Bright Young Things discussion

"Electric Eden" documents one of the great untold stories of British music over the past century. While ostensibly purporting to be a history of that much derided (though currently fashionable) four-letter word, 'folk', "Electric Eden" will be a magnificent survey of the visionary, topographic and esoteric impulses that have driven the margins of British visionary folk music from Vaughan Williams and Holst to The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, John Martyn and Aphex Twin. For the first time the full story of the extraordinary period of folk rock from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s will be told in a book with the breadth of a social history touching on sonic worship, pagan architecture, land art, ley lines and ther outer fringes of the avant garde. "Electric Eden" identifies a particularly English wellspring of imagery and imagination, an undercurrent that has fed into the creative and organic strand of Britain's music over the past century. From Edwardian composers assimilations of folk song and visionary poetry, via folk rock of the 60s and 70s, the story is brought up to date by placing these earlier movements in a continuum that links through significant figures in 21st century pastoral electronica.

The subject of this short, intriguing and chilling biography was a phenomenon between the wars. He invented a genre of travel writing which made him famous and rich - in 1938 royalties and a newspaper column yielded the huge sum of £36,000. In 1941, when Brendan Bracken (then Minister of Information) wanted a worthy chronicler of Churchill's trip to Placentia Bay to meet Roosevelt, Harry Morton, the star reporter, seemed the obvious choice to travel with the Prime Minister's party on the battleship Prince of Wales.

His photograph on the jacket of Michael Bartholomew's book shows a figure closely resembling Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Yet in truth, as this book shows with copious evidence from Morton's unpublished diaries and memoirs, he was more fitted to play Frankenstein's monster. The shrewd, amiable lone traveller of Morton's narratives emerges in real life as a thoroughly nasty piece of work - vain, cynical, misanthropic, deeply anti-Semitic, with a penchant for grotesque sexual adventures.

Michael Bartholomew embarked on his task as an admirer of Morton's work. As he explored his subject through his private papers, however, something close to revulsion set in. What is it about travel writers? This biographer's experience seems not dissimilar from that of Nicholas Shakespeare, a devoted admirer of Bruce Chatwin, who discovered as he wrote the Chatwin biography that, for all the man's famous charm, he possessed a notably unpleasant personality, and invented substantial parts of his books.

Henry Vollam Morton was born in 1892, the son of a Midlands regional newspaper editor. He himself achieved early success as a journalist on the Daily Express and was a favourite of Lord Beaverbrook. Like most of Beaverbrook's proteges, at the outset he was searched and relieved of scruples and principles, leaving him free to display superb reporting skills. Morton quickly perfected the art of producing heartfelt accounts of events before they took place, and composing moving interviews with people who did not exist.

When in 1926 he embarked on a motor tour of the country to produce pieces for the Express which later became his first best-seller In Search Of England, he invented substantial passages of experience, and omitted to mention that instead of travelling alone, as his books always implied, he was usually bonking for Britain as he went.

Travelling to Rome on an assignment for the Daily Herald (after he and his editor decided that the Daily Express was not big enough for the egos of both) he broke his journey in Paris for just long enough to dash from the station to a brothel for a ten-minute coupling, before rushing back to his train. All this sort of stuff he recorded in his private papers. His widow must have disliked him greatly, not to burn these after his death.

If the sexual passages were merely undignified, Morton's political views were repellent. He hated socialists, and indeed democracy. "I must say Nazi-ism has some fine qualities", he wrote in February 1941. For nationalistic reasons he did not want a German victory in the Second World War, but he believed the Fuhrer had sound ideas about Jews and Bolsheviks. "I am appalled to discover how many of Hitler's theories appeal to me", he wrote - fortunately for his reputation, not for publication. Even America is dismissed in his diary as "that craven nation of Jews and foreigners".

After the war, he and his wife decamped to South Africa, in those happy days when blacks were kept in their place and he could escape British democracy, austerity and taxation. The heyday of his success was over, but he got away with enough loot to live comfortably with his fascistic ruminations until his death in 1979.

His book In Search of South Africa might more justly have been titled something much cruder, since his travels there involved a ludicrous dalliance with a married woman whose husband appears to have accompanied them everywhere except the bedroom.

How good was Morton as a writer? Bartholomew approaches the issue with the ingenuous honesty of a non-professional writer. He is obviously shocked by the extent to which Morton made things up. Yet I fancy that it is a commonplace of travel writers, to mould experiences and encounters and the chronology of their journeys to conform to a literary shape. My father, as a child, once asked Hilaire Belloc in a wide-eyed fashion whether it was really true that he had walked from London to Paris with only sixpence in his pocket, as he had described. "Young man", said Belloc sternly, "I am a journalist".

Even some of the great Patrick Leigh-Fermor's travel writings represent the highest order of Irish story-telling, rather than precise and literal historical truth. This does not diminish their literary quality, and I bet Cobbett did exactly the same.

The best of Morton's writing displays great shrewdness, descriptive power and charm. He brought to his books the qualities of an outstanding Beaverbrook journalist of his period: masterly understanding of public taste, deployed in a moral void. Bartholomew is so disgusted by the revelation of Morton's nastiness and deceits that he finds it hard to be charitable about his books, though he struggles manfully.

Through the pages of In Search Of England, Morton contrived a portrait of the warm beer, country lanes and village greens he knew his readers wanted. I bet John Major lapped it up in his youth. The book ends with a passage which Bartholomew judges to have been not reportage, but pure fiction:

"I went out into the churchyard where the green stones nodded together, and I took up a handful of earth and felt it crumble and run through my fingers, thinking that as long as one English field lies against another there is something left in the world for a man to love.

'Well', smiled the vicar as he walked towards me between the yew trees, 'that, I am afraid, is all we have'.

'You have England', I said."

A blue commemorative plaque is to be unveiled next month at Morton's home town of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Nazi revelations in Bartholomew's book should alone suffice to quash that idea, even in a burgh a trifle short of celebrities. Morton was a gifted entertainer who grasped the knack of touching the heart of bourgeois Britain, but today it seems hard to pitch his claims much higher.