PB
>>21127316 “If I Was Biden I’d Hurry Up and Have Trump Murdered” – BBC Presenter
every single time
Where does it come from, this necessity for argument? Of course, it’s useful to him: it’s how he makes his living. (Far from ever being stuck for a subject for his column in the Times, he tells me proudly, he usually arrives at his desk with no fewer than three ideas.) But isn’t it wearying? Doesn’t it have any ill effects on his soul? Above the barking of his terrier, Dora, to whom he is, for the purposes of my tape recorder, rather annoyingly devoted, Aaronovitch insists, for the second time this morning, that the answer to both these last questions is “no”. As to the first, although he hates to be referred to as a contrarian – he would never take up a position just for the hell of it – he is well aware of his own engine, which manifests itself in what he calls “defensive clarification”. It’s a tendency he can trace back to his childhood.
David Aaronovitch at home in 1976.
David Aaronovitch at home in 1976. Photograph: courtesy David Aaronovitch/Penguin-Random House
“One of the things I grew up feeling was an intense need to explain myself. I have to try, somehow, to lift myself beyond other people’s negative assessments of me.” So why go around disagreeing with people all the time? “Yes… Well, I guess I tend to proceed through self-provocation. I get myself out of a slough that might lead to a depression by making myself do things [that I don’t really want to do].”
Aaronovitch’s childhood, singular and rather bleak, is laid bare in his extraordinary new memoir-cum-social history, Party Animals, which tells the story of his parents and their enduring love affair, not with each other, but with the Communist party of Great Britain.It is quite an honest book, and a surprisingly measured one, all things considered. But it is also, surely, another of the self-provocations to which he has just referred. In his world, deadlines are as frequent and as commonplace as breakfast; he should have been able to bash through the writing of it as if through a meringue. Yet it took him a decade. “Doing the personal bits took some goading,” he says. “One of my friends, John Lahr [the biographer of Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams], was always saying to me: the bit that’s the most difficult to write, the bit that makes you wince – that’s the thing you really should say. I think that’s broadly right.” Did it feel transgressive to be writing about his parents? “If you mean: do I feel guilty about the fact that the reader’s takeaway impression of them might not be one they would have wanted people to have in perpetuity? Yes, is the answer.
“But then, you know that old Janet Malcolm thing that writers are betrayers ever.” He gives me a meaningful look. “It’s what we do, isn’t it?”
It’s bewildering to remember that he grew up only a short distance from the huge Victorian house high on a Hampstead hill – in 2016, this is plutocrat central – in which we’re now sitting (he shares it with his wife and three daughters). From this vantage point, his beginnings, complicated and unhappy, seem to belong to another world.Aaronovitch’s father, Sam, was the son of Jewish immigrantswho’d grown up in grinding poverty in east London (Sam’s father, Morris, did piecework repairing buttonholes, and the family, five strong, shared two rooms in a terrace just off Cable Street).
His mother, Lavender, by contrast, was the middle-class daughter of Worcestershire industrialists. However, by the time they met in 1951 – they were married in January 1954, and David was born that July – both had something of a past. Sam, who’d been married twice before, had a daughter, Frances, by his second wife. Lavender, meanwhile, was alone in the world – her widowed father had rejected her, having begun a new family elsewhere – save for the daughter, Sabrina, she had conceived towards the end of the war (she would be brought up as Sam’s).
For both of them, you sense, communism rushed in to fill an emotional space, as well as an intellectual/political one. Sam, autodidact, ambitious and desperate to escape his roots, had joined the Stepney branch of the Young Communist League in 1934, at the age of 14, motivated by “hatred of fascism … of capitalists who had squeezed the blood out of my father and made Stepney the slum it is”. In the years since, he had slowly worked his way up the organisation, and by 1954, was its (full-time, salaried) cultural secretary – a job that earned him, thinly disguised, a walk-on part in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/10/david-aaronovitch-communist-memoir-party-animals-the-times-interview