Rose Tremain's The Colour: less than the sum of its - many - parts

I’ve just finished reading a novel which I didn’t much enjoy, but which I forced myself to finish because I wanted to leave a review of it on GoodReads. I haven’t posted here for while, so just to keep the pot simmering, here it is. OK, that might be cheating but . . .

Whether you intend to read Rose Tremain’s 2003 novel The Colour and have come here searching the views of others, or whether you have, like me, logged on to submit your own rating and review, you will be struck that far more readers who have finished reading the novel — I shall be unkind and describe that as ‘ploughed their way through the novel’ — thought it very good and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was also a hit with many of the critics: the blurb on the back of my paperback version quotes Britain’s Daily Telegraph as describing Ms Tremain as ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and the Britain’s Independent gushes ‘a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying’.

The New York Times is a little more sober and warns that the novel can be, and often is, a little ‘windy’. I know what the paper’s critic means and intend to be less kind. And I have to say that I was not moved, surprised, invigorated or satisfied by The Colour. Sadly not a bit.

Yet I cannot deny that the overall majority of those who rated it were impressed — 26pc of the almost 5,000 awarded this novel five stars and 41pc gave it four stars. Only 23pc gave it, like me, three stars. So I must be candid: this might well be your kind of thing and you might well enjoy it, but it certainly wasn’t mine.

In my view The Colour is often horribly overwritten: Tremain cannot resist a simile or two or even 2,000, which all too often are forced, stick out like a sore thumb and illuminate nothing. She is also quite addicted to longwinded, inappropriate and often contradictory metaphors which serve no purpose except, I suspect, because Ms Tremain wants to give her work a literary flavour.

They don’t — all they give this work is a faux-literary flavour (faux as in ‘fake’), though I wouldn’t doubt that some readers — those who made this a five-star read — will often often have paused and reflected ‘God, she can write!’

Ms Tremain is obviously very much at home with words but there is more to writing than that, and her flood of metaphors jar and confuse and are usually entirely superfluous. Her descriptions sometimes just don’t ring

true, can be confusing and convey — for this reader at least — far less than they might have done or should do.

A few years ago I came upon a similar word to the now quite well-known term ’journalese’, which well describes the style of this kind of writing — ‘novelese’. You might know what I am talking about. To my mind The Colour is ‘novelese’.

I forced myself to finish the novel because I intended writing this review and thought it only fair to Ms Tremain to do so. But it was no pleasure — The Colour is 363 pages long and remorseless.

Ironically, it might well have successfully been boiled down to a quarter its size, and far more tautly written, concentrated to make whatever Ms Tremain hoped to convey more telling, it could have been a greater success.

What, though, she hoped to convey is not apparent. I often felt, in fact, that there might be material for four, five or six quite good and quite distinct short stories. But yoked together as the different themes and characters’ back stories were, it is too amorphous and at times turgid.

Somehow it didn’t hang together: the separate strands of the novel remained stubbornly separate and did not gel as I think Ms Tremain intended them to gel. Certainly there was ‘story’ enough, but the strands and their stories might well have made up separate books with no loss to each other.

The quasi-mystical account of an outcast middle-aged Maori women — I think — looking for some kind of redemption had essentially very little to do with the account of the English immigrant who becomes obsessed with finding gold (it all takes place in New Zealand’s mid-19th century gold rush).

This man, escaping in shame from the death of a young girl in a botched abortion, is married to a woman in her mid-30s who is also escaping, in her case from sterile future as a governess. The marriage, on both sides was one of convenience, but — crucially — the reader (well, this reader) fails to become engaged.

The former governess’ musings on freedom and all the rest read more like the yearnings of an adolescent girl confided to her diary than anything we might reasonably be expected to take seriously. Then there’s fourth central character, a Chinese market gardener who also stumbles into a fair amount of quasi-mysticism which had me more than baffled once or twice.

Those  yearnings of an adolescent girl highlight one aspect of Ms Tremain’s writing which I found particularly irritating. From the first page to the last Ms Tremain, whose presence as ‘the author’ is apparent throughout, gives us the thoughts and ‘insights’ of pretty much every character at every turn, and all — even a preternaturally articulate eight-year-old boy and the outcast middle-aged Maori women — express themselves as they might were they (much like Ms Tremain) writing a novel. It is incessant, interminable and wearying, especially when such insights come loaded with all those bloody similes.

Pretty much everything the characters see, hear, feel or ‘understand’ — they are much given to ‘understanding’ and getting insight into their lives, their pasts and their futures — has some kind of significance, and they examine and reflect their thoughts and feelings at pretty much every turn. It’s more like eavesdropping on a university creative writing class than being in the windy wilds and open country of New Zealand’s South Island.

Despite that, all the characters, with the possible exception the Englishman’s widowed mother (who emigrated with her son and his wife) and a 15-year-old male prostitute, remain distinctly two-dimensional. We don’t — well, at least I didn’t — care much about any of them and what fate might have in store for them at all.

This might, though, be your thing: after all 67pc of those who rated it gave it four stars or more. You might well enjoy a spuriously literary immersion in a sea of feelings, thoughts, insights. Yes, there is ‘action’ of kind and, yes, ‘things happen’ — quite a bit, in fact — but it is all so remorselessly swamped and our involvement struggles to survive. It really wasn’t my bag at all.

At first I was going to give The Colour just two stars, but I felt that was possibly unfair. It is not ‘bad’ at all. It’s just it doesn’t achieve what I suspect Ms Tremain set out to achieve or, more unkindly, it doesn’t live up to its pretensions. On the other hand there are far worse such novels out there, so I’ve finally settled on three stars.

You do realise, of course, that reading this blog marks you out as — well, how do I put this without being too effusive? — a little more refined, a cut above the rabble and someone whose intellect and lively mind one can only admire. Elite? Yes, and then some

Over the years like many, many people the world over, I had bought ‘the Sunday papers’. Being — apparently — less intellectually and politically developed than my peers I suspect I regarded doing so as an aspect of being grown-up. It’s what ‘grown-ups’ around me did. Or perhaps I’m being too hard on myself. Anyway until I was in my mid-30s I spent several hours reading them like every other good middle-class chap.

Then one Sunday lunchtime sitting in a pub in Birmingham with my girlfriend, a pint of cider, The Sunday Times and The Observer the penny dropped. I suppose I might even call it ‘an epiphany’ if that didn’t sound too daft and if it had a more religious dimension to it, but it didn’t. It was quite straightforward in fact. I had just finished

reading some ‘important’ news story or other, written at length and taking up the best part of two broadsheet pages, when it occurred to me that I had not learnt a single new fact. Not one. Everything I had read I was already familiar with, and it dawned on me that all I had read was simply a rehashed round-up of the various stories and accounts of a particular matter that had been carried by the dailies throughout the previous week.

Well, if that occurred to me, why hadn’t it occurred to many others over the years? After all then — this was in the early 1980s when I was working for the Birmingham Evening Mail — the circulation figures for the Sundays were still very healthy, so the Sundays then had a great many more readers than they do now. Yet everyone was still at it and many, a great many, thought that their Sunday broadsheet pretty much had the inside track on everything. Actually, they were just, to a large extent, skilled re-write jobs.

Circulation figures these days are discouraging: according to the ABC figures for July 2019 (I got these from the Press Gazette, the Sunday Telegraph annual figure was 257,034 a week (down by 12% on the previous year), the Sunday Times was 649,908 (down 11%, but of that figure 51,445 were ‘bulks’, the trade term for simply giving the paper away free for various purposes) and The Observer a very piddly — in fact an embarrassingly bad — 157,4553 (down 7%).

By comparison, at the beginning of January 1980 when I joined the Evening Mail, its circulation was a healthy — if I have got this right — 240,000 or thereabouts, but, to its extreme annoyance, it had fallen some from the papers’ heyday and had recently been outshone by the Wolverhampton-based evening paper, the Express & Star. Regarded by the Evening Mail as something of an upstart, by January 1980, the Express & Star was selling about 20,000 copies more a night.

In the early-1980s there was no internet and so no ‘social media’, just four TV channels (and the newest, Channel 4 had only just been launched) and most households bought a Sunday paper. The tabloids sold better, but even the circulation figures for the three main broadsheets — the Independent wasn’t found until 1986 and its sister Independent on Sunday not for another few years and both went to the wall as printed papers three years ago — were good, though already declining from their heyday but still making a great deal of moolah for their owners. Apart from the broadsheets, there was The News of the World (‘the Screws’ as in The News of the Screws), The People, The Sunday Mirror, and in those days several regional Sunday papers. In Birmingham we had the Sunday Mercury, though I never read it.

. . .

The trick used by (here in Britain, but you will have your own ’Sundays’) the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ was - and still is - a good one and, like all good tricks, a simple one: to write your news stories in a pseudo-authoritative manner which seems to wink at the reader ’WE know what’s REALLY going on, and as YOU are reading this, YOU do to’ (with the tacit message ‘so, well done, join us, The Intelligent Informed People’).

That’s outrageous flattery, of course, but it’s one of only true keys to success in this world. Flatter someone well and consistently — and so that they don’t notice — and you will have whatever is your wicked way before you can say ‘sucker!’ It beats brute force every time, and no one is immune to it — well, perhaps YOU are, my dear: but then you always did strike me as being just a little too sharp to fall for that kind of schtick and I doubt I could sucker you successfully, but as for everyone else . . . (yes, you know who, that’s it him/her).

Grateful to be acknowledged, however spuriously, as something of ‘an insider’, Sunday Telegraph, ST and ‘Obs’ readers (and, until it was put out of its misery, ’Indy’ readers) would then spend the early part of the following week when at work, in the gym changing room or down the pub, pontificating with equal pseudo-authority on a subject they barely understood and whose essential details were becoming harder to remember by the hour:

‘Well, that Dominic Cummings is a complete menace, of course/the only one of that sorry gang who seems to have any kind of grip . . . The Queen is furious, apparently, but she can’t say or do anything at all/serves her right, I’m sure she’s a secret remoaner . . . Come on, Boris might have pulled a fast one, but its genius, for God’s sake, and anyway, what’s the fuss about, Parliament is prorogued every year/he’s really gone too far and it’ll end he career with a bit of luck . . .

But never mind. By Thursday and Friday when their increasingly threadbare comprehension of ‘an issue’ courtesy of two hours spent ‘with the Sundays’ is so hazy most folk wisely keep schtumm on the matter, there is a new edition of the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ to look forward to the following Sunday.

Try it yourselves: if you are one of the fast-diminishing gang who still spend a few hours every Sunday ‘with the Sundays’, ask yourself after reading a story — like the one I’ve linked to, but any of the others — the demos and protests in Hong Kong, the US/China trader war, Salvini shooting himself in the foot in Italy — what have you exactly learned from reading that latest story that you didn’t already know?

To be fair, Sunday papers have a tough time: unless ‘a story breaks early on the day before publication, it will be picked up by one of its daily rivals and no longer ‘news’ by the time they add their two ha’porth worth. That’s why, I suppose, they have to give it that ‘authoritative’ spin. They have somehow to give the impression ‘the story’ has moved on.

. . .

A vaguely related practice, one often adopted by the Guardian, it to cover what they call ‘a running story’, giving ‘live updates’ on an EU meeting, a huge train crash, or whatever ‘the story’ is. It is equally spurious (in my view). Take the ‘EU meeting’: its a hoary old cliche that we, the public, are not only entitled to learn what those who govern us are up to but should know. Fair enough, although that rather ignores the problem that most of us interpret events to suit our own bias.

Thus the recent ‘prorogation of Parliament’ is either a sneaky way of denying those opposed to a ‘no-deal’ Brexit as much parliamentary time as possible to get their ducks in a row to make sure a deal is struck; or it is — this is the official line — something that happens every year in September before the three weeks of party conferences (the period often referred to as the ‘conference recess’) and always happens before a Queen’s Speech is due.

That Parliament will be suspended (the common or garden word for ‘prorogued’) for longer than is normal is a coincident say its supporters: it is just how the ‘conference season’ and the usual prorogation of Parliament before a Queen’s Speech have panned out, and that it does rather stymy ‘no-deal’ opponents hoping to scupper the Prime Minister’s plans to sell Britain down the river (No commenting! Ed.) is neither here nor there.

For these past few minutes or so Radio 4’s the World This Weekend news programme has been playing. OK, often — another problem faced by hacks when there has been no new development in a story — news editors will think up some angle or other to give the story legs and this is certainly what happened on the World This Weekend. But they got some historian or other in, an expert on the English Civil War — note the English Civil War, not the Scottish, Welsh or British Civil War — to compare the situations.

It all kicked off, she said, when the the Parliamentarians found there seemed way forward in their negotiations with Charles II over his high-handed handling of Parliament. The point of comparison is, I suppose, not just the stalemate reached between the no ‘no-deal’ Brexit camp and the ‘we leave by October 31 come what may’ wallahs, but the stark and unreconcilable positions of the Remainers and Brexiteers: ne’re the twain will meet.

On the bright side, of course, is the fact that in Britain, unlike in the US where apparently every child over seven is by law obliged to own and know how to use at least two different kinds of gun, few households have a stock of weapons. When we are angry we prefer to right strong letters to someone rather than take a number of semi-automatic weapons to the nearest school and kill as many kids as possible. So if this matter does turn into a civil war (and, to be frank the last one was more than 360 years ago, so we might well be due one), at least most combatants will be armed with nothing more lethal than a few obscenities.

Should I be joking? Of course, I should. The whole matter, from the Brexit vote on three years ago, is a farce. Pip, pip.

Bugger Hemingway and his phoney machismo - the football season has started! Rejoice.

To Bodmin last night with sister-in-law and brother-in-law Julie and Denis and Denis’s friend Leo to the folk club. Folk really isn’t my thing, but I do like good guitar playing, and these two guys, Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith with guitar, banjo and squeezebox between them, play well. In fact, the music was excellent, it’s just the kind of singing and to a less extent the lyrics which leave me a tad cold.

Denis and Leo are both Irish, though they first met when after they had moved to England to work. Leo likes his James Joyce and last night presented me with, in two volumes, Ulysses in German (I am half-German, speak German and went to German schools for four years). He’s already given me Portrait Of The Artist in German - which I have not yet read - so I had better get on with them.

For some odd reason I suspect all three will be more readable in German than English, although I really couldn’t tell you why. I can honestly say that - strictly speaking - I have read every word of Ulysses, but each just once and quite apart from not understanding a word, I didn’t enjoy it. But that was in my last year at college when I was 22 so perhaps I’ll have more luck this time. Or perhaps not.

The Hemingway thing is progressing - now on to a book (an a ‘Critical Lives’ series) by a Verna Kale on Hemingway. It’s good reading. Although I am by now quite familiar with the course of that dick’s life, each such book adds more colour and nuance to my picture of him.

I have also, reluctantly, but from a sense of duty, ordered his short story collections In Our Time and Men Without Women. And I stress ‘from a sense of duty’. Hemingway did have a gift of sorts, though I still can’t see how he was ‘a genius’, but in other respects he couldn’t bloody write and much of what he writes - a Moveable Feast which I also recently read being a good case in point as well as his Art Of The Short Story - are so bloody jejeune that you really have to wonder why the myth persists. There is, of course, the other possibility - and this does worry me - that it is I who is simply to dense, insensitive, untutored, I don’t know what, to see what ‘makes Hemingway great’.

I’ve decided that if I’m going to do this thing properly, I’m pretty much obliged to read some of his stories, even though the piece began simply as a gasp of astonishment that anyone could think The Sun Also Rises is ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway ‘a writer of genius’.

Add to that now - and I realised this after finishing Leonard Leff’s book about how Hemingway’s reputation was the result of the growth in the 1920s of Hollywood, magazines and the cult of the celebrity (about which Hemingway was pretty schizophrenic: part of him hated it or so he said, but that didn’t stop him from subscribing to a news clipping service) - that the ‘lost generation’ angle was, at best, not picked up at the time judging by reviews of the novel and, at worst, was grafter on later by the academic industry.

A while ago, while reading Kale’s book, there occurred to me an image which for me sums up what it is like reading Hemingway: if you have ever walked across a field that has been occupied by cattle for several months in all weathers from which they have now been removed and the earth has now dried out, you will know that what

superficially looks reasonably smooth is anything but. You stumble and trip from tussock to tussock, each of which hides quite a deep hole into which you plunge your foot and often lose your balance. It is not easy to walk across and certainly no pleasure. That’s what bloody Hemingway’s ‘prose’ is like. OK, you might attempt to justify it by insisting ‘but that’a his style’, but to that I respond: ‘Well, it’s a fucking awful, fucking juvenile, fucking often unreadable style.’

For this long whatever its called - critique, monograph, whatever, but which I think of as ‘the Hemingway bollocks I’m doing at the moment’ - I have tracked down various pieces and posted them on the net so that I can give links in the piece when finished and posted to act as appendices. You can find Hemingways’ Art Of The Short Story here. Were you told it had been written by an undergraduate, you wouldn’t doubt that for a minute.

. . .

I was going to post on Facebook, but have left it too late so I shall do so here, the following:

A long sigh of relief could be heard last night even as most of Britain was plunged into darkness because of two power supply failures when a whistle was blown, a ball was kicked and the 2019/20 English Premier League season got underway.

Last night it was Liverpool v Norwich, which, predictably, Norwich lost. Tomorrow, it’s Manchester United - my team - against Chelsea, a match which might indicate what kind of season both can look forward to.

United will have Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in charge for his first full season as manager - and the bizarre brilliant start and disappointing end to his short tenure as manager at the end of last season after taking over from Jose Mourhino and wondering how he will fair will focus attention on his side. Solskjaer is a former United player and hero, and Chelsea have their own former player and hero in charge: Frank Lampard, who did bloody well for Derby. So that game will be interesting.

Longwinded? Dull? Are we really talking about the acme of new journalism? Yes, sadly we are - ain’t nothing as impressionable as impressionable folk. On the other hand: RIP Jim Innes

I have made no secret of the fact that growing up, with a very bright older brother who seemed to be able to master whatever he turned his hand and mind to, and generally being more of a slow plodder than a fizzing spark, that I had something of an inferiority complex.

I now realise, of course, that it wasn’t necessarily that bad at all, and that could I but have seen into the souls of my young friends at school and then at college, I might have been surprised, then astonished, that they felt pretty much the same thing. It was more a lack of confidence borne of a lack of experience and in that I was really no different to my peers. It didn’t help when you - that is I - came across, as one often did, as one of those young chaps who were the very personification of confidence. And I say ‘chaps’ because like most males of my generation women didn’t really ‘count’.

Although I think that attitude to women - which I most certainly no longer share - is less than admirable and that, thank the Lord, we have made progress in the matter of equality of the sexes (to the point where I believe some women are now fully prepared, despite deep and secret reservations, to regard men as their equals) I shan’t apologise for once owning it because now realising just how insidious it is; and, I hope, behaving accordingly, is worth far more than some easy, and easily forgotten, ‘apology’. Let’s be straight: words are cheap. Actions count far, far more.

There is a great song by Leon Russell, which I believe I have previously posted her, called Magic Mirror, the essence of which is ‘if only we could see ourselves as others do’ and the ‘subtext’ might be ‘perhaps we would worry less and perhaps we would treat them better’.

Well, I now, where I saw myself as the rather unconfident and fresh-faced lad, others who encountered me at Dundee University when I pitched up at the beginning of October 1968 might well have seen a noisy, talkative, quite cheerful, friendly public-school lad with a very nice accent; and as was the way in the late 1960s when Labour and Harold Wilson were on the up and many a middle-class chap (though not me, I wasn’t that bright to spot the advantage and it didn’t occur to me) dropped their ’aitches and slurred their words to fit in with the Zeitgeist (©Guardian/Observer and all other worthwhile serious papers), many will certainly have assumed the worst. But that is neither here nor there.

As it turned out I, who was and is lucky enough to rub along and make friends easily and who, although deep-down is quite shy, gets on with most - though not all people - became friendly with a whole range of folk. And one of them was a Jim Innes, two years above me (and a friend of Brian Wilson, Jim Wilkie and Dave Scott, who I only mention so that they can be added to the labels and if they google themselves might come across this blog entry - NB they went on to found the West Highland Free Press).

Jim introduced me to acid (as it was called) and with him I had my first trip, in the summer of 1969 on a sunny Saturday afternoon accompanying the Dundee University charity carnival procession though the centre of the city. (I had many more, often with Jim, one notable trip in the countryside in Aberdeenshire on a very early morning. We had stayed up and driven up from Dundee during the night to the farm where a friend of his live - she was with us and tripped with us - and as it was so early we didn’t disturb anyone but took off up a hill.

Later in that trip, lying in the heather on my back staring at the sky and marvelling at the geometric pattens the clouds were making I heard, from the sky and not in my mind - a perfect arpeggio played on piano. To this day I can’t for the life of me think what the fuck it was. But it certainly was not a piano arpeggio being played up in the sky.

. . .

This entry is, though, not a dull trawl through hippy memories and memorable acid trips, but to mention that Jim subscribed to Rolling Stone. Jim had very striking and very long red hair, and gave a stand-up turn as a Glaswegian Jesus Christ at the end of the revue I and a friend, Phil Welton, wrote and staged in 1971 at the Dundee Rep for three night.

NB Just looking up Jim, I came across a memoir of him by Jim Wilkie. It seems he died just over three years ago. And here’s another tribute, from Brian Wilson. RIP.

When I say ‘staged’, to be frank I did most of the writing but was grateful for his presence to facilitate it (and having ‘a writing partner’ gave me confidence; but Phil did most, well, all of the staging, directing the revue and undertaking pretty much all of the production work. I just did a bit of acting (and in one skit glorious over-acting - Christ I loved that skit. Ain’t nothing like over-acting for definite effect).

In those days, before its founder Jann Wenner discovered wealth, celebrity and social status and took to being invited to the Oscars (I don’t doubt), the White House and I don’t know where else, Rolling Stone still had a certain non-conformist, counter-cultural credibility and was regarded as something of a bible by Jim and others like him who subscribed.

I can’t say I ever read it closely but I did at some point look through it and was struck by how bloody wordy its features were. Christ they went on and on and on, saying very little. Now, I must be honest: I shan’t say that at the time (as I do now) think that it was distressingly longwinded, if not to say pretty bloody dull. No, not at all. Instead I thought that because the features didn’t interest me much - too much bloody reading - and being so long and apparently detailed, and because I thus felt no inclination to read them whatsoever, the fault was wholly mine. I was lacking. I was the dumbo.

If I was ‘cooler’, I felt, and if I ‘knew more’ and, I don’t know, were somehow ‘trendier’ and ‘hipper’, I would be able to appreciate those features and the brillaince which somehow eluded me. As it was I didn’t and so obviously I wasn’t. World 1 - Patrick Powell 0. Damn.

. . .

My thoughts on those long and longwinded Rolling Stone features came back to me when earlier today I tracked down and began to read Lillian Ross New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway. You can find it here. It was printed in the May 13, 1950, edition of the New Yorker, when Hemingway was still taken seriously, not least by impressionable Americans such as Ms Ross.

To find out more about her, I googled her name and came across an obit in the Guardian (here) It seems Ms Ross was something of a ‘respected writer’ (much like Ms Martha Gelhorn, she who started her career by fabricating and eyewitness account of a Deep South Lynching, although I’ll grant that she later might well have redeemed herself by some good war reporting. That last, at least, is a detail I feel obliged to add as a way of getting my retaliation in first if I am taken to task by Gelhorn drones who think, as apparently many do, that the sun shone out of her arse).

According to that obit - in the second line as luck would have it, so you don’t have to plough (US plow) through the lot to get to it - Ms Ross was ‘an early practitioner of the “new journalism” ’ but she ‘differed from its other flamboyant figures - Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson – in preferring a personal invisibility in her work. In plainer language, she wasn’t an egomaniac like the others who took her cue and who knew a good thing when they saw it.

‘New journalism’ has been defined as (yes, you guessed it, I’ve resorted to everyone’s lazy standby, Wikipedia, but as a definition it isn’t bad) ‘characterized [UK characterised] by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing [UK emphasising] ‘truth’ over ‘facts’, and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them’. And, it has to be said, also starred in, to make sure every cunt knew their name and was ‘impressed’ by whatever it was they hoped to impress with.

At first, perhaps, though certainly not in Ms Ross’s piece about Hemingway, the writer, although part of ‘the story’ was not centre-stage; but as ‘new journalism’ developed, and with Hunter S Thompson in the vanguard (was he actually mad? Discuss) it came to be known as ‘gonzo journalism’ after one of Thompson’s phrases, and the writer most certainly did take centre-stage (no doubt reluctantly).

It helped, of course, that ‘gonzo journalism’ and its name sounded hip, modern and up-to-the-minute. (Similarly, a few years ago, about 20 - at my age ‘few’ gets ever greater - referring to something as ‘cyber’ lent it a certain, though spurious, glamour and modern currency: ‘cyber’ this, that and t’other was ‘now’, and get on the bus, man, or get left behind! Today, of course, ‘cyber’ is a word most often used - and rarely by others - by the minutes; secretaries of parish councils up and down the land who venture - if they might, for a moment, be so bold - to suggest that perhaps, you know, thinking of moving with the times and, you know, attracting ‘younger people’ in the ‘community’ posting a copy of the parish council’s minutes ‘online’ (‘that is the word, isn’t it, ‘online’ I’m sure I’ve got it right?’) might be the war to ‘go forward’.)

Today, July 29, 2019 (I am now obliged to check the date as often as my blood pressure to make sure I know who, why, where, when and how I am) using the phrase ‘gonzo journalism’ will age you as much as (my son assures me) using the phrase ‘hamburger’ to describe a ‘burger’ or admitting that you think Love Island is cack of shit. Nothing dates faster than last year’s fashion. Even its most recent, and equally spurious, descendant ‘citizen journalism’ sounds, to my ears at least decidedly old-fashioned. (Let’s be blunt: it means fuck all. The phrase just sounds good. And that is its one virtue. It sounds, or sounded, good.)

. . .

When I found Ms Ross piece about Hemingway, a profile, apparently, I copied and pasted it into a Word file and printed it off. I still prefer reading from the printed page because I find it more comfortable to be lying back in my bed rather reading something sitting at my desk or having a laptop lying on my lap while lying in bed. I’m not saying it’s ‘better’, just that I prefer it.

So earlier today I printed off the piece - it is 11,589 words long - and began to read it. I haven’t yet finished it, but . . .

Is this the kind of stuff the celebrated New Yorker, the journalistic nirvana of so many college students, wants? To put it bluntly: for fuck sake get a grip! Now, I don’t doubt there are many who lap up this kind of crap. But I also don’t doubt that just as I, 51 years ago and a lad who lacked self-confidence, thought ‘hmm, I’d better not let on that I think this is dull bollocks, there are those who to this day read the a New Yorker feature and are considerably underwhelmed but who decide it best to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Here are a few excerpts from Ms Ross’s piece. And before I give them, please realise that I am fully aware that my selection might, given my views and thoughts on ‘new journalism’, be thoroughly subjective. But if that has crossed your mind, it’s best if you check for yourselves and follow the link above (and given here again https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/05/13/how-do-you-like-it-now-gentlemen) and make up your own mind.

I have so far read only the first half and will certainly finish reading it tomorrow, but I can’t think it gets any better. The important thing to remember is that the celebrated Ms Ross - celebrated later in her career that is, when she wrote this she was just starting out - was deemed one of the best of the New Yorker’s writers, and so this kind of ‘profile’ was significant.

. . .

When I started reading it, my heart already sank with the intro:

‘Ernest Hemingway, who may well be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, rarely comes to New York. He spends most of his time on a farm, the Finca Vigia, nine miles outside Havana, with his wife, a domestic staff of nine, fifty-two cats, sixteen dogs, a couple of hundred pigeons, and three cows.’ So, it pretty much says, let me worship at his feet.

It gets even duller. Ms Ross (who, it seems, had spent a few days with Hemingway and his wife at their farm in Idaho and was already acquainted) goes to meet the couple at Idlewide [now JFK] airport:

‘Hemingway was wearing a red plaid wool shirt, a figured wool necktie, a tan wool sweater-vest, a brown tweed jacket tight across the back and with sleeves too short for his arms, gray flannel slacks, Argyle socks, and loafers, and he looked bearish, cordial, and constricted.

‘His hair, which was very long in back, was gray, except at the temples, where it was white; his mustache was white, and he had a ragged, half-inch full white beard. There was a bump about the size of a walnut over his left eye. He was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, with a piece of paper under the nosepiece. He was in no hurry to get into Manhattan.

To which my reaction was simple ‘get on with it woman, who gives a fuck?’ Well, of course, New Yorker readers seem to. And on it goes, duller by the line:

‘We went into the airport cocktail lounge and stood at the bar. Hemingway put his briefcase down on a chromium stool and pulled it close to him. He ordered bourbon and water. Mrs. Hemingway said she would have the same, and I ordered a cup of coffee. Hemingway told the bartender to bring double bourbons. He waited for the drinks with impatience, holding on to the bar with both hands and humming an unrecognizable tune. Mrs. Hemingway said she hoped it wouldn’t be dark by the time they got to New York. Hemingway said it wouldn’t make any difference to him, because New York was a rough town, a phony town, a town that was the same in the dark as it was in the light, and he was not exactly overjoyed to be going there anyway.

‘What he was looking forward to, he said, was Venice. ‘Where I like it is out West in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and I like Cuba and Paris and around Venice,’ he said. ‘Westport gives me the horrors.’ Mrs. Hemingway lit a cigarette and handed me the pack. I passed it along to him, but he said he didn’t smoke. Smoking ruins his sense of smell, a sense he finds completely indispensable for hunting. ‘Cigarettes smell so awful to you when you have a nose that can truly smell,’ he said, and laughed, hunching his shoulders and raising the back of his fist to his face, as though he expected somebody to hit him. Then he enumerated elk, deer, possum, and coon as some of the things he can truly smell . . .’

and on and bloody on. This is ‘new journalism’? Well, stuff new journalism. You’d have more fun reading the small print on a tube of toothpaste, and it would certainly be more interesting. But I can’t resist putting the boot in further:

‘I said that there was a tremendous amount of talk about him these days in literary circles — that the critics seemed to be talking and writing definitively not only about the work he had done but about the work he was going to do. He said that of all the people he did not wish to see in New York, the people he wished least to see were the critics. “They are like those people who go to ball games and can’t tell the players without a score card,” he said. “I am not worried about what anybody I do not like might do. What the hell! If they can do you harm, let them do it. It is like being a third baseman and protesting because they hit line drives to you. Line drives are regrettable, but to be expected.”

‘The closest competitors of the critics among those he wished least to see, he said, were certain writers who wrote books about the war when they had not seen anything of war at first hand. “They are just like an outfielder who will drop a fly on you when you have pitched to have the batter hit a high fly to that outfielder, or when they’re pitching they try to strike everybody out.” When he pitched, he said, he never struck out anybody, except under extreme necessity. ‘I knew I had only so many fast balls in that arm,’ he said. ‘Would make them pop to short instead, or fly out, or hit it on the ground, bouncing.’

As a profile it does capture that phoney Hemingway in all his bragging, vainglorious, conceited, pseudo-macho, self-important ‘glory’. On the way to the hotel where he and his wife are staying:

‘As we drove along the boulevard, Hemingway watched the road carefully. Mrs. Hemingway told me that he always watches the road, usually from the front seat. It is a habit he got into during the First World War.’ Never!

At the hotel front desk:

‘The Hemingways were stopping at the Sherry-Netherland. Hemingway registered and told the room clerk that he did not want any announcement made of his arrival and did not want any visitors, or any telephone calls either, except from Miss [Marlene] Dietrich. Then we went up to the suite — living room, bed room, and serving pantry — that had been reserved for them. Hemingway paused at the entrance and scouted the living room. It was large, decorated in garish colors, and furnished with imitation Chippendale furniture and an imitation fireplace containing imitation coals.

“Joint looks O.K.,” he said. “Guess they call this the Chinese Gothic Room.” He moved in and took the room.

Mrs. Hemingway went over to a bookcase and held up a sample of its contents. “Look, Papa,’ she said. “They’re phony. They’re pasteboard backs, Papa. They’re not real books.” ’ Well, yippee!

. . .

If I remember well, our own ‘serious Press’ in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was seriously impressed with this style of writing, with ‘new journalism’, and copied it. Everything began to read like a short story, every sentence had a kind of portentous significance (as in, from the bits quote above, ‘Mrs. Hemingway told me that he always watches the road, usually from the front seat. It is a habit he got into during the First World War.’ Dear soul. Do you, dear reader wipe your arse from left to right? Or right to left? Or is it a simple, uncomplicated and authentic up and down? Jesus, give me a break.

The true irony is, of course, and here you can only accept what I am saying, that it is I, ‘mad Pat’, the noisy one, the tactless one, the indiscreet one, who thinks this and much other ‘new journalism’ is worthless cack and is prepared to say so.

Who are we do believe? That’s the question: ‘Mad Pat’ or the thousands who religiously bought and still buy the Sunday Times, the Observer (the ‘Obs’), the New Yorker, the weekend edition of the Washington Post and New York Times - all 155 pages of them - and and all the other newspapers and magazines whose real value is not what they write but that they are good to be seen with?

Click on the link to Ms Ross’s 1950 piece for the New Yorker, read it, then decide for yourselves. Sadly, this cynic still thinks most of you will opt for insanity (we all like to play it safe).

More reading, finishing off one and starting a promising new one (Kierkegaard, Hollywood And How He Married An Alien From Mars or something - I’ll check and get back to you)

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.

Finished off Hemingway vs Fitzgerald today, then start on an intriguing book I only came across last week called - provocatively it has to be said and I think you get a fair idea of what angle it will take from this title - Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. It’s by some guy call Leonard J Leff.

I trust myself after reading a few pages on sussing out whether it can be taken reasonably seriously or not (e.g. I Married and Alien From Outer Space), but even if everything has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, if it’s entertaining, it’s entertaining.

Along the lines of ‘loaded titles’, in my last year at university, after having done fuck all pretty much for two years in my English and Philosophy joint honours course, I was desperate to come up with a book, any book, a pamphlet, even, any pamphlet which might (as Hemingway would say, the old phoney) give me the inside dope on aspects of my Existentialism course.

One of the guys it covered as Soren Kierkegaard, who was well-known for his scepticism in most matters and a satirical bent. Scouring the library for ‘commentaries’, most of which by that late stage in the game had been borrowed anyway, I came across the following. You can guess just what an objective commentary it might be from its title: Kierkegaard the Cripple.

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.I’ve just looked it up and it by a Theodore Haecker. I seem to remember - this isn’t borne

out by my just recent googling - that it was published by some protestant seminary in the Mid-West. I didn’t read it, however, I didn’t bother. Maybe I should have done.

Nominally, ‘the cripple’ was based on the fact that Kierkegaard had a rather strange shape, or seemed to, and after injuring his leg walked with a limp.

So it remains to be seen how good my latest acquisition which arrived yesterday is or whether it is just a throwaway piece of fluff. By the way, I recently came up with a, for me, useful description of The Sun Also Rises which I shall use: a sad, sour, sardonic, romantic potboiler. Even after reading the bloody novel three times, the most recent last week, I still can’t see how the ‘lost generation’ angle is in it rather than grafted on by Scribners’ marketing department. And, friends, Hemingway might have started a new style of writing - though as far as I am concerned a pretty limited one - but a writing ‘genius’ he wasn’t.

PS Looked up Theodore Haecker (or Theodor) and he was a German, not a Yank and a RC convert to boot. Lord knows what that colony of Mid-West puritan godwhackers were doing publishing his book.

In which I confess to an ongoing bout of ‘out of sortism’ (and wonder whether Boris Johnson will come crashing down this week or next)

Since losing the puzzles (which I think I mentioned) and being aware that my annual income has plummeted by pretty much a third, I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts, though not quite in the way you might imagine. The money was handy, the work, though a bit longwinded, easy and highly manageable, but the important thing was the £8,400 it brought in every year gave me a kind of freedom.

I did not spend it profligately, but it meant I could, if I wanted, buy a flight abroad, hire a car and stay somewhere for two weeks without a second thought. Now I can’t. Now my income is down to my state pension and the money I get from the house in Birmingham. What I get is certainly a little more than some — well, pensioners — and I have ‘savings’ which I could, should I want to, spend. But I don’t want to.

The current plan is (though remember telling God your plans makes him laugh out loud) is that I shall as far as possible not touch a penny of it and give it half each to Elsie and Wesley, which sum should be very welcome as they might then be at the age when they want to invest in a house. Actually, Elsie, now married with a toddler, is already at that age.

The other thing is — and there is no reason for this except that it is self-imposed and for entirely different reasons I am trying to learn a little more discipline (the writing, if you must know, which will start once I’ve got this Hemingway bollocks out of the way), so sticking to my rule of spending a less than comes in is what I am trying to do.

This ‘out of sorts’ feeling, which I wouldn’t want to stress too much, however, means that if I don’t ‘do’ something which is not just filling in time or some kind of mindless activity, I feel a tad guilty at the end of the day. Writing counts very much as ‘doing something’. In fact, to be honest it is the only thing which counts as that. And although it is quite legitimate to do the background reading for the Hemingway bollocks — at the moment I am reading Hemingway vs Fitzgerald: the rise and fall of a literary friendship by a guy called Scott Donaldson — I have to persuade myself every day that ‘it counts’. And I don’t like that kind of introverted internal debate.

Today I might have done some reading but I frittered away about four hours making a short video by editing a BBC Michael Cockerell piece about Boris Johnson, our new Prime Minister. In a sense that is ‘doing something’ because it demands thought etc, but on the other hand I can’t deny that it is most certainly not essential and was purely done to be posted on Facebook. But then I might also now post it here, having now mentioned it. So take a look.

As for the Hemingway bollocks, well, I’m enjoying it, but the task is growing exponentially as I come across more books I might read — and then read — and as, the more I get to know about his novel The Sun Also Rises, the more I realise that my reaction cannot, as it started out, be simply ‘this is no fucking masterpiece and Hemingway is no fucking writer’. That’s essentially what I think, but it is a little more complex than that and I want to do the matter justice — after all this is about ‘learning a little more intellectual discipline.

So new angles I feel I am obliged to tackle include ‘can there be objective literary judgment’ (which will bring in the whole ‘relativity/subjectivity’ thing and that, dear friends, if not handled carefully, could be the kiss of death); taking a look at publishers’ motivation etc — after all at the end of the day they are commercial outfits hoping to turn a penny, honest or otherwise; and, well, the ‘literary scene’ overall (or what I can know about it, which isn’t much). But I have had a good idea for a novel based on H and F.

And now to bed.

PS Boris Johnson is cunt. If and when this is ever read, you will long know from your recent history how he did. I’m not optimistic, but odder things have happened at see.

Give and take? It’s has to be a two-way street. Always. And as for gentle summer evenings . . . a boy, even one batting 70, can still dream

This is also going in my main blog:

I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post it, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, at some point, still decide to publish it. First I decided to publish it in a second more private blog I keep which really is more a real diary.

The different between that and this, my main blog, is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. The other blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like this one — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.

In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.

I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.

As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.

But back to that entry: here it is.

I suppose that everyone who is married has many war stories to tell, and I am no exception. Just now, well about 20 minutes ago, my wife’s essentially childlike nature again manifested itself: in many way our house is a tip, not as bad as many, certainly, but a little worse than some, and I don’t like living this way.

The trouble is that quite apart from being farmers - who notoriously don’t throw away anything - there is, I discovered a few months ago, autism in the family and my wife keeps everything. Every cupboard is jam-packed with stuff that will never, ever be used. In one corner of our bedroom are about five or six big plastic storage boxes, the kind you can pick up at Asda and B&Q, full of stuff. Much of it is old school reports, our children’s scrapbooks, photographs, that kind of thing, and although I am equally sentimental about their childhood there comes a point when enough is enough. These things aren’t looked at and never will be. They are just kept and woe betide anyone — well, me — who suggests perhaps sifting though them and throwing some of it it.

Down here in the kitchen is a cupboard jam-packed with small plastic boxes, the kind you can put sandwiches in. Many of them are old ice-cream boxes, and, yes, they can be useful. But how many does a sane person need. Three, four, five, perhaps, but in that cupboard, stuck in any old how there must be at least 30.

I suspect a strain of mild autism runs in my wife’s family. My brother-in-law is apparently autistic - I was told this by my sister-in-law Lucy with Andrew sitting right next to her, so it’s not as though she was somehow talking out of school - and two of their children have also been diagnosed as autistic.

I realise that autism is on a spectrum and that it can range from being mild to severe, but it does most certainly affect behaviour. I mention this because I think it’s highly likely my wife is also autistic to a certain extent and that would explain a great deal about what I have so far seen as extremely irritating quirks in her behaviour.

To describe it in one way - and I don’t mean this in any way unpleasantly but merely descriptively - her behaviour can quite often seem to resemble that of an eight-year-old child in a school playground. In arguments she always resorts to simply talking over you (well, me) and repeating the same phrase over and over and over again. As that kind of discussion leads absolutely nowhere, invariably I give in, though by no means gracefully. I have relaxed a little since I retired, but in the past I could quite often lose my rag and I have something of a sharp tongue.

There was an instance of my wife’s odd behaviour earlier. Every single cupboard and drawer in the house is jam-packed. In many you can’t get anything more in, and here in the kitchen one cupboard is jam-packed with small, plastic boxes, some bought, some old ice-cream boxes and that kind of thing. There must be at least two dozen knocking around. Occasionally one is use for food. One, occasionally.

A few days ago I took one out and filled it with all the little odds and sods of mine which clutter up the bench in our kitchen. This is an old-fashioned farmhouse bench just. This morning all the stuff had been taken out again, stuffed into a plastic shopping bag and the box removed. I asked why: it’s her box, she said, and it’s for food. You have about two dozen boxes in the cupboard I said, can’t you spare one? No, she said. And that was it.

Everything, and I mean everything has to stay in the place she has allocated it. If something is even slightly moved, she notices immediately and moves it back.

I don’t for a second imagine I am blameless and don’t also have my quirks. But I do like to think they are a little more mainstream. More to the point, not only do I believe in that hoary old cliche about marriage ‘give and take’, but I also practice it. Even more to the point I pay for everything, I pay every bill and then some.

For example, my wife has fallen out with her sister-in-law and her brother who since I’ve been married have employed her, both on the farm and in the house (my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business). So now she has not income and no job.

Part of the make-up of her character (and I supposed, if I am right, her mild autism) is that in situations in which she is comfortable she is self-confident. In all other situations she completely lacks confidence, and so, for example, is shit-scared of going out into the world - Bodmin, say - and working.

She says she is keeping her ears open for anyone wanting someone to do with farm work (fruit-picking, for example, though I pointed out that that would provided employment for just a few weeks a year) and heard that the pub/restaurant in St Tudy wanted someone to keep the outside tidy, the verges, bushes etc. She went along and got the gig, but there was one slight complication: she needed a strimmer. So far when strimming work was necessary around our cottage, she borrowed her brother’s, but - well, see above. I offered to buy her one and a few hours later we went out to Mole Valley farmers in St Columb and I bought one for her. It costs, with a few odds and sods, the best part of £185.

What is relevant here is that the freelance work I have been doing for the Daily Mail for the past ten years, laying on the puzzles, which brought in a very handy sum every month, has ended. (I looked up what the original weekly fee was worth ten yours on after inflation had taken its toll and was surprised to find it had been devalued by 25%. So I informed the managing editor of that and told him I would be upping what I had been charging a month.

I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post in on my main blog, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, instead want to publish it here.

The different between here and my main blog is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. This blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like the other — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.

In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.

I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.

As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.

But back to that entry: here it is.The upshot is the Mail (like all newspapers preternatually penny-wise and pound-foolish) decided to take the work in-house and my annual income has dropped by almost a third. (I might, perhaps, have handled it better, although I do suspect even more schmoozing wouldn’t have saved the situation and the work would have been taken in-house anyway.)

I mention that because £185 less means a lot more to me now than it did three weeks ago. I also mention that because it’s the kind of detail my wife simply forgets when it comes to my ‘using her plastic boxes’. The whole fucking point about ‘give and take’ is that it has to be a two-way street.

I have in the past thought of moving out and going to live on my own again now both our children are pretty much independent - our daughter is now married and our son will start his second year at university in September - and financially that would put my wife so far up shit creek there would be no coming back. But it would also be unbelievably petty however much it might provide a very brief satisfaction of ‘I’ll show you!’ so I shan’t do it. But by Christ the temptation is huge.

I will do anything for anyone as long as I am not taken for granted. I firmly believe that he who has should share it with he who hasn’t, especially in a partnership like marriage. You can believe that or you can think I am just bullshitting, but it is true. I also believe in trying as best as possible to live in a harmonious, peaceful and happy atmosphere for the benefit of everyone. But I also firmly believe that ‘give and take’ should be a two-way street and time and again I feel I am simply taken for granted. And it fucks me off.

Having written the above, I have got a bit of the irritation out of my system, but this time I shall post this in my blog. Why not? If it is read by someone in my immediate family, well, perhaps they will realise which way the wind is blowing. Fuck it, I am getting to the point where I really do feel I have had enough.

Ain’t nothing going to do it except doing it. So why am I still pfaffing around?

OK, I know exactly what I should be doing but I’m not doing it. It’s not rocket science. There is not great shakes about it: I should be getting up - not early, doesn’t have to be at the crack of dawn - and sitting down in my ‘shed’, which is what this place has been called, and doing nothing until I am so bloody bored I start writing.

It doesn’t matter what I fucking write, but as long as I write, that is fine. Jesus there’s enough shite out there as it is and a little more, courtesy of me, isn’t going to bring the world to its end. But I don’t. I have no idea was stops me. Laziness isn’t the word, because it isn’t laziness. I mean if it were laziness I wouldn’t even be writing these bloody words which, so far, these included, make up 745.

It’s not even ‘dread of failure’ because I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I ‘fail’. But for some reason when I wake up I am in a kind of torpor which lasts until 10.30 in the morning.

BUT - I am going do it! So far in my life I have three times been disciplined enough to sit down and write something over a prolonged period. The real irony is that ONCE you sit down, you wonder what all the agony is about. I did it with one ‘novel’, which was not a bad idea and could be re-written though what I did produce (which is the Lord knows where) I don’t imagine was very good. That was in Birmingham while I was still working for the CEGB staff newspaper.

The routine was simple: get a litre of Strongbow (or whatever) from around the corner, a packet of ‘skins’, ten ciggies, then get back home and write for four hours until I was so knackered I slumped off to bed. That routine, at least, produced a novel, however shite that novel was (and I think I still have it, but if I don’t, oh well, not the world’s greatest loss).

Later, while living and working in London but staying down here in St Breward at Terry’s, I used to get up early, about 6am and type away for several hours, this time sustained by nothing more dangerous than tea and fags. And I did get something done.

And even though I say so myself, it was possibly a cut above what I had previously produced at Norlan Drive (which, as of writing, I still have somewhere).

Most recently there was ‘Love: A Fiction’, previously called ‘Letters Never Sent’ which I wrote in two stints in London in the early 1990s. Pertinently the same ‘secret’ was applied: just get if fucking done! In - as I say - two stints, I sat down regularly twice a week at 7pm to write after telling myself that I had no other choice but to fucking do it. And do you know, sweethearts, it worked a treat. And THAT is the one piece of work so far I would not in the slightest be ashamed of showing anyone.

It might not be ‘what people want’ at present but who gives a fuck. I’m almost 70. If not I were still to care about ‘being accepted’ and producing ‘what people want’, I am pretty much dead. Getting older, not being able to get it up - not that I have had any know that in practice, though after two heart attacks and the occasional wank I’ve to a pretty good idea - does have it’s compensations, not to say rewards. Not giving a fuck about what ‘I’m supposed to be doing’ is one of them.

To be blunt, I’m not going to starve, so fuck money from now on and fuck ‘playing the game’ (which I rather think I never did anyway, though I’m sure when I was younger I wasn’t quite as cocky or sanguine about not doing so.

Pip, pip

PS I have been indulging in a rather lovely concoction: brandy and alcoholic lovage, 50/50. I can recommend it. Helps to let you shout your mouth off (‘shoot off your mouth’? Subs please check).

PPS This is going both in my official blog and my unofficial blog (which you can find here).

Sorry about this, but — completely unplanned — I began jotting down a few comments and being the sort who really can’t shut up . . .

Oh, what have I let myself in for? Just read the introduction to a book of five essays on Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel (it was his second, in fact, but like much about the man, nothing is straightforward) called New Essays On The Sun Also Rises in a series called The American Novel, and despite the hi-falutin’ talk of ‘New Critics’, ‘new criticism’ and modern perspectives and modernism, I still think the guy is a nine-bob note who had the luck of old nick.

But — a huge ‘but’ — is it really likely that yours truly, a snotty-nosed cynic cast aside in deepest North Cornwall is right and an assortment of academics and critical literary types are wrong? Really? Come on, let’s get real. And yet, and yet...

I’ve just finished the introduction and will continue with the rest of the essays tomorrow, but let me cite just one passage which makes me wonder whether, however unlikely it might be, the world really is capable of disappearing up it own arse. Remember: my background is in newspapers, mainly as a sub, and I know — I know! — the kind of bullshit which can be produced to make white seem black and black seem like a stroll in the park. So let me cite this, from the end of Ms Linda Wagner-Martin’s introduction:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Sounds real doesn’t it? But is it? This is the same novel about which Hemingway’s sometime friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote (in a review of the novel when it came out):

‘Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [the novel] is a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.’

He also noted in that review that ‘it had been a mistake to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectation which were not met by the story that followed’. He is referring to the quote from Ecclesiastes which is used as a second epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’ quote.

Then there’s the verdict of Donald Ogden Stewart, who was of the party in the visit to Pamplona in 1925 who along with Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith, Hemingway based the fictioal character of Bill Gorton. Stewart was also no opinionated snotty-nosed cynic: he had published several books by the time he got to know Hemingway in Paris, had hinterland and became an Oscar-winning screenwriter (he wrote the script for The Philadelphia Story). After reading the novel, Stewart commented that ‘It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’ and added that ‘it didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’

So might be going in?

. . .

Putting forward my explanation — OK, putting forward a possible explanation — lays me wide open. I am no academic, not literary critic, no published author or poet, in fact, I have no obvious qualification at all for adding my two ha’porth worth. But I’m going to do so anyway (which is partly what writing this whole bloody thing — the ‘thing’ being how The Sun is not a masterpiece and Hemingway is not ‘a writer of genius’ — is all about). I think what happened is quite simple: Hemingway’s initial success and his subsequent reputation was the result of the confluence of a variety of often quite disparate factors: there was Hemingway himself, a complex man who believed himself to be something of a literary genius, who was ruthlessly ambitious bordering on being a sociopath, and who believed his own bullshit.

There were his various champions, who promoted him at difference times and for very different reasons and who each in some way or other furthered his career: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, most notably Scott Fitzgerald (who almost hero-worshipped Hemingway) and eventually his editor at his publishers Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins. Pertinently, Perkins had entered publishing through Scribner’s advertising department and seems to have had a healthy commercial instinct. That is a vital part of the Hemingway success story.

Then there was the time at which Hemingway (born in 1899) appeared on the literary scene: the post-World War I era (not, of course, then known as World War I — I thought I might alert one or two younger readers to that fact) when pretty much everything was up in the air and ‘modernism’ was all the rage. The ‘Great War’ (which, kiddiwinks, is what it was called at the time) was a watershed, possibly the mother of all watersheds to adopt a current cliche, and what folk wanted was ‘something different’. And they wanted it desperately.

The established authors — Henry James, John Galsworthy, DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton (who didn’t in fact pop her clogs until 1937) were very much ‘out’ and what the young folk wanted — as always — something ‘new’ and ‘different’. And Hemingway was certainly that. Different? Try reading some of his ‘lean, muscular prose’. It’s different all right, though — in my very humble view — not at all very good.

Perkins, he at Scribner’s with the commercial head who had already championed Fitzgerald by publishing Scott’s first novel This Side Of Paradise and his subsequent work (which, believe it or not were at the time regarded as ‘shocking’ — this was, remember, in only the second decade after the end of the Victorian Age and whatever it is called in the US) was more than ready to take a punt on Hemingway, and boy did it take off.

The Sun Also Rises sold steadily more and more copies, not least because Hemingway was marketed by Scribner’s as a new kind of author, a writer who was not some airy-fairy pale artistic pansy (the mention of which allows me

to post a picture of Reginald Bunthorne) but who was a wholesome he-man who could not only write (so the story went) but who also boxed, enjoyed bullfighting and eventually shot big game and all the other things which get you wondering what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. In marketing terms it was genius: his style and the writer were new, and new sells, sells, sells, and then sells, sells, sells some more (until something newer comes along, of course).

Here’s another taste of the kind of bull The Sun Also Rises elicited — this is from a review of the book in the New York Times in 1926:

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.

Surely after reading that, which on the face of it seems, well, fair enough, it is legitimate to ask: what exactly does ‘more literary English’ have to feel ashamed about? Well, nothing, really. That quote is just a snippet of the acres of newspaper bullshit churned out daily which, in Hemingway’s case, did him a great favour.

Three years later Hemingway published his second (third) novel, A Farewell To Arms and that, too, sold like hotcakes. But although he carried on selling stories to some magazines, to be blunt that was the sum of his novelistic output. What about To Have And Have Not? you ask, and For Whom The Bell Tolls? Well, yes and no. To Have And Have Not (1937) was more a novella, a short story on steroids and didn’t sell particularly well at all. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) was done a favour by Hollywood who turned it into a film starring Gary Cooper and I would bet my bottom dollar that those who still remember the work, remember the film not the novel.

Then, again to be blunt, Hemingway really dried up. In fact he had pretty much dried up at the beginning of the 1930s after A Farewell To Arms. Much of his work published in that decade was collections of previously published

short stories, but he kept his name aflame by using his reputation and ‘name’ and negotiating a deal with a US magazine group to ‘cover the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda Vaill makes clear in her book Hotel Florida, Hemingway was getting a little desperate to keep his name in the lights. Here is a taste of his ‘war reporting’:

‘It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming into Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.’

Hmm. Doesn’t quite do it for me.

Ten years later, in 1950, he published another novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which — I haven’t myself read it and really don’t want to — was pretty much panned and is today, I imagine, only read by keen Phd students and nerds. Then, two year later, came The Old Man And The Sea, another ‘short novel’ — long short story is more accurate, but that, too, I haven’t read and really — well, you’re ahead of me.

And that, dear friends, was it. Oh, there’s the matter of his ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’, which is pretty inexplicable until you remember that one Bob Dylan was also awarded a ‘Nobel Prize of Literature’ which might indicate that the whole Nobel Prize thing is something of a racket.

NB I fully believe Dylan is a true one-off and deserves a Nobel Prize or equivalent, but what makes his award so farcical is that it should be ‘for Literature’. I suspect Dylan was equally bemused which, for me, explains his initial silence on the matter and his decision not to fuck off to Stockholm to receive it in person. I think — I believe he is an honest man — he was just downright embarrassed but was buggered that he would play the game. Me, if they offer me one, I’m refusing.

. . .

But what about all the acres of academic and literary criticism? Well, first of all I should point out that Hemingway is now old hat. The collection of essays I am reading is quite recent in terms of Hemigway research, but it is more than 32 years old. There are now plenty of other ‘new’ things to be getting on with. I mean even bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is old hat in 2019. And, no, I have read his work either and don’t want to. My policy is that there is plenty of good stuff which has stood the test of time which is there for me to read, more than enough of it, in fact, to last me until well after I am dead (though I did try Oliver Twist a while back and, er, wasn’t that fussed, though it was an early work and maybe later stuff is not quite as irritating).

As for the reputation, my, admittedly left-field explanation, is that it’s all rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather as there are precious few research grants available for anyone suggesting a project to show climate change is a load of old cack, for many years after World War II there was no kudos to be had be outlining why one Ernest Miller Hemingway, star of the modernist movement, stylistic innovator, mainstay for American literature, ‘one of the greats’ (John O’Hara who could write even called him the best writer since Shakespeare) was actually a man of straw and a nine-bob note.

Let me ask of you a favour: remind yourself of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and while it is fresh in your mind, read this paragraph again from the introduction to the book of essays. And when you have finished allow step to one side, as it were, and not take this literary guff at face value. Perhaps you might then see what I am getting at:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Another damned thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Wolfe?

Well, as I’m serious about getting this Hemingway bollocks completed, and as I want to prove to myself that the reading this, that and t’other isn’t just displacement activity (about which I’ve already written a blog entry, so I can’t procrastinate any more — actually that’s unfair), I got down to adding a few more words. Mainly they were based on a few more thoughts I had after reading a book of a collection of essays by a guy called Malcolm Cowley, who knew Hemingway in Paris.

He wasn’t part of Hemingway’s crowd really, mainly because he and his wife (he tells us in his in the first piece in the book about Hemingway) live in ‘a painters’ colony’ in Giverny about 50 miles from Paris and only visited ‘the crowd’ in Montparnasse once a week. He and his wife lived off a $5,000 fellowship (which was renewed for a second year) and which, because of the fabulously cheap franc the dollar could buy, was more than enough for them to get by on.

The book of essays is called A Second Flowering and was published in 1973. I mention that in particular because by then Hemingway had only been dead for 12 years and even though he hadn’t published anything of any consequence since The Old Man And The Sea (which I haven’t read and neither intend to read or even want to and which I gather is more of a novella than a novel and when it was published Hemingway hadn’t published anything of any consequence since For Whom The Bell Tolls 11 years earlier in 1940) his reputation, courtesy of his 1954 Nobel Prize no doubt was still undented.

From my limited reading — limited because there could be an awful lot more to read if I had the stomach for it — I have gathered that since Cowley wrote his book that reputation has slowly been declining, although any number of spotty-faced adolescents — of all ages — still cream themselves over his ‘style’.

Cowley can write, however, so it didn’t surprise me that although he rated Hemingway and I get the impression seems to have quite like the man, Hemingway was something of a shit to him (or at least behind his back). In my noodling around the net I came across something or other in which Hemingway refers to Cowley along the lines of ‘that moon-face idiot’.

The other authors Cowley covers in his book are Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, a poet I had not before heard of called Hart Crane, e e cummings (apparently the lower-case spelling is compulsory and in some of the more backward and remoter US states where they do quite a bit of reading for want of anything much else to do you can still be jailed for up to a year for ignoring that convention, so I’m playing if safe in case this blog is happened upon by some busybody in Alaska, Wyoming or Montana), Thornton Wilder and — another guy I hadn’t heard of, Thomas Wolfe.

Actually, whenever I heard about ’the American novelist Wolfe’, I always thought of the Bonfires Of The Vanities chappie (I’ll look up his name in a minute and add it if I can be bothered). In fact they are two different guys. (The one I mistake him for is Tom Wolfe, so the confusion is understandable).

Cowley’s book is very good reading and after reading the two piece he has on Hemingway (and the introduction, of course) I have now started the chapter on Thomas Wolfe. And what an odd guy he was.

Like it seems rather a lot of Yankee writers Wolfe went in for writing long, long tomes. I have not read anything by him so I can’t comment on his work — sound off might be closer tot the truth — but I can’t say I am initially enthused after reading that the first book he submitted to Scribner’s, where his editor was Maxwell Perkins who did the same job for Fitzgerald and Hemingway was an astonishing 330,000 words long. Perkins edited it back to manageable form, presumably after reading the bloody lot, and there must have been something in the original manuscript which persuaded Perkins that it was worth the effort.

Wolfe had started his ‘literary life’ as a playwright, but apparently despite high praise from his tutor at Harvard, no one on Broadway wanted to buy them off him to stage one because they were just too bloody long. Apparently all Wolfe’s work was about Wolfe (pictured).

The polite way of saying that is that Wolfe was a trailblazer in ‘autobiographical fiction’. And it was when I read in Cowley’s book about how it put himself centre stage in bloody all his fiction that I decided to write this entry (‘compelled to put my thoughts to paper’).

Cowley quotes from a letter Wolfe wrote to his mother which made me shudder a little. Here is the extract: ‘I intend to wreak out my soul on paper and express it all. This is what my life means to me: I am at the mercy of this thing and I will do it or die.’

Cowley goes on: ‘The next sentence reveals the nature of the “all” that he was going to express at the risk of his life.’

‘I never forget, I have never forgotten. I have tried to make myself conscious of the whole of my life since first the baby in the basket became conscious of the warm sunlight on the porch, and saw his sister go up the hill to the girl’s school on the corner (the first thing I remember).’

This is all recorded in his first novel which, edited down by — surely a very patient and benign — Maxwell Perkins became Look Homeward, Angel.

I mention all this not to make a few snide remarks about Yank writers who can’t shut up, but to wonder what it was that Perkins saw in those 330,000 first on 1,100 pages of handwritten text which landed on his desk. For he must have seen something which persuaded him doing a mammoth job of editing — apparently the task took for ever — was worth a candle. But he did.

Perkins and Wolfe are said to have got on well and (I’ve read that Wolfe saw in Perkins a father figure, although he did have his own father) and Perkins, the father of five daughters, saw in Wolfe the son he never had. Be that as it may, apparently once the book was published and sold well, Wolfe became a bit paranoid and felt he wasn’t getting the kudos he deserved as the writer because Perkins was getting a great deal of kudos as the editor who had knocked it all into shape. So Wolfe then jumped ship and went to another publisher.

. . .

Don’t imagine that the irony isn’t lost on me that I am being a tad critical about some writer bod who wrote solely about himself in — er my blog. But whatever my failings, I do like to think that egomania or even obsessive introspection is not one of them. But, and her I must confess to a possible failing, for all my huffing and puffing about how Hemingway is not, in my view, anything close to ‘a writer of genius’, I can’t shake of the fear that possibly, perhaps possibly my judgment is at fault. That perhaps Hemingway is rather good and I’m just to thick to appreciate it. Believe me that horrible thought crosses my mind more than twice a day.

So for example, I am both reading The Sun Also Rises for the third time just in case there is something in it which eludes me and might dawn on me in this third reading. And, almost from a sense of duty because I want to do this thing properly, I have also bought and have started reading A Moveable Feast. Every now and then you come across a rather good turn of phrase in Hemingway (in both books) but invariably he fucks it up within seconds by something so hamfisted that you wonder ‘where did this idiot get his reputation from’.

That question I hope to answer in the longer piece I am writing but briefly what I shall say is: his style was different, in fact very different, at exactly the right time: when the ‘literary world’ wanted something different. In a sense Hemingway scored not because he was Hemingway, but because he wasn’t Henry James or Edith Wharton or and not even Scott Fitzgerald who had a far more conventional style.

I gather, in fact, that Hemingway’s ‘new style’ wasn’t all that different to that of Ring Lardner and a one-time mentor Sherwood Anderson. But where Hemingway scored was with his almost sociopathic ambition. The man was ruthless about becoming famous and — I suspect — lived in a fantasy of his own even before he was published and became a bestseller as a ‘world-famous author’. He wouldn’t be the only one, although before the pop psychologists among you lay me down on the couch, I gave up that fantasy years and years ago. But as they say, it takes one to know one.

As for Wolfe, well the Lord knows what made him tick and why his huge tomes actually sold enough for his publisher not to boot him out of the door. I know if I were in any way ‘serious’, I would get one of his novels and read it. However, I shall be 7o in just over four months time and with a bit of luck I’ll have another 20 years on this earth, so to be frank I don’t really think I can spare the time.

Pip, pip.