DIARY
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT Before the war, the Paris newspaper Le Temps used to close down for the month of August. Or so a colleague tells me, and since he's a big cheese, on the Times rather than the Le Temps, I wouldn't dream of doubting it. But the belief that 'nothing happens in August' is historically dubious: the paper must have looked pretty silly if it was closed in August 1939. Something certainly hap- pened this August in the Barents Sea, and in the Shankill Road. It was an odd sensa- tion to follow the violence in Belfast from Cork and Kerry, where we were staying. We might have been on a different conti- nent. But then one of the striking things about the past 30 years is the way in which the sufferings of 'the North' have barely impinged on southern Ireland, which itself has interesting political implications.
Despite young children, unenthusiastic for sightseeing, we managed to visit some heritage sites, as they are now called. Bruree is a curiously English-looking village in Co. Tipperary, with the tiny cottage where Eamon de Valera grew up. My feelings about him are hopelessly mixed. He was a greater man than either his many detractors in Ireland today or his political successors (Dev was distinguished not least by, ahem, his complete personal honesty). But his brand of romantic isolationism has been a visible failure, while leaving behind a corro- sive cult of patriotic bloodshed, made worse in his case by the notorious ultra-national- ism of the outsider (Napoleon was Corsican, Stalin was Georgian, Hitler was Austrian, de Valera was Cuban, and Perry is Belgian). Then we went on to a distant fingertip of Kerry, and my spirits lifted. Derrynane is the boyhood home of Daniel O'Connell, the greatest leader Catholic Ireland ever had, and a man who abhorred violence. In one room is a framed copy of his proclamation after his arrest in 1844 for contriving `by means of intimidation and the demonstra- tion of great physical force, to procure and effect changes to be made in the govern- ment, laws and constitution of this realm', a charge of which he was blameless, though it describes Shin Fein today remarkably well. O'Connell told his followers, 'Be you, there- fore, perfectly peaceable. Attack nobody. Offend nobody. Injure no person.' No won- der the modern fanatics of 'republicanism' are so lukewarm towards him.
Nothing easily ruffles my composure as I sit in the sunshine outside Ballymaloe House in east Cork, one of my favourite places anywhere. But I put down Kathleen Burk's new biography of A.J.P Taylor, which I'm reading for review, and pick up a batch of London papers, to fmd that two of them have already reviewed the book, more than three weeks ahead of publication. When I was literary editor of The Spectator 20 years ago, the publishing embargo was religiously observed. No review ever appeared ahead of `pub. date', when all the reviews came out together. It was a convention which suited everyone: publishers, authors, booksellers, papers, reviewers. Then one paper began to jump the gun, and a stupid competition began to get reviews in first. Now reviewers are pressed to deliver copy as fast as possi- ble, without any fuddy-duddy business about reading the book properly, or indeed at all, and it shows. Admittedly, I did myself once turn out a review of an 800-page political autobiography for the Daily Beast within two hours of receiving it, but such feats of speed- reading should be kept for rare occasions.
Bloody streakers — they never learn.' Ido wish my friends would stop dying. Middle age has plenty of consolations, but against watching children grow up has to be set losing touch with friends, or just losing them, and the sheer annoyance of another conversation cut short. The past few years have seen more thinning of the ranks of Old Soho and Old Fleet Street. It's just three years since Jeff Bernard left us, droll and disobliging to the end, and his laconic, surly, very gifted brother Bruce went a few months ago. Looking further back, the worst losses for me have been Michael Dempsey (who died in 1981, aged 37, after an accident which might have been associ- ated with more general train de vie), Shiva Naipaul (1985, 40, heart attack, with possi- bly an element of t. de v.), and Toby Rodgers (1997, 56, haemorrhage and defi- nitely t. de v.). They were three of my dear- est friends. Writing this Diary some time ago, my old and still-with-us friend Alan Watkins gave his own list of colleagues who had left El Vino too early, and cursed God. It might have occurred to Alan that this rate of premature mortality says less about divine malignance than the habits of Bohemia. But I don't miss the absent friends any the less for that.
When I want to conjure up one of them in my mind's ear, I can usually think of some characteristic phrase. In Shiva's case it might be, 'A novel about rabbits? About rabbits!' Or it might be his carefully articulated reaction to an editor who had made some slight change in his wording: `To kill such a man would not be murder.' People who don't care about language can never understand why people who do mind do. And for those who do reading the papers can be an ordeal. Two of the bug- bears I shared with Kingsley Amis (another absent friend) popped up last week: `jejune', which does not mean callow or immature, and 'quixotic', which does not mean freakish or crazy. Almost odder is the disappearing 'might'. The disgruntled widow of a Labour MP says, 'If John Smith had lived his political career may have been slightly different'; a journalist writes of John F. Kennedy Jr and his wife, 'They may never have made the trip at all.' Well, did they or didn't they? But one can waste ner- vous energy like this. When I grow too tetchy about linguistic solecism, I remind myself of Dominic Behan's story about the condemned man visited in his cell by a pedantic priest. 'Well, my son, no doubt you will wish to make your confession and give me any last message for your family.' `J-Jasus, Father, how can I be thinking of family and confession, when I'm to be hung this morning?" "Hanged", my son.'
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