by Alan Coren
Ninety per cent of all anthological output was manufactured by the BBC, linked on the one hand to a vaguely similar broadcast, and on the other to a wide range of dangle-dollies and jocular tea-towels.
These were, in consequence, bleak years for me. My entire creative life to this point had been wasted, the art of anthology to which I had dedicated myself was no more. Not that I surrendered lightly: by day, I worked as stevedore, cocktail waiter, pump attendant, steeplejack, male model, by night I pursued my muse, working feverishly and without sleep to produce, in the space of five years, The Connoisseur’s Book of Business Poetry, The Big Book of Boer Operetta, A Nosegay of Actuarial Prose, and, perhaps my own favourite, We Called It Medicine: A Selection of Middlesex Hospital Correspondence Between the Wars.
I was thrown out of every publishers in London. It was the same story everywhere, as the 1960s rolled inexorably on and television worked its equally inexorable way deeper and deeper into the culture – I was not a Face. For a new breed of anthologiser was abroad: the personality. Names like Michael Barrett, Jimmy Young, Robert and Sheridan Morley, David Frost, Antonia Fraser, Freddie Trueman, Des O’Connor, Henry Cooper and the rest, all represented the New School of English Anthology; they were household words who held the publishing world in enviable thrall.
It was upon this inescapable realisation that I finally threw in the creative sponge. I had reached that nadir which all anthologisers have at some time or another plumbed, when you feel you can never skim through a book again. Worse, my run of bearable jobs had come to an end with the installation of an automatic car-wash, and I had nowhere to turn but to a weekly humorous magazine, where I was employed to manufacture lengths of material which could be inserted in between pages of advertising in order to display them to advantage. It was, as can readily, I think, be imagined, lonely, grim and unrewarding work, relieved only by my access to a comprehensive library of published humour and the constant stream of new humorous books which paused briefly in the office of the Literary Editor before being wheeled around the corner to a Fleet Street bookseller prepared to exchange them for folding money.
I thus came to read every comic word that had ever been written. It has left me grey before my time, and I jump at the slightest sound, but it has produced one strange by-product, an effect unsettling yet at the same time curiously thrilling: when I had been convinced for the better part of two decades that every creative instinct within me had shrivelled and died back like a frostbitten rose, a glimmer of the immortal longings of my youth returned. On a chill November evening, as I huddled for warmth among the teetering piles of comedy, a tiny spark of – shall we call it – inspiration no bigger than a dog-end falling through the night flashed deep within my head and, a second later, hope blew upon it, and it glowed.
This book, then, is the result. Whether, given my time again, it would have been wiser to have spent the thirty years in humping barrels, I cannot say. I know only that it would have been a lot easier.
Southgate–San Francisco–
Fleet Street
1960–1969
MELVYN BRAGG
Introduction
When I first met Alan, he was heading for the library in the back quad at Wadham College. He was also headed, the word was, for a brilliant academic career. I still have no idea why he stopped to chat with a callow newcomer from the sticks, but I remember vividly the blast of bonhomie, the instant embrace into an unearned familiarity which turned to friendship, and the dazzle of his wit. This was Oxford on stilts.
I was quite alert to accents at the time, but Alan made it quite difficult. He had the breezy metropolitan machine gun manner, but it was already minced into a sort of Oxford ease. Not Upper but no longer WC or even LMC.
He had adopted the linguistic camouflage as immediately as he had put on the correct 1950s tweed jacket, and maybe even cavalry twills, and God help us perhaps a cravat.
Had he re-launched himself as gentleman Pip? Yes. But that was job done. Over the next decades of Punch lunches and the occasional posh dinners, he rested cheerfully in the berth he had made for himself so characteristically quickly, and the machine gun delivery never slowed down.
He carried his literary gifts into the columns and programmes which seduced him from scholarship, but scholarship blazes through his earliest pieces in the 1960s.
In ‘Under the Influence of Literature’, for instance, he describes an awakening. One morning aged thirteen and three-quarters, he wrote to his mother: ‘Please do not be alarmed but I have turned into a big black bug.’ He had read Kafka, was ‘in that miserable No-Man’s-Land between Meccano and Sex’, and was about to change heroes from Captain Marvel and Zonk to Raskolnikov and Werther.
In another early piece in the same period, in a single paragraph mocking the failure of the English to produce plausible Bohemians, he mentions more than twenty authors: ‘Our seed beds have never teemed with Rimbauds and Kafkas and D’Annunzios . . . Our Bohemia is populated by civil servants, Chaucer and Spenser and Milton . . . by corpulent family men Thackeray and Dickens and Trollope . . .’
He then launches into the excesses which were to colour some of his best comic writing. ‘Cowper mad among his rabbits, Swinburne, a tiny, fetishistic gnome as far from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as water is from blood . . .’
Then he turns his guns on Wordsworth. I ducked.
It would have taken at least three years to write that up as a thesis, and another five to produce it as an academic masterwork, but an extraordinary speed of thought was Alan’s great gift; the necessary tortoise pace of serious research would have driven him screaming mad. And he was blessed with what was almost a disease of humour. These two qualities gave him his take on the world.
Later, he begins to wean himself from the literary inheritance he conquered and subsumed so thoroughly. His 1970s pieces take off from a standing start, which can be seen in ‘Let Us Now Phone Famous Men’: Mao Tse-Tung, Kosygin, the Pope, full of Coren fantasy and phonetically convincing accents. Then there’s a little masterpiece on alcohol and the artists which begins: ‘“Shrunk to half its proper size, leathery in consistency and greenish-blue in colour, with bean-sized nodules on its surface.” Yes, readers, I am of course describing Ludwig van Beethoven’s liver.’
As ever, he takes it for granted that his readers are as culturally clued up as he is, and the jokes work the better for that.
I think that what was tugging away at Alan in the 1960s was not so much academic regrets as fictional possibilities. He wanted to write novels. Perhaps he did, and didn’t publish them. He was certainly sufficiently talented, inventive and energetic.
The only reason he didn’t, that I can think of, is that he came to prefer the columns and the radio, which themselves became short fictions, unceasing figments of his imagination.
As a friend and someone to talk to (or more usually listen to), it never took him more than a few minutes to torpedo even the most serious conversation with wit meant to sink it.
He was one of the very few people who made me laugh out loud. He does still.
For which, old pal, much thanks.
2
No, But I Saw the Movie
Up until a very short time ago, no nation on earth enjoyed as splendid a popular Image in the United States as the English; the visiting Briton basked. And no one ever asked him actually to demonstrate those qualities on which his glory was based; he was simply required to Be. Whatever his personal appearance, whatever his character, or behaviour, or background, when he passed through a crowded room, hushes fell, beautiful women gnawed their lower lip, strong men dropped their eyes, and small boys lifted their shining faces, as to the sun. For all knew this man’s inheritance. Not, necessarily, the facts of it; but this ignorance was unimportant to them. Across a thousand panoramic screens, they had seen his clouds of glory trailed, and now, encountering the Englishman in the flesh, they recognised the presence of something greater than they knew. And so they roared at jokes they did not und
erstand, because the English Sense of Humour was a rare and precious thing, they nodded at his truisms, seeing immediately their hoary wisdom, they saw his inarticulacy as noble taciturnity amid the sounding brass; and husbands, noticing their wives’ idolatrous looks, dashed in herds to their tailors to order suits made up from old army blankets, specifying the dashing trousers, flared at the knee, the cunningly asymmetrical jacket, the skilfully frayed shirtcuffs.
Americans, in that sweet not-so-long syne, knew where respect was due. Millions of feet of celluloid had taught it them, and they had met nothing to say it was not so. They had seen the Englishmen in War, whistling dirty songs at the Japanese, escaping in guffawing droves from cretinous camp-commandants, knocking back bitter in the mess before going out with a boyish toss of the head to paste Jerry over Kent, while all the world wondered. Americans had gaped at the Miniver set, picking shrapnel out of their tea and fussing over the Young Conservatives’ Picnic. In Peace, too, they had seen and doted; England was God’s Little Acre, a thatch-dotted paradise of trafficless lanes where blithe spirits in veteran cars chugged from one hunt ball to another, swam in Piper-Heidsieck, watched the dawn come up over Pont Street, and spent their serious hours redecorating mews cottages. Just as Jack Hawkins had been everybody’s CO, so now everybody’s Daddy was Cecil Parker, and Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne were always running through the drawing-room on the way to Ascot. Between War and Peace, there were Times Of Stress, when the British, played by John Mills disguised as Richard Todd, or vice versa, tightened their belts, stiffened their lips, chased the natives out of the rubber, and went back to their airmail copies of the Telegraph. The Common Folk, of course, were a splendid bunch. In War, they died uncomplainingly like flies, sat in the ruins of their homes and told uproarious Cockney stories, and, adrift in a lifeboat with Noel Coward, were never at a loss for a spirited song. When Peace came, they all went back to being chauffeurs, bus-conductors, publicans, comic burglars, bank clerks, and Stanley Holloway. They were deliriously happy.
When I first came to America, this image still hadn’t changed much. True, a backward glance from New York towards the horizon might have caught those little fistshaped clouds forming, but it was some time before the first cans of Truth were unloaded on the docks. At first, it was easy to argue my way out of American suspicion. ‘Look Back In Anger’? ‘Room At The Top’? Flashes in the pan, I said. I would laugh nervously. Alarmist minorities, I said. But when the new wave of British filmmaking broke across this continent and swamped Old Albion in its scummy tide, I knew I was beaten. For, worst of all, it hit at a time when some of the facts of English life were finally filtering through to the average American; word was out that the garlands were showing a tendency to wither on the brow, and the films provided the clincher. America knows. Over the last few months, San Francisco cinemas have shown: ‘Saturday Night And Sunday Morning’,‘The Entertainer’, ‘A Taste Of Honey’, ‘The Long And The Short And The Tall’, ‘Sons And Lovers’, ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’, ‘Term Of Trial’ and ‘A Kind Of Loving’. In succession; to packed houses; and against the background of Time’s articles on the decline of Britain, and Mr. Acheson’s penetrating twang.
Now, I’m not complaining. I’m delighted, Lord knows, that English filmmen are at last making films. I can hold up my head among the cognescenti. But not among the masses. And this overnight switch of Image is hard to bear. Now these Americans who once looked on me with awe, look with derision, or pity, or revulsion. If they bother to look at all. For they know the Truth. They know that I was born in a narrow street, in a scrofulous terraced hovel, to a withered old mother of twenty-four, her delivery screams drowned by the roar of the machine-shop/pit disaster. As a child, I stumbled wretchedly about in a pall of silicotic filth, unaware of the sun, occasionally catching a dim glimpse of my father, an emaciated creature in long underwear and a cloth cap, as he was dragged home, stewed to the gills on dole-money, from the local thieves’ kitchen. I never had much of an education, due to long absences from my hellish school after regular beatings by me mum’s fancy-man (tattersall waistcoat, moustache, Vauxhall), and weekend jaunts to drizzleswept boarding-houses with the nubile milk-monitor in 5A. However, the educational problem was easily solved by sending me: (a) to Borstal, where I was thrashed by the staff, humiliated by Etonians, and ostracised by my fellows, or (b) to a bicycle factory where I got my kicks from dropping dead rats (with which England is bubonically overrun) into the packed lunches, or (c) – if I was a girl – down to the waterfront to watch the boats. A short time later, sex reared the ugliest head outside a Hammer Film; due to the constant presence of drunks in underwear mashing tea all over the hovel, I pursued love’s young dream in bus-shelters, grimy cinemas, on canal-banks, behind bill-boards, and so on. My partners in the great awakening were diverse; every American schoolboy knows that I have: (a) Gone to bed with the foreman’s wife and got her pregnant, (b) Gone to bed with the blonde from the typists’ pool and got her pregnant, (c) Gone to bed with one of the sailors and got myself pregnant. This is the new Time Of Stress, and acting in the new True British Fashion, I faced the problem squarely by: (a) Nipping off to my auntie, the cheery abortionist, (b) Marrying the girl and promising her a life of loveless squalor, (c) Playing house with a young homosexual and waiting for the Day.
But suppose I managed to survive this jeunesse dorée; what then? Well, I might have gone into showbiz, and, living the glamorous life of a matinée idol in Bootle summer stock, entered my senior years without (from sheer luck) having got anyone pregnant, and with the comfy recognition that I was merely an alcoholic failure. Alternatively, had I gone into a respectable profession like teaching, I would have got all the plums the other fellows got (penury, frustration, domestic disaster, social rejection) simply by giving private lessons to a little girl to keep myself from the workhouse. Naturally, there was justice in all this – if I hadn’t been a dirty pacifist, and had gone off to Burma to whistle with the rest of the lads, I could have landed a job in a public school. Mind you, I mightn’t have got a look-in on the whistling routine; the Americans now know that I should have wound up in a grass hut with six typical British chaps, beating the living hell out of a senile Japanese until his mates turned up to square the odds and give us what we deserved.
Nevertheless, though I have been passing these last months with all the misery of an ad-man watching the Truth knock the stuffing out of a beloved Image, it wasn’t until last night that I actually broke and ran. The cinema that had been responsible for most of the punishment suddenly interrupted its run of English films to show an American low-budget movie, called ‘David And Lisa’, and since this took as its subject two young inmates of a mental hospital, I went along with glee at the prospect of having the ball in my court for a rare hour or so. The manager smiled at me in the lobby.
‘Hi there!’ he said. ‘Just in time for the short subject. You’ll like it. It’s an English documentary.’
‘Splendid!’ I said, with a touch of the old panache. After all, I was safe enough. It was probably a Pathé Pictorial, one of those delightfully exportable Technicolor furbelows full of Cotswold centenarians, and Chelsea Pensioners who’ve made the Brighton Pavilion out of matchsticks. I sat down. The lights dimmed. And onto the screen, in several shades of grey, came Waterloo Station, wrapped up by Edward Anstey and John Schlesinger in a package called ‘Terminus’. Leaden-faced people milled about in the gritty air; a small boy sat on a battered trunk, and howled; queues of people moaned about trains that had left ages before, and failed to arrive. I pulled up my coatcollar. I heard the familiar dark laughter breaking out around me. And when a party of convicts appeared and shuffled into a carriage labelled: ‘HOME OFFICE PARTY’, I stood up slowly, mumbled; ‘Excuse me’ in a deep southern accent, and left. The manager was still in the lobby.
‘Where’re you going?’ he said. ‘You’ll miss “Terminus”.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there before. It�
��s where I get off.’
He looked at me. ‘You British and your sense of humour,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Personally, I never went for it. But, by God, I guess you need it, huh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess we do.’
3
Through a Glass, Darkly
The man who owned the papershop came out onto the pavement and watched me copying down addresses from his board. He didn’t say anything; he had been studying me from inside the shop for a long time; I’d seen his eyes in the slit between the halfdrawn blind and the Coca-Cola sign.
I took down half a dozen names and numbers and closed my notebook. He stepped forward.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, a little hesitantly. He was a short, tubby, midfortyish negro in a pinstripe blue suit, white shirt.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Look buddy, maybe it ain’t none of my business, but you sure – I mean, like absolutely sure – you wanna look up them addresses? What I mean is, you wanna live there?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Y’ain’t looking up for somebody else, maybe?’
‘No. For me.’
He plucked a small cigar from his breast pocket, picked a hair off it carefully, struck a match on his window, and lit up, watching me through the smokeclouds.
‘We – ell –’ he said, soft southern, rolling the word, ‘– guess you know y’own mind. Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and would have probed him, but he’d disappeared inside the shop again, and I was left on my blasted heath wondering whether, perhaps, he couldn’t have fitted me out with a quiet little country thaneship somewhere.