Fragment 20: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment

Books, plays and canoodling.

Having written about the goings-on in my working life, here’s a quick catch-up on the domestic and leisure fronts.

Around this time I had a dalliance with a young woman a couple of years older than me. Or, rather, she had a dalliance with me: I distinctly felt that I was the junior partner. We had been at school together, but she was a year or two ahead of me. It was more than that, though: she seemed to me to have crossed the threshold into adulthood. She was a woman rather than a girl. But I was still a boy rather than a man.

It was not a long-lasting relationship (surprise, surprise!) but, somewhere along the way, the liaison must, I think, have enabled Nick (he of the Leicester wood/craft shop, and brother of friend Tony) to meet my womanfriend’s younger sister. I can’t think how else they would initially have met. Anyway, Nick and the younger sister married and set up home in the village of Naseby, Northamptonshire, just eight miles from Market Harborough.

Naseby? Does that name sound familiar? If so, it may well be because of what happened on 14th June 1645. The Battle of Naseby, a major clash of the English Civil War. On that day, The New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, defeated the Royalist army commanded by King Charles I and Prince Rupert.

Anyway, as a consequence of my friends setting up home there, Naseby became a regular place for me to visit; much of the time spent in the village pub.

Also at this time Nick made me a bookcase from Parana pine. It had three-shelves, each 1.5 metres wide. Very simple. Very solid. Absolutely wonderful. A well-crafted accessory for my passion for book collecting.

So, what books launched the collection? If you have read previous fragments in this series you may recall that, early on, I discovered the works of Charles Dickens, that I loved Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, I loved the sounds of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and had experienced a little of the magic of Shakespeare. I also had a passion for the Leslie Charteris (1907-1993) Saint stories.

But, at this particular time in my life, I discovered the Irish - specifically, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

First, I acquired a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was widely talked about as the great 20th century novel. My expectations were of something erudite. Maybe it is, but what surprised me was Joyce’s extraordinary facility with various writing styles and, above all, the amount of humour - some of it laugh-out-loud funny. Plus, of course, the fact that it had at first been banned for obscenity was an added bonus for a young chap. And there was the irreverence towards religion which, to a young, declared atheist like me was both refreshing and reassuring. The book even opens with an act of mockery:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
- Introibo ad altare Dei.¹

‘I go unto the altar of God’ marks the opening of the Old (Tridentine) Catholic Mass. So, Buck Mulligan, with his free-flowing dressing-gown leaving his genitals on display, is enacting a sort of Black Mass. And that’s just for starters!

There was humour, coarseness and irreverence, too, in Beckett’s work. Some of it struck me as Rabelais reborn. This, for example:

1. What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam’s rib, but from a tumour in the fat of his leg (arse?).

2. Did the serpent crawl or, as Comester affirms, walk upright?

3. Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?

4. How much longer are we to hang about waiting for the Antichrist?²

As the years went on I came to love Beckett’s plays - Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and the rest - but I started out with the prose works - Murphy, Watt, Molloy and so on.

As my twenty-first birthday approached, Nellie asked me what I would like as a present. I asked for, and got, Finnegans Wake. It’s a battered edition now but I love it, not least because Nellie wrote an inscription in it. The book, written by James Joyce and published in 1939, it was in fact worked on by both Joyce and Beckett because, for some years, Beckett was Joyce’s assistant.

Finnegans Wake introduced me to a concept that I subsequently took on board and still ponder a great deal - the idea that history is cyclical:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.³

That’s how Finnegans Wake opens, and it concludes with the beginning of that sentence,

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

We’re in the same territory, here, as the observation with which T.S. Eliot starts the first of his Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, :

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.⁴

This seems to me to be profound, and it feels as though it has particular importance in the Now because we really do seem to be going through a once-in-every-couple-of-millennia reshaping of human society. [See NOTES ARISING #1, below.]

Okay, so what else was going on when 1966 was ‘time present’?

Well, for one thing, I hadn’t entirely given up on the amateur dramatics. I joined a group called The Leicestershire County Players, operated by Leicestershire Education Committee and overseen by a chap called Peter MacDonell who was the County Drama Adviser.

We were a repertory company that took plays out around the county. Our number also included an old school friend, Colin, who I think may well have been the one who introduced me to the group in the first place. When we presented Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party⁵, described as a comedy of menace, Colin played the central character, Stanley Webber, and I was McCann, one of two sinister strangers who turn Stanley’s birthday party into a nightmare.

We also both took part in a Somerset Maugham comedy titled The Noble Spaniard⁶. I have a letter from Peter MacDonell dated 12th July 1966 which starts:

One hundred and seventy thousand salaams to you for your extremely funny performance in ‘The Noble Spaniard’. I don’t want you to get swollen headed about it, but I did enjoy watching you every evening.

Well, although I hope I acquitted myself tolerably well in my part, this also recalls, for me, the fact that, first and foremost, Peter was a lovely bloke - bright, energetic, funny. Although his humour could sometimes get him into hot water. He told the story, for example, of the parent or teacher (not sure which) who wrote to him for advice about the best make-up to use for a young girl who was to play the part of a mermaid or fish in a school production. Peter recommended Dulux gloss paint … because it was waterproof. The parent or teacher apparently did not see the joke and was not amused.

So, with the job at the shoe factory and these extra-curricular activities, life was quite busy. But it was about to change. My doubts about my long-term track [NOTES ARISING #2] and my pathetic desire to get a better motor car were about to take me to a new employer, Procter & Gamble, and a new location, Banbury in Oxfordshire.

---

NOTES ARISING:

It’s a commonplace to say that writing helps clarify one’s thoughts. Unclear about something? Write it down, work at it, and some clarity will emerge.

That’s the theory, and I think that, provided one is honest with oneself, it is fair and true. So, I’m going to take a stab at identifying occasional specific insights that emerge, for me, from these scribblings.

NOTES ARISING #1:
I’m only now beginning consciously to ‘get’ that pretty much everything I write, whether autobiographical or about business or life generally, has the issue of time present, time past and time future at its core. I have a deep sense that, as the old adage has it, ‘there’s nothing new under the Sun’. So I look for connections: seems I can’t help it.

NOTES ARISING #2:
Long-term! What did I know of long-term? Long-term in my perception at that stage of life seems to have been about five minutes! Then again, maybe that’s for the best? If this is all part of wiggling ones way forward, is it better to rather blindly - or, perhaps, blithely - bounce from one thing to the next rather than hanging about in a (perceived) dead end? And if NOTES ARISING #1 is true - if whatever goes around, comes around, so to speak - is there any point whatsoever in thinking long-term? Answers on the back of a postcard …

Thanks for reading.

1. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922)

2. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy (1950 in French)

3. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (1939)

4. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets (1941)

5. Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. First produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 18th June 1964.

6. Somerset-Maugham, W. The Noble Spaniard (1948)