Alcoholic remorse set in afterwards John Betjeman confessed in 1931
Alcoholic remorse set in afterwards,” John Betjeman confessed in 1931. Booze looms large in literary Christmases, both as antidote and as agent provocateur. The following year, “I made a fair show of geniality throughout the day, though the spectacle of a litter of shoddy toys and half-eaten sweets sickened me.” Lunch was “cold and poorly cooked”, and Waugh spent the remainder of a “ghastly day” comparing the published version of The Diary of a Nobody with that serialised in Punch – an improvement on Harold Nicolson’s 1940 Christmas diet of government memoranda.”We got tight and I recited Newbolt’s poems, firing off a toy pistol as a `turn’ at the local Yuletide Dance at the Beach Hotel in Littlehampton. “We managed to collect a number of trashy and costly toys for the stockings,” he wrote in 1945, and although the plum pudding was tasteless, “by keeping the children in bed for long periods we managed to have a tolerable day”. On the way home, the Connollys’ car run out of petrol, and the embattled couple stamped angrily off in opposite directions.Equally unflattering accounts of seasonal festivities are provided by Connolly’s friend and tormentor, Evelyn Waugh.
A fellow-guest and former lover, Peter Quennell, came up with the same Henry James novel he’d given her 10 years before. Famously greedy, Connolly liked to be known as a gourmet, but although much had been promised from the Flemings’ new cooks, the best they could provide was “rancid stuffing for the turkey and bottled chipolatas”, and brandy butter made with synthetic cream.After lunch, presents were handed round. The year before Fleming had given Barbara a “used pencil, a used lighter and a dirty motto”, but this time he stretched to a pair of black lacy underpants and a “hideous beige galoshes bag”. Their host, Barbara noted, had “lost any semblance of good looks, a bottle-necked figure with a large bum”. Cyril Connolly and his pantherine second wife, Barbara Skelton, spent Christmas Day 1953 with Ian and Ann Fleming in Kent. Thirty years on, staying with the Droghedas, Lees- Milne found himself caught up in a more familiar routine of “effusive thanks, cries of gush as we unpack expensive parcels which we don’t always want, much over-eating of too rich foods.”One of the dangers of inviting writers to lunch is that the world may end up learning about the stinginess of the presents on offer and the horrors of the cooking.
The Dame reciprocated with a honeycomb, while Nancy Mitford chipped in with an egg and “an ounce of real farm butter”. In 1941, Vita Sackville-West gave Harold Nicolson an alarm-clock which failed to go off, and he spent the rest of the day “sitting indoors feeling rotten”.Lunching with the formidable dame Una Pope-Hennessy on Christmas Day two years later, James Lees-Milne gave his hostess, her two sons and Nancy Mitford a small bar of soap each, shaped like a lemon. One of the side-effects of wartime shortages had been to simplify the business of buying presents. Widespread sentiments, it seems, in the republic of letters, the citizens of which grudgingly push typewriters aside to partake in last-minute present-buying, gorging themselves rigid, affecting paroxysms of pleasure and surprise, trying to be kind to dull or unwanted relations, and seeking oblivion via the bottle.Christmas 1959 was, for Frances Partridge, “as usual a gruelling endurance test for almost everyone – except the children, who moved like ecstatic ghosts among mountains of parcels, toys, books, television sets and Balmain fur coats”. Despite Dickens’ best endeavours (“That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused by the recurrence of Christmas”) the Season of Good Will seems to have an equal and opposite effect on many literary folk, who have a way of articulating feelings (often unworthy) common to us all.
“Christmas is upon us, Oh Lord preserve us,” sighs the diarist Frances Partridge, while Stephen Spender sagely observes that “This part of winter becomes every year more like a dark tunnel one enters about 15 December, not to emerge until after New Year”. In December 1958, Philip Larkin wrote, festive as ever: “What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, if it just won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense”.
When a US intervewer said that HRH had no one to confide in, Junor allegedly countered “He’s got me!” The first rule of journalism? Protect your sources!. Sadly, the move backfired and even Vinnie Jones entered the fray when he and Junor were guests of Libby Purves on Midweek. The deal was brokered by Ed Victor, Britain’s most egocentric literary agent (and, according to a survey, our third most popular party guest).Penny JunorIn writing Charles: Victim or Villain?, the journalist whose toadying oeuvre includes biographies of Richard Burton and John Major presumably hoped to help with the heir’s rehabilitation. Many agents and authors bewailed the fact that, however benign the Bertelsmann management, publishing was becoming ever more homogenised with power in fewer and fewer hands.Andrew MortonAs though he hadn’t helped to dish enough dirt already, Morton signed a deal with publishers Michael O’Mara to collaborate with Monica Lewinsky on her memoirs.Mike O’MaraFor brokering the Morton/ Lewinsky deal and then justifying their collaboration by citing a shared love of T S Eliot.Frederick Forsyth and Lord Lloyd-WebberTwo of the world’s most overweening ambitions announced they were joining forces to produce a sequel to Phantom of the Opera. Staff at HarperCollins bitterly resented being made to appear morally bankrupt and there was widespread feeling that Proffitt had attempted to use the Patten affair to enlarge his territory, never expecting that he would be forced to resign.BertelsmannLike a thief in the night, the German media conglomerate stole in to buy Random House from Si Newhouse. Patten was perfectly free to publish elsewhere, which he did.
Murdoch, in deciding that Patten did not fit his agenda, was doing what all publishers do from time to time. A word-of-mouth success shunned by all the major prizes, Corelli has doubled its sales in the past 12 months, to 700,000 copies in Britain alone. A film is in train.Sir Edward HeathFor simply – finally – finishing those memoirs.VILLAINSStuart ProffittJust as Michael Heseltine’s resignation was not merely about helicopters, so Proffitt’s was not merely about Chris Patten Impartial critics noted this was not a censorship issue. The Queen’s Dragoon Guards dropout spent years odd-jobbing before embarking on a literary career. At signings he made time for everyone, chatting, inscribing messages as requested and even phoning one woman’s husband – despite the enormous queues. At the year’s biggest launch party, for Bag of Bones, he sang and played guitar with Ken Follett’s band Damn Right I Got the Blues.
