by Amis, Martin
He is a bearish, messianic figure with porkchop sideburns, cowboy boots, a 'bolo' tie (silver brooch on a neck pulley), and a lumpy, muscular, overloaded forehead. I expected cheerful volubility, but Asimov gives off an air of irritated preoccupation, as if silently completing a stint of mental arithmetic.
We met at a Broadway radio station, where Asimov was giving an interview prior to the one he had promised me. He sat hunched at the round table, nodding at me as I was shown into the control room to wait with the elderly, chain-smoking lady producer.
'No funny stuff in there,' said Asimov gloomily. 'She's a nymphomaniac, you know.'
When the interview was over, Asimov mooched out into the street. 'You want something to eat?' he asked. 'You look skinny enough.' It was a typical New York spring day - 90 degrees, the tarmac spongy beneath your feet. In the cab, Asimov frequently fell silent as his gaze followed the lightly-clad women in the lunchtime crowds. 'Look at them all', he said abstractedly, ' - all out in their summer uniforms.'
We talked about robotics, psychohistory, inflation, future shock, fear of flying, space travel, marriage, overpopulation, Jimmy Carter, biological warfare, workoholicism, autobiography and Isaac Asimov. He is a far more reflective figure than you would have any right to expect, stoically resigned to his own eccentricity and waywardness.
'I wanted my autobiography to be unanalytical, without wisdom. I wanted to show the reader what it was like to be me. A genius, maybe, but also a schmuck. It's a big effort for me to behave like other people. I have to concentrate on it, otherwise I'd be impossible.'
Earlier that day, Asimov had absentmindedly jumped a coffee queue in the radio-station canteen.
'A girl turned to me and said, "Just because you're so famous doesn't mean you can go to the head of the line." I turned to her and nearly said, "Just because you're so damned insignificant doesn't mean ..." I shut myself up this time. But I got to keep trying about things like that.
'You know, everyone gets the idea I'm so bright I must be dumb. My wife Janet, she doesn't like the idea of me crossing the street by myself. She knows I'm always writing books inside my head - sort of crazy professor, I live inside my head all the time. But why not? I like my head.'
Asimov looked at his watch, for the fourth or fifth time. I thanked him for the interview and got up to leave - for a long afternoon with In Joy Still Felt.
'I'd like to give you more time,' said Asimov, as he skulked off to his apartment. 'But if you'll excuse me, I've got a few books to write.'
Sunday Telegraph, 1980
DARTS: GUTTED FOR KEITH
Let us imagine the following scene. It is Men's Finals day at Wimbledon. Ivan Lendl and Boris Becker flex themselves on the same baseline, next to two little tables, on which stand tankards of lager. They have cigarettes in their mouths. A tuxed MC with a matinee mike steps forward and introduces the players. His voice is, if not the worst voice of all time, then certainly the worst voice yet. 'Best of order now. Game on. Ivan tyou er, throw first.'
Lendl refreshes himself with a husky drag and a few gulps of lager, steps forward with a deep breath, and throws a tennis ball at some arbitrary point in the opposing court — the junction of centre and service lines, perhaps. Becker follows, in his turn. The monotony of the contest is relieved only by the excitations, the fruity trills and graces of the scorer's voice. 'Love-thirty! Fifteen-FORTY!' and so on, until the concluding, 'Yayce. First game, Ivan. Unlucky, Boris. Second game: Boris tyou er, throw first.'
I could have mentioned that Lendl and Becker have been outfitted by Rent-a-Tent and tip the scales at a couple of hundredweight each. But this would merely add to a sense of anachronism, or nostalgia. Always endearingly sensitive, always touchingly touchy about its image ('Let's face it. . .'), the world of darts is yet again in the process of cleaning itself up. With a groan of effort and many whimpers of protest (what about tradition? what about civil rights?), darts is trying once more to burst into a new dawn.
There is, to begin with, a fresh emphasis on personal appearance. It is now accounted a 'victory for darts' when a thin player beats a fat one. No smoking at the oché (the throwing line), at least in the televised stages. 'They're even thinking', said Martin Fitzmaurice, the large and affable MC, 'of banning that.' 'What?' I asked, looking round. 'That,' he said. 'What?' I said. 'That,' he said, indicating the pint of lager I had obediently ordered. No piercing whistles from the crowd, no hoarse screams of poof and wanker. You even hear tell that the sport's gentle giant Cliff Lazarenko (known as Big Cliff, which is one way of putting it) has whittled himself down to nineteen stone.
I sought guidance from the world number one, Bob Anderson, as he prepared for an exhibition match at a Bishopsgate pub called Underwriter. We were in Bob's 'dressing-room' at the time (a frosty wind-tunnel stacked with empties and beer crates), and Bob was trembling in his underwear. The Limestone Cowboy (explanation for nickname: lives near Swindon and likes Tex shirts) had brought along a selection of outfits in a zippered suitbag. He contemplated the scarlet tassels of what might have been an Elvis jumpsuit, and shook his head. 'No, I think this tartan job,' he said. He shivered. 'I shouldn't think many other world number ones have to put up with this kind of thing. But there we are.'
'You must be a godsend', I said, 'to the people who want to take darts up-market.' For Bob is sportsmanlike, articulate, well-spoken, above all slender.
'Thank you. That's the nicest thing a journalist's ever said to me.'
Bob's reaction surprised me, but not for long. The darters I spoke to all felt starved of 'recognition'. They were additionally gratified to attract the attention of the Observer, accustomed as they are to the odd smudged scurrility several pages from the back of the Star.
'I regard myself, Bob went on, 'as an ambassador for the sport. Darts has to improve its image. We're talking about television, sponsorship, endorsements.'
'Get it out of the pub?'
'You can't get it out of the pub, and I wouldn't want to get it out of the pub. But it has to find a broader appeal. It has to move from the bar-room to the ballroom.'
I had entered Underwriter to a blizzard of badinage and dirty jokes (nymphomaniacs, vibrators) and there was more fierce cajolery when me and my mate Bob emerged from behind the heavy drapes. Mr Fitzmaurice and a personage known as the Clacton Stallion were jovially assembling the darts clobber: Mimic Board, Indicator, Enumerator. One-lining regulars, fourteen of whom would soon face Bob at the oché, now cackled away with the anecdotal landlord. In this milieu, you suddenly see the urgent meaning of that phrase about everybody needing a good laugh. The Algonquin Round Table could never have been so remorselessly pawky.
In fact, an atmosphere of piss-taking one-upmanship is the natural background of darts — appropriately, too, for the game is all about scoring. No sport is more bound up with nerve, with nerves, with nervelessness: the sense of your own resolve, the predatory awareness of an opponent's weakness. This is what darters are praising when they talk of 'the killer instinct'. And maybe that's all it comes down to: the savagery of your desire to get that dart to go where you throw it.
'Man is the hunter,' Bob had told me. He competes against nature, but also against other hunters. 'If you hit the target, you bring home a haunch of venison. If you don't, it's turnips and gravy.'
That night in Bishopsgate, Bob's line sounded a bit on the grand side. Yet perhaps there's life in it. After all, in evolutionary terms, man has spent a lot more time throwing spears than he's spent in cities — or hanging around in pubs, throwing darts.
What will never change about the game is its essential simplicity. You could put it differently: what will never change about the game is its irreducible and dumbfounding starkness. Hand, projectile, target, through a medium of thin air — and that's that. Remove one umpire, both batsmen and all the fielders from a cricket pitch, and you get some idea of the dourness of darts. Even ten-pin bowling (the other great proletarian sport of the North Atlantic) has dimensions that dar
ts could only wonder at: the spun or powered ball hits skittles, which then hit other skittles in varying ways, and the scores progress geometrically. There are things you can do with the darts and dartboard that involve strategy and complication. But these games are chess to the checkers, snooker to the billiards of 501, the format to which televised darts has grimly dwindled.
In 501, nine-tenths of the board is in effect never used. Of the board's wide face, the flat nose of the treble 20 (the size of an elongated postage stamp) is alone the grail of the players, the G-spot of the crowds. True, as each leg concludes, the player must 'finish' or 'check out' or 'make the pick-off, using the doubles. But this is just a different target, not a different kind of target (and the much-touted 'maths' of darts can be mastered over a weekend). There is no equivalent, in darts, to the wrong-footing cross-court topspin backhand half-volley. Every shot is the same shot.
Totally lacking in strategy, darts is also quite without technique. 'You got to get the basics right,' say the darters: head still, smooth arm, legs steady. But do you? Jocky Wilson hasn't got the basics right: he seems to be riding that dart into the cork. Alan Glazier looks as though he's throwing a harpoon. Ceri Morgan looks as though he's throwing a baseball.
'Ceri Morgan', said Bob, when I put this to him, 'looks as though he's throwing a baseball bat. No, everyone evolves a personal style. It's like golf.'
I didn't point out that no golfer addresses the ball sideways with one foot in the air (never mind a fag in his hand, or his mouth). We agreed, however, that in the absence of everything else darts came down to a natural ability - hand-eye — and natural resilience: i.e. bottle.
'Then what's wrong?' I said. 'Help me, Bob, help me.'
On a reasonable day a top thrower will 'average' about 30. This is my average too - but with three darts rather than one. I am what you might call a twenty-sixer: a dart in the 20, a dart in the 5, and a dart in the I. Sometimes the magics descend on me, and I am in the darter's nirvana: I'm not throwing them in - I'm putting them in.
Once, for instance, while throwing away, I threw 180: three treble 2os, the maximum. No sweat, I thought. Now I'll do a John Lowe: the fabled nine-darter. Three more treble 2os, then treble 17, treble 18, double 18. No sweat. I was, as they say, in a non-pressure situation: I was alone in the kitchen. I plucked the arrows from the board and returned to the line. I took a deep breath, and threw.
I got 26. My subsequent scores were 22, 3, 26, 41, 30, 11, 26, 45, 15, 6 (a bad bounce-out), 22, 26 (featuring two treble ones), 45, 7, 22, 63 (helped by, of all things, a treble 14), and 26, which put me on a finish. 167: treble 20, treble 19, bull. I threw 26. Then 9, 30, 17, 24, 43, 0, 0, 9 . . . Twenty minutes later I tearfully skewered the double i. So, a distinction of a kind: the 180-darter.
I motor out to North London's Enfield for lunch with Keith Deller. Shock winner of the 1983 World Championship, Keith was for a while the great white hope of darts: young and apple-cheeked, a breath of fresh air. But then Keith showed that in darts it is hard to do your ageing one year at a time. By 1984, he looked like a darts player.
It would have suited my preconceptions if I had found Keith half-drunk in some roadhouse, smothered in tattoos and darts magazines. On the contrary: Keith and his pretty wife, Kim, awaited me over their Perriers in the ante-room of a pleasant businessman's restaurant. There was talk of the gym, and countryside rambles with dog Sheba. No alcohol and no nicotine. It was I who felt like the true darter of the company, with my drink, my roll-ups, my North Circular pallor.
Keith is genial, straightforward, considerate, clear-eyed. He is also charmingly uxorious, constantly deferring to Kim, who, for her part, is fully abreast of Keith's darting hopes and fears. In a conversation that often went like this -
'143?'
'Treble 20, treble 17, double 16.'
'127?'
Treble 20, treble 17, double 8.'
— Kim Deller was in no sense left out. 'I like double 10, don't I, love?' Keith would say. Or again: 'Treble 14 - it's one of my favourite trebles, isn't it, Kim?' Courteous, clean-living, an ambassador for his sport. The only thing that might upset Keith, you felt, was if you had forgetfully sworn in front of his wife. Tomorrow would see the start of the Winmau World Masters. For Keith this spelt an early night after a sandwich and a spot of TV. You can't live the old life now, he suggested, not in the modern game. The standards are too high.
So that's the thing that will eventually clean up darts: darts.
To Kensington's Rainbow Room, for the Winmau. A Parliament of Darts, a vast arena entirely devoted to darts, darts, darts. At the central tables, darts families — darts dynasties - have gathered for the day (darts kids in darts shirts charm tenners from darts grannies). Darts accessories are on sale, and darts literature. And darters are darting, in dozens of booths around the hall.
Here, darts cuts through the barriers of age, sex, race and creed. Big names mingle with small, and many a Lars and Sven and Costas rubs shoulders with the Eric Bristows, the Mike Gregorys, the Davie Whitcombs. The stars do look relatively slim, but this is partly because the fans look relatively fat. Reassuring, in a way, to see that the human butter mountain is not exclusively a British physical type. Among the cries of 'Unlucky', 'Good darts' and (the supreme accolade) 'Darts', one also hears pintlager, gooddarts, unloeucky and scotchverybig in Belgian, Dutch and a variety of Nordic tongues.
I team up with my boy Keith and hobnob with him and not-so-big Big Cliff. Keith has a bye in the first round ('he didn't turn up') but is soon tackling a black Netherlander called Ellis. I watch anxiously as Keith does the biz. We hardly have time for a lager shandy before Keith is back at the oché, up against an eighteen-year-old beanpole called Kurt. Keith throws well but Kurt (moustachioed, unsmiling) throws 'superb', smacking in the ton-forties. I stand in the little pocket of howling body-heat saying, 'Go on, Keith,' and, 'Darts, Keith.' Six minutes later Keith sits slumped on the scorer's desk, rubbing his eyes, his Winmau challenge over for another year.
Gutted for Keith, I return to the bar and hobnob with Bob. Bob is having an ambassadorial pint with his latest scalp, a nervous young lad from the North. Bob is generous in victory. After a discreet pause I go to Keith and comfort him. He is statesmanlike in defeat. We agree that the lad threw good darts.
'He was a maniac,' I said. 'But Keith — what happened? You had a dart to finish him.'
Keith shrugged. 'Bad darts,' he explained.
The next day I saw Bob go on to win it, beating Lowie in the final. The explanation for that? Good darts. Or, more simply, darts.
I had bashfully taken my darts pouch along when I went to interview Bob Anderson. We didn't play, but I made him give me some tips. I had also hoped to learn something at the feet of Keith Deller. Back in the kitchen I addressed the dartboard with a new stance and a new action. I threw five consecutive 26s. Then I threw the darts to the floor and had a smoke and a drink instead.
All sports are eventually confining, and there is no cave deeper or darker than darts. During my visit there I felt no hostility, remarkably enough, but I constantly felt the symptoms of asphyxiation. Can darts progress? Its limitations, surely, are set by the game, not by the players. What draws me and many others to the sport and the spectacle, I think, is a liking for human variety, specifically a drastically primitive activity in a drastically modern setting. I don't want to see sporting ambassadors. I want to see the usual arrow-shower. Darts is going upmarket. But where to? My suspicion is that it may have to come right back down again.
Observer, 1988
JOHN BRAINE
In 1975 the New Statesman ran a series called 'The Defectors': profiles of more or less distinguished figures who had abandoned the left and embraced the right. My father was included in the series; so were several forgotten politicians, and several half-forgotten politicians like Alun Chalfont and Woodrow Wyatt. Such pieces were unsigned and usually written by the staff. I got John Braine. In my time at the New Statesman I also got Esther Rantz
en ('Household Faces') and Sir Peter Parker ('Captains of Industry'). John Braine earns inclusion here on the grounds of his eccentricity — and his pathos (see Postscript).
'They're a bit liberal, are the Monday Club — but they're basically sound.' Few defectors of recent years can have crossed the floor with quite the outrageous swagger of John Braine. One-time charter member of the Committee of 100, Labour Party proselytiser, apologist for the USSR and (so it's said) darling of the working-class literati, Braine is now established as the most wild-eyed and querulous champion of the literary Right, a more colourful turncoat by far than either Conquest, Osborne or Amis. Although any study of what one might call Braine's political 'thought' quickly reveals it as a shambles of folly and recklessness, a rehearsal of his views is well worth undertaking: he shows us, with exuberance and candour, how to get both ideologies wrong.
Success came late and suddenly to Braine, and this may account for the thoroughness with which it changed him. The son of a sewage-works superintendent - origins which Braine these days describes as 'petit bourgeois' — he was born in Bradford in 1922 and educated there at St Bede's Grammar. He now sees himself, and some of his literary confreres, as flowers of the grammar school system, whose imminent passing he greatly regrets. After a period of uncertain employment the teenage Braine became in 1940 an assistant at the public library in nearby Bingley, where he worked, with a spell in the forces, until 1951. That year he came to London to try his luck as a freelance journalist. He published a few articles in papers like Lilliput, Tribune and the New Statesman (intriguing pieces to look back on, these, with their fierce class-hatred and almost lyrical Leftiness — 'empty shops . . . their boarded windows blind with failure', etc.); but ill-health struck again, and Braine was invalided out of London just as he had been invalided out of the navy ten years earlier. In hospital, and back at Bingley, the dream that was to become Room at the Top took shape. Within months of its publication in 1957, Braine was in a position to give up his job and turn to writing — and polemicising — full time.
