Poetry (at any rate in my case) is like trying to remember a tune you’ve forgotten. All corrections are attempts to get nearer to the forgotten tune. A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision – lasting one second or less – and he attempts to express the whole of which the vision is a part.
And that’s the sort of thing you want, surely, when you wade through a writer’s letters. What you end up with, however, is a lot of stuff about farting and wanking. Every now and again you are reminded forcibly that the ability to write fiction or poetry is not necessarily indicative of a particularly refined intelligence, no matter what we’d like to believe; it’s a freakish talent, like the ability to bend a ball into the top corner of the goal from a thirty-yard free kick, but no one’s interested in reading Thierry Henry’s collected letters – no literary critic, anyway. And Thierry would never call Katherine Mansfield a cunt, not least because he’s a big fan of the early stories. Anyway, I have given up on Larkin for the moment. The rest of you: stick to the poems.
As nobody noticed, probably, I was barred from the Believer again last month, this time for quoting from one of Philip Larkin’s letters, more or less accurately – what’s a second-person pronoun between friends? – at an editorial meeting. The Polysyllabic Spree, the seventy-eight repellently evangelical young men and women who run the magazine, ‘couldn’t hear the quotation marks’, apparently, and anyway, as they pointed out (somewhat unnecessarily, I felt), I’m no Larkin. So I have a lot of ground to cover here – I have had several Major Reading Experiences over the last couple of months, and I’ve got to cram them all into a couple of measly pages, all because of those teenage white-robed prudes. Oh, it’s not your problem. I’ll just get on with it. I know I won’t need to tell you anything about Zadie Smith’s warm, moving, smart and thoroughly enjoyable On Beauty; Hanan Al-Shaykh was one of the authors I met on a recent trip to Reykjavik, and her lovely novel Only in London was a perfect reflection of the woman: surprising, fun, thoughtful.
A disgruntled Barnesandnoble.com punter slams Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: ‘Oh well,’ says our critic in his one-star review. ‘At least it was better than the Odyssey.’ This means, presumably, that the Odyssey is a no-star book; you have to admire someone prepared to flout conventional literary wisdom so publicly. I personally don’t agree, and for me the Odyssey still has the edge, but Warren’s novel seems to have held up pretty well. It’s overwritten, here and there – Warren can’t see a sunny day without comparing it to a freckly girl wearing a polka-dot dress and new shoes, sitting on a fence clutching a strawberry lollipop and whistling – and at one point, a propos of almost nothing, there’s a thirty-page story set during the Civil War which seems to belong to another book altogether. You could be forgiven for thinking that All the King’s Men could have done with a little more editing, rather than a little less; but the edition I read is a new ‘restored’ edition of the novel, containing a whole bunch of stuff – a hundred pages, apparently – that was omitted from the version originally published. A hundred pages! Oh, dear God. Those of us still prepared to pick up sixty-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winners should be rewarded, not horribly and unfairly punished.
You may well already have read All the King’s Men; you will, therefore, be familiar with Willie Stark, Warren’s central character, a demagogic Southern politician whose rise and demise deliberately recalls that of Huey Long. Me, I’ve just read a book about someone called Willie Talos – the name Warren originally wanted until he was talked out of it by his editor. I think the editor was right; as Joyce Carol Oates said in her NYRB piece about the restored edition, ‘“Talos” is a showy, pretentious, rather silly name in the “Stephen Dedalus” tradition, while “Willie Stark” is effective without being an outright nudge in the ribs.’ But even that, I don’t think, is the point; the point is that Willie Stark is now the character’s name, whatever the author intended all those years ago, and whichever name is better is a moot point. I feel as though I’ve just read a book about David Copperbottom or Holden Calderwood or Jay Gatsbergen. You can’t mess around with that stuff, surely? These people exist independently of the books, now – I have, I now realize, seen countless references to Willie Stark in reviews and magazine articles, but as the book isn’t widely known or read here in the UK, I had no idea that was who I was reading about until after I’d finished.
Talos was, apparently, the guardian of Crete, who threw boulders at people attempting to land on the island; he was also a mechanical man attendant on the Knight of Justice in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. These are both very good reasons why Talos is a very bad name for a Southern American politician, I would have thought, and I can imagine that a good editor would have made the same arguments. Noel Polk, who put this new edition together, is of the opinion that Warren was badly served by the editing process; in a reply to Joyce Carol Oates’s piece, he claims that ‘many of us are interested in more than a good read’, and that he knows, and Oates doesn’t, ‘how often well-intentioned commercial editors have altered novels for the worse’. If I were Robert Penn Warren’s editor, I’d point to a Pulitzer Prize and sixty years in print as all the vindication I needed; we will never know whether Polk’s version would ever have endured anywhere near as well. There is even the possibility, of course, that if Warren had had his way in 1947, there would have been no interest in any kind of edition in the twenty-first century. I can see that scholars might want to compare and contrast, but I notice on Amazon that the long ’un I read now has a movie tie-in cover. Caveat emptor.
I reread John Lukacs’s little book on what turned out to be the biggest decision of the twentieth century – namely, Churchill’s decision not to seek terms with Hitler in May 1940 – because I found it on my bookshelf and realized that the only thing I could remember was Churchill deciding not to seek terms with Hitler in 1940. And I kind of knew that bit before I read it. So this time, I’m going to make a few notes that help make it all stick – it’s great, having this column, because I keep the magazines, but I’d probably lose a notebook. Excuse me a moment. Norway defeat brings down Chamberlain; C becomes PM 10/5/1940. Early unpopularity of C in his own party – ‘blood, sweat, toil, and tears’ speech didn’t go down well – ‘gangsters’ + ‘rogue elephant’. Churchill v HALIFAX. Churchill and Lloyd George – wanted him in the Cabinet because LG admired Hitler, who might appoint him if and when… Dunkirk: feared max 50,000 evacuated – in the end over 338,000.
Thanks. That’ll really help.
Lukacs’s book is completely gripping, clear and informative, and corroborates a theory I’ve been developing recently: the less there is to say about something, the more opaque the writing tends to be. In other words, you hardly ever come across an unreadable book on World War II, but pick up a book on, I don’t know, the films of Russ Meyer, and you’ll be rereading the same impossible sentence about poststructuralist auteurism three hundred times. People have to overcompensate, you see. And Five Days in London also helped give a context for Philip Larkin’s early letters, too. Here’s Larkin, in 1942: ‘If there is any new life in the world today, it is in Germany.’‘Germany will win this war like a dose of salts’ (1940). ‘And I agree we don’t deserve to win’ (1942). Lukacs points out that there was a grudging admiration for Hitler’s Germany in Britain: we were clapped-out, the old order, whereas Germany was thrusting, energetic, modern. And he also notes that it was the intellectuals – and I suppose Larkin must be categorized thus, despite the farting – who were most prone to defeatism. Ha! That’s the Spree, right there. They’re very brave when it comes to suspending innocent columnists. But you wait until someone (and my money is on the French) lands on the West Coast. You won’t see them for dust.
And the coveted ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Stuff That Stayed Read’ award for the non-fiction book of 2005 goes to… John Carey, for What Good Are the Arts? It’s rare, I think, for a writer, maybe for anyone, to feel that he’s just read a book that absolutely expresses who he or she i
s, and what he or she believes, while at the same time recognizing that he or she could not have written any of it. But Carey’s book – which in its first two chapters answers the questions ‘What is a work of art?’ and ‘Is high art superior?’ – is my new bible, replacing my previous bible, Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses. I couldn’t have written it because I – and I’m not alone, by any means – do not have Carey’s breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles, from Kant onwards. What Good Are the Arts? is a very wise book, and a very funny book, but beyond even these virtues, it’s a very humane, inclusive and empathetic book: as we all know, it’s impossible to talk about ‘high’ art without insulting the poor, or the young, or those without a university degree, or those who have no taste for, or interest in, Western culture. Carey’s approach to the whole sorry mess is the only one that makes any sense. Indeed, while reading it, you become increasingly amazed at the muddle that apparently intelligent people have got themselves into when they attempt to define the importance of – and the superiority of – ‘high’ culture.
Just after I’d finished it, and I was looking at the world through Carey’s eyes, the winner of the 2005 Booker Prize claimed that at least his was a ‘proper’ book – as if Green Eggs and Ham or Bridget Jones’s Diary weren’t proper books. And then, a few days later, the Guardian’s art correspondent launched an astonishing attack on the popular British artist Jack Vettriano: ‘Vettriano is not even an artist.’ (No, he’s just someone who paints pictures and sells them. What do you call those people again?) ‘He just happens to be popular, with “ordinary people”… I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you… Some things about art are true, and some are false – all of which was easier to explain before we decided popularity was the litmus test of aesthetic achievement…’
Oh, man. That’s got it all. This is not the time or the place to unravel the snobbery and the unexamined assumptions contained in those few lines; it’s easier just to say that nothing about art is true, and nothing is false. And if that’s scary, then I’m sorry, but you have to get over it and move on.
I read G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday because (a) I’d never read a word by Chesterton and (b) because I’d decided that from now on I’d only read stuff that John Carey recommends (in his useful little book Pure Pleasure). And it was pretty good, although I think that younger readers might get a little frustrated with the plotting. I don’t want to give too much away. But say you were an x, and you believed that a group of seven people were all not xs but ys. And then you discovered that the first of these seven was actually an x, too. And then you found out the same thing about the second, and then the third. Wouldn’t you start to get the idea? Yes, well. Anyway, I can’t say anything else about it now other than that it’s a novel that fundamentally believes in the decency and the wisdom of us all, and you don’t find too many of those. John Carey has now made me buy a book by Kipling, and I didn’t think anyone would ever manage that.
MARCH 2006
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Hang-Ups – Simon Schama
Scenes from Provincial Life – William Cooper
BOOKS READ:
Scenes from Metropolitan Life – William Cooper
Scenes from Metropolitan Life – William Cooper
Death and the Penguin – Andrey Kurkov
Ghosting – Jennie Erdal
So this last month was, as I believe you people say, a bust. I had high hopes for it, too; it was Christmastime in England, and I was intending to do a little holiday comfort reading – David Copperfield and a couple of John Buchan novels, say, while sipping an egg nog and…
Oh, what’s the point? No one, I suppose, will remember that I began my March ’05 column in this way. And if no one remembers me beginning my March ’05 column in this way, then there is even less chance of them remembering that I began my March ’04 column in this way, too. The tragedy is that I have come to think of those opening words as a tradition, and I was beginning to hope that you have come to value them as such. I even had a little fantasy that one of your popular entertainers – Stephen Sondheim, say, or Puff Diddle – might have set them to music, and at the beginning of March you all hold hands and sing a song called ‘It Was Christmastime in England’, to mark the imminent arrival of spring. I am beginning to suspect, however, that this column is making only medium-sized inroads into the American consciousness. (I have had very little feedback from readers in Alabama, for example, and not much more from our Hawaiian subscribers.) I shall keep the tradition going, but more in hope than expectation. It’s the New Year here in England, and I’m sorry to say that, because of the apparent indifference of both Puff Diddle and Alabama (the whole state, rather than the band), I am entering 2006 on a somewhat self-doubting and ruminative note.
This last reading month really was a washout, though, for all the usual holiday reasons, so it was as well that, with incredible and atypical foresight, I held a couple of books back from the previous month, just to pad the column out a bit. I met Andrey Kurkov at the Reykjavik Literary Festival and loved the reading he gave from Death and the Penguin. (He also sat at the piano and sang a few jolly Ukrainian songs afterwards, thus infuriating one of the writers who had appeared on the same stage earlier in the evening: as I understood it, the Infuriated Writer seemed to think that Kurkov had wilfully and sacrilegiously punctured the solemnity of the occasion. You can see his point, I suppose. You can’t mess around with readings by singing after them. The paying public might begin to expect fun at literary events, and then where would writers be? Up shit creek without a paddle, that’s where.) I afterwards discovered that Death and the Penguin is one of those books that people love unreservedly. The eyes of the assistant in the bookshop lit up when I bought it, and all sorts of people have shown a frankly sickening devotion to the novel whenever I’ve mentioned it since.
I think I’d sort of presumed that the eponymous penguin was metaphorical, like both the squid and the whale in The Squid and the Whale; my antipathy to the animal kingdom is such that even animal metaphors tend to have a deterrent effect. (What kind of person thinks in animal metaphors? In this day and age?) Imagine my horror, then, when I learned during Kurkov’s reading in Reykjavik that the penguin in Death and the Penguin is not like the squid or the whale, but, like, an actual penguin. The penguin really is a character, who – pull yourself together, man, which – has moods and feelings, and has an integral part in the story, and so on. And, as if the author actually wanted me to hate his novel, it’s a cute penguin, too. ‘It will be a hard-hearted reader who is not touched by Viktor’s relationship with his unusual pet,’ says one of the quotes on the back. (Why not just include a blurb saying ‘DON’T BUY THIS BOOK’?) And, of course, Death and the Penguin turns out to be fresh, funny, clever, incredibly soulful and compelling, and the penguin turns out to be a triumphant creation. I might read only books about animals from now on.
Misha is effectively Viktor’s flatmate; Viktor adopted it (I’m not giving in on the pronoun thing) when the failing local zoo was dishing out animals to whomever could afford to feed them, and as Viktor’s girlfriend had recently moved out, he was feeling lonely. (Oh, stop it. It’s not that sort of book.) Misha, however, turns out to be as depressed as Viktor, and it just sort of wanders about, and occasionally disappears off to its bedroom, like a homesick teenager on a foreign exchange programme. Viktor, meanwhile, has recently started work as an obituarist: he’s told to write and stockpile the obituaries of leading local figures, but the obits turn out to be needed earlier than anticipated, and Viktor eventually realizes that his work is somehow bringing about the untimely demise of his subjects.
It’s a neat plot, but Death and the Penguin isn’t a plotty book: Kurkov gives himself plenty of room to breathe (it’s
actually more of a long, rueful sigh) and that’s pretty cool in and of itself. This is a literary novel – Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy – but he doesn’t see why weltschmerz shouldn’t come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass. Sometimes it seems as though everything in the arts (and I include sports in the arts) is about time and space – giving yourself room to move, finding the time to play… My copy of Death and the Penguin is two hundred and twenty-eight pages long, and yet it never seems overstuffed, or underpowered, and it manages to be about an awful lot, and it never ever forgets or overlooks gesture or detail. And I already said it was funny, didn’t I? What more do you want? At that length, you couldn’t even reasonably want less.
Jennie Erdal’s Ghosting is a book about writing, so, you know, if you don’t want to read it because you’re a plumber or a chiropodist, then I quite understand. If I were you, I would resent the repeated implication, by publishers and books pages, that my profession is more interesting than yours. Unlike most books about writing, though, this one contains a narrative that is both genuinely gripping and eccentric. Jennie Erdal was employed by a flamboyant London publisher, the sort of man who is often described as ‘larger than life’. (In other words, run for the hills! And don’t look back!) She began as a translator, and then worked on a huge book of interviews this guy conducted with women; finally, she wrote two novels for him. They were his novels – his name, and his name alone, was on the title page – but according to Erdal, the author took only a passing interest in their conception and execution.
His first novel, he decides, will be both thrilling and very romantic:‘“It has to be a love story. People associate me with love…”’ When his amanuensis asks whether he has any notion of the characters who might populate this thrilling love story, he is precise and unequivocal: they must be ‘“a man and a woman. Do you think I could write about poofters?”’