It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey.
At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen. Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls.
‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is actually cream. Does he have John Donne or Ernest Hemingway in mind with this title? Donne, via Hemingway. It’s a title on loan. Martin Bell insists that his new book, which is his first ever poetry, sorry, ‘verse’ book, is a bit of fun. One could hardly dispute that. Here’s an example of one of his anti-romantic verses:
‘You gave me joy and grief, you fickle female
And when I’m gone if you still misbehave
You can expect to get a scorching email
From someone on the far side of the grave.’
Writing this book, Bell confesses, has been the most fun he’s ever had writing. This means he found it even more fun to pen than his celebrated harangue of the MPs’ expenses scandal, A Very British Revolution. The former BBC war correspondent and single-term Independent MP for Tatton considers himself apart from the “regular, conventional, civilized” people, and says he’s happy to laugh at himself. But last night he also said that the older he gets, the more strongly he feels, and it is obvious that, beneath the humour of his verse, Bell has a more serious mission — politics today.
He told the audience gathered in the Guildford canal-side Electric Theatre yesterday evening that the idea for his book took off when he was waiting to give evidence at the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague — something he chose to do and evidently did not regret. Later in the year he would make use of the frequent train journeys he makes as an Ambassador for UNICEF to channel his feelings into light-hearted verse, “I find the rhythm of the train makes me write. A bit like John Betjeman.”
Last night, Bell read around 30 of his poems to a full and appreciative crowd. He will be happy that his poetry had the effect he desired of it – it provoked laughter and gasps, often at once.
A lot more work and thought has gone into it than he would have you believe. Shortly before the book went to print, for example, he “got cold feet” and withdrew two of the verses. One was about the phone hacking scandal, and he was worried about becoming embroiled in legal disputes (or offending a former colleague, who featured in it). He replaced those works with musings on the recent riots, particularly the rioters’ avoidance of bookshops.
Other poems in the collection take as their impetus the horror of the Kindle, a host of falsely-named lovers, Marmite, and the strangeness of being a living exhibit at the IWM [Imperial War Museum] North.
Bell, now 73, wrote his first poem in 1958, waited fifty-odd years, wrote 160 over the last year, and has another 60 up his sleeve for what he hopes will make a second book of verse. He has alleged that For Whom the Bell Tolls is the closest thing he’ll ever write to an autobiography. With a fast-changing and admirably full schedule like Bell’s, that can surely be no wonder.
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