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       Present Laughter

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

      Nobody 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