Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Koteliansky called LM Katherine’s ‘sole and only friend’; in a sense she allowed Katherine to live the two lives – though both were brief – that a woman who burns with a desire to work and to love needs. In allowing us to trace the course of this extraordinary friendship from adolescent enthusiasm through many trials and quarrels to the final mutual acceptance, Ida Baker has continued her service to her friend.

  New Statesman, 1971

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci

  You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of

  Dorothy Parker by John Keats

  A Month of Saturdays by Dorothy Parker

  introduced by Lillian Hellman

  How do you like your Dorothy Parker? Straight from the page, all staccato typewriter jokes, or in a biographical mausoleum encrusted with psychological interpretation and two large photographs of the big, beautiful, brown, short-sighted eyes? Students of the macabre will go unerringly for John Keats’s You Might as Well Live. Many of her words are entombed within, but her spirit puts in more appearances in A Month of Saturday s, a collection of her New Yorker reviews of the twenties and thirties, with an introduction by Lillian Hellman and Al Hirschfeld’s perfect drawing on the jacket. There she sits with her drink and rueful smile, meditating some piece of character assassination, probably on herself. In fourteen pages Lillian Hellman tells us about the self-contempt, the bad taste in men, the deterioration when drink made her dull and repetitive, the entirely theoretical socialism, the habit of embracing and denouncing, the crazy way with money, and of course the delicate, clear wit which ‘usually came after a silence, and started in the middle’.

  Style and wit are rare and precious, and very difficult to bring alive in biography. Turn to the reviews: although there are traces of self-indulgent padding and repetition (her spoken jokes she never repeated, surely a unique piece of restraint), the level of both humour and judgement is high indeed. She puts across the agony of sitting at the typewriter with this dreadful book to review, the desperation that makes the reviewer clown and pun; and conducts imaginary exchanges with those friends who share her tastes and standards and expect her to be ruthless in adhering to them.

  Nearly all the books she had to review were terrible, but that is the lot of reviewers; perhaps she commanded more choice than most. She deserved to: Appendicitis by Thew Wright AB, MD FACS, elicited what was for her a long piece: ‘when I saw that it started “Let us divide the abdominal cavity into four parts by means of four imaginary lines,” I could only murmur, “Ah, let’s don’t.”’ Her favourite illustration was ‘Vertical section of the Peritoneum’ – ‘It has strength, simplicity, delicacy, pity, and irony.’ And the reproduction of bacteria inspires her to:

  Think of it – no quarrels, no lies, no importunate telegrams, no unanswered letters… and, at the end of twenty-four hours, 16,772,216 children to comfort them in their old age… I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

  Another time she apologizes for having fallen into reviewer’s superlatives. She had been praising Hemingway in phrases such as ‘the greatest living writer of short stories’, and a kindly reader wrote to draw her attention to the still living Max Beerbohm and Rudyard Kipling. Parker climbed down with infinite grace, ending with the whispered emendation: ‘Ernest Hemingway is, to me, a good writer’ – a phrase we reviewers might well hang in pokerwork above our desks.

  Equally memorable is her encounter with Emily Post over the matter of etiquette, culminating in her flat refusal to adopt the safe conversational topics recommended in the guide:

  I may not dispute with Mrs Post. If she says that is the way you should talk, then, indubitably, that is the way you should talk. But though it be at the cost of future social success I am counting on, there is no force great enough ever to make me say, ‘I’m thinking of buying a radio.’

  Social success was not a problem for Dorothy Parker, at any time in her life till the last years, when, according to Keats, her few living friends grew understandably apprehensive about calling on her in her hotel room where she might be found crouching on a rug littered with bottles and dog faeces, muttering ‘You’re Jew-Fascists. Get out of here.’ Those who spend their emotional capital faster than the common rate often make sordid ends: Beau Brummell, Wilde, Scott Fitzgerald. Keats gives us the good years too, when she was queen of the Algonquin wits (sometimes known as the Vicious Circle), an intellectual meritocracy who asked no questions about backgrounds, enjoyed the courting of the rich, drank and whored, and held no morning-after post-mortems; but on the whole his book reads like every mother’s nightmare about what you don’t want to happen to your daughter.

  Keats has worked very hard, asked a lot of questions and compiled a long list of facts about Dorothy Parker; probably more industry has gone into the making of his book than its subject put into her entire œuvre (her husband Alan Campbell once left her to work for an afternoon and placed a hair on the typewriter keys; when he returned it was still there). No pains are spared. We are given the intellectual background:

  Darwin’s theory of evolution had been brought to public attention, leading some people to question the authority of the Bible and even the existence of God. Such talk would have been both exciting and comforting to young Dorothy…

  and the medical background:

  …as the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy says: ‘Modern studies indicate that, with few exceptions, only individuals with serious personality maladjustments become chronic alcoholics.’

  And Montaigne is called in for comment on whether her personality was changed by the abortion and miscarriage episodes.

  And yes, a picture does emerge, of a little woman shaped like a beehive with appalling taste in clothes and interior decoration, who liked knitting and wouldn’t wear glasses, accepted money and foreign trips from men she despised; whose ambivalent feelings towards her Jewish father and Christian stepmother warped her nature into a ferocious distrust of her own affections and achievements; who tried to live like one of the boys and celebrated her partial success in verses that read like A. E. Housman with wisecracks; who earned and spent a fortune in Hollywood during the Depression and joined in some curious parlour pink antics; and who was rather improbably married (on and off) for nearly thirty years to a much younger and probably bisexual man. We are indebted to Keats for his labours, and for anyone interested in the cultural history of the period his book is obligatory reading. But it’s a mercy Dorothy Parker is not alive to review it, because he has succeeded in what one would have thought impossible: he has very nearly turned her into a bore.

  New Statesman, 1971

  PART TWO

  LITERARY EDITOR

  At the New Statesman, Tony Howard had taken over as editor from Crossman in 1972. John Gross was his literary editor but he was about to move on to edit The Times Literary Supplement, and before the end of 1973 Tony and John approached me with the suggestion that I might follow him as literary editor. Tony, with characteristic kindness, insisted that it would be altogether better for me to have a demanding job than to stay at home. John, over coffee at the Holborn Kardomah, gave me a powerful account of the satisfactions to be found from editing: not the same as writing a book, perhaps, but serious and even exciting work, competing each week to make your pages the best. I didn’t need much persuading.

  Tom was due to have an operation at Great Ormond Street early in the year. Jo, my eldest daughter, had just won a scholarship to Cambridge to read mathematics, and her sisters were both doing well at school. Theresa generously assured me that she would stay with us until Tom was five. Nick’s mother came to help care for Tom while he was in plaster after his operation, and Great Ormond Street was blessedly close to Great Turnstile.

  So I took the job at the Statesman and started work in January. Years later, Jo told me this was the time I became recognizably the person I am now. I had to appear confident, at any rate, and the pace of work was such that I was carried on too fast to worry much. I was happy to inherit the
best established contributors, but I wanted to make something new, and I looked for younger writers. Paul Theroux wrote in my first issue and Clive James gave me a fine Byronic ‘Epistle to John Fuller’ as its lead. Other early contributors were Shiva Naipaul, Jonathan Raban, Alison Lurie, Alan Ryan, Julian Mitchell, Hilary Spurling, Neal Ascherson, Marina Warner and Victoria Glendinning. Timothy Mo was my deputy for a while; he left to write full time, becoming deservedly successful as a novelist. Craig Raine reminded me recently that I told him, ‘I’m going to make you famous,’ and burst into peals of laughter. What was that about? Craig was a serious reviewer, I was serious about making good pages, but I had to joke about it too. It was like crossing your fingers for luck; and I knew he didn’t need me to make him famous.

  I wanted the book pages to have a critical edge, to be sharp without being portentous. The back half of the Statesman was traditionally apolitical, and I took it that my job was to engage as seriously with literature as the front of the paper did with politics. Best to be witty while you were about it if you could, but it was not a frivolous activity, being a reviewer. One critic who asked to review a particular book turned in a piece which proved he had not read it through, and I never gave him work again.

  Being able to print poetry was one of the best parts of the job. I wrote to poets I admired for their work – Larkin, D. J. Enright, Derek Mahon, Gavin Ewart, Hugo Williams were some of them. John Fuller’s ‘Wild Raspberries’ is a poem I remember admiring when it came in; seeing it again in his Collected Poems recently, it struck me again how good it is. In 1974 there was a New Statesman Prize I judged with Victor Pritchett, which we gave unhesitatingly to Derek Walcott for his long narrative poem Another Life.

  Martin Amis was a contributor and then my assistant. His first novel made me laugh with pleasure at its high spirits, and because he had that rare thing, a voice of his own, not borrowed from anyone else. His speech was unmistakable too, the deep smoker’s voice coming as a surprise from his slight frame. He had the presence of a star already. Sure of himself and sure of his taste, he was rude about what he didn’t admire, as assured as the most arrogant young Oxbridge don. He could have taught English at Oxford too, if he hadn’t been a writer, and found his territory and subject in the rich mix of London.

  I’d never seen anyone’s hands shake in the morning as Martin’s did. He rolled his own cigarettes out of a neat tin. He also turned in his reviews scrupulously finished on time. And he was an acute sub of other people’s copy. Run it once more through the typewriter, he would say, if he didn’t quite like what he read. We still used typewriters then, the kind you had to hit hard. Martin was unfailingly good humoured, and, if he was not the smoothest or wittiest of that circle, I had no doubt he was the cleverest person I could hope to work with. And the most competitive. They could be a fierce bunch, Clive James, Ian Hamilton, Craig Raine, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Chris Hitchens, and I sometimes felt I was surrounded by a band of pugnacious younger brothers, charming, extraordinary, intellectual elbows out. They were intent on success, as novelists, poets, critics, political journalists or television performers. They glittered with ambition. I’ve enjoyed watching them all shine ever since.

  Soon Julian Barnes joined this formidable nursery, every bit as clever, a shade less fierce in manner. When he turned up to be interviewed for a job with the NS he announced he liked the sound of the idle life we lived, up late, three-hour lunches, off early to the wine bar, he’d heard. His cool humour made him into one of the paper’s star writers, with an adoring following.

  I made friends with other writers. One was Jim Farrell, who won the 1973 Booker Prize for his odd, marvellous novel, The Siege of Krishnapur. He told me he’d been born a rugger player and transformed into a writer by polio, and he was full of contradictions, half worldly, with his flat in Egerton Gardens where we perched on piles of books to drink exquisite wine, and half innocent. He cherished a dream of a pastoral life and regretted that I was not a shepherdess rather than a literary editor. But none of his many devoted friends was in the least bucolic; we were all sorrowful when he retreated to Ireland, and grief-stricken when he died a cruel death there, falling from rocks while fishing.

  Jim and I were both friends of Alison Lurie, who arrived every June from the States, armed with needle-sharp curiosity about the way we lived in London, and as kind in person as she was astringent in her novels. Then there was Paul Theroux, with whom I sometimes rambled round London, while he told me about his ambitions – he called me his boastee – taking in everything with his insatiable writer’s eye as we talked. One day, boating on Regent’s Park lake, he asked me to name the different species of ducks, and was shocked that I couldn’t. In my own country, he said, I should know them all. I think he learnt them then and there, and could probably still give their names.

  While I was at the Statesman my book on Mary Wollstonecraft was published. It caught the feminist wave, attracted a lot of reviews and attention, and won a prize; even the film rights were sold. I found myself broadcasting, judging prizes, serving on committees, writing a script about Virginia Woolf for German television, travelling as a cultural delegate to the Soviet Union, and altogether in danger of taking on so much ‘literary’ activity that it left no time to get on with writing more books.

  So I left the Statesman in 1977, intending to concentrate wholly on writing. It was a bad decision. I was very happy on the paper, working with people I admired and liked; the bustle of office life was congenial to me, and I especially enjoyed being able to try out new talents. Once I had left, I realized what a mistake I had made. And within two years, in which I managed to finish a short book on Shelley, researched and set aside another on Katherine Mansfield, gave up a project on ‘Mark Rutherford’, and had an anthology turned down as too gloomy, I put in for the job of literary editor at The Times. After an interview I was summoned to the Sunday Times by Harold Evans and offered the job there instead. It was an amazing moment for me.

  The drawback to the literary editorship at the Sunday Times was that the paper was going through industrial troubles, and I started work in the autumn of 1979 in an extremely confused situation. At home things were also difficult, and worse than difficult. One of my daughters was struck by an illness which ran a grim course for a year and led to her death. Work became my refuge. Work and death are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and working as an editor puts constant demands that fill the mind; you have to plan ahead, argue with colleagues, make decisions. I found something consoling in the perpetual batches of books coming into the office to be sorted, sent out, discarded. I worked late every day at the Sunday Times, bicycling to and from the office through the Camden and Bloomsbury streets, pleased to be alone and inaccessible to everyone, the traffic like a rough sea to be breasted. I would get home and go straight into the kitchen to make dinner for my schoolboy son and his current helper. The girls went, Jo to teach in Mozambique, Emily to read engineering at Warwick and then to work as an engineer. My mother was descending into dementia, and I had to make hard choices and arrangements for her. The next years were full of the deaths of old and young.

  But work went on. At the Sunday Times the balance between the cultural part of the paper and the rest was very different from the New Statesman’s half politics, half books and arts. Culture was a small enclave in a very large product which went out to millions; the Statesman sold only in the ten thousands. Yet the Sunday Times had always taken critics from the Statesman. Raymond Mortimer and Desmond Shawe-Taylor were still writing for the Sunday Times when I joined, John Carey had been spotted in the pages of the Statesman by Harold Evans and put under contract, Julian Barnes came to the paper as my assistant, and I signed up Paul Theroux, Ian Hamilton, Marina Warner and Victoria Glendinning to write regularly. This was good. At the same time the relative standing of the books pages within the paper was much lower than in the Statesman. I was told by one colleague that I was not a ‘proper journalist’ but a dilettante. The proper journalists were in
clined to see us as peripheral, and too keen on filling our columns with long grey paragraphs of words. I became fierce in defence of words, critics and intellectual values during my years in the Gray’s Inn Road.

  There were few problems of this kind as long as Harry Evans was there. Working under him was like being at the court of Louis XIV. When he beamed his attention fully on any one of us, we were all, men and women, a little in love with him. ‘Let’s make these headlines a bit sexier,’ he would say, coming into the literary department on Thursday afternoon and putting his arms round us. We wanted to please him. If he liked a review, he took the trouble to write to the contributor, and to make him feel as if he were part of the family. Not many editors do this. Harry was loved, even if we sometimes swore at him when his attention was distracted or his favours divided.

  I had no fights with Harry, who upheld my view that the book pages should represent the best in critical judgement. I got on with Frank Giles too, who followed him as editor. I remember only one argument with him, after I had asked John Carey to review the three election manifestos in 1982. Frank objected strongly on the grounds that the book pages should not be political. I wanted the manifestos judged for their literary quality, I explained. Hugo Young supported me in conference, and Frank allowed me to go ahead. Carey judged the Conservative manifesto the best written, not too surprisingly, since it was the work of Ferdinand Mount.

  I planned issues as far ahead as I could, aiming to have at least one review to catch readers who normally ignored book pages. There was a short golden period when John Carey and the historian John Vincent alternated in the lead from week to week. Both were natural journalists with lethal powers of attack. They did not go for the kill every week – in fact they probably praised more often – but they were renowned for their savagery. From them I learnt the appeal of blood sports. I used to whoop with joy over their copy.