Memoirs... memoirs (Updated)

Memoirs... memoirs    (Updated)



George Orwell

Well, first some good news. Although I had something of a blip over last weekend I feel I am most definitely recovering  - and this before the antidepressants take effect. Thanks all for your good wishes. Our next Good Yarn session will be on Friday 15th and I will be attending. Not drinking in case any of you are worried.

Now on to the subject of autobiography. I am thinking of completing a second volume of my memoirs. I think in my present circumstances it may be very therapeutic to keep myself busy with such a project.

George Orwell has written “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Maybe nothing disgraceful but transparent honesty will be the hallmark of this memoir.  

Readers of this blog will recall that I have written an earlier  memoir covering my life from my mid-teens until my mid-twenties... working title: HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SUCH A PRAT? It certainly does reveal a lot that is disgraceful.  It's all there in agonising detail: my Onan-dominated  'O' Level and 'A' Level years, my dissolute and unhappy years at St John's College Oxford, my belated gap year on London building sites, my absurdly happy PGCE year at St Mary's College, Twickenham [SIMMS] my first years in teaching and of course my disastrous first marriage.

I have assured Marianne that I will never publish this while she is alive. In light of this I arranged a meeting with my solicitors and settled that if I predecease Marianne that they arrange to have my memoir published after both of us have deceased and gone heavenwards.

HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SUCH A PRAT?  covers from when I was about fifteen until I was around twenty-six years old. I now think that writing an account of my first fifteen years might be something I need to record. So much material there: my father and his battered thermos and tin lunchbox setting off for work. (Didn't they have a canteen at RAF Northolt?) My brother combing his hair in the hallstand mirror and looking the spit image of Billy Fury. My mother and her food parcels and boxes of colouring books for the gypsy children on Iver Heath. And of course dear old Uncle Nancy with his penchant for pink cardigans and all things Ivor Novello.

IVOR NOVELLO

So who and what will I be perhaps influenced by in my approach to this memoir? Well, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for sure.

James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


CHAPTER I

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was
a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow
that was down along the road met a nicens little boy
named baby tuckoo. . . .

Although in the form of a novel this is indeed James Joyce's autobiography of his youth. It's wonderful and I am modest enough to realise that I couldn't match it in quality.

One of the best set of memoirs I have ever read is the Clive James series entitled Unreliable Memoirs:

Unreliable Memoirs

Falling Towards England

May Week Was In June

North Face of Soho

The Blaze of Obscurity

Wonderful stuff, I was sad nearing the end of each volume knowing I could not approach such fun afresh again. Clive James is so self-deprecating, brutally honest and outrageously funny. I think maybe I can match Clive here in honesty and humour.



Clive James: superb memoirs



 

And on memoirs lets have three cheers for my fellow Uxbridge man, the boxer Chris Finnegan R.I.P. the former Olympic gold medal winner at middleweight. Most sports biographies are ghost-written dross but Chris' SELF PORTRAIT OF A FIGHTING MAN is a revelation. Full of original self-deprecating banter and side-splittingly funny Cockney-Irish humour, it is outstanding.





Another autobiography I may revisit before getting down to writing my second instalment of memoir is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Published three years after his death, this is part road trip, part love letter to Paris, part study of his friendship with characters such as F Scott Fitzgerald, and wholly wonderful. It is a mystery how he remembered a moment of it, though, since he drinks so much all the time. Try keeping up with him and you’ll be dead drunk by page four.

"And  what,"  I hear you ask, "about Detterling's memoirs? Weren't they to be published in April 2016?"

Oh! my prophetic soul! Did I not predict over a year ago that April 2016 would come and Detterling's memoirs would not be published? He puts the delay down to his health but then are we to believe this? He has a long record of malingering.

Somehow I don't think they will ever be published. Many obstacles and foremost his writing style. His pomposity will trip him up for a start. Then there is his Thesaurus-driven prose... everything overwritten to the point of sclerosis. Would-be epigrams meet each other, fight and freeze. Pointless erudition and strained jocularity form a rigid amalgam. The result a prose cloying and thick as fog on his native Tyne. Then of course we will have 'jejune', 'rebarbative' and 'pinchbeck' in every other sentence.

But of course the real reason we will never see Detterling's memoirs is down to his lack of bottle. Does he have the coruscating humility, honesty and courage to describe himself as say I or Clive James might do - and indeed have done? Of course he doesn't.

Fog on the Tyne

And of course there  is more - and even by Detterling's bizarre standards of excuses this takes the biscuit. He claims that he might die before he gets his memoirs finished!!! This puts into the shade even the incident of him throwing in the towel against Jjbloggs claiming he was too dizzy to carry on! (For those not in the know this refers to an episode almost eleven years ago on the TES website Opinion Forum when Detterling was engaged in a set to with a madcap poster named Jjbloggs. In an astonishing act of craven surrender Detterling turned tail and quit claiming he was too dizzy to carry on with the argument.)

To be continued