Julie Burchill is among the most conceited writers who ever lived. Her brashness is crucial to her success – that spell she cast over so many editors across at least four decades, a voodoo that remains difficult to explain even after reading several of her books – but it has also been an obstacle, a poor substitute for discipline. A self-described skiver, Burchill’s immodesty all too often tipped over into shamelessness. Even in her best decade, the 1980s, she was guided by the idea that opportunities were there to be squandered and the golden ticket was up for endless renewal. There was always another gigantic salary, another unforgivably lavish book advance, to cushion the latest sacking or scandal.
There are plenty of reasons to hate Burchill’s writing – more and more, in fact, as the weeks go by. Earlier this year she sparked fury by insulting the journalist Ash Sarkar on social media. This probably wouldn’t rank in her top ten worst episodes, but there was a new exasperation in the air. Burchill offered a formal apology, as well as money for damages. Her forthcoming book was cancelled by Little, Brown, picked up by a fringe outfit (Stirling Publishing) and then withdrawn by Burchill after Stirling’s director turned out to be an ethno-nationalist. More recently, she made an unfunny joke about a famous baby and was subsequently sacked by the Daily Telegraph. Vocal defenders were thin on the ground. In the New Statesman, Nicholas Lezard vented: ‘Like many public figures these days, her schtick is to say what she claims is unsayable, and get paid handsomely for doing so… I am so sick of these people, and the people who publish them, and give them airtime.’
It’s not as though she had nothing to offer. Burchill is a natural writer, which isn’t the same as being a good one. Even at its best, her writing is thwarted by her mission to annoy the reader. Her style is rebarbative, immediate, spiteful, engaging, leaden with puns, cack-handed. She is good at punchy tabloidese but too often leans on half-arsed metaphors and haphazard jokes – readers will encounter all three in her longer pieces. Sometimes she’s so excited by the verboten appeal of her chosen subject that she forgets to be precise (sometimes – I mean most of the time). ‘In person she has the purr of a pink telephone,’ wrote James Wolcott in 1992. ‘In print she has the bark of small-arms fire.’ But amid the gun smoke and bullet casings you can hear something else: a self-satisfied cackle. ‘I have to admit I do laugh a lot when I write,’ she told Sathnam Sanghera in 2005, making a distinction between ‘everyday Julie’ and ‘mad Julie, the writer’. ‘Mad Julie, the writer, is so extreme. But I lead the life of a provincial housewife 95 per cent of the time.’
I am not going to dwell on everyday Julie, who as far as I know has never properly introduced herself to the public. A 2005 encounter with Mark Simpson, published in the Independent, begins with Burchill stuffing Simpson’s fingers into her mouth. A dental investigation had recently revealed a jawful of milk teeth: ‘Hahahahaha! In a horrible way Mark, it does seems [sic] like a dreadful metaphor dunnit! I still haven’t grown up, have I?’ Lynn Barber’s 2004 profile was headlined ‘Growing pains’. ‘I am fond of her but also wary,’ wrote Barber, ‘the way you would be if a strange dog came up and licked your hand.’ Nevertheless she ‘bowed the knee’ to Burchill as a writer (tellingly, admirers of her writing rarely give examples). To Sanghera, Burchill described her allure as ‘50 per cent freak appeal and 50 per cent pure fucking talent’. We can debate those proportions, but some of the restless energy that makes her interviews so enthralling does transfer to her writing.
The Burchill of the 1980s hated cosiness and domesticity, however innocent. ‘People who have relationships put the kettle on, talk things out and “grow”… People who have affairs, on the other hand, have violent sexual intercourse and fistfights. In other words, they behave like human beings.’ To be human is to be glamorous and freewheeling. ‘I can personally never understand what people mean when they call Dallas unrealistic; everyone dresses well and argues constantly, which seems to me about as realistic as you can get.’
Sometimes her cruel analysis is on the money, and enduring. This is from 1984:
Certain people are obsessed with being SURVIVORS, and if there are no real hardships in their lives they will create their own obstacle course of a life out of anything that comes to hand… Beauty on the skids, genius on the skids – these have their morbid fascination and their market. Mediocrity on the skids, or even mediocrity picking itself up, dusting itself down and starting all over again – this doesn’t.
And then there’s the lame and lazy: ‘The difference between being a goer and a slag is comparable to the difference between having a suntan and melanoma.’ Maybe there’s something to it, a certain pugnacity. But all too often she gets herself in a tangle: ‘Conspiracy theories are the opiate of the cocaine-Communists, and the pop arena has become a popular place in which to walk the dogma.’ And perhaps worst of all: ‘The penis is mightier than the sword of Damocles when it comes to hanging over men’s heads threatening to puncture their sense of self with every step towards the bed they take.’
The first essay in Damaged Gods (1987) is a screed against ‘Cows’ and ‘Cowspeak’ (or women who disagree with Burchill and have the nerve to say so). She berates the ‘Politicows’ who ‘speak out for women who have accomplished nothing in the race – notably those two most treacherous parodies of the human female, the prostitute and the housewife.’ Burchill really doesn’t like prostitutes; they are the ‘tax-free tarts of Tooting Bec’ and ‘Quislings of the quim’ – the kind of phrase-making that makes you want to clap the book shut and massage your temples. She concludes with a comparison that quickly becomes familiar (though I have no desire to quote the coarser examples here) accusing women who ‘condone’ housework or prostitution of being like ‘blacks who condone shoe-shining and slavery.’
But let’s go back to this: the ‘women who have accomplished nothing in the race’. What race? Her first novel, Ambition (1989), the book that best captures Burchill in her pomp, features an epigraph, a pep talk in miniature, from the American football player Joe Namath: ‘When you win, nothing hurts.’ This was Burchill’s attempt to write a ‘blockbuster’, or ‘shopping and fucking novel’, with its straightforward criteria of luxury brands and flawless sex. In 1984 Burchill attacked ‘the housewife, with her vapid, starved sponge of a mind’ for turning ‘station bookstalls into an ocean of slush’. By 1989 she was ready to launch her own takeover of the slush market and, in commercial terms at least, it paid off.
Ambition’s protagonist, Susan Street, is deputy editor of the Sunday Best, ‘a tabloid with teeth’. Having shagged the paper’s editor to death on the first page, Susan’s climb to the highest rung of the ladder is blocked by the paper’s American proprietor, Tobias Pope. In order to become the youngest female newspaper editor in history, Susan Street from ‘Nowhere-on-Sea’ must face a succession of challenges set by Pope, who plays the Gordon Gekko to Susan’s Bud Fox. Almost all of the challenges involve group sex in exotic or seedy locations, but before the real debauchery begins Pope coerces Susan into a more unconventional act of debasement by tattooing the word ‘SOLD’ on her forehead.
Burchill is an admirer of Jackie Collins (‘Jackie’s Ulysses’, is how she described the ‘70s perfume bomb Lovers and Gamblers) but Ambition is not exactly a tribute. The brands are there – Kurt Geiger, Bill Blass, Janet Reger and, er, David Cameron (an ‘80s designer ‘for the fast and the young’, according to the New York Times) – but the sex is always either brutal or comic. Burchill’s eye for off-putting details constantly brings the reader back down into the mud. Testicles are ‘the ugliest items in the history of the world, like figs covered in fungus’. Condom lubricant is disgusting, like ‘fish oil’. Surprisingly, for someone so transfixed by the sensual world, Burchill relishes the chance to make jokes about the boredom of it all. Receiving cunnilingus is tedious in itself but ‘like ironing, it freed your mind to dwell on higher things.’ For most women sex is ‘marginally less pleasurable than waxing their legs.’
Susan has one properly good lay in the novel: Tobias Pope’s son, David Weiss, a Michael Douglas lookalike who is dragged by Susan into the workplace toilets within moments of their first meeting. The sex is pornographic, with ‘fluorescent and terminally unflattering’ lighting and Weiss verbally degrading her all the while. But, in Susan’s mind, ‘it was perfect sex’. Burchill is making an obvious but worthwhile point: sex in commercial fiction is unreal, and if it was real it wouldn’t be worth pursuing. The nasty stuff is what people want. But Ambition isn’t just a satirical take on the delusions of generic romance. The cut-throat materialism, the hatred of the slow and the thoughtful, are convictions rather than poses, and many of them are transplanted directly from her essays.
Susan’s boyfriend, Matthew, is a ‘New Man’ with all the wrong opinions. Worse, he doesn’t earn as much as Susan. ‘Yes, taunting a man about the money he made was the Nineties’ equivalent of teasing him about the size of his penis, she decided – it hit him where he lived.’ When Matthew argues that anyone can make a lot of money if they’re ‘prepared to sell out’ Susan calls it ‘the popular fallacy put about by failures… Show me someone who hasn’t sold out and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t got anything anyone wants to buy.’
In ‘Nature, Nurture or Nietzsche? Excerpts from the Julie Burchill Story’, an essay published around the same time as Ambition, Burchill makes the same argument. ‘I refuse to lose, I refuse to be anyone’s hard luck story… And as for selling out, boys, let me tell you this. The only people who never sell out are those who have nothing anyone wants to buy.’ Here, Burchill is confident that talent alone determined her fate. She left Bristol because she was too smart for the locals and ‘within a month of setting pen to paper’ was a star in London, the ‘working-class girl who made it’. ‘Twelve years later, I still write like an angel on Angel Dust.’ Fortunately, she has some advice for those of us who remain earthbound and sober. Young writers, take note:
People think words are these dumb bimbos you can use to get where you want to go – but it’s never been so. Words are as smart as you and me and if your ambition lies beyond them, if you mutter the wrong name at the crucial moment, they won’t give you the best of their love. They’ll become as hookers, they won’t kiss you. And if words won’t kiss you, you’re fucked. So to speak.
And what about the people she left behind? Ambition has a jagged glacier for a heart, but there is something like warmth when Susan finds herself in an ‘ordinary pub’ with ‘ordinary people’: ‘She thought of her parents. Their cheap drink, their cheap food, their cheap labour. Everything was cheap about the people she had come from, except their souls.’ Pure slush.
It didn’t help that for a long time Burchill was, to borrow from Ash Sarkar, literally a Communist. Lezard is bemused by her ‘trajectory’ from Stalinist to Brexiteer – though surely even hardened Europhiles must concede this is an improvement – but as long as you remember that Burchill’s main goal is to upset people, there is no mystery. She was a Stalinist to upset the punks (or, according to an unconvincing 2016 article for the New Statesman, to impress her dad) and a Thatcherite to provoke the lefties. Now she’s pro-Brexit and ardently Zionist in order to irritate the perpetually online commentariat. The one thing she consistently embraces is disapproval.
Even class loyalty can’t be counted on. Burchill references her humble credentials at every opportunity – the mother in the cardboard factory, the friends in the biscuit factory – but this clashes with her hatred of those who don’t or can’t succeed. In the ‘80s she described the working class as the ‘voluntarily oppressed’ who consistently vote for their own degradation: ‘I know the working class, the new working class, and I know their fatalism and their tiny minds.’ She condemned them for their support of Margaret Thatcher, not long before becoming something of a fan herself. During Thatcher’s last years in office, Burchill saw her as ‘one of those strange socio-economic mutations, like Morrissey, who by the grace of talent and timing have nowhere to go but the top.’
The Stalinist material was weirder, more perverse. In a 1984 essay titled ‘Waiting for the Russian Ballet’, published in the Danube, a short-lived, Toby Young-edited student magazine, she called the Soviet Union ‘the most benevolent dictator the world has ever known’. Comic hyperbole? ‘There is nothing wrong with any country on earth that is so serious that it cannot be cured by a ruthless Russian invasion followed by a brutal suppression of all dissent.’ Exaggeration for effect? ‘Culture in Eastern Europe was practically non-existent before the countries got lucky enough to be kicked into shape by the Bear’.
When AA Gill was asked why he wrote, he almost always answered: to sell newspapers. Burchill, too, comes from a time when reading something raucous over your porridge was an important part of the morning routine. A slug of Burchill to go along with your coffee, before it was possible to summon unlimited rage-fuel with a twitch of your thumb. But now the consolidated leverage of readers through the medium of social media allows for the kind of adjudication that used to be impossible. This is not any kind of blessing. Columnists are now permitted a certain degree of wildness according only to particular patterns, like pre-distressed jeans. They’re just as bad as the old line-up, but in different ways. Meanwhile the faded aggro-hacks who found their voices in a more sedate era are working their notice.
It was all too easy. Nothing diverts talent like early success, and the overly pliable media did Burchill no favours in the long run. It may be sentimental or even masochistic to stress the importance of paying your dues, but there is something to be said for the rough-and-tumble apprenticeships – the closed doors, the rejections, the must-do-betters – that the typical writer navigates before reaping even the slenderest rewards. In Burchill’s case, too many editors and gatekeepers were high on the caustic fumes of indignation. She’s pissing people off so she must be doing something right. Right? And besides, there was no room for doubt, they were paying her too much money. So we have mad Julie, milk teeth intact, still cackling away; a bunch of misshapen books, warped and dented by a battery of misjudgements; and a new generation discovering the worst side of a writer whose outstanding achievement was to entrench the habit of what we now call ‘hate-reading’. A legacy of a kind, I suppose. Freak appeal is better than no appeal at all. But she could have been good.