Thursday, 23 January 2020
Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland
Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actually taken just two days ago. They are all of East Frisia/Ostfriesland, the part of North-West Germany I am in for the next two weeks (and have already been here for two weeks). I hope you like them. The church is in a tiny hamlet called Marienchor.
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Do we actually need writers? And here’s the question: did Wimsatt and Beardsley, and Roland Barthes (who has to be French with a name like that) work as hard was Ernest Miller Hemingway? I bet they did. And I bet they didn’t bullshit quite as much, either
A few years ago, the following occurred to me (and I shall stick to the art of writing rather than any other art to try to avoid muddying the waters, but essentially what I say I think holds true for the music and the plastic arts).
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
little? Even the greatest Hemingway aficionado might agree that the amount of work he produced for his first commercial publication In Our Time (upper case initial letters), much of which had previously appeared in in our time (lower case initial letters) was decidedly slim.
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
Saturday, 11 January 2020
Building guitars in the back of beyond, in Esterwegen (a nice spot now, but not so nice for some in 1933)
Heinitzpolder, East Frisia, Germany
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Monday, 6 January 2020
Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)
Bodmin to London train:
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
Saturday, 28 December 2019
You ain’t seen nothing yet, sunshine, so do me a favour and fuck nostalgia
I’ve not posted here for a while and feel my crown slipping, so I thought I might add a few anecdotes about newspapers and folk I have known on newspapers to keep the pot boiling.
While I was working in Birmingham, I was working as a sub-editor on the Evening Mail, but I made a friend of a guy I met while working subbing shifts on the morning newspaper, the Birmingham Post, which as it appears in the morning is subbed and produced the night before. (The Mail, an evening paper, is subbed and produced during the day — please keep up.)
Nigel had a friend who I later met and about whom I remember little except his ancestry and the short tale I am about to relate. The friend, who I now seem to remember was called Ben Travers, was the grandson of another Ben Travers, a playwright known for writing farces.
Nigel and Ben (the younger Travers) had worked together as reporters on a weekly in (I think) Cheshire and were there when a Daily Express reporter was killed in an IRA. I don’t know which one and a brief web search, a brief and superficial web search, as thrown up nothing. Ben somehow got wind that the Express reporter was not just a general news reporter but worked on the paper’s gossip column, still known in those days as William Hickey. So he rang them up.
‘I hear one of your reporters has been killed and you have a vacancy,’ he asked when he got through to the William Hickey editor, one (again I think) Ross Benson. Wikipedia says Benson was ‘a reporter for William Hickey’ not the editor, but as we used to say (or rather as I heard rather than said myself) don’t let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story.
Benson (or whoever was the editor at the time) said, yes, you’r right and when Ben informed him he would like to be considered to fill the vacancy, asked him go down to London for interview. That interview consisted of a night on the piss and just one question: ‘Tell, me Ben,’ said Benson (or whoever was the William Hickey editor at the time), ‘would you be prepared to do the dirty on your friends?’.
‘Yes,’ Ben told him. And it was the right answer, because Ben was given the job. Whether or not he really would have been prepared to do the dirty on any friends or, more to the point, whether he actually did do the dirty on friends I have no idea. But it was the right answer.
I met Ben once, perhaps twice, in the early 1990s while I was living in London working shifts wherever I got find shifts, which wasn’t difficult. I was quite organised and used to ring around until my weekly diary was filled, and it was my proud boast then that I never had a day off I didn’t want. Mind unless you totally screwed up — and I never totally screwed up — and papers liked the cut of your jib, in time you became ‘a regular’ which helped a lot.
(I was in London working shifts for the nationals for five years — when I married and moved to Cornwall in 1995, I only worked shifts for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express — that I finally learned the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut, as in ‘you don’t always have to speak your mind’. I was never shy about speaking out, ever, but I now learned that you weren’t always obliged to speak out. Sometimes it was useful to adopt a lower profile.
. . .
My second anecdote involves on Jeff S. I shan’t give his full name — see above where I allude to the virtue of occasional discretion — but I have, in a way nominally, known Jeff for about almost 40 years. When I first worked on the Evening Mail as a news sub-editor, Jeff was working as a sub-editor on, I think, the Sunday Mercury.
I didn’t quite know him well then, but I bumped into him again when I started working shifts on the Daily Mail features sub-editing desk and knew him for many years after. By the way, I should add, because I hate to give the wrong impression, that I was almost 41 when I worked my first shift on the Mail and was far too old (and possibly not a good enough sub) to be considered for a full-time job on the desk. And although I subsequently went on to work for the Mail on that same desk for the next 28 years, every day when I turned up I was ‘a casual’ and a sub hired by the day — literally ‘hack’ derived from a ‘hackney carriage’ a vehicle hire by the day.
That might not sound too complimentary but given that as ‘a casual’ you were hired and worked one night on The Times, the next on the Mail, the next on the Independent, the next on the Sun etc and had to be able to sub in the style of that paper, and furthermore if being ‘a hack’ means you were versatile enough to carry it off, I would be proud to be described as ‘a hack’. Sadly, as far as I know no one has done so. Oh well. Perhaps they were out of compliments.
Anyway, Jeff
. . .
While Jeff was beavering away on the Sunday Mercury, he, like many of his colleagues was hoping to land ‘a job in London’ and had arranged to work a week’s worth of shifts somewhere or other in London to land such a job. London money was always better as in higher, though I assume kids from ‘the provinces’ never realised that London prices and rents were also always higher which might have accounted for the higher wages.
Anyway Jeff landed his week’s worth of shifts and booked a week off of annual leave, telling his boss — in the odd belief that his boss would not be too chuffed to know he was working shifts in London with a view to getting a
better job (why did we ever think that, Pete, they didn’t give a fuck?) — that he was off for a week in Saudi Arabia where his father, then working for the RAF, was currently stationed.
He worked wherever he worked in London for a week, then returned to Birmingham at the weekend. At some point it occurred to him that as he was supposed to have been in sunny Saudi Arabia for a week he would be expected to show a slight tan.
The trouble was that he was still as pale as a lump of Cheshire cheese. So he went to a chemist’s and bought himself some tanning lotion which he then applied. But the following morning the lotion did not seem to have done the trick and he panicked a little and decided to apply the lotion again. He did, and he woke up the morning he was due back at work a bright orange colour. And that was how he went to work. What they said when they saw him I don’t know.
. . .
Eventually, Jeff moved to London in the 1980s to work shifts much as I did in the 1990s. Before Fleet Street got digital, efficient, binary and I don’t know what else and pretty much all the papers were based in Fleet Street, some casuals (as those working casual shifts were called) managed a trick of working parallel shifts, that is working a shift on one paper while working a shift on another paper just up the road (the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph were all within a stone’s throw of each other).
The trick was to turn up at one paper, make your presence known, sling your jacket over chair (presumably as far away from the main desk as possible), then pretty smartish leave the premises — the jacket staying behind, of course — to turn up to your other shift. Then for the next six or seven hours it was just a question of commuting between the two papers for whom you were working shifts. No one will have noticed because if you weren’t at your desk, it would have been assumed you had gone to the loo or the library or the canteen. I never tried it and here I am simply retelling the story of what Jeff did.
. . .
I know the rules of nostalgia oblige us to pretend that ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ but that is nonsense. Eccentricity is not only not a purely British trait but is universal, but it is also timeless and you will find as many examples of outright eccentricity in 2020 as you would have found 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. There will never be a shortage of nutters.
I get very impatient with all folk who regard the past through rose-tinted spectacles, and when, for example, they bemoan the passing of ‘the good old days’, I always ask whether those would be ‘the good old days’ when you could be sacked and thus penniless at a moment’s notice, when if you didn’t have any money illness spelled complete penury, when catching tuberculosis was a daily risk and when being forced to sell you brother into male prostitution was not such a bad idea if it helped save a family of 12 from starvation.
So further examples of tragic deprivation in the past and why we must can be found on The Official Labour Party Guide To 100 Years Of Tory Inhumanity.
So to cut a long story short future generations can look forward to any number of extraordinarily funny comedians, very talented actors, writers, directors, footballers and painters and, of course, outrageously eccentric hacks.
While I was working in Birmingham, I was working as a sub-editor on the Evening Mail, but I made a friend of a guy I met while working subbing shifts on the morning newspaper, the Birmingham Post, which as it appears in the morning is subbed and produced the night before. (The Mail, an evening paper, is subbed and produced during the day — please keep up.)
Nigel had a friend who I later met and about whom I remember little except his ancestry and the short tale I am about to relate. The friend, who I now seem to remember was called Ben Travers, was the grandson of another Ben Travers, a playwright known for writing farces.
Nigel and Ben (the younger Travers) had worked together as reporters on a weekly in (I think) Cheshire and were there when a Daily Express reporter was killed in an IRA. I don’t know which one and a brief web search, a brief and superficial web search, as thrown up nothing. Ben somehow got wind that the Express reporter was not just a general news reporter but worked on the paper’s gossip column, still known in those days as William Hickey. So he rang them up.
‘I hear one of your reporters has been killed and you have a vacancy,’ he asked when he got through to the William Hickey editor, one (again I think) Ross Benson. Wikipedia says Benson was ‘a reporter for William Hickey’ not the editor, but as we used to say (or rather as I heard rather than said myself) don’t let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story.
Benson (or whoever was the editor at the time) said, yes, you’r right and when Ben informed him he would like to be considered to fill the vacancy, asked him go down to London for interview. That interview consisted of a night on the piss and just one question: ‘Tell, me Ben,’ said Benson (or whoever was the William Hickey editor at the time), ‘would you be prepared to do the dirty on your friends?’.
‘Yes,’ Ben told him. And it was the right answer, because Ben was given the job. Whether or not he really would have been prepared to do the dirty on any friends or, more to the point, whether he actually did do the dirty on friends I have no idea. But it was the right answer.
I met Ben once, perhaps twice, in the early 1990s while I was living in London working shifts wherever I got find shifts, which wasn’t difficult. I was quite organised and used to ring around until my weekly diary was filled, and it was my proud boast then that I never had a day off I didn’t want. Mind unless you totally screwed up — and I never totally screwed up — and papers liked the cut of your jib, in time you became ‘a regular’ which helped a lot.
(I was in London working shifts for the nationals for five years — when I married and moved to Cornwall in 1995, I only worked shifts for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express — that I finally learned the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut, as in ‘you don’t always have to speak your mind’. I was never shy about speaking out, ever, but I now learned that you weren’t always obliged to speak out. Sometimes it was useful to adopt a lower profile.
. . .
My second anecdote involves on Jeff S. I shan’t give his full name — see above where I allude to the virtue of occasional discretion — but I have, in a way nominally, known Jeff for about almost 40 years. When I first worked on the Evening Mail as a news sub-editor, Jeff was working as a sub-editor on, I think, the Sunday Mercury.
I didn’t quite know him well then, but I bumped into him again when I started working shifts on the Daily Mail features sub-editing desk and knew him for many years after. By the way, I should add, because I hate to give the wrong impression, that I was almost 41 when I worked my first shift on the Mail and was far too old (and possibly not a good enough sub) to be considered for a full-time job on the desk. And although I subsequently went on to work for the Mail on that same desk for the next 28 years, every day when I turned up I was ‘a casual’ and a sub hired by the day — literally ‘hack’ derived from a ‘hackney carriage’ a vehicle hire by the day.
That might not sound too complimentary but given that as ‘a casual’ you were hired and worked one night on The Times, the next on the Mail, the next on the Independent, the next on the Sun etc and had to be able to sub in the style of that paper, and furthermore if being ‘a hack’ means you were versatile enough to carry it off, I would be proud to be described as ‘a hack’. Sadly, as far as I know no one has done so. Oh well. Perhaps they were out of compliments.
Anyway, Jeff
. . .
While Jeff was beavering away on the Sunday Mercury, he, like many of his colleagues was hoping to land ‘a job in London’ and had arranged to work a week’s worth of shifts somewhere or other in London to land such a job. London money was always better as in higher, though I assume kids from ‘the provinces’ never realised that London prices and rents were also always higher which might have accounted for the higher wages.
Anyway Jeff landed his week’s worth of shifts and booked a week off of annual leave, telling his boss — in the odd belief that his boss would not be too chuffed to know he was working shifts in London with a view to getting a
He worked wherever he worked in London for a week, then returned to Birmingham at the weekend. At some point it occurred to him that as he was supposed to have been in sunny Saudi Arabia for a week he would be expected to show a slight tan.
The trouble was that he was still as pale as a lump of Cheshire cheese. So he went to a chemist’s and bought himself some tanning lotion which he then applied. But the following morning the lotion did not seem to have done the trick and he panicked a little and decided to apply the lotion again. He did, and he woke up the morning he was due back at work a bright orange colour. And that was how he went to work. What they said when they saw him I don’t know.
. . .
Eventually, Jeff moved to London in the 1980s to work shifts much as I did in the 1990s. Before Fleet Street got digital, efficient, binary and I don’t know what else and pretty much all the papers were based in Fleet Street, some casuals (as those working casual shifts were called) managed a trick of working parallel shifts, that is working a shift on one paper while working a shift on another paper just up the road (the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph were all within a stone’s throw of each other).
The trick was to turn up at one paper, make your presence known, sling your jacket over chair (presumably as far away from the main desk as possible), then pretty smartish leave the premises — the jacket staying behind, of course — to turn up to your other shift. Then for the next six or seven hours it was just a question of commuting between the two papers for whom you were working shifts. No one will have noticed because if you weren’t at your desk, it would have been assumed you had gone to the loo or the library or the canteen. I never tried it and here I am simply retelling the story of what Jeff did.
. . .
I know the rules of nostalgia oblige us to pretend that ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ but that is nonsense. Eccentricity is not only not a purely British trait but is universal, but it is also timeless and you will find as many examples of outright eccentricity in 2020 as you would have found 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. There will never be a shortage of nutters.
I get very impatient with all folk who regard the past through rose-tinted spectacles, and when, for example, they bemoan the passing of ‘the good old days’, I always ask whether those would be ‘the good old days’ when you could be sacked and thus penniless at a moment’s notice, when if you didn’t have any money illness spelled complete penury, when catching tuberculosis was a daily risk and when being forced to sell you brother into male prostitution was not such a bad idea if it helped save a family of 12 from starvation.
So further examples of tragic deprivation in the past and why we must can be found on The Official Labour Party Guide To 100 Years Of Tory Inhumanity.
So to cut a long story short future generations can look forward to any number of extraordinarily funny comedians, very talented actors, writers, directors, footballers and painters and, of course, outrageously eccentric hacks.
Wednesday, 11 December 2019
Does Britain want to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer? Neither, as it happens, but that is our choice tomorrow when we go to the polls
It will be of little interest to anyone living outside the Western Hemisphere because many living there have other concerns (and however much we Westerners like to think we are at the centre of the world, the message has still to get to the further reaches of the globe) but tomorrow we here in Old Blighty will troop to our nearest polling station to cast our vote as to who should be in the next government.
We don’t actually vote for a party but a local chap or chappess under an antiquated system called ‘first past the post’ with which most of you will be familiar if you ever watch horse racing on television or athletics. In these and other sports (is horse racing a sport?) whoever passes the winning post soonest after the starting pistol has been fired has won the race. That makes sense of course if you are racing your horse against other horses or yourself against other athletes. But to the way of thinking of some of us — and that obviously includes me — it makes no sense whatsoever if you are trying to put in place a parliament which broadly represents the mood of the country.
This is where I might get a little muddled if I’m not careful but you need not: the parliament is made of all those who win the election in their constituency, that is who metaphorically care ‘first past the post’. So if A wins 10 votes, B wins 9 votes and C wins 3 votes, A is elected to parliament. More realistically if A wins 10,002 votes, B wins 10,001 and C (usually a Lib Dem) wins 3 votes, A is elected. He might have won only 1 vote more than B, but that’s first past the post. And it is a shite system. Complete cack.
I’m rather stupidly talking about a system with which you might all be familiar, although the chances are that you live in a country which long ago left the 17th century and has adopted a system of proportional representation. But it is often worthwhile going back to basics, especially if, like me, you are trying to demonstrate quite how unfair a long-accepted process is.
Under our system — the first past the post system — if the party to which A belongs sees its more of its candidates win in more constituencies than the party to which B belongs, it will have the most members of parliament and can form the government. That is true whether or not its candidates beat their opponents hollow or whether in each constituency each A candidate won merely 1 vote more than B. That is, of course, theoretical, but it does highlight the basic flaw in the whole system.
Here in Britain we have 650 odd constituencies. It is theoretically possible (though this would never happen) that in each constituency the candidate belonging to party A could win just 1 vote more than the candidate belonging to party B. So, overall, the A party candidates would win a national total of (650 x 10,002) 6,501,300 votes and, overall, the B party candidates would win ‘just’ (650 x 10,001) 6,500,650 votes — just 650 fewer votes. That means the parliament would be made up of 650 A party candidates and no B party candidates, even though overall the A party was supported by just 650 more voters out of a total of 13,001,950. That is just 0.005% of the total number of voters.
OK, these are hypothetical figures and the reality is very different, but crucially and importantly the principles underpinning them still stand. And party A would have complete freedom to bring in what ever laws it wanted and there would be fuck all party B could do about it.
Party A might, for example, have stood on a manifesto that ‘as times are hard, couples can have only two children and if a third child is born to a couple, it will be killed at birth. (NB If you think that is far too way out an example, a similar principle existed in China until about 40 years ago. To stem overpopulation because of then scant resources, couples were only allowed to have one child. Because male children were economically ‘more valuable’, female babies were somehow discarded at birth. The upshot was, of course, that for many years China began to have far fewer women than men. In practice it wasn’t quite as simple, and there were ways to get around the policy, but broadly that is what was happening.)
So — in theory — party A could bring in a law ensuring that all third children born were killed at birth even though just under half of all voters might be dead against it.
But I think by now you get my point. In sum: first past the post has never, does never and will never help to elect a parliament which is in any way representative of what the a country’s voters want. But it is what we are still stuck with here in Britain.
. . .
That aside, of course, things are looking really, really dire. Although several parties are putting up candidates, the choice is still between a moron on one side and an idiot on the other. And this isn’t just me sounding off: Britain — what’s the cliche? ‘The cradle of democracy’ — really is faced with Hobson’s choice. And the country really does
not know what to do. We are stymied. It’s like being asked whether you would prefer to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer.
I have place several bets with Ladbrokes and hope and pray we will get a hung parliament. The problem with that, though, is that hung parliaments are trouble. If it did come about — which I’m bloody hoping for! — this country is faced with weeks, possibly months, of horse trading as the parties try to get together to form a coalition government.
If the Tories don’t get a majority — and here’s hoping they don’t, did you get that? — they are right out of the window as no-one, not even the tarts from the DUP would choose to get into bed with them. The next alternative would be a Labour/Lib Dem/SNP coalition or, at least, attempts to form one.
The hurdle that venture would have to overcome is that Labour, which would have by far the most MPs elected and would thus insist it is the senior party in any coalition, is lead by the idiot (or moron — I’ve lost track) and the Lib Dems and SNP would refuse point-blank to have him as PM. So if Labour did want to get into government as part of the coalition they would have to ditch that leader. And would that happen without a hitch? Is the Pope getting married next week?
There would be chaos, chaos, chaos — and this is what I am hoping for! Christ, things are bad here in ‘the cradle of democracy’, which come to think of it is not Britain but Greece. Britain had the ‘mother of all parliaments’. Sorry about that, but I can’t be arsed to correct the reference above, so (it’s time for the Champions League football on television) go hang. If, later, I have time and the inclination, I shall correct it. if not, still go hang.
We don’t actually vote for a party but a local chap or chappess under an antiquated system called ‘first past the post’ with which most of you will be familiar if you ever watch horse racing on television or athletics. In these and other sports (is horse racing a sport?) whoever passes the winning post soonest after the starting pistol has been fired has won the race. That makes sense of course if you are racing your horse against other horses or yourself against other athletes. But to the way of thinking of some of us — and that obviously includes me — it makes no sense whatsoever if you are trying to put in place a parliament which broadly represents the mood of the country.
This is where I might get a little muddled if I’m not careful but you need not: the parliament is made of all those who win the election in their constituency, that is who metaphorically care ‘first past the post’. So if A wins 10 votes, B wins 9 votes and C wins 3 votes, A is elected to parliament. More realistically if A wins 10,002 votes, B wins 10,001 and C (usually a Lib Dem) wins 3 votes, A is elected. He might have won only 1 vote more than B, but that’s first past the post. And it is a shite system. Complete cack.
I’m rather stupidly talking about a system with which you might all be familiar, although the chances are that you live in a country which long ago left the 17th century and has adopted a system of proportional representation. But it is often worthwhile going back to basics, especially if, like me, you are trying to demonstrate quite how unfair a long-accepted process is.
Under our system — the first past the post system — if the party to which A belongs sees its more of its candidates win in more constituencies than the party to which B belongs, it will have the most members of parliament and can form the government. That is true whether or not its candidates beat their opponents hollow or whether in each constituency each A candidate won merely 1 vote more than B. That is, of course, theoretical, but it does highlight the basic flaw in the whole system.
Here in Britain we have 650 odd constituencies. It is theoretically possible (though this would never happen) that in each constituency the candidate belonging to party A could win just 1 vote more than the candidate belonging to party B. So, overall, the A party candidates would win a national total of (650 x 10,002) 6,501,300 votes and, overall, the B party candidates would win ‘just’ (650 x 10,001) 6,500,650 votes — just 650 fewer votes. That means the parliament would be made up of 650 A party candidates and no B party candidates, even though overall the A party was supported by just 650 more voters out of a total of 13,001,950. That is just 0.005% of the total number of voters.
OK, these are hypothetical figures and the reality is very different, but crucially and importantly the principles underpinning them still stand. And party A would have complete freedom to bring in what ever laws it wanted and there would be fuck all party B could do about it.
Party A might, for example, have stood on a manifesto that ‘as times are hard, couples can have only two children and if a third child is born to a couple, it will be killed at birth. (NB If you think that is far too way out an example, a similar principle existed in China until about 40 years ago. To stem overpopulation because of then scant resources, couples were only allowed to have one child. Because male children were economically ‘more valuable’, female babies were somehow discarded at birth. The upshot was, of course, that for many years China began to have far fewer women than men. In practice it wasn’t quite as simple, and there were ways to get around the policy, but broadly that is what was happening.)
So — in theory — party A could bring in a law ensuring that all third children born were killed at birth even though just under half of all voters might be dead against it.
But I think by now you get my point. In sum: first past the post has never, does never and will never help to elect a parliament which is in any way representative of what the a country’s voters want. But it is what we are still stuck with here in Britain.
. . .
That aside, of course, things are looking really, really dire. Although several parties are putting up candidates, the choice is still between a moron on one side and an idiot on the other. And this isn’t just me sounding off: Britain — what’s the cliche? ‘The cradle of democracy’ — really is faced with Hobson’s choice. And the country really does
I have place several bets with Ladbrokes and hope and pray we will get a hung parliament. The problem with that, though, is that hung parliaments are trouble. If it did come about — which I’m bloody hoping for! — this country is faced with weeks, possibly months, of horse trading as the parties try to get together to form a coalition government.
If the Tories don’t get a majority — and here’s hoping they don’t, did you get that? — they are right out of the window as no-one, not even the tarts from the DUP would choose to get into bed with them. The next alternative would be a Labour/Lib Dem/SNP coalition or, at least, attempts to form one.
The hurdle that venture would have to overcome is that Labour, which would have by far the most MPs elected and would thus insist it is the senior party in any coalition, is lead by the idiot (or moron — I’ve lost track) and the Lib Dems and SNP would refuse point-blank to have him as PM. So if Labour did want to get into government as part of the coalition they would have to ditch that leader. And would that happen without a hitch? Is the Pope getting married next week?
There would be chaos, chaos, chaos — and this is what I am hoping for! Christ, things are bad here in ‘the cradle of democracy’, which come to think of it is not Britain but Greece. Britain had the ‘mother of all parliaments’. Sorry about that, but I can’t be arsed to correct the reference above, so (it’s time for the Champions League football on television) go hang. If, later, I have time and the inclination, I shall correct it. if not, still go hang.
Friday, 6 December 2019
Letter (email) to my daughter
By chance, I came across this, a ‘letter’ (actually an email) to my daughter when she was at the end of her first year at university and unhappy in the course she was in. Because she was born in August, she was young for her year. At the time (about May, 2014) I was on holiday in Mallorca and had stopped off for a lager and a cigar at a café somewhere or other of the inland towns. I had with me my works laptop (I can’t think why but I did). My daughter messaged me because she was in a complete tizzy about whether even to carry on with her uni course or not and was very unhappy. About 1,300 miles away I was trying to advise her and cheer her up. This is the email I sent.
Quite why I am posting it here and why I think it would be OK to do so, I don’t know (although I know none of my family reads this blog) but it does occur to me that what I have to say is in some ways also generally true.
I have not altered it except where indicated in [square brackets]. I feel it would be dishonest to do so, but again I don’t know why or why that would even matter. But there you go.
Sweetheart,
It occurred to me that if I told you a bit about my troubles at college, it might help give perspective to your thinking and in some way make it a little easier for you.
But first I have to tell you that I believe we inherit one or two traits from both our parents but also have some of our very own. Mum, as I told you, also tends to bottle things up and you might well have got that from her. She is also a curious mixture of a great deal of confidence in some areas – farming, local life - and a troubling, for her, lack in others, i.e. she would hate to have to drive up to Bristol. But then we all have our oddities and curious aspects of behaviour. I know I have mine.
You, too, seem to be a bit like that (though not necessarily in farming – you will have your own areas of confidence and a lack of it). But believe me, please, and you will only realise I was right when I am long gone and you remember me just as that cranky old sod who used to shout at people on the phone and sit outside smoking cigars when everyone else had retreated from the chill outside and was warm and comfortable inside.
I’ve told you this before, but I’ll repeat it so you believe me: when we are young, before we become three or four and still lack self-consciousness, many of our most fundamental characteristics are already apparent. And you were always a confident lass, determined and at times a bit stroppy, with a tendency to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Whatever else happens to us in later life, these things rarely change. Obviously, they can manifest themselves in different ways depending on what happens to us and how our lives go, so self-confidence sometimes becomes an arrogance which doesn’t take the feelings of others into consideration. But that will be the exception rather than the rule.
This might also be the point where I should tell give you my take on ‘intelligence’. It has nothing to do with education or academic achievement. And we can be intelligent and bright in some ways and shit-stupid in others. It has nothing to do with profession, job, ‘class’, who your parents were, your family or anything else. It is something all our very own. I think you are both bright and determined – the way you conscientiously set about doing your essays is a case in point. If at the moment you feel ‘uni isn’t for you’, well, I suggest you look at it and tell yourself ‘this course isn’t necessarily for me’, not uni. You sound more enthusiastic about this new course, for which I am glad.
You also mentioned that you decided you wanted to become a teacher after others said ‘you would make a good teacher, Elsie’, but that in practice it is a harder than you thought. Nothing wrong with that, either. In fact, look on the bright side: you now know that you are not necessarily cut out for working with children by teaching them in class, but you still, I think, would like to work with children and in education in some other capacity. My point: look at the positive – you have gained a little from experience.
As I am talking about experience, let me tell you that gaining a little experience in whatever way – it could be in work, driving a car, dealing with your taxes, in your personal, in relationships, in our dealings with the opposite sex, the different circumstances are endless - is very useful. The bright person takes from it what is useful and tries not to make a similar mistake (and not always successfully, but that doesn’t alter the point I am making). The stupid person doesn’t and repeats a mistake again and again and again. On the other hand, don’t be afraid of making a mistake, but if you do, take stock and try not to do the same thing again. As I say, the bright person learns from mistakes, the dumbo doesn’t.
. . .
I went to boarding school. In my first term I was very, very, very unhappy and homesick. Without exaggeration, I was completely and utterly miserable 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout that first term. I ran away from school to go home three times, though as we only live eight miles away it wasn’t that difficult. Then I had a stroke of luck: my parents couldn’t really afford the fees any more, so for the next two terms and the three terms of my second year I was a day boy, cycling to school every day. Then – as I saw it then – disaster. My father was posted to Paris by the BBC and I was told I would have to be a boarder again. I was heartbroken and, remembering how miserable I was, I was dreading the next few months until September. Then something odd happened: on my first day – as boarder – I met up with some friends, made them laugh and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t going to be half as bad as I had feared. In fact, I enjoyed the next three years. And I learned a lesson: keep an open mind.
At school I didn’t fit into any of the three main groups. There were the sporty ones, the swots and the dumbos. I was none of those: for one thing I could make people laugh, and I wasn’t all that stupid (he says carefully, so as not to be thought self-satisfied). But I didn’t really work hard at all. I got by but that was it.
So when it came to applying to uni (though we didn’t call it that in those days) and [I] had decided I wanted to study philosophy (because I was intrigued that we could talk about ideas and concepts) and English [that was] (because I had written a poem, showed it to an English teacher, he told me to ‘carry on’ and so there and then I decided I was going to ‘be a writer’. I though that by telling me to ‘carry on’, he was saying ‘look, you’re rather good at this’, but he wasn’t. It only occurred to me years and years later that all he was doing was what any good adult should do for a child: encourage them. Another lesson learnt, though many, many years later. And to this day, until today, and into the future, I still want to ‘be a writer’.)
But applying to uni, I got nowhere. My [UCCA] application spiel was laughably naïve and childish. So I stayed on to retake my chemistry A level and do German S level. (German was always easy – I wonder why). But the second time around I got nowhere. No offers from anyone. And all the time there was the threat from my father that if I didn’t ‘buckle down at school’, he would take me away an ‘put me in an office in Reading’ (the school was near Reading). Well, that did it: there was no way I wanted to work, especially not in ‘an office in Reading’ which frightened me beyond measure. That was the only reason – the only reason – I was desperate to go to university. I should add that, unfortunately, neither of my parents seemed to take any interest in my education, really, although I do know it wasn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, they both had confidence that I would somehow do reasonably well in life and, anyway, were far more concerned with my brother Ian who was already showing distinct signs of his mental illness. But also, their marriage wasn’t at all happy and hadn’t been for many years. (For that reason, while we were living in Paris, from 1965 until 1972, I only went home about five times for a couple of weeks at time, because it was a miserable household. Instead I stayed with friends from school.)
But there I was, 18, two very poor A levels, biology and chemistry and one very good one, German, as well as S level German, and no university had offered me a place through the UCCA (now UCAS) system. And I didn’t get anywhere on the clearing system. I was down in the dumps big time.
My mother’s distant cousin in Germany owned a shipyard (in Papenburg), ) so it was arranged that I should [go] to [sic] and work there. And about the same time I got the advice simply to write to individual universities simply asking for a place. I did. I wrote to Liverpool, Dundee, Kings College London, Bradford and one or two others I can no longer recall asking for a place on their English and philosophy course. I got an interview with Kings College, came back from Germany for a few days, fucked the interview and that was that with Kings. But Liverpool, Dundee and Bradford all offered me place. Well, stupid little public school snob that I was, I turned down Bradford – ‘who wants to live in working-class Bradford’ I thought. But I accepted the offer from Dundee.
Then, just a few days later came the Liverpool offer, but being, as I thought ‘gentlemanly and upright’ I believed that as I had already accepted the Dundee offer, I couldn’t turn around and say no, so I turned Liverpool down. (This business of simply asking for a place at a university which seemed make a complete nonsense of the whole UCCA (UCAS) scheme puzzled me for many years, until I heard that as universities were at the time fully funded by the government, they tried to ensure they completely filled their available places so they would get as much money per student as they could. So that’s why I got to college: they wanted their money from the government. It has bugger all to do with me. But at least I got to go to college.)
So there I was, my parents in Paris, me living in North Germany and I had to organise getting to Dundee, all in a matter of weeks. And I did, but I have no idea how. None.
Dundee is miles away from anywhere I had been used to. It seemed like the back of beyond. I eventually went to Kings Cross station and caught a train to Edinburgh. We got to York and I thought ‘well, not far to go now’. But it was. Newcastle is 100 miles north of York, but at the time I didn’t know – my knowledge of British geography was pitiful. So when we got to Newcastle, I panicked. I thought ‘isn’t Newcastle south of York? Bloody hell, I got on the wrong train’. But someone put me right. Edinburgh is another 100 miles north of Newcastle and it took ages to get there. But once we did, I looked up a train for Dundee and got on. Now that train was the same kind which took us from Henley to Twyford, a ten-minute journey, where we could then catch the train to London. So I thought ‘I won’t even bother sitting down, we’ll be there in ten minutes.’ We weren’t – the journey, on a slower train, took two hours.
Dundee was desolate. I arrived in October at about 3.30pm. It was pissing with rain, it gets dark far earlier that far north and not only was Dundee desolate, but so was I. I found my digs (I had called the college accommodation bureau who gave me an address) and was confronted by Mr and Mrs Scottish Incomprehensible Accent, both of them only about five foot four. They told me I was just in time ‘for tea’. Teas [sic] was high tea, i.e. a fry-up with chips. Nothing wrong with that except that when I asked for vinegar, I was handed a bottle with clear liquid and it was called ‘condiment’. I was totally and utterly at sea. And desolate. What the fuck was going on?
But I’m a sociable sort and made a few friends (and felt very guilty eventually ditching some of the early ones). I went to my lectures on time for the first few weeks, then got into the habit of sleeping in till noon. My room was on the top floor and it was so damp, my jeans were always – always – wet when I put them on in the morning. We were allowed on bath a week, but there was never enough water for more than – I am not bullshitting you – about four inches. I carried on, in my private moments, being very desolate indeed.
At the end of my first year, and after not attending any lectures at all, I failed all five of my foundation year subjects – methodology, economics, political science, history and psychology. It seemed like the end of the road and that ‘office in Reading’ or, worse, Bradford beckoned with all the miserable boredom I thought ‘working in an office’ entailed. But we had ‘resits’, a chance to take the same exams again in September, and I had just one thought in mind: make damn sure I was able to stay on at college and get that bloody grant cheque.
So I went to a bookshop, bought as [many] teach yourself history/economics/political science and psychology – the thinner, the better - and spent the summer months living in Dundeed [sic] – no one, but no one was around, the place seemed dead as a doornail - preparing for those all-important ‘re-sits’. How I managed to learn all about ‘methodology’ I really can’t remember, but I took my exams and past [sic] four out of five. I failed psychology (but passed [well, if I could get it right a few words on, why not the first time?] later that year) and my university course could continue. That all-important grant cheque was mine and the nightmare of starting work ‘in an office in Reading’ had been postponed. Phew!
More important problems started in my second year. Like you, but not like you, I, too, have a habit – some might call it a facility – of bottling things up. And out of the blue I had a panic attack. And, dear Elsie, panic attacks are awful, quite awful. They arrive completely unannounced and, for the first one or two at least, are utterly bewildering. (I have had a second bout of them, years later in London, which went on for about two years, and they were still bloody awful.) No one knows what causes them, except most probably unresolved stress. Which is why I insist: never bottle things up. Don’t postpone problems, deal with them now. Tackle them head on.
I went to the college doctor who put my [sic] on – well, I don’t know what they were back in 1969, but they ‘solved’ the problem by more or less zombifying you. When I returned home to Paris that Christmas, having taken the pills for a few months, my mother was horrified. But then that was almost 50 years ago. Science has moved on, though I am still very, very dubious about putting young children with attention deficit disorder on drugs. (In fact, as far as I am concerned western society relies on psycho drugs far too much. They merely mask a problem and make it seem to go away, but we don’t look at underlying causes as much as we might, though things are a lot, lot better. I rather suspect the pharma industry which makes fabulous sums flogging the bloody things is not being quite as responsible as it might and encourages their use for its own shabby ends.)
This is the point where what I am writing might be relevant to you. Everyone has problems and difficulties - there are no exceptions and sadly some get more than their fair share - and we deal with them or not according to our personal resources, attitudes, character and wisdom. If you had ever had a panic attack, Mum and I would most certainly know about it, and I doubt very much that you have. But if you do, don’t suffer in silence. But the other side of the coin is that: we all have problems and difficulties and we all find ways to deal with them.
From the day I was born until I left university, I had moved – was moved when I was younger – seven times, and especially when a child is young that can be disconcerting. I didn’t have my first bout of appalling homsickness [sic] at school, but years earlier when we had been in Berlin for a few months. Suddenly, all I could think of was to go back to Henley. So I am eternally grateful that you and Wes were born, have grown up and will eventually leave to start your own independent lives in the same place, the same house, the same environment. All things being equal it gives you an inner stability which is invaluable. I believe you have that inner stability, Elsie, apart from being bright, determined and resourceful – yes, that, too, even though you might not think so. Don’t sell yourself short.
Mum is a very good woman and very good mother. It might not have been, as I once told you recently, Romeo and Juliet between us (and, to be frank it is hardly ever the case between any married couple), and we have had and will always have our moments. Both of us love you in a way you will never understand until you have your own children. There is no other live [love] like it. In some ways a love for one’s own children is the only real love, utterly pure and utterly selfless. We want nothing from you but your happiness, contentment, health and fulfilment and my heart goes out to those children (Daisy, possibly?) who are sold short in that respect [Daisy was not my niece in the farm, but a former flatmate of my daughter’s drank, smoked a lot of dope, slept around]. You owe us nothing, nothing at all. And if you feel you do, don’t repay us, repay it to your children by giving the [sic] unconditional love.
I know you understand every word I have written. You are now on the cusp of womanhood, but please try to understand that both Mum and I have known you at very stage in your life from newborn baby, to toddler, you [to] young child, to growing child, you [to] adolescent teenager, to the woman you are now. And we don’t just see you now as Elsie 18 going on 19, but as ALL those Elsies.
If there is anything – and I mean anything – you want to talk to me about, don’t feel shy. (I told you yesterday that I am shy. Well, deep, deep, deep down I am, far deeper than anyone could ever imagine, so I know what shyness is, though no one, but no one believes that loudmouth Pat – as I am at work – is shy. But I am.)
Now, chill out, take a long deep breath, don’t rush things – you might well have inherited ‘rushing things’ from me if you do – chill out and look forward to the future with confidence. You might sometimes not think so, bout you are one of Life’s lucky ones. I hope all this has helped.
Dad, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Quite why I am posting it here and why I think it would be OK to do so, I don’t know (although I know none of my family reads this blog) but it does occur to me that what I have to say is in some ways also generally true.
I have not altered it except where indicated in [square brackets]. I feel it would be dishonest to do so, but again I don’t know why or why that would even matter. But there you go.
Sweetheart,
It occurred to me that if I told you a bit about my troubles at college, it might help give perspective to your thinking and in some way make it a little easier for you.
But first I have to tell you that I believe we inherit one or two traits from both our parents but also have some of our very own. Mum, as I told you, also tends to bottle things up and you might well have got that from her. She is also a curious mixture of a great deal of confidence in some areas – farming, local life - and a troubling, for her, lack in others, i.e. she would hate to have to drive up to Bristol. But then we all have our oddities and curious aspects of behaviour. I know I have mine.
You, too, seem to be a bit like that (though not necessarily in farming – you will have your own areas of confidence and a lack of it). But believe me, please, and you will only realise I was right when I am long gone and you remember me just as that cranky old sod who used to shout at people on the phone and sit outside smoking cigars when everyone else had retreated from the chill outside and was warm and comfortable inside.
I’ve told you this before, but I’ll repeat it so you believe me: when we are young, before we become three or four and still lack self-consciousness, many of our most fundamental characteristics are already apparent. And you were always a confident lass, determined and at times a bit stroppy, with a tendency to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Whatever else happens to us in later life, these things rarely change. Obviously, they can manifest themselves in different ways depending on what happens to us and how our lives go, so self-confidence sometimes becomes an arrogance which doesn’t take the feelings of others into consideration. But that will be the exception rather than the rule.
This might also be the point where I should tell give you my take on ‘intelligence’. It has nothing to do with education or academic achievement. And we can be intelligent and bright in some ways and shit-stupid in others. It has nothing to do with profession, job, ‘class’, who your parents were, your family or anything else. It is something all our very own. I think you are both bright and determined – the way you conscientiously set about doing your essays is a case in point. If at the moment you feel ‘uni isn’t for you’, well, I suggest you look at it and tell yourself ‘this course isn’t necessarily for me’, not uni. You sound more enthusiastic about this new course, for which I am glad.
You also mentioned that you decided you wanted to become a teacher after others said ‘you would make a good teacher, Elsie’, but that in practice it is a harder than you thought. Nothing wrong with that, either. In fact, look on the bright side: you now know that you are not necessarily cut out for working with children by teaching them in class, but you still, I think, would like to work with children and in education in some other capacity. My point: look at the positive – you have gained a little from experience.
As I am talking about experience, let me tell you that gaining a little experience in whatever way – it could be in work, driving a car, dealing with your taxes, in your personal, in relationships, in our dealings with the opposite sex, the different circumstances are endless - is very useful. The bright person takes from it what is useful and tries not to make a similar mistake (and not always successfully, but that doesn’t alter the point I am making). The stupid person doesn’t and repeats a mistake again and again and again. On the other hand, don’t be afraid of making a mistake, but if you do, take stock and try not to do the same thing again. As I say, the bright person learns from mistakes, the dumbo doesn’t.
. . .
I went to boarding school. In my first term I was very, very, very unhappy and homesick. Without exaggeration, I was completely and utterly miserable 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout that first term. I ran away from school to go home three times, though as we only live eight miles away it wasn’t that difficult. Then I had a stroke of luck: my parents couldn’t really afford the fees any more, so for the next two terms and the three terms of my second year I was a day boy, cycling to school every day. Then – as I saw it then – disaster. My father was posted to Paris by the BBC and I was told I would have to be a boarder again. I was heartbroken and, remembering how miserable I was, I was dreading the next few months until September. Then something odd happened: on my first day – as boarder – I met up with some friends, made them laugh and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t going to be half as bad as I had feared. In fact, I enjoyed the next three years. And I learned a lesson: keep an open mind.
At school I didn’t fit into any of the three main groups. There were the sporty ones, the swots and the dumbos. I was none of those: for one thing I could make people laugh, and I wasn’t all that stupid (he says carefully, so as not to be thought self-satisfied). But I didn’t really work hard at all. I got by but that was it.
So when it came to applying to uni (though we didn’t call it that in those days) and [I] had decided I wanted to study philosophy (because I was intrigued that we could talk about ideas and concepts) and English [that was] (because I had written a poem, showed it to an English teacher, he told me to ‘carry on’ and so there and then I decided I was going to ‘be a writer’. I though that by telling me to ‘carry on’, he was saying ‘look, you’re rather good at this’, but he wasn’t. It only occurred to me years and years later that all he was doing was what any good adult should do for a child: encourage them. Another lesson learnt, though many, many years later. And to this day, until today, and into the future, I still want to ‘be a writer’.)
But applying to uni, I got nowhere. My [UCCA] application spiel was laughably naïve and childish. So I stayed on to retake my chemistry A level and do German S level. (German was always easy – I wonder why). But the second time around I got nowhere. No offers from anyone. And all the time there was the threat from my father that if I didn’t ‘buckle down at school’, he would take me away an ‘put me in an office in Reading’ (the school was near Reading). Well, that did it: there was no way I wanted to work, especially not in ‘an office in Reading’ which frightened me beyond measure. That was the only reason – the only reason – I was desperate to go to university. I should add that, unfortunately, neither of my parents seemed to take any interest in my education, really, although I do know it wasn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, they both had confidence that I would somehow do reasonably well in life and, anyway, were far more concerned with my brother Ian who was already showing distinct signs of his mental illness. But also, their marriage wasn’t at all happy and hadn’t been for many years. (For that reason, while we were living in Paris, from 1965 until 1972, I only went home about five times for a couple of weeks at time, because it was a miserable household. Instead I stayed with friends from school.)
But there I was, 18, two very poor A levels, biology and chemistry and one very good one, German, as well as S level German, and no university had offered me a place through the UCCA (now UCAS) system. And I didn’t get anywhere on the clearing system. I was down in the dumps big time.
My mother’s distant cousin in Germany owned a shipyard (in Papenburg), ) so it was arranged that I should [go] to [sic] and work there. And about the same time I got the advice simply to write to individual universities simply asking for a place. I did. I wrote to Liverpool, Dundee, Kings College London, Bradford and one or two others I can no longer recall asking for a place on their English and philosophy course. I got an interview with Kings College, came back from Germany for a few days, fucked the interview and that was that with Kings. But Liverpool, Dundee and Bradford all offered me place. Well, stupid little public school snob that I was, I turned down Bradford – ‘who wants to live in working-class Bradford’ I thought. But I accepted the offer from Dundee.
Then, just a few days later came the Liverpool offer, but being, as I thought ‘gentlemanly and upright’ I believed that as I had already accepted the Dundee offer, I couldn’t turn around and say no, so I turned Liverpool down. (This business of simply asking for a place at a university which seemed make a complete nonsense of the whole UCCA (UCAS) scheme puzzled me for many years, until I heard that as universities were at the time fully funded by the government, they tried to ensure they completely filled their available places so they would get as much money per student as they could. So that’s why I got to college: they wanted their money from the government. It has bugger all to do with me. But at least I got to go to college.)
So there I was, my parents in Paris, me living in North Germany and I had to organise getting to Dundee, all in a matter of weeks. And I did, but I have no idea how. None.
Dundee is miles away from anywhere I had been used to. It seemed like the back of beyond. I eventually went to Kings Cross station and caught a train to Edinburgh. We got to York and I thought ‘well, not far to go now’. But it was. Newcastle is 100 miles north of York, but at the time I didn’t know – my knowledge of British geography was pitiful. So when we got to Newcastle, I panicked. I thought ‘isn’t Newcastle south of York? Bloody hell, I got on the wrong train’. But someone put me right. Edinburgh is another 100 miles north of Newcastle and it took ages to get there. But once we did, I looked up a train for Dundee and got on. Now that train was the same kind which took us from Henley to Twyford, a ten-minute journey, where we could then catch the train to London. So I thought ‘I won’t even bother sitting down, we’ll be there in ten minutes.’ We weren’t – the journey, on a slower train, took two hours.
Dundee was desolate. I arrived in October at about 3.30pm. It was pissing with rain, it gets dark far earlier that far north and not only was Dundee desolate, but so was I. I found my digs (I had called the college accommodation bureau who gave me an address) and was confronted by Mr and Mrs Scottish Incomprehensible Accent, both of them only about five foot four. They told me I was just in time ‘for tea’. Teas [sic] was high tea, i.e. a fry-up with chips. Nothing wrong with that except that when I asked for vinegar, I was handed a bottle with clear liquid and it was called ‘condiment’. I was totally and utterly at sea. And desolate. What the fuck was going on?
But I’m a sociable sort and made a few friends (and felt very guilty eventually ditching some of the early ones). I went to my lectures on time for the first few weeks, then got into the habit of sleeping in till noon. My room was on the top floor and it was so damp, my jeans were always – always – wet when I put them on in the morning. We were allowed on bath a week, but there was never enough water for more than – I am not bullshitting you – about four inches. I carried on, in my private moments, being very desolate indeed.
At the end of my first year, and after not attending any lectures at all, I failed all five of my foundation year subjects – methodology, economics, political science, history and psychology. It seemed like the end of the road and that ‘office in Reading’ or, worse, Bradford beckoned with all the miserable boredom I thought ‘working in an office’ entailed. But we had ‘resits’, a chance to take the same exams again in September, and I had just one thought in mind: make damn sure I was able to stay on at college and get that bloody grant cheque.
So I went to a bookshop, bought as [many] teach yourself history/economics/political science and psychology – the thinner, the better - and spent the summer months living in Dundeed [sic] – no one, but no one was around, the place seemed dead as a doornail - preparing for those all-important ‘re-sits’. How I managed to learn all about ‘methodology’ I really can’t remember, but I took my exams and past [sic] four out of five. I failed psychology (but passed [well, if I could get it right a few words on, why not the first time?] later that year) and my university course could continue. That all-important grant cheque was mine and the nightmare of starting work ‘in an office in Reading’ had been postponed. Phew!
More important problems started in my second year. Like you, but not like you, I, too, have a habit – some might call it a facility – of bottling things up. And out of the blue I had a panic attack. And, dear Elsie, panic attacks are awful, quite awful. They arrive completely unannounced and, for the first one or two at least, are utterly bewildering. (I have had a second bout of them, years later in London, which went on for about two years, and they were still bloody awful.) No one knows what causes them, except most probably unresolved stress. Which is why I insist: never bottle things up. Don’t postpone problems, deal with them now. Tackle them head on.
I went to the college doctor who put my [sic] on – well, I don’t know what they were back in 1969, but they ‘solved’ the problem by more or less zombifying you. When I returned home to Paris that Christmas, having taken the pills for a few months, my mother was horrified. But then that was almost 50 years ago. Science has moved on, though I am still very, very dubious about putting young children with attention deficit disorder on drugs. (In fact, as far as I am concerned western society relies on psycho drugs far too much. They merely mask a problem and make it seem to go away, but we don’t look at underlying causes as much as we might, though things are a lot, lot better. I rather suspect the pharma industry which makes fabulous sums flogging the bloody things is not being quite as responsible as it might and encourages their use for its own shabby ends.)
This is the point where what I am writing might be relevant to you. Everyone has problems and difficulties - there are no exceptions and sadly some get more than their fair share - and we deal with them or not according to our personal resources, attitudes, character and wisdom. If you had ever had a panic attack, Mum and I would most certainly know about it, and I doubt very much that you have. But if you do, don’t suffer in silence. But the other side of the coin is that: we all have problems and difficulties and we all find ways to deal with them.
From the day I was born until I left university, I had moved – was moved when I was younger – seven times, and especially when a child is young that can be disconcerting. I didn’t have my first bout of appalling homsickness [sic] at school, but years earlier when we had been in Berlin for a few months. Suddenly, all I could think of was to go back to Henley. So I am eternally grateful that you and Wes were born, have grown up and will eventually leave to start your own independent lives in the same place, the same house, the same environment. All things being equal it gives you an inner stability which is invaluable. I believe you have that inner stability, Elsie, apart from being bright, determined and resourceful – yes, that, too, even though you might not think so. Don’t sell yourself short.
Mum is a very good woman and very good mother. It might not have been, as I once told you recently, Romeo and Juliet between us (and, to be frank it is hardly ever the case between any married couple), and we have had and will always have our moments. Both of us love you in a way you will never understand until you have your own children. There is no other live [love] like it. In some ways a love for one’s own children is the only real love, utterly pure and utterly selfless. We want nothing from you but your happiness, contentment, health and fulfilment and my heart goes out to those children (Daisy, possibly?) who are sold short in that respect [Daisy was not my niece in the farm, but a former flatmate of my daughter’s drank, smoked a lot of dope, slept around]. You owe us nothing, nothing at all. And if you feel you do, don’t repay us, repay it to your children by giving the [sic] unconditional love.
I know you understand every word I have written. You are now on the cusp of womanhood, but please try to understand that both Mum and I have known you at very stage in your life from newborn baby, to toddler, you [to] young child, to growing child, you [to] adolescent teenager, to the woman you are now. And we don’t just see you now as Elsie 18 going on 19, but as ALL those Elsies.
If there is anything – and I mean anything – you want to talk to me about, don’t feel shy. (I told you yesterday that I am shy. Well, deep, deep, deep down I am, far deeper than anyone could ever imagine, so I know what shyness is, though no one, but no one believes that loudmouth Pat – as I am at work – is shy. But I am.)
Now, chill out, take a long deep breath, don’t rush things – you might well have inherited ‘rushing things’ from me if you do – chill out and look forward to the future with confidence. You might sometimes not think so, bout you are one of Life’s lucky ones. I hope all this has helped.
Dad, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thursday, 5 December 2019
On the road again, again
Travelodge – Hellingly Eastbourne, East Sussex
It’s a bit of a stretch entitling this entry ‘On the road again’ as it involves neither amphetamines, superhcharged sports cars, long straight roads stretching into far distance or me escaping life and a futile existence. In fact, I have only taken off from deepest, darkest North Cornwall to visit more civilised East Sussex for a funeral. And rather than spend days and weeks on the road, hooking up with equally disillusioned young women and sparked out, druggy lunatics, the journey from St Breward to my Travelogdge here near Hailsham took only - only – six hours (a little longer than usual as I spent the usual hour hunting down an Asda, this time to get a white shirt).
But it is good to get out and about. The funeral is for the widow of one of my stepmother’s former friends from the BBC, one of her more acceptable friends I have to add, because some of them can be a pain in the arse (not that I tell them – I can be as two-faced as the you).
My stepmother is now in a home as she kept falling over and is slowly losing it, so her cottage is empty, but last Sunday, I happened, just happened to be there watching a couple of football matches, when the niece of the woman who has died rang to tell my stepmother. As I liked the dead woman and her husband (who was Anglo Irish and had much of the charm the Irish often have) I said I would come along to the funeral. So here I am.
Staying at Travelodge’s has become something of a habit, and for good reason. They might be basic – i.e. no flunkies schmoozing up to you in the hope of a tip to supplement his pitiful wage – but they have everything I want: clean sheets, hot water and they are warm. And they are not expensive. I have now got to the age when a price rise for a Mars bar from nine to tne pence (and that is old pence, so 9d to 10d) is shocking, but a more modern part of me is fully aware that prices are rising all the time.
So, for example, the £40 I am paying for one night here is, according to my inflation calculator app, the equivalent of £26.95 20 years ago and just £16.96 in 1986, a year chosen because that’s when I began on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. And in 1974, when I started my first job, as reporter on the Lincoln Chronicle, it was just what might seem an astonishing £4.77, though that isn’t astonishing at all because in them ol’ days most folk were still paid in washers.
The big news hereabouts – well in the whole of Britain – is next week’s general election, exactly seven days from now. I have spent the past few months bending the ear of anyone patient enough not to punch me up the bracket that ‘it will be another hung parliament with the Lib Dems doing rather better than expected, winning at least 60 seats’. Well, I have had to revise my predictions rather as the Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, has proved to be a – though in keeping with Lib Dem tradition – as useful as a chocolate teapot and is, it seems inspiring no one.
The Lib Dems polling figures are just not shifting from the 15% mark, though mention of ‘polling’ obliges me to give the usual health warning that the polls these days are as useless as Jo Swinson. For two weeks they had the Tories in the lead by about 16%, but that lead is now being cut. But bear in mind that in the election in 2017, known colloquially as ‘Mrs May’s finest hour’, she was way ahead in the poll, but on the night did not manage to get a majority and came out with fewer MPs than she had before she called the election.
I still think it will be a hung parliament, however, and so much the better. Nothing would please me better than to see both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn end up with egg on their faces. Corbyn will most certainly be out after the election, but I doubt he will resign. There will probably be some kind of palace coup. Johnson will hang on, though he influence will be much diminished, and, of course, we will be in for a few more months of ‘Brexit? What the fuck is going on?’
In other news, this Hemingway bollocks is proceeding, though slowly, as there is a lot of reading to do. And, dear friends, I have finally admitted to myself that to do it justice I shall have to – I have no choice – re-read A Farewell To Arms. I read it years ago (at the end of the 16th century I think) and can remember nothing about it. But as everything about Hemingway, from his style to the man himself, irritates the hell out of me, I am not looking forward to it. File this under ‘poor chap, he’s suffering for his art’.
Pip, pip.
It’s a bit of a stretch entitling this entry ‘On the road again’ as it involves neither amphetamines, superhcharged sports cars, long straight roads stretching into far distance or me escaping life and a futile existence. In fact, I have only taken off from deepest, darkest North Cornwall to visit more civilised East Sussex for a funeral. And rather than spend days and weeks on the road, hooking up with equally disillusioned young women and sparked out, druggy lunatics, the journey from St Breward to my Travelogdge here near Hailsham took only - only – six hours (a little longer than usual as I spent the usual hour hunting down an Asda, this time to get a white shirt).
But it is good to get out and about. The funeral is for the widow of one of my stepmother’s former friends from the BBC, one of her more acceptable friends I have to add, because some of them can be a pain in the arse (not that I tell them – I can be as two-faced as the you).
My stepmother is now in a home as she kept falling over and is slowly losing it, so her cottage is empty, but last Sunday, I happened, just happened to be there watching a couple of football matches, when the niece of the woman who has died rang to tell my stepmother. As I liked the dead woman and her husband (who was Anglo Irish and had much of the charm the Irish often have) I said I would come along to the funeral. So here I am.
Staying at Travelodge’s has become something of a habit, and for good reason. They might be basic – i.e. no flunkies schmoozing up to you in the hope of a tip to supplement his pitiful wage – but they have everything I want: clean sheets, hot water and they are warm. And they are not expensive. I have now got to the age when a price rise for a Mars bar from nine to tne pence (and that is old pence, so 9d to 10d) is shocking, but a more modern part of me is fully aware that prices are rising all the time.
So, for example, the £40 I am paying for one night here is, according to my inflation calculator app, the equivalent of £26.95 20 years ago and just £16.96 in 1986, a year chosen because that’s when I began on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. And in 1974, when I started my first job, as reporter on the Lincoln Chronicle, it was just what might seem an astonishing £4.77, though that isn’t astonishing at all because in them ol’ days most folk were still paid in washers.
The big news hereabouts – well in the whole of Britain – is next week’s general election, exactly seven days from now. I have spent the past few months bending the ear of anyone patient enough not to punch me up the bracket that ‘it will be another hung parliament with the Lib Dems doing rather better than expected, winning at least 60 seats’. Well, I have had to revise my predictions rather as the Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, has proved to be a – though in keeping with Lib Dem tradition – as useful as a chocolate teapot and is, it seems inspiring no one.
The Lib Dems polling figures are just not shifting from the 15% mark, though mention of ‘polling’ obliges me to give the usual health warning that the polls these days are as useless as Jo Swinson. For two weeks they had the Tories in the lead by about 16%, but that lead is now being cut. But bear in mind that in the election in 2017, known colloquially as ‘Mrs May’s finest hour’, she was way ahead in the poll, but on the night did not manage to get a majority and came out with fewer MPs than she had before she called the election.
I still think it will be a hung parliament, however, and so much the better. Nothing would please me better than to see both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn end up with egg on their faces. Corbyn will most certainly be out after the election, but I doubt he will resign. There will probably be some kind of palace coup. Johnson will hang on, though he influence will be much diminished, and, of course, we will be in for a few more months of ‘Brexit? What the fuck is going on?’
In other news, this Hemingway bollocks is proceeding, though slowly, as there is a lot of reading to do. And, dear friends, I have finally admitted to myself that to do it justice I shall have to – I have no choice – re-read A Farewell To Arms. I read it years ago (at the end of the 16th century I think) and can remember nothing about it. But as everything about Hemingway, from his style to the man himself, irritates the hell out of me, I am not looking forward to it. File this under ‘poor chap, he’s suffering for his art’.
Pip, pip.
Saturday, 2 November 2019
To publish posthumously and squeeze a bit more money for the estate of the writer and his publisher (even though the work might be crap) or not? Decisions, decisions, though as it turned out not a difficult one for Charles Scribner’s Sons, of New York, publishers to the gentry
Below are around 400 words from Joan Didion’s piece — the opening — on the practice of publishing Hemingway’s work posthumously. It appeared in the November 9, 1998, issue of the New Yorker. NB I had never heard of Joan Didion, either, but I gather she is — she is now 85 — a journalist, essayist and writer who is well-known in the United States.
I should preface this by saying — and this is relevant — that literary criticism is and cannot be a science. In fact, that is true of all art criticism. Well, that’s obvious, you might counter, of course it isn’t, how can it be? But hang on: even those who agree with me often inadvertently behave as if it were a science; or if not exactly ‘a science’, a discipline akin to a science which commands — rightly, many would insist — the respect we pay to science; and that just as the various sciences have their acknowledged experts who know more than you and I about their field, so criticism has folk akin to such experts who know more about their field than ordinary joes like you and I.
Well, if that is your view, there is your first piece of nonsense. And when I seem to diss literary and art criticism and pooh-pooh the expertise of critics, I am, at least, in good company: Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by the airs and graces acquired by such criticism.
If we acknowledge the fundamental dichotomy between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ and accept — not that you can do otherwise — that they are mutually exclusive, literary (and art) criticism falls squarely in the ‘subjectivity’ camp — there can be no ‘objective’ literary or artistic judgment.
Yet, as Woolf points out when writing about literary critics in her review (New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927) of Hemingway’s volume of short stories, Men Without Women (first published in 1927) something odd happens when the ‘ordinary’ reading public is confronted with the views of a literary critic. It is worth reading her full essay (which you can find here), but one pertinent bit is this, another opening paragraph:
Let me extrapolate from what Woolf writes: because at first the ordinary reader ‘begins to think that critics . . . must be right. . . He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees’, hey presto, by some obscure alchemy the critic’s subjective opinion — that this writer is ‘good’ but this writer isn’t (or in the world of art criticism, that this picture ‘is art’ but that picture isn’t) — mysteriously and almost unobtrusively crosses the divide between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’.
Very soon those judgments are ‘facts’: in many people’s minds it becomes a ‘fact’ that Picasso, Klee, Stravinsky, Epstein, Joyce, Beckett are geniuses. Teenage students are taught as much and so the ‘fact’ is passed from generation to generation. A corollary is — the first of many circular arguments which bedevil much talk about ‘art’ — that the work they produced (and are producing if they are still alive) are ‘masterpieces’. And why is it a ‘masterpiece’? Why, because so-and-so who write/painted/composed it is really great! And why is he really great? Well, just look at this, the novel/painting/piece of music he/she has produced (though, as is the way of the world, it is usually a ‘he’)! Etc.
By now there is also a tacit implication: if you disagree with these judgments by men and women — though, as is the way of the world, mainly men — you don’t know what you are talking about and you are a fool. And because few of us care to look foolish in the eyes of our peers, we find ourselves beaten into acquiescent silence, take care to watch our p’s and q’s and might even be cowed enough by the mighty critics into echoing their judgments.
One odd consequence of this canonisation of various composers, painters and writers is that their work, when it goes up for sale, begins to command fabulous prices. At this point I would briefly like to point out, but not spend too much time on doing so, that the ‘value’ of a work of art is essentially what someone who wants to own it is prepared to pay for it. So when you hear that in 1990 at Sotheby’s in London Paul Klee’s Der Künftige (pictured)
sold for $3,717,600 all you know with any certainty is that someone or some institution wanted the pictures enough to cough up $3,717,600. (I must say I do like it and would certainly tolerate it in my living room but that’s because I like it as an image, a picture, not because it is ‘a Paul Klee’ and I rather like the idea of folk thinking I have taste because I own and have on my wall ‘a Paul Klee’.
Casting around the net for an example of ‘value’ in art, I just happened upon that particular painting, and until about eight minutes ago I had no idea it is ‘a perfect example of Paul Klee’s politically engaged art. This painting was a response to the call of totalitarian pseudo-utopian ideologies in the 1930s for the evolution of a New Man. This is addressed of course to the fascist and Nazi dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, as well as to Stalin’. I’ve got to say looking at it, I’d have never guessed that. The things you learn.
Oddly enough — I’ve done a little more casting about on the net and this is somehow relevant to discussing the ‘value’ of a work of art — 20 years on after that sale, whoever bought it at Sothebys in 1990 sold it again at Christie’s in New York and got $387,100 less for it than she/he paid for it. That makes my point rather well: surely the ‘artistic ’ of Klee’s Der Künftige hasn’t declined? Surely if it was a great painting in 1990, it is still a great paining now?
All we can say from the drop in price that for whatever reason — the whim of potential buyers, the global banking crisis (this was in 2010) or just the weather being so bad in New York on Tuesday, May 4 of that year that Christie’s had fewer bods at that particular auction that it did not make the price expected.
So, yet again, that circular argument is very simple. Actually, I can even — I think — legitimately use the word simplistic (one that increasingly of late is used to mean ‘simple’ although both words have distinct meanings). It goes: this novel/poem/painting/piece of music is great/a masterpiece. Why? Because it is by so-and-so, and so-and-so is an artistic genius. Why do you claim he is a genius? Because he [it’s usually a bloody he, I don’t know if you have noticed] produces work like this.
Collapse of stout party.
. . .
I’ve mentioned several times before that I am ‘working’ on a piece about Hemingway and how, in my view, he was certainly far from being the literary genius he is often claimed to be, and how, in my view, his ‘debut’ novel (i.e. it wasn’t he debut novel but is often regarded as such) The Sun Also Rises is far from being the masterpiece it is often claimed to be.
My project is slowly acquiring the characteristic of ‘interminable’, mainly because I keep coming across more books relevant to the subject, which I buy, read and which in some ways obliged me to reshape the piece (as in ‘re-write’) will eventually produce.
As I shall post it here, I don’t want to say too much more, but I strongly suspect something similar to that circular argument took place when Hemingway first ‘burst upon the literary scene’. When his work began to be published, first a collection of short stories (In Our Time in 1925, then The Sun Also Rises in 1926) his work — the then unique style in which is was written, his subject matter and his treatment of it — was so utterly different to what else was on sale that it caused a sensation.
His publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, with both eyes on the bottom line, came up with great marketing and advertising strategy, selling Hemingway as a writer quite unlike his peers, an ‘action man writer’, and the public, as always eager for novelty, took him up with gusto. The myth of Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ took root.
A year later came Men Without Women, his second collection of short stories, but both he and Scribner’s knew he had to produce a follow-up novel to sustain the success, and in 1929 he published A Farewell To Arms. It was in the same style, contained more ‘obscene’ language — horribly lame ‘obscene language’ by contemporary standards, but that isn’t the point — and that reputation was established. Hemingway, the young turk and literature’s latest sensation, had arrived.
It helped that the man himself was a bombastic, duplicitous, attention-seeking self-publicising narcissist who, perversely insisted point-blank that he wasn't interested in celebrity and just wanted to write. That was a ludicrous claim, given that he subscribed to two news cuttings service which kept him informed on the growth of the celebrity he certainly did not want, but more of that when I post my piece (at some point).
In 1932 published Death In The Afternoon (1932), an odd amalgam of a guide to bullfighting and writing which sold badly in Depression-era America (and didn’t much please his publisher who were urging Hemingway to write a third bloody novel). A year later came Winner Take Nothing [sic], his third final collection of original short
stories; and in 1935 came The Green Hills Of Africa, an account of his safari in Africa, which also failed to set Depression-era America alight (many of whose potential readers could not afford to put food on the table let alone gallivant Africa slaughtering wildlife).
Two years later came the novella To Have And Have Not, cobbled together from several short stories, which yet again failed to enthuse the reading public. And if you are thinking ‘but wasn’t that a huge success?’ you will actually be thinking of the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film which had almost nothing in common with Hemingway’s novella, except the name of the main protagonist and the first chapter.
In 1938 came The Fifth Column And The First 49 Stories. The stories were simply those which had appeared in his first two volumes, In Our Time and Men With Women. The Fifth Column was a silly play, written when Hemingway was holed up (with his third wife-to-be, the blonde journalist Martha Gellhorn) in Madrid’s Hotel Florida under contract to report on the Spanish Civil War about a cynical, hard-drinking journalist who has an affair with a blonde colleague and is working undercover as a spy. It was never staged as Hemingway had written it.
After that came nothing until in 1950 when Hemingway wrote Across The River And Into The Trees, and embarrassing tale of a 50-year-old war hero reminiscing about an affair he had with an 18-year-old Italian teenager. At the time Hemingway, also 50, was infatuated with an 19-year-old Italian teenager. In 1952 came The Old Man And The Sea, another novella which sold brilliantly but which also brought the charge that Hemingway was parodying his own style. And until he died in July 1961, Hemingway published nothing more, though he had been working intermittently on several projects.
In 1970 came Islands In The Stream, edited by someone or other somewhere from reams and reams of prose he had been writing; then, in 1986, Scribner’s published a novel called The Garden Of Eden, an odd sexual fantasy about, ahem, a successful writer and his second wife, he had been working on intermittently for 30 years, which was again boiled down from what he had written. Finally, in 1999, came a book about his second African safari, which appeared as True At First Light, boiled down to a quarter its length from the 250,000 words Hemingway had written.
Despite brave claims by Hemingway champions along the lines that all three books are ‘important additions’ to ‘the Hemingway oeuvre’, all three got bad to lukewarm reviews and sold badly. One biographer, Matthew Brucolli, summed up that oeuvre neatly: ‘. . . Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. . . Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’ That makes my point quite well.
. . .
In what follows Didion provides an analysis of the opening paragraph to A Farewell To Arms which is, to my mind, ludicrous. That the paragraph is somehow ‘brilliant’ is a given as far as Didion is concerned. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that any number of writers, whether they are fictionalists or working hacks (journalists) can and very often do produce prose which is often far better.
This passage is possibly now too well-known, but were I to show it to someone who was unfamiliar with the novel and asked for a judgment, I suggest that judgment would be ’it’s OK, nice enough’ and would then I might be ask ‘where’s it from’. Well, I suggest it could well be from the travel diary of a recent graduate taking a year off before starting her/his career. Bear that in mind when you read what Didion has to say.
That first paragraph of the novel reads:
Then comes Didion’s take on it [new paragraphs inserted by me to make what she wrote it easier to read]:
I think it is pertinent that Didion first came across the novel and it’s opening paragraph at an impressionable age — she says she was 12 or 13 — and to illuminate why I think it is pertinent, I should like to quote Vladimir Nabokov’s judgment of Hemingway’s work.
In an interview with the ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 published in Playboy, he agreed he had once described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’ and added: ‘In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile . . .’ Sums it all up rather well, although if push came to shove I would defend Conrad’s writing long after I had given up defending anything by Hemingway.
What is ‘mysterious’ and ‘thrilling’ about it? I’m blowed if I know, but then you might counter along the lines that I am quite ’obviously to stupid/biased/contrary to see it’. And there is no response to that.
As for the ‘liturgical cadence’ of the paragraphs with so enthrals Didion (thanks to ‘the placement of commas’) I really do think she should get out a bit more. I have personally come across any number of feature writers in my time in newspaper who could turn out paragraphs like that seven times before tea, but who didn’t and don’t make a song and dance about ‘the writer’ writing ‘truly’.
’The irony — the Hemingway story is full of ironies — is that his style did influence how English literature evolved throughout the 20th century. Many respected writers cite Hemingway and his style as ‘an influence’. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily good. Many jazz guitarists will happily admit that when they were ten and becoming interested in the instrument, they were strongly influenced by the playing Bill Hailey and Buddy Holly or even Old Blighty’s very own Bert Weedon.
I must stop here because I could go on for ages and would simply be repeating what I have so far written elsewhere and what I intend to write. But let me leave you with this: read (or re-read) Hemingway’s story — sorry, his ‘celebrated’ story — The Killers (you can find it here). As far as I am concerned it is a rather poor attempt by Hemingway to emulate the ‘hard-boiled style becoming popular at the time, eventually leading to the work of Dashiell Hammett.
Again if you were unfamiliar with it and didn’t recognise it as Hemingway’s ‘celebrated’ story and I instead told you I had written it, I suspect it would no longer be ‘celebrated’ and you would cast about for a way politely telling me ’nice try but no cigar’. Ah, but as it is by Hemingway . . .
Please, Ms Didion, let’s all try and calm down and stay a little more sober.
I should preface this by saying — and this is relevant — that literary criticism is and cannot be a science. In fact, that is true of all art criticism. Well, that’s obvious, you might counter, of course it isn’t, how can it be? But hang on: even those who agree with me often inadvertently behave as if it were a science; or if not exactly ‘a science’, a discipline akin to a science which commands — rightly, many would insist — the respect we pay to science; and that just as the various sciences have their acknowledged experts who know more than you and I about their field, so criticism has folk akin to such experts who know more about their field than ordinary joes like you and I.
Well, if that is your view, there is your first piece of nonsense. And when I seem to diss literary and art criticism and pooh-pooh the expertise of critics, I am, at least, in good company: Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by the airs and graces acquired by such criticism.
If we acknowledge the fundamental dichotomy between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ and accept — not that you can do otherwise — that they are mutually exclusive, literary (and art) criticism falls squarely in the ‘subjectivity’ camp — there can be no ‘objective’ literary or artistic judgment.
Yet, as Woolf points out when writing about literary critics in her review (New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927) of Hemingway’s volume of short stories, Men Without Women (first published in 1927) something odd happens when the ‘ordinary’ reading public is confronted with the views of a literary critic. It is worth reading her full essay (which you can find here), but one pertinent bit is this, another opening paragraph:
‘There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs.
No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.’
Let me extrapolate from what Woolf writes: because at first the ordinary reader ‘begins to think that critics . . . must be right. . . He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees’, hey presto, by some obscure alchemy the critic’s subjective opinion — that this writer is ‘good’ but this writer isn’t (or in the world of art criticism, that this picture ‘is art’ but that picture isn’t) — mysteriously and almost unobtrusively crosses the divide between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’.
Very soon those judgments are ‘facts’: in many people’s minds it becomes a ‘fact’ that Picasso, Klee, Stravinsky, Epstein, Joyce, Beckett are geniuses. Teenage students are taught as much and so the ‘fact’ is passed from generation to generation. A corollary is — the first of many circular arguments which bedevil much talk about ‘art’ — that the work they produced (and are producing if they are still alive) are ‘masterpieces’. And why is it a ‘masterpiece’? Why, because so-and-so who write/painted/composed it is really great! And why is he really great? Well, just look at this, the novel/painting/piece of music he/she has produced (though, as is the way of the world, it is usually a ‘he’)! Etc.
By now there is also a tacit implication: if you disagree with these judgments by men and women — though, as is the way of the world, mainly men — you don’t know what you are talking about and you are a fool. And because few of us care to look foolish in the eyes of our peers, we find ourselves beaten into acquiescent silence, take care to watch our p’s and q’s and might even be cowed enough by the mighty critics into echoing their judgments.
One odd consequence of this canonisation of various composers, painters and writers is that their work, when it goes up for sale, begins to command fabulous prices. At this point I would briefly like to point out, but not spend too much time on doing so, that the ‘value’ of a work of art is essentially what someone who wants to own it is prepared to pay for it. So when you hear that in 1990 at Sotheby’s in London Paul Klee’s Der Künftige (pictured)
sold for $3,717,600 all you know with any certainty is that someone or some institution wanted the pictures enough to cough up $3,717,600. (I must say I do like it and would certainly tolerate it in my living room but that’s because I like it as an image, a picture, not because it is ‘a Paul Klee’ and I rather like the idea of folk thinking I have taste because I own and have on my wall ‘a Paul Klee’.
Casting around the net for an example of ‘value’ in art, I just happened upon that particular painting, and until about eight minutes ago I had no idea it is ‘a perfect example of Paul Klee’s politically engaged art. This painting was a response to the call of totalitarian pseudo-utopian ideologies in the 1930s for the evolution of a New Man. This is addressed of course to the fascist and Nazi dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, as well as to Stalin’. I’ve got to say looking at it, I’d have never guessed that. The things you learn.
Oddly enough — I’ve done a little more casting about on the net and this is somehow relevant to discussing the ‘value’ of a work of art — 20 years on after that sale, whoever bought it at Sothebys in 1990 sold it again at Christie’s in New York and got $387,100 less for it than she/he paid for it. That makes my point rather well: surely the ‘artistic ’ of Klee’s Der Künftige hasn’t declined? Surely if it was a great painting in 1990, it is still a great paining now?
All we can say from the drop in price that for whatever reason — the whim of potential buyers, the global banking crisis (this was in 2010) or just the weather being so bad in New York on Tuesday, May 4 of that year that Christie’s had fewer bods at that particular auction that it did not make the price expected.
So, yet again, that circular argument is very simple. Actually, I can even — I think — legitimately use the word simplistic (one that increasingly of late is used to mean ‘simple’ although both words have distinct meanings). It goes: this novel/poem/painting/piece of music is great/a masterpiece. Why? Because it is by so-and-so, and so-and-so is an artistic genius. Why do you claim he is a genius? Because he [it’s usually a bloody he, I don’t know if you have noticed] produces work like this.
Collapse of stout party.
. . .
I’ve mentioned several times before that I am ‘working’ on a piece about Hemingway and how, in my view, he was certainly far from being the literary genius he is often claimed to be, and how, in my view, his ‘debut’ novel (i.e. it wasn’t he debut novel but is often regarded as such) The Sun Also Rises is far from being the masterpiece it is often claimed to be.
My project is slowly acquiring the characteristic of ‘interminable’, mainly because I keep coming across more books relevant to the subject, which I buy, read and which in some ways obliged me to reshape the piece (as in ‘re-write’) will eventually produce.
As I shall post it here, I don’t want to say too much more, but I strongly suspect something similar to that circular argument took place when Hemingway first ‘burst upon the literary scene’. When his work began to be published, first a collection of short stories (In Our Time in 1925, then The Sun Also Rises in 1926) his work — the then unique style in which is was written, his subject matter and his treatment of it — was so utterly different to what else was on sale that it caused a sensation.
His publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, with both eyes on the bottom line, came up with great marketing and advertising strategy, selling Hemingway as a writer quite unlike his peers, an ‘action man writer’, and the public, as always eager for novelty, took him up with gusto. The myth of Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ took root.
A year later came Men Without Women, his second collection of short stories, but both he and Scribner’s knew he had to produce a follow-up novel to sustain the success, and in 1929 he published A Farewell To Arms. It was in the same style, contained more ‘obscene’ language — horribly lame ‘obscene language’ by contemporary standards, but that isn’t the point — and that reputation was established. Hemingway, the young turk and literature’s latest sensation, had arrived.
It helped that the man himself was a bombastic, duplicitous, attention-seeking self-publicising narcissist who, perversely insisted point-blank that he wasn't interested in celebrity and just wanted to write. That was a ludicrous claim, given that he subscribed to two news cuttings service which kept him informed on the growth of the celebrity he certainly did not want, but more of that when I post my piece (at some point).
In 1932 published Death In The Afternoon (1932), an odd amalgam of a guide to bullfighting and writing which sold badly in Depression-era America (and didn’t much please his publisher who were urging Hemingway to write a third bloody novel). A year later came Winner Take Nothing [sic], his third final collection of original short
Two years later came the novella To Have And Have Not, cobbled together from several short stories, which yet again failed to enthuse the reading public. And if you are thinking ‘but wasn’t that a huge success?’ you will actually be thinking of the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film which had almost nothing in common with Hemingway’s novella, except the name of the main protagonist and the first chapter.
In 1938 came The Fifth Column And The First 49 Stories. The stories were simply those which had appeared in his first two volumes, In Our Time and Men With Women. The Fifth Column was a silly play, written when Hemingway was holed up (with his third wife-to-be, the blonde journalist Martha Gellhorn) in Madrid’s Hotel Florida under contract to report on the Spanish Civil War about a cynical, hard-drinking journalist who has an affair with a blonde colleague and is working undercover as a spy. It was never staged as Hemingway had written it.
After that came nothing until in 1950 when Hemingway wrote Across The River And Into The Trees, and embarrassing tale of a 50-year-old war hero reminiscing about an affair he had with an 18-year-old Italian teenager. At the time Hemingway, also 50, was infatuated with an 19-year-old Italian teenager. In 1952 came The Old Man And The Sea, another novella which sold brilliantly but which also brought the charge that Hemingway was parodying his own style. And until he died in July 1961, Hemingway published nothing more, though he had been working intermittently on several projects.
In 1970 came Islands In The Stream, edited by someone or other somewhere from reams and reams of prose he had been writing; then, in 1986, Scribner’s published a novel called The Garden Of Eden, an odd sexual fantasy about, ahem, a successful writer and his second wife, he had been working on intermittently for 30 years, which was again boiled down from what he had written. Finally, in 1999, came a book about his second African safari, which appeared as True At First Light, boiled down to a quarter its length from the 250,000 words Hemingway had written.
Despite brave claims by Hemingway champions along the lines that all three books are ‘important additions’ to ‘the Hemingway oeuvre’, all three got bad to lukewarm reviews and sold badly. One biographer, Matthew Brucolli, summed up that oeuvre neatly: ‘. . . Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. . . Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’ That makes my point quite well.
. . .
In what follows Didion provides an analysis of the opening paragraph to A Farewell To Arms which is, to my mind, ludicrous. That the paragraph is somehow ‘brilliant’ is a given as far as Didion is concerned. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that any number of writers, whether they are fictionalists or working hacks (journalists) can and very often do produce prose which is often far better.
This passage is possibly now too well-known, but were I to show it to someone who was unfamiliar with the novel and asked for a judgment, I suggest that judgment would be ’it’s OK, nice enough’ and would then I might be ask ‘where’s it from’. Well, I suggest it could well be from the travel diary of a recent graduate taking a year off before starting her/his career. Bear that in mind when you read what Didion has to say.
That first paragraph of the novel reads:
‘In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.’
Then comes Didion’s take on it [new paragraphs inserted by me to make what she wrote it easier to read]:
‘So goes the famous first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ which I was moved to reread by the recent announcement that what was said to be Hemingway’s last novel would be published posthumously next year. That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself.
Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are ‘the,’ fifteen are ‘and.’ There are are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of ‘the’ and of ‘and,’ creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of ‘the’ before the word ‘leaves’ in the fourth sentence (‘and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling’) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season.
The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?
I think it is pertinent that Didion first came across the novel and it’s opening paragraph at an impressionable age — she says she was 12 or 13 — and to illuminate why I think it is pertinent, I should like to quote Vladimir Nabokov’s judgment of Hemingway’s work.
In an interview with the ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 published in Playboy, he agreed he had once described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’ and added: ‘In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile . . .’ Sums it all up rather well, although if push came to shove I would defend Conrad’s writing long after I had given up defending anything by Hemingway.
What is ‘mysterious’ and ‘thrilling’ about it? I’m blowed if I know, but then you might counter along the lines that I am quite ’obviously to stupid/biased/contrary to see it’. And there is no response to that.
As for the ‘liturgical cadence’ of the paragraphs with so enthrals Didion (thanks to ‘the placement of commas’) I really do think she should get out a bit more. I have personally come across any number of feature writers in my time in newspaper who could turn out paragraphs like that seven times before tea, but who didn’t and don’t make a song and dance about ‘the writer’ writing ‘truly’.
’The irony — the Hemingway story is full of ironies — is that his style did influence how English literature evolved throughout the 20th century. Many respected writers cite Hemingway and his style as ‘an influence’. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily good. Many jazz guitarists will happily admit that when they were ten and becoming interested in the instrument, they were strongly influenced by the playing Bill Hailey and Buddy Holly or even Old Blighty’s very own Bert Weedon.
I must stop here because I could go on for ages and would simply be repeating what I have so far written elsewhere and what I intend to write. But let me leave you with this: read (or re-read) Hemingway’s story — sorry, his ‘celebrated’ story — The Killers (you can find it here). As far as I am concerned it is a rather poor attempt by Hemingway to emulate the ‘hard-boiled style becoming popular at the time, eventually leading to the work of Dashiell Hammett.
Again if you were unfamiliar with it and didn’t recognise it as Hemingway’s ‘celebrated’ story and I instead told you I had written it, I suspect it would no longer be ‘celebrated’ and you would cast about for a way politely telling me ’nice try but no cigar’. Ah, but as it is by Hemingway . . .
Please, Ms Didion, let’s all try and calm down and stay a little more sober.
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