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:

‘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

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:

‘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.

In which I admit to slightly odd behaviour (and later in the day put the boot in Honest Ernest yet again)

It really is bloody odd. Every day since I’ve retired I’ve been conscious of ‘using my time’ and not wasting it. The silly thing is, though, that no one, but no one gives a flying fuck whether or not I do ‘use my time’ except me. And the only thing which will satisfy my conscience and allow me to accept honestly that I have ‘used my time today’ is writing something. Usually it is a few hundred words more of this Hemingway bollocks.

Sometimes (I’ve signed up to a website run from South Africa which I’ve found useful: every month it give you a prompt for a short story and a poem and the discipline of getting it done is worthwhile) it might be editing and honing the brief poem or short story I shall be submitting. (You have to write the story to strict length).

I have plenty of other things to be getting on with, and the lessons with Paul in Padstow are now really paying off, so there’s all the practising and laying out all the scales and modes in Indesign as a way of learning them and understanding them.

Tomorrow I’ve got to arrange the Skype chat for Ann in France with Paddy, then it’s drop of the car to get the exhaust fixe. But everything — everything — except writing is just ‘something to do’. It is, at the end of the day of no consequence. And I really don’t know why.

This isn’t something I tell myself, some adolescent pose (I doubt I could be mistaken for a silly adolescent except in some of my behaviour), and I’m not going to get phoney and precious about it and talk in vague terms about ‘inner life’ and all the other claptrap you come across (OK, that is a bit broadbrush, but you know what I mean). Which leads me to another odd thing about: I don’t know nor care why I feel like that. I just do and that’s good enough for me.

Earlier today when I was grumbling that ‘this Hemingway bollocks is taking up too much time’ — I keep coming across more reviews, essays etc which I read and many of which I format into PDFs and post on my website ready to be linked to when I finally post this pied. And each of the essays etc subtly changes the dimensions of it all just a little, but a crucial 'just a little', so I have to slightly rethink things, and know, of course, that tomorrow and the next day and the one after that I shan’t for the life of me remember the ‘new shape’.

And, no, writing notes (which I do on a useful app called Scapple) doesn’t help because once written I never look at the notes, well very, very rarely. So there I was grumbling away and my wife asked ‘who’s going to read it?’ And I answered, truthfully, ‘no one’, adding ‘well, I’ll post it on my blog and some people might read it, but that will just be a bonus.’

‘So it’s a bit pointless, then, isn’t it.’

No, I said, it isn’t.

‘But if no one is going to read it, why are you doing it?’

I told I’m doing it to do it, but she just didn’t understand that point. I tried to illuminated: musicians will play their instruments, alone or together, because they like playing their instruments. It’s like that. But she still didn’t get it.

I told her I had to get it out of the way, properly, and done as best I could because if I didn’t or did but cut corners, I would never be able to relax completely as it would always be at the back of my mind. She didn’t get that point either.

Then she said why didn’t I do something else, something which would sell? I said no one sells anything except a very few lucky bods, but that wasn’t the point, either. But there were things I am planning on doing, though not until this is done and dusted, properly, and out of the way. She didn’t get that, either.

The silly thing is that shifting myself from here to my little ‘shed’ outside (actually a warm and comfortable granite outhouse where my guitars are and where I can play loudly) is the hardest thing I have to do. BUT once in there and started, I wonder what all the fuss was about. Odd.

And not that’s out of the way, I must persuade myself writing it wasn’t just a form of displacement activity to avoid getting started today (today? It’s already bloody 3.30 you pillock).

. . .

PS LATER Here is a case in point. I am just reading yet another essay in the New Yorker about Hemingway by Joan Didion (or rather more truthfully ‘a Joan Didion’ because although I understand she is famous, possibly even world-famous, I’d never heard of her before) about the publication after his death, edited and substantially boiled down from the several hundred thousand words he left behind, of The Garden Of Eden and True At First Light. I’ve got to the bit where the title True At First Light, awarded to the bloody novel by someone or other, was taken from this sentence in the text:

‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’.

Now call me a philistine old fool, but although that sentence sounds just fine and dandy and even a bit literary if that is the kind of thing you like, in pretty much every way you approach it is meaningless and pointless. It is false and that is notable for a writer who insisted — who truly insisted — that everything should be true. In Hemingwayese it’s a fine and good piece of crap.

Hemingway might have meant the ‘and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ ironically, i.e. you actually do have a great deal of respect for it, but in that case ‘the thing’ [sic — ‘thing’ is not, I suspect, a word one might expect ‘a wordsmith’ blah-blah of the kind Hemingway kept insisting to us and the world he was would care to use] would certainly be at odds with it being a ‘lie at noon’.

And what does the writer of ‘athletic, taut, muscular, lean, declarative’ prose (© Hemingway nerds passim) mean by ‘a thing is true at first light’? It is quite a striking and suggestive sentence, but not one which can be given some kind of ‘meaning’. If anything it is more in keeping with the kind of images of Dylan’s early songs. A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall is a good example — ‘I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains / I’ve walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways / I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests’ doesn’t mean fuck all, but they are great lyrics and carry on with you long after the song has finished. Or how about jokers talking to thieves etc. Dylan can carry that off with aplomb whereas others fall flat on their faces. And that would include Hemingway.

But that wasn’t and never was Hemingway’s approach. He made a fetish out of being ‘true’. Well, Ernie dear heart, you can’t have it both ways, although I’ve read enough about you to know you always did. (He must be the only ‘publicity-shy’ ‘I only want to write’ bod who honed his skills at PR and made sure the world knew about him, from a very young age. He gave a series of talks about his ‘war experiences’ in Oak Park, Chicago, and up in Michigan, exhibiting the medal or medals he had been awarded. He had actually only been working at the front, delivering ciggies and chocs to Italian soldiers for five weeks before he was blown up. As for fighting and serving with the Italian Arditi as he later claimed he had . . .)

Quite apart from that maybe I, now no longer a philistine but something of a snob in snob mode, dare admit that Hemingway’s ‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ is distinctly middlebrow. What, for the sake of God, is a ‘perfect’ weed-fringed lake? And would you really be able to spot a flat lake (however weed-fringed) some distance away across a sun-baked salt plain? And in land so salty would weeds really thrive? Obviously it all depends on the kind of writing you want to produce, but all the above is really not in the ‘hard, declarative style’ the old fraud is famous for. And unlike Ernie I am not inclined to lay down the law of what writing should  ‘truly’ be. Me, I’m more laissez faire. If it works, it works, but for me pretty much all of Hemingway except his journalistic turns of phrase do not. Sorry.

Elsewhere in her piece Didion makes great play over how Hemingway cared about punctuation. Well, that ‘care’ is news to me, and given that as far as I am concerned the sole purpose of punctation is a tool to help you to convey what you want to convey as best you can (a comma, for example, briefly pausing the reader, a semi-colon doing so for just a little longer), time and again you have to re-read Hemingway’s prose just to get the drift. A little more punctuation might have helped. So in the above sentence, I suggest a comma might be appropriate here — ‘noon, and you’. Just a thought.

Crisis? What crisis? This one, matey, this one!

We here in Britain are stuck in a truly bizarre age: for once the observation that ‘the country is split’ isn’t actually just a silly, self-important middle-class exaggeration describing, for example, the fact that Wilf next door really thinks English rugby is in for a golden age and can look forward to great things whereas John and William down at the club think that’s nonsense. It is far more serious than that: the country is well and truly split down the middle and it’s not going to end well because there is no way it can end well. And that worries me.

I’m not just talking about Brexit, either, although that is the root cause.

At the moment the government wants to call a general election, and the Opposition is buggered if it is going to commit suicide on national scale. The government is having a lot of trouble getting its ‘deal’ through Parliament (the initial withdrawal agreement between it and the EU outlining what is what, for example how much Britain should contribute to the EU budget to help pay for items agree upon when it was still a member).

Part of it problem is that before Johnson became PM it had a small majority, essentially because under the premiership of his predecessor, Theresa May, the Tory government had bought off the DUP with a £3 billion bung and the Northern Irish party agreed to support it in the Commons. Recently, Johnson took way the whip from 21 MPs because they voted against him on a Commons motion, thereby flushing his small majority down the pan. Whether that was plain incompetence or real stupidity doesn’t even matter any more.

The fact is that Johnson cannot and will not command a majority in the Commons on any motion except perhaps one granting all MPs a huge pay rise. His government is, at present quite impotent and he believes if held an election, he might get a working majority in the Commons. But getting that election is proving very tricky indeed. And he is trying to come up with various ruses to get his election, not least ensuring his government loses a vote of no confidence.

If some gifted satirist were to dream up a plot for a novel in which a government considers calling such a motion of no confidence in itself (and urges supporting MPs to vote in favour of the motion in a tacit admission that they and the government are useless twats), the resulting novel might, if well-written, prove to be quite amusing. In essence such a plot would recall all those Ealing comedies of the 1950s when Britain was assured it had ‘never had it so good’.

Fleshing out that plot to have the main Opposition party voting against the motion (that ‘this House has no confidence that Her Majesty’s Government could even organise an orgy in a brothel’ — essentially that it has every confidence in Her Majesty’s Governments and wishes it only well) would add a great deal more spice.

In fact, that is exactly the situation our House of Commons finds itself in: the Tories, under Boris Johnson’s leadership are aching to go to the country in the hope they will be voted back into power, and Labour, under the leadership — I use the word as loosely as I am able to without it becoming thoroughly meaningless — of Jeremy Corbyn are desperate to avoid a general election.

But the government can no longer simply call an election. Complicating it all is what is known as the ‘fixed-term parliament legislation: whereas until 2015 when the Tories had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems if they

wanted to retain power, the sitting government could call an election when it damn well wanted — usually, and quite obviously when it thought it had the best chance of winning (as it now does), now an election can only be called if two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons want one. Well, the Tories want one, and the SNP want one and the Lib Dems want one but Labour is buggered if it wants to go to the country to get on its way to oblivion sooner than most expect. The latest opinion poll figures will explain why:

According to them, the Tories have the highest support among British voters (around 35% tell all those from the polling firms who knock on the door or ring up to ask that they would vote for the Tories). Labour, on the other hand are preferred by far fewer (around 25%). The Lib Dems aren’t doing badly, though, up to around 18% from their very low (although not historically low) 8%.

What is so odd about these figures is that usually the incumbent government (whether Tory or Labour) is not at all popular with the electorate and the Opposition will be rather well off in the polling figures. Not this time — Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is the fly in Labour’s ointment: apart from a few scruffy herberts of all ages and genders who consider themselves to be ‘socialists’, no one, but no one likes him. And apart from the scrappy band of Dave Sparts, they would rather go blind than vote him into office and see him as Prime Minister.

But all that is not even half the story.

Both parties are split — although neither is split exactly down the middle — into those who support Brexit (or, at least, support the implementation of the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum) and those who want Britain to remain as a member of the European Union.

Broadly, the Tories are split into two-thirds who support Leave and one third (those Tories Mrs Thatcher would have regarded as ‘wet’) who think Britain’s best interests are served by remaining an EU member. Labour is some kind of mirror image: two-thirds support Remain and one-third support Leave. But it’s not even that simple: a great many of those in Labour-voting constituencies in the North of England voted Leave. So their MP, who most probably is a Remainer, is fearful she or he might be out of a job if they don’t go against their own convictions and support Leave in House of Commons motions.

The Tories have a slightly different problem: now that Ukip has gone the way of all flesh and is rotting on the bone and about as relevant as a four-year-old bus ticket, their one-time leader Nigel Farage has come up with a new party, the Brexit Party. And rather too many Tory voters, terminally pissed off that more than three years after the Brexit referendum Britain still hasn’t left the EU, are more than mindful to give the Brexit Party their support. Thus Tory high command has decided that to see off the electoral threat from the Brexit Party it must be more hardline on Brexit than even Farage. The strategy has worked to a certain extent, except that it has alienated the minority of ‘wet’ Tories who believe Britain’s future would be better served if it remained a member of the EU.

I don’t doubt that thus outlined the situation isn’t quite as troublesome as I seem to have made out. Anyone familiar with Italy, even superficially, will insists that many of the political dilemmas it faces are just as bad and often worse. Then there is Belgium which for many years didn’t even have a government and was run by its civil service. But I suggest this is different.

For better of worse Britain is a undramatic country. Certainly of all the European countries you might associate, were you asked, with the concept of ‘compromise’, ‘working things out’, ‘settling things amicably’ Britain would most probably top the list. Quite simply we British are essentially too lazy and comfortable to get worked up about much. Yes, we get angry and, yes, we sometimes take to the streets, but we only march in protest and cause disruption if the weather outlook is reasonably good, and even then the prospects of heavy showers on the day in question is more than enough to dampen most revolutionary moods. But this is different.

My knowledge of history is quite patchy and mainly garnered from the back of cereal packets, but I do know of several instances in the past 110 years when Britain faced a crisis. One was in 1910 when the Liberals abolished the veto the House of Lords had on the Budget. Then came the Abdication Crisis in 1936 although however ‘critical’

it seemed at the time, I can’t think it posed much of a threat to the stability of the United Kingdom. Far, far more serious and far closer in spirit to the current crisis we are facing was the situation in England in the 1640s which eventually led to our bloody civil war.

I am not suggesting that a civil war will break out in 2019/20, the situation we have now, as then, seems to suggest no immediate solution which might be acceptable all round.

Say there were an election. My view is — and I am often quite wrong — that the Tories would not get the majority they are hoping for. Although they are doing better in the polls since Johnson took over as prime minister, many will not forgive him for his rash pledge to ‘leave they EU by October 31 no if, no buts’ and, disillusioned, vote for the Brexit Party.

That doesn’t mean the Brexit Party will get any seats at all (we still have an ante-deluvian ‘first-past-the-post electoral system here in Britain), but losing votes to the Brexit might mean the Tories losing seats to the Lib Dems. There are six seats where the Tory majority is under 10% and the Lib Dems are in second place. This last suggests that Tory electorate there is composed of quite a few ‘wets’ who might well go over to the Lib Dems.

There seem to be fewer Labour seats at risk to the Lib Dems, but I do think many Leave-supporting Labour voters will opt to vote Brexit rather than Labour to register their irritation.

My main point is that the result of the coming general election need only be a ‘hung parliament’, that is one in which no party has a majority for this chaos to continue. Brexit supporters can only get down on their knees and pray that the Tories will get a majority and will get be able to get their deal through the Commons, but even if that were to happen our current crisis would be far from over.



-

The Brexit farce continues and it’s not going to end well . . .

I am conscious that I haven’t posted here for a while and there’s reason: the only thing I would like to write about at present (not having bought a new laptop for a week or two, or come up with any more trivia about my father’s life — possibly — as 007 both of which topics usually make for scintillating blog posts) is the sheer farce that Brexit has become. And for many reasons it is quite pointless making any comments.

For one thing what is happening is changing daily, but for another this is one of those issues in which you are firmly on one side or that other, with both sides becoming more polarised by the hour. And in the nature of things in such punch-ups the one side will never listen to the other: but more pertinently they don’t want to listen. The name of the game is not seeing whether you might persuade the other side that they are wrong and you are right. It is seeing who can shout loudest and drown out the other. Well, I’m not interested in that at all.

(As it was I voted Remain that ‘on balance’ remaining a member of the EU was by far not just in Britain’s best interests but better for Europe as a whole. I do feel the EU must be careful how it evolves and, vitally, must ensure it carries the vast majority of those who live in EU member states with it when it does make changes. Not doing that, proceeding on a de haut en bas basis, will cause a great deal of trouble in the future.

It would be pointless to write much more about the Brexit debacle and the state it is in, if I’m honest, because whatever is recorded here will be out of date within hours. But there’s one aspect of all this which I do think is worth commenting on but which in nothing I have read I have seen commented on. It is simply that there is something going on — in Britain, in Europe, in the US, in the world — of which Brexit, the continual bizarre behaviour and decisions of Donald Trump, the situation in both Russia and China where ‘a hard man’, and the protests in Hong Kong, are just aspects and symptoms.

I think I have alluded to it before (and can’t be arsed to go and check) but it is as though the force of enlightenment which has been growing over the past 70 years is now encountering resistance. I don’t want to come across as some semi-illiterate part-time autodidact, but from the intellectual bits and bobs I have scavenged over the years there seems to me to be a distant echo in the developments of the past ten to 15 years (and I would really not want to push this one too far) of Hegel’s notion of ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’, later adopted and adapted by Marx.

In fact, it is quite possible to sidestep any heavy philosophical notions and not quote Hegel (useful if you haven’t read a word of Hegel and don’t want to look like a prize prune by misrepresenting him) and simply mention the Chinese notion of yin and yang the (that night follows day as day follows night) and the Tao, or the long-acknowledged realisation that ‘everything carries the seed of its own destruction’.

In order to give a little more detail on that last idea, I’ve just looked up quotes to see ‘who said that’ and it would be faster to list all those who didn’t say something along those lines, but here’s one from Mark Twain with which you’ll have to make do:

‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

Yes, there have been problems but looking back over the past 70 years in Europe, one might be forgiven for thinking that overall the general direction of social and political sensibility was towards greater liberalism — in the non-political sense — and, for want of a better word, enlightenment. Certainly, it might seem to be two steps forward, then one back, but ‘progress’ was made. But using that word ‘progress’ draws attention to the essence of one problem: that one man or woman’s ‘progress’ is another man or woman’s ‘abomination’. And it is not a question here of deciding who is right and who is wrong — a debate as futile as trying to agree which is the better football club, United or City? — but of the attitude of each side to the other.

Sometimes part of the difficulty is as basic as that the one side does not even care to acknowledge that however abhorrent it might think the attitude of the other is, it is — because in a democracy it must be regarded as — equally valid.

But ironically that attitude — my attitude — is essentially a liberal one and others (though not necessarily you) might say ‘stuff and nonsense, you lily-livered pinko!’ (followed by, possibly, ‘no surrender!’)

. . .

As for Brexit, well, it is not looking good, not for Britain, Ireland or the EU. Everyone will be a loser unless Britain leaving the EU can be sensibly managed and it is not looking as though that will happen. Well, that at least is my view.

Part of the problem is that on the Brexit side there are those who want Britain to leave the EU, but to do so in a managed and orderly way. And there are those gung-ho individuals (many of whom haunt the comment pages of

the Daily Telegraph where I trade insults with them) who take the attitude of ‘let’s have a clean break and make Britain great again’. So even on the Brexit side there is disagreement.

There has been all kinds of shenanigans in Parliament and our Prime Minister — our current Prime Minister, one Boris Johnson — has painted himself into a corner from which there would seem to be no escape. He has vociferously vowed that Britain will leave the EU by October 31 ‘do or die’, i.e. whether a withdrawal agreement has been made with the EU; on the other hand Parliament has made it law (after through his own incomprehensible stupidity Johnson lost his very slim majority in the House of Commons) that Britain cannot leave the EU unless a withdrawal agreement is in place.

Furthermore, Johnson is fighting a rearguard action against a new party founded by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party, which will hoover up support from the Tories if we don’t leave by October 31 and Britain is forced to ask for ‘an extension’. Everyone expects a general election to be held in November if we have not left the Tories (in my view) are toast. Ironically, given just how unpopular Jeremy Corbyn, the equally hamfisted Labour leader is in the opinion polls, the Conservatives are ahead by, I think, an average six points.

I am pretty certain that Johnson will not manage to get deal by October 31 (in fact, for technical reasons it must be struck by October 19) and that the coming general election, many voters who previously voted Tory will back Farage’s gang of wankers, other ‘one-nation’ Tories — well, some of them — might throw in their lot with the Lib Dems (who will make it a manifesto pledge that they will revoke ‘Article 50’, the clause in the EU constitution (?) which allowed Britain to announce its withdrawal from the EU).

Then because of that manifesto pledge and in view of Corbyn’s half-baked policy on what to do about Brexit, quite a few Labour voters will pitch in with the Lib Dems and the result of the election will be a hung parliament. What happens then is anyone’s guess. And I’m not going to guess because I have to drive into Bodmin for various reasons and time is getting short. And I’m sure I haven’t told you anything much you didn’t already know. But I wanted to get this post entry finished and posted.

On the road . . .

Travelodge - Retford Markham Moor

Off on my travels for a day or two, this time to visit the Jorvik Vikin Centre in York which I did yesterday. I’ve always wanted to. Interesting experience, and the whatever you call them - animatronic’ figures were novel, semi-lifelike humans and animals moving – slightly, doing various things and ‘talking to each’ other – sitting outside reproductions of what their houses must have looked like were useful to covey they kind of life they will have led. Can’t say I learned much, but that wasn’t the point. If I want to learn shite like that, I’ll simply renew my subscription to Look And Learn (not to be mocked - bet I know more about how tyres are made - from the collection of sap from the rubber tree to fitting them to your Ford Consul! - than you do, so take your mockery . . .

It’s also good to get up and about. I was on the point of using the phrase ‘on the road’ but it does sound a little portentous, implying I’ve got a stash of dexies in the glove comparment, a fistful of hot dollars, a small handgun and have just picked up a mysterious brunette. Sadly I’ve done none of these things. But I do like getting away on my own, even though I’m not doing an awful much.

Set off on Tuesday to get to this Travelodge, chosed because it is near Lincoln (where I shall take off to a little later) and York (where the Jorvik Centre is), though at 52 miles away, York was a little further than I thought it might be. When booking a Travelodge - exactly what I want from a hotel, clean sheets and hot water - I had looked for one inbetween Lincoln and York, and came up with Doncaster. Then I noticed this one was about £15 cheaper for two nights but kept thinking is was ‘between Lincoln and York’. (A dull piece of info? Well, pity me not yourselves, I’ve had to think it.)

Went off to a superstore in Retford - eleven miles away - to ‘get something to eat, stocked up on olives, hummus, crackers, tangerines, cheese, a bowl, a tumbler and a ‘pairing knife for my supper but then stayed in Retford anyway for two glasses of red and a bowl of penne arrabiata.

Trying to get out of Retford to get back here was a hoot. Since I had driven in and was now attempting to drive out again, workmen had closed ‘the London Road’ and no amount of following their diversion signs would let me escape sodding Retford town centre. It did get beyond a joke, I kept driving past the same bloody temporary traffic light again and again and again and didn’t have a clue why. The Google Maps directions didn’t help either cos they didn’t know London Road was closed.

It must have taken me almost an hour to get out and the only reason I did that was by setting my Google Maps for York - 50 miles due north - then following the road until I got to the A1. Then it was turn around and drive down the A1 till I reached the Travelodge.

After the Jorvik centre stopped off at a tapas bar and enjoyed three plates of tapas and three different cherries before tasking the ‘Richar III Experience in whatever gate tower (complete with portcullis) it is. Wait, I’ll take a look. Back again: the Monk Bar gatehouse, the tallest of the medieval city’s four gatehouses.

Today, it’s off to Lincoln for a mooch around. The Lincoln Chronicle - long since dead (and the then evening paper the Lincolnshire Echo is now ‘the local weekly’, things ain’t great in the wacky world of hackdom) - was my first paper so I’m off to look at 15 Kirkby St where I lived for about 15 months and the site where the old office was.

I was going to drive straight home tonight but I have since booked a oom at the Travelodge in Devizes (£44 for one night, just £3 cheaper than what I am paying here for two, but fuck it), to break the journey. The drive up from Cornwall was about six hours - though I was going slowly, I mean what’s the rush? More later.

Olivares Tapas Bar, corner of Drury Lane and Castle Hill, Lincoln – Lunch

As luck would have it my trek up Steep Hill took me to this tapas bar, and although I was – and still am – planning another Italian meal tonight in Devizes, I couldn’t resist it. Tapas and Continental food are gorgeous, we Brits – pretty much all of us – love it, bang on about it, can’t wait to go abroad to eat it, yet stick to the kind of shite we are accustomed to when we cook. OK, obviously not all of us and a great many Brits, both men and women can cook and can cook well. And there are some great British dishes and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit it. Yet if the there is no rocketc science to preparing tapas, your average Brit could do it with his or her eyes closed, yet you rarely come across tapas bars – I have struck lucky twice. Still.

Went to 15 Kirkby St in ‘downhill’ Lincoln where I lived for about 15 months, and it and the area looked drabber and drearier than I could remember. This was, of course, 45 years ago and time is never kind, but haven’t they heard of ‘gentrification’? Really not.

The irony is that when folk think of Lincoln, they probably think of the medieval streets and houses (now shops, of course) up Steep Hill (called Steep Hill – why? Why, Joseph. Correct, because it’s fucking steep). Well, all that, as well as the nice middle-class house in the surrounding area are ‘uphil’. Downhill, meanwhile, are the rows and rows of two-up, two-down terrace houses where those not lucky enough to be related to or to have gone to school with the Bishop of Lincoln are obliged to live. In June 1974, when I moved in as a lodger to Gwynn (I think his name was) I wasn’t.

From Kirkby St to Riverside North where Lincoln Chronicle (not Lincolnshire Chronicle as I have so far been calling it) office and presses were it’s just a short walk, one I undertook every day. Sadly the presses and offices have disappeared, to be replaced by an NCP car park (watch out Buck House!) but as far as I know there are so far no plans to kill the Queen and bury her in the car park, though after listening to the lunchtime news about David Cameron’s interview on Today this morning when he admitted Liz (Brenda) had tipped him the wink and given him to understand in no uncertain terms that she was against ‘all this Scottish independence nonsense’ there might be informal talks about giving ‘that dick Cameron’ a seeing to and ‘he should seriously consider taking Samantha and their brood to the South Island in New Zealand while the going is good’.

The Green Dragon, the up on the other side of the bridge (or the end of the bridge) where the office was is now shut and the building for let and my short stroll up from Waterside North to here, near the cathedral, has made it pretty plain Lincoln has its own contingent of Baltic state EU citizens and asylum seekers as anywhere else.

The flat, horribly flat Lincolnshire drone has also lingered – well, it would – and is just as dull as it always was.

Off to Devizes in a while where I have decided to stay that night and not rush back to St Breward. It’s not that I am an old fart whose energy levels dictate that he is now obliged to interrupt his trip to the downstairs loo and do it in stages, just that I’ve got this travelling bit in my blood and although it’s not quite Maine to New Mexico, it’s still there. The only drawback about doing some more travelling is the cost of staying somewhere and it occurs to me that if I got a small camper van in which I could get my head down, the only other cost would be petrol. Look into that. See you a bit later when I had some more from Devizes.

Travelodge – Devizes.

All together now: who’s a complete prat? Why, I am. I arrived here about 30 minutes ago (now settled in) to discover that when I booked my room here last night, I bloody booked for next week. Dick! So that’s £25 up the swannee or to put it in my terms, just over three bottles of the Rioja I like and buy at whichever supermarket has it on offer. Bollocks. Now I’m off for another does of penne arrabiata. .

Bon nuit. Don’t stay up, I’ll only whinge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the hotel front desk:

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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