Gotham Diary:
Sometimes, the Teasing Peacock
28 July 2014
About a year before his death, in 2003, Roy Jenkins published a curious book called Twelve Cities, in which he combined thumbnail histories and architectural sketches of a dozen towns, ranging in size and importance from Cardiff and Bonn at one end to Berlin and New York at the other, with memoirs of his activities in each of these places — or of activities elsewhere of which something in a given city might by chance remind him. Jenkins’s style, a blend of twinkling mandarin and zealous discrimination, was the touchstone of the project. Freed from the narrative obligations of his great political biographies, Jenkins could simply write not only what he pleased but as he pleased — very much, I couldn’t help noticing, as one might write a Web log entry.
That Twelve Cities is self-indulgent cannot be disputed, but readers will disagree about whether the self being indulged is charming. For those whom Jenkins rubs, for one reason or another, the wrong way, the book will be absolutely unreadable, while for those who can’t help liking him even Glasgow becomes fascinating. Completely fascinating, I hasten to note: Jenkins does not inspire a desire to travel so much as he does the itch to turn the page and keep reading. It is actually Jenkins who is fascinating, not Glasgow, as the following arguable fatuity attests:
Glasgow’s industry also had a peculiar vividness, which is retained by such of that industry as remains. The cranes of Govan, still to be seen on the drive in from the airport, proclaim that this is Glasgow as emphatically as the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, or the Statue of Liberty does New York, or the bridge and the Opera House do Sydney.
There is a photograph of the cranes of Govan, but, doubtless owing to my lack of perspicacity, I fail to see how they are different from the gantries of Elizabeth, still to be seen on the drive in from Newark. But I don’t complain; on the contrary, I treasure these examples of overreach. They inspired a delicious parody by the English humorist Craig Brown. One of Brown’s specialties is the parody diary, a series of which he wrote for Private Eye for about twenty years. His parody of Jenkins was called Twelve Tube Stations. John Campbell quoted two passages in his biography of Jenkins, and I thought I was going to die laughing. Here is a bit from an entry that Campbell did not quote (taken from Brown’s collection, The Lost Diaries, of which more anon), about the West Kensington station:
As I remember it, I had just stepped onto the ‘down’ escalator when the red carpet they had earlier laid upon it began to ‘ruck up’ at the bottom, causing myself and my honoured guests — who included the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Duke of Westminster and Dame Anna Neagle — to hurtle head-over-heels down forty-odd steps or more. An unfortunate occurrence, perhaps, but what it lacked in dignity it more than made up for in exhilaration, so we immediately climbed the stairs and did it all over again.
My copy of The Lost Diaries arrived almost a week before Twelve Cities showed up, by which time I’d come to doubt that Jenkins — always a thoughtful writer — could really have written anything to inspire such ridiculous delight. Happily, Twelve Cities swept away this doubt. If it is not funnier than Twelve Tube Stations, it is every bit as jolly, and Brown’s distillation captures most of the features that sparkle so smilingly in Jenkins’s memoir.
Even Brown would have been hard put to top an anecdote from the essay on Naples. This essay begins, as many do, with mention of Jenkins’s first visit to the city, which includes a description of the special train cars that the Italians placed at the disposal of a Parliamentary delegation of which Jenkins was a member. The run down to Naples was a side trip from Rome, itself a junket from Milan. In Naples, a few of the delegates made a point of calling on the great philosopher (and notable anti-fascist), Benedetto Croce, and almost missed their train back to Rome, boarding it, finally, ten minutes late. (“We sank into comfort, but were not popular.”) A few subsequent visits are noted, and then Jenkins asks the beguiling question, “But what is it that Naples conceals?” He launches into a summary history of Naples, focusing on the part about the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, also known (but not at the same time) as the Kingdom of Naples. This involves the Bourbon dynasts who ruled both Naples and Spain, and fastens on the man who ruled Naples as Charles II and then Spain as Charles III for many, many years. Jenkins has nice things to say about this monarch, but the careful reader will be asking, “What is it that Jenkins is building up to?” And then he delivers.
Charles III ranks high among the sovereigns of the Spanish decline —
(Note the contrary motion: ranks high, Spanish decline. This contrapuntal tic pervades Jenkins’s comparisons.)
— but for me his main impact was that he founded the order bearing his name, the grand cross of which carries the right to wear a pale blue and white sash, which exceeds even the Garter in refulgence, if not in its rarity. In the Prado collection of Goya portraits (and in one or two in Capodimonte [in Naples, lest we wonder as we wander]) nearly all the Spanish royals are wearing it. Until I subsequently took this in I did not appreciate its full status, although I had been given it in 1980, for opening negotiations which led to Spanish entry into the European community. I sometimes wear it at Buckingham Palace banquets for visiting heads of state, partly as a tease and partly as a bit of peacockery.
But altogether because he can.
Oh, that “sometimes”! It would be unkind to describe it as the insolence of a coal miner’s son who made good. It is entirely of a piece with Jenkins’s lifelong commitment to leading an enjoyable, if seriously industrious, life. Most people would find attendance at a single state banquet at Buckingham Palace to be an extraordinary lifetime experience, but Jenkins belonged to the nimbus of the great and the good who provide the human furniture at these occasions, much as the caterer provides the canapes. Sometimes he dons his refulgent sash. (But probably not for the banquet in honor of Nelson Mandela that is mentioned in another essay.) Sash-aying around Buck House, the teasing peacock winks.
I couldn’t like it more.
Daily Blague news update: Human People.