BOOKS
All Gordon, no Bennett
Julie Burchill
AREN'T WE DUE A ROYALTY STATEMENT? by Giles Gordon Chatio & Windus, f16.99, pp. 352 There are two ways of reading this book (if that's the use you choose to put it to). One is to read it straight, as the memoirs of a man who has somehow managed to spend 30 years as a critic, columnist and literary agent without ever being heard of further north than NW3. Reading it this way, you may expect it to be `scurrilous, uproarious and gloriously indiscreet', as promised. You will know dismay.
But if you read it as a spoof autobiogra- phy, in the manner of the immortal Diary of a Nobody — Diary of a Busybody, perhaps — it really works. Suddenly the clichés (`Lady Antonia Fraser was beautiful, in the way of an English rose') come alive, and the pontifications,
I have never fully comprehended the obses- sion with sport which grips this country, and obviously other countries as well. It is mostly involved with hitting balls of differing sizes and substances all over the place: the history of sport would be much diminished if no one had invented the ball
make perfect, surreal sense. Even the names (Mr Gordon is proposed for the Garrick by the well-named Mr Playfair, a proponent of prison reform) remind one of the Grossmiths' Messrs Cummings, Gow- ing, Perkupp and Posh.
But oh, it's boring! I worked in the world of pop in the Seventies and the world of books in the Eighties, and one thing I found interesting was that there was a good deal more sex, drugs, drink and general bad behaviour in the latter. The women were far better, too; prettier, wilder and classier, reaching their peak of pickled per- fection in the phenomenon of the Publish- ing Sloane Off the Rails. This was the only time in my life that lunching has seemed like something more than an endurance test, as I spent a good part of the late Eighties whisking my new friend Val away from her desk at assorted publishers to embark on marathon drunks which made Keith Moon, Shane MacGowan and Billy Idol look like three little maids from school, and a Quaker school at that.
There is no sign of that scatty, catty, conniving camaraderie here, the very female atmosphere of modern publishing, one of the few professions in which women are properly represented. No, Mr Gordon is more of an ambulatory archive of what publishing used to be like some 50 years or so ago; a world of old buffers waddling between clubs and cassoulets, more inter- ested in vintages than ISBNs. The groupie mentality, which is more often found in publishing men than publishing women, is well to the fore as Mr Gordon boasts of being harassed by a young Hanif Kureishi (`forever trying to persuade me to drink with him'), of rejecting an unknown Salman Rushdie ('who has had his troubles since') and of being savaged by a rabid Martin Amis (`not the revered figure he is now taken to be') in the pages of the New Statesman — when Martin Amis still wrote for the New Statesman: this truly is an antique and vanished world.
Between pearls of wisdom that I would risk my last tooth prising open an oyster- shell to get at (`On the whole, writers should write and readers should read') the narrative fairly scampers along at a crack- ing pace between such Olympian back- drops as the Tufts University Creative Writing Programme at the Reynolds Hotel off the Gloucester Road, where Mr Gor- don taught in his lunch hour in 1971 (`One of my students is now in a senior position at a leading New York publishing house; another is married to the co-proprietor of the Caprice and Ivy restaurants') and the Royal Society of Literature in Hyde Park, of which he becomes a fellow in 1990.
You have the choice, as Roy Jenkins puts it, of signing your name in the book of Fellows using either Byron's pen or his, Lord Jenkins', biwo. To use Byron's pen (who would vouch for its authenticity?) is, of course, the most ridiculous conceit, but one I couldn't resist.
Most people who find speech impedi- ments funny usually find foreign names a real scream, too, so it wasn't all that sur- prising to me that after banging on about how many books he's had dedicated to him (around a dozen, to put you all out of your misery) Mr Gordon concludes with the brilliantly witty observation that in one Polish translation, his name turned up as Gilesowi Gordonowi! Quick — the smelling salts! I cannot take this rarefied level of hilarity much longer without assis- tance.
Despite its determined air of jollity — or perhaps because of it — this book is a bit depressing, and never more so than at the end when Mr Gordon performs a sort of Garrick Club 'My Way': I sincerely hope that I am not becoming, as my second half-century begins to fast- forward, too respectable or respectful. I think there is little likelihood of that; and if there is, the publication of these irreverent but not, I hope, unsympathetic pages about some of those I've encountered as I go about life's increasingly bewildering business, should dis- pel any suspicions of complacency and time- serving.
This passage is particularly sad because there are few minor tragedies more poignant than that gap between people's perceptions of themselves and the way they really are. Mr Gordon seems to have spent a lifetime telling himself that his is a unique, bizarre and amazing paradox: to be a Scotsman who has lived most of his life in England, to be a publisher turned agent, to be a clubbable chap who sneaks to Private Eye. Or indeed to have agented both Prince Charles and 'Adrian Mole'. (I thought Prince Charles was 'Adrian Mole'.) But each one of these experiences is a comfy, creaking cliché simply not worthy of Mr Gordon's gilded flourishes. If he had embraced his ordinariness, Pooter-style; he might have written a much better book for, as Alan Bennett has proved, there is real poetry in the life of the Little Man. There is precious little anything, though, in the life of the Wannabe.
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