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| Paradise Lost and Found
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| His credentials are impressive—long-term fixture and compelling voice in English newspapers and broadcast, cultural critic for The New Statesman, author of several acclaimed books including the recently released Big Babies, writer-in-residence at Magdalene College, at Cambridge University where he teaches.
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And just in case you think you get the picture—there’s more to Michael Bywater than a good grasp of grammar and an intimidating intellect. How about the time he flew over the Australian outback in a shaky old Cessna 182 or played the organ while performing “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in company with Gary Brooker who composed it?
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And then there's the way he has of making hearable poetry
out of prose—his voice ringing out clear as a church bell on Sunday morning.
Listen as he talks about his favorite place: “Cambridge, probably, on a cold morning early in the Lent term with a light snowfall on the ground, a blue sky and the wind curling in from the Fens, on my way to the University Library: paradise on earth.”
Not, by the way, his first experience of earthly paradise—hear him describe the house that he grew up in the Midlands town of Nottingham: “I was brought up in a house in what I suppose was the Georgian equivalent of an executive estate, called The Park. The house and the surroundings were, I suppose, something like Paradise on earth. Again, there was that sense of some... I don’t know, some texture, just beyond the reach of the senses. Outside the house was a gas lamp which the man lit every evening. The street, which was called Park Valley, lay at the foot of Castle Rock and in the rain everything was perfused with the scent of wet sandstone and the smell of perfumes containing vetiver or coumarin take me back there instantly.”
When he was eight years old, his mother’s poor health precipitated a move to a less challenging house—a life-altering turn of affairs for the little boy, the son and grandson of doctors, who sat up all night reading A Christmas Carol when he was only six, and who painted his own life and family in vivid Dickensian strokes of imagination.
(Even now in his early fifties, Bywater recalls his childhood in camphorated novelistic detail, “…the baize curtain on a clever Victorian automatic curtain rail which hung over the door into my grandfather’s surgery. I remember the texture of the leather on his examination couch, and the corner-cupboard full of tools, and a bottle of mercury in my father’s surgery; I remember an embosser for writing-paper my grandfather had, which I called ‘the djeep’ because when you pushed the handle down it went djeep. I remember a special sort of bon-bon my mother used to buy from the sweetshop, and the cheese-wire that Frank the Grocer used to cut the cheese, and a rubber snake my Grandmother bought me when I was three, from a joke-and-magic shop called The Sign of Four…”)
Uprooted to his new “characterless” house, in a suburban no-man’s land, away from the street-lamps, absent the walk into town, devoid of urban vitality, altogether disappointed by “outside reality”, Bywater invested in the consolation of imagination, reading, listening to classical music, playing the organ, nurturing his interest in science and medicine, all part of his efforts to escape the claustrophobia of a certain kind of domesticity.
“…we were one of those little English units, Mummy, Daddy, Michael and Jane, and – for reasons I don’t much understand – my parents seldom entertained and when they did it was immensely formal and nerve-wracking and awful. Otherwise the social life of the household changed into a terribly narrow nothingness, just the Beardalls on one side and Hoffens on the other, both of whom I loathed. So I lived in my head.”
And felt the pangs of the evicted.
“[Leaving The Park was] an expulsion from Eden, but an urban rather than a pastoral Eden. I think I felt terribly cheated out of something, and the idea of peoples being cheated has been something I’ve written about ever since, in one way or another. Probably most people don’t actually feel cheated and I’m transferring my own sense of it onto them. But I think you’ll find that there’s some sense of expulsion from the garden in most writers’ past (and present).”
It wasn’t until he was in his twenties and newly-married that Bywater, who had variously considered academia, the priesthood, music, theater and aviation, seriously entertained the idea of becoming a writer and set about teaching himself its secrets and trade.
Loss is an obvious theme in his universally celebrated book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go, described by publisher Granta Books as, “…no mere miscellany, it weaves a web of everything we no longer have…Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined, not by what we have, but by what we have lost along the way…a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities.”
Talking about the ways that loss defines us he cites the views of a friend of his, a priest who preached about the three divine gifts to humanity—memory, the intellect and the will.
“Memory is about loss; if something is not lost, it is not a memory but the present. Without memory we are adrift in the present: the condition of life to which both tyrannical and neophile states would like to condemn us. Without memory we know no different. The ancient Greeks viewed time differently to us. We see ourselves facing the future, the past behind our backs. They saw themselves standing facing the past, the future approaching over their shoulder. Their image of it seems better to me.
“The other thing, of course, is that loss is a component of history; and without history we are like children. As Cicero said, To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it be woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? That sense of being ‘woven in’ is, I think, terribly precious and as soon as we stop feeling woven in, things start to seem provisional, contingent, optional.
“Finally, I think that another crucial element to our lives is texture. So much texture is being lost: everything tends towards the condition of virtual reality: even our commercial buildings no longer express aspiration or pride on a human scale, but aspire to a machine-like status in which we are components. A contemporary office building too often is a giant iteration of a computer-casing, and the people—monitored, timed, audited – are expected to acquire the status of microchips… This is not, not, not to say that past equals good, present equals bad. That would be an inconceivably fatuous thing to believe. There has probably never been a better time in history to be alive…”
The specter of something missing—our adult selves—is also implicit in his most recent book, Big Babies, a brilliant and funny account of the ways in which our inner child has emerged from its hiding place to become the infantilized face we present to the world, demanding, petulant, outraged, narcissistically enslaved to whatever’s in fashion and perpetually stylin’.
“…We have a sickness of attention,” he explains. “We (it’s believed) need constant novelty, entertainment, stimulation. And we’re buying into that. Just look at the way television or film is edited. Look at the hyper-manic cutting, listen to the frantic over-modulation of radio and TV announcers and anchors. These people need to be calmed down… But something I didn’t really consider in the book was that it’s a big payback, being infantilized. The responsibility is off our backs. Hey, we’re just big kids! Tapping our feet! We don’t have to risk the disapproval of our own kids—they like us! We’re like their friends! And we aren’t going to die or get old—eeoow! Gross!—because we’re really YOUNG. Maybe that’s the reward. I don’t know. Or maybe we’re dumb. I wish I knew the answer to this one.”
Now, courtesy the post-war economic boom, for the first time, people can afford to think in terms of lifestyle, says Bywater, who points out that where there is demand, there is someone to exploit it for money. In this case the media and advertising contribute mightily to the shaping of a “docile and infantilized audience in which they can first create a neurosis, an emptiness…a sense of incompleteness or inauthenticity ‘You’re not quite real unless you buy X.’… Most media are financed by advertising; indeed, the media model is not about delivering stuff to readers/viewers, but about delivering viewers/readers to the advertisers…”
Mobility and globalization have circumvented the traditional community with its rigorous hierarchies, pre-existing expectations and defined modes of social travel—the rules are less clear in the current cultural swirl we inhabit.
“…there’s no set of rules as to how you display the position you have/the position you aspire to. So everything is aspirational. We inhabit an Americo-Euro-Anglo-Oriento-African polyverse where the great stew of cultural influences is too complex for us to negotiate. We no longer know who we are so we don’t know how to demonstrate it. In many ways, this is a good thing. We’re much nicer than we’ve ever been. But it also leads to insecurity which in turn leads to lifestyle aspiration of this particular free-floating sort…
“The other thing, I think, is that there are two aspects of the American model which have populated most of the prosperous (and not-so-prosperous) world: one is the idea of aspiration as a primary virtue (‘change or die’) and the other is the idea of consumerism as a means of self-expression.
“In a nation like America, which is uniquely prosperous, people can afford ‘lifestyle’ choices; in other nations, it’s a struggle, and we end up with status symbols which indicate someone else’s status. In other words, we confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. Was a time when, if I had made it, I’d wear a gold watch to show I’d made it. Now, I might wear a diver’s or a pilot’s watch to show that, in some kind of hidden universe, I really thought of myself as a diver/pilot, or, at least, even though I might look like a fat, sedentary office worker, I had the characteristics of a diver or pilot. So my status symbol doesn’t symbolize status as much as confer it (and the status is imaginary, much of the time.)”
It may come as a surprise that despite his vaunted status as a public thinker, Bywater, who insists he gets fooled all the time and never quite knows what to do in any given situation isn’t exactly awash in self-esteem; most writers, he thinks, suffer from low self-confidence.
“I don’t know how rich, famous, lauded and honored I’d have to be before I could walk into a party and feel comfortable saying ‘Hi’…I know I’m clever. I know I put words together well. But confidence? No. About work, it’s different. Someone takes me on – hates my writing or what I have to say – I’ll fight back. But in other areas I remain very diffident. I still don’t see myself as a paid-up member of society, is the truth. I’d love to, but I don’t know how it’s done. I see friends of mine from way back and they are chairmen of political parties and controllers of television stations and multi-millionaires and I think, ‘How did they do that? I couldn’t do that. How did they do that?”
He draws up a long list of personal mistakes and failings that include laziness, not making strategic friendships, getting married too young without any idea of how the world works or how marriage works, being lousy at administrative stuff so he’s never quite on top of things, letting his house slip away in his divorce by trying to be a nice guy, postponing his own problems by trying to help other people with theirs, lacking confidence, lacking focus.
Being over-enthusiastic.
“Not learning from experience. Not learning from experience that one thing we don’t ever learn from experience is that we never learn from experience.”
Lessons? He’s had his share:
“[One] Keep your credit rating A1. Seriously. Money is many, many thousands of times more important than I would have liked to believe. [Two] Everyone thinks everyone else is having a way better time, but they’re not. [Three] Ars longa, vita brevis est.”
When asked for advice, the cosmic kind that has some practical application, Bywater is predictably generous, thoughtful and thought-provoking.
“First, an old journalist told me that when you’re interviewing someone – and it applies to listening to them on TV or watching the ads or whatever – always think: ‘Why is this bugger lying to me?’ And secondly, another old friend told me that when St Paul ended up as a very old man in Ephesus everyone used to say, ‘You were there, you knew Jesus, what was he like, what happened, tell us all about it,’ and he was very weak and frail and all he’d say was ‘Little children: love one another’. The two are contradictory, I know, but so is life. But perhaps best is Beckett, from Worstward Ho!: ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
And if he could only communicate one thing, make one recommendation to others with regard to what they can contribute to the greater world?
“You know, you really don’t have to do this.”
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