Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books

  Apart from the peculiar obsession with the sound of pissing, there’s a modern writing life described here. There’s the money thing, of course, but there’s also gossip, and endless charitable activity, and fame (Chekhov was recognized everywhere he went). He’s also the only genius I’ve come across who had no recognition of, or interest in, the immensity of his own talent.

  As a special bonus, you also get some of those bad biopic comedy moments thrown in. “I went to see Lev Tolstoy the day before yesterday,” he writes to Gorky. “He was full of praise for you, and said you were a ‘splendid writer.’ He likes your ‘The Fair’ and ‘In The Steppe,’ but not ‘Malva.’” You just know that there’s only three words in this letter Gorky would have registered, and that he spent the rest of the day too depressed to get out of bed.

  This month, my bookshelves functioned exactly as they are supposed to. I’d just finished the Chekhov and dimly remembered buying Janet Malcom’s book when it was first published. And then I found it, and read it. And enjoyed it. You forget that the very best literary critics are capable of being very clever about people and life, as well as books: there’s a brilliant passage here where Malcolm, who is travelling around Russia visiting Chekhov’s houses, links her feelings over the return of a lost bag to her feelings about travel: “[Our homes] are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed… Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real.” I can’t understand, though, why she thinks that the letters between Chekhov and Olga Knipper “make wonderful reading.” I’ve only read Chekhov’s side, but she seems to have reduced the man to mush: “My little doggie,” “my dear little dog,” “my darling doggie,” “Oh, doggie, doggie,” “my little dog,” “little ginger-haired doggie,” “my coltish little doggie,” “my lovely little mongrel doggie,” “my darling, my perch,” “my squiggly one,” “dearest little colt,” “my incomparable little horse,” “my dearest chaffinch”… For god’s sake, pull yourself together, man! You’re a major cultural figure!

  Knipper and Chekhov were together only rarely in their short marriage (she was acting in St. Petersburg, he was trying to keep warm in Yalta) and Malcolm seems to suggest rather sadly that famous men and women with more conventional relationships rob biographers of future source material, because they have no reason to write to each other. On the evidence here, all couples should be compelled by law to spend twenty-four hours a day together, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, just in case either partner is tempted to call the other a chaffinch, or a perch, or an aardvark, in writing.

  Malcolm, however, is one of those people so sweetly devoted to her subject that she won’t recognize flaws as flaws, but as strengths—or, at least, as characteristics. There’s this pedestal—I don’t know anyone who’s even seen it, but it’s there—and once you’re up on it, people stop telling you that you can’t do this, or you’re useless at that, and start wondering why you have allowed something that looks like uselessness to appear in your work. Christopher Ricks did it in his recent book Dylan’s Visions of Sin: he becomes very troubled by a ropy rhyme (“rob them”/“problem”) in “Positively Fourth Street,” and then nags at it until the ropy rhyme becomes yet another example of Bob’s genius: “It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying ‘No, I do not feel that good.’ So an unsettling rhyme such as problem/rob them might rightly be hard to stomach…” The notion that Dylan might have just thought, “Oh, fuck it, that’ll do” never crosses Ricks’s mind for a moment.

  Malcolm does her own, perhaps more self-aware version of this when talking about the troublingly “abrupt” and “unmotivated” changes of character in Chekhov’s stories: “after enough time goes by, a great writer’s innovations stop looking like mistakes.” See, I’m at that early stage, where everything still looks like a mistake, so I would have liked Ms. Malcolm to be a little more precise with the figures here. What’s “enough time”? Just, you know, roughly? Are we talking six months? Two years? I don’t really want to have to wait much longer than that.

  I’ve known Roddy Doyle for a while now. I read him before I met him, and the Barrytown trilogy was an important source of inspiration for me when I was starting out: who knew that books written with such warmth and simplicity could be so complex and intelligent? On this side of the Atlantic, at least, Doyle single-handedly redefined what we mean by “literary” fiction. Oh, Play That Thing is the second part of the trilogy that began with A Star Called Henry; it’s set in the United States during the twenties and thirties, and features Louis Armstrong as a central character, so I’ve been reading it while listening to Hot Fives and Sevens on my iPod.

  Reading reviews and interviews with him over the last few weeks, one is reminded that there’s nothing critics like less than a writer producing something that he hasn’t done before—apart, that is, from a writer producing more of the same. One reviewer complained that Doyle used to write short books, and now they’ve gone fat; another that he used to write books set in Dublin, and he should have kept them there; another that he used to write with a child’s-eye view, and now he’s writing about adults. All of these criticisms, of course, could have been based on the catalogue copy, rather than on the book itself—a two-line synopsis and information about the number of pages would have received exactly the same treatment. You’re half-expecting someone to point out that back in the day he used to write books that sold for a tenner, and now they’ve gone up to seventeen quid.

  What he’s doing, of course, is the only thing a writer can do: he’s writing the books that he wants, in the way he wants to. He wants to write about different things, and to add something to the natural talent that produced those early books. I wouldn’t want to read anyone who did anything else—apart from P. G. Wodehouse, who did exactly the same thing hundreds of times over. So where does that leave us? Pretty much back where we started, I suppose. That’s the beauty of this column, even if I do say it myself.

  Nick Hornby’s Preface to the Second Column Collection, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006)

  I began writing this column in the summer of 2003. It seemed to me that what I had chosen to read in the preceding few weeks contained a narrative, of sorts—that one book led to another, and thus themes and patterns emerged, patterns that might be worth looking at. And, of course, that was pretty much the last time my reading had any kind of logic or shape to it. Ever since then my choice of books has been haphazard, whimsical, and entirely shapeless.

  It still seemed like a fun thing to do, though, writing about reading, as opposed to writing about individual books. At the beginning of my writing career I reviewed a lot of fiction, but I had to pretend, as reviewers do, that I had read the books outside of space, time, and self—in other words, I had to pretend that I hadn’t read them when I was tired and grumpy, or drunk, that I wasn’t envious of the author, that I had no agenda, no personal aesthetic or personal taste or personal problems, that I hadn’t read other reviews of the same book already, that I didn’t know who the author’s friends and enemies were, that I wasn’t trying to place a book with the same publisher, that I hadn’t been bought lunch by the book’s doe-eyed publicist. Most of all I had to pretend that I hadn’t written the review because I was urgently in need of a couple hundred quid. Being paid to read a book and then write about it creates a dynamic which compromises the reviewer in all kinds of ways, very few of them helpful.

  So this column was going to be different. Yes, I would be paid for it, but I would be paid to write about what I would have done anyway, which was read the books I wanted to read. And if I felt that mood, morale, concentration levels, weather, or family history had affected my relationship with a book, I could and would say so. Inevitably, however, the knowledge that I had to write something for the Believer at the end of each month changed my reading habits profoundly. For a start, I probably read
more books than I might otherwise have done. I suspect that I used to take a longer break between books, a couple of days, maybe, during which time I’d carry a copy of the New Yorker or Mojo around with me, but now I push on with the next book, scared I won’t have enough to write about (or that I’ll look bad, unbookish and unworthy of the space in a publication as smart as the Believer). Magazines have been the real casualties of this regime (although the Economist has survived, partly to replace the newspapers I’m not reading.)

  It was the very nature of the Believer itself, however, that really shook up my reading, hopefully forever. The magazine, which is five months older than the column, is a broad church, and all sorts of writers (and artists, and filmmakers, and other creative types) are welcome to stand in the pulpit and preach, but it has one commandment: THOU SHALT NOT SLAG ANYONE OFF. As I understand it, the founders of the magazine wanted one place, one tiny corner of the world, in which writers could be sure that they weren’t going to get a kicking; predictably and depressingly, this ambition was mocked mercilessly, mostly by those critics whose children would go hungry if their parents weren’t able to abuse authors whose books they didn’t much like.

  I understood and supported the magazine’s stance, which seemed admirable and entirely unproblematic to me—until I had to write about the books I’d read which I hadn’t much liked. The first couple of times this happened, earnest discussions took place with the magazine’s editors, who felt that I’d crossed a line, and I either rewrote the offending passages so that I struck a more conciliatory tone, or the offending books and writers became anonymous. I didn’t mind in the least, and in any case it gave me the opportunity to mock the Believer’s ambition mercilessly. (For the record: there is no Polysyllabic Spree. I deal with Vendela Vida and Andrew Leland, co-editor and managing editor of the Believer, respectively, and they are neither humorless nor evangelical. They even watch television, I think.)

  The Believer’s ethos did, however, make me think about what and why I read. I didn’t want to keep rewriting offending passages in my columns, and I certainly didn’t want to keep using the phrases Anonymous writer or Unnameable novel. So what to do? My solution was to try to choose books I knew I would like. I’m not sure this idea is as blindingly obvious as it seems. We often read books that we think we ought to read, or that we think we ought to have read, or that other people think we should read (I’m always coming across people who have a mental, sometimes even an actual, list of the books they think they should have read by the time they turn forty, fifty, or dead); I’m sure I’m not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong. As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems to me to be the highest-risk category—or the highest risk for me, at any rate, given my tastes.

  I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what language can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possibly be. But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes, and I certainly don’t have the patience to read it. (I suspect that I’m not alone here. That kind of writing tends to be admired by critics more than by book buyers, if the best-seller lists can be admitted as evidence: the literary novels that have reached a mass audience over the last decade or so usually ask readers to look through a relatively clear pane of glass at their characters.) I am not attempting to argue that the books I like are “better” than most opaquely written novels; I am simply pointing out my own tastes and limitations as a reader. To put it crudely, I get bored, and when I get bored I tend to get tetchy. It has proved surprisingly easy to eliminate boredom from my reading life.

  And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books. It’s one of the reasons why we choose to do almost anything else rather than read; very few of us pick up a book after the children are in bed and the dinner has been made and the dirty dishes cleared away. We’d rather turn on the television. Some evenings we’d rather go to all the trouble of getting into a car and driving to a cinema, or waiting for a bus that might take us somewhere near one. This is partly because reading appears to be more effortful than watching TV, and usually it is, although if you choose to watch one of the HBO series, such as The Sopranos or The Wire, then it’s a close-run thing, because the plotting in these programs, the speed and complexity of the dialogue, are as demanding as a lot of the very best fiction.

  One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s “Books of the Year” lists. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents—they each, coincidentally, have three children—and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they plowed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a major twentieth-century world figure. At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realized that one of his kids had dropped it and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.) The truth is, of course, that neither of them will ever finish it—or at least, not in this phase of their lives. In the process, though, they will have reinforced a learned association of books with struggle.

  I am not trying to say that the book itself was the cause of this anguish. I can imagine other people racing through it, and I can certainly imagine these two people racing through books that others might find equally daunting. It seems clear to me, though, that the combination of that book with these readers at this stage in their lives is not a happy one. If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity—and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured—then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn’t mean you’re dim—you may find that Graham Greene is more to your taste, or Stephen Hawking, or Iris Murdoch, or Ian Rankin. Dickens, Stephen King, whoever. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.

  “If reading is a workout for the mind, then Britain must be buzzing with intellectual energy,” said one sarcastic columnist in the Guardian. “Train stations have shops packed with enough words to keep even the most muscular brain engaged for weeks. Indeed, the carriages are full of people exercising their intellects the full length of their journeys. Yet somehow, the fact that millions daily devour thousands of words from Hello, the Sun, The Da Vinci Code, Nuts, and so on does not inspire the hope that the average cerebrum is in excellent health. It’s not just that you read, it’s what you read that counts.” This sort of thing—and it’s a regrettably common sneer in our broadsheet newspapers—must drive school librarians, publishers, and literacy campaigners nuts. In Britain, more than twelve million adults have a reading age of thirteen or under, and yet some clever-dick journalist still insists on telling us that unless we’re reading something proper, then we might as well not bother at all.

  But what’s proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that’s fo
r sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell—were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters. I have on my desk here a James Lee Burke novel, a thriller in the Dave Robicheaux series, which sports on its covers ringing endorsements from the Literary Review, the Guardian, and the Independent on Sunday, so there’s a possibility that somebody who writes for a broadsheet might approve… Any chance of this giving my gray matter a workout? How much of a stretch is it for a nuclear physicist to read a book on nuclear physics? How much cleverer will we be if we read Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck’s beautiful, simple novella? Or Tobias Wolff’s brilliant This Boy’s Life, or Lucky Jim, or To Kill a Mockingbird? Enormous intelligence has gone into the creation of all these books, just as it has into the creation of the iPod, but intelligence is not transferable. It’s there to serve a purpose.

  But there it is. It’s set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work; otherwise they’re a waste of time. And so we grind our way through serious, and sometimes seriously dull, novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive. Please, please, put it down.

  And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book—The Da Vinci Code, maybe—because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don’t mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that’s what you want to read, it’s fine by me, because here’s something else no one will ever tell you: if you don’t read the classics, or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.