REPORT 60 SEPTEMBER 2007
Tim's more or less monthly blog since May 2003
I view the news that Oxford is teaching creative writing with the same scepticism that I felt when told the university was awarding half blues for ballroom
Germany was very German and the International Crime Writers very…I was
going to say writerly and criminal and international which is true in
a way but sounds mildly defamatory. AIEP, as the Association of
Internacional Escritores Policianos or something is correctly
acrosticked - is a mildly bizarre collection of crime writes from
Iceland, Bulgaria, Japan, the Fleming part of Belgium as well as more
predictable places such as the USA and UK. As always there were, in
Berlin, some surreal moments, my favourite being the moment en route
to the Berlin equivalent of the Old Bailey, that the forty or so
crime-writing delegates, solemnly stepped off their standard issue
local bus only to be told that they had alighted a stop too early and
turned round and got back on again. What the man (or woman) on the
Berlin bendi-bus made of this spectacle heaven only knows but it
seemed wonderfully ridiculous to this participant/observer.
dancing . . .
There was some worried navel-gazing prompted particularly by our
Icelandic delegate (Reykjavik is scheduled to host us in 2009) and
centred, I think, on the sad but undeniable fact that more than twenty
years after its original formation AIEP is as unknown and unconsidered
outside its membership, as it was when the Russian Juliam Semyonov and
the Mexican Paco Taibo first formed it. Their aim was to raise the
profile of crime writing in countries which had a mother-tongue other
than English and although the annual conferences in unlikely places
such as Zaragoza in Spain and Varna in Bulgaria are very enjoyable I
am by no means convinced that they do a tremendous amount for
crime-writing. On the other hand you never know and this time I was,
for instance, able to put a Spanish writer in touch with the
International liaison person for Australian travel to help out with a
book on Australia he’s been commissioned to write. Not exactly crime
but useful and interesting. I have written a piece and it’s at the
New Statesman being thought about.
My Princess Margaret book recedes into past history but I must say
that I was disappointed in the UK reviews. Far too many critics simply
rehearsed their views of Princess Margaret and seemed not to have read
the book properly if at all. I didn’t read the one by Jenny Diski in
the London Review of Books though she seemed an odd choice
since what comparatively little I have read of hers (and rather liked)
seems determinedly anti-monarchist in a slightly predictable way
whereas I tend to deal in what exists rather than what one wishes to
exist. Anyway Diski apparently said at some stage that she didn’t know
me from a bar of soap (this was the phrase Alexander quoted though I
may be doing her a disservice). I think it’s true that we’ve never met
there was an incident some years ago when Dame Barbara Cartland got in
a pre-emptive strike against my biography of her – which she professed
not to like – by lying down and dictating yet another volume of
self-glorifying memoir. She was a cunning old bat and conned a number
of reviewers including Diski who wrote a long glowing review and
completely ignored my more objective offering published by Christopher
Sinclair-Stevenson. I wrote to Jenny Diski and got a reply saying that
she didn’t know my book existed. I thought this curious and not very
impressive and left it at that. However I feel that in the context of
her latest, unfavourable review, the story has a certain relevance. I
think we should have been told. Sales, incidentally, now stand at just
over 20,000 but my agent says that we won’t get any more money until
March at the earliest and that, despite the sale to the Daily Mail,
he cannot lead me to expect more than for the advance to be covered. I
don’t think this would have been the case before the abolition of the
Net Book Agreement. Discounting doesn’t seem to do most authors many
favours. Good review in the Sydney Morning Herald at the
weekend and I understand Jonathan Sharp said nice things in the
Foreign Correspondents’ Club Magazine in Hong Kong.
The other day I did a drone at the Theatre Royal in Bath. I enjoyed it
though I got the impression that a small number of the 140 odd
audience who had paid a tenner for the privilege of listening, were
disappointed not to get more Princess Margaret stuff. I’m afraid I
rather take the view that if you want that you should buy the book and
the job of the lecturer/talker/droner is to flog the book by talking
about it, how it came to be written and so on, rather than simply
précis-ing the contents. I know this isn’t an always popular view but
I think that in so far as they have a point or purpose Literary
Festivals and their ilk should be an addition to book-reading, not a
substitute. I do understand, however, that this isn’t always a popular
view.
The builders are still here, hammering, painting and doing whatever it
is that builders do. We are in dispute with one man so I had better
not say more. Penny “fired him” from a pavement outside Newton’s, a
Berlin café named after Helmut the photographer, and then again from
another pavement outside one of the museums or galleries. Weeks later
we are still surrounded by dust-sheets, scaffolding and debris. Not
conducive to anything much but luckily the Sunday Times and the
Daily Express taught me how to block out one’s surroundings
when writing or researching. The latest catastrophe is water coming
through into the sitting room area. The new builders went up on the
roof and entirely predictably came down sucking their teeth and
wanting to know who had executed such a terrible botch-up there and
how it was going to cost an absolute fortune to put right. I’m sure
they’re right but it does seem to be an absolute rule about employing
almost any kind of specialist or expert. They always end up charging
more than you expected and blaming their predecessors for doing such a
dreadful job.
The Spectator used my piece on Sydney on the business pages.
Thank you Martin Vander Weyer who is exemplary in his consummate
professionalism and courtesy. He always responds to e-mails, seems
always to be positive, is in no way a soft touch and seems to me
excellent in every respect. I suppose I would say that wouldn’t I? All
the same the Spectator remains, I think, a good shop-window,
whatever that means and I have been writing for it ever since
university. That is I think my third piece in the magazine this year
which isn’t exactly being a “regular contributor” but does represent
something akin to a return to the fold after a number of lost years or
at least months. Wish I could do another main diary for them. I feel a
bit of a fraud on the business pages! And an American has posted a
note on the web-site saying that while the piece is “cute” it’s also
“naïve” and ”ill-informed”. Interesting line in invective and eerily
reminiscent of the old hopeless headmaster line when defeated in
argument. He/they would say that nuclear disarmament or corporal
punishment or Latin or whatever we were discussing was far to
complicated for little boys to understand and we should run along and
play. It is in its way an unanswerable ploy. “It’s not as simple as
that”. Well, in a sense nothing ever is. But in another sense the
essentials are nearly always starkly simple.
And on a final note I have been in touch with Geraldo who has just
arrived in Oxford to embark on a course of creative writing. He is at
Jesus and I met him in Sydney where he was a student at St. John’s
College and I had a long chat with him as one of the very few
(pleasurable) duties imposed on a Visiting Fellow. It is the first
time he has been to Europe (he is a Brazilian-Australian) and so far
he seems to be loving it. I am giving him the phone number of an old
school friend who, after an improbable career change, now lives in
Oxford and who just happened to phone yesterday. I shall hope to keep
in touch with both. And even though I view the news that Oxford is
teaching creative writing with the same scepticism that I felt when
told the university was awarding half blues for ballroom dancing I
feel that this is the sort of thing that makes visiting fellowships
worthwhile! Old boy networks, too.
Final post-script. Today’s paper says that Ned Sherrin has died of
cancer. I went on his radio show, Loose Ends, a couple of times
and found him terrifically professional, kind and thoughtful. He
always hosted an informal pub lunch after the show and made the whole
experience seem fun. He was also helpful with the Princess Margaret
book and gave me some very funny anecdotes. 76 years old, in bed at
home, surrounded by friends, which is, I suppose, a good way to go but
he’ll be missed. He always seemed cheerfully irreverent if not
iconoclastic and he was always nice to me, which, at the end of the
day, is fairly or not, what matters most of all!
Tim Heald
