Farewell from King Street
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CHRISTOPHER HURST takes his leave.
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DEAR Reader, This is my last regular piece in The Hindu. Nothing in life in permanent (the older one is, the faster time flies), least of all in journalism. Having enjoyed the warm hospitality of this column for 11 1/2 years, I can only feel gratitude to the paper and to you. My original brief was to write about my trade, and I have often done so, but I soon got lured into other fields — once even apologising to you for so often writing about crime and our royal family (not in conjunction), subjects with which many of my compatriots are known to be obsessed.
Publishing poetry
At this moment there is inevitably unfinished business. Three further pieces on publishing were somewhere in the pipeline. One was to be on the small area of it concerned with poetry. I am not a serious reader of modern poetry, but as a publisher the dynamics and economics of poetry publishing interest me. One could argue, without paradox, that it is the most important area of publishing. Most of it is subsidised out of public funds, which reflects well on our bureaucrats. Carcanet in Manchester and Bloodaxe in Newcastle-upon-Tyne are established privately-run imprints wholly dedicated to poetry, but Faber and Faber have published mainstream new poetry since its foundation in the 1920s (T.S. Eliot was one of their authors — and directors) till the present — for which they deserve to be honoured. What fired me to write on this subject was the decision by Oxford University Press only a few years ago to close down its poetry list; with its money-spinning Bibles and dictionaries, it could have kept the list going at little cost instead of earning a reputation for cultural vandalism. I knew their poetry editor personally, and for a time she did not say no to my request to interview her, but in the end she declined on the grounds that the whole episode was too painful to talk about. Peter Porter, a distinguished poet, was willing to be interviewed on the subject, but once when I phoned to fix a date he was abroad for the next three months, and the plan got shelved.
Other subjects were Yale University Press and Whitaker. Yale is unique among U.S. academic presses in having an editorial office in London and not merely a sales office as some others do. Its list, under an umbrella of superior scholarship, embraces contemporary history, social sciences, and — its speciality — art. The standard of production is wonderfully high. I would call Yale one of our best publishers in terms of quality (in this context what else matters?), and it wisely keeps a low profile and doesn't get "talked about", hence my desire to write about it. J. Whitaker & Son was that rare thing, a bibliographical publisher: of the trade's organ The Bookseller (for which I wrote articles for 10 years); of the massive cumulative list of Books in Print — a bible to all librarians and booksellers; and of a fascinating annual compendium of information, long a national institution, Whitaker's Almanac. The firm was owned and run by the Whitaker family till within the last 10 years, when family quarrels led to its sale. The last chairman David Whitaker is an elder statesman of the trade who invented the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and is much involved in trade charities. He agreed to be interviewed, but we will now have to find something else to talk about.
Niue in the news
I spent the fortnight immediately after last Christmas in my mother's native country, New Zealand. Most visitors from Europe complain that, in spite of the people being gentle and kind and the landscape beautiful, it is dull — well and fairly governed, but conservative, inward-looking and complacent. It was last in the international news over the "Rainbow Warrior" incident, which makes me angry to think about even now. Of course I enjoyed every moment of my visit, being very fond of my relations there, and a quirky item of news came up which made me think "This will be good for a Hindu article". New Zealand had a small dependent island hundreds of miles out in the South Pacific called Niue, and in the wave of such places becoming independent, Niue duly did, despite the smallness of its population: about 1,200. New Zealand, as a progressive welfarist country, was proud of giving birth to the world's smallest independent state — needless to say, its subsidies kept Niue alive. But in the past year Niue was hit by a catastrophic cyclone which destroyed most of its buildings and forced many of the people to emigrate, leaving well under 1,000. Unprecedentedly outside a play by George Bernard Shaw ("The Apple Cart") Niue asked New Zealand to take it back, the pains of independence now exceeding the joys, and that was precisely where things stood when I left for home. There was enough in a copy of the New Zealand Herald that I brought away with me to make a nice article, but I left it on the plane. Since then, unsurprisingly, there has not been a word about Niue in the British press. Have you heard anything?
Constitutional crisis?
I have not written about crime for years, because the recent crimes that come to mind are all of such a loathsome character that anyone writing about them, other than forensically, would have to adopt moral attitudes, which I have striven to avoid in all my years writing in this newspaper. I bracketed this subject, in the first paragraph above, with the royal family, and here the only interesting thing to say is that the nearer Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Prince of Wales's mistress before, during and since the time he was married to Diana, comes to being accepted (in effect, by the Queen) as his regular partner, the nearer we may be to a constitutional crisis which could make the abdication of Edward VIII seem like a storm in a teacup. If Charles and Camilla should marry while her ex husband is still alive, we will have a future supreme head of the Church of England who has flouted one of its cardinal rules — never mind whether they marry in a church or a register office, or whether she is made Princess of Wales and hence the future queen, or merely given a humbler title.
Defective grasp of reality
Even if she never becomes more than Charles's titular mistress, the reactions of the public and especially members and leaders of the church of which he is head are unpredictable; but his grasp of reality seems defective, and like Edward VIII he may not be satisfied with anything less than marriage — while retaining his position. If it ever appears that "the Palace" has prevailed on the leaders of the Church to bend its rules for Charles's convenience he — and they — will lose all respect and authority among those whose loyalty is most important to them. (Henry VIII, another sovereign whose matrimonial affairs got him into trouble with the national church, then headed by the Pope, would have made Mrs Parker Bowles a widow in short order.) None of this is to say that Charles and Camilla are not well suited to be man and wife.
No logical reasons
Ever since the mayor of San Francisco, with the support of the "chattering classes" worldwide, declared homosexual marriage legal and gave his blessing to it (appropriate for him only because his city is the gay capital of the world with a whole district, Castro Street, inhabited by homosexuals) I have been waiting to be in the right mood to write an article seeking to find a logical reason — not an emotional, legal or religious one — why homosexual marriage should never be sanctioned legally or by the world's great religions. It may be impossible, but consider this. For me and many others the most resonant line in the Anglican marriage service is "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder". Could God, who ordered creation with such logic, really want to do something so illogical as join same-sex couples together?
I can only bewail the folly of liberals, a class of person to which I naturally belong. They, of all people in the United States, want George W. Bush out of office, yet by promoting homosexual marriage they are making his re-election more likely. He has declared, in view of what has happened in San Francisco and elsewhere in the U.S., that he will seek an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring homosexual marriage illegal. This is likely to win him the support of an overwhelming majority of voters.
Time to sign off
Did you read about the celebrations, attended by the British minister of defence with a warship moored offshore, which have just taken place in Gibraltar to mark 300 years of our sovereignty over that barren rock attached to the landmass of Spain? It is amazing that as a nation we still cannot understand how much more attention we should be paying to the ineradicable resentment of Spain, a mature democracy with which we are allied in the EU and NATO, at this shoddy anachronism than to the "patriotism" of our 30,000 self-seeking Gibraltarian subjects. We should give it up willingly and win the plaudits of all before we are forced to do so in humiliating circumstances.
It is now time to sign off. Goodbye and good luck.
christopher@hurstpub.co.uk
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