Women? I like them . . . but I despise their minds!
SOCIETY A withering putdown from society couturier Hardy Amies, just one of the big names who pulls no punches in this sparkling collection of interviews
THE shortest answer in this glorious collection of in-depth interviews conducted in the nineties by naim Attallah, the hugely well-connected publisher, is: ‘no.’
that was from the art critic Brian Sewell, in reply to Attallah asking him whether he had any regrets about writing of the artist R.B. Kitaj (whose wife had just died from stress brought on by savage reviews of her husband’s work), that Kitaj was ‘a vain painter puffed with
amour propre, unworthy of a footnote in the history of figurative art’.
the longest answer is from Lord Lambton, who rambles on for two-anda-half pages after he is asked whether being born into the aristocracy gave him a special viewpoint on the world. though he meanders and name-drops, he is not dull.
He says such things as: ‘Don’t make any mistake about it, a great number of the British aristocracy are not charming. Some of them are absolutely minus charm. Charm is quite distinct from breeding. the Irish peasant has enormous charm.’
In their vastly varied lengths, every reply in the book is both gripping and revealing. It’s like Desert Island Discs without the discs, only ten times more probing.
Attallah is a master of the psychologically nosy interview question — and he reveals his own obsessions, one of which is other people’s sex lives.
of ned Sherrin, he asks: ‘Most people still think there is something a bit sad and desperate about going to a prostitute. Is that a completely mistaken view, would you say?’ But my favourite question (not about sex) was one to John Mortimer: ‘Woody Allen once said of Jesus that he was very well adjusted for an only child. Do you think the same could be said of you?’
Don’t expect much political correctness in these pages. the interviews (39 with men, ten with women) appeared in the oldie from its founding in 1992, when people could get away with making remarks for which they’d be vilified now.
Hardy Amies says of women: ‘I like them as artistic figures, as a sculptor likes his clay, but on the whole I despise their minds.’
And: ‘Men make better bosses than women do. Because we are more intelligent.’
I’m not sure whether the interviewees were knocking back bottles of wine while chatting, but Attallah certainly gets them to make witheringly rude comments about their contemporaries.
nigel Dempster describes Ian Hislop as ‘a runtish figure who looked like a sort of bat you see at London Zoo’. And Lord Lambton labels ‘that a**e Runcie’ as ‘the most inadequate Archbishop of Canterbury there has ever been’.
With his provocative questioning, Attallah inspires people to answer provocatively, too. Brian Sewell, in answer to the question ‘Should sex take place in the context of love?’ says: ‘oh, for heaven’s sake, that’s a terribly old-fashioned thing.
‘Sex, like food, works on all sorts of levels. You could go to a restaurant and have something that is exquisitely titillating to the palate, or something that simply stokes the boiler.’
A warning: we’re in a bit of a ‘no checks or balances’ situation here. It was because Attallah was financing the oldie that he was given free rein to conduct an extended interview in each issue of the magazine.
He owns Quartet Books (the publisher of this volume), so no one dared say to him: ‘Er, Mr Attallah, perhaps this book is a bit too long?’ At 823 pages, it’s not so much a stocking-filler as a stocking-shredder or a bedsidetable crusher.
I treated it like a super-sized box of chocolates, reading the interviews in the order of my level of fascination with the people, leaving until last those I hadn’t heard of (as I might leave the marzipan and the hazelnut cluster).
I devoured Diana Mosley, who recalled being hunted (literally like a fox) by her father in the 1910s: ‘You see, he had a bloodhound, and it was rather fun to hunt with him, and we children were there, available. Most men love hunting, after all.’
Her dislike of Churchill comes across strongly: ‘If Churchill had had absolute power, which, thank God, he did not, then who knows what he might have done? Roosevelt and Churchill would have been capables de tout’ (i.e. capable of the same degree of cruelty as Hitler and Stalin).
I lapped up nigel nicolson, who bleakly described the failure of his marriage: ‘I lacked my father’s patience with what I saw as the failings of my wife, and she was exactly the same with my failings, and so the marriage dissolved, not in acrimony, but in mutual indifference.’
I warmed to tony Benn, who recalled: ‘When my daughter was 16, she put up notices all over the house saying: “End sexism in the Benn family.” that altered my attitude quite substantially.’
And I was moved by Elizabeth Jane Howard, speaking about separating from Kingsley Amis: ‘You can live with somebody who doesn’t love you, but you can’t possibly live with somebody who doesn’t actually like you.’
LAuREnS van der Post I left till later, dreading that he’d bore me stiff — and he does speak a lot of mumbo-jumbo, such as: ‘In Africa, the myth was the earth and the earth was the myth.’
But Attallah, brilliantly, baits him. He asks: ‘Your [book] Venture to the Interior is presented as a Herculean journey but, according to your critics, it amounts to no more than a day’s walk up and down a hill. Do you perhaps mix fantasy with truth sometimes?’
to which van der Post explodes: ‘Who are these idiots? Where do they say these things? I can’t cope with this . . . I shouldn’t have to respond to these remarks; they’re obviously made by singularly stupid people.’ He goes from mystic to maniac.
the book’s dismal title, no Longer With us, is painfully true. the contents page is a roster of now-dead eccentric figures who flourished in the days when politicians were still well-read.
Denis Healey holds forth about Virginia Woolf, Kipling, Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson; Enoch Powell mentions Shakespeare and Homer.
there are enough gems of wit and wisdom to guide the reader to a serene old age. Here are the ones I’ll stick on my noticeboard . . .
the Duke of Devonshire: ‘If I come away from meeting someone and I’ve been bored, I regard that as my failure.’
John Mortimer: ‘Pessimism is a very good basis for a cheerful outlook on life.’
tony Benn: ‘Clever people can be very stupid. there are people with top degrees who haven’t had a single thought since they left college.’
nigel Dempster: ‘It gives people a sort of comfort to know that the private lives of the rich and powerful are falling apart.’
Yehudi Menuhin: ‘I begrudge time spent that is not invested — just as some people feel about money.’
Attallah likes to probe his interviewees on the matter of their approaching death. on this subject, I’ll bear the late Duke of Devonshire’s self-deprecating comment in mind: ‘I can’t believe in another world, although I shall certainly go to hell if there is one.’