by Alan Coren
G: Maybe we shouldn’t put it in.
V: It would definitely be safer not to. But The Bulletins Of Idi Amin was his best-selling book ever. It sold a million copies. They made a record of it. It made him famous. It’s because of the Amin books that The Sunday Times called him ‘The funniest writer in Britain today.’ Richard Ingrams ran a spoof in Private Eye with Daddy’s picture at the top. Do you remember what that was called? ‘The Bulletins of Yiddy Amin’, of course. They must have cracked open the champagne when they thought of that. Anyway, the point is, those pieces make us nervous and they might give people the wrong impression of him, but I don’t think we can just censor them out.
G: Hang on. Think about Team America, one of the best adult comedy films of modern times; a serious, anarchic, liberal and right-thinking movie. And think of the hilarious pastiche of Kim Jong-Il. He is a very decent parallel with Idi Amin, except even more powerful and even more sinister – and when Trey Parker and Matt Stone make an entire film based on his dictatorship, the centrepiece of it is his hilarious Korean accent. When Jong-Il bursts into tears and sings ‘I’m So Ronery’, it’s pure Alan Coren. People might have been a bit squeamish about Idi Amin in the 1980s and ’90s, but you only have to look at South Park – also created by Parker and Stone – to see that we have come back into a world where everything’s fair game, and exaggerated ethnic mimicry doesn’t make you a racist. I’d hate to think that future generations of South Park viewers would have to watch edited versions, from which Chef has been removed because not all black men sound like Isaac Hayes.
V: Maybe we could put Idi Amin in an appendix?
G: Okay, put those pieces in an appendix, at the end of the 1970s. With a perforated line down the page so people can tear them out if they want, and leave them in the shop.
V: Are we going to put anything in from the Arthur Westerns? I know they were children’s books, but I think I might love them more than anything else he ever wrote.
G: I love them too. Originally Arthur was called Giles. Daddy told me the stories at bedtime and then wrote them down, and it was massively exciting, like my own version of the Alice in Wonderland creation myth.
V: Except without the naughty photographs.
G: But we shouldn’t put them in. The books are brilliant, but they’re for children. If you’re compiling The Essential T.S. Eliot, you don’t include Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
V: Okay, no Arthur the Kid. No Luke P. Lazarus, no cricket-playing pigs, no Seminole Gap. So will the book just have the magazine and newspaper pieces?
G: Just? What do you mean ‘just’? He published twenty-six books of them. Collectively, they’re twice the length of Proust. And that’s only the pieces he put in books.
V: But would there be room for something that wasn’t written at all? Extracts from The News Quiz, maybe? He became the twelfth editor of Punch in 1977 and that was the start of his golden age. By the 1980s he had a TV career, he was doing chat shows. Maybe we should include some transcripts of those?
G: And the commentaries from Television Scrabble? His Through the Keyhole work? Look, he was a famous person, he was a sort of celebrity, plenty of people will know him only from Call My Bluff. But that’s not what this book is about. It’s about what will endure of his writing. Let’s just have the writing.
V: I wish he had written a novel. Actually, what I really wish is that he had written an autobiography. He had that great idea for writing one based on all the cars he ever drove . . . it would have been so good.
G: The 1990s would have been the time for that sort of writing. He left Punch in ’88 and all of that Fleet Street romance – cricket in the corridor, drunken lunches, contributors carving their names in the Punch table, Sheridan Morley, Miles Kington, Basil Boothroyd, Bill Tidy, Bywater, royal visitors – it all came to an end. It had got too businesslike, he was summoned to too many meetings with people who wore grey suits and talked about revenue streams. He edited The Listener for a year and then he came home to write.
V: He wrote the Times column twice a week, and talked a lot about novels and the autobiography without actually doing them.
G: I tried to persuade him. If he was that good at writing sentences, I thought he would write a very good novel. But he didn’t think the two things necessarily went together – he always said that his old pal Jeffrey Archer could write novels but he couldn’t write sentences.
V: I think that was just an excuse. He was never going to get much work done once he came home. Part of the problem was that he had such a happy marriage. He famously never went out for drinks after The News Quiz because he was always in such a hurry to get back home to her and eat veal schnitzel together in front of the TV. Once he was working from home, he got all involved with the domestic routine. He always had an ear cocked for Mummy’s key in the door. He was much happier helping her unload Waitrose bags than sitting at the computer trying to write.
G: And the writing was all about Cricklewood. That strange Cricklewood of his own invention, which didn’t really exist. Except for the domestic frustrations – gas men turning up late, junk mail, plants dying when he went on holiday, tiles falling off the roof, ‘narmean’ – that was all a comic version of his very genuine obsessions.
V: And he did it brilliantly. The American influence, the youthful inspiration he took from civil rights and political stories, disappeared from the writing, and it became a very British sort of comedy – small things, silly things. Herons, hearing aids, hosepipe bans, talking parrots, QPR fans arguing at cheese counters. He was a master of all that.
G: It’s funny to use a word like ‘master’ in the context of a writer whose work was so ostensibly superficial, so entirely motivated by humour. It’s usually the boring ones who get called that. As a writer you want to move people, or at best ‘affect’ them in some way, and for him the easiest way, the only way, was to make them laugh. He got hundreds and hundreds of letters from Times readers, far more, I’m sure, than any of the ‘serious’ writers. They loved him, and they needed to tell him that.
V: I think they loved him because his comedy was so warm, it reflected a charming and optimistic and kindly vision of the world. And it was ambitious, even if it was only a thousand words long, or half an hour on the radio. It’s easy to get a laugh from being nasty or from being philistine, but he didn’t do that. He never hid the fact that he was clever, and he never got a cheap laugh at someone’s expense – if it was at someone’s expense, it was a fair target and cleverly done – but he was always funny, and that’s really hard for twenty minutes, never mind a lifetime.
G: I read one obituary of him, a not especially kind one by a man who always bore a grudge, that suggested the old man’s prose did not achieve the rank of ‘greatness’ because he put nothing of himself into his writing – and, at the same time as being annoyed at something negative being said about him, I had to sort of agree with that, at least partly. He was not a seeker after truth in his writing, he was a seeker after laughs. He would also never have dreamed of suggesting he was a major literary figure – the idea would have struck him as laughable. He found the truth a bore, he hated opinions, he distrusted earnestness. His pieces were a flag-wave designed to distract people from the horrors and the tedium of real life and also, in a way, to distract them from looking too closely at him. So you wouldn’t really expect him to lay himself bare in there. But then again, reading all his stuff again for this book, I was struck by how much of himself he was including subconsciously: so much of the humour, for example, derives from a sense of impending domestic disaster: something being spilled, a great mess everywhere, things being lost, maps being misread, planes being missed, pipes freezing, children screaming, people being bitten by dogs . . . and you and I both know what a stickler for order and tidiness and planning he was – and how all these sorts of little domestic mishaps in fact drove him round the bend so that he wasted a lot of energy worrying about them. But then in his pieces, for forty-odd years, he was ma
king out like he found it all terribly funny. That’s a man’s soul informing his writing if ever anything was.
V: He would have written a great piece about his funeral. It was rich with potential catastrophe – if he’d been there to plan it, the worry would have killed him. But the various strange details all fell into place, and they were perfect. The Cricklewood churchyard that he loved because a ventriloquist is buried there with his puppet. And so is Marie Lloyd – we’ve got his piece about it somewhere in the 1990s section. The rabbi who didn’t mind coming to a churchyard – who advised us, in fact, to ‘drop this prayer, it’s a bit God-heavy’. The cantor who sang a mournful Hebrew song, and then came out to Sandi Toksvig. The moment when Uncle Andrew misread the map, looked in the wrong part of the cemetery and said: ‘We’ve got a disaster on our hands – they’ve forgotten to dig a hole.’ It was like an Alan Coren piece being acted out by accident. And it worked: it reflected everything. The sentimentality about Judaism with its gefilte fish balls and anxious tailors . . . and the sentimentality about England’s green slopes and church spires . . . with some lovable, fallible, funny human characters in the middle. If we’d only had an Austin Healy with a copy of Gatsby and a hamburger on the front seat, it would have ticked every box.
G: Speaking of ticking boxes, we still have to write the introduction.
V: We haven’t decided which one of us will type and which will pace . . .
G: We could just leave it as dialogue.
V: Mightn’t that look a bit lazy?
G: No, no, people will think it was our plan right from the beginning.
V: But then mightn’t it look a bit gimmicky?
G: And thus in some way unsuitable for the introduction to an anthology of writing by Alan Coren . . .?
V: True, true.
G: Remember the introduction he wrote to that anthology of humour in the ’80s? It looks like a piece of autobiography – except of course it’s all nonsense, not autobiographical at all.
V: And yet at the same time, in a way, it is. Okay, it’s a daft story about a man who dreams of compiling anthologies of Boer operetta lyrics. And who has a preposterous soldier father with a giant tattooed arm. But the basic narrative . . . a young man who yearns to get into publishing . . . whose physical, practical, sceptical father thinks he won’t make money from it . . . the son pressing on regardless, travelling abroad . . . returning to England at twenty-two, publishing his books and working on a humorous magazine . . . It is actually Daddy’s mini-life story, but with everything transformed into cartoon, like the farm hands becoming scarecrows in The Wizard Of Oz.
G: Do you think perhaps you’re over-reading it?
V: That was a short story which he thought counted as an ‘introduction’ – but at least he wrote it out in paragraphs.
G: We could call ours a ‘foreword’.
V: Fine. Dialogue it is, and a foreword it shall be.
G: It’s not as if people have forked out twenty pounds to read a piece by us anyway, is it? It’s him they want to read.
1
Present Laughter
The introduction to an anthology of modern humour,
by Alan Coren (1982)
Nobody who met my old man ever forgot him. The first thing you saw was the sabre scar across his head. The wound had been stitched up by a chanteuse who went in with the first ENSA wave at Salerno, and the only way she could work the needle without passing out was to stay drunk.
His left arm was the size of anyone else’s thigh, and it was tattooed in the shape of a cabriole leg. One of his favourite party pieces was where he went out of the room and came back a couple of minutes later as a Regency card table. People still talk about that. His right arm stopped at the elbow: the rest had been left inside the turret of a Tiger tank after the lid came down, somewhere in the Ardennes Forest.
When he came back from the War, he just laughed about it, at first. But then, one night in the winter of 1945, he suddenly said:
‘You’re going to have to help me at the brewery, son.’
I said: ‘I’m only seven, Dad.’
It was the first and only time my old man hit me. If he had hit me with the left, I should not be here now; but it was the right he threw, and being short it had neither the range nor the trajectory, but it hurt just the same when the elbow connected.
Later on, he quietened down and asked me what I intended to do with my life if I didn’t want to hump barrels.
‘I want to do anthologies, Dad,’ I said.
He looked at me hard, with his good eye; the other one is still rolling around near El Alamein, for all I know.
‘What kind of job is that for a man?’ he said.
‘I don’t think I’m cut out for humping barrels, Dad,’ I said.
He spread his arms wide; or, more accurately, one wide, one narrow.
‘It doesn’t have to be barrels. There’ll be other wars, you could go and leave limbs about.’
I nodded.
‘I thought about that, Dad. I could be a war anthologiser. A war provides wonderful opportunities, collected verses, collected letters, collected journalism, things called A Soldier’s Garland with little bits of Shakespeare in. Did you know that Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” has appeared in no less than one hundred and thirty-eight anthologies, Dad, nearly as often as James Thurber’s “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty”?’
He thought about this for a while.
‘Is there money in it?’ he said at last.
‘Dear old Dad!’ I said. ‘An anthologiser doesn’t think about money. He is pursued by a dream. He dreams of making a major contribution to gumming things together. He dreams of becoming a great literary figure like Palgrave or Quiller-Couch.’
‘And how do you go about learning to anthologise, son?’
I smiled, but tolerantly.
‘You can’t learn it, Dad. It comes from the heart and the soul. Fifty pounds would help.’
People have asked me, three decades on, in colour supplements, on chat shows, what the major influence on my work has been. I tell them that it wasn’t Frank Muir, it wasn’t Philip Larkin, it wasn’t even Nigel Rees or Gyles Brandreth, important though these have undeniably been: it was the day my old man took his last fifty pounds out of his wooden leg, and set me on my path.
I left school soon after that. There was nothing they could teach me that would not be better learned in the real world: the experience of felt life is what lies at the still centre of all the great anthologies. I shipped aboard a coaler on the Maracaibo rum, and I discovered what a Laskar likes to read in the still watches of the equatorial night. My first anthology, a slim volume and privately circulated, consisted of buttocks snipped from Health and Efficiency interlarded with Gujurati limericks and reliable Portsmouth telephone numbers. Juvenilia, perhaps, and afflicted with the sort of critical introduction that I have long since learned always goes unread, but no worse than, say, the annual Bedside Guardian.
Two years later, I jumped ship at Dakar, and took up with a Senegalese novelty dancer who had a tin-roofed shack down by the harbour and a brother who worked three days a week as a roach exterminator in the British Council Library. It was perhaps the most idyllic and fruitful period of my life: it was mornings of grilled breadfruit and novelty dancing on the roof overlooking the incredible azure of the Indian Ocean, and afternoons of studying the anthologies her brother would steal from the library, the absence of which, when noticed, he would attribute to the kao-kao beetle which subsisted, he said, entirely upon half-morocco.
I read everything, voraciously: I learned how anthologies worked. I divined the trick of bibliographical attribution whereby the skilled anthologiser credited the original source, rather than the previous anthology from which he himself had worked. I noticed how an expensive thin volume could be turned into a cheap fat volume by amplifying it with long sections of junk that happened to be out of copyright. I made out an invaluable list of titled paupers who could be called upon to endor
se the anthologiser’s choice with tiny masterpieces of prefatorial cliché, usually beginning: ‘Here, indeed, are infinite riches in a little room,’ and ending with a holograph signature.
The idyll could not last: there was a waterfront bar where expatriate anthologisers – they called themselves that, though few among them had ever collated anything more remarkable than privately printed regimental drinking songs, or limited-circulation pamphlets called things like The Best of the Old Eastbournian, 1932–1938 – gathered of an evening to drink and argue recondite theories of anthological technique, and one night I had the misfortune to fall foul of a gigantic ex-Harvard quarterback who claimed to be on the point of closing a two-figure deal for his Treasury of Mormon Prose.
I shall not distress you with the details. When I woke up the following morning, my youthful good looks were gone, to be rapidly followed by my Senegalese paramour. Two weeks later, I left the infirmary and returned, far older than my twenty-two years, to England.
Britain, in 1960, was not at all as it had been a few scant years before. A new spirit was abroad, a harsher, grittier, more realistic spirit. It was the Age of Anger, and the whole face of English anthology had changed overnight.
Gone were the elegantly produced collections of ethereal lyrics and robust nineteenth-century narrative verse. Gone were the leatherbound volumes of India paper bearing the jewelled fragments of English prose from A Treatise on the Astrolabe to Hillaire Belloc on mowing.
In their place, the new race of angry young anthologisers was churning out paperback collections of bogus radicalese entitled Whither Commitment? and Exercises In Existentialism and The Right to Know – Essays on the Obligations of Communicators in a Negative Environment. As for the more popular market, such classics as A Knapsackery of Chuckles or A Wordsmith’s Bouquet had been thrown out in favour of The Wit and Wisdom of MacDonald Hobley and Dora Gaitskell’s Rugger Favourites.