5.9.14
Believe me. I was serious twelve years ago when I said that I was going to stop writing about politicians, stop forever the laptop key in my head that predicts a T into Thatcher, an M into Major, a B into Blair. I made a promise to myself when I stopped being the Editor of The Times. I promised to go back to what I did before I was a journalist at all, back two thousand years to books and cities of books, to Naples, Alexandria and here, beside a Roman bridge over slow, brown water, in Roman Spain. There seemed no reason that Margaret T, her heirs and successors, would ever trouble me again. Twenty-five years with them was enough.
I meant it too when I said I was never going to write one of those ‘memoirs of the print trade’ that I have occasionally enjoyed. Last week by the River Thames, when I left Thomas More Square for the last time and came here to Cordoba, there were lives like mine all over my floor. Turn right out of the lifts on Tower Three, Level Six: turn ten yards along the carpet tiles, and there you would have found them, pages and pages of Born, Learnt, First Break, First onto Fleet Street, scoops, scrapes, prizes, always more success than failure, often successes that would have been even greater if some greater betrayal had not occurred.
Last week all these books, the kind I always said I would not write, were waiting for packers to take them to the Oxfam shop nearest to London Bridge. This week Dogs and Lampposts, by my fellow editor, Richard Stott, and dozens of others, by friends and the not so friendly, are safely under charitable supervision, looking for good new homes.
So no, my life is now different. I edit the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS, a very different kind of paper. Over four decades I have been a critic, reporter, a writer of opinions, an editor, and now I am almost a student again. When I arrived yesterday at this café table by the Guadalquivir river, my aim was to finish a book which stars an ancient Roman, a writer who was born in Cordoba around the time when BC turned to AD. Lucius Annaeus Seneca was his name, sometimes Seneca the Younger because his father too lived and wrote here and lived off the profits of olives as everyone here always has.
Why Seneca? He wrote books which were important to me both when I was a journalist and before. He was a politician who wrote plays, or a playwright who played politics (people still argue which came first), or maybe he was even more important as a philosopher. Cordoba has been a city of words and power for longer than anywhere west of Rome, one of the earliest homes for poets paid to make virtues more renowned, a first base for flatterers with foreign accents.
Seneca was the heir to a family business of writing and politics here, the writing of speeches for farmers and financiers in this hottest, driest part of Spain and also in Rome where the younger Seneca grew up to be himself one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He became a prime minister (not yet in capitals) at the court of the Emperor Nero, possibly the richest great writer ever to have earned a fee.
So Seneca is much on my mind, his arguments, Stoic arguments as they are known, small questions about cold water, travel and alcohol as well as the big questions, how to survive in dangerous times, how to live a good life in even the worst of times. I found him first when I was young in the 1960s and secondly when Margaret Thatcher was in power almost 2,000 years after his death.
I have brought to his birthplace a story which also stars four courtiers of the Thatcher age. That is my aim, a portrait of lesser characters who can sometimes shed light on the greater. Their names are enough for now: David Hart, Ronald Millar, Woodrow Wyatt and Frank Johnson. All served Margaret Thatcher in different ways.
This is an account of plotting and principles. It comes from an age which in Downing Street and surrounding streets was both a Reading and a Believing Age. So much was different then.
What I need to do here in Cordoba is to read again what I have written and see what I want anyone else to read. This is a book that has come into being in a curious way. Five months ago I had no fixed plan for The Senecans, not for this year, maybe for next year, as I’ve said in many past years. What made me begin was a strange encounter with my own past.
But in order to write this book I had to break some of those earlier promises about putting politics behind me. Accept, please, that I did not break them lightly. Five months ago I did not set out to recall stories of these men around Margaret Thatcher. Remembering is hard work. Answering someone else’s questions is not what I wanted to do.
Even less did I intend anything like that other kind of memoir, the Editor’s career, the ideal obituary, the apologia pro sua vita as Seneca would have seen it. There is much in The Senecans that a writer of his own newspaper life, anxious to grasp some twig of posterity, might sensibly have omitted. Editing is my profession but it seems too late for much self-censorship now.
What I did was to answer the questions of a peculiarly persistent interviewer, a woman who I would at most times have seen briefly or not at all, a writer herself, a diligent researcher at what was for her a fortuitous time, months when my mood was to remember rather than forget.
Miss R was not my first interviewer with research in mind. This was not the first time that a writer about Margaret Thatcher asked me to help. I saw things that others did not. Newspaper editors see many things. But this year, this time, was different. Miss R disturbed me from the start and somehow I was ready to be disturbed.
Each night, I wrote down what she said and what I said in return. It is she who set the terms in April, posed the questions till August, waited for the answers and, only last week, did I understand why.