Diary - 4 August 2006

‘The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and ...no other task is of any consequence.’ So Palinurus, aka Cyril Connolly, warns in the opening sentence of The Unquiet Grave. This ruthless reminder made me totally depressed as I published my first book in English in Hong Kong last week. Obviously it’s not a masterpiece. But what could I have done? The only thing I had published before was a Chinese translation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. English is my second language and my book is in no way erudite. It is merely an anthology of articles I had written for a Hong Kong newspaper, on subjects as diverse as Einstein, Pope Alexander VI, Bobby Fischer and a number of parochial issues, as well as about my childhood, which was split between a typical Chinese home and an English boarding school. But a nascent author is mercilessly seduced by the prospect of seeing and reading his words in print between hard-covers and of holding his book in his hands. So despite a sense of resigned mediocrity, I saw this whole process through last week with extraordinary excitement, experiencing for the first time that egoism of signing books for those reckless enough to buy them.

At first I hesitated, because he might have said no and I would have lost face; but egged on by my mercenary publisher, who obviously wanted his name, I asked Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, to write a foreword to my anthology. It was also thought that his being Chancellor of Oxford University would cut some ice among the Chinese book buyers. Luckily he agreed and wrote so generous a foreword that he might have committed perjury. He too happened to be in Hong Kong last week, promoting his own book Not Quite A Diplomat. I managed to piggyback on his blaze of publicity, as he was ubiquitously followed by the press.

Poised for the Adriatic, my children, wife and I arrived in Venice at the weekend. There are no clichés left with which to describe its romance. Maybe there aren’t even any more  phrases left to evoke the uplifting spirit which the magical city invariably brings. Little wonder, as the likes of Byron, Ruskin, Henry James, L.P. Hartley and others have had a go. And artists such as Turner. But perhaps they all paint too golden a picture of Venice, for one can easily see the decay and filth in the psoriatic walls and crumbling buildings. Yet our senses on entering that wondrous lagoon are always waylaid by its rhapsodies.

We taxied to the Lido for lunch. It reminded me of Death in Venice, but the pathos and glamour of Thomas Mann and Visconti had long disappeared. The Excelsior is now an excruciating Westin hotel, run by staff in polyester uniforms. The beach cabanas are in boring corporate beige, instead of broad blue and white stripes. And talking of death, we bumped into Michael Winner, who of course made Death Wish, which had macho Charles Bronson as an excellent vigilante, travelling on the Tube with guns in his mac and mowing down anyone who was more than a petty mugger. Winner is a character. Half the world loves him while the other half hates his guts. I belong to the former category, because I love abrasiveness. It is necessary in our world, which has plunged itself into a black hole of political correctness. We need a bit of rudeness from people like Winner to make us laugh, with him and at him.

My 20-year-old son failed his history exam last month — uncharacteristically, as he had passed all his exams with top marks before. He must now atone by writing a review of A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. With lazy anxiety, he asked me to help and I threw him a copy of the latest Spectator so that he could see how a book review is properly done. But he seems to expect me to write the review for him. As I couldn’t possibly re-read Taylor, he might well get chucked out of university.

We left Venice in two sailing boats — we en famille in a technological wonder called Wally B which, in jet black with a 45-metre mast, is straight out of a James Bond movie; and our great friends the Weinbergs on their exotic gulet — also in jet black, punctiliously designed by Anouska. Over a Havana I asked Mark if he knew T.S. Eliot’s pretentiously named poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar’. He stared blankly at me from behind his smoke, but then googled it on his handheld BlackBerry! It all happened in open sea. With such ridiculously efficient cyber-intervention, I was able to remind him that T.S. Eliot might have been anti-Semitic in his poem set in Venice.

We stole into port at night at Rovinj in Croatia, when the place was shimmeringly lit. The next morning, daylight confirmed that this little-known town is as pretty as they come, with stone houses on the edge of the water and a little hill with a wonderful late-Renaissance tower on top. One tends to forget that this region for decades suffered from totalitarianism and war. But compared with the Middle East, Croatia seems immeasurably lucky to me and my family as, on my 52nd birthday, we chug down towards the Dalmatian coast, on holiday and needing only to complete the Daily Telegraph crossword, which offered ‘guacamole’ just as I was dipping into it.

David Tang’s An Apple a Week is published by Next Media in Hong Kong.