The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

  George, meanwhile, is compelled to convince everyone that he doesn’t eat, even though he does. After his mum has made his breakfast she has to reassure him that it’s for Sam, and then turn her back until he’s eaten it. (Food has to be smuggled into school, hidden inside his swimming things.) Sam loves white goods, especially washing machines, so during a two-week stay in London he was taken to a different launderette each day, and nearly combusted with excitement; he also likes to look at bottles of lavatory cleaner through frosted glass. George parrots lines he’s learned from videotapes: ‘The Government has let me down,’ he told his trampoline teacher recently. (For some reason, trampolines are a big part of our lives.) ‘This would make Ken Russell spit with envy,’ he remarked enigmatically on another occasion. Oasthouses, washing machines, pretending not to eat when really you do… see? You really couldn’t make it up.

  I don’t want to give the impression that living with an autistic child is all fun. If you have a child of the common or garden-variety, I wouldn’t recommend, on balance, that you swap him (most autistic kids are boys) for a child with a hilarious obsession. Hopefully I need hardly add that there’s some stuff that… well, that, to understate the case, isn’t quite as hilarious. I am merely pointing out, as Moore is doing, that if you are remotely interested in the strangeness and variety and beauty of humankind, then there is a lot in the condition to marvel at. This is the first book about autism I’ve read that I’d recommend to people who want to know what it is like; it’s sensible about education, diet, possible causes, just about everything that affects the quotidian lives of those dealing with the condition. It also made this parent feel better about the compromises one has to make: ‘This morning George breakfasted on six After Eights [After Eights are ‘sophisticated’ chocolate mints] and some lemon barley-water. I was pleased – pleased – because lately he hasn’t been eating at all…’ In our house it’s salt-and-vinegar crisps.

  I can imagine George and Sam doing a roaring trade with grandparents, aunts and uncles tough enough to want to know the truth. I read it while listening to Damien Rice’s beautiful O for the first time, and I had an unexpectedly transcendent moment: the book coloured the music, and the music coloured the book, and I ended up feeling unambivalently happy that my son is who he is; those moments are precious. I hope George and Sam finds a US publisher.

  A couple of months ago, I became depressed by the realization that I’d forgotten pretty much everything I’ve ever read. I have, however, bounced back: I am now cheered by the realization that if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever read then I can read some of my favourite books again as if for the first time. I remembered the punch line of The Sirens of Titan, but everything else was as fresh as a daisy, and Vonnegut’s wise, lovely, world-weary novel was a perfect way to cap Charlotte Moore’s book: she’d prepared the way beautifully for a cosmic and absurdly reductive view of our planet. I’m beginning to see that our appetite for books is the same as our appetite for food, that our brain tells us when we need the literary equivalent of salads, or chocolate, or meat and potatoes. When I read Moneyball, it was because I wanted something quick and light after the 32-oz steak of No Name; The Sirens of Titan wasn’t a reaction against George and Sam, but a way of enhancing it. So what’s that? Mustard? MSG? A brandy? It went down a treat, anyway.

  Smoking is rubbish, most of the time. But if I’d never smoked, I’d never have met Kurt Vonnegut. We were both at a huge party in New York, and I sneaked out on to the balcony for a cigarette, and there he was, smoking. So we talked – about C. S. Forester, I seem to remember. (That’s just a crappy and phoney figure of speech. Of course I remember.) So tell your kids not to smoke, but it’s only fair to warn them of the downside, too: that they will therefore never get the chance to offer the greatest living writer in America a light.

  A selection from

  GEORGE AND SAM: AUTISM IN THE FAMILY

  by CHARLOTTE MOORE

  Monday morning. We’re in a hurry – of course we are. Every working mother with three school-age sons is in a hurry on a Monday morning.

  George is nearly thirteen. The physical process of puberty is beginning, but he seems unaware of this, just as he’s always been unaware of the effect his exceptional good looks have on people. He wanders into the kitchen, naked. He climbs on to the Aga, and sits there twiddling a piece of cardboard. I send him to get dressed; his skin is red and mottled from the heat. He returns with all his clothes on the wrong way round.

  I fill a lunchbox for eleven-year-old Sam. Plain crisps, gluten-free biscuits, marzipan, an apple that I know he won’t eat, but I suppose I live on in hope. George doesn’t have a lunchbox, because George maintains the fiction that he doesn’t eat anything at all, and a lunchbox is too blatant a reminder that this cannot be the case. I smuggle his food supplies – mainly Twiglets and chocolate – into his school taxi, underneath his swimming things.

  I make George’s breakfast – but I have to pretend it’s not his breakfast. ‘I’m making this for Sam,’ I announce, pointedly. I toast two slices of rice bread; Sam’s diet excludes wheat, oats, barley, rye and all dairy products. I place them on two plates which George has selected by sniffing. I spread Marmite in an even layer right up to the edge of the crusts, cut them into quarters, then busy myself elsewhere. George slips down from the Aga; as long as my back’s turned, he’ll risk the toast. ‘These are for Sam,’ he states as he starts to eat. ‘Yes, they’re for Sam,’I confirm, without looking round.

  Sam’s always the last up. He’s awake, but he’s under his duvet, murmuring; his vocalization is somewhere between a hum and a chant, and is almost completely incomprehensible. He fingers the toy owl he’s had since babyhood. The owl has no name, no character; Sam has never played with him, but then, he’s rarely played with any toy. The owl is a tactile comforter, not a friend.

  Sam won’t get up and dress until the taxi driver rings the doorbell. I did try ringing it myself, to get him moving, but Sam’s not daft. He only fell for that once. And the dressing process can be infuriatingly slow. Pants on – pants off again. Shirt inside out – outside in – inside out once more. Six pairs of identical tracksuit trousers rejected – the seventh finally, mysteriously, acceptable. Socks stuffed down into the toes of his trainers, pulled out, stuffed in again. One step forward, two steps back – and endless little rituals about touching things and moving things in his bedroom. If I try to intervene, the whole process starts all over again.

  At last he’s dressed – no time for niceties like washing or brushing teeth. Now Sam has to get down the stairs all in one go. If anything blocks his way, or if he has a crisis of confidence halfway down, he’ll freeze. He takes the stairs at a gallop, gets as far as the front door. I open the door for him. Mistake! Sam has to do everything for himself. He opens and shuts the door six times before he can bring himself to leave the house.

  George’s taxi arrives. I note with pleasure that the toast has been eaten – but where is George? In the lavatory of course, where he spends about a quarter of his waking hours. He emerges, and makes for the front door – but wait, there’s something odd about his gait. He’s pulled up his trousers, but forgotten about his pants. I ignore his protests, hoick up his pants, waft a brush over his uncut hair, and propel him towards the taxi. ‘Don’t wave! Don’t say goodbye!’ he commands, and hands me a fragment of sweet paper to add to the collection that already covers the kitchen table. Two empty Fanta bottles, eight yellow lollipop sticks, silver foil, Softmint wrappers… hoarding litter is George’s latest obsession.

  A call from the playroom reminds me of the existence of my youngest child. Blue Peter has finished; Jake, four, wants his Ready Brek. He chats as he eats; he’d like to meet Gareth Gates, he’d like to be Young Sportsman of the Year. Have I found his reading book? Can he have three kinds of sugar on his cereal?

  I take Jake to the local primary school, where he is in Reception. He greets his friends on the way in, dismisses me with a hug and a kiss. Nei
ther George nor Sam ever embrace me in greeting or salute.

  As I leave, I peep through the window. Jake is cross-legged in the middle of the group; he is listening to what the teacher has to say. His hand shoots up. He’s right in there, a proper schoolboy, a social animal. He couldn’t be more different from his older brothers – but then, Jake’s not autistic.

  FEBRUARY 2004

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Old School – Tobias Wolff

  Train – Pete Dexter

  Backroom Boys – Francis Spufford

  You Are Not a Stranger Here – Adam Haslett

  Eats, Shoots and Leaves – Lynne Truss

  BOOKS READ:

  Enemies of Promise –

  Cyril Connolly

  What Just Happened? – Art Linson

  Clockers – Richard Price

  Eats, Shoots and Leaves – Lynne Truss

  Meat Is Murder – Joe Pernice

  Dusty in Memphis – Warren Zanes

  Old School – Tobias Wolff

  Introducing Time – Craig

  Callender and Ralph Edney

  PLUS: a couple of stories in You

  Are Not a Stranger Here;a

  couple of stories in Sixty Stories

  by Donald Barthelme; a couple

  of stories in Here’s Your Hat

  What’s Your Hurry? by Elizabeth

  McCracken.

  My first book was published just over eleven years ago and remains in print, and though I observed the anniversary with only a modest celebration (a black-tie dinner for forty of my closest friends, many of whom were kind enough to read out the speeches I had prepared for them), I can now see that I should have made more of a fuss: in Enemies of Promise, which was written in 1938, the critic Cyril Connolly attempts to isolate the qualities that make a book last for ten years.

  Over the decades since its publication, Enemies of Promise has been reduced pretty much to one line:‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ which is possibly why I was never previously very interested in reading it. What are you supposed to do if the pram in the hall is already there? You could move it out into the garden, I suppose, if you have a garden, or get rid of it and carry the little bastards everywhere, but maybe I’m being too literal-minded.

  Enemies of Promise is about a lot more than the damaging effects of domesticity, however; it’s also about prose style, and the perils of success, and journalism, and politics. Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. Ironically, the copy I found on the shelf belongs to one of the mothers of my children. I wonder if she knew, when she bought it twenty years ago, that she would one day partially destroy a literary career? Connolly would probably argue that she did. He generally takes a pretty dim view of women, who ‘make crippling demands on [a writer’s] time and money, especially if they set their hearts on his popular success’. Bless ’em, eh? I’m presuming, as Connolly does, that you’re a man. What would a woman be doing reading a literary magazine anyway?

  Connolly spends the first part of the book dividing writers into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular. (He is crankily thorough in this division, by the way. He even goes through the big books of the twenties year by year, and marks them with a V or an M:‘1929 – H. Green, Living (V);W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (M); Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (V); Lawrence, Pansies (V); Joyce, Fragments of a Work in Progress (M)’, and so on. One hesitates to point it out – it’s too late now – but shouldn’t Connolly have been getting on with his writing, rather than fiddling around with lists? That’s one of your enemies, right there.) And then, having thus divided, he spends a lot of time despairing of both camps. ‘The Mandarin style… is beloved of literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the title of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.’ (Yay, Cyril! Way to go!) Meanwhile, ‘According to Gide, a good writer should navigate against the current; the practitioners in the new vernacular are swimming with it; the familiarities of the advertisements in the morning paper, the matey leaders in the Daily Express, the blather of the film critics, the wisecracks of the newsreel commentators, the know-all autobiographies of political reporters, the thrillers and ’teccies… are all swimming with it too.’ (Cyril, you utter ass. You think Hemingway wrote like that lot? Have another look, mate.) Incidentally, the ‘know-all autobiographies of political reporters’ – that was a whole genre in the nineteen-thirties? Boy.

  The invention of paperbacks, around the time Connolly was writing Enemies of Promise, changed everything. Connolly’s ten-year question could fill a book in 1938 because the answer was genuinely complicated then; books really could sit out the vicissitudes of fashion on library shelves, and then dust themselves off and climb back down into readers’ laps. Paperbacks and chain bookstores mean that a contemporary version of Enemies of Promise would consist of one simple and uninteresting question:‘Well, did it sell in its first year?’ My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then. They might have passed all the Connolly tests, but they’re dead in the water anyway.

  You end up muttering back at just about every ornately constructed pensée that Connolly utters, but that’s one of the joys of this book. At one point, he strings together a few sentences by Hemingway, Isherwood and Orwell in an attempt to prove that their prose styles are indistinguishable. But the point, surely, is that though you can make Connolly’s sentence-by-sentence case easily enough, you’d never confuse a book by Orwell with a book by Hemingway – and that’s what they were doing, writing books. Look, here’s a plain, flat, vernacular sentence:

  So I bought a little city (it was Galveston, Texas) and told everybody that nobody had to move, we were going to do it just gradually, very relaxed, no big changes overnight.

  This is the tremendous first line of Donald Barthelme’s story ‘I Bought a Little City’ (V); one fears that Connolly might have spent a lot of time looking at the finger, and ignored what it was pointing at. (‘See, he bought a whole city, Cyril! Galveston, Texas! Oh, forget it.’) The vernacular turned out to be far more adaptable than Connolly could have predicted.

  Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature – match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. (M) or (V)? Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P. G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here; Connolly is sniffy about him several times over the course of Enemies of Promise, and presumes that his stuff won’t last five minutes, but he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.

  The Polysyllabic Spree, the twelve terrifyingly beatific young men and woman who run the Believer, have been quiet of late – they haven’t been giving me much trouble, anyway. A friend who works in the same building has heard the ominous rustle of white robes upstairs, however, and he reckons they’re planning something pretty big, maybe something like another Jonestown. (That makes sense, if you think about it. The robes, the eerie smiles, ‘the Believer’…if you find a free sachet of powdered drink, or – more likely – an edible poem in this month’s issue, don’t touch it.) Anyway, while they’re thus distracted, I shall attempt to sneak a snark under the wire: Tobias Wolff’s Old School is too short. Oh, come on, guys! That’s different from saying it’s too long! Too long means you didn’t like it! Too short means you did!

  The truth is, I’ve been reading more short books recently because I need to bump up the numbers in the Books Read column – six of this month’s seven were really pretty scrawny. But Old School I would have read this month, the month of its publicat
ion, no matter how long it was: Wolff’s two volumes of memoir, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, are perennial sources of writerly inspiration, and you presumably know how good his stories are. Old School is brilliant – painful, funny, exquisitely written, acute about writers and literary ambition. (Old School is set right at the beginning of the sixties, in a boys’ private school, and you get to meet Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.) But the problem with short novels is that you can take liberties with them: you know you’re going to get through them no matter what, so you never set aside the time or the commitment that a bigger book requires. I fucked Old School up; I should have read it in a sitting, but I didn’t, and I never gave it a chance to leave its mark. We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.

  Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a somewhat laboured joke about a misplaced comma and a panda) is Britain’s number-one best seller at the moment, and it’s about punctuation, and no, I don’t get it, either. It’s a sweet, good-humoured book, and it’s grammatically sound and all, but, you know… it really is all about how to use a semicolon and all that. What’s going on? One writer I know suspects that the book’s enormous success is due to the disturbing rise of the Provincial Pedant, but I have a more benign theory: that when you hear about it (and you hear about it a lot, at the moment), you think of someone immediately, someone you know and love, whose punctuation exasperates you and fills them full of self-loathing. I thought of Len, and my partner thought of Emily, neither of whom could place an apostrophe correctly if their lives depended on it. (Names have been changed, by the way, to protect the semiliterate.) And I’m sure Len and Emily will receive a thousand copies each for Christmas and birthdays, and other people will buy a thousand copies for their Lens and Emilys, and in the end the book will sell a quarter of a million copies, but only two hundred different people will own them. I enjoyed the fearful bashing that Lynn Truss gives to the entertainment industry – the Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice (sic), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (sic), the fabricated English pop band Hear’Say (sic) – and the advice she quotes from a newspaper style manual: ‘Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling’, which helps to explain a lot of literary fiction. I had never before heard of the Oxford comma (used before the ‘and’ that brings a list to a close), and I didn’t know that Jesus never gets a possessive ‘s’, just because of who He is. I never really saw the possessive ‘s’ as profane, or even very secular, but there you go.