Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  With Andrew Neil’s arrival as editor in 1983 things did not improve in the literary department. He wanted to sack John Mortimer (too left wing) and Marina Warner (too highbrow). At the same time he was obsessed with the idea that books should be reviewed by famous names, cabinet ministers and celebrities. There are politicians who write well – Jenkins, Foot, Powell among them – but they are few. One minister wished on me did not understand the difference between reviewing and handing out the party line. Another politician sent in copy written by his secretary. Celebrities understandably think their name is what matters, not how they write. Neil and I battled over this throughout my time with him. I said the Sunday Times could make names famous by using good writers and showing we were proud of them; but I could never persuade him to feature book page names at the front of the paper, or in advertisements, as the Observer did.

  Neil suggested I should try to get Anthony Burgess to write for the Sunday Times. I said I admired his reviews in the Observer: presumably we would be offering him more money than our rival paper? No, no, I was told, we couldn’t afford to pay more. Why didn’t I just fly to the south of France, take Burgess out to dinner, and persuade him to write for us? As a plan, it seemed to lack something, and I let it fade away. Conversely, I failed in my attempt to sack Woodrow Wyatt, who was under contract when I joined the paper. He arrived at what was meant to be the fatal lunch looking woebegone, and when I told him I wanted to end his contract, he became pathetic. Could he not stay on and write just the occasional piece? Then he launched into an account of his early days in the Labour Party and in India. On these topics he was entertaining. I found myself agreeing he might continue. Although I gave him very little work, I came to like him, and I realized he could have tried to intimidate me by telling me he was a close friend of Murdoch. But he hadn’t said a word.

  I cherish the memory of another lunch, with Charles Monteith of Faber & Faber. Literary editors were invited regularly by the heads of major publishing firms to these ritual treats. The procedure was to concentrate on food and wine until about halfway through the main course, when the publisher would draw out his new catalogue and take you through it. Some praised every book, the more sophisticated passed over a few, saving their best effects for favourite titles. On this occasion Charles turned the pages slowly and thoughtfully. Fiction, general, biography, poetry passed by as I sat poised to listen, sole half consumed in front of me. At last he spoke, more memorably than any publisher I have ever lunched with. ‘I’m afraid… I don’t think there’s anything interesting at all in our spring list, Claire.’ I wanted to hug him.

  Neil regularly spoke of book publishing as a sunset industry. I argued that books fuelled and nourished other industries, films and television. Another row we had was about the best-seller lists. One day I was formally instructed that they must be printed right across the top of the book pages. I said I was not prepared to do this. The book pages did not serve the best-seller list, they put forward an alternative view of what might interest our readers. The deputy editor, Ivan Fallon, was sent to make me comply. We were locked in battle when Victoria Glendinning came in to the office with her review. I turned to her and asked her how she would respond to book pages laid out as suggested, with the reviews appearing below the best-seller lists. For one second she hesitated, then, ‘Ridiculous’, she said. Ivan Fallon turned tail before these two Furies, and the idea was not raised again.

  Neil and I had another fight over a review by Hugh Brogan of a book critical of US policy in Guatemala. As editor, he had every right to order out a review, but I fought him on this too, and it appeared with only a few words changed. Neil became so suspicious of my way of doing things – reviewing the wrong books, sending books to the wrong reviewers, giving space to books he did not approve of, overlooking ones he did – that he announced he was going to have a computer print-out of all book titles as they came in. He and Fallon would go through them and send down instructions. I agreed cheerfully, because I suspected he had no idea of how many books came through our department every week. I did ask him if he had thought of consulting the Bookseller or the publishers’ lists, but he insisted it must be the computer. The system was put into action at once. A young woman came to our department each week to list the hundreds of titles by hand; she then transferred them to a computer and finally produced print-outs. It was a very large task, even though by the time she got to the shelves most of the important books had already been sent out to reviewers. A forest’s worth of paper was churned out, but no instructions based on the print-out ever came down from the editor or his deputy, and after a while the system lapsed.

  One day Rupert Murdoch appeared on the stone with Neil, who was heard complaining about the highbrow tendency of the book pages. ‘Leave the book pages alone,’ said Murdoch. ‘Nobody reads them anyway.’ I decided I would take this as an expression of support from our proprietor.

  I stayed with the Sunday Times until 1986, but I never enjoyed it as much as the Statesman. I cherished my contributors, Anita Brookner, John Keegan, David Lodge, Peter Ackroyd, George Melly, Adam Mars-Jones, Jonathan Raban, Anthony Storr and Christopher Ricks among others. When Julian left, John Ryle came as my assistant. Neil’s suspicion of another highbrow – John came from the TLS – was allayed when he learnt that he was ghosting Mick Jagger’s memoirs. Here at last was someone on the books pages who lived in the real world. And when the real world beckoned John away in 1984, Sean French, who was already contributing and advising us on young writers, took over. My view was that it was best to have a deputy cleverer than you are, and I kept up the tradition to the end.

  *

  As literary editor, I had to cover the Booker Prize each year, and in my first year at the Sunday Times I was a judge. Margaret Forster, Ronald Blythe and Brian Wenham were my fellow judges, David Daiches our chairman. I was determined that Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid should be on the short-list. I didn’t expect it to win, but I knew it should be there. So I dug in my heels, and after some hard bargaining it went on. (Fifteen years later she won the W. H. Smith Prize, to my joy.) But the big contenders for the Booker in 1980 were, by general consent, Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, a huge, ungainly, careless book full of life and energy; and William Golding’s Rites of Passage, a finely constructed work by an established master, but with something slightly stale about it – I even wondered whether he had written it some years earlier and left it in a drawer. The night before our final meeting I lay awake telling myself I must decide between these two. But in the morning Daiches began by dismissing the Burgess book as one that needed no further consideration – it simply wouldn’t do. I then made a pitch for it, for its range and vitality, for the way Burgess applied his imagination to the world we were living in, for his heroic powers to entertain. At the end of my speech I saw that not one of my fellow judges agreed with me. Seeing that Burgess was out, knowing that the other judges had only just consented to Munro being on the short list, I gave my vote to Golding.

  While we were talking, we were brought a message from Burgess to say he would come to the dinner only if he had won. I felt sympathy for him. There is something brutal in making writers into circus performers for the media. Better for short-listed writers to be told in advance, whatever the public’s appetite for watching humiliation, disappointment or triumph. When the announcement was made that year, I saw a tear on Golding’s cheek. It should have been a private tear.

  While I was at the Sunday Times the job of editor of the TLS came up. Once again, John Gross was leaving, to go to the New York Times. I was encouraged to apply for the editorship, and was short-listed. But I was in two minds about it. It would have been a great thing to be the first woman editor of the TLS, and I thought I could do the job. What made me hesitate was the knowledge that if I took it on, the commitment would be so big and the work so demanding that I would have no time or energy left to give my son. He was already fatherless, and still a small boy. I had thought it better for him to have a
working mother than one perpetually absorbed in him and his problems, but there was a difference between being a literary editor and editing the TLS. I judged it would take me two years to feel on top of that job, and I hesitated.

  Any crack in your ambition will be apparent when you are interviewed for a job. There were in any case other excellent candidates – Jeremy Treglown, who got it, was admirably qualified – but I think my own uncertainty about whether I really wanted it helped to rule me out. When I was told, I felt relief, but also guilt, because I had not pursued the prize with all flags flying, full steam ahead. And I had lost it for my sex as well as for myself. I still can’t decide whether I was right or wrong.

  Out of Africa

  The Black House by Paul Theroux

  It takes courage for a writer to abandon a tone of voice which he has mastered and to attempt something completely different; but it is the sort of courage a serious writer needs. Paul Theroux started publishing novels in 1967 and has produced a series of brilliant and much praised books each of which, though more than funny, was without doubt very funny indeed. The Black House marks a departure from this series: any jokes lurking in the narrative are of a depressed and bitter kind, jokes involving disappointment, betrayal of friends, disgust with the way things are. This may be partly because the hero is neither a young man nor even – as Theroux’s last hero, ‘Saint Jack’, was – a middle-aged man able to comfort himself with fantasy. Sickness, sourness and despair afflict Alfred Munday, an anthropologist forced into early retirement away from a sunny African location and ‘his’ people, the Bwamba, into the damp Dorset village his wife Emma has hankered after.

  In part, then, it is a novel about the expatriate condition, a condition Theroux is in a good position to explicate; he has lived and set novels in Africa and Singapore since leaving his native America, and is now himself settled in England. He has to an unusual degree the qualities a travelling writer needs if he is to be more than a travel writer: he can soak up atmosphere as quickly and thoroughly as a sponge, and he does not intrude his own personality. His English village, its flora and fauna, topography and moods, indoor and out, are here as sharply outlined as any of his earlier exotic settings. Anyone who has been an interloper in an English village – and it’s the commonest way of experiencing country life today – will recognize the accuracy of the descriptions. Pleasure has to be found in cold, rain and early darkness (‘it never gets this dark in London’, as one baffled visitor points out); there is a good deal of slyness, social unease, bonhomie that cracks quickly. Munday’s views on Africa, delivered at the village hall, do not help him along any more than his bad temper when he is baited at the pub by the villagers or condescended to by the squire over sherry.

  Two episodes touch on expatriate torments with particular acute-ness. In one, Munday takes the umbilical train to London for the day and meets first with an old tea-planter friend who cannot disguise the misery of his present life, reduced to incompetent English whores, macaroni cheese in pubs, bus-catching and evenings of television in Ealing – he, who had once bossed hundreds. Later on in the same day Munday takes tea with an old flame whose only asset now is her pretty daughter; left alone over the fruitcake with this schoolgirl for a moment, Munday politely asks her how she likes London, and the child answers laconically, ‘Mummy fucks my friends.’ He is shocked, as we are. Mummy returns to assure him that marriages are broken by the strain of English life after the ease of post-colonial society.

  Munday and Emma, however, have the innocent mutual dependence of certain childless couples. They don’t feel that strain consciously. In parental mood, they invite down a Bwamba friend Munday had helped (and studied) from his boyhood; Emma is maternal, but Munday finds himself no longer able to like the younger man, aware of the villagers’ suspicions of a black and unable to tolerate him outside his natural setting. One of the best things in the book is the cross-country walk on which Munday cruelly drags his friend in his thin shoes.

  ‘I sometimes feel I could have discovered all I needed to know about isolation and perhaps even tribalism right here… and witchcraft of a sort,’ says Munday at one point; the parallel between the African village community and the English one is never far from his mind. And in fact he is caught up in some English witchcraft, a haunting providing the other strand to the plot. Sinister and erotic, this is the most technically adventurous part of the narrative, and it put me in mind of a Henry James ghost story; only there the sexual element is never allowed to surface, whereas here it is not only explicit but insistent.

  There is a tremor of uncertainty at the end of the book. Munday reaches some resolution whose value is not quite made clear; and he himself grows shadowy, more possessed by his ghost than in possession of himself. But then the book is about a man panicked by doubts about just where he and other creatures do belong. The degree of skill with which Theroux handles these various themes and the level mastery of his writing have produced a novel of unusual scope and promise still more for the future.

  New Statesman, 1974

  Anger and Accommodation

  Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick Reader, I Married Him by Patricia Beer

  There is a scene early in Tess of the D’Urbervilles when Tess’s mother chides her for having failed to hold out for marriage with Alec D’Urberville. Tess cries out: O mother, my mother!… How could I be expected to know?… Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of learning that way.’

  Tess herself could scarcely have known about the novels read by ladies and the lessons learnt from them; the remark is really Hardy’s own, and he puts it here to point the difference between the innocent, untutored heroine of his tragedy and the type of woman he perhaps expected to be reading her story: a woman who had learnt, partly through novels, the importance of accommodating her instincts to the smooth running of society. For nineteenth-century women readers certainly did look to fiction for models and warnings and patterns of behaviour, and few writers failed to apply themselves with particular care to the problem of the feminine model. It was known to be in a state of crisis. Questions of innocence and anger, of sexual guilt, of frustration and adjustment to the existing social framework, are raised regularly from Fanny Burney and Jane Austen on. It is especially interesting to see that, whereas the nineteenth century opened with a deliberate, careful and successful suppressal of the doubts and demands of the feminists of the 1790s, it came to a close with a crop of works in which women figure either as pitiful victims or as hysterics and killers. All the piety, fear, invocations of duty and renunciation as the supreme female virtues, all the swallowing back of bile, culminated in some fine womanly anger. Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s last book, which appeared in 1876, is a hysteric and a killer by instinct. She quite ruthlessly determines to push out another woman and her children in order to secure for herself a husband, though she fears him and finds him disgusting, rather than face the only alternative open to her – that of becoming a governess. To be reduced to the condition of governess seemed almost as horrible to a middle-class girl in nineteenth-century fiction as for a working girl to lose her virtue: both meant an almost ritual outcasting.

  Gwendolen’s later murderous inclinations mark her quite clearly as a forerunner of Ibsen’s fierce women. In Hedda Gabler, written in 1890, and in the character of Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, which came out four years earlier, frustration and hysteria are brought to a terrible climax. The plight of Hedda and Rebecca West was aggravated, no doubt, by the isolation of Norway, but they were recognized, hailed and assimilated in England: Dame Rebecca West is, in fact, our living reminder of the response they found amongst intelligent English girls.

  Two books that touch on this subject of anger, suppressed and explosive, have just been published. One is by the American writer Elizabeth Hardwick: it has an arresting title, Seduction and Betrayal, and a rather less arresting subti
tle, ‘Women and Literature’. It consists of a series of essays linked – perhaps a little loosely – by the fact that each essay considers in one way or another ‘the arrangements women make with men’, both within the framework of fiction and in their actual lives. It is a broad sweep, and the author has chosen to alight here and there only; but where she does she always has something illuminating and to the point to say.

  The other book is by the British poet Patricia Beer: a study of four nineteenth-century women novelists and their view of what George Eliot referred to as the ‘woman question’. The four she considers are Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. It too has an arresting title: Reader, I Married Him. These words are, of course, taken from Charlotte Brontë, and I imagine Patricia Beer chose them partly because they underline her theme of the close interdependence between her authors’ living conditions and the tone of their books. Both she and Elizabeth Hardwick respond with warmth to the appeal for sisterly understanding implicit in those words of Charlotte Brontë’s; and both discuss her life and work at some length.

  Of course, she has to be a central figure in any study of women writers of her century; and it is not too fanciful to suggest that, for her, life itself was something of a betrayal, though she was careful not to say so. Her underlying sense of desperation, her latent anger and her attempts to deny that anger, have an emblematic force.

  Elizabeth Hardwick says: ‘The worries that afflicted genteel, impoverished women in the nineteenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. It was Charlotte’s goal to represent the plight of the plain, poor, high-minded young woman. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned.’ And Patricia Beer reminds us of the tyranny of old Brontë and the automatic assumption within the family that the girls should make sacrifices for their infinitely less talented brother. Mrs Gaskell, in her great biography of Charlotte, worries a little at this fact, but does not question the appointed role of the son. Her attitude can perhaps be assimilated to her own inconsolable grief upon the death of her only son, little Willy: much as she loved her four daughters, they were a perpetual source of anxiety to her – would they marry, would they marry suitably, what would they do if they did not marry? – whereas the son, had he lived, would have been her reward, one feels: her release, even.