"Three Hundred Years of British Prime Ministers" A talk by Sir Anthony Seldon, 19 November 2021

 Like the convent girls in Yeats’s Among School Children the too, too solid flesh of the assembled, socially distanced Lit. Soc.  in momentary wonder stared upon a sixty-year-old public man, Sir Anthony Seldon, whose pandemically postponed tryst with the Society finally played out in the spacious surroundings of the New Hall.  His remit was to share his insights from his most recent work, The Impossible Office–The History of the British Prime Minister, published on the tercentenary of the office’s institution.

Our speaker began by reading out a charge sheet, in peerless, prosecutorial prose, against an anonymous British Prime Minister.  The topical resonance of these charges saw knowing glances exchanged among the audience and a tacit consensus emerged by telepathy that the lonely figure in the dock was Britain’s 55^th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.  The complacent cognoscenti were startled by the revelation that the accused was our first Premier, Sir Robert Walpole; gratifying reassurance for Winchelsea’s ever-irrepressible band of traditionalists (motto; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).  Employing an engaging, front foot style of peripatetic pedagogy, which leant heavily on sustained Socratic dialogue, Seldon listed the questions he was proposing to answer on the Impossible Office: - Why was the post created?  Why had it survived particularly given the synchronous existence, in Britain’s case, of the monarchy?  Why had it proved a model for so many different countries?     

In the pre-Walpole era, powerful statesmen were no novelty but men like Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and the Cecils (father and son) derived their power from the monarch and some duly discovered it could be arbitrarily removed.  The republican interlude which saw the apotheosis of the New Model Army and rule by the military outfitters, Cromwell and Son, remains unique in British political history.  Seldon considered that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ultimately facilitated the advent of the Prime Ministerial office as the subsequent constitutional monarchs needed a trusty in Parliament to arrange the funding of the Royal Household.  Disaster is often the harbinger of major political change and Walpole’s ascent to the Premiership came in response to the financial crash which followed the bursting of the 18^th century speculative extravaganza that was the South Sea Bubble.  

Although the title Prime Minister only appeared in the 1850s and then as a sarcastic barb,  Walpole under the aegis of First Lord of the Treasury started to accumulate leadership powers – in National Finance, in Parliament and in Government. Other now familiar additions to Walpole’s work in progress followed; the Cabinet, political parties and the management of the nation’s defences.    Sir Anthony adduced several reasons for the continued survival of the office – successfully avoiding invasion, revolution, civil war and a major military defeat.  Constitutionally, being a unitary state rather than a federal one and the lack of a written constitution and an elected head of state also contributed to the longevity of the role.  To assuage any impatience among potential pub political pundits our visitor revealed his lists of achievement and failure.  The top tier of Agenda Changers read: -

1)      Walpole

2)      Pitt the Younger

3)      Robert Peel

4)      Palmerston

5)      Gladstone

6)      Lloyd George

7)      Churchill

8)      Attlee

9)      Thatcher 

Sir Antony emphasised the importance of the Max Factor i.e., political longevity in gaining access to this tier.  The second tier, close but no cigar, comprised: -

1)      Pitt the Elder (Chatham) 

2)      Lord Liverpool

3)      Earl Grey

4)      Disraeli

5)      Asquith

6)      Baldwin

7)      Macmillan

8)      Wilson

9)      Heath

10)    Blair?  

The audience was on tenterhooks for the Duds, who were

1)      Grenville

2)      Melbourne

3)      Aberdeen

4)      Rosebery     

Bonar Law, on whose funeral arrangements Asquith had approvingly commented how fitting it was that the Unknown Prime Minister should be buried alongside the Unknown Soldier, managed to evade capture by Seldon.  Consolation prizes for noble failure were awarded to Neville Chamberlain and Theresa May.  Able to draw on a professional lifetime’s immersion in high politics, Sir Anthony was prepared to divulge the ingredients for his recipe for a successful Premiership: -   

1)      Have a clear agenda

2)      A strong economy

3)      Moral seriousness

4)      An iron will

5)      Be beyond party

6)      High work rate

7)      Even temper

8)      Be a good manager 

9)      Enjoy good luck 

10)  Have good timing 

Some recommendations for improved performance by future incumbents included trust people more, rein in the Treasury and employ more professional, diverse and challenging advisers.  In a lively Q&A, Sir Anthony confidently fielded the host of questions rained on him by his enthusiastic hearers who clearly reciprocated his declared reverence for famously encephalised Winchelsea audiences.   

William Doherty 

"How Do We Help Writers?" Dr Alastair Niven's talk to our October Meeting

 

The healthy sceptics of the Lit. Soc. embraced the chance to test Auden’s assertion:

 "Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places"

 as the Society held its first face to face meeting for months in the unfamiliar expanses of the New Hall. Alastair Niven addressed us on the theme of helping writers, drawing on his extensive experience with the Arts Council and as a Booker Prize judge. Few expected Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten to be numbered among the most influential books in his literary life but we all had to start somewhere. Scanning the broader horizons of the British literary scene, he informed us that the U.K. had the most books published per capita (1 per 2,700) of any country in the world. 100,000 fiction works (novels, short stories) are published annually although this represents a 30% decline over the last 20 years. In our current plague years, independent bookstores have seen sales increase although the 13% increase in works of fiction has been partly offset by a decline in the non-fiction field. The plethora of publications is problematic in that many publishers cannot afford to market books. It is easier to pitch the work of glamorous, young authors. Our speaker was ambivalent about celebrity writers. While an established public profile might seem an asset, Alastair confessed that he considered recent ghosted offerings from the Clintons and Martina Navratilova as a literary nadir. Those members of the audience quietly nursing private literary ambitions would have been inspired by an unknown writer triumphing solely from word-of-mouth recommendations as in the case of Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Traditionally sales can be enhanced by the literary press e.g. The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement or the review section of the former broadsheet press although this last has been a diminishing asset in recent years. Literary prizes provide an intoxicating cocktail of publicly acclaimed merit launched on a tidal wave of favourable publicity and can transform a writer’s career. Alastair’s stints as a Booker Prize judge each involved reading between 150 and 200 novels although he admitted some judges may have been less dutiful. He made a prescient observation on the post-Booker media ubiquity of Bernardine Evaristo, nicely anticipating a cartoon in the 29 October edition of Private Eye. Evaristo was the first black woman to win the Booker although female Asian authors have had previous successes. An intriguing contrast emerged in the commercial success of two winners whose works were both set in a proletarian Glaswegian milieu. Following his 2020 Booker triumph, Douglas Stuart saw the sales of Shuggy Bain surge from 80,000 to 800,000 while James Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late only managed 40,000. Admittedly, Kelman’s uncompromising Glasgow argot offered no concessions to the mainstream Anglophone reader. In some fields, most notably the Peace Prize, the Nobel judges have made some controversial even contrarian selections and the 2021 Literature prize broke new ground as it was won by the Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the first black African winner. Somewhat embarrassingly, the last African win was the white British-Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007 (born to British parents in Iran). Although arguably a win for the global South, Gurnah’s best known work, Paradise, was published in 1995 and indeed made the Booker short list. This award followed accusations that the Nobel judges ignored the more vociferous critics of post-colonialism many of whom came from the global South.

Literary festivals, book launches and poetry readings provide platforms for publicising and selling books although sometimes mandating encounters in the farthest reaches of eccentricity. The novelist P. D. James filled a marquee with 800 people at Hay on Wye and declined any fee, requesting only a donation to The English Hymn Society. She was disconcerted to learn afterwards that the organisers’ donation was a princely £5! The author Simon Brett was left completely alone for an hour and a half in one festival hall while his organising host went for her lunch.

Our speaker’s conclusion was resolutely upbeat – there is no evidence of the imminent death of the book or of reading. In a lively Q and A session he was positive and open minded on anything that facilitated the public’s interaction with Literature, be it coffee shops in booksellers or even a McDonald’s in a public library.

 William Doherty 

 

Angel Hour, by Ciaran O'Driscoll, reviewed by Gillian Southgate

Ciaran O’Driscoll’s new collection of poetry, ‘Angel Hour’, documents the process of searching for the right words to write; this is a commonplace enough observation to make, since any good poet is embarked on that journey. But here we have the struggle persistently revealed to us, while life, everyday life with all its dramas and frustrations, goes on. ‘And the TV took it on to report the daily numbers of the stricken and the slain/and told us to wash our hands or we’d become statistics’ he says of the Covid pandemic. That remorseless reporting  enhanced ‘my noxious dreams my cancelled travel plans my fears my paranoias envies and oddities’. But when he contemplates the figure of a pot-bellied Buddha in his garden, with a perpetual cosmic laugh ‘that brings everything scuttling back into place’, it makes him understand how the chiaroscuro aspects of existence must be  balanced if quiet of mind, and freedom to let go and ‘see the light’ are to be achieved.

 In ‘Tunnels’ he says the essence of achieving equilibrium is ‘to break out to the sunlit world at the far end of despair.’ The sunlit world is elusive, but can be approached by paying homage to other poets and meeting the challenges they face in trying to express an idea, an emotion. Robert Frost’s powerful poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ has a stillness and simplicity that makes the reader feel nature writing has rarely been so distilled, and so plain. O’Driscoll examines the making of a poem so unassuming and so artless, and does it in Frost’s, and his own voices, (‘I didn’t stay with lovely, dark and deep’ ), making the reader share in the complexity of the creative process.

Often, as he has told us, the words the poet is striving for will not come. In ‘Uncreative Pages’ he plays a melodeon to aid or distract him from the elusive ‘shimmering sentence’ he is seeking. Once, he comes close to understanding how it might be mined, in the title poem ‘Angel Hour’, when on holiday, he falls into a light sleep, and a crack of thunder reveals to him a ranked file of angels standing ‘on a road of golden clouds that climbed into the sky.’ Reminiscent of the words of William Blake, they show in metaphor the process of imaginative creation, as well as that other, spiritual world transcending our corporeal desire for wine and ‘appetite’. He glimpses and comprehends how fasting opened visions for saints and martyrs of the church, revealing to them the glories of life beyond the body. When the life of the mind climbs like angels standing on golden clouds, the ‘basis of the poet’s being’ is liberated into creative action, and a ‘visceral shiver of delight’, (From ‘Dead Recital’) confirms the truth of the resulting poetry.

‘My Builder’s Opinion of Light’  is a brilliant (I’m using the word advisedly) exercise in extended metaphor, and works on every level.  The builder is both muse and imagination itself. In order to liberate the mind into creative thought, to find exactly what one is searching to say, the moment when light can be caught is critical, but constantly elusive. But it is necessary to have faith in the process: ‘Be of unspeakable cheer, all that’s serene will come from nowhere,’ the builder/creative mind advises. The poet is transmogrified into a kind of celestial farmer: ‘I see you in star-studded wellingtons, robed in a mantle of the zodiac’, but also as a harvester of ideas, words, the shapes of words, the music of words.

Being a poet is a lonely business, yet it is a business the poet has no choice but to bring alive. The natural world is an actor in this drama of creativity, and many of these poems are suffused with images of light and dark. The political, indifferent world functions both as a source of inspiration and a straitjacket for it: ‘the air ‘went the way of water, health, a place called home’. Despair is always hovering on the edge of the poet’s consciousness, and sun is sought to relieve the mood, even as he acknowledges he is ‘more of a moon man, me’. Maybe so, but there is no more honest poet than Mr. O’Driscoll. Accomplished, bringing integrity to his craft, he is a blessed inhabitant of the fortunate isles of imagination. For all who need poems in order to live, this anthology will bear reading and re-reading.

Angel Hour, SurVision Books, Dublin, August 2021. 90 pp, £10.39 at Amazon.