Wabbling Back to the Fire

Don’t you go blaming me: Ruveka Attygalle is chiefly responsible for this great work of moral exegesis. I merely added a verse or two and did some light editing.

THE HUNGRY PROPHET

There was a young man, shrewd and wise,

Who was quick to realize

There’s much to gain from telling lies

And pulling wool o’er people’s eyes.

Thus he went to turn a profit

Making out he was a Prophet.

And this Prophet walked abroad,

Singing praises to the Lord,

Gathering up a charmless horde –

Rich and stupid, fat and bored.

Lonely, jaded, desperate,

We flocked to him and took his bait.

To us then the Saint proposed

That God was just like Santa Claus:

Keen to bless all girls and boys

With the most material joys –

Gold Rolexes, trophy brides –

Free to all who paid their tithes.

Furthermore, the Saint explained,

Being saved did not depend

On sin or virtue, love or hate,

But simply on how much you ate.

‘If through yonder Gates you’d pass,

Curb your appetite and fast.’

 ‘Holiness means skipping dinner;

‘Souls ascend as they grow thinner;

‘So, if truly saved you’d be,

‘Go Breatharian like me.’

Then we fasted and we prayed,

And to him our savings paid.

Feats of prestidigitation

Added to his reputation;

Cures miraculous he wrought,

Though of the reversible sort.

Pretty soon his fame was national;

When are people ever rational?

Thus the Prophet prospered, till

(You might call it Heaven’s will)

One fine day they caught him cheating:

Some apostate filmed him eating!

That was it: the legend crumbled,

Now the greedy fraud was rumbled.

Learning that he loved his meat,

How we wailed and gnashed our teeth!

Moans of loss and grief we uttered

Hearing he liked toast well buttered.

Some in anger left the church

And our Prophet in the lurch.

Then our lives seemed dull and empty;

How we starved amidst our plenty!

How we missed the highs of old

Which we’d paid him for with gold.

Hopeless husbands, helpless wives

Found the wow gone from their lives.

Wand’ring planets, one by one,

Back we wobbled to our Sun;

Though we knew he’d been deceiving,

It was better just believing.

Now we all cough up with zest,
Fools withal, but truly blest.

A Nasty Man in Africa

Remote People
by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was an unpleasant man with nasty political and religious ideas, but a brilliant writer when he chose to be. There are places in this book where he does so choose.

Waugh went to Africa in 1930 to cover the coronation of Ras Tafari, the emperor of Abyssinia, for the Times of London. His descriptions of the ceremony and his travels in the country are vivid and often hilarious, though anyone who has read Wilfred Thesiger’s account of Tafari’s coronation may wonder whether the two men had ended up at different parties by accident. In his autobiography Thesiger presents Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), as a heroically, splendidly barbarous land; Waugh agrees about the barbarity but gives it to us as a gimcrack shambles, populated by savages playing ineptly and absurdly at a game, civilization, to which they do not know the rules. He claims to find it all very funny, but his humorous sallies, which tend to rely for their effect on racism, religious prejudice and snobbery, often fail to amuse because they are so obviously based on a mistaken interpretation of what he sees about him.

Evidently stung at some point during the interminable coronation by the tsetse fly of perversity, Waugh decided afterwards to take in even more of a continent that he must, by then, surely have recognized as disagreeable to his own constitution. He thus commenced to travel by road, rail and steamer down the East African coast, visiting Aden, Kenya and Uganda before making a detour into the Belgian Congo in the hope of catching an aeroplane to fly him over Central Africa to an Atlantic seaport where he could catch a steamer back to England. The last part of this plan failed, leaving him to return to British East Africa and make his way by train down to South Africa, where (his funds now almost exhausted) he bought himself a third-class passage home.

His brief stay in Aden, a hellish place that he mischievously pretends to like, gives us the funniest passages in the book. These describe an outdoor ramble with a Levantine businessman and his muscular European clerks that turns out to be a kind of Outward Bound test of manhood, involving climbs up precipitous cliffs and a swim in a shark-infested bay. He professes to like Kenya, too, and gives us a sympathetic portrait of the white farmers and the decadent Happy Valley Set, who in spite of their decadence were very much his kind of people. Unfortunately he then ventures to expound for several pages on colonial and imperial politics, about which he doesn’t have a clue. It’s demented waffle, all of it, and completely ruins his picture of Kenya for us by making it plain that he traversed Africa quite blind to anything that he had not, in some sense, expected to see. This affects our vicarious experience as much as it did his direct one, because we don’t get to read about anything new, or even about anything old from a fresh perspective.

From this point onwards his travelogue becomes a litany of tedium and discomfort, taking a nosedive into genuine privation aboard a Belgian steamer on the Great Lakes. This part of Africa, I have found, does not lend itself to enjoyable travel writing, principally because it so unpleasant and ugly in every aspect, from the scenery to the souls of the people who inhabit it. Waugh only recovers his composure when he has left the Congo and is safely back in British territory.

There is not much to the book after this. The last few pages, about a visit to a London night-club, seem intended to prove that the civilized world can be quite as unpleasant as the interior of Africa. All they really do prove is that Evelyn Waugh could find something nasty to say in almost any circumstances.

A Birthday Prayer

It was my birthday a few days ago. We had a discreet little celebration, which began well after dark, indoors, at the Dutch Burgher Union Bar. Everyone left obediently at closing time, save for the few who had left earlier. It was delightful, and my wife and I are most grateful to all who attended.

Later, I wrote these lines.

A BIRTHDAY PRAYER

Now the day is over,

Night is coming on;

Sozzled lunchtime stragglers

Decorate the lawn.

Deaf to our entreaties,

Heedless of our threats –

It would take a hailstorm

To rid us of these pests.

How they quaffed and guzzled!

How they quacked and squawked!

Lovers rubbed and nuzzled,

Drunk raconteurs talked;

Fun was had in bagfuls,

Hospitality flowed;

Still the sots insist upon

One more for the road.

Through the dusk the bleary

Stars begin to peep;

Though I know it's early,

How I long for sleep.

Jesu, grant this weary

Birthday boy’s request:

Send away the Gadarene swine,
Let me get some rest.

Voodoo Tetrametrical

The wife lent me Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. And now just look...

APOLLOGIA

Space cadets and woo-woo chicks

Clutter up my social media:

Prating, preaching, beating gongs,

Posting tuneless Sixties songs,

Cursing Wikipedia;

Vegan cures for drooping dicks

Flaccify my Facebook page:

Gastroextrudescent yoga,

Tantra, tattva, Kundalini,

Herbal draughts with adu seeni,

Lifestyle gurus wrapped in togas,

Logic and good taste outrage.

I palm my face, yet still do know compassion;

All minds deny mortality in their fashion.

Man of Affairs

Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

This smells strongly of lamp-oil, as any good portrayal of life in seventeenth-century England should. Ms Tomalin has done her homework, and how; we get an awe-inspiringly detailed account of Pepys’s life and times, not just the Diary years but the whole story from birth to death. The scope and depth of the author’s research is astounding, and her portrayal of the times in which Pepys lived – the early Enlightenment, the English Civil War, the Restoration and the so-called Glorious Revolution – is vivid as well as detailed. The characters in the story are presented in all their human complexity and contradiction.

And if any human being was complex and contradictory, Samuel Pepys was. By today’s standards he was a serial sex offender, exercising his domestic droit de seigneur over the maidservants, visiting prostitutes, forcing his attentions on unwilling women (some young enough to be thought children by the conventions of our own time) and cheating incessantly on his beautiful French wife. He was – again, by today’s standards – a corrupt man, one who used his position as a trusted public servant to enrich himself, in some cases (such as the Tangier Mole affair) at the expense of his country. He charged interest on loans to members of his family and absconded from their funerals. Now and then, he beat his wife (she beat him back). Samuel Pepys was a man of his time.

Though loyal enough, he commanded more devotion than he showed, and was not slow to abandon his benefactors and sponsors when the political winds were changing, as they did with alarming frequency during his lifetime. He was born and raised a Parliamentarian and something of a Puritan, was a vengeful spectator at Charles I’s beheading, served Cromwell with dedication but grew disgusted with the period of Parliamentary misrule that followed the Protector’s death and was not slow to turn his coat, along with his sponsors Edward Montagu and George Downing, in good time for the Restoration. His loyalty swung to and fro between Parliament and Crown thereafter before finally settling with the latter – only for him to be put out of favour again when William III gained the throne.

Claire Tomalin proposes these saving graces: Pepys, she tells us, was a clear-eyed and honest reporter of his own actions and perceptive about his own character and motives as well as those of others. He was prudent, meticulous and a very hard worker, and although he did accept bribes and commissions he excelled at his job and rose from a clerkship in the Navy Department to become, in the course of ten or fifteen years, the civilian boss of the Royal Navy. In this capacity he reported directly to Charles II, and also to James II during the latter’s short, inglorious reign. He looked after his own, friends and family alike, though he expected (and usually managed to) lord it over them while doing so. He had excellent taste in domestic objects, art and food, was a passionate amateur musician, interested himself in science and was at one time president of the Royal Society. He counted Robert Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton among his friends. He was no coward, and in youth had himself operated upon successsfuly for kidney stones, which without anaesthetic and in the absence of sterile modern instruments was one of the bravest things a man or woman of his era could do. He was also, in Tomalin’s words, an expert at ‘squeezing every drop out of the day’. He lived as fully and intensely as any man ever did.

Most of all, of course, Pepys was a great writer, who invented a new literary form – or, if you prefer, elevated one to the condition of literature. There are plenty of quotes from the Diary here. Too many of them, for my taste, are about Pepy’s rather ugly sexual behaviour, which he liked to describe in excruciating detail using a special vocabulary of his own, part foreign words and part made-up ones that clearly held an erotic charge for their coiner. But there are plenty of other extracts that give us the flavour of the man and his thought and which often take our breath away by their frankness and insight. There is no question that he was both a man of, and one of the founding fathers of, the Enlightenment.

And what a reporter! His accounts of London life, the trials and executions he had seen, the plague, the Great Fire of London and so on have survived to this day because they are masterpieces of descriptive journalism – though written, originally, for no eyes but his own. It is largely because of Pepys’s diary that we know so much about London life in those long-ago times.

Although I found Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self slow going, I appreciated the level of detail and Ms Tomalin’s own incisive commentary. There are times when she takes speculative risks, as for example when she attributes a painting in Pepys’s library to his mistress, although the evidence is only circumstantial. However, what she has done in terms of writing and research in order to produce this book is extraordinary. I, who have spent the last six years working on a project of similar depth and scope, can only marvel at her scholarship and dedication, and at a work-ethic that clearly rivals her subject’s. It took me forever to read this book, but only in the chapters concerning Pepys’s personal life and relationships during his final years did my interest really flag. As a history of his times (and they were interesting, indeed frightening ones to live in) as well as a biography of a great though largely unsung icon of literature and culture, I heartily recommend it.