Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny
A young, brattish Mary Kenny admired tricky Katharine Whitehorn
I remember in 1963 sitting on a street bench on the Champs-élysées – a Sunday off from skivvying au pair duties – and reading a column by Katharine Whitehorn.
I was 18 and what she wrote in that column shaped the direction of my life. It was better, she wrote, to be a good journalist than a bad novelist. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I doubted I could succeed as a novelist. I resolved to become a journalist.
Katharine, who died in January, aged 92, was hugely, uniquely influential in her time, not just because she was witty, clever and insightful, but because she was the first woman to write the kind of column she did. She confessed to failures in an era that urged perfection, extrapolating with disarming honesty from her own life to the female condition in general.
The social context of the time was crucial: it was funny and daring to write about being a slut in an era when everyone from Woman’s Hour to Woman’s Own was fussing about wearing white gloves to a garden party.
Whitehorn launched an entire genre of journalism – the intelligent woman’s personal column. She was followed by a phalanx of copycat voices – including mine – in a range of registers, from high-minded bluestocking to the amusing malice of the Glenda Slagg genre (‘Meghan Markle? Dontcha just hate her?’)
I got to be a journalist – and to meet Katharine in person, when I was stepping out with her friend Bernard Levin. Alas, she didn’t take to me and it became obvious. She could be rather ‘Hampstead’ – with that de haut en bas air that the North London tribe does so well. But then I was a brattish 20-something, trying to be outrageous, and a completely unsuitable consort for her friend Bernard.
And, despite vaunted proclamations of ‘sisterhood’, women journalists didn’t always bond. Katharine couldn’t stand her Observer rival, my compatriot Mary Holland.
Yet I went on admiring La Whitehorn. She was a feminist who liked men, and upheld monogamous marriage. She loved G K Chesterton. She really did have a well-furnished mind and a measured wisdom. Though I still wonder if I should have aimed at being a bad novelist.
I can see the lights of Calais from Deal – so it’s been frustrating not being able to hop across to France because of the lurgy.
But I’ve discovered a fabulous on-line French TV discussion channel called Cnews: you just type the name into Google and up it pops.
At 6pm each day, there’s a scintillating sociopolitical discourse led by France’s most provocative conservative intellectual, Éric Zemmour, and moderated by the beautiful, serene presenter, Christine Kelly, originally from Guadeloupe.
The highfalutin conversation flows in the spirit of a brilliant and competitive Parisian dinner party, or an 18th-century literary salon. Yet everyone gets to talk at length, with no ‘Briefly, please – we’re running out of time’ curtailments. So stimulating! So French!
A fresh biography of the painter Francis Bacon, Revelations, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, highlights the excesses of that compelling artist given to painting screaming popes.
Bacon fans should plan to visit his reconstructed studio at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery (once COVID restrictions are lifted). His heir, John Edwards, bequeathed every paintbrush, sketchbook, catalogue and slashed canvas, and his cluttered mess of 7,000 items, to the Irish gallery.
The Francis Bacon Studio is the filthiest, untidiest and most chaotic space you could ever behold, crammed with dust and detritus. I love it. Just as the contestants on Jeremy Kyle confessional TV make one feel positively normal by contrast, the Bacon studio makes clutterbugs feel quite organised. It’s a wonderful antidote to the Marie Kondo nostrums of obsessive tidiness.
Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin’s Baggot Street and grew up in a household that specialised, Edwardian-style, in 11-course meals. He left Ireland at 16 – but Ireland, along with Soho, co-claims him.
I mentioned recently that during COVID times our local shops had taken to using the adverb-less Americanisation ‘Shop safe’.
The Belfast-based academic and critic John Wilson Foster tells me that he came to realise, when teaching in the States, that Americans despise adverbs, which are seen as feminine: ‘The “-ly” ending is girly, weak and, well, British.’
This hostility to adverbs complements their dislike of the inactive: ‘Thus the British “birdwatching” had to become “birding”, by masculine analogy with hunting, shooting and fishing.’
I have no great objections to Americans’ using language according to their own cultural perceptions, but must the practice always cross the Atlantic? Do we consider adverbs ‘girly’?
By the way, I have a lovely addition to my collection of German portmanteau words: vergangenheitsbewältigung. It means ‘overcoming the past’. Or perhaps, as Katharine Whitehorn put it, in the title of her memoir, ‘selective memory’.