Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. Alan Coren
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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.
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.