THE PRESS O Bitchery
By JOHN WELLS
971HE Truth That Will Shock You. . . . Now 1 the Time Bomb that has been ticking away for months is about to explode.' Beverley Nichols, the Sunday Express warned us, was gloating over his stop-watch, ready to blow the late Somerset Maugham inside-out. Already blinking and jittery after the recent explosions in the Sunday Times, the public crept anxiously about, gritting its teeth and waiting for the bang. Then, last Sunday, it finally came. But for those who expected a rumbling, earth-shaking roar, wrecking reputations, shattering images, and bringing the faceless perverts down like ripe fruit, it must have come as a disappointment. No more in fact than the bathetic pop of a fairy puffball, filling the air with nostalgic thistledown and tiny barbs of silvery whimsy.
But the coincidence of the publication in the Sunday newspapers of Lord Moran's Diaries and Beverley Nichols's Reminiscences is never- theless interesting, if only for the light they cast on this particular genre of journalism. The en- thusiasm of the general public for unburying the newly dead is perennial, though political and social corpses have proved more fascinating in the past than bodies physically decomposing in the coffin. What seems to be new is the desire to maul or dismember the still-warm cadaver: and these two highly-paid body-snatchers appear to illustrate very clearly the dual aspect of the public's new-found delight in this rather per- verse form of necrophilia.
The first approach, that employed by the Sunday Times, seems, for all its shortcomings, to be essentially praiseworthy. Setting aside the 'controversial' aspects of Lord Moran's position as a doctor and his moral obligations under the Hippocratic oath, the public's fascination with the series seems very similar in origin to the interest shown during the eighteenth century in the work of those anatomists who dismem- bered bodies in search of the seat of the soul, which they eventually believed they had located in the pineal gland. Conscious of a crumbling belief in human greatness, and in the figure of the Great Man in particular, we pick disconso- lately through the ruins of the machine, half hoping to lay the ghost once and for all and to prove that it was just a machine like any other, half hoping to learn something of this mysterious spirit's reactions to physical break- , downs and mechanical shortcomings.
With the Sunday Express there seems little to justify the playful poking of the dead body. We note the stammer, the physical smallness of the man, the apparently crippling grief on the death of Gerald Haxton, and the petulant flinging of cigarettes and glasses into the fireplace at the mere memory of the perfect cocktails he had made and could now make no more. But the world of the Villa Mauresque, the figure of The Master himself, these are scarcely mirrors in which the readers of the Sunday Express are
likely to look to see a reflection of their own human condition. The post-mortem, in fact, sen- sationally advertised and no doubt delicious for the spectators, can do little more than render the corpse ridiculous.
Why, then, should this adaptation of Beverley Nichols's book have been published in the paper? It seems unlikely that it was done simply out of malice for Maugham. The story of the late Lord Beaverbrook offering his field-glasses to guests in the South of France so that they could watch the pathetic wreckage of The Master being wheeled down to the water's edge for its daily paddle is almost certainly apocryphal and it is anyway a little late for the disclosures to do any damage. What seems more likely .is that it is some new move to revolutionise the old Sunday Express. The only indication so far has been the assassination of Ephraim Hardcastle. Instead, a similar column, on page two instead of page three and called 'Town Talk,' has been given to a former Hardcastle man who had been away in another part of the paper. This new exploitation of The Men Who Are Not Entirely As Other Men Are, however—until now held in horror by Express Newspapers—may be an original departure. John Gordon's hatred of homosexuals has burned ever brighter in the light breezes of liberal reform : one rather won- ders how he will feel to have this curious chronicle printed almost literally on his backside.
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