Ladies’ man (BBC news online)

September 9th, 2009

Ten years ago the former Conservative MP Alan Clark died of a brain tumour aged 71. Despite being a highly regarded defence minister, he never reached cabinet rank and was most famous for his determinedly reckless or independent streak.

But it was not his political career that he will be remembered for, rather his three volumes of published diaries. Indiscreet, amusing, bitter and full of his eccentric private and home life, the diaries were compared by reviewers to those of Samuel Pepys.

As the satirist Craig Brown put it in a review: “The skill in the diaries and memoirs of most politicians lies in the delicate airbrushing out of their faults and weaknesses. Alan Clark’s self-portrait, on the other hand, is defiantly warts-and-all.”
For the political obsessives, the diaries opened up with breathtaking frankness the status anxiety, vicious backbiting, and fleeting moments of triumph and despair amid the general tedium of being a minister.

But in the end the politics was not the main selling point. “There have been half a million copies sold and not all of those people would be interested in the politics,” says Ion Trewin, who edited the diaries. “He becomes a friend and a real person.”

Mr Clark invites us into a richly described world that is far removed from that of his readers – his struggles to pay for his half a dozen houses, including Saltwood Castle where he lived most of the year; his loving but fraught marriage to Jane, his affair with the young woman referred to only as “X”, his many animal friends, the lovingly maintained vintage cars, and his unembarrassed descriptions of bodily functions.
It was part Brideshead Revisited, part the Westminster Hour, part Adrian Mole. Mr Clark wrote in the preface to his first volume: “Diaries are intensely personal – to publish them is a baring, if not a flaunting, of the ego.”

Mr Trewin, whose biography of Mr Clark is published this month, believes the diary form is compelling because it throws the reader into the moment.
“It’s the fact they are written as the events are taking place. It isn’t the rose tinted reminiscing of a memoir. And diaries are a bit like soap operas. You’ve got different running stories and you cut in between them.”

And one of the strengths of Mr Clark’s diaries was his ability to knit these different narratives together without the need for reams of explanatory footnotes, Mr Trewin says.
Sue Townsend, the creator of what her publisher Penguin calls “Britain’s best loved diarist” – Adrian Mole – was an admirer of Mr Clark’s diaries, if not his politics.
“They’re great – you recognise that courageous honesty he always had,” she says.
Ms Townsend was the best selling novelist of the 1980s thanks to Adrian Mole so understands better than anyone how the genre works.
“A good diarist needs to be venal – they must have quite severe flaws and be wretchedly human like Alan Clark,” she says. “You were horrified at his behaviour but you’re laughing at the same time. You’re thinking ‘please don’t make a speech when you’re drunk…”
Adrian Mole shares some of that mix of flaws and endearing qualities.
“Mole often unconsciously reveals himself to be not a very nice person and a liar. But he is also bullied and shows himself to have an incredibly kind heart.”
In her youth Ms Townsend had loved Diary of A Nobody with its “nit picking” fictional diarist, Pooter. And it was while working on youth projects with teenage boys in Leicester that the idea of Mole emerged. “There was a side to them that was very endearing. I knew they had this secret life that most adults and even their parents never saw. And while women have an outlet for their secret fears – their friends – men don’t talk to each other. That’s why it was the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.”

Ms Townsend has kept faith with the diary form and the latest Mole instalment, The Prostrate Years, is published in November. It details the financial crisis – “when Britain fell to its knees” as she puts it – and Mole’s struggle against prostate cancer.
She is still in love not just with Mole but the diary format. Mole’s life allows her to reflect the zeitgeist of modern Britain, from the Iraq war to the fact that at least half the population say prostrate when they mean prostate. And she loves the regular peaks and troughs that a diary permits. “In normal fictional prose the author has to express a certain mood for a whole bloody chapter. But in a diary you can go from joy to hurt in a day or gallop through a week’s worth of happenings in one entry. My favourite entry is ‘Nothing happened today apart from a hailstorm at 3pm’ – it conveys a certain mood.”
While Ms Townsend is uninterested in blogging, there’s a clear argument that blogs are simply the diaries de nos jours. In an uncanny echo of Mole the prominent technology writer Jeff Jarvis recently revealed on his blog, buzzmachine.com, that he had prostate cancer. “Why am I even telling you about this?” he asked. “As I wrote in [my book], I gained tremendous benefit sharing another ailment – heart arrhythmia – here on my blog. And so I have no doubt that by sharing this, I will get useful advice and warm support (and maybe a few weeks’ respite from trolls). I argue for the benefits of the public life. So I’d better live it.”

So is the blog, the new diary? Phil Gyford, a web designer by trade, decided in 2002 to post an entry from Samuel Pepys’ diary, online, every day. He was curious to read this canonical text but intimidated by its sheer size – it covers a period from 1660 to 1669 – so resolved to break it down into daily bite sized chunks.

Six-and-a-half years on the project continues. “The site’s probably not as popular as it was at the start because we got a lot of publicity at the beginning. But we still get about 30,000 people a month and 20 or 30 comments a day about what he’s up to.”
There is another three years to go and Mr Gyford is committed to accompanying Pepys to the end. He’s even taken to putting a few snippets from Pepys on Twitter, giving updates about the great man would have been doing at that time.
So does Mr Gyford think that technology has replaced or improved on the old fashioned diary?
“Even if blogging had been around during Pepys’ time he wouldn’t have used it. He is writing a diary for himself. But if you write a blog you want people to read it at that time. And Twitter is more like having a conversation with people.”
But technology is a red herring. We may progress from quill to Biro to laptop or mobile phone, but people will always be compelled to put down their most intimate thoughts in a secret diary, Mr Gyford believes.
And when that individual – be it Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Alan Clark, or for that matter an Adrian Mole or Bridget Jones – can capture the pain and joy of being alive within a daily journal, others are always going to be fascinated. In essence it’s the chance to see inside the head of a fellow human being. And for Ion Trewin it’s why Alan Clark’s diaries will go on speaking to future generations:
“It’s not so much to do with political history. It’s one man’s life and it comes back to the old idea of a rattling good yarn. He was a diary writer without parallel in modern times.”

CLARK’S DIARY STYLE ANALYSED

Monday, 19 November 1990
I listened outside the door. Silence. I knocked softly, then tried the handle. He was
asleep, snoring lightly, in the leather armchair, with his feet resting on the desk.
Drake playing bowls before the Armada and all that, but I didn’t like it. This was ten
minutes past three in the afternoon of the most critical day of the whole election. I spoke
sharply to him. “Peter.”
He was bleary.
“I’m sorry to butt in, but I’m really getting a bit worried about the way things
are going.”
“Quite all right, old boy, relax.”
“I’m just hearing bad reactions around the place from people where I wouldn’t
expect it.”
“Look, do you think I’d be like this if I wasn’t entirely confident?”
“What’s the arithmetic look like?”
“Tight-ish, but OK.”
“Well, what?”
“I’ve got Michael on 115. It could be 124, at the worst.”
“Look, Peter, I don’t think people are being straight with you.”
“I have my ways of checking.”
“Paul?”
“I know about Paul.”
“The Wintertons?”
“The Wintertons, funnily enough, I’ve got down as ‘Don’t Know’s’.”
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘Don’t Know’? This isn’t a fucking street canvas. It’s a
two horse race, and each vote affects the relative score by two, unless it’s an abstention.”
“Actually, I think there could be quite a few abstentions.”
“Don’t you think we should be out there twisting arms?”
“No point. In fact it could be counter-productive I’ve got a theory about this. I think
some people may abstain on the first ballot in order to give Margaret a fright, then rally to her
on the second.” (Balls, I thought, but didn’t say.)
…In deep gloom I walked back down to the Speaker’s corridor. It can’t really be as bad as this
can it? I mean there is absolutely no oomph in her campaign whatsoever. Peter is useless, far
worse than I thought. When he was pairing whip he was unpopular, but at least he was crisp.
Now he’s sozzled.”

Below, the editor of Alan Clark’s diaries, Ion Trewin, highlights five key elements in the extract to show why the diaries were such a success.

Living history:
What would screenwriters have
done without this account? In the
TV series about the last days of
Thatcher that scene between Clark
and Morrison is used almost word
for word. Peter Morrison is dead so
there’s no other evidence. No writer
would have invented the idea that
Margaret Thatcher’s campaign-
manager was asleep. But as they
say, truth is stranger than fiction.

It’s written in the moment.
He showed me the actual diary for
this entry and you can see it’s written
in haste, he’s probably writing it in
the corridor as he goes. He’s like a
reporter taking notes and writing
them up later.

Novelistic style.
In the 1950s Alan tried his hand at
short stories and novels. This scene
could be out of a novel. He understands
how to tell a story. There’s brief descrip-
tion, dialogue and suspense. He knows
how to hold the reader’s attention.

Dialogue.
He had a superb memory for what people said. They
always say in creative writing courses that when it
comes to dialogue “less is more”. He understood that.
You get the key bits without the pleasantries.

An awareness of history.
He refers to Drake here and later in
the entry to the Potsdam Conference
as Thatcher is away in Paris while
all this is taking place. He has a
sense of history – after the novels he
turned to writing military history –
and it means he knows what is
significant and what can be left
out.

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