Ghosts of failures past
Obituaries of authors, many of whom are not dead, make an entertaining read.
I’m pretty sure it was Tessa Duder who remarked of a writer, in a critical essay, that “she lived long enough to see her books forgotten”. I remember the shudder of recognition down my spine. Who was the sad she? Sorry, I’ve … forgotten.
Distilled from years of Independent on Sunday columns, Christopher Fowler’s obituaries (they are not meant to be, but
they often read that way) are not so much a who’s who as a “Who?”
There are 99 mini-essays on individuals, plus a few diversions into Forgotten Booker Authors, including a winner who had died; Forgotten Nonsense Writers, including the laceratingly funny Harry Graham; Forgotten Dickens, including
something called Mugby Junction.
Each 500-word entry is a brief bio, a smattering of titles, an assessment, a couple of anecdotes. Breath-catchingly amoral Simon Raven once telegraphed his wife, “Sorry no money. Suggest eat baby”; Lobsang Rampa of The Third Eye was a Devon plumber called Cyril. Isn’t that just great?
Fowler’s choices are sometimes provocative, as they should be. Mystery writer Margery Allingham has vanished? What a mysterious claim. Arthur Upfield, Barbara Pym, Georgette Heyer? Make up your own mind.
You’ll accept the obscurity of others.
Try Kyril Bonfiglioli, Lucille Fletcher, or
the gloriously christened Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett. As I’m sure you know, they were respectively the creator of mincing 1970s art thief Charlie Mordecai, a US script writer hugely admired by Orson Welles and an Anglo-Irish aristocratic novelist who always used a quill pen.
So what edged them and many others into the shadows? Chance. Marketing.
The Blitz. Illness. Chance. Changing social mores. Addiction. Chance.
It’s a commendably eclectic selection. We get Frank Richards of Billy Bunter fame; Ian Fleming’s older brother
Peter; Michael Green, who wrote books entitled The Art of Coarse [insert subject] about just about everything; Arthur Mee, children’s encyclopaedist and author of that seminal article “Our Wonderful Glands”.
Evaluations are free and frank: “a disgraceful cliffhanger”; “a horrible human being”. Fowler won’t be getting a Christmas card from the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (“arteryhardening New Age sputum”) or Bookertopping The Sellout (“motor-mouth”).
He may have written the most emetically coy author note of the decade, but the guy cares about books and their authors. A lot of his pieces build to a plea for restoring reputations, and he gets quite emotional about the arbitrary injustice of neglect. True: why is Keith Waterhouse here, and not Jeffrey Archer? A paradoxically reassuring book – for writers – in its emphasis on Fortune’s wheel. Its other paradox is that it may boost the subjects’ sales. In second-hand bookshops, anyway.
THE BOOK OF FORGOTTEN AUTHORS, by Christopher Fowler (Riverrun / Hachette $31.95)
Fowler won’t be getting a Christmas card from the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull , which he calls “artery-hardening New Age sputum”.