BOOK OF THE DAY: Travels with a Typewriter: a Reporter at LargeBy Michael Frayn, Faber 281pp, £15.99
AFICIONADOS OF the printed word accustomed to reading news in newspapers, rather than on computer screens, must be dismayed by the latest evidence that no publication, however august, is immune to technological progress. Reports that England's oldest newspaper, the Observer(established in 1791), will soon close down make Michael Frayn's new collection of old pieces from that venerable institution assume the status of a memorial.
His leisurely dispatches from around the world half a century ago exemplify traditional journalism at its most civilised, informative and amusing.
"I was brought up reading the old News Chronicle," he writes, "a decent Liberal paper that died of either decency or Liberalism."
It remained an inspiration when young Frayn, as a recent Cambridge graduate, got his first job as a reporter, on the equally decent and liberal Manchester Guardian, which later moved to London as the Guardian.
In 1957, he was paid 12 guineas a week (the paper was famous in the trade for paying largely in prestige) and there were holes in his only pair of shoes; but he enjoyed editorial encouragement to report “the idiosyncratic, the odd, the whimsical”.
Even the most junior members of the staff were allowed to write as well as they were able.
“Our speciality was ‘colour reporting’ and it was our well-crafted essays, we liked to feel, that gave the paper its distinctive character and tone.”
Such was his talent that Frayn was elevated (or moved sideways) to the rank of columnist, with freedom to express his opinions of contemporary society, just in time for the so-called “satire boom” of the 1960s. Sudden affluence provokes sardonic comment.
He wrote three columns a week for the Manchester Guardianfor two years, and then was hired away to write a weekly column for the Observerfor six more years. He found that eight years of writing satirically in that form were enough. He felt there was more scope in novels and plays. However, he never ceased to believe in the value of the fundamental skills of an observant reporter.
“. . . I have sometimes thought that all writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time,” he writes, “just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them.”
With his wife's Olivetti, he undertook a variety of explorations to write features for the Observerand other publications. Some of the articles written between 1963 and 1975 make up this entirely pleasant collection, which might serve as a journalism textbook – for a course on the history of journalism before it was irremediably influenced by the urgency of television.
He decided not to try to describe the “untypical or extraordinary” but to concentrate on “the ordinary, the typical, the everyday”, as they would have been approached by his quiet and subtle newspaper heroes, such as Norman Shrapnel and John Gale.
Here are accounts of unhurried visits to Cuba, France, Israel, Germany, America, Japan, the Soviet Union, Sweden and Austria, with subjective close-up appraisals of Notting Hill and Cambridge, and a detailed survey of the Festival of Britain, on the cusp between national austerity and flamboyance.
He pronounces one of his few obvious moral judgments on St Tropez, which, he says, was named “after St Trop, the patron saint of excess, who takes under his special protection those who charge too much”. Michael Frayn is liberal and decent.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels and books for children