The Daily Novel

Last Friday morning I woke from a dream in an absolute fury which jerked me up into a sitting position, It was the most intense anger and rage I have ever felt in my life. There was only one thought in my head, ‘They have closed down my blog’.

It took all my journalistic training and experience of keeping cool in a crisis to let the tides of anger sweep through me while keeping calm. What to do? Run downstairs and check my computer to discover whether my blog actually had been closed down? No. Much more likely that this thought had come from a dream. Maybe the dream would give me a clue about who I thought would want to stop my blog?

So I lay back and tried to open my mind to the dreams I had had. Quite often when I do that fragments of the dreams come into my mind and I have a lot of experience in distinguishing between what is a dream fragment and what has been invented by my waking imagination.

First thought that comes in the prone position is that my anger is so intense that it might relate to the murderous rage all children feel, from time to time, towards their parents, or to the sibling born after them who has become the new focus of attention. Perhaps I had had one of those big dreams which are better than any play you see in television because are taking part in the action as well as seeing and hearing the play?

Then an actual fragment popped up. Just two words written on the screen in my mind: ‘The Observer‘. Not surprising, because my dreams quite often are not like scenes from a film, they are just words that are spoken or written down. But at least these words were obviously related to my blog with is a journalistic blog.

But I do not like the word ‘observer’ used to describe what the journalist does. It smacks too much of the journalistic convention that urges the journalist to be an ‘objective’ observer, suppressing his own opinions and feelings, and just writing what he can see and writing down exactly what the people he talks with tell him. I prefer the word ‘reporter’ or the word ‘witness’.

Then I suddenly realised that what I was looking at in the screen of my mind was not ‘the observer’ but ‘The Observer‘ written in the same type face as the mast head of The Observer newspaper. In that instant my third ‘religious’ experience happened. The anger and the thoughts vanished and I slipped into feelings of peace, well-being, bliss, etc. The words give some clues as to how it feels. But they are grossly inadequate.

The experience lasted probably two or three minutes. But I lay quietly in bed allowing the thoughts and feelings to float through my mind for half an hour afterwards.

(Annoyingly, another thought has come into my mind now as I write. I shall have to include it before I go on. These experiences are so powerful that the person who has them feels that he has to do something really momentous with his life from now on. So St Paul, after his vision on the road to Damascus was impelled to develop a slightly different brand of Christianity and to evangelise the whole world. When John Wesley had his vision in City Road, (which as it happens runs alongside City University so I have walked in his footsteps many thousands of times), it caused him to found the Methodist branch of the Christian religion. Having written this I can go on.)

The difference between The Observer and ‘the observer for me goes right back to the core of my own particular commitment to journalism. It was David Astor’s Observer which I began to read in the 1950s that inspired me, not the Daily Mail and the Express & Star, which I read as a boy.

David Astor’s Observer was famous for many things. What inspired me particularly? First, there was the reporting of the many revolutionary movements in different parts of the British Empire, which helped to bring the geography books I was reading for my degree up to date. And The Observer gave me quite a different picture of Empire from that painted by the Daily Mail. Next was the drama criticism of Kenneth Tynan, which had an impact far beyond most criticism. It caused me to challenge a lot of values I had been brought up with. Next was the women’s column written by Katharine Whitehorn, which was in fact, a new kind of journalism which happened to be written by a woman, rather than a column for women. She wrote about her own personal life and her own feelings, not in a gossipy way, but linked to the serious issues of the day. She it was who helped me to first realise that ‘the personal is political’.

Finally there was the business writing of Anthony Sampson, who pioneered in the Mammon column a new form of business journalism, much of which was sycophantic and plain boring to anyone not in the City or in business. Sampson brought it too life by writing about the personalities of the businessmen and the power battles which went on behind the scenes. I started to read it regularly as soon as I became a business journalist myself in 1955 and whatever success I had in that field owes much to Sampson and his book of those years, Anatomy of Britain.

As I write now I see that I can use this dream to develop the style of those of my blogs which I think of as the journalism of the mind. And which sometimes read much more like a character thinking in a novel than journalism.

In writing this way I am influenced by two disciplines, journalism and psychotherapy. The psychotherapist seeks, by using what Casement describes as ‘non-certainty’, to discover what is going on in the mind of the patient. By adopting this attitude and by providing a safe place for the patient to talk about the hidden fears which produced the crisis which led them to seek help, the psychotherapist helps patients to resolve the inner conflicts in the best way for them. Instead of conforming to what someone else thinks is best for them.

I have learnt the discipline of psychotherapy mostly from my many years in the patient position, although I did spend a few years being a therapist in early 1970s. I went into therapy myself in New York in 1959 because of a crisis accompanied by suicidal feelings. But I have realised over the years that one of the by-products of my therapy is that it has enabled me to be a better journalist and a better teacher than I would have been otherwise. The two disciplines have much to offer each other.

No time today for more of this.

But I can end by reassuring readers that, despite my momentous experience on Friday, I am not going to found yet another new religion. But I will be carrying on with my various crusades, including my attempts to get Dvorak on to the world’s computer keyboards. And I will be writing in an adventurous way, so that it is possible someone, some day, will try to close my blog down. So, readers, watch my back please.