Slow death of diversity

'Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker wrote poetry. It's only when we get to the modern age that Woody Allen doesn't. Are we all too specialised?'

Yesterday I was talking a bit about A P Herbert, and it has suddenly occurred to me that not everyone will know who I was talking about. A P Herbert, I have a horrible feeling, is not much remembered these days.

Humorists are quickly forgotten at the best of times but A P H is also going through that period of obscurity which is fashionable just after a good writer's death, and which lasts just until all the people who knew him well are dying off and a future biographer has nobody left to talk to.

But the gravest mistake that A P H committed, apart from dying, is that he had the bad taste to spread his talents too wide. He wrote brilliant operettas, musicals and songs. He wrote lovely novels and comic poetry. He wrote Punch articles and much stuff exposing the law as an ass. He was an independent MP and responsible for some important legislation, including some that relaxed the divorce laws.

I cannot think of anyone alive today who is active in all those fields. It is as if Tim Rice not only wrote libretti and lyrics, but also was a funny and wise force for social reform. It is as if Noel Coward had been useful.

There is, above all, one sentence in the preceding paragraph that has caught my own attention, and that is the simple statement that "he wrote novels and poetry". That is a combination which one hardly ever comes across these days. Poets don't write novels and novelists don't write poetry. The last man I can think of who clearly took delight in both was Kingsley Amis, who knocked out novels and tossed off verse, and did both rather well. Even his chum Philip Larkin wrote one novel.

But can you think of Martin Amis writing poetry? Can you think of any novels that Wendy Cope has written? Can you think of anyone alive today who notably combines both? I can't. (I am sure you can. I wait to be instructed.)

It is odd, though, because once upon a time the two went together, or at least it was not thought odd if they went together. I have several times in my life met people who said to me: "Thomas Hardy's novels are all very well in their own way, but his poetry – that's the stuff which will keep him alive!". Indeed, I have been told that so often that I suspect they were all pupils of some Bluff-Your-Way-in-Thomas-Hardy course which I don't know about.

But there are other novelists who doubled as poets. There was Rudyard Kipling, who was equally good at either. There was Robert Graves and Hilaire Belloc, and there was D H Lawrence – come to think of it, there must be a Bluff-Your-Way-in-D H Lawrence course as well, because more than one person has told me that when Lawrence's novels fail to captivate you, his poetry still works.

Even some writers who are thought of as out-and-out novelists turn out to have written a bit of verse (Aldous Huxley, for example). Oscar Wilde wrote poetry and Dorothy Parker wrote loads of poetry and it's only when we get to the modern age that Woody Allen doesn't write poetry. Are we all too specialised these days? There was a time when actors were also managers, when playwrights were also actors, when composers were also musicians. Composers as late as Chopin and Mendelssohn played their own music in public. How many do that now? I don't think Charles Dickens wrote poetry, but he loved reading his stuff in public and he loved acting in other people's stuff. Is there a modern equivalent?

The only example of specialisation I can think of, of which I entirely approve, has taken place in my own lifetime, in jazz. There was always a tradition in jazz that trumpeters were the great entertainers and therefore sang. Red Allen sang. Bunny Berigan sang. Louis Armstrong never stopped singing, even when he stopped playing. They didn't all sing well but they all sang, and even nowadays in trad bands it tends to be the trumpeter who commits the vocals (stand up, Kenny Ball! OK, now sit down.)

When modern jazz came along, Dizzy Gillespie played the trumpet and sang. He played wonderful trumpet and sang nonsense. After him Chet Baker played fragile trumpet and sang wispy vocals. And then came Miles Davis.

So may I propose a toast to Miles Davis? And when they write the ultimate history of jazz, may it be noted that Miles Davis's supreme importance in jazz history was that he was the first major trumpeter who never sang? And therefore absolved all later trumpeters from doing so, for which we are all profoundly grateful.