One of the souls at the bottom of the lake belongs to the mother of Ruth, the novel’s teenage narrator, and of her sister Lucille; Helen drove into the lake, calmly and deliberately, when her daughters were young. Her father, the girls’ grandfather, is down there somewhere too, along with the passengers on a train that came off the bridge that crosses the water. Ruth and Lucille never knew their father, so eventually their aunt Sylvie comes to live with them. She’s not much of a mother figure, Sylvie. She sits in the dark surrounded by empty tin cans and old newspapers, and yearns to go back to traveling around on the railroads, but she stays anyway. Have you ever seen that great Stanley Spencer picture, The Cookham Resurrection? It depicts the dead coming alive again, sleepy and bewildered, in the small, pretty, and (otherwise) unremarkable Thameside village where Spencer lived. I’m sure that Robinson must have had the painting in some part of her extraordinary mind when she wrote Housekeeping. There is that same strange fusion of the humdrum and the visionary, and though Fingerbone, the bleak little town where the novel is set, clearly isn’t as cute as Cookham, it still seems an unlikely location for waking dreams about a reunion of the living and all the people we have ever lost. (“Families should stay together,” says Sylvie at the end of the book. “Otherwise things get out of control. My father, you know. I can’t even remember what he was like, I mean when he was alive. But ever since, it’s Papa here and Papa there, and dreams.”)
It’s quite clear to me now, having read her two novels, that Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s greatest living writers, and certainly there’s no one else like her. I think I am using that phrase literally: I have never come across a mind like this one, in literature or anywhere else, for that matter. Sometimes her singular seriousness, and her insistent concentration on the sad beauty of our mortality, make you laugh, in an Anthony Burgess kind of way. Pools and ponds and lakes “taste a bit of blood and hair,” observes Ruth, with customary Robinsonian good cheer. “One cannot cup one’s hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up.” She may be a great writer, but you wouldn’t want her on your camping holiday, would you? (I know, I know, that’s a cheap joke, and I’m making the schoolboy error of confusing narrator and author; Marilynne Robinson almost certainly spends her camping holidays singing Beach Boys songs and trying to give everyone wedgies.)
We have, from time to time in these pages, expressed our impatience with a certain kind of literary fiction. (By “these pages,” I mean the two I’m given. And by “we,” I mean “I.” The Spree would never express their impatience with literary fiction. In fact, “the duller the better” is engraved on the gates, in enormous letters, at Spree Castle.) To us, it can sometimes seem overwrought, pedestrian, po-faced, monotonous, out of touch; we would argue that literary fiction must take some of the blame for the novel’s sad disappearance from the center of our culture. But sometimes, a book just can’t help being literary; it can’t do anything about its own complication, because its ideas defy simple expression. It took me forever to read Housekeeping, but it’s not possible to read this short book quickly, because it comes fitted with its own speed bumps: the neo–Old Testament prose, exactly the right language for Robinson’s heartbreaking, prophetic images. And I’m glad I wasn’t able to race through it, too, because the time I spent with it means that it lives with me still.
I have always prized the accessible over the obscure, but after reading Housekeeping I can see that in some ways the easy, accessible novel is working at a disadvantage (not that Housekeeping is inaccessible, but it is deep, and dark and rich): it’s possible to whiz through it without allowing it even to touch the sides, and a bit of side-touching has to happen if a book is going to be properly transformative. If you are so gripped by a book that you want to read it in the mythical single sitting, what chance has it got of making it all the way through the long march to your soul? It’ll get flushed out by something else before it’s even halfway there. The trouble is that most literary novels don’t do anything but touch the sides. They stick to them like sludge, and in the end you have to get the garden hose out. (I have no idea what that might mean. But I had to escape from the metaphor somehow.)
Neither of the other books I read this month were sludgy, at least. I read and loved Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince recently, so I wanted to check out one of his earlier books. Unlike Citizen Vince, Over Tumbled Graves belongs firmly within the crime genre, although it’s not formulaic—it actually plays cleverly with the serial-killer formula. I enjoyed it a lot, but on the evidence of the recent book, Walter is a writer who is heading for territory that gives him more freedom than genre fiction allows. Under the Believer guidelines, the second novel must remain nameless because I hated it so much. I was recommended it by a friend with normally impeccable taste, and he’s not alone—my paperback copy contains blurbs from a couple of clever literary figures who really should know better. Is the phrase “Deliciously politically incorrect” used with the same gay abandon in the U.S.? You come across it all the time here, and usually it means, quite simply, that a book or a movie or a TV program is racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic; there is a certain kind of cultural commentator who mysteriously associates these prejudices with a Golden Age during which we were allowed to do lots of things that we are not allowed to do now. (The truth is that there’s no one stopping them from doing anything. What they really object to is being recognized as the antisocial pigs they really are.)
Anyway, this book is “deliciously politically incorrect.” The narrator, who fancies himself as a cross between James Bond and Bertie Wooster, thinks it’s funny to transpose the r s and l s in dialogue spoken by Chinese people, and has what he clearly regards as sound advice for women in the process of being raped: “lie quite still, try to enjoy it. The choice is a simple one: a brief and possibly not unpleasant invasion of one’s physical privacy—or a painful bashing causing the loss of one’s good looks and perhaps one’s life.” There may well have been men like this in the 1970s, when this book was written, but they were not clever men. It would have been torture to listen to them for two minutes at a bus stop, and you certainly don’t want to hang around with them while they narrate a whole book. To compound the reader’s misery, this narrator favors a jocular, florid circumlocution intended to invoke the spirit of Wodehouse, who is unwisely mentioned twice in the first fifty pages. I ended up hurling him across the room. At the time of writing, I haven’t been able to confront the friend who recommended the book, but there will, I’m afraid, be bloodshed.
I really want to read every book I bought this month. That’s true of every month, of course, and usually nothing happens, but this month I really really want to read the books I bought. I have just been to a wonderful literary festival in Iceland, where I spent time with Siri Hustvedt and Andrey Kurkov and lots of other interesting, companionable writers; and it’s true that there is a slight possibility, judging from my track record, that either of these novels might fall off the bedside pile at some stage in the future, but surely they can see that the commitment is there? And the two works of nonfiction, by John Carey and Ernst Gombrich, have the most perfect titles imaginable: I desperately need to know what the uses of the arts are, and the great John Carey, who wrote the great The Intellectuals and the Masses, is undoubtedly the man to tell me, and thus make me feel better about the ways in which I waste my time. He may even tell me that I’m not wasting my time, as long as he manages to get solitaire and football under the arts umbrella. The title of Gombrich’s book, meanwhile, cleverly isolates the precise area in which I am most ignorant. How did he know?
February 2006
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Eminent Churchillians—Andrew Roberts
The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax—Andrew Roberts
The Tender
Bar: A Memoir—J. R. Moehringer
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil—George Saunders
Only in London—Hanan Al-Shaykh
Traffics and Discoveries—Rudyard Kipling
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare—G. K. Chesterton
Ghosting: A Double Life—Jennie Erdal
Untold Stories—Alan Bennett
Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985—Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite
Scenes from Life—William Cooper
BOOKS READ:
Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985—Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite
On Beauty—Zadie Smith
Five Days in London, May 1940—John Lukacs
All the King’s Men—Robert Penn Warren
Only in London—Hanan Al-Shaykh
What Good Are the Arts?—John Carey
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare—G. K. Chesterton
If, as a recent survey in the UK suggested, most people buy books because they like to be seen reading rather than because they actually enjoy it, then I would suggest that you can’t beat a collection of letters by an author—and if that author is a poet, then so much the better. The implication is clear: you know the poet’s work inside out (indeed, what you’re saying is that if you read his or her entire oeuvre one more time, then the lines would ring round and round in your head like a Kelly Clarkson tune), and you now need something else, something that might help to shed some light on some of the more obscure couplets.
So there I am, reading Larkin’s letters every chance I get, and impressing the hell out of anyone who spots me doing so. (Never mind that I never go anywhere, and that therefore the only person likely to spot me doing so is my partner, who at the time I’m most likely to be reading Larkin’s letters is very much a sleeping partner.) And what I’m actually reading is stuff like this: “Katherine Mansfield is a cunt.” “I think this [poem] is really bloody cunting fucking good.” “I have just made up a rhyme: After a particularly good game of rugger / A man called me a bugger / Merely because in a loose scrum / I had my cock up his bum.” “Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss: in point of fact I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies and generally misbehaved myself.” And so on. In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it: you look like un homme ou femme sérieux/sérieuse, but you feel like a twelve-year-old who’s somehow being allowed to read Playboy in an English lesson. And what you come to realize is that the lifestyle of a naughty twelve-year-old is enervating to the max, if you’re a grown-up; indeed, there are quite a few thirteen-year-olds who would find great chunks of Larkin’s correspondence embarrassingly puerile.
The irony is that I was drawn to Larkin’s letters through that beautiful poem “Church Going,” which makes a case for the value of churches long after organized religion has lost its appeal and its point: “And that much never can be obsolete / Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.” This last line was quoted in an article I was reading in the Economist, of all places, and it struck a post-Gilead chord with me, so I reread a few of the poems and then decided that I’d like access to the prose version of the mind that created them. And yes, you can see where Larkin’s hunger to become more serious came from; if I had a mouth like that, I’d have wanted to pay frequent visits to God’s house, too. Larkin writes brilliantly and enthusiastically about his jazz records, and every now and again there’s a peach of a letter about writing:
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, apropos 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 were 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, Penn’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 5/10/1940. 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.