The Pursuit of Laughter (38 page)

The choice of what to put in and what to leave out in a melancholy book of this kind is so vast that a central idea must govern it. There are moving passages, and beautiful ones, but what does the whole add up to? ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage?’ Although it is true that man’s indomitable spirit, his courage, his nobility, his love of beauty, can rise triumphantly above sordid and terrifying circumstances, it should be pointed out that Lovelace’s comfortable little poem does not correspond with the facts. It was bound to be quoted here, and it is a great favourite with people unfamiliar with the insides of gaols. In truth, however, stone walls and iron bars do make a prison, and prison is a very terrible place. As Oscar Wilde wrote:

This is a perfectly ghastly book, not commended for holiday reading. The depressing thing about it is that appalling cruelty and torture are practised just about everywhere on earth, man’s inhumanity to man is universal.

The palm for the refinement of disgusting cruelty must go to the Chinese, keeping their victim alive while cutting bits off him here and there, to prolong his suffering. Yet though widespread, everyone who thinks about torture identifies with the sufferer. Few people would imagine they could possibly find themselves in the role of torturer, but, in fact, there are legions of them.

Why resort to torture? Algeria is a typical example; there was guerrilla war and Arabs were tortured to get information without which the French army would be in danger. There was an outcry in France, and General Massu had himself tortured (electric shocks) to see how much it hurt. But, of course, half the agony is the prisoner’s utter helplessness surrounded by cruel enemies, while the General only had to say ‘Hold! Enough!’ to get up and go home.

Terrorists are very cruel. When the oppressed revolt they become oppressors, and are not noticeably more merciful. How can people, ‘of all races’ as they say, be so
wonderfully
brave under torture? Apparently, it is because their rage against the tormentor makes the adrenaline flow. Nobody feels anger against his dentist, or because he has a painful corn. These ills must be borne, but when somebody deliberately hurts, it infuriates.

Kate Millett has bravely read through the records of unspeakable horrors. Her book, though well written, is repetitive and much too long. She is preaching to the converted, it is highly unlikely that she will be read by police anywhere on the globe.

Can nothing be done? Possibly an energetic government might catch and punish those who have tortured in its name. But what am I saying? ‘Punish’? What a frightful idea. The only hope is to change human nature; a vast programme.

The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment
, Millett, K.
Evening Standard
(1994)

Because Charlotte Despard lived to be 95 she is always thought of as old, an old rebel, an old saint. As Charlotte French, one of a large family of fairly rich orphans, she married Max Despard, and her real life began when he died and left her a widow of fifty with a good deal of money. She had energy, imagination and courage.

One of a group of ladies who took country flowers to the London slums to brighten the lives of the poor, she found her vocation. She realised that charity could hardly
alleviate
the misery she found, it was not only not enough, it did not even dent the surface of the appalling poverty and injustice she saw. Her aim was to change society radically and permanently.

In order to help them she decided she must live among the poor, and she bought a house in Nine Elms, a noisy, dirty neighbourhood with an all-pervading smell of coal-dust.
Her house became a club, a clinic, a soup kitchen, and headquarters of her fight against the conditions in which her neighbours lived, with rotten houses, starvation wages and the threat of the workhouse always hanging over them. Mrs Despard became a socialist, a Marxist. She believed that if Liberals and Conservatives could be defeated the world would completely change; misery, and with it crime, would disappear. Life in the
workhouse
, particularly for old women with no hope of getting work, was cruel. They were
harried
, insulted, ‘bullied and half starved’. Their diet was ‘stringy, half-cooked meat, thin gruel and black rotten potatoes’. One towel was provided for twenty four women; they were made to wear coarse, ill-fitting clothes and hard boots; the wards were not
ventilated
and smelt. When Mrs Despard asked the women why they did not complain to the Guardians she was told that if they did the Master put them on a bread-and-water diet as a punishment. She became a Guardian herself and worked from inside the system to change it.

Mrs Despard joined the suffragettes; she was convinced that once women were
enfranchised
there would be no more wars, justice for all, and slums would vanish.

Like many another saint, Charlotte Despard was hard upon those near her. She worked a willing helper, Rosalie Mansell, almost to death, and the unfortunate woman took to injecting herself with laudanum to obtain relief and had to go away and be cured of her addiction. In an account of her own childhood Charlotte boasts of her rebelliousness, but when in an impulse of generosity she adopted a little girl, who grew to be ‘mischievous and emotionally insecure’, she found herself lecturing the child on proper behaviour in exactly the same way as her governesses had lectured her.

During the Boer War Charlotte was a pacifist; it was the war in which her only
brother
, John French, made his reputation as a cavalry general. Her fondness for him was such that she managed to overlook their differences of opinion.

As a suffragette in and out of prison Mrs Despard was as courageous and
uncompromising
as she had been in her fight against the Poor Law. When the Great War came she was shocked by Christabel Pankhurst’s pro-government and conformist attitude. She
herself
was the target for many a rotten egg when she spoke in favour of a negotiated peace. After the war, women were given the vote, and although she once stood for parliament, the idea of being a back-bench MP would have seemed like a death sentence of boredom to her fiery nature.

Mrs Despard looked around for another ‘cause’. She found it in Ireland. Her family had Irish roots and Charlotte had become a Catholic (rather a strange one, since she
dabbled
in theosophy and also spiritualism, and when in doubt was in the habit of consulting Mazzini* in the great beyond) and she was also an ardent Sinn Féiner. Like many rebels she loved to annoy, and her adherence to Sinn Féin was made more fun for her by the fact that her brother, now Earl of Ypres, was Viceroy in Dublin. She was a great
embarrassment
to the unfortunate man, whose name she never hesitated to invoke whenever,
during
the troubles and the civil war, she and her Republican friend Maud Gonne were held
up by troops here and there as they went about their revolutionary business.

The troubles over, she settled in Belfast where she took up the cause of the Catholics who were discriminated against in every way. At the time of the riots in 1935 as an old lady of 91 she was threatened and abused ‘by Protestant hooligans’. This would once have delighted her, but now she was ill and old, and becoming rather poor. She had spent
nearly
all her money on her ‘causes’, now she was in pain and lonely but for two companions in favour of whom she made a new will in 1939. A few weeks later she fell downstairs
during
the night, and died in hospital. People said she had been pushed. There was a case about her will, and legal expenses accounted for what remained of her fortune.

Her causes never turned out to change the world quite as she would have hoped,
nevertheless
she was one of those pioneers who make things a little less vile. It was not her fault that her enthusiasm for Soviet Russia was misplaced, or that the Nine Elms
workhouse
had so many features in common with the Gulag archipelago.

If she were alive now, Mrs Despard might turn her attention to English prisons, where three men are cooped up in a cell designed for one. Or to another scandal of our time, the way in which old and suffering people are artificially kept alive by doctors. As long as the heart beats, each unhappy day that passes is counted a triumph for modern medicine. There are still causes worth the attention of a Mrs Despard.

Andro Linklater has written a most interesting book about her. On its cover is a
wonderful
photograph of her addressing an anti-fascist meeting, frail, indomitable, age-old.

* Giuseppe Mazzini, Marxist philosopher and Italian statesman.
An Unhusbanded Life: Charlotte Despard
, Linklater, A.
Books and Bookmen
(1980)

A quote from each of these biographies. The answer is that Wagner, as man and as artist, is an inexhaustible subject, and also that after being hidden in a bank for almost a
century
we at last have Cosima Wagner’s diary. It is indispensable reading for understanding the years between 1869 and 1883, the years of
The Ring
, of Bayreuth and of
Parsifal
. It is a human document of intense fascination, and a considerable work of art in its own right. Through it we get to know Wagner as never before; a companionable, high-spirited man, not robust, often depressed, but full of loving kindness and real goodness; and at the same time an artist who knew the importance of his art and who strove for it ceaselessly. The
words from heaven in
Faust
:

(He who strives, we can redeem) could have been written with Wagner in mind.

A poet with pencil and paper can produce his poetry. Wagner’s poems and music, his music-dramas, in order to be born, needed enormous energy and large sums of money. Even when the money was forthcoming there were vast problems to be solved; singers had to be found and trained, a huge orchestra mobilized, difficult stage effects achieved. Small wonder that, to begin with, it was not easy to persuade opera houses in various parts of Germany to devote such a large proportion of their resources to a new work by an unknown composer. Suppose Wagner had been born an Englishman (an impossibility, since he is the most German of German artists) and instead of Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Würzburg, Nuremberg, Munich, Vienna, Königsberg, he had had to try Cardiff, Newcastle, Norwich, Leeds? Would his operas have seen the light? Covent Garden would have been his only hope. Despite a festival with visitors from far and wide, Edinburgh has not troubled to build itself an adequate opera house. Wagner complained bitterly of his countrymen, their blindness and meanness, when he was bestowing upon them works of incomparable grandeur and beauty. Yet in any other country he would have fared worse.