Most of us, by the time we reach our early forties, will have had several
George Michael moments. By which I don’t mean exactly that we will have been
discovered by the police slumped near Hyde Park at the wheel of our car,
allegedly in possession of Class C drugs, and taken off to spend a cheerless
night down the nick before waking to find ourselves the subject of reproving
headlines in the morning papers. But there will have been something along
those lines — some catastrophic and semi-public loss of dignity so painfully
bruising to our sense of ourselves as kind, responsible, well-conducted,
good people that the memory of it makes us flinch for the rest of our lives.
Perhaps there are people so grown-up that they reach middle age without ever
having been unkind, unfaithful, irresponsible or undignified, but if there
are, I don’t think I’d want to know them. Anyone who arrives at George
Michael’s age of 42 with a charge sheet entirely clean of abject human folly
is either very timid or very overcontrolled, and neither quality is the mark
of a person who is easy to love.
The really interesting question about such lapses is not so much why one
commits them (“it seemed a good idea at the time” usually covers the
question of motive pretty well) as what one does with the grisly aftermath.
Boy George (himself no stranger to self-inflicted trouble; he’s up on a
drugs charge in New York) remarked briskly in a recent interview that
“adversity can be good for you”.
There speaks the product of a good Catholic upbringing. But is he right? In
what sense is adversity beneficial? Anyone who grew up with a knowledge of
the trials of saintly Beth and boisterous Jo in Little Women, or
virtuous, paralysed Cousin Helen and her reluctant pupil Katy in What
Katy Did, knows the theory well enough. Something bad happens, probably
as a result of your own recklessness, the chastening effects of which have,
in the long run, a refining effect upon the character.
That’s the idea at any rate. In practice I find the equation not quite so
straightforward. Perhaps I am an especially hard case, but I find that
adversity, far from acting as the crucible in which the pure gold of my real
nature is refined, has a distinctly coarsening effect. Pain, fear,
disappointment and their grim outriders, shame and anxiety, make me not
nobler but nastier. I rage, I nag, I whine, I spin myself a voluble cocoon
of self-pity. Boy George would be shocked.
The only positive thing I have learnt from years of abject folly is this: that
it helps to make a story out of it, a process that usually takes three days.
On the first day you carry on like Toad locked up in the dungeon. “Stupid
animal that I was” (you cry). “O unhappy and forsaken Toad!” And so on. On
the second day you rally sufficiently to call a couple of your closest
friends and tell them all about it, so as to be reassured (if they are kind)
that you aren’t as unhappy and forsaken as all that. And on the third day
you wake up feeling unaccountably chirpy and realise that your dread
humiliation has transformed itself into an amusing anecdote, to be told
against yourself in the pub (if your inclinations don’t lie in the writing
line) or spun into a story, a drama or a song.
All of which renders extremely mysterious the pledge taken by George Michael
in the admirably droll and humble statement he released after his night in
the nick. “All my own stupid fault, as usual,” said he (only that “as usual”
admitting a chink of self-pity). Hands up to the drugs, firm clarification
of the unfit to drive business, for which he was “dearrested”. The only
oddity came with the postscript. “PS, ” he added, “I promise I won’t make a
record out of this one — though it is tempting.”
George, George, why on earth not? Last time he found himself in a spot of
difficulty with the law the result was the hit Outside. So why stop
now? If you have the talent to turn the raw material of distress into a
commercial success, I’d say it was your positive duty to do it. The thing
is, it’s not just private therapy. There is a public-service aspect to be
taken into account. Lots of us who have a talent for doing stupid things,
but no corresponding creative talent, depend for our peace of mind on being
able to recognise our own squalid experiences, transfigured by other people
into the consoling form of art. So go on, George. Write a song about it,
there’s a good chap. Lots of us will feel better if you do.
Tates told simply, but well
While we’re thinking about the kindly power of story-telling, I am intrigued
by the series of short books by well-known writers, published to mark World
Book Day this week. The aim is “to help people who struggle with books to
turn reading from a chore into a habit and a joy”.
As a bookish child who grew into an adult for whom books are only a little
less crucial than breathing, I struggle with the idea of not reading. A
recent piece by a Times colleague on how she doesn’t read books
left me deeply disturbed. A life without stories seems to me a poverty
almost as bad as a life without food, and the project of having good writers
produce good, simple fiction and non-fiction books a noble one.
The rules are these: the books are aimed at the 12 million adults in this
country with a reading level at or below that expected of a 13-year-old.
They are about 100 pages long, with no more than one three-syllable word per
paragraph. This is a limiting brief, as I am finding, just by trying to keep
to it within this bit of my column. Of the 12 books published to start the
series, I have read two: The Thief, by Ruth Rendell, and The
Book Boy, by Joanna Trollope. Both are thoughtful and bear the clear
marks of their authors’ style. Having read them, you would want to read
something else by the same person. From a writer’s point of view, the
exercise is a striking lesson in how hard a thing simplicity is.
Moggie malaise
In Germany, where a cat has expired from bird flu, they are dumping their pet
cats at animal refuges, claiming that they are strays. In France pet owners
reacted with panic to the news. Serge Relais, the president of the SPA,
France’s equivalent of the RSPCA, predicted a “deluge” of abandoned cats. I
hear a muffled sneeze from upstairs and find our own cat, Caspar, hiding
under my duvet. We eye each other with wild surmise. “Don’t worry,” I say.
“We love you far too much to dump you.” “Atchoo!” says Caspar.
