Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  You arrive home on page 463, shaken and seared, but fit and well, sitting in your own armchair with a glass of lightly chilled chardonnay in your hand and a bowl of taco chips in front of you. For £1.50! No hidden extras. No airport tax, no gratuities to guides. You buy the wine and the taco chips, the rest’s on me. I think you have a pretty good deal.

  Or maybe you’re not one of those first 2,500 pioneers who rushed to the bookshops as soon as stocks arrived. Maybe you’re one of the readers numbered 2,501 to 5,000, from whom my contract stipulates that I get 12.5%. All right, so we have a slightly different relationship. We have a £1.87375 relationship. How do we feel about this? I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I feel good about it. I feel I’m selling you something that people want to buy. I believe you feel good, too. You think, OK, so I’m paying a little over the odds for this, but that’s the kind of person I am – someone who’s ready to pay a premium price for a premium product. This is the kind of novel that 2,500 people have bought already. This novel is beginning to be hot. Hot costs.

  Unless you’re the 5,001st customer – unless you re one of the people who are paying me 15% thereafter. You see me getting my hands on a cool £2.2485 of your money, and you feel you’re being taken for a ride. Well, why not? I mean, frankly, you’re a Johnny-come-lately. You should have run down to the bookshop along with my fashion-conscious friends 2,501 to 5,000, as soon as they saw it lying on the coffee-tables of their innovative neighbours 1 to 2,500.

  Or did you by any chance pick this up off the remainders table? Because if you did I’m getting nothing at all. You know what I think of a reader like you? I despise you. You’re cheap. You get to the scene where they torture Precious to death with an electric toothbrush, you’ll have a heart-attack, you’ll die.

  Get out of the shop! Go home! You think I’m going to give you bizarre forms of intercourse and violence for nothing? This is what you get for nothing:

  Zack grabbed the old man by the ankles as he fell, and with a huge effort hauled him back into the window. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just kidding.’

  And they all sat down together and had a good laugh and a nice cup of tea.

  (1994)

  Gift to the nation

  I felt terribly guilty when I read that the Treasury had received small sums of money as gifts from private citizens who were ‘anxious to do their best to help in the present situation.’

  I hadn’t realised that the Government would be ready to accept charity. I thought they’d be too proud – I thought they’d be dreadfully hurt if one tried. As soon as I heard that they were prepared to be helped out, of course, I put a pound in an envelope at once, with a brief note to say it was just a little something to see them through to the brighter days we all knew lay ahead.

  But, as I was on the point of sealing the envelope up, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I was being a bit irresponsible handing out charity like this without having any idea how it was going to be used. Giving people handouts which they use merely to debauch themselves further is no kindness at all.

  ‘PS,’ I added at the bottom of the note. ‘You will use this money sensibly, won’t you? You’re entirely free to use it as you think best, naturally – but you won’t go spending it on inessentials, will you?’

  Just a brief word of advice – that’s all that’s needed on these occasions. People thank you for it in the end. But on reflection I realised that perhaps I’d put it in rather a misleading way.

  ‘PPS,’ I added. ‘I don’t mean by this that you should spend it on essentials. Don’t spend it on either inessentials or essentials. I’m trying to reduce the pressure of domestic demand by sending you this pound – I’m trying to take purchasing power out of the home market. If I hear you’ve been putting the purchasing power back by spending my pound in the home market I shall be rather cross.’

  Obvious, of course. But just as I was licking the flap it struck me that this last bit was open to the most terrible interpretation, too.

  ‘PPPS,’ I scribbled hastily. ‘I don’t, of course, mean go spending the money abroad! I’m certainly not giving you a pound to pay for an increase in imports, and to aggravate the flight of sterling to foreign parts!’

  I thought that made it pretty clear what they weren’t to do with the money. But perhaps I ought to drop a hint about what they could do with it?

  ‘The point is,’ I explained, ‘I don’t want you to think of this as spending money at all. I want you to save it up sensibly for a rainy day. Invest it wisely in British enterprise and British skill. Think to what good use dynamic, go-ahead British firms like Screwe Steel Spoons or the Eccleston Ready-Buttered Muffin Co. could put an extra pound!

  ‘I happen to know for a fact that if Eccleston’s could raise any capital they would buy some of the modern automatic muffin-buttering plant which they can’t afford at the moment because of this terrible credit squeeze. And that would mean that they could really flatten their competitors in Germany and Japan …’

  But hey! It would also mean that the pound had got spent after all! The whole pound’s worth of pent-up purchasing power would have been unchained upon the reeling economy! Muffin-buttering machines which would otherwise have gone for export would have been sold at home – operatives in the muffin-buttering machine factory would have drawn my pound in overtime, and squandered it wildly on essentials and inessentials of every kind! Bit of a slip here – I saw that at once.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ I wrote, ‘I see that a more subtle investment policy is called for. Now how about this? You invest the pound in a German or Japanese ready-buttered muffin firm! Then it will be their economy which gets rocked by the inflationary effect, not ours!

  ‘It’s a low trick to play on anyone, I admit, but all’s fair in love and economic competition, isn’t it? Just a moment, though – supposing their re-equipped muffin industry plays a low trick back, and puts ours out of business?

  ‘All right, don’t invest the pound. What I meant all along was this: put my pound in the reserves. Keep it by you until there’s another run on sterling, and you have to buy pounds to support the exchange rate. You may well be glad of the odd pound to buy the odd pound with …

  ‘No, I haven’t put that very well. I mean you’ll be glad of some dollars to buy pounds with. So buy a pound’s worth of dollars to keep by you. I mean, don’t sell the pound, of course. I’m not giving you this pound for you to go around selling it, as if you didn’t have any confidence in the currency and you wanted to unload it in favour of dollars, like some damned Continental speculator. I mean, what I want you to do is … well …

  ‘Now let’s work this out calmly. There must be some way of using the pound to make the country rich without actually letting go of it. Let’s say you borrow a pound’s worth of dollars against the security of the pound. Then you use the dollars to support sterling by buying a pound’s worth of pounds. Then with the pound’s worth of pounds you buy a pound’s worth of dollars … And there we go again, selling pounds!

  ‘Look, are you sure that my giving you this pound isn’t just going to make things worse instead of better? The more I think about it, the more ways I can see that you might cause trouble with it.

  ‘It seems to me on mature reflection that the most constructive thing you could do would be to neutralise its purchasing-power and general potential for harm by burning it, provided that you can do this without spending money on matches and paraffin.

  ‘On second thoughts I recall that there is a national shortage of banknotes. Perhaps the best solution all round would be if I kept the pound, and sent you a cheque for the amount instead. Then you can burn the cheque, and I’ll give the pound to the milkman.

  ‘A little nearer Christmas I’ll send you a bundle of clean cast-offs for the winter.’

  (1966)

  H & C

  One of the rewards of reading Marshall McLuhan is that it enables me to make my friend Horace Morris feel uneasy about not having read it, just as in the p
ast I’ve made him feel very insecure for not understanding commitment and alienation, and not knowing what charisma was, and thinking that pop music was a bad thing after all the rest of us had realised it was a good thing.

  The way the dissemination of ideas works around our way is that first my good friend Christopher Crumble gets to hear about them, and makes me feel insecure. Then I catch up and make Horace Morris feel insecure. By the time Horace had discovered the meaning and omnipresence of charisma, for example, I was right off it – no one seemed charismatic to me any more, not even Harold Wilson or David Frost. I was on to ‘symbiosis’ – and Christopher Crumble, the Speedy Gonzales of the intellect, was already out of ‘symbiosis’ and into ‘I-Thou,’ or even ‘freakout.’

  What happens to ideas after Horace has cast them off I can’t imagine. That far down in the market their secondhand value must have reached vanishing point.

  Anyway, now it’s McLuhan, and almost everything in the world, as I now realise, is iconic. Including McLuhan’s own book, ‘Understanding Media.’ I’ve never come across anything more iconic, as I said to Horace.

  ‘Iconic?’ repeated Horace uneasily.

  ‘Oh, tremendously iconic. I didn’t know it was possible for a book to be so iconic. Have you read it, Horace?’

  ‘Well, not exactly …’

  ‘I think your lack of interest in books is very significant and interesting, Horace. Even without reading McLuhan you instinctively reject the print culture, and the whole repetitive, mechanical approach to life of which printing is the archetype. You realise that print means centralisation and uniformity. You’re not satisfied with the shallow participation which is all books demand – the specialisation and fragmentation of human life which the print culture suggests.’

  ‘Well, you know, Michael …’

  ‘You understand instinctively that print is a hot medium.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘You feel in your bones that this is the electric age – the age of the total involvement of the individual in humanity at large by way of television. You didn’t need McLuhan to tell you that television was a cool medium – that it’s low-definition, that it requires the participation of the viewer to give the image meaning. The truth is that you’re a natural twentieth-century man, Horace!’

  ‘Well, I watch a certain amount of television,’ he said uneasily. ‘But I must admit, I do read some books …’

  ‘Oh, some books, sure. But how about medieval manuscripts. Horace? Do you read manuscripts at all?’

  ‘Manuscripts? Oh God no, I certainly don’t read manuscripts I think I can truthfully claim that I’ve never read a single medieval manuscript in my life.’

  At this, of course, I became somewhat pensive.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh. That’s rather a pity. Manuscript is a cool medium.’

  ‘Well, of course, I’ve read a few modern …’

  ‘Quite. How do you stand on strip cartoons, Horace? Do you look at the strip cartoons at all?’

  He thought for some time, shifting uneasily about in his chair.

  ‘N-o-o-o-o,’ he said at last. ‘No, I don’t. I think I’ve always realised somehow that they were part of the print culture business – you know, very standardised and mechanical and …’

  ‘I see. Well, McLuhan thinks strip cartoons are a cool medium. He may be wrong, of course.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that …’

  ‘Do you listen to the radio at all, Horace?’

  ‘Oh God yes! Oh God, I mean, I really feel that radio is an essential part of the electric culture …’

  I was looking very grave at this point in the interrogation, as you can imagine.

  ‘Radio is a hot medium,’ I told him, as kindly as I could. ‘High definition. Involves visualisation. Caused the rise of Hitler, according to McLuhan. Still, no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy it, if you want to. I suppose you like using the phone?’

  ‘Oh God no!’ said Horace hurriedly. ‘I mean, oh God yes! I mean no! Hate it! Can’t stand all that visualisation, and so on …’

  ‘Wrong again, I’m afraid, Horace,’ I said, shaking my head sadly. ‘The telephone’s a cool medium. Low definition – involves participation. Still, you do watch television. That’s something. What do you watch, Horace? ‘Panorama’?’

  ‘Yes – no! No, no, no, no! I watch things like – well old movies.’

  ‘Old movies, Horace?’

  ‘Bad old movies,’ he added hastily. But he could see from my expression that there was something wrong here. ‘I thought bad old movies were good?’ he cried. ‘I thought bad old movies were the new thing?’

  ‘My God, Horace!’ I shouted, my tactful reserve breaking down at last. ‘Bad old movies were new three years ago! Bad old movies were back in the days of Susan Sontag! Listen, Horace, films are high-definition. Films don’t involve the total participation of the viewer. Films are a relic of the mechnical print culture. Films are hot, Horace!’

  So much for Horace Morris’s pretensions to be cool electric man. Though after he’d had time to think about it, he said that he watched the old movies on BBC 2, with an inside aerial. Definition was so poor, he said, with three or four overlapping images and the picture going jump-jump-jump every minute, and viewer participation was so high, with the viewer springing up to shift the aerial back and forth round the room all the time, that the medium was cool enough to neutralise the heat of even the hottest film.

  And when you consider that he’s short-sighted, too … Maybe he is cool electric man after all.

  (1967)

  Hamlet OBE

  The one heavy industry that shows no sign of declining is the vast enterprise which turns all that crude Shakespeare the country possesses into finished Peter Hall and Peter Brook.

  I sometimes wonder if the workers in this industry ever worry lest one day they exhaust all the possible permutations of interpretation, editing, punctuation, fancy dress, and general joking up, and find themselves reduced to the shameful expedient of putting the stuff on more or less as the old fool wrote it.

  I’m not advocating this; I couldn’t sit through a Hamlet uncut and unrelieved by cheering breaks for swordplay. All the same, as time goes on the variations left to try are going to become pretty esoteric. Particularly when the National Foundation Stone on the South Bank gets under way with all the brainpower at its command.

  They may bulk the programme out with Roots, Look Back in Anger, The Caretaker, Roots done in Second Empire costume, Look Back in Anger in Gestapo uniforms and riding boots, The Caretaker in Melanesian ritual masks, Roots chanted by antiphonal choruses of Manchester schoolgirls, Look Back in Anger danced to music by Chopin and Rachmaninov, The Caretaker mimed by actors from the Kabuki Theatre, and so on and so forth, but in between whiles it’s going to be Shakespeare, Shakespear, Shaksper.

  By the end of the century they should be very far out indeed. Here’s a preview of what Lord Olivier of Elstree, Sir Kenneth Tynan, Sir Sean Kenny, Sir Lionel Bart Bart, and Dame Kayser Bondor will be giving us for the winter season of 1999 – Hamlet OBE.

  Act One

  [Enter Ghost, in phosphorescent buskins.]

  HORATIO: Look! My! Lord, it comes!

  [He flexes his thighs.]

  HAMLET: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

  [While the Ghost mimes telling his tale, angels and ministers of grace appear dressed as fighter-pilots and Ministers of Defence and burlesque defending us in a satirical anti-war masque.]

  GHOST: Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.

  [Exit, pursued by a bear.]

  HAMLET: O that! This too? Too solid!

  Flesh would melt,

  Thaw – and resolve itself in two.

  Adieu!

  [He slaps his buskins.]

  OPHELIA: O! what a noble! Mind is here o’erthrown!

  [They fight.]

  Act Two

  [Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, and attendant Knights Commander. They flex their thighs and s
lap their buskins.]

  HAMLET: How long hast thou been grave, mucker?

  [The grave diggers perform a very grave digging dance, while newsreel shots of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand are shown in back projection.]

  HAMLET: The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll slap the buskins of the king.

  [They fight.]

  Act Three

  [Another part of the plot. The King, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, etc. They flex their buskins and slap their thighs.]

  POLONIUS [aside]: Though this be madness, yet there is Method in’t.

  [They fight.]

  Act Four

  HAMLET: To be or not.

  To be that

  Is the question whether.

  [He thighs, and busks his slapkins. They fight.]

  Act Five

  HAMLET: The rest is silence.

  [Dies.]

  HORATIO: Now cracks a noble.

  [A noble cracks. Horatio auscults him.]

  Heart good.

  [Yawning, and offering a chocolate to Fortinbras.]

  ’Night! Sweet, Prince?

  FORTINBRAS: Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier, from the stage;

  For it was likely, had it been put on,

  To have prov’d most royally.

  [A dead march. Exeunt, bearing knighthoods.]

  (1963)

  A hand of cards

  Bernard –

  With All Good Wishes

  for a Merry Christmas

  and a Happy New Year!

  –from Charles (Edwards!)

  I don’t know whether you remember me – we used to prop up the bar of the Rose and Crown together occasionally in the good old days, in dear old London town. How are you keeping back there in England, you old reprobate? Look me up if you’re ever passing through New Zealand.