As poet James Fenton accepts this year’s PEN Pinter prize, awarded for verse that has spoken ‘truth to power’, his friend Julian Barnes celebrates his ‘deeply particular alloy of gravity and levity’
Poet, librettist, translator, essayist, journalist, poet, war correspondent, political columnist, foreign correspondent, poet, traveller, exile, theorist of Crepuscular Journalism (according to which sources become more trustworthy after dark), theatre critic, art critic, Oxford professor of poetry, historian of the Royal Academy, garden writer, poet, old friend of nearly 40 years – not, so far, thankfully, novelist – but poet, poet, poet …
I first met James Fenton when I joined the New Statesman in the 1970s under the indulgent editorship of Anthony Howard. The magazine’s three stars – all precociously talented, as well as alarmingly younger than me – were James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. Martin had already published a novel, Christopher a political biography, James a collection of poetry as well as reportage from Indochina. They all seemed confident in their understanding of the world, and seriously intent on shaking things up. Not that they were interchangeable. Martin at one point explained the difference between Christopher and James to one of his girlfriends. The girlfriend – I forget which, one of the mille e tre– remembered the difference but not how it operated. And so, ingenuously, she asked one of them (again I forget which), “Are you the one who can write but can’t talk, or the one who can talk but can’t write?” Their friendship survived this moment of satire; and over time Hitchens learned to write and Fenton learned to speak, even unto professorship.
Related: Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi named co-winner of PEN Pinter prize
Oh the thing that people do,
The thing that people do;
It’s long-winded and it’s difficult,
Like changing trains at Crewe ...
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