Joe Bitter writes: the Golden Goose has flown

Well, the golden goose has fucked off. The puzzles work is no more. For the past ten years I have been earning extra from the Daily Mail by ‘placing their puzzles’, and it has been very handy money helping to ensure the bills were paid, especially when I started and the ‘casual rates’ at the Mail were still at Victorian levels.

Although I worked at the Mail for 28 years, I was never ‘on staff’ but ‘a casual’, one ‘employed by the day’. The ‘casual rate’ went up at some point by for many years was whittled away by inflation and by the time I began dong the puzzles - and thus earning the extra money - it was getting quite hard making ends meet, what with the extra expense of shelling out quite a bit to travel to and stay in London for four days a week.

Most recently, given the pitiful salary the Mail has taken to paying its junior employees, I was doing rather well compared to them, though not as well as several of those who were ‘on staff’ and in the case of one had been since the dawn of time. For many years staff received a percentage raise each year and that had a cumulative effect, year in, year out, so that salaries were, for many, quiet handsome. In fact for many years the ‘national papers’ were extremely generous employees, especially compared with their penny-pinching cousins in the ‘provincial press’.

(Around the time my son was born in 1999 and under pressure from my wife to ‘get a local job’, I worked as a sub-editor at the Plymouth Evening Herald and although I was paid peanuts, I was still the highest paid sub except for the chief sub and his deputy. There were two girls there who had been taken on from art school, and so were about 22/23 who were paid an abysmal £6,000 a year, but with the promise that the amount ‘would be reviewed after six months’. The promise was kept, the amount they were paid was reviewed and it was decided ‘not to pay them any more because they had never been reporters’.

It’s that kind of shit behaviour which gives newspapers a bad name. I’ve even heard the argument put forward that wages are low in the provinces ‘because working as journalist is a vocation’. The thing is when you are young, keen and impressionable and, for some odd reason, working as a reporter/for a newspaper/call it what you will is seen as the acme of a glamorous job, you can easily be persuaded to accept crap wages. A part of that hoary old ploy is the phrase ‘breaking into journalism’ which implies it is a difficult thing to do but you, my son/girl, had the wherewithal to achieve it. Congratulations, you are now part of an elite band of idiots who will now work for peanuts because what you do is ‘a vocation’. Every heard of anyone ‘breaking into accountancy’ or ‘breaking into civil engineering’? No, thought not. But don’t listen to me, I’m mad old Pat, the indiscreet cunt, a bit of a loose cannon. But back to the puzzles.

I shan’t give the amounts, but a few months ago and out of curiosity I went online to the thisismoney inflation calculator to find out what the weekly fee for doing the puzzles I had agreed with the managing editor in spring 2009 was worth now. And I was astonished - under the circumstances a very apt word - to discover its value had fallen by 25%. So I emailed the managing editor and told him so and informed him I would be charging a new few, the sum we had agreed with inflation taken into account. A day or two later he responded saying he ‘would look into it’, but then I heard nothing more. I waited for two weeks, delaying submitting my latest invoice (charging the new amount) but when I hadn’t heard anything, I submitted it and it was paid. I assumed the new fee had been accepted.

The work is not at all hard, but a bit fiddly - files have to be processed so that they are optimal for printing etc - and since I started I have done a little often (and very soon discovered the benefits of being organised) and this helped me stay on top of it. So last week as usual I logged on remotely (i.e. over the internet) to my PC at work every day to get a little bit more done. Everything was fine until the Wednesday morning when I was informed ‘your primary account has been disabled’.

I rang the IT Helpdesk but they were oddly unhelpful. I must have rung for or five times (and was simply left hanging on once or twice) when suddenly I got a call from the managing editor who had rung to give me ‘a double apology’. The first was that someone ‘had jumped the gun’ and ordered my account to be disabled prematurely so that I had not received his email asking me to call him. The second apology was for the fact that ‘doing the puzzles’ was being taken back in-house.

I assume that he expects this to be cheaper but I can’t see the chief sub and her desk being particularly happy about the new arrangement, especially when they find out all the backroom work that has to be done. Because I worked ahead, several weeks worth of puzzle pages were partly completed by by the middle of July the full extent of the task will become apparent and by the end of July when a new batch of puzzles arrive to be processed it will become even more apparent.

I must confess that it did occur to me that all this might happen once I charged a new fee to reflect how inflation had devalued the sum I was being paid weekly and wondered whether I should do so or just take it on the chin and settle for, in real terms, getting less money. Well, I decided not to. I’m not a serf and have always been bad at tugging my forelock and expressing gratitude for the scraps I am allowed from the rich man’s table and despite the inconvenience - to put it mildly - of my annual income being pretty much slashed by a third, I decided that I had no choice.

Perhaps I should have negotiated a little but even that would have been pretty much like tugging a forelock because Alex, the managing editor, would most certainly have done his best to minimise the rise to take account of inflation. So I would still have been settling for a pay cut. And who in his right mind does that?

The managing editor has held out the possibility that the new arrangement, in his words, might ‘crash and burn’ and that he might at some point be back in touch with me to get me to do it again, and as I say I don’t think the chief features sub will have been too happy being landed with the work, but to be frank I’m not holding my breath. And possibly, being such cheapskates, they might find some other sucker to do the work for less (the name Roger Wilkinson occurs to me, Pete).

Still, it was good while it lasted and life down here on the farm - so to speak - is not expensive: as long as we have enough twigs for the kitchen fire, enough candles to see us through the winter (once it arrives), frost doesn’t hit the

vegetable patch and Denzil doesn’t blow himself up making the potato spirit (he’s come close to that several times) life is tolerable even without the extra gelt I got from ‘doing the puzzles’.

To be the whole ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’ mentality of the nationals into context, the Mail will think nothing of paying some rancid old cunt (like Richard Littlejohn) a million a year to, as the phrase does, fart on paper. Michael Gove’s wifey Sarah Vine is another Mail columnist who will be rolling in it and although the rates they pay ‘name contributors’ has come down a little in these past few years, it will still be around a grand for 1,000 words, though that figure is an estimate. Yet agreeing to my fee rise would only have cost the Mail another £2,600 a year.

Bitter? Me?

. . .

I have now also started a daily diary which will be easier to write because I shan’t fanny around with discretion. But that one is not public, and anyway as general reading is concerned and as it is just be a record of what I have done during the day it will be dull, dull, dull for the general reader.

Oh, and just for the crack. . .

Four short videos to keep the pot boiling . . .

One of the little things I enjoy doing is taking a track I like, then hunting down images to add to the music to make a short video.

Here are two I have done recently and two others knocked up a few years ago. The first, Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III (probably now known to most of you as ‘Rufus Wainwright’s dad’) put together on May 25 (coincidentally my son’s 20th birthday); the second, Magic Mirror by Leon Russell was completed today.

Then there’s my tribute to the gallant guys and gals beavering away keeping Putin safe from democrats and finally a piece of nonsense done to pass the time.

All four benefit from going full-screen — click the little ‘square’ thing on the bottom right.

Here they are:

Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III

Magic Mirror by Leon Russell

Back And Forth by Cameo

And a piece of nonsense knocked together using Pinnacle Pro on my iPhone on my

trip back home from the Bordeaux region to Cornwall. Shot in France and on the

plane. Steglitz is in the south-west of Berlin (but then you knew that). The piece of music

is Emotional Shirt by Bill Bruford

Want to do something instead of frittering away your life? Read. And don’t ever allow yourself to be persuaded that running around like a blue-arsed fly is actually ‘doing’ anything. When something is ‘done’ you need more than a pile of shopping to prove it

I should imagine it happens to everyone every so often, but for some reason I have been feeling very restless for these past few days and about the only thing which soothes that restlessness is to write (as I am doing now). I have no idea why I feel this, or why it began. Oddly, I suspect it has, apart from anything else, something to do with blood sugar levels as in low blood sugar levels, but that is just surmise. I do know (and this is the first time I have admitted this to anyone but myself) that another reason for the restlessness whenever I suffer from it is feeling that I haven’t ‘done’ anything.

I know exactly what I mean by having ‘done’ something but I won’t try to define it here because, to be frank I can’t be arsed and anyway there’s not much point in doing so. But to try to clarify what I mean I’ll point out that as far as I am concerned, and this is probably quite obvious’, ‘activity’ is really not the same as ‘action’.

Going shopping for a few necessities is ‘activity’, as is spending a very pointless sixty minutes — and invariably always far longer than I intend — going through the Guardian and Daily Mail websites very morning to see if there’s anything worth knowing. (NB There rarely is and I always, on the Guardian website, skip the many ‘eco pieces’ agonising over how the world is going to hell in a handcart. In tandem, on the Daily Mail website, I make a point of skipping all its gammon pieces about what load of old cack all this eco-nonsense is).

At some point I’ll look through Facebook, but there’s rarely anything there to hold my attention. Facebook then out of the way, I often — I do this particular thing quite a lot — log onto the Autotrader website to see what cars are for sale at between £500 and £2,500 locally. By locally I mean within 35 miles: much further and you start being shown cars for sale in South Wales, just 50 miles away as the crow flies but about 180 miles if you drive there, and I’m obviously not going to drive there to buy a cheap secondhand car.

The silly thing is there isn’t even any point in taking a look at what is available on Autotrader: I’m not going to, and don’t yet have to, replace my old T-reg 1600cc automatic Astra which might now have quite a few miles on the clock (LATER 118,060 as of yesterday when I filled her up), but has some life left in her yet. But it’s something I like doing, though I don’t know why.

In a nutshell, all that is just ‘activity’ — it is not ‘doing’ anything at all — and fritters away several hours, if most of the day, and the restlessness continues.

. . .

I’ve previously mentioned the piece I am slowly working on which is about what — in my view — something of a nine-bob note Ernest Hemingway was and how his ‘debut novel’ (it was actually his second novel) is anything but a masterpiece and that Hemingway is anything but a ‘writer of genius’. Getting on with writing it is, as far as I am concerned, bona fide ‘doing’ something in that it all has a definite purpose, however personal and obscure that purpose is. Ironically, doing a number on Hemingway — which is pretty much what I am doing—is not, in fact, that purpose. And I’ve already posted a few blogs along those lines — one here and another here.

Writing it long, long ago stopped being just a languid blog rant about ‘what an odd-bod tosspot Ernest Hemingway is’ and is taking longer than I thought it would. For one reason or another the task is becoming increasingly complex (although ‘complex’ is meant comparatively and I don’t want to over-egg the pudding — it’s not ‘complex’ in any sense in which the word is customarily understood, just more ‘complex’ for a simple chap like me), and as one reason for writing it — and engaging in all the reading that has now shown itself to be necessary — is to acquire more ‘intellectual discipline’, I don’t want to cut corners. In my scheme of things, cutting corners, of which I have been too often criminally guilty in the past, would be utterly pointless.

BTW My ‘comma placement’ was laboriously learned from one Peter B. with and for whom I worked on the Daily Mail (and previously in Birmingham). My view is that the only ‘rule’ in punctation is that it should make a written piece more comprehensive. A comma will briefly slow you down when reading a piece. For example, these two sentences don’t mean the same thing and using a comma is important: ‘The doctors who were fed up resigned from their jobs’ and ‘the doctors, who were fed up, resigned from their jobs’.

The first is talking about only those doctors who ‘were fed up’ and implies there were other doctors who were not fed up and who did not resign. The second sentence implies that all the doctors were fed up and all of them resigned from their jobs. Just thought I’d add that as I am very conscious that I do use a lot of commas, but, I hope, correctly. I mean that all too often you are reading a sentence, then have to re-read it because you don’t understand it, and that a well-placed comma would have saved you all that hassle.

. . .

 I began the piece last July and have steadily but slowly worked on it, but as I got deeper into it, found out more about what was going on in Paris while Hemingway was living and working there, and found out more about the convoluted process which led to the publication of The Sun Also Rises, the task has grown and evolved. And keeping true to my primary purpose of acquiring a little more, possibly a lot more, intellectual discipline, I want to go down every new avenue as one opens up, and that involves quite a bit of reading and taking note. So a few hours spent lying on my bed reading the relevant books also counts as ‘doing something’.

I started by simply reading then re-reading The Sun Also Rises (LATER and have even just started reading it for a third time, bugger it, just to be fair) then googling for whatever I could find about it and Hemingway’s life as a would-be literary star. That last might sound like a throwaway gibe, but I have learned that becoming a major figure in the literary world was a singleminded pursuit, and Hemingway’s whole being was pretty much marshalled into serving that purpose. Given the number of people he ruthlessly shat upon after they had given him a leg up, given the number of fights he picked, given his bizarre obsession with looking macho and given many other aspects of his life, there might even be a good case to be made that the man was clinically a sociopath.

My googling threw up many reviews of a book by a New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume (pictured) called Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises and finding it was like finding the motherlode. NB I have included a photography of Ms Blume on the horribly sexist grounds that not only is she an interesting (and witty) author who can write, but she is also, in my view, a strikingly handsome woman. In today’s #MeToo environment I don’t doubt this might dismay many female readers of this blog and possibly one or two men, so let me apologise in advance and assure you no offence is intended even if some is taken. And surely intention is the sin? Still, she is handsome, isn’t she?

It is a very detailed — and very, very entertaining and highly recommended — account of the time and circumstances of the novel’s genesis I was interested in. I’m now re-reading it (and finding that re-reading really is worthwhile. Perhaps I’m thick and miss too much the first time around, but for me re-reading is immensely useful) and have two more books lined up.

It has occurred to me that the reading — and I am not a fast reader — might be some kind of displacement activity to put of the actual writing, but I’m sure that’s not the case as the so far I have written more than 14,000 words. They, however, now merely make up very much a first draft because the ‘shape’ of the whole piece changes by the week as I re-think my attitude to the novel and Hemingway, and despite my — well, let me be frank — antipathy to the man (‘tosspot’ is to my mind going easy on him) it is only fair to do him justice.

I mean I might not think he’s a genius and I might not think The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, but he certainly did regard himself as such, and for decades that view has been shared by many. And if I am serious about acquiring a little ‘intellectual discipline’ I am obliged — or better I am obliging myself — to check out a great deal more than I first imagined I would have to.

So, for example, after reading his bloody ‘debut’ novel twice, I am now reading it again and intend, reluctantly I have to say, to read some of his short stories. I’ve mentioned that I am re-reading Blume’s book and I have already finished Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill and the two other books I have lined up to be read are Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise And Fall Of A Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson and Being Geniuses Together by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald played a crucial, possibly the crucial role, in Hemingway being able to establish himself a novelist of renown. He was already well-established as novelist when he met Hemingway in Paris (reportedly at a café called the Dingo’s Bar, though there are several accounts of that first meeting, one from Fitzgerald and several

differing versions from Hemingway, who often played fast and loose with the truth and was something of a mythomaniac, especially about his own life).

Fitzgerald persuaded his editor, a Maxwell Perkins (pictured), at his publisher’s Charles Scribner’s Sons, to take an interest in Hemingway, and with Perkins’s backing and his eyes on the future, Hemingway’s career took of spectacularly. Here the important point to make is that Perkins, who had started his career at Scribner’s in the advertising department after spending several years working as a reporter for the New York Times and had a very good commercial eye, was for Scribner’s to move ahead and publish more modern authors.

Until then, Scribner’s, which had started in 1846 by publishing sermons before it broadened into literature, was known as being a very staid, though prestigious, house whose authors included such establishment luminaries as Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald had been one of his first successes with his debut novel This Side Of Paradise, a book which for the times was regarded as very racy and which the older folk at Scribner’s hated. But Perkins won through, after pointing out that if it was to survive as a leading house, Scribner’s had to move with the times. This argument persuaded the house’s chairman.

The attraction of Hemingway’s novel for Perkins was precisely its shock value and ‘modernity’ and that it would continue to drag Scribner’s into the 20th century and help to ensure its survival. I suggest that his motives in championing Hemingway were more commercial than literary. (Scribner’s is still thriving but was bought out by Simon & Schuster seven years ago.)

. . .

I am especially looking forward to reading Being Geniuses Together: I might well be wrong, of course, but the title of his and Boyle’s memoir of their time in Paris has a certain tongue-in-cheek quality which makes me suspect that his low and brutal opinion of Hemingway character and his work hits the mark rather truer than all the eulogising from assorted self-proclaimed modernists who thought the sun shone out of Hemingway’s arse.

In 1923 writer and poet Robert McAlmon (pictured) published Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories And Ten Poems in a 300-copy run, and he and another acquaintance, the journalist Bill Bird, who at the same time published Hemingway’s second book in our time (the initial lower case were intended, presumably, to lend the work an air of modernism, and the volume should not be confused with Hemingway’s collection of shorts stories In Our Time — upper-case initials, published by his first real publisher, Boni & Liveright) were part of the ‘the Crowd’ Hemingway with whom knocked around in Montparnasse.

I call McAlmon and Bird ‘acquaintances’ of Hemingway because I can’t say whether or not they were friends, and given what my reading has taught me about the regular and enthusiastic backstabbing which went on in ‘the Quarter’ I think ‘acquaintances’ is more to the point. McAlmon and Bird, however, did take off with Hemingway for a trip to Pamplona and McAlmon, for me gratifyingly, developed a low opinion of the man.

He and Hemingway first met when Hemingway was staying with Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy in Rappallo, Italy, where the Pounds had move, and his first impression was not complimentary. Lesley Blume writes: ‘McAlmon materialised in Rapallo during Hemingway’s winter stay. He had never heard of Hemingway before, and his early impressions of the young writer were less than favourable. He had a “small-boy, tough-guy swagger,” McAlmon recalled later. “And before strangers of whom he was uncertain a potential snarl of scorn on his large-lipped, rather loose mouth.” ’

On that visit, and despite in many ways being like chalk and cheese, the two men drank together and Hemingway showed McAlmon some of his short stories. There were fewer of these than he would have liked because his wife

Hadley (pictured with Hemingway at their wedding in 1921, a photo which also shows off Hemingway’s ‘lovable, boyish grin’ which so impressed Robert McAlmon) had a case containing pretty much all Hemingway’s work up to that point stolen from a train in the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Blume writes: ‘Even though McAlmon and Hemingway seemed socially mismatched [McAlmon was thought to be gay or bi-sexual], they got together in Rapallo and drank in the evenings. For Hemingway a potential publisher as still a publisher, no matter what his tendencies. He showed McAlmon the remains of his earlier work and his new efforts. McAlmon didn’t love the style; he deemed it the self-conscious approach of “an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child”.’

Later, once he had got to know Hemingway better and had witnessed how the putative genius slowly clawed his way up the literary ladder, his opinion did not improve. Blume writes: ‘Some in the Crowd watched Hemingway’s ascent through narrowed eyes, including those who had once happily helped build his platform. Robert McAlmon, for instance, had decided that Hemingway was an utter phoney. “He’s the original Limelight Kid, just you watch him for a few months,” he ranted one day after running into Hemingway in a Montparnasse café. “Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay . . . He’s going places, he’s got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy.” ’

. . .

So once my second reading of Blume’s book is out of the way, it is on to those two none-too-slim volumes. But my point is that although the world might see me lying on my bed with my nose in a book, apparently lazing without a care in the world, this, given the nature of my reading is ‘doing’. Chasing off to Bodmin to Asda or Morrisons, however necessary and useful, is not ‘doing’. The one is action, the other mere activity. And I find that these days unless I have actually ‘done’ something during the day and, in my own terms, have used that day productively, I feel a tad guilty.

Finally, of course, once this Hemingway piece is out of the way (and it will be published here in this blog — after all, it began its life as a blog entry) I can then get on with my next, and I have to say, far more important project, although on that matter I shall be keeping wholly schtum.

The road to salvation if you want to provide astonishing party small talk, impress those dumb enough to be impressed and want to cut a dash: read The Economist. (NB You won’t find it in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and you’ll have to buy it but there’s a downside to most things, eh?)

For several years in the 1980s and 1990s I was rather impressed by my younger brother’s knowledge - and not just his general knowledge, but his sometimes quite specific knowledge of business, politics, world affairs and I don’t know what else. If you mentioned something, he had to hand the facts and figures, the latest development, a general prognosis of how things might well develop and quite often details of a minority view, why the accepted view of matters was possibly too pessimistic or too optimistic or something. The things he knew, the obscure snippets he could - and would - come out with with startling ease was often quite astonishing. How can he know that? I would wonder, and often felt very thick.

Strictly he - Mark - was only my ‘younger brother’ until December 22 of a few years ago, but our older brother Ian died that day, so now my younger brother has been bumped up to ‘my brother’. And please don’t think me heartless for making such a quip in bad taste. My older brother would have rather enjoyed it, so as far as I’m concerned that’s me off the hook.

To be frank if that’s the kind of comment which makes you shudder and consider looking for your smelling salts, you don’t belong in this blog anyway. I like to think that my small blog readership is made of sterner stuff and can take a little rough-round-the-edges humour.

Oh, and speaking of my brother - the one who died a few years ago - remind me one day to recount the tale of the theft of my brother Ian’s ashes from a car in Kensington, how they were recovered within minutes of the theft and delivered to me at work, and how the legend has grown that I subsequently covered a friend and colleague sitting next to me with those ashes. I didn’t, in fact, do anything of the kind and that, in microcosm, is just one example of the kind of torrid and irresponsible exaggeration which hacks indulge in which in the past has led to war.

Yes, I did inadvertently manage to spill just a little of Ian’s ashes onto my desk, but that is not the story now told. So if you ever do get to hear the story about how I recklessly and quite bizarrely covered most Daily Mail editorial third floor with the ashes of a dead man, don’t believe a word of it. And don’t even settle for ‘there’s no smoke without fire and that Pat Powell has done some odd things in the past - just look at his collection of nine laptops’. It’s simply not true (later: well, the bit about the nine laptops is true, but don’t be too quick to rush to judgment, there is an explanation of sorts), and this is all quite some distance from my younger brother Mark’s - sorry, my brother Mark’s - quite startling general knowledge of this, that and I don’t know what else.

. . .

One day I discovered what was going on, how my brother was so startlingly well-informed. For years, especially when I was younger and had an older brother (the one who died a few years ago) who seemed to be able to excel at whatever he turned his hand to, I regarded myself as rather thick. I’m not suggesting I was entirely wrong, of course, and I have no idea how thick or bright I am, and I truly suspect that, like most people, I am somewhere right in the middle (I’ve found almost all of us are miserable at evaluating ourselves, our abilities and such).

But over the years I’ve learned that any such binary distinction - in this case between being bright and being thick - is so broadbrush as to be totally pointless. Life is a lot more subtle than that and, again in this case, there is an

infinite variety of different kinds of intelligence. The point is highlighted when someone regarded as very bright does something completely stupid, yet despite doing something very stupid is otherwise still very bright.

I, as far as I was concerned, belonged pretty much with the thickos and so, for example - and pertinently - magazines such as The Economist were ‘not for the likes of me’. And then I read the magazine (which likes to call itself ‘a newspaper) and discovered I had been missing out on a very useful and very interesting source of information and news.

Crucially - and this is important - the Economist is very well written as in written in straightforward, unpretentious and clear English and that, too, is pertinent point. It took me many years to realise that I didn’t quite understand or often did not have a clue,what a writer was trying to convey because the piece was so badly written (Observer and Independent feature writers please note). Until that penny dropped, I assumed it was my fault because I was ‘thick’ (and I wonder how many others have suffered from the same feeling of guilt).

I hold to the traditional view that the purpose of communication is to communicate successfully and that it is not to show off what superficially fancy English you can write. It’s also true that a piece is more than a tad incomprehensible not just because it is badly written but because the writer simply hasn’t thought through what he or she wants to say or simply doesn’t understand what they are attempting to write about. In fact, a very good test of whether you understand a concept, idea, political situation etc is trying to explain it to someone. If you find doing so increasingly heavy going, you will now know why.

In all these respects The Economist is a virtuous example, and I appreciate that. Certainly, it does have one or two flaws, but these pale beside its worth. It is, for example, remorselessly upbeat and positive. There’s nothing wrong with being upbeat and positive, of course, with with The Economist that is relentless. I once asked my brother, the

‘younger’ one, how he thought the first Economist leader would read after Armageddon. What he came out with does sum up up the magazine/newspaper: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can now be learnt from it all?’

The Economist, I discovered, when I started reading it regularly, was pretty much the course of my brother Mark’s apparently impressive and often quite obscured general knowledge. Where once I was baffled by how he knew about the difficulties facing suburban commuters in Indonesia or how he could confidently assert that so-and-so will face an uphill struggle to retain power in local elections in Peru, I now knew: he had read about it all in that week’s edition of The Economist.

So, for example, a quick glance at this week’s edition of The Economist (date May 11) will tell, as you might expect, you all about the Trump-inspired trade war between the US and China and the danger of war in the Middle East involving the US duking it out with Iran, as well as the latest development in Britain’s Brexit fiasco, but also that taking their lead from free public transport in Tallinn, Estonia (introduced six years ago) other European countries, impressed by the success of the scheme, are considering introducing it in their cities.

There’s also an account of how Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of Indonesia’s ‘strongman’ president Rodrigo Duterte is being groomed to succeed her father and that in France the decline of the Roman Catholic church has meant that more and more children are being given less traditional first names. From the US comes the most disturbing news that the nation’s pay-TV companies are facing an ever tougher time, recently losing a fifth of their customers, although somehow managing to make a third more profit (by the simple expedient of bunging up prices which would probably explain why one in five customers has called it a day and is turning to web-streaming services).

In Switzerland the country’s finance industry is somehow under threat. I haven’t yet read the story and so I can’t give you chapter and verse, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that the news will profoundly disturb those who are disturbed by such news.

So guess what I shall be talking about, casually dropping these and other matters into the conversation, when I next chat to someone whose horizons don’t begin and end at the village boundary? And guess who, with a bit of luck, will think - while staying resolutely schtumm to avoid betraying a growing sense of inferiority mixed with awe - will marvel at just how well-informed that Patrick Powell is? Unless, of course, whoever I’m talking to also reads The Economist every week. In that case I shall be rumbled, just as I eventually rumbled my brother (the ‘younger’ one, not the other one - he’s now dead and beyond rumbling).

. . .

After posting this, I seemed to remember a recent Economist TV advert which rubbed me up the wrong way. It ran along the lines of ‘Intelligent people like you and us have to be informed and read The Economist’. So I searched the web for it to post it here with a few catty comments, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. YouTube has a few Economist TV ads and the recent is dated January 2019. Here it is. If I do find the one I didn’t like, I’ll post it here.

I have to say I rather like the injunction to ‘question everything’ and I don’t find it in any way offensive. I am though pissed off that I didn’t find the ad I didn’t like just to post it here and ask whether others agree or disagree with me (not that any of you buggers apart from P. and B. ever bother to respond to posts, but - well, that’s life and I’ll have to live with it. At least I’ve still got my original two kidneys and fully functioning liver, so thank the Lord for small mercies.

PS On a completely different tack, finding out as I have just how easy it is to post videos here, I shall start posting a few more. I mean, why not?

NB The bloody video doesn’t yet work. Went to try it and no dice. It’s MP4 and sometimes there is trouble with that format, so I shall dick around a little and see if I can’t save the day by posting it in a different format. Tough, I know, but there you go.

. . . 

 As I have just discovered how easy it is to post videos, here are three I did a few years ago, now languishing unseen and unappreciated in dank depths of YouTube. I hope they entertain you. Sadly, I haven’t yet found out how to make them bigger.

Finally, this one . . .

Well, crims in the family! I knew about the spy - well, the sort of spy - but crims eh! An everyday folk of country folk, one of whom apparently was not above skinning turds

That, of course, is a huge exaggeration, but what would one of my posts be without a least one bucketful of bullshit. The question is rhetorical, of course, because going by the number of comments left here - as in none to hardly any - no one will answer it anyway, so in a swift face-saving exercise I am downgrading that question with immediate effect to ‘rhetorical’. There is though a bit of truth in it, and I found out like this.

A few posts ago I recorded by my 96-year-old very ill father-in-law had come to live with us after spending the past seven or eight months across the lane at the farm. As my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business and as the season has now started, Roy couldn’t stay on (he was living downstairs in a part of the farmhouse guests and their children use), but my wife didn’t like the idea of him going into a home and offered to take him in.

My son’s bedroom (he is now at university in Liverpool), once the a big utility room behind the kitchen, was adapted, getting a wall-to-wall carpet where my son had made do with rugs on the granite floor (and I wasn’t the first to observe - in my case to the carpet fitter and his mate - what a shame it was that the kind of granite floor assorted middle-class folk would kill for was being hidden by a wall-to-wall carpet) and various hand rails on the walls.

My father-in-law then moved in. But it turned out what with one thing an another that he really does need 24-hour care and my wife found that increasingly she couldn’t cope. So now he has been found a home in Bodmin (and seems to have settled in quite well). His cottage up the road has since been sorted out to make way for letting it out to raise funds to pay for the home and the other night my wife found herself sorting through old photographs. She also came across this newspaper cutting from the Cornish Guardian for 1956. Give it a read:

MADE TO “MISTRUST MY OWN MAKER,” SAYS FARMER

ST BREWARD MAN’S PLEA OF “CONSCIENCE” IN INSURANCE CASE

A father and son, farmers at St. Breward, summoned at Bodmin Magistrates Court on Friday for not paying a National Insurance contribution for the week commencing November 5, were said to have taken no part in the health scheme since it started in July 1948.

They were Frederick Roy Finnemore and Arthur Wesley Finnemore, of Higher De Lank Farm, St Breward. Each was find £1 and ordered to pay 6s. 10d. costs.

Both defendants, decribed [sic] as self-employed farmers, pleaded guilty, and Mr. C. E. Williams, Regional Inspector, pointed out that although they had not paid any contributions, nor held insurance cards, in the eight years the scheme had been in force, they were only summoned for failing to pay one week’s contribution.

Mr. Williams said that when a Ministry inspector called at the farm on a routine check to see insurance cards, the Finnemores agreed that they had not any. The son said they were not going to do “anything about it” unless they had to.

“Flagrant Disregard of Law”  
Commenting that the Ministry regarded the case as a “flagrant disregard of the law,” Mr. Williams said there was no suggestion of financial difficulty so far as the defendants were concerned. He added that he was not asking for an order for the arrears as in view of the period involved the Ministry would take other steps to recover what was due — if necessary through the County Court.

The father, Arthur Wesley Finnemore, told the magistrates: “During the 1914-18 war I was told I was fighting for freedom. I should like to have a little of that.”
He claimed that he was being denied the right of his own conscience and made to “mistrust my own maker.” That was why he had not applied for National Insurance cards.

. . .


Arthur Wesley Finnemore, known as Wesley and after whom my son is named, is bullshitting in my view. He most certainly was a bit of a god-squadder but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t pay his national insurance for eight years. Shortly after I married, a neighbour said of my father-in-law (Wesely’s son) that he ‘would skin a turd to save a penny’ and I don’t doubt that a certain parsimonious streak ran (and runs) through some of the family.

For example, the cottage in which I live was once ‘the farmhouse of the manor’. That makes it sound quite big but it isn’t. Apparently it dates from around the 14th/15th and predates the manor house which as ‘first renovated’ in the 16th. Old Wesley had been a tenant farmer on Bodmin Moor when, at the beginning of the 1930s, the farmhouse, our cottage, the cottage he moved into when he retired in the mid 1990s and another farm several miles away near St Kew came up for sale as a job lot, apparently as a very good price - £3,000, around £200,000 now (for which you can’t today buy a rabbit hutch in London).

At the price there would have been some interest, and quite how old Wesley pipped everyone else to the post I don’t know, but he did. The trouble was that neither he nor his son ever liked spending even the slightest amount on maintaining the farmhouse, so bit by bit it deteriorated, until my sister-in-law (who had married into the family and was not inflicted by the parsimony gene) decided to renovate a great deal of it so she could start her ‘farm holidays for families for young children business’. Incidentally, I am certainly not talking out of school but the family would kill me if they ever read this, but the chances of them ever happening upon this blog are slight to non-existent. And if they do, I shall probably have long been pushing up the daisies.

So Wesley’s plea from the heart that he was being forced ‘to mistrust his own maker’ is bullshit as far as I am concerned (quite apart from the fact that it doesn’t actually make any sense at all - in what way?). He just didn’t like spending any money.

I met him in the late 1980s once or twice before he died, but what I know of him is what I have been told. He was a strong Methodist - a very strong and very manic Methodist by all accounts who would not tolerate alcohol in the house and, I heard just this last Christmas, at Christmas lunch went around smelling everyone’s Coca Cola to make sure there was no booze in it.

Another story I heard was that the last tenants to live in our cottage before were a family of whom the wife was apparently a bit of a goer and sought out the company of the US servicemen who were stationed locally at Hengar Manor in the run-up to D Day. Quite possibly money changed hands. When Wesley found out, he evicted the whole family. Our cottage then slowly became derelict and was used as a cowshed until it was given to my wife who renovated it (doing much of the work herself - she was said to be the only young woman for many miles around to have her own concrete mixer).

So there you have it. Crims? No, not really? Forced to distrust their own maker? Again, no, not really. It was just the usual silly cant said in court by folk who don’t have a leg to stand upon. I remember when I was a district reporter for the South Wales Argus in Ebbw Vale, I attended a magistrates court hearing of a guy up for drink-driving. He swore blind - again and again - that he hadn’t touched a drop. All he had done was polish off a bag of wine gums. Honest, your honours, it must have been those wine gums!

A few more piccies for the entertainment of those who like eating but don’t spend an inordinate amount of time agonising over ‘what that meal just meant’

If you like the pictures I published in my previous post, here are a few more. They are again chosen at random, and I repeat that there is no underlying theme, they don’t represent an exposition of any ideology or theory and I make no great claims for them. They are simply offered in the hope that you might linger over them just a little longer than you might otherwise.

I also occasionally enjoy manipulating a picture so that it is almost but not quite abstract and quite often like a rather ‘artificial look’. But pretty much it comes down to what final result I end up with. If I like where I have arrived, the dicking around stops.

Oh, and none has any ‘meaning’ whatsoever. You don’t eat a well-cooked, well-prepared and well-presented meal (as in ‘the art of cooking’) then spend days and weeks agonising over what exactly that meal ‘meant’. With a bit of luck you simply enjoyed and appreciated eating it. 

A few piccies to help you keep your pecker up. No mention of Brexit in this entry, by they way, and I am probably even more relieved than you are

A friend, B (and, yes, B you are B) commented just the other day that he wished I would publish my blog entries ‘by topic’. Well, the more I think about his suggestion, the less I understand it. For one thing although I am ‘serious’ about my blog, publishing entries, as suggested, by topic, strikes me as taking it - the blog - and but also myself just a tad too seriously.

I am ‘serious’ about it in several ways, none of which, though, are very important. Let’s face it: it is just one of several hundreds of thousands blogs published throughout the world and at the end of the day is indistinguishable from all the rest. So, B, publishing entries ‘by topic’ kind of implies that I have something rather worthwhile to pass on, but to save all the busy ‘time-poor’ readers the hassle of ploughing through unnecessary stuff, here’s what I have to say ‘by topic’. Lord preserve me from any such self-importance.

I write this blog for several reasons: in no particular order because I like writing, because I find getting something down on paper helps me sort out my thoughts on some issue or other, because I like making people laugh (or perhaps that should be ‘trying to make people laugh’ - I do hope you have noticed that my tongue is occasionally in my cheek), because I like posting pictures.

Talking of which here are several more. These have gone up on my Facebook page (which you can inspect here) but as they on Facebook they only get to be seen by about 20 ‘friends’, I thought I might post them here, too.

There is no rhyme or reason to them, no ‘theme’, no underlying theory, nothing. I simply enjoy taking pictures - most of these were with my iPhone - then using a particular app, Camera +2, to manipulate them this way and that. Because I am now familiar with the app there is less experimentation, but I still carry on until I get to the point when, for whatever reason, I like the result and stop dicking around any further.

The one thing I shall admit to is that I do like taking pictures of ‘real’ things - pretty much anything - then manipulating the image to the point where it is almost - but not quite - abstract.

I could go on (Christ, can I go on, I was always told to stop talking when I was a child) but it is now almost 7.20pm and I want to see Brighton beat the living shit out of Spurs to ensure my team, Manchester United still have a lifeline to playing Champions League football next season. Well, a boy can dream. Here are some pics, selected at random. These - I shall be posting some more in due course - were all taken comparatively recently.

Wednesday, April 24: There are a few more pics here.

Two developments at home and the Brexit farce goes on (although it might conclude a week today)

For a blog which has its roots in a diary I kept for about 15 years - handwritten at that - I’ve surprised myself by not mentioning two developments, one of which is surely a big moment in any father’s life. Four weeks ago today my daughter married her boyfriend and the father of her young daughter (who is the sweetest little thing - well, I’m biased, of course, but decide for yourselves from the photograph below. I must admit that in keeping with modern trends I didn’t expect her to marry so soon - she will be 23 at the beginning of August - because as a rule women have been getting married later in life than ever before. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that over the past

40 years attitudes to women and the roles assigned to them in Western society has changed a great deal.

Then there’s also the fact that the introduction of reliable contraception in the form of the pill (strictly the ‘Pill’, though I can’t for the life of me understand why it should be given an initial capital) has gradually given women more independence. I know - as a semi-regular listener to Woman’s Hour in Radio 4 for at least 20 minutes every day while I have my bath in the morning - that women still feel hard done by and given that in many sectors they are still not paid as much as a man doing exactly the same job, they certainly have a point.

But where we are today is a million miles from the set-up that they were regarded as just so much chattel, had no rights, could not own property and where being forced to have sex by their husband was not seen as rape. However, she has been to university and has graduated and is slowly setting up a childminding and babysitting business so it’s not as though ‘early motherhood’ - early compared to previous generations - and married life will, as happened so often in the past, close down her life.

. . .

The second development is that my very old and very frail father-in-law has moved in with us. He needs constant care and my wife has given herself over to that (although her dedication and conscientiousness notwithstanding, her brusque attentions and constant scolding often make me squirm. I don’t think I am talking out of school (and if I am, what the fuck, but then no one in my immediate family reads this blog) when I say that in some respects the Cornish can be quite singular, but that in the context of being Cornish her family might be regarded as more singular than others, and finally in the context of her family my wife might well be regarded as more singular than her siblings. I hope I have put it delicately enough. But to her credit she is, as I say, conscientious and hardworking.

My father-in-law is now in a very poor way. His father lived until he was 100 hundred - quite possibly because he was a farmer who didn’t drink or smoke - and my father-in-law is now within a few years of hitting his century. His wife died about 15 years ago and he subsequently lived on his own up the road (he had long retired and one of his sons took over the farm just a stone’s throw from where I now live). About 10 years ago - these figures are very approximate - I was diagnosed with prostate cancer but it was not the aggressive kind and he opted to have not treatment for it.

Over the past few years the cancer has spread and about last autumn, after falling several times, he left his cottage and moved into the farm. However, my sister-in-law runs a B&B for families with toddlers business as well as three holiday cottages, and with the holiday season soon to start she is unable to tend to him.

His family decided to put him in a care home, but my wife didn’t like the idea of it, so he has moved in with us, living in the room downstairs behind the kitchen my son has left vacant now that he has gone to university. He is, as I say very frail, and gets increasingly confused, but at least he isn’t wilting away in come home several miles away.

. . .

This whole Brexit farce is still not settled and the next deadline is the middle of the week when our gracious and noble Prime Minister Mrs Theresa May must get a rabble of MPs to back some deal which will govern Britain’s departure from the European Union if we the country is not most certainly to leave in seven days on April 12. That was already a delayed deadline, and if Mrs May can get backing for an agreement - as far as I can see any agreement, Britain’s departure will again be delayed until - I think June 30. it was to be May 22, but for some reason everyone and their cat is now talking about June 30.

I don’t mind admitting I that what with Canada Plus, Canada Plus Plus, Norway, Common Market 2.0, calls for a second referendum, calls for the Leader of the Opposition to wear his pants inside out and calls for I don’t know what else, I am utterly at sea on the detail of it all. I voted Remain in the referendum almost three years ago, but that was on pragmatic grounds, believing that of the two options - staying as a member of the EU or leaving the EU - it was overall in the best interests of the country. And I still do, despite bizarre and unjustified suspicions by my sister and brother that I am some kind of ‘secret Brexiteer’ who simply doesn’t have the courage to come clean about it all. What I am not, however, and I think this might be the foundation for their suspicions is an out-an-out cheerleader for the EU. And because I have explained why to them in the past, I think they think that I am some kind of Brexiteer fifth columnist.

I have to say that Britain is now wholly, not to say dangerously, divided between Brexiteers and Remainers, and that doesn’t bode well for the future. What irritates me a lot is that both sides - and the Remainers are just as bad

as the Leavers, giving the impression as many do that they are on the side of the angels - insist that ‘if you are not with us, you are agin’ us’, so when I do try to explain my position on the EU to either side, I am condemned out of hand by both. I think I have in the past done so here in this blog but I’m not going to do so again and can’t even be arsed to go back and check whether I have done so.

Broadly I think the notion of a European Community - note I do not say European Union, but I’ll explain why in a minute - with wholeheartedly co-operation in as many ways as possible, common health and trade standards and all the rest is a very good one and ought to be pursued. I think it all began to go a little wrong with the Lisbon Treaty of which one core element was to try to achieve ‘ever closer political union’. In fact, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that goal in theory, but that in practice it is pie in the sky. Yet even that is not important: what was and is foolish is how the EU has been going about it, insisting that such political union must happen, no ifs or buts.

To demonstrate why I think that is a rather foolish and cack-handed approach I will cite the rise of the populist right in several EU member states, and bearing that in mind the results of the imminent EU parliamentary election in May should prove very informative. I suggest that a wiser EU would have trod rather more carefully in pursuance of is political goal and might, pragmatically, have been prepared to adapt its plans if necessary when it realised there as small but growing opposition to them.

What for me typifies what I regard as a somewhat arrogant triumphalism on the part of some of the European Commission was the hoopla and jollies which attended the introduction of the euro in January 1999. It was rather like celebrating winning Olympic gold before the race was won. Many ‘convinced Europeans’ insist the euro ‘has been a success’. Well, it has if you live in some EU countries, and it hasn’t if you live in others. In several EU countries more than half of those under 25 have been chronically unemployed. Success?

It is often been pointed out - and quite rightly - that the euro would be far more successful if the EU could overall take charge of the national budgets of member states - in fact, there would no longer be ‘national budgets’ - and set taxes for the whole of the EU. This would, in theory, stabilise the euro and allow the EU central bank to impose the control on the currency it needs to. And that is what ‘political union’ would facilitate. But in practice? Really? I suggest those who advocate the measure spend some time reading up on their European history.

That, however, is all irrelevant as far is Britain is concerned. I sincerely believe we shall be out by a week today, and I also am pretty convinced it will lead to deep economic problems for Britain. I think leaving is daft, daft, daft as does the rest of the EU. Given that Britain was the third largest net contributor to the EU budget it looks as though it might also mean problems for the EU. And I rather fear that for one reason or another the future for the EU isn’t half as rosy as all those swilling champagne and slapping each other on the back when the euro was introduced 20 years ago though it would be.

When things do go tits up in many EU countries, I also fear that Britain’s Brexit madness will get the blame. That would be unfair: it certainly won’t help, but if the EU is honest it has other problems wholly of its own making.

Don’t do this, kids, ever! It’s the road to ruin, will bring you nothing but grief, ruin your eyesight and quite possibly reverse Brexit (or something — subs please check). So don’t do what I am about to do. Ever!

Well, I trust the headline caught your eye and drew you in, but this has nothing to do with Brexit, yet another bloody heart attack, another rundown of my (or anyone else’s) collection of laptops or anything else (though, by the by I have just, over an hour ago, bought a desktop, a secondhand G4 mirror double door desktop, although I’ve acquired it — a PowerMac at that and in computer terms ancient — for a specific reason, to rescue a long list of email addresses and a database, but that’s just by the by). In fact, I am simply posting this to test the waters. 

A few weeks ago, I think it was, I let on that I was writing a quite long piece along the lines of — I exaggerate, of course, but just a little — what a fraud and piss-poor writer Ernest Hemingway was (in my humble, quite possibly ill-informed opinion), Nobel Prize for Literature and all. And what should you never do? Why, publish — prematurely — work in progress as I am dong now: it often makes poor reading, but...

Writing my take on how, contrary to accepted judgment, Hemingway’s nominal debut novel The Sun Also Rises is not ‘a masterpiece’ and the man himself is not ‘a writer of genius’ has been slow going because I am not the most diligent of lazy bastards. But I am getting there, and today I have written another bit, and I decided to post it here in the hope of getting just a little feedback.

Now I have to say that apart from B., who gives occasional feedback, and P., a friend and M. my sister who both give very occasional feedback, writing this blog and wondering whether anyone actually likes it is like trying to thread a needle at the far end of a deep cave. In fact the only reason I do it is because I like writing, not because I have anything at all ‘to say’.

(It’s always puzzled me why, when you hear Bookclub or some such on Radio 4, the novel being discussed, is these days invariably an ‘ecological thriller’, a ‘memoir of growing up gay in the industrial heartlands’, ‘what it means to be a Somali asylum seeker living in the Forest of Dean’, then for good measure a ‘dystopian vision of the future unless we all stick two bricks in the lavatory cistern and stop global warming’. And on and on and on. OK, we know already, and I doubt there is a novel novel still to be written. All we can do is write it in a different way. As they say, it’s not the joke but the way you tell it. But all that, too, is by the by.)

So, ladies and gents, boys and girls — feedback, please! If you think what I have written is a load of old cack, comment and say so. If you find it interesting, please do the same. But let me, please, please, please know that you are all alive and that I don’t actually — unusual and unlikely though it would certainly be — really do live in some solipsistic hell.

WHETHER Hemingway’s set of ‘rules on writing’ and his ‘theory of omission’ should be taken seriously or not is neither here nor there; but from what we know of the genesis of his supposed portrayal in The Sun Also Rises of a — or as many would prefer the — ‘lost generation’, the prominence and spurious significance it has achieved over the past 90-odd years is more than a little ridiculous.

In those 90-odd years, what is understood by the term ‘lost generation’ is, to quote Hemingway himself, very much a moveable feast, and rooting around the net, it is noticeable how often different sites simply quote one another when they attempt to define it. A great many, particularly sites which provide ‘study notes’ on Hemingway’s novel, simply repeat this from Wikipedia or slight variations of it: ‘Lost in this respect means disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years.’

Doesn’t that, one is encouraged to ask, pretty much describe a sizeable minority of every generation returning from war, whether that war was World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War or both Iraq Wars? I rather think it does. So one is then encouraged to ask quite why a particular ‘lost generation’, the one we are told which saw action in World War I and washed up in Paris in the 1920s and notably whose lives were chronicled in Hemingway’s novel, should be singled out as the ‘lost generation’? Isn’t, perhaps, for some an inability to settle down on returning home from fighting — in Britain a disproportionate number of homeless served in the armed forces — a common feature of every society in every age?

Certainly in Britain there was a huge problem with limbless and often mad army and naval veterans roaming the country after the Napoleonic Wars had been concluded. And now that we are far more aware of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by many ex-servicemen, shouldn’t we, perhaps, rethink what might cause such disorientation and lack of direction?

In fact, unhelpfully, the term ‘lost generation’ and what is understood by it has become so vague and convoluted that rather as functioning as a general term for many, it is often used to refer specifically to the colony of English-speaking writers living and working in Paris in the 1920s.

So, for example, reviewing a re-issue of Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast in its Books section (‘Reworked, reshuffled, and for what?’, subtitled ‘Ernest Hemingway’s heirs have desecrated his classic Paris memoir’, October 24, 2009, p42) a Vancouver Star contributor, the novelist and poet Brian Brett, writes:

‘The exquisite little volume [A Moveable Feast] was instantly recognized [in 1962 when it was posthumously published] as a masterpiece for the way it captured the life of an impoverished young writer in the fever of Paris in the early ’20s where he lived among a cluster of soon-to-be-great artistic companions now known as the Lost Generation. What luminaries he met! James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, the generous Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald.’

This might just be a case of a writer picking on one definition rather than another, or simply just getting it all wrong and a sub-editor/copy-editor not quite being on the ball, but the ‘luminaries’, Hemingway’s ‘artistic companions’ in the ‘fever of Paris in the early ’20s’, would certainly have been taken aback to be described as a ‘lost generation’. Ford Maddox Ford did see action after working in a British government propaganda department (he enlisted at the age of 41), but Pound, Joyce and Eliot did not serve, and although Fitzgerald enlisted, the war ended before he could be deployed to Europe.

I don’t doubt that they all felt a moral disgust for the justifications for that pointless way and at what had been perpetuated by all sides, but on the other hand the zeal and artistic dedication of these self-conscious

modernists does not sit at all well with a description of them as ‘disoriented’ and ‘directionless’, whereas Hemingway’s mooted ‘lost generation’ as supposedly portrayed in The Sun Also Rises was nominally composed of entirely different men and women, men and women who could think of nothing better to do than drink themselves into oblivion every night and have sex.

. . .

The decade after ‘the Great War’ had ended in November 1918 certainly saw a fair degree of turmoil, change and upheaval throughout Europe, but despite the threat of revolution in Germany and rampant inflation in the Weimar Republic until 1924, and despite industrial problems in Britain which culminated in the General Strike in May 1926, economically most nations experienced increased prosperity from the early 1920s on until the depression which followed the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. Even France’s description of that decade as les années folles (‘the crazy years’) was more admiring than pejorative. Because of the number of men who were killed in the war — an estimated nine million on all sides — there was certainly an imbalance of the sexes, yet that was by no means the whole picture, and the social upheavals experienced in the so-called ‘Roaring Twenties’ (with the second half of the decade even referring to itself as the ‘Golden Twenties’) also saw women feel more liberated socially and sexually, possibly because there were fewer men available to partner with.

The decade also saw the development and the widespread adoption of domestic gadgets, affordable cars and telephones; the film industry grew enormously, and the public began to celebrate stars of the silver screen and radio; writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald were also feted and became celebrities, and (Lesley Blume records) fans would even queue up to buy a new edition of a magazine if they knew a new short story by their favourite writer was being published; jazz became the popular music of its day, and the modernism in arts of which Hemingway was so pleased to be seen as a part sent them off in a wholly new direction.

Some — many of the men who did survive the war had to live with, as did The Sun Also Rises narrator Jakes Barnes, both physical and mental wounds — might well have been felt disoriented and directionless, and for them the only solace and release might well have come from a bottle. Others, though also drinking a great deal, rather enjoyed it. In fact, drinking to excess, whether occasionally or regularly, has been a feature of a young life for as long as I can remember and, I’m led to believe, for even longer: are we to accept that essentially we are only doing — or only did — it to seek solace from some pain or other? Might it not sometimes be the case that young folk like to party because they like to party? The question is rhetorical.

. . .

That search of the net came up with varying definitions of who the ‘lost generation’ were (and, as I point out above, many parroting each other), and the online Encyclopaedia Britannica mainly opts for the literary angle. It writes that the ‘lost generation’ is a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s’ but it then goes on to muddy the water a little by adding ‘The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation’.

It adds: ‘The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the post-war world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.’

That description is certainly plausible enough, but it does ignore the simple fact — acknowledged by Hemingway himself in short piece he wrote from Paris for the Toronto Star — that for Americans the very favourable dollar/franc exchange rate allowed them to live extremely cheaply in Paris, at the time regarded as the world’s most vibrant artistic centre.

This would have been especially encouraging for those like Dos Passos, e e cummings, MacLeish, Crane and Fitzgerald intent on making a name for themselves, especially as earning a living from writing, painting or composing was always precarious — Fitzgerald was already doing very nicely, but he was the exception. In fact, there were an estimated 200,000 English-speaking ex-pats living in Paris at the time, although not all of them were American and certainly not all of them were would-be writers, painters and musicians. If you had just left college, didn’t want to settle into a career just yet and wanted to see the world a little, a spell in Paris living high on the hog for very little will have had its attractions.

Some who went to live and work in the French capital might well have done so because they felt a ‘spiritual alienation’ from the United States and preferred to breathe the more nourishing air of Paris, but it is also certainly easier to be idealistic when you are able to live a pleasant and comfortable life on a pittance (and most certainly when you are not starving).

In relation to Hemingway’s novel describing — so the claim — a group of ‘disoriented’ and ‘directionless’ expatriates, there is a further difficulty with the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s description of a ‘lost generation’ that had moved to Europe because of the ‘spiritual alienation’ it felt from the United States. Yet when Jake Barnes’s friend Bill Gorton does allude to Jake being an ex-pat and tells him ‘You're an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés, it reads far more as though he were criticising his friend for choosing to live in Europe rather than in the United States, ‘spiritual alienation’ or not. Jake, his friend Bill tells him has been ‘ruined’ by fake European standards, has become ‘precious’ and has ‘lost touch’ with ‘the soil’ (presumably American soil).

So what is going on? If Jake (and those like him) escaped the United States because they felt ‘spiritually alienated’, they had, one assumes, done the only thing they could to seek some kind of salvation and sanctuary. But if in doing so they had ‘ruined’ themselves, either way they were ‘lost’. Was that what Hemingway was getting at? Was that his point? I don’t think so. I just think he hadn’t quite thought it all through.

But then the claim, which provided an essential element of Hemingway’s overnight success and later reputation, that in his novel he had skilfully defined the despair of a hopelessly disengaged younger and ‘lost’ generation by examining the lives of five of them is full of such inconsistencies and contradictions. Like a great deal in Hemingway’s work, career and reputation from every angle it is approached nothing quite fits.