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(How many people are left who know what a platen was? And where did all the typewriters go? In what vast quarry do their rusting frames coagulate?)
(In childhood, I had sobbed the same way when I spilled flavoured milk into my box of crayons. In the course of time we cry for different things, but we always cry the same way.)
Even today I will do a lot to get out of a face-to-face disagreement. I could ascribe this debilitating characteristic to a desire to be perfect, and a concomitant disinclination to hear any evidence that I am not, but a simpler explanation could be moral cowardice.
It must have been just about then, in her Observer column, that Katherine Whitehorn wrote, ‘You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.’ I didn’t have to write it down: it went straight to memory, which may have displaced some of the words, but the balance of the sentence was unforgettable.
Especially in bad times, it can help to be alone with the pen and paper, working on a self-contained creation that the money men can’t stop. But it might also be something that they will not publish. Best to have something in the bank, then, before you start feeling brave.
A help towards taciturnity, and perhaps towards heart’s ease, was the dreaded weed.
When they arrived at Gibson Square, they had the present in a flute case. Reverently they opened the lid. Inside, lying in a trough of worn blue velvet, was what they told me was the World’s Biggest Joint. The flute case could have been a suitcase and the super-joint would still have been prominent.
(Nobody ever explained how stoking yourself with proven narcotics could plausibly be called ‘experimenting’, or why the expression ‘experimenting with alcohol’ had never been heard even from the kind of drinker who wakes up in the police station after driving his car through a bus queue.)
Hidden in the stereo system of the living room, Sandy Denny sang ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’. She could sing that again.
As I recall, there was not even a brief period of tranquillity before the unpleasantness began. The wave of nausea came straight up the beach, flooded the highway, knocked down the motel, and washed me upside down into the trees.
People who say they have an addictive personality are usually just transferring the blame for their deficiency of resolve, but if there really is such a thing as an addictive personality, then I have one.
from that time forward the cold-turkey episodes of my life – cutting out my daily packet of Jaffas, for example – had been accompanied in my mind by a Saul Bass title sequence and the music of Elmer Bernstein.
although it was unlikely that I was naturally secreting C17H21NO4, there is indeed such a thing as a constitutionally determined hyperaesthetic state.
To put it in non-technical language, I have a metabolism like Colombia.
The same could be said about Carrie Fisher’s excellent debut novel Postcards From the Edge, which remains one of the most fearlessly penetrating memoirs about what cocaine can do to an original intelligence.
The day’s work was sealed by a few beers with Arthur at Soho’s most notorious drinking club, the Colony Room. Nothing about the Colony Room was more notorious than its proprietress, the notorious Muriel Belcher.
Manning desks all around me and far into the distance, there were a lot of full-time journalists slogging dutifully at their mandatory tasks, and for them it was no pleasure to see a part-time carpet-bagger earning the full whack in two hours, hammering away as if being fed his whole piece by dictation through an electrode implanted in his skull. Apparently the least prepossessing element was my tendency to rock with silent laughter at my own jokes. There was a reason for that. The jokes were the last aspect to form on the page.
It was an unwritten rule that no journalist could enter the downstairs composing room where his prose, after being set up in type, was laid out on the flat table called ‘the stone’. Unaware of the rule, I would turn up at the stone to see what they were doing with my stuff. In the days of hot metal it was a compositor’s skill to read the blocks of type back to front, like Leonardo’s mirror writing.
The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can’t tolerate having strong men around him.
Corridor-stalkers are placemen, more concerned with protecting their position than exercising judgement.
A good general tip for would-be writers in any field is to beware of outlines. If you keep going back to elaborate the outline, instead of getting to work on the first of its listed topics, then the outline has become a substitute for the project, which will never get done.
On a charitable view, faults of tone are the inevitable consequence of early exuberance: only a dullard is infallibly decorous from his first day. On a less charitable view, faults of tone are the deadly product of a tin ear working in combination with a loose mouth.
The nagging question was made more so by the sudden prosperity of a friend, Bruce Beresford. In previous volumes I called him Dave Dalziel, for the usual reason: I was attributing to him inappropriate behaviour.
record this sad fact in the hope of passing on a useful lesson. If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don’t go in.
This aesthetic belief, which is at the head of my political beliefs as they stand today, was in the forefront of my mind from the very start, although it has taken me a lifetime to make it clear even to myself.
Burges castles of Cardiff, kitsch replicas that had been put up in the nineteenth century like film sets for an industry that did not yet exist. (Today, no visitor to that city should fail to avoid them.)
‘Bruce tells me you’ve got two university degrees. Do you think I’d be doing this stuff if I had two university degrees?’ Arising, as so often, out of hubris and humiliation, this was one of the moments that resonated throughout my later life. From then on, I was more willing to let the tennis champions play the tennis and the racing drivers drive the cars. In my daydreams I still believe that I could have done all those wonderful things if I had set my mind to it.
‘When we do the number,’ Alf said as I hobbled away leaning on his arm, ‘for shit’s sake do exactly what I say and don’t do anything extra.’
But I was carried away by my flood of ideas, which is always the first desirable condition. Into my stanzaic boxes of tricks I poured all my learned irrelevancies and interdisciplinary gags. It was, I thought, a way of airing my knowledge while heading off the standard accusation, often levelled at my prose, that I was putting everything I had in the shop window.
What happened during the event was so predictable that it was scarcely to be believed.
Never, at a literary event, have I ever seen even one person rise from the audience and say, ‘This is too boring to bear.’
I have always worked on the principle that a poem, whether comic or serious, should pay its way as a theatrical event.
most poets are writing poetry only because they can’t write prose, have no more sense of structure than the director of a porno movie, and will escape being forgotten only in the sense that they have never been remembered.)
But that’s an argument you always have to be wary of: we’ve put all this effort into doing the wrong thing for you, so you have to use it.
Already, when I came back from Moscow, I was faced with the proof that to write a solid piece, with a factual basis for every paragraph, you needed a notebook with enough detailed entries to write a book from.
But don’t try to take a short cut just by stating what you fancied to be your common-sense view and tarting it up with local colour.
Rivalling the splendour of the new knock-through in Cambridge, there was now a London apartment, situated below podium level in the Barbican, down beside the famous artificial lake around which, on the brick patio, ducks gathered from all over the world for their annual shitting competition, for which the qualifying rounds took most of the year. I was no longer sharing my London base with the rest of the boys.
But a form like rhyming couplets – like, indeed, all the set verse forms – gets a lot of its propulsion from its precision.
Tynan had called me to his house in Thurloe Square to discuss a project.
One of the reasons I admired Stoppard so much – later on I admired Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols for the same reason – was that his plays, despite the room they made for an exalted level of visual hoopla, were so full of lines begging to be spoken.
He was one of the British theatre’s permanent supply of licensed radicals – Harold Pinter and David Hare are other prominent examples – who are allowed, and even encouraged, to rain scorn on the beliefs of the very people who come to see their plays. How this reciprocating system of gauchiste rhetoric subsidized by bourgeois self-flagellation actually works is a subject for sociological analysis that need not detain us here.
We had to forgive each other because we both pulled our cons using the same device: the spellbinder sentence, that little castle in the air.
The idea must have been a registration of his bulges and skin texture, but I still don’t know how the visual perception translated itself into a verbal creation. As far as I can tell, looking inwards from within, the gift of phrase is the semantic equivalent of something mathematical, but I don’t know whether the mechanism is clever, like the chess master’s ability to see the whole board with all its possible combinations, or stupid, like the idiot savant’s capacity for following the line of prime numbers all the way to eternity. All I know for sure is that the knack is in my life’s blood, and
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The surest way of dealing with an oncoming collective catastrophe is to opt out in advance. You can’t take anyone down with you if you don’t let the project happen in the first place. When the handsome, voluble, original, and erratic Tony Wilson kindly asked me to contribute a two-minute spot to each episode of his new show for Granada, I could accept without a qualm because nothing depended on me and I could go as easily as I came. I wouldn’t have had time to hold myself guilty anyway, because the whole show was clearly headed down the drain from its first night on the air.
The same stricture would later haunt 24 Hour Party People, the film based on Wilson’s memoirs. The brilliant Steve Coogan brilliantly incarnated the brilliant Wilson, and the film was a hit with an audience of the brilliant: roughly enough people to fill the first two rows of the average cinema anywhere except Manchester,
‘What are you looking at?’ Sid Vicious asked me, his lips flecked with foam. It was the first time I had ever heard this deliberately terrifying question, and I didn’t have an answer ready.
it occurred to me that there might be some mileage in misinterpreting ordinary news footage. Over the next twenty-five years I would do a lot of that. Nowadays everybody does it, but I can honestly put my hand up and say that if I didn’t invent the idea, I was the first to steal it, and that I stole it from Viv Stanshall.
should have been more decisive at the start, and from then on I always tried to be, if only by being more careful to make clear that the word ‘maybe’ meant what it said. I can
offer that as a valid general tip: be very careful that your hesitations are not construed by hopeful people as a licence to proceed.
On television, a successful gag doesn’t just click, it thumps. From that moment, I was made. In future years, the irony did not escape me that the delicate little boat of my literary fortunes had been launched on a wave of liquid shit.
