five years pass...
James Delingpole says, "I think there are two sorts of writer. There's the Jeffrey Archer type, who can't write for toffee, but is quite good at thinking up plots, and then there's the sort like me, the sort who uses style as a way of hiding the fact that they haven't got many great thriller plot-lines.'' He ponders for a minute, and says, "And in a way, I think it becomes a virtue. I don't think my books at all suffer from lack of Archer-type-incident.''
Delingpole's books are all about anxious urban media types who suffer from terrible career problems and humiliating sexual encounters – people, he is happy to admit, who are just like himself. His first novel, Fish Show, was about a neurotic restaurant critic. His second, Fin, features a man who smokes too much dope, and thinks he is terrified of sharks, although he might actually be more frightened of settling down and getting married.
His latest novel, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is about a man called Josh Devereux, who, like Delingpole, went to a minor public school, read English at Oxford, and spent some time as an arts correspondent at The Daily Telegraph. Some passages made me snort with laughter.
We meet at Delingpole's large terraced house in south London. He tells me that he is keen on food and wine, although "these are low-level obsessions now. You should have seen me when I was really bad." His new obsession, he says, is gardening. It's a warm day, so we sit outside to have lunch. Delingpole cooks. "Writing,'' he says, "is a horrible business. It's an absolute nightmare job. The worst in the world. And the only way of making it bearable is to write about things that interest you and you care about. In a way, it's an exercise in stopping yourself getting bored.''
Like Josh Devereux, Delingpole grew up near Bromsgove, in Worcestershire, the son of a successful factory owner. His latest autobiographical novel is very thinly disguised indeed.
"It's an attempt to exorcise the bad shit that's happened to me in my past," he tells me. "The sex that one didn't have. The success that one didn't enjoy. The disappointments. The incidents in your life which have had a far bigger impact on you than they should have done. They might have made you more bitter – or they might have made you a better person.''
In the book, Josh keeps failing to have adequate sexual relationships. At one point, on the brink of possible consummation, he loses control of his bowels. "This is really more information than you needed,'' Josh tells the reader. "You don't want to hear about vomit and follow-throughs. You want to hear about burgeoning romance.'' He is a young man who describes himself as "having triumphed over the dread forces of sobriety''. As a student, he lives in a world of "drugular sophistication'', and "post-wankal shame''. At one point, spotting a girl he fancies, he wonders whether or not he should "hurl myself at that enemy machine-gun nest''.
"There's a bit in the book,'' says Delingpole, who is now 38, and married with children, "where I talk about how we look back on ourselves in our late teens and early twenties, and we are appalled at what we were – how gauche, how embarrassing, how terrible. But at the same time, I hope, what we must do is love ourselves, because actually, you know, we were just poor, sweet kids who didn't know any better. And I think one can be terribly harsh on oneself.''
Delingpole started "proper writing'' after he'd left Oxford, having failed, like Josh Devereux, to get a job in a bank. "Now I realise it's a good thing I didn't get that job,'' he says. "I had this idea when I was at university,'' he adds. "I don't know how I thought it up. I was probably drunk one day, and it was a sort of whimsical fantasy.'' His idea was about a restaurant critic who begins to write reviews of restaurants that don't actually exist. The twist is that, after the reviews are printed, the restaurants magically appear.
But he found it hard at first. "I found I'd got halfway through the book, and I'd only written about 5,000 words,'' he says. Like Josh, Delingpole began work as a diary columnist on the Evening Standard, graduating to The Daily Telegraph. Like his character, he spent some time wearing smiley T-shirts and taking Ecstasy. "I think my Ecstasy chapter is one of the best bits of the book,'' he says. He's right. It's lovingly nostalgic about the club scene during the late 1980s, as well as a savage indictment of it. He tells us about the "warm, beatific smiles'' and the "beautiful faces radiating happiness'' on the dance floor, as well as the "poo-scented tailwind of the swing doors'' in the dreadful lavatories, and the terrible malaise when the drugs wear off.
When he was writing the book, Delingpole says, "There was one occasion when I sat down, and I thought, 'Which incident in my life do I least want to write about now?' And I thought, 'Mm, that one! I'll write about that!' I do have this terrible self-punishing streak in me, really flagellatory. I'm not sure if it's good for me as a person. But it's bloody good for the writing.''
He takes me up to his study. It's very neat, with a posh Apple computer, and more CDs than books on the shelves. He only keeps his essential books in his study. His main influences, he says, are Boswell and, currently, BS Johnson. Delingpole adores Johnson's The Unfortunates, a novel about a miserable football reporter and a man who dies of cancer. He managed to get a first edition for £150, which he shows me. Reading The Unfortunates, he says, gave him a boost; Johnson's ruthless self-scrutiny made Delingpole feel that he, too, could write about himself.
He says: "I don't want to sound like some loser who's bitter and twisted. I'm kind of happy with my literary career for the first time – although that may change.'' But at least he has an idea for his next book. "I was having a conversation with my brother about what a damn shame it was that we weren't in 'Nam,'' says Delingpole. "And it spun off from there. There's only a bit about 'Nam." He won't give away any more.
"You've got to lay yourself on the line, and go for the truth,'' he says, "because then people can respond to it. I mean, when you go into a bookshop, and you see how much stuff there is to compete against, you would give up at that point. And then you read a sentence by Martin Amis, and you think, 'I could never write that.' I can't write like Jonathan Franzen. I think the first third of The Corrections is just awesome. As a writer, I realised that the only thing you're good at is being more you than anyone else can possibly be. So you have to make a virtue of all your defects and really milk all the things you're good at. And maybe, just maybe, you'll get through."
`Thinly Disguised Autobiography' is published by Picador at £10.99 (pbk)
― The stickman from the hilarious "xkcd" comics, Friday, 13 June 2008 13:12 (eighteen years ago)