Time Bites: Views and Reviews

How can things possibly get worse for this family? They do. In the end it has to collapse. Meanwhile, do they understand how very badly off they are? Henny does, for she has always understood exactly how the family stands, and how her husband is seen. But Miss Aiden, Louie’s beloved teacher, comes to visit and finds a poverty that is incredible to her. The Pollits lack everything, she thinks: ‘I had no idea that there was a place as primitive in the whole world.’ She had expected a decayed gentility, nothing like this threadbare misery – which, strangely, the family do not seem to see. But what Miss Aiden does not understand is that beyond the ugly home-cemented back porch is an orchard wilderness, and birds, and creeks and a river – the wildness that has been the children’s safe place and is their heritage.

Not long ago a camera team in some frightful South American urban slum handed over a camera to children, so they could photograph their infinite deprivation from their own point of view and their situation would not always be seen through the eyes of rich visitors from the fortunate world. But what the children chose to film were scenes of themselves and their friends playing in the water of an old cracked fountain – a joyous scene. They did not know their poverty was extreme, and wanted to commemorate happiness. Louie is sent every year for the summer to her mother’s family, the Bakers, another once well-off, now impoverished, clan. We are ready to be sorry for her, immersed for weeks at a time with these mean, sternly religious people, who resent the improvident Pollits, and resent her, for they know she is there because Henny wants to get rid of her and sees these visits as a way of having one less mouth to feed. But Louie is happy with all the family pressures off her, she chooses not to notice the ungenerous mutterings. For her this other family is a paradise she longs for all the year, and when at last they refuse to have her, it is a tragedy for her.

So insistent a claim do Henny and Sam make on the tale that it is easy to overlook the prodigal variety of the other Pollits and the Collyer relatives who come and go, each of these lives written and offered to the reader with the same sense of epic importance that lives do have to the livers of them. A visit from any one of these people brings into the story that sense of the extraordinariness, the mysteriousness of existence which so easily gets lost as the days go round. Even a tiny scene of a servant girl talking with Louie suggests so much more than the important (to them) exchanges of two little girls competing to sound interesting, for here, though only suggested, is the tragedy of the young girl Nellie, who is thrown out in disgrace, turned out like a dog, because she has told Louie she is a bastard, herself hardly knowing what the word means. Where did this ‘sloppy and cheerful’ little girl come from? A reformatory, for that’s where people got their servants. ‘A love-child,’ mutters Henny, disgustedly imagining sordid couplings. And where did she go? What happened to her?

Or three women, Henny, her sister and Sam’s sister, sit gossiping through a long afternoon, creating worlds of lives and people, while Louie listens – but they do not know she is there. This is how talk is used in Ulysses (the Irish one) to create a matrix of events, thick and complex, painting a picture of a culture, a society.

Aunt Bonnie, Sam’s sister, is a minor character. She is used by the Pollits as a servant, but her life is explosive with drama. When she scorches, as she irons it, Henny’s only decent blouse, a relic of her gracious living, it is a crisis like a war or an earthquake. She gets thrown out too, only to become pregnant. It is Sam, who loves children, and wishes he could have a hundred, who defends the disgraced woman while the other Pollits draw aside their skirts.

The children are each one an individual. Of them all, apart from Louie who pervades the story as thoroughly as Henny and Sam, little Ernie is the one with the power to make you think about his future. He is obsessed with money, because his mother is obsessed. He knows exactly what is in her purse, demands to know what she has spent it on if there are a few cents gone after a trip into town, and saves up his pocket money, such as it is, in a hiding place under the floorboards. But his mother steals it from him, one day when she is desperate. Will she put it back? he begs, he demands, and she says she will … Evie, the other daughter, ‘Little-Womey’, is being tutored by her father into being the perfect female, but we feel she will survive. The twins and Thomas are very much themselves – we can imagine their futures as adults. The new baby is a hate-child if ever there was one, but not much is made of his unfortunate beginnings, and he seems to survive adequately on no nurturing at all, or none that is recorded.

When you put down this book at last and emerge into the light of a day very dull by contrast, as is as if you have left not only this densely imagined swarming world of Pollits and Collyers but your own childhood too, where a smashed cup or a burned blouse or an overheard matter of gossiping women is a revelation of life’s dangers and richness.

And when these children grow up, will they remember the preposterousness of po’ little Sam, and poor clever demented Henny, and the poverty so extreme a teacher could not believe what she saw, or will they know they were in an Eden where children ran about naked among animals and birds, where their ears were filled with shouts of rich and resounding language, where it was only an exuberance of temperament for mother and father to scream insults and threats of death, and where a sister, as ugly as a crippled beast, wrote verses ‘after Confucius’:

A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,

No mere return for courtesy but that our friendship might outlast the grave.

Well, there are no households, no families, like that now, intoxicated with words, for poetry has been silenced by television, and poverty is no longer redeemed by the world of imagination entered by opening a book.

The Man Who Loved Children may be read for its evocation of a lost world as much as for its great virtues. For it is a great novel, one that is always being rediscovered and then for some reason slips away out of sight, and then is found again. Christina Stead is a great writer. Beside her name is a list of novels, each one unlike the work of any other writer and unlike each other, and perhaps that is why she is not finally accepted into the company of great writers. It is hard to understand, though. There are formally accepted canons of Best Books, Best Writers, for that time – the thirties and forties – and some of them are nowhere near her size in scope and magnificence.

For Love Alone continues the story of the ugly duckling, under another name, with a different family, and in a different country – Australia. But here she is, love-hungry, lonely, stuffed with talent and ambition, tormented by the penny-pinching poverty of the thirties, longing to escape to London and the company of fellow spirits – which she eventually does. Now the picture is the same in ‘feel’ and atmosphere as D. H. Lawrence’s evocation of talented, poor and fiercely independent souls. ThePeople with the Dogs so strongly creates New York it is easy to believe you have lived there yourself even when, like myself, you have not lived there more than a few days at a time. I could walk into one of these rooming houses as if I had never left it, a friend of these people and their dogs. Letty Fox: Her Luck is about the anarchic relationships in New York in a time of sexual revolution. These women are ‘free’, but really a woman’s luck still depended on men: if she was going to live well, she needed a well-heeled man.

Every one of Christina Stead’s novels is unique and unforgettable. This one, The Man Who Loved Children, is reckoned her best. And it is. But sometimes it seems that the last one of her novels you have read is her best. This may happen with a great writer. As I look along my shelf of her books, it is difficult not to write eulogistically about every one of them.

Kalila and Dimna – The Fables of Bidpai (#u49eb7384-7820-5f54-a6e4-9a2ba17836bc)

The claim has been made for this book that it has travelled more widely than the Bible, for it has been translated through the centuries everywhere from Ethiopia to China. Yet it is safe to say that most people in the West these days will not have heard of it, while they will certainly at the very least have heard of the Upanishads and the Vedas. Until comparatively recently, it was the other way around. Anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai, or the Tales of Kalilaand Dimna – these being the most commonly used titles with us – was a great Eastern classic. There were at least twenty English translations in the hundred years before 1888. Pondering on these facts leads to reflection on the fate of books, as chancy and unpredictable as that of people or nations.

The book’s history is as fascinating as its contents, and would make a pretty volume on its own.

The first English translation was done in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas North – he who translated Plutarch into a work which was the source of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Roman world. North’s Plutarch was popular reading: so was his version of Bidpai. In the introduction to the reissue of this translation in the nineteenth century, Joseph Jacobs of Cambridge (Jews have been prominent in the movement and adaptation of the book) concludes: ‘If I go on further, I foresee a sort of mental dialogue which will pass between my reader and myself: “What,” the reader will exclaim, “the first literary link between India and England, between Buddhism and Christendom, written in racy English with vivacious dialogue and something resembling a plot. Why, you will be trying to make us believe that you have restored to us an English Classic!” “Exactly so,” I should be constrained to reply, and lest I be tempted into this temerity, I will even make a stop here.’

And he did stop, but by then he had written a very great number of pages. I have been handed over by Ramsay Wood a vast heap of many versions of the Fables of Bidpai – some of them rare and precious – to aid me in this task of doing an introduction, and the first thing to be noticed is that the introductions tend to be very long: it is clear that the authors of them have become beguiled and besotted with the book’s history. As I have. For one thing, it has lasted at least two thousand years. But it is hard to say where the beginning was – suitably for a book whose nature it is to accommodate tales within tales and to blur the margins between historical fact and fiction.

One progenitor was the Buddhist cycle of Birth Tales (or Jātaka Stories) where the Buddha appears as a monkey, deer, lion, and so on. Several of the Bidpai tales came from this cycle. Incidents that occur in Bidpai can be seen in sculptures around Buddhist shrines dated before 200bc. The Buddha himself took some of the Birth Tales from earlier folktales about animals. But there is no race or nation from the Egyptians on – or back, for we may surely no longer assume that current information regarding ancient history is all there is to be known, or all that we will come to know – that has not used beast-fables as part of its heritage of instructional material. And so the genre is as ancient as mankind itself. Sir Richard Burton, who like all the other orientalists of the nineteenth century was involved with Bidpai, suggested that man’s use of the beast-fable commemorates our instinctive knowledge of how we emerged from the animal kingdom, on two legs but still with claws and fangs.

Another source or contributor was that extraordinary book, the Arthaṡāstra of Kautilya, which is suspected of dating from about 300 bc. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on a copy, and this is a pity: at a time when we are all, down to the least citizen, absorbed, not to say obsessed, with sociology and the arts of proper government, this book should take its place, not as the earliest manual on the subject, but as the earliest we know of. It describes in exact and even pernickety detail how properly to run a kingdom, from the kind of goods that should be available in the market-place to the choice of kingly advisers; how one should go about creating a new village, and where; the right way to employ artisans to manufacture gold and silver coins; disputes between neighbours about property and boundaries; how to keep accounts; the legal system; the use of spies. It is all here. And to our minds, what a mixture of humanity and brutality! It was forbidden, for instance, to have sex with a woman against her will, even if she was a prostitute, but there are also lengthy instructions about the use of torture as a punishment. Kautilya was a very cool one indeed; surely this book must have influenced Machiavelli when he wrote The Prince. If not, then the books come from the same region of human experience. Candid, unrhetorical, infinitely worldly-wise, the tone is more like that which one imagines must exist, let’s say, between a Begin and a Sadat when sitting together facing the realities of a situation unobserved by slogan-chanting supporters, or between a Churchill and a Roosevelt meeting in the middle of a war. There is nothing in the Arthaṡāstras that minimises the harshness of necessary choices. It was by no means the first of such handy guides to statesmanship, for Kautilya says it is a compendium of ‘almost all the Arthaṡāstras which in view of acquisition and maintenance of the earth have been composed by ancient teachers’. In other words, this to us so ancient book was to him the last in a long line of instructive tracts, stretching back into antiquity. Throughout he quotes the view of this one or that, sometimes up to ten or more, and then adds at the end, ‘My teacher says …’ but usually disagrees with them all, including his teacher, with ‘No, says Kautilya …’ or ‘Not so, says Kautilya …’, setting everything and everyone right, so that the book has about it the air of a young man refusing to be impressed by tradition – rather like students in the sixties bringing their own books to class and insisting on choosing their own curriculum.

The cycle called The Fables of Bidpai came into existence in this manner … but let us choose a version that, typically, tries to set fiction on a base of fact. Alexander the Great, having conquered India, set a disliked and unjust governor over the vanquished ones, who were at last able to overturn this tyrant, and chose a ruler of their own. This was King Dabschelim, but he turned out to be no better than his predecessor. A wise and incorruptible sage named Bidpai, knowing that he risked his life, went to the no-good king to tell him that the heavens were displeased with him because of his depredations, his cruelties, his refusal to be properly responsible for the welfare of the people put in his care. And sure enough, Bidpai found himself cast into the deepest and foulest dungeon; but the king, attracting to himself heavenly influences because of his inner disquiet over this behaviour of his, was caused to think again and … Thereafter the tale unfolds in the characteristic way of the genre, stories within stories, one leading to another. We in the West do not have this kind of literature, except where it has come to us through influences from the East: Boccaccio and Chaucer, for instance. What this method of storytelling, or this design, is supposed to illustrate is the way that in life one thing leads to another, often unexpectedly, and that one may not make neat and tidy containers for ideas and events – or hopes and possibilities – and that it is not easy to decide where anything begins or ends. As the history of the book itself proves. When the ‘frame’ story stops, temporarily, and a cluster of related tales is told, what is happening is that many facets of a situation are being illuminated, before the movement of the main story goes on. There may be even more than one ‘frame’ story, so that we are led gently into realm after realm, doors opening as if one were to push a mirror and find it a door.

Another version of the book’s origin is that there was once a good and honest king who had three stupid and lazy sons. Many educational experts came forward with suggestions as to their proper instruction, but the king was in despair, knowing that to give them the foundation of information they needed would take years, by which time the kingdom would be ruined. And then came a sage who said he would impart to the three princes the essence of statesmanship and sensible conduct in the form of instructive fables, and the process would be accomplished in a very short time, if the princes could be persuaded to pay attention. Thus the book has been known as A Mirrorfor Princes, and we are told that it was given to princes as part of their training to be monarchs.

The original Sanskrit version vanished, though later the material was translated back into Sanskrit from other languages, and India has produced as many versions ‘as there are stars in the sky’. The ancient Persian King of Kings, Nushirvan, heard of the book, and sent embassies, and it was translated into the ancient Persian tongue of Pahlavi, which event was thought of such importance that Firdausi celebrated it in the Shahnama. The incidents of the tales were infinitely illustrated in this book and in very many others, and anyone at all interested in Persian art will certainly have come across them in miniatures and otherwise. Not only Persian art – I have here a postcard from the British Museum of a turtle being carried through the air on a stick by two geese: the friends who could not bear to be parted. It is from a Turkish manuscript. The British Museum has this and many other ancient manuscripts so precious one may view them only through glass, like jewels, which they resemble.

When the Arabs conquered the old world, after the death of Muhammad, poets and scholars arrived in India, enquiring for the famous book they had heard so much about. The way they tracked it down, like the account of how the old Persian envoys found their copy, makes an attractive story full of suspense, mystery and drama, so that one has to suspect that the storytellers of the time took their opportunity to honour even further this honoured book by copious invention; while some of them made ‘quest tales’ from the material, in which the book becomes a hidden treasure. The most famous translation into Arabic was by a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam. Another was probably by an honoured Jewish scholar. In those comparatively flexible days, scholars were able more easily than now to appreciate each other and work together across boundaries. There were religions then, not nations – a fact it is hard to remember in its dimensions when considering how things were in those days. For instance, to read the biography of Muhammad by ibn-Ishaq, the Muslim equivalent of the New Testament, where nations and national feelings are absent, and men and women are known as Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and there were no Arabs and Jews in our sense, since that is a division of modern times, to read this book is hard for a modern Westerner because of how we see everything in terms of nations and nationalism. So strange is it that the mind keeps seizing up and you have to stop, and start again.

The query has been raised: What was the ‘secret ingredient’ of this Bidpai book, ‘this ocean of tales’, that enabled it to be absorbed without resistance, and to be loved by Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews? One answer was that in all these traditions it is established that tales and parables are for instruction and illustration as well as for entertainment. Medieval Europe rushed to translate the book because its fame was known, and they wanted its aid in learning how to live better. But nowadays we use this phrase in a different sense.

One of the best-known and most influential of the old versions was Anwar-i-Suhaili, or The Lights of Canopus. There had been earlier Persian versions, but these were considered inadequate and even elitist. An emir, or general, called Suhaili (of Canopus) invited one al-Kashifi to make a new version. I was interested that Canopus was being used as a name in a culture and at a time when names were often chosen to describe qualities, or as an indication of qualities a person hoped to acquire. People were expected to regard names as signposts, as it were. Round about that time there came into existence a cluster of Persian classics, all of Sufic origin and inspiration. The Lights of Suhaili is one of these. It is the same in ‘feel’ and format as, for instance, Saadi’s Rose Garden, using the Bidpai tales as a frame, or lattice, around which are woven associated tales, anecdotes, reminiscences, current scientific information, and verse of different kinds. It is worthwhile insisting that this great classic, now regarded with a truly horrible reverence and solemnity, was a popular book, meant for entertainment, as well as instruction. But who was this general or governor whose name became the name of the book, so that he was, in the way of those times and regions, place, person, tradition – all at once – and was able to bring about the creation of a new Sufi classic, using the ancient Bidpai material to do it? And who was al-Kashifi, whose name means ‘that which is manifested’, or ‘shown’, or ‘demonstrated’?

Canopus the star is much embedded in the mythology of ancient times and when you trace it to this country or that it melds and merges into other names, places, personages. To illustrate the remarkable law known to all researchers, but not yet acknowledged by science – that when one is becoming interested in a subject, books formerly unknown and unsuspected fly to your hand from everywhere – while I was speculating about Canopus, and what it could mean in this context, if it meant anything, there came my way Astronomical Curiosities, published in 1909, and one of its main sources of information was one al-Sufi, an Arabian astronomer of the tenth century. Much is said by al-Sufi about Canopus of the constellation Argo. Argo was associated with Noah’s Ark. It represents, too, the first ship ever built, which was in Thessaly, by order of Minerva and Neptune, to go on the expedition for the conquest of the Golden Fleece. The date of this expedition commanded by Jason is usually fixed at 1300 or 1400 BC. Canopus was the ancient name of Aboukir in Egypt, and is said to have derived its name from the pilot of Menelaus, whose name was Kanobus, and who died there ‘from the bite of a snake’. The star is supposed to have been named after him, in some traditions, and it was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians … but Canopus is also the god Osiris, and is in the most remarkable and ever-changing relationship with Isis, who was the star Sirius … and thus is one enticed into all kinds of byways, from which it is hard to extricate oneself, and harder still to resist quoting, and thus joining the immoderate preface-makers whom I can no longer in honesty condemn.

The Iliad and Odyssey are linked with Bidpai in another way too: a Greek called Seth Simeon translated it in the eleventh century, adding to it all kinds of bits and pieces from these two epics – another illustration, if one is needed by now, of the way such material adapts to new backgrounds and new times. In Hebrew, Turkish, Latin, Russian, Malay, Polish – in almost any language you can think of – its naturalisation followed the laws of infinite adaptability. It is not possible to trace its influences: as is always the way when a book’s seminal power has been great, it was absorbed and transformed by local cultures. Certainly the Bidpai tales can be found in the folklore of most European countries, almost as much as they can in the East. Some were adapted by La Fontaine. Beaumont and Fletcher are supposed to have used The Dervish and the Thief as a germ for Women Pleased. Aesop’s fables as we know them are indebted to Bidpai.

There has not been an English version for a long time. The existing ones have become stiff and boring. Many consider Sir Thomas North’s still to be the best, but what for the Elizabethans was a lively new book is for us a museum piece.

This fresh creation by Ramsay Wood follows the more than 2,000-year-old precedent of adapting, collating and arranging the old material in any way that suits present purposes. It is contemporary, racy, vigorous, full of zest. It is also very funny. I defy anyone to sit down with it and not finish it at a sitting: his own enjoyment in doing the book has made it so enjoyable.

And there is another good thing. The original, or perhaps I should say some arrangements of the original, had thirteen sections: The Separation of Friends, The Winning of Friends, War and Peace, The Loss of One’s Gains, The Rewards of Impatience, and so forth. This volume has only the material to do with friends, artfully arranged to make a whole. And so we may look forward – I hope – to the rest.

Speech at Vigo on getting the Prince of Asturias Prize 2002 (#u49eb7384-7820-5f54-a6e4-9a2ba17836bc)

Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, The Educated Person. He – it was usually he, but then increasingly often she – was educated in a way that differed little from country to country – I am of course talking about Europe – but was different from what we know now. William Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century, whose curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school now, a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for granted that this already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development, for the pupils were expected to read, and they did.

This kind of education, the humanist education, is vanishing. Increasingly, governments – our British government among them – encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.

The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He – or she – read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best-known writers of other European countries, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from Spain, one from St Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveller from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other, they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind has thought, said, written.

This has gone.

Greek and Latin are disappearing. In many countries the Bible, and religion – going. A girl I know, taken to Paris to broaden her mind, which needed it, though she was doing brilliantly in examinations, revealed that she had never heard of Catholics and Protestants, knew nothing of the history of Christianity or any other religion. She was taken to hear mass in Notre Dame, told that this ceremony had been a basis of European culture for centuries, and she should at least know about it – and she dutifully sat through it, rather as she might a tea ceremony in Japan, and afterwards enquired, ‘Are these people some kind of cannibal then?’ So much for what seems enduring.

There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a speciality, computers, the law, economics, politics, but knows about nothing else, no literature, art, history, and may be heard enquiring, ‘But what was the Renaissance then?’ ‘What was the French Revolution?’

Even 50 years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background – impossible. To call oneself educated without a background of reading – impossible.

Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World a kind of parallel education, which once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing, were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers’ movements fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and poetry. A favourite of their books was the Count of Monte Cristo. A group of workers wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of their cigars.

Perhaps there is no need to labour this point to anyone present here, but I do feel we have not yet grasped that we are living in a fast fragmenting culture. Pockets of the old excellences remain, in a university, a school, the classroom of an old-fashioned teacher in love with books, perhaps a newspaper or a journal. But a culture that once united Europe and its overseas offshoots has gone.

We may get some idea of the speed with which cultures may change by looking at how languages change. English as spoken in America or the West Indies is not the English of England. Spanish is not the same in Argentina and in Spain. The Portuguese of Brazil is not the Portuguese of Portugal. Italian, Spanish, French grew out of Latin not in thousands of years but in hundreds. It is a very short time since the Roman world disappeared, leaving behind its legacy of our languages.

One interesting little irony about the present situation is that a lot of the criticism of the old culture was in the name of Elitism, but what is happening is that everywhere are enclaves, pockets, of the old kind of reader and reading and it is easy to imagine one of the new barbarians walking by chance into a library of the old kind, in all its richness and variety, and understanding suddenly what has been lost, what he – or she – has been deprived of.

So what is going to happen next in this tumultuously changing world? I think we are all of us fastening our seat belts and holding on tight.

I drafted what I have just read before the events of 11 September. We are in for a war, it seems, a long one, which by its nature cannot have an easy end. We all know that enemies exchange more than gunfire and insults. In this country Spain you know this better perhaps than anyone. When feeling gloomy about the world I often think about that time here, in Spain, in the early Middle Ages, in Cordova, in Toledo, in Granada, in other southern cities, Christians, Muslims, Jews lived harmoniously together, poets, musicians, writers, sages, all together, admiring each other, helping each other. It went on for three centuries. This wonderful culture went on for three centuries. Has anything like it been seen in the world? What has been, can be again.

I think the educated person of the future will have a wider basis than anything we can imagine now.

Censorship (#u49eb7384-7820-5f54-a6e4-9a2ba17836bc)

Towards the end of the reign of the late unlamented Shah of Iran a certain lowly citizen named his beautiful cat Shah-in-Shah, King of Kings, a title claimed by this king who was the son of a common soldier. The culprit was arrested, and disappeared into Iran’s system of prisons, tortures and hangings. It is safe to assume that the Shah, while a petulant tyrant, could not have approved of the unfortunate being executed for calling a cat a king, but then he would not have known about it. Rulers more than anyone else may complain that they really cannot be expected to keep an eye on everything. Our age of terrors is often characterised by the grotesque, the inconsequent, the simply silly, and this incident is such a perfect example it must be cherished by connoisseurs of the politically surreal. But surely what must interest us is not the Shah, nor even the victim, whose fate is too familiar to merit much notice, but the state of mind of the man responsible. If, as is usual, the machinery of the secret police was simply transferred from shah to ayatollahs, then the same official was probably at it for years, but he must have retired by now, growing roses and generally cultivating his garden. How does he see himself? Is he secretly thinking, but what got into me? What got into me is the secret theme of the thinking of successive waves of people who were part of persecution’s machineries, but later became appalled at the past – at themselves. As for the many citizens who thought, ‘And quite right too, he shouldn’t have insulted our dear Shah’, then there isn’t much to be done about them, for the lovers of authority, no matter how cruel, will always be with us. And they will have forgotten about it by now, as the white supporters of apartheid may now murmur, ‘I was always a bit of a liberal you know.’

Direct and unambiguous censorship, as part of state control, is easier to combat than the indirect results of it. Books, works of art, and their authors, may be banned, reviled, made non-books and non-people, but what is hard to see is a prevailing wind of opinion, most particularly if it blows fitfully. Jack Cope, the writer, having been a communist, wanted a passport to leave South Africa, where he was under threat. At last he found himself sitting opposite the relevant official. ‘Ach, hell, Mr Cope, look at it from our point of view. How can we give you a passport? You are a commie and you are a liberal too.’ Impasse. Recently Jack had written a little tale about a bird caught in power lines. A linesman saw it, notified base, the machinery for power was shut down for the district, a man climbed up and rescued the bird, and with tears in his eyes watched it fly away. The official with life and death in his hands – passports were that then – confessed he hadn’t read Jack’s books, he didn’t read commie books, but he remembered a nice little story, and he told Jack the tale of the sparrow. ‘I wrote that story,’ Jack modestly confessed. ‘Ach, hell, man, but that is a nice story.’ And he gave Jack his passport. Never say that literature cannot have practical uses. Meanwhile South Africa’s prisons, some of the cruellest in the world, continued to flourish, and so did censorship, which was arbitrary, to say the least. For instance, Black Beauty was banned, for reasons obvious to the white censor. Many writers’ books were banned, mine among them, and then we authors might hear they were on sale somewhere, but then banned again, all this giving rise to much satirical laughter. If you are white – and privileged, or privileged anywhere, then it is easier to maintain a stoical attitude towards persecution, petty or otherwise, and easy to make jokes. The white progressive writers could fight with ridicule, but the appealing little scene of the white immigration official, white writer and released bird could never have happened with a black writer, and they fled from the country when they could. But I wonder about the books not written, and here I come to my concern. When certain winds blow they wither everything that is unprotected. Let us imagine a poor black man – these days it could be a woman – who has managed because of frightful sacrifices by his parents, and then himself, sometimes walking miles to school every day, to get himself some kind of certificate, and with that, a clerk’s job. He has read enough to know that his everyday experiences could make tales that would be printed and admired. He dreams of writing them. But he lives, let us say, in old Soweto, and his working conditions make it hard for him to sustain creative energy, and then he cannot help observing how the black writers still in South Africa are treated. Those who have fled, sometimes a few steps in front of the police, are in exile in London and New York and in universities which these days so often give shelter to victims of persecution. He heard some are drinking too much, dying young, often not writing much. In the evenings he sits at a table where his mother and then his wife have cleared the supper things, he lights the oil lamp, he gets out his exercise book, he takes up his biro, and then – he stops. What he would like to write about are his daily struggles, the miseries of poverty, the attentions of the police, the efforts of his women to feed him and the children, how it feels to watch and – this is the worst – how his talented children are going to waste. He knows that simply to describe his life could be seen as an act of sedition; these days everyone knows what the daily lives of people are in luckier countries. He sits on, staring at the bricks of his wall, which he may have built himself. Would he have to leave his home, his family? Who would look after them? His exercise book remains empty. His own talents, let alone his children’s, will remain unfulfilled.