A fear of the bores who see a coin at sunrise
The great enemy of Richard Ingrams, the sage of Aldworth (Berkshire), is bores. “One does right to treat bores as genuinely dangerous,” he says, quoting Claud Cockburn, a hero of his. “There is something dangerously wrong with their mentality, character and general relationship to life.”
That comes in Ingrams’s commonplace book, Quips and Quotes. It came out five years ago, but it had been sitting on my shelf unread, partly because the title put me off. But it is an enjoyable read which also forms a sort of memoir of Ingrams, who, now 80, remains something of an enigma despite having lived in the public gaze as editor of Private Eye for a couple of decades and of The Oldie for a couple more.
I have a notion that his derision and fear of bores has a higher value. It may be illustrated by a quotation that he includes from the Journals of Lord Glenbervie (1743-1823), telling of a suicide who left a note in his pocket explaining his motive: “Tired of buttoning and unbuttoning.”
The contrary of this quotidian tedium of waking, dressing, undressing and sleeping again, is expressed in the quotation from Blake: “‘What,’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ Oh, no, no, I see an Innumerable Company of the Heavenly Host, crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty’.”
It is in the light of such an outlook that we may consider Ingrams’s admiration for the Autobiography of Edith Sitwell. “The reason I am thought eccentric,” she declared, “is that I won’t be taught by a lot of pipsqueaks. I will not allow people to bore me. Nobody has even been more alive than I. I am an electric eel in a pond full of flatfish.”
Another of Ingrams’s heroes on the side of life, was William Cobbett, who was so determined not to be the quarry of bores that he thought out a stratagem for keeping them at bay when he travelled by stagecoach: “I have held my tongue, and, in order to keep all quiet, I have generally taken a French book to read.”
Jonathan Swift, fearful of being a bore in old age, made a list of resolutions: “Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people. Not to be over severe with young people, but give allowances for their youthful follies and weaknesses.”
Since foolishness thrives, the latter resolution might take some keeping.
W T Stead, the sensational Victorian journalist who went down with the Titanic, sets an example of not minding the folly of others: “I should not take libel proceedings if it were stated that I had killed my grandmother and eaten her.”
The correlative of not minding is an ability to appreciate what’s there. “Oh, thought I!” exclaimed Dorothy words worth, the poet’s sister. “What a beautiful thing God has made winter to be, stripping the trees, and letting us see their shapes and forms.”
That’s the sort of thing noticed by Thomas Traherne, whom Ingrams quotes saying: “The beauty of colours, the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones is nothing but heaven breaking through the veil of this world.”
It’s like G K Chesterton remarking that we only see the back of the world, and long to see right side of the tapestry. Ingrams quotes a lot from Chesterton, who shared an ability to admire heroes, such as Stevenson or Dickens. Taking the world as it is, he felt awe, which was why he had this to say on the dulness of the rich: “The reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events.”