yen all these years after his death, that
great trickster Graham Greene continues to cause trouble. The small press Hesperus has been forced to cancel its publication of a Greene novella called No Man's Land. Enclosed with the autumn catalogue in which they announce its 'first ever publication', and describe it as having been 'recently unearthed from a collection of papers', comes an erratum slip saying that 'due to copyright issues the publication of No Man's Land has been cancelled'. A spokesman for Hesperus is reluctant to expand on the 'copyright issues' involved, and says that the company has hopes of publishing at some time in the future. Those acting for Greene's estate suggest that at a late stage Hesperus discovered that, far from being either unpublished or recently unearthed, No Man's Land was included in Carcanet's 1993 collection of Greene's film pieces, Mornings in the Dark. A shame, too, for the thriller-writer Ken Follett, who contributed an introduction to the Hesperus edition. Written as a film treatment, Mr Follett says, No Man's Land is a spy thriller, set in postwar Germany, along the lines of The Third Man. Millionaire Mr Follett wasn't paid for his introduction — 'It's a small publisher, and I did it for love' — but Hesperus 'sent me a couple of bottles of wine as "sorry", which was nice.'
Several weeks ago now, this column started what was to have been an occasional feature dedicated to exposing the historian Andrew Roberts's indefatigable efforts to plug, at every tenuous opportunity and in every forum imaginable, his girlfriend Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de Medici. The idea was, you see, to shame or embarrass him into stopping. That was the Vole's mistake. Mr Roberts is immune, it turns out, to both these things. In fact, he has defeated the purpose of the campaign by becoming, postmodernly enough, its most enthusiastic contributor. An email, for example, arrived the other day. Sender: 'Andrew Roberts': Subject: `Robertswatch goes international.' At a recent cricket match, Mr Roberts reports. he met a lady archaeologist who told him that 'while watching Italian TV in the bathroom of a Moroccan hotel recently, she saw me being interviewed about the expansion of the European Union. I needn't tell you whose biography of a 16th-century French queen was propped open prominently on the table behind me ...' He supplies a contact
number for the lady in question, and signs off: 'Fondest regards, Andrew.' Oh. I feel a terrible migraine coming on. Offending the little beast is like trying to sink a cork.
Ever since the mad axeman of American letters, Dale Peck, announced plans to hang up his hatchet, there has been something of a gap in the market for literary vitriol. Zembla, the hideously overdesigned — sorry, incredibly hip — new literary magazine has come up with an ingenious way of supplying it. The magazine's publisher, the book dealer Simon Finch, introduces a competition. 'Vitriol is always best and definitely easier,' he writes. 'Therefore I won't ask you for a treacly tribute to your favourite novel. Instead, we want a 300-word demolition of your most despised sacred cow.' He's offering £200-worth of books, and publication, as a prize. Anyone too lazy to stretch to 300 words may feel free to send the Vole a 'Haiku of Hate' on any subject of their choice. A bottle of mouth-puckeringly cheap champagne for any published.
The introduction to the announcement of this year's Arts Council England Writers' Awards — 15 individual awards of £7,000 intended, admirably, 'to buy time for writers to write' — gives a historic instance of the way even the most admired writers can find themselves in the soup, financially. 'The dry arithmetic of [F. Scott] Fitzgerald's ledger is a cautionary tale. It defines his life by numbers and behind almost every entry one senses struggle and compromise, the grinding out of a life that is almost Sisyphean in its need to keep going, to begin again and again. When Fitzgerald finally gave up the unequal struggle. on 21 December 1941, he had $700 in cash. $613 of those went to the undertaker.' Happy, happy, joy, joy! Thus Paul Theroux, in The Author, on 'How I Write': 'How I wish it were possible for me to describe the snail trail of my fiction writing — that groping interior journey of false starts and bad days and sudden enchantments — without uttering dubious generalities and pompous approximations and absurd sanctimonies. Even that rambling attempt is sort of pretentious and irritating, so you see the problem.'
Hooray! St Hilda's College. Oxford will once more echo to the patter of hairy feet, with the Tolkien Society's 2004 `Oxonmooe. This is the year's main social event for tragic hobbit obsessives — sorry, that's a low blow, and quite undeserved, as you'll see from the schedule of events. Held 17-19 September — the closest dates to Bilbo Baggins's birthday — the weekend will include a panel discussion of the new Lord of the Rings films, preceded by a presentation by Professor Martin Barker of the University of Aberystwyth on research he has done into audience reception and The Return of the King. On Saturday night, there's a costume masquerade and party (organised, presumably, by the Ents Committee). Elsewhere, `Zainab Thorpe invites you to dabble in Conversational Sindarin', there's a two-hour Tolkien Quiz, and, back by popular demand, Merry and Pippin's Dance Workshop, in which the two hobbits 'will yet again show folks of any size how to perform the Springle-Ring and other dances that the denizens of Middleearth would "probably" enjoy'. Details at vvww.tolkiensociety.org.
Lawks! And on it goes. A reader draws my attention to the Amazon website's listing for Catherine de Medici, and the three 'reader reviews' of the book there posted. All three appeared within a week of the launch; all three gave it five stars out of five: 'brilliant', 'truly fascinating', 'witty, incisive, exciting as any thriller'. One is from Ivo Coulson, one from Mrs A. Gurdon, and one from Robin Birley. My correspondent claims that (as the innocent reader would not think to suspect) Mrs Gurdon is Andrew Roberts's sister-inlaw, Ivo Coulson is his best friend, and Robin Birley was the man who introduced him to Leonie Frieda. Can this be true? More to the point, does my correspondent ask me to withhold his name because he fears retribution? Or because it will turn out he is, in fact, one of Mr Roberts's many aliases or catspaws?
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