So why shouldn’t she issue a dance work-out video? One thing to be said for Barbie is that she always kept her figure. Obviously there is a slight danger that if you adhered to Barbie’s rigorous hamstring exercises you might end up with your feet (like hers) permanently pointed in a tip-toe – which means that unless you wear the right high heels, you forever topple forwards and bang your bonce. But otherwise Barbie possesses precisely the same qualities as the other supermodels, whose exercise videos are bestsellers. She is plastic, perfect, self-absorbed, and her hair comes ready-lacquered. However, she is also very, very small; so you can derive a certain comfort from the thought that Richard Gere wouldn’t glance at her twice (unless he crunched her underfoot by mistake).
Whether I shall buy Dance Work-Out With Barbie depends on my next fortnightly visit to the ‘Body Sculpt’ class, led by ‘Geri’ at the local gym. A young woman whose abductor muscles are strung so tightly that they are visibly teetering on the edge of a breakdown, Geri is beginning to annoy me. She is Australian, white-blonde, long-legged and deep-tanned, with a face like Rosanna Arquette. She wears skimpy Lycra ensembles in purple and lime green with large interesting peep-holes cut from the sides, just to show that in places where the rest of us have grey-white crêpey stuff (which cries aloud for elasticated containment, ‘Pants! Give us pants!’), she has taut brown skin, and that’s all. I am beginning to hate the body sculpt class. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall-to-wall mirror, lumbering out of step, and I think, ‘I don’t have to do this, Woodrow Wyatt doesn’t do this.’ Which shows to what levels of mental desiccation an envy of somebody’s lime-green peep-holes can plunge you.
Barbie’s work-out is for five-year-olds, of course. But so, in a way, is the body sculpt class. In fact, few experiences in adult life so readily evoke the wretched emotions of the infants’ playground as to be led in a mindless game of mimicry by a tyrannical bimbo shouting above the music, ‘Do this! Now do that! Back to this, again! Four of these! Two and two! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg!’ Noticeably, there is no camaraderie among Geri’s brutalized troupe – just as there is none when you are five years old – so you can’t heckle ‘Make your mind up, woman!’ and expect to get a laugh and a breather. Under Geri’s tutelage, the goody-goodies get all the steps right, the others do their earnest best, while I, the only no-hoper, clap my hands at the wrong moments and pray privately that the bell will soon ring for Two-Times Tables or Finger-Painting.
I wish Barbie success with her video. Children don’t need it, obviously, but it will be good for the rest of us to face facts. See this dolly? This is what you want to look like. This is what Geri looks like. But in any other context she’d look very, very stupid. Apparently, in the video, Barbie doesn’t do much of the actual dancing; someone called Kim takes over. Meanwhile Barbie presumably has a lie-down, phones her analyst, and then smokes a minuscule cigarette from a tiny box. Honestly, if this is a role-model for today’s children, I think we have little to fear.
It is a well-established fact (not acknowledged enough) that in journalism there are only eleven basic ideas. The reason journalists over the age of twenty-five get cynical and start to fall over in public houses is that in their cradles they have been cursed with a particular kind of limited intelligence. They are bright people, but a Bad Fairy has ensured that they are bright enough only to discover the eleven basic ideas for themselves. What they are not bright enough to notice is that everything they do has been done before. Then one day they realize – to the dismay of the Really Good Fairy who gave them the brains – that they have run out of ideas. Disillusioned, they are obliged to stand back and watch as other, younger people – the fairy-dust still sparkling on their shoulders – start to discover the eleven ideas all over again.
New ideas are, therefore, pretty exciting things within journalism, and I can’t remember the last time anybody had one. But as an example of how desperate everybody is, let us take the example of the word ‘Bratpack’. Within minutes of its coining, this term had been picked up and applied to just about everybody – movie directors, teenage actors, Manhattan writers – before finally coming to rest in the Loose Ends studio in Broadcasting House. That was just the beginning. The next day somebody said, ‘Yeah, but how about ‘‘Ratpack’’ as a term for the media journalists who write about (and occasionally join) the ‘‘Bratpack’’?’ Brilliant, as Basil Fawlty might say, Brilliant. The richness of imagination was of such quality that even the originators themselves seemed impressed.
So I thought I’d join in, get a share of the action, start an entirely original (if a bit derivative) genus of nomenclature. We all want to make our mark, and this seems a simple enough method of doing it.
My first thought was that one could refer to all clever French writers – de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus – as the ‘Baccalauréat-pack’. What do you think? By the same token Indians, like Jhabvala, Narayan and Desai, might be called the ‘Ghatpack’ (not to be confused with the American tough-guy detective grouping ‘Gatpack’). On a more serious note, writers publishing their work secretly in totalitarian states might be called, simply, the ‘Samizdatpack’. Smartipants writers might be termed the ‘Eclatpack’, while successful, well-heeled NW3-based novel-a-year writers could rejoice in any of the following: ‘Cravatpack’, ‘VATpack’, or, well, ‘Fatpack’. This only leaves the blockbuster writers, who, I think, can be pretty neatly summed up in the term ‘Tatpack’.
So there you are. A complete new terminology. Please watch out for any appearance of these terms, for which copyright application is already in the post.
On Sunday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old unpublished poet named Clive was mournfully twiddling a pencil at his special poetry-composing desk, huddled in a greatcoat, when the telephone rang. He paused before answering it, feeling sorry for himself. ‘Nothing rhymes with telephone,’ he said, his face puckering uncontrollably; ‘in fact, why do I bother?’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he croaked.
It was his mother. She sounded agitated. Clive, alarmed, snapped his pencil in half, and then looked at it, aghast.
‘Clive, I’m worried,’ she said. ‘Have you read today’s Sunday Times?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then you don’t know! Oh, that I should have to break such news to my own son! Clive, it says here that a professor in America – is Kentucky still in America? I expect so – has established from studying a thousand important twentieth-century dead people that poets are by far the most at-risk group for depression, paranoia and suicide!’
‘Yes?’ Clive shrugged. ‘So what?’
‘So you never told me that! You said, ‘‘Mum, I want to be a poet,’’ and I let you! You were so sweet, with those big brown eyes, Clive, and you said, ‘‘If I can’t be a poet, Mum, I’ll kill myself.’’ And now I discover you’ve chosen the very profession in which the risk is greatest! You tricked me, Clive!’
‘You’re hysterical.’
‘Who is this Sylvia Plath he mentions? Is she a friend of yours? What about W.H. Auden? Is he making you depressed, too? Give up this poetry madness, my son, before it is too late!’
Clive spent the rest of the day indoors. Like Jean Cocteau, he knew that poetry was indispensable, although indispensable to what exactly, he didn’t feel qualified to say. He was deeply offended by the sweeping accusation of poet-paranoia, yet didn’t dare go out to buy the newspaper, for fear he would find an immense placard outside the shop, screaming ‘Poets Are Loonies! Official!’ So instead he wearily copied out some of his old verses – in his best wiggly handwriting, on lined paper – and made packages to send to Marxism Today and The Economist, choosing ‘Lines on the Wedding of Prince Andrew to Lady Sarah Ferguson (revised)’ and ‘Why Is This Black Dog Following Me Around? – An Allegory’. He didn’t know whether these magazines printed poetry, though he somehow felt sure they used to. Last week his submissions to The Listener and Punch had both been re
turned with just the bald, scribbled legend, ‘Not known at this address’. Clive had taken these harsh rebuffs very much to heart.
Suddenly, at about six o’clock, the phone rang again. It was his mother. ‘Clive. I’ve been looking at this article, and you’ve got to tell me something. Were you gloomy by the time you were thirteen?’
‘Gloomy?’
‘Just answer the question.’
‘Well, yes. I suppose I’ve always been …’
‘So it’s not the job that makes you depressed? It’s because you’re sensitive, or high-minded or something, that you chose this particular job in the first place?’
‘But poetry isn’t a job, Mum, more a result of a struggle in the poet’s mind between something he wants to express and the medium in which he intends to express it.’
There was a pause.
‘Why do you always talk like that, Clive? Do you think Albert Einstein talked to his mother like that? No, he didn’t. And why? Because he wasn’t a wimp of a poet, depressed all the time!’ She hung up.
Clive wondered whether it was worth phoning back, to make the point that the lives of poets and scientific pioneers were not strictly comparable. He might mention, too, that being an unpublished (and therefore failed) poet was about twenty times more life-endangering than being (say) W.H. Auden, who rarely contended with stinging letters from Caravan and Trailer (‘I read your poems with interest, Mr Auden, but I can’t imagine why you sent them’). But he decided not to bother, and immediately cheered up. He would write an epic poem about rejection letters, simply for his own amusement. To say that writers are generally depressed, he reflected with satisfaction, is on a par with saying that Kentucky professors tell people precisely what they know already.
I don’t know what a reservoir dog is. I mean, I know that a new heist-movie called Reservoir Dogs has just opened, which is where the expression comes from; but after that my information runs out. Evidently the film is rather nasty but brilliant, is set in a warehouse after a failed robbery, and has a great central performance from Harvey Keitel. But curiously there are no dogs. And there is an infamous torture scene, and lots of blood, and fantastic suspense about which of the six conspirators tipped off the police. Yet the canine input, as such, is small. In short, then, nobody should buy a ticket under the illusion that Reservoir Dogs represents the relaunch of the animal picture. If the organizers of this week’s Cruft’s have bought it as a treat for the last day of the show, they should reconsider.
I raise this matter not just because I am irredeemably literal-minded, but because when the director of the film appeared on Moving Pictures (BBC2) he seemed to be saying that actually he didn’t know what the title meant either. He just liked it, and when producers had frowned and tut-tutted, he had fobbed them off with a fancy answer about French gangland argot, which like prize mutts they had fallen for. Quentin Tarantino is his name, and this is his first film. He seemed young and over-excited, and was evidently a stranger to the benefits of personal grooming, but to say that he was wised up to the movie business would be like saying Edward Scissorhands was sharp. He knew perfectly well that a title like Reservoir Dogs raises images in people’s minds, but no awkward questions. Also, that the moment it enters common parlance (‘Seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’), it tucks itself into a nice safe corner of the memory where semantics does not intrude.
Obscure titles have one great advantage, of course: they flatter the punters. This explains why so many up-market book titles take allusions from other writers, or invoke the names of famous intellectuals. A little while ago there was a spate of titles so obviously following in the footsteps (or possibly claw-prints) of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, that I began to suspect a directive had gone out from publishers, with the promise of a bag of nuts for the best entry: Balzac’s Horse, Schrödinger’s Cat, Foucault’s Pendulum, Aubrey’s Raven, Kafka’s Dick. I remember vowing at the time that if I were ever to write a novel, I would hitch my skateboard to the bandwagon and plump for Einstein’s Tick, or Savonarola’s Bum, or Darwin’s Teapot, and hang the consequences. It wouldn’t matter that the book didn’t fit the title, because obviously the allusion is so clever it doesn’t have to. And if pushed, like the director of Reservoir Dogs, you could just make something up (‘Darwin’s teapot? Well, obviously, it stands for bone-china fragility in a tough survivalist world’).
Mainly, however, you would rely on the fact that somewhere in the back of the collective mind there are philosophical things such as Occam’s Razor, which sound fantastically difficult and all-encompassing and seriously paradoxical, and just right for a modern book. In the end, by the way, I pretty well settled on Heidegger’s Bactrian for my own novel. It’s a title that suggests all sorts of things, including two handy humps of water for emergencies. Occam’s Wash-Mitt I will preserve for another occasion. And just to cover all the angles, I will give my book the full title of Heidegger’s Bactrian: Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Meanwhile it is slightly worrying to realize how unthinkingly all titles are assimilated in one’s mind. No sooner have you heard of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross than it becomes simply something to get your tongue round, not to ask damn-fool questions about. Recently I met a man who had seen Pygmalion at the National Theatre and who clearly had no idea where the title came from, but had not let this trouble him for an instant. Fair enough. Not everyone carries a Larousse Classical Encyclopedia in their coat pocket. As far as he was concerned, Pygmalion was the name of a famous play by George Bernard Shaw; why did it have to mean anything? Indeed, I just wish I’d said it was French gangland argot, or something, to see how far I would get.
Of course, it was probably just a silly little administrative oversight, but I nevertheless yowled with agony when I realized I hadn’t been invited to this year’s Booker Prize. ‘Will you be going to the dinner?’ my nice literary holiday companions had asked, as we lay beside our swimming-pool in Italy, catching up on our Ian McEwans. ‘Me?’ I said carelessly. ‘To the Booker Prize? On Tuesday 16 October at the Guildhall at 6.15 (drinks in the Old Library)? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Haven’t really given it much thought.’
I don’t suppose anyone was fooled by this rather obvious dissimulation. When I got home from holiday, I was so desperate to find out whether I had received an invitation that I screeched the car to a halt outside the house (leaving it blocking a bus-lane) and rushed inside to ransack every item of post that had arrived in my absence. The cats, who had not seen me for three weeks, looked distinctly pained as I paced up and down, distractedly shuffling envelopes and shouting four-letter words. But when at last I admitted defeat, and lay stunned on a heap of litter, they came and sat on my chest, and discreetly looked the other way.
Now, I know what you are asking. Why the fuss? It’s something I can’t explain. But if it is anything to do with pride, why did I phone the Booker Trust three days before the dinner and beg to be admitted? Their kind suggestion was that I could most certainly come to the Guildhall, but that unfortunately I might have to eat my meal in a different room from everyone else (the ‘parlour’) and watch the proceedings on a monitor. Sounds all right, I thought, I can live with that. Just so long as they don’t single me out in any other way – like stamping ‘ONE DRINK ONLY’ on my forehead, or shouting ‘You! Out!’ if I attempted to strike up a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge in the toilets.
In the event, however, I didn’t spend much time in the ‘parlour’, because a nice lady came along just after I had completed my first course and said that I could join the main event. ‘Does it matter that I’ve eaten something?’ I asked anxiously. It was quite disconcerting, actually, to be picked out for this honour, and conducted at a brisk pace from the rather cheerless parlour (which reminded me of being in a classroom at eight o’clock in the evening) to the glitz and hubbub of the grown-ups’ dinner. Did I feel proud and exhilarated as we strode along? No; strangely, I was too desperate and anxious to feel either of these thin
gs. In fact, what kept coming into my head was an intensely paranoid recollection of an old Nazi trick I had seen in umpteen prisoner-of-war films. Perhaps the Booker people were only telling me I had been released from the parlour, so that – just as I broke into a run – they could shoot me in the back and use me as an example to others. ‘Nobody,’ they could say afterwards, ‘invites herself to the Booker Prize and gets away with it.’
About a month ago, Alan Coren wrote a column on this page about the loss of his novel. Perhaps I should just phone him, but on the other hand I feel I am too distant a relative to intrude on the grief. The thing is, he said he had been writing this novel on the quiet, had fetched up 20,000 words of it, and then lost the whole damn lot when his computer in France was nicked. As it is well attested that a writer cannot possibly reconstruct the thing from memory, his novel-writing days were thus officially over, and it was no great tragedy. He was taking it surprisingly well.
Well, obviously one’s chin wobbled a bit. A tear fell into one’s Common Sense breakfast food. The man was so brave. The traditional lost manuscript (of which the lost hard disk is the modern equivalent) is a highly touching motif for anyone who has ever attempted a sustained piece of fiction. Our words are our children, you know. Remember the despair of Eilert Lovborg in Hedda Gabler when he realized he had thoughtlessly abandoned his infant manuscript in a whorehouse? How the words ‘child murder’ came up, and in his remorse he shuffled off into the dark Norwegian night with a revolver? I pictured the two gruff French burglars, both played by Arthur Mullard, breaking into Mr Coren’s gaff and shining big rubber torches about. ‘Vous êtes coming wiv us,’ they said in deep voices, alighting on the computer. ‘Non, non,’ piped the novel, its eyes round with panic, ‘Papa! Papa!’ ‘Har, har,’ they laughed, ‘Votre papa habeets en Cricklywood! Il est miles away.’ And then they threw a black sack over its head before … well, I can’t go on.