The Diary: AN Wilson

Isaiah Berlin popularised the old saying that the fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. (The proverb goes back to the Greek poet Archilochus; Erasmus in the Renaissance said a version of the same thing). Berlin tried (not entirely seriously) to apply the saying to Tolstoy, saying the great Russian was really a fox who wished he were a hedgehog.

I don’t think Berlin’s game quite worked with Tolstoy. It is a good distinction, though, to make between journalists and some other types of writer – poets, say. A good journalist surely has to be a fox – interested in everything from the Test match to tittle-tattle to the internal feuds in the Labour party. The poet might only be interested in the perfect ode.

These thoughts hopped in my head during the remarkable new exhibition at Tate Britain of Susan Hiller’s varied and extraordinary oeuvre (it’s on until May 15). Gone are the days, it would seem, when a visual artist can be a hedgehog. The last good exhibition I went to, of Thomas Lawrence’s Regency portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, was really a display of a man doing one thing better and better and better. And JMW Turner, by the time he reached his heyday as a great artist, was really only interested in one thing: light itself.

Hiller’s installations, games, collections and objets trouvés suggest a fox-like need to take in everything, and to engage with the multifarious modern preoccupations of those viewing her work. Her “Automatic Writing” is a work where visual preoccupation spills over into the strange, apparently random, utterances of telepathic women. The photographs that Hiller took of her pregnant belly are the paradoxical opposite of self-obsession – they make her individual experience sink into the larger cycle of the lunar months, and the fecundity of landscape. Hiller’s collection of British seaside postcards encapsulates in a mysterious way not so much her experience of “rough sea” – as she calls it – but ours. She is, to this extent, a generous, inclusive artistic intelligence. No long retreat into monomania, no Monet’s Water Lilies, for her.

. . .

The agonising saga of the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston, Staffordshire continues. A collection of ceramics without parallel, it also houses the old firm’s archive, with the papers of old Josiah and much else besides. The first Josiah in the 18th century had started, and intended to keep, a museum. In 1962, my father, together with the other directors of what was then Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, established a charitable trust. The 8,000 ceramic items and the archives that form this wonderful collection were separated from the firm so that, whatever the fortunes of Wedgwood, the unique museum could be preserved in perpetuity.

Sadly, not long after that trust was drawn up, Wedgwood ceased to be a family firm and, in 1966, was floated on the stock exchange. Last year, after a series of catastrophes, the company, which since 1986 had been controlled by Waterford Glass in Ireland, went into receivership. It has since been sold, but a shortfall of more than £130m is owed to the company’s pensioners.

Alas, for those who love the Wedgwood Museum, it might be possible, legally, for the charitable trust established in 1962 to be reinterpreted retrospectively, so the museum and its contents can be counted as being “available” to pension scheme creditors. Of course they should be paid somehow but not – one hopes and prays – at the expense of this priceless and unique collection being dispersed and sold off bit by bit to the highest bidder.

Much apparently hangs on whether the learned judge in the case, which is likely to be heard later this spring, will believe that the directors wished to create an “express trust” – ie whether it was truly their intention to protect the museum and never to regard it as one of the firm’s assets.

Common sense makes it clear that, of course, the directors (my Pa included) saw the museum as totally independent of the firm. Otherwise, why would individual Wedgwood family members have given their treasures to the museum over the past 250 years?

It is nightmarish to think of the collection being dispersed, not least because it has been rehoused in a stupendous building, opened in 2008 and funded with almost £6m of lottery money, next to the old Barlaston factory. (To learn more about this important campaign, go to www.savewedgwood.org).

. . .

A sad day for us Wilsons in Camden Town. Our neighbour Nicholas Mosley, novelist of genius and the best conversationalist in England, and his wife Verity have sold up and gone to live in Holloway. Nicholas told me that from the top of their new house they can just see the prison where his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, who was leader of the British Union of Fascists, and stepmother Diana (née Mitford) were imprisoned in the last year of the war.

Nicholas and Verity came to supper with us for the last night and we “tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky” (William Johnson Cory). Gossip, theology, literature, politics all got an airing. While the removal men were loading the vans, Nicholas had retreated to a room at our local Holiday Inn with a copy of what he told me is his favourite novel, William Faulkner’s 1939 work If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (sometimes known as The Wild Palms). I’d never read it but have since done so, and would endorse the judgment of the great man. The figures in this haunting story make Hardy’s Jude the Obscure seem like a figure in a light comedy. The unfolding bad luck is Sophoclean in its relentlessness (avoid the next lines if you don’t want the denouement revealed): the story culminates in our hero, who has just performed an abortion on the woman he loves and has accidentally killed her, being offered a cyanide pill by the woman’s husband. He refuses because, if forced to choose between misery and extinction, he would still rather be conscious. “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” Nicholas did a good imitation of Sartre quoting the line, which was somehow absurdly funny. Presumably it is the choice most of us would make, which is why so many poor old things insist upon the National Health Service keeping them artificially alive rather than chucking the antibiotics and yielding to pneumonia, or what we used to call “the old man’s friend”.

. . .

For about nine years, since the death of our last dog, I have held out against sharing my life with another canine friend. But the pressure has been building at home and, when the hamster died last summer, I realised it would be impossible to go on resisting the deep yearning of my wife and daughter to add this unnecessary complication to our existence. None of the common sense arguments prevailed – not the need to pick up all the doings in a plastic bag, not the curtailing of foreign travel, not the (to me but not to them) troubling emotional neediness of dogs.

So, last week, like Mr Earnshaw returning from Liverpool with Heathcliff under his arm, my wife Ruth came back from Dartmoor, of all places, with a lurcher pup under her arm. The pup’s melancholy, long, whiskery face, and her way of looking at you with her head on one side, is, I am bound to say, meltingly beguiling. I am trying not to fall in love but I think I am failing.

AN Wilson’s most recent book is ‘Our Times’ (Arrow)