Another voice
Roll of Honour
Auberon Waugh
Last week I received a notification from Mr John Sumsion, Registrar of Public Lending Right, that the nine of my eleven published books judged eligible for PLR had been borrowed an estimated 37,852 times during the year ended June 30, 1983. Accordingly, I will receive a cheque for £386.09p at the end of next month, each estimated borrowing being worth 1.02p.
It is a fascinating thing for any author to learn which of his books are still being read, and by how many people, but 1 fear it would be unreasonable to expect others to share the fascination. The estimates are made from a sample of 16 public libraries spread around the country. If only one could discover which libraries were being used as samples — this should not be too difficult for anyone with time to take a few librarians out to dinner — one could make a nonsense of the whole system by arrang- ing for friends to take one's books out and return them daily. The sample is so small that a single borrowing in, for instance, the southern English counties (where only three libraries are operating the scheme) counts as 187 borrowings nationally and brings home £1.90. In the metropolitan boroughs, if one can correctly identify the two libraries in- volved, a single borrowing is worth £1.39. In Northern Ireland, a sample borrowing is worth only 40p, so Northern Irish librarians may have to make do with tea.
I find it hard to believe that nobody has already cracked the system, which makes one grateful that there is a maximum pay- out — fixed, for the moment, at £5,000. We are told that 46 authors have reached the maximum this year. It requires a notional 510,000 borrowings but only 2,728 actual ones if they were all from the three chosen libraries in the southern counties region. That should not be too difficult to organise, but I know 1 am quite incapable of organis- ing it on my own behalf and can't help wondering about the identity of these 46 who have achieved the maximum rate. Over half a million borrowings seem an awful lot when one thinks how comparatively few people in this country read a single book from one year's end to the next. No doubt a few of our greatest writers — Dick Francis, Graham Greene, Barbara Cartland achieve it, but 46 of them?
lf, as I suspect, a few have been helped towards this figure by friends and relations living in the catchment area of the 16 libraries, one is in no position to whine about it because one has been less enterpris- ing oneself. Ronald Knox used to divide humanity into the pathetic and the dynamic — those who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on the one hand, and on the other those who take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. However much one may moan about the in- adequacy of £386.09p as a return for 23 years' work, 11 books and a notional 37,852 borrowings in the year, one must also admit that it is better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish, even when reduced to £154.44p by the income tax. Incidentally, one might observe that authors who ge- nuinely achieve the maximum borrowing are also, presumably, paying the top rate of income tax. Far from receiving £5,000 from the Government for its plundering of their life's work, they are in fact paying £34)00 straight back to the Inland Revenue, and so receiving only £2,000.
But even these paltry sums would almost certainly never have been made available without the selfless and dedicated efforts of two outstandingly dynamic women — Mss Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy. Bet- ween the two of them they organised the whole campaign, sending out hundreds of cyclostyled letters, shepherding their notoriously ungregarious flock into deputa- tions, working parties, action groups and dealing, in the course of it, with individual writers and politicians so horrible as might make one die to look upon them.
It has long been fashionable to decry such activities among those of us whose idea of taking arms against a sea of troubles is to moan about them quietly in the fish queue, or in the columns of Spectator. We talk of government by pressure groups, and point terrified fingers at the bloodthirsty fanatics of ASH, the anti-smoking lobby, at its sister-organisation the IRA, at the Temperance plotters in Whitehall, at the lesbian terrorist movement and the trade unions. But if a few dynamic stalwarts were not prepared to fight the good fight, nothing wholesome or useful would ever be done, and these disagreeable enthusiasts would walk over us even more than they do.
Perhaps Mr Keith Waterhouse deserves a place in my Roll of Honour, along with the Misses Brodie and Duffy, for his stand against the frenzied anti-smokers. His line is that since smokers are now a minority, they should be recognised as such and eligi- ble for a grant from Ken Livingstone. Smokeism should be identified as the fifth deadly prejudice after racism, sexism, ageism and (a new one) handicappism. He recommends smokers' workshops and smokers' action groups to counter the violent, often misleading smokeist pro- paganda from local authorities and govern- ment 'experts'.
There is nothing particularly heroic in that, of course. I often urge the country to rise up and hang all its politicians, but these exhortations are addressed to other people while I get on with evaluating the 1982 vin- tage from Bordeaux. What might just qualify Waterhouse for the Roll of Honour is that at the end of urging the rest of us to make this Anti-Smokeist Year, he suggests that his 12 million-odd readers in the Daily Mirror might let him have any examples of smokeism which offend them.
Other heroes of the week who qualify for the Roll of Honour are Mr George Stern, leader of the Highgate Archway Motorway group, and Mr Nicholas Phillips QC who has been waging a private war against the Customs and Excise officer who seized a half-kilo tin of foie gras addressed to him in the post and claims to have destroyed it.
For many months now I have been receiving polite, intelligent, good-humoured letters from Mr Stern about his Highgate Archway and other subjects. Like most readers of the Spectator, I imagine, I have very little idea of what the Highgate Ar- chway is. But he has almost singlehandedly rounded up 4,000 protesters against a road- widening which is obviously necessary from the point of view of lorry drivers, on the simple grounds that their inconvenience must be measured against his own. He is ab- solutely right and I hope he wins, despite being denounced as a 'waffler' by the in- quiry chairman on its first day. If motorists' interests always prevail we are none of us safe.
But there is always a third option bet- ween suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and taking arms against a sea of trustees. This is, quite simply, to die, which is what Alasdair Clayre appears to have done last week at the age of 48. Alasdair was unmistakably the most brilliant undergraduate in the Oxford generation immediately before my own. I knew him first as a friend of my older sister, then as a young Fellow of All Souls, by which time he had perfected the Isaiah Berlin accents and staccato delivery which amazed my contemporaries and left us speechless with admiration that one small brain could carry all he knew. Academic honours fell into his lap like ripe plums his equivalent in my own time would have been Francis Hope, who became a staff writer on the New Statesman before being killed in a place nearly ten years ago.
I do not know how or why Alasdair died. Perhaps these are not good times for the ex- ceptionally gifted. He wrote a good book about China which I had just finished reviewing for Business Traveller last week when I learned about his death, but he never got into Who's Who and most of his time after leaving Oxford, I believe, was spent singing protest songs in cellars. I have forgotten, if I ever knew, what exactly he was protesting about — whether it was whales, or Vietnam, or the ineluctable pro- gress of the four seasons...
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