Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. Alan Coren
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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.
I thus came to read every comic word that had ever been written. It has left me grey before my time, and I jump at the slightest sound, but it has produced one strange by-product, an effect unsettling yet at the same time curiously thrilling: when I had been convinced for the better part of two decades that every creative instinct within me had shrivelled and died back like a frostbitten rose, a glimmer of the immortal longings of my youth returned. On a chill November evening, as I huddled for warmth among the teetering piles of comedy, a tiny spark of – shall we call it – inspiration no bigger than a dog-end falling through the night flashed deep within my head and, a second later, hope blew upon it, and it glowed.
This book, then, is the result. Whether, given my time again, it would have been wiser to have spent the thirty years in humping barrels, I cannot say. I know only that it would have been a lot easier.
Southgate–San Francisco–Fleet Street
1960–1969
MELVYN BRAGG
Introduction
When I first met Alan, he was heading for the library in the back quad at Wadham College. He was also headed, the word was, for a brilliant academic career. I still have no idea why he stopped to chat with a callow newcomer from the sticks, but I remember vividly the blast of bonhomie, the instant embrace into an unearned familiarity which turned to friendship, and the dazzle of his wit. This was Oxford on stilts.
I was quite alert to accents at the time, but Alan made it quite difficult. He had the breezy metropolitan machine gun manner, but it was already minced into a sort of Oxford ease. Not Upper but no longer WC or even LMC.
He had adopted the linguistic camouflage as immediately as he had put on the correct 1950s tweed jacket, and maybe even cavalry twills, and God help us perhaps a cravat.
Had he re-launched himself as gentleman Pip? Yes. But that was job done. Over the next decades of Punch lunches and the occasional posh dinners, he rested cheerfully in the berth he had made for himself so characteristically quickly, and the machine gun delivery never slowed down.
He carried his literary gifts into the columns and programmes which seduced him from scholarship, but scholarship blazes through his earliest pieces in the 1960s.
In ‘Under the Influence of Literature’, for instance, he describes an awakening. One morning aged thirteen and three-quarters, he wrote to his mother: ‘Please do not be alarmed but I have turned into a big black bug.’ He had read Kafka, was ‘in that miserable No-Man’s-Land between Meccano and Sex’, and was about to change heroes from Captain Marvel and Zonk to Raskolnikov and Werther.
In another early piece in the same period, in a single paragraph mocking the failure of the English to produce plausible Bohemians, he mentions more than Twenty-authors: ‘Our seed beds have never teemed with Rimbauds and Kafkas and D’Annunzios … Our Bohemia is populated by civil servants, Chaucer and Spenser and Milton … by corpulent family men Thackeray and Dickens and Trollope …’
He then launches into the excesses which were to colour some of his best comic writing. ‘Cowper mad among his rabbits, Swinburne, a tiny, fetishistic gnome as far from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as water is from blood …’
Then he turns his guns on Wordsworth. I ducked.
It would have taken at least three years to write that up as a thesis, and another five to produce it as an academic masterwork, but an extraordinary speed of thought was Alan’s great gift; the necessary tortoise pace of serious research would have driven him screaming mad. And he was blessed with what was almost a disease of humour. These two qualities gave him his take on the world.
Later, he begins to wean himself from the literary inheritance he conquered and subsumed so thoroughly. His 1970s pieces take off from a standing start, which can be seen in ‘Let Us Now Phone Famous Men’: Mao Tse-Tung, Kosygin, the Pope, full of Coren fantasy and phonetically convincing accents. Then there’s a little masterpiece on alcohol and the artists which begins: ‘“Shrunk to half its proper size, leathery in consistency and greenish-blue in colour, with bean-sized nodules on its surface.” Yes, readers, I am of course describing Ludwig van Beethoven’s liver.’
As ever, he takes it for granted that his readers are as culturally clued up as he is, and the jokes work the better for that.
I think that what was tugging away at Alan in the 1960s was not so much academic regrets as fictional possibilities. He wanted to write novels. Perhaps he did, and didn’t publish them. He was certainly sufficiently talented, inventive and energetic.
The only reason he didn’t, that I can think of, is that he came to prefer the columns and the radio, which themselves became short fictions, unceasing figments of his imagination.
As a friend and someone to talk to (or more