Threats of Pain and Ruin Read online

  Architects are not entitled to the same indulgence as the writers of bad books because bad books are easily avoided, consigned undisturbed to the remoter shelves of libraries, whereas bad buildings obtrude on passers-by and create an obligation on future ages, either to maintain or to replace them. Bad buildings are to the eye what passively-breathed smoke is to the lungs of the non-smoker: something noxious and unwanted but inescapable. An author has a right to his badness, but not an architect.

  It is true, of course, that there is no universal agreement about Denys Lasdun’s buildings: but I suspect that those who claim to like them are applying extra-aesthetic considerations (such as that they were at the cutting edge in the way that Lister was at the cutting edge of the surgery of his time) and indulge also in an architectural variant of Macbeth’s logic: that past architectural crimes are so heinous that one has to continue them or admit them.

  Nor does Denys Lasdun’s probity, testified to movingly by his son, improve matters, rather the reverse. The son says that his father was not motivated either by the desire for fame or money, rather by the desire for the perfection of the work, and that his father’s example had given him as a kind of artistic conscience in his own chosen field of literature. But a man who can build the worst and most inhuman of buildings with purity of heart appals me more than one who does so for mere lucre: for while the desire for the latter is comprehensible to us all (which of us, after all, has never been tempted?), the former builds from a pure and undiluted failure of taste, ability and understanding. And since architecture is an inherently social art, requiring clients or patrons for its transformation from concept to actual building, its failure is a social or at least a collective failure. An author, by contrast, can write a bad book by his own unaided efforts.

  Be this all as it may, I still find James Lasdun’s filial piety (an ancient but now uncommon virtue) exemplary, and wish only that I could feel and express it myself. Alas, I cannot.

  His memoir of being persecuted by e-mail is well worth the reading because it illustrates a modern vice as well as an ancient virtue, or at least a modern way of putting a vice into action: persecution by e-mail and internet being the dark side, or a dark side, of the so-called information age. By the end of the book one trembles: for what happened to James Lasdun could easily happen to any of us. Each of us is but the press of the send button away from vicious denunciation, character assassination and the destruction of our reputation. This applies almost as much to private individuals as to public figures, and it is perhaps surprising that it is not more frequent than it appears to be. Perhaps it is just that even an evil requires time to gain momentum.

  Lasdun’s persecutor not only altered his Wikipedia entry, but wrote calumnies about him on Amazon and other sites (admittedly a hazard faced only by those who put themselves before the public in some way). These calumnies could be and were removed in time, but e-mails to his employers accusing him of things that were both inherently unlikely and difficult to disprove were far more serious, and could have been done to anyone. Lasdun stood accused of the kind of ‘crimes’ which always besmirch in the modern world—racism, sexism, harassment etc.—and which he himself had previously believed ought to be extirpated by administrative regulation. He found that proving a negative, even within the confines of his own mind, was not easy.

  None of us is totally immune to the idea that there is no smoke without fire and unless we assume that the world is full of people of motiveless malignity (to quote Coleridge’s inapt characterisation of Iago, for Iago has one of the most common, pervasive and long-enduring motives in the whole of the human repertoire), we are inclined to believe that every denunciation or calumny must contain a grain of truth—to mix slightly the smoke and fire metaphor. Yes, there must be a grain of truth in all that smoke.

  Indeed, Lasdun himself almost believed it himself, of the very calumnies that have made his life a misery for three or more years. He calls himself a man of impeccably liberal views—is it only liberals who think of their own views as impeccable?—and as such wondered to what extent his persecutor’s (perhaps a neologism, persecutrix would be in order in this context) complaints against him might be justified. In fact, there is not a shadow of justification, or even plausible reason, for them if his account of his own conduct is true: they are obviously the product of a wilfully unbalanced mind, a mind that has delighted to unbalance itself. It is strange how the author’s certainties about some things, namely the impeccable nature of his equally unquestionable liberal views, lead to a strange lack of confidence about his own rightness in the face of outrageous persecution.

  I once suffered to a very minor degree the kind of persecution that Lasdun suffered. I had written an article displeasing to an active pressure group and soon found myself not only inundated by offensive messages but the object of efforts to have me fired from the institutions in which I worked. This persecution lasted only a few days, not years like Lasdun’s, but it was very unpleasant while it lasted and I will neither mention the subject here nor return to it another time, for fear of stirring up the hornets’ nest again. (Yet another metaphor, I am afraid: between smoke, fire, grains of truth and hornets’ nests, it seems that we live in a hazardous world). This is not very courageous of me, no doubt, but I do not care enough about the subject to endure any suffering because of my opinions about it—which, I have to confess, might not be impeccable in the sense of being indisputably true. And unlike the persecution of Lasdun, the persecution of me was at least rational: it was obviously directed at getting me never to repeat my views in public, and it worked. I have not been persecuted since.

  Perhaps the most alarming thing about Lasdun’s account is his complete impotence in the face of his persecutor. The police agree that she is in breach of the law, but not to a sufficient degree to make it worthwhile to prosecute her. (Here one is inclined to ask, Worthwhile for whom? He who fails to prosecute the Dane never gets rid of the need for someone to pay the Danegeld.) No doubt Lasdun could resort to the civil rather than the criminal law, but like most citizens he has insufficient means to do so and the result in practice would probably be nil in any case. He is, in a word, defenceless, at least without resorting himself to criminal means. One feels a rising sense of outrage on his behalf as the story proceeds, and also increasing anxiety.

  The question that a memoir such as this cannot possibly answer (and this is not criticism of it) is whether persecution of the kind suffered by the author is on the rise. Inclined as I am to pessimism, I suspect that it is; for as the reactions to the death of Mrs Thatcher showed, people now seem not to feel the need to control their anger in the name of decorum and decency. Indeed, I suspect that you could ask a hundred people in the street how they valued decorum, and a goodly percentage of them would not know what it is and would not value it if they did. And where there is no decorum, no holding back, why should persecution of individuals not rise when the means to persecute are so readily available?

  17 - Of Owls and Richard the Third: Part 1

  Not long ago at a conference I was asked whether I thought that boredom was an important cause of bad, and worse than bad, behaviour. I said that I thought that it probably was, though I could not positively prove it. At any rate, those who behave badly often claim to do so because they are bored, and no one claims to behave well because he is bored.

  But even if it is accepted that boredom causes, or rather explains, bad behaviour, it cannot be the final explanation: for why are people bored? Is not the world interesting enough for them? What would a world be like that they found sufficiently interesting to keep them on the straight and narrow path that leads to good behaviour? It is a terrible fate for a creature endowed with consciousness and self-consciousness to find the world uninteresting.

  My problem is the opposite: I find the world too interesting. This means that I am all too easily distracted, like a child confronted with too many good t
hings to eat. I pursue things that interest me until something else distracts me, which means that I master nothing. But at least I am not bored.

  I happened the other day to walk past a charity shop (called thrift shops in America) in whose window were displayed two books, one about owls and the other a biography of Richard III. Both owls and Richard III have played a small part in my life, and I went into the shop and bought them. Together they cost less than a packet of cigarettes, the smoking of which is disproportionately encountered among the bored community—we must now call all people who share a characteristic a community.

  I shall deal with my relationship with Richard III in another article; suffice it to say that I became more than normally interested in him as a result of buying the book. Here I shall deal with my relationship with owls.

  Owls, I confess, play a only very small part in my life. In the little town in which I live when I am in England there is a woman who is always accompanied on her shopping expeditions by a pet owl. No one finds this astonishing or, if they do, lets their astonishment be known; this is either from a laudable desire not to intrude upon the owner or not to gratify her desire for notice. And in France a pair of tawny owls to-whit to-whoo every summer night in a tree a hundred yards or so (to judge by the sound of it) from the house. I never tire of listening them; I also never see them, and so their lives are a closed book to me. They therefore reassure me that there is mystery still in the world; for a world without mystery, in which everything were revealed and known, would be a terrible place. Knowledge is wonderful, the more of it the better, but omniscience would be a nightmare.

  The first owl of my life was Owl in Winnie the Pooh. I think he had a delayed effect upon my intellectual development, or perhaps I should say upon my Weltanschauung. Owl held himself to be intellectually the superior of every other character in Pooh: in fact he was the intellectual among them, and took himself very seriously, as the embodiment of knowledge and wisdom. But he wasn’t very good at spelling (he signed himself WOL) nor were his thoughts always of the most brilliant. He put a notice up outside his home in a tree asking visitors to ‘PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.’ Of course, I delighted as a child in the absurdity of this: why would anyone go to his door if he did not want an answer (notwithstanding the fact that I sometimes rang doorbells myself and ran away).

  So Owl gave me the first intimation in my life that all are not wise who claim to be learned. And Owl was a hint also that the clever could be the most foolish of all.

  But why did owls symbolise wisdom in the first place? The splendid photos in my book, succinctly titled Owls, suggested a reason: owls seem to have only two states, the serene calmness of sleep and the most intense alertness when awake. Try as we might not to anthropomorphise, owls look serious; they indulge in no foolish or redundant movement. This is nonsense, of course: owls are bird-brained. And one of the things that I learnt from this book, delightful to me because completely useless, is that the Owl of Minerva does not necessarily spread her wings at dusk: nearly forty per cent of the 133 extant species of owls are diurnal, not nocturnal. I bet you didn’t know that.

  Reading Owls brought back my second encounter with these birds. It was with their pellets rather than with the birds themselves. I had quite forgotten that these pellets are not faeculant but rather the product of regurgitation because owls have no crops. As I learnt from this book, owls have relatively low acidity stomachs, and tend to swallow their prey whole. They are bad at digesting bones, hair and the chitin of insects, so they dispose of them by regurgitation.

  I remember (vaguely) sifting through owl pellets on a nature-study weekend when I was about fifteen. The purpose of this was to learn the diet of owls. Owls taught me (alas, nearly half a century later) how important this analysis was, for it indicated not only how owls lived but—interestingly—proved the law of unintended consequences.

  Cape barn owls were introduced on to islands in the Seychelles in an attempt to control the rodents there that were destroying crops: for in their own environment, Cape barn owls feed copiously on such rodents. At about the same time of their introduction into the Seychelles, however, the indigenous and unique avian fauna of the islands began to die off. This was thought initially to be because of illegal hunting and trapping by local people; but the analysis of Cape barn owl pellets soon showed that it was the owls, not the local people, who were responsible. The owls had been introduced to reduce the rodents, but they reduced the birds instead; this was because the unsuspecting birds were the easier prey. Not only humans, but owls take the path of least resistance.

  The law of unintended consequences is one of the hardest for people to learn because it is so unflattering to our conception of ourselves as rational beings, and because (if it is a law) it suggests inherent limits to our power. We shall never fail to commit errors.

  Some of the hidden historical information in Owls was to me fascinating. Ornithologists have long studied the numbers of birds which fluctuate markedly as conditions vary. Obviously predators depend greatly upon their prey; and the numbers of their prey (in the case of owls, predominantly rodents and other small mammals) depends on the state of vegetation, which goes through regular cycles. I had not quite realised just how accurate Pharaoh’s dream was, a dream that applies (allegorically) to nature as to the business cycle:

  Behold, there come seven years of great plenty

  throughout all the land of Egypt:

  and there shall arise after them seven years of famine;

  and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt;

  and the famine shall consume the land;

  and the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason

  of that famine following; for it shall be very grievous.

  The cycle in nature may be shorter than seven years, but the description in the Bible is not an exaggeration. Lemming populations explode in good years, as do the populations of owls that prey upon them; but then the collapse comes, just as it does when traders think the bull market will never end, and the lemmings and owls are decimated by famine.

  The historical information that truly astonished me in Owls was that studies of bird populations in Europe by ornithologists continued even throughout the First and Second World Wars. We learn, for example, which years were good and which bad for barn owls during the German occupation of the Netherlands, even as the population was close to starvation. The authors do not point out how strange this is, but I found it very moving. Others, of course, might find it disconcerting that people could seriously concern themselves with such matters even in the midst of the cataclysm surrounding them; but to me the power of mental abstraction from the surrounding cataclysm was a proof of the human spirit. In its quiet way, the continuation of the study of bird populations was as heroic as outright resistance.

  One method by which ornithologists of the past estimated fluctuations in the numbers of owls was by the numbers brought to taxidermists for stuffing. The fashion for stuffed birds in glass cases seems to have passed and so this method is no longer used; but I am glad to have learnt another such (to me) completely useless fact.

  Reading Owls destroyed one of my fantasies: that it would be good to live as an owl (provided, of course, that one had human consciousness to go with it). I had assumed that owls had no enemies, that they sat on their trees and contemplated life when not actually hunting, living as at the peak of a pyramid; that theirs was an easy life. How wrong I was! Owls have less than a one in four chance of surviving to their first birthday (though the oldest owl recorded was 68 years old). They often starve to death. And just because owls may be grouped in the same classificatory families does not mean that they have family solidarity; indeed the larger owls often prey on the smaller. If Swift had read Owls he might have written:

  So nat’ralists observe, an owl

  Hath smaller owls that on him fuel;
<
br />   And these have smaller owls to bite ‘em.

  And so proceeds Ad infinitum.

  I also learnt in Owls about the superiority of the Swedish social security system to the British. The Swedes noticed that the population of eagle owls had declined in their country. Owls are relatively easy to breed in captivity, and the Swedes did so. More difficult, however, is the successful release of owls bred in captivity into the wild; having got used to being fed, they fall into a state of dependency.

  The Swedes, with their typical intelligent pragmatism, devised a system of rehabilitation for their home-bred owls. They put their owls in open cages into the field. The owls would fly out; to begin with would return to the cage to be fed but as they learnt to find food for themselves they would return less and less until they did not return at all. Their high rate of attrition was no higher than that of birds bred in the wild. The Swedes used social security for owls as a means to restoring them to independence.

  If the Swedish ornithologists had been British, however, they would never have let the owls into the wild but kept them in their cages and gone on feeding them. They would have wanted to keep the owls dependent for ever, not for the owls’ sake, but for fear of making themselves redundant and losing their jobs.

  There is thus a lot to be learnt from a book about owls, and I was pleased to see from the back cover of my copy that the book had sold more than 50,000 copies since first published in 1970. My copy was dated 1995, which means that it had sold 2000 copies a year for a quarter of a century (there were thirteen printings, evenly spaced, in that time); interest in owls, while it continues no doubt to be a minority one, is perpetual, and that those who have it are not likely to be bored.