Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

On his last Christmas Day, Braine ate lunch at a Community Centre, in the company of indigents. All but the last months of his last years were spent in a murky bedsit: narrow cot, wobbly table, one knife, one fork. Among his last public appearances was a visit to the Newcastle Literary Festival: fortified by a hearty breakfast, many cigarettes, and much gin, he rounded off an incoherent hour-long address to a gathering of nine or ten people by reducing himself to tears as he read the closing lines of Room at the Top … His later fiction devolved into a uniquely transparent form of wish-fulfilment, or self-therapy, in which the novelist hero hobnobs with celebrities, gets recognised wherever he goes, and is assured by his mistress that – on top of all this – he has the body of a young boy. It was vanity publishing in the fullest sense: he had lost his audience. Awarded a modest grant by the Writers’ Benevolent Fund, Braine (it is said) behaved as if he had just won the Nobel Prize. He was not self-pitying; he persisted with delusion; he continued to care about the literary canon (Flaubert, Dostoevsky) and remained convinced of the security of his place within it.

Comment

Comment

Amis here is the closest I’ve got to a primary source for most famous quote – Bob Pitman worked at the Sunday Express, but I haven’t found the article or publication date:

‘I always travel first-class. I always stay at a good hotel,’ he told interviewers in
1958, confessing, more frankly, to Robert Pitman: ‘What I want to do is drive through Bradford in a Rolls-Royce with two naked women on either side of me covered in jewels.’

H/t Brian Groom.

Colin Wilson is amusing and revealing on his, John Braine and Pitman’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1960 (Wilson 2004).

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Original

On his last Christmas Day, Braine ate lunch at a Community Centre, in the company of indigents. All but the last months of his last years were spent in a murky bedsit: narrow cot, wobbly table, one knife, one fork. Among his last public appearances was a visit to the Newcastle Literary Festival: fortified by a hearty breakfast, many cigarettes, and much gin, he rounded off an incoherent hour-long address to a gathering of nine or ten people by reducing himself to tears as he read the closing lines of Room at the Top … His later fiction devolved into a uniquely transparent form of wish-fulfilment, or self-therapy, in which the novelist hero hobnobs with celebrities, gets recognised wherever he goes, and is assured by his mistress that – on top of all this – he has the body of a young boy. It was vanity publishing in the fullest sense: he had lost his audience. Awarded a modest grant by the Writers’ Benevolent Fund, Braine (it is said) behaved as if he had just won the Nobel Prize. He was not self-pitying; he persisted with delusion; he continued to care about the literary canon (Flaubert, Dostoevsky) and remained convinced of the security of his place within it.

209 words.

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• Alcoholism (12) ·
• Angry young men (1) ·
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• John Braine (1) ·
• Martin Amis (1) ·
• Newcastle upon Tyne (8) ·
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