Post WW2
Melancholy, angst, uncertainty
Summary of 30s depictions
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The press and journalists were portrayed with increasing anxiety as the 30s wore
on. Novels, plays and poems had themes of war and foreign conflict.
Dog Beneath the Skin: anxiety about censorship by the press
Autumn Journal: press is inextricably linked with fears of impending doom
Kenton in Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger tries to make sense of life in a Europe
increasingly torn by conflict
Scoop: satirical account of how journalists behave in wartime written as WW2
becomes an increasing inevitability
Storm Jameson’s trilogy: reflects on the powerlessness of individual journalists in
the face of proprietors who want a certain line; constant references to the
situation in Germany
A remarkable difference between this period and the Edwardian period is that
these depictions are not written by journalists in the mould of Gibbs, Courlander,
Thorne and Wallace. Apart from Waugh, who made his antipathy to journalism
very clear, many 30s writers were not journalists and had no real experience in the
working life of the reporter.
Therefore to a great extent they imagined the practice of journalism and the
atmosphere of news rooms
After WW2, changes in portrayals
• Texts:
• My Turn to Make the Tea (Monica Dickens,
1951)
• The Quiet American (Graham Greene, 1955)
• Fortunes of War (Olivia Manning, 1960)
• Towards the end of the Morning (Michael
Frayn, 1967)
Context
• Steadily growing grumblings about the conduct of the Press since
WW1; the 1938 PEP report into the press was supposed to pave the
way for a major inquiry
• WW2 put everything on hold
• In March 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced the first
Royal Commission on the Press:
• Terms of reference: With the object of furthering the free
expression of opinion through the Press and the greatest
practicable accuracy in the presentation of news, to inquire into the
control, management and ownership of the newspaper and
periodical Press and the news agencies, including the financial
structure and the monopolistic tendencies in control, and to make
recommendations thereon.
• NUJ had asked for the Royal Commission – to undermine the power
of the press barons
Why a Royal Commission?
• ‘Relations [between Downing Street and Fleet
Street] were never so poisonous, badtempered and embittered as during the years
of the Attlee Government. To be frank I have
never known the press so consistently and
irresponsibly political, slanted and prejudiced.
One can only sympathise with Aneurin Bevan’s
protest about ‘the most prostituted press in
the world’…James Margach, The Abuse of
Power, 1978, pp 86-87
Remit and findings of the Commission
• The remit of the Commission was, essentially to inquire into press
ownership and to establish if press freedoms and journalistic
independence were being eroded by the concentration of proprietorship.
• The Commission finally reported in June 1949, concluding in its 180 pages
that ‘the British Press is inferior to none in the world. It is free from
corruption…the present degree of concentration of ownership…is not so
great as to prejudice the free expression of opinion or the accurate
presentation of news…’
• It also recommended the establishment of a Press Council, with 20 per
cent lay membership with the object of: ‘to safeguard the freedom of the
Press; to encourage the growth of the sense of public responsibility and
public service among all engaged in the profession of journalism…’
• Established in 1953, not without a lot of resistance from some proprietors
• This was followed in 1962/3 by the Radcliffe Tribunal, which investigated a
famous cold war spying case and also commented severely on the conduct
of the Press surrounding the stories.
Lords Debate on the Radcliffe Tribunal,
May 1963
• Lord Rea: ‘…the behaviour of the Press, which
it seems to me in this case has been quite
remarkable. The calumny to which the two
Ministers were subjected is really beyond
bearing.’
Literary Context
• After WW2 many European writers focussed on themes of despair,
melancholy, alienation and the limits of human endeavour in the face of
global war, Nazism, the holocaust, Totalitarianism
• Most famous of all WW2 and immediately post WW2 texts is Albert
Camus’ L’Etranger (The Outsider, 1942) and its follow-up, La Peste (The
Plague, 1947). His philosophy was absurdism: life is absurd, how do you
make sense of it?
• The other literary giant of post-war Europe was Jean Paul Sartre, whose
name is forever linked with the philosophical idea of existentialism. Only
the individual can take responsibility as Government has been proved
unable.
• Post WW2 literature dwells on the futility of existence in a godless,
hopeless world. Think of George Orwell’s 1984, the classic post-War
dystopian fiction. Information is strictly controlled; civil servants re-write
newspapers to suit the Party’s aims; TV is reduced to state propaganda
machine.
My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica
Dickens, 1951
• Humorous – but bittersweet - depiction of small
town life in the early 1950s, based on the
author’s own experience at the Herts Express
• A fond portrayal, yet one which carries cynicism
about the hypocrisy and double standards of local
newspapers.
• Pages and pages are devoted to the minutiae of
local paper life – death knocks, BMDs, womens
institute reports and parish council meetings
My turn to make the tea: quotes
• Poppy approaches the Goffs to ask if she can
rent a room in their house: ‘The Goffs cheered
up a little when I suggested it, especially when
we talked about the rent. ‘A press reporter,’
Mrs Goff said once or twice, as if trying out
the sound of it. ‘Well I’m sure.’ She inspected
me, and I could not tell if she was impressed
or disapproving. I thought she was impressed,
until she took her eyes off me with, ‘Oh well, it
takes all sorts.’ (p.46)
On the use of ‘colour’ in local
reporting
• ‘Murray did not like too much of the human
touch. He had been brought up in a news
agency, and liked his news straight and cold.
He had thrown my copy back at me and said
that people in Downingham did not want to
read stuff like that. I said that people in
Downingham did not want to read any of the
stuff we wrote, only there was nothing else,
except the Messenger.’ (p.52)
The futility of thinking you can change
the world
• ‘I scribbled madly, filling the pages of my
notebook. I would write a moving, shocking
story, a slashing indictment of the housing
conditions that lurked, unheeded at the back
of our town.
• ‘Not all that,’ muttered Vic, leaning back and
yawning. ‘You’ve only got a few lines, not the
whole mucking column. Just the name and
address and that.’ (p.61)
Hypocrisy and complacency
• Mr Pellet, the editor: ‘By the way…that possession case came up
this morning, didn’t it? Woman with the foul mouth. Leave it alone.
Major Back, friend of mine who made the applications, asked me to
keep off it. Says there’s been too much talk about it already.’
• ‘Oh but,’ I said, ‘It was the best case of the lot. It would make a
wonderful story, and anyway the Messenger will run it.’
• ‘Blast them,’ said Mr Pellet. ‘We won’t. A friend’s a friend…’
• He passed by the kettle, which lifted its lid at him. ‘What’s this?’ he
asked. ‘Tea again? I don’t know. Women. There never was all this
tea drinking before you came to the office.’ (p.65)
Climax
• The climax of the plot occurs on the last few
pages of the novel when Poppy realises that a
friend of her’s husband is in court and giving
away details of her friend’s identity will ruin her
career as a dancer.
• Poppy begs Murray who is standing in for the
editor, to suppress the story but Murray refuses.
Poppy resorts to hammering out the print just as
the paper is going to press, leaving a two inch
blank space in the middle of the paper.
Last lines
• ‘When Mr Pellet came back, Murray told him who had
tampered with the print and mutilated the Downingham
Post for all the world to see. There was nothing for it. I
went upstairs to hand in my notice and met him half-way
coming down to give it me. It made quite a friendly
transaction, and we agreed that women were a nuisance
in an office anyway.
• ‘We all had a tremendous party in the white lion to
celebrate my disgrace. Mr Pellet got a little drunk and said
he did not know how they were ever going to get the
paper out without me.
• ‘We’ll miss you,’ he said, and they got a promising young
lad of sixteen, fresh from school, to take my place on the
Downingham Post.’
Melancholy and Uncertainty
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There is a melancholy wistfulness throughout the novel: every one is hard up, the
most fun people have is a beer in the evening, people are forced to share lodging
houses with strangers; gas fires are always running out of coins, food is execrable
and scarce; surroundings are drab and colourless.
This is not the only Post WW2 novel to have this air. Austerity Britain coloured
everything including fictional narratives. Literary themes focus on attempts to
make sense of a senseless world that has seen two world wars in thirty years; the
search for moral and spiritual certainties amidst uncertainty; alienation is a strong
theme in post WW2 literature. The journalist figure, often portrayed as the
outsider, lends itself well to these post war themes.
A main theme of My Turn to Make the Tea is Poppy’s uncertainty over whether she
fits into the newsroom. Her act of vandalism precipitates the inevitable sacking.
A main theme of Quiet American is Fowler’s uncertainty over Phuong’s love
Towards the End of the Morning is peopled with characters uncertain about their
careers, the relationships and who they really are
Fortunes of War, though set during WW2 is about the disintegration of love and
trust in a marriage
Graham Green’s Quiet American, 1955
* In his pre-WW2 novels Greene had explored morality, evil,
fallen humanity and ‘Greeneland’, the black and white world
where ‘The hunted figure in a shabby mackintosh against a
shabby urban background conveyed an impressive personal
vision of a world evil and corrupt.’ (Graham Greene: an
approach to the novels).
• The second phase, say critics, is more mature, and earns
him the status of ‘great.’ It is a more secular phase, yet still
deals with the spiritual idea of the soul seeking
authenticity. Contains ‘sadness of personal relations
permeated by the fear of betrayal, self knowledge too long
delayed, the missed opportunity, the terror of life’s
unpredictability, a longing for peace. It is also about how
obsessive love can undermine one’s humanity.’
A ‘great’ novel about a journalist
• In my view, it is the best novel written with a
journalist protagonist. Greene uses the image
of the emotionally burned out cynical outsider
to ask questions of all humanity, about
political engagement, about how far we would
go in the pursuit of love, and about what
constitutes moral cowardice. Fowler, in many
ways is not a coward: his reporting puts him at
much physical risk, but the way he deals with
Pyle, Phuong and his wife is cowardly.
Brief plot summary
• Thomas Fowler is a cynical tired out foreign correspondent
posted in war-torn Vietnam. Although married back home,
he has a beautiful young Vietnamese lover, Phuong, whom
he adores, yet will not commit fully to.
• Pyle is an earnest, honest American diplomatic attache who
falls in love with Phuong and woos her away from Thomas.
• Much of the novel is taken up by Fowler’s attempts to
report on the conflict. Pyle at one stage saves Fowler’s life
out in the paddy fields. Eventually Fowler sets a trap for
Pyle who is killed in an ambush. Fowler then takes back
Phuong whom he has promised to marry.
Key points and themes
• Uses a first-person narrative conducted by a writer-protagonist whose
experiences mirror in many respects those of the author.
• Exotic setting, political concern with colonial wars, American meddling in
the Third World and the individual’s choice as to whether to become
politically involved, or to stand back and watch
• Opens with two members of a love triangle discussing the third, who if not
dead yet, is certainly doomed. Although Fowler does not actually wield
the gun, he has knowingly directed Pyle to the place where the
Vietnamese soldiers will find him and probably kill him.
• Fowler is cynical, world-weary, dissatisfied and seems to have lost all
sense of conventional morality.
• Key line: ‘Sooner or later Mr Fowler, one has to take sides if one is to
remain human’. The cleverness of Greene in this however is that in this
scene he is meeting with the leader of a Communist gang who is going to
kill Pyle. The leader knows Fowler and Pyle are love rivals.
Fact and Fiction
• Fowler is an English journalist living in Saigon,
covering the French Indochina war as Greene
had done for Life Magazine and the Sunday
Times. Fowler’s first name, Thomas [the
doubter], is the name Greene took when he
converted to catholicism to marry. Like
Greene, Fowler is terminally estranged from a
devoutly religious wife. Fowler, like Greene, is
violently anti-American
Character of Fowler
• A brave and professional foreign correspondent,
but like Mabel Warren, in personal disarray
• Driven by uncertainty over whether Phuong loves
him:
• ‘She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she
been fond of me, and hadn’t she left me for
Pyle?’
• ‘I wondered what they talked about together. ‘Is
he still in love with you Phuong?’
• ‘I said to Phuong ‘Do you miss him much?...You
spoke his name once in your sleep.’
Is Fowler a good reporter?
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Eschews the usual routine of organised press conferences ‘I’m tired of flying four
hours for a press conference’ and goes ‘off piste’ for more unusual stories.
Risks his life for his work: ‘I had come in before dawn in a landing craft from Nam
Dinh. We couldn’t land at the naval station because it was cut off by the enemy
who had completely surrounded the town at a range of six hundred yards, so the
boat ran in beside the flaming market. We were an easy target in the light of the
flames, but for some reason no one fired…I felt as though I were a mark on a firing
range. It occurred to me that if something happened to me in this street it might
be many hours before I was picked up: time for the flies to collect.’ (pp 38, 42)
‘If one writes about war self respect demands that one occasionally shares the
risks.’
Read Chapter 4 (and if time 5); think about Fowler’s character and the themes of
the novel and how Greene presents them.
How do Fowler’s observations compare with the portrayal of foreign
correspondents Harold Spence, Humphrey Quain and Kenton?
Is he a good reporter because actually it doesn’t mean anything to him if he lives
or dies?
Does not want the job of foreign editor
– but why?
• ‘I was to be the new foreign editor, arriving every afternoon at half
past three, at that grim Victorian building near Blackfriars station
with a plaque of Lord Salisbury by the lift…I was to be a reporter no
longer: I was to have opinions, and in return for that empty
privilege I was deprived of my last hope in the contest with Pyle…’
(58)
• ‘There was no point in telling Phuong, for that would be to poison
the few months that we had left with tears and quarrels…’
• ‘I wrote to the managing editor that this was the wrong moment to
change their correspondent. General de Lattre was dying in Paris:
the French were about to withdraw altogether from Hoa Binh…I
wasn’t suitable for a foreign editor – I was a reporter, I had no real
opinions about anything.’
Has his reporter’s training and lifestyle
damaged him as a human being?
• Wondering how to tell Phuong that Pyle is dead:
‘I had no technique for telling her slowly and
gently. I was a correspondent: I thought in
headlines. ‘American official murdered in Saigon.’
Working on a newspaper one does not learn the
way to break bad news, and even now I had to
think of my paper and to ask her, ‘Do you mind
stopping at the cable office…My paper would get
the news first under a Paris date-line. Not that
Pyle was very important.’
Suggestion that being a journalist is
bad for your humanity
• This passage suggests that his journalist’s training has
hardened him against more sensitive human emotions.
• This is a common theme of novels of this period. In his
forward to his novel The Spike (1965), Peter Forster
attempts to explain: ‘I incline to believe that jobs
create people…I think there is a genus journalist.
Certainly Fleet Street is a mentality as much as it is a
noisy, grubby thoroughfare between the law courts and
Ludgate Circus…’ In the novel, human tragedy is
treated in terms of ‘being a good story’ – something
that may not shock journalists, but may well shock
others.
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Has a horror of returning to England
and the bourgeois lifestyle of his
colleagues
on
the
paper
He imagines the night editor returning to his ‘semi detached villa in
Streatham and climb into bed with it beside the faithful wife he had
carried with him years back from Glasgow. I could see so well the
kind of house that has no mercy – a broken tricycle stood in the hall
and somebody had broken his favourite pipe; and there was a
child’s shirt in the living room waiting for a button to be sewn on.’
• For many this image of domesticity is something to be craved and
desired. For Fowler it is something to flee. The rootless foreign
correspondent is the ideal job for him.
• Greene fascinated with motive: does Fowler put Pyle in danger
because ‘sooner or later on has to take sides’ or because he is
jealous of him?
• What does Fowler’s being a journalist ‘mean’ for the novel,
compared to Mabel Warren’s being a journalist?
Quiet American Film
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBjOW9lu
DWw&feature=relmfu
• The novel was made into a successful film
with Michael Caine as Fowler. Not as good as
the novel but reflects Fowler’s detachment
and moral uncertainty well.
• What does this clip tell you about Fowler’s
character?
Towards the End of the Morning by
Michael Frayn
• (intro handout)
• ‘This book seems to have been retitled over the years, by the
common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me
since it was fist published in 1967 as ‘Your Fleet Street Novel’,
Michael Frayn, new note to the 2000 edition (Faber)
• ‘Fleet Street is now just the dull, busy thoroughfare that connects
the City to the West End. When I first arrived to work in it, in the
last few months of the 1950s, it was synonymous with the
newspaper industry. It referred not just to the street itself but to
the whole close-packed district around it – to a way of life with its
own style and philosophy; a world that has now vanished…It even
had its own smell…the alleys and courts of Fleet Street were
haunted by the grey, serious smell of newsprint. I catch the
delicious ghost of it in my nostrils now, and at once I’m back at the
beginning of my career, struggling to conceal my awe and
excitement at having last arrived in this longed-for land.’
Intro contd…
• ‘We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace, it’s
true, by the standards of today’s journalists. We didn’t
have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill
and we hadn’t yet got bogged down in the endless
Union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet
Street, before Rupert Murdoch sidestepped them, and
in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and
embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of
Wapping…I don’t know who’s getting thrown out of the
King and Keys these days, but no one, I imagine, with
that astonishing ability to drink until the floor tips and
still write a thousand words on the shocking decline in
standards of behaviour.’
Picture of Fleet Street
• "Various members of the staff emerged from
Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark
hour of the morning, walked with an air of
sober responsibility towards the main
entrance, greeted the commissionaire and
vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their
friends and draw their expenses before going
out again to have lunch."
John Dyson
• Main character is John Dyson, editor of the obscure
newspaper back pages that deal with crosswords,
nature notes (homage to Scoop?) and lowly features
from second rate public figures.
• ‘I toil all the hours God made at this job,’ said Dyson
bitterly, ‘and somehow I feel I never quite get on top of
it. It’s like trying to fill a bottomless bucket. You just
about get next week’s stuff straightened out – and
already it’s gone, it’s used, it’s forgotten, and the week
after’s on top of you.’
• What kind of stuff do you normally fill a bucket with?
The Dichotomy of Journalism
• Here he is expressing similar feelings about his work to a number of
other fictional journalists – remember Poppy in ‘My Turn…’ ‘I said
people in Downingham didn’t want to read any of the stuff we
wrote, only there was nothing else…’ or Gideon in Potterism musing
that journalism is only ‘babble to fill a moment.’ In Children of the
Dead End, the first time the narrator Flynn comes across a
newspaper is when it is wrapped around ‘a chunk of mouldy beef’.
• The unresolvable dichotomy that lies at the heart of all journalistic
endeavour – that ultimately it’s all futile, forgotten in a day,
tomorrow’s chip paper on the one hand and on the other it is the
most powerful tool of public opinion, everybody wants to control it
– right at the opening of his novel, and it’s a theme that colours
every page.
• It’s the dichotomy at the heart of what being a journalist is: it’s one
of the most pointless, yet also one of the most important jobs in
the world
The mutating image of journalism
• (From The Spike): ‘Clay waited in the road, hoping for a taxi, looking
also at the young man who seemed so avid for Clay’s day’s work.
The young man stood under a street lamp, going through the paper,
page after page, quickly yet without hurry. When he reached the
end, he threw the newspaper away into the gutter, and strolled off
towards the Strand. Clay looked after him, absolutely appalled.’
• The Genus journalist in fiction has mutated from the romantic,
swashbuckling type of the Edwardian era, through the lower class,
vulgar peddler of lies in the 20s and 30s to, in the 50s and 60s the
character unsure of his role, alienated from society, questioning his
profession – even Fowler does – in a way earlier depictions didn’t.
• Is the nature of journalism changing, or is it the nature of society in
which writers producing these fictions live? Do these fictions reflect
a decline in the authority of the press as television – a strong
threatening theme in the 60s novels – emerges?
The search for meaning
• Possibly this explains why so many journalist characters are so flawed,
perching on a narrow fence between good and evil, meaning and
pointlessness, cynical detachment and commitment – because their work
is, as the American reviewer of Scoop admitted, was ultimately, absurd.
• Certainly John Dyson’s character, of all the journalists we are studying,
most perfectly exemplifies this search for meaning that many of our
characters are involved in. Of course that is the journalist’s job: to search
for meaning and then convey that meaning to readers. Dyson and Fowler,
however search for a different meaning in their real lives.
• Furnishes the novel with one of the most oft-quoted lines in Fleet Street:
‘A journalist’s finished at forty, of course.’
• Read handout two: this is a key part of the novel: Dyson has taken this
disastrous freebie; he has ignored his wife and children in the vainglorious
pursuit of a television career which is dead before it has really been born.
• Along with Scoop it is held up the novel about journalists that most
journalists like the best. Why do you think so?
Frayn and Journalism
• Frayn wrote for the Manchester Guardian,
Guardian and Observer.
• In his recent anthology of journalism, Travels
with a Typewriter’ he recalls those days in the
50s and 60s
• (hand out)
Other characters in Towards…
• Bob, a young man just starting out on his career and on
Dyson’s small staff of 3. He’s up from the provinces and
is easy prey to his vampish landlady who keeps trying
to get into bed with him. According to Dyson, ‘writes
like an angel.’ Nearly has an affair with Dyson’s wife
Jannie and also has a rather frumpy girlfriend, Tessa.
• He’s a strangely insubstantial, passive character for the
second most important character in a novel. Things
happen to him, he never initiates action. A comment
by Michael Frayn on the vapid youths coming into Fleet
Street and pushing out the older ‘characters’….
Like Eddy Moulton
• Eddy Moulton, Dyson’s other staff member and representative of
the old Fleet Street. He’s either always asleep or day dreaming of
his glory days and dies, in harness, at his desk.
• ‘The bang of the door as Dyson went out woke old Eddy Moulton.
He had been dreaming about a journalist he had known in the old
days called Stanley Furle, who had never gone anywhere without
his gold-knobbed cane and a carnation in his buttonhole. One day
Stanley Furle had fallen down the basement steps of the Falstaff
and given himself a black eye on the knob of his cane! Old Eddy
smiled at the thought of it. He dipped his pen in the ink and began
to copy out in his close, careful longhand a report which had been
published exactly a hundred years ago on Thursday week about a
boiler bursting in Darlington with the loss of 13 lives. Nothing much
surprised old Eddy Moulton, but he was taken aback very slightly to
find that night had fallen already
The editor
• …Furtively among them came a short, rather fat man in a shapeless
raincoat and a shapeless trilby hat. He kept his eyes cast down upon
the gleaming dark pavements, as if he were trying to avoid other
people’s gaze, or treading on the gaps in the paving stones. He did
not walk across the middle of hand and ball court, but shuffled
along close to the walls, surreptitiously feeling them as he passed.
He was the sort of man who calls at newspaper offices carrying
sheaves of brown paper on which he has written down messages
from God or outer space setting forth plans for the spiritual
regeneration of the world. He slipped through the swing doors
while the commissionaire was looking the other way, got past the
inquiries desk with his head turned slightly to one side so that his
face was hidden by the sagging brim of his hat, and shuffled into
the lift…’
Reg Mounce, the pictures editor
• Office bully, old fashioned sexist, hated and feared by all
• ‘There were a great many pictures in the Pictures Department. The
ones around the walls were almost exclusively of naked women,
some of them supplied as advertising material by freelance
agencies and firms selling photographic products, others clipped
out of magazines to which Mounce subscribed. The photographs
intended for publication were laid out on the tables. These were of
restored cathedrals, Cotswold villages, sunsets over lakes, seagulls
in flight, small children gazing at clowns and patterns of light and
shade formed by steel girdering, frost, moving traffic at
night…Mounce was looking at a sheaf of prints which Lovebold had
just brought down from the darkroom. They showed patterns of
light and shade formed by the rigging of sailing boats.
• ‘What’s all this crap supposed to be?’ he asked insultingly.
• The editor spends the whole novel trying to sack Mounce
Christopher Hitchens on Towards…
• ‘Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, first published in 1967,
used to have the status of a cult book among the hacks (as we all
agree to call ourselves). It does have more or less everything: the
white-haired and burned-out old soak who can only reminisce
about forgotten, bibulous trips with forgotten, bibulous stars of old
Fleet Street: the bullying, self-loathing pictures editor who insists
on how self-made he is; the dreamy assistant scribe who only wants
to write book reviews for the New Statesman on the side (that
dates it a bit: in those days the NS had a literary editor and was
literate); the neurotic deputy editor who can't keep up the supply
of pre-digested columns entitled "In Years Gone By", or hold his
rural clergymen contributors to their deadlines. (In the latter
respect, there is something of a lift from William Boot's "Lush
Places" countryman column in Scoop.)’
Hitchens contd…
• ‘In Frayn's novel in the sixth decade of the C20 century, the lure of
television is already beginning to exert its anti-magic. The mindlessness of
the opinion poll and the reader-survey is coming to replace news and
analysis. The reporters and editors are beginning to think about mortgages
and pensions. The editor is a cipher. I do not think that there will again be
a major novel, flattering or unflattering, in which a reporter is the
protagonist. Or if there is, he or she will be a blogger or some other species
of cyber-artist, working from home and conjuring the big story from the
vastness of electronic space.
• What do you think about this statement, from what we know so far?
• ‘In any case, the literature of old Fleet Street was to a very considerable
extent written by journalists and for journalists. Most reporters I know
regard Scoop as a work of pitiless realism rather than antic fantasy. The
cap fitted, and they wore it, and with a lop-sided grin of pride, at that.
Fortunes of War
• Set in the Second World War, but written and
published in the 1960s.
• The journalist character is Galpin. This is how
he is portrayed in the film version of the
novel, one of my favourite TV journalists:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoJN2gkslQ&feature=related fortunes of war 10;
first minute then 4.54 'the press has arrived'
to Churchill speech
• Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War is a trilogy set
against the backdrop of WW2.
• The story is about the slow disintegration of a
marriage between Harriet and Guy Pringle and
the journalists are players on the great sweeping
canvas of the novel.
• They all hang out together, rather like the
characters in Scoop in the same hotel, the
Athenee Palace in central Bucharest and their
names, Screwby, Tufton and Galpin are
reminiscent of ‘Corker, Shumble and Pigge’
Galpin
• ‘Galpin’s dark narrow face hung in folds above his rag
of a collar. Elbow on bar, sourly elated by his return to
his old position, he kept staring about him for an
audience, his moving eyeballs as yellow as the whiskey
in his hand. As he drank, his yellow wrist, the wristbone like half an egg, stuck out rawly from his
wrinkled, shrunken, ash-dusty dark suit. A wet cigarette
stub clung, forgotten, to the bulging purple softness of
his lower lip and trembled when he spoke…’
• Wonderful classic description of a ‘hack’ – the
charicature that, down the years, seems to have stuck.
Defence of the Realm
Quiet American
State of Play
Philadelphia Story
His Girl Friday
Galpin
•
•
•
•
‘Galpin was one of the few journalists permanently resident in Bucharest. An
agency man living in the Athenee Palace and seldom leaving it he employed a
Rumanian to scout for news, which was brought to him at the hotel. The other
journalists in the bar had flown in from neighbouring capitals to cover the
Bessarabian crisis. As the Pringles entered Galpin seized on them and began at
once to describe how he had marched into the bar at the head of the new arrivals
and called to the barman ‘Vodka, tovarish.’
Whether this was true or not, he was now drinking whisky. He let Guy refill his
glass…’
‘This was too much for the journalists, who ridiculed the idea of Russia winning
any war, let alone this one. A man who had been in Helsinki spoke at length of the
‘Finnish fiasco’. Galpin then said the reputed power of Soviet armour was one
huge bluff and described how during the war in Spain a friend of his had run into a
Soviet tank which had buckled up like cardboard.
…He preferred to be the one to theorise, ‘Still they’re sticking their necks out.” He
looked for Tufton’s agreement and when he got it grunted, agreeing with himself,
then added: ‘If the Gemans ever attacked them, I wouldn’t give the Ruskies ten
days.’ (Written after the war)
More on Galpin
• He’s a solid reporter who seems to know everything that’s going on
(and some of which is not) a few minutes before it happens.
• He is stereotypically harsh and cynical however he is not a bad man.
• He rescues another man, Yakimov (whome he previously described
as ‘that turd Yakimov’), from a fascist mob
• He takes a female correspondent, Wanda, who is down on her luck
(‘Accredited to an English Sunday paper that did not inquire too
closely into the truth of what it printed, she had recently lost her
job because the news she was sending bore no relation of any kind
to the news being sent by other journalists’) under his wing. (p.374)
• When the German army is approaching and everyone is fleeing
Bucharest, he offers Guy and Harriet a lift out. (p.574)
Olivia Manning’s own wartime
experiences
• She travelled with her husband Reggie to Romania
where she witnessed King Carol's abdication, the rise
of fascism, and the tyranny of the totalitarian regime.
From Romania they escaped to Greece, then occupied
by British troops who retreated at the advance of the
German army. In 1942 Olivia Manning was a press
officer at the American embassy in Cairo; in 1943–4
she was press assistant at the public information office
in Jerusalem, and in 1944–5 held the same position at
the British Council in Jerusalem. Throughout the war
she was in constant touch with foreign correspondents
and drew heavily on her experience of them for the
characters of the journalists in her novels.
A word on the post-war press baron
• The monsters of the twenties and thirties (Beethameer,
Beethameer, bully of Britain…
• a green bile-sweat, the news owners, . . . . s
• the anonymous
• . . . . . . . ffe, broken
• his head shot like a cannon-ball toward the glass gate,
• peering through it an instant,
• falling back to the trunk, epileptic
• Are now replaced by Simon Birtle, the proprietor in J B Priestly’s
The Image Men (1968): ‘Simon Birtle was a shortish plump man in
his later fifties. He had a round face with rather small features and a
browny yellow complexion so that he suggested a worried and
somewhat bad-tempered mandarin. He didn’t drink, his wife
explained hastily…
Other mid C20 texts
• The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965)
• Northern Star by James Lansdale Hodson
(1954)
• The Spike by Peter Forster (1965)
• Northern Light by A J Cronin (1954)
• Everyone’s Gone to the Moon by Philip
Norman (1996) – set in a 1960s newspaper
office