Scribble, Scribble, Scribble Read online

  A year or so later, the Revolution in the Fens but a heady memory, we dreamed up the idea of an anthology of some of the best writing over the life of the Review and, to our amazement, Jonathan Cape agreed to publish it. Out it came in 1972, bejacketed in a peculiar shade of pink (more or less my politics), grandly entitled The Cambridge Mind. Though we had pieces by examples of the most rarefied regions of the Cantabrigian medulla – G. E. Moore, J. J. Thompson, William Empson – I knew this was asking for trouble of the chucklesome kind, but I was outvoted by my more serious colleagues and collaborated in an introduction of numbing loftiness. The anthology was reviewed, rather kindly, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who pointed out that The Oxford Magazine had published a similar anthology some time before called The Oxford Sausage. The difference in titles, he implied, with that thin literary smirk he assumed at moments of intense self-amusement, was all you needed to know. In private I knew he was right.

  There followed the years of Rain in The Hague: gallons of it streaming down the windows of the old National Archive where I endured a lonely research vigil, thinking – a lot – about one of my best friends who had decided to do his research in Venice. Whenever I could I high-tailed it to Amsterdam, then in the throes of stupendous cultural uproar, a non-stop porno-dope-anarcho-rock-and-roll madness. Major publications were called things like Suck and knew, it is fair to say, even by the standards of the time, no bounds. In a disused church a coagulated jam of bodies swayed (dancing was physically impossible) to violent music, while lava-lamp blobs oiled their way over a huge screen where once an altar had stood. Limbs became confused, and then the rest of us. Back in Cambridge, Lawrence Stone was contrasting the slow historical evolution of sex and marriage with the outbreak of what he called, smiling merrily (and quoting that line of Philip Larkin’s), ‘polymorphous sexuality’. In Amsterdam I knew what he meant.

  As I slowly and painfully assembled the source materials for my first book, Carlyle’s phantasmagoric vision of the archive as an interminable coral reef stretching away as far as could be imagined often appeared before me. The danger of drowning was real. So, more than ever, I needed to surface and get a hit of oxygenated journalism. Kindly, clever John Gross came to my aid with assignments to write about art for the TLS, and lots of hospitable editors followed – at New Society, Tony Elliott at the young Time Out (which was decent of him since I’d been part of the gang that tried to compete with him with a Richard Neville publication, Ink, a gloriously stoned and thus inevitably short-lived affair). After my first book appeared in 1977, to mostly positive reviews, editors on both sides of the Atlantic began commissioning pieces, which I turned in always on time and always overwritten, both length-wise and adjective-wise.

  I have been lucky ever since; more than most, I think, in the generosity with which editors of all styles and philosophies have let me run around, not just in history, art and politics – the fields in which I graze in my book-length scholarly life – but in other departments of enthusiasm: music, film, theatre and, the writing which is simultaneously most challenging and most rewarding, words about food. Cooks – at least those who don’t have to sweat it for a living – will tell you that the whole business is about the delivery of pleasure; the sampling of that lovely moment when, if one has done fairly well, even the most garrulous company will fall silent after a bite or two and get lost in delight. This salmagundi – a thing of various tastes and textures – is likewise offered to my readers in a similar hope that some of it, at least, might go down a treat.

  Travelling

  Sail Away: Six Days to New York

  on the Queen Mary 2

  New Yorker, 31 May 2004

  Overlooked – literally – by the seventeen-deck Queen Mary 2, as she slid into her berth at Pier 92 on 22 April 2004, was the dead white bird. Laid out on its funeral barge beside the USS Intrepid, as flightless and obsolete as the dodo, Concorde wasn’t going anywhere. The sleek dream of supersonic speed, the princess of whoosh, which got you there before you’d started, was now, officially, a museum piece. The future – as the mayoral bloviations greeting the ship’s midtown docking affirmed – belonged to 150,000 tons of steel capable of grinding through the ocean at all of thirty knots (that’s around thirty-five m.p.h. to you landlubbers). The latest and most massive of the transatlantic liners takes twenty times as long to carry you from New York to England as a Boeing or an Airbus. And that’s the good news – the reason, in fact, for Commodore Ronald Warwick, the master of the Queen Mary 2, to brag, at the quayside ceremonies, that Cunard was poised to compete with the airlines for a serious share of the transatlantic business.

  Like those of us who had sailed with him through Force 10 gales and thirty-foot swells, the Commodore may have been pardonably giddy at coming through the worst that the feisty ocean could throw his way on a maiden North Atlantic voyage and still getting to the Statue of Liberty on schedule. But could this be the start of something really big and really slow? We take for granted the appeal of velocity, that there is money to be made and pleasure to be had from the gratification of the instantaneous: the three-gulp Happy Meal, the lightning download, the vital mobile phone message that I am here and are you there? And where has this culture of haste got us? Baghdad, apparently, where the delusions of the get-it-over-with war are being compounded by the unseemly rush to exit, leaving the whole gory mess for some other loser to sort out.

  It has been thus, as Stephen Kern, in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, points out, ever since the orgiasts of speed at the turn of the twentieth century made acceleration the necessary modern ecstasy. In 1909, the Italian writer and artist Filippo Marinetti declared, in his Futurist Manifesto, that ‘the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed’. On an afternoon two years later, a sixteen-frames-a-second movie of the investiture of the Prince of Wales was developed in a darkroom on a British express train and taken to London, where it was shown the same night. Translated into military strategy by the overarmed Great Powers, as the historian A. J. P. Taylor liked to note, the imperatives of railway timetables drove the logistics of pre-emptive mobilisation. A pause to ponder was already a defeat. So modernity bolted out of the starting gate in 1914: Archduke shot, millions of men in grey and khaki precipitately herded into railway carriages, carnage begun right on cue – before the Flemish mire slowed everything down and millions plodded to their doom.

  For much of its history, Cunard has been part of this feverish hurry-up. In 1907 its flagship, the Mauretania, captured the Blue Riband for fastest transatlantic crossing, and kept it for twenty-two years, spurring jealous – and fatal – competition. A novel by Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan; or, Futility, appearing in 1898, had featured a liner named Titan that cuts another ship in two simply ‘for the sake of speed’. And the captain of the Titanic was blamed for sailing full steam, even in an area notorious for ice floes, in deference to the White Star Line’s determination to wrest the Blue Riband from Cunard.

  Abraham Cunard, a Philadelphia shipwright, had settled in Nova Scotia, in the loyalist diaspora, after the American Revolution. The loyalists, severed from not only their homes but the mother country, had good reason to want their mail delivery to take less than six weeks, the time often needed for sailing ships to cross from Britain to Canada or the West Indies. Abraham and his son Samuel prospered with a small mail fleet, and in the 1830s Samuel, watching George Stephenson’s locomotive the Rocket hurtle along the tracks at thirty m.p.h., became convinced that on the oceans, too, steam propulsion was about to replace sail.

  Paddle-driven steamers had been in common use in both American and British coastal waters and rivers since the early nineteenth century, and steam-assisted masted ships had crossed the Atlantic since 1819. But it was only in 1838 that the first full steam crossing was made, by the St George Steam Packet Company’s ship Sirius. Immediately the journey was cut to two weeks (twelve days to Halifax, fourteen to Boston). The Sirius was followed by Isambard Kingdom Br
unel’s Great Western, which added style to speed. It boasted 128 staterooms, bell ropes to summon stewards, a ladies’ stewardess and a seventy-five-foot saloon, decorated with panels celebrating ‘the arts and sciences’.

  Disdaining both opulence and reckless speed, Samuel Cunard offered something else when, in 1839, he made a tender to the Admiralty for the conveyance of Her Majesty’s Mail: dependability, guaranteed by the novel presence of an on-board engineer. In July 1840 the Britannia, the first of Cunard’s packets, docked at Boston after a two-week crossing. A wooden-hulled ship with two masts and a central funnel, it was a footling 1,150 tons and about 200 feet long (compared with the QM 2’s 150,000 tons and quarter-mile length). In the port where the American Revolution began, Britannia was greeted with gun salutes, a performance of ‘God Save the Queen’ and the declaration of Cunard Festival Day.

  The word ‘historic’ was much repeated over the public-address system last 16 April, as the Queen Mary 2 moved out into the Solent from its Southampton berth under a classically grey English spring sky. The maiden North Atlantic crossing was hugely subscribed, and, despite the famous superstitiousness of sailors, no one aboard seemed to have been deterred by, or even to have spoken of, the tragedy that cast a shadow over the ship’s prospects even before she had been formally launched. On 15 November 2003, while the QM 2 was still in the shipyard at Saint-Nazaire, in Brittany, where it was being built, a gangway, bearing fifty people, collapsed, throwing some of them fifty feet to the concrete bed of the dry dock. Fifteen were killed and twenty-eight injured. Many of the dead and injured were shipyard workers and family members and friends, who were visiting the liner before its sail to Southampton.

  In defiance of ill omens, the transatlantic send-off was exuberant; for those braving the raw breezes there was sparkling wine on the upper-deck terrace. But anxieties about the target of opportunity presented by a mass of slowly moving Anglo-American steel precluded all but a vigilantly screened handful from the dockside ‘sailaway’. A spirited band did what it could with ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Life on the Ocean Wave’, but neither was able to compete with a phantom soprano hooting from the loudspeakers. Then the ship’s whistle drowned out everything else, and streamers were tossed from the decks, landing beside flocks of indifferently bobbing seagulls. Waving hankies were to be seen only in blown-up photographs of Cunard’s past glory days mounted on walls in the ship’s interior.

  And where were the cows? Samuel Cunard had made sure that each of his packets was equipped with at least one ship’s cow, to provide a steady supply of fresh milk, which, to anyone faced with trays of small plastic miniatures of ‘dairy-taste’ creamer, seems like an idea whose time should come again. There would be risks, of course. During the fourth crossing of Brunel’s immense Great Eastern, in 1861, the seas were so high that, according to one report, they not only tore off the paddles, but knocked over the deck-mounted cowshed, sending one of the animals through the skylight of the saloon, where it landed on an understandably surprised barfly. This might have happened early in the morning, for in the halcyon days of the packets saloons opened for business at 6 a.m. and closed at eleven at night. A decent breakfast on the Britannia in the 1840s was steak and Hock, which Cunard might think of adding to room service, as a more cheering way to start a day on the tossing waves than weak tea, overstewed coffee and dried-out croissants. And anyone who has waited all his life for the moment when, from a blanket-wrapped steamer chair, he could interrupt his reading of Anita Loos or Evelyn Waugh to summon a steward for a cup of piping-hot bouillon will have to wait a bit longer, for on the QM 2, I regret to report, bouillon was there none.

  What there is on the QM 2 is grandeur: lashings of it, Bel-Air baroque, heavy on the upholstery. The dominant style is officially described as ‘Art Deco’, but it is more le grand style Ginger et Fred: sweeping staircases (especially in the triple-decker main restaurant); long, curved bars (very handsome in the Chart Room); leopard-patterned carpets; and, in one theatre, bronze bas-reliefs that feature disporting deities, as in the pre-multiplex yesteryear, though the athletic statuary posted at the doors summons up Albert Speer and ‘Honour the Komsomol’, rather than Garbo and Groucho. Over the shipboard ‘art’ a tactful veil should be drawn, but there is great art on the Queen Mary 2: namely, the exterior of the ship itself – a thrilling scarlet-and-black tower of a funnel and four heroically scaled brushed-steel propeller screws mounted on deck seven, as mightily torqued as anything from the hand of Richard Serra.

  Even though the ship is a small floating town – 2,600 passengers and 1,300 crew – it seldom feels crowded. It helps if you have a cool $27,000 to spare, for then you get a share of the Balmoral Suite: 2,249 square feet of what the brochure describes as ‘sheer extravagance’, including a dining area for eight; two interactive plasma-screen TVs; your own exercise equipment; and (the least they could do, really) ‘a fully stocked bar’. For $18,000 less, you rate a not so fully stocked bar and about 250 square feet of elegant, if rather narrow, cabin and balcony. This would still be nearly 200 square feet bigger than Charles Dickens’s stateroom aboard the Britannia in 1842. For his thirty-five guineas Dickens got a claustrophobic twelve by six: two stacked curtained bunks (no room to stow his trunk); two washstands, with jugs of water brought by stewards; a niggardly porthole, rather apt to leak; and a single oil lamp. But even this austerity was princely compared with steerage on such ships, where passengers slept communally in rows of swinging bunks ‘tween decks’ and cooked in their own utensils without much help in the way of lighting or ventilation.

  For the cabin-class passengers, the centre of the Britannia, both socially and physically, was the grand, coal-heated saloon, which Dickens described, in American Notes, as

  a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the low roof and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather.

  Dinner, taken on oilcloth-covered tables – which, predictably, aggravated the roll of crockery in heavy weather – was at one: roasted potatoes, baked apples and much pork, in the form of pig’s head or cold ham (for some reason, pig was thought to lie easiest on ocean-going stomachs). At five, a cheerless supper was served, usually of boiled potatoes and mouldering fruit, washed down with brandy-and-water or wine, but then there was always the saloon to repair to. Those among the crew who could play a tune or two sometimes did, and there were a few books in the saloon. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when wooden hulls were replaced by steel and paddles by screw propellers, did a comprehensively stocked and magnificently panelled and furnished library become a crucial fixture. The heavily used library on the QM 2 runs the gamut from Danielle Steel to Tom Clancy; there is a wall of less intensively visited Everyman classics, and I found, improbably lurking amid the bodice-rippers and spy thrillers, Albert Camus’s The Plague.

  Though the best thing about a week’s Atlantic crossing is an eyeful and a day full of nothing other than the rhythm of the sea and the silvery curving rim of the world, and although Old Cunarder hands insisted that was the way that crossings, rather than mere vulgar cruises, should be, Cunard is now owned by the mother of all cruise companies, Carnival Corporation. And the job description of its toiling entertainment directors begins with the abhorrence of a vacuum. So the gym rumbles with massed treadmilling; the Canyon Ranch spa is packed with heavy massaging; the herbal sauna is crammed with oversized marine mammals (bipedal). In front of the two huge theatres, passengers line up by the statuary to hear a glamorous string trio of Ukrainian musicians dressed in miles of retro-ballgown satin taffeta give their all to ‘Jealousy’; or watch spirited young British actors throw themselves into greatest hits from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; or listen to lectur
ers like me pontificating about Atlantic history.

  In the Queen’s Room, a frighteningly accurate bust of the actual Queen Mary, the present Queen’s grandmother – a human galleon who seemed to sail fully rigged through state ceremonies as lesser craft chugged contemptibly about her – surveys Gavin Skinner and Lydia Lim, the dance teachers, as they steer giggly novices through the samba, cha-cha or foxtrot, the ‘walk-walk, side-together-side’ contending with the unhelpful motion of the waves. On the parquet, middle-aged ‘gentlemen hosts’ hired to squire single ladies through the dances glide their partners around with courtly grace. After being screened for ballroom-dancing prowess and other credentials of respectability, the gentlemen hosts sign on for at least two voyages, and pay a token sum for the privilege. But if Gordon Russell Cave, an impeccably turned-out widower, is any guide, the hosts see their work more as vocation than as vacation: the purveying of shipboard happiness. The moments Gordon recalled with most pleasure were those befitting a preux chevalier. One widow told him, after he had walked her back to her seat, that it was the first time she had danced since her husband’s death, four years before. ‘I think it helped, that little moment,’ he said.