Gore Vidal, Fred Astaire and the cock size question

Will Gore Vidal be remembered 50 years from now? I doubt it. Myra Breckinridge will, by 2063, be a forgotten contribution to a vast library of late 20th century transgressive fiction. Vidal's first gay novel The City & The Pillar - a bold work of juvenilia for 1948 - is already just italics. No one reads it. The historical novels? See the fate of Barbara Cartland's oeuvre. The scintillating essays? See last season's collections with front row Anna in her shades: instant period pieces. In other words, Vidal surfed the earthly moments splendidly but left no timeless time-capsules. 

However, Vidal fans can cling to one hope for his immortality - he could survive in time's freezer as a case study. He fucked thousands, mainly other men. Rampant cockery and cuntery have their own heroes - or case studies. I won't name them; google 'em. Now, this November, a new book is released which examines the extent of Vidal's cockery. Penned by someone called Tim Teeman, it's titled In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master and promises to be 'explosive'. That's a publishing word for 'sex life not shared by publisher'. Readers may say, as they flick over the kindle pages on the bus, 'How did he find the time?' That's what 'explosive' amounts to these days.

More importantly, did Gore Vidal possess a massive cock? The book will answer this question. But why wait for publication day? Here's the answer Tim offers prematurely:

'One of Vidal’s oldest friends was Scotty Bowers who had sex with, and procured sex for, celebrities including Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Vidal himself. “Gore had a medium-sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalls. The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually: you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. He was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”' (From the Daily Beast)

I had no idea Gore had sex with Fred Astaire.

There.

Nesta Wyn Ellis letter: The return of The Bonker's Daughter!

Nesta Wyn Ellis: the biographer of John Major at home

Dear Madame,

Just enjoyed that YouTube piece with Barbara [Hulanicki]. She figures in my upcoming memoirs - we don't know when the world economy will up perk but I'm waiting - as the woman I interviewed in a jacuzzi in Miami Beach and who introduced me to my editor (the late and much lamented) Susan Hill at Sidgwick and Jackson, who commissioned The Banker's Daughter.

The latter is shortly to be reincarnated as a kindle edition under the imprint "Lioness Books." Those who can't wait to read the sex scenes should buy up one of the few remaining hard copies still available on the Internet if you Google for Nesta Wyn Ellis.

From your Paris Fan Club

Nesta Wyn Ellis

Darling Nesta

So delightful to hear from you! When you mentioned Susan Hill, I thought for a moment you meant that dreadful Aquarian writer who awaits her damehood for services to ghosts - if there's one thing I can't stand is a ...

But I must not permit unpleasantness to intrude on our pleasurable intercourse.

I can't wait to read your memoirs! Among other things, I hope that you will at long last deal with those hissed whispers (which blight London longueurs) on the precise nature of your relationship with former Prime Minister John Major. 

Your biography of him - all the better for the huge access you enjoyed to Number 10 - was by far the best of that genre; and I'm certain 'waspish' AN Wilson (whose voice can be heard on Nicky Haslam's debut 'pop' album) would concur: after all, he described your book as an 'accidental masterpiece'; or something like that. The image of Norma throwing crockery at bespectacled John has never left me.

(Still to be decided among Arcatistes is which PM had the biggest cockerdoodle - John Major or Gordon Brown) 

As for The Banker's Daughter - I wonder which 'Westminster wit' insolently retitled it 'The Bonker's Daughter'. A former political colleague I suspect - and I feel sure that your memoirs will insert a welcome micro-camera into the orifices of yesteryear's body politic.

Have to rush - keep in touch -

Madame Arcati x

Susan Hill: The-willies queen is missing in blogging action

Susan Hill

The writer Susan Hill hasn't blogged at the Spectator since February - this observation was made in a comment to my review of Duncan Fallowell's new travel book, How to Disappear. What could the matter be? I visited the Speccie site where a few of her commenters are grumbling among themselves over her non-appearance. The word 'twat' gets used - how common.

A Hill loyalist has helpfully left the comment: 'Susan is one of the judges for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, and according to her posts on Twitter over the past couple of days, is working on the proofs of her latest novel, starting a new book and making notes for a collection of short stories. It's hardly surprising that she's not been blogging. Let's hope she'll be back soon.'

The key words here are 'according to her posts on Twitter...' She has time to tweet but not to blog. The truth is Susan is always busy so far as I can tell, always up to her neck in deadlines, celebrity visits to pubs and cavorting about in fashionable beauteous rusticity. And tweeting. She's always writing books, publishing books, writing about books: she is a production line, a sausage factory of hauntings hokum for lovers of the-willies. None of this has ever stopped her from churning out another batch of finely-tuned opinions for her various blogs over the years.

Obviously she has fallen out with the magazine. I hope no one's bitter.

(Do read Duncan's book which describes his stay at her Gloucestershire home while working on a book: oddly, she declined to eat with him though was otherwise friendly.)

Review - How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits by Duncan Fallowell

Duncan Fallowell

Adult warning: enlargeable naked author pic below. Don't panic!

July 19, 2012: News - Duncan Fallowell wins PEN/Ackerley Prize for Memoir for How to Disappear.

Is Duncan Fallowell’s seventh book How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits his actual life story? True, he confesses on p236 to an impressive 40 ‘sexual partners’ in the month following Princess Diana’s death, ‘including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton.’ And certainly he liberally seeds us with tantalising glimpses of private multi-generational Duncan, including the nosey little boy whose first instinct was always to boldly go and duff up any mystery. But be clear: this is no autobiography.

It is instead something much more… typical. It is, for the dorky genre-spotters, a mongrel private parts book - ‘part memoir, part travelogue, part biography,’ to quote his unusually accurate latest publisher Ditto Press. In other words, How To Disappear is not unlike, in form and style, his other classic private parts books To Noto, St Petersburg, ‘New Zealand’ (Going As Far As I Can): each a brilliant self-portrait of the feral Duncan Fallowell on location, as spotted in the looking glass of adored or maligned travelled nation.

Is he then a narcissist whose World Atlas serves exclusively as his mirror? Well, I’ll come back to that.

Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves. There’s the business of the cryptic title: How To Disappear. The early dread threat of a self-help book from California soon gives way to compelling true-life stories of strangeness: each of the four of the five long pieces comprising this book cradles a social Houdini, a personality once great or associated with greatness, who has performed a public disappearing act and now lurks shyly in the shadows awaiting (willing or unwilling) rediscovery by Fallowell.

Will force be necessary to open up these exotic clams? These misfits? Part of the joy of this book lies in wondering whether.

There’s reclusive Alastair Graham who was Evelyn Waugh’s ex-boyfriend; and the elusive social climber Bapsy Pavry (aka Lady Winchester); not forgetting the absent Maruma who bought the alcoholic Isle of Eigg; and who could forget dead Diana? DF himself ‘disappears’ in ‘Sailing To Gozo’ where a ubiquitous, faintly menacing stranger haunts Fallowell’s way on a quaint island yester-world.

The feral DF: click to enlarge

Like the little boy he once was, DF the man is first drawn to mystery or it is drawn to him. Not any mystery, mind. The mystery is usually well-connected and/or old world glamorama. And if his overriding instinct is to dispel mystery then his fix is to be found in the tricky process of unravelling it.

Take the case of Alastair Graham, for example. Fallowell first chances on the old dipso in a pub in New Quay and only later discovers who he is (or was) precisely. Sherlock Holmes himself would be impressed by the lengths to which Fallowell goes to track down witnesses for enlightening demystification: awe-inspiring. In the case of poor old Bapsy, who spent her life in posh hotels hustling for royal party invitations, Fallowell’s decades-long quest begins with the discovery of her potted bio in a book in India: he’s hooked by her sad eyes in the accompanying photo, he must meet her!

Fallowell’s dazzling analyses and asides (the book could be subtitled, But I Digress…) do not spare his own primal motivation: ghosts of a sort, such as the subjects of his book, absorb him. He is drawn to ‘the disquieting state in which someone is neither present in one’s life nor absent from it.’ He is the ghostbuster in the ‘abyss which can open up between being here and not being here.’ In his Bapsy piece, the spectre metaphor is bettered by reality when Fallowell has what could be an actual supernatural experience. He remains agnostic on what it is; but to risk ridicule from literary followers of the atheistic faith by writing about it at all is most admirable.

Fallowell’s ghosts come in all shapes and sizes and dead places sometimes tickle his inner Madame Arcati. He adores Pompeii as a zombified still of disinterred pagan sexuality while sluttish ever-dying Venice is subject to such a fantastic Fallowell flogging (a ‘desexed city’) that doges in the Roman Catholic hell must be planning revenge should he ever convert.

As ever, Fallowell seduces with an electric prose style which straddles knowledge high and street like a whore plugged in to a well-stocked Kindle. Why else would I want to read about some sad old snob like Bapsy but to relish the vervy manner in which he compassionately grants what eluded her in life: the right kind of attention. Pathetic she may have been but Fallowell’s mockery is only very faint: he observes the human constant in her, the disappointment that urged her pointless epic life.

Certainly no narcissist (to return to my question above) ever spent as much time preoccupied with how others tick as Fallowell. Beautifully packaged in art-worked hardback, How To Disappear is a beyond-fabulous wallowing in weird people in wonderful places - magical and mesmerising. Oh, and very gossipy, too.

 
How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits by Duncan Fallowell.

Published by Ditto Press
on 7 September 2011.

To buy a copy click here.

Book Review: Redeeming Features by Nicky Haslam: Joy of being souffléed alive

Seasoned Arcatistes will know that I am not given to incontinent praise. So when I say that Nicky Haslam's memoir Redeeming Features is the most brilliantly trivial book I have ever read (since the Andy Warhol Diaries) you may need to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, you have my permission not to work for the rest of the day. By all means have sex. At least buy a good champagne.

Redeeming Features is the book Proust might have written had he not literary talent - his curse I'm afraid - or the book Duncan Fallowell might have penned had he not a brain or Oscar Wilde might have dashed off had he not a sense of humour. This is not to say that Nicky lacks literary talent or brains. Or a sense of humour. It is that he has neither (nor the sense of humour) in sufficient quantity to get in the way. His naked magnetism to society and celebrity figures is pure, romantic, child-like: nothing takes priority over his natal desire to nurture intimacies that are worth it.

A reader of average intelligence, and with an above average interest in names (obscure upper class aristo satellites, especially) will find their own delight unchallenged by artistic soul delving, behavioural over-noticing or mere satire. Many a memoir is utterly ruined by the simple inability of the author to maintain the consistency of a soufflé in matters entirely inconsequential. Nicky avoids this. He rises to the occasion all puffed up like a pillow, his named crowns golden, and with a yielding middle bit: yes, he did have a romance with Tony Armstrong-Jones. Redeeming Features is that scrummy.

In keeping with the frothy nature of the book it would be unseemly then to try to paraphrase his tale: it matters only that he is here and the book is there. To say more would be to ruin the effect, to puncture the soufflé. Light things, such as a joke, cannot bear to be named or explained. To write a book which is just there is a high accomplishment: it is an act of witting or unwitting humility. I can't say better than that.

Like all good books, Redeeming Features hosts a mystery. On p283, Nicky writes of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll "meeting a supposed sex-change relative." Of this encounter he recalls once writing in the defunct magazine Ritz: "With a song in her heart, Marg beheld an adorable face. It may be a her to you and me, but it sure is a him to Her Grace." I can't imagine why the "supposed sex-change" is not named but if he means who I think he means he should know she's highly litigious. And she's no sex-change.

Susan Hill gets it all wrong on Katie Price and the lower orders

Susan Hill

Former Arcatiste Susan Hill (famed novelist, publisher, playwright, opinionist spewer of words) now writes a blog for The Spectator, the magazine that's hosting an Aids-denialist movie screening on Oct 28 - and my thanks to the loyal, all-weather Arcastiste who brought the blog to my attention. I did say elsewhere that I would not bother to read it, but being a double Gemini I succumbed to curiosity and had a look. Oh dear.

Susan's latest post is a nattery onslaught on ghost written celebrity novels such as those by Katie Price (aka Jordan). In Mail-style fulminant mode she writes of these books: "To pretend to pen a novel, to appear and sign the book for long queues of people and never to acknowledge the ‘real’ author, is simple deceit and the many people who buy a novel believing that it really was written by Jordan or Katie Price, are being cynically manipulated."

I don't think so, dearie. If Susan did her homework, instead of wallowing in upper middleclass oblivion of lower-order cultural realities - a condition encouraged by the infantile, belle epoque mindset of the Spectator - she would know it's no secret that Katie is not the author of the novels that bear her name. As Katie herself said in a Mail interview - among others! - last year to push Angel Uncovered: "I'm not going to sit here and say I write it word by word because I'd be lying. I actually say how I want the story and that's how it happens." Her non-authorship is a truth universally acknowledged. Her books are brand-stamped productions and promoted as such.

I bet Susan a modest £50 - to be donated to an Aids charity - that she will not find one Katie Price fan chosen at random who imagines Katie has written any of her books. Susan would do better to get back to writing a properly earthed indie blog and not try to pander to the delusional and out-of-touch soaks of the Spectator readership.

On other matters, I've always been fascinated by spiders ...

Nicky Haslam: Cock-cocking with Tony and Roddy

Nicky Haslam's Redeeming Features autobio is out on Nov 5 and one of its delights is his revelation that the old party-goer and name-dropper cock-cocked with Tony Armstrong-Jones (now Lord Snowdon) in the 1950s, before Tony married Princess Margaret, and later with Roddy Llewellyn, before Roddy became her boyfriend. I had never thought of Nicky till now as the late Queen sister's unwitting bedtime taster.

James Delingpole: Muslims, Farah and Chippy Drivel-gate

Comments are welcome. But highly insulting or plainly defamatory remarks will not be posted. In particular, comments of a personal or insulting nature about Farah Damji and Toby Young will be ignored.

So, where were we? Ah yes, James Delingpole. The writer, novelist and rightwing joker whose work appears often in the Telegraph and Spectator. Last month he started a curious conversation on Facebook about Muslims: he invited people to name a Muslim peer who had got his or her job on merit. Naturally this precipitated quite a row with fellow Facebook writer Farah Damji (what do you mean you've never heard of her!). The exchanges also feature the novelist Susan Hill. I make no comment. Oh, and do read Delingpole's book Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work, click here. After you've read Farah's Try Me, click here.

James Delingpole
Can anyone name me a single Muslim peer who got the job on merit?
14:20 · via Twitter ·

Farah Damji at 14:23 on 03 May
Karan Bilamoria

Susan Hill at 14:26 on 03 May
How many peers of any faith or none got the position on merit ? 20%

Susan Hill at 14:26 on 03 May
That should have been 20% ?

James Delingpole at 14:30 on 03 May
You just made that one up didn't you Farah?

Farah Damji at 14:32 on 03 May
*drops her Mail on Sunday in shock *
Baron Bilamoria to the likes of you Mr D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karan_Bilimoria,_Baron_Bilimoria

James Delingpole at 14:35 on 03 May
Point taken Susan, but let's pick one target at a time. Baroness Uddin: £100,000 claimed from the taxpayer for a flat she didn't use; Lord Ahmed - killer, rabblerouser; Baroness Warsi - the Tories' chocolate fireguard on "Social Cohesion".

Farah Damji at 14:35 on 03 May
oh sorry, take it all back. But he is a Parsi, and they were kinda sorta one of "us Mossies," back in the day. Anyway he is brown. Isn't that your point?

James Delingpole at 14:46 on 03 May
Stop being so chippy Farah. And misleading for that matter.

Malcolm Hugh Delingpole at 07:52 on 04 May
Zoroastrianism = Islam ? Stretching it a bit!

Farah Damji at 09:44 on 04 May
Ah! Someone who knows the difference. Intelligent debate as opposed to rabble-rousing racism?

James Delingpole at 10:29 on 04 May
For FUCK'S SAKE Farah Damji. You really do have some gall. It was you who proposed Karan Bilamoria as your favourite Muslim peer. And now you have the bloody cheek to make out like I can't tell the difference. And since when was Islam a race?

Farah Damji at 10:43 on 04 May
I did. I made a mistake. I am not always right. And your initial comment was racist. Because I said so, learn Macpherson. "The definition of 'racist incident' should be: 'any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person'." After I realised Karan was a Parsi, I added three more Muslim Peers you haven't refuted. This is like the Sunny Hundial school of debate. Pointless.

James Delingpole at 10:57 on 04 May
Farah, are you stupid as well as annoying? I don't believe in the Macpherson report. No one with even half a brain believes in the Macpherson report. It set back the cause of race relations in this country by decades. If you want to talk chippy drivel go somewhere else.

Farah Damji at 11:05 on 04 May
As in Paki go home? I think you have lost this one. The Macpherson report is not a religion for you to believe in, unlike Islam. The Macpherson report remains the most important historical document YOUR country has produced since the Magna Carta. Chippy Drivel sounds like a character invented by you to cover up your "intelligence" which has as many holes as a hooker's fishnets. I'm bored with arguing with someone who can't hold an argument, can only lob insults. And not very good ones at that...later.

James Delingpole
All right, apart from Karan Bilamoria - inventor of that marvellous thing Cobra beer - name one other Muslim peer who got the job on merit

14:38 · via Twitter · Farah Damji at 14:43 on 03 May
GOTCHA. Wait calling my Jihadist friends for some back-up.

Farah Damji at 14:48 on 03 May
what is chippy? something to do with fishy? Off to the park, enjoy your snit.

Rob Stevely at 15:14 on 03 May
Jobs? Mostly I see muslims on the streets burning things in effigy and throwing stones at tanks

Jim Mellon at 19:49 on 03 May
and waht non Muslim peers got the job on merit?

James Delingpole at 20:25 on 03 May
entirely agree with you Jim. But that's a separate point.

Farah Damji at 20:37 on 03 May
Baroness Shreela Flather.

Josie Charlotte Jackson at 22:10 on 03 May
Easy: ÕÈÇÑ, ÔÌÑÉ ÇáÊíä ÇáÔæßí (Babylon English Arabic) or Êíä Ôæßì (plain ol' Arabic, Arabic) or "prickly pears" (English, English). Grown in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, prickly pears got the job of being used, most deliciously, in prickly pear juice.
Have a very, very nice week ( is it Monday over there yet?).
xxxxxxxxx

Farah Damji at 22:12 on 03 May
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usha_Prashar,_Baroness_Prashar

Farah Damji at 07:13 on 04 May
Oh and Lord Ali.

Nirpal Dhaliwal at 3:04pm May 4
can anyone name me one single right-wing privately-educated white-boy hack who got his job on merit?

To listen to libertarian conservative Delingpole click here. There's no (unnatural) climate change, global recession is all Blair's fault (but he was right on the Iraq War), and other simplistic crap. Bush W's fault was that he "was a compassionate conservative". Is that a joke?

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website

Shena Mackay: A touch of the Atmospherics

I’ve asked the master short story writer and novelist Shena Mackay to talk to Madame Arcati on the occasion of the publication of her new collection: The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories. It’s out on November 6, here’s the Amazon link. Fingers crossed.

Fans of her work know her to be a hard-wired original: poetical, mischievous, funny; supremely peculiar; a little sly and certainly dark. Shabbiness seems to do something to her. Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags has to be one of the oddest fiction titles ever – if you know odder let me know. Many of her stories lyricise the otherwise mundane and domestic. “A utopia in Croyden?” asks a review of her novel Heligoland. One character is described as having “the face of a cruel spoon.” Almost Dali-esque.

She loves cats.

British Bastard Corporation (3): Susan Hill writes ...

"This is been the way for a long time. About 10 years ago someone said how much they had enjoyed my play on Radio 3 the previous evening.I had waited 20 years for it to be repeated so I could tape it but assumed it never would be. Of course no one let me know."

Susan Hill's new crime novel The Vows of Silence is out now, click here to buy.

Duncan Fallowell, Hay and a Dracula's attic happening

Hay Castle: The flat there is available at £25 a night, click here. You too could live like Edward II

It's a mark of Madame Arcati's selfless philosophy that she happily cannot resist another Duncan Fallowell epistle, in response to a reader's suggestion that he interview someone connected with poor old Diana for his Peepshow book. This thought then associates with his recent performance at Hay Castle at the Real Hay Fest and its contrasting advantages to the wretched Hay Fest ...

"I agree about Diana but I have already written a piece on her which forms the last chapter of ANOTHER book which I've almost completed called The Ones That Got Away.

"I performed - yes, that is the word - a shortened version of the Diana piece at Hay Castle recently and I think it worked fantastically well. It was pouring with rain. The official festival site out of town was tented and a wash-out - firemen were called to pump it out. But I was in the huge, dry State Room which was up a narrow staircase, with three great windows overlooking the castle lawns. It's often used for storage and there was extraordinary lumber everywhere - old gilt mirrors, decaying cabinets, Raj Gopal's Indian dancing costumes, a French bed, frayed Turkey carpets. Dracula's attic!

"I had the room blacked out, a big log fire blazed at one end, flamelight flickering on the ceiling. I was at the other end beside an urn-shaped lamp. Creepy electronic music played as people filed in and sat themselves in the dark intervening space. In fact it was a happening."

Keep your ideas coming for other sleb stars for Duncan's Peepshow book - see posting below and send comments there. Publisher Susan Hill is keeping an eye on proceedings which is just as well ...

Susan Hill buys up Duncan Fallowell's 'Peepshow'

Well I never! Two of my favourite writers - and they are friends of Madame Arcati - are getting married! In a manner of speaking, of course. Susan Hill's publishing company Long Barn Books has bought up Duncan Fallowell's book Platinum Peepshow, Scenes from Art, Fashion and Entertainment 1979-2009 for publication in March 2009. A more fascinating union I could not have imagined and all done behind my back.

As I have said before - see my interview with DF via labels - and I'll say it again: Duncan Fallowell is one of the world's best writer interviewers. He applies his own customised rohypnol to his celebrity subjects - teasing out the most extraordinary revelations and indiscretions - and recreates them in splendid pieces of entertainment and acute and glamorous insight. My congratulations to Susan Hill on a bold and imaginative acquisition.

The book is a collection of his star interviews - a good omen is that in the week of this development, Tina Turner has announced she'll be in the UK for her Euro tour in March (the month of the 'Peepshow' publication) - and she's one of his subjects. There's synchronicity for you. Other huge names he's encountered include Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Tony Snowdon, Valentino, Peter O'Toole, Eartha Kitt, Judi Dench, Gilbert & George, Johnny Rotten and many many more. Why, even Sam Fox gets a look in.

Be sure there'll be further news ...

Any ideas who else Duncan should interview? See his note in comments.

Susan Hill: 'I'm disappointed with Nicky Haslam ...'

Dear Madame Arcati

I was extremely disappointed when Mr Haslam decided not to publish his autobiography after all. I was all set to review it for a posh broadsheet newspaper in what the lit ed called 'a fascinating match.'

Perhaps Duncan will give us his memoirs instead.

Susan

The New Statesman and Empress Madame Arcati

Do read Duncan Fallowell’s marvellous diary in this week’s New Statesman – Scrooges can click here.

His first item tackles the verminous anony-mice of the internet (I know them soooooooo well) who have sent him abusive mail over his (still) unpublished New Zealand book Going as Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book. In the course of this he touches upon the “two empresses of the blogosphere, Susan Hill and Madame Arcati”. Other than the fact that he lists our names in the wrong order – and Susan is too pacific a person to be called an empress; she is more a Queen (but should at least be made a Dame [Dame Susan Hill, mm, yes ...]) – Madame Arcati is pleased to appear in the Staggers’ pages, particularly on the day its editor John Kampfner has resigned. I’ll come back to him in a minute.

But anyway, Empresses Madame and Susan are name-checked for their appeal to their vast publics (hello Quebec!) to send comforting “online hugs” to Duncan as the ghastly, cowardly anony-mice nibbled away at him with their blunt yellow teeth over a book they have yet to read. Such was the response – and such our influence – that he ended up feeling “buried alive in chocolate truffles”. There’s no pleasing some people.

But anyway, back to Mr Kampfner. Yes, he’s gone! Was it as recent as the summer of 2006 that he delivered a triumphalist speech at a Statesman party over the increase in circulation (25k to 30K a week I think)? Tesco paid for the champagne then and the Hamiltons hustled about. At last summer’s do Virgin paid for the champers and the Hamiltons hustled about (see my party pieces on labels). At the latter knees-up Kampfner was plainly subdued, his speech perfunctory, his boss Geoffrey Robinson faintly sarcastic about a throne and his editor. An empress of pre-resignation body language I feared then that he was not long for this world. He lasted longer than I expected. A staffer told me that the two men were at odds over budgets.

As Kampfner spoke my eyes were drawn to columnist Suzanne Moore's fuck-me shoes and their gorgeous lace-ups: I was rendered deaf. Though I would deny being lesbotic I did feel a funny tingling - my uterus sort of sighed - and I imagined her heels were six inches long, which is good length for all sorts of different things. She subsequently corrected me on this in a published message.

May I suggest Paul McCartney buy the magazine off Robinson once he’s given Heather her £80m (the global prayer meeting went well, thank you)? I think Macca would be perfetto.

Kampfner glammed up the Staggers: he ushered in the nice silky paper. His stand-out piece was the Tony Blair wars report which listed the numbers of the dead from his various military entanglements. He brought in Julian Clary – a feline diarist of minor absurdities - but failed to sign up Mr Fallowell as the magazine’s travel editor. What a loss. Tsk. His worst mistake was letting go arts writer Ben Dowell – who I hear it rumoured has embarked on a mini-me adventure. I prefer cats myself.

Kampfner’s gone but he’ll be back in a senior role on a newspaper. He has a loud voice, the requisite certainties and lovely big ears. If he wants his horoscope done, he’ll have to send his birth details.

Support Susan Hill's Books Behind Bars campaign

If you agree with the statement below, go to novelist Susan Hill's blog and add your name to the posting Books Behind Bars (Feb 7, 2008), click here.

WE WISH FOR ALL PRISONERS TO HAVE ACCESS TO BOOKS IN THE PRISON LIBRARY FROM THE MOMENT THEY ARE FIRST ADMITTED TO PRISON. WE SUPPORT ALL INITIATIVES TO ALLOW PRISONERS AND / OR PRISON LIBRARIES TO RECEIVE DONATIONS OF BOOKS.

Susan Hill: 'Give Duncs a hug'

I'm glad novelist Susan hill has offered some comfort to Duncan Fallowell as he finds himself cyber stalked by the yellow-toothed anony-mice who scurry about the net in search of people to hate, click here. New Zealand appears to have hired a lynch mob even though Duncs' travel book is yet to be published. She relates how she, too, became a hate object when she dared to make some slighting remarks about a few indie book shops in the Guardian. Suddenly she was the Darth Vader of the chains intent on driving out the titchy shops still with door ding-a-lings and pounds-shillings-pennies tills. As Susan says, do write to Duncan and offer him a hug, click here.

The Woman In Black - Sultan of Brunei's a fan

At a party the other night a PR tells me that Susan Hill's The Woman in Black has now been seen by Henry Kissinger, Jonathan Ross and his family and the Duke of Kent. Every year for 10 years the Sultan of Brunei has taken over half the theatre to watch the play - his entire entourage arrive in stretch limos. They adore it. And next September it will be on for one week only with the cast of the Japanese production, which is sooooooo succesful in Tokyo, and it will be played entirely in Japanese. It's likely to be booked out the day the box office opens apparently.

If you want a spooky Christmas, read Susan's marvellous novella The Man In The Picture. To buy the book online click here. To read my review click here. To read more about The Woman In Black click here.

Ms Baroque on Arcati, Amis and his pomposity

Ms Baroque has taken Madame Arcati to task over the Amis/Eagleton row ...

I thought Amis' riposte to Eagleton seemed strangely wheedling, ending with that weird rhetorical "collegiate" "Shall we?" - It even came out supplicating. I'm sure that's not what he intended but I find it very interesting. What Alibhai-Brown calls "part affectionate" is just archness, I think; "somewhat patronising" is really very patronising. But MA was also disingenuous taking Eagleton to task for quoting remarks "that aren't in the essay" - when in fact those are remarks by Amis, so it's not exactly as if TE had made them up!

It's interesting how all through this he has lost control of his material - his tone - which is why he's now having to backpedal. I remember his reams of writings in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 - it was astonishing, how he managed to churn out so many thousands of words seemingly immediately! Of course it was mostly hysteria and hyperbole. Everyone was hysterical. I would certainly never go back to anything written in that time. But then, the racist impulse still sees to me an inappropriate response.

And that's the thing. Amis really hasn't got his finger on the pulse. Okay, he hit something with "Money" etc, but he has never been a populist - always a snobbish man - and I think the "isn't everyone a bit like this really" line is disingenuous at best. Would everyone, if they could, simply send all their bank statements unopened to their accountant because it is really "too boring" to have to read them - as Amis once said he did?

Dear Ms Baroque

Thank you ... you don't like Amis fils, do you?

Amis' response to Eagleton was unambiguously hostile; there's nothing supplicating in it so far as I can see. Amis was plainly rattled. I agree that Amis' letter to Alibhai-Brown was faintly patronising; but then that is one strategy in a war of words, a not very effective strategy.

It was Amis himself who pointed out that Eagleton was wrong to say that Amis' remarks on Islam in 2006 were made in an essay when in fact they were reported words from an interview. He then went onto to draw a distinction between airing passing thoughts (or racist "urges") in an interview and calling for discrete action in the written word. I think to Amis there is a big difference (one is a confession to racist thoughts, the other a call to racist action), but as I wrote in a later post, in the broad-brush world of public perception such a subtle distinction is going to be lost. All people will hear is Islamophobic sentiment and judge accordingly.

I would agree - and Amis has admitted as much in literary terms - that he does not have his finger directly on the pulse anymore. Money wonderfully captured the greed and the soulless brutality or vulgarity of the '80s in a literary demotic that sounded of the times, too. But I'm not sure any literary writer can capture the moment all his or her life. He produced brilliant work, he does so no longer, but who is to say what may come yet?

On a broader canvas, I think Amis - like his godawful pal Christopher Hitchens - may be using the debate on Islam and its "quietism" on Islamicist terrorism to push an atheist agenda: in his letter to Alibhai-Brown, Amis makes it clear that he thinks not believing in a god is superior to believing in a god. It is plainly crass to imagine, let alone say, that a religious faith must mean that one necessarily buys into its moral proscriptions or punishments.

Eagleton's harsh criticism of Amis has had the refreshing effect of a correction and limited retraction or clarification from Amis. But in the process we have been forced to ask ourselves whether so many more of us privately yield to occasional racist thoughts or urges - particularly in the wake of atrocity. That Amis admits to such thoughts or feelings - while calling for bridge-building with Muslim moderates - is better than spouting what we think others want to hear.

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. Review

Quite why the Literary Review permitted critic Amanda Craig to reveal the twist in Susan Hill’s new novella The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story must remain a mystery. Spite? Clumsiness? Too much weed? Whatever, we must console ourselves that the publication hardly figures on anyone’s radar except as a poor-paying finishing school for bright trustafarians all called Pandora – quite why it retains its amateurish, throwaway tone is another question I can’t quite summon up the enthusiasm to address. I leave to others to ponder.

And so to the work-in-hand. Hill launches light-handed raids on a wide variety of literary genres and ideas – from Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dickens-style Gothicness to Victorian/Edwardian Yuletide spookmeister MR James and touches of Poe and Faust (and many more) – to confect an atmospheric ghost story all her own. If there is subtle mischief in some of the references – in a post-Scream world, horror must be knowing – then it remains an unassuming guest as Hill artfully builds up an affective sense of foreboding. No wonder BBC Radio 4 recently selected it as its Book of the Week: it’s the perfect read for horror fetishists who like to sip port as they shiver, alone.

So slight is the tale – by which I mean, so dependent is it on a series of simple but unexpected mechanics for build-up – that the most basic précis will have to do. Before a crackling fire in the grate – crucially it’s a cold and frosty night - ancient Cambridge don Theo tells his former student Oliver the strange history of an 18th Century painting hanging on the wall. It depicts masked revellers at the Venice carnival. One debauched figure in particular seems to possess a sulphuric, independent life: this is a painting that only appears to imitate life. In reality it has the power to take life, entrapping the souls of those who enrage whatever dark force controls it and imprinting their image upon the canvas forever. Revenge (a ghost story necessity) is the dark catalyst – whose revenge, or why the revenge, is best discovered in the narrative, not here.

The widowed countess, who appears a little later in the story, conjures up a passing Miss Havisham – and yet was that the shadow of the vengeful Mrs Danvers flitting by, too? I even found my mind wandering over the masterpiece horror movie Don’t Look Now (in which Venetian necromantic forces prove lethal) as Hill drives her unfortunate characters to smelly La Serenissima – the beguiling, the misleading “the most serene”, in this fiction.

Told in recollection (except for one part) by different, inter-related people, The Man in the Picture is both a classically constructed ghost story and a homage to the classic ghost story genre. What could have been mere comic pastiche, even a straight and obvious send-up, works as invented horror in its own right, in the hands of a great story-teller - remember Hill's The Woman in Black? A perfect Christmas read, in other words.

To buy a copy, go to Amazon