Patrick Marnham is a distinguished fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a biographer, travel writer, and historian, and in his younger days a reporter for the satirical magazine Private Eye. His latest book is War in the Shadows: Resistance, Deception, and Betrayal in Occupied France. He lives in Woodstock with his wife, Chantal.
Here he talks with Linda Glees:
First of all, Patrick, when and why did you come to settle in Woodstock? Before we moved to Woodstock, we lived for 20 years in a very pretty Cotswold village. This had a pub and a church, but not much else. We had to drive everywhere for practically everything. So four years ago we decided it was time to start walking again and in Woodstock almost everything is within walking distance. Apart from which there is the Park, one of the most beautiful in England.
I understand that you lived in France for many years, in which time you worked as Paris correspondent for the Independent and The Evening Standard Yes, it was during ‘les années Mitterrand’, one political or financial scandal after another. It was a golden age for a foreign correspondent, although not always for the French. Chantal comes from a large French family, which gave me a valuable insight into French society that would otherwise have taken years to acquire. We brought up our children in Paris, which was a huge privilege for them.
You have a truly impressive catalogue of books to your name- which have you enjoyed writing the most? My first book Road to Katmandu is still in print. It described the naïve idealism of the 60’s and the overland trail across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, so many frontiers closed today by fanaticism or war. Researching the life of Mary Wesley was enjoyable, since I spent many hours in her company in the last year of her life. She was very clever, very funny and extraordinarily frank. Or so I thought. After she died I was able to consult her diaries, which she had not wanted me to see while she was alive. I had to re-write much of the book.
Your latest book is a history of resistance in wartime France. Has this book been controversial? Has it been translated into French? War in the Shadows has caused quite a stir among those who follow the history of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and I am glad to say that a number of academic noses have been put out of joint. It is the second book I have written about the wartime French Resistance and is based on research conducted over more than 30 years. It contains new evidence about the betrayal of a large SOE network in 1943 in central France. After starting work I discovered that, by chance, many years before, I had known some of the resisters who were betrayed, and this meant that I could write a more personal account. But the meat of the book is in the research I conducted – initially in half a dozen French archives and eventually in the National Archives at Kew.
Among your biographies is one on Georges Simenon, the creator of the fictional Maigret. What attracted you to this author? Well it certainly was not Inspector Maigret. Simenon divided his books into two categories, the wonderful Maigret stories, in which a good detective uses his knowledge of human nature to solve terrible crimes, and the romans durs (the ‘hard’ or ‘dark’ novels). Maigret’s motto was comprendre mais pas juger, ‘understand but do not judge’. Maigret is the sort of person Simenon would have liked the world to think he himself resembled. But there was another side to Georges Simenon, which inspired those books. His childhood in Belgium was marked by the German occupation of Liège during the First World War. People were short of food and fuel. Some starved or died of poverty. The teenage Simenon watched all this, grown-ups cheating and lying to get more food, and the mob rule in 1919 that followed the liberation. That experience formed his lucidly cynical outlook on life, and his darker novels gave me the key to understanding his character.
Did you enjoy your work as a youthful reporter for Private Eye? You have also written The Private Eye Story. Can you share any memories?
I worked for Private Eye in the early years, it was my first job. The editor was Richard Ingrams and the regular contributors included Peter Cook, who owned the paper, Willy Rushton, Barry Humphries, Gerald Scarfe, Christopher Logue, Barry Fantoni and both Paul Foot and Auberon Waugh. So office life was quite lively. Rushton used to invent wonderful characters like Lunchtime O’Booze, who had started life as a Catholic priest, ‘Father Lunchtime O’Booze’, but was subsequently defrocked and redeployed as a thirsty Fleet Street reporter. Then there was the motoring correspondent, J. Bonington Jagworthy. I think he eventually came to life in the form of Jeremy Clarkson. It was a remarkable paper in those days because, famously, it never ‘acquired a point of view’. This infuriated committed journalists and party politicians but attracted readers – who were never sure what was coming next. Of course we had the great advantage, in those days of competing against a rather conventional and incurious national press, closely patrolled by the law of libel. The Eye attracted libel writs almost as fast as readers. Ingrams somehow managed to give the impression that anyone who sued the paper must have something to hide, which turned the libel law on its head.
Would you agree that satire, whether in print or on TV, has a far harder task today in our extrasensitive cultural climate?
You are right. The magazine I knew would never have been launched today. Private Eye, when I was there, was full of inappropriate jokes and opinions. We mocked everything, we laughed a lot – and scraped a living by making others laugh with us. I feel sad that students today seem to have lost all tolerance of different points of view. It must be so much less fun, and so much less interesting, straining not to say – or even think – the wrong thing. And marching around in a mob chanting the same off the peg slogans.
Finally, do you have any reflections on living here in Woodstock? Well, we like it here. A small town with a beautiful Town Hall, an excellent bookshop, a library, a post office, a chemist, a butcher, a greengrocer, and so many choices – two museums, four cafés, two delis, shops that sell only sandwiches or ice-cream, half a dozen restaurants. We even have two local societies organising historical and literary talks. I live in hope that the dedicated staff in our surgery soon find more spacious premises from the generous choice that seems to be available.