DIARY
Last week a minor personal catastrophe tossed me the key to open yet another door bolted against my freedom. Chewing on some toast during the large breakfast I am obliged to consume, a £25,000 wall of den- tistry collapsed as I could only have wished upon the Channel Tunnel. Like the original Gestapo, the Himmler of Harley Street unearthed a Shropshire Schindler and before you could say NHS he was bowling along the Shell-like-Guide highway to my house, dispensing skill, comfort and, above all, hope. My Salopian wizard is a true gent. It set me replaying another old game: What is a True Gent? Is it the same as a gentle- man? It is a definition as elusive as 'camp'. Certainly, it is a subjective one and not to be confused with that other incomparable English jigsaw, the Class Game.
Some dozen years ago, I came upon a brilliant book called The Gentleman in Trol- lope — Individuality and Moral Conduct by Shirley Letwin. It seemed to me to shine like a rainbow insight into the English char- acter. The author was no more than a name to me, and when she died recently I was fascinated by Charles Moore's moving and eloquent obituary in this journal. Her book, along with The Anatomy of Melancholy, is always at reach beside me as the light rises up from the Long Mynd across the way. I cannot begin to summarise its richness and perception, but only urge you to try to obtain a copy (Macmillan). Above all, it must raise the spirits of those, like myself, who squirm at the imbecile notion of class- lessness. The English Gentleman not only exists but is flowering amidst the cultural rubble of these last hideous years of the century. The very word 'culture' has been debased to promote anything that is primi- tive and alien, like Australian soaps or the accepted trash that calls itself 'music', ban- ishing modesty and the patient pursuit of excellence that is the mark of the EG. Here we go, 'ere we go, such a response to popu- lar culture is, I am told, `squirearchicar. So be it. If a refusal to be intimidated by gen- eral loutishness is `blimpish', you may call me squire any day. All this glib, simple- minded categorising by the liberal mafia becomes more vicious than tedious when the Prince of Wales comes under attack for proposing what is no more than self-evi- dent to anyone decently intelligent.
Abook like Dr Letwin's remains a clas- sic of wisdom about the way we live now. It is both discursive and instructive, ambling over the nation's landscape, describing the oddity and definition of a Gentleman, his incompatible qualities, the meaning of his integrity, manners and occupation, finish-
JOHN OSBORNE
ing up with his conduct in regard to love, ambition, religion and, finally, the dangers to which it exposes him. It is delivered rather like table talk of a high order. Luther's for example, and none the worse for that. Let me give you a few examples: `The gentleman's world does not require a choice between rebellion and submission, violence and reason, alienation and unity, certainty and apathy, it is a world full of nuances.' Dr Letwin continues:
In a world of people who think only of get- ting and spending, who are trying to wipe the slate clean or tie up everything in large, neat sharp-cornered parcels, who confuse authori- ty with power, who shudder at the dappled diversity of the human world, the gentleman will not feel at home ... When others give in, he may go on fighting ... He may be a statesman, a farmer, a brewer, a doctor or a parson, but still he will work in the spirit of a potter, shaping and moulding as best he can.
AGentleman 'will always be thorough- ly at home and true in the human world because he can enjoy its absurdities and has no ambition to overleap mortality'. Well, a week in which it is announced that Andrew Neil is off to America with a licence to go shoot the really big game of wealth and power can only be a good one. I once began a gossamer piece of fancy for the Sunday Times: 'A year in which my mother died cannot be said to be all bad.' It hap- pened to be the week that its newly appointed editor took the road to England, fame and riches, and I must have been one of the first victims of his obdurate stupidity. Neil, who probably thinks 'nuance' is a form of choreography, refused (in breach
of all gentlemanly newspaper practice) to pay the admittedly huge fee which had been already agreed. No one can repudiate so insistently the existence of gentlemanly virtues by his every act and utterance as Neil, a Scot by mischance and a true-born Australian. America doesn't deserve him. Even they have produced some true gents, albeit mostly films stars like Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracey. What puzzles me about Andrew Neil is how any- one over the age of 35, let alone the editor of a national newspaper, can contemplate the rapacious joylessness of regular immer- sion in a night club. Dr Letwin would have had the answer.
I find 1 am still a-babble with Betjernania. Last week, someone mentioned a new board at Waterloo which will announce the departures of trains to Omsk, Tomsk and Kathmandu (Moscow: 'serfs on the line' or `frozen points'?) and I was reminded of passing Blackfriars Station long ago with J.B, who pointed out the places it served, carved into the stone, including Vienna, Baden-Baden and St Petersburg (seemingly forever Leningrad at that time). He marched up to the ticket office and asked cheerfully for a return to St Petersburg. The clerk hardly looked up and replied, 'I'm afraid you'll have to go to Victoria for that.'
In Candida Lycett Green's book, I was intrigued to see a photograph of Nancy Mitford at the wheel of a motorboat accompanied by John Betjeman and Lord Alfred Douglas. Several times I had got J.B. to retell me a story about Lord Alfred, which made me assume that they had never met. While a schoolboy, J.B. wrote a char- acteristically enthusiastic letter to L.A. in praise of his poetry. L.A., then living in France, wrote a courteous and most proper reply. John's mother, in the way that moth- ers probably still do, rifled through his trousers, found the letter and passed it to her husband. J.B. described an oppressive Sunday lunch from which Mrs B. and her daughters rose hastily, leaving father and son to take an afternoon walk together. After some time, J.B. pare said, 'I under- stand that you have been corresponding with Lord Alfred Douglas. Is this correct?' `Yes, sir.' Long pause. `Do you know what Lord Alfred Douglas is?"No, sir.' Lord Alfred Douglas is a bugger.' Pause. `Do you know what a bugger is?"No, sir.' A bugger is one of two men so mutually infatuated that one inserts his piss pipe into the other one's anus.' Pause. 'Now do you know what a bugger is?"Yes, sir.' They walked home in silence and neither the subject nor the protagonist-poet was ever mentioned again.
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