The Questing Vie
LIven as the Christmas season draws in ,
I ' upon us, the academy's best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was contacted for help by an inhouse DNB scribe who had been commissioned to write the entry for his stepfather, the historical novelist Patrick O'Brian. Tolstoy — who was working on his own full-length biography, and knew that O'Brian had taken several liberties with the facts of his own life over the years — asked his interlocutor starchily 'what were his qualifications for writing on a subject of whose most basic rudiments he was confessedly ignorant'. The answer did not give satisfaction, and he went on to contact the DNB's editor who, he claims, refused to reveal the name of the writer, and 'cavalierly rejected my misgivings'. Tolstoy now reports (he is not a man, we conclude, who you would in any circumstances want on your case) that the eventual DNB entry is 'so replete with factual errors that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that barely a biographical detail is correct'. He offers a 'specimen selection of solecisms' 17 items long. Yikes. The authors of the entry, incidentally, were Tim Wales and Bill Peschel. O'Brian is Peschel's only entry to the DNB; Wales is credited with 16 contributions, including a thief, a highwayman, a public executioner and several Church of England clergymen.
To take our minds off mean old Nikolai Tolstoy and nasty old Patrick O'Brian and the slapdash old Dictionary of National Biography, let's think instead of all that is good and lovely and nice. The Duchess of York — author, as countless fans will remember, of Budgie the Little Helicopter — has returned to the world of children's literature. Hers is the opening contribution to Christmas Stories, a charming wee anthology of celebrity children's stories produced by Selfridges in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. It tells the story of Bill, a `big fat pigeon' who sat all day on a sagging telegraph wire, 'had no family and usually missed Christmas'. Bill eventually finds himself gloriously redeemed when he is invited to share Christmas at Tiddly Hill with a brown cow, two sheep, four pigs, a black pony, a
family of robins and several chickens. Does it encode personal poignancy? Wintry stories used to emerge from Balmoral of Fergie, barred from the table of her former in-laws, eating a lonely, microwaved, Bernard Matthews Turkey Drummer while her ex-husband and daughters pulled crackers around the royal turkey.
The closing event in the London Review of Books' superb series of 25th anniversary debates featured Sir Frank Kermocle, Terry Eaglcton, Zadie Smith and James Wood trying to establish 'What is Literary Criticism For?' in the resultant ding-dong, pitched roughly between Terry Eagleton insisting Everything is Political and James Wood arguing for good oldfashioned exegesis of Great Works Articulating Profound Human Truths, the elderly Sir Frank presided with a sagacious air of having seen all these arguments rehearsed in different terms before. He wasn't without spikes, however. When the name of Helen Gardner, widely regarded as one of the century's most distinguished commentators, came up, he gave a little smirk: 'not the brightest of critics ...'
Beinga vole and not therefore having thumbs, my interest in computer games is largely theoretical. But still my heart sinks at Tessa Jowell's stagy announcement of a 'crackdown' on violent videogames. She is cracking down in response to a hysterical Daily Mail campaign against a computer game called 'Manhunt', following the murder by a teenage friend of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeerah. In 'Manhunt', your character ambles around garotting people for kicks. Was Stefan's killer driven to murder by an obsession with the game? As Bendt Simon pointed out in these pages some months ago — something largely ignored in the public debate — the police specifically ruled out the game having had anything to do with the murder. This was not least for the sensible reason that it was the victim who liked playing 'Manhunt' rather than the killer. Tessa Jowell it was, incidentally, who posed prettily for photographs in a casino to publicise the Gambling Bill, before executing a nearcomplete U-turn on the subject, in response to a campaign by the Daily Mail.
Back to Christmas Stories, in another effort to cheer myself up. Look! It's a poem by the radiantly wonderful Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, called 'The Little Girl who Lived in a Cake': 'There was once a little girl who lived in a cake,' it begins. 'Her bedroom took only one hour to bake.' It rumbles along in like style. Gosh, she's great. Even now she's off the drugs, she's still got it Other contributors include Madonna's daughter Lourdes, Sharon Osbourne, and the hunky Baywatch star David Hasselhoff.
B'no sooner are one's spirits lifted by the thought of Tara's perky metre, and of Mr Hasselhoff gambolling through the California surf in his red bathers, than 1 open a newspaper and am gloomy to see evidence of disharmony between two of my cherished colleagues, A. N. Wilson and Bevis Hillier. In his recent Books of the Year round-up in these pages BH named ANW's novel My Name is Legion as the worst book of the year ('flabbily plotted ... soon lost me') and dropped in a gratuitous swipe at his The Victorians to boot. A couple of days later in the Evening Standard ANW returned the favour by offering that BH's Betjeman biography 'could have been half the length if [he] had been prepared to absorb [his] material and digest it for the reader rather than slapping it down on the page.' Now, perhaps in a spirit of remorse, he offers an olive branch in the Telegraph, deplore feuds. and I seriously believe that to cultivate hatred or dislike of anyone is a wicked thing to do,' he writes. Then, oops, he goes on to describe BH as a 'pitiable .. old bachelor in a Hiram's Hospital ... dribbling resentment like the dottle from a smelly church
warden's pipe the old pauper ... old, malignant and pathetic'.
And, as the phrase goes, goodwill to all men. Happy Christmas!
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