Londoner's Diary: Beckett estate’s endgame on a secret affair

Secret Liaison: Samuel Beckett (image: Reg Lancaster for Getty)
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6 June 2016

SOMETIMES the greatest, most passionate love affairs are not found in fiction but in the lives of the writers behind the stories. Percy and Mary Shelley, Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, Byron and, well, everyone:there’s nothing like a real-life bodiceripper.But one of the 20th century’s most fascinating literary liaisons was almost kept in the shadows by the blushing estate of Samuel Beckett.

Next week sees the publication of The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs. The story is a fictionalised account of Lucia Joyce, daughter of Ulysses author James, and her love for Beckett, who dated her briefly but rejected her advances. She was later incarcerated in an asylum. No wonder, then, that Abbs felt a need to tell Lucia’s story, but after she applied for permission to quote from Beckett’s early prose she received a denial from the estate, via publisher Faber, along with an unexpected suggestion: “that Beckett as a character, as well as all references to Beckett, are removed from the text with immediate effect”.

Abbs has ignored the request and the novel will come on the 16th, coinciding with the 110th anniversary year of Beckett’s birth. But it is not the first time that the estate has attempted censorship: in 1998 it attempted to halt an Edinburgh Fringe Festival production of Waiting for Godot because the central duo was played by women.“I was defiant, I thought they were cheeky,” Abbs told us this morning. “It’s a bit like saying you have to take Darcy out of Pride and Prejudice.”She is sure to have the last laugh: the book is already in the hands of film producers. Will Lucia finally step out from her lover’s shadow?

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BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner will avoid reviews for his first novel, Crisis, not because he wants to dodge them but because he left on Friday for three weeks in Papua New Guinea, where he will be making a BBC documentary with travel writer Benedict Allen. “It’s mad in a way,” he told us. “I don’t know how I’ll get around Papua New Guinea in a wheelchair.”

Khan, Armani and the ties that bind

WHEN asked at the Vogue 100 party last month if he’d been invited because he was London Mayor, Sadiq Khan replied with a wink: “No, because I’m the coolest Londoner they could find!”The Londoner was happy to find out, then, that Khan has always been a dedicated follower of fashion. Speaking to friends and supporters on Friday night, he mentioned meeting Giorgio Armani at the Vogue bash. He told the designer that, as teenagers, he and his brothers would take the money they’d saved up from jobs and go to the Oxford Street sales and buy Armani ties. After hearing this, Armani sent a bag full of ties to City Hall. As Khan put it: “Who’s going to tell him I’ve stopped wearing ties?”

Ed’s cracked it at the ballad box

AS ENTHUSIASTIC young people and courageous older ones get ready for Glastonbury, The Londoner decided to spend a weekend closer to home, and in a nicer setting — at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. Among the many guests was former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who was there to talk food and drink as part of the festival’s gastro salon. Veering off topic, food writer Rachel McCormack asked Balls about the karaoke habits of him and his Labour colleagues.

Balls boasted that his favourite was Endless Love, and he tackles both parts of the classic ballad from Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross. Deputy leader Tom Watson is, he said, “a Sinatra type — a Fifties crooner”. What about Gordon Brown, whose time as PM was dogged by rumours of paranoia? His version of Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds is apparently “irreplicable”.

What is it with Labour and karaoke? During Labour conference we witnessed MP Michael Dugher belt out the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, and former leader hopeful Andy Burnham did his best rendition of Beatles tunes. Then came the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Christmas shindig, where Mary Creagh sang Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, and Yvette Cooper offered Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. Balls, who is married to Cooper, has more time on his hands since losing his seat last year. We do hope they’re working on a duet at home.

In with a shout at the races

Eleanor Tomlinson looked every bit the fair lady at the Epsom Derby on Saturday, where she was joined by Prince Andrew and actress Ashley Jensen. Tomlinson, star of Poldark, quickly swapped her hat for Hay-on-Wye yesterday for a Q&A with Alan Yentob, where they addressed the “mumbling” that has left some BBC viewers rather baffled. Tomlinson said she did “a lot of work” with a coach to master the Cornish accent while Yentob said audio is “scrutinised before airing”. Repeat after us: the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

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While the red and green benches are often at war, tonight things get physical. Every year cancer charity Macmillan organises a parliamentary tug-of-war between teams of Lords and MPs. The Commons has won seven years in a row so The Londoner will be in Westminster cheering on the peers. Surely with former policeman Lord Paddick on hand, they have an advantage?

Lagerfeld goes to the wall

“FASHION is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to change it every six months,” Oscar Wilde once said. So what would the great wit make of the giant graffiti mural on a disused shopfront on Portobello Road? It depicts a medallioned Karl Lagerfeld appearing as a demigod flanked by three accolytes — Cara Delevingne, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell — all dressed in saintly clothing and wielding bottles of Chanel perfume.Lagerfeld isn’t known for his godliness: the octogenarian once called singing sensation Adele fat and advised that Pippa Middleton should only show her back and not her face. Have we taken the phrase “worshipping at the altar of fashion” too literally?

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Simile of the day from John Major, who said this weekend that the NHS is as safe with Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith “as a hamster with a hungry python”.

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