DIARY
Ihave spent the past week on one of those author's promotion tours of America which, some outsiders delude themselves, flatter the ego. In reality, unless you are Jeffrey Archer or Jackie Collins, the ex- perience is pretty crushing. All day and every day, one is meeting a procession of people who have never heard of you or read your book, but have entered into a desperate conspiracy with the publisher to trade publicity for the filling of air time. One begins to understand how politicians work, ignoring any question put in front of them, merely giving a reply to the question they wanted to be asked. It is a lonely pilgrimage, because one has no social intercourse lasting longer than 12 minutes with any one human being for nine days, or nine weeks if one is that much in demand. I blush to remember all those cracks about the difficulty of finding a copy of any book by Edward Heath unsigned by the great yachtsman. All authors are taught in the cradle is that they should sign every book they can get their hands on. Once auto- graphed, the shop cannot send them back. The process becomes obsessional, so that a writer newly returned from a promotion tour can be readily recognised in church, absent-mindedly signing hymn books.
Doing the same sort of trip in Canada last year, I heard many lurid tales from the publishers' local agents about the eccentri- cities of other British authors on the circuit. A middle-aged thriller writer, said the girl in Vancouver, arrived having sel- dom left home before. He gazed in be- wilderment around the airport lobby, then burst into tears. 'I don't think I like it here,' he said gently. 'I think I want to go home.' A well-known comic novelist, the Ottawa man claimed, drove his escort mad by demanding that he should be found a woman in every town he visited, and not the kind he would have to pay for. 'Let me tell you,' said the agent grimly, 'there are a finite number of women in Canada willing to sleep with Jerome K. Jerome' (I shall spare the Spectator another expensive libel writ). The agent's burden was compound- ed by the author's demand that white roses should be sent from each city to his wife in England, to banish guilt. There was a seedy little argument about who should pay for these, which the publishers lost.
At the age of 21, I was lucky enough to be given a fellowship by one of the host of American foundations that provide quite large sums of money to enable foreigners to study the United States. This program- me was exceptionally well conducted, com- pelling the participants to spend most of their time in America's least familiar cor- ners: touring the South, studying politics in
MAX HASTINGS
the Mid-West, doing fortnight or month- long secondments to radio stations in South Dakota, great corporations in Ohio, Senate offices in Washington. Nobody who went through an experience like that for a year — as many foreigners do, thanks to transatlantic generosity — has much ex- cuse later in life to plead ignorance of the United States or its institutions. It seems a serious omission that we, the Europeans, do nothing seriously comparable the other way around. It remains a fundamental problem of America's relations with the outside world that so few even of her rulers know anything much about us, beyond our past and the way to Harrods. Rhodes scholarships operate only in the academic world. It would seem much to Europe's advantage to transport across the Atlantic an annual quota of young corporate execu- tives, journalists and embryo politicians on sabbatical, to spend a few months on the sort of extended programmes Americans run for us in their country. Sceptics will answer that, as a society,' we lack loose money of the kind available in such vast sums to US foundations. But surely we could make a start, perhaps with a little help from some generous Anglophile such as Mr Getty.
In the past decade, everybody from the Prime Minister downwards has got into the habit of telling us how much we owe our Victorian forefathers, and what an admir- able place Britain would be if we readopted their standards. This, of course, is rubbish. Such writers as Correlli Barnett, in The Decline of British Power, pointed out years ago that it was the Victorians, by taming our society, who bred out of the British people most of the ruthless, freebooting, buccaneering inventive anim- al qualities that had made them great. On aeroplanes around America last week, I was reading Boys Together, John Chan- , dos's fascinating study of English public schools between 1800 and 1864, which drives this message home in the most scholarly fashion. If the unreformed public schools of the early 19th century were often brutish and cruel, they also encour- aged a remarkable measure of independ- ence of thought and behaviour in their inmates. The reformed public schools of Victorian England restored order, brought to an end the frightful physical confronta- tions between masters and boys of the early period, only at the cost of imposing a deadly, generally anti-intellectual unform- ity. Arnold, Chandos gratifyingly shows, was in large measure a fraud, and his achievements at Rugby were very limited. The frightful brand of Christianity he encouraged is evidenced by a letter from one of his boys to his parents, on hearing that they were financially ruined
Rugby, 9 April, 1831. My Dear Papa, after reading your letter, 1 could not but grieve for the calamity so distressing to yourself and Mama, but the thought struck me im- mediately, that it was the work of the Lord. Therefore let us hush our repinings.
The spirit of narrow conformity as the highest good, bred into so many public schoolboys from that day to this, remains a major cause of the failure of middle-class leadership and initiative in the country now. I find it fascinating to look back upon the boys selected for office in my own schooldays. Without exception, they have since sunk without trace. Their only merit was a willingness to play by the rules. The schoolboys of the early 19th century, who fought tooth and nail with gamekeepers who interrupted their poaching expedi- tions, and treated rules and athletes and schoolmasters with open or tacit contempt unless they had merited respect, may have been uncivilised, but they knew far more about surviving, and winning. The Arnold vision produced a century of Englishmen conditioned to remove their hats before hitting a lady.
To me, as to most authors, it seems implausible that anybody dumb enough to watch or listen to chat shows on which authors appear should buy books. In the good old days, writers just wrote. Can one imagine Trollope on a publishers' publicity tour? Yes, actually, one can. He would have been terribly good at it.
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