I'm Your Number One Fan

A Blogger writes: Off on a tangent, this post was supposed to be about something else - the original content will probably turn up in the next post - but a throwaway line in the original post mutates it into something completely different so I may as well post it for the sake of it. I'm getting paid by the word.

Confession time folks, sad bastard that I am, I can only hold my hands up to writing two fan letters in my life. The part I play up to on this blog, where every second post relates to eighties pop music suggests that at least one, if not both, fan letters must be to one of the pop stars beaming forth from the old Smash Hits covers that I had specially laminated and tacked to my bedroom ceiling but the truth of the matter is that both letters were politically related and written around about the same time - when I was 16 or 17.

One was to Robert Barltrop, the author of, amongst other things, an excellent biography of Jack London but also of The Monument: The Story of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Both titles are recommended reads as Barltrop has an effortless writing style, and in the case of the latter book he wrote an endearing book that can only warm you to the Socialist Party, warts and all. Two quick points do have to be made about the book:

Firstly, it is surprising just how many people have read it down the years and will discuss it with you at length when they discover your political loyalties. Published originally in the mid-seventies by Pluto Press, it does point to a time when both the Party and the interest in its tradition and history had a far wider reach than it does today.

Secondly, it has to be said that the emphasis on the title of the book should be 'Story'. By all accounts, Barltrop, as someone who himself was a member of the Socialist Party on and off for over 25 years, did take the opportunity when writing the book to settle a few inner Party scores, emphasising those aspects of the tradition that he was more in tune with and giving short shrift to those ideas that emerged within the Party in the late sixties and early seventies. He also played up to a certain image of the Party that is best understood in its age old nickname: that of 'The Small Party of Good Boys'. Originally conjured up as a nickname to gently mock the Socialist Party for its emphasis on its call for peaceful democratic socialist revolution which can only be brought about by a majority of the working class with socialist consciousness, it has become over the years a nickname that the Party has taken to heart. The book, like the nickname, conjured up an image of an organisation that is quintessentially English, and is both eccentric and harmless. It's a characterisation that only has one foot in the truth, and neglects an alternative history that was far spikier, class conscious and politically combative than most friends and foes have given it credit for down the years.

Well this post started off as a tangent, and I'm now off on a tangent of a tangent, so to drag it back to some sort of conclusion, the letter to Barltrop was a gushing fan letter (as much for the Jack London book as for the Monument) masquerading as a serious enquiry about questions raised from the both the content of the latter book and its publishing history. Feeling a bit embarrassed about writing such a letter, I couched it in self-deprecating terms and mentioned at the end of the letter that I hoped I wasn't wasting his time unnecessarily.

I still have his handwritten reply somewhere. Written in beautiful copperplate that only the old folk can do nowadays, he wrote back gently admonishing me that he hoped I wasn't "writing a letter for the sake of it" and answered my query at length and in depth. Not sure if there was a Japanese translation of the Monument like he said in his letter, but it was nice that he replied. Let's be honest, if I had written to Pete Wylie I would have been lucky to get a 10 x 8 blurred black and white photo with his signature forged by his Auntie back in Bootle. Sinful.