My memories are inevitably vague, but I think the Aberfan disaster of 1966 was the first news story that I noticed. I was then just starting school, and it would have been difficult to miss the coverage of the landslide of coal-waste avalanching down on a small village. For the first buildings to be hit were the schools, and when the final death toll was reckoned up, it turned out that 116 of the 144 victims were children.
What I obviously didn’t register at the time was the full scandal – the fact that the disaster could have been avoided, had the National Coal Board heeded the warnings that the slurry tip was on a stream that made it structurally unsound.
Nor did I know anything about the continuing story, the second tragedy that engulfed the survivors and the bereaved. As money poured in from around the world, a disaster relief fund was set up, with around £1.8 million contributed (nearer £25 million at today’s prices), most of it from individuals wanting to help out.
But the money didn’t make it through to the intended recipients. Instead it sat in the bank, accumulating interest for the local council.
Which is where my late friend, John Summers, entered the story. Writing then for the Sunday Telegraph, he was the one Fleet Street journalist who wouldn’t let go of the story. He returned repeatedly to Aberfan (just five miles from Rhymni where he grew up), wrote about the families in the Telegraph and in Harpers Bazaar and Queen magazines, and even issued himself the High Court writ that released some of the funds.
All of which is much in my mind because I have today been reading through some of those articles by John and putting them on the site dedicated to him (scroll down to the bottom of the page).
For John himself, it was a turning-point in his life. He began his campaigning as a journalist and emerged as a novelist, the whole tragic story having been incorporated into his first novel, Edge of Disaster. For those interested in his work, it’s worth comparing his articles with the published, and slightly fictionalized, account from that book.
Oh, and for anyone intrigued by the mention in the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of a feud between John and his former lecturer, Kingsley ‘Bopa’ Amis, I recently put the relevant material online as well.
Showing posts with label John Summers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Summers. Show all posts
Monday, 10 November 2008
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
John’s Return Home
John Summers left instructions that he wanted his remains to be interred in the family plot in Rhymni Cemetery, and today a small group of friends and family gathered to see his wishes honoured.
Amongst many other things, John was probably the most travelled man I’ve ever met, bringing back tales from all over the world. But wherever he went, and in whatever he wrote, he kept a part of his heart for the valleys of South Wales where he grew up, and particularly for Rhymni.
That background formed the basis of his finest novel, The Raging Summer, named in honour of Rhymni’s greatest poet Idris Davies, whose long poem The Angry Summer had depicted the town in the days of the Depression.
So, in memory of John, and in commemoration of the return of his mortal remains to his hometown, here are some lines from The Angry Summer:
And one by one the lights shall go out
in all the valleys, leaving isolated lamps, silver pins,
sticking into the inverted velvet of the midnight air.
And you shall listen then to the silence
that is not silence, to the murmur
of the uneasy centuries among the ancient hills and valleys
as here you stand with the mountain breeze on your brow.
Amongst many other things, John was probably the most travelled man I’ve ever met, bringing back tales from all over the world. But wherever he went, and in whatever he wrote, he kept a part of his heart for the valleys of South Wales where he grew up, and particularly for Rhymni.
That background formed the basis of his finest novel, The Raging Summer, named in honour of Rhymni’s greatest poet Idris Davies, whose long poem The Angry Summer had depicted the town in the days of the Depression.
So, in memory of John, and in commemoration of the return of his mortal remains to his hometown, here are some lines from The Angry Summer:
And one by one the lights shall go out
in all the valleys, leaving isolated lamps, silver pins,
sticking into the inverted velvet of the midnight air.
And you shall listen then to the silence
that is not silence, to the murmur
of the uneasy centuries among the ancient hills and valleys
as here you stand with the mountain breeze on your brow.
Thursday, 9 October 2008
John Summers’ funeral
The funeral was held on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 of John Summers at Swansea Crematorium.
It was a sad occasion, obviously, but also a real honour and pleasure to meet many of John’s friends and family, almost all of them for the first time. He was a very special man and will be much missed.
There was a reading from one of John’s novels, The Raging Summer, and - for those new to his work - this passage is probably as good a place to start as any. It contains so many of the elements that are found in his work: sensually descriptive writing that touches on nature, on his Welsh roots, on politics and on why anyone would want to be a writer:
‘To write books. Just words. So that afterwards the reader would feel, yes, that it had all happened to him and to her. Then each book would no longer belong to me but belong to them too and they would, with even more than my own small determination, fight for it and protect it because it was for ever theirs now.’
As one of those readers, I do indeed feel the need to fight for and protect John’s work. The Raging Summer is out of print at present (though copies can be found at abebooks.co.uk), but a couple of years back, when John was in hospital, I promised him that it would one day be republished.
I intend to honour that promise.
It was a sad occasion, obviously, but also a real honour and pleasure to meet many of John’s friends and family, almost all of them for the first time. He was a very special man and will be much missed.
There was a reading from one of John’s novels, The Raging Summer, and - for those new to his work - this passage is probably as good a place to start as any. It contains so many of the elements that are found in his work: sensually descriptive writing that touches on nature, on his Welsh roots, on politics and on why anyone would want to be a writer:
‘To write books. Just words. So that afterwards the reader would feel, yes, that it had all happened to him and to her. Then each book would no longer belong to me but belong to them too and they would, with even more than my own small determination, fight for it and protect it because it was for ever theirs now.’
As one of those readers, I do indeed feel the need to fight for and protect John’s work. The Raging Summer is out of print at present (though copies can be found at abebooks.co.uk), but a couple of years back, when John was in hospital, I promised him that it would one day be republished.
I intend to honour that promise.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Dai Chavez
Having mentioned in my last entry the wonderful character Dai Chavez in John Summers’ novel The Raging Summer, I thought I’d better introduce him more formally.
So here’s a moment from his musical career. If you like this, do have a look at some of the other extracts from The Raging Summer – there’s some fabulous stuff there:
Later on, during the middle of the war, Rumni became the talk of the neighbourhood when Dai Chavez broke up the Full-Temperance and Full Gospel Seven Valleys Eisteddfod Great Tent Evangelist Mission. Just as the recitation of ‘Deffro Zion!’ (‘Awake Zion!’) was about to be rendered by the massed religious reciting congregations of Zoar, Penuel and Moriah chapels, the curtain stuck on stage.
Dai, who was there with his accordion slung over his shoulder ready to bike over to the Catholic Friday night dance, volunteered to play a few suitable tunes to the massed audience while the men worked to get the curtain unstuck. Standing on the middle of the stage in front of the curtain, with all the faces of the Full-Temperance and Gospel audience looking up at him, he struck up ‘Roll out the Barrel’.
He interpreted the frenzied signals of Lloyd Penuel from the side of the stage as encouragement and went on for another fifteen verses, whilst whitely-shocked Nonconformist ministers and their wives stood and walked out. It was not until Williams Williams Tin-Chapel finally marched on-stage and tore the accordion off him that he halted with a last squeal of notes.
‘There you are,’ Dai said afterwards. ‘You try and show willing and go out to help people but that’s all the thanks you set for it...’
So here’s a moment from his musical career. If you like this, do have a look at some of the other extracts from The Raging Summer – there’s some fabulous stuff there:
Later on, during the middle of the war, Rumni became the talk of the neighbourhood when Dai Chavez broke up the Full-Temperance and Full Gospel Seven Valleys Eisteddfod Great Tent Evangelist Mission. Just as the recitation of ‘Deffro Zion!’ (‘Awake Zion!’) was about to be rendered by the massed religious reciting congregations of Zoar, Penuel and Moriah chapels, the curtain stuck on stage.
Dai, who was there with his accordion slung over his shoulder ready to bike over to the Catholic Friday night dance, volunteered to play a few suitable tunes to the massed audience while the men worked to get the curtain unstuck. Standing on the middle of the stage in front of the curtain, with all the faces of the Full-Temperance and Gospel audience looking up at him, he struck up ‘Roll out the Barrel’.
He interpreted the frenzied signals of Lloyd Penuel from the side of the stage as encouragement and went on for another fifteen verses, whilst whitely-shocked Nonconformist ministers and their wives stood and walked out. It was not until Williams Williams Tin-Chapel finally marched on-stage and tore the accordion off him that he halted with a last squeal of notes.
‘There you are,’ Dai said afterwards. ‘You try and show willing and go out to help people but that’s all the thanks you set for it...’
Thursday, 11 September 2008
The Raging Summer
I’ve been re-reading John Summers’ best novel, The Raging Summer (1972). And it’s wonderful – a book that gets better with every reading.
The setting is John’s childhood in a mining village in the South Wales valleys of the 1930s. It’s a place and a time so far removed from my own life that I can’t claim any knowledge of it, but those who did experience the world of which he wrote vouch for the truth of its depiction of time and place. And I can at least vouch for the truth of its depiction of humanity in all its everyday dreams and struggles.
Part of the genius lies in the dazzling virtuosity of the writing. It ranges from comedy to fury, from pen-portraits to anecdote, all delivered in a prose style that bears the hallmarks of the oral tradition of Welsh literature, with its repetitions and heaped adjectives that approach at times the rhythms of poetry.
In an ideal world, I’d put the whole thing online, but (a) I’m not sure about the legality at the moment, and (b) it’d take too long to scan and code it. Anyway, I very much hope we can get it republished in due course, and you’ll be able to read it all then.
For the time being, though, I’ve put a few extracts on the website I set up for John. These include: his memory of the great miner-poet Idris Davies who inspired him to write the novel in the first place; a passage about Edward VIII’s visit to the Valleys, which prompts bitter reflections on the relationship between London and Wales; a portrait of an archetypal preacher, Williams Williams Tin-Chapel, that ends with a characteristically deflating joke; and a hilarious account of how the Second World War came to town.
There’s also the beginning of the story of the Rose of Tahiti, a chapter that could stand alone as one of the greatest short stories in 20th century literature. The extract doesn’t do anything like full justice to the totality, but it’s still beautifully and brilliantly observed.
And that’s the problem, of course, with just having extracts. I’ve tried to encompass some of the sheer diversity of subject and tone, but a mere five thousand words or so simply can’t do it. The sheer joy of a character like Dai Chavez, for example, needs to be experienced in real time as he pops up throughout the book, commenting on the action like a comedy Chorus, always optimistic, never changing.
‘When I looked at Dai Chavez,’ writes John at the end of the novel, remembering a recent encounter, ‘I realized that what I was looking at was a man who, through his life, was extremely happy. He had always had little and now he had little enough and still he was happy. He probably didn’t even know how happy he was. The happiest kind of happiness.’
And, while I’m quoting from the book, this is John on the literary ambition that took him out into the world, to make his name and to change the lives of many thousands of people, including mine:
‘To write books. Just words. So that afterwards the reader would feel, yes, that it had all happened to him and to her. Then each book would no longer belong to me but belong to them too and they would, with even more than my own small determination, fight for it and protect it because it was for ever theirs now.’
He was, and remains, an inspiration.
The setting is John’s childhood in a mining village in the South Wales valleys of the 1930s. It’s a place and a time so far removed from my own life that I can’t claim any knowledge of it, but those who did experience the world of which he wrote vouch for the truth of its depiction of time and place. And I can at least vouch for the truth of its depiction of humanity in all its everyday dreams and struggles.
Part of the genius lies in the dazzling virtuosity of the writing. It ranges from comedy to fury, from pen-portraits to anecdote, all delivered in a prose style that bears the hallmarks of the oral tradition of Welsh literature, with its repetitions and heaped adjectives that approach at times the rhythms of poetry.
In an ideal world, I’d put the whole thing online, but (a) I’m not sure about the legality at the moment, and (b) it’d take too long to scan and code it. Anyway, I very much hope we can get it republished in due course, and you’ll be able to read it all then.
For the time being, though, I’ve put a few extracts on the website I set up for John. These include: his memory of the great miner-poet Idris Davies who inspired him to write the novel in the first place; a passage about Edward VIII’s visit to the Valleys, which prompts bitter reflections on the relationship between London and Wales; a portrait of an archetypal preacher, Williams Williams Tin-Chapel, that ends with a characteristically deflating joke; and a hilarious account of how the Second World War came to town.
There’s also the beginning of the story of the Rose of Tahiti, a chapter that could stand alone as one of the greatest short stories in 20th century literature. The extract doesn’t do anything like full justice to the totality, but it’s still beautifully and brilliantly observed.
And that’s the problem, of course, with just having extracts. I’ve tried to encompass some of the sheer diversity of subject and tone, but a mere five thousand words or so simply can’t do it. The sheer joy of a character like Dai Chavez, for example, needs to be experienced in real time as he pops up throughout the book, commenting on the action like a comedy Chorus, always optimistic, never changing.
‘When I looked at Dai Chavez,’ writes John at the end of the novel, remembering a recent encounter, ‘I realized that what I was looking at was a man who, through his life, was extremely happy. He had always had little and now he had little enough and still he was happy. He probably didn’t even know how happy he was. The happiest kind of happiness.’
And, while I’m quoting from the book, this is John on the literary ambition that took him out into the world, to make his name and to change the lives of many thousands of people, including mine:
‘To write books. Just words. So that afterwards the reader would feel, yes, that it had all happened to him and to her. Then each book would no longer belong to me but belong to them too and they would, with even more than my own small determination, fight for it and protect it because it was for ever theirs now.’
He was, and remains, an inspiration.
Monday, 1 September 2008
Spanking Mary Whitehouse
I’ve been reading some of John Summers’ old articles. It’s a constant astonishment to find the number of people he interviewed: WH Auden, William Burroughs and LP Hartley are amongst those I didn’t know about, as well as Eugene O’Neill in his last ever interview.
And then there was Mary Whitehouse. John spoke to her in 1965 after Kenneth Tynan had broken a broadcasting taboo by saying the word ‘fuck’ on television, and - predictably - she wasn't best pleased.
‘Little boys’ language,’ she tutted. ‘He wants his bottom smacked.’
Well, quite. But how did she know?
And then there was Mary Whitehouse. John spoke to her in 1965 after Kenneth Tynan had broken a broadcasting taboo by saying the word ‘fuck’ on television, and - predictably - she wasn't best pleased.
‘Little boys’ language,’ she tutted. ‘He wants his bottom smacked.’
Well, quite. But how did she know?
Saturday, 30 August 2008
John Summers obituary
A fine obituary to the late John Summers appears in today's Daily Telegraph. My thanks to Mr Roger Wilkes for his unfailing courtesy and professionalism in compiling this piece (and for finding such fabulous pictures).
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
John Summers website
John Summers died a week ago. In the hope that I can help to preserve his memory and promote his wonderful writing, I’ve created a website in his name: john-summers.net.
It includes extracts from John’s books, together with a few of his interviews with the likes of Kingsley Amis and Rocky Marciano, as well as an interview with John himself from the great Welsh website The Wolfman Knew My Father. It also brings together my own reviews of John’s novels.
This is far from complete – I hope to be adding many more extracts from his work, and other people’s reviews of the books – but it is at least a start.
It is, of course, a start that I really should have made during John’s own lifetime. And I feel a little bad for not having done so. News of a death is so often accompanied by feelings of guilt, an awareness of having done those things we ought not to have done, and having left undone those things we ought to have done.
This is my attempt to make amends. And to honour the best writer I ever had the privilege of meeting, let alone of calling a friend.
It includes extracts from John’s books, together with a few of his interviews with the likes of Kingsley Amis and Rocky Marciano, as well as an interview with John himself from the great Welsh website The Wolfman Knew My Father. It also brings together my own reviews of John’s novels.
This is far from complete – I hope to be adding many more extracts from his work, and other people’s reviews of the books – but it is at least a start.
It is, of course, a start that I really should have made during John’s own lifetime. And I feel a little bad for not having done so. News of a death is so often accompanied by feelings of guilt, an awareness of having done those things we ought not to have done, and having left undone those things we ought to have done.
This is my attempt to make amends. And to honour the best writer I ever had the privilege of meeting, let alone of calling a friend.
Friday, 22 August 2008
John Summers
This piece was written in the immediate aftermath of hearing of John's death. It contains - I have since discovered - some factual inaccuracies, but I have refrained from changing my first response. Please also see this website for a fuller and more accurate picture of the man and his work - Alwyn W Turner, 30 August 2008.
It is with great regret and sorrow that I have to record the death of John Summers.
John was one of the finest writers of our time. Two of his novels, in particular – Edge of Violence (1969) and The Raging Summer (1972) – rank alongside the best literature written in the last fifty years. There’s a humanist passion that burns through his works, combined with a gift for description that is simply breathtaking.
I came to know John only recently, in 2003, when his attention was drawn to a review I’d written online, enthusing about one of his books. He became a substantial presence in my life, communicating regularly via phone (from a call-box, since he didn’t have a phone) and, even more often, via the post. Because John was a voluminous letter-writer; it wasn’t unusual to receive three or four letters in a day, all typed on manual typewriters that he’d buy from boot-sales and all contained in recycled envelopes.
It’s difficult to write about him at the moment, even though I feel the need to do so. I hope that I can do better justice to his memory later on, with greater reflection, but right now I want to say a few words.
He was an extraordinary man, and he had lived an extraordinary life. Running away to sea from his Welsh home at an early age, he’d worked his passage around the world before – in his late-20s – he decided to take up writing.
He became a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, and frequently insisted that it was his late arrival in Fleet Street that kept him so fiercely independent. Alongside him worked Paul Foot, to whom he was to dedicate his novel The Rag Parade (describing him as ‘a real journalist’).
In 1966 John was sent to cover the Aberfan disaster, when the criminal negligence of the National Coal Board resulted in the killing of 116 children and 28 adults. Refusing to accept the tragedy as simply a story, he became an active campaigner for the rights of the survivors and the bereaved, pursuing their case up to the high court as they tried to unlock the monies that had been received from around the world for a relief fund.
He wrote a series of articles in the Telegraph and in Queen magazine, and his first novel, Edge of Violence (retitled The Disaster for its paperback editions), was based on his experience, though for legal reasons the names were changed, so that Aberfan became Abertaf. The book launch was held at the House of Commons and was attended by many of the bereaved from the village.
The events – both the disaster itself, and the subsequent attempts by the establishment to protect its own – were a recurring theme in his letters. He saw Aberfan as symbolic of the human failings of capitalism.
The Edge of Violence was very successful, not least in the Soviet Union. John was invited to tour the country, from which came a fine volume of travel-writing, The Red and The Black. His respect for the achievements of Soviet communism was another common thread in his letters. He fell in love with Russia, a nation that he believed had a proper respect for literature.
There’s a certain irony that he should die so soon after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a writer for whom he had no time whatsoever. Nonetheless, there were points of comparison. There was a stubborn refusal to accept that this society was sufficient, an awkward determination to speak out, a horrified repudiation of herd-like consumerism.
A closer parallel, though, was name-checked in The Raging Summer, a book based on John’s own childhood in the Welsh valleys of the 1930s. Writing of his fictionalized hometown, he says: ‘There would be no Mikhail Sholokov born from here: no And Quiet Flows The Don. From a place like this there would only be something always slightly comic; no grandeur. A comical waste and a folly.’
But he was wrong, because this truly is the voice of the Welsh Sholokov: it’s a magnificent book, and its account of the horrors of the Depression are the best I’ve ever read.
That, though, makes it sound like a depressing read. And it’s not. Like all his work, there’s a joy in life itself that sweeps you away. At the risk of being self-indulgent, this is from my review of The Raging Summer:
‘Beyond the “comical waste and folly” there is the essential human dignity of the struggle with avoidable adversity. There's an engagement with life. Some of the characters find strength in nationalism or socialism, but even amongst those whose politics are inchoate at best, the assertion of individuality becomes itself an act of defiance. And, this being a great work of literature, the truth is undimmed by distance: their stories are still inspiring and instructive and utterly entrancing.’
The same was true of the John I knew in the last years of his life. By the time I came into contact with him, he’d already endured the series of misfortunes that increasingly caused him difficulties, but he continued to rail against the stupidities and evil he saw in the world. His book Dylan was a fictional account of a great Welsh writer clearly based on Dylan Thomas, and inevitably I’m reminded as I write this of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.
He didn’t.
I learned a great deal from John. Apart from anything else, here was a man who’d been to parts of the world I shall never see, who’d met and interviewed everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Rocky Marciano, and who’d developed a beautiful, utterly distinctive prose-style:
‘Examine every word carefully that you ever read in a newspaper. Find out who owns the paper and then wash the muck off each shovelful of words dumped down on your doorstep each day. Wash off the dross of muck on them and see if the wretched journalist who was paid to write them (poor man, he probably has a wife and a mortgage he has sold himself to a newspaper for) might have managed to secrete a few little gleaming gems of knowledge through the fine sieve of his newspaper's editorial department.’
It was only five years that I knew John. But there was an intensity to the man that didn’t seem to be dependant on time or age. He could be challenging, provocative, annoying, even endearingly eccentric, but always passionate. He had an integrity that I’ve never met before.
He was a fascinating man. And a great, a truly great, writer.
It is with great regret and sorrow that I have to record the death of John Summers.
John was one of the finest writers of our time. Two of his novels, in particular – Edge of Violence (1969) and The Raging Summer (1972) – rank alongside the best literature written in the last fifty years. There’s a humanist passion that burns through his works, combined with a gift for description that is simply breathtaking.
I came to know John only recently, in 2003, when his attention was drawn to a review I’d written online, enthusing about one of his books. He became a substantial presence in my life, communicating regularly via phone (from a call-box, since he didn’t have a phone) and, even more often, via the post. Because John was a voluminous letter-writer; it wasn’t unusual to receive three or four letters in a day, all typed on manual typewriters that he’d buy from boot-sales and all contained in recycled envelopes.
It’s difficult to write about him at the moment, even though I feel the need to do so. I hope that I can do better justice to his memory later on, with greater reflection, but right now I want to say a few words.
He was an extraordinary man, and he had lived an extraordinary life. Running away to sea from his Welsh home at an early age, he’d worked his passage around the world before – in his late-20s – he decided to take up writing.
He became a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, and frequently insisted that it was his late arrival in Fleet Street that kept him so fiercely independent. Alongside him worked Paul Foot, to whom he was to dedicate his novel The Rag Parade (describing him as ‘a real journalist’).
In 1966 John was sent to cover the Aberfan disaster, when the criminal negligence of the National Coal Board resulted in the killing of 116 children and 28 adults. Refusing to accept the tragedy as simply a story, he became an active campaigner for the rights of the survivors and the bereaved, pursuing their case up to the high court as they tried to unlock the monies that had been received from around the world for a relief fund.
He wrote a series of articles in the Telegraph and in Queen magazine, and his first novel, Edge of Violence (retitled The Disaster for its paperback editions), was based on his experience, though for legal reasons the names were changed, so that Aberfan became Abertaf. The book launch was held at the House of Commons and was attended by many of the bereaved from the village.
The events – both the disaster itself, and the subsequent attempts by the establishment to protect its own – were a recurring theme in his letters. He saw Aberfan as symbolic of the human failings of capitalism.
The Edge of Violence was very successful, not least in the Soviet Union. John was invited to tour the country, from which came a fine volume of travel-writing, The Red and The Black. His respect for the achievements of Soviet communism was another common thread in his letters. He fell in love with Russia, a nation that he believed had a proper respect for literature.
There’s a certain irony that he should die so soon after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a writer for whom he had no time whatsoever. Nonetheless, there were points of comparison. There was a stubborn refusal to accept that this society was sufficient, an awkward determination to speak out, a horrified repudiation of herd-like consumerism.
A closer parallel, though, was name-checked in The Raging Summer, a book based on John’s own childhood in the Welsh valleys of the 1930s. Writing of his fictionalized hometown, he says: ‘There would be no Mikhail Sholokov born from here: no And Quiet Flows The Don. From a place like this there would only be something always slightly comic; no grandeur. A comical waste and a folly.’
But he was wrong, because this truly is the voice of the Welsh Sholokov: it’s a magnificent book, and its account of the horrors of the Depression are the best I’ve ever read.
That, though, makes it sound like a depressing read. And it’s not. Like all his work, there’s a joy in life itself that sweeps you away. At the risk of being self-indulgent, this is from my review of The Raging Summer:
‘Beyond the “comical waste and folly” there is the essential human dignity of the struggle with avoidable adversity. There's an engagement with life. Some of the characters find strength in nationalism or socialism, but even amongst those whose politics are inchoate at best, the assertion of individuality becomes itself an act of defiance. And, this being a great work of literature, the truth is undimmed by distance: their stories are still inspiring and instructive and utterly entrancing.’
The same was true of the John I knew in the last years of his life. By the time I came into contact with him, he’d already endured the series of misfortunes that increasingly caused him difficulties, but he continued to rail against the stupidities and evil he saw in the world. His book Dylan was a fictional account of a great Welsh writer clearly based on Dylan Thomas, and inevitably I’m reminded as I write this of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.
He didn’t.
I learned a great deal from John. Apart from anything else, here was a man who’d been to parts of the world I shall never see, who’d met and interviewed everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Rocky Marciano, and who’d developed a beautiful, utterly distinctive prose-style:
‘Examine every word carefully that you ever read in a newspaper. Find out who owns the paper and then wash the muck off each shovelful of words dumped down on your doorstep each day. Wash off the dross of muck on them and see if the wretched journalist who was paid to write them (poor man, he probably has a wife and a mortgage he has sold himself to a newspaper for) might have managed to secrete a few little gleaming gems of knowledge through the fine sieve of his newspaper's editorial department.’
It was only five years that I knew John. But there was an intensity to the man that didn’t seem to be dependant on time or age. He could be challenging, provocative, annoying, even endearingly eccentric, but always passionate. He had an integrity that I’ve never met before.
He was a fascinating man. And a great, a truly great, writer.
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