To publish posthumously and squeeze a bit more money for the estate of the writer and his publisher (even though the work might be crap) or not? Decisions, decisions, though as it turned out not a difficult one for Charles Scribner’s Sons, of New York, publishers to the gentry

Below are around 400 words from Joan Didion’s piece — the opening — on the practice of publishing Hemingway’s work posthumously. It appeared in the November 9, 1998, issue of the New Yorker. NB I had never heard of Joan Didion, either, but I gather she is — she is now 85 — a journalist, essayist and writer who is well-known in the United States.

I should preface this by saying — and this is relevant — that literary criticism is and cannot be a science. In fact, that is true of all art criticism. Well, that’s obvious, you might counter, of course it isn’t, how can it be? But hang on: even those who agree with me often inadvertently behave as if it were a science; or if not exactly ‘a science’, a discipline akin to a science which commands — rightly, many would insist — the respect we pay to science; and that just as the various sciences have their acknowledged experts who know more than you and I about their field, so criticism has folk akin to such experts who know more about their field than ordinary joes like you and I.

Well, if that is your view, there is your first piece of nonsense. And when I seem to diss literary and art criticism and pooh-pooh the expertise of critics, I am, at least, in good company: Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by the airs and graces acquired by such criticism.

If we acknowledge the fundamental dichotomy between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ and accept — not that you can do otherwise — that they are mutually exclusive, literary (and art) criticism falls squarely in the ‘subjectivity’ camp — there can be no ‘objective’ literary or artistic judgment.

Yet, as Woolf points out when writing about literary critics in her review (New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927) of Hemingway’s volume of short stories, Men Without Women (first published in 1927) something odd happens when the ‘ordinary’ reading public is confronted with the views of a literary critic. It is worth reading her full essay (which you can find here), but one pertinent bit is this, another opening paragraph:

‘There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs.
No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.’

Let me extrapolate from what Woolf writes: because at first the ordinary reader ‘begins to think that critics . . . must be right. . . He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees’, hey presto, by some obscure alchemy the critic’s subjective opinion — that this writer is ‘good’ but this writer isn’t (or in the world of art criticism, that this picture ‘is art’ but that picture isn’t) — mysteriously and almost unobtrusively crosses the divide between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’.

Very soon those judgments are ‘facts’: in many people’s minds it becomes a ‘fact’ that Picasso, Klee, Stravinsky, Epstein, Joyce, Beckett are geniuses. Teenage students are taught as much and so the ‘fact’ is passed from generation to generation. A corollary is — the first of many circular arguments which bedevil much talk about ‘art’ — that the work they produced (and are producing if they are still alive) are ‘masterpieces’. And why is it a ‘masterpiece’? Why, because so-and-so who write/painted/composed it is really great! And why is he really great? Well, just look at this, the novel/painting/piece of music he/she has produced (though, as is the way of the world, it is usually a ‘he’)! Etc.

By now there is also a tacit implication: if you disagree with these judgments by men and women — though, as is the way of the world, mainly men — you don’t know what you are talking about and you are a fool. And because few of us care to look foolish in the eyes of our peers, we find ourselves beaten into acquiescent silence, take care to watch our p’s and q’s and might even be cowed enough by the mighty critics into echoing their judgments.

One odd consequence of this canonisation of various composers, painters and writers is that their work, when it goes up for sale, begins to command fabulous prices. At this point I would briefly like to point out, but not spend too much time on doing so, that the ‘value’ of a work of art is essentially what someone who wants to own it is prepared to pay for it. So when you hear that in 1990 at Sotheby’s in London Paul Klee’s Der Künftige (pictured)

sold for $3,717,600 all you know with any certainty is that someone or some institution wanted the pictures enough to cough up $3,717,600. (I must say I do like it and would certainly tolerate it in my living room but that’s because I like it as an image, a picture, not because it is ‘a Paul Klee’ and I rather like the idea of folk thinking I have taste because I own and have on my wall ‘a Paul Klee’.

Casting around the net for an example of ‘value’ in art, I just happened upon that particular painting, and until about eight minutes ago I had no idea it is ‘a perfect example of Paul Klee’s politically engaged art. This painting was a response to the call of totalitarian pseudo-utopian ideologies in the 1930s for the evolution of a New Man. This is addressed of course to the fascist and Nazi dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, as well as to Stalin’. I’ve got to say looking at it, I’d have never guessed that. The things you learn.

Oddly enough — I’ve done a little more casting about on the net and this is somehow relevant to discussing the ‘value’ of a work of art — 20 years on after that sale, whoever bought it at Sothebys in 1990 sold it again at Christie’s in New York and got $387,100 less for it than she/he paid for it. That makes my point rather well: surely the ‘artistic ’ of Klee’s Der Künftige hasn’t declined? Surely if it was a great painting in 1990, it is still a great paining now?

All we can say from the drop in price that for whatever reason — the whim of potential buyers, the global banking crisis (this was in 2010) or just the weather being so bad in New York on Tuesday, May 4 of that year that Christie’s had fewer bods at that particular auction that it did not make the price expected.

So, yet again, that circular argument is very simple. Actually, I can even — I think — legitimately use the word simplistic (one that increasingly of late is used to mean ‘simple’ although both words have distinct meanings). It goes: this novel/poem/painting/piece of music is great/a masterpiece. Why? Because it is by so-and-so, and so-and-so is an artistic genius. Why do you claim he is a genius? Because he [it’s usually a bloody he, I don’t know if you have noticed] produces work like this.

Collapse of stout party.

. . .

I’ve mentioned several times before that I am ‘working’ on a piece about Hemingway and how, in my view, he was certainly far from being the literary genius he is often claimed to be, and how, in my view, his ‘debut’ novel (i.e. it wasn’t he debut novel but is often regarded as such) The Sun Also Rises is far from being the masterpiece it is often claimed to be.

My project is slowly acquiring the characteristic of ‘interminable’, mainly because I keep coming across more books relevant to the subject, which I buy, read and which in some ways obliged me to reshape the piece (as in ‘re-write’) will eventually produce.

As I shall post it here, I don’t want to say too much more, but I strongly suspect something similar to that circular argument took place when Hemingway first ‘burst upon the literary scene’. When his work began to be published, first a collection of short stories (In Our Time in 1925, then The Sun Also Rises in 1926) his work — the then unique style in which is was written, his subject matter and his treatment of it — was so utterly different to what else was on sale that it caused a sensation.

His publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, with both eyes on the bottom line, came up with great marketing and advertising strategy, selling Hemingway as a writer quite unlike his peers, an ‘action man writer’, and the public, as always eager for novelty, took him up with gusto. The myth of Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ took root.

A year later came Men Without Women, his second collection of short stories, but both he and Scribner’s knew he had to produce a follow-up novel to sustain the success, and in 1929 he published A Farewell To Arms. It was in the same style, contained more ‘obscene’ language — horribly lame ‘obscene language’ by contemporary standards, but that isn’t the point — and that reputation was established. Hemingway, the young turk and literature’s latest sensation, had arrived.

It helped that the man himself was a bombastic, duplicitous, attention-seeking self-publicising narcissist who, perversely insisted point-blank that he wasn't interested in celebrity and just wanted to write. That was a ludicrous claim, given that he subscribed to two news cuttings service which kept him informed on the growth of the celebrity he certainly did not want, but more of that when I post my piece (at some point).

In 1932 published Death In The Afternoon (1932), an odd amalgam of a guide to bullfighting and writing which sold badly in Depression-era America (and didn’t much please his publisher who were urging Hemingway to write a third bloody novel). A year later came Winner Take Nothing [sic], his third final collection of original short

stories; and in 1935 came The Green Hills Of Africa, an account of his safari in Africa, which also failed to set Depression-era America alight (many of whose potential readers could not afford to put food on the table let alone gallivant Africa slaughtering wildlife).

Two years later came the novella To Have And Have Not, cobbled together from several short stories, which yet again failed to enthuse the reading public. And if you are thinking ‘but wasn’t that a huge success?’ you will actually be thinking of the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film which had almost nothing in common with Hemingway’s novella, except the name of the main protagonist and the first chapter.

In 1938 came The Fifth Column And The First 49 Stories. The stories were simply those which had appeared in his first two volumes, In Our Time and Men With Women. The Fifth Column was a silly play,  written when Hemingway was holed up (with his third wife-to-be, the blonde journalist Martha Gellhorn) in Madrid’s Hotel Florida under contract to report on the Spanish Civil War about a cynical, hard-drinking journalist who has an affair with a blonde colleague and is working undercover as a spy. It was never staged as Hemingway had written it.

After that came nothing until in 1950 when Hemingway wrote Across The River And Into The Trees, and embarrassing tale of a 50-year-old war hero reminiscing about an affair he had with an 18-year-old Italian teenager. At the time Hemingway, also 50, was infatuated with an 19-year-old Italian teenager. In 1952 came The Old Man And The Sea, another novella which sold brilliantly but which also brought the charge that Hemingway was parodying his own style. And until he died in July 1961, Hemingway published nothing more, though he had been working intermittently on several projects.

In 1970 came Islands In The Stream, edited by someone or other somewhere from reams and reams of prose he had been writing; then, in 1986, Scribner’s published a novel called The Garden Of Eden, an odd sexual fantasy about, ahem, a successful writer and his second wife, he had been working on intermittently for 30 years, which was again boiled down from what he had written. Finally, in 1999, came a book about his second African safari, which appeared as True At First Light, boiled down to a quarter its length from the 250,000 words Hemingway had written.

Despite brave claims by Hemingway champions along the lines that all three books are ‘important additions’ to ‘the Hemingway oeuvre’, all three got bad to lukewarm reviews and sold badly. One biographer, Matthew Brucolli, summed up that oeuvre neatly: ‘. . . Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. . . Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’ That makes my point quite well.

. . .

In what follows Didion provides an analysis of the opening paragraph to A Farewell To Arms which is, to my mind, ludicrous. That the paragraph is somehow ‘brilliant’ is a given as far as Didion is concerned. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that any number of writers, whether they are fictionalists or working hacks (journalists) can and very often do produce prose which is often far better.

This passage is possibly now too well-known, but were I to show it to someone who was unfamiliar with the novel and asked for a judgment, I suggest that judgment would be ’it’s OK, nice enough’ and would then I might be ask ‘where’s it from’. Well, I suggest it could well be from the travel diary of a recent graduate taking a year off before starting her/his career. Bear that in mind when you read what Didion has to say.

That first paragraph of the novel reads:

‘In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.’

Then comes Didion’s take on it [new paragraphs inserted by me to make what she wrote it easier to read]:

‘So goes the famous first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ which I was moved to reread by the recent announcement that what was said to be Hemingway’s last novel would be published posthumously next year. That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself.

Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are ‘the,’ fifteen are ‘and.’ There are are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of ‘the’ and of ‘and,’ creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of ‘the’ before the word ‘leaves’ in the fourth sentence (‘and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling’) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season. 

The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?

I think it is pertinent that Didion first came across the novel and it’s opening paragraph at an impressionable age — she says she was 12 or 13 — and to illuminate why I think it is pertinent, I should like to quote Vladimir Nabokov’s judgment of Hemingway’s work.

In an interview with the ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 published in Playboy, he agreed he had once described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’ and added: ‘In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile . . .’ Sums it all up rather well, although if push came to shove I would defend Conrad’s writing long after I had given up defending anything by Hemingway.

What is ‘mysterious’ and ‘thrilling’ about it? I’m blowed if I know, but then you might counter along the lines that I am quite ’obviously to stupid/biased/contrary to see it’. And there is no response to that.

As for the ‘liturgical cadence’ of the paragraphs with so enthrals Didion (thanks to ‘the placement of commas’) I really do think she should get out a bit more. I have personally come across any number of feature writers in my time in newspaper who could turn out paragraphs like that seven times before tea, but who didn’t and don’t make a song and dance about ‘the writer’ writing ‘truly’.

’The irony — the Hemingway story is full of ironies — is that his style did influence how English literature evolved throughout the 20th century. Many respected writers cite Hemingway and his style as ‘an influence’. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily good. Many jazz guitarists will happily admit that when they were ten and becoming interested in the instrument, they were strongly influenced by the playing Bill Hailey and Buddy Holly or even Old Blighty’s very own Bert Weedon.

I must stop here because I could go on for ages and would simply be repeating what I have so far written elsewhere and what I intend to write. But let me leave you with this: read (or re-read) Hemingway’s story — sorry, his ‘celebrated’ story — The Killers (you can find it here). As far as I am concerned it is a rather poor attempt by Hemingway to emulate the ‘hard-boiled style becoming popular at the time, eventually leading to the work of Dashiell Hammett.

Again if you were unfamiliar with it and didn’t recognise it as Hemingway’s ‘celebrated’ story and I instead told you I had written it, I suspect it would no longer be ‘celebrated’ and you would cast about for a way politely telling me ’nice try but no cigar’. Ah, but as it is by Hemingway . . .

Please, Ms Didion, let’s all try and calm down and stay a little more sober.

In which I admit to slightly odd behaviour (and later in the day put the boot in Honest Ernest yet again)

It really is bloody odd. Every day since I’ve retired I’ve been conscious of ‘using my time’ and not wasting it. The silly thing is, though, that no one, but no one gives a flying fuck whether or not I do ‘use my time’ except me. And the only thing which will satisfy my conscience and allow me to accept honestly that I have ‘used my time today’ is writing something. Usually it is a few hundred words more of this Hemingway bollocks.

Sometimes (I’ve signed up to a website run from South Africa which I’ve found useful: every month it give you a prompt for a short story and a poem and the discipline of getting it done is worthwhile) it might be editing and honing the brief poem or short story I shall be submitting. (You have to write the story to strict length).

I have plenty of other things to be getting on with, and the lessons with Paul in Padstow are now really paying off, so there’s all the practising and laying out all the scales and modes in Indesign as a way of learning them and understanding them.

Tomorrow I’ve got to arrange the Skype chat for Ann in France with Paddy, then it’s drop of the car to get the exhaust fixe. But everything — everything — except writing is just ‘something to do’. It is, at the end of the day of no consequence. And I really don’t know why.

This isn’t something I tell myself, some adolescent pose (I doubt I could be mistaken for a silly adolescent except in some of my behaviour), and I’m not going to get phoney and precious about it and talk in vague terms about ‘inner life’ and all the other claptrap you come across (OK, that is a bit broadbrush, but you know what I mean). Which leads me to another odd thing about: I don’t know nor care why I feel like that. I just do and that’s good enough for me.

Earlier today when I was grumbling that ‘this Hemingway bollocks is taking up too much time’ — I keep coming across more reviews, essays etc which I read and many of which I format into PDFs and post on my website ready to be linked to when I finally post this pied. And each of the essays etc subtly changes the dimensions of it all just a little, but a crucial 'just a little', so I have to slightly rethink things, and know, of course, that tomorrow and the next day and the one after that I shan’t for the life of me remember the ‘new shape’.

And, no, writing notes (which I do on a useful app called Scapple) doesn’t help because once written I never look at the notes, well very, very rarely. So there I was grumbling away and my wife asked ‘who’s going to read it?’ And I answered, truthfully, ‘no one’, adding ‘well, I’ll post it on my blog and some people might read it, but that will just be a bonus.’

‘So it’s a bit pointless, then, isn’t it.’

No, I said, it isn’t.

‘But if no one is going to read it, why are you doing it?’

I told I’m doing it to do it, but she just didn’t understand that point. I tried to illuminated: musicians will play their instruments, alone or together, because they like playing their instruments. It’s like that. But she still didn’t get it.

I told her I had to get it out of the way, properly, and done as best I could because if I didn’t or did but cut corners, I would never be able to relax completely as it would always be at the back of my mind. She didn’t get that point either.

Then she said why didn’t I do something else, something which would sell? I said no one sells anything except a very few lucky bods, but that wasn’t the point, either. But there were things I am planning on doing, though not until this is done and dusted, properly, and out of the way. She didn’t get that, either.

The silly thing is that shifting myself from here to my little ‘shed’ outside (actually a warm and comfortable granite outhouse where my guitars are and where I can play loudly) is the hardest thing I have to do. BUT once in there and started, I wonder what all the fuss was about. Odd.

And not that’s out of the way, I must persuade myself writing it wasn’t just a form of displacement activity to avoid getting started today (today? It’s already bloody 3.30 you pillock).

. . .

PS LATER Here is a case in point. I am just reading yet another essay in the New Yorker about Hemingway by Joan Didion (or rather more truthfully ‘a Joan Didion’ because although I understand she is famous, possibly even world-famous, I’d never heard of her before) about the publication after his death, edited and substantially boiled down from the several hundred thousand words he left behind, of The Garden Of Eden and True At First Light. I’ve got to the bit where the title True At First Light, awarded to the bloody novel by someone or other, was taken from this sentence in the text:

‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’.

Now call me a philistine old fool, but although that sentence sounds just fine and dandy and even a bit literary if that is the kind of thing you like, in pretty much every way you approach it is meaningless and pointless. It is false and that is notable for a writer who insisted — who truly insisted — that everything should be true. In Hemingwayese it’s a fine and good piece of crap.

Hemingway might have meant the ‘and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ ironically, i.e. you actually do have a great deal of respect for it, but in that case ‘the thing’ [sic — ‘thing’ is not, I suspect, a word one might expect ‘a wordsmith’ blah-blah of the kind Hemingway kept insisting to us and the world he was would care to use] would certainly be at odds with it being a ‘lie at noon’.

And what does the writer of ‘athletic, taut, muscular, lean, declarative’ prose (© Hemingway nerds passim) mean by ‘a thing is true at first light’? It is quite a striking and suggestive sentence, but not one which can be given some kind of ‘meaning’. If anything it is more in keeping with the kind of images of Dylan’s early songs. A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall is a good example — ‘I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains / I’ve walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways / I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests’ doesn’t mean fuck all, but they are great lyrics and carry on with you long after the song has finished. Or how about jokers talking to thieves etc. Dylan can carry that off with aplomb whereas others fall flat on their faces. And that would include Hemingway.

But that wasn’t and never was Hemingway’s approach. He made a fetish out of being ‘true’. Well, Ernie dear heart, you can’t have it both ways, although I’ve read enough about you to know you always did. (He must be the only ‘publicity-shy’ ‘I only want to write’ bod who honed his skills at PR and made sure the world knew about him, from a very young age. He gave a series of talks about his ‘war experiences’ in Oak Park, Chicago, and up in Michigan, exhibiting the medal or medals he had been awarded. He had actually only been working at the front, delivering ciggies and chocs to Italian soldiers for five weeks before he was blown up. As for fighting and serving with the Italian Arditi as he later claimed he had . . .)

Quite apart from that maybe I, now no longer a philistine but something of a snob in snob mode, dare admit that Hemingway’s ‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ is distinctly middlebrow. What, for the sake of God, is a ‘perfect’ weed-fringed lake? And would you really be able to spot a flat lake (however weed-fringed) some distance away across a sun-baked salt plain? And in land so salty would weeds really thrive? Obviously it all depends on the kind of writing you want to produce, but all the above is really not in the ‘hard, declarative style’ the old fraud is famous for. And unlike Ernie I am not inclined to lay down the law of what writing should  ‘truly’ be. Me, I’m more laissez faire. If it works, it works, but for me pretty much all of Hemingway except his journalistic turns of phrase do not. Sorry.

Elsewhere in her piece Didion makes great play over how Hemingway cared about punctuation. Well, that ‘care’ is news to me, and given that as far as I am concerned the sole purpose of punctation is a tool to help you to convey what you want to convey as best you can (a comma, for example, briefly pausing the reader, a semi-colon doing so for just a little longer), time and again you have to re-read Hemingway’s prose just to get the drift. A little more punctuation might have helped. So in the above sentence, I suggest a comma might be appropriate here — ‘noon, and you’. Just a thought.

Crisis? What crisis? This one, matey, this one!

We here in Britain are stuck in a truly bizarre age: for once the observation that ‘the country is split’ isn’t actually just a silly, self-important middle-class exaggeration describing, for example, the fact that Wilf next door really thinks English rugby is in for a golden age and can look forward to great things whereas John and William down at the club think that’s nonsense. It is far more serious than that: the country is well and truly split down the middle and it’s not going to end well because there is no way it can end well. And that worries me.

I’m not just talking about Brexit, either, although that is the root cause.

At the moment the government wants to call a general election, and the Opposition is buggered if it is going to commit suicide on national scale. The government is having a lot of trouble getting its ‘deal’ through Parliament (the initial withdrawal agreement between it and the EU outlining what is what, for example how much Britain should contribute to the EU budget to help pay for items agree upon when it was still a member).

Part of it problem is that before Johnson became PM it had a small majority, essentially because under the premiership of his predecessor, Theresa May, the Tory government had bought off the DUP with a £3 billion bung and the Northern Irish party agreed to support it in the Commons. Recently, Johnson took way the whip from 21 MPs because they voted against him on a Commons motion, thereby flushing his small majority down the pan. Whether that was plain incompetence or real stupidity doesn’t even matter any more.

The fact is that Johnson cannot and will not command a majority in the Commons on any motion except perhaps one granting all MPs a huge pay rise. His government is, at present quite impotent and he believes if held an election, he might get a working majority in the Commons. But getting that election is proving very tricky indeed. And he is trying to come up with various ruses to get his election, not least ensuring his government loses a vote of no confidence.

If some gifted satirist were to dream up a plot for a novel in which a government considers calling such a motion of no confidence in itself (and urges supporting MPs to vote in favour of the motion in a tacit admission that they and the government are useless twats), the resulting novel might, if well-written, prove to be quite amusing. In essence such a plot would recall all those Ealing comedies of the 1950s when Britain was assured it had ‘never had it so good’.

Fleshing out that plot to have the main Opposition party voting against the motion (that ‘this House has no confidence that Her Majesty’s Government could even organise an orgy in a brothel’ — essentially that it has every confidence in Her Majesty’s Governments and wishes it only well) would add a great deal more spice.

In fact, that is exactly the situation our House of Commons finds itself in: the Tories, under Boris Johnson’s leadership are aching to go to the country in the hope they will be voted back into power, and Labour, under the leadership — I use the word as loosely as I am able to without it becoming thoroughly meaningless — of Jeremy Corbyn are desperate to avoid a general election.

But the government can no longer simply call an election. Complicating it all is what is known as the ‘fixed-term parliament legislation: whereas until 2015 when the Tories had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems if they

wanted to retain power, the sitting government could call an election when it damn well wanted — usually, and quite obviously when it thought it had the best chance of winning (as it now does), now an election can only be called if two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons want one. Well, the Tories want one, and the SNP want one and the Lib Dems want one but Labour is buggered if it wants to go to the country to get on its way to oblivion sooner than most expect. The latest opinion poll figures will explain why:

According to them, the Tories have the highest support among British voters (around 35% tell all those from the polling firms who knock on the door or ring up to ask that they would vote for the Tories). Labour, on the other hand are preferred by far fewer (around 25%). The Lib Dems aren’t doing badly, though, up to around 18% from their very low (although not historically low) 8%.

What is so odd about these figures is that usually the incumbent government (whether Tory or Labour) is not at all popular with the electorate and the Opposition will be rather well off in the polling figures. Not this time — Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is the fly in Labour’s ointment: apart from a few scruffy herberts of all ages and genders who consider themselves to be ‘socialists’, no one, but no one likes him. And apart from the scrappy band of Dave Sparts, they would rather go blind than vote him into office and see him as Prime Minister.

But all that is not even half the story.

Both parties are split — although neither is split exactly down the middle — into those who support Brexit (or, at least, support the implementation of the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum) and those who want Britain to remain as a member of the European Union.

Broadly, the Tories are split into two-thirds who support Leave and one third (those Tories Mrs Thatcher would have regarded as ‘wet’) who think Britain’s best interests are served by remaining an EU member. Labour is some kind of mirror image: two-thirds support Remain and one-third support Leave. But it’s not even that simple: a great many of those in Labour-voting constituencies in the North of England voted Leave. So their MP, who most probably is a Remainer, is fearful she or he might be out of a job if they don’t go against their own convictions and support Leave in House of Commons motions.

The Tories have a slightly different problem: now that Ukip has gone the way of all flesh and is rotting on the bone and about as relevant as a four-year-old bus ticket, their one-time leader Nigel Farage has come up with a new party, the Brexit Party. And rather too many Tory voters, terminally pissed off that more than three years after the Brexit referendum Britain still hasn’t left the EU, are more than mindful to give the Brexit Party their support. Thus Tory high command has decided that to see off the electoral threat from the Brexit Party it must be more hardline on Brexit than even Farage. The strategy has worked to a certain extent, except that it has alienated the minority of ‘wet’ Tories who believe Britain’s future would be better served if it remained a member of the EU.

I don’t doubt that thus outlined the situation isn’t quite as troublesome as I seem to have made out. Anyone familiar with Italy, even superficially, will insists that many of the political dilemmas it faces are just as bad and often worse. Then there is Belgium which for many years didn’t even have a government and was run by its civil service. But I suggest this is different.

For better of worse Britain is a undramatic country. Certainly of all the European countries you might associate, were you asked, with the concept of ‘compromise’, ‘working things out’, ‘settling things amicably’ Britain would most probably top the list. Quite simply we British are essentially too lazy and comfortable to get worked up about much. Yes, we get angry and, yes, we sometimes take to the streets, but we only march in protest and cause disruption if the weather outlook is reasonably good, and even then the prospects of heavy showers on the day in question is more than enough to dampen most revolutionary moods. But this is different.

My knowledge of history is quite patchy and mainly garnered from the back of cereal packets, but I do know of several instances in the past 110 years when Britain faced a crisis. One was in 1910 when the Liberals abolished the veto the House of Lords had on the Budget. Then came the Abdication Crisis in 1936 although however ‘critical’

it seemed at the time, I can’t think it posed much of a threat to the stability of the United Kingdom. Far, far more serious and far closer in spirit to the current crisis we are facing was the situation in England in the 1640s which eventually led to our bloody civil war.

I am not suggesting that a civil war will break out in 2019/20, the situation we have now, as then, seems to suggest no immediate solution which might be acceptable all round.

Say there were an election. My view is — and I am often quite wrong — that the Tories would not get the majority they are hoping for. Although they are doing better in the polls since Johnson took over as prime minister, many will not forgive him for his rash pledge to ‘leave they EU by October 31 no if, no buts’ and, disillusioned, vote for the Brexit Party.

That doesn’t mean the Brexit Party will get any seats at all (we still have an ante-deluvian ‘first-past-the-post electoral system here in Britain), but losing votes to the Brexit might mean the Tories losing seats to the Lib Dems. There are six seats where the Tory majority is under 10% and the Lib Dems are in second place. This last suggests that Tory electorate there is composed of quite a few ‘wets’ who might well go over to the Lib Dems.

There seem to be fewer Labour seats at risk to the Lib Dems, but I do think many Leave-supporting Labour voters will opt to vote Brexit rather than Labour to register their irritation.

My main point is that the result of the coming general election need only be a ‘hung parliament’, that is one in which no party has a majority for this chaos to continue. Brexit supporters can only get down on their knees and pray that the Tories will get a majority and will get be able to get their deal through the Commons, but even if that were to happen our current crisis would be far from over.



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The Brexit farce continues and it’s not going to end well . . .

I am conscious that I haven’t posted here for a while and there’s reason: the only thing I would like to write about at present (not having bought a new laptop for a week or two, or come up with any more trivia about my father’s life — possibly — as 007 both of which topics usually make for scintillating blog posts) is the sheer farce that Brexit has become. And for many reasons it is quite pointless making any comments.

For one thing what is happening is changing daily, but for another this is one of those issues in which you are firmly on one side or that other, with both sides becoming more polarised by the hour. And in the nature of things in such punch-ups the one side will never listen to the other: but more pertinently they don’t want to listen. The name of the game is not seeing whether you might persuade the other side that they are wrong and you are right. It is seeing who can shout loudest and drown out the other. Well, I’m not interested in that at all.

(As it was I voted Remain that ‘on balance’ remaining a member of the EU was by far not just in Britain’s best interests but better for Europe as a whole. I do feel the EU must be careful how it evolves and, vitally, must ensure it carries the vast majority of those who live in EU member states with it when it does make changes. Not doing that, proceeding on a de haut en bas basis, will cause a great deal of trouble in the future.

It would be pointless to write much more about the Brexit debacle and the state it is in, if I’m honest, because whatever is recorded here will be out of date within hours. But there’s one aspect of all this which I do think is worth commenting on but which in nothing I have read I have seen commented on. It is simply that there is something going on — in Britain, in Europe, in the US, in the world — of which Brexit, the continual bizarre behaviour and decisions of Donald Trump, the situation in both Russia and China where ‘a hard man’, and the protests in Hong Kong, are just aspects and symptoms.

I think I have alluded to it before (and can’t be arsed to go and check) but it is as though the force of enlightenment which has been growing over the past 70 years is now encountering resistance. I don’t want to come across as some semi-illiterate part-time autodidact, but from the intellectual bits and bobs I have scavenged over the years there seems to me to be a distant echo in the developments of the past ten to 15 years (and I would really not want to push this one too far) of Hegel’s notion of ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’, later adopted and adapted by Marx.

In fact, it is quite possible to sidestep any heavy philosophical notions and not quote Hegel (useful if you haven’t read a word of Hegel and don’t want to look like a prize prune by misrepresenting him) and simply mention the Chinese notion of yin and yang the (that night follows day as day follows night) and the Tao, or the long-acknowledged realisation that ‘everything carries the seed of its own destruction’.

In order to give a little more detail on that last idea, I’ve just looked up quotes to see ‘who said that’ and it would be faster to list all those who didn’t say something along those lines, but here’s one from Mark Twain with which you’ll have to make do:

‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

Yes, there have been problems but looking back over the past 70 years in Europe, one might be forgiven for thinking that overall the general direction of social and political sensibility was towards greater liberalism — in the non-political sense — and, for want of a better word, enlightenment. Certainly, it might seem to be two steps forward, then one back, but ‘progress’ was made. But using that word ‘progress’ draws attention to the essence of one problem: that one man or woman’s ‘progress’ is another man or woman’s ‘abomination’. And it is not a question here of deciding who is right and who is wrong — a debate as futile as trying to agree which is the better football club, United or City? — but of the attitude of each side to the other.

Sometimes part of the difficulty is as basic as that the one side does not even care to acknowledge that however abhorrent it might think the attitude of the other is, it is — because in a democracy it must be regarded as — equally valid.

But ironically that attitude — my attitude — is essentially a liberal one and others (though not necessarily you) might say ‘stuff and nonsense, you lily-livered pinko!’ (followed by, possibly, ‘no surrender!’)

. . .

As for Brexit, well, it is not looking good, not for Britain, Ireland or the EU. Everyone will be a loser unless Britain leaving the EU can be sensibly managed and it is not looking as though that will happen. Well, that at least is my view.

Part of the problem is that on the Brexit side there are those who want Britain to leave the EU, but to do so in a managed and orderly way. And there are those gung-ho individuals (many of whom haunt the comment pages of

the Daily Telegraph where I trade insults with them) who take the attitude of ‘let’s have a clean break and make Britain great again’. So even on the Brexit side there is disagreement.

There has been all kinds of shenanigans in Parliament and our Prime Minister — our current Prime Minister, one Boris Johnson — has painted himself into a corner from which there would seem to be no escape. He has vociferously vowed that Britain will leave the EU by October 31 ‘do or die’, i.e. whether a withdrawal agreement has been made with the EU; on the other hand Parliament has made it law (after through his own incomprehensible stupidity Johnson lost his very slim majority in the House of Commons) that Britain cannot leave the EU unless a withdrawal agreement is in place.

Furthermore, Johnson is fighting a rearguard action against a new party founded by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party, which will hoover up support from the Tories if we don’t leave by October 31 and Britain is forced to ask for ‘an extension’. Everyone expects a general election to be held in November if we have not left the Tories (in my view) are toast. Ironically, given just how unpopular Jeremy Corbyn, the equally hamfisted Labour leader is in the opinion polls, the Conservatives are ahead by, I think, an average six points.

I am pretty certain that Johnson will not manage to get deal by October 31 (in fact, for technical reasons it must be struck by October 19) and that the coming general election, many voters who previously voted Tory will back Farage’s gang of wankers, other ‘one-nation’ Tories — well, some of them — might throw in their lot with the Lib Dems (who will make it a manifesto pledge that they will revoke ‘Article 50’, the clause in the EU constitution (?) which allowed Britain to announce its withdrawal from the EU).

Then because of that manifesto pledge and in view of Corbyn’s half-baked policy on what to do about Brexit, quite a few Labour voters will pitch in with the Lib Dems and the result of the election will be a hung parliament. What happens then is anyone’s guess. And I’m not going to guess because I have to drive into Bodmin for various reasons and time is getting short. And I’m sure I haven’t told you anything much you didn’t already know. But I wanted to get this post entry finished and posted.

On the road . . .

Travelodge - Retford Markham Moor

Off on my travels for a day or two, this time to visit the Jorvik Vikin Centre in York which I did yesterday. I’ve always wanted to. Interesting experience, and the whatever you call them - animatronic’ figures were novel, semi-lifelike humans and animals moving – slightly, doing various things and ‘talking to each’ other – sitting outside reproductions of what their houses must have looked like were useful to covey they kind of life they will have led. Can’t say I learned much, but that wasn’t the point. If I want to learn shite like that, I’ll simply renew my subscription to Look And Learn (not to be mocked - bet I know more about how tyres are made - from the collection of sap from the rubber tree to fitting them to your Ford Consul! - than you do, so take your mockery . . .

It’s also good to get up and about. I was on the point of using the phrase ‘on the road’ but it does sound a little portentous, implying I’ve got a stash of dexies in the glove comparment, a fistful of hot dollars, a small handgun and have just picked up a mysterious brunette. Sadly I’ve done none of these things. But I do like getting away on my own, even though I’m not doing an awful much.

Set off on Tuesday to get to this Travelodge, chosed because it is near Lincoln (where I shall take off to a little later) and York (where the Jorvik Centre is), though at 52 miles away, York was a little further than I thought it might be. When booking a Travelodge - exactly what I want from a hotel, clean sheets and hot water - I had looked for one inbetween Lincoln and York, and came up with Doncaster. Then I noticed this one was about £15 cheaper for two nights but kept thinking is was ‘between Lincoln and York’. (A dull piece of info? Well, pity me not yourselves, I’ve had to think it.)

Went off to a superstore in Retford - eleven miles away - to ‘get something to eat, stocked up on olives, hummus, crackers, tangerines, cheese, a bowl, a tumbler and a ‘pairing knife for my supper but then stayed in Retford anyway for two glasses of red and a bowl of penne arrabiata.

Trying to get out of Retford to get back here was a hoot. Since I had driven in and was now attempting to drive out again, workmen had closed ‘the London Road’ and no amount of following their diversion signs would let me escape sodding Retford town centre. It did get beyond a joke, I kept driving past the same bloody temporary traffic light again and again and again and didn’t have a clue why. The Google Maps directions didn’t help either cos they didn’t know London Road was closed.

It must have taken me almost an hour to get out and the only reason I did that was by setting my Google Maps for York - 50 miles due north - then following the road until I got to the A1. Then it was turn around and drive down the A1 till I reached the Travelodge.

After the Jorvik centre stopped off at a tapas bar and enjoyed three plates of tapas and three different cherries before tasking the ‘Richar III Experience in whatever gate tower (complete with portcullis) it is. Wait, I’ll take a look. Back again: the Monk Bar gatehouse, the tallest of the medieval city’s four gatehouses.

Today, it’s off to Lincoln for a mooch around. The Lincoln Chronicle - long since dead (and the then evening paper the Lincolnshire Echo is now ‘the local weekly’, things ain’t great in the wacky world of hackdom) - was my first paper so I’m off to look at 15 Kirkby St where I lived for about 15 months and the site where the old office was.

I was going to drive straight home tonight but I have since booked a oom at the Travelodge in Devizes (£44 for one night, just £3 cheaper than what I am paying here for two, but fuck it), to break the journey. The drive up from Cornwall was about six hours - though I was going slowly, I mean what’s the rush? More later.

Olivares Tapas Bar, corner of Drury Lane and Castle Hill, Lincoln – Lunch

As luck would have it my trek up Steep Hill took me to this tapas bar, and although I was – and still am – planning another Italian meal tonight in Devizes, I couldn’t resist it. Tapas and Continental food are gorgeous, we Brits – pretty much all of us – love it, bang on about it, can’t wait to go abroad to eat it, yet stick to the kind of shite we are accustomed to when we cook. OK, obviously not all of us and a great many Brits, both men and women can cook and can cook well. And there are some great British dishes and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit it. Yet if the there is no rocketc science to preparing tapas, your average Brit could do it with his or her eyes closed, yet you rarely come across tapas bars – I have struck lucky twice. Still.

Went to 15 Kirkby St in ‘downhill’ Lincoln where I lived for about 15 months, and it and the area looked drabber and drearier than I could remember. This was, of course, 45 years ago and time is never kind, but haven’t they heard of ‘gentrification’? Really not.

The irony is that when folk think of Lincoln, they probably think of the medieval streets and houses (now shops, of course) up Steep Hill (called Steep Hill – why? Why, Joseph. Correct, because it’s fucking steep). Well, all that, as well as the nice middle-class house in the surrounding area are ‘uphil’. Downhill, meanwhile, are the rows and rows of two-up, two-down terrace houses where those not lucky enough to be related to or to have gone to school with the Bishop of Lincoln are obliged to live. In June 1974, when I moved in as a lodger to Gwynn (I think his name was) I wasn’t.

From Kirkby St to Riverside North where Lincoln Chronicle (not Lincolnshire Chronicle as I have so far been calling it) office and presses were it’s just a short walk, one I undertook every day. Sadly the presses and offices have disappeared, to be replaced by an NCP car park (watch out Buck House!) but as far as I know there are so far no plans to kill the Queen and bury her in the car park, though after listening to the lunchtime news about David Cameron’s interview on Today this morning when he admitted Liz (Brenda) had tipped him the wink and given him to understand in no uncertain terms that she was against ‘all this Scottish independence nonsense’ there might be informal talks about giving ‘that dick Cameron’ a seeing to and ‘he should seriously consider taking Samantha and their brood to the South Island in New Zealand while the going is good’.

The Green Dragon, the up on the other side of the bridge (or the end of the bridge) where the office was is now shut and the building for let and my short stroll up from Waterside North to here, near the cathedral, has made it pretty plain Lincoln has its own contingent of Baltic state EU citizens and asylum seekers as anywhere else.

The flat, horribly flat Lincolnshire drone has also lingered – well, it would – and is just as dull as it always was.

Off to Devizes in a while where I have decided to stay that night and not rush back to St Breward. It’s not that I am an old fart whose energy levels dictate that he is now obliged to interrupt his trip to the downstairs loo and do it in stages, just that I’ve got this travelling bit in my blood and although it’s not quite Maine to New Mexico, it’s still there. The only drawback about doing some more travelling is the cost of staying somewhere and it occurs to me that if I got a small camper van in which I could get my head down, the only other cost would be petrol. Look into that. See you a bit later when I had some more from Devizes.

Travelodge – Devizes.

All together now: who’s a complete prat? Why, I am. I arrived here about 30 minutes ago (now settled in) to discover that when I booked my room here last night, I bloody booked for next week. Dick! So that’s £25 up the swannee or to put it in my terms, just over three bottles of the Rioja I like and buy at whichever supermarket has it on offer. Bollocks. Now I’m off for another does of penne arrabiata. .

Bon nuit. Don’t stay up, I’ll only whinge.