Am currently waking up with BBC Radio 3, whose morning programme is presented by the gentle-voiced Rob Cowan. I’m far from an expert on classical music, but something without vocals tends to work better in the background when getting on with something involving words, such as writing.
The spoken word stations shout too much or depress me with their insistence on everything being soundbite-friendly and summarised “very briefly” (the pop song attitude to news reporting), while the pop music stations tend to play something that deeply irritates every bone in my body every few minutes. And the DJs shout too much too. Classic FM is punctuated with banal adverts like all commercial stations (ie non-BBC ones), though I quite like the movie soundtracks show they do on Saturdays. Thanks to that I’ve been introduced to the excellent likes of Danny Elfman’s ‘Ice Dance’ from ‘Edward Scissorhands’, with its exquisite choral hook. In fact, I heard it while supping coffee alone in the iconic New Piccadilly Cafe, Denman Street, which tends to have Classic FM burbling away in the background.
But listening to Rob Cowan’s breakfast show there’s also a feeling of loyalty to one’s extended family. Mr Cowan’s daughter Vicky married my brother (and Fosca guitarist & producer) Tom last year, and this week marks their first anniversary. I can confirm he’s an entirely nice man who made a poignant and quite lovely speech at Tom’s wedding. He had no choice in being related to me, granted, but he’s been very civil about it. The first time we met, we chatted about Radio 3’s late night ‘Other Music’ show Late Junction, possibly the only BBC programme to play selections from the last Scott Walker album The Drift. Which is, shall we say, somewhat more avant-garde and ‘difficult listening’ than the Walker Brothers hits. People are always banging on about the genius of Mr Walker, and rightly so, but there can’t be many radio stations that gave The Drift the attention it got in the monthly music press. What’s the use of making music that’s written about or talked about but not actually listened to? Hats off to Late Junction, I say.
Other family connections with non-shouting BBC presenters: my mother knows the BBC TV & radio presenter Martha Kearney’s mother. Mothers chat about what their offspring are up to, so when Mother K heard about my tentative dips into TV, being sought by producers and so on, she asked (or rather cajoled) Daughter K to phone me with advice. Which happened yesterday. So I’ve taken down her kind notes of tips and names to approach. “You’re to do with blogging and Shane MacGowan, aren’t you?” Well yes but no, I think. I tell her I’m this sort of London dandy character that dips in and out of many social and artistic spheres, and wince slightly at having to say so. But one must be careful not to be Best Known For something which isn’t quite what you want to be best known for.
More leftover thoughts from Cambridge. At the book festival, I attend one of the other events, a panel discussion on how to get published which features two literary agents and two publishers. The audience is presumably made up of unpublished authors, and I note there are far more women than men, and far more people over 50 than under. A lot of their advice is common sense: do your research about who you’re sending your manuscript to, approach agents not publishers, target the agents of the writers you’re more likely to be compared to, and so forth.
A man from Weidenfeld & Nicholson talks about the trend in biography publishing. It used be quite normal to put out lives of the great and good in large tomes, often carried over several volumes. These days, he says, people are less keen to wade through door-stopping biographies, regardless of who it is.
“There’s just been this huge biography of Kingsley Amis doing the rounds… [presumably he means the one by Zachary Leader] But does anyone in 2007 really want to slog though 1000 pages of Kingsley Amis’s life? Of anyone’s life?”
One of the panelists is from the noted feminist publishers Virago, and I think of that incident when they once accepted a novel from someone called Rahila Khan. It was about the life of a young British Asian woman, and was just the sort of thing they were looking for. Close to publication, they finally got to meet the author. Ms Kahn turned out to be a white male vicar called Toby, writing under a pseudonymous persona. He didn’t see himself as a hoaxer or trying to make any kind of satirical point; he just had seen the novel turned down when submitted under his real name everywhere else, and wondered if this approach might not be better. Virago disagreed, felt deceived, pulped all the copies and asked for their advance back.
I sympathise with both parties here. Yes, a book is a book, and the author’s identity shouldn’t affect its merit, particularly in these equality-driven times. But people like a bit of truth in their fiction, a handrail to grasp on the ride into another world. If Zadie Smith turned out to be an elderly man using an actress as a stand-in (as in the case of JT LeRoy) I do think it would affect the present reception of his / her books.
But it works the other way. Monica Ali’s follow-up to her bestseller Brick Lane hasn’t done nearly as well as her debut, and some observers have put this down to it being about villagers in Portugal rather than Bangladeshi Britons. She was doing what authors are meant to do: use her imagination. And her fans rewarded her by giving the book a miss. There’s probably other factors at work here (it’s had mixed reviews), but the connection between author identity and the reading experience must surely be one.
I wonder what Virago’s policy is on the transgendered? Do they now insist on a medical examination of a debut author, to check they are biologically female? Or give them a investigative fondle like Crocodile Dundee did with that transvestite? (a scene which seems appallingly homophobic until you find out the drag queen in question was played by the androgynous actress Anne Carlisle, star of Liquid Sky, making it curiously radical whether by intention or accident)
But facetiousness aside, I see Virago’s point. It shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. Virago is for women authors; it’s their raison d’etre. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of other publishers.
Likewise, I never buy a book if I don’t like the haircut or the clothes in the author photo. I don’t care how acclaimed a novelist is, if he dresses like Man At C&A he can never ‘only connect’ with me.
