The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done. The other day I was in a bookstore flicking through a book called something like 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (and, without naming names, you should be aware that the task set by the title is by definition impossible, because at least four hundred of the books suggested would kill you anyway), but reading begets reading—that’s sort of the point of it, surely?—and anybody who never deviates from a set list of books is intellectually dead anyway. Look at the trouble Orwell’s essays got me into. First of all there’s his long and interesting consideration of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a novel that I must confess I had written off as dated smut; George has persuaded me otherwise, so I bought it. And then, while discussing the Orwell essays with a friend, I was introduced to Norman Lewis’s astounding Naples ’44, a book which, my venerable friend seemed to be suggesting, was at least a match for any of Orwell’s nonfiction. (Oh, why be coy? My venerable friend was Stephen Frears, still best known, I like to think, as the director of High Fidelity, and an endless source of good book recommendations.)
I think he’s right. The trouble with the Orwell essays is that they are mostly of no earthly use to anyone now—and this is perhaps the first book I’ve read since I started this column that I can’t imagine any American of my acquaintance ploughing through. If you really feel you need to read several thousand words about English boys’ weeklies of the 1930s, then I wouldn’t try and stop you, but these pieces are mostly top-drawer journalism, Tom Wolfe, as it were, rather than Montaigne; Orwell is dissecting bodies that actually gave up the ghost eighty-odd years ago. This problem becomes particularly acute when he’s dissecting bodies that gave up the ghost ninety or a hundred years ago. “In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of [A. E. Housman’s] A Shropshire Lad by heart. I wonder how much impression A Shropshire Lad makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced into it; it might strike him as rather cheaply clever—probably that would be about all.”
If you try and do Orwell the service of treating him as a contemporary writer, someone whose observations make as much sense to us now as they did in 1940, then that last sentence is merely hilarious—how many bright seventeen-year-old boys do you know who might have glanced into A Shropshire Lad and found it “cheaply clever”? So even when Orwell is talking about things that he knows haven’t lasted, he is unable to anticipate their complete and utter disappearance from the cultural landscape. How was he to know that the average seventeen-year-old boy is more likely to have sampled his sister’s kidney than Housman’s poetry? It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t see 50 Cent coming.
An essay titled “Bookshop Memories,” about Orwell’s experiences working in a secondhand bookstore, notes that the three best-selling authors were Ethel M. Dell, Warwick Deeping, and Jeffrey Farnol. “Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women”—well, we all knew that—“but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists.” Ah, those were the days, when popular novelists were able to rely on the fat wives of tobacconists for half their income. Times are much harder (and leaner) now. Many is the time that I’ve wished I could tell the size-zero wives of tobacconists that I didn’t want their rotten money, but I have had to button my lip, regrettably. I have a large family to support.
One of the most bewildering lines comes in “Inside the Whale,” the long essay about the state of literature, first published in 1940, that begins with the appreciation of Henry Miller. “To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.” Is it possible to accept, say, tinned food, Hollywood films, and aspirin without accepting Stalin and Hitler? I’m afraid I am one of those cowards who would have happily invaded Poland if it meant getting hold of a couple of pills to alleviate a hangover. And what was wrong with tinned food, that all those guys banged on about it so much? (Remember Betjeman’s poem “Slough”? “Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens / Those air-conditioned, bright canteens / Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans / Tinned minds, tinned breath.”) It’s true, of course, that fresh fruit is better for you. But one would hope that, with the benefit of hindsight, Orwell, Betjeman, and the rest would concede that Belsen and the purges ranked higher up the list of the mid-twentieth century’s horrors than a nice can of peaches. Mind you, when in fifty years’ time, students examine the intellectual journalism of the early twenty-first century, they will probably find more about the vileness of bloggers and reality television than they will about the destruction of the planet.
There are some brilliant lines. How about this, from Orwell’s essay on Dickens: “What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.” There’s a great little essay called “Books v. Cigarettes,” although some will find his conclusion (books) controversial. And of course his prose is beyond reproach, muscular, readable, accessible.
Naples ’44, however, is something else altogether. Norman Lewis, who lived to be ninety-five and who published his last travel book in 2002, was an intelligence officer for the Allies; what he found when he was posted to Naples beggared belief. The Neapolitans were starving—they had eaten all the fish in the aquarium, and just about every weed by the roadside. An estimated 42,000 of the city’s 150,000 women had turned to prostitution. And yet there is so much in this short diary other than sheer misery, so many tones and flavors. You might wish to point out that Lewis wasn’t one of the starving, and so accessing flavors wasn’t a problem for him, but the variety and richness and strangeness of life in what remains one of the maddest and most neurotic cities in the world clearly demanded his attention. This is a long-winded way of saying that this book is, at times, unbearably sad, but it is also very funny and weird too. There are the doctors who specialize in the surgical restoration of virginity (although before you book your flights, ladies, you should check that they’re still working), and there are the biannual liquefactions and solidifications of the blood of saints, the relative speeds of which presage either prosperity or poverty for the city. Vesuvius erupts in the middle of all this; and of course, there’s a war going on—a war which is occasionally reminiscent of the one Tobias Wolff described in In Pharaoh’s Army. It allows for strange, pointless, occasionally idyllic trips out into the countryside, and the enemy is all around but invisible.
My favorite character, one who comes to symbolize the logic of Naples, is Lattarullo, one of the four thousand or so lawyers in Naples unable to make a living. Much of his income before the war came from acting as an “uncle from Rome,” a job which involved turning up at Neapolitan funerals and acting as a dignified and sober out-of-towner, in direct contrast to the frenzied and griefstricken native relatives. Paying for an uncle from Rome to turn up showed a touch of class. During the war, however, Lattarullo was denied even this modest supplement because Rome was occupied, and travel was impossible. So even though everyone knew Roman uncles came from Naples, the appearance of a Roman uncle at a Neapolitan funeral before the liberation of Rome would have punctured the illusion, like a boom mic visible in a movie. This is Orwell via Lewis Carroll, and if I read a better couple of hundred pages of nonfiction this year, I’ll be a happy man.
If, at the moment, you happen to be looking for a book that makes you feel good about sex, though, then I should warn you that this isn’t the one. There are too many devout Catholic wives selling themselves for a tin of fruit, and way too many sexual diseases. William Kennedy’s Ironweed is beautiful—haunted and haunting, thoughtful and visceral. But,
like Naples ’44, it is entirely without aphrodisiacal qualities. The people are too sick, and drunk, and cold, but they try it on anyway, sometimes just so they can get to sleep the night in a deserted car full of other bums. None of this matters so much to me anymore. By the time you read this I will have turned fifty, so I can’t reasonably expect very much more in that department anyway. But you—you’re young, some of you. I don’t want you to feel bad about your bodies. Yes, you will die, and your bodies will decay and rot way before then anyway. But you shouldn’t feel bad about that just yet. Actually, on second thought, the truth is that Ironweed is exactly the sort of book you should be reading when you’re young, and still robust enough to slough it off. And it’s a truly terrible book to be reading in the last few months of your forties. Is this really all that’s left?
June / July 2007
BOOKS BOUGHT:
On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan
My Life with Nye—Jennie Lee
BOOKS READ:
Novel (abandoned)—A. Non
On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan
In My Father’s House—Miranda Seymour
The Blind Side—Michael Lewis
This morning, while shaving, I listened to a reading from Anna Politkovskaya’s A Russian Diary on BBC Radio 4. It was pretty extraordinary—brutal and brave (Politkovskaya, as I’m sure you know, was murdered, presumably because of her determination to bring some of her country’s darkest wrongdoings into the light). And its depiction of a country where the state is so brazenly lawless is so bizarre that I couldn’t help but think of fiction—specifically, a novel I had just abandoned by a senior, highly regarded literary figure. Politkovskaya’s words reminded me that the reason I gave up on the novel was partly because I became frustrated with the deliberate imprecision of its language, its obfuscation, its unwillingness to give up its meaning quickly and easily. This, of course, is precisely what some people prize in a certain kind of fiction, and good luck to them. I can’t say that this kind of ambiguity is my favorite thing, and it’s certainly not what I look for first in a novel, but I know that I would have missed out on an awful lot of good stuff if I wasn’t prepared to tolerate a little incomprehension and attendant exasperation every now and again. In this novel, however, I found myself feeling particularly impatient. “A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender,” the novelist (or his omniscient narrator) tells us. Does it? Not for me it doesn’t, pal. Unless, of course, death here means “a good night’s sleep.” Or “a strong cup of coffee.” Maybe that’s it? “Death” = “a strong cup of coffee” and “the semblance of death” = some kind of coffee substitute, like a Frappuccino? Then why doesn’t he say so? There is no mistaking what the word death means in Politkovskaya’s diaries, and once again I found myself wondering whether the complication of language is in inverse proportion to the size of the subject under discussion. Politkovskaya is writing about the agonies of a nation plagued by corruption, terrorism, and despotism; the highly regarded literary figure is writing about some middle-class people who are bored of their marriage. My case rests.
The highly regarded literary figure recently quoted Irwin Shaw’s observation that “the great machines of the world do not run on fidelity,” in an attempt to explain his views on matrimony, and though this sounds pretty good when you first hear it, lofty and practical all at the same time, on further reflection it starts to fall apart. If we are going to judge things on their ability to power the great machines of the world, then we will have to agree that music, charity, tolerance, and bacon-flavored potato chips, to name only four things that we prize here at the Believer, are worse than useless.
It wasn’t just the opacity of the prose that led me to abandon the novel, however; I didn’t like the characters who populated it much, either. They were all languidly middle-class, and they drank good wine and talked about Sartre, and I didn’t want to know anything about them. This is entirely unreasonable of me, I accept that, but prejudice has to be an important part of our decision-making process when it comes to reading, otherwise we would become overwhelmed. For months I have been refusing to read a novel that a couple of friends have been urging upon me, a novel that received wonderful reviews and got nominated for prestigious prizes. I’m sure it’s great, but I know it’s not for me: the author is posh—posh English, which is somehow worse than posh American, even—and he writes about posh people, and I have taken the view that life is too short to spend any time worrying about the travails of the English upper classes. If you had spent the last half century listening to the strangled vows and the unexamined and usually very dim assumptions that frequently emerge from the mouths of a certain kind of Englishman, you’d feel entitled to a little bit of inverted snobbery.
I’m not sure, then, quite how I was persuaded to read In My Father’s House, Miranda Seymour’s memoir about her extraordinary father and his almost demented devotion to Thrumpton Hall, the stately home he came to inherit. George Seymour was a terrible snob, pathetically obsessed by the microscopic traces of blue blood that ran through his veins, comically observant of every single nonsensical English upper-class propriety—until he reached middle age, when he bought himself a motorbike and drove around England and Europe with a young man called Nick, with whom he shared a bedroom. Nick was replaced by Robbie, whom George called Tigger, after the A. A. Milne character; when Robbie shot himself in the head, a weeping George played the Disney song on a scratchy vinyl record at the funeral service. Actually, you can probably see why I was persuaded to read it: it’s a terrific story, and Miranda Seymour is too good a writer not to recognize its peculiarities and its worth. Also, the same people who have been telling me to read the posh novel told me to read the posh memoir, and I felt that a further refusal would have indicated some kind of Trotskyite militancy that I really don’t feel. It’s more a mild distaste than a deeply entrenched worldview.
Miranda Seymour owns up to having inherited her father’s snobbery, which meant that I was immediately put on the alert, ready to abandon the book and condemn the author to the legions of the unnameable, but there is nothing much here to send one to the barricades. There is one strange moment, however, a couple of sentences that I read and re-read in order to check that I wasn’t missing the irony. When Seymour goes to visit some of her father’s wartime friends to gather their recollections, she finds herself resenting what she perceives as their feelings of superiority; they saw active service and George Seymour didn’t, and the daughter is defensive on the father’s behalf. “I’ve plenty of reason to hate my father, but his achievement matches theirs. They’ve no cause to be disdainful. They fought for their country; he gave his life to save a house.”
Where does one begin with this? Perhaps one should simply point out that George died in his bed (a bed within a bedroom within one of Britain’s loveliest houses) at the age of seventy-one, so the expression “he gave his life” does not have the conventional meaning here; a more exact rendering would be something like “he put aside an awful lot of time…” It’s a curious lapse in judgment, in an otherwise carefully nuanced book.
A couple of years ago, I wrote in this column about Michael Lewis’s brilliant Moneyball; when I found during a recent trip to New York that Lewis had written a book about football, I was off to the till before you could say “Jackie Robinson.” The Blind Side is very nearly as good, I think, which is saying something, seeing as Moneyball is one of the two or three best sports books I have ever read. It cleverly combines two stories, one personal, the other an account of the recent history of the game; Lewis explains how left tackle became the most remunerative position in the game, and then allows the weight of this history to settle on the shoulders of one young man, Michael Oher, currently at Ole Miss (I’m finding my effortless use of the American vernacular strangely thrilling). Oher is six feet six, weighs 330 pounds, and yet he can run hundreds of yards in fractions of seconds. He is, as he keeps being told, a freak of nature, and he is exactly what ev
ery football team in the U.S. is prepared to offer the earth for.
He has also had a life well beyond the realms of the ordinary, which makes his story—well, I’m afraid my knowledge of the terminology has already been exhausted, so I don’t have the appropriate analogy—but in my sport we’d describe it as an open goal, and Lewis only has to tap the ball in from a couple of feet. I don’t wish to diminish the author’s achievement. Lewis scores with his customary brio, and the recognition of a good story is an enviable part of his talent. But who wouldn’t want to read about a kid who was born to a crack-addict mother and part-raised in one of the poorest parts of one of America’s poorest cities, Memphis, and ended up being adopted by a wealthy white Christian couple with their own private plane? This is material that provides the pleasures of both fiction and nonfiction. There’s a compelling narrative arc, a glimpse into the lives of others, a wealth of information about and analysis of a central element of popular American culture. There’s a touching central relationship, between Oher and his adoptive parents’ young son, Sean Jr.; there is even a cheesy, never-say-die heroine, Oher’s adoptive mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy, whose extraordinary determination to look after a boy not her own is Christian in the sense too rarely associated with the American South. This would make a great movie, although you’d need a lot of CGI to convince an audience of Michael Oher’s speed and size.