DEVASTATION ROAD, JASON HEWITT

Jason Hewitt at the launch of his second novel, Devastation Road

GLORIOUS GOODWOOD

Goodwood racecourse has such exquisite views over the Sussex Downs; you half expect the band to strike up Jerusalem at regular intervals. It was wonderful watching the horses race - at about this point they move up several gears from an average pace of thirty miles an hour to over forty as they near the finish line, every sinew stretching, their coats gleaming in the sunshine, their long, elegant legs carrying their jockeys past the finish. I can quite see why Diana Vreeland thought the horse was the definition of beauty. But then again, she also thought one ought to wash one's children's hair in left over champagne to bring out the blond highlights "as the French do". The French don't.

The day began with drinks at the house - which I nearly didn't make. My train was late, and so missed my car at the station but hopped on the double decker shuttle bus taking everyone to the racecourse. Very grandly, I persuaded the driver to let me off at the house on the way, and skipped over the gravel to the beautiful porticoed front, which the driver thought was hilarious. It was a marvellous moment. Ladies Day at Goodwood is more relaxed than other race meetings - one doesn't see quite such extravagant hats as one does at Ascot, and there aren't the same dress codes. I was having a Carolina Herrera moment, and wore a cream silk shirt with a satin floral skirt, a hat I'd made myself (which wasn't quite enough of a hat, so I will redesign it for next year.) and some wonderful Schiaparelli pink glace kid flats (a great sale bargain, and much as I love heels, they have no place at the races.) A quarter of the people who go to Goodwood are very county, straight from Jilly Cooper, another quarter are, like me, down from London and so dressed as if for an informal wedding. The other half are on the double decker bus. 

Tracey Greaves, of Goodwood, has a brilliant talent for bringing together really interesting women - I made lots of new friends amongst those she'd invited, and was absolutely delighted to discover there were old friends there too - Jacquie Greaves, Publisher of ELLE (centre) and Jacqueline Euwe, Publisher of Harper's Bazaar and Town & Country on the right, both looking wonderful in proper hats (see what I mean about my hat not being quite enough of a hat, though, I hope it was not so small as to class as a fascinator.) There seem to be several glasses of left-over champagne - perhaps I should have saved it to bring out the gold in  Trefusis Minor and his sister's hair? 

The Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta

I worked at Harper's Bazaar for nearly ten years before going out on my own and miss everybody because it's a magazine I love and I had great friends. However, I'm doing lots of work for a company called Boat international Media who have the leading magazine for Superyacht owners, and also do lots of amazing events so life after Bazaar has its compensations. One of their annual events is the Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta in Porto Cervo - it's a series of races for big sailing superyachts and it's incredibly competitive but also enormous fun. I followed the racing today on a lovely hybrid tender - the electric motor makes it incredibly quiet as you pull out of the marina and into the open sea and we watched the start of racing before going off to a beautiful quiet cove for a picnic. We watched the end of the race, then joined the owners back at the yacht club Costa Smerelda. One of my favourite yachts is called Marie - looks like a nineteen twenties ketch on the water but below the waterline it's built like an America's cup racer and it slices through the water incredibly fast - it also has a baby grand below deck and the owner likes to play Mozart in light seas and Wagner if the conditions are heavier. He also fires a shot when he crosses the start and finish of a race from a canon that was built for the Anglo French wars in the West Indies in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

It's enormously glamorous and huge fun and such a privilege to be part of it. The day ended with a party at Phi Beach, watching the sun go down on a perfect day.

ADVICE FOR WRITERS

 Writing requires great selfishness and great focus - it helps if you're so burned up by the words trying to burst out of you that you can do nothing else but sit and write. I am not like that. I have no self-discipline at all.  I started writing a book in 2009 and I'm still writing it, not because I've endlessly tinkered with every line in pursuit of some Flaubertian marvellousness, but because I've had to prioritise the business of earning a living - not so much the pram in the hall as the spectre of the bailiffs in the street.

 Anyway, six years have gone past and every day I don't finish it I berate myself more for my failure to finish anything, it becomes a symbol of a wider laziness, of failure.  It's also, partly, because whilst I'm still writing it, it could still be brilliant - I'm still a contender - and I'm scared of the spirit-crushing defeat if I gaily write 'The End' only for everyone to find it so terribly wanting. 

The longer I spend writing it, the more the fear grows. The more time I invest in it, the more afraid I am of it coming to nothing. 

Various things have happened over the last few weeks that have made me think it's time to get over myself and just bloody finish it. I lost a big piece of business, and the sensible thing would be to fire up the selling cylinders and get on with replacing it at once. But, Mercury being retrograde, I'm committing to a different approach - I will give myself until August to write the rest of the book. A writer isn't a writer unless they write. I'm not trying to write a whole book in ten weeks, but a quarter of one. I must try to be more scared of not finishing it than of finishing it. I must allow myself some ambition. 

Anyway, I'm reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast - I'm making slow progress because there is something so apposite on each page, I keep stopping to write it down. Maybe it's the iChing for writers ...

"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. but sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. you have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. write the truest sentence you know.'."

PRESTAT AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

Reading is an intensely pleasurable activity. 

At least, it should be - I suppose if one is cramming for exams or ploughing one's way through a book one hates out of a sense of duty, then it's less of a treat and more of a chore. I remember trying to cram A La Recherché du Temps Perdu and a pile of other massive 19th century novels for my finals and it so ruined reading for me, I don't think I read anything but Jilly Cooper and spy thrillers for a whole year after graduating.  Contrarily, if someone presses a novel on me, earnestly or otherwise, it can set me against the book forever.  My refusal to read The Sheltering Sky was once the straw that broke the camels back of a relationship - apparently, it was a potent metaphor for my habitual privileging of my own tastes, and my disengagement with his. Its also tricky when someone gives you a book because it 'will tell you everything you need to know' about them. A boyfriend of mine once gave me a copy of I Heard The Owl Call My Name  and to this day I have no idea what a story about a terminally ill vicar living with native Americans in a village in British Columbia had to say about an actor from East London. I'm not saying that people's favourite books say nothing about them - that would make a nonsense of The Books That Built Me - but I do think that the book one generally believes to reveal great truths about oneself probably doesn't. Books are more of a window into one's bookshelf than into one's soul.

Ive taken myself right off topic - this was supposed to be a post about self indulgence being good for one. I read lots of books that are recommended to me -  and love them and recommend them to others. At the moment I'm reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, on Alex Preston's recommendation. And it's an intensely pleasurable read - in a world driven by social media, of digital overload, the act of reading books needs to be fetishised a bit, one should wallow in the luxury of time spent in someone else's imagination, treat it as a mini holiday, revel in the pleasure of print in a digital world. When I conceived the idea for the salon, I wanted to make it as hedonistic as I possibly could- so, there is champagne,  a beautiful setting, and there is chocolate, possibly my second favourite thing after books - and delicious Prestat has been an essential part of the salon since it began. Prestat and I always try to pick up something from the author's books, even if it's very oblique, and match the choice of the chocolate the guests are given. So on 2nd June, for Alex Preston's salon, we have chosen an Earl Grey flavoured milk chocolate from the Art Deco collection - Esmond Lowndes, the hero in Alex's book In Love And War, is British in rather a Rupert Brooke kind of way, and he mixes with an aristocratic bunch of British ex-pats in Florence - at least in the first part of the novel - and one can imagine them having Earl Grey sent from Fortnum's   In Love and War begins in 1937, hence the Art Deco bit. 

So you see, there is rhyme and reason. 

The Books That Built Me - for literary sybarites....

CHAMPAGNE BOLLINGER AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME, AND THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE WINNER 2015 IS ANNOUNCED

“I drink my Champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it — unless I’m thirsty.”
Madame Bollinger 

Today is the first anniversary of The Books That Built Me - what better way to celebrate the salon's birthday than to announce Champagne Bollinger as its official drinks partner. Is there any finer accompaniment to a literary conversation, I wonder?

Champagne Bollinger has form when it comes to fiction: there's Bond of course - Bollinger first makes an appearance in Diamonds are Forever - but it's in the sponsorship of Britain's only prize for comic fiction, The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, that the link between Bollinger and books really comes into its own. I had a delightful time at a party with some of the shortlisted authors a few weeks ago, and the winner - Alexander McCall Smith for Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party - joins an august list of previous prize winners - Hanif Kureshi, Howard Jacobson and Terry Pratchett to name but three.

The first year of The Books That Built Me has been wonderful - I'm enormously grateful to my first guest, Sarah Churchwell, author of Careless People, whose tireless support and encouragement got me off the starting blocks and I'm looking forward very much to the second year and beyond. 

Year two kicks off with marvellous Alex Preston - I look forward to sharing a glass of Bollinger with him, and with all the guests at his salon on 2nd June. 

For tickets to Alex Preston's Books That Built Me at the Club at Cafe Royal, click here. Ticket includes a signed hardback copy of Alex Preston's In Love and War, a glass of Bollinger, delicious Prestat chocolate to take home, a copy of the latest Tatler and a six month subscription to Tatler for you or to give to a friend. 

ALEX PRESTON, IN LOVE AND WAR (AND ALSO AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME)

I write this sitting, not in the kitchen sink, but in 9F of a British Airways flight back from a business trip to Italy, trying to not to let the passengers either side of me see that the last pages of Alex Preston’s ‘In Love And War’ are making me cry.

Quite by chance, an appointment with Salvatore Ferragamo took me down the Via Tornabuoni in Florence, where so much of the first part of the book is set, I walked past St Gaetano, 'ugliest church in Florence' and longed to have the time to pop into Procacci, where raffish Gerald promises to take Esmond, In Love and War’s protagonist, for 'milk rolls and jam'. There's something magical about a literary itinerary, particularly an unintended one: it gives you a sense of complicity with the text, of seeing what it has seen.

In Love and War is the moving, exactingly researched, exquisitely written story of Esmond Lowndes, son of a leading light in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Caught in flagrante, he is sent down from Cambridge and despatched to Florence to set up a commercial wireless station for the British Union of Facists, to raise money from advertising and to promote the relationship between Italian and British Black Shirts. His first days in Florence, living at the British Institute on Via Tornabuoni, are idyllic, all very Brideshead-in-Italy, but when a party to celebrate the coronation of George VI is violently broken up by fascists, the brutal realities of Mussolini's Italy start to make themselves felt. As war comes, Esmond is drawn into the resistance, and falls for Ada, his aide de camp at Radio Firenze; their love becomes a courageous counterpoint to the terrifying weight of war.

I don't want to talk too much about plot, it's there, and it's gripping and marvellous and has all the right kind of narrative arc and drive and so on. It's more than plot that marks this book out as the work of a stunningly accomplished writer: In Love and War is about ideas and ideologies and how both are compromised by the realities of love and war. It's also a novel that's deeply engaged in the business of writing: all of its characters with the exception of Esmond and Ada are real people, which brings its own challenges, and it uses letters, telegrams, and transcripts of recordings alongside more conventional narrative techniques as an original and effective story-telling devices.

Preston has been compared to Hollinghurst and to Forster, and I think, with In Love and War, the comparisons are justified. He is a writer whose literary skill builds with each book he publishes, and we have yet to see the best he is capable of.

Hear Alex Preston discuss the books that made him a writer at The Books That Built Me on 2nd June at the Club at Cafe Royal. Tickets are £26.99 (plus eventbrite fee) and include a copy of In Love and War, a glass of Bollinger, Prestat chocolate, and a six month subscription to Tatler. 

In Love And War is published by Faber, price £14.99