Social Acrobat
An advantage of the unpolitical: to see with a clearer eye. This eye sees the differences between public and private schools, French and the English educational systems, the peculiarities of the Oxbridge class of 1975, closer to the Hanoverians than our own. Such an eye has all the lively intelligence of a living organ, not the dull opacity of ideological glass. Though her greatest advantage, which allows her to stand outside the conventions, is her talent: Bridget Strevens-Marzo is a natural autodidact, a home-grown virtuoso. It is to follow her father, who taught himself to paint; while she has also mastered the crafts of translation and book-illustration. Little wonder that when talking about her two divorces she mentions growth. These abilities are grown, they are not acquired; and with this consequence: there is always something fresh about what she says.
When looking in the wood this woman sees bluebells not bracken.
It’s what we expect from an artist. Bridget’s ideas rooted deep within the self, evolving their own shapes and forms. Living ideas. Not dead leaves blowing in an Autumn wind, swept into carts by public officials, their minds on tea and chat. Hardly! What blows without is absorbed and made new within. Up the sap goes! Buds popping out all over her branches!
Thoughts at the open window of the payroll department. That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colours that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung.1
Early on she knows herself odd: I was one of the few interested in books.
The Schloss will have his say...if this true, and I think it is, this has alarming consequences for education, and especially for literature: only a minority to enjoy the subject. Here is the danger of a mass education system; for there will be many, alas, who, even teaching these subjects, do not share this pleasure (itself so intimate with taste). Such a lack going far to explain the current crisis in the humanities; it accounts for that PhD reflex, it is an intellectual tick, to criticise, attack, debase the old masters and mistresses. Yet the only way to understand these greats is to embrace their ancient bodies, stroke, cuddle even kiss their wrinkles and grey hair.
There are odd effects of knowing one’s self unusual. Bridget acquires the ability to disappear into an environment; it is why here she appears the quintessential English lady, though with the uncanny ability to mimic a Spanish accent, and whose French has gone native. We are told the back story. Her mother was Catalan, a daughter of refugees from the Spanish Civil War; and she had French relatives and lived in France for many years. An oddity in three countries. She has to find a way to fit in. The one tree in the plain is the one tree nobody must see. It is not just books! The story Bridget tells is typically concrete. On a first stay in France she finds herself in a school playground surrounded by children amazed she cannot speak the language. The vertigo of the alien. This must not be! So she decides to adapt herself perfectly to any social landscape, her accent that of the crowd. More inside than the insider. A role of perfect authenticity. The explanation is that of the clever person, who will always find a reason for an action. Yet I wonder. What if it is an instinct, that comes reflexively from living in foreign territories - abroad and here? Such a body a natural chameleon. And isn’t this what artists automatically do; creation as much mimicry as the making of new things: to become what is around you.
A tension in those who grow themselves. Hyper-conscious, yet also instinctive; the feelings cultivated but the mind on perpetual alert. Some friction here, surely, as she rubs against those who so closely adapted do not see their surroundings. The artist is never quite the exile - that need to lose one’s self in a scene - but enough distance remains to produce anxieties and fragilities: who is there to understand us?
Bridget is lucky in times and places, and with those she meets. Nor must we forget this gift from her father: just like her dad, our heroine has the priceless ability to make the best of circumstance.
So much seems to come from the parents. The art, the languages, the confidence to be a self; which allows her to travel across countries, disciplines, careers, and her own talents. This independence has a loose, almost insouciant, quality; there is no need flash its uniqueness, its integrity, its brilliance. Her talents emerge naturally; apple blossoms in an orchard; the Schloss runs laughing under the trees.... Such a contrast with our times, where everyone is an advert, selling mostly valueless stuff. Today we are told all are original and individual...the paper has already pealed off that billboard. Ha! I can rely on Bridget to reverse the fashionable wisdom: you appear conventional to be original. Lichtenberg says it beautifully:
The most brightly coloured birds sings the worst; the same goes for people...2
A story from her father’s life illustrates an aspect of a lost world. Working as a messenger boy in the City of London, a wine merchant notices his interest in pictures, and allows him to look at the firm’s collection. A new kind of life begins.... This tale shows the fluidity and spontaneity within a rigid class structure - because that culture was liberal and open - creating interstices where talent could rise. By the 1970s this culture had been institutionalised; thus the policy in King’s to attract clever children from state schools; Bridget a beneficiary. The Seventies the apogee of what was still an aristocratic culture, open to talent wherever to be found. Now a bureaucratised educational system works against the brilliant and the maverick; they often oppressed by institutional conventions easily gamed by the rich.3
Not all is due to parents. Bridget had wonderful teachers. Miss Reid turned birds into cartoon characters; Tania Woolf was a scholar in her own right, conveying her own enthusiasm for literature to gifted pupils. To succeed one has to fit in - talent and independence can work against you if you don’t. But how one fits in is key. How do you retain your idiosyncrasies without upsetting an audience? So much due to the personalities of inspirational figures at school and university, who stimulate the abilities while moulding them to an elite culture remarkably tolerant within certain wide bounds.4 Talented individuals need an environment of talent, located mostly on society's hills.5
I’m slightly shocked by her maturity. Encouraged to apply to Oxbridge because of her writing skills - old for her age - she decides to take Chinese language and art. It is the self-analysis - I wouldn’t learn much more taking English - and the confidence - to explore a difficult topic from scratch - that strikes my surprised note. What follows is two years of hard work: the students of Chinese were the ‘medical students’ of the humanities. Yet, the pull of art too strong, she didn’t follow the Chinese through. She studies art history in Part II, belongs to the Young Friends at both Kettles Yard and the Fitzwilliam, and ran the art room at King’s. Inevitable! In a tug-of-war between inner and outer, we know who’ll be pulled over....
Oh, I didn’t mention the boyfriend, another magnetic pole, pulling Bridget back from Beijing to Braque and Bonnard.
Though a dedicated student, she nevertheless imbibed its atmosphere; her extra-curricular activities to determine a life’s path: Kettles Yard, Fitzwilliam, the art room, and those early illustrations for Granta, encouraging that natural drift towards the aesthetic. After her degree, she finds herself in the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. Partly due to poor career advice, but, also, I suspect, some deep instinct, and that inner need; for, as she says, at that time there was a tension between her analytic and artistic side; the latter likely to suffer if she stayed inside academe.
For someone with such propensities to self-creation, could art’s victory ever be in doubt? I watch an angel pull a speculative bucket up to their metaphysical cloud. We know her fate is assured. A life-long artist, supported by various odd jobs, such as translation, where each new canvas a plot of land where she grows her own sorts of vegetables and flowers.
To my left, the city that was a maze of stone
is now an airy monument of ash or dust
sinking without a sound beneath the weight of mist
and reappearing further off, but fainter,
like something dreamt in a fever-tossed sleep,
between the long groping hands of bridges.
And on I go among other shapes unravelling
on snowy embankments, towards gardens with no end.6
And so it is, until a minor tragedy changes the style of her life.
Before I come to that, let me swim around this thought: for someone with such natural talent, with its instinct for independence, it was surely inevitable that a university’s formal instruction would not shape what would become an artistic life. And was it here that she found the supreme value of King’s: it allowed her to enter her own world? The rich cultural experience of Cambridge the space in which to find and develop her anima.
Such an individual is bound to looked askance at the privileges of the privileged; thus Bridget’s wry comment on the demand for a creche in King’s during the radical Seventies. Coming from a state school, being paid by the taxpayer to have this marvellous education, she was shocked by these demands for more! and by those who already had far far more than enough. It is the story of the 1960s, one that tends to be quietly told.7 The heaviest social restrictions, of etiquette, of taboo, on instinct, on urge, tend to lie upon the elite; these taboos the way elites control their own, and society limits their enormous power.8 In the 1960s a generation of young rulers were liberated from that weighty burden, though this hidden behind slogans of revolutionary rhetoric. The 1960s the decade an emerging elite broke free.9 And for while did whatever it liked.10 But then, starting in the 1970s, as the side-effects took hold, there was retrenchment. At first political and economic, then on the social level, as these young rulers, at least in their personal lives, returned to a more restrained and rigorous morality; the poor to suffer the consequences of the Sixties, as its religion of excess slid down the social landscape.11 The counter-culture doesn't look so nice in Treorchy 1995.12 Those captured by these radical ideas created a new class, which manages the Welfare State, and who are its greatest beneficiaries. This shift in resources camouflaged by a politics that speaks the language of morality not power or self-interest.13 With time these characters have suffered the fate of earlier Christians; one that Caradog Evans rather maliciously liked to mock, as the expression of their ideas diverges markedly from actual behaviours, their own middle class lifestyles. Difficult to be a revolutionary when you have a big house and an even larger job title. Hume would have called it hypocrisy.14 But the West has moved into the telly age. Life has become a performance; where one pretends a radical virtue one doesn’t have. And it begins early. In the 1970s Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpiece, The Third Generation, documents the folly of such behaviour, with its tragic consequences.15
There is another perplexing story that Bridget’s comments suggest: how much was the radicalism of the Sixties about transferring resources from the lower to the upper classes, as it changed the nature of politics, shifting it away from class justice to identity affirmation, which tends to favour the wealthy and articulate? The Schloss, wearing his Che Guevara beret, is making at faces at me. He forgets how many upper class radicals turned against the workers even by the decade’s end.16 To understand the Sixties we have to stop listening to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.17
Watch Performance!
Typically, Bridget has an interesting aside on our identity obsessions: identities were much more fluid in her day! This shouldn’t be a surprise: in a bureaucratic culture the bias is towards names and categories; they fit neatly inside a filing cabinet. To exist only if packaged, as a Dickensian, a Cartlandite, a Naipaulist.18 (Schloss has his little joke.) Partly a marketing technique, it is also a result of the mass marketisation of the Concept; a difficult and complex entity reduced to caricature by a consumerist public realm, that sells ideas like teabags.
A minor tragedy changes this heroine’s life. Her beautiful house burns down, destroying her entire corpus of paintings. In this moment of devastation a friend asks the life-changing question: what do you really want to do? Bridget thinks. Then decides: I want to illustrate books.
This event shows the marvellous tolerance and generosity of the sophisticated and cultivated rich: Mr Kindler doesn’t care about his house - the insurance to pay, the artisans will make it better. No, his concern is about the safety of the children, the fate of her art. Such a story makes me doubt our contemporary demands for equality, the Welfare Class’s disdain for the rich. What kind of elite do we want...tolerant and cultivated or bureaucratic and barbarian? But of course such simple divisions do not exist in social fact. A scene at Cambridge shows another side of the elite: an Etonian invites Bridget to his room to watch her pour tea. The milk goes in first and the Etonians giggle. So Non-U! For once Bridget’s chameleon-like qualities let her down. This a social code not visible from the outside.
Though the ironies are enormous. This working-class boy from the Valleys always puts the milk in last...would I have been taken for a member of the Bollinger Club?19
Every inside group to find a means of identifying those who are outside its enchanted circle; indeed part of the enchantment is in creating these magic rules. Bridget belongs to her own set. And what is more inside than the lefty artist-types of King’s, the inheritors of the aristocratic bohemianism of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, whose parents were the Bloomsburies?
Is it possible to fool everyone.... Maybe, if like Bridget you are a social virtuoso.
A story of success. Talent, will, intelligence, plus the diplomat’s canny abilities, sees her win reward and acclaim. The art of metamorphosis is the secret. This outsider so flexible that everyone thinks she belongs with them. There are different ways of handling a lower-class background; the most obvious, but limiting, is to emphasis lower-class chip: Keith Hart. The less recognised but more common and effective way is to merge into one’s milieu; the course of most dons, according to Edmund Leach. Bridget goes for the latter, but does something unusual with it: she cultivates her own idiosyncrasy. Which is easier, perhaps, with artists, who create themselves from within.
A being who differs from you only in that he is able to master life by the use of his own specific gifts; a being perhaps happier, than the man who has no means of creative expression and no chance of release through the creation of form.
This modest advantage should be readily granted the artist. He has difficulties enough in other respects.20
The aesthetic personality tends to be less political, so more forgiving of foibles and moral infractions, though at the same time keenly aware of injustice, when it impinges directly on the senses. The artist often critical, but in a creative way. Bridget dispassionately compares the strengths and weakness of the more rigidly academic French educational system with the more academically relaxed atmosphere of Britain; these differences reflected in how she educated her children. The artist, more attuned to the details of life, isn’t so enamoured of ideas, which are apt to freeze our responses, separating us from the material. For the politico and moralist our relation to society is a set of ideas not to be explored and deconstructed - such play is puritanically verboten - but defended and extended; moral conquest an urge and an imperative. Artists create their own rules. Why often so marginal to society. Their ecosphere fragile.
This wry look back on Cambridge. It encourages us to look at the universities of today with fresh eyes. Today’s cartoon abstractions of equality and diversity hide the neon-signed reality: the same kinds of people run things as before the 1967 Summer of Sex. Because institutions create their own social types to run them. A big statement, which Mr Schloss qualifies for the universities. An equality of all the talents, a remnant from its Christian past – for the majority the Church was not a lucrative profession, its ranks staffed with scholars from poorer backgrounds – making the universities a looser, more diversified place; as the culture allowed entrance to lower order cleverness and originality, which given the right sort of space finds its own way. And what a space it was in the 1960s and 70s, we glimpse in this interview. The times do not last. Since the Eighties the dons have succumbed to Weber’s bureaucrat; so that the universities now a training school for the corporate executive, with their high-powered but narrow abilities.21
In our society’s game of snakes and ladders, the ladders are taken away, while the snakes grow longer...it is a world, where the lower-class autodidact suffers not the minor ailments of accent or etiquette, but that life-threatening disease: paucity of funds. Also from a decline in intellectual mores, as the quality of education at the lower levels falls. And even if you win the educational lottery - one has to submit to the bureaucrats. My head hurts! As it bangs against those filing cabinets, overflowing with rules, those blasted regulations. Campus no longer the place for the freewheeling life.
I’ll tell you a story, one that is unbelievable, at least to me. It was at a Prevent training course, where we were being told how to spot an extremist (I spotted one straight away: he was giving the course). A student from the local university intervened - I was looking forward to some sharp and witty critique, à la the Schloss. No chance! This young chap delighted in telling us how he’d helped the administrators break up a communist group. Clearly a cult, to be removed from campus.... Oh my Karl Marx! What to happen E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill if lecturing now?
It was better in the old days, says the Schloss. But was it, was it really? Bridget suggests our Schloss is onto something. We warm to this chameleon. So acute, so charming, so well-balanced and playful. Eye-witness testimony that Eden did once exist, on the banks of the Cam.
Interview: Bridget Strevens-Marzo
________
Notes
1 The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, edited, with an introduction by Felix Klee, p.374.
2 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, translated by R.J. Hollingdale.
3 This is the real story of Benjamin Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap. For the problem of ‘credentialism’ see Matthew B. Crawford: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.
4 For a brilliant description of this training, together with the talents it generates in talented individuals: Fiona MacCarthy: Eric Gill.
5 The problems of clever working class kids is discussed in my Working Class Highbrow.
6 Jacques Réda, Pont des Arts, in Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, edited and translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer.
7 An exception is David Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain Now.
8 For the food and language taboos of the Trobriand chiefs: Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia.
9 See the extraordinary last chapter in Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.
10 For the excess: Keiron Pim, Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock ’n Roll Underground.
11 See Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950.
12 Rachel Trezise, In and Out of the Fish Bowl.
13 This shift is brilliantly brought out in Nina Bawden, A Woman of My Age.
14 When describing the Puritans of the English Civil War. The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I.
15 It may even begin in the 1960s. The heroine’s behaviour in A Woman of My Age is at best ambiguous, at worse a fraud.
16 Nicely illustrated in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. See my A Sad Case. See also David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, p.19. One of the odd things about Graeber: people think he is left-wing.
17 We should always remember Malinowski’s dictum: study what people do rather than believe what they say.
18 Just how much identities are consciously constructed by the corporations: Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.
19 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall. You know the reference.
20 Paul Klee on Modern Art, with an introduction by Herbert Read, p.11
20 We see the limitations in the very book that describes the type: The Meritocracy Trap.
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