Gotham Diary:
Relevance
21 May 2013
Whilst tidying the bedroom yesterday afternoon (pursuant to the current household schedule), I watched two of the St Trinian’s movies, British Lion comedies based on cartoons by Ronald Searle that were produced between 1954 and 1960. I had never seen either. First, Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957). I chose it with a purpose; I wanted to see Sabrina (née Norma Ann Sykes), the pneumatic blonde whose 41-inch chest was insured for £125,000. How did I come to be thinking about her, you may ask. I never heard of her until last week, when I read about her in the “Good Times Girls” chapter of An English Affair.
In the film Blue Murder at St Trinian’s … she was given star billing after Alistair Sim, above Terry-Thomas, Joyce Grenfell, and Terry Scott, but played a swot who stayed in bed with a book, and never spoke.
The last part of the sentence is accurate enough. Sabrina reads a book in a manner that points up her mammary endowments. Lavish waves of blonde tumble about her face, like curtains meant to distract from an undistinguished view: Sabrina looks neither pretty nor intelligent, but sour. I question Richard Davenport-Hines’s account of the movie’s credits, because surely “Terry Scott” was meant to be “George Cole” (like Grenfell, a constant in all four St Trinian’s films), and both Sim and Sabrina are given special billing at the end of the bill, not at the top. (Sim speaks, but his scene is even shorter than Sabrina’s.) But I’m grateful for the prod. I happened to have the St Trinian’s DVDs on hand — buying all four was the only way to acquire The Belles of St Trinian’s, the riot in which Alistair Sim plays both a Queen-Maryish headmistress and her con-artist brother — but I’d never got round to viewing the others. I’m enjoying postwar British comedy these days; the other night, I saw Whiskey Galore (1949), with Basil Radford and Joan Greenwood, and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945; Wendy Hiller) and Fallen Idol (1948; Ralph Richardson) are in the queue pile.
Blue Murder at St Trinian’s involves a diamond thief and a trip to Rome on two rickety buses operated by Terry-Thomas, but the plot is just an armature for the series’s tropes. First, the notion of a girls’ school so out of hand that the army has to be called in to police it — a school, moreover, with two classes of students, the youthful fourth formers who brandish squash rackets and scream incessantly when they’re not plotting mayhem, and the curvaceous sixth formers who wear scanty gym slips and carry on like kittenish Mayfair escorts. Second, and rather funnier, the despair of authorities from the Ministry of Education whose efforts to impose order and decency at St Trinian’s are eternally unavailing, and the plight of poor Ruby Gates (Grenfell), whose nuptials with the cold-footed Superintendant Sammy (Lloyd Lamble) can’t take place until the St Trinian’s “problem” is solved. In both Blue Murder and the final film of the series, The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s, Sammy deputizes Ruby to infiltrate the goings-on at the school, abandoning her to the clutches of dodgy lovers (Terry-Thomas, Cecil Parker) with whom she flirts and faints like a spinster whose idea of what follows marriage are wilfully cloudy. Grenfell, if you’re in the mood, is the funniest thing about these movies.
***
My French prof taught me a phrase that has sunk into the Anglophone part of my brain: de fil en aiguille. Robert’s Dictionary says that the phrase means “gradually,” but my prof used it to explain the course of a conversation, which moves from one thing to another along forgettable but coherent connections. It is the opposite, in short, of “one damned thing after another.” It is my guiding principle these days, as I hope has been palpable, if not obvious, here. It has become the principle according to which I determine the relevance of things.
“Relevance” has never been a word I’ve been fond of. It was used a great deal during my undergraduate days. I was familiar, of course, with “irrelevant,” having grown up watching Perry Mason just like everybody else. But “relevance” did not figure in everyday life until, rather suddenly, it was found to be wanting in the books that we were supposed to read for our Great Books seminar. Although no one mentioned the word “theory,” it was the dawn of a wretched period in higher education, which reversed the purpose of teaching by declaring objectives at the outset and then, rather tautologically, reading through to them. A by-product of the then-fashionable cocktail of Maoism and pseudo-physics, this totalitarian approach had no truck with uncertain outcomes or unanticipated discoveries. Even if you did bother to read Aristotle (never very agreeable on the best of the days), you failed to find anything in his texts that still had any application to life, except in terms of the broadest generality. Aristotle’s role in the history of ideas was not relevant, because history itself was not relevant. (History and science proceed according to incompatible principles.) Without knowing it, I sensed that I was living through a mild sort of Cultural Revolution. I don’t believe that higher education ever recovered. A sinking ship during the theory years, it has now dropped to the bottom of the sea: say “college,” and what comes to mind is sport, student centers, and binge drinking. But it all began with course evaluations, which transformed undergraduates from students into consumers.
“Relevance,” in American society during the past fifty years, has been a deadly corrosive, breaking down the connections between things by demanding too much clarity of them. A few weeks ago, George Packer surveyed recent books about the parlous state of the nation’s human economy, and he ended it with a powerful warning.
But Occupy turned out to be a moment of its time — a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, and (to invert one of Agee’s best-known senteces) not so hardly wounded as eeasily killed. There’s no shortcut back to the thirties. Without an idea of the future that’s genuinely shared by large numbers of people — a real and lasting solution to the conditions described in these books — an arrest on Wall Street becomes one more story from an age of individuals.
Because, qua individuals, no one is really all that relevant to anyone else. (Interestingly, David Brooks uses his column today to regret the recession of community-oriented language in recent decades. This is the conservatism of Charles Murray’s latest book, but it amounts to the same complaint that Packer makes.)
At this stage of my life, I am following connections, in my library mostly (of books and movies), and keeping a written record of them here. It doesn’t matter where I began, and I’ll never reach an end. But I believe that the data base of connections that I’m compiling will show some larger ideas, and reveal a mental reality to me that is more comprehensive than anything that can be grasped in the moment. Connections are none the less important for being slight and accidental. (We begin by assuming that we don’t know enough about what’s important and why.) I can pass through these connections relatively quickly because I’ve been intellectually inhabiting an increasingly inclusive model of West Civilization for more than forty years. Something like my search needs to be conducted in what, a moment ago, I surprised myself by calling human economics: the connections between persons, goods, and property. (I believe that this is what Packer is calling for.) Otherwise, what are we all doing here?