Many hands tore at the Berlin Wall. To a large extent it collapsed from its own weight, but we should acknowledge the shove given by European democrats, Pope John Paul II, the dissidents in the Soviet Union, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr and George Kennan, who defined the policies that contained communism without blowing up the world or in the name of freedom destroying freedom at home. And Gorbachev. I see him around a lot and regret that he never seems to get the acclaim he deserves for being willing to put his country before his party. Americans tend to give most of the credit to Ronald Reagan. In the 1950s I saw first-hand the vengeful witch-hunts against supposed communists and so later recoiled from Reagan’s description of the ‘evil empire’, which it was (and the shadow of repression has hardly vanished). But what haunts me most of all is the naive treacheries that perpetuated the Soviet Union, and with it the danger of a nuclear apocalypse. The best image of how betrayal rots the soul is a shadowy portrait in Jane Bown’s new book, Exposures: Anthony Blunt in 1968, when he was still enjoying protection as the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures.
‘Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.’ Of course, Shakespeare’s Caesar was right about the wretched Cassius and his lean and hungry look. Caesar has been much in my mind reading Robert Harris’s new novel, Lustrum, where he casts Cicero as a Roman hero, but let’s for a moment forget Caesar’s ambition and applaud his choice of words.
Fat! He’d not get away with that today. Let me have men about me that are obese. A man weighing 15 or 16 stone is overweight, obese, portly, corpulent, anything but fat. Once America had more fat people than anywhere else on the planet; now they’ve gone, though in fact behind the nomenclature fat people are multiplying more rapidly than thin. I am reminded of how the Americans dealt with ‘poor’ people. There were a lot of them, too, when I first came to America, but they’ve been going up in status. They became ‘needy’, then ‘underprivileged’, ‘deprived’ or ‘disadvantaged’, and latterly they’ve become members of a ‘lower income group’. As a Jules Feiffer character remarked, he still didn’t have a dime, but he had acquired a fine vocabulary.
Maybe Caesar was right about the geniality of the fat; thin people never attract the adjective ‘jolly’. Certainly, I was enamoured of Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe, who came to a small downtown New York preview of the Lee Daniels movie Precious, opening in the UK in January. She’s 26, playing the role of a 350lb black 16-year-old, pregnant with a second child by her father. If that is not enough, she is cruelly abused by a horrible fat mother who makes her live on greasy leftovers and beats her furiously for wanting to learn to read. It sounded like something I’d go a long way to miss, an ugly white middle-class stereotype of welfare blacks before Obama changed the lens, but I found it an inspiring testimony to the power of aspiration. Even more devastating than a diet of trans-fats is a diet of junk TV and the illiteracy that Precious struggles to overcome. Escaping her mother’s furious veto, she attends an alternative school; that finally makes an invisible woman visible to herself. The image imposed on her by her ghastly parents begins to melt with literacy and opportunity.
Three fears haunt every author. First, we’ll never finish; no book is ever finished anyway, only abandoned. Second, nobody will bother to read it. Third, that if and when anyone does, they will hate it, at least immediately identify a thousand errors, etc. Well, I did finish my autobiography, but I haven’t had to fret a lot about the other two fears. Waterstone’s, Britain’s major book distributor, vanquished those by arranging not to have books in the bookstores. Apparently, they achieved this by installing some monstrous new machinery in their ‘supply chain’. It is called the Hub. It has devoured thousands of books at Waterstone’s Burton-on-Trent distribution centre (i.e. lair) and has been regurgitating them haphazardly as much as a month or more after publication day and all the reviews. I couldn’t think they were picking on me or my publishers, Little, Brown. Waterstone’s have been even-handed in failing to supply a multiplicity of titles in reasonable time. Would they have dared to sacrifice Senator Edward Kennedy to the Hub if he had lived the extra few weeks to see his autobiography (True Compass) in print, or rouse the eloquence of Shirley Williams (Climbing the Bookshelves) or risk dining at the River Café any more if they’d ‘lost’ Ruth Rogers’ new book (River Café Classic Italian Cookbook)? I read in the Financial Times that the chief executive of Penguin, Peter Field, fears that the Hub won’t be tamed until after Christmas.
Mr Gerry Johnson, the boss of Waterstone’s, is the only one around these parts who has no fears. What backlog? he asks. The Bookseller magazine, which reported that there was a backlog on the testimony of innumerable booksellers and authors, has been told Waterstone’s won’t communicate with it any more. Last week Mr Johnson stopped his flagship store in Piccadilly receiving direct from publisher John Murray an emergency 70 copies, to top up a measly five, of Juliet Nicolson’s The Great Silence. Writers and readers must hope the industrious Mr Johnson is devoting energies spared from castigating the press and publishers to wrestling with his Frankenstein’s Monster in the fastnesses of Burton-on-Trent.