Not as Simple as all that

Charles Moore

A DUBIOUS CODICIL by Michael Wharton Chatto & Windus, f15.99, pp. 261 This is a poetical book. It deals with desire and madness and rural beauty and human frailty, and it does so in word pictures of painful vividness. Here is the author's description of walking through a high meadow in Yorkshire early one sum- mer morning 40 years ago after a drunken night:

Half way along the path I thought I saw something gleaming in the grass. Could it be a bright button mushroom? Or one of the country's small, exquisite snail-shells, some pink, some palest blue, some white like the pearl the base Indian threw away? Or the policeman's teeth? I bent to look again but now I could see nothing; and as I straight- ened up, by mischance I brought my elbow into Kate's face with enough force to bruise her cheek-bone. She cried out as I put my lips against it, then moved away. As we walked on, our separated shadows were long in the summer grass.

I shall not explain about the policeman's teeth, but they remind the reader of the fact that Michael Wharton's poetical pic- ture is as funny as it is sad and mad.

The funniest, maddest thing is that the frame for the picture is the Daily Tele- graph. The book begins with a description of 'The Lodge', the reception area of the newspaper's office in Fleet Street: Mr Wharton imagines it to be a real lodge, the entrance to the country seat of the Berry family who owned the paper. The book ends with the emptying of the building when the offices moved to the Isle of Dogs:

Where was Lord Hartwell [the chief Berry], I wondered . . . . Where was the once all- powerful master of this doomed domain? As we walked down the marble stairs for the last time, noting that with utter rightness all the lifts were out of order, I had a sudden vision of him, poignant and noble, striding up and down his battlemented garden where the grass grew rank among untended, weed- grown borders, on a Fifth Floor emptied of all its grandeur, lashing with his stick at the overblown, already mouldering flowers of Fleet Street's end.

The frame contained Michael Wharton's 'Peter Simple' column for 30 years. From within it, he conducted what he calls his 'infamous war on reality'. Although the book seems very honest, Mr Wharton cunningly treats his art with a reticence that he does not apply to his life. He admits a resemblance between himself and his column's dejected man of letters, Julian Birdbath, who lived at the bottom of a disused leadmine in Derbyshire and dreamed of going to literary parties, but the reader has only hints about the genesis of the characters, their interrelation, or the

became more and more common among people like myself who were being driven mad by the egotism laying waste themselves and the technological progress laying waste the world . . . . What is a 'nervous break- down' but an extreme form of self-regard and therefore deadly sin?

Those sentences give a good idea of the beliefs and emotions and tensions that gave the column its shape.

Everything Michael Wharton describes he colours with his imagination, but this does not necessarily mean that he distorts. As someone who arrived at the Daily Telegraph just in time, I can testify that some of his descriptions of the scenes in Fleet Street pubs, especially the King and Keys, are almost downplayed. There was a beautiful contrast between the respectabil- ity of the paper and the behaviour of its staff. No one could forget the man whom Mr Wharton calls Philip Weston, friendly and charming until, sometimes half way through a sentence, the drink made him `go critical'. Once Weston was in a pub called the Falstaff:

A party of elderly American women, Daugh- ters of the Revolution with blue-rinsed hair and the earnest mien of cultural tourists, entered. 'Pardon me, sir,' said their leader,

addressing Weston, who was waiting expec- tantly for a victim. 'Pardon me, is this your Dr Johnson's house?' Weston, brandishing his umbrella, rose to his feet. 'I am Dr Johnson', he croaked maniacally. 'Now fuck off!'.

For this he was expelled from the pub.

Smiling in triumph, Weston crossed the road to the King and Keys, where he found me talking to Sheila Murphy, Desmond Wil- liams's companion, over from Dublin on a visit. 'Who's this?', shouted Weston. 'I know all about you, whoever you are. You've got a purple bottom!' Whether Sheila actually had a purple bottom I have no idea; but such was the force of Weston's personality that it seemed perfectly possible, even likely, that she had.

This is an uncomfortable book. It is uncomfortable to be mentioned in it, parti- cularly uncomfortable to be praised in it. It is generous often, but sometimes cruel. Its opinions can be unsettling. I defy anyone really to claim, as Mr Wharton records misguided fans of his column saying, that he agrees with everything he writes. (My own bugbear is Mr Wharton's Welsh nationalism.) But no one seems more uncomfortable, or receives harsher treat- ment, than the author. Mr Wharton is confident of certain things — of the right- ness of his views, of his ability to write, of ' his good looks — but he also lacerates himself — his 'instinct for the negative', his lack of moral responsibility, even his part- Jewishness. He regards himself as a symp- tom of the disease called the 20th century, and this book is the story of his unending struggle, unsuccessful, of course, but heroic, to find the cure.

This is the second volume of Michael Wharton's autobiography. The first is call- ed The Missing Will, a reference to a family belief in a lost inheritance. The idea of something lost before it could be seen or used, never possessed, pervades both books. Which makes it moving that the books, like the column, bequeath so much to the reader.

`Sometimes I think he understands everything we say...'