sank, against only one American. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the largest naval engagement in history – 216 Allied warships and 64 Japanese took part -Japan lost four carriers, three battleships, six heavy and four  light cruisers, whereas US losses were confined to a light carrier and two destroyers.

Roberts gives some striking details of the air power America deployed against Japan. On 10 March 1945, 334 B-29s flattened 16 square miles of Tokyo, killed or wounded 183,000 people and made 1.5 million homeless.

He calculates that the decision to make the A-bomb, made possible in part by Hitler’s persecution of Jewish scientists, saved the lives of 250,000 Americans alone. Sir Ian Jacob, Churchill’s military secretary, said the Allies won the war ‘because our German scientists were better than their German scientists’.


the French – AR is scathing about them. More  Frenchmen fought on the Axis side than with the Allies;  quoting Jean Cocteau’s aphorism,  ‘Long live the shameful peace’.

out of 100,000 French soldiers evacuated at Dunkirk, 10,000  remained in England to fight, the rest returned to France. Up to 400,000 French enrolled in various German military organisations. In 1941 it required only 30,000 German troops to hold down France. Vichy implemented anti-Jewish measures before it was even requested to do so by Berlin.

When 600 boxes of files captured from the Abwehr were opened in 1999 it became clear that several thousand French volunteered to spy on their own countrymen for pitifully small amounts of money. The cruelty of the Vichy police was appalling.

when Pétain visited Paris in April 1944, bigger crowds turned out to cheer him than welcomed De Gaulle three months later. Vichy aircraft actually bombed Gibraltar.

Some 76,000 Jews and French citizens were deported from France between 1942 and 1944. Most went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to be exterminated on arrival.

This rounding up of their own citizens was done by Frenchmen, not Germans. The victims were taken by French police or militiamen to trains manned by French railway workers, lists of those to be taken were compiled by French officials. Without this collaboration at all levels of the French administration, it would have been impossible for the Germans to deport so many Jews – they simply did not have the manpower to do so.

11,400 children were taken from French internment camps, most of them from Drancy, to Auschwitz. In all, almost 76,000 French Jewish citizens were deported, 2,500 returned. 2,000 children were less than six years old, none  survived.

compare with Nazi-occupied Denmark. In January 1943 with the help of the Danish civil service and police, and the encouragement of King Christian X, almost the entire Jewish population was smuggled out of the country overnight, to neutral Sweden, without alerting the occupying forces.

other points
The massive brain drain of top scientsts leaving Germany: between 1901 and 1932 Germany won 25 Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, the US won 5. From 1950 to 2000 the US won 67 Nobels and Germany 16.

When war broke out H had 39 million people working in his war production factories, this dropped to 29 million by 1944; he lost a quarter of his workforce at the same time as he was killing 6 million of the most intelligent, hard working citizens. In addition, Jews were ferocious fighters. H got his own Iron Cross on recommendation of adjudant who was Jewish.

books to read
there are so many, tell me which aspects you are interested in.

 

 

Sunday 5 February 2012

Dotty Parker

Filed under: people,poetry,writing - the tops — Tags: — Peter Monro @ 3:36 pm

taken from
writers, poets

Dotty Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dying at  73,  she took an unconscionably long time to leave a world of which she had always claimed to hold a low opinion.

 The Glad Girl

The bitter ills her fortune sends
She sprinkles smiles galore on;

It seems to me our little friend
Is something of a moron.

She had the imagination of disaster.  Her knack for causing things to end badly amounted to genius.

Frustration

If I  had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains.

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love

But I have no lethal weapon –
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on.
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

Like a guest aware they have outstayed their welcome yet who makes no attempt to pack their things and go.


Sympton Recital

I find no peace in paint or type
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I’m disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I’d be arrested.

I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:
I do not like me any more.

 

Friday 3 February 2012

An Englishman Abroad

Filed under: countries,film,writing - the tops — Tags: , , , , , — Peter Monro @ 10:36 am

taken from
film, actors, writers

an Englishman Abroad


Coral: Listen dear, I’m only an actress, I’m not a bright lady by your standards. I’ve never been much interested in politics but if this is communism I don’t like it because it’s dull. The poor things look so tired. Then some people think Australia’s dull and that’s not communismn and look at Leeds.

Only it occurs to me that we sat here all afternoon pretending that spying, which is what you did my darling, was just a minor social misdemeanour, no worse or I’m sure in some people’s minds, much better than being caught in a public lavatory the way gentlemen in my profession constantly are.

That it’s just something we shouldn mention, out of politeness. So that we won’t be embarassed. (chortles) That’s very English. And pretend it hasn’t happened because we’re both sensible people.

Well, I’m not English, I’m not sensible. I’m an Australian. I can’t muster much morality and outside Shakespeare, the word treason to me means nothing – only you pissed in our soup, and we drank it.

Well, very well, it doesn’t affect me darling, I will order your suit and your hat and I’ll keep it under mine, Mum, not a word. But for one reason, I’m sorry for you

Well in your book, in your real book . that probably adds my name to the list of all the other fools you’ve conned. But you’re not conning me, darling, I know. Pipe isn’t fooling pussy.


And there you have the nub of the matter:  traitors and tailors.


An Englishman Abroad was directed by John Schlesinger in 1983 with Alan Bates as Guy Burgess and Coral Browne as herself,  the story happened to her 25 years before. One of the best things Alan Bennett ever wrote, two outstanding actors; funny, moving, astute, it took in patriotism, love, exile, communism, traitors and tailors.

In 1951 Guy Burgess the “Cambridge spy”, disappeared, defected,  with the diplomat Donald MacLean. The security forces of almost every Western nation tried to find them.  But it was not till 1955 that the “missing diplomats,” were reported to be in the Soviet Union.

Seven years later in 1958, Coral Browne, superb actress and mordant wit, was touring Russia with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In Moscow Burgess lurches into her dressing room during a performance of Hamlet and throws up in her basin.

Coral – I wouldn’t care, but it’s only the interval. If you want to come round and be sick you might at least save it for the end of the performance.

He leaves after having stolen her soap, drink and cigarettes. At her hotel a note is pushed under the door asking her to visit him and bring – a tape measure.

She finally finds his flat, after the British Embassy does its best to stop her. As she climbs  the stairs, you hear him reciting the Lady of Shalott, as he shaves:

From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
“Tirra lirra,” by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.

It’s magical, Bates’s beautiful voice, the strange, entrancing poem, in this ghastly place. His flat is a shambles, as he cheerfully says:

“Hardly luxury’s lap. Quite a pigsty in fact. I used to live in Jermyn Street. Tragic you might think, but not really. That was a pigsty too.”

The lunch is burnt to ruin in a filthy pot, but “all is not lost, I managed to scrounge two tomatoes, quite a talking point,”  and he takes a bite of raw garlic. Irrepressibly merry, he could be sitting down at the Caprice,  he is quite unaffected by his dismal state and that of the country he is stuck in.

A pip gets into his teeth, prodding away inside his mouth, he muses:

“You know people ask me if I have any regrets. The one regret I have,  before I went away, I didn’t get myself fitted out with a good pair of National Health gnashers. Admirable as most things are in the Soviet Socialist Republic, the making of dentures is still in its infancy.

He has an unusual request, he wants some suits made by his tailor in London, along with hat, old Etonian tie, the works. He can’t get them  in Russia “Clothes have never been the comrades strong point.” Marxist and traitor he may be,  but he is an Englishman, “I don’t want to look like everyone else do I ?” She gets the measuring tape and runs it over him, writing down the inches; adding hat, tie, shoes, ‘ a trousseau…for a shotgun marriage’

If Burgess had hoped to be a hero, he wasn’t. To the Soviets he didn’t matter any more, even if he is followed everywhere by the police. He uses all his charm to keep up a good front but it’s a pathetic existence in a miserable place (filmed in Dundee)  His Russian lover is probably a policeman.

Burgess: “I know what I’ve done to deserve him, but what has he done to deserve me ? Am I a reward or a punishment ?”

He is still in love with the country he betrayed and with all things English. Without his friends, the writers, the famous, where ‘everyone seemed to know everyone else’, all his wit is for nothing – “They’re not strong on irony, the comrades.” No more Reform club, streets of London, latest books and plays, conversations. All he now has is anonymity, stultifying boredom and loneliness surrounded by cold concrete ugliness.

Yet he is still wondrously funny; to some old crow stuck behind an office window, he remarks with great charm:

“I’m sure I’m not the first to remark on your resemblance to the late Ernest Bevin. It is MOST striking. You could be sisters.”

He yearns for gossip, news of those he knew – Cyril Connolly, Harold Nicloson, Pope Hennessy, Auden, Forster  – Coral doesn’t know any of them.

Finally, when he gets the telephone call which allows him to go out, he takes her to a church.

In a haunting scene, standing upright and still, he weeps silently as he listens to the exquisite music of a Russian church service, a priest chants the blessing while babushkas light candles whose smoke drifts up past the icons.  As the tears fall down and the music soars, at last the joker’s mask falls away and the true one is revealed, the desperately homesick exile. Only here, in this dark sanctuary of a country where even God has been banned does the traitor find redemption.

Back at the flat, after all his charm, wit and persiflage; before leaving, Coral finally tells him the truth - shown in full above

Coral – Outside Shakespeare, the word treason to me means nothing – only you pissed in our soup, and we drank it.

That probably adds my name to the list of all the other fools you’ve conned. But you’re not conning me, darling. Pipe isn’t fooling pussy.

She keeps her word and goes to the outfitters in St James, Saville Row, Jermyn street for his suit, shoes, hat and tie. The scenes are pitch-perfect, they accept the orders for their disgraced former client without question; British courtesy at its most sublime. For his tailor who reminisces with affection, the defector might have been fitted only the day before. As for discretion:

“Mum’s always the word here, madam. Moscow or Maidenhead, mum is always the word.”

There is only one who doesn’t, he is Hungarian and unleashes a tempest of invective from Coral that would fell an oak forest.

In writing the play Bennett had Burgess’s letters to Browne, her cuttings and original notes of his measurements, even his cheque for £6 – she never cashed it.

So at the end of the film, Burgess strides out impeccable, in the Moscow snow, over the bridge, to the thunder of Gilbert and Sullivan. For all the world, he might be going to the office in Curzon Street or Whitehall.

Burgess:  “So little, England, little music, little art. Timid, tasteful, nice. But one loves it, one loves it.”

He died far from little England. On September 1, 1963, an official of a Moscow hospital announced that Jim Andreyevich Elliott – the name he was given there – had died from heart disease. The “Internationale” was played at his funeral, apart from MacLean, no one of note attended.

And why did he do it, betray his country ?

“No point in having a secret if you make a secret of it.”

 

 

Tuesday 31 January 2012

Jeff at Royal Ascot

Filed under: people,writing - the tops — Tags: , — Peter Monro @ 1:59 pm

taken from
writers


Jeffrey Bernard

God he was funny and his writing a joy. His stories of disaster and mayhem, Hogarth paintings in words. Postcards from the cliff face as Icarus plummeted ever down.

The catastrophic marriages, drunkenness, gallows humour,  reckless, self-destructive courage and his extraordinary ability to tap into the kindness of strangers. He had to having long exhausted the supply of kindness from his friends.


Geoff to footballer ‘You’ve got an IQ as low as the number on the back of your shirt’.

Gazza ruminated for a couple of minutes, and asked ‘What’s an IQ ?’

a day at the races

It began when Jeff and I (Mike Molloy) set off light-of-heart to attend the opening day of Royal Ascot. In those days, Jeff was employed as a columnist by the Sporting Life, until he was sacked for a multitude of transgressions: all of them featuring the consumption of brutal quantities of drink.

“I’ve fixed it for us to meet William Marshall in the bar after the third race,” Jeff confided. “He’ll give us a couple of winners.”

I was thrilled by the prospect. Marshall, one of the greatest trainers in racing, amazingly still retained a wry affection for Jeff.

I must explain at this point, neither of us were wearing morning dress. I had on a plain grey suit that passed muster, but Jeff was decidedly more Bohemian in his choice of plumage.

He wore a pink, open-necked shirt, a crumpled, double-breasted blazer of the sort favoured by Trust House majors, ancient jeans, battered desert boots and the coveted brass badge of a racing correspondent. Eminently suitable for an afternoon boozing in Soho, but an unusual choice for a representative of Britain’s grandest racing journal attending one of England’s great racing occasions.

Having lost on the first three races, we once again went to the bar used by the press, where Jeff was received by other members of the racing fraternity with a show of warmth they usually reserved for Gypsy beggars. But our stock went up when Marshall joined us and ordered champagne.

It is always uplifting when a hero turns out to be as delightful as one hopes. Marshall, blithely ignoring Jeff’s louche appearance, regaled us with priceless information about the rest of the card. Information that sadly passed straight through our minds without making the slightest dents in our fuddled brains. Eventually he announced that he was going to the paddock to view the runners in the next race.

“We’ll come with you,” said Jeff, quickly sinking his drink.

“Where’s your hat ?” Marshall enquired as Jeff swayed away from the bar.

“Hat ?” growled Bernard, suddenly belligerent. “What the fucking hell would I need a hat for ?”

Marshall also bridled. “Suppose we meet the Queen,” he asked indignantly. “What will you raise ?”

Jeff thought for a heartbeat and all others at the bar strained to hear his answer.

“There’s always the question of my knighthood,” he replied.

 

Sunday 29 January 2012

Lord Castlereagh

Filed under: international relations,people,politics — Tags: , , , , , — Peter Monro @ 10:33 pm

from lessons on
statesmen – foreign affairs

Lord Castlereagh by sir Thomas Lawrence

I met Murder on the way-
He had a mask like Castlereagh-
Very smooth he look’d yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew,
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

                                                                                                                 the masque of anarchy: Shelley

On August 16th 1819, at a rally in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, sabre-wielding cavalry charged an unarmed crowd gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation; 15 people were killed,  400–700 injured.  It was called the Peterloo massacre, in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, four years earlier. For radicals, the government used the same tactics against their own people as it had  against Napoleon’s army.

As government spokesman in the House of Commons, Castlereagh had to justify the action of the troops.

   ‘Chop em down my brave boys’ by George Cruickshank

On hearing of the event Shelley wrote his poem, the Masque of Anarchy (91 verses long) which was banned for 30 years. Its effect  blackened Castlereagh’s reputation which never recovered, he has remained a byword for reactionay Toryism ever since. His reluctant role in the crushing of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland made him even more detested.

War Secretary and Foreign Secretary in the early 1800s he dominated English politics for a generation. As a statesman he had a profound appreciation of the contrast between romantic oratory and political reality. By his dogged pursuit of the possible and the necessary, he worked to abolish slavery, kept rebellion at bay in Britain and Ireland and secured peace across Europe.

And he was loathed for it; booed in public and cursed in print. It is hard to think of another great British political figure who is remembered mostly for being hated.

Byron called him “an intellectual eunuch” and a “tyrant”; when Castlereagh died he suggested travellers should “stop…and piss” on his grave.

On walking down to Parliament with the (almost equally hated) Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth and encountering a mob, Sidmouth said: “Here we go, the two most popular men in England.” “Yes,” replied Castlereagh, “through a grateful and admiring multitude.” He added that it was more “gentlemanly” to be disliked by the mob than liked by them, which was some compensation for their habit of constantly smashing the windows of his London house in St James’s Square during his twenty years in office.

He once had to flee to his country house at North Cray to avoid the army being called out. At a performance of Twelfth Night in Covent Garden, he was hooted and hissed at so loudly that the play had to be stopped. Another time, he took refuge in a draper’s shop in St Martin’s Lane where he was pelted with mud and vegetables until the Bow Street runners came to his rescue.

Hazlitt described him sitting in the House of Commons when Foreign Secretary:

“with his hat slouched over his forehead, and a sort of stoop in his shoulder . . . like a bird of prey over its quarry . . . coiled up like the folds of its own purposes, cold, death-like, smooth and smiling – that is neither quite at ease with itself, nor safe for others to approach”.

A hired gang of louts cheered at the gates of Westminster Abbey as his coffin was carried inside (to be interred, such were his achievements, between Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox).

An Irishman, both he and Wellington himself were born in Dublin within six weeks of each other and remained lifelong friends. They were to become perhaps the strongest combination of general and war minister ever seen. Castlereagh’s education petered out after a year at Cambridge, where he picked up nothing much except the clap.

With a reputation for integrity, consistency, and goodwill, which was perhaps unmatched by any diplomat of that era, he never confused negotiation with appeasement. He insisted that  there could be no dealing with Napoleon and that he must be fought to the end. He was instrumental in creating and maintaining the coalitions that defeated the French emperor.

But after Waterloo he refused to punish or intervene in France and was strongly against extracting severe reparations or of shrinking her traditional boundaries:

“It is not our business to collect trophies but to try to bring the world back to peaceful habits”.

Perhaps the best tribute, though an unintended one, came from Napoleon himself. How, he wondered, could a sensible nation allow herself to be governed by such a lunatic:

“The peace he has made is the sort of peace he would have made if he had been beaten. I could scarcely have treated him worse, the poor wretch, if it had been I who had proved victorious.”

With the Duke of Wellington, he attended the Congress of Vienna. A conference of European ambassadors and statesmen, chaired by Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, in Vienna from September, 1814 to June, 1815. It’s purpose was to reach a settlement after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it’s result was the redrawing of the political map of Europe.

Travelling to Vienna in 1814  Castlereagh called the ‘German dirt’, through which his carriage tried to advance, ‘beyond the worst parts of Scotland’. While the King of Würtemberg was ‘As repulsive in character as in body, with a stomach that fell in folds onto his knees, he  looked like one of the boars he hunted.’

the Congress of Vienna

From the chaos of war-torn Europe, Castlereagh made the peace, picking his way firmly and delicately through endless national interests and wily protagonists. He negotiated the framework for a stable and orderly continent, producing a peace that lasted for 130 years up to the revolutions of 1848.

Other attendees such as Metternich, Talleyrand-Périgord and Tsar Alexander I all admired him, as did giants at home like Pitt, Nelson and Wellington. Henry Kissinger so respected his policy of realpolitik that he did his PhD on Castlereagh.

the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury thought him the greatest of all Britain’s foreign secretaries and gave this wonderful description of what diplomacy entails:

“There is nothing dramatic in the success of a diplomatist. His victories are made up of a series of microscopic advantages; a judicious suggestion here, or an opportune civility there: of a wise concession at one moment, and a far-sighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness, and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunders can shake.”

Eventually he broke, driven mad by the insults and his masssive burden of work. He retired to his estate at North Cray Place in Kent and on 12th August, 1822, in his dressing-room, cut his throat with a penknife

The testimony of statesmen of the highest character and of all parties to his gifts and charm is in strong contrast with the flood of vituperation and calumny poured out upon his memory by those who knew him not.

His driving will concealed a generous nature, and a forgiving one. For making peace, as for making war, he has had few equals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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