Two anniversaries

It’s been a week of two sad anniversaries. One of them rather less painful than the other. But neither of them cheerful.

The Spanish have a curious habit of referring to key dates by just the day of the month and the capital letter of the month’s name. So ‘11M’ is the terrorist attack on a commuter train approaching Atocha station in Madrid. That leaves us guessing whether the day it happened was the eleventh of May (try again) or the eleventh of March (bingo). As for the year, I can only assume Spaniards have excellent memories and they just remember it was 2004.

The particular Spanish anniversary I’m thinking of, however, is 23F. The 23rd of  February. Which year? Well, you just have to develop a Spanish memory to know that it was 1981.

At twenty-three minutes past six in the evening of that day, a group of Guardia Civil paramilitary police, led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, irrupted into the chamber of the lower house of the Spanish parliament. It was debating the appointment of a new Prime Minister so the whole government was present. As a result, the rebel police took hostage not just MPs but the entire administration.

February 1981. The late dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, had been dead only just over four years, after a near four-decade dictatorship launched by the previous coup in July 1936 (18J, although oddly I’ve never heard it referred to that way). In 1981, Spain was still in its stumbling transition towards democracy, a process by no means certain of reaching its goal. 

A friend of mine in Barcelona once told me she and her friends spent that evening driving to each others’ houses for anxious conversations about what they should do and in how much danger they stood. Were they about to see Spanish democracy snuffed out again, they wondered, before it had even had the chance to take root?

Gran Via de Ferran el Catolíc
As I enjoy it today and as it was on 23F

I think of that terrible moment whenever I’m in one of the fine avenues of my local city, Valencia. That’s the Gran Vía de Fernán el Catolíc, broad, leafy, with gardens down the centre. It’s a pleasure to walk down. But on the night of 23F, in response to orders from the local military commander, Lieutenant General Jaime Milans del Bosch, it was lined with 50 tanks and 2000 soldiers, as the local garrison rose in support of the coup attempt. 

A fine Spanish poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma, once wrote that “of all sad histories in History, the saddest without doubt is the history of Spain, because it ends badly”. Well, it looked back then as though it was about to end badly on 23F too. But this time it didn’t.

At 1:00 in the morning, the king, Juan Carlos I, went on TV to order troops back to barracks. Even Milans del Bosch in Valencia, the only regional military chief to have risen so enthusiastically in support of the coup, recalled his forces. That didn’t save him from an eventual prison sentence, however. Tejero got an even longer one.

A matter of some controversy to this day remains what exactly the king was up to between the coup attempt and his TV address, nearly seven hours later. Was he ensuring that he had all the pieces in place to resist the insurrection? Or was he checking to see which side would win before committing himself?

Back then most people might have given him the benefit of the doubt. He emerged from the incident as the saviour of democracy. It became common for Spaniards to say that, though they might not be royalists, they were certainly Juan-Carlists. These days, following financial, sexual and lifestyle scandals that have forced him into abdication, Juan Carlos might, however, find the public less accommodating.

Still, democracy survived and the anniversary of 23F isn’t a bad one.

Much less cheerful is the one that fell the following day, 24 February, the first anniversary of Russia’s so-called ‘special operation’ in Ukraine. This week, as the day approached, Vladimir Putin announced that the fighting was all down to the aggression of NATO and Ukraine. Now, I admit I don’t follow the news closely enough, but I don’t recall any NATO forces being on Russian territory. No Ukrainian ones either, to be honest, unless he means the territory the Russian invaders occupied just long enough for Putin to deem it annexed to Russia, before the Ukrainians pushed them back out.

Putin reflects the outlook of only some Russians, though possibly a majority, in a nation bombarded by propaganda and with little access to independent news. There are other Russians with different views. I met one some weeks ago, a man who’d been tipped off that he was likely to be mobilised. That would have sent him to the meatgrinder for unfortunate soldiers which the Russian operation in Ukraine has become. He dropped everything, leaving work and family, to flee his homeland. Sadly, securing asylum abroad hasn’t proved easy: while Ukrainians are immediately viewed as refugees, Russians escaping the Putinocracy aren’t automatically extended the same kindness.

Street scene from Kharkiv during my 2011 visit when I met Alex
and after another strike in Putin’s ‘special operation’

Meanwhile, Ukrainians keep up their spirit of resistance. My friend Alex is from Kharkiv, one of those majority-Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine that Putin claims are longing to join the Russian motherland. With his city suffering Russian bombardment, Alex just finds it sickening:

… to see how KGB/FSB brainwashing techniques multiplied by modern technology have turned a whole nation [Russia] into a totalitarian sect… 

He likens them to residents of Jonestown, the sect most of whose members committed mass suicide in Guyana back in 1979. He points out that the Russians:

… send their loved ones to death or go to die themselves, because ‘Putin knows better’. 

What about the sustained bombardment of his city?

I still cannot grasp the fact that ordinary Russians are shelling our cities every night for absolutely no reason. That thought comes to my mind every time I hide in the bathroom when an air alarm goes off and there are sounds of explosions nearby (I mostly ignore alarms during the day because I am busy buying or delivering things for civilians or military, but we have a curfew from 23.00 to 5.00, and during that time my wife and I usually go to the bathroom during air alarms if we are not asleep)

The Ukrainians, he believes are different from the Russians:

… that comes from them, notwithstanding their various political views, living for 30 years in a free democratic society. Somehow 90+ percent of our people got a feeling that our only chance to survive is to stand united as Ukrainians. If Putin had any chance to present this as an ‘internal conflict amongst Russians’ we would have fallen already. But our President is very good at messaging, and him wearing a pullover ‘I'm Ukrainian’ tells it all. Sooner or later all of us started to believe in the idea of free independent democratic Ukraine, and that I think has brought the whole civilized world to our side

Every day I deliver aid to people in their eighties, some of them visually impaired or having problems walking, and they tell me that ‘Western tanks are coming to our rescue…’ One senior lady who lives alone has told me she lies on her back every time a Russian shelling starts, puts an icon on her chest and prays. But, she says, ‘Ukraine has not died yet!’

Those people make me so much stronger

Well, I hope Western tanks do make it to the Ukrainian armies in sufficient numbers and time to make a difference. Planes too. Ammunition. And the humanitarian aid a persecuted people needs.

Spanish history didn’t for once end badly on 23F. Now that we’re past the anniversary of what I suppose we can call 24F, I hope that we in the West will do enough to ensure that it doesn’t end badly for Ukraine either. Because the survival of Alex’s ‘free democratic society’, in the face of brutal and unprovoked aggression, matters far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Shirt tale

I don’t think I’ve previously used a photo of a cellophane-wrapped shirt as an illustration for one of these posts, so perhaps I owe you an explanation.

The shirt was the spur

The only reason I’ve done it today is that I came across the shirt in a wardrobe while I was looking for something else, and it brought some memories to mind, as well as a smile to my lips. Because, as you can probably tell from the fact that the shirt isn’t symmetrically placed in the cellophane, it isn’t because it’s new that it’s in cellophane at all. No, that’s the wrapping it was in when it was returned from the laundry service of a hotel I was staying in when I was last working.

Now, that particular company didn’t authorise us to use hotel laundry services or (come to that) have a good dinner or a drink while away on business. Fortunately, though, I had an indulgent boss – the best boss I ever had, a great final act to a long and not particularly glorious career – and she never made any difficulties about signing off my expenses, even if they included such forbidden gems.

There’ve been times when I’ve wondered whether perhaps excessive expenses didn’t contribute to the car-crash end to my time with the company. She tells me they didn’t, because we were always well within budget, but I can’t help feeling that this only means the budget was high, set at a level too conspicuous to escape the probing eye of a newly-appointed finance officer, fixated on costs and blind to value. It had always been my fear that some such character would eventually turn a baleful glare on us since, while I thought our team was doing invaluable work maintaining customer loyalty, it wasn’t actually bringing in any revenue of its own, while its costs were substantial.

When the company did indeed appoint such an accountant, his first step was to start sharpening his axe for any costs that could be saved. A former director I worked for used to say that accountants were people who only knew that the numbers run from nought to nine, and I think this guy fit that bill. Within months, he’d dumped three-quarters of my boss’s team, and all but one of the eight in my own within it.

I wasn’t the one spared.

My boss repeatedly warned me that the good times were coming to an end as the moment of execution approached.

“I don’t even know whether they’ll allow the team to keep going,” she kept telling me, when we were trying to make plans.

I certainly can’t claim I wasn’t warned. But, like lots of people who’ve been warned, I preferred to keep on going as though the future were serene. Right up to the moment when the future stopped. 

That’s why I still have a shirt in a hotel laundry’s cellophane wrapping, ready for a next use that never came. It joins the jackets hanging in another wardrobe, unused since the day in September 2019 when all those concerns ended. One of those jackets has never been worn – yes, so deep was my sense of denial that I was still buying clothes for work a few weeks before work ended.

Jackets hanging to no purpose

Execution was, as is traditional, at dawn. However, since this was an American company, dawn there was a lot later here – more like noon. Still, it did strike me as significant that I had been summoned to an on-line meeting when it would be six in the morning at the other end of the call.

The night before I can only describe as disturbed, as any condemned man’s must be. And it only took a few seconds to confirm my fears, when the other person on the call, alongside my boss, turned out to be someone from human resources. My wife Danielle came in to find out what was happening, and she was at least as taken aback as I was at the news.

Equally taken aback, if in a different way, was my boss who followed her dismissed team members out of the company soon afterwards.

But it was far from all negative.  I decided immediately that I wasn’t going looking for another job at 66. Danielle had been urging me for some time to give up on my irrational idea of retiring only at 73 or 74, and I told her I was going to take this painful experience as an excellent motive to take her advice.

I’ve never regretted it. Indeed, the idea that I might be working for another three or four years even now, strikes me as bleak. Today, I can concentrate on my history podcast, on these blog posts, on my novel of the life of an outstanding eighteenth-century woman, instead of donning that shirt and one of those jackets to travel to places which are exhausting to get to and little fun to be in once you’re there.

So the shirt stays in its wrapper and the jackets hang on in their closet. A reminder of a nasty little moment that opened the door to a great deal of satisfaction. And, since I still count my ex-boss as a close friend, what do I have to complain about?

That’s why the spur for this post was the discovery of that badly packed and never unpacked shirt…

Danielle's magic way with gardens

One of the features that first attracted us to the house we live in now, near the Spanish city of Valencia, was its back garden. And when I say ‘us’, I mean all of us, including the toy poodles Luci and Toffee and the cat Misty, alas no longer with us.

A feature that made it particularly appealing was that it was a sun trap for most of the day. The house faces East-West so the back garden gets the morning sun, and then the front catches it from late morning on so that, even in January, we were able to have lunch out of doors there several times in recent weeks.

Even in the afternoon, the back garden is long enough to catch the sun pretty much until it sets. Or at least, it would have been, had sunlight not been cut off by one of the garden’s apparent charms: the tall cypress hedges down each side. With the grass in between them, those hedges provided privacy and an enclosed spot of greenery for us all to enjoy, but with a serious downside.

Toffee enjoying the old garden

Misty found the garden a fine place for his retirement

Indeed, when looked at more closely, things weren’t quite as good as they seemed. Not by any means. The hedges, thirty years old, had grown so high as to cut off the sun. Deprived of it, many other plants simply couldn’t thrive. Besides, over those three decades, the hedges had invaded the garden and, like Russian tanks in Ukrainian territory, were in defiant and arrogant occupation of far too much of that relatively small space, making it smaller still.

Attractive. But enclosed. And deprived of light
That’s Luci and Toffee in the background

Rainscape dominated by cypress hedges
Note the brown patches

What’s more, after all that time, patches of dead vegetation were beginning to appear amongst the cypresses, breaking the pleasing green with ugly areas of dull brown. And as for the grass, lawns aren’t really made for Mediterranean climates, and ours could only be maintained by constant watering. These days, watering grass feels like something of an ecological sin.

From the day we arrived, we talked about taking the cypresses down. That would flood the garden with light. It would widen it. It would allow other plants and flowers to grow and bloom.

Our neighbours urged us to go ahead. They were sick of the hedges. One even offered to contribute to the costs on her side, where the fence, into and through which the hedge had grown, had suffered most damage and would need most work.

We got some quotes for taking the hedges down. They seemed excessive to us. “Why didn’t we do the job ourselves?”, we wondered. I mean, how much effort could it really represent?

I can answer that second question now. It was a colossal task. And backbreaking. 

What was worst was where the hedge had grown through the fencing. 

Pruned trunks ready for the chainsaw

You see, the deal was that we’d cut all the branches off the cypresses. The gardeners who come around weekly would then take the trunks down with their chain saws. Our local council has a wonderful arrangement whereby, if we tie pruned branches together in bundles that aren’t too big (that wasn’t a problem, because I certainly had no intention of carrying bundles big enough to be unpleasantly heavy), we can dump them at the kerbside and they’ll collect them. 

But they wouldn’t do that if there were bits of metal, such as parts of our garden fence, still firmly joined to the branches. So we had to separate them. The presence of our son Michael proved a tremendous boon, as he was apparently inexhaustible in disentangling branches from fencing.

As for the metal waste that emerged, nothing could be simpler. Danielle explained to me that I just had to leave it, too, on the kerbside, since there’s a constant flow of cars on our streets, carrying people who make their living collecting the metal waste people throw out, and turning it into something they can sell. And, indeed, when I dumped a pile of fencing waste on the pavement outside our house, it was gone less than twenty minutes later. 

Waste metal.
Left on the kerbside, it was gone in 20 minutes

Unfortunately, the side where fence and hedge had become so welded together was so damaged by removing the hedge that we had to get it replaced. Though before we could do that, we also had to repair the little wall on which the fence stood.

The wall that supports the fence repaired

New fence in place

Still, that was all done in time. We put up willow fencing inside the metal to make it all more aesthetic. And Danielle turned the garden into a low-water environment, replacing almost all the grass by gravel, with patches of earth in which plants can grow, alongside the much wider flowerbeds we can enjoy now that the hedges have been removed, adding perhaps as much as a third to the width of the garden. 

New Look

Toffee approves

It's winter still, so the new plants are still a way from blooming. But we’re heading fast towards spring, and the new garden will soon be a blaze of colour. A very different place from the one that greeted us when we moved here, but in its specific way, far more attractive.

Getting ready for spring

That’s the Danielle magic touch in gardening.

New Look from the other angle
With the artist at work in the background

Smiling gaily

Let’s celebrate Netflix for making the show Smiley.

Set in Barcelona, it’s one of the best gay-scene series I’ve seen for a long time. At least, at the light-hearted end of that scene. At the darker end, It’s a sin is right up there with the best, a powerful story of young gays at the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. It has plenty of humour, but that highlights the tragedy far more than blunting it.

Smiley, on the other hand, had us laughing within a couple of minutes, and we kept on laughing right to the end. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t serious, even sad, moments. It’s just that it’s the other way around from It’s a sin: the sadness or tension only make the returns to humour all the more pleasing.

Smiley: quarrelling again

The protagonists are two men who have next to nothing in common. One is somewhat older and an architect, a man of culture, while the other is a bartender in a gay bar with everyday tastes. Whenever they meet, they quarrel. Can there ever be a link between them?

The relationship I find most intriguing is the lesbian one. What do they really feel about each other? Is their love uplifting or a constraint? A series of gloriously humorous situations that arise between them keeps us guessing.

There’s also a heterosexual couple and their story, though it interested me less, has its wonderful moments too. And there are others.

Finally, the drag singer – with a beard – is a wonderful creation, making the series worth watching just for the songs.

So, a glorious experience. It’s available in several languages (including Catalan, the official language in Barcelona). If you have Netflix, I’m sure you can get it and I recommend you do. 

What added to its attraction for me is that it’s set in Spain. 

It’s less than half a century since homosexuality was legalised again in the country. It had been legal during the short-lived Second Republic in the 1930s, but the Franco dictatorship that overthrew it made it unlawful. It was treated as a medical syndrome, and gays – mostly gay men – could be brutally treated in an attempt to ‘cure’ them, including long terms of imprisonment in gaols for ‘deviants’.

Funnily enough, it was in Barcelona and nearby that the first cracks began to appear. A handful of gay clubs began to operate, clandestinely, from the 1960s and up to Franco’s death in 1975. But freedom only fully came with legislation in 1979, after the return to democracy.

Thinking about all that reminded me of one gay artist, Jaime Gil de Biedma. 

Jaime Gil de Biedma: the businessman or the poet

He was born in 1929, so he was approaching seven years of age when the most infamous murder of a gay man by Spanish nationalists backing the Franco rebellion took place. That was the shooting of a poet outstanding not just in Spain but around the world, Federico García Lorca. His killers would certainly have regarded many of the things he did as offences, such as claiming that expelling the Muslim Arabs was the greatest disaster his native Granada had undergone. No doubt, however, his worst offence was simply being gay.

Gil de Biedma knew the risks a gay poet ran. Not that, in his view, it was ever he, a successful businessman in his family’s tobacco business, who wrote poetry. The way he presented things, the businessman had invented a fictional character, also called Jaime Gil de Biedma, and it was the character who was the poet. 

That fiction wrote poems about love including including its erotic manifestations. Today we can read them as gay, though he, the poet, always stayed neutral, and it’s striking that he carefully avoids ever making clear the gender of the figures he mentions. Well, whether he chose to write for gays or for everyone, he had in any case to be careful. To a friend, Juan Ferraté, he once wrote about “the suffocating system of moral inhibitions that for all these years one has had to use for everything other than relationships with personal friends”.

In the end, the businessman Gil de Biedma announced, ten years before his own death, that the fictional poet Gil de Biedma had nothing more to say. By then, Franco was dead and Spain was reverting to a more civilised state. But the poetry stopped.

The art of that fictional poet might have ended but, fortunately, the life of gays, the life of art, and specifically the life of gay art, had been given a new lease. Which adds to the pleasure of watching a series like Smiley. Its exuberance would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, and that gives us something to celebrate today.

To celebrate but also to defend. Sadly, there are far too many Spaniards who seem to hanker for a return to those days of suffocating moral inhibitions. Let’s hope there are enough of the other sort to resist them.

Let’s end with a couple of extracts from one of the poet’s pieces. This one’s called After the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma. It starts (in a poor translation of my own which I hope nonetheless gives you a flavour of the original):

In the garden, reading
the shadow of the house darkens my pages
and the sudden cold at the end of August
makes me think of you.

The garden and the house nearby
where the birds pipe on the vines,
on an August evening, when it's about to get dark
and you still have your book in your hand,
were, I remember, your symbol of death.
I only wish that in the hell
of your last days this vision could give you
a little sweetness, though I don't think it will.

At peace at last with myself,
I can now remember you
not in the dreadful hours, but here
in the summer of last year
when crowding in
- so many months erased -
happy images return
brought by your image of death...

August in the garden, in broad daylight.

And here’s the ending, with its ingenious reflection of the poem on itself and the ambiguity over who did the writing:

It was a happy summer.
... The last summer
of our youth, you told Juan
in Barcelona when we returned
loaded with nostalgia,
and you were right. Then came the winter,
the hell of months
and months of agony
and the final night of pills and booze
and vomit on the carpet.

I saved myself by writing
After the Death of Jaime Gil de Biedma.

Of the two of us, it was you who wrote better.
Now I know how much they were yours
the dreamy desire and the irony,
the romantic muffle that beats in those of my poems that I prefer
for example in Pandémica...
Sometimes I wonder
what my poetry will be like without you.

Though perhaps it was I who taught you.
Who taught you to take revenge on my dreams,
out of cowardice, by corrupting them. 

Big four-oh

In La Cañada’s ‘Irish’ pub

It was quite a celebration. Not just a simple birthday, at least not in the sense of a specific day. More a serial celebration over the best part of a week.

I’m not talking about my birthday, although that kicked the process off. My celebrations, in which I’m always proud to say that the whole nation of Australia joins, under the mistaken apprehension that they’re marking their national day, were happily confined to the date in question. Let me stress that ‘happily’: it was just right, with excellent food in a lovely setting with wonderful company.

But I wasn’t the only one to have a birthday with a zero in it. Just three days after my 70th came my son Michael’s 40th. He’d joined us for the celebration of both.

The aim, you may remember if you read my last post on the subject, was to go for a Chinese meal on his birthday and follow that up with a visit to the Irish pub next door. Danielle and I had seen the pub several times but never gone in. Michael, however, had tried the place with his sister-in-law Sheena, with whom his last visit had overlapped. They’d liked it and he wanted to go back with us.

Eventually, the day dawned. Danielle baked Michael the cake he wanted, a Black Forest gateau, which he enjoyed, as did several of our neighbours: Danielle doesn’t hold back when she’s baking and likes her cakes to be generous.

Michael with his cake

But then there was a bit of a debate about the evening meal, in the Chinese restaurant. It quickly emerged that no one really felt like it. Michael, who likes to adapt his desires to the reality of circumstances, quickly modified his ideas. We’d go to the pub that night and a Chinese meal another day. 

It was only an Irish pub in a loose sense. It had clearly been decorated by a company that has a kit of ‘Irish pub’ accessories, delivers it and puts the contents up. But it seems to be pretty hazy on geography. For instance, one of the items up on the wall was a first aid kit box (yes, you read that right: a first aid kit box, and before you ask, your guess is as good as mine) from Redruth Rugby Football Club.

Now, I know a Redruth in Cornwall, which is in England, but to my knowledge at least, there’s no Redruth in Ireland. Or if there is, it’s not important enough to have a rugby club.

What I’m absolutely sure of is that the football scarf up on the wall, adorned with the words ‘Aston Villa’, is associated with one of the longstanding traditional English football teams, in this case in Birmingham. Nothing Irish about it.

What’s more, of course, this being a village on the outskirts of Valencia, everyone on the staff is Spanish, not Irish. To start the evening, I had an Orujo, a well-known drink in the Spanish province of Asturias, completely unknown, I’d guess, in Galway or County Down. 

I didn’t want two and wasn’t sure what to follow it up with. 

“I’ll have a Bloody Mary,” I eventually decided.

No good.

“They don’t do cocktails,” Michael told me.

But having thought about it, he went on, “Hold on a moment.”

I followed him back to the bar.

“Do you have Vodka?” he asked.

“Yes,” came the reply.

“Do you have tomato juice?”

“Yes,” again.

Now came the difficult one, the one where a positive reply was far less likely.

“Do you have tabasco?”

“Yes,” the manager told us, to our surprise.

With Michael in the pub. Note my supersized Bloody Mary

Well, a really good Bloody Mary has more ingredients than those, but they’re enough for a basic version. And, since the barmaid had never made a Bloody Mary before, she just kept tipping vodka into the glass until there was enough there for at least three strong ones. I had to get a second tomato juice just to make it drinkable.

We had a good time. Michael reckoned it was one of his best birthday celebrations. There was a price to be paid the next morning but, hey, it was fun while it was happening. “Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,” the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam tells us, “why fret about them if today be sweet?” Damn right too, even though when tomorrow managed to get born, it provided a little to fret about. 

That left the matter of the Chinese meal. Our Chinese restaurant is shut on Mondays and Tuesdays, the two days following the pub trip, so we decided to head into Valencia itself for lunch in a restaurant called “The Spicy Soul Hotpot”. It doesn’t offer souls, but the rest of the name is accurate. We hesitated between ‘medium spicy’ and ‘very spicy’, having ruled out ‘super spicy’. We opted for and enjoyed ‘very spicy’, but I’ll just say that next time we’ll go for ‘medium’, to spare our throats.

Michael with the hotpot

Then came the end of Michael’s stay and we still had the bottle of Cava, Spanish sparkling wine, I’d put in the fridge to cool for our celebrations. So we got it out and finished it off, much to our enjoyment. That marked the third celebratory event for his fortieth and, therefore, a full week of festivities starting from my seventieth.

A birthday week. Highly pleasurable. And it kept going for far longer than a mere birthday day.

Words that echo

It’s such a pleasure to be visited by friends you haven’t seen for years. 

We’ve known Christiane and Jean, French friends who live near Marseille, for twenty years or so, though we hadn’t seen them for ages. With good friends like these, though, when you meet up again, it’s as though you’d never been apart. The conversation virtually picks up where you’d left it off.

One of the subjects that came up during this visit was the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. You know, the man best known for his short but powerful novel, The Outsider. I recently re-read one of his books, The Plague, but after listening to Jean’s tribute to his remarkable compatriot, I felt it was time to go back to another I’d liked while I was studying French literature, oh, way back there in prehistory. 

That novel was The Fall. The Outsider and The Plague are set in Camus’s native Algeria, with the Mediterranean lapping at its shores. Sea bathing is one of the central symbols of the novels, whether you stay out – refusing communion with nature – or go in – communing with nature and other people (in The Plague, a night swim by the two protagonists is a key moment).

The Fall is different. It’s set in Amsterdam and the sea is grey and cold. Far from being an inviting place for communion, it’s alien, unattractive, awash with “the bitter water of my baptism”. The book is unusual, as it’s a second person narrative: all those references to ‘you’ can feel like a direct reference to us, the readers. And it’s about how we create barriers between ourselves and the rest of mankind, about cold alienation from other people, about a deliberate indifference or even hostility towards the possibility of communion.

But then, while I was re-reading the novel, or rather listening to the audible version, one passage struck me particularly hard.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you well know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone. Since that isn’t as easy as reading specialist novels might lead you to believe, one generally turns to politics and runs towards the cruellest of the parties. 

Orwell (left) and Camus
Outstanding writers with more than that in common

The words rang a bell. I got hold of George Orwell’s 1984 and went hunting through it until I found the following exchange from the interrogation of the central character, Winston Smith:

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’ 

Winston thought. 

‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain… 

Later, the interrogator concludes:

There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. … But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

Not a feel-good vision of the future, but then as anyone knows who’s read 1984, it’s nobody’s idea of a feel-good book.

What struck me most, however, was the way that it presents, in a more extensive form, the same vision of the world that the speaker in Camus’ The Fall describes. There is a certain kind of man who seeks power through violence, who wants to plant a boot on a human face. It’s a pretty bleak view of power and how it’s likely to be used, and it seems to be shared by these two novelists.

That’s not surprising in writers who’d not that long before emerged from the stress of particularly vicious wars.

Orwell had served for a time in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he chronicles compellingly in Homage to Catalonia. Then he’d lived through the Second World War in Britain.

Camus had lived through the Nazi occupation of France. He edited, at huge danger to himself, the resistance newspaper Combat. Despite Gestapo oppression, at its height the paper was printing nearly 200,000 copies daily.

1984 was published in 1949. The Fall came out just seven years later. 

Both authors were tubercular. Both died depressingly young, coincidentally both at 46 years of age. In Orwell’s case, it was the TB that killed him; Camus died in a still more senseless way, in a car accident.

War, tuberculosis, the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union (which was continuing) and in Germany (only recently defeated) might seem like the source of the shared bleakness of the books. That’s a conclusion too far, since there is a far more optimistic tone in Camus’s work overall: he does see an alternative attitude to life that can counteract the inclination to stamp a boot on a human face. The Fall is a denunciation of a man who represents the antithesis of the pursuit of communion Camus promotes in the other novels.

In any case, I’m not sure that the negativity both books portray merely reflects the times in which they were written. I mean, have the overthrow of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Soviet Russia, really dealt a massive, potentially fatal, blow to the regimes that want to crush through violence?

Vladimir Putin seems to embody the attitudes of the interrogator in Orwell’s 1984. What can Putin hope for in his war on Ukraine? He can’t be after money. He’s spent years corruptly amassing a huge personal fortune, but that’s surely just a safety net, in case he ever has to get out, isn’t it? While he stays in power, he can have anything he would otherwise have to buy, simply by announcing his desire. Not just his needs but his wants are fully catered for. The cruelty of his regime is surely just the naked exercise of power. He can’t think it’s good for anyone inside or outside Russia.

And what about Donald Trump? When he talked recently about the need to suspend items of the US constitution to enable him to continue to exercise power, what was he expressing but the would-be autocrat’s resentment at being denied the right to rule as his will dictates?

Camus and Orwell were superb authors. That’s a good enough reason to read these books. We should, however, avoid thinking that they’re addressed only to their contemporaries. 

They express warnings we’d do well to heed today.