Sometimes in America. By Alexander Chancellor. Bloomsbury. 307 pages, £16.99 in UK
This is one of those books that entertain precisely because there was no compelling reason for them to have been written. Alexander Chancellor, an English journalist of the now rapidly dwindling patrician school, was invited by Tina Brown in 1992 to come to America and edit the "Talk of the Town" column in the New Yorker, of which she had recently, and controversially, been appointed editor by the enigmatic media billionaire, Si Newhouse. Chancellor hesitated, despite a salary offer that made his eyes pop, then agreed to take on the job for a year, provided the magazine would throw in eight return flights to London, so that he might visit his family regularly. Nice work.
Tina Brown was a celebrity even before she took over the New Yorker, having already made a success of Vanity Fair, a magazine which Newhouse had raised from the dead. Also, she was married to Harold Evans, the former Sunday Times editor then running Random House. They were the original golden couple, although many in New York held that the gold was, in fact, a very thin layer of gilt. Some among the New Yorker's "old guard", as Brown called them - Chancellor encountered one old lady who had been writing for the magazine for 70 years - were outspoken in their criticism of her appointment, notably Garrison Keillor, who at the time lost no opportunity to make known his view that her coming meant the destruction of a monument to American graciousness, style and wit. The editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, voiced a general criticism when he pronounced it "a bit odd" to have an Englishwoman running a quintessentially New York magazine. (After she left the job, Epstein really let rip, disdaining what she had made of the magazine, "with its unbuttoned and often sloppy language, its edge of political meanness, the childish obviousness of its attempts to outrage".)
Chancellor arrived in New York to take up his post in the autumn of 1992. He already knew something of America, having been the London Independent's correspondent there in the mid-1980s. He had begun that job by worrying at the vastness of the territory he would have to cover; however, for a start the Canadian ambassador to the US relieved him of Canada, saying he should ignore the land of the maple leaf as it was so much less interesting than the US, and then, having settled in Washington, Chancellor rapidly came to his own conclusion that, apart from the capital, "most of the United States was not really worth worrying about". Hmm.
Chancellor likes to present himself in the well-worn role of upper-class English amateur. His father was head of the Reuters news agency, and he confesses that "family connections of one kind or another had often played a part in my getting jobs". He is a former editor of the Spectator, and was founding editor of both the Independent Magazine and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. Some amateur. He arrived at the New Yorker feeling some trepidation, and in the end it would turn out that his instinct was right. He enjoyed the job, despite some difficulties dealing with the mercurial and driven Ms Brown - whom he had once rejected for a job at the Spectator - and the magazine's notoriously totalitarian fact-checking department. It is obvious, too, that Chancellor's slightly whimsical style and Old World manner did not fit as comfortably with the "Talk of the Town" as Tina Brown had hoped. There were mutterings against him, and frequently pieces he had scheduled for the column were "pulled" at the last minute.
However, no amount of office frets could dent his love for New York, a city whose beauty, gaiety and glamour suffuse every page of this account of his year there. He was lent an apartment by the writer Gregor von Rezzori and his wife Beatrice (I once spent an interesting afternoon drinking with them in Turin; ah, the international life), and settled down happily. He suffered the obligatory mugging, which left him feeling quietly proud of himself. He made friends, attended parties, went to the theatre, lunched - one of his chapters is titled "The Principle of Lunch" - and was taken up by a bevy of extremely wealthy society hostesses, all of them, it seems, securely widowed. He has nothing but warm things to say of these formidable patronesses, who obviously doted on him. "It isn't easy to steer a listing millionaire safely into port," he observes, "so it's no wonder America's richest widows are often exceptional women."
Despite Alexander Chancellor's dogged urbanity, there are passages here that jar. He recounts how he brought to a Washington dinner party an early transcript of the "Camillagate" tape, a recording made of an intimate phone conversation between Prince Charles and his lover Camilla Parker-Bowles, and "performed" it for the assembled company, with Meg Greenfield, a Washington Post editor, taking the part of Ms Parker-Bowles. When the incident was reported in the London Times, Chancellor received a number of letters, including one from a cousin of his, severely criticising him for his behaviour. His reaction was one of surprise and puzzlement. Hmm again. Before going to New York, Chancellor had signed up to write a book on his experiences there, and he confesses that when he came to the task he could think of nothing very interesting to say. Brendan Gill, a New Yorker Old Guardsman, urged him to "Make it up, for Christ's sake!" - advice he surely did not take, for I cannot believe Mr Chancellor's imagination is as dull as this. At times he plunges into bathos as deep as the Hudson: "Having never been in a canoe before, I was a little nervous about taking to the water in it, especially as the river was so vast. But when I eventually found the courage, I really enjoyed it."
YET any reader who gives up before the end will miss the best, even if it is the sourest, wine. In the final pages, nice Mr Chancellor winds up his suede-shod foot and delivers Tina Brown a kick the likes of which has not been felt since Geoffrey Howe in a single Westminster speech destroyed Margaret Thatcher's political career. After Chancellor's return to England, Ms Brown wrote him a nasty, brutish and long letter, saying in effect that her hiring of him had been one of her worst errors of judgment as editor of the New Yorker. In response, Chancellor, in Howe-ish, ovine tones, proceeds delicately to unpick her reputation, revealing that, contrary to the impression she liked to give, the New Yorker lost millions yearly under her editorship, that she was overly cautious, sucked up to celebrities - Chancellor not only read a letter from Brown to Arthur Schlesinger that was sent to him by mistake, but quotes a damning passage from it - made frequent misjudgments, and was terrified of what the New York Times might say about her.
I do not know Tina Brown - though I once heard her describe me as "intelligent", making it sound like an insult - but by the time Alexander Chancellor had stepped away from her prone and crumpled form, dusting his hands, I could not help feeling sorry for her; it cannot have been easy for an Englishwoman to fight her way through that male New York, and New Yorker, world. Mind you, she hardly needs my sympathy; from the New Yorker she has shot so high in the multi-billion-dollar media firmament, where she does something starry for Miramax, that she is hardly any longer visible to us down here. Meanwhile, Alexander Chancellor is writing for Slate, the Miscrosoft online magazine, whatever that may be.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times