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Towards the End of the Morning
MICHAEL FRAYN
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1967
First published in the U.S. (as Against Entropy) by Viking Press in 1967
First Valancourt Books edition 2015
Copyright © 1967 by Michael Frayn
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Michael Frayn
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Cover photograph: Toronto Star newsroom, ca. 1964. Reproduced under a Flickr Creative Commons License.
Cover design by Henry Petrides
INTRODUCTION
This book seems to have been retitled over the years, by the common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me since it was first published in 1967, as Your Fleet Street Novel. No one, for some reason, can remember the title I gave it, though I rather like it still, when I can manage to recall it. The confusion has been made worse because it had a different title in America, Against Entropy. I like that one, too; but no one has been able to remember it any better than Towards the End of the Morning.
What surprises me a little is that anyone can still remember what the phrase ‘Fleet Street’ once signified. Fleet Street now is just the dull busy thoroughfare that connects the City to the West End. When I first arrived to work in it, in the last few months of the 1950s, it was synonymous with the newspaper industry. It referred not just to the street itself, but to the whole close-packed district around it – to a way of life with its own style and philosophy; a world that has now vanished as completely as the Fleet Ditch that gave the Street its name. (The notoriously foul stream was incorporated by Bazalgette into the sewerage system, and concealed in a culvert that runs beneath Ludgate Circus, at the eastern end of the Street; certain parallels with the newspaper industry, however, continued to be visible to its critics.)
It even had its own characteristic smell. Just as Southwark, where my father worked, on the other side of the river, was immediately identifiable by the delicately sour smell of the Kentish hops that were warehoused and factored there, so the alleys and courts of Fleet Street were haunted by the grey, serious smell of newsprint. I catch the delicious ghost of it in my nostrils now, and at once I’m back at the beginning of my career, struggling to conceal my awe and excitement at having at last arrived in this longed-for land.
By that time, actually, Fleet Street was coming towards the end not just of the morning, but of the afternoon as well, and the shades of night were gathering fast. On the Street itself there were only two real newspaper offices left – the modernistic black glass box from which the Daily and Sunday Express improbably dispensed their archaic patriotics, and the white imperial slab of the Telegraph, looking more appropriately like the Tomb of the Unknown Leader-Writer. The London offices of various provincial and foreign papers maintained Fleet Street addresses in cramped rooms up staircases above tobacconist’s shops – the Manchester Guardian, where I worked, had a few rooms over the Post Office at the Temple Bar end of the Street.
The real life, though, was in the narrow lanes just off the Street, in Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane to the north, and Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street to the south – in the grimy, exhausted-looking offices of the Mail and the Mirror, the News of the World, the Evening News and the Evening Standard. The Observer, to which I moved in 1962, occupied a muddled warren down in Tudor Street. Other papers had ventured a little further, though they all remained in pubbable range – the Times at Blackfriars, the Financial Times up the hill by St Paul’s, the Sunday Times and Sunday Pictorial a bleak half-mile away in Gray’s Inn Road. The Sun and the Independent were still undreamed of, and the appearance of anything new in this run-down world seemed as unlikely as the birth of a baby in an old folks’ home. Even when the Daily Telegraph did manage to give birth to the Sunday Telegraph in 1961 the new infant had a suitably grey and elderly air.
A few terminal cases were still coughing their last in odd corners. The Daily Herald up in Endell Street, being slowly suffocated by its affiliation to the TUC; down in Bouverie Street the poor old News Chronicle, the decent Liberal paper that everyone liked but no one read, and on which I had been brought up, kept going by its rather more successful little brother, the evening Star. (A third evening! Can you imagine?) On the masthead of the Chronicle lingered the titles of a whole succession of defunct and forgotten papers that had been interred in it over the years, like the overgrown names of the departed accumulating on a family mausoleum: the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, the Daily Dispatch, the Westminster Gazette, the Morning Leader. I’d scarcely been there a year when the whole vault finally collapsed, taking the Star and all the old names with it.
All the same, the forests of the sub-arctic North were still being steadily digested each day through this tangled alimentary canal. Great cylinders of newsprint went swinging above your head from the articulated lorries blocking every side-street. Through grimy pavement-level skylights here and there you could glimpse the web racing on the huge machines thundering in the basements. In every loading-bay there loitered underemployed gangs left over from some earlier industrial age, waiting to pass the product out, bale by bale, hand to hand, like sacks of grain from a mediaeval mill, to the the vans that raced the more and more clamorously titled Late Extras and Late Finals of the evenings to the street-corner vendors, then the Irish and country editions of the dailies to the main-line stations. And, wafting from every bay and ventilator and seedy lobby, that intoxicating scent.
Mingling with it was another characteristic smell – the warm beery breath from doorways with titles above them as familiar as the mastheads on the papers themselves. The Mucky Duck, aka White Swan, where the Chronicle and I think the Mail drank; the Printer’s Devil, favoured by the Mirror; the King and Keys, in Fleet Street itself, that refreshed the Telegraph opposite. I was passing the King and Keys one day when I was almost killed by a projectile emerging from it like a shell from a howitzer. It was a man being ejected by unseen hands, in a high trajectory that took him clear above the pavement and into the gutter beyond; whoever it was, somebody evidently felt quite strongly that it was time for him to be on his way back to the office. From the windows of the Guardian on another occasion I watched a very large and distinguished journalist slowly emerge from Piele’s, the pub opposite, totter a few dignified steps, then abruptly sit down on the pavement, where he remained, with a surprised but resigned look on his face, plainly not the shape of person to be able to get to his feet again unaided, until the news got back to Piele’s, and a team of rescue workers came straggling out to hoist him up and carry him back inside again for medication.
The Observer drank in Auntie’s, though I’ve forgotten whether it had any other name, and even who Auntie was. The Guardian had a foot in two camps. One was the Clachan, a rather undistinguished Younger’s house grimly decorated with samples of the different tartans, where we drank our best bitter watched by a mysterious official of o
ne of the print unions, who sat on his own at a corner of the bar every day from opening to closing time, wearing dark glasses and referred to in respectful whispers, but speaking to no one, apparently paid by either union or management just to sit there and drink all day.
The other was El Vino’s (always so-called, with an apostrophe s, like Piele’s or Auntie’s, as if it had a landlord called Elmer Vino). This was quite different – not a pub at all, but a wine-bar before wine-bars had been invented, where we drank not bitter but Chablis-and-soda, alongside not trade-unionists but florid Rumpoles from the Temple and the sort of fellow-journalists who had pretensions to be members of a learned profession themselves – ruined scholars who could review you at short notice a book about Lord Northcliffe or Hugh Kingsmill, or knock you out a belligerently authoritative think-piece on the proper constitutional relationship between Crown and Woolsack. Women were strongly discouraged from entering. Any woman who insisted was not allowed to disturb the collegiate atmosphere of the bar itself but was directed to a room at the back furnished with chairs and tables, where Elmer’s grand head-waiter would ritually shame her by forcing one of the more elderly and infirm old soaks taking refuge there to give up his seat to her.
There was something symbolic about our alternation between these two different establishments. On the one hand we were simple craftsmen and trade-unionists; on the other we had certain social aspirations. I was a member of the National Union of Journalists, certainly, but my only contact with it by the time I had moved to the Observer, apart from paying my dues, was an occasional plaintive note from the Branch Secretary asking why we had no union chapel at the office. I would pass the queries on to colleagues who knew more than I did about the paper’s rather idiosyncratic workings, and back the same answer would always come: we didn’t need a chapel because we were all, staff and management alike, gentlemen together.
We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace, it’s true, by the standards of today’s journalists. We didn’t have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill, and we hadn’t yet got bogged down in the endless union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet Street, before Rupert Murdoch side-stepped them, and in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of Wapping. Now the rest of the newspaper industry has followed Murdoch’s lead, and scattered across London – to the Isle of Dogs and Clerkenwell (where my two former employers have taken refuge under the same roof at last), to Old Street and Kensington High Street – even, at one point, to South London and Heathrow. I don’t know who’s getting thrown out of the King and Keys these days, but no one, I imagine, with that astonishing ability to drink until the floor tips and still write a thousand words on the shocking decline in standards of behaviour.
Long before newspapers were out of Fleet Street, though, I was out of newspapers. Leaving behind the small memento that follows, My Fleet Street Novel.
The unnamed paper where the story is set is located in one of the Street’s more obscure backwaters. From the sound of it I imagine that Hand and Ball Court was on the site of a yard where an early forerunner of fives was played. Perhaps it had been part of the Henry VIII’s Bridewell Palace, that Edward VI made better known when he turned it into a penitentiary for vagabonds and whores. I can’t find it on the current A to Z, so I suppose it has vanished in its turn to make way for a splendid new palace of commerce, perhaps also housing a few modern rogues of one sort or another, just as the paper itself has presumably been relocated to a more remote and less congenial environment, if not to the footnotes of media history.
I have been authoritatively informed by some people that it’s really the Guardian; by others that it’s the Observer. It doesn’t seem to me much like either. So far as I can tell it is itself, as things in fiction so often are, though no one believes it. In which case its editor bears no resemblance to any real editor of my acquaintance? – Well, yes, he does, as it happens – to a most distinguished editor, though not one who ever, so far as I know, set foot in Fleet Street, or any of its surrounding byways. So are any of the other characters based on real people? – I borrowed a few features, I have to confess – a nose here, perhaps, and an eye there. Some of the characteristics of John Dyson, the head of the department that deals with the crossword, the nature notes, and other miscellaneous features, I took from the wonderful leader-page editor of the Observer, John Silverlight, who used to handle my copy, and of whom I was very fond. Gradually everyone in the office but John guessed. He wasn’t one to keep a thought to himself, any more than John Dyson is, but he never noticed even when one of our colleagues used to embarrass me by performing lines of his dialogue in front of him – ‘Oh, Michael, you write like an angel!’ etc. I never owned up, I’m afraid. Not, at any rate, until I wrote his obit a few years ago, just as poor old Eddy Moulton, the ancient who is sleeping out his last years in the corner of John Dyson’s office, was no doubt doing of his contemporaries.
The story begins with a premature and premonitory nightfall, and I suppose that with hindsight the book does look a bit like a valediction – though in the case of Fleet Street itself, as it turned out, the darkness that settled in was not going to lift in time for lunch. I’m not sure if I think of it like that, however. Dyson is in his thirties, and I see it as being more about . . . well, yes, the later stages of the morning – of his morning – and about his doomed attempts to turn back the tide of entropy, the inevitable trend of any system towards death and disorder.
I was in my early thirties myself when I wrote it, so I suppose I was thinking about my own life as well, at any rate unconsciously. What was I worrying about? I can’t remember any conscious forebodings. I was happily married to my first wife, with two small daughters. I was still writing a weekly column, but I’d made a start as a novelist and I was already more than half out of journalism, as my characters feel they will have to be before they’re forty. Even writing the book was a relatively serene experience, after the difficulties I’d gone through with my first two novels, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it as a result.
Curiously, it’s the ends of the mornings that I remember best when I was writing it – not sudden darknesses in Fleet Street, but sunlit autumn days at home as the first chapters began to take shape, and I went off to fetch my three-year-old daughter from nursery school, my head still humming with all John Dyson’s great plans to reconstruct himself along more gentlemanly lines, and all his colleague Bob’s helplessness in the face of women and toffees. Writing isn’t always the misery that writers sometimes like to make out. Those autumn mornings seem a long time ago now, and there were a few complications coming in the plot, for me as well as for my characters.
Now, I suppose, the evening is drawing on, and here am I, no longer fretting away about future events like John Dyson, or awaiting them with dozy fatalism, like Bob, but rambling on about the past like poor old Eddy Moulton. Whatever I was worrying about the first time round, I don’t think I saw that coming.
Michael Frayn
One
The sky grew darker and darker as the morning wore on. By the time the coffee came round it was like a winter evening, and there were lights in all the windows that looked down on Hand and Ball Court. Bob stood at the window of Dyson’s department, gazing out dreamily at the apocalyptic gloom, and eating toffees from a paper bag. He was watching the people emerging from the passageway which connected Hand and Ball Court with Fleet Street. Some of them he knew; colleagues, arriving at their various different times to start the day’s work – Ralph Absalom, Mike Sparrow, Gareth Holmroyd. In the strange mid-morning darkness their familiarity seemed slightly ridiculous. It was like seeing one’s fellow-countrymen abroad.
‘Oh God!’ said Dyson, flinging himself back suddenly in his chair. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God! Will somebody put the lights on in here before we all go blind?’
Apart from Bob, the only other person in the room was old Eddy Moulton, who was sitting over a tatte
r-edged Victorian newspaper file, picking out items for a daily column called ‘In Years Gone By’. He was long past retiring age, and not expected to pay any attention to Dyson. In any case, he was asleep.
‘Bob!’ said Dyson plaintively. ‘Will somebody for God’s sake put the lights on?’
‘All right, John,’ murmured Bob automatically, not moving, still intent upon the dark figures in the Court.
‘Oh God!’ said Dyson. He had a staff – Bob and old Eddy Moulton were his staff – and he had to jump up and down all the time switching the lights on and off himself! No wonder he was overwhelmed by work. No wonder that by four o’clock in the afternoon he would be literally dizzy, literally overcome by a sensation of drowning in work, so that he had to loosen his tie and undo his collar. Now that he had put the lights on he could see clearly just how much work there was waiting on his desk. There was copy waiting to be subbed, galley proofs waiting to be corrected. There were complimentary tickets for the National Provincial Bank’s performance of The Pirates of Penzance, and for an undergraduate production of Sweeney Agonistes, passed on to him by the News Editor and the Features Editor, and invitations to try new golf-training machines and indoor ski slopes, sent along by the Sports Editor. Dyson’s department was the drain into which the last spent dregs of the world’s commercial largesse fell after being sieved and filtered by everyone else on the paper, so that it was Dyson who had the labour of writing the letters of refusal. He did not like to tell his colleagues to stop passing on their unwanted perquisites, because occasionally they involved free airline trips abroad, which he and his department accepted.
Most urgent of all, there were notes and memoranda scribbled on pieces of coarse office copy paper. They were from himself to himself. ‘Ring Muller abt t buzzards piece,’ they said. ‘Ask Sims abt t libel poss of sayg chem frtlisr klls hdghgs.’ ‘Check w Straker on immac concep VM.’ ‘RING MORLEY FIND OUT WHRE T HELL COPY FOR FRI IS.’
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