MAY 2008

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There’s nothing like clearing out one’s filing cabinets . . .

THE GREAT spring-clean continues. I’ve been going through the filing cabinets and it’s amazingly salutary. I’m keeping some of the personal stuff back; a lot of material, especially letters to do with work in one form or another, is going off to the “Heald Archive” at Boston University and one or two – notably wonderful, humourless self-parodying letters from Jeffrey Archer and Edward Heath – have gone to the framers before being hung in the Heald loo where they belong.

It’s proving an odd experience. Most of the letters are from the eighties and nineties and it’s like venturing into another unrecognisable life. Some people are dead. Among the things I’ve kept are one or two order sheets for memorials or funerals but in one case I rediscovered a correspondence with a one-time employer whom I rather liked even though the project ended in disaster. I looked this person up on the internet which has done so much to transform so many lives and found myself reading an obituary for 1997. The person concerned had died, tragically young, of meningitis. I simply hadn’t known. I’ve fired off two letters to people I once knew quite well but have completely lost touch with. It looks as if they are both still alive although their lives, like mine I suppose, have changed with the passage of time. One now seems to have gone to live in the Scottish borders and the other has married and now has a home in rural Vermont. I don’t think either has retired – I knew them both through work – but they are certainly not doing the same day-to-day jobs as they were when I last corresponded with them. It would have been bizarre if they were. It’s between ten and twenty-five years ago. I’m not leading the same life; I’m not living in the same house or even the same part of the world; I’m not married to the same person. I feel like an American politician (running for office perhaps). Life changes. How profound!  But there’s nothing like clearing out one’s filing cabinets to be reminded of this obvious and sometimes uncomfortable fact.

It’s five years since I started this web-site and the blog that goes with it. The site-master and I have decided, sadly on my part at least, that the time has come to go our separate ways. As regular readers know I have been experimenting with a shorter more frequent message but for various reasons I’m not convinced this works. It’s interesting, to me at least, that there are some bloggers who write daily or even more frequently. One daily blogger who I now read frequently is the crime writer, Martin Edwards, who writes daily and almost exclusively about crime. He is a lawyer in Liverpool and I had lunch with him recently in his club, the amazing Athenaeum, in that city. It’s an extraordinary historic oasis and Martin’s is an astonishing blog. He is immensely erudite and every day he seems to produce some extraordinary apercu about crime, factual or fictitious. I don’t think I can begin to compete. Other bloggers seem to bang something out whenever the fancy takes them – sometimes on an hourly basis or even more often. On the whole I don’t care for these effusions.Nor am I that keen on the site that invites comments from readers. I’m enough of an old-fashioned journalist to believe that writing is not just a dialogue. One of the most upsetting comments on modern main-stream journalism was the remark that the function of a newspaper nowadays is to have a conversation with its readers. I still believe that this is rubbish and that the function of a newspaper is to tell me things I didn’t already know, preferably in a more entertaining and clever way than I – and certainly the average reader – could manage. I do see though that this is a hopelessly grumpy old view.

Anyway the clear-out is a salutary experience – rather like delving into the biography of someone else altogether. There are letters I had completely forgotten – one from Raold Dahl, for instance, judging a short story competition when I was Chairman of the Crime Writers Association. He chose one by Peter Dickinson and dismissed the others on the short list as rubbish. He also asked for a dozen bottles of very good claret rather than two of quite good. Good man! There was another from John le Carre saying that he would prefer cuff-inks to a tie pin as his prize from Cartier. I remember that got me into trouble because the cuff-links cost much more to make. But I rightly supposed that le Carre wasn’t a tie-pin man. And some of the correspondences. I’d quite forgotten, for instance that I’d exchanged so many letters with dear Dorothy B. Hughes whose house we sat in for one year in Santa Fe New Mexico and her equally dear sister Calla whom we got to know while we lived there. And so on.

Back in real life I am into the final stretch of the fictional return of Simon Bognor which really ought to be a HUGE publishing event; there was an enjoyable few days in London which included a fascinating visit to Tate Britain, a briefing with the “financial advisers” (hollow laughter), more attempts to get the great non-fiction project off the ground (watch this space), no cricket, a long lazy Sunday lunch, and a few days in Wiltshire staying with my Ma. And talking of Ma, there was a huge sadness the other day when my much-loved Godma Mary died. She had a horrid cancer but mercifully suffered no pain. I absolutely adored her and have to deliver “a few words” at her funeral some time very soon. That will be a curious bitter-sweet occasion. She was well into her eighties and completely wonderful as well as being fantastically loyal. I already miss her dreadfully.

Her death, is, like the clearing of the filing cabinets, a melancholy reminder of the transitoriness of life. The only lessons are clichés such as carpe diem and do-as-you-would-be-done-by which is a reminder that the great truths are all cliches and – very salutary especially for a writer – that it’s all been said before. And better!
 

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