Anatomy of a book

During Tuesday's Bondiplus programme on TVM Lou Bondì made a good point using an extract from an interview he had carried out with me five years ago. In it he had asked me whether I would be publishing my memoirs.

The TV presenter wanted to remind me and the viewers that I had replied in the negative, and had stated that I had never kept a diary. How come - therefore - that I have now published a collection of memories, titled As I Passed through Politics" (Jien u Ghaddej fil-Politika)?

Fair question and implied comment. The book did not come about, though, because I had in fact kept a diary, and could draw upon it to produce such somewhat detailed memories as appear in it. I have never written in a diary, not even in my ancient young years when it was a fad to do so. A diary, apart from being an ego-flourish of sorts, is meant to remind its keeper in detail the events of one's life. In my case, I would rather have forgotten some of the things that I went through, and how I felt about them at the time.

I did not quite forget. As I wrote here a fortnight ago, memory is a funny old mechanism. Mine rapidly goes to sleep when I want to remember something, yet it seems able to navigate the deepest of waters when it comes to the past. I was moved to write some of my experiences as I wended my way through politics after a discussion I had about the politico-religious dispute of the Sixties.

My political beard began to grow as that harsh period dawned. It turned an early shade of white by the time it had ended and I had lived for years carrying along the Malta bishops' interdict, as well as their condemnation that what I wrote in the Labour media constituted a mortal sin.

I had already written about that period in our recent history, in literary form. My novel - Rivoluzzjoni, do Minore - was based on the main events of that period, with the cooling advantage of a decade's distance. I wrote the first chapter at the end of the Seventies, without having planned either that or the novel, while my wife and I were visiting my mother.

For the next 30 days, I ran the Central Bank during the day and wrote my socio-political novel during the night. God was kind to me. I wrote with the detachment of the spirit, as well as of the years. The novel was by no means a masterpiece, in literary terms. But critics commented that it reflected no rancour and was essentially a signpost warning society not to go in that direction ever again.

Perhaps the person who inspired the first chapter influenced the rest of the novel. He was Fr Vincent Deguara, who had been our parish priest in Qormi before we moved to Attard. He was and remains the unobtrusively, almost silently most holy man I have ever encountered. I based the character of the parish priest in the novel on him. I doubt that I have ever crafted a better character in all of the literary work that I have published.

It was also Fr Deguara, now a monsignor, who inspired the first chapter of my latest book. I met him and some young men he was helping to prepare for the priesthood at the Archbishop's Seminary in Rabat. The young men did not know anything about the terrible Sixties.

Even as I foisted on them a discussion of that period, I envied them. I was long healed of what that decade had brought along, but scars always remain, even if in the subconscious. I rejected subsequent invitations by two parish priests to open discussions about the Sixties. I was reluctant to go down that particular memory lane again, and of the political fields I had ploughed through around it.

With the benign thought of Fr Deguara alive within me, a time came along when I asked myself whether I might not attempt an antidote to the Sixties as well as to the dark side of politics. A title sprang in my mind - Il-Helu tal-Politika (The Sweet Side of Politics). I wondered whether I could write a collection of anecdotes that had left a good taste in my mouth.

In a way, I had already done that in literary form over the years. Around one in five of the 120 or so short stories that I have written and published in eight collections were based on characters I had met in my political life. Only two of the stories were based on the anecdotal. As I envisaged it, Il-Helu tal-Politika would consist of factual, historical episodes and characters.

I did write two or three anecdotal chapters, but could not really get going. Especially so since there intervened a more urgent thought - I wanted to write another collection of short stories. I worked assiduously on that, and produced Meta Jdellel il-Qamar. It mapped out as my longest and most demanding collection, including 22 stories.

Then I was told that the advanced Maltese Matsec syllabus was to include Hala taz-Zghozija, a collection of short stories I had first published in 1970. I had to extensively revise and see the collection through print.

At the time, therefore, I had no thought for any other writing aside from literature and my opinion pieces for this and its sister newspapers. When I passed the revised Hala taz-Zghozija to my publishers, PEG Ltd, I told Manuel Debattista, the managing director, that I wished very much that, if I managed to get ogling again, my next book would be a collection of political anecdotes. I gave him Il-Helu tal-Politika as the title. I would also speak of it to friends, but still could not really get going with it.

There came a time late last summer when I realised why. There were anecdotes of the sweetish type, but by no means enough for a book. For the simple reason that the practice of politics is not a pleasure cruise to the sweet centre of the earth. Politics is a reality project. Inevitably, reality is a mix of the good and the not so good, of sweetness and bitterness too. If I was to write anything of that genre at all, it had to be a recipe mixing both.

That realisation set me off. I did not dig for seams of bitterness. My memory tank simply began throwing things up as they had happened. I did not miss the fact that I did not have diaries to consult. Without any bidding from me, my memory had kept its own diary. I had almost total recall of personalities I had known, and events I had experienced within or close to the political minefields and gardens.

Memories of yesterday rose to full tide, begging to be taken at the flood. And I took them, wearing out my poor laptop with 31 fast chapters, as I chose to forget what I did not want to remember, and remembered that which is not at all easy to forget.

My working relationship with three Labour prime ministers was easy to recall and lay out, without much milk and sugar alongside the reality pot, often filled with brackish water. It was easier still to bring forth individuals whom I remember with everlasting fondness for the goodness within them, as well as for the way they had helped, guided and to a considerable extent shaped me.

People like my parents and my wife, my political role model, Dr Albert Hyzler, my friends Manuel Ellul, Michael Zammit Cutajar and Victor Fenech, like Karmenu Vassallo, Paul Xuereb, Dr Daniel Micallef, Dr George Abela and Tony Nicholl, the one and only Sir Anthony Mamo, as well as the businessmen Tumas Fenech, Sunny Borg and Albert Mizzi.

Another two close friends with whom I have shared a great deal that was good through the years, Professor Dominic Fenech and Dr Joe Agius, helped me immensely with their comments and suggestions during the editing. So did another long-standing friend who has always been selfless with me, despite the demands the hungry Muse makes on his time, Professor Oliver Friggieri, and Josanne Paris, who helped with the proofreading.

Mine was not an attempt at full-blown 'memoirs', much less an autobiography. I do not consider myself to be stuff of either. I am a wordsmith and I applied such skills as I have to narrate some exper-iences which, in reality, do not have me as their linking theme, as much as the Maltese society that I grew up in as a child and a young man, and am still growing up in as a 68-year-old senior citizen.

PEG LTD and I agreed that Pierre Portelli would design yet another cover for me. Pierre was responsible for the striking cover of Meta Jdellel il-Qamar and Honourable People, among my books. More recently he had adapted the beautiful cover which my old friend Tony Preca had designed for the second edition of Hala taz-Zghozija, after he designed the cover for my first collection, Tad-Demm u l-Laham, and of a synthesis of the two collections, Anatomija.

I left Pierre to his devices, suggesting only that he incorporate a picture of me when I was 23, the time I first became a Labour MP in 1962 (in those days it was MLA - Member of the Legislative Assembly). The artist in Pierre went for subtlety, so not for him any blooming rose to symbolise my commitment to social democracy. We exchanged views by e-mail, he took in my reaction and suggestions and crowned my collection of memories with another striking cover, where a lot of white highlights a symbolic jar full of rose petals.

Jien U Ghaddej Fil-Politika was greeted with instant spin by the Nationalist media, and with an uncertain interest by some Labourites. I do believe, though, that those who looked at it closely took the memories in the round. That is what the panel at the book's launch did.

That, too, is how Lou Bondì went about it on Tuesday, in what I consider to be one of the best programmes I have ever featured in, including the digs and criticism of the presenter, as behoves real critical journalism, which I welcomed.

I am grateful and considerably surprised that so many want a copy of my collection of memories. Manuel Debattista told me that he has been pressured for copies almost like never before. That's the first flush of the book. Only time will tell whether it has any small meaning at all, though not a few have been kind enough to tell me that to them it does.

Those who disagree, and who see the reality I have set down with as much honesty as I could muster from a different angle, are as appreciated by me as those who have been positive about the book.

Bondiplus was filmed on location in the printing press of PEG Ltd in San Gwann. Among other things, that yielded an anecdote which I must share with my readers.

One of PEG's operators told Manuel that he watched the programme with his mother. At a point when a camera zoomed on the printing area, the young man, bursting with pride, cried out to her - Look, Ma, that's the machine I work on! See how it shines!

I ask you, what could be sweeter than that.