Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  FRIDAY, 5TH SEPTEMBER

  Yesterday evening Dick Francis held his publication party for his new book, 10 Lb. Penalty. Dick is a remarkable writer. He produces a book a year, all of which immediately appear on the bestseller list, usually at number one. He begins writing in January, delivers the manuscript by the end of May, and the book is published in August. Obviously this regularity of output and the disciplined setting aside of five months each year for writing suits him. I don’t think I could possibly do it and I admire both his inventiveness and his stamina. For me a novel takes from nine months to a year to plot and plan, and even longer to write. I sometimes envy those writers who produce their best work when under the pressure of time. They make my own leisurely method seem self-indulgent.

  Dick’s annual novel is always launched at the Ritz and the usual mixture of media people, publishers and crime writers was present. John and Norma Major were guests, both looking extremely well and cheerful. As John has said, “There is life outside Number Ten.” I suspect it is a life Norma prefers. They won’t be able to be at my publication party on 6th October as this is the first day of the Conservative Party Conference and John will attend before beginning a lecture tour in the United States.

  The Royal Family seem to be giving way to pressure from the people—which of course means pressure from the tabloids—to show their grief more publicly. It seems outrageous that the bereaved should be expected to come down to London publicly to collude in what is increasingly seen as a self-indulgent, almost neurotic display of emotionalism. But it would have been wise if the Queen had spoken briefly on radio and television to say that it was right that she should be with her grandchildren at this time, but that her thoughts and prayers were with all who were grieving, and if the Duke of York and Prince Edward had returned to London at once, perhaps to meet some of those waiting to pay tribute.

  Today there was a curious atmosphere in London composed of unease, expectation and grief. The carpets of flowers are growing before Kensington Palace, St. James’s and Buckingham Palace, and people are already settling down to spend the night on the funeral route. There was a spell of heavy rain in the afternoon, but a clear night.

  In the evening I had supper with Harriet Harvey-Wood, now retired as Director of the Literature Department of the British Council, and her mother. Harriet had shopped in Kensington High Street and said that it was virtually impossible to get out of the Tube trains because of the pressure of people on the Underground platform—all carrying flowers. Mrs. Harvey-Wood, now over ninety, found the public emotionalism particularly distressing. Her generation, which has survived two world wars, is stoical in grief and mourns in private. And for what exactly are people mourning? I suspect for themselves.

  SATURDAY, 6TH SEPTEMBER

  I spent most of today until evening watching the funeral on television. It was an extraordinary, indeed unique, event. Apart from a brief preliminary wailing when the gun-carriage first appeared, the crowd was very quiet and the half-feared demonstrations of anger never occurred. For me the most poignant moment was when the young princes, with their father, Prince Philip and Earl Spencer, took their places behind the coffin at St. James’s Palace. The fact that the boys could manage this walk before thousands of onlookers was a tribute to their fortitude and self-control—qualities which are not much in fashion.

  I was glad that it was so sunny. London—the parks, the trees, the buildings—looked very beautiful. It was extraordinary that the whole funeral could be so well organized and so perfectly carried out in just a week. The Abbey service was a successful compromise. I thought that I would find the Elton John song obtrusive but it seemed appropriate; this, after all, was the world in which the Princess was most at home. There was applause both outside and inside the Abbey for Earl Spencer, but I thought his attack on the Royal Family was unnecessary and misguided; the wrong words at the wrong time in the wrong place. I wonder if those sad, mascara-laden eyes will droop in reproach for ever over the House of Windsor, or whether this media-fuelled emotion will burn itself out as quickly as it has arisen.

  TUESDAY, 9TH SEPTEMBER

  The American Ambassador, Admiral Crowe, and his wife held one of their goodbye parties at the Residence in Regent’s Park. There was room in the marquee even for the large number of guests, but as the evening was fine I strolled into the garden. Unusually for a party at Winfield House, I saw few people I knew. The Ambassador gave a short and amusing speech and I particularly liked one story. He said this was his second retirement. The morning after he left the Navy he dashed out of his house and settled himself comfortably with his newspaper in the back of his car. A few minutes later his wife came out to point out gently that, if he wanted the car to go anywhere, he would have to sit in the front and drive! He can’t be the only one to tell this story.

  The Residency is now to be closed for about two years for necessary repairs, including the removal of asbestos. I shall miss the parties there which, under different ambassadors, I have known always to have a welcoming spontaneity and informality even on more formal occasions.

  WEDNESDAY, 10TH SEPTEMBER

  To the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favourite London galleries, for the first viewing of a portrait of John Major by John Wonnacott and one of Tony Benn by Humphrey Ocean, both commissioned by the Trustees. The two portraits are very different.

  The John Major, considerably larger, shows him sitting in the white room at Number Ten with Norma on a window seat and a view through the open door into the adjoining green room. I like portraits in a domestic setting, particularly with an interesting vista, but I found the perspective somewhat disturbing. The carpet seems to be hung rather than laid, and John’s hand and foot look out of proportion. No doubt all this is intended and the picture certainly has a dramatic impact. In front of John is a white glistening object resembling crumpled foil, but which I was told is a piece of modern silver from his collection. I know about his fondness for silver; he showed me with obvious pleasure some pieces from the dinner service when I dined at Number Ten. But I am not sure that the piece included in the portrait is a successful addition. Tony Benn’s portrait is much smaller, an amorphous egg-shaped visage but one which did convey something of the sitter’s essential character.

  Portrait painting seems to be in a state of flux. Perhaps because of the development of photography and its power both to fix and interpret personality with powerful immediacy, artists seem to have lost confidence in representational painting. Few do it well and others, in their desperate search for new ways of looking at life, have sacrificed a recognizable likeness to experimental technique. But a photographic image, however brilliant, can never challenge the best of painting. For me, a painting provides a more intense, more personal and more enduring insight into human personality. A photograph, however brilliant, says all it has to say at once. To return to it is only to reinforce that first immediate response. I can return to a painted portrait again and again, learning more each time about the artist as well as the sitter.

  Tony Benn’s son came up to me while I was looking at my own portrait by Michael Taylor, and wanted to talk about my use of St.-Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell in Original Sin. We spoke about setting in the crime novel and I told him that I had wanted to erect a house for one of my characters on a desolate stretch of East Anglian coast and thought Bradwell would suit my purposes admirably. He took a photograph of me in front of my portrait. I read that there is an audio cassette about the portrait giving Michael Taylor’s views as artist on me as sitter. I didn’t buy it, although I was tempted to hear Michael’s views.

  When the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery decided that they wanted to commission a portrait of me, I was invited to meet the Director, Dr. Charles Saumarez Smith, and the keeper of the twentieth century collection, to discuss which artist should be chosen. I was asked whether I would prefer a well-known, well-established figure or a brilliant up-and-coming painter, although I don’t think the choice was presented i
n precisely those terms. I was shown postcards of the work of Michael Taylor and I liked the strength and originality of his compositions and the authority with which he used colour.

  He came to my house for the sittings, himself chose the room and the pose, and when I showed him the dress I had in mind, liked it, although in the portrait it certainly appears more shapeless than it does when I am wearing it. I enjoyed the thirteen sittings and liked Michael very much. There was no problem in sitting still—there never is for me—but I wanted to use the time and silence to think about my new novel and every time I retreated into that imaginary world, Michael would say, “You’re not looking at me.” He worked with great intensity, seeming to widen and shoot out his eyes as he painted and using copious amounts of toilet paper from a roll to clean his brushes.

  We spoke hardly at all during the sittings. There is much I would like to have asked him. What did he think of the commercial art world today and of such iconoclastic artists as Damien Hirst? How far did private patrons influence what people feel is important and are prepared to pay for? How difficult was it for a newcomer to find a gallery willing to take him on? Did galleries have too much influence? Did artists feel themselves under pressure to produce quickly or in a certain style? How easy was it to make a living? Were art colleges good or bad for an aspiring artist? But I totally sympathized with Michael’s wish not to chat. He was as much in his private world while painting as I am in mine while writing, and at those times interruptions are intolerable.

  I did ask him during a break if he was intending to make me look sinister or mysterious, to which he replied, “I have enough problems putting down what I see without trying to see something else.” He has put down precisely what he saw: an elderly, much-lined woman with, I suppose, a certain authority. It is the painting of a seventy-five-year-old by someone still young, and is literally wart and all. It is a powerful painting which I much admire and, like all powerful paintings, provokes controversy. Some of my friends complain that it verges on caricature, but no one says it isn’t like me.

  THURSDAY, 11TH SEPTEMBER

  The children’s writer and artist Shirley Hughes is seventy, and four of her publishers joined to give her a party held at the Royal College of Art. Shirley and her husband John are two friends whom I never meet without a lifting of the heart, and see only too rarely. She has had a profound influence on writing for children, particularly young children, through her stories and the vigour of her superb illustrations. Here are real parents, real children, never sentimentalized but drawn with tenderness, humour and humanity. The party was crowded, but not unpleasantly so because of the number of rooms and the fact that the windows could be opened to a generally warm night. There were speeches by Margaret Meek, the educationalist who, like me, occasionally attends All Saints, Margaret Street, by one of Shirley’s editors, by Posy Simmons, and by Shirley herself. She blew out seventy candles to general acclamation, after which I left.

  There were flowers, teddy bears, other toys, balloons and messages tied to the railings of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, although the heaps of dead flowers inside the railings show that the work of clearing has begun.

  SUNDAY, 14TH SEPTEMBER

  To Southwold on Friday with an Oxford friend, the novelist Ann Pilling. She didn’t have the car so came up very early by bus and we took a taxi to Liverpool Street. It was the first time Ann had seen the rebuilt station, which I think architecturally one of the most successful in London. I love the meticulous brickwork and the way in which the great iron arches have been retained and repaired. I can remember the Liverpool Street of my childhood: smoke-filled, mysterious, exciting. To me it represented London and all that word implied of romance, history, pleasure, and a whiff of danger. I came to London very rarely when a schoolgirl, but was once taken by my father to a Promenade Concert at the old Queen’s Hall outside the BBC. I remember Sir Henry Wood turning, baton in hand, to scowl at us as if we were a potentially unruly mob. The scowl seemed to be directed personally at me, as if he had detected that, musically, I was unqualified to be there. The music meant little, but I can remember walking down to Oxford Street, by then deserted, and being told by my father that this was the longest street in the world. He was given to confident assertions, most of which I believed.

  It has been a good weekend, the beautiful, delicately hued skies and the sea changing from grey-green to pale milky blue. We had much talk, mostly personal on Ann’s side, and we also discussed how far the novelist’s strong emotions should influence the process of writing. I made the point that a novel can’t be just a raw slice of personal experience, however tragic or engulfing. Obviously we must use our own lives as material—what else do we have?—but a novelist must be able to stand aside from this experience, view it with detachment, however painful, and fashion it into a satisfying shape. It is this ability to detach oneself from experience and at the same time portray it with honesty and controlled emotion which makes a novelist. Perhaps it is also this ability to assume the role of privileged spectator, the cold searching gaze, which caused Graham Greene to write that every writer has a splinter of ice in the heart. Even as a child I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye. But I know that there are two experiences too overwhelming for such detachment. One would be the death of a child; the second, overwhelming physical agony. Pain, our response to it, our fear of it, makes the whole world kin. Perhaps because no detachment is possible from intense physical agony. I can think of no novel which has described it adequately. The more intense, the higher, more refined and exquisite the physical sensation, whether of agony or ecstasy, the less power have words to describe it.

  TUESDAY, 16TH SEPTEMBER

  I went this evening to the Royal Society at Carlton Terrace for the Annual General Meeting of the Society of Authors. It was the last appearance as chairman of Simon Brett, who presented the 112th Annual Report and, as expected, made an entertaining and lively speech. He welcomed his successor, Clare Francis, and also reported that I had been elected by the Council to succeed Sir Victor Pritchett as President of the Society. This has given me immense pleasure. When Mark Le Fanu, Secretary of the Society, wrote to tell me about it I replied that I knew I was following a president of great distinction both as a writer and as a man, and hoped to be worthy of the trust the Society was placing in me. The words were conventional but the emotion was sincere.

  After the AGM there was a discussion under the title “For how much would you sell your soul?” with a panel including Robert McCrum, formerly of Faber and Faber. The discussion concentrated less on money than on the problems raised by indecency and pornography. The general view was that all censorship was wrong, indeed indefensible, but I made the point that there were surely some matters—the depiction on video of the sexual exploitation of young children, for example—which no civilized country ought to tolerate. There are two easy options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total licence. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsibility of any civilized and democratic country.

  One of the questioners suggested, although she did not positively state, that I have sold my soul over television since she had seen one of the less successful adaptations. I pointed out that television is a visual medium and that one can’t expect ever to be totally satisfied with an adaptation. When people say to me, “Do you like what television has done with your book?,” I reply that the director has done nothing to my book, since he has no power to alter a single comma. But it is true that television is increasingly trivial. I have no doubt of the current priorities as far as television is concerned; first in importance is the scheduling, second the star, third the director, fourth—and a long way behind—the drawing power of the writer’s name and, last of all, the book. But to turn
down the offer of a television series is not a simple decision. The series can dramatically affect paperback sales, which gives the publisher as well as the author a strong interest, and the series provides jobs for actors and adapters.

  It is easy for me to say, “I am rich enough now to do without television and will keep my art undefiled,” but I am not sure how far this high-mindedness is justified. I am, however, only too aware what changes may be made to the plot of A Certain Justice in order to ensure that the star has an appropriate number of appearances on screen. The story, too, will have to be compressed if a long and complex novel is to be televised in only three episodes. More I fear will be lost than parts of the plot.

  SUNDAY, 21ST SEPTEMBER

  I arrived home from Heathrow after 9:30 p.m. having spent the weekend in Oslo helping my Norwegian publisher, Aschehoug, celebrate their 125th anniversary. A century and a quarter is apparently a special commemoration in Norway and the event was impressive. It must also have been extremely expensive.

  There was a dinner on the Friday night at the Drammensveren Hotel, and on Saturday there was open house at the firm’s recently extended offices with a buffet lunch and plenty of drink, and in the evening a concert with 1,500 invited guests. The concert was a celebration in words and music of Aschehoug’s 125 years in publishing, and I enjoyed the Norwegian songs and the special mini-opera composed for the occasion, although I could understand none of the rest of the programme, except the words “Sherlock Holmes” and “Dr. Watson” during the episode celebrating the publication of the Conan Doyle stories.