Alan Brien

Everybody, they say, has a book in them, if only the history of their lives up to their graduation from adolescence. I would agree, but with the proviso that these books be openly offered as fiction. When I think what unreliable witnesses my book chums are, especially about each other, I wonder how any trust worthy biographies, let alone autobiographies, ever get to be written. Most of these friends tend to dispute this thesis. But then, they would, wouldn’t they? For if they have not themselves been persuaded against their natural modesty and common sense to write autobiographies, flattered out of their natural caution and canniness to take on huge biographies, they will be reviewing the end-products, or perhaps supplying pre-publication quotes for the ads. At the very least, they are buying, or borrowing, or pretending to have read, the things.

Many is the time I have hauled Quentin Crewe into a restaurant on my back, his wrists crossed under my chin, his voice chattering into one ear or another. As I did so, I often caught a surreal glimpse of myself as some kind of hunter of human game, bearing to the cannibal feast one more main course still alive and thrashing. ‘Q’, I am happy to say, is still alive and stirring things up – not least in this quirky and curious autobiography.’

‘Reads like a novel,’ it says more and more often on the jackets of biographies, memoirs, travellers’ tales, historical studies, collections of essays, volumes of poetry – anything in print, except the novel. And the claim, unlike most of those on blurbs, is frequently true, since non-fiction nowadays contains so much fiction. Examples are everywhere.’

One mid-morning in the mid-Fifties, I came across Ken Tynan on Fleet Street, hurrying towards the Evening Standard offices, then around the corner in Shoe Lane. I tagged along as he explained, between puffs, that there had been an unfortunate misprint in a piece he had written about Orson Welles. Luckily, he had spotted this in the first edition and now was on his way to ensure it was corrected for the rest of the day’s run. While he was inside, I bought the paper and read his article in the pub over the way. I could not see the error that so agitated him. It seemed a brilliant sketch, containing one phrase I particularly admired, envied even. When Ken returned, he stabbed his finger at the page. ‘That’s it! What I wrote was: “Everything that passes through the hands of Mr Welles acquires a touch of poetry.” ’ I could not bring myself to tell him that the compositor’s slip had been, for me, the most penetrating insight in the essay. In the first edition, it had read: ‘Everything that passes through the hands of Mr Welles acquires a touch of perjury.’

Steven Aronson’s Hype, a guide to the latest techniques of mass manipulation, may have less impact on British readers than it has had on American. The word is a recent coinage, but since the days of Dickens’s American Notes or, even earlier, of Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, we have been accustomed to associate the practice of hype with what many Brits still call the Yank. For a century, in boys’ comics, thrillers, magazine humour, music-hall sketches and pre-war films, the American was a loud-mouthed, boastful vulgarian who always claimed that whatever he had must be the biggest, the rarest or the most expensive in the world. The Yank was never satisfied with a fair share, we thought, and I well recall hearing Tommy Trinder complaining on stage during the war that there were only three things wrong with the GIs – they were ‘overpaid, over-sexed, and over here’ – and how I cheered along with the rest of the uniformed audience.–