What’s Lost in Winning?

# 71

   Last weekend was all Hip! Hip! and Hooray! across the land. We had Andy Murray winning the gentlemen’s singles at Wimbledon, The Lions taking the Rugby Union series in Australia and Chris Froome wearing the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France.  For many hours it was true to say that British (and Irish) cups ‘ranneth over’. On Sunday afternoon the hot and sunny streets of South London had fallen unusually quiet save for spasms of gasps and yells and cheering spilling from the open windows of living rooms. Indoors, with curtains drawn to keep out the sun’s unfamiliar glare, the population were held in thrall to television pictures and commentary from the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Pump me up before you go go.

   Everywhere fists were pumped, teeth bared and flags waved. For three or four hours the nation experienced something close to collective catharsis brought on by two extraordinary athletes playing lawn tennis. The infectious noise and frantic arm-waving provided evidence, which I still find quietly embarrassing, of how much less emotionally restrained we have become than our parents were. The spread of professional sport has made us all more competitive, more intense and more determined to win. We know we cannot play like that ourselves - most of us have never won anything - but we are desperate to identify with the winner or the winning side.

They argue with umpires…

   We are no longer recognisable as the people parodied by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in their 1967 Song of Patriotic Prejudice. That was a time when (so they claimed) ‘the English, the English, the English’ were best and the English immodestly claimed that their sporting behaviour stood out in contrast to conduct in the rest of the world:

And all the world over each nation’s the same,

They’ve simply no notion of playing the game.

They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won,

They practice beforehand, which ruins the fun…

…they cheer when they’ve won.

   When Andy won, he gratefully thanked his whole support team who had stood by him year after year; his trainers, coaches, fetchers, carriers and backers. Doubtless – somewhere amongst them – there was a ‘Sports Psychologist’; tasked with giving him the “…mental and emotional skills that athletes need for successful competition”[i] A mentor who could be relied upon to dismiss what used to be called ‘Corinthian values’; the ‘old-fashioned’ approach to sport that put amateurism, fair-play and morality above such sordid, vulgar, things as actually ‘winning’.

1934, 1935 & 1936, Fred Perry wins – cue polite applause. No arms raised, no flags waved.

   Today, thoroughly professionalised and all about money, sporting competition is no longer separated by its own special values and virtues from the grinding everyday world of market forces. The will to win at all costs has stripped much of the poetry out of sport. When it ceases to contain metaphors for the dilemmas we might encounter in life, sport is left with little to value but winning itself.

   The Corinthian Football Club, founded in 1892, is now largely forgotten although, in its heyday, its influence spread across Europe and reached even as far as Brazil. Real Madrid, for instance, originally chose to play in white shirts in respectful emulation of the kit worn by Corinthian FC. The Corinthians played only friendly matches and wouldn’t join the Football League or enter the FA Cup (until 1923) because they had rules forbidding them to compete for prizes of any description or take part in any contest that did not have charity as its primary objective. If the team they were playing lost a man, either through injury or by being sent off, the Corinthians immediately sent off one of their own men – just to keep the game even. Imagine Fergie or José The Special One offering to do that!

   The Corinthians of ancient Greece were proverbial for their wealth and profligacy but by Shakespeare’s time the title ‘Corinthian’ suggested a reliable ‘lad of mettle’. In Henry IV, Part 1, Act II, Scene iv, Prince Henry says of ‘Tom, Dick and Francis’ that;

“They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy…”

   Come the Regency period of the early 19^th Century and ‘Corinthians’ described a group of hard-living aristocrats, dedicated to pleasure, pugilism and horse-racing. By the 1890s the term had lost its associations with gambling and licentious behaviour retaining only ‘gentlemanliness’, ‘amateurism’ and the notion of playing sport for love of the game - not profit. This was the world of Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) who famously championed the virtues of chivalry and sportsmanship combined in the service of the British Empire. He belonged to a very particular class and period of history, displaying attitudes mostly alien to us now. Appropriately, he called his autobiography ‘The World as in My Time’ (1932). In so far as Newbolt is remembered now it is for his 1897 poem ‘Vitae Lampada’ (Torch of Life) which eventually became something of a millstone around his neck. By 1923 he was describing it to an audience in Canada as a “Frankenstein’s Monster that I created thirty years ago.” You will know the work (I’m certain). It begins;

There’s a breathless hush in The Close tonight,

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in…

It’s clearly not simply a poem about cricket, belonging instead alongside Wellington’s observation that the battle of Waterloo had been won ‘on the playing fields of Eton.’

   Next year sees the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and this, therefore, is the centenary of the last ‘endless’ summer of Edwardian England – mythologized by images of tennis and croquet played on green lawns, crisp rowing eights pulling together on bright rivers, cycling clubs touring dappled lanes and day-trips from the pier aboard friendly paddle-steamers. Reality, of course, was never like that. In England, the summer of 1913 was dry, dull and rather cool. But, when compared with the horror that was to come, there was an unnoticed finality – a hidden marker for the end of an era – to the undistinguished summer of 1913.

   ‘The Close’ that hosted Newbolt’s ‘breathless hush’ was the cricket field of Clifton College, Bristol. In June 1899, The Close was where A.E.J. Collins - then a thirteen year old schoolboy – made the highest cricket score ever recorded of 628, not out, in an innings that lasted across four afternoons. (Matches were not ‘time-limited’ in those days). Then, sure enough, with tragic inevitability, young Collins went on to get killed in action in November 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres. His body, like so many, was never found but his name is recorded in Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack and carved in stone on the Menin Gate.

   Newbolt’s poem linked his schoolboy cricketer to a battle in Africa, but a minor quibble about geography could not prevent the jingoism of 1914 applying its sentiments to the mud of Flanders or, later, to the slopes of the Gallipoli Peninsular;

The sand of the desert is sodden red –

Red with wreck of a square that broke; -

The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his banks,

And England’s far and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,

“Play up! Play up! And play the game.”

Give me strength.

   In ‘Take a Pew’, Alan Bennett’s wonderfully hollow sermon from ‘Beyond the Fringe’ (1960),[ii] he deliberately misquotes the words “of that grand old English poet, W. E. Henley;

When that One Great Scorer comes

To mark against your name,

It matters not who won or lost,

But how you played the game.

‘But how you played the game’. Words very meaningful and significant for us here, together, tonight. Words we might do very much worse than to consider…”

   Now, as far as I can Google, the reference to One Great Scorer comes not from William Henley at all but from the poem ‘Alumnus Football’[iii] by an American sports writer named Grantland Rice (1880-1954). The theme of the poem is the need to ‘keep coming back’; this being the advice given by a ‘wise old coach called Experience’. The last verse begins;

“Keep coming back and though the world may romp across your map,

Let every scrimmage find you still somewhere within the scrap;

For when the One Great Scorer comes

To mark against your name,

It matters not who won or lost,

But how you played the game.”

   Instead of this, the misquoted William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) had actually written ‘Invictus’; a much more considerable poem than ‘Alumnus Football’. From childhood, Henley was afflicted by tuberculosis of the bone and at the age of seventeen had one leg amputated below the knee. ‘Invictus’ was first published in 1875; the title being Latin for ‘unconquered’.  The first verse reads;

Out of the night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

And the final verse;

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll;

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

   Although I have only quoted two verses, I recommend reading the whole. It is also, I believe, the origin of that phrase, familiar to politicians and sports commentators alike, “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” Henley implies that virtue is sufficient and avoids the sentimentality exhibited by Newbold and Grantland Rice. His inspiration derives from Stoicism and a belief that passion can – and should - be overcome by reason. This is an insight which explains, for me, why Sports Psychologists make a living but Sports Stoics don’t.

A player not being overcome by Reason.

The reputation of Henley’s ‘Invictus’ was greatly enhanced when we heard that it had been recited by Nelson Mandela as an inspiration to his fellow prisoners on Robben Island, but later dented when quoted too by the Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy McVeigh, on the eve of his execution. Poetry it seems, like sportsmanship, is eventually up for grabs.

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[i] Random quote from the website of Winning Edge Psychological Services, St. Louis, Missouri. It seems there’s no competition that these guys can’t help you win!

[ii] See also my blog # 68, ‘Famished for shrapnel’ - below.

[iii] Published in The Pittsburgh Press, November 1914.

Radically slammed

# 70

   It doesn’t get any easier. Events in the reported world these last few weeks have left many of us by turns anxious, angry, appalled, saddened or just profoundly depressed. It is difficult to sustain a belief in the possibility of progress, of making a better future, when day by day the broadcast news contains more of the medieval world than the modern. If we cannot even respect each other’s lives, how can we claim to care about our society, let alone the environment? When people are murdered at random, whether by knives, rockets, bullets, car bombs, IEDs, sarin gas or missiles fired from drones, civilisation is always the first casualty. Killing people is actually wrong. After ten thousand years of civil society, do we still not know that? The weaponry employed indicates a level of access to technology, not the ethical standards of the killer. Murder remains murder; it is never excusable as ‘collateral damage’. Killing in the name of a religion diminishes all its followers – especially those who are priests, imams, rabbis or sheikhs; the schooled and the scholarly, whom you might suppose should at least know better.

   Refugees are everywhere. What Blair and Bush began as their ‘war on terror’ makes refugees of us all. Those not yet physically dispossessed require places of refuge if they are to preserve their sanity. For me, this week, one such place of safety became the British Museum. Established by Act of Parliament in 1753 “…to be preserved and maintained not only for the Inspection and Entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general Use and Benefit of the Public”, Sir Hans Sloane’s original bequest embodied the 18^th Century Enlightenment’s ideals of Reason, Discovery and Learning. These remain guiding lights in the present murderous gloom. They continue to form the basis of all reliable and humane alternatives to any self-styled radical’s barmy recital of opaque verses from whatever Holy Book comes to hand.

   The Museum – literally ‘the temple of the Muses’ - enjoys a serenity that belies the violence sometimes involved in the creation of its ancient artefacts and their later, enforced, collection into this one place. But as Lloyd Evans wrote in The Spectator recently, defending the Museum against the prospect of cuts in its government funding, “To most of us the museum is like drinkable tap water or tarmacked roads; it’s one of the bare-minimum amenities of civilised life. You rely on it without giving it a moment’s thought.”[i]

   With our history so accessible, why have we conceded ownership of the title ‘Radical’ to the forces of darkness? We grew up associating ‘radical’ with anything even vaguely progressive; a popular agitation, chipping away at the established structures of wealth and power. English Whig parliamentarians began calling for ‘radical reform’ of the electoral system in the 1790s. A few years later, supporters of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian principles were called ‘philosophical radicals’ and gradually, all over the world, the term ‘radical’ became attached to progressive, liberal, reforming political movements and ideologies.

   The ‘Radicals’ found in our history books were often people motivated by religious beliefs but their ‘radicalism’ was directed outward at economic, social and political reform. It was not self-destructive and did not require actions which contradicted the basic tenets of their faith. Religions have an appalling track-record in terms of what happens when they do take power. History teaches that a secular democratic state is the single best guarantee available of human rights, of any and all religious freedoms and the toleration of dissent. Be your heart’s desire ever-so ‘Radical’ or ever-so ‘Fundamental’, for God’s sake, let’s please just keep our politics secular.

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[i] ‘It’s madness to slash the British Museum’s budget.’ Lloyd Evans, The Spectator, 01 June 2013.

Bonjour Stylo Bon-Bons?

# 69

   Last week we walked as slightly awkward intruders through a clutch of Berber villages set into the rugged hillsides of the Ourika valley in Morocco. The greeting from the children playing amongst the rocks, flowers and thorns was immediate and friendly. Whereas passing adults exchanged discreet Arabic salaams with us, the children’s more lively welcome came in French and requested pens or sweets. Tactically and rhythmically, the call for pens was placed before the plea for sweeties. Maybe it’s a legacy from my own upbringing that I find it harder to refuse a child a pen than a sweet. After the first village I was entirely pen-less and wishing I’d had the foresight to pocket a good few multi-packs of pencils, crayons and biros while dawdling among the superfluous ‘retail opportunities’ which clog the arteries at Gatwick.

Berber village children

   I walked on down the red-earth track reminded of the much-quoted proverb; “Give a man a fish…”[1] There is no equivalent maxim predicting the consequences of giving a child a pen but it must have at least an outside chance of being life-changing. In my education, learning to read went hand in hand with learning to write. Why else would you learn to read if not also to write? In Islam there is a tradition of learning to read by fluent and accurate recitation of the Quran. The village children will already have embarked on this project, repeating verses until they have them by heart. If a pen helps in this endeavour, all well and good, but if the habit of writing enables them to expand upon other observations and compare different ideas it may, in time, unlock a more varied future. Isn’t there a line in Hamlet – spoken by either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern – that, in consequence of children yelling out their lines, ‘many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills’?[2] Maybe it’s from there we get the ever-hopeful sentiment that ‘the pen is mightier’?

Above every Berber village, the minaret of the mosque

   The amplified call to prayer echoes around these hills five times each day. According to our guide, five is the most important number. Islamic belief rests on five pillars; the Moroccan flag bears a five-pointed star. He was keen to distinguish this from the six-pointed Star of David. Could that be all that fundamentally divides Judaism from Islam - the geometry approved to draw a star? I remembered the previous day in Marrakesh when, at the Saadian Tombs, a different guide had shown us historic Muslim graves, all orientated so that the head of the deceased pointed to Mecca. Occasional tombs were set at right angles to these and were, he said, the graves of Christians. On one level, admirable religious toleration was displayed by burying Muslims and Christians close together if not actually side by side. I felt (but did not mention to the nice man) that a refined appreciation of absurdity was shown by persisting with religious differences even after death. Surely, beyond the grave, either one of them would have been proven correct or both had entered into some conclusive oblivion where no amount of abstruse theology and lifelong obedience to ritual would matter a single damn - for ever and ever. Amen.

   In Marrakesh, the calls to prayer passed unheeded by most of the population. Conspicuously a tourist, I did not feel so much an intruder in the city as I had in the Berber villages. My relationship with the villagers was plainly unbalanced. We shared a mutual curiosity but, realistically, those Berber children would not have the option of taking a trip to London and a stroll past my house. In Marrakesh, the curiosity of the merchants did not extend to London, only to our wallets. Their constant importuning was driven solely by the wares they had to flog.

Monkey and handler

Place Jemaa-el-Fna, Marrakesh.

   The constantly churning activity, by day and night, in Place Jemaa-el-Fna is described in the guide-books as ‘unmissable’ and ‘open-air theatre ‘. ‘Unavoidable’ and ‘unbearable’ might be more accurate. Piping snake-charmers, rubbery snakes, fortune-tellers, acrobats and sellers of trinkets compete frantically for attention and cash. The air reeks of horse-shit, burning sheep-fat and charcoal smoke. Decidedly, this is not one of my favourite places. From within a huddle of onlookers comes the pounding of drums and the hectoring of story-tellers. Distracted by a group of men manipulating child-sized monkeys wearing nappies, I nearly walked into an extraordinary display of ready-made dentures and a heap of extracted teeth, spread across a fragment of carpet. The crowd are supposed to be first curious, then fascinated and, finally, sufficiently astonished to part with their money. Honestly? I found it difficult not to be repelled - but hey, if they gave each monkey a typewriter and an endless supply of paper…

Approaching perfection in spontaneous graphic design

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[1] Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life.” (Or until the fishery is terminated by over-fishing, pollution, etc.) There are humorous variations on this; I like the one which concludes …Teach him to fish and you get rid of him for the weekend.

[2] Okay, according to Google, it’s reported by Rosencrantz in Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.

‘Famished for shrapnel’ – A Habit for Bennett

# 68

   You probably need to have been going to school in England well before 1959 to feel fully ‘at home’ with all of the characters in Alan Bennett’s memoirs and many of those in his plays. The audience for ‘People’ at the National Theatre last Tuesday evening appeared to qualify on grounds of age, being predominantly grey on top then the habitual beige, navy, brown or black everywhere else. Many were undoubtedly subscribers to the National Trust and thus the very ‘people’ whom Bennett’s Lady Dorothy would shortly be intent on keeping out of Stacpoole House. Neatly combed and instinctively polite we shuffled to our seats grunting at each step and trailing a collective whiff of eucalyptus-based embrocations. “Decay,” observes Lady Dorothy “is a kind of progress.”

   Our schooling in the 1950s instilled a habit of obedience which we thought we had long ago overthrown but it has crept back as we’ve aged. It came as no surprise to hear a woman announce to the row behind us that, since she and her husband had been allocated un-adjacent seats, they could be reunited if everyone ‘would just budge along one.’ Sure enough, with only a mildly irritated flurrying of coats and scarves and shopping-bags, the entire mid-section of Circle row ‘B’ shifted themselves one seat to the left. We were Bennett’s people. All those years ago we had sullenly accepted the need to ‘grow into’ over-size school blazers and belted gabardine raincoats. Turning eleven, we had sported bright new school caps when out and about with our parents and accepted an Osmiroid fountain pen as an appropriate birthday present. Using it to strike a neat line under the date and title on page one of our homework books we had gazed with horror on the inky smudge becoming visible as soon as the ruler moved away.

   Alan Bennett describes the reality of his childhood as being “enclosed and uneventful” notwithstanding events such as his family’s self-evacuation from Leeds on the day war was declared in 1939. Alan had looked forward to the excursion as a promised picnic but the family ate their sandwiches in the chaos of the city’s bus station before travelling deep into the countryside to escape the aerial bombardment many feared would begin as soon as Mr Chamberlain finished speaking on the wireless. In fact, Leeds experienced relatively few air-raids, leaving young Bennett to record that he and his school-friends had been ‘famished for shrapnel’. And it’s shrapnel I find best describes the penetration achieved by his observations. He never mocks or ridicules. He skilfully lances the incessant prudery and pretence with which the English middle-classes have surrounded their sexuality let alone their bodily fluids and functions. His anger is sometimes evident but never caustic. His stories build a whole picture, with the humour remaining incisive rather than raucous, blunt, exaggeratedly surreal or confrontational. His remarks are restrained, apposite and often dry but they cut to the heart of the matter, leaving the target scarred but manifestly still intact.

Alan Bennett – awkward, northern and…err …acute.

   I first became aware of Bennett’s work in 1963 when someone’s parents had an LP of ‘Beyond The Fringe’. He was unmistakable as the Anglican vicar in Take a Pew, delivering a persuasively meaningless sermon constructed entirely from commonplaces. In the sketch, Civil War, he portrayed a government spokesman. When questioned about how they would deal with a four-minute warning of impending Soviet nuclear attack if the call came when Prime Minister Macmillan was not at Number Ten, he cheerfully replied,

   “Well, we’d ask Lady Dorothy of course!”

   Ah, Lady Dorothy. Dorothy Evelyn Macmillan, née Cavendish, daughter of the 9^th Duke of Devonshire, wife to the then Prime Minister and long term mistress to Lord Boothby – a fact known to the press and all of Westminster but never mentioned in public. Lady Dorothy, her very name an echo from a time when a Tory PM had not only attended Eton with half the toffs in his cabinet but was actually related to the rest by either blood or marriage.

   Alan Bennett, as you might expect, does a formidable line in Dorothy’s; Dorothy Lintott in The History Boys, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole in People (both characters played beautifully by Frances de la Tour). With the Talking Heads series of monologues, he rather cornered the market for dramas involving ‘ladies of a certain age’ (Patricia Routledge, Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith, Thora Hird...). Bennett notices in particular the vocabulary and syntax of authentic speech. He doubtless keeps a notebook of overheard snippets which will one day find a home in a piece of dialogue on the stage. Years ago, two elderly women were sitting in front of him on a bus and one remarked,

   “Her cat - you know, from next door - had one of my tits this morning.”

   Or, more recently, a new arrival at some twilight nursing home was welcomed with the greeting, enunciated with the perfectly patronising and mellifluous intonation of someone schooled in professional 'caring',

   “You’re our first Kevin.”

   Finding himself on one occasion ‘outed’ by the Daily Mail for (apparently) not being homosexual, Bennett explained to Mark Lawson of the BBC that he found it “…a great blessing to be a writer because you think, well – I can always write it down. And that does dull the pain, really.”[1]  I like to imagine Alan Bennett and his partner, Rupert Thomas, heading off to visit an ancient Saxon or Norman church and pausing to eat their sandwiches, quietly, among long-forgotten names and dates and benisons in the churchyard. Bennett tells of coming home one day to find Rupert watching a production of Wuthering Heights on television.

   “You’re rather like Heathcliff,” says Rupert and Alan is pleasantly surprised until Rupert adds, “Awkward, northern and a cunt.”

   Mark Lawson has interviewed Bennett many times for the BBC. Most recently, on Radio 4’s Front Row programme[2] Lawson observed that the question ‘What is history?’ has become a recurrent theme in Bennett’s work. “History Boys is about the teaching of history, The Habit of Art about the writing of biography … People about the packaging of history…who gets to tell the story, who gets the last word.”[3]  The temptation to illustrate this by running together various lines of dialogue from People and The History Boys is suddenly overwhelming. Oh, go on then…

Irwin Ours is an easier faith. Where they reverenced sanctity we reverence celebrity; they venerated strenuous piety; we venerate supine antiquity. In our catechism old is good, older is better, ancient is best with a bonus on archaeology because it’s the closest history comes to shopping.

Dorothy I particularly abhor metaphor. Metaphor is fraud. England with all its faults. A country house with all its shortcomings. The one is not the other…I will not collaborate in your conceit of country. It is a pretend England… I want it the way it’s always been…not done up, not run down…just taken for granted. When did that stop?

Mrs Lintott History’s not such a frolic for women as it is for men…

Dakin I tell you history is fucking.

Mrs Lintott History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history?

Rudge History is just one fucking thing after another.

Mrs Lintott History is women following behind with the bucket.

Lumsden You see, Lady Dorothy. There is no pollution that time does not expunge, no affront that indifference will not embrace…

Dorothy  I long for the decay of England. Then at least we could stop blustering. England at a standstill and this just another stately home…not evaluated, not made special. Ordinary.[4]

  

   In his Introduction to People[5]  Bennett notes that “When it came to giving offence…I kept finding that I had been if not timid, at least over scrupulous.” He had tried to imagine the National Trust as “entirely without inhibition, ready to exploit any aspect of the property’s recent history to draw in the public, wholly unembarrassed by the seedy or disreputable.” Very soon, however, he found his imagination overtaken by real life. He points out that his objections to some of the Trust’s marketing strategies “are not to do with morals but to do with taste.” The chamber pots of celebrity urine he invents as an attraction for Stacpoole House stem surely from the same imaginative root as “those scraps of cloth on which the monks wiped their bums” in The History Boys. Alan Bennett has a reliable habit of making both history and his personal reminiscences witty, surprising, clever, insightful and – at times - reassuringly basic.

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[1] BBC Archive: interview with Mark Lawson, 06.12.2009.

[2] Front Row BBC Radio 4. Broadcast 20.03.2013

[3] Mark Lawson, ibid.

[4] Irwin, Dakin, Mrs Lintott and Rudge appear in The History Boys. Dorothy and Lumsden are from People.

[5] People - with an introduction by the author. Alan Bennett. Faber & Faber. London 2012

Portraying Life – don’t try this on your way home.

# 67

   An exhibition of Manet’s portraiture continues at the Royal Academy until 14 April 2013. We went to see it last Friday evening. I know an exhibition has worked for me if I realise I am seeing things differently afterwards; usually on the way home. The pictures in this show are portraits and all are concerned in some way with the level of realism that can be achieved by direct observation. Collectively, they also represent Manet’s disregard for the previous European tradition of giving primacy to ‘history’ paintings: paintings which depict mainly religious and mythological subjects set in ‘morally uplifting’ compositions. A number of Manet’s portraits are specifically described as ‘genre paintings’ because they convey scenes from his everyday life. And in these he often included an identifiable individual almost as a means of confirming the reality of what was being depicted.

   Manet’s milieu was that of the leisured 19^th Century Parisian bourgeoisie. His subjects were largely his family and his friends. An urban man throughout his life, Manet had a “wide circle of literary, artistic, musical and political friends who defended his art, served as sitters for his portraits and took roles in his scenes of contemporary life.”[i]  Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is both a group portrait and a painting from modern life. Manet included himself in the panorama as if he were “the orchestrator of this social gathering” and was thereby making it his “cultural self-portrait.”

 

Manet’s cultural milieu : a detail from Music in the Tuileries Gardens.

Manet is the figure at the extreme left.

   Entirely consistent with gender attitudes of the time, Manet depicts the women as encased, passive and figuratively grounded. His men are almost all standing, some are mobile, most have the capacity to be active; but only, perhaps, as flâneurs. They celebrate their status as the idle rich; loafers and strollers of the boulevards to a man. In 1862, however, the painting was highly controversial. The French Academy did not consider the depiction of modern urban life was a suitable subject for ‘high art’. And worse; Manet’s brushwork was intentionally fleeting and his composition defied formal perspective. It all amounted to far too much realism, not something that the École des Beaux-Arts could accept as a finished painting.

   Leaving the RA sometime after 8pm we made our way to Olivelli, a commendable and affordable Italian restaurant in Waterloo.[ii] It was not until later - when we had a long wait at the far end of Lower Marsh for a Streatham-bound 159 - that the difficulty of portraying our contemporary urban milieu began to gnaw away at me. Looking up at the passengers on the top deck of the fifth number 12 to swish past, I recorded weariness, anxiety and subdued frustration in equal measure on the passing faces. Men and women seemed to share the same air of tired resignation. None were ‘active’, none were ‘grounded’ and their ‘cultural portrait’ would be captured only by an endless loop of CCTV recorded by the security cameras.

 

My urban milieu : late last Friday

   Before this exhibition, I had not previously been aware of Manet’s painting The Railway, 1873. In this, Victorine Meurent models for him as an enigmatic young woman looking up from the pages of her book as an unseen steam train departs from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Her fingers secure references to several pages in the book and a puppy snoozes in her lap. This is painting as a snapshot, capturing a single, unrepeatable, moment in time. It is very clearly a painting made at the beginning of the age of photography. In a moment, the steam will vanish, the puppy will awaken, the little girl will turn around or the young woman may glance again at her book. It is even possible that Manet himself will appear at his studio door (in the background, to the left of Victorine’s head). In all respects The Railway is a truly modern painting, obedient to the new, impressionist, injunction to paint the effect, not the object.

Edouard Manet, The Railway, 1873

 

London, Gare de Waterloo, one hundred and forty years later.

  

   Awaiting the night bus in the rain, an immigrant worker keeps his thoughts to himself in a composition not entirely dissimilar to Manet’s, but perforce without the background of steam and the fair little girl. Manet, I believe, would at least have approved the volume and intensity of the blackness all around the lonely individual and the transient, unsettling, discomfort suggested by the glossy redness of the narrow seat.

 

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862-3

   But then, a Waterloo bus shelter on a cold rainy night; what could be further from a summer picnic in a woodland clearing? When the bus finally came, I sat staring at a postcard purchased in the exhibition. Around me, other passengers dozed, gazed into the night or tapped the screens of their smart phones. It occurred to me that Le dejeuner sur l’herbe may be a painting about the tension between confidence and vulnerability. A nude woman is having a picnic with two fully-dressed men. She is not at all alarmed by her situation and stares directly at the viewer. Her right leg is planted very definitely within the space of the reclining male. The men are in conversation which may or may not include the naked woman. A second woman, improbable in size, bathes in the near background. It would surely have been the assertiveness of the naked woman that made the picture so controversial when exhibited in the Salon des Refusés of 1863. She was manifestly confident when the society of the time required her to be distinctly vulnerable.

 

Confidence and vulnerability on the night bus.

   The night bus takes some of us home but others – minimum wage cleaners and security guards – may be heading back to work. Confidence enables sleep, it’s their economic situation that renders them vulnerable. Transport for London records 38 million such night-time journeys annually. Clothed or unclothed, a picnic on the grass becomes the stuff of dreams. And “What you lookin’ at?” is meant as a vigorous challenge, not a casual enquiry… welcome to my world, Monsieur Manet.

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[i] All quotations are from the Gallery Guide written by MaryAnne Stevens.

[ii] Olivelli. 61 The Cut, London SE1 8LL. www.ristoranteolivelli.co.uk