Untold Stories (43 page)

10
October
. A poor day ends badly when I take the rubbish out to find the dustbin slopping around with half a dozen turds which had dissolved in the rain of the last three days to make a kind of shit soup. To actually shit in the dustbin must take some skill or maybe it's a dog owner whose social responsibility stretches to picking up the mess but not to putting it in their own bin.

Anyway I empty the water as best I can and manoeuvre the turds into a bag then change and wash every stitch of clothing I'm wearing. My mother, on the other hand, would have moved house.

From this unsavoury episode I salvage an etymological distinction: shit I think of as the self-contained shapes; shite as what's smeared round the sides of the bin.

16
October
. A lesson from life: when the dying want to give you something, take it.

Gardening woman (to someone planting bulbs): ‘Can I say one word? Drifts. Drifts.'

Coming up the escalator at Camden Town one catches its authentic smell: piss and chips.

19
October
. Reading, in bed chiefly, Larkin's
Oxford Book of Twentieth
Century English Verse
(1973) bought along with a dozen or so other copies as presents on the first night of
Habeas Corpus
in 1973.

Some of the poems chosen reflect his own concerns, e.g. E. Nesbit's ‘The Things That Matter':

The Oxford anthology came out a few years before Larkin's ‘Aubade',

which has the lines:

2
November
. The car gets a flat tyre, out of sheer boredom, I imagine, as it gets driven so seldom. I take it to Chalk Farm Tyres opposite the Roundhouse where a boy runs out, assesses the damage then jacks up the car while a bald Alfred Drayton-like man finds the split and decides it needs a new tyre. This is put on and it is all over and done with in ten minutes. I feel I want to ask them home so that they can take charge of my life.

16
November
. I am reading Paul Bailey's
Three Queer Lives
, one of whom is Naomi Jacob. Eccentric though she was (and what Mam used to call ‘one of those men-women'), she did represent the attraction, the glamour and certainly the possibilities of escape, of the literary life. This was partly because she was Yorkshire-born (Ripon) and thus often in the local papers but she was also one of a breed of popular writers … others would be Godfrey Wynn, Beverley Nichols, Phyllis Bentley and even (though he would have scorned such company) J. B. Priestley … who impinged on our lives as more celebrated literary practitioners, Virginia Woolf, say, or Evelyn Waugh, never did.

So absurd though Naomi Jacob was … and without ever having read a word that she wrote … I feel she made it easier for others starting off down the literary path and I wonder whether she was ever read by John Braine,
who in his way was as absurd a figure as she was but equally talismanic.

I imagine human beings have always seen faces in fires and foliage or in the play of sun and shadow. So, lying on my bed, I fancy I can see a girl's face composed of the reflections of the bookshelf in the mirror. It's not a naturalistic face and were it reproduced on paper or canvas would look almost abstract. So when with Cubism (is it?) painters start making faces out of awkward angular shapes it's really only a setting down of what most people … an old lady looking into the fire, a child staring at a tree through the bedroom window … do as a matter of course and without thinking.

So abstract art, to begin with, isn't very abstract at all and as a figurative way of seeing is surely pretty general.

30
November
. More Larkin parallels, this time with an indifferent poem by Belloc: ‘The world's a stage …' – life as a play.

This mirrors Larkin's own account of how when he was an undergraduate he went to see
The Playboy of the Western World
at the Oxford Playhouse. At the interval he asked himself whether he was enjoying it, decided he'd seldom had to listen to so much balls so had another drink and didn't go back for the second half … a decision he found immensely liberating. Which is okay but hardly earns Belloc's poem its place.

9
December
. Page 4 of today's
Observer
is taken up with a large photograph of me and extensive coverage of the supposedly riveting news that I have writer's block. Below is a list of other writers who have suffered from this dreadful affliction. On the opposite page is a picture of Osama Bin Laden
(writer's block not his problem). The piece stems from the Q and A session I did last week at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where on being asked what I was doing at the moment, I said I wasn't doing anything very much, and that I was a bit stuck. But the phrase writer's block was not used (I never do use it) and the tone of my reply was sceptical and ironic. This has passed the reporter by and she reports the exchange so that it appears I have gone to the
Observer
and wept on its caring shoulder.

This is a technique perfected by the
Mail
but which (particularly in the week of David Astor's death) ought not to disgrace the
Observer
. However, as R. says, who reads the papers?

10
December
. Well, lots of people seems to be the answer as I have had letters from
Observer
readers recommending various remedies for my sad situation and my supposed writer's block: remedies psychological, remedies physical and indeed remedies herbal. Since I always acknowledge letters, though seldom pursue a correspondence, this has increased my workload considerably. One letter is actually from the
Mail on Sunday
wondering if I would consider being interviewed about ‘my problem'.

15
December
. Words only used at Christmas: Tidings. Abiding. Swaddling. Lo! Abhors.

Carols are also full of titles for bad novels:

A card from Victor Lewis-Smith with a sanctimonious picture of Jesus and printed underneath:

Jesus loves everyone, except you, you cunt.

This makes me laugh helplessly.

Isabelle McN. is twelve and her end of term assignment is ‘The Most Outstanding Personality of the Twentieth Century'. She chooses Martin
Luther King but having been writing for five minutes she switches to Joan Crawford.

26
December
. Nigel Hawthorne dies. A heart attack, though presumably related to the pancreatic cancer he'd had for the last eighteen months and which was discovered quite by chance in the course of another investigation entirely. Courteous, grand, a man of the world and superb at what he did, with his technique never so obvious as to become familiar as, say, Olivier's did or Alec Guinness's. No one could have played George III as well, even though his superb performance sometimes cast the play itself into the shade. He was a delight to watch, as I imagine a superb batsman is, touching the ball to the boundary with no effort at all; a dancer, little flicks and glances, the raising of an eyebrow, techniques honed, I imagine, in the umpteen small parts he played until middle age when
Yes, Minister
made him famous.

He owed me something but I probably owed him more.
George III
would have been half the play it was without his performance, a performance that I was able to write around as I saw it evolving in rehearsal, thus benefiting both him and the play.

27
December
. Still ploughing through Larkin's
Oxford Book of Twentieth
Century Verse
. It's full of poets I've never heard of and rather than organising little trips to Larkin's parents' grave and any other spots the poet may have known or visited, the Larkin Society would do better putting together a companion to this particular Oxford book. It would tell you more about Larkin and about these out-of-the-way poets he discovered and would, I should think, commend itself to him far more than their brackish trips down memory lane.

The poems he chose continue to chime in with poems of his own (which would also bear investigating), e.g. poems about horses or jockeys (nos. 240, 302), a country fair, the ‘Fair at Windgap' (no. 293) as it might be his ‘Show Saturday'. And there are other prescient notes.

This from ‘The Old Couple' by F. Pratt Green, and a foreshadowing of the old age Larkin and Monica Jones were not to have.

29
December
. Snow in the night and when we stop for our sandwiches on the road to Garsdale Head, Dentdale is in immaculate relief with the Howgills ghostly beyond. They're Christmas sandwiches (cold pheasant, apple sauce, Cumberland sauce and lettuce, followed by mince pies), then we go on down Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen where we buy a curtain pole and two storage jars at Mrs Hill's and then in another shop a couple of country elm chairs (‘Hepplewhite' the label has it) which are only
£
65 and which we buy to use in the kitchen. Plain, bleached and nicely bowed, they could well be out of Kettle's Yard, and really need a similarly spacious white-painted interior such as we don't have.

‘No stopping J. K. Rowling,' says this morning's
Independent
.

‘No stopping Marcel Proust' either, not that any paper said so at the time. But then he didn't make any money.

‘No stopping J. K. Rowling coining it' is what the
Independent
means.

4
January
. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst:

13
January
. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on
Omnibus
extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It's sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring.

One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer's by, among other things, asking Dame Iris to recall which of her many books won the Booker Prize. This was
The Sea, The Sea,
the winner in 1978, a triumph the ailing author could not recall, but since the Booker Prize in 1978 was not the over-publicised proto-Oscars it tries to be today, this is hardly surprising. Still, that an artist's state of mind should be assessed by his or her recollection of awards won adds a new terror to success. The test used to be recalling the name of the prime minister or counting backwards from 10 to 1. Now it's whether you can remember winning the
Evening Standard
Award or something similar at BAFTA. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats.

19
January
. Watch a video of Michael Powell's
A Matter of Life and Death
(1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner, where we'd sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn't explained, or the workings of the device either, which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps coming up in Powell's work until with
Peeping Tom
it virtually ended his career.

Other oddities in
AMOLAD
are the naked goatherd playing the flute,
an unlikely sight on the Norfolk sands, I would have thought, even in 1946, and a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in
The
Red Shoes
) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.

This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that follow with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the
LRB
.