Nicci French Blog

Things I Don't LIke

The wretched Jacqui Smith business, what even the Guardian have called the 'porn furore', reminded me of one of those cultural institutions which make me ashamed to be British - or relieved to be half-Swedish: namely, the 'Carry On' films.

But first Jacqui Smith's poor husband. It's a perfect British sensation, combining sex (which isn't actually sex), nosiness, embarrassment and pomposity. He watched a couple of (entirely legal) porn films and charged them as expenses by mistake.

It's quite clear that the damage to Smith's career would have been less if he had been arrested for drug possession or grievous bodily harm or if he had been caught having an affair. It might even have been less if he had been caught with a prostitute because it would have been less 'embarrassing', less supposedly funny.

Which brings me to the Carry On films. How do I hate them? Let me count some of the ways. (The earlier ones, by the way, like Carry On Sergeant and Carry on Teacher are just dullish black and white comedies. I'm talking about the later 'sex' comedies.)

They are visually repulsive, pruriently obsessed by sex while being fearful of it and censorious about it, deeply conservative while pretending to be anarchic. They would be too contemptible and trivial even to bother about except that they managed to hijack something genuinely comic and subversive - the musical hall tradition of Marie Lloyd and Max Miller - and make it really nasty while also neutering it.

Far from incidentally, the one famous joke from a Carry On film, 'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy' (from Carry on Cleo) wasn't written by the Carry On team but borrowed from two genuine comic writers, Frank Muir and Denis Norden.

  

The Price of Things Nowadays

On his blog, David Hepworth laments the cost of a West End ticket to see Young Victoria. (Why anyone would pay any amount of money to see Young Victoria is a matter I won't go into here.) For two people, it added up to £27, not including tube fares, popcorn. That's not just more than the last DVD we bought. It's more than that DVD player we just bought. It cost £20 and seems fine. The growing disparity in price between anything that involves paying for people's time (running a restaurant, cinema or theatre) or paying for a manufactured object is becoming bizarre. 

The results aren't always what you think. Live rock music is thriving, the the rock music CD is dying. Because it seems that people don't want to pay very little for a CD. They want to pay nothing. 

Sea to Blustery Sea

I just got back from doing the coast-to-coast bike ride, Whitehaven to Tyneside, with my stepson. I do a lot of exercise, regularly, relentlessly, grimly. He doesn't do much at all, except as a by-product of something else. Over three days of cycling, I was in more pain day by day, and he was in less pain day by day. And now I feel pain in many muscles, joints and tendons, while his body has already forgotten all about it. 

The words of the Leonard Cohen song keep coming in to my mind:

'Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey,

I ache in the places where I used to play.'

Beautiful ride, though.

Squeamishness

This morning it fell to me to bury our guinea pig, last of the small pets. I dug a deeper hole that was necessary and then went back inside to put on sunglasses, although the sky was overcast, and collect a pile of old newspapers. I didn't want to see and I didn't want to touch. I screwed up my shaded eyes so that I could barely make out the dead body lying in the corner of the hutch and then, using the newspapers, I picked it up and carried it over to the waiting hole, holding the package away from me as though it carried the plague, my mouth puckered up in distaste. What was I so scared of and why do dead animals fill me with such squeamish, shrinking horror that I have to steel myself to deal with them? I placed the body in the earth and then, on an impulse, lifted off its newspaper covering. Not a horror story, barely even a reminder of death and decay, just a small brown familiar guinea pig that looked as though it was sleeping. It's better to look at things than to imagine them.

By heart

I have recently agreed to be on the Board of the Poetry Book Society - a small but energetic and dynamic body, whose aim is to encourage the reading of poetry by adults and children and increase the sale of poetry books in the UK. It runs the T S Eliot poetry prize, organises a poetry prize for children, works with teachers and pupils, sells archive recordings of poets reading from their own work. 

Why don't we read more poetry? (Stephen Spender once said that poetry was the only form of literature that had more writers than readers.) Why don't we buy poetry books more often? (Most of us, when we do buy them, chose either a well-loved anthology or collections by someone like Seamus Heaney). 

Sean and I, when we first met, used to learn poems together - I was a bit quicker to learn but much quicker to forget; he can still recite whole chunks of Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium' or Auden's 'Spain', whereas I retain only disconnected fragments. It was lovely, though. I would cycle along shouting verses from Keats ('where are the songs of spring?') or Betjeman ('Miss Joan Hunter Dunne, Miss Jan Hunter Dunne, furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun...') or lie in the bath murmuring lines from Plath ('You're clownlike, happiest on your hands, feet to the stars....') and Stevie Smith ('Nobody heard him, the dead man....'). I've learnt the entire 'Highwayman' with my daughters, several by Ogden Nash with my father (they aren't very long, as in - 'The cow is of a bovine ilk, one end is moo, the other milk') and various weepy ballads with my mother. 

So this is today's resolution. I am going to go away and learn a poem. Something short. Perhaps something I've learnt before, that is lurking in my mind ready to be rediscovered. I'm going to learn it and I'm not going to forget it, and soon - by the end of the year - I'm going to have a memory bank of poems to speak to myself.

Feet of Clay

Are some things that you know are great but there's something about them that just gets on your nerves? I need an example, don't I?

Ira Gershwin had a fantastic, paradoxical title for a love song, 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off', and he had a great idea and a good beginning (forgive my attempt at phonetic spelling):

'You say eether and I say eyether,

You sey neether and I say neyether...'

He had one more example up his sleeve: tomayto and tomahto. But then he couldn't think of any more examples, but he wrote the song anyway. Potayto and potahto was just silly, and pyjamas and pyjammas was nonsensical. When Fred Astaire sang it in the original version, they even sound the same. Good tune, though.

An even more irritating example is the Beach Boys classic 'California Girls'. Another great idea: talk about the specific qualities of girls from different parts of the US. The trouble was that Brian Wilson and Mike Love's inspiration ran dry very quickly. East Coast girls are 'hip'. OK. The key thing about Southern girls is 'the way they talk' which can admittedly be attractive (though it's been undercharacterised in this song). But the mid-west farmer's daughters 'make you feel all right', whereas the northern girls keep their boyfriends warm at night because of 'the way they kiss'. 

Great sound. Revolutionary song. But imagine if Brian Wilson had kept office hours like Leiber and Stoller instead of dropping acid in a sand pit in his living room. 

Family histories

The family casts a long shadow. Forty-six years ago, Sylvia Plath killed herself, putting her head in a gas oven while her two small children were in the next door room. Her son, Nicholas Hughes, was then just one. Last week, he too committed suicide. All families are burdens as well as blessings. He was born into an almost mythic one - both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were great poets and both had a sense of their poetic destiny. Especially after Plath's death, they achieved an almost iconic status in the literary world and dividing readers. People supported one or the other clamorously, argued over the rights and wrongs of their marriage and its tragic aftermath, took up political positions. This was increased when Ted Hughes's subsequent partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself and her small child, and in the same way as Plath. A whole industry of books and films has grown up around the myth, until now it is almost impossible to make out the domestic truths that lie at the centre.

Although his father tried to protect his children, Nicholas Hughes came from this maelstrom of intense emotion and tragedy. He also inherited his mother's depressive tendencies. He went to Alaska, but perhaps in the end it became impossible to escape the family history. It is tempting to make it into a another myth: the myth of the cursed family. Nothing can be so simple. All we know is that here was a man in despair who hanged himself.

A Nation Mourns

I have no insight to offer on the Jade Goody story. Nothing about what it tells us about ourselves, about society, about culture. Instead, why not watch an old movie? Is it possible to make a comedy about cancer, celebrity, the media and the public who eat it all up? Yes it is, if you've got Ben Hecht writing it (and Ring Lardner and Budd Schullberg - God, those were the days), William Wellman directing and the absolutely peerless Carole Lombard in the lead. Nothing Sacred shows how much tougher and smarter Hollywood movies were in 1937 than in 2009. 

Lesson for anyone trying to write or make a movie: nothing is off-limits, but you need to earn it. 

Literary Riches 2

A postscript: I mentioned the profiles of two well-provided-for writers, Polly Stenham and Alain de Botton, in this week's Observer. Polly Stenham's father apparently became rich saving Unilever. Alain de Botton was educated at Harrow. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Observer was a profile of Richard Curtis. Whose father worked for Unilever and who was educated at Harrow. If I was good at all this computer stuff, I'd draw it as a Venn diagram. It's a small world.

Literary Riches

In this week's Observer, Lynn Barber interviews two writers, Alain de Botton and Polly Stenham, in different parts of the paper. It turns out they have something in common. De Botton's father bequeathed a trust fund of 'well over £200m'. I'm not sure I'd agree with de Botton's assertion that he (Dragon School, Harrow and Cambridge) was 'in many ways less privileged than children in an ordinary middle-class family'. 

The 21-year-old Polly Stenham lives in the 'very beautiful old house in Highgate' she inherited from her industrialist father but she 'feels very strongly about not living off my father's money. I use it to look after the house, which costs a fortune to maintain...' Those beautiful old houses in Highgate can be such a trial, can't they? 

Is there something peculiarly English about this inability to admit the obvious about money? A more interesting question: is there a single other writer in English literary history who started out with anything like their level of inherited wealth? I can't think of one. Remarkable that Barber should have interviewed them in the same issue.