THE WINK OF DISHONOUR

The sometime tv scamp turned whacky guru Russell Brand winked at me in the street once.  Because it struck me as a collusive wink: joker to joker, word-junkie to word-junkie, Jack the Lad to Jack the Lad (I know how unlikely that sounds, but I was younger then) - I winked back.  Anything less would have been a rejection and I wasn’t sure he was strong enough to take a rejection.

I wasn’t a close student of Russell Brand’s psychology – neither the real thing nor the carefully cultivated theatricality – but I had watched him post-presenting Big Brother with a horrid fascination, struck by his outlandish cleverness, his gross fluency, and his showoffy use of fancy words, as often as not misunderstood and misapplied, as though by a demoniacal Mrs Malaprop,  bringing to mind the comedian Eric Morecambe’s execrable piano-playing in which, as he explained to Andre Previn, he was in fact playing the right notes, Sunshine, though not necessarily in the right order.  And yes, his infernal beauty.  

He was, for the time, a creature like no other, unabashed, pantomimic and derisive, not in the slightest bit funny though he made us laugh, and seemingly self-generated, as though he had sprung up from nowhere, exactly as he was, both supremely self-confident and on the verge of a narcissistic collapse. Things came together in him that couldn’t possibly co-exist.  How long before they blew him apart?

The least I could do, in these circumstances, was to wink back when he winked at me. Wasn’t I, in part, responsible for him?  If he were finally to blow apart to please his audience, then I too was at fault.  We were in something together.  Of course I winked back.

But what was I doing – I who hated to my soul the whole Big Brother circus - watching him at all? 

One answer is that I too was experimenting with myself, thinking it was time to try relaxing my high-principled contempt for popular culture and taking a peek at what happened on the other side of the wall.  You could learn from watching people unlike yourself unravelling on television, I told myself.  The world wasn’t populated only by lovers of late Beethoven quartets and Nietzsche.  And anyway – when had I last gone to a concert and why did Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals lie unopened on my bedside table?  Yes, Big Brother had nothing to recommend it beyond satisfying the desire to murder time.  It was low.  It was unkind.  It was indecorous.  It mistook prurience for curiosity.  But my not wanting to know anything of people for whom appearing on reality television was the height of personal achievement also lacked kindness and decorum.  ‘Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost,’ Henry James famously advised aspiring novelists.  Very well.  I would not let television be lost on me.  I would watch Big Brother.  And if that turned out to be a grievous expenditure of vital fluids, I would know whom to thank.

Thanks, Henry.

And then, suddenly, into this wasteland of triviality stepped Russell Brand, who might just have been as disgusted by it all as I was, at once its creature and its critic, its paid jester and its foul-mouthed disparager.

Did it occur to me to ask, as our paths crossed on Maddox Street, whether he winked at me because he winked voraciously at everybody or because he knew who I was and had read every word I’d written.  Critics sometimes accused me of wordiness.  Could Russell Brand have picked up a few of his longer words from me?

These are shaming questions but I will endeavour to answer them honestly.  Novelists commonly referred to as ‘literary’ inhabit a strange nowhere-land of reputation.  Only poets inhabit a stranger.  To those who read such novelists avidly they are so many twinkling stars in a small, exquisite firmament; to those who wouldn’t be seen dead reading a novel that doesn’t have a wizard or a detective from the Home Counties in it, they are not visible even in the darkest skies.  None of this – neither the excitement of cognoscenti nor the blankness of the ignorant - should matter to a novelist whose true Penelope is Flaubert and who fishes by obstinate isles.  We go our way unnoticed, content to know that Art knows who we are and guides our steps.  We write, as Stendhal had it, for ‘the happy few,’ accepting obscurity as the price we pay for of our disinterestedness.

This being the case, no ‘literary’ novelist must be seen hungrily scanning the faces of strangers for the faintest light of recognition.  We all know what it’s like to pass a bit-part actor from a TV soap opera and see him all-but begging you to show you know who he is.  Nothing is sadder than half-fame.  May we never be so desperate, we tell ourselves as we lower our heads and scurry through the indifferent streets.  But then someone from the other side of the wall, someone who walks in a halo of notice - both giving and receiving it promiscuously - winks at us and we wonder.  Is that recognition?  Is that admiration even?  Will he go home and tell his wife and children who he’s just seen?  And in that moment of wondering, we are lost.

The event I am describing – the wink of dishonour – dates from the earliest years of this fame-crazed century.  Long enough ago, you’d think, to be forgotten.  But some dishonours linger in the mind as long as life itself.  ‘How long does a man lie i the earth ere he rots?’ Hamlet asks the gravedigger. For someone chasing down bad news, it’s the wrong question.  ‘How long do a man’s shames lie i the earth with him?’ would be a better.

And the answer?  ‘For all time, sweet prince.’

I mean my confession to be salutary.  I should never have looked over that wall. I should have been truer to my stand-offish self.  We who are born monks should stay monks.  Henry James was wrong.  A novelist can be a person on whom some things are lost.  Maybe not if they want to be Dickens or Tolstoy, great novelists of whom it can be said their subject was all human life.  And yes, Dickens would surely have had fun with Russell Brand, making him a highly-coiffed assistant at Signor Billsmethi’s dancing academy in Grays-inn-Lane, and Tolstoy would have sent him to meet his fate at Sebastopol for breaking some poor princess’s heart, but Henry James wasn’t Tolstoy or Dickens.  And neither, alas, am I.

My course was set early.  As a boy I loved reading in the papers of high-court judges who would say ‘And who is this Marilyn Monroe?’ and be asleep by the time the clerk explained ‘A Hollywood actress famous for standing in the street and letting the hot air from the subway blow her skirts up around her middle, M’lud.’  It wasn’t just that ignorance was bliss.  It seemed to me that ignorance was a kind of duty.  Someone had to be looking somewhere else.  Me, me – I’d do it.

And who is this ‘Russell Brand?’  Oh, to have been able to answer, ‘Not a clue M’lud.’

I imagine those who sought him out in the hope his unaccountable allure would rub off on them must be feeling the same. I don’t mean commissioning editors and programme makers who have a crust to earn; I’m looking higher up the greasy pole of gullibility to politicians such as Ed Miliband, then leader of the Labour Party, who, in one of the most excruciating interviews of all time, talked ‘credible change’ with Russell Brand and then wished he hadn’t; and Jeremy Corbyn, another ex-leader of the Labour Party, who, in the light of the recent charges made against Brand, has just had to drop his contribution to Corbyn’s upcoming Christmas bookwooky, Poetry for the Many.

Well, we know what changing one’s mind denotes. An agenda!

Sad, when all’s said and done, that the once exhilarating tomfoolery had nowhere to go in the end but conspiracy theory, that consolation for sedentary revolutionaries, that opium of social media, that last resort of the charismatic who don’t know what their charisma’s for.  How the flighty are fallen. 

‘Extremely egregious’ you call the charges a number of women have made against you, Russell.  Those charges are for the police to investigate. I’m just a private word-detective and am disappointed to see you are still employing one word too many.  You don’t need that ‘extremely’. ‘Egregious’ is fine by itself. 

‘This thing of darkness,’ Prospero declared – looking at Caliban – ‘I acknowledge mine.’   It’s an acknowledgment we all should make.  We watched too much television; we rubbed the lamp and set the extremely egregious genie free; we saw a blank slate and wrote the words ourselves.  And when the genie winked at us on Maddox Street, like the very devil roaming London for souls to send laughing into hell, we volunteered ours.

First delivered two weeks ago as a Point of View, BBC Radio 4