Letters From London Read online

  JULIAN BARNES

  Letters from London

  Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford University, and now lives in London. He is the author of seven novels—Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun, A History of the World in 10¼ Chapters, Talking It Over, and The Porcupine.

  Books by JULIAN BARNES

  Metroland

  Before She Met Me

  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Staring at the Sun

  A History of the World in 10¼ Chapters

  Talking It Over

  The Porcupine

  to Jay and Helen

  Contents

  Preface: On Author

  1. MPTV

  2. FAKE!

  3. MRS. THATCHER DISCOVERS IT’S A FUNNY OLD WORLD

  4. YEAR OF THE MAZE

  5. JOHN MAJOR MAKES A JOKE

  6. VOTE GLENDA!

  7. TRAFFIC JAM AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE

  8. THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER BUYS SOME CLARET

  9. BRITANNIA’S NEW BRA SIZE

  10. THE DEFICIT MILLIONAIRES

  11. MRS. THATCHER REMEMBERS

  12. TDF: THE WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP

  13. FIVE YEARS OF THE FATWA

  14. FROGGY! FROGGY! FROGGY! 282

  15. LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT: THE ARRIVAL OF TONY BLAIR

  Preface: On Author

  As a child, I was a brief devotee of I-Spy books, those spotters’ guides for the short-trousered. Each covered a single subject—butterflies, London statues, wheeled transport—and you were encouraged with a reward system: ten points for a red admiral, thirty for a rare Edward VIII pillar-box, and so on. You then filled in the precise location of each spotted item (not that anyone would have thought of cheating) and sent the completed book up to Big Chief I-Spy at the Wigwam, News Chronicle, Bouverie Street. This improbable fellow—who was, I trust, a deep suburbanite-posted you back a scout’s feather as proof of your ocular zealotry.

  I never gained a feather: either I failed to track down enough items or some detail of club membership prevented me from making a start on my headdress. But I remember a couple of chaperoned trips from Acton W.3. into the center of London during which, sharpened pencil aloft, I tried to bulk out my meager logging of such things as horse-drawn provisions vans or commissionaires’ epaulets. This sort of enforced looking is, I realize, comparatively rare in our lives: on the whole, we seek out the things we are already interested in. Our habits of inspection and our view of the world are reconfirmed each time we concentrate our vision or avert our eye.

  So when Bob Gottlieb, editor of The New Yorker, invited me late in 1989 to be the magazine’s London correspondent, I had various predictable if contradictory reactions. This could be a very nice job; this could be a life sentence; this could be well paid; this could be the novelist’s classic trap. However, beyond these pleadings, I heard the most persuasive argument of all for taking the job: this will make you look. I-Spy London, here we come, I thought; I-Spy England.

  I was, in effect, to be a foreign correspondent in my own country. This brought with it a technical challenge I’d not encountered before in journalism. My readership would be sophisticated and would understand every single word I used, but the situations and events I was describing might seem as culturally strange to them as those of ancient Rome. Of course, there are many Anglophile Americans: those are the ones we in Britain tend to meet. But non-Americans should never forget that every country in the world is more interested in America than America is in it: this is the normal loading of the international equation of power and money. As a visitor to the States you can work a very inexpensive piece of magic: buy a newspaper and see your own country disappear. Ten years ago I found myself in Fort Worth watching the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics on television. During the march-past of contestants the ABC subtitles explained the location of each country and its size in domestic terms: thus Bhutan was in Central Asia and was “approx. ¼ Indiana.” However, it was not just Bhutan. Someone judged that the American viewer also needed enlightening about Belgium (“in NW Europe”), Bangladesh (“approx. Wisconsin”), and, saddeningly, about Britain. I was advised to rethink my own country as “size of Oregon.”

  So it was a useful discipline not to take even the most obvious sentence for granted. “The next general election, which will take place in either May or October…” Hang on, an American heckler in my skull would go, how come you don’t know? Oh, you mean elections aren’t held regularly? And the government chooses the election date itself? You’re kidding. Who ever thought that was a good idea? And so on. This sense of forcedly reexamining the supposedly familiar was at its strongest when I was working on Lloyd’s of London, one of those typically British institutions which you half-assume you understand simply because you are British and live in Britain (size of Oregon). I don’t think my eggshell preconceptions withstood the slightest tap of evidence. And if I, as a dispassionate outsider, was surprised by what appeared to be the case, imagine the surprise of a blithely ignorant Lloyd’s Name suddenly bankrupted several times over, let alone the further and extreme surprise of an American investor. No wonder many American Names are currently refusing to pay their bills.

  My predecessor as London correspondent, the novelist Mollie Panter-Downes, began filing in 1939 and held the job for nearly half a century. Brendan Gill wrote that, during the war, “To us and our readers, she was as much the embodiment of the gallant English spirit as Churchill himself.” My own first (and last) five years were less world-historic than hers, but they had their instructive moments, some dramatic (like the fall of Mrs. Thatcher), some farcical (like the nonfall of Norman Lamont). I didn’t, of course, set myself up as the embodiment of anything, let alone as a parallel spirit to either of the Prime Ministers I wrote under, and I doubt American readers viewed me as such. I’m also wary of Zeitgeist journalism and decade summarizing. Was there, in the first half of the nineties, a tiredness and repetition to public life, a sense of things unraveling? It seemed to be the case. And if so, there are pleasures as well as despondencies to be had: Flaubert said that his favorite historical periods were those which were ending, because this meant that something new was being born. Unless most observers are mistaken—that journalistic formulation which tends to mean “I think”—the current fourth term of Conservative rule will be the last for a while. The final piece in this collection looks at the “something new” which might ensue

  WRITING FOR The New Yorker means, famously, being edited by The New Yorker: an immensely civilized, attentive, and beneficial process which tends to drive you crazy. It begins with the department known, not always affectionately, as the “style police.” These are the stern puritans who look at one of your sentences and instead of seeing, as you do, a joyful fusion of truth, beauty, rhythm, and wit, discover only a doltish wreckage of capsized grammar. Silently, they do their best to protect you from yourself You emit muted gargles of protest and attempt to restore your original text. A new set of proofs arrives, and occasionally you will have been graciously permitted a single laxity; but if so, you will also find that a further grammatical delinquency has been corrected. The fact that you never get to talk to the style police, while they retain the power of intervention in your text at any time, makes them seem the more menacing. I used to imagine them sitting in their office with nightsticks and manacles dangling from the walls, swapping satirical and unforgiving opinions of New Yorker writers. “Guess how many infinitives that Limey’s split this time?” Actually, they are less unbending than I make them sound, and even acknowledge how useful it may be to occasionally split an infinitive. My own particular weakness is a refusal to learn the difference between wh
ich and that I know there’s some rule, to do with individuality versus category or something, but I have my own rule, which goes like this (or should it be “that goes like this”?—don’t ask me): if you’ve already got a that doing business in the vicinity, use which instead. I don’t think I ever converted the style police to this working principle.

  The editor who gently interposed himself between me and the style police was Charles McGrath. I worked closely with him for five years, under the overall sovereignty first of Bob Gottlieb and then of Tina Brown. It’s customary at this point in the preface to a collection of journalism to praise your editor’s tact, savvy, unwavering helpfulness, and so on, and it’s equally customary at this point for the preface reader to let rip a monster yawn. So instead I’ll tell you a story about Mr. McGrath’s editing. About halfway through my stint, we were on our third or fourth extended conversation about a particular piece; it had been through a couple of sets of galleys and was now in page proof. By this stage any writer knows the article almost by heart: you are as fed up with it as you are familiar, you long for it to be put to bed, but you civilly attend to what you hope will be the last few queries. It was at this point that Chip picked on an adjective I’d used, one of those words like, say, crepuscular or inspissated, which don’t form part of your core vocabulary but which you reach for from time to time. “You’ve used crepuscular before,” said Chip. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “Yes, I think you have,” he said. “I’m fairly sure I haven’t,” I replied, beginning to feel a little irritated—hell, I knew this piece inside out. “I’m pretty sure you have,” Chip responded—and I could hear his tone hardening too, as if he was really going to dig in on this one. “Well,” I said rather snappily, “which galley did I use it on then?” “Oh,” said Chip, “I don’t mean this piece. No, it was a couple of pieces back. I’ll look it up.” He did. I’d used the word some nine months previously. I naturally excised it now. And that, if anyone wants to know, is editing.

  After your article has been clipped and styled (not always a gentle process: sometimes the whole poodle is thrown back at you), it is delivered to The New Yorker’s fact-checking department. The operatives here are young, unsleeping, scrupulously polite, and astoundingly pertinacious. They bug you to hell and then they save your ass. They are also suspicious of generalization and rhetorical exaggeration and would prefer that last sentence to read: “They bug you a quarter of the way to hell and on 17.34 percent of occasions they save your ass.” Making a statement on oath before a judge is as nothing compared with making a statement before a New Yorker fact checker. They don’t mind who they call in their lust for verification. They check with you, with your informants, with their computerized information system, with objective authorities; they check to your face and they check behind your back. When I interviewed Tony Blair at the House of Commons, I was impressed by the elegant door hinges of the Shadow Cabinet room. My Pevsner guide told me they were attributable to Pugin, or rather, “Augustus W. N. Pugin.” Pevsner states: “He designed, it can safely be said, all the details in metal, stained glass, tiles, etc., down to door-furniture, ink-stands, coat-hangers, and so on.” Half-wondering if the department of verification would swallow the clause “It can safely be said,” I ascribed the hinges to “Augustus Pugin” in my copy and awaited the fact checker’s call on this and related topics. “Could we leave out ‘Augustus’ so as not to confuse him with his father?” was the first shot. Sure, no problem: I’d only put “Augustus Pugin” because I fancied American style prefers “John Milton” to “Milton” (the truth also is that I didn’t know Pugin had a father, let alone that my suppressing the initials would cause genealogical havoc). Then I waited for the next question. It didn’t come. Semisatirically, and with my Pevsner open at the page before me, I asked, “You are happy that the hinges are by Pugin?” “Oh yes,” came the reply, “I checked with the V and A.”

  In my five years I only knew the fact checkers defeated once. In a piece on the redesign of British coins, I referred to members of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee walking past a Landseer on their way to work at Buckingham Palace. The call from New York came through. “I’m having a little trouble with the Landseer.” “What sort of trouble?” “I need to find out whether it’s still hanging where it was hanging on the date your informant walked past it.” “Well, I suppose you could always ring up Buckingham Palace.” “Oh, I’ve talked to the Palace. No, the problem is, they refuse to confirm or deny whether such a painting is even in the Palace.”

  I used to rather enjoy it when the heat went off me and onto my informants. Apart from anything else, fact checking turns up comic disparities between how you describe people and how they see themselves. There was the Lloyd’s Name who didn’t want it said that he lived “off Ladbroke Grove” but rather “in Holland Park” (well, he was trying to sell his house at the time). There was the other Lloyd’s Name who wanted the tainted words “second home” altered to “cottage” And there was the political observer who jibbed at the label “veteran” and pleaded with the fact checker that “seasoned” would be a more appropriate adjective.

  But always, in the end, the fact checkers come back to you, the writer. And it was here that I discovered, after several years of filing, two of the most powerful words of New Yorkerese: the words on author. If, for example, the fact checkers are trying to confirm that dream about hamsters which your grandfather had on the night Hitler invaded Poland—a dream never written down but conveyed personally to you on the old boy’s knee, a dream of which, since your grandfather’s death, you are the sole repository—and if the fact checkers, having had all your grandfather’s living associates up against a wall and having scoured dictionaries of the unconscious without success, finally admit they are stumped, then you murmur soothingly down the transatlantic phone, “I think you can put that on author.” Those magical words are then scribbled in the margin of the proofs, words absolving The New Yorker and laying the final literary responsibility on you, the writer. Of course, you must utter the phrase in the right tone, implying that you are just as frustrated by the unverifiability as is the checker; and you must not use it too often, lest you be suspected of frivolity, of winging it with the truth. But once pronounced, the words have a quietly papal authority.

  This preface has, faute de mieux, been fact-checked by me (and, yes, I can confirm that the United Kingdom’s landmass is very close to that of Oregon), while the Letters from London have benefited from the deft editorial process I have just described. But it goes without saying that all of what follows is, in a phrase I shall regret not being able to use anymore, on author.

  —Julian Barnes

  NOVEMBER1994

  I

  MPTV

  The best show in town” opened last November, with the unusual promise from backers that it would definitely run for eight months. The latest Lloyd Webber, or the speedy return of Dustin Hoffman after his triumphant Shylock? Not a bit of it: the new entertainment promised us was the televised proceedings of the House of Commons. And, in the finest traditions of showbiz, the high claim made for this live matinee show (Mondays through Fridays) came from one of its principal actors: Sir Bernard Weatherill, Speaker of the House, a Tory MP elected into benign impartiality by his office. The sixty-nine-year-old Sir Bernard, scion of a tailoring business that once presented jodhpurs to the Queen, now stands before the TV cameras as well as before the unruly House in buckle shoes, black stockings, bridal-length black gown, and full, clavicle-tickling wig. Bizarrely, he has landed himself the double job of Parliamentary disciplinarian and TV warm-up man. The barker outside the fairground boxing booth turns up inside as referee.

  The British Parliament, which in the eighteenth century tried to jail those who sought to log its activities with precision, had doggedly resisted the claims of television since they were first debated back in the sixties. Coverage of the House of Lords was permitted a few years ago, though it can’t be said that this golden-age soap opera has pulled
in many viewers: everyone in the Upper House is formidably polite (some with the civility of Morpheus) and makes a show of attending to the graybeards opposite. This has not been the stuff of drama or ratings; on the other hand, it did point up the anomaly whereby the business of the Upper House was available to the citizen in normal televisual reality, while that of the Lower was represented on the nine-o’clock news by colored drawings backed by a radio tape.

  There were, of course, the usual arguments beforehand. Television would detract from the dignity of the House; MPs would play up to the camera; the solemn process of government would fall victim to the TV ambitions of bit-parters. To outsiders, this seemed back to front, since the evidence of radio showed how undignified the House was already. The proceedings sounded to the mere voter’s ear less like wise debate than beer-garden babble, with speakers struggling to make themselves heard over the interruptions of gargling shire-voiced Tories and raucous vox-pop Labourites. The Mother of Parliaments—which is how the British are encouraged to think of their legislature—came across more like a fat sow rolling on her farrow. Skeptics also wondered if the cameras were not being kept out of the club by members who didn’t want the trouble of smartening up their act. The predominantly male chamber has for decades exhibited a shabbiness unmatched by any other profession except that of Oxford don: the place has been a market stall of ill-fitting suits, a museum of short socks, a vender’s tray of matching tie-’n’-hanx sets, a flour bomb of dandruff. And, just as it remains spectacularly easy for an Oxford don to become famous as a local “character” (wear secondhand clothes, ride a motorbike, sit in the same chair in the same pub every evening), so in the House a career of facetious insult got a man labeled a wit, while the mildest self-indulgence in dress turned you into a dandy. Perhaps this is what they were afraid of letting us see.