The Soap Letters - Henry Root (1988)

The Soap Letters was one of the last books Willie credited to the gloriously ill-tempered reactionary wetfish merchant Henry Root. It appeared in 1988, long after the original 1980 Henry Root letters had been a bestseller and, in truth, there’s not actually very much Root in it.

Indeed, readers picking up The Soap Letters expecting a cavalcade of pompous, credulous letters from BBC officials and TV personalities in response to spoof enquiries from Root should know that his name more-or-less disappears about an eighth of the way into the book.

It’s actually closer in style to his 1998 toilet book The Heartfelt Letters (which Willie wrote in the guise of Liz Reed), because, like that book, The Soap Letters is based around a series of missives from a fictitious TV production company to celebrities, journalists, politicians and other authority figures seeking the go-ahead for a tacky TV show.

But whereas The Heartfelt Letters is a series of pitches for brilliantly tasteless TV programmes (like ‘Disabled Gladiators’) from a vapid female grotesque, the titular Soap Letters in this book emanate from a group of individuals working for Film & Television Copyrights (naturally based at 139 Elm Park Mansions - Willie’s home address) on a soap opera.

Well, at least at first. Root opens the book by firing off a series of desperate pleas. He’s, as he writes to Sir Ralph Halpbern, “in deep snooker”. He weighs 22 stone, Mrs. Root has gone off with”Bath’s boy Weymouth” and he’s been commissioned by some damn fool publisher to write a book about money.

He’s also desperate to get into TV, but laments “my concepts are ignored, my letters go unanswered”. Root confesses that he’s taken the drastic, if sensible, step of attempting to fabricate the existence of both a small-screen series and a book to a TV producer and a publisher respectively - but to no avail.

Salvation comes however, when a letter arrives from a lovely old dear called Lucy Appleby who lives in a charming cottage called ‘Rosewood’ in Middleton-on-Sea. In it, the idealistic pensioner mentions she’s writing a TV script for a soap called The WestEnders.

Root adopts a dismissive tone, but asks to see a copy of the script, which Mrs. Appleby dutifully posts him. Naturally, once in receipt of the script, Root removes all traces of Mrs. A from the bundle of papers, signs his own name on the title page and begins posting it out to people.

A group of Americans get involved, who pick up The WestEnders and form a production company. Before long Root is replaced in the footer of the book’s Letter by the likes of Selina Sidey, Jeremy Cox and Max Templeton.  Interestingly, the names of two of Willie’s real-life friends, Angela Picano and Julia Mortimer, are also adopted as pseudonyms for dizzy staff members at Film & Television Copyrights.

Thereafter the narrative becomes quite avant garde, with Willie writing to casting agencies, race relations people, the Pope, the Duchess of Argyll and more and playing his respondents off against one another. The story is therefore necessarily quite muddled, shapeless and lacking but, to be honest, it doesn’t really matter.

While he doesn’t elicit side-splitting responses with the frequency of his successes in the original and Further Henry Root Letters, Willie creates some astonishingly vivid personalities in his letters - indeed, he conjures up a complete cast of other selves - and is naturally playful, daring and, above all, believable.

Fans of Willie the person, not just Willie the writer, will also notice a few influences creeping in from life during the book. The WestEnders becomes a docu-drama series about scandal and the decline of morality in Britiain since the “(so-called)” Sixties called Crack-Up in fairly short order, and the title is apt given Willie’s growing fondness for crack cocaine at the time - a habit which began during his time with the call-girl Melanie Soszynski.

Indeed, just as that affair formed the basis for his 1987 novel Is This Allowed? (review :here), it’s also dealt with obliquely in The Soap Letters. For instance, the plot of Crack-Up is largely about a trial of the “disgusting” Marquess of Beauchamp, who in real life got Melanie - and consequently Willie - hooked on crack.

She turns up too, as Princess Soszynski, a “leather-clad sadist” who “with her slave, the cherry-lipped Beauchamp corrupt everyone with whom they came in contact,” and Willie talks a lot of the “Mad Christians” who, in Is This Allowed? (and in real life), got Melanie off drugs and forced her to cease all contact with Willie.

He also intersperses his letters and synopses about the series with samples of Crack-Up’s cliche-ridden shooting script - which really are a joy to read aloud in your head.

All in all, The Soap Letters is a fairly unique book. It’s an interesting blend of practical mischief, autobiography and characterisation and, in truth, one of the most personal bits of Willie’s output I’ve ever read.

‘Root’ only authored two more books after this one:1992’s Root Into Europe and 1993’s heavily recycled Root Around Britain. I own both but, because Terence Blacker says in his masterful biography of Willie You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This, the latter “shows distinct signs of authorial weariness” and the former is a tie-in with the reputedly awful Root Into Europe TV series, I probably won’t rush to pick up either.

(Incidentally, if anybody actually reads these reviews and owns the Root Into Europe TV series in some form, please get in touch!)

So, in summary, if you’re after a straight-ahead Root book, The Soap Letters may surprise you. But, hey, if you like Willie Donaldson, it’ll surprise you in a good way.

I’m currently picking through the collection of his Independent columns, The Big One, The Fat One, The Black One and the Other One at the moment, so that’ll probably be the next title reviewed here...

Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen (1975)

Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen was Willie Donaldson’s first published "novel" and it’s one of the very best of his books I’ve managed to track down. It’s a difficult tome to categorise, but it’s probably more accurate to call Both... a work of distorted autobiography than a novel. Written when Willie was aged 38, the book details the period of his life he spent as a ponce, a "career" he embarked upon after returning to London from Ibiza, penniless, having blown the last of his third inherited fortune on a glass bottomed boat.

It’s a scream from the outset, by the way. From its opening line “Living in a brothel isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be” to its last words (coincidentally identical to its first) the book is a thoroughly engaging mixed bag, crammed with eccentric characters, philosophical diversions and an upside-down sense of morality.

From sozzled, upper-crust ex-impressarios to louche Australian con-men, from good-natured tarts to bent coppers, they’re all here and caricatured perfectly by Willie at his most playful. From early chapters detailing the lives and arrangements of call girls and their clients to the book’s outrageous, yet tastefully described, orgy, there are laughs aplenty to be had here and no mistake.

The plot, as much as there is one, sees Willie embarking on a number of schemes to keep himself busy while living on his call girl girlfriend’s “artistic earnings”, such as planning to write books on police corruption or pornography, before eventually moving out of the “brothel” at the novel’s end in a doomed attempt to set up an elite swingers’ club in partnership with a totter and the boozy, grandiose ex-theatre producer Toby Danvers (modelled on David Conyers, who produced the musical Hair in London in the late '60s).

As I say, though, it’s a difficult book to pin down. Unlike most novels, the book's narrative isn't concerned with being linear and, indeed, the work reads like a collection of embellished diary entries (which, in all honesty, is probably what it actually was).

Though this apparently loose style may well have been a deliberate ploy on Willie’s part. At one point in the book he pauses to reflect: “When I got home Emma Jane was doing a trick with a Spaniard, so I dipped into the Carnets of Albert Camus (as ponces will)...

“The first passage I came across was the one in which he refers to misplaced nostalgia for other people’s lives. This fallacy arises, says Camus, because other people’s lives, seen from outside, appear to form a whole. Our own lives, however, seen from the inside are all bits and pieces...”

Perhaps Willie was doing what he proposed in his memoir From Winchester to This and simply presenting the reader with “the facts” and allowing his audience to make of them what they will.

Sticking with the literary theme for a moment, it’s worth noting that Willie’s prose - which is always a delight - is top-notch here in his debut novel, and every page abounds with beautiful sentences, locutions and asides.

Indeed, Willie comes across as a world-weary upper-class Englishman perfectly at home in a strange little world vice, soft drugs and bizarre people, which is both a lovely depiction of his character and a useful way of ensuring that the plot nips along agreeably. Willie, here, is an observer rather than a doer, forever being pulled hither and yon by his various acquaintances’ crazy schemes.

Some of the scenes in this book are almost too funny to be read on public transport, and if you manage to get hold of a copy I’m sure you’ll agree that Ken and Willie’s visit to Farthingale’s bank, Danvers’ seduction of an eccentric old dame and the aforementioned climactic orgy (if you’ll pardon the phrase) are comedic situations you’ll find yourself re-playing in your head long after you’ve finished the book.

Compared to Willie’s other works, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen is very similar in style to its follow-up The Balloons in the Black Bag/Nicknames Only and quite close in tone to The English Way of Doing Things, which was based on this book. It’s a more conventional and straightforwardly amusing book than his memoir, less obtuse than his Independent columns and much cheerier in tone than Is This Allowed.

A book I can’t recommend to fans of Donaldson heartily enough, Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen is essential reading for anyone keen on Willie’s work or fascinated by London low-life in the early ‘70s. It’s described on its jacket by Kenneth Tynan as “a minor classic of uncivilised bawdry,” and, frankly, I can think of no higher compliment nor more appropriate summation for this treasure of a book.

You Cannot Live as I Have Lived on BBC iPlayer until May 21 2012

A quick post just to spread the word that Radio 4's adaptation of Terence Blacker's biography of Willie is available to listen to now via BBC iPlayer. Read by Stephen Boxer, You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This is as entertaining to hear as it is to read. Check it out on BBC iPlayer now. The first edition's available to listen to until May 21.

Is This Allowed? (1987)

Is This Allowed? was Willie Donaldson’s fourth novel and marked a radical departure from his previous three. While Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, The Balloons in the Black Bag and The English Way of Doing Things were light-hearted picaresque affairs, Is This Allowed? is markedly different: it’s darker in tone and narrower in focus, but also one of his more mature and honest works.

The book is ostensibly a novel about a married middle-aged, upper-crust writer’s love affair with a prostitute, which charts their relationship from its sunny beginning to its crack cocaine-addled end. In actual fact, it’s a fictionalised account of Willie’s obsessive affair with a call girl called Melanie Szopynsky, who's disguised here as Melissa.

We begin with the unnamed narrator (clearly Willie himself; this character writes toilet books for a living and knows Dawn Upstairs) in Ibiza and awaiting the arrival of Melissa, a prostitute he’s flying out to the Balearics for a week of fun and frolics.

Despite having been warned by a mutual acquaintance that Melissa’s a ruthless whore who’ll bleed him dry, both financially and emotionally, he decides to go ahead with the liasaon, and as soon as they’re together, he begins to notice and admire her vivaciousness, sex appeal and lust for life. Indeed, the old rogue becomes so enamoured with the girl that he dubs her his Princess, a name both he thinks both affectionate and absurd.

But the experience of being with Melissa is something more than everyday love for Willie. In fact, he compares the experience of being around Melissa with that of being on drugs, and whenever he buys her cocaine in the course of the novel he experiences some form of, presumably metaphorical, contact high, which compels him to keep seeing her and chasing the thrill.

He also wastes little time in revealing some of the perversity that, according to Terence Blacker’s biography, coloured much of Willie’s life. For instance, only a couple of nights into their break, he takes her to a disco and makes her seduce a man in front of the fellow’s wife, then urges her to bring the man home in the first of many baffling sexual mind games he describes in the book.

When Melissa leaves at the end of the week to return to England, Willie can’t stop thinking about her and is overjoyed when she reveals that she’s coming back to Ibiza to see him again after only a few days apart. So pleased is he to have her back that, despite her presence ruining a business meeting he’s arranged, Willie doesn’t seem to mind.

From here the novel becomes obsessive and desperate as Willie schemes and plans ways of seeing Melissa in London or abroad behind his partner’s back, eventually ruining his relationship with her, and straining the bonds between Willie, his friends and his business associates.

As the novel nears its conclusion, Melissa falls in with a crowd of crack-smoking aristocrats who live in her block of flats and becomes an addict in a matter of weeks. She begins to break her ties with Willie, driving him almost to the point of madness, until he wins her back by beginning to smoke crack with her.

However, what should be a happy ending (albeit an unorthodox one), is foreshadowed throughout the book with fragmentary dialogues clearly taking place between Willie and Melissa after she’s gone through treatment for her cocaine addiction, which reveal that the pair are destined never to be together. Indeed, Melissa’s last lines to Willie are truly heartbreaking, and the novel ends on a sour note.

While the book is brilliantly written, full of Willie’s sparking wit and clever turns of phrase, it’s not a laugh out loud affair. There are moments –Willie convincing a friend to call him away from home to discuss a non-existent book, and his race from Barcelona to Calais with Alison and her dying mother in the car – which had me roaring with laughter, but the book is so sad and oddly perverse that it couldn’t in any way be called a merely comic novel.

But it’s one heck of a compulsive read, though. One of the press quotes on the Futura edition I own compares perusing Is This Allowed? to the experience of “read[ing] your lover’s diary,” and the candour of the prose bears this out. There is no embarrassment or concealment on display here, only honesty and raw emotion.

If you’re interested in Willie and the way his mind worked, or want to know more about his middle years, this is essential reading, but if you’re looking for another novel to have a few chuckles at, proceed with caution. Is This Allowed? is a frequently shocking work of twisted genius but, like Willie himself, it’s bound to alienate more people than it’ll fascinate…

The English Way of Doing Things (1984)

The English Way of Doing Things is, according to the Futura paperback of Is This Allowed?, the third of Willie Donaldson’s novels published under that imprint. It’s a book with a complicated genesis, being, I think, the only book in Willie’s canon to have begun life as play and gone on to become the focal point of a lawsuit after it was published as a novel.

But putting all that to one side, regular readers of Donaldson will find themselves in familiar territory with The English Way. It’s the third novel in what I’d call his Emma Jane trilogy and features a lot of the same cast we were introduced to in Between the Ladies and the Gentlemen and who we got to know better in The Balloons in the Black Bag/Nicknames Only. Toby Danvers, Ken the Australian Horse Player, Dawn Upstairs, Pretty Marie, Big Dolores, they’re all here and accompanied by fruity newcomers like Steady Eddie, Scott-Dobbs, and Nigel Mount-Hugh MP.

Before turning to the contents of the book, it’s worth knowing a bit about its background. According to Terence Blacker’s biography of Willie, work on what eventually became the novel began in collaboration with a writer called Philip Wiseman in 1978. Wiseman was apparently having problems at the time, both personal and financial, and Willie, as his friend, agreed to co-author a play based on the characters from his first novel with Wiseman in an effort to earn the fellow some money. The play was written, sent out and utterly ignored.

Willie subsequently wrote The Balloons in the Black Bag, which appeared in 1978, and shortly afterwards hit the big time with The Henry Root Letters in 1980. Fast forward to 1984 and Willie’s publishers suggested he write a novel, which he did and turned in The English Way of Doing Things. He was accused by Wiseman of simply writing up their play and making a commercial and critical success of it. Wiseman sued Willie for £10,000 but the case was eventually decided in Willie’s favour.

Why is all this important? Well, because reading the novel makes one all too aware that there’s a certain amount of truth to the allegation. The novel really does read like a play, given that most of the action relies on characters bursting in and out of doors, or from behind scenery. Indeed, much of the text reads somewhat like stage directions, and the dialogue is certainly dramatic. Willie was always a very good writer of dialogue, granted, but in this novel each character has a very distinct (and funny) voice of their own.

That’s not to knock the style of the novel at all, by the way. It moves along at a fair clip, but once you’re aware of its dramatic origins, The English Way really does show a signs of having been adapted.

So, what’s it about? Well, as I say, it concentrates on the same menagerie of lowlifes who occupy the pages of his first two novels, but unlike those books The English Way of Doing Things isn’t told from Willie’s perspective. While the first two novels are written autobiographically, the third novel is, perhaps appropriately, told in third person and neither Willie nor Emma Jane appear in the book.

There isn’t one sole central character, apart perhaps from Dawn Upstairs (who loses the Upstairs part of her pseudonym here), and the plot plays out over the course of two days.

Briefly, a criminal named Ronnie Snipe is released from prison and is owed a substantial sum of money by Toby Danvers, the mad impresario who was working at the Telephone Exchange in Balloons in the Black Bag. Snipe swears revenge and vows to track down Toby, who is at that moment lunching with a fellow called Scott-Dobbs in the Ivy.

Toby’s his usual drowsy and theatrical self, breaking wind and succumbing to narcolepsy in mid-sentence, but he’s trying to raise the money to stage his great stage comeback, an allegedly modern morality play called Satan’s Daughter. He’s trying to hit up Scott-Dobbs for the price of a share in the venture, £1000, but makes a hash of it, offending the whole Ivy restaurant in full-force Donaldson fashon as he bungles things.

From there, he avoids an encounter with Snipe as he falls, dazed, into a taxi after a pavement altercation with a creakingly posh couple, and arrives back at Dawn’s flat. Inexplicably she’s taken him in as her boyfriend and dotes on him like a mother, and she’s trying to get their lives to go straight: she’s getting off the game and wants him to take a job as a teacher.

However, Ken the Australian Horse Player (or Ken Pardoe, as he is more commonly referred to here) arrives on the scene and mistakes Toby for a monied eccentric, while Toby comes to realise, deliriously that Ken is mad, persuasive, energetic and, crucially, rich. The two forge an alliance and try to get Satan’s Daughter staged in the hopes of making some serious capital (Ken) or being lauded as a Grand Old Man of the theatre (Danvers), with predictably catastrophic results.

Along the way the novel takes in stoned prostitutes, cross-dressing pimps, a batty old Dame who gets high on some hash-laced duck with orange, corrupt policemen, a politician with a somewhat unorthodox fixation on Justin Fashanu, a mad old military man and many more eccentrics besides.

I laughed and laughed reading this novel. On balance, I enjoyed The Balloons in the Black Bag/Nicknames Only more but that’s because I like Willie’s weasley reasoning and armchair philosophy, which are absent in English Way, owing to his non-participation in the narrative. But that’s not to say isn’t a whole lot of fun. The first few pages are somewhat disorientating and reminded me of the prose that opens his autobiography, From Winchester to This. However, once you get used to the pace of the book, it becomes a joy to read.

Particular praise must be reserved for Willie’s treatments of Toby Danvers and Ken Pardoe. Both characters are huge fun, and their interactions are priceless. Scenes involving them ’casting’ a young actress and talking to the Dame’s agent had me laughing aloud. The dinner scene and the concluding bust-fundraiser-clusterfuck were so riveting and hilarious that my cheek muscles ached while I was reading them.

If I have one criticism it would be that the book’s first quarter is a little slow. After a brilliant build-up with Toby Danvers at the Ivy, there are several long scenes of Dawn Upstairs, Delores and Eddie which aren’t especially funny and tried my patience. But, that said, those segments of dialogue are essential for setting up plot, and on the whole, the novel is very, very funny indeed. I would say I laughed a little less than I did at Balloons in the Black Bag but probably as much as when I read Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen.

To be brief, those who’ve read and enjoyed either of Willie’s previous books about the Cheslsea call-girls and hustlers scene will have a whale of a time with The English Way of Doing Things. If you’re unacquainted with the characters on display here, you might be better off tracking down one, if not both, of those books first. But, whatever, this is a smashing book that will definitely entertain anyone who enjoy’s Willie’s work.

Totally arbitrary overall rating: 8/10