An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014

‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial Times

The 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to be found everywhere – in the intense observation of adult frailties, in landscapes and prepubescent sex, in calligraphy and in rivers.

This memoir is an engrossing portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 8, 2014

About the author

Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies.
Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association.
Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968.
Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year.
His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists.
Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
Meades's book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this might be the book that has finally sold me on the concept of audio-books. At least if they could persuade Mr Meades to provide the narration. Because, truth be told, I find Jonathan Meades word-vomiting loquaciousness compelling on the television, but slightly wearing when I have to put in the effort of parsing it.

The book is not really a memoir in the conventional sense, but rather a series of vignettes about his experience of growing up in the 1950s in Salisbury, to parents who appeared relieved to have survived the war, and were not in search of any further adventure.

It's told in Meades' characteristic style - it begins with a chapter entitled 'Abuser, Sexual' in which he states: "Not applicable. I have no abuser to confront" and then goes on to list all the plausible candidates: the 'friend-of-the-family', the 'nonagerian former children's entertainer'... And I shall leave you to guess which major historical figure he dismisses as "that sometime mass caterer".

If you're looking for conventional social history, then look elsewhere, but for an almost fantastical, surreal look through a child's eyes at the world of the 1950s and early 1960s, it's quite compelling in its own way.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big Jonathan Meades fan so I'm biased. He's not yet a national treasure, like Alan Bennet, but he should be. The problem is that he's not easily classifiable - other than being an iconoclast. He's best known for his writing and TV programmes on architecture. But, a few years ago, he made a documentary on his 1950's childhood in Salisbury and about his father, a sales rep for a biscuit company. It was great. And now, here is his childhood autobiography.
Any book that starts with a section called 'Abusers, Sexual' and apologises for the fact that he was never sexually abused as a child and then goes through, in great detail, all the cliched sexual abusers (most notably the euphemistic 'friend of the family') has to capture your interest.
Even so, I must issue a warning. Meades is overly in love with language and will use the most obscure vocabulary whenever he can. Sometimes, reading him is like eating a whole pile of cream cakes. I especially found his childhood experiences fascinating as I was also a child of the 5os and 60s and so could wallow in his memories of sweets, toys, pop music and films. His cast of characters is unbelievably huge and yet each one of them is described in exhaustive Dickensian detail. As a writer, he uses a range of original metaphors which I'd love to steal. I particularly liked his search for a suitable term to describe himself in his late sixties. He finally settles on calling himself a 'pre-dotard'.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abuser, Sexual
Access to the Unknown
Anal Penetration
Ayleswade Road...

The best documentarian and architecture critic in Britain - also "the best amateur chef in the world" (cf. Marco Pierre-White) - writes about his childhood in a brutal panoptic manner. His unsentimentality about himself, his mother, his horrible uncles, is startling, even speaking as a fan of his sarky and acid programmes. It's not exactly linear: there are several odd repetitions and filling-ins, mimicking the meandering of memory. Still, Meades' prose makes them worthwhile twice over:

When, after they had both died, I sold my parents' house, I got rid of a cupboardful of toys which had collected decades' dust, and a bookcase of Eagle annuals, Tiger annuals, Buffalo Bill annuals and so on. I picked through tins of broken pens and perished erasers. I excitedly anticipated the past to come rushing back. Each of these rusty, tarnished pieces of metal or plastic is, surely, a potential madeleine, a mnemonic of some bright day in 1959. They were, however, doggedly mute.

It took time in that house whose purpose was finished to realise that this was a pitiful and self-pitying exercise: I was trying to freeze myself, to transport myself back to the land of lost content which had, actually, been no such thing. I was trying to do to myself what parents do to their children.

No girls meant no calm solicitude, no sweet fragrance of talc and cleanliness, but, rahter, the soilpipe smell of almost a hundred shrieking, blubbing, chucking, grubby, boisterous, energetic, savage, merciless small boys... Kissing was of course sissy. In the Cathedral School's swimming-pool changing hut, a riot of asbestos, just-prepubescent boys boxed with their penises in friendly companionabiity and competitive violence: he who drew blood won. They aptly dignified this as 'cockfighting', insouciantly associating covert pugilism with the hedgerow gamblers' sport conducted between roofless brick cowsheds where flames from pyres of palettes relieve the ruined farmyard's midden chill and lend ceremony to the bucolic rite.

Some fleshpot, Southampton: the Port Said of the Solent. A poor whore has only to sit in a window in Derby Road, and a major police operation will be launched. All the coppers who've been on Cottage Patrol squeeze out from beneath the rafter to race a mile east from the Common. Their route takes them past Great Aunt Doll's chaotic bungalow where there were peals of dirty laughter and sweet sherry and sweet Marsala, and a room heated to eighty degrees and fish and chips for a dozen in an enamel bowl, and gossip and ribbing and silly stories, and gaspers, and will someone let the dog out else he's going to wee on the couch, and Jonathan you better go with him if you want a widdle cos Eric's been and done a big one...

I had emerged [from Sunday School] a materialist. It was, equally, the first time I had walked out of anything, that I had had the nerve to walk out. Thus was a lifelong habit initiated. Cinemas, jobs, sexual relationships, exams, opportunities, marriages, commitments, professional partnerships, schools, theatrical performances (a specialty), parties, expeditions, dinners, homes, prior arrangements - I've walked out of them all, often.

The whole book is anomalous - it is sustained emotional recollection by a professed enemy of nostalgia:

Nostalgia is not simply a yearning for a lost home, a yearning which can never be satisfied by revisiting that home, which could only be satisfied by becoming once more the child who inhabited that home, at that time. It is also primitive, pre-rational, pre-learning. It quashes developed taste, aesthetic preference, learnt refinements. It insists that the chance associations of infancy are more obstinately enduring than the chosen positions of our subsequent sentience. It tells us that we are lifers in a mnemonic prison from which there is no reprieve.

But then the man's an anomaly: a razorish rationalist, a scathing positivist about the arts, who has devoted his life to them. (They were accompanied by their arty and - it follows - entirely artless friends.)

His childhood was not like other children's in Fifties Britain. (I'm comparing his to Bennett, Hitchens, wrongly also Clive James.) His parents quietly rewarded his not conforming, and he ate Afghan curry throughout (his father was stationed in Iraq and brought back a tonne of spices). He grew up surrounded by clergy and the weapons scientists of the Downs:

I pictured the Red Menace - a cannibalistic giant whose face was impasted with human gristle and blood; bullnecked mass murderers weighed down by medals; cloud seeding; barbed wire; secret policemen; evil scientists; informers; torturers; factories as big as cities; insanitary collective farms; starvation; deportations. 'You're going to Siberia!' was a playground taunt of the Fifties.

(He really likes the biological warfare men, in maybe the biggest piece of contrarianism in this large contrary book.)

The book stops when he's only 17 - but there are so, so many deaths in it. Maybe 70, counting the drowned calf; my total by that age was 3. Let's say he delights in the contrast with today, not in the deaths themselves.

For all they spoke of death, I might have believed we live perpetually, growing ever more crooked, more and more dried up, more rasping, more fearful. (I obviously didn't know that it was death's proximity that caused the eyes of the very old to communicate unimaginable terror.) ...The names of the dead were dropped from conversation, as one might drop that of a disloyal friend. Death seemed to be a kind of disgrace... The rare times they were remembered, it was with irked brusqueness.

It is very easy to put him in a bad light; he makes it easy for you, because he is always absolutely emphatic, usually vitriolic, and often wrong. (The things he's wrong about include vegetarians, anti-racism overall*, arguably human rights.**)

Where would we be without monotheism, fasts, judicial impartiality, the eucharist, sincerity, pork's proscription, Allah's ninety-nine names and seventy-two virgins, weather forecasts, life plans, political visions, conjugated magpies, circumcision, sacred cows, the power of prayer, insurance policies, gurus' prescriptions, the common good, astrology? Where indeed? But those are the big lies.

Picturing the equine Princess Royal is a sure way of inhibiting orgasm and prolonging enjoyment, so long as one doesn't picture her for too long and so risk flaccidity.

stoical meiosis was normal in a generation which denied itself deep immersion in feeling, had not learned to wallow in empathy, understood an outpouring to be the discharge of cloacal sewage. The lexicon of demonstrative care had yet to be coined; the people's absurd princess had yet to be born; the mistakenly unaborted Blair had yet to perfect the catch of tremulous sincerity in his voice.

my mother had assured me that the old testament was risible tosh. And so it is. So, of course, are all 'holy' books. But risible tosh can be persuasive.

The desert landscape [in Iraq] is relentlessly grim. There was indigenous hostility to contend with. The Arab world was broadly sympathetic to the Axis powers. (The Nazis' successors are not the lost causists of the BNP, NPD and Vlaams Belang but the totalitarian Islamist post-Khomeini terror states... The Arab armies included Bosnian Muslim veterans of the Handzar SS brigades... The entire sentimental Arabist package, the tradition of the fawning British buggerocracy - Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, St John Philby, Glubb Pasha, Wilfred Thesiger and countless other aristocratic eccentrics - had become la pensee unique of the army's higher strata. It was also (not that its adherents acknowledged it) effete, misogynistic, irrational, anti-urban, Luddite and gullible.

Antiquarian pillage is hardly scholarly and far from scientific, but its perpetrators were not culpable of the misanthropic relativism which grants rights to ancient amphorae and entitlements to yokes' remnants. Nor did they conceive of history in terms of movements, big ideas and sweeping theses. Their empiricism militated against generalisation.

The tyranny of minorities had caused the atomisation of England. The damage is repairable - by state terror or mob rule. But since the state's treasonable clerks are the very cause of the embuggerance we can be sure that it will do nothing. And a mob needs a leader to bring its hatred to the boil, foment its venom, drive it on. It needs the Duke of Edinburgh. Much as he might wish it he won't be around.

Consider that last one: it is natural to read in it a fascist glee - but it isn't that at all. It is rather the dread of inevitable deadlock and looming contradictions. There's no relish, only misplaced fear. But you need to have read his contempt of fascists (and of Philip) and his fear of totalitarianism before, for it to sound like that.

Why isn't the cannibal internet calling him out? Because he is in the grey zone of non-celebrity? Because he is too old to shame? Because he isn't on Twitter? Anyway: He is neither a bigot (offensive because hateful and ignorant), nor a clickbait troll (intentionally, insincerely offensive), nor an aged victim of social drift (obliviously offensive): he has not defaulted to these opinions; he was never much tied to his time's prevailing prejudices, whether it's Fifties' conformism and class obsession or Noughties PC and pomo. His antipathies are reasoned and he refuses to pander. Compare this passage to e.g. what Yiannopoulos was finally banished for:

The formula states that adults are wicked predators, children are innocent prey. In the hierarchy of abuse, paedophilia (which may be literally that, liking children) is demonised, fetishised. It has giddily attained equal status with race crime... Homo faber. Isn't he just? Man has devised multitudinous forms of child abuse which are not sexual. Their immeasurable consequences may, however, be just as grave as those of sexual abuse.

Child soldier, child slave, child labourer, child miner, child skiv, child beggar, child bloody from scrounging in the shambles.

The book is highly abridged (only up to cram school) and still a bit too long. Before reading this you should first watch any 10 of these films.



* If you insist on challenging the worst e.g. woke, trivial internet activism, you have to say that's what you're against: Meades is being uncharacteristically imprecise, and decimating sympathy as a result. "Against (actually-existing) anti-racism" is not the same as "pro-racism", but people will read you that way unless you give them explicit reason not to. (And even then.)

** Rights are only good if they produce good outcomes; lots of people all over the world think in terms of imperatives and absolutes and it is almost futile to argue about it; thus rights can be a useful fiction. Meades again spits on "rights" in general without laying out this or any other philosophical objection, without showing us what he's for and so allowing people to not think the worst.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it strongly. Jonathan Meades has given us a well written and honest account of his formative years. His language is vivid and unfailingly graphic. He constructs fascinating by ways in his short chapters and paints a picture of his life in 1950s and 1960s Salisbury which has aspects of familiarity to all those who grew up at the same time. At the end you know much about him and equally much about post war Britain.

[Tony Mcgowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, baroque prose, hysterical exaggeration, lacerating wit, the best lists in modern literature (often his humour works through accretion, demonstrating the Hegelian notion of the transformation of quantity into quality). Much of his best writing here is about food, and he can induce both disgust and hunger in the same sentence. Loved this book to death. But I can quite see it irritating as many readers as it enthrals.

[Grim-Anal King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much what I expected having read The Fowler Family Business and watched every Meades documentary. It's definitely a plus to be able to imagine him narrating it in his idiosyncratic style. The main downside was the encyclopaedic tendency for repetitive subject matter. Then again childhood often seems unbearably repetitive.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although he is a year younger, I found this offering to be a veritable Catherine wheel of of reminiscence, anecdote and embellishment and youth. Meades has a way with words that tickles my palate. This is to be especially recommended to everyone who grew up in Britain in the fifties and early sixties. Fabulous! If you cannot remember chocolate rationing this book is not for you!

[David Galvani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some funny things here about life in the 50s but very niche. Inexorable sarcasm a bit waring. Needs more self awareness.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sweet song to childhood..the 50s, hopeful but still shell shocked..this is familiar to me although my childhood was the 70s..(seems so long ago)..the school hierarchy, corner grocers selling England by the pound..white tinned something or other..boiled sweets and the mystery of alley ways, open fields, the annual escape to the seaside..the world seemed far away; it was far away..all the black and white memories of bruised Britain: cads, moustaches, doctors who lived in the bigger houses..car names now history (Austin, Lagonda, Sprite), Colonels and biscuit empires, stretched diphthongs and the rustling of brown paper. Early rock n roll in static mystery on wooden radios. Pre - teen innocent sexual curiosity without kisses. Music lessons and water colour paintbrushes, chemically engineered cheese triangles. The dull whispers of suburban declines that were murmured about but never spoken of. And those things that only ever belong to the 1950s: jazz trumpeter, Viceroy filter, Porton Down, Elvis and Jerry Lee, jet engines and defence of the realm.

Self contained snapshot chapters in encyclopaedic order..a memory chalet in English Brown. Think of your own 10 year long conscious childhood and it's fragments; soap smells, grass and sunshine. Snow and cold fingers. Music box tinkles and cartoon near deaths. Cough medicine and the thrill of sugar. It's that first bee sting or a nervous tummy on a new day of term. Eavesdropped adult conversations about Things That Don't Concern You.

It's a series of dream moments. The past won't sit still for moment. All these things make a life.

[Timothy Urban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and a half stars. Masterful prose combined with an incredible memory for detail. This book reveals a vivid picture of Britain in the 50s and early 60s, though not an especially nostalgic one. I wanted more, and time to pass, especially into Meade's young adult years. If you enjoyed this book you should seek out the TV documentary 'Meades Abroad: Salisbury Cathedral', it's probably on YouTube. It explores a lot of the places mentioned.

[Cthonus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually avoid these semi-autobiographical tracts however Meades eye for detail is so compelling each chapter becomes a self-contained vingette of a time passed.

The title is however a misnomer: it ought to be called 'An Encyclopaedia of My Environment' as it covers everything from architecture to fishing, maids to mothers, with his keynote turn of phrase.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waspish, erudite, contrary. This is a typically Meadesesque memoir of growing up in Salisbury in the drab 1950s, replete with bogus majors, chemical warfare boffins, malevolent and witch-like virgin aunts and undrinkable home-made plonk. Hilarious and moving fare.

[Ross Whamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just loved this biography.With his lovely turn of phrase and fascinating family and neighbours in Salisbury and beyond.Really captures the times and mores of that period.And as you would expect extremely funny.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful wonderful wonderful. All the better for being set so close to where I live now... we walk through his childhood memories.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love his use of language.

[Tom Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great study of fifties Britain, about the odd people we grow up with.