Writing a column is a question of rhythm. Thoughts and ideas and experiences accumulate between outings, far more than could ever be excavated in eight or nine hundred words. I’m not sure I could manage more than one a month, and have to resist, from time to time, the tendency to repeat myself, which results from recurring patterns in my life or from simple forgetfulness.
So this time I could start by riffing on where I’ve been—most recently, Copenhagen. I toyed with taking a volume of Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, with me; but, having struggled to make sense of his Fear and Trembling, I hesitated to go over it all again. It’s a meditation on the story of Abraham and the non-sacrifice of his son Isaac, at Jehovah’s request; but the proto-existentialist “leap of faith” with which the Danish theologian makes sense of God’s barbaric demand and Abraham’s pious acquiescence never did it for me. It seems much more interesting that Kierkegaard wrote the book in the tumultuous aftermath of breaking up with his fiancée.
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I hadn’t sung in Copenhagen for 25 years and was back to sing the same piece, in the same hall, with a different orchestra and conductor. This time, the fantastic US-based Stefan Asbury, an old university friend. Last time, the late, lamented Jeffrey Tate, who made an unlikely career at the summit of the musical world despite having qualified as a medic and having been born with spina bifida. He also played great jazz piano and we made an album of Noël Coward songs together.
But I can’t talk about the War Requiem again, because—as regular readers will know—I’m writing a book about it (nearly done) and have a habit of returning to it, perhaps too often.
Copenhagen could have meant a look at Hans Christian Andersen, he of the sadistic children’s tales: The Red Shoes or The Little Mermaid, whose statue sits on the Langelinie promenade in the city, or the immortal Emperor’s New Clothes, a warning to us all. My musical connection is via a small set of Schumann songs, his Op 40, four of which set German translations of slightly creepy Andersen poems. The best of them is “Der Soldat”, in which a soldier has to march with eight comrades to participate in the execution of the man he loves above all others. Nine bullets fly but only one hits its mark. You can guess whose.
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I’m tempted only occasionally to return to reinforce or recant a recent column. The press that I read—New York Times, UnHerd, the Guardian, the Telegraph and, of course, Prospect—has been full of AI hysteria ever since I wrote about it two issues ago. Not, I hasten to add, as a result of my article, which was sceptical about the narrative of emergent intelligence and suspicious of its motivations. As more and more people pile onto the panicky side and the only holdout appears to be Donald Trump, I find my convictions a little shaky, but I cling to the notion that AI as currently pursued is aptly called a “stochastic parrot” and that the real dangers (of human subordination to mechanistic rationality) are obscured behind sci-fi fantasies of alien minds. Bandying around speculative probabilities of extinction doesn’t seem all that scientific to me. Still, we’ll see…
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This month, I thought I’d talk about something I’m reading. I remember flicking through, many years ago, a rather mischievous book by Pierre Bayard called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. It sounds rather cynical, but Bayard usefully reminds us how many kinds of not-reading there are: books we’ve merely flicked through; books we’ve only heard about; books we’ve read and forgotten; and so on. For a history graduate whose primary skill as an undergraduate was to skim, skim, skim, it seems to me that Bayard very usefully shakes up our pious attitudes to book reading and remembrance.
My own history of reading is full of books I feel I must read, and have started, but have yet to finish (Proust, Ulysses…); books I’ve read many times; old favourites (Jane Austen, War and Peace, The Portrait of a Lady); and books from the past that I’m pretty sure I read.
I’m absolutely certain that I’ve read LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. Like countless others of my vintage, I was given it as a pubescent schoolboy. I can even remember when: in the winter term of 1978, seven years after the disappointing Losey/Pinter film was released. Adults were fond of giving books about the cusp of adulthood to boys on that cusp, and I’m not sure that at that age I really understood Lord of the Flies, Gorky’s My Childhood or The Turn of the Screw. The basic plot of The Go-Between is simple. In the year 1900, 13-year-old Leo Colston makes a weeks-long summer visit to his schoolfriend’s country house, where he is drawn into carrying messages between his friend’s sister Marian (engaged to the local aristocrat) and a neighbouring farmer with whom she is having a passionate love affair. Class looms as large as sex, as does betrayal. It’s a brilliant novel.
I’d forgotten the two set pieces that sit at the centre of the novel: the cricket match (in which I would never have had much interest) and the concert after the match, at which Leo sings to Marian’s accompaniment at the piano. Reading it today, I find it so true to how it is to sing as a boy—and somehow, even how it is to perform now. Leo sings Handel’s “Angels, ever bright and fair”, from Theodora:
I liked singing it because the idea of something worse than death had a powerful appeal to my imagination… with my passion for extremes I contemplated it with ecstasy.
