It might be thought to imply the charitable, humanist-lite and rather cosy view that ‘we are all valuable, all of us, we are all interesting and we all have a story to tell’. Sigh.
Though I like to think that I am neither charitable nor cosy, I do confess that there seems to me to be a small degree of truth in that interpretation: get anyone to talk about themselves and their lives, and you will sooner or
On the other hand, as far as that first interpretation is concerned, we would be wise to remember that real writers are few and far between, and that there are even fewer ‘good’ writers.
That point might well be summed up in the observation that ‘it’s not the joke, it’s the way you tell it’.
To extrapolate, in other words, it’s not the story, but ‘how you tell it’ or ‘how you write it’. I have met folk who could make an account of Judgment Day sound decidedly dull.
If someone, he or she – though it’s more likely to be a very boring ‘he’ – prepares to recount an ‘amusing’ incident, make your excuses and leave! If you don’t, you will have no one but yourself to blame.
The second interpretation is less kind: that everyone wants to ‘write a novel’ or possibly ‘my book’ and thinks they have one to produce. Actually, not ‘everyone’ does, and of those who do, it would be truer to observe that ‘they think they do’.
The writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens nailed it, though here I must paraphrase as I have not been able to find a definitive quote; but Hitchens (right) observed, more or less, ‘Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain’. Quite.
Perhaps one of the more useful lessons we can learn as we grow up – and many folk never learn that lesson – is that we are really not as interesting to others as we like to think we are. You might be the centre of your world, but you are most certainly not at the centre of their world – they are.
As for ‘that book inside me’, hacks – my preferred word for ‘journalists’ – are no exception and equally as frail and self-deluding in thinking they have ‘a novel to write’.
I should add that in my world the use of the description ‘hacks’ is not pejorative but far more admiring: as far as I’m concerned, ‘hacks’ are the real professionals, men and women able to turn their hand to all journalistic tasks required of them without a moment’s thought. They might be rough journeymen, but a true hack will always deliver and do the job.
Quite a few hacks, although most certainly not all, regard themselves as essentially writers who happen to be forced by cruel life and practical circumstance to earn their daily crust and rather than sell insurance or repair plumbing, they choose to do so by serving the Press (or, in these digital days, the media).
If only, their thinking goes, they could break free of the necessity to make a living, they could finally write The Great American Novel or The Great German / French / Australian / Russian – you get the drift – novel.
To get to the novel in hand, A Crooked Sixpence was Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s ‘book inside me’, written in his early thirties, and it is telling that it is the only novel he wrote.
Sayle had arrived in London from Sydney, Australia, in 1952, at the age of 26 and found himself a reporter’s job on the Sunday People, a British Sunday ‘red-top’. He had already trained as a reporter in Australia and was certainly no beginner, however. It seems he had schlepped across the world to Old Blighty in pursuit of a girlfriend who was relocating there (and who dumped him).
The Sunday People is still published today, although in common with all other British print media, it has fallen on very hard times and its circulation has declined alarmingly to almost nothing since the digital age began.
At its height, pretty much when Sayle was working at the Sunday People, it was selling five million copies every Sunday. Its circulation is now said to be down to around 125,000 copies.
While the News Of The World still existed – it ceased publication in 2011 in the midst of the ‘phone hacking’ scandal – its main rivals at that bottom end of the market were the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror (which in Sayle’s days on the Sunday People was the Sunday Pictorial).
All three papers dealt in the same subject matter: sex scandals, showbiz and celebrity news, ‘human interest’ stories and more sex scandals. Sayle’s novel is an account of his time on the Sunday People and we’re informed by all who were also active in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a very thinly disguised account indeed.
If someone, he or she – though it’s more likely to be a very boring ‘he’ – prepares to recount an ‘amusing’ incident, make your excuses and leave! If you don’t, you will have no one but yourself to blame.
The second interpretation is less kind: that everyone wants to ‘write a novel’ or possibly ‘my book’ and thinks they have one to produce. Actually, not ‘everyone’ does, and of those who do, it would be truer to observe that ‘they think they do’.
. . .
As for ‘that book inside me’, hacks – my preferred word for ‘journalists’ – are no exception and equally as frail and self-deluding in thinking they have ‘a novel to write’.
I should add that in my world the use of the description ‘hacks’ is not pejorative but far more admiring: as far as I’m concerned, ‘hacks’ are the real professionals, men and women able to turn their hand to all journalistic tasks required of them without a moment’s thought. They might be rough journeymen, but a true hack will always deliver and do the job.
Quite a few hacks, although most certainly not all, regard themselves as essentially writers who happen to be forced by cruel life and practical circumstance to earn their daily crust and rather than sell insurance or repair plumbing, they choose to do so by serving the Press (or, in these digital days, the media).
If only, their thinking goes, they could break free of the necessity to make a living, they could finally write The Great American Novel or The Great German / French / Australian / Russian – you get the drift – novel.
To get to the novel in hand, A Crooked Sixpence was Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s ‘book inside me’, written in his early thirties, and it is telling that it is the only novel he wrote.
Sayle had arrived in London from Sydney, Australia, in 1952, at the age of 26 and found himself a reporter’s job on the Sunday People, a British Sunday ‘red-top’. He had already trained as a reporter in Australia and was certainly no beginner, however. It seems he had schlepped across the world to Old Blighty in pursuit of a girlfriend who was relocating there (and who dumped him).
The Sunday People is still published today, although in common with all other British print media, it has fallen on very hard times and its circulation has declined alarmingly to almost nothing since the digital age began.
At its height, pretty much when Sayle was working at the Sunday People, it was selling five million copies every Sunday. Its circulation is now said to be down to around 125,000 copies.
While the News Of The World still existed – it ceased publication in 2011 in the midst of the ‘phone hacking’ scandal – its main rivals at that bottom end of the market were the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror (which in Sayle’s days on the Sunday People was the Sunday Pictorial).
All three papers dealt in the same subject matter: sex scandals, showbiz and celebrity news, ‘human interest’ stories and more sex scandals. Sayle’s novel is an account of his time on the Sunday People and we’re informed by all who were also active in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a very thinly disguised account indeed.
. . .
The hero of Sayle’s novel is his alter ego, James O’Toole, who begins to get pangs of conscience about the work he does – it requires him to do behave pretty shabbily – and who eventually resigns his job, unable to take any more heaping shit on otherwise harmless and innocent people.
One can only assume that by 1956, Sayle was suffering the same pangs because after four years toiling at the Sunday People he, too, collected his cards and took off for Europe, living in Paris and Germany – accounts vary, in keeping with dealing with newspapers and their often elastic relationship with the truth).
Sustaining himself – we read on Wikipedia and in pieces which will also have relied on Wikipedia – by selling encyclopaedias door to door and flogging dodgy savings products to US serviceman, he wrote his novel in his time off. A Crooked Sixpence was published in 1961 by Doubleday, but was only briefly available because it soon ran into trouble.
Those who worked in Fleet Street in at the same time as Sayle say they are able readily to identify the – rather small – number of characters in A Crooked Sixpence: the editor, his features editor, his news editor, its crime reporters, his head of the art department and a photographer. All, it seems, were based on real-life journalists (the crime reporter was the, I’m told ‘famous’, Duncan Webb).
But it was not the ready identification of those men that lead to trouble. Also based on someone Sayle encountered was his friend Michael Alexander with whom he lodged in South Kensington and who, like his fictional counterpart in the novel, Michael Macedon, was for ever stony broke. So when A Crooked Sixpence was published Alexander decided to make himself a few bob by suing Doubleday for libel.
Sayle was not particularly happy about this apparent and, it will have seemed briefly, ‘foolproof’ ruse to acquire some cash, but was persuaded by Alexander that his libel suit would cost neither Sayle nor the publishers a penny as Doubleday’s insurance company would cough up.
That was the theory, but it didn’t work out that way: instead of claiming from its insurers, Doubleday pragmatically decided simply to junk publication and it pulped all the copies it had so far printed. And that was it for Sayle’s first and only novel for the next 47 years.
. . .
Alexander died in 2004, and as the dead cannot sue for libel, the novel was again published in 2008, by Revel Barker, a former Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror reporter who also writes thrillers. By then Murray Sayle (left),
suffering Parkinsons, had returned to see out his life in Australia with his third wife, but as he did not die until 2010, he did eventually see his novel back in print and on sale to the public. That might have been some comfort.
Sayle was and is spoken of as something of a one-off, an intelligent, engaging man with a sardonic wit and conversation who had a keen nose for sniffing out the real essence of a story, and going just that little bit further than many of his colleagues.
After he had realised that scandal-mongering for a red-top was not how he wanted to spend his life and had finished writing his novel, he began to work in France for a news agency and then, in 1964, found a berth on the Sunday Times.
Under its then new editor Harold Evans (below), the Sunday Times was being turned into a true newspaper of record and gained a great deal of respect. Evans left in 1981 when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and since then the Sunday Times has, shamefully, lived off the reputation for investigative reporting it achieved under Evans.
It is now an embarrassing shadow of its former self, more given to plugging ‘must-have’ aftershaves and perfumes and ‘lifestyle’ features and still essentially dealing in gossip, though of the ‘top-drawer’ kind. While working
for Evans, Sayle filed some remarkable stories, including finding the Soviet spy Kim Philby in Moscow and tracking down Che Guevera, reporting from Vietnam and from Prague during the Soviet invasion.
Sayle was and is spoken of as something of a one-off, an intelligent, engaging man with a sardonic wit and conversation who had a keen nose for sniffing out the real essence of a story, and going just that little bit further than many of his colleagues.
After he had realised that scandal-mongering for a red-top was not how he wanted to spend his life and had finished writing his novel, he began to work in France for a news agency and then, in 1964, found a berth on the Sunday Times.
Under its then new editor Harold Evans (below), the Sunday Times was being turned into a true newspaper of record and gained a great deal of respect. Evans left in 1981 when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and since then the Sunday Times has, shamefully, lived off the reputation for investigative reporting it achieved under Evans.
It is now an embarrassing shadow of its former self, more given to plugging ‘must-have’ aftershaves and perfumes and ‘lifestyle’ features and still essentially dealing in gossip, though of the ‘top-drawer’ kind. While working
However, he called it a day with the Sunday Times in 1972 after his – we now know very accurate – report about the January ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of Irish civilians in Derry/Londonderry was spiked.
Sayle reported that the British Army had fired first and without warning, which would make the deaths of the 14 civilians who died plain murder. Some were shot in the back as they ran away, others were shot trying to help wounded.
The British government was insisting – wholly untruthfully – that the Army had merely ‘returned fire’ and the Sunday Times bosses, for whatever reason, chose to toe the government’s line. Sayle resigned.
In short, Sayle in journalistic terms was the real deal. What he was not, this reviewer believes, was a very good novelist.
Sayle reported that the British Army had fired first and without warning, which would make the deaths of the 14 civilians who died plain murder. Some were shot in the back as they ran away, others were shot trying to help wounded.
The British government was insisting – wholly untruthfully – that the Army had merely ‘returned fire’ and the Sunday Times bosses, for whatever reason, chose to toe the government’s line. Sayle resigned.
In short, Sayle in journalistic terms was the real deal. What he was not, this reviewer believes, was a very good novelist.
. . .
For all the praise heaped on A Crooked Sixpence as, for example – notably by Sayle’s pal and fellow Australian reporter Phillip Knightley – ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ – A Crooked Sixpence is something of an amorphous muddle.
Sayle relies heavily on dialogue, and although there is nowt wrong with that in itself, it all becomes wholly unconvincing in longer passages when the main protagonist O’Toole begins to philosophise. Perhaps I’m not the sharpest blade in the box, but more than once this reader was wondering what the hell O’Toole was talking about.
Worse – far, far worse, though – for ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ which centres on the vastly popular and best-selling Sunday Sun, the newspaper, its newsroom and its whole operation remains flat, two-dimensional and remarkably – make that unforgivably – dull: nothing but nothing comes alive, not the characters, the newsroom, or very much about the paper.
I’ve worked for Sunday newspapers (though as a sub-editor) and the newsroom is quite a quiet place from Tuesday to Friday. But even then it is far livelier than what comes across as an empty shell of a place in Sayle’s novel.
Sayle’s candour about the mucky work the Sun’s reporters and executives get up to is admirable, but is wholly lost and almost irrelevant.
That dull two-dimensionality extends to what occurs outside the Sun’s offices: here again nothing comes alive. A natural fiction writer Sayle most certainly was not. I suspect he realised as much in that he does not seem to have attempted any more novels and certainly published none.
A Crooked Sixpence was the book Sayle had in him, and at the end of the day, Knightley’s praise and other kudos notwithstanding, Sayle might have been best advised to have heeded Christopher Hitchens advice and let the book remain inside him.
There are other novels about newspapers – Michael Frayn’s Till The End Of The Morning, Michael Green’s two volumes of autobiography, The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship and Nobody Hurt In Small Earthquake and Monica Dickens ‘memoir/novel’ My Turn To Make The Tea are the ones I’ve read – and there will certainly be one or two others.
In a sense, the ‘gold standard’ is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But Waugh, Frayn, Green and Dickens were first and foremost writers and – though not so much the Dickens – they carry it off. Sadly, Sayle does not.
Sayle relies heavily on dialogue, and although there is nowt wrong with that in itself, it all becomes wholly unconvincing in longer passages when the main protagonist O’Toole begins to philosophise. Perhaps I’m not the sharpest blade in the box, but more than once this reader was wondering what the hell O’Toole was talking about.
Worse – far, far worse, though – for ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ which centres on the vastly popular and best-selling Sunday Sun, the newspaper, its newsroom and its whole operation remains flat, two-dimensional and remarkably – make that unforgivably – dull: nothing but nothing comes alive, not the characters, the newsroom, or very much about the paper.
I’ve worked for Sunday newspapers (though as a sub-editor) and the newsroom is quite a quiet place from Tuesday to Friday. But even then it is far livelier than what comes across as an empty shell of a place in Sayle’s novel.
Sayle’s candour about the mucky work the Sun’s reporters and executives get up to is admirable, but is wholly lost and almost irrelevant.
That dull two-dimensionality extends to what occurs outside the Sun’s offices: here again nothing comes alive. A natural fiction writer Sayle most certainly was not. I suspect he realised as much in that he does not seem to have attempted any more novels and certainly published none.
A Crooked Sixpence was the book Sayle had in him, and at the end of the day, Knightley’s praise and other kudos notwithstanding, Sayle might have been best advised to have heeded Christopher Hitchens advice and let the book remain inside him.
There are other novels about newspapers – Michael Frayn’s Till The End Of The Morning, Michael Green’s two volumes of autobiography, The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship and Nobody Hurt In Small Earthquake and Monica Dickens ‘memoir/novel’ My Turn To Make The Tea are the ones I’ve read – and there will certainly be one or two others.
In a sense, the ‘gold standard’ is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But Waugh, Frayn, Green and Dickens were first and foremost writers and – though not so much the Dickens – they carry it off. Sadly, Sayle does not.
. . .
While preparing for this post, I was digging around for more info on Sayle and 1950s / 1960s newspapers when I came across the following anecdote. As almost always it is attributed to many folk and sorting out is really true is a dull task I shall leave to others.
Several years ago, in a healthier, less moralistic age when boozing was not infra dig and reporters enjoyed refreshing themselves, one Daily Mirror reporter (when it was still the Daily Mirror not, as today The Mirror and also a pale shadow of itself) got so pissed while out on a job that he was incapable of doing anything.
A mate, a Daily Mail reporter on the same job, realised the guy would be in trouble as he would be in no fit state to write a story of any kind.
So after writing and filing his own story, he re-wrote it and phoned it in to the Mirror copy-takers under his Mirror mate’s name.
The next day, the story appeared under the Mirror man’s byline and later that day when he bumped into his Daily Mail mate, he proudly flaunted the Mirror with his bylined story and crowed ‘See, I can write a story even when I’m completely pissed!’
Thing is, he was so completely pissed the day before, he could not remember a bloody thing at all.
A mate, a Daily Mail reporter on the same job, realised the guy would be in trouble as he would be in no fit state to write a story of any kind.
So after writing and filing his own story, he re-wrote it and phoned it in to the Mirror copy-takers under his Mirror mate’s name.
The next day, the story appeared under the Mirror man’s byline and later that day when he bumped into his Daily Mail mate, he proudly flaunted the Mirror with his bylined story and crowed ‘See, I can write a story even when I’m completely pissed!’
Thing is, he was so completely pissed the day before, he could not remember a bloody thing at all.
. . .
LEST WE FORGET:
On January 30, 1972, Catholics in Derry/Londonderry organised and launched a protest march.
The British Army stood by in case of trouble, as undoubtedly did members of the Provisional IRA (the Irish Republican Army, first formed in 1917, then reformed in 1922, but largely inactive until the early 1970s).
At some point shooting broke out: the Army insisted its men were simply returning fire, the IRA insisted the Army had fired first and it had then returned fire.
The official Army line was taken up by the British government and repeated again and again until it finally 38 years later it finally came clean.
At first, within days of the massacre, the British government set up the Widgery Tribunal into what went on and – in hindsight predictably perhaps – it absolved the Army of any guilt and found that the Army had been responding to gunfire and bomb-throwing.
Twenty-six years later, in 1998, the Savile Inquiry was established and – after 12 years – found that the Army had ‘lost control’ and was responsible for the deaths. This completely contradicted Widgery Tribunal’s findings.
In June 2010, David Cameron, the then prime minister, made a public apology in the House of Commons for the murders.
... and to think I thought the Cambridge Five was the Cambridge turn off on the M11 Motorway until I finished my MI6 induction program by studying Beyond Enkription in #TheBurlingtonFiles series. No wonder it's mandatory reading on some countries’ intelligence induction programs.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I have no idea, more or less, what you are talking about, especially in context of this post, but second, I'm interested in what you have or might have to say. Could you possibly flesh it out?
ReplyDeleteI only have what is everyone's else's general knowledge about Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the rest (the kind of information which is repeated 'authoritatively' by The Sunday Times as if they were letting us in on a secret), so I shall look up the book / publication you mention.
NB Like many, I would read 'the Sunday papers' every Sunday morning almost as a ritual (and I can remember the moment - the time and where I was - when I gave up on them for ever and I have never looked back.
My then girlfriend and I were sitting in front of a pleasant fire in a pub on a Sunday lunchtime for a Sunday lunchtime drink. We had bought the ST, the 'Obs' (as some folk call it) and the Sunday Telegraph and I was reading through a Sunday Times news story.
Then it occurred to me: what have I read in this piece which I did not already know from the TV news and papers all through the week before? The answer was: fuck all, nothing.
By then I was working as a news sub-editor after 6/7 as a reporter, most recently on The Journal in Newcastle. And in Newcastle, the practice was when you were given a story to go to the cuttings library and look up what, if anything, had previously been written about what you were dealing with. (The Journal had an excellent, well-organised cuttings library, some papers do not.)
From these details - certainly not always true as I once found out - you had at least half of the story you were about to write. That Sunday lunchtime I went through that ST news story again, carefully, trying to spot what was 'new' and what was being regurgitated from cuttings.
I can't remember the story and certainly not the 'new element(s), but whatever they were it was wholly insignificant - someone was 'seen coming out of so and so's office - now what could that mean?' In other words bullshit.
But it was all couched in that authoritative manner the 'serious' Sundays adopt, implying 'actually, there's even more we know, we we can't as yet tell you'.
I would appreciate a response fleshing out your first comment.
P.