Fragment 13; The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
In the autumn of 1960 a wonderful gift came my way – a school trip to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. A busload of us set off to see The Merchant of Venice.
By this time I had already seen the 1955 film of Richard III starring Laurence Olivier, and a production of the same play back in my first year at Wyggeston Grammar in Leicester, with Bernard Simons in the lead. And, by the by, I would see Christopher Plummer play Richard III at Stratford in 1961. In addition, because George had wanted to go to the cinema one Sunday afternoon in Leicester (his method of avoiding too many church services) I’d seen the 1953 movie of Julius Caesar – a wonderful production with Marlon Brando and James Mason. But this was my first experience of a professional theatre production of a Shakespeare play. I was knocked out.
Looking back at the programme, it was one hell of a line-up: Patrick Allen, David Sumner, David Buck, Ian Holm, Patrick Wymark, Denholm Elliott, Dorothy Tutin, and a not-yet-30-year-old Peter O’Toole as Shylock. But it was the play itself that thrilled me. The words, the words. And, at the time, I had no idea that a year later I would myself be playing Shylock in the 1961 Market Harborough Grammar School production.
That evening cemented my love of Shakespeare’s work. Although, back then, I didn’t understand a lot of it, I seemed to grasp the fact that, although the language of Shakespeare’s time was different to the present, the foundations of human existence remain the same, and Shakespeare seemed able to express those elements supremely well. Shakespeare’s words still work magic for me. More about The Merchant of Venice later but, for now, as a sample, the following strikes me as appropriate for a memoir:
Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancel’d woe,
And moan th’expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances fore-gone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
The sound, the flow, the euphony of the words - it’s wonderful. Sometimes, as with many of those by Shakespeare, words that were so well-chosen and well-connected that they transported me to a kind of magic place. Sometimes I straight away got the full import of what a writer was saying, sometimes I barely understood a word but, if they delivered that effect, that was sufficient in and of itself.
Another writer who delivered this for me was T.S. Eliot. I recall, for example, an evening at the Congregational church youth club, where I took the floor and read fragments of The Waste Land, to a recorded musical accompaniment of the third movement of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.1
Pretentious, moi? Surely not! I cringe when I think back on it but it wasn’t intended to be pretentious. I was more introverted than many of my peers and tried to compensate in some peculiar ways. Back then, of course, many more people lived simpler lives but I knew that my family, my situation, was extremely basic. Much of my presentation to the world was, I think, a reflection of the resulting screaming lack of confidence.
Don’t get me wrong. Generally speaking, the people around me at this stage of life were lovely. Inclusive. Friendly. Supportive. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that I was part of it all: part of the community; part of the place; part, even, of the landscape.
Recently, driving near Market Harborough, the feeling came back: the bocage landscape (“Wooded country interspersed with pasture” as my OED defines it) and, still, the feeling of belonging; the feeling that the landscape wrapped itself around me. It's all about place.
In an earlier fragment, I referenced The Wind In The Willows. Although, as a child, I lacked the context to grasp it, it too expresses English ‘place’. The same is true of an earlier reference to John Buchan’s Midwinter. It’s all about place. In fact, when it comes to capturing the essence of ‘place’ Buchan was an absolute master. In her biography of John Buchan2, his granddaughter, Ursula Buchan, remarks on his ability to conjure childhood holidays in Tweeddale in Scotland:
As a result of these summer holidays, JB felt keenly all his life that, like his hero, Sir Walter Scott, “he had that kindest bequest of the good fairies at his cradle, a tradition, bone of his bone, of ancient pastoral, of a free life lived among clear waters and green hills as in the innocency of the world.”3
A caution to keep in mind: fairies were definitely not all the universally sweet little creatures that a Disneyfied world subsequently reinvented them to be. Hence Buchan’s specific reference to “the good fairies”. Make no mistake, there are also malign fairies.
So, it's all about place, and the concept was beautifully expressed by philosopher Sir Roger Scruton:
Ideas of race, tribe and religion, which have played a dangerous part in continental politics, have also shaped English identity. But they were qualified and moderated by the concept of home. England was first and foremost a place – though a place consecrated by custom. There thus grew on English soil a patriotism not unlike that from which the word ‘patriotism’ derives – the patriotism of the Romans, in which the homeland, rather than the race, was the focus of loyalty.4
American commentator, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson goes further to make the point that:
You can’t have citizenship unless you have a sacred space that inculcates traditions and customs.5
Market Harborough is where, all those years ago, I discovered this concept – or, perhaps more precisely, it discovered me.
But despite my happiness with life in Market Harborough, and the acceptance and kindness of so many of the people around me, I suffered a chronic lack of self-confidence. I guess there are two kinds of people in the world: those who care what others say about them and those who don’t give a hoot. Oh, how I envy the latter. It’s not that clear-cut, of course; most people are probably situated somewhere between the two extremes. Trouble is, I found myself uncomfortably close to the needy end of the scale: “Please like me! Don’t reject me.” A foundational cause of this is, I suppose, obvious.
The neediness led to my embracing some unhelpful ideas. For example, I thought it essential to smoke cigarettes. Why? Because it was ‘grown up’ and ‘cool’. Smoking, I figured, would somehow raise my level of attractiveness. One had only to see Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca to see how goddam cool it was. And, anyway, most of the populace smoked in those days.
Back in 1961, the legal minimum age to smoke in the UK was 16 years. So, on my 16th birthday I bought my first packet of cigarettes. That’s interesting in and of itself: the fact that I did not try to do so before my 16th birthday shows a tendency to compliance. So, needy and compliant. What an unhelpful combo!
I lit a cigarette. It was horrible. I coughed, retched and turned pale green. But, come on, one had to persevere. And I did. It took a while but the promise of social inclusion was worth the nausea.
In fairly short order, of course, I was hooked, on both the nicotine and the idea that squinting through a haze of smoke somehow made me irresistibly attractive to any passing female. It was, in fact, the start of a nigh-on 40-year smoking habit. What an idiot. Apart from anything else I could have saved a hell of a lot of money. That said, smoking did help keep down the anger that I had not at that stage realized I felt. The trouble was, the anger then leaked out in the awful passive aggressive form. More about that later.
At the same time that I was learning how to smoke cigarettes, I was rehearsing to be Shylock in the school production of The Merchant of Venice. The local paper, The Harborough Mail, carried a review of the production which I’m pleased to say was favorable towards the production and me personally. Interestingly, the review made specific reference to my handling of the “moments of deep-rooted anger.”
I have a theory about this: at the risk of yet again sounding pretentious, I think I found it a damn sight easier to express anger when not being me, so to speak, than when I was not wearing some character. After all, if I directly and openly expressed anger, as me, it might lead to my being rejected all over again, might it not?
The central theme of The Merchant is justice versus mercy, as relevant today as it was 400 years ago. Justice is presented as ‘Jewish’, mercy as ‘Christian’, ‘Gentile’. And there’s play on the words ‘gentile’ and ‘gentle’. So Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, when she runs away from her father with Lorenzo is favourably termed “gentle Jew” – a coded version perhaps of “Gentile Jew”, which is to say “Christian Jew”.
At the time of writing, a version of this very same topic is top of the news agenda because, on 7th October 2023, the Hamas faction, which ousted the Palestinian Authority to take over control of Gaza in 2007, launched an unprovoked attack on homes in neighbouring Israel, murdering around 1,400 Jewish people, committing vile outrages and taking over 200 hostages.
I style it a version of the same topic because, it seems to me, the roles have reversed. In the current crisis, the Jews are expected to be on the side of mercy, while Hamas claims the right to a form of so-called justice based upon genocide … which, of course, is as far from justice as you can get. As it forms up to confront the Hamas terrorists, Israel finds itself confronting an ancient, totalitarian mindset - a perversion of Roger Scruton’s paean to ‘place’. The trouble is, this can be hard for us to fathom; a point made by centenarian former United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger:
To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the ideological clashes of ‘History’, Qutb [Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966)] and his followers’ views long appeared so extreme as to merit no serious attention. In a failure of imagination, many Western elites find revolutionaries’ passions inexplicable and assume that their extreme statements must be metaphorical or advanced merely as bargaining chips. Yet for Islamic fundamentalists, these views represent truths overriding the rules and norms of the Westphalian - or indeed any other - international order. They have been the rallying cry of radicals and jihadists in the Middle East and beyond for decades - echoed by al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran’s clerical regime, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, active in the West and openly advocating the reestablishment of the caliphate in a world dominated by Islam), Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Syria’s extremist militia Jabhat al-Nusrah, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which erupted in a major military assault in mid-2014.6 [Emphasis added.]
Kissinger goes on to mention that this last group was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981:
They accused him of two heresies: recognizing the legal existence of the Jewish state, and (in their view) thereby agreeing to cede land deemed historically Muslim to a non-Muslim people. [Emphasis added.]
There may well be more on this troubling subject in future posts but, for now, let me conclude this fragment of memoir with a return to Shakespeare’s play, and to its conclusion. Shylock does not appear in the final Act. The Shylock story is resolved in Act Four and he has no on-stage presence thereafter. This meant that, on each evening of our run, I was free to stand in the wings and watch and listen to Act Five. Here, the hitherto jokey Lorenzo becomes serious and outlines the doctrine of the music of the spheres to his new love, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica; look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold;
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.7
There is a melancholic mood about the first half of Act V, Scene 1 and the poetry got me, every time. In fact, literature, theatre, music and the visual arts all fascinated me. They offered often surprising glimpses of a world that, at this stage, I knew precious little about. But I also persisted with my maths and science!
Thanks for reading.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: 1. The Burial of the Dead (1922)
Buchan, Ursula. Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (2019)
Buchan, Ursula. Ibid. The inset quote is from John Buchan’s Sir Walter Scott (1932)
Scruton, Roger. Where We Are (2017)
Hanson, Victor David. The Dying Citizen (2021)
Kissinger, Henry. World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (2014)
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene One (circa 1600)