Stuff I've Been Reading
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 Sir John 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 flavours. You might wish to point out that Lewis wasn’t one of the starving, and so accessing flavours 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 favourite 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 grief-stricken 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 non-fiction 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 any more. 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 thoughts, 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: Elegy for an Obsessive Love – Miranda Seymour
★ The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game – 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 favourite 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 view
s 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-flavoured 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 vowels 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 world view.
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 reread 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 judgement, 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 every football team in the USA 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 non-fiction. 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.
The Blind Side is funny, too. Michael’s first game for his high school is made distinctive by him lifting up his 220-pound opponent and taking him through the opposition benches, across the cinder track surrounding the pitch, and halfway across a neighbouring field before he is stopped by players and officials from both sides. (Oher had been irritated and surprised by the opponent’s trash-talking – he later told his coach he was going to put the lippy kid back on his team bus.) And the formal interview between Oher and an investigator from the NCAA, the organization whose job it is to determine whether any illegal inducements have been offered to influence a promising footballer’s choice of college, is equally memorable. It’s not just Oher’s attempts to list his brothers and sisters that baffle the investigator; it’s the opulence of his surroundings, too. The Tuohys are Ole Miss alumni, desperate for Michael to take the scholarship being offered by their alma mater, while trying to avoid putting inappropriate pressure on him. But isn’t Oher’s whole new life – the access to the jet, the new car, the pool, the exclusive private high school – a form of inappropriate pressure? The baffled investigator eventually decides not, but she is clearly perplexed by the atypicality of the arrangement.
Ian McEwan has hit that enviable moment that comes to a novelist only very rarely: he has written himself into a position where everyone wants to read his latest book now, today, before any other bastard comes along and ruins it. He’s genuinely serious and genuinely popular, in the UK at least, and in an age where our tastes in culture are becoming ever more refined, and therefore ever more fractured, he is almost single-handedly reviving the notion of a chattering class by providing something that we can all chatter about. On Chesil Beach is, for me, a return to top form after the unevenness of Saturday. It’s unusual, on occasions painfully real, and ultimately very moving.
Philip Larkin famously wrote that ‘Sexual intercourse b
egan / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ On Chesil Beach is set on a July night in 1962, and sexual intercourse is about to begin for Edward and Florence, married that afternoon, and painfully inexperienced. Edward wants it and Florence doesn’t, and that, pretty much, is where the drama and the pain of the novel lie.
On Chesil Beach is packed with all the period detail one might expect, and occasionally it can feel as though McEwan’s working off a checklist; there’s the bad food, the CND marches, the naivety about the Soviet Union, the social-realist movies, the Beatles and the Stones … Hold on a minute. The Beatles and the Stones? ‘He played her “clumsy but honourable” cover versions of Chuck Berry songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.’ Well, not before July 1962 he didn’t. (The sentence refers to the couple’s courtship.) What’s strange about this anachronism is that McEwan must, at some stage, have thought of the Larkin poem when he was writing this – it might even have inspired him in some way. So if the Beatles’ first LP was released in the same year sexual intercourse was invented, what exactly was he playing her in the months leading up to July 1962? ‘Love Me Do’ was released towards the end of that year, and there was nothing else recorded yet; the Stones, meanwhile, didn’t produce anything until the following year. Does it matter? It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but I suspect that it does, a little. The Beatles really did belong to a different age, metaphorically and literally. I hereby offer my services as a full-time researcher.