Time to Be in Earnest by P. D. James Page B
Authors: P. D. James
Tags: Literary, General, Biography & Autobiography, Authorship, Language Arts & Disciplines, Novelists; English, Novelists; English 20th Century Diaries
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destructive and doomed, it is hard to believe that she could have found happiness. Her comfort was always in the love of strangers and, if she most wanted that love to be intense, personal and universal, today, at least, she would be satisfied.
September
TUESDAY, 2ND SEPTEMBER
Frances Fyfield arrived at 11 o’clock for our last session in connection with a
Times
interview with me. In the course of general discussion about writing we spoke about copy-editing. Frances said that she doubted whether any novel could be absolutely accurate in every detail and that the last person to spot a mistake was usually the author, who was too involved with plot and characters to notice small inconsistencies or typing errors. I know that I am occasionally a careless writer in this respect and, as my books are long and complex, they do need very careful copy-editing; this they certainly receive. Apart from the Faber copy-editor, who is usually excellent, the proofs are read by Peter and Jane. Peter is meticulous about language, deleting, for example, the superfluous adjective in the phrase “wide panorama,” and methodically noting the number of duplicated words.
Ruth Rendell held her publicity party for her new book
Road Rage
at the Groucho, but I was unable to be there as I had undertaken some months ago to speak at the University Women’s Club. I managed to reach Ruth at her London house both to explain and to congratulate her on the reviews for
Road Rage
. Ruth, who, with her husband Don, is a long-standing friend, is a remarkable and prolific writer, regularly producing novels which explore with power and high imagination the darker corners of the human psyche. She used to find the conventions of the detective story too restrictive and some critics would agree that her best novels are those written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. But she is now beginning to use the Wexford saga as an opportunity to deal with social affairs about which she feels concern. Neither Ruth nor I are didactic writers and I never set out to point a moral or to deal specifically with a social problem. But if a novel is set in the modern world, social and political concerns necessarily intrude. In the first book in which my woman detectiveKate Miskin appears,
A Taste for Death
, I didn’t set out to explore the problems of an intelligent, ambitious and underprivileged young woman fighting her way to seniority and success in the machismo world of the police, but the book would not have been realistic if these problems hadn’t been dealt with. Because the detective story is usually set unambiguously in its own time and place, it often gives a clearer idea of contemporary life than does more prestigious literature. If we want to know what it was like to work in a City advertising office in the early 1930s, there is no better book than Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Murder Must Advertise
.
The dinner at the University Women’s Club was, I think, successful and it is always a pleasure to be in this attractive, comfortable and well-managed club with its ambience of unpretentious feminine tranquillity. But the evening left me exhausted because of the high level of noise at dinner. I realize now that I really cannot tolerate being battered by a cacophony of shouting voices, but it is difficult to know what to do about it. Peter, who is a neuroscientist, has explained that in youth the human brain has the facility to distinguish between the sounds it wishes to receive and others, thus effectively shutting out loud background noise, but that this ability decreases with age. But then, I am becoming intolerant of almost all loud noises and, in particular, of pop music. It blares out in shops, assaults my ears in taxis, is piped into offices and seeps from the earphones of fellow passengers in trains and on the Underground. And now we have the intrusive nuisance of the ubiquitous mobile phone to disturb the peace of railway journeys. Perhaps the train companies should
September
TUESDAY, 2ND SEPTEMBER
Frances Fyfield arrived at 11 o’clock for our last session in connection with a
Times
interview with me. In the course of general discussion about writing we spoke about copy-editing. Frances said that she doubted whether any novel could be absolutely accurate in every detail and that the last person to spot a mistake was usually the author, who was too involved with plot and characters to notice small inconsistencies or typing errors. I know that I am occasionally a careless writer in this respect and, as my books are long and complex, they do need very careful copy-editing; this they certainly receive. Apart from the Faber copy-editor, who is usually excellent, the proofs are read by Peter and Jane. Peter is meticulous about language, deleting, for example, the superfluous adjective in the phrase “wide panorama,” and methodically noting the number of duplicated words.
Ruth Rendell held her publicity party for her new book
Road Rage
at the Groucho, but I was unable to be there as I had undertaken some months ago to speak at the University Women’s Club. I managed to reach Ruth at her London house both to explain and to congratulate her on the reviews for
Road Rage
. Ruth, who, with her husband Don, is a long-standing friend, is a remarkable and prolific writer, regularly producing novels which explore with power and high imagination the darker corners of the human psyche. She used to find the conventions of the detective story too restrictive and some critics would agree that her best novels are those written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. But she is now beginning to use the Wexford saga as an opportunity to deal with social affairs about which she feels concern. Neither Ruth nor I are didactic writers and I never set out to point a moral or to deal specifically with a social problem. But if a novel is set in the modern world, social and political concerns necessarily intrude. In the first book in which my woman detectiveKate Miskin appears,
A Taste for Death
, I didn’t set out to explore the problems of an intelligent, ambitious and underprivileged young woman fighting her way to seniority and success in the machismo world of the police, but the book would not have been realistic if these problems hadn’t been dealt with. Because the detective story is usually set unambiguously in its own time and place, it often gives a clearer idea of contemporary life than does more prestigious literature. If we want to know what it was like to work in a City advertising office in the early 1930s, there is no better book than Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Murder Must Advertise
.
The dinner at the University Women’s Club was, I think, successful and it is always a pleasure to be in this attractive, comfortable and well-managed club with its ambience of unpretentious feminine tranquillity. But the evening left me exhausted because of the high level of noise at dinner. I realize now that I really cannot tolerate being battered by a cacophony of shouting voices, but it is difficult to know what to do about it. Peter, who is a neuroscientist, has explained that in youth the human brain has the facility to distinguish between the sounds it wishes to receive and others, thus effectively shutting out loud background noise, but that this ability decreases with age. But then, I am becoming intolerant of almost all loud noises and, in particular, of pop music. It blares out in shops, assaults my ears in taxis, is piped into offices and seeps from the earphones of fellow passengers in trains and on the Underground. And now we have the intrusive nuisance of the ubiquitous mobile phone to disturb the peace of railway journeys. Perhaps the train companies should
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