Let the people not perish

And the Ghost's recommendations? Only one. That all educationists be allowed to spend a maximum of five years in their tin towers (ivory would be an insult to ivory), babbling in that jargon that is divorced from the reality they purport to confront, and then be brought back with a shock to the chalk and slate face (though that image dates me). That way saneness lies. The other way, their way, if they are allowed to have it, 'sameness' lies. And that awful Orwellian uniformity and accountability , and enslavement to an educational theory that is driven not by learning but by politics. Otherwise Jerusalem will never be builded again in what was once a green and pleasant land. For as somebody once said (and he wasn't using the language of Alternative Scripture) - where there is no vision, the people perish.

Doing my head in

No, listen again. You are exhorted in one of the many educational circulars, to consider the value of real language products, considering reading as a holistic activity, the techniques emerging from research, the now widely used group close, and group sequencing activities being designed to encourage readers eager for a learning outcome to be alert to the whole context and the real ambience of the prime stimuli.

As Hamlet once said, using the language of Shakespeare Made Easy, a sentence like that (and it's not even a sentence) 'just does my head in'. The barbarous and inane phraseology used by educationists is quite simply a negation of the ideals of literature and literature teachers, and an annulment of all their teaching, and of all that I ever wrote.

Clap-trap

Here's another sentence - a death-sentence - of educational clap-trap to make your mind go numb:

When pupils are starting to write they will find real versions useful as models for structure and real information useful in providing them with something to say, and moving out from reading, real investigations and interactions with the world beyond the school will provide real audiences and real purposes for the exercise of all the modes.

Do you believe you just read that? Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sentence so touching in its majesty! Only a man with the iron of the dark Satanic Mills in his soul could have written this. And yet this is the language employed by the educational bureaupratts who actualy have the effrontery to believe that they are qualified to teach teachers how to teach English, and to make me easy for schools. Anything is easy after that verbiage - or should I say garbage? - after which, through sheer exhaustion and utter exasperation, I rest my case.

Mean language

More on mean, trite, ordinary language? Easy. Ordinariness is, after all, the goal of the educationists who made a brave new egalitarian wasteland of the last two decades of the last millennium, and who show no sign of aspiring to extraordinariness as we move closer to the end of the first decade of the third. And it suits some teachers and many pupils very well indeed. Why shuffle off this mortal coil, or fall into the blind cave of eternal night, or your quietus make with a bare bodkin, or take arms against a sea of troubles, when you can simply snuff it instead? If, like mine, your ghostly breath can turn the pages of an educational exemplar unit, you might come across a statement like the following: "For those pupils who have 'done the unit' on Romeao and Juliet, it will not be necessary to read the actual text; seeing the video will do!" (My ghostly italics. My breathless exclamation mark.) Shall I hear more - or shall I speak at this? Neither, my masters. I'm blind with weeping and speechless with rage. I'm for a cup of sack - to recover. Until tomorrow them. Anon.

Talk of Princes

Quite recently – in a ghost’s perspective, that is – Prince Charles spoke to some English teachers in presenting the Thomas Cranmer Schools prize, and declared that the English Language had dwindled down into a ‘dismal wasteland of banality, cliché and casual obscenity’, exhorting them all to give their pupils instead ‘a vision of greatness’. As evidence of the rot he cited the pedestrian crassness of the New English Bible and the Church of England’s alternative Service, and went on to proffer a personal illustration of what happens to a certain great dramatist when he’s Made Easy for Schools. One of his fellow princes (of Denmark, as I recall), contemplating suicide in a soliloquy that since became famous, once put it something like this:

Well, frankly, the problem as I see it
At this moment in time, is whether I
Should just lie down under all this hassle
And let them walk all over me,
Or whether I should just say: OK, that’s cool,
I get the message – and do myself in.
I mean, let’s face it, I’m in a no-win
Situation here, and straight up,
I’m so stuffed up with the whole bloody mess
That I can tell you it’s doing my head in.
I’m just gutted, that’s all, gutted,
And I’d top myself this minute, no problem,
And that’s the bottom line, man. The thing is,
What happens if I find out that after I’ve
Wasted myself, there’s some sort of a, you know,
What do you call it, all that mystical stuff,
I mean, stuff happens, like when you die
And stuff – you might find you’re still –
Like, know what I mean?

Yes, I know what you mean, sweet prince. The trouble is, it was obvious some time ago that not all schoolchildren did know what he meant when he spoke the words I gave him. So somebody had the bright idea of simplifying me, putting me into the language of the street, and making me palatable for pupils. When the actress Julie Walters saw these gems of contemporary eloquence she backed the Shakespeare Made Easy texts by saying’ if only it had been like that when I was at school, it would have made doing my O-Levels so much easier and so much more enjoyable!’ Or words to that effect.

And doubtless it would, sweet Juliet. But I have an even better suggestion. If this guy Shakespeare is so difficult that he needs to be made easy, why bother with the bleeder at all? I think I’d rather be skipped than translated into street-speak. Easy for O-Levels? Yes. But rich and strange? No. The Prince of Wales struck a blow for the Prince of Denmark when he said, summing up this ghastly situation: ‘If we encourage the use of mean, trite, ordinary language, we encourage a mean, trite, ordinary world.’ True? Switch on your televisions any night of the week and find out. But flights of angels can sing your words to rest, sweet princes, for all the educationists care. More on this anon.

Perchance.

"Some have greatness thrust upon them..."

The ghost could have wished that this anti-Stratfordian nonsense had died the death by now, and I'm sorry to return to it - but Derk Jacobi has now joined the loonies. He is quoted as saying that he can't see how one person could have done it on his own! It's called genius, Sir Derek - same thing as made it possible for Bach or Michelangelo to do it all on their own. And as Jonathan Bate (to repeat an earlier blog) pointed out that no great actor has ever been attracted to the loonie brigade, I guess that puts you in your place, Sir D. Enjoy the rest of your career!

The Long Pen(is)

Pardon, gentles all, the bard’s in bawdy mood today. It’s just that, sitting upon a cloud, weeping again the king my father’s wreck, and looking down on earth, I saw a writer, signing books. Not an activity I was ever accustomed to. God save us, I never even signed my own. How many of you out there would offer a king’s ransom for a book from my personal library with the name William Shakespeare scribbled on the flyleaf? Dream on. I never even left a clue to my reading habits, at least not directly.

Anyway, it was Margaret Atwood. (For the benefit of the blog it should be recorded here that the Bard gave a treble ghostly yawn.) Yes, boring. As Iago rightly put it, ‘reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.’ But guess what? Though the words of Atwood made me yawn, she is actually a most excellent inventor of another sort: of what is termed ‘The Long Pen.’

Don’t ask me how it works. But she can sit in Canada and sign your copy of her book for you in England, or anywhere in the world, wherever you happen to be. Isn’t that sweet? I just wondered if she could next invent The Long Penis, so that when she’s off on her global signing sessions, her spouse back in Nova Scotia or wherever can have long distance sex with her whenever he or she feels like it. Now that would be quite an invention – though not one necessarily wished for by many a partner away from home. As for he who invents one to reach from beyond the grave, the eternal fax-feelie – thou art the nonpareil! But I’m stretching my imagination now, if nothing else. I’d better bid you good day. Yours in the ranks of death, William Shakespeare.

Class Act(or)

The Iliad was not written by Homer but
by another gentleman of the same name.

I see that Mark Rylance has put on a play at the Minerva in Chichester which tells its audiences – if they haven’t all melted away already – that I never wrote my plays. Can a ghost yawn? Imagine it, anyway. It’s that hoary old English class thing again. How could a backwoods butcher’s son, a shit-kicker from Stratford, possibly have written the world’s greatest literature without the benefit of blue blood and an Oxbridge degree? The Guardian reviewer quotes Jonathan Bate, who wrote, originally in ‘The Genius of Shakespeare’ (love the title!) ‘that no major actor has ever been attracted to anti-Stratfordianism’. But let’s have the full quotation shall we? Professor Bate goes on to give the reason for this. It is, quite simply, because every truly great actor knows from within that the plays of Shakespeare can only have been written by a man who was himself an actor – which the Countess of Pembroke, unsurprisingly, never was. Nor were the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon, or Queen Elizabeth. The list gets more lunatic the longer it gets. And you may just wish to know here that the original proponent of the Earl of Oxford’s claim to authorship of my plays was an Edwardian schoolmaster who rejoiced in the name of J. Thomas Looney. I kid you not. The Rylance play is in good company. I can’t believe it will be in the company of its audiences for very long. As the Guardian reviewer remarks, the play’s conclusion may be liberating, but is also eagerly awaited!

The double ‘G’ String

It’s often been said that my first review was a hostile one (Hackman Robert Greene’s). Envy eats out the hearts of lesser talents, and sometimes they turn critics, and tell you more about themselves than about the writers they’re supposed to be reviewing.

I’m sorry for mentioning the double G-word again, but Germaine Greer’s book about my wife (suppressed snort from Ann here, and wan smile from me) does tell you more about Greer than Hathaway. And the critics who went for the GG jugular last Sunday did have something to carp about.

Firstly, how can you be objective if you start with an agenda? (in her case a double one: a man-hating mother-hating agenda). Secondly, how can you be factual when there are no known facts? And there aren’t. Take it from me – she’s stringing you along.

And thirdly, how can the world’s most self-abnegating writer (blogs not counted) expect fair treatment from the world’s most self-promotional hysterical shrew? We’re blogs apart. I kept my head down all my life. She’s spent her entire career waving from the parapet. Well, not waving, but clowning. She needed a Petruchio to sort her out, but all’s one for that.

What really dismays me is the media’s inability to let something important be said unless it’s being said by someone already famous (or notorious) for something else (let’s face it, she didn’t get famous on me) and the sheer waste of newspaper space devoted to telling readers what they already know: that re-hashed and barmy biographies are not worth reading. Isn’t it better, as Marcus Aurelius once said, quietly to ignore them? And above all to refrain from imitation. That is the best revenge.

Diaries and gaping holes

Some blog-bibber asked me the other day if I’d ever read my diaries. A nice piece of irony, that. I like your wit, sir – or madam. But if I’d kept any diaries I’d certainly have destroyed them, like Larkin – into the shredder with the private life, and let the blank verse tell all, or as much as it can, or dare, the blanker the better. Plays are shutters on the soul – poems are windows. And as for diaries – man, they’re gaping holes. And in my day a man who opened your diary could quickly be opening your belly. Question answered?

That apart, I confess I never had the time for diaries – largely in any case an invention of the private and interior age ushered in by Hamlet, and even he kept only his ‘tables’. I suppose his soliloquies were his real diaries: interior monologue externalised and overheard – a pretty modern definition of a diary, I’d say. As for me, I was just too busy scribbling scripts and making a living.

If I’d lived in your time it might have been different. I’d have caught on – that the diaries of public figures are written to be read by their public, not by the diarist himself (for a price, of course) and that the odious Alastair Campbell must have chuckled from line one of day one, thinking of the million he’d make. As somebody once said, ‘keep a diary and it will keep you.’ The trouble with that is, you can’t believe a word the diarist says. And if it’s edited to boot, like Campbell’s, then it’s not reality but a selection from reality, a simplification resulting in a falsification. Never trust the man who knows you’re listening to him.

And now? Now I have world enough and time – and the daily bread of these blogs are, if you like, my eternal diaries, deathless or dire, whatever you say. Meanwhile, if you really do want to peer into the absolute privacy of a life lived 1564-1616, you have my WILL, ghost-written, if that’s the word. I prefer to say I dictated it – and a willing writer merely held the pen. Read it if you will – and it will tell you all you need to know.

Trapped monarchs

Trapped monarchs? Everyone’s trapped – between two eternal tides, beached on this bank and shoal of time. Until you’re dead, that is, floating free, like me. Call no man happy until he is dead. Everybody’s imprisoned in some sort of role, usually a set of multiple roles: child, parent, sibling, partner, friend, employer, priest, parishioner, ad infinitum. Whether you’re a monk in your cell or a celebrity strutting your stuff on the world’s stage, you act out the role that has been given to you by accident, circumstance, character, destiny. And among all these roles and forces, which one, if any, is the real you? Is there in fact a real you?

As an old actor and theatre man and scribbler of scripts, I could say that this pull and counter-pull between public and private was always of enormous interest to me. It’s expressed in all my plays, most notably in ‘Hamlet’, whose eponymous hero is hugely trapped between his private self and the avenging role prepared for him and expected of him by tradition. The bigger the role the greater the tension. You won’t find a prince or leader in any of my plays who isn’t trapped between roles. Naturally it leads you to ask that hoary old question: what is truth? Or does it even exist?

‘The Queen’ is such a good film because it shows a decent woman, no less repressed than many another ‘performer’ in this stage-play world, trapped in her own monumental role. And it shows her reaching out almost to identify (if not quite getting there) this whole business of acting and image which actually determines how people live. The Diana she knew was, quite simply, not the one the public knew, or thought they knew. The one the public thought they knew was a creation of the media. But then she herself took part in the play, helped them in their false creation of that graven image which the people crave and adore. So who was the real Diana, then? Ask that and you ask an imponderable. And only her ghost would know.

Trojans

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here

They’ve been digging like Trojans at Diana’s dust for ten years and may just let it settle at last – what’s left of it, that is, that hasn’t already been broadcast to the ends of the earth.

I was writing recently about parents losing children. Here two boys lost their mother, and in their hearts and minds it’s a grief as great. And she was young and fair, which is doubly tragic. But she also made a Faustian pact with life, in some measure, and when you do that it’s only a matter of time before the devils come on stage and tear you to pieces. Her time was short, shorter than Faust’s, and in the end she perhaps never even felt the power, so much as the effects of it on her. And she never became queen.

As for the woman who was queen, and still is – with whatever human flaws it conceals, she wears the mask of true royalty. Is it the mask of the actor too? And is Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Her Majesty that of a shadow shadowing a shadow, twice removed from an inner truth? Well, it was beautifully done, and whatever that truth may be, there is one that is undeniable. Our queen – (as a dead Englishman I can still say ‘our’) – also made a pact. Not for the quick fix, but for life. And a marriage to duty always involves some degree of repression. Look at my Elizabeth, for example – the first one. Look at all the royals in all my plays. They were all trapped. Repressed royals are not an invention of the Windsors. It comes with the territory. But I’ll leave that till tomorrow, perhaps. Till then, heavy low lie down – uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Tears Three

Tennyson’s In Memoriam is undoubtedly the greatest elegy of all time. But perhaps the most beautiful is the 14th century alliterative poem, Pearl, in which the anonymous author mourns his only daughter, who died before she was two. In the symbolism of the poem, she was a pearl who slipped from his careless hand and was lost in the grasses – i.e. the grave. Medieval convention then kicks in. The poet has a vision of her in a paradisiacal landscape, where they meet. She is no longer an infant, however, but a grown woman – presumably aged 33, the perfect age of man (and woman) at which we’ll all be resurrected. And though Dickens would have wallowed in the reunion of father and daughter, guess what? – she lectures him on his grief, his irrational inability to submit to the divine plan.

Most poets, by comparison, make gentle lecturers – like Sir Philip Sidney, for example:

Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou my mind aspire to higher things –

a serene detachment which Chaucer’s Troylus (Troylus and Criseyde) was unable to achieve until after he was dead, and had quite literally risen to higher things. Look at what he says from the heavenly plane, immediately following his killing by Achilles. Seen now in relation to the eternal verities, his earthly attachments are quite worthless. They were not so at the time, but the new perspective is one of good-humoured recognition and release. All that fuss over a mere thing of flesh and blood, a human being, and a girl at that, just imagine, well well, what was I thinking of?

What indeed? Souls in bliss are not all as humourless as Pearl in their exhortations to the fools that we mortals be. Similarly the disguised Duke Vincentio, in Measure for Measure, lectures the earth-bound fleshly Claudio on the vanities of life – ‘a thing that none but fools would keep’, and there is a divine comedy in that perspective too, reminding us that we could look at Dante’s greatest poem as one massively submerged elegy for a dead girl and an unconsummated love.

Hamlet is more analytical than Vincentio (in the famous fourth soliloquy), Prospero more poetical, as he envisages the eventual dissolution of the globe and all its inhabitants – the stuff as dreams are made on. And my sonnets, songs and singers all join in:

Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

What did I tell my young man?: ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead.’ I loved him so much that I’d rather be forgotten by him than cause him a moment’s pain in the remembering:

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay.

A sweet thought. Feste sings much the same refrain, ending his send-me-no-flowers lyric (’Come away, Death’) with the injunction to his audience to spare the mourners’ breath and brine:

A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O! where
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there.

While this strikes a familiar poetic pose, the sadness is lent an authenticity and a depth by the genuine melancholy that emanates from the ageing jester who sings it.
Tennyson can be a sterner lecturer, heavier on what he calls ‘weak hearts’

Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave...
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time.

There is no doubt that reading widely in this field enlarges your perspectives, freeing you from absolute bondage to your own, tincturing the bitterness of bereavement with others’ gall, that literary form has somehow made sweet.
In those most famous of sonnets, I lectured my young man again, telling him that our children are our immortality, and so is poetry. My verse will immortalize him as indeed it has done. But not only does the poem immortalize the aristocrat (‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’), the aristocrat in turn immortalizes the poem. (In black ink my love may still shine bright’). He is the reason for it. So our loved ones, if we’ve written about them, immortalize our lines of literature as well as our lines of ancestry and descent. The dead give birth, in a sense. Life goes on, in literary form. There is a symbiotic relationship between death, life, love, loss and literature. They all feed on one another, expanding the universe of optimism and hope.

All that said, sometimes there is just no answer to the stab of pain that goes through you when you overhear a confession of grief, a simple statement of somebody’s heartbreak. There are two poems by the Chinese poet Po Chu-I (772-846), Golden Bells and Remembering Golden Bells, in the first of which he recalls how disaster struck when he was about to turn forty – he was planning his retirement (a nice pastoral retreat to the hills) when a daughter was born! Delightful in its way, of course, except that he was now tied to externals, to things outwith himself, a regrettable philosophical predicament for an oriental seeking emancipation from the follies of the flesh. Now he will have all the trouble of seeing her safely married, and as for retirement, that is something he will have to postpone for another fifteen years.

The second poem finds him suddenly ruined and ill, a broken man, glad now to have a little girl of three, to soothe his heart. Then she died – just like that. ‘There came a day – they took her away from me.’ Years later he is still remembering the baby-talk, the sweet prattle, and he laments that, for all their pleasure, the ties of flesh and blood bind us to a burden of grief and sorrow. Eventually, by forcing his mind back to the life he had known before she was born, he managed to put her out of his thoughts and drive away the pain. ‘But this morning,’ he says, ‘the old grief came back, the old heartbreak, when in the road out there I ran into her old nurse.’

Telling and true. All the philosophy in the world is but skin-deep, and the truth is that real people need more than Zen. Ultimately we are human beings, not texts, not readers, not philosophers. And yet even in the act of reading these lines, another catharsis is achieved. The Chinese poet may not have felt that his tears did him any good, but they do good to us that share them. Lord Kenneth Clark did actually burst into tears on one occasion when he was being lionized by a vast crowd in America, following the phenomenal success of his Civilisation lectures, filmed for television in the 1960s. These remarkable essays made into films actually brought back would-be suicides from the brink – at least nine wrote to Clark to pour out their gratitude. He had made them see that life was still worth living. Women tried to beat a path to his door – a rather grand one at Saltwood, where they would have had to get past the butler, and the lord’s formidable wife. It was great art’s equivalent of the knicker-throwing females who mobbed the popular singer, Tom Jones, a decade later. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast – and to render it bra-less, if the performer cares. Neither Clark nor Jones succumbed.

Of course the women who stormed the art historian’s letter-box had also been listening to music. Underneath the stiffness and dryness and inadvertent pomposity ran the music of the lecturer’s voice – lofty, lucid, measured, if hardly magnificent, the words shaped into a Bach sonata by a master draughtsman, a cross between Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. Then there was all the incidental classical music chosen to accompany and enhance the images. Poetry, architecture, ideas, artwork, all married to music and talk – the combination was ravishing, especially for its time. No wonder Clark became an overnight star.

Read the book, Civilisation, and it’s like looking at the score of a symphony that once bowled you over. But you can still hear it in your head and it’s wonderful. Joy can be as great an educator and saviour as pain, and as Clark found, can lift people out of their pain. It is immensely gratifying – simply to know that after you have gone, something you have written may comfort (i.e. strengthen) and console another human being. It is the end and object of life. And there are countless memoirs I could mention, and even more novels, in which people lose people, and are comforted, or not. Yet somehow for me they remain, like my own, stuck in time; and like Tennyson and Po Chu-I, I am rather tired of time, being a ghost, and prefer the ever-rolling river of poetry, in which life and love and loss and a return to life are so much more universal and unspecific.

In the second volume of his autobiography (The Other Half) Clark describes his tears. He was being given a medal at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and he had to walk the entire length of the auditorium with people waving and screaming at him and trying to touch him. Halfway to the podium he cracked up. He felt, he said, like a doctor, called to the scene of a plague, an immense human disaster, deafened by the many cries for help. And he knew he was not a doctor, not a prophet, not a saint.

But to these people he had become one. His words had worked their spell on them. As words do.

Early in his first lecture Clark refers to that illuminating moment in the Aeneid when the hero and his friends are shipwrecked on a foreign shore. Aeneas is afraid that the country may be inhabited by barbarians. Then as he looks about him he sees, carved in bass relief, some figures – artwork! And is mightily relieved. That’s when he speaks the most famous lines in Virgil: Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These men know the pathos of life – and mortal things touch their hearts.’
A nice translation. But the wonderfully succinct Latin cannot be beaten for expressing everything that I have been trying to say today. Sunt lacrimae rerum. Quite simply, and quite literally, there are tears for things. We don’t look after our children today – we are losing them. Listen to an old ghost’s lament. And pray that those who have lost children, or any loved one, may find them again in their tears.

Tears Two

There is no more moving image of grief than that of a parent holding a dead child, whether it has been tranquillized by Michelangelo in his Pietà, or rendered almost unbearable by myself when King Lear enters carrying the body of Cordelia and I’ve seen too many armfuls of grief recently, in Iraq and elsewhere, or arms that are achingly empty, lacking the child. But for me the most telling expression of such grief appears in Rogier Van Der Weyden’s 1435 altar painting, The Descent from the Cross, in which the movements and body lines of the fainting Virgin mirror exactly those of the descending Christ. The artist has deliberately linked her with the dead body of her son, and for reasons that go far deeper than the first principles of the art of painting. Mary and Jesus are visually united because they are spiritually inseparable at that point, bonded by a mother’s grief, probably the strongest emotion in the world. His tragedy and hers are presented as one and the same.

Parent and child. It struck me forcibly in the first weeks following my son’s death the extent to which human reality is rooted in relationships, so that when someone dies whom you loved deeply, part of you really does die too, it’s not just a cliché, no mere form of words. If you have been as close to that person as it is possible to be, in the John Donne sense in which your two souls are one, then the essential ‘you’ dies completely. You have lost your identity. Of course if you happen to be a complete egotist, if you have never loved anyone more than you love yourself, then you will never feel the force of this truth upon your pulses.

Add to this the nature of bereavement and it is no surprise that when an elegist mourns he may tell you more about himself than about the one he has lost. If you saw the film Shadowlands you might be surprised by the intelligent coolness of C.S. Lewis’s self-dissection in A Grief Observed, but those who know Lewis won’t be surprised, and may wish to read his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, its title taken from Wordsworth’s moving sonnet to his ‘heart’s beast treasure’, his lost daughter, and also playing on the name of Lewis’s lost wife, Joy. ‘From the way that I’ve been talking anyone would think that her death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. Her point of view seems to have dropped out of sight.’ Most critics would forgive him, in the circumstances.

On another level entirely, the tenderest, most moving love poem written after my time IA also a cry for the dead, Henry King’s The Exequy: To his Matchlesse never to be forgotten Freind. The friend in question was Anne Berkeley, whom he married in 1617 and lost in 1624, having impregnated her six times. The astonishing feature of the poem is that you read through 120 lines of verse and never once come across the word ‘wife’, let alone learn anything about her, the colour of her hair, what she liked for dessert, nothing. Astonishing but appropriate – because she has slipped the bonds of marriage, even of gender, until halfway through the poem. They were soul mates and still are. It is the poet’s state of mind we learn about, not his wife’s, whose mind is now extinct. This does not invalidate Henry King’s grieving or make it selfish, except insofar as all grieving is selfish. Nor does it invalidate his actual entitlement to write his wife’s elegy. None but the most cynical soul would question his deep sincerity as he longs for the day when ‘age, or grief, or sickness must/Marry my body to that dust/It so much loves’. Or none but the lonely heart, perhaps, who cannot know his anguish.

Some writers do pull you into the private world of the lost one, Ted Hughes startlingly so in his Birthday Letters, which takes you through something of the storm that led to Sylvia Plath’s suicide. But these are poems whose central focus is not on bereavement. Call it guilt – a twin sister of bereavement. By contrast Douglas Dunn’s Elegies for his wife Lesley, who died of cancer at 37, are much more moving, besides being more elegant. And they manage to comprise so much more vivid a tribute to the lost woman while not really saying all that much about her, though we do glimpse her dining, choosing a dress, and in other odd moments, apart from the last ones. The success of this powerful collection, quite apart from the creative gifts of its accomplished author, is down to the fact that the poems really are about the naked solitary nature of bereavement. They are as selfish and un-entitled as they have to be, reflecting the selfish, self-consuming nature of all pain.

Literature is full of it. Thomas Hardy treated his first wife abominably and neglected her as she lay dying of compacted gallstones, one of the most painful conditions known to medicine. Yet in his old age he re-visited the emotional territory of their courtship, their forgotten love, and poured out some of the most powerful love poems in any language, poems deep as first love and wild with all regret. Guilt again, if you care to see it that way, but it does not invalidate the poems as autonomous works of art.

It was in 1596 that I lost my only son, and from that point on my dramas darken, and I spread the pain around, putting on the agony, putting on the style, the tragic style:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

‘Vacant garments’ says it all. The dead one does not miss what he or she leaves behind, but for those who are left to do the grieving, the clothes are a torment. You learn nothing about the boy, Hamnet Shakespeare, from me, his father, the master of impersonalised emotion, if I may say so, but you learn a lot about the master’s own pain. It was tragic that such a young child should die, but I’ve made it my tragedy, and King John’s, and King Lear’s, and yours, just as John Milton, Henry King, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Ted Hughes, Douglas Dunn and Sorley Maclean make the deaths of Edward King, Anne Berkeley, Arthur Hallam, Emma Gifford, Sylvia Plath, Lesley Balfour and Calum Maclean into their tragedies, and in exploring not the lives and tragedies of the deceased so much as the anguish of their own souls, these great writers perform a service to grieving humanity, including you in their private grief, universalizing it, and so helping you to understand and cope with your own.

Larkin was your poet laureate of death. It was coming out of his ears. He crowned himself with yew-leaves. But he was also the poet of tender warning: we should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is time. And even of hope: unexpected images of eternity, trees coming into leaf, arrow-showers of rain – and injunctions to begin afresh, afresh, afresh, hints of Milton and Tennyson. I expect that for most readers the Hull grump will encourage ataraxy rather than optimism. But at the end of the day, whatever poets write, or counsellors say or society provides, the dead are ours, nobody else’s, and in the ultimate quietness of our own souls, we have to cope singly and on our own.

Tears for things

If happiness writes white, as some Frenchman said, then it follows that the most colourful literature will be about unhappiness, or will have been inspired by it. Unhappiness itself is caused by loss: either by not having whatever it is that you want, or by having lost something that you wanted, needed, or loved: money, security, certainty, self-respect, or whatever. For human beings there is no greater, more universal loss than the loss of another human being, either through some form of separation or alienation – absence, divorce, the end of love – or through death, the ultimate absence and divorce, the ultimate form of separation.

Is there a cure for death? Not so far. But there are cures for grieving and they take many forms, from the bottle (at the least useful end of the spectrum), to religion (the best remedy if you can believe it), and with literature somewhere in between, requiring somewhat less of a willing suspension of disbelief than flights of angels singing your sweet prince or princess to their rest.
Eleven-year-old Hamnet was my sweet prince – and I’m back to the sad subject of Rhys Jones. And Madeleine McCann, for whom, among so many others, the mourning must go on, until or unless she is found.

Blessed are they that mourn, said Jesus, adding by way of corroboration, for they shall be comforted. The implication is that mourning is not intrinsically useful but is a pain, which may be salved. And he goes on to provide his own best cure for grief by resurrecting his dead friend, Lazarus, for whom he famously wept. The cure is also extended to grieving humanity with the promise of resurrection for all, under certain conditions. And as one antidote to grief is belief in life after death, it would be ironic if a loquacious ghost did not place the Bible at the top of his list of books on how to cope with the loss of a loved one. Quite apart from the promise of resurrection contained in the New Testament, there is the Old Testament’s Book of Job, a stunning account both of patience in adversity, and of man’s insignificance beside the sheer spectacle of a wondrous and God-created universe: a snowflake, a star, a whale. Who do you think you are by comparison to complain of mere human catastrophe in the face of such natural splendours? And I wonder if those bereaved by recent hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes would agree.

I first met death when I was sixteen, and my eight-year-old sister died. Of course I’d heard about death already, from an early age, and read about him – in Genesis.

And I identified readily with the Genesis pair, Adam and Eve. They’d been brought into the world not on demand but on the whim of a Creator, and they’d scarcely had time to take the first breath before that Creator was putting the fear of death into them, quite literally. Eat this and you’ll be pushing up daisies. The actual words appalled my early imagination. Lest ye die. I knew it was no empty threat. Death was all around us in those days. This could happen to me, to my mother, my brothers, anybody. And the end of the story left no doubt about the matter. It not only could, it would. For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

And yet the words carried an undeniable logic, written into the narrative as death is written into life. God had indeed created Adam out of a fistful of earth. So the fistful of earth which I watched the priest hurl onto my sister’s shroud was no accidental handful of dirt. It was the symbol of that ancient truth about dissolution and return.

So much for the help of the Hebrews. You folk are used to rather pleasanter literary condolences. You re-enter the universe and reappear in a different form, not so much pushing up daisies as becoming one yourself, becoming one with all:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Shelley on Keats, dressed for the occasion as Adonais. And Keats had his own versions of immortality, as did all the Romantics down to Rupert Brooke. You could be a nightingale, an urn, an autumnal sunset, a corner of a foreign field that is forever England. The possibilities are endless and the poets played on them to great effect. But none has the inexorable iron logic of that early bible story. It leads you to acceptance and dry land, where the poetic fancies leave you floundering, not knowing what to believe. Death is the condition of being human, as opposed to being a mere fruit or flower in Eden.

Of course all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity, as I famously wrote. But the Genesis story didn’t make that point, choosing instead to isolate man and woman and single them out for execution. God made man in his own image, and as each man kills the thing he loves, God also killed his prize creation. Or chose not to prevent its demise. He was getting in some early practice, as later he would allow his own son to be crucified, thereby in some mysterious sense killing himself, or part of himself. And if even gods die, then what have you to complain about, you, a mere mortal? No question about it. Religion apart, the bible offers food for thought on the big issue. And you don’t have to be a believer to partake of its wisdom.

Not that everyone would find it helpful. If you have a closed mind, like Richard Dawkins, then there’s simply nothing to be said. Philip Larkin, now my pal, was at least more intellectually honest. He kept an open pulpit bible on a lectern in his bedroom and would read a few verses each morning when dressing. ‘Amazing that anyone ever actually believe any of it,’ he is reported to have concluded. Or words to that effect. Still, he gave it a try, as he did philosophy, and pornography and gin. When you’re Larkin, nothing helps. Now he’s air, and fire, like me.

Christianity spawned many a self-help manual of recovery from grief. If you’d been around in the 1840s and found yourself bereaved, you might have flicked the pages of The Afflicted Man’s Companion by the Reverend Joseph Willison, and if you were a sensitive soul you might have retreated in shocked horror. Willison’s central tenet was that ‘whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth’. So: if you are having a bad time, enjoy it, like leprosy – you are one of the chosen few, in a special relationship to the Almighty, who has afflicted you only that you might better understand yourself and your predicament. If you felt sombre at the start, Willison might just bring you, counter-productively, to the brink. Thank God I was long before his time. With such comforters, who needs scourges.

I hit the bottle after my son died, I admit it. Couldn’t get back across the river. I needed a stepping-stone back across what Mallarmé described as un peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort, that shallow, much slandered stream called death – a stepping-stone back into writing. But as well as hitting the bottle, I also did a lot of reading during the rawest stage of my bereavement, looking, I suppose, for consolation. There’s a moment in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus when the doomed doctor asks Mephistopheles why Lucifer wants his soul. A suitably scholastic Mephistopheles answers: Solamen miseris socius habuisse doloris: ‘To the unhappy it is a comfort to have had companions in misfortune.’ I don’t know if Gloucester or Lear would agree. It is the universalisation of agony, the human multiplication of grief that tears from them their greatest howls of anguish. They could have endured their own, perhaps, but the sight of suffering humanity simply sends them over the edge.

And yet the strongest human impulse is to reach out blindly with both hands and grab anyone who’s listening. Or who has listened. Anyone, that is, who’s been there, and knows what you’re going through, especially anyone who’s written down precisely what it feels like, and has expressed in advance an understanding and a sharing of your pain. Hold on, the words, seem to say – there is life after death. It takes the form of words, what you’re reading now. They may not be the meaning you are looking for, not the whole meaning, but they do mean something. And they are a resurrection of a kind.

This is where literature comes in, and although I’d lost for a time the actual joy to be taken out of literature, the healer, the truth is that literature stayed with me, like Everyman.

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,In thy most need to go by thy side.

Imagine

Today I’m going to give you a little sermon. And it’s based on a song I heard on somebody’s car radio as I drifted along – without wheels or petrol (an environmentally friendly ghost) – over the quilted fields of England, under an English heaven.

Ah, but imagine there’s no heaven, as John Lennon invites you to do in that song. And no hell either. And all the people living for today. And this is where the plot, as they say, thickens.

You hardly need me to tell you, what living for today means: to spend as if there were no tomorrow, to say, ‘let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’: a limited, hedonistic and brutish philosophy, a morality (if you can call it that) without religion. We look before and after and pine for what is not, writes Shelley, himself an atheist. Yet he realised that it is our perception of yesterday and today that makes us human and distinguishes us from the beasts of the field.

Of course the atheist would say that living for today is a good thing. It means that human beings should focus on getting this world right and setting their own house in order, rather than relying on the promise of the next world, and a house with many mansions – more than adequate housing conditions for the poor. And on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like a bad action plan, does it? If religion is the opium of the people, encouraging them to endure almost anything at all here on earth, drunk on incense, and on the understanding that there is awaiting them a nice piece of pie in the sky, made by a cunninger hand than Jamie Oliver’s, nicely topped with ambrosia and washed down by nectar – then this world is going to be left a very poor place indeed, an example of very bad housekeeping. Why bother to look after a temporary residence if eternal mansions await you on the eternal lottery, where every believer is a winner?

So let’s ditch religion and form a socialist state. It’s logical. It really is. And taking Marx at his word, men went head and did just that. With disastrous consequences. In Russia it lasted 70 years. I needn’t recount the miseries that poor country suffered under one of the worst, possibly the worst of atheist dictators in history. No, living for today is a simplistic and facile philosophy, leading to a life bound in shallows and in misery.

The irony is that even the communists were not living for the day. The fruits of revolution were always on offer, like our pie in the sky – but always tomorrow, never today. And of course it never happened, did it? I didn’t live for the day either. I was a good business man. I thought of tomorrow. So does the farmer. So does everyone, except the fool – or the easy spinner of words. Don’t be a fool then, and don’t be fooled by cheap lyrics. Don’t miss the boat, whatever you do, and be sure to take the tide for tomorrow, don’t stay tied up in the harbour of today. Skylines are what matter to man, the pull of seemingly empty horizons that nevertheless teem with the promise of life beyond the brim. Listen to Ulysses, the greatest sailor in literature, as he asks you ‘to follow knowledge like a sinking star/Beyond the utmost hound of human thought’:

Come my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world...
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die...
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!’

Now there’s a philosophy to die for. And now let’s imagine instead living for today, with nothing to kill or die for. Rather tawdry, weak, spineless and pathetic, isn’t it? Almost unmanly. Like living without God.

But that’s not the end of Mr Lennon’s imaginings. The song goes on. Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do. No, it’s not too hard. George Orwell imagined it quite easily, and extremely convincingly: a world without countries, just three gigantic superpowers running the global show. And no nations left on earth. And with what result? We all know about the nightmare world of 1984. Easy for a pop singer to imagine a nice open-plan world where everyone can share the accommodation – and with absolutely no house-room given to patriotism and national honour or pride. Oh no, there would be no Winston Churchills in Mr Lennon’s brave new world; Winston Smiths perhaps, but no Violet Szabos or Rupert Brookes, nothing to kill or die for, remember? No need to fight for your country or lay down your life for your fellow man. And Mr Hitler would have been delighted to have had John Lennon running things on the other side of the Channel, instead of Churchill. Then we might indeed have been all one country. There would have been no sign of England in it, though. And no sign of Mr Lennon either, for that mater.

No, I’m afraid the open-plan Lennon philosophy leads in Orwell to a single room, Room 101. And behind its closed door lurks the worst thing in the world. Winston Smith knew what that was. So do you. Every man has his own private hell, whether it be rats or other people or whatever. No hell below us? Don’t be fooled, my third millennium friends. Heaven and hell are neither above us nor below us and never were: they are within us, and within our reach, for a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? But I’ll return in a moment to this wonderful notion of a world without heaven or hell, and with no religion too, a world so far fetched it sounds like the bum’s dream of paradise in another famous song about a Big Rock Candy Mountain, with ‘the buzzing of the bees and the cigarette trees!’ Or should I say fields of cannabis? Or poppies. Well, if religion is not your opium, it seems like something’s got to be. And Imagine is as far removed from reality as a drug addict’s dream. ‘You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us.’ No thank you. Some other day perhaps. When pigs fly. And Lucy’s in the sky with diamonds.

But there is one more thing you are asked to imagine: a world without hunger or greed, a brotherhood of man, sharing everything. And that too is apparently easy to envisage. You simply have to ‘imagine no possessions’. And that does sound good on the face of it. If property is theft, as Prudhon put it, then a world without possessions would be a world without thieves, without police, and everyone being nice to one another. Forgive me if I say this sounds even more unlikely than the Eden myth. But Imagine is not presented as a myth. It’s a serious suggestion that we’d be better off without religion, and that the world would be a really nice place.

Well, that’s been tried too – in rotten regimes all over the world that have preached equality and have achieved instead systems based on corruption, privilege and power, and that image of a boot stamping into a human face forever and ever. Great theory, foul practice. But let’s go with the theory for a moment longer. Imagine no possessions. It’s like something Jesus himself might have said – and did say. While he was preaching, a very rich young man approached him and asked how he might attain salvation and the kingdom of heaven. Oh, that’s easy, Jesus told him, you just give away all your possessions to the poor – and you’ll have treasure in heaven. And the rich young man turned away and went off with a sad look on his face. Easy theory, difficult practice. Some people have managed it. But John Lennon, preaching a doctrine of no possessions, kept a room in his New York house specially temperature-controlled in order to preserve his collection of fur coats. Nothing wrong with that – unless you happen to be glibly asking the rest of the world to throw away its possessions while you live in luxury.

I once saw a striking image in my ghostly wanderings. It was Ghandi’s possessions laid out on the ground just after he died. There was his robe, his sandals, and a pair of spectacles. In Christ’s case there would have been no spectacles – just the footwear and the robe, the seamless robe, the perfect garment for the man who perfectly exemplified his own philosophy of a life without possessions. Practise what you preach is the moral of the story; and let’s go with people like Ghandi, and St Francis of Assissi, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who did just that – in the name of the religion so reviled by the song.

For that is the song’s central vision: a world from which religion has disappeared. That nice world. Did John Lennon really imagine that we’d never have it so good, in a God-free world? Intelligent men have indeed believed as much. The deluded Dawkins describes it as ‘a magnificent song’, according the singer far greater respect than he does Jesus, a fact that would have gratified Mr Lennon, who once famously remarked that he and his group were more popular than Christ.

I advise you all to read Professor Dawkins’s book. It will actually strengthen your religious beliefs in its amateurishness, ignorance, confusion and sheer prejudice. Fine scientist, useless philosopher, stuffing anecdote in place of argument in our faces, arguing backwards from conclusions that have already been reached, courting cheap popularity by even cheaper jibes, and above all failing to distinguish between religion and religious intolerance; stupidity, barbarism and fanaticism. In a word, he confuses religion with the church that exists to promote it. But we hear little from him about the good works carried out by the church, because it does not suit his book to consider them. We hear only of the silly and terrible things. And only a fool would disagree with much of what he carefully choose to say; a simplification resulting in a falsification. But only a fool would imagine that a world without religion would really be a better world.

It would in reality be a world in which life would become again nasty, brutish and short. A state of nature. It would be a world without yours truly – who couldn’t write a speech without alluding to the bible. I may have lost my formal piety by the end of my life, may even have believed that the rest was indeed silence. But I never lost my belief in the mystery of things, never shut my mind on the sky. A world without religion would be a world without me, without Milton. It would be a world without some of the greatest music ever written. It would be a world without Bach. For all those millions of little black dots on thousands of staves – what would they be without the faith that inspired them? They’d be neurotic scribblings, nothing more. Sometimes it’s not religious conviction that inspires great artists, it’s religious confusion, even despair. Look at Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example. Its faith is a poor thing, its doubt heart-rending. But it’s religious doubt, and there’s nothing wrong with that. No, let’s thank all our gods for all the religions of the world. This, my friends, is a greater call than Ulysses can give you, and a far far greater call than John Lennon or Richard Dawkins can give you. Give me the Sistine Chapel before Penny Lane! Give me my bow of burning gold! Give me my chariots of fire! Give me the cathedrals, and Dante, and Mozart, and Handel, and Bach – men who did imagine, and whose imaginations soared far above the visible sphere. Above all give me what lies beyond that sphere and in every human being: the living God of imagination, whom all the popular singers and amateur philosophers in the world can never wash away. Belief in God? Paradoxically, that may be the ultimate leap of the imagination. And those who don’t believe may be nice singers or fine scientists, but ultimately they lack imagination, because they are trapped in rationalism, or dreams, or plain old-fashioned arrogance. In which case they are worthy of God’s grace. Let’s imagine that they are. Let us pray for them now.

And that’s my sermon for today.

A Brown Study: Reflections on a TV documentary on a most fundamental matter.

Ever had a shitty day? Of course you have – and I got through many a one in my time. As you do. Time and the hour run through the roughest day. But don’t come home and complain to your spouse about it – not any more. Spare a thought for the Boys from the Brown Stuff, the patrollers of the London sewers, whose every working day is, quite literally, shitty. In my own London days the river was our main sewer, and if it ran softly there was good reason for it. Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song. Or should that be pong?

After seeing the programme I decided to investigate for myself. And so the other day I was ‘this fellow in the cellarage’, part of the miasma, though not quite freed from my earthly senses, you may be interested to know, in spite of being a ghost. After all Hamlet’s papa-spook did say he could ‘scent the morning air’, and so I got a good whiff of the sewerman’s trade. I could hear them too, and gathered that girlfriends are hard to come by when you’re a young flusher, and divorce lurks in the pipe-line like you know what, to block your nuptial bliss.

I’m reminded of a gong-scourer I used to know. Gong-scourers cleaned out the crap from the royal palaces, deep in the bowels of the building, and kept these brick-built intestines as spotless as they could. A thankless trade. This one was also a bachelor perforce, but had grown philosophical about it. John Donne once wrote of ‘rich and curious excrements’, but gong-scouring Godfrey once assured me there was nothing curious about even the most aristocratic excrement. You just couldn’t tell the queen’s from the scullion’s. It all came from the same place and all went the same way, and King Turd was as great a leveller as King Death. This gave me a good line. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm... so a king may go a progress through the guts of beggar.

Thus the great and good of this world, flushed with their success, ought to study the sewers. They should work in them for at least one day of their privileged lives, and learn their place in the great chain of pooing – same as anyone else’s. It would be very good for the souls of the posh. In a hard hat, mask, boots and boiler suit, even Victoria Beckham might look good.

Sons and other matters

Eleven years old.

My only son, Hamnet, was eleven when he died, the same age as Rhys Jones, shot dead in Liverpool last week, in a street near his home. Both deaths were 'tragedies' - if you want to mis-use a theatrical term and apply it to a human situation that is simply sad, shocking, almost unbearably painful. I say 'almost', since no matter what the pain, we do bear it, and we carry on, because we have to, because there's nothing else to do, short of self-slaughter. But these two eleven year olds died in different ways.

My own son died in much the same way as most children died four centuries ago. It could have been something else than what it was. It could have been plague, poison, fever, an accident, a wasting. Usually it was invisible and our infants and ended our most precious joys. But we bore it as not only inevitable but natural. All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

You may say I actually got off lightly, losing only one in three. I lost all my brothers before I died. Some of my friends lost every last one of their children. When Ben Jonson lost a son he wrote that the creations of our loins matter more than anything that spills from the quill, even the perfectest coinage of the brain. Ben accepted his child's death as did we all, reflecting, in a line he stole from me, 'that in short measure life may perfect be'. I penned no epitaph for my son, but the long sorrow I carried for him can be heard in many a line from many a play thereafter.

What are the parents of Rhys Jones going to write? What can they say? Hamnet's death was a necessary part of nature, happening when it did. But when an eleven-year-old child is gunned down in a Liverpool street, yards from his home, you have to admit that it is so much more shocking simply because it is so unnecessary, and so preventable. And you want to know the cause, so that you can prescribe the remedy.

The cause, the cause. And it does not lie in the chaste stars, that's for sure. You may wonder why I of all spirits even raise the question, I who wrote of Wars of the Roses, and who dramatized civil war not only in Harry the Sixth, but showed the Montagues and Capulets, rival gangs, slugging it out in the streets of Verona, where I laid my scene, a feud that led eventually to the death of a thirteen year old girl and her young lover.

Same thing? Liverpool's Croxteth estate is the turf of the Crocky gang, who are apparently the Capulets, according to a member of the Nogzy gang from the Norris Green estate, because 'We are good us, we never do robbing. The Crocky does robbing. We do grafting'. This translates into car-stealing, which is apparently acceptable, the Crockies thus coming under the banner of the milder-mannered Montagues, and foul coming out as fair. There's a topsy-turvy morality for you.

And yes, there's no point denying we lost proportionally more men in Towton (1461) than you did on the Somme; that there were fatalities in London when the apprentice boys went on the rampage; and that the dog-days fairly got the young bloods going to the point of madness, with rapiers and daggers glinting in the sun and many the mother's son robbed of his youth.

But it was all part of a society that hung together in spite of its cracks, and whose people by and large - dare I say this? - cared about God and country, sovereign and state. Or at least believed in them. Listen to the Clockwork Orange language of these third millenium teenagers (millies and bizzies, beaks and Buds, Asbos and Nogadogs) and you hear the truth and see the problem in a flash. These youngsters are not part of society - they have broken off, fragmented and hardened independently, and have formed an alternative society with its own lawless laws and mindless codes and blank brutal lingo. Fair is foul and foul is fair. As for honesty, decency, hard work, neighbourliness, charity, loving kindness, aspiration, ambition? Not in their vocabulary. 'I just stay in bed till about 2pm. Then I sit around and smoke weed.' Meanwhile some poor sod is slaving his guts out in a factory putting the beans into the tin out of which this parasite lives. And that's just the passive side of it. The active face is slashing police tyres, sometimes policemen, and shooting their rivals in the face. Or in this case an innocent bystander.

And the remedy?

Ah, well, I'll leave that till tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Or better never.

For mine would be the form of political incorrectness that dare not speak its name. And even an old ghost can be hunted down - and laid to rest.

The Seven Ages

You’ve heard of the Seven Ages of Man? – made famous by none other than yours in the ranks of death. Well, this is my blog to the 5th of these – and therefore to all you middle-aged. Which may of course be more a state of mind than body. And which does not mean you needn’t read it if you haven’t reached it yet – for you will – or if you’ve gone on to the 6th. If however you’ve passed to the 7th, or simply passed on, it won’t concern you.

Personally speaking I hated middle age – mainly I suppose because I never got past it; like many of you, knew I was somehow stuck in it; and shuffled off this mortal coil at 52.

Now I know what you’re thinking: old enough for an Elizabethan. And absolutely ancient for a Londoner. Youthful, thrill-full, lethal London saw most of us off in our 30s, especially if we’d come into contact with any of her whores, who died even younger. But in the country you could live a lot longer, and old buffers like my dad were still enjoying life in their sixties. My mother made it into her seventies. I outlived her by only eight years.

Everything’s relative. If you’re still busy getting and spending then you won’t have time to worry about the horrors that haunt you in that long hiatus before old age. By the time I reached the 5th age I was a burnt-out case and none too well, with little left to do but to return to Stratford to count my plums, and fence in a bit of old England for my heirs, such as they were. So I had some time to reflect on that most unapplauded, unglamorous and least sympathetic of our Seven Ages.

And what is it that I hated most about poor uneventful unsung middle age? The worst thing is that it’s a state in which the body insists on changing the worse for wear, while the spirit within you stays young and yearning. The grey tide-line of your hair ebbs and thins; your teeth are mainly missing – or made of lead in your case, and the bits that aren’t tend to hurt; your shoulders sag backwards and your belly forwards; increasingly you have to peer outwards over a sheer drop of paunch in order to see your knees or check that you are still a man – or a woman; your chest goes bumpy, your thighs flabby. All around your imprisoned self the birthday suit that God gave you crumples and coarsens, refusing to respond to exercise, massage, drinklessness, diet. It prepares for its parchment days. And burning. In the distracted globe of your whitening head, Goldberg and Bosola conduct diatribes against your frail house of flesh: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste... What are you but a corpse waiting to be washed?’
But infuriatingly, perversely, that little golden core of being inside of you that even priests have stopped calling the soul will not follow the changing fashions of your poor old skin – what St Francis of Assissi called ‘my poor brother donkey, my body’. You want to act the baby, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the chirpy things you once were all those fare stages ago. Or, more frequently, anticipate the imagined pleasures of the Sixth Age, the pipe-smoking pantaloon of respectability, generous with what wisdom and advice accumulate with silver hairs and serenity. Anything other than be what you are: a stodgy bore.

Now this refusal to lie down decently in the long spacious ante-room to death’s door does have its plus points. It’s good, for example, to keep hearing reminders that big bellies and nimble brains are not incompatible, that Falstaff and the great Cham are not confined to literature and history. An acquaintance of my most honoured biographer, C. R., who would qualify for the tag Falstaffian if not Johnsonian went into hospital the other day for the kind of medical check-up that leaves nothing unexamined. When the doctor, quite without warning, shoved a gloved hand up his back passage, the ton of patient came out in a hurt tone with the quip immodest and un-Pickwickian: ‘What, no foreplay?’ The nurses fell about. I’m all for this well-sharpened wit which keeps the Grim Reaper at bay – and the Empire of Dullness too.
For the most part, however, middle age is a time when wit’s purpose grows blunted and the vices whet their knives instead. You can see this in your friends and colleagues just as surely as they can see it in you. The worst vice is the quality of boredom, neither strained nor gentle, but which droppeth steadily as third millennium rain. From beyond the grave I have heard some of them converse for hours upon mortgages and interest rates, and more recently on such slim pickings as the jokes of Gordon Brown – the shortest list in Christendom. They who only yesterday made the rafters of Student Union bars ring with their Gaudeamus now wax anti-lyrical about the antics of the under-25s, who are merely, so they contend, playing at their professions, at politics, at loving. At living.

But not at dying. (That’s no jest.) And it may be just as well that this is still being done in earnest, even by all the young folks fresh and fair. Especially by them. For look what happened to the revolutionary Wordsworth, for example. A cynical fate spared him to live on into a formal middle age and an even more tedious old age, in which sonnet cycles were composed to the Church of England and earlier pantheisms and pregnancies dropped quietly into that wallet at time’s back. Alms for oblivion.

Can you imagine Keats, Shelley and Byron living similarly on into gouty Toryism and frowning on all the frothy radicalism of their salad days? Unthinkable – but it’s happening all around you. How many live wires do you know who have suffered short circuits recently? Their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. Look about, my masters. You won’t find age doing to many of your acquaintances what it does to wine and fiddles.

Eliot (T.S.) acted as an eloquent spokesman for the middle-aged when he wrote Prufrock. And coffee-spoons will never be the same again. Nor toast and tea. I have to confess though that it’s not Eliot that middle age reminds me of, but fellow ghost and fellow poet Philip Larkin, who put it thus: that if the days of your years are three score years and ten, then they may be seen as a single week, each of its seven days corresponding to a decade, starting at Sunday and ending at Saturday.Are you a teacher? None of your pupils are past Monday, and some are still at Day One. But what about you? Is it tea-time on Thursday, and do you die the day after tomorrow? A quick way of measuring time, isn’t it? We use it a lot on this side, thanks to old Philip, who was always rehearsing for eternity. As for me, I made it to Friday forenoon. And that’s the real throat-sticking point. I worked all week and missed out on the weekend. Don’t let it happen to you if you can avoid it. Have a good life – and keep taking the medicine.

Richard IV

I said I’d return to Richard Dawkins. And in doing so today I’d like to put my printless finger on the essential difference between us that makes him, in the end, I’m afraid, not my man. First, let an old ghost be bold enough to say something about himself.

What is it about me that so many of you out there have found so admirable? I know I’ve changed lives, lifted them out of the gutter, added immeasurably to the language, the cultural continuum, offered magic, humanity, humility, mystery, wisdom, artistic extravagance, exuberance, insight into human nature, a world of characters, and so on. But if you were to ask me to name the two things I’m proudest of, the first would be my simple acceptance of people for what they are, without that neurotic need to change them that disfigures Dawkins. Call it my sheer joy in human nature, if you like. Life itself I found far more fascinating than any academic’s opinions about it. Quite simply I loved the surface of the earth and the entire enchanting business of living, as opposed to scientific fact, the endlessly curious maltworms of human existence and the tapsters who served them, the old but ageless story of man. And woman.

Secondly, -- and I hope you will find this in my writing – a freedom from judgement and judgementalism, an avoidance of triumphalism in any shape or form. Keats called it my ‘negative capability’, ending in what a more recent critic has termed my ‘pragmatic nihilism’! OK, call it what you like. My drift is certainly towards non-belief in formal religion (if I read myself aright), but a drift is not a belief, still less a didactic Dawkins propaganda campaign, and I’d have to say that the main difference between myself and Dawkins is that I’m not the preacher that he undoubtedly is, as much a bigot and pontificator as the deluded souls he seems so intent on saving.

The really deluded souls, however, are the readers of The God Delusion, an intellectually immature and rather stupid book which has, ipso facto, become a best-seller. It should be re-titled The Dawkins Delusion, as he hides away from dissent, uses sloppily emotive language, fails to engage in religious debate or to distinguish between believers and bombers, never steps into the ring with serious opponents, never seriously examines theology, confuses religion with the churches that practise it and chooses the worst and most fanatical practices he can find, ignoring or avoiding good practice and decent behaviour; and quotes ‘thinkers’ like John Lennon rather than tackle Wittgenstein or James, while being careful to bring in Woody Allen and the feminists to guarantee another million or so of fans.

Why? Why is it that such a brilliant scientist and scientific writer should have written such an intellectually poor book – a mediocre jumble of jibes, anecdotes, letters and quotes, all on his side, with so little of any real substance from those who disagree with him?

And I think the reason is that he is actually such a poor thinker when he’s outside the laboratory, a black-and-white dogmatist (thinker is not even the word) who is severely short on imagination, which makes him at the end of the day a boring sort of fellow. There’s quite a bit of evidence in his book against himself, though he doesn’t realise it, evidence for example that he is not as familiar with scriptural texts as one ought to be who is so intent on demolishing them as valid views of the universe. Or, like any fundamentalist, he picks the bits that bolster his arguments and ignores those that don’t, as for example when he says that ‘love thy neighbour’ means ‘love another Jew’, happily ignoring, or perhaps even ignorant of the opposite meaning contained in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Nor does he even question his own assumptions, for example about matter and laws of nature. And how can you take seriously a man who isn’t troubled by Stalin and Mao as institutors of state atheism? He can’t allow them to trouble him, of course, because if he thought honestly and seriously about it for one second, he would have to admit that institutional atheism on that scale has resulted in crimes equalling if not surpassing anything achieved by the church in all its history. This, quite literally, just doesn’t suit his book. But so long as he’s cheered on by the likes of Joan Bakewell and Hermione Lee, mere media intellectuals, he will go on feeling important and accomplished, instead of facing up to what he is: an amateur out of his depth, who has conned the book-buying public into believing he’s written something revolutionary and new. It’s neither. It’s all been said before and I’ve heard it all before. I notice he doesn’t quote Montaigne. He doesn’t quote me either to any real purpose.One last thing. He claims that if I, your blogging bard, had had to rely on church commissions, I’d never have written Hamlet. He’s forgetting, of course, that there was a system of censorship that could have axed Hamlet but didn’t. That apart however, Hamlet is the very last play Dawkins should cite, because it’s the play above all others that refuses to try to persuade you to a particular position, and particularly on the question of religion. I don’t make the claim that ‘the rest is silence’, these are Hamlet’s words. Yet one second later his friend Horatio is blessing his corpse with ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’. So which is it, then – angels or silence? And the answer is: neither. Or both – depending on the believer or unbeliever. As for me, I don’t tell you in that play what I believed, or in any other play for that matter, if I believed anything at all, that is. And that is Dawkins’s real problem. He’s got to know the truth. And if it can’t be settled in the laboratory, he’s lost. He’s a troubled man. But don’t be too sorry for him. A silly book has made him a minted millionaire.