by Giles and Victoria Coren
Giles: So who’s going to write the introduction?
Victoria: I thought we were doing it together.
G: I don’t know. I’ve never written with anyone else. He never wrote with anyone else.
V: It’s not that hard. One person types, the other one paces …
G: And how do we refer to him? If it’s a serious essay, making a case for his inclusion in the canon, he ought to be referred to as ‘Coren’. But that would be weird, coming from us.
V: Well, we can’t write ‘Our father’. That sounds like God. ‘Daddy?’ We can’t call him Daddy. That’s just embarrassing.
G: Maybe it would be better if someone else wrote it. If we do it, it looks like vanity publishing. Any old twonk can die and have his children bind up his writing and say it’s great. Maybe we should ask an academic to do the introduction, to give it some gravitas.
V: He’d like an academic. For a long time he thought he was going to be one, after all. He spent those two years at Yale and Berkeley on the Commonwealth Fellowship.
G: And there was post-grad at Oxford before he went. And his First was a serious First. I think maybe even the top one in the year. He got the Violet Vaughan Morgan scholarship.
V: I always confused that with his medal for ballroom dancing.
G: No no, that was just called ‘the junior bronze’.
V: Do you think he’d have enjoyed being an academic?
G: Probably, but I don’t think his students would have enjoyed failing their exams because all they had at the end of term was a lot of jokes about Flaubert’s haemorrhoids, and an ability to write parodies of Trollope as spoken by two dustmen from Croydon.
V: He was brilliant, though. It’s a rare man who can go on a panel game and work an argument about the exact dates of the Augustan period in English literature into the middle of a John Wayne impression.
G: He was happier doing it in the middle of a John Wayne impression. Remember how he used the phrase ‘homme sérieux’, with a little flounce of the heel? He thought the very idea of a serious person was somehow preposterous.
V: He could have made a wonderful tutor in the 1960s, when it was about infusing students with a love of literature, rather than the rigours of critical theory.
G: But he had a short attention span. That’s also why he never wrote a novel. He had ideas for novels, but they were always flashy ideas with a great first sentence. He could never quite be bothered to sit down and write them.
V: Let’s not get an academic to write the introduction. We’ve got serious people introducing each decade anyway.
G: Serious like Victoria Wood, do you mean? Or serious like Stephen Fry?
V: They’re serious comedians. And Clive James is a heavyweight.
G: And A.A. Gill spells his name with initials, which is the sine qua non of academia. That’s better than being a Regius professor. T.S. Eliot, A.J.P. Taylor, F.R. Leavis, A.C. Bradley …
V: P.T. Barnum.
G: We still need someone for the 1960s.
V: The four people doing the later decades have written ‘appreciations’ of someone who was already quite established by then. They’re brilliant pieces. But for the 60s, it would be nice to have someone who knew him really well personally, when he was young.
G: Uncle Gus?
V: I was thinking more of Melvyn Bragg. They were at Wadham together, they’ve been friends ever since – and if you asked most British people to name an academic, they’d probably say Melvyn Bragg anyway. Or Peter Ustinov.
G: Melvyn is a big name. And he does carry intellectual weight. But he won’t get the bums on seats at readings in Borehamwood and Elstree like Uncle Gus would.
V: I’m asking Melvyn. And I think we should do the main introduction ourselves. So what shall we write in it?
G: Well, if we were going to treat him as a serious writer, we’d start with the Saul Bellow stuff. The lower-middle-class Jewish home in Southgate. Osidge Primary. East Barnet Grammar. The inspirational English teacher, Ann Brooks, who encouraged him to join the library and start reading. Growing up in the war. The mother who was a hairdresser. The father who was a … what was Grandpa Sam exactly? A plumber?
V: That’s what they said. I think it’s just that he had a spanner. He was an odd job man really. I also heard he was a debt collector.
G: And I heard Great Grandpa Harry was a circus strongman, but I doubt it was true. Harry was born in Poland in 1885 and left in 1903 before the pogroms started. A smart man is what he was.
V: Sam and Martha dreamed of Daddy being articled to a solicitor, didn’t they? That’s the other reason he loved Miss Brooks, because she went round to the house and persuaded them that he should apply to Oxford instead.
G: God, a solicitor. He’d have been so miserable. And, of course, nepotism being what it is, we’d have ended up solicitors as well. And then we’d have been really miserable too.
V: You are really miserable.
G: So then he went off to Oxford. And there was that first morning when he came downstairs in his digs and the landlady had cooked bacon and eggs …
V: He always called it ‘egg and bacon’ …
G: … she says with Talmudic precision, of the kind which crumbled in 1957 when he took the first forkful. And that was the beginning of the end, really, for all things Jewish.
V: He was always sentimental about Jews though.
G: He was always sentimental about everything. Like America.
V: He loved Yale and Berkeley … Do you think he ever actually wanted to be a