Untold Stories (35 page)

6
November
. Some Essex police officers convicted of ill-treating (and in one case killing) police dogs. They are said to be likely to lose their jobs, which makes a nice change. Had it been blacks they had been ill-treating (or indeed killing) they would be returned to duty as a matter of course.

17
November
. I'm looking forward to a quiet morning's work when out of the blue [
sic
] a letter comes from Oxford offering an honorary degree. This distinction is what Larkin called ‘the big one' and when he got his letter he uncharacteristically bounded up the stairs to tell Monica Jones the good news. I sit looking at mine and wondering about it for most of the morning, wishing I could just say ‘Delighted' and have done with it. But ever since the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Language and Communication I've felt disaffected with the University. I'm aware of the arguments about bad money being put to good uses but I still think that Murdoch's is not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself. So, eventually, I write back saying no and explaining why.

Of course I am aware that writing (and publishing) this may be sneered at as showing off, and that if one does turn something down it's proper to keep quiet about it. But this refusal isn't for my own private moral satisfaction: Murdoch is a bully and should be stood up to publicly and so, however puny the gesture, it needs to be in the open.

One disappointment about the proposal is that it comes on ordinary paper. My first contact with Oxford took place nearly fifty years ago when, as a schoolboy, I sent off for the prospectuses of the scholarships and exhibitions given by the various groups of colleges. These were printed on quarto sheets of thick rough-edged paper, rag paper perhaps it was, the texture so fleecy and absorbent it was practically blotting paper. Peppered with phrases I had never come across like ‘
viva voce', ‘pro hac vice
' and ‘Founder's kin', these sheets I took as evidence of the grandeur and antiquity of the institution I was hoping to enter; one could imagine them peeled off the stone and hung up to dry. I wonder this morning when such prospectuses fell into disuse and the University's correspondence ceased to be conducted in such an antique mode. Certainly today's letter, apart from its contents, is just like any other.

I wish I could say that this refusal leaves me with a warm feeling of having done the right thing, but not a bit of it. I end up, as so often when I have tried to get it right, feeling I've slightly made a fool of myself, so that I wonder whether after more momentous refusals martyrs ever went to their deaths not in the strong confidence of virtue but just feeling that they had somehow muffed it.

7
December, Venice
. The size of the place apart, there's not much difference between landing at Venice and at JFK. There's the same grey lagoon with industry on the horizon, the same sparsely inhabited islands of cold brown grass with channels in between and, once you're out, the same thrill to be had in both places from the first glimpse of the towers of the city.

It's always said that one should arrive in Venice by boat, which, if you come by air, you generally do. But I think rail is best. The first time I came was by train and at night and, not knowing what to expect, was amazed to
find that the canals weren't sequestered in a quarter of their own but were part of the city itself and that, with the water lapping the steps, Venice began right outside the station. And that still astonishes.

8
December, Venice
. I used to feel badly that I didn't care for the inside of St Mark's (tatty, no vistas and too much gold) but once written off or regarded as a collection of superior bric-à-brac it's full of separate pleasures, particularly the floor, though what takes my eye this morning is an intricate little stretch of Gothic arcading in brown and white marble on the right of the steps behind the lectern. I would like to parcel it up and take it home, just as, like so much else in the church, it was presumably parcelled up and brought home here by the Venetians, who plundered it in the first place.

We climb the steps to the outside loggia, empty this cold bright morning. The horses overlooking the Piazza are now replicas, the Greek or Roman originals these days stabled in a room behind. Here they can be seen face on and in close-up as they can seldom have been seen before in their long history. It is as if they are in conversation with each other and, at first glance, it seems from their expressions that two are clearly female, two male. But move round them and the genders shift, so that each animal can be seen to partake of both. The patina is a sumptuous blend of green and gold, the remnants of the harness still hiding the joints in the casting. But they are not much visited now, or not on this particular morning anyway, though they must be the most extraordinary and certainly the most appealing sculptures in Venice.

9
December, Venice
. The Scuola San Giorgio behind the Riva degli Schiavoni is never easy to locate so when we've managed to track it down it's a keener disappointment to find it (and its collection of Carpaccios) closed. A handwritten note on the door promises that it will be open on Wednesday at ten, but today is Wednesday and it's after eleven and there's no sign of life, just a handful of disconsolate Carpaccio-lovers hanging about on the Calle Furlani.

I first came across these Carpaccios by accident late one Saturday afternoon in 1970, a couple of hours before my train left. The caretaker was about to lock up and he waited while I put in my 200-lire coin to turn on the light in what seemed on that hurried visit like a dark parish room which just happened to house these extraordinary pictures.

Being a particularly human painter with quite a limited output, Carpaccio is an artist, unlike Titian, say, or Veronese, who has fans. His grave, long-nosed elegantly turned-out young persons people a Venice that is still walkable-through today, though the picture here I would most have liked to see again isn't of Venice at all but of the monks thrown into a panic by the arrival of St Jerome's lion.

10
December, Venice
. Walking back to the Accademia from the Rialto, we come through the Campo Santa Margherita, a long, irregular-shaped space surrounded mostly by two-storey houses. J. G. Links's
Venice for
Pleasure
directs us to what is reputedly the oldest house in Venice, which, except for a marble well-head built into a garden wall, isn't very interesting. But coming out again into the Campo I realise that this was where we lodged when I first came to Venice in the summer of 1957. I was with Russell Harty and two other undergraduates from my college and we had digs in one of these little low houses. In those days I only needed to shave once or twice a week, the process always painful and never achieved without a cut or two. Shaving one morning, I had an accident and was mystified as to what to do. None of us spoke Italian but Russell, always the man of the world, went out into the Campo and bought a large bunch of flowers which he presented to the beaming but baffled landlady while I tried to explain (the phrase not occurring in any of the phrase books) that I had dropped my styptic pencil down the plughole.

24
December
. I watch the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's with the familiar words, as particularly with carols, coming unbidden and with them the same odd associations. ‘Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing', for instance, has always seemed to me like theatrical
billing – and without thinking I've taken it as meaning that, until this afternoon the daftness of it comes home.

27
December, Yorkshire
. A wet dark day as it has been all through Christmas. Train late into Leeds, where we pick up a car and drive out through Garforth and Castleford to Methley. The church (noted from Pevsner) is locked and when we go to the vicarage for the key the vicar, a woman, asks me for some identification. When I show her my railcard she glances at it briefly and says, ‘Yes, I thought it was you' (which isn't quite what identification means).

The church is well worth the detour, though, crammed with monuments, many of them in the Waterton chantry, which has a painted, coffered ceiling and two superb fifteenth-century alabaster tombs with that of Lord Welles (killed at Towton in 1461) particularly fine – the features (broken nose, big chin, pudding-basin haircut) make it seem a definite portrait, though the church leaflet says not. Waterton's own tomb is even bolder and more individual but the most striking monument is to a seventeenth-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt, who sculpted Elizabeth I's monument in Westminster Abbey.

Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don't take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is famous as they are among the earliest subjects of Henry Moore who, visiting his aunt at Methley as a boy of nine, used to come to the church and draw. Which is a link with Blake, whose first experience as an artist was also drawing tombs, in his case in Westminster Abbey when he was apprenticed to an engraver.

The church as a whole is fascinating (though rather snubbingly dismissed in Pevsner as ‘over-restored') and full of curiosities, with oddest of all in the vestry a rather watery crucifixion done by Robert Medley, the schoolboy friend of Auden who first turned him on to poetry. I mean to ask the vicar how it got here but when we return the key she is so keen to
tell us how, apropos Henry Moore, the church has its own website that I forget.

It's dark when we get to the village, where the beck is high, the moon almost full and snow on the tops. We fetch in some logs, light the fire and have cheese on toast.

12
January
. A New York producer sends me
Waiting in the Wings
, Noël Coward's play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play'.

The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all round, the only character not requiring updating (or a new perspective) is an old actress, Sarita Myrtle, who's gone completely doolally, and so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation is that it includes a character called Alan Bennet (
sic
) who is described as ‘in his late forties. He is neatly dressed but there is an indefinable quality of failure about him.'

Coward's play was staged in September 1960, a month after
Beyond the
Fringe
, and a year after I had appeared on stage for the first time with the Oxford Theatre Group. (I am just thinking how the name might have lodged in Coward's mind.) Nobody has ever noticed it before – not even Nora Nicholson, who played Sarita Myrtle and was with me in
Forty
Years On
.

13
January
. Humphrey Carpenter comes round to do some fact-checking for his forthcoming book on satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to
Beyond the Fringe
, which was Robert Ponsonby's contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can't think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick', a reference to Flanders
and Swann's
At the Drop of a Hat
and Peter Cook's suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I've seen for some time. Bernard Levin', the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of the house.

27
January
. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I'd written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason she asked at the library for something on Larkin but seeing his photograph gave the book straight back: ‘He looked too much like Sergeant Bilko.'

28
January
. I switch on the
Antiques Roadshow
where someone is showing an expert a drawing by E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of
Winnie the Pooh
. It's a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ‘Gobbling Market' and meant as a satire on black marketeers. It was for
Punch
but it could just as easily have been for
Der Stürmer
, as all the black marketeers are strongly Semitic in features, some as demonic as the worst Nazi propaganda. The expert makes no reference to this, except to say: ‘It's very strong.' When the owner bought the drawing he'd had the chance of getting a
Winnie the Pooh
cartoon instead: that would have appreciated in value a good deal but ‘Gobbling Market' not at all, which is encouraging.

9
February
. Yesterday evening to the National Gallery's Ingres exhibition. Some glowing early portraits … the earliest like Fabre or Géricault and the best an extraordinary painting of his friend J. B. Desdéban. Red-haired, orange-jacketed and against a russet background, he's not unlike the Chicago Degas of the woman having her hair brushed, which is another exercise in red. Ingres is supposed to have said it was the best thing he ever did and it could be taken for an early Picasso. Lynn points out how bony and articulated the hands are in the drawings whereas in the paintings the hands become fat, boneless and almost claw-like.

Dame Iris Murdoch dies and gets excellent reviews, all saying how (morally) good she was, though hers was not goodness that seemed to require much effort, just a grace she had been given: so she was plump
and she was also good, both attributes she had been born with and didn't trouble herself over. I wonder if it's easier to be good if you don't care whether you're wearing knickers or mind, as Wittgenstein didn't, living on porridge; goodness more accessible if you're what my mother used to call ‘a sluppers'.

Nobody explains (or seems to think an explanation required) how this unworldly woman managed to be made a dame by Mrs Thatcher and was laden with honorary degrees; sheer inadvertence perhaps.