On Memory

 I mentioned previously that amongst the boxes I uncovered in the attic, I found some letters home from prep school. One of the things I mentioned has been troubling me somewhat: offhandedly I refer to Rosemary Sutcliff. In particular, I write to my parents, in amongst other bits of schoolboy news, "I am going to see Rosemary Sutcliff tomorrow."

Rosemary Sutcliff was a great favourite writer of mine as a child: I loved The Eagle of the Ninth, and was given The Lantern Bearers as a prize. And yet - I have absolutely no memory of going to see Rosemary Sutcliff give a talk, at all. I would have been 10 at the time. I do remember seeing a writer called June Counsel, when I was very young, and her lovely book A Dragon in Summer; I also have vague memories of Val Biro, who was a Sussex resident, coming to visit my day school, and I still have copies of books from both writers with their signatures inside.

I would have thought that seeing Rosemary Sutcliff in person would have been burned onto my memory. What's stranger is that I also have no memory of being disappointed that I couldn't  see her, perhaps through illness, or the event being cancelled. She died in 1992, not long after the date of my letter: perhaps the event was cancelled through illness, or simply old age.

There's no way, of course, of checking, bar visiting the school and searching their archives (if they have any), unless someone else who happened to be at school with me at the time remembers. It remains a mystery, and probably will remain so. In the meantime, it has encouraged me to go back to the books.

Salman Rushdie's KNIFE: review

 Here's my review of Salman Rushdie's KNIFE, in Spectator World.

Diary keeping

Both my mother and brother keep diaries; I could hardly escape doing the same myself, and have done for twenty years. Recently, I've been taking down boxes from the attic in my parents' house, unearthing things from my early childhood: the clockwork musical toys, the ravaged blue elephant, the handkerchiefs with my name embroidered on them. Much of it is still usable: a box of tiddlywinks, for example, which still delights. Even a travel version of Blockbusters (remember that?) can be played (Sample questions: "What VD is a time to send those you love a card?") I almost squealed with delight when my Funday Times club card turned up, though I don't remember at all what being a member of the club entailed. (I seem to recall getting some sort of Filofax, but I may be wrong.)

Amongst all the toys was a bundle of letters, invitations, postcards and tickets. They immediately seem both of another time, and absolutely contemporaneous. Here were the birthday parties of my childhood, the names of the houses and streets redolent of Sussex: Bluebell Cottage, Ashleigh, Leeward Road. We were invited to a lot of parties at the swimming pool. There are many Thelwell ponies on invitations. There are a few letters I sent back from my prep school, delivering small items of interest, to me at any rate ("Did you know that there was a Bantu Kingdom in Africa that flourished in the 18th century?" "The radiator is right behind me, so I am never cold." "We had a horrible pudding today. It was some sort of orangey-lemony-pie.") There is a very glamorous letter from a family friend, written from her seat in first class on a plane ("I am enjoying some champagne.") And also a little notebook, in which I kept my first ever diary, in May 1989, when I was seven years old. 

It's a reporters' notebook, and opening it hit me with such a flash of recognition it was almost disorienting. All at once I remembered the pen I wrote it with: it had many coloured inks, and there was a great deal of satisfication gained in switching from colour to colour. Which I did, switching at almost every word, so that the writing (in careful "joined up" letters) is dizzying to read. I think I thought I was being artistic. To every page I taped a little envelope, in which is a drawing, and just in case there is any doubt about authorship, I have written "Pictures by Philip Womack" on the envelopes. 

The entries are a tiny snapshot of childhood in Sussex in the 1980s: a picnic in the grounds of Chichester Cathedral; throwing stones into the sea; falling off a step and grazing a knee; buying mint creams. I was particularly interested in how long I could hang on the climbing frame we had in the garden, recording it down to the second.  In gymnastics, "We did things with a ball, then we did things with a stick and along peice [sic] of silk." We visit the library, buy comics, go to the bookshop and buy Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger. An early interest in newspapers is apparent: "I hanged from the climbing frame for 164 seconds! Then I read YOUNG TELEGRAPH" (I attempted to reproduce the typeface.) I play "spaceships" and "bakeries" with my brother, build sandcastles on the beach. "Daddy came home and gave us a pound!" I note, excitedly, and then "I got some envelopes!" as excited about them as the money.

I don't remember any of the specific events, although as I write this, little flashes begin to appear; perhaps those days will return to me soon. 

As a small child, I remember being very puzzled about why adults would want to read diaries. I vividly remember Frances Partridge, a member of the Bloomsbury set, publishing hers, and there being stories about them all over the newspapers. Why? I wondered. Why on earth would anyone want to read something as boring as a daily record? Where's the excitement? Where are the pirates? But now, I understand, because diaries are, aside from letters, the most intimate expressions we have of what it feels like to be a person. They are records of period and personality. These days, I'd be happy to read a shopping list, if it came from the 18th century.

I am so glad that I wrote this little journal, and so pleased that we kept it in a box in the attic for over thirty years. It's a reminder that not much has changed about childhood, that those children growing up now will experience the same small delights and upsets.

And if nothing else, it's a window into time past through which both I, and my children, can peer. Your Facebook posts will vanish, your Instagram feeds will disappear. But your diaries: they'll hang around for as long as the paper lasts.

Henry Henry by Allen Bratton

 

My review of Henry Henry by Allen Bratton in The Times Literary Supplement.  There is an erratum in the review: the courtesy title given to Hal is Earl of Hereford, not Hertford. Mea culpa.

On Book Reviewing

For twenty years, I've been reviewing books for the papers. I do keep a list, which I began  in 2008, but I expect that the number of tomes I've written about extends into the high hundreds. I have reviewed books of every ilk: from the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (and yes, I read every single entry, at least once), ed. Daniel Hahn, which was a surprisingly joyful commission, through history books, biographies, travel writing, a book about measurements, fiction and, of course, children's books.

Being at the forefront of the literary world is an exciting thing: I was one of the very first people in the world, for example, to read Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, which I reviewed for the Financial Times. Recently, a copy of Salman Rushdie's Knife, his harrowing memoir about the violent attack he endured at a literary festival in the US, was biked to me on the day its embargo lifted: the sense of excitement as I waited for the courier to arrive was palpable. It can, of course, be depressing: there's many an overlong middle-ranking fourth novel that I would rather not have had to wade through. But overall, it's a task which requires skill and care, and it's also immensely enjoyable.

What's striking is how many names have endured over the past couple of decades: there is a huge amount of literary talent around, and there are many novelists and writers who continue to produce excellent, demanding and thoughtful work. What's also striking is how difficult it is for new names to make a splash: declining book sales and a "winner takes all" model in the publishing industry mean it's ever harder for writers to sustain an economic model, and I have seen talent vanish.

Which brings me to my point: the wages for book reviewing. When I began, in those early 2000s, to receive payment for reviewing, you generally received somewhere between £40 and £300 for a review (dependent on length and publication, of course: your small literary magazine is not going to be able to fork out in the way that a broadsheet is.) 

There were more newspapers, and more literary pages: The Independent on Sunday, for example, had an excellent literary section, as did the Sunday Telegraph. There were opportunities for younger writers to take on the duties of reviewing paperbacks, at, say, £80 a pop. Of course, this activity could never be a main source of income (unless you were lead reviewer for the Sunday Times); you would need to be reviewing about four books a month for the broadsheets to get anything approaching a reasonable salary. But £300 felt like a decent amount for what is usually a week or more's work (and it is work, and it is often demanding and painstaking. Many times I've stayed up till the early hours to finish a volume for a deadline). For comparison: my monthly rent in 2004, for a room in a nice house share in Brixton, was £450.

So what has changed? Well, the number of outlets have reduced. The Independent on Sunday is no more; the Sunday Telegraph lost its culture section. The books pages in most of the broadsheets have shrunk in size, and the commissioning editors look first towards their own staff before they go to freelancers. What hasn't happened is a concomitant rise in online opportunities for paid work: and this is quite simply because people don't click on book reviews online, and the general mass of readers tend to go for peer-review websites like Goodreads, where the reviews are free. This is generally fine, if all you want is a recommendation, but it does have its problems: I remember when the Game of Thrones finale was advertised with a "quote" from a Twitter user, which simply read: "I was like..." followed by three monkey faces, the first with its hands over its eyes, the second with its hands raised, and the third with its hands over its eyes once more. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, Eagleton it was not.

These days, you are still likely to get something between £40 and, at the top end, £350 for a book review, and there are fewer opportunities to do so. The inflation calculator tells me that £300 in 2004 is now worth £577. And yet fees have not kept up with inflation; they have, in some cases, even stayed the same, which means that twenty years later, you're being paid less for doing the same job. A similar room in Brixton will now set you back upwards of £650.

Some might say: what does it matter? Book reviewing is a niche gig in any case, and those who do it are lucky to have their voices heard. (And I have lost count of the amount of times someone has said to me: "but you get to keep the book!" Which is all well and good, when it's one you want. When it isn't, it just goes on the charity pile. In any case, these days, you're more often than not given a pdf.) But in order to get as many voices heard as possible, it should be the case that reviewers are paid more for their time, their expertise and their experience. Newspapers are still making profits, and their reach is ever larger: the internet means that articles can be shared around the world in a way that they never could before. If we want a thriving public sphere, in which critical voices of all stripes are heard, then we need to look at how it can be made economically sustainable by the newspapers.

Otherwise, I wonder what the future of critical writing will look like. Monkey face with hands over eyes, monkey face with hands raised off eyes, monkey face with hands back over eyes.