Becky Boo! Interesting!
I have almost no contact these days with people from my former life. So to hear from two of them in one afternoon recently was, well, sort of exciting. Both emails were drawn from the same deep but slightly stagnant well – but I’ll cite just the one, from a former colleague now reporting on business matters, on a semi-detached freelance basis, for a well-known national news outlet. (I believe these days they like to be known as newsbrands…)
The email had no body copy. Just two exclamations in the subject line. The two I’ve used as the headline to this piece.
So. An email out of the blue.
We haven’t spoken in years.
But I had to call him
As he well knew.
Throughout my time as a writer on advertising industry magazines, people would always ask me: “Why do you loathe adland so?” Followed, almost inevitably, in short order, by: “And if you do, which is so clearly the case, why do you choose to earn your living writing about it?”
Loathe? Not exactly true, naturellement; but I can appreciate that those who’ve witnessed me at my most scathing might feel that way.
A long time ago, so long ago in fact that the world therein is now no more than a speck of light in the inky vastness of a parallel universe… a long time ago, as I was saying, one of my fellow writers on Media Week compiled a book of anecdotes about ad agency folies de grandeur and general fuck-ups perpetuated by a colourful cast (no names, no packdrills) of clowns, nitwits and walking disaster zones.
Oh yes, and the odd monster too.
Astonishingly, the project was picked up by a reputable publisher.
Less astonishingly, weeks after publication it was remaindered.
And yes of course there were, for many years, half a dozen real monsters in the advertising industry. Maybe there were more; but there was a tight cluster of names that tended to crop up regularly. Rumours, gossip, the sotto voce testimony of friends of friends. Or, more precisely, contacts of contacts.
One well-known business magazine could have ended the career of a prominent adland figure at any point over the course of more than two decades, it had mountains of source material and the assurances of people prepared to go on the record.
We’re talking about a bully, a sex-pest, a misogynist and almost certainly a crook.
But time after time… Oh look! Is that a kitten over there?
Yea. Thrice yea. Tellingly though (and shame on me, I hear you say), while the industry’s monsters are and were a compelling phenomenon, I’m far more fascinated by its Becky Boos. They’re horrifying obviously, truly ghastly people; but they’re sort of, if you have a perverted sense of humour, funny too.
For years, my small but perfectly formed coterie used Becky (and her like: there were male models too) as a shorthand for a certain sort of utterly useless narcissist promoted way beyond their natural talents and hated by their underlings but somehow prospering from every single debacle they fomented.
We lampooned her in private, yes, and shared jokes about her with our closest contacts; and sometimes, inevitably, this would colour our reporting and feature writing.
Therefore I reckoned I knew what my former colleague was after. Surely there was a story breaking about Becky and he was hoping I’d help him flesh it out.
So yes, I called him.
We shared, in a stilted sort of a way, some reminiscences. Then he cut to the chase.
“You worked for her too though, didn’t you?”
Half accusation, half barely-concealed mockery.
“Who on earth told you that?” I countered.
Because of course the truly bizarre thing was that when I stopped being a journalist and began reinventing myself as a ghost-writer, I was hired pretty much straight away by a string of adland clients.
“It doesn’t matter who told me. It’s true, isn’t it?
“No.”
“No?”
“It’s not that simple. I may have worked with someone who’s worked with her. These things happen. We live in a tiny village.”
There was a strained silence. White noise, grey noise; vague intimations of an ethereal doppler effect.
Then he began outlining the story he’d heard.
And then another silence.
“Two heads are better than one,” I said eventually.
“What?”
“Sorry. You made me think of something. Ignore. I’m wittering.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think it’s a small earthquake. She won’t be fired for this. In a few weeks’ time, a press release will drop, an announcement that she’s been poached by the Very Big Marketing Services Company Inc. Big new job title. Big bucks. And at that point you’ll go, Yeah, I can sort of see the sense in that.”
The third sustained silence in a conversation like this is the one there’s no coming back from.
So we agreed we should meet up soon for a drink. A proper catch-up.
And we both knew what the other was thinking.
Yup. Never going to happen.
Two heads? What on earth are you on about?
Coda here:
Maps, storytelling, Alfred Hitchcock and Saul Bellow’s Columbus… in which you correspondent essays a more or less random addition to Mr Memory Encore
Right up until the emergence of the moving picture medium in its most flamboyant forms, the stories we read or listened to or told ourselves occupied pinched and somewhat claustrophobic domains. They took place not only in, at best, two dimensions, but in a fog or some sort of fuzzy amniotic soup.
Yes, of course, they were psychologically liberating and emotionally fulfilling but they did not really inhabit what we’ll laughingly call the real world.Indeed, they might strike out often from their home parlours in the direction of a London or a Bath or a wherever; but these were locations in name only, mere semi-abstract nouns. Or, as in Cheapside taverns, archetypally vague in their apparent specificity. True, we must acknowledge occasional outings to recognisable landmark settings: a cobb at Lyme here, a Stonehenge there. But still…
Your adventure novelists, your Fenimore Coopers and your Walter Scotts, aspired to tempt you away from the fireside too, but mainly toward other categories of near-abstraction: stagey impressionistic backdrops of forests and moors and engorged river valleys and clifftops resplendent with ecclesiastical moonlit ruins.
This is why (to cut a long story short (there’s a thesis or two here, perhaps even a modest academic career) so few storytellers ever really seized on maps as a potential adjunct to their storytelling.
Robert Louis Stevenson obviously numbers among the few. Who doesn’t love his Treasure Island map?
But surely it’s rather telling that this happy few, this small band of literary mapmakers, is dominated by authors who wrote primarily with children in mind? And that their maps are, pretty much without exception, renderings of fantasy domains?
All of which brings me at last to the curious case of the map of Killin in Alfred Hitchcock’s take on The 39 Steps. And the questions it raises.
I suppose to me these questions boil down this: is this an instance of Hitchcock treating his audience like children?
But then what are we to make of the fact that this isn’t, as in the Stevenson tradition, a map of a fantasy domain? Or rather it is and it isn’t. It’s a map of Killin, yes. But adulterated.
Again I’m sure there are all sorts of aesthetic theory threads just waiting to be pulled at here.
But for now, all I’ll say is, I like this map.
I like it a lot.
Oh. I almost forgot. A coda, here, to our evocation of fogginess.
Prefaced by an acknowledgement: yes it’s ironic, really that I’m about to paraphrase Saul Bellow.
Because in my albeit limited experience, the dreariest of writing school teachers turn out almost inevitably to be adherents of the World According to Saul.
But here we go. Make of this what you will:
Though storytellers may be (and, indeed, should aspire to be) brave explorers, intrepid Columbuses, they should also understand that they are purblind and can only really write about the near-at-hand.
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/mistermemoryencore/maps
England, my England
Huge thanks to Charles Moore who mentioned, in passing, in this week’s Spectator, that he has, he reckons, slept at least one night in all but one of the English counties.
This made me reflect; and of course a Jubilee weekend is a fitting time for an inventory of personal memories too.
History, geography, intertwined with sometime dreams, I can reveal that I have slept at least one night in:
Northumberland
Yorkshire
Derbyshire
Nottinghamshire
Cambridgeshire
Norfolk
Suffolk
Essex
Hertfordshire
Kent
Berkshire
Surrey
Sussex (both East and West)
Dorset
Devon
Cornwall
Somerset
Gloucestershire
Oxfordshire
Northamptonshire
Shropshire
Lancashire
Cumbria
The West Midlands? Terra incognita. I have no desire to rectify this. But Bedfordshire? How curious. It’s only next door. So perhaps, yes, soon, it will be time to set out on a journey into the very heart of England. And climb that wooden hill…
People drift apart. Lose contact. We’re all in the process of moving on, leaving no forwarding address. These days it’s easier than ever for you to melt into the night, you’re freelance, so you can’t be traced through your place of work, you change your email provider, ditch your old mobile number, delete your social media accounts and in a blink you’re gone. There are all sorts of cracks you can slip through.
Saddling Mahmoud by Sebastian Bell was published by The Book Publishing Company in 2005
isbn 0 9549007 0 7
a web version, Mr Memory Encore, was created in April 2020
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/mistermemoryencore
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/mistermemoryencore/thebookpublishingcompany
Here’s the unvarnished truth about Neville Chamberlain – and the inside track on why you won’t read this in the Munich reviews
I was going to open by asserting that, where historians are concerned, Chamberlain really does sort the sheep from the goats.
Then I paused. And reflected. And concluded, eventually, after staring for longer than is healthy at the wall behind my desk, that (uncharacteristically, unwontedly) I was perhaps in danger of being rather too generous here. The truth, should I care to acknowledge it, is that, where Neville’s concerned, they’re all a little bit sheep-like. Even the ones who quite clearly know their stuff.
And the problem (not just their problem, but a problem for many of the rest of us too) I reckon, is this: Chamberlain is one of those curious figures who’ve passed beyond history (and not in an entirely good way) into a hazy realm of national myth. More so than, say, Churchill, about whom a very great deal is known by a very great number of people. An over-familiarity has rendered him all-too-banal.
So those historians with a real feel for the late 1930s, those who’ve not only acquitted themselves creditably when it comes to the primary sources but who’ve spend hours immersed in microfilm copies of the Times and the Daily Express in the archives at Colindale… well, at a time like this, they find themselves confronted with Hobson’s choice.
And of course they choose the line of least resistance: it’s easier to take part in (rather than take issue with) the shoddy sorts of culture-section debates we’ve seen across the last couple of weeks or so.
I’m talking obviously about the chatter arising from the release (in cinemas from 7 January, more widely on Netflix a fortnight later) of Munich: The Edge of War. (Truly terrible title, but that’s another thought for another day.)
And yes, much of the chatter has been about how good Jeremy Irons is as a Chamberlain lookey-likey. But the rest of it tends to circle around a predictable cluster of questions.
Is it time to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain? Was this so-called craven appeaser actually a national hero? Should he get more credit for his “noble failure” at Munich?
And the answer (I’m sorry to have to break this to you) is, in almost all instances, unequivocally, no. But not in the way you might imagine.
Where posterity is concerned, Chamberlain suffers hugely (and this applies to Stanley Baldwin too) from the fact that he came to prominence during the decade when the phenomenon of Mass Media, notably the talkie newsreels, first emerged – but did not survive to speak for himself in the decades when those media outlets (and the audience) became more sophisticated.
So: Chamberlain has become, first and foremost in the minds of many, a Harry Enfield pastiche. A ridiculous old fogey in a starched collar.
It’s an image we find immensely comforting.
So we rarely seek out its counterbalance. Even those of us with curious minds and a penchant for old stories.
Maybe that’s because the counterbalance is actually quite hard to find – and has to be put together piecemeal from the memoirs of Chamberlain’s contemporaries, notably those of Sir Robert Vansittart and his circle. But it’s worth pursuing, it really is.
Thus might you discover, in short order, that Chamberlain was ahead of his time. And that he is not the man you thought he was. Not by a long chalk
You might get a feel, for instance, for how paranoid he was as a leader, how much of a control freak and a bully. Few Prime Ministers have used (arguably abused) the Whips’ Office in quite such an unashamedly brutal manner.
You might also intuit that, though he was an absolute ingenu when it came to foreign affairs, he alienated and then side-lined (a prime example of his control freakery) all the clever thinkers at the Foreign Office.
His fecklessness in the field of international relations is amply illustrated too by his determination, while as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later as Prime Minster, to urge defence contractors to sell military technology to Nazi Germany, the notion being that taxation on the profits accrued would help Britain balance its chronically unbalanced books.
And you might also get a feel for just how vain he was. In the 20th Century he was rivalled in this respect only by Tony Blair: and as such it is no surprise to find him obsessed with image, presentation and what we would now call public relations.
Which brings us to the nub of the matter: the Prime Minister flew all the way to Munich on a fool’s errand just to stage an “opportunity” for the press and cameras on his return.
For the bottom line is that Munich was an utter irrelevance. And Chamberlain, in the round, too. Utterly irrelevant.
A refresher, should you need one, of the timeline: As the Sudeten crisis unfolded in the late summer of 1938, France gave assurances that if Germany were to invade Czechoslovakia, the Czechs could count on French military support.
In turn, the British Government, with Chamberlain’s wholehearted approval, told the French that it could rely on British backing in this resolve, including overt military support.
In early September, the US State Department and its military advisers began putting pressure on the French government to renege on this commitment.
In mid September, following a tumultuous meeting of its cabinet, the French government caved in and withdrew its reassurances to Czechoslovakia… and so ashamed were its senior minsters of this volte face that they opted not to inform Britain immediately of their decision or the reasons for it.
But that, then as now, was neither here nor there. This was, to use a wholly inappropriate phrase, game over.
The notion, perpetuated down the years, that there was anything remotely at stake in Munich, is a measure of our vanity as a nation. Seemingly there’s an almost atavistic need to claim centre stage for Britain in all of this and to marginalise the role of other actors, especially the US; but it’s fascinating to note how isolated elements of this shadow narrative are often dropped into the Munich backstory but allowed to hang there unexplained or, indeed, unresolved.
So what? I hear you ask. Does any of this matter? Who cares?
And of course you’re right. All of this is (in both the best and worst of senses) academic.
I’d love, though, to see a talented writer do real justice to 1938. And as someone who appreciates a ripping yarn, I’m especially perplexed at our determination to write America out of the story.
It’s sort of understandable in some respects – an important part of our national sense of superiority is derived from our notion that the US was late, again, to the Big Show. That’s hugely undermined by the knowledge that US diplomats were intriguing away furiously behind the scenes.
But it’s a shame: because there’s a compelling (though relatively minor) cast of characters in play here. Not least Joseph Kennedy, US ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Who, let us not forget, just happened to be JFK’s dad. JFK paid close attention to the events of 1938 – and wrote about them right after the war.
Surely someone, somewhere, might be persuaded to pick that up and run with it.
But no. Don’t hold your breath.
SO IT HAD COME to pass. Exit, stage right, a weeping King, led by his belt buckle. Exit, stage left, a bruised bruiser of a Prime Minister, supernumerary, a worked-out Warwick, a provincial kingmaker needed no longer now the King was unmade. And in his place, stepping into the Premier spotlight, a man of quiet confidence, a man who had always known this moment would come and who was utterly assured as to its rightness: a conceited man, a man, in other words, well-practised in mastering conceit. Scrubbed, pressed, immaculate in a wing collar, a stickler, a grey man with a salt and pepper moustache: and yet, for all that, a man who’d almost succeed in convincing you there was a twinkle, a mischievousness behind the bombastic façade. Chamberlain, in short; Chamberlain plain.
It was like the denouement to a History Play. Or, who knew, the opening scene of its First Act.
He stepped right over to the lip of the stage and stood there, scanning to left and to right, as if to take the measure of every single member of his audience.
And then it seemed as if he were about to strike a dramatic pose. Looking up now, uppish, his eyes fixed on the back row of the gods, it seemed possible that at any moment he might shape a definitive gesture; his hand might shoot up and he’d clutch at an essence in the empty air, destiny perhaps, and pull it passionately to his breastbone in his fist.
But this gesture, the gesture of all great dictators, did not come. He merely stood there, the faintest suggestion of a smile playing on his lips. There were a few scattered coughs from the darkest depths of the auditorium; but not a pin dropped. And the more he stood there in the spotlight, inviting you to take him in, Chamberlain plain, the more you were aware of motes of dust dancing in the column of lit air that isolated him from the darkness.
Motes, like microbes, like a swarm of tiny insects. They somehow made him seem moth-eaten.
Behind him, lit only by their leader’s reflected glory, his cabinet. The sort of supporting cast of which only a Caesar might dream: Hailsham, Halifax, Simon, Hoare, Eden, MacDonald, Hore-Belisha, Inskip. Even Harold was there, to the very back of this tableau.
“This, I’ll have to say, is an exceptional case. A stonker, a stinker, an absolute copper-bottomed doozy: almost 1700 words of utter drivel written for an agitprop rag by (oh my word) a freelance science correspondent name of Laura Spinney…”
Oh my! What have we here?
I’ve written elsewhere, on more than one occasion, though not always particularly deftly, on the witless ways in which political animals of all stripes attempt to co-opt history.
History, I should stress, with a big H.
I had sort of assumed, by and large, that I had very little left to add. Or indeed the energy to voice it.
But this, I’ll have to say, is an exceptional case. A stonker, a stinker, an absolute copper-bottomed doozy: almost 1700 words of utter drivel written as a high-concept thought-leadership piece for an agitprop rag by (oh my word) a freelance “science correspondent” name of Laura Spinney.
Sorry – this sounds not just unkind but desperately intemperate too. It isn’t though. It really isn’t.
This history of world conflict in 21½ paragraphs is peppered with depressingly awful “clunk” moments and in some respects the first is the worst – I can’t even get to the end of the headline without experiencing a horrible sinking feeling.
“Can history teach us anything…?”
No, Laura, it cannot. Heraclitus applies here m’dear. As countless numbers of rather more gifted writers have pointed out down the decades, we cannot step twice into the same stream.
* * * * *
Coincidentally, by sheer happenstance, I’ve been reading EH Carr’s What Is History? – a text published in the early 1960s but revered by Guardianista historicists right up until the evening of 9 November 1989. 32 years ago today. Just think. Doesn’t time, even time so heavily freighted with History, fly? Carr, a sometime apologist for Stalin and the Soviet Union, answers his own question by arguing that history (we simplify and exaggerate here, clearly) cannot, by its very nature, be objective and apolitical.
All is rhetoric. He prefigured our modern understanding, its cruder aspects at least, of the political facets of history. For those on the Left, History teaches us that soi-disant Progressives (like Calvin’s Justified Sinners) inhabit, by definition… er, um, ah… the Right Side of History; and for Liberals and Conservatives, History teaches us that nothing has piled high the corpses more ruthlessly than the charnel house that is Socialism.
* * * * *
When I read a car crash of a feature like Spinney’s, an article so ghastly that it is almost a hallucinogenic experience, my first thought is that I’m terribly glad I’m a mere dilletante, not a professional historian. How on earth would you explain to your contemporaries that your discipline it is not as plain ridiculous as is sometimes made out? But then I remember that the profession, such as it is, is often its own worst enemy.
Historians are, by and large, teachers. But they tend to justify their existence by insisting that they have much to give a wider world, one well beyond their tutorial rooms. Their ultimate role, should anyone care to listen, is to offer sage counsel, insights derived on the soundest of methods, when it comes to political decision-making and the conduct of public affairs.
And indeed, members of one of the profession’s oldest and most important client communities, the Foreign Office and its sister Diplomatic Service, have always assumed that history is of direct interest only inasmuch as it makes a contribution to the formation of policy.
* * * * *
It would be churlish of me if I failed to acknowledge (and relish) a rich vein of burlesque implicit in the publication of Spinney’s stonking think-piece. You can sense, shimmering just below the surface, a glorious comedy of errors here – the sort of tomfoolery captured deftly for almost two centuries by satirical writers familiar with the life and times of Grub Street.
Think Frayn, think Waugh, think Gissing… all the way, come to think of it, back to Thackeray and Dickens. Or, to evoke a more modern TV example, The Thick of It.
I’m more than willing to believe that, to the dopey Trustafarian interns on the Observer’s features desk, Spinney does indeed look and feel like an intellectual titan. And I’m more than willing to believe, also, that Spinney, a writer doubtless supremely aware of her own limitations, had no idea, when she first pitched it, that a modest proposal was about to be trundled towards the paper’s intellectual frontline as a flagship thesis.
Her proposal doubtless emerged after she’d spent the better part of a whole morning on Google, curious to see if there was anything new to report from the few remaining souls still toiling at the History by Numbers coalface.
She then (again, I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet: we’ve all been there) packaged up her meagre findings by trying to evoke these isolated Inspectors Clouseaux as a community of thinkers working urgently at the cutting edge of human endeavour, a sort of virtual RAND corporation, a shadow think tank on the verge of finessing their rubbish-in-rubbish-out algorithms in order, at long last, to compute the sum total of human destiny.
So here she comes, affecting to report hotfoot from the heart of a furious debate – always a gloriously inane journalistic wheeze when your only hope is the sort of miracle that might convert ditch-water into pink champagne: “most researchers accept…” “…while some researchers agree…” “…others think…” “…historians show no signs of agreeing a truce…”
No! Really?
Spinney contrives here, hand in hand with her Observer paymaster, to make Sky’s dim-witted, race-to-the-bottom History Channel look like an intellectual powerhouse.
But then it’s transparently obvious she knows nothing about history, with or without its big H. And cares even less. Furthermore, she probably assumes that there are no downsides in play here – for instance, in terms of damage to her reputation, such as it is. Maybe, sadly, she’s absolutely right.
So, sit back, relax, nod sagely as she tells us, breathlessly, for instance, (my personal highlight moment) of the heroic efforts of “computer scientist Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado Boulder [who] crunched data on wars fought between 1823 and 2003…”
Bless.
* * * * *
This is all a bit rich, though, isn’t it? Scattergun insinuations of fecklessness? I should talk.
For instance, Exhibit A, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, I began a sometime project, an amusing diversion so I thought, charting an alarming outbreak of History Abuse, perpetrated not just by the holier-than-thou purveyors of news and opinion, but by politicians, spin-doctors and the mavens of thought-leadership in big business too.
I began outlining how easy it had become to default to meaningless (yet superficially compelling) notions: the Lessons of History, the Dustbin of History, History Stuck on Repeat.
You know, the whole gimcrack apparatus you’d rig up if you were attempting, as a politician or in fact any sort of a polemicist, in the spirit of a summer season conjuror, to turn History into Prophesy.
I gave up in the end, utterly overwhelmed. Not emotionally overwhelmed. Not exactly. I’m not evoking some sort of narcissistic dark night of the soul. No. I was overwhelmed in the sense that there was so much material, appearing on an almost daily basis, that collecting it, tagging it, curating it… this felt… well it just seemed banal.
So this endeavour was destined to join, in my own particular Dustbin of History, a couple of other projects, Exhibits B and C, that have (or had) their roots way back in those far off days when I had a penchant for rambling in the foothills of the publishing industry: a picaresque field guide to the historical novel, from Scott to Mantel; and a compleat (yet, for all that, rather pithy) compendium of quotations, historians on the craft of history.
Somewhere, in the world of the word, mixed in with writers, critics, editors, readers, teachers, of no use to anyone at all really, there are the perennial wool-gatherers.
In other words: How very dare I?
* * * * *
So, yes, anyway, Laura Spinney, History Whisperer, having run the numbers, how exactly will the world end?
Spinney: “It is not yet possible to say of course.”
Readers of the Observer in their most thoughtful mode: “Thank you.”
I’ve started using this WordPress blogging platform again, now and then, not because I like it. In fact, the reverse is the case. It’s almost impossible to make anything look good on the free service and I’m too much of a cheapskate to upgrade to premium. But the beauty of it is that its SEO performance is absolutely superb, so for that reason alone, especially where there’s mischief somewhere in the mix, I sometimes post here first; then, if I can be bothered, I’ll do a post justice by building a proper page for it on Wix, where I can, if I fancy it, go full-bore bells and whistles, with all manner of pictures, pull-quotes and links. There’s a page waiting for this post here:
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/outset/historywar-peace
Goodness knows if I’ll ever get round to filling it.
Susanna Clarke, in pursuit of a sometime notion that never quite coalesced into a manifesto, links arms with Carl Jung and Thomas De Quincey
LOOKING BACK NOW from our safe vantage point in a post-post-modern cultural desert, it’s almost possible to argue that there was a point in time (a window, you might suggest, of opportunity) when Jungian lit crit looked like it might really become a thing. In the decade after the publication by Alethea Hayter, in 1968, of Opium and the Romantic Imagination, the creative universe was ready to revisit notions that had been given impetus first by the likes of Coleridge and Shelley and more recently by the French Symbolist poets and Second Renaissance writers like Ezra Pound.
It didn’t happen, not in any definitive sense – and you could argue that, as a consequence, our notion of a whole genre has been lost. You could go on to argue that, as a consequence of that consequence, a whole direction of literary impetus has been lost too.
Hang on, I can hear you saying. What, exactly, are we talking about? And I’m glad you’ve asked. Explicitly put, it’s the insistence that great literature derives its power and its glory from its perception, however hazy, of unseen powers, parallel universes and archetypes beloved of the human soul, aka the Collective Unconscious.
Jung, as we’ve already indicated, didn’t invent or own (the literary facets of) these notions. But as one of the leading proponents of a promising new pseudo-science called psychology, he certainly helped refashion these ideas in a more forceful form.
And I think it’s worth making clear at this point that when I reference “unseen powers” I am not talking about the metaphysical agencies that littered then (and still litter now) the pages of popular fiction. No. What’s at issue here is more a state of mind.
But by the end of the 1970s, the once-convivial relationship between psychology (as a science of now questionable status), psychoanalysis and aesthetic theory had all-but evaporated – and the Jungian school was looking particularly silly, redolent more of patchouli oil and joss sticks than the print-room odours of book-binding glue and rag stock paper.
Dispersal wasn’t absolute. Most top-level creative writing courses will, for instance, introduce you to the ideas of Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces) as taken on by plot design gurus like Christopher Vogler (Mythic Structure for Writers). Some literary novels (more than a few, but not many) will flirt with a Jungian state of mind, stray wisps from a cloud of sometime notions that never quite coalesced into a manifesto.
And then there’s the occasional throw-back, real outliers like Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
So. What is that other world? How shall we get there? And what shall it look like?
Well, we think we know the answer (often as not) to that last one.
A labyrinth.
(More at this web page https://bit.ly/2PI1dA8 which for a number of reasons, or actually just two, won’t configure for mobile. Sorry…)
Christie clues, entanglements, revelatory subplots… and dripping fountains
Christie through a looking glass: “I put the point to Sir Henry. He said he thought quite a lot of people would know – on account of all the detective stories that are written. Quoted a new one, The Clue of the Dripping Fountain, which he said John Christow himself had been reading on Saturday and which emphasised that particular point.” Oftentimes, this story almost fades into nothingness, looming no larger than a throwaway line in a throwaway novel. And yet I almost always sense a pull in the other direction, I feel compelled, often with a heavy heart, for I know there may be a painful tariff exacted here, to worry at this metafictional thread. Suffice it to say that the publishing history of The Clue of the Dripping Fountain, which began life as an arch piece of mischief on Agatha Christie’s part, was blighted by sporadic legal manoeuvrings that entangled the author, her husband, her anonymous assistant, her agents and her publishers across a period of several decades. Curiously, though this fascinating (perhaps even revelatory) subplot had been explored by a French literary journal and had been the subject of an essay by Umberto Eco, references to it were heavily edited and then removed altogether from Janet Morgan’s definitive biography – at the insistence, we must presume, of all the usual suspects…
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/outset/drippingfountain
Memories, dreams, reflections… it became, above all, a labyrinth. A rabbit hole riddled with rabbit holes
The Saddling Mahmoud project started around the turn of the century as an article, for a business magazine, about the squandering of Britain’s pre-1960s celluloid heritage. It soon became something richer, stranger, more obsessive, definitive.
It evolved over many months into a book (part meditation, part critique, part compendium of whimsical trivia) about one work in particular, a Hitchcock production released in 1935. Inevitably, as the book grew, it acquired not just structure and form but a narrative voice. In short, it mutated into a fictional quest – it acquired a protagonist: part cultural archaeologist, part echo detector, he’s a seeker driven to discover if anything tangible has survived: a 35mm print of the film perhaps or scenery or props, maybe even a pair of handcuffs.
And so, inevitably, its narrative drifted ever closer to home: it became a book about someone who has begun to haunt the corridors of hospitals, someone whose circle of friends is falling apart. It’s about love. It’s about the ghost of an affair.
It became a ghost story (whatever I write turns, inevitably, into a ghost story) in other more important way too. It was, is, the partial biography of a man I’d grown up with, the man who’d suggested to me all those years ago that The 39 Steps was a peerless work of art. He’d seen it so many times, he knew every intimate detail of every set-up. He helped me to see, really see, though his own eyesight was failing.
Thus my book (let’s call it now, in hindsight, a first draft) became a book about one of the film’s most remarkable characters, Mr Memory. Perhaps indeed it was my fond hope that I was in some small way becoming Mr Memory.
Memories, dreams, reflections… it became, above all, a labyrinth. A rabbit hole riddled with rabbit holes.
As a book, it aspired to breathe the same air as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar or Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges or The Tattooed Map by Barbara Hodgson or Lights Out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair or The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald.
And now, dear reader, it also lives online.
https://alasdairreid.wixsite.com/mistermemoryencore/journey05-rabbitholes
In which a budding but feckless Twitter sensationalist (that would be me) takes Julian Barnes’s name in vain
I told a lie in my post the other day. Sort of.
The thing is, I’ve written to many literary giants down the years. Two alone have denied me satisfaction*.
I don’t know why they slipped my mind. The silence of one of these lambs, Stephen Poliakoff, chimes very much with an even-more-deafening silence – the one currently engulfing me.
Maybe that applies to the other lamb too. His name? Julian Barnes.
This calls for a preamble. Way back in the mists of time, maybe a million years ago, having (more by bad luck than misjudgement) caught a repeat of a Jeremy Brett era Sherlock Holmes adaptation on TV, I reread said story.
I’d read it many times before but this time I recognised (or thought I recognised) a teasing, playful reference to a place I now knew well. And, as I let this sink in, it also began to dawn on me that there were other teasing, playful hints and suggestions here. There were veiled autobiographical allusions, surely, to a love affair.
Or were there? I’m always terribly suspicious of the sorts of people who seem more-than-naturally attuned to veiled allusions… whether in songs or pictures or stories or indeed the main evening news from the BBC.
Especially as this veiled allusion ran so unambiguously contrary to conventional wisdom. Leaving fairies to one side, the definitive biographical fact about the sainted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the notion that he was a devoted and faithful husband – a man who refrained from pursuing intimate relations with the woman who was to become his second wife until the first one was dead.
But hey, you know, it was a slow week… and having joined forces with my former partner-in-crime, Sebastian Bell, we set off on a plodding, unhurried investigation, low on expectation, high on (what I now strongly suspect to have been) life.
But blow me down if we didn’t start dusting off circumstantial evidence that we were on the right track; and then, in short order, we unearthed a weightier and (potentially) shinier nugget.
And of course, being as venal as we were narcissistic, we knocked together a feature proposal and sent it off to the arts desks of The Sunday Times and The Guardian, where Sebastian still had friends (or at least people he’d not yet managed to upset while in his cups).
We waited. I think at one stage, jointly, severally, we held our breath or breaths. How long should it take for your cloudy dreams, even modest dreams like this, to evaporate? Thomas Mann, in one of my favourite ever passages, writes compellingly about this – the process by which fervour and optimism are ever-so-slowly replaced by that sinking feeling… and as a serial-sufferer I’ve always been fascinated by the metaphysics of this sort of rejection, bittersweet and subtle rather than deep and dark.
But anyway, it took a week, maybe more, for us to steel ourselves to make the follow-up calls.
The guy at The Guardian said he absolutely wasn’t interested. His readers, he solemnly informed us, were Progressives and certainly weren’t interested in tittle tattle about a dead white male writer, especially one so complicit in war crimes. (No. Me neither. To this day, I have no idea what he meant.)
The lady at The Sunday Times had far worse in store for us. She’d taken some soundings, she said, not least from a world-renowned expert on Conan Doyle, who’d made it crystal clear to her that our story was arrant nonsense.
But we have a photocopy, we said.
Bung it in the post, she parried.
For one reason or another, and the details are hazy now, we declined to do this.
Not long after, Julian Barnes published Arthur and George, a work of historical fiction in which the conventional wisdom about Sir Arthur’s fidelity is rehashed.
It’s no big deal. It’s not an essential part of the story. It’s in no way central to the brilliance of the book.
And I feel I must declare an interest here. I’d like it on record that I am a fan. I’d go so far as to state my belief, my IMHO manifesto, that Julian Barnes is the world’s greatest living writer.
But at some point, maybe a decade ago, I dropped him a line through a recognised channel. “Thought you might be interested to know,” I wrote, chirpily… “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t faithful to his first wife. Far from it. Might you be interested in seeing evidence?”
Julian didn’t reply.
It’s only now, in long hindsight, that I am able to work out why.
He clearly thought I was offering to send him dirty pictures. Possibly drawn by yours truly. In wax crayon.
* 1 November 2021: revisiting this today, quite by chance, I now realise, with the benefit of hindsight, that the phrasing here is disingenuous. My reasoning seemed sound at the time, less so now. Suffice to say that the two instances in question don’t deserve to be conflated. Not by a long shot.
Alasdair Douglas Reid 