PICTURES OF A DARK AGE
Maurice Rowdon
It began to occur to me. that it, would be interesting
to set down a detailed account of myworking life as a
writer over a period of a year or so, and thereby to try
to find out what kind of unprecedented world we live in
and whether we have much understanding of it. As I wrote
this day by day---talks with publishers, agents, actors,
theatre managers, TV directors and producers---I began
to find that there was an extraordinary ignorance of the
functions of the present world among those who set out
to provide it with its image. I found myself describing
an unprecedented state of affairs which were largely
treated as if they were a known and therefore past state
of affairs-- --not only in the world of publishing and play-
performing and film-making but in everyworld I touched on,
from politics to working class life, from the countryside
to newspaper organisation and travel. A new world had
apparently come about which few people approached with
more than the attitudes of the past.
My scene is mostly
London, but this necessarily involves Americans too, as
they are so active in the literary and filming scene here.
As I travel a lot, the Continent is taken into some of
the arguments.
When I am trying to describe something
in detail here in London I elicit from it the non-provincial
interest, and otherwise throw it out. For instance,a
repeated experience in the narrative is that a purely
English enterprise---where no Americans or Germans or
Italians or even English Jews are involved---begins with
warmth and then slowly or quickly peters out. Now this
could be the occasion for moral reflection, about English
'cold feet', the now notorious lack of enterprise and
grip.
But my conclusion is, again and again, that in
England perhaps more than anywhere else in the western
world, including the once-agrarian Italy, there is a
gxexkEr gap between present practices and functions on
the one hand and attitudes and knowledge on the other.
Another fact elicited gradually from the narrative
is that I find myself more and more dependent indirectly
on American money, mostly via the publishers. At first
this looks like the kind of international co-production
which is happening in almost every field today. And
that is so, partly. No TV 'art programme', for instance,
can hope to be made nowadays on the finances of an
individual TV company in any one country. My narrative
shows the Swedes and Germans putting up over half the
money for a BBC script of mine. But what I am saying
here is that most other fields of English life show a
story of American backing, until you find that little with
real vitality lacks it. Here again there are powerful
motives for moral reflection--- 'Chruchill sold us to the
Americans'etc. But the facts are far more interesting.
America is the first pure money-society, and its money-
infiltration into other parts of the world has been
exactly proportionate to the awareness inthose parts
of the system we now live in: that is, the greater the
awareness the less damaging the infiltration. My con-
clusion is therefore that the infiltration into England
has been as damaging as it clearly has been (producing


a sophisticated stagnation, comparable---but in terms
of advanced civilisation-- -with the present state of
Haiti) because of the stupendous ignorance of the oper-
ations of our world, above all in this country's one-time
elite. It is not to say that America started the money
society, or even developed and refined it. That was
done in the sixteenth century in the first banking oper-
ations that disregarded frontiers.
The election of
Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor, for instance, was
financed to the tune of a milliongold sequine mostly by
the Fugger banking family in Germany. Money of course
is only the symboll of the operation. It takes no notice
of allegiance: it seeks opportunities to expand, to reach
profit, irrespective of allegiance. And naturaily, when
you have a pure money society, as ours is behind the web
of allegiance and historical background, you have a quite
new state of affairs which means the fundamental alteration
of life from anything that the past history of Christen-
dom even up to 1940 might have led us to expect.
This country's elite, hanging on by its last lifelines
in the Fifties of this century, had on the whole little
sense that a new world had come about which they as much
as anyone else (and perhaps more than anyone else) had
produced. It was thoroughly confused bj its sense (even
the bankers were) of having an historical position, and
by an upbringing which offered moral incentives and even
moral explanations for operations that clearly had nothing
to do with marality at all. Its collapse was therefore
all the more momentous.
The disbandment of the British
empire was the quickest collapse of a world power ever
recorded in history, so drowsily indifferent was the elite
to even its own survival (meaning 'so sunk in allegiance').
And socially therefore it was as smooth a transition of
power as that which took place in the last hundred years
of the Venetian republic, whose elite was as drowsily
unconcerned for itself and for precisely the same reasons.
Through part of the narrative I am living among
'working people', who show as devastating an ignorance as
the ex-elite, with more dangerous consequences because
there are more of them. I notice their unsatisfied
yearning for allegiance of the old type, and their ass-
umption that it still exists, by way of mental substitute,
and without any leadership towards the present realities.
The lower the tabloid, the greater the tribal wallowing--
via the eyes now. Another thing I become aware of is
that the nineteenth-century system of work schedule, which
took a man out of the house round about dawn, and brought
him back about dusk, and was a visible guarantee not only
that he had work but respectability, still dominates
the 'working class' districts like a pall, at a time
when work is staggered, no longer belonging to the
mechanical but the electronic epoch.
It is no longer
true,, as it was before World War 11, that a working man
seen out during the day was naturaliy put in the shameful


category of the workless, but the pall---the memory
of this remains, and goes together with the expectations
of allegiance and belonging. Thestreets no longer have
the appalling sense of imprisonment, like a treeless
ghetto cut off by no visible frontier (but all the more
cut off for, that) from the happier districts. But with
the loss ortcauterised and disembowelled atmosphere of a
the concentration camp has gone the snugness.
Of course
this is a slowly developing story, not one that started
even twenty years ago: the evolution to our strkkingly
unbearable society has been slow, but the convulsions
have been clear and sudden, and quick in their effects.
I take England as a graphic example of what has been
happening, and of the confusion that of course exists
in every part of the world.
It is a more subtle picture
than that presented by Italy, for the smmple reason that
agrarian and virtually mediaeval Italy has had to leap
across two revolutions (the mechanical and the electronip)
simultaneously, with the result that theold attitudes,
being so utterly irrelevant, were more easily shendeit shed,
while in this country---more perhaps than anywhere else
outside America---the expectations resulting from the
mechanical revolution, a clamourous nineteenth century
of great wealth, make it seem that the present age is
known, that 'modernity' has long since been reached.
Thus it is possible for the Italian holidaying in London
today
find the hotels 'old fashioned', meaning that
for theny 9,tan do not belong to the recognisably 'modern'
(in this'case electronic) epoch.
As a matter of fact
nothing crippled this country's society more than its
experience of the long me chanical revolution, when worker
and middle-class expectations were drilled to a fixi ity
difficult now to unloose. The old agrarian atmosphere
of Italy, where a man might work for a month and then
anjoy himself on the money before taking up another job
(the 'Neapolitan' system), yielded much more easily to
present requirements than the rigid mechanical society.
There was no association between work and respectability,
none of the evangelical background of Anglo-Saxon indust-
rial life. Work was no allegiance, therefore it was all
basically casual.
That more than any other factor is
the reason for the survival of Italy in this epoch,
though the advantages will probably now dissolve as
money-society industrial strikes, a new ferment of ideas,
take hold.
No writer could describe working-class life today
without talking a lot about the obsessive frivolity
and the taste for violence that have crept into it, part
of the same process. It is necessarily the field of
his greatest battles. I show it operating in the TV
companies---in the actual people, despite themselves.
I show violence as a sophisticated taste (inherited with
literacy), not the 'tribal" one quoted by some people,
though of course it is a tribal response on a highly evolved
level.
The viciousness and violence on TV are the satis-
faction of an effete taste, so to speak the last spasms
of the body shaken by its failure to achieve any of the
old satisfactions of allegiance, its struggle to achieve
a new set of relationships of a tribal kind; a quest
Rxiginakig originated by the disturbed mind, not by the
animal impulses, though it exploits and distorts these.
Thus I would not at all accept the usual explanation of
'American violence' as something to do with America being
a pioneer country, where violence has been an accepted


mode from the beginning.
This violence is of a quite
new and special (and worldwide) order, only America
concentrates it precisely to the degree of its purity as
a money society. The pioneer-country explanation is
the 'old-type( thinking, the thinking by 'history', just
as the idea of progress (and of America as the denouement
of a long historical development of a moral kind) is 'old
type' thinking, fit for another society where the idea of
a moving belt of time, to-and-from, was a principal source
of energy. Now America lacks the compensatory back-
ground of history and the still-recognisable allegiances
that other countries of the world have.
It has none of
the deep-cast shadows of aristocracy, church, tribe that
the other countries have.
The development of a pure
money society makes no such spectacular reading. The
degree of dislocation is greater in America than anywhere
else, so much so as to threaten the survival of its
social life. Now this suject of America enters the
narrative not as the descfiption of a foreign country
but as an in extremis description of our own society,
in all the various forms (the American-Violence programmes
that go out on the TV channels nightly, co-production
schemes, visits of presidents, talks by campus revolution-
aries recorded there and put out here, the numberless
American 'refugees' in London, the Vietnam demonstrations).
We have to guard just the same against the 'historical'
view that we have been sucked into an àmerican' world
empire; it is simply that the whole world has been sucked
into a new society, and that for a time America was its
purest and most available element. In the narrative I
notice Walter Lippmann in an interview with the British
correspendent Henry Brandon saying, 'I think the diff-
iculty for you, Henry, if I may say so, being English,
is that you are haunted by the notion that the United
States is going to fill the role in the twentieth century
that Br'tain thinks it filled in the nineteenth century.
I mean after the Napoleonic War the theory was that
there was a Pax Britannica in the world. After World
War 11, Britain having exhausted itself and America
becoming very strong, thetheory was propagated---foremost
of all by Churchill himself after World War 11-- --that
from now on we should have a Pax Americana in the world.
Now, that proved to be an illusion.
There won't be a
Pax Sovietica or anything like it, because the world is
too big to be governed by anybody.
There will be no
central place---not London, not Washington, not the
United Nations---to which you can go and resolve every
conflict.'
What I do not say is that there is a gap between
people e's attitudes and the 'technological' world that
haschome int81d being. I try to show that in fact the
tecahdlogECaiL has come from the attitudes, and not vice
versa, that the techniques are a manifestation of the
change and not the change itself.
I say that film and TV
came into existence because they were required, they
never 'burst' into life. I show that in fact XXXXXXXXOXTY
cinema and TV are offshoots of the restricted picture
stage' or proscenium arch' theatre, rather than actually
in themselves imaginative advances. It was an imagin-
ative requirement that brought them into being, but they
did not satisfy this requirement; they were only instrum-
ents on the way. They are not the denouemen t that the
old history-type thinking makes of them---i.e. the climax
of a sort of moral unfolding, as if people everywhere and
at all times dreamed and a spired towardsxthem, and as if


stay
they are here to sety and no one in the future will
want to derive other satisfacitons from life than ours.
The narrative continually goes into the naivete of this
now accepted ordinary man's thinking which derives from
evangelical industrialisation. As a matter of fact, as
I try to show, the theatre will satisfy new thinking far
more than the cinema and TV for the simple reason that
it is not, as technique, tied to the picture-stage or
Italian rennaissance-type of presentation, which is bound
in Newtonian or rationalist space-time.
The frame of
the camera anchors it to this picture-view of Iife, and
makes TV and cinema veer between two opposite extremes of
the exhibition (french sense-- - --erotic show) and the doc-
umentary. On the stage it is easy to talk across end-
less spaces and endless times, and in my narrative I
descripe how I have done it myself by using what I call
the mutiple-action stage. Most people even in the theatre
(because it is still stumbling in the picture-stage, 'a
window on to life' formula, and therefore is overshadowed
by the cinema and TV) fail to recognise this 'new' but in
fact simply proper use of the stage in the script form.
I show Laurence Olivier (in a letter to another manager)
having a slight misgiving that my script is 'static',
for the good reason that he is an actor and studies the
speeches (as he should and must) and not the movement.
The script manager of a London theatre who recognised
the mobile qualities of my script at once did se not do So
because he was a better sirector than anyone else but
because of the fact that in thirty years of stagework he
had never branched off into TV or cinema. Contrary to
expectations, he had a better chance of rejecting the
picture-stage formula, which incidentally is less prevalent
in Shakespeare than in most dramatic TV presentations.
In describing the development of a TV film called
The Fall of Venice I show the difficulty of making a
transition from the eighgeenth century to modern life
so as to convey a synthesis of meaning, though on the
face of it the technique of the mix and dissolve make it
easy, because of the expectations of the audience, who
while used to adjusting very quickly from cut to cut
cannot make theleap beyond the space-time formula of
the actual camera-form. On the stage one can do it
without the slightest confusion on the part of the audience;
I deploy the stage for an audience accustomed to the
quick cuts and message-giving dissolves of the TV and
cinema, and maintain that people are fully capable of
watching and absorbing-several quite distinct actions
at once, and of drawing from these EEYEXXXXENgukexaiskinedISEINEX
xekians separate actions exactly the synthesis I want
them to draw.
Naturally the narrative shows the struggle of the
writer as chiefly one against dead attitudes, the
failure to think through the formulae used by the peess
and other media as the only shared langugge of thind
that exists. The media live on cliché for this reason
(no 'private' or 'personal' material).
I show TV script
editors reading formulae into all scripts not because they
are journalistic in temperament but because they have
somewhere along the line accepted the formulae as simply
a description of the truth. I therefore basically
show the struggle of the writer (and by inference the
struggle of everyone) as that of unravelling the dead formulae


by means of which the people round him are interpreting
life.
The skeleton of the narrative is provided by the
gradual development from talking to plotting to planning
to deplanning to bungling to finally shooting a BBC film
(The Fall of Venice). It describes how the idea grew
from a book of mine of the same title on the last hundred
years of Venice's independence (Weidenfeld/Praeger).
I describe a quick visit to Venice with thelirector, and
our 'plotting the moves' and talking to anyone willing
to talk to us. Venice is an excellent vehicle for describing
the 'old' society kept alive for decorative purposes in
a world that in no way resembles it: this is what kept
Venice alive for its last hundred years-- --the fact that
it was a showplace of the ancien regime to which people
flocked from every part of Europe as a relief from the
increasingly revolutionary atmosphere elsewhere.
And
it shows the collapse of an empire.
Above all it shows
that where some discreparicy exists between attitudes and
actual practical function the same tastes prevailed as
in our society- -violence became 'heroic', there was
stupendous self-indulgence; Carlo Gozzi in a famous
sentence described Venice asta place where the men were
women and the women men, and' both monkeys. He said they
'sniffed' at each other like hounds on a scent.
Great
women lowered their shawls at the opera and were put
under house arrest for it.
And so on. There was the
same obsessive use of the fertileorgan as there is today,
that is it had an obsessive imaginative role, being the
main symptom of the mind-in-vertigo, unable---in the
midst of imperial or religious or family or class
allegiances of the past (allegiances as strong in the
common people as in other classes)---to adjust to a world
where these allegiances amount to nothing. A great
sense ofliberation is experienced, the old exclusive
societ ety is thrown off: the self-indulgence and self-
display are simply the old society dissolving. So
The Fall of Venice make a useful skelton for the narrative,
not simply in providing a story but in demonstrating
the theme.
The narrative maintains that sexual exhibition or
pornography belong# toget ther with violence.
Now I also
examine this 'viobence' in terms of Venice. Its 'violence'
was the same as ours, in the sense that the Venetians
were most peaceful and charming, as we are civic, and you
could no more see the violence than you can in any respectable
city today. It is the taste for violence, the imaginative
appeal of violence that we are talking about: the
mental violence that now and then realises itself in
actual violence, as of course it must. When violence is
achieved, you read about it in the papers, as Venice read
about it in the gazettes (which were not by accident the
first newspapers there ever were). That is, newspapers
came into being because theyt. were required. People
wanted to read about it. It' became more important than
action. The newspapers reported what action there was.
Today a minute amount of action from every part of the
world makes a full newspaper.
As to the title, PICTURES OF A DARK AGE, this
reference is not a loose moral reflection but a comparison
of this epoch with the period between the Roman and the
Chrfistian empires.
The historian Maitland once said
that we call those ages dark because we are in the dark
as to what happened in them.
It simply means that the


spectacular and recorded events necessary to the making
of history books were lacking.
But there is increasing
evidence that this was a period of ferment and incubation,
when life went on developing (even in the matter of
inventions) until what we know as the middle ages were
evolved. And I compare this period we have now to that
period of 'dark' incubation (necessarily dark like all
incubation).
The old 'barbarities' are noticed and dealt
with, and stand out by their contrast with the new minds
aware of them, and become for the moment even more in
evidence than before.
Naturally the middle ages, a
highly evolved epoch, with inventions and doctrines and
researches that emanated in what we call the rennaissance,
that is the beginning of our world, could not have come
about after a stagnant twilit boorish period at the end
of the Roman empire. In any case it issimply not the
way empires fall. Also of course we have the comparison
between the falls af (that is, the evolution into new
epochs) of the Roman and European (British/French) empires,
whose systems of communication were exploited for the new
uses to be put upon them. The American society falls
into place as the new multilingual switchboard for a time-
a brief time because the nature of the newly evolved epoch
is as little imperial, as little given to strong centres
as the middle ages were, in fact much less so.
We should not be blinded by the multiple inventions
and apparently spectacular events of our epoch.
Journeys
to the moon or Mars or Venus, or extra-uterine conceptions,
add nothing to the scene, as little as a man with toothache
in Bangkok resolves it by flying to Berlin.
Incubation
is an interior affair.
What is financed, publicised and
heralded is necessarily of an archaic nature, howyerle it
may be in the 'modern' idiom. Decided epochs are simply
decided attitudes, and these are not formed by means of
clear power-endorsed announcements. What is looked on
now as spectacular (but even then by relatively few people)
will later seem simply a mechanical repetition of earlier
attitudes. The impatience of American TV audiences at
their programmes being over-interrupted for space shots
was in fact impatience with archaic concerns, above all
perhaps with the hypertensive theory imported from Germany
that contemporary society is the culmination of the work
of past societies, in an ever rising line: pageant science
always carries this implication of tribal arrogance.
As the narrative remains at this moment it will claim
that civilisation has nothing to do with manners, much less
civic manners, but is always the attempt however bungled
and brief to realise in daily life the terms of some
mystical thought. The failure of Christianity to provide
a valid basis for the realities, to provide adequate
spiritual exercises' is therefore the basis and key of the
book, though it will hardly take up more than a few pages.
Here I may use with value my present commission The Spanish
Terror (Constable/Putnam) for something on the Jesuit
exercises. Thus the narrative of a writer s working life
is used to fulfil a programme far beyond a recital of
market news.
Here below are some excerpts from the narrative,
taken at various points throughout.
Naturally the future
work involved in this book is the collation of day-to-day
naterial, noted down without particular thematic slanting,
into a continuous narrative with dominant
themes. At the moment the work is in the apdrre recurring


five or six close-written notebooks.
It is still
being written, necessarily, since I want the shooting
of the TV film to close the story at the end and that
wonIt happen before March 1970. I imagine about 80-100
thousand words would come out of it.
You will see that I use italis hereand there. In
the book these would actually be italics bold, so that
the themes will be clearly seen in the body of the work,
and recognised whenever we want to look forward or back through
the pages. Partly this is to replace chapter divisions
and running titles, which are rather made impossible by
the nature of the book.
The Hitler excerpt below is one of several designed
to demonstrate the theme that Hitler and Mussolini laid
down the working principles of the 'dark age' for the
first time.
I think perhaps there is an occasion for pictures in
this book, with captions from the text.


à .I passed by the Arts theatre to get a decision on
Carmagnola but a 'crisis' had just happened---there were
no costumes gor a show going up at the end of the week....
....He phoned on Friday to say that the BBC might possibly
put up the money for a film of Mann's Death in Venice
with perhaps Paul Schofield playing Aschenbach, and would
I do something to get hold of the rights. He said we
would simply stay on in Venice when our FALL OF VENICE
had been shot. I telegraphed Germany and gext day got
a call to say that Erika Mann had sold the rights in the
States some years ago and that she was trying to disen-
tangle them, in which case they would be ours..
..the story of Berlin in the last war on TV, and we saw
Hitler in triumph, with vast pushing crowds.
Later he
was on a balcony with Goering and others. Goering was
skaking his head like a delighted child at the sheer size
of the crowd below, and exchanged a glance with Hitler,
and Hitler smiled to himself in a quick moment of intimate
pride. Hitler craned forward suddenly; he wanted to see
how far the crowd extended.
Goebbels, seen at a political
rally, looked as much a boy as Goering, but ingenuous,
with vigorous, even perhaps unmalicious thfoughts passing
through his head. None of ghem seemed to have anything
to do with Hitler.
The crowds, healthy and smiling,
delightedly pushing at the cordons of police, who delight-
edly held them back, seem to have nothing to do with him
either. He is quite alone.
He steps down from his car
in a prowling, ghostly way.
When he peers into the
camera during a procession his eyes are black discs without
the slightest meaning or depthbin them. They carry no
message whatsoever. They are simply black stagnant pools
in which nothing is reflected. The message comes from
the crowds.
Their cheering is the message. He seems
simply the instrument.
He seems to float, long-stepping,
on to the dais to take a salute---small, pale, self-effacing
in the German way..
I caught a moment of evil when
the other officials stepped aside for him---a sense of the
terrible vibrations he was famous for. He looks mad.
It is the German who chaperones and protects him. Every-
thing falls into place around his madness. There is no
one to halt any of his ideas, no form in which to contain
his roving unearthly ambitions...His strategy was mad.
He first thought of invading England, and abandoned it
just when it might have come off. He bombed strategic
points in Britain and then switched to night raids on
London just when the fighter protection was at the end
of its KEKEX tether. He switched his attention to the
Mediterranean, to Russia, to the Balkans, to Britain,
in a series of impatient moves that flabbergasted those e
near him who knew anything about war. And he ended with
four fronts going---Italy, Russia, France and the Balkans.
His strategy was distracted, that of a madman.
It was
the excesses---precisely the excesses---not the victory
or the power or the war-- --that people needed.
He was
called into being.
He had a worldwide function to
...Along this street they are technical operators now
rather than the factory workers they used to be. They
are post office technicians, printing mechanics, elect-
ricians, laboratory assistants, machinists, salesmen of
technical appliances. The street has changed entirely,
without a brick or an evergreen hedge of a bleak slate
roof looking different...


.The function of TV (not the purpose, because it has
no purpose, having come into being to fill a need, and
not having itself brought the need into being) is to
generalise the habits of the new epoch or the new society,
and finally to disrupt the old make-believe affiliations
of class, family, church, country---'make-believe now
because they have no further function. TV is therefore
an instrument of social movement, a technique of adjust-
ment, and has nothing to do with art or indeed any meaning,
any value whatsoever.
It has simply to do with the
generalising of at first unfamiliar attitudes.
It is
the quickest direct agent of change there ms.
In an
agrarian country like Italy, in country-districts every-
where,it reveals---it shows with authority---the new
attitudes to take.
When TV goes out into the theatre,
the studio, the workshop, the streets, it is simply
universalising; putting-on-display.
The interest it
excites in us is quite different from that of the cinema.
It is not a dramatic interest.
When a programme achieves
dramatic interest it is because it has become for a moment
an imitation-cinema, or an imitation-theatre: it is still
at its job of universalising, displaying $o to speak the
revolution that is going en all the time and whose terms
aee just bring deciphered for us.ee.
.Even the favourite idea that TV spreads 'knowledge'
is wrong.
TV spreads facts about the human presenee.
TV can be false or true: this is irrelevant. It is the
human presence we are watching.
We notice the way he
sits, smiles. The fact that he is talking nonsense
makes no difference.
But an insincere look, that does
make a difference..
...Technique is simply a mental operation, and disappears
when we divest our minds of the need for it, that is,
when we can control life without it.
Technique is a step
towards an attitude of control, necessary for control
itself... It is the universalisation of a habit of mind-
detachment not very different from priental disciplines
that had the same end. But of course it is not detachment
itself, as we see from the vested interests, the tribal
ferocities in and behind 'technical' people. Technique
is the demonstration of an anmiated world, to those who
do not wish to be animated themselves as 'part of nature'.
It destroys the 'mechanical' or 'rationalist's' world
of separate visible entities joined only by intellectual
concepts, and substitutes a message about the overall
forces at work.
People who laughed at the idea of
telepathy or radiations emanating from people or rocks,
or invisible light that could pass through objects,
were safe during the strict mechanical era (i.e. eight-
eenth century thought) but were thrown into confusion
by radio, TV, x-rays, electricity, by the whole science
of invisible unheard frequences..
...a fihm made in the Thirties with Robert Donat, based
on Cronin's The Citadel. How delicate everyone iooks,
not in health but in their relation to each other: they
stand more separate from each other; the furntiure, the
way of talking and walking, shots of Piccadilly and the
Bank of England and the Park, with passing ornate buses
and square-mouthed taxis, make everything seem more ordered,
more rational.
One object is separate from the next.
People and things stand more away from each other; there
is space, ordered space---in people's eyes, in their talk.
And the film is informed with ideas. These ideas eoolly


and clearly pervade the action.
The old civilisation
still lingers. The mind has not yet concentrated itself
on the appetites....
..It seems to me that I was brought up on the idea that
life is simply a system for the appeasement of gross app-
etites, though neither my parents nor my grandparents
had anything to do with formulating the idea, or ever
believed such a thing themselves. It was simply the idea
on which their lives were forcibly based. It was the
condition in which they found themselves working---my
mother as a maid of all work at the age of twelve, look-
ing after three children, and my grandfather as a football
maker who dressed up. on Friday nights and got 'as drunk
as a fiddler's bitch'. Appetites were the aspiration.
It was a hara, roaring society, where most were thwarted
of their full satisfattions'.
There was this yearning
all the time, this pressure on everyone to satisfy himself
and his failure to do so because of poverty or else pur-
itan feelings (in turn a stimulant to the appetites).
My mother's mother was unyielding to her young. My
uncle Dliver told me that she would sweep all his books
off the table and shout at him 'Who the bloody hell do
you think you are, reading?'The children grew up to think
of themselves as unwanted (also a spur to the appetites):
nearly everyone was higher than themselves----policemen,
shopkeepers, rent-collectors,, insurance men; they all
had to be feared. My mother's mother never allowed her
nine children to touch the teapot until she had had her
second cup. 'You leave that bloody pot alone!' And
yet, in all the resenting stories told about her, there
was a sense of a certain majestic firmness and sureness,
as if none of her thoughts failèd to be clear, engagé
in the battle of the appetites. She turned a solid,
thumping, appetite-appeasing family out indt the worid.
My mother would some times say, 'We were buggers---the lot
of us. We got up to some terrible tricks.'
Their
father would tiptoe into the house in his socks after
he'd been drinking, and throw a bag of sweets into their
bedroom on the way up. Their mother gave them the rooted
impression that she had a natural proprietary right over
ali sweets in the world. She would hide them in the coal
skuttle, among the coals. My mother and her sister would
come in and have a 'singing lesson'---one would bang the
piano while the other rummaged in the coal skuttle. I
remember going to see my grandmother when she was in bed.
I was rather afraid, perhaps with my mother S fear. She
was propped up taxkeot solidly and massively and self-
assuredly on her pillows and I have the impression that
she leaned forward and gave me a long searching look like
an important property being valued.
It may have been her
deathbed. There were stories---those dim tribal stories
of childhood which are only half heard---that money was
hidden under her mattress, and that one of the 'soppy'
brothers (the family was divided into the intellgient
and the soppy' or 'doughy' wings) found it and got away
to Canada.
When one of the doughy ones came to see us
my father would dive into the house with,, 'There's that
bripehound Walter coming down the street.
I remember
the steps leading up to the door of the grandmother's
house, one of those solid, pugnaciously square Victorian
houses where gross appetites seemed to sweat and stew
through the bricks and stones. The whole world glowered,
puffed, boiled with passions.
Even churches managed to
smell of steak and onions...
WE ached to be like the grownups in one sense particul-
arly----to share their appetites---the smoking, fornicating,


drinking. Growing up was the process of inheriting
these rights, and smoking, drinking, fornicating were
allowed us in that order.
The thought of these appetites
seldom left my mind free to do what it wanted to do.
It could never concentrate on the book it wished to enjoy.
I turned over the leaves of books as if actually reading
them was a privilege I was still waiting for. I was a
precise definition of the word 'barbarian' without having
anything aggressive in me. Being barbarian or otherwise
has nothing to do with manners.
The fervid dissipation of the young is due to having
been given this definition of life. Technique stimulates
the appetites, which it defines as the whole of life below
its level of operation. Only when I got to know what
fields looked like did I begin to realise that perhaps life
Wasn't the scheme I thought. It was better. Civilisation
emanates from the countryside to the barbarian for the simple
reason that it has been formed, generation by generation,
into a garden, refining the earth's grosser appetites.
The breath of a different life came from the leaves as they
rustled against the window, and the sky seemed capable of
taking their echo, even that of rustling leaves..
..The little house roared all the time and spilled its
life straight on to the pavement.
Privacy was unheard
of. The women suckled their children in front of you.
The air stank from the gaswarks and the trains and the
factory at the end of the street.
The men used to get
drunk on Saturday nights and pick a fight with each other.
They walked into the tiny back yard in their bowler hats
and fought with bare fists until there was a nose-bleed
or a knockout.
The women and children went on roaring
in the front room, taking no motice of the scuffling and
cursing outside. My father was exempted from these
fights as his right hand had been cut off in a sawing
mill. It was obviously a penance for my mother to go
there, and she translated the sense of penance to us.
She was living forward to the new epoch....
.'Reason' can offer no reason for death.
If life
is defined as appetites and their appeasement, death
must be defined as the guillotine which suddenly and
inexplicably cuts them off. It poses the question of
why you should have been popped into life with aset
of appetites simply in order to appease them. 'Reason'
therefore makes the world a wildly unreasonable place.
It produces schools of unreason, which argue that
religion, being foreign to this type of rationality,
must come from irrationality. Hence you have a society
riddled with the most refined crimes, sometimes described
as of a 'ritual' nature, and on the other side the utmost
apparent rational detachment.
The two belong to each
other... a
..Religion begins with the words, 'I have always been
It takes the barbarian's helpless 'I feel, there-
fore I am' and separates the 'feel' from the 'am' by
defining the 'I'. On the definition of the 'I' all
religion rests.. - -
..Schoolchildren were reading little essays into the
camera on old age.
I remember the same sense of urgent
concern for old age when I was at school. We were
charged with pity for the old for the simple reason that
we were talking about ourselves.
Seeing ourselves stripped
of our smooth skin, our ready and tireless sex appetites,
our hungers and our iron
we saw ourselves as
nothing, since the appetites iédgostiones," were
we supposedly had


and were.
'Who am I?' was answered many times in
Anatolia, in India and Mesopotamia, in Crete, in Egypt,
in Greece.
But notin Rome. And from Rome we spring....
.I was sitting in the basement with the tiny monitor-
screen in front of me, flickering, and the tea trolley
being pushed along outside.
'He wants to walk,' the
child said into the camera, 'but he cannot.' Old age
was helpless. But if he cannot walk he must have trained
himself not to walk, because of the image of old age he--
like this child---was given.
Thôught makes faces.
It digs lines, opens and darkens eyes, halts the stride.
It trains our bodies whichever way we want them to go.
And if we believe that our bodies have a life of their
own, and we have no control over them, and they are
separate from our thoughts like armchairs are separate
from our arses, we produce a helpless body which swells
and erupts and stumbles and does things for which no
preparation can be made.
Those who have helpless bodies
prove satisfactorily to themselves that the body is
helpless, and so nature achieves its end quite implacably,
having signed no document on behalf of our particular
salvation. It will pour into the holes it finds open.
Believing that people are black in heart will populate
the world with black-hearted people.
Nature is quite
a magician, having a foothold inside us as well as out-
side. Or so it seems. Butoit is thought that is the
real magician. Onlyy when it becomes literary or dis-
embodgied does it lose its depth: but even then it
shows its presence by producing the 'literary man',
concentrated on his appetites mentally.
Fascism derives
its seeming contradiction (i.e. the work of intellectuals,
carried out by thugs) because it is a 'literary' doctrine
of society.
Therefore it should be no surprise that a
thoroughly literate world should plunge into a dark age.
The more literate the society, the greater the propensity
to violence.
This excites a horror of literacy, which
in turn produces doctrines of irrationality, which produces
the violence again....
.The best thing would be for him to read my Black Cats
and Carmagnola as these fulfil best my 'multiple-action
stage idea. In both playscripts I have people talking
to each other from different scenes---that is, across
distances of space and time. On TV this couldn't be
conveyed in anything like so graphic a way. In fact it
couldn't be conveyed at all without a spooky, surrealist
or bogus effect. In Carmagnola I have Philip 1I of
Milan perched on his throne in whispered conversation
with his courtiers while another character in Savoy,
downstage, is describing his various appalling quaiities:
Philip sits there, so to speak silently demonstrating
these, and the other man's listenere watch him as if
they could actually see him before them. On TV you
would have to have the Savoy character as a Voice Over,
that is commentator, thus losing his visible contribution...
..There is no such thing as a physical object. That
fiction is an inheritance of the cartesian philosophers.
Nothing is dead....
....I turn out ideas by the dozen---programme ideas,
book ideas, play ideas-- --SO that a handfull of them may
be picked up and keep me in shoe leather for the follow-
ing year. The scene has changed entirely for the writer,
but few people treat me as if it was anything but 1930
and we were all still serving our separate inspirations


and marketing the results, like the men we read about.
Over half mywork is 'samples'.
That is, the play or
TV script is sent to the producer as a sample of my
work, for other purposes.. The solution for the writer
(his liberation) used to be the fashionable success.
This is no longer the case. As there is no continuous
audience, so there is no continuous reputation. Scripts
from celebrities pour into the theatres and TV companies
and pour out again, rejected. A fashionable success
does not in fact 'establish' anything but a market event.
Henry James at the height of his reputation produced seven
novels in a row each of which failed to repay its tiny
advance of £150-8300.
His 'success' was entirely another
matter from what we mean by that word today, though it
was fashionable enough.
All these terms have to be re-
defined.. :
..TV cannot be the sole training for the writer,
actor, musician, director. The mind and the spontaneity
soon wither, even if the nerves hold out. The writer
must have tried himself in a dozen ways ousside TV before
he can cut and fade and mix and intercut his material
for the camera without the camera taking over.
The
pressure on the nerves of seeing everything, when only
a small part of life is ever seen, is the exact opposite
to what art requires and thrives on....
.She asked a junior no higher than her shoulder what
flavour his icecream lolly was and he said, 'Strawberry,
and stick it up your arse.
She said on the stairs the
boys look up their skirts from below, or spit on them
from above... à
.He wrote a from his schoal in Germany that if a boy
does something wrong he is disciplined by the other boys.
He is woken in the middle of the night and powerful
torches are shone into his eyes while he is under cross-
examination, sometimes until dawn, sometimes for nights
....I phoned Erika Mann and she said that the rights
could be ours only after four and a half years, and
that they would cost something like forty thousand
dollars..
: ..Like me, he found/Love's Labour]s Lost production
as cold as mutton, with nothing real in the love, and
certainly nothing courtly. Inept and ungainly business
inteffered with the lines as in all the current fashion-
able productions of Shakespeare today. A belch was
slipped in, to bring a cretinous laugh from the stalls.
Every reference to copulation was helped by a back and
forward motion of the hips, and all the physical functions
when mentioned were heavily underlined utnil they got
the right knowing roar ('We are liberated! We recognise
what you are doing!") from the audience.
The women
were squeaky, flat-chested, out of tune, as if not really
wanted on the stage at all. Biron stepped on his lady's
train to stop her walking off during an elegant chat they
were having. Everything Shakespeare meant by the king's
withdrawal from public life and therefore sex for three
years was lost. It clearly was never thought about.
Almost none of the speeches were decently comprehensible,
and the lines were eaten' to imitate colloquial speech,
in the current fashion, so that they lost their natural
rhythm.
At the end there was a burst of poetry, for a


few sedonds, so that you were reminded of how much you
had missed in the last two hours.
You realised how
deeply and deliberately and perhaps spitefully it had
been missed out. In the pub afterwards I talked to
Paul Curran, who played Holofernes, and asked him why
the first half was so cold, and he said, 'Well, you
know---the Bard---it often happens---it simply is cold!'
I told him I had seen an Old Vic production of the same
play where the first half had if anything been warmer
than the second. Love's Labours Lost ia after all
Shakespear's nost deliberately literary, most satirical
play: it satirises preciocity, but describes chivalry,
and unless you gettthe enchantment of the chivalry, unless
you know that chivalry was the absorption of Christian
feeling into the daily life of the rather crude noble
classes for the first time, unless you realise its
particular application to women, raising them so to speak
to the levelhof Mary-in-life, unless you know that
chivalry was the advancement of a quite new kind of love
between the sexes you can only get out of Love's Labours
Lost a cold literary exercise without much meaning,
and this production was certainly that. Everybody
sympathised with Olivier in his job of directing it.
He came into the pub looking tired and perhaps smilingly
sad. It was like directing a play 'in a vacuum', one
of the actors quoted him as saying. Of course it is
if you conceive the play in a vacuum, without a reason
EEXEXPIXEE or a history or a place in any system of
e .The next day's paper called the production cold
but asked the idiotic question, what are we to make of
'The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of
Aollo'? In a play swimming in tongue-tying and nearly
incomprehensiblé literary conceits he takes the simplest
one of all, and that not even a conceit.
Collapse of
theatre always goes with collapse of criticism.. o
w.In the afternoon the Arts theatre rang to say that
they had read Carmagnola and would like to talk to Laurence
Olivier about it, for the National.
It was too 'big'
for them. He will be coming to the Arts next Monday
with his children and they will give him the script....
If anything Hitler's mnfluence on the German was
far less than on the rest of the world.
The rest of
the world didn't go through a deliberate inner de-
hitlerising operation as the Germans did.
Hitler
never succeeded in inciting the Germans, through his
military commanders, to the detestable task of mass
bombing foreign cities, as he did the English and Americans.
An influence works many ways. You can succumb to it by
reaction.
This is how all dictators rise to power...
..Tasked her how many scripts she read in a week and
she said fifteen at least, with 'a few' novels. My
agent said that this was about his quota too. She
talked about a new series London Weekend are launching.
..He said he would send her further 'samples' of mine.
We ate French rolls and cheese and squeezed together on
a bench in the smoke and noise... -
He said that bad work had an imperative hold on
the film world.
We talked about Ford Madox Ford, whose
rights he controls. I mentioned The Good Soldier as one
I liked very much, and he asked me if 1 thought I could


adapt it. A film is in the air and both Robert Bolt
and John Osborne have been approached and have turned it
down.
The company at present wanted a'big market name 1
but if they ever decided they wanted a writer suitable
for the job he would suggest me. He said the signing
of contracts had no connection with the value of the
writer signing. A writer's value was perhaps the last
value to be considered in taking a writer on..
Christendom has concentrated on sin.
There is an
Islamic doctrine that the earth is the creation of the
devil, and Christendom has not been far from this at
times.
The concentration has naturally produced
spectacular results.
Christendom produced a whole
hierarchy of sins-- --mortal, venial and those simply of
imperfection, and volumes have been devoted over the
centuries to analysing and grading all the possible
actions of men in the scale of sinful manifestations.
So much childish rubbish has poured from the printing
presses, from monasteries and universities, that it is
little wonder that the whole thing came tumbling down,
and the names 'God' and 'Christ' and 'the holy spirit'
lost meaning for people, and 'sin8 and 'the devil' and
'evil' maintained their vididness and began positively
re ..The theatre# is in a particularly bad situation (in
all epochs) because it sucks in the barbarities of every
society it serves. The bulk of the productions will
always appall the best theatre minds of every generation.
The theatre wades in the blood and scum of its times
and that is its nature, and on the very rare occasions
when it illuminates and thereby escapes the barbarities
it becomes what the next generations will want to see.
For each epoch has enough barbarities of its own not to
want to share those of a previous world, especially as
past barbarities always look absurd and exactly what
they are---barbarities.
No one is more amused or shocked
by the barbarities of the last epoch than the barbarian
of this one.. :
..In the Pinter two-hander the audience rustled into
a moment's warmth and ease, letting out great coughs of
laughter, when 'buggers' started coming out, and at the
remark 'there was shit everywhere'. Barbarities surge
out of the audience at the slightest touch.. :
...Out of five hours viewing on Friday evening there were
three and a half devoted to crime, war and 'mystery'. If
you run forty minutes of cruelty all you have to do is
suggest (at the end) that this doesn't pay, and you can
purvey more or less what you like.
This is the accepted
market formula..
.He rang to say that he didn't want to waste my Intercom
on TV, especially as it was an hour too long for a teleplay
anyway. He would like to try it on a film company..
...He said that a trinity of American producers was giving
him a quarter of a million for filming this year, and one
of the scripts he wanted to do was my Intercom, as he found
it very funny.. .
..He said the Americans were pulling out of the deal.
A crisis has hit the industry.
It may only last a year.. :
..We arrived at a sort of plan for my teleplay Persona
Non Grata. I said I thought it was hopeless to put


the script through the script department, where it
would certainly be blocked as 'unpopular'. And I
suggested I get a director to hitch his name to it first.
This is farcical, as she is the script department, but
she thoroughly agreed, and this is what I did.. à
...When he arrived he was carrying Persona Non Grata
and to my relief said he would like to direct it. My
agent said he would convey this to London Weekend..
..She. said that the producer had been very impressed
and wanted to seefmy next script but they couldn't do
this one, in spite of its being couplled with a fine
director.
Translated, this means much fighting inside.
She lost the battle.
Leter the battles got to the Press...
a .He phoned to say that the script manager of the
Mermaid had liked Carmagnola very much and wanted to
discuss it with me....
I took the new Fall of Venice script to the office
to get it photostatted. We shall take this to Venice
and 'stand it on its head', to make the final script....
..The cinema served quite another function.
It was
a simple extension of the picture-stage theatre, to reach
millions.
It was the picture-stage theatre aiming at
a vast simultaneous audience, for vast profits. The
audience paid for its seats like a theatre-audience.
But TV, virtually gratis, is the homeport of the cinema--
what it was trying to reach.... Cinema was thus a bridge
from one world to the other, as the internal combustion
aeroplane was a bridge to cheap-fare jet travel..
..The key to our sopciety is not its being technological
(whatever else the key may be): for instance, the theatre
is not dead because of fifty years of cinema, and in
certain ways it even looks like superseding it.. eee
weeOur society is a certain attitude, and technology
is simply one of the aspects of this attitude. All
technology could disappear and leave this attitude intact.
The attitudes call the technology into being. In turn
the technology enforces ehanges in attitude: it so to
speak drives the attitudes already there home to their
o.Global wars broke out when there were grave hitches
in the universalising of these attitudes.
Where people
clung to the past they provoked or reacted to fierce
doctrines of assault. The job of universalising is now
being done with great pain, but the global-type war has
ended its function..
..The British empire was a revolution in communications.


It set up global communications for the first time,
with its centre London, a vast multilingual switchboard.
Its destruction was simply a durther step in the devel-
opment of this system, just as the 'destruction' of
nazism was a step in its diffusion as a system of political
...She said, 'Nobody wants it straight any more. He
loses his erection as soon as a bed, a woman and no chance
of being interrupted offer themselves. - ....He said a resp-
ectable Swiss banker had offered him five quid for his
soiled underpants but wasn't interested in sex (which he
gie/
was quite willindto/eter)...
a ..Meanwhile the Broadway actress was keeping up a volley
of jokes.
She and a young Polish actor went into a long
story about some quantity called kakapoopoo which they had
invented for the long hours of vaiting in the film studio.
It applied to everything. Said at all times of the day,
and in all situations, it sent them into fits of laughter.
My agent said to her sotto voce that she might press a
copy of Carmagnola on the Broadway manager at present
setting up Ginger Rogers in Mame....When she got up to
leave he leaned forward, bold to the last, and said,
'Don't forget about Carmagnola. I There was a little pause,
then---from her-- 'Kakapoopool", and roars of laughter....
.eato a young American writer.
He said that in the
States there was only one fact, one theme, one activity,
and that was the 'revolution' going on. Hevprobably sees
no such revolution here, precisely as I would see no revol-
ution there.
That is the nature of the revolution going
on everywhere..
.ATV put out an interview with one of the so-called
SS men over here with the presédent.
The man proudly
pulled out what looked like a fountain pen and said with
a smile that it wouldn't be comfortable to find yourself
at the wrong end of this....
..There were small demonstrations and scuffles wherever
the president went but the greatest demonstration was that
of abashed and wondering silence as people kept away from
those still-looking men with their handson hidden holsters...
...He said the BBC had offered Tyrone Guthrie fifteen
pounds for a treatment for a series of programmes on
the history of the theatre which would take two years to
e ..Just after we took off he asked me for a precise idea
of how the Venetian empire fell. We talked all the way...
I found that the intense script-writing period in London
had swept all the names of the Grand Canal palazzi out of
my mind... .He showed me how to get an idea of what a shot
would look like on the box by bending down and twisting
one's head as far upside down as possible---a cameraman's
trick... That evening we want across to the Lido and
found Aschenbach's hotel. He got very excited and said,
'Look, that's the balcony he sat on, watching the dancers
down below, the night he heard about the plagye!' All
the way back on the vaporetto we talked about Mann...We
will make it an interview where he shows us his latest
paintings of Venice, among them several strange ones on
the theme
'the end
starkly reminiscent of
Domenico :R6pol8e I ask 2'eniooka him
he chose the theme and


he says, 'Because Venice is ending.'....I went to the
Fenice theatre and found it would cost over five hundred
pounds dor half a day's shooting there, which is too much...
I found two actors to play our little Goldoni.
I was
standing in the box office with the manager and they were
suddenly peering through the grille at me, the Knight and
the Marquis to the life!.. .The generator and the costumes
are our headache. It would cost over two thousand pounds
to bring costumes from London, but on the other hand it
would cost as much if not more to hire them in Milan..
Access to museums, convents etc is easy when palmahave
been greased. He said he would take care of the greasing.
We stood by the bar and he reminisced about the films he'd
been involved in.
He described an English star who was
the terror of the hotel he lived in. When he entered the
foyer everybody started trembling.
This was last year.
When the whisky couldn't be found one morning there was
well nigh a revolution, and filming was wrecked for the
whole day. No king, no shah, no wildest of sheikhs
could behave like that nowadays, he said....
...I asked Orazio why Venice had fallen, and he said,
'Because men have fallen'....
...We have 8500drrom Munich and £4000 from Sweden. So
we shall be able 'to budget for fourteen thousand.. - a
.It is easy to talk about a dark age but putting a
duration to it, when it began and when it ended, isn't so
easy. The fact is that our Christian world, which means
largely Europe as far as history goes, never did do more
than fling itself up like a flying fish out of the dark-
ness, and then flop back again.
The European people have
never been really religious.
They were theological, often
moral, sometimes bigotted, superstitious, but they never
had, in comparison with the peoples of Egypt, India, China,
sustained spiritual illumination...
..At not time was there Christian development without
ambition and greed on a barbarian scale. The establish-
ment of a separate church in England happened quickly and
easily because of the big church lands available for grabb-
ing. The crusades were nakedly profit-making exploits,
on which Venice based her empire andher haval hold on the
Adriatic and the Aegean. When the Spanish planted the
cross in Haiti they found hundreds of thousands of the
gentlest creatures on the earth, and within half a century
they had reduced them to a handful of broken and disalesed
slaves.. .When Pizzarro kidnapped Atahualpa, ruler of the
Incas, and burned him to death, he had the support of the
friars..
.Christendom never endowed ordinary people with a
living discipline which they could make the hub of their
private concentration, as Hinduism did in India.
became a 'literary' society where 'thought' came to mean
a localised brain-event with no necessary connection with
the rest of the organism...
.The Archbishop of Camara from Brazil said that the
armies of Latin America operated in close contact with
the Pentagon and that this association had introduced a
new social order of violence.
..He said that London Weekend had offered £350 for


for the world rights on three books by one of his authors,
to provide a children's serial covering at least thirty-
nine weeks.
He said he had laughed and changed the
subject...
.They have sent out a new series of such bestial
violence that even the public has protested.
The
Independent Television Authority has had to step in.
The writers, directors, producers, actors involved
are necessarily involved in criminality. They live by
the dissemination of the doctrine of crime. The series,
by being protested against, has achieved its purely PR
end (win the big audience).
The PR work has been done
free.
The Press helped by giving more free PR coverage.
One columnist said, 'Say what you like about this thug,
he will be in the Top Ten this week.'
These PR me thods
were all quite clearly set out in the first plore place
by Goebbels....
.They are also putting out a series called Murder.
A different one each week..
..My father, who watches the commercial channel from
six till eleven every evening, starts if I come into the
room EXE unexpectedly, peeps round the corners of doors
tremulously, peers into the dimness of the little hall. e
..I went out to the Teddington studios. I looked at
their faces in the restaurant for signs of the bestial
violence you see on their 'programmes', but they seemed
no different from anybody else....
...I am beginning to see that the insecurity in which I
live is part of the bargain---a price and even a guarantee
of the freedom... e
...I said that *KE nature is 'intimate' and not 'conceptual',
and that following the dangerous science of mathematics
in practical experiments might produce a dangerous
'pageant' science. I said that the concept of infipity
while a XXH usual one in mathematics could not be realised
in space and time (where we happened to live) for the
simple reason that it was by definition beyond space and
time. I said that the accepted concept of 'two parallel
lines meeting at infinity' could not be realised because
parallel lines by definition are those which never meet.
Grand experiments XEEXXX based on the idea of the universe as
a mathematical concept can lead to great disasters, first in


the weather and then in less obvious ways. I said
this had already begun...
.Christianity simply threw a veil over the barbarian.
Christian Burgundians and Venetians tore the Veil of the
Sancturary. in Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and smashed
the altar of the Virgin....
.Quick switches of subject stimulate visual attention.
It is a technique used in films, newspapers, magazines.
In a TV script you 'cut for shock'. It is of fascist
origin. The first clear sign of it was the German
magazine that appeared in the Twenties, called Der
Querschnitt.. a
.The ache for pleasure comes from a previous ache of
pain.
Mass self-indulgence naturally followed a
period of mass self-torture in two world wars..
...He said that a few years back he had walked up
to the Cassino monastery with General Alexander and
they knocked on the door and the abbott came, and
Alexander held out his hand with, 'Good morning. I
bombed this place.'
The story had such a disarming
ferocious barbarity that I gasped. Narino Marini
was tapping his foot. I was glad he understood so
little English. I started talking to him about his
latest piece, a horse and rider become all but one
machine, all but launched from a launching pad....
...Hitler was invented, constructed, not only by the
Germans but the whole world. The Germans were simply
the pioneers of the fearful operation, as they so often
are.
The famous passivity of the Germans, their
toleration of the most obvious political abuses, has
been repeated in people after people since, notably in
those who 'defeated' them...
....I asked Montgomery if he would have bombed Cassino
and he said quietly, 'Of course not.
I would have gone
round the back. They had to anyway.'
e ..The stagnation resultant from American money was
precisely the same as the stagnation in Eastern Europe
from Russian occupation, not because of the wickedness
of the more powerful states but because of the failure
of the subject peoples (outnubering by far the 'occupying'
peoples) to understand what was happening to them.
They had no system by means of which to absorb the highly
evolved 'rational' system being applied to them...
...The 'rational' conduct of life in the money-society
does not mean 'reasonable' or even 'cool'. It implies
no value, being simply a type of operation. It may be