The man who loved toast
Byron Rogers
THE HUNGRY YEARS by William Leith Bloomsbury, £10.99, pp. 296, ISBN 074757250X Mr William Leith approaches a toaster. ‘Now I’m in a hurry. The bread is brown. Damn. Still, I put two slices in the toaster, and, while I’m waiting, I take another slice from the loaf, butter it, fold it over, and eat it in three bites. I pop the toast to see if it’s nearly done, but it’s not — nowhere near — so I butter another slice, and try, and fail, to eat it slowly. Now, when I pop the toast, it is slightly crisp, and slightly warm, so I take a slice, butter it, eat the disappointing, mushy result, and put another slice in the toaster. And then I realise I should have put the second slice in the toaster before I ate the first. As usual I am falling behind.
‘I am in a toast frenzy. . .’ Mr Leith loves writing about himself. The trouble is that he is a middle-aged, metropolitan, freelance journalist, which means that to make a living he has to meet, and write about, other people, usually famous, which is a definite minus, other people being nowhere near as interesting. So he had a moment of real inspiration. Out of it came this book, which is basically all about the agonies of being a middleaged, metropolitan, freelance journalist.
In such a man’s beginnings these usual ly have to do with financial uncertainty, but if he gets beyond that stage, as Mr Leith has, then he encounters, in the long dark watches between celebrities, the really dark agencies of the 21st century: daytime television and food. If he succumbs to the first, his brain falls out; if the second, his gut falls out. Mr Leith steps between the Scylla and Charbydis of Trisha and toast.
So far he seems not to have encountered cooking, which was my downfall, or fornicating neighbours, especially that multiorgasmic bitch across the gardens who seemed to hit top C every time I had a deadline.
But what Mr Leith did was to turn his agonies to profit by conjuring up a structure. He decided to write a book about being fat and dieting, a matter of some obsession in the West, only he wrote about Mr Leith, who is fat and diets. He went on the protein diet pioneered by Dr Atkins, whom of course he met before the doctor’s sudden death. This was a brainwave: it guaranteed him a reading public, which allowed him to pontificate on just about anything he chose.
Mr Leith investigates contemporary fashions in pubic hair:
It’s hard to remember how it used to be, but in the past, right through to the Eighties, women just let their pubic hair grow, and now a full thatch is the exception rather than the rule; most women I know are getting waxed and plucked, buying trimming tools, reading about different pubic hairstyles on the beauty pages, and this, of course, will happen to men.
He remembers flared trousers:
The material picked up mud and other filth, and then it became frayed and split, so even when people took their shoes off, long tendrils of, at worst, dog-shit marinated denim left brown streaks all over the carpet. Indoors, with your shoes off, you manipulated your front trouser-cuff with your toes; outdoors, you leaned against walls and bus shelters, looking downwards, casually flipping your cuffs over your shoes.
He inveighs against farming, not just modern farming, but all farming, the whole shooting match back to the sunset of hunting and gathering:
It’s the most important, not to say the most destructive, revolution in the history of mankind ... Farming led to dense populations, which led to diverse occupations, which led to people having time on their hands, which led to inventions — ploughs and millstones and knives, and, much later, forks, and the combine harvester, and the Lamb Water Gun Knife, which shoots potatoes along a tube into a criss-cross network of blades, turning them into perfect French fries ... Farming was the impetus that caused human beings to settle down in communities, which became the first cities, which spawned roads and rising land values and, eventually, urban angst and skyscrapers and elevators and fat people rising in elevators at the expense of no calories.
In other words, farming led to Mr Leith again. You will note the technique, the short phrases (he loves commas), which become lists, which give an air of absolute authority. The omnipresent present tense presses all argument down, so that when not getting high, or gloomily measuring his waistline, or slagging off old girlfriends (one of whom requires some sexual manipulation, over which, for once, he draws a veil), or meeting celebrities, Mr Leith demonstrates his authority, for, like Mr Toad, he knows everything there is to be knowed. He loves lists, too. ‘Wheat Thins or Crisps or Bits or Ritz or Hits or Twigs or Snaps or Chips or Dips ... etc.’ Mr Leith has popped into his local deli.
Somehow, in the background to all this, and despite the sudden death of his guru, he manages to lose weight through the Atkins Diet. But by then he has also discovered walking. Being Mr Leith, he describes it thus. ‘After 20 miles, I start to feel twinges. I am creaky. My ankles are sore. My knees hurt when I walk down hills. After 23 miles, I feel better; after 24, I feel worse.’ The result is an act of rebellion. He eats pasta, has some bread, drinks wine, and then, in the company of a girlfriend, passes out fully dressed in their hotel room. Like Philip Marlowe, he passes out more than once in the course of his narrative, but this passing out, he reflects the next morning, is the happiest moment of his life.
By then, for 296 pages, you have been in the company of an opinionated egomaniac, the sort of man who, instead of writing for newspapers, should be writing letters in green biro to them. But the weird thing is that the 296 pages have been like an evening gone. ‘Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views ...’ It is truly amazing what a man can get away with when he writes well. This book is a triumph of nerve. Being Mr Leith, he has dedicated it to his wife and son.
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