Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary success and achievement, Saatchi has kept his counsel on most subjects. He never gives interviews, he doesn’t like parties much (he doesn’t even go to his own) and I have yet to see him popping up on TV shows offering opinions about anything at all. This may be about control. When you have been in charge of so much for so long, you really don’t want your thoughts and ideas twisted out of recognisable shape by snarky interviewers who might not have your best interests at heart. But you still want to express those thoughts and ideas, and because you’re Charles Saatchi, you find a way.
Babble, then, is a collection of short essays, although that may be too highfalutin a term: in tone and style, they feel more like newspaper columns. In each, Saatchi takes a subject — the theatre, say, or Franz Liszt, or your last meal on Death Row — and writes 1,500 or so pithy words about it. Sometimes he tells jokes, sometimes he rants, sometimes he muses. A few of his opinions drift into Grumpy Old Man territory: he hates wind farms, doesn’t believe that secondary smoking gives you cancer, prefers an enormous meal to any form of exercise. ‘Many people cycle or swim to keep trim. But if swimming is so good for the figure, how do you explain whales?’
When he’s being playful, which is often, you suddenly get a vision of yes-men in one of his various organisations wondering whether to laugh, and deciding on balance that they should. But then he surprises you with a sharp little glimpse into the inner Charles:
If, like me, you have many reasons to be less than secure and self-assured, and like me, you are far from stable even on your best days, don’t for a moment imagine a psychotherapist will be of more help than a physiotherapist.
I have read a lot of books by great business figures who insisted that, underneath it all, they were sensitive, thoughtful men who were kind to animals and only shafted their enemies when they absolutely had to. But none of them wrote a sentence like that.
Within this alpha male, it seems, there lurks the small boy who ‘still bears the humiliation of never having been picked for any school cricket or football game, unless the need to make up a full squad was a desperate one’. It may just be a pose, but I doubt it. The self-revelation is intentional: he just wants to do it on his terms, that’s all. What is control freakery but a symptom of insecurity, as well as a mechanism for making the world feel a safer place?
Babble is frequently bonkers, sometimes overbearing and never too keen to explain or justify itself. Some of its jokes have seen better days, or even decades. Saatchi has a slightly worrying tendency to outsource his gags without due attribution, which a professional writer would never do (unless employed by an advertising agency, of course). But Babble also has immense energy and a certain astringent wisdom, and it’s infinitely more readable than 99 per cent of books by pillars of the business community. Universities are ‘breeding grounds for clinical depression’. Journalism is ‘another favourite occupation for strangely gifted people with a limited set of skills’. Who else would talk of his own ‘ability to create enemies without even trying’? ‘I am also quite effective at antagonising friends with the Tourette’s level of self-satisfied advice I confer.’ At times you decide that he couldn’t care less what people think of him; at others, that he cares too much. It’s all quite fascinating, and thoroughly recommended.
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