Hard Copy
20 February 2013
It’s really quite irksome to find, just as I’m trying to reanimate this old blog, that nothing online is really very interesting these days. Perhaps it’s just me. I’m finding that, aside from the Times, which for all its many faults remains the news source of record, The New Yorker, and the two Reviews of Books, there isn’t much out there worth reading. And the sadness of that damps any inspiration that I might have to write anything here. I plow through acres of Google Reader feeds, day after day, but — to paraphrase Johnson, the man who is tired of the Internet is tired of something.
The current issue of the London Review of Books (35/4), in contrast, is a banquet of substantial fare. There’s the Hilary Mantel piece, “Royal Bodies,” that has elicited a fusillade from the conservative British press. Allergic to historical fiction, I haven’t read either of Mantel’s Tudor blockbusters, and I’m not surprised that their author prefers “doomed” Diana and Marie-Antoinette to the faultless Kate Middleton (whom I admire, precisely, because my word for “doomed” is “spoiled,” and she isn’t). However sentimental she might be about dead princesses, though, Mantel is no star-struck royalist. She describes attending an event at Buckingham Palace at which she “stared” at the Queen. “I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” It’s a good thing for Mantel and her publishers that the United Kingdom does not enforce Thailandish rules about lèse-majesté. Even stranger is Mantel’s account of an earlier event at Buck House.
I had expected to see people pushing themselves into the queen’s path, but the opposite was true. The queen walked through the reception areas at an even pace, hoping to meet someone, and you would see a set of guests, as if swept by the tide, parting before her or welling ahead of her into the next room. They acted as if they feared excruciating embarrassment should they be caught and obliged to converse.
(I must confess that my dread of such embarrassment would make it impossible for me to attend. I loathe having to make ceremonial contact with other people.) Then there’s David Runciman on the “Profumo” scandal, which I can remember, if only as a matter of names and naughtiness. (I was mystified that a man with an Italian name could be in the British cabinet, although, in fact, John Profumo wasn’t.) The review of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new book on the scandal, An English Affair, is so rich that I feel I must now read it, even if I agree with Runciman’s suggestion that the title is somewhat misleading, insofar as all democracies have their scandals, and the early Sixties was a particularly fertile period for them. Still, an anatomy of political scandal as probing as this one seems obviously worth the time it will take to read.
Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, toward the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun. But Davenport-Hines doesn’t see these oppositions as having created social divisions between the classes, or between the coming men and the old buffers. Instead, they were evident in everyone, from prime ministers to good-time girls, from property developers to law lords, bringing out the absolute worst in all of them.
An amazing insight that I’m just old enough to feel, or to remember, the truth of. Another must-read item in the LRB is Philip Noble’s piece on the new Henry Petrowski book, To Forgive Design. You’ll see why when you learn about the iron rings that Canadian engineers wear, to dampen any hubristic impulses.
In The New Yorker, Nick Paumgartner writes about the real-estate catastrophe in Spain, which is really so staggering that one almost misses Franco!