Towards the End of the Morning (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

Product Information

A few terminal cases were still coughing their last in odd corners. The Daily Herald up in Endell Street, being slowly suffocated by its affiliation to the TUC; down in Bouverie Street the poor old News Chronicle, the decent Liberal paper that everyone liked but no one read, and on which I had been brought up, kept going by its rather more successful little brother, the Evening Star. On the masthead of the Chronicle lingered the titles of a whole succession of defunct and forgotten papers that had been interred in it over the years, like the overgrown names of the departed accumulating on a family mausoleum: the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, the Daily Dispatch, the Westminster Gazette, the Morning Leader. I'd scarcely been there a year when the whole vault finally collapsed, taking the Star and all the old names with it. Enough, perhaps, of the Catholic school of fiction. I graduated to the cool and elegant universe of Anthony Powell, in whose world the influence of the newspapers is relatively minimal. In fact, as it now seems to me, the absence of this influence is a limitation on his claim to have been describing English social reality. Surely Sir Magnus Donners, that tycoon of 1930s tycoons, should have been the ambitious and manipulative proprietor of at least one Fleet Street title? When Powell gets round to it, though, as he does in the 10th of his 12-novel cycle, he does not stint. Here is the port-soaked "Books" Bagshaw, in Books Do Furnish a Room: A central theme of the book is Dyson's struggle against what he sees as encroaching entropy – indeed, the book was published in the United States under the title Against Entropy.

Bob felt himself swooping down again into the great soft darkness of sleep. Somewhere down there he stubbed himself against an ill-defined but hard mass of fact, and brought himself up to the surface to examine it…’ Frayn seems at home regardless of genre - stage plays, drama, and here genuine but gentle English comedy. To the extent the book is about anything of general interest, I suppose it recounts how we all fiddle with daily trivia as Rome burns around us. What else can anyone do but fall in line with silly, archaic aspirations, suffer annoying neighbours, maintain peace with one’s colleagues, and avoid drinking too much at lunch. The mysteries of what goes on in the editor’s inner sanctum, much less the rest of the world, are unfathomable.

John Dyson Invites the surveyor that lives in the area for dinner, ‘but whatever it was the man surveyed, it was done mostly through the bottom of a glass’ and later on, there would be hopes that maybe Bob will move nearby, once he is engaged with Tessa – here there was a misunderstanding, for the two young people (he is twenty nine, and I am not sure if we know what her age is) had been invited for dinner, and during that, the two sons of the hosts had had an argument and in the confusion, generated by the noise and misapprehension, it seemed that the two of them intend to get married.

The real life, though, was in the narrow lanes just off the street, in Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane to the north, and Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street to the south - in the grimy, exhausted-looking offices of the Mail and the Mirror, the News of the World, the Evening News and the Evening Standard. The Observer, to which I moved in 1962, occupied a muddled warren down in Tudor Street.Bob tried to remember why he hadn’t told her...But he couldn’t really remember the reason. It was already lost – part of the jetsam of discarded immemorabilia which disappeared astern all the time. From hour to hour one’s life slipped away into the haze, before one had really looked at any of it properly... No one, for some reason, has ever been able to remember the title of my novel Towards The End Of the Morning. By the common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me since it was first published in 1967, it seems to have been rechristened Your Fleet Street Novel. What surprises me a little is that anyone can still remember what the phrase Fleet Street once signified. We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace by the standards of today's journalists. We didn't have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill, and we hadn't yet got bogged down in the endless union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet Street, before Rupert Murdoch side-stepped them, and in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of Wapping. Not much later, I came across Orwell's essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer". It opens thus, in case you may have forgotten: