Bruce Charlton's Notions

This struck me as I was considering Colin Wilson's discussion of the prevalent pessimism in philosophy - worse in the past 200 years, but always prevalent.

Most philosophy is an act of self-harm, insofar as it devalues life; insofar as it has the view that it would either be better never to have been born, or that life may be pleasant or unpleasant, but ultimately makes no difference to anything...

I have always affirmed Colin Wilson's basic optimism - but in a not-created world and absent a creator who is good and who loves us; I would have to admit that the pessimists are correct!

Because CW avoided metaphysics, his discussion operates at the level of feelings. He argues that our happiest and best, most meaningful feelings are correct about life - yet in the deepest analysis, if these are just feelings, then that basic situation is a pessimistic one.

In contrast is the Nobel prizewinning author Samuel Beckett, whose work is an act of self-harm, directed at harming others - designed to make life pessimistic, to persuade that despair is the rational response to this world. The read Beckett with seriousness is the psychological equivalent of slashing one's own wrists, or drinking poison.

Of course we want to be happy and optimistic (at least, we want this with a part of ourselves) but this happiness must be True. To mean more than just a fleeting emotion, flickering in the mind of a finite being; happiness needs to derive from Good news about Reality. Otherwise the situation would be that Beckett is describing reality correctly; and Wilson's denial of pessimism is merely a way of feeling, and perhaps functioning, better - in what is otherwise an intolerable universe. 

So philosophy is only about what we feel unless real-life really-is Good.

For William Arkle his optimism was based on his knowledge (and awareness) of the fact that this is a created reality, and the creator is our loving Father - so reality is designed-around each of us, and what we most need.

Furthermore, Arkle is convinced that we personally chose to be born into our lives. So - with these underpinning convictions - we have an essentially 'optimistic' situation, in which our life is has purpose, meaning, is specifically what we need; and this actual life (its situation) was specifically chosen by our-(pre-mortal)-selves. Therefore William Arkle's philosophy is more than just about feelings.  

What 'evidence' does Arkle have? Quite simply: intuitive conviction. Arkle asked basic questions of reality, and knew the answers directly. He asked - is there God, is this reality created - answers came yes. Then, he knew by direct apprehension that this God was Good, and loved him. Looking around at life - he recognised meaning and purpose everywhere and in everything. 

Arkle might have been happy merely because he was optimistic by nature - as was Colin Wilson. The two men were indeed good friends, and would have long conversations together, keeping in touch from the 1950s into the 1990s. And on the surface, they were saying similar things.

Implicitly, I suspect that Wilson did have similar beliefs to Arkle - but he was not aware of them, and did not state them explicitly. Therefore, Wilson's work can reduce to self-help - to advice on how to be happier and more optimistic.

But the fact that Arkle stated his fundamental assumptions meant that his happiness and optimism were linked to, and derived-from, ultimate reality by means of stated assumptions. Thus Arkle, unlike most philosophers, broke-through from self-help to metaphysics. 

I can never really endorse a book (or movie) that ends badly - and there are a lot of them. I mean works that begin well and fall to pieces to end poorly. It seems to be much more difficult to end well than to begin well. 

It is interesting to speculate why this might be. There might be many reasons - but one is clearly that the author is technically able to write, but does not have anything to say. The book goes nowhere, because there is nowhere for the book to go. 

This is a product of the fact that the work cannot be greater than the man - and there are a lot more technically-adept Men than there are great Men. 

For the same reason, there are a lot more first-rate minor writers, than major writers; and many problems arise from a minor writer trying to give the impression he is major. The word for this is pretentious.  

Another, related phenomenon is more modern - which is an author striving for originality or to 'make a point' - usually of a socio-political nature. Such authors sabotage their own works by their desire to avoid at all costs being clichéd; avoiding what they regard as tropes or stereotypes; wishing to be known as to be 'subversive', edgy, dark... 

That is; the desire primarily to please critics, editors, scholars and 'pseuds' in general. Naturally, this leads to poor works. 

Such self-sabotage with the intent of garnering the praise of those whose world view is primarily ideological can, itself, be a mask for incompetence; but is not necessarily so. 

One of the most notorious self-sabotages in literature is the ending of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw; which has Eliza Doolittle marrying Freddie instead of Higgins - as the narrative irresistibly suggests she would. 

Shaw was trying to make an anti-romantic ideological point - as he explained in a (very unconvincing!) post-script; and for this he was prepared to wreck the end of a brilliant play - and he then doubled-down on this error. 

Because the actors who were successfully touring Pygmalion away from London changed the ending (without telling Shaw) by adding some unspoken 'business' to imply that Eliza would actually marry Higgins. This 'played' much better with the audiences; who were otherwise leaving the theatre confused and dissatisfied.

Shaw was incensed when he found-out, and did his best to stop it; yet when Pygmalion was converted to one of the most successful musicals ever - My Fair Lady - the anti-Shaw pro-Higgins ending was retained.  

Shaw was setting his undoubted genius against the autonomous and irresistible demands of natural narrative - and not even Shaw could make anything else work. 

In writing Pygmalion; Shaw had something to say, and said it - which is why the work has lasted. But for the play to be truthful, there can only be one ending - and it is not the ending that Shaw wanted to write. 

There are many works that contain much that is good, but are marred by a bad ending; and whether one responds to such works is a matter of preference. 

A couple of examples from my experience are Phillip Pullman's 'Dark Materials' trilogy; which begins very well indeed but begins to fall to pieces even before the end of the first volume - and of course ends very poorly. 

(The reasons why have been definitively described by John C Wright in his essay collection Transhuman and Subhuman). 

Another example is Elidor by Alan Garner - which is generally well-liked but which has an ending that is both abrupt and unsatisfying. 

Why this should be, I believe to be related to an element of bitter, disillusioned (apparently guilt-motivated) class-resentment; that seems to have grown in Garner throughout adult life almost to overwhelm him - and to spoil most of his books (and especially the endings).

Both Pullman and Garner are technically very gifted writers who are limited by their own natures, which are significantly stunted by their (very typically modern) failure to learn from experience and consequent doubling-down on a false and nihilistic world view. 

That same critic-pandering, reality-rejecting pathway was pioneered by James Joyce with Finnegans Wake, and Samuel Beckett from 'Godot' onwards. 

From the above analysis it can be seen why so many movies of the past few decades fail to end well - after a promising start. 

There is this determination to be praised for 'courageous' (ha!) subversive/ edgy/ dark qualities - for imposing value, sex and plot inversions without regard for the natural demands of narrative. So the movie draws us in, sets-up a situation - then delivers... nothing. No closure. No meaning. 

(And then gets Establishment-praised for 'bravery'!)

To construct a coherent and satisfying movie remains possible (e.g. Groundhog Day, Dunkirk), but is never easy nor common - and these all have a strong sense of inevitability about their unfolding and resolution.  How much simpler to write politically-correct dross - and reap the awards...

Surprising plot twists and ends can be done effectively - e.g. Maleficent, Rogue One; but always by deploying some alternative 'traditional' story trope - such as self-sacrificing heroism. 

In other words, new story shapes are possible; unpredictability and surprising twists may be effective. But these require exactly the kind of endorsement of narrative inevitability that the subversive/ edgy/ dark anti-heroic impulse rules-out.  

In sum; some of the poor endings (and, indeed, middles) of novels and movies can be explained in terms of authorial limitations; but even-more is subtracted by authors trying to make socio-political points, or curry the favour of cultural gatekeepers at the cost of narrative destruction. 

The Angry Young Men was a largely nonsensical media coinage for what was supposed to be the new generation of post WWII writers - the term was launched in 1956 by the play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and The Outsider by Colin Wilson.

I became aware of the Angries only after discovering The Outsider in the summer of 1978, having read Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim a year before (which, although from 1953 is usually regarded as an 'Angry' book; it is one of the funniest books I have ever read). For some reason I became very interested in the general idea of the 1950s at this point; and took to listening to Trad Jazz and wearing a corduroy jacket with leather patches - with or without trademark polo neck sweater.

I sampled a wide range of the literary output of the fifties - but aside from Colin Wilson I must admit I did not find very much to enjoy. Among those mentioned in this book I did not take to John Wain, Stuart Holroyd, JP Donleavy, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe - and I never read John Braine or Kenneth Tynan.

I wasted a lot of time reading Amis, without finding anything else anything like as good as Lucky Jim - although his second and third novels (That Uncertain Feeling and I Like It Here) both had good stuff in them. Look Back In Anger was certainly original and had a kind of energy - but watching it was a torment; and Osborne's other works were entirely without interest.

I don't like it nowadays, but Iris Murdoch's first novel - Under The Net - was a favourite re-read for several years. And of course that miserable so-and-so Phillip Larkin (who is sometimes, absurdly, regarded as an Angry) was our last really worthwhile English poet.

Despite this long term interest, I have only just read Colin Wilson's account of the era. Especially considering the book was written in his mid-seventies - there is a lot of detail and energy in it - and I found it well-organised. Although I should warn that this book is certainly depressing in its sordid litany of lives ruined by drink, drugs, dissipation, sexual promiscuity and marital infidelities - Wilson is actually pursuing a thesis throughout: he clearly had a philosophical, almost spiritual reason for writing the book about his contemporaries and their successes and failures.

Indeed, as he approached the end of his life, Wilson seemed to be returning to the same focus as his second philosophical book: Religion and the Rebel - the necessity of a spiritual awakening, that Man needed a religion in order to live well. At times Wilson seems to argue himself right up to the very edge of theism, especially when analysing the demotivation and despair which overwhelmed so many of his friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

But to return to the theme of sex - and there is a lot about it; my conviction was again reinforced that sex has always been the nemesis of the recurrent romanticism revivals since 1800 - and that is what the Angry Young Men were. They were the British equivalent of the US Beat Generation, or the French Existentialists; and therefore in origin an 'attempted' or embryonic spiritual revival.

Whatever high ideals and ambitions were harboured by the best of these writers was wrecked on the writers unrepentant embrace and celebration of the sexual revolution. This took away much of the energy, created an atmosphere of exploitation and dishonesty, and blocked-off the only answer they could ever have found: Christianity. Consequently, they largely wasted their time and lives, running round in circles, showing off, and making excuses.

TS Eliot's first work in his first book, and the title piece of that book, was 'Prufrock' - i.e. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

Full text of the poem: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

It is a brilliant piece of work, extremely powerful, full of memorable lines (in that respect unlike almost any other example of modernist poetry) - it was also revolutionary in technique and attitude, and massively influential on later writers (and scholars).

Yet it is a horrible, fiendish production; that aims to induce - and successful succeeds in this task - a mood of world-weariness and despair; an attitude that it is not worth bothering with anything, because it will inevitably fail; a perspective that the good things of the world are illusion and the underlying solid reality is of ugliness, misery, lies, incoherence, ridiculous but self-aware vanity...

(The mainstream condition of modernity that Peter Sloterdijk terms 'enlightened false consciousness'.)

Prufrock is, in sum, the modern condition of alienation and hope-less-ness achieved perfectly in a single work at the first attempt and never surpassed.

Now I am not saying that TS Eliot was an evil genius when considered as a whole - of course he later became a very influential Christian of a traditionalist type; but the damage he did as a young man with Prufrock, and later The Waste Land, was never undone by anything he (or anybody else) subsequently achieved.

Prufrock fed an attitude of cynicism and - ultimately - hedonism and conformity (because all explicit cynics sell-out and become cogs of the system - at least all the many young cynics I have known have become middle managers or Establishment commissars).

Prufrock also led to the destruction of poetry - because it looked-like poetry, used various techniques of accepted poetry; but it was not poetry. It was 'poetry' minus the lyricism that made it poetry, 'poetry' without 'song'; 'poetry' with the essence of poetry extracted and replaced with subversion of lyricism.

Future generations followed suit, and the most 'respected' and influential 'poets' since Prufrock have not been poets. 

(This was not an accident. Unlike - say - Yeats and Frost, Eliot was not a poet; and never wrote poetry (as poetry would have been understood in the previous hundreds of years). He was, of course, a prose-writer and versifier of genius - and that is why his verse is so effective; but he was not a poet, and could only pastiche real poetry. Nor did Eliot 'get' poetry, he could not detect its 'presence' or absence - which was unfortunate in the major literary critic of his age.)

(But then, neither did FR Leavis understand real poetry, nor CS Lewis, nor Empson, nor bloom... indeed real poetry is much too simple and lucid and popular to be a suitable theme for the powerful and influential critic.) 

Prufrock, although easily appreciated by anyone, also triggered the cleavage between 'serious' writers aiming at an audience of critics, academics ad students on the one hand; and the spontaneously poetry-reading public on the other - and in a century this has grown ever wider.

Of course, all this would have happened anyway without Prufrock! - maybe half a decade later. So in that sense, the poem had zero influence. The culture had changed by a kind of mass embrace of the inversion of Good; Leftism was already pervasive among the intellectuals, the Great Apostasy from Christianity was too far advanced and celebrated; the sexual revolution already had the opinion-leaders in its grip; the mass media and the labilities of fashion were already a ruling addiction...

Hence Eliot's star, and Prufrock's fame' has faded and faded over the past decades. The brilliance of the decadent culture it inspired continued to glitter into the 1970s (Tom Stoppard - the best of recent playwrights - listed Prufrock as one of his major influences; Beckett was the other) - but has long since dimmed and extinguished.

Modern culture is Prufrock without the inspiration, without the sparkling wit, without the permanently memorable phrases.

We have lost or ditched the genius; and retained only the evil.

*

I was reading a memoir of Nevill Coghill (Inkling and Oxford Professor of English - a scholar and translator of Chaucer and Langland) - and I was struck by the remarkable, indeed truly amazing, concentration of literary genius among the Protestant Irish gentry (the Anglo Irish) in the days when Ireland was ruled by Britain.

*

With no effort, I came up with Jonathan Swift, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Steele, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, WB Yeats, J.M Synge, Samuel Beckett, CS Lewis - all of whom are of the first rank in their genres within English Literature - plus a similar sized group of minor or lesser-known figures.

Indeed, considering that there are only few canonical playwrights, this is an extraordinarily high proportion (the only ones missing before the 20th century are ?Marlowe, Wm. Shakespeare (of course), ?Ben Jonson, ?Congreve...

...but really I am scratching around for anyone other than The Bard who is performed as often and provide such enjoyment as Sheridan (The Rivals, and School for Scandal), Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer), Wilde (mostly The Importance of Being Earnest) and (of course) Shaw (with a couple of dozen plays done frequently - perhaps even more than Shakespeare himself?).

*

Among the indigenous Irish I would only put James Joyce and Flann O'Brien into the same quality bracket.

At any rate, the number of Anglo Irish/ Protestant Ascendancy writers of the first or second rank in English Literature is grossly disproportionate to the small absolute size and minority status of their population.

And gives rise to the interesting question of the nature of the (much vaunted) Irish literary genius: it was certainly real, but actually mostly consisted of the English-living-in-Ireland (since expelled).

Note: Another first-ranker (among English poets) is Edmund Spenser, who was among the first of the English upper class to settle in Ireland as recent conquerers: the first of the great Anglo-Irish literary figures.

Solipsism is the belief, usually quite brief, that the thinker is the source of everything that is - my  feeling that everything is just a product of my own thinking and has no independent existence: my life is a dream.

Solipsism seems to me a state which we must go-through during our spiritual development towards divinity - because it represents the exact point at which we become wholly 'free': the point at which we become fully agents, and detached from the causes of everything else which impinges upon us.

We are conceived and born, unselfconsciously immersed in the universal world which we simply accept; but the moment of solipsism is when we become independent of that world.

Solipsism is therefore - momentarily - necessary, if we are to move from being immersed in the world to a situation in which we engage with the world from a position of free agency.

If we are to become grown-up children of God, at some point our selves (or 'souls') need to become god-like - which means that our relationship to universal reality but alter profoundly from immersion-in to engagement-with - we need to have a relationship with reality that is voluntary, agent, purposive, and conscious of itself.

To be fully free we must be fully conscious - which means that we must know what we are doing. Sadly, this means leaving-behind the un-self-consciousness of childhood and of early stages in our cultural history; and it really is left-behind - because the process of detachment signalled by solipsism is irreversible.

We have grown a shell, and breaking that shell (voluntarily or with with drugs, or by disease perhaps) is not a return to innocence, but some kind of pathology.

We can really only go forward - indeed we must go forward because if we get stuck in solipsism - as so many modern people seem to have chosen to do - then nihilism and despair are inevitable. In solipsism we begin by regarding the world as our own thought, but soon (and inevitably) we begin to doubt the reality of these thoughts - after all, thoughts change, they are not solid...

The self in solipsism surveys the world paralysed by doubt - the thoughts are transient, the world a product merely of thoughts - everything slips away. The self doubts its own reality... (The situation was depicted many decades ago in the world of Samuel Beckett.)

In solipsism the mind thus alternates between an assertion that the self is the only reality, and the recognition that if this is true then there is no self.

Thus solipsism is a necessary and inevitable phase in spiritual development - but ideally it should occupy only a very short time, a full recognition as brief as possible - we should go through solipsism to a new, free-and-agent relationship with universal reality - a state that is qualitatively the divine relation with reality.  

*

It is striking how often modern secular people assert that human life is intrinsically delusional.

A delusion is a psychotic symptom - a false belief or idea that is held with conviction and which affects behaviour.

Classic examples would include delusions of grandeur ('I am Napoleon'), delusions of guilt ('I caused world war two'), paranoid delusions ('when I read a newspaper, the stories are directed at me, they are about me'), delusions of persecution ('there is an international conspiracy of Opus Dei/ Freemasons/ the CIA who have me under surveillance and intend to capture and kill me').

Simply put, a delusion is a subjective belief which is mistaken for objective reality. 

*

But how do we know reality from delusion?

It is normal, in the modern secular world, that people regard the meaning of life as a delusion and any purpose in life as a delusion.

In other words, modern secular people believe that - objectively - life has no meaning or purpose; and that therefore anyone who believes that there is an objective meaning or purpose to life, outside of the human mind, is deluded.

To put it another way, secular modern people believe that the meaning of life comes purely from humans, from the human mind - a product of human creativity (either individual or social creativity).

That humans create meanings by which they live, by which they keep themselves going.

Human morality, beauty and truth are likewise manufactured (perhaps covertly, unconsciously) by the human mind - they are a delusional system.

*

This belief in the fundamentally delusional (subjective) nature of life is quite remarkable: or it would be remarkable if it were not so common.

Yet people often say that although life has no real objective external meaning, this doesn't really matter, because humans are able to create meaning and then live by it.

Humans, in other words, are equipped to manufacture the delusions by which they live - are, indeed, able to reach down and grab their shoe-laces and, by tugging hard, levitate themselves.

I certainly managed to 'believe' this for many years.

*

It is a remarkable thing to try and live by a delusion, yet that is supposed to suffice for the modern world.

Furthermore, the secular elite believe that self-aware delusions are better, superior, to unconscious or unreflective delusions. It is a matter of pride among secular intellectuals that they see-through the delusions by which other (dumber) people live.

For instance, atheists regard atheist morality as delusional - but also regard it as superior to Christian morality, because the atheist knows that he is deluded while the Christian believes his delusion to be real.

'At least' (as they say) atheists recognize that their lives really are objectively meaningless and purposeless and that humans are sustained by delusions, whereas dumb Christians are delusional without even knowing it. 

*

But how do we know we are delusional? It is a deep question.

Presumably we recognize delusions in ourselves by reasoning on the basis of publicly-shared and 'tested' knowledge (by science, or maybe common sense).

But if we know we are delusional, live by delusions; why then should we trust our reasoning and our supposed 'knowledge'? Why should the reasoning of self-confessedly deluded individuals be valid?

So atheism is led into nihilism, and to despair, alienation, purposelessness - the absurd world of Samuel Beckett, and indeed the mainstream view of thoughtful 20th century art.

*

Yet somehow, intellectual atheists, perhaps by sheer animal spirits, do manage to get up in the morning and keep going in their consciously-deluded lives, they mostly manage to live by their admitted-delusions that life has meaning and purpose, some things are better than others, and all the rest of it.

Remarkable. 

*

This, then, is the situation of the intellectual elite. They 'know' that in reality there is 'nothing more' to life than our perceptions - than our emotions and feelings.

And given that life is pointless and meaningless, the intellectual elite take it upon themselves to make it as painless and pleasant as possible - while life lasts.

This is their heroic task: to bear the burden of knowledge that life is meaningless and purposeless, yet to create a situation in which the dumb masses are allowed to live in a painless and pleasant state of of ignorance.

*

Because when all is delusion and nothing really matters in an objective sense, then subjectivity is primary. When 'being alive' is just 'being alive' then pleasure is the best thing and suffering is the worst thing. Self-evidently.

Subjective perception is therefore 'reality' (since there is no humanly relevant objective reality).

And the modern secular elites have taken-it-upon themselves to make a reality which (so far as they understand these matters) will be as pleasant and painless as possible.

This created-reality is liberalism, socialism, leftism - Political Correctness.

*

Political Correctness is a self-consciously created delusion, designed to make life as gratifying as possible, made by the self-aware elite for the benefit of the ignorant masses.

*

If everyone (or at least the ignorant masses) can be made to believe the gratifying delusion of Political Correctness, then it will become 'reality' (as real as anything is, in a nihilistic world).

And life will become as pleasant and painless as it is possible to make it.

And that is the best that humans can hope for (given that the real reality is unbearable): the best we can hope for is a pleasant delusion that makes us feel good, rather than a nasty delusion than makes us feel bad.

This is a high aim indeed! To make life 'good' for the ignorant masses, while hiding and guarding the devastating secret that life is a pointless nothing: a mere spark of energy in eternity.

*

But why must the Politically Correct elite be aware of the delusional nature of life?

 Because they must recognise that Political Correctness is a delusion - a delusion for the good of the masses - and since it is a delusion it is therefore the responsibility of the intellectuals to maintain the delusion.

Since so much depends on maintaining the delusion of Political Correctness (i.e. the whole [fake] meaning and purpose of life as seen by the ignorant masses), the elite are forced to be, must be, utterly ruthless in its defence.

The true liberal elite know perfectly well that PC is a delusion, but they have taken on the responsibility of protecting the masses from this knowledge. That is their duty, like it or not.

If the validity of the delusion of PC is threatened in any way, they will act in any way necessary to negate  that threat.

The stakes are high - life itself

(or at any rate 'life' as perceived by the dumb majority).

*

Therefore Political Correctness is a logical (although not inevitable) consequence of a secular elite who have gone through nihilism (disbelief in reality) and come out the other side with the idea that at all costs the masses must be protected from the devastating insight that life is a delusion.

The solution is to create a 'nice' delusion - the delusion of Political Correctness, a delusion based around the primacy of (where possible) reducing suffering and maximizing pleasurable lifestyle choices (especially sexual choices, since the pleasurable effects of chosen sexual behaviours are apparently self-validating).

For the time being this mission involves the elite in the horrific realization of nihilism, and the degrading work of policing the system of PC - which entails unpleasantness such as lying, vilification, mockery, shunning, injustice, violence, ugliness and multiple other forms of coercion.

In a nutshell, the liberal elite must utterly monopolise the medium of legitimate public discourse. 

*

All this nastyness and bullying and deception to defend PC is regrettable - but at this stage it is still necessary in order that the benign delusion of PC can be nurtured.

However, the hope is that there will come a time when Political Correctness has grown so big and strong that it will be the only form of legitimate discourse in public and also in private. And when this is achieved all the coercion can be allowed to fall away, and wither (like the Marxian state).

Instead of dwelling outside the delusional system, defending and manipulating it; PC will have become automatically self-perpetuating. The liberal elites can  then allow themselves to become as blissfully ignorant of the delusional nature of PC as everybody else.

On that glorious, impatiently anticipated day, the elites can lay-aside their burden and joyfully join the ignorant masses inside the delusional system of Political Correctness.

Oh blessed day. But until then it is a life of secrecy, ruthlessness, toil and heaviness for the poor liberal elites.

*

All this really can happen - according to modern elite understanding (which denies the reality of reality).

And the only requirement for this blissful state of humankind is a complete monopoly of all forms of discourse, at all times, and everywhere in the world - and then all will believe, and universal belief is truth.

The benign modern delusion of Political Correctness will permanently and everywhere have replaced the wicked delusions of the past.

Because, to thorough-going nihilists such as the modern secular, liberal elites - when a delusion is made universal, then it becomes eternal reality - and secular humankind will have escaped from nihilism.

*

...reading Samuel Beckett

I read a lot of plays and short stories and novels - too many - beyond the call of duty.

For a while I regarded 'Dante and the Lobster' as the most perfect short story ever written.

For a while I wallowed in Murphy.

(I never was impressed by the contrived dramas).

There was a great talent for language, almost first rank - and underneath it all there was profound dishonesty; and a kind of passive-aggressive sadism which one could only call evil - he used his glorious gift for phrase and situation to try and infect the minds of others with his incoherent, solipsistic and demotivating worldview.

And for a while he succeeded with me.

Wham Bam - thanks but no thanks Sam.