A Quote From ...

Worlds in Words

Quotations, like biographies, often shed light on particular worlds - theatre, literature, politics. Noel Coward provided a deceptively simple account of what an actor has to do: ‘Just say the lines and don't trip over the furniture’ (perhaps an easier recommendation than the advice said to have been given to a young actor by the dramatist J. M. Barrie, ‘Try and look as if you had a younger brother in Shropshire’). Fashions, however, change in the theatre as elsewhere: in 1927 the noted actress Mrs Patrick Campbell said wryly, ‘I'm out of a job. London wants flappers, and I can't flap’. She was in fact coming to the end of what had been a glittering career: when she died in 1940, the critic James Agate noted in his diary, ‘This was an actress who, for twenty years, had the world at her feet. She kicked it away, and the ball rolled out of her reach.’ Alexander Woolcott, watching the defiance of her last years, commented, ‘She was like a sinking ship firing on the rescuers.’

Success can also be wearying: Agatha Christie said of her long list of detective novels, ‘I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine’. Dylan Thomas, however, was clear about his enjoyment of her books: ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in life...I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets’. (Philip Larkin, in a letter to Barbara Pym, took another view of poetry: ‘The notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at their ends seems as remote as mangoes on the moon’.) Nancy Mitford's character "Uncle Matthew" was sceptical about the pleasure afforded by reading, telling enquirers: ‘I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is’ White Fang. ‘It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.’

Politicians are more likely to comment on their own world, and the view is often a grim one. ‘No use looking beyond the next fortnight’, said Joseph Chamberlain (it was in his biography of Chamberlain that Enoch Powell gave the view that ‘All political lives...end in failure’). The "most superior person" Lord Curzon, watching the fall of Lloyd George's Coalition Government in 1922, pointed out that, ‘When a group of Cabinet ministers begins to meet separately and to discuss independent action, the death-tick is audible in the rafters’. 60 years later, "Rab" Butler warned of another danger, ‘In politics you must always keep running with the pack’. Harold Macmillan, however, gave a proper value to the pleasures of reading, in a comment on the office of Prime Minister which interlocks the worlds of politics and literature: ‘Sometimes the strain is awful, you have to resort to Jane Austen.’

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