Moab is my Washpot

Falling In
1

UPPINGHAM SCHOOL was founded in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, but like most public schools did nothing but doze lazily where it was, in the cute little county of Rutland, deep in prime hunting country, until the nineteenth century when a great pioneering headmaster, as great pioneering headmasters will, kicked it up the backside and into a brief blaze of glory.

Uppingham’s great pioneering headmaster was Edward Thing and one must suppose he had some connection with Gabbitas and Thring, the scholastic agency. Certainly Edward Thring founded the Head-masters’ Conference, the public schools’ defining body. Even today, if you are not a member of the HMC you are not a public school, merely an Independent.

Thring believed, like all Victorian pioneering headmasters, in simply enormous side-whiskers and in the Whole Boy. Uppingham School, under his command, was the first public school in Britain to build a swimming pool. Thring encouraged the development of carpentry, woodwork, pottery, printing and crafts. He believed that every child had a talent and that it was the duty of the school to find it. If a boy was a duffer at Latin, Greek or the Mathematics, Thring argued, then something else must be found at which he could excel, for Every Boy Is Good At Something. Edward Thing had wider and more substantial sideburns by far than Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, but Uppingham had no Webb Ellis to invent a new field game and no Thomas Hughes to invent a new literary genre, and thus, despite the staggering impressiveness of Thring’s whiskers, that flew from his cheeks like banners of flame, Uppingham never quite attained Rugby’s heights of fame and glory and throughout the passage of the twentieth century it slowly floated down to its current middle level of middle-class, middle-brow, middle-England middledom.

The English have a positive mania for attaching the word ‘philosophy’ to the most rudimentary and banal platitudes: ‘Our philosophy is to please the customer’, ‘do as you would be done by, that’s my philosophy,’ ‘a blend of traditional comfort and modern convenience is very much the Thistle Hotel’s philosophy,’ that kind of nonsense. The word gets its most savage mistreatment in the mouths of that peculiarly pompous animal, the public school headmaster, that creature so ruthlessly and brilliantly slaughtered, stuffed, mounted and put on permanent display by Peter Jeffrey in Lindsay Anderson’s film masterpiece If…

The public school headmaster and the public school prospectus use the word ‘philosophy’ much as Californian Valley Girls use the word ‘like’, ceaselessly and senselessly.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy, for example, to apply the precepts and principles of Edward Thring to the modern world.

In other words, they had added a metalwork division and a screen-printing room to the carpentry shop.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy to develop the potential of every pupil.

In other words, the school’s A-level results and Oxbridge success rate were well below the average.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy (even in my day unironically expressed) to turn out polite, cheerful, all-round chaps.

In other words the average Uppinghamian is a well-mannered, decent fellow with a stout heart but not too much between the ears.

If all this sounds like mocking criticism, it is not meant to.

Well-mannered, decent fellows with stout hearts and not too much between the ears were the gravy and potatoes of two world wars. The well-maintained memorials in Uppingham catalogue a greater roll of the dead than the size of the school warrants. If other, smarter schools provided the brilliant generals and tacticians who moved counters on maps at Staff HQ, then Uppingham served up the gallant young fellows who sprang so cheerfully and so unquestioningly up the trench ladders, leading their men into the certainty of muddy, bloody slaughter. What is more, Uppinghamians who survived would never be so unsporting or so tasteless as to write clever sceptical poetry about the experience afterwards.

There is a word which still means much to the English and which was for many years a rod for my back, a spur to prick the sides of my intent, a Fury from which to flee, a nemesis, an enemy, an anathema, a totem, a bugaboo and an accusation. I still recoil at its usage and its range of connotation. The word stands for everything I have always wanted not to be and everything and everyone I have felt apart from. It is the shibboleth of the club I would never join, could never join, the club outside whose doors I might stand jeering, while all the time a secret part of me watched with wretched self-loathing as the elected members pushed through the revolving doors, whistling, happy and self-assured. The word is

HEALTHY

– a word that needs some unpicking. Its meaning derives from whole and hale and is cognitively related to such words as holy and healing. Heal is to weal (as the Eleven Plus might say) as health is to wealth. To be healthy is to be whole and holy. To be unhealthy is to be unclean and unholy, insanitary and insane.

For the English the words healthy and hale, at their best, used to carry the full-bellied weight of florid good cheer, cakes and ale, halidom and festive Falstaffian winter wassail. By the end of the seventeenth century, the hale health of pagan holiday was expelled from the feasting-hall along with Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch by the sombre holy day piety and po-faced puritanism of Malvolio, Milton and Prynne. ‘Health!’ became no longer a bumping boozer’s toast but a quality of the immortal soul. Health no longer went with heartiness, but with purity.

‘For your soul’s health’s sake…‘ said the priest.

Thomas Arnold, and behind him Edward Thring and a squadron of other great Victorian pioneering headmasters, whiskers flowing in the breeze, found a new meaning for health. They twisted a poor Roman satirist’s cynical hope into the maxim of the Muscular Christian: Mens sana in corpore sano.

‘A healthy body makes a healthy mind,’ became the wilfully syllogistic mistranslation upon which a 'philosophy’ was founded. Cleanliness, generation upon generation of Britons were led to believe, was next to godliness. Health of body was to be looked upon as an outward and visible sign, to misappropriate the glorious poetry of the Eucharist, of an inward and spiritual health.

Thring had some reason to believe in Health, where health meant hygiene. During his headmastership of Uppingham School he had become infuriated by Uppingham Town’s refusal to do something about its sewers, whose antiquity and medieval inefficiency were causing regular outbreaks of typhus and typhoid amongst pupils and staff. With the furious energy and implacable will of all great Victorians, he moved the entire school hundreds of miles away to the seaside village of Borth in Wales until such time as Uppingham’s local economy suffered enough to force its burghers to do something about their sanitation and, literally, to clean up their act. Thring and the school returned in triumph to a hygienic Uppingham and the school’s Borthday is annually celebrated still.

It is one thing to build sanitation systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy bacteria and bacilli, but it is another to build educational systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy ideas and beliefs. Besides, while we can universally agree that cholera, typhus and typhoid are unhealthy we are unable to come anywhere close to consensus as to the healthiness or otherwise of ideas. I suppose today, the fashionable word to apply is ‘meme’, the evolutionary scientist’s new buzz-word, a concept that applies the model of the selfish gene and the greedily self-replicating virus to movements in thought, to philosophies, religions, political tendencies, trends in individualism and sexual licence, to growth, development, change and ideo-diversity in everything from the rights of animals to the rights of man. One model is as good as another, but today’s memologists kid themselves if they think they were the first to look on ideas as diseases. Their twist is to call religion the virus, where their predecessors looked on atheism, humanism and free-thinking as the contagions. Scientists bring the pure neutrality of φυσις and the beautiful self-working holiness of nature to bear upon the problem. Their grandfathers, Charles Darwin s furious contemporaries, invoked the Bible, the edicts of Empire and that curious Victorian morality that believed worthiness to be the same as worth and healthiness the same as health.

The religiosity of the public schools had sown into it, praise the Lord, the seeds of its own destruction, for the cornerstone of public school education was a study of the languages of classical antiquity, Latin and Greek, and a study of the classics leads the alert reader away from the revealed claims of ecclesiasticism and towards the beauty and holiness of Socrates, Plato and Lucretius.

Uppingham School has very few alumni of whom it can boast in terms of that fell whore, Fame. The odd politician (Stephen Dorrell being the current foremost example), the even odder explorer and eccentric (the Campbells, Donald and Malcolm, for example) an odd actor or two (William Henry Pratt was in my House and achieved eternal glory under the wisely altered name of Boris Karloff), the great director John Schlesinger was there too, but very few writers and artists. Indeed the best known writers to have attended Uppingham include a most exotic trio of early twentieth-century minors. James Elroy Flecker for example, a poet and dramatist whose best known work Hassan was set to incidental music by Delius and contains splendid mock Arabian felicities like, ‘Shall I then put down the needle of insinuation and pick up the club of statement?’ and the couplet that should be the motto of every unhealthy schoolboy:

For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Flecker’s contemporary at Uppingham was the exotic Arthur Annesley, better known as Ronald Firbank, whose books included Vainglory, Valmouth and Sorrow in the Sunlight, unfortunately retitled as Prancing Nigger. Firbank remains even today near the top of the essential reading list of every well-read literary queen. He was a great favourite of ‘better’ writers like Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and his writing exemplifies par excellence that style of poisonous, luxuriant prose that Cyril Connolly defined as the Mandarin. As E. M. Forster wrote of him and his louche created world of birettas, lace-stays and pomanders, ‘Is he affected? Yes always… Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought!’

A little older, but longer-lived than either, was Norman Douglas, the third of the Uppingham triumvirate, and at one time a kind of literary and social hero to me and a writer whose first editions I still collect to this day. Here is something that Douglas wrote about Uppingham in his 1933 memoir Looking Back.

A mildewy scriptural odour pervaded the institution – it reeked of Jereboam and Jesus; the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs; the food was so vile that for the first day or two after returning from holidays I could not get it down. The only good which ever came out of the place was cheese from the neighbouring Stilton, and that, of course, they never gave us. And the charges… On my mother’s death I found, among her papers, those Uppingham accounts: God, how they swindled her! I daresay all -that is changed now.

The mildewy scriptural odour and that reek of Jereboam and Jesus still sometimes hung in the air around the more solid Victorian buildings of Uppingham during my time there and we were certainly never fed on Stilton, but otherwise the place had certainly, as Douglas dared say, changed. The fees were, and still are, steeper than those of many schools with better reputations, but I don’t think it could be accused of swindling. Most of the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs too, but then schoolmasters always strike cocky adolescents as supercilious humbugs. If anyone was a supercilious humbug it was most certainly me.

What I adored about Douglas and about Firbank is that they were, as Forster said

UNHEALTHY

The black bombazine bombast of their Victorian childhoods and educations gave those two writers a deep yearning for light, colour, exoticism and the pagan, in Firbank’s case the Marian paganism of the Romish church, in Douglas’s the real paganism of dryads, fauns and the Great God Pan. They strove instinctively for a style that is the antithesis of blackness and bombast and the best word for that style is not Connolly’s Mandarin, but Camp.

What is camp? A much misunderstood word. Everyone has their own feel for it, here is mine.

Camp is not in rugby football.

Camp is not in the Old Testament.

Camp is not in St Paul.

Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.

Camp loves colour.

Camp loves light.

Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.

Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.

Camp prefers style to the stylish.

Camp is pale.

Camp is unhealthy.

Camp is not English, damn it.

But…

Camp is not kitsch.

Camp is not drag.

Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.

Camp casts out all fear.

Camp is strong.

Camp is healthy.

And, let’s face it…

Camp is queer.

(Mostly)

How much a sensitive heterosexual boy is drawn to the silks, the light, the paganism, the poison and the luxury of camp, is a question. How much a straight boy needs an alternative world, that too is a question. If he does need one, it is more easily found ready-made in the contemporary outside of rock and roll, sport, cars and girls. So easily found that it is not really an alternative world at all, merely one that is just different enough in emphasis from that of the older generation to enable the youth to feel rebellious and rorty.

A boy who knows that he is other, who knows that the world is not made for him, who reads the code implicit in words like ‘healthy’ and ‘decent’, he may well be drawn to the glaring light and savage dark of the ancient world and the poisonous colours and heavy, dangerous musks that lie the other side of the door into the secret garden, the door held open by Pater, Wilde, Douglas, Firbank… even Forster himself, missish and prim as he could be.

Without the ‘benefits’ of a classical education, a boy growing up knowing his difference, might in my day, have been drawn to The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, musicals, glam rock and fashion. Today the gayboy in every section of society has a world of gay music, dance and television to endorse his identity. Manchester has its gay village, London has Old Compton Street, the gay world meets daily to chat, cruise and invigorate itself on the internet. They don’t need a parcel of old poofs historically sequestered in Capri and Tangier to tell them who they are and where they come from and whether or not they have the right to hold their heads up high.

I did need them, however. I needed them desperately and without them I am not sure what I would have done to myself.

Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course. There are Jews too.

I never much cared about my jewishness as a boy. The arbitrary oddity of difference between the western patronymic custom and the primacy of maternal bloodlines in Judaism meant that, by virtue of surname, I passed as gentile. My father’s family name of Fry was as old English as could be, steeped in Quakerism as far back as the founding of the movement. John Fry, a parliamentarian ancestor, signed King Charles the First’s death warrant. My Great Uncle George wrote a book called The Saxon Origins of the Fry Family as a counterblast to those heretical relations (the chocolate making swine from Bristol) who believed that they originated from the town of Fry in Normandy. The opening words of Uncle George’s disappointingly little read work are:

Unlike many so-called English families, the Frys did not come over with William the Conqueror in 1066 -they were there to meet him when he arrived.

My mother might be entirely Jewish, but my surname is entirely English, and that made all the difference to me in terms of my perceived identity. To the English it meant I was English, with faintly exotic overtones, to the Jews it meant I was Jewish, with only a venial blemish. I had, that is to say, the best of both worlds. There are plenty of children in Britain with Jewish fathers and gentile mothers who therefore count as non-Jews to the Jewish, but whose surnames being Goldberg, Cohen or Feinstein, find themselves being treated by the British, in Jonathan Miller’s phrase, as the Whole Hog. Besides, I don’t really, so far as I can tell, look especially Jewish and these things too, make a difference.

I only remember three other Jewish boys at Uppingham: their names were Adley, Heilbronn and Green. Their jewishness was probably of greater importance to them than mine was to me. I used my mixed blood as a vague extra element of exoticism about which I could boast, for there was no palpable anti-Semitism at Uppingham – just the usual careless use of the words ‘jew’ or ‘jewy’ applied to anybody to indicate meanness with money, no more than that.

I have feelings about English anti-Semitism that are as mixed as my own blood. Those members of my mother’s family who survived the holocaust went to live, with the single exception of my grandfather, in America or Israel. In conversation with them I would get very hot under the collar when they shook their heads wonderingly at my grandfather’s decision to live in what they regarded as such an anti-Semitic country as England.

‘What about Benjamin Disraeli?’ I would retort. ‘He was Prime Minister over a hundred years ago. He gave Queen Victoria the Suez Canal and the title of Empress. He died an Earl. When’s the first Jewish President of the United States going to be sworn in?’ I would conveniently forget to add, of course, that Disraeli’s father had converted to Christianity. ‘Or look at Rufus Isaacs,’ I would say. ‘Presidents and potentates would have to bow and call him Your Highness when he was Viceroy of India. He died a Marquess. Half of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet is Jewish. The New York Athletic Club didn’t allow Jews in as members until a few years ago. Can you imagine such low, brash vulgarity in a London club?’

Very self-righteous and patriotic I would be. They might respond with talk about the British wartime reluctance to believe in the depths into which Nazi anti-Semitism had sunk and their handling of the Palestinian Mandate.

This is not an argument I feel qualified to pursue. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that there is a kind of anti-Semitism peculiar to Britain. I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael. Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy. They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the divided self. Einstein, Marx and Freud took the old healthy guilt that sprang from Eden and the Cross and which Western Culture had somehow successfully purged of jewishness and gave us a whole new suite of guilts that a good cold shower and a game of rugger couldn’t quite cleanse. Indeed, the perverted swine would probably look at that cold shower and that game of rugger and read all kinds of nasty things into them, the kind of nasty things that only a pale, unhealthy kind of outsider could possibly see. They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies. Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favourite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is. Come to think, dim stirrings of old Latin lessons here, doesn’t intellectual actually mean ‘reading into’? There you are then. People nowadays can’t look a plain thing in the face and call it plainly what it is. Intellectuals to the left of us, intellectuals to the right, reading. Beastly, unhealthy swine.

Well, no one talks in quite that John Buchaneering way any more, but the modes of thought are still there, or rather modes of anti-thought: still there, still present and incorrect. The Jews still manage, in some people’s eyes, that supremely clever trick of being to blame both for capitalism and its excesses through their control of banks and financial institutions and for socialism and the liberal consensus that threatens the very stability of capitalism and the free market. It’s their bloody torah and their damnable talmud, simply encourages too much of reading things into things and too much smug rabbinical clever-clever cleverness.

The Uppingham mind certainly was not trained to read too much into things. Those schoolmasters with imaginations and intellects had enough to do to get the boys through 0 level examinations without worrying their heads with real ideas: they did their best, but it is easy to forget how much more powerful is the corporate mentality of schoolboys than the individual intellect of a schoolmaster. It was easier for the boys to brand a schoolmaster pretentious than it was for a master to call a boy unimaginative. Indeed, I can remember endless arguments (see, there’s another thing you Jews are always doing… arguing) with other boys about that great sin of ‘reading too much into things’. It is a cliché amongst healthy schoolboys to say, ‘You can read anything into anything. Bloody hell, all this Shakespeare stuff. I mean they read too much into it. In Braddy’s English set today, you won’t believe it, but he was going on about bloody Hamlet and his mother and he used the word “Freudian” about them… I mean, Jesus, how stupid can you get? Doesn’t he realise Freud wasn’t born until hundreds of years later? Shakespeare couldn’t have known anything about Oedipus complexes and all that rubbish. I can’t believe our parents pay men like that to talk such pseudy wank.’

It’s mean to attack so hopeless a brand of feeble stupidity or mock so terrible a lack of imagination, in the end it is its own tragic handicap, and those who go to the grave unilluminated by the light of ideas are the sufferers, but of course I didn’t know that then, I thought such Philistines were already the victors and that the life of the mind and the imagination was under threat from all sides. Besides I was a terrible show off and I used to react angrily, with great moral fervour and all the jewy, pansy strength of my wicked tongue. Not that argument could ever swerve the stolid Uppinghamian mind away from his settled conviction that art, literature and the play of ideas were anything more than ‘wank’. Indeed, the better one argued, the more it proved it was all words, words, words.

‘Oh, you can argue anything with words, Fry. Doesn’t make it right.’

It is one of the great ironies of British (anti-) intellectual life that a nebulous sense of twentieth-century relativism has taken hold, somewhere deep down, and is used to damn and distrust the logical and the rational. Thus a point of view about art can be dismissed as ‘pretentious’ and ‘wank’ – in other words, as not solid, not real, ‘airy-fairy’ and ‘artyfarty’ – while at the same time any logical, rational defence of it is dismissed as ‘just opinion’ or ‘semantics’ in a world in which, ‘let’s face it, everything is relative, anyway…'

I wished that Forster’s 1934 obituary of the art critic Roger Fry (no relation so far as I know) could be mine… I can’t think of a better encomium.

What characterized him and made him so precious in twentieth-century England was that, although he was a modern, he believed in reason…

[He] rejected authority, mistrusted intuition. That is why his loss is so irreparable… If you said to him ‘This must be right, all the experts say so… Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,’ he would reply in effect, ‘Well. I wonder. Let’s see.’ He would see and he would make you see. You would come away realizing that an influential opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe…

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

Forster, in other words, is talking about a classical mind, a Greek mind. It is so ironic that classical education, English style, produced nothing but anti-classical attitudes. The English public schoolboy product can easily live out his whole life believing that imagination is the same thing as fantasy, that ideas are deceptive ornament and that ornament itself is supernumerary to life’s requirements, he reflects absolutely our age of unreason: the plodding and carefully plotted lines of Nuffield empiricism are fine, but inference is to be distrusted. He lives between the extremes of the revealed truths of convention and current morality on the one side, and the vague, ignorant madness of a misunderstood sense of relativism, opinion and New Age finger-wagging-more-things-in-heaven-and earth Horatio-ism on the other, confusing mysteriousness with mysticism, and relativism with the idea that any view is up for grabs without the need for the winnowing processes of logic, reason and personal experience. Catastrophe, breakdown, marital disaster, personal tragedy, injustice or abuse are often the only crises that drop the scales from their eyes. I speak as such a product myself, you must understand, not as one looking down from a Heliconian height.

For, in spite of all my differences, such as they are, I was never fully the sensitive outsider, the rejected Jew, the outrageous queen or the distanced intellectual that I liked to picture myself to be. I was never quite as intelligent as I thought I was, never quite as bold in my refusal to be conventional, never quite as alienated by my sexuality, never quite as sure of my belonging to the inner life of art and the mind. I absorbed the lessons of E. M. Forster readily and greedily. I collected him in first edition as avidly as I collected Norman Douglas. It is worth quoting almost in full that famous passage that hovers above all this. It is taken from ‘Notes on the English Character’, the first essay in his 1936 collection Abinger Harvest, whence also came the lines on Roger Fry and Firbank.

Note One is that the character of the English is essentially middle-class; after a little historical explanation as to why that might be safely stated, Forster continues:

Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in every country, but in England they are national characteristics also, because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years. Napoleon, in his rude way, called us ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ We prefer to call ourselves ‘a great commercial nation’ – it sounds more dignified – but the two phrases amount to the same.

The Second Note contains that famous phrase ‘the undeveloped heart’.

Second Note. Just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle classes is the public-school system… How perfectly it expresses their character – far better, for instance, than does the university, into which social and spiritual complexities have already entered. With its boarding-houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers…

And they go forth [the public-school boys] into a world that is not entirely composed of public-school men or even of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts… An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important…

Once upon a time (this is an anecdote) I went for a holiday on the Continent with an Indian friend. We both enjoyed ourselves and were sorry when the week was over, but on parting our behaviour was absolutely different. He was plunged in despair… I could not see what there was to make a fuss about… ‘Buck up,’ I said, ‘do buck up.’ He refused to buck up, and I left him plunged in gloom.

The conclusion of the anecdote is even more instructive. For when we met the next month our conversation threw a good deal of light on the English character. I began by scolding my friend. I told him that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion; that it was inappropriate. The word ‘inappropriate’ roused him to fury. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes?’ I did not like the simile of the potatoes, but after a moment’s reflection I said, ‘Yes, I do; and what’s more I think I ought to. A small occasion demands a little emotion, just as a large emotion demands a great one. I would like my emotions to be appropriate. This may be measuring them like potatoes, but it is better than slopping them about like water from a pail, which is what you did.’ He did not like the simile of the pail. ‘If those are your opinions, they part us forever,’ he cried, and left the room. Returning immediately, he added: ‘No – but your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong. Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn’t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not.’

This remark impressed me very much. Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word ‘bankrupt.’ I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities. But my friend spoke as an Oriental… he feels his resources are endless, just as John Bull feels his are finite.

This is how Forster finishes.

… the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface – self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

I hope and believe myself that in the next twenty years [this was written in 1920] we shall see a great change, and the national character will alter into something which is less unique but more loveable. The supremacy of the middle-classes is probably ending. What new element the working classes will introduce one cannot say, but at all events they will not have been educated at public schools…

The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing us into one another’s arms. To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution -notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

Well, have we seen ‘a great change’? Has the supremacy of the middle-classes ended? In a pig’s arse has it ended. Even today, mutatis mutandis, the character of the English is defined by the character of its (still rising) middle-classes and even today, the character of those middle classes is defined by the character of the (still disproportionately) powerful public-school product. The schools of course have changed, to the extent that public schoolboys wear baseball caps and expensive Nike footwear, listen to rap music, raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences in that bizarre Australian Question Intonation picked up from the TV soaps, and say ‘Cool’ and ‘Slamming’ a lot. That is nauseating certainly, embarrassing obviously, but fundamentally it alters nothing. No one can seriously suggest that the average English public schoolboy emerges from his school with a South Central Los Angeles sensibility, or the outlook, soul and character of an unemployed working-class spot-welder. The body is probably even better developed, the brain as fairly developed but the heart just as undeveloped. The British have always absorbed cultural influences without losing their character. After all Humphrey Lyttelton and his generation listened to black jazz at Eton in the 19308 and probably called their friends ‘cats’ and ‘daddy-o’. In our day we said that things were ‘far out’ and ‘like, wow… ‘ but it altered our Englishness not a whit. Plus ça change…

It is worth remarking, I suppose, that the Indian ‘friend’ Forster referred to in his Notes was, of course, a lover; also worth remarking that Forster never points out that his impression of the English character was not only middle-class and public-school, but also male.

On that subject it so happens that the first edition of Abinger Harvest that I possess once belonged to the historian R. W. Ketton-Cremer who retained in its pages a pristine clipping from the Sunday Times of March 22nd, 1936 containing a review of the book by the eminent critic Desmond MacCarthy – in those days there really were such things as eminent reviewers.

MacCarthy makes the following delicate point with great perspicacity and elegance.

His [Forster’s] peculiar balance of qualities is more often found in woman than in man; and if I could be confident of not being misunderstood by those who consider intellect a masculine speciality, I would add that his view-point… both as a critic and a creator, is feminine rather than masculine… Absurdities and tragedies, he seems to be saying are due to the failure to link experiences together – to connect. That is Mr Forster’s “message.” Now, the essentially masculine way of taking life is to handle it departmentally. A man says to himself: there is my home and my private life of personal relations; there is my business, my work; there is my life as a citizen. In each department he has principles according to which situations can be handled as they arise. But in each department these are different. His art of life is to disconnect; it simplifies problems… The feminine impulse, on the other hand, whether on account of women’s education or her fundamental nature, is to see life as more of a continuum. That is part of what I meant by saying that Mr Forster, as a creative writer and as a critic, takes the feminine viewpoint.

Intuiting, and finally knowing for sure that Forster was somehow, like me – Not As Other Boys -allowed me to form a more natural bond with him as a writer than I might otherwise have done. Certainly ‘Notes on the English Character’ and later Howard’s End became sacred texts for me at Uppingham, together with Cyril Connolly’s perfect Enemies of Promise and its Theory of Permanent Adolescence:

It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

It was difficult for me to know quite how to handle that. On the one hand I believed that I was made homosexual the day I was born, on the other I loved the idea that it was School’s Fault and that I was the victim of a wicked and corrupt system. Connolly, one sees now, meant socially as much as erotically homosexual, hence ‘the last analysis’ – but there were days when, unhappy with my sexual lot, I liked to blame my education for my nature. Ihab Hassan, as so often, is right on the money when he says in The Anti-Hero:

The ambivalences of a bourgeois hero in an overwhelmingly middle-class society raise for him problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence… The sad history of the anti-hero is nothing more than the history of man’s changing awareness of himself. It is the record of his recoil… Man, meanwhile, goes clowning his sentimental way into eternity.

It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one’s own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

I am sorry to borrow from others so much, but to do it one last time, I bring Montaigne to my defence:

I quote others only the better to express myself.

Just in case you get the impression that from the age of thirteen onwards I spent all my time sitting in libraries reading Cyril Connolly, Michel de Montaigne (the fabulous edition translated by the fabulously named M. A. Screech was not available then), E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and Ihab Hassan, I should say that I have conflated and compressed time here.

None of this reading, none of this connecting or identifying with literature or the lives of others took place until the great event happened – the great event of my falling in love. Until that time I read a huge amount of Sherlock Holmes and P. G. Wodehouse, Talbot Baines Reed and G. Henty, Alastair Maclean and Agatha Christie, Biggles and Buchan, Hammond Innes and Len Deighton, Dornford Yates and Dorothy Sayers. What is more, I still do.