The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

Those five minutes were the happiest of my life. Happier even than when I was reading Schopenhauer as my father died. Linda’s pregnancy provided plenty of interruptions for my writing: we argued constantly about whose turn it was to read the latest Rachel Cusk, and it was typical of her selfishness that she chose to go into labour while I was putting the finishing touches to the first sentence of my second novel.

  Vanja was a stroppy, demanding baby who constantly required attention. After giving her a week of my time, I told Linda I needed to go to my apartment to write for several months. Much to my amazement, I did manage to finish my novel – a torpid affair about sheep and angels – which the critics predictably praised, failing to recognise its inherent mediocrity.

  ‘I’m so fed up with Sweden,’ I screamed when I returned to Linda. ‘All our friends are petit-bourgeois writers and artists who have never done a proper day’s work in their life.’

  Geir returned from not writing his book in Iraq and reminded me I had once told him I had been a paedophile. I slapped him. ‘You failed to understand my use of Hamsunian infantilist metaphor.’

  Somewhere down the line, Linda got pregnant again. Heidi’s birth was even duller than Vanja’s. I can barely bring myself to mention John’s.

  ‘Where have we gone wrong?’ Linda cried. ‘We used to be in love. Now I’m the world’s worst parent.’

  ‘That’s typical,’ I replied. ‘It’s always got to be about you. I’m the world’s worst parent. Now stop moaning while I fly to Norway to give a lecture to seven people about my two shitty novels.’

  As I landed in Oslo, my phone rang. My mother had had a serious heart attack. I smiled. Maybe now I’d have something to write about in my next book.

  Digested read, digested: A man in love with writing about not writing.

  Girl Least Likely To

  by Liz Jones (2013)

  I went to visit Mum today. Her dentures were out and she was dribbling. She hadn’t even moisturised. The staff at the expensive, run-down care home that I have been bankrupting myself to pay for on my own because my brothers and sisters are too dead or too tight-fisted to contribute towards, don’t know her name. They even put full-fat milk in her tea. I can’t help weeping, and I pray that when my dear horse Lizzie is dying she isn’t so degraded.

  When I was 11, my father told me a joke. That was the last time I ever laughed. At school I was the ugliest girl in my class. My hair was long and greasy, my face pitted with acne, and my whole body covered with matted fur. The only boy to snog me was Kevin, and he was so disgusted he vomited down my throat. I immediately rushed to the lavatory to make sure I hadn’t accidentally swallowed any unnecessary calories.

  By the time I left school, my skin was so bad as a result of my anorexia the doctor prescribed me hormone tablets. These caused my breasts to balloon from a 32B to a 32C. How I hated those pendulous dugs and was delighted when I found a plastic surgeon willing to remove them for just £20,000! I asked if he would also amputate my legs while he was about it, so I would never have to set eyes on my hideous calves again, but when I came round I was shocked to discover they were still attached. Since then, I’ve never been able to trust a man.

  I’m not sure why I was appointed editor of Marie Claire. Everyone hated me there. They couldn’t cope with my perfectionism and workaholism, and I couldn’t stand their idleness. ‘There’s no need to go to the toilet to throw up your lunch,’ I would say. ‘Just stay at your desk and use the wastepaper basket like I do.’ I also couldn’t understand their uncritical attitude towards the fashion industry. ‘Can’t you see it has a negative impact on women’s self-image?’ I said, as I hailed a taxi to take me home, laden with freebies from Mulberry and Prada.

  In my late 20s, I nearly had sex for the first time after I paid a man called Chris £1,500 a week to live with me, after bargaining him up from his initial request for £1,000. But I’d mown my extensive pubic area and he declared that my vagina was completely sealed – then went to the pub to watch football. In the end, I got a doctor to treat me rough and came home to tell Chris I was now fixed. But he had left, taking all my credit cards with him.

  When I did have sex for the first time with my husband, I remember thinking how messy it was. My cats agreed. ‘By the way,’ said Sweetie, ‘did you know he brings loads of other women back here while you’re out at work? I can’t get a wink of sleep with all the noise they make.’ Straight away I told Nirpal he could pack his bags with all my belongings and leave.

  I decided to move out of London to live among the small-minded bigots on Exmoor who couldn’t tell the difference between a Gucci original and a knockoff. ‘Why does everyone hate us?’ Lizzie sobbed, when I brought her three-course dinner to her stable. ‘Have they never seen a horse with a Brazilian before?’

  The £3m bill for building a dog jacuzzi left me nearly bankrupt, and what little grasp I once had of reality deserted me for good. I no longer knew quite who I was, what I was or even if I had a Rock Star boyfriend. All I knew for certain was that no matter how badly everyone treated me, no one could hate me more than me.

  Digested read, digested: The girl least likely to stop writing about herself.

  An Appetite for Wonder

  by Richard Dawkins (2013)

  I was christened Clinton Richard Dawkins. By a strange quirk, Charles Darwin also has the initials CRD. I often think how proud he would have been to share them with me. Although, by reductio ad absurdum, everyone must be related to one another if you go back far enough, I propose to start this memoir with my grandfather, Clinton Evelyn, the first Dawkins to go to Balliol College, Oxford. The eulogy I wrote for his funeral still brings tears to my eyes.

  My father also went to Balliol. My mother, being of Cornish origin, didn’t, though I have often wondered about the evolution of the Cornish dialect. Her father wrote a book, Short Wave Wireless Communication, which was legendary in our family for its incomprehensibility, but I have just read the first two pages and find myself delighted by its lucidity in comparison to my own.

  I was born in Nairobi in 1941, my father having been posted to Kenya by the colonial service. By all accounts, I was a sociable child and I have a clear memory of all the friends I made by pointing out the nature of their second-order meta-pretends while we were playing together. I also had a fondness for poetry and have only recently realised that some of the early, rhythmic verses I invented for myself are highly reminiscent of Ezra Pound.

  After several peripatetic years, my family returned to England where I was sent to Chafyn Grove, an unremarkable preparatory school, where I frequently pretended to know less than I actually did. This, I now see, was early evidence of my peculiar empathy towards individuals who are much stupider than me. There was, of course, life beyond Chafyn Grove and I spent many happy holidays sorting out my father’s collections of coloured bailer twine and serpentine pebble pendants.

  My father had intended me to follow him to Marlborough, but his application on my behalf was too late and I was rejected – a sleight from which he never fully recovered, as I explained so movingly in my speech at his funeral. Instead, I went to Oundle boarding school and I shall never forget the shame I felt on my first day as a fag, after ringing the five-minute bell five minutes too late. For my many thousands of American readers, I should point out that fag in this context does not mean homosexual. Of course, some boys did make advances towards me, but I firmly believe there was nothing sexual about that. Likewise, Mr GF Bankerton-Banks whose preferred method of teaching was with his hands in a boy’s pockets. No doubt in these more suspicious times, he would have been dismissed as a paedophile.

  Some years ago, I was invited to give the inaugural Oundle lecture, in which I playfully invoked the ghost of a long-dead headmaster. I would like to make clear that this was just creative use of poetic imagery and in no way implies a belief in the supernatural. I may have once, shortly after my confirmation, been foolish enough to believe in the possibility of an intelligent designer, but I
have long since exposed the pathetic fallacy of that belief.

  Having taken up my anointed position at Balliol, I quickly became one of the most remarkable zoologists of my generation, and it was a surprise to find my work on chickens pecking at eggshells and crickets reacting to light sources didn’t receive greater international acclaim. Not that Balliol was all work and no play. I did achieve my first sexual congress with a cellist and it was most gratifying to discover how biomechanically efficient my penis was.

  I married my first wife Marian in 1967, though that’s the last time I propose to mention her. Far more interesting are the two computer languages I invented to determine hierarchical embedment. Who would have guessed that P=2(P+P-P*P)-1?! In the early 1970s, I started work on The Selfish Gene. I had no idea when I was writing the first chapter just how remarkable the book would be, as it had seemed self-evident for more than a decade to me that panglossian theories were erroneous and that natural selection took place at the genetic level. What I hadn’t then realised was my remarkable ability to be right about absolutely everything: the consequences of that realisation will follow in a later volume. Though you may be hoping a process of natural literary selection prevents that.

  Digested read, digested: Me me meme.

  LETTERS/DIARIES

  The Letters of Kingsley Amis

  (2000)

  My dear Philip,

  So very sorry not to have written earlier, so very sorry. I haven’t done much of anything since my wife left me. Not for anyone, she just buggered off. I think she did it partly to punish me for stopping wanting to fuck her and partly because she realised I didn’t like her any more. Even so, not having her around is infinitely crappier than having her around. I did feel better for 20 min today, though, as I have just found and installed the couple who will look after me. They are Hilly and her third husband, Lord Kilmarnock.

  I’m still working on the Welsh novel, Iv dn bggrll. I’m so painfully slow. I have to keep checking the Welsh dictionary, and have come up with the not particularly Taffy suggestion that the reason women live longer than men is that a good number of women knock off their husbands with rage-induced coronaries. What do you think?

  I saw your piece on Waugh. It sounded a fucking dreary book. The more I think about it the more I reckon he wrote one good book and then went off when he became a Catholic. The thing that really gets me about him is the way he toadies to the upper classes, droning on and on about how wonderful everything about them is. Still, he isn’t as bad as Bron, I suppose.

  Bin reading the new Tony P. It starts OK but then falls apart. Pissy as it is, though, it’s not half as bad as the bunch of new books by the leading young novelists I’ve been sent. Not that I’ve read them all. As if. One William Boyd short story goes on and on, and just when you think something is about to happen it ends.

  And then there’s M**t** *m*s. Don’t know what to say about him, though I bet you do. He made £38,000 last year. The shit. The little shit.

  NB: Have you read the new Dick Francis? He’s back to form with The Danger. I went out to lunch with the Penguin publicity girl yesterday and quite enjoyed it. It would have been bloody brilliant if I had actually wanted to fuck her. It wasn’t her fault. My sex drive just isn’t what it was.

  My damn fool doctor has told me I ought to give up the booze as I’ve been getting spasms in my arm. But what’s left if you can’t drink? So sod him. I am on my New Alcoholic Policy of four to five drinks per day. It allows me to eat, sign my name and follow films on TV. But it doesn’t stop the nightmares. I’m piling on the pounds. I now have a 42-inch waist rather than the normal 38. Growing old is hell. What a feast future generations will have when they read our letters.

  Happy and prosperous new bum,

  Kingers.

  Digested read, digested: Grand old curmudgeon turns out to be consistently more entertaining as a letter writer than as a novelist.

  The Diaries of Ken Tynan

  (2001)

  June 1971 Chronically idle since my return from France. I used to take Dexamyl to give me confidence to start work. Now I take it to give me the confidence not to.

  April 1972 I talk to John Dexter and Frank Dunlop about LO’s willingness to sell us all at the National to P Hall. Hall is one of those curious types with no enemies and no friends.

  October 1972 One difference between the London theatre today and 20 years ago is the relative paucity of queers.

  February 1973 I have been seeing a fellow spanking addict, an actress called Nicole. Her fantasy is to be bent over with knickers down and caned, preferably with the buttocks parted to disclose the anus. She also enjoys spanking and exposing me. Really there is no sport to touch it; it is not just a nocturnal relaxation, it is a way of life.

  April 1973 My birthday. Noel is dead and Muhammad Ali has broken his jaw and I am 46. God and bugger and fuck.

  September 1973 For lunch and dinner at Tony Richardson’s villa near St Tropez. John Gielgud asks me about The Joint by James Blake. KT: It’s about a masochistic convict who gets himself imprisoned because he likes being sucked off by sadistic Negro murderers. JG: You can’t quarrel with that.

  May 1974 What is my current profession? Drama critic: not since 1963. Impresario: not since Oh Calcutta. Nabob of the NT: not since last December. Film director: untested. Journalist: extinct. Author: blocked. I have no professional identity and have ceased to exist.

  July 1975 General depression due to persistent bronchial infection.

  March 1976 At last able after many months to make love to Kathleen again. But my potency vanishes after she spends another night with her lover, Dan Topolski. Debts now mountainous; yesterday the telephone was cut off. I can’t write without smoking and if I smoke I shall die. Vicious circle or double-bind. Compare and contrast.

  November 1977 A cheque for $22,000 – three times the amount agreed – arrives from the New Yorker. For a day I am surely the best-paid journalist in the world.

  January 1980 Debts in excess of $75,000 and health failing rapidly. From Maugham’s The Summing Up: He leaves out his redeeming qualities and so appears only weak, unprincipled and vicious. Shall I fall into this trap?

  Digested read, digested: High angst, top gossip and lashings of S&M from the final years of one of Britain’s most talented theatre critics.

  Alan Clark: The Last Diaries

  (2002)

  Saltwood/Albany, February 1991–September 1999

  Still obsessive about ‘X’ but haven’t the nerve to end it. Darling Jane is looking strained, she knows something is up. Tension headache, my pulse up to 87. I’m not at all well. How much longer have I got? Five years? Ten years. Finances in a total mess. Don’t want to get rid of Big Red so might have to sell the Degas; 300 would clear the tax bill. State of abject depression. The party is in a mess and I feel now is the time to step down. But I can’t bring myself to do it yet as ACHAB*.

  Slept very badly. Had to get up three times for a tinkle. I must book a PSA. ‘X’ is ignoring me and I’m taking it out on Janey. Cleared my office at Westminster and said my goodbyes; my health is good, my stamina is up, but my mood is black. I SHOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. I really need to organise a car cull and get on with my life. God has been good to me; I’ve had a great career, sex-life with Janey has never been better and there’s the prospect of grandchildren on the horizon.

  Is it too much to ask for one last chance at power and 10 more years? Richard Ryder isn’t returning my calls – little shit. How I miss the thrill of power. JM is almost isolated, the party rudderless. Publication of my diaries has caused something of a stir. It’s nice to still be famous. Or should that be infamous?

  Desperate to get back into the House. Had an approach from Kensington & Chelsea but Nick Scott is hanging on. Am I too old? Still, ACHAB. My vision is going. Cancer of the optic nerve? Scott enquiry still rumbles on, find it increasingly hard to trust Tristan G-J. See in the Sunday Times my name has been put forward as possible leade
r of the Tory party. I feel marvellously young once more. A miracle. K&C have adopted me against all the odds. But how long will I be alive to enjoy it? Disastrous general election, but my seat quite safe.

  Alastair Campbell phoned twice to offer me a K. BB published but poor reviews. My headaches are getting worse. The doctors say there is nothing wrong with me.

  The fact is I have a brain tumour and I’m going to die.

  Digested read, digested: AC’s observations both on his health and his fellow politicians remain spot on to the last.

  Primo Time

  by Anthony Sher (2005)

  2 November 2002: I wonder if Nelson Mandela knows Primo Levi. I’m on my way to meet Nelson and I’m planning to adapt Primo’s If This is a Man as a one-man show; it would be a remarkable coincidence if there was a tangible connection between three of the most iconic figures of the 20th century.

  7 November 2002: At Grayshott health farm with my dear friend Richard Wilson. I mention the project to him and he replied, ‘But of course you must play Primo.’ I immediately see he’s right.

  8 November 2002: Sod it. I start writing tonight.

  9 November 2002: Finished. It’s far too long, but I could sense Primo’s presence guiding me. I am wrung out; I have cried so many tears.

  27 November 2002: Dearest Greg says it’s the best thing I have ever written. Richard, too, has been terribly affected by the script and has agreed to direct me.

  10 January 2003: I am bereft. Nick Hytner has said he’s not sure Primo is right for the National and my agent says Primo’s estate is extremely reluctant to give permission for his work to be adapted for the stage. Don’t they understand Primo is not just theirs? He belongs to the world. How many more bitter tears do I have to weep?

  20 July–18 October 2003: I am doing I.D. at the Almeida and The Fear is gripping me. Will I walk off stage? No.