Whilst still a young man the young Billy Yeats wrote, in his second collection of poetry, a poem called ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ which contains the lines, ‘I will arise and go now, for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with  low sounds by the shore’. His poem evokes the dream of leaving, going off somewhere, casting-off one’s former self, building a log cabin and finding peace in the purple skied afternoons of a beautiful isle.  He was a dreamer and loved the notion of the dream, the dream of nature, in a quiet corner of his beloved Ireland.
I was a pacifist when I was young, then in my late teens and early twenties I dabbled with the notion of revolution, having first read socialist, then revolutionary communist tracts and writings. I imagined most young people sought out such works, eager to see justice brought into the world. Yeats himself followed a similar trajectory, being first the dreaming poet, who then grew into a believer in, if not revolution, certainly revolt and rebellion, and ultimately the overthrow of the English in Ireland.
Recently I had the rare opportunity of seeing the inner workings of the political elite in this country. I spent an afternoon with one of the people that couch and advise the upper apparatchiks of the Tory party (names dropped included Ruth Davidson leader of the Scottish Conservatives and Sajid Javid Secretary of State for Business and Trade). Having listened to him explain a little of his PR work for the government, I then asked him what the naval photos on the wall of his office where all about. He proudly explained that he’d sort of been ‘given’ a battleship, (I think it was a P45 Destroyer) or least the honorary role of representing the ship at certain military functions and events. This was reward for work done for the MOD and is just the kind of sinecure (though unpaid I think in this case) that elites like to give one another. For a simple boy with a working class background and ‘Comp’ education, who knows this is how things work, it was still an eye-opener. But what really struck me was how this gentlemen’s son came in at one point to show off a naval calendar. This boy of seven was full of pride at having learnt the names and details of the various weaponry and instruments of death that his father was involved with. This young boy will soon be off to boarding school in Oxfordshire and I was of course struck by the notion that he is quite unlikely to grown into his teens reading Trotsky or feeling the need to go on demonstrations.
Nonetheless, whilst this boy was not being brought up in anything like my social background, I still found, or could see, his youthful sweetness mixed in with his exuberance and the usual childish extremes of love and aggression. All this reminded me of thoughts I’d had earlier that day, that we are born pacifists but through socialisation learnt to be war-like. I don’t deny there is an innate aggression within us and naturally we have moments or days when we are argumentative and ornery. The Native American would fight his neighbour when necessary but mostly aggression was expressed and released by traditional rites of passage which actually weren’t primarily about war. It was the more technologically developed ‘civilised’ European invader that introduced the gun to the Americas and went on to commit genocide. Indeed how could one fight war (war of great, devastating consequence at least) without civilisation?
This is not to condemn civil society, it brings great positives along with its nuclear weapons. My point is that to talk of ‘nature’ with relation to war has always seemed to me the opposite of the truth. The young are inclined to seek out excitement (and risk to life and limb can be part of that) but whether one joins the Navy to engage in warfare or climbs mountains instead, is surely about the values one is taught and the goals one sets oneself. Does one release more aggression on a rugby field, than on the fields of Flanders? Which is the more humane, sane, imaginative, enjoyable, useful?
Yeats gradually moved from his youthful, pacific, dreams of peace, to the angers and aggressions of civil strife. Which I wonder brought him more happiness, peace and contentment? Its true, anger is a response to injustice, and the dream of peace can only exist if one is surrounded by a just society or one seeks out a quiet corner away from it all. One’s heart and mind and passions swing between the two. How can it be otherwise? Those who fight hardest for social justice are often those who have been damaged most by the unjust; those most willing to guide and direct others to war are usually an elite who have been taught for a long time that somehow it is impossible not to do so, it is inevitable, natural and necessary.
War is a betrayal of humanity, it utilises our natural aggression but civilises and socialises and transmutes this emotional and physical state into the cold anger of killing and the disinterestedness in empathy and compassion required in battle. The speed and rapidity of killing today takes our breath away, it doesn’t allow for the rendering of justice, it destroys too quickly for that. It contains no consideration, it is the final judgement, a judgement that allows no argument, no debate. I have lived my life on the isle of dreams mostly, dipped my toe into the troubled waters of human society and politics only infrequently, but I still believe in judgement and justice, as long as it’s entwined with the notion that there is a great need in this world not to harm or hurt others. ‘Others’ are after all essentially and certainly genetically much like oneself. I will engage in both realms (politics and poetry) but live, I hope, mostly on my isle of dreams, because as Yeats wrote, ‘I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the crickets sings.’
We are naturally aggressive and naturally full of love but love is the deeper, more complex element within us and ultimately moves society to greater, gentler and more sublime heights.

  It’s been a busy week this week on all fronts. Having just had another baby we seem also to have just bought a house! We’d been talking of moving before the birth of our second girl but really didn’t expect to find a place and put in an offer and have it accepted all within a week. I published an old play of mine ‘The Life and Theatre of Antonin Artaud’ which I’d had in the works, edited and ready to go for a year and half but I’d had some copyright issues to clear up (I use one of Artaud’s plays within my play) with the famous French publisher’s Gallimard. Having written to them several times and received no reply I decided to go ahead anyway as the copyright issue was rather obscure and I’m pretty certain I’m not infringing any copyright. I hope not and have certainly tried my best to find out if that’s the case or not. In a similar fashion I’d also had great problems with the cover. The design by my nephew Adam was perfect but used a photograph of the playwright the ownership of which I couldn’t locate and so along with a technical problem that ruled out using his design. I finally gave up and, out of frustration, I used a very simple design instead. I’ll get the cover right on the second edition.
The tangled history of literary production and manuscripts is often actually quite interesting. I recently started reading Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’ a book that had long been sitting on my shelf unread. I’d always wanted to read it to contrast and compare with all the George Orwell material I’d read on the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War. A few short chapters in however I learnt two interesting and troubling facts about the book and the author.
Firstly, the book as we have it was only a rather hasty translation by English sculptor Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s partner at the time, in the spring of 1939. She recorded in her journal that she was translating the novel (in their tiny apartment in Paris) almost at the same time as Koestler was writing it (in German). Hardy was not a professional translator and would ask Koestler’s advice over certain words and phrases. Koestler’s English at the time was not too hot and so the finished product was rather rough and ready. In the panic and mayhem of the advancing German army Koestler’s original was left on the kitchen table, Hardy’s translation had been sent to Koestler’s English publisher Jonathan Cape ten days before they fled south to escape the occupation. By the time Koestler got to do a back-translation four years later he had learnt to speak, write and think in English and had trouble recalling exactly how he’d phrased things in the original German version. He even called on German friends to remind him how certain things were said in German and so on. Wind forward to July 2015 and a German doctoral student, Matthias Weßel, discovers the original German typescript in the papers of Swiss publisher Emil Oprechet who founded the famous Europa Verlag publishing house in Zurich. How it ended up there is another long and fascinating story but it made me reflect that my own problems with my manuscript were, in the wider literary scheme of things, rather mild by comparison.
As a consequence of  Weßel’s discovery ‘Darkness in Noon’ will be republished in Germany with a new English translation to follow and having seen a number of the differences, I’d say the new edition is likely to be quite different and superior. This classic novel as it stands at present and in the form it’s been known for half a century has some rather clunky elements and it’s now very clear why. The differences are not simply, awkward phraseology either. There are elements that are mildly misleading. To take just one example, on the contents page of my copy of the novel it reads, ‘The First Hearing’, ‘The Second Reading’, ‘The Third Reading’ and ‘The Grammatical Fiction’. This terminology is clearly not correct, anyone familiar with the setting, which is fictional but obviously intended to depict the show trials held in the USSR during the thirties, will recognise that a better and more accurate translation for ‘hearing’ would be ‘Interrogation’. Similar examples are legion and at times Michael Scammell, one of Koestler’s biographers, says ‘Almost comical’. ‘Darkness at Noon’, when it was published, was revealing, for the first time to many readers in the West, just how harshly dissenters to Stalin’s Russia were being treated. Even with a rather ham-fisted translation it still became a classic, in its rediscovered form we will see just how much more powerful it may be. So my dilemma this week was do I continue reading the copy I have or wait for the new version?
This became a very mute issue, when I discovered a more troubling issue about the author himself. The ‘literary storm’ caused by Professor David Cesarini’s biography of Koestler in 1999 had completely passed me by. Jill Craigie author and filmmaker (and wife of former Labour leader Michael Foot) had revealed to Cesarini that she had been raped by Koestler in 1951. Cesarini also said Craigie may not have been his only victim. There is a short piece about this in the BBC World Service ‘Meridian’ programme on IPlayer if you’re interested and want a quick potted version of what happened. Anyway this was a shock to me and has rather put me off reading Koestler’s book at all. The question of whether we should or should not read authors who have committed such crimes is not straight forward. One is rarely in exact moral alignment with the authors one reads, in fact that’s part of the reason one reads, to get a different point of view from one’s own. I’ve also found that it’s generally best not to put one’s literary heroes too high up on that pedestal they almost always tumble at some point.
George Orwell for example, one of my favourite authors, slept with prostitutes whilst married, which doesn’t exactly endear one to him. But rape is rather more brutal and difficult to forgive, somehow, even murder seems less distasteful when one is assessing the character of someone. Caravaggio for instance killed a man and yet, without knowing much about the circumstances, I’ve always felt this must have been a great personal tragedy which he regretted and which informed his art. I am ready to be proved wrong about Caravaggio’s character but I can see circumstances where one accidently kills or is forced to kill. The likelihood however of this being the case with relation to rape is, in the former impossible (how could you accidentally rape somone?) and in latter could only happen in very extreme circumstances.
The truth is I suppose I will quite possibly still read the ‘Darkness at Noon’ but my reading will be utterly coloured by my knowledge of the author’s personal conduct. Koestler may well have been a good writer and written a damming portrait of the moral transgressions of the Soviet authorities but whilst being despicable to other human beings himself doesn’t negate his observations it certainly makes one wary of feeling one can/should/will empathize with all he has written. For me there is a loose analogy with the good moral codes one finds in belief systems other than one’s own. Whilst one may agree with the moral tenants put forward, one can still be troubled by the individuals who deliver such articles of faith and the atmosphere of belief they create.