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I’ve never tried to emulate the elegant uniqueness of subject of The Spectator’s own Toby Young, and rather dislike talking about myself or, in any detail, about my books. The telephone rings, and it is a newspaper. Could we come to photograph where you write? OK, but you won’t get anything to make Interiors-addicts salivate. Again: have you ever suffered a bout of stage-rage for a little feature we’re putting together? A third time: what’s your favourite poem, for another l.f.w.p.t? I can’t believe anyone would really be interested in the information that P. Hensher’s favourite poem is ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’. But it seems only polite to answer, and I can see that these features keep the costs of newspapers down. Not many people, even these days, would have the rind to ask to be paid for telling the Daily Telegraph what their favourite poem is.
Off to the Hayward to see its Andy Warhol exhibition, and to face a recurrent dilemma for the viewers of contemporary art. When are you allowed to stop watching a video in an art gallery? This one has, in a single room, all those terrible old movies you always heard about but have never seen — the film of the Empire State Building doing nothing much for eight hours, the film of the bloke sleeping, and so on. If you watched all these films back to back, you would be there for the whole week, and not have been entertained all that much. I conscientiously watched all of them for five minutes each, but felt, afterwards, that half that wouldn’t have affected my enjoyment much.
Novelists are generally nice and collegiate people, unlike poets, who of course all hate each other. The six Booker shortlistees, once brought together, quickly form a bond, starting with rebellious mutterings against a Guardian photographer who wants to stick Sebastian Barry up a ladder in the National Art library. Everyone else, I sense, is rather disappointed with our failure to behave like rival wrestlers with an eye on the cup. But literature, in the end, isn’t a zero-sum game where one writer wins and another one loses. It’s very unlike sport. Foreigners are fond of observing that ‘nobody remembers the one who came second’. That’s demonstrably untrue of literary competitions. Some of the novels I love best in the world are the ones which got shortlisted for, but didn’t win the Booker — Earthly Powers, Ending Up, A Bend in the River, The Beginning of Spring, Lawrence Durrell’s Constance. Reminder to self: keep telling yourself this.
And the next day everything went back to normal, and I got on with reviewing a new life of Gabriel García Márquez for The Spectator.
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