What really matters? Ma, the Cobb kerfuffle, friends…
Someone once said…even as I type those words I find myself repeating the mantra “Look it up, look it up”. Well I have tried the Dictionary of Quotations and I can’t find it so, a Mars Bar or a small cigar for the person who can identify the author. Meanwhile “someone” will have to do. What someone once said was that “Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all” or words to that effect. I was thinking something along those lines as my mother’s ashes were lowered into the family plot at Martock Church the other day. I googled the author and Wikipedia says it was the Prime Minister, Balfour, who was a bit of a philosopher too.
Anyway I tried the quote out on my niece Rebecca over breakfast the other day and she seemed to prefer one of the subsidiary attributes of a journalist according to the late great Nicholas Tomalin who said that the ability to believe passionately in second rate projects was important. I prefer the Balfourism myself and thought of it when my mother’s ashes were buried and again when I was abused in a review in one of the newspapers the other day. One event matters a bit, the other not at all. And it is worth remembering what Balfour said.
It was a busy month. The third and fourth were devoted to my Ma. On the third she was cremated at Yeovil crematorium. Penny and I went to metaphorically hold her hand and the following day she was remembered in a service at St. Leonard’s Semley; there was a wake at the Benett Arms and we finally buried her ashes in Martock churchyard. It would be entirely wrong to say that everything went well but there were very few hiccups, the two (female) Revs did the business and we all thought Maurice from the undertakers was a star. We all have memories, of course, but her going represents the final closing of a chapter. Sad, of course, but many memories mostly good and she was able to stay in the house that she loved from 1966 almost to the end. Part of me wishes that she could have finally gone like my Godma’s mother, bending down to smell her roses at home and never getting up. Still we can’t have everything and she lived to be over 90 and saw four great-grandchildren. I think she deserves a rest.
Besides the end of that chapter everything else seems oddly insignificant. I have had some stinking reviews for my Richard Cobb letters – everyone seemed to approve of the letters but one or two people were rude about me though not for the first time I was depressed not by the bile but the incompetence. If I were reviewing the book I hope I would have been critical but not for the reasons offered. Besides which anyone who thinks that Basildon Bond blue was bright when the whole point is that it was (still is I guess), a sort of sludgy, turgid non-event misses the point. And the sad thing is that the reviewer’s verdict is probably cast in stone and Basildon Bond blue will go down in history as bright.
There are interesting things about the letters. Why did we have to wait more than a decade after Cobb’s death? Why were they published by a relatively small press and not one associated with academic life? Was he a good letter writer? Why do we major on letters to Trevor-Roper when he wrote better letters to people such as John Bromley? What happened to the cache of wartime letters to Christopher Lee? Did the editor not know that Simon Schama got his first undergraduate degree at Cambridge where he was tutored by Jack Plumb?Or did the same editor not know perfectly well that Goronwy Rees is dead and that there is no “e” on the end of Corpus Christi? Editorial lapses seem much more frequent than heretofore and are often ascribed to economies and to the wholesale sacking of editors and fact checkers. Is new technology an improvement? Above all, I suppose, does any of this matter? In comparison to life and death, not a lot. What would Balfour have thought? Discuss. My own view is that the letters are of interest but in the long march of history not especially important. Their editing even less so.
Oh well, Richard was a flawed genius. Deeply flawed but still a genius and at least we have some of his letters two of which are works that deserve to be remembered for a long time and are models, as they say, of their kind. They were not – and here is a clue – written to Hugh Trevor-Roper but they are wonderful. Anyway if I know Richard he would be amused at the fuss but pleased that I am able to laugh however wryly.
My Sherborne book continues to chuff along. The research is fun if often maddening. Every time I think an interview is going to be straightforward it turns out to be the reverse and one ends up with more questions than answers. The best history of a school that I have read so far is Brian Rees on Stowe but I am told that the governors suppressed it. I think I may see why but they lacked guts and were plain wrong. Silly governors.
We have just returned from a weekend in Salzburg with an old university chum who is finishing a five year stint in a local schloss once owned by Max Rheinhardt. We travelled by train, via two nights in Munich, one in Cologne and another on a night train from Paris. I would recommend everything but the train from Paris which was dire. We ended up having no sleep, and eating sausage and potato salad in a minute box and staring at the wall as we trundled south-east. But the rest was marvelous – no snow but markets everywhere and in Munich one of the world’s great art galleries virtually empty. Compare with the Leonardo exhibition at London’s National Gallery. My dear the people. Will the Lady with the ermine ever be left in peace again? We saw her in Krakow is an empty room at the Czartoryski but from now on everyone will be flocking to see her and she will need a body guard. She was, I think, better off relatively undiscovered.
So. Maybe nothing matters very much and hardly anything matters at all. Was Balfour right? Or Nick Tomalin? Or neither? Or both? Some things obviously matter more than others and my mother’s death matters much more than my editing of Richard’s letters. Neither has a lot to do with money; nor celebrity; nor with anything that the modern world thinks important. But then nor does blogging per se. I suppose I like blogging because it is a way of getting even and making oneself heard. And the best thing I heard all month was the man who said that one or two of Tom Braun’s translations reduced him to tears. If it weren’t for me and Tom’s brother the world and our friend might not have read them.
And the publication thereof had nothing whatever to do with fame or money. Incidentally my friend Matthew Melliar-Smith, a former Balliol College Brakenbury Scholar, said that the point about Richard Cobb for us who knew him originally as a teacher was that he expanded rather than contracted our horizons. He was a man of the world; he spent a lot of time in France; he was dangerous and as such emphatically unlike the teachers to whom many us were used. He was much more than a regular at the King’s Arms. Another old friend reminded me of the word “kerfuffle”. According to one of my dictionaries, though not the shorter Oxford which omits it altogether, the word has Scottish antecedents and means something like to ruffle or cast into disarray. I was brought up to think that it implied storm in a teacup. At all events I am grateful for the reminder and for the letter which accompanied it. Makes a change from worrying about the brightness of Basildon Bond blue.
Oh revenge. Silly idea and the idea that it is best cold has always struck me as ridiculous. Hot or not at all. At university I was told by the chairman of examiners, a New Zealander who knew everything about the Duke of Newcastle,that never before had they encountered a candidate who wrote so much so fluently about so little. I told Nick Tomalin by whom I was then employed and he said it sounded a good story and why not ring up the don concerned. I did so, told him the Sunday Times was concerned that he and his colleagues had made a pig’s ear of the exam results and that Sunday we carried the definitive piece, complete with graph, under the heading “a first class row”.
Very satisfactory.