The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  Guardian, February 4, 2008

  ALAN COREN

  Aided by her brother Giles, Victoria Coren was editing Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: the Essential Alan Coren, a selection of her late father’s writings, and she asked me to be one of the panel who would introduce the various sections. They were a distinguished bunch – Melvyn Bragg, Victoria Wood, A. A. Gill and Stephen Fry – so I was honoured to be asked to join them. I got the plum job of introducing a sheaf of Coren’s pieces written in the 1980s, which the editors themselves regarded as his golden age. The essay appears here as it did in the book, with no additions, although I could easily have doubled its length. The book was published in October 2008, to deserved acclaim.

  Writers of humour often have a bag of tricks, and one day the tricks become recognizable. Eventually even S. J. Perelman could be caught in the act of copying ideas that he had been the first to have. But Alan Coren was so inventive that the new ideas – not just the dazzle on the surface, but the structures underneath – kept on coming, with the seeming ease which invites belittlement from the less blessed. The great Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser’s achievements were often taken for granted by the local press, on the grounds that she was ‘a natural athlete’. In the same way, Coren was naturally funny. Nevertheless even he had his peak period for minting new coin. He was never better than in the 1980s, when the first flush of youth had been tempered by wisdom and learning.

  The learning showed up brilliantly in a piece like ‘£10.66 And All That’, which can be taken as the pioneering instance in any medium of a modern humorist exploiting the probability that the yeomen of olde Englande, while they waded through the mud, exhibited all the whining venality and warped entrepreneurial ambition that we so admire today. As we join the action, the estate agency William & Bastards is about to be ‘dragged into the 11th Century’. While we read of how the agency strives to flog a ‘property with relatively scum-free well’, we can see how Coren was unmatched at the conceit of showing up the delusional sales vocabulary of Now by exporting it to the inappropriate context of Then. Almost every humorist has tried it but Coren could actually do it, at a level of ventriloquism which had been equalled, before him, only by Beachcomber.

  Like Michael Frayn in his Guardian ‘Miscellany’ column at the turn of the 60s, Coren always knew that the only way to keep up with Beachcomber’s ghost was to cock an ear to the new yet instantly tarnished linguistic counterfeit of the present. This is the secret of Coren’s extraordinary feat of mimicry in ‘One is One and All Alone’, the story of what happened when our current Queen accidentally found herself at a loose end for a whole day. She kept a diary, in which we find that she played I-Spy with Fusebox Pursuivant. (‘One won’.) At the end of the day (the kind of dud phrase that Coren always hijacked at the very moment of its ponderously sprightly arrival into the language) Her Majesty is in prison, and obviously grateful for the change of scene.

  Nowadays, Google makes it easier to write a catalogue piece that sounds as if it has been researched in a library, but the list of phobias in ‘No Bloody Fear’ sounds like the inside job of someone who had done a lot of delving in his own head. With Coren it’s always important to realise that his vast range of particular knowledge almost certainly included a deep insight into himself. He just never let on. Of all the great British comic writers – among whose number, we must surely see now, he stands high – he is the one whose flights of fancy tell you least about the agonies within. Probably, rather than being defensive, he was just too fascinated with the limitless extravagance of the follies in the outside world: to take them personally would have seemed, to him, disproportionate.

  His consolation for a world whose cruelties mocked his mockery – Coren’s Idi Amin was a talking doll that spoke from the puppeteer’s sense of pity, not from his frivolity – was that the universal madness would always be there, if only because it had been there throughout history. Hence the enchanted insanity of ‘Tax Britannica’, my personal candidate for the title of Coren Piece for the Time Capsule. The scene, once again, is ancient Britain, but this time very ancient. The Romans are here. A sniffling tax collector called Glutinus Sinus? Of course. But when I learned that the tax-collector’s assistant was called Miscellaneous Onus, I was helpless with admiration as well as laughter, because the name is so exact. Miscellaneous onus equals various jobs, get it? Or, as the skiving Briton in the piece would say, ‘Narmean?’ Coren was first with that too: transcribing the tormented demotic with phonetic exactitude. Novelists got famous for doing the same. Coren just did it, from week to week, working so far within his abilities that he was the walking, laughing and dancing (he was a wickedly good Lindy Hop dancer) exemplar of a principle: the secret of success in the popular arts is to have power in reserve.

  The worst a critic could say of him was that he didn’t seem to be trying. There were critics who said the same of Gene Kelly. But although Coren never had to practise a knee-slide that would finish exactly on the mark that the cameraman’s assistant had put down on the studio floor, he still had to do an awful lot of technical calculation in his head before he got his effects. He did it so quickly that he could go on a radio programme like News Quiz and unreel impromptu lines which were so neatly compressed they sounded as if they had been written. They had been: written instantly, a nanosecond before he said them. Somebody with that kind of gift is always going to be underrated. Coren didn’t care. He preferred to make the English language the hero. So generous a writer forms a conspiracy with the reader, as they both revel in the splendour of the tongue they speak. For as long as the spell lasts – and Coren could make it last for a thousand words at a time – the reader can almost persuade himself that he, too, knows how it’s done. But it’s a secret. Writers who convince you that you share their sense of humour are pulling a fast one. They are celestial con-men. Alan Coren was one of them, and one of the best.

  PAT KAVANAGH

  Already a star agent in the days before there were any others, Pat Kavanagh had the glamour to reduce most men and not a few women to slavery. She was beautiful, clever and loved to laugh, but she could also have a blunt way with a fool. Since most writers are fools, especially about money, a new client was likely to find his dreams being set straight quite early in the relationship. I can’t speak for her other clients – she never spoke about them either – but in general I would be surprised if there were any who were spared a close encounter with brute reality when she first explained to them why it would be unwise to start living like Donald Trump on the assumption that the next advance would be as big as the last one.

  Such bluntness could be daunting but it was also reassuring, because the client guessed, correctly, that his new mentor wouldn’t be pussyfooting with the publishers either. Pat could make publishers shake in their hand-made shoes. On the appointed day to have lunch with her they always dressed with extra care. Some of the awe she inspired at all levels of the business might have come from the fact that she had a self-assured hauteur and yet was hard to place. She didn’t come from any recognizable British social stratum. She was a South African who had sent herself into exile. Like the Australian expatriates of the same generation, she counted as having come from nowhere.

  People who had come from nowhere could score an effect if they looked as if they knew something. Pat looked like that. She didn’t even have to say anything. At the parties and book-launches that endlessly punctuate the literary round, one babbles to stay alive. Pat never babbled. Her gift for waiting until she had something to say was enough to scare the daylights out of those of us who were busy saying anything at all without waiting for a moment. Julian Barnes, who doesn’t babble either, was at a loss for words when he first met her at a party in the old A. D. Peters office. Wisely he sent her a letter saying so, and from then on he was the lucky man. But not even Julian’s looming presence could subtract from her individual status. She was always at the centre of a roomful of admiring glances.

  On a grand occasion, she had
a way of looking unimpressed that could set the assembled company to wondering if they quite measured up. Actually her inscrutability might have had more to do with shyness, but there was no telling for sure even when you knew her. Perhaps you had done something wrong. I once turned up for a book-launch in a flared-trouser all-denim suit that was very wrong indeed, and couldn’t help thinking that my appearance might have had something to do with the way she looked into her glass of white wine as if a fly had drowned in it.

  But she forgave us all, as long as we kept writing. Pat’s client list, always bung full for decade after decade, was a persuasive indicator that she was on the side of the creator. To be effectively on the side of the creator, however, an agent must know the business. Pat did. I can well remember her first explanation to me of why it was better, on a book of memoirs, to have a rising rate on later royalties (the ‘escalator’ clause) than to inflate the advance, especially if I also wanted the publisher to put out off-trail stuff such as collections of essays and poetry. ‘The secret,’ she said, ‘is to be a long-term asset.’

  I wish I could say that the idea had been all mine, but without her deep knowledge of the practical possibilities I would have been stymied. I am sure that there are many other clients who could say the same about their careers. Every literary career is different but the same principles apply, or anyway they ought to. The first principle is to have principles. The writer should not expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a piece of junk that will never get the advance back.

  Pat saw all this nonsense coming a long way off and she could be very funny about it (she was never more delightful than when pouring on the scorn), but she profoundly disapproved. Everyone in the business knew how honest she was and it must have made some of them uncomfortable. When PFD, of which she had been a stalwart, was taken over, it was an awkward situation for many of us because the literary world in London is quite small and everyone knows everyone. But Pat’s clients went with her en masse to the new outfit, United Agents, and I doubt if even one of them hesitated any more than I did. I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable. This week many voices will be heard saying the same thing. Being literary voices, they will all say it differently, but there will be common themes: respect, admiration, love, and a racking grief at so cruel a blow, which had an awful quickness for its only mercy.

  Guardian, October 21, 2008

  Postscript

  She died on a Monday morning, and in the afternoon the Guardiancalled me ten minutes before the Times did. I had already composed my first few paragraphs, because I knew somebody would be asking, and it was something to do. One of the dubious privileges of sharing your life with famous people is that if you outlive them, you will be called upon to help bury them. Pat was good at fame: disliking the attention intensely, she perfected a natural gift for public privacy. Her lifelong physical beauty announced itself always, but through no fault of her own; and she flaunted nothing, not even her principles. But they were fiercely held, and one of the many things to regret about her unexpected death was that it came just a few days too early for her to see a black man become President of the United States. In her youth, she had left South Africa because of apartheid. The renunciation cost her much regret, which she bore without complaint. I tried to get some of that heroic quality into my piece. In all the pieces – and I suppose there will be more, unless I check out early to be summed up in my turn – I make it my first and only task to catch the character. The standard obituary, with all the biographical details, is beyond me. What I write is what the obit editors call the additional feature. It’s easier, but I still wish I didn’t have to. The only way out of it, however, would be if your loved ones lived forever: and we can’t have that.

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  MUSIC IN THE DARK

  All set to go on stage at the Sydney Opera House and do some talking in between renditions of crime-movie music by the Symphony Orchestra, I’ll be able to rely on my memory to a remarkable extent. I might have to look up the odd name and date, but mostly the stuff is already in my head. For most of my waking life, I’ve been seeing almost every notable movie on its first release, and I formed the habit right here in Sydney. Near my home suburb of Kogarah in the late 1940s and the 1950s there were three movie houses (always known simply as ‘the pictures’) operating full blast. Early on, when I had barely cut my second teeth, my mother used to take me to every change of double bill at the Ramsgate Odeon.

  A little later, but while still in short pants, I took myself to the Saturday afternoon matinee at Rockdale Odeon for a couple of action movies, four episodes from different serials, and sixteen cartoons. Long pants having been acquired, I went solo to the Ramsgate double bill in the evening at least once a week, and, on another evening in the same week, to the double bill at the Rockdale Odeon. If the movie had Grace Kelly in it, I could see it repeatedly by chasing it from Ramsgate to Rockdale and back to Kogarah. I saw Dial M for Murder five times that way. When the Symphony Orchestra plays the soundtrack music in the Opera House, they’ll have to hose me down to stop me singing along.

  Is there anything more ridiculous than a young man in love? No, but there is nothing more dedicated either. Time after time in Dial M for Murder I was sending thought waves to the screen, warning Grace Kelly that her life was in danger. (Many years later, when I heard the news of her death in a car-crash, I immediately had the guilty thought that I had not sent her a sufficiently powerful message when we were spiritually united in the thrilling darkness of the Ramsgate Odeon.) I even remembered the names on the credits, and so knew from an early age that the spine-tingling score had been composed by Dmitri Tiomkin – two words that I could not pronounce, but they were engraved in my mind as if with a stylus.

  My golden-haired beloved was also in Rear Window, and once again I sent messages of warning as the music cranked up the tension. She’s searching Raymond Burr’s apartment for the missing wedding ring! She’s found the ring! She’s signalling James Stewart but he doesn’t know how to tell her that Raymond Burr has come home early! Luckily my own signals reached her in time and she managed to bluff her way out of certain death. The music was by Franz Waxman. I assumed, of course, that he knew Grace Kelly personally.

  I had no idea of how movies were made. All I knew was that I couldn’t do without a regular supply of them. The experience of watching was closely allied with the experience of eating. In those days I existed on an exclusive diet of sweets and I graded them according to the type of movie on show. At the Rockdale Odeon, when the action films and serials and cartoons were running, I existed mainly on Jaffas and Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bars. Jaffas were ideal for popping like pills during an Eastern Western like The Golden Blade in which George Macready threatened Piper Laurie’s virtue. Crumble Bars, which imposed a much slower chewing rate, were appropriate when enduring the tension of the latest episode of Lost City of the Jungle. In reality, the actors were in no danger except from the set falling down, but I had no idea what the term ‘low-budget’ meant. For any item on the endless matinee programme, the music could have been by Alfred Newman, who, during a long career, composed for every kind of movie there was. He also composed the Twentieth Century Fox logo theme. ‘Da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-da-DAH!’ I could sing it. They’ll be playing it at the Opera House to start the show and I’ll be singing it right along with them unless they can stop me.

  For a high-end romantic movie at Ramsgate, I moved my sweet-eating choices upmarket, culminating in the luxurious Cherry Ripe, still the all-time most sensuous Australian gustatory experience. Either out of lust for Grace Kelly or loathing for Stewart Granger I choked on a Cherry Ripe while watching Green Fire. But sophistication was soon to arrive. In the late fifties I expanded my movie-going range. Sydney University had a Film So
ciety whose operating members were drunk at all times. The movies were screened in the old Union Hall (gone now, alas, with all its atmosphere of girls longed for and time wasted) and the screening was always preceded, just before the lights went down, by Bunk Johnson playing ‘The Saints Go Marching In’.

  Owing to the inebriation of the personnel in the projection box, the reels did not always come on in the right order. Thus my fourth viewing of The Sound Barrier was lent a unique dimension. I had already seen it several years before, two nights running at the Ramsgate Odeon and then again at the Kogarah Odeon. I had seen it three times because Ann Todd was in it. She was the British Grace Kelly and in some ways even more attractive, because she made tea for her guests, like my mother. In the movie she falls in love with a handsome test pilot (Nigel Patrick, whose suave sneer was much imitated by me) but he dies in a crash. In the Film Society version, he died in a crash and then she fell in love with him.

  Imitating the male stars was a feature of my youth. Though I had no natural gifts as a mimic, I could get closer to a passable impression by seeing the movie several times in a row. Variously rehearsed at both Ramsgate and Rockdale after multiple viewings of The Wild One, my Marlon Brando had a startling effect on my mother. When she said that she was getting sick of asking me to mow the lawn, I told her that I would mowmduh lawm domorrow. On the other hand, Brando’s Mark Antony in Julius Caesar got me speaking in blank verse whatever the occasion. (‘Have I not said the lawn will soon be mowed?’)

  Australia in those years is often accused of provincialism but the truth is that the movies connected us to a wider world. They always had. In the thirties, my mother and father, during those onerous depression years when they could not yet afford to have the child that would grow up to be me, would watch Myrna Loy and William Powell in the ‘Thin Man’ movies and get a lasting idea of what men and women could be like when they treated each other as equals. And it wasn’t just the standard Hollywood and British product that reached us. By the time I was ready to sail, I had seen all the Italian neo-realist movies at Sydney cinemas. But it was an off-trail British movie that knocked me sideways. You couldn’t see it in Ramsgate or Kogarah or Rockdale. You had to go ‘into town’, as we used to say. It was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and for three nights on the trot I absorbed the chemicals that transformed me into Albert Finney. By the third night I was talking with a Nottinghamshire accent and humming the themes of the score by Johnny Dankworth. I was ready for England.