22 November 2008
Dear Jane
Thank you for inviting me to Alan's memorial. I owe him a great deal, not
simply for guiding me to The Roundhouse but, as theatre critic of The
Statesman (and elsewhere) for his early support of my writing. It's not
merely that he admired it but that he did so with uncanny perception. I
remember thinking that's how I would have reviewed them myself!!!
You had a very good crowd there though I missed other critics, were they
there? And you assembled music that really recreated the times. I can
remember lustily singing The International on my (communist) mother's knee
as it were. Not sure how I feel about it now. Mixed emotions, like many,
I guess.
Anyway, Alan must have left a huge hole in your life which I hope is being
filled as he would have wanted.
Thanks again, till Hay perhaps - before I sell it.
Warm wishes
Arnold
SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L
Wednesday 26 November 2008
Tuesday 25 November 2008
The Addresses
My tribute
The first film Alan and I saw together in 1994, was ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. I mention it because it seemed so utterly unlikely, at that point, Alan would become my husband or I, his fourth wife. And it makes him sound like Blue Beard.
He had just returned from Bosnia with Ken Lukowiak, who introduced us. It was spring, it was the matinee, and Alan placed his jacket over my lap, the first in a succession of courtesies from this inscrutable man with the black eyes and the lilting, gravelly voice. His looks reminded me of my own Russian and Polish ancestry even though it was a northern light that cast across Alan’s whole being.
Over a lunch at Zamoyski’s, we talked about Savile Row tailoring - he still wore a bespoke suit he’d had made in September 1965 - and pearl buttons on oyster satin. ‘We go in and out of the same door’ he would say.
I had never knowingly read him and knew nothing of his reputation. His first present to me was a copy of Lenin: the Novel, delivered by hand, inside which he wrote ‘If G. Greene can write letters in other people’s books. I can write to you in mine…I would like (as we used to say at school) to be your friend…if you have a life time or two to spare, dip into mine - it contains about half of what has happened to me…’ Though he never used two metaphors where three would do, my, what a book.
He was working on his second novel, a fiction of The Life of Cicero, and our first trip abroad would be around the ancient Greek and Roman sites of the Western Mediterranean, when we would always be first at the gates to disembark.
Alan, owned himself, as Boswell put it, “to be amorous”. He became a life model at the Ruskin School of Art in the forties to be nearer the Cuban studio model he had a pash on. He had the gift of listening with his whole attention and those stealthy tactics of his were extremely seductive.
I now know the Alan I met, aged 68, was less gladiatorial than he had been. Strangely, in retrospect, I think he handed the baton of ‘bad cop’ in this partnership, to me. He never bragged, rarely took credit, NEVER said ‘I don’t know’, was most tender with animals. He owned very little, other than books, and poetry in particular lit him up. What prejudices he had, he put aside for me, embracing the Bloomsbury Group, for one, becoming deeply fond of my old friends, Igor Anrep and Annabel Farjeon.
Alan was the first person I had met who almost never said ‘no’, nor ‘I told you so’, no matter how many times I ditched the car, we were caught by the tide, not even after I encouraged him into the middle of the river to get a better view of Low Force, and he broke his ankle. His pedal was always pressed to the floor and we enjoyed the same kind of delving into things.
But there is also the truth of unremembered things. I want particularly to say that DEVASTATING as the diagnosis of Alan’s Lewy Body disease was, with respect to the things he couldn’t influence he showed tremendous courage and stoicism, adopting his father‘s motto ‘let the other fellow be embarrassed’. If anything his imagination became even more elaborate and filmic. Alan called his hallucinations ‘free cinema’ and if he didn’t mind them neither did I… most of the time. He may even have had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome for all I know. Of course I jest but he had always seen the world through a fish eye lens, whitewashed mulberry trees in Crete were cricketers, starlings in the sky were tea leaves, he loved the narratives of cloud formations, and he was eccentric, a natural bohemian. Once he dyed his sand shoes with food colouring that turned his feet green when it rained.
Strangely, given his autobiographical style, he didn’t gossip or chew the cud.
Alan’s silences had always been more pregnant than most and I never stopped wanting his opinion, succinct as it became. When we met a new person and I asked what he thought, ‘shallow but not superficial’ came back in a heart beat.
The fact is Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy. Lives coast on memory and for Alan it became new ones. He had the ability to live in the moment. His appetites had always been vital, ravenous even. ‘That was the best meal I ever ate’ he would say. ‘You were marvellous’ he would whisper on our way home from a do during which he had simply smiled beatifically.
I never tired of looking at him. What a gift he was for painters and sculptors. But how is it possible to be variously mistaken, in the street, for Sean Connery, David Leitch, even Liberace? And, to resemble all of them, including Lenin, Augustus John and Cezanne. Somehow, they all really were aspects of Alan.
Now Alan was tone deaf and the only song I ever heard him sing, and really well, was ‘Herrin’s Head’.
From Paul Vaughan
A little more than 60 years have passed since I first met Alan, and so you’ll understand how very hard it is to realise that we’ll never hear again that voice still with its traces of Sunderland and somehow tuned to mockery and aphorism...like those in his famous 34 Things Every Sociologist Knows (and may or may not be true). It was a New Statesman piece in 2006: example --
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain
who have published more than one book is £178.
And
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return
to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the
name of the signatory.
I think I may have been present at the coining of one of his axioms. It was at Oxford in the forties when a man none of us knew had punched one of the people sitting in the bar where we had met. When remonstrated with he said, ‘I’m sorry, I always talk with my fists,’ leading us to try to think of suitable rejoinders to this fatuous excuse, like ‘I don’t like your grammar,’ or ‘We don’t speak your language.’ Alan however remarked ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,’ a precept he must have stored away, because out it came later on in life though didn’t for some reason make it to the famous 34.
Alan had started writing at school in Sunderland. One thing he wrote was a story
for the Wizard, or it might have been The Hotspur, with a hero called Hercules Standpoint. He sent it off to D C Thomson of Dundee, the firm who published all the popular boys’ weeklies, and they liked it, and put it into one of the weeklies in their stable. The letter of acceptance asked for more episodes -- but unfortunately Alan was quite unable to think of one, and never replied. What happened to Standpoint, marooned, as it were, in one episode, Alan never found out.
In spite of this early glitch in his career, Alan became the No 1 literary journalist of his day but I always think of him first at Oxford after the war -- a slim, laconic individual already with a beard: he shaved it off one day and looked so different that I passed him off as somebody else, an undergraduate called John Martin: I suppose we could have called him Hercules Standpoint but thought a very ordinary name would work better. Anyway people introduced to him were puzzled: the voice was familiar and so, vaguely, was the face but who was he? Alan re-grew the beard and Martin passed, briefly, like a sort of semi-recognised phantom through Oxford society.
Of course the late 1940s in Oxford were a wonderful time as many here will testify: we had come out of the services, a reforming government was in by a landslide, and we had the world at our feet. And I think we all, including Alan, loved Oxford with its glorious buildings and vistas and wonderful things to do. Alan, like me, had been up during the war, before being called up, and he had upset the dons at Jesus by his Sunderland accent and as I understand it rather delinquent behaviour...so much so that the Principal of Jesus said, when Alan left, ‘That man will come back to this college over my dead body.’ And as Alan said to Godfrey Smith, ‘that is exactly what I did.’ The Principal having unfortunately died in the interim.
Alan‘s career in the RAF was only intermittently heroic. He went for training as a pilot but he turned out, as he told us, totally incompetent, and his last act in pilot training was to crash his plane while attempting to land. The CO of his unit was furious, and told Alan he was going to have to pay for a new aeroplane out of his RAF pay (ten bob a week or so) but I don’t know if this threat was carried out. Instead they made him an air-gunner, and he liked it when someone said to him once, ‘If you’re an air-gunner, where’s your air-gun?’ Actually Alan did fly one mission, and told us he was terrified: luckily, the war ended before he could be sent up again.
So it was back to Oxford, where the star undergraduate of the time was Ken Tynan, conspicuous in those peculiar orange and green ensembles of his. He had written a piece about Oxford for Vogue, which appeared I think in the long vac of 1947. It was a rather camp sort of piece, on which Alan did an efficient hatchet-job in the Isis. Tynan had written ‘Oxford is feminine, yes, feminine,’, causing Alan to write, ‘The emphasis will be Mr Tynan’s to the grave.’
Anyway this led to his being appointed editor of the Isis. He was a huge success at this and his Isis was funny and essential weekly reading. Derek Cooper was Features Editor and they made a formidable partnership, Derek producing brilliant parodies (notably of Graham Greene and John Betjeman (the first brought a telegram from a reader that said CONGRATULATIONS GRAHAM GREENE), and Alan with extraordinary leading articles, like one that started
‘Like Adversity, and I dare say Perversity, University makes
strange bedfellows...’
During his term as editor, the rival university magazine was Cherwell. The Cherwell editor had for some reason been made a Papal Count, and (I dare say quite reasonably) he liked to flaunt this honour. But he was rash enough to pick a fight with the Isis and it developed into a sort of mini-feud. Alan finished it off: he delivered the coup de grâce when he described Cherwell as ‘count-struck.’
With his sharp eye for paradox, Alan could make ordinary things seem extraordinary. We were walking back to his flat in Walton Well Road one day and he said,’That’s the house, there, the one sticking out at the front. looks as if it’s volunteering -- Here, take me...’ And once, we were in the ABC in the Corn when the door opened and in came a black man who happened to be in holy orders, and with his dog collar he was wearing a white tropical suit. ‘Look,’ said Alan, ‘there’s a clergyman in negative.’
When he went down he continued to view the world with a certain louche disdain. He was determined to become, not a journalist but a literary journalist.and that is what he very soon did. There were one or two hurdles to be jumped, including the job at Mini-Cinema, which he called Mini-Enema -- and that job ended badly, when the editor called him in after he’d been enjoying a three- or four-hour lunch and told him he was fired. Drawing himself up, Alan said before stumbling out: ‘I came here for increment. And you give me excrement.’
During his earlier years as a journalist he became a sort of ghost writer for Randolph Churchill, a position that led to several odd adventures. He had a story about staying the weekend, with Randolph, at Chartwell, Winston Chuirchill’s house in Kent. It was said that a small boy who was one of the other guests, having nothing to do, wandered around the house and climbed the stairs. He walked along a corridor and opened a door: at the other end of the room he saw an old man sittingup in bed smoking a cigar and reading. He looked up over his spectacles. The boy said, ‘Are you the greatest living Englishman?’ And the old man said, ‘Yes, I am. And you can bugger off.’
There was ano9ther occasion when Randolph took Alan to lunch at White’s, in St James’s. As it happened, Alan had just written for George Scott’s Truth a Profile of Evelyn Waugh in which he made no attempt to hide Waugh’s faults, chiefly his snobbishness and country-squire affectations. As Randolph and Alan entered the club, Waugh emerged. Randolph greeted him enthusiastically, and introduced Alan. In the moments that followed Alan decided he should identify himself, and he said, ‘I’ve just written your Profile for Truth.’ Waugh ignored him. But later wrote to a friend, ‘Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.’ I suppose this tells us more about E velyn Waugh than aboiut Alan but it does illustrate Alan’s fearlessness, his readiness to take risks and his indifference to those whom others regarded as iconic.
At Oxford he was a pupil of the great F W Bateson, Oxford’s only rival to the Leavises in Cambridge, a believer in analytical reading and close criticism of the texts we had before us, and quite opposed to the romantic, phrase-making belle-lettriste tradition that had held sway in Oxford for decades. Alan would come back from a Bateson tutorial and pass on the day’s aperçus, like the probability of incest in the Wordsworth household and the masturbation images in Donne --
But since that I
Must dye at last, ‘tis best,
To use myself in jest.
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye...
On the whole t wasn’t wise to bandy words with Alan, I remember him saying he used to deal with bullies at school by arguing with them -- no poor man’s repartee for him -- he was like Auden’s ‘The silly fool, the silly fool, who beat the bully as a rule,’ except that Alan was certainly no fool. He was a man of strong opinions, eloquently and wittily expressed. I recall how he came out of the Radcliffe one day after reading some of Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, in a contemporary edition and was pleased to find someone (no doubt some early Victorian undergraduate) had written in the margin Damned Whig. Somehow it could only have happened to Alan. He was a damned Whig of course: he was on more than one Aldermaston march and in 1956 he asked his editor on the Evening Standard to send him to Hungary...the editor wouldn’t, but as a kind of compromise he sent him to New York. There, his bullshit-detector was no doubt working at full stretch. At about this time his telephone number in London, which was GULliver something, could be more easily remembered by people like us who were better at words than numbers, as GULFPAN.
Well, it continued to do that throughout his career. He had a way of looking at you sideways through eyes that were a quarter closed and you knew his sceptical intelligence was examining your opinions and, quite possibly, found them untenable. You can’t say that he would begin, and you’d have to try to defend your ideas as he dismantled them for you. It has been the grimmest of ironies that this most articulate of men should be stricken with a condition that interferes with your judgement and causes, of all things, a failure to communicate. But I am glad to say that when I saw him a few days before he died he was pretty lucid and seemed in control of his feelings and actions. Much like the old Alan that I shall always remember with admiration and affection.
Dear Jane here are my words: [Valerie Grove]
Alan Brien was one of those rare people with whom I fell in love long before we actually met. Since he came from Sunderland, and I came from South Shields only six miles away, I always knew we’d get on because people from the North-east always do. But what I fell in love with was his pieces in the New Statesman in the 1960s, and when we did meet, I was able to recite from memory a paragraph from a column of his that I’d copied into my commonplace book – something he’d written in 1969.
At that first encounter, at a film preview in 1971, he did not disappoint. He was everything I’d expected: a large presence, with a fine profile and those Slavic eyes and cheekbones and sardonic smile that were entirely suited to the amused, sceptical expression he so often wore. He would listen, but he was always ready to argue and provoke, even when wrong. We had a bet on his assertion that The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God was written by Kipling, which in fact was written by E Milton Hayes. He seemed to recall everything that Lord Beaverbrook ever said, and could recall whole conversations, at fantastic length: you’d think he’d reached a punch-line, but then he’d go on to another. It was the same in arguments, where Jill’s famous description of him being like a wart-hog, butting its way through the other animals to the water, was most apt: he’d shoulder his way through everyone’s verbiage and views, and get to the truth. I’ve never met anyone who held the table like him.
Here’s the opening of his column that I still have by heart.
“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after eating too many burberries’.”
Dear Jane
I plan to be at the memorial. Not sure about The Garrick Club.
Will one of your eulogists add a paragraph pointing out that it was Alan
who contacted me to alert me the fact that The Roundhouse had been bought,
along with other land, by a property dealer named Louis Mintz who didn't
know what to do with the old engine shed, which was a Grade Two listed
building, and perhaps - suggested Alan - I could persuade Mr Mintz to give
it to the Centre Fortytwo project. I took up the suggestion and eventually
persuaded Louis Mintz to give us the 19 years lease left on the building.
Thus it was Alan who ignited the spark that led to the Roundhouse becoming
an iconic London building. And it was Centre Fortytwo's focus on The
Roundhouse and its surroundings that led to the beginnings of Camden
Market!
Arnold
SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L
The first film Alan and I saw together in 1994, was ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. I mention it because it seemed so utterly unlikely, at that point, Alan would become my husband or I, his fourth wife. And it makes him sound like Blue Beard.
He had just returned from Bosnia with Ken Lukowiak, who introduced us. It was spring, it was the matinee, and Alan placed his jacket over my lap, the first in a succession of courtesies from this inscrutable man with the black eyes and the lilting, gravelly voice. His looks reminded me of my own Russian and Polish ancestry even though it was a northern light that cast across Alan’s whole being.
Over a lunch at Zamoyski’s, we talked about Savile Row tailoring - he still wore a bespoke suit he’d had made in September 1965 - and pearl buttons on oyster satin. ‘We go in and out of the same door’ he would say.
I had never knowingly read him and knew nothing of his reputation. His first present to me was a copy of Lenin: the Novel, delivered by hand, inside which he wrote ‘If G. Greene can write letters in other people’s books. I can write to you in mine…I would like (as we used to say at school) to be your friend…if you have a life time or two to spare, dip into mine - it contains about half of what has happened to me…’ Though he never used two metaphors where three would do, my, what a book.
He was working on his second novel, a fiction of The Life of Cicero, and our first trip abroad would be around the ancient Greek and Roman sites of the Western Mediterranean, when we would always be first at the gates to disembark.
Alan, owned himself, as Boswell put it, “to be amorous”. He became a life model at the Ruskin School of Art in the forties to be nearer the Cuban studio model he had a pash on. He had the gift of listening with his whole attention and those stealthy tactics of his were extremely seductive.
I now know the Alan I met, aged 68, was less gladiatorial than he had been. Strangely, in retrospect, I think he handed the baton of ‘bad cop’ in this partnership, to me. He never bragged, rarely took credit, NEVER said ‘I don’t know’, was most tender with animals. He owned very little, other than books, and poetry in particular lit him up. What prejudices he had, he put aside for me, embracing the Bloomsbury Group, for one, becoming deeply fond of my old friends, Igor Anrep and Annabel Farjeon.
Alan was the first person I had met who almost never said ‘no’, nor ‘I told you so’, no matter how many times I ditched the car, we were caught by the tide, not even after I encouraged him into the middle of the river to get a better view of Low Force, and he broke his ankle. His pedal was always pressed to the floor and we enjoyed the same kind of delving into things.
But there is also the truth of unremembered things. I want particularly to say that DEVASTATING as the diagnosis of Alan’s Lewy Body disease was, with respect to the things he couldn’t influence he showed tremendous courage and stoicism, adopting his father‘s motto ‘let the other fellow be embarrassed’. If anything his imagination became even more elaborate and filmic. Alan called his hallucinations ‘free cinema’ and if he didn’t mind them neither did I… most of the time. He may even have had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome for all I know. Of course I jest but he had always seen the world through a fish eye lens, whitewashed mulberry trees in Crete were cricketers, starlings in the sky were tea leaves, he loved the narratives of cloud formations, and he was eccentric, a natural bohemian. Once he dyed his sand shoes with food colouring that turned his feet green when it rained.
Strangely, given his autobiographical style, he didn’t gossip or chew the cud.
Alan’s silences had always been more pregnant than most and I never stopped wanting his opinion, succinct as it became. When we met a new person and I asked what he thought, ‘shallow but not superficial’ came back in a heart beat.
The fact is Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy. Lives coast on memory and for Alan it became new ones. He had the ability to live in the moment. His appetites had always been vital, ravenous even. ‘That was the best meal I ever ate’ he would say. ‘You were marvellous’ he would whisper on our way home from a do during which he had simply smiled beatifically.
I never tired of looking at him. What a gift he was for painters and sculptors. But how is it possible to be variously mistaken, in the street, for Sean Connery, David Leitch, even Liberace? And, to resemble all of them, including Lenin, Augustus John and Cezanne. Somehow, they all really were aspects of Alan.
Now Alan was tone deaf and the only song I ever heard him sing, and really well, was ‘Herrin’s Head’.
From Paul Vaughan
A little more than 60 years have passed since I first met Alan, and so you’ll understand how very hard it is to realise that we’ll never hear again that voice still with its traces of Sunderland and somehow tuned to mockery and aphorism...like those in his famous 34 Things Every Sociologist Knows (and may or may not be true). It was a New Statesman piece in 2006: example --
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain
who have published more than one book is £178.
And
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return
to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the
name of the signatory.
I think I may have been present at the coining of one of his axioms. It was at Oxford in the forties when a man none of us knew had punched one of the people sitting in the bar where we had met. When remonstrated with he said, ‘I’m sorry, I always talk with my fists,’ leading us to try to think of suitable rejoinders to this fatuous excuse, like ‘I don’t like your grammar,’ or ‘We don’t speak your language.’ Alan however remarked ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,’ a precept he must have stored away, because out it came later on in life though didn’t for some reason make it to the famous 34.
Alan had started writing at school in Sunderland. One thing he wrote was a story
for the Wizard, or it might have been The Hotspur, with a hero called Hercules Standpoint. He sent it off to D C Thomson of Dundee, the firm who published all the popular boys’ weeklies, and they liked it, and put it into one of the weeklies in their stable. The letter of acceptance asked for more episodes -- but unfortunately Alan was quite unable to think of one, and never replied. What happened to Standpoint, marooned, as it were, in one episode, Alan never found out.
In spite of this early glitch in his career, Alan became the No 1 literary journalist of his day but I always think of him first at Oxford after the war -- a slim, laconic individual already with a beard: he shaved it off one day and looked so different that I passed him off as somebody else, an undergraduate called John Martin: I suppose we could have called him Hercules Standpoint but thought a very ordinary name would work better. Anyway people introduced to him were puzzled: the voice was familiar and so, vaguely, was the face but who was he? Alan re-grew the beard and Martin passed, briefly, like a sort of semi-recognised phantom through Oxford society.
Of course the late 1940s in Oxford were a wonderful time as many here will testify: we had come out of the services, a reforming government was in by a landslide, and we had the world at our feet. And I think we all, including Alan, loved Oxford with its glorious buildings and vistas and wonderful things to do. Alan, like me, had been up during the war, before being called up, and he had upset the dons at Jesus by his Sunderland accent and as I understand it rather delinquent behaviour...so much so that the Principal of Jesus said, when Alan left, ‘That man will come back to this college over my dead body.’ And as Alan said to Godfrey Smith, ‘that is exactly what I did.’ The Principal having unfortunately died in the interim.
Alan‘s career in the RAF was only intermittently heroic. He went for training as a pilot but he turned out, as he told us, totally incompetent, and his last act in pilot training was to crash his plane while attempting to land. The CO of his unit was furious, and told Alan he was going to have to pay for a new aeroplane out of his RAF pay (ten bob a week or so) but I don’t know if this threat was carried out. Instead they made him an air-gunner, and he liked it when someone said to him once, ‘If you’re an air-gunner, where’s your air-gun?’ Actually Alan did fly one mission, and told us he was terrified: luckily, the war ended before he could be sent up again.
So it was back to Oxford, where the star undergraduate of the time was Ken Tynan, conspicuous in those peculiar orange and green ensembles of his. He had written a piece about Oxford for Vogue, which appeared I think in the long vac of 1947. It was a rather camp sort of piece, on which Alan did an efficient hatchet-job in the Isis. Tynan had written ‘Oxford is feminine, yes, feminine,’, causing Alan to write, ‘The emphasis will be Mr Tynan’s to the grave.’
Anyway this led to his being appointed editor of the Isis. He was a huge success at this and his Isis was funny and essential weekly reading. Derek Cooper was Features Editor and they made a formidable partnership, Derek producing brilliant parodies (notably of Graham Greene and John Betjeman (the first brought a telegram from a reader that said CONGRATULATIONS GRAHAM GREENE), and Alan with extraordinary leading articles, like one that started
‘Like Adversity, and I dare say Perversity, University makes
strange bedfellows...’
During his term as editor, the rival university magazine was Cherwell. The Cherwell editor had for some reason been made a Papal Count, and (I dare say quite reasonably) he liked to flaunt this honour. But he was rash enough to pick a fight with the Isis and it developed into a sort of mini-feud. Alan finished it off: he delivered the coup de grâce when he described Cherwell as ‘count-struck.’
With his sharp eye for paradox, Alan could make ordinary things seem extraordinary. We were walking back to his flat in Walton Well Road one day and he said,’That’s the house, there, the one sticking out at the front. looks as if it’s volunteering -- Here, take me...’ And once, we were in the ABC in the Corn when the door opened and in came a black man who happened to be in holy orders, and with his dog collar he was wearing a white tropical suit. ‘Look,’ said Alan, ‘there’s a clergyman in negative.’
When he went down he continued to view the world with a certain louche disdain. He was determined to become, not a journalist but a literary journalist.and that is what he very soon did. There were one or two hurdles to be jumped, including the job at Mini-Cinema, which he called Mini-Enema -- and that job ended badly, when the editor called him in after he’d been enjoying a three- or four-hour lunch and told him he was fired. Drawing himself up, Alan said before stumbling out: ‘I came here for increment. And you give me excrement.’
During his earlier years as a journalist he became a sort of ghost writer for Randolph Churchill, a position that led to several odd adventures. He had a story about staying the weekend, with Randolph, at Chartwell, Winston Chuirchill’s house in Kent. It was said that a small boy who was one of the other guests, having nothing to do, wandered around the house and climbed the stairs. He walked along a corridor and opened a door: at the other end of the room he saw an old man sittingup in bed smoking a cigar and reading. He looked up over his spectacles. The boy said, ‘Are you the greatest living Englishman?’ And the old man said, ‘Yes, I am. And you can bugger off.’
There was ano9ther occasion when Randolph took Alan to lunch at White’s, in St James’s. As it happened, Alan had just written for George Scott’s Truth a Profile of Evelyn Waugh in which he made no attempt to hide Waugh’s faults, chiefly his snobbishness and country-squire affectations. As Randolph and Alan entered the club, Waugh emerged. Randolph greeted him enthusiastically, and introduced Alan. In the moments that followed Alan decided he should identify himself, and he said, ‘I’ve just written your Profile for Truth.’ Waugh ignored him. But later wrote to a friend, ‘Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.’ I suppose this tells us more about E velyn Waugh than aboiut Alan but it does illustrate Alan’s fearlessness, his readiness to take risks and his indifference to those whom others regarded as iconic.
At Oxford he was a pupil of the great F W Bateson, Oxford’s only rival to the Leavises in Cambridge, a believer in analytical reading and close criticism of the texts we had before us, and quite opposed to the romantic, phrase-making belle-lettriste tradition that had held sway in Oxford for decades. Alan would come back from a Bateson tutorial and pass on the day’s aperçus, like the probability of incest in the Wordsworth household and the masturbation images in Donne --
But since that I
Must dye at last, ‘tis best,
To use myself in jest.
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye...
On the whole t wasn’t wise to bandy words with Alan, I remember him saying he used to deal with bullies at school by arguing with them -- no poor man’s repartee for him -- he was like Auden’s ‘The silly fool, the silly fool, who beat the bully as a rule,’ except that Alan was certainly no fool. He was a man of strong opinions, eloquently and wittily expressed. I recall how he came out of the Radcliffe one day after reading some of Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, in a contemporary edition and was pleased to find someone (no doubt some early Victorian undergraduate) had written in the margin Damned Whig. Somehow it could only have happened to Alan. He was a damned Whig of course: he was on more than one Aldermaston march and in 1956 he asked his editor on the Evening Standard to send him to Hungary...the editor wouldn’t, but as a kind of compromise he sent him to New York. There, his bullshit-detector was no doubt working at full stretch. At about this time his telephone number in London, which was GULliver something, could be more easily remembered by people like us who were better at words than numbers, as GULFPAN.
Well, it continued to do that throughout his career. He had a way of looking at you sideways through eyes that were a quarter closed and you knew his sceptical intelligence was examining your opinions and, quite possibly, found them untenable. You can’t say that he would begin, and you’d have to try to defend your ideas as he dismantled them for you. It has been the grimmest of ironies that this most articulate of men should be stricken with a condition that interferes with your judgement and causes, of all things, a failure to communicate. But I am glad to say that when I saw him a few days before he died he was pretty lucid and seemed in control of his feelings and actions. Much like the old Alan that I shall always remember with admiration and affection.
Dear Jane here are my words: [Valerie Grove]
Alan Brien was one of those rare people with whom I fell in love long before we actually met. Since he came from Sunderland, and I came from South Shields only six miles away, I always knew we’d get on because people from the North-east always do. But what I fell in love with was his pieces in the New Statesman in the 1960s, and when we did meet, I was able to recite from memory a paragraph from a column of his that I’d copied into my commonplace book – something he’d written in 1969.
At that first encounter, at a film preview in 1971, he did not disappoint. He was everything I’d expected: a large presence, with a fine profile and those Slavic eyes and cheekbones and sardonic smile that were entirely suited to the amused, sceptical expression he so often wore. He would listen, but he was always ready to argue and provoke, even when wrong. We had a bet on his assertion that The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God was written by Kipling, which in fact was written by E Milton Hayes. He seemed to recall everything that Lord Beaverbrook ever said, and could recall whole conversations, at fantastic length: you’d think he’d reached a punch-line, but then he’d go on to another. It was the same in arguments, where Jill’s famous description of him being like a wart-hog, butting its way through the other animals to the water, was most apt: he’d shoulder his way through everyone’s verbiage and views, and get to the truth. I’ve never met anyone who held the table like him.
Here’s the opening of his column that I still have by heart.
“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after eating too many burberries’.”
Dear Jane
I plan to be at the memorial. Not sure about The Garrick Club.
Will one of your eulogists add a paragraph pointing out that it was Alan
who contacted me to alert me the fact that The Roundhouse had been bought,
along with other land, by a property dealer named Louis Mintz who didn't
know what to do with the old engine shed, which was a Grade Two listed
building, and perhaps - suggested Alan - I could persuade Mr Mintz to give
it to the Centre Fortytwo project. I took up the suggestion and eventually
persuaded Louis Mintz to give us the 19 years lease left on the building.
Thus it was Alan who ignited the spark that led to the Roundhouse becoming
an iconic London building. And it was Centre Fortytwo's focus on The
Roundhouse and its surroundings that led to the beginnings of Camden
Market!
Arnold
SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L
Order of Service
Memorial for Alan Brien
1925-2008
Wednesday 19th November 2008
ST PAUL’S
CHURCH
COVENT GARDEN
Rector
The Reverend Simon Grigg
Organist
Simon Gutteridge
The Bidding
The Reverend Simon Grigg
Hymn
He who would valiant be
‘Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound --
His strength the more is.
No foes shall stay his might,
Though he with giants fight:
He will make good his right
To be a pilgrim.
Since, Lord, thou dost defend
Us with thy Spirit,
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away!
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
John Bunyan 1628-1688
Address
Jane Hill
‘Herrin’s Head’
Sung by Bob Davenport
Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head,
Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head?
I‘ll mak’ ’em into loaves of bread,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things.
(Chorus)
Of all the fish that live in the sea,
The herrin’ is the one for me.
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
My hinny lad.
What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes,
What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes?
I‘ll mak’ ‘em into puddings and pies,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)
What'll I do with my herrin’s fins,
What'll I do with my herrin’s fins?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into needles and pins,
Herrin’s fins,
Needles and pins,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)
What'll I do with my herrin’s tails,
What'll I do with my herrin’s tails?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a ship that sails,
etc. (Chorus)
What'll I do with the herrin’s guts,
What'll I do with the herrin’s guts?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a pair o’ boots,
etc. (Chorus)
Address
Paul Vaughan
Alan by Himself
‘Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate’, Quote…Unquote (Nigel Rees), BBC Radio 4, 1985
In the Boiler Room
Written and played by Susie Honeyman (violin)
Address and Reading
Valerie Grove
Alan Brien, New Statesman, May 23 1969
“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries’.”
Hymn
Sung by Bob Davenport, to the traditional tune ‘The Rose Tree’,
with Roger Digby on anglo concertina
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
William Blake 1757-1827
Reading
Terry Jones
‘My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout’, Paul Durcan
Reading
Nigel Wild
Alan Brien’s Diary, The Sunday Times, June 18 1972
‘A new, welcome addition to any political get-together, an ironic, fantasy essay by folk-singer Bob Davenport. The problem of the North East, he argued, was how to replace industry by tourism- hijacking the Yanks on their way to Edinburgh. His solution? “A dude pit”, like a dude ranch, where visitors (after a D.H. Lawrence crash course on the plane) could spend a shift under ground, suffer a mock disaster with stereophonic sound, and be rescued with their names on a casualty list in the local paper.’
The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s ‘The Call’)
Sung by Bob Davenport with Roger Digby on anglo concertina
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows’ tears, and orphans’ moans;
And all that misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.
John Scott of Amwell 1730-1783
Alan by Himself
‘Sacred Cows’ extract from ‘Face Your Image’ (Malcolm Muggeridge), presented by David Dimbleby, 1974
The Internationale
The Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales, recording from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier‘ (Director, Frank Cvitanovitch), Thames TV, 1973
Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers
Arise ye criminals of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant
Now away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses arises arise!
We'll change forthwith the old conditions
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
(Chorus)
Then comrades come rally
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race,
Then, comrades, come rally!
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race.
We peasants, artisans and others
Enrolled among the sons of toil,
Let's claim the earth henceforth for brothers,
Drive the indolent from the soil.
On our flesh too long has fed the raven,
We've too long been the vulture's prey.
But now farewell the spirit craven,
The dawn brings in a brighter day. (Chorus)
No Saviours from on high deliver,
No faith have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains of must shiver,
Chains of hatred, of greed and fear.
Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot,
Each at the forge must do his duty,
And strike the iron while it's hot! (Chorus)
Eugene Pottier 1816 - 1887
Blessing and Prayers
The Reverend Simon Grigg
1925-2008
Wednesday 19th November 2008
ST PAUL’S
CHURCH
COVENT GARDEN
Rector
The Reverend Simon Grigg
Organist
Simon Gutteridge
The Bidding
The Reverend Simon Grigg
Hymn
He who would valiant be
‘Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound --
His strength the more is.
No foes shall stay his might,
Though he with giants fight:
He will make good his right
To be a pilgrim.
Since, Lord, thou dost defend
Us with thy Spirit,
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away!
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
John Bunyan 1628-1688
Address
Jane Hill
‘Herrin’s Head’
Sung by Bob Davenport
Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head,
Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head?
I‘ll mak’ ’em into loaves of bread,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things.
(Chorus)
Of all the fish that live in the sea,
The herrin’ is the one for me.
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
My hinny lad.
What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes,
What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes?
I‘ll mak’ ‘em into puddings and pies,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)
What'll I do with my herrin’s fins,
What'll I do with my herrin’s fins?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into needles and pins,
Herrin’s fins,
Needles and pins,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)
What'll I do with my herrin’s tails,
What'll I do with my herrin’s tails?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a ship that sails,
etc. (Chorus)
What'll I do with the herrin’s guts,
What'll I do with the herrin’s guts?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a pair o’ boots,
etc. (Chorus)
Address
Paul Vaughan
Alan by Himself
‘Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate’, Quote…Unquote (Nigel Rees), BBC Radio 4, 1985
In the Boiler Room
Written and played by Susie Honeyman (violin)
Address and Reading
Valerie Grove
Alan Brien, New Statesman, May 23 1969
“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries’.”
Hymn
Sung by Bob Davenport, to the traditional tune ‘The Rose Tree’,
with Roger Digby on anglo concertina
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
William Blake 1757-1827
Reading
Terry Jones
‘My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout’, Paul Durcan
Reading
Nigel Wild
Alan Brien’s Diary, The Sunday Times, June 18 1972
‘A new, welcome addition to any political get-together, an ironic, fantasy essay by folk-singer Bob Davenport. The problem of the North East, he argued, was how to replace industry by tourism- hijacking the Yanks on their way to Edinburgh. His solution? “A dude pit”, like a dude ranch, where visitors (after a D.H. Lawrence crash course on the plane) could spend a shift under ground, suffer a mock disaster with stereophonic sound, and be rescued with their names on a casualty list in the local paper.’
The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s ‘The Call’)
Sung by Bob Davenport with Roger Digby on anglo concertina
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows’ tears, and orphans’ moans;
And all that misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.
John Scott of Amwell 1730-1783
Alan by Himself
‘Sacred Cows’ extract from ‘Face Your Image’ (Malcolm Muggeridge), presented by David Dimbleby, 1974
The Internationale
The Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales, recording from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier‘ (Director, Frank Cvitanovitch), Thames TV, 1973
Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers
Arise ye criminals of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant
Now away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses arises arise!
We'll change forthwith the old conditions
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
(Chorus)
Then comrades come rally
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race,
Then, comrades, come rally!
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race.
We peasants, artisans and others
Enrolled among the sons of toil,
Let's claim the earth henceforth for brothers,
Drive the indolent from the soil.
On our flesh too long has fed the raven,
We've too long been the vulture's prey.
But now farewell the spirit craven,
The dawn brings in a brighter day. (Chorus)
No Saviours from on high deliver,
No faith have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains of must shiver,
Chains of hatred, of greed and fear.
Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot,
Each at the forge must do his duty,
And strike the iron while it's hot! (Chorus)
Eugene Pottier 1816 - 1887
Blessing and Prayers
The Reverend Simon Grigg
They are what you eat
Thanks to Duncan for telling me about Julie's article.
To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/26/documentary
They are what you eat
Julie Christie
Friday September 26 2008
The Guardian
I am often asked if I have ever been in a film that I believe changed people's lives. Away From Her did, maybe - but the one I am sure about is The Animals Film, which I narrated for its director, Victor Schonfeld, more than 25 years ago, and which revealed on film for the first time all the different ways in which we abuse animals.
It's hard to quantify the impact the film had at the time. The late Alan Brien, in his review in the Sunday Times, wrote: "I do not know when I have come out of a screening so moved by the power of the cinema as a medium to transform the entire sensibility of an audience." It was applauded when it was shown at the London film festival, and Channel 4 outbid the BBC to have it shown in its first week of broadcasting. Since then, it has been shown around the world, sometimes leading to changes in law. Many people who watched it became vegetarian. Many more, myself included, completely changed their consuming habits, according to whether their purchases involved animal testing or not.
Because the message of the film was so powerful, there is a tendency to forget the film-making skill it involved. Victor realised that you could not present unmitigated horror for two hours, so he interspersed the remarkable exposés of factory farming and animal experimentation with cartoons and vox pops, while Robert Wyatt and David Byrne lent their wonderful music to it. Twenty-five years later, it stands up as a major documentary, in the tradition of films such as Harlan County USA, the 1977 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple about the plight of American miners. Victor's film really was a breakthrough for this kind of documentary-making. Like the best documentaries - like the best films of any kind - it was illuminating.
But what long-term effect did the film have? Since it was made, some things have changed in Britain, through campaign pressure, public opinion, education and legislation. Many of these changes stem, I am sure, from the film's exposure of the extent to which animal cruelty is involved in all aspects of our lives. For instance, in the early 1980s when the film was made, you would have been lucky to lay your hands on free-range eggs or meat; and never, ever would you have imagined that, owing to public demand, supermarkets would stock humanely reared dairy products. The cruelty-free movement has grown to such an extent, and its lobbying become so effective, that the testing of cosmetic products on animals is now banned in the UK - a big step forward.
However, horrific animal cruelty is still part of the foundation on which we build our comfortable lives in the west, and will be so as long as we continue to demand massive quantities of cheap meat. Only through factory farming can this craving be satisfied, and the issue has tended to slip from view since the film was made. Thank goodness for the emergence of a new kind of animal-rights campaigning - personality- and television-driven, to suit our times - exemplified by the efforts of people such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. People are again being reminded that the chicken we eat is not actually born on a polystyrene tray wrapped in clingfilm. As with everything, education is the key - we learned about Corn Belts and Rice Bowls at school, but never how the animals we eat reach our plates. It suits the agricultural industries to keep us ignorant, and as long as corporations pursue profit at any cost and human beings refuse to recognise the sensibilities of all species, we have a very, very long way to go. Victor's film reminds us of the journey made so far - and encourages us to continue on it.
· The Animals Film is released on DVD on September 29
To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/26/documentary
They are what you eat
Julie Christie
Friday September 26 2008
The Guardian
I am often asked if I have ever been in a film that I believe changed people's lives. Away From Her did, maybe - but the one I am sure about is The Animals Film, which I narrated for its director, Victor Schonfeld, more than 25 years ago, and which revealed on film for the first time all the different ways in which we abuse animals.
It's hard to quantify the impact the film had at the time. The late Alan Brien, in his review in the Sunday Times, wrote: "I do not know when I have come out of a screening so moved by the power of the cinema as a medium to transform the entire sensibility of an audience." It was applauded when it was shown at the London film festival, and Channel 4 outbid the BBC to have it shown in its first week of broadcasting. Since then, it has been shown around the world, sometimes leading to changes in law. Many people who watched it became vegetarian. Many more, myself included, completely changed their consuming habits, according to whether their purchases involved animal testing or not.
Because the message of the film was so powerful, there is a tendency to forget the film-making skill it involved. Victor realised that you could not present unmitigated horror for two hours, so he interspersed the remarkable exposés of factory farming and animal experimentation with cartoons and vox pops, while Robert Wyatt and David Byrne lent their wonderful music to it. Twenty-five years later, it stands up as a major documentary, in the tradition of films such as Harlan County USA, the 1977 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple about the plight of American miners. Victor's film really was a breakthrough for this kind of documentary-making. Like the best documentaries - like the best films of any kind - it was illuminating.
But what long-term effect did the film have? Since it was made, some things have changed in Britain, through campaign pressure, public opinion, education and legislation. Many of these changes stem, I am sure, from the film's exposure of the extent to which animal cruelty is involved in all aspects of our lives. For instance, in the early 1980s when the film was made, you would have been lucky to lay your hands on free-range eggs or meat; and never, ever would you have imagined that, owing to public demand, supermarkets would stock humanely reared dairy products. The cruelty-free movement has grown to such an extent, and its lobbying become so effective, that the testing of cosmetic products on animals is now banned in the UK - a big step forward.
However, horrific animal cruelty is still part of the foundation on which we build our comfortable lives in the west, and will be so as long as we continue to demand massive quantities of cheap meat. Only through factory farming can this craving be satisfied, and the issue has tended to slip from view since the film was made. Thank goodness for the emergence of a new kind of animal-rights campaigning - personality- and television-driven, to suit our times - exemplified by the efforts of people such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. People are again being reminded that the chicken we eat is not actually born on a polystyrene tray wrapped in clingfilm. As with everything, education is the key - we learned about Corn Belts and Rice Bowls at school, but never how the animals we eat reach our plates. It suits the agricultural industries to keep us ignorant, and as long as corporations pursue profit at any cost and human beings refuse to recognise the sensibilities of all species, we have a very, very long way to go. Victor's film reminds us of the journey made so far - and encourages us to continue on it.
· The Animals Film is released on DVD on September 29
Monday 24 November 2008
Post memorial...and in no particular order...
Unedited texts from Daniel Carrier, writing as John Gulliver in the Camden New Journal.
'Celebrating the life and principles of Citizen Brien'
SITTING in a flea pit cinema in Sunderland as a teenager, Alan Brien became inspired to be a journalist.
What did the trick was the film, Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane, about a press mogul.
All around him he could hear chairs flip up as others walked out. But he was gripped…… his future was calling him.
Now the life of the extraordinary journalist, novelist, raconteur and political sage is due to be celebrated at memorial service next week in Covent Garden.
His fourth wife Jane Hill, who lives in the Highgate Village cottage the couple shared before his death aged 83 in May, tells me that among the people coming to pay their respects is the legendary folk singer Bob Davenport, jazz giants Ian Christie and Wally Fawkes and scores of his friends from journalism and broadcasting.
“He was a life long Socialist, feminist and revolutionary and that never changed,” Jane recalled when I met her on Tuesday.
“He had firm principles and he stuck by them. It cost Alan personally at times, too: “He was a serial resigner – if he was a member of an organisation and there was something he did not agree with, he'd walk out. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sunday Times, he resigned from his post, saying his conscience would not allow him to take Murdoch's shilling. His principles cost him a News International pension.”
And he could be scathing towards those who he felt had sold out, too – but not in a cruel way.
Jane recalls him tearing strips off Malcolm Muggeridge on air in a show called Face Your Image for departing from his left wing principles he held in his younger days and finding religion.
“The thing was, when Malcolm was asked to respond, he simply said Alan was absolutely right. That is because however vitriolic Alan could be, he was always fair and always true,” said Jane. “His concern was always for truth – he was never spiteful.”
Alan's memorial is at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden next Wednesday at 2.30pm.
'Monty Python star celebrates the life of Brien'
THE life of Alan Brien, journalist, critic and broadcaster was celebrated by friends and relatives yesterday (Wednesday) at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden – and they heard Monty Python star Terry Jones reveal the debt Camden Town owes to Alan.
Before reciting one of the author's favourite poems - 'My beloved compares herself to a pint of stout' by Paul Durcan – he said playwright Sir Arnold Wesker gave Alan the credit for turning the Roundhouse into an arts venue.
Terry Jones said Alan told Sir Arnold the Roundhouse had been bought by a property developer who did not know what to do with the old engine shed.
So Alan asked Sir Anold if he could persuade him to give it to Centre 42 [Wesker's arts group]. “It was Alan that made the Roundhouse an iconic building for the arts,” he said.
His widow Jane revealed that although Alan was struck down by a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body disease, he was always brave, stoical and cheerful, calling his hallucinations 'free cinema.'
Those gathered to pay their respects heard broadcasts of the journalist, who lived in Highgate, heavily criticising Malcolm Muggeridge, and Muggeridge responding by saying Alan was absolutely right, and failing to spot that the phrase 'violence is the repartee of the illiterate' as a quote of his own on a Radio Four quiz programme.
Biographe Valerie Grove, who lives in Highgate said: “He was one those rare people I fell in love with before I'd even met him. We were both from the north east and people from the north east always get on with each other.
“When we met, I was not disappointed – he had such a large presence, and I have never known any one to be able to hold a table’s attention like him.
“In the 1960s, my economics master insisted I read the Statesman every week and I was able to recite from memory a column he had written.”
She read the passage, which typified Alan's wit: “I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens – 'don;t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe…. I know a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries.'
Those celebrating Alan's life were also treated to Bloomsbury folk singer Bob Davenport singing two traditional songs from the north east and a version of William Blake's Jerusalem.
Among the crowd was writer Paul Johnson, Observer film critic Philip French, his son crime writer Sean French, author Deborah Moggach and illustrator and writer Posy Simmonds. They headed to the Garrick club afterwards to listen to trad jazz provided by Highgate's Wally Fawkes and Ian Christie.
'Celebrating the life and principles of Citizen Brien'
SITTING in a flea pit cinema in Sunderland as a teenager, Alan Brien became inspired to be a journalist.
What did the trick was the film, Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane, about a press mogul.
All around him he could hear chairs flip up as others walked out. But he was gripped…… his future was calling him.
Now the life of the extraordinary journalist, novelist, raconteur and political sage is due to be celebrated at memorial service next week in Covent Garden.
His fourth wife Jane Hill, who lives in the Highgate Village cottage the couple shared before his death aged 83 in May, tells me that among the people coming to pay their respects is the legendary folk singer Bob Davenport, jazz giants Ian Christie and Wally Fawkes and scores of his friends from journalism and broadcasting.
“He was a life long Socialist, feminist and revolutionary and that never changed,” Jane recalled when I met her on Tuesday.
“He had firm principles and he stuck by them. It cost Alan personally at times, too: “He was a serial resigner – if he was a member of an organisation and there was something he did not agree with, he'd walk out. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sunday Times, he resigned from his post, saying his conscience would not allow him to take Murdoch's shilling. His principles cost him a News International pension.”
And he could be scathing towards those who he felt had sold out, too – but not in a cruel way.
Jane recalls him tearing strips off Malcolm Muggeridge on air in a show called Face Your Image for departing from his left wing principles he held in his younger days and finding religion.
“The thing was, when Malcolm was asked to respond, he simply said Alan was absolutely right. That is because however vitriolic Alan could be, he was always fair and always true,” said Jane. “His concern was always for truth – he was never spiteful.”
Alan's memorial is at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden next Wednesday at 2.30pm.
'Monty Python star celebrates the life of Brien'
THE life of Alan Brien, journalist, critic and broadcaster was celebrated by friends and relatives yesterday (Wednesday) at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden – and they heard Monty Python star Terry Jones reveal the debt Camden Town owes to Alan.
Before reciting one of the author's favourite poems - 'My beloved compares herself to a pint of stout' by Paul Durcan – he said playwright Sir Arnold Wesker gave Alan the credit for turning the Roundhouse into an arts venue.
Terry Jones said Alan told Sir Arnold the Roundhouse had been bought by a property developer who did not know what to do with the old engine shed.
So Alan asked Sir Anold if he could persuade him to give it to Centre 42 [Wesker's arts group]. “It was Alan that made the Roundhouse an iconic building for the arts,” he said.
His widow Jane revealed that although Alan was struck down by a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body disease, he was always brave, stoical and cheerful, calling his hallucinations 'free cinema.'
Those gathered to pay their respects heard broadcasts of the journalist, who lived in Highgate, heavily criticising Malcolm Muggeridge, and Muggeridge responding by saying Alan was absolutely right, and failing to spot that the phrase 'violence is the repartee of the illiterate' as a quote of his own on a Radio Four quiz programme.
Biographe Valerie Grove, who lives in Highgate said: “He was one those rare people I fell in love with before I'd even met him. We were both from the north east and people from the north east always get on with each other.
“When we met, I was not disappointed – he had such a large presence, and I have never known any one to be able to hold a table’s attention like him.
“In the 1960s, my economics master insisted I read the Statesman every week and I was able to recite from memory a column he had written.”
She read the passage, which typified Alan's wit: “I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens – 'don;t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe…. I know a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries.'
Those celebrating Alan's life were also treated to Bloomsbury folk singer Bob Davenport singing two traditional songs from the north east and a version of William Blake's Jerusalem.
Among the crowd was writer Paul Johnson, Observer film critic Philip French, his son crime writer Sean French, author Deborah Moggach and illustrator and writer Posy Simmonds. They headed to the Garrick club afterwards to listen to trad jazz provided by Highgate's Wally Fawkes and Ian Christie.
Friday 21 November 2008
http://www.scena.org/blog/2008_08_24_archive.html
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
In a critical condition (5)
When the versatile writer Alan Brien died in May this year, obituarists reminded us that he was the first person to be hired in 1960 by the new-founded Sunday Telegraph, in the post of drama critic. 'On this we can build,' the editor is supposed to have declared as, around Brien, he formed a team of witty, incisive and never-too-sententious Sunday writers.
Couldn't happen now, I hear you say. No paper would ever construct itself around an arts critic, and no critic could ever be held to personify a newspaper in the way that Brien did, or Neville Cardus on the Manchester Guardian, Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Pauline Kael on the New Yorker, and others of a golden age.
Or could it? We keep hearing media executives talk of innovation when they mean sackings - the latest to use this euphemism is the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, where 550 jobs are about to go.
But innovation is not made overnight. It comes from the experience and wisdom of newspaper veterans who have seen it all before and know what works and what won't. Getting rid of good critics is a symptom of media death wish. It declares that a newspaper has no sense of its past, present or future, and no conversation with its readers.
A newspaper that cherishes and promotes its critics - as The Scotsman does, for instance, during the Edinburgh Festival - offers readers a reliable benchmark against which they can measure their own reactions and opinions to things they have seen and heard. The Scotsman deploys its critical team strategically in festival time as a way of setting itself apart from the range of free newspapers that flood the city streets.
In Salzburg, likewise, the local Nachrichten is read more closely during festival time than any of the national or international papers because its critics provide a clearer context day by day of events in the present festival against triumphs of the past. Their value cannot be measured purely in payroll terms.
True, few critics these days have the fame or clout that Brien, Cardus and Reich-Ranicki did in their pomp, but arts critics still form the thin blue line between a newspaper of value and a throwaway sheet.
They can be, in the public perception, the soul of a newspaper or at the very least its conscience. Executives who ignore that truth will follow the critics they fire very rapidly onto the nearest dole queue.
Source: Artsjournal
posted by Norman Lebrecht at 3:22 PM
In a critical condition (5)
When the versatile writer Alan Brien died in May this year, obituarists reminded us that he was the first person to be hired in 1960 by the new-founded Sunday Telegraph, in the post of drama critic. 'On this we can build,' the editor is supposed to have declared as, around Brien, he formed a team of witty, incisive and never-too-sententious Sunday writers.
Couldn't happen now, I hear you say. No paper would ever construct itself around an arts critic, and no critic could ever be held to personify a newspaper in the way that Brien did, or Neville Cardus on the Manchester Guardian, Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Pauline Kael on the New Yorker, and others of a golden age.
Or could it? We keep hearing media executives talk of innovation when they mean sackings - the latest to use this euphemism is the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, where 550 jobs are about to go.
But innovation is not made overnight. It comes from the experience and wisdom of newspaper veterans who have seen it all before and know what works and what won't. Getting rid of good critics is a symptom of media death wish. It declares that a newspaper has no sense of its past, present or future, and no conversation with its readers.
A newspaper that cherishes and promotes its critics - as The Scotsman does, for instance, during the Edinburgh Festival - offers readers a reliable benchmark against which they can measure their own reactions and opinions to things they have seen and heard. The Scotsman deploys its critical team strategically in festival time as a way of setting itself apart from the range of free newspapers that flood the city streets.
In Salzburg, likewise, the local Nachrichten is read more closely during festival time than any of the national or international papers because its critics provide a clearer context day by day of events in the present festival against triumphs of the past. Their value cannot be measured purely in payroll terms.
True, few critics these days have the fame or clout that Brien, Cardus and Reich-Ranicki did in their pomp, but arts critics still form the thin blue line between a newspaper of value and a throwaway sheet.
They can be, in the public perception, the soul of a newspaper or at the very least its conscience. Executives who ignore that truth will follow the critics they fire very rapidly onto the nearest dole queue.
Source: Artsjournal
posted by Norman Lebrecht at 3:22 PM
www.iconocast.com
Reunited after 64 years: RAF gunners who thought each other had ...15 Jul 2008 ... Evening Post, UK - Jul 21, 2008 ... The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer ...
www.iconocast.com
www.iconocast.com
From The Times November 20, 2008
Memorial service: Alan Brien
There was much laughter in church, when a tape recording was played of Alan Brien’s last appearance on Quote Unquote.
“Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,” was the quotation presented to him. He was mystified. Could it be George Bernard Shaw, Brien wondered. Or Chesterton, perhaps? Whereupon Nigel Rees had to reveal that Brien himself had written those words in 1971.
The broadcaster Paul Vaughan, an Oxford contemporary, spoke of Brien’s brilliantly aphoristic leading articles when he was editor of Isis, and about the time Randolph Churchill introduced Alan to Evelyn Waugh. “I’ve just written your profile for Truth,” said Brien. Waugh ignored him, but later wrote to a friend, “Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.”
Brien’s Sunderland background was echoed in songs sung by Bob Davenport, the Tyneside folk singer. His fourth wife Jane remembered that he could be mistaken in the street for Sean Connery or Liberace at various times, and was able to say: “The fact is, Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy.”
Terry Jones read one of his favourite poems, My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout, by Paul Durcan, and Valerie Grove recalled one of his 1960s essays in the New Statesman, remarking on how London’s shop names resembled a nanny addressing her charge in Kensington Gardens: “Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c.c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the whiteleys after eating too many burberries.” VG
A memorial service for Alan Brien was held on November 19 at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. The Rev Simon Grigg, rector, officiated and said the bidding prayers.
Mr Terry Jones read My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout by Paul Durcan; Mr Nigel Wild read Alan Brien’s Diary, from The Sunday Times, June 18, 1972; Mrs Valerie Grove read a piece written by Alan, published in the New Statesman, May 23, 1969, and gave an address, along with Ms Jane Hill, widow, and Mr Paul Vaughan.
During the service Mr Bob Davenport sang Herrin’s Head; Jerusalem by William Blake, to the traditional tune; The Rose Tree; and The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s The Call) by John Scott of Amwell, accompanied by Mr Roger Digby, anglo concertina. Ms Susie Honeyman, violin, performed her own composition entitled In the Boiler Room and a recording of the Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales singing The Internationale from The Road to Wigan Pier was played. Recordings of Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate from Radio 4, 1985, and Sacred Cows an extract from Face Your Image, presented by David Dimbleby in 1974, were also played.
Among others present were: Mr and Mrs Adam Brien (son and daughter-in-law), Mr and Mrs John Mckelvie, Mr and Mrs Richard Arison, Mr and Mrs Stuart Verrilli (sons-in-law and daughters), Ms Alyson Brien (daughter), Mrs Joyce Hill (mother-in-law), Mr Peter Hill (brother-in-law), Mrs Alexa Gilpin Hill (sister-in-law), Ms Lucy Gilpin Hill (niece), Mrs Muriel Halls, Miss Amy McKelvie, Miss Esther McKelvie, Miss Isabella Arison, Mr Jack Arison, Miss Megan Brien, Mr Josh Brien and Burt Brien (grandchildren), Mr Malcolm Carr, Captain Phillip Carr with other members of the family.
Sir Arnold and Lady Wesker, Mr Trevor Grove, Ms Andrea Galer, Ms Jane Bond, Mr and Mrs David Stone, Mr and Mrs George Carey, Mr and Mrs Jack Waterman, Mr Nathan Silver, Ms Roxy Beaujolais, Ms Deborah Moggach, Ms Catherine Rickman, Mr Felix Jay, Mrs Margaret Legg, Ms Fiona Legg, Mr Jock McFadyen, Ms Annie Morag McFadyen, Mr and Mrs Karl Miller, Ms Petra Markham, Mr David Walsh, Mr Philip Purser, Mr John Spurling, Ms Jean Lovell Davis, Ms Anna Soderstrom, Ms Carole Holland, Ms Sarah Holland, Ms Julia Holland, Ms Gilly Oakes, Ms Mary Kenny, Ms Marjorie Wallace, Mr Ken Lukowiak, Ms Kersti French, Ms Nicci Gerrard, Mr Sean French, Ms Ursula Owen, Ms Jo Batterham, Mr and Mrs Grenville Robinson, Mr Graham Binmore, Mr Jo Simon, Mr Ian Christie, Mr and Mrs Wally Fawkes, Mr Ronnie Payne, Ms Celia Haddon, Mr Nigel Rees, Ms Julia Hobsbawm, Ms Teresa Grimes, Ms Harriet Green, Ms Yeen Au, Ms Lynn Barber, Ms Mary Clemmey, Mr Ernie Eban, Ms Victoria Glendinning, Ms Anne Holmes-Drewry, Ms Alison Telfer, Ms Diana Melly, Ms Angela Neustatter, Mr and Mrs Philip Thomas, Ms Finola Quinn, Ms Estella Weldon, Ms Eleanor Bron, Mr David Maccoby, Mr Christopher Gardner, Ms Monica Petzal, Ms Olivia Fane, Mr and Mrs Paul Johnson, Ms Carolyn Gowdy, Ms Monica Petzal, Mr Joseph Steeples, Mr Daniel Carrier, Mr John Forman, Ms Emma Gibson, Mr Graham Tayar, Mr Paul Shearsmith, Ms Rachel Miller, Mr David Croft, Ms Maria Wakely, Ms Naomi Fabian Miller, Ms Serena Inskip, Ms Celia Lowenstein, Mr Godfrey Smith, Mr Peter Preston, Mr and Mrs McGrath, Mr Michael Leapman, Ms Pippa Vaughan, Mr and Mrs Bernard Carnell, Mr Gerald Wakelin, Mr Ivor Samuels, Ms Elspeth Hamilton, Mr Christopher Cross, Mr Phil Grey, Ms Vicki Jung, Ms Jane McAusland, Mr Colin Crewe, Ms Josephine Marston, Mrs Pat Hutchison, Mr Nick Callow, Ms Mary Morrison, Mr Steve Swannell, Ms Melissa Pow, Mr Robert Robinson, Mr Al Alvarez, Ms Irma Kurtz, Ms Jane Brown, Mr Don Cameron, Mr and Mrs Hilary Rubinstein, Ms Shirley Conran, Ms Dorothy Rowe, Ms Joan Bakewell, Ms Nina Bawden, Mr Russell Enoch, Ms Katharine Whitehorn, Mr Hunter Davis, Ms Margaret Forster, Ms Cynthia Kee, Ms Claire Tomalin, Mr Michael, Frayn, Mr and Mrs Herbert Kretzmer, Mr and Mrs Jay Landesman, Mr Lewis Wolpert, Mr David Galliford, Mr and Mrs John Mortimer, Mrs Gladys Glascoe Mr Philip French (Critics Circle), Mr Mark Le Fanu (Society of Authors), Ms Eileen Gunn (general secretary, Royal Literary Fund) together with many more friends and former colleagues.
There was much laughter in church, when a tape recording was played of Alan Brien’s last appearance on Quote Unquote.
“Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,” was the quotation presented to him. He was mystified. Could it be George Bernard Shaw, Brien wondered. Or Chesterton, perhaps? Whereupon Nigel Rees had to reveal that Brien himself had written those words in 1971.
The broadcaster Paul Vaughan, an Oxford contemporary, spoke of Brien’s brilliantly aphoristic leading articles when he was editor of Isis, and about the time Randolph Churchill introduced Alan to Evelyn Waugh. “I’ve just written your profile for Truth,” said Brien. Waugh ignored him, but later wrote to a friend, “Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.”
Brien’s Sunderland background was echoed in songs sung by Bob Davenport, the Tyneside folk singer. His fourth wife Jane remembered that he could be mistaken in the street for Sean Connery or Liberace at various times, and was able to say: “The fact is, Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy.”
Terry Jones read one of his favourite poems, My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout, by Paul Durcan, and Valerie Grove recalled one of his 1960s essays in the New Statesman, remarking on how London’s shop names resembled a nanny addressing her charge in Kensington Gardens: “Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c.c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the whiteleys after eating too many burberries.” VG
A memorial service for Alan Brien was held on November 19 at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. The Rev Simon Grigg, rector, officiated and said the bidding prayers.
Mr Terry Jones read My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout by Paul Durcan; Mr Nigel Wild read Alan Brien’s Diary, from The Sunday Times, June 18, 1972; Mrs Valerie Grove read a piece written by Alan, published in the New Statesman, May 23, 1969, and gave an address, along with Ms Jane Hill, widow, and Mr Paul Vaughan.
During the service Mr Bob Davenport sang Herrin’s Head; Jerusalem by William Blake, to the traditional tune; The Rose Tree; and The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s The Call) by John Scott of Amwell, accompanied by Mr Roger Digby, anglo concertina. Ms Susie Honeyman, violin, performed her own composition entitled In the Boiler Room and a recording of the Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales singing The Internationale from The Road to Wigan Pier was played. Recordings of Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate from Radio 4, 1985, and Sacred Cows an extract from Face Your Image, presented by David Dimbleby in 1974, were also played.
Among others present were: Mr and Mrs Adam Brien (son and daughter-in-law), Mr and Mrs John Mckelvie, Mr and Mrs Richard Arison, Mr and Mrs Stuart Verrilli (sons-in-law and daughters), Ms Alyson Brien (daughter), Mrs Joyce Hill (mother-in-law), Mr Peter Hill (brother-in-law), Mrs Alexa Gilpin Hill (sister-in-law), Ms Lucy Gilpin Hill (niece), Mrs Muriel Halls, Miss Amy McKelvie, Miss Esther McKelvie, Miss Isabella Arison, Mr Jack Arison, Miss Megan Brien, Mr Josh Brien and Burt Brien (grandchildren), Mr Malcolm Carr, Captain Phillip Carr with other members of the family.
Sir Arnold and Lady Wesker, Mr Trevor Grove, Ms Andrea Galer, Ms Jane Bond, Mr and Mrs David Stone, Mr and Mrs George Carey, Mr and Mrs Jack Waterman, Mr Nathan Silver, Ms Roxy Beaujolais, Ms Deborah Moggach, Ms Catherine Rickman, Mr Felix Jay, Mrs Margaret Legg, Ms Fiona Legg, Mr Jock McFadyen, Ms Annie Morag McFadyen, Mr and Mrs Karl Miller, Ms Petra Markham, Mr David Walsh, Mr Philip Purser, Mr John Spurling, Ms Jean Lovell Davis, Ms Anna Soderstrom, Ms Carole Holland, Ms Sarah Holland, Ms Julia Holland, Ms Gilly Oakes, Ms Mary Kenny, Ms Marjorie Wallace, Mr Ken Lukowiak, Ms Kersti French, Ms Nicci Gerrard, Mr Sean French, Ms Ursula Owen, Ms Jo Batterham, Mr and Mrs Grenville Robinson, Mr Graham Binmore, Mr Jo Simon, Mr Ian Christie, Mr and Mrs Wally Fawkes, Mr Ronnie Payne, Ms Celia Haddon, Mr Nigel Rees, Ms Julia Hobsbawm, Ms Teresa Grimes, Ms Harriet Green, Ms Yeen Au, Ms Lynn Barber, Ms Mary Clemmey, Mr Ernie Eban, Ms Victoria Glendinning, Ms Anne Holmes-Drewry, Ms Alison Telfer, Ms Diana Melly, Ms Angela Neustatter, Mr and Mrs Philip Thomas, Ms Finola Quinn, Ms Estella Weldon, Ms Eleanor Bron, Mr David Maccoby, Mr Christopher Gardner, Ms Monica Petzal, Ms Olivia Fane, Mr and Mrs Paul Johnson, Ms Carolyn Gowdy, Ms Monica Petzal, Mr Joseph Steeples, Mr Daniel Carrier, Mr John Forman, Ms Emma Gibson, Mr Graham Tayar, Mr Paul Shearsmith, Ms Rachel Miller, Mr David Croft, Ms Maria Wakely, Ms Naomi Fabian Miller, Ms Serena Inskip, Ms Celia Lowenstein, Mr Godfrey Smith, Mr Peter Preston, Mr and Mrs McGrath, Mr Michael Leapman, Ms Pippa Vaughan, Mr and Mrs Bernard Carnell, Mr Gerald Wakelin, Mr Ivor Samuels, Ms Elspeth Hamilton, Mr Christopher Cross, Mr Phil Grey, Ms Vicki Jung, Ms Jane McAusland, Mr Colin Crewe, Ms Josephine Marston, Mrs Pat Hutchison, Mr Nick Callow, Ms Mary Morrison, Mr Steve Swannell, Ms Melissa Pow, Mr Robert Robinson, Mr Al Alvarez, Ms Irma Kurtz, Ms Jane Brown, Mr Don Cameron, Mr and Mrs Hilary Rubinstein, Ms Shirley Conran, Ms Dorothy Rowe, Ms Joan Bakewell, Ms Nina Bawden, Mr Russell Enoch, Ms Katharine Whitehorn, Mr Hunter Davis, Ms Margaret Forster, Ms Cynthia Kee, Ms Claire Tomalin, Mr Michael, Frayn, Mr and Mrs Herbert Kretzmer, Mr and Mrs Jay Landesman, Mr Lewis Wolpert, Mr David Galliford, Mr and Mrs John Mortimer, Mrs Gladys Glascoe Mr Philip French (Critics Circle), Mr Mark Le Fanu (Society of Authors), Ms Eileen Gunn (general secretary, Royal Literary Fund) together with many more friends and former colleagues.
Evening Standard: The Londoner's Diary, 20th November 2008
* VETERAN jazzman Wally Fawkes played the clarinet in the Garrick Club yesterday afternoon, following a memorial service for Alan Brien, critic and columnist for The Spectator, Punch, the New Statesman and The Sunday Times. It's thought to be a first for the crusty old Covent Garden watering hole. One or two members claimed Fawkes hadn't played for years, but Londoner's Diary readers will recall that he performed at the launch of Humphrey Lyttelton's posthumous book only last month. Although Brien was a member of the Garrick, he refused to wear a tie when he didn't feel like it, until he was persuaded to resign.
I posted a comment to say Alan didn't resign because of a tie - he happily wore a bow tie after all - he resigned because the club wouldn't allow women members.
I posted a comment to say Alan didn't resign because of a tie - he happily wore a bow tie after all - he resigned because the club wouldn't allow women members.
Saturday 1 November 2008
'Another hoary old, yellowing, cutting...'
'Another hoary old, yellowing, cutting: this time an article Alan wrote for the New Statesman during the World Cup in 1966, when teams from football-playing nations around the world descended on host-country, England, to play matches in grounds all over the country, including Sunderland's Roker Park, now, sadly demolished.' sent by Malcolm.
NEW STATESMAN 22 JULY 1966 p139
ARTS
Out of London: Sunderland for the Cup
ALAN BRIEN
‘Playing Football is Strictly Prohibited’ said the notice between the deck-chair attendant and the pie-and-chips stall on the lower promenade. The pale golden Sunderland sun hung in the creamy postcard blue sky like a heraldic emblem. For once the fizzy, ginger-beer North Sea stretched waveless and silent to the curved horizon like a rippling expanse of oiled silk. On the first morning of my holiday visit to my home town, I led the family safari of mother, wife and two small children to the water’s edge, carrying as badges of my domestic office a bottle in one hand and a blanket in the other. As I supervised the unloading of the pack team into a defensive half-circle, I said: ‘This is what I call the sea-side’. And so it was.
But it was also the second week of the World Cup season in the football-crazy North-East. No sooner had I placed the metal tray with its precious load of drinks in the heart of the encampment than a large spotted ball dropped from the heavens and sent the paper cups spilling and scooting for cover. It was the classic situation envisaged by Charles Atlas in those body- building ads in my schoolboy pulp magazines. Here was the beach-bully at last, kicking sand in my face, while my loved ones mimed indignation. But it was a 14-stone weakling who had difficulty struggling up out of the canvas embrace of his chair to face the two brown, muscular, young seven-stone athletes leaning over him with apologetic grins. I had waited too long to send in the coupon for that free, without-obligation first lesson and the weight of middle-aged parenthood lay heavy on my pullovered, shawl-wrapped shoulders as I preached a sermon on neighbourly decorum to the almost naked oafs. I looked around along the great scimitar of sand, wet and red and coarse and shining below the tidemark, dry and white and fine and scalloped above, and realised I was in the middle of an enormous practice pitch. League upon league of Walter Mittys were playing at Bobby Charlton, kicking and heading and diving and dribbling. Rub-a- dub-dub went the noise of balls endlessly pummelled and thumped against the towering sea wall, shooting off at unexpected angles as they hit the corners of the massive stone blocks, rocketing up and up into the sun until they were caught in the high off shore breeze and then curving in a smooth parabola to plop back on the gently swirling water. Young and old, toddlers and grandfathers, fat and grey as lard or hard and weathered as teak, each alone and oblivious in a mass opium dream of football fame, speeding across an imaginary Roker Park towards an open goal-mouth. Meanwhile a family party had materialised from nowhere in the penalty area.
As the sun sank improbably behind the backs of our necks on this eastward-facing beach, the area available for play had in creased ten-fold but the soccer sandmen were still arriving. Sunderland regards it self as the homeland of football, still remembering the day when they could point with modest pride to their unique record of being the only team never to be relegated from the First Division. Local historians even claim that Roker Park was the first place where the spectators ever developed the habit of flooding over the barriers to hug and punch their heroes after a goal. Yet though the shops are full of World Cup symbols, and the Sunderland Echo printed a message of welcome in Russian from the Mayor to the visiting Soviet team, the fans are largely staying at home to watch the Cup on television.
Admittedly, the two matches to dale — Chile v. Italy and Italy v Russia — have been mediocre. The Russians were obviously the best team and the best team won — as every spectator observed to his mate in exactly those words as we marched 50-abreast, like a mob of strikers in a Soviet film, through the suburban streets after the Saturday afternoon game. But the style seemed to me oddly mechanical and academic, as if they were taking part in some athletic drill. There was no aggression, no sinewy anger or intelligent pugnacity, so that a beautifully executed sequence of tricky passes up the field would culminate in the placing of the ball with mild accuracy exactly in the arms of the opposing goalkeeper. The Italian supporters chanted their slogans through transistorised loud hailers, syncopating them with rhythmic clapping and tattoos of foot-beating. The few Russians waved their red flags and encouraged players by the names and nick names. But the majority of locals, massed in the standing room at both ends, preserved an almost contemptuous aloofness, occasionally approving a clever manoeuvre or a showy save, but never letting loose that great rumbling, roaring steam-locomotive howl of partisan excitement I remember from pre-war days.
I think the Sunderland apathy had only a little to do with the quality of the football. The truth is that Wearsiders, cut off from through-traffic by road or rail from the north to south, form their own cloth-capped, weird-accented Ruritania as insulated and nationalistic as the Welsh or the Cornish. When my friend Blank was film critic of the Daily Express in years gone by. there was a notice on the subs’ table which read: ‘In Blank’s copy, for “Ava Gardner” read “Lana Turner”, and for “Lana Turner” read “Ava Gardner”.’ He explained to me that no errors had ever occurred when he always confused these two stars because the subs realised that he always confused these two stars. Until the age of 18, though intellectually I knew better, emotionally I still considered ‘Sunderland’ and ‘England’ as more or less interchangeable terms.
On top of Sunderland/England, like a bonnet worn by a witch riding an invisible broomstick, sat Scotland, a nation of dour, humourless trusties, fake rebels aching to be bought over by the shallow South at the expense of everything but their rolling consonants. Below lay the Midlands. Manchester, Yorkshire and the rest, a country of born chargehands and natural foremen, tight-lipped stingy organisation men. To the West, Ireland was scarcely more an island than Wales — two Celtish strongholds of shifty foreigners who, fortunately for them, did not often dare invade the North-East — which, anyway, did not contain the easy pickings they relished. Right down at the base, practically a suburb of Paris, a dependency of Rome, lay Mediterranean, sub tropical London, the Latin Quarter of King’s Cross, visited only by beer-crated coach parties, or on specially chartered, indestructible trains, for royal marriages, jubilees and coronations and equally sacred ceremonial Cup matches. To us, the compass point was embedded in the mouth of the River Wear and every extension of the free leg took you further away from the heart of England, Sunderland.
Italy, Russia Chile, North Korea - what are these but outsiders’ substitutes for Sunderland? They would have to have superlative football teams to get us out there cheering. This intense conviction of superiority runs alongside a deep, sceptical, comical condescension towards the town itself and most of its inhabitants. When I returned last week, I had not been in the place for more than an overnight swoop for 10 years or more. In my memory, though I constantly boosted it as a mixture of Dodge City and Coronation Street, it had become a low, dull, monochrome panorama of houses which should have been called hice and of ugly factories, It seemed to me on every previous visit, as the special train strayed off the main line and wormed its tedious way across to the forgotten coast, that the sunshine and the blue skies ‘would be cut off within a few miles of Sunderland by a barrier which reached to the clouds. - There might almost have been great signs by the track announcing ‘Here Be Grendel’s Lair — Beowulf Turn Back’.
This time, perhaps because my American wife enjoyed the place and my metropolitan children begged to be allowed to come back next year, I began to see the whole area as a wild, lush country landscape with great corridors of dazzling sand and mysterious rock dotted all over with outsize working toys of shipyards, cement factories, forests of cranes, exhibitions of ships, startling bridges over valleys as well as rivers, which appealed instantly to an eye for the picturesque. I was not surprised to find that Lowry was staying here, painting a new series of waterscapes and harbour views. There is a peculiar excitement and satisfaction in coming down the valley of the upper Wear - itself rich, fruity, flowery land banked by bare rolling moor like the Dordogne with a bite in the air - upon a glowing white factory with a chimney like an obelisk. The pit heads - wheels endlessly spinning, lines of buckets building geometrical mountains of gun-metal grey, serviced by line upon line of clinking trucks - have the sort of line and pattern artificially and pointlessly imitated by many modern sculptors. In the age of the motor car, countryside which cannot be bettered in France or Ireland lies within an hour’s leisurely drive.
I also began again to appreciate that friendly argumentative cynicism, expressed in long, repetitive, probing paragraphs of natural rhetoric, which is the characteristic of the North-Easterner. They have seen too much of politicians, clergymen, social workers, educationalists, to expect life to be changed by outside forces. I was told of a visiting VIP, admiring a new council estate, caravan after caravan of red-bricked boxes marching into the ploughed fields, who asked a local councillor whether a church had been included in the plan. Replied the councillor, a staunch Methodist: ‘Church? Why, man, we haven’t even built the Club yet.’ The working man’s club is the East End pub music-hall of 50 years ago with its programmes of comedians, singers, impressionists, jugglers, advertised each week in the local paper. And the Sunderland night-clubs have a relaxed, jovial, value-for-money air which makes their London equivalents seem like sucker traps. La Strada, in the centre of a town which in my day closed down all cafés at 6.30, has the smooth, cinematic atmosphere which reminds me of an early Bogart movie based on a Chandler script.
Sunderland takes its share of that working-class prosperity which our socialist rulers are assuring us is ruining the nation. It is a democratic land where no one is insolent because no one is condescending, where the poor who arc mainly the old and the sick are buoyed up with strong and tender family ties and good neighbours, where the majority live modestly but well, while a few are making their fortunes turning comforts into necessities. In the evening, even in July, the people who clog the town in the day vanish as the sun begins to slant down and you can scorch along the main streets at 8p.m. without seeing another car. Life is in the pubs, in the clubs, by the telly, with an iron-tasting beer served in a glass like a flowerpot. It is a gregarious, family, matey world full of nest warmth and community solidarity. It has many of the qualities of the England of the past which have vanished in our atomised South. It has many of the qualities which a social-democratic England of the future will need to develop. Sunderland has partly opted out of the commercialised meritocratic fads and fashions of the England of today. Perhaps it is not so far away from the genuine England which underlies all change of governors and rulers.
NEW STATESMAN 22 JULY 1966 p139
ARTS
Out of London: Sunderland for the Cup
ALAN BRIEN
‘Playing Football is Strictly Prohibited’ said the notice between the deck-chair attendant and the pie-and-chips stall on the lower promenade. The pale golden Sunderland sun hung in the creamy postcard blue sky like a heraldic emblem. For once the fizzy, ginger-beer North Sea stretched waveless and silent to the curved horizon like a rippling expanse of oiled silk. On the first morning of my holiday visit to my home town, I led the family safari of mother, wife and two small children to the water’s edge, carrying as badges of my domestic office a bottle in one hand and a blanket in the other. As I supervised the unloading of the pack team into a defensive half-circle, I said: ‘This is what I call the sea-side’. And so it was.
But it was also the second week of the World Cup season in the football-crazy North-East. No sooner had I placed the metal tray with its precious load of drinks in the heart of the encampment than a large spotted ball dropped from the heavens and sent the paper cups spilling and scooting for cover. It was the classic situation envisaged by Charles Atlas in those body- building ads in my schoolboy pulp magazines. Here was the beach-bully at last, kicking sand in my face, while my loved ones mimed indignation. But it was a 14-stone weakling who had difficulty struggling up out of the canvas embrace of his chair to face the two brown, muscular, young seven-stone athletes leaning over him with apologetic grins. I had waited too long to send in the coupon for that free, without-obligation first lesson and the weight of middle-aged parenthood lay heavy on my pullovered, shawl-wrapped shoulders as I preached a sermon on neighbourly decorum to the almost naked oafs. I looked around along the great scimitar of sand, wet and red and coarse and shining below the tidemark, dry and white and fine and scalloped above, and realised I was in the middle of an enormous practice pitch. League upon league of Walter Mittys were playing at Bobby Charlton, kicking and heading and diving and dribbling. Rub-a- dub-dub went the noise of balls endlessly pummelled and thumped against the towering sea wall, shooting off at unexpected angles as they hit the corners of the massive stone blocks, rocketing up and up into the sun until they were caught in the high off shore breeze and then curving in a smooth parabola to plop back on the gently swirling water. Young and old, toddlers and grandfathers, fat and grey as lard or hard and weathered as teak, each alone and oblivious in a mass opium dream of football fame, speeding across an imaginary Roker Park towards an open goal-mouth. Meanwhile a family party had materialised from nowhere in the penalty area.
As the sun sank improbably behind the backs of our necks on this eastward-facing beach, the area available for play had in creased ten-fold but the soccer sandmen were still arriving. Sunderland regards it self as the homeland of football, still remembering the day when they could point with modest pride to their unique record of being the only team never to be relegated from the First Division. Local historians even claim that Roker Park was the first place where the spectators ever developed the habit of flooding over the barriers to hug and punch their heroes after a goal. Yet though the shops are full of World Cup symbols, and the Sunderland Echo printed a message of welcome in Russian from the Mayor to the visiting Soviet team, the fans are largely staying at home to watch the Cup on television.
Admittedly, the two matches to dale — Chile v. Italy and Italy v Russia — have been mediocre. The Russians were obviously the best team and the best team won — as every spectator observed to his mate in exactly those words as we marched 50-abreast, like a mob of strikers in a Soviet film, through the suburban streets after the Saturday afternoon game. But the style seemed to me oddly mechanical and academic, as if they were taking part in some athletic drill. There was no aggression, no sinewy anger or intelligent pugnacity, so that a beautifully executed sequence of tricky passes up the field would culminate in the placing of the ball with mild accuracy exactly in the arms of the opposing goalkeeper. The Italian supporters chanted their slogans through transistorised loud hailers, syncopating them with rhythmic clapping and tattoos of foot-beating. The few Russians waved their red flags and encouraged players by the names and nick names. But the majority of locals, massed in the standing room at both ends, preserved an almost contemptuous aloofness, occasionally approving a clever manoeuvre or a showy save, but never letting loose that great rumbling, roaring steam-locomotive howl of partisan excitement I remember from pre-war days.
I think the Sunderland apathy had only a little to do with the quality of the football. The truth is that Wearsiders, cut off from through-traffic by road or rail from the north to south, form their own cloth-capped, weird-accented Ruritania as insulated and nationalistic as the Welsh or the Cornish. When my friend Blank was film critic of the Daily Express in years gone by. there was a notice on the subs’ table which read: ‘In Blank’s copy, for “Ava Gardner” read “Lana Turner”, and for “Lana Turner” read “Ava Gardner”.’ He explained to me that no errors had ever occurred when he always confused these two stars because the subs realised that he always confused these two stars. Until the age of 18, though intellectually I knew better, emotionally I still considered ‘Sunderland’ and ‘England’ as more or less interchangeable terms.
On top of Sunderland/England, like a bonnet worn by a witch riding an invisible broomstick, sat Scotland, a nation of dour, humourless trusties, fake rebels aching to be bought over by the shallow South at the expense of everything but their rolling consonants. Below lay the Midlands. Manchester, Yorkshire and the rest, a country of born chargehands and natural foremen, tight-lipped stingy organisation men. To the West, Ireland was scarcely more an island than Wales — two Celtish strongholds of shifty foreigners who, fortunately for them, did not often dare invade the North-East — which, anyway, did not contain the easy pickings they relished. Right down at the base, practically a suburb of Paris, a dependency of Rome, lay Mediterranean, sub tropical London, the Latin Quarter of King’s Cross, visited only by beer-crated coach parties, or on specially chartered, indestructible trains, for royal marriages, jubilees and coronations and equally sacred ceremonial Cup matches. To us, the compass point was embedded in the mouth of the River Wear and every extension of the free leg took you further away from the heart of England, Sunderland.
Italy, Russia Chile, North Korea - what are these but outsiders’ substitutes for Sunderland? They would have to have superlative football teams to get us out there cheering. This intense conviction of superiority runs alongside a deep, sceptical, comical condescension towards the town itself and most of its inhabitants. When I returned last week, I had not been in the place for more than an overnight swoop for 10 years or more. In my memory, though I constantly boosted it as a mixture of Dodge City and Coronation Street, it had become a low, dull, monochrome panorama of houses which should have been called hice and of ugly factories, It seemed to me on every previous visit, as the special train strayed off the main line and wormed its tedious way across to the forgotten coast, that the sunshine and the blue skies ‘would be cut off within a few miles of Sunderland by a barrier which reached to the clouds. - There might almost have been great signs by the track announcing ‘Here Be Grendel’s Lair — Beowulf Turn Back’.
This time, perhaps because my American wife enjoyed the place and my metropolitan children begged to be allowed to come back next year, I began to see the whole area as a wild, lush country landscape with great corridors of dazzling sand and mysterious rock dotted all over with outsize working toys of shipyards, cement factories, forests of cranes, exhibitions of ships, startling bridges over valleys as well as rivers, which appealed instantly to an eye for the picturesque. I was not surprised to find that Lowry was staying here, painting a new series of waterscapes and harbour views. There is a peculiar excitement and satisfaction in coming down the valley of the upper Wear - itself rich, fruity, flowery land banked by bare rolling moor like the Dordogne with a bite in the air - upon a glowing white factory with a chimney like an obelisk. The pit heads - wheels endlessly spinning, lines of buckets building geometrical mountains of gun-metal grey, serviced by line upon line of clinking trucks - have the sort of line and pattern artificially and pointlessly imitated by many modern sculptors. In the age of the motor car, countryside which cannot be bettered in France or Ireland lies within an hour’s leisurely drive.
I also began again to appreciate that friendly argumentative cynicism, expressed in long, repetitive, probing paragraphs of natural rhetoric, which is the characteristic of the North-Easterner. They have seen too much of politicians, clergymen, social workers, educationalists, to expect life to be changed by outside forces. I was told of a visiting VIP, admiring a new council estate, caravan after caravan of red-bricked boxes marching into the ploughed fields, who asked a local councillor whether a church had been included in the plan. Replied the councillor, a staunch Methodist: ‘Church? Why, man, we haven’t even built the Club yet.’ The working man’s club is the East End pub music-hall of 50 years ago with its programmes of comedians, singers, impressionists, jugglers, advertised each week in the local paper. And the Sunderland night-clubs have a relaxed, jovial, value-for-money air which makes their London equivalents seem like sucker traps. La Strada, in the centre of a town which in my day closed down all cafés at 6.30, has the smooth, cinematic atmosphere which reminds me of an early Bogart movie based on a Chandler script.
Sunderland takes its share of that working-class prosperity which our socialist rulers are assuring us is ruining the nation. It is a democratic land where no one is insolent because no one is condescending, where the poor who arc mainly the old and the sick are buoyed up with strong and tender family ties and good neighbours, where the majority live modestly but well, while a few are making their fortunes turning comforts into necessities. In the evening, even in July, the people who clog the town in the day vanish as the sun begins to slant down and you can scorch along the main streets at 8p.m. without seeing another car. Life is in the pubs, in the clubs, by the telly, with an iron-tasting beer served in a glass like a flowerpot. It is a gregarious, family, matey world full of nest warmth and community solidarity. It has many of the qualities of the England of the past which have vanished in our atomised South. It has many of the qualities which a social-democratic England of the future will need to develop. Sunderland has partly opted out of the commercialised meritocratic fads and fashions of the England of today. Perhaps it is not so far away from the genuine England which underlies all change of governors and rulers.
Wednesday 15 October 2008
Tuesday 16 September 2008
First Elegy, Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke
"Oh, and there's Night, there's Night, when wind full of cosmic space
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, longed for, mild disenchantress,
painfully there for the lonely heart to achieve?
Is she lighter for lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don't you know yet?-Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe-maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight."
Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to espy it. Many a wave
would rise on the past towards you; or, else, perhaps
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be giving itself to someone. All this was a trust.
But were you equal to it? Were you not always
distracted by expectation, as though all this
were announcing someone to love?
(As if you could hope to conceal her,
with all those great strange thoughts
going in and out and often staying overnight!)"
"Strange not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it's hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity-"
~ First Elegy recited by Alan, June 1994
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, longed for, mild disenchantress,
painfully there for the lonely heart to achieve?
Is she lighter for lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don't you know yet?-Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe-maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight."
Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to espy it. Many a wave
would rise on the past towards you; or, else, perhaps
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be giving itself to someone. All this was a trust.
But were you equal to it? Were you not always
distracted by expectation, as though all this
were announcing someone to love?
(As if you could hope to conceal her,
with all those great strange thoughts
going in and out and often staying overnight!)"
"Strange not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it's hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity-"
~ First Elegy recited by Alan, June 1994
'One Art' from Geography II, 1976, by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.
The Mariner's Star by Candida Clark
....Beyond this just a shell of infinite beauty oystered all around.
Thursday 4 September 2008
Wednesday 27 August 2008
Tuesday 26 August 2008
From Godfrey Smith
27 V 08
My dear Jane:
Even when we know the moment has to come, it’s impossible to imagine a world without Alan. I feel as if some enormous gusher of power, some inexplicable force of nature, had suddenly been turned off. Indeed, so strong was his imprint that I don’t really see him as gone at all: he’s still indelibly in my mind, and always will be. I remember those legendary days at Oxford, when he pedalled about the town with that famed beard already conjuring up the idea that some sage from outer space had arrived to shake us all out of our skulls. He was enormously articulate: the readiest man I ever met. He was one of those people who not only can spin a marvellous yarn, but was himself the source of endless anecdotes. All Oxford people think their own era was the best; but I think we knew it was. What luck we had! And then there were all those years in Fleet Street, when no gathering of great hacks was complete without Alan. I had the added good fortune to look after his copy during his spell as film critic of The Sunday Times; though to tell the truth, it seldom needed more than some par marks before it was sent to the printers. In retrospect, what an exhilarating team that was: Bernard Levin on theatre, Dennis Potter of television, Alan on cinema. But shake the kaleidoscope any way you like, during the half century in which he wrote like an avenging angel, Alan’s name glitters among all the rest - unmistakeable, irresistible, incomparable. And funny. Thank you, dear Jane, for all the loving care you gave the dear chap; it’s impossible to say much to help at some moments, but remember nothing can ever take away all those good times you had together, and all those memories. Let’s keep in touch. Warmest wishes.
Yours ever
Godfrey Smith
My dear Jane:
Even when we know the moment has to come, it’s impossible to imagine a world without Alan. I feel as if some enormous gusher of power, some inexplicable force of nature, had suddenly been turned off. Indeed, so strong was his imprint that I don’t really see him as gone at all: he’s still indelibly in my mind, and always will be. I remember those legendary days at Oxford, when he pedalled about the town with that famed beard already conjuring up the idea that some sage from outer space had arrived to shake us all out of our skulls. He was enormously articulate: the readiest man I ever met. He was one of those people who not only can spin a marvellous yarn, but was himself the source of endless anecdotes. All Oxford people think their own era was the best; but I think we knew it was. What luck we had! And then there were all those years in Fleet Street, when no gathering of great hacks was complete without Alan. I had the added good fortune to look after his copy during his spell as film critic of The Sunday Times; though to tell the truth, it seldom needed more than some par marks before it was sent to the printers. In retrospect, what an exhilarating team that was: Bernard Levin on theatre, Dennis Potter of television, Alan on cinema. But shake the kaleidoscope any way you like, during the half century in which he wrote like an avenging angel, Alan’s name glitters among all the rest - unmistakeable, irresistible, incomparable. And funny. Thank you, dear Jane, for all the loving care you gave the dear chap; it’s impossible to say much to help at some moments, but remember nothing can ever take away all those good times you had together, and all those memories. Let’s keep in touch. Warmest wishes.
Yours ever
Godfrey Smith
Saturday 16 August 2008
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion
That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together."
That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together."
Tuesday 29 July 2008
Thursday 24 July 2008
Tuesday 22 July 2008
Friday 4 July 2008
Columnist who wrote on theatre and inspired Auberon Waugh to don a false beard
Daily Telegraph Obituaries Friday July 4 2008
Alan Brien, who has died aged 83, was a sparkling columnist sought after throughout Fleet Street in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s; like all pundits he was driven to exaggeration by the need to write something fresh, but in a couple of paragraphs he could cast a penetrating light on any subject, whether it was the pleasures of whisky, the pessimism of the Irish or Tudor building.
He was at various times film critic for the Evening Standard, television critic for The Observer, political pundit for the Sunday Pictorial and a trenchant denunciator on all subjects for the Daily Mail.
But his keenest interest was the theatre, which he covered for the Evening Standard, The Spectator and, most notably, The Sunday Telegraph from 1961 to 1967.
He described Michael Hordern's Macbeth as resembling "an Armenian carpet-seller who would not have been allowed into the back portcullis of Dunsinane".
Leo McKern's Volpone had "all the rubbery, tireless pugnacity of an overgrown toddler freaklishly endowed with grown-up glands and adult organs"; while Madge Ryan, in Entertaining Mr Sloane, was "a nymphomaniac Goldilockse parodying adult sexuality with many a roguish twinkle and a girlish skip, like a debauched Shirley Temple".
Brien pointed out that The Merchant of Venice was "a fairy tale with a plot as full of holes as a string bag" and groaned at the popularity of the "well-made" play, epitomised by Noël Coward's explorations of drawing-room embarrassments.
Yet while relishing such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and then Tom Stoppard, he recognised that "the Theatre of the Absurd is nowhere to go for a laugh".
The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer School, Sunderland, before going into the RAF to become a pilot. He then transferred to train as an air gunner before joining No 207 Squadron in June 1945. After going up to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, and staying on to edit Isis, Brien arrived in London with an influx of ambitious northerners determined to give assured Oxbridge figures a run for their money.
Soon he was was appearing in most well-known publications as well as on television, most notably when he chaired the discussion programme Three After Six. A gregarious character, given to frequenting all the journalists' favourite watering holes, he once had a fight with the Panorama reporter John Morgan at a Private Eye lunch over which of them was the more working-class.
In 1967 Brien was snapped up by Harry Evans, The Sunday Times editor, who declared that his new recruit could get interesting copy from the fluff in his navel. He reported from abroad, reviewed films and wrote a diary. But the latter, which ran with a photograph of his bearded face, prompted Auberon Waugh to write a cruel parody in Private Eye (topped by his own face in a false beard) with regular references to "when I was in the RAFe_SLps " and conversations with Lord Beaverbrook, who had once sued Brien.
Like many journalists, Brien proved surprisingly sensitive when attacked, with the result that Waugh kept up his campaign; and long after Brien and his beard had vanished from The Sunday Times Waugh's column marched on.
After leaving the paper in 1984 Brien retired to Wales to write a long, well-researched novel, Lenin, which earned some respectable reviews. He also produced Domes of Fortune, a volume of essays in which he hymned the breasts of his third wife, the feminist journalist Jill Tweedie, for being the shape of Roman helmets.
She died in 1993, having affectionately written that he had none of the attributes of a mythic lover, being neither chivalrous nor very polite; he reminded her, she added, of an old warthog she had once seen in the African twilight.
Alan Brien suffered from poor health in later years, and died on May 23 at Denville Hall, the actors' home. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hill, and by the four daughters and one son of his first two marriages.
Alan Brien, who has died aged 83, was a sparkling columnist sought after throughout Fleet Street in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s; like all pundits he was driven to exaggeration by the need to write something fresh, but in a couple of paragraphs he could cast a penetrating light on any subject, whether it was the pleasures of whisky, the pessimism of the Irish or Tudor building.
He was at various times film critic for the Evening Standard, television critic for The Observer, political pundit for the Sunday Pictorial and a trenchant denunciator on all subjects for the Daily Mail.
But his keenest interest was the theatre, which he covered for the Evening Standard, The Spectator and, most notably, The Sunday Telegraph from 1961 to 1967.
He described Michael Hordern's Macbeth as resembling "an Armenian carpet-seller who would not have been allowed into the back portcullis of Dunsinane".
Leo McKern's Volpone had "all the rubbery, tireless pugnacity of an overgrown toddler freaklishly endowed with grown-up glands and adult organs"; while Madge Ryan, in Entertaining Mr Sloane, was "a nymphomaniac Goldilockse parodying adult sexuality with many a roguish twinkle and a girlish skip, like a debauched Shirley Temple".
Brien pointed out that The Merchant of Venice was "a fairy tale with a plot as full of holes as a string bag" and groaned at the popularity of the "well-made" play, epitomised by Noël Coward's explorations of drawing-room embarrassments.
Yet while relishing such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and then Tom Stoppard, he recognised that "the Theatre of the Absurd is nowhere to go for a laugh".
The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer School, Sunderland, before going into the RAF to become a pilot. He then transferred to train as an air gunner before joining No 207 Squadron in June 1945. After going up to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, and staying on to edit Isis, Brien arrived in London with an influx of ambitious northerners determined to give assured Oxbridge figures a run for their money.
Soon he was was appearing in most well-known publications as well as on television, most notably when he chaired the discussion programme Three After Six. A gregarious character, given to frequenting all the journalists' favourite watering holes, he once had a fight with the Panorama reporter John Morgan at a Private Eye lunch over which of them was the more working-class.
In 1967 Brien was snapped up by Harry Evans, The Sunday Times editor, who declared that his new recruit could get interesting copy from the fluff in his navel. He reported from abroad, reviewed films and wrote a diary. But the latter, which ran with a photograph of his bearded face, prompted Auberon Waugh to write a cruel parody in Private Eye (topped by his own face in a false beard) with regular references to "when I was in the RAFe_SLps " and conversations with Lord Beaverbrook, who had once sued Brien.
Like many journalists, Brien proved surprisingly sensitive when attacked, with the result that Waugh kept up his campaign; and long after Brien and his beard had vanished from The Sunday Times Waugh's column marched on.
After leaving the paper in 1984 Brien retired to Wales to write a long, well-researched novel, Lenin, which earned some respectable reviews. He also produced Domes of Fortune, a volume of essays in which he hymned the breasts of his third wife, the feminist journalist Jill Tweedie, for being the shape of Roman helmets.
She died in 1993, having affectionately written that he had none of the attributes of a mythic lover, being neither chivalrous nor very polite; he reminded her, she added, of an old warthog she had once seen in the African twilight.
Alan Brien suffered from poor health in later years, and died on May 23 at Denville Hall, the actors' home. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hill, and by the four daughters and one son of his first two marriages.
34 things every sociologist knows
Published 14 August 2006
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 May 1970.
How many of these might you hear today? Number 2 and number 12, certainly, and perhaps number 34, which like a few others at least ought to be true. Whatever the reality was in 1970, I wonder how many modern Hull bridegrooms have met their wives at public dances. Alan Brien, critic, columnist and wit, was a regular contributor to the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
My sociologist friends complain that we laymen possess very little scientific information about our fellows, yet whenever we are faced with some elaborately researched generalisation about human behaviour we sneer and say: "But everybody knows that!" In order to muddy the waters of controversy, I have constructed a list of apparent truisms. I do not vouch for their accuracy, and reserve the right not to enter into correspondence with anyone about any of them.
1. The divorce rate is higher among the rich than the poor.
2. Men have a lower pain threshold than women.
3. No one has ever contracted lung cancer through smoking pot.
4. More soap is used per head per year in the north of England than in the south.
5. More men commit suicide than women but more women attempt suicide than men.
6. As 5, with the addition of the phrases "except in the north", "before 1945", "of childbearing age", and "collected from a random sample taken from readers of the Guardian woman's page".
7. London bus conductors have the lowest rate of heart disease of any British manual workers.
8. London bus drivers have the highest incidence of ulcers of any British socio-economic group.
9. The sales of tinned food to housewives are significantly lower in Wales than in the Home Counties.
10. Most serious accidents in the home in Scotland occur when the male wage-earner falls downstairs on a Saturday night.
11. The likelihood of any Member of Parliament bearing the same surname as any other MP is six times greater than the same likelihood among any group of the same number.
12. Most criminals are the product of broken homes.
13. 67 per cent of all London taxi drivers are Jewish.
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain who have published more than one book is £178.
15. More sexual offences are committed on the night of the full moon than on any other night in the lunar month.
16. At the 1966 general election, 27,264,747 votes were polled out of a UK electorate of 35,957,245.
17. The Daily Mail has had seven editors since the last war.
18. This is the same as the Spectator over the same period.
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the name of the signatory.
20. On a test measuring group attitudes, Hong Kong Chinese showed most hostility to Japanese and Asiatic Indians and least to Americans.
21. Married couples are more likely to share any physical characteristic - colour of eyes, hair, skin; height, weight, blood group - than not.
22. Criminal statistics show that in Britain the characteristic crime of the Irish is drunkenness, of the Scots violent assault, of the Jews fraud, and of the Welsh petty larceny.
23. That of the English is cruelty to children.
24. The amount of tax relief allowed to owner-occupiers in 1969-70 was £215m.
25. Britain has one acre of woodland to every 13 people.
26. There are 19 Briens in the London telephone directory.
27. Only 7 per cent of all people murdered in the UK in the past 25 years were killed by someone who was a total stranger to them.
28. The drop-out rate among students is highest among those from large families and lowest among those who are an only child.
29. The majority of motorists prosecuted for motoring offences have criminal records.
30. One bridegroom in four in Hull met his wife at a public dance.
31. Three married couples out of four in southern England were born, or brought up, within half a mile of each other.
32. Mental illness decreases in time of war.
33. There is a small, but distinct, tendency to bronchial ailments to be found among middle-aged people who have owned a dog for more than five years.
34. No long-term increase in the sales of any goods has ever been proved to result from an increase in advertising expenditure.
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 May 1970.
How many of these might you hear today? Number 2 and number 12, certainly, and perhaps number 34, which like a few others at least ought to be true. Whatever the reality was in 1970, I wonder how many modern Hull bridegrooms have met their wives at public dances. Alan Brien, critic, columnist and wit, was a regular contributor to the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
My sociologist friends complain that we laymen possess very little scientific information about our fellows, yet whenever we are faced with some elaborately researched generalisation about human behaviour we sneer and say: "But everybody knows that!" In order to muddy the waters of controversy, I have constructed a list of apparent truisms. I do not vouch for their accuracy, and reserve the right not to enter into correspondence with anyone about any of them.
1. The divorce rate is higher among the rich than the poor.
2. Men have a lower pain threshold than women.
3. No one has ever contracted lung cancer through smoking pot.
4. More soap is used per head per year in the north of England than in the south.
5. More men commit suicide than women but more women attempt suicide than men.
6. As 5, with the addition of the phrases "except in the north", "before 1945", "of childbearing age", and "collected from a random sample taken from readers of the Guardian woman's page".
7. London bus conductors have the lowest rate of heart disease of any British manual workers.
8. London bus drivers have the highest incidence of ulcers of any British socio-economic group.
9. The sales of tinned food to housewives are significantly lower in Wales than in the Home Counties.
10. Most serious accidents in the home in Scotland occur when the male wage-earner falls downstairs on a Saturday night.
11. The likelihood of any Member of Parliament bearing the same surname as any other MP is six times greater than the same likelihood among any group of the same number.
12. Most criminals are the product of broken homes.
13. 67 per cent of all London taxi drivers are Jewish.
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain who have published more than one book is £178.
15. More sexual offences are committed on the night of the full moon than on any other night in the lunar month.
16. At the 1966 general election, 27,264,747 votes were polled out of a UK electorate of 35,957,245.
17. The Daily Mail has had seven editors since the last war.
18. This is the same as the Spectator over the same period.
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the name of the signatory.
20. On a test measuring group attitudes, Hong Kong Chinese showed most hostility to Japanese and Asiatic Indians and least to Americans.
21. Married couples are more likely to share any physical characteristic - colour of eyes, hair, skin; height, weight, blood group - than not.
22. Criminal statistics show that in Britain the characteristic crime of the Irish is drunkenness, of the Scots violent assault, of the Jews fraud, and of the Welsh petty larceny.
23. That of the English is cruelty to children.
24. The amount of tax relief allowed to owner-occupiers in 1969-70 was £215m.
25. Britain has one acre of woodland to every 13 people.
26. There are 19 Briens in the London telephone directory.
27. Only 7 per cent of all people murdered in the UK in the past 25 years were killed by someone who was a total stranger to them.
28. The drop-out rate among students is highest among those from large families and lowest among those who are an only child.
29. The majority of motorists prosecuted for motoring offences have criminal records.
30. One bridegroom in four in Hull met his wife at a public dance.
31. Three married couples out of four in southern England were born, or brought up, within half a mile of each other.
32. Mental illness decreases in time of war.
33. There is a small, but distinct, tendency to bronchial ailments to be found among middle-aged people who have owned a dog for more than five years.
34. No long-term increase in the sales of any goods has ever been proved to result from an increase in advertising expenditure.
Thursday 3 July 2008
"The Anatomy of a Bore"
A first response to the Quote...Unquote Newsletter from John O'Byrne in Dublin. Forwarded by Nigel Rees.
'Interested to read your piece on Alan Brien. I had no idea he had died - I must have been away on my travels and missed the papers. By sheer coincidence, last night I was reading a 1958 piece by him (a review of The Birthday Party) reprinted in the recent Spectator 180th special anniversary annual. He wrote: "The Birthday Party is like a vintage Hitchcock thriller that has been, in the immortal, tear-stained words of Orson Welles, 'edited by a cross-eyed studio janitor with a lawn-mower'.
Also on my shelf is a great piece, "The Anatomy of a Bore", he wrote for the same magazine in 1963, where he identified the people he least wanted to sit down next to at dinner. He wrote: "The most boring thing about the bore is not just that he is boring, but that he makes you boring too. You can smell him out in any group by tuning into your own conversation."
A great writer - will be missed.'
'Interested to read your piece on Alan Brien. I had no idea he had died - I must have been away on my travels and missed the papers. By sheer coincidence, last night I was reading a 1958 piece by him (a review of The Birthday Party) reprinted in the recent Spectator 180th special anniversary annual. He wrote: "The Birthday Party is like a vintage Hitchcock thriller that has been, in the immortal, tear-stained words of Orson Welles, 'edited by a cross-eyed studio janitor with a lawn-mower'.
Also on my shelf is a great piece, "The Anatomy of a Bore", he wrote for the same magazine in 1963, where he identified the people he least wanted to sit down next to at dinner. He wrote: "The most boring thing about the bore is not just that he is boring, but that he makes you boring too. You can smell him out in any group by tuning into your own conversation."
A great writer - will be missed.'
Monday 30 June 2008
Miles & Me by Jonathan Sale
'He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit.'
For more than two decades, Miles Kington's daily musings on culture, politics and modern life were cherished by readers of The Independent. His death this week robs Britain of one its most original humorists. Here, friends reflect on the man they loved, while over the page are extracts from some of his finest columns
Friday, 1 February 2008 The Independent
Laughing all the way: Miles Kington pictured in 2006 © Geraint Lewis
There was only one occasion when my father, a retiring Cambridge academic, actually picked up the phone and dialled my number to congratulate me. It was after he'd read a piece I had written for Punch magazine – in collaboration with Miles Kington. The idea for the feature had been mine – "A history of demolition", prompted by the fact that half of London was being demolished to make way for the building boom of the early Seventies – but the fine touches, needless to say, had all belonged to Miles.
When we were preparing that article, some of the bits of work that we threw out for reasons of space were more imaginative than the efforts that other contributors to Punch would come up with in an entire year. "A history of demolition" was our only joint byline in my 17 years on the magazine, and by far the best thing I ever put my name to. On other weeks, it would have been me who phoned my old man.
Many people are so-called humorous journalists. Give us (or, to be precise, give me) a sandwich board inscribed "The End Of The World Is At Hand" and we (I) can turn out a jolly 1,500 words about what Japanese tourists said to us as we strapped it on and paraded up and down Oxford Street. Miles, however, was that rarity, a real humorist. He wouldn't have had to do that stunt – because he would have been able to come up with something far, far better.
Other journalists might write about sex. Miles wrote a wonderful spread on "How To Write a Sex Manual", which was illustrated with explicit photographs of the author engaged in foreplay with a typewriter and stroking the keyboard in a post-coital sort of way.
As a literary editor and writer, Miles was the best of colleagues and the worst of colleagues. He was my closest friend, and biggest pain in the neck. He was senior enough to "OK" my ideas, and junior enough for me not to be in trouble when I admitted that I had boobed. We were the only cyclists at Punch, in an office where the other blokes were always making pretentious remarks about their over-the-top motors.
He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit. He could be pointlessly rude, but democratically so: he would be offhand to someone in the post-room (which was not admirable) and to the editor (which was foolhardy). He could mooch off early, leaving the rest of us to drown in a flood of page proofs.
One editor wanted to have him locked up. This was allegedly so that Miles could write an article about a night in the cells. More seriously, the same editor, Bill Davis, finally had enough and asked the rest of us if Miles was worth his keep. I protested that he was worth his weight in new typewriter ribbons (a judgement I later began to revise somewhat) and was pleased when no more was said about throwing the book at the then literary editor.
The feeling between editor and employee was clearly mutual. After a Punch works outing, in which as usual the drink had flowed even faster than the bons mots, a loud crashing was heard from the editor's office. This turned out to be Miles, expressing his feelings towards that editor by kicking hell out of his desk. He clearly felt better about getting this off his chest, and boot, and we put the desk together again – and expressed elaborate surprise when bits fell off it during the next editorial meeting.
My patience was tested after the next Punch works outing, when again the drinks flowed like printer's ink. Afterwards, Miles retired to the editor's office and yelled: "Hey, do you remember when I kicked the desk in?" In case I'd forgotten, he proceeded to wallop it again. I was reassembling the unoffending piece of furniture when Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the entire newspaper group, wandered in to see who was trashing his premises. I persuaded him that desks often fell to bits, thanks to shoddy modern manufacturing techniques.
"Kington works hard at his eccentricity," wrote Michael Parkinson in a piece about passing the Kingtons' flat while on the top deck of a bus and seeing Miles dreamily playing his double bass while his children ran round him and other people got ready to go to work. (This was back in the days when Kington rented a flat in Notting Hill and Parkinson travelled on buses.) Maybe there was an element of artifice in his demeanour; but certainly Kington cared less than most about appearances – his own appearance, anyway.
Tidying my office in a burst of keenness during my first month, I burrowed down through archaeological layers of dusty correspondence to long-gone members of staff. Round about the Pleistocene age, I discovered a pair of trousers. "Ah," said Miles, "I wondered what had happened to them." They were probably his best pair. He tended to wear old jeans, as he went everywhere on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, stopping occasionally to pull The Times out of the basket and fill in a crossword clue.
He dressed, said a cartoonist, as if someone had given him a 20-quid Millets voucher. Yet he always seemed more elegant and handsome, in a raffish sort of way, than anyone else. You would never have guessed it, but there seemed to be money in the background. While the rest of the staff were scraping around for mortgages, he quietly mentioned that he would buy his house outright. But in his family in general, he saw himself as being of the church mouse persuasion; there was or had been a castle somewhere in the family tree but it had gone to another branch.
When Alan Coren, the new editor, took over, Miles would have expected to move up to become deputy editor, but maybe his CV – the desk-bashing etc – stood in his way. Alan announced nervously that there would not be a deputy editor as such. In fact there was, but it wasn't Miles. This may have been the safe decision but it didn't please Miles, then literary editor, who became somewhat less reliable. During one of his unexplained absences from the office, Coren was forced to ring around various BBC recording studios to see if anyone had seen him playing there with his band, Instant Sunshine.
Miles always said that he didn't realise he had been sacked. He left when he was asked to present a programme about a train journey in the Andes. This involved, clearly, going to the Andes, which would make it hard to pull his weight around the office for a while. He asked if Coren minded. Coren didn't mind at all, but said that he would have to hire another literary editor to fill the enormous gap left by Miles, as indeed he did. That was much nicer than saying: "On your bike."
For more than two decades, Miles Kington's daily musings on culture, politics and modern life were cherished by readers of The Independent. His death this week robs Britain of one its most original humorists. Here, friends reflect on the man they loved, while over the page are extracts from some of his finest columns
Friday, 1 February 2008 The Independent
Laughing all the way: Miles Kington pictured in 2006 © Geraint Lewis
There was only one occasion when my father, a retiring Cambridge academic, actually picked up the phone and dialled my number to congratulate me. It was after he'd read a piece I had written for Punch magazine – in collaboration with Miles Kington. The idea for the feature had been mine – "A history of demolition", prompted by the fact that half of London was being demolished to make way for the building boom of the early Seventies – but the fine touches, needless to say, had all belonged to Miles.
When we were preparing that article, some of the bits of work that we threw out for reasons of space were more imaginative than the efforts that other contributors to Punch would come up with in an entire year. "A history of demolition" was our only joint byline in my 17 years on the magazine, and by far the best thing I ever put my name to. On other weeks, it would have been me who phoned my old man.
Many people are so-called humorous journalists. Give us (or, to be precise, give me) a sandwich board inscribed "The End Of The World Is At Hand" and we (I) can turn out a jolly 1,500 words about what Japanese tourists said to us as we strapped it on and paraded up and down Oxford Street. Miles, however, was that rarity, a real humorist. He wouldn't have had to do that stunt – because he would have been able to come up with something far, far better.
Other journalists might write about sex. Miles wrote a wonderful spread on "How To Write a Sex Manual", which was illustrated with explicit photographs of the author engaged in foreplay with a typewriter and stroking the keyboard in a post-coital sort of way.
As a literary editor and writer, Miles was the best of colleagues and the worst of colleagues. He was my closest friend, and biggest pain in the neck. He was senior enough to "OK" my ideas, and junior enough for me not to be in trouble when I admitted that I had boobed. We were the only cyclists at Punch, in an office where the other blokes were always making pretentious remarks about their over-the-top motors.
He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit. He could be pointlessly rude, but democratically so: he would be offhand to someone in the post-room (which was not admirable) and to the editor (which was foolhardy). He could mooch off early, leaving the rest of us to drown in a flood of page proofs.
One editor wanted to have him locked up. This was allegedly so that Miles could write an article about a night in the cells. More seriously, the same editor, Bill Davis, finally had enough and asked the rest of us if Miles was worth his keep. I protested that he was worth his weight in new typewriter ribbons (a judgement I later began to revise somewhat) and was pleased when no more was said about throwing the book at the then literary editor.
The feeling between editor and employee was clearly mutual. After a Punch works outing, in which as usual the drink had flowed even faster than the bons mots, a loud crashing was heard from the editor's office. This turned out to be Miles, expressing his feelings towards that editor by kicking hell out of his desk. He clearly felt better about getting this off his chest, and boot, and we put the desk together again – and expressed elaborate surprise when bits fell off it during the next editorial meeting.
My patience was tested after the next Punch works outing, when again the drinks flowed like printer's ink. Afterwards, Miles retired to the editor's office and yelled: "Hey, do you remember when I kicked the desk in?" In case I'd forgotten, he proceeded to wallop it again. I was reassembling the unoffending piece of furniture when Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the entire newspaper group, wandered in to see who was trashing his premises. I persuaded him that desks often fell to bits, thanks to shoddy modern manufacturing techniques.
"Kington works hard at his eccentricity," wrote Michael Parkinson in a piece about passing the Kingtons' flat while on the top deck of a bus and seeing Miles dreamily playing his double bass while his children ran round him and other people got ready to go to work. (This was back in the days when Kington rented a flat in Notting Hill and Parkinson travelled on buses.) Maybe there was an element of artifice in his demeanour; but certainly Kington cared less than most about appearances – his own appearance, anyway.
Tidying my office in a burst of keenness during my first month, I burrowed down through archaeological layers of dusty correspondence to long-gone members of staff. Round about the Pleistocene age, I discovered a pair of trousers. "Ah," said Miles, "I wondered what had happened to them." They were probably his best pair. He tended to wear old jeans, as he went everywhere on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, stopping occasionally to pull The Times out of the basket and fill in a crossword clue.
He dressed, said a cartoonist, as if someone had given him a 20-quid Millets voucher. Yet he always seemed more elegant and handsome, in a raffish sort of way, than anyone else. You would never have guessed it, but there seemed to be money in the background. While the rest of the staff were scraping around for mortgages, he quietly mentioned that he would buy his house outright. But in his family in general, he saw himself as being of the church mouse persuasion; there was or had been a castle somewhere in the family tree but it had gone to another branch.
When Alan Coren, the new editor, took over, Miles would have expected to move up to become deputy editor, but maybe his CV – the desk-bashing etc – stood in his way. Alan announced nervously that there would not be a deputy editor as such. In fact there was, but it wasn't Miles. This may have been the safe decision but it didn't please Miles, then literary editor, who became somewhat less reliable. During one of his unexplained absences from the office, Coren was forced to ring around various BBC recording studios to see if anyone had seen him playing there with his band, Instant Sunshine.
Miles always said that he didn't realise he had been sacked. He left when he was asked to present a programme about a train journey in the Andes. This involved, clearly, going to the Andes, which would make it hard to pull his weight around the office for a while. He asked if Coren minded. Coren didn't mind at all, but said that he would have to hire another literary editor to fill the enormous gap left by Miles, as indeed he did. That was much nicer than saying: "On your bike."
Posy Simmonds
Posy was shipwrecked on Desert Island Discs, yesterday, Sunday 29th June 2008 (repeated this coming Friday). Posy lodged with Jill before either of them worked on The Guardian and part of the arrangement was that she collect Luke from nursery school.
Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.
One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.
See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:
Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.
Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.
One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.
See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:
Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.
Monday 23 June 2008
Memories of Alan from Jo Simon
Visiting your Dad in hospital, I was daydreaming in the cafeteria gathering strength for the long journey to the ward when I heard someone say very softly 'it's der Teufel'.
It was Alan and Jane who had come down from the ward. Alan was quoting from his schooldays when he was indoctrinating a Jewish contemporary into Marxism.
The boy eventually invited Alan home for tea. The door was opened by his mother, who was possibly a rare breed of Sunderland Tory. Leaving Alan on the doorstep she shouted up the stairs 'It's der Teufel'.
It was Alan and Jane who had come down from the ward. Alan was quoting from his schooldays when he was indoctrinating a Jewish contemporary into Marxism.
The boy eventually invited Alan home for tea. The door was opened by his mother, who was possibly a rare breed of Sunderland Tory. Leaving Alan on the doorstep she shouted up the stairs 'It's der Teufel'.
Sunday 22 June 2008
Game Shows
Take It or Leave It
Host
Alan Brien
Co-hosts
Adjudicator and question-setter: Brigid Brophy
Broadcast
BBC2, 7 November 1964 to 8 January 1971
A television literary quiz, with four writers and critics discussing books and poetry. A paragraph or verse would be read out, and the contestants asked to name the work and author. Contemporary writers suggested the enjoyment came not from instant recall, but the literary detective work employed.
Host
Alan Brien
Co-hosts
Adjudicator and question-setter: Brigid Brophy
Broadcast
BBC2, 7 November 1964 to 8 January 1971
A television literary quiz, with four writers and critics discussing books and poetry. A paragraph or verse would be read out, and the contestants asked to name the work and author. Contemporary writers suggested the enjoyment came not from instant recall, but the literary detective work employed.
Feliks Topolski R.A.
Feliks Topolski's 'Memoir of the Twentieth Century'
Alan Brien, Punch
"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."
Alan Brien, Punch
"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."
EVELYN WAUGH
EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER
Volume 7 Number 1 - Spring 1973
David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.
TWO NEW BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS
D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."
Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.
Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."
Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.
Volume 7 Number 1 - Spring 1973
David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.
TWO NEW BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS
D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."
Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.
Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."
Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.
Footlights
from The Mausoleum Club Forum
Tangocow
posted on 21-5-2007 at 11:25 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26/10/79 - Alan Brian - Russell Davies, Harold Evans, Sponooch, Jilly Cooper, Prof Peter Townsend, Lord Melchett, Peter York, Lynda Hayes, Will Elsworth-Jones, and Jeremy Child, Norman Bird, Ronnie Brody in a sketch.
16/11/79 - Cambridge Footlights - Martin Bergman, Hugh Laurie, Robert Bathurst, Emma Thompson, Peter Cook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who's Alan Brian? I can't find anything on him anywhere. (Maybe it was journalist Alan Brien?)
And is that a list of the Footlights members, or were they the guests?
andrew martin. posted on 21-5-2007 at 03:22 PM
Yes, it's Alan Brien.
Martin Bergman sat at the desk for the Footlights show, presenting - the others did sketches, Cook was a guest.
Tangocow
posted on 21-5-2007 at 11:25 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26/10/79 - Alan Brian - Russell Davies, Harold Evans, Sponooch, Jilly Cooper, Prof Peter Townsend, Lord Melchett, Peter York, Lynda Hayes, Will Elsworth-Jones, and Jeremy Child, Norman Bird, Ronnie Brody in a sketch.
16/11/79 - Cambridge Footlights - Martin Bergman, Hugh Laurie, Robert Bathurst, Emma Thompson, Peter Cook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who's Alan Brian? I can't find anything on him anywhere. (Maybe it was journalist Alan Brien?)
And is that a list of the Footlights members, or were they the guests?
andrew martin. posted on 21-5-2007 at 03:22 PM
Yes, it's Alan Brien.
Martin Bergman sat at the desk for the Footlights show, presenting - the others did sketches, Cook was a guest.
Saturday 21 June 2008
Sunderland, circa 1940
The following is a transcription of a tape sent to Alan by Gladys Glascoe (maiden name unknown) in 2005 after coming to Alan's 80th birthday celebrations at The Spaniards.
I hope someone will recognise, and correct, names and places which I transcribed phonetically.* See Comment.
Dear Alan,
I'm afraid it's proving too difficult to pay a visit and arrange a meeting for the time being but Joan [sic] tellls me you're busy writing your memoirs. It occurred to me it might amuse you to hear my recollections from the far past. So here goes.
I was in the winter of 40, back from evacuation, in the lower sixth form, and getting ready for A levels, when my brother, Randal, made a friend Tom McNichol [spelling], whom I quite liked because he had red hair, and his family had a flat that was for the time unoccupied, and unheated I may say, and he and Randal used to go and sit there and talk and have the odd cigarette and Randal persauded me to join them and we used to sit there and talk and I heard Tom mention someone called Adam. And when I said 'who is that?' I didn't get a very clear answer except this was someone who was a person of distinction. One of a kind. But I still wasn't clear in what way.
Now later I met Nancy and Eric Clavering and became involved in the YCO and frequented the old rooms in Coronation street. Do you remember? I don't know if it was there that I met you or at the Claverings, in their ...top floor flat I think it was. I know we had parties there and meetings. Trying to think when I heard of you next. I can't remember when I first met you. I just can't. I remember having the impression, because of course you were two years younger than me, but that didn't seem to weigh in your reputation. My recollections of seeing you, whenever that was, was that you were tall and thin, and shabby, as many of us were in those days.
Now, you were friendly with Lesley Jolly [spelling], of whom I was greatly enamoured for a long time, and I remember Lesley Jolly and you having a conversation about the fact you used to get up early and since you passed the library on your way to school, you would stop in there and read all the newspapers, now this impressed me, I must say, and it obviously impressed Lesley.
A story I have in connection with Lesley Jolly is that he persuaded you to take part in an apprentices' strike in the ship yards. My clearest memory was of you reporting back to Les - he was coaching you, what you have to do and what you have to say - he said now keep your hands in your pockets, cos your hands are obviously not those of someone who has done manual work. Taking a rest now because my voice gives out easily.
PAUSE
Don't expect these impressions to be connected or organised at all....
You told me your father went over to Ireland with the black and tans and came back on the other side, because of his experiences. I once met your father while you were away in the airforce. I called because I hadn't heard from you for a while. I found him a lovely person. I really liked him very much.
Now what else...? We smoked, and how we smoked, whatever we could lay our hands on. There was a kiosk near the station and when shortages were most severe we found this girl who sold us cigarettes that no one else had ever heard of. There was one particularly throat searing brand called Robin. You remember? When she sold it to us she was really quite triumphant she'd be able to supply our needs. I haven't smoked for twenty years but I still.. . I've dreamnt ocassionally that I was smoking, and after a good meal I get that sensation in the chest, that I would love a cigarette or better still a cigar, but I don't, not worth it....
After we took to - they call it hanging out together these days - but I think the expression we would have used was knocking about together, in a desultory way. We went to the Havelock once to see 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne, singing of course, looking absolutely gorgeous. You said 'I wouldn't mind marrying her', to which I replied 'Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it?' You said 'well some people would object because she is black', and I was really surprised that you should even jokingly allow the existance of that sort of prejudice.
Another thing that comes to my mind is that you, and I, and a third party, whom I don't recall except in a vague and shadowy way, took to - you may disbelieve this but it's true - took to breaking into unoccupied houses. I think only three times at most. God knows why we did it... On one ocassion the three of us were crossing a sort of conservatory and suddenly you disappeared up to your knees. You'd stumbled into... I think it must have been a pond originally, dry fortunately, full of leaves and rubbish... we were very luck we weren't caught...
What else did we do? Sit about in each other's homes. On one occasion I recall we were in an icecream bar, sitting either side of one of those cubicles. On the side opposite to me a woman appeared over the top of the barrier waving for, requesting a light.....which I, I reached across and asked you to pass to her. You expressed great surprise that I'd been so observant as to notice her. I'm prepared to accept that I was a horrid and really quite stupid girl but I wasn't that stupid I couldn't see someone waving, climbing over a barrier and waving.
Every now and then I have to stop because my voice gives out.
PAUSE
Do you remember going to socialist summer school at Malham? Do you remember that? I remember one character who was staying there telling us about his visit to the pub the night before, saying I came back, on the way I bent down, I could hear the sound of someone being sick and it was me. I don't think either you or I drank to that extent, certainly not then...
I remember when we arrived, going for a walk along a stream where there were swans, it was a lovely setting, beautiful fresh clean air. You took the train part of the way and biked for the rest. I remember on the way back, seeing you out of the window, where the road rang alongside the railway track, peddling furiously to keep up, which you did, and you managed to get into the train at the next stop.
Do you remember we had a spell - I don't know who the third party was - of pretending to talk common? 'tack and common' [spelling]. The character, alderman Chalk [spelling] and we put about to each other scurrilous reports of alderman Chalk and the council. I can't remember who we played these games with. It may have been David Maccaby. I often wonder what happened to David. An amazing family that. There was Lorna and there was HZ. HZ was a formidable character. I gathered ... I think I met him once briefly. We didn't know him as well as David. I once heard an argument reported, an argument with him, reported, that you had had. You told him Marxists don't believe in formal logic. The only way you could half way win the argument.
PAUSE
I remember when my unrequited passion for Lesley Jolly reached a point where he was...when we were engaged, after a fashion. I mean I didn't realise... It took me a long time to realise his problems, or his cast of temperament. It wasn't until he and I had split up and he was involved with Julian Meckelfeld [spelling] that I fully realised the strength of the passions that could be aroused. I remember walking down the street between the two of them and it was as if I wasn't present at all. They sort of gravitated together. I remember when I told you Lesley Jolly had told his mother he was engaged to me. You said you weren't surprised. You know I expected her to be surpirsed. You said, 'Well it's better than getting engaged to Colin and Brighton [spelling].'
These recollections are very scrappy I'm afraid but I do ask if you want amplification on any of them, say so, I may not be able to give it but I'll try.
PAUSE
I remember quite vividly a happy week that we had when you suddenly turned up on the doorstep, home on leave, and in airforce uniform, and if I may say so looking very good in it,... towards the end of the school summer holidays. We spent the time going about, just sitting and talking, and when you went back, I understood - I don't know how true this was - that you had overstayed your leave and that you were in trouble when you got back. I remember you writing your ambition was to be a columnist like Alexander Woolcott. God forgive me, I wrote back and said 'wanting's one thing, being's another.' I like to think this spurred you on. ...You were a rear gunner and when your plane was damaged, or landed badly, the rear gunner's pod broke away and bounced you across the air field. A shocking experience.
PAUSE
Well Alan these reminiscences are proving very scrappy and uncoordinated but I'll give you two or three more and then post this off and see what you think of them.
I seem to remember... you coached my brother, Colby [spelling], in maths... I'm not very well acquainted with that period as for some reason you and I weren't speaking to each other. I can't remember why and I cant imagine why.
There was a time when... I think it was the party held a dance in the lake, or it may have been the soviet committee, something progressive or we wouldn't have been there and I turned up in my one and only evening dress, which I rather loved, it was cyclamen, it fitted to the waist and flared out to full length and I was very pleased with myself. I tried to get you to dance and you claimed not to dance. At that time I didn't realise that there are lots of reasons why young men didn't want to go onto the dance floor. But you did say that I had a nice waist. No longer I'm afraid.
Oh yes... Another flattering bit. You and Lesley Jolly were discussing knowledge of marxism and one of you asked what I'd read? 'Only Tommy Jackson's [spelling] Dialiectics'. And one of you said 'You've made it go a long way.' How far that was a polite rejoinder and really concealed a contempt for my ignorance. I don't know.
I think I shall close now and say look after yourself. Love to Joan [sic]. And I will either tape something more if I remember anything more or I'll write.
I hope someone will recognise, and correct, names and places which I transcribed phonetically.* See Comment.
Dear Alan,
I'm afraid it's proving too difficult to pay a visit and arrange a meeting for the time being but Joan [sic] tellls me you're busy writing your memoirs. It occurred to me it might amuse you to hear my recollections from the far past. So here goes.
I was in the winter of 40, back from evacuation, in the lower sixth form, and getting ready for A levels, when my brother, Randal, made a friend Tom McNichol [spelling], whom I quite liked because he had red hair, and his family had a flat that was for the time unoccupied, and unheated I may say, and he and Randal used to go and sit there and talk and have the odd cigarette and Randal persauded me to join them and we used to sit there and talk and I heard Tom mention someone called Adam. And when I said 'who is that?' I didn't get a very clear answer except this was someone who was a person of distinction. One of a kind. But I still wasn't clear in what way.
Now later I met Nancy and Eric Clavering and became involved in the YCO and frequented the old rooms in Coronation street. Do you remember? I don't know if it was there that I met you or at the Claverings, in their ...top floor flat I think it was. I know we had parties there and meetings. Trying to think when I heard of you next. I can't remember when I first met you. I just can't. I remember having the impression, because of course you were two years younger than me, but that didn't seem to weigh in your reputation. My recollections of seeing you, whenever that was, was that you were tall and thin, and shabby, as many of us were in those days.
Now, you were friendly with Lesley Jolly [spelling], of whom I was greatly enamoured for a long time, and I remember Lesley Jolly and you having a conversation about the fact you used to get up early and since you passed the library on your way to school, you would stop in there and read all the newspapers, now this impressed me, I must say, and it obviously impressed Lesley.
A story I have in connection with Lesley Jolly is that he persuaded you to take part in an apprentices' strike in the ship yards. My clearest memory was of you reporting back to Les - he was coaching you, what you have to do and what you have to say - he said now keep your hands in your pockets, cos your hands are obviously not those of someone who has done manual work. Taking a rest now because my voice gives out easily.
PAUSE
Don't expect these impressions to be connected or organised at all....
You told me your father went over to Ireland with the black and tans and came back on the other side, because of his experiences. I once met your father while you were away in the airforce. I called because I hadn't heard from you for a while. I found him a lovely person. I really liked him very much.
Now what else...? We smoked, and how we smoked, whatever we could lay our hands on. There was a kiosk near the station and when shortages were most severe we found this girl who sold us cigarettes that no one else had ever heard of. There was one particularly throat searing brand called Robin. You remember? When she sold it to us she was really quite triumphant she'd be able to supply our needs. I haven't smoked for twenty years but I still.. . I've dreamnt ocassionally that I was smoking, and after a good meal I get that sensation in the chest, that I would love a cigarette or better still a cigar, but I don't, not worth it....
After we took to - they call it hanging out together these days - but I think the expression we would have used was knocking about together, in a desultory way. We went to the Havelock once to see 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne, singing of course, looking absolutely gorgeous. You said 'I wouldn't mind marrying her', to which I replied 'Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it?' You said 'well some people would object because she is black', and I was really surprised that you should even jokingly allow the existance of that sort of prejudice.
Another thing that comes to my mind is that you, and I, and a third party, whom I don't recall except in a vague and shadowy way, took to - you may disbelieve this but it's true - took to breaking into unoccupied houses. I think only three times at most. God knows why we did it... On one ocassion the three of us were crossing a sort of conservatory and suddenly you disappeared up to your knees. You'd stumbled into... I think it must have been a pond originally, dry fortunately, full of leaves and rubbish... we were very luck we weren't caught...
What else did we do? Sit about in each other's homes. On one occasion I recall we were in an icecream bar, sitting either side of one of those cubicles. On the side opposite to me a woman appeared over the top of the barrier waving for, requesting a light.....which I, I reached across and asked you to pass to her. You expressed great surprise that I'd been so observant as to notice her. I'm prepared to accept that I was a horrid and really quite stupid girl but I wasn't that stupid I couldn't see someone waving, climbing over a barrier and waving.
Every now and then I have to stop because my voice gives out.
PAUSE
Do you remember going to socialist summer school at Malham? Do you remember that? I remember one character who was staying there telling us about his visit to the pub the night before, saying I came back, on the way I bent down, I could hear the sound of someone being sick and it was me. I don't think either you or I drank to that extent, certainly not then...
I remember when we arrived, going for a walk along a stream where there were swans, it was a lovely setting, beautiful fresh clean air. You took the train part of the way and biked for the rest. I remember on the way back, seeing you out of the window, where the road rang alongside the railway track, peddling furiously to keep up, which you did, and you managed to get into the train at the next stop.
Do you remember we had a spell - I don't know who the third party was - of pretending to talk common? 'tack and common' [spelling]. The character, alderman Chalk [spelling] and we put about to each other scurrilous reports of alderman Chalk and the council. I can't remember who we played these games with. It may have been David Maccaby. I often wonder what happened to David. An amazing family that. There was Lorna and there was HZ. HZ was a formidable character. I gathered ... I think I met him once briefly. We didn't know him as well as David. I once heard an argument reported, an argument with him, reported, that you had had. You told him Marxists don't believe in formal logic. The only way you could half way win the argument.
PAUSE
I remember when my unrequited passion for Lesley Jolly reached a point where he was...when we were engaged, after a fashion. I mean I didn't realise... It took me a long time to realise his problems, or his cast of temperament. It wasn't until he and I had split up and he was involved with Julian Meckelfeld [spelling] that I fully realised the strength of the passions that could be aroused. I remember walking down the street between the two of them and it was as if I wasn't present at all. They sort of gravitated together. I remember when I told you Lesley Jolly had told his mother he was engaged to me. You said you weren't surprised. You know I expected her to be surpirsed. You said, 'Well it's better than getting engaged to Colin and Brighton [spelling].'
These recollections are very scrappy I'm afraid but I do ask if you want amplification on any of them, say so, I may not be able to give it but I'll try.
PAUSE
I remember quite vividly a happy week that we had when you suddenly turned up on the doorstep, home on leave, and in airforce uniform, and if I may say so looking very good in it,... towards the end of the school summer holidays. We spent the time going about, just sitting and talking, and when you went back, I understood - I don't know how true this was - that you had overstayed your leave and that you were in trouble when you got back. I remember you writing your ambition was to be a columnist like Alexander Woolcott. God forgive me, I wrote back and said 'wanting's one thing, being's another.' I like to think this spurred you on. ...You were a rear gunner and when your plane was damaged, or landed badly, the rear gunner's pod broke away and bounced you across the air field. A shocking experience.
PAUSE
Well Alan these reminiscences are proving very scrappy and uncoordinated but I'll give you two or three more and then post this off and see what you think of them.
I seem to remember... you coached my brother, Colby [spelling], in maths... I'm not very well acquainted with that period as for some reason you and I weren't speaking to each other. I can't remember why and I cant imagine why.
There was a time when... I think it was the party held a dance in the lake, or it may have been the soviet committee, something progressive or we wouldn't have been there and I turned up in my one and only evening dress, which I rather loved, it was cyclamen, it fitted to the waist and flared out to full length and I was very pleased with myself. I tried to get you to dance and you claimed not to dance. At that time I didn't realise that there are lots of reasons why young men didn't want to go onto the dance floor. But you did say that I had a nice waist. No longer I'm afraid.
Oh yes... Another flattering bit. You and Lesley Jolly were discussing knowledge of marxism and one of you asked what I'd read? 'Only Tommy Jackson's [spelling] Dialiectics'. And one of you said 'You've made it go a long way.' How far that was a polite rejoinder and really concealed a contempt for my ignorance. I don't know.
I think I shall close now and say look after yourself. Love to Joan [sic]. And I will either tape something more if I remember anything more or I'll write.
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