TELEPHONES HAVE BEEN A BIG PART of the week. I went to see La Voix Humaine at Sadler’s Wells, the opera about a woman breaking up with her lover on the telephone — music by Poulenc, libretto by Cocteau.
The opera cannot be staged without a telephone that is iconic. It has to be visible, come in two parts — a receiver and a handset — and have a cord of romantic and suicidal possibilities; you can hang up on someone on a cordless phone, but you can’t hang yourself.
I doubt that either Poulenc or Cocteau could have written the opera for the world of mobile phones, and in any case the heartless lover would have ended the affair by text message or voicemail.
Virginia Woolf loved the convenience of the telephone, but worried about its effect on letter writing, which she loved more. She and her friends continued to write letters, and we are grateful to them, because the letters are a pleasure to read — the particularly literary pleasure that is a cross between the highbrow and the voyeur.
What would Woolf do now? Send texts, e-mails, and write her blog? I suppose we’ll find a way of collecting these things for the future, but the romance will be gone. Turning up a bundle of love letters to Vita Sackville-West is not the same thing as checking her texts or raiding her computer for e-mails.
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Of course we can still do things the old-fashioned way, but an element of self-consciousness has crept in that destroys both the privacy and spontaneity of a diary, or a letter to someone you love. We know that what we are doing is old-fashioned, and we know, too, that what we are doing might one day be printed or sold. Even soldiers writing home from Iraq can expect that their letters might be used in the tabloids. The letters and diaries that we love to read, whether Pepys, or Woolf or Betjamin, are not self-conscious, and not done with an eye to the future or as an anachronism in the present.
The present so quickly uncouples from the past these days that sometimes, perhaps, a bit of an anachronism can be a good thing.
When my touch-phone broke (again) this week, I hauled out the Bakelite phone from the 1930s that came with my cottage. It is large and black, like something out of The Third Man or The Maltese Falcon. My god- children spent hours playing with it at the weekend — their computers forgotten. They loved the dial and the big receiver, and could hardly believe that such a thing had ever been in daily use. (“How does it send texts?” “Do you just put your finger in the holes and press?” “Why does the dial go round?”) The instant world of speed phones makes us all act like kids who need Ritalin, as we thumb and jab and yell. Back on the dial, I find that by the time I eventually trudge through the number I am either fully concentrating on the call, or I have discovered that I really don’t want to speak to anybody. It has slowed me down remarkably, and to good effect.
Remember Coleridge and the Man from Porlock — the unfortunate bacon salesman who interrupted the poet in the middle of writing Kubla Khan? Coleridge never did finish the poem. Good thing for his work that he didn’t have a mobile or broadband.
I know that it annoys people when I won’t answer my phone before 4pm and check my e-mails only twice a week, but I don’t do the kind of work that thrives on interruption — and so I have to make a conscious choice to keep the interrupting world at bay. No broadband and a dial phone are quite attractive.
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I’m not a Luddite, but I don’t want so-called progress to tell me how to live. Maybe I prefer a quieter, slower life. Maybe I want to go to the opera or the theatre without some nut sitting beside me fiddling with their BlackBerry because they are bored and boorish. Maybe I don’t want to be in a carriage with a bunch of lunatics who can’t make eye contact or be polite because they are too busy announcing to their mobiles that they are on the train. Maybe I don’ t want the new Trio that can download porn direct from the internet.
Maybe I’ll sit by the fire, write a letter, read a book and leave the phone off the hook.
Opera North’s La Voix Humaine can be seen at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle (0870 9055060) on Thursday and at the Grand Theatre, Leeds (0870 1251898)
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on Saturday December 9