by Nick Hornby
How I Live Now has had amazing reviews here in England—someone moderately sensible called it “a classic”—and although that might sometimes be enough to persuade me to shell out (cf. Seven Types of Ambiguity, which has received similar press), normally that wouldn’t be enough to persuade me to read the thing. Rosoff’s book, however, is delightfully short, and aimed at teenagers, and the publishers sent me a copy, so you can see the thinking here: knock off a classic in a day or so, at no personal expense, and bulk this column out a little. And that’s pretty much how things worked out.
I’m not sure that How We Live Now is a classic, though, even if a book can achieve that kind of status in the month of its publication. It’s set in a war-torn England a few years from now, and though the love affair between the cousins has a dreamy intensity, and Rosoff’s teenage voice is strong and true, her war is a little shoddy, if you ask me. London has been occupied, but by whom no one, not even the adults, seems quite sure: it could be the French, it could be the Chinese. What sort of war is that? Rosoff is aiming for a fog of half-truth and rumor, the sort of fog that most teenagers live in most of the time, and yet one is given the impression that not even Seymour Hersh would be able to shed much light on the matter of who invaded Britain and why.
I’ve been meaning to read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son for about ten years; the only thing that was stopping me from reading it was the suspicion that it might be unreadable—miserable and dreary and impossibly remote. First published (anonymously) in 1907, Father and Son describes Edmund’s relationship with his father, Philip, a marine biologist of some distinction who was also a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and whose fierce, joyless evangelism crippled his son’s childhood. In fact, Father and Son is a sort of Victorian This Boy’s Life: it’s inevitably, unavoidably painful, but it’s also tender and wry. OK, sometimes it reads like that Monty Python sketch about the Yorkshiremen, constantly trying to trump each other’s stories of deprivation (“You lived in a hole in the road? You were lucky.”): when Gosse’s mother was dying of cancer, and too sick to travel from one London borough to another for the hopeless last-chance quack treatment she was trying, she and her young son stayed in a grim boarding house in Pimlico, where Edmund was allowed to entertain her by reading from religious tracts. His pathetic treat, at the end of the day, was to read her a hymn—in the Gosse family, that was what passed for fun.
My first book, Fever Pitch, was a memoir, and I own a copy of Father and Son because some clever-dick reviewer somewhere compared the two. (I seem to remember that the comparison did me no favors, before you accuse me of showing off. Someone must have been dissed, and I can’t imagine it was Gosse.) My young life was blighted by my devotion to Arsenal Football Club, a team so dour and joyless during the late sixties and seventies that they would have been rather intimidated by the comparative exuberance and joie de vivre of the Plymouth Brethren. It’s always weird, though, for a writer to spot the same impulses and ambitions in another, especially when the two are separated by history, culture, environment, belief, and just about anything else you can think of, and I identified absolutely with more or less every page in Gosse’s book. I had hoped, when I wrote mine, that even if I were to allow myself the indulgence of writing in detail about 1960s League Cup finals, people might be prepared to put up with it if they thought there was something else going on as well; Gosse’s football-sized hole was created by religion, and filled by marine biology, so he was, in effect, both damaged and repaired by his father’s twin obsessions. (His father, meanwhile, was almost split in two by them—Darwin’s theories were more devastating for the evangelical naturalist than for just about anyone else in the country.) Father and Son is an acknowledged classic, so I had expected it to be good, but I hadn’t expected it to be lovable, or modern, nor had I expected it to speak to me. How I Live Now, by contrast, felt as if it was talking to everyone else but me—I was watching from the wings as its author addressed the multitudes. Maybe that’s why you have to give books time to live before you decide that they’re never going to die. You have to wait and see whether anyone in that multitude is really listening.
Every time I read a biography of a novelist, I discover that the novels in question are autobiographical to an almost horrifying degree. In Blake Bailey’s book about Richard Yates, for example, we learn that Yates fictionalized his mother by changing her name from Dookie to Pookie (or perhaps from Pookie to Dookie, I can’t remember now). In Nigel Jones’s Through a Glass Darkly we learn that, like Bob in The Midnight Bell, Patrick Hamilton had a disastrous crush on a prostitute, and that, like Bone in Hangover Square, his obsession with a young actress (Geraldine Fitzgerald, who appeared in Wuthering Heights alongside Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) was deranged, although he stopped short of murdering her. And, of course, like all of his characters, Hamilton was a drunk. I’m sure that a biography of Tolkien would reveal that The Lord of the Rings was autobiographical, too—that Tolkien actually fell down a hole and found a place called Central Earth, where there were a whole bunch of Bobbits. Some people—critics, mostly—would argue that this diminishes the achievement somehow, but it’s the writing that’s hard, not the invention.
See, some of us just don’t come from the right kind of background to be the subject of a literary biography. Hamilton’s father was left a hundred thousand pounds in 1884, and pissed it all away during a lifetime of utter indolence and dissolution; his first wife was a prostitute whom Hamilton Sr. imagined he could save from the streets, but the marriage didn’t work out. ’Snot fair! Why didn’t my dad ever have a thing with prostitutes? (Note to Believer fact-checker: I’ll give you his number, but I’m not making the call. He’s pretty grouchy at the best of times.)
Jenny, the prostitute in The Midnight Bell, takes center stage in The Siege of Pleasure, the second novel in the 20,000 Streets Under the Sky trilogy. Hamilton was a Marxist for much of his life, and though he ended up voting conservative, as so many English Marxists did, in his case it was because the Tories hated the Labor Party as much as he did, which at least shows a warped kind of ideological consistency. The Siege of Pleasure is in part a careful, convincing analysis of the economic and social pressures that forced Jenny onto the streets and out of her life below stairs. It’s more fun than this sounds, because Hamilton, who wrote the play Rope, which Hitchcock later filmed, loves his ominous narratives. He’s a sort of urban Hardy: everyone is doomed, right from the first page. Hamilton isolates Jenny’s plight to an evening spent boozing with a tarty friend; she gets plastered, wakes up late in the house of a man she doesn’t know, and fails to turn up at her new job, skivvying for a comically incapable trio of old people. It’s sad, but Hamilton’s laconic narrative voice is always a joy to read, and as a social historian, Hamilton is unbeatable. Who knew that you could get waiter service in pubs in the 1920s? And plates of biscuits? Biscuits! What sort of biscuits? Hamilton doesn’t say.
In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid attempts to grapple with the question that seems constantly to arise in this column, namely, Why bloody bother? Why bother reading the bastards, and why bother writing them? I’m not sure he gets a lot further than I’ve ever managed, but there are some great stats here: Zaid estimates, for example, that it would take us fifteen years simply to read a list of all the books ever published. (“Author and title”—he’s very precise. You can, presumably, add on another seven or eight years if you want to know the names of the publishers.) I think he intends to make us despair, but I was actually rather heartened: not only can I now see that it’s possible—I’d be finished some time in my early sixties—but I’m seriously tempted. A good chunk of coming across as educated, after all, is just a matter of knowing who wrote what: someone mentions Patrick Hamilton, and you nod sagely and say, Hangover Square, and that’s usually enough. If I read the list, something might stick in the memory, because God knows that the books themselves don’t.
Zaid’s finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says th
at “the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.”
That’s me! And you, probably! That’s us! “Thousands of unread books”! “Truly cultured”! Look at this month’s list: Chekhov’s letters, Amis’s letters, Dylan Thomas’s letters… What are the chances of getting through that lot? I’ve started on the Chekhov, but the Amis and the Dylan Thomas have been put straight into their permanent home on the shelves, rather than onto any sort of temporary pending pile. The Dylan Thomas I saw remaindered for fifteen quid (down from fifty) just after I’d read a terrific review of a new Thomas biography in the New Yorker; the Amis letters were a fiver. But as I was finding a home for them in the Arts and Lit nonfiction section (I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey), I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. My music is me, too, of course—but as I only really like rock and roll and its mutations, huge chunks of me—my rarely examined operatic streak, for example—are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children… But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not worth the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?
November 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Deception—Philip Roth
Wonder Boys—Michael Chabon
The Essential Tales of Chekhov
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892–1895—Anton Chekhov
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories—Leo Tolstoy
BOOKS READ:
On and Off the Field—Ed Smith
A Life in Letters—Anton Chekhov
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey—Janet Malcolm
Oh, Play That Thing—Roddy Doyle
I have been meaning to read a book about cricket for awhile, with the sole intention of annoying you all. I even toyed with the idea of reading only cricket books this entire month, but then I realized that this would make it too easy for you to skip the whole column; this way, you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle. I’m presuming here that very few of you have ever seen a cricket match, and if you have, you are almost certain to have been both mystified and stupefied: this, after all, is a game which, in its purest form (there are all sorts of cheap-thrills bastardized versions now), lasts for five days and very frequently ends in a tie: five days is not quite long enough to get through everything that needs doing in a cricket match, especially as you can’t play in the rain.
The funny thing is that we actually do like cricket here in England—it’s not some hey-nonny-no phony heritage thing, like Morris dancing (horrific bearded men with sticks and bells), or cream teas. Thirty or forty years ago it was our equivalent of baseball, an all-consuming summer sport that drove football off the back pages of newspapers completely for three months; now Beckham and the rest of them get the headlines even when they’re lying on Caribbean beaches. But big international matches still sell out, and every now and again the England team starts winning, and we renew our interest.
Ed Smith reminds traditionalists of a time when cricketers were divided into two camps, “Gentlemen” and “Players”; the former were private-school boys and university graduates from upper-middle-class backgrounds, the latter horny-handed professionals who weren’t even allowed to share a dressing room with their social betters. Smith is a Cambridge graduate who reviews fiction for one of the broadsheet newspapers. He’s also good-looking, well-spoken, articulate, and he has played for England, so perhaps not surprisingly, On and Off the Field, his diary of a season, attracted a fair bit of attention, all of it, as far as I can tell, admiring. Where’s the fairness in that? You’d think that if critics had any use at all, it would be to give our golden boys and girls a fearsome bashing, but of course you can’t even rely on them for that.
To be fair to the critics, Smith didn’t give them much ammunition: On and Off the Field is terrific, exactly the sort of book you want from a professional sportsman but you never get: it’s self-analytical (even if, after the self-analysis, he attributes some of his early-season failure to sheer bad luck), wry, and honest. The sports memoir is such a debased form—George Best, the biggest football star of the sixties and seventies, has “written” five autobiographies to date, and he hasn’t kicked a ball for thirty-odd years—but On and Off the Field is different: the photo on the back depicts Smith slumped against a wall, the very epitome of defeated misery. Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this, but Smith is one of the very few capable not only of recognizing this bitter truth, but acknowledging it in print. I know you’re not going to read it. But let’s say I’ve read it on your behalf, and we’ve all enjoyed it.
To my surprise, I managed to read, in its entirety, one of the many books of collected letters I inexplicably bought last month. Why I read it, however, is almost as mysterious as why I bought it in the first place; or rather, I’m not sure why I felt I had to read every word of every letter. After a little while, you get the pattern: letters to his feckless brothers tend to be fiercely admonitory (and therefore fun); letters to his mother and sister tend to be purely domestic, functional, and a little on the dull side (“Tell Arseny to water the birch tree once a week, and the eucalyptus”); letters to his wife, Olga Knipper, are embarrassingly slushy, and the letters he wrote to Alexey Suvorin, his publisher, are the letters I was hoping for when I started the book: they’re the ones where you’re most likely to find something about writing. I should have stuck to the Suvorin letters, but you get addicted to the (mostly sleepy) rhythms of Chekhov’s quotidian life.
Chekhov, as you probably know (I don’t know why, but I always think of you lot knowing everything, pretty much, apart from the rules of cricket) started life as a hack, a journalist who wrote short comic articles for various Russian periodicals while training and then practicing as a doctor. And then, in 1886, when he was just beginning to take his writing more seriously, he received the sort of letter most young writers can only dream of getting. Dmitry Grigorovich, a respected older novelist, wrote out of the blue to tell him he was a genius, and he should stop pissing around.
I know from personal experience that these letters have a galvanizing effect at first. But once you’ve had twenty or thirty of them, you start to chuck them straight into the bin once you’ve checked out the signature. I had a rule that I’d only take any notice if the correspondent had a Pulitzer or a Nobel; if you get involved with every two-bit literary legend who wants to be your friend, you’d never get any work done. Some of them can be a real pain. (Salinger? Reclusive? Yeah, I wish.) Anyway, Chekhov’s reply to Grigorovich is every bit as humbled, as sweetly thunderstruck, as you’d want it to be.
“Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while very few have even heard of ‘The Wife’ or ‘In the Ravine,’” says Janet Malcolm in her short, moving, clever book Reading Chekhov. Perhaps this isn’t the right time to talk about what “everyone” means here, although one is entitled to stop and wonder at the world in which our men and women of letters live—not “everyone” has seen a football match or an episode of Seinfeld, let alone a nineteenth-century Russian play. But she’s right, of course, to point out that his stories languish in relative obscurity. In his introduction to the Essential Tales, Richard Ford writes about tackling the stories before he was old enough to realize that their plainness was deceptive, and though I hate that “writers’ writer” stuff (after a lifetime of reading, I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time), I can see what he means. When you’re young and pretentious, you
want your Greats to come with bells on, otherwise you can’t see what the fuss is about, and there are no bells in those stories.
What’s remarkable about the letters is that the drama hardly comes up at all. Every now and again, Chekhov tells someone that he’s just written a rubbish new play, or that he’s hopeless at the craft. “Reading through my newly born play convinces me more than ever that I’m not a playwright,” he says when writing to Suvorin about The Seagull; Three Sisters is “boring, sluggish and awkward.” He’d have been staggered at the way things have turned out. His working life was about prose—and money. He tells just about anyone who’ll listen how much he got for this, and how much they could get for that.
The letters are full of useful advice—advice that holds good even now. “Sleeping with a whore, breathing right in her mouth, endlessly listening to her pissing… where’s the sense in that? Civilized people don’t simply obey their baser instincts. They demand more from a woman than bed, horse sweat and the sound of pissing.” He’s right, of course. There’s no sense in that, at all. But that pissing sound is sort of addictive after a few years, isn’t it? If you haven’t even started listening to it, then I can only urge you never to do so.