Like most truly civilised people, I love literature, hate gossip. To me, books are a passion. Short books, long books, medium-sized books: I've got masses of time for them all. I love the way one word follows another, and then comes another, then another - and before you know where you are they have all been built into sentences, then paragraphs, then chapters. And finally, there they stand, shrouded in glory, my beloved books.
But gossip is a very different business. Frankly, who cares exactly who was doing what with whom where when? To be honest, it's a matter of no interest to me. It's literally decades since I read a gossip column, and if ever I hear something remotely "interesting" (note the inverted commas!) about someone famous, I make sure it goes in one ear and out the other.
But literature, ah, literature! I have just finished soaking up The Journals of Sylvia Plath, and there's no other way of expressing it - I've basically been totally knocked sideways by them. At last, in easy-to-understand words, we are in a position to determine exactly what she and Ted were on about in their poems. To my mind, the Journals offer us a far deeper understanding of their domestic arrangements than ever before, and present a far greater range of evidence on which to judge the pros and cons of both their cases than their poems ever did.
For example, for years literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have been arguing that it was only Sylvia who ever picked her nose. But now we know from her Journals that Ted picked it too (by which I don't mean that Ted picked Sylvia's nose, but his own, though Ted's still-to-be-published Journals may well prove that he indulged in the former activity too).
Ah, literature! I have long been a fully paid-up fan of the works of Margaret Drabble and Antonia Byatt. Indeed, I am widely credited as the inspiration behind the indomitable yet strangely domitable character of Belinda Bigjack in Margaret's magnificent 70s State-of-England trilogy, Darkness in the Night, particularly in the uplifting but strangely saddening final volume, The Last Drop, in which Belinda's attempt to drown herself goes awry when Julian inadvertently switches off the shower. So it grieves me greatly that newspaper gossip about a "feud" between these two sisters is in danger of overshadowing their contributions to literature.
Needless to say, those of us who know them both well have been studiously ignoring their spats for goodness-knows-how-long. I suppose it was when they both shared a platform at the Cheltenham literary festival at some time in the early 70s that I first detected modest differences between Antonia and Margaret.
While Margaret was standing at their shared table reading out that moving passage from her early novel The Blocked Drain (1966) in which Matilda strangles her uppity sister Agatha with a slimline leather bookmark ("You've lost my place!" gurgles Agatha, to which Matilda replies, "It's The End!"), I couldn't help but notice that Antonia Byatt was beneath the table busily tying Margaret's shoelaces together, causing her to plummet headlong into the vase of cut flowers upon venturing forth to take a bow.
It was now Antonia's turn to take the platform. She was reading a passage from her new novel of ideas, and had just got to that bit where the good idea is horrified upon coming home to find a very bad idea sitting slumped in the kitchen with nothing to do, when I found myself glancing in the general direction of Margaret's chair, and noticed it vacant. Further investigation revealed that Margaret had crept behind Antonia, then struck a match, and was even now covertly setting fire to the back hem of Antonia's strikingly floral summer frock.
Before long Antonia Byatt was engulfed in a thick black fog of smoke (the frock, it later emerged, was 78% viscose), causing her to splutter uncontrollably, thus ruining her delivery of the climactic confrontation between the two ideas ("Huh! You're not such a big idea after all!" "I may not be big, but by God I'm a better idea than you'll ever be!"), and ending what should have been a pleasant literary afternoon in a splurge of extinguisher foam.
Over the next two decades, one sometimes heard of other incidents between the two sisters - an impromptu arm-wrestling session at the Adelaide poetry festival, an ill-judged appearance by the two of them in the ring at WWF in Madison Square Garden, a shouting match on the "My Sister Hates Me Because She Writes Worse Novels Than Me" edition of the Jerry Springer Show - but, by and large, they carried themselves with great dignity. So let us hope that this newspaper, at least, can refrain from retelling any tittle-tattle about them, for gossip's loss is surely literature's gain.
