The latest unanswerable accusation is that of "having an agenda" (the singularisation of Latin plurals is something which Simon Raven and I deplore, but who are we against tous pollous?). Since Anthony Julius' book about TS Eliot's anti-Semitism has not been widely sent for review in Britain, I had to write about it in The Weekly Standard, a Washington DC mag not unlike Prospect. While ironising, subtly, on changing Christian attitudes to "the Jews," I referred to a reputable French book which alleged that in 1939 Pius xii shelved an encyclical, about to be endorsed by his predecessor, Pius xi, in which the authors-a Dominican and a Jesuit-proposed to condemn Hitlerian doctrines without equivocation. The replacement of imminent outspokenness by eminent reticence was flagrant and could not, I said, be denied.
Denial followed swiftly. The usual readers insisted that I had this, yes, "agenda." Reproachful letters (their margins impressive with watch-your-step committees) promised that Pius xii did so much for exterminated Jewry that the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted to Catholicism and took Pacelli's name for his own when baptised. So there. (One recalls a pseudo-Messiah who converted to Islam when offered the alternative of instant execution, not to mention Galileo when shown the instruments of torture.)
How is it that Catholic apologists always spontaneously cite the same figure of exactly 860,000 Jews whom Pacelli saved personally from the Holocaust? What audit supplied it? Since His Holiness is said to have managed this without ever publicly condemning the Nazis or rebuking-let alone revoking-members of his own clergy, such as the quisling ruler of the puppet state of Croatia (who assisted in the slaughter of thousands and thousands of local Jews), one may be excused for wondering what the vicar of Christ might not have achieved had he chosen to lift two fingers.
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those of us who, like Philoctetes, live in isolation with our wounds and our bows, never resent a telephoned reminder that someone, somewhere, thinks we are still alive, though we may no longer kick. Imagine with what gratitude I responded to last week's Hollywood call from someone who could think of no one better qualified than I to rewrite a romantic comedy entitled Jet Lag. I said that Jet Lag did not sound like something I particularly wanted to beef up, but my new best friend reminded me that we were talking about a very appropriate payday here. He wouldn't "let me go that easily." Suddenly I was Proteus hitting the mat with Heracles.
The next afternoon, at almost the same hour, the telephone rang again. Dread and greed picked up the same receiver. It was again an American voice and once again it was offering work. The University of Pennsylvania was undertaking a crash programme of Greek drama in translation. Would I undertake to do Sophocles' Ajax, but fast? Unfortunately, there was no money. I accepted instantly. Ajax was the first Greek play I ever construed under the implacable eye of Bob Arrowsmith in the Remove at Charterhouse, OQ 1945. Is it not tempting to discern some pattern in life, maybe not a divine purpose but at least a figure in the carpet?
Never mind that. Ajax resembles the Iliad in being about a bad loser. Both Achilles and Ajax sulk because they are denied prizes they think they deserve. Translated in the modern style (by someone who cannot tell alpha from omega, but recognises a commissioning editor when he sees one), our heroes would be rewritten as novelists mischievously denied the Booker Prize. (By the way, did you know that Gertrude Stein advocated Hitler for the Nobel prize in 1937? What does that do to incline us to re-evaluate Pius xii, huh? One of my correspondents would like me to think about that, but I can't.)
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perhaps after the next general election, in which pale shades of everything will contend for power, the eminently fair idea might be considered of democratically conferred fame. As Names That Really and Truly Mean Something to People become regrettably vacant through natural wastage, their prestige will be passed on to lookalikes or thinkalikes. Can we afford not to have a Lord Longford in our midst? Now more than ever England needs her stabilising archetypes to be made renewable flesh. Why not have exemplary figures such as Paul Johnson (art critic), William Cash (philosopher), Susan Crosland (novelist), Lord Jenkins (Oxonian), Melvyn Bragg (television shareholder) and Arnold Wesker (Memory Man) declared, like French mineral water springs, "d'int?r?t national"? As incumbent fame-holders disappear, their likeliest replacements will be shortlisted and submitted to referendum. Sealed envelopes will be opened at annual ceremonies attracting worldwide interest. The advertising revenue might be sufficient to fund a brand new watchdog. There is no doubt that the disclosure of who had been voted the new, say, Lord Tebbit or Mrs Whitehouse would excite enthusiastic, often weeping audiences as far afield as St Helena or Macao, where British sailors are still very fondly remembered.
