Mr Pooter buys a computer
Julie Burchill
HUNTING PEOPLE: THIRTY YEARS OF INTERVIEWS WITH THE FAMOUS by Hunter Davies Mainstream, f7.99, pp. 256 In every hack, a heartache, a hero we can never hope to measure up to, but who comes sometimes and sneers over our shoulder when the midnight oil is all but consumed, 'Are you sure? You really want to use "smorgasbord" again? Well, go on . . . but people are laughing at you, you know.' The hero of the hack is not as benign or free with blessings as the hero of a novel is; he's a hardhat, heavy on the kibosh. But we like him that way; he makes us better.
But looking on the light side, a lot of us also have an anti-hero; a hack we know that we will never, never in a million years, or its equivalent intake of alcohol, be as bad as. We cannot look at this mark with- out our jaws dropping in sheer molten awe and our celestial semaphore appealing: 'Oh God, don't make me like that — please! Make me a stringer from Strathclyde, if you must! But please, please, don't make me like that!' My stop-sign, my scarecrow, is Hunter Davies.
He is 58. He has written more than 30 books. This one, subtitled Thirty Years of Interviews with the Famous, takes its pieces from the Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Observer and Independent. Which really does make you think, has talent got anything to do at all with Making It in newspapers? I'm a success; Hunter Davies is a success. I don't want to come over as the little boy swinging on the lamp-post and giggling at the Emperor, but what does this make me?
One can only hope — and actually believe, on the evidence supplied here that journalistic standards have changed quite dramatically for the better over the last 30 years. Surely no one would trust a young Hunter Davies with a major inter- view these days? Someone — probably me — once said that the key to understanding Jeffrey Archer's prose was simply to accept that English must be his second language; it would appear to be Hunter Davies's fourth. The quite singular gracelessness of his writing can be sampled in a few sen- tences from the introduction (which reads much more like an extremely painful induction): Over these last thirty years I have had the possibility, pleasure, nay privilege, of inter- viewing many of the household names of the day. They were often interesting and impor- tant enough to be still remembered today, from Noel Coward to Salman Rushdie. Or later events have retained our interest in them, such as Christy Brown.
Not since last year's wonderful Giles Gor- don autobiography has the ghostly hand of the Grossmiths so hovered over a book; Mr Pooter buys a computer.
His unintentional humour knows no lim- its. In the course of the introduction, he actually asks two of our greatest interview- ing journalists — Zoe Heller and Lynn Barber — what makes them so good. But when they reply that it is a tape recorder, endless transcribing and at least a week's worth of work on each piece, he makes his excuses and leaves: 'I was surprised, in talk- ing to the women interviewers, how long they take to write their pieces.' Try it! is the only possible reaction. But dismissing the hard graft of Heller and Barber, Hunter lets us in on his tricks of the trade: 'I'm a notebook man myself. Always have been.' Tell me more. 'Little red notebooks, the soft sort which fit flat into the pocket.' And what, 0 Great One, do you fill them with? `A few shorthand abbreviations, of my own devising, but mainly it's a mad scribble.' Phew!
Davies divides these pieces by decades. The Sixties section is probably the funniest, a helter-skelter of non-specific fame; because the interviews are chronological, U. Thant sits sandwiched between Paul McCartney and Bill Naughton. Mr Thant, you'll be amazed to hear, was 'not a great one for casual chat', and appeared to be unsportingly preoccupied by the American war in Vietnam. Still, as Davies writes robustly of the UN, 'As long as there's con- fidence in U. Thant, people will meet there.' Vera Lynn couldn't have put it better.
I do feel a certain louche loathing for the likes of Keith Waterhouse, endlessly fidget- ing with words as though they were doilies set out to protect a prized table from stains, but his fogeyism is positively ener- gising when one reads Hunter on Nancy Mitford: 'She doesn't do nothing. She just moons around.' Innocent little full stops seem like furniture he cannot help but blunder into: 'Not stupid,' he says of one subject. 'Hard not to get good stuff out of,' he says of another. This is a fine style for, say, sending telegrams; as writing proper, it just won't do.
Judge for yourself: on Noel Coward `You couldn't be snide about him, could You? He's a living legend,' On Yoko Ono, promoting her tragic 1967 film Bottoms `You ou might think it's ridiculous, but at least the people making it are convinced intel- lectually about what they're doing.' Or how about 'Is Marshall McLuhan a genius? In North America many people think he is.'
Just think, Hunter Davies sat down and read these stinkers! What were the pieces he rejected like, you can't help but wonder. He uses the word 'potty' a lot; a sure sign of a resigned wretch who knows he will never make words sing. And he uses the abbreviation 'etc'. 'Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera' is just about acceptable from the King of Siam; it is not acceptable in grown- up journalism. Occasionally, humanity can- not help but shine through; on a minor note there is the ever-adorable Paul McCartney admitting that, yes, he did question the wisdom of putting his wife in his band: 'I did once say in a row that I could have had Billy Preston on keyboards. It just came out. I said I was sorry about an hour later.' (Also, amusingly, we experi- ence Linda cooking the family a huge egg- and-bacon breakfast as late as 1976: 'We don't get cholesterol!') Then there is Christy Brown. Spotting a newspaper picture of Davies's wife, Mar- garet Forster, and taking a shine to her, he becomes a pen-pal. Eventually they meet, and Brown is left alone with Davies for a while. What did he think of her husband? Miss Forster asks him. 'Naïve,' says Brown. ./W say; if you are as bad a writer as Hunter Davies is, is it really smart to include the brilliance of a man who has to type his words with the toe of one foot?
Hunter Davies has the moustache of a Seventies San Fran homosexual, and the sad eyes of a man who hangs around ice- skating rinks staring mournfully at the little girls. Because he is neither, he accentuates his ordinary-bloke persona to an excruciat- ing extreme, and tries to turn everyone else, from James Baldwin to J. R. R. Tolkien, into an ordinary bloke too. Salman Rushdie becomes 'a bearded spec- cy bloke' wearing 'a boring anorak'. But if these people are as relentlessly ordinary as Davies seeks to make them, why on earth would we want to read about them? Surely not for the sheer pleasure of the prose?
"I blame it all on the kids watching too much Bayeux Tapestry.'
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