Slowing Down (19 page)

So from then on I have smoked openly but, given that Diana hates the smell of it, in the house I do so only in my bedroom at the top, leave a window wide open, and confine myself, although not exclusively, to my own little Egypt behind a tight-sliding door.

I have added several anti-stale ashtray devices and various precautions. The first is to smoke sitting on the loo with the lid down and blow the smoke into the steam from the turned on hot tap in the adjacent basin. This rises towards a small air-extractor above the cistern, carrying, I hope, the cigarette smoke with it. Then, switching off the hot tap, I turn on the cold one to extinguish my dog-end, prior to throwing it far into the road. This is a skill I have gradually perfected, and quite often I succeed in actually landing it in the gutter. (When I achieve this not too difficult feat, I congratulate myself in an accent suggestive of windmills, tulips, clogs, soft drugs and legalized prostitution. ‘
In de goot
’ is a straight translation into Dutch. I know this because in the seventies, when we were appearing in Amsterdam, on the edge of the pavements was the representation of a dog in silhouette engaged in heaving and straining and beneath it this brusque command to move its arse five inches to the right or left.)

My other precaution is to expel several squirts from an air-freshener, a device which certainly masks the smell of tobacco smoke but in no way eliminates it. The names of these products are equally ridiculous: they promise the illusion of an Alpine glen, or a hillside of lily of the valley, whereas they smell of synthetic chemicals; in fact they smell like what my father used to call ‘a whore’s boudoir’ (how did
he
know?).

When I explained to Diana my apparently thoughtful attempts to freshen the air, she objected. It involved, she said, a waste of hot water and, worse, the release of a disgusting smell which didn’t obliterate smoke but only masked it. OK, I agreed, but I still employ both water and spray for my own gratification, and if I time it right, when she comes back from the cottage, the traces of both the Alpine glade and the money-wasting hot water have evaporated, leaving the doubtful air of Shepherd’s Bush in its place.

Recently on TV I saw an advert for a new air-freshener which first dismisses its rivals for, as Diana had already asserted, only masking ‘offensive odours’, then claims it
destroys
them. I’m going to try this out as soon as I can find it. As yet – I hope it is not due to pressure from its rivals – it seems unknown to the many chemists I’ve asked about it.

One sunny afternoon in a Birmingham garden attached to the house of Professor and Mrs Hoggart, he spoke of an aunt who hated the smell of human excrement. Then she discovered the scented sprays and for a time believed she had found a permanent solution, but then she started to associate the sweet smell of the sprays with the human stink they hid and so in the end was no better off.

A final statement on my current position on smoking: my only rule is that, if I run out of cigarettes at home, I never walk to the newsagent at the end of the road especially to stock up, but wait until I have to go out for medicinal or professional reasons; and then, with all the excitement of a prisoner breaking parole, I walk to the nearest pub, buy a Stella Artois if available and a whiskey and ritualistically, like a priest at the altar, slowly open the packet, extract the first neat cylinder and light up. That very first puff is the best. I

‘I am and will remain a true and happy smoker’

sit there in a kind of pleasurable trance, ignoring the cackling and triumphant capering of Nic O’Teen and his allies. I am and will remain a true and happy smoker. Oscar Wilde put it best (when didn’t he?): ‘Smoking is the only perfect vice – because it’s never satisfied.’

12. Treats

About suffering they were never wrong

The Old Masters, how well they understood

Its human position…

W. H. Auden

I must stop banging on about my health (although no doubt I shall issue a short communiqué after my next appointment with Dr Kohn), and instead write positively of those pleasures which remain and which I think of now as ‘treats’, that is to say, those invitations or events I cannot, nor would want to, resist. I usually pay the price of feeling absolutely destroyed afterwards. The only solution then is to ‘climb the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire’, as old-fashioned nannies used to say (and may still do), or ‘hit the sack’, or ‘wanking chariot’, as Mick Mulligan preferred to describe it.

My most recent ‘treat’ was the Caravaggio exhibition at the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. The exterior of this extension is a bland affair, but the original design didn’t please the Prince of Wales. He described it as ‘like a carbuncle on the face of a dear friend’, and I’m sure most of the public with their mistrust of extreme modern architecture would be on his side. I really despise what they finally put up. It nicked several features of the ‘dear friend’ next door – classical columns, architectural details and the like – and then gradually simplified and eventually erased them
altogether, as if with an India rubber. On the other hand I find the interior, while austere, perfectly OK. All its galleries, including the one in the basement, are tall, the lighting versatile, and there is enough hanging space. The late Caravaggios certainly need that space, the majority of them being enormous.

I had tried to visit this show earlier, but seeing the long queues outside I had calculated that, even if I’d waited, the sardine-like crowd would make it impossible to get back far enough to see a whole picture or near enough to grasp the significant naturalistic detail: the dirty feet, the broken nails, the frayed sleeves. And the faces too: the ‘job’s-worth’ torturers, Salomé’s expression, arising from sexual frustration and its subsequent kinky satisfaction, holding up the head of John the Baptist, whom she had failed to seduce but whose dead mouth she was now at liberty to kiss.

Out of the dark of all this shabby splendour emerge images to solidify in shafts of light. A hand, thrust out towards us, creates the illusion of a third dimension. Yet perhaps the most amazing work in the whole exhibition is the almost sensual slump of Christ, a bead of blood beginning to trickle down his forehead from the recently jammed on crown of thorns.

When I arrived in London just after the war I made a point of visiting all the interesting exhibitions at the museums and private galleries but there were only a few (even the Picasso and Matisse shows) where you couldn’t slide in easily enough. Today, I sometimes wonder how much the ‘been there, done that’ mob really likes pictures. Certainly art is no longer confined to a few artists, their educated and intellectual admirers and sincere collectors. Art is now
‘cool’. If it’s real enthusiasm, that’s fine. If it’s a passing fad, like the yo-yo or art deco, well it will pass. I don’t mind either way.

I believe that if you love and understand art as such you’ve been lucky. But if, for example, you worship ‘the beautiful game’, then that’s fine by me too, and the same applies to a penchant for motors or even cricket. All I ask is that the fans of these various enthusiasms don’t take it for granted that everybody shares their obsessions, and I, in my turn, will try to avoid bending their ears on surrealism, jazz and fishing.

I do, however, deplore that television companies seem concerned only with maximum viewing figures, and have been dumbing down their programmes in general and those of minority interests in particular. There is very little covering the arts, although I understand that Channel 5 is preparing to cut back on the ‘tits ’n’ arse’. I have to admit that I occasionally like a bit of ‘tits ’n’ arse’, and at the time when I was too ill to read or concentrate I could enjoy any kind of rubbish; and still do if overtired, a bit pissed or both. I don’t think it’s an either/or situation; I don’t believe that everybody is either only high-brow or low-brow. But where are the great informative series? Where, for example, is the admirable Robert Hughes, the Oz narrator and writer of
The Shock of the New?
Witty he was, and no doubt is still. He was a wild boy in the sixties and a grizzled sage today. He’s also infinitely funnier and no less irreverent than most contemporary ‘alternative’ comics with their obsession with wanking. Where (wait for it) are the Morecambe and Wise of today? A typical old codger remark that, but then I am one, after all. Pomposity and ‘the grass is greenerism’ are the
hallmarks of most old men’s pronouncements. Alienating and boring both, no doubt.

What I really like is nature red in tooth, claw and fanny, although I don’t think any commentator has come along to challenge the informative David Attenborough as master of cool even when in the arms of a silver-backed male gorilla.

There are, it’s true, several rangy girls touchingly obsessed with the slim survival chances of cheetah cubs, and some rather serious neutral men of the same mind, but there is also a young Australian who, while obviously courageous and offering confidence and expertise, drives me mad with irritation. He has blond hair and very macho shorts which show off more leg than a pole dancer. He also describes the most dangerous creatures as if they were ‘beaut Sheilas’. ‘What a little beauty,’ he says, manhandling a particularly venomous viper doing its best to inject his bare arm, and he loves physical involvement and risk with huge and bad-tempered ‘crocs’. He’s more like a showman than a guide, although I will admit he’s calmed down a bit recently – and not before time.

Otherwise, apart from snooker and women playing tennis, my only ‘can’t miss’ programme is
The Antiques Road Show
, the Chippendale daddy of them all. It’s not entirely enjoyable, but while one learns from experts whether the legs are ‘right’, or how to tell an Edwardian copy from the real thing, it is the varied reaction of the people who’ve turned up with a treasure which is really fascinating. Here the upper-middleclass woman’s response to being told that her great-grandmother’s escritoire is worth thousands is as unexcited as if a not especially good cook had given her notice. This is in direct contrast with the near hysteria of a working-class
woman whom the experts tell that the Chinese vase her great-uncle brought back from Hong Kong during his service in the Merchant Navy, and which has recently been stored in the cupboard under the stairs, is of eighteenth-century origin and worth several thousands. ‘No! You’re having me on!’ screams the plumber’s wife incredulously. She then laughs hysterically and, partially covering her mouth, repeats the sum several times. She doesn’t bother to listen to what it should be insured for, and one senses that as soon as possible, having given it long enough time to swank to the neighbours, it’ll be on its way to the auction room – and why not?

But then, perhaps the upper-middle-class couple in their well-worn tweeds may decide to do exactly the same thing in order to repair the roof on their Grade II Georgian home.

My favourite and deeply unpleasant joke on the subject came from Bernard Manning, an outstanding comedian when it comes to timing his inevitably dodgy material. Asked what would give him the maximum pleasure, he said it would be to appear as an expert on the
Road Show
and (his voice softened) a dear old lady, obviously badly off, would open a cardboard box and unwrap a small framed mirror. Manning would examine it in detail and then ask her if she wanted to know what it was worth. ‘Oh yes,’ she would cry, trying to conceal her excitement. ‘Well,’ Piggy would say, ‘it’s worth FUCK ALL!’

Another senior moment, I’m afraid. I look back a few pages to see where I left the straight road. Caravaggio! Could it have been?

*

So, to return finally to my evening with the slumping Christ, how did I, put off by the vast crowds, get to see it? I know I would, in the end, have ‘stood the buffet with knaves that smelt of sweat’. Although in fact the crowds today aren’t knaves, nor would they have smelt of sweat. It is only very occasionally, unlike in my youth, that you come across people who are strangers to deodorants, except for trampish alcoholics. I read, however, that Elizabethans were often excited by sweat, despite Shakespeare’s adverse opinion. Mulligan wasn’t against it either, in an erotic context. He called it ‘a healthy pong’. I think too that it was appreciated by the beruffled gallants and their female contemporaries for the same aphrodisiac reasons. It would seem that Lord Darnley was implored by his friends never to change his shirt on account of his BO’s powerful appeal.

There was no need, however, for me to brave the physical and mental strain of the crush. I’d heard that, after closing to the general public, the gallery would open for two hours to allow artists a clear view of the pictures. The lovable, eccentric and remarkable painter Craigie Aitchison, ARA, sent me and a ‘long-time friend’ a letter of invitation and we sailed in.

My ‘long-time friend’, despite occasional rows and ‘non-speakers’, had known him for so many years that she always referred to him as ‘the fiancé’. Her nickname is Greckel, not her real nickname, but I asked Diana to change it in her book (already published by the time you’ll read this), as she is her relentless enemy, and so I will use that name now. Craigie didn’t come with us that evening. He had been to an earlier ‘special evening’ and found it almost as full as usual.