Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books Page 5
Smoking is rubbish, most of the time. But if I’d never smoked, I’d never have met Kurt Vonnegut. We were both at a huge party in New York, and I sneaked out onto the balcony for a cigarette, and there he was, smoking. So we talked—about C. S. Forester, I seem to remember. (That’s just a crappy and phony figure of speech. Of course I remember.) So tell your kids not to smoke, but it’s only fair to warn them of the down side, too: that they will therefore never get the chance to offer the greatest living writer in America a light.
February 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Old School—Tobias Wolff
Train—Pete Dexter
Backroom Boys—Francis Spufford
You Are Not a Stranger Here—Adam Haslett
Eats, Shoots and Leaves—Lynn Truss
BOOKS READ:
Enemies of Promise—Cyril Connolly
What Just Happened?—Art Linson
Clockers—Richard Price
Eats, Shoots and Leaves—Lynn Truss
Meat Is Murder—Joe Pernice
Dusty in Memphis—Warren Zanes
Old School—Tobias Wolff
Introducing Time—Craig Callender and Ralph Edney
PLUS: a couple of stories in You Are Not a Stranger Here; a couple of stories in Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme; a couple of stories in Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry? by Elizabeth McCracken.
My first book was published just over eleven years ago and remains in print, and though I observed the anniversary with only a modest celebration (a black-tie dinner for forty of my closest friends, many of whom were kind enough to read out the speeches I had prepared for them), I can now see that I should have made more of a fuss: in Enemies of Promise, which was written in 1938, the critic Cyril Connolly attempts to isolate the qualities that make a book last for ten years.
Over the decades since its publication, Enemies of Promise has been reduced pretty much to one line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” which is possibly why I was never previously very interested in reading it. What are you supposed to do if the pram in the hall is already there? You could move it out into the garden, I suppose, if you have a garden, or get rid of it and carry the little bastards everywhere, but maybe I’m being too literal-minded.
Enemies of Promise is about a lot more than the damaging effects of domesticity, however; it’s also about prose style, and the perils of success, and journalism, and politics. Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. (Ironically, the copy I found on the shelf belongs to one of the mothers of my children. I wonder if she knew, when she bought it twenty years ago, that she would one day partially destroy a literary career? Connolly would probably argue that she did. He generally takes a pretty dim view of women, who “make crippling demands on [a writer’s] time and money, especially if they set their hearts on his popular success.” Bless ’em, eh? I’m presuming, as Connolly does, that you’re a man. What would a woman be doing reading a literary magazine anyway?)
Connolly spends the first part of the book dividing writers into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular. (He is crankily thorough in this division, by the way. He even goes through the big books of the twenties year by year, and marks them with a V or an M: “1929—H. Green, Living (V); W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (M); Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (V); Lawrence, Pansies (V); Joyce, Fragments of a Work in Progress (M),” and so on. One hesitates to point it out—it’s too late now—but shouldn’t Connolly have been getting on with his writing, rather than fiddling around with lists? That’s one of your enemies, right there.) And then, having thus divided, he spends a lot of time despairing of both camps. “The Mandarin style… is beloved of literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the title of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.” (Yay, Cyril! Way to go!) Meanwhile, “According to Gide, a good writer should navigate against the current; the practitioners in the new vernacular are swimming with it; the familiarities of the advertisements in the morning paper, the matey leaders in the Daily Express, the blather of the film critics, the wisecracks of the newsreel commentators, the know-all autobiographies of political reporters, the thrillers and ’teccies… are all swimming with it too.” (Cyril, you utter ass. You think Hemingway wrote like that lot? Have another look, mate.) Incidentally, the “know-all autobiographies of political reporters”—that was a whole genre in the nineteen-thirties? Boy.
The invention of paperbacks, around the time Connolly was writing Enemies of Promise, changed everything. Connolly’s ten-year question could fill a book in 1938 because the answer was genuinely complicated then; books really could sit out the vicissitudes of fashion on library shelves, and then dust themselves off and climb back down into readers’ laps. Paperbacks and chain bookstores mean that a contemporary version of Enemies of Promise would consist of one simple and uninteresting question: “Well, did it sell in its first year?” My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then. They might have passed all the Connolly tests, but they’re dead in the water anyway.
You end up muttering back at just about every ornately constructed pensée that Connolly utters, but that’s one of the joys of this book. At one point, he strings together a few sentences by Hemingway, Isherwood, and Orwell in an attempt to prove that their prose styles are indistinguishable. But the point, surely, is that though you can make Connolly’s sentence-by-sentence case easily enough, you’d never confuse a book by Orwell with a book by Hemingway—and that’s what they were doing, writing books. Look, here’s a plain, flat, vernacular sentence:
So I bought a little city (it was Galveston, Texas) and told everybody that nobody had to move, we were going to do it just gradually, very relaxed, no big changes overnight.
This is the tremendous first line of Donald Barthelme’s story “I Bought a Little City” (V); one fears that Connolly might have spent a lot of time looking at the finger, and ignored what it was pointing at. (“See, he bought a whole city, Cyril! Galveston, Texas! Oh, forget it.”) The vernacular turned out to be far more adaptable than Connolly could have predicted.
Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature—match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. (M) or (V)? Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was PG Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here; Connolly is sniffy about him several times over the course of Enemies of Promise, and presumes that his stuff won’t last five minutes, but he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
The Polysyllabic Spree, the twelve terrifyingly beatific young men and woman who run this magazine, have been quiet of late—they haven’t been giving me much trouble, anyway. A friend who works in the same building has heard the ominous rustle of white robes upstairs, however, and he reckons they’re planning something pretty big, maybe something like another Jonestown. (That makes sense, if you think about it. The robes, the eerie smiles, “the Believer”… if you find a free sachet of powdered drink, or—more likely—an edible poem in this month’s issue, don’t touch it.) Anyway, while they’re thus distracted, I shall attempt to sneak a snark under the wire: Tobias Wolff’s Old School is too short. Oh, come on, guys! That’s different from saying it’s too long! Too long means you didn’t like it! Too short means you did!
The truth is, I’ve been reading more short books recently because I need to bump up the numbers in the Books Read column—six of this month’s seven were really pretty scrawny. But Old School I would have read this month, the month of its publication, no matter
how long it was: Wolff’s two volumes of memoir, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, are perennial sources of writerly inspiration, and you presumably know how good his stories are. Old School is brilliant—painful, funny, exquisitely written, acute about writers and literary ambition. (Old School is set right at the beginning of the sixties, in a boys’ private school, and you get to meet Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.) But the problem with short novels is that you can take liberties with them: you know you’re going to get through them no matter what, so you never set aside the time or the commitment that a bigger book requires. I fucked Old School up; I should have read it in a sitting, but I didn’t, and I never gave it a chance to leave its mark. We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a somewhat labored joke about a misplaced comma and a panda) is Britain’s number-one best seller at the moment, and it’s about punctuation, and no, I don’t get it, either. It’s a sweet, good-humored book, and it’s grammatically sound and all, but, you know… it really is all about how to use a semicolon and all that. What’s going on? One writer I know suspects that the book’s enormous success is due to the disturbing rise of the Provincial Pedant, but I have a more benign theory: that when you hear about it (and you hear about it a lot, at the moment), you think of someone immediately, someone you know and love, whose punctuation exasperates you and fills them full of self-loathing. I thought of Len, and my partner thought of Emily, neither of whom could place an apostrophe correctly if their lives depended on it. (Names have been changed, by the way, to protect the semiliterate.) And I’m sure Len and Emily will receive a thousand copies each for Christmas and birthdays, and other people will buy a thousand copies for their Lens and Emilys, and in the end the book will sell a quarter of a million copies, but only two hundred different people will own them. I enjoyed the fearful bashing that Lynn Truss gives to the entertainment industry—the Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice (sic), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (sic), the fabricated English pop band Hear’Say (sic)—and the advice she quotes from a newspaper style manual: “Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling,” which helps to explain a lot of literary fiction. I had never before heard of the Oxford comma (used before the “and” that brings a list to a close), and I didn’t know that Jesus never gets a possessive “s,” just because of who He is. I never really saw the possessive “s” as profane, or even very secular, but there you go.
The most irritating book of the month (can’t you feel the collective heart of the Spree beating a little faster?) was Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder. One can accept, reluctantly, Pernice’s apparently inexhaustible ability to knock out brilliant three-minute pop songs—just about any Pernice Brothers record contains half a dozen tunes comparable to Elvis Costello’s best work. But now it turns out that he can write fiction too, and so envy and bitterness become unavoidable. Meat Is Murder and Warren Zanes’s Dusty in Memphis are both part of a new and neat little “33-and-a-third” series published by Continuum; Pernice is the only writer who has chosen to write a novella about a favorite album, rather than an essay; his story is set in 1985, and is about high school and suicide and teen depression and, tangentially, the Smiths. Warren Zanes’s effort, almost the polar opposite of Pernice’s, is a long, scholarly and convincing piece of nonfiction analyzing the myth of the American South. Endearingly, neither book mentions the relevant records as much as you’d expect: the music is a ghostly rather than physical presence. I liked Art Linson’s What Just Happened?, one of those scabrous, isn’t-Hollywood-awful? books written by someone—a producer, in this case (and indeed in most other cases, e.g. Julia Phillips, Lynda Obst)—who knows what he’s talking about. I can’t really explain why I picked it up, however; perhaps I wanted to be made grateful that I work in publishing, rather than film, and that’s what happened.
Clockers was my big book of the month, the centerpiece around which I can now arrange the short books so that they look functional—pretty, even, if I position them right. I cheated a little, I know—Clockers is essentially a thriller, so it didn’t feel as though I’d had to work for my 650 pages—but it was still a major reading job. Why isn’t Richard Price incredibly famous, like Tom Wolfe? His work is properly plotted, indisputably authentic and serious-minded, and it has soul and moral authority.
Clockers asks—almost in passing, and there’s a lot more to it than this—a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? Price’s central characters, brothers Strike (complicatedly bad, a crack dealer) and Victor (complicatedly good, the minimum wage guy) act out something that feels as inevitable and as durable as a Bible story, except with a lot more swearing and drugs. Clockers is—eek—really about the contradictions of capitalism.
I’ve been trying to write a short story that entails my knowing something about contemporary theories of time—hence Introducing Time—but every time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry. This actually inhibits my reading pretty badly, due to not being able to see. I’m OK with time theorists up until, say, St. Augustine, and then I start to panic, and the panic then gives way to actual weeping. By my estimation, I should be able to understand Newton by the time I’m 850 years old—by which time I’ll probably discover that some smartass has invented a new theory, and he’s out of date anyway. The short story should be done some time shortly after that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, because it’s killing me.
March 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
The Amateur Marriage—Anne Tyler
The Eclipse—Antonella Gambotto
The Complete Richard Hannay—John Buchan
Selected Letters—Gustave Flaubert
Vietnam-Perkasie—W. D. Ehrhart
BOOKS READ:
Some of Flaubert’s letters
Not Even Wrong—Paul Collins
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World—Francis Wheen
Liar’s Poker—Michael Lewis
Some of Greenmantle—John Buchan
How to Give Up Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good—Gillian Riley
So this last month was, as I believe you people say, a bust. I had high hopes for it, too; it was Christmas-time in England, and I was intending to do a little holiday comfort reading—David Copperfield and a couple of John Buchan novels, say, while sipping an eggnog and heroically ploughing my way through some enormous animal carcass or other. I’ve been a father for ten years now, and not once have I been able to sit down and read several hundred pages of Dickens during the Christmas holidays. Why I thought it might be possible this year, now that I have twice as many children, is probably a question best discussed with an analyst: somewhere along the line, I have failed to take something on board. (Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours’ reading-time while kids are awake. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.)
If I’m honest, however, it wasn’t just snot-nosed children who crawled between and all over me and Richard Hannay. One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception—Blonde on Blonde might mash u
p The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four-week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music. Sure, there will always be gaps and blind spots, but I’ve been watching and listening for a long time, and I’ll never again have the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began. This month, however, the cultural highlight of the month was a rock and roll show—two shows, actually, one of which took place in a pub called the Fiddler’s Elbow in Kentish Town, North London. The Fiddler’s Elbow is not somewhere you would normally expect to find your most memorable drink of the month, let alone your most memorable spiritual moment, but there you go: God really is everywhere. Anyway, against all the odds, and even though they were fighting above their weight, these shows punched the books to the floor. And they were good books, too.