The Craft of Clarkson

For Malcolm, Hell, if it does exist, must involve Jeremy Clarkson in some form. Far worse than endless fire and brimstone: a continuous loop of Clarkson videos blasted away for all eternity… Now that is a more terrifying incentive to climb Jacob’s ladder than any Jesuit or Alpha Course.

Except, he has a style, a way of writing, a sense of drama. Take the current issue of The Sunday Times (and, indeed, as much of it as possible, as fast as possible, and never bring it back.) Clarkson is reviewing the Rolls-Royce Phantom drophead:

The Phantom is a first cousin only to the God of silence, and manners, and breeding. It is an exquisite car and I would have one tomorrow if it weren’t so bloody expensive. That and the fact my wife has said she would divorce me. And then kill me with a knife.

And now comes the convertible and, oh deary me. When I came home to find it sitting in my drive, all huge and brilliant, I’m afraid I started to dribble….

And then my wife came home. “Jesus H Christ,” she said. “What is that monstrosity doing here?” An argument ensued. She said it was vulgar. I said she was from the Isle of Man so she’d know. Some doors slammed. And I went for a drive.

Now that simply works as a piece of writing. It’s got the lot: balance and contrast; light and shade; 5W+H (Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?). It seems to tick a fair number of the seven levels of meaning, too: the literal, the metaphorical, the allegorical, the … [Oh for crying out loud, Malcolm, give it a break!] And it’s got a main and a sub-plot, for goodness sake.

Malcolm drools over writing like that. And he loathes cars of all kinds, but the bigger, shinier , and more opulent then the more gross, offensive and and tasteless.

A short while back, he was making a similar point that some of the best journalism is hidden away in the supplements and between the display advertising. Here the writers are often younger, hungrier, more innovative, less pressed to file several thousand words by bed-time. And so there is a higher quality quota.

It’s not a matter of talent, or at least of talent alone. It is what distinguishes craftsmanship from getting-the-job-done. It’s the recognition that the last ten-per-cent of the work takes ninety-per-cent of the time.

Monkeying with the numbers

Some 70 minutes into the England-Tonga game came a jarring remark in the commentary.

There had been a period in which England had been passing the ball hand-to-hand quite successfully, and totally out of character with some of their recent performances. Farrell over, right between the posts. Wilkinson slots it home. Nice stuff. Game sewn up.

Then the moment. Tonga had proved to be the best of the Pacific islanders. OK, fair enough. Despite having a total population of barely 100,000, “the size of Chesterfield”.

For a start, Chesterfield is only about 70,000: to get to the 100,000 mark one has to add in the outlying areas, especially Staveley. Malcolm has genealogy that stretches back to Chesterfield, of which he is quite proud. He has a fond memory of going to Chesterfield to watch the 1961 Australians play Derbyshire. It snowed. No play. The main event of the day was drinking bitter with his cousin, Ralph, and watching Frank Misson running laps round the boundary.

Perhaps a better comparison might be Hartlepool, with a population below 90,000.

The reason Malcolm suggests this is because there was a time, some forty years ago, when he seemed to spend an inordinate number of Saturdays playing one or other of the Hartlepool rugby clubs: Hartlepool Rovers. West Hartlepool, Hartlepool Athletic, Hartlepool Old Boys … He came to the conclusion that every Hartlepudlian male between 15 and 50 must be turning out for one team or the other.

And they were evil buggers too. If they didn’t knacker you in the scrum, they’d drink you under the table afterwards. And every member of the pack seemed to be built on the proportions of a barn-door.

Just like the Tongans, indeed.

Is The Economist declaring for Hillary?

There’s a certain fascination in decoding the Lexington column in this week‘s (any week’s ) Economist.

The column runs through an overview of the state of play:

• Clinton has led the Democratic hopefuls from the beginning, and is now firming up a decisive lead.
• The massed ranks of nay-sayers are composing their arguments that her campaign will stumble and fall, and particularly so in the Iowa caucuses (the main objection being that, last outing, Kerry was running third in the State until the final week).
• The Republicans, Giuliani especially, have her in their sights.

Lexington demolishes the arguments against her taking the Democratic nomination:

• Her opponents are falling further behind.
• She has commanding leads in polling across the country, despite what difficulties Iowa throws up.
• Her political machinery is polished, potent, efficient and effective, and harnesses the Party’s heavyweights.

So that brings it down to:

Do Democrats really want a candidate who has so much baggage, wayward husband and all, from the 1990s? And do they really want to run the risk of handing the Democratic crown to such a polarising figure?

The simple answer to both questions is “yes”. Most Democrats associate the Clinton years with peace and prosperity rather than stained dresses and disappearing furniture. Bill Clinton left office with a job-approval rating of 66%. Three-quarters of Democrats, and 53% of voters in general, would like him to play an active role in a future Clinton administration. Nearly nine in ten Democratic voters (88%) express a positive view of Hillary’s candidacy; 38% express a very positive view.

Which leaves the Giuliani factor:

Mr Giuliani seems less impressive in person than he does in the polls. His speeches are poorly prepared and convoluted, and he is given to silly gimmicks, such as stopping in mid-speech to the NRA to take calls from his wife on his cell-phone.

And so to the bottom line, the clincher:

Inevitable is too strong a word. But Mrs Clinton looks much more like a president-in-the-making than any of her opponents, Republican or Democratic.

Malcolm remembers that, in 2004, The Economist endorsed Kerry over Bush:

It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush.

Tuesday, 4th November, 2008, is still well over most of our horizons. Even so, Malcolm is prepared to risk a few hostages-to-fortune that, absenting cataclysms in the meanwhile, he can predict The Economist’s front page for its issue of 31st October next year.

Oooh, no missus!

No… no…hold on…
wait a moment…

Either she’s the best Frankie Howerd impersonator in town, or she just doesn’t get it.

Here’s Ann Treneman doing the ‘Conference Sketch’ on page 25 of Malcolm’s Times:

Mariella [Frostrup] wondered what he had done when he [Gordon Brown] was young.
“I played sports,” he announced (he didn’t say during which meal). He had gone to University at 16 but, in the first week, hurt his eye playing rugby.
“I spent several years in and out of hospital. Some of you may not know this but this was the Sixties and Seventies. At my hospital at 9 o’clock in the evening—this was the NHS, free at the point of need!—and I was only 17 and 18, they would serve all the patients with drinks!’
The audience barked, possibly with shock.
“Yeah! You could have Guinness. You could have beer! Free beer for all the workers!”

Oh god, where does one start?

Look, Anne dear; that is true. Arthur Guinness and Co believed that their product was healthy and good. They provided, free of charge, one third of a pint bottles for patients in hospital. Malcolm knows that, for sure, because, at the age of barely sixteen, because of a broken arm in a rugby game, he was in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, and was provided with, and—yes— joyfully imbibed the stuff (and looked for seconds).

So what?

Meanwhile, Gordon’s punchline: you simply didn’t get it, did you?

Well, dear, there’s this song, you see. It used to be very popular among the Lefties. Particularly after pay-day.

Some say it came from the Wobblies (and they’re still out there, you know!)

Everyone can make up verses to infinity. Basically, it goes like this:

[Invent your own iambic dodecasyllabic line, as offensive as possible, or]
We’ll hang [any four-syllable name] from a sour apple tree
When the red revolution comes.

Then the only other rule is that every verse, however inane or inflammatory, has a rousing chorus:

Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!
When the red revolution comes!

After a requisite intake of mild, bitter and comradeship, everybody staggers home, carolling an obligatory final chorus:

Free beer for all the workers! Free beer for all the workers!
When the red revolution comes!

Gordon knew that. The Labour membership knew that. The Times readership, alas, remain no better informed from Ms Treneman’s efforts.

Dee-dee-dum-dum,
de dee-dee-dum-dum…

The BBC website is doing a small piece of self-puffery—and why not?—by wondering:

The Shipping Forecast can be heard four times a day on BBC Radio 4, giving details of conditions in the seas around the UK, Ireland and beyond.

Each broadcast attracts hundreds of thousands of listeners, many of them with no connection to coastal waters – so what is its enduring appeal?

Malcolm notes that this is being done by Kevin Young, Entertainment reporter. The only link to this being “news” is an approximate anniversary:

The broadcast was already part of the Home Service when it was rebranded as Radio 4, 40 years ago this week.

The schedule for the first day of Radio 4, on 30 September 1967, has an entry from 2345 to 2348, describing a “forecast for coastal waters”.

The nearest thing to an explanation for the phenomenon is given by Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4:

“It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English…

“It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.”

The Shipping Forecast has a quite remarkable footprint in popular culture: as wikipedia will explain in full, it has appeared in lyrics by Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, Chumbawamba, British Sea Power and Jethro Tull.

Of greater significance, famous Seamus did for the shipping forecast in number VII of his Glanmore Sonnets sequence, which are central to his 1979 collection Field Work:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

There’s a lot going on here. Heaney had removed to Wicklow from Belfast, north to south, city to countryside. He acknowledges the duality of his own tradition: nodding equally at Paddy Kavanagh’s sonnet sequence Temptation in Harvest (which marks Kavanagh’s removal from Monaghan to Dublin) and, in Sonnet X, Thomas Wyatt (the pioneer of the English sonnet). There are also references to Joyce (‘inwit’ in Sonnet IX), Shakespeare (inevitably, perhaps) and Wordsworth. The more Malcolm reads those lines, the more antitheses he finds: land and sea, Anglo-Saxon past (‘keel-road, whale-road’) and modern, morning and ‘closedown’, storm and shelter, ‘gale-warning’ and ‘clearing’, the French and the English names. Above all Heaney is reminding himself, then us, of the instabilities of life, particularly of emotional life, which perversely repeat into an eternal pattern of continuity.

Carol Ann Duffy uses the shipping forecast to illustrate and conclude her sonnet, Prayer (a bane in many a GCSE English candidate’s studies, inevitably juxtaposed with George Herbert, from which it borrows):

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Again the contrasts: ‘prayer’ but ‘faithless’, ‘console’ but ‘pain’ and ‘loss’, the anonymous simplicity and distance of ‘Grade 1 piano scales’ with the personal complexity and empathy of ‘the lodger looking out across a Midlands town’. It is held together by two conceits: the metaphor of ‘prayer’ as a natural, non-religious ritual, and the unexpected and ordinary universality of music.

Heaney … Duffy … and the shipping forecast’s appeal, according to Mark Damazer (above), is so “English”. Well, well.

Above all, we all seek a full-stop, a closure to each episode, to each day. And that is the wider signification of the post-midnight shipping forecast. It is a sonorous formula of some 350 words, which follows a ritualistic order. The shipping areas, as they are recited, form a clockwise pattern around the British Isles: the names visualised on a chart following a clock’s hands from 12 o’clock all the way round the face of the dial. It is delivered at dictation speed. It is comforting, especially in the warmth of a bed, while, however briefly, musing on the lot of all poor souls at sea. It is full of marvellous names, real and metaphoric: the mundane rivers (Tyne, Humber, Thames, Shannon) and the islands (Fair Isle, Wight, Lundy) rubbing along with the romantic (Hebrides, Trafalgar, Fitzroy — formerly Finisterre). And for the older contingent (including Malcolm) the mysteries: where did Utsire come from? where did the Minches go? the significance of ‘veering’ versus ‘backing’?

Malcolm’s father was a strict observer of the late shipping forecast, followed by the metronomic repetition of Sailing By, followed by sleep. As he became deafer, so the volume increased: nobody in the house would miss out. Dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee-dee-dum-dum, de dee. So that was why Malcolm had it played as the fade-out music at the end of the crematorium service. And why, perhaps, in due course it will see Malcolm out, too.

Re-writing a wrong

Malcolm contends that anyone with even half-an-interest in US politics needs the daily feed from makethemaccountable.com. At worst (which is not infrequent) it is a recital of the miscalls and misdemeanors of the US media Right. At best it can be dynamite.

Today there is an example of the latter: a re-appraisal (by Eric Boehlert, who has a useful track record on this one) of the Dan Rather Memogate/Rathergate affair.

Cis-Atlanteans may need a reminder here. As the 2004 Presidential Election campaign proper was getting under way, on 8th September CBS aired 60 Minutes Wednesday, a regular news and features programme with a venerable history. The producers had received documents which apparently showed George W Bush had defaulted on his service with the Texas National Guard (since this was 1968, it was itself a cop-out from serving in Vietnam). The material showed Bush was declared unfit for duty and put on suspension. A fortnight after broadcasting these and similar allegations, CBS withdrew the claims, apologised, fired the producer (Mary Mapes, who has just posted her version on huffingtonpost) and shortly afterwards Rather retired, or was forced to do so.

Rather has now issued a writ against CBS for damages.

Ever since, whenever the incident has been mentioned, the media have been anxious to make clear that the claims in the so-called Killian documents were disproved. There has been some mockery of Rather for his action against CBS.

Boehlert is now re-opening the original story, reviewing Bush’s record with the National Guard:

Using Bush’s own military records, I’ll list 10 glaring discrepancies regarding his fraudulent military service, none of which is based on the disputed memos that were aired by CBS News in 2004.

Many of those “discrepancies” seem to rely on missing paperwork, or instructions given to other agencies in the military which went unregarded: all coincidentally working in favour of Bush.

Here’s Boehlert’s accusation:

In spring 1972, after receiving $1 million worth of taxpayer-funded flight training, Bush unilaterally decided he was going to stop flying and attempted to transfer from his Houston base to a non-flying, paper-pushing postal unit in Alabama. The request was denied. While Bush searched for a new unit, he took the summer off, never bothering to show up for his mandatory monthly drills. Bush was eventually ordered to report to a flying unit in Montgomery, Alabama. There is no evidence Bush ever showed up there, which means he missed more weekend training sessions. In July of that summer, Bush also failed to take his mandatory annual physical and was grounded by the Guard. In 1973 Bush was supposed to return to his base in Houston but again he was a no-show; his commanders in May 1973 claimed they had no idea where he was. Then between the summer of 1973 to the time he was discharged in 1974, there’s little evidence that Bush ever attended training sessions, which means for nearly two years Bush snubbed his Guard duty.

Bush has precious little reputation left to tarnish, personally or politically. There is another issue: the Rovian manufacture of George W. Bush as a credible candidate for public office, following a very chequered early life, is one of the great confidence tricks (some might say, dirty tricks) of all time. There is now a mission for makethemaccountable.com and its like to ensure that the public are not misled, duped, lied to and finagled by the Right again.

King Billy, the Pope,
and a changing view

Malcolm starts from the facts, only the facts, ma’am.

Try finding “Peter Mills” with very few clues to go on. Now try with his near-namesake Pieter van der Meulen, whom the BBC Northern Ireland website assures us was William III’s court painter.

There was an Adam-Frans van der Meulen, who worked at the court of Louis XIV. He produced Baroque battle scenes of the kind that clutter the walls of public galleries and palaces, which Malcolm, for one, walks past in ignorance: any relation? Does it matter?

Well, perhaps, if our Pieter’s recent appearance on the radar is anything to go by.

Here’s what Malcolm knows:

In March 1933 the Northern Ireland Government paid £209 4s 0d for a painting by said Pieter van der Meulen, showing William III landing at Carrickfergus. Do not expect this to represent 14 June 1690 or Carrickfergus with any authenticity: that’s not the point with these works. Expect, instead a heroic monarch, surrounded by other worthies, all presumably represented with some nod at actuality, against an all-purpose stage-set. It is history being written (or, in this case, painted) for the victors. Right.

Here’s an earlier BBC description:

Unionist MPs cheered when they heard of its acquisition. But those cheers gave way to bewilderment when the canvas was unveiled.

There in the foreground is a figure which looks like King Billy on his white charger.

But floating above him on a cloud is someone who appears to be Pope Innocent XI, apparently blessing his ally as he makes his way towards the Battle of the Boyne.

The cruelty of critics

Two months later:

In May 1933 a group of visitors from the Scottish Protestant League were touring Parliament Buildings when they came face to face with King Billy and the Pope

An enraged Glasgow councillor, Charles Forester, threw red paint over Innocent XI.

His companion Mary Ratcliffe slashed the canvas with a knife. Both were arrested and fined £65 when they appeared in court in Downpatrick.

The painting was restored for a cost of £32 and 10 shillings.

Another version of the same story is even more sinister:

In 1934, a former RUC Inspector and “extreme right-wing bigot”, Unionist MP John Nixon (1880 – 1949) led a gang of Loyalists into Stormont where they slashed the painting with a knife and threw crimson paint over the image of the Pope.

The “monumental”, but (by the 1930s, in James Craig’s Stormont) politically-incorrect painting went into store, until, in 1975, it went to the Belfast Public Record Office. By 1983 it was back at Stormont, where it had remained stacked in the Speaker’s Office. It had a brief mention last year:

Damian McCarney, who writes for Daily Ireland and the Andersonstown News recently had a private viewing.

In his opinion, “a reproduction of it doesn’t do it justice”.

“Whenever you first encounter the painting you are awe struck by the size of this epic tale unfolding in front of you,” he said…

“Here’s a painting which attracted controversy and was attacked for no justifiable reason.

“I think a lot of people can respond to that. It has echoes of the sectarian past and now we’re coming to a more tolerant period in history now is the time for it to be restored to its rightful place in the southern corridors of the Stormont assembly.”

Now we have more voices suggesting it is time for the work to be put back into public view:

The SDLP’s John Dallat said a prominent place in Stormont should be found.

He said it would “intrigue visitors and certainly put another slant on our previous beleaguered history”…

Alliance Party Assembly member Sean Neeson said that during the summer a request had been made for the painting to go on loan.

“Clearly it is quite a significant painting,” said Mr Neeson.

Notice nobody has expressed any opinion on the thing as a piece of art.

And that is appropriate, for it was conceived as a propaganda piece, which is what it has remained.

Only in Northern Ireland could such things happen. Even last year, the Beeb felt the need to tread lightly: the central character “looks like king Billy”, the figure on the cloud “appears to be Pope Innocent XI” who is shown “apparently blessing his ally”. Curiously, identification seems to have firmed up now: why could that be?

The Boyne

William imported 6,000 additional troops from England, hired 7,000 Danish mercenaries, with Scots, Germans, Swiss and (of course) Dutch in the 37,000 total strength. James’s army of 25,000 included 6,000 from France, half of them Germans and Wallooons, but 5,387 Irish went to France, cancelling out the addition. Here’s James Lydon, with the view from Coláiste na Tríonóide:

In Europe news of the [Williamite] victory was celebrated as an important success for the Grand Alliance by Catholics in Spain and Austria, where Te Deums were sung in thanksgiving in the cathedrals. The battle of the Boyne deserved the notoriety it received. Not only had two kings joined battle to see who would rule in England, but troops from many parts of Europe had fought in remote Ireland for a cause which would determine whether France would be dominant.

But the battle of the Boyne was less significant in the history of the struggle within Ireland itself. Despite the huge forces involved, only about 1,000 Jacobites and 500 Williamites were killed; most of the Jacobite army escaped to fight another day.

What was more significant, in Irish terms, was Aughrim, the following year. Lydon again:

It was the worst disaster in Irish miltary history and made a Williamite victory in the Irish war inevitable. If the Boyne passed into Protestant folklore, then Aughrim became part of the Catholic Irish folk memory, kept alive by poets and story-tellers as ‘Aughrim of the slaughter’.

Lessons?

Well, Malcolm thinks, two really.

One is that not all art is good. Too many miles of canvas went to produce over-inflated ego-massaging, that the great might feel better about themselves, impress their subjects, and somehow convey to posterity an over-inflated reputation. Which is why these flummeries should not greatly matter, and why the modern study of history was born, to prick that bubble.

Second, and more salient, we must see things from a broader perspective.

Malcolm has frequently found himself in arguments where he has wished he was as certain of anything as his opponent seemed of everything. Charles Forester, with his (doubtless premeditated) red paint and Mary Ratcliffe with her (conveniently-available) knife were objecting because the image before them offended their assumptions and prejudices. The truth is not always as clear-cut as we might wish. Lydon for the last time:

When Derry closed its gates against the Catholic Duke of Antrim on 17 December 1688, it was not because of any rooted objection to James II, but rather because of a panic created by the revelation of a supposed plot to massacre Protestants. The citizens, in fact, behind the closed gates proclaimed their loyalty to King James and swore ‘to persevere in our duty and loyalty to our sovereign lord the king’.

Malcolm, however, will not be rushing to tell that out to his in-laws in the RBP.

The Nasty Party

Since the earlier effort today, Malcolm has realised whodunit:

Labour Historian Brian Brivati and [Iain Dale] have compiled a big feature for the Telegraph website which has just gone live.

Fair enough. No problems so far.

Scroll down the subsequent comments on Dale’s page, and we find this:

Geoff said…

If I had a sniper rifle with 21 bullets then you’ve made a magnificent list. I’d need the extra bullet just to make really sure of Polly Toynbee. There’s a big risk that you’d miss her tiny brain the first time around.

Make that 143 bullets.

If I read the additional 80 entries then I’d be looking for a machine gun so for the sake of my blood pressure I won’t click on the link.

Well, thank you, Geoff at 10.12 p.m. last night: you’ve confirmed something. And it isn’t your numeracy.

Who’s Left?

The Telegraph is celebrating the Labour Conference by listing Britain’s 100 most influential Leftwingers.

The first two individuals are Gordon Brown (natch) and Tony Blair. One is a recognition of the reality: the other, the Cheshire cat of British politics, (disappeared except for the rictus grin): a nod at “legacy”. The precedence of one, at least, will be gone in a twelve-month.

The bronze medal spot disturbs Malcolm: Alex Salmond. This takes the Scot Nats on their face value, as a self-declared party of the Left. Malcolm demurs from reciting his numerous objections to Salmond and the Tartan Tories of the SNP being “Left”. If it were so, it would be a world’s first for an oil economist and his paid creature of a major Bank.

After that it’s a beauty parade of Cabinet Ministers, political advisers, union bosses, the usual suspect journos, a couple of Greens, with the odd nod at blue-sky merchants on the way. All the way down to Blasted Pilger as la lanterne rouge.

A real curiosity is Gerry Adams (number 85): that must represent a double mischief, in putting him on a ‘British’ Left-list and so low down, too. Malcolm would have thought that Máirtín Mag Aonghusa deserved at least at much acknowledgement.

And there’s Billy Bragg (number 80) as “one of the party’s elder statesman” [sic]. Bragg’s proposal for sorting the Upper House has some validity. His songs are worth half an ear. Malcolm would suggest that, in the scheme of things outside the Metropolitan bubble, Dick Gaughan has been at least as significant.

Fortunately, these exercises are little more than page-fillers, inflating the vanity of those who need such, but inevitably ignoring claims of many worthier bods. Were they to be taken seriously, as a kind of check-list for precedence on Lenin’s Tomb, that would be a nightmare.

All Malcolm can add is it kept him amused for a few moments, before he returned to real life.

Left!

Far more significant is the issue which prefaced the list, the problem of definition: what is the Left?

Until 20 years ago the answer would have been straightforward – to be on the left meant believing that the state could transform society into a more equal place. Today being on the left cannot be reduced to this formula because many of those who would see themselves as “left” have little time for state intervention, let alone ownership of industry or direct taxation or even equality.

Perhaps the left should be defined as “radical” or “progressive”. But such a definition is hard to sustain in an era in which revolutions have come from the right—the Thatcher revolution or the fall of the Soviet Union for example.

That caused some serious harumphing from Malcolm. He accepts that the term “Left” may be degraded, even over-elastic (as this list proves), but there remains one essential shibboleth: that little word ‘equality’.

Malcolm tends to the antinomial at the best of times, but here his differentiation is precise. The Left/Right thing is not a dead metaphor. Let him recapitulate. The conceit come from the French Revolutionary Convention of 1792-94, and refers to where in the Chamber the factions seated themselves. On the Right were the Girondists. On the Left, the Montagne (named because they occupied the higher benches). A fuller description looks like this:

The Girondists were the party of orderly progress, sweetness and light the men who dreaded all violent, i.e., energetic measures… Such men, however well-intentioned they may be, must always in the long run become the tools of reaction from their timidity and hesitancy. The Girondists desired a doctrinaire republic, led by the professional middle-classes, the lawyers and literateurs. Their main strength lay in the provinces, the name being derived from the department of the Gironde, whence some, of their chief men came…
The Mountainists advocated uncompromising revolutionary principles (besides aiming to some extent, at economic equality) a vigorous policy and strong centralisation in, opposition to the Girondists, who favoured strictly middle-class republicanism, a timid and vacillating policy, and federalisation, or local autonomy. The struggle between the Mountain and the Gironde was in part a struggle for supremacy between Paris and the departments.

So far, so good? Fair enough. That section of Malcolm’s argument is hereby dedicated to Bob Mitchell, distinguished son of Kinnegad, in the County Westmeath, and MA of Trinity College, Dublin, who maintained that, “History began in 1789, and everything earlier was archaeology.” And then went off to study medieval trade routes.

Malcolm now humbly submits that adherence to Liberté, égalité, fraternité is as good a way as any to define a Leftist.

Vorwärts!

Fortunately, the Declaration of the Rights of Man is quite clear about two of these ideals:

• Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law [Article 4].
• The Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, personally or through their representatives, in its making. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes [Article 6].

The fraternité bit amounts to: Do as you would be done by.

According to wikipedia, the French did not get their motto until later:

it was only in 1848 that Pierre Leroux revived the phrase. Pache, mayor of the commune of Paris, painted the formula “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort” on the walls of the commune. It was under the Second Republic that it took on its final form and only under the Third Republic was the motto made official.

There’s something seriously confusing there. Jean-Nicholas Paché was Mayor of Paris in 1793-4 and originally a Girondist. He is not to be confused (as a casual reading of that quotation might do) with the Mayor during the 1871 Commune: Jules Ferry, later twice Prime Minister in the 1880s.

Pierre LeRoux could qualify as the original woolly Christian Socialist. He is often credited for giving the French the word “socialisme” in 1834. English had recognised “socialist” the year before, when it appeared in The Poor Man’s Guardian of 24th August. There are earlier uses of “socialisme” (for example The Globe of 13th February 1832), but there it implies the antithesis to “personnalité”. The Encyclopedia Britannica believes that Robert Owen’s followers were using “socialism” by the later 1830s.

The motto was current in Paris by 1793, and was undoubtedly widely displayed, and painted on walls. It was not original: Fénelon made the connection in the later 17th century. Robespierre was proposing it as a national motto in 1790.

Halt!

Serendipity as art and science

When he was first married, and lived out in the Sticks, Malcolm’s pad backed onto Guildhall Street (left). So his immediate neighbours included the Constitutional Club (who chucked bottles into Malcolm’s garden when he stood as a Labour candidate), a newsagent (whose dog piddled over Malcolm’s front door each day she delivered the morning Guardian) and a knicknackery called Serendipidy.

It was a “nice” shop, mainly selling the ornate, expensive and barely useful, but he came to like the word.

He was made even happier when he discovered the origin of the word. Horace Walpole wrote a letter to a friend living in Florence:

It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand ’serendipity’?

Unkind souls have even suggested that Walpole was guilty thereby of a piece of self-publicising, in that he was the author of The Three Princes of Serendip. That would be remarkably precocious of him, for the book appeared in London in 1722, when Walpole was just five years of age.
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By chance, by the laws of serendipity, Malcolm came to scan this week’s New York Times property (sorry: ‘real estate’) supplement. And thereby hangs another tale.

The best thing for any casual passer-by to do at this moment is to by-pass Malcolm’s maunderings and go directly to the hyperlinked source. Enjoy.

The Village

You ignored the advice? Or you came back? Oh, well.

Now that his eldest daughter, who has appeared previously in these entries, has married, moved to Joisey, and spawned, Malcolm finds himself in New York occasionally, but regularly. Each visit normally means percolating down to the Village before taking the A Train (or the C or the E or the 1,2 or 3 for that matter) up to Penn. And each percolation usually involves an extended rest in a place of liquid refreshment.

This is, after all, one of the more homely parts of Manhattan, very much human-sized.

It is, as Gerry Shanahan’s article makes clear, a veritable mother-lode of serendipitous discoveries. He started at 66 Perry Street, a key marker for Sex and the City fans, as is the Magnolia Bakery at 401 Bleeker Street (where the cupcakes are so popular, customers are rationed to a dozen). He continued:

A friend visiting and walking with me on, say, Bedford Street, will hear, “That’s the oldest house in the Village that’s still standing, from 1799” (No. 77), and “That’s the narrowest house in the city — nine and a half feet wide; Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there (No. 75 ½).” On Grove Street, it’s “They say John Wilkes Booth plotted Lincoln’s assassination here” (No. 45). On Bank Street, it’s “Here’s where Lauren Bacall lived when she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village 1942” (No. 75).

Lauren Bacall as “Miss Greenwich Village”! Ha! A likely story! But, incredibly, true: Betty Joan Perske was new York born. By another of those weird serendipities, she is the better-looking cousin of Shimon Peres.

Her mother (who was separated) moved into 75 Bank Street (on the corner of Bleeker, and just across the road from Abingdon Square) when Betty was 17, and just before her “Miss Greenwich Village” moment.

She went into the theatre and onto Broadway as Betty Bacall (her mother’s maiden name was Weinstein-Bacal) , before being spotted, and re-renamed, by Howard Hawks. On the way, she sat on Harry Truman’s piano (right). And, sixty-odd years later, and now 83 years young, she is still there, to be snapped shopping locally in SoHo (left). Yikes!

On the same block, at 63 Bank, Sid Vicious succumbed to a heroin overdose. Head the other way, towards the river, and 105 was home to John and Yoko before they moved to the Dakota.

Shanahan (a good County Clare name, that) writes far too well to be mere page-filler between the property ads, but exemplifies what makes the by-ways and back-pages of the New York Times such a preposterously-good read.

Malcolm lingers with Shanahan on Bedford Street. Take 75½, “the narrowest house in the city” (right), because it was built to in-fill a carriage entrance. The connection to Edna St Vincent Millay is barely valid, for it was only a few months in the six decades of her life. She was in her late twenties, in her “open” (but discreetly managed) marriage with Eugen Boissevain, and already anticipating the Sex in the City ethos. Where else could she be but Greenwich Village? Try this for size:

According to [Max] Eastman, while at a cocktail party Millay discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist. He asked her, “I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional impulse toward a person of your own sex?” She responded, “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual, too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”

That, to Malcolm, defines ‘feistiness’. Shanahan could have added that the same house has more history: it was also home to John Barrymore and Cary Grant (with his live-in boyfriend). Further down Bedford Street, at number 69, was home to William Burroughs in 1943-44.

Double back, across Commerce Street, and pass 81 Bedford, where, in the early 1950s, the CIA conducted experiments with LSD. Malcolm loves his anecdotage, but this one is a doozy.

Colonel George H. White, a.k.a. ‘Morgan Hall’, was managing part of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s programme to manipulate human behaviour. ‘Operation Midnight Climax’ (better believe it!), was the second phase of LSD testing, and involved using prostitutes picking up men in bars:

Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment.

Enough, already!

Chumley’s

Malcolm’s reverie takes him further along Bedford, across Barrow, and would like to serendipidously slip through an unmarked door at 86 Bedford into Chumley’s. Lee Chumley opened his illegal basement bar here in 1928.

Despite its anonymity, a fair quota of American literary greats apparently found their way here (which is more than Malcolm did at his first attempt) . The worthies are memorialised by a recent plaque above the brown door. This is the only obvious clue to locate the joint: it almost spoils the fun of the neighbourhood, watching the tourists unable to match the picture in their DK Eyewitness guidebook with the reality around them. Inside, photographs, book-jackets and memorabilia line the walls. Passing trade also included Simone de Beauvoir:

In Bedford Street is the only place in New York where you can read and work through the day, and talk through the night, without arousing curiosity or criticism: Chamby’s [sic].

A good number of beers should be available, the food more than acceptable, the fire in winter welcoming. Expect it to be tatty and cash only, but enjoy one of the few bars in the tourist guides guaranteed not to disappoint.

At which moment Alcuin’s self-composed epitaph (translated by Helen Waddell, who is this entry’s Ulster connection) comes to mind:

The world’s delight I followed with a heart
Unsatisfied; ashes I am and dust.

Chumley’s ashes and dust came last April 5th, a Thursday that will live in infamy. Contractors dislodged a chimney, which collapsed into the bar. Some six square yards of 1830s brickwork came down, causing number 86 and next door to be evacuated. As of now, the bar remains closed; and Malcolm would have appreciated Shanahan going the extra furlong or two to bring confirmation that it will, indeed, reopen next month.