Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  On the Sunday morning there was a little free time and my escort Ivor (I never registered his surname) took me to see Amundsen’s ship, the Fram. It is incredible to think that the crew of thirteen were held in the ice together for three years, apparently without anyone going berserk or murdering one of his colleagues. A ship marooned in ice could be a dramatic setting for a detective story, a closed circle of people exposed to the inevitable emotional traumas of enforced intimacy, and a limited number of suspects. This last is important if each suspect is to be given equal space and attention, each motive made credible.

  Providing a believable motive for murder is one of the greatest difficulties facing the modern crime writer. In the 1930s readers could apparently believe that A had murdered B because B knew something highly discreditable about A’s sex life which he was threatening to reveal. Today, so far from fearing disclosure, people receive good money for writing about the more lurid aspects of their sex lives in the Sunday newspapers. Politicians who are guilty of flagrant infidelities are no longer propelled into the wilderness of ignoble obscurity, but into the lush pastures of media fame and fortune. Blackmail can still provide a credible motive but our priorities for disgust have changed; nowadays it would not be a sexual misdemeanour but racism or child abuse which would invite disaster. Money, the need of it, the lack of it, particularly if the amount is large, is always a credible motive, as is that deep-seated hatred which can render an enemy’s very existence insupportable. In one of my early novels an experienced sergeant is reported to have said to the young probationer Adam Dalgliesh that the letter “L” covers all motives for murder: love, lust, loathing and lucre. He adds, “They’ll tell you, my boy, that the most dangerous emotion in the world is hate. Don’t you believe it. The most dangerous emotion is love.” As a writer I find that the most credible motive and, perhaps, the one for which the reader can feel some sympathy, is the murderer’s wish to advantage, protect or avenge someone he or she greatly loves. But should the reader feel sympathy for the murderer? Perhaps sympathy is too strong a word; but I think there should be empathy and understanding. In the words of Ivy Compton-Burnett: “I believe it would go ill with many of us if we were faced with a strong temptation, and I suspect that with some of us it does go ill.”

  On board the Fram there was a piano and a gramophone for entertainment, and their scientific expeditions by sledge would have added a change of scene and the relief of physical activity. Even so, the whole enterprise was a triumph of courage, will and scientific passion over danger and discomfort. What I wanted to know and didn’t discover was how they kept healthy, particularly how they got their vitamins. They obviously shot and ate bears and other wildlife, but they couldn’t have had vegetables or fresh fruit.

  Ivor was an interesting guide. We talked about his country’s educational system, the health service, and social and economic problems which are remarkably similar to ours. We also spoke about language and he said one thing which I found interesting, that much German thoroughness comes from the need to think every sentence through to its concluding verb before speaking it, whereas in English and Norwegian, words can be strung together in an occasionally artless concatenation.

  We then went back to the hotel to collect Marilyn French, who wanted to see the Anselm Kiefer pictures at the Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art. I was glad we went. I was impressed and moved by the Kiefers, but the Francis Bacons—violent slabs of meaty flesh—are not pictures I could live with without some risk to mental health. There were three good nudes by Lucian Freud. He paints what he sees with total honesty if little humanity. I should like to own a Freud.

  Before coming back on Sunday there was a reading in the Great Hall of the University by two Scandinavian writers, and by Marilyn French, Salman Rushdie and myself. Salman and I had been booked on the same plane at Heathrow and we both went through the VIP channels on arrival, although he was whisked off in a police car with escort and I was found a taxi. I suppose I might have been slightly nervous in flight had I realized that he was a fellow passenger. William Nygaard, my Norwegian publisher, was shot and was lucky to escape being killed when he decided to publish The Satanic Verses. He wore a bullet-proof coat during most of the weekend, but I can’t say I felt that any of us were particularly at risk. Salman read from Midnight’s Children exceptionally well, then was hurried away to catch an early plane home. I felt slightly ashamed of my relief that I was booked to travel later.

  It was a joy to have Marlene Mitev at the door to welcome me back. She has spent the weekend here looking after Polly-Hodge. When she is here, I realize how much I have missed being greeted at the end of a trip. We shared a room together when we were both working at the Home Office, first in the Whitehall building and then at Queen Anne’s Gate. To share an office is to spend more time in one another’s company—about eight hours a day—than most people spend with their families. It can also mean sharing more experiences, good and bad. Marlene is intelligent, amusing, kind and, being a Yorkshirewoman, given to speaking plain common sense. We became, and remain, close friends.

  It occurs to me that I have mentioned but not described Polly-Hodge. I have shared this house, and to an extent my life, for the past ten years with a white long-haired female cat. Previously I had two Burmese: Cuthbert, plumply indolent and affectionate; Pansy, flirtatious and overactive. Both were stolen. I never heard anything of Pansy again, but the RSPCA telephoned to say that Cuthbert had been found dead in the Underground but without his collar. I don’t know how they traced him to me. I suppose he somehow managed to evade his captors and made a dash for the stairs at Holland Park.

  After this I decided not to have another cat. I wasn’t entirely uninfluenced by the difficulty of arranging for an animal to be fed while I am away. But then this white cat began to appear in the garden, sleeping on one of the chairs under the glass roof of the loggia. She was excessively nervous and would glide from the chair and disappear at great speed as soon as I opened the kitchen door to feed the birds. But she was frequently in the garden getting—at least to my eyes—thinner and slightly bedraggled. Eventually I could not resist putting out a saucer of Whiskas. When I went down for my early morning tea the next day she was curled up on the kitchen wicker chair and showed every intention of remaining there.

  From that morning she moved in permanently. Knowing this was inevitable I attempted to lay down the conditions under which we would live together. (I dislike anthropomorphizing, but when a cat sits in her Ancient Egyptian pose—head erect, paws together, tail curled, eyes straight ahead—it is difficult to believe that my carefully reasoned arguments are not being understood.) I said that the kitchen would be her territory. An old fur coat would be placed on the chair for her greater comfort. A cat-flap, as she had already discovered, would give access to the garden and the mat by the door was suitably tough for scratching.

  Receiving this information, Hodge (as I immediately called her) was mentally laying down the conditions under which she would condescend to live with me. She did not long remain in the kitchen. The corner at the top of the basement stairs is particularly warm since the hot water pipe runs down that wall. There seemed no good reason why she should not be allowed to sleep on the top step. Then it became apparent that she enjoyed watching television with me, provided no war film was being shown when she would immediately leap from my lap and make for the door while keeping close to the wall. So the sitting-room became available to her during the evenings. After that it was only a flight of stairs to my bed where, although she is never allowed to sleep at night, she often finds it convenient to spend the day. Now, of course, there is no corner of the house which is free from white hairs.

  It was my then neighbour, the late Lady Moynihan, more knowledgeable than I about people in the neighbourhood, who discovered where Hodge had come from. This coincided with a photograph of me with the cat published in a national newspaper. A letter immediately followed from her previous owners. Apparently Hodge—whose name, I learn
ed, was Polly—had previously lived with the family in Holland Park. When they moved, however, they acquired two more cats and Polly obstinately refused to share her home. It was impossible to keep her in and the vet, when consulted, said that there was nothing they could do to prevent her leaving. Polly-Hodge, cat-like, was prepared to live wild in her old haunts until an acceptable home presented itself, rather than share comfortable accommodation with two interlopers. Her previous owners—although the word owners is inappropriate in relation to cats—were happy for me to keep her and Polly-Hodge, now renamed, has remained. Since she never answered to the previous name, the addition of Polly has made no difference. She doesn’t have to earn food or houseroom by any service, by tricks of behaviour or by an inordinate display of affection. It is enough that I take daily pleasure in the infinite variety of attitudes, all graceful, in which she composes herself for sleep, the elegant hieratic stillness with which she contemplates life with those inscrutable amber eyes. It is in this attitude that she waits beside her bowl for food. When hungry she never wreathes herself round my legs but sits in a parody of patience unrewarded. Returning to her half-empty bowl she won’t deign to eat until I have bent down to scrape the food into the middle. The impression given is that she is awaiting permission to begin eating; more likely she prefers not to touch the edge of the bowl with her whiskers or requires me to perform this small act of servitude.

  I have no doubt that she would have found a more desirable home on the Avenue had one presented itself, but nevertheless, irrationally, I feel a sense of pride that she chose me. She is embarrassingly affectionate to all callers, particularly those who dislike cats, loves being photographed—except when she is wanted, when she declines to cooperate—is obstinate, timid and entirely beautiful. I took her to the vet when she first moved in and he thought she was about five years old, so she is now over fifteen and, alas, has that illness common in elderly cats. The symptoms are constant hunger and thirst but, despite huge intake, the cat gets inexorably thinner. But Polly-Hodge still purrs, still grooms herself fastidiously and obviously still enjoys life. When the moment comes when that life is no longer agreeable and it is apparent that she is suffering it will be painlessly ended. We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other. Meanwhile we grow old together, she the more gracefully.

  WEDNESDAY, 24TH SEPTEMBER

  A young photographer, Andy Slack, came to take a portrait photograph for The Times to accompany Frances Fyfield’s interview. He brought a young woman assistant and I provided tea and cakes before and after the photograph, which was happily stress-free once the young man realized that I strongly dislike talking about my work when being photographed. Photographers, particularly the young ones, seem to feel they should take an interest in an author’s craft, and actually imagine that we are gratified to answer the overfamiliar questions about working methods, where we get our inspiration, how long it takes to complete a book, etc. At least this one didn’t come accompanied by a skull and a dagger and expect me to peer round the edges of doors looking malevolent. Photographers, new to me and setting out to produce images of a dark, sinister and probably emaciated witch-like woman, are disconcerted to find themselves facing a plump, generally benign grandmother. They do their best to fulfil the picture editor’s expectations (“You don’t happen to have a skull we could use, I suppose?”). Most resign themselves to failure. But I thought the results, judging by the contact prints, were good and Andy was an unfussy photographer. Some of the best photographs I have had taken have been by Jane Bown with no assistant and only a hand-held camera.

  I realize that a diary should be written up daily even if the day is without particular events and there seems little of note worth recording. No day is really without interest, being filled with thoughts, memories, plans, moments of particular hope and occasional moments of depression. Every day is lived in the present, but also vicariously in the past and one can write a novel of 100,000 words covering just one hour of a human life. But it seems too egotistical to spend the last hours of every day contemplating the minutiae of unrecoverable moments. I say my prayers and am grateful for the comfort of bed.

  THURSDAY, 25TH SEPTEMBER

  This evening the Mayor of Kensington, Mr. Edward Hess, gave an enjoyable dinner at the Town Hall. At thirty-five he is the youngest mayor the Royal Borough has ever had, and I imagine probably younger than any previous mayor in any borough. He is a lawyer and a number of barristers from his chambers were there, including Gavyn Arthur, who has so generously helped with the research for A Certain Justice. Gavyn had his copy with him and passed it to Mr. Hess, who obligingly held it aloft at the end of his brief speech and exhorted the company to buy it.

  SUNDAY, 28TH SEPTEMBER

  This weekend I attended a Conversazione on Culture and Society under the heading “The Future of the Past” held at Lincoln College, Oxford. The event was interesting and at times enthralling, bringing together more than eighty representatives of Church, finance, the arts, academia and journalism in a three-day discussion of our attitudes towards the past and our cultural perceptions of history and heritage as we have inherited them through literature, art and buildings. My own lecture, on the importance of language and the written word, given this afternoon, was generously received, although I feel that I was boxing somewhat above my weight (always the surest way to ensure a swift knock-out), and most of what I said about literature, language and the importance of encouraging children to read has been said before both by me and by others better qualified to participate. I emphasized that preserving the language doesn’t mean resisting change. English has from the beginning been a hybrid; brought to Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, influenced by Latin and Greek, enriched by the Danes and French-speaking Normans, given strength and beauty by Tyndale’s translation of the Bible and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. To preserve a language is not to guard it jealously against any alien influence but, in the words of Chambers Dictionary, “to keep safe from harm or loss; to keep alive; to keep sound; to guard against decay.” A living language responds to the aspirations and needs of each generation but the changes should enrich, not impoverish. We debase our language if, while inventing new words to meet new techniques, we lose that nice precision of definition in vocabulary and construction which makes English an exact as well as a versatile language.

  This was the first Conversazione I have attended and it had its own form and procedures, being neither conference nor colloquium. At dinner people at each table conferred and then asked a question of any of the speakers. They were designed, I think, to entertain, challenge or amuse rather than seriously to elicit information. I was asked for Dalgliesh’s views on structuralism—or was it post-structuralism? I replied that he had given it careful thought for a number of evenings and had come to the conclusion that it was nonsense. The young chaplain sitting next to me murmured, “In vain they lay snares at her feet.” I suppose that, if I’d been to university, I might have understood these more complex literary theories. Whether they would have added to my enjoyment of reading or made me a better writer is open to question. The Conversazione was an enjoyable and welcome experience and I was reminded of the conversation between Mr. Elliot and his cousin Anne Elliot in Persuasion:

  “My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

  “You are mistaken,” he said gently. “That is not good company, that is the best.”

  TUESDAY, 30TH SEPTEMBER

  Yesterday was one of those catching-up days in which resolutions to tackle the “pending” file, sort out my summer dresses and put them away, and fit in a hair appointment had all been dissipated in a kind of aimless activity. I did manage to complete, and Joyce faxed to the Sunday Times, my review of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations edited by Peter Kemp.

  To the making of dictionaries there is no end, particularly under the aegis of the
Oxford University Press, and I for one make no complaint. Books of quotations, in particular, afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure. Oxford University Press have been wise in their choice of editor, Peter bringing to his task a wide knowledge and appreciation of literature both old and contemporary.

  I can think of a number of quotations which I should like to have seen included, and no doubt Peter will be inundated with suggestions from friends. All the more reason for a supplement or for an enlarged paperback edition. One quotation I would most like to see in any revised edition are the words of Henry James, writing of Anthony Trollope, “We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities.” It is an elevated ideal of fiction but, thinking it over, I am not sure that it is any longer true. Dickens could write a novel which would move his readers to pity or outrage and act as a spur to action, but surely today it is television which, sometimes powerfully, sometimes superficially, examines for us the dilemmas and concerns of our age, reflects our lives and opens to us the lives of others. Men and women who in Victorian England would have read Dickens are now watching EastEnders and Panorama.

  In particular the so-called literary novel too often seems removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. The very description “literary novel” is, for many readers, an indication that the work is not intended for them. With some notable exceptions—David Lodge is one—the worlds of industry and commerce, the very means by which society gains the wealth which supports our art and literature, are alien to the modern novelist, perhaps because they are worlds few of us have experienced. Have we a responsibility to break free from our cabined preoccupations, our fascination with history and our literary exploitation of the evils of the past and address ourselves to more contemporary themes? Is there a novelist today who could write—or would try to write—War and Peace or Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with its brilliant portrayal of the financier Melmotte, the nineteenth-century Robert Maxwell?