*7 By 2003 I had written a novel about the Third Reich, ten years earlier; and ten years later I would write another…‘When I’m at my desk, Mum,’ I once or twice told her, ‘I get at least as much from you as I get from Dad.’
*8 In this area I knew myself to be rather frail. When I became back-half editor of the New Statesman I was assigned my own secretary. After a week I noticed a similar sort of expression on all the faces I knew best: a guarded reluctance to meet my eye. When I questioned them, I heard phrases like unbearably grand and unrecognisably smug. In short, I had gone insane. Because I had a secretary.
*9 As a non-reclusive man of letters from the British Isles, I could not but have encyclopedic experience of the effects of alcohol. Alcohol usually made people more this or more that – more high-spirited, more loud-voiced, more volatile, and so on. But the thing to look out for, as ever, is personality change. Those who undergo it are the dipsomaniacs, actual or potential. All else is just heavy drinking.
Interludial
Memos to my reader – 1
My American friends and relatives tell me I can’t say they’re nuts any more, not after Brexit. But I think I still can, up to a point. See, in the UK, no one had any idea what Brexit looked like. And in the US everyone knew exactly what Trump looked like. They’d been seeing little else for seventeen months. And if my British compatriots had known that Brexit looked like a hairy corn cob balancing on a Halloween pumpkin, then they would’ve voted Remain.
This brings us to the end of the first half.
…On the day after I got back from a book tour in Europe in October 2015 I said to Elena, ‘Now I know I’ve got to get on with my real-life novel, but in Munich I walked straight into a real-life short story – and I’d better write it while it’s fresh.’ I did write it, and the story came out in the New Yorker at the end of that year. The title was ‘Oktober’; and it appears below.
The novel I’d gone on the road for – my most recent – was set in Auschwitz in 1942–3. ‘Oktober’ makes no mention of the book about the Holocaust, so I’ll add a few lines about the German response to it, which powerfully surprised me (and not because it was in any way positive).
I saw very many homeless nomads in Europe, most of them self-evacuees from the Middle East.
That was over a year ago, and now, for Christmas 2016, we’re off to our house in the Sunshine State, me, Elena, and our two daughters, Eliza and Inez (to be joined, we hope, by my two sons, Nat and Gus) – before proudly returning, on New Year’s Eve, to all the comfort and security of Strong Place… ‘Oktober’
I
I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the the Munich hotel. A lady in a lustrous purple trouser suit attended to the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of Hungarian Rhapsody (with many graces and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. For it was the time of the Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to 6 million visitors, thereby quintupling its population – visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors (a far smaller contingent) were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent…
‘Let’s see if we can make a bit of sense of this,’ an itinerant executive was stonily saying, bent over his mobile phone two tables away, with clipboard, legal pad, gaping laptop. He spoke in the only language I could understand – English; and his accent derived from northern regions, northern cities (Leeds, Doncaster, Barnsley). ‘Yes yes, I should’ve rung two weeks ago. Three. All right, a month ago. But that doesn’t affect the matter at hand, now does it. Believe me, the only thing that’s kept me back’s the prospect of having to go through all this with the likes of…Listen. Are you listening to me? We need to resolve the indemnity clause. Clause 4C.’ He sighed. ‘Have you got the paperwork in front of you at least? Quite honestly, it beats me how you get anything done. I’m a businessman, and I’m accustomed to dealing with people who have some idea of what they’re about. Will you listen? Will you listen?’
The photographer arrived and after a minute he and I went out into the street. In great numbers the Oktoberfesters were parading past, the women in cinched dirndls and wenchy blouses, the men in suede or leather shorts laced just below the knee, and tight jackets studded with medals or badges, and jaunty little hats with feathers, rosettes, cockades. On the pavement Bernhardt erected his tripod and his tilted umbrella, and I prepared myself to enter the usual trance of inanition – forgetting that in this part of Eurasia, at least for now, there was only one subject, and that subject was of intense interest – to the entire planet. But first I said,
‘What do they actually do in that park of theirs?’
‘In the funfair?’ Bernhardt smiled with a touch of sceptical fondness. ‘A lot of drinking. A lot of eating. And singing. And dancing – if you can call it that. On tabletops.’
‘Sort of clumping about?’
‘The word is schunkeln. They link arms, and sway while they sing. From side to side. Thousands of them.’
‘…Schunkeln’s the infinitive, right? How d’you spell that?’
‘I’ll write it down for you – yes, the infinitive.’
Our session began. Broad-shouldered
