Morning Read: Nobody to call us cowards
¶ A maxim for our times from La Rochefoucauld:
Nous promettons selon nos espérances, et nous tenons selon nos craintes.
We make promises according to our hopes, but we hold back according to our fears.
¶ Lord Chesterfield writes to his son about the importance of paying attention: a favorite theme. The advice is all very paternal, but the close is quite sweet:
My long and frequent letters, which I sent to you in great doubt of their success, put me in mind of certain papers, which you have very lately, and I formerly, sent up to kites, along the string, which we called messengers; some of them the wind used to blow away, others were torn by the string, and but few of them got up and stuck to the kite. But I will content myself now, as I did then, if some of my present messengers do but stick to you. Adieu!
¶ Almost but not quite: the Pequod is piloted out to see, and only then do Captains Peleg and Bildad deboard. Peleg: “… and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket.” The following chapter, foreseeing rather gnomically the drowning of one of the ship’s crew, suggests otherwise.
¶ Chapter XX of Don Quixote makes me laugh out loud: to pass the time (in an awkward position), Sancho entertains the Don with a fustian love story about Lope and Torralba that involves a fisherman who can ferry only one of Lope’s three hundred goats across a rive at one time.
“…Your grace has to keep count of the goats the fisherman ferries across, because if you miss one the story will be over and it won’t be possible to say another word. And so I’ll go on and say that the landing on the other side was very muddy and slippery, and it took the fisherman a long time to go back and forth. Even so, he came back for another goat, and another, and another —
“Just say he ferried them all,” said Don Quixote. “If you keep going back and forth like that, it will take you a year to get them across.”
“How many have gone across so far?” said Sancho.
“How the devil should I know?” responded Don Quixote.
“That’s just what I told your grace to do: to keep a good count. Well, by God, the story’s over, and there’s no way to go on.”
“How can that be?” responded Don Quixote….
“Do you mean to say that the story is finished?” said Don Quixote.
“As finished as my mother,” said Sancho.
How like Don Quixote to complain of not hearing the rest of Sancho’s ridiculous tale!
¶ In Squillions, further collegial exchanges, with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Harold Pinter. To the last he addresses a well-known salute: “You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in, except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second.” He is quite appealing in responding to a scolding from Osborne, who complains of Coward’s rattling off his opinions of the day’s playwrights to the press.
I really am very grateful for your letter. It gave me a sharp and much deserved jolt. I absolutely agree that it is unnecessary and unkind to hand out my opinions of my colleagues to journalists. It is also pompous. I know by the grace and firmness of your letter that you will forgive me if I have inadvertently hurt you or even irritated you.
He then goes on to ask Osborne to lunch.
¶ In Wilson, a brief chapter on economic anxieties after the Great War but before the Crash, and the persistent distrust of businessmen.
It is to institutions founded by capitalistic benefactions from the likes of Mond and Nuffield that refugees from socialist states have gratefully come; not the other way around. Some British workers, especially coal miners, and dockers, were communists, but very few chose to seek work in the Soviet Union. Nuffield’s car manufacturers at the Cowley works might have been a blight on the landscape as far as the nearby Oxford dons were concerned — and it is not difficult to guess what John Ruskin would have made of them. But they were not all clamouring at the first opportunity to go and find work in Stalin’s Russia. And yet almost all intellectual people, from left such as Priestley or right such as T S Eliot, have regarded industrial capitalism as sinister.
I don’t expect that intellectuals ever will — or should — lie down with the titans of business, but it would be a good thing if thinking people would make more of an effort to understand commerce and finance. Long before the details become bewildering, it’s obvious that the outlines are fascinating.