Reading 2024 - Various Continued: the Effect of Time on Humour

I have never forgotten a party my mother gave not long after she and my father divorced in the mid-1960s. My mother's best girlfriend arrived first. She and my mother stood by the window of our first floor drawing room and my mother pointed out a bright turquoise mini just drawing up. "That's Patrick Campbell", my mother told her friend. "Whatever you do don't mention the colour of his car as he's furious about it."

To my surprise some time later, when my mother's friend and Patrick Campbell found themselves standing side by side at the window at the edge of what was by then a throng of people, I heard my mother's friend open a conversation by saying:

"Look at that car - isn't it the most hideous colour? Can you imagine who would drive such a frightful thing?"

Campbell was at the time considered to be hilarious. He had come into our orbit because he was supposed to be writing something with a woman who lived across the street. I don't know if their collaboration bore fruit but the woman certainly left her husband for Campbell, and the husband subsequently killed himself. 

The events of this part of my life disturbed me as a child and they still do, while also puzzling me and making me feel a little sad.

The one thing I continued to cling to, regarding the marriage of the people across the road ending and its subsequent consequences, was the idea that Campbell was hilarious. In some obscure way, I felt that might give him license to behave badly. 

His manner suggested he believed himself funny. The reactions of others suggested they did too. I had never read anything he wrote, so I had to rely on the judgments of others - until the other day, when I saw two of his books in a secondhand bookshop. I bought them, thinking that, homewrecker though he had seemed to be, I would at least be entertained.

I wasn't. His pieces struck me as thin, uninspired and plodding. At some point, I might include some in a separate blog post to prove my point - or possibly hear from people who laughed uproariously and will accuse me of missing the point. 

Perhaps the problem is that humour dates. Or it might be something to do with Campbell's style going out of fashion. Yet Three Men in a Boat was published ages before Campbell became well known and it remains the funniest book ever written.  And as for style going out of fashion, Evelyn Waugh would have said that was a nonsensical proposition:

"Style", Waugh said, "is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance & individuality; these qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence.”

The books I bought by Campbell are illustrated by Ronald Searle and his style has definitely endured. As a result I am still glad I bought them.

I also bought a collection of the essays Alice Thomas Ellis used to write for the Spectator. These were not quite as good as I had found them when I used to read them in the magazine, but they still had many enjoyable moments. Here are my favourites:

1. She remarks about contemporary architects - 

"I should like to round them up and make them live in a tower block. For ever. When you see what they've done to our cities for ever is not long enough."

2. She claims that when truly melancholy:

"I don't want to read PG Wodehouse. When I'm really, really low only Strindberg makes me laugh."

3. As I am alarmingly untidy, I like her description of her approach to important papers:

"My system with documents and letters is usually to stuff them into the handbag of the moment until I can't close it any more and then I stuff that into the bottom of the wardrobe and buy a new one."

and her observation that "rearranging things gives me the illusion that one is tidying up."

4. She describes some pictures as being "oddly sinister in the way that only the Victorians could achieve", which seems a good insight to me.

5. The book was published way back in 1988 but already Thomas Ellis is describing how living in London she experiences "the hopeless feeling that faceless and ruthless powers are in control - local councils for the most part - ripping up the paving stones at random, closing down the little shops and authorising the erection of nightmarish mega-stores."

6. When she gets going on her loathing for cardboard boxes, she becomes unhinged enough to be truly hilarious, especially when her loathing for cardboard boxes and her dislike for Blue Peter combine, with a side reference to her hatred of pine plantations, a hatred I was particularly pleased to discover someone else nurtures (or at least used to nurture) since I have found many people think pine plantations are fine - or even, almost unbelievably, rather nice.

When I have time I might even type out the whole cardboard box essay and put it here so that other people can enjoy it, since I assume the book is no longer obtainable except by chance.

Moderation

Recently a noisy section of the population has been spending a lot of its time nagging the rest of us about not wasting food. The presumption is profoundly annoying, to me at any rate. Speaking as a person who, having brought home a chicken, has never allowed it to feature in fewer than four meals minimum - ditto any other morsel of edible substance brought into the household - I am insulted at the suggestion that I throw money around at the supermarket just so I can throw food in the bin at home. I do not need chiding or advice on this subject, but I get it anyway. and it drives me mad, especially as I thought I'd escaped the phenomenon by leaving Great Britain to return home to Australia as soon as Gordon Brown and his meddling interfering cohort began lecturing the populace on their wicked foodwasting ways.

But now the hectoring has reached our shores. It's enough to drive you to drink. Except that that too is off limits. The notion that the odd alcoholic beverage might help get you through the stresses of life seems to be considered barbaric in some vociferous circles these days, (and yet no-one can explain to me what alcohol is for if it is not for easing strain). Someone has even written a book about how horrid people were to her when she decided to lay off the bottle for a year. I know this because the book was discussed solemnly last night on the First Tuesday Book Club, (a programme that is in itself an argument for alcohol - I only saw it inadvertently and I doubt I'd have survived it if my husband hadn't kindly supplied me with strong drink [well some wine]).

What concerned me about the discussion of the book - which is called High Sobriety, although I've no idea why I'm giving it free publicity - was the fact that not one person on the panel questioned the decision of the book's writer to drink nothing and to let it be known that she was drinking nothing. Clearly, just as it is annoying if vegetarians when invited to dinner don't just pick out the broccoli and avoid the steak on their plate but instead insist on ringing you up before they come to your house to inform you that they are vegetarians and ensure you make proper arrangements for them, so, if you don't drink but do make a song and dance about it, it can feel to others that you are challenging their decisions, throwing down the teetotaller's gauntlet and expecting a response. If on the other hand, you simply order something non-alcoholic without pointing out that it's non-alcoholic, no-one even notices. And anyway why not just drink in moderation?

But I'll leave the last word to Alice Thomas Ellis who, in a piece called Drink Up in her collection called Home Life, wrote much more perceptively about this subject than me:

"...I once took a child to see a doctor about a verucca. The doctor was bored stiff with the verucca. He looked keenly at me, enquired what was wrong and on hearing that I had sustained a bereavement pressed upon me an unsolicited prescription. Being half-witted, I cashed it in and started on a course of pills which had to be approached warily - one a day for two days, two a day for three days - that sort of thing. After a week of this I found I could no longer read newsprint, my mouth was as dry as a dog biscuit and every time I stood up I fell over. Vodka never did that to me.

Nothing does anything much for grief, but just a little alcohol helps just a little, especially at funerals. A wake would not be the same with everyone standing round, carefully timing his anti-depressants."

Mind you, she goes on to mention that her husband believes women "don't need to drink because they're drunk already." That is a very sobering thought.

Colin Haycraft

Until a couple of days ago, I knew almost nothing about Colin Haycraft, except that he was the horrid man who upset Penelope Fitzgerald with a flip comment. What happened is described (at least from her point of view) in the hurt letter she sent him after she moved away from his publishing house, Duckworth, to Collins:

"Dear Colin,
I'm terribly distressed at having done the wrong thing and caused trouble when I meant to remove it. That is, I'd thought the most helpful thing to do would be to take myself off without making a fuss. You did tell me, you know, that if I went on writing novels you didn't want it blamed on you and that Anna thought I should do detective stories and also, by the way, that you had too many short novels with sad endings on your hands, and I thought, well, he's getting rid of me, but in a very nice way. I don't at all expect you to remember everything you say to 32 authors, but the trouble is we take all these remarks seriously and ourselves too seriously as well, I expect.
I would have liked to stay, because I'm not the sort of person who ever has any money anyway, and I admire the firm so much and then you were always so clever and funny that everyone else seemed exceedingly slow by comparison. However having made this mistake, and I'd rather be taken for an idiot than a liar, I'll be careful to make it clear that it was my mistake, which is what you want, I think.
I told Collins that I wouldn't give them an option on non-fiction just in case you were still interested in the LPH biography, -by the time I get the necessary permissions for that I expect you'll have forgotten my various errors and misunderstandings so it would be worth asking you again -
best wishes
Penelope"

(how is that for a master class in passive agression, by the way [that's me speaking, not Penelope Fitzgerald]?)

Then, when Beryl Bainbridge died a week or two ago, I saw that Haycraft came in for more bad press, this time via AN Wilson's obituary of Bainbridge, which devoted itself almost entirely to sticking the boot into Haycraft and his wife (making me wonder, inevitably, whether they had at some point rejected Wilson's own offerings [many of which I like]):

"Colin Haycraft and his wife, Anna (who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis), made the mistake of patronising Beryl and believing that the various masks she wore – the timid-little-girl Beryl who was totally lacking in social confidence; the illiterate scouser who could not spell and needed editorial help to finish a sentence; the Gin Lane slag who keeled over at parties – were "real".The Haycrafts liked to suggest that they were an essential part of the Beryl Bainbridge production line. Anna, herself the author of novellas with a cult following, claimed that she was the one who somehow crafted Beryl's raw material. Colin, snooty about fiction, as about much else, said that novels belonged to the "distaff side of the business". But he was perfectly happy to pocket the profits from Beryl's novels – the only commercially successful books he ever published. She saw almost none of this money and it was a dark day when – Duckworth being in trouble – Haycraft came and asked Beryl to sign over her house. For a few hours she seriously considered this monstrous demand. Then the steely common sense surfaced – helped by her friend Bernice Rubens shouting from the sidelines – and that spelled the end of Beryl's association with Duckworth.
Here is perhaps not the best place to air Beryl's complicated relationship with the Haycrafts, who were both, in their different ways, monsters. She love-hated them both. In her morphine-induced trance in hospital last week, she imagined that she was dancing with Colin through a crowd of Hollywood film stars.
I felt that Colin's distaste for fiction had a bad effect on her work. Skilful as some of her historical reconstructions are – such as The Birthday Boys, about Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition – I never felt they drew on such deep wells as the self-projections, such as her Liverpool-rep novel, An Awfully Big Adventure. That book, made into a superb film with Alan Rickman, was really a masterpiece.
In her fiction, and in her life, Beryl liked the role of the wronged woman. Stella, the would-be actress, who is seduced in An Awfully Big Adventure, wants to tell all to her mother. But the only way she gets to hear her mother's voice is by dialling the Speaking Clock, which her mother professionally reads. ("'There was this man who seduced me.' 'The time,' mother intoned, 'is 6.45 and 40 seconds precisely.' 'It wasn't my fault,' Stella shouted, 'I'll know how to behave next time. I'm learning.'")While the Haycrafts thought they were manipulating Beryl – Anna by supposedly improving her novels, Colin by playing the Sir Jasper role of total cad – some of their friends could see the dynamics of the infernal trio working very differently. Beryl was not short of men who fell in love with her."

Leaving aside the fact that AN Wilson's claims do not appear to be borne out by this or this or this (in fact, the last of those three argues that, far from being, as Wilson suggests, limited to writing historical reconstructions by Haycraft, Bainbridge felt restrained from writing her greatest novel of that kind until after his death), what interested me most about Wilson's obituary, in as far as it concerned Haycraft, was the revelation - to me at least - that it was he who had been responsible for publishing Bainbridge in the first place. That meant, I realised, that it was Haycraft who gave three of my favourite recent novelists - Bainbridge; the wonderful Fitzgerald (a nice appreciation of her and one of her less good novels here); and Haycraft's own wife, Alice Thomas Ellis - the opportunity to be published.

(Of that trio, to go off at a tangent for a moment, the least known nowadays is Alice Thomas Ellis. Her books are not as magnificent as the best of Bainbridge's and Fitzgerald's, but they are still often pretty entertaining. For instance, I've just dug out Pillars of Gold by Ellis and immediately found a couple of passages that make me laugh. In the first, the book's main character is assaulted by absurd [but, to me, not completely unfamiliar] media-induced anxieties as she tries to decide what is the best thing to do with some courgettes she is cooking for her daughter:

"... if she immersed them in water, their vitamin C content would dissipate. She could cook them now and reheat them, but that, she believed, would be deleterious to their nutritional value: it would perhaps be best to entrap them, with their vitamins and trace minerals, in a china bowl enveloped in clingfilm in the coolness of the fridge, taking care that the film did not touch them lest some cancer-inducing chemical should migrate from the one to the other.
Next she considered the potatoes: in the past she had always cooked them in their skins, but recently it had been suggested that potato skins, if not carcinogenic, were yet harmful to the system, perforating the bowel or preventing it from absorbing the vital vitamins. She scraped them carefully and put them in a steel pan ... Scarlet had thrown away all her old aluminium pans since she had learned that they might cause Alzheimer's disease ... The chicken, which she next drew from the fridge, had, so the label proclaimed, ranged freely over a district of France before being hygienically and humanely slaughtered and packed. It somehow gave the impression that the fowl had led such a delightful and pleasurable existence that it was a positive act of virtue to eat it."

In the second, the trials of this woman continue, as she tries to engage with her teenage daughter:

"Do I look all right?" asked Scarlet. She was wearing what she considered to be an ageless garment - a hip-length coat of black watered taffeta; the shoulders were rather too narrow and too sharply defined to be precisely fashionable, but the material was of most superior quality. Underneath this she wore black cotton trousers - ideally these should have been made of silk, but she felt sure no one would notice.
"You look wonderful," said Camille without raising her eyes from the television set. She had eaten her supper" [which included the pristine courgettes, I think] "and was beginning to feel hungry again.
'No, really,' said Scarlet.
Camille fell to her knees from the sofa and gave her mother's leg a patronizing pat. 'You've got a sweet little face,' she said. Scarlet, though not reassured by her words, was touched by her gesture until she saw that Camille was merely reaching for the crisp packet and had patted her in passing.
'Do these shoes go with these trousers?' she asked.
'Yes,' said Camille, her fingers deep in the crispbag.
'You didn't look,' said Scarlet. 'Are they too old-fashioned?'
'No,' said Camille. Scarlet gave up. Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely conerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.")

As well as providing us with the pleasure of Bainbridge, Fitzgerald and Ellis's writing, Haycraft also argued in defence of the short novel (apparently, he wrote something called 'a satire' on the subject for the Times Literary Supplement, but, as it was well before the advent of the internet, I can find no trace of it). I support that view, not because I don't enjoy Dickens or George Eliot or Tolstoy, but because I think the lengthy novels that are published nowadays are rarely up to the standard of their predecessors. Nowadays they are often really just sloppily edited - or completely unedited - short novels (there's a slim volume lurking inside every fat volume, or something like that). My impression is that few of today's writers - especially the really popular female ones - emulate the writing habits of Beryl Bainbridge, as described by Lynn Barber:
"It is here that she walls herself in for the four months it takes her to produce a novel, chain-smoking, never leaving except to sleep and collect the odd takeaway, writing draft after draft then cutting, cutting, till not one sentence, one phrase, one word is redundant. For every page of print, she will have written at least 12 pages of draft and then compressed it to the bare bones."
What is more the kind of editor Barber herself ended up working with at Penthouse, according to her memoir 'An Education' -

"Harry ... had this obsession with redundancy. He could find extraneous paragraphs in any page and would merrily run his black fountain pen through them all. ... 'Can't print waffle,' he would say ... My ambition was one day to write an article from which Harry would be unable to delete a single word. But there, you see, I've already failed. 'What do you mean single word?' he would bark. 'As opposed to what? A hyphenated word?' -

no longer exists, (which is a pity as Harry sounds like my kind of guy).

Haycraft also gave Jonathan Coe his first break, which I think is excellent (I don't love everything that Coe writes, but I usually at least quite enjoy it, and I certainly regard him as pleasingly unslick, with a much more original voice, less driven by concerns of fashion and the desire to please a small coterie of London friends than, say, Ian McEwan). He lent a helping hand to the creator of the Bash Street Boys, as well, which is a good thing in my book. He helped a writer I've never heard of called Eva Hanagan, (and if he thought she was good enough to publish, I think she's worth at least looking for on Abebooks,) and I'll bet there are dozens more I don't know about.

Given all this, (but in light most especially of Haycraft's willingness to publish a variety of witty women's writing that is either no longer being written - which seems unlikely - or, since his disappearance, no longer has any outlet), it seems to me that the man has been given a pretty rough ride. He was clearly sometimes insensitive (possibly thanks to the wonders of a good dinner and a bit too much wine [and who hasn't sometimes in those circumstances been careless once in a while -regretting it at three o'clock in the morning when it's too late and the die is already cast]), but even so I am grateful to him for giving me some of my most pleasurable reading hours.

So hurray for Haycraft - he deserves much more credit than blame. The kind of fiction he published - tightly written, harshly pruned, spare but humorous writing which managed to be both serious and entertaining, light without being silly, and which left quite a lot to the reader's imagination - is virtually impossible to find nowadays, and I miss it. Possibly there was never much of a market for it, of course, given the financial state Haycraft left Duckworth's in. I wouldn't know. After all I have never managed to progress beyond the first sentence of Twilight, one of the most successful novels the world, the universe, infinity, has ever seen. In case you haven't read it, it goes like this:

"My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down."

I mean, I ask you -who has ever been to an airport where you can open the windows, let alone roll them down?