The Pursuit of Laughter (27 page)

Mr Arthur Koestler, in his autobiography
The Invisible Writing
, describes the Budapest of the 20s, where he says there was a group of first-rate writers who would have been world famous had they been born in London, Berlin or Paris, but who were condemned to write for each other and a relatively small public because their language was Hungarian. Translation? Of course it is possible, in theory, though much gets lost in the process.

Certain words and idioms are untranslatable. In another category are translators’ howlers, the Englishman who gave
lac du Japon
as Japanese lake (instead of lacquer), the Frenchman who turned Alexander Pope into
le pape Alexandre.

General Spears, in his book
Prelude to Dunkirk
, says that Madame de Portes, a lady who had an influence on pre-war politics in France through her friendship with a member of the Government, was known as
la porte à côté,
the side door. He does not add the other meaning of
à côté
—common, a person one does not receive—which is the whole point of the joke. A German once told me that in a prisoner-of-war camp in America he was classified as a rabid Nazi—
kaninchen Nazi,
he said, laughing. Had he really confused rabid with rabbit?

Who has not, when learning a foreign language, read a book and laboriously noted down all the unknown words in order to look them up afterwards in the dictionary? And who has not felt rather depressed, when, having more or less mastered the language, he comes across dozens of words in as many pages which he has never heard of?

Personally I never mark books. The only point of doing so is to emphasize something for future reading, and as I dislike reading books where words and sentences have been scored and underlined this, for me, would defeat its own end. But I notice that lending library books often have remarks written in their margins by people who cannot contain
their furious irritation or disagreement with the authors’ opinions.

In small libraries the librarian sometimes makes a note, to refer to when giving advice to borrowers. This had been done, for example, in Holloway Prison library, where the librarian was a wardress and not exactly what my father used to call ‘a literary cove’. Yet I suppose she had to know vaguely what the books were about; it would never do if a new prisoner managed to borrow an exciting novel during the very first week. The wardress goes from cell to cell accompanied by a prisoner carrying a tray of books; only boring or at any rate edifying books are supposed to he offered to a prisoner during the early part of a sentence.

In women’s prisons books bound in red cloth used to be the favourites, because the prisoners contrived to transfer some of the red dye from the bindings onto their own lips. This is one of those brilliantly clever things, like splitting a match into ten parts each of which will light a cigarette, that convicts learn in a trice. Probably they no longer have to trouble about the shabby old red books; I saw in a paper some time ago that they are allowed to keep ordinary make-up in their cells now. I wonder whether peroxide is also available to them; one of the saddest sights in a women’s prison was the piebald heads, with a few inches of golden, crimped hair hanging down below the black, brown or sometimes grey.

I once borrowed a rather pretty leather-bound edition of Racine’s plays, printed about 1840, from Holloway Prison library. The presiding wardress had written on the fly-leaf:
Wonderful language; dull.
If she considered Racine dull, whom would she find brilliant? It is anybody’s guess.

Prison has a very special effect on one’s taste in reading. Where the surroundings are so desperately degraded, ‘realism’—which generally means the description of
disagreeable
happenings against a sordid background—is not much cared for. The need is for either beauty, wit and elegance, or else for what Germans call ‘
das Erhabene
’ (which can be more or less translated ‘the sublime’).

This accounts for the fact that St John of the Cross was a best-seller to prisoners of war, or so at least I was told by somebody who worked in a bookshop. I wonder if they read him much now that they have returned to the world. There is no doubt that a very light diet, or in other words semi-starvation, combined with a completely sedentary life, tends to direct the thoughts of even a pleasure-loving and worldly person towards
contemplation
and mysticism. And the untempting temptations of St Antony as imagined by Bosch might be any light-headed prisoner’s dream.

Lord Berners used to send me his books as they came out when I was in prison. They gave me great pleasure, but they were distressingly short; a prisoner wants to look up from a book and discover that several hours have gone by unnoticed—just the opposite of
ordinary
life when one never has time for all the myriad things one would like to do. We only had permission to write two letters a week, and mine were always mortgaged up to the hilt to go to children and other near relations. But for writing to a Member of Parliament it was possible to obtain special leave from the prison governor; many
prisoners
took advantage of this with the idea that an MP might summon up courage to raise the whole question of Regulation 18B in general, or of some constituent’s case in
particular
, in Parliament. (One or two courageous MPs actually did so). I used to get permission for an extra letter to thank Lord Berners for his gifts by saying that I must write to a
member
of the House of Lords. As a matter of fact he never took his seat or went near the place; his excuse was that the only time he had been there his umbrella was stolen by a bishop.

The day my arrest was reported in the newspapers he wrote to ask whether he could help me in any way; should he, for instance, send me a little file concealed in a peach? This letter was only given to me months later; it had meantime been the rounds in the Home Office and was riddled with pin holes.

On a raw November morning at Waterloo station a woman exclaimed in an indignant way to the world in general but also to me in particular because I happened to be near by:

‘Look at that man! It’s a shame! He’s dressed in nothing but a blanket and his bedroom slippers!’

I looked. ‘I think he’s a friar,’ I said. She calmed down a bit. ‘Oh, is that what they call it, dear,’ she murmured doubtfully.

The committee which formed itself in Mahatma Gandhi House has appealed for money to help it save liberty in France. I long to know 1. whether money is pouring in, and 2. how it will be spent. I suppose the committee will have to come to Paris on a fact-finding expedition. Rather a clever idea of theirs, really; but how surprised the French will be! English people enjoy giving money to ‘save’ some country or other. I remember at the end of the war ladies went from house to house in every village collecting ‘for China.’

English pacifists certainly pick their weather for demonstrating with a noble disregard for their own comfort. The Aldermaston march took place in a snow storm; the attack on the concrete mixer at a rocket-launching site in Norfolk was made in bitter December fog. Climbing over barbed wire entanglements and rolling in icy mud, the demonstrators
accurately
reproduced for themselves conditions in the front line in the war before last.

I suppose the demonstrator called ‘Arrowsmith’ was compensating for an ancestor who, in medieval times, was an armaments manufacturer hammering out arrowheads on his anvil.

I see that the memorial designed by Mr Lynn Chadwick, to commemorate the crossing of the Atlantic forty years ago by the airship R.34, is not going to be erected at London Airport after all. Lord Brabazon complained that it looked like a diseased haddock.

Sculpture arouses much more furious controversy than painting because, I suppose, being set up in a public highway, it is seen by many more people. When I was a child, the target for angry denunciation was Epstein’s
Rima
, a rather inferior work which we all felt obliged to defend because those who attacked it were art-haters.

The Sudanese have hit upon a rather original idea. Instead of
unveiling
statues in Khartoum they now
veil
them preparatory to removing them out of sight. A statue of General Gordon riding a camel and one of Lord Kitchener on horseback have recently been veiled, to the accompaniment of ceremonial music and military parades.

This is an idea Londoners might with advantage copy. My first choice for veiling would be Nurse Cavell. But I hope London will offer to purchase the Khartoum statues; I feel sure they would be popular, the camel in particular would give great pleasure.

What an excessively odd animal a camel is; the sight of General Chinese Gordon
riding
his across Hyde Park would beguile countless Londoners from now till doomsday,
art-haters
and art-lovers alike.

A doctor told a friend of mine that 700 different chemicals are used to preserve food. He said that nobody knows what effect they may be having on the human body. He added that of course food must be preserved if vast agglomerations of populations are not to starve. The same argument is used about chemical fertilizers. As the poor little suicide boy in Hardy’s novel said in his farewell note: ‘because we are too menny.’

Possibly we need a Bertrand Russell of chemistry to point out the dangers in our foods; in any case, patient research is required. Maybe the 700 chemicals do no harm at all to A but give B the permanent stomach-ache which makes his life such a bore. I suppose it is on the cards that if the brains and energy which are lavished on satellites were given to medical research, and if an equal international prestige attached to healing the sick as now accrues from the conquest of space, preventions and cures would in fact be
discovered
and mankind would suffer less.

Is the Devil at work in the world, or is it just the dark side of Nature which forces men
to struggle on, trampling and discarding the weak as they go? Who knows?

A correspondent informs me that it is not the Sudanese who invented the veiling of
statues
, but Max Beerbohm; he thought of it in 1911. Ah, but did it just stop at being a clever notion, or did Max Beerbohm actually succeed in veiling any? And if the answer is that he did, was there a military band and an ambassador at his veiling ceremony? The Sudanese veiled so stylishly.

The veil itself, on the Kitchener statue, looked like an immense ballet skirt, with the horse’s legs playing the parts of Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn in a
pas de deux
.

Sir Frank Medlicott, National Liberal and Conservative MP for Norfolk Central, is
reported
as saying: ‘Imprisonment without trial is anathema to British people. We are getting slack about this.’ Apparently they had nabbed a couple of foreign seamen and omitted to charge them. I agree with Sir Frank Medlicott about the slackness, but I do not feel too sure about the anathema. I don’t believe the British people give a button for habeas
corpus
, though I suppose they might if they were nabbed themselves. I do, for example.

When I was at Holloway, concerts were occasionally given for the prisoners by well-
meaning
and philanthropic visiting musicians. They took place in the chapel. Although
architecturally
this chapel naturally could not compare with a Gothic country church, it was rather pleasant in its way. In the dirty, smelly, dark old prison it seemed clean, well polished and brightly lit. (I once asked permission to be allowed to buy a stronger bulb for my cell because I could not see to read—the answer was
NO
).

One such chapel concert I went to I shall never forget. There was a man who sang folk songs and at the end of each line of verse he raised himself on tiptoe and poked his head out first to the right and then to the left. I began to laugh and couldn’t stop—
something
that had never happened to me since childhood. I buried my face in my hands and tears of laughter ran through my fingers. Terrified that he might see and be deeply hurt, I did everything I could think of including biting my tongue; but still I shook with
laughter
which became more painful with every ‘Hey nonny no’ from the singer, who had so kindly come to Holloway to amuse the prisoners but had not meant to amuse them quite as much as that. It was agony; back in my own cell I was overcome with extreme
exhaustion
. I hope he did not notice; perhaps he thought that I was like Mme Verdurin, who demonstrated her sensibility by listening to music with her face in her hands.

President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is apparently considered such a good idea (
The Economist
calls it a ‘noble experiment’) that other countries may imitate it. But
The Economist
admits ‘there is a good deal of scepticism in Washington about these “innocents abroad.” Will they be mainly rich men’s children hungry for adventure? Will pampered young Americans prove tough enough and humble enough? How many are likely to know or to learn
quickly
the obscure languages they will need later?’

I have been wondering just the same thing. Of course all foreign languages seem obscure until one has managed to learn them. But it might be better in some ways if the Peace Corps refrained from foreign languages altogether. It is so much easier to annoy people if they can understand what you say. And the under-developed will already be
highly
tried by the noble experimentalists sharing their homes and eating their food.

There is a brighter side for them (the under-developed peoples) however. They can get a bit of their own back. For ‘President Kennedy does not rule out similar corps in the slums and depressed areas of the United States.’ Well done him! It will be most
instructive
to observe the reactions of the American unemployed to a highly-powered team of, for example, Congolese, living with them, eating the same food, and speaking heaven knows what language. This will certainly deserve to be called an Experiment, though how Nobly it turns out remains to be seen.