One On One by Craig Brown - review

One On One

The satirist has reached such a peak of mastery he no longer needs to make things up. Here, in this work of non-fiction, he simply tells the truth and nothing but the plain, bonkers, howling truth.

One on One is a literary daisy chain of 101 genuine celebrity encounters, each more preposterous than the last. Groucho Marx meets TS Eliot coming up the gangplank of a glass-bottom boat in Jamaica; Marx wants to discuss King Lear; Eliot wants to discuss Animal Crackers, and one excruciating dinner together is all they will ever see of each other. On to the next round: TS Eliot meets the Queen Mother at a poetry reading. He declaims The Wasteland; she gets the giggles. And onto the next round, until the circle is completed where it started, with the hammiest name in the hat - Adolf Hitler. It is partly a huge karmic parlour game, partly a dance to the music of chaos - and only the genius of Craig Brown could have produced it.

His self-imposed rules are as intricate as a Moorish ceiling: the book has 101 vignettes of 1,001 words, making 101,101 words in total. It can be read backwards or forwards. This is not showing off, so much as necessary precautions taken against the dangerous commodity the satirist is working with here: chance. Slippery, messy, meaningless chance, which catapults celebrities out of their genres, leading to moments of magnificent, ignominious comedy. Walter Sickert slams his door in the face of the eager teenage carol singer Ted Heath; Heath, in his turn, fails to listen to his Albany neighbour Terence Stamp's political advice when he comes round for tea: "OK, you're sitting on the Opposition front bench, old Wilson gets up. You just think, it's not me he's trying to hurt, it's his missus or whatever."

Whenever the entries start to seem implausibly detailed, the sources listed in the back of the book restore credulity (the above came from John Fowles's diary). Conflicting accounts - such as the famously disputed encounter between Proust and Joyce - are put side by side, so that the book becomes in effect a historiography of the anecdote. This keeps it fresh even if you already know the story in question, and some are pretty mythical already - although they all feel new here, in this otherworldly game of consequences, in which Marilyn Monroe is only a paperfold away from Nikita Khrushchev, and she greets him with the Russian phrase that Natalie Wood, a fluent speaker, has coached her to say: "We the workers of Twentieth Century Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and our country."

Khrushchev, for his part, is so appalled by his reception by the drunken deputy Labour leader George Brown that he pronounces that if he were British, he would vote Conservative.

Each encounter is disruptive in an unexpected way: a one-night stand echoes on for ever (Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin at the Chelsea hotel); a meeting between a murderer and a justice-for-victims campaigner results in a friendly correspondence (Phil Spector and Dominick Dunne).

People meet in lifts, on cruise ships, in urinals, or they are strangers drawn together (for example, Princess Diana writing to Michael Barrymore to announce their spiritual kinship).

Out of the truth comes absurdity; out of levity comes profundity, and out of chaos comes order, as Craig Brown's mighty wheel revolves.