Stuff I've Been Reading Read online

  Hardy died in 1928, and one of the unexpected treats of Tomalin’s biography is her depiction of this quintessentially rural Victorian writer living a metropolitan twentieth-century life. It’s hard to believe that Hardy went to the cinema to see a film adaptation of one of his own novels, but he did; hard to believe, too, that he attended the wedding of Harold Macmillan, who was Britain’s Prime Minister in the year that the Beatles’ first album was released. What happened to Hardy after his death seemed weirdly appropriate: in a gruesome attempt to appease both those who wanted the old boy to stay in Wessex and those who wanted a flashy public funeral in London, Hardy was buried twice. His heart was cut out and buried in the churchyard at Stinsford, where he’d always hoped he’d be laid to rest; what was left of him was cremated and placed in Westminster Abbey, where his pallbearers included Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie and Edmund Gosse. Hardy was a modern celebrity, but his characters inhabited a brutal, strange, pre-industrial England.

  Such is Tomalin’s skill as a literary critic – and this is a book that restores your faith in literary criticism – that I did end up going back to the work, although it was the poetry, not the novels, that I read. The poems written immediately after the death of Hardy’s first wife, Emma, are, as Tomalin points out, quite brilliant in their …

  I think they’ve gone now. They never read on after the first couple of paragraphs, and I know they will approve of the Tomalin book, so I’m pretty sure they will leave me alone for a while, and I can tell you what’s been going on here. Older readers of this magazine may recall that I had a regular column here, up until the autumn of 2006; you may have noticed that when I was removed, I was described as being ‘on sabbatical’ or ‘on holiday’, a euphemism, I can now reveal, for ‘being re-educated’, which is itself a euphemism – and here the euphemisms must stop – for ‘being brainwashed’.

  The Polysyllabic Spree, the 365 beautiful, vacant, scary young men and women who edit this magazine, have never really approved of me reading for fun, so after several warnings I was taken by force to the holding cells in the basement of their headquarters in the Appalachian Mountains and force-fed proper literature. It’s a horrific place, as you can imagine; everywhere you can hear the screams of people who don’t want to read Gravity’s Rainbow very much because it’s too long and too hard, or people who would rather watch Elf than that Godard film where people sit in wheelbarrows and read revolutionary poetry out loud. (I saw poor Amy Sedaris down there, by the way. I won’t go into what they’ve actually done to her. Suffice to say that she won’t be making any jokes for a while.)

  Luckily, I have seen lots of films where ‘mad’ people (i.e. people whose refusal to conform results in them being labelled insane) resist all attempts by The Man to break them, and I have picked up a few tips. For example: I hid under my tongue all the Slovenian experimental novels without vowels they were trying to make me read, and spat them out later. I had a little cache of them hidden beneath my mattress, so if the worst came to the worst I could read them all at once and kill myself. Anyway, if you see me recommend a book that sounds incomprehensible, you’ll know they are taking an interest in my activities again.

  I have bought a lot of books and read a lot of books in the last few months, so this first post-brainwashing column is more in the nature of a representative selection than an actual diary. And, in any case, I have been told that there are certain books I have read recently, all novels, that I’m not allowed to talk about here. One beautiful, brilliant novel in particular, a novel that took me bloody ages to read but which repaid my effort many times over, was deemed unacceptable because its author apparently impregnated an important member of the Spree a while back (and some Spree members are more equal than others, obviously), and the Spree regard sex as being obstructive to the consumption of literature. What is the … What is the point of having a books column like this if you have to lie about what you’ve read?

  In my tireless and entirely laudable attempts to teach myself more about the past, I have been working methodically through books about individual years, namely James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. And I read the actual books, too, not just the titles and subtitles. If I read two of these year-books a week, then I’m covering a century every year, and a millennium every decade. And how many millennia are worth bothering with, really? I’m pretty excited about this project. By 2017, I should know everything there is to know about everything.

  Pedants might argue that there was more to 1599 than Shakespeare, and more to 1977 than Reggie Jackson signing for the Yankees, an event that provides the spine for Jonathan Mahler’s book. But this, surely, shows a fundamental lack of faith in the writer. Mahler has had a good look at 1977, and decided it was about Reggie Jackson; if he’d thought there was anything going on in the rest of the world worth writing about, then he would have chosen something else instead.

  Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning is not just about Reggie Jackson, of course. That New York summer there was the blackout that resulted, almost instantaneously, in twelve hours of looting and burning over an area of thirty blocks; there was a colourful mayoral race between Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch; there was the Son of Sam, and Studio 54, and a World Series for the Yankees. In those few months, New York seemed to contain so much that you can believe, while reading this book, that while Mahler can’t cover our planet, he has certainly touched on most of our major themes.

  That phrase ‘the city itself emerges as the book’s major character’, or variants thereof, is usually the last desperate refuge of the critical scoundrel, but Mahler pretty much pulls off the trick of anthropomorphizing New York, and the face that emerges is almost unrecognizable; certainly there’s been some major plastic surgery since the 1970s, and not all of us find the stretched skin and the absence of worry lines in SoHo and the Village attractive. There’s no doubt that New York is safer, less broke and more functional than it was back then. But it’s impossible to read about the city that Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning portrays so thrillingly without a little ache for something funkier.

  You know I said that you should view with suspicion any book I’m recommending that sounds dull? Well, James Shapiro’s 1599 isn’t one of them, honestly. It’s a brilliant book, riveting, illuminating and original (by which I mean, of course, that I haven’t read much like it, in all my years of devouring Shakespeare biographies), full of stuff with which you want to amaze, enlighten and educate your friends. 1599 was the year Shakespeare polished off Henry V, wrote As You Like It and drafted Hamlet. (I was partly attracted to Shapiro’s book because I’d had a similarly productive 2006 – although, unlike Shakespeare, I’m more interested in quality than quantity, possibly because I’ve got one eye on posterity.) Shapiro places these plays in their context while trying to piece together, from all available sources, Shakespeare’s movements, anxieties and interests. Both Julius Caesar and Henry V are shown to be more about England’s conflict with Ireland than we had any hope of understanding without Shapiro’s expert illumination; the section on Hamlet contains a long, lucid and unfussy explanation of how Montaigne and his essays resulted in Hamlet’s soliloquies. I’d say that 1599 has to be the first port of call now for anyone teaching or studying any of these four plays, but if you’re doing neither of those things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing you have to care about to love this book is how and why things get written.

  The ‘why’ is relatively straightforward: Shakespeare wrote for money. He had a wife, a new theatre and a large theatre company to support, and there was a frightening amount of competition from other companies. The ‘how’ is more elusive, although Shapiro does such a wonderful job of accumulating sources and inspirations that you don’t really notice the absence of the man himself, who rema
ins something of a mystery.

  Claire Tomalin and James Shapiro take different paths to their writers: there is scholarship in Tomalin’s book, of course, but she is more interested in the psychology of her subject, and in exercising her acute, sensitive critical skills than she is in history. Both books, though, are exemplary in their ability to deepen one’s understanding for and appreciation of the work, in their delight in being able to point out what’s going on in the lines on the page. We’re lucky to have both of these writers at the top of their game in the here and now.

  Robert Altman’s Nashville is one of my favourite films – or, at least, I think it is. I haven’t seen it in a while, and the last time I did, I noticed the longueurs more than I ever had before. Maybe the best thing to do with favourite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because what it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgements as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe that the reverse is true. I was eighteen when I saw Nashville for the first time, and I was electrified by its shifts in tone, its sudden bursts of feeling and meaning, its ambition, its occasional obscurity, even its pretensions. I don’t think I’d ever seen an art movie before, and I certainly hadn’t seen an art movie set in a world I recognized. So I came out of the cinema that night a slightly changed person, suddenly aware that there was a different way of doing things. None of that is going to happen again, but so what? And why mess with a good thing? Favourites should be left where they belong, buried somewhere deep in a past self.

  Jan Stuart’s The Nashville Chronicles is a loving account of the making of the film, and reading it was a good way of engaging with Altman’s finest seven hours, or however long the thing was, without having to wreck it by watching it for a fourth or fifth time. And, in any case, Nashville is a film that relies on something other than script (which was thrown out of the window before shooting started) and conventional methods of film-making for its effects, so a book like this is especially valuable in helping us understand them. There was Altman’s apparently haphazard casting – one actor was chosen when he came to another’s house to give him guitar lessons, and Shelley Duvall was a student research-scientist before being co-opted into Altman’s regular troupe. There was his famous vérité sound, which required the invention of a new recording system, and his reliance on improvisation, and his extraordinary handling of crowd scenes, which required all cast members to improvise at all times, just in case he should pick them out with the camera … Actually, there’s no way this film can be no good. Forget everything I said! Revisit your favourites regularly!

  It’s nice to be back.

  May 2007

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  ★ In My Father’s House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love – Miranda Seymour

  ★ Collected Memoirs – Julian Maclaren-Ross

  ★ Light Years – James Salter

  ★ The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness – Steven Levy

  ★ Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

  BOOKS READ:

  ★ Essays – George Orwell

  ★ (Some of) The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness – Steven Levy

  ★ Ironweed – William Kennedy

  ★ Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth – Norman Lewis

  I have been listening to my iPod on ‘shuffle’ recently and, like everyone else who does this, I became convinced that my machine was exercising a will of its own. Why did it seem to play Big Star every third song? (All iPod users come to believe that their inanimate MP3 players have recondite but real musical tastes.) And how come, if you shuffle for long enough, the initial letters of the artists picked spell out the names of your children? Confused, as always, by this and most other matters, I remembered that an English magazine had extracted a book about the iPod in which the author had dealt with the very subject of the non-random shuffle. The book turned out to be Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing, a cute (of course) little (naturally) white (what else?) hardback history of the iPod – or at least, that is how it’s billed. (The British subtitle of the book is ‘How the iPod Became the Defining Object of the Twenty-First Century’.) What the book is actually about, however – and maybe most books are, these days – is my predilection for 1980s synth-pop.

  I am not speaking metaphorically here. In an early chapter of the book, Mr Levy describes, for reasons too complicated to explain, how a fellow writer was caught listening to ‘a pathetic Pet Shop Boys tune, the sort of thing Nick Hornby would listen to on a bad day’. Now, I’m almost certain that this is supposed to be me, even though I don’t recognize my own supposed musical tastes. (The Pet Shop Boys are a bit too groovy for my liking, and their songs don’t have enough guitar on them.) I am relieved to hear, however, that I have good days and bad days, which at least opens up the possibility that on a good day I might be listening to something a little more au courant – Nirvana, say, or early Britney Spears.

  Aren’t people rude? It’s something I don’t think one can ever get used to, if you live a semi-public life – and writers, by definition, can never go any more than semi-public, because not enough people are interested in what we do. It doesn’t happen often – I don’t seem to have cropped up in Orwell’s essays, for example – but when it does, it’s always a shock, seeing yourself in a book, listening to music you don’t listen to (not, as Jerry Seinfeld said, that there’s anything wrong with the Pet Shop Boys), put there by someone you have never met and who, therefore, knows nothing about you … And what has the band done to deserve this, to borrow one of their song titles? They were mentioned in my newspaper this morning, in a diary piece about their plans for a musical adaptation of Francis Wheen’s brilliant biography of Marx; that, like so much they have done, sounds pretty cool to me. Unnerved, I skipped straight to his chapter about whether the shuffle feature is indeed random. It is, apparently.

  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 400 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 non-fiction. (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 to 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 sevente
en, 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 to 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 entitled ‘Bookshop Memories’, about Orwell’s experiences working in a second-hand bookstore, notes that the three bestselling 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.