The Fry Chronicles (42 page)

My career as a book reviewer was short-lived, but long enough to make me feel that it was not the occupation for me. For good or ill (perhaps it is what footballers call a fifty-fifty ball) I cannot bear to upset people. Perhaps it would be truer to say that I cannot bear to know that there are people going around whom I have upset and who think badly of me as a consequence. My overwhelming desire to please and to be liked has not gone unnoticed. I sometimes hopefully imagine that it may be an agreeable and acceptable enough quirk of character, but I have lived long enough to know that it is more likely to appal than appeal.

It is obvious that the purpose of critics is to transmit their opinion of the works that have been sent to them. In your life as a reviewer, the day will soon come when a book arrives which is too bad to respond to with anything other than the savaging you are convinced it deserves. You berate it and its author, you mock, you expose, you trash and you pillory. It is, for a short time, a wonderful feeling to tick an author off and in scalding prose to ridicule their inadequacies and rubbish their pretensions. After all, for weeks and weeks you have been compelled to read novels, autobiographies, histories, guides and collections, most of which are – dread word, as Wallace Arnold would say –
fine
. They are of sufficient quality to justify their publication and for the most part it will be easy enough, if you are a placating weasel like me, to find something about them to like. But, willy nilly, the iron has entered your soul. You cannot help but begin to look on authors and publishers as the enemy. They pound at your door at all times of the day and night clamouring for your attention. So many of them, all with so much to say. Their tics, minor flaws and mannerisms become an aggravation, but you hold your fire as reasonably as you can. One day, with all this building up inside you, there is a buzzing at the entryphone, and a motorcycle courier stands outside in the rain with a package for you to sign for. Another set of new literary works to be read and rated. After the leather-clad messenger of the metropolis has gone through the usual ‘Do you mind if I use your toilet?’ and ‘Oh, can I use your phone to call my dispatcher?’ and ‘Shall we have sex right here and now?’ I am left alone with his delivery. And this time one of the books is It. The Stinker.

Incidentally, anybody who thinks that a book reviewer has at least the profitable perk of hundreds of free books a month to offset his misery may not know about uncorrected bound proofs: these are flimsy and hastily assembled pre-release editions sent out to reviewers and to anyone likely to provide a winning phrase to be printed on the front of the proper later-to-be-printed dust-jacketed edition – ‘ “Deliciously insightful, coolly ironic,” Wayne Rooney’; ‘ “A rip-snorting, barn-storming, cliff-hanging, roller-coaster of a ride,” Iris Murdoch’; ‘“The dog’s bollocks: Bukowski is gang-raped by Burroughs and Gibson and has a bastard child,” Ann Widdecombe’ – that kind of thing. There is now an online auction market for the bound proofs of better-known authors, but in the mid-eighties they were so much waste paper to be thrown away as soon as they had been read and reviewed. Today email, .pdf and the eBook and iPad are beginning to put an end to the age of the bound proof, as they have to the age of the motorcycle courier, of course. In the eighties every phone call between editors and journalists, agents and clients, producers and writers, lawyers and lawyers included phrases like: ‘I’ll get it biked over to you,’ ‘Bike it over, I’ll sign and bike it back,’ ‘Is it small enough for a bike, or shall we cab it round?’ London in the mid-eighties buzzed and snarled to the sound of 550cc Hondas and Kawasaki 750s swooping and skidding around you, clipping your wing-mirrors, revving at the traffic lights and terrifying the citizenry with their desperado devilry.

I shall divert for a revealing story that a friend told me round about this time. Her aunt had been checked into Moorfields Eye Hospital, where she was due for a corneal graft, cataract operation or similarly routine, but nonetheless delicate, ophthalmic procedure. She was lying in bed wondering what was up, when the consultant came in.

‘Ah, Miss Tredway, how do you do? You’ve had the operation explained? What we do is we cut out your nasty cloudy old lens and replace it with a shiny new donor one. Simple as can be. Trouble is, we don’t have any donor eyes in at the moment.’

‘Oh.’

‘I shouldn’t worry, though.’ He went to the window and looked out over the City Road. ‘It’s raining, so it won’t be very long.’

You know there is something amiss when a doctor can absolutely guarantee that if the roads are slippery a fatal accident will be sure to befall a despatch rider somewhere in the city and that a fresh, healthy pair of young eyes will soon be speeding their way to the operating theatre packed in a cool-box. A cool-box bungeed to the pillion of a motorcycle in all probability …

Well, that was London in the pre-fax, pre-internet eighties. Couriers and cars did the work, and it was matter in the form of massy atoms, rather than content in the form of massless electrons, that had to be conveyed from place to place.

But I was telling you about The Stinker. It was inevitable that sooner or later in my career as a literary critic I would open a courier’s package (ooer, now but shush) and find a book about which there could be nothing good to say.

‘Well, if you haven’t anything nice to say, then don’t say anything,’ is the recommendation of most mothers, and as always their advice is worth considering. The difficulty comes when, as mentioned, iron has entered the soul and charity, compassion and fellow-feeling have fled it.

I shall refrain from naming names and titles, but The Stinker was the one that propelled me into meanness. I sharpened the nib, dipped it in the most caustic solution available and set forth to make my feelings known. Just as when a beautiful person is beautiful in all their lineaments – hair, nose, ankles, eyelashes and nape – so when a writer is bad they seem to strike one as bad in every particular, from style and syntax to moral outlook and spiritual worth. There will be those reading this book who have come to that same conclusion about me, although it is probable that they will have cast it down in disgust before getting this far. Unless they are reading it for review, of course, in which case I shall have cause to shudder. Or rather my mother will, since I do not read reviews.

I might have hoped that the nameless author of the nameless book that I so mercilessly tore into never read my review either, but I happen to know that they did. Oh, I was witty, devastating and – to anyone who read the piece – incontestably convincing and incontrovertibly correct. I adduced quotations with which to condemn the poor author out of his or her own mouth, I questioned their sanity, sense and intellect. I ‘proved’ that their book was not only bad but wicked, not only imperfect but opportunistic, creepy and deluded. All of which I sincerely believed it to be. It really was a most awful piece of work, this book. Had it been cack-handed and incompetent but well-intentioned and unobjectionable in disposition, I am sure I would have let it be. Since it was The Stinker, however, no feature redeemed it, and I let myself go. I mustn’t overstate things. You should understand that plenty of worse reviews were written of that book and of other books that week, plenty of meaner and more disapproving pieces are written about books
every
week. Nonetheless, my article would certainly cause anyone who read it to wince and to feel for the author. Why am I lingering on this book and my review of it?

In a long life of offering up works for public scrutiny I have had my own share of negative critical notices. I no longer look, and my friends know better than to commiserate with (or occasionally to congratulate) me on a review that I will never read. But in all the years during which I could not resist checking my reviews and on reading them felt myself punched and lowered and dispirited by the savageries or cruel perspicacities levelled at me, I never felt a tenth as chronically dreadful as I did in the weeks following the publication of my assault on The Stinker. I lay awake at night picturing his or her reaction. On the cowardly level I imagined that one day, when I least expected it, I would be waylaid by this now wholly deranged and indigent ex-author and have a quart of actual vitriol flung at my face as revenge for the quart of virtual vitriol I had flung in theirs. In less egoistic moods, I pictured their misery and humiliation and I felt like the worst kind of bully. What right had I to make them unhappy? What business of mine was it to hold up to the light their infelicities of phrasing or falsities of reasoning? Where the fuck, in other words, did I get off?

Any number of reviewers and critics will tell you that if someone chooses to present a work for money then the public should be warned before making an expenditure that they cannot recall. If you writers and performers don’t like the heat, they say, you can get out of the kitchen. What right, they will add, turning the question around, do practitioners of theatre, literature, film, television or any other art have to be immune from informed opinion? Are they only to be lauded and applauded, pampered, praised and petted?

I cannot deny a single word of these and many other of the cogent
plaidoyers
routinely offered by criticism’s apologists. There are all kinds of responses and attitudes that can justify the art and practice of reviewing, but none of them, not a one, addresses the question of how you live with yourself if your wicked wit, shrewd insight and scornful judgement will have hurt someone, will have them crying themselves to sleep. Or worse still, how you can live with yourself if you realize that you have become the kind of person who does not even
care
that they regularly cause pain, suffering, discouragement
and loss of self-regard in those trying to earn a living in their field?

It is weak, it is wussy, it is probably a betrayal of everything the Cambridge literary ethos from Leavis to Kermode stands for, but I am much less interested in artistic standards, literary values, aesthetic authenticity and critical candour than I am in the feelings of others. Or in my own feelings, I suppose I should say, for I cannot bear to feel that I have offended or that I have enemies. It
is
weak, it
is
wussy, but there you are. And for that reason I was relieved when Alan Coren took over the
Listener
and suggested that I move away from literary reviewing and contribute instead a weekly column on general topics that might appeal to me. From that day on I have only agreed to review a book, film or television programme if one proviso is understood and accepted by the editor commissioning me: the review will be favourable or, if the product is so dreadful that even I cannot find a good word to say about it, there will be no article. I am less fastidious about kindness to the digital devices, smartphones and computer peripherals I sometimes review, but then their origins are usually so much more corporate and so much less personal. However, if it ever got back to me that the designers of a camera or the authors of a new piece of software were weeping because of something cruel I had said, then I would probably pack in my geek reviews too.

Most of all I refuse to say anything bad about the work of a friend. My literary integrity can go hang, but friendship is sacred. Of course, by telling you this, it allows you – were you so minded – to look back at the blurbs and jacket quotes I have given for writers I have known and speculate that when I wrote, ‘Brilliant, harrowing, lung-achingly funny’
I might really have been thinking, ‘Grisly, horrible, arse-seepingly incompetent’. You will never know.

One of Alan Coren’s favourite academic stories was one of mine too. It concerns a don, often identified as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, that great moustachioed Edwardian doyen of letters, author of children’s adventure stories and responsible as ‘Q’ for the great edition of the
Oxford Book of English Verse.
Apparently he was welcoming a new Fellow to the Senior Combination Room at Jesus, the Cambridge College where he roosted for the last thirty years of his life.

‘We’re delighted to have you here,’ he said, putting an arm round the young man’s shoulder, ‘but a word of advice. Don’t try to be clever. We’re all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.’

Like most university stories, this one is variously attributed and it probably never even happened but, as the Italians say,
se non è vero, è ben trovato –
even if it isn’t true, it’s well founded.

I wrote a weekly
Listener
column for another year. The
Tatler
smelling duties lasted only a few months before Boxer and I parted by mutual consent: the puns were threatening my sanity. I continued meanwhile to tap away at the keyboard for other publications as often as I was asked to. I seemed to be in almost limitless demand and, so long as I didn’t have to breach my peculiar rules on reviewing, all was well.

How did it all begin? Why did editors fasten upon me in the first place? What motivated Mark Boxer to be
in touch? Why did Russell Twisk make an approach? Well, it is possible that I owed my journalistic career, such as it was, to a man called Jonathan Meades. If you watch good television you will know who I mean. He wears charcoal suits and sunglasses and talks about architecture, food and culture high and low as brilliantly as any man alive. For many years he was
The Times
’s restaurant critic, and there are many who might think that,
pace
Giles Coren and his generation, he has never been surpassed in that field. In the mid-eighties he had some kind of position on the
Tatler
, ‘features editor’ is I think the proper description. He got hold of my telephone number somehow, perhaps from Don Boyd, who knew everybody.