The Atlantic Ocean Read online

  Writers of a certain kind – the unwise kind, you might say – should put on their shoes and go outside. There is something intoxicating about the odour of pencil shavings and cut lilies, but I always felt that outside was the place to test the weatherproof nature of one’s style and I have wanted to know how far I can press for the unobvious disclosure. In time I may grow to hate the outside world, but this book is a record of a natural inclination to see the writer hard at work in the open air and at the water’s edges, finding out just what it might be that a writer can find. In that sense the volume is also a story about the parameters of style, the American manner of reportage in conversation with the British, laying down a plan for the Atlantic mode.

  All representative ghosts have their natural haunts, and I feel my generation was built to feel with a measure of instinct how non-fiction could be as written as fiction. But there are still controversies around this topic and I’ve been known to run into them. They featured even in my childhood and could be found in the those dusty copies of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s magazine that fired my dreams of literary possibility as a boy. When I think of grand attempts to shape real life into art I don’t think first of Kansas and In Cold Blood, I think of James Boswell’s fantasia of Johnson’s life and the brilliant Edinburgh mimics who wrote for the great journals. Reality is not what it was, for writers no more than for the producers of sellable television shows, and I suppose that is something I take too much for granted. In any event, these pieces were written in the belief that journalism, as much as fiction, might work best when the style and the content are united. Material often speaks in its own way and it is the job of the writer to capture that way of speaking and to preserve it. This will sometimes mean throwing everything of yourself onto the page, allowing your own experience and your own ego to enliven the subject, but it might mean erasing yourself as completely as actuality allows, so that the material can properly survive your attempts to make excuses for it. There are stories – especially ones that feature extreme talk or behaviour – whose reality would be ground to dust by authorial intrusion, by a writer nervous of his material who was also anxious somehow to separate himself from its existence on the page or its validity in life. But that is bad writing. Our only responsibilities are to accuracy and the literary value of the thing – a writer who very obviously considers, as he writes a piece, what his friends will think of him when they read it is not a writer one can trust. It’s not a question of being brave or being right, but of sticking to the material.

  Some time after publishing one of the pieces in this book, the one about New Orleans, I discovered that some readers had found it to be somewhat unfair to its subjects and to America itself. I was told that some Americans had found it so too, and that the fault – if it is a fault – was mainly to do with my seeming absence from the piece. I felt shocked at this discovery because it appeared, for me at least, to betray a lack of faith in what writing is about. The New Orleans piece may have any number of failings, and, as with everything here, I wish I could go back and make them right, but I doubt that any of them are to do with my failure to appear more often as myself, and to somehow correct the opinion of America configured by the reporting. I actually liked Sam and Terry, the two men in the piece, and I recorded the facts of their journey to the South with faith, but the material demanded that it be allowed to speak for itself. My dalliance with them in the act of gathering stuff for the piece was immaterial when it came to remaking their world in a literary sense. Their journey had drama and dialogue – and it may have had political relevance too, or social ramifications – but none of that would have been enhanced by my adding my own voice to their scenes. For good or for ill, one must sometimes let the story be the story, and my own attendance at Sam and Terry’s rescue effort was not the story.

  There is a fourth wall in journalism as much as in drama: writers take it down as and when it suits them, though in British journalism, as opposed to American, addressing the reader directly is considered good manners. George Orwell, for instance, with all his brilliance, would act as valet to every thought a reader might have, which might, at the same time, explain why Orwell is both so congenial to be with and why none of his non-fiction narratives is as beautiful as those collected in Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel. Though they may not have known it themselves, the people who wanted me to be more present with Sam and Terry were really asking me to find a way to make Sam and Terry less like themselves, to launder them somehow by being a good liberal journalist who can explain or otherwise relieve the anxiety that is created by the men’s way of talking and being. My critics weren’t going that far, they weren’t asking for a censor, but they needed help in coping with these two men and the picture my account of their world gave of America, and they wanted that help to come not from their own imaginations but from mine.

  All I can say is Sam and Terry are not Everymen and their America is not the only one: I wanted readers to be in proximity to the relentless tension of their lives and this meant establishing a style for the piece that might precisely meet that content. There are other pieces here where the author is forever coming to the front of the stage to explain why the sisters will not be going to Moscow, but the story about Sam and Terry depends on the idea that a journalist, as much as any writer, may on certain occasions be present everywhere but visible nowhere. I cared about the piece as writing, not as a social experience, though I think I always knew in my bones that some readers would want more of the latter. But editorialising would have killed Sam and Terry stone dead; I knew that more than anything. Perhaps people wanted me to say more about myself because it would have meant saying less about Sam and Terry: they were a discomforting pair, and the call for ‘balance’ is very often a masked desire that the thing being described just wasn’t described or even seen to exist.

  Writing is not a character test and writers aren’t gods: you can charm your way into a reader’s affections with displays of good counsel and little arias of decency, but it will almost always in the end be like adding sugar to a dish that can be known for its own flavours. You will find many personal pieces in this book – pieces where the author is the character and the character is the point – but now and then the presence of the actor is most keenly felt when he is offstage. John Hersey wrote Hiroshima without once denouncing the savagery of those who invented the atom bomb or without once giving rise in the reader’s mind to the image of a good man scratching diligently in a notepad. He found a way to tell the story which perfectly served the story, and his example might tell us what we mean when we say that too much modern reporting is banal – it is the banality that comes when a writer imagines that he and his great conscience are more interesting than the story. Now and then they are, but the trick is to know when the story is working for itself.

  In Britain over the last two decades, some of us might say that pop culture and pop politics have been under the spell of an American kind of allure. It’s not a singular story – the same could be said of what used to be East Berlin – but in Britain we may have embraced the rise of the Christian Empire of America in ways that seemed purely natural and purely brave, if you followed Tony Blair. He felt he was right and saw it as an act of statesmanship to go to bed with the moral ambitions of George W. Bush, but in a sense Blair’s record as the people’s prime minister had already predicted such an event. Our own empire was gone. The shipyards had closed. We no longer exported Britishness to the world, so why wouldn’t an ambitious, populist politician of the new millennium see it as natural – an act of survival, even – that we should instead swallow our pride and our reason and take a hand in exporting American democracy?

  Several of these essays try to follow these arcs as they span the Atlantic Ocean: you might call it the people’s journey from a pride in having pride to a dependence on dependence. The culture of self-help that seemed so to dominate the airwaves – including the airwaves of high culture, movies, poetry and the novel – was born in t
he suburbs of America as surely as Oprah Winfrey. Before long we were watching the leisured underclasses throwing chairs at one another on Jerry Springer, and then we had it too – every day on the Jeremy Kyle Show.

  Culture as social balm.

  Spite as entertainment.

  Shouting as argument.

  Dysfunction as normality.

  Desires as rights.

  Shopping as democracy.

  Fame is the local hunger in so much of this and I find I have looked for it on both sides of the water. Sometime between the death of Marilyn and the death of Diana we learned to call it celebrity and began to feel it in our bones, this new open trade in alienation across the Atlantic. I remember the moment the Scottish light-entertainment heroine Lena Zavaroni went off to sing for Gerald Ford at the White House. It was the first time I realised someone like us could achieve fame. We couldn’t have known then that, within ten years, this small girl would be writing private letters saying, ‘I have lost myself’, ‘I am in a black hole’, and that she would be dead by the age of thirty-four, killed by complications associated with anorexia nervosa. Her hunger for fame went physical, and over the years I came to see her as a patron saint of British celebrity. The rise of celebrity in Britain is actually the rise of a populist ethos.

  As we clapped in our Scottish living room for Lena Zavaroni on Opportunity Knocks, I was convinced – being the youngest and the most starry-eyed – that the ‘Clapometer’ in London would pick up the noise and help Lena to win. Opportunity Knocks made the public the star: we made her success possible. And that is still the signature of phone-and-text competitions today. ‘If I am a star,’ Marilyn Monroe once said, ‘then it is the public who made me a star.’ And it is that power which became a kind of contagion in Britain at the end of the twentieth century. Margaret Thatcher may have wrecked our former sense of community, but she created a temperament for other forms of mass communion based on spite, many of which seek to mobilise collective feeling at 54p a minute.

  This is the theatre of the new celebrity and its front-of-house staff is the tabloids. It is sometimes hard to be sure, when reading those papers with their trigger-happy eruptions of populist zeal, whether the issue at hand is a celebrity’s big bottom or the exposure of a paedophile. Is one being invited to win a million pounds, or being told about the terror in Darfur or encouraged to gape at a woman’s breasts or laugh at someone’s downfall? It all comes at you with the same aggressive common sense and unassailable male joy. The wiles of celebrity make the public feel powerful and imperial: we can decide on the fame of ordinary people, which makes us feel very real and does something politics cannot do – it makes us feel together.

  I remember walking through those flowers along The Mall after Diana died, thinking, This is the revolution we’ve been waiting for: the country and the press got the god-like victim it wanted, and now come the observance and the vigils and the flowers. It could only end in prayers. We wanted a celebrity to die in the cause of our need to feel that our own feeling of normalcy is everything. People were overwhelmed by the local power of that sentiment and they gathered together and bawled in the street.

  A few years after that I was working on a novel and one day I visited a classroom of thirty girls. I gave out pieces of paper and asked them to write down what they wanted to be. It was the question we were always asked at school, and we would write ‘astronaut’ or ‘hairdresser’. (Something that could take you to America.) Seventy per cent of the papers I’d given out to the girls contained a single word. ‘Famous’ was no longer an adjective; it was a job and a condition of being.

  You used to have to be chosen. You used to have to be chosen over others, lifted up, made special. That is what being famous was all about: the glow of her chosenness, the heat of his recognisability. Producers and directors and editors and talent scouts chose you – they married you to the means of production – and then the public chose you in their turn. But the means of production have altered for ever, and now people can broadcast themselves in ways that make the old entertainment models seem as antique and ghostly as the music hall. Young kids make a record in their bedroom and they play it on MySpace. Girls create an audience and a network of contacts on Facebook, letting the world assess them and join them and make them famous. Everyone can make a spectacle of himself nowadays: home computers are increasingly built for that, for iLife, which isn’t the same as any life that went on in this country before the dawn of the twenty-four-hour media cycle. Every bedroom is a potential studio and every person with Wi-Fi is a potential star. They are already the stars of their own lives. And perhaps that is where television has ceded most to the new technologies: togetherness will not in the future be served by a diet of programmes for our collective experience, but by each of us acting as producer and crew and star of our own show, which we then share with selected others. Our transit to Narcissus will be complete when our screens become mirrors: one star, one audience, the same person, oneself.

  We have gone well past Andy Warhol. I saw that in New Orleans, when those two men from North Carolina showed a post-9/11 hunger to be heroic and be on television. At least they weren’t on Jerry Springer, though in many ways they would have done well there. I flew home from Atlanta that time with a bag full of notes and a head full of recognitions: parts of the Britain I was going home to are not at all unlike the world of Sam and Terry. It was filled with people like one or two of the boys I grew up with, workless for years but holding out for fame or glory in the media or a famous win on the Lotto. People like that often went to Iraq and died fighting battles ordered and run by 1960s idealists.

  As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness. But I know I will always be captivated by the green breast of the New World as imagined by Scott Fitzgerald, the old island that once flowered for the eyes of Dutch sailors. ‘For a transitory enchanted moment,’ he writes in The Great Gatsby, ‘man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent.’ And when I read that sentence I always think of my great-grandfather Hector Lavery, a fishmonger from Glasgow, who was crossing the Atlantic at the time Fitzgerald was writing his book. Arriving in Manhattan Sound on the SS Columbia in 1923, Hector and his wife Elizabeth and their child must have looked out and seen something of what the novelist had in mind. They had left a whole lot of life back in Glasgow – this was new life and the country must have seemed made for them. Sixteen liners narrowly avoided colliding at the piers that day before depositing 18,558 passengers on American soil. ‘There were more than thirty-five nationalities represented by the immigrants who landed yesterday,’ reported the New York Times, ‘and some of them spoke such strange tongues that no one so far has been found who can understand them.’ I like to think of my relatives’ Glasgow and Irish voices with Atlantic salt on their tongues. When I look at their documents, I see they signed them with an X. The invisible worlds suggested by those bleary marks have spurred me in my attempt to find ways of writing these stories over the years. There is work to be done in our own hand, and I suppose I am still on that spit of Ayrshire coast, a scene of arrival and a point of departure.

  Scotland’s Old Injury

  OCTOBER 2002

  In Westminster Abbey a number of years ago, I stood for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we adopted our BBC faces in Poets’ Corner, looking at the memorials and marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope:

  ’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,

  And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

  Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I watched Ascherson watching. He gave the impression there was something new to be said about Campbell.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘I want to show you something.’ Leading Ascherson across the Abbey,
round an altar, down a spartan side-chapel, I pointed through some slats to the Coronation Chair. ‘They took it eight weeks ago,’ I said, ‘the Stone of Destiny.’

  ‘How did they remove it?’ Ascherson asked.

  ‘They gouged it out. They broke the chair. It’s a thirteenth-century chair.’

  Ascherson looked at me, then looked again at the dimly lit chamber. He was smiling but I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or not. The Stone of Destiny had been taken back to Scotland, and I remember wondering, as we stood in the Abbey, if Ascherson thought the Scots would be delighted to have their Coronation Stone back after seven hundred years. ‘It was borne on the back of a polished military Land Rover,’ he writes in Stone Voices.

  The onlookers on the pavement were sparse, and did not applaud. They seemed uncertain about what reaction was expected of them; whatever it was, they refrained from it … They found this mournful pageant a bit alienating, and in a way it was meant to be. For the Queen, the Stone still remains her personal property; she had sent her son the Duke of York to escort it to Edinburgh Castle, where it would be deposited ‘on loan’ between coronations, visible to her subjects for £5.50 a peep.

  Ascherson is interested in relics, interested in what they mean, and he’s not short on native instinct when it comes to endowing even the most common stones of Scotland with an uncommon mystical power. His book Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland is a haphazard work of auto-geography, one man’s attempt to map his feelings about his own country, to send his affections first through the prism of history and then through the mincer, to hold up his own experience, his own devotions, to argue with time and battle with his own ambivalence, and above all, in the end, to have a go at telling a story about what it’s like to spend your life married to a scenic fiction: Scotland the Brave.