Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis (2020)
Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis (2020)
Part III-Dissolutions: Antepenultimate
1 | The Shadow-Line…Nobodaddy
For a while they all talked about a report on the financial toll of pandemic childhood obesity. That generation would be sickly, true, and very expensive to treat; on the other hand, they would cost practically nothing to police, being too bulky and cumbrous to brawl, burgle, mug, rape, or flee. Elena said,
‘I keep thinking the ferry’s going to sink,’ said Elena. ‘It’s the cheap food. Cheap food is drenched in what they call saturated fats.’
‘We all know it’s not their fault,’ said Rosamund, ‘but you still feel they couldn’t get that way without buckling down to it.’
I said, ‘Saul, your Sorella. In Bellarosa. She got that way on purpose. For a reason.’
‘Yes, she did in a sense. And for a good reason.’
‘A noble reason. Obeying a noble instinct.’*4 (262)
At some point in the afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table with Rachael, Sharon, and Eliza; and Sharon was talking about her predecessor (as nanny to Rosie Bellow), saying,
‘And she seemed such a nice girl on the surface. Very sensible and responsible.’
‘Mm, I remember,’ said Rachael.
‘Very well brought up. No one dreamed she was such a…’ Sharon checked herself and glanced at the attentive Eliza. ‘No one dreamed she was such an ess el you tee.’
Eliza said, ‘Why was she a slut?’
This was followed by a rush of laughter (and a second rush, when I passed it on to the others)…English is ‘a beautiful language’, I would later be told at a dinner party in Switzerland by a group of European writers; and this surprised me. Italian is beautiful, Spanish is beautiful, French is beautiful, and I’m prepared to accept that even German is or can be jolie laide. But English? It is impressively advanced, I knew: no diacritical marks (no cedillas, no umlauts); ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘grammatical’ gender (cf. das Mädchen, where ‘girl’ is neuter); and an immense vocabulary.*7 Still, the thesaurus gets very thin when it comes to ‘amusement’; it is very hard, in English, to describe laughter (266).
A faint rattling noise from behind - Rosamund, having returned, was coming out to join me. Her movements seemed hurried, yet she paused, and with almost pantomimic thoroughness she closed, she sealed, the double-layered door. Sealed it for sound. And even then - after the usual hug (or perhaps not so usual, more urgent, more heat-seeking)- she whispered,
‘For this class - don’t expect too much from him.’ She said it almost entreatingly. ‘He can’t…’
I waited. And I remembered something she told me on the phone only a month or two ago: that one day when Saul was teaching he faltered (in mid-paragraph, in mid-sentence) and trailed off (‘And normally he’d be flying’), and he gave a sudden frown, as if feeling a palpable occlusion.
‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’
‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’
A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?
And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out)- but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.*10 (272)
I was slow to feel it coming over me, but an unfamiliar - an unrecognisable - mental state was imposing itself; it was something like a surfeit of significance, with too many elements and arguments struggling to cohere. I couldn’t control them - I had no idea what went where. It reminded me of the most painful gropings of authorship, when you’re unmanned by sheer complexity - only here I was in real life and real time, facing an arduousness normally found only in pen and ink, and not in flesh and blood.*13 (273-4)
How would he usher in the new reality? A great deal would depend on his opening sentence. After hours of circular thought it was beginning to feel to me like a novelistic challenge: the fundamental challenge, which meets you twenty times a day, of finding the right tone.*17 And Christopher, with his extravagant idiolect… (285)
Footnotes
*4 Like Desirée Squadrino, Sorella Fonstein, the heroine of a late-period Bellow novel, is a girl from New Jersey; and she is fabulously fat: ‘She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock’…During the war Sorella stayed put in America, but her husband, club-footed Harry Fonstein, escaped only by a miracle from his appointment with Auschwitz, and crossed the Atlantic very comprehensively bereaved. The narrator respects and responds to Sorella’s intelligence and integrity. ‘I never lost sight of Fonstein’s history, or of what it meant to be the survivor of such destruction. Maybe Sorella was trying to incorporate in fatty tissue some portion of what he had lost.’ The Bellarosa Connection (1989).
*10 The writer’s life is tripartite, divided between writing and reading and… oh yeah, living. Don’t forget living. That has to be got done too. If you can’t read then you clearly can’t write, so all you can do is live. And then stop living. There’s no avoiding that either. As James Last, the ailing hero of Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, puts it: ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’
*13 Real life is almost always complicated, but it is hardly ever complex. When Freud called death ‘the complex symbol’, he meant that it contained many levels and many themes, all very hard to reconcile and combine. I’m now fairly sure that my singular mental state that day at BU was the result of a memento mori; it had been brought home to me that my mind, too, was mortal, and open to erasure…
*17 Literary critics call it ‘decorum’. In colloquial English decorum means ‘in keeping with good taste and propriety’. Literary decorum means ‘the concurrence of style and content’, and is of course wholly inattentive to propriety and taste.
2 | Hitchens Goes to Houston…He’s an ox
And I was thinking of the two of them in hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all in waiting rooms. Sickness is itself a waiting room…Many, many people have written with great penetration on sickness, on the estrangement from the world of will and action, the indignity, the onerousness, but not many have evoked the boredom, as Christopher has: how really incredibly boring it is. ‘It bores even me,’ he wrote…
It would freeze my blood, for instance, to see an appointment-book entry that promised morning with lawyers, afternoon with doctors; but in Washington, when all this began, that was Christopher’s daily routine. Now, later on, he was in Houston (that famous fortress on the medical frontier), and it was doctors all day long (292).
Two things were and would remain undiscussed. First, I wasn’t going to tell Hitch about Phoebe and the Larkin complication (inactive for a while but quietly reignited by Letters to Monica); you think you keep no secrets from your closest friend, but no one tells anyone everything. Second, neither of us was likely to bring up the fact that Larkin died of oesophageal cancer at the age of sixty-three. And, for us, sixty-three was in plain sight - visible to the naked eye.
‘With Monica,’ I said when we were back at the table. ‘…Okay, here’s a question for you. Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?’
‘Mine? Worst in what sense?’
‘You know, the least attractive and the most boring…Or put it this way. The least attractive, the most boring, the most embarrassing in company, the most garrulous, the most self-important, and the worst fuck. Because that’s Monica.’
He said, ‘You think? Maybe she was the best fuck. Look at the others.’
‘No. Keep reading. Later on he says, I can’t tell whether you’re feeling anything. You don’t seem to like anything more than anything else…That’s not what you’d write to your best fuck. So go on - make a mental composite. Now. Imagine you went out with her, not for a week, not for six months, but for thirty-five years. Oh yeah, and this is a chick who votes Conservative. Confident and proud, she writes, of “my conservatism”.’
‘Christ.’ For the first time he looked really shaken. ‘My conservatism.’
‘Such was Monica. I last saw her in the uh, the early eighties. He brought her to dinner at Dad’s. And I tell you, brother, I tell you, she was a real…’
‘And so were all the others. Well I say all. All three or four of them.’
‘He was a genteel poltroon-that’s what I’ve come to think. Fastidious, prissy. He lacked courage, in all departments except poetry. Especially in the sack.’
‘Is it…Do you need courage in the sack?’
‘Have you come to the billet-doux where he says all sex is a form of male bullying - male “cruelty”? Bending someone else to your will, he says.’
‘I don’t think so. I’m on page…forty. I’ve skimmed ahead a bit. All those highminded excuses about his low sex drive.’
‘Well it’ll give you a twinge, this paragraph. There’s no actual duress, but you can’t help going through some of the same motions. You know - put your legs there. Flip over, darling. Now spin round…Decades ago I was in bed with Lily, uh, after the act, and she said, “Right. I’ll show you what it’s like being a girl.” She’s really strong, Lily, and she had me do the splits and hooked my feet round the back of my neck. All the time rutting breathily up against me. And it was certainly very forceful. And enlightening. And incredibly funny. I think I actually shat myself laughing…It’s one of my most cherished memories.’
‘He didn’t have any cherished memories. Where’s that bit?…Nothing will be worth looking back on, I know that for certain. For certain! There will be nothing but remorse and regret for opportunities missed. And he wrote that aged thirty-four.’
‘Terrifying. I like looking back on my lovelife, and I’m sure you do too. But not everyone does. Maybe most people don’t. The sexually unlucky, the sexually lonely. There’s infinite misery in that (303-4).’
‘What’s that line in one of Julian’s early novels? How we are in the sack governs how we see the history of the world. Or words to that effect.’
‘I remember. Which sounds like a leap too, but there’s definitely a connection.’
‘And it might partly explain why Larkin never had a fucking word to say about the history of the world. His lovelife was a void, so he…’
‘So he didn’t know what the stakes were. Humanly. So he wasn’t moved to speak (305).’
3 | Politics and the Bedroom…Not left wing enough
…Happiness, as a source of beauty. This somewhat tragic theory came over me slowly and much later on, after I’d taken my younger daughters to and from school a few thousand times. In the first year the girlchildren were almost without exception magical to look at. In the third year there was a significant minority whose eyes had lost much of their light (prideful fathers, angry mothers?). And by the fifth year a kind of apartheid had taken hold: the division between the happy and the not so happy, I came to think - as well as between the appealing and the not so appealing… Oh, this subject is as fiendishly complex as death. Which comes first? Are they happy because they’re appealing or are they appealing because they’re happy? Or is it that you can’t be one without the other (313)?
Hedonism was luxury. Anna in herself, in her physical person, was luxury. She was opulent, high church, sweet tooth (316).
Footnote
*1 ‘You’re upper class and you’ve got a very loud voice. Is it congenital?’ I once asked an upper-class friend. ‘Yes. It comes’, he blared, ‘from centuries of talking across very large rooms.’ If upper-class girls were in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution, which they were, it came from centuries of loudly asking for what they wanted and expecting to get it.
4 | Hitchens Stays On in Houston…The synchrotron
Stateside - and you learn all this by anecdote, atmosphere, and osmosis - adults of all ages imagine and anticipate illness or injury with a two-tier queasiness wholly unknown in Britain (and in all the other developed democracies except South Africa). On the question of healthcare, as on the question of guns, facts and figures lose their normal powers of suasion. It is no cause for embarrassment when the World Health Organization ranks America thirty-seventh in quality of service; and it may even be a point of pride that America comes a clear first, besting all rivals, in cost per capita.*3 On this question America will go on failing to put two and two together, and for a little clutch of very American reasons (321).
A marginally better-phrased version of the same distaste was put to me by John Updike, in the panoramic setting of Mass. Gen., or Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston (the year was 1987). In the pre-interview chat I was absorbing the sight of hundreds of Updike’s compatriots (and rough contemporaries) milling about the place in search of bargains (or good buys or sweet deals) on longevity, and I couldn’t help saying,
‘Look at them. Well, it’s a shameful spectacle. To my eyes.’
‘It’s our system,’ he said. ‘Anything else would be unAmerican.’
Which was a tautology, as any truthful answer on this matter is bound to be. It was not the highly individualised boho Updike who talked to me about healthcare in Mass. General; it was the lumpen bohunk Updike, the Rabbit Angstrom side of Updike - which is certainly there and is also the reason the Rabbit novels (particularly volumes three and four) are so good and so inner. But Rabbit was saying what almost all Americans say, or whisper: the more you earn, the longer you deserve to live.*4 For-profit healthcare is such an obvious moral and economic fiasco that only ideology - in the form of inherited and unexamined beliefs - could possibly explain its survival.
Rabbitism is especially strident on the healthcare question because the basic aversion is to spending money on the poor- who, it is felt, got that way through moral unregeneracy. This was the prevalent view in mid-nineteenth-century England, and clarifies the meaning of Bumble the Beadle’s repeated references (in Oliver Twist) to ‘them wicious paupers’. Bumble, one of the vilest characters in all Dickens, hates and fears the poor-because he can so vividly see himself among them. But in America everyone hates and fears the poor, even the very rich (322).
Footnotes
*3 You feel like a crazy professor for saying so, but the US spends about a fifth of its GDP on healthcare, while Sweden spends about a twelfth; and in life expectancy America comes in just behind Costa Rica. Here, free healthcare is never called ‘free healthcare’; it is superstitiously known as ‘the single-payer system’ - where the single payer turns out to be the government. ‘Free healthcare’ doesn’t sit well on the native tongue. It would confuse the sleep of a fully monetised society; every American subliminally accepts that, in the land of the free, absolutely nothing at all should be free of charge.
*4 In the course of the (mainly literary) interview that followed I effusively praised ‘The City’, Updike’s long short story about a man falling very ill on a business trip. Years later it occurred to me that Updike on American health had affinities with Gogol on Russian serfdom: as citizens they might have seemed to accept it, but as artists they rejected it tout à fait. See Dead Souls; and see ‘The City’ and much else, including Rabbit’s lengthy hospitalisations…The theme of literary self-contradiction - meaning differences between the conscious and subconcious mind - cries out for a monograph. Dickens, in his ‘editorial’ voice, championed incarceration for bad language and flogging for bigamy, and approved the practice of strapping mutinous sepoys to the mouths of artillery pieces and firing cannonballs through them. All these positions are undermined by his fiction - and not just his fiction: in American Notes, Dickens (who elsewhere denounced black suffrage as ‘a melancholy absurdity’) writes hauntingly about passing from free territory into slave states, and declares that the ambient deformation is palpable in the very physiognomies of the whites…Updike, too, was capable of giving his inner hick access to the typewriter. In his memoir Self-Consciousness, the chapter called ‘On Not Being a Dove’ (i.e., on being a hawk on Vietnam) is unreconstructed - and self-pitying - Rabbit: ‘It was all very well for civilised little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft-evaders, but the US had nobody to hide behind.’ Updike continues this strophe by dully repeating, word for word, the number-one herd-think justification for prolonging the war: ‘Credibility must be maintained.’ Which is a dismal cliché even among bureaucrats.
5 | And say why it never worked for me…Invidia
But that articulacy, that penetration, could sometimes approach the miraculous. Lawrence spoke German and was married to a German (Frieda von Richthofen); and he had a real grasp of the central divide in German modernity: the divide between the tug to the west and the tug to the east, between ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’, between progressivism and reaction, between democracy and dictatorship (for a retrospective, see Michael Burleigh’s Germany Turns Eastwards). Sydney went there in the late 1930s and had no sense that anything was wrong - at a time when most visitors found its militarised somnambulism ‘terrifying’. Lawrence went there in 1928 and showed us what the human antennae are capable of:
It is as if the life had retreated eastward. As if the German life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east…The moment you are in Germany, you know. It feels empty, and, somehow menacing…
[Germany] is very different from what it was two and a half years ago [1926], when I was here. Then it was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to Europe, for a sort of reconciliation. Now that is over. The inevitable, mysterious barrier, and the great leaning of the German spirit is once more eastward, towards Tartary.
…Returning yet again to the destructive East, that produced Atilla… But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of their still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and listen to the night. There is a sense of danger…Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.
1928, not 1933. Not 1939, and not 1940 - by which time the exiled historian Sebastian Haffner was writing Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, where he came to the following conclusion:
This point must be grasped because otherwise nothing can be understood. And all partial acquaintance is worthless and misleading unless it is thoroughly digested and absorbed. It is this: Nazism is no ideology but a magic formula which attracts a definite type of men. It is a form of ‘characterology’ not ideology. To be a Nazi means to be a type of human being.
And the National Socialist Weltanschauung ‘has no other aim than to collect and rear this species’: ‘Those who, without pretext, can torture and beat, hunt and murder, are expected to gather together and be bound by the iron chain of common crime…’
And this is the ethos Sydney Larkin ‘admired’ or was ‘really batty about’; this is the ethos his son cautiously ‘disliked’ (331-2).
Q: What could have steered the tremulous undergraduate into this morbid and forsaken cul-de-sac? A: Having a father like Sydney (and being very young).
When it was all so obvious. Even the most reactionary writer in the English canon, Evelyn Waugh, saw the elementary simplicity of September 1939. As Guy Crouchback, the hero of the WW2 trilogy Sword of Honour, puts it:
He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off…Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
This much had long been clear to everybody: Naziism meant war (and for its enemies a just war par excellence). And, when war came, what type of young man would scorn a place in it - any place whatever (334)?
‘Something to do with violence / A long way back’. I think what we are seeing here is PL’s unconscious mind (very tardily) beginning at least to register what he could never absorb. People can be violent non-kinetically; and Larkin Senior was an intensely violent man. Sebastian Haffner in 1940 identified the essence of National Socialism: it was a rallying cry for sadists. And Sydney heard that call.
How lastingly extraordinary it is. Larkin’s fastidious soul was shaken by the Patsy visitation: ‘it seemed a glimpse’, he informed Monica, ‘of another, more horrible world.’ That world was bohemia, whose (sloppy but pacifistic) ethos repelled him all his life. As for the ethos of Bavaria and the Brown House and the Beer Hall Putsch-Larkin never seemed to mind that his father was a votary of the most organised and mechanised cult of violence the world has yet known…
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Well, whether or not this dad meant to, here is a clear case of Mission Accomplished. As Philip’s sister Kitty said after the cremation, ‘We’re nobody now. He did it all (347).’
Part IV-Penultimate
How to Write: The Mind’s Ear
There really are such things as destined moods. At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself - and that’s your lot, that’s your destiny. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You have found your destined mood, and it has found you, too (369).
Like Elmore Leonard,*2 Vonnegut was a popular - or demotic - artist gifted with an exceptional inner ear. Which meant that his prose was almost wholly free of ‘false quantities’ (in the non-technical sense): free of rhymes, chimes, repetitions, toe-stubs, letdowns, free of anything, in short, that makes the careful reader pause without profit. A near-frictionless verbal surface is usually the result of much blood, toil, tears, and sweat. I’ll be giving you a few tips on how to streamline the process (371).
Footnote
*2 And the last time I saw Elmore was at another literary gala in New York (November 2012), where he in his turn won an award for Lifetime Achievement. That night I gave an introductory speech, praising inter alia Leonard’s wholly original and swingeingly effective way with tense. He uses not the past tense (‘he lived in’), not the imperfect (‘he was living in’), not the historic present (‘he lives in’- the present tense used to vivify completed actions, as in Updike’s Rabbit books), and not quite the present tense; he uses - or he invents - a present tense indefinitely suspended (‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan’, ‘Bobby saying’, ‘Dawn saying’). In Riding the Rap a louche character at a louche party is said to be ‘burning herb’ and (prudently) ‘maintaining on reefer’. And it is a kind of marijuana tense, vague and creamy, opening up a lag in time…After the presentations Elmore and I went outside (twice) for a smoke and a discussion of another seminal crime writer, George V. Higgins. Later we parted with embraces and warm words. His destined mood appeared to be one of slightly agitated high spirits. He was eighty-seven. And he never saw eighty-eight.
2 | Saul: Idlewild
‘Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. But the effect it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use. [The subject of my book] was just how well or, mostly, how badly writers have described madness.*8
‘Shakespeare got it right. Lear, of course. Cerebral atherosclerosis, a senile organic disease of the brain. Periods of mania followed by amnesia. Rational episodes marked by great dread of the renewed onset of mania. That way madness lies - let me shun that - no more of that.
‘Perhaps even more striking - Ophelia. In fact it’s such a good description that this subdivision of schizophrenia is known as the Ophelia Syndrome even to those many psychiatrists who have never seen or read the play. It’s very thoroughly set up - young girl of meek disposition, no mother, no sister, the brother she depends on not available, lover apparently gone mad, mad enough anyway to kill her father. Entirely characteristic that a girl with her kind of upbringing should go round spouting little giggling harmless obscenities when mad.
‘The play’s full of interesting remarks about madness. Polonius. You remember he has a chat with Hamlet, the fishmonger conversation, and is made a fool of - the very model of a dialogue between stupid questioner and clever madman as seen by that, er, that unusual person R. D. Laing. Polonius says, I will take my leave of you, my lord. And Hamlet says, You cannot take from me anything I would more willingly part withal, except my life, except my life.
‘Very clever, very droll. But actually Hamlet’s only pretending to be mad, isn’t he. Polonius gets halfway to the point. How pregnant sometimes his replies are, he says, a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of - as it happens, a remarkably twentieth-century view. Hamlet in general very cleverly behaves in a way that people who’ve never seen a madman, a madman fresh and unmedicated, expect a madman to behave.
‘In my view, though, Polonius is a rather underrated fellow. Earlier in the same scene he comes up with a very good definition of madness, not a complete definition, but an essential part of it, excluding north-north-west madness. He says, To define true madness, what is it but to be nothing else but mad?’*9 (385)
Footnote
*8 The speaker is Dr Alfred Nash, a character in Kingsley’s novel of 1984, Stanley and the Women. Nash’s monologue was based on, or made possible by, Jim Durham, a learned and literary psychologist and a close family friend…When I was in my early twenties Jim effortlessly cured me of what felt like a serious mental condition - incapacitating panic attacks on the London Underground (‘Just remember’, he said, ‘that no harm can come to you’). And I would have gone to him with the confusions induced by Phoebe Phelps in 2001; but by then he had repatriated himself to Australia, where he runs a psychiatric hospital in Sydney.
How to Write: Decorum
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an -ly adverb. The -ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Literary English seems to want to be end-stressed. Maybe it’s the iamb. With the exception of Housman and not many others, the meter of serious poetry is ti-tum (394).
3 | Philip: The Love of His Life
‘Well, getting, uh securing the interest of a poet - that makes women feel interesting. But I think it’s simpler than that. Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr Larkin, but poets don’t get much in the way of rewards, do they. Compared to dramatists and even novelists.’
‘That at least is incontrovertible.’
‘And women sense it. Poets don’t get much, so women make sure poets get women. God bless them.’ Phoebe clutched her bag and gazed about her. ‘Ah, Christopher’s here. He’s a definite Christopher, isn’t he - not a Chris. Now Dr Larkin, I can’t hog you all night. There’s a press of admirers dying to give you a pinch and a punch (405).’
1964 contained the poem I’d been meaning to look out, ‘Dockery and Son’, in fact a B-grade PL poem famous for its last four lines.*2 But the bit I wanted came in the stanza before…Funereally dressed for the occasion (‘death-suited’), the poet-narrator, who is forty-one (and wifeless and childless), pays a visit to his old college and learns that a contemporary of his, Dockery, already has a son enrolled there. And the stunned ‘I’ wonders at how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
And I thought, No. To me it wouldn’t be dilution, and not addition, either. Something more impersonal. Continuation: so that when the only end of age at last arrives, your story doesn’t just stop - doesn’t just stop dead.
Children, that was the thing (that was the next thing): you needed children. Because (or so I later came to believe) they were the ones who embodied the ordinary, the average, the near-universal push for a kind of immortality. Or so I later came to believe. I would say it out loud, gropingly, several times a day - I just want to see a fresh face…
Julia, then (I hoped), let it one day be Julia (408-9).
In the early 1980s I knew nothing much about Philip and Monica. I know a lot about them now. And nothing stands out as starkly as the letter quoted below.
They met in September 1946; by the summer of 1950 PL ‘had come to me’, as Monica quaintly put it; and in October 1952 he wrote to her with this advice:
Dear, I must sound very pompous…It’s simply that in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it…I do want to urge you with all love and kindness…I’d even go so far as to make 3 rules.
One. Never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you’re speaking to; Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don’t do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener - don’t do it! It’s most trying.
Now this is the kind of therapeutic routine that would need to be rehearsed at least twice a week. Rehearsed with all love and kindness, and also high moral energy (a smattering of sexual legitimacy would have been useful too - they were both about thirty). But it was an effort never made by him, and never made by her. In the early 1980s the Monica idiolect was just as PL described it in the early 1950s.
So they had their world, with its cosy jokes and whimsies, its pet names and imagined menageries, its confidences and indulgences, its childlike attempts at the physical (‘I’m sorry to have failed you!’). That was their own business. But when they mingled with others Philip was inflicting on the company what he had somehow managed to inflict on himself: unignorable proximity to a deafening windbag. And she wasn’t his weird sister or his crazy cousin: she was the woman you would have to call the love of his life (412-3).
Footnote
*2 ‘Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age.’
How to Write: Impersonal Forces
At the outset, before things loosen up, introduce only one character or maybe two, or possibly three, or at the very most four.
Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air - a break, a subhead, a new chapter (418).
...don’t keep them waiting too long for a stretch of clear white paper. They will be grateful for a chance to catch their breath and to brace themselves for more; and so will you.
This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root - from Latin hospes, hospit- (‘host, guest’) - readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener) (418).
I for one have never read a novel that I ‘wished I’d written’ (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing (418).
…For me it’s a journey with a destination but without maps; you have a certain place you want to get to - but you don’t know the way. As you near that goal, though (one year later, or two, or four, or six), you can probably do what Jane did: you can formulate its gist in a single phrase; and that commonplace motto can serve as a touchstone during your final revisions. This is when you begin to sense the salutary pressure to cut…Particular sentences and paragraphs will feel strained and unstable; they seem to be hinting at their own expendability. And now’s the time to consult the back of that envelope: if the passage that disquiets you has no clear bearing on the stated theme - then (with regret, having saved what you can for another day) you should let it go. What you are after, at this stage, is unity.
Writing a novel is a…is a learning experience. In the old days I would get to the end of a first draft and then flip the whole thing over, and stare at it in wonder; and then start reading. And I was always astonished and embarrassed by how little I knew about that particular fiction, how larval it seemed, and how approximate. That’s the first page. By the last page you are back where you were (and confirming that, yes, the entire cast without exception has been transformed en route: their names, their ages, even sometimes their genders)…A much milder reprise of the same experience can be expected when you come to the end of draft two.
In writing this or that novel, you are learning - you are uncovering information - about this or that novel (419).
There are three impersonal forces - three guardian spirits - hovering over the theme park of fiction; they are there to help you; they are your friends.
First: genre. If you write Westerns, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to Westerns. If you write historical romance, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to historical romance. If you write social realism, you will have the tacit support of all those attracted to society and reality - a rather larger quorum. And you have the ballast of the familiar and the everyday; you have the ballast of human interaction and the way we live now.
Second: structure. If it has energy, fictional prose will tend to be headstrong. Structure is there to keep it in line. It’s a question of chopping up the narrative and parcelling it out in a satisfying pattern. Once the pattern is formed, you can be confident that the building won’t fall apart overnight; the scaffolds are in place.
Third: the subconscious.
On this subject I hesitate to say too much - because I don’t want to spook you. The mysterious contribution of the subconscious, in particular, is spooky (it’s why Norman Mailer called his collection of his very perceptive ‘thoughts on writing’ The Spooky Art). The business of compiling a novel puts you in near-daily contact with a force that feels supernatural (and duly gives rise to superstitions) (420-1).
Most fictions, including short stories, have their origin in the subconscious. Very often you can feel them arrive. It is an exquisite sensation. Nabokov called it ‘a throb’, Updike ‘a shiver’: the sense of pregnant arrest. The subconscious is putting you on notice: you have been brooding about something without knowing it. Fiction comes from there - from silent anxiety. And now it has given you a novel to write.
∗
A few minor points.
Dialogue should be very sparely punctuated. Just use the comma, the dash, and - above all - the full stop. People talk in short sentences (however many of them they string together) (421).
Despite what some novelists still seem to believe, no one talks with colons and semicolons - not farmers, and not phoneticians. If you want to show a moment of hesitation, use the ellipsis, the dot- dot-dot (which has many other very civilised uses); it will save you the indignity of typing out such makeweight formulations as ‘She paused for thought, and then continued’. Otherwise, in dialogue, confine yourself to those marks that have some kind of aural equivalent: the comma (a short pause), the full stop (a rounded- off statement followed by a longer pause), and the dash.
The dash is a versatile little customer - but a word of warning. A single dash will do as an informal colon (among many other functions). Two dashes signal a parenthesis, like brackets (though without their slight sotto voce effect). But never present your reader with three dashes in the same sentence (as some highly distinguished writers persist in doing), typically with two serving as brackets and one as a colon. This is a sure formula for syntactical chaos.
Last and also least (so far as I’m concerned), there is the subjunctive, the verbal mood that deals in conjecture (‘if I were a carpenter’). Well, I’m pleased to report that it’s on its way out (422).
How to Write: The Uses of Variety
Many eminent writers don’t seem to sense that paragraphs are aesthetic units; so they’ll give you a short one, then a long one, then a very long one, then a medium one, then another medium one, then a short one, then a very short one, etc. Paragraphs should be aware of their immediate neighbours, and should show it by observing a flexible uniformity of length: usually medium, though retaining the right to become uniformly long or uniformly short as you vary the rhythm of the chapter. Going from short to long (and back again) resembles a change of gear. Long paragraphs are for the freeway, short paragraphs for city traffic.
∗
‘There is only one school of writing,’ said Nabokov, ‘that of talent.’ And talent can’t be taught or learned. But technique can be; and so can the foundations of palatable prose. All it asks of you is a reasonable commitment of time and trouble.
Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938) was originally - and very briefly - entitled ‘Invitation to an Execution’. Now why do you think he changed it?
‘… The repeated suffix?’
Exactly. Invitashun to an execushun. It sounds like doggerel. So keep an eye on the suffixes; maintain a safe distance between words ending (say) with -ment, or -ness, or -ing; and the same goes for prefixes, for words beginning (say) with con-, or pre-, or ex-. Try it. You’ll notice that the sentences feel more aerodynamic. Oh yes. Can you use the same word twice in a sentence? This is arguable (see below). But do try not to use the same syllable twice in a sentence (which can only be the result of inattention): ‘reporter’ and ‘importance’, ‘faction’ and ‘artefact’, and so on.
When I’m at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.
∗
As you compose and then revise a sentence, repeat it in your head (or out loud) until your ear ceases to be dissatisfied - until your tuning fork is still. Sometimes, along the way, you’ll find you want a trisyllable instead of a monosyllable, or the other way round, so you look for a more congenial synonym. It’s the rhythm, not the content, that you’re refining. And such decisions will be peculiar to you and to the rhythms of your inner voice. When you write, don’t forget how you talk.
It is here that you’ll need the thesaurus - whose function is much misunderstood, especially by the young. When I was about eighteen, I used to think that the thesaurus was there to equip me with a vocabulary brimming with arcane sonorities: why would you ever write ‘centre of attraction’ or ‘arid’, given the availability of ‘cynosure’ and ‘jejune’?
Although the passion for fancy words (and the more polysyllabic the better) is a forgivable phase or even a necessary rite of passage, it soon starts to feel like an affectation. So for years my thesaurus went unconsulted, scorned as a kind of crib. But now I use it as often as once an hour - just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations. It sits on my desk alongside the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and I often spend twenty minutes going from one to the other, making sure that the word I’m tracking down still passes the test of precision (442-4).
…Eliot said that poetry ‘is an impersonal use of words’: it has no designs on the reader, or eavesdropper, because poets are not heard - they are overheard. To a lesser extent this applies to the novelist. Sickeningly rife in discursive prose, EV [Elegant Variation] is comparatively rare in fiction - though it regularly vandalises the ‘beautiful’ sentences of Henry James (in which ‘breakfast’ becomes ‘this repaste’, ‘teapot’ becomes ‘this receptacle’, and ‘his arms’, pitiably, becomes ‘these members’) (445).
Your path as a writer will be largely determined by temperament. Are you cautious, buoyant, transgressive, methodical? It is temperament that decides the most fundamental distinction of all: are you a writer of prose or a writer of verse?
On this matter Auden’s sonnet ‘The Novelist’ wields great authority. ‘Encased in talent like a uniform’, the poet is pure royalty, to the manner born, tolerating no distractions or competing voices; the poet sings as the sole begetter. By contrast the novelist is a putschist upstart, and cannot aspire to such purity (or any purity at all), and must become ‘the whole of boredom’, ‘among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too’. The novelist is partly an everyman - and partly an innocent (446).
Part V-Ultimate: Doing the Dying
The Poet: December 1985
Maybe nobody really knew him. Except Margaret Monica Beale Jones. She knew what he was as a man (she was tough enough to sustain that) and she knew what he was as a poet.
My father’s aversion to Monica survived Larkin’s death - largely because she fell into the habit of ringing him up, most nights, to reminisce drunkenly and interminably about the love of her life. ‘Grief?’ said Kingsley after an eighty-minute session. ‘No. She’s glorying in it.’
But in truth Monica had little else to glory in, and less and less as the years went by. In 1988 she had the Collected Poems and ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (in which she and the others ‘have their world…where they work, and age, and put off men / By being unattractive’), and in 1992 she had the Selected Letters, where she saw the most elaborate belittlement of all.* Monica lived on in Newland Park, alone and semi-bedridden, until 2001. ‘Oh, he was a bugger,’ she told Andrew Motion. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’
During a stay in hospital (one of many in his final year), he was visited by Monica, of course, and also by Maeve and also by Betty (his ‘loaf-haired secretary’). ‘I didn’t want to see Maeve,’ he told Betty. ‘I wanted to see Monica to tell her I love her’…Is it merely sentimental to fantasise about a deathbed wedding (perhaps the only kind of wedding he could honestly respect)? In which case Monica would have passed her remaining sixteen years as Larkin’s widow, and not just as one of the spinsters he left behind (468-9).
Footnote
* Of his (never-finished) third novel Larkin wrote to Patsy in 1953: ‘You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.’
Postludial
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent - don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting - yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting (498).
Part III-Dissolutions: Antepenultimate
1 | The Shadow-Line…Nobodaddy
For a while they all talked about a report on the financial toll of pandemic childhood obesity. That generation would be sickly, true, and very expensive to treat; on the other hand, they would cost practically nothing to police, being too bulky and cumbrous to brawl, burgle, mug, rape, or flee. Elena said,
‘I keep thinking the ferry’s going to sink,’ said Elena. ‘It’s the cheap food. Cheap food is drenched in what they call saturated fats.’
‘We all know it’s not their fault,’ said Rosamund, ‘but you still feel they couldn’t get that way without buckling down to it.’
I said, ‘Saul, your Sorella. In Bellarosa. She got that way on purpose. For a reason.’
‘Yes, she did in a sense. And for a good reason.’
‘A noble reason. Obeying a noble instinct.’*4 (262)
At some point in the afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table with Rachael, Sharon, and Eliza; and Sharon was talking about her predecessor (as nanny to Rosie Bellow), saying,
‘And she seemed such a nice girl on the surface. Very sensible and responsible.’
‘Mm, I remember,’ said Rachael.
‘Very well brought up. No one dreamed she was such a…’ Sharon checked herself and glanced at the attentive Eliza. ‘No one dreamed she was such an ess el you tee.’
Eliza said, ‘Why was she a slut?’
This was followed by a rush of laughter (and a second rush, when I passed it on to the others)…English is ‘a beautiful language’, I would later be told at a dinner party in Switzerland by a group of European writers; and this surprised me. Italian is beautiful, Spanish is beautiful, French is beautiful, and I’m prepared to accept that even German is or can be jolie laide. But English? It is impressively advanced, I knew: no diacritical marks (no cedillas, no umlauts); ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘grammatical’ gender (cf. das Mädchen, where ‘girl’ is neuter); and an immense vocabulary.*7 Still, the thesaurus gets very thin when it comes to ‘amusement’; it is very hard, in English, to describe laughter (266).
A faint rattling noise from behind - Rosamund, having returned, was coming out to join me. Her movements seemed hurried, yet she paused, and with almost pantomimic thoroughness she closed, she sealed, the double-layered door. Sealed it for sound. And even then - after the usual hug (or perhaps not so usual, more urgent, more heat-seeking)- she whispered,
‘For this class - don’t expect too much from him.’ She said it almost entreatingly. ‘He can’t…’
I waited. And I remembered something she told me on the phone only a month or two ago: that one day when Saul was teaching he faltered (in mid-paragraph, in mid-sentence) and trailed off (‘And normally he’d be flying’), and he gave a sudden frown, as if feeling a palpable occlusion.
‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’
‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’
A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?
And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out)- but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.*10 (272)
I was slow to feel it coming over me, but an unfamiliar - an unrecognisable - mental state was imposing itself; it was something like a surfeit of significance, with too many elements and arguments struggling to cohere. I couldn’t control them - I had no idea what went where. It reminded me of the most painful gropings of authorship, when you’re unmanned by sheer complexity - only here I was in real life and real time, facing an arduousness normally found only in pen and ink, and not in flesh and blood.*13 (273-4)
How would he usher in the new reality? A great deal would depend on his opening sentence. After hours of circular thought it was beginning to feel to me like a novelistic challenge: the fundamental challenge, which meets you twenty times a day, of finding the right tone.*17 And Christopher, with his extravagant idiolect… (285)
Footnotes
*4 Like Desirée Squadrino, Sorella Fonstein, the heroine of a late-period Bellow novel, is a girl from New Jersey; and she is fabulously fat: ‘She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock’…During the war Sorella stayed put in America, but her husband, club-footed Harry Fonstein, escaped only by a miracle from his appointment with Auschwitz, and crossed the Atlantic very comprehensively bereaved. The narrator respects and responds to Sorella’s intelligence and integrity. ‘I never lost sight of Fonstein’s history, or of what it meant to be the survivor of such destruction. Maybe Sorella was trying to incorporate in fatty tissue some portion of what he had lost.’ The Bellarosa Connection (1989).
*10 The writer’s life is tripartite, divided between writing and reading and… oh yeah, living. Don’t forget living. That has to be got done too. If you can’t read then you clearly can’t write, so all you can do is live. And then stop living. There’s no avoiding that either. As James Last, the ailing hero of Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, puts it: ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’
*13 Real life is almost always complicated, but it is hardly ever complex. When Freud called death ‘the complex symbol’, he meant that it contained many levels and many themes, all very hard to reconcile and combine. I’m now fairly sure that my singular mental state that day at BU was the result of a memento mori; it had been brought home to me that my mind, too, was mortal, and open to erasure…
*17 Literary critics call it ‘decorum’. In colloquial English decorum means ‘in keeping with good taste and propriety’. Literary decorum means ‘the concurrence of style and content’, and is of course wholly inattentive to propriety and taste.
2 | Hitchens Goes to Houston…He’s an ox
And I was thinking of the two of them in hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all in waiting rooms. Sickness is itself a waiting room…Many, many people have written with great penetration on sickness, on the estrangement from the world of will and action, the indignity, the onerousness, but not many have evoked the boredom, as Christopher has: how really incredibly boring it is. ‘It bores even me,’ he wrote…
It would freeze my blood, for instance, to see an appointment-book entry that promised morning with lawyers, afternoon with doctors; but in Washington, when all this began, that was Christopher’s daily routine. Now, later on, he was in Houston (that famous fortress on the medical frontier), and it was doctors all day long (292).
Two things were and would remain undiscussed. First, I wasn’t going to tell Hitch about Phoebe and the Larkin complication (inactive for a while but quietly reignited by Letters to Monica); you think you keep no secrets from your closest friend, but no one tells anyone everything. Second, neither of us was likely to bring up the fact that Larkin died of oesophageal cancer at the age of sixty-three. And, for us, sixty-three was in plain sight - visible to the naked eye.
‘With Monica,’ I said when we were back at the table. ‘…Okay, here’s a question for you. Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?’
‘Mine? Worst in what sense?’
‘You know, the least attractive and the most boring…Or put it this way. The least attractive, the most boring, the most embarrassing in company, the most garrulous, the most self-important, and the worst fuck. Because that’s Monica.’
He said, ‘You think? Maybe she was the best fuck. Look at the others.’
‘No. Keep reading. Later on he says, I can’t tell whether you’re feeling anything. You don’t seem to like anything more than anything else…That’s not what you’d write to your best fuck. So go on - make a mental composite. Now. Imagine you went out with her, not for a week, not for six months, but for thirty-five years. Oh yeah, and this is a chick who votes Conservative. Confident and proud, she writes, of “my conservatism”.’
‘Christ.’ For the first time he looked really shaken. ‘My conservatism.’
‘Such was Monica. I last saw her in the uh, the early eighties. He brought her to dinner at Dad’s. And I tell you, brother, I tell you, she was a real…’
‘And so were all the others. Well I say all. All three or four of them.’
‘He was a genteel poltroon-that’s what I’ve come to think. Fastidious, prissy. He lacked courage, in all departments except poetry. Especially in the sack.’
‘Is it…Do you need courage in the sack?’
‘Have you come to the billet-doux where he says all sex is a form of male bullying - male “cruelty”? Bending someone else to your will, he says.’
‘I don’t think so. I’m on page…forty. I’ve skimmed ahead a bit. All those highminded excuses about his low sex drive.’
‘Well it’ll give you a twinge, this paragraph. There’s no actual duress, but you can’t help going through some of the same motions. You know - put your legs there. Flip over, darling. Now spin round…Decades ago I was in bed with Lily, uh, after the act, and she said, “Right. I’ll show you what it’s like being a girl.” She’s really strong, Lily, and she had me do the splits and hooked my feet round the back of my neck. All the time rutting breathily up against me. And it was certainly very forceful. And enlightening. And incredibly funny. I think I actually shat myself laughing…It’s one of my most cherished memories.’
‘He didn’t have any cherished memories. Where’s that bit?…Nothing will be worth looking back on, I know that for certain. For certain! There will be nothing but remorse and regret for opportunities missed. And he wrote that aged thirty-four.’
‘Terrifying. I like looking back on my lovelife, and I’m sure you do too. But not everyone does. Maybe most people don’t. The sexually unlucky, the sexually lonely. There’s infinite misery in that (303-4).’
‘What’s that line in one of Julian’s early novels? How we are in the sack governs how we see the history of the world. Or words to that effect.’
‘I remember. Which sounds like a leap too, but there’s definitely a connection.’
‘And it might partly explain why Larkin never had a fucking word to say about the history of the world. His lovelife was a void, so he…’
‘So he didn’t know what the stakes were. Humanly. So he wasn’t moved to speak (305).’
3 | Politics and the Bedroom…Not left wing enough
…Happiness, as a source of beauty. This somewhat tragic theory came over me slowly and much later on, after I’d taken my younger daughters to and from school a few thousand times. In the first year the girlchildren were almost without exception magical to look at. In the third year there was a significant minority whose eyes had lost much of their light (prideful fathers, angry mothers?). And by the fifth year a kind of apartheid had taken hold: the division between the happy and the not so happy, I came to think - as well as between the appealing and the not so appealing… Oh, this subject is as fiendishly complex as death. Which comes first? Are they happy because they’re appealing or are they appealing because they’re happy? Or is it that you can’t be one without the other (313)?
Hedonism was luxury. Anna in herself, in her physical person, was luxury. She was opulent, high church, sweet tooth (316).
Footnote
*1 ‘You’re upper class and you’ve got a very loud voice. Is it congenital?’ I once asked an upper-class friend. ‘Yes. It comes’, he blared, ‘from centuries of talking across very large rooms.’ If upper-class girls were in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution, which they were, it came from centuries of loudly asking for what they wanted and expecting to get it.
4 | Hitchens Stays On in Houston…The synchrotron
Stateside - and you learn all this by anecdote, atmosphere, and osmosis - adults of all ages imagine and anticipate illness or injury with a two-tier queasiness wholly unknown in Britain (and in all the other developed democracies except South Africa). On the question of healthcare, as on the question of guns, facts and figures lose their normal powers of suasion. It is no cause for embarrassment when the World Health Organization ranks America thirty-seventh in quality of service; and it may even be a point of pride that America comes a clear first, besting all rivals, in cost per capita.*3 On this question America will go on failing to put two and two together, and for a little clutch of very American reasons (321).
A marginally better-phrased version of the same distaste was put to me by John Updike, in the panoramic setting of Mass. Gen., or Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston (the year was 1987). In the pre-interview chat I was absorbing the sight of hundreds of Updike’s compatriots (and rough contemporaries) milling about the place in search of bargains (or good buys or sweet deals) on longevity, and I couldn’t help saying,
‘Look at them. Well, it’s a shameful spectacle. To my eyes.’
‘It’s our system,’ he said. ‘Anything else would be unAmerican.’
Which was a tautology, as any truthful answer on this matter is bound to be. It was not the highly individualised boho Updike who talked to me about healthcare in Mass. General; it was the lumpen bohunk Updike, the Rabbit Angstrom side of Updike - which is certainly there and is also the reason the Rabbit novels (particularly volumes three and four) are so good and so inner. But Rabbit was saying what almost all Americans say, or whisper: the more you earn, the longer you deserve to live.*4 For-profit healthcare is such an obvious moral and economic fiasco that only ideology - in the form of inherited and unexamined beliefs - could possibly explain its survival.
Rabbitism is especially strident on the healthcare question because the basic aversion is to spending money on the poor- who, it is felt, got that way through moral unregeneracy. This was the prevalent view in mid-nineteenth-century England, and clarifies the meaning of Bumble the Beadle’s repeated references (in Oliver Twist) to ‘them wicious paupers’. Bumble, one of the vilest characters in all Dickens, hates and fears the poor-because he can so vividly see himself among them. But in America everyone hates and fears the poor, even the very rich (322).
Footnotes
*3 You feel like a crazy professor for saying so, but the US spends about a fifth of its GDP on healthcare, while Sweden spends about a twelfth; and in life expectancy America comes in just behind Costa Rica. Here, free healthcare is never called ‘free healthcare’; it is superstitiously known as ‘the single-payer system’ - where the single payer turns out to be the government. ‘Free healthcare’ doesn’t sit well on the native tongue. It would confuse the sleep of a fully monetised society; every American subliminally accepts that, in the land of the free, absolutely nothing at all should be free of charge.
*4 In the course of the (mainly literary) interview that followed I effusively praised ‘The City’, Updike’s long short story about a man falling very ill on a business trip. Years later it occurred to me that Updike on American health had affinities with Gogol on Russian serfdom: as citizens they might have seemed to accept it, but as artists they rejected it tout à fait. See Dead Souls; and see ‘The City’ and much else, including Rabbit’s lengthy hospitalisations…The theme of literary self-contradiction - meaning differences between the conscious and subconcious mind - cries out for a monograph. Dickens, in his ‘editorial’ voice, championed incarceration for bad language and flogging for bigamy, and approved the practice of strapping mutinous sepoys to the mouths of artillery pieces and firing cannonballs through them. All these positions are undermined by his fiction - and not just his fiction: in American Notes, Dickens (who elsewhere denounced black suffrage as ‘a melancholy absurdity’) writes hauntingly about passing from free territory into slave states, and declares that the ambient deformation is palpable in the very physiognomies of the whites…Updike, too, was capable of giving his inner hick access to the typewriter. In his memoir Self-Consciousness, the chapter called ‘On Not Being a Dove’ (i.e., on being a hawk on Vietnam) is unreconstructed - and self-pitying - Rabbit: ‘It was all very well for civilised little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft-evaders, but the US had nobody to hide behind.’ Updike continues this strophe by dully repeating, word for word, the number-one herd-think justification for prolonging the war: ‘Credibility must be maintained.’ Which is a dismal cliché even among bureaucrats.
5 | And say why it never worked for me…Invidia
But that articulacy, that penetration, could sometimes approach the miraculous. Lawrence spoke German and was married to a German (Frieda von Richthofen); and he had a real grasp of the central divide in German modernity: the divide between the tug to the west and the tug to the east, between ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’, between progressivism and reaction, between democracy and dictatorship (for a retrospective, see Michael Burleigh’s Germany Turns Eastwards). Sydney went there in the late 1930s and had no sense that anything was wrong - at a time when most visitors found its militarised somnambulism ‘terrifying’. Lawrence went there in 1928 and showed us what the human antennae are capable of:
It is as if the life had retreated eastward. As if the German life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east…The moment you are in Germany, you know. It feels empty, and, somehow menacing…
[Germany] is very different from what it was two and a half years ago [1926], when I was here. Then it was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to Europe, for a sort of reconciliation. Now that is over. The inevitable, mysterious barrier, and the great leaning of the German spirit is once more eastward, towards Tartary.
…Returning yet again to the destructive East, that produced Atilla… But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of their still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and listen to the night. There is a sense of danger…Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.
1928, not 1933. Not 1939, and not 1940 - by which time the exiled historian Sebastian Haffner was writing Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, where he came to the following conclusion:
This point must be grasped because otherwise nothing can be understood. And all partial acquaintance is worthless and misleading unless it is thoroughly digested and absorbed. It is this: Nazism is no ideology but a magic formula which attracts a definite type of men. It is a form of ‘characterology’ not ideology. To be a Nazi means to be a type of human being.
And the National Socialist Weltanschauung ‘has no other aim than to collect and rear this species’: ‘Those who, without pretext, can torture and beat, hunt and murder, are expected to gather together and be bound by the iron chain of common crime…’
And this is the ethos Sydney Larkin ‘admired’ or was ‘really batty about’; this is the ethos his son cautiously ‘disliked’ (331-2).
Q: What could have steered the tremulous undergraduate into this morbid and forsaken cul-de-sac? A: Having a father like Sydney (and being very young).
When it was all so obvious. Even the most reactionary writer in the English canon, Evelyn Waugh, saw the elementary simplicity of September 1939. As Guy Crouchback, the hero of the WW2 trilogy Sword of Honour, puts it:
He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off…Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
This much had long been clear to everybody: Naziism meant war (and for its enemies a just war par excellence). And, when war came, what type of young man would scorn a place in it - any place whatever (334)?
‘Something to do with violence / A long way back’. I think what we are seeing here is PL’s unconscious mind (very tardily) beginning at least to register what he could never absorb. People can be violent non-kinetically; and Larkin Senior was an intensely violent man. Sebastian Haffner in 1940 identified the essence of National Socialism: it was a rallying cry for sadists. And Sydney heard that call.
How lastingly extraordinary it is. Larkin’s fastidious soul was shaken by the Patsy visitation: ‘it seemed a glimpse’, he informed Monica, ‘of another, more horrible world.’ That world was bohemia, whose (sloppy but pacifistic) ethos repelled him all his life. As for the ethos of Bavaria and the Brown House and the Beer Hall Putsch-Larkin never seemed to mind that his father was a votary of the most organised and mechanised cult of violence the world has yet known…
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Well, whether or not this dad meant to, here is a clear case of Mission Accomplished. As Philip’s sister Kitty said after the cremation, ‘We’re nobody now. He did it all (347).’
Part IV-Penultimate
How to Write: The Mind’s Ear
There really are such things as destined moods. At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself - and that’s your lot, that’s your destiny. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You have found your destined mood, and it has found you, too (369).
Like Elmore Leonard,*2 Vonnegut was a popular - or demotic - artist gifted with an exceptional inner ear. Which meant that his prose was almost wholly free of ‘false quantities’ (in the non-technical sense): free of rhymes, chimes, repetitions, toe-stubs, letdowns, free of anything, in short, that makes the careful reader pause without profit. A near-frictionless verbal surface is usually the result of much blood, toil, tears, and sweat. I’ll be giving you a few tips on how to streamline the process (371).
Footnote
*2 And the last time I saw Elmore was at another literary gala in New York (November 2012), where he in his turn won an award for Lifetime Achievement. That night I gave an introductory speech, praising inter alia Leonard’s wholly original and swingeingly effective way with tense. He uses not the past tense (‘he lived in’), not the imperfect (‘he was living in’), not the historic present (‘he lives in’- the present tense used to vivify completed actions, as in Updike’s Rabbit books), and not quite the present tense; he uses - or he invents - a present tense indefinitely suspended (‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan’, ‘Bobby saying’, ‘Dawn saying’). In Riding the Rap a louche character at a louche party is said to be ‘burning herb’ and (prudently) ‘maintaining on reefer’. And it is a kind of marijuana tense, vague and creamy, opening up a lag in time…After the presentations Elmore and I went outside (twice) for a smoke and a discussion of another seminal crime writer, George V. Higgins. Later we parted with embraces and warm words. His destined mood appeared to be one of slightly agitated high spirits. He was eighty-seven. And he never saw eighty-eight.
2 | Saul: Idlewild
‘Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. But the effect it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use. [The subject of my book] was just how well or, mostly, how badly writers have described madness.*8
‘Shakespeare got it right. Lear, of course. Cerebral atherosclerosis, a senile organic disease of the brain. Periods of mania followed by amnesia. Rational episodes marked by great dread of the renewed onset of mania. That way madness lies - let me shun that - no more of that.
‘Perhaps even more striking - Ophelia. In fact it’s such a good description that this subdivision of schizophrenia is known as the Ophelia Syndrome even to those many psychiatrists who have never seen or read the play. It’s very thoroughly set up - young girl of meek disposition, no mother, no sister, the brother she depends on not available, lover apparently gone mad, mad enough anyway to kill her father. Entirely characteristic that a girl with her kind of upbringing should go round spouting little giggling harmless obscenities when mad.
‘The play’s full of interesting remarks about madness. Polonius. You remember he has a chat with Hamlet, the fishmonger conversation, and is made a fool of - the very model of a dialogue between stupid questioner and clever madman as seen by that, er, that unusual person R. D. Laing. Polonius says, I will take my leave of you, my lord. And Hamlet says, You cannot take from me anything I would more willingly part withal, except my life, except my life.
‘Very clever, very droll. But actually Hamlet’s only pretending to be mad, isn’t he. Polonius gets halfway to the point. How pregnant sometimes his replies are, he says, a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of - as it happens, a remarkably twentieth-century view. Hamlet in general very cleverly behaves in a way that people who’ve never seen a madman, a madman fresh and unmedicated, expect a madman to behave.
‘In my view, though, Polonius is a rather underrated fellow. Earlier in the same scene he comes up with a very good definition of madness, not a complete definition, but an essential part of it, excluding north-north-west madness. He says, To define true madness, what is it but to be nothing else but mad?’*9 (385)
Footnote
*8 The speaker is Dr Alfred Nash, a character in Kingsley’s novel of 1984, Stanley and the Women. Nash’s monologue was based on, or made possible by, Jim Durham, a learned and literary psychologist and a close family friend…When I was in my early twenties Jim effortlessly cured me of what felt like a serious mental condition - incapacitating panic attacks on the London Underground (‘Just remember’, he said, ‘that no harm can come to you’). And I would have gone to him with the confusions induced by Phoebe Phelps in 2001; but by then he had repatriated himself to Australia, where he runs a psychiatric hospital in Sydney.
How to Write: Decorum
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an -ly adverb. The -ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Literary English seems to want to be end-stressed. Maybe it’s the iamb. With the exception of Housman and not many others, the meter of serious poetry is ti-tum (394).
3 | Philip: The Love of His Life
‘Well, getting, uh securing the interest of a poet - that makes women feel interesting. But I think it’s simpler than that. Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr Larkin, but poets don’t get much in the way of rewards, do they. Compared to dramatists and even novelists.’
‘That at least is incontrovertible.’
‘And women sense it. Poets don’t get much, so women make sure poets get women. God bless them.’ Phoebe clutched her bag and gazed about her. ‘Ah, Christopher’s here. He’s a definite Christopher, isn’t he - not a Chris. Now Dr Larkin, I can’t hog you all night. There’s a press of admirers dying to give you a pinch and a punch (405).’
1964 contained the poem I’d been meaning to look out, ‘Dockery and Son’, in fact a B-grade PL poem famous for its last four lines.*2 But the bit I wanted came in the stanza before…Funereally dressed for the occasion (‘death-suited’), the poet-narrator, who is forty-one (and wifeless and childless), pays a visit to his old college and learns that a contemporary of his, Dockery, already has a son enrolled there. And the stunned ‘I’ wonders at how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
And I thought, No. To me it wouldn’t be dilution, and not addition, either. Something more impersonal. Continuation: so that when the only end of age at last arrives, your story doesn’t just stop - doesn’t just stop dead.
Children, that was the thing (that was the next thing): you needed children. Because (or so I later came to believe) they were the ones who embodied the ordinary, the average, the near-universal push for a kind of immortality. Or so I later came to believe. I would say it out loud, gropingly, several times a day - I just want to see a fresh face…
Julia, then (I hoped), let it one day be Julia (408-9).
In the early 1980s I knew nothing much about Philip and Monica. I know a lot about them now. And nothing stands out as starkly as the letter quoted below.
They met in September 1946; by the summer of 1950 PL ‘had come to me’, as Monica quaintly put it; and in October 1952 he wrote to her with this advice:
Dear, I must sound very pompous…It’s simply that in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it…I do want to urge you with all love and kindness…I’d even go so far as to make 3 rules.
One. Never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you’re speaking to; Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don’t do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener - don’t do it! It’s most trying.
Now this is the kind of therapeutic routine that would need to be rehearsed at least twice a week. Rehearsed with all love and kindness, and also high moral energy (a smattering of sexual legitimacy would have been useful too - they were both about thirty). But it was an effort never made by him, and never made by her. In the early 1980s the Monica idiolect was just as PL described it in the early 1950s.
So they had their world, with its cosy jokes and whimsies, its pet names and imagined menageries, its confidences and indulgences, its childlike attempts at the physical (‘I’m sorry to have failed you!’). That was their own business. But when they mingled with others Philip was inflicting on the company what he had somehow managed to inflict on himself: unignorable proximity to a deafening windbag. And she wasn’t his weird sister or his crazy cousin: she was the woman you would have to call the love of his life (412-3).
Footnote
*2 ‘Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age.’
How to Write: Impersonal Forces
At the outset, before things loosen up, introduce only one character or maybe two, or possibly three, or at the very most four.
Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air - a break, a subhead, a new chapter (418).
...don’t keep them waiting too long for a stretch of clear white paper. They will be grateful for a chance to catch their breath and to brace themselves for more; and so will you.
This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root - from Latin hospes, hospit- (‘host, guest’) - readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener) (418).
I for one have never read a novel that I ‘wished I’d written’ (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing (418).
…For me it’s a journey with a destination but without maps; you have a certain place you want to get to - but you don’t know the way. As you near that goal, though (one year later, or two, or four, or six), you can probably do what Jane did: you can formulate its gist in a single phrase; and that commonplace motto can serve as a touchstone during your final revisions. This is when you begin to sense the salutary pressure to cut…Particular sentences and paragraphs will feel strained and unstable; they seem to be hinting at their own expendability. And now’s the time to consult the back of that envelope: if the passage that disquiets you has no clear bearing on the stated theme - then (with regret, having saved what you can for another day) you should let it go. What you are after, at this stage, is unity.
Writing a novel is a…is a learning experience. In the old days I would get to the end of a first draft and then flip the whole thing over, and stare at it in wonder; and then start reading. And I was always astonished and embarrassed by how little I knew about that particular fiction, how larval it seemed, and how approximate. That’s the first page. By the last page you are back where you were (and confirming that, yes, the entire cast without exception has been transformed en route: their names, their ages, even sometimes their genders)…A much milder reprise of the same experience can be expected when you come to the end of draft two.
In writing this or that novel, you are learning - you are uncovering information - about this or that novel (419).
There are three impersonal forces - three guardian spirits - hovering over the theme park of fiction; they are there to help you; they are your friends.
First: genre. If you write Westerns, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to Westerns. If you write historical romance, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to historical romance. If you write social realism, you will have the tacit support of all those attracted to society and reality - a rather larger quorum. And you have the ballast of the familiar and the everyday; you have the ballast of human interaction and the way we live now.
Second: structure. If it has energy, fictional prose will tend to be headstrong. Structure is there to keep it in line. It’s a question of chopping up the narrative and parcelling it out in a satisfying pattern. Once the pattern is formed, you can be confident that the building won’t fall apart overnight; the scaffolds are in place.
Third: the subconscious.
On this subject I hesitate to say too much - because I don’t want to spook you. The mysterious contribution of the subconscious, in particular, is spooky (it’s why Norman Mailer called his collection of his very perceptive ‘thoughts on writing’ The Spooky Art). The business of compiling a novel puts you in near-daily contact with a force that feels supernatural (and duly gives rise to superstitions) (420-1).
Most fictions, including short stories, have their origin in the subconscious. Very often you can feel them arrive. It is an exquisite sensation. Nabokov called it ‘a throb’, Updike ‘a shiver’: the sense of pregnant arrest. The subconscious is putting you on notice: you have been brooding about something without knowing it. Fiction comes from there - from silent anxiety. And now it has given you a novel to write.
∗
A few minor points.
Dialogue should be very sparely punctuated. Just use the comma, the dash, and - above all - the full stop. People talk in short sentences (however many of them they string together) (421).
Despite what some novelists still seem to believe, no one talks with colons and semicolons - not farmers, and not phoneticians. If you want to show a moment of hesitation, use the ellipsis, the dot- dot-dot (which has many other very civilised uses); it will save you the indignity of typing out such makeweight formulations as ‘She paused for thought, and then continued’. Otherwise, in dialogue, confine yourself to those marks that have some kind of aural equivalent: the comma (a short pause), the full stop (a rounded- off statement followed by a longer pause), and the dash.
The dash is a versatile little customer - but a word of warning. A single dash will do as an informal colon (among many other functions). Two dashes signal a parenthesis, like brackets (though without their slight sotto voce effect). But never present your reader with three dashes in the same sentence (as some highly distinguished writers persist in doing), typically with two serving as brackets and one as a colon. This is a sure formula for syntactical chaos.
Last and also least (so far as I’m concerned), there is the subjunctive, the verbal mood that deals in conjecture (‘if I were a carpenter’). Well, I’m pleased to report that it’s on its way out (422).
How to Write: The Uses of Variety
Many eminent writers don’t seem to sense that paragraphs are aesthetic units; so they’ll give you a short one, then a long one, then a very long one, then a medium one, then another medium one, then a short one, then a very short one, etc. Paragraphs should be aware of their immediate neighbours, and should show it by observing a flexible uniformity of length: usually medium, though retaining the right to become uniformly long or uniformly short as you vary the rhythm of the chapter. Going from short to long (and back again) resembles a change of gear. Long paragraphs are for the freeway, short paragraphs for city traffic.
∗
‘There is only one school of writing,’ said Nabokov, ‘that of talent.’ And talent can’t be taught or learned. But technique can be; and so can the foundations of palatable prose. All it asks of you is a reasonable commitment of time and trouble.
Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938) was originally - and very briefly - entitled ‘Invitation to an Execution’. Now why do you think he changed it?
‘… The repeated suffix?’
Exactly. Invitashun to an execushun. It sounds like doggerel. So keep an eye on the suffixes; maintain a safe distance between words ending (say) with -ment, or -ness, or -ing; and the same goes for prefixes, for words beginning (say) with con-, or pre-, or ex-. Try it. You’ll notice that the sentences feel more aerodynamic. Oh yes. Can you use the same word twice in a sentence? This is arguable (see below). But do try not to use the same syllable twice in a sentence (which can only be the result of inattention): ‘reporter’ and ‘importance’, ‘faction’ and ‘artefact’, and so on.
When I’m at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.
∗
As you compose and then revise a sentence, repeat it in your head (or out loud) until your ear ceases to be dissatisfied - until your tuning fork is still. Sometimes, along the way, you’ll find you want a trisyllable instead of a monosyllable, or the other way round, so you look for a more congenial synonym. It’s the rhythm, not the content, that you’re refining. And such decisions will be peculiar to you and to the rhythms of your inner voice. When you write, don’t forget how you talk.
It is here that you’ll need the thesaurus - whose function is much misunderstood, especially by the young. When I was about eighteen, I used to think that the thesaurus was there to equip me with a vocabulary brimming with arcane sonorities: why would you ever write ‘centre of attraction’ or ‘arid’, given the availability of ‘cynosure’ and ‘jejune’?
Although the passion for fancy words (and the more polysyllabic the better) is a forgivable phase or even a necessary rite of passage, it soon starts to feel like an affectation. So for years my thesaurus went unconsulted, scorned as a kind of crib. But now I use it as often as once an hour - just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations. It sits on my desk alongside the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and I often spend twenty minutes going from one to the other, making sure that the word I’m tracking down still passes the test of precision (442-4).
…Eliot said that poetry ‘is an impersonal use of words’: it has no designs on the reader, or eavesdropper, because poets are not heard - they are overheard. To a lesser extent this applies to the novelist. Sickeningly rife in discursive prose, EV [Elegant Variation] is comparatively rare in fiction - though it regularly vandalises the ‘beautiful’ sentences of Henry James (in which ‘breakfast’ becomes ‘this repaste’, ‘teapot’ becomes ‘this receptacle’, and ‘his arms’, pitiably, becomes ‘these members’) (445).
Your path as a writer will be largely determined by temperament. Are you cautious, buoyant, transgressive, methodical? It is temperament that decides the most fundamental distinction of all: are you a writer of prose or a writer of verse?
On this matter Auden’s sonnet ‘The Novelist’ wields great authority. ‘Encased in talent like a uniform’, the poet is pure royalty, to the manner born, tolerating no distractions or competing voices; the poet sings as the sole begetter. By contrast the novelist is a putschist upstart, and cannot aspire to such purity (or any purity at all), and must become ‘the whole of boredom’, ‘among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too’. The novelist is partly an everyman - and partly an innocent (446).
Part V-Ultimate: Doing the Dying
The Poet: December 1985
Maybe nobody really knew him. Except Margaret Monica Beale Jones. She knew what he was as a man (she was tough enough to sustain that) and she knew what he was as a poet.
My father’s aversion to Monica survived Larkin’s death - largely because she fell into the habit of ringing him up, most nights, to reminisce drunkenly and interminably about the love of her life. ‘Grief?’ said Kingsley after an eighty-minute session. ‘No. She’s glorying in it.’
But in truth Monica had little else to glory in, and less and less as the years went by. In 1988 she had the Collected Poems and ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (in which she and the others ‘have their world…where they work, and age, and put off men / By being unattractive’), and in 1992 she had the Selected Letters, where she saw the most elaborate belittlement of all.* Monica lived on in Newland Park, alone and semi-bedridden, until 2001. ‘Oh, he was a bugger,’ she told Andrew Motion. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’
During a stay in hospital (one of many in his final year), he was visited by Monica, of course, and also by Maeve and also by Betty (his ‘loaf-haired secretary’). ‘I didn’t want to see Maeve,’ he told Betty. ‘I wanted to see Monica to tell her I love her’…Is it merely sentimental to fantasise about a deathbed wedding (perhaps the only kind of wedding he could honestly respect)? In which case Monica would have passed her remaining sixteen years as Larkin’s widow, and not just as one of the spinsters he left behind (468-9).
Footnote
* Of his (never-finished) third novel Larkin wrote to Patsy in 1953: ‘You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.’
Postludial
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent - don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting - yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting (498).