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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the hotel front desk:

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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