ci hrist! My head! Where am I? What
happened to the Fenland Arms? Where's that minxy little mink I was talking to at the bar? My mouth feels as if a small bald human being has crawled in and used it first as his latrine and then as his mausoleum ... and, oh God, I've slept in my fur again...' And so, reader, run the doleful first thoughts of the Vole as he wakes up, toxic with shame, to find that he has passed out on the floor of the books cupboard in The Spectator's Doughty Street offices, and that the janitor has locked him in ... Worse, a deadline looms. Better get down to it, he thinks, What's in this pile of books? Hmmm. My Thief Career: The Trials of a Young Lawyer by Harty Mount? Nah. Please Stay to the Adjournment by John Taylor MP. Don't think so. Ahal This will do for a start ...
I n the introduction to his new collection of critical essays, The Irresponsible Self, James Wood retails a nice, and characteristic, story told about the late critic and poet Ian Hamilton. Hamilton — a man of flinty critical judgment and arid humour — used to conduct much of the business of his literary magazine, The New Review, not from its Soho offices, but from the nearby Pillars of Hercules pub in Greek Street. Early one morning, Hamilton was hunched over his usual table nursing a restorative beverage and a fag, when in stumbles a poet, green around the gills. Hamilton offers him a drink. The poet looks stricken. 'Oh no,' he says. 'I just can't keep drinking. I must give it up. It's doing terrible things to me. It's not even giving me pleasure any longer,' Pause. Then Hamilton, with teeth gritted, 'Well, none of us likes it.'
years after his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has become the object of something of a tug of love. In quick succession, two biographies have been published by two ermine-wearing titans of scholarship. In the blue corner, Conrad Black's 1,328-pager, Champion of Freedom. In the red corner, Roy Jenkins's posthumous life of the American statesman, only 176 pages long. Black's is £30. Jenkins's is £15.99. The bargain-hunter pays tuppence a page for Lord Black's prose, in other words. Jenkins comes at 9p a page, but for that you get portability.
AndrewRoberts, we salute you. The distinguished historian's determination to plug his girlfriend Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de Medici is
unrivalled in the history of literary uxoriousness. Not only has he taken out, at his own expense, two advertisements for it in Literary Review — one of them a full page — but he loses no opportunity to drop it into conversation. Interviewed for a recent article on publishing, he illustrated his view that 'we are going through a golden age of British non-fiction' with reference to ... you've guessed it. 'I know it sounds like a gratuitous mention of my girlfriend's book,' he said, but The crowning achievement, so far, has been an article he wrote about going on a diet. It was illustrated by a photograph of Mr Roberts sitting at table munching a crispbread. Propped upright in the middle of the photograph: a copy of Catherine de Medici ...
Writers and their Teeth is a topic surely suitable for a water-closet anthology of some sort (to go, perhaps, alongside Writers and their Beards). The latest nugget has been trollied up by Professor John Carey, reviewing John Sutherland's authorised biography of Stephen Spender. When Spender's first wife, Inez Pearn, ran off with a sociologist, Cyril Connolly advised Spender to 'lure her back by pretending he'd shacked up with a dazzlingly beautiful new girlfriend'. Sure enough, the ruse worked, and Inez returned to his arms. 'But when she inquired about her successor, Spender admitted he had made her up. and Inez disappeared for good. Two of Spender's teeth,' reports Professor Carey, 'died instantly from shock.'
Teere was more to Spender than his eth, though. Most reviewers of the biography have agreed that though a thoroughly good egg, a nifty memoirist and a tireless and effective ambassador for poetry, Spender didn't write more than a
handful of good poems. And he did write more than a handful that were just plain rotten. My favourite is a quatrain from 'Air Raid', describing a house whose facade has been torn off by a bomb: 'Bemused passersby are bound to observe/ That insideshown-outside like the deep curve/ Of mother-o'-pearl exposed in a shell/ Where a mollusc, long smashed, at one time did dwell,' Does doggerel get worse than that?
Tie Times is celebrating his legacy by sponsoring a Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. The deadline for submissions is 16 July, and the first prize is £500. It's open to anyone under 30, for English versions of poems in any language classical or modern. There are special prizes, too, for under-18s. A very good thing, I think, Details of how to enter can be obtained by emailing prize@timesspender.info. Is it too much to hope that the winning entry might end up being a translation of 'Air Raid' into English?
My colleague on these pages, Andro Linklater, expresses a frustration: when reviewing books, the irritations of sloppy editing — typos, minor inaccuracies, and what he calls 'general editorial ballsups' — are hard to point out without looking petty and taking up precious words, but 'they are relevant to the care that publishers take'. And, sometimes, they are funny. He points up, in Richard Holmes's Tommy (HarperCollins): 'Some officers preferred to frequent the freshpots of Etaples' and 'He lay stork still hoping to evade capture.' I'd welcome submissions for an occasional series recording the best worst.
T4ittle remarked upon outside the publishing industry is that, regardless of how obsessed we appear to be with Harry Potter, we actually buy and read much more non-fiction, as a nation, than we do fiction. In the hopes of highlighting this, Ottakars Bookshops and the Daily Telegraph recently launched 'The Real Read', a joint promotion in which people were invited to vote for their all-time favourite work of nonfiction, The preliminary results, though encouraging, suggest that at least some readers have difficulty distinguishing between the two. Gorky Park, Rebecca and — well, who's to say it isn't a piece of documentary reportage? — The Wind in the Willows. The Bible attracted 21 votes. L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics earned two. The Koran got no votes at all.
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