Dialogue Fragments

“Apparently one of the difficulties of depicting dialogue is that the two participants not only interrupt,..”

“And finish each others sentences” said my companion.

‘They are often in competition with each other’

‘You mean, you talk about the history of the Second World War, the English Reformation, and I talk about holidays, garden plants and design’

‘Yes. But I was thinking more that you talk about your state of health, and your difficulties with Anna, your job share, although I feel that you do have a lot to complain about her’.

‘Yes but you complain about your work colleagues too – Simon’s continuous and noisy eating, and the way he manages to turn his desktop into a compost heap of rotting banana skins, orange peel and apple cores, and Geoff Munday, even I can hear him on the phone, when I ring- talking about nothing relevant to his project to foreigners in the reclaimed oil business throughout the globe, all of whom are apparently deaf, and in need of his peculiarly annoying brand of hearty bonhomie. How is the weather in Cairo? As though it changes very much. How are your babies? Did you enjoy the kebabs last night to the computer illiterate from Istanbul?’

“Well I am glad you seem as immune to his charm as well, and you scarcely have any contact with him. If he makes any more business contacts he will be able to fulfil his ambition of spending the entire office day, in noisy and banal conversation with foreigners, without doing any work at all. For the integrity, security and maintainability of company software, this may be a good thing. I think he got into that position at Hewlett Packard. They made him redundant when functionally he was demonstrating the true meaning of that word. Any way let’s change the subject back to the subject of changing the subject. Who do we know who is the past master?”

‘Sue, despite her Oxford education and famous but disreputable relations’

“What! all those admirals – I thought you’d admire them”

“No I like them. They sound very brave and very modest. No it’s the other Lyons, although they’re not the real baddies, its the Saxe-Coburgs and Battenburgs, the Huns as Elizabeth Bowes Lyon used to call them, or as I would put it: ‘over-Saxed and over here.’ Then in spite of having more choice of partner than royal ever, they end up with a chinless army officer, a dippy blond who struggled to hold down a job as a nursery assistant, a polo players’ slapper straight out of Jilly Cooper, and a public relations consultant whose skills in the field were less than those of her most celebrated client.”

“Who was that?”

“Mr Blobby”

“You wouldn’t have said all this about the Royal Family in front of my mother”

“I wouldn’t mention the Royal Family in front of your Mother - it would give her a lead into the conversation, which she would not let go, before subsiding into a heap and having to be taken home. You know that she could not abide being anywhere but the centre of attention”

“Well it comes from the competitiveness of being in the middle of five sisters”.

“My point about Sue, is that in spite of her obvious intelligence, and privileged upbringing, if the topic turns away from pedigree west highland whites, plants, Iceland, physical geography volcanoes and soap opera, she says she’s not interested until she can get back to one of those things”

“How are your prawns?”

“This one seems to have been ‘with child’ – actually a couple of hundred of them, and their feet and shells are very crunchy The smoked salmon is good. How’s your lasagne?”

“Filling. What did you say al Forno means?”

“I think it means ‘in the oven’ the same as al horno in Spanish, but I may be wrong I have never made any pretence to learn Italian”.

“I remember the giggles you gave that waitress on Mallorca when you asked for the Polo al horno. You thought you were asking for roast chicken. She thought you were asking for a horny pole”

“What would we do for amusement, if it were not for foreigners with an uncertain grasp of the Lingo”.

“Yes and where would we be if we had no sense of humour?”

“Germany”.

Pause

“Have you had any success at overhearing other peoples conversations for your homework. Yes I overheard that man at the next table since the pub is empty. He seems to have recently returned from Botswana.”

“Yes I thought he had a bit of a South African accent”

“Yes and went on like unreconstructed colonial. Did you hear his story about booking a table for six in the best restaurant of the best Hotel in Botswana”.

“Well it seems that the booking clerk couldn’t understand his clipped speech and booked him 6 tables for 3. He then seems to have got very officious and demanded to see the manager immediately, when it seems that all they had to do was push the tables together. In spite of this, he somehow ended up having waiter service and free wine in the self-service cafeteria; not a triumph for diplomacy, more an own goal for patronising and inflexible colonialism. To listen to him you’d think he’d gained revenge for the Boer war. Well his story about the trivial incident went on for longer than the siege of Mafeking. How much do you bet he’s said “This country’s going to the dogs”

“Would that be in South Africa or here?”

“He probably says it about every country he visits”

“Don’t you think that too?”

“No, but I do think that deregulation of the media, and the growth of commercial broadcasting, has produced a climate in which television and newspapers pander to what they think are the tastes of young people, in the hope of securing an audience into the future, and because advertisers can make spurious claims which the young will believe, but the old won’t. In a sense Thatcher’s deregulation, which she saw as both democratic and wealth enhancing, has resulted in dumb down. It is up to us to turn off the radio and TV, cancel the broadsheets and get back to books”

“How’s the writing course going?

“It’s difficult. I don’t do vernacular. I don’t do ordinary. I may have trouble convincing the teacher”

“Is he OK?”

“I thought he was the first week, but last lesson he mentioned “Gritty and Northern” in the same phrase 4 times”

“Yes its an awful cliché, and offensive to people like us from Nottingham and Burnley.”

“If he uses it again, the Stan Barstow’s going to find himself floating down the Humber in Billy Elliott’s tutu, his blood sucked by Ken Loaches, and an Alan Sillitoe sticking out of his back”

“Wouldn’t it be crueller and far more appropriate to force him to spend his Saturdays and Sundays at a Colin Welland Weekend Workshop in Worksop”

“What would be the theme?”

“How about John Prescott – syntax on the edge”

“Talking of Sillitoe, he didn’t write Saturday Night and Sunday Morning sitting in a Radford district back to back. He started it on the beach at Deya in Mallorca, which is about half a mile from where I started my semi-professional writing research. Apparently he’d gone to visit the writing guru Robert Graves, who suggested he write about something he knew: Nottingham, course fishing, cross-country, beer, borstal, national service, and adultery. It was what people knew about and liked, particularly the adultery. In those days it was grim ‘oop Noorth. People had to work in mines factories or mills. They’re lucky now globalisation has moved all the mines, factories and mills to Africa and Asia”

“Now they have cars, gardens, central heating and hot water, even bidets fixes and indoor badinage. They work at supermarket check-outs, and run D H Lawrence theme weekends, with a chance to meet a real ex-miner, or perhaps even an ex-gamekeeper. The North is now classed as part of our heritage, which means people aren’t really doing anything worthwhile. It’s catching up with Cornwall”

An old lady a literary muse

“So I’m the plaything of your imagination now, am I?” she said. “Alan Bennett’s used me and discarded me like a a…”

“Lothario?” I suggested.

“Don’t be dirty, young man, that’s not what you call that nice Mr Bennett. I meant like a plastic cup?”

“Well I shall do my best with the dry brown spots and runnels, the sides torn into stripes like the spikes of a lost and rolling coronet”. I lapsed into fanciful metaphor.

“Yes but no-one will no-one pick me up and set me on Stanley Baker’s Welsh head, crowned King in a muddy Leicestershire field, as he ushers in the drama and glory of Tudor England” replied my cinematically versed muse.

“Well” I said, “We writers use people worse than philanderers. They only use people’s bodies before discarding them, we seek out souls, expose and destroy them. We are inquisitors and furies, and people would do well to deny us intimacy. Not only do we take others’ souls, we sell our own to Mephistopheles, take Marlowe for example”.

“Are yes” she said “Down these mean streets a man must sometimes go. But in my case I only get mean streets to walk down, and to stand and wait at ruined bus shelters. It is then I feel at odds with Milton, that they also serve who only stand and wait for a 42 to Camden Town. I have aspirations to heroism. Dad I think Ibsen called it”.

“No not Philip Marlow, Christopher Marlowe”, said I sounding exasperated, perhaps unfairly.

“And did he come to a sticky end?” she said

“Oh frequently.” I said, “But it’s said the devil’s dog died a dastardly death, dug deeply by a dirty dagger in Deptford”

“Oh its rough round there” she said “My late husband Sid, was a taxi driver and he would never go sarf of the river after 10 pm - all of the them yardies”

“Well Chris was more into back alleys than yardies, but he certainly liked a bit of rough”

“Was he in debt, behind with the rent?”

“No. More behind with the rent boy, I would say. Although some say Marlowe did not die, he re-invented himself. He acquired a provincial background, fake Brummie accent and baldy wig, calling himself William Shakespeare, although how Mr Fakespeare was supposed to have acquired his brilliant education and knowledge of the customs and mores of court life has never been adequately explained. Some say he got this knowledge from his patron, the Earl of Essex”

“And what happened to Essex?”.

“After going up an down in royal favour faster than his girlfriends’ knickers, the queen had him executed for his for his failed policy of compromise in Northern Ireland, his over familiar demeanour, and for flaunting his purple furry dice at her fainting ladies in waiting”

“So he lost his head for a disastrous accommodation with violent Catholic rebels in Northern Ireland. Does that mean that Mowlam, Mandelson and Reid will suffer the same fate?”

“Let’s not be too political or too hopeful” I said. “Anyway this piece is supposed to be literary and about you, can I give you a name?”

“Amanda she said – I loved Noel Coward’s plays, so witty, and urbane. He had heroines called Amanda, but all I really wish is that you keep me alive and stop me being mundane. Stop me ending up in a mawkish Ralph McTell song. You can abuse my Rubenesque body until its Baroquen! Make me run through your text, ‘Naked as Nietzsche Intended’, and have Friedrich, Julie Andrews and me climb every mountain of metaphysical expression, although I have no preference as to whether my mensch is ueber or unter, so long as he’s witty and gentle”

“Sturm and Drang!” I replied.

“I ain’t having any of them Sturmtruppen” – she said “Conformist Nancy boy skinheads”

“No I mean ‘struggle and desire’, the essence of Nietzsche”, I said “just like I go through to finish an essay”

“No SA. No Brownshirts”, she persisted, “and what happened to Nietzsche,-remind me?”, she enquired.

“He went sick, mad and eventually died from syphilis.”

“Does it always drive you mad”, she said.

“Nearly always, but Julie Andrews advising him to think of his favourite things made it certain. His brain rotted second. It was his second favourite organ”

First Day at School

I was 4. The month was January. The weather was cold. My mother made the decision to send me to Standhill Road Infants. Why she had even contemplated sending me to St Joseph's was a complete mystery. St Joseph's was further away and a religious foundation. Neither of my parents were religious, and Catholicism in both it's Anglo and Roman variants became an anathema to me - mumbo jumbo and superstition, smells, wobbly statues, gory tasteless crucifixes, and an unjustifiable crutch to psychological inadequacy and moral dereliction. Not everything Marxists say has been wrong. Anyway I wastaken to meet the reception teacher. She was tense, lined, ugly, thin vindictive, old. Her husband was apparently having an affair. One couldn't blame him. The teacher should have been given compassionate leave. It would have been compassionate for the pupils. She came down heavily on me for my
physical inadeqacies, unable to tie shoe laces, or drink all my milk through a straw without making the gurgling, sucking noise when you get to the end. She spent ages telling us how to tell the time, which was easy; I knew how already. I cried when mum forced me to go back in the afternoon. I wanted to get back home to the garden to play out fantasies of being Davy Crockett or
Zorro or D'Artagnan. It was the beginning of a 14 year sentence. An open prison where, if you behaved well they kept you for longer, which would keep you mentally under-stretched and bored senseless for half that time. After two terms of the reception class, things got better. From a mat I gazed up at the legs of first Miss Paskin, and later Mrs Fish, and thought that somewhere up there lay an earthly paradise. Exactly what it was, and when they would let me get there, and what I would do, might be revealed sometime in the future. It must have something to do with my thing which I used to go for a wee wee, but it felt different and better. But I would only find out after the 14 year sentence was over, and I'd learned how to avoid making gurgling noises in the bottom of the milk bottle, and no longer wanted to be Davy Crockett.

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A review of my muse's first publishing success in the Guardian. 199 years' late

Rereading: Childe Harold by Lord Byron

The overnight success of Childe Harold arguably made Lord Byron the first modern celebrity. But it would be several years before he understood the full significance of his creation

Benjamin Markovits
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 August 2011 10.00 BST
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Portrait of Lord Byron
Love-sick and world-weary . . . Byron sometimes slept with admiring female readers. © Bridgeman Art Library

As Byron himself observed, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. He was 24 years old and had just published his third book, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a loosely autobiographical account of the continental tour he made after leaving Cambridge.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of its publication, and the poem, like Byron himself, has had a strange history. It is now most famous for making him famous. Byron is sometimes called the first modern celebrity, and much of the interest in him is biographical: the affairs with Caroline Lamb and his half-sister, the breakdown of his marriage, his death fighting for Greek independence. His writing tends to get lost in his biography; the line between his life and his work was always blurred. In early drafts of the poem Childe Harold was called Childe Burun, and even though Byron publicly objected to any identification between poet and hero, later cantos eventually abandoned the distinction altogether. His readers sometimes became his lovers: women who liked the poem acted on their admiration by offering themselves sexually to the poet.

Can you measure a book's quality by the number of lovers it gets you? Byron himself later justified his most controversial long work, Don Juan, in terms of his sexual experience. He wrote to his publisher, John Murray, that it could only have been written by someone who has "tooled in a post-chaise . . . in a hackney coach . . . in a Gondola . . . Against a wall" etc.

John Mortimer, in the character of Rumpole, talks about the sadness he felt when he realised that Wordsworth was a better poet than Byron – one of the rites of passage for a bookish teenager. You're meant to outgrow Byron. Only Don Juan is still considered truly first-class. But it's a mistake to dismiss the early work. There are questions still worth asking about Childe Harold. Did the poet know what he was doing or did he get lucky? What biographical factors prepared him to write the poem? Why was it so successful? What influence did it have on other writers? Is it any good?

There is some evidence that Byron got lucky. Up to that point good luck and bad had been mixed fairly evenly in his life. He was born with a club foot. His father ran through his mother's fortune, then ran off himself and died when Byron was three. His mother took out on Byron her passionate conflicted feelings towards her husband. A nurse may have abused him sexually when he was nine. The Byrons didn't have much money and moved around rented lodgings in Aberdeen. Byron went to local schools and kept getting into fights. Other kids made fun of his lameness, which several people who knew him described as the greatest misfortune of his life.

When he was six, he got his first real piece of good luck – a distant cousin was killed by a cannonball in Corsica, making Byron heir presumptive to the title. At 10, he became a lord and inherited the rundown Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire and various other estates. The title got him to Harrow, where he was miserable at first, and then to Cambridge. He began writing poetry in school and published his first book of poetry, privately, after a year at Trinity. Later this formed the basis for his first public collection, Hours of Idleness. The mixed critical response inspired him to write a satirical reply, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers", which he published just before leaving for Lisbon. The poem took a swipe at several prominent critics and writers, one of whom, the poet Thomas Moore, challenged him to a duel.

His continental tour lasted just over two years and changed his life. He experimented sexually, faced down bandits and dined with a pasha, who tried to seduce him. He saw famous historical sights and witnessed history in the making. The war with France had closed off much of Europe to English travellers, but Byron was among the first to visit key battlegrounds. Along the way he managed to write several short lyrics, some of which would still have been familiar to an educated Englishman a generation ago. He arrived home having completed two substantial works, a follow-up to "English Bards" called "Hints from Horace", and the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

TS Eliot wrote that great works of art exist in a timeless continuum. By this standard, Childe Harold is certainly not a great work of art – it has dated. But even to Byron's readers it would have appeared old fashioned. The poem took Spenser as a model, and was written deliberately in archaic language. After the conventional epic invocation, the second stanza introduces our hero: "Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth." "Whilome" appears at least three more times in the first canto.

Much of the poem is simply a travelogue. It describes the history, appearance and political context of the places Byron visited on his tour, and it seems likely that this kind of first-hand information was part of its appeal. Byron, in his preface, suggests that he guessed as much: "The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author's observations of those countries."

First-hand information, however, can hardly account for the poem's sudden success. Byron's awkward, symbolic method of referring to places and events must have confused his readers. So what did they respond to? The answer lies in the personality of the poet, and his relation to the character of Harold. Those who argue that Byron was the first celebrity writer talk about his careful stage-management of his public personality. While management might not be the right word, Byron was clearly curious from the start of his career about the relationship between author and man. He prefaced his first publicly released volume, Hours of Idleness, with a kind of pre-emptive apology that made heavy weather out of his youth and nobility. Critics rightly mocked him for this preface, but it introduced into the reader's mind the idea of Byron as a character – as a young man and a lord.

He strikes the same note less apologetically in the preface to Childe Harold: "A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece; which, however, makes no pretension to regularity. It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value, that in this fictitious character, 'Childe Harold', I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim – Harold is the child of imagination . . ."

Readers generally ignore such disclaimers, and writers have their own reasons for making them. Byron and Harold clearly had a lot in common: they were both British, noble and young; they possessed "ancient piles" and had travelled the continent.

So what are the other characteristics of this Harold, which the public imputed to Byron? Most are sketched out in the opening stanzas, and I imagine many of his readers would have waded through the political/historical material in the hope of seeing that sketch occasionally filled out. Harold is sinful, and "few earthly things found favour in his sight / Save concubines . . ." We'd seen such characters before, from Tom Jones to Toby Belch, but Byron adds three crucial details to this picture. Harold is unhappy ("Worse than adversity the Childe befell / He felt the fulness of satiety"), unrepentant ("For he through Sin's long labyrinth had run, / Nor made atonement when he did amiss"), and unrequitedly in love ("Had sigh'd to many though he loved but one / And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his"). In short, he grounded the love-sick metaphysical world-weariness of Werther and Hamlet in extreme worldliness, and the Byronic hero was born.

Byron's poem posed his more ardent readers with a difficult challenge: they not only had to redeem his virtue but restore his sense of pleasure. And women, who themselves must have suffered from the paradoxes implied by their sexual role in society (to be chaste and attractive) rushed to meet the challenge. The fact that Byron married the chastest of his admirers, Annabella Millbanke (whom he once described as "a very superior woman a little encumbered with virtue"), suggests that he suffered from this paradox himself.

By adding debauchery to alienation, Byron had created a new kind of hero. I don't know whether he recognised the significance of this innovation when he conceived Childe Harold, but he certainly recognised it after the poem was published. He followed Harold with a series of "verse tales" that had little in common with it except that they allowed him to explore the character of the Byronic hero. "The Giaour", "The Bride of Abydos" and "The Corsair" sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication.

Other writers responded to the creation of this new type. Macaulay's description is probably the best: "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection". This is a guy we all recognise, from Heathcliffe to Jim Stark.

What's curious, though, about Byron's verse tales is that none of them play off that tension between character and writer that established the Byronic hero in the first place. "The Giaour" and "The Corsair" are both unBritish, and the plots in which they appear leave no room for conflation with their author. It wasn't until "Beppo" in 1819, a very different kind of poem with a different kind of hero, that Byron played again with the blurry line between fact and fiction.

His real literary descendants are 20th-century novelists – writers such as JM Coetzee and Philip Roth. It's no coincidence that Disgrace's David Lurie is a lecturer working on Byron. And Portnoy's Complaint is probably the closest modern equivalent to the instant success of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Roth, like Byron, made sexual capital out of his literary fame and responded to the problems of that fame by writing books which teased their readership with autobiographical hints and pseudo-revelations.

I don't think Byron fully understood the potential of fiction to conceal and reveal yourself before Childe Harold was published, and it took him seven years to work through the various temptations of success to get to the kernel of the breakthrough and develop it further. Byron once complained about Wordsworth that he made "the bard the hero of the story" – a criticism he levelled not at The Prelude (which went unpublished in their lifetimes) but at "The Idiot Boy". The Prelude is now considered one of the founding texts of modern poetry, partly because of its influence in turning poetry into a form of autobiography. But Wordsworth wrote without the veil of fiction, and what interested Byron, and what interests Roth, is the way you can use that veil.

Of course, it doesn't hurt to be famous. The point of celebrity, in this context, is to suggest half-knowledge – both to create the demand for real knowledge and give it something false to play against. All of which seems a pretty good summary of the writer's art. Byron may not have mastered that art by the time he wrote Childe Harold, but the success of the poem established a new relation between a writer and his public. Byron learned to exploit this, and it remains his legacy.

Childish Loves, the third novel in Benjamin Markovits's Byron trilogy, is published next week by Faber at £14.99. Markovits will present The Life of Byron at the Edinburgh international book festival on Tuesday 23 August.