Times Obituary - May 26, 2008

Alan Brien
Prolific journalist, critic and distinguished commentator with a taste for whimsy, women and liquor

Read a New Statesman article by Alan Brien

Read a review of Alan Brien's novel Lenin

Alan Brien listed “procrastination” as a recreation in Who’s Who. But as one of the most versatile, fluent and prolific journalists of the postwar generation — in the tradition of Belloc, Chesterton and Agate — he was driven by deadlines for more than 50 years, producing highly opinionated film and theatre criticism, book reviews, comment columns and weekly diaries for the New Statesman, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times and Punch — invariably at the last minute, in true hack style.

Even his rare dreams would be full of newspapers and stacks of typed copy, he once wrote. If he tried to read what was written on the tantalising dreampages, it would say, “Turn to page 96 . . . take in Reuters . . . end of part one . . . is there much more of this?”

Alan Brien was born in Sunderland in 1925, the fifth and last child of an inspector of tramways: a working-class family which encouraged wide reading and educational aspiration with much lively humour. From the local Bede Grammar, he went on to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Kenneth Tynan. He had joined the RAF in 1943, but he was no good as a pilot — he never subsequently learnt to drive a car — but as an air gunner he took part in many raids, and would have been involved in the Dresden raid had he not been grounded by flu. Like many of his Oxford coterie, he aspired to become a foreign correspondent and to write a great novel in the Hemingway tradition. He even stayed on for an extra term in order to be editor of Isis. But while still at Oxford in 1947 he had married a fellow undergraduate, the first of his four wives, and quickly became a father of three daughters, including twins. So he settled in 1950 for a variegated journalistic career.

Having found jobs on two longdefunct magazines, Mini-Kinema and Truth, by the mid-1950s he was The Observer’s television reviewer, later its film critic. He transferred to the Evening Standard, which sent him to New York. But his chief ambition now was to write about the theatre, a role he took first at The Spectator (doubling as features editor), from 1958 to 1961, a vibrant period of modern drama. He deployed a critical viewpoint every bit as astute as that of his undergraduate rival, Tynan: thoughtful, detailed, observant, intellectual, expanding the review formula into sparkling essays on contemporary culture, perceptively diagnosing the future development of new playwrights such as Pinter, Wesker, Osborne, N. F. Simpson, Peter Nichols and John Mortimer.

While writing on politics for the Sunday Pictorial, he became the first drama critic of the newly fledged Sunday Telegraph, created in 1961, and was twice awarded the title of Critic of the Year. Brien’s output, which included a pseudonymous column as “John Jolley” for the Daily Mail, and frequent television appearances on the current affairs chat-show Three After Six, reflected a magnificent confidence and stamina. He was a contributor to Topic, a shortlived attempt in the early 1960s to create a British Newsweek. Columns rolled out, in The Spectator (1963-65) and the New Statesman (1966-72). In 1967 he went to hear the new editor of The Sunday Times, Harold Evans, speaking in Highgate. Evans told him flatteringly: “You can pluck more interesting fluff out of your navel than most people can from a week out on the road,” and recruited him for The Sunday Times, sending him to Moscow and Saigon.

He also reviewed television and eventually films, but he made his mark with Alan Brien’s Week, from 1967 to 1975, adorning the back page, captivating and enraging readers by turns, exactly as he wished. (The column inspired Private Eye’s parodic Auberon Waugh Diaries in the 1970s, with Waugh’s mugshot embellished with a painted-on Brien beard, above wild and reckless opinion-mongering.) Provocative in discourse, relishing argument, endowed with a rare memory for unstoppable racontage, he could dominate even the famous Punch table and was never averse to taking a bet, even when wrong. He remained an uncompromising socialist; which coloured his vision of society to the end.

In a typically inventive New Statesman column (1969), he made play with the names of London’s great department stores. These reminded him of an old-fashioned nanny addressing her charge: “Don’t be selfridge, Master Fortnum! Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, if you don’t have a C and A every morning on the derry & tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the whiteleys after too many burberrys.” Shop names also reminded him of what one’s mother might say when meeting an old school-friend: “I’m having tea with Lilian Skinner today.” In 1978 he announced that he was embarking on a book about his home town, Sunderland, but somehow ended up producing a photo-essay about women’s breasts, a subject on which he seemed to be something of an expert. His then wife, the feminist writer Jill Tweedie, had, he said, breasts in the shape of Roman helmets. As Tina Brown asked in her review, what was “the best descriptive writer of our day doing, publishing a pornographic picture book?” Domes of Fortune came out in the same month as Tweedie’s book In the Name of Love, which dissected the subject of marriage in terms of feminism — her thesis being that real love had only become possible since the women’s liberation movement, as women had formerly been enslaved.

Tweedie described Brien memorably thus: “My third husband has none of the attributes of a mythic lover. He is not chivalrous, he is not even very polite. He cannot dance, he is tone-deaf and colour-blind, he has no moods, he does not day-dream . . . He brings home no flowers, he remembers no birthdays, he does not try a little tenderness. He has no god, he worships no one, loyalty is not a word he recognises. He does not know the meaning of romance, nor care to know . . . He reminds me of an old warthog I once saw in an African twilight.”

This warthog had butted its way through all the other animals at a drinking-hole, intent on getting to the water. Brien, said Tweedie, was similarly engaged in his journalistic forays. “He shunts and butts through the verbiage . . . ignoring the startled, sometimes angry, sometimes timorous people around him, intent on only one thing. The truth, such as it is.”

He was a gregarious man and an expansive host. In one of his countryman episodes, he took a cottage near Cliveden (his second wife, Nancy, having Astor connections) where weekends featured sausage-and-mash lunches, and once a Thames boat trip when everyone fell in the river after too many gins. In the 1980s he became determined to be the oldest first novelist on the literary scene, and published Lenin the Novel in 1987, when he was 62. It was not a success, but he now styled himself “novelist”.

His next novel would be set in Ancient Rome, and he started on an autobiography, All Right for Some, neither of which was published.

He listed “empyromancy” as a hobby — a passion, shared with the Rev Sydney Smith, for blazing fires — and fulfilled it at his last home, the most ancient cottage in Highgate Village, which he shared with his fourth wife, the writer Jane Hill. As a retired man of letters, he kept up with old friends and with contemporary cinema, read poetry, and walked his dog, Solly, on Hampstead Heath. During his final decline with Lewy body disease, when he was cared for at Denville Hall, an expression of sceptical, cynical amusement never left his face, which, thanks to a fine nose and Slavic eyes and cheekbones, retained its striking profile.

He is survived by his wife, Jane, and by five children and three stepchildren.

Alan Brien, journalist and critic, was born on March 12, 1925. He died on May 23, 2008, aged 83