The Tories have to live with the deal they struck with the devil.

They said he was good because he was popular.  On that ground alone, would they prefer Barabbas to Jesus of Nazareth?  Just over eighty years ago, by the most popular politician in the world was a small house painter from a small town in a small country.  His name was Adolf Hitler.  The chip he had on his shoulder would cost the lives of more than fifty million people.

They said Trump had won a huge majority.  He did – with the brazen deceit that is his trade mark.  And he did not do it for them.  There is only ever one reason why he does anything.  He showed that in the worst public farewell on record.

And they said they owed him loyalty.  In this they made the mistake of putting second their loyalty to the monarch whose realm he was intent on putting asunder.  In this also, they sadly aped the generals of the Wehrmacht who gave an oath of personal loyalty to an Austrian corporal who was twice passed over for promotion to officer status, and they also came dangerously close to the total and cowardly sell-out by Republican elders, those gloomy, fading, white sometime stentorians, who are now forcing a general reconsideration of the role of cowardice in public office.

It now looks to be too late for the rebel colonies to learn from their more settled mother country in how to deal with a spoiled child who is trashing the joint.

PTories – Johnson – Trump

SCARLET AND BLACK

Stendhal, 1830

Folio Society, 1965; bound in cloth embossed boards and slip cased; translated and with an introduction by Margaret Shaw; wood engravings by Frank Martin.

She was a simple soul, who had never risen even to the point of criticising her husband, and admitting that he bored her.  She supposed, without telling herself so, that between husband and wife there could be no more tender relations. 

Stendhal was an alias of a Frenchman named Henri Beyle.  He had many aliases (or pen names) and history has had trouble coming to grips with the man behind them.  He came from a respectable family in Grenoble and served under Napoleon.  During that time, he witnessed the burning of Moscow.  He then held various government positions that allowed him to write.  He was very vain, not very handsome, and he saw more in his attractions to women than they did – so distinguishing him sharply from both Balzac and Hugo.  He spent much time in Italy, and fell for their notion of manhood.  For him, Italy was a country of love and hate.  Men loved for passion and they died for love.  He thought that in Italy men dared to be themselves.  It would be interesting to know how he squared his adulation of Italian men with the fact that his hero, Napoleon, wiped the floor with them.

Stendhal was the image of the artist against the world, the bearer of a kind of self-imposed separation or alienation.  That masque may hide the most awful snobbery, but Stendhal suffered acutely from two lesions that beset men of France at that time and have done so since.  First, there was le peuple.  ‘I love the people, I hate their oppressors, but it would be a perpetual torture for me to live with the people…I had and I have still the most aristocratic tastes, I would do everything for the happiness of the people, but I would sooner, I believe, pass two weeks in every month in prison than live with shopkeepers.’ 

Then there was Napoleon – the man who said that the nemesis of France was a nation of shopkeepers.  (The business of shopkeeping may be prosaic, but is there anything else wrong with it?)  Stendhal wrote of one of his heroes: ‘For many years perhaps not an hour of his life had gone by without him telling himself that Bonaparte, a penniless and unknown lieutenant, had made himself ruler of the world with his sword.’  Would he have felt the same about Hitler when he was at the height of his powers?  Will the French ever get over the little Corsican?

Stendhal has at least something in common with Cervantes – and other writers like him.  His style was dry and spare.  He even said that before starting to write each day, he would read a page of the Code Napoléon in order to chasten or flatten out his language.  He sought to avoid describing dramatic moments in a dramatic manner.

I make every effort possible to appear dry.  I want to impose silence on my heart which imagines it has much to say.  I always tremble in case I may only have written a sigh when I wished to note down a truth.

As a result, Zola said that Stendhal was the father of the naturalistic school.  He is principally remembered for two novels, The Charterhouse of Parma and Scarlet and Black. 

The latter was based on a celebrated murder trial.  Somerset Maugham remarked that ‘Stendhal was more interested in himself than anyone else and is always the hero of his novels…Julien Sorel, the hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, is the kind of man Stendhal would have liked to be.  He made him attractive to women and successful in winning their love, as he himself would have given everything to be, and too seldom was.’  Well, there must be some limit to that notion – Sorel ends up being executed for murder. 

Following the plot of the murder trial, Sorel seduces the mother of children he is engaged to teach, ‘not because he is in love with her, but partly to revenge himself on the class she belongs to, and partly to satisfy his own pride.’  Then he does fall for her, but propriety means he has to give her up.  He goes to a seminary.  Then he gets a post with a real aristocrat.  The daughter of the Marquis falls for Sorel – because he was different to the aristocrats who surrounded her and who despised them as much as she did.  She also sensed his ambition and she saw his dark side. 

Maugham said: ‘Those two self-centred, irritable moody creatures scarcely know if they love with passion, or hate with frenzy.’  When the daughter gets pregnant, the Marquis has to consider consenting to the union.  At this point, the hero loses it.  He suggests the Marquis asks the prior mistress for a reference!  When she blows Sorel’s cover, he seeks final revenge.  You might think this sounds more like an Italian opera than a French novel, but Maugham says the novel had to end this way – had Sorel gone on to fame and fortune, he would have been a different hero in a different book – he would have been like Rastignac, the hero of Old Goriot.

Julien Sorel comes from peasant stock in a small rural town.  He has been abused by his father and brothers.  He sees the priesthood as the way out and up.  A priest teaches him Latin.  The socially aware mayor appoints him as a tutor to his three children.  The mayor instructed Julien to cease to have anything to do with his family friends as ‘their tone would not be suited to my children.’  He had married a wealthy heiress when she was young.  Madam de Rênal had been brought up by Sacred Heart nuns who hated the French because they were against the Jesuits.  She was only thirty.

She was a simple soul, who had never risen even to the point of criticising her husband, and admitting that he bored her.  She supposed, without telling herself so, that between husband and wife there could be no more tender relations.  She was especially fond of M. de Rênal when he spoke to her of his plans for the children, one of whom he intended to place in the army, the second on the bench, and the third in church.  In short, she found M. de Rênal a great deal less boring than any of the other men of her acquaintance.  This wifely opinion was justified.  The Mayor of Verrières owed his reputation for wit, and better still for good tone, to half a dozen pleasantries which he had inherited from an uncle…As he was in other respects most refined, except when the talk ran on money, he was regarded, and rightly, as the most aristocratic personage in Verrières…..

The flatteries of which she had been the precocious object, as the heiress to a large fortune, and a marked tendency towards passionate devotion, had bred in her an attitude towards life that was wholly inward.  With an outward show of the most perfect submission, and a self-suppression which the husbands of Verrières used to quote as an example to their wives….her inner life was in fact dictated by the most lofty disdain.

Well, there you have the dry style and fierce psychological insight of Stendhal – and an insight into the wreckage that would almost certainly follow if she fell for the tutor.

The second part of the novel deals with the aristocracy.  These people look down on anyone not descended from a Crusader (apparently forgetting that the Crusaders lost.)  It is a world of mental stagnation and frightful boredom.

There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns, no blue riband that can prevail against a drawing-room so constituted.  The smallest living idea seemed an outrage.  Despite good tone, perfect manners, the desire to be agreeable, boredom was written upon every brow.  The young men who came to pay their respects, afraid to speak of anything that might lead to their being suspected of thinking, afraid to reveal some forbidden reading, became silent after a few elegantly phrased sentences on Rossini and the weather.

Here are the aspirations of the Marquise de La Mole.

Baron de La Joumate was a chilly creature with expressionless features.  He was small, thin, ugly, he spent all his time at the Chateau, and, as a rule he had nothing to say about anything.  His speech revealed his mind.  Madame de La Mole would have been passionately happy, for the first time in her life, if she could have secured him as a husband for her daughter.

What a drab, cruel world.  Barry Humphries and Clive James would have liked this writing, but is it any wonder that adultery was the order of the day?  And it is no surprise that the daughter would be ripe for plucking by the hero.

In having an affair with Sorel, Mathilde is, in the words of the author, outraging her caste.

‘If, with his poverty, Julien had been noble, my love would be nothing more than a piece of vulgar folly, an unfortunate marriage; it would lack that element which characterises great passion; the immensity of the difficulty to be overcome and the dark uncertainty of the issue’.

Her brother sees Julien differently.

Beware of that young man who has so much energy…if the Revolution comes again, he will have us all guillotined.

Here is how this dry writer describes the end of his hero.

The bad air of the cell was becoming intolerable to Julien; happily, on the day on which they told him he was to die, a lovely sun enlivened nature, and Julien was in a courageous mood.  To walk in the open air was to him a delicious sensation, as to walk on land might be to a sailor who has been long at sea.  Well, everything is going well, he told himself, I don’t lack courage.  Never had that head been so poetic as when it was about to fall.  The sweet moments he had passed in the woods of Vergy crowded upon his memory with the utmost force.  Everything took place simply decently, and on his side without affectation.

It takes nerve to write as sparely as that, but you can see why Stendhal had such appeal for the later American writer named Ernest Hemingway.  He would take aspects of the hero of the other great Stendhal novel as a model for parts of Farewell to Arms.

For many, now, the passion of this 19^th century melodrama will be way over the top; a political sub-plot in the second half of the novel comes from and goes to nowhere; then with a rapid change of pace, the whole deal unfolds in three pages; some might ask whether the hero has any heart at all; and it’s a bit rough to be executed for murder when the victim is alive and begging for mercy. 

But, boy, this guy could write, and this novel is a stand-out.  And fans of the film La reine Margot will recall that the de La Mole family had form with the severed heads of lovers.

Like a lot of the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, this one is a study in caste in France after Napoleon.  They make you wonder why the French bothered to have a revolution at all.

Four Corners last night reminded me that fifty years ago, it was the ALP that was stricken by faction, especially in Victoria.  Now it is the Liberal Party, especially in New South Wales.  The sitting MP who was attacked is a very decent woman whom I would vote for.  The rest are mongrels.  No sane person would wish to go anywhere near any of them.  It was further evidence of what we know – the party system in general, and the two-party system in particular, is in deep trouble.  What follows comes from a draft of a book about what is wrong in government and business in Australia.

And in Australia the case of the Liberal Party is even more fraught.  They usually govern in conjunction – in ‘coalition’ – with the National Party.  That party used to represent those in primary industry and contained some of the world’s best practice agrarian socialists.  (Most of our tax laws were written for the relief of farmers.)  Just what that party stands for now is a little like the quest for the real presence.  But what is now clear is that this ménage ȃ trois is very heavily on the nose for about two out of three Australians.

It is not just these two parties that involve coalitions – each of the two major parties increasingly looks like a coalition of factions in itself.  The Victorian ALP used to be the most notorious for being riven  by faction.  That mantle now looks to have been taken by the New South Wales Liberal Party.  Factions of one kind or another are inevitable in any political or social grouping – a school council, a club committee, a student’s representative body, the management of a large law firm, the Royal College of Surgeons, or the office holders in a trade union. 

But they are also poison to outsiders.  They bring images of manipulators, puppeteers in the Godfather, or the most notorious ‘faceless men.’  There is something inherently sinister about factions.  And common experience suggests that those who have the time and inclination to go in for this back-room back-stabbing hardly ever represent the general feelings of the overall members of the relevant body.  Most people are not so zealous about such affairs – and that is one reason why they are not going into political parties any more.  If you say of an Australian that he or she is a political animal, you might be asked to step outside.  Most Australians would rather not get their hands dirty, that way or at all, and they leave the field to the enthusiasts, the extremists – and the branch-stackers.  And it will only get worse for the major parties if good people decide to invest their time and energy in the independents.

There is something inherently dangerous and hence sinister  about any kind of division within groups of people.  The result tends to be what we call faction.  The Oxford English Dictionaryis almost colourful:

A party in the state or in any community or association.  Always with the imputation of selfish or mischievous ends or unscrupulous methods…..Factious spirit or action; party strife or intrigue; dissension.

It is the dissension that is fundamental.  And that leads immediately to an allegation of disoyalty.  And that is the most venomous charge that can be levelled against a member of any group.  In religion, it is a charge of heresy that in other times saw people burned at the stake.  And that is the reason why when the English were developing the Westminster system of parliamentary and cabinet government in the 18^th century, the term ‘party’ was anathema.  His Majesty’s ‘loyal opposition’ was a contradiction in terms.  It is worth recalling therefore that our system of two party parliamentary government arose out of heresy.

Common experience suggests that division and therefore faction are more likely to arise in a group that wants to effect radical change, or in one that has lost its way.  People in business know that the whispering starts when business is slow, and experience suggests that faction is more active in a party in opposition than one in government. 

And let us return to the point that experience suggests that those who have the time and inclination to drive the agenda – stated or merely aspired to by some – of a group of people may not reflect the views of the members of that group as a whole  (In my five years at Melbourne University in the 60’s, I frequently wondered who sprinkled what on the Weeties of those in the Student’s Representatives.  From time to time I would experience similar quizzicality at the Victorian Bar.)

It was all there on TV.  The worst is Alex Hawke.  A boy wonder who has never had a real job and who is there for one reason only – Alex Hawke.  He even looks shifty – like the Inquisitor of El Greco.  He shows why people turn away from the major parties and look to independents – and why that gets up the noses of other people who have never had a real job.

Liberal Party – ALP – Factions – Hawke – Four Corners