More thoughts on randomness

Six

In his book Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says ‘All my life I have suffered the conflict between my love of literature and poetry and my profound allergy to most teachers of literature and “critics”.'

The man has sound instincts, you see, not to mention a greater capacity than most of us for detecting bullshit.

Seven

Taleb makes the point that modern behavioural science demonstrates that our cognitive apparatus exerts far less influence over our actions than does our emotional machinery. He adds that this is a circumstance which we need to be more aware of, if only for our own protection.

In few areas of life is this problem more obvious than in the world of writing, where it is almost invariably the case that a writer will make her decisions on the basis of emotion rather than on a calm assessment of the facts. Among writers, hope, naivety, and blind optimism reign supreme.

The writing world is absolutely teeming with people who are filled with an alarming ambition to be rich, famous, and admired as a ‘leading writer of our time.’ (Quite why and how they have acquired this burning ambition is difficult to say, but it doubtless has something to do with the fact that (a) they are trusting souls who tend to believe what they are told, and (b) they have been told lots of things by teachers of Eng. Lit., who, it is well known, firmly believe that the world is flat, that the curve on the horizon is an optical illusion caused by your new glasses, and that the moon is made of green cheese. Cheddar, actually. The result of being taught by such people is normally a complete failure of the rational processes. Equivalent to an amputation of same.)

If our would-be writers were clear thinkers, they would take a hard look at the facts and conclude that their chances of success as a writer, on the scale which they envisage, are somewhat similar to the likelihood of their being kicked to death by a donkey on their next trip to the seaside. Success is remotely possible, in other words, but not very likely.

But ambitious young (and old) writers don’t assess the situation rationally, do they? As you and I know full well (in some cases from painful personal experience). No, all our ambitious young writers plough on regardless, wasting endless hours, expending vast amounts of emotional and intellectual energy, and not a little money, getting nowhere fast.

A writer who doesn’t think clearly is a writer who is going to get into a whole heap of trouble, and sooner rather than later.

Eight

Taleb is quite taken with the Greek philosopher Solon (known as the lawmaker of Athens, died 559 BC).

Solon makes the point that a success which is delivered by Lady Luck can also be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). Once again, publishing and writing are two areas in which this is often demonstrated. A writer who has an early success, typically on the basis of an autobiographical novel, may subsequently have absolutely no real idea as to how that success was achieved, and may well struggle to repeat it.

If you want examples of such problems, writ large, consider the lives of Thomas Heggen and Ross Lockridge. Both of these men had massive successes with early novels, Mr Roberts and Raintree County respectively, and both had difficulty with going anywhere after that. Both men committed suicide. Their lives and deaths have been studied in some detail in John Leggett's Ross and Tom, and make sobering reading for anyone who is working on a novel. Perhaps, come to think of it, compulsory reading.

Conversely, good things which come with little assistance from luck are more resistant to randomness. So it pays to learn your trade. For instance, James Siegel, about whom I was less than enthusiastic yesterday, has at least this virtue: he has learnt his trade. He knows how he did it. Siegel could no doubt go on producing books like Derailed for as long as he can be bothered. In fact he could produce them for longer than he can be bothered, because the trend among successful writers these days is to sub-contract the tedious business of actually writing the book. Once you have a brand name, such as James Patterson, Lawrence Sanders, or V.C. Andrews, any skilled professional can produce another of the same, working to a template known as a ‘bible’.

I note that, in commenting on Fooled by Randomness (having first read the whole thing), I am still only on page 12. But you and I may both weary of more. We shall see.

James Siegel: Derailed

From time to time in this blog, I may well have expressed a preference for fiction of the commercial variety rather than the literary. And I am certainly not going to change that view. I do have to make plain, however, that there are limits. Or at any rate there are constraints. In other words, I don’t like my commercial fiction to be too damned commercial for its own good. A case in point is Derailed, a thriller by James Siegel.

Siegel is an interesting character. He is vice chairman and senior executive creative director of the advertising agency BBDO in New York, and seems to write at weekends and when commuting. In that respect he strongly resembles James Patterson, a thriller writer who wrote several books in his spare time while he was still chairman of J. Walter Thompson, which is yet another advertising agency.

In a recent interview, Siegel tells us that he is now forty-plus, and that he has been writing since his youth. As a young man he wrote a couple of novels which never made it into print, so when he hit forty he decided to have another go. When he had completed his new book, Epitaph, he approached Sara Ann Freed at Mysterious Press, and asked her to read it. (Sara used to publish my own detective novels when she was at Walker, years ago. I once showed her round the city of Bath.) I imagine that Siegel told Sara what his job was, and she, realising that he was not short of intelligence and writing skills, agreed to read the book. Having read it, she recommended a good agent and he landed a two-book contract.

So, we have an author who has been writing (i.e. practising his skills) for well over twenty years, and a writer who is quite smart enough to do his research. Research, that is, on how to bolt together a commercial novel. There is quite a lot of information available for those who take the trouble to burrow for it. Plus, of course, you can read successful books for yourself, and analyse what factors they have in common – in much the same way, I imagine, as an advertising man looks at a competitor’s campaign and works out what made it sell soap.

Now to Derailed. The plot concerns an advertising executive, a married man with a child, who commutes into New York. One morning he sees an absolutely fabulous-looking woman on the train, gets into conversation with her, and begins an affair. When they go to a hotel to have sex, a bad guy bursts in, rapes the woman, steals our hero’s cash, and departs. Later, he blackmails our hero for every penny he has. Things get worse from then on.

It has to be admitted that the structure of Derailed is clever, up to a point, the characterisation tolerably sound, and the story moves at a fierce pace. Siegel has done his homework: he has studied the structure of modern thrillers, worked out that sudden surprises and unexpected plot twists are big plus points, and has included the necessary number of same. And my guess is that Siegel has had more than one conversation with his fellow advertising executive, James Patterson, about how to tell a tale. The 53 chapters average about 5 or 6 pages each, which is very Pattersonesque.

What then, is the problem? Why, in short, do I find Derailed so unsatisfactory?

Well, let me go back a bit for younger readers. In the distant mists of time, when people actually went to the theatre, and authors wrote plays which actually got produced, there were several well-tested formulae for a popular success. The three-act structure was then the preferred arrangement for a play, and one pattern for a box-office hit was as follows: in act one, get your hero up a tree; in act two, throw rocks at him; and in act three, get him out of the tree, and preferably married to the girl by the time the curtain comes down.

So far so good. Siegel follows this formula to the letter. He gets his hero into trouble, and then bombards him with rocks of formidable size and weight from all angles. The protagonist finds himself in every sort and kind of trouble: he is being blackmailed, his wife hates him, his daughter is dying, the police keep knocking on his door, the man he recruits to help him ends up dead, and so on.

But Siegel has forgotten one important factor. In getting your hero into trouble, it is not wise to have him act like a complete idiot. Otherwise, why the hell should anyone care? And the first and most major problem with Derailed is that the hero acts like a complete arsehole. He is presented to us as an intelligent and successful man, with a basically sound marriage. But he embarks on an affair after little more than a friendly smile. The guy is a shit, a fool, and a clown. So when he gets beaten up and finds himself having to sit there and watch while his girlfriend is raped it is hard to feel much sympathy for him.

That’s the first problem. There are others. There’s the fact that the surprises and plot twists are not really very surprising (at least not to someone like me who has plotted a few of his own). Then there’s credibility: lots of problems there. Just by way of example, would a couple wanting to have illicit sex really go to such a sleazy hotel? There are many more comfortable places to go, and our hero could certainly afford one. Neither do I believe that it’s quite as easy to adopt a new identity as Siegel would have us believe – not in the present-day United States. And the whole story-within-a-story framework of the book is totally unconvincing if you stop to think about it for one moment.

So, there we are. Derailed is entirely typical of the kind of slick, ruthlessly professional commercial fiction which publishers just love. They have orgasms over this kind of thing. In London, Derailed was advertised on the underground, and probably got the full publicity treatment in other respects as well.

And the result? Well, on Amazon.co.uk there are three five-star reviews, so Derailed obviously found and pleased its audience. But its audience, if I may say so without sounding too condescending, is probably young, somewhat naïve and inexperienced, and relatively undemanding in what they require from a thriller over and above a page-turning impulse.

Such readers are not like me. I am old, cynical, bitter, twisted, awkward, difficult, fussy, and generally hard to please. In a word, grumpy. But I am ever optimistic, and perhaps next week will bring something about which I can be genuinely enthusiastic.

Foreign Affairs: Erotic Travel Tales

I don't know about you, but I get a lot of emails with very dubious headings. 'Lebsian (sic) wh_rz (sic) suk (sic) kokx (sic)' and stuff like that. I never read them, of course. Well, hardly ever. And if I never visit the sites they link to. Or if I do it is strictly in the interests of research, because my dedication knows no bounds.

Anyway, amidst all the usual rubbish in my inbox I found a message from one Jibby Collins, headed 'Book release: Mitzi Szereto's hot new anthology "Foreign Affairs: Erotic Travel Tales".' Ever alert (on your behalf) to interesting developments in the book world, I followed this up.

Turns out that Mitzi Szereto is a very active lady. She has written about a dozen books all told, and is one of those up-front, available-for-interview erotic writers; not like some we could mention, who lurk permanently behind a pseudonym. She also photographs rather well. Not, of course, that I would ever be guilty of making a sexist comment of that nature, but I just thought you ought to know.

Mitzi has both written her own stuff and edited anthologies of other writers' work. As an author she seems to be best known for Erotic Fairy Tales, which is a collection of reworked versions of familiar stories. So Cinderella's Prince turns out to be a shoe-fetishist, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I have doubts about that fairy godmother too. (In English pantomimes, the Dame is always played by a bloke in drag, and the Principal Boy is a girl. The main requirement for the part is that the actress should have absolutely wonderful legs. I remember once -- No, sorry, got distracted there. It's writing about sex books that does it.)

Mitzi also writes as M.S. Valentine, under which name she has produced a variety of books such as The Governess, which is described thus: 'Lovely Miss Hunnicut eagerly embarks upon a career as a governess, hoping to escape the memories of her broken engagement. Little does she know that Crawleigh Manor is far from the respectable household it appears to be. Mr Crawleigh, in particular, devotes himself to Miss Hunnicut's thorough defiling.' The beast. Well you wouldn't want to read that book, obviously, but it's the sort of thing you need to know about in order to avoid making embarrassing faux pas. And somebody is certainly keen on The Governess. On the day that I write this, a dealer is offering a used copy of the first edition on Amazon.co.uk for £60. No, I don't understand it either. Perhaps there is a whole gang of Mitzi groupies who are collecting her early stuff.

But back to Foreign Affairs: Erotic Travel Tales, which is the basis of this post. It is the third instalment of Mitzi's travel tales series and features the work of both best-selling novelists and new arrivals, though I must confess that none of the names are familiar to me so I can't tell you which is which. The publisher, Cleis Press of San Francisco, claims that an earlier book in the series, Erotic Travel Tales 2, is the first collection of erotica to feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Now who could that be, I wonder.

Cleis Press, by the way, seems to have been going for 25 years or so and publishes some books with a very definite literary flavour. Coming soon, for instance, are the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. But the vast majority of the books on the list are about sex. Well, that's fair enough, but nobody is going to get rich that way. My belief is that books about sex do not sell nearly as well as people think. There's too much of the real thing around.

Henry Porter: A Spy's Life

It seems that I am reading the thrillers of Henry Porter in reverse order of publication: so I began with Empire State, his third, which I mentioned on 23 July, and I have just finished A Spy's Life (number 2). On the evidence so far it will do me no harm at all the read the first of Porter's books, Remembrance Day.

A Spy's Life strikes me as being a very professional piece of work. A little too long, of course, but most books are nowadays. The first half works better than the second. And some of the dialogue is not as expert as reviewers would have you believe: at times the characters deliver a political speech rather than engage in a realistic conversation. These, however, are minor flaws in an excellent book for the beach or plane.

This is, of course, commercial fiction, so the outcome is never in doubt. The hero triumphs, finds himself a good woman, and defeats the forces of darkness. But I doubt whether, on the beach or plane, you would want anything else, would you? The author is intelligent, thoughtful, and has taken the trouble to inform himself about the workings of the UK's intelligence services -- not to mention those of other nations as well.

In the nature of things, thrillers probably appeal more to male readers than female. But then you knew that already. As for the plot -- well, it's a thriller about spying. That's all you need to know.

Comparisons have no doubt been made with Le Carre, Robert Harris, and others of that ilk. But this guy doesn't need comparisons. He can stand up on his own, thank you very much.

Random thoughts on randomness

Here, as promised, are some random thoughts prompted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, Fooled by Randomness. Said thoughts come in no particular order, but they relate, loosely speaking, to books and publishing.

One

A reviewer of Taleb's book points out that 'we view the world through the lens of survivorship bias -- we tend to consider only the few winners and not the many losers in a particular endeavour.' Well quite. And in few areas is this more the case than in relation to writing books in general, and fiction in particular.

Suppose you are a young man with a passion for cars. You want to make a career in the motor trade. Two options: you can either become a greasy-handed mechanic, or a suit-and-tie salesman. Either way, unless you are a complete idiot, you have an excellent chance of getting a job of some sort. Turn up on time, work reasonably hard, keep your eyes and ears open, and you will make some progress. You will at least earn a living.

Is this true of a young person with a passion for writing books? Hell no. First, you have to write a book, which is likely to take you a year of your spare time. Then you have to try to interest an agent or a publisher. Any idea of the odds against that? Enormous, is the answer.

But let's suppose that you succeed in getting published. What is the most likely outcome? It is that you will be allowed to publish a couple of books, that no one will take much notice, and that your publisher will then dump you, and you will have nowhere else to go. End of 'career'.

Does any wannabe writer ever understand these simple facts? Well, maybe, and if they do then you and I will never hear about them, because they will go off and do something sensible, like breeding budgerigars or making quilts. But even I -- and goodness knows I am not a high-profile person -- even I am regularly approached by ambitious writers who seem to think that I can make them rich and famous.

These people tend to have a number of crystal-clear characteristics. First, they are rabidly ambitious. Second, they are convinced that they have more talent 'than quite a few of the people being published today', and they say so. And third, they exhibit no awareness whatever of the statistics relating to would-be writers, published books, and the proportion of published books which actually make any money or achieve any degree of recognition for their authors.

It is not a sin or a crime to be young, inexperienced, ignorant, and hopeful. But this combination, in relation to writing, does make you peculiarly vulnerable. And I get nervous on behalf of divine innocents when I see their vulnerability. It will end in tears, I say to myself. And it frequently does.

Two

Which follows on somewhat from one. Publish, say, a hundred novels a year, written to a decent professional standard, and the simple laws of probability dictate that some of them are going to do better than others, either in terms of critical assessment or sales, or both. Publish a hundred novels a year for five years, and it is quite likely that one of them will get some word-of-mouth recommendation which builds the thing into a reasonable seller if not a smash hit.

Will you, as the publisher, ascribe this phenomenon (as it should properly be ascribed) to sheer luck -- the working of the law of averages? No, of course not. You will ascribe it to your own brilliance as a publisher. ('I always knew that book would be a hit, Daphne,' says Nigel, the Managing Director of that well-known firm Clapham & Irons. Which is why Nigel paid the author a £500 advance, and limited its publicity to a page in his catalogue.)

Saying that a book which takes off unexpectedly is the result of chance is not to deny that the author possesses talent and has exercised considerable skill in writing the book. But all our hundred books a year are of professional standard -- I said that at the beginning, remember? And, in all probability, every one of those hundred authors was convinced that her book would catch on once it got into print.

After a book has achieved a certain momentum, of course, repeating the success is not too difficult. Nigel, the MD of Clapham & Irons, will probably be prepared to invest in a decent advertising budget, and, provided the author can go on turning out professional stuff, a career of sorts can be built. It's not really all that difficult, though author may get weary of repeating the same book with small but significant alterations. But then I dare say that dentists get a bit bored with filling teeth.

Three

And another thing about random events. They do not occur at evenly spaced intervals. Many types of cancer, for instance, can be thought of as a random event, in that we do not know what causes them. So, in a city of a hundred streets, you do not get one case of cancer every ten streets. What you get is 1 case in Street 5, 3 cases in Street 22, four in Street 23, then nothing until Street 55, when you get 4 cases, and so on. Random.

How does this relate to publishing? It relates in this way. In any given centre of publishing, say New York or London or Paris, there may well be fifteen firms which each publish a hundred professionally written and competent novels a year. And what happens is that surprise hits are not distributed evenly between those fifteen firms. Surprise hits occur at random.

So, in London last year, our friends at Clapham & Irons did not have just one novel which suddenly took off unexpectedly -- they had ten of them! Wow!

'Daphne,' remarks the MD Nigel modestly, 'people say that I have a flair for this business. And they are absolutely right.'

Bollocks. Total, complete and absolute bollocks. But then, since there is so much of that substance floating around in publishing anyway, hardly anyone notices.

Four

The 2004 edition of Fooled by Randomness is substantially revised and enlarged over the original 2001 edition. Taleb tells us that, in general, publishing a second and revised edition is a smart move. He claims (and he is more likely to know than you or I) that books have bubble dynamics. This means that a new edition of an existing non-fiction book is 'far more likely to break through the critical point than a new one.'

I can't say that Taleb produces the figures to prove it, but the idea is at least worth thinking about. And I know of at least one case in point. I have a friend who wrote a non-fiction book which was published by an academic publishing company back in the 1980s. When the first edition was sold out, the rights in the book were sold to a mainstream trade publisher, who issued it with revisions and a slightly altered title. Publisher 2 didn't do all that well with it, but when the rights reverted again the book was sold for a third time. Publisher 3 has issued a succession of versions, with slightly differing titles, new covers and revised and updated content. The book is currently doing very nicely indeed, and both author and publisher intend to keep it alive pretty much for ever.

Five

In his acknowledgements, Taleb thanks the Hollywood agent Jeff Berg 'for his insights on the wild type of uncertainty that prevails in the media business.' You can say that again. Remember William Goldman's dictum about making movies: 'No one knows anything.'

In a later book, Goldman points out (a) that the film Titanic has been one of the most gigantic box-office successes of all time, and (b) that, even on the night before the film went on release, the producer had absolutely no idea that it would be any sort of a hit at all.

More randomness later. Maybe. Depending on random events in the life of this blog.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Fooled by Randomness

A while back (24 March) I mentioned that I thought that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness would be worth reading. And I can now confirm that it definitely is. Published by Texere, the book first appeared in 2001, and a revised and expanded second edition was issued earlier this year.

What is the book about? Well, the subtitle is ‘The hidden role of chance in life and in the markets.’ This tells you quite a lot. Incidentally, the emphasis in the subtitle has changed from the first edition: now ‘life’ comes first, and ‘the markets’ second, whereas previously the position was reversed. This reflects, I think, the author’s realisation that he has much to say which is of interest to the general reader as well as to the financial world.

When the first edition appeared, reviewers generally saw Fooled by Randomness as a book about investment management. And Taleb himself makes the point that, when trying to summarise what his book is about, journalists tend to make mistakes. So I am going to be cautious in what I say here. But I think it is fair to say that Taleb does argue that much of the apparent success which is enjoyed by investment-fund managers is due not so much to skill on their part as to pure chance. Or luck, if you prefer.

I have no difficulty in accepting this argument. I am, after all, old enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of such alleged masters of the financial universe as Bernie Cornfeld, Jim Slater, and Michael Milken. Such people, Taleb argues, very naturally perceive any success which they enjoy as being the result of their own amazing intelligence, which is, of course, far superior to that of their competitors. But sooner or later they discover, the hard way, that they are not quite as clever as they thought.

This thesis has many implications, not least for those of us who are trying to build up a pension fund, or have inherited a lump sum which we wish to invest safely. For that reason alone, Fooled by Randomness would be worth reading. But there is far more to it than that. And, as I suspected back in March, much of what Taleb has to say is highly relevant to the worlds of writing and publishing. Before too long, I hope, I will be posting a number of ‘random thoughts on randomness’ in the context of books and publishing.

English as she is tort and spoke by the English

The Times for Wednesday 18 August carried an article by Alice Miles, from which I will quote at length below. But if you care about the English language at all, you might wish to read the article in full.

The English language was invented, so to speak, by the English. In the past, English writers were generally held to have exhibited some skill in the use of the language. The Oxford English dictionary is, I suppose, the recognised authority on the spelling and meaning of English words. But what Alice Miles tells us, courtesy of an email from someone who marks examination papers in English Literature, is that English schoolchildren are no longer taught how to spell, how to punctuate, or how to use grammar an orthodox way.

There is nothing particularly new about this revelation. We have known it for some time. But readers outside the UK may, I think, be a little surprised by how far we have gone down the road to more or less complete illiteracy.

First, a few words of background. For some fifty years now, the final examination taken by children in English schools, if they stay on until the age of 18 or so, has been known as the 'A' level. You can take 'A' level exams in a mass of subjects, but they are fairly specialised, and most school-leavers take about three subjects. For arts students, History, English Literature, and French might be a suitable combination; for a science student, Maths, Physics, and Chemistry. The examination papers are marked by human beings, rather than machines, and on the basis of these marks the candidates are awarded a particular grade, of which A* is apparently the highest.

Here is Alice Miles's report of what one of last year's examiners told her about the marking process, together with his comments on what this means in terms of the candidates' skill with the English language:

"A* grades are given out like sweets at a children’s party to youths who not only cannot spell or punctuate to save their lives, but who cannot do something much simpler than that, namely copy words which are printed in front of them,” he writes. “I marked nearly a thousand English Literature papers. Of those, over a hundred wrote ‘Literature’ wrongly (e.g. litriture) on the front of their answer-sheet, in spite of the fact that it was there in big letters on the question paper.

"I marked approximately 700 essays on An Inspector Calls, by J.B. Priestley. The candidates had the book with them in the exam-room, and the name Priestley is in large letters on the front of the book. It was also printed as part of the wording of the questions. Yet over 95 per cent of my candidates wrote either Priestly or Preistly.

A similar number misspelt the characters’ names Sheila and Arthur. “Yet these words are printed on almost every page of the text which they have on their desk.”

He continues: “I was also forced to award ludicrously high marks to candidates whose command of English grammar and/or sentence structure was simply non-existent. Upwards of 150 candidates will have been awarded a C (or better) who wrote ‘could of’, ‘might of’, ‘should of’. The pronouns I and me were used interchangeably by large numbers of candidates (as in ‘Me and Mr Birling have done nothing wrong’ or ‘The Inspector was so rude to Mr Birling and I’). Neighbours-speak was quite common, as in ‘Then Shelia (sic) was like, what?’ (meaning she was surprised, I supposed).”

This examiner was not allowed to penalise such basic errors. “I don’t want to award A* in a subject called ‘English Literature’ to a person who knows no English and cannot spell Literature even though it’s printed in front of him/her. And yet I had to, again and again and again. I was told repeatedly, explicitly, and unambiguously, that I was to mark only the ideas expressed, and not — not even a tiny bit — the way in which those ideas were expressed.” The instructions given to him by the examining board read: “There is NO Assessment of Written Communication on this paper.”

My comments on this state of affairs follow:

I have for some time been of the view that the English (specifically) were driven insane by the two world wars which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. In the first world war, our brightest and best young men were killed in vast numbers. In the second world war, the same thing happened again, only this time we lost many women also. We were also rendered bankrupt.

The psychological impact of these losses, and the consciousness of those losses, should not be underestimated. Post the second world war, the English clearly became deranged. Society became flooded with well-meaning do-gooders who bumbled about in the most hopeless manner.

The insanity led to a number of public policies which were idealistic and well-intentioned on the one hand, and unrealistic and unachievable on the other. We took the view that everyone has the right to good health, so we tried to provide state-of-the-art medical treatment for every citizen (and some non-citizens), as and when need, instantly, and free of charge. In immigration policy we took the view that everyone deserves the chance of a better life, so we would open our borders to pretty much the entire world. And in education we noticed that no one likes to be punished, so we abandoned any form of discipline in schools. I have a young relative who actually enjoys teaching in a comprehensive school (a rare circumstance), and he recently applied for a job in a new school. As part of the selection process, he was asked to teach a lesson in front of observers. 'You're too strict,' he was told.

Above all, we decided that no child should ever be allowed to feel a failure, so we arranged, as far as possible, that no one should ever fail an exam. This year, the pass rate in 'A' levels is 96 per cent.

The result of all this well-meaning bumbling is that, for the last forty years, English education has been a catastrophe. We have a world in which English children, educated in English schools, not only cannot use the English language to communicate their feelings, hopes, wishes, and ideas - but they cannot even copy down correctly a word which is in print in front of their very eyes.

I have been known to say that the last great privilege of the Englishman is that he can still afford - just - to ignore politics. But by God I am beginning to wonder.

The illusion of fame

Those of us of a bookish disposition should never forget that there are plenty of sensible people who never read a book from one year’s end to the next. Furthermore, it is possible to be wildly famous within the world of books and yet not make any impression whatever upon the consciousness of the non-book-reading populace. This is rather nicely illustrated by a story about the poet Swinburne.

In the nineteenth century, poets were at least as famous as novelists, if not more so. The list of household names, then and now, is lengthy: Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and so forth.

In his day, Algernon Charles Swinburne was at least as famous a poet as any of those listed above. Indeed in 1892, when it was necessary to appoint a new Poet Laureate, Queen Victoria is reported to have said to Gladstone: ‘I am told that Mr Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions.’ And this was true. But it was also true that Swinburne was a republican with a private life which bordered upon the scandalous, and so a second-rate but much safer man was appointed in his place.

Swinburne was born in 1837 and died in 1909. He rose to fame in the 1860s and thereafter was not only famous but notorious, because his poetry was considered dangerously sensual. Even after his death his reputaton was such that, with the funeral scarcely over, the Canon of Canterbury Cathedral preached a sermon condemning Swinburne in forthright terms: he held the wretched Algernon personally responsible for the sad decline in sexual morality.

It seems, however, that Swinburne was not famous throughout the land. There were places in which the passage of this blazing meteor across the literary sky went entirely unnoticed.

In 1923 (give or take a year or two), Sir Osbert Sitwell found himself seated at luncheon next to a old gentleman who admitted to being eighty-six years old. In due course, the old boy began to reminisce about his time at Eton.

‘If a man – or a schoolboy for that matter,’ he said, ‘does not get on well, it’s his own fault. I well remember, when I first went to Eton, the head-boy called us together, and pointing to a little fellow with a mass of curly red hair, said, “If ever you see that boy, kick him – and if you are too far off to kick him, throw a stone.”

‘He was a fellow named Swinburne,’ the old man added. 'He used to write poetry for a time, I believe, but I don’t know what became of him.’

Margery Allingham -- queen of crime

It's time I got around to writing a piece about the late Margery Allingham (1904-1966).

There are several sound reasons for mentioning the great Margery: one, she was an extraordinarily good English crime writer, and I am rather partial to such; two, 2004 marks the centenary of her birth; and three, I have just finished re-reading all the twenty-some novels in her canon, in chronological order, and a very rewarding experience it was too.

On examination, however, I find that it is not necessary for me to write very much at all, because there are a whole gang of Allingham enthusiasts who have done all I would wish to do, and more. Visit the web site of the Margery Allingham Society, and you will see what I mean.

The web site offers an admirable biography cum summary of her output by B.A. Pike, taken from volume 77 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. If I quote the first paragraph at some length it will at least demonstrate why the lady has so many admirers:

Margery Allingham is pre-eminent among the writers who brought the detective story to maturity in the decades between the two world wars. She created an aristocratic, unassuming detective called Albert Campion, who matured from “just a silly ass” of the 1920s to an eminent intelligence veteran forty years later. He ranks high among the great detectives of fiction but does so unobtrusively,
disdaining self-advertisement. Other recurrent characters contribute richly to the Campion series: Campion’s wife, Amanda; his manservant, Lugg; and his police associates, Stanislaus Oates and Charlie Luke. The novels and stories in which they appear are among the most distinguished in the genre – vivacious, stylish, observant, shapely, intricate and witty. They are unfailingly intelligent and imaginative, even when they do not wholly succeed.

The Allingham Society web site also offers: a detailed bibliography; an account of the life and character of her husband, Philip Youngman Carter (the marriage was not without its strains); details of the Society’s activities and publications; links to other relevant sites; and much more. There’s enough there to keep you going for a very long time.

Allingham's 'masterpiece' is generally held to be Tiger in the Smoke, and it is certainly very good. But if you want a single book to test the flavour, try Police at the Funeral. First published in 1931, it is very much of its time, but it is hardly fair to criticise a long-dead author for showing her age.

Personally I like Allingham for two principal reasons. First, she was very English. She wrote about English people, many of them deeply and sometimes alarmingly eccentric, but no less interesting for that. And, secondly, she was a wonderfully stylish writer, without ever falling into the trap of ‘look at me aren’t I awfully clever’. They just don’t make ’em like that any more. Or, if they do, no one has had the courtesy to tell me.

Sex in the eighteenth century -- and later

Saturday's Times carried a review of a book about sex in the eighteenth century - Lascivious Bodies by Julie Peakman. The review was accompanied by illustrations of lesbian nuns and information about flagellant brothels and the like. Nothing new in the book, as far as I could see, but of course I have to remember that not everyone is as old as I am. That being the case, I thought I would mention a few other famous books on sex. Somebody will no doubt be hearing about them for the first time.

First – not that they are in any particular order – I should mention a book called Tea Room Trade, by Laud Humphries. It is, apparently, over thirty years since this famous work was first published, but it seems like only yesterday.

A tea room, it appears, is what the Americans used to call a public lavatory. Or at least that was what gay men used to call it. Maybe they still do. In England the term was ‘cottage’, and hanging about in them for the purposes of homosexual liaison was known as cottaging.

Tea Room Trade, I hasten to point out, is a serious work of sociology. The author, Laud Humphries, was apparently an Episcopalian minister before he became a sociologist (other inernet sources describe him as a Catholic priest). His research methodology, so far as I can make out, involved nothing more complicated than hanging about in public lavatories (of the male variety), and seeing what happened. He posed, in short, as a participant, sometimes acting as the lookout while two other men got it on. This was, to put it politely, a method open to misinterpretation, and was seriously risky. But, after a considerable amount of said hanging about, Humphries accumulated enough material to write a book.

I never read Tea Room Trade from cover to cover, but I did take a look at it in an academic library some twenty years ago, and the story that sticks in my mind is that of a respectable hospital doctor. For years – years, mind you – this doctor had been in the habit of stopping off at a particular tea room on his way home from work. Virtually every day he would go in there, and virtually every day he found someone who was willing, to put it crudely, to suck his cock for him.

I found this story absolutely amazing when I read it, but I never doubted for one moment that it was true. The risks involved were so enormous, as George Michael has amply demonstrated to us. The story simply illustrates, should you need it illustrating, that you and I know very little of what goes on in other people’s minds and lives.

Another interesting book on sex – and I haven’t read this one, either – is The Technology of Orgasm, by Rachel Maines (1998). This book reveals that, until the 1920s, women who were diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria’ were treated by having their genitals massaged – by male doctors, if you please – until they achieved orgasm, and were thus released from the tension which was causing their ‘hysteria’. Well, nice work if you can get it, is all I can say.

Once we approached the end of the nineteenth century, it began to be possible to create electric ‘massage machines’ which relieved the doctors of this tedious task, or at any rate enabled them to complete the treatment within ten minutes instead of, perhaps, an hour.

This is the story which Rachel Maines tells us in The Technology of Orgasm. And apparently, if internet reports are to be believed, the university at which she then worked promptly sacked her for publishing the book. There you go, see. I was under the impression that it was the duty of all universities to support research into difficult and controversial subjects, despite opposition from the forces of darkness. I was also under the impression that there was something in the American constitution about freedom of speech. But obviously I was wrong, on both counts.

Finally, a few books which I remember from even further back. In the 1950s, when poking about in secondhand book shops, it was not uncommon to come across two books on the classical world: Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, by Hans Licht, and Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, by Otto Kiefer. Both of these are still readily available secondhand: try abebooks.

I never read either of those books all the way though, either, and all I remember from dipping into them is that fashionable ladies in the ancient world were in the habit of getting rid of pubic hair by singeing it off. A hazardous enterprise, I feel, but then the ladies have always been prepared to suffer to look beautiful.

Finally, I must mention Sex Variants, by George W. Henry (1941). This was another serious academic book, a study of what are now referred to as gay men and lesbians, but it seems to have been read more by general readers than specialists. In any event, there are, once again, masses of copies available on the secondhand market.

It is forty years since I last saw Dr Henry’s book, but I seem to remember that it consisted, at least to some extent, of first-person accounts of the gay or lesbian life. One of the fascinating case histories which it included was that of a black woman who had somehow or other ended up in the court of the Tsar of Russia. She had been in much demand as a sexual partner, and had many affairs with both men and women, but preferred women on the whole.

Of books about sex there is absolutely no end, but that will do for the moment.