Since the book is now out, it is too late to ask Susan Hill to be gentle with me. As from yesterday, a surging modern sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has crashed and boiled by moonlight into the bookshops, and my name – Mrs de Winter – is once again in common parlance, along with Rebecca and Mrs Danvers, and Mad Ben the beachcomber. (‘No shell here,’ nods gap-toothed Ben mysteriously in my dreams at night. ‘Been diggin’ since forenoon. No shell here.’)
Ho hum. Crash. Boil. That’s the trouble with being shy and mousy. When you are the sort of nervous person who pushes the shards of a broken ornament to the back of a drawer so that the servants don’t find out (‘Oh lord, that’s one of our treasures, isn’t it?’ quips your husband, helpfully), it is natural that people should go right ahead and publish sequels about you, without bothering to ask you first. In my worst moments I think Mrs Danvers was right, I should have chucked myself out of an upstairs window and done everyone a favour. But the trouble with being Rebecca’s nameless heroine is this: supposing Susan Hill had taken me out for a coastal drive and then explained, ‘I’m asking you to be in my new novel, you little fool!’ – well, I would have had no option but to swoon my acceptance, wouldn’t I?
But I have changed a lot since Rebecca, since those ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. And I just hope Susan Hill is aware of it. The fact is, I experienced a quite surprising character change just at the point when Daphne du Maurier’s narrative left us – Maxim and me – on that mad, desperate nocturnal drive westwards towards the blazing Manderley. You may remember the scene. I spotted the giveaway glow on the horizon, and suggested, feebly, that it was the northern lights. ‘That’s not the northern lights,’ said hubby, all grim and lantern-jawed (as usual). ‘That’s Manderley.’ And he put his foot down. ‘Maxim,’ I whined. ‘Maxim, what is it?’ But he didn’t answer, just drove faster, much faster. I felt cold, very cold. It was dark, horribly dark. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. ‘It’s the bloody house!’ I yelled, suddenly. ‘That snotty cow in the black frock has set fire to the bloody house!’
Well, you can imagine the consternation. We came off the road. The car juddered to a halt. There was a hiss of steam. The ash still blew towards us with the salt winds of the sea, but I beat it off my jacket saying, ‘Ugh! Ash! Yucky! Look!’ Maxim could not believe his ears. ‘Stop it, you idiot!’ he said, but it was the wrong thing to say. ‘And you can stop calling me an idiot as well!’ I said, and socked him on the jaw. It was terribly peculiar; not like me at all. The author watched in stunned amazement, and then asked very quietly whether she could have a word.
The whole point of Rebecca, she explained patiently, was that I – as the modest, hapless, mooncalf heroine – should serve as a role-model for readers yet unborn, as the acceptable face of womanhood. Surely I could see that? ‘First we have Rebecca,’ she said; ‘she’s sexy and manipulative and selfish. You see? Then we’ve got Mrs Danvers, who is dark and jealous and self-sacrificing and is obviously everybody’s mother because she knows their faults and judges by impossible standards and rests her chin on their shoulder. And then there’s you, the victim. And you haven’t got a clue, basically. But because you are well intentioned, not very bright, motivated by gratitude and love, and terrorized by a fear of failure, you’re the heroine. Everyone loves you! Trust me! You are a great modern archetype! One day your followers will include the Princess of Wales!’
But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ So I divorced Maxim, took half the insurance money on Manderley, learnt to sail, wrote a book on sexual politics, broke a lot of ornaments and felt much better. That’s all there is, I think. Except that I decided to call myself Jackie. It comes as a surprise to some people, but as I always say, it’s a great deal better than nothing.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in my little flat, turn on the light, and burst into tears with relief. ‘Oh kitties,’ I gasp. ‘What a terrible dream! I dreamed I was in the Algarve on holiday on my own again!’ The awoken cats (God bless them) at first assume an air of polite concern. But at the word ‘Algarve’, they exchange weary glances (the feline equivalent of ‘Tsk’) and settle their heads back down on their paws. My buried-alive-in-Portugal saga seems to have lost its news value.
Meanwhile, I witter on. ‘I am in this café, you see, and I am reading the phrase-book. And all I can say in Portuguese is that I want two coffees, and four teas with milk, and lots of cakes! But I don’t really want all these drinks because I’m on my own! And they keep bringing cakes and teas and coffees, and I don’t know how to say Stop! and the teas keep coming and it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and …’ I look around and see that nobody is listening.
The good thing about this Algarve nightmare is that at least it covers everything you might want to have a nightmare about – from waking up in a box, to doing Finals in Sanskrit, to being drowned in a flash flood of Twinings. It’s all there. A friend of mine, who frequently suffers from the Finals dream, says he sometimes manages to double the anxiety by imagining that if he doesn’t pass this impossible exam, he won’t be allowed to reach the age of thirty-five; he will be obliged to go back to eleven and start again. Yike. In a similar exercise, I sometimes ring the changes on my Algarve nightmare by imagining that while I order the usual never-ending buckets of tea and coffee, I am unaware the laws of the country have been changed, so I am slung into jail for some sort of beverage transgression.
Why am I going on about it? Because I have been studying a little phrase-book I picked up in Italy on my last holiday, and have been rather alarmed by it. L’Inglese come si parla has worried me, I admit, ever since I first discovered I had goofed in the shop and bought the wrong sort of phrase-book – intended for Italian visitors to England, rather than the other way around. ‘What would you charge to drive me to Richmond?’ was the first phrase I saw in it, helpfully spelled out in pretend-phonetics: Huot uud iu ciaadg tu draiv mi tu Ritc’mond? And I thought, hang on, this can’t be right. Richmond is miles away.
But what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was what a nightmare experience the Italian visitor would have if he allowed this little phrase-book to govern his expectations of England. Because close attention reveals this newly printed publication to have been written either: a) by someone trying to push back the boundaries of existential terror; b) by someone who got all his information from watching Ealing comedies; or c) in 1948.
It’s the telltale references to trams that first set you thinking. Then you notice that the pubs close at 10 o’clock, the planes stop at Renfrew, and there are jam omelettes on the bill of fare. The world is suddenly all Sidney Tafler and black and white. In a tobacconist’s shop, the choice of cigarettes is Gold Flake, Players and Capstan; and the lonely Italian visitor in search of a girlfriend proceeds at once to a dance hall. ‘Dhis tiun is veri na(i)s, isn’t it?’ he says to his partner, peering over her shoulder at the phrase-book, and speaking like a computer. He riffles a few pages. ‘Iu aa(r) e wanderful daanser! Mei ai sii iu ho(u)um? Huot is iu(r) adres?’ Encouraged to dabble in less formal English, he tells his new lady-friend she is ‘(e) nai(i)s litl bit ov guuz’ (a nice little bit of goods). Something about all this makes me intensely worried on his behalf.
I mean, what would happen if he arrived at Victoria Station, and shouted (as he is advised here), ‘Poorter! Te(i)k dhis laghidg tu dhe Braiten trein!’ (‘Porter! Take this luggage to the Brighton train’). There would be some sort of riot. Alas, the British public would never guess he was living in some parallel phrase-book universe, would they? They would just assume he was asking for a punch in the eye. ‘Wash the car, and give it a good greasing,’ he commands at a petrol station. But what’s this? Biff! Boff! Ooof! Crawling back to the car, clutching his abdomen in one hand and his phrase-book in the other, he mutters, ‘Dhets dhe ghidi limit!’ (That’s the giddy limit).
I do wonder whether the book was published in a spirit of mischief by someone obsessed with Ealing films, because actually the story that emerges from its pages is rather like an Ealing plot. Poor guileless foreigner (played by Alec Guinness, perhaps) works hard to overcome loneliness by using authentic popular slang such as ‘nose-rag’, ‘old horse’ and ‘cheese it!’ and nobody knows what the hell he is talking about. ‘Dhets ool mai ai end Beti Maarten!’ he exclaims jocularly (‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’), amid general shrugs.
To make matters worse, the phrase ‘To pull the plonker’ is mysteriously omitted from L’Inglese come si parla. So the poor bloke keeps hitting the deck without ever understanding the insistent question on all English people’s lips.
Occasionally, we television critics like to reflect on our lives and pull a few strands together. In particular, we like to emphasize that, far from wasting our childhoods (not to mention adult-hoods) mindlessly gorming at The Virginian and The Avengers, we spent those couch-potato years in rigorous preparation for our chosen career. ‘It’s been tough,’ we reflect thoughtfully (as our eyes dart unbeckoned to the nearest flickering screen). ‘I mean, er, gosh, Streets of San Francisco, I love this. Oh yes, of course there were a few dodgy moments during the second run of Blankety Blank when I feared I might not make it, that the pace was simply too hard. But I pulled through. And leaving aside the damage to the optic nerve, I can honestly say that watching wall-to-wall drivel was the best – ahem – mental investment I ever made.’
I know, I know. Such pious fraud fools nobody. But in the week that saw the thirty-fifth anniversary of BBC1’s Blue Peter, and in which I calculated that I watched this enjoyable, educative programme, girl and woman, for a total of fifteen years, I simply felt obliged to trawl for a valid extenuation. In reality, of course, I watched it because I loved it, because it was live and dangerous, and because the invited animals acted up, refused to eat, and sometimes dragged presenters clear off the set. Most of all, however, I watched for its suggestion of that strange made-it-myself domestic world (reached, perhaps, through the airing-cupboard) in which Mummy’s work-basket was filled with Fablon off-cuts, while Daddy was a kindly twinkler in carpet slippers who would happily drill a hole in a piece of wood (‘Hand it here, youngster!’); you only had to ask.
Some people disliked Blue Peter for this cosy middle-class idyll; they got chips on their shoulders. But I thrived on these glimpses of a parallel universe. I adored the fanciful idea of aunties who exclaimed, ‘What a lovely present! How ingenious to think of painting an egg-box and making it into a fabulous jewellery case!’ Wisely, however, I stayed on the right side of the airing-cupboard, not dabbling in glitter and squeezy bottles; also, I recognized cheap tacky home-made stuff when I saw it, and refused to get involved. Only once in thirty-five glorious Blue Peter years did I let slip my guard (oh, woe) and attempt to make ‘jelly eggs’ as a nice surprise for a family Easter. I regretted it instantly. It was a terrible mistake. One day, they will find ‘Jelly Eggs’ engraved on my heart, just next to the inexpressibly mournful ‘Copy fits, no queries’.
The jelly eggs instructions looked simple enough, but that’s no excuse.
1) Take an egg, make a tiny hole in each end, and then just blow the contents through the tiny weeny hole, leaving the shell empty.
2) Boil up some jelly.
3) Cover one of the tiny holes with a small piece of sticky tape.
4) Pour the jelly into the shell, then pop it into the fridge, where it will set. Now, just picture the surprise of the adults on Easter morning when they take the top off your egg and find the jelly inside!
Whatever possessed me to try this at home? Could I blow an egg? No, not without blowing my brains out. Would a piece of sticky tape keep the jelly inside (assuming I could pour it into a tiny hole without a funnel)? No, the only thing that worked, finally, was an Elastoplast – the big brick-red fabric sort, generally used for heels. Would the egg-shell mould the jelly into the shape of a perfect egg? No, because the jelly seeped into the Elastoplast overnight, and sank to half-way. Were the adults dumb-struck with surprise when they ate their Easter breakfast? No, because they had all been involved in this disastrous enterprise at some stage or another, urging me in my own interests to see sense and give the whole thing up.
But I never lost my love for Blue Peter. I now hear that under pressure from the real world they have sealed up the old airing-cupboard door, which is a shame. Blue Peter taught me that when my own turn as auntie came around, I should exclaim, ‘That’s lovely, how clever, is it a tissue box with my name on it in glitter?’ – thus making a little girl quite happy. So it just goes to show. Watching fifteen years’ worth of television does teach you something, sometimes.
Alas, I am perplexed again. A few weeks ago, a writer chum phoned me to ask for some help with a difficult ethical question, so naturally I pulled a straight face immediately, rested my fingertips lightly together (tricky when holding a receiver) and suggested she proceed. A friend had left an expensive winter coat in her flat, by mistake, she explained, then flown abroad for six weeks. ‘I see,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully; ‘And so? What?’
My chum’s question was this: if I were in her position, would I wear the coat?
I was so shocked by the very idea that I instantly abandoned my rational, objective Michael Ignatieff impersonation. ‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘No, I would not.’ ‘Why?’ she asked.
Well, I said, first I would be worried about the safety of the coat, you know, down the shops, bloke on a ladder, tin of paint, Norman Wisdom, ha ha ha. Second, I would be almost suicidally flummoxed in company if anyone remarked: ‘Nice coat, where’s it from?’ But really and honestly, I wouldn’t wear it because it wasn’t mine.
Now my friend was much taken with this tin-of-paint idea. When she rang other people for further ethical and practical viewpoints, she found that the irrational Fear of Paint not only entered other people’s neurotic purview, but could easily be brought to dominate it.
But what she didn’t find, apparently, was anyone else who said, ‘No, I wouldn’t wear it because it isn’t mine.’ So she wore the coat, recklessly defied the malign god of magnolia gloss, and eventually decided to write a piece for the Guardian about the whole damn thing.
And my point (at last) is this. She told me she was writing an article in which I would – nameless, of course – appear. She read me her description of my response, and told me precisely when the piece would be published.
Such careful, respectful and scrupulous behaviour put me to shame. Because when it comes to other people’s anecdotes – other people’s ‘stuff’ which might come in handy to illustrate a point in a column or a story – I rip it straight off the hanger without asking, shout ‘Yes! This will do nicely!’, and publish it in a newspaper. Which is the exact equivalent of wearing it to the open day at the Jackson Pollock Primal Hurl Art Therapy Group for Particularly Messy Serial Killers.
Luckily, my friends are more broadminded than me. I parade their best stuff in public and they don’t get all twisted about it. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once said that when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. Equally, when a columnist has bosom friends, they find that they no longer have a thing to call their own.
Every anecdote they utter goes directly into the writer’s mental dressing-up box, and though any single item may not re-emerge for a decade, it will undoubtedly turn up again one day – albeit crumpled, stained, mildewed, or laced with holes – to the owner’s muffled astonished cry of’ But surely that was mine originally, wasn’t it?’
It is no extenuation whatever to claim (as I do, frequently) that so long as I attribute stories to ‘a friend’; so long as I don’t tell the story against the originator – well, then it’s all perfectly OK. In her Great Left-Behind Coat Ethics Research, my friend encountered precisely such casuistical chicanery, and I poured scorn on all of it.
For instance, perhaps it would be a different ethical kettle of fish if the item were not a coat but a frock? Or if the owner were the sort of person who suffers from amnesia? Or if you only allowed yourself to wear the coat outdoors on National No Decorating Day? Bah, I retorted; the matter is simple. If it doesn’t belong to you, leave it in a cupboard. The rest is sophistry.
And so here I am, writing about my friend’s article about borrowing things without asking. And did I ask her? Of course I didn’t.
‘Yes! This will do nicely!’ I yelled excitedly, as I tried it on for size, did a quick twirl, and hacked a few inches off the sleeves with the bread-knife. Such a gigantic fuss about nothing! As the great Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz might have remarked, if they didn’t want me to wear it, they really shouldn’t have left it lying about.
At the cinema these days there is a rather peculiar advert for jeans. It is basically a witty rewriting of Cinderella, but since it appears to have been edited by a madman run wild with a bacon-slicer, the narrative unfolds so precipitately that it takes at least two viewings to get the gist. Anyway, it goes something like this. Clock strikes bong for midnight. Boy rushes off without his jeans. Girl holds jeans to face with funny wistful-but-determined look in her eyes, then hawks jeans around town, getting big fat men to try them on. Finally, she locates her beloved, who buttons up a treat. And that’s it. Allowing for how difficult it is to make trousers even slightly interesting, this ad is a huge success.
The thing about fairy tales, surely, is that they can be used to sell anything; indeed, it is almost their primary function. Anyone who thinks it is radical of the Disney studio to turn the heroine of Beauty and the Beast into a modern-thinking self-determined book-lover (‘There must be more than this provincial life!’ she sings discontentedly, several times) is right in only one respect. Yes, it is radical of the Disney studio. Previously Disney sold other things; now it is selling this. A generation of girls grew up believing that to be a heroine (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) all you required were a decent whistling technique, first-class handiness with a broom, and an ability to sleep for extended periods in a glass box without mussing your make-up or dribbling on your frock. And as values go, these were probably OK for the time.
But my point is this. In the traditional folk tale, women were not these puny types. Big tears did not roll down their pretty faces, and they did not wear rouge. Instead, they rescued princes from enchantment, tipped witches into ovens, all that. The reason we know only of the rescue-me namby-pambies is that we inherit our knowledge of folk tales from the Victorians, whose respect for divergent viewpoints, especially in the realm of sexual politics, was notoriously meagre. Funny how The Sleeping Prince got dropped from the canon, wasn’t it? I wonder why.
But as Alison Lurie points out in her marvellous book on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups, even the Grimm brothers tidied up the tales to reflect the mores. ‘In each subsequent edition of the tales,’ writes Lurie, ‘women were given less to say and do.’ At issue, of course, is whether it is cynical and outrageous to impose modern values on traditional stories. When George Cruikshank, the Victorian illustrator, rewrote four of his favourite fairy stories as temperance tracts, Charles Dickens countered with a brilliant essay, ‘Frauds on the Fairies’ (1853), denouncing the practice. But what is odd now is to see how certain Dickens was that the versions he remembered from childhood were necessarily the originals. Cruikshank, thundered Dickens, ‘has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.’
Dickens boiled with sarcasm (‘Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in’); and then embarked on a thoroughly sardonic rewrite of Cinderella incorporating absurdly modish references to tax reform, vegetarianism and, interestingly, the rights of women. Cinderella, in this version, was a moral swot and reviler of meat, who on becoming queen did all sorts of absurdly fashionable things. She ‘threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices, and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and whom nobody dared to love’. It is the mark of a great writer that he allows his own imagination to scare him like this. Come to think of it, this must have been the version that was read to the infant Neil Lyndon in his cot.
Where does it all stop? Well, it won’t stop at all, of course. Walt Disney is supposed to have said, ‘People don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. In the end they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.’ But now Linda Woolverton, the scriptwriter of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, has started saying she would like to remake ‘the old Disneys’, so it turns out that nothing is sacred after all. Cinderella, she says, needs to stand up to the ugly sisters, stop hanging around with mice, and not necessarily marry the prince. Hmm. Snow White should not stay at home all day but work with her chums in the mines and marry one of the vertically challenged men with pickaxes. And lastly, Sleeping Beauty – the most famously inert character of them all – should ‘track down and personally punish’ her wicked stepmother immediately she wakes up in the glass box. Whether she will punish her stepmother by making her watch the new version of Cinderella is not made clear.
I promise I didn’t make any of this up. I just wonder how serious Linda Woolverton was when she said it. Currently she has been let loose by Disney on a remake of the famous animal adventure film The Incredible Journey, which seems at first glance to have fewer opportunities for political correctness, although the cat could have a wooden leg. Meanwhile, it ought to be said that Belle may indeed be a book-reader, who swoons at the sight of the Beast’s enormous library, yet she is a traditional heroine in most other respects. She is kind, friendly, chats with cockney teapots, and has enormous eyes. And of course she is everso, everso pretty. But then ‘Passable Looking and the Beast’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it somehow.
Anyone watching the BBC news on Sunday night, with its edited highlights of the Remembrance Day ceremony, will have noted a very curious thing. The newsmen cut out the two minutes’ silence. Thus, the clock went ‘Bong’, the distant cannon went ‘Bang’, and the next thing you knew, they were playing the Last Post and laying wreaths. Since the annual two minutes’ reflective silence is about the most moving thing on television, it is possible that the edit was intended to protect the already raw feelings of the grief-stricken. But I doubt it. What we witnessed here was the consequence of fear, of a feeble failure of nerve. You see, silence on the television is about as unthinkable (Oh no!) as blank lines in a newspaper, thus:
In fact, the chances of this gaping white wound not being panic-sutured by someone in the course of the paper’s production (‘What the hell is this? There’s a space on page 18!’) are very slim indeed, and I am thoroughly foolhardy even to attempt it.
Gaps are great, however. I firmly believe we should have more gaps, especially in broadcasting. ‘And now on BBC2, er, Nothing. Over on BBC1, in just over ten minutes, good grief, Nothing there, as well.’ Personally, I would embrace the return of the potter’s wheel, the interval bell, the test card, and the inventive use of ‘Normal Programmes Will be Resumed Shortly’, but arguably Nothing could be finer. Don’t other people’s brains get overloaded? Or is it only mine? Has no one else noticed that new books are published every week, without let-up, over and over, till the end of creation? Why don’t they stop sometimes? Why don’t they admit they have run out of ideas? Am I run mad, or just in desperate need of a holiday? Asked recently in a published questionnaire to compose a headline for the event that I would most like to cover, I’m afraid I gave myself away completely. ‘Airwaves eerily silent,’ I wrote, ‘as all networks simultaneously run out of programmes.’
Clearly this is an unusual attitude to our splendiferous burgeoning culture, especially in a television critic, but on the other hand, for God’s sake somebody, help! While others famously ‘surf’ through the television channels – presumably humming ‘Catch a Wave’ by the Beach Boys as they paddle back out, letting their fingertips stiffen from prolonged immersion – I find I can only cope by taking short exhilarating dips, then towelling off vigorously and getting fully dressed again. Sharing a sofa (and a remote control) with someone who uses commercial breaks in cop shows as an opportunity to surf over and ‘see what’s happening in the snooker’ is guaranteed, in fact, to drive me to violence.
‘Shouldn’t we switch back now?’ I say, after a minute has passed.
‘Not yet, this is interesting.’ Pause.
‘Let’s switch back, go on.’
‘Not yet.’ A longer pause, more charged with tension. There is an irritating click of balls.
‘Give me that thing!’ I shout, suddenly. ‘I want to go back to Columbo!’
At which point a grabbing-and-kicking scuffle breaks out, and the remote control is somehow hurled out of the window, where it lands with a plop in a rain-butt.
Recently on Radio 4 the wonderfully repugnant Alan Partridge (spoof Pringle-wearing radio personality chat-show host) attempted a one-minute silence, when an interviewee supposedly suffered a fatal heart attack in the chair opposite. ‘And now, the one minute’s silence,’ said Partridge (or something similar). ‘Yes, ah-ha, here we go … very respectful, this … in case you’re wondering, anyone who’s just tuned in … this is a One Minute Silence … about half-way through, I should think … it’s very moving, actually … perhaps I could use this opportunity to tell you about next week’s show … or perhaps not … can’t be long now … that’s it! Minute’s up! Lovely.’ Well, I’d just like to say I genuinely appreciated what he was trying to do. So here’s another gap:
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Once, when I was still a literary editor, I was instructed by an ebullient boss to commission a piece from Norman Mailer. ‘Try Norman Mailer,’ he said. ‘If our usual fee isn’t high enough, tell him we can add an extra fifty quid.’ I dropped the tray of cups I was holding. ‘Something wrong?’ he said. Fighting back tears, I forced out the words, ‘Isseny nnuff.’ ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Isseny NNUFF.’ ‘Oh, you never know,’ said my cheery editor, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Tell you what: you can add a hundred. That ought to do it.’ And he went off home.
The trouble with having low self-esteem is that you recognize immediately when you are out of your depth. I was out of mine from the moment the Manhattan switchboard-operator took my call. ‘You’re calling from where?’ she asked, making me repeat myself more loudly, so that she could hold up the receiver for everyone else to have a good laugh, too. As I felt myself sinking, I realized I was like a character in an American short story, hazarding everything on the tiny chance that someone had once saved Mailer’s life by staunching a gunshot wound with a copy of The Listener.
Mailer’s agent was clearly a very busy man, with little time to mess around with small fry like me. When he at last spoke to me, I was convinced he was having a haircut and manicure at the same time. He started with the bottom line: ‘You ought to know,’ he declared equably, ‘that Norman’s alimony commitments are so titanic that if he writes for anything below his bottom rate he actually ends up in court for defaulting. Now, I’ll tell you that the last time Norman wrote for a magazine, he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Tell me what you are offering and I’ll run it past him.’
I did a rapid calculation on a scrap-pad, and figured we were roughly forty-nine and a half thousand dollars short. Did I have sufficient cojones to pledge the magazine into bankruptcy? No I did not. I added an extra hundred to our top fee (‘I can always sell the car,’ I thought), but my effort elicited no cheers or huzzahs from the agent. As he said goodbye, I heard myself say, ‘Don’t you want to know what we’d like him to write about?’ but it was too late. I hung up and went home. I never found out whether he ran it past Norman or not, but I have often envisaged it bowling past Mailer at top speed, just as he was bending down to tie his shoelaces.
I have dwelt on this conversation ever since. None of it need be true, of course: the agent may just have been trying to let me down gently. But what a terrible fix for poor Norman. It struck me that we might turn the evidence to our advantage, by printing a slogan across the mast-head: ‘The magazine Norman Mailer can’t afford to write for’. But though I ran this idea past the editor, he didn’t attempt to flag it down.
Contrary to popular preconception, you can meet all sorts on a march to save Radio 4 Long Wave. Oh yes. On Saturday, as our happy band of orderly middle-class protesters set off from Speakers’ Corner and headed for Broadcasting House, I actually found myself demonstrating alongside a woman who reads the Guardian. Hey! Right! So let us, once and for all, forget this slur that the Long Wave Campaign is about fuddy-duddy types who think ‘grass roots’ is something to do with Gardeners’ Question Time. What Saturday’s protest showed was that it is possible to feel very strongly about an issue yet remain polite, that’s all. ‘What do we want?’ yelled our cheerleader. ‘Radio 4!’ we responded, slightly heady at our own daring. ‘Where do we want it?’ ‘Long Wave!’ ‘How do we ask?’ ‘Please!’
It was a small march, admittedly, but the hell with it, we carried lots of balloons. Efforts to recruit bystanders from Oxford Street (‘Come and join us!’) were slightly optimistic, I thought – the bewildered looks of shoppers telling us what we knew in our hearts already: that the cause of ‘R 4 LW’ is not an instantly emotive one, and that the joke about Duke Hussey being able to pick up FM reception on his leg is a trifle arcane.
‘What are you protesting about?’ a young woman asked the contingent from Belgium. ‘The BBC wants to put Radio 4 on FM only, which means we won’t get it on the Continent any more.’ The woman walked alongside us while she considered this information, in all its many aspects. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said at last, as she nevertheless noticeably slowed her pace and dropped out. ‘Hey, listen, I hope you get what you want.’ And then, as an afterthought, she called after us, ‘This Radio 4, can you get it here?’
There were contingents from all over the place – all of northern Europe, and lots of areas in Britain where trying to get an FM signal is almost as fruitless and frustrating as trying to get a straight answer from the BBC. Embarrassed that personally I did not live in a far-flung outpost of the Long Wave Diaspora, I admitted sotto voce to my exotic Guardian-reading friend that my FM reception is actually OK so long as I don’t attempt to move the radio, or stand more than three feet away from it in leather-soled shoes. She seemed relieved. She admitted likewise that hers was also OK, so long as everyone in the kitchen made only limited lateral movements with their upper bodies, and the fridge door was left open.
Neither of us, however, could get FM in our bathrooms, so we formed an instant bond and became the Bathroom Contingent, marching on behalf of Long Wave bathrooms throughout the land. Meanwhile I couldn’t help inwardly pondering the health consequences of repeatedly opening the fridge for the sake of good bits on Pick of the Week. John Birt’s BBC no doubt has many things on its conscience, but the potential for dealing bacteriological food-poisoning to a nation of Guardian readers has surely escaped its purview until now.
When we arrived at Broadcasting House, our reception – appropriately enough – was a bit fuzzy, and depended on where you were standing. Suddenly mob-like once we stopped moving, we assembled outside the Langham Hotel and raised our educated voices against those unresponsive grey stone walls, waggling our balloons in an aggressive manner, until eventually a bloke in a suit (Phil Harding) came out to meet us and shoved through the crowd, filmed by BBC news. And that was it; the balloons were collected; we all drifted off to John Lewis for a bit of light shopping. According to reports in the Sunday papers, Mr Harding said, ‘I’m listening; I’m listening,’ but I didn’t hear him. Perhaps I was wearing the wrong shoes.
But what I will remember is the weird experience of waiting across the road for something to happen. Extra police materialized – making us feel more agitated, of course – and we started to grow restive. After all, if there was one thing guaranteed to make us livid, it was the feeling of being ignored by the BBC. I had a nasty moment, I can tell you, when it suddenly struck me that if a riot broke out I might go down in broadcasting history as a member of the Bathroom Two.
Since supermarket shopping is probably the most dismal, routine, mindless, time-wasting and wrist-slitting element in most people’s lives, it was at first glance rather baffling to discover that ITV was planning Supermarket Sweep, a weekday morning game show in which contestants are tested (and rewarded) on their ability to answer simple questions about products and then hurtle down the aisles, lobbing big cartons of washing-powder into overloaded trolleys amid whoops of excitement from a studio audience. ‘Oh heavenly doo-dahs, that the culture should be reduced to this,’ I sighed (in a vague, regretful kind of way): ‘Stop the world, I want to get off; to have seen what I have seen, see what I see.’ Admittedly shopping is a skill (some people are certainly better at it than others), but as an intellectual test, you have to admit, it’s just one small step from asking people to spell their own name, or open their own front door and switch the light on.
QUESTION: It’s eaten from a plastic bowl on the floor, by a pet
that likes to go for walks.
ANSWER (tentatively): Dog? Er, dog? Is it?
Q: Hmm, I’ll let you have it, but the answer I really wanted was dog food.
A: Ah. Yes. I see.
The first Supermarket Sweep was shown yesterday, and yes, the above exchange did take place, no kidding. Of course, the programme’s proceedings bore no relation to supermarket shopping in the real nightmare, universal sense (which would have made it interesting): none of the trolleys were fixed so that they slewed violently sideways into the biscuits; no mad people blocked the aisles muttering over a basket of teabags and kitchen roll. The real skill in supermarket shopping is to get round (and out) without the banality of the experience reducing you to screams or blackouts. But none of this was reflected in Supermarket Sweep, which was the opposite of shopping anyway, because the strategy was to locate only the most expensive stuff, and eschew the bargains. How interesting, moreover, that the climactic ‘checkout’ section was cunningly edited for highlights, so we never found out whether the contestants were obliged to yawn and stare at the ceiling while a clueless overalled youth disappeared with their unmarked tin of beans, and then, once out of view, decided to forsake this humdrum life and catch a plane to Guatemala.
Politically, I get confused by programmes such as this. If the idea is to make uneducated people feel good about themselves, it churns up highly equivocal feelings of, on the one hand, ‘Right on, give them a chance!’ and on the other, ‘Could we please go back to the eighteenth-century notion of improvement and start again?’ In the modern world, careless congratulatory talk has been taken literally, with appalling results. ‘You ought to be on the stage’ was a thoughtless cliché that led straight to karaoke; ‘You ought to be on the telly’ led to Jeremy Beadle; and ultimately, ‘You’re so good at shopping, you ought to go on Mastermind’ led, in the very last tick-tock minutes of civilization, as the hourglass sands drained finally and softly away, to Supermarket Sweep. Personally, I reckon I know the ground-floor layout of John Lewis so intimately I could traverse it blindfold. But it’s odd to think there’s any intrinsic virtue in that. Rather the reverse, really: it’s the shameful sign of a misspent adulthood.
The additionally consoling thing for the Supermarket Sweep contestants, of course, is that they can beat the brainboxes in their own arena. Just think, if you put Eric Korn and Irene Thomas (the legendary Round Britain Quiz London team) in this grab-a-trolley-and-run situation, they would almost certainly be rubbish. Told to collect ‘Tuna and sweetcorn cottage cheese, a litre of bleach, and high-juice lemon squash,’ they would pause and frown, musing, putting two and two together, while the others bolted for the shelves in tracksuit and trainers, and performed heroic wheelies by the fridge. ‘Sweetcorn. Mm. Bleach. Lemons,’ says Irene Thomas with a happy quizzical overtone, indicating that she’s spotted the arcane link between these disparate items already. ‘Would Der Rosenkavalier help us here? Yes, I thought it would …’ Oh dear. And the answer he wanted was dog food. It just goes to show the limits of a classical education.
In times of stress, I firmly believe, you must reach for the family Bible, close your eyes tight, allow the book to drop open, and stab the page forcefully with a compass point wielded in a random arc. The idea is not just that the violence of the act will make you feel better (although it does), but that fortune will somehow guide you to a relevant helpful passage, while at the same time miraculously preventing you from impaling your other hand to the desk.
Superstitious? Certainly, and especially the last bit. But I am sure I have seen evidence of its efficacy, if only in the movies. You know: gangsters staring agape in shock when the book falls open at ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ (Numbers xxxii, 23) just seconds before a curtained window is suddenly blown to smithereens a couple of feet behind them.
Anyway, spending a lot of time on my own, I sometimes devote the odd couple of hours to testing the theory of Bible-dropping, rather as if I were an infinite number of monkeys bent on disproving the notion of dramatic genius. The happy sound of ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ sometimes emanates from my flat all day long. Where other people might, as a matter of course, consult Patric Walker or the I Ching (or Spillikins) before applying for a job or taking a trip abroad, there are days when I scarcely plan a journey to the post box without first securing some random canonical go-ahead from Deuteronomy in the Authorized Version.
I don’t take it seriously, not really. But on the other hand I have had some pretty startling results. Take the other day. I had been experimenting in the kitchen again, had concocted a rather interesting Lentil and Pink Marshmallow Bolognese in a saucepan. Obviously I now required guidance: should I take a picture of it before slinging it in the bin? I shut my eyes, flipped open the Good Book, poked it with the bread knife, and what do you think it said? It said: ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ (Genesis iii, 13). Blimey. How spooky. I tried it again. ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ And this time I got II Kings iv, 40: ‘There is death in the pot.’
Sometimes the messages are a bit mysterious. Once, when I had been drawing losers for hours – ‘Go up, thou bald head’ (?); ‘And they spoiled the Egyptians’ (?) – and wumping and slashing like an early agricultural machine in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I suddenly got a rather grumpy-sounding ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’ (Proverbs xxvi, 11), which drew me up short for a minute. Some significance here, perhaps? Naturally, I decided to have another go. And this time I got ‘The dog is turned to his vomit again’ (II Peter ii, 22). Weird, eh? But completely unfathomable, alas.
Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that I recently discovered a potential application for this unusual hobby of mine. Browsing in a religious bookshop one rainy afternoon, and flicking through Bibles (‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ met my gaze immediately, so I knew things were running to form), I discovered a rack of biblical posters. And much as I dislike slander in matters of taste, these posters were truly horrid – in the classical sense of making all your hair stick out like spines on a hedgehog. Who could be responsible for these ghastly things, I wondered. I could only suppose that the infinite number of monkeys had been up to their usual tricks.
Imagine, if you will, two large fluffy ducklings waddling away down a country lane at sunset, with underneath the legend ‘Can two walk together, except they be agreed?’ I mean, is this sick, or what? A pair of cute kids hold hands in a lush pasture, bathed in summer light, and one holds out a daisy-chain to the other. ‘God loveth a cheerful giver,’ it says. Two tiger cubs embrace roughly, evidently mindful of the injunction of ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ I ask you, what a paltry use of the imagination. I nearly produced some new vomit to come back to later on.
But on the other hand, I did rush home with a whole new sense of purpose. My idea was simple: take this ghastly notion to its natural bathetic extreme. A man could be shown reprimanding a cat that has unaccountably stalked out of the room halfway through the EastEnders omnibus: ‘What,’ he says, in a speech bubble, ‘could ye not watch with me one hour?’ Good, eh? A woman, evidently frazzled from shopping, could be shown consulting a list in a dusty foreign market, and looking jolly peeved. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ could be written underneath.
I hope my posters will give pleasure somewhere. Meanwhile I shall cheerfully continue with my Bible-bashing. I got ‘We have as it were brought forth wind’ the other day (Isaiah xxvi, 18), and I can’t say it hasn’t given me lots to think about. An acquaintance has gently suggested to me that any big book – telephone directory, Argos Catalogue – will work equally well for my purposes, but I suspect this is a fallacy. Faced with a dilemma, surely nobody wants to know that the answer is an automatic pet-feeder at £12.99, or ‘Mr H. MacGuire, 26 Fulwell Gardens, W6’. Unless of course (by some remote probability) you are Mrs MacGuire, suffering from amnesia. Or you have suddenly acquired an infinite number of monkeys, all demanding meals at funny intervals.
It is only when one watches several weeks of ‘Crime and Punishment’ television that one realizes how little real-life contact one has with the police. It is rather odd. As a viewer, I feel I am so well acquainted with police procedure I could confidently head a murder enquiry; but at the same time, in real life, I have only twice been inside a police station. Talking recently to the producer of a ‘Cops on the Box’ documentary, I was relieved to find he shared this wildly discrepant experience. In making his programme, he said, he hired two actors in uniform to sit in an old white Zephyr (in homage to Z Cars) and walk shoulder-to-shoulder down whitewashed corridors. At one point, he momentarily forgot where he was, turned round to see these two coppers bearing down on him, and jumped aloft with shock.
Perhaps this explains why it has stuck in my mind, the time long ago when a real-life local CID bloke, taking a statement from me about a bag-snatching, conformed to his image as portrayed by left-wing television playwrights and thereby delivered a bit of a jolt. He had asked what my job was, to which I truthfully replied I was a literary editor on a magazine (The Listener). He looked interested, so I elaborated. Publishers sent me their new books, I said, and I commissioned reviews; then I edited them, wrote headlines, laid out pages and corrected proofs. ‘It’s a dog’s life,’ I added cheerfully, in case he thought I was showing off. He thought about it, as if he were going to volunteer for a spot of reviewing (people often did), and then pronounced the words that have niggled me ever since: ‘I expect there’s room for corruption in that.’ I remember how my mind went blank. I said how d’you mean, corruption? You’ve got something people want, he said; it stands to reason they’ll pay for it.
Well naturally I went back to the office next day and shook all the books to see if any fivers fell out, but with no success. I rang up Chatto & Windus and asked for the bribe department, but they denied all knowledge. My detective was evidently wrong in his suspicions. But what alarmed me, obviously, was that this friendly backhander insinuation was the first conversational angle he thought of. While normal people might have said, ‘Do you read all the books?’, ‘What’s Stephen Fry like?’ or ‘So that’s why you smell of book dust and Xerox toner!’, this policeman evidently saw the world as one huge greasy palm, and assumed that everyone else did, too. In retrospect I wish I had countered more effectively. ‘Detective sergeant, are you?’ I might have said, ‘Gosh, I expect there’s room for reading a novel with a pencil in your hand in that.’
So it took me aback, this encounter, the way corruption came up in the first five minutes I ever spent with a policeman. Especially when, merely out of politeness, I turned the conversation round to him (‘But I expect there’s room for corruption in your job?’) and he fobbed me off with a ludicrous story involving a motorist and a ten-bob note. ‘You seem to have left this money in your driving-licence, sir; we must be more careful,’ he had said, apparently, handing it back confused.
In my more paranoid moments I still wonder, though, whether I missed out on something. Whether other literary editors were taking delivery of string bags stuffed with notes in the gents at Waterloo while I was miserably sticking galleys on to layout sheets and getting cow-gum in my eyebrows. The idea of the lit. ed. as wide-boy certainly has its attractions; any gathering of the downtrodden, stoop-gaited chaps (it’s mostly chaps) tells you at a glance that sniffing the bindings is the nearest they get to an illicit activity. So what we obviously require is a culture in which literary editing, not police work, is the theme of tough, uncompromising television shows. ‘I told you,’ the hard-boiled lit. ed. snarls down the phone, while admiring his manicured nails, ‘I want a pony for the Brookner, or the deal’s off.’ The viewing nation would be held in thrall. He’s tough; he’s mean; he edits book reviews. And then, whenever the public chanced to meet a real literary editor in the flesh, they would get the same frisson of second-hand recognition that we currently reserve for the cops.
At the end of last year, when the terrific Radio 4 dramatization of Little Women was underway on Thursday mornings (tough luck for people with jobs), a man wrote to Woman’s Hour with an interesting point. Listeners had been challenged to vote on which of Louisa May Alcott’s four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, they identified with – which possibly doesn’t sound very interesting, but actually was. For example, some women curiously opted for Meg (sweet, placid, forgettable), and a few even fancied themselves as the vain affected Amy or the timid moribund Beth. However, the majority opted for the splendid heroine Jo – tomboy, literary genius, portrait of the author as a stormy petrel – perhaps because she seems quite modern, but more likely because identification with Jo is what the author so clearly intends. Like a fool, I hadn’t realized this before. I thought I was the only reader who secretly admired Jo March. But it turns out that the adult female world is crammed with undercover Jo fans, all wishing we could scribble up a storm, scorch our frocks, and exclaim ‘Christopher Columbus!’ despite its not being ladylike.
If these names and characters mean nothing to you, I can only say you must blame your classical education. These are female archetypes, mate. How can you possibly understand feminism if you don’t personally recollect the quietly touching scene in which good, wise Mrs March (known as ‘Marmee’) advises her justly furious daughter ‘Never let the sun go down on your anger’? Generations of young female readers have felt so exasperated at this point that they immediately chained themselves to railings or resolved to set fire to something. It all goes very deep. ‘Moral pap for the young’ was how Louisa May Alcott once startlingly described her own books, and the suggestion of a soft, absorbent foodstuff shovelled into girl infants is alarmingly close to the truth as one recalls it. Radio 4’s decision to present Little Women and then its sequel Good Wives (which finished last week, amid sobs in my house, with Jo’s marriage to the penniless Professor Bhaer) was a brilliant one, if only as a kind of catharsis therapy. All those forgotten, repressed episodes somehow fundamental to one’s own childhood were dug up publicly and found not to be so ghastly after all.
But what did this chap write in his letter to Woman’s Hour, you want to know. Well, he said that having read Little Women at an early age, not only had he found it useful in understanding women, but he had honestly needed to enquire no further. As far as female taxonomy went, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy covered the lot. If an occasional hybrid crossed his path (a Meg-Beth, an Amy-Jo-Marmee), it was the work of an instant to sort it into its constituent parts. He spoke as someone who had known multitudes of women – but each of them for a shortish period, presumably, the acquaintance always mysteriously ceasing at the precise moment when she discovered his heavily annotated copy of Little Women wedged behind the lavatory-cistern, sussed his creepy game at once and scarpered via the back gate into the sunshine. No woman should stick around with a man who thinks she’s Beth, it’s obvious. When I was twelve years old and chronically ill, my older sister cheerfully said that she saw me as a little Beth, and in my innocence I thought she was being nice. But I realize now the sad, sad truth of the matter, that actually she wanted me to croak.
Four seems to be the standard number for female types: four sisters in What Katy Did; four Marys in the famous Bunty comic strip; four Golden Girls. When a pilot for a British version of The Golden Girls was broadcast recently, the makers obviously couldn’t think of any new female comic humours to depict, so they adhered to the American originals – vain, dim, sardonic, outrageous – so endorsing the unfortunate impression that this is the full range available. Perhaps the number four gives the illusion of all-round choice; I mean, it always worked for Opal Fruits. For the moment, however, I am far too worried about this long-buried identification with Jo March to give it much thought. Good grief, it may even explain why I am disastrously attracted to old foreign blokes with no money.
If I were Barbie, I would be rather hurt by the general reception given to my new dance work-out video. Amid all the hoots of derision, nobody bothers to see its significance from Barbie’s own point of view – her amazing courage, after those years in a creative desert, to ‘pick up the pieces’ and ‘go out on a limb’. It’s not easy being Barbie, you know. For one thing, how would you like it if your boy-friend (Ken) slept in a shoe-box, and melted on contact with radiators? You would feel pretty humiliated, obviously. But remember the publishing disaster of Fear of Bending, Barbie’s teensy-weensy, reveal-all autobiography? Remember her public miniature fury when Claire Bloom snatched the lead in A Doll’s House? Those drunken pavement cat-fights with Tressy outside a small-scale model of the Limelight Club? Those whispers about the itsy-bitsy Betty Ford Clinic? Ah yes, it all comes back to you now, when it’s too late, the damage done.
So why shouldn’t she issue a dance work-out video? One thing to be said for Barbie is that she always kept her figure. Obviously there is a slight danger that if you adhered to Barbie’s rigorous hamstring exercises you might end up with your feet (like hers) permanently pointed in a tip-toe – which means that unless you wear the right high heels, you forever topple forwards and bang your bonce. But otherwise Barbie possesses precisely the same qualities as the other supermodels, whose exercise videos are bestsellers. She is plastic, perfect, self-absorbed, and her hair comes ready-lacquered. However, she is also very, very small; so you can derive a certain comfort from the thought that Richard Gere wouldn’t glance at her twice (unless he crunched her underfoot by mistake).
Whether I shall buy Dance Work-Out With Barbie depends on my next fortnightly visit to the ‘Body Sculpt’ class, led by ‘Geri’ at the local gym. A young woman whose abductor muscles are strung so tightly that they are visibly teetering on the edge of a breakdown, Geri is beginning to annoy me. She is Australian, white-blonde, long-legged and deep-tanned, with a face like Rosanna Arquette. She wears skimpy Lycra ensembles in purple and lime green with large interesting peep-holes cut from the sides, just to show that in places where the rest of us have grey-white crêpey stuff (which cries aloud for elasticated containment, ‘Pants! Give us pants!’), she has taut brown skin, and that’s all. I am beginning to hate the body sculpt class. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall-to-wall mirror, lumbering out of step, and I think, ‘I don’t have to do this, Woodrow Wyatt doesn’t do this.’ Which shows to what levels of mental desiccation an envy of somebody’s lime-green peep-holes can plunge you.
Barbie’s work-out is for five-year-olds, of course. But so, in a way, is the body sculpt class. In fact, few experiences in adult life so readily evoke the wretched emotions of the infants’ playground as to be led in a mindless game of mimicry by a tyrannical bimbo shouting above the music, ‘Do this! Now do that! Back to this, again! Four of these! Two and two! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg!’ Noticeably, there is no camaraderie among Geri’s brutalized troupe – just as there is none when you are five years old – so you can’t heckle ‘Make your mind up, woman!’ and expect to get a laugh and a breather. Under Geri’s tutelage, the goody-goodies get all the steps right, the others do their earnest best, while I, the only no-hoper, clap my hands at the wrong moments and pray privately that the bell will soon ring for Two-Times Tables or Finger-Painting.
I wish Barbie success with her video. Children don’t need it, obviously, but it will be good for the rest of us to face facts. See this dolly? This is what you want to look like. This is what Geri looks like. But in any other context she’d look very, very stupid. Apparently, in the video, Barbie doesn’t do much of the actual dancing; someone called Kim takes over. Meanwhile Barbie presumably has a lie-down, phones her analyst, and then smokes a minuscule cigarette from a tiny box. Honestly, if this is a role-model for today’s children, I think we have little to fear.
It is a well-established fact (not acknowledged enough) that in journalism there are only eleven basic ideas. The reason journalists over the age of twenty-five get cynical and start to fall over in public houses is that in their cradles they have been cursed with a particular kind of limited intelligence. They are bright people, but a Bad Fairy has ensured that they are bright enough only to discover the eleven basic ideas for themselves. What they are not bright enough to notice is that everything they do has been done before. Then one day they realize – to the dismay of the Really Good Fairy who gave them the brains – that they have run out of ideas. Disillusioned, they are obliged to stand back and watch as other, younger people – the fairy-dust still sparkling on their shoulders – start to discover the eleven ideas all over again.
New ideas are, therefore, pretty exciting things within journalism, and I can’t remember the last time anybody had one. But as an example of how desperate everybody is, let us take the example of the word ‘Bratpack’. Within minutes of its coining, this term had been picked up and applied to just about everybody – movie directors, teenage actors, Manhattan writers – before finally coming to rest in the Loose Ends studio in Broadcasting House. That was just the beginning. The next day somebody said, ‘Yeah, but how about ‘‘Ratpack’’ as a term for the media journalists who write about (and occasionally join) the ‘‘Bratpack’’?’ Brilliant, as Basil Fawlty might say, Brilliant. The richness of imagination was of such quality that even the originators themselves seemed impressed.
So I thought I’d join in, get a share of the action, start an entirely original (if a bit derivative) genus of nomenclature. We all want to make our mark, and this seems a simple enough method of doing it.
My first thought was that one could refer to all clever French writers – de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus – as the ‘Baccalauréat-pack’. What do you think? By the same token Indians, like Jhabvala, Narayan and Desai, might be called the ‘Ghatpack’ (not to be confused with the American tough-guy detective grouping ‘Gatpack’). On a more serious note, writers publishing their work secretly in totalitarian states might be called, simply, the ‘Samizdatpack’. Smartipants writers might be termed the ‘Eclatpack’, while successful, well-heeled NW3-based novel-a-year writers could rejoice in any of the following: ‘Cravatpack’, ‘VATpack’, or, well, ‘Fatpack’. This only leaves the blockbuster writers, who, I think, can be pretty neatly summed up in the term ‘Tatpack’.
So there you are. A complete new terminology. Please watch out for any appearance of these terms, for which copyright application is already in the post.
On Sunday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old unpublished poet named Clive was mournfully twiddling a pencil at his special poetry-composing desk, huddled in a greatcoat, when the telephone rang. He paused before answering it, feeling sorry for himself. ‘Nothing rhymes with telephone,’ he said, his face puckering uncontrollably; ‘in fact, why do I bother?’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he croaked.
It was his mother. She sounded agitated. Clive, alarmed, snapped his pencil in half, and then looked at it, aghast.
‘Clive, I’m worried,’ she said. ‘Have you read today’s Sunday Times?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then you don’t know! Oh, that I should have to break such news to my own son! Clive, it says here that a professor in America – is Kentucky still in America? I expect so – has established from studying a thousand important twentieth-century dead people that poets are by far the most at-risk group for depression, paranoia and suicide!’
‘Yes?’ Clive shrugged. ‘So what?’
‘So you never told me that! You said, ‘‘Mum, I want to be a poet,’’ and I let you! You were so sweet, with those big brown eyes, Clive, and you said, ‘‘If I can’t be a poet, Mum, I’ll kill myself.’’ And now I discover you’ve chosen the very profession in which the risk is greatest! You tricked me, Clive!’
‘You’re hysterical.’
‘Who is this Sylvia Plath he mentions? Is she a friend of yours? What about W.H. Auden? Is he making you depressed, too? Give up this poetry madness, my son, before it is too late!’
Clive spent the rest of the day indoors. Like Jean Cocteau, he knew that poetry was indispensable, although indispensable to what exactly, he didn’t feel qualified to say. He was deeply offended by the sweeping accusation of poet-paranoia, yet didn’t dare go out to buy the newspaper, for fear he would find an immense placard outside the shop, screaming ‘Poets Are Loonies! Official!’ So instead he wearily copied out some of his old verses – in his best wiggly handwriting, on lined paper – and made packages to send to Marxism Today and The Economist, choosing ‘Lines on the Wedding of Prince Andrew to Lady Sarah Ferguson (revised)’ and ‘Why Is This Black Dog Following Me Around? – An Allegory’. He didn’t know whether these magazines printed poetry, though he somehow felt sure they used to. Last week his submissions to The Listener and Punch had both been returned with just the bald, scribbled legend, ‘Not known at this address’. Clive had taken these harsh rebuffs very much to heart.
Suddenly, at about six o’clock, the phone rang again. It was his mother. ‘Clive. I’ve been looking at this article, and you’ve got to tell me something. Were you gloomy by the time you were thirteen?’
‘Gloomy?’
‘Just answer the question.’
‘Well, yes. I suppose I’ve always been …’
‘So it’s not the job that makes you depressed? It’s because you’re sensitive, or high-minded or something, that you chose this particular job in the first place?’
‘But poetry isn’t a job, Mum, more a result of a struggle in the poet’s mind between something he wants to express and the medium in which he intends to express it.’
There was a pause.
‘Why do you always talk like that, Clive? Do you think Albert Einstein talked to his mother like that? No, he didn’t. And why? Because he wasn’t a wimp of a poet, depressed all the time!’ She hung up.
Clive wondered whether it was worth phoning back, to make the point that the lives of poets and scientific pioneers were not strictly comparable. He might mention, too, that being an unpublished (and therefore failed) poet was about twenty times more life-endangering than being (say) W.H. Auden, who rarely contended with stinging letters from Caravan and Trailer (‘I read your poems with interest, Mr Auden, but I can’t imagine why you sent them’). But he decided not to bother, and immediately cheered up. He would write an epic poem about rejection letters, simply for his own amusement. To say that writers are generally depressed, he reflected with satisfaction, is on a par with saying that Kentucky professors tell people precisely what they know already.
I don’t know what a reservoir dog is. I mean, I know that a new heist-movie called Reservoir Dogs has just opened, which is where the expression comes from; but after that my information runs out. Evidently the film is rather nasty but brilliant, is set in a warehouse after a failed robbery, and has a great central performance from Harvey Keitel. But curiously there are no dogs. And there is an infamous torture scene, and lots of blood, and fantastic suspense about which of the six conspirators tipped off the police. Yet the canine input, as such, is small. In short, then, nobody should buy a ticket under the illusion that Reservoir Dogs represents the relaunch of the animal picture. If the organizers of this week’s Cruft’s have bought it as a treat for the last day of the show, they should reconsider.
I raise this matter not just because I am irredeemably literal-minded, but because when the director of the film appeared on Moving Pictures (BBC2) he seemed to be saying that actually he didn’t know what the title meant either. He just liked it, and when producers had frowned and tut-tutted, he had fobbed them off with a fancy answer about French gangland argot, which like prize mutts they had fallen for. Quentin Tarantino is his name, and this is his first film. He seemed young and over-excited, and was evidently a stranger to the benefits of personal grooming, but to say that he was wised up to the movie business would be like saying Edward Scissorhands was sharp. He knew perfectly well that a title like Reservoir Dogs raises images in people’s minds, but no awkward questions. Also, that the moment it enters common parlance (‘Seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’), it tucks itself into a nice safe corner of the memory where semantics does not intrude.
Obscure titles have one great advantage, of course: they flatter the punters. This explains why so many up-market book titles take allusions from other writers, or invoke the names of famous intellectuals. A little while ago there was a spate of titles so obviously following in the footsteps (or possibly claw-prints) of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, that I began to suspect a directive had gone out from publishers, with the promise of a bag of nuts for the best entry: Balzac’s Horse, Schrödinger’s Cat, Foucault’s Pendulum, Aubrey’s Raven, Kafka’s Dick. I remember vowing at the time that if I were ever to write a novel, I would hitch my skateboard to the bandwagon and plump for Einstein’s Tick, or Savonarola’s Bum, or Darwin’s Teapot, and hang the consequences. It wouldn’t matter that the book didn’t fit the title, because obviously the allusion is so clever it doesn’t have to. And if pushed, like the director of Reservoir Dogs, you could just make something up (‘Darwin’s teapot? Well, obviously, it stands for bone-china fragility in a tough survivalist world’).
Mainly, however, you would rely on the fact that somewhere in the back of the collective mind there are philosophical things such as Occam’s Razor, which sound fantastically difficult and all-encompassing and seriously paradoxical, and just right for a modern book. In the end, by the way, I pretty well settled on Heidegger’s Bactrian for my own novel. It’s a title that suggests all sorts of things, including two handy humps of water for emergencies. Occam’s Wash-Mitt I will preserve for another occasion. And just to cover all the angles, I will give my book the full title of Heidegger’s Bactrian: Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Meanwhile it is slightly worrying to realize how unthinkingly all titles are assimilated in one’s mind. No sooner have you heard of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross than it becomes simply something to get your tongue round, not to ask damn-fool questions about. Recently I met a man who had seen Pygmalion at the National Theatre and who clearly had no idea where the title came from, but had not let this trouble him for an instant. Fair enough. Not everyone carries a Larousse Classical Encyclopedia in their coat pocket. As far as he was concerned, Pygmalion was the name of a famous play by George Bernard Shaw; why did it have to mean anything? Indeed, I just wish I’d said it was French gangland argot, or something, to see how far I would get.
Of course, it was probably just a silly little administrative oversight, but I nevertheless yowled with agony when I realized I hadn’t been invited to this year’s Booker Prize. ‘Will you be going to the dinner?’ my nice literary holiday companions had asked, as we lay beside our swimming-pool in Italy, catching up on our Ian McEwans. ‘Me?’ I said carelessly. ‘To the Booker Prize? On Tuesday 16 October at the Guildhall at 6.15 (drinks in the Old Library)? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Haven’t really given it much thought.’
I don’t suppose anyone was fooled by this rather obvious dissimulation. When I got home from holiday, I was so desperate to find out whether I had received an invitation that I screeched the car to a halt outside the house (leaving it blocking a bus-lane) and rushed inside to ransack every item of post that had arrived in my absence. The cats, who had not seen me for three weeks, looked distinctly pained as I paced up and down, distractedly shuffling envelopes and shouting four-letter words. But when at last I admitted defeat, and lay stunned on a heap of litter, they came and sat on my chest, and discreetly looked the other way.
Now, I know what you are asking. Why the fuss? It’s something I can’t explain. But if it is anything to do with pride, why did I phone the Booker Trust three days before the dinner and beg to be admitted? Their kind suggestion was that I could most certainly come to the Guildhall, but that unfortunately I might have to eat my meal in a different room from everyone else (the ‘parlour’) and watch the proceedings on a monitor. Sounds all right, I thought, I can live with that. Just so long as they don’t single me out in any other way – like stamping ‘ONE DRINK ONLY’ on my forehead, or shouting ‘You! Out!’ if I attempted to strike up a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge in the toilets.
In the event, however, I didn’t spend much time in the ‘parlour’, because a nice lady came along just after I had completed my first course and said that I could join the main event. ‘Does it matter that I’ve eaten something?’ I asked anxiously. It was quite disconcerting, actually, to be picked out for this honour, and conducted at a brisk pace from the rather cheerless parlour (which reminded me of being in a classroom at eight o’clock in the evening) to the glitz and hubbub of the grown-ups’ dinner. Did I feel proud and exhilarated as we strode along? No; strangely, I was too desperate and anxious to feel either of these things. In fact, what kept coming into my head was an intensely paranoid recollection of an old Nazi trick I had seen in umpteen prisoner-of-war films. Perhaps the Booker people were only telling me I had been released from the parlour, so that – just as I broke into a run – they could shoot me in the back and use me as an example to others. ‘Nobody,’ they could say afterwards, ‘invites herself to the Booker Prize and gets away with it.’
About a month ago, Alan Coren wrote a column on this page about the loss of his novel. Perhaps I should just phone him, but on the other hand I feel I am too distant a relative to intrude on the grief. The thing is, he said he had been writing this novel on the quiet, had fetched up 20,000 words of it, and then lost the whole damn lot when his computer in France was nicked. As it is well attested that a writer cannot possibly reconstruct the thing from memory, his novel-writing days were thus officially over, and it was no great tragedy. He was taking it surprisingly well.
Well, obviously one’s chin wobbled a bit. A tear fell into one’s Common Sense breakfast food. The man was so brave. The traditional lost manuscript (of which the lost hard disk is the modern equivalent) is a highly touching motif for anyone who has ever attempted a sustained piece of fiction. Our words are our children, you know. Remember the despair of Eilert Lovborg in Hedda Gabler when he realized he had thoughtlessly abandoned his infant manuscript in a whorehouse? How the words ‘child murder’ came up, and in his remorse he shuffled off into the dark Norwegian night with a revolver? I pictured the two gruff French burglars, both played by Arthur Mullard, breaking into Mr Coren’s gaff and shining big rubber torches about. ‘Vous êtes coming wiv us,’ they said in deep voices, alighting on the computer. ‘Non, non,’ piped the novel, its eyes round with panic, ‘Papa! Papa!’ ‘Har, har,’ they laughed, ‘Votre papa habeets en Cricklywood! Il est miles away.’ And then they threw a black sack over its head before … well, I can’t go on.
But the reason I write this is that at the same time as feeling Lovborgian empathy with Mr Coren’s loss, I also feel intensely envious. You mean, your novel has just gone? Just like that? How absolutely fantastic. Personally, I have reached the late laborious paranoid stage in my own creative outpouring when its unfinished state gnaws at me like a constant reproach, and its mewlings for attention drive me mad with guilt. Which is why, whenever someone innocently asks, ‘How’s the novel?’ I actually feel like screaming, or pulling a gun. ‘Novel?’ I want to yell, waving the weapon in dangerous circles. ‘Did you ask about my novel?’ I fumble with the trigger, wildly push back my fringe, and take a swig from a bottle. ‘What do you know about it? Just what do you think you know about it? You know nothing,’ – I start to sob, here – ‘Nothing, nothing …’ The outburst tails off. I drop the gun. I give myself up. It’s all over.
People are only being nice, when they ask. To the enquirer, ‘How’s the novel?’ is like saying ‘How’s your Mum?’ – friendly, concerned, non-judgemental. All that’s required by way of response is, ‘Fine thanks, how’s yours?’ But unfortunately this simple question, when filtered through the cornered-animal mentality of the weary last-lap novelist, is transformed into the sort of sneering insinuation that makes homicide justifiable. ‘It was peculiar,’ friends say to one another, when I pop out of the room. ‘All I said was ‘‘How’s the novel?’’ and look, she bit my hand.’ ‘Tsk, tsk,’ the others agree, shaking their heads and peeling back the fresh bandages on their own nicks and flayings. ‘How did you get those bruised ribs again, Terry?’ ‘Well, we were at dinner, and she’d put down her knife and fork, and I said brightly, ‘‘Have you finished?’’ That’s all. And she flew at me.’
They don’t realize how sensitive you can get. They don’t know what it’s like to live constantly with this Tiny Tim of an unfinished book, sitting trusting and wistful in the inglenook of your consciousness waiting for you to fix its calipers and make it well. It’s such a drag. My novel can do nothing independently; I can’t pay somebody else to look after it in the afternoons; and if ultimately it gets botched, it will be nobody’s fault but mine. So I keep thinking of Mr Coren’s novel, kidnapped by ruffians, and considering whether, all in all, this unkind fate would not be preferable. ‘How’s the novel?’ people would ask, automatically ducking sideways and shielding their faces with their arms. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ I could say dolefully (as if sad). ‘It’s gone.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yes, I left it outside a supermarket, and just my luck, someone lured it away with a packet of crisps.’
The historical Saint Valentine was clubbed to death, you know. And now, seventeen centuries later, by means of one of those great arching ironies to which history is so partial, the rest of us are being clubbed to death by St Valentine’s Day. We are bludgeoned with love, and I am not sure I like it. Formerly St Valentine’s was one of those optional festivals, like Septuagesima, which you could celebrate at your own discretion. It was also, I always thought, associated with the finer, more delicate aspects of love: tremulous, unspoken, violet-scented. But a heavy hand in a red velvet glove has taken care of such love-heart nonsense, and St Valentine’s has turned overnight into an excuse for relentless Channel 4 extravaganzas featuring wall-to-wall exhibitionism and rumpy-pumpy. A certain grossness, it must be said, has poked its way into the sweet satin folds of the romance, and ‘Be my Valentine’ is no longer a wistful request.
Isn’t February depressing enough, without this? Channel 4 sent me a little bottle of massage oil in celebration of the ‘Love Weekend’ and I have been thinking seriously about drinking it. But leaving aside all the arguments on behalf of lonely stay-at-homes (and romantics) dismayed and alienated by frank, endless sex-talk on the telly, isn’t it just spit-awful to find yet another date in the calendar turned irrevocably into an imperative national event, demanding special film seasons on the box? I mean, where will it end? It was actually a surprise, on Monday, to see the world return to normal, with the banks open, and people going off to work. ‘No holiday, then?’ I breathed in relief, thankful for the small mercy.
Personally, I am now dreading next week’s Pancake Day, for fear that the TV channels will be given over to a ‘Night of Batter’. I hardly dare open my Radio Times:
BBC2, 7.50pm: a short, irreverent history of the Jif lemon.
8pm: an in-depth profile of modern artists whose chosen medium is pancake-and-gouache.
Midnight until 4am: an acclaimed, sobering French movie about the unremembered crêperie wars that shook Paris during the Occupation.
Channel 4, meanwhile, could fill a studio with talentless ugly nude people with frying-pans on their heads, extracting endless nervous hilarity from the word ‘toss’. It could all happen; I sincerely believe it. Something for everyone, that’s the principle of these theme nights; only unfortunately it usually comes out curiously awry, as everything for someone.
I said I would leave aside the special-pleading arguments about lonely stay-at-homes struck downhearted and dismal by the excesses of this past weekend, but the pancake analogy somehow invites them back to the forefront again. Because – well, it’s obvious. While for single people (and people not happily in love, which is a different category that includes nearly everyone) the whole dark, heaving Valentine event is so dispiriting it makes the depression of Christmas seem like a hayride to a clambake, Pancake Day requires no special personal circumstances for its enjoyment, and is therefore, actually, a better cause for celebration. Hm, I may be on to something. I mean, you don’t have to be ‘lurved’ as a prerequisite for Pancake Day, just handy with a whisk. I have never thought of it this way before, but the pancake is obviously a great leveller. Old and young, ugly and beautiful, we can all roll them up and squirt them with lemons – and if we choose not to, it’s not because there is anything wrong with us.
It is sad to think how St Valentine’s is going – but on the other hand, the hell with it. You’ve got Shrove Tuesday to look forward to. Moreover, there is still time to record a short sequence on video describing your first pancake, your ideal pancake, your lost pancake, or the final pancake that left you feeling a bit sick and sorry for yourself. And the funny thing is, that compared with many of the dreary sexual relationships displayed and analysed on the ‘Love Weekend’, your pancakes will probably appear to have colour, individuality, interest – and above all, depth.
When Raoul Fitzgerald Hernandez O’Flaherty, the hot-blooded Irish-Argentinian international polo ace, called me up on Friday from his helicopter, begging me to join him on a weekend trip to Palm Beach, I admit I was slightly taken aback. This is a bit irregular, I thought. I had planned a nice weekend rearranging my dried fruit collection and mending my string bag, and now here was Randy Raoul hovering spectacularly over my front garden, showering emerald trinkets into my bird-bath, and demanding by loud-hailer that I go and inspect some new ponies.
Of course I became an expert on horse-flesh years ago, when I avidly consumed books such as Jill Enjoys Her Ponies. Also, I spent many childhood Sunday afternoons ‘treading in’ (stamping on divots) between chukkas at a nearby polo club. Yet I had a strange feeling that it was my body, not my equine expertise, that Raoul was really after. The O’Flaherty triplets are all notorious womanizers, but Raoul is the best lover of the three, ranked number eight in the world! Raoul clearly wanted to pluck me from my flat, lavish all sorts of sexual attention on me, drive me wild with jewels and frocks, and drop hilarious innuendoes about the thrill of goal-scoring. What on earth was a girl to do?
Well, the string bag is much better now, you will be relieved to hear. The currants are tucked in neatly behind the prunes. But I am seriously wondering what to do with this copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo, which seems to be the source of the trouble. What do other women do in these circumstances? As a mere novice to the so-called bonk-buster novel (obliged to read Polo for purely professional reasons) I had no idea it would fill my world with rich, good-looking blokes with strong brown arms akimbo. I poke through my jewellery and can’t believe my eyes. What, no perfect emeralds, gift of an infatuated millionaire? No diamonds? How can it be true that my only ring is the one I bought for a fiver in a place called Mousehole? Thank goodness the Freudian heyday is a thing of the past.
Of course I am not the ideal reader for a bonk-buster novel, because I am not married. I am free to get excited in the polo tournament bits (‘Come on, you brave little ponies!’) and to salivate openly during the sex scenes, whereas the target reader will be a married woman on a beach somewhere, obliged to disguise her reactions for the benefit of the husband (not rich, not handsome, and can’t tell a divot from a hole in the ground). While reading, she controls her breathing, tries not to perspire too visibly, and occasionally breaks off during a particularly juicy bit to say offhandedly ‘Not very good, this, actually’, before plunging back again and memorizing the page number for later on.
For me personally, on the other hand, Polo recalled all those Jill and Her Ponies books I used to read when I was ten. Who will win the silver cup? Will the pony rescued from cruelty turn into the best little pony in the world? This jolly gymkhana stuff made me feel quite young again, but it also made me wonder whether the Jill in question grew up to become Jilly in later life. It is not impossible. After all, the fictional Jill’s mother was a writer – but an unsuccessful one who clearly overlooked the bankable nature of her own daughter’s pony-mad activities. Poor Jill was obliged to wear second-hand jodhpurs to the Pony Club Gymkhana, which is just the sort of indignity (in bonk-busters, anyway) that makes an ambitious girl grow up aching for a shot at some serious dosh.
I am not sure, in retrospect, that we were supposed to despise Jill’s mum for being a hopeless breadwinner. In fact, I used to think it was sweet that when the pig-tailed Jill came home on summer afternoons – all dusty from a hack on Black Boy, all worried about where the next curry-comb was coming from – there would be Mother, leaning out of the window of their little cottage, excitedly waving a small piece of paper. ‘A cheque!’ she would yell. ‘I’ve sold a story in London!’ And my heart would leap. ‘Saddle up Black Boy again, Jill,’ Mother would say. ‘Today we’ll have buns for tea!’
Such innocence. It makes you feel all old and jaded and peculiar. True, I always shout ‘Buns for tea!’ when a cheque arrives in the post, but it is heavily ironic, since I know perfectly well that the money will only service the overdraft, or go half-way towards some car insurance (buns doesn’t come into it). But I prefer the world of ‘Buns for tea!’ to the casual purchase of Renoirs and Ferraris to be found in Polo. Cream puffs evidently mean nothing on the international polo circuit; teacakes make them laugh.
I think this is why, in the end, I turned down Raoul’s tempting offer of the Palm Beach trip. So what, if these polo people are good at jewels and orgasms, if they are blind to the value of an honest barm cake? Of course, memory may be playing tricks here: perhaps Jill and her mum sang ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in the evenings, while flipping through glossy magazines for pictures of rich people. Perhaps they would have killed for a chance to fly off to the world of Cartier and great sex, leaving the second-hand jodhpurs in a heap on the ground. In which case, when Raoul O’Flaherty came to call, perhaps I made a rather large mistake.
A few years ago, I met a dynamic woman journalist who told me she was keen to launch a new daily paper aimed at a female readership. Unfortunately for the ensuing discourse, our meeting took place at the wrong end of a highly boozy book-award dinner, at that delirious point in the evening when you start to pass out in your chair, and think hey, that’s nice, everyone’s a bunny rabbit. So when this charismatic woman mentioned the newspaper idea, I couldn’t think how to react, except with boundless enthusiasm. ‘Great,’ I shouted, so loudly that other people looked round. ‘Brilliant, I mean, brilliant,’ I added, in a whisper, and knocked back another glass of port as if to show how brilliant I thought it really was. ‘Er, how would it be different exactly? What would you put in?’ ‘Well, the main thing is this,’ she said. ‘It’s what you take out.’ I smiled in a vague what’s-she-talking-about kind of way and concentrated for a couple of minutes on trying to rest my chin on my hand, without success. ‘All right, what do you take out?’ I slurred at last, leaning forward. ‘You take out the sport,’ she said.
I never saw this woman again, but I often think of her. Until I met her, I would never have dared to assert that sport was uninteresting to all (or most) women; I just thought I had a blind spot. But now, when I open my Times in the morning, flipping the second section adroitly into the bin (only to rescue it later with a stifled scream and a flurry of soggy tea-bags when I remember the arts pages), I know I am not alone. Similarly, when the Today programme reaches twenty-five past the hour (‘Now, time for sport’) and I rush about for precisely five minutes doing the noisy jobs such as bath-running and kettle-boiling, I am confident that countless other people are doing the same. And finally, when a programme such as Sports Review of the Year soaks up two hours of BBC1 peak-time on a Sunday night, I happily regard it as a gap in the schedule, and read a book. Fran Lebowitz spoke for me and for millions, I quite believe, when she said the only thing she had in common with sports fanatics was the right to trial by jury.
I mention all this because on Sunday I eschewed the usual literary treat and forced myself to watch Sports Review instead. I had heard about the time-honoured award for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and envisaged it as a bit of a laugh, with household-name sports heroes lined up in swimsuits and sashes (‘Mister Cricket’, ‘Mister 100 Metres’ and so on) trying to impress Desmond Lynam with their breadth of hobbies and love of travel, and nervously pushing back their tiaras as they paraded at the end. Of course, it turned out to be much less interesting than that, with lots of unidentifiable sports people got up like funeral directors, but it did conclude quite as oddly, when Nigel Mansell (the winner, a racing driver) addressed the viewer at home and said that he would like to thank us all for supporting him.
For a moment he was so convincing that I almost didn’t notice. ‘Any time, Nige. Don’t mention it, old son,’ I said, wiping a tear. But then I remembered that I never watch racing driving (can’t stand the nyow-nyow; can’t stomach the commentators; can’t follow who’s winning; hate the bit when they squirt champagne). And it suddenly occurred to me: These people don’t know. They really don’t know that sport is a minority interest. When they say ‘England’ and assume you will understand a team of footballers, they forget completely that the word has another (if only a secondary) meaning. Far be it from me to argue that other people should not enjoy sport. It is merely childish to argue against something on the grounds that you don’t know what they see in it. I just wish to point out, for those who didn’t know, that in a large number of households the television news gets switched off automatically when the announcer says, ‘Cricket, and at Edgbaston …’ And also that sometimes, when drunk and in the pleasant company of the cast of Watership Down, one can believe for a bright shining moment that the collective indifference is so very marked, it might even be marketable.
How heartening to know that the prime minister buys books he doesn’t have time to read. No piece of news has ever, metaphorically speaking, drawn him closer to my bosom. I doubt it was meant to, however. The thought of him excitedly shuffling his book tokens at Waterstone’s check-out has already elicited sneers – intellectual snobs being always alert for vulgarians proudly displaying their embossed Shakespeare with the disclaimer, ‘Of course, it’s not something you can actually read’. But personally, I take great comfort in the news; it gives him a whole new human side. He has faith in the future. At the same time, he sensibly realizes that busy jobs don’t last for ever. He likes books for their own sake. And when people look at his shelves and say, ‘Have you read all these?’, he replies without embarrassment, ‘No, but I live in hope.’
My own sensitivity on this issue I can trace to my days as a guilty, hard-pressed literary editor in an office waist-deep with neglected review copies. ‘Have you read all these?’ people would enquire, innocuously enough, and then draw back in alarm as I scrambled to the window ledge and threatened to jump. They learnt not to ask. At home, I own literally hundreds of books I have bought, but not yet read; but if I say I regard them as a squirrel regards his nuts, I hope you will pardon the expression and catch my drift. I mean, what is the point of owning only books you have read? Where is the challenge or excitement in that? It would be like having a fridge full of food you have already eaten, cupboards of booze that’s already been drunk. Imagine browsing for a meal in the evenings – ‘Mm, this moussaka was pretty good last time, and I reckon Mister Retsina could stand another paddle down the old alimentary canal.’
Of course, I have made mistakes, bought books I couldn’t get on with. By rights, I should donate them to passing students, but instead I hoard them, like ill-fitting shoes, in hope that one day I will make the effort to break them in. Henry James is no good at all, God knows I’ve tried, but from the very first sentence I always find myself sinking, disappearing, drowning in dark mud, it’s horrible, horrible, and finally I cry out in Thurberesque despair, ‘Why doesn’t somebody take this damn thing away from me?’ Yet if I retain my copy of The Golden Bowl, it’s not because I am dishonestly feigning an abiding love of Henry James, it’s just because I like to be prepared for all contingencies. Who knows, but one day I may positively yearn for intellectual suffocation in mud? Similarly, who knows, but I might break a leg and catch up on all my Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ books as well.
No, I defend the prime minister’s position. First, I think there is a moral imperative to buy books, even if you have little time to read them. After all, the authors wrote them in all good faith; why should they be penalized just because you are busy (temporarily) running the country? I grow very cross in bookshops, watching customers dither over fulfilling their obligation. ‘Just buy it, for heaven’s sake!’ I want to say. ‘What’s the big deal? First Lord of the Treasury salary not good enough for you?’ Second, there is no pleasure to compare with a heavy Waterstone’s bag. And third (obviously), if you wait for the exact appropriate moment to buy the exact appropriate book, it will no longer be in print, stupid.
I keep trying to imagine the sort of person whose bookshelves don’t say ‘This is what I’m interested in’ but ‘This is what I’ve read, actually; go on, test me.’ What a miserable way to live your life. I remember once a potential boyfriend (it came to nothing) solemnly inspecting my bookshelves as though they were a measure of compatibility, and I thought, lumme, he’ll ask about those German poets, I’m done for. But then he leaned back and said, ‘I see you’ve got M.R. James, Henry James and P.D. James all together here.’ ‘Er, is there a problem?’ I said, nervously. ‘Well, yes,’ he snapped. ‘Alphabetically, Henry should come before M.R. Also, the books should be drawn forward neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves.’ It took me several weeks to realize it, but this reaction said more about him than it did about me.
If M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu were alive today, I have no doubt about the particular universal neurosis they would be tapping – terrifying us out of our skins by making a simple story out of our deepest nightmare. The story they would be writing would be called ‘The Newspaper’.
On the staircase of the London Library in St James’s Square, a middle-aged clergyman (his hair prematurely white) would meet by chance a young man with whom he had once shared a railway compartment on a journey to York. After a few pleasantries, they would decide to take tea together, perhaps in Fortnum’s. Only when they had seated themselves comfortably in a quiet corner with some Darjeeling and some dry cake would the clergyman relate – in simple, unsensational prose – his terrible story.
On a summer morning in the year of 198—, he had bought, he says, a Sunday newspaper. After scanning it for church news, he had left it in his conservatory while he pottered peacefully among his roses, stopping occasionally to make a fuss of Theo, his faithful old Labrador. Returning once to the conservatory for an implement – a trowel, let’s say – he had sensed something odd; something not quite as he had left it. But glancing around, he had seen nothing particularly out of the ordinary: perhaps the newspaper, with his spectacles resting on it, had shifted slightly – but no doubt, he reasoned, Theo had been sniffing about. He thought little more of it, and later shut the conservatory door and strolled up the lane to his pretty parish church for Evensong.
Returning later, he thought he heard the dog whimpering. The sound was one he had never heard from Theo before – deep fear was there in that sound. The clergyman, his pulse racing, frantically searched the house for his faithful friend, but only when Theo started to yowl and scratch furiously at the door did he realize that the sound was coming from the conservatory. Tearing open the door, he saw the most terrible sight: the dog, frothing at the mouth, was lying on its side, its red eyes starting out of its head, its old heart having given out at last. And in the corner, the Newspaper, no longer an inoffensive two-section broadsheet, but now an indescribably huge, ugly, monstrous, garish, unnecessary object. In the course of a single day, the Newspaper had grown exponentially, in that poor clergyman’s conservatory, to one hundred times its original size.
The terror of that moment still seized the clergyman, even in the safety of the tea-room. During their modest repast, his fine bone china teacup rattled and danced on its saucer, and though he broke his madeira cake into pieces, never did he raise a morsel to his lips. The Sunday Times had done for him. It has done for us all.
Personally I would be sorry to see it go, that nice busy roundabout outside Buckingham Palace. Last week’s news that the Royal Parks Review Group wants to pedestrianize it for the sake of tourists has come as a blow. Naturally, I can’t fault their humanitarian motives, indeed I can easily picture the escalating woe their research must have induced, as, faces fixed in a rictus of alarm, they kept their St James’s Park vigil, and monitored the near-hits with a regular muffled shriek. ‘I can’t look!’ they squealed, as every ten minutes a clueless foreign tourist, intent on the Palace, ventured halfway across the road from the Victoria Memorial, stopped, blinked for a moment, panicked, flapped his arms, and then at the very last minute vaulted the crash-barrier out of the path of a roaring cab.
But why don’t they look at it from the other point of view? For the average Londoner, this game of high-speed chicken outside a national heritage beauty-spot is one of our very few opportunities to contribute usefully to the tourist industry. It’s our only chance to interact. And it is to our credit, I think, that we do it with such enthusiasm. ‘There’s one!’ we say, dropping down a gear as we sweep round the corner from Birdcage Walk, and accelerate hard. ‘This will give them something to write home about!’ And quite honestly, the tourists do seem to appreciate it, especially when we make jolly local hand-gestures at them through the windscreens and shout ‘Yah, turkeys!’ as we thunder past. Safely arrived at the railings, they giggle red-faced from the chase, pant with pleasure, and sometimes even clutch their chestal area as testimony to the excitement. Which means that the gratified motorist can speed off up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner with the pleasant satisfaction of a job well done.
Pave it over, make a namby-pamby promenade, and this precious interaction will most certainly be lost. But not only that; it will also give tourists the wrong impression of our lovely city, in which dangerous jay-walking is surely one of the chief means of expressing individuality and free will. ‘I am going to cross this road now, though hell should bar the way!’ we declare stoutly, as we stride out into four lanes of traffic, misjudge the speed of an oncoming motorbike, and pretend not to hear what’s shouted at us as it swerves and skids to a halt at the lights, just twenty yards down the road. Traffic dodging is part of the metropolitan experience, for goodness’ sake, it’s part of being British.
What’s the point of coming to London if you never expose yourself to the fear of being run over? You might as well stay at home and knit fjords, or whatever it is that foreigners do. Our high pedestrian accident rate should be made a glowing feature of tourism campaigns, not swept under the carpet. Look at it in a positive light, and these foreigners are returning to their homes equipped with a life skill they could not possibly acquire anywhere else outside the Third World.
No, if London’s tourists deserve sympathy, it’s for other things. The place is expensive and unfriendly, you can’t get a coffee after half past five, London airport is curiously nowhere near London, and as for linguistic proficiency, well, let’s just say our spoken English needs work. But since we don’t make strenuous efforts to protect our honoured visitors from anything else in this hostile, uncomfortable culture, it is definitely a bit peculiar to want to save them from the cars. I mean, good grief, let’s not get xenophobic here, but they do make these cars, you know. We only buy them and then drive in a reckless manner, as God intended.
So let’s stop pussyfooting around. Leave that roundabout precisely where it is, with the traffic going clockwise to confuse the foreigners. After all, it could well be true that for every Japanese or German car squealing round and round the Victoria Memorial, sufficient funds flow back into the Japanese or German national kitty for several lucky people to pack a suitcase, fly to London, run across the road outside Buckingham Palace, and be almost knocked down. And if that’s not a circular irony, then I don’t know what is.
Should you ever feel the urge to see where Jim Morrison is buried (Jim Morrison of the Doors, d. 1971), I now feel pretty confident I can guide you to the spot. Prior to last weekend, I had only the vaguest idea that Morrison was interred somewhere in France; but now, having navigated a friend around the famous Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise (‘Next stop Balzac, this way, step along’), I am an authority on Morrison’s precise whereabouts, despite having no personal interest in him whatsoever. People just kept asking us, that’s all, because we had a map. ‘Jim Morrison?’ they enquired earnestly, these young Italian girls with rucksacks and brown legs, born circa 1975. ‘Er, oh yes, down here, turn right, follow the crowd,’ we said, mystified.
It seemed a bit peculiar, all this fuss. My friend and I appeared to be missing the point of Père-Lachaise, getting excited about Rossini and Colette, when we obviously should have been focusing our dilated eyeballs to scrawl, ‘We miss you JIM, where are you JIM, are you dead then JIM’ on the side of somebody else’s tomb abutting the mighty Morrison’s. What terrible luck for those bourgeois Parisian families, incidentally, who found themselves slap-bang next to a blown-out Sixties youth icon. No chance of resting in peace. An American couple asked us near the gate who was buried in Père-Lachaise. ‘Who isn’t?’ we exclaimed, jabbing wildly at our map. ‘No, look, Proust, Bizet, Géricault’ (no response); ‘Er, Chopin, Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison –’ ‘Really? Jim Morrison?’ they interrupted. And they went off happy. We could see they were impressed.
But as we continued our tour of this starry necropolis, sadly taking note of the fact that devotees of A la Recherche had failed to write, ‘I can’t live without you MARCEL, Come back MARCEL, This is what happens when you go out MARCEL’ on the grave of Proust, I suppose we should have realized that Jim Morrison, for all his paucity of talent or achievement, really is the point of Père-Lachaise. What does it matter that Proust is here? He is only where he ought to be. In any cemetery, the deepest sentiment is rightly reserved for the exile or itinerant who happened to step on a bee in an unlikely place, and got buried before anyone noticed. For the best effect, Proust should be in Florida. ‘No no MARCEL’ we would write. ‘Whatever possessed you MARCEL.’
I speak as someone who has wept openly at the Keats-Shelley memorial in Rome, has stood bereft at the tomb of Henry Fielding in Lisbon, but who visits Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey dry-eyed and impervious. It is the sorry truth: the sight of a hero properly interred in his own country is rarely an occasion for a Kleenex, whereas the idea of poor Fielding, one of England’s greatest (and most English) writers, embarking for Lisbon in 1754, arriving there, loathing it, and dying in just a few weeks, is somehow heartbreaking. Furthermore, it adds to the touching romance of the thing that his monument is nowadays difficult to find. I remember asking a bemused Portuguese leaf-sweeper for directions, and he clearly had no idea what I was driving at – even when I helpfully mimed scenes from the movie of Tom Jones.
All this has been much on my mind because, two or three weeks from now, I hope to stand on a hilltop in Western Samoa looking at the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson, on which his famous ‘Requiem’ is engraved.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
And, well, pardon me for sniffing, I must have a cold coming on, but why does nobody understand that this is intensely moving? They understand about Jim Morrison, but ‘Stevenson?’ they say, ‘I don’t get it. Surely he invented the Rocket and that was that.’ Clearly I’ve got a big job ahead of me, scrawling, ‘All right LOUIS, It’s your centenary soon LOUIS, They are hoping to do a commemorative stamp LOUIS.’ But it really shouldn’t be necessary, when the poem says it all:
This be the verse you grave for me,
Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
I bet JIM wishes he’d thought of that.