Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning, first published in 1967, used to have the status of a cult book among the hacks (as we all agree to call ourselves). It does have more or less everything: the white-haired and burned-out old soak who can only reminisce about forgotten, bibulous trips with forgotten, bibulous stars of old Fleet Street; the bullying, self-loathing pictures editor who insists on how self-made he is; the dreamy assistant scribe who only wants to write book reviews for the New Statesman on the side (that dates it a bit: In those days the NS had a literary editor and was literate); the neurotic deputy editor who can’t keep up the supply of pre-digested columns entitled “In Years Gone By,” or hold his rural clergymen contributors to their deadlines. (In the latter respect, there is something of a lift from William Boot’s “Lush Places” countryman column in Scoop.)
There was always, also, an interest in guessing whether Frayn had “set” it all at either the Observer or the Guardian, which in those days were separate institutions. (Malcolm Muggeridge’s journalism novel Picture Palace had been too transparent in this regard, enraging his employers, the then-Manchester Guardian management, who obtained an injunction preventing its publication.) In the introduction to the new edition, Frayn says that it was a touch of both. The paper is never given a name, but it’s in any case obviously not the Observer because it comes out every day. A possible clue, for addicts and cognoscenti, is contained on the very cover of the new edition which drops an entire word out of the title of the novel, and rather metaphysically offers it as Towards the End of Morning. The Guardian is no longer so celebrated for its misprints but there will always be those of us who are nostalgic for the days when it was, and when the opera critic Phillip Hope Wallace, for example, could wake up to find that he had reviewed last night’s Covent Garden performance of Doris Godunov.
Admirers of Frayn’s second novel are sneered at by those of us who are in the know, and who appreciate that it is his first novel about journalism that really demonstrates his genius. In The Tin Men, published in 1965, there are some boozers and louts and misfits, to be sure. But the brilliance of the thing lay in its attempt to reduce the business of hackery to an exact formula. At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or “Unit Headline Language.” A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
A total of 86.4 percent of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why. Thus the search must go on. Would people like to read about air-crashes with children’s toys in the wreckage, or without children’s toys in the wreckage? In the case of a murder of a woman, should the victim be naked or partially clad? Frayn re-summons the tones of old Fleet Street into this laboratory of shame, when the questing researcher Goldwasser is brusquely accosted by his vile assistant Nobbs: “ ‘Do you prefer a female corpse to be naked, or to be clad in underclothes?’ he repeated to Goldwasser. ‘That’s what I call a good question, mate. That’s what I call a good question.’ ”
How shall we know the cultural mayhem wrought by thinking in headlines? Philip Roth’s Portnoy does it all the time, as he guiltily imagines how his foulness would be rendered on the front page. When a WASP girl will not administer him a blow-job for fear of suffocation, for example: JEW SMOTHERS DEB WITH COCK: Vassar Grad Georgetown Strangulation Victim; Mocky Lawyer Held.
The habit breaks out fairly mildly in Scoop, where all the genius goes into the reporter’s cables that are now a thing of the past (“LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING”). In Decline and Fall, a lazy journalist comes to interview the mad architect Dr. Silenus at Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s country home, and “happily” visualizes as he talks: “Peer’s Sister-in-Law Mansion Builder on Future of Architecture.” In Brideshead Revisited, for that matter, debutantes shriek at the headline “Marquis’s Son Unused to Wine.”
In one movie version of Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page, Walter Matthau sees the condemned man’s distraught girlfriend launch herself from a window and barely breaks off to mutter: “Shady Lady Leaps for Love,” thus anticipating the New York Post’s “Headless Body in Topless Bar” by some two decades. But in Frayn’s Tin Men the examples are barely even satirical, or self-satirizing. “Child Told Dress Unsuitable by Teacher”; “Paralyzed Girl Determined to Dance Again.” And since the demure days in which he was originally writing, further defenses against satire have been erected at the lower end of the business. (Just try adding “bonk” to the list of four-letter headline words listed earlier, and begin your computer simulation.)
Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog does its level best at parody (as can be proven by the mild name of his fictional rag, the Morning Lark, which is far less grotesque than the Daily Beast or Daily Brute and could very easily be imagined on a newsstand right now). And yellow is the light in the newsroom, and in the eyes of the hacks, and in so many of the bodily fluids that they tirelessly seek to make their readers emit. The new modern skill is that of wildly overdone photo-caption-writing, where no groan-making multiple-entendre is off-limits, and again I wasn’t absolutely sure that part of the yellowing Clint Smoker’s effort, about royalty in a Chinese restaurant, couldn’t have been at least partly stolen:
But sweet turned to sour when photographers had the sauce to storm their private room. Wan tun a bit of privacy, the couple fled with the lads in hot pursuit—we’ll cashew!
(“That bit was good,” said a hard-bitten old Fleet-Streeter of my acquaintance, “but the bit about how we discuss the readers at editorial meetings was bloody uncanny.”) In Kingsley Amis’s Girl, 20, which is the second-funniest of his novels and the only one I can call to mind that features journalism—though I suppose Jim Dixon in a low moment does briefly impersonate a newspaper reporter on the telephone—the description of the editor Harold Meers is so thoroughly and worryingly accurate that I have met people who are certain that they must know who the bastard was. (“ ‘It’s the way he keeps thinking up new ways of being a shit that you can’t help taking your hat off to him for,’ said Coates.” Albert Coates, incidentally, exactly resembles Jake Slump in the tartarean depths of his smoker’s cough—“Coates drew at his cigarette and coughed terribly. He seemed unaware of any link between these two actions”—while the hero of Girl, 20 joins Slump, Boot, and the awful Reg Mounce of Towards the End of the Morning, in the notorious newspaper-industry bind of the hack who has been fired without knowing it.)
The Amises are the only ones of the authors I have mentioned who didn’t serve time on a national newspaper. Fleming was a foreign editor for Kemsley when that family owned the Sunday Times, Waugh was a correspondent, and Greene had been a sub-editor as well. Powell toiled at the Daily Telegraph, and Frayn we all know about. They mostly did quite well out of it. Orwell never had a steady job, but he haunted Fleet Street in search of work and knew the argot. Yet they all unite in employing the figure of the journalist, or the setting of a newspaper, as the very pattern and mold of every type of squalor and venality. The sole exception I can call to mind is P. G. Wodehouse, who started out as a penny-a-liner on the Globe and seems to have found journalism to be innocent fun. Bertie Wooster never misses a chance to mention his article on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing,” which appeared in his Aunt Dahlia’s own magazine Milady’s Boudoir, and to which he deprecatingly refers as “my ‘piece,’ as we journalists call it.” Psmith, in Psmith Journalist, takes over a small magazine of domesticity in New York, named Cosy Moments, and transforms it briefly into a campaigning, reforming, and crime-fighting organ. His slogan when confronted by those who would intimidate him is: “Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled.” This motto has been inscribed on the wall above my keyboard for many years.
Probably nothing is as boring as the reminiscences of an old Fleet Street hand, but I shall have to say that I pity those now in the t
rade who won’t remember the atmosphere of that little enclave between Ludgate Circus and the Strand, with its byways and courts and alleys. Yes, the smell of printer’s ink, the thunder of the presses like the engine-room of the Titanic. Yes, the lights blazing in the black-glass palace of the old Daily Express, and the vans swinging out on their way to catch the overnight trains with the first edition. Yes, the fog around Blackfriars Station. Yes, the exorbitant padding of the night-shift by printers with names like M Mouse.
Yes, the suicidal imbibing in the King and Keys, or the Punch, or El Vino. Yes, the demented whims of the latest proprietor. Yes, the overflowing ashtrays and the pounding of ancient upright typewriters. Yes, the callousness and gallows humor. (“Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker,” as Waugh describes a hacks’ reunion in Scoop. “They had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home.”) And yes, it’s true that the most celebrated opening line of any Fleet Street war correspondent was that of the hack in the Congo who yelled: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”
The palm goes to Frayn, in the end, because well before it happened he could see that closing time was coming, to those pubs and those hot-metal presses both. Hackery and Grub Street had of course been lampooned before, from Pope to Gissing, but the real “age” of newspapers begins roughly with the Northcliffe press—“written by office-boys for office-boys,” as someone loftily said—and the era of mass literacy. In other words, it opened with the twentieth century and may have closed with it.
In Frayn’s two novels in the sixth decade of that century, the lure of television is already beginning to exert its anti-magic. The mindlessness of the opinion poll and the reader-survey is coming to replace news and analysis. The reporters and editors are beginning to think about mortgages and pensions. The editor is a cipher. I do not think that there will again be a major novel, flattering or unflattering, in which a reporter is the protagonist. Or if there is, he or she will be a blogger or some other species of cyber-artist, working from home and conjuring the big story from the vastness of electronic space.
In any case, the literature of old Fleet Street was to a very considerable extent written by journalists and for journalists. Most reporters I know regard Scoop as a work of pitiless realism rather than antic fantasy. The cap fitted, and they wore it, and with a lopsided grin of pride, at that. Perhaps this assists us in answering the age-old question: Why does the profession of journalism have such a low reputation? The answer: Because it has such a bad press.
(The Guardian [London], December 3, 2005)
Saki: Where the Wild Things Are32
AT THE AGE of fifteen, Noël Coward was staying in an English country house and found a copy of Beasts and Super-Beasts on a table: “I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it.” I had a similar experience at about the same age, and I agree with Coward that H. H. Munro—or “Saki,” the author of the book in question—is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later. I have the impression that Saki is not very much appreciated in the United States. Good. That means I can put into my debt many of you who are reading these words. Go and get an edition of this Edwardian master of the short story. Begin with, say, “Sredni Vashtar” or “The Lumber-Room” or “The Open Window.” Then see whether you can put the book down.
The spellbinding quality of the stories is almost too easy to analyze and looks mawkish when set down in plain words, because Saki’s great gift was being able to write about children and animals. But consider: How many authors have ever been able to pull off these most difficult of tricks? Kipling, for sure, but then, Kipling would not have been able to render the languid young princes of the drawing room, such as the exquisite Clovis Sangrail, with whom Saki peopled so many a scene. The character of these lethal Narcissi is well netted in a phrase coined by Sandie Byrne, who refers to them as “feral ephebes.”
If you want to incubate an author who will show lifelong sympathy for children and animals, it seems best to sequester him at an early age and then subject him to a long regime of domestic torture. This was the formula that worked so well for Kipling, as evidenced in his frightening autobiographical story, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” and it is almost uncanny to see how closely Saki’s early life followed the same course. Abandoned to the care of cold and neurotic aunts in England while his father performed colonial duties in India, he and his siblings had to learn how to do without affection, and how to resist and outpoint adult callousness and stupidity. But without those terrible women—and the villains in Saki’s gem-like tales are almost always female—we might not have had the most-fearsome aunts in fiction, outdoing even Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha or Wilde’s Lady Bracknell.
Wodehouse happily admitted to being influenced by Saki, and it would be interesting to know to what extent Saki was himself influenced by Wilde. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that he was, because some of his epigrams (“Beauty is only sin deep”) betray an obvious indebtedness, and one (“To lose an hotel and a cake of soap in one afternoon suggests willful carelessness”) is an almost direct appropriation from The Importance of Being Earnest. But in that epoch, Wilde’s name lay under a ban, and Saki would have been well advised to not challenge the unstated rules that underlay that prohibition. (I find the speculation about his own homosexuality pointless because there is nothing about which to speculate: He was self-evidently homosexual and, just as obviously, deeply repressed.)
As is by no means uncommon in such cases, Saki was of the extreme right, and even an admirer must concede that some of his witticisms were rather labored and contrived as a consequence. Several of his less amusing stories are devoted to ridicule of the women’s suffrage movement, which was cresting during his heyday, while a persistent subtext of his work is a satirical teasing of his contemporary and bête noire, the ponderously socialistic Bernard Shaw (“Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world”). And, like another of his great contemporaries, Arthur Balfour, future author of a famous Declaration, Saki harbored a suspicion of Jews. One of his feral ephebes, Reginald, tells a duchess while chatting at the theater that what she terms “the great Anglo-Saxon empire” is, in fact, “rapidly becoming a suburb of Jerusalem.”
That same empire, and its survival, was at the center of the contradictions in Saki’s personality. Byrne’s insightful and sprightly book makes plain that his affectless poseurs and dandies may have reflected one half of the man, just as his repeated portrayals of lithe and lissome and amoral young men must have expressed his banked-down yearnings. But this other hemisphere of his character also admired wildness and risk and cruelty and warfare, and associated the concepts of empire and nation with manly virtue.
This point can be reinforced by some thoughts on his choice of nom de plume. I had not known, until I read Byrne’s book, that there was any doubt about the provenance of this. She mentions almost casually that one of his obituarists claimed it was a shortened form of “Nagasaki,” which seems unintelligible in more ways than one. Enormously more probable, given Munro’s often expressed admiration for FitzGerald’s version of Omar Khayyám, is that he saw himself in the cupbearer of the Rubáiyát:
And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Sáki from that Bowl has pour’d
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea’s self should heed a pebblecast.
In a story called “The East Wing,” a lazy young male creature named Lucien Wattleskeat expresses something of the same thought—not exempting the bubble metaphor—but with more focus on the paradoxical importance o
f his own ephemerality:
I don’t think I can risk my life to save someone I’ve never met or even heard about. You see, my life is not only wonderful and beautiful to myself, but if my life goes, nothing else really matters—to me. Eva might be snatched from the flames and live to be the grandmother of brilliant and charming men and women, but as far as I should be concerned she and they would no more exist than a vanished puff of cigarette smoke or a dissolved soda-water bubble.
I think this clears up any dispute about the source of the pseudonym (which often appeared on book jackets alongside his true name), and I pause to note that Lucien Wattleskeat is a poor register of Saki’s generally brilliant and somewhat Wildean ability to devise memorable names. Like Wilde (and like Anthony Powell later on), he made good use of the atlas of Britain and Ireland to come up with surnames and titles that were at once believable and eccentric. Many of these were from his beloved West Country (Yeovil, Honiton, Cullompton), but he ranged far and wide in choosing names like Courtenay Youghal for a smoothly accomplished politician and, in a moment of sheer brilliance, Tobermory for one of his most outstanding characters, the house cat who learns to speak English (and also to eavesdrop). Of his selecting Clovis as the model par excellence of his breed of bored and elegant young men, I have heard it suggested that it was because he was so appallingly Frank.
Creatures that essentially can never be tamed—felines and wolves pre-eminently—were Saki’s emotional favorites. In his best-known novella, The Unbearable Bassington, which contains in the figure of Comus Bassington one of the two most obviously homoerotic of his protagonists (the other being the boy-werewolf Gabriel-Ernest in the story of the same name), the hero is a man named Tom Keriway, whose daredevil nature is summed up in the echoing phrase “a man that wolves have sniffed at.” But Keriway has become sickly and nearly destitute, and morosely recalls an observation about a crippled wild crane that became domesticated in a German park: “It was lame, that was why it was tame.”