Implement Me No Directives! - 25 October 2002

There are three little piles of books that lie by my bedside.

I won't tell their titles at the moment because since these letters began - which was during the dark, threadbare English winter of 1945/6 - it's been the only broadcast of its kind from America, and I take this to be a privileged position I ought never to exploit in the interests of any commercial product, including books - though you can well imagine the hundreds of times since then when budding and full-blown authors have suggested that a friendly word about their latest masterpiece would do no harm and possibly add a healthy rustle to their wallet.

From time to time though I have felt compelled by the freshness, the splendour, of some book and in those 50-odd years I have mentioned maybe four books, five books, which greatly appealed to me and which were not getting much public notice.

I have to mention one now.

It is - get ready - the Old Testament, in the King James or if you're a highbrow, in the Jacobean version.

In case there are some American liberal leftists present, I must hasten to say I am not violating the First Amendment to the Constitution or their mistaken interpretation of it.

I'm not concerned with the Bible as a religious document, simply as a work of literature, available and incomparably useful to anybody interested in human life.

More so than, say, War and Peace, Vanity Fair or Balzac's entire Human Comedy.

Never mind whether you're a Methodist or a Buddhist or one of a hundred sects or a simple, downright atheist.

My favourite parson has written:

"Unfortunately over the centuries the Bible has become hopelessly associated with tub-thumbing evangelism and dreary piety, with superannuated superstitions and blue-nosed moralising, with ecclesiastical authority and crippling literalism.

"And yet, just because it is a book about the sublime and the unspeakable it's a book also about life the way it really is.

"It's a book about people who are at once - at one and the same time - believing and unbelieving, innocent and guilty, crusaders and crooks, full of hope and full of despair.

In other words it's a book about us."

From a recent poll it seems enough Americans have found this to be true, that there's been a very sizeable increase in the conversion or progression or lapse, if you prefer, of agnostics and atheists into either Judaism or Christianity.

For myself, as a lover of literature, that is to say of memorable writing about life as it is - I'm not so concerned in the movement from doubt or disbelief to religious belief - since the original doomsday Tuesday of 11 September I've been struck by how closely events here and in Afghanistan, in the Middle East in general, in Asia, follow the horrendous and sombre plots of so many stories in the Old Testament.

That is not, however, why I have a copy on hand.

By the way let me say I well understand the reluctance of anyone to start reading either testament because of its appalling printed layout - as of a miniature railway guide published exclusively for people with 20/20 eyesight.

So I will now recommend, without a misgiving, a book.

I think it's been out of print for a long time but surely it can be tracked down.

It's called The Bible designed to be read as living literature, arranged and edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates. The Bible arranged by Bates.

Here, for the first time, the huge hodgepodge of books of history, of incantation, of poetry, sermons, parables, myths, allegories, prayers, written hundreds of years apart, are separated out.

And so here Isaiah, for instance, is all laid out as poetry, which it is.

The books are arranged in order of the best historical knowledge we have.

All of it is beautifully printed. The Bible arranged by Bates.

However, its tragic relevance to the life we're all going through just now is not the reason I have a copy close at hand.

Two other small piles are there. One contains a couple of books of Mark Twain, another, three or four books by the man whom the late Hilaire Belloc called "the present master of the English language" - a tribute from such an eminent source that made the dons at Oxford take their favourite trash from under the pillow, declare they'd agreed with Belloc all along and hastened to give PG Wodehouse the never-anticipated jewel, an honorary degree: Doctor of Literature of Oxford University. Wow!

The reason I find myself falling into the nightly snooze so amiably is that I have just taken my final dose of medicine - one of the three handy medicines - The Bible, Mark Twain and old Pelham Grenville - to rinse out my mind after the day's over-gorged fill of newspaper prose and political prose and lawyers' prose and businessmen's prose and all the other experts strutting, who live by expressing themselves in a jungle of jargon and are incapable of struggling onto the path of simple English where the rough places are made plain and the crooked straight.

Nobody, I believe, has ever explained the miracle whereby a committee of bishops, of all unlikely simple writers, translated the Bible into English which, at that time, the early 17th Century, was both simple and sublime.

Just think, open the first book, Genesis, and the fourth sentence does not say: "The supreme being mandated the illumination of the universe and his directive was immediately implemented."

It does say: "And God said let there be light and there was light."

Incidentally did I ever tell you about a famous memorandum of the late, lamented Mr Churchill? If I did well then I'll tell it again.

As well as doing the work of 10 generals, a cabinet, ambassadors, ministers and allies all over the world, Churchill added to his outrageous 16, 18-hour day, a nightly chore of memoranda to everybody - admirals, cabinet ministers, allies, Roosevelt, regional commanders - a flood of memoranda.

In early 1945, when plans for the invasion of France were well along, he received an urgent message from the Admiralty asking whether they could begin to build the floating piers which Churchill had invented as launch pads for the invasion?

But the message went: "Permission is hereby urgently requested for the implementation of your direction with regard to the floating piers."

Back came the reply: "If you mean should you build the piers? Yes, build them. Do it. Carry on. Implement me no directives ever!"

Well if you'd wanted an earful of implemented directives speech you should have been present for the past six weeks at the debate in the United Nations about the wording of an Iraqi resolution that the Security Council will approve.

As I speak there seems little hope of anything better than a procession of all previous weasel words that save the council from any truly positive action.

Its habit has always been to deplore, to warn, to hint that there might be a possibility of something called action - something that happens very rarely to mean what it meant in the original charter: military action by the mighty United Nations army.

Which, the charter said, would be made up of contingents of men, weapons, supplies, that each nation would always have on call to contribute to the overwhelming force of the United Nations army, navy, air force, which would be, in fact, a universal militia.

Need I say that this Utopian provision of the charter, Article 43, signed by 50 nations in June 1945, was never remotely implemented.

Every member nation had promised to list the sort of weapon, force, expertise, it was good at by, at the latest, the autumn of 1945.

Nobody sent in a list of anything, there never has been a permanent UN force and the UN, as I've lamented before, doesn't own a pop gun.

Consequently almost every one of its threats of action, its resolutions seeking peace, have been paper threats mocked by, in the past 57 years, over 240 wars.

That grim fact, which is never talked about in the halls of the United Nations, is what the Bush administration has had in mind and been lamenting since a year ago when the president and his secretary of defence and the CIA amassed horrifying evidence of the nuclear industry in Iraq and Saddam's very advanced development, complete with warheads, of what is politely called a chemical, biological capability.

The fact that he has already used it on the rebellious Kurds obviously adds another twist of anxiety to the administration.

Although President Bush has his majority approval for Congress to do whatever he eventually decides, he cannot yet show a United Nations resolution that satisfies him, the Congress or the British government or what he keeps calling "the allied coalition" - but the other never mentioned fact is that there is no coalition.

As I speak the outlook is bleak for a resolution that backs any military action.

The French and the Russians especially are expert at composing gobbledegook, so-called diplomatic sentences that weave and tiptoe around every practical act and are most likely to leave us with a wordy lamentation, and Saddam with his nuclear and biological programme undisturbed.

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