To be honest, I’m too knackered to try to think up some clever-clever ‘isn’t he such a smart cookie’ title, so this will have to do. If you’re really interested, you can regard it as a ‘companion piece’ to my ‘entry’ on art a few weeks ago. If you’re not really interested, what the hell, just read this anyway

I was getting one with this Hemingway bollocks when I decided, for one reason or another to post it here as my latest blog entry. (Note to foreign readers i.e. non-British readers: ‘bollocks’ is a semi-technical term we use in the production of newspapers to indicate ‘the matter in hand’, ‘the latest piece of turgid shite from our star columnist who in a more honest world wouldn’t be paid in washers’, ‘this crap’ etc. It is a word extensively used by working sub-editors/copy editors.) For one thing I haven’t been posting as regularly as I once was. For another, it struck me as a possibly useful companion piece to the entry on art. But, hell, whatever...

There is a notable tendency most of us share which is obliquely pertinent to the prominence Hemingway achieved in the literary world in his lifetime and still broadly retains. The tendency is this: many, if not most, of us, are generally quite prepared, often almost eager, to forgive and perhaps even to justify the flaws and shortcomings in those (or that) to which we are generally well-disposed. We are ‘on their side’ and we will gladly cut them a little slack.

Conversely, if for whatever reason we have taken against someone or something, we are only too pleased to pick up on, highlight and condemn each and every flaw and shortcoming, however slight. And here, being one of the minority who are not persuaded by Hemingway’s ‘genius’ and, furthermore, puzzled as to why anyone can be, I am willing to admit that I might well be guilty of nit-picking for fault.

A similar, though certainly not the same, tendency is often at play in ‘the arts’, although unlike in our private lives, it is not driven by personal bias but by something at once both more complex and remarkably simple.

If after reading the latest ‘innovative’ and ‘ground-breaking’ novel, hearing an ultra-modern piece of music or visiting an exhibition of ‘subversive’ art, and despite being assured it is a work of genius, privately we remain unconvinced, it is a brave woman or man who will publicly announce their doubts: but it is not necessarily doubt in our own judgment which causes our reticence. 

It is more likely to be a fear of looking ridiculous: who are we to judge on the worth of a piece when the great and good in the arts have given it their blessings?

Rather than risk the scorn of our peers, we might decide to ignore those aspects of a ‘new’ work with which we feel uncomfortable and cut it a little slack. We might try to assure ourselves that such a new, unusual and ground-breaking piece ‘needs space’ and being new, unusual and ground-breaking can be judged only by new rules.

In a bout of modesty we might even tell ourselves it is no doubt our own fault that we are not immediately able to acknowledge its excellence: look at Picasso and Stravinsky or, in earlier years, the Impressionists, we might tell ourselves, and how the world had to learn to appreciate the art they produced; how we all had to discover ‘new ways of reading’, ‘new ways of looking’ and ‘new ways of listening’.

Read this:

‘In the morning it was bright and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.’ 

Were that rather flat, not to say banal, passage (the first paragraph of chapter 10 of The Sun Also Rises) not the work of a writer hitherto hailed as ‘a great writer’, but merely an excerpt from the travel diary of Rockbridge, Illinois’s Lewis Monroe, I suspect the kudos would be in shorter supply. But as it’s Hemingway, he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’ that ‘puts more literary English to shame’ (as a contemporary New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, has it), so . . .

Flat, banal? Rubbish! Hemingway? He’s a great writer, isn’t he? Nobel Prize laureate, leading modernist, one of America’s best novelist, an original voice . . . How could a man like Hemingway be thought even capable of writing flat, banal passages? Get a grip man! Oh, you’re not an academic, or a fellow published writer, or a professional literary critic? Ah, well, that explains it, doesn’t it? Now, fuck off and don’t waste our time!

It is, in fact by Hemingway (he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’), but had I, in fact, accomplished a double bluff and, after persuading you beyond any doubt that the piece is a passage from Hemingway’s masterful pen, then come clean and revealed that in fact this is from the travel diary of Lewis Monroe, of Rockbridge, Illinois, composed while he and a few pals, would it still be a piece of masterful writing?

Or would it — on reflection (‘well, of course, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’) — revert to being flat and banal? I believe it might well do so. I have no truck with the ‘transubstantiation’ of Roman Catholic ideology, and I similarly have not truck with any other kind of suggested transubstantiation.

Is a piece of loo paper suddenly valuable because it has been certified that the Epstein (the sculptor Jacob, not The Beatles’ manager Brian) used it to wipe his arse? No, doubt, though some clever shyster would have no trouble drumming up some schmuck willing to part with $1,000 for it. Put it in an ivory frame and you can double the price.

. . .

There are certainly those those throughout the world who are passionate about literature and ‘the arts’ (and, given half the chance, will explain to you at length just why and why they simply could not live without the arts), but in the grubbier corners of the arts world, less lofty, more commercial imperatives come into play.

A great many people make a great deal of money from selling ‘the arts’ in one way or another, and those involved in making it – publishing houses, film and recording studios, auction houses, concert promoters, upscale galleries and dealers of every stripe — are naturally ever keen to talk up the value of the merchandise they are pushing — for when all is said and done ‘merchandise’ is what it is, whether ‘it’ is a rare first edition, a napkin some famous jerk painter doodled on to settle a restaurant bill are that piece of used loo paper you have just bought for $1,000. By the way, if you think I am being unnecessarily scatological, check out Gilbert and George’s Naked Shit Pictures.

What’s good enough for Gilbert and George is certainly good enough for me, though I should point out the Gilbert and George are Turner Prize winners, have several honorary doctorates and three years ago were elected to London’s Royal Academy of Arts. On the other hand, I’m not, I’m just a knob with a loud mouth who likes writing and getting pissed on tawny port.

If a writer, painter or composer ‘has a name’ and is ‘selling’, those with a stake in maximising the profits to be made from that person’s output will try to ensure she or he continues to sell; and thus they have a vested interest in talking up her or his significance in their given field and downplaying any flaws or shortcomings that might be apparent to some. To do that they will to some extent rely on the arts’ industry’s camp followers — the film, theatre and art critics and book reviewers all of whom function as influencers and are an intricate element of the arts industry.

The upshot is that the ‘consumer’ — many might consider using that word in the context of ‘the arts’ vulgar, but to be frank there is none better — can often find it difficult to gauge the worth of a ‘work of art’, especially if the work is unusual and they are assured it is ‘fresh’ or ‘innovative’ or ‘ground-breaking’. So when the rest of the world is lauding to high heaven a new novel or film, a piece of music, play or exhibition, most of us are quite prepared to go with the flow and accept the judgment of those we assume know what they are talking about.

. . .

The world has always demanded new darlings and celebrated them accordingly, and Hemingway was by no means the first when In Our Time, his first book of short stories, was published in 1926. Some are still remembered, many more have been forgotten, at least by the reading public if not by academia, as each younger generation enthusiastically espouses the latest fashion in the arts as they espouse the latest fashion in clothes. And will always regard those who question their judgment and championing of their new darlings as, at best, stuffy, uncool and old-fashioned, at worst wilfully contrary or just mad.

Unlike me, you might well believe Ernest Hemingway really was a ‘writer of genius’, but you might also agree he and his career benefited enormously from the commercial imperatives which dictated Scribner’s decision to publish The Sun Also Rises. Idealists might care to believe the house had the purest motives at heart and by choosing to publish Hemingway’s work was simply concerned with furthering ‘literature’. What is, though, undeniable is that under that guidance of Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins, the publication of The Sun Also Rises was first and foremost a business venture.

Perkins, one of the young Turks of the publishing world who had begun his career at Scribner’s in its advertising department and knew a thing or two about the business side of publishing, also wanted to ensure Scribner’s did not lose market share and would be seen as a house equally as interested in avant-garde work.

Hemingway’s literary prominence and certainly his reputation have, admittedly, declined a little since their zenith, not least because over the past century many other darlings have arrived to be championed (and sold). But with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1927 and on the back of In Our Time, Hemingway became, in more modern parlance, an overnight sensation, and this was thanks to very astute marketing by Scribner’s, and sales of the novel were astonishing. According to Ms Blume in a piece she wrote for Vanity Fair

‘ . . . thanks to [Scribner’s] public-relations machine that plugged [Hemingway] as a personality along with his breakthrough novel, which would sell 19,000 copies within the first six months of its publication. (By the time of Hemingway’s death, in 1961, an estimated one million copies had been sold.)’

Scribner’s marketing department know its job. Ms Blume continues that those

‘charged with marketing Hemingway’s work were aware of their good fortune: in a sense, they were getting two juicy stories for the price of one. It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald’.

She observes that

‘The Sun Also Rises became the guidebook to youth culture. Parisian cafés teemed with Hemingway-inspired poseurs: the hard-drinking Jake Barnes and the studiously blasé Lady Brett Ashley became role models. The reason this pioneering youth movement still shimmers with dissipated glamour has a lot to do with The Sun Also Rises’

. . .

I might be an apostate on the matter of Hemingway’s ‘genius’, but even I won’t deny that among his peers his style was distinctive, although whether being ‘distinctive’ is necessarily praiseworthy is a moot point. It was certainly an aspect of his work which Scribner’s marketing department highlighted in its campaign to launch the writer as a sensation: here was something ‘new’ and ‘fresh’, the publishers stressed, a style and attitude that was very different to that of the old-school writers.

Scribner’s was, though, obliged to tread carefully: among its other authors were both Henry James and Edith Wharton, two of the ‘old-school’ writers Hemingway was touted to be leaving behind and whose ‘more literary’ styles, according to that rather overwrought New York Times reviewer, his own put to shame. Although James had died several years before Hemingway’s rise to fame, Wharton was still alive (and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928 and 1930). The work of both writers was still selling so well that some senior Scribner’s partners were discomfited by the tactics of Hemingway’s editor Max Perkins and had to be won over.

There is more to ‘writing’ than just prose style, but here, too, I suggest, Hemingway comes more than a little unstuck and proves to be less than the full deal. He long, and inexplicably, insisted that The Sun Also Rises was not an autobiographical novel. Strictly speaking it isn’t, much of the novel was exactly that, especially to the friends and acquaintances who accompanied him on his third trip to Pamplona and who with barely any attempt to disguise them became the protagonists in his novel. In a piece for Town & Country (about Lady Duff Twysden, Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s novel) Lesley M M Blume observes

‘In the end, The Sun Also Rises was a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that had gone down in Pamplona’.

She adds that Donald Ogden-Stewart (the humorist and later Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden-Stewart who, with Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, was transmuted in the novel into ‘Bill Gorton’ in the novel)

‘. . . was astonished that Hemingway was even passing it off as fiction: it was, in Stewart’s opinion, nothing but a report on what happened … [it was] journalism”.

This is not in itself reprehensible – many authors extrapolate into fiction events from real life. It is what you do with your material which tells, how you transmute it into something greater than what is was before you started. What is baffling is Hemingway’s continued and persistent insistence that his novel was not autobiographical.

I suspect that, as Ms Blume establishes, desperate as he was to become a ‘great writer’ — and to be acknowledged as such — he feared his novel would not be taken seriously if it was seen as according to one reviewer of Ms Blume’s book put it mere ‘gossipy reportage’, even though, uncharitably, at the end of the day in many ways that is all it was despite the high-flown claims made for it as literature.

I’m disappointed. When you tell a joke, it’s a bit of downer when no one laughs. OK, not a joke you know what you mean

About 15 months ago, I came across a very useful website called Deadlines for Writers. And that’s exactly what it is: you are provided with a monthly ‘prompt’, a strict word count and a deadline for a story and a poem (you can accept the challenge for both or either).

Crucially, it’s free. There is no charge as, for example, there is a charge, usually about $20, for entering writing competitions to win a top prize of $3,000 (and far small second and third prizes. OK, you might say, wearing your charitable ‘let’s not get too cynical’ hat: these sites have costs and have to be paid for somehow so a small charge is understandable. And anyway, what’s $20?

Well, on the face of it, yes, but just do the maths (US ‘math’ though why I really don’t know) and you will realise that first and foremost such ‘competitions’ are exceptionally nice little earners for the poor, hopeful schmuck who cough up their $20. But I have written about that before (and you can find the post here) so I won’t do so again.

The point is that Deadlines For Writers does not charge you anything. It does have a higher tier where, for a small fee, you can have your story or poem appraised (by whom I don’t know), but joining at the basis, free level, does me (and it seems many others) fine.

The benefits are learning discipline, pretty much as far as I am concerned the prerequisite for most endeavours, including writing fiction of verse. You have a month to write and revise you piece, but just a 12-hour window so submit. And although the word count is a little flexible, it’s not much.

This month 155 were submitted, which is about the average. Members are from all around the world from every continent, though for some reason women predominate.

Another benefit is that, if you are lucky, others who have submitted stories (this month well read other stories and occasionally make comments. They only do so occasionally, but these comments can sometimes be useful.

I have submitted two stories (I created second identity a few months after joining so I could do so) every month, so the discipline side of it is working. Just how engaging and interesting my stories are I don’t know. And that is cause of my disappointment.

Usually get one or two comments every month and, I don’t mind admitting, I look forward to them. But this month I have had no comment on either one of the stories I submitted.

As you can imagine subject matter and style vary. Most folk, it seems, try their hand at chick-lit, science fiction or fantasy, which are not my bag and I don’t. Also some of the stories (I read a few at random every month

and sometimes leave comments) vary in — how do I say this without coming across as snob? — quality. Of the ones I read some are engaging and interesting, many are not.

Now for the cause of my disappointment: one of the stories I submitted this month was a little different. I attempted a pastiche of the kind of rotund, wordy, often overblown style of the 19th-century. It took the form of a review of a novel by Henry James (he of the rotund, wordy, and as he got older, often overblown style).


I realised it wasn’t quite the kind of stuff most folk choose to submit, but I took care over it, a great deal of care, in fact, to make sure it was not just horribly wordy and overblown, but actually also made complete sense. And I have so far had no comment.

Well, that’s a shame, so here and now I ask any of you reading this, if you have time, to read it and tell me what you think. It’s called Yes, You Mr James! and you can read or download it here.

Pip, Pip

(Or as Henry James, he of the mysterious bicycle/fire hose incident — find out for yourselves — would put it, pip, as it were and indeed, pip.)

When, why, how and where (subs: please check) using a simile is always pretty pointless, rather like driving a red car with a tennis racket or eating a sausage in Latin or (cont. P94)

No entry here for almost two months (well, seven weeks). Am I losing interest? Well, no, it’s just that pretty much all that’s been occurring to me has to do with Trump, the coming economic crash and Brexit, and how in many ways both Putin/Russia and Xi Jinping/China are running rings around ‘the free world’.

To be frank, on those matters I’ve nothing much to add to the generalities I’ve already posted in this blog (and which, as I’ve long admitted, are generalities I recycle from only papers and the media. The Economist is always a good bet. Subscribe to the Economist, pick up one or two obscure facts every week — that the housing market in New Zealand has seen better days, for example — and get ready to score Brownie points with the more gullible of your friends who don’t subscribe when you drop them — obliquely! — into conversation).

Then there’s my Hemingway project. It’s coming along OK, though slowly, and I don’t have anything new to say about that either. But one topic has presented itself which might take me away from all the doom and gloom (though the bad times are not complete — football is back on TV).

I’ve been doing a lot more reading over these past 30 months since I hung up my eyeshade and stashed away my spike and pot of glue, and although in that time the bulk of it has been about Hemingway — biographies and related books — I have also been able to read more fiction again. Over that time I’ve read and enjoyed Troubles by J G Farrell, got stuck into Middlemarch (but I’m taking is slowly) and read, but not enjoyed several other novels. In fact, I’ve not enjoyed more novels than I have enjoyed, but I have a kind of rule to finish reading what I’ve started to read as I think that’s only fair to an author.

I’ve also been working on the principle of casting my net far and wide and reading stuff I wouldn’t normally be interested in. So after hearing on the radio that the writer and ex-spy Ted Allebury was an excellent writer, I read his novel Show Me A Hero and discovered — on the basis of that book at least — that he wasn’t.

Then by chance I came across Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith, which was billed as ‘horror’ (or something) and not having read any ‘horror’ before, I read it. It was dreadful in quite a few ways, but at least I gained a little from it: how not to write.

Trickier to deal with was The Colour by Rose Tremain. She is an ‘award-winning’ author (which surely should impress us all, surely?), a ‘Dame’ to boot and I gather something of a respected fixture in contemporary English literature. All that leaves me out on a limb when I confess that I wasn’t particularly impressed by The Colour, either. In fact, I didn’t think it was at all good.

. . .

A crucial point to make, though, is that we all like different things, in this case writers and styles. Quite obviously given Ms Tremain’s reputation and her long list of awards I (who admittedly is only talking about one book here, the only one by her I have read, though did and does not encourage me to read any more) I am in a distinct minority. Some might, possibly with some justification, claim I don’t know what I am talking about. I happen to think I do, but you’ll see that no definitive answer can be given to that question.

Nor can a definitive answer be given to the question ‘is this book [whatever it is] good or bad?’ I contend that, particularly if a novel or story or poem isn’t the kind of thing we usually ‘like’, all literary judgments are subjective and can’t be anything but subjective.

You might argue that this or that critic or English literature department academic is ‘a professional who is daily immersed in literature of all kind’ and is able to evaluate a book dispassionately without letting her of his personal tastes intrude. To that I would respond ‘cobblers’, simply because there is no way at all we can be sure personal tastes has not intruded. And when it does, the particular critic or academic is very likely to be unaware that it has.

The ‘professional’ critic or academic might well agree with me that Geoff Smith’s Time Of The Beast is pants, rubbish. But I also don’t doubt Mr Smith’s novel has entertained many and they felt it is ‘quite good’.

How would you react to that? Would you insist (in a sense pulling rank on behalf of the ‘professional’ critic/academic) that in some way she or he is ‘more qualified’ to pass judgment, because they have read more etc? I’ll concede that ‘having read more’ might mean their judgment and reasons for making it are more interesting to listen and pay attention to rather than those of someone who thinks Time Of The Beast is ‘really, really brill, I mean it’s ace!’; but that still doesn’t make the one subjective judgment more objective than another, quite simply because it cannot. It simply isn’t possibly, just as 2 plus 4 will never add up to anything but 6 however hard you try.

. . . 

As it happens I am not alone in being more than a tad sceptical about the views of ‘professional’ critics and academics or rather the overly respectful attention they get and, no doubt, often demand. As part of my background reading for this — almost interminable, but not quite yet and I shall finish it — Hemingway project (which I’m thinking of subtitling ‘Was Hemingway a twat or just a pillock?’) I came across Virginia Woolf’s contemporary review of Men Without Women, his second volume of short stories, in which she is quite scathing about ‘the critics’ and the almost slavish respect we give them and their views. You can read her piece here.

I am certainly not about to claim that the judgment of the ‘ordinary reader’ is just as good as that of the better-read critic or academic. Instead I am trying to make the, rather negative and certainly more subtle point, that the judgment of the critic or academic is not per se better. I shall simply ask those who will continue to argue that it is: how then do you explain that quite often the judgment of one critic about the latest work by this year’s new darling might utterly contradict that of another.

To show you what I mean, here are two judgments by two ‘respected critics’ about John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea (it won the Booker that year). The Guardian wrote: ‘Banville’s book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) . . . And that we can mention such writers in the same breath as Banville should alert us to the fact that we can count ourselves privileged to be around at the same time as he is.’

Then there’s the view of the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani that The Sea is

‘a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale’.

So which is it? Who is right and who is wrong? Actually, neither is, because there can be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ subjective judgment.

. . . 

I happen to agree with Kakutani. Certainly, Banville does try something different and something quite interesting, but by Christ does he spoil it all by shitting on his own doorstep. As far as I am concerned for every point he scores — and he does score one or two, not least that he shares with many of his fellow Irish writers a feeling for the flow of prose, something which is all-too-often distinctly lacking in too many English novelists (are you listening, Ms Tremain?) — he loses two.

For one thing he chooses to use so many arcane words — her’s a pick of them: ‘leporine’, ‘strangury’, ‘perpetuance’, ‘finical’, ‘flocculent’, ‘anthropic’, ‘avrilaceous’, ‘anaglypta‘ and ‘assegais’ — that you get the distinct feeling he’s just showing off.

In fact and on the face of it, that would seem to be very unlikely, given his prominence etc. But that is how it comes across and that is, sadly, what I suspect Banville is doing. When he won the Booker with The Sea in 2005, he commented along the lines of ‘wasn’t it good that for a change a work of art won the Booker’. Modest, he ain’t.

In The Sea, Banville is also horribly addicted to similes and — a trait he shares with the lovely Ms Tremain — he doesn’t use just one where one might do: every burp and fart gets at least two similes, and most are so bloody forced you think you are sitting in a junior creative writing course class.

Overall — to my mind, I’ll stress that point once again — The Sea is horribly overwritten and so top-heavy with ostentatious ‘fine writing’ that it is nothing but bad writing.

The all-important arts establishment, who possibly never got around to reading The Sea, disagree. Among his honours, Banville has won (this list is from Wikipedia) the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature’.

He has also been ‘elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007’, and in 2017 ‘Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood)’. The bottom line: he must be a fine writer, and you, Pat Powell, couldn’t tell a purse from a sow’s ear. Ho-hum.

. . . 

Another writer who has been honoured by the bods who like to do the honouring is one our English literary critics’ several darlings, Ian McEwan. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary English ‘letters’, McEwan has, as sadly always seems to happen, become an eminence grise.

He hasn’t yet been knighted as Ms Tremain — sorry Dame Rose Tremain — has been honoured, but many, many bodies, in Britain and abroad have made it clear just what a splendid, splendid writer they think he is. Nor only has McEwan, like Banville, also won a string of prizes, but among other things a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and most recently was awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal who being a splendid chap who isn’t a kraut.

Immediately after finishing Banville’s The Sea, I read, again at random, McEwan’s ‘James Tait Black Memorial Prize’ winner Saturday. This is billed by the Observer, at least on the cover of my paperback edition as ‘Dazzling . . . profound and urgent’.

Yes, as far as London’t literary luvvies are concerned it is firmly in the camp of ‘important literature’. Here’s my subjective opinion: it’s not ‘dazzling’ or ‘profound’ and what ‘urgent’ means or might mean in the context I have no idea at all.

Actually, I do have an idea as to what is going on: publishers — spoiler alert! — don’t publish books because they are ‘passionate about literature’. They publish books to make money and preferably as much of it as possible. Thus telling the constituency of readers who regard themselves as ‘passionate about literature’ that McEwan’s novel is ‘dazzling . . . profound and urgent’ should urge those on any doubters further towards the Waterstone’s till.

Like Banville, McEwan is also addicted to two similes where even one is one too many, and like Banville they are usually so bloody forced, you wonder whether the writer’s literary judgment had taken the day off at the time of writing. Perhaps you might even agree with me that supplying two similes is remarkably odd: doesn’t that second simile more or less neutralise the first? In which case why provide the first?

To be frank, why not let words you are trying to illuminate with a simile (or do whatever similes are intended to do) speak of themselves? In short, junk similes now and forever. I have not — in my more mature and enlightened reading — yet come a cross a simile which is not pointless, affected and could certainly be junked without a second thought.

We’re told — and we have to be told because I doubt the average reader would guess however ‘passionate’ they are about literature — that Saturday is (or was when it was published in 2005) a commentary on the second Iraq War and the ‘state of the world’. Well — ahem, in my view — it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it is hard to see quite what the point of McEwan’s novel is.

I love ironies, and it is a supreme irony that John Banville — yes, the same John Banville of the mainly pretentious bilge outlined above — was extremely nasty about McEwan’s Saturday when he reviewed it in My 2005 for the New York Review of Books. He wrote:

Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.’

I have to say I agree with Banville. Reading McEwan’s novel was like — oh, bloody forget it!

What is art? Quick, where's the bloody door!

My ‘project’ is as interesting as ever — to me, at least — but it is lasting a lot longer than I anticipated. Certainly that has something to do with not beavering away at it day in, day out, week in, week out, although I do work at it regularly, whether undertaking background reading or writing. And I’ve already created the website where I shall publish it once it is finished. It is also taking longer than I thought it would because I am continually redefining what I want to do.

I began it, in July 1918, after reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel (often called his ‘debut novel’, but in fact his second) The Sun Also Rises. The blurb on the back of it — the publisher’s blurb as in ‘the publisher who makes money from selling copies of it and the more copies he sells, the more dosh he rakes in’ — described the novel as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. I thought it was neither, but I was aware that Hemingway was, apparently, regarded as ‘one of our greatest writers’ and had even been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I decided to write an entry for this blog wondering out aloud quite why the publisher made his claims.

I have described the genesis of my project in earlier posts and won’t repeat it all here, except to say it very quickly became apparent to me that to do my argument justice — my argument is summed up by the title I have given the Hemingway blog (‘The Hemingway Enigma: How Did A Middling Writer Achieve Such Global Literary Fame’) — I was obliged to do more reading of his work and, for want of a better word, a little ‘research’ (which in my case is just another word for ‘reading’). And that’s what I have been doing.

In that first year I wrote about 15,000 words, possibly a little more, as I was writing several files at the same time. But when a little later I came to read what I had written, with a more critical eye (it is always worthwhile letting a little time elapse before going over what you have written), I realised it was all rather superficial, not to say quite adolescent, crap. So I started over again.

By then I was more familiar with the life of Ernest Hemingway and the man himself, and I realised it would be pointless just to rehash the various biographies and memoirs I’d read, quite apart from irrelevant to answering the question I was asking: How did a middling writer . . . ? etc. To do that, I realised, I would have to write a series of ‘essays’ (the quotation marks are suitable for conveying how nervous I still am in part about what I am doing and that I’m running a very real risk of looking quite foolish) on various aspects of his rise to fame. And one of those ‘essays’ had to be the most dangerous one of all to undertake: what is ‘art’ and what do we mean by ‘art’?

It is, though, necessary to write about it and outline just what ‘art’ might be seen as because all the books, paper, memoirs, features and dissertations I have so far read on the writer refer to ‘Hemingway’s art’. The problem is that the still widely accepted use of the word ‘art’ places it high, high, high on a pedestal and even the mere mention of ‘art’ in connection with Hemingway is inclined the reinforce and spuriously substantiate the claims for him as being a ‘writer of genius’.

Undoubtedly, Hemingway did have a certain facility when writing — his journalism, though as facile as most such journalistic pieces are — is very readable. And he easily mastered the trick of writing in such as way as to persuade the reader he didn’t just know what he was talking about, but knew a great deal more and would reveal it if, well, you know, he were able to do so . . .

It’s just that in my view the end product of ‘Hemingway’s art’ was not and is not particularly good. I grant that it is not exactly bad, either — well, not to begin with and he certainly had a greater gift for short fiction than novel-length works — but I can’t get my head around the claims made for it. So, I realised, I shall also have to write about ‘art’, or better, ‘art’ as I understood it.

. . .

As it happens I had for some time been wondering and thinking about ‘what do we mean by art’ and had already reached some conclusions. I was, and still am, also aware that minds far greater than mine have done the same and that intellectually I am simply not in the same league as they.

Yet despite that I felt and feel, my observations might, at least, be pertinent. And by way of practising, rehearsing so to speak, what I want to write on ‘Hemingway’s art’, I thought I might do so in this entry. Some of the points I shall make I’ve made before and if, by chance, you have previously dipped into this blog, they might sound familiar.

There are several jumping off points when wading into the quagmire of ‘what is art and what do we mean by art’ and none is particularly better than any other. So I shall start with this observation: we often hear the question ‘. . . but is it art?’ or hear the declaration ‘. . . but it’s not art’; and we often hear a distinction being made between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’.

To my mind — and I should like you always to keep in mind the proviso that mine is merely one point of view and that I’m not, as too many do, in any way laying down the law — the thought behind each of those first two statements excludes the third.

If, on the one hand we wish to distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘not art’ and on the other to distinguish between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’, surely that begs the question: which is better/more worth our attention — ‘bad art’ or ‘not art’? That is: is ‘bad art’ still ‘better’ than ‘not art’? Is there some kind of hierarchy, some consolation for whoever is deemed to have produced ‘bad art’ that it is, at least, ‘still art’.

Well, I’ll let you off the hook and stop demanding that these questions should be answered because in my view ‘art’ is something very, very straightforward and simple and is created by the minute the world over: it is nothing special, that the badly painted, out-of-of proportion still life produced by 64-year-old widow Daphne Rutherford in her Leek, Staffs, Women’s Institute art class is as much ‘art’ and a ‘work of art’ as Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Certainly, Holbein’s work might hold your attention for longer than Mrs Rutherford’s Bowl Of Fruit At Sunset, but that is not the point.

Granted, in the estimation of many Blinding Lights by The Weeknd can’t hold a candle to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Freddie Freeloader by Miles Davis, but I suggest there is absolutely nothing intrinsically ‘better’ about that fourth movement compared to Blinding Lights: the preference is wholly subjective.

I had to look up what in pop terms is recent and found Blinding Lights on You Tube. I’d heard of The Weeknd, though I’d never heard his music before, and in my — admittedly also subjective — view Blinding Lights is pretty bloody ordinary, pretty bloody indistinguishable from 1,001 other tracks with whom it is vying for prominence and really can’t hold a candle to either of the other the Beethoven or the Miles Davis. But that isn’t the point: I suggest again that there is nothing whatsoever intrinsically ‘better’ about Beethoven’s fourth movement than The Weeknd’s track. Both are ‘works of art’.

At this point many will think ‘the guy has lost the plot’. Actually, I haven’t done so at all. The essential issue here is that for decades, for centuries even, we have got into the habit of genuflecting before ‘art’ and insisting there is something very special about ‘works of art’, often, to make that point, referring to ‘real art’ and ‘real works of art’. It is now a convention, a tradition.

Even all those, often quite self-conscious, iconoclasts and would-be iconoclasts who demand regularly something of ‘a clean sweep’ of the art world, ‘away with the old and in with the new’ are dancing to the same old tune, worshipping the same old gods. It’s just the gods have different costumes (and the young Turks inevitably become the dinosaurs a new generation of young Turks demands should ‘make way!’ And it is most certainly not the tune I am singing).

Perhaps to clarify what I have just written: both that fourth movement and The Weeknd’s latest release are ‘works of art’. But if many of us value the one — the fourth movement — more than the other, it is not because one is ‘a work of art’ (‘it is art’) and the other isn’t. It is because as a work of art the one achieves more than the other. And I am using such a vague phrase not just because I can’t think of a better one, but because quite what it achieves, the value of what it achieves and whether or not it should be given more respect are entirely separate questions.

Over the years many claims are made for ‘art’ and ‘works of art’. ‘Art’, some have declared, has a ‘moral dimension’. At other times the demand is made that ‘art must be political!’ Towards the end of the nineteenth century the cry

went up that ‘art should be for art’s sake’. Leo Tolstoy wrote that ‘Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs’.

As I understand it — I haven’t yet read the book What Is Art in which he makes that claim, but dear hearts, ever the dedicated and responsible man of integrity I have ordered it and shall read it once Amazon have delivered it next Tuesday as promised — but I gather Tolstoy, who became something of a religious nut in his later years when he put down his thoughts on art, insisted that to be regarded as ‘art’ a work must be grounded in the truths of christianity.

So he has already limited what might become ‘art’ in his definition, and ruled out as potential producers of art all those who had never heard of one Jesus of Nazareth. And what if a writer puts pen to paper, paint to canvas or quill to score sheet to do something entirely different than ‘communicating to other people a feeling he once experience’? What if she or he simply wants to entertain, to engage? Would that preclude anything she or he produced from ‘being art’?

You might or might not agree with these and the many other demands and claims made of and for ‘art’. My point is that all such demands, definitions and claims are, in one context, quite irrelevant. ‘Art’ is essentially nothing special at all. Individual ‘works of art’ might be thought of as special — the obvious examples would be that fourth movement I keep mentioning, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Miles Davis’s album Kind Of Blue and many other works you reading this can think of. But that is because of the qualities some find in them as individual pieces, not because they are works of ‘art’.

Some ‘art’ interests or engages or entertains us more than other ‘art’. Some art does have a moral dimension — Dickens’s novels are said to have tried to highlight the awful working conditions many children were forced to endure in his time. Some art might have a ‘political’ dimension — Goya’s Black Paintings and Picasso’s Guernica could be cited as examples. But, I suggest, these dimensions are particular to each work, not general attributes of ‘works of art’.

. . .

Another, as far as I am concerned glaring, anomaly in all our talk of ‘art’ and ‘works of art’, ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ is the very inconvenient distinction we are obliged to make — if we are honest — between an ‘objective judgment’ and a ‘subjective judgment’. Crucially, the one can never be the other, and no number of subjective judgments reaching the same conclusion can transmute majority judgment into one‘objective judgment’.

Equally crucially, many works are regarded as ‘masterpieces’ simply because it is now accepted that is what they are, that is the general consensus and because ‘the critics’ say so. But it is hard to deny, because it is impossible to deny, that each and every critic’s judgment is, at the end of the day, ‘subjective’. In An Essay On Criticism which was her review of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf has some very trenchant things to say about ‘critics’ and the power they seem to wield. Thus strictly speaking they cannot say ‘Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’, but ‘I think that Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’.

At this point some might point out that the judgments of ‘the critics’ is worth far more than my (or your) judgment. And to my subsequent question ‘why’, they might respond that ‘the critics have far more experience and that their judgment thus carries far more weight’. Perhaps.

Granted they have read, seen and heard more than I have (and thus their views might demand more attention than mine do), their judgment is still a ‘subjective judgment’, just one of many. And what are we to make of the fact that all too often the judgments of critics contradict each other: this is ‘a masterpiece’ one will say, to which another will respond ‘rubbish!’ In those cases, to whose wagon do we hitch our horse so that we — or those for whom these matters are important — hold ‘the right opinion’?

That last point highlights another difficulty with ‘art’: the part snobbery, money and the venal interests of the various ‘arts’ industries play in deciding what is art and what isn’t. If I have persuaded you and you have now adopted my position on ‘art’ – that ‘art’ is commonplace and than some ‘works of art’ are valued more than others not because of some intrinsic essence, but because of the work itself — that won’t trouble you at all.

But there are many folk who are desperate to be seen to have the ‘right’ opinion among their peers, who have enough money to buy ‘art’ and are desperate to buy the ‘right’ works and who rely on the folk who decide that ‘this is art’ and ‘this is not art’ to ensure they buy the right shite.

Then there are others who buy art as an investment, the essential point being that they expect what they have bought to command a price higher than what they paid if and when it comes to be sold. If they bought a piece because as ‘art’ it commanded a high price, but if it were from one week to the next to be deemed not to be ‘art’ its price would fall substantially, they are very keen to ensure ‘it is still art’ — or, at least, it is still seen as ‘art’.

Thus the arbiters of what is and what is not ‘art’ become important people who would be decidedly put out if, as I suggest, ‘art’ is commonplace and has no intrinsic value at all. Certainly, a picture by Picasso might still command a high price at auction, but now its snob value would be more important, not its status as ‘art’.

Actually, that was always the case, but remained unspoken. You do not tell a wealthy man or woman about to buy a picture (whose sale will earn you a nifty commission) that they are not women or men of taste at all but simply out-and-out snobs with more money than sense.

Auction houses, publishers, concert halls and promoters, galleries and museums also like to get in on the act: it is quite obvious why an auction house is keen that there should be something ‘special’ about this work: the price is will fetch and the 10% commission they charge (or however much they charge) will be accordingly higher. The same is true of art galleries. Museums, many of which are funded by public money, must be careful that what they purchase with that public money passes muster, and having a group of ‘art experts’ declare the unmade bed they have just purchased is ‘art’ goes a considerable way of getting them off the hook. In fact one unmade bed, Tracey’s Emin’s by now famous My Bed was sold in 2014 for just over £2.5 million. If a gallery shelled out £2.5 million on my unmade bed and, crucially, no one had yet declared it to be ‘art’, there would be hell to pay.

Incidentally, one surefire way of assuring a ‘work of art’ acquires credibility is to wash it in pseudo-intellectual verbiage: on the website artnet Emin’s My Bed was described as an ‘iconic installation’ that ‘offers an uncompromising glimpse into the life of the then 35-year-old after a traumatic relationship breakdown’ — note

the strategic use of the buzzwords ‘iconic’ and ‘uncompromising’. I doubt whether anything produced by, say, unemployed 35-year-old mother-of-five Sharon O’Connor of the Wordsworth Estate, in Ebbw Vale, to provide an ‘uncompromising’ glimpse into the traumatic breakdown of her latest relationship — the bucket of vomit she produced after guzzling too much vodka and lime to soothe her heart — would garner quite as much attention. Perhaps I’m being too cynical.

. . .

Other ‘essays’ I shall have to write for this Hemingway project include just how ‘modernist’ was Hemingway and, as I allude to above, the spurious role the subjective judgment of some plays in the advancement of many a career.

I also want to look into the role the growth and evolution of advertising and marketing played in establishing Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’, and how our need for celebrities — by no means a new craving as the Lord Byron might have testified — also helped push ‘Papa’ Hemingway ‘to the top’.

By the way, Hemingway himself invented the nickname ‘Papa’ and insisted everyone should use it. As Michael Reynolds astutely points out in the third volume of his biography of the writer, commenting on Archibald MacLeish calling him ‘Pappy’:

Archie thought it referred to Ernest’s fatherhood, but he could not have been more wrong. To be ‘Papa’ was to have authority over whatever the game happened to be.

Meet me, the ‘hate criminal’ and ‘transphobic’ to boot. That I am not, never have and never shall be and loathe bigots is neither here nor there.

As is the odd way of these things, I have — more or less — been accused of a ‘hate crime’. The situation is similar to when I posted a comment to a Guardian story last summer and for a month my comments were ‘pre-moderated’.

My comment then was on a story by one of its football writers who began life as Paolo Bandini, but had transitioned and is now Nicky Bandini, a trans-woman. And let me say upfront to ensure there is no misunderstanding (as, almost invariably, there can be): I have no problem, objection, dislike or anything of that kind with trans folk. None whatsoever, and I never have.

Furthermore, I believe, and would advocate, that everyone and anyone who is afflicted by ‘gender dysphoria’ — which put simply (and, to tread carefully, I should add in my understanding) is when a man or a woman, registered as male or female at birth, feels and is convinced they are, in fact, a member of the opposite gender — should get all the assistance, understanding and compassion possible, because they do not seem happy in the sex assigned them at birth.

This has nothing to do with hermaphroditism or those rare occasions when a newborn child does not present with two X chromosomes (which genetically marks them as female) or an X and a Y chromosome, but presents some variation thereof. It is also not related to sexuality as such, although it might come to have a bearing on sexuality.

Gender dysphoria (and I shall shall stress again as far as I know) occurs in folk who at birth had conclusively presented with two XX chromosomes and were registered, brought up and regarded as ‘female’; or who presented with an X and a Y chromosome and were registered male etc. The problem for them is that they become convinced they are simply not either female or male and identify with the opposite gender. And I get that too, and I repeat I accept that wholly and without reservation.

I came unstuck in my Guardian comment and, more recently, in a comment I posted on a Digital Spy forum, when I said that with the best will in the world I found it difficult to accept that a trans-woman is a woman as much as my mother and sister are women. As far as I can see the issue rests on the distinction — a crucial distinction, I suggest — between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’.

My point is that as far as ‘gender’ is concerned, folk can be any gender they choose to be and, I am obliged to concede, a trans-woman is a woman as much as a woman born a woman is a women as far as ‘gender’ is concerned. My problem comes when I am obliged — as I think I am — to accept that a trans-woman is equally as much a woman as far as her sex is concerned (i.e. not her ‘gender’) as much as are my mother and my sister.

Given that, as far as sex is defined, it requires two X chromosome to be a woman, how can, on that definition, a trans-woman who still presents with an X and a Y chromosome ‘be’ a woman as much as the woman with two XX

chromosomes (and, of course, that applies to trans-men who still present with two X chromosomes).

NB I have avoided using the term (which might seem useful here, but on reflection would not be) ‘sexual identity’, as it is more often used in a different context and if used here might muddy the water.

To repeat: distinguishing between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ is crucial.

I can see where the objection comes from when I proclaim (as I did in my Guardian comment and again more recently on the Digital Spy forum) that I find it impossible to understand how in terms of their ‘sex’ — as opposed to their ‘gender’ — a man can become a woman. Does she menstruate? Does she have a womb and and can she conceive a child?

Yet, already, simply by asking those questions I am, in the eyes of some, guilty of transphobia and, by implication, a hate crime. My one hope is that others might understand what I am trying to say — because they agree that the distinction we must make between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ and will not find me guilty of transphobia or anywhere close.

. . .

The particular thread to which I added my comment was concerned with a tweet the Harry Potter author J K Rowling had made. I haven’t seen her original tweet, but after the row blew up, she posted a response on her blog which you can read here.

This is what I said on the Digital Spy forum which made Digital Spy email to say

‘This post has been removed for defending transphobia and making comments that are considered transphobic rhetoric. This isn't productive to discussion. Due to this and our zero tolerance policy on comments of this nature your account has been terminated.’

Here is my post in full (which was contained in the email DS sent me). It does to some extent duplicate what I have written above. I have not changed it or corrected my literals, but I have added paragraphs to make it easier to read. And because I simply copied and pasted it from the email I have retained the odd typographical features:

The whole ‘transphobia’ issue is a minefield and one in which I have already been injured. What I find unacceptable is the insistence by some that if you don't subscribe to the idea that someone who ‘identifies’ as a man having been born a woman, or who identifies as a woman having been born a man, you are ‘phobic’.
But finding yourself, as I do, unable to accept that a human with two X chromosomes is ‘a man’ simply because she/he identifies as ‘a man’ and has perhaps had surgery and hormone treatment (and an XY chromosomes but now identifies as ‘a woman’ cast as someone who ‘hates’ trans people is beyond bizarre.
I’m well aware of the philosophical debates about ‘what is gender’ etc but I cannot get past simple facts: irrespective of how someone ‘identifies', they will have (the small number of exceptions we know off such as having three chromosomes) either XX or XY. How does ‘my identification’ change that?
Yes, if someone is born and raised in one sex/as one gender (it is still to vague which term to use as both are used to mean both the same and different things) but all their life feels they are they other, something is certainly going on. And they and they concerns should be taken seriously and their concerns should be respected.
But from there to move swiftly to decrying those of use who cannot equate a ‘trans woman’ as ‘a woman (and vice versa) as ‘phobic’ and ‘guilty of a hate crime’ really is very, very dangerous. It's the kind of behaviour exhibited by both Stalinists and Nazis, but in some circles it is becoming the norm. Rowling has my sympathy for the firestorm she finds herself in.
BTW A year ago I said much the same thing in a Guardian comment and immediately my comment was deleted and for several weeks all comments I made were ‘pre-moderated'. What made it all the more farcical is that officially the Guardian does not believe ‘in censorship’. It’s the kind of double-think Orwell satirised in Animal Farm when some animals were ‘more equal than others’.We must be very careful were we are allowing ourselves to be led.

. . .

When I first got the email from DS informing me they were terminating my account, I was just astonished. I could not believe it. By the following day I had become quite angry: I wasn’t and am not transphobic; I loathe those (usually on the far-right) who are (and who tend to be racist and homophobic, too) and do not want to be lumped into the same group as them; and the implication is that I am guilty of a ‘hate crime’, although that phrase has not been used.

Last week, I wrote to the legal department of Hearst Magazines (which owns Digital Spy) telling them just that. I added that they must — and I used the phrase — put up or shut up, that if Digital Spy (and thus Hearst’s lawyers) did and do think I am transphobic and thus guilty of a ‘hate crime’ they must report me to the police.

If, on the other hand and on reflection (and I did spell this out as I suspect this is the crux of the matter) they feel that an overzealous moderator (and possibly her/his supervisor if it was referred up) was responsible for judging me transphobic, they must rescind the judgment and re-instate my account.

For good measure I sent a copy of my letter and a printout of the comments to the chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police (who I imagine would be responsible for charging me with the ‘hate crime’ if it came to that as I live in Cornwall), Liz Truss, the government minister responsible for (among other things) Women and Equalities, and, for good measure, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, who takes an interest in these matters.

NB Although I don’t share most of his political views which are to the right of mine on a good day, I was acquainted him and often chatted to him when I was working on the Daily Mail and I can tell those who might think so that he is certainly not the right-wing ogre of popular repute (which usually gets these kind of things wrong).

I have so far only heard from the chief constable who wrote to tell me he had passed on my letter to the most senior officer in Cornwall. I haven’t heard from the Hearst lawyers and, I don’t expect to: they will simply decide to allow the whole issue to dissipate: do they care whether or not I am transphobic? Er, probably not. I suspect they would also be reluctant to reinstate my account because it would be a tacit admission that ‘they were wrong’ and big organisations are, for many reasons, invariably reluctant to admit they were wrong unless the can somehow spin it to their advantage (‘Look, how openhearted and honest we are; we made a mistake and are only too pleased to admit it’ — except, of course, when they don’t which is usually). Best and certainly easiest to allow the matter to die a death.

I, however, will not let it dwindle away. I really, really, really don’t want to be lumped in with those right-wing thugs that do, metaphorically speaking, go around beating up gays and trans people. In practice, of course, there’s really not a lot more I can do apart from write again demanding a response. And my second letter can, and probably still will be, as ignored as the first was.

Wish me luck.

‘Teflon Don will go on and on: How could Trump survive November’s election when he’s engulfed in riots, Covid meltdown and high unemployment?’ Well, here’s what one man thinks, and it’s worrying

While in the US all the peaceful protest and demonstrations of the murder of George Floyd, the riots and looting by some, heavy-handed containment by some law forces have carried Trump has made repeated outrageous comments. His crass announcement, in view of a rise in the number of employed — note though, this is among white people: black and minority unemployment has risen — that ‘Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that's happening for our country’ makes your jaw drop: did he really say that? Well, yes did.

You might be prepared — at a pinch — to give him the benefit of doubt that he didn’t, as he claimed, know the provenance of the phrase by a Miami, Florida, police chief that ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’. Even so given the circumstances that statement in itself is pretty provocative. But his posing for a photo opportunity with a bible outside St John’s Church, near the White House is an indication of the cynicism of the man.

You might again be prepared to give him the benefit of doubt that he had no idea police would use tear gas to disperse a peaceful demonstration in Lafayette Park to clear the way for him to get to the church and did not sanction it. Perhaps or perhaps not. His statements, his attitude and his encouragement of civil disobedience against state governors will certainly have persuaded whoever did instigate that police action that they would have the president’s full backing and approval.

All this comes on the back of the Trump administration’s terrible handling of the coronavirus crisis in the US and Trump’s various comments from the outset would be worth a laugh if it weren’t all so serious. The upshot is that Trump’s poll ratings have fallen, but just slightly. Perhaps, as I once thought, you believe that Donald Trump will certainly not be re-elected for a second term as US president. Well if that is the case, read the following. It is by David Cay Johnston, editor-in-chief of DCReport.org. I thought it better to allow you to read it in full rather than try to summarise it. It makes for very worrying reading:

Teflon Don will go on and on: How could Trump survive November’s election when he’s engulfed in riots, Covid meltdown and high unemployment? One Pulitzer-winning reporter says he’s set to win

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, editor-in-chief of DCReport.org

After the anarchic and deeply troubling scenes of recent days, many will surely conclude that, in overwhelming numbers, the American people will kick Donald Trump out of the White House in November’s election. What else could we do? Our country is in flames, with peaceful protesters being tear-gassed and struck with police batons amid looting and lawlessness.

Twelve major cities have declared curfews, 17,000 troops have been activated, governors in at least 24 states called in the National Guard and more than 11,000 people have been arrested since the sickening footage first emerged of a white police officer pinning an unarmed black man, George Floyd, to the ground by kneeling on his neck, resulting in his death.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, we have the world’s worst tally of coronavirus deaths, at well over 100,000 — approaching double the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

Millions of people have lost their jobs already, and millions more are expected to join them in a recession — even a depression — following the pandemic. Little wonder that many of Trump’s most ardent supporters are subdued on the subject of ‘four more years’. But I have studied Trump for 32 years, having first met him in 1988 when I investigated his casino operations in Atlantic City and uncovered his friendships with the Mafia.

I know the man, his motivations and his modus operandi well. Let me tell you that it would be a huge mistake to assume he has lost the 2020 election. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that what is happening now will deliver him that second term.

Critical as I have long been of him, I’ve always admired his ability to convince millions of people that he is a modern Midas, a ‘very stable genius’, to use his own phrase — and the only person who can save America. That these claims are nonsense doesn’t matter as long as enough people believe them. Despite his many flaws, Trump is remarkably resilient.

Trump will claim his tough law-and-order
policies crushed the violence

To retain the White House, he faces three challenges. First, he must persuade Americans that China is responsible for the coronavirus deaths, and feckless state governors and local mayors — rather than his own chaotic administration — mishandled the pandemic. If fatalities, as expected, are falling after the summer, he will benefit. Should a reliable treatment have emerged by then, this will help further.

Second, the social unrest needs to recede — as it will in the weeks to come. Trump will claim it was his tough law-and-order policies that crushed the violence that erupted after Mr Floyd’s death and simultaneously reassure voters he is concerned about abusive policing.

His third challenge is the economy. This is the easiest one for him. Even with more than a quarter of American workers on jobless benefits — and after a slightly uptick in employment numbers yesterday — Trump can argue the fastest way to revive the economy is to cut taxes further and jettison yet more business regulations. Most of the big

corporations don’t want the Democrats back in power, with the prospect of higher taxes and more red tape. They can help him now by announcing expansion plans and job-hire schemes, promising even more if he wins in November.

Meeting these challenges is achievable. And it is of a pattern with a man whose life has been characterised by turning setbacks that would destroy the careers and reputations of anyone else into triumphs.

Trump never admits error. His late mentor, the notorious political fixer and mafia consigliere Roy Cohn (who was disbarred as a lawyer for trying to defraud his own client), taught him to attack law enforcement and make them the bad guys. Whenever a judge rules against him, Trump calls the jurist a bigot, an idiot, corrupt or a ‘hater’.

The President understands that millions of white Americans never embraced the civil rights movement. Sadly, too many still wish they could put minorities ‘back in their place’. They don’t want to sit next to an Asian on a plane, work alongside a Latino, and God forbid having to report to a black female boss!

Trump delights these fans by denouncing ‘political correctness’. He’s particularly brilliant in attacking this taboo, building support among those who demand the freedom to use racial, religious and gender slurs. He also champions the peculiar American right that prevails in some states to walk around with military assault rifles slung over a shoulder and handguns holstered on the hip: a right that has been extensively displayed during recent protests against lockdowns and social distancing.

In this year’s election, Democrats expect heavily armed Trump supporters to mass near polling places where those who oppose the President will vote. Their message will be clear — and some voters will be too intimidated to cast ballots.

Rejecting Washington bureaucratese
he endlessly repeats crude slogans

Trump is also pushing hard to block postal voting in certain states, a process he uses personally but insists is rife with fraud. His campaign is currently lobbying for postal voting in states where the process might benefit him, but against it in states he risks losing. All this makes him a formidable candidate in 2020.

Then there is his core appeal.

His feral nature — his speech and bearing a world away from most politicians and statesmen — chimes with people who’d never dream of reading manifestos or the detailed plans of presidential candidates. Rejecting the bureaucratese of Washington DC’s politicos, he endlessly repeats crude slogans. Where his 2016 opponent Hillary

Clinton — and his predecessor as President, Barack Obama — used sophisticated language, Trump gives his supporters chants: ‘Lock Her Up!’ ‘Build the Wall!’ and, of course: ‘Make America Great Again.’

When he cries, ‘I love the poorly educated,’ the same people applaud him, despite the slur.

He has long positioned himself as the champion of the Forgotten Man and that will not change in November. Denied his beloved rallies in sports stadiums because of coronavirus, he is now using Twitter and his combative press conferences to keep feeding lines to his ‘base’.

His appalling brilliance lies in the fact that no other candidate has so tapped into the disappointment, heartbreak and fury many poorer Americans feel from being endlessly squeezed, having watched their manufacturing jobs go to China and their pay-packets shrink as the billionaire class — of which he noisily claims to be a member — has only grown richer.

The ordinary voters do not scrutinise economic data. Yet they hear Trump brag incessantly that he has built the world’s greatest economy. Jobs, he insists, were becoming more plentiful on his watch until the virus struck, and wages had started rising in real terms.

He even made the preposterous and unsubstantiated claim that his over-promoted daughter Ivanka had created ‘14 million jobs — and going up’. That would be nearly a tenth of all jobs in America.

So even though many of his supporters might admit that, perhaps, they are no better off than they were four years ago, they can nonetheless believe that having a Democrat in the White House would be worse.

Demographics also favour him: at the last election, Hillary Clinton won among voters aged between 18 and 39, and Trump won among those over 40. Those older Americans account for more than 70 per cent of the voting-age population and are more likely to cast ballots than younger people.

Thanks in large part to Trump, America is now more polarised, especially by generation, than at any time its recent history. On social media here, many complain that family gatherings have become impossible because of irreconcilable differences of opinion about the President.

Once Trump wins a voter, he seems to
have an unbreakable hold on them

Trump also benefits from a psychological phenomenon that has received scientific scrutiny in recent years. People are stubborn in their beliefs. Studies show most of us double down on them, even after being shown clear evidence that the facts do not support our convictions. Once Trump wins a voter, he seems to have an unbreakable hold on them: why else would his approval ratings have barely budged throughout his term?

All his life, Trump has always enjoyed stunning success in damage avoidance, and not only when he cheats on his wives. He dodged any fallout in the 1980s when both his personal helicopter pilot and the provider of his fleet of casino aircraft, were caught running an international drug-trafficking ring. Trump continued to employ the pilot after he had been indicted, later urging the judge to impose a lenient sentence.

Three decades ago, his lawyers negotiated an extraordinary private settlement in which his empire shed a total $3 billion debt — over $800 million of which he had personally guaranteed — without being forced, as he would

normally be expected to, to declare personal bankruptcy. That was followed by four corporate bankruptcies when he was CEO of a casino company — even as it paid him at least $83 million.

In 2005, I received by post the only Trump federal tax return the public has ever seen. I believe he sent it to me — an investigative journalist specialising in economics and tax issues — only because it showed a huge income for that year of $153 million.

Following my reports on the subject, the New York Times launched its own investigation into Trump’s financial affairs, uncovering mountains of business records and finding, among other things, that ‘President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes in the 1990s’. For the rest of us, any one of these lemons would have barred a future political career. Sitting today in the Oval Office, it’s clear Trump concocted the ultimate lemonade.

He also benefits from deep fractures in the Democratic Party, which is torn between progressives who want European-style benefits such as universal health care, and corporate-friendly Democrats such as Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee, who is tarnished with sleaze allegations. Trump is the fourth president out of 45 who lost the popular vote but won the White House. Presidents are voted in not by the citizens, but by ‘electors’ in each state, in a process called the Electoral College

Finally, in Trump’s favour, there is the peculiar way American presidents are elected. Trump is the fourth president out of 45 who lost the popular vote — the total number of votes cast nationally — but won the White House anyway. Presidents are voted in not by the citizens of the country as a whole, but by ‘electors’ in each state, through a process called the Electoral College. America’s ‘founding fathers’ designed the system in this way because they feared that the rabble might one day choose a madman or a zealot: it was a backstop against mob rule.

Trump can win office even when most
Americans do not want him there

The Electoral College favours under-populated rural states — which tend to vote Republican — against more populous urban ones, whose allegiances are more likely Democrat. Put simply, your vote goes further in Wyoming (population 572,000) than in California (40 million). Unfortunately, the arrangement does not work perfectly, which is why a man like Trump, who has no respect for our Constitution or for democracy, can win office even when most Americans do not want him there.

Come November, I expect Trump to lose the popular vote by up to 16 million ballots. Despite this, he will secure a second term if he wins just 270 of the 538 Electoral College votes. (In 2016, he won 304.) Suddenly, his approval rating of 43 per cent doesn’t seem quite so fatal.

The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’. Trump’s biography gives the lie to that. That he succeeds when he should fail is testament to his extraordinary skills as a con artist, easily the most successful the world has ever known.

New York gangster John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family with whom Trump’s father did business, became known as ‘the Teflon Don’ because nothing would stick to him: he was acquitted at three major criminal trials having participated, it later emerged, in witness intimidation and jury tampering.

Though he is not a criminal like Gotti, Donald Trump’s unsinkable reputation shows he is a Teflon Don for our own era. Deceptions, lies and near-treasonous acts of disloyalty such as saying he trusts Vladimir Putin over American intelligence agencies merely slide off him.

The lesson for November’s election is clear. Don’t — for a single moment — write him off.

Woe is us, woe, woe (and for once I’m a little more serious)

I’m not a born cassandra and tend to look on the bright side of things. I’m a ‘the glass is half-full’ guy. But for some years past, and again quite keenly a few months ago, I’ve felt that the good times were drawing to a close in a far more long-term way, that the ‘good life’ many — though certainly not most —have been living could not go on for ever.

Be honest: we might all have our petty troubles, our health concerns, trouble with children, but for many of us our lives and existences are demonstrably more comfortable than they were for our parents, our grandparents and their parents. But I feel and suspect that circumstances are slowly to change and we will have little control over it.

To be fair to myself, this was not and is not some ageing gent’s pessimism, the unobtrusive side-effects of still tiny but growing cataracts, dulling the colours of the world and making it look drabber and greyer; or the product of the mind and spirit of a body subjected to growing hypertension after a lifetime of smoking and boozing, feeling ever-so-slightly off-colour all the time with the impact that has on feelings and outlook. It is just what I believe history tells us.

In 2020, the vast majority of the nine billion-odd who live on Earth do not have to fear a early death or that half of our offspring will not survive until adulthood. In the Middle Ages the average life span was an astonishingly low 32 years (a figure which takes into account, of course, the huge infant mortality — it doesn’t mean that most people were dead by 32, though they were tens and hundreds of millennia ago). In 2020 it is over double that, at 73 years (again taking into account that the vast majority of our children reach adulthood).

In many parts of the world justice is no longer arbitrary and does not depend on the whims and moods of a ruler’s place men (though I’m sure everyone reading this will be able to cite exceptions). Broadly — and there are certainly exceptions to this — the rule of law does not favour ‘the authorities’ and ‘the rulers’, and justice of some kind can be achieved.

I am most certainly generalising: notions of ‘justice’ vary widely throughout the world, and arbitrary, sudden violence is still all to common. So, yes I am certainly writing from the vantage point of a white, now retired, man who exists on a smallish, but steady state income, but who also has savings to be used if times get hard. I don’t live in a Brazilian favela, or cheek by jowl with others in a refugee camp, I am not a woman living in the far north of Pakistan, I don’t live in rural China subject to the whims of the local party boss. You get the picture.

Those are the varying details of individual lives: my point is that history is amoral, it just doesn’t care: history takes no account of race, religion, age, health, lineage or any circumstance at all. Granted that in the present coronavirus crisis here in Britain statistics show that bame (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) Brits are more likely to die from covid-19 infection (and we don’t yet know why) and males are more likely to die than females (and we don’t know why), but my general point holds, I think.

All bame Brits and all men face the same danger. The virus doesn’t decide ‘well, this chappie went to a good school and is of standing in the community whereas this one is a jobless layabout, so I’ll kill him’. All are at risk from the virus, and all are equally subject to the whim of history (or to put it a little more sensibly, the whim of events).

. . .

I suppose any age taking a look around and trying to identify contemporary evils will have an easy time of it. But ‘history’ does seem to come in ‘waves’ (if that makes sense). As always context is important. So for us folk in Western Europe the past 75 years have broadly been peaceful. Folk in the Congo, China and parts of South America would not say the same.

Yet all of us, because of the impact of government lockdown measures in response to the virus pandemic which will have severely damaged nation’s economies, pretty much every corner of the world is said to be likely to suffer from a global recession that is forecast to be not just as bad as the Great Depression in the 1930s, but ‘the worst for 300 years’.

And even if for some reason one nation’s economy is in better shape than that of others, if that nation relies on global trade, it will be equally badly hit. You might have been lucky enough to be in a position to carry on and manufacture goods and services, but if you traditional clients are screwed and unable to buy those goods and services from you, it’s all a little pointless.

. . .

Also on the horizon is the uncertainty of what China is up to. It has long been irked by the freedoms the former British colony Hong Kong was granted when it reverted to Chinese control and it has been especially irked by the resistance to its rule in Hong Kong and has taken the time while the world’s focus was elsewhere because of the virus crisis to impost new laws bringing the former British colony much closer under its control. These are being resisted.

The question is if the situation in Hong Kong did get a lot worse, if something akin to a ‘civil war’ did break out, how would the world react? And if that reaction was only half-hearted, with a series of those ineffectual ‘strong warnings’ which mean even less than the paper they are written on and ‘red lines’ which are subsequently

forgotten about (©Barack Obama viz Syria), China might then finally cross a rubicon and try to take control of Taiwan (it claims Taiwan is part of China, Taiwan disagrees).

This prospect is all the more real in that whereas previously China has insisted one of its aims is ‘peaceful reunification’ with the island, in the past months it has dropped the word ‘peaceful’ whenever that aim is repeated. That is significant.

Taiwan would most certainly put up a far bigger fight than Hong Kong if it were invaded, and has the artillery to do so, but would the West come to its defence as it has long promised? Discuss.

. . .

That last question is all the more pertinent in that for the US the ‘Trump question’ is reaching crisis point. I shan’t here repeat the recital of the man’s almost incomprehensible stupidity which you either know about or have been asleep for the past four years, but ‘the US president’ is, like it or not, pivotal to the outcome of world events of magnitude, and a the moment (hopefully only for another eight months) Trump is that president. How he would react to Chinese military action to take control of China is anyone’s guess. On paper the US has promised to defend Taiwan. Would Trump?

Trump has vacillated on so many issues that it is impossible to predict what he might do. He was friends with North Korea’s Kim Jung-un as part of some cockeyed, ill-thought out plan to get Kim to get rid of his nuclear arsenal. Then he wasn’t. In 2015 China’s Xi Jinping visited the US (still under President Barack Obama), but when Trump took office relations between the US and China, not very good even then, worsened considerably.

Trump imposed trade restrictions and tariffs but his actions were not underpinned by any discernible strategy. Trump seems to rely on his bowel movements for inspiration and strategy on what to do next rather than rational thought. So how would he react if China did move on Hong Kong or Taiwain? Who knows.

One line of reasoning is that China is too concerned with keeping up trade with the rest of the world to risk damaging its trading relations. After the coronavirus outbreak in China, the ruling Communist Party became a little more unpopular with ‘the people’, and it knows that it must keep up living standards for the vast majority for its own sake.

A slump in trade and sales of its goods to the rest of the world could see a recession in China and a decline in those living standards, and even more unhappy people. As a rule, folk aren’t a much concerned with airy-fairy notions such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom of speech’ as with how full their stomach is. The emptier the stomach, the more concerned they become with airy-fairy notions.

On the other hand if, as we are told we are all in for the mother of all recessions, that, too, will hit China badly and Xi Jinping might reason that as times are bad, now might be a good time to invade Taiwan. That would, at least, work according to the principle that if a ruler has internal trouble, creating external trouble for his nation abroad is a good way uniting the nation and deflecting attention from domestic problems

Another line of reasoning is that while the ‘free world’ is concerned with the virus crisis and while the US gets ever more divided by the antics — there can be no other word — of an unstable president, now might be the best time to do the unthinkable: attempt to take over Hong Kong or, more to the point, Taiwan. This would not be, or even mainly be, to get control of those two islands, it would to underline so that there is no doubt on the matter that China is now the dominated world superpower. And that, Xi Jinping might believe, is worth the risk.

He, though, has problems of his own. We can’t know too much of what is going on in China but he does seem to have a great deal of internal Communist Party opposition. A few years ago he finagled himself into becoming more or less president for life. That has not gone down with many in his party (especially, I should think, those few slightly younger ones who would have been in a position to take over as party chairman when he retired. Well, dear hearts, choke on it: now he ain’t).

. . .

In the US things seem to be going from bad to worse for ‘The Donald’: after being caught out time and again spouting complete nonsense about how to tackle the coronavirus and insisting things were getting better when it was obvious to the rest of the US that they simply were not, he now has rioting and looting in more than 40 cities to deal with. And is dealing with it unbelievably badly. I mean if one were to sit down and work out how not to handle the situation, you couldn’t come out with a worse way than Trump’s.

The situation is complex. Many of the demonstrators are peaceful, protesting over what seems likely to have been, at best, the wilful homicide of a black man called George Floyd. Many demonstrators are not peaceful because they are so angry and so frustrated at how they and their fellow black Americans are treated day in, day out. It is also likely that there are several agitators in play, acting for their own particular reasons. And, bizarrely, it is even

possible that some of those agitators are undercover white supremacists who have long wanted a ‘race war’ in the US to get rid of all black and who feel now is the time to exacerbate the situation and start one. This morning’s papers carry a report that Twitter has closed down an allegedly ANTIFA account calling for violence when it discovered it was a fake account set up by a white supremacist group.

At the time of writing, just after 10.10 GMT + 1 on Tuesday, June 3, 2020, what will happen is all up in the air. Most likely the situation will peter out as have previous such violent protests over the murder of black folk by police (for the record Arthur McDuffie in 1979, Rodney King - 1992, Timothy Thomas - 2001, Michael Brown - 2014, Eric Garner - 2014, Freddie Gray - 2015, Keith Scott - 2016). But the anger and frustration will remain. And so, it would seem, will such police action. I must be fair: there will be any number of white US police officers are who good, honest men and women who would not discriminate against blacks. But we all know just a minority can do real harm and real harm is what it seems a minority in the US want.

Trump is worse than useless in handling the situation, just as he is worse than useless at handling the covid-19 crisis.

. . .

As for ‘the future’ it is always impossible to tell what ‘history’ has in store for us. But it is not looking good, for very tangible reasons. Once the virus pandemic has died down and if there is a second wave, once that, too, has died down, there is the economic fallout to deal with. And that will certainly involved unemployment on a scale unknown for decades and all that entails.

Happy Easter!