In the Republic--that handbook for dictators which dictators seldom read, a fact responsible for the decline in the standards of dictatorship in our time--Plato makes one of the earliest pleas in recorded literature for the censorship of the arts, specifically of poetry.
His reasoning is simple. Bad poetry, poetry that shows the gods in a bad light, corrupts the minds of the young. From which it follows that it is harmful to encourage such poetry.
When the argument gets going, Socrates, that disputatious prophet about whom Bertrand Russell says in his 'History of Western Philosophy' that he deserves a long stay in some philosophical purgatory, asks the following question: " Shall we just carelessly allow the children to hear any chance fables moulded by chance persons, and to receive in their souls opinions which are generally contrary to those which we believe they ought to have when they grow up?"
"Most certainly not," says one of his listeners. At which Socrates, now in full flow, drives home the preordained conclusion: "Then first, as it seems, we must set up a censorship over the fable makers, and approve any good fable they make, and disapprove the bad: those which are approved we will persuade the mothers and nurses to tell the children, and to mould the souls of the children by the fables even more carefully than the bodies by their hands. Most of those they tell now must be thrown away."
The experience of more than half a lifetime--the other half, Dostoyevsky assuring us in 'The Possessed' being merely a repetition of the first half--has convinced me of the soundness of this fundamentally pernicious doctrine. The books you read influence your mind, a resounding truism but one well worth remembering.
Music too has a powerful influence on one's mood and feelings. If one is endeavouring to perform stern tasks it doesn't do to listen to sentimental music. For stern deeds, stern music. Which perhaps is why, as one of his biographers assures us, Lenin, although fond of classical music avoided listening to it because of its sentimental effect on the mind. Stern man indeed.
At school where a Mr Manthorpe (now sadly gathered to his fathers) endeavoured to get us away from purple prose and the use of cliches--an endeavour only half successful, I am afraid--we were introduced by him for the first time to the works of W. Somerset Maugham. During a spare period on Saturdays he used to read out to us out of his short stories. How profound they seemed, how full of the wisdom of life, a rather Mediterranean version of it as I was later to learn.
It is in adolescence that one adopts cynicism and a contempt for the 'grosser' things as a pose and an attitude. At least we did this. I can't say what the young of today do. Smoke pot? Take to heroin? Terrible things. Sticking to literature was a much better alternative. Maugham with his rather superficial cynicism appeared to represent the attitude of my generation in a wonderful manner. I fell at his feet. Walter and Oscar Wilde had a large following in England at the close of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. If ever Maugham had a passionate devotee it was I.
Later I read his novels, 'Cakes and Ale', 'Of Human Bondage' and the rest. My opinion was merely confirmed. All that I needed to know of life I knew, such being the arrogance, or call it greenness, of a young fellow fresh out of school. What made it worse was a failure to go to either college or university. The Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul is not the best place for anyone in search of the Holy Grail, a quest to which every soul, even the meanest, is entitled.
It was a place for brainwashing of a peculiarly mindless kind. Map reading and the rudiments of tactics we were taught. Those perhaps were the only true accomplishments we acquired. A sage or a guide could have directed me to the right kind of books, books that would have accorded with the mood in the Academy. But no sage being at hand, I fell back on what I already knew something of: the English classics. Maugham says somewhere, and of this at least I heartily approve: "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from nearly all the miseries of mankind." The Academy at times could be a pretty miserable place.
I developed the habit of sitting in the last row of my class, a slim volume of romantic or Victorian prose hidden in a pamphlet dealing with, say, the finer points of machine gun firing. At a lecture on military intelligence I distinctly remember reading Mansfield Park of all things.
I might have gained something from this desultory reading had it not encouraged my natural indolence. Maugham with his tendency to dwell on what I can only call intellectual hedonism--in some of his notebooks he writes admiringly of artists on the Left Bank (in Paris, where else?) lying in bed all day--made matters worse. My day-dreaming had nothing to do with my military training. Where I should have been concentrating on drill and tactics I would be thinking of other things.
From this to surreptitious sipping on weekends was but a small step. The Parsi cadet, Dara, who initiated me into the rites of mixing Seven-up with I forget what, and then hiding the concoction in a thermos, I shall always remember fondly. I have forgotten half my instructors at the Academy. But not Dara whose memory (I hope he is having well-deserved fun somewhere) I shall always cherish. But the point I am trying to make is that my disenchantment with things military became more deep-rooted.
The drift towards what I would call 'lotus eater' literature continued even after I left the PMA behind and became an officer. On manoeuvres near the BRB canal I remember reading, again of all things, Aldous Huxley. 'Crome Yellow', 'Antic Hay', 'Eyeless in Gaza' helped me pass those tedious hours.
Once I was getting my artillery battery ready for a supposedly important inspection by the brigade commander. We had lost half the country and in the aftermath of that tragedy were seized with a fever of efficiency, as if to make up for lost time and opportunity. Anyway, I was walking up and down in front of the assembled guns and vehicles reading Dickens's 'Martin Chuzzlewit'.
To get a flavour of this priceless novel let me quote one passage out of a hundred, an account of Mr Pecksniff being hospitable at the dinner table: "'This,' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a mingling that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry.' Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants to merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table.'" Great stuff, isn't it?
You will readily understand that with reading such as this my mind could not have been too much on either the brigadier or his inspection. To make matters worse, at the lunch table I had a bit of an argument with the brigadier. During the 1971 war which had just ended several Bengali officers had gone over to their own side. Referring to one of them, Major Ziauddin, the brigadier said that he could have done anything but should not have gone over to the enemy. I tried telling the brigadier that Major Ziauddin's idea of the enemy might have been a bit different from ours. The brigadier fixed me with a cold glare.
I think I have made it pretty clear that poetry and art--what the Greeks called music--should be in keeping with what one is supposed to be doing.
Had I stayed away from the Maughams and the Huxleys and the other producers of minor classicism in which English literature abounds, I might have made a better officer. But then I suppose I might not have had the other mishaps with which my life has been full. Each his own way to the devil.