The books I forgot to remember

What happens to books after we have read them? Where do they go? Do they drain from our memories like water down a plug-hole? I have heard it argued that there's no point reading any book at all because a year later you'll only be able to remember what you could read on the blurb for nothing.

It's an observation that carries a depressing echo of truth. The moment I finish a book, my memory ejects the names and professions of the main characters, their relation to one another and their causes for celebration or complaint—all those areas which those pushy blurbs are generally so eager to reveal. A year on, all that remains of a novel is a vague atmosphere, and maybe one or two random scenes. But perhaps this doesn't matter: pleasure in reading must surely lie in the moment-to-moment experience, not in passing an exam on all its details in the years to come.

A year on, what remains of a work of non-fiction? If last year you read a 500-page biography of President Nixon and this year all you remember is that he was an American president with the middle initial M who was involved in some sort of a scandal, then the weeks you spent slogging through the book must surely have been wasted.



Memory can be tactless and irresponsible. It refuses to defer to significance, preferring to hang around with the flotsam and jetsam of triviality. A few years ago I did, indeed, read a 500-page biography of President Nixon, and though I could now name his wife (Pat) and his daughter (Tricia—or did he have another one too?) and three or four of the Watergate conspirators (Haldeman, John Dean, Ehrlichman and the one who used to go on debating tours with thingy, you know, the hippy who coined the phrase "Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out") I knew these things before I read the book.

The only knowledge of Nixon that I can definitely pinpoint as coming from the biography is embarrassingly inconsequential. Elvis Presley once flew on impulse to Washington and, choc-a-bloc with drugs, went to the White House and asked to meet Nixon. His stature was such that his request was granted; he arrived in the Oval Office plastered in make-up and wearing a purple velvet V-necked tunic, a vast gold belt and a high-collared shirt.

"You dress kind of strange, don't you?" said the president.

"You have your show and I have mine" replied Elvis, who then rambled on about how the Beatles were anti-American.

Actually, to be strictly honest, I didn't even remember that: I've just checked in the book for the details of Elvis's clothes.

And what do I now remember from my favourite political diaries, those of Alan Clark? I have general memories, of course—his drunken speech interrupted by the self-righteous Clare Short, his account of the to-ings and fro-ings on the night of Mrs Thatcher's ejection, his wonderfully feline scorn for Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine—but I can remember none of them in detail, and the detail in Clark's diaries—as in any worthwhile diaries—is what matters.

Oddly enough, the only passage I can remember with any clarity has Clark motoring along in his Bentley, noticing a Jaguar that has broken down by the side of the road. He skids to a halt. "I can never resist lording it over the owner of a Jaguar," he says, or words to that effect. He offers to give the Jaguar driver a lift to the nearest garage. Only when the two of them are driving does he realise that the Jaguar driver is the comedian Rowan Atkinson. Clark tells Atkinson how much he enjoyed Blackadder, but he senses that this compliment casts an immediate pall of depression over Atkinson. Clark concludes, quite rightly, that actors like to be congratulated on what they are doing at present, not on what they have done in the past.

I deliberately wrote the above paragraph from memory. I have now checked it against the printed diary entry; it turns out that I got almost every detail wrong. It was not Clark but his wife Jane who was driving, and it was a Rolls, not a Bentley. Atkinson was driving an Aston Martin, not a Jaguar. Clark tells Jane to pull in. "A DBS V8 in trouble is always good for a gloat," he writes, which is infinitely wittier and more Clark-ish than my own version.

Clark then tells their passenger that he looks "very like an actor called Rowan Atkinson," and goes on to say how much he enjoyed a sketch on Not the Nine O'Clock News, rather than, as I recalled it, Blackadder. I was right about Clark's comment about actors living for the moment. But I had forgotten Clark's final comment on Atkinson: "He didn't sparkle…"

So in any exam on my chosen entry in Clark's diaries, I would have scored three or at most four out of a possible 20.

So that's what happens to books. But what happens to articles about books? Or have I already asked that question?