Towards the End of the Morning (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

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Not much later, I came across Orwell's essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer". It opens thus, in case you may have forgotten:

Their work lives are dull and their personal lives are dull. But what lifts this novel above the average is the writing; it has an ingenious, imaginative, glimmering edge to it, often most serious even when it is being so damn funny. It has a somewhat skewed approach to approaching the world through metaphor that so many other books of this author’s generation have (I’m thinking in particular of Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘The History Man’ here) where it’s almost like certain images come to dictate the existence of the characters beyond what we would normally expect in a realistic novel. It’s not only that metaphor is defined by the subjective experiences of the characters here, but it’s as though the literary device is an experience which is waiting out there in the world for these slightly dull and perfectly ordinary men to stumble across it. Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do.The Amises are the only ones of the authors I have mentioned who didn't serve time on a national newspaper. Fleming was a foreign editor for Kemsley when that family owned the Sunday Times, Waugh was a correspondent and Greene had been a subeditor as well. Powell toiled at the Daily Telegraph, and Frayn we all know about. They mostly did quite well out of it. Orwell never had a steady job, but he haunted Fleet Street in search of work and knew the argot. Yet they all unite in employing the figure of the journalist, or the setting of a newspaper, as the very pattern and mould of every type of squalor and venality. The Observer drank in Auntie's, though I've forgotten whether it had any other name, and even who Auntie was. The Guardian had a foot in two camps. One was the Clachan, a rather undistinguished Younger's house grimly decorated with samples of the different tartans, where we drank our best bitter watched by a mysterious official of one of the print unions, who sat on his own at a corner of the bar every day from opening to closing time, wearing dark glasses and referred to in respectful whispers, but speaking to no one, apparently paid by either union or management just to sit there and drink all day. George God strikes again’ and John is to travel to the Middle East, on a trip organized by an agency called Magic Carpet and arrive just the day before the television program is to air live and thus he could manage both endeavors, or so he thinks, for the trip to the Orient is a marvelous disaster (for the readers, it is the occasion to laugh out loud) for the journalist that are expected to write flattering reports… No one, for some reason, has ever been able to remember the title of my novel Towards The End Of the Morning. By the common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me since it was first published in 1967, it seems to have been rechristened Your Fleet Street Novel. What surprises me a little is that anyone can still remember what the phrase Fleet Street once signified.

Some review or other of this book mentioned "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" by Orwell. That is a good reference point for this work. The cover review quotes of this book mention jokes and humour. I can see the parts of the book where I'm supposed to laugh. I managed a couple of stifled grunts. I wonder if my reaction to the book is my own cynicism or simply the gap in the cultures of the 1970s where things were somehow still "jolly" and 2017 marked by war all the time, the growing gap between the people and the capitalist class and the shift to the populist right. The book was written when the defeat of fascism in Europe was still fresh in the memory and post-modern capitalism was still a young beast. Bob tried to remember why he hadn’t told her...But he couldn’t really remember the reason. It was already lost – part of the jetsam of discarded immemorabilia which disappeared astern all the time. From hour to hour one’s life slipped away into the haze, before one had really looked at any of it properly... Its protagonists work to compile the miscellaneous, unimportant parts of the newspaper – the "nature notes" column, the religious "thought for the day", the crossword and so on. The paper seems sunk in a state of torpor, and the journalists' work is extremely dull. Feeling their lives and careers are stalled, they spend most of their day complaining about work and dreaming of better things. John Dyson, the lead protagonist, longs to work in television, and is at last given his chance towards the end of the book. However, fate seems determined to thwart him.Mr Salter saw he was not making his point clear. "Take a single example," he said. "Supposing you want to have dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You've had a slap-up dinner, you're three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied." Towards The End Of The Morning is a 1967 satirical novel by Michael Frayn about journalists working on a British newspaper during the heyday of Fleet Street. He possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice: politics: sport: books: finance: science: art: fashion - as he himself said, "War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse". All were equal when it came to Bagshaw's typewriter. He would take on anything, and - to be fair - what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than what was to be read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever managed to be printed." Frayn seems at home regardless of genre - stage plays, drama, and here genuine but gentle English comedy. To the extent the book is about anything of general interest, I suppose it recounts how we all fiddle with daily trivia as Rome burns around us. What else can anyone do but fall in line with silly, archaic aspirations, suffer annoying neighbours, maintain peace with one’s colleagues, and avoid drinking too much at lunch. The mysteries of what goes on in the editor’s inner sanctum, much less the rest of the world, are unfathomable. A few terminal cases were still coughing their last in odd corners. The Daily Herald up in Endell Street, being slowly suffocated by its affiliation to the TUC; down in Bouverie Street the poor old News Chronicle, the decent Liberal paper that everyone liked but no one read, and on which I had been brought up, kept going by its rather more successful little brother, the Evening Star. On the masthead of the Chronicle lingered the titles of a whole succession of defunct and forgotten papers that had been interred in it over the years, like the overgrown names of the departed accumulating on a family mausoleum: the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, the Daily Dispatch, the Westminster Gazette, the Morning Leader. I'd scarcely been there a year when the whole vault finally collapsed, taking the Star and all the old names with it.

As the author explains in the introduction, the novel is based on his own experiences as a journalist and he even indicates the real life man on whom John Dyson – probably the second most important character in the story – is based, given that the newspaperman had passed away at the time when this segment has been written…Die Tatsache, dass ich eine Übersetzung dieses Buches im Regal stehen hatte, hat mich jahrelang davon abgehalten, es zu lesen, was im Nachhinein betrachtet nicht nur Unsinn, sondern auch ein schwerer Fehler war. Trotzdem würde ich unbedingt zum Original raten. It isn't really a book about fleet street. It is just based in fleet street. I guess the literary writers of fleet street brayed so much about it in the 70s that it is now pigeon holed there.

The story concerns a bourgeois idiot and other characters around him. Vacuous existence abounds here. The women are unhappy and seek something else. The men "don't mind really, whatever you say..." Docile, unquestioning fools, dead fish going with the flow, a preening egotistical nonentity. Towards was Frayn's third book after The Tin Men and The Russian Interpreter, and is based on his experiences at The Observer, where he worked from 1962 to 1968. He looked at his watch in the firelight. It was a quarter to twelve. Well, it felt like four. And four and a quarter hours later, when it actually was four, and the bedclothes both above and below were a mere conglomerate heap, and Tessa’s strapping behind had pushed right across the bed, and Bob was cold and stiff from hand to foot, and had neither been asleep nor awake for a moment, it felt as though the solar system had finally run down and stopped, and closed off the ever-renewing spring of pure, fresh time for good and all...’ In Frayn's two novels in the sixth decade of that 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. There was always, also, an interest in guessing whether Frayn had "set" it all at either the Observer or the Guardian, which in those days were separate institutions. (Malcolm Muggeridge's journalism novel Picture Palace had been too transparent in this regard, enraging his employers, the then-Manchester Guardian management, who obtained an injunction preventing its publication.) In the introduction to the new edition, Frayn says that it was a touch of both. The paper is never given a name, but it's in any case obviously not the Observer because it comes out every day. A possible clue, for addicts and cognoscenti, is contained on the very cover of the new edition which drops an entire word out of the title of the novel, and rather metaphysically offers it as Towards the End of Morning. The Guardian is no longer so celebrated for its misprints but there will always be those of us who are nostalgic for the days when it was, and when the opera critic Phillip Hope Wallace, for example, could wake up to find that he had reviewed last night's Covent Garden performance of Doris Godunov.

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The sole exception I can call to mind is PG Wodehouse, who started out as a penny-a-liner on the Globe and seems to have found journalism to be innocent fun. Bertie Wooster never misses a chance to mention his article on "What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing", which appeared in his Aunt Dahlia's own magazine Milady's Boudoir, and to which he deprecatingly refers as "my 'piece', as we journalists call it". Psmith, in Psmith Journalist, takes over a small magazine of domesticity in New York, named Cosy Moments, and transforms it briefly into a campaigning, reforming and crime-fighting organ. His slogan when confronted by those who would intimidate him is: "Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled." This motto has been inscribed on the wall above my keyboard for many years. This reader has had the chance to read Spies by Michael Frayn http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/s... and has been enthused by it, therefore the fact that Towards the End of the Morning is such a spectacular beano should not be a surprise, except while Spies is just about as ‘serious and grave’ as it could be, Towards the end is often hilarious.