14 Fit To Print

Of all the editors I worked for, Alastair Dunnett was by far the most endearing as well as the most   important. Although the first staff job he gave me was in the The Scotsman’s London office, and he himself was based in Edinburgh, I was always aware of his background  presence and of his guiding hand. He was an inspiration whose support always mattered to me, and with whom I never once fell out.

Yet there was one occasion in London when he briefly challenged my devotion to him. It was the first night of his play, Fit To Print, in the West End in the nineteen-sixties.  Its subject was journalism, and its star Sir Donald Wolfit. Who would be asked to review it? Ronald Mavor, The Scotsman’s senior drama critic, seemed the obvious choice, though it would have been more considerate perhaps to assign the task to an outsider - say, someone such as Harold Hobson, though the London critics of the period were an intimidating pack, led by Kenneth Tynan, Bernard Levin, and TC Worsley.

Dunnett pondered the matter and, I assume, discussed it with Mavor - though maybe not. In the end he said that since I was the paper’s London drama critic - at that time John Amis was the London music critic, with drama pleasingly though surprisingly  allotted to me - the review of the play should therefore be my responsibility.

It was an alarming prospect. Was the invitation - presumably one I could not refuse -  a compliment to me, as I naturally hoped, or a poisoned chalice, or simply an escape route.  Clearly, as an inexperienced young critic, only just turned thirty, I was bound to feel honoured.  I was given a press seat placed  so distant from the section of the theatre reserved for Dunnett and his dignitaries that my integrity was not in doubt and I never had a chance to speak to him.

Though by no means a bad play, it seemed not a greatly penetrating one, even coming from a professional editor. But coming from a staff critic,would such a judgment be even remotely permissible? I thought not.   Dunnett was not a natural playwright, and even  though Harold Hobson wrote in the Sunday Times that he liked it very much, the rest of the reviews seemed on the cool side, with Wolfit, as the protagonist, the subject of criticism.  Writing my own review straight after the performance,  as most of us did in those days, I found myself in a state of agitation.

 Nerves, no doubt, were the reason for an initial blunder. Forgetting that Wolfit had recently been knighted, I described him as Mr Wolfit. Whether Dunnett noticed I do not know, for he never referred to the matter. Whoever sub-edited my copy failed to spot the error, but  I myself  certainly did when I saw it in print the next day.

Things could, I suppose, have been worse. My assessment of the play was impeccably innocuous.  Unlike Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane, I was not - or turned out not to be - a critic whose future depended on my boss’s reaction. But the memorably named Fergus Cashin in the Daily Sketch (once described by Keith Waterhouse as “the original legend in his own lunchtime”)  wrote what he believed I should have written. His opening paragraph ran:   “I would not like to be the drama critic  of The Scotsman today because I fear that I would have to pan my editor’s play.” This was followed by a list of what he deemed to be its faults. Perhaps Dunnett silently forgave me for my politeness, as well as for my own faults, just as I forgave him for asking me to review the play in the first place. The subject, at any rate, was closed.

Never again, as a reviewer, would I experience such an overpowering need to sit on the fence, and as an older, shrewder critic I like to think that I would have found a better way of handling the whole thing better than I did.

21 September 2014