The Revolt of the Pendulum (19 page)

As I know from my own time in broadcasting, it takes a degree of egocentricity to feel that one has a natural affinity with a microphone. People eager to get on air are often bent on impressing
you with their superiority, and the rule applies all the way down to those whose only access to broadcasting is a public address system associated with some means of transport. Many an announcer on
a British train is as stilted in his diction as a minor Victorian novelist, and there must be something about the atmosphere of an airport that drives would-be broadcasters to the heights of
rhetorical bravura. At Stansted one afternoon I heard a strident female voice warn all of us under the terminal’s elegant metal roof that any car left incorrectly parked outside would be
‘subject to a towing procedure’. You couldn’t say that the announcement was grammatically incorrect. Semantically, however, you yourself would never have thought of saying it at
all. It’s a whole new language, closely based on ours yet infinitely foreign, like a penthouse hotel suite in Dubai.

HAPPINESS WRITES WHITE

Usually attributed to that prolific aphorist Anonymous, the sadly true notion that ‘Happiness writes white’ probably emerged from Tin Pan Alley or Broadway, when
somebody finally realised why most of the good love songs were about love lost. The idea might seem to conform to the standard Romantic conception of poetry, but it is important to remember that
the Romantic conception was a real discovery of something that had always been true: art is an outward integration inspired by the artist’s inner disintegration.

The converse holds. Contentment has either no need of artistic expression, or few resources for it. Even when we doubt this is so, we think it ought to be so, and apply the concept to other arts
as well as to poetry. One of the reasons we speak so slightingly of Mendelssohn when we put him beside Beethoven is that we can hear Mendelssohn’s music smiling – or anyway we believe
we can, which is enough to make us patronise him, reserving our unmixed approval for Beethoven, even when the personality revealed in his life story strikes us as actively unpleasant. With a less
glaring discrepancy, but in the same way, our opinion of Renoir will always be lower than our opinion of Monet, because Renoir suffered less. Renoir might have suffered more had he not been so
reasonable, but he gets no points for that. Renoir correctly found Monet irresponsible and loathed the way he spread misery among his women, but the more that the truth of their lives came out, the
more that Monet looked serious vis-a`-vis Renoir, until, by now, Renoir’s reputation carries an indelible question mark. Instead of putting himself to the anxieties of developing his
maniere aigre
, he might have done better studying to be more miserable.

Unhappy artists are to be pitied, but often not for the apparent cause of their unhappiness, which they might have arranged. If they had become artists in order to deal with a psychic imbalance
that was implanted early, the urge to remain productive might well entail a deliberate avoidance of ordinary happiness, especially in its domestic branch. When Philip Larkin said ‘Deprivation
is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ he was giving a powerful hint that he would stay deprived if he could. Eliot showed the cost of settling for bliss: it produced exactly one late,
pale lyric, whereas the opposite had produced
The Waste Land
.

Yeats probably knew he was a fool for love. Knowing it, he was no fool at all, but perhaps something even more pitiable, an artist so dedicated that he would hoodwink reality if it threatened to
make him content. His instruction to himself – ‘Never give all the heart’ – would have killed his work had he obeyed it. He always gave all the heart, over and over: but
only to those women who shared the useful characteristic of incomprehension. His wife, George, paid the penalty for understanding him: she inspired him often to gratitude, but seldom to a
rhapsody.

Yeats’s muse, on the other hand, whoever she might happen currently to be, fled forever out of reach, like a Daphne just a touch faster on her feet than Apollo. In Norman Jeffares’
excellent
Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
, we find Yeats expressing himself thus: ‘How much of the best I have done and still do is but the attempt to explain myself
to her? If she understood I should lack a reason for writing, and one can never have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious.’ He means that he wouldn’t write poetry unless he
had to, and implies that nothing must be allowed to remove the reason. Chateaubriand, in the preface to
Atala
, said that when the Muses cry, it is only to look more beautiful. The immediate
implication was that the poet might not be beyond courting some high-quality misery in order to make the Muses tearful.

There is a deeper implication: the poet will exploit grief when it comes. Peter Porter, with characteristic frankness, laid bare this truth in the sequence of monumentally beautiful poems he
wrote in commemoration of his first wife. But true artists don’t need love trouble to stave off happiness: all they have to do is look at the world. In that regard, all the great art we know
of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content. Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most powerful possible assertion that love is not only a fine thing but that we have
scarcely lived if we are shut out of it, yet all the ecstasy in the sonnets would amount to nothing if it were not threatened by time and death, which he evokes with at least the invention that he
lavishes on the erotic. Similarly Dante’s
Inferno
might be hard to take if we didn’t know that he would later write the
Paradiso
, but the
Paradiso
would be
unbearable without the
Inferno
. We don’t allow our master artists to be merely twee, but neither, on the whole, do they themselves; and they, as we, will always put Boucher and
Fragonard in the second rank merely for suggesting that Arcadia can be an unmixed pleasure and go on forever; although it could be said that the melancholy of monarchical absolutism imposing its
requirements somehow seeps through to give even manufactured bliss an undertone of menace. Besides, Fragonard’s pretty girl reading her book will grow old and die: we know that, and we know
he knows that, or he would not have been so seized with the beauty of her concentration. French painting and music are copious with what we would call the merely lovely but we can be confident
about bringing our own unhappiness to the picture or the composition even when they are careful to avoid any of their own. We can be equally confident that their makers would never have shown that
care if they themselves had been truly untroubled. To be undisturbed and yet still creative would be impossible. When playing Vermeer in
Girl with a Pearl Earring
, Colin Firth looked
grief-stricken but probably underplayed it. To
want
to produce that degree of serenity is a sign (for once the semiotic vocabulary becomes appropriate) of a sensitivity to turbulence that
can’t, as it were, be brushed away. If the world’s horror had not been eating at the artist’s soul, we would never have seen the girl. The instinct, on the part of those who
project utopia, to leave the artists out of it is politically deplorable but aesthetically sound: they would produce anodyne art.

The Monthly
, December 2006 – January 2007

Postscript

Coughing apologetically as I run, let me hasten to add that I don’t put Fragonard in the second rank when I am actually looking at one of his pictures. I put him
first and everybody else nowhere. Any successful work of art drives all the other works of art out of your head while you are in its grip. In the Oval Room at the Wallace Collection hangs the great
Fragonard picture in which the love-sick young swain is forever looking up the skirt of the girl in the swing. If Hieronymus Bosch had painted the same scene, the stricken youth might have been
looking into the pit. But if that idea occurred to me while I was looking at the Fragonard, it would only mean that my attention was wandering. The insidious fault of all criticism that ranks
artists is to convey the impression that we can do that while we are occupied with the works of art. But a work of art is successful precisely to the extent that it stops us doing any such thing.
Hence the folly of asking whether Bob Dylan is as good as Keats: the mere question means that we aren’t listening properly to Bob Dylan.

ALL STALKERS KILL

There are few passages of poetry that I have ever underlined, put a mark beside or made notes on, because any real poem or body of poetry is not susceptible to having fragments
snapped from context without the fragments losing colour. In the Selfridge’s Shakespeare I carry with me on long trips I put dots in the margin, but they are not admonitions as to what I
should remember, merely guides back to what has already been remembered, so that I can check up on whether distortions have crept in. Otherwise, in less copious reservoirs, if poetry makes me
remember it, I remember it all:
omnia mea mecum porto.
I carry it all with me. But here are two lines I marked in the margin of a newspaper. ‘Nicole, your eyes are like the stars / I
think of them in various bars.’ As far as I know, these two lines constitute the complete poetic works of Elmer O. Noone as they have come down to us, and perhaps repay study on the clinical
level, if not the critical and aesthetic. To cease being coy for a minute, I should grasp the nettle, or poisonous coral fragment: Elmer O. Noone is a stalker, and his poem was addressed to my
talented compatriot Nicole Kidman.

When you know that much for background, his seemingly slight poem gains weight, in the same way that a cockroach would gain weight on the surface of Jupiter. In 2001 Nicole Kidman applied for a
restraining order against Elmer O. Noone: an action which automatically ranked him high in her swarm of stalkers. Any female celebrity of her eminence attracts dozens of them, but we assume that
most of them can be seen off by private action. Since to go public inevitably generates an atmosphere of vulnerability that excites a fresh supply of heavily breathing candidates to try their hand,
Elmer O. Noone must have been unusually persistent even in a field where persistence is one of the chief qualifications. By what we know of him, he had a romantic sensibility to temper his
determination, although it is fair to assume that his unsolicited tenderness made her feel even worse. He must have been horrifying enough when he rang her doorbell a few hundred times, but he also
brought flowers. He invited her to the ballet. He offered to tutor her children, pointing out that such an arrangement ‘would give us the chance to know each other better’. Possibly it
was his avuncular concern with her children that sent her to the cops, but his protestations of courtly love would have been enough.

The most depressing aspect – depressing because it concerns us all – is that it
was
love, and probably still is. I have talked of him in the past tense so far because time has
gone by and he has not yet been given his own talk show. He has submerged, down to where the forgotten stalkers slowly swim. The three-year restraining order might have made him give up. (It
sometimes happens, although I personally know two female television presenters and one actress whose stalkers regarded their restraining orders as a mere bachelor’s degree on the academic
ladder towards a doctorate.) After the court found against him, he concentrated his efforts on suing Nicole Kidman for 300,000 US dollars on the grounds that she had defamed him, and on persuading
the next court to find for him, on the grounds that his human rights had been abused. I had expected him to take his case all the way to the Hague by now. Whether he is out of action or not,
however, he will never get over his relationship with Nicole Kidman. For him, the fact that the relationship never existed will be the least of his considerations. He believed it did exist. He felt
it. But something went slightly wrong. He could have fixed it, if only he could have explained it to her: if only she had given him a chance. If only she had
listened
. And here is the
connection with the rest of us. When we are given the elbow, there is always a terrible, sleepless period when we believe that one more phone call will set things right. The phone call
doesn’t work out. She tells us we are making too many phone calls. No, it can’t end like this. She hasn’t understood. Better call her again. She’s not picking up. How can
she do that? Luckily, in all this turmoil, the moment arrives when we realise that if we really love her, her welfare comes before ours, and that we owe it to her, for the love we have had, not to
punish her for the love we have lost. Better call her and tell her that. No, better not. Put the phone down. The moment of sanity.

For the stalkers, the moment of sanity never comes. Love can unbalance anyone for a time, but Elmer O. Noone was unbalanced all the time. His feelings of love were so powerful that they drove
him to poetry. But he was a solipsist. He believed that Nicole Kidman would reciprocate his feelings if she were allowed to, because he couldn’t imagine that she might not. It wasn’t
that her welfare meant nothing to him: he thought that to love him
was
her welfare, and all she needed to do was admit the fact. Most men spend a good part of their lives learning that other
people are alive too, but in a democratic society all normal men learn it to some degree. Elmer O. Noone never learned it, because Elmer O. Noone was a psychopath. (I have changed his name in this
piece, because on past evidence he is perfectly capable of bringing a court case that he is bound to lose, simply for the satisfaction of tying up a sane person’s life for years on end.) In
him, solipsism and egomania were compounded into a one-man universe. The woman destined to be his bride turned out to be Nicole Kidman, not that nice-looking girl at the check-out counter in his
local Wal-Mart. Apart from his eminence in the field of sexual allure, he was equally exalted in his worldly ambitions. He announced that he had plans to become ‘a trillionaire’. Being
a mere billionaire obviously wouldn’t do. He wanted to be elected President. No Vice-Presidency for him, and don’t even mention Secretary of State. Where have we heard this sort of
stuff before?