“Plant one bamboo shoot — cut bamboo for the rest of your life.” This Chinese saying seemed an apt epigraph for this enterprise and the bamboo shoot of the first properly published review that I wrote for the New Review in 1978 has, like the plant does itself, multiplied exponentially. Surveying the totality of my non-fiction writing over the last quarter of a century as it was gathered in for this volume has provoked several reactions: astonishment, curiosity, incredulity. When did I find the time to write these hundreds of thousands of words alongside the main business of my writing life: novels and screenplays?

In any event, here is a judicious selection, perhaps 30 percent of the total, covering six broad subjects: Life, Literature, Art, Africa, Film and Television, and People and Places. The various articles, prefaces, profiles, reviews and introductions amount to a form of intellectual portrait, I suppose. These subjects, and their subdivisions, represent what interests me, infuriates me, obsesses me, fascinates me. It’s one reason why, when the invitation to write comes from an editor, I find it so hard to say “no.”

In fact I realize that I have been writing criticism for as long as, and in parallel with, my fiction. While I was at university in Glasgow I wrote a novel (unpublished) called Is That All There Is? and at the same time I edited the arts pages in the university newspaper, giving myself the plum jobs of film and theatre critic. When I went to Oxford to do a postgraduate degree I contributed articles to Isis (interviews with other writers, in the main) as I began to write fiction more seriously (there was another bottom-drawered novel) and started slowly but surely to publish short stories. None of these articles makes it into this collection however, even though there might be grounds for including it or others as intriguing juvenilia. One of the reasons for writing criticism that is often passed over in silence is that not only do you see your own name in print (very important for a young writer) but also you get paid (most of the time) and you receive a free book. So I thought it was fitting to begin the selection process with the first published review that I received money for. It was commissioned in 1978 by Craig Raine, who was then books editor of the long-defunct New Review (and can be found on page 93). Interestingly enough, I have been writing sporadically for Craig in one form or another ever since, after the New Review at Quarto and more recently in Areté, and we were colleagues for a while on the New Statesman in the early eighties. I have had several similar editorial relationships over the period this compilation encompasses. As the editor has moved and changed jobs so have I tagged along. I think, amongst others, of Bill Bu-ford at Granta and then the New Yorker, of Peter Stothard at The Times and now the Times Literary Supplement, of Mary Kay Wilmers at the TLS and then the London Review of Books, and of Rebecca Nicolson at the Spectator, the Observer Magazine, the Sunday Telegraph and finally at Short Books. Christopher Hawtree oversaw some of my earliest reviews in the London Magazine in the early eighties and was an invaluable and indefatigable help in bringing this collection together. I am very grateful to him. One of the bonuses of assembling these pieces is that it enables you to trace these literary songlines in your output and your life. It’s never quite so haphazard a journey as you think.

Faced with these hundreds of thousands of words I decided to impose a rough criterion of choice. I have tried mainly to include pieces that throw a light, sometimes strong and clear, sometimes oblique and occluded, on my novels, short stories and films. These pieces are often guileless anticipations of something I was going to write about; sometimes arguments with myself about subjects that were preoccupying me; and sometimes retrospective glances at aspects of our world about which my novelist’s research had made me a temporary authority. Writing a novel, amongst all manner of other things, is also a form of self-education: The Blue Afternoon led me to early powered flight and surgery, Brazzaville Beach to primatology, The New Confessions to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and so on.

At the same time I have resisted the temptation to fiddle and tamper. What is true of all writers is true of me also: we have our particular quirks, tropes and tricks of the trade, our favourite words, metaphors and jokes, our regular points de repère (in my case, it seems, an abiding fondness for bringing in Wallace Stevens, Paul Klee, Anton Chekhov, T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso to back up my contentions). There seemed no purpose in removing the inevitable repetitions: they make their own valid point about the way I argue my case.

Another motive for writing all these pieces is that it has always seemed entirely normal. It never occurred to me that this might be a waste of energy and inspiration that might be better employed elsewhere: I always wanted to write articles and reviews from the beginning of my literary career. Isn’t this what novelists do? I thought. Don’t they write as much as they can, all the time? In hindsight this argument may seem naive but in one of these articles I advance the notion that this is perhaps a particularly British phenomenon. Certainly in the two other literary worlds I am familiar with — the USA and France — their novelists seem positively costive compared to ours — always excluding the prodigious John Updike, of course. It is as if the tireless energy of our great nineteenth-century exemplars — Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray — still inspires us, or has established a norm of writerly endeavour and output that — with a few notable exceptions — most British novelists (and many British poets, come to think of it) are happy to live with.

And yet there is an injunction to myself often to be found in the pages of my journal (something else I’ve been writing for twenty-five years): the cry of, “NO MORE JOURNALISM!” And yet again, I seem incapable of following my own advice. The last piece that appears in this volume was written in December 2004. As I write this introduction, a month into 2005, I note that I have agreed to review a book for the Times Literary Supplement, produce a preface for some Katherine Mansfield stories and write a long article on films that feature Adolf Hitler. That bamboo shoot planted in 1978 has produced a bamboo grove that continues to expand, lush and densely green, spreading and thickening remorselessly.

WILLIAM BOYD, London, 2005

I have gone on record claiming that I am not an autobiographical writer, that my fiction will provide no handy keys to unlock the door to my personal history. However, I have written autobiographically in my non-fiction, more than I had ever imagined, and particularly about my African childhood and my schooldays — a near-decade spent in a boarding school in the north of Scotland. But in putting this collection together I realized that, over the years, even more of my life had crept into my writings than I had thought. Therefore these pieces are assembled in rough chronological order — the chronology of my life rather than their writing: there are big gaps but, to my vague surprise, they cover a fair bit of the ground. I still believe I’ll never attempt a bona fide autobiography or memoir. I suspect that these occasional scraps and gleanings will be all that it will amount to.

This section also introduces one of my favourite formal devices: the A-Z. I have used it with some regularity in my non-fiction (and it will be encountered later, several times) for the signal reason that it allows me to squeeze a quart into a pint pot or at least give the illusion of so doing. The strict logical progression of the alphabet paradoxically forces you to be arbitrary: you have to find something that fits a “Q” or an “X” or an “O” or a “V” even when nothing appears obvious or forthcoming. An A-Z of a given subject (a painter, a borough of London, an iconic writer) somehow seems more all-inclusive than a measured essay of exactly the same length. The necessary darting around, as you try to fit the letters to a relevant subject — makeshift invention requiring you to hammer a square peg into a round hole from time to time — inevitably assures a skewed, disparate and eccentric account that, when it works, produces a richer, more accurate portrait.

The ant-lion builds its traps in sandy soil. It fashions — somehow — a geometrically perfect inverted cone. At the tip of the cone the ant-lion lurks, buried and invisible, waiting for any small insect to tumble in. When this occurs, the ant-lion at first makes no move. The walls of the cone are so smooth, the sand-grains they are composed of so fine, that only the largest insects can gain any purchase. As the smaller victims slither and scrabble on the steep sides of the cone, the ant-lion spits — or flicks — more sand at them, causing them to tumble down into the cone-tip where they are dragged beneath the sand and devoured.

The largest ant-lion cone I ever saw was about three inches deep; the predator itself half an inch long. I caught it underneath our house in Signals Road, Achimota, in what was then the Gold Coast. The house was built on six-foot concrete piles. Beneath it was sand, pocked with ant-lion traps. A lunar landscape of immaculate craters. Hundreds upon hundreds of ant-lions. A no man’s land for any small crawling insect. Our particular ploy was to dig out a small ant-lion and drop it in the hole of a larger one.

I always think of ant-lions when I think of our house in Achimota. It is the first of our houses in Africa that I remember, though we had lived in two before that. At the time I was born we lived in a converted officers’ mess, made of mud bricks and with a corrugated-iron roof. Achimota was about six miles from Accra and the coast. On the huge beaches, ten-foot breakers would cream in from the Atlantic. We weren’t allowed on the surf beaches until we were older and could belly-surf, but there were rocky stretches with rock pools burgeoning with submarine life. Sitting in a rock pool, waist deep in blood-warm water, aged five. Life was good.

We moved away from Achimota to Legon, three miles further inland, to the new campus of the University of Ghana. We lived in a large U-shaped house, painted white with a red-tiled roof. There was a large stoep, big enough for thirty to gather on, that gave on to the enormous garden and a view of the surrounding countryside — grass-covered hills, clumps of small tough trees.

The insect I associate with the house in Legon is the velvet mite. These completely benign creatures were the size of a fingernail, a brilliant coruscating red, and did indeed seem to be covered in a sort of velvety fur. They were the only insects I’ve ever encountered that you could stroke. At certain times of the year, particularly after the rainy season, they proliferated, and the grass around our house hotched with them. My sisters and I used to ranch velvet mites, gathering them in their hundreds into makeshift twig corrals. There the mites would mill around aimlessly, square feet of shifting scarlet velvet, a boiling carpet of red.

We moved to Nigeria, to Ibadan, in 1963. Our house on the university campus there was long and straight. The garden was surrounded by a dense hibiscus and poinsettia hedge and was full of trees: frangipani, cotton trees and tall elegant casuarina pines. I would borrow our gardener’s machete and chop at the frangipani trees. Bury the curved blade (made in Czechoslovakia) in the bole, which was soft and yielding. The tree bled a white milk that dripped all day. Later I bought my own machete for five shillings. It was useful for hacking things down. Ibadan is set in the middle of tropical rain forest, things grow at an enormous speed. I cut two poles and stuck them in the ground to support our badminton net. When I came back from school three months later they had turned into trees.

The insect I associate with our house in Ibadan is the sausage fly. It’s not really a fly at all but some kind of bloated ant that grows wings and takes to the air after rain. The sausage fly is about an inch long, a hard shiny banger-brown, hence its name. In the evening, after it has rained, you shut all your windows. Wings unfold from the carapace of the sausage fly and they take to the air in droves. They are not very good in the air — it isn’t their natural element — and it’s as if they have only borrowed the wings for the day. They steer haphazardly for the nearest light. Inside the house you can hear them carom into the windows and wire mosquito-netting. Squadrons veer unsteadily around exterior lights. They only have their wings for an hour or so. The sausage flies touch down and their wings fall off. A lot of them die as a result of mid-air collisions, flying into walls and such like. The next morning the veranda is crunchy underfoot with their hard bodies, and brilliant fragile drifts of discarded wings lie in the corners. The surviving sausage flies have resumed their earthly existence and have crawled off somewhere to complete their life cycle.

My father went out to West Africa during the Second World War. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was based in Lagos, Jos, in northern Nigeria (where they grow strawberries and new potatoes on the plateau all year round) and in the Gold Coast. We have a picture of him, very young and thin, sitting on a cane chair outside a grass hut some time in 1945. He came back to the Gold Coast in 1951 with my mother, planning to stay a few years only. He remained until 1977, until he was forced to leave because of ill-health. He had contracted a curious and rare disease called “Q” fever. He had been a doctor working in Africa all his life and eventually Africa was literally the death of him.

His work began very early in the day. He would work through until two in the afternoon when he returned home for lunch. He would sleep until four and then go and play nine holes of golf. In the evening my mother would join him and their friends on the stoep of the golf club (drink was plentiful, very cheap and on credit). Perhaps there would be an impromptu supper-party later on. There was nothing frenetic or debauched in this social round — it was a far cry from Happy Valley — but in comparison to the life that most of these members of the professional middle class would have been living in Britain in the fifties it must have seemed paradisiacal.

They could lead this life because everyone had servants. My parents had only been in the Gold Coast a week when one morning they discovered a small old man sitting on the kitchen steps. He said his name was Kofi and he had heard they needed a cook. Kofi was our cook for the next eleven years. He and his family lived in a village some two miles away. In Legon our house had servants’ quarters, a simple, not to say crude, concrete cottage a few yards from the main house. This was occupied by Kofi’s son, Kwame, who was then in his twenties. He is now a major in a tank battalion in the Ghanaian Army. Kwame used to babysit for my parents. My sisters and I would often spend the evenings in his hot concrete room, eating the very peppery fried plantain that he would prepare on a small cast-iron charcoal brazier in the corner.

In Nigeria we had a cook and a houseboy, Johnson and Israel. Johnson was very old, his hair was greying, and he was very set in his ways. When I read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson I always think of our old cook. Cary’s Johnson is much younger but the two had much in common. Johnson had been married many times but had no children. This, he claimed, was the fault of the wives he had had and nothing to do with his potency. Just before we left Nigeria he got married again to a very young girl. She used to do our washing for us and when Johnson was away in the afternoons received visits from other men. Eventually she became pregnant and later had a baby girl. There never was a prouder father.

Johnson was very tall and lanky, Israel was extremely small and walked everywhere very fast. He was an Easterner, an Ibo, and during the Biafran War he joined the Biafran Army in order to get something to eat. One day he was given a rifle and five rounds of ammunition and was deployed in the bush to repel an attack by the Federal forces. He was always quite candid about what he did next. He took off his camouflage jacket (the only uniform he possessed) and buried it. Then he threw his rifle away and deserted.

Once, in some waiting-room, or at some station bookstall, I picked up a copy of Scientific American. On the cover was what looked like a picture of a badly made patchwork quilt, all greys, rusts and ochrous browns. I recognized it immediately as an aerial photograph of Ibadan town centre, without need of recourse to the theme of the issue — which was “Town Planning in the Third World,” or something equivalent. Ibadan is lodged as firmly in my mind as any of the other cities I’ve lived in. It is known, sometimes affectionately, as the largest village in Africa. It has a population of well over one million. Most of the buildings within its sprawling purlieus are made of mud and roofed with corrugated iron. The streets crumble away at the edges into large deep ditches and are permanently crammed with cars. From every house and shop, radio music blares. At night the buildings are lit with fluorescent tubes, predominantly green and blue. There is public transport but the most common way of getting about the city is in Volkswagen vans. When you see a VW coming you stick out your hand and it stops. You climb in (the sliding doors are removed) and give sixpence to a small boy who hangs on to the outside. The vans ply certain basic routes. When you want to get off you rap with your knuckles on the roof. The van stops at once.

I used to travel by this means from the university campus into town to the Recreation Club. Here you could play tennis, golf and squash, swim at the pool, eat snacks and drink at the bars. During school holidays it was a focal point for the children of expatriates. We would spend the entire day there. In the evening we would go to the cinema or go to a party. There were lots of parties. Parties in town, parties at the university, parties at the New Reservation, parties in Bodija. Teenage parties: the same boys, the same girls, records and beer, sometimes a punch made from illicit gin brewed on the banks of distant creeks and reputed to make you blind if you drank too much.

Excursions out of town were few and far between. Sometimes we would go fishing. Drive out a couple of hours into the jungle to find a slow brown river and spin for perch. Sometimes we went down to Lagos for a week to stay in rickety beach huts at Tarqua Bay. Fish off the breakwater, go sailing — dodging the merchant ships steaming into Lagos harbour; surf at the surfing beach, and at night sleep on camp beds in the open air, beneath the stars and a mosquito net. The Americans refer to the children of US Army personnel serving abroad as “army brats” or “air force brats.” There were times when we were “colonial brats.” Lazy, self-regarding, pleasure-seeking and utterly incurious about the country we were living in.

That all changed with the Biafran War. I well remember the day of the military coup that precipitated the country into its civil war. I was due to fly back to Britain for the start of the school term. Johnson, our cook, laconically told me that I wouldn’t be going. Why not? I asked. Because, he said, there’s going to be a military coup on Monday. He was right.

When the war was on (1967-70) the tenor of life changed radically, largely because of the overwhelming presence of the Nigerian Army. From the minute you stepped off the plane at Ikeja airport armed soldiery became a constant feature of your day. Off-duty soldiers kept their guns with them: on buses, in bars, taking their kids for a walk.

One evening, driving along a quiet road with my father, we turned a corner and passed an oil drum with a plank leaning against it jutting a couple of feet into the road. It was only when we saw half a dozen soldiers spring from the trees with Kalashnikovs levelled that we realized it was a road block. We stopped abruptly and got out of the car. The guns were lowered and the car was searched. They were looking for currency smugglers, they said. The soldiers were young and edgy. They wore the odd bit of camouflage uniform supplemented by their own clothes, gym shoes, flannel trousers, an Hawaiian shirt. Their guns looked like very old Warsaw Pact surplus — with numbers burned crudely into the stock. You looked at these guys, who had volunteered because of the free beer and cigarettes the Army provided, and wondered what was going on in the rebel heartland.

I haven’t been back to Nigeria or any part of West Africa since 1973. I started writing about it in 1976 when I wrote an (unpublished) novel about the Biafran War. Subsequent efforts of hindsight and occasional nostalgia keep it very fresh in my mind. Particularly heavy rain, a warm and muggy night, the sound of crickets, a cold beer on a hot day, are always weighed up against their African equivalents and always found wanting. But it’s the music of Nat King Cole that proves the most effective Proustian trigger.

It was one of my father’s habits when he first got up in the morning almost immediately to put a record on a shiny walnut hi-fi he had shipped out from Britain. Invariably, the record he chose was by Nat King Cole, the first bars of which were greeted by loud groans from the rest of the family, but he paid no heed. He would stand in the middle of the main room, the sliding glass doors thrown wide open to catch the cool early-morning breeze and look out on the sunlit view as he sang along with Nat Cole. He always struck me in those moments as being a very happy man. Whenever I hear that distinctive dry voice I think of my father and of Africa in the early morning.

1984

York, Hermes, Argonaut, Stratocruiser, Super Constellation, Britannia, Boeing 707, VC10 … The story of my early encounters with England is a small history of aviation. I do not remember the York, a development of the Lancaster bomber, I believe, but in 1952—the year I was born — my flying life began, in a Hermes. I was born in March in the Ridge Hospital in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast. Four months later I was carried up the steps to the waiting Hermes to begin my first flight from my native land back to the place my parents came from. The Hermes followed the York on the first passenger services from the Gold Coast to London, making a series of short hops across the great protruding bulge of western Africa — Accra, Lagos, Kano, Tripoli — before crossing the Mediterranean to Madrid, Rome or Frankfurt and then on to London. The whole journey took seventeen hours.

I do remember the Argonaut quite well, however, a British version of the DC6, a four-engined prop plane that did not owe anything to World War Two precursors and was the first to make the trans-Sahara overfly routine (if one discounts the truly terrifying turbulence), and was thus able to cut the time of the West Africa to London trip substantially. We would land in Kano in northern Nigeria to refuel before setting off on the long leg over the desert to Tripoli. Kano airport was so fly-infested that the airport buildings were proofed with mosquito wire. Vultures perched on the control tower. We always crossed the Sahara at night (perhaps at the level the planes flew in those days the turbulence made it impassable when the sun was up?) and we would arrive at Tripoli as dawn broke. For this reason Tripoli airport always seemed dramatic and somewhat disturbing to me, as I recall: its hangars were colandered from World War Two shrapnel and in the pale light you could see cannibalized hulks of Italian bombers of the same era rusting mysteriously in the thin blond grass that fringed the runways. Beyond the perimeter fence camels grazed… There was still one more stop to be made in mainland Europe before we cruised over the English Channel to land at London airport — as Heathrow was always quaintly referred to in those days.

The Stratocruiser represented the ultimate in luxury. Twin-decked, with a glassy round bulbous nose, the plane tried to simulate the elegance of the Pullman cars in transcontinental express trains. Seats were arranged in fours, pairs facing each other. Above our heads was a reach-me-down bunk bed for children. On the lower deck was a small bar accessed by a tight spiral staircase, which I remember my parents descending for a cocktail before the meal was served — a side of roast beef on a silver trolley, the steward carving slices off it as if he were for all the world in the Savoy Grill and not twenty thousand feet above the dark wadis and sand seas of the endless Sahara.

All these aeroplanes and their successors — the Britannia, the VC10, and so on — were in the livery of BOAC — the British Overseas Airways Corporation — crisp white and navy blue and badged with the famous speedbird logo (now long vanished). As I grew older and became conscious of our annual trips back to Britain on leave, the planes, and by extension the company, came to represent the country by proxy, as if a little segment of Britain had been sent out to the colonies to fetch us back to the motherland. It was a kind of idealized metaphor, I suppose — the smart modern planes and their smart modern crew luring us on board with their smiles and their trays of boiled sweets — showing us what we had left behind, reminding us of our good fortune in being able to return.

My early experience of air travel instilled in me a love of flying, of airports and all the accoutrements of aviation which has not left me to this day. How could such an introduction to flight, at such an impressionable age, and with such magnificent ambassadors, not fail to entrance? As children our idea of a treat was to be driven from home to Accra airport to look at the BOAC plane. One runway, one uneven expanse of tarmac apron, a control tower, a few hangars, some low sheds doubling as immigration and customs, arrival and departure halls, Accra airport was modest and unassuming in the extreme. Across the road from the airport was the airport hotel, called The Lisbon for some forgotten reason, a single-storeyed wooden building with a wide veranda. On Saturday nights a highlife band would play and the more daring young expatriate couples would come there to dance. Like all airport hotels in Africa it effortlessly maintained a louche and faintly racy ambiance. We children would take our drinks — our Fantas and Cokes — and go and stand at the wood paling fence and stare at the silver giant, propellers stilled, parked on the tarmac. Fuel bowsers and generators hummed, linked trolleys bouncing with luggage trundled from the departure lounge, engineers and cleaners ran up and down the wheeled steps set against the doorways. Then came the crew, then came the long lines of passengers. Doors were closed, propellers turned, the plane was freed of its various appurtenances and it taxied to the end of the runway.

To see it lift off and climb into the dusty evening air was both exhilarating and melancholy, emotions perhaps not fully comprehended then but more easily analysed now. It has to be understood that in the fifties, certainly from an African perspective, these tremendous aeroplanes, and the world they both encompassed and conjured up, were for us a vision of immense and modern glamour and at the same time, like all people being left behind, we felt a sense of flatness and disappointment lingering as we returned to the car and were driven home, counting the weeks and months until it would be our turn to cross that cracked uneven piste towards the blue and white flying machine and be carried away by it also, cosseted and nourished, across the desert to Europe, to England, homeward.

As you mounted the steps towards the door, almost swooning with excitement, the first impression, aside from the stewardess (a figure of unearthly exoticism), was olfactory. The smell of the flyspray that was liberally pumped throughout the plane’s interior prior to take off was both sweet and oddly choking. It was a smell replicated nowhere else in my range of nasal memory — part marzipan, part cough medicine, part liqueur, part candy, part liniment… I could not place it: our flysprays at home did not smell remotely the same. But whatever it was, whatever brand it was or compound of chemical meeting unnatural fabric in a confined space, the BOAC version was potent and palpable. It was always, for me at least, the first smell of England. It was a kind of Rubicon; as you stepped over the threshold and were directed down the aisle, your lungs were filled with this curious reek. You soon became used to it but it signalled that your journey home had truly begun.

And yet my real home was in West Africa, in the Gold Coast — which in 1957 became Ghana. Until my tenth year I only spent summers in Britain, almost always in Scotland. But my parental home was in Ghana, and so were my bedroom, my things, my school, my friends. Scotland was where my relatives lived, where we rented a house and my parents caught up with their families. We were always in transit, welcomed but always “just visiting.” The real business of my life lay at the end of another plane journey in the reverse direction. And the comparative brevity of the annual leave never allowed us fully to integrate, to take things for granted, to become au fait with the latest fads and fashions. Little details remind me now of that sense of apartness. I felt ill at ease walking past school playgrounds, always stared at. Why wasn’t this boy (me) at school? (one could sense the unspoken question). How were my sullenly curious coevals to know that African school holidays did not coincide with the British? If I had not detoured, I crossed the street, head down. I never felt comfortable with children of my age group, en masse. I remember my father too, a man of status and real importance on the university campus where he ran a hospital and health clinics responsible for 20,000 people, fumbling like a new immigrant with his unfamiliar change as he tried to buy a newspaper in Edinburgh. You could sense the newsagent’s impatience building as my father picked and prodded hesitantly at a palmful of coins. I possessed also a vague embarrassment about my clothes. The shorts and sandals and shirts made from local tie-dyed cloth — which were wholly unexceptional in Ghana — seemed eccentric, not to say bizarre, in breezy St Andrews or the High Street in Peebles. I had no long trousers at all, and how I coveted my first pair of jeans — finally bought at the age of nine with an aunt in a department store in Birmingham — at last, knees covered, I might not stand out from the crowd. Needless to say I never felt like this in Africa, where I roamed about the countryside, cycled through the streets and boulevards of the enormous, sprawling campus, possessing the place so thoroughly, so intimately, that such unreflecting familiarity has never been reproduced, no matter where I have subsequently lived. I knew paths through the bush, short cuts through servants’ quarters. I knew where the biggest mangoes grew, the best spot to catch pythons, what pie-dogs to avoid, how to eat fufu, who would sell you a single stick of chewing gum, what were the rules and penalties of a complicated game involving the spinning of hollow snail shells … My life in Africa up until the age of ten was a modest but genuine idyll and its basic elements will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in the tropics — the child, the white child, still possessed a form of tolerant laisser passer denied the adult. We were unnoticed, or barely noticed, everywhere — which, when freedom to come and go is all you ask, is the best and most sincere form of welcome.

And then June came round and the rainy season threatened and it was time to go on leave. BOAC would send one of its planes to fetch us and the strange and exciting process that led to our landfall in England would begin. Sunset in Kano, the lurching rollercoaster of the night flight across the Sahara, dawn in Tripoli, morning in Madrid or Rome — finally peering through clearing clouds at the green patchwork of English fields and the occasional wink of sunburst from a car’s windscreen. London airport. More low wooden buildings. Lino and formica. Tall blue policemen. Pale pasty faces. Strange accents … And somewhere, deep inside me, the private hollow of fear and insecurity that all aliens (however legal) carry within them. My passport was British so why was I uneasy?

It all changed when I was sent to boarding school in Scotland, something that happened to all expatriate children, as inevitable as puberty. However, my routine was turned on its head, everything was reversed: now I flew to Africa in the holidays. My family, my home, my room, my things, my friends were all as they had always been but now I only saw them for two months of the year. But back in Britain I was beginning to understand the place; I was beginning to be assimilated; I had started to fit in.

I was barely four months old when I made that first flight in a Hermes from Africa to England in 1952. My parents took me up to Scotland to present me to my grandmothers and the rest of the family. For some reason my father went back early and my mother and I joined him some weeks later at the end of our leave. By curious chance, as we were waiting in London airport for our plane to be called, there was a photographer from the Evening Standard patrolling the departure lounge looking for a light-hearted filler, I suppose, a bit of human interest for a corner of a page, snapping babes in arms about to go on a long plane journey, still a rarish event in those days, no doubt. My mother has kept the cutting. In the picture one glum and tearful toddler sits morosely on her mother’s knee. Opposite is me, aged six months, fizzing with energy, bald and beefy as a Buddha, beaming hugely, my mother’s arm clamped around my middle trying to stop the thrashing and the squirming. “Why is master William Andrew Murray Boyd so happy?” the caption asks. I could not answer then, but I can now — I was flying home.

1998

I went to boarding school at the age of nine. This was not exceptional: when I arrived at my school in September 1961 I found boys of six and seven. One exceptionally tiny boy — tawny-skinned with crow-black, dead-straight hair (was he half-Chinese?) — was rumoured to be five, though he angrily denied it.

I was not unhappy to be going away to school. In West Africa, where my parents lived, all the children of expatriate Europeans were doing the same at around my age. It was entirely normal and for years we were gently prepared (a form of benign brain-washing, I suppose) for the day when we would be left to fend for ourselves. Neither of my parents had been to public school or boarding school and both were unfamiliar with where or how to introduce me into the system. In the end it was decided that I should go to the same school as had a son of close friends. They had heard good reports of it; it was not horrifically expensive; I had seemed to like the place when I had been interviewed one summer when we were back on leave and, as I was Scottish, it was an advantage that the school was in Scotland, albeit in the remote far north. This northerly aspect provided the school with a not entirely deserved reputation for a Spartan, no-frills style of education, its most obvious manifestation being a proclaimed fondness for cold showers and early morning runs and the odd fact that the boys wore shorts throughout their school career, regardless of the seasons and the weather, until they left, aged eighteen.

The main school was serviced by two prep schools: the junior for boys up to the age of ten and a senior for boys from ten to thirteen who then, if they passed an undemanding entrance exam, were claimed by the parent institution. It was to the junior school that I was driven that September afternoon by my mother, all the way from Edinburgh, to find the field in front of the school house filled with forty or fifty small boys, dressed in navy blue jerseys and shorts, running about, kicking balls, wrestling and generally horsing around. It seemed like fun and I was oblivious to my mother’s brimming tears as she said goodbye. She told me later she had had to stop outside the school gates, had pulled the car in to the side of the road and wept for an hour.

The junior prep school was housed in a former shooting lodge called Wester Elchies (now sadly demolished), a rather magical-looking Scottish baronial building with turrets and castellation set in fair-sized grounds with its own home farm. There were extensive woods, a telescopeless observatory and a curling pond. Over the hill was an orphanage (we were terrified of the orphans — sinister yahoos to our over-privileged eyes) and not far away, in the valley below, the River Spey flowed where salmon were caught by our headmaster, a legendary fly-fisher.

I was introduced to my “minder,” a tall rather glamorous blond boy called Holland. Holland was rich (his father had a Rolls-Royce) and he had an older brother who played in a pop group. This was a stroke of luck for me as, with Holland’s patronage, I was introduced to his “set” and achieved almost instant acceptance into the relatively innocent, tribal world of a prep school.

We were not particularly cruel to each other at this stage of our scholarly life, cruelty (sometimes exceptionally vicious) came later, after puberty, at the main school. For the pre-adolescent there seems to me to be only one requirement for success at prep school and that is popularity. Academic and sporting achievements at that age are so ephemeral and inconsequential that they gain little kudos, and at Wester Elchies the only miserable boys I recall were the unpopular ones. They were unpopular because they looked peculiar: Webster had the aspect of a puppet or cartoon character — with thick, springy carrot-coloured hair and heavy black specs; Sedley had dark, bruised eyes and unusually dun, greasy skin. Sed-ley was genially and routinely persecuted because he cried so easily. All it took was three or four of us to gather round him making quacking duckbill movements with our hands and chanting “Baitey! Baitey! Baitey!” and Sedley would obligingly break down into incoherent and hysterical weeping fits. We found this very amusing and never tired of the game. It was gratuitous but not malevolent. I don’t think life at prep school as I experienced it was ever malign. The school’s regime was good-natured, on the whole, the staff kind and tolerant. Sex and power, the two elements in boarding school life that really corrupt, even to the extent that they can make people evil, were waiting for our older selves up ahead.

Life at an all-boy prep school, though unreal (as all monosexual societies must be, by definition), was still an extension of childhood, and consequently our ambitions and disappointments, our desires and our hatreds retained some quality of childhood innocence. Most of our carnal energies, for example, were expended in trying to see female members of staff in the nude or, second best, to find some way of peering up into the dark recesses of their skirts. I and many others nurtured simultaneous passions for Miss Grey, the art teacher, and Miss Cibber, the music teacher. Miss Grey was tall and languorous with glossy dark hair wound round her head in a loose Bloomsburyesque bun. Her clothes were rich-looking, romantically hued. Miss Cibber too was dark, almost swarthy in fact, with a sturdier more curvaceous figure. For a term she ousted Miss Grey from my fantasies as I found myself allotted to a dormitory outside one of the staff bathrooms which she used. There was an inch-wide crack between the bottom of the door and the floor through which, if you pressed your head to the cold linoleum of the corridor, you could obtain a partial view of the bathroom beyond. Miss Cibber’s strong legs from the thigh down became very familiar. We kept praying she would drop a towel or her toothbrush and have to bend over. She excluded herself from all our affections when she was surprised one day in a passionate kiss with the English master — a dull, weak fellow, to our eyes — called Hearn.

We did not like Hearn and therefore could not like anyone who liked him. Our affections were extremely fickle. Miss Cibber was dropped and I returned my loyalty to Miss Grey.

Ah, Miss Grey, Miss Catriona Grey! Strange how passionate the pre-pubertal crush can be. She must have been very young, in her early twenties, I suppose, and, as I recall her face, I realize she was very pretty too. I was good at art and saw a lot of her and became something of a favourite. Because I was close to her it is with Miss Grey that I associate my first adult feelings of envy — a pure, elemental, resentment-driven emotion. Miss Grey’s beauty was not just apparent to her acolytes in the art room: the headmaster, Mr Vaughan, was also susceptible.

I was impressed by Mr Vaughan: he was the first person whom I recognized — unconsciously — as “sophisticated.” He drove an MG roadster with leather straps holding down the bonnet. He wore suede shoes, he smoked a lot, Player’s Navy Cut, and had a deep, raspy smoker’s voice. I can recall his flat in the school house with real clarity. A dark blue carpet, loose cream lineny covers on the sofas, good pictures on the walls. He was, I now realize, genuinely urbane, a confirmed bachelor, a throwback figure from John Buchan or Sapper who had taken up schoolmastering before the war in the way that young men did coming down from Varsity with a poor degree (think of Waugh and Auden) and had been too lazy, or found the life too congenial, ever to move on. He was white-haired — in his fifties — and being headmaster of a small prep school in Banffshire was to be the pinnacle of his professional life. But he seemed perfectly content and he used regularly to invite Miss Grey (a fellow smoker) to share a cigarette with him at his table at the end of the midday meal.

I can conjure up the tableau now, and the green fog of envious bile through which I viewed it, as we filed out to go to our dormitories for the obligatory postprandial rest. Mr Vaughan would push his chair back so he could cross his legs and dangle one brown suede shoe. He smoked with a small flourish, his hand describing a generous arc, a flexing, cuff-shooting movement, as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Inhaling avidly, laughing, leaning forward to share a throaty smoky confidence with Miss Grey who, her body language tells me in hindsight, was not wholly at ease with Mr Vaughan’s raffish innuendoes. Miss Grey stiffly upright, an arm crossed below her breasts, a palm supporting the elbow of the smoking hand, the cigarette more demurely, more delicately, puffed at — a social smoker, then, not with Mr Vaughan’s nicotine craving. I can hear Mr Vaughan’s barking laugh crossing the emptying dining room as we troop out, degenerating into a barking lung-tearing cough. I look back, hating him, wanting to kill him, to see Miss Grey leaning forward, helping him to a consoling glass of water.

What kind of person was I then, in my pre-teens? Memories are vivid and precise but I cannot summon up a retrospective self-consciousness. The world is a simpler more straightforward place when you are ten, eleven, twelve. It is adolescence, the burgeoning hormone-swarm in the body, that brings home real intimations of character and personality. I look at pictures of the fair-haired lad I was and gain no real access to the persona. The alternately carefree and moody fifteen-year-old, say — both precocious and deeply lazy — is far more familiar. And yet the pre-teen places and the people, the events and the adventures lurk in the memory bank pristine and available.

I was popular, thanks partly to Holland and his cronies, and I was tall and a fast runner — did not let the side down at rugby and cricket — but I realize I never made it into the first rank because I did not have a nickname. The real stars were called “Ducky” or “Fitzy” or plain “Johnnie.” Once for a week or so a few boys took to calling me a Latinate “Boydus” but it never caught on and soon died away, never to be resurrected. What made these boys so liked, what was the secret of their charm, so evident that even the staff addressed them by their nicknames? The answer, I think, is that they were unrelentingly cheerful. As they became teenagers they seemed almost visibly to fade away, without exception, puberty robbing them of their unfailingly sunny demeanours. But somehow at the age of ten or eleven an initial personality had developed, sufficient to make them the life and soul of the party, and this was enough to make them everybody’s favourites. These boys were loved, admired and cherished, I am sure, by all of us without any jealousy. I remember when Johnnie’s mother suddenly died the sense of collective grief in Elchies was palpable: his loss affected us all in a profound way that can only be explained by the role he played in our midst. Johnnie’s loss was, of course, our loss too.

Indeed, within the small community of the prep school a kind of covert favouritism operates, rather as I imagine it does in a large family, with no real resentment being expressed by those excluded. For a while I was the beneficiary of such advancement when I became the favourite of the matron — I think as a result of having suffered a very bad dose of chickenpox — Mrs Herrick, a pallid but no-nonsense, vivacious woman, married to the Latin teacher (we called him “Shirley” for some forgotten reason). Mrs Herrick was not the most powerful patron among the staff, but her benevolence did pay dividends.

Every morning — part of our Scottish heritage — we had porridge for breakfast. The school would gather in the assembly room before filing through to the dining room (a pre-fab wooden hall tacked on to the rear of the house). Mr Vaughan would declaim a prayer, read the day’s notices and then Mrs Herrick would appear to select the sugar-server. This was one of the most coveted jobs in the school (our sweet ration was one Quality Street per day). The sugar-server’s job was to place one dessertspoonful of brown Demerara sugar in the middle of each bowl of porridge. The key perk of the job was that one was permitted to sugar one’s own bowl of porridge with boundless liberality. And, naturally, friends of the sugar-server benefited also. During my reign as Mrs Herrick’s chosen one she would come into the assembly room each morning, scan the eager pleading faces of the boys and then, as if the result of spontaneous whim, select me. This went on for many weeks and nobody ever appeared to express surprise or complain at this manifest unfairness. I became rather smug and developed a sweet tooth that I have never really managed to neutralize.

My move to prep school from my school in Africa meant the first of several progressive steps that shifted me away from being an “African” child to becoming a British one. The winter of 1961 was the first time I saw snow. As I remember it there had been a heavy fall in the night, some six inches or so, and we woke to the refulgent, muffled, eerie landscape that dense snowfall brings. For two of us — me and another boy who had been born and raised in Jamaica — this was a surreal lifetime first. Amazed, astonished, we stepped outside and picked the stuff up, tasted it, felt its cold numb our fingers, heard its crump beneath our feet. Other boys and staff, amused, looked out at us from the big library windows — two aborigines out of their element — as we struggled to come to terms with this new natural phenomenon that we had heard and read so much about but never experienced — stamping our feet, throwing handfuls into the air — before we were gently summoned back inside for breakfast.

Quite a number of us lived abroad and made the long plane journey home at holidays — to India, West and East Africa, Singapore, the Caribbean — to a world of sun and humidity, ocean beaches and palm trees. On our return we wore our exclusivity proudly in the shower room, our deep tans contrasting strongly with the pale pink bodies of our coevals, quite unconcerned to be known to the others as “wogs.” This sort of cheery racism was quite common, even at prep school, but, as with many of the less admirable aspects of boarding school life, our prejudices and bigotries tended to become more extreme as we grew older. Any deviation from our self-ordained norms was more mercilessly pilloried — accents, deformities, perceived ugliness — anything strange or out of the ordinary was grist to the intolerance mill.

But at the junior prep school our energies and animosities revolved instead around the forts we built in the woods. This was a form of peer-group creation, joining a gang combined with war-gaming, a kind of obsessive militaristic territoriality that dominated our free time. Who was in, who was out, whose loyalties had been transferred and so on. In the dense woods around the house we would build elaborate shacks, lean-tos and tree houses, erect earthworks and construct trip wires and booby traps. Membership of the most splendid forts was eagerly striven for. Certain substantial forts of the recent past had assumed almost legendary proportions. There had been one called “Laramie”—but somehow Laramie had fallen into disrepair and all that remained of it was a jumble of roped-together logs in a clearing. Old hands would take new boys to the site and reminisce about its Ozymandian splendours.

One was elected into a fort either by patronage (Holland helped me into his) or by the possession of tools. In this way feeble or unpopular boys could gain admission into elites by offering the use of a hammer or drill or, in one enterprising case, by having his father send up supplies of six-inch nails at weekly intervals. The six-inch nail was the key currency — you could buy your way anywhere.

The move to the senior prep school, a few miles away on the other side of the Spey, marked an end to the Edenic pleasures of the Wester Elchies. The new house was grander and larger, with a great pillared portico, a stable block and generous formal terraces leading down to playing fields. It represented a larger society, too, and within it were played out early and inchoate strategies of power and responsibility, and with that development came a corresponding loss of innocence. Here were thirteen-year-olds in the first hot flush of adolescence, voices breaking, pimples sprouting, the first snouty stirrings of pubertal lust. The easy egalitarian-ism of the junior school ebbed away, the sense of being part of a large, unruly but essentially loving family was replaced by the divisions familiar to all closed societies. There was the public face of the school — sporty, academic, disciplined — and there was the inevitable private face, one that was created and shaped by the boys and ran like a cold, unseen, dangerous current beneath the placid surface.

At a prep school, however, the tacit acknowledgement of this fact — that the two distinct worlds coexist, one overt, one hidden — is never really established. The real world (the world of the boys, the hothouse society) never gets full purchase because there remain old elements of that unspoilt innocence of childhood in place — we were still children, after all, even though, at the end of our prep school careers, the embryo adult in each of us could be perceived taking shape.

I developed a curious relationship with one of the matrons. I can’t remember her name but she was attractive, energetic and a little plump with reddish blonde hair and a nicely cynical, gently mocking way with her charges. I can see her face in my mind’s eye, see her in her white coat serving spoonfuls of malt to the needy and malnourished, dispensing aspirins for imagined headaches. In our pre-teens the female members of staff played a far more important part in our lives than the males did. I can bring all these young women to mind instantly, have them fixed in my memory far more vividly than all but a few of the men. It was as if we unconsciously realized that here was the only likely source of any vaguely maternal affection — a smile, a pat on the back, a literal shoulder to cry on — which we all, even the most rambunctious and independent spirits, separated from our real mothers three months at a time, periodically craved.

Thinking back, I suppose that what happened was that this matron and I must have become friends, an odd state of affairs to arise between a thirteen-year-old boy and a young woman in her twenties, especially given the institutional roles imposed on us. Perhaps, quite simply, she was lonely. There is another side to prep school life which the schoolboy seldom considers, if at all — that of the solitary teacher in his or her room, little more than a bedsit, whiling away their off-duty hours. What did you do if you weren’t married? I suppose there were occasional visits to a pub or a local restaurant (though the junior staff must have been paid a pittance); or you could hopefully attempt to find a soulmate amongst your colleagues … And the social life of a staff common room need not necessarily be congenial, populated — as all common rooms are — by its share of bores and petty martinets, third-raters and sadsacks. This matron, however, seemed a more feisty and worldly character and, inevitably, she did not stay long with us, no more than a term or two. I never thought anything particular about her announced departure: she was popular with the boys and we were collectively sorry to see her go but, most unusually, before she left she came into my dormitory late at night to say goodbye and sat on my bed and talked for an hour or so. The other boys fell asleep or tried to eavesdrop but she sat close to me and we chatted in low voices. Chatted about what? I can’t remember exactly — where she was going, I suppose. I recall something about her telling me she was sitting more exams, better qualifications leading to a better job. Did she kiss me farewell, squeeze my hand? I hope so. I never saw or heard from her again.

Otherwise the relations between staff and boys were by and large cordial and run-of-the-mill. With one exception. There was one young master, popular with the boys, who distinguished himself in our eyes by demonstrating a clear sense of his own sartorial style — a worn leather greatcoat, knitted ties, Chelsea boots — and who, we guessed, possessed a source of income separate from his school salary. He had his own car, something sporty, went abroad in the summer — there was generally a debonair and confident manner about him that we responded to. Then, one evening in my dormitory a junior boy returned from a late-night punishment lesson (malefactors copying out lines in a classroom) in tears. When quizzed by the dormitory leader he confessed that this particular master had “fiddled” with him. The boys had been in dressing gowns and pyjamas; when this fellow approached the master — the invigilator of the punishment period — with his completed lines the man had slid his hand into the fly of the boy’s pyjamas. The seniors of us in the dormitory — I was probably thirteen by then — consulted. We reported the matter to the head boy who decided he would have to tell the headmaster. We watched him go downstairs and knock on the door of the headmaster’s study. In the morning the young master had gone, not a sign, not a trace of him left. A brief, bland announcement was made about his sudden departure, “a family crisis” had called him away, and it was never spoken of further. We, as I recall, were not so much outraged by the molestation as by the breaching of convention: it was not so much the act itself but the collapse of general principles it betokened — principles of decorum and staff-pupil relationships rather than anything more highly moral — this sort of thing really wouldn’t do. We were pompously pleased that he had been sent packing and no more fuss was made.

Sex was definitely in the air as I approached the end of my prep school years. I remember a very young under-matron — no more than seventeen or eighteen — supervising ablutions in the shower room, inspecting the fingernails of naked, hirsute, mature thirteen-year-olds and, as I waited my turn, I caught myself wondering if she found it a bit embarrassing, standing there fully clothed with fifty assorted sizes of cocks and balls on display. And I think she did. Sexually we were insatiably curious: more advanced boys were envied for their masturbatory prowess; there would be the odd thrilling torchlit striptease cabaret in the dormitories late at night, and some more daring souls crept into each other’s beds for mutual stimulation, but their numbers were few and they were regarded as mild eccentrics rather than pariahs.

As the time came for our transition to the main school a certain tension became evident in those about to make the move, uneasy at the idea of exchanging a small pond for a much larger one in which we would be conspicuous minnows. There was a rite of passage that took place in the final week of our final term and which symbolically marked this impending alteration in our status. It was known as “P.D.” and was a one-on-one solemn discussion with the headmaster about the facts of life.

The initials referred to “Pandrops”—a name peculiar to Scotland, I believe, which was given to a brand of large round white peppermints. These the headmaster would feed the boy throughout his faintly embarrassed disquisition in the strange belief that the peppermint would prevent any unseemly arousal. Where he discovered this faith in the anaphrodisiac properties of peppermint I have no idea, but anyway, there one sat, dutifully sucking on a succession of mints, as he tediously ran us through the familiar mechanics of procreation. At the end he would ask peremptorily: “Have you any questions?” This was what we were waiting for, the tacit understanding being that the headmaster was duty-bound to answer everything — everything — we wanted to know. Consequently medical textbooks, dictionaries and novels were scoured in advance for sexual arcana: “Sir, what are the symptoms of tertiary syphilis?” “How do you do soixante-neuf, sir?” The aim was to make the P.D. session last as long as possible, a fact which, rather than displaying the appalling extent of one’s ignorance, was instead perceived to convey the impression of massive virility. There was a record for the longest P.D. — an awesome interrogatory effort which had endured for most of an afternoon, was abandoned and resumed after breakfast the next day — but no one in my year lasted much more than an hour.

So I left the world of the prep school after four years and everything changed, but my memories of that period of my life seem fixed and anchored in my first year at Wester Elchies; perhaps because of my coming from Africa everything about it was so strange and new and its impact inevitably left deeper traces. Recollections of my first summer there are particularly resonant because by then I had settled in, I had explored my world and was at home in it. And, I suppose, I was happy. It was a kind of idyll living in that remote and rather beautiful Scottish estate, for all its strangeness. I remember on summer nights after supper we would gather around the teachers sitting out on the grass tennis court, lounging beneath the cedar tree (or was it beech, or have I just planted it?), pestering them, chatting and playing, before the bell was rung and we were summoned inside for prayers, then bed. A wash and a teeth clean standing on the wooden duckboards in the washroom, then into the cool dormitory high under the eaves of the house. Lights out at 8.00, not that it made much difference, the thin curtains drawn vainly against the sunny northern skies. In reality I couldn’t have spent more than a few dozen summer evenings at Elchies but it is that particular limpid northern atmosphere — the sun still stubbornly in the sky but the shadows long and with the warmth just beginning to go — that my memory most associates with the place and that time of my life. The ambience is always conjured up by Auden’s haunting poem, “Summer Night,” written — coincidentally — while he was teaching at a prep school in Scotland himself:

That later we, though parted then,

I have known few large buildings as intimately as I knew my house at school; after all, I lived there, day in, day out, for five years. All public schoolboys can claim a similar familiarity, but in almost every case you will find there is no nostalgia for the building itself. Apart from my parental home I have never lived in any one house for longer than three years, but I remember the shabbiest and most transient student bedsits with more affection. It is not all that surprising: the living quarters of your average public schoolboy are at best functional and soulless, and at worst utterly disgusting. If Borstals or remand homes were maintained in similar conditions, there would be a public outcry. I recently visited several famous public schools, and nothing I saw there made me so depressed as the dormitories and the thought that for so many years I had slept so many nights in such dismal and depressing circumstances.

It is, I think, a retrospective revulsion. Adolescent boys are not much preoccupied with personal hygiene, let alone the care and maintenance of their living quarters. But now, when I recall the concrete and tile washrooms and lavatories, the pale-green dormitories with their crude wooden beds, I form a new respect for the resilience and fortitude of the adolescent spirit.

Not that the conditions we experienced at school were the worst I have seen. At one school that I visited in Scotland some of the studies were in a converted greenhouse, which the boys had lined with egg boxes in an attempt to provide some insulation. Older buildings in older schools give rise to prospects of damp and decay that are almost Dickensian in their extravagance; the dormitories look like wards in some Crimean war hospital.

Anyway, we were fortunate, if that is the right word, in that our house was newish and made of wood. It looked rather like an army barracks, a large, single-storey frame building, creosoted brown, with a tar-paper roof, constructed around a square, grassy courtyard. There were four very long terraced corridors with rooms off each side. One edge of the square expanded to contain a large locker room, towel and shower room and lavatories; one corner contained the housemaster’s flat. We ate in a dining room a mile away in the main school, an old, rather attractive, stone manor house whose fine architectural proportions had suffered when a Second World War fire destroyed its mansard roof.

When I arrived at the school, aged thirteen, in 1965, everything about the house was functional and anonymous. The floor, throughout, was brown linoleum; the lampshades were white plastic. Curtains at dorm windows were made from the same drab material. Only in the studies was individual decoration permitted, but as this consisted almost entirely of pictures of women scissored from lingerie and swimwear advertisements, they too had a homogeneous air.

Prospective parents being shown round the house often found the unrelieved wallpapering of brassière and corset ads (interspersed with the odd film star or motor car) something of a shock, and from time to time the housemaster or the headmaster would initiate a clean-up campaign. Shortly after I arrived new regulations were issued. (1) Nudity was banned. Even the most decorous and coy picture from a girlie magazine (or nude mags, nude books, skin mags, as we called them) was not permitted: the pin-up must be clothed. (2) Only three pin-ups were allowed on the wall per person. (3) As a special concession, a fourth pinup could be kept concealed in a drawer for furtive, private consultation. This is true.

It was vain legislation and constantly had to be reinforced. But as years went by attitudes relaxed, and by the time I left every boy’s study looked like a Soho bookshop or soft-porn emporium. Indeed, in terms of fixtures and fittings the history of my house, and of all the other six houses in the school, was one of prettification and improvement. Carpets were introduced; studies were subdivided into cubicles or converted to study-dormitories; painting and wallpapering were encouraged. Taste, as might be expected, was execrable. I remember that in one of my studies we lowered the ceiling by two feet by tacking string to and fro from one wall to another and laying brightly coloured crêpe paper on top of the resulting web. In the five years I lived there the character of the house altered by stages from that of some sort of penal institution to that of a moderately prosperous South American shanty town.

Much of this home decorating was subsidized by profits from the house shop. This sold nothing apart from sweets, soft drinks and ice cream and did a roaring trade. It was considered completely normal, in the hour of free time between end of prep and lights out, for one person to consume, say, a litre of Coca-Cola, a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a packet of digestive biscuits, a Mars bar, a slab of chocolate, some packets of crisps, some strips of liquorice and a couple of dozen aniseed balls. Everybody, while his money lasted, seemed to eat constantly. As one rose through the ranks kettles were permitted and, along with them, “brewing” privileges. By the end of my school career I was allowed a toaster. During an average day I might drink between twenty and thirty mugs of instant coffee and eat two large white sliced loaves of bread.

Apart from eating and drinking, the other memory I retain of living in the house was the noise. Certain periods of the day were radio hours. As if on command, dozens of radios and record players would start up. Very little classical music was played. In my era the sophisticated public schoolboy listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Cream.

We had a television (black-and-white) in the house common room. Its use was very restricted. Far and away the most popular programme was Top of the Pops. I am sure its producers have no idea of the profound influence and effect this programme had on a generation of public schoolboys. I do not know if it commands the same allegiance today, but I would wager that during the last five years of the 1960s 99 percent of public schoolboys religiously watched the programme every week during term time. Everything stopped for Top of the Pops. In the entire school nothing moved. In our house sixty boys would somehow cram themselves into the common room to watch it on Thursday nights. And, pathetic as it may seem today, we didn’t watch it so much for the music but for the girls in the studio audience. The programme was accompanied throughout by the grunts and groans, the whoops and sighs, of group passion. It was, I believe, in every public school in the land, a spontaneous, countrywide expression of terrible lust.

The house was large, but it felt curiously constricted. In the summer one could get outside, but during the winter there was nowhere else to go. Curiously, there was not much traffic between houses, except at senior level. Going into another house in the school was like going into another country, but with the added disadvantage that its inhabitants constantly drew attention to your strangeness. Few events were more unsettling than, as a junior boy, to have to deliver a message to a boy in another house. To be jeered at as an alien was the best you could expect; more often you would be set upon. We were members not so much of different houses as of different tribes. The houses all had different atmospheres, almost different ideologies. One house was corrupt, full of villains; one was full of eccentrics; one house was obsessively self-interested. My house, at least when I first joined it, was very hard.

We had had a succession of popular and ineffectual housemasters. There was no discipline. A new housemaster was strenuously trying to impose his authority. But when he retired to his flat at the end of the day the old regime established itself. The source of the problem was a group of boys in the sixteen-to-seventeen age bracket. They were “bad” in the sense that they had no interest in promotion. In the evenings they terrorized juniors with a kind of candid ruthlessness that I still find chilling to recall. They would roam the junior studies, four or five of these roughs, and beat people up at random, extort money or food, rifle letters and lockers in search of diversion. One felt in a way rather like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War: one never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction. It was comparatively short-lived, this period of capricious thuggery, but it provided me with a full catalogue of the resourceful cruelties of the adolescent mind. Later the attitude of the house changed to something altogether more genial, but I will always remember my years as a junior, even though I was relatively unscathed. W. H. Auden said he detested fascism because at public school he lived in a fascist state. It is rarely a constant state of affairs, but it is not difficult for private life in a boarding school temporarily to take on certain fascist characteristics. It is the sense of being a victim, or potential victim, that lingers on: the way a house can become at certain moments a place of genuine terror and fear; the way you sacrifice all principles in order to save your skin; the ease with which the ideology of the dominant group seduces you. This is, of course, the private, unadministered life of a boarding house, but in a crucial sense it is the reality of being a boarder in a boys’ public school. Its opposite is what I call “the prison governor’s view of the prison.” That has a reality too, but it is for public and official consumption. The inmates experience something entirely different, vital and basic.

If you are lucky, everything changes at school as you grow older, stronger and more senior. Those few to whom this transformation and relaxation does not apply are the saddest products of the system. But for the majority the tenor of the daily round eventually establishes itself as tolerable. However, the last year or two at school, although the most privileged, can also be the most irritating. Most people experience this, and no doubt most people have their own reasons. On reflection, I wonder if my own vague disquiet was not to do with a subconscious reaction against the unrelenting absence of privacy that one experiences as the norm in a boarding school. Looking back at it now, years later, I realize that of my nine years at boarding school I actually spent three years on holiday and a full six at school. So for those six years, for example, I usually bathed and showered in the company of eight or a dozen other people; I relieved myself in what was effectively a public lavatory; I dressed and undressed, to order, in a crowded locker room; and, except for my final year, I slept in a room that never had fewer than four people in it and on occasions had fourteen. As a way of life — I am trying to be objective about it — this seems to me to be positively bizarre, not to say noisome and rebarbative. Five years in the same house is not only five years of crowding personalities; it is also five years of enforced proximity to the bodies that accommodate those personalities. The house was not a place for the fastidious.

Few people ever wield power as absolute as that possessed by a public-school prefect. Perhaps if you are an officer in the army, it may be similar, but really I feel it is more akin to something you might encounter in a feudal or totalitarian society, in so far as your power is subject to your whim. Boys may not be allowed to administer corporal punishment, but apart from that the head of house at a public school can — or certainly could — exercise a degree of control over the sixty boys in his charge that, day by day, could be said to be greater even than that of the housemaster.

The power operates on two basic levels. First, you can order people to do things: to shave, to repolish their shoes, to comb their hair, to have their hair cut, to run instead of walk and so on. On the second level you can deprive them of things: their freedom (by enforcing detention), their pleasures (you can forbid them to watch TV or ride a bicycle, reduce their pocket money, confiscate their possessions). A prefect may not be able to beat anybody, but if he works at it, and if the transgressions persist, he could probably have a boy beaten. Conceivably, if the circumstances were right, he could get a boy expelled. It is perhaps sufficient to say that, if he feels like it, a head of house can make the life of anybody in his house absolute hell.

I ended my school career as a head of house — we called them “house helpers.” I was not very officious, perhaps lethargic might be more apt, but I don’t ever expect to re-encounter that curious sensation of strolling through the house at night while everyone else was working at prep, master of my own territory, knowing that I could go anywhere, search anywhere, order people to do my bidding. It is, for those inclined to exult in it, a heady experience — perhaps not the sort of thing an eighteen-year-old should indulge in.

The occasion when one’s power, as it were, stared one in the face was over the issue of haircuts. In those days all young males had long hair, and one of the stigmata of being a public schoolboy was the fact that your hair was so short. Consequently, everyone endeavoured to grow their hair as long as possible. The longer your hair, the more “cool” you were. Haircut nights saw the head of house, clipboard in hand, patrolling the studies. His word was law — there was no higher court of appeal. Real dread was in the atmosphere. A local barber visited the house once a fortnight. He had to have heads to cut, a minimum of half a dozen. Who would be chosen? To enter a study was an eerie experience; one might have come to claim hostages or to issue a decimation order. At that moment the power one wielded was palpable.

A side-effect of power was adulation. They were not always concomitant, but one usually went with the other. By the reduced standards that operate within any enclosed or confined community it was possible to reach a level of fame or renown similar to that enjoyed by film actors or pop stars in the wider world. These folk heroes had their own fans, even their own imitators. I am glad to say that at my school prowess at games was not the sole route to celebrityhood. It was the age of student rebellion and we had our own existential heroes. I remember a couple of them vividly. There was Burns, taciturn and poetic. His influence was widespread and was responsible for an improbable Ezra Pound craze that swept the school. Against type, he decided rugby was permissible and secured a place in the First XV. But somehow he managed to play his rugby in a dissident, rebellious manner too — brooding, never shouting, socks always round his ankles — so it did not diminish his réclame. Pat-more’s hero was Oscar Wilde. He always wore his duffel coat like a cloak and parted his hair in the middle. He would saunter around, carrying a daffodil, with half a dozen acolytes at his heels. I do not know what has become of these two, but from time to time I do encounter other erstwhile superheroes and am always astonished at how bland and ordinary they are, and wonder from where they derived their early renown. The sad thing for these people is that adult life can never duplicate the fabulous triumphs of their schooldays — they peak at age seventeen or eighteen and it is all a long slide down from then on. They are the great reminiscers.

At my school promotion did not bring any great increase in privileges. Everyone wore the same uniform and rank was demarcated only by a silk flash on the left-hand side of the regulation school jersey. A house helper usually got a single study bedroom, and the prefects (“colour bearers”) enjoyed a more lax routine. Baths were a great luxury. We had two to serve sixty boys, and a house helper’s privilege was to order any boy out of a bath and take it as his own. There was always a huge waiting list, and because of the time involved the water was never changed. As a junior I would often step into a tepid bath in which the water was absolutely opaque from the grime of its seventeen or so previous occupants. As I grew more senior so my baths grew clearer. My one decadent luxury as head of house was to order the bell-ringer (the boy who woke up the rest of the house) to run me a bath in the morning. It would wait there — unused, steaming, limpid — until I came down to the shower room to claim it.

My own progress to this exalted position was straightforward. I moved up through the various ranks to colour bearer, and there I would have stayed had not the head of my house been promoted to head boy and I was pushed up to fill the vacant role. I do not think, from the official point of view, that I was a very good head of house — I was too lazy to put myself about in the accepted way. My two interests at that stage of my school career were sport and painting, and they, rather than official duties, claimed most of my energies. I was demoted to colour bearer for a term for staying out one night during a tennis tour in Edinburgh. An energetic Canadian took over for the interregnum (I was reinstated the next term) and ran the house far more efficiently than I. Fortunately, I was not obliged to move out of my study, so — apart from a certain notoriety — the punishment affected me not at all.

Our school was in Scotland, was in almost every respect a Scottish public school, and yet a strong Scottish accent was a real stigma. Indeed, any regional accent was parodied mercilessly. When people spoke with a strong Scottish accent we would make harsh retching sounds in the base of our throats or emit loose-jawed idiot burblings. Anyone with a Midlands or north of England accent heard nothing but a barrage of “Eee bah goom” and “Trooble at t’ mill.” We all found the mocking of accents endlessly amusing. This was part snobbery, part self-defence. All public schoolboys have an intensely adversarial relationship with the local population, especially with the local youths. To us the locals were “yobs,” “oiks,” “plebs,” “proles,” “peasants” and “yokels.” It now seems to me astonishing to recall the patrician venom we would express, like aristocrats faced with imminent revolution — a curious mixture of contempt, fear, guilt and jealousy. They lived, after all, in the real world beyond the school grounds, and however superior we congratulated ourselves on being, there was no escaping the fact that they were freer than we were — and that grated. I am sure that we in our turn were looked on as revolting, arrogant, nasty snobs. By no means a harsh judgement.

We longed to get out of school, but the outside world was both a lure and a taunt. It possessed everything that school denied us and at the same time was a constant reminder of the constraints and abnormalities of the society in which we were confined. Strenuous attempts were made to escape to it.

The easiest way to get there was to be selected for a school team. Because the school was situated so far north a considerable amount of travelling was involved in order to find reputable opponents. Rugby and hockey would take you to Inverness or Aberdeen two or three times a term, and often there were matches in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh occupied a place in our imaginations rather as Berlin did for poets in the 1930s. It seemed to our impoverished eyes unfailingly sinful and glamorous. To be selected for a rugby tour to Edinburgh meant happy hours in Thistle Street pubs rather than eager sporting challenges.

For the outside world meant alcohol rather than girls. Our stays were usually far too short and too well chaperoned to meet the opposite sex, but there always seemed to be a chance to get drunk. I remember a match in Dundee. A friend, who had left school a term earlier and had gone to Edinburgh Art School, caught the train to Dundee with two hefty overnight bags clinking with booze. After the match we had about forty minutes to drink the lot. The favourite tipple was neat gin washed down with a tot of Rose’s Lime Cordial.

Once in the outside world, we tended to band together. This was because we were conspicuous in our uniforms (the authorities had introduced blazer and flannels for exeats to spare our blushes over shorts and knee-socks) but also because we were somehow fearful and on edge. The outside world was a welcome source of contraband — pornography, drink, cigarettes — and also, in a sense, fair game. When boys went into towns the shoplifting rate rose alarmingly. In the local Woolworth’s two store detectives used to follow one particular boy around. He was the most accomplished kleptomaniac and used to take orders for his Saturday visits. We exulted in our delinquency and bandied legends of epic thefts: a souvenir shop in the Highlands left almost empty when a busload of boys cleaned it out; a boy who dug up copper wires on a nearby RAF station, at one stage blacking out the control tower when he sank his axe into a crucial cable. We would return gleefully to the safety of school, clutching our booty. And yet within the school itself theft was regarded as the most serious and antisocial of crimes — any thief could expect years of excoriation. Two worlds, two sets of standards.

Because of the isolation of the school we did not participate in the life of the local community in any significant way. We were too far away from most boys’ homes to make any half-term break practicable. It was not difficult to pass an entire three-month term without ever leaving the school grounds. As one grew older this unnatural segregation became more irksome. My abiding memory of my final two or three years is of a sense of life going on elsewhere. I felt as if I were experiencing a form of internal exile. A few away matches with teams only seemed to sharpen the sensation of missing out, of being bypassed.

The school grounds were capacious, the houses scattered randomly about the estate. I had a friend in a house so far away — over two miles — that I could rarely be bothered to visit him. The scale made it logistically difficult to creep out at night. I believe this is something that happens in most public schools. Here, escape is indulged in for its own sake, not as a means to some illicit end. In our case, and to reduce the risk of discovery, the nearest safe town was eight miles away. To drop from a dormitory window, change into civilian clothes, cycle the eight miles in order to snatch a pint of beer before closing time, then cycle back, was too arduous to make it worth while.

The summer was always better. We were very near the coast, and it was not difficult to spend a fragrant afternoon hidden among the gorse on the endless sand dunes, replenished with food and drink bought from stores at nearby caravan sites. Summer meant tennis too. The school tennis team was a member of a league that operated among tennis clubs in that area of the north-east. We would play against clubs in places like Inverness, Forres and Fochabers. The great advantage was that these games were played mid-week, in the evening. There was something unreal about these matches. The six of us in the team would get into a minibus at about half-past five on a Wednesday or Thursday evening and be driven to a small county town. There we would be dropped at the local tennis club. The matches were so regular that often no master accompanied us. For some reason — perhaps it was to do with the nature of the league — we often played against mixed doubles, sometimes against women’s teams. Here, at last, was life as most people led it. I have the most idyllic recollections of these warm summer evenings: long shadows cast across the red clay courts, the sonorous “pock, pock” of the balls in the air, the punctilious courtesy of our game (“I’m not sure if that was out — play a let!”), a few idle spectators — two girls, a dog, a ruddy man with a pipe. And then, afterwards, in the small clubhouse, with the glowing, perspiring wives of dentists and solicitors, all of us still in our dusty tennis whites, drinking half-pints of ginger-beer shandy, chatting, laughing in the palpitating dusk. There was, at least to us boys, a tender, bourgeois eroticism about these encounters, which was much analysed on the bus ride back to school. We often got back late, well after ten, with the school in bed, all curtains drawn vainly against the sunny northern evenings. We felt immensely proud of our exclusivity and were the source of great envy. Although I was a very keen sportsman at school, I find it quite easy to understand why tennis is the only game I play today.

The two main vices were drinking and smoking. Drugs were taken too, mainly marijuana, but were not anything like as prevalent as they are today. Smoking was completely banned, drinking almost so. A senior boy might get a glass of sweet sherry or a half-pint of beer off his housemaster if he was very lucky. These drinking restrictions must seem positively antediluvian to today’s public schoolboy. I recently sat down to dinner with a housemaster at one of our grandest schools, and the three boys who were invited seemed to drink as much wine as they wanted.

The underworld life of the school, then, was concerned almost exclusively with trying to procure and consume alcohol and tobacco without getting caught. Smoking was the most common. I would say that 95 percent of boys smoked at some stage of their school career, regardless of rank and position. Like any law that is consistently broken by a majority, it became impossible to enforce. Most colour bearers — who probably smoked themselves — turned a blind eye. All they asked for was a degree of discretion. I remember my study overlooked a road that led to a nearby wood. Every night after prep I could see the hardened smokers, in all weathers, in all seasons, trudging off for a “drag in the woods.” From time to time I’d ask them where they were going, to get the reply, “For a walk.” There was nothing illegal about going for a walk. You could always tell the smokers because they chewed gum and reeked of Brut aftershave — a brand unanimously endorsed by schoolboys of my era for its wholly effective smoke-obliterating pungency.

Smoking was cheap, fast and easy to hide. Drinking, possessing none of these attributes, was consequently less frequently indulged in. Usually it took place outside the school grounds. Journeys to and from school at the beginning and end of term were drunken binges. Dances, school celebrations, open days and the like were also opportunities for excess. We tended to prefer neat spirits for speed of effect. I remember after one school dance a friend of mine drank half a bottle of gin. Apart from a euphoric light in his eye he seemed fine when he sneaked back to his dormitory. He was caught the next morning when he woke up in a rank and befouled bed to discover that at some time in the night, without his realizing it, he had not only pissed and shat himself but had also vomited all over his pillow.

There was a certain illicit trade in sex magazines. Scandinavian magazines that showed pubic hair were particularly prized and could be sold for high prices. One enterprising boy who ran the school film society for a term was sent blurry but lurid catalogues from blue-film makers which, as far as we were concerned, were the last word in shocking explicitness. Certain novels were censored: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Ginger Man, Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what was permitted varied from house to house. As a fifteen-year-old I once got into fearful trouble with my housemaster because he discovered me reading Harold Robbins’s The Adventurers. It was confiscated on the spot. When I boldly asked for it to be returned on the last day of term I was told it had been destroyed.

Apart from thieving, the only genuinely illegal act that occurred with any regularity was joyriding. In my house two boys used frequently to take the assistant housemaster’s car out late at night. They would disconnect the mileometer and drive through the dark countryside for an hour or two. The owner of the car never noticed. This was an act of real daring, not to say foolhardiness; the consequences of being caught or of having an accident would have reverberated beyond the school — and yet it was not a rare event. All manner of cars were parked around the school buildings overnight. People would use them. The penalty for this crime would have been instant expulsion, but the staff, I am sure, never suspected that it went on. People could be expelled for theft, sex (homo or hetero) and consistent smoking or drinking or the taking of drugs. Few boys were expelled while I was at school: two went for having sex with school maids (the maids were sacked too); a small clique of drug-takers departed and a few heavy smokers. Boys often left of their own accord. Occasionally there would be “scandals” that made the newspapers — boys vandalized a girl’s flat on a rugby tour once, I recall — and also demanded the ultimate penalty. The boy who blacked out the RAF station also made the local newspapers. He was a simple, pale, gangly soul called Clough. He had made hundreds of pounds selling copper and lead pilfered from the air base to local scrap-metal merchants. The school, although properly outraged, had, I think, a sneaking regard for his entrepreneurial drive. His father, who did not want him at home, came up to plead for leniency with the headmaster. Clough’s punishment was to dig up all the tree stumps on the estate, a task that occupied all his free time for about two terms.

Swearing was a minor crime too, naturally. It is perhaps worth emphasizing, for anyone who doubts it, that the language of a public school is as bad as that of any army barracks. We employed all the usual four-letter oaths with unreflecting abandon. There were not many nonce words or neologisms in our private language at school for some reason. Perhaps because the school had been founded only some decades before, traditions had yet to establish themselves. At prep school it was pure Jennings and Darbishire—“Vanes,” “Quis?” “Ego!” “Stale news,” “Cave,” etc., etc. One exchange that I have never encountered elsewhere I record here for those interested in the folkloric side of public-school life. If you farted (“buffed”), everyone was allowed to punch you. However, if you said, “Safeties,” before you were discovered, you could foul the air unpunished.

We were obsessed with sex. I know this is true of all adolescent experience, but when I think now of the energy and relentless focus of our interminable discussions about the subject a sort of retrospective lassitude descends upon me, as well as a retrospective anger. Of course we talked about sex — we lived in a freakish, monosexual society. There was a parallel world out there in which the two sexes mingled and interacted and to which entry was denied us. No wonder our curiosity was so febrile and intense — and so destructive. The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion — fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did.

Endless conversation, speculation, fantasizing, poring over sex magazines, fervid masturbation … there is something soul-destroyingly monotonous about that facet of public-school life, and one looks back with genuine sadness and weariness at the thought of so much wasted time. But there it was, and at the time it was the favourite hobby. We made the best of our opportunities. Every girl and woman who set foot on the school grounds was subject to the most probing scrutiny — housemasters’ wives, innocent secretaries, fond mothers and guileless sisters visiting the school were evaluated with ruthless purpose.

However, the people who bore the brunt of our lewd interest were the maids. These were local girls, I think, and were hired — so public-school rumour famously has it — solely on the grounds of their ugliness. It made little difference. Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterized by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them — squeezing, pinching, feeling. The girls were remarkably tolerant. I never heard of any boy disciplined as a result of a complaint made by one of them. I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous, tarnished further by a brand of wilful class disdain and mockery that was almost dehumanizing. I dare say any male sodality — rugby team, army platoon, group of Pall Mall clubmen — can descend to this level for a while, but what is depressing and degrading about the male boarding school is the unrelieved constancy of the tone, year in, year out, for at least five years. It must have some effect.

There was also, it is true, a brand of passionate romanticism about our sexual curiosity that was slightly more amusing. Nobody ever admitted to being a virgin. By tacit consent conversation about the great day was always rather vague and woolly — it was just taken as read that everybody was, well, pretty experienced. There was one boy who made the mistake of confessing, at the age of seventeen, that he had still to lose his virginity. He became a laughing stock in the house. Little boys of fourteen would howl, “Virgin! Virgin!” at him. He came back the next term claiming to have lost it in the holidays, but it was too late. His greatest mistake was to have admitted it — the only honest man among shameless liars. And it was easy to lie — no one could prove that you were not the satyr you claimed to be, come the holidays. It was quite important, however, to live up to your reputation on the rare occasion when the company was mixed. Many a self-appointed stud came to grief at school dances, for example.

There was also the problem of letters. If you boasted of having a girlfriend, some evidence needed to be furnished: a photograph at the very least or passionate letters. We liked our letters from our girlfriends to be as conspicuously feminine as possible — coloured paper and envelopes with deckle edges and illustrations and drenched in scent. Post was distributed after lunch in the common room. A letter was inhaled, fondled, groaned and swooned over — exhibit “A” in the defence of your virility.

One boy, a jolly, rowdy person called Dunbar, used to exchange clippings of pubic hair with his girlfriend. In the dormitory the little tufts would be passed round like holy relics. We begged him to go further — the girl was French after all. At our crass prompting he finally did what we required. Together we composed a touching letter requesting a photograph in the nude. The girl was deeply offended, and the relationship shortly fizzled out.

Some boys, though, had exceptional good fortune. A friend of mine “got off” with the headmaster’s au pair, a pleasant Norwegian girl called Ingrid — a fabulously exotic creature to us. Another had an affair with his housemaster’s daughter, provoking fraught dilemmas of divided loyalty. The rest of us had to rely on rare opportunities provided by school dances or the biennial Gilbert and Sullivan, when the girls were bussed in to play the female chorus.

The school dance was little more than a meat market. By the time the girls arrived all the boys were well-fortified with alcohol. At the first slow number they pounced. The occasion degraded everybody. The Gilbert and Sullivans were more fun and more decorum reigned. We were meant to be rehearsing, and we saw the girls quite regularly over a period of a month. Courtship rituals were rather primly observed, and the alliances that were struck up remained for a good while on a rather chaste level — one was often invited to the girl’s house for tea on Sunday afternoons to meet her parents, for example. This more sustained contact usually provoked the dormant, romantic side of our nature, and many of us fell deeply in love as a consolation for being denied any physical release. That came, eventually, usually as the dates of the performances approached, a sense of time running out — as with soldiers due to return to the front — affecting both boy and girl. These wistful encounters were not so shaming. They were like any adolescent affair — cute, thrilling, melancholic — a brief foray into real life. They ended after the show as the barriers of the single-sex boarding school were reimposed. The only real victim was the Gilbert and Sullivan, in my memory always appalling, for the simple reason that none of the chorus had joined for the singing.

Every boy who leaves his boarding school has been shaped and formed, like it or not, by his years in that hothouse society. Of course, each individual will be affected to a different degree, but the only effective way of resisting the legacy is to get out early. My generation of schoolboys (class of 1970) was entirely typical not only of every other school but also of the generations that preceded us. We left school as unreflecting snobs — we had a very acute perception of “us” and of “them.” “They” were all the yobs, oiks, lefties and deviants who hadn’t been to public school. We were also racist, in a robust, cheery, easy-going manner, as the blacks and Arabs at school could testify. “Wog” was the commonest of nicknames and, to us, devoid of pejorative intent. We thought of women quite simply as sexual objects. We were politically naive — which is to say, knee-jerk Tories of the old squirearchical model. We had our moody rebels, true, but they were influenced by Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac rather than by any political faith. I knew only one boy at school who claimed to vote Labour — we thought him a ludicrous poseur at best, a patent moron at worst. Although most of us had done “A” levels, and the more successful were trying to get into university, we were afflicted with a brand of philistinism that manifested itself as a grave suspicion of “pseuds” or anyone who was too intellectual by half. Also many years of group loyalty, to the school, the house, the team, the power elite, had engendered a mistrust of the individual — indeed, “individualist” was often employed as a term of abuse. The maverick, the odd one out, the not easily assimilable, were to be regarded with caution. Not the best set of values with which to rejoin the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

So what happened? I think that, usually, the shock of encountering real life stimulated a hasty course of unlearning. Most public schoolboys have to start a stringent programme of re-education almost as soon as the school gates close behind them. This assumes, of course, that the society in which you are compelled to mix operates under different codes. There are still many walks of life in contemporary Britain where the transition from schoolboy to adult is imperceptible — the attitudes that served you well at eighteen will see you nicely through to retirement.

When I left school I went to live on my own in France for a year. The signal inadequacies of my education swiftly presented themselves to me, and I suppose it was then that I began to look back on the strange institution in which I had spent half my life and to wonder at it.

I often found the focus of my thoughts coming round to one boy, a little younger than me, who had been in my house. This person, a sallow, weak boy called Gibbon, had been hated by everybody, myself included. I have no idea why; he was just very unpopular. He was never really persecuted, just spurned. Sometimes a gang would descend on him, demolish his desk, push him around, but most of the time the punishment was verbal. He was a whipping-boy for the house. He appeared to take it in reasonable spirit, was not abjectly miserable, and so there seemed no real cause to change attitudes. He had no friends and walked everywhere by himself. He was so disdained that even other unpopular boys in the house would not associate with him in case the taint was contagious.

My own school career was, in a banal way, a successful one, comparatively untroubled and orthodox, but I kept wondering what it had been like for Gibbon during his five years. When he went home in the holidays and his parents asked him how he was getting on at school, what did he say? And, more important, what effect would those five years have on him as an adult? Would he shrug them off? Struggle on regardless? Carry them like a yoke? When I looked at my contemporaries, boys who had had a far easier time, and saw them, years later, still living in the heavy shadow of their school days, still wrestling with aspects of their personalities that were somehow corrupted, undeveloped or warped, I doubted, somehow, that old Gibbon would be the breeziest and most carefree of fellows.

1985

It was a piece of metal, dark grey, about three inches by one inch, with curious scalloped edges which resembled the crude working of a stone-age tool. In fact it was a chunk of German shell casing which, one night in October 1917, in no man’s land, during the third Battle of Ypres, hit my grandfather — William Boyd — full in the back.

I have held that piece of shrapnel in my hand but I never had the chance to ask my grandfather — who survived this incident and the war — what it was like, because he died in 1952 when I was a week old. I never had the chance to ask him what was going through his mind during that wiring party (he was a sergeant in the Royal Engineers) as he unspooled fresh rolls of barbed wire in front of the British trenches, freezing motionless as the starshells came over from the German lines. Perhaps he heard the unmistakable noise of incoming artillery — he had been two years on the Western Front by 1917—and wondered, as everybody must have done, if this time his number might be up.

When he came to, when he realized he was only wounded — not about to die, not hideously maimed — perhaps he thought of his brother, Sandy, who had also been wounded, a year previously, in August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. The Boyd brothers were both sergeants, but Sandy was in the Australian Army — the Australian Imperial Force — having emigrated to Australia in 1914, only to be sent back to Europe two years later to fight for the Empire. Sandy’s wounds earned him a medal — the DCM — as he had received them rallying his company in the face of a German counterattack at Mouquet Farm, organizing the remains of the company (all the officers were killed and wounded) and leading them out of harm’s way. Sandy was shipped back to Australia to convalesce and was duly presented with his medal by the Governor General at a parade in a park in Melbourne. The two brothers never saw each other again — Sandy died of a heart attack in 1940.

What united them, and what united huge numbers of their generation, was the unique and terrible experience of the Great War. It wasn’t actually very long ago, the First World War, just over eighty years, yet it seems to be preserved in our contemporary memories — as the twentieth century slips into the twenty-first — as something almost ancient, a mythic tale of bygone times. Those monochrome or sepia images still have the power to haunt and move, but I think we forget just how proximate they are and how the events they reflect have shaped and still shape our own times.

I remember, as a child, hearing stories about my grandfather’s and my great-uncle’s war experiences as I weighed in my hand the piece of shrapnel that finally got my grandfather out of the trenches. He was lucky, incredibly lucky, hindsight tells us, just as his brother Sandy was lucky — the only physical reminder of their respective ordeals was patches of fading scar tissue — though no one can really evaluate what the psychological wear and tear would have been; memories and images that would undoubtedly prove a more enduring legacy of their experience of battle. And perhaps my generation is the last one to feel any real closeness to those world-shattering events of 1914-18. It was oddly destabilizing, as I tried to track down an early photograph of my grandfather the other day, to hear one of my uncles referring to him casually as “Dad.” Indeed, had William Boyd senior lived a few years longer (he was only sixty-two when he died) I might have had my own memories of that stout, mustachioed figure I have seen in family photographs. Not merely my grandfather, after all, but a man who managed to survive two years in the trenches.

I think it is that closeness, that familial proximity, that provoked my own abiding interest in the Great War. For me, fundamentally, it is the un-knowingness, the unimaginability of that conflict that triggers the imagination. We have the newsreel images and the photographs, we have the memoirs, the regimental histories, the poetry and so on, but despite all this evidence the questions always remained only partially answered: what was it really like?

I can’t speak for other novelists who have taken the Great War as their subject but sometimes the best way to arrive at the truth is to lie — to invent, to fictionalize. The curious alchemy of art — rather than the diligent assembling of documentary fact — can be a swifter and more potent route to understanding and empathy than the most detailed photographs or the most compendious documentation. You have to do your homework, sure — authenticity has to be striven for — but in the end it is the fecundity and idiosyncrasy of the novelist’s imagination that will make the thing work — or not.

I first wrote about the First World War in my 1982 novel An Ice-Cream War. This was a forgotten corner of the Great War, an interminable struggle between the British and German colonies in East Africa (mirroring the larger one in Europe) — a surreal but bloody little affair that resembled the counterinsurgency conflicts of the sixties and seventies more than the traditional image of huge, immobile armies facing each other across 600 miles of trenches.

I turned to the Western Front proper in my novel The New Confessions, which was published in 1987. Here I tackled the battle where my grandfather had been wounded, the third Battle of Ypres, or Passchen-daele, as it is more popularly known. In the course of my research I spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum in London, watching contemporary newsreel pictures.

For obvious reasons, most of the sequences were filmed well behind the lines — endless shots of Tommies marching through French villages, artillery blasting away at distant targets and so on. There was very little that was what you might call authentic front-line footage. It was dangerous in those trenches, after all, and the photographers wisely kept their distance. Yet many of the images that are routinely screened on our televisions around Armistice Day are patent fakes—“action” staged in training camps with soldiers playing dead. The real stuff, when you can find it, is unmistakable, but it is rare — and of course it is mute.

One day, by chance, I ordered up a sequence about a burial party, just a few minutes long, of young soldiers lugging in dead bodies after a battle and dumping them by temporary graves. The misery and nauseated dread on the faces of the living is highly distressing and, just for a moment, because the cameraman was there, I was vouchsafed a tiny glimpse of the reality of what these young men, these boys, were going through.

It was during those weeks of watching miles and miles of newsreel that the idea of making The Trench was born. We forget that the First World War took place in glorious Technicolor, so familiar are we with its monochrome version. We forget also that those smiling faces, chatting, brewing up, puffing on their Woodbines, also spoke. The silence — and the sepia — distance the event from us profoundly, and it seemed to me one of the great values of making a film about the trench experience of the First World War at the end of the twentieth century would be that, at the very least, we would see it and hear it approximately as it must have been.

And perhaps, more importantly, it would be of some significance, as we leave the century behind, to attempt once again to come to terms with one of its defining events. It can be argued, with some conviction, that the twentieth century actually began in 1914, not 1900. Or, even more pertinently, that it began on 1 July 1916 at 7.30 in the morning as the barrage lifted and the first waves of Kitchener’s Army left their trenches and walked across the dense untended meadows of the Somme valley, the misty morning sun beating down upon them, to their sudden, messy deaths.

Philip Larkin’s great poem “MCMXIV” contains the mordantly resonant line, “Never such innocence again”—but the innocence that the hundreds of thousands of eager volunteers possessed in 1914 remained intact until the hideous debacle of the Somme in 1916. Sixty thousand were killed and wounded that first day — the bloodiest day of slaughter in the history of the British Army; perhaps even the bloodiest day of slaughter in any battle between armies, ever.

In the event, whether the world would have changed anyway, the battle usefully marks the great watershed. Without the disaster of the Somme the allies might well have brokered a peace with the Germans in 1916. But the terrible carnage of the Somme (400,000 British casualties, 175,000 French, 600,000 German) meant that the war had to be fought on, and fought on to be won. The cost of the war continuing for another two years — in every dimension (lives, damage, money) — exceeded everything that the first two years had balefully notched up. And as for the war itself, after 1918, nothing in the Western world could ever be the same again — socially, economically, sexually, politically, geo-politically, culturally — the twentieth century was full-throatedly under way.

This may explain why in the past two decades British novelists, at least, may have felt like re-exploring those turbulent four years. But I have a feeling that what may be whizzing about in the zeitgeist doesn’t necessarily produce good art: good journalism, yes, good non-fiction, undoubtedly, but most novelists are drawn to a subject by the small scale, rather than the large. (How can you write a novel about the deaths of 9,000,000 people over a period of fifty-two months?)

The writer — the film-maker, the playwright — is drawn to a subject, I believe, by character and story, by their potential and by the imaginative possibilities of elaborating on them. One needs only to glance at any portrait or snapshot of the soldiers of the Great War to sense in yourself that burgeoning curiosity, to set those same questions running — who are you? Who did you leave behind? How frightened were you? Did you think you would die? How would I have coped if it had been me instead of them? And so on — the answers to which provide the foundations upon which the fiction will rise.

The Trench is my attempt to provide the answers to those questions. It is not a film about conflict — the Battle of the Somme only begins at the end — but about waiting to go into battle and the pressures of that wait — two days, with the clock clicking remorselessly down — on very young men.

For the novelist, writing a film, let alone directing one, represents a great social opportunity: suddenly from being in a state of creative solitude you are a member of an exclusive club that numbers 100 or so members. And, as a corollary, the novelist discovers that the one great advantage of making a film, rather than sitting alone in your room, is that your overwhelming desire to “get it right”—to make it as authentic and true-to-life as is feasibly possible — is one that you share with all these fellow workers.

I looked on it as a good omen, just before we started filming, when a package arrived through the post. One of my uncles had unearthed a whole mass of material about his uncle, my great-uncle, Sandy. For the first time I saw a photograph of him, learned a little of his life before and after the war. He was a teetotaller and by coincidence I had written the part of the sergeant in my film as a teetotaller also.

The fact that he had fought and been injured at the Somme was also a curious benediction on our enterprise, it seemed, and Mouquet Farm, where he had been wounded, was in the same sector of the battle front where I had placed my notional platoon. Great-uncle Sandy looked very much like my late father (after whom he had been named) and, as we worked on through the film, if there was any ghostly presence haunting our trenches (and they were spookily evocative, especially in the early morning before the lights were switched on), I imagined it as being that of Sergeant Alexander Boyd, DCM.

I look at his face, as I have looked at countless other faces of soldiers of the Great War, and wonder what kind of a person he was and what his experience must have been like. We say, casually, that life in the trenches of the Western Front must have been “unimaginable” but the challenge of art, surely, is to try to imagine it, to set the imagination free and to try to bring that bizarre, terrifying, boring, filthy world to life.

In the citation that accompanied uncle Sandy’s DCM it says, “when all the officers became casualties, he took charge, and extricated his company with great skill. He set a fine example of coolness and determination.” The bland vocabulary of military bureaucracy is literally meaningless. A padre wrote from a military hospital to Sandy’s mother. “I visited your dear boy this afternoon. He has several wounds, but none of them of a severe character. The doctors and nurses have good hopes of his recovery.”

Again, a dead wall of decorum and cliché. From what little I know of him and the ups and downs of his postwar life, he seems to have been a doggedly principled, determined, simple sort of person. There are passionate letters after his death to his mother from a woman who loved him and bore his child saying what a kind and good man he was. What stories lie there? The imagination starts working again, questions form, possible answers spring to mind.

Who was this young Scotsman who left his native country to travel across the globe only to be sent back to Europe to fight in the meadows of northern France? Close to home, but so far away. And a brother serving too, perhaps not far off. The questions form, but I think I’ll leave them unanswered; I’ve done my own time in the trenches, now, in a novel and a film, and I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.

1999

Saturday afternoon. Summer. Oxford, 1980. In Bonn Square — a patch of grass with a few trees that faces the Westgate shopping centre — there is a war memorial commemorating some remote colonial campaign at the tail end of the nineteenth century. On one side of the stunted obelisk there is an inscription: “Killed by mutineers in Uganda, Brevet Major A. B. Thruston.” Beneath it, on the three steps at the base of the obelisk, loll a pride of fourteen-year-old skinheads, boys and girls, their cap-sleeved T-shirts revealing pale arms bruised with self-inflicted tattoos (biro ink and a safety pin). Three of them, like aged barflies, raise inflated plastic bags to their noses and leisurely inhale the fumes from the glue that congeals in the bottom. One fat boy, his face unnaturally red and shiny from the chemicals, rolls his eyes in simulated gourmet delight. You can practically see the damage being wreaked on his numb fist of a brain.

A few yards away around the maw of the shopping centre a group of sandalled young Christians sing modish hymns to the beat of a guitar and tambourine. Bearded, glossy-haired Iranian students chatter and gesticulate. Shirt-sleeved coppers stroll through the harassed mobs in Queen Street and Cornmarket. Three hundred French and Italian schoolkids assemble noisily at the foot of Carfax Tower. Coaches clog the bus station and bulk in every side street. The pavements are dark and sticky from the residue of ice-cream cones and abandoned lollies; waxpaper wrappers and polyurethane hamburger cartons form brittle drifts in shop doorways. Every step seems to connect with an empty Coke can. The city reels in a hot, jammed stupor, stunned by the heat and the perspiring shifting populace thronging its streets.

And yet … And yet the colleges somehow preserve their peace, effortlessly — it seems — maintaining a world that Brevet Major A. B. Thruston would have no difficulty in recognizing. The college lawns are cropped like cricket squares, unbadged by weed or daisy; someone practising the piano in an upstairs music room runs off an appropriate arpeggio. Everywhere there is new, spanking clean sandstone. The colleges receive their regular face lift like placid Palm Beach crones. The rechis-elled cornices and gargoyles are suddenly in sharp focus again, as if a lens has been twitched by an alert projectionist.

It is all, in fact, unsettlingly like an elaborate show. On my first visit to New York, within fifteen minutes of my arrival, I passed Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sauntering and chuckling down Park Avenue as if doing a retake for Annie Hall. I found this curiously sinister because it’s exactly what the mythology of Manhattan makes you inclined to expect — before you get there. Oxford imposes a similar doubt. The University buildings, the colleges, are so close to their imagined forms that I felt I was being inveigled into some unwitting cameo role in a monstrous cinematic project. It affects everybody in this way, as the undergraduates so readily demonstrate with their arch self-consciousness and Brideshead Revisited pretensions. These antics — the braying voices, the paraded neuroses — are harmless irritants on the whole, but the perfection of the backdrop now seems to me to be Oxford’s greatest attraction and — for its inhabitants in the University — its most insidious and damaging influence.

I came to Oxford five years ago to write a PhD thesis on Shelley. I had just got married and we lived in a large but inconveniently designed college flat on the Woodstock Road. It was inconvenient because the occupants of the upstairs flat could only reach their front door via our hall so we — perforce — got to know them quite well. Our neighbours over the next three years were a taciturn ginger-bearded chemist and his clog-wearing wife and, after them, a couple of timid American organ scholars. This couple, whose demeanour gave new resonance to the epithet “mild-mannered,” treated their flat with all the respect of H-block inmates and managed in the course of a year to wreak more damage on their abode than the most anarchic squat. As the rubbish began to tumble off the landing and creep down the stairs we began to feel like participants in a J. G. Ballard novel and hastily moved out.

We now live half a mile up the road — in a flat above a dentist’s with no noise and no neighbours — but still in north Oxford. The houses around are large, Victorian and brick. Their walls are freighted with ivy and wisteria, the gardens are long and capacious, there are lots of trees. There is a smug air of self-satisfaction about this particular suburb, as if we all sense our luck in being able to live here. It used to be a kind of dons’ ghetto and most of the houses, some of them enormous, were built in the last half of the last century when the colleges first allowed their Fellows to marry. The larger houses in north Oxford hover around £100,000 and today’s Fellows, if they can afford a house at all — in many respects Oxford is more expensive than most districts in London — live in tiny terraced boxes in west Oxford — Jericho, Hinksey — or off the Cowley or Iffley roads to the south. West Oxford is undergoing radical class-surgery as its incredulous lower-income-group inhabitants sell-out for sums that must have seemed beyond their wildest dreams to the young academics, University Press editors and the “new” middle-class professionals: designers of every shape and hue, folk-art manufacturers (original wooden toys, pine-furniture restorers, personalized roller-blind creators, etc.), management consultants and the like. Every third house these days has the obligatory skip parked outside as interior walls are battered out, old fireplaces revealed and basements are renovated. Now, tiny two-up, two-downs fetch prices in the mid twenty-thousands. The walls are so thin you can hear your neighbour cleaning his teeth.

East Oxford — Old Marston excepted — is bland and unremarkably modern in character. To the south lie Cowley and the British Leyland works.

Auden’s poem on the city perfectly captures the spirit of the place, the

Stones in those towers … utterly

“Goodbye. I your new translator am.” The old joke about encountering your translator for the first time is both irrelevant and, curiously enough, often eerily correct. I remember meeting one of my translators at a British Council do somewhere abroad and he was virtually monoglot. We stood in a corner trying to talk to each other about whatever novel of mine he was currently translating and I could barely understand a word he said, so thick was his accent and wayward his syntax. Yet he was regarded as one of the country’s finest translators and by all accounts had done my novels proud. Of course, what is most important in a translator is not his facility in your language but in his or her own. Also, I suspect that, initially, few authors worry a great deal about accuracy or style. The thrill of being translated is simply having a new copy of that familiar old book; of seeing that title transformed into something quite bizarre. Indeed, different alphabets do even more to satisfy this particular urge: Japanese, Hebrew and Greek versions can be relished and savoured quite uncomplicatedly.

However, as you get closer to home, I have to admit, worries start to intrude. My novels have been translated into twenty languages. I suppose that in at least half of the cases I have had absolutely no communication with the translator. And perhaps this is just as well: you can then repose all your trust in the professionalism of your publisher, confident that he would not employ someone merely desperate for cash. But once the translator makes contact your sanguinity can be all too easily undermined. My Norwegian translator, for example, actually concluded one of his letters to me thus: “Hey listen, man, if you’re ever in Oslo and short of bread you can crash in my pad anytime.” After I stopped laughing I started frowning. If this was his idea of English, how was his Norwegian? I conjured up images of a superannuated hippie sitting cross-legged on a mattress in an Oslo squat blithely grabbing at the wrong end of every textual stick in my novel. Luckily we fell out shortly after that. He berated me with some vigour over what he regarded as my thoughtlessness, not to say selfishness, in writing a novel as long as The New Confessions.

One of the first languages my novels were translated into was Dutch. Now, I cannot speak or read Dutch, my translator never made contact and, duly, the novels appeared. Because every Dutch person I had ever met spoke perfect English this was one set of translations that I never wondered about. But then, when A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War and Stars and Bars had been translated into, respectively, Gewoon een Beste Kerel, Gewoon een Oorlogie and Sterren, Strepen en een Gewoon Englesman, I began to worry. What was this “Gewoon” business, for Heaven’s sake? Did they think I was writing some kind of serial novel? To this day I’ve never dared ask.

Most of the time one hopes earnestly for the best, trusts to luck and tries to suppress those horrible suspicions. That Bulgarian edition of A Good Man in Africa with a naked black lady spread-eagled across the endpapers… Someone completely mystified by the expression “Tal-lyho!” and asking for an explanation … what, no dictionary to hand? And if “Tallyho!” was such a poser what in God’s name did he make of “Haughmagandie”? So why wasn’t he asking about it? And so on. But these instances are rare. On the whole I have exceptionally good relations with my translators and in the case of my French translator, Chris-tiane Besse, I have a co-worker whose diligence and attention to detail are second to none. And in French, at least, the rewards of the new text can be appreciated. When one reads, for example, sentences like, “Le lendemain matin, la véranda craque sous les pas, couverte comme elle l’est de leurs cadavres coriaces. Des lambeaux délicats et chatoyants d’ailes abandonnées gisent dans les coins,” the frisson of surprise and pleasure is genuine and acute and one realizes that a different language need not imply a loss and diminution of effect and how even a scrupulous literality can be transformed by the skill and art of a real expert.

1986

London is too big, too sprawling and attenuated, to be encompassed or defined, to be fixed on the page in one or many identities. The city spreads itself out generously, expanding north, south, east and west from its brown river looping lazily through its shallow limestone valley. I live near its centre, a hundred metres from the Thames in Chelsea. I have friends who live in Hampstead and Crouch End to the north, Barnes and Richmond to the west, Streatham and Tooting Bec in the south, Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs in the east, but they feel so far away, as if they were inhabitants of other towns, in other counties. If I were to visit them, for example, for lunch or dinner, I would think nothing of allotting an hour or more for the journey, or even longer, depending on the time of day. These are vast distances for a city dweller and they affect our perceptions of the place radically. To a very real extent it is quicker for me to go to Oxford than it is to Stoke Newington in north London, easier to travel to Cambridge than visit a colleague who works on a newspaper in Wapping in the city’s east end. Oxford and Cambridge, provincial towns a hundred kilometres away, feel more accessible than districts of the city I inhabit. What does that tell me about London? What kind of Londoner does that make me? And I am not alone. No matter where you live in the city the same sense of isolation, the same alienation from other areas of the place affect you. We live so close and yet we feel so far apart, with such a long journey to make from district to district. And with these fraught trajectories across the city it is no wonder that we draw in on ourselves, create zones and parameters, homelands and reservations, beyond which we are reluctant to go. If Los Angeles can be defined as ninety suburbs in search of a city the same can be said of London too. There is no one London, there is no one place, one entity, it is a congregation, a plurality, the sum of its many and disparate parts.

Broadly speaking, the city is made up of two dozen or so villages, each geographically distinct and each with its own character. When I spread a map of London in front of me and look at those areas I know well, where I regularly frequent and visit, I am astonished at how much of the place is still terra incognita. I live in Chelsea, I know the neighbouring “villages” of Fulham, South Kensington and Knightsbridge well, very well indeed. A little further beyond and things begin to grow hazy: Hammersmith and Belgravia, Pimlico and Westminster, Notting Hill and Bayswater, Mayfair and Bloomsbury are familiar but I can easily get lost in them. I look at the map and I see I have barely strayed beyond London’s south-west quadrant. To the south, just across the bridges over the river, lie Battersea, Wandsworth and Clapham — barely explored. To the north, north of Regent’s Park, lie places that are wholly alien and strange. From time to time my work takes me to Camden Town. And beyond Regent’s Park, north of the great railway termini of Euston, St Pan-cras and King’s Cross, I feel I cross an invisible boundary. Here in north London the buildings look darker, sootier, in less good repair. The streets seem more narrow, the people scruffier, the pavements littered and soiled. Yet I have travelled barely two miles from my home. It is not so much that I have crossed a topographical frontier, it is more of a psychological barrier that separates me from these other areas. I feel different here in north London, just as I do in the east or south of the river, and because I feel different everything about these places — the buildings, the denizens, the atmosphere — is subtly altered as well.

So we cling to our familiar territories and venture forth with a bizarre reluctance. Everyone judges the other districts of London in unconscious comparison with their own. I have no desire to live anywhere else in the city so for me “London” is to a significant degree Chelsea and its immediate environs. I don’t drive either so my local streets possess a familiarity denied the motorist. I walk for miles through south-west London, in ever widening loops that take me to regular points of reference — bookshops, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, auction houses, newsagents. Here they make the best cappuccinos in town; here I can buy a complete copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on a Monday; here I can sit and read in a garden by a fountain. My portion of the city is exhaustively mapped, it is known intimately, but its grid references remain private and subjective.

Chelsea, of course, is a famous place and has been a haunt of artists and writers for two hundred years: Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Whistler, Rossetti, Henry James, Swinburne, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon… From my bedroom window I can see the spire of the church Dickens was married in. In a house in the little square around the corner Mark Twain stayed, and so on. It is a district of narrow streets and stuccoed houses, of secret tree-filled squares and back-street pubs, of Georgian terraces and Victorian public buildings, all loosely held together by the winding ribbon that is the King’s Road. Cyril Connolly (1903-74), writer, critic and bon viveur, in many ways the quintessential Chelsea dweller, developed a potent nostalgia for the place. He called it “that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum where I worked and wandered.” It is an enchanted place and there is a quality about the light too that appears different: perhaps it is the gleaming stucco that reflects back with extra force what little sun we receive in London, or perhaps it is the river — so close, but always out of sight — the air above and around it washed twice a day by its tidal ebb and flow, a conduit of freshness running through the grime of the city.

So much else of London suffers by comparison with Chelsea (or so Chelsea dwellers would have you believe): elsewhere seems less fun, less heterodox, less green, less refulgent, but Chelsea shares one quality with the other districts that makes London different from almost any other city one can imagine. Chelsea’s winding, narrow streets are lined with houses, small cottages and mews, Georgian crescents, Victorian terraces, and when one reflects further one realizes that London is in essence a city of houses, of single homes with small gardens with a single front door. There are a few areas of flats and apartments, but the overriding impression is of one family unit, one house. This seems to me to explain much about London, and not just the city’s sprawling, generous, unstructured size but also its particular atmosphere and ambience. The house becomes the centre of the city dweller’s universe, social life takes place behind the curtained windows of the dining room and sitting room, not in the streets, or squares or great public meeting places. In fact there are no real public areas in London, no great squares, no spacious boulevards. At night the vast majority of the population are back in their homes, enclosed and self-sufficient and indifferent to the life beyond their front door.

This has, it seems to me, two obvious effects that make London unusual, given its size and renown and that it is one of the great capitals of the world. First, the pace and energy of the city seem to quieten spontaneously at around eleven o’clock at night. It is as if there is a kind of tacit curfew, a feeling that to be out in the city after midnight is — if not illicit — not exactly normal. Leave a cinema or a show at the end of the evening and try to find somewhere congenial for a drink or a coffee or a meal and you are severely tested. The pubs are closed or closing, only a handful of restaurants serve meals after 11 p.m., public transport winds down, taxis disappear. The city is going to bed and those who want to stay up a little later are going to have their ingenuity and their wallets stretched to the full.

The second feature of London that extends from this home-based society is its privacy. London is a private city, intimate and reclusive. It works best for those who know its secrets, those who have learned the ropes. Even the pub — that one symbol of communal life on every street corner — represents a physical challenge to the stranger. You have to push through a heavy door to enter. You cannot see what is happening inside from the outside. It does not offer an implicit welcome to the casual passer-by, unlike the sidewalk cafe. It is a closed place, its windows are frosted, its gaze is inward-looking. Children are not admitted, its aura is masculine, gloomy, self-absorbed. Even more extraordinary, inside some pubs there are bars that operate on an overt class system: this bar, the decor says, is proletarian, for serious drinking; that bar is genteel, a place where you may bring your wife. The two rooms are often quite separate, entered by different doors.

There is no street life in London as might be recognized in Paris or Rome or Madrid, there is no community of souls in this city, there is no democratic sharing in what the city offers. To get the best out of it you have to be a member of a club. Clubs operate in many diverse ways, from the traditional gentlemen’s club in St James’s or Pall Mall to an avant garde theatre group, but they all point to the same conclusion. If you live in the city and if you wish to exploit it to the full you discover that again and again, to experience the best London has to offer, you have to become a member.

Fifty yards from my house there is a small London square, classic, pretty, with tall plane trees and rhododendrons, a lush lawn, some park benches. You come upon it, as is true of so many of London’s hidden squares, quite by accident. It looks enchanting, a small green island amongst the brick and the asphalt, sheltered and tranquil. Iron railings surround it. Tired, footsore, perhaps just seeking a moment’s repose, you try the gate. Locked. But people are in there, children are playing. A small sign says—“residents only”—you walk on by, excluded. You may look but you may not touch. This little garden in Tedworth Square is yet another of London’s exclusive clubs for members only. If you want to enjoy it you have to qualify for a key.

Such moments provoke attacks of spleen against London and its bourgeois smugness. You cannot live in a great city and not be alternately enraptured and repelled by it. I think of my own nine years in London, how privileged and protected they have been, and how any account of my point of view of the place does no justice at all to its dark side, London’s slums and sweat shops, its poverty and meanness, its vice and brutality. Look how the glossy limousines sweep out of the Savoy Hotel on to the Strand and how there, in every shop doorway in their cardboard boxes, huddle the homeless, the drunk and the deluded. But this juxtaposition is commonplace, this is not London’s problem any more than it is New York’s or Delhi’s or Nairobi’s or Manila’s. Other grudges against the city are, however, more precise and localized. Why has London neglected its river and built power stations and coal yards and warehouses along its banks? Why have so many disgusting buildings been erected everywhere else? London was never beautiful, it could never be described as stylish or splendid. Its centre — Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square — has a solid, massy quality to it, a reflection of the prodigious success of its mercantile past and imperial dominance. But even in the 1950s London had a low, almost Venetian skyline, punctuated by its needly church spires, one that has now virtually disappeared, swallowed up by the unregulated explosion of office blocks and high-rise buildings. Why is there so much dog shit in the streets? Why are there so many cars? Why did we allow Mrs Thatcher to abolish the perfectly efficient, though inconveniently socialist, Greater London Council so that this enormous city no longer has an elected administration to run it? The litany of complaints can run and run.

But, as Dr Johnson said, “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” And it takes only a moment for the bile and resentment to alter into in-vigoration and enthusiasm. In 1928 Cyril Connolly returned to London after five weeks in Spain. In his journal he recorded: “Back in London … feel nothing but intense disgust. General dissatisfaction and distress.” But a few days later he writes, “I seem to be falling in love with London… To feel this jungle come to life all round one in the evening, the same October mists, fires, lights, wet streets, blown leaves, to plunge into its many zones not knowing what one will discover …” This seems to me the authentic London voice and the authentic London experience. There is a vibrancy about the city just as there is complacency and apathy. There are maddening irritations as well as astonishing diversity. And there is also this constant prospect of discovery before you, of new places, people, experiences, views and vistas that this huge, perplexing, secret city somehow manages to keep hidden until it chooses to reveal them. A big solid hard place, pragmatic and worldly, but it still retains its powerful, irresistible allure.

1993

Since 1996 I’ve spent between forty and fifty days a year in New York and, if I can’t claim to be a local, I do feel I’ve come to know the place better than your average tourist: I have my habits, I have my little routines and short cuts, I am a regular in certain bars and restaurants. I may not be at home but I feel I occupy a kind of residential limbo — in prolonged and agreeable transit. I am, as they would say in France, un familier.

One measure of this familiarity is that there is a walk I do most Mondays to Fridays that has become as much a part of my life as similar walks are in London. It starts where I live when I’m in New York, a small hotel on 63rd Street between Park and Madison, and it forms a rough oblong shape that covers a fair bit of the Upper East Side. The Upper East Side suffers a little from its reputation — as a place where only the truly wealthy New Yorkers live, hidden away in immaculate, doorman-guarded apartment blocks. Like all clichés this one possesses a fair degree of truth. But the denizens of this bit of Manhattan do make for a fascinating passing parade, and the one place you’ll see them out of their apartments and town cars is on the streets around here. People-watching doesn’t come much better than on Madison Avenue.

Yet the Upper East Side is a far more heterogeneous place than its snootily upscale reputation might suggest and the first and most intriguing aspect of this walk is that, over its couple of miles or so, you will encounter as many facets of Manhattan life as you would almost anywhere else.

I leave the hotel and turn left towards Madison Avenue and, a few paces later, reaching Madison turn north, heading uptown. In the four years I’ve been coming regularly to New York, Madison has turned itself into one of the most remarkable shopping streets in the world, a mile-long hymn of praise to labels and logos, high prices and haute couture. This is fine if you’re interested in shopping but, even if you’re not, these immaculate temples of consumerism are still diverting to the eye. The Madison run actually starts a few blocks south of 63rd with Nicole Farhi, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, but as I turn northward pretty soon I’m flanked by Armani and Valentino and up ahead loom Krizia, Ungaro and Bulgari and so on. Also in this stretch of the Avenue are found small see-and-be-seen restaurants, such as Nello, Cafe Nosidam and La Goulou, serving international food to an international clientele, but my first break usually occurs, mundanely, at an ATM machine in Citibank and then, on 67th, I am occasionally obliged to stop for breakfast at the Gardenia Cafe. There are two potential breakfast/coffee stops on this long first stretch of the walk up Madison, but the other — another timeless classic, a Viand — is many blocks northward. The Gardenia is also a classic diner, although, fittingly for the neighbourhood, it seems slightly more genteel. A long, thin, dark room, serving American reliables — eggs, bacon, potatoes — with astonishing speed and fussless taciturnity. I drink my coffee and, if it’s a Wednesday, read my New York Observer, a weekly, and, just possibly, the most interesting and best written newspaper in the world.

On up Madison the march of brand names continues — Dolce & Gab-bana, Yves St Laurent, Sonia Rykiel. More intriguingly we encounter (on 70th) the first of five independent bookshops this walk provides. This is the Madison Avenue Bookshop, small and well stocked, famous for the contemptuous aloofness of its erudite staff.

We’ve been walking slightly up hill thus far, on the east side of the Avenue. At the crest of this gentle hill stands the Westbury Hotel, now converted into condominiums, and looking left down the cross streets you can see narrow, tree-crowded vistas of Central Park.

Strolling easily downhill you pass on your right the impossible fantasy that is Ralph Lauren’s shop/mansion on 72nd, a two-way cross street. It’s worth visiting this shop if only to see the quintessence of the Ralph Lauren vision of the good life: the dream made flesh. Across 72nd is the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. None of New York’s churches is particularly distinguished, architecturally, but they are to be valued for their Victorian gothic contribution to the twentieth-century skyscape. Gargoyles, teetering finials and flying buttresses make the perfect decorative counterpoint to the concrete and plate glass angularities of the skyscrapers and office blocks. Diverted as you might be by the life on street level it is always worth looking up in New York every fifty yards or so. It never palls, this prospect of lofty buildings, and, particularly at night, it can be astonishingly beautiful, these soaring masses of stacked lights and the wavy ripple of mirror glass

Up ahead, on 74th Street, is the inverted grey ziggurat that is the Whitney Museum of Modern American Art. The Whitney is a great museum, not so much for what it periodically contains (though its permanent collection is superb) but for the building itself. Solidity, moneyed-heft, integrity are the quiet messages its stone, brass and mahogany seem emphatically to convey. The lifts are gigantic, the finish flawless (no expense has been spared), its scale is impressive and it is astoundingly easy to use. I don’t know what it is about the Whitney that draws me so. I prefer it to the Guggenheim and MoMA (not so far away, either). I think it must be something to do with the proportion and massiveness of its construction. As I pass it every day I can go in when it’s just opened. I often find myself wandering around with only the museum guards for company. In any given week I may flit in for half an hour two or three times.

On up Madison past the discreetly sumptuous wonders of the Carlyle Hotel and we are approaching my destination on 79th Street. This is the New York Society Library — where I work. This is an ancient institution by American standards, dating back to the eighteenth century. The library has moved many times in its history before ending up here in a capacious town house on 79th, between Madison and Park. The library is private — it costs $100 or so a year to join — but it provides personal access to a huge collection of books and journals (you can browse in the stacks) and, more importantly for someone like me, at its summit, rooms with desks where a transitory writer can plug in his computer and, in theory at least, work. It remains a defiantly unmodernized place, with filing cards as well as computerized catalogues, marble sculptures on the wide stairways and a politely formal way of dealing with its members. Its reading room could come out of a gentleman’s club in London — tall, elegant windows, leather armchairs, periodicals displayed on circular tables, people speaking rarely and then in the quietest of whispers.

And this is where I spend my day, venturing out at lunchtime a little further up Madison to E.A.T. (80th Street) — the closest thing to a New York brasserie (as opposed to a pseudo-French one) that the city provides. It welcomes many solo diners, which seems an almost forgotten pleasure these days. Eating a proper lunch alone (rather than a bite of something on the run) is an agreeable pastime but it mustn’t be rushed and needs to be accompanied by some sort of reading matter — book, newspaper or magazine. They don’t chase you out, either, when you’ve finished. You can easily spend an hour in E.A.T. reading and eating and covertly watching the people around you at the same time.

And afterwards, if you require more diversion, just a block away on 5th Avenue is the sprawling bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, an incomparable treasure trove and again the sort of museum, in my opinion, that favours the periodic half-hour visit rather than the day-long, enervating culture-trawl. And, if the Met doesn’t beguile, a couple of blocks north of E.A.T. is my favourite bookstore in the city — Crawford Doyle, another independent bookshop, which not only sells everything in print you might want to read (with great charm and friendliness) but has a thriving antiquarian business to tempt you as well.

The library shuts at the end of the working day and the second leg of my walk commences. I prefer not to walk back down Madison — it’s more of a morning thing, Madison Avenue — so I stroll along 79th, heading eastwards towards Lexington Avenue. This involves crossing Park Avenue and here you are afforded one of the great American vistas: the view south down Park Avenue towards the Met-Life building at its foot. It’s probably best at dusk, with some blue still left in the sky, but with enough gathering gloom to set the refulgent windows of the towering, lit buildings glowing like banked coals.

On to Lexington and a right turn southwards. Lexington is smaller (in that its buildings are lower), narrower and shabbier than its two adjacent avenues to the west and it provides a welcome contrast. From gleaming, pricey, exclusive New York, you enter a neighbourhood, a place where people actually live and shop for themselves. Gone are the designer stores, to be replaced by supermarkets, delis, Chinese laundries. Lexington has its own special bonus, however: as you walk south you are aiming for the Chrysler Building, the world’s most beautiful skyscraper, its silver, art deco, hypodermic needle gleaming gold — if you’re lucky — in the orange evening sun.

You start to walk up hill again, fairly soon, up the steeper rise of Lennox Hill, heading towards Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) with its two aerial pedestrian-ways crossing the avenue. Here there is an intriguing congregation of antique shops and, within the space of a few blocks, three more independent bookstores: Lennox Hill Bookstore (on 73rd), Bookberries (on 71st) and Shakespeare & Co. on 69th. All have their own distinct character and all are worth stopping in to browse. The hegemony of Borders and Barnes & Noble hasn’t — visibly — seemed to have affected independent bookselling in this part of the city, and a visit to any of the five on this walk will remind you of the advantages of plucky independence versus the chain store.

My pit-stop on the walk back is on 73rd, called the Cafe Word-of-Mouth. Downstairs is a takeaway, upstairs is almost a tea-room: Rennie Mackintosh meets art deco, all cherrywood and taupe. The last time I did this walk I inverted it — came up Lex, went down Mad. It had snowed in the night and there were foot-high banks of frozen snow on the sidewalks. It was bitter cold, with a wind that seemed to take the skin off your face. I stopped in Cafe Word-of-Mouth for sustenance. A big caffe latte, scrambled eggs and crispy bacon. I read the newspaper and thawed out, then plodded off up Lexington to the library, full and warm.

If you want alcohol on this walk you have to go into hotels (the Mark or the Carlyle on Madison) or go further afield to the bars of Third Avenue where you’re spoilt for choice. Though it’s worth remembering that you can go into any New York restaurant and just have a drink at the bar without any problems. There used to be a bar on Madison called the Madison Pub — a dark semi-basement — but it closed recently. Things come and go with astonishing swiftness in New York and the Upper East Side is no exception: in the last two years I’ve seen an entire skyscraper rise up from Park Avenue to dominate the view from my hotel room. A favourite cafe closed (where reputedly you could get the best espresso in Manhattan); a famous landmark bookstore — Books Etc. — went, almost overnight. But this walk up Madison and down Lexington seems to me to contain, for all its regular and sudden transformations, something that remains a representative mixture of the whole city. Fashion, commerce, philanthropic art, the quaint, the banal, the unique, the down-and-dirty, high culture and nail parlours.

It’s all down hill from Hunter College’s crossroads. Students mill about smoking, sprawl on the steps. They seem all to be foreign, reminding you of this city’s polyglot heritage, the welcome it gives (or gave) to immigrants. And indeed many of the shops on this last stretch down to 63rd and the hotel reflect that ethnic mix: pizza joints, kebab houses, Korean nail parlours, Chinese take-aways. And just at the end at the last block is A&B Stationers, home, it seems, to every foreign newspaper and magazine you could ask for. The British papers arrive twenty-four hours later and it seems bizarre, at six o’clock on a New York evening, to see the racks outside filled with the Guardian, Independent and the Telegraph. Bizarre but therefore somehow normal in this place, if the paradox doesn’t seem too forced. Nothing, in New York, is really surprising, when you come to think about it — once you’ve got over your surprise.

2000

12 May 1986-27 March 1997

A Personal A-Z

While I was at university (1971-5), studying English Literature, my taste was shaped not so much by the syllabus of the courses I was following or the academic criticism I read for my essays but by the books pages of the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. In the Sunday Times I went — unfailingly, immediately — to Cyril Connolly’s weekly review, and in the back half of the New Statesman I read everything that was on offer.

The seduction of Connolly’s hedonistic, unscholarly, romantic enthusiasms is easily explained. I have read, over the years, almost every word he has written and he figures frequently in these pages. The New Statesman had an altogether more acerbic, influential effect. In the early 1970s I waited each week for its arrival with a hungry expectation that has never been repeated with any other publication. The literary editors in those years were Claire Tomalin and Martin Amis and when you draw up a roster of its contributors at that time some of its allure can be explained: Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Blake Morrison, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Conrad, Jeremy Treglown to name a few. The house style was mordant, knowing, witty and took no prisoners. It shaped my own reviewing practice and my early reviews, including one for the Statesman itself that I present here for sentiment’s sake, were an effort to achieve a similar cool, intellectual stringency. As a result I have to admit that, while I hope I was never ruthlessly or maliciously savage, I was often very harsh as a reviewer in my early days — something I take care to recall when I receive the odd critical spanking myself.

Later, in the early 1980s I became a regular reviewer of novels in the Sunday Times. This is perhaps the most thankless form of reviewing available, but a good apprenticeship for the tyro critic. To be given four novels and, say, 800 words in which to summarize and review them — amusingly, cleverly, accurately — is a taxing and demanding subclass of critical writing whose particular merits are very hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t attempted it. However, as you are at the bottom of the contributors’ food chain, your copy is also the first to be cut if space is required. This happened regularly and the corresponding terseness has not made the reviews wear all that well. Consequently, only a few of my Sunday Times reviews make it into this volume.

My first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981 and as I published more books myself and gave up my teaching at Oxford (I was a college lecturer there, at St Hilda’s College, from 1980-83) to move to London and write full-time I was happy to give up the three-weekly review. It’s hard work; you burn out. I carried on reviewing but I felt I’d paid my dues in the salt-mines of critical writing.

The organizing principle in this section has been to present the reviews as I wrote them, starting in 1978 and moving on, rather than arrange them under any thematic or geographical scheme. This is what came across my desk as the years went by. As time has progressed the space provided in which to write has steadily grown. It is a welcome corollary: the luxury of having a few more pages in which to expound your opinions is all the sweeter because of that earlier discipline.

Patrick Kavanagh repudiated his early and best-known book The Green Fool as “Stage-Irish autobiography,” and in one sense his so-called “autobiographical novel” By Night Unstarred looks like an attempt to reclaim Irish rural life from the lush romanticism and sometimes strained folksiness that marred the earlier venture. Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh’s only other major fictional work, also has its roots in his formative years and like The Green Fool concerns itself with the growth of the poet against the background of the Irish countryside. Although Kavanagh was much more pleased with Tarry Flynn — modestly finding it “uproariously funny”—both it and The Green Fool are damaged by Kavanagh’s semi-mystical love of nature and a certain platitudinous idealism that occurs whenever the subject of the poet’s privileged insight and depth of feeling is raised.

By Night Unstarred on the whole avoids these pitfalls; largely, I suspect, because the main portion of it has nothing to do with poets or poetry. Although claiming to be a “novel,” the book really consists of an unfinished short novel and a short story that would have been far better left unjoined. Peter Kavanagh, the author’s brother and the editor, has sought to produce a unified work of fiction by labelling the two disparate stories parts 1 and 2, and by supplying an apologetic explanatory interjection that in the end only exposes the artifice of the link.

Part 1 is far and away the most successful of the two, and, not surprisingly, the least autobiographical. Set in the parish of Ballyrush near Dundalk at the beginning of the century it charts the remorseless rise to prosperity of a weaselly Irish peasant called Peter Devine. Initially an impoverished farm labourer, he impregnates the local half-wit Rosie and has to flee the wrath of her family and the censure of the parish. He returns seven years later an obsessed and oddly motivated man. Maniacally set on becoming the richest man in the county, he courts the bulky daughter of the wealthiest farm-owner in the district and enlists the help of various colourful local characters to this end. By sly manipulation and unscrupulous use of the village gossips a myth grows up about his eligibility and fairly soon he is accepted as a suitor. Devine’s sole interest is in wealth and his romantic yearnings are wholly subservient to this drive (“When he noticed her wobbling breasts beneath the loose blouse he dreamt of the field before the door with the deep hollow in the middle”). Ultimately his dedication proves highly successful, and in material terms Peter Devine triumphs in everything he does from siring children to planting potatoes. The end of part 1 sees him poised on the edge of bourgeois prosperity — a rich mill owner and county councillor — with his financial horizons beginning to broaden: “The priest had smoked three cigarettes since coming into the room: a bit of money in a cigarette factory would be no dead loss, he thought.”

The strength and vigour of Kavanagh’s portrayal of the villagers of Ballyrush are due to the constancy of his ironic gaze; a steadfastness of viewpoint that The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn sadly lacked. Kavanagh sees all too clearly that country people are as pusillanimous, bitchy and determinedly mercenary as the rest of us, if not more so: “The misfortune of a neighbour provided nearly all the best delights of that part of the country.” And Peter Devine, who dominates part 1, is explicitly alluded to as a personification of “the slime-stuck peasant unconscious of cities, of cultures, of everything but the power of money.” There is a sharp Flaubertian cynicism in evidence, free from any romanticism or fond simplicity, which makes Ballyrush as mordant a picture of a rural community as Yonville in Madame Bovary.

Part 2 jolts uneasily some decades ahead and the central figure now becomes “Patrick Kavanagh” (in an Isherwoodian third-person return to his younger self) fruitlessly searching for a job in Dublin. The Devines have resurfaced as the De Vines, now, thanks to Peter’s acumen, a large, vastly wealthy and powerful Dublin family with an interest in the arts. Patrick’s attempts to advance himself — and thereby to marry the girl he loves — are continually thwarted by his refusal, or inability, to ingratiate himself with the monolithic De Vine family. The cynicism of part 2 is of a more embittered and personal sort. Kavanagh’s skilful, distanced irony turns to shrill vituperation and the personal venom is all too apparent in the vignettes of literary and middle-class poseurs.

This is where the autobiography obtrudes and once again Kavanagh returns to the question of the poet’s role and function in society which, with the weight of personal invective behind it, inevitably damages the fiction. By all accounts the first fifty years of Kavanagh’s life were remarkably unpleasant and frustrating, and it seems he had every justification for bitterness and self-pity. And it’s the self-pity in the end that emerges and weakens this section of the novel and which makes “Patrick Kavanagh” such a hard character to sympathize with.

1978

Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis on 9 January 1922 at Gurdjieff’s Institute, the Prieuré, near Fontainebleau. D. H. Lawrence commented that it was “a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt” and, having earlier accused her of “stewing” in her illness, he must have seen a singular aptness in her dying there. For in one sense, as this biography makes clear, most of Katherine Mansfield’s life had been composed of sickly stunts of one sort or another.

Born into a prosperous New Zealand family in 1888, she spent her childhood and early adolescence hankering for release, already thinking of herself, according to Meyers, as “an artist who lived in a world of her own.” She felt stifled by the bourgeois philistinism of life in the colonies and left to go to school in London at the age of fourteen. The abandoned country soon became transformed in her imagination — as is common with most exiles — into a land of beauty and innocent childhood pleasure. She returned there briefly in 1907 but from 1908 onward lived in England and Europe. It was a notably unhappy existence too, spent in a succession of drab rented properties and hotels and featuring, among other mishaps, a temporary addiction to Veronal, an abortion, a one-day marriage, lesbian relationships, continual ill-health and, most unfortunately perhaps, marriage to Middleton Murry.

At the centre of any biography of Katherine Mansfield lies her relationship with Middleton Murry, who was at one point, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, “the most hated man of English Letters in the country,” and who described himself as “part snob, part coward, part sentimentalist.” It was a highly unsatisfactory liaison from the start, with Katherine Mansfield having to coax a reluctant Murry into her bed, and its unpropitious beginnings heralded a succession of bitter rows, partings and brief reconciliations. Murry’s subsequent idolization of his dead wife has tended to obscure the picture but Meyers’s careful delineation of the facts makes the nature of the relationship clear. Where Murry is most condemned is not so much in the see-sawing marital strife but in his lukewarm and even callous response to her progressively worsening illness. He was often absent from her during her long periods of attempted convalescence on the Continent and provided skimpy financial support. However, it has to be said that she was not averse to employing her fragile condition to its full dramatic effect. One visitor to the Murry household had this to say:

Normally the pretensions of an American novel bear a direct proportion to the number of pages printed. The simple formula being: the thicker the volume the more serious the message contained. What is both striking and gratifying about Song of Solomon is the absence of transatlantic largesse and hyperbole in a novel that clearly sets out to be significant.

Toni Morrison’s well-structured story concerns itself with two generations of a black American family from the 1930s to the 1960s. Macon Dead is a wealthy Chicago landlord eager for bourgeois respectability. But like most façades of middle-class content this one hides the usual catalogue of fear and frustration. Macon’s unorthodox sister Pilate and her own Bohemian household of illegitimate daughter and grandchild stand as a permanent rebuke to Macon’s ambitions. Macon’s son Milkman hovers uncertainly between the two families, attracted by the life in one and the comforts of the other. Milkman’s dilemma is essentially that of the modern black American confronted by the brutal historical circumstances of his presence in the USA and at the same time drawn to the powerful consumer allure of contemporary society. As some kind of a way out he decides to attempt to trace his lineage and the search for his roots becomes — as in Alex Hailey’s book — a quest for his own identity and self-respect.

In a Southern town called Shalimar he discovers the clues to his ancestry in a song the children sing about his great-grandfather Solomon, a near-mythical figure who is reputed to have flown back to Africa. The fulfilment of his search, the new knowledge of the unity and special nature of his heritage coincides with the development of Milkman’s hitherto complacent character and a conformation of values — embodied in his aunt Pilate — he had thought dated and whimsical.

In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison consciously invokes a comparison with The Great Gatsby when she adapts the famous guest-list episode from Jay Gatsby’s party. In the names of the guests Fitzgerald encapsulates an entire society and Toni Morrison uses the device for the same purpose here. At the climax of the novel Milkman sees that the bizarre and colourful names of the black people he knows have real meaning too and bear witness to the past. In fact the lesson of The Great Gatsby can be seen everywhere in this novel. There is the same economy, the same discipline and the same potent manipulation of symbol where Solomon’s magical flight becomes — like the green light at the end of Daisy’s pier — an abiding and passionate metaphor for all kinds of human aspiration.

1979

Towards the end of William Golding’s novel — Rites of Passage — its protagonist Edmund Talbot remarks to a naval lieutenant that “life is a formless business, Summers. Literature is much amiss in forcing a form on it!” The notion is a central one in Golding’s work and also in any appreciation of it, for literature, we are now fully aware, cannot do other than impose a form, even when aping life at its most random and contingent. From one point of view Dean Jocelin’s vision and construction of his cathedral spire is a prolonged debate on the futility of the entire purpose of trying to shape and create something out of redoubtably intractable material — the writer’s problem no less than the medieval architect’s. Golding goes further than this. Not content with the struggle to shape and form he also seeks answers to grave and essential questions about the human condition: “the unnamable, unfathomable and invisible darkness that sits at the centre” (Free Fall). This overall seriousness of intent on Golding’s part — the sense that his novels are meditations on or dramatizations of life’s most seminal concerns — is at once his great strength and his weakness, an advantage and a constraint; some of his novels are immeasurably enhanced by it, others find the freight of significance too much to bear.

Perhaps the problem can be conveyed more precisely by recording a remark Graham Greene made. Greene complains that “I would like to ascend into myth but find my books so often muddy with plot.” This, I suspect, is not only a piece of self-criticism (misguided, in my opinion) but also a wishful indication of the way Greene would like his books to be read. It’s a plea for less popular assessment, a desire to be rated — or to write — on a deeper more elemental level. Golding, on the other hand, suffers from the opposite reaction. Not only in the reverential, solemn way people approach his work but also, from his fourth novel onwards, in some impulse governing the way he writes.

Most novels tend inevitably towards what we can call the world of history — the rich infinitely varied world of phenomena, of appearances and details. Indeed, it can be argued that there is something in the novel form itself that fosters and encourages this inclination. This is what Greene is bemoaning — the pull is too hard for him to resist. Golding, alternatively, has determinedly steered his fiction towards the other pole: that of myth, and all the more single-mindedly since Free Fall. Of course, in most serious fiction both elements coexist, but in varying degrees and, by and large, the mythic features are subordinate, the referential aspects of the form claiming most of our attention. This duality also applies to Golding. Lord of the Flies, he has related, started out primarily as an attempt to portray what children are really like, in opposition to the anodyne Victorian image in Coral Island. However, the novel is more than that, clearly — or at least became more than that — developing into the first exploration of now familiar Golding themes: an examination of innocence, the dark truth about human nature and a delineation of his particular Manichean vision of the world.

But what made Golding’s first three novels so remarkable (and I would rate Pincher Martin as high as any) was the extent to which he managed to introduce the mythic element without threatening the tenuous equilibrium that has to exist between the specifics of history and the generalities of myth. The Inheritors captures with marvellous ability a wholly realistic sense of the Neanderthal world as well as re-enacting on the wider level the confrontation between Innocence and Experience. So too Pincher Martin is at once the story of a real man marooned on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic as well as an elaborate parody of the Creation, an illustration of man’s immense ego and his futile heroism.

Many commentators see Golding’s first five novels as forming a homogeneous unit, but I would be inclined to mark the division after Pincher Martin. Both Free Fall and The Spire significantly tip the balance towards myth and concentrate attention rather more on the solution of what might be termed spiritual or aesthetic dilemmas. Significance is no longer tethered to fact. One is too conscious of the huge abstractions bulking beneath the narrative and its surface details. There is, at the back of the reader’s mind, an overpowering, and at times enervating, awareness of correspondence: the fact that nothing in these novels is offered for its own sake, but is there to serve the rhetoric of the mythopoeic impulse. In Free Fall and The Spire the mythical sous-texte of the novels dominates to the detriment of the fiction. There is on occasion a certain inflated, striven-for trenchancy in the prose (a failing Conrad was also prone to), as well as passages of great power. There simply isn’t enough “muddy plot” obscuring the vision. Not that the vision is ever crystal clear — Golding’s answers are never unambiguous and succinct — it is instead that one knows one should always be seeking the analogical matrix that lies beneath the prose, striving all the time to “see into the life of things.”

The two books that followed The Spire — The Pyramid and The Scorpion God — represented a hiatus in the Golding oeuvre. The Scorpion God consisted of three novellas and The Pyramid was an untypical, Trollopian novel recrafted from some early short stories. It wasn’t until the publication of Darkness Visible last year — after a self-confessed eight-year block — that the sequence of Golding novels proper continued. To put it at its most simple, Darkness Visible is an uneven, strained attempt to reconnect the twin worlds of muddy plot and myth that had diverged since Pincher Martin. To some extent it succeeds brilliantly, as in the opening chapter dealing with the blitz and the simple hero Matty’s exposure to the pentecostal firestorm, and the later chapters treating his life and education. However there is something disconcerting about the book’s self-conscious modishness — terrorism, paedophilia — and for once Golding’s superb organizational grasp of his material seems to have deserted him almost completely. There is no doubt that the writing of the novel was something of a purgative experience — Golding has stated that he has refused to read a single review of the book — and it will come to be seen, I suspect, as something of a curiosity — an aberration in what is otherwise a career of masterly technical control and authorial self-assurance. Its, so to speak, emetic properties have clearly proved efficient, and we now have, a year later, a novel which has not only won the Booker prize but, more importantly, reaffirms a memorable return to form and the literary stature of its author.

Many reviewers of Rites of Passage have qualified their praise, ranking it with The Pyramid, seeing it as something of a perfect minor work. It is far more than this: rather it’s a return to tried and tested techniques; in many ways a look back at what has come before and a summary of the preceding novels’ achievements. Golding’s best novels take place in a confined world: the island in Lord of the Flies, the rock in Pincher Martin, language in The Inheritors — further confined by the characters’ vastly limited conceptual boundaries. Similarly, Rites of Passage takes place on an ageing man-of-war, en route with a party of emigrants for Australia, at some point towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. The main burden of the narrative is taken up by a privileged young passenger called Edmund Talbot, who is recording the events of the passage in a journal for the benefit and amusement of his aristocratic patron. This journal in itself is a superb example of literary mimicry on Golding’s part, a feat of imaginative sympathy with the early nineteenth century that comes close to the intellectual efforts required to render Neanderthalers’ world-view in The Inheritors. Talbot is contemptuous and sneering about his fellow passengers, particularly an impoverished clergyman named Colley, who somehow manages to attract the disdain of just about everyone else on board. Talbot’s voyage and journal proceed with their unremarkable catalogue of seasickness, minor tiffs, a brief flirtation and sex-bout with a meretricious female passenger, and a tour of the bowels of the ship. Talbot has little out-of-the-ordinary to report until the Reverend Colley, in the course of delivering a sermon to the huddled masses in steerage, gets drunk on navy rum and makes an exhibition of himself capering about the deck semi-nude and finally pissing up against a mast in full view of the other passengers. Colley’s reaction to this inebriated display is, however, extreme. He lies face down on his bed in a kind of catatonic trance for four days before finally dying of shame. On going through Colley’s room, Talbot discovers a long letter that Colley had been writing to his sister and he duly transcribes it into his journal. The narrative point of view shifts and the events of the voyage are retold by Colley. This change in perspective completely alters our conception of events as Talbot has thus far related to us. Colley has been the victim of callous persecution at the hands of the officers of the ship and the captain himself. He has been humiliated in front of the ship’s company during the traditional crossing-of-the-equator ceremony. Colley’s idea of his own nature and his standing in the eyes of his fellow passengers is revealed as hopelessly and tragically inaccurate. Talbot’s journal and narrative have also to be reassessed and he sees himself as being unwittingly responsible for Colley’s bizarre demise. This sudden, final change of viewpoint causing a reanalysis of all that has passed before is a feature that occurs in all of Golding’s first three novels. Here it is handled with great skill and deftness, used not only as an instrument of humorous irony and a subversive literary technique (as remarkable as Conrad’s similar exercise in Under Western Eyes — a writer to whom Golding comes to bear more and more resemblance) but also as a means of focusing on the themes of guilt, persecution and delusion which were only intermittently apparent in Talbot’s self-opinionated journal. Now Talbot is able, with the aid of Colley’s letter and the impromptu inquest held after his death, to fill in the gaps in his own defective and subjective account of what has been going on in the ship. The hidden and unknown act which brought about Colley’s insupportable shame and eventual death is suddenly made clear.

Rites of Passage and Pincher Martin are the only two Golding novels where a revelation of what takes place at the end will completely ruin the reader’s enjoyment of the book — a sufficient testimony to the renewed status of muddy plot. However, Rites of Passage contains greater riches than pure narrative entertainment. Riches which, on the basis of only two readings so far, I can only hint at. Like Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, Rites of Passage has “at its back” another text. (For the preceding three, they are, respectively, The Coral Island, Wells’s Outline of History and Robinson Crusoe). In this case it is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” One comparison will have to suffice. Just before the Mariner is freed of his albatross he looks over the side of the ship:

Beyond the shadow of the ship

Philip Roth’s last book, The Ghost Writer, featured an unknown novelist called Nathan Zuckerman and dealt with the visit he paid to the home of a literary giant. In Zuckerman Unbound Zuckerman is now a celebrated and notorious author, whose novel, Carnovsky, has brought him overnight fame. Zuckerman Unbound details his inept attempts at coping with being a celebrity and, more seriously, considers the connections that exist between a writer’s life and his art.

The Zuckerman/Carnovsky link seems parallel to that between Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint. Carnovsky is a graphic account of the sex life of its eponymous hero and the simple equation that exists in the minds of its readers is that Zuckerman and the fictional Carnovsky are, in actual fact, interchangeable. There’s a lot of amusing detail about the pressures of living with fame, reminiscent in parts of Woody Allen’s film Stardust Memories. Allen’s paranoia is also echoed in Zuckerman’s fears that he will end up the victim of some deranged fan. Zuckerman finds himself pestered by the usual collection of cranks and weirdos, but is dogged more persistently by one Alvin Pepler, a contemporary who hails from the same town — Newark, New Jersey. Pepler had achieved a short span of fame as winner on a nationwide quiz show, a success brought to him by virtue of his photographic memory. But the quiz show was rigged (a genuine scandal in the fifties) and Pepler was “defeated” by another contestant and condemned to return to the obscurity from which he’d briefly emerged.

Pepler’s obsessions and his grandiose ambitions (he wants Zuckerman to help promote his book) are irritating, but later Zuckerman becomes more intrigued with this extraordinary character. For a while he contemplates writing Pepler and his life into a novel and begins to make transcriptions of everything he says. This illustration of a writer engaged in the process of turning life’s raw materials into art bears on the book’s wider theme, namely the persistent identification the public makes of the artist with his creation. Or, as Zuckerman cogently puts it, confusing the “dictating ventriloquist with the demonic dummy.”

The most serious consequences of this sort of identification are experienced by members of the artist’s family, especially if — as in the Roth/Zuckerman case — characters, such as parents, play a large part in the fiction. It’s in his relationships with members of his family that Zuckerman sees the genuine damage that his fame has caused. The incomprehension of his parents and brother, the sense of betrayal that they feel, have opened up an unbridgeable gap between them. The novel ends with Zuckerman returning to his native Newark, the setting for Carnovsky. It has all changed, to such an extent that it is almost unrecognizable. Roth seems to be leaving us with a symbolic reminder of the difference between life and art, a warning not to mistake the illusion for the illusionist.

It was T. S. Eliot who emphasized the gulf between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates.” It’s a separation that Zuckerman insists on throughout the novel too. There’s no connection, he repeats, between what happens in his novels and what’s happened in his life. Zuckerman Unbound is a very funny account of the consequences of not observing the distinction. Some consequences are easy to live with — Zuckerman’s sexual renown allows him to bed film stars — others are very sad: Zuckerman senior’s dying word to his son is “bastard.” But essentially Roth, I think, is playing an elaborate joke on the reader. In Zuckerman Unbound we constantly hear of other readers’ stupidity in taking Zuckerman for his fictional hero Carnovsky, and we sympathize with Zuckerman’s frustration. But at the same time — I’ve been doing it throughout this review myself and, I guarantee, it will occur in every notice the book receives — we identify Zuckerman with Roth and talk about Zuckerman Unbound in terms of Roth and the reception of Portnoy. Perhaps all that Roth is pointing out in laying this trap for us is simply to show how instinctive such a response is; that it’ll be made anyway, no matter what the writer tries to do. Is it an error on the reader’s part, though? Is the reader hopelessly unsophisticated? Roth doesn’t actually come out and say so, but I think that throughout the novel — especially in the way he reacts to Pepler — he drops hints that the notion of the separation of the artist from his art is, in a significant sense, something of a convenient piece of camouflage for the artist. Certainly Eliot for one — who energetically pursued this line throughout his life — was not doing it disinterestedly. Zuckerman Unbound is an elegant and amusing contribution to the debate.

1981

In 1975 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of reviews, articles and speeches under the annoying title of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Now, six years later, he has done much the same in Palm Sunday. He calls the book a collage but adds that

Every time I open a novel by Kurt Vonnegut the same words spring to mind: “Coy,” “Arch,” “Winsome” and “Cute.” But they are equally quickly dispelled. I suspect that Vonnegut’s tone of voice — and a remarkably consistent one it is — either wins the reader over fairly promptly or not at all. In my own case it’s the former effect that occurs, certainly with the category of novel which we can safely demarcate “late” Vonnegut: the sequence of books beginning with Breakfast of Champions and including Slapstick, Jailbird, Palm Sunday (autobiography) and this, the latest.

In these novels — and in Slaughterhouse 5 — the connection between life and art is straightforwardly causal. It seems to me that all the books mentioned emerge directly from the author’s baffled observation of human life and nature and effectively dramatize certain questions (and attempt to come up with some answers) that the observation engenders. Vonnegut considers our swarming damaged planet and contemplates our bizarre behaviour-patterns. He looks at the way we exploit and corrupt each other; he marvels at the multitude of toxic chemicals we happily ingest; he ponders why we spend so much time inventing devices that can so easily bring about our annihilation as a species — and so on, as he would say. But he also focuses his gaze more precisely: on the sex-game, as he terms it; on the connection between love and common decency; on how to cope with the random fatalities of life, with sudden and incomprehensible bereavement. In this sense Vonnegut is the most overtly humane of that remarkable generation of American novelists to which he belongs, and it’s to his undying credit that no sentiment, pap or any kind of emotional sop ever clouds or diminishes the cool, ironic, unapologetic quality of his vision.

In many ways Vonnegut exhibits — in his candour and disarming openness, the way he squares up these Big Issues — an archetypal Americanness. But he avoids the typical American response: an appeal to the heart, whether in the form of God, the flag, Mom or apple pie. He seems to lack the sophistication of a Roth or Heller; he has, in the best sense of the word, the most popular approach. But that type of naivety and simplicity is illusory. Vonnegut’s verdict on the world and its denizens is as hard-nosed and unconsoling as any his peers can offer up. And it’s this seeming paradox — the gum-chewing hick from middle America combined with a brand of cynicism almost classical in its consistency — that makes his work so intriguing.

Deadeye Dick exhibits all these qualities in the most satisfactory ways. The story relates the life of Rudolf Waltz from Midland City, Ohio. Rudy is, in his own terms, a “neuter”—he takes no part in the sex-game. He works as an all-night salesman in Schramm’s drugstore. His main aim in life is to be inconspicuous. This is partly owing to his crippling shyness but is also as a result of an accident he was responsible for when he was twelve. In a moment of elation young Rudy fired a gun over the roof-tops of Midland City. The bullet, falling many miles away, drilled a hole between the eyes of a pregnant woman. Thus Rudy became a double murderer, and thus he earned his nickname, Deadeye Dick.

This sort of picaresque autobiography (Rudy is the narrator) allows Vonnegut’s distinctive style and approach to function at their most effective. Various characters in Midland City are introduced to us and the mundane course of Rudy’s life steadily progresses. People die, people are unkind to and misunderstand each other. In the end a neutron bomb accidentally explodes in Midland City, wiping out the population but leaving the buildings intact. Fortunately, by this time, Rudy and his brother Felix have left and have set up in a hotel they’ve bought in Haiti. Rudy’s final comment is “we are still in the Dark Ages,” but there is no sense of Vonnegut passionately indicting man’s inhumanity to man. His stance is, if anything, more disinterested than ever. The book opens with a warning: “Watch out for life.” Rudy survives — to the extent that anyone survives — through a policy of mental non-engagement. In his attitude to others he is selfless and caring, but intellectually he is entirely uncommitted. Behind the wit and the humour this is the bleakest Vonnegut since Slaughterhouse 5.

1983

The Orators by W. H. Auden was published in 1932 when Auden was twenty-five. It is an immensely precocious, rambling, difficult and eccentric work, mainly in prose and almost entirely forgotten. Today, outside libraries, it is only available in The English Auden, a collection of his poems, essays and dramatic writings from 1927 to 1939. The Orators, I suppose, is subsumed under “dramatic writings,” but it’s not in any sense a play, or even a piece for several voices. It is in actual fact an un-classifiable oddity, a maverick work in Auden’s output, impossible to label or pigeonhole. It is fiction, but it’s neither a novel or a short story. It contains parodies, lists, geometric drawings, diagrams, odes, doggerel and straightforward poems too. And, to be honest, it is long-winded occasionally, and, at times, maddeningly opaque with a rich seam of cockeyed, socio-cultural analysis. Auden himself, in later life, said of it, “My name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented, but near the border of sanity.” So why do I keep on reading it all the time?

Two main answers and lots of minor ones. I re-read it chiefly because it’s very funny and also for the access I gain into an astonishingly vivid, entrancing and daft imagination. Auden is my favourite poet, but in the prose of The Orators the control and discipline of poetry are abandoned. If you like the Audenesque tone of voice, its particular tropes and obsessions, then here you will find it writ large, lavishly piled on. It is, I think, something to be dipped into or picked over and, although it was vaguely designed as a coherent statement, its parts are infinitely richer than its whole.

The Orators is subtitled “An English Study” and is, rather as The Waste Land intended, meant to be a survey of the state of England, and the moral and spiritual health of the populace. This all sounds eminently serious and dull but, being Auden, it is Englishness that comes through rather than gravitas, and the ills of society are very idiosyncratically diagnosed. There is none of the monumental distanced angst striven for in Eliot’s poem. The needs and desires voiced — though genuine — are much more the needs and desires of W. H. Auden Esq., one suspects, rather than the unspoken pleas of a generation.

The book is divided into three sections, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. Part One is called “The Initiates” and is itself subdivided. It opens with an “Address for a Prizeday,” a hectoring speech analysing the current problems of the population. The English, it transpires, can be classed as four different types of lover. Excessive Lovers of Self, Excessive Lovers of Neighbours, Defective Lovers and Perverted Lovers. All this has at root some ostensibly serious purpose, to do largely with Auden’s preoccupation with psychosomatic illness as inspired by people like Groddeck and Layard. But this can be safely set aside, for the “seriousness” of The Orators, it seems to me, is only a starting point — a sort of skeleton of the book which gives it a rough structure and shape but which is really only there to provide support for the fleshing out of the text. It provides Auden’s talent with the excuse it has been waiting for. Having classified the population in this way he can now get on with describing them. The Excessive Lovers of Self: “Habitués of the mirror, famous readers, they fall in love with the voice of the announcer, maybe, from some foreign broadcasting station they can never identify.” The Defective Lovers: “They sit by fires they can’t make up their minds to light, while dust settles on their unopened correspondence … Wearers of soiled linen, the cotton wool in their ears unchanged for months. Anaemic, muscularly undeveloped and rather mean. Hit them in the face if necessary.” And so on for two delightful pages.

The following sections, “Argument” and “Statement,” introduce the atmosphere of war, insurrection, civil unrest and the emergence of a Leader who will guide the true of heart to victory and a new life. Once again the rather “loony” message is the excuse for more virtuoso comic description. A bizarre and fantastic atmosphere of risk, threat and paranoia is conjured up. And here too are all the familiar ingredients of the Audenesque landscape: public schools, the OTC, mines, mills, crags, borders and spies. “The fatty smell of drying clothes, the smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun … Rook shadows cross to the right. A schoolmaster cleanses himself at half term with a vegetable offering; on the north side of a hill, one writes with his penis in the snow ’resurgam.’”

You will be beginning to gain some idea of the tone of The Orators— the sinister-comic-eccentric voice at its most developed. The mood is sustained in the final section “Letter to a Wound.” This is based on Auden’s own experience after an operation he underwent on an anal fissure which took many months to heal. The letter forms a curious coda: a love letter, it shows the extent to which illness and sufferer become one.

Part Two is “Journal of an Airman” and the triumph of The Orators. It should be included in every anthology of the English short story. In it the vague impulses and solutions, needs and prognoses that preoccupied Part One are splendidly focused and dramatized in the diary of a neurotic aviator. The battle lines are drawn. The airman and his comrades face the Enemy. Although meant to function as a metaphor, the Enemy turn out to be suspiciously like the English middle classes at their smug, bourgeois worst. A strange civil war or revolution seems to be in progress in a landscape which is half Icelandic, half Cotswolds, with moors and ice floes, golf links and country pubs. The airman’s tortured and paranoid voice leads us through the mounting conflict with notes and jottings, attempts at aphorisms and pensées. The need for a true Leader re-emerges, while the airman frets about his fear of his mother and his love for his homosexual uncle Harry. The voice is uniquely Auden’s — D. H. Lawrence meets P. G. Wodehouse by way of Freud and Ealing comedies, if you see what I mean.

Throughout, the airman keeps trying to define and fix the Enemy in his mind and encourage in himself the right elements of daring and fearlessness. “Three kinds of enemy walk — the grandiose stunt — the melancholic stagger — the paranoic sidle. Three kinds of enemy face — the fucked hen — the favourite puss — the stone in the rain. Three enemy traits — refusal to undress in public — proficiency in modern languages — inability to travel back to the engine. Three kinds of enemy hand — the marsh — the claw — the dead yam.” And manically on and on. The journal has all the elisions, fractures, non sequiturs and private references one would expect. But what is most striking and admirable is the way Auden has seized on the potentiality of this literary form and exploited it to the full. Hint, allusion and half-meaning suddenly become potent assets: the briefest references can conjure up the density and detail of a long novel.

Here are some examples.

This novel begins with a myth. Suppose that every act we committed in our life on earth was destined to be repeated, not just once, but in an endless series of cycles. In that case everything we did, trivial and grand, from minor sin to major goodness, would be invested with a momentous importance simply because of its permanence in the scheme of things. Every act of kindness, selfishness, deceit, self-regard would be etched on existence for ever. And, consequently, we would think twice, thrice, many times, before acting — our lives would be weighted down with import and significance, with unbearable responsibility.

But if, on the other hand, life is instead merely an endless linear flow of time, then every act, every moment, is at once unique and lost for ever — gone in an instant, never to return. The upshot of this theory is that life becomes an affair of utter insignificance, a droll succession of inconsequences — living (Being) is frivolous, transitory, light.

Kundera introduces these two opposing notions at the outset of this — his fifth and best — novel and throughout further opposes their two related qualities of lightness and weight. Which is better (I paraphrase drastically) — a life lived burdened by the weight of responsibility? Or a life lived unfettered by duty and moral injunction: a life of perfect, airy freedom?

This dilemma summarizes what I take to be the essence of this complicated and thoughtful novel. In a typically Kunderan manner, these questions emerge from a disjointed and rambling blend of wry philosophical speculation and fiction. Kundera himself discourses on and redefines a variety of subjects and categories (including vertigo, dreaming, nudity, betrayal, noses, abroad and WCs, among others) while, fictionally, the choices are dramatized in the lives of a pair of couples — Tomas and Tereza and Franz and Sabina — each of whom represents, in varying degrees, one or other aspect of the polarity of lightness and weight. Franz and Sabina have their roles to play in the enacting of ideas, but the central couple is Tomas and Tereza.

Tomas is a successful surgeon and philanderer who, by a series of chances, ends up one day in a provincial hotel where he attracts, inadvertently, the love of a waitress — Tereza. On impulse Tereza follows him to Prague where they become lovers and soon fall in love. Even after they are married, however, Tomas continues to sleep around, but his life has changed more than domestically with the arrival of Tereza, for Tereza is afflicted with “weight”—a sense of the unbearable responsibility of being. And Tomas, one might expect, is lightness personified. But soon he finds — like it or not — that his soaring irresponsibility begins to be tethered: he gains — metaphysically speaking — weight.

He renounces a prosperous career as a surgeon in Zurich to follow Tereza back to Prague after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. There, his career charts a steep decline owing to an ill-timed political article he has written. From top surgeon he descends to local GP, and from there to window cleaner. Ultimately, Tereza persuades him to leave the city and they go to work on a farm in the country where, before they die in a car smash, they find their own brand of happiness and Tomas — or so I take it — shoulders the burdens of responsibility and contentedly renounces “lightness.”

“Weight,” as Kundera defines it, is to do with love, compassion and a true sense of the absurd dictates of chance and contingency. “Lightness” is to do with sex, frivolity and irresponsibility. In the novel Kundera debates and counterposes the reasons for and the consequences of choosing one or the other. The dialectic is urbanely, wittily and cleverly orchestrated. One senses too — and Kundera encourages us to think so — that the conflict is a highly individual one (“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities”) born out of his own personality and his experience at the hands of the malign and bizarre forces of recent European history.

In a significant sense, then, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be described as an intensely moral book which, for all its superficial postmodernist totems (paraded fictiveness, blatant authorial intervention, disdain of basic narrative convention), would satisfy the most stringent and traditional imperatives of Leavisite “relevance” and “value.” For, in the novel, Kundera is really attempting to answer the key questions of how we should live our lives, given the sordid, perplexed and fraught nature of the human condition, and of the place of Love in a world seemingly compromised by corruption, self-delusion and evil.

His answer is dramatized — most movingly — in the death from cancer of Tomas and Tereza’s dog Karenin (the name is no accident). The animal’s slow, puzzled, wracked demise becomes a focus for all those traditional verities — compassion, understanding, disinterested love — so opposed to “lightness” and all it stands for. On the penultimate page of the novel Tereza apologizes for the way she has literally and metaphorically brought him down. “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here?” Tomas says.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being is of course a far more complex notion than this review can convey. It’s not, for example, to be confused with earnestness or commitment, and has nothing to do with political ideology (an elaborate disquisition on the phenomenon of “kitsch” denies weight to the passionate idealists of both East and West, Left and Right). It seems to be, to simplify once again, a steadfastly ironic facing up to all the sadness of the human condition, coupled with an awareness of the value of the modest and fleeting moments of happiness it can also provide (Tomas’s declaration occurs on the last night of his and Tereza’s life). The modish succés fou of this book does it a huge disservice: this is a clever, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating, occasionally flawed novel, but its central concerns are perennially valuable and humane.

1984

Evelyn Waugh was not fond of Labels, his fourth published book. In an interview given later in his life he referred to it dismissively as “a collection of essays bundled together.” In 1946, when he edited all his travel writing for the compilation When the Going Was Good only fifty of Labels’ 200 pages were included. Indeed, superficially, there does not appear much to recommend the book. An account of a cruise in the Mediterranean is hardly exotic. A few weeks on a luxury liner would not qualify one as an intrepid traveller. Also, the assignment was undertaken solely for money (although I realize that this does not imply, a priori, that the work will be bad) and was written up at speed over a period of two months in early 1930. And yet, in my opinion, this, the first of Waugh’s many travel books, is his best and most fascinating, and, for reasons which we will discover, it is a highly significant document with an important bearing on the development of Waugh’s oeuvre and is a vital clue as to why Waugh’s personality took the abrasive, complex and troubled course it did.

In 1929, when the trip that was to provide the raw material for Labels was undertaken, Waugh was twenty-six years old. He had just published his first novel, Decline and Fall, to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. He was a “fashionable” young writer, a self-appointed spokesman for Modern Youth and made regular appearances in the gossip columns. Life had finally taken a dramatic turn for the better. For, after the pleasant distractions and rowdy hedonism of Oxford, Waugh’s fortunes had reached a low ebb. He attempted vainly to become an artist and illustrator but lack of money drove him to badly paid jobs in remote preparatory schools. While his Oxford contemporaries were establishing reputations for themselves Waugh was miserably unhappy. He wanted to be an artist, he wanted to move easily in English high society, he wanted to be wealthy and he wanted to be in love. In the disappointing years following his university career it looked very unlikely that he would ever achieve any of these ambitions. But then the publication of Decline and Fall (1928) changed everything. He was now a novelist (albeit a reluctant one), celebrated, wined and dined, had made some money and there was now the prospect of making more, and he was married. Waugh had married (just prior to the publication of Decline and Fall) a pretty girl called Evelyn Gardner. They were known to their friends as “he-Evelyn” and “she-Evelyn.” Evelyn Gardner was “modern” (her blonde hair was cut in a short bob), wanted to write herself, and was well bred — she was the daughter of Lord Burghclere. Everything seemed to be perfect. They were both very happy and they lived in a small flat in London in Canonbury Square.

In the winter of 1928 “she-Evelyn” fell ill with a bad attack of German measles. To help her convalesce and to allow Waugh to write a travel book (while he gathered material for his next novel) a Mediterranean cruise was planned. Waugh’s agent managed to negotiate the Waughs’ free passage on the MY Stella Polaris in return for favourable mentions of the ship in Labels. In the gossip column of the Daily Sketch their departure was reported thus: the Waughs

“The style is the man,” Buffon said, and one wonders what he would make of a man who wrote like this:

This friend of mine from work, Bud, he asked Fran and me to supper. I didn’t know his wife and he didn’t know Fran. That made us even. But Bud and I were friends. And I knew there was a little baby at Bud’s house. That baby must have been eight months old when Bud asked us to supper. Where’d those eight months go?

These are the opening lines of a short story called “Feathers” and in them we are presented with what one might call stereotypical Raymond Carver: the demotic first person voice, the short sentences, the reduced vocabulary, the pointed unliterariness (the ugly repetitions of “know” and “Bud”). A few more sentences and the picture is complete: Bud and the narrator are blue-collar workers, the context is parochial — white, working class, middle America — and the events of the story, its narrative, minimal in the extreme.

This selection of thirty-seven stories was made by Carver himself before his premature death in 1988 at the age of fifty. The consistency of tone, style, setting and mood of the stories is remarkable, and, with a few variations, they roughly conform to the stereotype outlined above. Occasionally the protagonists become more affluent (or less) and occasionally the pronoun shifts to the third person, but it is clear that Carver had found his two inches of ivory and was prepared to work it as doggedly as he could.

And there is nothing wrong with this. The only danger is that by confining your focus and by making your voice so insistently individual and unchanging an element of self-parody unwittingly creeps in, and the writer becomes a victim of his own success. There may be a rough rule of thumb here that needn’t only apply to writers, namely: the easier it is to parody an artist’s style, the sooner the artist ought to change it. Something similar happened to Hemingway, a writer with whom Carver can stand some comparison. The style of Hemingway’s early stories was as terse, uncompromising and idiosyncratic as Carver’s and it made a similar impact. Each man, it seemed, had found a fully formed and distinct voice that was perfectly attuned to their particular vision of the world and that harmoniousness lent the prose an unmistakable authority and literary heft. But it was not sustainable; or rather it was, but a price had to be paid when every Eng. Lit. undergraduate could soon turn in a passable Hemingway parody with no trouble at all. And something of the same law of diminishing returns applies to Carver’s stories, even though, as he himself claimed, he made efforts in his last collection to broaden his canvas and enrich his palette. In a late story such as “Blackbird Pie” where the narrator appears to be an academic, the voice is educated and peppered with literary allusions but it seems epicene, uncarveresque. We want a misanthropic redneck in a trailer park musing on how awful life is.

This phenomenon, this double bind, occurs in various art forms but bears particularly on short story writers and painters. Throughout the ups and many downs of his career Scott Fitzgerald was constantly asked to reprise his tales of ditsy flappers in the Twenties, and Picasso’s reputation is still haunted by the enormous popularity of his “Blue period” paintings. Any number of other examples come to mind but the “problem” remains the same: what is first acclaimed as powerful and original soon becomes confining and restricting. The artist wants to develop and advance but does so at the risk of losing what has drawn the public to the artist in the first place.

Thirty-seven short stories may seem a smallish oeuvre upon which to build a significant reputation yet there is no doubt that Carver’s achievement is considerable and that he deserves his place in the pantheon of American letters. The down-and-out, the hobo, the underachievers of American life have all had their chroniclers (from Damon Runyon to John Fante to Charles Bukowski) but Carver’s bleak but fundamentally humane point of view has a distinct late twentieth-century feel to it, if only because it is so resolutely low-key, the prose studiedly refusing to indulge in sentimentality, sensationalism or bathos. In spite of all the despair and waste, the hardship and relentless grind, Carver’s stories do somehow seem to celebrate some lasting aspects of the human condition, however minimal, conjuring up something marginally positive, a quality of fellow feeling that may amount to nothing more than a recognition that — at the end of the day — we are all in this mess together, but which gives the stories a compelling dry-eyed poignancy, a bitter but intensely moving authenticity.

1993

In a semi-ruined villa somewhere in the north of Italy in the final year of World War Two a young Canadian nurse called Hana — numbed by the horrors of war — cares for a hideously burned aviator who has no name. He is the English patient, his brittle, cauterized skin the colour of aubergine. He is alone in the villa, the nurse his sole company, left behind to die, one assumes, by the field hospital that once occupied the building. The nurse bathes him, reads to him, listens to him and injects him with morphine to mask the agony of his terrifying burns.

This is the opening of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, and it is hard to imagine a better and more disturbing mise en scène, combining as it does all manner of romantic, gothic and mysterious elements: a young and beautiful woman tending to a terminally disfigured man in an antique and classical landscape ravaged by war. What secrets lie here, what explanations, what undercurrents of feeling, of emotion? Guilt and loss, pain and redemption, endurance and love… The book is gravid with the potential to move and beguile.

And Ondaatje does not disappoint. A poet turned novelist, his interest in his characters and their situation leans heavily towards their symbolic and elegiac aspects. And indeed, this curious conjunction of nurse and patient could have occurred in any war in any place in almost any time. A reader expecting the conventions of a realistic novel such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (another juxtaposition of nurse and patient in an Italian war) will be frustrated. Ondaatje eschews the nuts and bolts of period detail, the roughage of authentic fact, for the trenchant reverberation of metaphor and image. And in so doing the book sets entirely its own tone and its own conventions. To ask a question of it along the lines of: would the senior staff of a World War Two army field hospital really abandon a traumatized young nurse and one of its badly burned patients in a bomb-damaged villa while it moved on to safer and more secure quarters? is redundant, not to say pedantic. Ondaatje’s novel is hermetic and self-sufficient, its conventions and its final reality — and its strange power — belong to it alone.

In the event the nurse, Hana, and her patient are not left to each other’s company for long. They are joined by a man named David Car-avaggio, a friend of Hana’s late father. Caravaggio, a former cat-burglar from Toronto, has spent the war in intelligence and is himself recovering from wounds, only this time wounds inflicted by torture — his thumbs have been amputated. He claims to be concerned for Hana’s health and safety but it soon becomes clear that his real interest is in the English patient. Soon the trio is augmented by a fourth figure — a young Sikh bomb disposal expert, called Kip, who billets himself in the villa grounds while he tries to defuse the multiplicity of booby traps that the retreating Germans have set in the Tuscan countryside.

Slowly, steadily, the histories of these four emerge as they converse. We learn of Caravaggio’s capture and torture, of Kip’s training in England and his mastering of the precise and delicate art of bomb disposal, of Hana’s experience of the suffering and agonies of the dressing stations — the endless stream of broken and dying young men she tried to tend and comfort. And slowly too we begin to learn more about the English patient. A history begins to take shape, piecemeal, of his life before the war. We discover he was an Arabist and explorer in the Sahara, a scholar-soldier on the T. E. Lawrence model. We are told also of a doomed love affair with an Englishwoman, Katherine Clifton, the wife of a colleague, and its ultimate tragedy, and of his own final crash and rescue from his burning aeroplane by the Bedouin.

Ondaatje’s method and approach in the relating of these contrasting histories are both unusual and admirable. The narrative point of view is omniscient — we enter and quit the minds and experience of the other characters at will. Stylistically too the tone is fluid and changing. Tenses move from the present to the past and back again. Dialogue is presented with and without quotation marks. We transfer easily from meditation to monologue, from reverie to orthodox description. Anecdotes and digressions blend and recur: there is a disquisition on winds, on the fusing of bombs; key texts are referred to repeatedly — Kipling’s Kim and Herodotus’ great History. The language is lucid and vivid, certain moments, certain images, held and rendered with a clarity that gives them the lyric force of an epiphany:

I would wager that, of all post-war French writers, the best known in Britain, the most widely read and the most cherished is Albert Camus. I use the word “cherished” advisedly because Camus is one of those writers who, as our reading matures, introduces us to the world of literature. Or, to put it another way, Camus is one of those writers who produced one of those books that marks a reader’s life indelibly. I refer of course to L’Etranger. It is like Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22, like Lucky Jim or Brideshead Revisited (and a handful of others) — one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer’s imagination impinging irrevocably on your own.

In Camus’s case a reading of L’Etranger was invariably followed by The Myth of Sisyphus, then The Plague, The Fall and so on — the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer’s allure. And yet one knew very little about Camus himself, other than he was Algerian, liked soccer, had won the Nobel Prize and died young (he was forty-six) in a car crash.

Which was why the publication of Olivier Todd’s superb biography of the man was so welcome: clear-eyed, compendious, with full access to the Camus’s archive, it fulfilled every expectation and its publication in France last year was a cultural event. It is rare and gratifying to have an English “version” (more of that later) so swiftly.

Camus was born in 1913. Ten months after his birth his father was dead, a conscripted soldier, an early victim of the Battle of the Marne, a tragedy that condemned the surviving members of his family — a wife and two sons — to a life of near abject poverty. Camus, like James Joyce, never forgot the genuine privations of his early life and, also like Joyce, he saw his intellect as a source of escape. He was bright, ambitious and, one senses, remarkably sure of his destiny. As a young man in 1930s Algeria he joined the Communist party (and was expelled), plunged himself into the world of theatre — acting, producing, directing — married and divorced (his first wife was a morphine addict) but all the while nurtured dreams of becoming a writer.

Camus was also tubercular, gravely so, and his life from the age of seventeen was dogged with bouts of ill-health and the enervating pre-antibiotics treatments of his lesioned lungs. In Algeria, in the years before the start of the Second World War, the young Camus established a formidable reputation as a campaigning journalist, a left-wing intellectual with a fully developed social conscience and, it has to be noted, a compulsive womanizer. It was only the outbreak of war that took him to Paris (he was too unwell to be called up) where he began writing L’Etranger in 1940.

The novel was published in 1942, followed shortly after by the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus, remarkably, was only twenty-eight years old. By the time of the liberation of France he was already acclaimed in intellectual circles and his trenchant journalism in the resistance newspaper Combat added to his renown.

Indeed, Camus often thought that fame came too early to him: in the late 1940s he was an internationally bestselling author, his name (to his constant irritation) was for ever linked with Sartre as a founder of Existentialism and his life subsequently became that of the classic Left-Bank intello moving in all the right socio-cultural circles. He worked for his publishers, Gallimard, he travelled, he had many love affairs, he hobnobbed in the fashionable cafes and brasseries but he always remained, it is clear from Todd’s account, something of an outsider. This may simply have been a matter of temperament, or it may have been the ever-present proximity of death (the severity of Camus’s tuberculosis is one of the book’s key illuminations), or it may have been the fact that he was a pied-noir, an Algerian, never feeling truly at home in France.

In the event, he quarrelled bitterly with Sartre and after the start of the Algerian war in 1955 found himself even more isolated by his refusal both to support the FLN freedom fighters and to condemn France’s colonial oppression. Ironically, it was at this stage, in 1957 aged forty-four, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his elevation to the pantheon was assured.

And then he was killed, on 4 January 1960, in a car crash, being driven back to Paris from his new home in Provence and the legend, and the disputes about his greatness, or lack of it, began.

Todd’s biography is both remarkably thorough and candid, and will prove indispensable to all those interested in Camus’s life. However this English translation falls short on several counts. First it has been severely abridged: “some material not of sufficient interest to the British and American general reader has been omitted,” so runs the translator Benjamin Ivry’s introduction. This is disingenuous — only the economics of publishing could explain such significant cutting. Much has gone: notwithstanding the natural brevity of English, Todd’s 767 pages of French text somehow become 420 English ones. Furthermore, in Todd’s concluding chapter in the French edition he makes a profound and highly important comparison between Camus and George Orwell as exemplary figures of the heterodox left. This is mysteriously omitted in the English edition — but surely this would be “of sufficient interest” to the anglophone general reader? Further comparisons between the two texts throw up other anomalies. For example: a chapter entitled “Un regard myope” becomes in English “Algerian Grief.” The harmless adjective “foutu” (“done for” in my dictionary) is a coarse “fucked-up” in the English text (Ivry tends to inflame the mildest profanities). “Je n’ai plus un sou” is rendered as “I don’t have a dime” (what could be wrong with “I don’t have a sou”?). Certain infelicities of style draw attention to themselves: “His palling around deepened into friendships, as Albert became more choosy.” The French is: “Des copains deviennent des amis. Albert cloisonne.” Todd’s own style is punchy and terse and written in the present tense — which one would have thought would have favoured the English version, but here all present tenses have routinely been made past.

Still, despite these nagging worries and a sense of disquiet at being served up something indubitably boiled down, this biography remains completely fascinating for the portrait of Camus that emerges and, incidentally, for its depiction of the snake-pit of post-war French intellectual and political life. The debate over Camus’s status still rages across the Channel (interestingly, it is far more secure here) but Todd, I think, establishes the nature of Camus’s appeal and importance with great insight and skill. Its essence is contained in Camus’s own modestly couched ambition: “What interests me is knowing how we should behave, and more precisely, knowing how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason.” These are, in the end, interests we all possess, and answers we all seek. This is what provides the universal element in Camus’s work and this is what will make it endure.

1997

This is volume three of the late Maurice Cranston’s magisterial and definitive biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Volume one appeared in 1983, volume two in 1991 and now the grand project is completed. Alas, Maurice Cranston did not live to see the final volume published but those of us who have been impatiently reading and waiting over the last fourteen years will not be disappointed. All of Cranston’s scholarly and writerly credentials are on full display: the vast learning, quietly incorporated, the feel for the eighteenth century in all its social, cultural and intellectual aspects and, most importantly for the non-academic reader, a prose of limpid readability, a dry and worldly sense of humour and the ability to fix a character or a place or a moment with apparently effortless skill.

Volume three begins in 1762 in Switzerland with Rousseau at the height of his fame and notoriety. The Social Contract had been written, his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse has enjoyed wild success throughout Europe, turning him into a cult figure, and his treatise on the education of children, Emile, has fomented acclaim and hysterical derogation in equal measure. In fact it was the spiralling controversy over Emile that led the French parlement to order the burning of the book and the arrest of the author.

So Rousseau fled to the land of his birth seeking exile and asylum, but this last phase of his life was to prove as unsettled and disturbing as anything that his earlier career had witnessed. The fifty-year-old Jean-Jacques cut an eccentric figure: still living with his slatternly common-law wife Thérése Levasseur, he was plagued by urinary problems that necessitated use of a catheter and the wearing of an Armenian kaftan to make him more comfortable (he had need of a chamber pot every few minutes, he claimed). He settled in Môtiers in the canton of Berne trying to write his biography and going for long botanizing walks in the mountains. But a quiet life was always to be denied Rousseau, however arduously he tried to create one: he had powerful friends to protect him but also many enemies determined to make his life difficult. Also his renown was such that however reclusive and anonymous he sought to be admirers would beat a path to his door for audiences. One of the most amusing and best detailed of these was with the young James Boswell (who introduced himself as “I am a Scottish laird of ancient lineage”).

Rousseau was never wholly secure or at ease in Switzerland — the cantonal governments saw him as a dangerous dissident — and his few years there were fraught with vain lobbying to confirm his residential status. Rousseau’s paranoia grew, not unjustifiably, and he saw himself as dogged by malevolent enemies and persecutors. Voltaire, malignity personified, the arch rival, published an anonymous pamphlet recounting the scandal of Rousseau’s children by Thérése, all of whom he had left at the gates of an orphanage. Thus stimulated, local clerics stirred up their congregations with claims of heresy and depravity and Rousseau’s house was stoned by a mob on one memorable and terrifying night. He came to loathe the village and the canaille who inhabited it, longing to find a country where he could be left in peace.

The philosopher David Hume, then living in Paris, invited him to England and Rousseau reluctantly accepted his offer. Hume, another well-disposed Scot, was a genuine admirer of Rousseau but the history of their relationship ended badly — in typical Rousseauesque fashion. Rousseau was a man of spontaneous impassioned emotion and illogical mood swings. Hume records a moment when Rousseau, in a bad temper, suddenly “rose up and took a turn about the room: but judge of my surprise, when he sat down suddenly on my knee, threw his hands about my neck [and] kissed me with the greatest warmth.” It was not to last. In 1766 Hume accompanied Rousseau to London and a wealthy patron installed him in his house in Derbyshire. Boswell escorted Thérése thither separately from Switzerland, during which journey they had a brief, energetic affair (Boswell noting in his journal “gone to bed very early and had done it once. Thirteen in all”). And all for a while was well until Rousseau got it into his head that Hume was the author of a satirical letter published in the English press (in fact it was by Horace Walpole) and he accused Hume of betrayal and of covertly opening his mail. Rousseau’s affection and gratitude had turned immediately to passionate vilification and disdain. Hume was hurt and baffled and eventually equally outraged at the accusations. So the English period of Rousseau’s life ended on this tone of mutual defamation and aggrieved self-justification. He and Thérése returned to France where, finally, at Ermenonville near Paris, another wealthy patron provided the philosopher with a rural retreat and he passed his last years in some form of comfort and peace, dying of a stroke on 2 July 1778.

His greatest work, and his lasting monument, was published posthumously. The Confessions is a truly astonishing autobiography, a beguiling mix of total candour, self-abasement, vainglory and special-pleading. Hume had encouraged Rousseau to write his memoirs and Rousseau told him the work was already underway. Rousseau said, “I shall describe myself in such plain colours that henceforth everyone may boast that he knows … Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Hume commented sagely, “I believe he intends seriously to draw his own picture in its true colours; but I believe at the same time that nobody knows himself less.” This is the key to Rousseau’s abiding fascination in the modern age — he is one of the great characters of history, an absorbing psychological case study, of which we have, mercifully, copious documentation. Rousseau may not have known himself well but, thanks to Maurice Cranston’s exemplary labours, we have in these three volumes of biography (to be read alongside The Confessions, ideally) a chance to make the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques, in all his maddening and endearing complexities, ourselves.

1997

“He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.” Thus begins Muriel Spark’s shortish, beguiling, twentieth novel. The “he” doing the wondering is Tom Richards, a sixty-something film director of some renown, who is recovering from a serious accident — a fall from a crane during the shooting of his latest film, The Hamburger Girl. This is about as profound as Tom gets (he is no great intellectual) and most of his waking moments are given over to thinking about himself — his future projects, his cares and woes, his love affairs and his wife and family.

The mazy and improbable plot largely centres on Tom’s relationship with his daughter from his second marriage, Marigold. Marigold is plain, difficult and demanding and an air of mutual dislike colours their respective attitudes to each other. Cora, Tom’s daughter from his first marriage, however, is beautiful and can do no wrong. Claire, Marigold’s mother, airily tolerates Tom’s egotism and his regular adultery. The family congregate around Tom after the fall (many broken ribs, a shattered hip), commiserate somewhat and go on their merry ways. Tom’s film is put on hold, retitled, then, after he has recuperated, starts up once more with Tom restored at the helm. Tom has an affair with his leading lady, Rose Woodstock, alienates another dysfunctional actress called Jeanne and presides over the several misfortunes of his daughters and sons-in-law.

It is all slightly ditsy and eccentric with a La Ronde style of serial infidelities adding a certain spice. Things get serious however when Marigold disappears: rather, things eventually get serious because no one seems to notice she has gone, at first. Finally the alarm is raised, the media are alerted, a search is initiated world wide and eventually Marigold is found disguised as a man living with some New Age travellers. It was all, it turns out, a way of tormenting her horrible father. Except that, mysteriously, a taxi driver companion of Tom (a compliant ear to Tom’s convalescent witterings) has been shot at and nearly killed. Was this Marigold’s doing?

By way of compensation for his paternal neglect Tom casts manly Marigold as a prescient Celt called Cedric in his latest absurd movie, set in Roman Britain, called Watling Street. Curiously, but then perhaps not, this is the movie business after all, Tom persists in recasting Rose Woodstock and Jeanne in this new film. Jeanne, now druggy and seriously unhinged, becomes a compliant agent for Marigold’s wiles. Marigold, still nurturing murderous thoughts, decides to kill her father by re-enacting the original crane accident, only this time with more fatal efficiency. Jeanne is engaged as saboteur but the plans go tragically awry.

Such summaries of Muriel Spark’s novels do them a misservice. What delights principally is the tone of voice, so enviably assured, such a distinct signature. In this novel the point of view is omniscient, we visit whichever character’s thoughts suit the Sparkian design. The voice is cool and spare, and in complete disinterested control: “The youth recounted his experience with Marigold but said they had parted shortly afterwards. He did not discount that Marigold was perfectly capable of hiring a hit-man if the plan suited her. The police eventually believed the boy, whose name for the present purpose is irrelevant, and let him go. Where was Marigold? Nobody knew for sure.”

The disinterest can also shade into ruthlessness. There has always been a nail-paring objectivity about Muriel Spark’s authorial style (this is what drew Evelyn Waugh to praise her first novel) and it provides delectable pleasures throughout her work, Reality and Dreams included. This aloofness can breed a certain air of cynicism or fatalism and gives rise to the darkness that seems to haunt the story. Tom and his brood are lightweights, people we care little for, whose lives and concerns, from one point of view, seem almost nugatory.

A conclusion that is perhaps borne out by the novel’s opening sentence, Tom’s ingenuous aperçu. What, indeed, if we are mere figments in one of God’s dreams? Where does that leave us? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”—so Gloucester famously observed in King Lear and Spark’s wise and disturbing fiction often exploits a similar sense of human insubstantiality and unimportance with great subtlety and skill. Of course there is another layer here, apart from the nihilistic, that is readily developed. We can detect a God-like presence hovering over the action of the novel — that of the author: these characters are characters in one of Muriel Spark’s dreams. The dream/reality, art/life theme is further enhanced by the fact that Tom’s films all start from dreams he has had. He then makes these films “real” through the wholly unreal medium of film. Just as the plot slips and slides, and the characters’ various fates chop and change almost at whim so too does our sense of the reality of what we are reading shift and blur. There is, in the end, only one person who can make sense of the whole can of worms — the artist.

However, in Reality and Dreams the controlling role of Muriel Spark is a little too overt, I feel. Her unique sensibility functions best when the voice is subjective, the point of view confined or in first person, as in her two wonderful late novels A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent. This method localizes, and validates, that clear-eyed, unabashedly, brutally honest gaze on the world and its denizens. Omniscient narration has the opposite effect: the mode has its attractions but, in this day and age, it can seem a little too manipulative and knowing. Perhaps in this elderly century (and Spark makes some play with this notion) the predetermined, the ordered, the sense of everything-in-its-place is fundamentally inimical. In our novels, that most controlled of artefacts, we need at least the illusion of uncertainty, of ignorance, of the random.

Reflecting on his dream notion Tom concedes that, “‘Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They bulge with flesh, they drip with blood.’ My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments — all shadows.” The dreams of Muriel Spark, as we have seen in her exemplary oeuvre, are frighteningly real, also, and bulge and drip to great effect. Reality and Dreams, however, is a little muted, and a certain shadowiness detracts from the real frisson. We may not have, in this latest novel, Muriel Spark in her full symphonic majesty but we can still relish the real pleasures of this work on a smaller scale — a nocturne, say, a suite, a variation on certain themes — as we wait impatiently for the major work to resume.

1999

Two brief quotations will serve as the best introduction to this unique and extraordinary novel, the finest novel, in my opinion, to have come out of the First World War. The scene takes place in the reserve lines in the Somme valley in northern France during the late summer of 1916. A corporal is dressing-down the men in his section.

“You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat quick. See? You miserable beggar, you! A bloody cow like you’s sufficient to demoralize a whole muckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work for a change.”

Nothing too unusual here: standard NCO aggression, an attempt to render the colloquial nature of the speech by dropping the odd consonant, perhaps a hint of a more refined sensibility present in the way Corporal Hamley’s entry into the tent is so precisely described. But now here is the same passage as it was originally written and as it was originally meant to be read.

“You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat, quick. See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cunt like you’s sufficient to demoralise a whole fuckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work, for a change.”

The first problem about Martin Chuzzlewit is its title. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet,” opines Juliet, and normally I would agree, but I feel that in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit the axiom does not neatly apply. Martin Chuzzlewit is one of those novels that would benefit from a title change. It is a problem that emerges only once the book has been well begun, as a vague niggle at first, then a growing worry, and then, by the time one has reached the end, it is a full-blown puzzler. Why on earth is the book called Martin Chuzzlewit? More precisely: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit? Who, in all honesty, gives a fig about young Martin — whose story, I roughly calculate, probably occupies barely a fifth of the text — so why should the book be named after him? When one thinks of the great eponymous Dickens novels—Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby — it is apparent that Martin Chuzzlewit, though it would seem to be in the same family, is manifestly not. And this misnomer goes some way to account, I think, for the novel’s surprising though significant neglect. For one of Dickens’s greatest novels it is, without doubt, under-read and undervalued. It is as if it has been placed, as it were, in the wrong pigeon-hole: it shouldn’t be with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but with, say, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. Readers are expecting Dickens to offer them something they are familiar with, and something that he does unsurpassably well, and in the event the central character is almost insignificant, and was there ever such a bland pair of lovers as young Martin and Mary? It is not conclusive evidence, though telling enough all the same, but in a recent biography of Dickens the index cites only nine fleeting references to the novel, the longest being a couple of paragraphs dealing with the American episodes and their sources. Clearly, Martin Chuzzlewit is something of a square peg in a round hole; Martin Chuzzlewit is an odd fish.

And yet at the same time Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, the most sheerly funny of all Dickens’s novels, with a teeming energetic humour that continues to delight some hundred and fifty years after its first publication. It contains enduringly celebrated Dickens creations, notably Seth Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, a whole gallery of brilliantly rendered minor characters and writing of a verve and vigour, and imaginative audacity, that is the equal of anything else in the oeuvre. Dickens himself was highly pleased with the book as he was writing it. “You know, as well as I,” he confided to his friend and future biographer John Forster, “that I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I know, if I had health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up tomorrow. But how many readers do not think!” The somewhat plaintive self-justification is highly revealing, as is his evident ambition and confidence. It was prompted by the comparative failure of the novel, which was appearing in monthly parts throughout 1843 and the first half of 1844. By Dickens’s standards it was not doing well. Pickwick and Nickleby sold 40–50,000 copies a month: Chuzzlewit never rose much over 20,000.

It must have been hard for Dickens to comprehend this baffling shortfall. He was thirty-two years old and at the very apex of his fame. Chuzzlewit was his sixth novel, destined to follow the unequivocal triumphs of Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. He was in a real sense a mature novelist with a massive readership and in full and confident apprehension of his particular genius. He had special hopes for Chuzzlewit also: it was to be more deliberately structured than the picaresque form of its predecessors; moreover it was to have a clear moral agenda — it was designed to illustrate, according to Forster, “more or less by every person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have their root in selfishness.” And throughout the novel Dickens dutifully reminds us of this great theme of “Self,” addressing little homilies to the reader, explaining motives and consequences, just in case the outlines of the grand plan are becoming a little blurred. But it does not work, or rather it works, but only in the most general sense. Yes, one can see what he is driving at, but this sententious overview is an afterthought; it has nothing to do with the success, nor of the greatness, of the novel.

And here we enter the realm of speculation, somewhat. Chuzzlewit is a huge novel, more than half a million words I calculate, which was written more or less continually over a period of eighteen months. Your average late twentieth-century novelist, producing a lean, well-tooled 200 pager every three or four years, must stand in shamefaced awe at this superabundant energy. Dickens’s letters are full of it—“writing like a Dragon,” “powdering away at Chuzzlewit,” “writing merrily.” Again he declares to Forster: “I have been all day in Chuzzlewit agonies — conceiving only. I hope to bring forth tomorrow” (my italics). The demands of monthly serial publication must have made this form of writing rhythm inevitable. A day of feverish thought and plotting followed by days of feverish writing. Even if we did not have Dickens’s own words for it the internal evidence of the text would suffice to establish that the novel was composed in this manner. You can chart the rise and fall of his energies and enthusiasms, easily spot the longueurs and the padding. That the novel is generally so unflaggingly zestful is what is astonishing: the fact that it is not wholly sustained, that it occasionally goes off the boil, meanders and loses its way, is not only inevitable, it is also — thank God — only human.

In every artist’s head, certainly in every novelist’s, there is an urversion — a perfect Platonic vision — of the art form he or she intends to produce. For various reasons — usually a blend of impossible ambition and pragmatic constraints — something different, and, rarely, something better, emerges. And this, I think, is what occurred with Martin Chuzzlewit. We know in fair detail what Dickens hoped the Chuzzlewit he was writing would be: we can only be grateful that it didn’t come off.

Because it has to be said that, for all his hopes about producing a more sophisticated and better-structured novel than its predecessors, Chuzzlewit — judged by Dickens’s criteria — fails. It is uneven, it is ungainly, it sags and from time to time bores and baffles. The most signal example of this, as I have already suggested, is the superficiality of the eponymous hero. But the American episodes are another instance of bad planning (apparently an attempt, in response to the disappointing sales, to win new readers). When Martin and Mark Tapley go to seek their fortune in the New World the whole tone of the novel changes. It reads today as laboriously heavy-handed satire, but I suspect that, even in 1843, when the narrative switched back to England and the Pecksniffs, a sense of relief would be inevitable. This is not to say that the novel is badly plotted: on the contrary, Dickens keeps the strands of various storylines taut and neatly interconnected. As the novel progresses, the geographical displacements of minor characters — Mark Tapley, Bailey, Mrs Gamp — function very effectively as points de repère for the multilevelled plot. Young Bailey, for example, neatly takes us from Mrs Todgers’s boarding house, to the Anglo-Bengalee Assurance Company, which links us again with Jonas Chuzzlewit and the unfortunate Merry Pecksniff. Another device Dickens employs is deliberately to withhold information from us, while at the same time letting us know that the information is highly significant. This is a form of teasing on the part of the omniscient novelist that can occasionally verge on the arch. An obvious instance is the “dirt” that Nadgett digs up on Jonas Chuzzlewit. He hands the details to Tigg Montague who reads them with mounting glee. Dickens knows, Nadgett knows and Montague knows… but we don’t. The reader’s curiosity is distinctly piqued. Also the invalid Lewsome confides to John Westlock that he has a dread and vital secret to impart and will do so as soon as he recovers his health. This knowledge ticks away like a buried time bomb as the story continues elsewhere. Another tribute to Dickens’s skill in the mechanics of novel writing is that nothing is wasted. I am sure every reader would have forgotten that young Martin designed a grammar school while he was briefly Pecksniff’s pupil. But it delivers a pleasant frisson of surprised recognition when, hundreds of pages later, Martin and Mark return to England and discover Pecksniff humbly receiving the plaudits of an admiring crowd as the foundation stone of Martin’s grammar school is laid.

All these techniques are narrative skills that Dickens possesses in abundance, that contrive to keep the story moving, that deliver a sense of something shapely and well constructed (though he doesn’t hesitate to resort to absurd coincidence when he is in a tight spot). But they are the sort of manipulations that, I would suggest, manifest themselves in the day to day business of writing and plotting the monthly numbers. The component parts — the whirring cogs, the levers and the pulleys — are all functioning well: it is only the grand design of the machine that is flawed.

Not that this unduly matters, I repeat. The poet and critic Craig Raine suggests, quite rightly I believe, that “finally, we read Dickens for his brilliant detail.” Detail like this, for example: “his fingers, clogged with brilliant rings, were as unwieldy as summer flies but newly rescued from a honey pot.” This is masterfully done, not simply in terms of the visual analogue provided — one knows exactly the degree of vulgar flashiness we are dealing with — but also for its undertones, of “flies round a honey pot,” of the element of corruption — there is something candidly disgusting about this image. The fact that the simile is applied to Tigg Montague in his newfound glory makes it all the more apt. And the fact too that this is but one image in a marvellously burnished paragraph devoted to a description of Montague Tigg turned Tigg Montague is further evidence of Dickens’s prodigality.

A little later, in the extraordinary pages that make up our introduction to the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, we find this: “Look at the green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket-balls beaten flat …” The strength and sheer originality of this simile almost draw you up short. A cricket-ball beaten flat? Something I doubt anyone has ever seen, but in the forcing jar of Dickens’s imagination it not only is readily visualized but it also provides a vision of these mighty ledgers that is perfectly precise.

These “brilliant details,” the quality of writing, the very palpability of Dickens’s descriptive prose, are the nuggets we quarry from the great bulk of the novels and Martin Chuzzlewit is richly provisioned with them. But there are moments when Dickens, in full flow, is able to extend this feeling of physicality through entire paragraphs. Here, for example, is part of a description of Mrs Todgers’s boarding house:

In particular, there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the greens that had ever been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength. The parlour was wainscoted, and communicated to strangers a magnetic and instinctive consciousness of rats and mice. The staircase was very gloomy and very broad, with balustrades so thick and heavy that they would have served for a bridge. In a sombre corner of the first landing, stood a gruff old giant of a clock, with a preposterous coronet of three brass balls on his head; whom few had ever seen — none ever looked in the face — and who seemed to continue his heavy tick for no other reason than to warn heedless people from running into him accidentally. It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s, within the memory of man. It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy. And, at the top of the staircase, was an old, disjointed, rickety, ill-favoured skylight, patched and mended in all kinds of ways, which looked distrustfully down at everything that passed below, and covered Todgers’s up as if it were a sort of human cucumber-frame, and only people of a peculiar growth were reared there.

All the familiar Dickensian tropes are pressed into service here. Comic exaggeration, the swaggering simile (“balustrades …[that] would have served for a bridge”), personification, the conversational aside (“It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s”), the piling on of adjectives and then, finally, the startling transmogrifying image — of Todgers’s as a human cucumber-frame — that leaps from the page and delivers us Todgers’s in a manner so fresh, so audacious, that any sense that this was merely another run-of-the-mill tumbledown dwelling, of the sort that has been described in literature countless times before, is entirely banished from our minds.

There are also other, more covert, talents at work in passages like this: to do with punctuation and rhythm and sentence cadence. This is hard to analyse, and it may even be an instinctive gift, but Dickens, it seems to me, has a superb sense of timing, of when to throw in a short sentence—“It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy”—amongst longer ones; of when to allow the parenthetical clauses to build and mount; of when to introduce repetition (“The staircase was very gloomy and very broad”); and so on. This ability to orchestrate the pace of these bravura passages in no small manner contributes to their success. The way a paragraph like this is structured acts as a kind of invisible matrix upon which the ideas and images may confidently rest; and Dickens shows himself as deftly accomplished with these more recherché technical gifts, as with the principal ones of story, character and language, allowing them discreetly to distribute and enhance the various forces of the words he employs. One may admire the splendid ambition of the architect but one should never forget the less ostentatious labours of the engineer. Dickens, as we have seen, was a formidable exponent of both professions.

There are many passages of similar brilliance in Martin Chuzzlewit, as there are in all of Dickens’s novels, but Chuzzlewit, to my mind, is amongst the most amply provided. Furthermore, it is not simply a matter of sparkling and pyrotechnical description. Chuzzlewit, it is worth reiterating, is Dickens’s funniest novel, and it is the ever present, and effervescent, sense of comedy, alongside the virtuoso wordplay and image-mongering, that makes paragraphs like the one quoted above so memorably effective.

If, in some notional parlour game, I were asked to select the most sustained passage of comic writing in English literature, to choose a tour de force that one could confidently present as an exemplar of the comic form, then I think I would offer up as my choice the penultimate chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where Salter, the hapless news editor, follows William Boot to Boot Magna, the family home, and tries to persuade him to rejoin the staff of the Daily Beast. Every time I read these pages I laugh again and exult at Waugh’s impeccable comic sense. Comparisons are invidious, and the comic styles are so different in any case, but I now believe that the pre-eminence of the penultimate chapter of Scoop is seriously challenged, if not overthrown, by chapters eight and nine of Martin Chuzzlewit, pages which deal with the Pecksniff family’s trip to London, their arrival at Todgers’s, their visit to Miss Pinch and concluding with the Sunday dinner given in the Pecksniffs’ honour by the gentlemen lodgers. Waugh’s style is all to do with restraint, the humour is implicit, everything is merely presented — shown — and it is the reader who, automatically, fleshes out the context and significance, and supplies the humour and absurdity. Waugh sets the charges, if you like, and the reader detonates them. In Dickens the reverse is true — Dickens tells as well as shows — and it is a remarkable tribute to the potent verve and dynamism of his style (and perhaps to the fact that, at root, senses of humour barely change) that, a century and a half on, these forty pages or so of Martin Chuzzlewit provide such fecund and inventive writing as well as such rich and apparently timeless comedy. They are, in my opinion, unmatched in all his other novels.

But Dickens, as has been frequently observed, can all too easily make his critics appear clever. This may be a weakness apparent in a certain type of talent or genius — not so long ago Mozart was mocked for his “horrible little tunes”—a type that is generous and lavish, open and unguarded, the very opposite of the costive or over-intellectual artist. Dickens takes great risks (he was, it should always be remembered, writing for a huge popular audience) and he leaves hostages to fortune in every chapter. It is not difficult to deplore a ghastly passage like this, apostrophizing on the attraction between John Westlock and Ruth Pinch:

Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell; and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.

Oh, foolish, panting timid little heart, why did she feign to be unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so flutteringly happy there!

Can this be the same man who can write, with the laconic quietism of a Kurt Vonnegut, of a child’s death: “Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all”? The answer is “yes” and there is a complexity of reasons required to explain why this can be. Briefly, it is a combination, I would suggest, of autre temps, autres moeurs, and various impulses existing in the Dickens psyche. And there is no doubt that raw sentiment, in serious literature, is today almost wholly discredited and démodé to such an extent that we are embarrassed when we come across it in an artist we admire and revere. It is instructive to compare the contemporary responses to another comic genius — Charlie Chaplin (with whom, in the life and the work, there are many parallels) — who, forty years after Dickens’s death, also won enormous popular acclaim with a similar blend of comedy and unadulterated sentiment. In Chaplin’s case modern audiences feel happier analysing the complex architectonics of a pratfall or elaborate gag than responding to the two-fisted hauling on their heartstrings that many a Chaplin film indulges in. But Dickens is the greater artist (and, of course, his art form infinitely more rich and complex) and his genius, unlike Chaplin’s, more easily survives the excesses of an overloaded heart.

There are two broad reasons for this: one to do with content and one to do with form. Dickens proclaimed that Martin Chuzzlewit was to do with “Self.” But, as with many of the ostensible subjects of his great novels, this formulation is just another way of saying that it is to do with “Money.” Money and the getting of it are the key factors underpinning the narrative and moral strands of Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin wants money, as do Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit and Montague Tigg. Chuzzlewit, like many a Victorian novel, has as its starting point a potential inheritance, and the material changes that inheritance will bestow: who will get what and how will their lives alter thereby? It was a theme, to put it bluntly, very close to Dickens’s heart. But against this need, against this motive force, Dickens sets characters for whom these pecuniary desires hold no attraction. Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch, for example, lead lives in which the getting of money has no part to play beyond essential pragmatic concerns. (Symbolically, Tom sends back Mrs Lupin’s fiver without breaking it.) Their lives are driven instead by principles of simple human decency, and the moral tensions of the novel revolve around these counterposing tendencies. Money versus decency, and the eventual triumph of decency, is a sloganizing redaction of what Martin Chuzzlewit is “about.” It is not resolved in a satisfactory way because the comic form, the serious comic form, fights against this type of cosy sententiousness. This sort of conclusion is one where art is designed to console, but if it is to console in this way then it has to be handled, and the reader manipulated, with cool and masterly skill. A glance at the final paragraphs of Martin Chuzzlewit will illustrate just to what extent Dickens has lost this fingerparing, objective poise.

But it does not matter: the cute verities that Dickens endorses in the novel’s conclusion do not undermine its greatness (and in fact I defy anyone not to be delighted that young Bailey turns out to be alive after all. There is a small place for sentiment, one must grudgingly concede, however hardnosed we like our comedy to be in this day and age) because the triumph of decency, if we may so term it, is not why one values the novel. Because, to contemporary readers, its value must be to do with, in the end, questions of contemporary response. It is right that we should not bend Dickens’s work into some grotesque modern distortion—“The Existential Dickens,” or “Dickens as Marxist” or some such parody. He was an early Victorian, inescapably, with all the emotional and intellectual baggage that is implied in that classification. But at the same time it is vital for each new generation of readers to reassess and re-evaluate the great works of the past, and if we are to read Martin Chuzzlewit today, and derive pleasure from it — and not just as an anthropological curiosity — we must ask ourselves what there is in the novel that defies history, as it were, that makes it always valid.

My own response to this question would be that it lies in the comedy. The unequivocal fun and exuberance are crucial, as I have suggested, but there is a note in Chuzzlewit that is new in Dickens and marks Chuzzlewit as a precursor of the darker, later novels. The high-spirited comedy is mixed here and there with a brand of humour that one might designate “brutal” or “cruel”; moments where Dickens, like all great comic novelists, recognizes the indifference of the universe to mankind’s fate, recognizes that, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” One thinks in this context of the tenacious, indestructible fraudulence of Pecksniff, of Merry and Cherry and their respective fates, of Jonas Chuzzlewit’s bleak lechery and near-demonic possession, of the ruthless mockery of Chuffey and Moddle, of Mrs Gamp and her gallows humour, of Montague Tigg and his ebullient conning of trusting investors. Dickens’s comic vision of the world, despite his neat pairing off of happy young lovers, despite, one might say, his best intentions, is too sagacious, too clear-eyed and realistic, to pretend that all’s well that ends well. There is a moment, early in the novel, where Dickens is guying the rebarbative smugness of the Pecksniff family. “What words can paint the Pecksniffs in that trying hour? Oh, none: for words have naughty company among them, and the Pecksniffs were all goodness” (my italics). At the end of the novel “all goodness” seems to have triumphed but the jollity and benignity appear forced and self-deceiving. Tom Pinch may be bedecked with flowers and mellow harmonies may enfold him but we know what the world is really like because Dickens has just shown us, with fierce accuracy and intoxicating humour. It is the naughty company of words that we celebrate and recall: this is what gives Martin Chuzzlewit its edge, its wild glee, its cautious disquiet, and its greatness.

1994

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” Flaubert famously observed, but was he talking about the book as a whole or its heroine? Titles are important clues as to how a book should be read: Madame Raquin, Miss Emma Woodhouse, or even Emma Bovary carry a different freight than the originals do. And if titles are significant then subtitles represent another covert shove in the right direction. Madame Bovary was originally subtitled Moeurs de Campagne. “Moeurs”—in my Petit Robert — is defined thus: “habitudes (d’une société, d’un individu) relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal”—a far more nuanced term than the usual English translation of “customs.” “Customs of the countryside” will not do.

Both the title “Madame” and the subtitle speak of decorum, or, more precisely, bourgeois decorum. Madame Bovary is a book about the “bourgeois” of provincial France and their “habitudes relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal.” And the mal in question here is the adultery of Emma Bovary, the causes and the consequences thereof. Emma Bovary dreams of a different life and her dreams are driven by romantic literature, good and bad. Every choice she makes in her life is vitiated by this corrupting influence: she sees the world through a glass, rosily. Her marriage to the widower Charles Bovary, country doctor, her affairs with Rodolphe, the libertine, and Léon, the clerk, are a series of straw-clutching efforts to escape.

Flaubert, a bourgeois who lived in the provinces, loathed the bourgeois and the book is a sustained dissection and condemnation of this sensibility and class. When he quoted Voltaire’s dictum that “the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity,” he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

Everybody in the novel is stupid: Charles Bovary is stupid for loving Emma; Homais, the insufferable chemist, is a smug monster of stupid homilies. Emma’s two lovers are stupid and selfish in equal measure. Nothing escapes Flaubert’s gimlet eye and the precision of his detailing. And God is in the details of this novel, so lovingly reproduced in a perfectly fashioned prose that we forget we are dealing with a dull tale of provincial adultery. If Flaubert’s pen is dipped in bile it is so that he may write all the more clearly — phrases even italicized so they will not escape notice, relish and censure. The effort and art in this procedure were both phenomenal and revolutionary. One detail will have to stand for the mass. Emma’s daughter Berthe is brought into a room to say goodbye: “… la servante amena Berthe, qui secoua au bout d’une ficelle un moulin á vent la tête en bas.” Most novelists might have mentioned a toy, a few might have chosen a windmill, but only Flaubert would have had it dangling upside down on a string.

Emma, ruined, poisons herself; Charles dies — of grief — and the impossible Homais triumphs and is awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Flaubert is unremittingly and uncompromisingly bleak in his final vision — no consolation is offered. “I remain glued to the earth,” he wrote to George Sand, “… everything disturbs me, everything lacerates and ravages me, though I make every effort to soar.” It is his rage against the bourgeois spirit that informs his novel and his furiously precise prose but that alone cannot explain the book’s endurance as a classic. We are all, in our own way, bourgeois — like Emma Bovary — and even Flaubert admits he made every effort to soar. For to think that life might be better is no shame — it is, indeed, to be human. In the end, Madame Bovary, c’est nous.

1999

In early 1945 Evelyn Waugh was languishing in Yugoslavia, bored and dispirited, waiting for the war to end. He had recently completed Brideshead Revisited, the most important novel of his career, when Nancy Mitford sent him a copy of The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly. Waugh read and reread Connolly’s book and scribbled his reactions on the margins. The marginalia are extensive, full of insight and full of self-delusion. Waugh used the opportunity both to excoriate and analyse his old acquaintance (“friend” is too loaded a word for their complex relationship) and the comments he made on the book are fascinating, not just for what they say about Connolly but also for the light they throw on Waugh himself.

For Waugh was obsessed with Connolly: fascinated and irritated by him; alternately admiring and contemptuous; secretly envious and publicly derisive. These are a set of contrasting reactions easily understood by Connolly fans (amongst whom I count myself among the most ardent) because you cannot read Cyril Connolly for very long without wanting to acquire — and then develop — a relationship with the personality of the man himself. This is rarely the case with readers and writers. Everyone is curious (I’m deeply curious about the character of Evelyn Waugh, for example) but the dislocation between the mind that creates and the man who suffers (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) is usually happily observed. My admiration of Waugh’s novels is not diluted by his rebarbative personality. But with Connolly there is a marked difference and the difference is that the artist and the man are so conjoined and intermingled that you cannot savour the one without the other and vice versa. Connolly famously declared that it was the “true function” of a writer to try and produce a masterpiece “and that no other task is of any consequence.” Whatever the veracity of this claim (dubious), there’s no doubt that one of the great frustrations of his life was that he himself so conspicuously failed to live up to his own stern injunction. Yet the more one reads and the more one learns about him perhaps the fairest conclusion to arrive at is that Cyril Connolly’s greatest memorial — his particular masterpiece — is precisely that conjunction of life and work: that both how he lived (1903-74) and what work he produced form a unique and lasting whole. To invert the old saying: in Connolly’s case we cannot see the trees for the wood. It’s the wood — whole and entire — that interests us and not so much the individual oaks and elms.

This may seem harsh but, while almost everything Connolly wrote was stylish and intelligent, informed and passionate, there is no one book, or sequence of writings, that one can hold up as unequivocally excellent or fully achieved. The famous parodies are clever but finally lightweight and ephemeral; the millions of words of literary criticism and journalism suffer from the built-in obsolescence that undermines all journalism, however fine. Enemies of Promise, that precocious memoir, is good — but patchy. The Unquiet Grave is maddeningly flawed — pretentious, self-serving, arch — as well as achingly honest and true. The Rock Pool (Connolly’s one novel) is an interesting failure — and so on. Yet the sum of his uneven parts adds up to something formidable. He’s a writer for all seasons, for all readers. Waugh sneered at his amateur psycho-analysing. “We love only once,” Connolly wrote, “and on how that first great love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.” “Nonsense,” Waugh mocked in the margin. But there was never a truer comment made about his own life and situation and perhaps it pained him to see Connolly hitting a personal nail so squarely on the head.

Thus one’s reading and relish of Connolly’s work is shaped and conditioned by what one knows of the man himself to a degree not shared by any other writers. More will be derived, for example, from reading the prefaces to the monthly issues of Horizon (which magazine he edited from 1940-49) if you know about the history of Horizon, Connolly’s editorial lifestyle, his love affairs, the animosities and gossip that surrounded that period of London cultural life. The Rock Pool — self-conscious, straining for effect — becomes far less unwieldy once you know the background to its composition and who the thinly disguised characters are based on, and so forth.

This is not to denigrate or diminish Connolly’s skill as a writer and literary journalist. I first came across his work during the late sixties and early seventies when he was writing a weekly book review for the Sunday Times. At school and university I read Connolly’s weekly review religiously, whatever the subject, with — at that time — no insider knowledge about the man. What stimulated me was, I think, his enthusiasm. This was no dry, jaded don routinely turning out his 800 words, no embittered hack assailing grander reputations for the sake of a weekend’s frisson. Though I now know the drudgery of the weekly review caused him intense pain it never seemed to come through in the writing. He could pick and choose, of course, and the books he wrote about reflected his passions — French literature, the classics, the Augustans, the great Modernists — and his passion was contagious. From the reviews I moved on to The Unquiet Grave and was completely captivated by it. This “word cycle,” a loosely yoked collection of pensées, lengthy quotations, reflections on literature and autobiography, in many ways earns all of Waugh’s strictures — snobbish, fey, posturing, self-pitying — yet I can think of few better evocations of intellectual melancholy, if I can put it that way, of the dissatisfactions inherent in a life nurtured by and charged with European culture: of individual human insufficiency confronted by the great artistic ideals and achievements. Connolly is no Montaigne, he has none of his calm, resigned sagacity (though Montaigne is one of the presiding spirits of the book), but Connolly captures something ineffably present in the human spirit. And as he roves through world literature trying to pin down these emotions he does so with a candour and a kind of gloomy relish that are very easy to identify with (particularly when you are young: it is a perfect book for the young, would-be littérateur). We have all felt like this, have reached to art for solace and found only more despair, but only Connolly could be so unashamedly candid about it and make a virtue of his inadequacy.

This honesty, try as he might to disguise it, surfaces again and again in his writings and I think is what makes him perennially modern. Connolly is always confessing his failures one way or another and like all great confessors (Rousseau and Boswell spring to mind as real Connolly precursors and fellow-spirits) we are both appalled by what they tell us and at the same time drawn to them. We’re all human — all too human — but not all of us will admit to it in print. The vicarious thrill and recognition we take in confessional writings is one of the great literary pleasures and is nowhere more evident than in Connolly’s London Journal. Here we have the essence of the young Cyril, just up from Oxford, out of pocket, out of love, fretting and dissatisfied. I think the London Journal deserves its place alongside The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise as representing the best of Connolly. One regrets that this fragment is all we have (it seems Connolly was more of a notebook-jotter than a journal keeper). On the evidence of these few pages he could have been our modern Boswell — and how wonderful it would have been to have Connolly’s journal intime to set alongside Virginia Woolf’s diaries — fascinating, yet highly contrived and self-conscious, written, unlike Connolly’s, with both eyes firmly fixed on posterity.

Connolly earns my further affection by being the great self-appointed anti-Bloomsbury figure. He drew up the battle lines himself early in life, placing himself in Chelsea (“that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum … where I worked and wandered”) precisely to counter what he saw as the desiccated fastidiousness, the preciosity, the snobism and the cliquishness of Bloomsbury. Chelsea, by contrast, was more open to Europe, more grubby, sexier, more rackety, more worldly and hedonistic. It was not simply a question of the new generation rejecting the values of the older, he saw instead a real opposition: of contrasting lifestyles, of political and cultural values, of attitudes to art. And it was an opposition that he maintained all his life: there was always in his life not just a love of European culture (especially that of France and Spain) but also a love of beauty, of women, of alcohol and food, of sea and sunbathing, of idleness and travel. Connolly is one of the great evokers of place and of pleasure: whether he is talking about a meal of a rough red wine and steak-frites, or wandering through Lisbon or Rome looking at architecture, one feels through his words the physical relish he takes in the experience. He makes you want to do the same things and derive the same intense enjoyment as he does. When he writes that he wants to live in France, somewhere in a magic circle embracing the Dordogne, Quercy, the Aveyron and the Gers, in a “golden classical house, three storeys high with oeil de boeuf windows looking out over water … [with] a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games; a wooded hill behind and a river below, then a sheltered garden indulgent to fig and nectarine …” you respond, instinctively, “How true, that’s exactly where I want to live and how I want to live as well.” In a curious way he is both a great and dangerous role model: most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s prodigious appetites, both venal and exalted, and most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s failings, both petty and debilitating. This small, podgy, balding, pug-faced, funny, gossipy, lazy, clever, cowardly, hedonistic, fractious, difficult man somehow manages to enshrine in his work and life everything that we aspire to, and that intellectually ennobles us, and all that is weak and worst in us as well.

I think this explains both the fascination and repulsion that Waugh felt. Physically and temperamentally they were not far apart: both small, egotistical, selfish, stout and unhandsome. Waugh took the opposite route to Connolly and studiously and desperately reinvented himself as a parodic Tory squire cum reactionary man of letters. It is a facile oversimplification, but Waugh decided to live a lie while Connolly remained true to himself — however flawed or inadequate that self happened to be. Both men were consumed with self-loathing: both of them, Waugh said, were “always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.” Waugh became the rich and acclaimed novelist, with a large family, living in a country house; Connolly was always indigent, the hard-up journalist scraping a living but, somehow, seeming to attract a succession of beautiful women prepared to put up with him. Waugh’s life appears superficially the more successful and achieved and yet, for all his endless moaning, Connolly seems far and away the happier man. The secret, I think, was in his resolute secularity and worldliness: he did not seek solace in spirituality (as Waugh did), instead he took both simple and intelligent pleasure in what the world offered, whether it came in the shape of a building, a marsupial, the company of friends, a fine claret, a train journey, a cigar, a sunny terrace, a beautiful woman, a good book, a Georgian teapot or a painting. That relish of life and its potential joys (and the sense of their fragility and transience) permeates his work and gives it its enduring value — and, I suspect, for I never met him, permeated the man as well. There is a wonderful passage in the London Journal that, I believe, sums up the essence of the Cyril Connolly appeal. It was written in 1929. Unhappy in love, paranoid, fed up with London and duplicitous friends, the young Cyril Connolly flees to Paris for consolation and takes a room at the Hôtel de la Louisiane on the Left Bank:

Hôtel de la Louisiane

… I have a room for 400 francs a month and at last I will be living within my own and other people’s income. I am tired of acquaintances and tired of friends unless they’re intelligent, tired also of extrovert unbookish life. Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude, street worship, exploration of the least known arrondissements, shopgazing, alley sloping, café crawling, Seine loafing, and plenty of writing from the table by this my window where I can watch the streets light up … I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discreet and many folded strata of the old world, the past, the North, the world of ideas. I am for the Hôtel de la Louisiane.

Yes, yes! you cry spontaneously, when you read this. So am I. I’m for all this too. I’m for the life of the Hôtel de la Louisiane. And this, in the end, also explains why we are for Cyril Connolly.

2000

4 November 1977. 9.30 a.m. The painter Keith Vaughan, dying of cancer, opens his journal and prepares to record the moment of his death: “The capsules have been taken with some whisky,” Vaughan writes and keeps on writing, quietly waiting for oblivion to arrive. “I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much alive… I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened.” Vaughan writes on for a few more lines and then the editor adds, “At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop.”

In December 1945, Edmund Wilson opens his journal to log the beginning of a love affair: “I loved her body which I had first seen in a bathing suit — taller than my usual physical type — there was nothing about it that displeased me — her breasts were low, firm and white, perfect in their kind, very pink outstanding nipples, no hair, no halo round them, slim pretty tapering legs, feet with high insteps and toes that curled down and out.”

On 1 May 1792, Gilbert White, a country curate, opens his journal to observe that, “Grass grows very fast. Honeysuckles very fragrant and most beautiful objects! Columbines make a figure. My white thorn, which hangs over the earth house, is now one sheet of bloom, and has pendulous boughs down to the ground.”

On 21 June 1918, Katherine Mansfield opens her journal to ask, “What is the matter with today? It is thin, white, as lace curtains are white, full of ugly noises (e.g. people opening the drawers of a cheap chest and trying to shut them again). All food seems stodgy and indigestible — no drink is hot enough. One looks hideous, hideous in the glass — bald as an egg — one feels swollen — and all one’s clothes are tight. And everything is dusty, gritty — the cigarette ash crumbles and falls — the marigolds spill their petals over the dressing table. In a house nearby someone is trying to tune a cheap cheap piano.”

Four journal entries by four compulsive journal-keepers, each journal functioning for its author in a different way, satisfying different needs. Why did these people feel the urge to write these observations down? What is the strange allure of the journal? What does it do to your life?

It’s hard to come to any conclusive answer, to explain why a journal is something you have to keep. The simple reason is that the journal is all things to all men and women, a kind of literary text that is famously hard to define, and whose raison d’etre has rarely anything to do with fame or notoriety, narrative excitement or exoticism. There are many sorts of journals: journals written with both eyes fixed firmly on posterity and others that were never designed to be read by anyone else but the writer. There are journals content to tabulate the banal and humdrum details of ordinary lives and journals meant expressly to function as a witness to momentous events of history. There are journals that act as erotic stimulants or a psychoanalytic crutch and there are journals designed simply to function as an aide-memoire, perhaps as a rough draft for a later, more polished account of a life, and so on. But buried within these varying ambitions and motivations is a common factor which unites all these endeavours — the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth. The implication being that in the privacy of this personal record things will be un-censored, things will be said and observations made that couldn’t or wouldn’t be uttered in a more public forum. Hence the adjective “intimate” so often appended to the noun “journal.” The idea of secret diaries, of intimate journals somehow goes to the core of this literary form: there is a default-setting of intimacy — of confession — in the private record of a life that not only encourages the writing of journals but also explains their fascination to the reader.

In the case of Keith Vaughan this intimacy reaches unparalleled levels of candour. I can’t think of any other writer who has ever been writing deliberately at the very moment of his death, trying to record the last moments of conscious life. This in itself is enough to make Vaughan’s journal unique but it is typical of his tone of adamantine honesty throughout: his is the most unsparingly, harrowingly honest of the dozens of journals I have read over the years. I had the opportunity once to see the manuscript and the sight of that final page with the words tailing off into weakening squiggles freezes the soul. It is as if the terminal downward slash of the pen scarring the page (as his hand went limp and slid away) symbolizes the fall into the void that Vaughan longed for and had at that moment entered. And I wonder if there is something even more symbolic in that image that brings us closer to the root of the compulsion, the potent need that some of us feel to keep a journal. Vaughan’s marks on the page and their sudden cessation seem to me to sum up what is taking place in journal-keeping in a fundamental way: we keep a journal because we want to leave a trace of some kind. Like the prisoner who scratches the passing days on his cell wall, or the adolescent who carves initials into the trunk of a tree, or even an animal depositing his spoor, the act of writing a journal seems to say: I was here — here is some record of my journey.

My own serious journal-keeping has two distinct phases. The first began when I was nineteen, in 1971. I kept an almost daily journal for two years and then suddenly stopped, for reasons I now can’t recall — the journal gives no clue. I took it up again ten years later in 1981, and have kept it going steadily (though not daily) ever since. So, approximately half my life has now been set down in journal-form, but what’s interesting to me is that the two journals have quite different intentions. The first was motivated by a drive for total candour: it’s an urge common to many journal-keepers, that impulsion to set down on paper exactly what was going on in your life with no shame, prudery or cover-up. The second journal is of the aide-memoire variety: in 1981 my first novel had just been published and I thought it would be intriguing simply to record the everyday details, the ups and downs, the checks and frustrations, successes and failures of my writing life as time went by — and the second novel was published and then the third and then the fourth, the fifth and the sixth, should I ever reach those numbers. And so it has gone on over the last twenty-two years: it’s now a document of close to 2,000 pages and of abiding interest to its author. I refer back to it constantly.

But a couple of years ago I decided to reread the journal I had kept between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. It was a disturbing experience, like encountering a total stranger, a doppelgánger who had lived my life, but whom I barely recognized. The account I would give now of the factual events of those years would be essentially the same but the psychological and intellectual content seem to belong to somebody else. The journal is full of the usual undergraduate pretensions and musings and faithfully recalls the torrid roller-coaster that was my emotional life at the time. But there was also a kind of pitiless self-examination of almost everything I did that I could not remember ever undertaking. And I was very hard on myself — often insulting myself crudely and ruthlessly in the second person (and not very imaginatively: “you bloody fool,” “you stupid cretin,” sort of thing). Clearly, I had been much unhappier then than I thought, much more troubled and insecure. Yet if I had been asked before I reread the journal what I had been like in my late teens I would have said carefree, easy-going, relatively content.

But the hard evidence of my journal is irrefutably there and I value its honesty and have to acknowledge its truth. However, this schism between my memory of my earlier self and the historical facts made me wonder if the journal served another, more covert purpose for its keeper, namely to chart that progression of selves that we are at various stages of our life. We do change as people — even though our fundamental natures may remain the same. Whether we are in love or out of love, rich or poor, happy or sad, healthy or beset by illness will affect the self that we are at any given moment. Ageing and the getting of wisdom contribute to this constant metamorphosis as well but, as we move through time, it’s as if we shed these selves in the way a snake will slough off its skin: the glossy new scales bearing no imprint of the weathered, dull integument that was once there. And it seems too that we can be certain that our memories will play us false about our past: only the journal remains as witness to the series of individuals we were in our lives.

This thesis that we are an anthology, a composite of many selves, was put into practice when I decided to write my last novel, Any Human Heart, as the fictional intimate journal of a fictional writer. Over 500 pages, from 1923 to 1991, the protagonist ages from a seventeen-year-old schoolboy to an eighty-five-year-old man. The various journals he keeps during his life, among other things, record these transformations in himself. It was a paradoxical exercise because in writing the fictional journal I had to remain true to another constant that is a defining feature of the journal-form. For the journal — relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story — does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir, or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backward, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed. The impenetrable judgements of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband — and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it’s written as the future unspools into the present. There are glances backward, true, but in its essence it mimics and reflects our own wayward passage through time like no other form of writing.

There is one further fundamental stipulation I would make: no true journal worthy of the name can be published while its author is alive. Only a posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty. However interesting, journals and diaries published while their author is alive seem to me (with very few exceptions) to be bogus in some crucial way. This is particularly true of politicians’ journals — Clark, Benn, Castle et al. They have a different agenda (their very publication makes that point) and thus they can’t be totally honest, certainly not about their author, and thus they lose their legitimacy as true journals — they’ve sacrificed that potent alchemy of confession and confidentiality that all great journals require — for the quick fix of controversy and renown. If you’re going to publish your intimate journal while you are still alive you reduce it to another category of writing — your journal becomes a form of bastard-journalism or bastard-autobiography. There’s something inherently contradictory about being a living writer acclaimed for your published journals: you have to be dead to escape the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre. More to the point, because of these suspicions, we can’t read such journals in the same way: only the posthumous journal can be read purely.

However parochial they are, however apparently insignificant the entries, the pages of a journal offer us, as readers, a chance to live the writer’s life as he or she lived it, after he or she has lived it. On occasion, we are provided with the curious godlike knowledge of their destiny. Reading Virginia Woolf on 26 February 1941, a month before she commits suicide, provokes a bizarre conjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. She comments: “Food becomes an obsession. I grudge giving away a spice bun. Curious — age or the war? Never mind. Adventure. Make solid. But shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?” We actually know the negative answer to that question: we share the quiddity of her day and at the same time note that her vital clock is nearly wound down. Similarly, on 16 May 1763 James Boswell writes: “I drank tea at Mr Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy to the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’” As he describes his first sight of Dr Johnson we participate in the thrill of the young man’s meeting with the literary lion but there’s an extra frisson delivered by the foreknowledge that the mortal antipathy won’t frustrate the riches that ensued from that encounter.

But often we read with the same ignorance as that of the journal-keeper as he writes. The mundane flow of the day engulfs us similarly. Francis Kilvert notes on 21 September 1870: “Went to the Bronith. People at work in the orchard gathering up the windfall apples for early cider. The smell of the apples very strong. Beyond the orchards the lone aspen was rustling loud and mournfully a lament for the departure of summer.” We are with Kilvert that day. “The smell of the apples very strong” bears a kind of witness to 21 September 1870 that has as cogent and undeniable a validity as any other. Which brings me to the final characteristic of journal-keeping: it is the most democratic form of writing available, perhaps even more so than a letter. The letter presupposes another person in order to function; the intimate journal is designed to be read by only one pair of eyes, the author’s (even though others may be hoped for one distant day). Therefore it is judged by standards of truth, integrity, honesty and immediacy that require no special education, talent or gift. Poetry, the novel, biography, the essay and journalism are weighed up by different criteria, different forms of evaluation — and therefore different categories of success and failure too. D. H. Lawrence defined the novel as “the bright book of life.” Not everyone can write a novel but everyone is, in theory, capable of keeping a journal. And if you keep a journal — a true intimate journal — then it becomes, in a real sense, the book of your life and is therefore a unique document. But there is more to it than simply that, I feel, for we all share the same fate and — as we live, as long as we live — we all submit to the same condition: the human condition. In that case, then, the book of a life, an intimate journal — if it is true, if it is honest — will speak to everyone who has a chance to read it: it will be, in a curious way, both completely individual and universal. This is what happens when we read a journal: “The smell of the apples very strong” is, in its own way, perfect and unimprovable—21 September 1870 is fixed for us, for ever.

2003

I write these words in France on the eve of war [the invasion and occupation of Iraq]. A few days ago I travelled from London to my house, not far from Bordeaux in the south-west, by train, stopping off, en route, for a few hours in Paris. Fortuitously, I have covered a great swathe of this country and the weather, for March, is sublime: cool, dry and sunny — the hedgerows and the plum trees are dense with blossom. And to sit on a wicker chair in a Parisian sidewalk cafe with a cold beer on the table and the sun slanting warmly on the façade of the Louvre is to reinforce the abiding impression that there is no city in the world as beautiful as Paris and that — surely, also — France is the best country in the world when it comes to the quality of life. The things that give us pleasure, the buildings we see, the landscapes we traverse, what we drink, what we eat, what stimulates us aesthetically, and so on, seem to have been sorted out better here, if I can put it that way. Centuries of refinement have created a country where even the simplest, most democratic pleasures — a loaf of bread, a café au lait, a glass of wine — have a depth of meaning, a quality of enrichment that is somehow lacking elsewhere.

But there is another side to France, a more complex, darker one that coexists with its sophisticated hedonism, and the three books I’ve chosen all in their own way exemplify this admixture. Rather than range through French literature and select a Molière with a Proust and a Sainte-Beuve, or a Rimbaud with a Racine and a Montaigne, I have deliberately limited myself to the twentieth-century novel. On no other country in Europe (with the possible exception of Germany) does the last century cast such a sombre shadow and each of these novels hints at or explores the three great traumas France has endured during those hundred years and still endures today.

The first, moving chronologically by publication, is Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. I read this novel in my teens and I can still recall the impression it made on me then. It is a great novel of adolescence — you might say The Catcher in the Rye of contemporary French literature. It deals with the relationships between three school friends in provincial France at the end of the nineteenth century and the adventures that befall its eponymous hero, Meaulnes. The boys discover, in the depths of the French countryside, a lost domain, an old manor house, and at the same time are captivated by the girl who lives there, Yvonne. It’s hard to analyse the magic that this book works. It’s to do with secrecy, with the stirrings of adolescent sexuality but, more movingly, with the transience of our childhood pleasures and pains. Lurking behind the sunlit felicities of the simple story is the idea of death and its inevitability. All the more poignantly, the novel was written and published in 1913, a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Alain-Fournier, twenty-eight years old, was killed in the first month of the conflict and his body never recovered. The memento mori prescience of the novel’s atmosphere found an eerie parallel in the author’s own fate. And the undertone of melancholia that sits beside the precise and beautiful descriptions of a provincial adolescence is very French.

There’s a similar but more brazen confrontation with the human condition in my second choice: Albert Camus’s celebrated L’Etranger (The Outsider). Its status as a modern classic makes it difficult to imagine what it must have been like to read this short, laconic novel at the time of its publication in 1942 in the middle of the war, with France occupied by the invading Germans.

Camus’s hero, Mersault, is a truly modern man in his godlessness and his uncompromising, ironic understanding of the absurd nature of human existence. He is chillingly and brutally honest in his refusal to ameliorate his relentless non-conformity. Again the extra-literary resonances of the novel contribute to its exemplary nature. Camus was an Algerian, a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa. There is, in Mersault’s blunt diffidence, his absolute disinterestedness, a challenge to the culture of France and Europe. Here is a Frenchman with a different and very uncomfortable attitude — but who is as French as any Parisian waiter, for all that. These tensions foreshadow the Algerian war of the 1950s — effectively a French civil war — whose ramifications are still powerfully felt in the country half a century on.

My third novel was published in 1970 and won the Goncourt Prize of that year. Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl King) is an extraordinary account of the life of one Abel Tiffauges, whom we follow from ungainly schoolboy to humble garagiste to a prisoner of war of the Germans in East Prussia. There he is transformed into, literally, a form of ogre — a child stealer (the erlking of legend). The novel is a haunting mixture of beautifully observed reality (Tiffauges’s boarding school is enduringly horrible) and an expert reinvention of familiar myth. While it deals with the Second World War and the Nazi terror it is also an example of the kind of novel that only a French writer can achieve. Tournier is an immensely learned author with powerful opinions of true and controversial intellectual heft. And although he uses these ideas to buttress the cultural and literary leitmotifs of the novel they never overwhelm it. There is a tendency to denigrate French abstract thinking by contrasting it with Anglo-Saxon plain speaking. Each cultural predisposition has its extremes: impenetrable pretentious waffle on the one hand and pipe-and-slippers philistinism on the other. Tournier’s novel manages, however, to walk a line between intellectual profundity and narrative excitement with unusual poise and fascinating, stimulating flair. It is a very French novel.

Which is why I admire it so. I love France, I love its culture and its people. I was educated in one of its universities and I have lived in the country for ten years now. But like all countries and all peoples there are complexities of attitude, problems of understanding and comportment. All three of these novels explore aspects of the French “character” and in so doing elaborate, sometimes inadvertently, on themes peculiar to it. Generalizations about a country or its population are facile and effortlessly disproved (I’m speaking as a spendthrift Scotsman), but Camus said once, “situveuxêtre philosophe, écris un roman.” Novels, then, with their complexity, their scope, their built-in engagement with our common humanity, may be an ideal way of getting under a nation’s skin. So what do these three tell us about France? My feeling is that all three of them are darker than they may first appear and I think one can point to a strain of pessimism in French life and behaviour that these works echo. When Camus says, “everything that exalts life adds at the same time to its absurdity” he is not airing some convoluted intellectual trope but facing up to a pitiless fact about our existence that we would be better off acknowledging. Does this darkness contribute to that wilful stubbornness, that contrariness we non-French so often find in the French? Perhaps so — and tant mieux, I would add. The world seems palpably, rebarbatively absurd this week, hellbent on war. A dose of French contrariness is both provocative and salutary in the face of the new hegemony to whose tune we seem obliged to march, these days. A discordant note in a military band has never been so welcome.

2003

Madame Bovary rewritten by Noël Coward. Is this too harsh — or too glib — a redaction of A Handful of Dust, considered by many readers to be Evelyn Waugh’s finest novel? My one-sentence summary is not intended to be facetious but arose from a thought-experiment I imposed on myself. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to read the novel when it was first published (in 1934), to imagine what the experience must have been to read Waugh without the mighty baggage of the posthumous reputation. The problem is that we know too much about Evelyn Waugh — the biographies, the journals, the letters and the memoirs flesh him out in a manner rare amongst twentieth-century British writers. Virginia Woolf runs him close, Philip Larkin is coming up on the rails, but it is unusual to have so much information so comparatively soon on a writer who died only a generation ago. This weight of public judgement and analysis (and self-analysis) makes it hard to return to the novels as an innocent and unknowing reader: the bloated Catholic apologist, the misanthropic, check-suited Tory squire, stands at your shoulder and hindsight’s 20/20 vision provides answers that are both too swift and too pat. Hence the attempt at a thought-experiment and hence the reference to Noël Coward and Madame Bovary. And in this spirit it seems to me that above all else A Handful of Dust—this complex, fraught, tension-riven novel — is essentially, pre-eminently, two things: namely, it is a society novel (which is not the same as a novel about society) and a novel about adultery. I had forgotten how Tatlery the book is: how it was so plainly written for a small elite of London and County readers who would pick up the many smart references and the in-jokes. It is bright and brittle and knowing in its depiction of that milieu and written with an insider’s ease and familiarity. This tone of voice seems a little mannered and tiresome today (as indeed does Noël Coward’s) but it was designed at the time to play to a well-heeled and well-connected gallery.

It is also a brutally cold and clear-eyed look at a wife’s betrayal of a loving husband. Brenda Last, like Emma Bovary, is a provincial lady married to a stuffy and somewhat dull, prematurely aged man (“a bore,” as Cyril Connolly dubbed Tony Last). John Beaver is a metropolitan version of the clerk who takes his pleasure selfishly and lovelessly. From here the comparisons begin to grow a little strained. Flaubert may have said “Madame Bovary c’est moi” but Waugh would never have made that claim about Brenda. A Handful of Dust is a portrait of adultery seen from the side of the blameless cuckold — there can be few more ruthless and unredeeming literary portrayals of a woman than Waugh’s of Brenda Last. As the affair between Brenda and Beaver continues and the lies become more and more brazen (and therefore condemnable) one begins to question the veracity of the earlier portrayal of the Lasts’ marriage: how could Tony Last (a good man, though set in his ways) have ever married anyone as vapid, heartless and lacking in human warmth as the Brenda who takes up with Beaver? I would argue that the portrait of Brenda is inconsistent and dislocated (wife and adulteress seem different people) because it is not her character that particularly interests the author but the nature of what she has done to her marriage. The betrayal is everything and Waugh is unsparing in the way he wrings every final humiliation from it.

This is not all that surprising given the circumstances in which A Handful of Dust was begun. Waugh travelled to Fez, in Morocco, to write the book in January 1934. The preceding months had seen him much preoccupied with an unhappy love affair with Teresa Jungman (Waugh had proposed marriage, she had turned him down — Waugh was distraught and miserable) and with the continuing consequences of his own divorce from his first wife Evelyn Gardner, a complicated process which involved appearing at an Ecclesiastical Court to testify to the flawed and insincere nature of his marriage in an effort to have the religious authorities declare the union null and void, Evelyn Gardner (she-Evelyn) had had an affair with John Heygate in the first year of her marriage to Waugh. The publicity and grim procedures surrounding the eventual divorce (announcements in The Times, for example; meeting the lover in a lawyer’s office so he could be formally identified as corespondent) and the acute embarrassment (and his own perceived shame and ridicule) that Waugh suffered within his circle of friends had a monumental and lasting effect on his life and personality. It is no wonder that adultery, betrayal and heartlessness so dominate the pages of the novel he began to write.

Waugh wrote fast: he finished A Handful of Dust in four months, dispatching sections to the typist as he completed them. But he was having trouble with the ending (there is a very useful account of the composition of the novel in volume I of Martin Stannard’s fine biography). Before starting A Handful of Dust, Waugh had just written a travel book (in a month), an account of his recent travels in the hinterland of British Guiana, published under the title Ninety-Two Days. It was a job of work and was not a book he held in much esteem. However, the trip had given him the material for a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” In the novel, Tony Last, having discovered Brenda’s adultery, also leaves Britain to travel into the jungles of British Guiana and his famous fate — compelled to read Dickens for the rest of his life to the baleful settler-cum-gaoler Mr Todd — is essentially Waugh’s short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” stapled on to the end of his unfinished novel about adultery. Henry Green wrote to Waugh when the book came out and said, “I feel the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you mixing two things together? It seemed manufactured and not real.” This is one novelist’s intuition analysing a fellow novelist’s work with great and embarrassing acuity. Waugh defended himself stoutly: “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end I made it an elaborate and improbable one.” Adding that it was a “conceit in the Webster manner.” This is disingenuous: I would argue that Waugh needed an ending and realized that he had already written something that would do. He was an assiduous recycler and re-user of his own experiences and other writings and A Handful of Dust is evidence of his economy — both Ninety-Two Days and “The Man Who Liked Dickens” were press-ganged into solving the problem of his novel’s conclusion.

There is nothing wrong with this — most novelists have occasion to do something similar from time to time, though perhaps they do it more covertly than Waugh. But I think the history of the novel’s composition and the evidence of its frankly cobbled-together ending undermine claims for the book’s thematic consistency and its structural cohesion. A Handful of Dust is characterized by several such tensions: not merely in its structure, but also in its tone of voice, its characterization, comedy — the novel is full of uneasiness. The key to Waugh’s objective in finding the right ending to the story lies in his phrase “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end” rather than any huffing and puffing about Websterian conceits. Waugh wanted to bring Tony to a sad end because this was the nature of his comic genius — it is pitiless and ruthless, and this is what makes it both modern and enduring. Tony, that most wronged of decent men, is served up with his own particular circle of hell through no fault of his own. Brenda, in contrast, one of the most empty and unpleasant women one can imagine, is rewarded with marriage to Jock Grant-Menzies, MP, one of Tony’s rich friends. This was the way the world worked for Waugh (and it certainly must have seemed so as he wrote the novel in 1934) — in his best work he always refused to allow his art to provide any form of easy consolation. At the end of Labels, the travel book he wrote in the immediate fallout of his own broken marriage, and in the full knowledge of the nature of his wife’s betrayal, he wrote: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” This is very bitter, but it also happens to be very true, in the main. It was a world-view that underpinned Waugh’s work and, I believe, was one that continually fought against his newly acquired Catholic faith. It provokes an unhappy tension in his work that begins to emerge in the novels after A Handful of Dust (with the notable exception of Scoop, his real masterpiece, in my opinion). The new seriousness that critics began to see in his work — in Brideshead Revisited and in The Sword of Honour trilogy, for example — is Waugh’s attempt to use his religious faith to combat or obscure this instinctive view he possessed of the human condition. He saw life as anarchic, indifferent and absurd. Waugh, to put it crudely, could not, or did not, want to write in this spirit any longer (which is fundamentally Godless) but it was one that came all too naturally to him. In A Handful of Dust we see its apotheosis.

Waugh wrote very fast and he always had financial reimbursement for his writing very close to the forefront of his mind. This is not to say he wasn’t an artist — he definitely was, as were Balzac and Dickens, two other speed-merchants — but he was not an artist in the sense that, say, Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov were. One fact about A Handful of Dust makes this very clear: before the book was published in Britain it had been serialized in five parts in the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Because “The Man Who Liked Dickens” had been published separately as a short story in America, Waugh found himself in copyright difficulties (this conflict also testifies tellingly to the virtually unchanged, bolted-on aspect of the Mr Todd conclusion). Consequently, he wrote a new ending for the serialized version of the novel. In the light of this evidence I find it very hard to accept that there is some schematic master-plan for A Handful of Dust and that its various components were always designed to harmonize and complement each other. This is what Henry Green sensed — one craftsman looking at another craftsman’s work — and his complaint is wholly justified. Waugh’s response is a little desperate: if the book is so intricately stitched together, then just how easy can it be to write an entirely new ending for it? However, the serialization ending is very interesting in itself and it inadvertently says as much about the novel’s underlying intentions, I would claim, as the published book version does. We will return to it later.

Waugh was one of the most confessedly autobiographical of writers. All his novels — with the exception of Helena, perhaps — are rooted in his own experiences, even the most exuberant and grotesque comedies. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy are particularly good examples of this tendency, but the life/art nexus is strongly present in all his novels. Novelists of this sort do not necessarily possess the fingernail-paring artistic objectivity of a Joyce or Nabokov. Themes and leitmotifs, images and metaphors tend to emerge more unconsciously with this category of writer. That Waugh wrote so quickly also testifies to something subconscious and instinctive in his art rather than highly planned and artistically organized. True, there are repeated themes in A Handful of Dust that appear to run coherently through it — lists of objects that define a character, images of beasts and animals, for example; the idea of the celestial city, of Gothic fantasy and romance — but such synthesis is not the overriding impression the novel conveys, I would claim. On the contrary, A Handful of Dust, structurally speaking, is highly variable, not to say disorganized, and the machinery of the novel — its nuts and bolts, its pulleys and levers — suggests, when analysed, something altogether more inchoate and thrown together.

Take the question of point of view, for example. The narrative voice is omniscient: namely, the author is at liberty to enter any character’s mind and tell us, the readers, what he or she is thinking. Godlike, the author can flit here and there, and present the novel’s world in all its objectivity or subjectivity as he pleases. As the twentieth century moved on, omniscient narration became less and less favoured, or else was used with deliberate knowingness. It was the most popular narrative method of the great Victorian novelists and, surprisingly, A Handful of Dust sounds at times very Victorian in its use of omniscience. Waugh does not hesitate to employ what we might call the Dickensian apostrophe: a moment in the text when all suspension of disbelief is cast aside and the novelist addresses the reader in his own voice. For a book regarded as bleakly modern it is in places creakingly antique. Waugh favours the use of the bracketed aside quite frequently. For example, early in the novel after Tony and Brenda have breakfast there is a two-line parenthesis: “(These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continuous in Tony and Brenda’s life for seven years.)” Whose voice is this, thus distinguished from the surrounding expository prose? It is Waugh, himself, filling in a bit of background, ignoring the modernist injunction, “show not tell.” And Waugh does a lot of “telling” in this novel, often clumsily, which is surprising given that the novel’s strongest technical virtuosity is otherwise its economy and spareness. A Handful of Dust is at its most accomplished and convincing when Waugh does the opposite of apostrophize and tells us virtually nothing: when what is implicit in the few words used detonates so much more effectively than any amount of elaborate explanation. I find Waugh’s manifest awkwardness with the omniscient voice perplexing — seeing it as evidence (with the aid of hindsight operating, I admit) of something hurried rather than fully or carefully considered. The opening of chapter three, “Hard Cheese on Tony,” almost reads like a parody of Dickens: “It is not uncommon at Brat’s Club, between nine and ten in the evening, to find men in white ties and tail coats sitting by themselves and eating, in evident low spirits, large and extravagant dinners.” The tone is avuncular, the overview authorial, the tense is present — and then it shifts back to the past tense for the arrival of Jock Grant-Menzies: “It was in this mood and for this reason that, one evening towards the middle of February, Jock Grant-Menzies arrived at the club.” This would not seem out of place in Trollope.

By dramatic contrast you then find passages as elliptical as this conversation between Tony and Brenda after Brenda has seen Beaver in London:

“Barnardo case?”

Brenda nodded. “Down and out,” she said, “sunk right under.” She sat nursing her bread and milk, stirring it listlessly. Every bit of her felt good for nothing.

“Good day?”

She nodded. “Saw Marjorie and her filthy dog. Bought some things. Lunched at Daisy’s new joint. Bone-setter. That’s all.”

“You know I wish you’d give up these day trips to London. They’re far too much for you.”

“Me? Oh, I’m all right. Wish I was dead, that’s all… and please, please, darling Tony, don’t say anything about bed, because I can’t move.”

Underneath these commonplace exchanges lurks the ticking time bomb: Brenda hasn’t mentioned Beaver. She hasn’t exactly lied, true, but we, the readers, will be hugely aware of the omission. It’s at this moment that we know for the first time she will have an affair with Beaver and will betray Tony. It is what is not said, what is left out, that makes these few lines function so effectively. But such skilful reticence isn’t consistent in the novel: implicitness and explicitness coexist, often uneasily. This is not a sign of a writer exercising total mastery over his material.

Such signs are legion, however, in the passages leading up to the death of Tony and Brenda’s child John Andrew in a hunting accident. Before the fateful hunt Waugh uses a device that can only be called cinematic: a series of short scenes juxtaposed, sometimes no more than a few lines of dialogue, a method that, in a film, would be known as cross-cutting, or even, at its most rapid, montage. Again, it is the absence of interlinking passages that is conspicuous. Often the speakers of lines aren’t identified, neither is their location. Waugh was an avid cinema-goer and he doubtless realized that here was a method of moving narration along without the need for pages of expository prose. And such descriptive passages as there are demonstrate the old adage of “less is more” to near perfection:

“Honey are you bored? I’m perfectly happy reading and not being wet in the rain. You have to write letters too.”

“No. I love for us to talk together. It’s the thing I miss when there’s so much excitement and work and we’re never alone except in bed. We have a wonderful time in bed and you say lovely things to me. I remember them and the fun. But this is a different kind of talking.”

It certainly is: it is mawkish, badly composed, embarrassing and toecurlingly cute and is written, not by Danielle Steele, but by Ernest Hemingway. This passage is lifted, almost at random, from one of the interminable dialogues in what purports to be the latest and final posthumous Hemingway novel, edited — if that is the correct word — by Hemingway’s son, Patrick. The work was done, so Patrick Hemingway tells us in an introduction, along the following principles: “[the] untitled manuscript is about two hundred thousand words long and is certainly not a journal. What you will read here is a fiction half that length… which I have licked here into what I hope is not the worst of all possible shapes.” And that is all, apparently, that we need to know.

The existence of this African journal is well known. It was written in the mid 1950s and extracts were published after Hemingway’s death by his widow in Sports Illustrated in 1971 and 72. The text emerged from the disastrous hunting trip Hemingway made to Africa in 1953-4 with his fourth wife, Mary. During the trip Hemingway was involved in two light-aeroplane crashes, one of which injured him severely. In the second crash Hemingway fractured his skull, dislocated his shoulder, ruptured his liver, right kidney and spleen and his face and head were badly burned. It could be argued that the health problems he suffered thereafter precipitated his notorious decline into terminal alcoholism and depression.

But not a word of this appears in True at First Light. Instead the book concentrates on the few weeks of the hunting trip that took place before Xmas 1953. Most of the action in the book — narrated by Ernest Hemingway — revolves around two significant events: first, the need to protect the camp against a possible raid by escaped Mau-Mau insurgents (this threat suddenly disappears) and second, the efforts made to help Hemingway’s wife, Mary, shoot a large lion which prowls around the vicinity. Added to these concerns are various hunting and camp-related activities — shooting game for the bearers, going into town for supplies, nattering round the campfire, relations with the African staff and so on. Most curious, though, is a kind of semi-covert “affair” going on between Hemingway and an African girl called Debba — whom Mary refers to as “your fiancée”—who lives in a nearby village. There are many visits to Debba and a certain amount of harmless physical contact ensues: “Debba said nothing. She had lost her lovely Kamba impudence and I stroked her bowed head, which felt lovely, and touched the secret places behind her ears and she put her hand up, stealthily, and touched my worst scars.”

Mary finally shoots her lion, Ernest shoots a leopard, there are long conversations around the campfire, Mary goes to Nairobi, Ernest visits Debba, the African landscape is regularly described, more animals are shot and, fundamentally, that is about it. One is left at the end with a feeling of saddened bafflement, rather than gratitude, wondering why this book would ever have been thought worth publishing.

The answer, of course, is that these are the final sweepings from the great vide grenier that has been the story of Hemingway’s posthumous publication. It began with A Moveable Feast and continued with the novels entitled Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, a collection of bullfighting articles which became The Dangerous Summer, various short stories and the African safari excerpts published in Sports Illustrated. A Moveable Feast apart, which Hemingway had, at least, actually submitted to his publishers before he died (and then withdrawn), all this work was deemed by the author to be unpublishable: his family has thought and chosen to do otherwise.

The ethics of this enterprise may be dubious but critically and artistically they have been close to ruinous as far as Hemingway’s reputation is concerned. True at First Light, the case in point, is a particularly lethal blow. The book is, frankly, often hilariously bad and embarrassing. Apart from the desperate archness and tedium of much of the dialogue, it has no organization, it rambles and repeats itself and it contributes nothing to the Hemingway oeuvre that was not already, more resplen-dently, there. There are, to be fair, some better moments. The account of Mary shooting her lion is tensely and effectively done; there are some lyrical passages of description of landscape (one of which gives the book its title) and, for biographers, the odd insight may be afforded — into Hemingway’s prodigious drinking, for example, and also some light may be thrown on his brag to have been married to a Wakamba girl and her sister.

A further miscalculation — on Patrick Hemingway’s part, I suppose — was pointedly to call this book a “novel.” Biographers have always referred to the manuscript as a “journal” and even Mary Hemingway classified it as a “semi-fictional account of our African safari.” Some sort of fudge of this order might have been advisable, especially in this day and age, when we readily accept that memoirs, travel writing and reportage will have a hefty dose of the fictive in the mix, but for Patrick Hemingway to carve out 50 percent of the text, “lick it into shape” and categorize it as a novel seems not only misguided but absurd as well.

Hemingway himself animadverts on this very topic in True at First Light. “My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad. If I write in the first person, stating it as fiction, critics now will still try to prove these things never happened to me.” This sounds like an attempt to form the artistic credo behind the African manuscript. It is so palpably Hemingway himself at the centre of the stage — he reminisces about his past, he quotes a hostile letter to him from a woman reader in Iowa, for instance — and the touchstones with his life are so vividly present that it is as if he is deliberately trying to pre-empt this tendency, as he perceives it, of critics’ efforts to fit the fiction to the creator. So, quite blatantly, he calls the narrator Ernest Hemingway; he calls his wife Mary; he fills the book with verifiable facts and persons and attempts no artful disguise. Everything about this endeavour stresses the documentary and the real.

Paul Fussell has written (in The Great War and Modern Memory) of “the necessity of fiction in any memorable testimony about fact.” True at First Light is in no way memorable testimony but one can see how this modus operandi would appeal to Hemingway as it makes it all the easier subtly to embellish, to foster the mythic tendancy: Papa Hemingway out on the veldt at dawn, gun in hand, hunting his prey — wife, booze and Kamba bride waiting for him back at home. And for the reader too, this notional autobiographical candour has the effect of making the aggregate of meandering anecdotage relatively more interesting in that, as is usual in this sort of writing, it is easier to fillet out the fictive decoration from the facts than the other way round — the whole sorry business of the “affair” with Debba being a fine example. However, Patrick Hemingway — for sound marketing reasons, doubtless — would have us read this book as a novel, which proves a frustrating and impossible task in the end: the book remains studiedly grounded in the biography and in its particular place and time. True at First Light has to be read in this spirit, as non-fiction, with all the usual caveats that apply.

And what it tells us is old news indeed: namely that by the mid 1950s, the Nobel Prize in his pocket, Hemingway was subsisting on “Hemingway,” that the writer had become more important than the work itself. Chronologically, the African manuscript follows the critical disaster of Across the River and into the Trees (which Delmore Schwartz described as “extremely bad in an ominous way”) and the huge commercial success of the novella The Old Man and the Sea. This last had won the Pulitzer for Hemingway in 1952 and in 1954 he had won the Nobel. Across the River had been Hemingway’s first published novel for ten years. Now, in the mid 1950s, he was, in terms of public recognition, at the very apogee of his career as a writer. Yet by the time Hemingway sat down to write up the account of his African safari the ominous decline that Schwartz had spotted was clearly in freefall. And, indeed, it must be admitted, everything that is bad in True at First Light is also present in Across the River. What the publication of True at First Light actually achieves — this “novel” hacked out of a disorganized work in progress — is to confirm beyond all reasonable doubt that the death of Hemingway the novelist had occurred some time at the end of the 1940s. All efforts to revive the corpse proved to be vain.

And nobody tried harder than Hemingway himself, as the publication of the posthumous novels reveals. Two hundred thousand words of unusable manuscript is no small price to pay. It is, in a backhanded way, a tribute to Hemingway’s own vanishing instinct as a writer that, even as he created them, he recognized that his fictional efforts were truly moribund and he kept them locked away from public view until his death and the family intervened. And yet, despite all the damaging evidence of the late work and the posthumous novels, Hemingway remains, in my opinion, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but his greatness resides almost entirely in his short fiction. His revolutionary short stories, written in the 1920s and 30s, blending tremendous complexity with radically new expression, rank him along with Chekhov, Joyce and Kipling as one of the great masters of the form. Paradoxically, the one service that publication of True at First Light might render is to furnish a metaphor or lasting image for the awful spectre of Hemingway’s decline as a writer. He writes that, “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon, and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely perfect weed fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there.” Hemingway’s real gift — his genius — was true at the first light of his writing career but by noon he was living a lie.

1999

It is 1959, you are a retired brigadier living in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. A friend of yours, a colonial officer, has offered to drive you up country to Morogoro. But when your friend arrives he is already accompanied by a stranger: a stout, elderly man named Evelyn Waugh. You have a long day’s journey ahead of you. In his book, published a year later, A Tourist in Africa, Waugh describes you as a man of “imperturbable geniality” and adds of his two travelling companions, “I don’t know if they enjoyed my company. I certainly enjoyed theirs.” I wonder… How one would love to know what the retired brigadier really thought.

I mention this tiny incident because one of the experiences of reading Waugh’s travel writing is that I constantly speculate what it must have been like actually to meet him while he was on the road, as it were. It strikes me that a day in a hot car driving through the African bush with Evelyn Waugh could well qualify as a minor circle of hell. He was not a tolerant or easy man, that much is clear, but he also had a weak grasp of how he himself was perceived. He was genuinely traumatized after a visit to the Caribbean to discover that his hosts thought him “a bore.” I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — and there was little love lost between him and Waugh — and asking him what Waugh had been like when they knew each other during the war. Maclean said, with candour — and no axe to grind, as far as I could tell — that he had never, in his entire military career, met an officer so loathed by the men who served under him.

One of the reasons why one tries to imagine an encounter with Waugh on his trips abroad is that he seemed always to be travelling under duress of one sort or another. And such duress is not conducive to congeniality: there never appears to be any real enthusiasm for the journey or curiosity about the places and people he will discover. You are left with the impression that he was more or less permanently disgruntled, quick to complain, a moan always on his lips, the spectre of terrible boredom forever hovering at his shoulder.

As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in his excellent introduction to this omnibus, Waugh’s travel writing was, in the pure sense, hack work. Waugh wrote travel books for the money and, later in life, also undertook assignments to escape the severities of the English winter. Waugh was completely open about this: even in his first volume, Labels, he advertised the ulterior motives of the enterprise, and it is not surprising that his travel writing is redolent of the dutiful task and the looming deadline. It rarely shines.

Mind you, if one was to be honest, one would have to confess that as a genre travel writing — at book length — with a few notable exceptions, makes tedious reading. Shakespeare is all too well aware of Waugh’s shortcomings but makes the valid point that the seven travel books in this collection form a kind of covert autobiography. We receive opinions, discover attitudes and prejudices that are unadulterated by fiction: we are permitted a direct glimpse of the man. And it’s a good point to make, but Waugh, it seems to me, always adopted a mask when he wrote a travel book and the comments and reflections often appear on closer examination to be disingenuous or assumed. I’m not so sure we uncover the truth or learn much more about this difficult and hugely complex man.

I had read all these books before but thought it might be a useful exercise to reread the first and last of his travel writings—Labels (published 1930) and A Tourist in Africa (1960) — to see what differences there were between the young man, recently published and recently married, and the prematurely old, eminent writer, full of cafard and taedium vi-tae, looking at the world with a carefully cultivated jaundiced eye. Labels has always been the most interesting of Waugh’s travel books because it witnessed and was written as his first marriage collapsed. When you know the facts behind the book it appears almost as a fiction: Waugh, the narrator, looks on at himself and his wife Evelyn, thinly disguised as travelling companions, posing as a detached and disinterested observer. Little of the acute misery he was suffering as he wrote it is obviously present, except for the final paragraph, and it has, like all his travel books, an air of hoops being doggedly jumped through. The pages on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona would challenge the most soporific guidebook.

In A Tourist in Africa Waugh, in his mid fifties, is now playing the part of the choleric, aged author. He can barely bestir himself to make any effort to engage our interest, spending pages, for example, summarizing books he has read on the voyage out to Mombasa. Occasionally you sense his spirits rise such as when, in Dar es Salaam, he comes across a man calling himself Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an American madman who was travelling the world crowning himself king of every country he found himself in. For a couple of pages the book turns into pure Waugh: the wholly relished black humour, the refusal to judge or comment, the clinical description of total absurdity. But such occasions are rare.

Even the fabled style slips. Labels is far more garrulous than mature Waugh, almost chatty, which is not surprising given the author’s age. A Tourist in Africa is interesting insofar as it shows the Augustan verities of his writing turning decadent: the matchless prose becoming slack and pompous: “For me a voyage is the time to read about the places for which I am bound and to study the bestsellers of the past year. I got through two books a day and never found myself without something readable.” Clichés (“breakneck speed”) and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage: “Over great areas the tsetse fly keeps man away. The great European settlement,” etc.

Waugh had little respect for his travel writing but Nicholas Shakespeare is right to claim that there are flashes of insight. Talking about Cecil Rhodes, Waugh contrasts the lives of the politician and the artist: the politician “fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy,” the artist “leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him.” This is very close to a personal credo, in fact: this was how Waugh saw himself and is both an exalted and humble definition of what a genuine artist hopes to achieve. Spontaneously addressing a school in Rhodesia he says he has been studying the wonders of the English language for over fifty years and every day still has recourse to a dictionary. There are nuggets of gold in these overworked seams but they are hard to find.

However there is one link between the first and last of these travel books that does resonate. When Waugh wrote Labels he had been cuckolded and was contemplating the impending and very public shame of his divorce. That personal hurt comes to the surface at the end of the book as his boat moves slowly up the Thames to its berth: “I woke up several times in the night to hear the horn again … It was a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be happy for very long.” Bleak words from a twenty-six-year-old who has just seen his world collapse. But the end of A Tourist in Africa sees a similar bitter envoi as he leaves the continent: “Cruelty and injustice are endemic everywhere.” It was while Waugh was away from home writing Labels that his wife betrayed him. And I have always thought, myself, that the collapse of Waugh’s first marriage was the determining event in his life, that this cataclysm shaped him in one way or another for the rest of his days. The saddened, humiliated young man of Labels is maybe not so far removed from the posturing clubman roving round Africa. Perhaps that helps explain why there is always something joyless in Waugh’s travels.

2003

“Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market women.” This observation comes from a notebook that Anton Chekhov kept during the last six years of his life between 1898 and 1904. In it he jotted down snatches of conversation he had overheard, anecdotes, aphorisms, interesting names and embryonic ideas for short stories. This entry about aristocrats and market women belongs to the last category. The more one has read of Chekhov the more one can envisage the short story that might have grown from this bleak comparison. The point is well made and as true today as it was in nineteenth-century Russia — death is the great leveller — but more interestingly these twenty words can lead us towards an initial way of understanding the short story as opposed to its larger sibling, the novel. I would argue that you could write a short story inspired by Chekhov’s words but they wouldn’t be sufficient for a novel.

What draws a writer to the short story? Some writers rarely tackle it, or else, in a full career, only write half a dozen stories. Others seem perfectly at home with the form and then let it drop. And then there are those for whom the novel appears the threat. Yet William Faulkner regarded the short story as harder to write than a novel. Many of the greatest short story writers have steered clear of the long form, by and large: Chekhov, J. L. Borges, Katherine Mansfield, V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor. My own case is perhaps typical: I have written eight novels but I cannot stop writing short stories — something about the short form draws me back again and again. The aesthetic pleasures on offer are fresh and beguiling.

It’s important to remember that the short story as we know it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The arrival of mass-market magazine publication and a new generation of literate middle-class readers in the mid to late nineteenth century saw a boom in the short story that lasted maybe a hundred years or so (things are different today). Many writers were initially drawn to the form simply as a way of making money. Particularly in America: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe all subsidized their less well-remunerated novel-writing careers by writing stories. In the 1920s Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for a story by the Saturday Evening Post (a vast sum today — multiply by ten to get some idea of a comparison). Even John Updike, in the 1950s, reckoned he could support his wife and young family by the sale of five or six stories a year to the New Yorker. Times have changed.

The popularity of the short story — indeed its very availability — has, unlike the novel, always been driven by and has always been somewhat at the mercy of commercial considerations. When I published my first collection of stories, On the Yankee Station, in 1981, many British publishers routinely brought out short story collections. Not any more. Moreover, there was a small but stable marketplace where a story could be sold. A short story writer could place his or her work in all manner of outlets. The stories in my first collection, for example, had been published in Punch, Company, London Magazine, the Literary Review, Mayfair and broadcast on the BBC. As a young writer I started writing short stories because at the time it seemed logical: this was my best chance of getting published.

All this talk of money and strategy masks the tenacious appeal of the form. In the end writers write short stories because a different set of mental gears are engaged. Melville wrote short stories as he laboured with Moby-Dick saying, “My only desire for their ‘success’ (as it is called) springs from my pocket and not my heart.” And yet, in the process, he wrote works of short fiction (“Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno” amongst others) that are timeless classics. The point being that something else occurs in the writing — and reading — of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel.

The basic issue here, it seems to me, is one of expansion versus compression. To go back to the remark I made apropos Chekhov’s little memento mori about aristocrats and market women: we see that the ideas, the inspiration, that will drive a novel, however succinctly expressed, have to be capable of endless augmentation and elaboration. The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It’s not a simple question of length, either: there are twenty-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels. We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether.

A common analogy is to see the novel as an orchestra and the short story as a string quartet. Beautiful and rich music will be produced by them both but the imbalance of scale will always favour the novel when it comes to variety, nuance, texture, power and so forth. But the analogy strikes me as false because once again it is all about size, and this leads us in the wrong direction. The music produced by two violins, a viola and a cello cannot ever sound anything like the music produced by dozens of instruments, but a paragraph or a page from a short story is indistinguishable from a paragraph or a page from a novel. The short story draws on exactly the same resources as does the novel — language, plot, character and style. Nothing — none of the literary tools that novelists require to write their novels — is denied the short story writer, which is not true for a composer of chamber music as opposed to orchestral. A more pertinent comparison — to try and pin down the essence of the two forms — is poetry: to compare the epic with the lyric. Let us say that the short story is prose fiction’s lyric poem, contrasted with the novel as its epic.

There are many definitions of the short story. V. S. Pritchett defined it as, “something glimpsed from the corner of an eye, in passing.” John Updike has said, “More closely than my novels… these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life’s incidents, predicaments, crises, joys.” Angus Wilson observed that, “Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for development backwards.” All things to all writers, then: the quotidian epiphanic moment, the submerged autobiography, a question of structure and direction. I could cite other definitions — some contradictory, some far-fetched — but all, in their own way, possessing some cogency. If the house of fiction has many windows so too, it seems, does the house of short fiction.

Therefore it might be worth trying to categorize the short story in a bit more detail, to try and classify its multifarious forms. I have published three collections of short stories over two decades, a total of thirty-eight stories, in all. Perhaps there are another four or five uncollected ones out there — juvenilia in university magazines, the odd one-off commission for an anniversary (I seem to remember I wrote something about 1984 and Orwell) or a themed number of a magazine or anthology. In any event what repeatedly draws me to the short story is its variety — the enticing possibility of adopting different voices, structures, styles and effects. Looking at other collections by other writers, I gradually came to the conclusion that there are in fact basically seven types of short story and that within these seven categories almost every kind of short story can be accounted for. Some of them will overlap, one category will borrow from a seemingly unrelated type, but these denominations seem, by and large, to subsume all the species of the genus. In this diversity we may begin to see what short stories have in common.

This term was coined by the English writer William Gerhardie in 1923 in a short, fascinating book he wrote on Chekhov. Gerhardie uses this appellation to distinguish Chekhov’s stories from everything that had preceded him. Up until Chekhov, all short stories, virtually without exception, were event-plot ones. In these stories the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end. The revolution that Chekhov set in train — and which reverberates still today — was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless. The stereotype of the event-plot story is the “twist-in-the-tail” famously developed by O. Henry but also used widely in genre stories — ghost stories (W. W. Jacobs, for example) and the detective story (Conan Doyle). I would say that today its contrivances make it look very dated, though Roald Dahl made something of a mark with a macabre variation on the theme and it is also a staple of self-appointed yarn-spinners (Jeffrey Archer, for example).

Consider this situation. You are a handsome, celebrated writer in your thirties — male and unmarried. You have been having a passionate affair for some years with a beautiful young woman (a decade younger than you) that has reached such a pitch that the next logical step is marriage. She wants desperately to marry you, but, however much you are attracted to this young woman, you inevitably draw back: you cannot commit and so the affair effectively ends. But the young woman, spurned in this way, hugely frustrated, embarks on a fresh affair — but this time with one of your close friends (who also happens to be married) and who is also your business partner. These new lovers decamp to Paris where the young woman becomes pregnant and duly has a child. Whereupon her faithless lover abandons her and returns to his long-suffering wife.

What does one do, embroiled in such a soap opera? Cuckolded in this way by a real friend, how does one feel or respond? Do you laugh it off, chalk it up to experience, move on? Or are there deeper wounds, more profound regrets, moments of poignant self-analysis, of possible self-loathing? Or do you write it all up and put it in a play?

Exactly this situation happened to Anton Chekhov in 1894. Chekhov had a prolonged affair with a young teacher and apprentice opera singer called Lydia (“Lika”) Mizinova. When marriage was ruled out by Chekhov she began an affair with his friend Ignati Potapenko. This ménage moved to Paris, Lika had a child, Potapenko returned to his wife and Lika returned to Russia. Chekhov affected to be unconcerned.

I have been reading a great deal and writing a fair amount about Chekhov recently (this year sees the centenary of his death) and have become very familiar with his various biographies. Chekhov had a rare and complex personality. He was much loved, but remained a closed and sometimes cool acquaintance. He was incredibly generous but was often ruthlessly hard-hearted. He loved the company of women but he was terrified of marriage. When he did marry towards the end of his short life it was only because ill health (he was dying of tuberculosis) would ensure that husband and wife were more apart than together. Reading Russian, French, American and British commentaries and accounts of his life, I have found that there is one consensus that emerges in the face of these conundrums. Namely that Chekhov was constitutionally incapable of falling in love and giving himself fully to a woman; that something in his nature always drew him up short; that he was always destined to be a loner.

And yet, and yet… The nature of his relationship with Lika Mizinova struck me as something of an exception to his usual amours (Chekhov was promiscuous with his affections). As I read about Chekhov, the story of his affair with Lika nagged at me: it seemed different from his other romantic entanglements. I began to wonder if Lika was the one that got away.

The facts are relatively straightforward. Anton Chekhov met Lika Mizinova in 1889, she was nineteen and a friend of his sister, Masha, who taught at the same school. Chekhov was twenty-nine and on the verge of his great literary fame. Lika was very pretty: grey-eyed with dark eyebrows, buxom, with a mass of curly ash-blonde hair and a chain-smoker (somewhat daring for the 1880s). Chekhov fell for her and an affair began. It’s worth bearing in mind that, amongst artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary Russia, social and sexual behaviour seem remarkably “modern”—not far removed from the norms of today. The Moscow and St Petersburg intelligentsia led similar lives to fin de siècle Parisian artists and writers. Fun was had. Life was good.

The precise nature of Chekhov’s affair with Lika is best derived from their letters. Apart from his wife, Olga Knipper (whom he married towards the end of his life), and his sister, Masha, Lika is his most regular female correspondent. Ninety-eight letters survive from her to him, sixty-seven in the other direction, though it seems there were many more, now lost. The tone of these letters is fascinating: it is almost consistently one of bantering flirtation, of feigned identities (idiot lover, childish sweetheart and so on), of joking, of sexual innuendo. Chekhov is always speculating that Lika has other admirers, direly warning her off other men. There is, clearly, an erotic undercurrent to these letters and this persistent role playing, as if they were designed to stimulate. For example: “Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolically beautiful Lika! … Do not despair but come to us, and we will hurl ourselves upon you with might and main.”

A year later Chekhov alluded to a friend that he might marry Lika, then added, “I doubt if I’ll be happy with her — she’s too beautiful.” Maybe this was the problem: Lika’s beauty attracted constant admirers, she was the cynosure of all male eyes. A friend would walk down a Moscow street with her and count the number of male heads turning. She was evidently strikingly attractive. Chekhov tried not to be jealous as other men fell for her, but he still would not commit to matrimony. Then Lika had an affair with the painter Levitan, another of Chekhov’s friends. It was as if Lika was challenging him, but Chekhov responded only with more jokes and ironies. However, Chekhov was obviously wounded: he parodied Levitan and Lika with some cruelty in a story he wrote in 1891 called “The Grasshopper.” Levitan refused to speak to Chekhov for three years. Lika persisted. Like no other woman he knew — and he knew a lot — Lika got under his skin.

A year later, 1892, the affair was back on. Lika, wiser now, was aware that it was best for her to bide her time. Chekhov dallied with other admirers but he was always drawn back to Lika. The on-off affair continued: she visited him at his country estate, he came to her flat in Moscow — but Chekhov still kept her at bay. As long as Lika wanted him, Chekhov could maintain his ironic distance. The affair with Levitan had touched him to a degree, but he could not have imagined what she would do next to stimulate his jealousy.

Lika’s affair with Ignati Potapenko began at the end of 1893, four years after she and Chekhov first met. It was undisguised and Chekhov appeared to give the union his blessing, even allowing the lovers to stay together at Melikhovo, instituting an odd ménage à trois. Lika conceived her child here at this time. Chekhov’s sister, Masha, was disgusted by her brother’s supine behaviour. Yet, even now, Chekhov could still write to Lika: “Darling Lika, today at 6.30 pm I shall leave for Melikhovo, would you like to come with me?” He was playing a curious and dangerous game, both desiring her and letting her betray him — the immediate consequence of which was that Lika left Moscow for Paris to be with Potapenko.

But even in Paris Lika and Chekhov wrote regularly, tormenting each other with coy invitations and hard irony. Chekhov was beginning to block out the ideas for The Seagull, in which the central character of Nina was to be very close to Lika. Potapenko kept the fact of Lika’s pregnancy from Chekhov and the two men were still sufficiently firm friends to travel together on holiday in the summer of 1894. Lika, meanwhile, went to Switzerland to have her child. Chekhov couldn’t stop writing to her: “You refuse to answer my letters, dear Lika … I’m not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you.”

In fact more had changed. The tone of their letters seems to signal that some sort of watershed had been reached. Chekhov by now could not ignore the fact that Lika was pregnant and expecting Potapenko’s child: nothing could ever be the same. Lika gave birth to a girl, Christina. Potapenko, under enormous pressure from his wife (she threatened to kill herself and her children), told Lika he could never see her again.

Lika’s life was in disarray: abandoned and impoverished (and noticeably plumper) she returned to Moscow. The birth of Christina seemed to have made Chekhov resolve to see her no more. Yet in early 1896 Lika was once again at Melikhovo, as Masha’s guest. Old feelings stirred in Chekhov. Despite everything, the love affair resumed. The next few months seem to have been the happiest the two of them shared. But as the year moved on the old pattern re-established itself. Mutual happiness provoked Chekhovian insecurity. Chekhov seems to have promised marriage and then reneged. Meetings were arranged and cancelled — Lika began to grow angry again. She was unaware that her character was about to be exposed on the Moscow stage in The Seagull.

Chekhov was understandably worried about the opening of the play (in October 1896). Both Potapenko and his wife — and Lika — were all naturally most eager to see the first performances and Chekhov had genuine reason to think that Potapenko’s wife might attack Lika. In the event he contrived to keep the parties separate. The first night was one of the most epic flops in the history of Moscow theatre, but, despite the huge controversy, Lika did not take against the portrayal of her character. A few days later she was back at Melikhovo and once again there was talk of marriage. And once again, Chekhov balked — he asked her to wait “two or three years.” Lika had had enough — and she still had other suitors of her own. She ruefully conceded that marriage — or “bliss” as they termed it — was unlikely to come about. She signed herself, “Goodbye. Your twice rejected L. Mizinova.”

And that really should have been the end of the affair. It had lasted seven years, but life was about to calamitously imitate art. Just as in The Seagull Chekhov had Nina’s child die, so too, now, Lika’s child sickened and died. Lika came to Melikhovo for comfort and to grieve, playing patience at a desk in Chekhov’s study as he worked. There seemed a kind of inevitability that she should seek him out in her darkest hour.

But Lika wound up the affair herself shortly after a final meeting: Chekhov’s prevarications eventually convincing her that nothing would come of it. Lika went back to Paris to pursue her career as an opera singer. She wrote to Chekhov: “To dear Anton Pavlovich, in kindly memory of eight years’ good relations.” Then she quoted some lines of poetry:

Whether my days are clear or mournful,

“Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,” Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. “We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.” There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not.

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a thoroughly dysfunctional family and his own tortured psyche and that of his mother and relatives provided him with the raw material of his fiction for his working life. Yates was mentally unstable and an alcoholic (as was his only sister). Their mother was a self-appointed “Bohemian” sculptress who divorced her dull, middle-management husband as soon as was feasible and took her children off on a series of flits through pre-Second World War New England and Greenwich Village, somehow managing to keep one step ahead of the bailiffs and the creditors but royally messing up her children in the process (in her cups, she was in the habit of slipping into bed with her pubescent son).

A scholarship pupil at private school, Yates was the talented poor boy who wanted to be a writer and he achieved relatively early success with his short stories. After graduating he served briefly with the US Army at the tail end of the war, married early and spent some time learning his trade, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, in France and London. The trouble with Yates was that he wanted to be a writer — and a “writer.” The ghost of Scott Fitzgerald haunts his life both as an artistic exemplar and as a ruinous role-model. Yates’s writing career was lived out against a background of eighty cigarettes a day, prodigious boozing and manic depression. The handfuls of pharmaceuticals he took to keep himself relatively sane were never designed to be washed down with Jack Daniels and it has to be said that, very early on, Yates placed his finger squarely on the self-destruct button and held it there. Marriages and relationships collapsed with regularity and the literary career that he embarked on so promisingly with his first novel Revolutionary Road (1960) soon evolved itself into a long, slow slide of falling sales, missed deadlines, alienated publishers and the law of diminishing returns.

Yet throughout his life Yates was sustained by grants, prizes, spells in Hollywood writing scripts, temporary creative-writing teaching posts (with a brief, unlikely period as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy) and the affection and support of steadfast friends and colleagues. As a young man he was tall and moodily good-looking. Yet for all his charisma he was, I suppose, that sad literary figure the “one book wonder.” His first novel, Revolutionary Road, turned out to be his chef d’oeuvre. It was written to be the Great Gatsby of the 1960s and it still has its fervent adherents. Reading Yates’s fiction today one has to say that, looking at the work as a whole (six novels and two collections of short stories), there don’t really seem to be grounds for resurrecting him as a forgotten master. His style is classically realistic and elegantly turned but the one-note tango of his inspiration finally enervates. John Updike — who one might argue overtook and outshone Yates as the pre-eminent chronicler of middle-class American angst and adultery — is in a different league. Yates is like many figures in twentieth-century American literature: an early flowering of an intriguing talent rendered nugatory by crowding, tormenting demons — drink, drugs, self-doubt, self-loathing, burn-out and so on. Fitzgerald is the obvious precursor but Hemingway was equally undone, as were writers like Berryman, Capote, Kerouac, Cheever and many more.

Yates in his middle age wound up in Boston, living in a bleak, roach-infested apartment with just enough money to feed himself in an Irish pub up the block. He looked like a derelict with a crusted beard, greasy clothes, muttering to himself as he trudged between his apartment and the bar. What sustained Yates — what kept him alive, I suppose — was his romantic vision of himself as an artist. He wrote all the time, even if what he wrote was inferior stuff, and pursued his vocation with a dedication that is in the end amazingly impressive, even if it was self-delusory. A friend described him as “fun to be around but a pain in the ass.”

Unfortunately, as his life spiralled downwards the “pain in the ass” aspects seemed to dominate. Yates was both bitter and aggressive, his moods swung violently because of his bipolar disorder and the vast amounts of alcohol he consumed. He fought with friends and his family; through his drink-driven dementia he made a regular public spectacle of himself and was in and out of mental institutions. But it was, so his doctors claimed and pleaded with him, his refusal to give up alcohol that was destroying his life. Eventually, however, it was his manic smoking that killed him. In the early 1990s Yates wound up teaching creative writing at a university in Alabama. Virtually immobile owing to his chronic emphysema, he became a familiar figure driving around campus in a clapped-out Mazda alternately puffing on a cigarette and clamping an oxygen mask to his face. He quit smoking a few months before he died and was astonished at how easy it was to give up. By then it was too late: he was rushed into hospital for a routine operation on an inguinal hernia (caused by his fits of coughing) and died alone in the night, asphyxiated by his own vomit. It was 1992: he was sixty-six years old.

“To write so well and be forgotten is a terrifying legacy,” a critic commented posthumously. Yates was a fine writer, but the very uneven quality of his work will always have him categorized as a minor twentieth-century American novelist despite the tremendous debut he made with Revolutionary Road. However, in a curious way, his hellish life itself may be what he will be remembered for. Blake Bailey has written a fully documented, wonderfully clear-eyed, shrewd and sympathetic account of what must be one of the most nightmarish journeys across this vale of tears that any novelist has undertaken. Yates’s battered, wheezing, ascetic indefatigability is almost heroic but, as with many artists who embark on this kind of slow suicide, one is left with the feeling that at root it is caused by an innate sense of the limits of their talent — by their awareness of just how far they fall short of the genuinely great — that sends them down the slippery slope to their own self-destruction.

2004

In my late teens I decided that I wanted to go to art school and become a painter. I was good at art, I took my A-level a year early and, to be honest, at that stage of my education I was more enthused about art than I was by literature. This was not to be: my father’s implacable objection to this plan provoked no rebellion in me and so I decided to follow the path of literature instead, a calling about which he was marginally less disparaging. Decades on, I have to concede that perhaps he was right to dissuade me. But, all the same, my old ambition still nags at me from time to time. It was Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, who in 1998 unwittingly re-opened this small Pandora’s box when she asked me to write for her journal and then, a little while later, invited me to join its editorial board.

Suddenly, I had a toe in the world I had hankered to belong to as a schoolboy and I found that, even if I couldn’t be a painter, at least I was happy to write about art. It was not a difficult compromise.

Most of the pieces I have written for Modern Painters and other magazines and newspapers have been largely about British painting, post World War Two. I am no expert in the fine art, scholarly sense, but I feel British painters of that era are both underestimated and undervalued. I was more than prepared to try and boost reputations unjustly in decline.

The other feature of my connection to Modern Painters was that it provided me with the opportunity to invent my fictitious American painter Nat Tate (see pages 306–8) who, for about a week or ten days in 1998, enjoyed a certain notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, as indeed did I, as the perceived perpetrator of a hoax on the New York art world. Nat Tate seemed to have a strange half-life for a while (I was interviewed on Newsnight about his work and there was a Channel 4 documentary made about him) and his réclame still rumbles on. Most interestingly for me, however, is that Nat’s curious existence has returned me, if not to painting, then to drawing again: from time to time I discover a “lost” Nat Tate and give it to a friend as a present. I am Nat’s only begetter, after all, and also the source of all his surviving art: perhaps the old ambition has been lying dormant all these years and may be beginning to stir again.

It is hard to gauge now — in this era of outrage and daily disaster — what the effects of the sinking of the Titanic were on the popular imagination in 1912. Was it simply one of shock and blank astonishment? Or did it give rise to darker premonitions? Matthias Eberle suggests, in this very intriguing if somewhat earnest book, that — certainly as far as German artists were concerned — it was a seminal date, the beginning of a process of profound suspicion and disenchantment with the mechanized forces of industry that reached its apotheosis in the 1914–18 war. That fervid exultation in dynamism and the heroic potential of mechanics so eagerly celebrated by the Futurists and, one suspects, by the world at large as well as the German artists, received its gory comeuppance on the Western Front. The fragility of the human body and the transience and futility of human aspirations were all too cruelly exposed when the machines they were pitted against took the form of trench mortars and howitzers.

No one was better placed to observe this than Otto Dix, a machine-gunner on the Western Front who no doubt on many occasions had the opportunity to observe at first hand the effect of high technology on the lumbering Tommies slogging across the mud. Dix had joined the war full of sub-Nietzschean enthusiasm for the fight. He was swiftly disillusioned and that disillusion manifested itself in his art. The same bitterness occurred in other German artists in a curious unity of vision which was called — in opposition to Expressionist and Futurist excesses — the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “New Objectivity.” Dix, Grosz and Beckmann are the most famous exemplars of the grouping and each is the subject of an essay in this book. Dix and Grosz are the most commonly linked and I suppose the most well known, but one of the bonuses of this book was to discover that the same strains in Dix and Grosz appear in Max Beckmann’s work. Indeed there are stronger parallels between Dix and Beckmann than one might have surmised. Each was influenced by Nietzsche, each saw active service and their war experiences produced in them tortured, morbid obsessions with sex, human cruelty and vague religious impulses. Grosz’s work exhibited similar tendencies but, interestingly, it was not produced by a spell at the front. Grosz was first declared unfit for military service. Later he was conscripted, but after a nervous breakdown of sorts he was sent to a sanatorium. A medical student, who thought he was perfectly fit, ordered him out of bed. In a fury, Grosz attacked him and was promptly beaten up by the other patients with, by all accounts, considerable glee. It was this trauma which accelerated his acerbic cynicism, not any spectacle of mass destruction.

For all their power, there is something unpleasantly pathological in the work of all three artists. There is a kind of righteous nihilism which one can applaud: their portrayals of the horrors of war (no British artist has painted anything so scarifying); their excoriation of the sleek industrialists and corrupt businessmen and so on. It is a little harder to explain away, however, their morbid obsession with sex. One could say that after the war, once the fighting was over, the crude commerce of prostitution served as a useful symbol of the degeneracy of the human spirit, but it rings somewhat of special pleading, especially when one is faced with its lurid prominence in the work of all three men. Both Dix and Grosz, for example, independently produced a series of etchings on sex murders. The answer lies, rather, in the complex individual personalities of the artists than in any Neue Sachlichkeit programme. Their respective traumatization — coincidentally — engendered the same symptoms.

It may be, of course, a national psychosis: it is tempting to see Weimar Germany (or rather one’s received image of Weimar Germany) suffering — so to speak — in the same way as its artists, especially when one takes into account the German race’s propensity for doing things en masse. It is a theory that gains some further credence when we look at Britain between the wars. If we accept that the Neue Sachlichkeit artists represent the most significant cultural response to the Great War in Germany then its corollary in Britain is the war poets — Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Gurney et al. What a fascinating contrast they make. The same shock and condemnation of the horrors of war provides a powerful stimulus for their respective arts, but nowhere in the British response do we encounter this purulent nihilism reflected through overt sexual loathing and revulsion. Is this simply a sign of the dissimilarity between the British and German psyche? Or is it merely the difference between victor and vanquished? Searching for an answer, it is perhaps significant that Grosz himself later (in 1933) disowned and repudiated his post-war etchings because he considered that the relentless cynicism of the Weimar artists and writers had contributed to the rise of the Nazis.

1988

Keith Vaughan was born in 1912. Later in his life he was to reflect on what he regarded as one of the more auspicious omens of his birth. He was a healthy baby, “but it was also observed that my penis possessed a loose and easily retractable foreskin which was not considered necessary to circumcise. For this piece of good fortune I have had many occasions to be grateful.” We shall see why in due course. In this nugget of autobiographical information are preserved many of the qualities that make Vaughan such a distinctive artist and personality: his unflinching candour, his formal exactitude, his dry wit, his lifelong obsession with his cock. All key aspects of his life as a man and, though perhaps not in every respect, his work as an artist.

Although he expressed satisfaction with his foreskin other features of Vaughan’s childhood were less happy. His father died when he was very young, and he grew up in a close, neurotic household composed of his mother — an omnipresent source of irritation for most of his life — and his younger brother Dick, a weak, insecure boy who totally depended on Vaughan for amusement and regular consolation.

Vaughan’s father’s death reduced the family to a level of bourgeois penury. Mrs Vaughan had to work hard to “maintain standards,” and constant economy was the order of the day. But in compensation the cultural atmosphere of the life they led was rich. At a young age Vaughan was an accomplished pianist and would accompany his mother on the violin. He also won a Royal Drawing Society award when he was seven years old. The intimacy of the family was broken, however, when he was sent away to boarding school two years later, to Christ’s Hospital in Sussex. Here he suffered the usual humiliations visited on sensitive boys at single-sex boarding schools — corporal punishment, bullying, smut, filth etc. — and Vaughan begged his mother to take him away, in vain. By his account his adolescence seems to have borne more than the usual burden of guilt, misery and isolation.

It was at school that Vaughan’s particular sexual nature began to assert itself in a manner that was unequivocally homoerotic and masochistic. And it was at Christ’s Hospital that he commenced a programme of regular and ingenious masturbation that was to prove lifelong. He retained nothing but unhappy memories of his schooldays but, whatever tribulations his psyche was undergoing, the seeds of his education as an artist were also sown. In the fields of music, literature and painting his years at school had not been unproductive.

It was his skill at drawing that led him, almost directly on leaving school, into the advertising world. He became a layout artist in the advertising services branch of Unilever — Lintas — where he spent most of the 1930s. The Lintas years functioned for Vaughan as a surrogate university and art school. Here he found a set of like-minded colleagues and friends who were also artists, intellectuals and eccentrics, happy to accept Vaughan on his own terms. Vaughan still lived at home with his mother but he began to experience a measure of independence too. He would spend weekends in a converted railway carriage on the Sussex coast at Pagham with a group of friends, where they would sunbathe and swim in the nude. In his memories, Pagham became one of the magic places of his life.

In other respects the broad character of Vaughan’s life in the thirties seems to be one of naively earnest and dogged cultural self-improvement: endless courses of reading, playing and listening to music, visits to the ballet (an obsession) and theatre. And in many ways the pattern of life he established for himself at that time was to remain constant. On one side single-minded artistic endeavour, and on the other an equal dedication to enriching his erotic experience.

Like many middle-class homosexuals of that era most of Vaughan’s sexual partners were working class, but in Vaughan’s case this arose out of expediency rather than from some Forsterian fantasy. Throughout his life Vaughan yearned — vainly as it turned out — for a romantic lover who would be his social and intellectual equal. Less orthodox, however, were the refinements of his masochistic auto-eroticism. He tried to construct a primitive machine that would deliver electric shocks to his genitalia; he pushed a needle through his foreskin, and when his mother left the family home at weekends he would endeavour to bind himself to the upturned legs of the kitchen table.

It was the war which changed everything. It removed him from the cosy world of Lintas and his family, and thrust him into an entirely new set of social encounters and environments. A committed pacifist, he registered as a non-combatant and was drafted into the pioneer corps. The manual work the corps carried out was routine and mindlessly laborious. It took him to parts of England he had never visited; it reintroduced him to communal life, but without the terrors of boarding school. Moreover, it initiated his development as a serious artist, forcing him out of the “years of dilettantism” of the Lintas period, and gaining him access to literary and artistic circles in London, that hitherto had been unapproachable, where he began to meet and be influenced by other contemporary artists — most notably Graham Sutherland.

The year 1939 also saw the start of his celebrated sequence of journals which he was to continue, almost without interruption, until the end of his life. The journals form an astonishing document. With complete candour Vaughan describes every aspect of his personality on the page. It is no exaggeration to say that they represent one of the most extraordinary, and greatest, pieces of confessional writing of the century.

From the outside, friends and colleagues variously described Vaughan as intelligent, charming, diffident, somewhat aloof, critically acute and astringently witty and generally good company. The self-portrait that emerges from the journals is considerably at odds with this, at once fierce, cold and anguished. They are excellently and lucidly written but what is so striking is the unsparing honesty, the brutal objectivity. The self-analysis is relentless. Full of self-doubt, seeded with contempt and rare exhilaration, Vaughan probes and reiterates his dilemmas and anxieties — both artistic and personal — with a determination and dedication that are prodigious. So far as his development as an artist is concerned it is as if Vaughan had realized that for him the route to success was through sheer persistence and hard work rather than inspiration and imagination. True, Vaughan had Sutherland’s own huge discipline and effort as an early model, but this tenacious and unceasing toil in the older artist must have chimed with elements that already existed in his own personality. A working practice was established that he was not to deviate from. Vaughan was not, it seems to me, a naturally gifted draughtsman in the way that, say, Augustus John was. The line in a Vaughan drawing is not fluid and suggestive but firm and heavily scored. Sketchbooks are filled with dense dark pencil drawings, fretted with cross-hatching, which are worked up in the studio into sombre, muted gouaches or oils in which form and composition dominate. The whole artistic achievement of Keith Vaughan from World War Two onwards is a strenuous, laborious one; its nature is obstinate, striven-for, built up slowly and steadily, relying on constant effort and patience to see the work through to a successful culmination, rather than afflatus or spontaneous invention.

After the war, during the forties and fifties this dedication began to pay off. Vaughan’s reputation grew and he began to move in established metropolitan artistic and literary circles. He taught at Camberwell, Central and the Slade. He was friend and associate with many of the artists that make up the neo-romantic movement, notably Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and John Minton. By 1950 his career was firmly established. On a personal level it seemed that he had found some measure of happiness too. He set up house with one of his painting students, Ramsay McLure, but although they remained together for the rest of Vaughan’s life the passion swiftly dimmed and Vaughan returned to his old methods of obtaining sexual satisfaction. At some time in the fifties he bought a machine from Gamages department store which he adapted to pass electric current through his genitals. For the rest of his life it was to the machine he turned when he was in need of sensual excitement or consolation.

Biographically, the last thirty years of Vaughan’s life were uneventful. His subject matter remained remarkably constant — more often than not the male nude in a landscape — as his style became more abstract. He showed regularly and the prices he commanded rose steadily. He and McLure moved to a flat in Belsize Park, and increasing prosperity soon allowed him to buy a cottage in Essex. McLure lived there while Vaughan led a solitary life in London during the week, returning to the country at weekends. Vaughan’s working routine was quickly established and rarely varied. He would paint in the mornings and break for lunch at 12.30. After lunch there would be a siesta followed by a shorter period of work until seven when he had his first whisky. He took great care over his solitary dinner and made sure to drink a bottle of good wine. After dinner he might watch TV, listen to music, or write in his journal.

Sexually he resorted more and more to the machine. He went on occasional “lust sleuthing” forays in Soho looking for rough trade but he came to rely on masturbation for sexual release, perfecting the operating procedures of his machine and employing other flagellatory or masochistic props — metal-tipped canes, needle and thread, mustard and red pepper.

The last ten years of Vaughan’s life as evidenced by the journals represent, as their editor Alan Ross describes, “a descent into hell … redeemed by … frankness, spleen and dry humour.” Self-analysis, nostalgia and misanthropy are mingled with despair and meticulous chronicling of his experiments with the machine (which, in a display of typical Vaughan candour, he kept on open show in his studio). Yet to the outside world, until the onset of his final illness, he appeared little changed; still teaching, still painting successfully, still reluctant for company, yet, when he was persuaded to go out, apparently enjoying himself. In 1975 he developed a malignant cancer of the bowel and underwent a colostomy. Radiation treatment followed and Vaughan became a semi-invalid, becoming progressively iller as the cancer advanced and complications set in. On the morning of 4 November 1977 he decided to commit suicide. He swallowed the pills with some whisky and sat down to record his final thoughts in his diary before he died. “Oblivion holds no terrors for me,” he wrote. These last pages of this extraordinary document are very moving, full of stoic resignation and dignity. The final lines read: “65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure, I did some …” And then nothing.

He did some good work. Vaughan’s posthumous artistic reputation continues to grow as indeed does his personal fame, owing to the publication of the journals last year. Malcolm Yorke’s fine biography is a valuable and diligent adjunct to them, filling in many of the gaps and also setting Vaughan’s work firmly in its artistic and historical context. Inevitably, though, the journals form the best and unique access to Vaughan’s strange and complex personality. Any biography would suffer by comparison in this regard but one senses here and there that, however well-equipped Yorke is to talk about the work, the life of Keith Vaughan — or rather the life in Keith Vaughan — remains something of a mystery to him.

1990

Stanley Spencer is an odd fish. The responses to his work are both complex and contradictory — they always have been, and the new exhibition at the Barbican, “Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love,” will prolong the debate. In my own case, one of the most nagging of the many dilemmas his art provokes is this: for someone who could clearly paint so well, why did Spencer often paint so badly? It is not simply a matter of indolence or easy nonchalance on his part: there is nothing slipshod about his bad paintings, indeed in places they are rendered with fanatical, pedantic diligence, but for me the great problem at the centre of his achievement remains this schism, this schizophrenia of technique. It is rather as if a chess grandmaster voluntarily switched to draughts, or Chopin confined himself to ragtime.

When you look closely at, for example, the extraordinary deftness and skill with which Spencer has painted the shadow of Patricia Preece’s lace negligée as it falls on her thigh (in the remarkable Patricia Preece, 1936), or the way, in the great self-portrait of 1959, the cropped grey fringe falls over the seamed brow, you wonder how the same man could have produced the simplicities and inept distortions of Villagers and Saints or The Lovers. It is like setting a Lucian Freud beside a Beryl Cook. In the end such a wilful abdication of talent — if there is no obvious reason: sloth, drink, drugs, penury or mental collapse — remains baffling.

Perhaps this sort of deliberate shift — from the refined to the unrefined, from the subtle to the crude — occurs when innocence is over-venerated, and in Spencer’s case this notion may be particularly apt. Broadly speaking, what we value in the native or the primitive — the pleasure prompted, say, by a Grandma Moses or an African carving — is the delight we take in seeing aspects of our world depicted in a manner un-mediated by sophistication, by familiar cultural reference, by centuries of tradition and so on: all the rules and regulations, expectations and assumptions of a mature art form. I suppose that motives of this sort may inspire the highly accomplished artist to attempt to reproduce these effects, to scour away the gunge and clutter of too much skill and civilization, too much thought and reflection. By fashioning a false innocence we may borrow some of the properties of the real thing: fool’s gold has duped many a gnarled prospector.

Certainly Spencer in his early work followed the example of the quattrocento with genuine success, but no pictures in this exhibition date from before 1933, and their naivety, their distortions and simplifications have moved on from emulation or the influence of classical traditions. Spencer’s faux-naïf style is from this time onwards sui generis—it stands or falls on its own.

And its putative success would have been far easier to establish or defend if it were not counterposed — and undermined — by examples of a technical skill and artistry unshakeable in its self-assurance and triumphant in its exceptional ability. For example, Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece is one of the great disturbing portraits of the twentieth century. Initially, it is the arrant candour of the image that unsettles and disquiets. The almost palpable weight of the large, pendulous, blue-veined breasts, the folds and creases of slack flesh, all the flaws and discrepancies of a particular body that give an individual her, or his, physical quiddity. Then almost unconsciously you grow aware of the variety of skin tone — the chicken-fat yellows, the tarnished greens and licheny blues, the raw pinks and dirty browns, the blurry roses and clotted creams. Patricia Preece’s body seems extraordinarily lit, as if by some sublime cinematographer, until you realize that this is in fact what we are actually like, that human skin, closely observed, looks like this, that this improbable assemblage of pigments on a canvas is the product of an artist’s eye scrutinizing what he sees in front of him. Steadily, other aspects of the portrait emerge: the unusual intensity of Patricia Preece’s big-eyed stare, the troubling ambiguity of her expression — a tension? or a superb confidence? Then, inevitably, ideas of artist and model intrude on the reverie of portrait and spectator. This model is the artist’s wife. Even if you knew nothing of Spencer’s fraught relationship with Preece you would concede the astonishing intimacy of the portrait, acknowledge what it offers up and exposes to the viewer’s gaze, what emotions and potential history are implicit in it. The unequivocal power of this and other portraits set the standards by which the rest of Spencer’s work is to be judged, and, as with all great artists, the criteria are established by the artist himself.

The physical layout of the exhibition is constructed roughly along lines that Spencer envisaged. It was an idea that originated in the early 1930s after the completion of the Burghclere chapel (and was probably inspired by it). Spencer conceived of a notion of displaying his work which he referred to as the Church-House project, or a “church of me” as he sometimes described it, a collection of pictures that would represent a conspectus of his unique imagination, in both its sacred and secular dimensions. The architecture of this building was vague but was approximately churchy in configuration — a long nave, with side chapels, a transept, an altar and altarpiece. He made rough sketches of this scheme over the years and it is fair to say that almost anything he painted after its conception had its place somewhere in the rambling aggregate of buildings, small rooms, alcoves and corridors that the Church-House design had now become. He was, to put it another way, painting to equip and fit out his own private gallery which, when completed, would be a summation of his life’s vision. Clearly, it was always going to be impossible to reproduce this ambitious plan in its entirety, but the Barbican has made a good stab at it, first by assembling a large and significant proportion of those pictures, and second by physically recreating something of the church effect. In the “nave” of the gallery pictures are grouped under generic titles, set in alcoves, and on either side are a couple of “rooms,” or “chapels,” one containing the magnificent portraits of his formidable second wife Patricia Preece, the other for the “Christ in the Wilderness” series, the small square paintings set high up on the wall, like a frieze. A large and bizarre crucifixion (of 1959), a kind of horrific cartoon, acts as the altarpiece, and to the left the gallery continues, as one arm of an extended transept into rooms containing the Port Glasgow Resurrection, and the Hilda Chapel, a homage to Spencer’s long-suffering first wife, containing the enormous, unfinished Apotheosis of Hilda.

It was worth the effort: the arrangement conveys a vivid sense of Spencer’s idiosyncratic personality and obsessions, and you gain some sense — however stylistically distinct the work is — of its unifying factor, that joyous celebration of life’s diversity. The Patricia Chapel is the most effective. There is an almost visceral shock experienced as you walk in, with four of the big pictures hung virtually frame to frame: the two double portraits and two nudes, and, to each side, two portraits. The viewer stands there, faced with this vision of flesh, pinned in a crossfire of Patricia Preece’s unflinching stares, nervously privy to Spencer’s candid exultation in his wife’s — and his own — nakedness.

But here lies the problem. To move from the profound and disturbing power of the Patricia Chapel back to the “nave” of the gallery is to experience a marked diminution of effect, a diminution brought about by a number of factors that we will come to see are typically Spencerian. To put the contrast very simply, you move from refulgent, life-sized, superbly painted portraits to large long rectangles of canvas crowded with small figures. The juxtaposition is disquieting. But this shape of canvas crowded with its clustering figures was highly popular with Spencer. It embodies what might be termed the predella effect. A predella is part of an altar-piece, a horizontal strip, or separate painting below the main painting, often used, so my Pevsner informs me, “for a number of representations in a row.” Its effect was deliberately designed to be subsidiary. The votary would approach the altar, overwhelmed and awestruck by the vast crucifixion, or transfiguration, or whatever, above it, then kneel, and then his eye would be caught by the predella. The same emotions are experienced in this exhibition on emerging from the Patricia Chapel — nothing matches the power or impact of its pictures. And many of Spencer’s most famous paintings are predella-like, not just in format but in design, containing large “numbers of representations in a row.” The Port Glasgow Resurrection, the “Last Day” sequence, the “Christ’s Passion” sequence, and so on, all reflect this strong linear component. The eye need not necessarily travel from left to right as if reading a text, but it does (in pictures of this sort and shape this is the eye’s natural tendency — it has to be cajoled into roving). Furthermore, if you look closely at, for example, a panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection, The Reunion of Families, 1945, in purely painterly terms, ignoring its religious import and not attempting to assess its particular meaning, then the first quality that strikes you is the mutedness of the palette. The colours are uniformly sombre and subdued: beige, stone, moss green, grey, dull cinnamons and umbers. There is nothing rich here, nothing vibrant or glowing. At first I thought this might be a side effect of the very unsatisfactory lighting in the gallery or of the curious colouring of the walls the pictures are mounted on — a pale puce — but in fact this dullness is a feature of many of the large paintings on display. Unusually, reproductions of Spencer’s pictures tend to flatter the originals. His colours are predominantly dusty, flat, depthless — even the famous Desire from the “Beatitudes of Love” series shines on the page in a way it does not on the canvas. It is not hard to see why this should be so. In The Reunion of Families (or any number of other examples) the paint is applied very thinly, so thinly that the warp and woof of the canvas is rarely obscured by the pigment. There is absolutely no sense of any joy or satisfaction in the plastic tactile sensation that comes from the application of paint to canvas from loaded brush, no exploration of the fundamental possibilities of oil. Oil paint is used in these cases simply for its basic colour properties, and even then within this oddly reduced, dull range. The paint seems heavily thinned with turpentine, often leaving the squaring-up, pencilled grid clearly visible behind the near-transparent smear of colour. Of course, in these large pictures Spencer reproduces an overwhelming effect of texture, but this is more a result of his love of pattern and minute detail, which is depicted with assiduous and mind-boggling patience. In the great olive drab swathe that is Love on the Moor every brick in the wall which runs along the top of the picture is dutifully painted in, as is every dogtooth and stripe, herringbone and polka dot, dart and flick on the clothes of the picture’s swarming population.

Staring at square yards of these paintings two comparisons came to mind as I tried to register and evaluate their effect. First of all they seemed to possess the properties of tapestries, rather than paintings. The absence of depth of field is the clearest similarity, and the flatness of the visual plane and the diminished or non-existent perspective are very tapestry-like. So too is what might be termed the picture’s dogged egalitarianism. The very top right hand corner of Christ Delivered to the People—a branch of a tree, a wall, a neutral section of street — is rendered with precisely the same care and attention, sharpness of focus and concentration on detail as is Christ’s face! This is the democratic deadening effect of tapestry, one stitch enjoying exactly the same status as another, but is not normally a consequence of painting, except in one genre of it — which brings me to the second comparison — namely hyperreal-ism. One is hugely impressed, full of admiration, before these large Spencer pictures, almost stunned by these vast testimonials to his prodigious diligence and tirelessness, in much the same way as one is amazed how this or that airbrush-wielding hyperrealist has captured every gleam and warped reflection, every twinkle and dent, in the chrome innards of a Harley Davidson. Look at the Waking Up panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection. Each leaf is there, every blade of grass, every petal on the primroses (yet the babies have the individuality of lumps of dough, strangely). But this sedulous industry — like hyperrealism — is in the end a facile talent, indicative more of a certain hyper-patient cast of mind than of genuine artistry or genius. And nowhere is this better illustrated than in the huge unfinished canvas (twenty feet by six feet) The Apotheosis of Hilda.

Perhaps “barely started” would be a more apt description than “unfinished,” as only the top left hand corner is actually painted, approximately one twelfth of the canvas. The rest is ready for painting, and in a way that is highly revealing of Spencer’s methods. In fact the expanse of white canvas is more like a sheet from a giant sketch pad: most of the rest of the composition has been drawn on the surface in pencil, but drawn in the most elaborate detail — even the fishnet mesh of Hilda’s gloves has been cross-hatched in. And what has actually been completed — and this is not meant to sound flippant — forcibly reminds one of an abandoned “paint-by-numbers” exercise. Looking at the painted twelfth of the picture, it is immediately obvious that the completed work would have been the Apotheosis of Detail also. Spencer has painted virtually every pebble on the ground, every brick in a wall. Here and there the white circle of an untreated face waits for later attention. The effect of so much effort is disorientating: clearly on paintings of this scale this kind of method, or something similar, has to be employed simply to get proportions right and composition exact, but it has to be said that there is something soullessly mechanical about this laboured depiction of minutiae: leaf by leaf, pattern by pattern, stitch by stitch it goes, a monstrous pseudo-Gobelin, the triumph of pertinacity over afflatus.

What is in the end so exasperating (and I think that one word sums up the complexity of response this exhibition stimulates in me) is that counter-examples abound, and not just in the rapt carnality of the Patricia Chapel. There is a portrait of Hilda Spencer—Seated Nude—which is equally fine. As with the Patrica Preece portraits, it exhibits a sensitivity to the potential and resources of oil paint far superior to anything in the large allegories or religious paintings, not just in the freedom with which the paint is applied, or reproduction of subtle skin tones, but also an awareness of how impasto and wash, highlight and shadow, of overt brushmark set beside absolute smoothness can simulate the contours of the body and properties of skin with spectacular success. The effect of the bulge of muscle over bone on Hilda’s right shoulder is achieved by thick strokes of pale coral set just below the smooth cream highlights where the skin is stretched over the deltoid. The axillary folds above her breast are painted slate grey, almost scumbled, with the white weave of the canvas allowed to show through as highlights. Over and above this technical mastery the wholly uncompromising honesty of the painter’s eye is again very powerful. It is the antithesis of idealization, but derives its power precisely from that ruthlessness. The flesh tones of the face are markedly darker than the hues of the torso, suiting the slight frown on Hilda’s brow and the odd, troubled, askance nature of her gaze. One needs no specialized biographical information to recognize this as a great picture; all its ingredients fuse superbly. As they do in the portraits of the Patricia Chapel and as they do, for example, in the three marvellous self-portraits of 1914, 1936 and 1959.

By emphasizing the achievements of these portraits over the religious and allegorical paintings I do not wish to denigrate work that we might normally and unreflectingly regard as quintessential Stanley Spencer. But the division exists, and the artistry and spirit that infuse the former seem only marginally present in the latter. Furthermore the allegories and religious paintings are heavily encoded, replete with possible interpretations. Some of them have a more public dimension — great religious themes — others remain irreducibly private. From this stem further ambiguities and problems of response. Standing before a picture that is manifestly the product of a personality at once so eccentric and idiosyncratic can be unsatisfying: one’s own emotional and intellectual comprehension seems inadequate or nugatory. What is one to make of The Chest of Drawers, for example? A large woman looms over a small man rummaging in the bottom drawer of a chest. Superficially it seems to me badly painted — textureless, hurried, faux naïf—and as for its content I suppose it might pass muster as a private joke or whimsical jeu d’esprit. However, set in the full context of Spencer’s life, buttressed and explicated by what we know of his personal history and his private needs and desires, from information gleaned from his letters and journals, the painting takes on a different significance and is judged by altogether different standards. But this is to make the picture an adjunct to autobiography — as a work of art it still seems to me deficient. By this I don’t want to imply that great or good art must necessarily have an accessible public dimension — I am not insisting that the cryptic and the obscure exclude themselves from evaluation by their very nature. On the contrary, the truly private import of, say, the Leg of Mutton Nude will probably remain for ever buried. But the picture exists for us in a way that, for example, The Lovers or A Village in Heaven don’t. If we are denied — or are uncertain of — the significance of the images in a picture then the only way we can respond to it is either through some purely private correspondence — a fortuitous subjective recognition — or else by traditional methods of evaluation. This is the case with many of Spencer’s pictures, and they suffer thereby. The same disadvantage besets the religious paintings. Suffused as they are with Spencer’s highly individual sacramental vision, the odds on chiming with it naturally and spontaneously are small. Hence the almost inevitable accusations of whimsy (the British disease) or facetiousness. No such occlusion conditions our response to the portraits.

Not everyone would agree with Frank Auerbach’s conviction that the only lasting and valid test of an artist’s worth is how he or she treats the posed human figure. Mind you, they might not agree because it is such an exacting yardstick, before which many a lesser or vainglorious talent has its inadequacies brutally exposed. However, in a slightly wider context the assertion does have a real bearing on Spencer and his corpus of work. The great problem for artists of narrative, allegorical, ideological or symbolic subjects is that, more often than not, it is the story, the allegory, the politics, or the symbol itself, which fascinate, far more than the medium through which they are rendered. Form, as the cliché has it, is sacrificed to content. Hence the enduring presence of those great eternals in an artist’s repertoire — the posed figure, the nude, the self-portrait, the interior, the still life, the landscape. Because the nature of the subject is so timeless, the balance between form and content remains in equilibrium. And it takes a real, not to say great, artist to raise the subject from the humdrum to the sublime.

The very nature of the religious and allegorical sequences, the faux naïf Beatitudes, and the domestic scenes place them in a different category. Here are the products of a highly personalized and maverick imagination, in the line of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. It is their very strangeness, their self-contained and self-assured idiosyncrasy that either enchants — or not at all. But in the astonishing portraits and double portraits of himself and his wives and a handful of other pictures Spencer reveals himself as an artist of major and enduring stature. All great art is unsentimental, and this is art of an honesty that is transcendent and magisterial in its formal accomplishments.

1991

Looking at the “by the same author” list on the fly leaf of Robert Hughes’s latest book, Barcelona, published a few months ago, it is clear that we have been the happy recipients of an explosion of productivity. It began in 1987 with the expansive and masterly history of the discovery and colonization of Australia, The Fatal Shore, and has continued apace. It was followed by two monographs — one on Lucian Freud (1988) and one on Frank Auerbach (1990) — a new edition of The Shock of the New (1991), his survey of twentieth-century art, and a weighty collection of his articles, Nothing If Not Critical (1991). Six substantial publications in five years represents an output of Ackroydian prolixity, a veritable torrent of creative juices all the more impressive when one notes that, apart from The Shock of the New, the publication listed before The Fatal Shore’s appearance in 1987 was Heaven and Hell in Western Art, published in 1969. What had Hughes been doing during all those years between? The answer is: writing art criticism (and, doubtless, researching and writing The Fatal Shore). Hughes has been art critic for Time magazine since 1970; notching up a near quarter century as the art world’s most acute and uncompromising observer and interpreter. His position is pre-eminent and unchallenged: he is far and away the best art critic of his generation.

The reissue of the The Shock of the New provides a handy opportunity to reassess Hughes’s achievements. A swift random collation between the two books threw up no examples of editorial doctoring, except, as might be expected, in the final chapter, “The Future that Was,” which has been significantly altered. The first edition signed off in 1980 and, a decade and more further on, the scene had changed dramatically. Hughes’s conclusion in 1980 was gloomy, but one could detect an undertone that was cautiously upbeat. In the new edition his despair, not to say contempt, is conspicuous. That the worst excesses of the art market, with its obscene inflation of value, along with a frenzied hyping of reputation and image-mongering, have been played out in his own backyard, so to speak, probably explains Hughes’s dismay, but his savage indignation makes a potent fuel for his criticism. Hughes is an exceptionally fine writer and, as with many great critics, it is scorn and vituperation which set his pen bulging with spleen, but, in castigating the minor talents and ego-driven poseurs, he negatively defines what he regards as positive and estimable. As he excoriates the prancings and posturings of the contemporary art world, a credo emerges and, so I contend, sets standards of evaluation, creates parameters of excellence, which are very hard to refute. (Interestingly enough, his approbatory gaze has crossed the Atlantic and heavily favours figuration. The expanded final chapter makes it clear that Hughes regards certain British artists as repositories of those qualities he admires. As well as Freud and Auerbach the list includes Hockney, Hodgkin, Bacon, Kitaj and Kossoff.)

If the fundamental function of criticism is to make a value judgement, to establish a system of ranking, to say why this is good and that is mediocre, and in so doing to explain and justify why the critic believes this to be the case, then Hughes’s work over the years is as consistent and thorough as any. Of course all criticism is subjective, and of course it is just an expression of opinion, but in any argument the best arguer wins, other opinions are altered thereby and a consensus emerges. It is not set in cement, true, but broadly speaking, as a result of informed and intelligent critical discourse, standards are laid down and ideals are established which, if they are to be overturned by alternative criteria, have to be equally convincingly propounded and defended in their own right. This is the essence of the critical dance, if you like, and no one trips the light fantastic more effectively than Hughes.

Consider this statement, for example, which comes from Hughes’s terrifyingly effective critical demolition of Julian Schnabel:

During the composition of this mightily impressive, beautifully written, astute and capacious book, Robert Hughes found himself describing it to others as “a love letter to America”—a description which he now qualifies with the reminder that “different stages of an affair produce different letters and some are not free of reproach to their brazen, abundant, horizon-filling subject.”

Pursuing the analogy, we might observe that the relationship starts off with some cautious flirtation, is duly consummated, enjoys a passionate middle phase and then, as doubts and suspicions crowd in, turns acridly sour. By the book’s end Hughes’s love has turned, if not to hate, to something close to contempt.

If American Visions is the history of a love affair gone bad, it is also the history of a nation. Hughes, as well as being the doyen of art critics, is also a historian of the first rank (as The Fatal Shore, his history of the founding of his native Australia, and Barcelona testify). One of the extra pleasures of this richly pleasurable book is that on its completion one has read, almost by accident, a learned and succinct account of the last 300 years or so of America’s existence, taking in and placing in context all the familiar milestones, from discovery to colony to revolution, to republic, civil war, industrialization, depression and eventual world dominance. Hughes does this effortlessly, it seems (which means the vast scholarship and writerly skill are implicit), braiding his cultural exegesis with his historian’s, giving us the history not only of the development of the visual arts in America but also of its multiform, energetic, striving and troubled people.

As far as the art is concerned, it was a slowish beginning. Pueblo architecture and Amish quilts apart, the painting produced in pre-revolutionary America is naive and on the quaint side. Tardily, artists of merit evolve as the eighteenth century turns into the nineteenth: Copley, the brothers Peale (Rembrandt and Raphaelle — clearly their parents had ambitions for the boys); but the one dominant figure of this period is Thomas Jefferson, brimful of prodigious talents — statesman, writer, farmer, inventor, collector and architect of real note. Hughes’s mini-essay on Jefferson is a gem; the book is studded with such glinting nuggets, models of concision and insight.

The first artist of real status to emerge, and one who seems quintessentially American, is Frederick Church, the Caspar David Friedrich of American art, whose vast apocalyptic canvases drew huge crowds. But the interest we have in the painters of the nineteenth century (Eakins and Winslow Homer aside) is largely topographical (Thomas Cole, Audubon), or cultural-historical (Remington), rather than aesthetic. Hughes is wisely cautious about making grand assertions (one is always aware, behind one’s back as it were, of the muted roar of Europe’s contemporaneous artistic achievements). For example, he posits Whistler as America’s first great painter, but with the rider that it is “absurd to class him with Degas or Manet.”

Indeed one is always conscious, because of the historical context into which the art history is woven, of America’s other claims to fame as the twentieth century begins and advances — the industrial might, the innovations in architecture and consumerism, its increasing hegemony in the world — to such an extent that the accomplishments in the visual arts seem nugatory.

There are two exceptions. Hughes uses the word “genius” only once in the book and applies it to Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he could also have appended it to Edward Hopper. Hughes’s admiration for Hopper is of the highest, but it strikes me, inspired by Hughes’s long view of the twentieth century, that Hopper emerges as the indisputable great modern American artist: painterly diligent, visionary, unique (Europe has produced nothing like him). And as the artistic efforts of this century end in a wet fart of faddery, flim-flam and self-indulgence, one wonders if we shall ever see his like again.

The long view puts everything in perspective. Even the golden years of American painting — the 1950s and 1960s — when New York was the demonstrable capital of the art world, now require some careful reassessment. Here Hughes is at his most incisively authoritative. While authentic geniuses may be thin on the ground, twentieth-century American art produced its fair share of legends and icon-makers, notably Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. There were artists of real talent — Davis, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Kelly, Johns and Rauschenberg perhaps — and talents that flickered brightly for a moment (Kline, Lichtenstein, Rivers and Guston), but now the fuss has died down true merit will out and a lot of it looks thin stuff.

Hughes’s thesis is subtle and persuasive and I apologize if my summary makes it seem all crude, broad strokes. Much of the blame for the decline in American art in the last half of the century is laid at the door of the art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of Abstract Expressionism and later of movements dubbed Post-Painterly Abstraction and Colour Field Abstraction. Greenberg’s disastrous “triumph,” Hughes avers, was to suppress the evidence of skill — pictorial skill in an artist’s repertoire being deemed a snare and a delusion. As a result of Greenberg’s baleful influence (unparalleled in any critic before or since), America evolved a system of art education “that has repealed its own standards,” that destroyed a whole tradition in a generation or two by not teaching its skills, “and that was what happened to figure painting in the United States between 1960 and 1980.” NO ONE CAN DRAW ANY MORE is the stark and frightening message. The art world is now reaping that whirlwind, and the stiff breeze is being felt on these shores also.

Hughes has plenty of positive things to say about contemporary American art, though it is clear that the current scene and its swarming Varps (Vaguely Art Related Persons) fill him with despair. He writes superbly, of course, and indignation often brings the best from his pen; for example, when he describes the art world of the eighties:

Ingres said it takes thirty years to learn to draw and three days to learn to paint. That may be putting it a little strongly, but one can understand the fundamental thrust of his argument: it is to do with delineation, with establishing the primacy of the line in art. And if there is one area of artistic practice where this primacy holds incontrovertibly it is etching, once defined as “drawing at its most expressive.” In etching, the abstract and suggestive qualities of the line dominate and are given a further authority through the medium of printing. Graham Sutherland began his artistic life as an etcher, and it is in that fascinating and meticulous craft, it seems to me, that some of the clues to his artistic personality reside.

In etching there is a freedom denied the engraver, the freedom of the needle running easily over a grounded plate, whereas the engraved line — the burin cutting into the copper — has a necessary precision and discipline, a pondered finality. But every etching is an original drawing. The plate is prepared, the edge bevelled and the surface cleaned, the ground — beeswax and bitumen — is applied. The needle is poised. The implement held in your hand is closer to a nail or a knife than anything else. No pliant brush, no blurriness or shading of graphite or chalk, just a point. And the gesture it makes, its signature, however fluid, however graphic, is still a kind of cutting, a scratch, an incising. There are many variations of technique to be learned, many tricks of the trade to suggest distance and tone and differing effects of light, but etching is, in the end, purely a matter of expressive line.

Those early Palmeresque etchings of Sutherland, with the whole frame filled, dark with the precise scribble of cross-hatching, possess an assurance and mastery of technique that are mightily impressive. Inch by square inch the trees and the hills and the sky are rendered with the needle. The plate is immersed in the acid bath and the exposed metal eroded—“bitten”—according to the artist’s judgement: just a scratch here, the merest graze, here biting deeper, a scar, a furrow formed to hold the ink in a darker seam. But in the final process of etching, luck and experience apply: too many factors are at work — temperature, acid strength, character of the lines — to make for certainty. It is a job to be done indoors in an atmosphere redolent of the workshop rather than the studio. Perhaps this was something Sutherland responded to or even welcomed? He left school at sixteen and was apprenticed to the Midland Railway Works in Derby, where he worked with lathes and rivets, and welded plates to boilers for steam engines, before he quit the industrial world for Goldsmiths School of Art to specialize in printmaking.

Imagine, then, the almost terrifying freedom and immediacy of outdoors after the deliberate procedures of the print room — from the acid bath to the messy application of watercolour, from the permanency of the etched line to the rapid transit of pencil over a sketch pad balanced on your knee. Sutherland clearly responded to nature, as the faintly cod and cosy pastoral of those early etchings demonstrates, but the evident passion of the Pembrokeshire gouaches and oils in the mid 1930s testifies to a deeper liberation. This was not simply a numinous identification with landscape. There is — paradoxically — in that uncertain tremulous line of Sutherland, a liberation of technique. It is as if he cannot believe that the horizons have receded, that the light in the atmosphere is not produced by an electric bulb. Just as the lifer, once released, once through the prison gates, is more likely to savour the demotic pleasures of a coffee in a greasy spoon rather than embark on a holiday in Bali, so too Sutherland’s new freedom never goes all out for the full Romantic orgasm. The focus is precise: the entrance to a lane, the stark contortions of a blasted tree, the prickly grip of gorse on a sea wall. This is not a Turneresque visitation of the egotistical sublime, it is an altogether more cautious feeling-out, a tentative survey of new possibilities, new geometries, new worlds.

The artistic process reflects this exactly. First comes the raw exposure to the subject matter: the roving eye waits to alight on something, anything, that holds it — stone, rock, fissure, fall of water, bole of tree — and the sketch is made on the spot. Then possibly a series of sketches from different angles. A colour wash is added. Back in the studio a selection is made and is then squared up for copying and placing in the frame of the finished canvas. Wordsworth defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Sutherland’s working practice partially replicates this. But there is something dogged about the way the initial serendipitous coup d’oeil is worked up and worked on until its fitness as the subject of a painting is deemed suitable. Patience, thoroughness, endless practice, precision … These are the virtues of the etcher’s craft, and Sutherland transported them to his painting. Keith Vaughan testifies to the example Sutherland presented to a younger painter — the sheer number of hours he spent at work, its relentless daily routine. For those artists who rely on easy afflatus, or a facile or natural talent, or happy accident, a painter such as Sutherland can seem dauntingly intense and an almost shaming rebuke. Everyone else begins to look lazy, an amateur.

Sutherland was born in Streatham in 1903, his family and upbringing redoubtably middle class. He was a day boy at Epsom College (as was John Piper, by uncanny coincidence) which he left early — not deemed intelligent enough to continue to tertiary education — and was pointed at that dependable middle-class career, engineering. Whatever it was that made him want to go to art school and chuck his engineering apprenticeship was probably the saving of him, for there was no precocious talent on offer, no bohemian role model that made him hanker for life as an artist. He was handsome and polite, with a diffident charm, and he married his first girlfriend, Kathleen, a sustaining and vitally important union that was to last to his death. In short, or in superficial terms, there was nothing extraordinary about Graham Sutherland except his vocation. Looking at the life and at the work one can see it as a series of unfoldings, of revelations. The apprentice engineer discovers he can draw, the student masters the technicalities of printmaking, then responds to the vision of Samuel Palmer, which leads him in turn to landscape, where his own vision supersedes and a new style and way of seeing are created.

Even with portrait painting this process repeats itself. An excellent rather than naturally brilliant draughtsman, Sutherland was reluctant to attempt a likeness, yet in relenting to pressure and undertaking a commission to paint Somerset Maugham he produced one of the great portraits of the twentieth century. And continued to do so in subsequent commissions. There is no braggadocio, no easy profligacy in the Picasso manner, no bludgeoning personality, saturnine or sensational. Simply, the work exists, a half century of extraordinary effort.

And at its back, at its root, is that evocative line, the Sutherland line, his style, worth considering in more detail. It is idiosyncratic, unflowing, full of pauses, changes of angle. Not feathery, not sinuous, but quite strong, supplemented by little dashes, dots, squiggles, overlays, hatchings. In the studies for the landscapes the broad ovals and rectangles of black or colour are embellished or bordered with a fritter of pencil or pen marks, small circles, a series of curves to suggest the contoured bark of a tree, nervy shadings or meticulous renderings of the texture of lichen, or the rutted imprints of a country road. These leaves from the sketch pads are heavily worked between the broader, smoother swathes of colour. The swift scratches of a pen — a suggestion of a furrowed field — fringe a wash of green; a freckling of leaf shapes separates two aqueous crescents of ochre; feathery strata, veins in rock, worm between rough squares of umber and aquamarine.

Who can say what it is about an artist’s style that engages? What it is precisely that one responds to? How it pleasures the eye? How does that particular hand wield its brush or pencil or stick of charcoal, and what causes it to make its marks upon the surface in that singular way? With Sutherland I would say that it is this contrast of fiddly penmanship — of the black, the ink or the paint — with the smoother mass of the colour-field. The worrying, jaggy, suggestive line sits against empty calmer surfaces of colour, the tension of the one counterposed by the translucency or the opacity of the other. I am almost convinced this is a matter of instinct — this is unlearned, this is simply how you do it — and it is in these manipulations of pigment that the artist’s quiddity resides. In Sutherland’s case a quick skim through the oeuvre reveals this trope, this strophe, again and again. It is there in Mountain Road with Boulder, 1940, in the thorn trees and thorn heads half a decade later, in the Standing Forms of the 1950s, and the insects and corn cobs of the sixties and seventies. Any sketch, any gouache reveals that this tension, this contrast, is what his eye and his imagination respond to. Even the portraits are a variation of the same theme. The details of the face and clothing set against the broad empty panels of colour that form the background play with the same fecund juxtapositions.

It is not, however, a mere matter of busy line versus tranquil vacancy. With the move from the monochrome world of the print Sutherland’s palette multiplied dramatically, with the result that there are few better colourists in twentieth-century painting, it seems to me. Sutherland could exploit the exquisite harmonies of greens — from apple to moss to bottle — with the same exhilarating subtlety as Braque handled his browns, greys and blues. But his range was never sombre or confined to tastefully complementing shades, and he never allowed the slubby, rainsodden tones of the British landscape to dominate. Sutherland could look at a Welsh estuary on a dull, drizzling day through the refulgent, sunfilled eyes of a Fauve or a Gauguin. True, his pictures took on a more evident mineral brilliance once he was exposed to the glare of the Mediterranean light, but his work was always boldly hued. Terracotta skies, corn-yellow clouds and magenta fields were part of his pictorial world from the thirties onwards, and it was his temerity in this area that perhaps most influenced his contemporaries and is another justification of claims for his eminence. Sutherland produced great paintings from humdrum, readily available material. Fields, trees, rocks, plants, animals. It is not through any heaped-on numinous import that his subject matter is special; it is that peculiar alchemy of line, form, colour and composition that combines on that square of canvas to give it a significance and import.

I want to resist, I suppose, too much neo-romantic baggage when it comes to an assessment of Sutherland. His imagination responded to forms in the natural world in the way that, say, Bonnard’s was fired by domestic interiors or Morandi’s by arrangements of vases and bottles on a table top. In each case it is what that artist does with the material selected that is important, rather than any subtext, philosophy or ideology that might be tacked on later. In any event, dogma or intellectual ambition are almost the first things that a great painting sloughs off on its journey through posterity. If we admire a Boccioni or a Marinetti today, for example, it has precious little to do with the Futurist Manifesto. The power that Sutherland’s work has to enthral or move, disturb or enchant, is a tribute to his particular skill and talent and, occasionally, genius. It fluctuates, as it does in any oeuvre; there are great pictures and interesting ones, some enduringly powerful and some manifestly tired and slipshod (the Standing Form obsession of the fifties and sixties was a very overmined seam), but the qualities that make Sutherland a major artist are there to be seen in the pictures rather than read about later.

In the late forties and early fifties Graham Sutherland was the most famous living British painter. He was not only esteemed by his artistic peers, he also had a renown that prompted one critic to claim that he existed on the same level of public awareness as Brigitte Bardot and Ernest Hemingway. While the public never lost its interest in him — the Churchill portrait controversy, the Coventry Cathedral tapestry, kept him always close to centre stage — his critical reputation began to suffer in the sixties, and Sutherland never really managed to reverse its slow but steady diminution. It is a savage, unfair and inaccurate measure of any artist’s standing, but it does indicate some degree of value to record that, today, a good, late-1940s Sutherland is probably one tenth the price of a good, late-1940s Bacon. Sutherland and Bacon … We will return to them in due course.

The problem with Sutherland’s career is both instructive and minatory and I think goes a considerable way to explain this imbalance and injustice. Any twentieth-century artist’s life is not simply a record of work done, there is also the question of the life led as an “artist,” how the personality is perceived and the extent to which it bolsters or detracts from the work. In a perfect world this would not be the case, and it is true that some artists do manage to maintain a reclusive non-presence and still be highly regarded. But it is difficult, and when the great and the good come calling and the seductions of acclaim beckon, only the toughest egos or the most taciturn spirits can spurn them.

Sutherland charmed people, he was an attractive man, and with his arrival on the scene in the late thirties he was also plainly a major talent, a British artist of international stature painting significant pictures among which were several enduring masterpieces. He attracted powerful patrons: Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, Douglas Cooper, an opinionated and influential art critic, Lord Beaverbrook, and various others. They championed him, and he succeeded and thrived, but, in the way these well-meaning associations can turn into Faustian pacts, his familiarity with a powerful elite came to be a positive disadvantage, especially in Britain. His move to Menton did not help, and neither did his portrait commissions. Maugham, Beaverbrook, Churchill, Adenauer, Helena Rubinstein, and assorted industrialists and foreign aristocrats, however brilliant they were (and his 1957 portrait of Helena Rubinstein is as close to Velázquez as you can get in the twentieth century), gave off too rich a whiff of grandeur and plutocratic influence. There were too many exhibitions, too rapid an execution of canvases to fill up the shows. The public demand, not for the first time, served the artist badly. It is not hard to see why the critical wind shifted so uncompromisingly: changing the terms of reference, any artist today who found himself championed loudly and simultaneously by, say, Nick Serota, Robert Hughes and Rupert Murdoch might also feel that was too much of a good thing. And this was what happened to Sutherland, who, I feel, had unwittingly broken a key rule of British public life that applies to its artists as much as it does to other personalities, whether in show-business, politics or sport: if you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it. A series of critical savagings in the sixties speeded up the undermining of his artistic reputation. Sutherland grew richer (he was charging £20,000 for a full-length portrait in the 1970s), but he was not to enjoy the unrivalled estimation he had experienced in the years following World War Two. Interestingly enough, his greatest acclaim in the last decade of his life came from Italy, where he was widely collected and admired, his reputation as one of the leading artists of the century secure and undiminished.

And the loss is ours, and the shame that we are cursed with pusillanimous critics. The work of the last two decades of Sutherland’s life is wonderfully full and ambitious, the colours richer, the scale larger, a mature extension of the themes and styles first shown to the world in the thirties and forties. The same spiky, intricate, organic forms set against glowing colour-fields, haunting and brooding interiors, marvellous luminescent landscapes that hark back to the charged Pembrokeshire canvases of thirty years previously, and an exemplary body of portraiture that has never really had its due.

As the century nears its end and we survey the past decades of British painting, two figures, I believe, will emerge as dominant influences, major talents who have produced a corpus of work that gives modern British art its true weight and significance in the international arena. One of them is Francis Bacon; the other should be Graham Sutherland. The canonization of Bacon is already under way, and it is hard to argue that this should be otherwise. But when we set Bacon alongside Sutherland, contemplate the oeuvres and assess the respective achievements, the comparison between the two artists is highly illuminating. In many respects the two men were complete opposites, not only in terms of their personality but also in many facets of their art. And in many ways they represent twin poles of artistic endeavour, twin touchstones of taste and evaluation. They seem to have met first in the mid 1930s, and became friends. Sutherland’s star was in the ascendant, but he genuinely admired Bacon’s talent and did a great deal to advance his career during the war. By the mid 1940s they were seeing a good deal of each other socially. In 1946 Bacon based himself in Monte Carlo and suggested Sutherland (and his wife Kathleen) join him there, which they duly did. It was his introduction to the Mediterranean littoral and to the pleasures of the roulette table; both were to prove lasting obsessions.

During the next few years the two men were at their closest, and it was inevitable that a certain amount of cross-fertilization would emerge. On the vexed question of who influenced whom Bacon is commonly granted the upper hand, but attempts to document the exchange precisely are fruitless. Baconian elements appear in some of Sutherland’s works; but there are also elements of Sutherland in some of Bacon’s canvases. Indeed, one could mount a very convincing argument that such major Sutherland paintings as Gorse on Sea Wall, 1939, or Green Tree Form, 1940, completely prefigure the classic Baconian composition — a twisted, tortured, organic form set more or less centrally against bold opaque panels of colour. But such point-scoring is redundant: it is in their dissimilarities that our interest lies.

The list of oppositions is fascinating and extends to their personalities. Sutherland charming and well mannered; Bacon the extrovert roué. Sutherland the devoted husband; Bacon the promiscuous homosexual. The paramount place of line in Sutherland’s work; with Bacon the plasticity of the painted surface. Sutherland making study after study, laboriously squaring up and striving for perfection; Bacon relying on the adventitious moment, destroying everything that hadn’t worked. Sutherland face to face with landscape and nature; Bacon confined to interiors. Sutherland’s passionate response to the natural world in all its forms; Bacon’s brutal obsession with the human condition. Sutherland the master etcher, the portrait painter, technically accomplished; Bacon who claimed “I know nothing about technique.” And so on.

I am reminded here of Archilocus’ ancient and somewhat baffling adage: “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog knows one big thing.” If Bacon is the hedgehog of twentieth-century British painting — and any survey of his oeuvre will illustrate the “one big thing” he knew, the relentless single-mindedness of his art, the one furrow he ploughed almost without deviation from the 1944 Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion—then Graham Sutherland is the fox. And one’s response to both these artists will, in the end, be determined by one’s affiliation to either the “Fox” school of painting or the “Hedgehog,” if I can extend the metaphor. For those who judge that all great painting springs from a fundamental mastery of line, that it is the absolute bedrock upon which all other forms of expression, however free, rest, then Sutherland, the “Fox,” will claim their adherence. For those who like their emotions raw and unadulterated, then the “Hedgehog” Bacon will win the day. From my point of view, I find Sutherland’s achievement the more impressive. Much as I admire Bacon’s single-mindedness, much as I acknowledge the sheer heft of his presence in the history of twentieth-century British art and respond to the visceral force of his canvases, I find the paucity of graphic skill a weakness at the centre of his work. A worry.

Bacon liked to sneer at Picasso and Matisse — the great modern masters of the line — and their talent for “decoration” as he put it. So too did he dismiss Sutherland as their friendship cooled in the fifties and the sixties and as his own stature grew. He likened Sutherland’s great portraits to “Time magazine covers,” a peevish slur in any event, but one that might have more weight if there were any evidence that Bacon himself was his equal, or even near equal, when it came to sheer ability to draw. All artists set out to create a taste by which they may be appreciated, and Bacon’s denigration of those artists who possess this immense graphic gift is highly revealing. Sutherland, who was blessed in this way, was a more generous spirit towards his former friend. But then foxes can always afford to be kind to hedgehogs.

1993

A novelist, who had done his time in the screenplay salt mines of Hollywood, was asked once to define the difference between novel writing and script writing. The answer came in the form of this useful analogy: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a screenplay is like swimming in a swimming pool. The comparison is worth bearing in mind whenever one has to distinguish between radically different forms of activity within the same art form. Different satisfactions are in play, different resources are drawn upon and, it has to be said, one activity is going to be more rewarding than the other.

The analogy is particularly germane, it seems to me, when one comes to analysing the respective merits of figurative and non-figurative painting. I want to concentrate, as far as the last category is concerned, on what one might call pure abstract art, namely one where all attempt at representation has been eschewed, where, in the terms of one definition, “neither the work itself, or any of its parts represents nor symbolises objects in the visible world.”

It is worth raking over the coals of this debate as one of the great exemplars of this form of abstraction has just had a major exhibition in London. Franz Kline and the loosely associated members of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman and others) initiated what one might call the second great wave of abstract painting in the late 1940s and 1950s (I am taking the work of Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group to be the groundbreakers in pure abstract painting, a trend that culminated in Mondrian’s primary-coloured grid paintings in the late 1930s). However, nothing in this corner of European modernism matched the brouhaha that erupted in New York with the advent of Abstract Expressionism. “The death of figuration” was loudly bruited about by both artists and critics, such was the influence and excitement generated by this group of painters.

Today, contemplating the pronouncements issued at the time, and the extravagant claims made for the artists themselves, a curious, not to say incredulous, distancing takes place. Can people really have believed that the arrival on the scene of Kline, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Mother-well and the others signalled a watershed of such magnitude in the history of art? What does it say, half a century on from those days, about the kinds of critical judgement on offer? Can we really blame it all on Clement Greenberg?

As the twentieth century draws to its close, one of the most intriguing intellectual exercises will be the retrospective reassessment of “Modernism” (by which I mean that generation of revolution against formal traditions in all the arts that started, one might claim, with Schoenberg’s D minor quartet in 1905 and Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, and ended, let’s say, with the publication of Finnegans Wake and the outbreak of World War II in 1939). As time relentlessly intercedes between then and now, it will be all the easier to chart Modernism’s rise and fall, and analyse its application and transmogrification in the art forms of this particular 100 years. And it will be seen — it is already evident — that the archetypal, fundamental characteristics of the seven arts have absorbed and adapted themselves both to the serious currents of theory and innovation and also to the countless bouleversements of taste and wilful modishness that have swirled busily around them. Like mountains they are eroded somewhat, somewhat altered here and there, some cliff faces are more seamed and haggard, in some places the tree line has advanced or receded, but their elemental character remains the same. They have not, to extend the metaphor, suddenly become ox-bow lakes, or salt flats: for all the upheavals of their recent history they resolutely remain mountains. The novel, for example, has taken on board the lessons of Proust and Joyce, has filleted what little it likes from Virginia Woolf and decided to spit out much of what, say, B. S. Johnson and Alain Robbe-Grillet served up. Similarly with the theatre and the cinema — our diet is not pure Beckett and Brecht or Jean-Luc Godard and Ozu. Dance and music, too, have recognized where the culs-de-sac lie and have changed and reflected the upheavals in taste and aesthetics that have come and gone. One would like to say the same about painting and sculpture, and to a significant degree that is the case: the necessary lessons of the Modernist generation have been learned and have been exploited by most of our great artists. But to another, more worrying, extent it often seems to me that many artists — and critics and curators and dealers — still behave as if the Modernist iconoclasms of the 1920s and 1930s are as valid as they ever were. Here and there in the art world people still seem possessed of the desire to épater les bourgeois (as if they haven’t been thoroughly routed), to be outrageous, to break the mould, to “push the envelope,” as they say in Hollywood, as if this were something new, as if it hadn’t already been done for us before, many many times. In some areas Art at the end of the twentieth century — and this is not meant to be glib — seems the only art form that has not learned the lessons that the beginning of the century provided. It has not outgrown Modernism. It has not, in other words, grown up.

Franz Kline was a modestly talented American artist, born in Pennsylvania in 1910, who up until the late 1940s was painting figuratively in a style of sombre neo-Impressionism. There is some dispute about the source of the influence that caused him to turn so dramatically to abstract painting (possibly de Kooning’s black and white abstracts of 1948, possibly Arshile Gorky’s work), but whatever it was the change in artistic direction was marked and memorable. The first indications of the new style occur in the late forties in a series of small ink on paper sketches, clearly done almost spontaneously, in a manner of slashed doodling, sometimes one or two strokes of the brush, sometimes more squiggly and cursive. The key word often employed here is “gestural,” and it is by and large apt, suggesting as it does the vague arm movements one might make in conversation, the way one might render visually with one’s hands the random geometry of a car crash. Kline’s early black and white sketches reproduce this sparse but effective vocabulary. If a spread palm-down hand juddering through the air delineates succinctly the idea of a car skidding to a halt, then the smear and spotting of ink on paper also has a stylistic validity: one is conjuring up, suggesting, implying — in the same way as a raised fist implies a more complicated act of violence.

But — and there is always a “but” with Kline, as there is with all the Abstract Expressionists — Kline’s work is both enhanced and betrayed by reproduction. On the page an 11 × 8 inch sketch such as Study for Buried Reds can assume the massive gravitas of Four Square, which is 6½ × 4½ feet. In the museum, however, a collection of sketches known as the “Telephone Page Series” turns out to be less than nugatory. Loose watery bands of black ink on torn out, yellowing pages of Manhattan’s telephone directory, they are nothing more than a tribute to the framer’s art. They are certainly beautifully framed.

Kline’s work needs the large scale in order for it to function in its singular, solid, charged way. Even medium-sized canvases such as Third Avenue don’t deliver the visual impact that the big pictures do, even though the ingredients and the manner of their execution are virtually identical. I don’t want to suggest that Kline’s work only succeeds by virtue of what one might term the skyscraper effect (a skyscraper is the same shape as an upended match box — which is the more impressive?), as there are other forces operating in addition to sheer size and graphic shock value, but I think that the disappointment, the banality, of the smaller work is due to the fact that the brushstroking is too evident. Too evident and too simple. The aleatoric dominates: one begins to think of the arrangement of volumes, of the painting’s design, as merely serendipitous rather than consciously artistic. In a huge painting like Wanamaker Block, although the effect is of, let’s say, a dozen great slashes on the canvas with a loaded housepainter’s brush, there must in fact have been carefully considered dozens more. The big canvases are more worked, in other words, the black derives its density from more thoughtful application than a simple backhand sweep or haphazard doodle. And so is the white, too. One of the pleasant revelations of the Kline show is to observe how different the whites can be: sometimes a thick impasto, or sometimes a watery shading with the canvas showing through. There is a distinct textural quality to a successful Kline that reproduction again does not convey.

One is searching for instances of the painterly in work that seems deliberately to shun such values. But it is significant that the black and white pictures are not simply a stark contrasting of opposites. The painterliness is again more evident when Kline begins to introduce small notes of colour. In pictures such as To Win or Lehigh V Span, the note of purply maroon in the former and small streaks of blue and pistachio green in the latter function ideally with the dominant black and white — minor chords that set off the major themes. Curiously — or perhaps significantly — the less monochrome the pictures become, the more Kline’s palette enlarges, the less memorable and effective they are. Kline’s large colour pictures — exactly as “gestural” and fervid as the black and white — seem mere angry discordancies. Pictures such as Yellow, Orange and Purple or Head for Saturn seem strangely un-Klinean, routine Abstract Expressionism exploiting some vague idea of energy or rage. Kline is a victim of his own success, a fate that often befalls abstract painters. Once your style is established and recognized (better still: if it can be recognized at fifty yards), then it is very hard to make a change. Kline’s black and white paintings are as much a signature of the New York School as Pollock’s luminous dribblings. Kline is not about colour in the same way that Pollock is not about draughtsmanship. To put it cruelly, they had both found their “gimmick” and that was what the world wanted of them.

Kline died in 1962, aged fifty-one, of a heart attack, having wilfully, perhaps deliberately, ignored doctors’ warnings to cut down his potent appetite for nicotine and alcohol. He was concentrating on colour in the last year or so of his life, wanting colour, as he phrased it, to behave structurally like black and white. It was a new direction, but, on the evidence of the works left behind, it might not have proved a fecund one. It is a measure of Kline’s gift, his singular talent, that with such a reduced vocabulary — black and white, the ragged brushstroke, and the limits these factors impose on form and composition — he was able to produce abstract paintings that are so memorable. (I was about to say “haunt,” but I feel that is a misnomer: let us say that some of Kline’s big simple paintings stay doggedly in the mind.) I think particularly of Thorpe, Yellow Square, Lehigh V Span, Wanamaker Block, Accent Grave and, to my mind his best painting, Hazelton.

What is it about Hazelton that makes it worthy of this distinction? It is large (41 × 78 inches) and the characteristic beamy slabs of black are painted with unusual confidence. There is less blurriness on the edges, less evidence of second thoughts or soft options, the black and white contrast is more austere, denser. It is also weighted heavily towards the right side, the volumes of black congregating in one half of the picture. One automatically scans a picture left to right, as one reads a book, the eye instinctively moves rightwards, and the massiness of the swathes of black in the right-hand segment seems gravid and packed, in powerful opposition to the two big white planes of the left-hand side, which are marred only by three or four tiny flecks. The flecks inevitably give a sense of scale, albeit arbitrary, small and scratchy beside the huge horizontal bar and the great tapered columnar vertical that almost divides the painting in half. There is an inevitable sense, too, of a horizon — a feeling that the top left rectangle of the picture recedes, is unpenned by the edge of the canvas.

Further comment becomes more subjective. The title of the painting suggests a place, the idea of a place implies a landscape, and one starts to imbue this dispersal of black and white pigment with attributes from our human world. Factors like “winter,” “woods,” “snowfields,” “sky” intrude, possibly all quite wrongly, as Kline claimed only to add his titles after the picture was painted as a means of identifying them, of distinguishing them from the mass of Untitleds that confuse critics and perplex curators. I feel this explanation is somewhat disingenuous as there is no doubt that calling a picture Wotan rather than Untitled 1957 inevitably adds something to the totality of response to that picture. Like it or not, one’s reaction to an abstract painting is always bound up with one’s human nature; it is virtually impossible (outside of an academic exercise) to confine it to the three essential judgements on colour, form and composition. People, human beings, who like art bring a whole complexity of sentiments — hard and soft, positive and negative — to the study of paint on canvas. By calling his picture Hazelton Kline slyly taps into that infinitely variegated richness, and thereby adds something to the picture’s greatness. It is naive, not to say dishonest, to pretend that it doesn’t matter.

I use the word “greatness,” but I use it advisedly. Much as I like and admire Franz Kline’s work, I would never use the word “masterpiece” about any of his paintings. Indeed I would never use the word about any purely abstract painting. This is what baffles and frustrates me about abstract painting in general, and not just the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. When I consider the abstract paintings that I possess (by William Scott, Keith Vaughan, Sandra Blow and John Hoyland) and consider the pleasure I derive from them, it is of exactly the same order as my response to Franz Kline’s best work. Yet for all the pleasure taken, there is something lacking, something fundamentally indifferent. Pure abstraction, in denying the human context, denies itself true greatness.

Two factors lead me towards this conclusion, and the presence of both of them is essential if a painting is to be deemed “great” or the artist acclaimed as a “master.” In 1928 Paul Valéry reviewed a book on Veronese’s frescoes, during which he bemoaned the quality and calibre of the art of his time (this in 1928! One wonders how he would have felt today). He further commented that it was taken for granted in Veronese’s time that there would be in any artist

1906. February.

Paul Klee writes in his diary:

An A — Z

I know noble accents

An artist’s antipathies can often be as revealing as his enthusiasms. Picasso, for example, loathed Bonnard, describing his painting as a “potpourri of indecision.” Mind you, Picasso also purported to loathe Monet, which is not bad company to keep, I suppose. One can understand why it was necessary for Picasso to react against these painters — their evanescence, their seductive powers, their refulgence represented everything he himself didn’t want to do. Too soft, too representational, too retrospective, too harmonious and finally, for him, too safe. But like many antipathies such hostility often tells us more about the hater than the target. Such a dismissal of an artist of Bonnard’s rank is a brutal and deliberate misunderstanding. Bonnard’s work is far more disciplined and dogged, more modern and integrity-filled than Picasso’s aspersions would imply — indeed, as this superb exhibition at the Tate amply demonstrates — and it is both intriguing and telling to note that Matisse — the other giant of twentieth-century painting — was a lifelong and close friend of Bonnard and, as their wonderful correspondence illustrates, they were almost co-theorists in painterly matters. Matisse’s world could encompass Bonnard’s, but for an artist like Picasso Bonnard had to be removed far beyond the pale.

There is another problem with Bonnard, and not just his refusal to “go modern”: his pictures are simply too beautiful, too sensuous, too flooded with the most delicious light and colour. Any art — however high, however serious — that is hard to resist, that provokes immediate, almost unreflective pleasure, makes people (critics, historians, curators, academics) illogically suspicious. It is this reaction that prompts the classification of Bonnard as a kind of lazy post-post-Impressionist, a hangover from the nineteenth century, still basking in the creative afterglow of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley et al. In fact Bonnard (born in 1867) first made his name at the end of the nineteenth century as an innovative, ultra-modern graphic designer, designing posters and making coloured lithographs. It is worth remembering that underneath the shimmering, feathery brushstrokes and the blurry juxtaposition of pigment there is a tried and robust graphic talent. In 1915 (when Bonnard was forty) he told his nephew that he had resolved a profound artistic crisis in this efficacious and straightfoward manner: “I drew ceaselessly.” And, as the studies for his big landscapes reveal, every painting had its beginnings in a series of highly detailed drawings.

The 1915 crisis had arisen from a fear that colour alone was beginning to rule and overwhelm his art. So Bonnard reapplied himself, quite consciously and with no small pain, relearning the fundamentals behind painting, namely drawing and composition. This was the second crisis of his life that had redirected and corrected his artistic course. The earlier one had occurred in 1905 when he saw the work that Matisse was doing and realized that modernism and everything it implied — all its iconoclasm, its uncompromising decorative side and potential abstraction — was not for him. He voluntarily left that field to others and pursued his own lonely course, a factor that both explains the remarkable homogeneity of Bonnard’s work and also accounts for the marked decline in his reputation between the wars.

Bonnard stayed faithfully with figuration and remained sui generis: his subject matter was classical — the nude, the landscape, the interior, the still life. His development and stylistic divagations were consequently un-dramatic, often marked by nothing more significant than looser brush-stroking, a more severe flattening of the picture plane, a brilliant and daring use of composition, some mannerist distortion and, of course, one of the most rich and beguiling palettes of the twentieth century.

His reputation and his popularity have recovered, unequivocally, from the inter-war slump. Bonnard is now rightly considered one of the great painters of the nude — an equal of Degas and Modigliani. This was an obsession that began early in his life, particularly after his meeting with his muse, a working-class woman called, simply, Marthe, who was his model and companion for most of his life. They met in 1893 and Marthe died in 1942—immortalized in a sequence of paintings covering five decades, ranging from the erotically charged L’Indolente (1898) to the disturbing and celebrated Nu à la Baignoire (1930).

But it is Bonnard’s domestic interiors that remain the quintessential Bonnardian subject, a form of “intimisme,” as the genre is so called, that he made his own. These pictures are in fact highly sophisticated and respond to the most stringent analysis (indeed this is where it can be convincingly established that Bonnard directly inspired Matisse). Yet for all their artistry, their bold coloration, their “flatness,” their use of a form of faux-naïf style, they exert an appeal that extends beyond the painterly. Bonnard’s interiors are pictures that we should and do unashamedly love because — effortlessly, inevitably — they conjure up and provoke memories, experiences and associations of ideas that we can all share and verify. The opening lines of Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Sunday Morning” summon up exactly this ambience and these universal emotions:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

The Late Works

Bathers at La Grenouillère

Notes Towards a Definition of Edward Hopper

The True Story

The origins of “Nat Tate” go back a fair distance. In 1987 I published my novel The New Confessions which took the form of a fictional autobiography. Reviewing it, Bernard Levin said, “hypnotised by its autobiographical form I found myself riffling through the pages for the photographs.” “Photographs …?” I thought, “I’ve missed a trick there.” Then some years later I was invited to contribute to a book called David Hockney’s Alphabet, in which twenty-six writers were asked to provide a short text — of any sort — to accompany Hockney’s graphic depictions of each letter. I was given the letter “N” and wrote a biographical memoir of a wholly fictional francophone Laotian writer called Nguyen N, who had briefly flourished in Paris between the wars. I quoted a letter from N to André Gide and I cited his celebrated work of aphoristic philosophy, Les Analects de Nguyen N (Monnier, Toulon, 1928). At the launch party for the book I was engaged in protracted conversation with a guest who claimed to remember reading about N, and indeed had a French bookseller searching for a first edition of Les Analects. It was an awkward few minutes and I thought it best to leave enlightenment for another day.

In both cases it was not the idea of a hoax that intrigued me so much as the ability to make something entirely invented seem astonishingly real. I began vaguely to formulate the idea of taking the fictional biography mode even further into the area of verisimilitude and, some years ago, started collecting discarded photographs — from junk shops, house-clearance sales, brocantes in France — with a view to one day writing a “life” tricked out with all the artefacts of a real biography — illustrations, notes, bibliography, index and so on.

Thus when, last year, Karen Wright, the editor of Modern Painters magazine (on whose editorial board I sit), started talking to me about the forthcoming New York issue — and was wondering if there was a way of getting fiction into the magazine — I realized immediately that here was the perfect opportunity. “Why don’t I invent a painter?” I said, knowing I already had the raw materials to hand. And so I duly did and so Nat Tate was born, lived for three decades and died.

I placed Tate in a period of twentieth-century artistic history that I was already fascinated by — namely the 1950s in New York, which saw the emergence of the New York School of artists and the birth of Abstract Expressionism. This was the era of Jackson Pollock and Action Painting, of de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. It was the first time that the full glare of hype and media interest transformed a group of impoverished, unknown artists almost overnight into national and international celebrities, and with that renown came the more destructive elements of sudden wealth, notoriety, groupies, drugs, booze, jealousies, acrimony and premature death. This background had everything I needed for Nat and as I began to evolve the details of his brief life I began to invent characters — his foster parents, fellow artists, gallery owners — whose personalities would fit the photographs I had collected.

It was a complex process — but hugely enjoyable — and as it enlarged I started factoring real people into the Nat Tate story — the poet Frank O’Hara, Georges Braque, Franz Kline, Picasso and Larry Rivers amongst others. I began to feel like Dr Frankenstein. Nat Tate became my benign, doomed monster: I had his photo in front of me, I had put together all the ingredients of his short, tragic life; he seemed, even in manuscript stage, almost to live and breathe. The search for authenticity went further — some of Nat Tate’s drawings were created, and a large abstract oil. I approached Gore Vidal and John Richardson (Picasso’s friend and biographer), both of whom I knew, and asked them to “reminisce” about meeting Nat in the 1950s — which they sportingly and readily agreed to do.

But at the same time as I worked to provoke immediate credulity I knew that the story could not withstand sustained analysis — far too much was invented. Indeed one of the key witnesses to Nat’s life — an English writer called Logan Mountstuart — was a character taken from one of my short stories published in The Destiny of Nathalie X in 1995. The book was, in the end, studded with covert and cryptic clues and hints as to its real, fictive status. For me, the author, this was part of the pleasure — a form of Nabokovian relish in the sheer play and artifice — and the fundamental aim of the book, it became clear to me, was to destabilize, to challenge our notions of authenticity. First would come belief — the thing looked so wonderfully genuine, beautifully produced, full of photographs — then doubts would set in, alarm bells begin distantly to ring. But then the reader would come across — say — Gore Vi-dal’s recollections, and there would be a picture of Frank O’Hara and a Frank O’Hara poem mentioning Tate and credulity would be established again for a while — before suspicions crept back in. What was created was a form of reverse propaganda. Not truth disguised by lies, but “Truth” peeled away to reveal the true lie at the centre.

But we — the key conspirators and 21 Publishing — decided to present the book absolutely straight, deadpan. People had to be seduced — deluded — at first in order for the plan to work. The Sunday Telegraph joined the inner circle — an extract would be published, again in deadpan, orthodox manner, on the arts pages. Launch parties were planned, a week apart, in New York and London. We synchronized our responses and waited to see what would happen.

My own expectations were that we would experience a form of slowly mounting scepticism ending, on our part, in candid confession. But in fact the projected slow burn became a loud detonation when a journalist on the Independent, who had overheard two conspirators’ loose tongues wagging, decided to blow the whole thing wide open.

I wasn’t there. When the “hoax” was exposed I was in Paris promoting the French edition of my new novel, Armadillo, hearing everything at second hand. The unspooling of the Nat Tate story was always intended to be something far more subtle and intriguing, but I must confess to a strange frisson when I read, in Paris, an account of the affair in the Herald Tribune. There was the name “Nat Tate” printed in bold alongside other celebrities — Eva Perón, Jimmy Stewart, the Rolling Stones. Perhaps, I thought, poor Nat would, in a curious way, endure — and Nat Tate would have a sort of life, after all.

1998

I was born in Africa (in Ghana) and for the first twenty years of my life regarded it unreflectingly as my home. I felt far more at ease in Ibadan, for example, the regional capital of western Nigeria, than I did in Edinburgh, the city nearest my family’s home in Scotland, where we went on two months’ leave each year — as the rainy season drenched equatorial Africa — to enjoy a showery Scottish summer. So, as I started to write fiction, it seemed entirely natural for me to set that fiction in the continent that, in a way, had both nurtured and fired my imagination.

As a result of this I have found myself perceived as an expert or potential commentator on all things African and have been asked to review books on subjects as varied as the Fashoda Incident, the exploration of the Sahara, the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil war in Sierra Leone. By and large I have readily complied, and in the process have learned a lot.

But Ghana and Nigeria are the only countries I can claim to know well at first hand and Nigeria, where I spent my teens, provided me with most of the raw African material that I transmuted into my novels and short stories. It also provided me with a friend in the shape of the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and through him, inadvertently, to a saddening connection with ruthless Nigerian politics that I had never expected or sought.

I wrote a great deal about Ken Saro-Wiwa over the years and the articles selected here reproduce the bitter trajectory of his life from contented and successful writer to inspiring political activist, to stubborn prisoner, to condemned man, to the executed victim of a repressive regime.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. The latest population estimate is 100 million and rising. Yet every Wednesday evening at 8.30, about a third of that vast population sits down in front of its television sets to watch a particular soap opera.

They are enthralled, they are obsessed with it, and they laugh. This is a comedy, pointed and unsparing, scabrous and overtly moral. What makes the whole phenomenon singular and bizarre is that the audience is laughing at itself. This is not some sanitized, deodorized version of family or community life, or some farcical ad-man’s sitcom; this is a soap opera about corruption and graft, about idleness and self-delusion, about futile dreams and impossible aspirations. It is a soap opera about what not to do with your life.

The man who created this is a forty-nine-year-old Nigerian writer called Ken Saro-Wiwa. When I mention the viewing figures he smiles wryly. “You wouldn’t think it an unreasonable conclusion to draw … that as the writer and producer of a television programme that has run to 156 episodes with an average audience of 30 million, I would have made a fortune,” he says.

“Well, yes.”

“Well, you’d be wrong.”

“But you do break even?” I venture, somewhat amazed.

“Not yet.” He shrugs, and smiles again. “Maybe one day.”

Perhaps this is the most extraordinary feature of a most extraordinary enterprise: Mr Saro-Wiwa is not in this for the money. Mr Saro-Wiwa, and I say this with genuine admiration, is not bothered by being in the red. The forces that impel him to make and pay for his soap opera have nothing to do with the profit motive.

The programme in question is called Basi & Co., and although there has never been an official assessment, viewing figures of that size must make it a contender for the world’s most watched television serial.

The idea itself stemmed from a radio play Mr Saro-Wiwa wrote in the early seventies called The Transistor Radio, about an inept conman in Lagos who tries to rip people off by posing as a collector of fees for transistor radio licences.

He was invited by the director of programmes of Nigerian Television to produce a television series of thirteen episodes. He took the characters from his radio play and assembled a troupe of actors to perform his scripts and went into production.

The first episodes were screened in October 1985. Since then, Mr Saro-Wiwa has written the series, produced it, paid the salaries of the cast and crew and has sold the finished programmes to Nigerian Television and the thirty-five local television stations.

Five years later, Basi & Co. has established a place in the national Nigerian consciousness as firmly and redoubtably as Coronation Street or Dallas in other countries. As with any soap opera or sitcom, the central cast of characters inhabit a precise location, in this case Adetola Street in Lagos. The series features half a dozen key personalities, but the eponymous hero is Basi, or Mr B, as he refers to himself. Mr B is an idle, likeable rogue who is powerfully convinced that the world most definitely owes him a living. His personal motto which he has printed on the red T-shirt he invariably wears is, “To be a millionaire, think like a millionaire.” Basi’s dreams are always almost about to be realized.

Almost, but not quite. True, Basi’s vulgar aspirations are timeless and perennial, shared by all lovable rogues, from Barry Lyndon to Basil Seal, but Mr Saro-Wiwa’s objective is not solely to entertain. For it seems clear that the series has succeeded so emphatically precisely because it holds a mirror up to Nigerian society. It is a soap opera fuelled and driven by vehement satire and moral indignation rather than the usual lures of vapid wish fulfilment, folksy low-life homilies or squeaky-clean fantasies of impossible communities. In five years, Basi & Co. has become a Nigerian phenomenon, as, indeed, has its only begetter.

Mr Saro-Wiwa was born in 1941 in the River State in the south-east of Nigeria, near the Niger delta. He won scholarships to a respected secondary school and to the University of Ibadan, where he read English literature. He was a post-graduate when the Nigerian civil war broke out. As the Biafran rebel enclave steadily shrank, Mr Saro-Wiwa escaped to the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil port of Bonny, a post he held for the rest of the war. (His most recent book, On a Darkling Plain, deals with this portion of his life.)

After the war he stayed in government for a number of years before he abandoned politics and went into business in 1973.

“I was writing before that,” he says, “and I had published two books of poetry, but in 1973 I decided to stop writing and turn to commerce.” He became a general merchant and ran a grocery store, selling imported foodstuffs and kitchen equipment. He worked hard and his business grew. The profits he made were invested in property. After ten years he was a wealthy man with a comfortable income. “You have no idea how hard I worked in those years,” he says, a flicker of retrospective exhaustion crossing his face. The money was in the bank; it was time to return to his writing career.

The efforts of the seventeen years since then have been no less prodigious. In addition to Basi & Co., Mr Saro-Wiwa has written three novels, two volumes of short stories, a volume of autobiography and six children’s books.

They are all published, moreover, by himself, with Saros International Publishers, head office in Ewell, Surrey. Mr Saro-Wiwa prints and publishes the books in England and exports them to Nigeria. The entrepreneurial drive has not been entirely abandoned. “How many copies do you sell?” I ask. He laughs. “That’s a trade secret.”

Mr Saro-Wiwa is a spry man who does not look his age. His demeanour is genial and amused, quietly self-assured. He does not appear driven or manically energetic, yet his workload is astonishing. On top of his business, television and publishing interests, he also has a reputation as one of Nigeria’s fiercest political journalists, writing a weekly column in the local Daily Times. I ask him how he sees himself now, how he would describe himself. “A publisher, I suppose,” he says.

Mr Saro-Wiwa’s most extraordinary novel, which he published in 1985, is called Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. It is a story told by a young conscript caught up in the horrors of the Biafran war and is written in a blend of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional limpid passages of correct idiomatic English. It has no rules and no syntax and, as Mr Saro-Wiwa observes, it thrives on lawlessness.

The effect at first seems too complex and discordant, but gradually the rhythms and expressive potential of this “rotten English” begin to take hold with remarkable force and impact. In this book, the demotic soul is given a unique literary voice.

Somehow, Mr Saro-Wiwa keeps all these various literary balls up in the air. His energy is fuelled by two extra ingredients not normally associated with writers, let alone soap opera producers.

The first is a strong pedagogic inclination: Mr Saro-Wiwa wants to show his audience and readers how to improve themselves. The implication is clear: African writers today rarely write for their own populations. “They’re published in London or New York.”

Mr Saro-Wiwa loves Nigeria and enjoys his life there. He makes it sound an extraordinary place. This is a country where anything is possible, he claims, however he is not sanguine about the return to civilian rule in 1992. “There will be a short civilian period, then the military will take over again,” he says. “We need an enlightened despot.” What about Nigeria’s bad image abroad? “It’s just lousy PR by the government.” He enthuses further about the astonishing freedoms in the country; anything can be done, he says, anything is possible and at the same time claims that it is the Nigerian people who actively encourage the military to take over when things get out of hand. Hearing him talking so enthusiastically about Lagos, say, he makes the place sound like Barcelona or pre-Castro Havana.

“Oh, Lagos is not so bad,” he says with a smile. “Things go wrong, sure. But there’s a lot of fun to be had there, too. A lot of fun.”

1990

“Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first” is the wonderful and audacious opening line of a wonderful and audacious novel. By the novel’s conclusion, however, this sentence’s disarming grammar and its minatory simplicity (what does that “at first” portend?) have taken on more sinister and melancholy hues. One has learned that this is the beginning of a story about innocence brutally lost and of a consolatory wisdom only fleetingly and partially grasped. The incomprehension — and the profound sadness — are gathered there in those few words; the inspired, odd displacement of “Although” carries a new poignancy.

Sozaboy is a war novel, the narrative of one young man’s helpless and hapless journey through a terrifying African war. Although — it is curious how the word has changed, somehow, charged with its Sozaboy freight — Ken Saro-Wiwa does not specify it is in fact set during a particular and precise conflict, namely the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, also known as the Biafran war. Unusually for an African conflict, it was one that figured prominently on British television screens. Nigeria was a former colony (independence had been granted seven years previously) and Britain had powerful vested interests there. The British government’s support — material and diplomatic — was firmly behind the Federal Government, led by General Gowon, and against the secessionist eastern states, known as Biafra, led by Colonel Ojukwu. There were no clear-cut heroes or villains in this conflict, and culpability can be equally distributed; but with hindsight one can see that the decision of the eastern states to secede made war — and also eventual defeat — inevitable. That the war lasted as long as it did, and that it caused as much misery and suffering (over a million died, mostly civilians, mostly from disease and starvation in the shrinking, blockaded heartland that was Biafra), is a result of many familiar factors: heroic tenacity, woeful stupidity, tactical blunders, difficult terrain, muddle and confusion, extended supply lines and so on. Anyone who requires an overview of this almost forgotten war should read The Struggle for Secession by N. U. Akpan, the best account that I know. Histories of the war are very thin on the ground or otherwise ponderously, not to say ludicrously, partisan; Nigerian novelists have been swifter off the mark and truer to this bleak chapter in their country’s history, and there are fine and moving works of fiction by Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri (among others) which treat of the conflict. But in my opinion Sozaboy remains the war’s enduring literary monument.

Ken Saro-Wiwa is from eastern Nigeria, a member of the Ogoni tribe. The outbreak of war in 1967 trapped him within the new boundaries of the Biafran state. It is important to establish that not all easterners wanted to secede from the Nigerian federation. Colonel Ojukwu was an Ibo, the dominant tribe in eastern Nigeria. When he declared Biafra independent, “Ibo” and “Biafra” were not at all synonymous: like it or not, some thirty or so other ethnic groups were included in the new country. Like it or not, these other tribes found themselves at war against Nigeria.

This fact explains much that is intentionally fuzzy about the novel. No one seems to understand why war is impending or why it breaks out. No one seems really sure why they are fighting or against whom: they are designated simply as “the enemy.” To many eastern Nigerians caught up in the Biafran net, the motives for war and the nature of their adversaries must have seemed equally vague. Sozaboy — as the hero, Mene, is dubbed (“Soza” means “soldier”) — is one such uncertain conscript and he meanders through the novel in an almost permanent state of ignorance; clarity beckoning from time to time only to be occluded promptly. This is a state of mind familiar to all front-line soldiers, but to the many non-Ibos dragooned into the Biafran army there must have been an extra degree of obfuscation.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was one who perceived the absurdity and injustice of fighting another man’s secessionist war. He escaped through the front lines to the federal side and was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil-port of Bonny on the Niger River Delta (he has written of his own experiences in the civil war in his fine autobiography, On a Darkling Plain), where he served until the final collapse of the secessionist forces, marked by the flight of Colonel Ojukwu to the Ivory Coast in January 1970. I lived in Nigeria during the Biafran war and can testify to the novel’s authentic feel. The war did seem that crazy, that surreal and haphazard. But any reader will experience the same undeniable reek of life as it comes off the page. Sozaboy is vivid with the special authority of personal experience.

It is also vivid with a language of uncommon idiosyncrasy and character. Saro-Wiwa subtitles the novel as “A Novel in Rotten English.” Rotten English, as he explains, is a blend of pidgin English (the lingua franca of the West African ex-colonies), corrupted English and “occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English.” In other words, the language of the novel is a unique literary construct. No one in Nigeria actually speaks or writes like this but the style functions in the novel extraordinarily well. Sozaboy’s narration is at times raunchily funny as well as lyrical and moving, and as the terror of his predicament steadily manifests itself, the small but colourful vocabulary of his idiolect paradoxically manages to capture all the numbing ghastliness of war far more effectively than a more expansive eloquence. It helps to hear the rhythms of a Nigerian accent in your ear as you read, but even if that cannot be reproduced, the cadences of the prose take over after a few lines or so and this remarkable tone of voice holds the reader’s attention absolutely. Some obscure words or phrases are explained in a glossary, but one is never in any doubt about what is going on, and the sheer freshness and immediacy of the subjective point of view are exhilarating. Here Sozaboy visits a local dive:

So, one night, after I have finished bathing, I put powder and scent and went to African Upwine Bar. This African Upwine Bar is in interior part of Diobu. Inside inside. We used to call this Diobu New York. I think you know New York. In America. As people plenty for am, na so dem plenty for Diobu too. Like cockroach. And true true cockroach plenty for Diobu too. Everywhere, like the men. And if you go inside the African Upwine Bar you will see plenty cockroach man and proper cockroach too. Myself, I like the African Upwine Bar. Because you fit drink better palmy there. Fine palmy of three or four days old.

This mode of literary demotic is a highly impressive achievement. Saro-Wiwa has both invented and captured a voice here, one not only bracingly authentic but also capable of many fluent and telling registers. I cannot think of another example where the English language has been so engagingly and skilfully hijacked — or perhaps “colonized” would be a better word. Indeed, throughout the novel, Saro-Wiwa exploits Rotten English with delicate and consummate skill. We see everything through Sozaboy’s naive eyes, and his hampered vision — even in the face of the most shocking sights — is reproduced through inevitable understatement. Sozaboy’s vocabulary simply cannot encompass the strange concepts he encounters or the fearful enormity of what he is undergoing. Yet these silences, these occlusions and fumblings for expression exert a marvellous power. Here a fifth-columnist has been undermining the new recruits’ shaky morale:

So that night Manmuswak did not spend long time with us. After some time he told us that we must be careful because nobody can know when the war will come reach our front. So we told him goodnight, and he began to go away, small small like tall snake passing through the bush, making small noise.

The threat of impending disaster has never been more economically or chillingly conveyed.

Sozaboy’s nightmare picaresque begins when, full of zeal to impress his new wife Agnes, he decides to join up and become a “Soza.” It is the uniform he is really after, hungry for the esteem it will confer on him in his village, where he is only an apprentice lorry driver. The downward spiral of his fortunes in the army — boredom, mutiny, punishment, battle and capture — depresses and mortifies him, but he somehow never loses his fundamental ebullience, his innocent joie de vivre. He reminds me of another classic of African literature, Mr Johnson in Joyce Cary’s novel of the same name. Like Mr Johnson, Sozaboy knows shame and humiliation, and like Mr Johnson it is his resilient spirit and the thought of his young wife that spur him on to greater endeavours no matter what desperate straits he finds himself in. But Sozaboy is also an African Candide and this is where Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel takes on dimensions that are absent in Joyce Cary’s. Mr Johnson is a great character, as is Sozaboy, but — like Voltaire’s Candide — Sozaboy is also an archetype and a victim in a way that Mr Johnson is not. Malign forces pluck up Sozaboy, whirl him around and deposit him in a heap, his spirit almost crushed, his village ruined, his family slaughtered, his prospects negligible. One needs only to glance at the recent history of Africa to see how paradigmatic Sozaboy’s story is: young men in uniforms, clutching their AK47s, spread fear and desolation, march and die all over the continent.

At the novel’s end, Sozaboy contemplates the destruction that has been wreaked on his life and reflects:

I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely.

Heartfelt and timeless thoughts, any simple bathos undercut by the astute final sentence, where the half-remembered formal valediction (the words are vapid and empty at the end of a letter) takes on an unfamiliar fervency and gravitas in its new and bitter context.

Sozaboy is a novel born out of harsh personal experience, but shaped with a masterful and sophisticated artistry despite its apparent rough-hewn guilelessness. With equal skill and deftness, it also carries a profound moral message that extends beyond its particular time and setting. Sozaboys are legion, and their lives are being destroyed everywhere on the planet. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel, it is also a great anti-war novel, among the very best the twentieth century has produced.

1994

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a friend of mine. At eleven thirty in the morning on 10 November 1995, he was hanged in a prison in Port Harcourt, in eastern Nigeria, on the orders of General Sani Abacha, the military leader of Nigeria. Ken Saro-Wiwa was fifty-four years old, and an innocent man.

I first met Ken in the summer of 1986 at a British Council seminar at Cambridge University. He had come to England from Nigeria in his capacity as a publisher and had asked the British Council to arrange a meeting with me. He had read my first novel, A Good Man in Africa, and had recognized, despite fictional names and thin disguises, that it was set in Nigeria, the country that had been my home when I was in my teens and early twenties.

Ken had been a student at the University of Ibadan, in western Nigeria, in the mid sixties. My late father, Dr Alexander Boyd, had run the university health services there, and had treated Ken and come to know him. Ken recognized that the Dr Murray in my novel was a portrait of Dr Boyd and was curious to meet his son.

I remember that it was a sunny summer day, one of those days that are really too hot for England. In shirt-sleeves, we strolled about the immaculate quadrangle of a Cambridge college, talking about Nigeria. Ken was a small man, probably no more than five feet two or three. He was stocky and energetic — in fact, brimful of energy — and had a big, wide smile. He smoked a pipe with a curved stem. I learned later that the pipe was virtually a logo: in Nigeria people recognized him by it. In newsreel pictures that the Nigerian military released of the final days of Ken’s show trial, there’s a shot of him walking towards the courthouse, leaning on a stick, thinner and aged as a result of eighteen months’ incarceration, the familiar pipe still clenched between his teeth.

Ken was not only a publisher but a businessman (in the grocery trade); a celebrated political journalist, with a particularly trenchant and swingeing style; and, I discovered, a prolific writer of novels, plays, poems and children’s books (mostly published by him). He was, in addition, the highly successful writer and producer of Nigeria’s most popular TV soap opera, Basi & Co., which ran for 150-odd episodes in the mid eighties and was reputedly Africa’s most watched soap opera, with an audience of up to 30 million. Basi and his cronies were a bunch of feckless Lagos wide-boys who, indigent and lazy, did nothing but hatch inept schemes for becoming rich. Although funny and wincingly accurate, the show was also unashamedly pedagogic. What was wrong with Basi and his chums was wrong with Nigeria: none of them wanted to work, and they all acted as though the world owed them a living; if that couldn’t be acquired by fair means foul ones would do just as well. This was soap opera as a form of civic education.

Whenever Ken passed through London, we’d meet for lunch, usually in the Chelsea Arts Club. His wife and four children lived in England — the children attended school there — so he was a regular visitor. And, though I wrote a profile of him for the London Times (Ken was trying to get his books distributed in Britain), our encounters were mainly those of two writers with a lot in common, hanging out for a highly agreeable, bibulous hour or three.

Ken’s writing was remarkably various, covering almost all genres. Sozaboy, in my opinion his greatest work, is subtitled A Novel in Rotten English and is written in a unique combination of pidgin English, the lingua franca of the former West African British colonies, and an English that is, in its phrases and sentences, altogether more classical and lyrical. The language is a form of literary demotic, a benign hijacking of English, and a perfect vehicle for the story it tells, of a simple village boy recruited into the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war. The boy has dreamed of being a soldier (a soza), but the harsh realities of this brutal conflict send him into a dizzying spiral of cruel disillusion. Sozaboy is not simply a great African novel but also a great antiwar novel — among the very best of the twentieth century.

Sozaboy was born of Ken’s personal experience of the conflict — the Biafran war, as it came to be known — and, indeed, so were many of his other writings. Biafra was the name given to a loose ethnic grouping in eastern Nigeria, dominated by the Ibo tribe. The Ibo leader, Colonel Chukwue-meka Odumegwu Ojukwu, decided to secede from the Nigerian Federation, taking most of the country’s oil reserves with him. In the war that was then waged against the secessionist state, perhaps a million people died, mainly of starvation in the shrinking heartland.

Not all the ethnic groups caught up in Ojukwu’s secessionist dream were willing participants. Ken’s tribe, the Ogoni, for one. When the war broke out, in 1967, Ken was on vacation and found himself trapped within the new borders of Biafra. He saw at once the absurdity of being forced to fight in another man’s war, and he escaped through the front lines to the Federal side. He was appointed civilian administrator of the crucial oil port of Bonny on the Niger River Delta, and he served there until the final collapse of the Biafran forces in 1970. Ken wrote about his experiences of the civil war in his fine memoir, On a Darkling Plain.

Ken’s later fight against the Nigerian military, as it turned out, was oddly prefigured in those years of the Biafran war: the helplessness of an ethnic minority in the face of an overpowering military dictatorship; oil and oil wealth as a destructive and corrupting catalyst in society, the need to be true to one’s conscience.

This moral rigour was especially apparent in Ken’s satirical political journalism (he was, over the years, a columnist on the Lagos daily newspapers Punch, Vanguard and Daily Times), much of which was charged with a Swiftian saeva indignatio at what he saw as the persistent ills of Nigerian life: tribalism, ignorance of the rights of minorities, rampant materialism, inefficiency and general graft. Apart from Basi & Co., his journalism was what brought him his greatest renown among the population at large.

In the late eighties, I remember, Ken’s conversations turned more and more frequently to the topic of his tribal homeland. The Ogoni are a small tribe (there are 250 tribes in Nigeria) of about half a million people living in a small area of the fertile Niger River Delta. The Ogoni’s great misfortune is that their homeland happens to lie above a significant portion of Nigeria’s oil reserves. Since the mid 1950s, Ogoniland has been devastated by the industrial pollution caused by the extraction of oil. What was once a placid rural community of prosperous farmers and fishermen is now an ecological wasteland reeking of sulphur, its creeks and water holes poisoned by indiscriminate oil spillage and ghoulishly lit at night by the orange flames of gas flares.

As Ken’s concern for his homeland grew, he effectively abandoned his vocation and devoted himself to lobbying for the Ogoni cause at home and abroad. He was instrumental in setting up the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and soon became its figurehead. That struggle for survival was an ecological more than a political one: his people, he said, were being subjected to a “slow genocide.” Ken protested against the despoliation of his homeland and demanded compensation from the Nigerian government and from the international oil companies — Shell in particular. (He resented Shell profoundly and held the company responsible for the ecological calamity in Ogoniland.) But from the outset Ken made sure that the movement’s protest was peaceful and non-violent. Nigeria today is a corrupt and dangerously violent nation: it was enormously to the credit of the Ogoni movement that it stayed true to its principles. Mass demonstrations were organized and passed off without incident. Abroad, Greenpeace and other environmental groups allied themselves with the Ogoni cause, but, ironically, the real measure of the success of Ken’s agitation came when, in 1992, he was arrested by the Nigerian military and held in prison for some months without a trial. The next year, Shell Oil ceased its operations in the Ogoni region.

At that time, the Nigerian military was led by General Ibrahim Babangida. Ken was eventually released (after a campaign in the British media), and Babangida voluntarily yielded power to General Abacha, a crony, who was meant to supervise the transition of power to a civilian government after a general election, which was duly held in 1993. The nation went to the polls and democratically elected Chief Moshood Abiola as President. General Abacha then declared the election null and void and later imprisoned the victor. Nigeria entered a new era of near anarchy and despotism. Things looked bad for Nigeria, but they looked worse for the Ogoni and their leaders.

Over these years, Ken and I continued to meet for our Chelsea Arts Club lunches whenever he was in London. In 1992 he suffered a personal tragedy when his youngest son, aged fourteen, who was at Eton, died suddenly of heart failure during a rugby game. Strangely, Ken’s awful grief gave a new force to his fight for his people’s rights.

We met just before he returned to Nigeria. From my own experience of Nigeria, I knew of the uncompromising ruthlessness of political life there. Ken was not young, nor was he in the best of health (he too had a heart condition). As we said goodbye, I shook his hand and said, “Be careful, Ken, OK?” And he laughed — his dry, delighted laugh — and replied, “Oh, I’ll be very careful, don’t worry.” But I knew he wouldn’t.

A succession of Nigerian military governments have survived as a result of the huge revenues generated by oil, and the military leaders themselves have routinely benefited from the oil revenues, making millions and millions of dollars. Any movement that threatened this flow of money was bound to be silenced — extinguished. With the ascendance of Abacha and his brazenly greedy junta, Ken was now squarely in harm’s way. Even so, he returned to Nigeria to continue his protests. These protests were now conducted in a more sinister country than the one I had known — a country where rapes, murders and the burning of villages were being carried out as a deliberate policy of state terrorism. There have been 2,000 Ogoni deaths thus far.

In May of last year Ken was on his way to address a rally in an Ogoni town but was turned back at a military roadblock and headed, reluctantly, for home. The rally took place, a riot ensued, and in the general mayhem four Ogoni elders — believed to be sympathetic to the military — were killed.

Ken was arrested and, with fifteen others, was accused of incitement to murder. The fact that he was in a car some miles away and going in the opposite direction made no difference. He was imprisoned for more than a year and then was tried before a specially convened tribunal. There was no right of appeal. This “judicial process” has been internationally condemned as a sham. It was a show trial in a kangaroo court designed to procure the verdict required by the government.

On Thursday, 2 November, Ken and eight co-defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Suddenly the world acknowledged the nature of Nigeria’s degeneracy.

Things did not augur well. But, instinctively wanting to make the best of a bad situation, I hoped that the publicity surrounding Ken’s case, along with the timely coincidence of the Commonwealth Conference in New Zealand (the biennial gathering of the former members of the British Empire), would prevent the very worst from happening. Surely, I reasoned, the heads of state congregating in Auckland would not allow one of their members to flout their own human rights principles so callously and blatantly? General Abacha, however, did not dare leave his benighted country, which was represented by his Foreign Minister instead.

The presence of Nelson Mandela at the conference was especially encouraging, not only for me but also for all the people who had spent the last months fighting to free Ken. (We were a loosely knit organization, including International PEN, the Ogoni Foundation, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and others.) We felt that if anything could persuade the Nigerians to think again it would be Mandela’s moral authority. We were baffled and confused, though, when Mandela did little more than persistently advocate that we should all be patient, that the problem would be resolved through an easy, low-key diplomacy.

Despite Mandela’s advice, there was a clamorous condemnation in the media of the Nigerian military. In response, Abacha’s junta released newsreel pictures of Ken’s trial to establish the legality of the “judicial process.” One saw a row of prisoners, still, faces drawn, heads bowed, confronting three stout officers, swagged with gold braid, ostentatiously passing pieces of paper to each other. In the background, a soldier strolled back and forth. Then Ken addressed the court. His voice was strong: he was redoubtably defiant; he seemed without fear, utterly convinced.

These images both defied belief and profoundly disturbed. If Abacha thought that this would make his tribunals look acceptable, then the level of naivety, or blind ignorance, implied was astonishing. But a keening note of worry was also sounded: someone who could do something this damaging, I thought, was beyond the reach of reason. World opinion, international outrage, appeals for clemency seemed to me now to be nugatory. Abacha had painted himself into a corner. For him it had become a question of saving face, of loud bluster, of maintaining some sort of martial pride. I slept very badly that night.

The next day, 10 November, just after lunch, I received a call from the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN. I was told that a source in Port Harcourt had seen the prisoners arrive at the gaol at dawn that day, in leg irons. Then the executioners had presented themselves, only to be turned away, because — it was a moment of grimmest, darkest farce — their papers were not in order. This source, however, was “110 percent certain” that the executions had eventually occurred. Some hours later, this certainty was confirmed by the Nigerian military.

So now Ken was dead, along with eight co-defendants: hanged in a mass execution just as the Commonwealth Conference got under way.

I am bitter and I am dreadfully sad. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the bravest man I have known, is no more. From time to time, Ken managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. One of the last letters I received ended this way: “I’m in good spirits … There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment … the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not able to do it as a politician or a businessman. My writing did it. And it sure makes me feel good! I’m mentally prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. I think I have the moral victory.” You have, Ken. Rest in peace.

1995

The story of the South African gold and diamond fields and of the men who rose to wealth and notoriety as a result of their exploitation has stimulated writers since the 1870s, when diamonds were first discovered there. And yet amongst the millions of words there are curious lacunae, particularly in the area of biography. The key figures are Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit, J. B. Robinson, Solly Joel and Julius Wern-her. None has a definitive biography, and on someone such as Beit there is an almost complete silence. This is even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd or even Leander Starr Jameson. Paradoxically, there exists a first-rate scholarly account of Rhodes’s involvement with the annexation of Bechuanaland — yet no similar treatment of his life. Even the most recent biography (by J. Flint, 1976) is inadequate on certain areas of his life. If one wants to learn about Neville Pickering, his first private secretary and the great love of his life (Rhodes, in his second will, left his estate to Pickering), one must turn to Brian Roberts’s Cecil Rhodes and the Princess, where, for the first and only time, Pickering’s early life and background are accurately delineated. Other murky areas — Rhodes’s dealings with Lobengula and the Matabele, the formation of the British South Africa Company, the widespread concession racketeering — still await their chroniclers.

As a result, no study of the period or of its protagonists can do without a process of assiduous weeding and winnowing of all manner of sources, from rambunctious Victorian travel books to dry works of Bantu topography. Wheatcroft is particularly good on the financial machinations that went into the making of the vast fortunes achieved at Kimberley and on the Rand. For the history of the gold and diamond fields — superficially a glamorous, adventurous one of strikes and rushes, booms and slumps — is, at a more profound level, a chilly illustration of the working of monopoly capitalism at its most forthright and ruthless. The early diggers were drawn by the lure of quick wealth for a little hard work; those that survived and stayed on were concerned with consolidation. They were essentially financiers and speculators interested solely in profit. What distinguished the men of Kimberley and Johannesburg from the grey souls who populated the world’s stock exchanges was a robust, frontier insouciance — no veneer of bland decorum had yet had time to form.

People like Beit and Wernher devoted their lives to making phenomenal amounts of money for themselves and after a while this process ceases to be interesting. I had expected that Wheatcroft’s book would fill in the gaps, particularly on Beit, but there is nothing about him in The Randlords that we cannot find elsewhere. This now seems to me not so much a deficiency in Wheatcroft’s research as a shallowness in Beit’s character. He was a timid, portly, extraordinarily hard-working man with superb financial acumen. He associated himself with Rhodes early on in his career and Rhodes came to rely heavily on his judgement. Perhaps there is nothing more to say. Others, such as Barney Barnato and J. B. Robinson, were more flamboyant — almost Gogolian — characters. Barnato was a Cockney Jew who arrived in the early days of the diamond fields with assets consisting of forty rather bad cigars. He became a multi-millionaire with — almost obligatory for the South African magnates — a Park Lane mansion. He never lost his accent and was never truly accepted by the high society of the day. Towards the end of his life he became afflicted by paranoias and depressions, and committed suicide by jumping overboard from an Atlantic liner. One story about Barney, which Wheatcroft doesn’t mention, occurred in his heyday. He bought a Millais called Joseph and the Sheep which he hung with due prominence in his Park Lane house. At a reception Barney was loudly asked by an aristocratic society grande dame (presumably to effect some social discomfiture) why he had bought the picture and what was it that made it appealing to him. Barney, goaded and irritated, replied with equal volume: “I bought it, madam, because one of the poor fuckin’ sheep looks just like me.”

Barney Barnato, sometimes accused of being a shady operator, was nevertheless a popular figure in the minefields. J. B. Robinson, on the other hand, inspired nothing but hate. After his death in 1929, the Cape Times published an obituary which must rank as one of the most vitriolic ever written. His will, the obituary said, was “scandalously repugnant … it stinks, too, against public decency.” What provoked the ire was the fact that Robinson’s will set up no trust funds nor benefited the country in any way. Robinson, the Cape Times went on, should serve as a warning: “those who in future may acquire great wealth in this country will shudder lest their memories should come within possible risk of rivalling the loathsomeness of the thing that is the memory of Sir Joseph Robinson.” It is ironic now to reflect that when Rhodes died he was regarded as a national hero. His funeral train passed through the solemn and mourning country as if he were some great monarch being laid to rest. Robinson’s legacy was one of personal bitterness and repugnance. Rhodes’s bequest to his adopted country was altogether more complex and damaging. Rhodes was not only a corrupt and ruthless capitalist who used his ostensible imperialist aims to win large fortunes for himself (he made at least a million pounds out of the creation of Rhodesia): he also laid the foundations of apartheid with his racial legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonization north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he and his agents (the good Dr Jameson again) adopted methods no less severe than the United States did in their wars against the Plains Indians in the 1870s: the smallpox weapon, the reservation policy, found an echo in Rhodesia.

And yet this man died an imperial hero. If ever there was a case for a revisionist biography, Rhodes positively cries out for one. Wheat-croft makes no attempt to rehabilitate, but holds back from attempting a full analysis. Speculating about the absence of a satisfactory “Life of Rhodes,” he asks: “Is it because, as hinted in Chapter Nine, and to borrow Gertrude Stein’s words in another context, ‘there is no there there’? The looming gap between his deeds and his unfathomable personality remains.” That “hinted in” is revealing, and I think that to preserve ideas of “mystery” and “unfathomableness” does Rhodes too great a favour and lends him an air of glamorous potency. There were, it is true, baffling sides to Rhodes, but in many crucial respects he seems to me entirely transparent.

Wheatcroft illuminates one significant fact early on. “Even in a rough age,” he observes, “standards of financial morality on the diamond fields were low.” This is almost a euphemism. The key to Rhodes’s character lies in the fact that his education — unusually for a boy of his class — was in the polyglot graft and corruption of the diggings. Rhodes left school at sixteen, moreover; unlike the other Englishmen of his class, he was not a public schoolboy. He did not possess that protective veneer which years in a single-sex boarding school provide. When he finally entered the English educational system — Oxford — it was as a mature young man with several years in the diggings behind him. He had, in fact, more in common with the working-class financiers — Barnato, Joel — than with the English “gents” he messed with. We are inclined to see Rhodes as typically middle class (father a vicar, brothers at Eton and Winchester, Oxford education), but it is more instructive to see him as an East End wide-boy in disguise. He was streetwise. The history of his career is of a man who gets what he wants by whatever means is most effective. Sometimes it was charm, sometimes guile, sometimes main force, sometimes bribery and corruption. “Tell me a man’s ambitions,” he said, “and I will tell you his price.”

Wheatcroft refers to a bribery case of 1876. The facts are more complex than he has space to make them. At that time, the diamond fields were in one of their slumps. Rhodes and his partner Rudd were very nearly broke, and they diversified into ancillary professions. The price of diamonds was low, mining was often impossible for months on end because of massive mud slides and cave-ins. Diggers were leaving Kimberley in their hundreds. Rhodes hung on, selling ice cream in the market square. Then he decided to attempt to gain pumping contracts from the various mining boards. First he needed a pump. He used charm. He spent a week persuading a Boer farmer to part with a new pump he had just installed on his farm. The man refused to sell, but through bull-headed persistence and by promising more and more money (which he did not have) Rhodes got his way. Again and again he was to persuade people into courses of action to which they were implacably opposed. It was his greatest skill.

Having secured his pump, he got a contract in one of the smaller mines. He then bribed a mining engineer in charge of the pumps in De Beer’s mine to damage them — thereby allowing Rhodes and Rudd to come to the rescue. This skulduggery came inadvertently to light during the deliberations of an official committee of inquiry into miners’ grievances. At the time it made a huge scandal, Rhodes effectively silenced it by suing the engineer (a Mauritian called Heuteau) for perjury. The case was called in court, then the charge was suddenly dropped. As Wheatcroft implies, this was achieved by collusion between Rhodes and the public prosecutor, Sidney Shippard — later, significantly, executor of Rhodes’s will. At the time of the trial, Rhodes and Shippard were living in the same mess. Heuteau’s allegation had been neutered by being transferred from a court of inquiry to a court of law. There, with Shippard conniving, the matter was swiftly settled. Rhodes dropped his case against the hapless Mauritian (who never raised the matter again). Shippard was well rewarded for his aid. Rhodes was tarnished, but free to operate, and, eventually, got the De Beers pumping contract. The same modus operandi appears again and again in his short but very busy life. To take an example not generally known: when Rhodes was negotiating with Lobengula, king of the Matabele, for a mining concession and the king was proving intractable, Rhodes drew up a contract with one Frank Johnson (an adventurer who was to lead the pioneer column to found Rhodesia) for the killing of Lobengula. Johnson revealed this in his autobiography, Great Days, and reproduced the contract. But the relevant chapter was withdrawn from the published manuscript, though the typescript still resides in a state archive in Harare. It is an astonishing document and reads like something from a CIA covert-operations file. (One has constantly to remember that this was the beginning of the British South Africa Company — lengthy negotiations with the Colonial Office eventually secured Rhodes a Royal Charter.) Johnson writes in the chapter:

The Soccer War broke out in 1970 between El Salvador and Honduras. The catalyst was a qualifying match for the World Cup of that year, which El Salvador won three-nil. The hapless Honduran fans not only had to watch their team being beaten but then had to run the gauntlet of jubilant and violently hostile El Salvadoreans. Two were beaten to death, dozens wound up in hospital and 150 cars were torched. A few hours later El Salvador invaded Honduras and the Honduran air force commenced a retaliatory bombardment of Salvadorean industrial and strategic targets. Ryszard Kapuscinski, acting on a tip-off, was the sole foreign journalist there, busily wiring back reports to the Polish Press Agency about the sudden and increasingly savage conflict. A small Third World war, a bizarre footnote in twentieth-century history, needless human suffering, observed by a humane, unflinching eye — these are the familiar ingredients, the stock in trade of Kapuscinski’s exemplary reportage, a thirty-year-long record of folly, despair, danger and black humour which makes him the doyen of foreign correspondents, and, latterly, with the publication in English of his books—The Emperor, Shah of Shahs and Another Day of Life—a writer of genuine authority and distinctive, idiosyncratic vision. The Soccer War is a collection of his journalism from the sixties and the seventies, interspersed with fragments of reflection and autobiography. And although the book takes its title from an article written about Latin America most of its concerns are African and to do with various disasters that have afflicted that continent since the independence of Ghana in 1957. The book begins and ends in Ghana and in between voyages far and wide: to the Congo at the time of Lumumba’s assassination, Algeria during the abduction of Ben Bella, Nigeria in turmoil with the factional strife preceding the Biafran War and the Ogaden in the midst of one of its endless famines.

The Third World is Kapuscinski’s personal “beat”; he has worked in Islamic Russia and the Far East as well as Iran and Latin America but there is something about the quality and feeling of his African reports that seems to set them apart. Or at least so it seems to me, and I don’t think this is simply a reader’s imputation or fond prejudice operating here. Kapuscinski, on his own evidence, appears to have lived more intensely, suffered more grievously, exposed himself to more danger in the African countries he has reported from than anywhere else on earth. No one writes more effectively of the sweaty cafard, the brutal contingencies, the hilarious and terrifying randomness of events, of the blithe, cruel anarchy of African countries in chaos. But at the same time no one conveys better that seductive allure of the continent, the captivating, tenacious fascination for the place that is always present despite the irritation and despair, and no one better testifies to the stoicism and the dignity that prevail despite the most shocking and casual atrocities.

Kapuscinski remarks in this book that foreign correspondents are not only witnesses to events on behalf of the rest of the world but that they also function as the world’s vicarious consciences. The foreign correspondent goes where we are not permitted or would not dare to venture. It is not simply a job or a vocation: the urge to bear witness, to record and report the world’s conflicts and conflagrations seems to be an urge, a need, that is impossible to resist. Kapuscinski refers to it as a “fever”—and the diagnosis appears accurate, for nothing else could explain the extraordinary risks the man takes with his own life other than a temporary dislocation of the senses, a dysfunctioning of normal rational procedures. And here lies a danger: there can be something ghoulish in the need to observe human suffering, to confront the worst excesses of depravity and self-destruction. In eighteenth-century London it was regarded as a fashionable afternoon’s diversion to spend an hour or two at Bedlam, the city’s asylum, and watch the poor naked lunatics rant and rave. There can be something of the Bedlam-watcher in the foreign correspondent too, particularly where wars are concerned. Here the lethal technology of the twentieth century can add a spurious glamour to the sordid business of people trying to kill each other and the correspondent in this arena can all too easily see himself as a heroic, semi-mythic figure, a pseudo-warrior, one who has been through hell and back, with his sweat-stained fatigues and grim countenance, trudging through the earth’s trouble spots with a world-weary, yet indisputably macho swagger. In 1979, James Fenton, a highly distinguished foreign correspondent himself, who had reported the Vietnam War and witnessed the fall of Saigon, rounded on this breed in the New Statesman, calling them “war-freaks,” describing them as journalists more interested in the unique and heady sensations of the war-zone — where war is seen and experienced as the “ultimate trip”—indifferent to its context or conclusion, exulting in its crude power and rabid energy, heedless of the awful human damage being wreaked. All this is by way of defining negatively what Kapuscinski resolutely is not. What makes his work remarkable, it seems to me, is its persistent humanity and concern, and his steadfast refusal to judge or condemn others even when he himself is the potential victim.

In November 1965 Kapuscinski drove from Ghana to Nigeria, passing through Togo and Dahomey. It was a 520-kilometre drive through a West Africa seemingly in a terminal stage of collapse. In each country there was a state of emergency, coups were being hatched, parliaments dissolved, governments falling, heads of state being deposed, all taking place in an atmosphere that was a bizarre amalgam of mad farce and terrible danger. The easy responses in such conditions are either those of disdain or despair but both are shunned by Kapuscinski: no judgement is passed, no facile observation is made. Perhaps this reserve, this effort to understand, exists because Kapuscinski is a Pole. As he reiterates throughout the book his own country’s history is as troubled as any African state’s: colonized, invaded, subjugated and partitioned. And from this angle, unusual in the West, nothing about Africa’s problems and difficulties seems exceptionally perverse or untoward. As a Pole observing Africa Kapuscinski’s first inclination is to empathize, not condemn or mock. The effect of this on his writing is to produce its entirely distinctive and beguiling tone, at once cool and detached, self-effacing and sagacious.

This is nowhere more evident than in one of the most extraordinary episodes he relates, in a piece entitled “The Burning Roadblocks,” that took place in Nigeria in 1966. The roadblocks in question were in western Nigeria, Yoruba land, constructed by the members of a political party called UPGA which had won recent elections but, through the trickery of the central government, had been denied power. In its place another party, the NNPD, ruled, courtesy of the central government. UPGA supporters went on the rampage. Roadblocks were set up throughout the country as supporters of the puppet NNPD were sought out and, invariably, killed.

In this terrifying atmosphere Kapuscinski took it upon himself to drive up a minor road to see what was going on. Some would say it was foolhardy; some would say Kapuscinski had a death wish. Kapuscinski explains it thus, quite simply: “I had to experience everything for myself … I had to do it myself because I knew no one could describe it to me.”

I was a teenager living in Nigeria during those years and I still remember the atmosphere of alarm and fear that any long journey by road engendered. As I recall, the way to indicate you were an UPGA supporter was to stick a palm frond or other type of greenery in the radiator grille of your car. This way, it was hoped, you would be waved through any roadblock. You never drove after dark. Then, so terrified rumour had it, political pressure gave way to general banditry and extortion. Burning logs would be placed across the road, when your car stopped the tyres would be slashed by machetes to prevent you escaping, then the gang would gather round…

On this particular drive Kapuscinski was halted at three road blocks. At the first he was clubbed with a rifle butt and paid five pounds to join the UPGA. At the second he was hauled from his car, beaten up, robbed of his remaining money and soaked in benzene preparatory to being burned alive. Benzene guarantees complete incineration. But for some reason the mood changed abruptly from manic aggression to wild hilarity. Unbelievably he was allowed back into his car and waved on his way. At the third roadblock he knew he had no option: he put his foot flat down on the accelerator and blasted his way through the flaming barrier.

I smashed into the fire, the car jumped, there was a hammering against the belly pan, sparks showered against the windshield. And suddenly — the roadblock, the fire and the shouting were behind me … Hounded by terror, I drove another kilometre and then I stopped to make sure the car wasn’t on fire … I was all wet. All my strength had left me; I was incapable of fighting; I was wide open, defenceless. I sat down on the sand and felt sick to my stomach.

As indeed does the reader. Kapuscinski’s simple, direct style is admirably gripping and powerful and the authenticity of the eye-witness account is stomach-churningly effective. You are in total awe at the astonishing lengths Kapuscinski will go to simply to get a story and at the same time impressed at the modest refusal to capitalize on his temerity. And this particular piece encapsulates the essence of the Kapuscinski approach. It is not about historical analysis, it is about feelings, sensations, the vividity of the singular moment. No one will read “The Burning Roadblocks” in search of enlightenment regarding political in-fighting amongst Nigerian regional parties in the mid 1960s, but if you want to know what the country was actually like at that time, what the mood was, what particular tensions and anxieties, animosities and fears were in the air, then Kapuscinski is unparalleled.

Indeed this quality applies to all the pieces collected in this fine book. Kapuscinski gallops through the history of the Algerian war but paints a portrait of Ben Bella that is highly individual and immediate. The complexities of Congolese politics are sketched in as background to an article on Lumumba but what lingers in the memory is a wonderful description of a bar in Leopoldville.

And so on. Again and again it is Kapuscinski’s feeling for the quiddity of a place, a person or a moment that emerges as trenchant and moving. For a man so widely travelled, who must have seen enough of the world’s injustice and misery to last several lifetimes, Kapuscinski’s essential magnanimity and sympathy remain a constant behind his writing and irradiate it with a kind of tough, clear-sighted integrity. In one of his personal reflections that punctuate the book (having once more come close to death) he reflects on an unknown official in Leopoldville whose act of kindness, whose selflessness, has saved his life. “There is so much crap in the world,” Kapuscinski concludes bluntly, “and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.” True of the world. And true of Africa.

1990

The “Scramble for Africa” began, according to Thomas Pakenham, in 1876. The Germans had a handy word that summed it up more succinctly — the Torschlusspanik—the “door-closing panic.” There the continent lay, ripe for exploitation, and nobody wanted to miss out. Europeans had been there for many years, of course, but only on the fringes — in Lagos, Zanzibar and Alexandria, for instance — where trade and climate had made a settlement necessary and possible, but, as the last quarter of the nineteenth century approached, they queued up, in an unseemly turmoil, like avid shoppers on the opening day of a sale, to see what they could lay their hands on. The “shopaholic” analogy is worth pursuing a little further: some of the would-be colonists had vaguely justifiable reasons to be in the race, but others were there fortuitously, simply to participate. There was land to be grabbed, vast tracts of it, and, so they believed, unimaginably large amounts of money to be made, and in their train came the added bonuses of strategic and political influence, of setting the agenda for the power struggles of the new century. And so they moved in on Africa: Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany all at once found themselves involved in an extraordinary “Sale of the Century.” A whole continent was available — and surely everyone would be able to claim a piece of the action. But the avid metaphors of commerce can only be sustained so far: this was no real sale, there were no real “vendors.” The multitudinous populations of Africa were not consulted about the identity of their new landlords. Heavy and powerful fists were beating at the door and property was going to be sequestered, like it or not. Suddenly the image of a smash-and-grab raid appears more apposite, and it would take another half century to set that particular injustice right. After a fashion.

A glance at a map of Africa, around about 1912, is a daunting testimonial to the sheer efficacy and uncompromising nature of that overwhelming urge to stake a claim. We now see that the entire continent, this vast unexplored landmass, most of which, fifty years before, had been terra incognita, has been parcelled up. Only two independent states exist: the empire of Ethiopia and the state of Liberia. All the rest belongs to Europe. Thomas Pakenham’s fine book tells the story of this particular gold rush with admirable and judicious poise. These four decades of European colonization contain some of the best-known episodes of nineteenth-century history as well as some of the most mythologized and colourful characters the world has ever seen. Pakenham steers us through the familiar and less familiar chapters lucidly and expertly. He is particularly good on the famous battles and short, brutal wars that characterized this period of history — notably Isandhlwana, Tell el-Kebir and the savage genocide of the Herero uprising. We encounter Livingstone and Stanley, Brazza and Rhodes, Kitchener and Gordon, Lugard and Jameson. We relive the seige of Khartoum and the Boer War, the relief of Emin Pasha and the Fashoda incident, and investigate the sinister manipulations of that most malign of colonists, Leopold II, the king of the Belgians.

Inevitably, any attempt to provide a conspectus of these tumultuous decades, however detailed, is bound to be accused of sins of omission. In the last year, for example, I have reviewed a massive life of Cecil Rhodes and a hefty biography of Stanley, both books considerably longer than The Scramble for Africa. In order to subsume this type of exhaustive documentation Pakenham has had to condense, summarize and elide constantly, yet there is never any sense of sketchiness or corner-cutting — and the fact that he has brought the book in under 800 pages is a phenomenal achievement. To take one small instance: the annexation of Bechuanaland in 1885 is both a key episode in the career of Cecil Rhodes and also of major importance in the subsequent evolution and history of southern Africa. The bibliography of this forgotten but highly complex episode is considerable — shelves of learned articles and doctorates and at least one highly documented, and excellent, scholarly monograph. Pakenham manages to summarize the whole affair, identify the key players and outline the vital consequences in little more than two highly readable and comprehendable pages. His ability to ingest libraries of primary source material and transform them into a clear, authoritative and compelling narrative is a remarkable talent and one that this book bears witness to again and again.

There was another scramble, of course, this time out of Africa, in the eleven years between 1957 and 1968 when the former European colonies emerged as the forty-seven independent nations of contemporary Africa. We may marvel at the pace of change in Eastern Europe today but the speed of transformation that Africa has undergone in just under a century appears, with only a little hindsight, to be even more breathtaking. The twentieth century arrived in Africa with astonishing and devastating pace. For example, the French explorer Brazza (founder of Brazzaville on the Congo) reached that mighty river in 1880 after one of the most arduous and debilitating cross-country treks ever undertaken — he was sick, exhausted, his clothes in tatters. A mere twenty-five years later he passed the same spot sitting on the deck of a double-storeyed steam-powered river boat with an ice-making machine on board. In the light of this incredible velocity — no continent has ever “fast-forwarded” through history in this way before — Pakenham asks at the end of his book (clearly expecting the answer “no”) whether the Africans of today “would wish to turn the clock back to the 1880s.” It is a fantastical notion, of course, but I have a feeling that rather more of the continent’s inhabitants would like to indulge in that hypothesis than he suspects. The scramble for Africa, whatever zealous gloss might have been put on it by missionaries such as David Livingstone (by all accounts a thoroughly unpleasant individual) with his idealistic vision of the “three Cs” that he was bringing to Africa — Commerce, Civilization and Christianity — was at the end of the day far more to do with plain avarice and chauvinistic ambition, and it would be revisionist, not to say wrong, to infer otherwise. It was all about the greater greed and glory of Britain and France, Germany and Belgium and the other Europeans participating in the carve-up. The Africans did not feature in the equation at all.

1992

This is the epic narration of a war in Africa that lasted one hundred years. It was fought in fits and starts from its first tentative skirmishes in the eighteenth century until it reached its full-blown military denouement in 1877. It took place at the continent’s southern tip and embroiled all of southern Africa’s tribes and peoples: white and black, coloured and Boer, settler and nomad, English redcoat and Xhosa impi. In the footnotes of imperial history books these bush conflicts were dubbed the “Kaffir wars”—inglorious, violent, muddled affairs, that brought no particular honour to the British Army (no Victoria Crosses were won) and reflected rather the attenuated, sweaty struggle involved in administering the pax Britannica. There were nine of these wars altogether, punctuating the century with savage and absurd regularity, but they have been overshadowed in the popular imagination — in the historian’s imagination too — by the more dramatic and compelling Zulu wars of the 1870s and Cecil Rhodes’s annexation of Matabeleland.

All this will change now, I should imagine, as a result of this massive, extraordinary and fascinating book. All histories of colonization shame the colonizers and this one is no exception. But Frontiers’ ambitions are prodigious. Over 1,300 pages, weighing as much as a car battery, its sheer heft and palpable scale provide a daunting objective correlative of its historical claims and scholarly revisionism. For Noel Mostert’s grand aspirations are cogently and confidently set down from the outset. Forget other imperial struggles in Africa, he states, the nineteenth-century wars in South Africa’s Cape are “central to the experience of the Atlantic community, or the Western world as it is usually referred to …” and, moreover, he will also demonstrate how these wars, this interminable conflict, are “integral to the confused moral debate about human conscience and the values of empire that arose in the post-abolition world of the nineteenth century.”

These are large claims, but Mostert makes his case not only exhaustively but with skill and passion. They arise from events that took place in a comparatively small area of land around the coast, eastwards from the Cape, on territory demarcated and irrigated by two rivers, the Great Fish River and the Great Kei River. It was here, more or less, that the crucial frontier was variously to be found between white and black, between the colonists of the Cape and one of the indigenous black peoples of southern Africa, the Xhosa nation. This was the line of confrontation where the battles and skirmishes ensued, the volatile border where colonial expansion met local intransigence and brutal warfare proved to be the only solution to the impasse.

Mostert begins his history some five centuries earlier, however, with a vivid and extensive account of the first visitors to the Cape, the Portuguese, who arrived in 1488. This was a small fleet of three ships commanded by one Bartolomeu Dias. A two-week gale blew them round the Cape and they landed to replenish their water barrels. Natives approached and began hurling stones. Dias picked up a crossbow and shot one of the stone throwers dead. This was the first indigene to be killed by a white man in southern Africa. It hadn’t taken long. (Indeed one of the many satisfactions in this book is the way hindsight provides such ghoulish and baleful ironies — the breezes of discord that presage the whirlwind we are reaping today.)

After the Portuguese came the Dutch who planned to use the Cape as a provisioning port-of-call for ships making the long voyage to the East Indies. The little plantation (first established in 1615) did not thrive and the colonizers were reluctant settlers. As they struggled to survive and slowly establish themselves they encountered three distinct native groups: the Bushmen (whose few successors still roam the Kalahari desert), the Khoikhoi (known disparagingly as Hottentots) and, a little further north, the handsome, prosperous and peaceful Xhosa, leisurely following their vast herds of cattle from grazing ground to grazing ground.

As with all incipient colonies at first some sort of coexistence appeared possible. There were occasional flare-ups and hostilities but by and large this curious new white tribe posed no real threat, even when pastoralist Boers began to move out of the Cape settlement into the hinterland during the “long quietude of the eighteenth century.” In fact at this stage there was little to separate Boer and Xhosa in terms of way of life. It centred round their beasts and their needs; it was tough, secular, communal and distinctly un-European in character. Families slept together in crude huts, miscegenation was frequent and unstigmatized. The Boers, like the Xhosa, wanted only to lead their own lives, free from external influence and control.

All this changed at the end of the eighteenth century, more or less when the British arrived, and took over from the Dutch as the colonial power in the Cape Colony. After “a century and a quarter of slothful and haphazard presence in South Africa” the remorseless northward drift of the whites had begun to penetrate the traditional Xhosa grazing lands. Cattle-raiding, farm-burning and skirmishes forced the government of the day to try and determine where the colony ended and a rudimentary frontier was posited. What this meant, of course, was that the Xhosa had to yield. They were to be encouraged to move north of the Great Fish River. If they wouldn’t move they would be “dislodged.” The hundred years war had begun.

The story of the nine “Kaffir” wars between the whites and the Xhosa is the main burden of Mostert’s history. Essentially, all the wars followed the same pattern. As a result of repeated provocation and encroachment the Xhosa would take to arms and attack white settlements. Commandos — groups of armed horsemen — would be raised (in the early days) in reprisal and Xhosa kraals would be attacked and their cattle driven off and seized. There would follow some terrifying ambuscades and hand-to-hand fighting in the bush before exhaustion set in and some sort of peace would be made and the frontier redrawn, inevitably to the Xhosa’s disadvantage.

By 1828 the Cape had become a fully-fledged British colony and the subsequent wars and the subsequent destruction of the Xhosa people take on a different character. Now professional British soldiers marched against black insurgents and the violence and blood-letting remorselessly escalated on both sides.

No summary can do justice to the vividness and detail of Mostert’s patient documentation of this tragic crescendo, nor can one do more than indicate the wealth of character and incident that this turbulent period of history throws up. Certain personalities emerge, on both sides, as key players in the drama. Harry Smith, a coarse, stupid and colourful British soldier determined “to put the kaffir in his place.” Andries Stockenstrom, a wise and humane Dutchman endlessly trying to mediate between settler and Xhosa. The Xhosa chiefs themselves, Maqoma, Ngqika and Hintsa, shrewd and proud. And the missionaries, the soldiers, the farmers and their families all trammelled up in the endless cycle of war and pillage.

In retrospect we can now see that the penultimate frontier war, the eighth, proved to be the most significant. It lasted twenty-eight months, the longest war in South Africa’s history (longer than the Boer War), and was its most bloody and devastating. It cost the British government £2–3 million to prosecute and 16,000 Xhosa died compared to 1,400 on the colonial side. The carnage and turmoil were to have a more bizarre and terrible side-effect on the Xhosa people. As if in response to the virtual disintegration of their way of life a millennial fervour arose en masse amongst a majority of the tribe. A young girl called Nongquwuse claimed to have seen a vision that promised the resurrection of the Xhosa and their eventual triumph. The British would be swept into the sea and new cattle would replace the old herds. The great day was proclaimed as 18 February 1857. Two suns would rise that day as a signal that the new order was about to begin. In preparation the Xhosa began killing their cattle and ceased to sow and reap grain. As an example of mass hypnosis this shocking self-immolation of the Xhosa is virtually unparalleled in human history. With the cattle slaughtered and the grain stores empty the Xhosa gathered on hilltops to watch two suns rise. As the day dawned, bright and completely orthodox, and the solitary sun marked its regular trajectory across the African sky the Xhosa nation knew that its time was over. Appalling famine and fatalities completed the job that one hundred years of frontier warfare had only partially achieved. Forty thousand are believed to have died in the famine and the survivors were dispersed about the colony as menial labourers. The first and most tenacious frontier to the north had been breached. The white tribe was moving on. Now it was the turn of the Zulus and the Matabele.

1992

As I began to write and publish my novels I always hoped that this would encourage a door to open to the world of cinema. And it did, relatively quickly, thanks to the arrival of Channel 4 and their decision in their first season of “Film on Four” to ask non-film writers to write a film for their new channel. I was duly commissioned and the first film to be made from one of my scripts was Good and Bad at Games in 1982. Since then twelve of my scripts have made it to the screen, one of which— The Trench—I also directed. I suppose I must have written some three dozen scripts in total over the years since Good and Bad at Games. A success ratio of one-in-three is actually not bad going for a screenwriter. The debilitating aspect of the job is that so much of the work you do goes both unseen and unpublished, therefore the key thing, from my point of view, is that films must be made from time to time: otherwise all the effort and frustration that inevitably comes with the job begins to take its toll. Luckily enough — and a lot of luck is involved — I seem to have been able to keep that sporadic momentum going. An added bonus for a moonlighting novelist is that the film world provides a refreshing sense of collegiate mutual endeavour. After the long solitary work required on a novel it is a pleasure to collaborate. Equally, after collaboration, it is a pleasure to return to the closed study.

No such collaboration, however, is involved in the job of TV critic, yet I was very pleased indeed, in 1981, to be offered the job of writing the television column of the New Statesman, taking over from Julian Barnes, who was moving on to be the Observer’s TV critic. Not only was I joining the staff of a magazine I revered but I was also to be paid a sum of £80 per week and provided with a free television and video recorder. I started on 1 May 1981 and lasted until 25 February 1983. It is the only regular column I have ever written and the most sustained work of journalism I have ever attempted. I found the unfamiliar discipline both a challenge and rewarding and discovered that, amongst the consumption of ephemera that two-years’ television-watching inevitably encourages, there were films and programmes that were not only stimulating but proved enduring. But because I wasn’t a professional journalist I grew increasingly conscious of the sheer amount of writing I was doing. This, more than anything, made me call a halt: when I left I calculated I had written some 80,000 words of television criticism — a reasonably sized novel’s-worth.

Do you consider yourself as much a screenwriter as a novelist?

The First-time Film Director: An A-Z

One of the funniest and best loved jokes in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop occurs when the innocent hero, William Boot, who is nature correspondent for the Daily Beast, has his copy tampered with by his sister. William had written his weekly piece about badgers and wherever the word “badger” occurred his sister Priscilla had replaced it with “great crested grebe.” The copy had been filed with the mischief uncorrected and the outcry was predictable. “The mail had been prodigious. Some correspondents were sceptical, others derisive… A major in Wales challenged him categorically to produce a single authenticated case of a great crested grebe attacking young rabbits. It had been exceedingly painful.”

It was an equally painful decision for me, when I came to adapt Scoop for the screen, that I decided to leave the “badger” joke out. It is succinct and very funny on the page but I felt that it simply could not work on the screen. The only way for it to function at all was the laborious one of presenting a close-up of William’s badger article, hold on it long enough for audiences to read enough of it to get the drift, then hold on it still further as Priscilla crossed out “badger” and wrote in “great crested grebe.” Pause to allow people to read the new copy and savour its absurdity. Cut to printed newspaper containing the vandalized article, and so on.

I use the story to illustrate just one of the many problems faced by a screenwriter adapting a much loved classic. The only way film could serve the novel in this case was to turn it into a visual “book.” This is a joke that works only when it is read. And it would have to be read on the screen too. It seemed to me to be a negation of what film was all about to ask people to read screeds of text from a screen to try and reproduce a joke that would, in any event, fall flat, so ponderous was its execution. When Scoop was broadcast critics predictably bayed for blood — how could anyone be so crass as to leave out the “badger” joke?

The adaptor is really on a hiding to nothing. The novel confers a near total writing freedom, the form is unbelievably generous and capacious. Screenwriting, by consequence, and adapting even more so, offers only a collection of handicaps and constraints. If novel writing is like swimming in the sea, then adapting is like swimming in a bath.

The first and most daunting constraint is one of length. When you write a film the rule-of-thumb calculation is: one page equals one minute. Consequently, very few screenplays exceed 120 pages. By my calculation between 60 to 70 percent of a novel is left out when it makes the transfer to the screen. Your first task as a screenwriter when your chosen text is presented to you is to reread the novel, pencil in hand, crossing out as much as possible.

In the recent adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, David Lodge made the wise decision to refer only obliquely to the American scenes (time has not served them well, they read desperately unfunnily today). He thereby excised a significant chunk of the novel and saved the production huge sums of money. For, as well as length, two other curbs crowd round the tormented adaptor — logistics and budget, though often the two coincide. When I came to adapt Mario Vargas Llosa’s wonderful novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter the very first thing I was told was that this film of the Peruvian novel would not be set in Peru. Similarly, anything in a novel that requires a cast of thousands or period detail or complex special effects takes on the lineaments of a sacrificial lamb. It either goes out or is drastically transformed: the battalion becomes a platoon, the Champs Elysées becomes a side street, a surreal nightmare becomes a sweat-drenched man tossing and turning in bed. Boil down, edit, reduce, discard, cut back, conflate — these are the hectoring instructions that echo in the adaptor’s increasingly frustrated head.

And it is a job that any screenwriter finds very hard to escape from. I would reckon that three quarters of all films made are adaptations of some sort — certainly that proportion conforms to my own career. Cinema loves literature for two main reasons. First, world literature is a vast warehouse of ready-made stories, a great many of which are absolutely free. And, second, in most cases the public has already declared its taste. Any producer suggesting an adaptation of Anna Karenina, for example, is unlikely to be regarded as a vulgarian. Studios and producers are cautious animals, and there’s nothing they like better than climbing aboard a bandwagon or gravy train. A successful or much loved book is perceived as already being on a roll.

So call in a screenwriter and set him or her to work. It is a peculiar craft, demanding particular skills. There is an injunction often presented to learner sculptors confronted with their first block of marble which is to “try to find the statue in the stone.” The adaptor, to extend the analogy, is like a sculptor presented with a finished statue, let’s say Michelangelo’s David, and enjoined to fashion another David from the original. The key to the adaptor’s job, then, is to try and find “the statue in the statue.” You have your mallet and chisel in hand and you have to chip away at the much venerated, not to say iconic, original and make another David. The new statue will certainly be smaller and no doubt cruder, and inevitably, in the chipping away process, it will have lost an arm or other appendages, but if all has gone well the original statue will be called to mind. But it is never going to be a faithful or slavish copy, the very nature of the job rules that out.

Vladimir Nabokov, contemplating Stanley Kubrick’s film of his novel Lolita, diplomatically professed himself well pleased. If ever there was a novel that would radically alter and diminish in its transition to the screen, then Lolita was that novel. But Nabokov, who had tried to adapt the novel himself, and whose script had been turned down, understood the problems inherent in the adaptor’s dogged and difficult task. Film versions of novels, Nabokov said, should not strive to reproduce exactly what was on the printed page, they should aim to be “vivacious variants” of the original. The creating of “vivacious variants” is fundamentally what screen adapting is all about, and with that in mind one should never judge the film by the book, but let the film stand on its own.

1995

At the foot of the greasy pole that is the Hollywood power structure toil the D-boys and the D-girls. The “D” stands for Development and what these minions do is provide “coverage,” in other words write reports on the hundreds of filmscripts that are submitted routinely day in day out to the studios and independent film companies in the hope that someone somewhere will like them.

Almost without exception this script analysis utilizes the concept of three-act structure to construe the merits and demerits of the screenplay in question. “… the conclusion of act one is weak and does not prefigure the emotional highs in act two …”; “… acts one and two work well but there are real problems of pacing in act three …” and so on. There are other buzz- or nonce-words that figure in Hollywood script analysis—“character arcs,” “backstory,” “beats,” “gracenotes,” “pushing the envelope,” etc. — but none — none — has such a pernicious hold as three-act structure.

Now this notion may be a handy device for writing coverage (by and large American filmscripts do not number scenes), but the use of three acts has become widespread in the teaching of screenplay writing and, inevitably, in the writing of screenplays also, and there its use is far less felicitous. No one ever determined that a screenplay should have three acts — why not five? why not two? — and there is no reason on earth why the 120-page screenplay, and therefore the ninety-minute to two-hour film, should have these segments imposed on it. The fact of the matter is that film is a narrative art form, a particularly straightforward narrative art form too, compared to the novel, and the rhythms and cadences of that narrative, its rise and fall, its crises and denouements should be determined, not by some arbitrary matrix, but by the demands of the story (how compelling is it, how entertaining, how suspenseful, etc.) and the characters it is dealing with (how real are they, how sympathetic, how dramatically effective, etc.). Any shape, any structure will do if it works narratively. There is no predetermined mould into which a story should be poured: its justification is provided solely by its success. If there is one area of a film where a strong sense of form may be relevant then that is its ending, but that is because it is the end of that particular story, and not of act three.

1996

“It’s Cannes, Baby,” James D’Arcy whispers in my ear as we wait outside the Olympia Cinema on the rue d’Antibes in Cannes on a hot, sultry afternoon. James is an actor in The Trench, a film I have written and directed, and which is about to be screened in Olympia 2. He is here with two other of the film’s actors — Daniel Craig and Paul Nicholls — and we are all, all four of us, a little apprehensive, I think, as we stand here watching the audience of studio executives, international film buyers and assorted journalists from around the world file, stony-faced, into the cinema. One of Paul Nicholls’s lines from the film comes, unbidden, unwelcome, into my head: “They don’t look too happy, do they?” I reflect that this screening is, in effect, the world premiere of The Trench. No audience has ever seen it before. I wonder vaguely, far too late, of course, if this audience is the ideal one to test it on.

I first came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 when I was nineteen. I was studying along the coast at the University of Nice and one evening, with a German girl, hitchhiked the few miles to Cannes and strolled up and down the Croisette for a few hours, rubbernecking, looking for stars. I’m pretty sure I saw John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel — but this may be a fantasy that I’m reluctant to let go. I remember little else about the visit but here I am, twenty-eight years later, back again.

In Nice, we quondam Niçois were somewhat disparaging about Cannes. Nice was the real city on the Côte d’Azur, Cannes was a kind of erstatz artefact, a pseudo city, all show and bravura, not worth the bother of visiting. Even Monte Carlo had more heft, more life to it. And certainly, walking up and down the Croisette — as one does, endlessly — all these years later I reflect that film festival time does not show the place in its best light. There are posters for movies everywhere — big expensive posters — stuck on the façades of buildings, specially designed to fit on lamp-posts, even the porte-cochéres and the balustraded ramps of the driveways and terraces of the luxury hotels are artlessly remodelled to promote this film or that. The place is permanently mobbed too, great crowds of people aimlessly wandering, day and night. Nothing reminds you more forcibly that Cannes is, let’s say, 5 percent glamour, 95 percent market. It’s a convention, an American friend of ours reminded us: think of it as a town invaded by sales representatives.

There are many different Cannes, depending on your needs and your function. There is the buyers’ Cannes: men and women scurrying from cinema to cinema burdened with press kits and synopses, sometimes watching only minutes of one film before they furtively leave to watch another few minutes of the next. There is the velvet-roped, red-carpeted razzamatazz of the Official Selection screenings — movie stars, the great and the would-be-great, pausing to wave to the paparazzi before they enter the concrete blockhouse that is the Palais des Festivals. However, one slowly but surely gets the impression, overwhelmingly, that Cannes is an Anglocentric event. Nothing but English spoken, it seems to me, in the cafes and bars and streets — American, English, Australian, European-English accents abound. Where are the French, one asks? All in our hotel, as it turns out.

We are staying at the Martinez, a huge art deco construct at the far end of the Croisette from the Palais and the Majestic. On the beach opposite a substantial open-sided TV studio has been built by Canal Plus to house their amazingly popular chat show, Nulle Part Ailleurs. As it happens I have been on Nulle Part Ailleurs once, in Paris — its usual home — and I know its power and its terror. It decamps to Cannes for the two weeks of the festival. It is live and unique — a combination, if that can be imagined, of, let’s say, Parkinson, TGI Friday, Spitting Image, the South Bank Show with a little bit of alternative comedy and soft porn thrown in for good measure. Everybody who is anybody in France obeys the Nulle Part Ailleurs summons. And Everybody is staying in the Martinez, or at least is temporarily present at the Martinez waiting to go on the show — which seems to last about three hours.

Which explains, I quickly realize, why there are several hundred young people corralled around the hotel’s entrance screaming their lungs out. For the serious French punter the Cannes Film Festival actually takes place here, occupying the fifty yards it takes to get from the Martinez lobby to the Canal Plus studio. The rest of the town can be left to the rest of the film industry.

I call a French friend of mine, an eminent film director, to see when he will be arriving. Oh no, he says, I’m not coming. He tells me he took special precautions to ensure his new film would not be ready for Cannes. It’s terrible what they do, the French press, he says. Look how they have massacred Carax and Pola X. “Already?” I say, sceptical. The film was screened on day one and this is only day three. “Le film est mort,” he says in a sober voice.

And it is true that the French are hardest on the French here. No reputation is immune and the attacks can be and are unremittingly savage. Catherine Deneuve — braving the firestorm in several films this year — said that for French film-makers the Cannes Film Festival is a “douloureux et dangereux” experience. Blood on the Croisette. It’s not all parties.

Thank God — because the parties are awful, appalling, a total waste of time. And yet we all go to them. We went to two in the two nights we had available: the MTV party, a modest affair of 1,200 on the Carlton Beach, and the Austin Powers party, in a deserted casino miles away. Rumours had it that there were 7,000 invitations issued for this one. We finally fought our way in, through crowds of desperate liggers, thankful our special invitations allowed us access to the exclusive VIP area where a mere 2,000 privileged guests drank free drinks and chatted sweatily to each other. Actually, the Austin Powers party was worth it, if only for the sight of a grinning, aged, squamous Hugh Hefner, sitting on a sofa, surrounded by four impossibly pert Bunnies, living tribute to the properties and potentials of Viagra and silicone, respectively.

On the morning after our screening, Daniel Craig, Paul Nicholls, James D’Arcy and I reported for duty on the Majestic Hotel beach. We were all — how shall I put it? — a little fragile and unanimously decided a round of Bloody Marys was the best way to get our press call off to a good start.

The Trench is a film about the forty-eight hours before the Battle of the Somme in 1916, concentrating on a group of very young soldiers waiting to go over the top to what is almost certain death. The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest day of slaughter—60,000 killed and wounded — in the entire history of the British Army. Daniel Craig drily made the point to me, as we were whizzing between TV crews and journalists, the sun shining, people sunbathing, yachts in the bay, drink-toting waiters running around, that there was a certain baleful incongruity about where we were and what we were talking about. He was right, of course, but at the same time in that realization all the absurdity and the craziness of the festival coalesced. Boys trying to come to terms with the prospect of their imminent death in 1916; young actors trying to explain the import of all this to a Brazilian film crew on a jetty in the sun on the Mediterranean shore in 1999. It was good to note the farcical nature of the juxtaposition. But we carried on. We were in high spirits. The screening had gone well: people clapped, people cried, people stumbled out wordless. That was Cannes, Baby.

1999

Recently, a wily old producer told me in all seriousness that, in his opinion, Hollywood should be looked at purely and simply as a river of gold, endlessly flowing; all one has to do is, from time to time, stroll down to the river bank, reach in and grab a handful of money. In its single-mindedness, its brutal candour, this theory seems reasonably astute. And it is true that, for a small minority, Hollywood and the movie business are indeed a source of endless, profligate wealth. Of course, this theory only functions if you have already succeeded, and it could be said to be true of any successful person in any successful enterprise (banking, plastic surgery, hamburger franchises, undertaking). But it is worth recalling that what takes place in Hollywood is the creation of an art form, not, as might reasonably be thought, drug-dealing or trading pork-belly futures — yet, of the seven arts, only the cinema proffers the alluring, tantalizing prospect of a permanent Klondike.

There is another, related theory of Hollywood: “Anyone can be a film producer.” All it requires is the assertion, “I am a film producer” and — bingo — you are one. All you really need is a business card, a telephone and the vaguest idea of the film you plan to “produce” and a degree of self-confidence coupled with social plausibility. Which brings us to Don Simpson and Charles Fleming’s book about him and the environment that allowed him first to flourish and then to self-destruct.

Simpson was the co-producer of a series of loud, action-packed, mind-numbingly simple Hollywood films that made vast sums of money: Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop (and BHC II), Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide and a few others which will inevitably slide into movie oblivion. In the 1980s, together with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, he was regarded as the most successful independent producer in town, and was royally rewarded (formidable perks aside, they each received, at the apex of their careers, a fee of $9 million per film). Simpson was a small, aggressive man with a tendency to obesity, who played the “bad cop” in the partnership. Bruckheimer produced the films (did the work) while Don hogged the limelight. What is remarkable about Fleming’s racily written, but diligent, account of Simpson’s short life is that, try as one might, one can perceive nothing remarkable about it. You don’t have to live in Hollywood to be a scumbag; you don’t have to be a film producer to be a cocaine addict and an S&M enthusiast; you don’t have to have untold millions in the bank to be consumed with self-loathing and behave like a spoilt child (Simpson, staying in a hotel in Hawaii, would call his assistant in Los Angeles and get her to order room service for him). The world is full of such people and sometimes, unfortunately, such tendencies congregate in one body. But, if they do, is it necessary to chronicle their inadequacies over 300 pages?

Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun… money and power seemed mainly to fuel Simpson’s vices: for cocaine, for expensive call girls, for boozing, bingeing and bad behaviour and, inevitably, more and more rehab. When Days of Thunder (Tom Cruise in racing cars) went massively over-budget, the magic seemed to leave the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula. They moved their deal to Disney. There was still a ton of money swilling around but no films got made. What’s a guy to do? Some plastic surgery, more hookers, massive weight gain, buy a Ferrari, porn videos, three jars of peanut butter a day, rehab, cocaine, more hookers… The litany of Simpson’s relentless over-indulgence gets boring. Even when, at the end of his life, in an effort to alleviate his addiction to illegal drugs, Simpson became addicted instead to prescription drugs (he was spending $75,000 a month in pharmacies), the ironies accruing around his sad, over-privileged existence provoke a kind of weary pity rather than moral outrage.

High Concept is the book’s title and it is suggested that Simpson (and Bruckheimer) invented the genre — if that is not too grandiose a label for what the veteran producer Dick Sylbert has called extended MTV videos: “It’s ‘rock and roll in a steel mill,’ or ‘rock and roll in a jet airplane,’ or ‘rock and roll in a race car.’” The “high-concept” film is one where the “idea is king,” as Simpson once eloquently phrased it. One of his champions put it this way: “Don made up this logarithm [sic]. There is the hot first act with an exciting incident and the second act with the crisis and the dark bad moments in which our hero is challenged, and the third act with the triumphant moment and the redemption and the freeze frame ending.” Although Simpson claimed to be the only begetter of this category of film he had, and has, a host of angry rivals who say they got there first.

There are many wealthy, powerful people in Hollywood, far more famous than Simpson ever was, who behave just as badly as he did, who have the same bizarre sexual proclivities and consume equal amounts of drugs. Charles Fleming’s wider point in this book is that there is something inherent in the culture of Hollywood which makes such excesses tolerable, inevitable or even encouraged. My own hunch — my theory — is that it is not so much the fault of Hollywood as that of human nature. Put vulnerable, dysfunctional people in positions of immense power, provide them with every available venal temptation, give them more money than they know what to do with and there’s a fair chance they will go off the rails. But, despite the horror stories, it should be stated that the Hollywood film business is also populated by many hardworking, intelligent, honourable souls who don’t do drugs, and whose idea of an evening out does not include weird sex with a $10,000-a-night call girl. Simpson was not one of these, but his story is ultimately banal because he personally achieved nothing concrete — in his life or his work — and, crucially, in a creative world filled with creative people, he did nothing creative. I suspect it was this sense of fraudulence, of worthlessness, that provoked the demons that drove him. He died in 1996 of a heart attack brought on by massive drug-abuse, at the age of fifty-two.

“He had everything, but he had nothing,” as one ex-girlfriend reflected on hearing of his death. Perhaps such a contrary figure deserves two epitaphs. One of his cronies said, “For all his drug derangement [Don] was adamant about not being full of shit.” Another less partial acquaintance, who encountered him at Simpson’s favourite rehab ranch, described him as “the epitome — as a successful man, as a representative of Hollywood, as a male animal — of the kind of person who made your skin crawl.” Take your pick.

1999

The bio-pic is a difficult genre, perhaps as difficult as it comes in the film world, and the longer and more familiar the life to be filmed, the tougher the challenge. Films are rarely over two hours long; at two and a half hours you are probably at the maximum length for these times of ours, stretching the tolerance of studio, exhibitor and — possibly — audience as well; and to encompass an entire life, public and private, and do it some justice (let alone produce an interesting or watchable or memorable film) within that frame is a daunting challenge.

The modern exemplar of the bio-pic — in my opinion — is Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Scorsese was initially fortunate in that his subject was virtually unknown outside the fight game. Secondly, the area of Jake La Motta’s life that he chose to treat was comparatively short — the rise and fall of a professional boxer, a decade or so. And third, Scorsese showed real astuteness in opting to eschew traditional narrative chronology. The film is a series of vignettes, punctuated by flash-forwards to the bloated, ageing Jake in his premature dotage as a nightclub raconteur. The style of the film is fractured and eclectic: sometimes naturalistic, almost cinéma-vérité, sometimes stylized (particularly the fights), but as a portrait of a man and his life it is remarkably successful. It could only have been bettered in that most fluid, capacious and malleable of art forms, the novel, but, in Scorsese’s hands, film — and I don’t mean this as faint praise — takes on a rare depth and texture (Robert de Niro has a lot to do with this, it goes without saying). It is nuanced, it resonates, it is both banal and passionate, it is full of complexities and ambiguities — we do not understand everything. It resembles, in short, life.

All this is by way of preamble to Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat. A bio-pic also, and one that shares many features with — however paradoxical this may seem — Raging Bull. Basquiat is comparatively unknown: certainly, outside of an art-world coterie, the details of his life are unfamiliar territory. Furthermore, his life was short, dramatic and controversial. Schnabel’s film needs only to concentrate on the few years — approximately 1981 to 1987—that chart his discovery, sudden fame, exploitation and ultimate drug-propelled downfall and death. Wisely, too, the style of the film is fractured and impressionistic. Basquiat’s story is presented in a series of episodes, often concentrating around encounters with friends, or girlfriends, artists, dealers, etc., who move in and out of the story at random. One of the film’s most memorable shots is visionary: Basquiat, contemplating Manhattan’s vast roofscape, sees the sky replaced by sea, with a solitary surfer riding a creaming breaker, high above the skyscrapers. Is this a vision of happiness? Of mere wishful thinking? Or simply the kind of aesthetic epiphany that can visit any artist, however down and out?

These ambiguities complement the film’s tone and atmosphere well, and Schnabel is excellently served by his cast too. Jeffrey Wright is superb as Basquiat: understated, befuddled, endearing, he can move effortlessly through the range of emotions from sweetness and charm to the manic, spoilt selfishness of the drug-dependent. One’s sympathy is thoroughly engaged, rarely the case with addicts, and Wright’s fraught depiction of a desperate soul on self-destruct rivals Ray Milland’s great portrayal of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend.

The supporting cast solidly buttresses Wright’s central position. The luminously beautiful Claire Forlani as Basquiat’s girlfriend is touchingly, edgily vulnerable. Benicio del Toro for once keeps his mannerisms under control as Basquiat’s friend from his graffiti-spraying days. Christopher Walken, playing a journalist, manages to invest a two-minute interview with such an amazing freight of off-beat menace and downright weird-ness that it almost steals the show. Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman, old reliables, do not let the side down. Special mention must be made of David Bowie as Andy Warhol. This expertly pitched performance is kept well this side of caricature (very hard to do with a white fright-wig on your head). More importantly, you see a version of Warhol that for once makes sense. Warhol emerges, not as some spaced-out party-animal, but as Basquiat’s only real, unconditional friend in the sea of sharks that is the New York art world. The friendship is played as manifestly genuine, without a trace of quid pro quo. And Warhol’s death, when it comes, provokes a vicarious sense of loss. And one understands vividly why this may well have been the factor that pushed Basquiat over the edge.

The film further benefits from an easy, unforced authenticity. Julian Schnabel knew Basquiat well, and has thrived and suffered (to a degree) in the same world. Tellingly, in the production notes to the film, Schnabel describes that world as an “arena.” In which artists as gladiators are pitted against a succession of wild beasts, perhaps?

As an oblique demonstration of biting the hand that feeds you, or of fouling your own nest, Schnabel’s take on the art scene of the eighties is unsparingly harsh. One wonders if it is fuelled by a personal bitterness, or perhaps a retrospective wisdom, but whatever the motivation, his portrayal of the gang of asset strippers that gathered round the frail personality and modest talent of Jean-Michel Basquiat makes other sinks of iniquity — Hollywood, the music business, oriental sweat shops — seem positively perfumed.

And this provides the material for the searching subtext that runs beneath the film. At another level it can be seen as a Hogarthian satire, a dire moral warning to the unsuspecting artist. And here we encounter the vexed question of Basquiat’s reputation, both while he was alive and posthumously. Basquiat died at the age of twenty-seven, a year older than Keats was when he died, but Basquiat is no Keatsian figure. Basquiat’s own idols were doomed, drugged musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker, and perhaps there the parallels are more valid, but not entirely. One would hesitate to call Charlie Parker the Basquiat of the jazz world. The inversion is revealing — it tends to diminish Charlie Parker — for what it tells us, both about Basquiat’s “gift,” whatever that may have been, and the world he moved in, where it became a commodity of huge value.

The fact is that Basquiat belonged to that category of artist who traded in, for want of a better term, one smart idea. It is a recent phenomenon, this, perhaps only prevalent in the last four decades or so, and posterity is already marking down the dividends sharply. Artists of this category offer a quick fix of appreciation and that quick fix can be relied upon to pack many a gallery and fuel many column inches for a limited period of time. I do not deny that the frisson such work generates may be genuine, but it is like a firework rocket, refulgently, gloriously there for a short time, and then darkness, and then the faint distant thump of the wooden stick and scorched cardboard falling back to earth.

Scenes in the film of Basquiat frenziedly producing his huge, vivid, scribbled upon canvases are excellently done and fascinatingly revealing (canvases on the floor, paint slapped on, scribbled words and phrases randomly added). Basquiat was unusual — young and black in a white, highbrow world. He would have liked to claim to have come up from the street, but his origins were bourgeois. He had a certain wit, a certain worldly cynicism and an artful enough faux-naïf style. And that was it. But it was enough to provoke an engineered feeding frenzy amongst the dealers and their patrons, the critics and the gallery crowd.

In his notes on the film Schnabel happily bandies about the term “genius” as applied to Basquiat, but the idea is utterly risible. Basquiat was not a modern snake-oil salesman, not quite; but the currency of his talent, his ability, his “knack,” was on the lightweight side, and I suspect — and Wright’s deeply sensitive performance encourages this conclusion — that amongst the demons that hurried him on his way to his premature death were those that were whispering “fraud” and “sham” in his ear. One of the loudest messages this film broadcasts is that there is no medium- or long-term substitute for talent, hard work, elaboration and exploration of technique, intelligence, hard work, empathy, thought, virtuosity, hard work and so on. This is the serious artist’s lot — his or her via dolorosa, if you like — and the froth and spume of celebrity, of radical-chic acclaim and lots of easy money cannot drag you away from it. One smart idea may buy you all this, for a while, but unless you cultivate a redoubtable cynicism (and bank your loot) it will not stand you in any further stead. Plenty of other flim-flam men and women are coming along behind you with all their smart ideas. Soon you will be old hat.

Perhaps Basquiat saw old-hatdom beckoning, perhaps he couldn’t think of anything else to do apart from his graffiti stuff? But, in any event, the indictment is not his to bear alone, but must rather be the burden of the world and its denizens who fell upon him and pushed him into the lucrative glare of the limelight.

Basquiat was vulnerable from the start because he held the wrong concept of what an artist was, believing that “Your life was the price you paid for your talent.” Such ideas of “being an artist,” a poet maudit, a tormented genius, or whatever, demonstrate a fanciful romanticism of the most puerile sort (which is why they are more often found amongst very young rock musicians, or very deluded actors). No serious artist can afford to believe in this notion of afflatus, whether God-given, spontaneous or drug-induced. The art world may be indifferent, or reluctant to make such a judgement, but the world of the real artist is ruthlessly self-regulating. The Stoics’ famous rejoinder, “Be silent — unless what you have to say is better than silence,” casts a long, minatory and humbling shadow over all artists’ endeavours.

Julian Schnabel has made a fine film and he can be proud of his debut as a director, but it seems to me that what emerges is something different from what he may have set out to achieve. Schnabel has said that “Jean-Michel’s work mocks categorization. It wasn’t enough for him to be a great black artist, or a graffiti artist or even a young artist. He placed himself among the great artists of all time.” Good God. Well, if he did, he paid a heavy price for his hubris. But this is not what the film conveys: there is a marked absence of vainglory, of preening self-congratulation. As Basquiat is fêted and wooed by his well-heeled acolytes and hangers-on, his mood appears rather to start as one of gratified bafflement, shading swiftly into cynicism, self-disgust and ultimate despair. Basquiat, it seems to me, is not so much Icarus or Narcissus but a sort of latter-day, low grade, Manhattan Faust. Too young, too gullible, too insecure, too easily led, he made his own Faustian pact with the art world — he did the Faust deal — and got royally burned.

1996

I have seen Woody Allen in the flesh three times in my life. I’ve never actually met him but the encounters remain vividly memorable, not to say poignant. I regard myself as a committed fan, though not an uncritical one, and my acquaintance with his work began with his very first film as a writer and director, Take the Money and Run (1969).

I saw this film as a teenager in an open-air cinema one evening in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1970. I’d gone to the cinema — casually, uninformed — expecting vaguely to catch some American thriller. Instead I was presented with a wry, knowing, absurdist, comic vision of life that seems to have emerged fully formed and that has really hardly changed over the subsequent thirty-odd years. As the moths and other night insects dipped and dived through the projector’s beam, scattering their ephemeral shadows across the screen, I found myself laughing, first incredulously, then out loud, then painfully, at the Allen persona — nerdy, intellectual, inept, randily heterosexual, angst-ridden. I was eighteen and such first encounters with an artist you come to revere and admire remain embedded in the memory, anchored there by something close to shock: a shock of recognition — the pure thrill of finding your own sense of humour, your own view of the world, replicated by an artist in an art form. At that age empathy and identification are the shortest route to aesthetic pleasure. Who is this Woody Allen? I wondered. Where can I see more of his stuff?

As it happened I didn’t have to wait long, nor have any of us. By my count he has made thirty-four feature films as writer/director and (mostly) actor since that debut. A Woody Allen film is as predictable as spring or autumn — every year sees a new launch, new debate about its quality, new speculation about the stellar cast. Until this year, that is. Woody Allen’s latest film, Anything Else, was released in the US in August, indeed it’s available for purchase there on DVD and video from the end of this month. You can currently see it in cinemas in France but not in the UK. A British distributor, it appears, may or may not be imminent, but why the delay? It is some sort of ominous signal when the new Woody Allen film, as far as his UK fans are concerned, risks going straight to video. One reluctantly starts to wonder: have audiences begun to fall out of love with the Woodman?

The first time I actually saw Woody Allen was in New York. It was 1981 and it was my first visit to the city. I stepped out of my hotel and wandered north up Park Avenue gawping at the skyscrapers and the other New York clichés that were on display. Then the biggest cliché of them all came sauntering down the avenue towards me: Woody Allen in trademark baggy chinos and combat jacket. Even better — he was arm in arm with Diane Keaton. I stopped still and tried not to stare too intently. They were laughing and chatting freely, apparently unaware of the ripples of interest and rubbernecking their passage provoked. They passed close by me. Was I rocked slightly by the turbulent wake of their renown and charisma? Yes: it was an epiphanic moment and in a way I now expect to see Woody Allen every time I go to New York. It was almost as if the sighting had been arranged for first-time visitors by the New York tourist board, so synonymous is Allen with the city. And to see him strolling its streets within hours of my arriving there, with his co-star and lover to boot, seemed both a serendipitous blessing and unbelievably appropriate.

This sighting occurred only a few years after Annie Hall (1977), remember, and I suppose that film still survives as his trademark, signature work. So many Woody Allen tropes were established there, and to such an extent, that later films that have gone back to the source suffer badly in comparison. This is all too true of the latest: Anything Else is a kind of poor man’s Annie Hall but without its freshness. Two other actors — Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci — replicate the Allen and Keaton roles but are hopelessly handicapped by our knowledge of their forerunners. Biggs (of American Pie fame) is seriously miscast and Christina Ricci (a wonderful actress) seems strangely lost, out of sorts — as if she were too aware of the ghostly redolence of the earlier film and of her vain efforts to recapture its allure. I loved Annie Hall when it first came out and decided to re-watch it last year. I stopped after five minutes, not wanting to spoil the memories of those earlier viewings. Age has not been kind to it. Furthermore it has had a baleful influence on American comic acting — what you could call the Friends school of acting. Allen’s furrowed-brow, hesitant, stuttering, self-regarding delivery and Keaton’s ditsy, kooky, stuttering, self-regarding delivery have spread like a pestilence through American drama schools. Pale shadows of Allen and Keaton throng American TV sitcoms (Friends being the most culpable in my opinion — but the disease is spreading over here too — fast). Anything Else is a ghastly depiction of the malady. Jason Biggs can’t get out three words without a pause, a “mmm,” a “huh,” a twitch, an “I mean.” “No” emerges as “N-n-n-n-n-no.” Beside him even Woody Allen himself sounds as sonorous and articulate as John Gielgud.

But I don’t think Allen minds his occasional turkeys and flops. His working practice is simply to work and work again and carry on working and he seems indifferent to criticism, positive or adverse. Like old-school film-makers he is concentrating on producing an oeuvre, a body of work. Out of the thirty-plus films he has made so far there might be six comic classics: a success rate most artists would kill for (think of Manhattan, Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives and Bullets over Broadway to name the first half dozen that spring to mind — there are another six that could also be contenders). But such a relentless output has a built-in fault mechanism: it’s impossible to maintain excellence with that level of productivity — whatever the art form you are working in. Allen’s yearly film prescribes that some will inevitably disappoint and fail. But something else has happened recently. I find myself less intrigued by the recent movies: I haven’t seen Celebrity (1998), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) or Hollywood Ending (2002). It’s not just a question of overproduction. I worry that it’s a question of over-familiarity — with the man himself.

The second time I saw Woody Allen was in 1995. I walked into a Madison Avenue bookshop and there at the rear I could see there was a small book-launch party going on, twenty or so people with glasses of wine and canapés in their hands. Customers were still allowed to browse, so I did and after a minute or two looked up to see that I was browsing beside Woody Allen. A little way off Soon-Yi Previn was standing. The whole Soon-Yi scandal, Allen’s humiliation and Mia Farrow’s despair and outrage, has changed our perception of Allen in a disastrous way, I feel. The confusion between the man and the roles he played in his films was one he deliberately allowed to take place — and it was creatively very effective: whatever the name of his character you felt you were watching, in essence, Woody Allen. But it was funny and ambiguous and self-deprecating. And then we found out it wasn’t: the court appearances, the memoirs, the suits and counter-suits provided us with too much unsavoury information — we came to know too much about the man and that knowledge has begun retrospectively to shadow the work. It’s very hard now to watch a film like Manhattan, for instance, or Husbands and Wives, and watch Allen lust after his young co-stars and remain in the state of benign, amused ignorance you were in when they first came out. As I stood beside him in that bookstore that day he looked much older and frailer than I expected. Then Soon-Yi called him over and he rejoined the guests.

In the latest film, Anything Else, Allen permits himself no unseemly sexual dalliances with much younger women. He’s a wiseacre, wannabe comedy writer dispensing laconic aphorisms about the human condition and worldly advice to his younger alter-ego. On a scale of ten the movie probably rates a four: it doesn’t really work — the dialogue seems strangely clunky, the situations appear reheated and mannered and we never engage with the central couple. I suspect Allen will chalk it down to experience. His next film, the Untitled Woody Allen Fall Project (2003), is in post-production (awaiting a title) and will be released in 2004. And then he’ll make another.

The third time I saw Woody Allen was in the spring of last year. I was in Manhattan, sitting in Bemelmans bar in the Carlyle Hotel one evening having a drink. On my way out to dinner I paused in the corridor between the bar and the Café Carlyle and squinted into the cafe through the glass door at the live show that was performing. A small jazz orchestra was on stage and there, in the second row, was Woody Allen playing his clarinet. I watched him for a minute or two. He seemed a contented man.

2003

I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories — I must have been about six years old — is of being so terrified by The Wizard of Oz that I covered my eyes for most of the film. Another is of a bizarre Disney film called The Three Caballeros, a mixture of animation and live action, which I saw in a cinema in Accra, Ghana, in the late 1950s, and of being bafflingly but erotically stirred by a sultry flamenco dancer who was flirting with the cartoon characters. These moments are the start of a long catalogue of subconscious influences that the cinema has had on my imagination and, no doubt, my personality. When I was at school I was a member of the film society and was profoundly affected (for some reason) by Juliet of the Spirits. In 1971 I lived in France for a year and went to the movies three or four times a week. I recall vividly oddities like Le Voyou, Bof, Le Beau Monstre — films I will probably never see again — as well as modern classics like The Conformist and Little Big Man. But none of these films, although they left indelible imprints on my mind, can really be described as crucially influential. The first film that had this effect on me, that for ever altered the way I responded to film, was Electra Glide in Blue.

There is a moment in every writer’s life when he or she consciously starts to think of himself or herself as a writer. It can happen early or late but as soon as that moment has arrived everything changes. That self-consciousness then mediates all experience. Electra Glide provided something similar for me which is why I select it as important. Up until I saw Electra Glide (in 1973) I had gone to the cinema as, if you like, a simple consumer, happy to be amused, thrilled, shocked or whatever. But when I saw Electra Glide I was no longer content with these unreflecting emotional responses. It was the first film I saw where I began actually to analyse how it worked; the first film I saw where I became excited by the process of movie-making, the manipulation of image and mood, rather than responding to it as a straightforward intellectual and sensual stimulant.

The film itself is an odd amalgam of thriller and road movie, of nihilism and wry humour, of action-adventure and morality tale. It tells the story of a motorcycle cop who wants to be a detective, who becomes one and, in the process of investigating a murder, discovers his ideals and standards are corrupted or misguided. It was written by Robert Boris and directed by James William Guercio, a former record producer, and as far as I know it is the only film he ever made. But for a debut it is extraordinary. There is a tremendous central performance by Robert Blake as the diminutive but tough motorcycle cop and the photography, by Conrad Hall, is audacious as well as sensational. I think it is the look of the film that is initially haunting — Monument Valley and the Arizona desert have always made great cinema — and on the wide screen the vast landscape with its lonely ribbon of road becomes a potent symbol. In fact I think that there lies the explanation of Electra Glide’s special allure: as the story unfolds the film subtly plays with key metaphors and icons of Americana and American film and refashions them for a modern audience. You have the elemental and essential loneliness of the American West; the one brave man; violent death and raw carnality (there is a bravura performance of white-trash sexuality from Jeannine Riley); you have the eternal appeal of the road movie — the transitoriness of experience, the possibilities of freedom — and an ending of shocking and absurd tragedy.

Electra Glide in Blue is not a great movie but it understands, I think, what movies can do best (and other art forms can’t) at a visceral and unconscious level, and exploits these particular strengths with seductive skill and brio. It certainly changed — irrevocably — the way I went to the cinema and it is a measure of how much it affected me that I still find myself thinking about it over twenty years later.

1998

When I told people that my novel Armadillo was being filmed for the BBC the first question I was inevitably asked was: “Are you adapting it yourself?” Yes, I would reply, instinctively, and then a part of me would shout “No! I’m not adapting it. What I’m doing to it is far more complicated than that: I’m writing it again, which is something entirely different.” I think the first thing we have to do is get rid of the word “adaptation”—the problem lies in the image conjured up by that innocuous noun. And the verb “to adapt” sounds too easy: “I’ll adapt it” implies something anyone could do — just hand me my tool kit and give me half an hour and I’ll adapt it. But in actual fact turning a novel into a TV series or a film — or an opera, or a musical, or a radio play — is a far more complex and radical act than one might think. By changing the art form the rules are completely rewritten. Turning a novel into a TV series isn’t a simple matter of “adaptation”—what we’re actually talking about is “transformation.”

Let’s try a thought-experiment. Let’s imagine the novel Armadillo as a house, a standard three-bedroom detached house with a garden. Now you want to turn it into a three-hour series for BBC1. The way you do this is to demolish the existing house and rebuild it using the same materials. As everyone knows when you knock something down and try to put it together again it’s not going to look exactly the same. Some of the bricks will have been smashed, windows broken, pipes burst, tiles cracked, joists given way and so on. As you assemble your materials and try to conform to the original plan certain compromises and alterations will have to be made: the sitting room will be smaller, the attic bedroom will have gone. You find that you can only make the central heating work downstairs, the new windows won’t quite fit their embrasures, you can only get into the kitchen through the downstairs loo and the garden has been ruined by all the heavy machinery. This image is not meant to be flippant or facetious: in my opinion and experience it genuinely reflects the process that is undergone when a novel is rejigged, reshaped and reformed for the screen. When you’ve rebuilt your demolished house it will look similar to the original but the building itself will have been through a process of death and rebirth and in so doing will be utterly transformed. Something different — something new — has been created.

Transforming a novel into a series brings about two fundamental changes, one challenging, the second often wonderfully exciting. First of all, when you move from the page to the screen, you move from a world of almost total liberty — where anything is allowed and anything can be achieved — to a world of boundaries, of peripheries, of no-go areas. In this world we have schedules, budgets, problems of availability, issues of length and timing. But, more dramatically than that, we find ourselves in a world where there is basically only one point of view — that of the camera and its lens. As a novelist who writes for the screen (large and small), I have to say this is the greatest change you encounter. In a novel you can spend the entire time effortlessly occupying the subconscious of one or as many characters as you like. On screen, however, it is astonishingly difficult to be subjective for any length of time. Armadillo is a novel where we are provided almost total access to the thoughts and dreams and fantasies of the central character, Lorimer Black. To reproduce that subjectivity on screen, to get to know Lorimer as well as we do in the novel, required special efforts — and very special acting.

This is the second feature of the film transformation, and one that often provides the happiest bonus — casting. As a reader of a novel you are in effect a one-man or one-woman casting director. You, the reader, flesh out the character on the page; you can imagine what he or she looks like, sounds like and so on. And it’s an intensely private process: each reader will have their own version. But once the film is cast, however, that specificity disappears — the look becomes universal. James Frain is for ever “Lorimer Black,” Catherine McCormack will be the eternal “Flavia Ma-linverno,” Stephen Rae is “George Hogg” and so on.

For the writer this particular identification is not, as some might feel, a source of worry. In fact it is one of the wonderful pleasures of seeing your work turned into a film or series to witness the word made flesh in this way. A TV series is drama but it is also photography and to see these creatures of your imagination as living, breathing human beings can be a magical experience.

Having adapted several novels for the screen (including three of my own) it seems to me that film and television adaptations of novels are handicapped by certain misguided expectations — more so than adaptations that occur in any other art form. Commentators too seem to have no real, practical idea of what is involved in turning prose fiction into filmed drama. I think the problem arises from the assumption that the processes of filmmaking are in some way close to novel writing, whereas in fact, as I’ve tried to show, the two forms are quite distinct — as distinct as a radio play is from a stage play, or a stage play from an opera. No one, for example, goes to see Verdi’s Falstaff and then comes home to read Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and then berates Verdi for the audacious changes he has made. Similarly, no one in his right mind would say that Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd is better than Herman Melville’s. You might as well say an apple is a better fruit than an orange. Yet such comparisons and judgements are routinely and unthinkingly made when a novel is filmed.

I think, however, there is some instinctive understanding of this fundamental alteration that occurs in book-to-film adaptation — for why else would people, having seen and enjoyed the film or the TV series, want to read the novel? All adaptations actively encourage readings of the original source not because people want to see what’s been changed or left out but because the aesthetic pleasures involved are entirely different. The pleasures you derive from seeing, for example, the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are quite different from those prompted by reading Ken Kesey’s novel. And we don’t need to rank those respective pleasures in a notional hierarchy — each has its own validity. The house of fiction has many windows, Henry James said, and that applies to all the seven arts: we want to keep as many open as possible. And, having taken Armadillo apart, brick by brick, timber by timber (with the help of a few old friends), and then (with the help of dozens of new friends) put it back together again, I can say that the transformed house stands proudly on its re-landscaped plot. The lights are on, people are wandering from room to room, I can hear laughter and conversation. I like my new house very much indeed. Come on in.

2001

Last week in Hollywood a small but significant victory was won by screenwriters. In the course of their negotiations with the Studios the Writers’ Guild gained a provision that affected the credits in the “end-titles” of a film. Hitherto the last three titles you see on every film have always gone — WRITER, then PRODUCER, then DIRECTOR. As a result of the new deal with the Studios they will now read — PRODUCER, WRITER, DIRECTOR. From being “Shmucks with Underwoods” we now officially rank second to the director in the creative pecking order.

There is a conspiracy theory bandied about amongst screenwriters that runs along these lines. The writer — the script — is so vitally important, is so crucial in the making of a film that if writers had artistic and industrial influence commensurate with that importance then they would effectively be running the show. So, keep the writers down at all costs, pay them peanuts, set them against each other, denigrate their creative role, grant others the title of “auteur,” anything, anything to prevent them realizing that the real power lies in their hands.

Paranoia? Well, a year or so ago, Robert King, a screenwriter in Hollywood, had the bright idea of analysing the Fall/Christmas Movie Preview in the Los Angeles Times. Of the 114 movies cited in the preview the screenwriters were credited six times. The directors were mentioned 114 times. King also studied six months of film reviews in the Los Angeles Times and discovered the following fascinating statistics. Where a film received a bad review the screenwriters were blamed 61 percent of the time; directors only 21 percent of the time. Where a film was deemed a success, however, screenwriters were praised 33 percent of the time, directors received the plaudits 45 percent of the time. Bad movies, the conclusion would appear to be, are the results of bad scripts — brickbats to the screenwriter. A good film, however, is down to the director.

When the Oscar nominations were announced this year a deal of British attention was focused, naturally enough, on Four Weddings and a Funeral. I did my own straw poll, á la Robert King, of how the nominations were covered on the news that evening. Now, the one and only and undisputable begetter of Four Weddings is the screenwriter, Richard Curtis. It was his idea, he invented the story, he created the characters long before his fellow collaborators came together to make the finished film. And quite rightly Richard Curtis was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. However, this fact was not mentioned on any of the early or late evening news coverage on BBC or ITV. It did not make it on to the Teletext or Ceefax list of nominations. Here was a great British success story, trumpeted and bruited abroad for months, for which its creator had received the ultimate accolade. Anyone interested? News at Ten, Trevor MacDonald, saw the day’s sole mention of Curtis’s achievement. Amidst all the Forrest Gump fanfares and Hugh Grant’s bitter disappointment some editor at ITN had finally decided it was worth reporting. Four Weddings was “also nominated in the category of Best Original Screenplay.” Were we to hear the writer’s name? No. As far as my researches revealed the name of the man who created the most successful British film ever, never even rated a mention on the day he was nominated for an Oscar.

Am I overreacting? A little. This is standard stuff, and screenwriters are wryly and reluctantly accustomed to this level of routine neglect. But it is symptomatic of a wider attitude, it seems to me, and that is why writers everywhere, in whatever medium, can derive a little satisfaction from the Writers’ Guild’s negotiating savvy last week. Shortly after the day of the Oscar nominations I went into one of London’s best bookshops to buy a published screenplay. In the film section I read the sign on the bookshelf. SCREENPLAYS LISTED A-Z UNDER DIRECTOR. There is more work to be done.

1993

“This novel,” Evelyn Waugh said about Brideshead Revisited, “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into the unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.” It’s not difficult to understand the novel’s abiding popularity: nostalgia for a vanished era, deep sentimentality, saccharine romance among aristocratic types — many of the ingredients of the contemporary best-seller. It’s Waugh’s best-known book, but in many respects it’s his worst, and problems arise when it’s seen in the context of his work as a whole. How could Evelyn Waugh, one of the great English novelists of this century, write this sort of rubbish?

The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life.

How also could he construct such a broken-backed plot; labour so clumsily with the techniques of first-person narration; abandon an excellent leading character for one of the most lifeless heroines in modern fiction?

Waugh himself, when he came to revise the book in 1959, was not unaware of its deficiencies, and the preface he wrote for the new edition represents an unmistakable demotion. The Magnum Opus, as it was known in the writing, becomes just a souvenir of the Second World War. But Brideshead Revisited can’t be dismissed as an aberration. It’s too large a book and its central position in Waugh’s career means it can’t be ignored.

Waugh’s novels divide themselves fairly neatly into two groups. On the one hand there are the comedies — with their naive or roguish protagonists — such as Decline and Fall, Scoop, Black Mischief and The Loved One. On the other are A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, Brideshead Revisited, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy. It’s on this last category of novels that Waugh’s status as a major novelist rests. They all contain examples of his comic genius but they are supplemented by an element which is best, though simply, described as autobiographical.

Waugh drew heavily on events in his own life to furnish himself with the necessary raw material for his fiction. In almost all his novels, even the most outrageously comic, this transposition can be detected with little effort — a procedure considerably aided by the publication of his letters and diaries. The egregious Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall is a faithful portrait of a master at the prep school where Waugh taught. The bizarre evangelist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies is Amy Semple McPherson. Scoop is a thinly fictionalized version of his travel book Remote People. Most famously, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a case history of his own paranoia. And so on. The image of Waugh as a beleaguered Tory squire tends to obscure the modernity of his fictional approach. In almost all cases the fiction remains very close to the source.

This is not to deprecate Waugh’s genuine imagination or great talent. All novelists — all realistic novelists — make the same transference, but some rely on it more heavily than others. In Waugh’s case, it seems to me, there is less pure invention than we might normally have supposed. The kind of world he described in his fiction wasn’t one he had to experience imaginatively: its elements lay dispersed all around him.

If this premise is acceptable it allows a more precise idea of the kind of novelist Waugh was (he is not like Dickens, for example) and it also makes a reading of Brideshead Revisited a little easier to achieve.

To summarize as briefly as possible, the novel consists of a sustained recollection on the part of the narrator, Captain Charles Ryder. It opens during the Second World War. Charles’s battalion is billeted in the grounds of Brideshead Castle and his arrival there prompts a long reconsideration of the relationships he enjoyed with its one-time occupants — the aristocratic, Catholic Flyte family — during the 1920s.

At Oxford Charles meets and is taken up by the dreamily eccentric Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the family. Charles is soon introduced to its other members and spends increasing amounts of his time at Brideshead. He is utterly captivated both by Sebastian and by the house itself. But, as Charles is drawn closer into the family, he and Sebastian drift apart. Sebastian evolves into a self-destructive alcoholic, finds life at home impossible and moves abroad.

Some years later, Charles — now a successful artist — meets Sebastian’s sister Julia again while on a transatlantic liner. They soon become lovers and plan to marry. This course of action is impeded because they both have to divorce their respective partners and also because of the return to England of Julia’s father Lord Marchmain. Lord Marchmain had scandalized society by openly taking a mistress and had abandoned his wife, family and religion to live abroad in self-imposed exile. He returns home to die, still a resolute apostate. The climax of the novel is a death-bed scene where, at the very last moment, Lord Marchmain acknowledges his faith. This gesture compels Julia to remain true to hers also, and she refuses to live with or marry Charles — even though Lord Marchmain had altered his will to leave Brideshead to them both. Charles accepts her decision and they part for ever.

The novel’s epilogue sees Charles wandering through the deserted and decrepit Brideshead contemplating the past. He is a sad and melancholy man but the experience has provided him with a faith of his own and, it’s strongly implied, he has converted to Catholicism.

The novel, Waugh said in a letter to Nancy Mitford, “is all about God.” This is only part of the truth. The events in Waugh’s life which made an appearance in his fiction were treated with an unremitting honesty, as Gilbert Pinfold makes abundantly clear. This is also true of the theme of betrayal and the faithless wife in A Handful of Dust, and his experience of war in the excellent and often underrated Sword of Honour. Brideshead belongs to this line of Waugh’s fiction but it’s the one book where the area of personal revelation and exploration is obscured by the unsatisfactory “story” surrounding it. The lingering over meals and wine, the implausible destinies of most of the characters, the meandering sprawl of the narrative are distractions and obfuscations. Beneath this Waugh’s real intentions can with some effort be made out. To put it crudely, Brideshead Revisited is not, as he would have it, about “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely related characters”; it’s about, first, the nature of a love that can exist between two young men and, second, the particular character of Waugh’s own religious faith.

The first part of Brideshead Revisited is an evocation of Oxford in the twenties and of a class of friendship which would now be recognized as homosexual. Waugh clouds the issue but the homosexual references are so numerous that only a wilful stubbornness could ignore their implication. When Charles’s relationship with Sebastian ends, the love interest is sustained in the person of Julia. However, although her similarity to Sebastian is continually stressed, the description of Charles’s love affair with her is almost wholly lifeless. It’s the character of Sebastian which attracts our interest, but his exit from the novel is clumsily abrupt and his ultimate fate — as a tame drunk in a monastery somewhere — is a feeble stab at plausibility.

After the Sebastian-Charles relationship the second theme of the novel engages Waugh’s remaining serious attention. As the family prepares for Lord Marchmain’s death, Charles systematically attacks, with devastating rationality, the tenets of the Catholic faith. To the agnostic or atheist reader — perhaps to the non-Catholic reader — everything about the book’s conclusion is maddeningly unsatisfying. And Waugh encourages this reaction with grim perversity. The reader is cajoled into condemning the Flyte family’s destructive faith. We cannot understand and must deplore Lord Marchmain’s death-bed recantation. We find it impossible to comprehend the reasons why Julia rejects Charles and we earnestly hope Charles will curse her for an ignorant fool. Finally, it becomes inconceivable that — at the novel’s end — Charles too should adopt their faith. But Waugh has no wish to provide a comforting or remotely rational explanation for his faith. It does not partake of reason or logic. Its sustaining power would be of no account if it did. It functions, for him at least, as the most severe and uncompromising of challenges, and it’s this aspect that Waugh so ruthlessly illustrates in the final pages.

This disharmony between the two themes of the novel and much of the narrative which is meant to reveal them may be one way of explaining the many dissatisfactions arising from this curious novel. Essentially it comes down to this: Waugh fudges the issue on the first theme and takes up the second halfway through the book, encumbered by having to work through a narrative in which he has only a superficial interest.

A television adaptation, I surmised, might seize the opportunity of focusing the emphasis on these subtextual obsessions. To a very limited extent this has been attempted.

I’ve seen the first five episodes — six hours — of Granada’s forthcoming adaptation of the novel. It is scrupulously faithful to the original. John Mortimer’s script uses Waugh’s own dialogue and vocabulary at every opportunity. Even the “feel” of the novel has been maintained through the extensive use of voiceover narration.

These episodes cover the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and take in their Oxford careers, a visit to Lord Marchmain in Venice, and several holidays at Brideshead. One of the defects of the novel, and where television actually improves on the original, is in the character of Charles. In the book his personality is — frankly — dull and boring. It’s hard to imagine why someone as intriguing as Sebastian should want to have anything to do with him. On film we have Jeremy Irons as Charles, fleshing out the “I” figure admirably. At least we can see why Sebastian and the preening aesthete Anthony Blanche (excellently rendered by Nicholas Grace) should be fascinated: simply he’s good-looking and they clearly fancy him. This implication is more heavily emphasized than in the novel but doesn’t move much beyond this. Sebastian puts his arms round Charles’s shoulders but otherwise their affection remains chaste. (Mortimer does get Charles on some occasions to light his cigarette from Sebastian’s. A code?)

This policy decision to follow the book at all costs is commendable (it extends to set decorations, costumes, even — with one important exception — hairstyles) though I should imagine it’s going to be progressively hard to maintain in the second half. However, it does mean that the faults of the book are carried over to the film. Certain explanations are not forthcoming — notably in the case of Sebastian’s self-loathing and his mysterious shame “of being unhappy.” A charge of tedium is sure to be levelled, as it can be at the book. A lot more could have been cut with little damage, and, as it is, it’s going to have to be spread fairly thin to cover twelve hours of viewing time.

There is one slip-up, though, which seems, in the midst of so much attention to detail, curious. In the novel both Sebastian and Julia are dark. Their extreme likeness to one another is regularly referred to — a fact which is intended to make Julia an obvious Sebastian surrogate. But in the series Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) is blond and Julia (Diana Quick) is dark. Why, I wonder. It seems a stupid oversight.

Otherwise one can only applaud. The acting is of a uniformly high standard. Anthony Andrews gives the performance of his life as Sebastian, the locations — Oxford, Venice, Castle Howard — are superb, and there’s a classic John Gielgud cameo as Charles’s eccentric father. The first episode is being shown on Monday 12 October. Despite all the problems, well worth watching.

1981

In the final episode of Brideshead Revisited Charles Ryder and Julia sit on the steps in the enormous house and agree to part. They’re both weeping and generally inarticulate, but one of the “broken sentences” Charles manages to mutter between stifled sobs is “So long to say so little.” It could serve quite nicely for the last word on this paradoxically compelling serial. Rather like the book itself, I suspect that it was the first half that got us watching the second. The departure of Sebastian, leaving centre stage to Charles Ryder, consigned most of the final episodes to a level of infuriating dullness. It’s a foreseeable defect, but one which scriptwriter John Mortimer seemed reluctant to avoid.

There’s been much talk of Mortimer’s faithfulness to the text, but in changing medium — from novel to TV series — such commendable rectitude can often be technically inept if not wrong-headed. This was particularly evident in episode six, where Julia is finally led on stage. Almost the entire episode was a sepia flashback of the courtship of Rex Mot-tram. In the book this largely takes the form of straightforward reported speech, but there are also some pages of direct conversation — post facto reminiscence by Julia and Charles. This is a clumsy device in the novel, but on the screen it comes across as sheer thoughtlessness. The voiceover renditions of this dialogue, and the clear intimacy that the interlocutors share, effectively deprive the forthcoming Charles/Julia romance of any vestige of suspense. We know from the very outset of Julia’s appearance, while we’re still in the process of learning about her and Rex, that she and Charles will end up together. One minute Charles is an art student in Paris, then suddenly we’re presented with a view of him on an ocean liner arm in arm with Julia. To someone who doesn’t know the book such methods of moving the story on must appear bafflingly amateurish.

Mortimer, of course, is simply reproducing Waugh’s own struggles with the plot, and to that extent is blameless. But, while Mortimer’s adaptation is by and large unobtrusive, he can’t entirely escape responsibility as he does occasionally contribute material of his own.

The most notable expansion has been of the General Strike episode. The strike, and the party Charles and Boy Mulcaster go to while it’s on, occupy some five and a half pages in the novel. In the serial these peripheral events took up an entire episode. The party scenes in particular had to be supplied almost entirely by Mortimer. This isn’t a bad thing; in fact these scenes were amusing and entertaining. The point is that if you can take these sort of liberties with the text on one occasion, then there are no grounds for not taking them on others, and the excuse of “scrupulous adherence” is no longer viable.

This takes us on to another area where Mortimer’s script has to bear some of the blame: dialogue. Because, in the novel, Waugh has selected first person narration, he finds himself having to get other characters to tell Charles various facts in order to fill in gaps in his — the narrator’s — knowledge. Waugh does this by allowing these other characters very lengthy uninterrupted monologues. A good example is provided by Cordelia telling Charles, over several pages, of Sebastian’s fate. Now, this only just works on the page. On the screen it seems almost a wilful breach of the conventions of realism. Film is an omniscient style of narration, the technical requirements of restricted point-of-view don’t apply, we’re not — in other words — inhabiting Charles Ryder’s consciousness. Where the whole thing broke down was in maintaining these monologues on the screen. Just because Charles doesn’t interject in the book didn’t mean that, in the realistic world of the TV serial, he had to keep a similar silence. He never said a word. Never said “Mmmm” or “I see” or “You’ve got a point there.” The camera frequently cut to him but all you got was a soulful look.

This had a further consequence as well as the irritation it gave rise to. Jeremy Irons as Charles had a difficult task. Charles Ryder is a typically dull Waugh narrator figure, like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust and Guy Crouchback in The Sword of Honour trilogy. But, somehow, Irons has contrived to make him more pompous and unlikeable than he is in the book. This is partly to do with his persistent non-participation in conversations but it’s also to do with Irons’s interpretation of Charles’s character, his repertoire of weak smiles and pursed lips. By the end of the serial I found Charles intensely off-putting, a sidling, supercilious creep, his cigarette daintily poised between thumb and forefinger. This may have been deliberate; it certainly makes Julia’s rejection of him at the end eminently comprehensible. But it also had more ironic side effects. In comparison to Irons’s Charles, Waugh’s villains — Julia (his wife), Rex Mottram and even Hooper — appear warm and sympathetic. Julia may be silly and materialistic but it’s very hard to sanction Charles’s treatment of her, let alone his callous disregard for his children. Even in the book this comes across as something of a puzzle, but in the serial it looks almost like a deliberate attempt to alienate the audience from Charles.

Curiously, though, the vast amount of criticism the serial has generated is a tribute to the overall success of the venture. It has provoked persistent debate and controversy at all levels and on all manner of topics, which is no mean achievement after all, and should be a source of genuine satisfaction to those who participated in the project.

It’s most lasting effect is a comprehensive and timely reassessment of the novel itself and the position it occupies in the Waugh canon. It’s surely clear now that Brideshead Revisited represents an aberration, a lapse. More kindly, perhaps, it can be seen as an unsuccessful prototype, a false start on themes tackled more skilfully in Waugh’s greatest achievement The Sword of Honour. The next challenge?

1981

The compelling drama surrounding the “War of the Falkland Islands,” or whatever it will come to be known as, made most of the week’s television seem nugatory — or, to put it in a more charitable way, highlighted its essentially artificial and fictive nature. Radio won the day, however, with its live transmission of the emergency parliamentary debate on Saturday morning. If there was ever a time when one wished TV cameras had been allowed into the House of Commons, this was surely it. Equally astonishing was the blare of xenophobic, jingoistic sentiment that erupted. It was an unsettling experience seeing the bellicose clichés being dusted off and reading the trumpeting headlines and leaders in the national press. This must have been what it was like before the Crimea, the Boer War or 1914, one thought bemusedly. Edward Du Cann’s absurd but surely to be immortalized assertion about the impossibly stretched lines of communication summed it all up: “I don’t remember Wellington whining on about Torres Vedras,” he said with no trace of irony. Yet we were whizzing further back through time by Monday morning as an ITN Special Report brought us the departure of the Invincible and the Hermes for the South Atlantic. “There’s a curiously seventeenth-century atmosphere about Portsmouth today,” the reporter opined. Sir Francis Drake and the Armada were regularly alluded to. However, the irate gung-ho spirit seemed to have subsided to a degree. The analyses offered by various experts were in a tone that seemed to imply a faintly unreal air about the whole undertaking. Were we really sailing off to wage war against the Argentinians? Were these prognoses about the superiority of the British Fleet, for once, not part of some hypothetical war game?

And yet the crowds packed the quayside, there was cheering and flag-waving as our gallant boys sailed off to do battle with the foe. The most alarming aspect of all the multitude of words so far expended is that comparatively few of them have been concerned with the actual fate that may greet these servicemen. “People will get hurt” appears at the moment to be the favourite euphemism for “killed and maimed.” “I’m afraid people get hurt in war,” was John Nott’s variation during a commendably vigorous and aggressive interview by Brian Walden on Weekend World (LWT), as if he were talking about pulled muscles or tennis elbow. Once again the bleak sense of déjá vu descended: images of chateau-dwelling, claret-swilling generals during the First World War, staff officers planning strategy hundreds of miles from the front line. The front line in this particular case looks like being halfway round the world. If I were a naval rating on HMS Invincible I would feel very uneasy about what I was being asked to do.

But then that’s not a characteristic response from people who volunteer to join the armed forces. This fact was made evident by a coincidental repeat of The Woolridge View (BBC2) about the Navy fieldgun teams which participate in the Royal Tournament. Here men volunteered to “learn to withstand unreasonable physical pain” within a training regime whose working conditions were blind obedience to the unbelievably tyrannical discipline of the NCO coaches. These men mercilessly knock their teams into shape. “Once fit,” a coach boasted, “they become beasts.” I suppose at this point one should growl “Look out Argentina,” but on reflection — not much required — it seems demeaning and sad. Clearly there’s nothing terribly sinister about it being applied to sport, but, equally clearly, one knows that these same values on display are intended to function on the battlefield as well.

1982

Shortly after the Falklands War I made two predictions in this column. One was right and the other was wrong. The first was that the journalists would have large axes to grind and deep grudges to settle over the treatment they had received. The second was that when the reels of film finally came back with the cameramen and reporters the visual record of the war would be transformed, that, finally rid of the MOD minders and government censorship, we’d get to see the pictures that had been denied us. “There should be,” I said, “some fascinating documentaries.”

Well, I was wrong. The Falklands documentaries and videos have established that what we saw at the time — albeit two weeks late — is all we’re going to get. That it was a naive assumption to think otherwise was made clear on Panorama (BBC1) in an excellent and informative programme on the astonishing hamstringing that the media experienced.

The main argument against unrestricted reporting of a war is that any information made available to the public is of value to the enemy. This is manifestly true in the case of military operations. “Eisenhower announces date of D-Day invasion” would not have been the kind of headline calculated to win friends among the armed forces, and no one, not even the most passionate advocate of a free press, would expect this sort of information to be made open. On the Panorama programme various top brass and the editor of the Daily Telegraph made exactly this point. This would have been fair and just if the practice at the time had been even approximate to this ground rule. But the mare’s nest of crossed lines, ambivalences, duplicities, disinformation and plain lying made the excuse of preserving military secrets a ludicrous sham.

The best example of this was the Goose Green leak when the World Service announced that the paratroops were advancing on the settlement, as indeed they were. The understandable wrath of the men on the ground was directed at the quislings of the BBC when in actual fact the information had been provided by a “senior government official” keen to provide some “good news.” Not, in any event, that it would have been difficult for the Argentinians to have drawn the conclusion that Goose Green was a key target. One of the more curious assumptions of the MOD’s case is that the enemy is extremely stupid and can only base his strategic and tactical decisions on what he happens to read in the newspapers.

It was Churchill who coined the phrase “in war the truth is so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” The aptness of this saw is very confined. Give it a general frame of reference and its aphoristic certainties conceal a more sinister import. As one of the news editors perceptively remarked, this sort of media manipulation possesses only short-term advantages, but in the longer term its consequences can be far from beneficial for the perpetrators. It’s clear that from now on a deep cynicism and profound suspicion will colour the relationship between the press and the MOD. It won’t be a bad thing if some of that rubs off on the public.

But will it? Most of the truth about the Falklands will emerge eventually. Some books are already telling us facts we didn’t know before, certain reporters are re-filing the “missing” dispatches. But they will be read by only a fraction of those who were tuned in to the news and reading the newspapers at the time.

And the MOD and the government will no doubt claim that this Panorama programme was biased. Of course it was and correctly so. The gags have been removed and the media have made a convincing case against the government’s manipulation of the news to suit its ad hoc political motives and ambitions. The ball is now in its court. But I suspect that the response will be “not available for comment.”

1982

Those Tory MPs dismayed by Archbishop Runcie’s lack of gung-ho spirit over our Great Victory in the Falklands will be able to console themselves with reruns of the first major documentary to have emerged from the conflict: BBC1’s eight-part Task Force South. Here was a chance, one thought, to get things straight, to produce an account of the war under conditions where accusations of aiding and abetting the enemy and lowering national morale need no longer apply. And, what’s more, under circumstances that should be a gift to your average documentary maker, namely an eager public who sensed there was more to be told and, perhaps most valuable, a public who, if not well informed, was at least cognizant of all the major facts, geography, names of key personalities, etc.

So why was Task Force South—or at least the two episodes we saw last week — so wretchedly bland, almost insultingly simple in its tone and approach? It was as if a decision had been taken not to make the thing too complicated, as if it were aimed at an intermediate class of foreign language students — a teaching aid in an “O” level course on contemporary British history. There was a lot of skilful editing on show and for much of the time the pictures were allowed to tell their own story, but the narration — supplied by Richard Baker and Brian Hanrahan — and the editorial approach seemed studiously inoffensive and pussyfooting. There was a notable absence of comment over the Carrington resignation and the merest nod at Al Haig’s furious shuttling. Both those topics, I’ll concede, are particularly gamey cans of worms, and I dare say that it could be argued that even lifting the lid for a second or two could eat into time that could be more profitably used elsewhere: but some indication of the complexities and controversies surrounding them was definitely required. Thus far at least, it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.

The first two programmes dealt with the initial days of the crisis and the dispatch of the fleet and here, it seemed to me, was another manifest lapse. The fact that there was a deal of jubilant unreflecting patriotism in the air at the time was incontrovertible and was clearly established by the pictures. But the narration failed to comment on the illusory nature of this elation or display any of the sobering but necessary ironies with which hindsight has now provided us. The most remarkable phenomenon of the early days of the crisis was exactly this dangerous self-delusion about the nature of war that appeared to have almost the entire country in its chilling grip. The prime function of any programme dealing with those heady days in April should be first to point out and highlight the cruel absurdities of the “Stick it up your junta” spirit and then do its utmost to eradicate any residual traces. There is no sign of that happening at the moment in Task Force South.

1982

This is a catch-all title to enable me to include articles I’ve written that often have a bearing — sometimes remote — on books I have published or the release of films I have written. Both my essays on the British “Caff” and minicabs, for example, were designed to promote, first, my novel Armadillo and then the broadcast of my three-part adaptation of it on the BBC. More and more the publication of a book seems to involve the author in all manner of ancillary journalism. The advantage of this, however, is that the article can be more uncompromising, and to the point: the necessary finesse involved in slipping hard facts into a work of fiction is not required. In this kind of journalism polemic overrules disinterestedness: a case has to be made as entertainingly as possible and sometimes that motive is exhilarating.

It turned out to be a 150-mile detour. Shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon I saw the first sign. “Welcome to Tallapoosa.” It had an unreal familiarity: Tallapoosa revisited, almost. Then there was another sign. “Lions Club of Tallapoosa welcomes you. Meets every Thursday at Tally Mt. Country Club.” And then, a little way up the road, “Tallapoosa city limit. Welcome. City of Tallapoosa. Please obey all ordinances. Population 2,869. Drive carefully.” The familiarity, I realized, was a poetic one: “Stars at Tallapoosa” by Wallace Stevens:

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.

Ninety years ago this week, on a cold blustery Thursday morning on 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright carried their flying machine — the Flyer — from its wooden shed and set it carefully on the forty-foot launchway of pine two-by-four planks and prepared it for take off. Their camp was on the Outer Banks, long thin islands, 90 percent sand dunes, off the coast of North Carolina. The nearest hamlet was Kitty Hawk, a small cluster of clapboard houses that sheltered the seasonal fishermen and the crew of the coastguard station. If you didn’t fish or work for the coastguard there was nothing much to bring you to Kitty Hawk. All around them was sand and a few huge dune hills, the Kill Devil Hills, thrown up by the scouring winds that blew in off the wintry Atlantic. It was the winds — their constant presence, their reliable force — that had drawn the Wright brothers from Dayton, Ohio to Kitty Hawk where, over the previous three years, they had spent the autumn and early winter months testing their big man-carrying soaring gliders and perfecting the controlling mechanisms that allowed them to steer.

The wind that December day was gusting between twenty-two and twenty-seven miles an hour, a little too strong for their purposes but, as both the brothers were determined to be back in Dayton in time for Christmas, they decided to press on. So they hung out a signal on their wooden shack to alert the men in the coastguard station at Kitty Hawk some four miles away. They needed witnesses for what they hoped was about to ensue. Three surfmen duly strolled down the beach from the station: John Daniels, Adam Etheridge and Will Dough. Two curious hangers-on accompanied them, a lumber merchant called W. D. Brinkley and a teenage boy, Johnny Moore.

Orville Wright set up his glass-plate camera on a tripod some way off aiming at a point towards the end of the launching rail. John Daniels was invited to take the photograph, a simple matter of squeezing the rubber bulb that activated the shutter. The small four-cylinder petrol engine that powered the two pushing propellors on the Flyer was started and was run for a while to allow the motor to warm up.

The honour of piloting the Flyer had been decided by a toss of a coin and it was Orville, dressed in his usual business suit, with stiff collar and tie, who lay down beside the motor on the bottom wing and hooked his shoes behind a strut on the trailing edge. His hips were fixed in a wooden cradle that could slide laterally to and fro, a movement that activated the “wing-warping” devices that allowed the pilot to control the direction of the Flyer. His hands were on the control lever that operated the front horizontal elevator. The whole 600-pound flying machine rested on a plank which in turn was supported by a small wheeled trolley (with wheels made from bicycle hubcaps) which ran along the launching rail, which was pointed in the direction of the prevailing wind.

At 10.35 the restraining wire was slipped and the Flyer began to clatter slowly along the launching rail. It was moving so slowly that Wilbur — who was holding the struts on the right-hand wing tip to keep the machine level — had no difficulty jogging alongside. As the Flyer reached the end of the track Orville pulled the control lever to turn the big front elevator up and the machine rose abruptly into the air, the plank on its trolley falling away from the skids into the sand. The Flyer’s speed was approximately thirty miles an hour at this stage but, because of the stiff headwind, was actually moving through the air at about seven mph. Wilbur, loping alongside, easily kept pace with the machine’s undulating progress through the air. Orville, now some ten to fifteen feet above the ground, was having difficulty controlling the big elevator. He would raise it, and the Flyer would surge upwards, he would lower it and then it would dip suddenly towards the sand. This sinuous vermiculate course was maintained for about twelve seconds until an oblique gust of wind coinciding with a downward dip caused one of the skids beneath the machine to hit the sand and the Flyer came suddenly to earth with a severe jolt some 120 feet along the beach from the point where it had risen from the launching rail.

One small miracle, besides the larger one that was achieved that day at Kill Devil Hills, was that John Daniels, the big surfman from the coastguard station, had remembered to press the rubber bulb that activated the shutter release of the camera as the Flyer took to the air, thereby inadvertently producing one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century. It’s not just that the camera recorded one of those moments that changed the world irrevocably but it is also, or so it seems to me, a wonderful photograph in its own right: perfectly exposed, wonderfully sharp, and a poignant and moving tribute to the human spirit; values enshrined not so much in the fragile beautiful white machine lifting itself slowly into the air but rather in Wilbur’s figure to the side — tautly poised, legs apart, staring at his younger brother prone on the lower wing, his arms half crooked, expectant, almost willing the machine into its new element. Of all the many photographs the Wright brothers took of their flying machines in their months at Kill Devil Hills, and some of them are superb, this adventitious snapshot by John Daniels must rank as one of the most memorable images of all time.

One wonders, also, what Wilbur would be thinking at that moment, at the culmination of this intense but comparatively brief interest in powered, heavier-than-air flight. It is hard to say: neither Wilbur nor Orville Wright seemed to be expressive or forthcoming men; there is no trace in their writings of much exhilaration or indeed of any romantic notion of being the first men to fly. They were a redoubtably practical pair, modest, capable and dogged, and it seems almost as if they were drawn to the challenge of powered flight out of a sense of whim rather than adventure, of a need to find some beguiling way of passing their time rather than being driven by obsession.

They were members of a large family: there were two other older brothers and a younger sister, and Wilbur’s birth, in 1867, the third child, preceded Orville’s by four years. Their father was a bishop of a nonconformist Protestant sect called the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, but neither Wilbur nor Orville “got” religion, their only concession to their father’s faith was that they would not fly on a Sunday. The atmosphere in the family home was close and folksily fun. Wilbur and Orville, neither of whom married, appeared to have a twin-like communication and understanding with each other. Neither drank or smoked. Both were averagely tall and lean, Wilbur was quite bald by his thirties, Orville was balding but wore a bold moustache that caused some to liken him to Edgar Allan Poe. He had a reputation in the family of being something of a dandy, though by any other standards than those of the Wrights such foppishness is hard to detect, though it is true that in one photograph of the two of them Orville is wearing a pair of snazzily checked socks.

When the cycling craze hit America in the 1890s the two brothers, who had initially gone into printing as a profession, opened a bicycle shop in downtown Dayton that was soon a flourishing business where they manufactured and sold their own brand of bicycle. It seems that the ease with which they had triumphed in this area of transportation caused them to look elsewhere for another challenge. And aerial navigation, as it was then referred to, was what took their fancy.

The myth has it that it was newspaper reports of the death in 1896 of Otto Lilienthal, the famous German glider, that concentrated the brothers’ minds on flying machines. Lilienthal did indeed do much to pave the way for powered flight with his scientific formulations of surface pressures and wing construction but powered flight, by the end of the nineteenth century, seemed as remote a possibility then as turning base metal into gold was in medieval Europe. H. G. Wells however, in a celebrated essay in 1901, predicted that the first aeroplanes would take to the air long before the year 2000: 1950 was his educated guess.

So the Wright brothers applied their minds to the problem of powered flight and sent off to the Smithsonian Institution for whatever literature on the subject was available in May 1899. The Smithsonian duly responded and sent along four slim pamphlets, free of charge. In this context of almost total ignorance the fact that just four and a half years later the Wright brothers’ own powered flying machine took off from the sands of Kitty Hawk almost defies belief and is perhaps the most effective testimony to the cool practicality, the commonsensical thoroughness of their unique cast of mind.

For they were not alone: in France, Germany, England and the USA would-be aviators were all trying to make the next step from manned gliders. Lilienthal had made over 2,000 glides; Englishman Percy Pilcher had glided 750 feet from the top of one hill to another, in the States Samuel Langley had successfully flown thirty-pound steam-powered model aeroplanes and Octave Chanute was developing manned gliders to carry on from where Lilienthal’s premature death had left the science.

Broadly speaking, all these experimenters were making a conceptual error about the prospect of flight. They tended to view the air much as they would the sea: something to be ridden much as a boat rides the waves. Langley hoped his flying machines would harness the “internal work of the wind” and even be able to circumnavigate the globe without landing. Chanute built a six-wing glider with wings that could move as the air currents buffeted them. The pragmatic Wrights, however, approached matters differently. They saw everything as a fundamental problem of control, that there was little purpose in providing any kind of glider with power if you didn’t know what to do if and when you suddenly found you were flying. The first models they made in 1900 were large kites and then they quickly evolved into building unmanned gliders which they flew with ropes attached and finally manned gliders, taking to the air on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, making many glides of over 200 yards and staying aloft for half a minute at a time. Back in their bicycle workshop in Dayton they analysed the information they had gleaned and, as they built a new flying machine each year, steadily modified its design.

Because they concentrated on controlling the flying machine the brothers quickly encountered the key inherent problems of sustained flight. Control has to be organized around three axes, lateral, vertical and longitudinal, or, put in nautical terms, the pilot has to be able to control pitch, yaw and roll. What the Wright brothers achieved, to simplify drastically, during their gliding experiments in 1901 and 1902 at Kitty Hawk was a method of controlling movement in these three dimensions. Only by controlling all three dimensions, for example, is it possible to make a banked turn in a flying machine. In the gliders of Lilienthal, Pilcher and Chanute the only way of exercising control was for the pilot to hang by his arms and thrash his body around to disturb the centre of equilibrium. A dangerous manoeuvre in any event as both Pilcher and Lilienthal died in gliding crashes. In the powered “hops”—where the flying machine left the ground for a second or two — of such pioneers as Langley and Maxim there was simply no time to demonstrate control.

But in 1902 in the dunes of Kill Devil Hills Orville and Wilbur Wright were turning and banking their big glider right and left with remarkable consistency. They were able to do this through the process they called “wing-warping,” a precursor of the modern aileron, where cables controlled by lateral movements of the hip cradle twisted the ends of the wings, pulling one into a positive angle and the other into a negative, or vice versa, with wind pressure then causing the wing with the positive angle to lift, and the wing with the negative to dip — and so the turn begins.

In the course of their four years of work the brothers made many discoveries about the mystery of flight, and, amongst other achievements, built their own four-cylinder engine and tested wing cross-sections in their own wind tunnel, but it was their development of the three-dimensional system of aeroplane control — the basic system that still operates all winged transportation today — that really marks them out as the great progenitors, the first true flyers.

The epochal day of 17 December 1903 did not end with Orville’s sinuous 120-foot flight. In true Wright fashion the damaged skid was swiftly repaired and the Flyer carried back to the launching rail for another attempt. Three more flights were completed, the third being the most remarkable. This time Wilbur piloted the Flyer and by now he had become more accustomed to the sensitive front elevator. The Flyer took off, its course through the air less undulating, and puttered off across the sandy plain at a speed of no more than ten miles an hour. Wilbur had flown nearly 300 yards when, once again, a slightly over-enthusiastic adjustment of the controls brought the machine down to earth, badly damaging the front struts that held the elevator. That was that for the day, and for 1903, as it turned out, for the Flyer was further damaged when, as the men were replacing it in its shed, a powerful gust of wind flipped it over on its back.

In many ways the fourth flight of that December day deserves the real prominence in the history of aviation. It lasted fifty-nine seconds and covered 852 feet and if anyone ever doubted that the Flyer was capable of sustained flight then Wilbur’s effort at the end of that memorable day would have quashed them completely.

Of course the 1903 flights were only the beginning of the Wright brothers’ story. New Flyers were built and tested and by 1905 the Flyer III was capable of staying aloft for half an hour at a time and flying many miles. As news of the brothers’ achievements began to be broadcast to an incredulous world so too did the atmosphere of envy, malice, bad faith and cupidity that attends most great innovators begin to gather round them. Sceptics at home and abroad refused to believe these taciturn bicycle makers from Ohio had conquered the air; former colleagues strove to hog the limelight; less successful aviators stole their ideas. Lawsuits, patent battles, controversy, claim and counter-claim continued to dog their lives for many years. Even in the 1930s there was a systematic effort to discredit their achievements when the so-called “lost” flights of Gustave Whitehead (it was suggested, quite fraudulently, that he had flown half a mile in 1901) were advanced as the true precursors of aviation history. But the Wright brothers, true to their natures, worked on relentlessly, steadily perfecting their flying machines until the technology they had initiated eventually superseded them. Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever. Orville lived on until 1948, the grand old man of American aviation, surviving long enough to see the astonishing progress of his invention and see what contribution — good and bad — it had made to the history of the twentieth century.

Such speculation risks entering the realm of banality and sentiment, but, as we idly cruise the upper atmosphere in our jumbo jets pondering the wisdom of a second Bloody Mary before lunch, and, elsewhere, Stealth bombers wreak pinpoint destruction by laser beam, it is worth reflecting on that winter day at Kill Devil Hills when the five men from Kitty Hawk watched the two brothers in their white muslin flying machine lift off the ground and chug erratically through the air over the chilly sand dunes. It was such a short time ago and feverish hindsight makes one want to invest the occasion with monumental significance. But, reportedly, John Daniels, Will Dough, Adam Etheridge, W. D. Brinkley and Johnny Moore were not overly impressed — they had seen the brothers make much longer and more graceful flights in their gliders in previous years. Even the brothers, when they cabled the news that evening to the family that the flights had been successful, seemed more concerned to let them know that they would be home in time for Christmas. However there was an eyewitness the following year when a new Flyer made the first ever circling flight and with a little effort of imagination one can gain some vicarious sense of the sheer strangeness of the phenomenon, as it must have seemed then, and share a little of the moment, a sense that the world would never be the same again:

The machine is held until ready to start … then with a tremendous flapping and snapping of the four cylinder engine, the huge machine springs aloft. When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it; and I said then, and I believe still it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air toward you — a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead … coming right toward you with the tremendous flap of its propellors, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move aside for fear that it might come down suddenly; but I tell you friends, the sensation one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.

1993

About eleven months ago in Edinburgh, so I have just been told by a friend who was there, Anthony Burgess turned to the audience he was addressing and said quite calmly, “I have only a year left to live.” There was a shocked silence and then Anthony, apparently, carried on without a care in the world.

I knew, we knew, that he was not in good health latterly, but the last time I saw him he did not seem much changed. He was smoking, inevitably, and we had a drink or three. He was participating in whatever book business had brought him to London with his usual heroic energy and benign composure, and, for all I know, was writing a novel, a book review and a concerto in his idler moments. All the same, the news of his death comes as a huge shock perhaps because one always thought that, having cheated the grim reaper once, Anthony’s prodigious energy would continue to defy mortality as long as he felt it was worth it.

I refer, of course, to the now legendary moment in 1959 when Anthony was diagnosed as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and was told he would be dead before a year had run its course. In the time he had left remaining to him, or so he tells it, to provide some sort of legacy for his soon-to-be widow, he wrote four novels, non-stop, one after the other. And when the diagnosis blessedly proved to have been false he carried on working with that same restless creativity. From the outside it seemed as if Anthony’s artistic momentum was indeed a kind of life force, sustaining and vivifying, and that as long as he was there working he would outlive the lot of us.

He was an exemplary writer in many senses. He was the towering example, for instance, to all late starters, not writing his first novel until he was in his forties. He was an intellectual, a polymath, at home in many languages, with a cultural sweep that was awe-inspiring, but at the same time he avoided all pretension and elitism, equally happy to let frivolity and fun — in the form of movies, soap operas, TV, chat shows, beach blanket best sellers or whatever — benefit from his shrewd and enthusiastic evaluation. And he worked hard, worked hard for his living, writing novels and criticism, screenplays and libretti, almost anything he wanted to do and could turn his pen to.

In this sense he seems to me to be a very British writer. If there is one thing that characterizes the British writer, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is that by and large he or she writes a lot, is very productive, is professional. Writing is both a serious calling and a serious career, and Anthony, in the twentieth century, embodied that attitude with more style and panache and consistent high standards than anyone else I can think of. But in many other senses he regarded himself as something of an outsider. A cradle Catholic, a northerner, non-Oxbridge, with a working life spent largely abroad, he considered himself, I believe, beyond the pale of the metropolitan literary world. And so much the better for him: he is the perfect example of the non-parochial in British literature. If ever the British novel is described as being cramped and confined by this cramped and confined little island Anthony Burgess can provide the flourishing counterpoise.

I remember on the occasion of his seventieth birthday celebrations him saying cheerfully on television that he never expected to be honoured by his native country. “You have to be a footballer or a jockey to be recognized by the establishment in Britain,” he said. And of course it is the usual matter of shame and a sad reflection on our inherent philistinism that someone as special and worth celebrating as Anthony should have been ignored. But he would know, as would any person of sense, that what matters in the end is the work done rather than any bauble conferred, and the work will continue to fascinate and beguile in all its multitudinous facets. Amongst the thirty-odd novels he wrote the consensus would probably be that Earthly Powers is his masterpiece and it is hard to argue against its huge and confident sweep. But my own particular favourites, the ones I re-read, are the Enderby novels, Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, which are about the life and extraordinary times of a minor English poet — wonderfully rich and funny novels. I first read these books twenty years ago at university and read them again when I had the chance to meet Anthony many years later. Enderby, eccentric, unworldly, insouciant, obsessed by his art, but fully caught up in the physical pleasures of this world, brings Anthony’s unique and vital spirit forcefully to mind. I shall go and read them again now, and think how lucky I was — how lucky we all were — to meet and know their remarkable creator.

1993

One lucent September morning in 1928, two Germans, a man and a woman, and their worldly possessions, were landed on the beach of Floreana, an uninhabited island in the Galapagos archipelago. The man, Friedrich Ritter, was small, blond and wiry, a doctor and an amateur philosopher with a bent for bizarre, male-supremacist metaphysics. The woman was his lover, Dore Strauch, equally small, dark and somewhat self-consciously bohemian in dress and manner. She adored and venerated Friedrich.

Friedrich and Dore had planned their new life with Teutonic thoroughness. In Berlin during the course of their affair they accumulated a vast supply of stores and provisions and, when the time came for them to leave, they arranged a dinner party and introduced their astonished, respective spouses to each other and told them of their plans. Friedrich suggested to Herr Strauch that, as he was being deprived of a wife, perhaps it might soften the blow if his wife, Mrs Ritter, came to live and work for Herr Strauch as his housekeeper. This completely bizarre proposal was deemed a very satisfactory arrangement by all parties and so Friedrich’s wife duly moved in with Dore’s husband.

Having sorted out their abandoned spouses, Friedrich and Dore travelled halfway round the globe to this small island in the Pacific, their tropical Eden, where they planned to live out their days, far from the corruption and clamour of Europe.

Beyond the jagged lava beach Floreana was and is a lush and plentiful tropical island. Friedrich and Dore struggled up from the shore through the thickly forested slopes of the dominant mountain (Dore with some difficulty, her arthritis had left her with a pronounced limp but Friedrich’s stern philosophy forbade him from giving her a helping hand) until they found a clearing by a stream where they decided to build a house and a garden (designed and laid out upon strictly philosophical lines). They called the house, rather sweetly, “Friedo” and soon they had a rather ramshackle dwelling erected and a garden that was producing sufficient vegetables and fruit for their complicated diet. All, so far, was well.

The mistake Friedrich and Dore had made was to talk about their plans to journalists while they were waiting in Ecuador for passage to the Galapagos. Their story inspired and inflamed other troubled souls who, spurred on by Friedrich and Dore’s example, decided that there was room to spare in this particular earthly Paradise. Soon the first of a series of new arrivals on Floreana took place.

The first to come were an innocuous petit bourgeois family, also German, the Wittmers — Heinz and Margret with their young son Rolf. The Wittmers built their camp a mile away from Friedo and, although there was candid resentment between the two women, the Floreana settlers seemed to coexist with reasonable harmony.

But that equilibrium was soon to be seriously and fatally disturbed by the arrival of the third party of settlers to the island. The Baroness Eloïse Wagner de Bosquet could have stepped straight out of a film noir thriller directed by Erich von Stroheim. Sexually licentious, a peroxide blonde, gun-toting and with a murky and dubious past, the Baroness spoke French and German with an Austrian accent and claimed her great uncles were Liszt and Wagner. She had with her two lovers, a Frenchman, Rudolf Lorenz, and a well-built young American called Robert Philippson. She too had been inspired by Friedrich and Dore’s Edenic dreams but she planned to imbue them with a more practical thrust. She set about constructing what she described as a luxury hotel, to be known as the “Hacienda Paradiso.” Its clientele was to be the many millionaires cruising the Pacific in their yachts. It never really got beyond planning stages and Lorenz appeared to be the one paying for everything. He was completely in thrall to the Baroness and had sold his shop in Paris in order to finance the venture. Initially all three of them slept together in a large bed, but Lorenz soon became the victim of sadistic games played upon him by the Baroness and Philippson and took to spending more time visiting the Wittmers or up at Friedo with Dore and Friedrich. Dore felt particularly sorry for the young man and grew close to him. Lorenz’s abuse provoked in her a violent hatred for the Baroness, who she was convinced was entirely evil.

It was by now 1932 and the main protagonists in the Galapagos Affair were assembled. And in the event the mix proved too rich for one small Pacific atoll. Enmities grew and animosities deepened. The three groups of settlers withdrew increasingly into their own camps.

There was one benign and regular visitor to the island who tried to keep the peace. This was an American multi-millionaire and amateur botanist called Alan Hancock who every year cruised the Galapagos in his luxury yacht collecting specimens of marine life. Friedrich and Dore, who had met him first, regarded him as their special ally.

The bad feeling between the three groups of settlers was fairly generalized — petty squabbles and jealousies, arguments over minor thefts and water sources, and slights and snubs arising over important visitors to the island (the settlers had become remarkably famous, many yachts called in and cruise ships changed course to pass by Floreana in the hope of glimpsing them). But soon the ill nature began to be concentrated around the Friedo/Hacienda Paradiso axis.

What set events moving towards the bloody and mysterious final act is hard to gauge. It seems to have been the frequency with which Lorenz left the Hacienda to seek solace with the Wittmers and Friedrich and Dore but the feuding was also stimulated by the increasing egomania of the Baroness. She claimed to visiting journalists that she was now “The Empress of the Galapagos,” an assertion that particularly enraged Friedrich, and adopted high-minded and imperious manners that went with the self-conferred title. Furthermore the summer of 1934 was particularly hot — there was a serious drought — and Lorenz appeared to be growing weaker as a result of the constant physical abuse he received at the hands of the Baroness and Philippson. Philippson regularly beat him up, with the Baroness occasionally lending a hand with a riding crop. Also, they locked away Lorenz’s few possessions and denied him access to his money.

One day, the date is not clear, in late March of 1934, as the Galapagos Islands suffered their fifth month of broiling, desiccating heat, Lorenz appeared at the Wittmer house and announced that the Baroness and Philippson had “gone away” with some friends who were passing in a yacht en route for Tahiti. He told the same story to Friedrich and Dore, who accompanied him to the Hacienda Paradiso to see for themselves. Dore remembered that the place was like the Marie Celeste, perfectly neat and tidy, with family photographs still in their frames, and, sitting on a table, the Baroness’s most treasured possession, her copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dore found it hard to believe that the Baroness would have gone to Tahiti and left this behind.

But nothing happened; suspicions remained unvoiced and no one investigated further. The drought broke, the rains came in April, visitors and journalists still arived, and life seemed to go on as normal. Then in July, Lorenz decided finally to leave, taking advantage of the visit of a Norwegian fisherman called Nuggerud — who lived on a nearby island called Santa Cruz. Lorenz had become an increasingly morose and haggard figure since the Baroness’s mysterious disappearance, often observed weeping. But he managed to persuade Nuggerud to take him to Chatham Island where he could catch a ship bound for Ecuador. The Wittmers and Friedrich and Dore said farewell with mixed feelings. Dore reassured him that in time his miserable years on Floreana would appear merely as a bad dream.

The Baroness and Philippson gone, and now Lorenz. Three months later the startled Wittmers were surprised one morning by a distraught Dore at the door of their house. Friedrich, she said, was terribly ill, poisoned as a result of eating some potted chicken that had gone off. Dore too, so she claimed, had been sick after eating the meat, but Friedrich’s condition had seriously degenerated.

They found Friedrich in an appalling state, wracked with stomach cramps and his tongue so swollen he was unable to speak. The ever-practical Margret Wittmer rigged up an impromptu stomach pump but found it impossible to operate. Friedrich refused to allow her to inject him with morphine. According to Margret he scribbled a few words on a piece of paper and handed them to Dore. They read: “I curse you with my dying breath.” Friedrich died in the night, his body writhing with convulsions. When he was lifted up they found his back was a livid bluish red. Thick dark blood oozed from his nose. He was buried under a pile of stones in his philosophical garden.

Friedrich died on 21 November 1934. Four days earlier the captain of a tuna clipper, cruising near an uninhabited island in the north of the archipelago called Marchena, saw the beached remains of a small skiff and on going to investigate found the mummified bodies of the Norwegian Nuggerud and Lorenz. It was obvious that they had been shipwrecked weeks earlier and had died of thirst. The news of Friedrich’s death and the discovery of Lorenz’s body reached Alan Hancock in Los Angeles as he prepared another of his Pacific cruises. He sailed straight to Floreana to comfort and ultimately take Dore away. She returned to Berlin, leaving Floreana to the Wittmer family, where their descendants still live today. The final victim of the Galapagos Affair had been accounted for.

No one knows what really happened to the Baroness and Philippson, certainly they were never seen in Tahiti or anywhere else. But the consensus on the island, even at the time, was that Lorenz killed the Baroness and Philippson and dumped their bodies in the ocean for the sharks to dispose of. However it is most unlikely that such a weak-willed and physically wasted man could have overpowered them both single-handedly. His most likely accomplice was Friedrich, whose loathing of the Baroness was intense and who publicly exulted in her “departure.” Moreover, he regarded his relationship with Dore as effectively over and, for the last few months before his death, had been urging her to leave the island. With the Baroness gone, and Dore banished, and the Wittmers no challenge, he could resume his self-appointed role as solitary philosopher king of Floreana.

And Friedrich? In a book Dore wrote some years later she said he died of a stroke but the symptoms all point to botulin poisoning. The Wittmers claimed that Friedrich had told them earlier that the poisoned chicken meat would be safe to eat after it was boiled, and Dore told Alan Hancock she had given the meat “a good boiling.” Did Dore, either through malice or carelessness, not boil the meat enough? My own hunch is that she may have wanted to “punish” Friedrich for his suggestion that she leave him (after all, she had eaten the chicken herself, or so she claimed, and a sick Friedrich might have appreciated the ministrations of a dutiful Dore) but the punishment had gone hideously out of control.

Whatever the truth, the brute facts of the matter are that what began as an idealistic utopian experiment degenerated under the strain of the predictable human emotions of envy, pride, greed, lust and resentment — and a mix of atavistic territoriality and sexual threat — into a mystery that has fascinated and intrigued for over sixty years. Of the original settlers four died: one accidentally, one a victim of a possible crime of passion and the two others almost certainly as a result of cold-blooded murders motivated by fear and hatred. But who really did what to whom and why? The Galapagos Affair continues to enthral and beguile.

1995

In 1943, in open court, an American lawyer described Charlie Chaplin as “a little runt of a Svengali,” a “lecherous hound who lied like a cheap cockney cad.” The lawyer went on to call upon “American mothers and wives to stop this gray-headed buzzard dead in his tracks.” The world was at war and Charlie Chaplin was being hauled through the courts in a highly publicized, bitter and vituperative paternity suit. It was a low point in the extraordinary life of the world’s most popular entertainer, arguably the most famous film star in the history of the movies, but worse was to come.

Charlie Chaplin was born in south London, probably Walworth, in 1889. Both his father, Charles Chaplin senior, and his mother, Hannah, were moderately talented minor artistes in the Victorian music hall. Charles wrote and published a few songs but his modest career soon foundered on his chronic alcoholism. Hannah’s life in the theatre was cursed too, but this time by her mental instability. Legend has it that young Charlie’s first stage appearance occurred when his mother “dried” on stage in the middle of a song and her little son — he was five years old at the time — took over to the audience’s unequivocal delight and rousing acclaim.

By then, however, the Chaplin marriage was already over and, what with Charles senior’s descent into drunkenness, and Hannah’s religious dementia, Charlie and his half-brother Sydney’s early life was one of signal poverty and hardship. The family home was now located in a couple of rooms in a foetid Lambeth tenement where Hannah took in piece work and Charlie combed the mudflats of the Thames at low tide for anything salvageable that could be sold. Hannah’s indigence meant spells in the workhouse for both her children and on occasion the entire family. And there the routine humiliations of Victorian welfare were never forgotten by Chaplin: he was beaten and bullied and his head was shaved and daubed with iodine against ringworm. Sometimes Hannah was confined to the workhouse as well but her bouts of insanity saw her more and more often incarcerated in Cane Hill asylum, where her violent hysteria was treated by periods of isolation in a padded cell.

Sydney Chaplin, four years older than Charlie, made his escape from this distressing world by joining the merchant navy as an apprentice steward. Charlie, meanwhile, at the age of nine, embarked on a stage career — clog dancing with a variety troupe called “The Eight Lancashire Lads.” From now on he was to support his mother from his earnings as an actor and performer. Charles Chaplin senior died, aged only thirty-seven, from cirrhosis of the liver, and Hannah’s intermittent periods of delusion and dementia meant ever longer spells in the bleak precincts of Cane Hill.

Chaplin’s early stage career proved reasonably successful, occupying juvenile roles in long-running touring plays, but his first real break came when Sydney left off seafaring and found a job with one of the greatest impresarios of the music hall age — Fred Karno. Before long, Charlie Chaplin was also on the Karno bill, as a comedian and mimic, and thus began a rise in his fortunes that would only terminate half a century later.

Chaplin soon moved into the elite of Fred Karno’s Army — as the travelling vaudevillians were known — where he won particular acclaim for his drunk act — playing an “inebriated swell” who pretends to interrupt the show. Chaplin worked with Karno’s troupe for eight years and it was during this period that he acquired and perfected the comic skills — the timing, the gags, the pratfalls and slapstick — that he was to put to such innovative use in the early silent movies. By the time Chaplin left for a tour of America in 1913 he was a thorough professional. He was earning £8 a week and had prominent billing on the company’s posters. He was a small man — about five feet four — but dark and handsome, and a dapper and fastidious dresser. His first serious love affair occurred about this time, with a young dancer called Hetty Kelly, but was cut short by his embarkation for the American tour. However, Chaplin invested this shortlived, unconsummated teenage romance with tremendous romanticism. The love he felt for Hetty became exalted and transcendent and Hetty substitutes were to figure in many of his movies. Whenever he was with Hetty, he said, he “was walking in paradise with inner blissful excitement.” Something about her purity and youth (she was fifteen when he met her) obsessed Chaplin—“it was but a childish infatuation to her, but to me it was the beginnings of a spiritual development, a reaching out for beauty.”—and his retrospective fascination for her and what she represented (she died of influenza in 1919) may well have influenced his own sexual tastes and nature throughout the rest of his life.

The trip to America with the Karno company proved to be the watershed in Chaplin’s life. His stage act was watched one night by Mack Sen-nett, founder and producer of the Keystone Kops, and at the end of 1913 Chaplin was offered a job in the then embryonic world of the movies, at a salary of $150 a week (a multiple of twenty will give an approximation of what Chaplin’s salary is worth in today’s terms).

In 1914 Hollywood was nothing more than farmland — miles of orange and lemon groves — far from the outskirts of Los Angeles. The first studios were reconstituted farms and barns where short films were churned out at the rate of one every three days or so. The medium was not highly regarded and was seen as a modern “fad” being exploited by a bunch of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs. Chaplin went to work for the doyen of comedy film-makers and just as he had cut his music hall teeth with Fred Karno so Chaplin learned the film business from the loudmouthed, tobacco-chewing braggart that was Mack Sennett. In 1914 thirty-five films starring Charlie Chaplin were released. By the end of the year Chaplin signed a new contract with a new company, Essanay. His salary had climbed to $1,250 a week.

In one year everything had changed; in one year the nature of film comedy had been irrevocably altered and the twentieth century had acquired a new icon. And all because of the Tramp. No one really knows how the Tramp was created, and Chaplin himself provided several contradictory versions over the years, but the fact remains that at some stage in February 1914, during the shooting of a Sennett one-reeler called Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Chaplin went down to the wardrobe shed at Keystone and emerged carrying a cane walking stick and wearing a bowler hat, a toothbrush moustache, a tight jacket, baggy trousers and oversized shoes. The Little Tramp was born.

And was an almost immediate and enormous success. Chaplin began to write and direct his own films as well as star in them. He moved into an apartment in the fashionable Athletic Club and acquired a valet as well as opened several bank accounts. He wrote to his brother Sydney, in his inimitable style, urging him to come over. “I have made a heap of good friends hear and go to all the partys etc … I am still saving my money and I have 4000 dollars in one bank, 1200 in another, 1500 in London not so bad for 25 and still going strong thank God. Sid, we will be millionaires before long.”

And he was. At the age of twenty-five, while Europe was embarking on the long agony of World War One, Charlie Chaplin from the slums of Lambeth set about mining one of the most lucrative seams in show business. Given the privations and suffering of his early life the money Chaplin made was always of vital importance to him and he was never in any doubt about what he was worth. Sydney duly came over and became his manager, and between the two of them they negotiated some of the shrewdest and most remunerative contracts in Hollywood’s history. One New York journalist observed, after Chaplin had spent a month in the city, that he “kept his bankroll exclusively to himself …never has Broadway known a more frugal celebrity.”

Chaplin could have contented himself with cranking out Keystone-style comedies, amassing his personal fortune and living the good life in the lotusland that was Hollywood, but his artistic ambitions were there from the start and always drove him on to greater challenges. He saw the huge potential of the movies at once, both as a means of mass entertainment on an international scale and also as an art form in their own right. Very soon after his initial success with the short comedies he tried his hand at a film of greater length and polemical heft—The Immigrant—the first of the series of comedies with a marked social comment that was to establish him as one of the founding geniuses of the movie industry.

Coexistent with the inexorable rise of his fame and fortune (his salary in 1918 was over a million dollars a year) his emotional life by contrast proved a far rockier business. After an affair with his leading lady in The Immigrant—Edna Purviance — Chaplin became infatuated with a smalltime teenage actress called Mildred Harris (she was sixteen years old and, as Chaplin put it, “no mental heavyweight”). This was the first of a series of disastrous liaisons with very young girls, a sexual obsession that was to dog Chaplin well into middle age, and was to provide his enemies with powerful ammunition.

Mildred became pregnant and to avoid the prospective scandal Chaplin married her. It was hardly a grand amour and what little affection Chaplin had for his bride evaporated when the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. As always, when his emotional life distressed him, Chaplin turned to his work. Shoulder Arms was made to boost the war effort and, in association with his old friends Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, United Artists was formed — the novel idea of a film studio controlled and run by actors that gave rise to the phrase, spoken by a disenchanted producer, that “the lunatics have taken over the asylum.” United Artists was to be another phenomenal money-spinner for Chaplin, but in the meantime the war was ending and his marriage was in ruins. Chaplin was editing his next film, The Kid, when Mildred Harris sued for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. It was finally granted in 1920.

In the celebrated dream sequence in The Kid a twelve-year-old child actress called Lita Grey played the part of an angel. Something about her fascinated Chaplin and he put her under contract. However, a more celebrated dalliance with the spectacularly beautiful actress Pola Negri dominated the gossip columns and there was a farcical series of on-off engagements that had more to do with enlarging Pola Negri’s public profile than any great infatuation. Chaplin was deeply embarrassed by this public speculation about his private life, and in fact Pola was not his type. It is hard to say exactly when his affair with Lita Grey began but by 1924, when she was fifteen, she had been signed up — to the dismay of his colleagues — as leading lady on Chaplin’s next big film The Gold Rush. When she signed the contract it was reported that she jumped up and down clapping her hands and crying “Goody, goody!” Lita was no star, and not much of a beauty — she was described by one journalist as a “peculiarly shy, reticent and far from loquacious girl. She seemed phlegmatic.” Chaplin’s folly was compounded in September of that year when Lita announced she was pregnant. Sexual relations with an under-age girl were regarded as de facto rape in California, a crime that carried up to thirty years’ imprisonment. The arranged marriage that followed took place covertly in Mexico. Press releases gave Lita’s age as nineteen.

Chaplin’s marriage to Lita Grey brought him two sons and a degree of misery and personal torment that almost drove him insane. In his autobiography he devotes no more than a couple of lines to the whole episode: “For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness.” In typical consolation he concentrated on his work with demonic intensity. As soon as he finished the arduous shoot of The Gold Rush he embarked on The Circus and shortly after the completion of that film, Lita walked out with her two children. The acrimony and publicity of the subsequent divorce action — its sexual innuendo and scurrility — drove Chaplin to a nervous breakdown. His hair turned grey overnight, he would bathe repeatedly and compulsively wash his hands dozens of times a day, and at night, paranoid and suspicious, he would patrol his empty house with a shotgun. As Lita prepared to announce to the world the names of five prominent women she alleged Chaplin had slept with during their short marriage (they included Marion Davies, newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst’s mistress) Chaplin agreed to a cash settlement of $600,000. It was the largest such settlement in American legal history.

While Chaplin’s personal life reached its nadir his films and popularity seemed ever on the ascendant. After the acrimonious divorce one headline read simply: “CHARLIE IS A REAL HERO.” But at about this time, unknown to him, a new factor had entered his life that was to have profound consequences later. The FBI, under its director J. Edgar Hoover, had, since its inception, been convinced that Hollywood and the film community were a nest of vipers, of corrupt and seditious Communist degenerates who were undermining the moral fabric of the United States. The first file the FBI opened on Chaplin was in 1922, recording the fact that Chaplin had hosted a reception for a prominent labour leader. At the end of his life the full dossier was discovered to be 1,900 pages long. One report was titled “Affiliation of Charles Chaplin with Groups Declared to be Communist Subversive Groups.” Chaplin’s politics were broadly, if idiosyncratically, left wing, and he made no secret of them. But something about the FBI’s diligence in singling him out from the other “parlor Bolshevists” of Hollywood suggests a more malign vendetta, one probably inspired by Hoover himself. Chaplin and Hoover had met at a dinner early in Hoover’s career and whatever took place that night initiated a dislike and distrust that were corrosive. Chaplin, moreover, did his cause no favour, in the eyes of the righteous, by never taking up American citizenship, by being regularly engaged in tax disputes with the IRS, and in making films with a pointed humanist-socialist message. They were also convinced he was Jewish (which he was not: faced with the accusation once Chaplin replied, “I’m afraid I do not have that honour.” This did not stop the FBI from labelling his files: “Charlie Chaplin alias Israel Thon-stein.”) His Achilles heel, however, proved to be the sexual scandals he became embroiled in. Lita Grey’s bitter muck-raking set a tone of derogation and abuse that was finally to bring him down.

In the thirties, during the Depression and beyond, the crescendo of redbaiting and witch-hunting provided a hysterical and shrill backdrop to Chaplin’s film career. After The Circus came City Lights (1931) — a remarkable silent movie success in the first heyday of the talkies — and then Modern Times (1936), that brilliant satire on the machine age and its complementary dehumanization of the worker. Chaplin’s fame was worldwide and he fraternized with the Great and the Good — Winston Churchill, Gandhi, H. G. Wells and the Mountbattens among others — on many continents. In the thirties too, perhaps the most adult and emotionally fulfilling of his relationships thus far occurred. He had a long affair with Paulette Goddard (whom he persuaded to change her peroxide blonde hair back to her natural brunette) and to whom he was briefly married. The rise of fascism in Europe pushed Chaplin further to the left and was responsible for his reluctant conversion to sound. His trenchant satire of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) was courageously prescient, as well as being the last appearance on film of the Little Tramp.

To Hoover and the FBI Chaplin’s films and his support of the Soviet Union were nothing short of an arrogant betrayal of American values, and although more and more voices were orchestrated to speak out against him Chaplin’s popularity appeared impervious to such slanders. Part of this was explained by Chaplin’s shrewdness in portraying himself as a humanitarian, an artist above partisan politics, and part of it was due to the fact that he was obligated to no man or system. Chaplin’s great wealth not only ensured his financial independence, it also meant he could not be leaned on. He had his own studio, he paid for his own films, he could do what he liked without fear or favour. There seemed no way the FBI could bring him down. Until …

In 1941 he had a short affair with a buxom twenty-two-year-old actress called Joan Barry. Chaplin described her as “a big handsome woman, well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive.” Another very young girl — Chaplin was fifty-two — another colossal error of judgement. Barry was mentally unstable and began to drink heavily. After a series of incidents — a car crash, a break-in at Chaplin’s house where she threatened him with a gun — he broke off the relationship, settled Barry’s debts and provided her with a one-way ticket back to New York.

At around this time Chaplin — with a coincidental neatness that no novelist would be permitted — met another young actress who turned out to be the great love of his life, the seventeen-year-old Oona O’Neill. While Oona’s beauty and extreme youth were as always a potent allure, there is no doubt of the sincerity of their mutual adoration — and this time, for once, he had made no mistake.

Chaplin’s wooing of Oona and their eventual marriage took place against a turmoil of controversy that was as distressing as it was damaging. Joan Barry reappeared on the scene, six months pregnant, claiming Chaplin as the father of her unborn child. A series of court cases then took place, covertly organized by the FBI, with the sole purpose of blackening Chaplin’s reputation beyond repair. First he was arraigned under the Mann Act, legislation designed to entrap pimps and brothel-keepers, and accused of paying Joan Barry to cross state boundaries for the purpose of having sex with him. When he was acquitted of this charge the FBI encouraged Barry to bring a paternity suit against him. Chaplin submitted to a blood test which proved negative but, in the subsequent trial, it emerged that blood tests were not recognized in Californian courts. Under a barrage of vilification and contempt that makes today’s gutter press look positively restrained Chaplin was condemned in court as a vile seducer and corrupter of American womanhood. He was declared the father of Barry’s child and ordered to pay maintenance.

And this time the character assassination seemed to work. After the war Chaplin continued to make films—Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight—but he was increasingly under attack, especially as the Mc-Carthyite anti-Communist purges were now running at full maniacal stretch, and his once indestructible popularity began to crumble and wane. A leading article in the Herald Express criticized his “complacent self-worship” and described him as “a moral nonentity.” The final move by the FBI came in 1952. Chaplin set sail from New York for Britain for the premiere of Limelight. Once he had quit territorial waters a telegram was sent: Chaplin’s re-entry permit to the United States was rescinded under legislation which permitted banning on the grounds of “morals, health or insanity, or for advocating Communism.” He was effectively persona non grata. Ahead of him stretched the long years of exile.

And here too the dramatic story of Charlie Chaplin, his rise and fall, ends. The boy from the slums of Lambeth had triumphed beyond measure amongst the freedoms and opportunities America offered. He had achieved astounding fame, vast riches, was acknowledged as one of the abiding geniuses of the cinema but in spite of all this something in him — hubris, moral fervour, arrogance, guilt, some curious self-destructive urge? — something had contrived to bring about his downfall and his banishment from the promised land. Chaplin went to live in Switzerland with his beloved Oona where they raised a large family of eight children. Other films were made—A King in New York (1957), The Countess from Hong Kong (1967) — other milestones were passed, many honours were conferred, but the twenty years of his exile from Hollywood have a flatness about them, and, inevitably, lack the excitement and energy and passion of the ones that preceded them. In 1972 he was welcomed back to Hollywood and presented with an Academy Award (a belated apology) and in 1975 he was knighted by the Queen. In 1977, on Christmas Day, he died quietly in his sleep. He was eighty-eight years old.

1991

In October 1963, Evelyn Waugh spent the weekend with Ian and Ann Fleming in their new house near Sevenhampton. Waugh wrote up the occasion in his journal: “A two day visit to see what Ann has been up to. The full horror of her edifice did not appear until the next day … Ian Fleming, near death, in a woollen sweater drinking heavily the whisky forbidden him by his doctor.” Fleming was only fifty-five and suffering from a chronic heart condition. Waugh continued in the same vein a few days later in a letter to Nancy Mitford: “[Ian Fleming] looks and speaks as though he may drop dead any minute. His medical advisors confirm the apprehension.”

Fleming carried on disobeying doctors’ orders for another ten months, enduring ever-increasing ill-health. In his drawn-out demise Fleming managed to sum up much of the character of his life: contrary, foolhardy, perverse and — somehow — very English. He was looking forward to dying and didn’t see why, until that moment arrived, he should be denied his booze, cigarettes and games of golf. Interestingly enough, Fleming’s key companions in his last months were other writers: William Plomer, Alan Ross and Cyril Connolly. He and Waugh were cordial but one senses that they didn’t much like each other. Waugh — another eccentric Englishman who drank, smoked and drugged himself to an early grave — was much friendlier with Fleming’s wife, Ann, a vivacious and somewhat terrifying society hostess. I once met a female contemporary of hers and asked what Ann Fleming had been like: “One of those women who didn’t much like women,” came the reply.

Ann Fleming was the great love of Fleming’s life but by the 1960s the passion had long gone. Fleming was having an affair with a divorcée in Jamaica and Ann was dallying indiscreetly with the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, but in their brittle, wealthy, worldly way she and Fleming kept up appearances. But Waugh and Ann Fleming were disdainful of Fleming in their letters and conversation, referring to him as “Thunderbird,” Waugh, as ever, choosing to mock someone he probably would naturally envy.

For, on paper, Fleming seemed to possess everything that Waugh felt he lacked. Fleming was born (in 1908) into a rich and famous Scottish banking family. He went to Eton where he excelled as a sportsman, and then Sandhurst. He was tall, dark and vaguely handsome. After Sandhurst he followed family tradition and went into the City, becoming, in his terms, “the world’s worst stockbroker” and led a stereotypical playboy life — pretty girls, fast cars, foreign holidays. He then had a “good war” in the celebrated Naval Intelligence Division, where he was perhaps at his happiest, at the centre of a highly efficient espionage network, with the power to plot and scheme, to travel on clandestine business, to flirt with genuine danger (he accompanied the Canadians on the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942, for example). The war ended and he became a senior executive and occasional journalist on the Sunday Times. And finally came the invention of James Bond, the huge sales, the money and the movies.

Like most people, I first encountered Fleming through his famous creation. I remember, aged eleven or twelve, reading From Russia with Love with a real illicit thrill. The book was passed around my pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography. So this was what the adult world was like, we remarked to each other, utterly captivated by the now familiar blend of snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods.

The scales fall from your eyes pretty quickly but the allure of Bond and Bondiana is potent while it lasts. Bond’s world was Fleming’s fantasy: a comic strip version of a life he almost lived. But when, after his death, Fleming the man began to crop up in the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries I found my attention began to focus more on the author himself than his works. As a case study he provided rich material. To such an extent, in fact, that I have now inserted him as a minor character in my latest novel.

It’s hard to say what fascinates and intrigues about Ian Fleming. My own hunch is that it has something to do with his torments, his personal demons. At first glance he appears to be the man who has everything but who, in some way, is simultaneously fundamentally unhappy. The Fleming I write about is the Fleming of the late thirties and the war years, when the useless stockbroker turned into the avid spymaster. Notwithstanding his business ineptitude, Fleming, thanks to his inherited wealth, was able to live in some style before the war: with his specially decorated apartment, his red sportscar, his regular orders of 1,000 custom-made mono-grammed Morland cigarettes (he was a dogged sixty-a-day man). When he joined the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939 he became the assistant to its chief, Admiral John Godfrey. He was awarded an honorary rank in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and had a uniform made by his tailor. Yet when he was teased by his raffish friends about being a “chocolate sailor” he took real offence and sulked. It’s a telling anecdote, and it testifies to his insecurities, his vanity and childishness. His behaviour displays the very opposite of Bondian cool self-esteem.

And the more one reads about Fleming, as he appears in the two biographies thus far written, in his wife’s published letters and in the comments and observations made by his friends and associates, the more complex and flawed he appears. He seems to be one of those emotionally closed Englishmen, incapable of fully engaging with the women he took up with. Time and again his girlfriends complain of being used and then discarded. His seduction technique rarely varied. First the girlfriend would be invited to peruse his collection of erotica (heavy on flagellation), then a Viennese waltz would be played on the gramophone while dinner was served — kedgeree or sausages with copious alcohol — then to bed. The common complaint was that Fleming was clearly far more interested in himself than his companion.

Fleming described himself thus: “I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes rather painful splits of one’s life.” And, one might add, provides a field day for the amateur psychologist. Am I wrong in thinking that this curious blend of the infantile and the world-weary is most commonly found in a certain type of upper class Englishman? One can mention any number of soldiers and explorers, industrialists, aristocrats and politicians who all too easily fit this peculiar bill. James Bond now seems a kind of hopelessly remote role model, a Platonic dream — the juvenile defects replaced by expensive hobbies, the emotional failings by carnal ruthlessness: the ultimate form of wishful thinking.

The “hurry to get to the grave” recalls Waugh again, another man eager to meet his maker. What was it about Fleming’s gilded life that prompted this death wish? My own supposition, for what it’s worth, is that it is fostered by a sense of the bogus and the sham. “To thine own self be true” is not a bad aphorism to guide you through your life but neither Fleming nor Waugh adhered to it, creating elaborate personas to shore up the bundle of neuroses and fraught contradictions that made up their innate selves. Their taedium vitae is just that: the urge to quit this world being a sign of the huge fatigue that maintaining the pretence engenders.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of his life, Fleming so cavalierly disregarded his doctors’ orders: he knew he hadn’t long to go — his heart was failing, there were blood clots forming on his lungs — his clock was rapidly ticking down, so why not carry on eating and drinking and smoking as if he were a young man again? And this knowledge perhaps explains the new serenity that his writer friends observed in his last months, whether watching cricket with Alan Ross at Brighton or reminiscing with Cyril Connolly about pre-war dalliances in Kitzbühel. Connolly found him altogether “sadder, gentler, and wiser.” According to his wife, however, “he stared from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” Relief and release came on 11 August 1964. He was fifty-six.

2002

17 August 1940. Does this date mark the lowest level in the fortunes of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor? On 17 August 1940, a day of humid, relentless heat, the Canadian cargo ship MV Lady Somers docked at Nassau harbour, in the Bahamas. On board was the colony’s new governor, accompanied by his wife: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. At the end of the gangway the Duke paused, allowing the Duchess to pass by, ensuring that she set foot on Bahamian soil before he did: neither of them had any idea that this tiny colony was to be their home for the next five years. They were being sent into a form of exile — one might even say a form of penal servitude — for Nassau, in those days, was a shabby colonial town with one main street, Bay Street, and a shifting population of around 20,000—made up of tax exiles, American tourists and, of course, the indigenous Bahamians. Government House was dilapidated and the swimming pool was empty. For the Duke and Duchess, after the life they had been used to living, it was an unequivocal tropical hell (albeit one peopled with servants). They were far away, constrained (they had to ask Churchill’s permission to leave the island) and gainfully employed. If you interpret the Duke’s posting as an act of revenge by the Royal Family it was a particularly shrewd and malicious one. Since the abdication and their marriage in 1937 the Duke and Duchess had led an idle, wealthy life in Paris and the Côte d’Azur (with a certain amount of foreign travel thrown in). But now war had broken out in Europe they had to go somewhere, and whoever thought of the Bahamas ensured that the biggest of bigwigs now found themselves in the smallest of small towns: the Duke and Duchess must have looked around them in dismay and incredulity.

For once, I feel I can say “must have” with some justification. Because, bizarre and presumptuous claim though it may seem, I feel I know the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in a peculiarly intimate way. This is because I placed them in my latest novel, Any Human Heart, as significant characters with whom the hero has, for some weeks, a close and fraught relationship. I undertook the usual research into their lives, spending months reading about them, poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads. But in a case like this the novelist’s task is different from the historian’s or the biographer’s. Having never encountered the Duke and Duchess, I had to imagine them into life, as I would do with the fictional characters I usually create. The better and more fully you can imagine a character the more they will live on the page — so I set about imagining the personalities of the Duke and Duchess buttressed by all the documentary evidence I could muster. Paradoxically, in the strange process that is the creation of a fiction, authenticity and plausibility are among your most powerful assets. So I had to imagine, for example, what it would be like to sit beside the Duchess of Windsor at a private supper party in Government House in Nassau in 1943. I had to imagine how it would be to play a round of golf with the Duke of Windsor in Portugal in 1940. And in the course of this exercise the couple began to flesh themselves out and become real — to such an extent that I was able to create fictitious conversations and encounters that seemed to me to have the ring of authenticity. The Duke and Duchess became as familiar to me as the other fictional characters in my novel and that strange familiarity now colours everything I read about them.

Their Bahamian exile was particularly interesting because I had visited the islands many times in the 1980s and had become highly intrigued by the Duke’s suspicious role in the investigation of a notorious murder (in 1943) of a local millionaire called Sir Harry Oakes. In my novel I try to make a convincing case — and the evidence is damning — that the Duke of Windsor conspired with corrupt detectives to pervert the course of justice and would have happily seen an innocent man hang for Harry Oakes’s murder. The more I came to learn about the Duke the more I came to dislike him. But the Duchess — subject of so much obloquy over the decades — was different. I wasn’t so much charmed by her as came to understand her better, somehow. The fact is that in the hell of their Bahamian exile — she called the place “this moron paradise”—the Duchess actually behaved extremely well — with patience, decorum and graciousness. The image of her as a spoilt, grasping harridan, manipulating the ineffectual Duke, doesn’t chime with the serene public face of the woman who was in fact loathing every minute of her life in Nassau. One could argue that almost everything that the Duchess aspired to in marrying the Duke was now absent from her life in the Bahamas. Position, high society, renown, glamour, haute couture and all the fine things money could buy were absent — or rather were replaced by farcically reduced simulacra. She had position — she was the governor’s wife — but that was a joke in this tinpot colony. High society was composed of dreary official receptions for visiting minor dignitaries and the unsavoury local politicians. Renown didn’t exist — during the war they were virtually forgotten — and as for haute couture, copious perspiration will make a mess of the most elegant outfit. And so on.

What makes the Duchess’s compliance more remarkable is that this role-playing, this tolerance of circumstances that she could never have imagined she was destined for, was not inspired by great love. The relationship between the Duke and Duchess was heavily one-sided. He adored her abjectly, slavishly, caninely. She was fond of him: the “great love” flowed only in one direction. It says something about the Duchess’s own sense of duty that she didn’t crack up under the strain. Her health was bad, she suffered from ulcers, but she didn’t let the side down. During the Bahamian years, 1940–5, she behaved, it has to be said, in an exemplary manner: just like a true royal.

But in fact the Duchess did crack — the mask slipped — but not until six years later. In 1951 she met a young man called Jimmy Donahue. He was good-looking, good company, very wealthy and homosexual. And the Duchess became obsessed by him. What is fascinating about the relationship between the Duchess and Jimmy Donahue is that such a fall from grace took so long in arriving. The suspicion remains that it was an after-effect of those years of drudgery during the war. Jimmy Donahue — a gossip, a joker, outrageously camp — offered the Duchess something that had been absent from her life and still was: fun and frivolity.

The Duchess was fifty-five, Donahue was twenty years younger. He was an heir to the huge Woolworth fortune and initially the Duke and Duchess’s interest in him was purely mercenary: Donahue’s even wealthier mother was lavish in her gifts to the royal couple and they did very well by her. In 1951 the Duke was a lugubrious, fussy, hollow man. The empty life he and the Duchess now led was well established and for the Duchess the prospect of the years ahead was daunting. She set out to win Jimmy Donahue and quickly did so. The Duke and Duchess and Jimmy Donahue became an unusual trio in the beau monde of Paris and New York and Mediterranean cruises where the Duchess’s torrid embroilment with her new young friend was rarely concealed. They were observed kissing passionately in a Parisian night club; one of Jimmy’s friends provided him with the use of an apartment so they could meet when the Duke was away. There was a sexual relationship between the Duchess and Jimmy Donahue but what precisely went on behind the bedroom door will only be informed guesswork. Donahue himself later claimed that it was mutually bestowed oral sex but by then he had been ousted from the royal circle and consequently his testimony has to be weighed up in that light.

But something carnal did go on and the relationship lasted just over four years. It ended with a row in a restaurant in Baden-Baden. Jimmy was growing bored trailing around Europe with the elderly couple. One evening he got drunk, became angry at some remark the Duke made and kicked the Duchess under the table, drawing blood on her shin. The Duke ordered him out and the end of the affair was finally achieved.

It’s not hard to imagine what the Duchess took from this association. In the kind of life they led — of peripatetic, well-heeled idleness that took them on a seasonal round to Paris, New York, Palm Beach, Biarritz, Monte Carlo, Portofino and back again — the great enemy is boredom. Jimmy Donahue was a gossip and a prankster and his own wealth and social connections made him unimpressed by the faux-regal aura around the Duke and Duchess. He made the Duchess laugh and passed the time, and the fact that he was handsome and prepared to put his own sexual proclivities on one side in order to pleasure her was an added bonus. As for the Duke, he became a public cuckold, a subject of whispered jokes and condescending tittle-tattle, but he bore the humiliation, until the final row, with glum stoicism. Nothing, it seemed, could dull the edge of his total devotion.

The Duchess, it has to be said, behaved badly and seemed unperturbed by her betrayal of her husband. As one of her friends later told her, Jimmy Donahue had destroyed her reputation and indeed it is the Duchess’s post-war incarnation — the mask-faced, immaculate, society hostess and permanent house guest of the vastly wealthy — that has coloured the world’s perception of her, subsequently. It is interesting to contrast her behaviour with Jimmy Donahue with the recent revelations of her so-called affair with Guy Trundle in 1935, before the abdication. But, thinking of the Duchess I “know,” I find I’m highly sceptical about the Trundle relationship. I can easily understand why she became infatuated with Donahue in the 1950s but I cannot imagine she would ever risk betraying the Prince of Wales, as the Duke then was, for a brief fling in a Mayfair flat with a man from the motor trade. Too much was at stake in 1935 for her to risk even a whisper of scandal: the prize was too big and her own affair with the Prince of Wales was by now fully established and at its most intense. I would argue that her behaviour in the Bahamas during the war underlines that she had as clear a sense of protocol and duty as any royal. That punctiliousness would have been at its most acute while the Duke was wooing her and the prospects of a royal marriage one day were not some impossible fantasy.

Picture the situation. It is 1935: you are an ageing, not particularly attractive American woman in a loveless marriage to a portly and dull businessman. You are having a passionate love affair with the world’s most eligible bachelor, the Prince of Wales, the future King of England. You have just been on a luxurious Mediterranean cruise and holiday with your lover. You are at the very pinnacle of high society: the prince’s terribly smart and aristocratic friends are suddenly your friends. After a difficult and rackety life and two husbands you find yourself breathing the rarefied air of a world you could only have dreamed about. Outside royal and political circles no one in Britain knows of the affair nor of the Prince of Wales’s obsession for you (you have helped him overcome his “sexual difficulty”). So do you pop off to Bruton Street, W1 for some clandestine sex with a Ford Motor Company salesman, however handsome and dashing? Whatever Mrs Simpson was doing when she visited Guy Trundle — if indeed she ever did — it wasn’t to have sex with him. Duff Cooper — one of the Prince’s inner circle and one who had no axe to grind — came up with an assessment that seems to me to be completely valid and true: Wallis Simpson, he thought, “is a nice woman and a sensible woman,” and he concluded, “but she is as hard as nails and doesn’t love him.” She didn’t love him but I believe she remained true to him, in her way, and lived up to the demands her role as his wife required of her — until, that is, she met Jimmy Donahue.

2003

On 13 June 1902 Edward VII had under a fortnight to wait until his coronation. On that day the King travelled from Buckingham Palace to Aldershot to review a parade of troops. He did not feel well and it was observed that his normally florid complexion was blanched and drawn. By the 14th he was complaining of pains in the abdomen and nausea. Edward was a prodigious eater and drinker and his personal physician, Sir Francis Laking, suspected that these symptoms were the familiar ones brought on by His Majesty’s compulsive over-indulgence. He prescribed a laxative and confidently expected matters to resolve themselves naturally. It was not to be. On the night of the 14th the King suffered violent spasms of abdominal pain and repeated vomiting. Laking called in an eminent surgeon for consultation, Sir Thomas Barlow. The two men feared the worst: King Edward VII was afflicted with perityphlitis.

Perityphlitis is one of the forgotten names in the medical lexicon. It was used to refer to the mysterious and inevitably fatal “abdominal affections of the right side” that had been killing people for thousands of years. The cause was obscure but the symptoms were remorseless: abdominal pain, followed by vomiting, fever, intestinal inflammation and ultimately death from general peritonitis — the inflammation and corruption of the serous membrane which lines the stomach cavity. The disease was a potent killer: in 1856 one study showed that out of forty-seven cases of perityphlitis only one survived. Over the years countless victims’ corpses had been dissected and their innards poked about and pored over but it wasn’t until 1812 that a surgeon suggested that this fatal inflammation of the stomach cavity may be caused by an initial inflammation of the vermiform appendix, a small worm-shaped attachment of the blind gut.

“Appendicitis,” as the disease came to be known towards the end of the nineteenth century, was very much an American appellation. American surgeons, in particular McBurney and Fitz, were in the vanguard of the treatment of the disease. Unlike surgeons in Europe, they advocated the earliest possible removal of the appendix as soon as the symptoms appeared. In Europe this was regarded as modish, not to say perverse, nonsense. If, in the nineteenth century, as a European, you were afflicted with appendicitis you would be dosed with opium and purgatives and it would be hoped the problem would disappear of its own accord. If not, and if an abscess appeared around the appendix and grew as it filled with pus, it would be hoped that a natural process of capsulation would then occur that would seal off the abscess from the abdominal cavity. The argument ran that the American method of early intervention created greater risks of general infection: it was too precipitate, better to wait until capsulation had occurred and then drain off the offensive matter. There was no greater advocate of this procedure, and no greater sceptic of the American way, than Britain’s most eminent surgeon, Frederick Treves, and it was he who was now called to the King’s bedside.

Frederick Treves (1853–1923) was a self-made man, the son of a cabinet maker who had risen to the heights of the medical profession. In 1902 he was internationally recognized as a brilliant surgeon and the authority on diseases of the abdomen and gut. He was a prolific writer and his medical textbooks were in standard use. More than this, he was a friend and confidant of King Edward and Queen Alexandra and was sergeant-surgeon to the monarch from 1901. Additional renown had accrued in the 1880s over his care and handling of Joseph Merrick, the so-called “Elephant Man.” It was Treves who formulated the adage that a good surgeon needs “a lacemaker’s fingers and a seaman’s grip.” He might have added that, in what we now recognize as the dawn of modern surgery, a good surgeon also required an adamantine ego and an unswervable ambition. Treves possessed all these attributes and in the small world of Edwardian medicine he guarded his pre-eminence jealously.

Treves was called to Windsor on the 18th where he confirmed the earlier diagnosis of perityphlitis. True to his own methods he proposed waiting a while before operating to ensure that the capsulation should be completed. Treves visited the King daily and then, on the 21st, an improvement was observed. The King’s temperature dropped and the abdominal swelling appeared to go down and he felt well enough to travel to London. The coronation, set for the 26th, seemed likely to take place as planned, the abdominal pains apparently cured by the traditional doses of opium. But on the afternoon of the 23rd the pain returned and with it fever and repeated vomiting. The remission had been short and it was decided that an operation should take place on the morning of the 24th. Treves was to act as surgeon; also present were Laking, Lord Lister and surgeons Barlow and Smith.

Edward VII was grossly corpulent — his waist measurement was forty-eight inches — and Treves had to cut to a depth of almost five inches before he found the abscess, fortunately still encapsulated, surrounding the remains of an almost completely destroyed appendix. Treves then cut into the abscess and the pus was discharged. The resulting cavity was cleaned and two rubber drainage tubes were inserted. The wound was dressed with ideoform gauze. As Treves’s biographer Stephen Trombley* comments, “Contrary to contemporary reports and current misinformation, Treves did not remove the King’s appendix. The belief that Treves and the King combined to make appendicitis ‘fashionable’ is ill-founded.”

Treves deliberately did not remove the appendix and he would have been appalled to think that he had done anything to popularize “appendicitis.” But the fact is that Treves took a massive risk in proceeding the way he did and in not removing the appendix. It was now vital that the wound cavity close of its own accord, but from the bottom up, as it were. Any other form of healing might give rise to a sinus which could provoke other complications. The few days or so after the operation were anxious ones as the surgeons and doctors waited apprehensively for any sign of the symptoms of general peritonitis. Luckily for them King Edward made a good recovery and by mid July was fit enough to convalesce for three weeks on the royal yacht. The coronation eventually took place on 9 August.

Treves was credited with saving the King’s life (and was duly made a baronet) yet there is a school of thought which would allege that in fact he needlessly endangered it. His insistence on waiting for some days before operating, his surgical intervention occurring finally when the King was in extremis and then his decision not to remove the appendix and only to drain the abscess were in line with prevailing medical orthodoxies. But they were far from being unchallenged orthodoxies, even in 1902. Indeed there was a consensus of well-informed medical opinion and overwhelming evidence that indicated that the swift removal of the appendix was the only truly successful method of treating these abdominal inflammations. Each of Treves’s decisions could have resulted in King Edward’s death: the delay and the reliance on opium could have caused the abscess to rupture; the tendency to operate only at the last minute often provoked peritonitis rather than relieved it, or was so late as to be redundant; and to leave the remains of the ulcerated appendix in the wound and to rely on chance that it would heal properly can be argued, with even a little hindsight, to be instances of malpractice.

Why was Treves, who throughout his career was such an innovator, such an advancer of surgical practice, so remiss when it came to the saving of his sovereign’s life? The answer lies, I would suggest, in a curious blend of xenophobia, vanity and shameful remorse.

In 1888 Frederick Treves removed a vermiform appendix and laid claim to be the first man in Britain to do so. However there is no doubt that the honour in discovering that the appendix was the root of so many abdominal inflammations went to American surgeons. Treves, for all his pioneering work, was an also-ran and his substantial ego was unhappy with this state of affairs. He then sought repeatedly to denigrate all the American advances in this field using every resource of patronizing mockery and pompous cynicism at his disposal. His disappointed vanity led him uncharacteristically to adopt the most conservative of approaches in this area of his expertise. Most surprisingly for a surgeon, as Trombley observes, Treves did not advocate surgery. His preferred method of treating “perityphlitis” was by medical means — bed rest and opiates. His wil-fulness was to have tragic consequences.

In 1900, Treves’s daughter Hetty, aged eighteen, fell ill with abdominal pain. Treves did not diagnose appendicitis. Hetty became iller and iller, feverish and vomiting. For some reason Treves refused to see what was happening. Eventually, inexorably, other symptoms appeared that indicated that, as a result of her father’s delay, Hetty had contracted peritonitis. Treves decided to operate but two colleagues persuaded him that it was pointless. Hetty died in great physical distress.

It is almost impossible to imagine Treves’s feelings at this time and he never spoke of the enormous grief and guilt he must have felt. Yet he did write about it, obliquely. In 1923, the year he died, Treves published a curious story called “The Idol with Hands of Clay.” It tells the story of a young surgeon who, so convinced of his own mastery of his craft, decides to operate on his own wife when she falls ill with appendicitis. During the operation he makes a fatal mistake and his wife falls into a coma, the surgeon struggles to save her and yet is unable to do so and she dies in his arms. Some glimpse of Treves’s response to his own tragedy is made available here:

[The surgeon] caught a sight of himself in the glass. His face was smeared with blood. He looked inhuman and unrecognizable. It was not himself he saw: it was a murderer with the mark of Cain upon his brow. He looked again at her handkerchief on the ground. It was the last thing her hand had closed upon. It was a piece of her lying amidst this scene of unspeakable horror. It was like some ghastly item of evidence in a murder story. He could not touch it. He could not look at it. He covered it with a towel.

During a stormy night in the middle of World War Two — Wednesday, 7 July 1943—in Nassau, in the Bahamas, a multi-millionaire called Sir Harry Oakes was murdered in his bedroom. The cause of death was a blow to the head by some sort of spiked weapon or club causing four circular wounds an inch deep and a quarter inch in diameter. Shortly after, an attempt was made to set the victim on fire. Petrol was doused on the body and bedclothes and lit. The murderer — or murderers — then left, but the fire did not take. A house guest discovered the badly scorched corpse before breakfast the next day.

During the 1980s I visited the Bahamas on many occasions and heard all sorts of lurid tales about the Oakes murder — tales embellished with rumours of currency speculation, sexual innuendo, Mafia gangsters and millionaire Nazi sympathizers. I decided to feature the murder as an episode in a new novel to see if I could elucidate the mystery and began to read everything I could find on the subject. The truth, as far as I can determine, is more banal, but, in a way, no less sinister.

Harry Oakes had made his fortune prospecting for gold in Canada and had come to live in the Bahamas to avoid paying tax on his millions. However, he involved himself in the community, forming partnerships with local businessmen, and philanthropically encouraging the islands’ industries. It would be fair to say that Sir Harry Oakes was the colony’s most important citizen — after the governor of the Bahamas himself.

And that governor of the Bahamas was the ex-King of England, Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been sent to the Bahamas in 1940, after the fall of France, in a deliberate attempt to keep them out of the public eye and under control. Both of them were infuriated by the appointment, seeing it as an insulting act of royal spite, and detested the place (the Duchess referred to it as “this moron paradise”). However, they both pursued their official duties with conspicuous diligence and no visible signs of bad grace — even though the Duke made every effort to have himself transferred away. He wanted desperately to be a kind of roving ambassador for Britain in the United States.

The death of Sir Harry Oakes came as shocking news to the Duke. He had known Sir Harry well but the last thing he wanted now was the scandal and notoriety that such a prominent murder was bound to encourage. The case had to be solved — and fast.

This can be the only explanation for the Duke’s next move. Instead of calling on the Bahamas’ perfectly competent CID force (headed by Police Commissioner Colonel Erskine-Lindop) he asked two Miami homicide detectives (one of whom had acted as his bodyguard on a trip to Florida) to fly immediately to Nassau and take over the investigation. The Miami police force at this time was one of the most corrupt in the USA: there is no reason to assume the Duke was aware of this.

The two detectives — Captains Melchen and Barker — arrived on Thursday after lunch and went to work. In the small, febrile and somewhat decadent community that was the wartime Bahamas speculation about the identity of the murderer was loud. Common gossip centred immediately on one Alfred de Marigny, Sir Harry’s son-in-law, as the likely culprit. De Marigny, an indigent playboy figure straight from central casting, had eloped two years earlier with Sir Harry’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, and they had married. Sir Harry’s death would see a significant amount of his fortune devolve on her.

Like most of Nassau’s white community, the Duke was convinced de Marigny was prime suspect. Melchen and Barker swiftly interviewed de Marigny and took away samples of his clothing for investigation. De Marigny had given a dinner party on the night of the murder but had driven some guests home, not far from Sir Harry’s house, West-bourne, and there was a damaging thirty-minute hole in his alibi. De Marigny had motive and means: if he could be placed in the house the case would look watertight.

Melchen and Barker summoned de Marigny to Westbourne for further interrogation. In the course of being questioned de Marigny was asked to pour a glass of water from a carafe and was made to handle a cellophane-wrapped packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He was then allowed to leave.

The next day, Friday, 9 July, the Duke came to Westbourne where he had an unwitnessed, confidential twenty-minute discussion with Melchen and Barker. This is the crucial moment in the investigation. In all their inquiries the Miami detectives had been accompanied by Erskine-Lindop or other members of the Bahamian police. But now the Duke wished to talk to Melchen and Barker alone. Two hours later de Marigny was arrested and accused of the murder. A perfect fingerprint — from the little finger of his right hand — had been found on a piece of furniture (a folding screen) in the murder room. De Marigny had been caught: it was almost as good as a smoking gun.

When de Marigny came to trial in October 1943 the prosecution case against him was demolished with brutal thoroughness by his counsel, Godfrey Higgs. Captains Melchen and Barker, the fingerprint experts, were rapidly exposed both as incompetents and liars. De Marigny’s fingerprint had been “lifted” (with a piece of Sellotape, probably from the cigarette pack) and placed on the screen. It was established beyond doubt that the print could not have been genuine. The case against de Marigny was a clear set-up and he was found not guilty and acquitted.

Now it was vital to keep a lid on the stench rising from the Oakes affair. The Duke was conveniently absent (in the USA) during the trial; he had not been interviewed and was not called as a witness. Neither he nor the detectives were ever asked about the substance of their Friday, 9 July conversation. Why? Simply because royal prestige and royal sway were still very potent in those days. Huge efforts were made to spare the Duke any embarrassment. He never explained why he had bypassed his own CID. More curiously still, after the trial the case was closed. Yet de Marigny was innocent: therefore, by definition, the killer was still at large. The Duke refused ever to talk about the subject of Sir Harry Oakes and his death and forbade the matter to be raised in his presence.

Why was the Duke so sensitive? What did he know? I now don’t believe the theory that he was speculating in wartime currencies — with Sir Harry Oakes’s help — for vast profits through Mexican banks (a treasonable offence); nor do I believe this murder was anything to do with American Mafia bosses wanting to build a casino in Nassau. The Duke called in Melchen and Barker because he wanted the affair solved quickly: he reasoned that the Americans would work faster than the local CID. And he was right. By planting a fingerprint Melchen and Barker had incriminated and arrested de Marigny in just over twenty-four hours. De Marigny was duly locked up in jail until the trial and everyone assumed he was guilty. Only the brilliance of the cross-examination saved him and exposed the detectives’ culpability.

But what about the Duke’s role in all this?

My theory goes like this. The planting of the fingerprint, in the context of Miami 1943, was routine work for Melchen and Barker. The carafe and the cigarette pack ploy testify to this. In their unwitnessed twenty-minute conversation with the Duke on Friday, 9 July, I believe they would have hinted that they had conclusive proof, or could manufacture the conclusive proof, that would put de Marigny in the murder room. Language would have been veiled and euphemistic on both sides. But the Duke — however covertly — would have to authorize them to go ahead. It is inconceivable that, having been summoned by the Duke himself, the two American detectives would have corrupted the evidence in a high-profile murder case on British colonial soil without, at the very least, a royal nod and a wink.

The governor of the Bahamas was a weak and worried man in 1943 but even the most charitable interpretation of his actions tends inexorably to the conclusion that the Duke of Windsor colluded with Melchen and Barker to pervert the course of justice. I deliberately don’t use the word “conspiracy”—that requires too much malice aforethought. The Duke would always be able to deny that he knew what the detectives planned, but he was no fool. De Marigny, thanks to his lawyer’s skills, was acquitted and the false evidence exposed. But what if he had not been? If de Marigny had been found guilty then he almost certainly would have been hanged. One wonders if the Duke’s conscience would have been unduly troubled. I suspect not.

So who killed Sir Harry Oakes, and why? That, as they say, is another story. But the Duke’s duplicitous role in the investigation and the incrim-ination of an innocent man is hard to gainsay. In 1943 the Duke wrote to the Foreign Office saying, “The whole circumstances of the case are sordid beyond description.” No one else was better placed to know.

2002

It is almost impossible now, in these days of cheap global air travel, laser-guided weaponry and routine trips to outer space and back, to conjure up the astonishing glamour and fascination of aviation when it first began. Hard too, when thousands of airline pilots are being made redundant around the world, to envisage the aloof, almost superhuman allure of the figure of the aviator. Part demigods, part daredevils, the first flyers achieved a renown and provoked an awestruck reverence in the public that now seem almost incredible. These were real men and women who risked their lives in a medium previously denied human endeavour and in machines that seemed to counter every natural law. And the fact that they were the first truly modern heroes, with the ancient values of fortitude and temerity yoked to the very latest technology the twentieth century could produce, perhaps explains why the mix was so potent and the idolatry so febrile and impassioned. Not until the first astronauts came along would the aviator as modern hero be displaced from his pedestal, but even then it was only by another form of pilot.

The most famous aviator of the early decades of the century, and arguably the most famous aviator of all time, was Charles Lindbergh who, in 1927 at the age of twenty-five flew his single-engined plane The Spirit of St. Louis non-stop from New York to Paris. This considerable feat, while impressive, does not however fully explain why Lindbergh should become one of the great, iconic figures of his time. The answer — and this intriguing biography attempts to delineate it — must lie in a curious combination of historical circumstance and individual personality. The world has a way of creating the heroes it wants that has little to do with rationality and more to do with collective intuition — why Charlie Chaplin and not Buster Keaton, for example, why James Dean and not Montgomery Clift? — and there was something about the gauche youthfulness of Lindbergh that sent crowds wild. Here was a tall thin Minnesotan barnstormer who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink and loved his domineering mother. There was no vainglory, no false modesty and, apparently, no undue cupidity either. Whatever the blend was — a combination of naivety and technological skill, a kind of “aw, shucks” mentality coupled with massive determination — it worked, and after his historic flight Lindbergh ascended to a plateau of international fame enjoyed by very few this century. Fortune, honours, reputation, personal happiness followed. The young man married a shy, pretty heiress, Anne Morrow, and the couple became the focus of media attention in the Western world and seemed permanently at home among the great and the good.

But of course if that was all there was to it the Lindbergh name would eventually have dimmed and his celebrityhood would have occupied its due niche in aviation history. But along with clouds of glory, great fame trails more noxious vapours. When Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped and held to ransom he was plunged into the dark side of the Faustian contract that all who become famous unwittingly sign.

Lindbergh himself supervised the various agencies — police, FBI, private sleuths — involved in the hunt for his baby son and in the farcical negotiations with the kidnappers. The discovery of the baby’s decomposing body a few hundred yards from the Lindbergh home brought no end to the trauma. The ransom money had been paid and it was only by chance that a sequence of marked notes turned up and led the police to the prime suspect, an immigrant German called Richard Hauptmann.

Joyce Milton devotes much space to the details of the kidnapping and its ramifications and, inevitably, it proves to be the most compelling episode in this joint biography. Somewhat against recent trends she firmly and very effectively makes the case that Hauptmann was in fact guilty of the kidnap and murder and was not, as some commentators have suggested, a convenient scapegoat. She suspects that he did not work alone and, more tentatively, suggests possible accomplices.

The exemplary drama that was Charles Lindbergh’s life still had a few acts to play out, however. Having come from obscurity to huge fame, having known scandal and tragedy (all carried on in a blaze of publicity), Lindbergh now seemed wilfully to court opprobrium and disgrace. A long-time believer in “air-mindedness” (a vague philosophy that air travel could foster peace and international understanding) Lindbergh saw those values enshrined in the new Nazi state in Germany. Throughout the 1930s various visits to Germany, coupled with a disenchantment with life in the USA and a growing Anglophobia, pushed Lindbergh ever further to the right. He became a leading figure of the isolationist America First movement and his public pronouncements became ever more shrill and anti-Semitic. By the time America entered the war Lindbergh’s reputation was at an all time low, and to that generation of Americans it never really recovered. However, the new obscurity he found himself in allowed him covertly to participate in combat operations in the Pacific theatre (where he worked as a consultant for defence contractors, testing aeroplanes) and after the war his rehabilitation was completed when Eisenhower restored his commission and promoted him to brigadier general in 1954.

Lindbergh continued his work as a consultant in the airline industry but the triumphs of the post-war years belonged to Anne who had real success as a best-selling author — an experience Lindbergh was to share himself in his surprisingly accomplished autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis, published in 1954. The later years provide less diverting copy as the Lindberghs grew old, more or less gracefully, educating their four children, prosperous and comfortable, with homes in Geneva and Hawaii, still travelling the world and still dabbling in various half-baked spiritual philosophies. Lindbergh died of cancer in Hawaii in 1974. His widow still survives him.

There is no doubt that there is something totemic or emblematic about the Lindbergh life. Such huge and sudden fame, followed by personal tragedy of such a shocking and disturbing nature, seems almost mythic in its retribution, as if Lindbergh was another Icarus who had flown too near the sun. And at the centre of the story resides the curious, oblique and complex personality of Charles Lindbergh himself (Anne Lindbergh, for all that this is a joint biography, essentially plays second fiddle). Joyce Milton too appears to have problems pinning it down. In a lucid biography of otherwise scholarly and professional qualities she refers to her subject haphazardly as Lindbergh, Charles, Slim (a nickname), Slim Lindbergh, Lindy and Charles Lindbergh — sometimes using three different appellations in one paragraph. It is as if this baffling persona is still ducking and weaving, evading the biographer’s scalpel. Was he an innocent who had fame thrust upon him and couldn’t cope with its pressures? Was he a bigot and a fool? Or a hopeless idealist suckered by more unscrupulous forces? Was there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein “no there, there”? Each reader will make his or her judgement but one of the shrewdest comments on Charles Lindbergh comes from Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, who befriended Lindbergh at the time of the kidnapping but who turned away from him in the crypto-fascist, America First years. Nicolson described the great aviator thus: “he is and always will be not only a schoolboy hero, but a schoolboy.” It explains a great deal.

1993

An A — Z

Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, at the age of sixty-three. I was at boarding school and had just turned fourteen but I remember the occasion of his death. One of the more rebellious intellectuals in the sixth form had pinned a notice to the main notice board deploring the fact that the philistine school authorities had made not a single announcement, had urged not a solitary act of remembrance, about the passing away of one of the greatest English novelists. This ardent Waugh fan urged that individual boys make donations so that flowers could be sent to the family. A small list of names, with modest sums of money beside them, was scrawled below. I don’t know whether some bouquet or other eventually made its way from the school to Waugh’s home in Somerset — but I do remember pointedly logging away the unfamiliar name of this author. Evelyn Waugh? … Wonder if he’s any good?

Thirty-five years later I now know the answer to that question but I could never have foreseen just how intense my relationship with the works and the man would become. Its latest manifestation is the four-hour adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and for which I wrote the script. This is the second time I have adapted Waugh’s work for the screen. The first was Scoop, a two-hour film for LWT, made in 1987. In 1982 I was TV critic for the New Statesman and wrote at length about John Mortimer’s epic adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. But by then the embroilment was well underway: I had read all the novels, of course, and had even taught them to undergraduates at Oxford. I had started searching second-hand bookshops for first editions. My Waugh obsession was fully developed.

Waugh, more than any of his peers, provokes this level of interest. The obvious reason for this is that the works endure so well and provide such great rewards. But the other explanation must be that we know so much about the man himself. I own four biographies, not to mention several other memoirs by family, friends and acquaintances. The juvenilia have been published and so have the travel books and the complete journalism; then there are the notorious journals and the collected letters and other additional volumes of correspondence between Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Waugh and Diana Cooper. Almost every public and private word the man wrote has been published and he’s not been dead forty years — we have all the information on Evelyn Waugh we could possibly want.

And this is what informs and charges our reading. Waugh is the most autobiographical of writers — even the grotesque and outlandish comedies—Vile Bodies, Black Mischief—are solidly rooted in the details of his life. This tendency to recycle his own experience is nowhere more evident than the trilogy of novels Waugh wrote about the Second World War—Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) — which he collected together, somewhat revised, under the general title of Sword of Honour, first published in a single volume in 1965.

The central figure of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback who, at the outbreak of war in 1939, is thirty-five years old, almost the same age as Waugh at the time. There all similarity breaks down: Guy is, in effect, an almost fantasy alter ego for the author — a cradle Catholic from an ancient aristocratic family, an independently wealthy single man living in Italy. Everything, so the uncharitable view would go, that Waugh himself aspired to and yearned for in his life.

But the course that Guy Crouchback’s war follows is, in almost every degree, that of Waugh’s. Waugh eventually managed to secure a commission in the Marines and was later transferred to the Commandos. The glamorous resonance of these names belies the mundanity and relentless frustration of Waugh’s military experience. Like Guy, Waugh’s first brush with action was a mission to Dakar in West Africa. Then in 1941 he was sent to Crete with the Commandos to try and repel the German invasion, just managing to escape before the British forces surrendered. Then, after a period of inactivity (during which he wrote Brideshead Revisited), Waugh was dispatched to Yugoslavia in 1944 to be part of a military mission liaising with Tito’s partisans.

Waugh was hugely discontented as a soldier. He was a brave man (quite fearless under fire during the Crete debacle) but he was difficult and unpopular. No commanding officer wanted Waugh in his force and he was routinely shunted from command to command as patience ran out and tempers erupted. He was rude and truculent: a wealthy and famous novelist, he was a malign and prickly presence in the officers’ mess. I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — with whom Waugh served in Yugoslavia — and I asked him what he thought of Waugh. Maclean said he had never known an officer more loathed and detested by the men who served under him. Maclean and Waugh cordially disliked each other so the opinion has to be treated with some caution. But, after Crete, Waugh’s disillusion with the army and its values was profound.

The section of Sword of Honour that deals with Crete is a magnificent and chilling tour de force. As a chronicle of military incompetence and absurdity it rivals Catch 22 as a bitter indictment of men at war. It is also a fascinating example of Waugh’s method, of how he turned his experience into fiction.

Waugh, like Guy Crouchback, arrived in Crete as the British and Empire forces were in full and shambolic retreat from the invading German army. The Commandos were ordered to provide the rearguard to protect the embarking men on the beach head. Under almost constant air attack somehow large numbers of the army were taken off by the navy. Waugh and the Commandos watched with alarm. As the clock ticked down it was apparent that there was not enough room on the boats and many would have to surrender.

Waugh’s commanding officer — whom he revered — Colonel Robert Laycock, dictated a false statement and had Waugh write in the war diary that he had ordered his men to evacuate Crete, “in view of the fact that …there was no enemy contact.” This was patently false: serious fighting was still going on in the hills, but Laycock ordered his men to abandon the rearguard positions, embark and thereby escape. After their departure many hundreds of soldiers were captured by the Germans. Waugh was complicit in this blatant disregard of orders and he felt the shame deeply, talking of “my ignominious flight,” and “my bunk from Crete.”

In the novel everything is subtly different. First, the character based on Laycock — Colonel Tommy Blackhouse — conveniently breaks his leg on a destroyer approaching Crete and never even lands on the island. Instead the man who ignominiously flees is the idealized, aristocratic warrior, Ivor Claire, whom Guy idolizes. Guy refuses to disobey orders and escapes in a small boat rather than surrender. But learning later of Ivor Claire’s desertion brings about Guy’s potent disillusion with the army. Ivor Claire bears all the guilt that Waugh felt himself at his duplicitous escape from Crete. Guy behaves with honour throughout but, when he learns of Ivor’s cowardice, his love affair with the army and all things military is effectively over.

As always with Waugh, he was brutally honest with himself. When Officers and Gentlemen was first published Guy’s last day on Crete is described as “fatal”—the day on which he resigned “an immeasurable piece of his manhood.” This makes no sense: Guy has done nothing wrong, but the words represent the true measure of Waugh’s own feelings about the incident. The sentence was excised from the later omnibus edition.

When Officers and Gentlemen was published (dedicated to Laycock) Waugh’s inner circle knew the facts. Ann Fleming, a close friend, waspishly telegrammed to Waugh “Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.” Waugh denied this absolutely: “if you suggest such a thing anywhere,” he wrote back, “it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … Just shut up about Laycock. Fuck you. E. Waugh.”

The autobiographical facts — and Waugh’s personal agony — underpin the fiction and explain its particular power and vehemence. Guy Crouch-back, like Waugh, wanted to go to war — it was a just war and he was zealous for battle — but everything he experienced resulted in bitter disillusion and disappointment.

It is this element in Waugh — his fundamental and unsparing honesty — that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that Waugh presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. Whether he is acting the choleric Tory squire, or the Victorian paterfamilias, or the Pall Mall clubman; whether he is expounding on his hatred of all things modern or displaying his near-manic adherence to the Catholic Church and the aristocratic values of county house life — almost everything is calculated to challenge and offend, to draw down, it would seem, the inevitable accusations of social-climbing, class-hatred, snobbery and affectation.

But nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh. His late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold proves beyond doubt that he knew himself better than anyone. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and devastating unsentimentality — nowhere more so than in Sword of Honour—and displayed the nature of the human condition with almost gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit — however paradoxical that adjective might seem — and explains why his books have lasted so well and will continue to survive.

2001

There’s a fine, near-classic example behind King’s Cross Station, and there’s a particularly austere — brutally austere — one in Hounslow. If you’re looking for down and out seedy there’s a beauty on the Old Kent Road, guaranteed to set the soul in a slow slide of despair. For pure grease, however, the air peppery and astringent with fat fumes, there’s one I frequent in Notting Hill and on the Gray’s Inn Road there’s a monster — London’s version of La Coupole, as it were — with a venerable history of some few decades.

I’m talking, of course, about that great, possibly obsolescent British institution — the Caff. “Cafe” seems far too classy an appellation, too foreign. “Greasy spoon” somehow recalls the 1930s American Depression to me, or a truckers’ halt — the semantics is not quite right. We say, don’t we, “I’m off down to the caff,” or “See you in the caff in half an hour” and the word seems just about perfect — bluntly anglicized, demotic, accentless, unpretentious, apt. Whether you’re in Aberdeen or Guildford, Norwich or Durham, you know exactly, precisely what you’re going to get — in terms of ambience and nourishment — when you call a place a “caff.”

Forget pubs, the British caff is our true and enduring culinary landmark. You can find a flawless replica pub in Prague or Barcelona, these days. Pubs have gone up-market, are franchised, themed. The caff resists this gentrification doggedly and triumphantly. They exist nowhere else, indeed no other country in the world would want them. They remain irreducibly ours. Ignored, despised, avoided, unrecorded, unclassified, guide-free, the caff clings on in all corners of our cities and towns, an enduring testimonial to our indifference to comfort, our bad taste, our appalling eating habits and our complete lack of savoir-vivre.

When I was researching my latest novel, Armadillo, which is set entirely in London, my travels around the city took me to many of these bleak estaminets, these gloomy watering holes, and I spent long hours in them, observing the traffic of customers, gingerly eating and drinking, making notes. I went into them initially in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, but the more time I spent, caff-dwelling, the more a form of creeping affection for them grew in me. Feelings of hygienic distaste, of mild shame, gave way to sneaking admiration, of almost pride. Who else could have evolved such a dauntingly rebarbative institution? What did it say about us as a people, a nation? Surely, I reasoned, here was some form of pure objective correlative for us, the British, one untouched by hand of marketing man, design team, tourist board or whatever. Here lay — in gustatory terms at least — a small quintessence of our national psyche.

This increasing familiarity with and affection for the caff grew into a near-obsession. I started seeking out more and more examples, subspecies and hybrid types, started pestering my friends for their local variations. I even gave my central character in the novel — who also spent a lot of time caff-bound — a similar fixation. He started — let’s be honest, I started — to evolve a crude taxonomy, writing prime exemplars down in a notebook under the rubric “Great British Caffs.” Like some latter-day Linnaeus, my protagonist set about distinguishing the true from the bogus, steadily evolving criteria for a more exact classification, beginning to understand what fitted the bill — what was an echt-caff, an über-caff — and what fell short of the archetype.

Months of experience, of diligent patronage, have led me to some basic definition of the key constituents. I think I can now describe what I would term the exemplary British caff — the Platonic Ideal — with some accuracy.

First of all the question of location — irrelevant. Some of the most authentic caffs thrive in the trendiest purlieus, indifferent to the modish frenzy around them, but, in truth, the real aficionado prefers mean streets. Litter, graffiti, urban decay, gasometers, a palpable sense of fear — a rubbish-clogged canal or railway marshalling yards nearby add a certain je ne sais quoi. That the caff flourishes in such an inhospitable domain is part of its essential appeal.

Second: size. The smaller the better. One room contains all — food and drink preparation, counter, tables and chairs together in the same rectangle. There is an argument to be made for a rear area — dingier, darker, redolent of the lavatory — but one room remains a key criterion.

Third: decor. The essential factor here is absence of decor. Charm lies in charmlessness. Lino, Formica, plastic cladding, melamine, stainless steel, aluminium, glass, styrofoam tiles, cork (at a pinch) — these are the materials out of which the Platonic caff is constructed. The only exception to this austerity is kitsch. Extreme kitsch is self-justifying — bad murals, clashing paint schemes, bric-a-brac and the rest. There is one caff I know whose decor revolves around a Union Jack theme (the owners are very patriotic). The flag motif overwhelms, is overabundantly in your face — no one in their right mind would want to see so many Union Jacks in one small room — which is why it works. We will allow also the odd calendar, a poster or two, a stray bit of never-to-be-removed Christmas bunting, an occasional pot of struggling moribund greenery — spider plants or parched geraniums, preferably. Otherwise an almost total Bauhausian form-and-function, abhorrence-of-the-decorative ethos should prevail.

Fourth: food. Again, the idea of a few central ingredients endlessly re-combined is the dominant concept. Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, chips, bread, mushrooms, peas, black pudding, gammon, tomato sauce, brown sauce, vinegar and so on. Quality is irrelevant. Indeed, the true connoisseur wants bad food — high gristle quotient in the sausage, nothing but margarine, over-generous salting everywhere, maximum water content in any cooked veg — but in fact it is fine if the food is tasty: no problem. The crucial factor, nutritionally, is the unhealthiness package. Baked beans are the only fibre admissible; a high saturated-fat content is a sine qua non, massive cholesterol intake is vital. Soft white sliced bread, everything pan- or deep-fried rather than grilled, a mix of carbohydrates that would defeat the training programme of an olympic athlete — bread and fried bread and chips and a pie, say, to accompany bacon and sausage and black pudding. The list is not long and any attempt to add something exotic (curried baked beans just pass muster) excludes the place from true caff classification. Any spaghetti, lasagne, any fish, chops, etc. — any salad, for heaven’s sake — move it into the sphere of pseudo-restaurant. Sandwiches are allowed but again must be strictly controlled — we want no hint of Marks & Sparks or Pret à Manger, no sesame seed baps or wholemeal baguettes. The bread is white — period — the whiter and more taste-free the better. The fillings are limited — ham, cheese, roast beef (just), chicken or turkey roll (nothing off the bone) and tomatoes and cucumbers which must be sliced transparently thin. One caff I know offers — year round — only egg, tomato, ham and cheese. On no occasion must the filling even approach the thickness of the bread slice. Tuna is allowed as long as it is mashed with vinegar to achieve a near-fluid state. Egg can be rendered similarly deliquescent with the addition of salad cream — never mayonnaise.

Drink. Firm rules apply here. Tea or coffee, milk — a glass of milk, an almost vanished drink these days, is regularly consumed in caffs — tins of cheap gassy colas (unrefrigerated) and that’s it. You might get a carton of juice and no caff is ever licensed to sell alcohol. Refinements on the hot drink agenda include tea being served from the pot (a real bonus) and, amazingly, there are some caffs still using Camp Coffee (the liquid mix, for those with long memories) but normally the coffee must be instant and unbranded. As soon as there is a Cona machine or a Gaggia then we are in espresso bar territory and caffdom is lost, irretrievably.

These are, I think, the essential defining factors of the Platonic caff. There are variations and some enthusiasts may argue for alternative necessities. But, as any regular caff-goer realizes, there are other more elusive, harder to define qualities that make the places and the experience of being in them so distinct and memorable. Think of pre-eminent factors such as condensation and cigarette smoke. To have a plate-glass window that one can see through seems entirely wrong (indeed, ideally one wants condensation and a diamond mesh security grille). Also, a non-smoking caff seems oxymoronic. A purist would insist on roll-up cigarettes only. A badly tuned transistor radio (Radio 1, Capital Gold) also adds to the ambience as, of course, do the patron and his staff and their various attitude problems (whether raucous or sullen, suicidally depressed or irredeemably sloppy). All these elements contribute immeasurably to the aggregate of features that makes the places unique.

But there is something higher, more intellectual and philosophical that makes caff-life so addictive in its special way. I think it is because caffs are not, fundamentally, social places. They tend to favour the solitary or the untalkative; indeed, they have to be uncrowded in order to function best. You sit there in a corner alone with two or three others. The old geezer with his tightly folded tabloid; the seventeen-year-old mother-of-two smoking herself to death; the tattooed youth with his face full of iron. You don’t want to share a table, you don’t want to talk, you’re not (unless you happen to be a novelist) even curious about these strange folk and they in turn are deeply incurious about you. There is something wonderfully solipsistic about being in these places, provoking a mood of melancholy reflection, of indulgent soul-searching, of escha-tological ponderings. You feel in a kind of social and moral limbo — you can’t even see the outside world because of the condensation and you can’t imagine what sort of a city contains these curious denizens eating their extraordinary food. But then, you ask yourself, what are you doing here, caff-haunter? Eating, drinking, hanging out. What does that say about you?…

Solipsistic, egalitarian, existential, democratic, esoteric, insouciant, disinterested, cheap — what kind of establishment offers you all this, plus baked beans, chips, fried bread, sausage, bacon, fried eggs, mushrooms, black pudding, bread and margarine, HP and tomato sauce and a chipped Pyrex cup of stewed tea? We should preserve these singular, beguiling places before they disappear but — and this is what adds the bizarre magic — how could you possibly achieve that? The very attempt to cherish and enshrine or consecrate removes everything special, destroys the quiddity of the establishment at once. It is as if there is a built-in, anti-tamper, self-destruct device designed to counteract our best arty-liberal-bourgeois intentions. The caff has evolved in these islands of its own accord — organically, mysteriously, almost unnoticed — and if one day it becomes extinct it will have been something self-willed, a kind of benign suicide, not driven out, not victim of an enforced, unnatural transformation, part radical chic, part heritage industry. All we can do is watch and contemplate these remarkable loci of our urban lives carefully, see how they adapt and change or die away, log and note them for posterity — and make sure to go in from time to time.

1998

In 1971 Cyril Connolly flew to the University of Austin, Texas, to view an exhibition of first editions of key twentieth-century works of literature inspired by his book The Modern Movement. Immodestly, Connolly had asked that one of his own books be included and suggested his “word-cycle” The Unquiet Grave, published in 1944. The university duly agreed and, having purchased Evelyn Waugh’s library on his death, decided to display Waugh’s own heavily annotated copy of The Unquiet Grave, sent to him on publication by Nancy Mitford. Connolly read the copious marginalia with horrid fascination: he was shocked and appalled at the cold dismissiveness and abuse they contained. Amongst the aspersions were “Irish corner boy,” “hack highbrow,” “drivelling woman novelist.” Writing about the experience later Connolly commented: “What I minded most was the contempt that emerged from a writer for whom for twenty years I had looked on as a friend.” He conjured up a demonic image of Waugh, contemplating the “bloated, puffed-up face of my old club-mate, the beady eyes red with wine and anger, the cigar jabbing as he went in for the attack.” Friends rallied, contrary and consoling alternative judgements were proffered. Waugh, it was generally agreed, was a venomous parvenu consumed by envy and snobbery.

I cite this anecdote because this portrait of Waugh still rings true, and it continues to represent for many the abiding image of the writer, born a hundred years ago on 28 October 1903. The fact that it does is in large part down to Waugh himself. The persona he created for himself in the later stages of his life was an elaborate construct — full of contradictions — but calculated to stir up derision, confusion and animosity amongst his perceived enemies. It was at times so close to the absurd, to the caricature (the bookie’s tweeds, the hearing trumpet, the brandished cigars) that its very artifice seemed to be designed to be exposed. Anthony Powell — who was always acutely perceptive about his peers — wrote about Connolly and Waugh, saying that both men were “mesmerised by beau monde mystique, both in their different ways fundamentally ill-at-ease there, unless in a position to perform his own individual act, put on a turn, in fact.”

“Putting on a turn” is what Evelyn Waugh did for most of his adult life and it had many manifestations: country squire, iconoclastic Tory, devout Catholic, fearless soldier, virulent anti-modernist, stern paterfamilias, rural anchorite, senile patrician and so on. Why he did this, and why he did it so assiduously, is a matter for endless debate (we all have our theories) but the consequences have not helped his posthumous reputation: the man, I feel, has in recent years shouldered the work aside — the life has become more compelling than the fiction.

The problem is that we know an enormous amount about Evelyn Waugh — we have the letters, the diaries, the collected journalism, five large biographies, let alone the memoirs of friends and neighbours — perhaps only Virginia Woolf of twentieth-century English writers has been more compendiously documented. This is a genuine shame because, however diverting the show might be, the spectacle of Evelyn Waugh guying or exploiting various forms of eccentric Englishness detracts serious attention from a fascinating and enduring body of work. Waugh’s debut was assured and precocious. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), published when the author was twenty-five years old set the style and the tone for the string of great comedies that followed: Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938). In between Black Mischief and Scoop, however, came A Handful of Dust (1934), considered by many to be Waugh’s “best” novel. I don’t agree: I see the novel as an uneven and semi-disguised act of revenge against Waugh’s first wife, whom he divorced after a year of marriage in 1928. Despite its modishly nihilistic superstructure (the title coming from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) it is essentially a society novel about an adulterous wife and the bleak consequences of that betrayal. It also heralded the concerns of his later work — a building religious dimension, a hatred of the new, a fawning admiration of the aristocratic past — that reached an early apotheosis in Brideshead Revisited (1945, considered by many to be his worst novel) and was continued and refined in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Scoop is, in my opinion, his real masterwork. It has a classical and deeply satisfying shapeliness but also contains sequences of hilarious comic writing unrivalled in English literature. As it turned out it was to be his final, sustained essay in the comic form. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) forms a strange coda to these four great comedies but is really too idiosyncratic to be truly cognate with them.

A hundred years on from Waugh’s birth and thirty-seven from his death it is perhaps timely to assess the measure of his achievement, to see how the work has survived. The “Brideshead myth” will, I suppose, always be the first aspect of Waugh’s output that seems the most visible if not the most significant. Yet a moment’s reflection — or a few pages of rereading — will expose the book as flawed and self-serving. It was conceived in wartime as an act of nostalgic recall, of rose-tinted reveries of a never-never-land Oxford (Waugh himself admitted as much). In a later edition he tried to curb the excesses and strip away as much as he could of what was lush and verbose but with little success. The subsequent television version in the 1980s only served to reinforce the sentimental romance. The book’s huge success was always rather embarrassing to Waugh: he was grateful for the revenue but vaguely ashamed of the way it was acquired. He never attempted such panting excesses again. Brideshead’s love affair with aristocratic virtues was dramatically honed down in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Claret, teddy bears and stately homes devolve into Mr Crouchback’s austere injunction “not to repine.” Lyrical upper-class hedonism gives way to an unbending and stoical faith in God’s edict and man’s duty to God on earth. To a non-believing or even agnostic reader the trilogy’s moral underpinnings appear close to mumbo-jumbo, but to anyone familiar with Waugh’s life they reflect his almost manic piety: he clung to his demanding faith with the tenacity of a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

The contrast with the later novels and the early comedies is acute. What makes the four novels of 1928–38 so continuously readable is their tone of voice. Waugh sees the world as fundamentally absurd and indifferent to mankind’s fate. With this in mind the comedy is triumphantly dark and pitiless: the evil thrive, the innocent are punished. Happiness is transitory or delusional; hopes, dreams and ambitions are redundant in the face of an uncaring, cruel and arbitrary universe. Waugh didn’t invent this point of view: one could argue that it first received its full fictional expression in the mature short stories of Anton Chekhov. The great follower of Chekhov at the time Waugh was beginning his writing career was the now forgotten William Gerhardie. Later in life Waugh admitted his debt to Gerhardie’s early novels—Futility, The Polyglots, Jazz and Jasper (published to huge acclaim in the early twenties). It was not so much a question of borrowing (though a lot of Jazz and Jasper has slipped into Vile Bodies and Scoop) but of seizing on an authorial point of view that Waugh found entirely congenial. Gerhardie did not have Waugh’s talent as a writer but he saw the world in the same absurdist, amoral way and, like Chekhov, refused to pass judgement on his characters and their actions. For the young Evelyn Waugh it must have come both as a recognition and a revelation: the tone of voice in Decline and Fall is so assured because it had already been aired and developed by Gerhardie. Waugh applied it to his own fictional ends and hit the ground running.

Waugh was received into the Catholic Church in 1930 after the humiliation of the collapse of his first marriage. He was, by all accounts, a diligent and sincere neophyte but the religiosity that makes its first pronounced appearance in Brideshead is absent from the three comedies he published in the decade following his conversion. The world of the comedies is, in effect, Godless. Indeed one might claim that it is a precondition of comedy that it is, covertly or not, atheistical: based on the premise that no omnipotent god could possibly have created or be responsible for the ghastly and rebarbative world we live in. However, Waugh’s developing obsession with his faith meant that the comedy in his work becomes intermittent and less successful: it lacks the cool, gimlet-eyed dispassion of the earlier works. As Waugh’s novels became more self-consciously serious — as God entered the frame — so they began to creak and sag.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Waugh is the most autobiographical of fiction writers and as he reached middle age so he began to be afflicted by melancholia and taedium vitae. Only his unbending religious beliefs offered him any kind of support. His son Auberon speculated that perhaps his father might actually have been clinically depressed — though he would never have admitted it and indeed the only medication he permitted himself for his condition was regular large measures of gin and lemon barley water.

In his writing life a similar zeal attached itself to the concept of style. Waugh saw himself as a craftsman whose medium was the English language: someone responsible for shaping a coherent sentence, choosing the exact words to convey the exact meaning the author implied. No language was richer and more suited to the task than English—“The most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known.” And Waugh is a consummate artist but within a particularly confined manner of English prose — he strove to write in an almost mock-Augustan idiom, sometimes beautiful and classically severe but sometimes verging on parody where too many Latinate orotundities tend to bleed the life from the fiction. As Thomas Hardy once tellingly remarked, “If you want to have a living style then it’s important not to have too much style.”

In this centenary year of Waugh’s birth, therefore, I feel it’s necessary to push to one side the image of Waugh the tweeded, social-climbing bully, and even Waugh the self-appointed guardian of the English language. Why we continue to read Waugh is why we are drawn to all great novelists: namely that in their fiction they tell us truths about our human nature and the human condition. Waugh’s perfect medium in this endeavour was comedy and what made his comedy so alluring in the 1930s is as true in 2003 as it was then. Reflecting on his father’s life and its litany of hostilities and antagonisms, Auberon Waugh wrote how sad that it should have been so when “one reflects that all he really wanted to do …was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy.” This would also pass muster as a fair summation of the effect of his comic novels. But, fantastical though they are, the fantasy is founded on a bedrock of precise observation and unflinching honesty. And it is this element in Waugh — his fundamental and unsparing honesty — that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that he presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. But this honesty meant that nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh himself. And there is no better proof than his late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: he knew himself better than anyone. Gilbert Pinfold is the record of an actual attack of dementia that Waugh suffered but it is also a merciless depiction of the author in middle age. All criticisms of the man are pre-empted because the most devastating come from the man himself. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and absolute unsentimentality — nowhere more so than in the great comedies where he displayed the nature of our short lives on this small planet with gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit (however paradoxical that adjective might seem when applied to Evelyn Waugh) and explains why the comic novels continue to beguile readers — provoking both laughter and serious reflection — and will continue to survive.

2003

Picture the scene. It is late at night, two or three in the morning and I am almost the last guest at a bibulous dinner party in north London. I need to get back home to Chelsea. I turn to the host: “I’d better call a cab,” I say. “Don’t worry,” he replies, “we have a local firm. Here in five minutes.” True enough, five minutes later there is a peremptory honking in the street. I make my farewells and go out to find my minicab. The car is not difficult to locate — double-parked and throbbing with muffled techno-pop. I slide into the back seat — apparently springless. Indeed the car, an indeterminate, currently unrecognizable model, appears to sit surprisingly low on its haunches, a real road-scraper.

The driver is smoking; the tearing, harsh voice of the dispatcher fizzles from the radio. “Where to?” the driver asks. The accent is foreign, foreign to London, anyway — the accents tend to come from far and wide, from Leeds, Aberdeen, Belgrade, Lagos, Kingston, Larnaca, Islamabad, Kiev. “Chelsea,” I reply. The set of the shoulders betokens no familiarity with this destination. “South-west London,” I add. “Embankment?” says the driver. “Get me to the Embankment and I can give you directions,” I say breezily, and settle back, noticing for the first time the curious smell — frowsty, farinaceous — here in the rear of this unclas-sifiable saloon, as if someone had cooked a spicy meal in the back of the car last week. Indeed, the material — the carpet — beneath my feet feels moist and tacky. I keep my hands in my lap and we pull away.

“POB,” the driver says into the handset of his radio. I know this means “passenger on board”—everybody knows this, so why the coy acronym? Then there is a fair bit of “Chelsea, yeah, Chelsea. Roger, Rog,” and the mike is rehung.

We drive crazily south, at high, reckless speed. I vaguely recognize the North Circular, Islington Green, then the Barbican, then the towers of Canary Wharf begin to loom closer. “Where are you going?” I ask, baffled. “Embankment,” comes the reply. “This is the wrong way,” I advise.

So, we turn and make our zig-zag way back to the West End, Parliament Square, Big Ben — now I know where I am and give confident instructions from the rear seat. The car is still being driven with adolescent disregard — exaggerated wheel-turn, heavy braking, muttered oaths. We pull up outside my house, a preposterous sum of money is demanded as the fare and a hostile altercation ensues. I see lights going on in my neighbours’ windows as the rhythmic thud of techno-pop rouses them from their beds. A compromise, but still-too-high figure is agreed (no tip) and no pen or paper is present either to furnish me with a receipt. I leave the car exhausted, frazzled, nervy, angry. I have just been mini-cabbed.

Admittedly, this scenario is an aggregate of several bad minicab journeys I’ve made — a nightmare amalgam of fear, irritation and noisome frustration — but aspects of this experience will ring true to almost everyone, I would claim. At some stage in their lives every Briton has been or will be minicabbed in a similar way. This, of course, is the downside of the minicab experience: there’s an upside too which we mustn’t forget (handy, cheapish, friendly, nearly always available). And “forget” is the key word, because the minicab, as we love and loathe it, will not be around for much longer: another quintessentially British phenomenon is about to be legislated — not out of existence — but into something safer, surer, more user-friendly. The minicab is going to become a pseudo-taxi.

From this time next year (approximately September 2002) all minicabs will have to be licensed (in fact minicab firms are meant to have had their licence applications in by now but there has been some foot-dragging). But, within a year, as far as I understand it, all the new licensed minicabs will have to display a plate on the rear bumper; it will be permissible to hail them in the street; insurance will be checked and verified by the local council; there will be possibly two mandatory MOTs a year (at least one) and there may even be a meter to regulate fares. It will not be the same thing at all.

I came to live in London in 1983, in Fulham, and there was a minicab office at the end of our street. I’m a non-driver and so this firm (let’s call them Ferret Cars) became one of my principal modes of transport around London. I opened an account with them (I still have an account with them). I came to know the drivers well — it was quite a small firm in the eighties (it’s rather flash and grand now, with a huge fleet) — and, equally, they came to know me. I learned of their many travails and woes — whose marriage was on the ropes, who was gambling away his wages, who was drinking too much, who was going to get fired and so on. The drivers became familiar to me almost as friends are: Tommy, with his shocking emphysema; Jeremy, the redundant City trader, working a twenty-hour day to repay his debts; Trevor, who as I approached his car would greet me with a stiff-armed salute and a shout “Heil Hitler”; Ben the worldly and cynical ex-police sergeant from Antigua … because I used minicabs so frequently I grew to know them all. Ferret Cars and their drivers inexorably became part of my life.

As the years went by, unconsciously, almost by a process of symbiosis, I learned a great deal about the minicabbing life — indeed, short of becoming a minicab driver myself, I couldn’t have been more familiar with their world. I knew how much you could earn; I knew when car insurance went up; I knew why the old-model Ford Granada was the mini-cabbers’ dream car; I knew all sorts of shortcuts and back-doubles in London; I knew how to avoid a traffic jam on the M4 (duck through a particular filling station on to a road unmarked on maps). Sometimes I felt I lived in a minicab — whereas, in fact, I almost died in one.

Well, if not death, then I risked fairly serious injury. I had ordered a Ferret car to take me to some “do” in central London one evening, and was picked up by Colin, a genial man but the most compulsive liar I have ever met. He was telling me about some vast house he was building in Majorca (the week before it had been in County Cork) when he drove through a junction without looking and we were hit broadside on by — irony of ironies — a black cab. Luckily the black cab hit the central door jamb. A foot to the right and I would have been in the way. Colin’s car was badly staved in but the superstructure held (was it a Saab? I can’t remember). I was thrown across the interior (a few bruises) but was otherwise fine.

I staggered out of the good door, adrenalin fizzing, and sat on the kerb for a moment to calm down and check the damage. I seemed fine but Colin was in a state. However, his mind was working fast. He asked me to leave the scene as soon as possible and said I would not be charged for the ride (I was grateful but I suspect there was an insurance issue going on here), the only other stipulation was a plea that I breathe not a word of the incident to Ferret Cars. I promised I wouldn’t and went groggily on my way, looking for a tube station, leaving Colin and the irate cabby to sort things out.

So it was not surprising, given my intimate association with Ferret Cars, that minicabs duly found their way into my fiction — the seam was too rich not to be mined at some stage. And a minicab firm is very central in my novel, Armadillo, where the hero’s brother, Slobodan “Lobby” Blocj runs the family firm, “B&B mini-cabs and International Couriers” with his dodgy partner Phil Beazley. B&B are at the low end of the minicab food chain (nothing like Ferret Cars who proceeded to go from strength to strength) and it was one of the enduring pleasures of seeing the book adapted for television to witness B&B come to vivid and appalling life.

This sort of firm in a way presents the inverse of the Platonic Ideal: B&B mini-cabs, in a pure and idealized way, is as bad as it gets — and we have all hired cabs from a B&B at some stage. First of all, the premises have to be condemnable and very small — a tiny dispatcher’s office (soft-porn calendars obligatory) and a slightly larger bull-pen adjacent to it where the waiting drivers sit, smoke and talk (what do minicab drivers talk about? They talk about cars) which is furnished with laboratory standard fluorescent lighting, a carpetless floor, a couple of winded sofas and overflowing ashtrays. And the more pretentious the name of the firm, the better: “Elite,” “Transcontinental,” “Platinum,” “International,” “Exclusive”—these are the adjectives that tend to be associated with the meanest congregation of clapped-out motors.

The cars themselves are a vital adjunct to the picture: the older and dirtier the better. One of the Ferret Car drivers (in the early days) drove an ancient Ford Cortina, through whose floor the road could be glimpsed. This driver, moreover, was the angriest man in London. I remember getting off transatlantic flights and seeing him waiting to take me home, scowling, wordless, full of hate for the world — and my spirits would wilt at the thought of the M4 waiting for us and the gush of abuse that would spout from him on the endless drive to Chelsea.

Seeing the road through the floor is good; having dangling wires hanging from the dashboard is good; very loud music is good; joss sticks burning by the gearstick is good. Eventually you become an aficionado of all the archetypically bad aspects to the echt minicab. Perversely, you don’t want the glossy Merc picking you up, you want the 1978 Toyota Corolla with the rusted chrome and the driver with Tourette’s Syndrome. You want rap music and chain smoking, you want the monoglot Serb with his new A-Z. Rather like greasy-spoon cafes (the caff, that uniquely great British contribution to culinary matters) it is what is awful that delivers the real aesthetic frisson. We want furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror; we want photos of the kids sellotaped to the dashboard; we want a boot full of junk with no room for your suitcase; we want a car that won’t move out of second gear; we want the driver-as-bore, the driver-as-kamikaze-pilot, the driver-with-terminal-halitosis. This is what makes the experience special, gives the journey its own frisson and texture — takes it out of the run-of-the-mill.

But it’s all going to disappear: clean, well-maintained cars, healthy, polite, heavily insured drivers will be the minicab norm — soon they’ll have to do the “knowledge.” But picture the scene: it’s 2005 or 2006, very late in the evening and you are almost the last to leave a dinner party far from your home. You turn to your host: “I’d better get a cab.” He says he’ll call a licensed local firm. Then he turns to you: “Or would you rather go unlicensed?” Ancient, uninsured cars, he says, all the drivers are asylum seekers. The hairs on the nape of your neck prickle. You realize how you’ve missed the authentic minicab experience. You decide to go unlicensed. Five minutes later you hear that old familiar peremptory honking outside. You leave; you locate your car. Strange music emanates from it, your driver speaks to you but you can’t understand what he says. The static from the radio cuts through your brain. You slide into the back seat, there is dampness under the soles of your shoes and an unfamiliar odour fills your nostrils. “Drive,” you say, a catch in your voice — it may be illicit, but it’s real.

This is a fantasy, of course, but it is a fond one. And I suspect it contains an element of truth: however they legislate, however they seek to root out the old-style minicab it will linger on in secret parts of London, tenacious and ineradicable — like an arctic lichen, a Coelacanth, a Tas-manian devil — a little bit of England that refuses to lie down and die.

2001

Montevideo, Uruguay … Why did I want to go there? I had never been, but there was one very good reason why I shouldn’t have planned a visit: the opening pages of my last novel are set in the place and I have found it’s a very bad idea to check out the validity of your research — your assumed knowledge—after the book has been published. I have written novels set in the Philippines, Kenya and Berlin, for example, and have still to visit these places. I had travelled there in my imagination and my imagination had enjoyed the experience — it seemed somehow unnecessary, or risky, to have to verify if it knew what it was talking about.

But I found myself, this July, in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, and was due to move on from there to Rio de Janeiro. Across the vast estuary of the Río Plata lay Uruguay and Montevideo — this strange South American city that my imagination had inhabited for some months. I knew the layout of its streets, I knew where to find the cathedral, I knew about its solitary hill with a fort on top, I knew the name of the street where the hero of my novel had been born. So close — two hours away by speedy hydrofoil — it would have been a crime not to have checked it out.

Novelists travel — or don’t travel — for all sorts of perverse reasons. And as I boarded the sleek buquebus (the hydrofoil) at Puerto Madera in Buenos Aires I started to wonder what had made me select Montevideo as the starting point for my last novel. These decisions are, more often than not, made almost unconsciously. My novel, Any Human Heart, was the story of one man’s progression through the twentieth century narrated via the medium of his intimate journals. For some reason I wanted this man, this Englishman, to be born abroad, to be somewhat deracinated, and I chose Montevideo as his birthplace and the locus of the first few years of his tumultuous life. For “some reason.” The first reason was simple: corned beef. Everyone older than me, everyone of my generation and perhaps younger, for all I know, has heard of Fray Bentos corned beef. But not many people know that Fray Bentos is not a brand name but a city in Uruguay. A city built in the late nineteenth century around beef and its processed variants. Corned beef, “bully beef,” that staple of our national diet for well over a hundred years, originated in large part from frigor’ificos—vast abattoirs and canning factories in Uruguay. Corned beef — iconic food of the British nation — came from Uruguay. Where better to start an Englishman’s life story?

But this wasn’t the complete explanation. I recently reread Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul, which is set in Paraguay. It starts like this, in a mood of classic Greenean evocativeness.

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag … It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

Three Nights of Samba in Rio