Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  There’s not space in the brochure to illustrate all these riches, of course, but they do have a page from one of their real treasures – the typescript of ‘Rally Round the Flag, Boys!’ by Max Shulman, which makes the value of this sort of collection abundantly clear.

  As readers of Shulman will no doubt recall, he describes the life of his character Guido as being ‘singularly free of vicissitudes.’ But this is not what Shulman originally wrote! He described it initially as ‘singularly free from vicissitudes.’ Then, upon mature reflection, he changed it. ‘Free from’ to ‘free of’; here we have a first-hand picture of the writer at work.

  The brochure also contains the facsimile of a page from ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ by Isaac Asimov, based on a screenplay by Harry Kleiner, which in turn was based upon an original story by Otto Klement and Jay Lewis Bixby. This is another extraordinarily revealing document. For one thing, Asimov types much worse than Shulman. Better than me, but worse than Shulman. That helps to place him, I think.

  And the revisions he’s made! There’s enough material for a thesis in this one page alone! ‘Grant nodded,’ he typed curtly for a start (p.94, line 14). Then he crossed out ‘nodded,’ and inserted ‘continued to stare about in wonder.’ You see? The whole character of Grant has changed. The neutral, merely acquiescent Grant of Harry Kleiner’s conception, not to mention Otto Element’s and Jay Lewis Bixby’s, has matured through Asimov’s rich reworking into Grant the wonderer, Grant the curious observer, Grant the concerned – in a word, Grant as he has come down to us today.

  The brochure illustrates a composition by Bizet, transcribed and written out by one of the actual composer’s actual contemporaries! There is a post-card from George Bernard Shaw (the George Bernard Shaw) to Claude Rains (the Claude Rains), directing him to change two lines in ‘Caesar and Cleopatra.’ The brochure illustrates not only the message side of the card, but also the address side. It contains the address of Claude Rains, interestingly enough. And a postage stamp.

  And here’s a scoop – an actual Christmas card sent by John F. Kennedy and his wife to Gladys Hasty Carroll! ‘Wishing you a Blessed Christmas and a New Year filled with happiness, Senator and Mrs John F. Kennedy,’ reads the printed text, followed by the autograph, ‘Best – Jack,’ ‘Best’ is spelt ‘B-E-S-T.’

  But manuscript is not the only commodity they’re curating out there. The Henry Roth Collection includes a mailbox, through which most of the correspondence between Roth and his publishers apparently passed. The mailbox is pictured in the brochure; it carries the autograph ‘Roth’ on its side in roughly painted capitals, and the lid doesn’t close properly.

  Looking at it, you can imagine Roth (embittered, according to the text, by the tepid public response to his book ‘Call It Sleep’) going out into the storm to collect the latest depressing news from his publishers. He is embittered still further to find the rain has got in through the open lid, turning the wad of circulars from the local supermarkets into a sodden pulp, and thereby gravely prejudicing their value as historico-literary documents – you can see it all! Lord, the life we writers lead!

  They are also curating Anthony Newley’s hat in the Anthony Newley Collection. I’m thinking of applying for a research grant to go and study it. I’d like to see it in situ – nestling in its acid-free hatbox in the humidity-controlled vaults, or framed by the picture window with the trolley-infested street beyond, and surrounded by the conspiracy of spatial illusion and the magic play of light.

  In the meantime I think I’d better send them a pair or two of my old socks, so that they can start the Michael Frayn Collection after all. I’ll throw in a birthday card from my Great Uncle Alexander, and part of the cardboard box I keep my old bank statements in, signed ‘Crosse and Blackwell.’

  I hate to see the stuff go out of the country, of course. But when scholarship calls, the dustman must take second place.

  (1967)

  We all say the same

  Sir – Are we alone in deploring the alarming decline in the number of Letters to the Editor bearing multiple signatures?

  No, Sir, we are not alone! At the foot of this letter you will find 270 signatures, standing in proud columns, shoulder to shoulder, united in deploration. (Or 271 if Renforth Ossett BA MBE signs, as he promised Sir Spencer Fough KCVO he would, though we have been unable to confirm this, in spite of many attempts to telephone him.)

  We believe that together we are able to deplore far more deeply than any one of us ever could on his own. Indeed, one of the things we deplore is the shallowness of so much deploring today. It is frankly deplorable that, with the world in the state it is, deploring has so signally failed to rise to the occasion by sinking to the new depths which are only waiting to be plumbed.

  It is surely economic madness, at a time when the communications industry is increasingly dominated by large multinational corporations, to leave letter-writing to the backyard efforts of individual correspondents. We believe that no Letter to the Editor should be accepted for publication in this day and age unless it is signed by at least twenty people, of whom half should have some kind of titles or letters after their name. Indeed, as the advent of the fax and e-mail make it ever easier to circulate drafts of proposed letters among ever wider circles of possible signatories, we look forward to lists of signatures numbered not in tens but in thousands.

  We are a curious nation. We complain about the overcrowding of our letters columns – but we continue to allow precious column-inches to be taken up by letters selfishly occupied by only one signatory. No wonder our forests are being laid waste to provide writing paper. No wonder carbon dioxide emissions are soaring, as readers light-bonfires with newspapers which they have so little personal motivation to preserve.

  We should perhaps add that this letter would also have been signed by Tessa Tilling MA PhD FRZS, only she wanted to insist on adding a paragraph about animal rights, whereupon Lord Blastwater, who has financial interests in this area, threatened to withdraw, together with some thirty business colleagues. This, we should explain, is a minority paragraph, signed by †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE in protest.

  In the light of this, may we urge? We should certainly hope we may, Or is this fundamental right to be taken away from us, like so many others, by unelected quangos and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels? If we, who between us have so much experience in urging, are not to be allowed to urge, then what hope is there for freedom of urging in this country?

  We therefore call upon the Government. We call upon them daily, but we are never invited in. This is further evidence, if evidence be needed, of the national decline in good manners, We do not expect to be offered lunch, but surely it is not too much to hope for a cup of tea or coffee? It cannot be beyond the wit of man to provide a simple cup of something, together perhaps with cake or biscuits, for 270 tired and hungry letter-writers (or 271, should Renforth Ossett BA MBE surface at the prospect of free refreshments). If the Government should ever take it into its head to call upon us in return, they will find our door open – indeed, all 270 (or 271) of our doors.

  We feel we must at this point sound a note of warning. In our concern for the mass letter-writing market we must not forget the plight of single letter-writers. We should in all fairness make clear that this is a further minority paragraph signed by †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE.

  What nonsense! We personally feel – and this is the vast majority of us writing now – that quite enough concern has been expressed already for so-called ‘single letter-writers’. If they didn’t want to be single letter-writers, why didn’t they make the simple effort to meet other letter-writers with similar outlooks, as the rest of us have, and set up happy, loving letters together? Every view, in our humble opinion, needs at least two authors to cherish it.

  Not in our even more humble opinion.

  Who wrote that last paragraph? Is this †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE breaking ranks once again? It would
be helpful if signatories wishing to make some personal comment would identify themselves.

  Oh, yes, sorry – (Lady) Frances Huffey CVO and (Sir) Rufus Tort QC and for that matter DSO, though I don’t usually mention this in informal contexts.

  May we say how much we agree with Lady Huffey and Sir Rufus Tort? And this expression of support, we are not ashamed to say, does come from †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE. We utterly reject the attempts being made by the big battalions of signatories to suppress the views of minorities amongst us. We can only applaud the sentiments that Lady Huffey and Sir Rufus express about paragraph ten.

  May I say (Blastwater, Chairman, Associated Swill Industries), with respect, through the letterhead, that †Twicester and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell, for all their display of doctorates and orders, are exactly the kind of perpetually cavilling, sententious, hand-wringing whingers who get the rest of us a bad name, or names?

  I for one (D. P Snedding, Deputy-Chairman, Associated Swill Industries) heartily agree with Lord Blastwater.

  I for two – B. B. Brumfit, Director of Public Affairs, Associated Swill Industries – would like to know why (Mrs) Treadwell keeps her marital status so carefully wrapped in brackets? Does she view being married as a source of shame? Why for that matter is (Mr) Treadwell not in evidence? Does he not see eye-to-eye with his wife? I should also be interested to hear the views of †Twicester’s good lady on her husband’s choice of cosignatory.

  May I say – and I speak as one who is Charles G. Strumley MD FRCS – in defence of †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE, that they are being unnecessarily modest when they say that they ‘can only applaud the sentiments’ of Lady Huffey and Sir Rufus. To my personal knowledge they can also dance an elegant foxtrot together, as they demonstrated most notably at the last annual get-together of signatories.

  Some of us (Grace Threadneedle and others) would prefer to leave personalities aside and get back to the urgent questions facing us all in the world today. First and foremost of these is surely whether paragraph nine of this letter should be allowed to stand in its present form.

  If paragraph nine goes (Professor Sir Thirlmere Stagg MA PhD and others) then so do all of us in the Paragraph Nine Support Group!

  What some of us (B. B. Brumfit, and all in Associated Swill Industries) want to know is why nothing has been heard of from †Twicester MA DD and (Mrs) Cynthia Treadwell CBE for several paragraphs now. So far as we can see from here their names are no longer in the list of signatories below. Have they perhaps run off together so as to be entirely alone in thinking?

  We remain,

  Yours, etc.

  CRAWFORD (‘BILL’) STRIVE

  MRS CRAWFORD (‘BUBU’) STRIVE

  CRAWFORD STRIVE II (aged 5)

  VICTORIA CRAWFORD STRIVE (aged 2 years 5½ months)

  GRANDFATHER STRIVE (aged 93)

  THE STRIVES’ NANNY (aged 22)

  MUSWELL TRACTION, a friend and neighbour of the Strives (aged 41, if this is relevant)

  MRS MUSWELL TRACTION (also aged 41, though my birthday in fact falls three months after my husband’s!)

  ‘DISGUSTED’ (age withheld)

  (MRS) ‘DISGUSTED’

  ‘SICKENED’ (aka ‘FORMER SPURS SUPPORTER’)

  ‘OUTRAGED’ (née ‘DOG LOVER’)

  ‘NOT AMUSED’ (LORD)

  ‘MILDLY AMUSED’ (THE HONOURABLE MISS)

  ALL THE LADS AT THE JOLLY WATCHMAKERS

  Etc.

  (1994)

  What the mice foretell

  The ancients tried to unriddle the secrets of the universe by an extraordinary variety of techniques, such as, according to Roget’s Thesaurus, hieromancy and icthyomancy (examining the entrails of animals and fishes), austromancy and crithomancy (studying the winds and the dough of cakes), and myomancy (for those who preferred a little flutter on the mice).

  These barbarous superstitions seem inconceivably remote from us today. Who can imagine any modern statesman resorting to crithomancy, and waiting, before he took action, to see exactly how the cookie crumbled? Or turning in his difficulties to austromancy, and not committing himself until he’d found out which way the wind was blowing?

  In those far-off days they used to resolve their problems by balancing a hatchet (axinomancy), and by going round in circles (gyromancy). Picture President Johnson juggling with weapons in the face of a crisis! Or Mr Wilson gyromancing uncertainly about! The mere idea is enough to make one provide material for geloscopy, which is divination by the mode of laughing.

  Nowadays we do it differently, as I can tell you from personal experience. We journalists are the real augurs and haruspices of the modern world, ready at all hours with prognostications and divinations at popular prices. We don’t use mice or dough, I can tell you, and we shouldn’t so much as glance at the intestines of a holy pig if you laid them out in front of us.

  We rely on much more advanced systems, such as taxi-mancy, shrdlumancy, and freudomancy. Thus, taximancy teaches us that the views of one taxi-driver picked off the rank at random to drive us from the airport are more significant than any systematic survey of opinion. Because, in sending us that particular taxi-driver with that particular set of opinions, the gods, or the Norns, or any rate the taxi-dispatchers, are clearly trying to get some message through to us.

  According to freudomancy, moments of misunderstanding and error offer us flashes of illumination from the Collective Unconscious which are unobtainable through regular channels. Misprints, similarly, are more revealing than something printed correctly; instead of a communication from some mortal author, we are vouchsafed a direct message from Shrdlu, the dark but playful god who lurks at every compositor’s fingertips. And in general, what almost happened, and what one for a moment thought someone was about to say, is more telling than what actually did happen or got said.

  The theory is abstruse; the practice is entirely straightforward. For instance, in a recent book about the situation of the writer in America, among other places, A. Alvarez reports that he woke up as his plane approached New York just in time to hear the cabin loudspeaker say, ‘This is John F. Kennedy.’ In the moments before he realised that this was the new name of Idlewild airport, Mr Alvarez reaped a rich harvest of significant confusion – ‘a sense of being put off-centre in a, macabre way – a sense of the absurd,’ which turned out after touchdown to pervade everything and everybody.

  Mr Alvarez is almost parsimonious in the use he makes of this ripe misunderstanding. If it had happened, to me, I’d have made it support a chapter at least, and I’d have dined out on it every night before publication date into the bargain.

  What happened to Mr Alvarez after getting out of the aircraft I don’t know, because all I’ve read of the book so far is the paragraph about John F. Kennedy, which was quoted in a review. Somehow it seemed quite significant enough on its own. (This is what the ancients called stichomancy, or divination by passages in books.) But here’s how I’d have gone on, if I’d been doing the job:

  ‘“Anything to declare?” asked the Customs man, and for a moment I had the wild feeling that I was expected to say something like “Only that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” I didn’t say it, of course, but it was an eerie experience, and the feeling persisted for a long time afterwards that this sort of lip-service to tradition was almost mandatory in America.

  ‘I’d scarcely got into the arrivals lounge before I was practically hit in the eye by the sight of a slot-machine with the legend “Gun 5 cents.” In fact it said “Gum 5 cents,” and the third leg of the m was simply hidden by the end of somebody’s cigar. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that it was in some way symptomatic of the violence always lurking just below the surface of American life, or that at any rate my reaction told me a great deal about the general jitteriness of people over there.

  ‘What the driver of the airport bus thought about integration or violence or cultural pressures
on the artist I don’t know, because he said nothing at all throughout the trip, which with the best will in the world I couldn’t help feeling suggested some profound fragmentation and failure of communication in American society.

  ‘I walked from the town terminal to the cable office, and it was the little things I noticed most – the hardness and greyness of the pavement, a crumpled newspaper lying in a rubbish-bin, the folded raincoat over my arm. As far as the raincoat went, I felt I could be anywhere – Berlin 1932, Budapest 1956, Stockton-on-Tees 1965.

  ‘I told the man at the cable office that I wanted to send this urgent news dispatch to London. For a moment I thought he was going to misunderstand me and assume I meant not London, England, but London, Ontario. He didn’t; but for that split second I looked the grim old ghost of North American isolationism straight in the eye.

  ‘(Next week: I see myself in the shaving-mirror at the Sherry-Netherland, and think for a moment it’s Theodore Roosevelt.)’

  (1965)

  What the peepers see

  A perpetual state of conflict and unrest exists between my eyes and the printed word. To be blunt, my eyes do not find words congenial co-workers in the business of communcation.

  It’s not the fault of the words, which are patient and long-suffering in the face of constant abuse. It’s my eyes. They won’t settle down to do one job at a time; they’re slapdash; they jump to conclusions; and they’re highly counter-suggestible. Speaking for the management, I can tell you they’re a right pair of layabouts.

  They read MACMILLAN PUTS PARTY’S TRUST IN HOME as MACMILLAN PUT PARTLY TRUSSED IN HOME. With salacious agility they leap five paragraphs of life-enhancing descriptive prose to the erotic events they have miraculously detected at the bottom of the next page.

  They read magazines backwards, jumping unsteadily back through the country notes and the annual reports of holding company holding companies, and give out exhausted long before they reach MIXED MANNING: A CAUTIOUS REASSESSMENT? at the front.