Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (3 page)

G:
I read one obituary of him, a not especially kind one by a man who always bore a grudge, that suggested the old man's prose did not achieve the rank of ‘greatness' because he put nothing of himself into his writing – and, at the same time as being annoyed at something negative being said about him, I had to sort of agree with that, at least partly. He was not a seeker after truth in his writing, he was a seeker after laughs. He would also never have dreamed of suggesting he was a major literary figure – the idea would have struck him as laughable. He found the truth a bore, he hated opinions, he distrusted earnestness. His pieces were a flag-wave designed to distract people from the horrors and the tedium of real life and also, in a way, to distract them from looking too closely at him. So you wouldn't really expect him to lay himself bare in there. But then again, reading all his stuff again for this book, I was struck by how much of himself he was including subconsciously: so much of the humour, for example, derives from a sense of impending domestic disaster: something being spilled, a great mess everywhere, things being lost, maps being misread, planes being missed, pipes freezing, children screaming, people being bitten by dogs . . . and you and I both know what a stickler for order and tidiness and planning he was – and how all these sorts of little domestic mishaps in fact drove him round the bend so that he wasted a lot of energy worrying about them. But then in his pieces, for forty-odd years, he was making out like he found it all terribly funny. That's a man's soul informing his writing if ever anything was.

V:
He would have written a great piece about his funeral. It was rich with potential catastrophe – if he'd been there to plan it, the worry would have killed him. But the various strange details all fell into place, and they were perfect. The Cricklewood churchyard that he loved because a ventriloquist is buried there with his puppet. And so is Marie Lloyd – we've got his piece about it somewhere in the 1990s section. The rabbi who didn't mind coming to a churchyard – who advised us, in fact, to ‘drop this prayer, it's a bit God-heavy'. The cantor who sang a mournful Hebrew song, and then came out to Sandi Toksvig. The moment when Uncle Andrew misread the map, looked in the wrong part of the cemetery and said: ‘We've got a disaster on our hands –
they've forgotten to dig a hole.
' It was like an Alan Coren piece being acted out by accident. And it worked: it reflected everything. The sentimentality about Judaism with its gefilte fish balls and anxious tailors . . . and the sentimentality about England's green slopes and church spires . . . with some lovable, fallible, funny human characters in the middle. If we'd only had an Austin Healy with a copy of
Gatsby
and a hamburger on the front seat, it would have ticked every box.

G:
Speaking of ticking boxes, we still have to write the introduction.

V:
We haven't decided which one of us will type and which will pace . . .

G:
We could just leave it as dialogue.

V:
Mightn't that look a bit lazy?

G:
No, no, people will think it was our plan right from the beginning.

V:
But then mightn't it look a bit gimmicky?

G:
And thus in some way unsuitable for the introduction to an anthology of writing by Alan Coren . . .?

V:
True, true.

G:
Remember the introduction he wrote to that anthology of humour in the '80s? It looks like a piece of autobiography – except of course it's all nonsense, not autobiographical at all.

V:
And yet at the same time, in a way, it is. Okay, it's a daft story about a man who dreams of compiling anthologies of Boer operetta lyrics. And who has a preposterous soldier father with a giant tattooed arm. But the basic narrative . . . a young man who yearns to get into publishing . . . whose physical, practical, sceptical father thinks he won't make money from it . . . the son pressing on regardless, travelling abroad . . . returning to England at twenty-two, publishing his books and working on a humorous magazine . . . It is actually Daddy's mini-life story, but with everything transformed into cartoon, like the farm hands becoming scarecrows in
The Wizard Of Oz
.

G:
Do you think perhaps you're over-reading it?

V:
That was a short story which he thought counted as an ‘introduction' – but at least he wrote it out in paragraphs.

G:
We could call ours a ‘foreword'.

V:
Fine. Dialogue it is, and a foreword it shall be.

G:
It's not as if people have forked out twenty pounds to read a piece by us anyway, is it? It's him they want to read.

1
Present Laughter

The introduction to an anthology of modern humour,
by Alan Coren (1982)

N
obody who met my old man ever forgot him. The first thing you saw was the sabre scar across his head. The wound had been stitched up by a
chanteuse
who went in with the first ENSA wave at Salerno, and the only way she could work the needle without passing out was to stay drunk.

His left arm was the size of anyone else's thigh, and it was tattooed in the shape of a cabriole leg. One of his favourite party pieces was where he went out of the room and came back a couple of minutes later as a Regency card table. People still talk about that. His right arm stopped at the elbow: the rest had been left inside the turret of a Tiger tank after the lid came down, somewhere in the Ardennes Forest.

When he came back from the War, he just laughed about it, at first. But then, one night in the winter of 1945, he suddenly said:

‘You're going to have to help me at the brewery, son.'

I said: ‘I'm only seven, Dad.'

It was the first and only time my old man hit me. If he had hit me with the left, I should not be here now; but it was the right he threw, and being short it had neither the range nor the trajectory, but it hurt just the same when the elbow connected.

Later on, he quietened down and asked me what I intended to do with my life if I didn't want to hump barrels.

‘I want to do anthologies, Dad,' I said.

He looked at me hard, with his good eye; the other one is still rolling around near El Alamein, for all I know.

‘What kind of job is that for a man?' he said.

‘I don't think I'm cut out for humping barrels, Dad,' I said.

He spread his arms wide; or, more accurately, one wide, one narrow.

‘It doesn't have to be barrels. There'll be other wars, you could go and leave limbs about.'

I nodded.

‘I thought about that, Dad. I could be a war anthologiser. A war provides wonderful opportunities, collected verses, collected letters, collected journalism, things called
A Soldier's
Garland
with little bits of Shakespeare in. Did you know that Rupert Brooke's “The Soldier” has appeared in no less than one hundred and thirty-eight anthologies, Dad, nearly as often as James Thurber's “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty”?'

He thought about this for a while.

‘Is there money in it?' he said at last.

‘Dear old Dad!' I said. ‘An anthologiser doesn't think about money. He is pursued by a dream. He dreams of making a major contribution to gumming things together. He dreams of becoming a great literary figure like Palgrave or Quiller-Couch.'

‘And how do you go about learning to anthologise, son?'

I smiled, but tolerantly.

‘You can't learn it, Dad. It comes from the heart and the soul. Fifty pounds would help.'

People have asked me, three decades on, in colour supplements, on chat shows, what the major influence on my work has been. I tell them that it wasn't Frank Muir, it wasn't Philip Larkin, it wasn't even Nigel Rees or Gyles Brandreth, important though these have undeniably been: it was the day my old man took his last fifty pounds out of his wooden leg, and set me on my path.

I left school soon after that. There was nothing they could teach me that would not be better learned in the real world: the experience of felt life is what lies at the still centre of all the great anthologies. I shipped aboard a coaler on the Maracaibo rum, and I discovered what a Laskar likes to read in the still watches of the equatorial night. My first anthology, a slim volume and privately circulated, consisted of buttocks snipped from
Health and Efficiency
interlarded with Gujurati limericks and reliable Portsmouth telephone numbers. Juvenilia, perhaps, and afflicted with the sort of critical introduction that I have long since learned always goes unread, but no worse than, say, the annual
Bedside Guardian
.

Two years later, I jumped ship at Dakar, and took up with a Senegalese novelty dancer who had a tin-roofed shack down by the harbour and a brother who worked three days a week as a roach exterminator in the British Council Library. It was perhaps the most idyllic and fruitful period of my life: it was mornings of grilled breadfruit and novelty dancing on the roof overlooking the incredible azure of the Indian Ocean, and afternoons of studying the anthologies her brother would steal from the library, the absence of which, when noticed, he would attribute to the kao-kao beetle which subsisted, he said, entirely upon half-morocco.

I read everything, voraciously: I learned how anthologies worked. I divined the trick of bibliographical attribution whereby the skilled anthologiser credited the original source, rather than the previous anthology from which he himself had worked. I noticed how an expensive thin volume could be turned into a cheap fat volume by amplifying it with long sections of junk that happened to be out of copyright. I made out an invaluable list of titled paupers who could be called upon to endorse the anthologiser's choice with tiny masterpieces of prefatorial cliché, usually beginning: ‘Here, indeed, are infinite riches in a little room,' and ending with a holograph signature.

The idyll could not last: there was a waterfront bar where expatriate anthologisers – they called themselves that, though few among them had ever collated anything more remarkable than privately printed regimental drinking songs, or limited-circulation pamphlets called things like
The Best of the
Old Eastbournian, 1932–1938
– gathered of an evening to drink and argue recondite theories of anthological technique, and one night I had the misfortune to fall foul of a gigantic ex-Harvard quarterback who claimed to be on the point of closing a two-figure deal for his
Treasury of Mormon Prose
.

I shall not distress you with the details. When I woke up the following morning, my youthful good looks were gone, to be rapidly followed by my Senegalese paramour. Two weeks later, I left the infirmary and returned, far older than my twenty-two years, to England.

Britain, in 1960, was not at all as it had been a few scant years before. A new spirit was abroad, a harsher, grittier, more realistic spirit. It was the Age of Anger, and the whole face of English anthology had changed overnight.

Gone were the elegantly produced collections of ethereal lyrics and robust nineteenth-century narrative verse. Gone were the leatherbound volumes of India paper bearing the jewelled fragments of English prose from
A Treatise on the
Astrolabe
to Hillaire Belloc on mowing.

In their place, the new race of angry young anthologisers was churning out paperback collections of bogus radicalese entitled
Whither Commitment?
and
Exercises In Existentialism
and
The Right to Know – Essays on the Obligations of Communicators
in a Negative Environment
. As for the more popular market, such classics as
A Knapsackery of Chuckles
or
A Wordsmith's
Bouquet
had been thrown out in favour of
The Wit and Wisdom
of MacDonald Hobley
and
Dora Gaitskell's Rugger Favourites
.

Ninety per cent of all anthological output was manufactured by the BBC, linked on the one hand to a vaguely similar broadcast, and on the other to a wide range of dangle-dollies and jocular tea-towels.

These were, in consequence, bleak years for me. My entire creative life to this point had been wasted, the art of anthology to which I had dedicated myself was no more. Not that I surrendered lightly: by day, I worked as stevedore, cocktail waiter, pump attendant, steeplejack, male model, by night I pursued my muse, working feverishly and without sleep to produce, in the space of five years,
The Connoisseur's Book of Business Poetry,
The Big Book of Boer Operetta, A Nosegay of Actuarial Prose
, and, perhaps my own favourite,
We Called It Medicine: A Selection of
Middlesex Hospital Correspondence Between the Wars
.

I was thrown out of every publishers in London. It was the same story everywhere, as the 1960s rolled inexorably on and television worked its equally inexorable way deeper and deeper into the culture – I was not a Face. For a new breed of anthologiser was abroad: the personality. Names like Michael Barrett, Jimmy Young, Robert and Sheridan Morley, David Frost, Antonia Fraser, Freddie Trueman, Des O'Connor, Henry Cooper and the rest, all represented the New School of English Anthology; they were household words who held the publishing world in enviable thrall.

It was upon this inescapable realisation that I finally threw in the creative sponge. I had reached that nadir which all anthologisers have at some time or another plumbed, when you feel you can never skim through a book again. Worse, my run of bearable jobs had come to an end with the installation of an automatic car-wash, and I had nowhere to turn but to a weekly humorous magazine, where I was employed to manufacture lengths of material which could be inserted in between pages of advertising in order to display them to advantage. It was, as can readily, I think, be imagined, lonely, grim and unrewarding work, relieved only by my access to a comprehensive library of published humour and the constant stream of new humorous books which paused briefly in the office of the Literary Editor before being wheeled around the corner to a Fleet Street bookseller prepared to exchange them for folding money.