Novelist Tom McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and feels insulted: ‘Like all English-language writers, I’m thoroughly European’. To prove it he refers to Shakespeare and Joyce, who, like him, would have voted to remain part of the European Union....
Coffee House
What is it with luvvies wanting to be ‘thoroughly European’?
Michael Henderson
Michael Henderson
11 October 2016
The Spectator
There’s always room for one more on the Ship of Fools, and Tom McCarthy has just booked his passage. The English novelist (no, I’d never heard of him, either) has written a column of such fifth-form puerility in the Guardian that it marks him down as a dunce of exceptional plumage. Make way, Hadley Freeman. Step aside, Zoe Williams. There’s a chap out there who can give you five yards and still beat you to the tape.
McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and feels insulted: ‘Like all English-language writers, I’m thoroughly European’. To prove it he refers to Shakespeare and Joyce, who, like him, would have voted to remain part of the European Union.
There are the usual clichés one expects from a man who read Derrida and Barthes when he was in short pants, and never got over it: cross-pollination, intersections, culture – shaping innovators. All of which brings to mind Tom Stoppard’s wonderful speech in The Real Thing about ‘every stale revelation of the newly enlightened ‘.
Stoppard, who was born in the old Czechoslovakia and became the most English of dramatists, could tell the likes of McCarthy quite a lot about writing and identity. But such people are more comfortable when they are doing the talking. Opting to visit a festival in Hackney instead of going to the RA, our batey pal says everybody had fun ‘celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalism bigotry’. Cor! Can we all join in?
He’s every inch the artist, is McCarthy. And one thing artists must never do, he says with the zeal of a prophet, ‘is be politically neutral’. Particularly in ‘a country where people are being killed in the street for not sounding or looking ‘British’ enough’. Or indeed not Islamic enough. The murders of Muslims in Glasgow and Rochdale were committed by co-religionists. As for the many acts of murder and violence in recent months in mainland Europe, he offers not a word. Maybe it has all passed him by, this proud European.
Not all artists are political. Matisse lived through two world wars, and there is no sign of upheaval in his paintings. In the early months of the second world war Vaughan Williams composed his fifth, and greatest, symphony. Although London was under siege, his symphony was a work of radiance. Are the novels of Hardy and Lawrence political? Or Joyce, for that matter? Not in the way this clown means. Stoppard again: ‘We should have the courage to lack convictions’.
Or, to borrow from a truly European figure, Karl Kraus of Vienna, McCarthy has nothing to say, and is determined to say it.
Tom McCarthy in The Guardian:
"Setting aside the fact that, since Dyson threw his lot in with Nigel Farage, I don’t even dry my hands in public toilets, the whole premise seems to me conceptually wrong. It’s wrong for the same reason the Blair government’s co-option of Britpop and Cool Britannia was wrong (although no one was being beaten up on the underbelly of the cognitive error back then)."
"About the same time, I received another invitation, this time to read from my work at an anti-Brexit art festival in Hackney’s gallery-filled Vyner Street. Beneath bunting designed by Fiona Banner, Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger played a gig, Katrin Plavcak and Ulrika Segerberg did an electronic sewing machine-enhanced performance, Lucy Reynolds conducted a “choir” who chanted in 20 languages at once, and a large crowd who could trace their heritage to every corner of the Earth ate, drank and generally had fun celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalist bigotry, while children darted round their legs."
What is it with luvvies wanting to be 'thoroughly European'? | Coffee House
Coffee House
What is it with luvvies wanting to be ‘thoroughly European’?
Michael Henderson
Michael Henderson
11 October 2016
The Spectator
There’s always room for one more on the Ship of Fools, and Tom McCarthy has just booked his passage. The English novelist (no, I’d never heard of him, either) has written a column of such fifth-form puerility in the Guardian that it marks him down as a dunce of exceptional plumage. Make way, Hadley Freeman. Step aside, Zoe Williams. There’s a chap out there who can give you five yards and still beat you to the tape.
McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and feels insulted: ‘Like all English-language writers, I’m thoroughly European’. To prove it he refers to Shakespeare and Joyce, who, like him, would have voted to remain part of the European Union.
There are the usual clichés one expects from a man who read Derrida and Barthes when he was in short pants, and never got over it: cross-pollination, intersections, culture – shaping innovators. All of which brings to mind Tom Stoppard’s wonderful speech in The Real Thing about ‘every stale revelation of the newly enlightened ‘.
Stoppard, who was born in the old Czechoslovakia and became the most English of dramatists, could tell the likes of McCarthy quite a lot about writing and identity. But such people are more comfortable when they are doing the talking. Opting to visit a festival in Hackney instead of going to the RA, our batey pal says everybody had fun ‘celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalism bigotry’. Cor! Can we all join in?
He’s every inch the artist, is McCarthy. And one thing artists must never do, he says with the zeal of a prophet, ‘is be politically neutral’. Particularly in ‘a country where people are being killed in the street for not sounding or looking ‘British’ enough’. Or indeed not Islamic enough. The murders of Muslims in Glasgow and Rochdale were committed by co-religionists. As for the many acts of murder and violence in recent months in mainland Europe, he offers not a word. Maybe it has all passed him by, this proud European.
Not all artists are political. Matisse lived through two world wars, and there is no sign of upheaval in his paintings. In the early months of the second world war Vaughan Williams composed his fifth, and greatest, symphony. Although London was under siege, his symphony was a work of radiance. Are the novels of Hardy and Lawrence political? Or Joyce, for that matter? Not in the way this clown means. Stoppard again: ‘We should have the courage to lack convictions’.
Or, to borrow from a truly European figure, Karl Kraus of Vienna, McCarthy has nothing to say, and is determined to say it.
Tom McCarthy in The Guardian:
"Setting aside the fact that, since Dyson threw his lot in with Nigel Farage, I don’t even dry my hands in public toilets, the whole premise seems to me conceptually wrong. It’s wrong for the same reason the Blair government’s co-option of Britpop and Cool Britannia was wrong (although no one was being beaten up on the underbelly of the cognitive error back then)."
"About the same time, I received another invitation, this time to read from my work at an anti-Brexit art festival in Hackney’s gallery-filled Vyner Street. Beneath bunting designed by Fiona Banner, Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger played a gig, Katrin Plavcak and Ulrika Segerberg did an electronic sewing machine-enhanced performance, Lucy Reynolds conducted a “choir” who chanted in 20 languages at once, and a large crowd who could trace their heritage to every corner of the Earth ate, drank and generally had fun celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalist bigotry, while children darted round their legs."
What is it with luvvies wanting to be 'thoroughly European'? | Coffee House
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