DIARY
One way of getting into hard covers is to be thanked in the Acknowledgments for providing literary digs. 'Much of the book was written in the houses of friends,' as Geoffrey Wheatcroft says in his preface to The Randlords: 'the Hon Kieran and Mrs Guinness of Dunlewey, Mr and Mrs Nicho- las Johnston of Pieve di Compito, Mr and Mrs David Leeming of Boxted, and Mr Panagiotis Theodoracopulos of Milton- under-Wychwood.' In his book Networks, Tun Heald housedrops 'Dorothy B. Hughes, who lent me her lovely house in New Mexico where the last stages of the book were completed.' So many authors have used George Melly's Welsh cottage I believe it is regarded as the UK equivalent of Yaddo in upstate New York, an institute which exists expressly to accommodate those with works in progress. At Yaddo writers live in cells, with lunchboxes depo- sited at their doors. Each evening they meet and (ghastly thought) may read out what they have written that day. There is something odd about this. While the National Trust cherishes the homes of Kipling, Carlyle, Ruskin etc, maintaining their desks exactly as if their owners left them a few minutes ago, some living authors will sit anywhere but at their own desks when confronted with the dull grind of actual creation. Penelope Mortimer put an ad in a gardening magazine: 'Woman Writer wishes to be waited on hand and foot for two months' (in order to write, she explained, she had to work like a man, with someone bringing in coffee) and Margaret Drabble once told me that to write her life of Arnold Bennett she took a room which was a long way from all possible distractions, in the Station Hotel, Peter- borough.
Something called the Letter Writing Bureau invited me to lunch. It turned out to be a PR outfit in the pay of the Post Office and the stationery business, run by one Jonathan Wootliff whose claim to fame was that he once won the title Conversationalist of the Year, by talking for 18 hours. He told us the decline in letter-writing had been arrested. Possibly because the Post Office is so inventive about selling stamps, he said, possibly because stationery is now so colourful and attracts the young. He showed us a video in which young people were told 'A letter is forever,' and encouraged to write down their feelings: 'Being in love and not writing a letter is like being hungry and not eating.' A housewife was seen writing a letter to a dishwasher company about the flood in her kitchen. 'I am sending copies of this letter to every Fleet Street editor I know,' she writes, 'which was six at the last count.' Oh dear. If the BBC is going to join in this write-a-letter campaign, as it VALERIE GROVE threatens with a new series, our postman (a Roy Kinnear lookalike) will be grimacing even more. He has quite enough to carry already, not only junk mail but junk books. Only a tiny percentage of one's mail is welcome. Of course I like real letters as much as anyone: long ones from friends abroad, twice a year, perhaps, and amus- ing postcards as often as possible. Who needs more? Wanting more letters is like wanting more phone calls. Perish the thought.
Margot Asquith is addressed by Dr Jowett, Master of Balliol: 'Would you like to have your life written, Margaret?' Mar- got: 'Not much, unless it told the whole truth about me and everyone, and was indiscreet.' In Peregrine Worsthorne's view, voiced on this page, it is the freedom to divulge the sex life that leads almost every new biography to be hailed as `definitive' or a masterpiece. But I note that even Hugo Vickers's apparently unin- hibited life of Beaton, with its liberal plundering of diaries and the loquacious subject safely dead, had some last-minute censorship imposed, as the paragraphs blotted out by Tippex in my proof copy indicate. (Beneath the chalky substance could be descried mostly details of Cecil's prowess as Garbo's lover, and how she taught him gentler ways.) But surely to know all and to include all is a pitfall of contemporary biography. It means that even unremarkable days are remarked, so the reader feels like a drowning man. Biographers forget that biography is an art (perfected by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians), not a test of how much detail a word-processor can process. Selina Hast- ings's forthcoming Nancy Mitford life is on the right lines, with an appropriate respect for the brief but illuminating quotation. Here is a sneak preview. When Nancy had fallen in love with a dashing Free French- man — Peter Rodd, her husband, who has everyone reeling with boredom, is, away she becomes pregnant. She is delighted, but it is an ectopic pregnancy. In the subsequent operation at UCH, a hys- terectomy is performed. Tearfully Nancy reports to Muv that both her ovaries have been removed. 'Both' shrieks Lady Redesdale. 'But I thought one had hun- dreds, like caviar!'
Ahouse is up for sale near us that the Thatchers wouldn't like at all. It is not new, and has no high-tech surveillance. It is an untouched example of Edwardian suburban domestic architecture. It has not been done up or knocked through. The brown paint outside is the giveaway. Inside all woodwork is grained and stippled, the washstands are ornamental, the lavatory seats wooden and the wallpaper floral dinge. Beyond the French windows to the verandah, the garden is a wilderness of elder, ilex and wistaria. The last owner, a water-colourist's widow, died two years ago. I sent Mr Mark Turner to see it at once. Mr Turner is the champion of the suburban semi, 1880-1940, and spends his life photographing untouched interiors be- fore anyone can get at them with white paint or sliding patio doors. He was enrap- tured with this house. 'All that lovely distemper! And the wonderful pre-war Ideal Boiler!' Dunroamin's time seems to have arrived. It is the 20th-century version of Mr Pooter's The Laurels. 'Most people in Britain would rather have a suburban house than any other kind of home,' declared Anne Scott-James in 1977. Each generation loathes the architecture of the preceding era but even those who find the suburbs stultifying have to concede that people do like rooms with doors, sloping roofs, and gardens — even if they are redolent of wax polish and Children's Hour on the wireless, and three-piece suites and Ovaltine, and 'Friday night is Amami night'.
Helene Hanff, the New York author of 84 Charing Cross Road,' tells a fanciful story in her new book about visiting my house. I shall chide her about this if we meet again, and remind her of a much better story. When she was last in London she was as usual on a literary pilgrimage visiting Dickens's house, Keats's house etc. As we happened to be near Hampstead and she had just been seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on television, I asked would she like to see John le Carres house? She certainly would. So I drove into his cres- cent and stopped at his gate, whereupon to my horror the writer himself emerged on his doorstep, wrapping a scarf about his neck. He stared hard at us and we stared back. 'That was him!' I said to Miss Hanff. `Wahl,' she drawled, impressed. 'That was something. They showed me Keats's house — but they never showed me Keats!'
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