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

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

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

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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.

In any case, the literature of old Fleet Street was to a very considerable extent written by journalists and for journalists. Most reporters I know regard Scoop as a work of pitiless realism rather than antic fantasy. The cap fitted, and they wore it, and with a lop-sided grin of pride, at that. Perhaps this assists us in answering the age-old question: why does the profession of journalism have such a low reputation? The answer: because it has such a bad press. Bob felt himself swooping down again into the great soft darkness of sleep. Somewhere down there he stubbed himself against an ill-defined but hard mass of fact, and brought himself up to the surface to examine it…’ 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. A few themes seem to be emerging from the way in which our novelists have treated our journalists: copious gin (or whisky, or port, or what you will), mediocrity, cynicism, sloth, and meanness of spirit. This is to say nothing of the greatest of all les déformations professionelles: shameless and indeed boastful fabrication. And I entirely forgot to mention the fiddling of expenses. All professions are deformed by this, of course, but only journalism has made a code out of it: Quite apart from the humour, however, there's an elegiac quality to the novel. Even by 1967 there was change was

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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. We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace by the standards of today's journalists. We didn't have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill, and we hadn't yet got bogged down in the endless union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet Street, before Rupert Murdoch side-stepped them, and in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of Wapping. 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. Indeed, the under signed has had a brief flirt with this profession, for he met Michael Meyers from Newsweek (and is proud to have been included in the article on the fall of Ceausescu, about three decades ago, when he was a hero of the revolution), then James Wilde from TIME, some others from Radio Sweden and various media channels and could see the big difference between the budgets and operations of those with television networks and the rest of the journalistic crowd, who had had lesser material, financial means

This being a satire, the professionalism of The BBC is questionable, when after this sorry and hilarious episode, another program invites the same ‘expert on the color issue’ for a new representation…when asked if they saw the previous program, the woman who is moderating now admits that nobody on the team is familiar with it, only this time there may be another formula for this show… 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." 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. 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.The story begins with a premature and premonitory nightfall, and I suppose that with hindsight the book does look a bit like a valediction: though in the case of Fleet Street itself, as it turned out, the darkness that settled in was not going to lift in time for lunch. This fabulous, but alas forgotten (it only has a few lines on Wikipedia) Magnum opus describes the shenanigans, procrastination, heavy drinking, leisurely pace of the life of journalists decades ago, in the glory (is that the appropriate term to use I wonder) days of Fleet Street, before the catastrophic years when many have been eliminated from the market, leaving tabloids and some extremist media outfits (Murdoch empire) to rule the arena…

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. First published in 1967 this could be seen as bit of a museum piece now in its fictional depiction of live in the media. I say media rather just a newspaper as it also touches on radio and TV. It does leave aside the hard news side of both broadcast and print media, but there are plenty of others who have trodden that path. 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 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.John Dyson Invites the surveyor that lives in the area for dinner, ‘but whatever it was the man surveyed, it was done mostly through the bottom of a glass’ and later on, there would be hopes that maybe Bob will move nearby, once he is engaged with Tessa – here there was a misunderstanding, for the two young people (he is twenty nine, and I am not sure if we know what her age is) had been invited for dinner, and during that, the two sons of the hosts had had an argument and in the confusion, generated by the noise and misapprehension, it seemed that the two of them intend to get married. John Dyson has the chance to be in a television studio, for a discussion on the ‘color problem’, on which he is supposed to be some kind of expert, he prepares for the appearance, informs everybody, drives with the family to see aunts and other relatives, calls all those he knows, prepares some notes, but when it comes to the evening of the big day, he drinks too much and if the effect is on the one hand salutary, for he is intoxicated and has lost all fear (while the other guests are febrile), on the other hand, he is clearly unable to contribute anything to the discussion, except ‘this is very interesting’ 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. The real life, though, was in the narrow lanes just off the street, in Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane to the north, and Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street to the south - in the grimy, exhausted-looking offices of the Mail and the Mirror, the News of the World, the Evening News and the Evening Standard. The Observer, to which I moved in 1962, occupied a muddled warren down in Tudor Street.

He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor." A central theme of the book is Dyson's struggle against what he sees as encroaching entropy – indeed, the book was published in the United States under the title Against Entropy. 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… On the cover of my copy of "Towards the End of the Morning" is a quote from Christopher Hitchens: "The only fiction set in Fleet Street that can bear comparison with 'Scoop'." 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...’

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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. Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn is a Fantastic Novel (to quote Morris –‘Sure, sure’) from the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... 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. 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. 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.



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