Author: Geoffrey Gibson

MY TOP SHELF – 25

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

25

LETTERS FROM A WALKING TOUR

John Keats (1818)

Grolier Club new York, 1995, limited edition of 225 copies; silk covered boards with tobacco morocco label embossed in gold, in slip case with marled paper; paper specially hand made by the Cardinal Mill in the Czech Republic; with portrait of Keats, facsimile of one of the letters, and map all tipped in separately.

All I hope is that we may not be taken for excisemen in this whiskey country.  We are generally up about 5 walking before breakfast, and we complete our 20 miles before dinner.

In June 1818, John Keats and a friend set out on walking tour of the English Lake District and Scotland.  He was twenty-two and had just published his second book of poetry, Endymion.  We saw with Milton that intelligence does not preclude art.  It is just as well – Keats, one of the great romantic poets, shows an astonishing IQ in prose.  This is from the first letter:

The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance……I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little.  I never forgot my stature so completely; I live in the eye, and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest.

Hazlitt, too, was very bright, but this difference between them is very revealing.  The English come across some Scottish dancers – ‘they kickit and jumpit…..and whiskit, and fleckit, and toed it and goed it, and twirld it    tattooing the floor like mad.’

I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling.  There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw, some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth.  I never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier.  This is what I like better than scenery.  I fear our continued moving from place to place will prevent our becoming learned in village affairs; we are mere creatures of rivers, lakes, and mountains.

Could Wordsworth have said that?  Rivers, lakes and mountains are just fine, but there is more to us than fire, water, stone and air – and it was not just Bishop Berkeley who may have said that they are nothing to us unless we are there to see and feel them.  They may as well be on the other side of the moon.

The dialect on the neighbouring shores of Scotland and Ireland is much the same – yet I can perceive a great difference in the nations from the chambermaid at this …. inn kept by Mr Kelly.  She is fair, kind, and ready to laugh, because she is out of the horrible dominion of the Scotch kirk.  A Scotch girl stands in terrible awe of the elders – poor little Susannahs.  They will scarcely laugh – they are greatly to be pitied, and the kirk is greatly to be damned.  These kirkmen have done Scotland good (query?): they have made men, women, old men, young men, old women and young women, boys, girls and infants all careful – so that they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers…..These kirkmen have done Scotland harm: they have banished puns and laughing and kissing…..I….go on to remind you of the fate of Burns.  Poor unfortunate fellow – his disposition was southern.  How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self-defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.  No man in such matters will be content with the experience of others.  It is true that out of sufferance there is no greatness, no dignity; that in the most abstracted pleasure there is no lasting happiness: yet who would not like to discover over and again that Cleopatra was a gypsy, Helen a rogue, and Ruth a deep one?……We live in a barbarous age. I would sooner be a wild deer than a girl under the dominion of the kirk, and I would sooner be a wild hog than be the occasion of a poor creature’s penance before those execrable elders.

What a plea do we have here for suffering humanity!  Let this text be nailed to the door of every gloomy kirkman or other prelate.

And he was still so young, and would die so young.

When I was a schoolboy I thought a pure woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some of them slept, although she knew it not.  I have no right to expect more than their reality.  I thought them ethereal above men; I find them perhaps equal.  Great by comparison is very small…..for after all I do think more of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.

Here is a candour about sex that the crusty Anglo-Saxon will let go straight through to the ‘keeper’.

Near the end of the last of these letters, this great poet offers an insight into what drives this fiery romantic imagination in a way that recalls one of his best known poems and is an enduring testament to our crumbling humanity.

…..went up Ben Nevis, and NB came down again.  Sometimes when I am rather tired, I lean rather languidly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her palfrey in passing, approach me – with her saddle bags – and give me – a dozen or two capital roast beef sandwiches.

There, dear Reader, you have the whole secret, heretofore hidden, of that great movement in art known as the Romantic Rebellion.  A decent round of sandwiches – roast beef, of course.

I have three editions of Keats’ letters, including a fine old edition of the complete letters owned and signed by Henry Cabot Lodge.  This present edition is the most luxuriant book in the hands of all those on this shelf – the paper is hand-made and rough cut at the bottom and the sides, and the facsimile letter, map, and portrait help bring the letters alive – not that they need all that much help.

Keats followed Shakespeare all his life.  He turned to Shakespeare for precisely those reasons that others turn to Scripture – for inspiration, for guidance, for discipline, and for faith.  He was to tell Severn that he could not ‘believe your book – the bible’.  In truth, Shakespeare was his bible.

The father of Keats was involved in keeping an inn.  That was enough in England then, as it is in Australia now, to dint the ideas of inclusiveness of some people.  Keats had to live with this snobbery – Shelley, who was not immune from the complaint, said that it killed him.

It is hard to imagine the idol of Keats as a snob.  It is not just that Shakespeare had to spend so much of his time with actors, as that he had to know what the crowd wanted and would pay to see, and he had to be able to characterise those who made up that crowd.  Shakespeare loved creating characters at the bottom of the ladder.   He went for women like Cleopatra, Helen and Ruth – Helen had nothing on Cressida.

Keats saw Edmund Kean play in at least the roles of Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Timon.  When he wrote his own play Otho, there were over forty borrowings from seventeen of the plays of Shakespeare.  When he published his most popular poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he did so under the name Caviare, a reference to Hamlet.  When he died in Rome, he had his seven volume set of Shakespeare by his bed. He had acquired a tasselled portrait of Shakespeare on the Isle of Wight and this, too, was with him at the end.  It was as if the two were on speaking terms. When Mrs Hunt told him he would be invited to a party for Shakespeare’s birthday, Keats told his brothers that ‘Shakespeare would stare to see me there’.

Matthew Arnold made a comment which may remind you of how religious people describe the condition of one of their faithful.  He said that Keats ‘is with Shakespeare’.  Arnold said that ‘…the younger poet’s work was not imitative indeed of Shakespeare, but Shakespearean because its expression has that rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master’.

But the observation of Keats about Shakespeare for which we best remember him comes from a letter to his brothers:  ‘At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’  You might think that this is just the start of a mature view of the world, but the observation might usefully be put up in bright lights on the rear wall of every court in the country.  It is the foundation of tolerance, and its absence marks the beginning of intolerance.

Shelley waited until Keats was dead to defend him.  He then spoke of ‘A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift’ fleeing ‘Far from those carrion kites that scream below’.  It is no surprise that T S Eliot, who could not have written a poem of the natural charm of those of Keats, said that he was intent on analysing not the degree of greatness of Keats but its kind, ‘and its kind is manifested more clearly in his letters than his poems’.  Rather like squirting the score of the Liebestod from Tristan with an antiseptic syringe.

If you have dragged yourself up the Grampians in Victoria and obtained an exhausted view of one hundred feet of mist, you will recognize a lot in these letters.  One difference is that Keats thought that twenty miles a day was about par.  Another was that having gained the top of Ben Nevis, he could punch out a sonnet on the spot.

I look into the chasms, and a shroud

Vaprous doth hide them; just so much I wist

Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead,

And there is sullen mist; even so much

Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread

Before the earth beneath me; even such,

Even so vague is man’s sight of himself.

It is hard, off hand, to think of anyone with a more clear-eyed view of the world than poor little John Keats.  If only someone could tell him that his name was not writ on water.

MY TOP SHELF – 24 – THE TRIAL

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MY TOP SHELF

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

24

THE TRIAL

Franz Kafka

Franklin Library, 1977; full grey morocco; gilt titles and humped spine; moiré endpapers in black with black ribbon; gilt edged paper in text; translated by W and E Muir; and illustrated by Phero Thomas.

Someone must have traduced Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

How do you feel when your bank bounces a cheque – usually in favour of your secretary or your landlord or, even better, your golf club – and you get a computer generated letter – long after the affront has been administered to the payee of the cheque – and which does not name any actual person in the bank but which bears an anonymous squiggle over the printed title ‘Team Leader, Dishonour Team’?  Just think of that – your bank has a whole team dedicated to dishonouring you and the rest of its customers.  Does the team get to march to a tune?  Do they have their own guernsey?

Or, you get another computer driven letter that contains the name of no real person. It is almost entirely incomprehensible, but it is alleging that you owe your government a large amount of money for tax.   You correspond with computers and you cannot get any sense from them.  You sense that they do not know what the law is and that they do not care about you.  But the one thing you do understand is that they say that the law stands behind their assessment and says that it is right and that you have the onus of proving them wrong.  Are not really bad criminals better treated by the law?

Or you live in a regime where you get fined for driving offences that are detected by computers and notified to you by computers and which carry points which are tallied by computers until you get enough to lose your licence – by computers.  Computers then notify you that you have scored enough points to have lost your licence and that accordingly you are not allowed to drive.  You seek to challenge that decision – if decision it is – and the bureaucracy showers incomprehensible paper all over you.  It refers to an ‘Infringements Court’.  Do people really believe that there is such a court?  In the meantime the law is that you have been deprived of your licence and therefore your livelihood by a process untouched by a human hand, much less by judicial hands.

These instances of contemporary absurdity – of how we are losing our way and our rights – are called Kafkaesque.  Franz Kafka was a German speaking Czech Jew who trained in law but who engaged in office work to support his writing.  His best known work is The Trial.  It is set in an indeterminate time and place and it follows the course of an absurdly unreal legal process brought against its hero who is named Joseph K.  It begins with the text set out above and it does not relent.

The events of the day somehow lead K to be attracted to another tenant, Fraulein Burstner.  ‘K … rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water ….  He wanted to call Fraulein Burstner by her first name, but he did not know what it was.’  There is a recurring streak of anonymity and unreality.

When he gets to see the court, he enters a door directed by a young woman with sparkling black eyes who is washing children’s clothes in a tub.  He felt like he was going into a meeting hall.  When he got before the crowd he said:  ‘Whether I am late or not, I am here now.’  This was met with a burst of applause.  K thought that ‘these people are easy to win over’.  K tells the Examining Magistrate that ‘I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption’.

There are nightmare elements throughout.  The uncle of Joseph K refers him to an old lawyer.  The lawyer is ill but agrees to see Joseph. The lawyer is looked after by a nurse called Leni who is attracted to men generally, and accused men in particular.  Leni immediately propositions K, and not without effect.  The lawyer knows more about K’s case than K, because he is a lawyer who moves in legal circles and has discussed this case with his colleagues.  In this system, the accused is never told the charge.  Sometimes they try to guess what it might be by looking at the course of the interrogations.  ‘In such circumstances the Defence was naturally in a very ticklish and difficult position.  Yet that, too, was intentional.  For the Defence was not actually countenanced by the Law.’  (The third question put to Galileo on his second visit to the Inquisition was: ‘Why do you think you are here?’)

There are ranks of lawyers.  At the bottom are pettifogging lawyers.  They are all over the place.  At the top are the truly great lawyers.  No one has ever met one of those.  The most important part of the role of the lawyer was counsel’s personal connection with officials of the court.  No client ever dismissed a lawyer – such a thing was not done.  An accused man, once having briefed a lawyer, must stick to him whatever happened.  It is rather like marriage, but more binding.

Joseph K is so preoccupied with the process – which in no way resembles what those in the common law would call a trial – that his work at the bank is affected and a deputy manager is moving in to poach his clients.  K has to keep customers waiting, and he sometimes gets some satisfaction from the fact that others have to be kept waiting.  It is a way of stressing the hierarchical nature of the world of Joseph K.  (When will our computers be programmed to be sweeter to those with money?)

Titorelli is a painter with influence.  He asks the question that criminal lawyers generally avoid:  ‘Are you innocent?’  When he gets an affirmative answer, Titorelli says, ‘I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court indulges and in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up.’  K asked the painter how he came into contact with the judges.  ‘That was quite simple ….I inherited the connection.  My father was the court painter before me.  It’s a hereditary post.  New painters are of no use for it…..For every judge insists on being painted as the great old judges were painted, and no one can do that but me.’  Titorelli thinks therefore that he is unassailable.  He assures K that ‘as you are completely innocent, this is the line I shall take’. But then the painter goes on to give K the bad news:  ‘I have never encountered one case of definite acquittal.’  The best that K can hope for is ‘ostensible acquittal, or postponement’.  ‘Ostensible acquittal’ is a masterpiece of evasion. In such cases it is just as possible for the acquitted man to go straight home from the court and find officers already there waiting to arrest him again.  The very fruitful meeting with the painter ends with the painter selling K a few paintings.

The lawyer says that he has discussed K’s case with a judge who does not think much of.  K:  ‘But for all they know, the proceedings have not yet even commenced.’  ‘At a certain stage of the proceedings there was an old tradition that a bell must be rung.’  It was perfectly possible that K’s case has not reached that stage even yet.

The last chapter is called ‘The End.’  It begins:

On the evening before K’s thirty-first birthday –   it was about nine o’clock, the time when a hush falls on the streets – two men came to his lodging.  They were in frock coats, pallid and plump, with top hats which were apparently irremovable.  After some exchange of formalities regarding precedence at the front door, they repeated the same ceremony more elaborately before K’s door.

Later K says to himself: ‘Tenth-rate old actors they send for me ….They want to finish me off cheaply ….What theatre are you playing at?’  He was repelled by the painful cleanliness of their faces.  They are mechanical and anonymous as the warders who came to arrest K.  They take him to a quarry and his last words are: ‘Like a dog!’

The end is unseemly, but not nearly as unseemly as the millions of ends inflicted by the secret police of Hitler or Stalin in ways and circumstances that Franz Kafka could never have dreamed of.

Orlando Figges informs us that on 28 July 1938, two young girls, Nelly and Angelina, were arrested without notice with their mother, Zinaida, by two NKVD operatives.  Their father had been arrested nine months before, and not seen since.  The girls were told that they would not see their mother again and would be sent to different children’s homes.  When they left, the girls could see the NKVD beating up their mother.  Unlike Joseph K., Zinaida was told of the charge against her.  She was charged with failing to denounce her husband.  The State said its subjects owed more allegiance to it than to their husbands or wives.  She was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp – the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland.  She was nursing a baby at the time.  Could the singular mind of Franz Kafka have comprehended such denials of the essence of our humanity?

Kafka wrote at a time when people spoke of the death of God, meaning peoples’ loss of faith in God.  What we now see is not a voluntary loss of faith, but a mandatory placing of faith.  After Einstein, physics passed beyond the understanding of all but a few.  Most of us have to take the physical world on faith.  It is like Darwin – and that ask is too big for some.  It is the same now the way computers control so many parts of our lives.  They add to our sense of loss of independence, to our sense of helplessness.

This novel is very different to the novels of the great George Orwell warning us of the loss of humanity under totalitarian regimes.  The Trial is more like an opera or a tone poem.  It is very twentieth century.  Think of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck or Lulu, or The Makropoulos Case of Janacek, or The Chairs of Ionesco.

The Trial delivers slashing insight into the frailty of the human condition.  As it happens, the nightmare vision of this artist may not be realized again under dictators like Stalin and Hitler, but more simply by the accretion of the processes that we have now mastered, as a result of which the trial system keeps getting longer and longer, lawyers keep getting more and more expensive, and the law itself just gets more and more incomprehensible, and the descent in each is completely assured and computer-assisted.  Did Kafka the lawyer see this, or is it merely implicit in the vision of Kafka the artist?  You will recall that great lawyers were like acquittals – they had never been seen.

As is commonly the case with great artists, the vision of Franz Kafka was eerily prophetic.

Passing Bull 196 – Anecdotal evidence

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This phrase is common, but I am not sure what it means.  What evidence is not anecdotal?  I see something happen and I report it.  This anecdote becomes part of the account of the life or lives of those involved.  A biography is just a collection of anecdotes.  History is just a collection of biographies.  By what alchemy of certification, statistics, graphs, corroboration or repetition does the evidence cease to be anecdotal?  If you were walking around a volcano, and a local said that he had seen signs of imminent eruption, would you dismiss this evidence as anecdotal?

Bloopers

Count Fedor Tolstoy was related to the great novelist.

Born in 1782, he joined the…Life Guards where he soon made a reputation for himself as a fire-eater duellist – he was said to have killed eleven men in duels in the course of his life – and card-sharp.  In 1803, he was a member of an embassy to Japan taken by Admiral Krusenstiern on his circumnavigation of the world.  Tolstoy made himself so obnoxious on board that Krusenstiern abandoned him on one of the Aleutian Islands – together with a pet female ape, which he may later have eaten.  (Pushkin, T J Binyon, Harper Collins, 2002, 96).

It can happen in the best of families, but either way, the ape was hard done by.

Here and there – Is Hamlet a tragedy?

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At a recent course on Shakespeare at Madingley Hall, Cambridge – on All’s Well, Measure for Measure, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – the tutor in his introduction said that Hamlet was a victim of circumstances.  This led me to reflect that Hamlet was the only hero of the big four tragedies who did not morally collapse before his death.  Macbeth was the victim of ambition, and a young wife who could not go the distance.  Othello was made vulnerable to insult and suspicion by slapping the Venetian Establishment in the face by marrying above his station and outside his race.  (He is so obviously open to manipulation that I can no longer watch the play – or the opera.)  By no later than line 141 of Act 1 Scene 1 in King Lear, we know that the weakness and heat of this choleric old man will lead to his unmanning and betrayal and to death and disaster.  (‘Come not between the Dragon and his wrath.’  You might think that’s ripe, but it is just the start.)  But we see no such disintegration in Hamlet.  Is Hamlet then a tragic figure, the hero of a tragedy?

What does that word ‘tragedy’ mean?

Drama dealing with serious themes, ending in the suffering or death of one or more of the principal characters…The tragic hero should be of high worth or standing, but not perfect: a tragic flaw, weakness or transgression…or an excess of arrogant ambition…leads to downfall.  The effect of the inevitable disaster (catastrophe) on the spectators is the purgation or cleansing (catharsis) of the emotion of pity and terror through what they have seen.  (The Oxford Companion to the English Language.)

In the still magisterial Shakespearian Tragedy, A C Bradley said:

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait…is fatal to him.  To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give.  He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin….In Hamlet, there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected….

We are, then, looking for a flaw in our hero that may prove to be fatal.  (‘Tragic trait’ does look a bit circular.)

What was Hamlet’s fatal flaw?  He is accused of delay and indecision.  Bradley turned this into a ‘neglect of duty’- the injunction by the ghost to revenge the murder of Hamlet’s father.  These allegations are frequently linked to the suggestion that Hamlet is rendered incapable of action because he thinks too much.  (This is a little curious.  When Caesar says Cassio spends too much time considering ‘the deeds of men’, he is giving the most withering assessment of the smiling assassin in our letters: Julius Caesar, 1,2, 198-213).

Is it fair to suggest such a flaw in Hamlet?  In my view, the suggestion is as unfounded as it is unfair.

First, it is wrong to say that Hamlet delayed.  The ghost could hardly have expected his son to race off to Gertrude and the alleged murderer writhing drunkenly and in flagrante in ‘the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed.’  (We may be forgiven for having difficulty seeing Derek Jacobi writhing with Julie Christie in any case at all.)  Even taking the ghost at face value, Hamlet had to seek corroboration and to count the numbers. This playwright was after all the most consummate political analyst the world has known. Sulky young Hamlet could not simply ask the court of Denmark to accept that a young son justifiably upset by his mother’s want of decorum was justified in killing the king – that adds the count of treason to that of murder – because he had the word of his father’s ghost that uncle had murdered dad.*

The second point is the more substantive.  To the extent that Hamlet hesitated to obey his father’s ghost, it was because the ghost was asking him to commit murder.  Murder is a crime both at law and morally.  It does not cease to be a crime simply because it is carried out to avenge a killing.  On the contrary, that motive makes the crime morally worse.

The first object of our law was to end the vicious cycle of revenge.  On the second and third pages of the biblical The Common Law of Oliver Wendell Holmes, we find:

It is commonly known that the early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance.  Modern writers have thought that the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.

(‘German law’ includes that brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons and therefore our law.)

What the ghost was asking Hamlet to do was to commit the crime of murder and by so doing take Denmark back about one thousand years to the Dark Age and to another cycle of vengeance and endless civil unrest.  That is why, as Tony Tanner pointed out, Hamlet is so different from the Oresteia. The intervening two millennia had witnessed the birth and acceptance in Europe of Christianity. Hamlet pauses for a simple reason – he has a conscience, a word that keeps cropping up in this would-be revenge play.

That being so, the wonder is not that Hamlet hesitated, but that he even thought about murdering his uncle for revenge.  And, as we know, he never executed the command of the ghost.  He finally kills Claudius for killing his mother and himself.

Let us test our conclusion in three ways.

First, we know from his swift and merciless despatch of the very unlovely Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Hamlet has no trouble in killing people where the homicide is morally justifiable – which it is in self-defence. (‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment./ They are not near my conscience.’  5, 2, 56-57.)  Here was no neurotic intellectual incapable of decisive, lethal action.  (You may recall that that hypocritical young hot-head, Laertes, expressly renounces ‘conscience and grace’ and dares damnation: 4, 5, 132-136.  Whoever expected Hamlet to act like that?)  Nor was Hamlet slow to accept a duel with Laertes.

Next, look at the models that the author of the play offers his hero for those who act strongly to exact revenge. I might seek to summarize what I have said before on this.

Pyrrhus was the son of Achilles. He murdered the King of Troy, old Priam, to avenge the death of his father. Hamlet was so fond of this story that he knew a lot of it by heart. There was one speech from this play that Hamlet ‘chiefly loved’ (2.2.456). He recites about a dozen lines about ‘Priam’s slaughter’ and then hands over to the Player King. Achilles may or may not have been a homicidal maniac, but he was certainly a manic homicide. Hamlet had nothing – nothing at all – in common with either of them.  They are not just worlds apart, but millennia apart.

The second model available to Hamlet may have been slightly more appealing, and for us more threatening. Fortinbras (a derivative of ‘strong-arm’) leads a Norwegian army against the Poles over a worthless bit of dirt. This sends Hamlet into a whirl of romantic bulldust. He refers to this ‘delicate and tender prince … with divine ambition puffed’ (4.4.48-9). (‘Divine ambition’ is, I suggest, a contradiction in terms.) Hamlet then switches over to a sickening paean to war:

… Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor’s at the stake … (4.4.53-6)

Men were being commanded to go to their death over a useless piece of earth because ‘honor’ was at stake. Hamlet steadies himself and then romances that twenty thousand men ‘face imminent death for … a fantasy and trick of fame’ (4.4.61). If that kind of thinking ever had any attraction – and it could never have had any place in the thinking of a true follower of the Sermon on the Mount – it went west at Gallipoli, on the Western Front, and in Vietnam, and in Iraq.

No, Hamlet could not get help from either of these two heroes to resolve his moral quandary.

Finally, let us look at the heroes of two tragedies, Macbeth and Othello.  Both are obviously flawed, and as a result both commit murder.  For that we condemn them. Are we to condemn Hamlet because he does the opposite and refuses to commit murder?  You will recall that Bradley spoke of ‘something [that] is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give’.  That is precisely the case with Hamlet – he is simply not able to commit murder to revenge his father’s death.  That incapacity is anything but a flaw – just as the incapacity of Lay Macbeth to extinguish her humanity is anything but a flaw.

Hamlet is not, then, a tragedy in the accepted sense.  I agree that he was not a victim of himself.  That is why, I think, Hamlet plays more like a spy thriller of John Le Carré than a tragedy of Euripides.

Does any of this matter?  Of course not.  Labels are the demons of pin-striped minds.  William Shakespeare made a good living out of entertaining people like you and me.  It’s just that he did it in ways that still leave us smitten with awe.  (Emerson said that when he read Shakespeare, he actually shaded his eyes.)  And it also just happens that Hamlet is I think the most popular play that he or anyone else has ever put on our stage.  And may God bless him for that!

*Going to bed with the man who murdered your husband was politically sensitive when Hamlet was first put on.  Protestants charged Mary Queen of Scots with doing just that, and, as ever, she was not her own best witness.

Here and there – The meaning of affront –and the real face of Avis

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The Road to Serfdom held some attraction for many university students in my time.  It looked at what George Orwell called Big Brother and what Ken Kesey called the Combine.   Hayek said that we were just heading for the status of serfs.  But, with time, the book sounded too doctrinaire for people not given to dogma, and it was preached by people whose company we may not have enjoyed – Andrew Bolt territory.

The following note that I sent my daughters while travelling in Scotland – on a round the world trip – will show just how far down that road to serfdom we have travelled.

It was a good short flight on time from Cardiff to Glasgow. I got clobbered with 40 pounds for each bag which a very capable agent assured me had been covered, but I know how predatory these small airlines are.

I finally made my way to the Avis desk to pick up my car. I had corresponded with  them about the booking – at some length.   All I wanted  was a good clear way for me to get on the A82 to the highlands.  I was getting on with Ann like a house on fire – comparing accents and so on.  She is finally about to hand over the keys, and then says, dead-pan: ‘Mr Gibson.  I’m sorry but I cannot let you have this car.  You have been banned’ – or words to that effect. 

I don’t know that I have felt anything like this before.  Among other things, I had just travelled around Wales for two days in an Avis car.  There was no reason.  Just a sign on the computer.  I saw her pointing to it with colleagues.  I suggested she call for a manager – but I instinctively felt that no one in a yellow jacket would override the computer.  While waiting for the manager, I shopped around.  Hertz said they had no car available.  Thrifty said they answered to the same computer. 

Finally, I got a very nice people at Europcar and their system did not disqualify  me.  They were very efficient and capable and their manager, a fine lady of Glasgow,  felt empowered to authorise my hire.  She was  a genuinely decent lady; the young man on the desk, Roddy, plays loch in rugby.   He was terrific.   My first credit card bounced – probably because Avis had not taken off the Cardiff deposit.  Thank God, the computer allowed the second.  In the name of God, I had spent time the night before in Cardiff to make sure ample funds were available on each credit card.

Well, I have a very adequate VW Polo that has got me here in comfort, and I will restructure my trip to take the car back to Glasgow.  That inconvenience is relatively slight.  Could I have been banged up in a Glasgow boozer for days?

But I cannot even begin to tell you how unsettling this has been. 

I think we are going to the dogs – as my old man used to say.

It is very unsettling.

What Orwell and Kesey described was the sense of powerlessness of the victims of the State entities that they described.  Orwell’s hero is crushed into total submission.  Kesey’s hero is despatched to eternity as an act of kindness.  One word for the result is ‘unmanned.’

That is how you feel when you deal with someone employed by a big corporation that rules its own like a very firm government.  If you are into labels, try fascist.  And it all gets so much worse when the whole corporation has handed over the keys to what might have been called  its soul to a machine in the sky – a deus ex machina – called a computer.  And no one – no one – is authorised to query, challenge much less override the computer.  The hand-over of power – the surrender – is complete.  And so is the victory of Big Brother and the Combine.  And we are left unmanned.

But the powerlessness of Ann was only part of the story.  Indeed, in at least one sense, Ann and I shared a powerlessness.  One of the primary aims of a vicious ruler is to make the subjects complicit in the viciousness.  That way, the minions get locked in.  Just look at how Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco went about stitching up their underlings (and reflect on the obsession of Donald Trump with personal loyalty of the kind that Hitler extracted, even from previously decent officers of the army).

Ann is, I fear, becoming complicit.  Possibly the most frightening part of this episode came when I was sitting down in something resembling shock, and Ann was standing and  looking down at me, and then Ann – yes, that  nice, kind Ann with the Glaswegian accent – gave me a look of suspicion.  For a moment, I could have been looking at an East German guard on Checkpoint Charlie.  ‘Are you sure there is nothing in your past with Avis, Geoffrey?’  Or words to that effect – words that Robespierre could have drooled over at the height of the Terror.  Suspicion is a primary tool of trade of the terrorist.  Robespierre said ‘Feel my fear’ and ‘Who among us is beyond suspicion?’  And Ann is being reduced to that level.

What the gods of the machine want to do with us is to strip us of our humanity.  And we are all now becoming complicit by handing the keys to ourselves to our mobile phones.  I was appalled in both Manhattan and Wales to see nearly everyone on the street looking at their phones. People at the Frick could not put them down.  (What about a selfie with my old mate Rembers, Digger?)  The plague has even reached us here in the Highlands.  At Ballaculish, I ran into a very handsome couple from Vancouver who looked like they might be on a honeymoon – if people still do those things.  Then I saw them in the bar – each immersed in his or her own phone.

In the name of God, what kind of world is this?  This device does not just murder minds and manners – it annihilates any sense of grace altogether.  All that bull about bringing people together from super brats like Zuckerberg is all just part of one grand lie.

The medical profession has astonished me with the care and professional attention with which it is treating a cancer that a few years ago would certainly have killed me.  I have just experienced another instance of professional care and plain human kindness deep in the Highlands.  What I must now do is to respond by fighting another form of cancer that does not terminate life but certainly terminates decency.

To return to Avis.   They promised to lend me a car in return for my promise to pay them.  That is a called a contract in our law – and the law of the US.  I travelled and made arrangements in reliance on that contract.  I am travelling around the world, and the visit to the Highlands was the principal reason for the whole trip.  Then Avis said ‘We made that promise, but we reserve the right to renege on any basis at all – including the colour of your skin or the way you wear a head scarf.’  What do we care if you are degraded and humiliated in public and if the last visit to the land of your ancestors is ruined?  Our only God is Mammon.  You – poor fellow – just fall under the heading of collateral damage.  Just look at the business model of our President.

Then there is the problem of a cartel operating to interfere with contractual relations.   At heart we are dealing with a wrong that our law does not distinctly recognise as one of outrage.  But, as Sir Frederick Pollock pointed out many years ago, our law has long permitted juries to deal with the arrogance of the haughty by the measure of the damages that they, on behalf of their country, award to the victim.  Putting to one side my personal circumstances, I find it hard to imagine a better case to test the limits of this wrong at law.

I do not know why Avis reneged.  They could not or would not tell me.  That inflames the wrong.  These people are like Richard III – they murder while they smile.  As the lady from Europe Car said, it may have been a parking ticket from ten years ago.

I have a recollection of hiring a car in Oxford about ten years ago for a fly fishing lesson.  I cannot recall the hirer, but I have a kind of recollection of correspondence that was (1) false (2) insulting and (3) extortionate – criminally so.  If it was that kind of thing on the mind of the computer, Avis is adding infamy to criminality.  Whatever incident the computer had in mind – it may just be wrong – it must look to be as mean and petty and spiteful as you could imagine.  But it does not matter – whatever it was, it cannot justify this frightful breach of promise.  We made our laws to shield the innocent,  not the arrogant.

About forty years ago, Aunty (our ABC) made rude remarks about a very important Royal Commission team.  These wronged lawyers then sued for libel.  And in cold blood they entered judgment by default.  When I moved to set aside the judgment, the late Neil McPhee, QC sought to hold on to the judgment by saying that we – the ABC – had no defence.  I well remember the relish with which Neil looked at me across the bar table and said ‘The only possible defence is truth and if Mr Gibson does make that plea, this court room would not be big enough to hold the damages.’

I think it may be time to offer that option to Mr Avis and his imperative computer.

Here and there – Tim Storrier

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THE ART OF THE OUTSIDER

Catherine Lumby

Craftsman House, 2000; fully illustrated; here with slip case.

About twenty or more years ago, I attended the opening of a swank art gallery in that swish part of Armadale in Melbourne that treats of antiques.  The person who was advertised to open the gallery was one of its featured artists, Tim Storrier.  When I got to the gallery I passed a room with an open door and four or five people in it.  I did not know what Storrier looked like but I felt instinctively it was a well-dressed man a few years younger than me who looked like a well presented squatter – in the old country, a squire of the county.  Although apparently content within himself, he did not look all that thrilled to be where he was and doing what was asked of him.  Somehow, I got the impression that you might be wiped off like a dirty bum if you put a foot out of line.  One might even get the kind of put-down that one might get at ‘School.’  Well, the artist commenced his remarks with words to this effect: ‘Asking an artist to open an art gallery is a little like asking a cow to open an abattoir.’  I laughed out loud in part because this observation was in accord with mine of the speaker.  But, I have to say that the owners of the gallery did not appear to share the hilarity.  Indeed, they looked a bit queasy.  But Storrier went on to make a speech that held my full interest – so much so, that I was sorry I was not in a position to take notes.  For the most part, talking about art is about as useful as dancing about architecture.  Catherine Lumby, in this sensible and illuminating work, makes it plain that Storrier shares that view.  So, his remarks were full of sense and devoid of bullshit.

You might say something similar about the art of Tim Storrier.  When I was in the better part of the market – with someone else’s money – an enthusiast at Australian Galleries said that this artist was absorbed in the ‘elemental.’  He was dead right about that – fire, water, pyramids, serpents, and the firmament, as often as not in an outback so barren that it is threatening.

I am lucky to have two pieces by this artist.  One is a photo of a burning pyramid in what looks like a desert at about dawn or dusk.  It was made in 1981 and is entitled ‘Toward an innuendo of impermanence.’  (That kind of title would have appealed to Shelly in his Ozymandias mode.)  Against what I might call stiff competition, that cibachrome, as it is called, attracts a lot of attention.  It is commandingly elemental.  The second is a lithograph of a minutely executed drawing of a saddle.  It is called ‘Saddle, 1987.’  The first cost $450 in 1998 and the second cost $700 in 2007 (both without buyer’s commission).  I probably would not get anything like that for either in this market, but that is not the reason I acquired them – or any other art I have bought.  What I can say is that if we put one side the art of aboriginals, before I put my hand in my pocket to buy a work of art I like to know that the artist can draw.  This saddle leaves that in no doubt at all for this artist.  He is not just a natural; he is trained in what I might here call ‘high technique.’

Storrier may approach the market in Australia in much the same way as Barry Kosky approaches putting Wagner on in Germany: ‘The way I look at it, if you’re not virulently criticized by at least fifty per cent of the people, then you’re not doing very much at all.’

Given our wariness of bullshit on this subject, I shall leave it at two citations.  In his Foreword, the late Edmund Capon said:

There is a wonderful quality of honesty at work in his paintings, haunted as they are by the space and strange emotional quiet that is evoked in pictures with low horizons and vast skies.

Driving off into the virtual obscurity of the outback, setting up camp with his tables, chairs, sunshade, easel, paints and brushes, Storrier places the smallest of canvasses on the easel and then proceeds to survey all that space before him through a pair of binoculars…..His pictures are beautifully composed and executed: there is nothing brusque, temporary or arbitrary about his work…..Such images, of instinct and memory that sometimes border on the nostalgic, are fraught with the dangers of the cliché, but ultimately, the strength of conviction, the personality of memory and experience, and the subtleties of technique triumph.  Storrier is a cautious artist – he has to be in tackling such subjects.

John Olsen said:

First thoughts could have been influences of Drysdale or even Nolan, but this was not so.  There was rigour and exactness in his draftsmanship that allowed no vagueness of edge or blurry metaphors…..For Storrier, the Australian landscape is a stage set where all the players have gone home; where ‘camps’ or deliberately planned situations, named surveyors’ camps, are adorned with flat handmade saddles; where tools of craft hang symbolically from them…..Storrier remains privately shy and socially uncomfortable.  He is one of the most secretive and enigmatic artists working in Australia today – a man of unpredictable intentions and directions, and one of the most original.

Boyd, Nolan, Smart and Williams have changed the way I see my country.  I am not sure that Storrier has done that, although the night sky can cause a tremor, but he has changed the way I look at painting and drawing.  And Olsen was surely right when he said that Storrier is an original.  Possibly for that reason, the two works of his that I have are the only two that are specifically identified in my will.

MY TOP SHELF – Chapter 23

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[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

23

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Immanuel Kant (1781)

Macmillan Co Ltd, London, 1963; translated Norman Kemp Smith; Papermac; rebound in half biscuit morocco with soft burgundy boards.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1724.  He was the fourth of nine children of a poor harness-maker.  His parents were simple Prussians – and devout Pietists, a reformist group within the Lutheran Church, sometimes compared, not always politely, to the Jesuits.  Kant was fortunate to be sent, although poor, to a school that would have given him a better education than many countries in the West now offer to their poor children.  But Kant was to be scarred for life by the teachers whom he regarded as religious fanatics.

The whole life of Kant was governed by duty.  One Prussian Pietist saw what duty might mean at the age of thirteen.  A friend of his mother was jilted in love.  She fell sick with a deadly high fever.  Kant’s mother nursed her friend.  The friend refused her medicine.  To encourage her, Kant’s mother took a spoonful herself.  As she did so, she realised that her friend had already used the spoon.  She died the same day of smallpox – in the words of Kant, ‘a sacrifice to friendship’.  She was buried ‘silently’ and ‘poor’, possibly in the manner shown in the film Amadeus for the burial of Mozart.

Kant entered the University of Konigsberg at sixteen and graduated six years later.  He took work as a private tutor.  When aged thirty one, he obtained a post at the University.  He gave public lectures.  He became known as de Schöne Magister, the Elegant Teacher.  Konigsberg was then a substantial city of 50,000.  It was a sea-port with trading interests and it therefore had a cosmopolitan flavour.  Kant was constrained to lecture over a wide area, including geography, but from the time he became a professor, his interest was in philosophy.  It looks like Kant never stepped out of Konigsberg.

His lectures were very popular.  He gave them at 7.00 a.m.  It was said that you had to be there at 6.00 a.m. to be sure of getting a place.  One of his students said of the lectures that Kant had an intense way of stating the issue to be discussed.

Kant was indifferent to music and painting – how unlike Wittgenstein! – but he loved poetry and satire, a form which he indulged in his own writings.  His published works are astonishingly substantial.  He must be the most prolific and industrious philosopher since Aristotle.  His major work, The Critique of Pure Reasoning, was not published until he was fifty seven.  Most of it is too dense for the average reader, but it is shot through with practical insights.  He later wrote The Critique of Practical Reason, The Critique of Judgment and The Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals.  The last work contains his ethical theory, and may be the most accessible to the general reader.  Kant is probably the most uplifting of writers on ethics for the uninitiated.

In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant launched an all-out assault on those who want to intellectualize God and faith.  Kant was well and truly warned off by the Prussian establishment.  Throughout his life Kant managed to avoid attending any ceremony at the University that may have involved religious ceremony.

Toward the end the mighty mind of Immanuel Kant fell into decline. This is how the English philosopher Roger Scruton describes his ending:

He faded into insensibility, and passed from his blameless life on 12 February 1804, unaccompanied by his former intellectual powers.  He was attended at his grave by people from all over Germany, and by the whole of Konigsberg, being acknowledged even in his senility as the greatest glory of that town.  His grave crumbled away and was restored in 1881.  His remains were moved in 1924 to a solemn neoclassical portico attached to the cathedral.  In 1950 unknown vandals broke open the sarcophagus and left it empty.  By that time Konigsberg had ceased to be a centre of learning, had been absorbed, following its brutal destruction by the Red Army, into the Soviet Union, and had been renamed in honour of one of the few of Stalin’s henchmen to die of natural causes.  A bronze tablet remains fixed to the wall of the castle, overlooking the dead and wasted city, bearing these words from the concluding section of the ‘The Critique of Practical Reason’:  ‘Two things fill the heart with ever renewed and increasing awe and reverence, the more and the more steadily we mediate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within’.

It is good to see that the tradition of clear, crisp writing, in English philosophy is not dead.

You might think that the religious writings of Kant constitute one long protest.  He was brought up, but he did not remain, a Protestant (as was the case with Hume and Gibbon).  He was brought up as a Lutheran Pietist and it shows, both in his life and in his writing.  The Pietists saw themselves not as subscribing to doctrine, but as being in a living relationship with God.  They had a ‘born again’ feeling.  They were against their religion being taken over by intellectuals.  You see both tendencies alive and well in the US – the second with alarming consequences.  They also tended to be egalitarian. The priesthood was their community of believers.  All this comes through in Kant, the most intellectual man in Europe.

The thinking of Kant would affect the Christian churches of Europe in at least three ways.  First, Kant set about demolishing the logical arguments for the existence of God.  Moses Mendelssohn, a friend and colleague, said that the criticism of Kant were ‘world-crushing’.  But Kant did hold that the concept of God is natural to human reason.  Just what that concept may involve is another matter.

Secondly, Kant developed a system of ethics or morals from the ground up, so to speak, and without invoking religion or the supernatural in the process.  His teaching on ethics was and is available to most people.  Some in the church may have felt threatened by a moral code that did not require God.  But Kant went one step further.  He did not stop with saying that morality does not rest on religion; he went on and said that religious faith is founded on morality.  The whole point of his arguments on morality is to establish that morality, which is independent of religious belief, nonetheless does lead us to religious belief.  Such a contention would, of course, leave plenty of room to manoeuvre on the content of the religion.

Thirdly, Kant has a lot to say about the practice of religion, and it was mainly this that got him into trouble.  Like the old Hebrews with God, Kant refused to refer to Jesus of Nazareth by name, but like Spinoza before him, Kant accepted the teaching of Jesus and incorporated it into his own and was hostile to people who sought to come between that teaching and the rest of mankind.

Kant may have been a bit of a pill to have lunch with – even if he did ensure that a wine decanter was in reach of every guest.  But his mind was one of Europe’s great engine rooms.  It is sad that provincialism and specialization mean that he is hardly taught now at English universities because no one since has got within a bull’s roar of producing insights across the scale like Kant ,and Kant might be just the kind of man to make the word ‘intellectual’ sound decent to Anglo-Saxon ears.  He fought the fight for religious faith and he did more than anyone else to give people an ethical code that did not require underpinning by faith.  He never set out to hurt anyone, and he left the world better than he found it.  It is not just Prussia or Europe that should revere the name of Immanuel Kant.

Passing Bull 195 – Defiling the dead

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People who play around with geniuses like Shakespeare or Mozart overestimate their ability and worth to an extent that might make even Donald Trump blush.  They also defile the work and the art of the dead.  Their haughty conceit is staggering.  We may have been able to get over Glenda Jackson playing the lead role in Sam Gold’s King Lear on Broadway – although ‘humility’ does not come easily to your lips with that lady – but she was not the only one in the part of a male, and the three daughters had three very distinctive accents.

The New Yorker is not amused.  According to Hilton Als, this director has form.  He sent out an actress with muscular dystrophy to play a key role in The Glass Menagerie.  This, said Mr Als, takes the audience hostage – if you condemned the casting, you could be splattered with all kinds of abuse.  It’s a bit like that South African runner who looks like a bloke and who runs like one but who competes as a woman.  If you take the side of the badly beaten women, you get canned for intolerance – for a want of sympathy for ‘gender fluidity.’  Balls.  I just don’t want my night out at the theatre to be ruined by some arrogant puppeteer who is out to make a political point and to bignote himself – or herself – or itself.

What about Lear?

In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of ‘King Lear,’ because, in the arrogance of its conception, it turns up its nose at the plebeian notion of simply providing the audience with what it wants: Shakespeare’s words, that accumulation of more intelligence and insight about humanity than it seems possible for one mind to have produced….I grew increasingly consumed by questions about what was happening onstage and why.

Precisely.  And that’s before you get to the poetry.

If I said that I could improve on Einstein’s theory of relativity, I would fairly be dismissed as mad.  But these swaggerers behind the stages of theatre and opera do not have that out.  We should assess these directors like we assess judges and AFL umpires – if we hardy know that they are there, they have done well.  If their interference with proceedings catches our attention and annoys us, they have botched it – big time – and they should be given time off in the sticks to repent and reform.

Bloopers

So far, the special investigator probe and report by Robert Mueller are a significant victory for Donald Trump.

This is because the Democrats and other Trump critics have so wildly overplayed their hands and because Mueller, too, has not conducted himself well.

Of course there is in the full Mueller report stuff that shows Trump is unpleasant, but there is nothing on which Mueller can recommend any charges at all.

Greg Sheridan, The Weekend Australian, 20-21 April, 2019

As bullshit goes, this is in the category that Kant may have called transcendental.  Every word drips with wrongness.  Among other things, what would a person who (1) is not a lawyer or copper and (2) has not read the report know?  We have thought that Mr Sheridan may have had some intelligence, but we have long known that he has zero judgment.  Mueller is everything that trump is not.  Who but a lunatic could compare Trump favourably to Mueller?

This rubbish shows how we in this country have completely failed to develop a press that might fairly be called ‘conservative.’  No conservative properly so called could regard the aberration of populism called Donald Trump as anything but a disaster for the U S and the world.  When Mr Sheridan refers to ‘stuff that shows Trump is unpleasant’, he shows that he is craven as well as inane.

And Mr Sheridan has a new toy – ‘bloviation’.  It will not be long before that little chap with the silly beard gets on to it.  Wikipedia says:

Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous political speech particularly associated with Ohio due to the term’s popularization by United States President Warren G. Harding, who, himself a master of the technique, described it as ‘the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing’.

Well now, for a political commentator in the Murdoch press to accuse someone of bloviation must be an instance of what psychologists call projection.

Here and there – Alan Bennett

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A LIFE LIKE OTHER PEOPLE’S

Alan Bennett

Faber and Faber, 2009; bound in cloth, with dust jacket featuring photo of the author’s family; copy signed by the author; slip case added.

About thirty years ago, I went to the theatre in the West End to see two one act plays.  Each play featured just one actress.  The first had Margaret Tyzack, and the second featured Maggie Smith – the cream of the English stage.  I can recall standing in a queue to collect my tickets, and hearing the lady behind me say ‘I could listen all day to Maggie Smith reading the phone book.’  In my experience, the English do appreciate that they are fortunate to have the best actors in the world.

I cannot recall the name of the first play, but it was about a woman whose husband, I think a banker, had been convicted of embezzlement.  She had had to live with the degradation.  The mood varied from wistful to wrenching.  But at the end, Margaret Tyzack from a spotlight looked straight at us in the audience and said something like ‘But don’t you dare feel sorry for us – we are not that kind.’  This was the perfect way to evoke the very strong reaction of the audience that the play and performance warranted.  The whole thing was so very English.

The second play was Bed Among the Lentils.  We knew from the program notes that it was about the wife of a vicar who has it off with a Pakistani greengrocer.  Well, that should give a decent playwright something to work with.  As the curtain went up, Maggie Smith was standing centre stage under a narrow spot.  Dressed in grey, white and black, she was drabness and fatigue personified – ennui.  After a considered pause, she looked up at us and said words to the effect: ‘Being married to Geoffrey is bad enough, but I’m glad I’m not married to Jesus.’  Well, the whole theatre just erupted, and it remained cocked on Vesuvial for the rest of the play.  I feared that the lady beside me may not have survived the show – she would wail in anticipation in the same way that some American ladies did in the 60’s when listening to Shelley Berman.

This was a great night out at the theatre.  Great entertainment, and a lyrical reflection not just of the English, but of what is human in each of us.  The playwright was Alan Bennett.  The plays reminded me of David Williamson – with that gift of putting on the stage characters that immediately call to mind members of your family or friends or neighbours.  Some may wish to put the comparison at a higher level.  Ibsen and Chekhov were not minded to write for laughs like that, but the greatest playwright of the lot certainly was – just think of the hilarity with which we greet the outrages of Falstaff.

A Life Like Other People’s is a memoire of the early life of Alan Bennett.  It is obviously the work of a naturally gifted writer.  It comes to us clean and simple – pure, even.  You wonder if the writer ever bothered to change a word.  Partly for that reason, the book comes to us as being candid.  It reeks of truth.  (In this, it reminded me of the memoire of Joseph Heller – another natural.)  The book starts this way:

There is a wood, the canal, the river, and above the river the railway and the road.  It’s the first proper country that you get to as you come north out of Leeds, and going home on the train I pass the place quite often.  Only these days I look.  I’ve been passing the place for years without looking because I didn’t know it was a place; that anything had happened there to make it a place, let alone a place that had something to do with me.  Below the wood the water is deep and dark and sometimes there’s a boy fishing or a couple walking a dog.  I suppose it’s a beauty spot now.  It probably was then.

For some people – not many – it’s just like turning on a tap and watching the water flow out.

The photo on the front of the book is of an English family of the time – probably during the war.  Dad is in a suit with a shirt and tie, a buttoned up overcoat, a trilby, a cigarette and a deferential smile.  He looks very like Stan Laurel.  Mum has a buttoned up coat and a beret for a hat.  (Her struggle with mental health is a large part of the book.)  She has her hands on Alan who has a shirt and tie, a home knitted sleeveless jumper and school cap.  The daughter is much younger, but she too sports a hat.

Alan got a scholarship to Oxford and for some time thought of teaching history.  But his involvement with the Oxford Review and people like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller led him to the stage, cinema and television.  He has been prolific and hugely popular in all fields, especially in his autobiographical writing.  His personal life looks to have had its Byzantine moments.  People like Groucho Marx, Spike Milligan and Alan Bennett, who offer slashing and potentially lethal insights, tip-toe closer to the volcano than the rest of us.  Patrick White conveys the same feeling for me.  (Ibsen and Joyce terrified people – but for different reasons.)

The book fairly ripples with anecdote.  The ultimate threat to his family was to be described as ‘common.’  His Mum and Dad were very shy.  They wanted a quiet wedding – before work.  Dad’s boss would not give him time off to get married.  The vicar agreed to start the ceremony before 8 am but finish it on the knocker so that Dad could be at work by 8.15.  In lieu of a honeymoon they got tickets for The Desert Song at the Theatre Royal.  He once asked Dad an awkward question about whether he ‘touched’ Mum enough.  Dad told him to mind his own business, but years later Mum made a surprising disclosure that ‘Dad does very well you know’ – at seventy-one.  Bennett talks about hugging ‘and that other loveless construct, caring.’  And the aunties were like my Mum – infatuated with Now Voyager.  The attraction of that film, and Bette Davis, to ladies of that generation was fabulous.  ‘Oh, Jerry.  Don’t let’s ask for the moon.  We have the stars.’

This is raw diamond of a book.  It is included here to celebrate the life and work of the author.  It ends this way.

Sometimes as I’m standing by their grave I try and get a picture of my parents, Dad in his waist coat and shirtsleeves, Mum in her blue coat and shiny straw hat.  I even try and say a word or two in prayer, though what and to what I’d find it hard to say.

‘Now then’ is about all it amounts to.  Or ‘Very good, very good’, which is what old men say when a transaction is completed.

Here, then, is someone who tells it as it is – and he didn’t learn how to write like that at Oxford.

Passing Bull 194 – Presumptions outside court?

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People talk of the presumption of innocence and the legal requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt in considering the prosecution and conviction of Cardinal Pell.

Most of the commentators are unaware of the presumption of regularity that would say that the jurors are presumed to have discharged their duties in this case in an appropriate manner.  There is a Latin tag to the effect that steps are taken to have been done correctly.  A leading authority (Thayer) refers to ‘the assumption of the existence of the usual qualities of human beings, such as sanity, and their regular and proper conduct, their honesty and conformity to duty.’  Some people may wish to bear this assumption in mind before accusing the Pell jury of being perverse or unreasonable or of not adhering to their oath.  Championing a presumption of innocence may run in both directions.  It’s just that for one reason or another, the jurors don’t usually get to be championed.

To return to the onus of proof, in a criminal case, the Crown (the accuser) bears the burden of proof.  In a civil case, the person complaining (the plaintiff) bears that burden.  If nothing happens in either case, that is the end of it.

The law recognises three standards of proof.  In crime, it is proof beyond reasonable doubt.  In civil cases, it is proof on the balance of probabilities – it is sufficient that the evidence warrants a finding that it is more likely than not that the relevant allegation has been made out.

But the law recognises a standard in between those two.  It is typically applied where a serious crime is alleged in civil cases or where an adverse finding might cost someone their job or their good name.  The criterion for drawing the line has never been adequately explained to me.  The best I have seen is that common sense suggests that you need more persuasion to hang someone for murder than you need to give them a parking ticket.

One formulation is ‘comfortable satisfaction.’  The Court of Arbitration for Sport was comfortable about applying that test in the case of the Essendon footballers – and in upholding every single allegation against them while doing so.  If you think that the worth of a proposition can be tested by looking at its negation, what might ‘uncomfortable satisfaction’ look like?  Spending a fortune on a suite up front in an Arab airline and then finding that you have a burr in your nickers?  In thirty years sitting on tribunals, where counsel sought to invoke this protection I never felt intellectually secure in seeking to apply it.  I just followed my nose.

So, when a private hearing was conducted into an allegation of abuse against Pell by former Supreme Court judge (Southwell, J), the judge, as I am informed, applied this intermediate test.  (The lawyers refer to it as Briginshaw because that was the name of the parties in the leading case in the High Court that arose from an allegation of adultery in a case that reached the High Court.)  The judge found that each side had given credible evidence, but that this was not enough to satisfy the intermediate standard of proof.  That finding was far from being an exoneration of the accused.

Well, that’s fine for the accused.  What about potential victims?  If the Church is going to be responsible for the wrongs of this man, what standard of proof should the Church apply in determining whether this man represents a risk to those who may be in his care or merely exposed to unsupervised contact with him?  When I there ask how the Church ‘should’ proceed, I am speaking of both a moral and legal obligation (or duty).

Let us look at the civil side.  If you are running a trucking company – an analogy once unhappily invoked by the cardinal – and you suspect that one of your drivers may be a risk to the public, and therefore to you and your insurers – say from drugs or alcohol or some physical disability – it would in my view be morally and legally wrong to say that you needed to be persuaded of the risk beyond the balance of probabilities before you took remedial action.  The company would be obliged to take action as soon as it appeared to it that it was more likely than not that this driver was a risk to others.

The case is a fortiori for people in positions of power who can apply undue influence over those not of the age of consent.

It looks to me therefore that the church was legally and morally wrong in not taking adequate remedial action on the Southwell report to protect those in its charge from the risk posed by this priest.  It would be quite wrong to say that the Church could not take any such action until it was satisfied of the risk beyond reasonable doubt or to a level of ‘comfortable satisfaction.’  A rule that was fair to the priest may have been anything but fair to those in his charge – it looks to have been fatal for one of them.

And the reason sounds familiar – the Church put their interests over those of their flock.  Most victims would be appalled to learn that the Church took no action against a priest who had not been exonerated on a most serious allegation.

And, if it matters, that is why so many lawyers in the neutral corner would be so uncomfortable with the rubber stamping on party lines of the appointment of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States.  It’s not just that appearances matter; the public conduct of this man showed that he was susceptible to partisan influence – it is beyond doubt that he got the job as a result of such influence – to an extent that rendered him unfit for that office.

But that is not all.  Is it right to have someone appointed to high office when there is a serious allegation against them that is unresolved?  Or that is rammed through on party lines?  Some positions are ‘Caesar’s wife’ territory – the occupant must be beyond suspicion.  Judicial office is one such office and the U S Supreme Court now has two members on it that fail that test.

The onuses and presumptions that we have been discussing are part of the law of evidence.  They are applied by law courts in the trial of issues in an attempt to ensure a fair trial.  The law does not ordinarily require or even suggest that these rules be applied elsewhere (although that part of our law called administrative law will subject some bodies to procedural obligations to protect certain rights).

You could look stupid if you sought to apply the rules of evidence in ordinary conversation – if, for example, you objected to a statement in a political debate on the ground that it was inadmissible as hearsay.  The referees in sporting contests may have an onus in awarding penalties – but how often do you hear the standard of proof being discussed?  Well, one thing is clear enough.  If you want to red card someone for rough play in a world cup final, you will require a lot more assurance than you would for calling a kid off-side in the Under 12’s.

If you told a high school teacher of rowdy teens that the students had the benefit of the presumption of innocence, you would not be believed.  And the same should apply to people in positions of trust or confidence – there any onus might lay on them to show that they have discharged their office – or at least not put it out of their power to do so.  In some instances of ‘undue influence,’ the onus is on the office holder to demonstrate the probity of an impugned transaction.  That does not happen if an issue as to the person’s probity has been left unresolved.

That appears to have been the case with Cardinal Pell.  If so, some unfortunate people have paid an awful price for this lapse of judgment.

Bloopers

Willkie Farr, which put Mr Caplan on leave after he was charged last month, announced that it has now cut ties with him. ‘At Willkie, nothing is more important to us than our integrity and we do not tolerate behaviour that runs contrary to our core values. We remain focused on our responsibilities to our clients, partners and employees,’ the firm said in a statement.

Financial Times, 6 April, 2019

With those fees, they might at least try talking English.  Do they tolerate behaviour contrary to values that don’t go to their core?  Are values like apples?  Are they, too, subject to the laws of gravity?