Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (2 page)

V:
You
are
really miserable.

G:
So then he went off to Oxford. And there was that first morning when he came downstairs in his digs and the landlady had cooked bacon and eggs . . .

V:
He always called it ‘egg and bacon' . . .

G:
. . . she says with Talmudic precision, of the kind which crumbled in 1957 when he took the first forkful. And that was the beginning of the end, really, for all things Jewish.

V:
He was always sentimental about Jews though.

G:
He was always sentimental about everything. Like America.

V:
He loved Yale and Berkeley . . . Do you think he ever actually wanted to be a don, or was he just so happy as a student that he wanted it to go on longer? Going to Oxford transformed his life.

G:
Yes, but people know about all that. Not necessarily about him, but about that generation of 1950s grammar-school boys – the Alan Bennetts, the Melvyn Braggs, the Dennis Potters – that brief window between two educational Dark Ages, when a certain kind of lower-middle-class boy got a chance, went to Oxford and had a crack at the Establishment. That's the irony of the antagonism between
Punch
and
Private Eye
later in the '60s . . .

V:
Exactly.
Private Eye
tried to mock
Punch
for being fuddy-duddy and Establishment, but
Punch
was run by the working-class boys, the grammar-school boys, the revolutionaries, while
Private Eye
was a bunch of right-wing, privileged public-school boys, sons of diplomats, who looked down on the staff of
Punch
because they thought they were common. And, in Daddy's case, Jewish. In public,
Private Eye
pilloried them for being Establishment, in private Barry Fantoni was telling everyone: ‘Alan Coren looks and sounds like a cab driver.'

G:
Which is why cab drivers liked him so much.

V:
The Establishment is one of the things Daddy was sentimental about. He was so proud to feel part of it. And of Englishness – Keats, Shakespeare, churches, rolling hills, striding through the New Forest in a tweed cap, slashing at the ferns with a shooting stick. He actually enjoyed horseriding. And he was strangely good at it. Despite his grandfather having come over from Poland, he really did feel part of all that.

G:
His proudest moment was meeting the Queen. Closely followed by meeting Princess Margaret. Closely followed by meeting Andrew and Fergie. He loved a royal. Almost as much as he loved a punctual postman.

V:
But we were talking about America. He was so dazzled by it. All those hamburgers and giant steaks after the austerity of '50s Britain. And better cars. And the literature, all those garish 1960s paperbacks of
Augie March
and
On The Road
. He started sending pieces to
Punch
from there, and they offered him a job so he chucked in the academic plans, came home and went to work in Fleet Street. El Vino's,
Punch
lunches, Toby Club dinners, fellow writers, the old
Punch
table, the line of editors going back to 1841, he loved it all.

G:
It was strange reading back through those first pieces from the 1960s. The fledgling him. You can see what was coming in a piece like ‘It Tolls For Thee', a domestic comedy about trying to get a phone installed. But the writing is politically engaged, he was still taking things seriously – like racism in ‘Through A Glass, Darkly' and the bombing of North Vietnam in ‘The House That Jack Built'. He flips them around and makes his own sorts of jokes, but they developed out of a genuine concern for civil rights and social issues of the time – in a way that he left behind by the 1970s, when it started to be all about the jokes.

V:
He hadn't decided not to be a novelist yet. If he ever decided that. But he hadn't even decided not to be a serious writer. He wasn't completely a humorist, in the '60s.

G:
He was already doing the Hemingway parodies though. ‘This Thing With The Lions', that was his first one.

V:
How many Hemingway parodies are we going to put in the book, by the way?

G:
Any fewer than thirty would be unrepresentative. But it might skew things a bit.

V:
He must have written a Hemingway parody a year.

G:
Let's have a couple. The book will be full of parodies anyway – Chaucer, Coleridge, Kafka, Conan Doyle, Melville, a lot of Melville – they're some of the most enduring pieces. They work in an anthology. All jokes need a context, and the context of the parodies is, to some extent, eternal. They're not dependent on immediate social or political or cultural context. Humorous writing doesn't last as long as serious – look at Shakespeare's comedies compared to the tragedies. Or
Carry On
films compared to . . . well, almost anything. Lots of Daddy's pieces are still very funny, but the parodies all are. The passage of time doesn't do the same damage to a literary pastiche as it does to a joke about the 1964 general election. We need to use the stuff which still works. He was so proud to be compared to James Thurber and S.J. Perelman – but who reads Thurber and Perelman now?

V:
That's all very well, but I see you've put two
Winnie the
Pooh
parodies on the list. Do we need two?

G:
But which would you remove – ‘The Hell At Pooh Corner', or ‘The Pooh Also Rises'?

V:
Isn't ‘The Pooh Also Rises' a double parody of Pooh
and
Hemingway? We don't want to make his frame of reference seem limited.

G:
But we must include it! That one's part of a complex triptych of adult/child fictional parodies. Lose ‘The Pooh Also Rises' and we lose ‘Five Go Off To Elsinore'. We lose ‘The Gollies Karamazov'.

V:
Speaking of political relevance, what are we going to do about Idi Amin?

G:
Yes. Idi Amin. That was always going to be a problem for so many reasons. The Idi Amin parodies don't operate in a timeless context like the literary ones. The Idi Amin of now isn't the one he was writing about. Daddy said himself that he wouldn't have written those pieces later, once it turned out that Amin was such a monster. In 1974, he just thought he was writing about someone funny.

V:
In a funny African voice. That's the bigger problem. Even if Amin hadn't turned out to be a monster, those pieces wouldn't read the same now. ‘Wot a great boom de telegram are!' ‘Dis international dipperlomacy sho' payin' off!' Monster or not, if you were writing a column about Robert Mugabe, you wouldn't do him like that.

G:
Tempting though it would be.

V:
But I don't want anyone to think he was racist. He wasn't racist. He went on civil rights marches in America in 1961. And his Idi Amin . . . he's not a ‘generic African', he's a fully fledged character: childish, megalomaniac, charming, violent, funny. With this comedy voice – ‘Ugandan' sent up no more squeamishly than if it were Cockney – but people might not read it like that.

G:
Maybe we shouldn't put it in.

V:
It would definitely be safer not to. But
The Bulletins Of Idi
Amin
was his best-selling book ever. It sold a million copies. They made a record of it. It made him famous. It's because of the Amin books that
The Sunday Times
called him ‘The funniest writer in Britain today.' Richard Ingrams ran a spoof in
Private Eye
with Daddy's picture at the top. Do you remember what that was called? ‘The Bulletins of Yiddy Amin', of course. They must have cracked open the champagne when they thought of that. Anyway, the point is, those pieces make us nervous and they might give people the wrong impression of him, but I don't think we can just censor them out.

G:
Hang on. Think about
Team America
, one of the best adult comedy films of modern times; a serious, anarchic, liberal and right-thinking movie. And think of the hilarious pastiche of Kim Jong-Il. He is a very decent parallel with Idi Amin, except even more powerful and even more sinister – and when Trey Parker and Matt Stone make an entire film based on his dictatorship, the centrepiece of it is his hilarious Korean accent. When Jong-Il bursts into tears and sings ‘I'm So Ronery', it's pure Alan Coren. People might have been a bit squeamish about Idi Amin in the 1980s and '90s, but you only have to look at
South Park
– also created by Parker and Stone – to see that we have come back into a world where everything's fair game, and exaggerated ethnic mimicry doesn't make you a racist. I'd hate to think that future generations of
South Park
viewers would have to watch edited versions, from which Chef has been removed because not all black men sound like Isaac Hayes.

V:
Maybe we could put Idi Amin in an appendix?

G:
Okay, put those pieces in an appendix, at the end of the 1970s. With a perforated line down the page so people can tear them out if they want, and leave them in the shop.

V:
Are we going to put anything in from the Arthur Westerns? I know they were children's books, but I think I might love them more than anything else he ever wrote.

G:
I love them too. Originally Arthur was called Giles. Daddy told me the stories at bedtime and then wrote them down, and it was massively exciting, like my own version of the
Alice in Wonderland
creation myth.

V:
Except without the naughty photographs.

G:
But we shouldn't put them in. The books are brilliant, but they're for children. If you're compiling The Essential T.S. Eliot, you don't include
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
.

V:
Okay, no Arthur the Kid. No Luke P. Lazarus, no cricket-playing pigs, no Seminole Gap. So will the book just have the magazine and newspaper pieces?

G:
Just? What do you mean ‘just'? He published twenty-six books of them. Collectively, they're twice the length of Proust. And that's only the pieces he put in books.

V:
But would there be room for something that wasn't written at all? Extracts from
The News Quiz
, maybe? He became the twelfth editor of
Punch
in 1977 and that was the start of his golden age. By the 1980s he had a TV career, he was doing chat shows. Maybe we should include some transcripts of those?

G:
And the commentaries from
Television Scrabble
? His
Through
the Keyhole
work? Look, he was a famous person, he was a sort of celebrity, plenty of people will know him only from
Call My Bluff
. But that's not what this book is about. It's about what will endure of his writing. Let's just have the writing.

V:
I wish he had written a novel. Actually, what I really wish is that he had written an autobiography. He had that great idea for writing one based on all the cars he ever drove . . . it would have been so good.

G:
The 1990s would have been the time for that sort of writing. He left
Punch
in '88 and all of that Fleet Street romance – cricket in the corridor, drunken lunches, contributors carving their names in the
Punch
table, Sheridan Morley, Miles Kington, Basil Boothroyd, Bill Tidy, Bywater, royal visitors – it all came to an end. It had got too businesslike, he was summoned to too many meetings with people who wore grey suits and talked about revenue streams. He edited
The
Listener
for a year and then he came home to write.

V:
He wrote the
Times
column twice a week, and talked a lot about novels and the autobiography without actually doing them.

G:
I tried to persuade him. If he was that good at writing sentences, I thought he would write a very good novel. But he didn't think the two things necessarily went together – he always said that his old pal Jeffrey Archer could write novels but he couldn't write sentences.

V:
I think that was just an excuse. He was never going to get much work done once he came home. Part of the problem was that he had such a happy marriage. He famously never went out for drinks after
The News Quiz
because he was always in such a hurry to get back home to her and eat veal schnitzel together in front of the TV. Once he was working from home, he got all involved with the domestic routine. He always had an ear cocked for Mummy's key in the door. He was much happier helping her unload Waitrose bags than sitting at the computer trying to write.

G:
And the writing was all about Cricklewood. That strange Cricklewood of his own invention, which didn't really exist. Except for the domestic frustrations – gas men turning up late, junk mail, plants dying when he went on holiday, tiles falling off the roof, ‘narmean' – that was all a comic version of his very genuine obsessions.

V:
And he did it brilliantly. The American influence, the youthful inspiration he took from civil rights and political stories, disappeared from the writing, and it became a very British sort of comedy – small things, silly things. Herons, hearing aids, hosepipe bans, talking parrots, QPR fans arguing at cheese counters. He was a master of all that.

G:
It's funny to use a word like ‘master' in the context of a writer whose work was so ostensibly superficial, so entirely motivated by humour. It's usually the boring ones who get called that. As a writer you want to move people, or at best ‘affect' them in some way, and for him the easiest way, the only way, was to make them laugh. He got hundreds and hundreds of letters from
Times
readers, far more, I'm sure, than any of the ‘serious' writers. They loved him, and they needed to tell him that.

V:
I think they loved him because his comedy was so warm, it reflected a charming and optimistic and kindly vision of the world. And it was ambitious, even if it was only a thousand words long, or half an hour on the radio. It's easy to get a laugh from being nasty or from being philistine, but he didn't do that. He never hid the fact that he was clever, and he never got a cheap laugh at someone's expense – if it was at someone's expense, it was a fair target and cleverly done – but he was always funny, and that's really hard for twenty minutes, never mind a lifetime.