Thurifer
Wandering around several bookshops in my leafy suburb, there appears to be a large number of spare copies of Spare, the effusions of Prince Henry. There are several reasons for not reading the book but his own words (translated by his able ghost-writer) prove the most persuasive: ‘Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past’. The acerbic academic and critic, F.R. Leavis once asked if had read a certain book replied, ‘To read it is to condone it’. *
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In an episode of Spectator TV in mid-January was an interview with the critic John Maier (Unherd, Balliol) who had reviewed a book by Quentin Tarantino. It was a master-class in the use of fillers words. The scorecard was ‘kind of’ 32; ‘sort of’ 18; ‘I mean’ 10; ‘you know’ 8; ‘like’ 6; ‘or whatever’ 1; ‘and stuff’ 1; total 66. The usually excellent interlocutor, John Connolly, also had a smattering of ‘sort of’. The review was better. Despite this Spectator TV is worth the hour it takes to view each week. Civilised, informed comment and never a shouting match between contributors.
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Is the beer-swilling, cigar-smoking Thérèse Coffey, ‘Let them eat turnip’, channelling her inner Marie-Antoinette and presaging a political decapitation for herself and her party? It is noteworthy how many such phrases, sometimes apocryphal, seem to encapsulate a telling moment in history.
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This year saw a successful Lenten disciple as I obeyed faithfully and fully, to the letter, for forty days, the injunction of Deuteronomy 25.4 ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads the grain’.
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The American Civil War broke out on 12 April 1861, twelve days after Easter Day and ended on 9 April 1865, Palm Sunday, when General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee met at Appomattox in Virginia. The modest house where they met was owned by William McLean. He had previously lived on a farm beside a stream called Bull Run, which had seen the first battle of the War. His farm, overrun by soldiers, was sold and bought the house in Appomattox. Having witnessed the first battle of the War on his land, he now witnessed the end in his front room. A fearful symmetry.
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The two generals who met to agree terms of surrender could not have been different. Not merely in dress: Lee, a ‘legend incarnate – tall, grey, one of the handsomest and most impressive men who ever lived’. In contrast, Grant, dishevelled, short, trousers sprinkled with mud, uniform rumpled. One represented the past and its values, of societal values and privileges that had outlived their time. The other was untethered to the past, rough, uncivilised, with only a casual thought of the values and assumptions that were being destroyed. He would become president, but not an overly successful one.
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One of the most attractive of the Unionist Generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, was also considered a potential presidential candidate. He declined by saying, ‘I will not accept if nominated and I will not serve if elected’. Sherman was a fine soldier, one of humane sympathy and not, as some are, without emotion. One of his young officers was denied leave of absence to return home to marry. Within a few days of the decision the officer was killed in action. Sherman wrote to the bereaved fiancée: ‘I yield to no one on earth but yourself the right to exceed in lamentation for our dead hero … I see him now, so handsome, so smiling, on his fine black horse, booted and spurred, with his easy seat, the impersonation of the gallant knight … Though the cannon booms now, and the angry rattle of musketry tells me that I also will likely pay the same penalty, yet while life lasts I will delight in the memory of that bright particular star which has gone before us to prepare the way for us more hardened sinners who must struggle to the end’.
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These vignettes come from Catton’s book This Hallowed Ground, first published in 1955 and which I read in my teens. A battered, yellowing, stained paperback copy was found a few weeks ago in a well-stocked secondhand bookshop in Blackheath. That such a shop still exists is a minor miracle.
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The death of the polemical journalist and historian Paul Johnson earlier this year took me back many years to my heady youth. He was Editor of the New Statesman (from 1965 until 1970) when I began to read it. Always a journal of the left in politics, it was, at that time, a literate and accessible political and literary journal. Johnson was succeed by the former Labour Cabinet minister, Richard Crossman, the quintessential don turned politician. He wrote the Diary under the pseudonym Crux. His deputy editor (later his successor in the editorial chair) was Anthony Howard (later the biographer of Basil Hume). When he wrote the Diary it was signed Crucifer (one who bears the cross). Succeeded in 1978 by Bruce Page it became a densely written, tedious sociological journal. I stopped taking it and have not seen an issue since.