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- Herausgeber: Little Island Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic. As organising and generating principle for the essays he chose the alphabet, and the result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of topics from Aachen to Zoos, passing by Alexandria, Luciano Berio, Ivy Compton-Burnett, reflections on his own early works The Echo-Chamber and Flow, Langland's Piers Plowman, the idea of repetition in life and art, and much else.Josipovici reminds us that he has previously 'plundered episodes in my life to illustrate the intertwining of memory and forgetting, the desire to remember and the need to forget', and here he has someone say to him: 'You don't seem to be afraid of revealing a great deal about yourself.' 'I don't think I feel it that way,' he responds. 'I can "reveal" precisely because it does not seem to be part of me. It seems to belong to someone else, a writer I have lived with, an immigrant I have known.'Loquacious, funny and incautious, this surprising book is in effect a kind of expressionist self-portrait as well as a meditation on a hundred days of the pandemic.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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100 DAYS
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
7
for Tamar
8
Contents
FOREWORD
When I learned that we were going into lockdown I decided I mustn’t fritter away the unexpected gift of a bracket round life which the virus had imposed on us. What I needed, I felt, was a project which would be absorbing yet not too demanding, partly because anything really demanding, like getting down to a novel or even a short story, would probably be impossible for me in a time of extreme anxiety and uncertainty; and partly because such a task, were I to attempt it, would, I knew from past experience, make me an extremely difficult companion to be with and I did not want to inflict this on my partner. I decided then that I would keep a diary for a hundred days and that I would follow this every day with a short thought or memory, one a day, connected to a person, place, concept or work of art that had played a role in my life. These could not, in the nature of it, be perfect little essays or perfectly rounded autobiographical fragments, but rather a way of talking to myself in order to arrive somewhere I could not have arrived at without the day’s work. And a hundred days, I imagined, would probably take us to the end of, or perhaps a little past, the lockdown.
Vaguely recalling Tony Rudolf’s delightful memoir of his early years, The Alphabet of Memory, I also decided that I would allow the alphabet to trigger these thoughts and memories. Despite the fact that as a constraint this was fairly weak, since I would get to choose what topics to write about under each letter, I thought it might push me to revisit areas I might not have thought of had I written either randomly or chronologically. It might also, I thought, be interesting to see what sorts of juxtapositions the alphabet would throw up. And this indeed proved to be the case. I would not have thought of writing about Agami, the little resort near Alexandria where 10as a child I had spent a happy fortnight, or Zazie dans le métro, had the alphabet not nudged me in those directions.
I also decided that I would not write about any topic I had covered at length elsewhere, so Ivy Compton-Burnett but not Proust, spirals but not touch. I had no idea if my alphabetical list of subjects would take me to the end of the hundred days I had allocated to myself but I felt I should leave this to chance. I scribbled down a provisional list of items and every afternoon when we returned from our daily walk on the Downs I would sit down with a cup of tea and look over the list and add or take away a topic here or there.
As it happened my alphabetical thoughts and memories came to an end with Zoos on 26 June, ninety-seven days after I had started. And around that time the Government announced that there would be an almost complete easing of the lockdown restrictions on 4 July even though none of its own criteria for doing so had been met, so my hundred days was a pretty accurate forecast of the length of the lockdown.
The days did not go quite according to plan. On several occasions I was not able to complete my account of a thought or memory in one day and had to let it spill over into two; and once or twice I felt unwell and unable to do more than jot something down for the diary. As, towards the end, I realised I was going to fall just short of my hundred days, I tried to think of a few additional topics to write about, but none of these fulfilled the criterion I had set myself of making each day’s writing a genuine exploration. In the end there are 86 thoughts and memories for the hundred days of the diary and the whole is, I now realise, an attempt to come to terms with my life as I approach my eightieth birthday.11
When I was three-quarters of the way through I took Tony Rudolf’s book down from my shelves to have another look at it and discovered that it was called not The Alphabet of Memory but The Arithmetic of Memory. Such are the delightful tricks memory plays on one.
Lewes, 25.9.2020
22.3.2020
Just past the Spring Equinox. Tomorrow, 23 March, twenty-fourth anniversary of Sacha’s death. And a week in to the moment the coronavirus pandemic really hit the UK. That was on Monday 16 March, when the Government began to announce measures which have, by today, more or less brought the country to a standstill, as all places of mass gatherings, pubs, restaurants, theatres, sports venues, etc. have been ordered to close as from tomorrow and all those ‘at risk’, those with chronic conditions, pregnant mothers, and over seventies, have been advised to ‘self-isolate’. Strange to feel so fit and well and yet know one is well into the ‘at risk’ category, and this is no mild flu but at best, if one catches a severe version of it, an excruciating week or two, and at worst, an excruciating death, as doctors struggle to keep one breathing. And I am haunted by the thought that my grandmother died exactly a hundred years ago of typhoid during the typhoid epidemic that swept across Egypt in 1920.
I imagine this is what the Phony War of 1939–40 felt like: you wait for the enemy to strike and both can’t quite believe he will and are filled with nameless dread in case he does. But of course even when ‘he’ does there will be none of the horror of bombs and bullets, but none of the solidarity either, since each of us has been told to retreat into our houses and only go out for essentials or for exercise. So T has come down here to Lewes, though she is concerned about her mother, a not so frail ninety-two. But John, her brother-in-law, as a doctor, has (wisely in my view) told her there would nothing she could do for her mother in London, that her sister and brother are there, and there are two doctors in the family – and that anyway there will be no policing of London’s borders, so in a real crisis she could get into her car and drive up. 14
Since we are told that the worst will be upon us in the next twelve weeks, that this may well last six and even as much as twelve months, I have decided I need a project to settle down to every morning. Since, alas, the longer fiction I so much crave to be at work on is still very nebulous, I have decided to use the alphabet to trigger memories and thoughts and try and write a memory or thought every day; and I have decided to preface each session with a brief ‘coronavirus diary’, of which this is the first and necessarily the longest instalment. Longest just because it is the first and I need to bring myself up to date, so to speak.
Who would have guessed, as the parliamentary Brexit saga dragged to its painful and horrible conclusion in the last quarter of 2019, ending with the nightmare of an eighty-seat Conservative majority and the certainty that we would leave the EU and that we would have five years at least of a bragging and reckless government slowly turning the country into an English version of Hungary and Poland (gradual erosion of any opposition, be it in the media, the judiciary or the universities) – who would have guessed that in the last week we have become a kind of Leninist country, with the state in effect employing the workers to keep things running? Johnson and the Tories, who crushed the opposition and cowed and uplifted the country, depending on your point of view, with a vision of heroic Britain at war with Europe and going it alone, now find themselves in effect presiding over a country at war – but not with Europe or with any visible enemy, but with a virus that is rapidly spreading world-wide and promises to decimate the planet in a way not seen in peace-time since the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–26. It is likely to be with us for a long time to come, though in eighteen months or so there is a chance that a vaccine will have been developed and put into general circulation. But how effective will it be? We have seen with the common flu vaccines that they often don’t 15work, and we are told that this is very different from the flu. What will the country, Europe, the world, be like then?
There are some positives. Already, only weeks after countries shut down travel, China, where the Covid-19 virus started to infect humans, is showing a marked decrease in its emissions of greenhouse gases, with the great cities visibly less polluted, and Venice, since the vaporetti no longer run and the vast cruise ships have stopped coming, is swiftly and miraculously returning to what it must once have been, with swans and herons on the canals and the water clear enough for one to spot seaweed waving in its depths.
And countries, cowed for so long by populists bent on destroying the fabric of the state and of communities, are beginning to see that there is some virtue in efficient governments which can organise their countries to deal with a world-wide emergency, where inter-country co-operation in the field of science and the production of medicines and hospital equipment is a vital necessity, and where – in Britain at any rate – the innate kindness of people and their spirit of caring for each other, long thought dead, is suddenly blossoming. Whether any of this will survive the pandemic is of course a moot point. It may be that, as after the financial crisis of 2008, things will soon get back to ‘normal’ – but I wonder if modern capitalism and its mantra of ever more progress will have taken such a beating that some things at least will change – fuelled by the desperation of the young for far swifter action on global warming.
For me, at this moment, the key thing about it is that, unlike the last fifty-plus years of my life, spent in relative comfort in England, where what made me uneasy was that there was nothing to push against, that the march of consumerism and Americanism, which I was deeply troubled by, seemed inevitable and unstoppable, rather like one’s nightmares of being slowly suffocated by an octopus, now there is something 16to push against, something that is making us change our habits drastically, calling all this into question – as perhaps religion did in earlier centuries.
Enough of banalities. On with the alphabetical memories.
Aachen
Robert Browning wrote a rather bad poem in rollicking verse, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, published in his 1845 collection, which I had to study for A-level. The poem leaves it deliberately vague as to what the news is that the three riders are bringing from one town to another, and in the days before the internet if nothing was said about it in the notes and the teacher did not think it important enough to highlight, one was left to make do as best one could. My mother had often talked to me of the years she and my father spent in Aix as young students coming from Egypt and enrolling in the philosophy department of the University of Aix-Marseille to study under the distinguished philosopher Philippe Segond, so I presumed this was the locus of Browning’s poem. I had no very clear idea of the geography or history of Europe, so no idea what the good news might be or where Ghent was or what the distance was these riders would have had to travel. It was only much later, after several years in England and a growing understanding of the Middle Ages, that I discovered that the Aix in question was not Aix-en-Provence, where my parents had studied, but Aix-la-Chapelle, the town where from the 770s to his death in 814 Charlemagne had established his court and where he had built a cathedral which all the commentators described as one of the strangest in the world. The word aix, I discovered, is the French for the Roman aqua and merely signifies that both towns were spas, where the Romans had discovered 17springs from which healing waters gushed. Aachen is still called Bad Aachen in German. It is a mere 200 kilometres from Ghent to Aachen, and, since the latter remained the centre of the Holy Roman Empire (strategically placed between the Frankish and Germanic kingdoms) till as late as 1531, the place where all the Emperors were crowned kings of the Germans, it is perfectly easy to imagine that news (of an attack or uprising repulsed?) would have gone there as quickly as possible from an outlying town, and that this is what Browning’s poem must be about. It doesn’t make the poem any better, but I wonder how much of the content of one’s mind at any one time is made up of this jumble of true and false facts, unwarranted suppositions and a kind of benign darkness. For we seem on the whole to manage perfectly well and we do this, as Wittgenstein was always at pains to point out, by constant correcting or jettisoning of what are discovered to be false assumptions.
Some years after my revelation about the many spas or Aixes dotted about France, on our way to the Dolomites, my mother and I stopped at Aachen to visit the strange cathedral, originally built on the model of S. Vitale in Ravenna but added to for the next six centuries, leaving a curious and unsatisfactory mixture of styles, though the Carolingian portions, Charlemagne’s marble throne, and the circular fountain outside are still etched on my memory.
23.3.2020
Nothing has changed radically, though lockdown officially starts today. Phony War still on in Britain, though Spain, Italy, France and Germany, the first two especially, well in the grip of it. People point out that at this stage in the pandemic other countries, even Italy, had fewer deaths per infected cases than 18the UK. But the Public Health England officers point out that these are very unreliable statistics.
The threat of a complete shut-down, with no one allowed out even to walk, has been raised, but only if people continue to flout the advice and go out in groups, etc. Were this to come into force I think that for me it would change everything. At the moment I’m very happy working, walking and reading. But I need to walk.
Abraham
‘And the Lord said to Abram: “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse, and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” And Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him and Lot went forth with him, Abram being seventy-five years old when he left Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew and all the goods they had gotten and the folk they had bought in Haran, and they set out on the way to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan. And Abram crossed through the land to the site of Schechem, to the Terebinth of the Oracle. The Canaanite was then in the land. And the Lord appeared to Abram and said: “To your seed I will give this land.” And he built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. And he pulled up his stakes from there for the high country east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, and he built there an altar to the Lord, and he invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed onward by stages to the Negeb.’
(Genesis 12: 1-10)
19Robert Alter, whose translation I have used, succinctly makes the point that many have of course made before him: ‘Abram, a mere figure in a notation of genealogy and migration in the preceding passage becomes an individual character and begins the Patriarchal narratives, when he is here addressed by God.’ But he of course begins more than that. Here we are at the origin of the Hebrew nation. And that origin consists not in identification with the land, as is the case with most (all?) foundation myths, but with a getting up and a going. In Jewish culture the locus classicus of this is the exodus from Egypt, repeated playfully and sacramentally every year in the celebration of Passover, but here is where it starts. The story feels very ancient and clearly belongs to a culture very different from our own. Alter points out that what he has translated as ‘he pulled up his stakes’, (AV ‘and he removed from thence’) is his rendering of the Hebrew waya‘ateq a word that ‘is meticulous in reflecting the procedures of nomadic life’. The term for ‘journey’ in the following verse, he goes on, ‘also derives from another term for pulling up tent stakes’. And the whole narrative is driven by the Lord speaking to Abram, who later builds Him an altar, while elsewhere we are told of a ‘Terebinth of the Oracle’. But though all this gives us the feeling of far-off times and places, the essence of the story – and this is true of so many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible – is one every Jew – and, alas, today, not only every Jew – can identify with: the voice comes, saying: ‘Get up and go’, lekh lekha, literally ‘go you’. And Abram, who will later be shown not to be afraid to argue with God, simply ‘went forth as the Lord had spoken to him’. I think of my mother, in 1956, deciding that the time had come to leave Egypt – where she had been born and to which she had returned with me after surviving the war in France – despite the advice of her sister and all her friends to at least keep some roots there – not sell the property which had been her inheritance and ferret 20the money out to Switzerland, losing two thirds of it in the process. No, my mother said, there’s no future in Egypt for a non-Moslem, we are getting out. And this even though all we knew was that I had a place reserved as a day-boy in an English school and there was no certainty that she would be able to settle in England herself. She was forty-five.
And I think of Elly, T’s mother, leaving Vienna at the age of ten with her parents and her brother and sister, in the immediate wake of the Anschluss, for a new life in England, a country whose language she did not speak and about which she knew nothing. ‘It was the best thing that could have happened to me’, she has said in a film made by her daughter-in-law about the exodus of the Jews of Vienna in 1938. ‘It taught me to think for myself.’
I recently found myself on a panel during Jewish Book Week, with two distinguished speakers, one of whom, an Auschwitz survivor I greatly admired. I was therefore horrified to hear her saying: ‘People have always found us Jews very strange, they have always been suspicious of us.’ And, later on: ‘Jews are exceptional. What other people has produced so many great men like Einstein and Freud?’ Every people thinks it’s exceptional: the Irish, the English, the French, the Germans, the Chinese – the list is interminable. All have felt misunderstood and have consoled themselves with the thought that they can number very many great men amongst their people. Such ideas are not only misguided, they are dangerous. Of course Jews are different, but not because they are ‘special’ but because so many of us have, like Abram (he is only later called Abraham), had to get up and go, and there is nothing like crossing borders to give one a sense of how complex life is and there is nothing like living amongst different nations to make one see that none of them has a monopoly on the truth or on righteousness.
But, it will be argued, this very passage that you have quoted tells us that God picked out Abram and informed him that if 21he did as he was told, He would make him ‘a great nation’. Is that not proof that the Jews have been specially chosen, are, indeed, The Chosen People? I would answer that it all depends on how one understands ‘chosen’ and how one understands ‘a great nation’ and one that ‘will be a blessing’. It seems to me that the passage implies that God did not choose Abraham because of some special virtue in him, though that is how the rabbis understood it, filling in the silence of the Bible as to Abram’s earlier life with pious stories about how he fought the idol-worshippers around him and retained his faith in a God who has no image. But all the Bible tells us is that a man, Abram, received a sudden call from God, telling him to get up and go. I think we need to make the effort to see the radical contingency of that: it could have been someone else, it happened to be Abram. And with the call come obligations: if you are called, and if you answer, then… No more. No less. And if we are a people who grasp more clearly what life is about than those who have always lived in one place we should also know that all peoples are different and none has a monopoly on truth or on God.
Today, of course, instead of wanderers and refugees being a minority among the peoples of the world they are most probably the majority. Everyone is on the move. And I found it particularly obnoxious of my fellow panellist that day at King’s Place to describe Angela Merkel’s actions in opening the German borders as ‘giving way to her heart rather than her head and letting in a tide from the Middle East’. A tide? However one feels about the wisdom or not of Merkel’s actions in 2015, Jews of all people should not generalise in this way about migrants, for from the time of Abram that is what, in the main, they themselves have been.
24. 3.2020
The Government tightened the regulations still further yesterday in response to images of crowds on Hampstead Heath at the weekend and tubes packed with travellers: all but essential shops (food shops, chemists) to close, no one to go out except for essential shopping and once a day for exercise. That’s what T and I were doing anyway. Downs a bit busier than usual on Sunday but quiet yesterday, a typical fine Monday. Some complain the Government has taken these decisions much too late and is horrendously behind with its provision of protective gear for medical staff, ventilators and testing equipment, that they had two months to prepare but somehow hoped it would all blow away. And the supermarket shelves are apparently still emptied, as if by locusts. My neighbour, a Greek from Crete, says: It’s English individualism, it’s not like that in Italy or Greece or even Germany. If he’s right this can be traced back to the Reformation, but must that series of events itself not merely have thrust to the fore something deeply embedded in English culture? Perhaps, but I don’t see it in Chaucer or Langland or Beowulf – those great ‘English’ poets and poems that are one with the rest of the Europe of their time. Or in Shakespeare, despite the attempts by successive waves of jingoists to turn him into a celebrant of ‘true Englishness’.
Adjective (and Adverb)
‘I’ve written it because I need to make some money,’ Rosalind said to me once. ‘There are two adjectives in every sentence, so it should go down well.’
Like me, she thinks adjectives and adverbs are the visible sign of all that is wrong with the novel. Here, from the first page of an Iris Murdoch novel, is an example of what we mean:23
Hilda and Rupert Foster, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary with a bottle of rather dry champagne, were sitting in the evening sun in the garden of their house in Priory Grove, London, S.W.10. Hilda, a plumper angel now, reclined limply, exhibiting shiny burnished knees below a short shrift dress of orangy yellow.
Admittedly Murdoch carries this to extremes, but the principle is the same. Novelists like Murdoch, which means ninety-nine percent of all the novels published in the world since the war, see it as their task to tell a story, but, no longer in active dialogue with an audience as the traditional storyteller once was, feel they have to ‘see their characters’ and find the words to make the reader see them in turn. They have, they think, to persuade their readers that this is more than a story, it is life itself passing before them. They imagine that the more adjectives and adverbs they use the more the reader will forget he or she is reading a book and enter the world the writer has conjured up for them. What I find is that exactly the opposite happens to me: the more adjectives and adverbs are used the more I am aware of the writer using words and the less I believe in what he or she is saying.
We have an almost copy-book example of the transition from the storyteller to the novelist in the successive editions the Brothers Grimm put out between 1812 and 1857 of their Kinder und Hausmärchen – constantly rewriting them and expanding the collection. The first edition itself was based on a manuscript written in 1810. We can thus trace how what had started out as a collection of German tales, collected and transcribed by them as part of a project which we find replicated in many European countries throughout the nineteenth century to foster national self-awareness gradually turned into a hugely popular book of stories aimed at children.
Here is the start of the well-known tale which opens the collection. In the 1810 manuscript it reads: ‘The king’s youngest 24daughter went out into the forest and sat down by a cool well. Then she took a golden ball and was playing with it when it suddenly rolled down into the well.’ In the manuscript, as Joyce Crick, whose excellent Penguin selection and translation I am using, explains, the stories ‘were written down with little attention to style, often with abbreviated forms, insertions and minimal punctuation’, which she has normalised. In the first sentence there is one adjective, cool, which is not a description of how the well looked, but how it felt to the little girl. One would not wish it absent, for in one short word it explains why the child was drawn to go there. In the second sentence, similarly, there is one adjective, golden, which again does not so much help one to see the ball as signal how precious it was to her. That sentence ends with the crucial verb, rolled down, which leads into the third sentence, which is full of verbs: ‘She watched it falling… and stood at the well and was very sad.’ Even the was, hardly an expressive verb, here acquires great force precisely through its passivity: all she can do is stand and be sad.
Here now is the version in the first, 1812, edition of their great collection:
There was once a king’s daughter who went out into the forest and sat down by a cool well. She had a golden ball which was her favourite toy; she would throw it up high and catch it again in the air, and enjoyed herself as she did this. One day the ball had risen very high, she had already stretched out her hand and curled her fingers ready to catch it when it bounced past onto the ground quite close to her and rolled straight into the water. [The German is better: rollte und rollte und geradezu in das Wasser hinein.]
Here the rot has started to set in. Why say that the ball was her favourite toy? The manuscript version knows it is and trusts the narrative to bring that out; the 1812 version feels it has to 25explain and so loses time and energy. In the same way there is no need for ‘had risen very high’ – what is important is that the ball gets away from her control and falls into the well. All that business of ‘she had already stretched out her hand and curled her fingers ready to catch it’ is redundant, as is ‘rolled straight into the water’ – it rolled into the water, that’s enough.
And here, finally, are the first lines of the much longer 1856 version:
Not far from the king’s palace there lay a big, dark forest, and in the forest, beneath an ancient linden tree, there was a well. Now if it was a very hot day the king’s daughter would go out into the forest and sit at the edge of the cold well; and if she was bored she would take a golden ball and throw it up high and catch it again; and that was her favourite toy.
Now the rot has well and truly set in. The collection, which had started out as an attempt by the brothers to record and publish ancient Germanic tales, is now firmly a children’s book and this is what they believe children will respond to: atmosphere. So the forest is not just a forest but big and dark, and though we all imagine that if the well was in the forest she must have sat down under a tree, this is now spelled out and the tree described: ancient, linden. The girl does not just start to play with her ball, she does so because she is bored; and it is insisted upon that it is her favourite toy.
It is clear even from this that the brothers grew more and more self-conscious the longer they lived with the stories they had collected, and, as they saw it, refined and improved them, though some (me included) feel that instead they came close to ruining them. For children don’t need atmosphere: the parent’s voice is enough, what they want is the story.
Benjamin was right: the novelist, unhoused, exiled, no longer a story-teller telling his stories in public but a private individual 26writing alone in his study, feels, in his impoverishment, that he must hide this at all costs, that he must either disappear altogether or create a persona, as the Grimms do here or as Dickens does, which will somehow ‘speak’ to the growing and absent audience. And clearly, in spite of the puncturing of the assumptions that lie behind both the genial persona and the ‘neutral’ narrator by a Cervantes or a Sterne, they have proved right: the ‘traditional’ novel has brushed all literary competition aside and still reigns supreme, though more and more with a sense that it is fighting a rearguard action against film, television and online ‘reality’ entertainment.
For some of us, though, the whole thing feels like a sorry charade. I think of Duchamp’s remark: ‘It is demeaning to a painter to expect him to fill in the background.’ A well-placed adjective, such as ‘cool’ for the well is fine, a playfully used adjective, as we get it in Chandler and Wodehouse (‘The refined moon which served Blandings Castle and district, was nearly at its full, and the ancestral home of Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, had for some hours now been flooded by its silver rays’), is also fine, but adjectives that aim to set the scene only get in the way.
But that of course is a personal view. The bulk of the book-reading public and the judges of literary prizes clearly think otherwise. But my body balks at the of use adjectives and adverbs, and I can’t gainsay it. Aharon Appelfeld said to me once: ‘My style I learned from the masters of clarity and simplicity, Kleist and Kafka, and above all the narratives of the Bible.’ That’s my man.
25.3.2020
Last night on the telly, Matt Hancock, sent out by Johnson, couldn’t quite bring himself to say it, but kept implying that it was all right to keep working if what you were doing was essential, and blaming Sadiq Khan for reducing the number of trains in London. When asked why then Scotland had decided to shut down all building work except for hospitals and the like he wriggled and squirmed and just repeated what he had said. Again, clash between money and life will cost lives (mine possibly) and do nothing for the economy.
Agami
I think I only visited it twice but on each occasion it was at an important juncture in my life.
Agami in the 1950s has been described as ‘a compound for the elite of Egypt’. In fact it consisted of a few fairly simple holiday villas built on the white sand of the Mediterranean some twelve miles west of Alexandria, with no running water, so that it could only be used by those with cars. We didn’t have a car but the parents of my friend Ronnie Sullam did, and one summer I was invited to spend a week with Ronnie, his younger brother and his parents in their villa. Did they rent it or own it? I have no idea. At twelve one doesn’t ask questions like that.
I had never much liked Alexandria so had no great expectations, but I looked forward to the novelty of a car journey through the desert and then to a week away from the routines of home life. I had not expected the sheer unbelievable gloriousness of Agami. The sand was nothing like that in Alexandria but purer, whiter, deeper, softer, the sea was a blue I had never seen and, in the sand between the villas fig trees in full fruit grew in abundance.28
As if that wasn’t enough a girl inhabited one of the villas, a creature whose name and even whose appearance I can, alas, no longer recall, but whose swimsuited body filled our night-time dreams, our daydreams and our waking desires (though plucking ripe figs from the trees and eating them in our bathing suits as we waded in the shallow waters also figured and was a desire more easily satisfied). I think we spoke to her once or twice, she may even have swum with us, but we never really got to know her. Did she have friends with her? Siblings? I can only remember the intense rivalry that developed between Ronnie and me, never I think spoken about, for the favours of this nymph, though what we meant by ‘favours’ consisted, I suspect, of a laugh and a smile and perhaps the toss of her glowing curls.
The Agami I returned to three years later was still just as beautiful, just as unspoilt, but the times had changed and the nymph had gone. My mother and I were on our way out of Egypt. We had said goodbye to my aunt, my uncle, my cousins and the two dogs we had left with them, and taken the train to Alexandria with just the two suitcases my mother had decided would constitute our worldly possessions in this new stage in our lives. In Alexandria we stayed with Joe Tilche and his wife and it was they, with some friends, who took us out to Agami on the day before our boat was due to sail, a boat we were not sure we would in fact be sailing on, for if the authorities had found out we were leaving for good we would be taken in and asked to account for the money my mother had received on the sale of the house and, since it was (we hoped) now in a Swiss bank, who knows what we would be charged with, and we might well, I thought, end up in jail.
So the bathing and sunbathing in Agami, though as delightful as I had remembered it, was tinged with anxiety and foreboding, as well as with the huge weight of sadness I felt at leaving my friends and especially my dogs behind.29
The next day we boarded the boat without trouble but the anxiety we felt at the possibility of being stopped did not abate till the boat finally sailed and from the deck we saw Alexandria and its harbour slowly disappearing in the haze of an Egyptian summer’s day.
26.3.2020
Weather continues beautiful and Downs walks more and more enjoyable. Spring in the air and newborn lambs and blackthorn in the fields at Landport Bottom. But everywhere that strange sense of a phony war, waiting for the April Offensive. Yesterday the Government under pressure again for doing too little too late – still only 8,500 ventilating machines say the NHS though Hancock boasts of 12,000, a figure repeated by Johnson. But what worked for Brexit, when lies and reality happily intermixed in Government announcements, does not work when the NHS provides cold statistics, frontline staff still not given the protective clothing they need and the experts all insisting testing in the quantities needed will not be available for weeks – as with the ventilators, probably long after the peak of the epidemic has passed.
Albert
My uncle, the husband of mother’s sister, Monika and Anna’s father. The only Catholic in the group of Jewish lycéens to which my mother and aunt belonged in their twenties in Egypt, where they grew up, he was the one Chickie fell in love with. She determined not only to marry him but to convert. However, she had doubts, not about her love for him but about whether that love trumped her love of God. Should I marry 30Albert or should I become a nun? she asked the priest who was instructing her. Marry Albert, he said, you are not cut out to be a nun. He was a wise man. No one was less suited to be a nun than my wilful and impulsive aunt, though the idea of one great renunciation which would make her life meaningful never left her and in later life she came to England and did try, with the help of her friend Manya Harari, Anna’s godmother, to become a nun. She lasted barely three months.
A serious, calm, blonde man, the son of a Cairo jeweller, with a sister who had become a nun, Albert worked all his life as a clerk in a Cairo firm which made typewriters. His real life was elsewhere: at the Maadi Sporting Club, where he became librarian and at one time ran a regular music evening for members, playing records of his favourite classical music and, I am told, speaking knowledgeably about them; where in the summer he was to be seen in immaculate whites, playing bowls; and where, after the virtual breakdown of his marriage (though he and Chickie continued to share the same house), he flirted with the many bored and beautiful women, married and unmarried, who made up a fair proportion of the membership.
His day was probably typical of that of many middle-class men in Mediterranean countries at the time: he got up at 5.30, had a cold shower, breakfasted, caught the train to Cairo (15 minutes), worked in the office from seven to one, came home, showered, changed, had a leisurely lunch followed by a siesta, dressed and went out to the club, where he stayed till dinner-time at around eight-thirty or nine, or sometimes, if he had one of his musical evenings, ate at the club and was not home till eleven.
I remember him as a kind but reserved man. Part of the trouble was that my aunt loved animals and at one time had as many as forty cats, plus a few dogs, in the house, while he, though I don’t think averse to the odd pet, loathed the 31all-pervasive smell of so many cats and of the meals my aunt was constantly having to cook to feed them all. It was a rule in their house that no cat should come into his room or into the dining room. I remember Sunday lunches there. The dining room was very large, with two French windows opening out onto a terrace and the garden and a raised dais at the end furthest from the door, where the large dining table stood. At one time a favourite cat of my aunt’s had learned how to leap up to the door handle and hang on to it as it opened. We would be in the middle of a meal when the door would suddenly open, with Pazouki (why was he called that?) still clinging to the handle while the other cats, who had obviously lined up behind him, would stream in, my uncle would utter a stifled Ah mais non alors!, and my aunt and cousins would rush down to try and reverse the tide. Eventually all the cats would be bundled out of the room, the door shut again (and locked?) and we would settle down once more to our meal.
I can’t remember Albert ever talking to me. Not that he was stand-offish, it just never (in my memory at least) happened. He was, however, a great raconteur and teller of jokes, always with a very straight face, pince-sans-rire the French called it. He would read out, or pretend to read out, adverts from the paper. ‘Restaurant cherche petit vieux avec la tremblotte pour sucrer les fraises.’ [Restaurant seeks little old man with the shakes to sugar the strawberries] is one I particularly remember.
Though he sometimes conversed in Italian with my aunt and my cousins the language we all spoke together was French, though my aunt, like my mother, was bilingual in French and English, the result of having had an English nanny when they were small, and the girls, like me, had been to English schools. My aunt in fact preferred English to French literature and talked to me at length about her favourite books, Keats’s Letters and de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and was happy to recite Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’, 32especially its opening, ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun’ (very apposite in that country ruled by the blazing sun) at every opportunity. I don’t know if Albert ever read any English (or indeed Italian) books, but the Club library over which he presided was largely French.
I recall him coming out onto the terrace where we were sitting one day and telling us that the club library had just received a book, the text of a play that was all the rage in Paris, written by an Irishman living in France, En Attendent Godot. That would have been in 1953.
My aunt fell in love with an Italian builder/engineer, and, though he had a wife and daughter, he and his daughter were often at the house. I understood nothing of all this at the time of course. But eventually Albert took up with a much younger woman, a friend of his daughters. By that time the engineer had returned to Italy with his family and Chickie found Albert’s new passion very hard to bear and decided to leave him and come to England. In her Buddhist way she imagined she could earn her living cleaning for people and thus keep her mind and spirit unsullied. She had not realised how hard and exhausting cleaning was, though she found some compensation when one of her employers thrust a sheaf of typewritten pages into her hand as she was leaving for the day and asked if she would be so kind as to read her poems and give her an opinion of them. After an abortive attempt to become a nun she returned to Egypt. They had forfeited the mortgage on their house (she was a terrible spendthrift and her animals had cost a small fortune) and settled into a small flat with a monkey and two dogs who had to be kept apart or they would fly at one another. The monkey found this great fun and when he could, would open the doors my aunt had carefully shut to keep the dogs apart. We saw them when we visited Egypt in 1984, twenty-eight years after we had left, and Albert seemed unchanged to me. His girlfriend had married 33and moved to New York and the club had changed as well, and had no further use for him, but he endured everything with his usual equanimity. He died the following year.
27.3.2020
Weather continues wonderful. Number of known infections and deaths in the UK rises and though London hospitals are already starting to say they are reaching full capacity, the sudden sharp rise we have seen in other countries is not yet upon us. Chancellor Rishi Sunak goes on forking out, this time to the newly unemployed.
Alexandria
‘Ah, you come from Alexandria!’ ‘No, Cairo.’ ‘Oh.’
Unlike Cairo, Alexandria is a city all in the West can dream about. It has been made into the equivalent of a technicolour film by Laurence Durrell and written about with empathy by Forster. It is where Cavafy, one of the great twentieth-century poets, lived, loved and worked. But though in the early years of my mother’s return to Egypt with me after the war we spent some of most summers there, staying with my mother’s half-sister Charlotte and her daughter Nell, my memory of the place is fragmentary and thin: breaking my arm when I jumped off a low wall; the banyan tree in Joe (Carlo) and Nadine Suares’ wonderful garden (there was also one of those giant cactuses whose spikes, my mother told me, were once used as gramophone needles – was that true?); diving off Alexandre Naglovsky’s boat in the Bay of Alexandria (I learned later that one reason we went to Alexandria was because he and my mother had an affair, only ended when he decided to go to 34South America and she felt she couldn’t uproot me again and follow him there, though he very much wanted to marry her); sitting upstairs with my mother in the double-decker tram that went round the perimeter of the city, with its exotically named stations, French, Greek, German, Arabic, English, evidence of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan history: Sarwat, San Stefano, Zizinia, Mazloum, Glymenopoulos, Saba Pasha, Bulkley, Roushdy, Mustafa Pasha, Sidi Gaber, Cleopatra, Sporting, Ibrahimieh, Camp de César, Chatby, Mazarita, Ramleh. The whole journey to the terminus and back took at least two hours and I can still hear the sound of the ticket collector’s horn as the next station was announced.
But, unlike André Aciman, who was born and brought up in Alexandria before his Jewish family finally left, long after most Europeans, in 1964, and whose Out of Egypt is the best evocation of that city at the height of its cosmopolitan glory, it does not resonate in my memory, suggesting that I never really liked Alexandria or felt at home there. And in those early years after the war, between the ages of five and ten, I think I was still a bit shell-shocked by the war years and the abrupt move when the war was over to a country where the indigenous inhabitants spoke a language I did not understand and rich and poor – the middle-class town of Maadi where we lived and the Arab village half a mile away where my mother occasionally shopped – seemed to belong to different worlds. I think I felt the same sense of shock, followed by a shutting off of any deep feeling, when, after eleven years in Egypt we uprooted ourselves again and arrived in England.
Whatever the reason, the Alexandria of Cavafy and Forster, let alone of Durrell, remains as foreign a land as the Blandings Castle of P.G. Wodehouse.
28.3.2020
Ravelli, the Italian physicist, on Newsnight last night. Said the reason the West had been so much less efficient than the Far East in dealing with this pandemic was hubris, a sense that it was superior, knew better. Maybe a bit of that but I also think it’s part of the DNA of Western democracies that if a situation arises in which there are two possible sets of actions, both with disastrous consequences that can be foreseen, they tend to put off the decision, hoping it will all go away; and so of course when they do finally have to choose they have a lot of leeway to make up. As with confronting Hitler in the ’30s, or the dithering over climate change, or, now, Covid-19, where shutting down will bring the economy to a halt and lead eventually to huge job losses, and not shutting down will lead to the rapid spread of the pandemic.
Animals
How did we acquire our first dog? Lala was his name. A mongrel (baladi, ‘from the village’, was the Egyptian term), like all our dogs, he became part of our life when we lived in Road 9, between the railway line and a busy road, but where, from the terrace we could see, beyond the railway, great fields of maize and, in the far distance, on clear days, the sails of the feluccas moving in stately fashion on the Nile. It was our first flat in Maadi (we had lived with Chickie, Albert and my two cousins, Anna and Monica when we first arrived from France in October ’45), and there is a beautiful set of photos taken by Alexandre Naglovski of me with Lala on the banks of the canal that ran through the town. But all I really remember about him is my mother waking me up one morning, kneeling by the bed and saying: ‘Lala is dead.’ He had been run over by 36a car, she explained, holding me as the news sank in. It was my first direct experience of death and it was terrible.
After Lala there was Rex, who left the Egyptian family he was with because he decided he preferred being with us. One day, taking him for a walk on the outskirts of the town, a woman came out of a house and, pointing to him, said he was hers and had been missing for a while. But when she tried to pull him into the house he dragged himself away and rubbed up against our legs. You see, we said, he’s ours. She became aggressive and said we had no right to steal her dog. Eventually we had to buy him off her. Then there was Judy the little epileptic bitch who drowned one day in a shallow puddle during a fit; Paavo, a woolly, gentle little dog, named after the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, one of my heroes at the time, who had the knack of sleeping on his stomach with his hind legs out behind him like a frog; and Sambo, the beautiful and impossible mixture of black Labrador and setter, who was incensed by anyone in a galabieh, a constant worry to my mother though she loved him for his fiery spirit and splendid looks; and, in England, Bimbo and Pilic, our English dogs, about whom I have written in A Life. My mother was known in Maadi as omm-el-kilab or mother of the dogs, and her sister as omm-el-ottat or mother of the cats. But we had cats too. In Egypt there was Batly or, to give him his full name, Batleymous, the Egyptian king known as Ptolemy in the West, a name which, to our ears, was both pompous and funny, and somehow suited him. He liked to sleep on his back in the bidet in which my mother put the dirty laundry prior to washing with his legs in the air. In England, Ginger, the large neutered Tom we inherited, who was the inspiration behind the only children’s novel I have ever written, Mr Isosceles the King; Miss Black, another animal who adopted us, this time in Woodstock, and who would bring in live shrews from Blenheim Park, for her kittens to play with, something that both fascinated and repelled us; and Nimrod 37in Lewes, given that name because we hoped, in vain, that it would stop him from being a mighty hunter, although his main prey was slugs which he would lay down carefully on my bed or my mother’s as a gift-offering. All the Egyptian dogs died, run over by cars or, in Judy’s case, drowning in the course of a fit – except for two, Rex and Paavo, whom we had to leave behind with Chickie when we left Egypt in the summer of 1956. But what happened to Batly? He must have died but I have no memory of it. Why?
29.3.2020
Summer time. But the UK is hardy celebrating. Yesterday the highest number of deaths in one day was recorded, and one of the medical people was on TV to say that if we kept the number below the 20,000 mark we would have triumphed. We are at the beginning of the upward curve, following Italy by about a fortnight, as all the pundits predicted.
America now has the highest number of recorded infections anywhere in the world and even Trump is having to admit there is an emergency.
I wrote about our dogs in A Life, but I did not pause to reflect on what it means to love dogs (and even cats) in the way I still do, though it is a long time since I had one. I suppose being with T, who is terrified of them and would not dream of having one, has made me realise that to love them and want to have them in the house is not a given. So what is it?
In my case at any rate there is a powerful sense, if one is rescuing a dog (as we always were in Egypt), that here is a 38creature who is suffering as I can imagine myself suffering. Empathy I suppose. Cf. Raskolnikov’s dream of seeing the horse being beaten to death by men who treat it as an object there to serve them, and of course our sense as readers that this dream is produced by his repression of his killing of the old pawnbroker and her saintly sister, for whom, as he did the deed, he had pushed all empathy out of his mind. And Bonnard’s identification at the end of his life with the circus horse whose head he so powerfully paints (his ghostly presence on the right, palette in hand, suggests a self-portrait). Sentimentality, some might say, self-pity. But it isn’t, of that I’m convinced. It is an awareness, which clearly some people have more than others, that all living creatures are interconnected, that what is done to an animal is done to me. That is why, Rowan Williams remarks in his wise book on Dostoevsky, Sonya presses Raskolnikov to ‘kiss the earth and confess your crime’. By kissing the earth you accept that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves, says Williams, part of nature as well as the human race, and no confession is possible without that.
It is well known that the Nazis drilled it into their killing troops, the Einsatsgruppen that Jews and Slavs were inhuman, vermin, and so desensitised them and made the killing possible. My heart goes out to an animal. I could not kill it, though I have taken dogs to the vet and held them while the vet injected them so as to put them out of suffering that could never be alleviated. I wonder, if the need arose if I could do that to another human being? (But I would not know how.)
But where are the limits? I’m not a Buddhist. I kill a mosquito without compunction (but not a spider; though I feel nothing but horror at the sight of a spider, I try to put it in a glass and throw it outside). And I always have scruples about killing moths or ants, though in the end I often do.
Timothy Sprigge claimed he felt empathy for everything with eyes and was a strict vegetarian. I’m not so clear on where 39the boundaries are. Once, walking along the jetty at Newhaven with Sacha, we watched as a boy caught a fish on his line and then watched it expire on land, struggling for breath. I decided then and there never to eat fish again, but now I do. I have to repress something, though, as with free-range chicken, which I also eat. Perhaps if I was a better cook I wouldn’t need to? I could make delicious vegetarian dishes? (I have the time, so why don’t I become one?)
But having a dog or a cat is the result of more than empathy. Just as you can see the fear in a dog’s eyes when it is afraid so you can see the pleasure a dog takes in running free, a pleasure I again can identify with, though humans, after the age of about three are never able to show it as dogs do. And cats, in a different way, not by running free but by lying in the sun, rolling on their backs. Such sensual delight. A joy to behold. (In the mountains above Kabis we have seen horses and foals do it on the grassy meadows.)
