A Point of View

Not long ago I went to see Will Self read from his works at the Norwich Playhouse. There hung over the event the sense of a writer who has so stylised his public persona as to have become a kind of performance artist. Certainly the gap between novelist playing – literally – to the gallery and stand-up comedian was sometimes a bit too close for comfort. It was all quite amusing, even if the woman sitting next to me, having remarked to her husband shortly before the interval that she “came here to be entertained”, failed to return for the second half.

Self’s angle on the half-century of the Kennedy assassination (8 November) followed a particularly raucous edition of Any Questions from some Scottish bear pit. The contrast between Jonathan Dimbleby’s farewell to his baying audience and the solitary voice that followed was rather alarming: the communally effervescent had suddenly been replaced by the lugubrious, the drawling and the drily ironic. Filling us in on his recent visit to Dallas, Self reprised an encounter with a wise-­cracking onlooker, to whose quip he hesitated to rise. Was levity the best way to respond to a political murder?

But then America, still awash in conspiracy theories and Kennedy lore, seemed uncertain how to swing itself: “oddly muted” Self reckoned its collective reaction. The locals gathered around him to reflect included a local academic, who recalled Dallas Catholics emerging weeping from houses decked out with the “twin icons” of President and Pope once the news broke, and Mark Oakes, a JFK obsessive these 40 years past, who was offering for sale copies of the autopsy report signed by one of the technicians.

Self’s highly plausible theory was that Kennedy’s death inaugurated “the media­tisation of public events in the 1960s” and the transformation of things usually kept behind doors, or enacted beyond the camera lens in remote parts of the world, into spectacle. As for the conspiracy angle, he seemed fascinated by Oakes who, when asked who he thought had done it, remarked that he didn’t know, although the mob, the CIA and the Teamsters Union seemed possible candidates. What seemed really to irk him, Self shrewdly deposed, was his own debarment from the mediatising process. The anniversary documentaries and write-ups had passed him by.

There was a wider argument here too, about people in the intervening 50 years no longer believing what they read in newspapers or saw on TV. Conspiracy theories, in fact, were a response to oligarchism and powerlessness: paradoxically, the notion that everything is arranged and that the powerful are mostly unaccountable is deeply consoling to those outside the loop. Curiously, despite mention of “psychic mulches” and the “tentacular” reach of the National Security Agency, and much good sense, our man seemed as muted as American reaction to the current crop of memorials, and the museum which he visited in the course of his researches. Stylisation may be harder to keep up than we imagine.

Meanwhile, over on Start the Week (11 November) something rather extraordinary was going on – nothing less than an entire programme devoted to the poetry of George Herbert. The excuse, we soon learned, was the taste for religious verse of the Herbert-Berry-Eliot kind acquired by Andrew Marr (“not a religious person”) while recovering from his recent stroke. The guests were Herbert’s biographer, John Drury, the composer Sir John Tavener (who died the day after the broadcast) and Jeanette Winterson, and Marr’s guess that the discussion would “shoot all over the place” proved to be uncannily prophetic.    

In fact, once Drury had summarised his subject’s life for us – the “search for obscurity” that accompanied his transfer from Cambridge don to country parson, the poems written with no thought that they would ever be published – the debate straight away turned to the question of why, in a supposedly secular age, people were so interested in religious poetry. Tavener, naturally, spoke of Herbert’s musicality, but Winterson, whose Pentecostalist upbringing was made much of, went instantly to the heart of the matter with her claim that it was a consequence of the soul trying to adapt to a world in flux.

The soul, she continued, was a part of us that even non-believers could understand, and, in an age where religion was in retreat from public spaces, something that screamed out for “company”. Working-class culture, oral traditions and patronising middle-class ­revisers who assumed that ordinary people couldn’t understand the language of the King James Bible followed in quick succession: rarely has the displaced religious sensibility that floats around so much of our national life been given such a spirited airing.