PERSONAL COLUMN

The right of reply

KINGSLEY AMIS

An important concomitant, if not a necessary condition, of a free press is the protection of the individual against it. Redress for defa- mation is provided by the law; the less seri- ous offence of misrepresentation carries no penalty, but is supposedly covered by the in- dividual's right of reply, normally in the form of a letter in the correspondence col- umns of the journal concerned.

My main concern here is with this right of reply. A couple of years ago a friend who had seen a show I had missed told me

that some remarks about me he thought might be libellous had been passed on BBC 2.

When approached, the BBC turned down my

request at first, explaining that it was not their policy to divulge 'confidential' scripts. Now we all know that Bac 2's audience is small, but to describe material already broad- cast on it as 'confidential' is surely carrying humility too far. Anyway, before the Corp- oration would cough up a script I had to wave a barrister at them, only to find that the offending passage was merely dishonest, witless and inaccurate, not defamatory enough to matter. It would have saved the

BBC some sweat, and me a lot of sweat and getting on for a hundred quid, if they had res-

ponded to my request like civilised beings, The misrepresentation matter, affecting papers, is more complicated. The first basic point is that press reporting in this country is more often (let us say) imperfectly ac- curate than hot. For instance, only two national papers, the Express and the Sun, have ever reported what I said in interviews accurately and in full, or near enough in full. This general incapacity, or disinclination, to - tell the truth first time round would matter less than it does if it were not followed up by a plucky unreadiness to admit error—to print. corrections, in fact, let alone apologies.

Bernard Levin and I had a rough time in 1968 trying to get several allegedly reputable journals to print our rejoinders to attacks on us—including a few flat lies—over the affair of the Yevtushenko candidature for the Ox- ford poetry chair. The editors respectively of the New Statesman and Sunday Times just refused to publish us in full, imposing cuts of substantial points. A third editor closed his

correspondence, reopened it to slip in a fur- ther attack, and instantly closed it again : the editor of the SPECTATOR, alas, or fairly alas, since his office now has a new occupant.

All three organs, however, had at least given us some sort of hearing. On two occa- sions the Sunday Telegraph has firmly de- nied me the right to reply to its misrepresen- tations. The first of these was in 1964, when one of the people who then worked for its 'Mandrake' feature came to interview me. It turned out that I knew him, remembered him well as an unusually thick student in my classes at the University College of Swansea. (My erstwhile colleagues must forgive me if I observe that that is saying something.) How, I wondered--at first—had such a person got his present job?

It was soon clear that he had already written most of his piece. 'This man Lucky Jim,' he said, eye on notebook, 'always fall- ing out of windows and getting his finger stuck in the woodwork while lecturing on English literature—he isn't really you, is he?'

`No,' I said, 'and while we're about it he doesn't fall out of any windows, and the finger-sticking incident comes in the film, not the book, and it's history, not literature.

'Oh yes,' I think he said.

Some days later the telephone rang. (It was incidentally the only movable object in the entire dwelling, everything else having been packed into a removal van that was throb- bing in the roadway outside.) A girlish voice read the interview over to me : a piece of common courtesy, this, but, in fairness to my interviewer, normally omitted. "This man Lucky Jim," I was told, "always falling out of windows and getting his finger stuck in the woodwork while lecturing on history [aha lb he isn't really me," said Amis.'

There was much more of a kindred absurd- ity, but I could not then and there rewrite the piece. 'At least scrub the bit about the finger in the woodwork,' I said; 'change it to ... oh, setting fire to his bed-sheets.'

On the Sunday I read (in part) that the man who was always falling out of windows and setting fire to his bed-sheets while lecturing on history wasn't really me. No, indeed. I wrote a letter to the editor, saying (in part) that a man who always lectured an history from a blazing bed was undoubtedly a splendid character, but one I had not thought to in- clude in any of my works or even conversa- tions. The editor refused to print my letter, on the grounds that I had passed the piece.

Had I? Had I passed the hot-lecture detail? I got bored and gave up—which they bank on. A couple of weeks ago, Mandrake came

back into my life. He was a young lady this time, wanting to know what I thought of the film of my novel, Take a Girl Like You. I told her. The report of the interview, which this time was not read over to me, appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 10 January, and was unsatisfactory in ways sufficiently indi- cated by the letter of correction I addressed to the editor, as follows :

To his advice to writers dealing with the film industry (Take the money and run'), Ernest Hemingway might have added a word to anybody at all approached for a press inter- view, along the lines of, 'Refuse point-blank without a written guarantee that they'll let you see a proof and accept your corrections.'

Anyway, laziness or optimism led me to neglect this precaution when confronted with 'Mandrake's girl colleague' the other day, with the result that, out of a half-hour inter- view, the Hemingway quote was one of the - few correctly-reported points in her (or Man- drake's) piece last Sunday.

I pass over its illiteracy—'Ostensibly Amis didn't like [the film];' can I have given her the impression that I really loved it after all? And its inaccuracy—it is the hero, Standish, not his friend Ormerod, who teaches classics in the book and graphics in the film; etc. And its incoherence—more or less throughout.

But I must protest at the omission of a vital qualification in my remarks about film producers. Twice or three times I said in effect, as emphatically as I know how, and that's fairly emphatic, 'But you must also say that there are shining exceptions to the general sad rule. From the Boulting Brothers, Messrs Launder and Gilliat and others I've never had anything but the utmost consider- ation and politeness. Mind you put that in.'

This, I suppose, wasn't newsworthy, mere- ly true and important, so it got left out. Would you please put it back in the record, to clear me of what would otherwise be a fair charge of gross ingratitude and dis- courtesy?

Later that week, I was called to the tele- phone to speak to somebody called Bennett (I think) on the Sunday Telegraph. He asked politely enough, to be allowed to print just the final two paragraphs of my letter. I sum- marise what followed.

'What's wrong with the first three?' 'They're libellous.'

'No they're not.'

'Well, they're damaging.'

'Yes, they're meant to be that.'

'Anyway, the editor won't print them. May we publish the last two?'

`No. Either you print the whole letter or I publish it elsewhere.'

'Thank you,' he said, still politely, and rang off.

Guess whose letter failed to appear in the Sunday Telegraph of 17 January.

It is true that those last two paragraphs do set out my main grouse. But to print them suggests they describe an isolated lapse only, and robs me of my further and, in one way, more important point that the omission was merely the most glaring example of a per- vading incompetence that would disfigure the meanest amateur rag. (Perhaps it was the second part of the first paragraph that was the most unacceptable.) If you are too stupid or lazy to report me correctly, you are literally adding insult to injury if you fail to publish my correction— in full. And then you wonder, if you ever wonder about anything, why a large and growing number of people refuse to be in- terviewed anywhere.