DIARY
IAN JACK
You may be aware of a kind of writing called 'the new non-fiction', a phrase cred- ited to the editrix of Esquire, and on first sight about as specific and meaningful as Tony Blair's 'New Labour'. What it proba- bly best describes is the increasing use of novelistic tricks in the writing of biography. autobiography, travel and social inquiry. There's nothing much new about it: see Truman Capote, Laurie Lee, or George Orwell (whose experience in Wigan, as dis- closed in his diaries, was not reflected with total accuracy in The Road to Wigan Pier). But there's certainly a fashion for it, partly, I suspect, for the sound commercial reason that literary novels, unless they're by some- body famous and/or outstandingly good, get noticed only in books pages, whereas something 'real' — look, folks, this actually happened — might get the welcome public- ity of the features pages, perhaps a news story or two. DV, you might even flog the serialisation rights.
The important question is: did it actual- ly happen, is it true in the sense that most of us take that word to mean? As the new editor of a magazine, Granta, that has done a lot to blur the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, I live in the most fragile of glass houses and need to proceed with cau- tion. I'm suspicious, however, of the 'greater truth' argument, as in: 'I made up these slightly dodgy details to serve a greater truth.' A few years ago I was talking at a party to a celebrated travel writer about his encounters with pygmies, retired schooner captains, river pilots, nomads. Did he take notes as he interviewed them? No. Did he rush back to his hotel and there write down a version of what they had said? No again. Did he use a tape-recorder then? Never. 'The tape-recorder,' he said, as though holding one a long way from his person like a rotten fish and pronouncing the words as the late Dame Edith Evans might, 'is the greatest liar.' Actually, I think he was. But then I'm rather literal, like the Muslim taxi-driver in Dhaka against whose anger I found myself defending Salman Rushdie soon after the fatwa. 'But look, it's fiction, a novel, invented.' Yes,' said the taxi-driver triumphantly, 'fiction — lies, all lies!'
One of the joys of no longer being a newspaper editor is that I don't have to read newspapers. For four years at the Independent on Sunday this was a morning duty: into the office at eight, get coffee from machine, then gut the contents of London's five broadsheets and six tabloids, working methodically from front page to back. With practice, it took about an hour. Some titles — the Express, the Star, latterly the Sun (except for its political man) were the work of seconds. On the other hand, I usually felt I had short-changed the Financial Times, that I'd be a better informed person if I studied it more care- fully, and for this reason carefully folded it and put it in my briefcase, where it lay as a merely notional form of self-improvement until I chucked it out on the following morning, preparing myself for the next day's tide.
None of this skimming and scanning had much to do with the discovery of useful or important information — it's easier and quicker to do that by listening to Radio Four or reading one good newspaper thor- oughly (the Herald Tribune might be my choice). The reasons were professional seeing what your rivals were up to, looking for inspiration for the feature 'ideas' that are the mainstay of Sunday newspapers, and (mainly) not wishing to seem a dummy at my own daily conference; to be able to reply to the question: 'Why don't we do a profile of Ethelred the Unready?' with the answer: 'No, he was all over the Mail on Tuesday.' The way for an editor to proceed in his conference's eyes from the neutral role of non-dummy to the positive state of smart-arse is to read beyond the limits of the national press. As I can't read (or, for that matter, speak) any language other than English, I was unable, unlike my colleague Neal Ascherson, to tell people about a 'fas- cinating piece' that had appeared in Sud- deutsche Zeitung or in a challenging new weekly in Riga. So I fell back, as I suspect 'You're very pale. Been abroad for your holiday?' many editors do, on the good old Wall Street Journal. 'Terrifically interesting thing in today's Journal on Europe's yoghurt wars,' I would say, if only as a response to: 'I still think there's more mileage in Ethelred the Unready. And Geoffrey [Wheatcroft] is really keen to write about him.'
Last week at a branch of Waitrose I bought a small carton of dried bananas, marked 'class one' (why are fruit and veg never marked classes two or three?) and the produce of Thailand. It cost 79p, a small price to pay for what I intended as Proustian experiment in memory retrieval, the madeleine and all that, though, in com- mon with most people who use this allusion so readily, that is roughly all I know about Proust. For people of my age and older, as we never cease telling younger people, dried bananas were the only banana-like things available in the shops during the last war and for several years after. I hadn't tasted one since circa 1952. The Waitrose ones were much smaller, the size of the tiny corncobs you get in Thai restaurants, per- haps grown by miniature Thai farmers on miniature Thai farms, but their texture and taste were exactly as I'd remembered: sticky, slightly sulphurous, more pungent than fresh bananas. No flood-gates of memory were unlocked; simply one scene from 45 years ago. My father has taken me to what would now be called a 'health food shop' (and perhaps was even then) in the back streets of Bolton, Lancashire. The shop is dark and unfrequented, and near a similarly dark and unfrequented railway terminus, since demolished, called Great Moor Street. There is a conversation between my father and the shopkeeper, a man dressed as darkly as his shop, about the availability of dried bananas. He has some and we take away a brown paper bag. This does not seem a promising start to an epic series of novels.
Afriend and I agree to meet at the American bar of the Connaught Hotel, where we think it appropriately swish to order dry martinis. They arrive on a silver tray, complete with a carefully folded neck- tie (I'm not wearing one). There are two other reasons why I won't be doing this again. The first is that one dry martini makes my speech suddenly reckless and unmanageable; the amnesiac click in the brain in the way that Patrick Hamilton describes in Hangover Square. God knows how old-fashioned New Yorkers managed three or four before lunch. The second is the bill. For two dry martinis and 20 Silk Cut: £22.43. Cheers.
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