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Peter Simple's triumph
A. N. Wilson
Manypeople in the darkest days of the 1940s were thankful to the humorists (Pont, ITMA, the Crazy Gang, etc) for keeping their pecker up. As the lady said, 'The only good fing abart the Blitz is ow it tikes yer moind orf the war.' Later in the century, however, and especially in the Wilson-Heath era of unhappy memory, it was the humorists themselves who were doing the fighting. They were 'the Few' for my generation. They alone seemed able to puncture all the ridiculous cant of politics. And Peter Simple led the van. By looking forward to the day in 2020 when the country was ruled by the Royal Socialist Party with King Norman (heir apparent: Prince Barry of South Wales) and Queen Doreen, one almost feels that Peter Simple is responsible for it not quite happening. Now, as soon as some prize ass in lawn sleeves gets up and starts talking about the miners' strike, we all immediately recog- nise him as Dr Spaceley-Trellis, go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, and he seems less horrible than absurd. Only those who sit spellbound in the Beria Memorial Hall will fail to be amused by 'Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the Hampstead thinker, chairman of Deck- chairmen against Racism and many other organisations', as yet again she denounces South Africa.
A very un-Peter-Simplish writer once began a poem with the words, 'Look, we have come through!' In spite of Mr Scargill and the IRA, many people in England also echo the words, very cautiously, as they stare back over their shoulders at the Wilson-Heath era which we have moved away from. The changes of the time were horrible. England became coarser and uglier. But the Left failed to establish dominance. The foamingly fanatical left- wing fringe moved in to take over the Labour party and rendered it politically impotent. And among intelligent people it no longer became necessary to pretend that one subscribed to all the vacuities of the liberal package deal. This was certainly not due to any skill on the part of right- wing politicians who in our generation have been feebler, thank God, than at any stage of history. Nor was it due to the 'serious' right-wing intellectuals of the Salisbury Review stamp, most of whom are as repugnant as their lefty counterparts. But it is due largely, I believe, to the humorists who have made us realise that we do not need to take any posturing bore seriously merely because she or he is claiming moral superiority over us.
So long live Peter Simple, who has helped to render paper tigresses such as Dame Judith Hart and Mrs Barbara Castle into toothless hags who, in their judgments of the world, merely seem to echo the self-righteous pronouncements of Mrs Dutt-Pauker. The hallmark of Peter Sim- ple's humour is black pessimism, for he knows that there is little or no distinction between his darkest fantasies and the condition of the real world. But his vision is always tempered by a ridiculous childish whimsicality which gives it its particular charm. It has more in common with Beach- comber than with more modern satirists. In the latest selection from his column, for instance, I was delighted to renew my acquaintance with Saint Oick who was 'of course, the well-known hermit who lived with several anchoresses in a wall-to-wall carpeted hermitage in what was then a dense forest but is now occupied by St Oick's Crescent, Oickwell Road and other suburban streets' . . . Equally, I rejoiced to meet again all my old favourites: Dr Heinz Kiosk the social psychologist ('We are all guilty'); Neville Dreadberg the playwright; and J. Bonington Jagworth, the beastliest road-hog of them all, accom- panied one need hardly add, by the Rev John Goodwheel, the 'Apostle of the Motorways'.
But what of another character? What of Peter Simple himself? His fantasy world is wholly distinctive, and yet I have always found it impossible to reconstruct the personality of the man behind it. Meeting him was a surprise; for, in spite of the underlying melancholy of the column, I think I had expected the whimsy to pre- dominate. In appearance, Michael Whar- ton recalls the Beachcomber, perhaps even the Belloc era of journalism, girt about as he is with black fustian and dark tie. There is laughter in his eyes, but something like affliction plays across his features as he talks in a low, quiet voice which, while lacking an 'accent', is recognisably that of a Yorkshireman. The two subjects about which he discoursed when I first met him were the legendary history of Britain — King Arthur and so on — and Belloc's attitude to the Jews. I was surprised to be told that Peter Simple's mother was a Yorkshirewoman, but that his father was the son of a German Jewish emigre who had come to Bradford in the 1860s, and that as a young man, Peter Simple, alias Michael Wharton, was called Michael Nathan.
Some of the story which he then un- folded has been published in this remark- able autobiography. It is deadpan, brief, modest, elegant and (I found) extremely moving. Now that I have read it more than once, it occurs to me that much of Peter Simple's brilliance derives from a sense that England is a strange place, not to say a foreign land. Although both his parents were thoroughly acclimatised, Wharton grew up as a social outsider. His father had cut loose from the Jewish wool-merchants of Bradford and devoted himself to a weird life, hill-farming, gambling and generally embarrassing his children as much as he had embarrassed his parents. But I don't think this sense in his writing that Michael Wharton is a stranger and a sojourner derives from his inheritance. It is surely an ingrained part of his own imaginative nature. As he says, 'It was not until I went to Oxford and so, as far as such a thing is possible, escaped from my family. . . that I realised how extremely odd they all were.' It was only later that he realised that everyone else was even odder.
He left Oxford, as he put it, 'under the statutory cloud', having thrown a Scotch egg at the dons on High Table, and also dismantled a sofa and thrown it out of the window of his college rooms. He has always been an amorous man, and by this stage he had a girl in tow, by whom he had a baby, and whom he at some stage married. Having shared his 'life of mingled torpor, drunkenness and general oddity' in London, she accompanied him to a small cottage in Westmorland, the idea being that he was to be a 'writer'. Some of this book's flavour can be tasted if I quote a paragraph relating to those days:
'On one evening, I stood in the winding stony lane which led from the main road to our cottage; the soft, suffused light of the sun going down, the smell of may blossom, the calling of birds, the rustle, almost imper- ceptible, of the trees and tall grasses by the
wayside filled me with serene delight. I leaned on my bicycle, waiting for my wife to come from our cottage to meet me, and thought: supposing it were some girl I trulY loved, as I loved with holy fervour this natural world spread about me on every side! That would have been a perfection of life in which the erotic and the numinous, the human and the inhuman, would have been joined in an experience I have never known. Not having known it, have I ever lived?
It is surely not completely absurd to think this is almost as good as some of Prince Andrew's ruminations in War and Peace. What puts it in such a league is its devastating truthfulness. Ninety-five per cent of the human race would so want to have enjoyed a moment of perfect ecstasy on that golden evening in Westmorland that their memories would have tricked them into supposing that they had done so. Michael Wharton's knowledge that he has failed to have an experience is much more moving than a lot of bogus people's belief that they have had one. It is almost impossible to write well about one's own emotional history, which is why, I suppose, most novels about love seem so much more plausible than most autobiographies. But The Missing Will, which is a classic of the genre, is a great exception. We are not surprised that the outbreak of war finds him as 'a rather useless and idle subaltern', spending a couple of Ian' guid years in India. By the time he has returned to England at the end of the war, and then spent five years wondering how on earth to live, his marriage has found; ered. He does not go into much detail about his career at this date, but there is mingled melancholy and hilarity in such throw-away sentences as this: 'Another job I was working on at the time was editing the Football Association Yearbook, pub' lished by a small firm which had beer' infiltrated, for reasons I could not discov- er, by Marxists.'
Still with the vague ambition of becotn; ing a writer (he wrote a novel cane? She/drake which was not published until years later by 'a rich Jew called AnthonY Blond'), he got a job with the BBC in, Manchester. No less than the Football Association, the Corporation was crawling with Marxist coteries whom Wharton found uncongenial. The book ends in 1965. Things are not going well with his second marriage. (`My wife was hurt by my neglect and lack of love — or to be more accurate perhaps, my perverse inability or unwill' ingness to express it'). The world itself seems very dark. There was Suez: 'the preposterous conspiracy of England, France and the State of Israel, and the political humiliations that followed'. There was the experience of weeping over the wireless set at the news from Hungall. And in England, it looked as though there, was going to be a triumph of the liberal consensus, which 'at its silliest, involved belief in human perfectibility and paradise on earth'.
It was at this phase that Michael What' ton was staying with some friends and Colin Welch arrived from the Telegraph to say that he was on the look-out for a full-time contributor to the Peter Simple column. 'I made no particular response to this. It was good old Theodora (Fitzgib- bon) who shouted: "Can't you see you fathead? He's offering you a job".'
At this point the book ends, with Whar- ton arriving at his desk in the Telegraph, With one of the most appalling hangovers I have ever had in my life and without a single idea in my head'. This phrase is the only lie in an otherwise preternaturally truthful story, for the ideas have been pouring out of him ever since. And be- cause the religious dark-suited septuagena- rian humorist is obviously so different, in many ways, from the young man at the end of this book, we can hope that there will be a sequel to shed light on the transforma- tion.
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