Schama - Scribble, scribble, scribble: writing on politics, ice cream, Churchill, and my mother

Scribble,
Scribble,
Scribble

Writing on Politics,
Ice Cream, Churchill,
and My Mother

SIMON SCHAMA

To my editors, with gratitude

Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?

The Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon

Contents

I have two styles of writing, anal and loopy, both adopted in slavish but futile imitation of models who used a fountain pen as though they had been born with one in their hands. I had not. My primary-school exercise books, an Abstract Expressionist field of blots and stains, looked as though the nib had wet itself on to the page rather than been purposefully guided over the paper to form actual words. And yet I loved and still do the purchase the metal makes on paper, and cant begin a chapter or a script or a newspaper piece without first reaching for a fountain pen and notebook. I scribble, therefore I am.

At university I thought my bizarre handwriting more or less the calligraphic equivalent of Tourettes Syndrome, disfigured by ejaculatory whiplashes above the line ought to submit itself to a sterner form that might attest to my arrival at an Age of Reason. So I strove for a version of the professors hand when he corrected my essays. This was a backward-leaning row of indentations and projections: a Cambridge minuscule. The letters rose, as if they were unsure about the worthwhileness of the effort involved, a bare millimetre from flatline horizontal and had a tightness that I thought conveyed densely packed critical power. In the professorial hand the little ts and ds were barbs on a high-voltage wire and they snagged you with small, piercing lunges of pain. This paragraph five times as long as it needs to be, the hand said, or Do you ever tire of adjectives? My chastening superego, such as it was, reached for mastery of an economic style, but the unmannerly slob of id lurked to foul its plans. So my version of the professors writing resembled the secretion of a crippled ant, one leg dragging behind the body as it crept from left to right across the page. But this is still the hand I use, involuntarily, when correcting the work of my own students, or printed drafts of my own. Sometimes, the students beg me to decode a completely illegible set of comments, but I reckon that decipherment is part of their educational challenge. Hell, it did me no harm.

Do you know, chuckled the girlfriend from the 1970s, a queen of the nib, waving a page of my fractured minuscule written, I blush to recall, in green ink I had no idea until you wrote me that note, that I was going out with a serial killer! Of course I could be wrong, she added, flashing me one of her fine-boned sardonic smiles, you might just be a paranoid schizophrenic. It wasnt her forensic diagnosis of my handwriting that stung, it was the merry way she laughed whenever she saw it, as if no one in their right mind could be expected to bother, except clinically. For our relationship to prosper, I realised I would have to make my hand lean in the opposite direction, with a degree of forwardness that testified to my ardour. On the other hand, it could not be a servile imitation of her own elegantly oblique manner, penned with long white fingers, for that would seem offputtingly craven, a bit like calligraphic cross-dressing. But wasnt I the yid with the id?

So I just let it out of the kennel to see what it could do, and thus was born that wowser of a hand: loopy, big, brash, vauntingly cursive, and often entirely out of control. Loopy is to my writing what fox is to hedgehog, Tigger is to Eeyore, Bugs is to Elmer, Rabelais to Montaigne, Bjrk to Coldplay. Loopy bounds and leaps and lurches and cant wait to get to the end of the line because gee, gosh, boy oh boy theres another line to fill, and omigod, a whole half-page waiting just for me to do my thing all over it. Loopy will not be confined. Loopys hs snake skywards like a fly-fishers line, the tails of Loopys fs and gs and ys drop deep into the pond, Loopy frisks and gambols, Loopy jives, Loopy got da mojo, Loopy LIVES! And people well, some people tell me they can actually read it. Or so the nice ladies in the Burlington Arcade pretend when they watch me try out another antique Swan or Parker 51. Of course it could be in their interest to keep their smile of disbelief to themselves as Loopy goes for a test run on their scratch-pads, but theyre usually called Heather so, what the hell, I trust them. And the queen of the nib? Oh, she was tickled.

And so it has been well before my encounter with, lets call her Italica that the call of Loopy moved me instinctively towards a kind of writing that was driven by the pleasure principle, or at least danced to a different drummer than Carefully Considered Academic Analysis. That beat is called journalism and I have always, unapologetically, enjoyed committing it. Most of the pieces collected in this book were written for the many newspapers and magazines generous enough to indulge my habit and actually pay me for the exercise. (My first book review was for the venerable Saturday Evening Post and I got paid $25.) A few of the lengthier, more spaciously considered pieces catalogue essays, the occasional lecture, book reviews made the cut if they retained something of the nervous tingle of the moment, even if the high-wire act was performed in front of an audience rather than exacting editors and their readers. In some ways the title of this collection could not be less apt, for the joke of the Duke of Gloucesters breezy enquiry at what Gibbon might be up to is comical only when one registers the pains and time it took the historian to produce every baroquely rolling sentence of his masterpiece. In that sense the pieces here are most unGibbonish, written on the fly (though after much thought): capers and flourishes that try to share the passion whether enthusiasm or grief for their subjects. If they were not always hot off the press, they were often hot from my head.

But then I got the hot-metal romance early. I wasnt even out of grey flannel short trousers and snake belt when our class got taken to Fleet Street some time in the mid-1950s. The Daily Mirror had it all, I thought: shrivelled trolls with the right kind of fungal pallor, chained to machines that chattered out type; trays of set pages; even the occasional green eyeshade; the whole wizards den culminating in sheets of raw newsprint cascading into bins. Was there ever a headier bouquet cheap cigarettes and printers ink? They had to drag me back to the school coach.

Paradise got postponed. I signed up as soon as I could for the secondary-school magazine, but it was a prim production called The Skylark, bound in air-force-blue paper and featuring deadly reports on the doings of the school hockey team interspersed with juvenile odes to the Grampians. The paper signified the sky part, I supposed, but I was more interested in the lark. I got it when the school librarian, the son of a Labour MP, got busy with a subversive publication, printed clandestinely in the art rooms after school. Called Perspective, like all lefty broadsides which didnt really have any, it railed gloriously against British policy in Cyprus and defended EOKA bombs and ambushes as legitimate self-defence. I was but a baby gofer to the sixth-form comrade editor whose extreme unfriendliness I took as a sign of iron political discipline, but I loved every minute of the transgression, stacking copies in the inner sanctum of the library office, unbeknownst to the kindly Latin teacher whom we were getting in the hottest of water. It was a tribute to our modest powers of circulation, I suppose, that at some point, men in pork-pie hats and raincoats (I swear) paid a visit to the headmaster and invoked, so we heard, the Official Secrets Act. While we were happy not to be expelled along with our mastermind, our reverence for his steely wickedness only intensified with the glamour of his indictment.