Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books

by Nick Hornby

  In some ways, my commitment to modernity stood me in good stead: those who cling to the cultural touchstones of an orthodox education are frequently smug, lazy, and intellectually timid—after all, someone else has made all their cultural decisions for them. And in any case, if you decide to consume only art made in the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first, you’re going to end up familiar with a lot of good stuff, enough to last you a lifetime. If your commitment to the canon means you’ve never had the time for Marilynne Robinson or Preston Sturges or Marvin Gaye, then I would argue that you’re not as cultured as you think. (Well, not you. You know who Marvin Gaye is. But they’re out there. They’re out here, in Britain, especially.)

  Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve been dipping into Keats’s letters, listening obsessively to Saint-Saëns, seeking out paintings by van Eyck, doing all sorts of things that I’d never have dreamed of doing even in my forties; what is even more remarkable, to me, at least, is that none of these things feel alien. There wasn’t one single Damascene moment. Rather, there was a little cluster of smaller discoveries and awakenings, including:

  1)Laura Cumming’s magnificent book A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, one of the cleverest, wisest books of criticism I’ve ever read. I wouldn’t have picked it up in a million years if I hadn’t known the author, and I ended up chasing after the self-portraits she writes about, which involved visiting galleries and old masters I’d carefully avoided until she taught me not to. (I read this book during my laughably unjust and almost certainly illegal suspension from these pages last year, so I was unable to recommend it to you then, but you should read it.)

  2)The Professor Green/Lily Allen song “Just Be Good to Green.” I am old enough to remember not only the Beats International version, “Dub Be Good to Me,” but the SOS Band’s original, “Just Be Good to Me.” And I’m not saying that the Professor sent me off screaming toward Beethoven’s late quartets (very good, by the way); I did, however, find myself wondering whether, when a song keeps coming round again and again and again, like a kid on a merry-go-round, there comes a point when you have to stop smiling and waving. Saint-Saëns is a new artist, as far as I’m concerned, with a big future ahead of him.

  3)A new pair of headphones, expensive ones, which seemed to me to be demanding real food, orchestras and symphonies, rather than a wispy diet of singer-songwriter.

  4)Jane Campion’s beautiful film Bright Star, which turned Keats into a writer I recognized and understood.

  5)During promotional work for Lonely Avenue, the project I’ve been working on with Ben Folds, the two of us were asked to trade tracks for some iTunes thing. Ben recommended an early Elton John album and the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. I bought the Rachmaninoff, because the enthusiasm was so unaffected and unintimidating.

  6)And now, Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, How to Live.

  I had never read Montaigne before picking up Bakewell’s book. I knew only that he was a sixteenth-century essayist, and that he had therefore willfully chosen not to interest me. So I am at a loss to explain quite why I felt the need first to buy and then to devour How to Live. And it was a need, too. I have talked before in these pages about how sometimes your mind knows what it needs, just as your body knows when it’s time for some iron, or some protein, or a drink that doesn’t contain caffeine or absinthe. I suspect in this case the title helped immeasurably. This book is going to tell me how to live, while at the same time filling in all kinds of gaps in my knowledge? Sold.

  Well, How to Live is a superb book, original, engaging, thorough, ambitious, and wise. It’s not just that it provides a handy guide to Hellenic philosophy, and an extremely readable account of the sixteenth-century French civil wars; you would, perhaps, expect some of that, given Montaigne’s influences and his political involvement. (He became mayor of Bordeaux, a city that had been punished for its insurrectionist tendencies.) Nor is it that it contains immediate and sympathetic portraits of several of Montaigne’s relationships—with his wife, his editor, and his closest friend, La Boétie, who died in one of the frequent outbreaks of the plague, and of whom Montaigne said, famously, “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.” The conventional virtues of a biography are all there, and in place, but where Bakewell really transcends the genre is in her organization of the material, and her refusal to keep Montaigne penned in his own time. In just over three hundred pages, she provides a proper biography, one that takes into account the hundreds of years he has lived since his death; that, after all, is when a lot of the important stuff happens. And the postmortem life of Montaigne has been a rich one: he troubled Descartes and Pascal, got himself banned in France (until 1854), captivated and then disappointed the Romantics, inspired Nietzsche and Stefan Zweig, made this column possible.

  He did this by inventing the medium of the personal essay, more or less single-handedly. How many other people can you think of who created an entire literary form? Indeed, how many people can you think of who created any cultural idiom? James Brown, maybe; before “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” there was no funk; and then, suddenly, there it was. Well, Montaigne was the James Brown of the 1580s. In his brilliant book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro says that Montaigne took “the unprecedented step of making himself his subject,” thus enabling Shakespeare to produce a dramatic equivalent, the soliloquy. Of course, you can overstate the case for Montaigne’s innovative genius. It’s hard to imagine that, in the five-hundred-odd years since the essays were first published, some other narcissist wouldn’t have had the idea of sticking himself into the middle of his prose. Montaigne invented the personal essay like someone invented the wheel. Why he’s still read now is not because he was the first, but because he remains fresh, and his agonized agnosticism, his endearing fumbles in the dark (he frequently ends a thought or an opinion with a disarming, charming “But I don’t know”), become more relevant as we realize, with increasing certainty, that we don’t have a clue about anything. I’d be surprised and delighted if I read a richer book in the next twelve months.

  And then, as if Montaigne’s hand were on my shoulder, I discovered Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days, a collection of personal essays. I had read a nice review of them in the Economist, but had presumed that they’d be nicely written, light, amusing, and disposable, but that’s not it at all: these are not blogs wrapped up in a nice blue cover. (And is it OK, given the Believer’s no-snark rule, to say that some blogs are better than others? And that one or even two have no literary merit whatsoever?) There are jokes in Book of Days, but the writing is precise, the thinking is complicated and original, and just about every subject she chooses—faculty wives, her relationship with Kafka, her niece’s wedding—somehow enables her to pitch for something rich and important. If you are interested in writing and marriage—and if you’re not, then I don’t know what you’re doing round here, because I got nothing else, apart from kids and football—then she has things to say that I have never read elsewhere, and that I will be thinking about and possibly even re-reading for some time to come. In Sarah Bakewell’s introduction to How to Live, she quotes the English journalist Bernard Levin: “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put the book down at some point and say with incredulity, ‘How did he know all that about me?’” Well, I haven’t yet had that experience with Montaigne, probably because in my admittedly limited excursions so far, I’ve been looking for the smutty bits, but I felt it several times while I was reading Book of Days. “The Prodigal Returns,” the essay about Gordon’s niece’s wedding, turns into a brilliant meditation on the ethics and betrayals of memoir-writing, and contains the following:

  What do I enjoy? Not staying in hotels, apparently. Not gluttony, not parties, not flattery, not multiple glasses of white wine. What I seem to want to do—“enjoy” is the wrong word here—is not to have exp
eriences but to think and tell about them. I’m always looking for excuses to avoid sitting down at my desk to write, but I “enjoy” my life only to the extent that even as I’m living it, I’m also writing it in my mind.

  Well. Obviously that’s not me, in any way whatsoever. I’m an adventurer, a gourmand, a womanizer, a bon viveur, a surfer, a bungee jumper, a gambler, an occasional pugilist, a Scrabble player, a man who wrings every last drop from life’s dripping sponge. But, you know. I thought it might chime with one or two of you lot. Nerds. And it certainly would have chimed with Montaigne.

  I’m afraid I am going to recommend yet another epic poem about the Mau Mau uprising—this time Adam Foulds’s extraordinary and pitch-perfect The Broken Word. It will occupy maybe an hour of your life, and you won’t regret a single second of it. Foulds has written an apparently brilliant novel, The Quickening Maze, about the poet John Clare, in whom I have obviously had no previous interest, but this has the narrative drive of a novel anyway. Set in the 1950s (der, say the people who know all about the Mau Mau, which I’m presuming isn’t every single one of you), it tells the story of Tom, a young Englishman who, in the summer between school and university, goes to visit his parents in Kenya, and is drawn into a horrific, nightmarish suppression of a violent rebellion. If there were money to be made from cinematic adaptations of bloody, politically aware but deeply humanistic long-form poetry, then the film rights to The Broken Word would make Foulds rich.

  Such is his talent that Foulds can elevate just about any banal domestic conversation. In the last section of the poem, Tom is attempting to seduce a young woman at university, and the dialogue is full of nos and that’s not nices, the flat, commonplace rejections of a 1950s courtship. But what gives the passage its chilling power is everything that has gone before: how much of the violence Tom has seen is contained in him now? The control here is such that the language doesn’t have to be anything other than humdrum to be powerful, layered, dense, and that’s some trick to pull off. Why the Mau Mau uprising? At the end of the poem, Tom and the girl he has been forcing himself upon are looking in a jeweler’s window; the children they would have had together, born at the end of the 1950s and early ’60s, sent to English public schools, are as we speak running our banks and our armies, our country, even.

  These are three of the best books I’ve read in years, and I read them in the last four weeks, and they are all contemporary—How to Live and Book of Days were published in 2010, The Broken Word was published in 2008. So despite all my showing off and name-dropping, a narrative poem published two years ago and set in the 1950s is the closest I’ve come to the ancient world. But then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Great writing is going on all around us, always has done, always will.

  January 2011

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Dickens Dictionary—Alexander J. Philip

  Half a Life—Darin Strauss

  The Anthologist—Nicholson Baker

  The Million Dollar Mermaid—Esther Williams

  BOOKS READ:

  Our Mutual Friend—Charles Dickens

  The Uncoupling—Meg Wolitzer

  Let the Great World Spin—Colum McCann

  Half a Life—Darin Strauss

  The advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (it’s amazing what people will do to get early information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you can’t read long books. Well, I can’t, anyway. I probably read between two and three hundred pages, I’m guessing, during the average working week, and I have the impression—please correct me if I’m wrong—that if you saw only one book in the Books Read list at the top there, it would be very hard to persuade you to plough through what would, in effect, be a two-thousand-word book review. And as a consequence, there are all sorts of intimidating-looking eight-hundred-pagers that I feel completely justified in overlooking. I am ignoring them for your benefit, effectively, although it would be disingenuous to claim that I spend my month resenting you. On the contrary, there have been times when, watching friends or fellow passengers struggling through some au courant literary monster, I have wanted to kiss you. I once gave a whole column over to David Copperfield, I remember, and more recently I raced through David Kynaston’s brilliant but Rubenesque Austerity Britain. For the most part, though, there’s a “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”–induced five-hundred-page cutoff.

  In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I am a literary fattist anyway; I have had a resistance to the more amply proportioned book all my adult life, which is why the thesis I’m most likely to write is entitled “The Shortest Book by Authors Who Usually Go Long.” The Crying of Lot 49, Silas Marner, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man… I’ve read ’em all. You can infer from that lot what I haven’t read. And in any case, long, slow books can have a disastrous, demoralizing effect on your cultural life if you have young children and your reading time is short. You make only tiny inroads into the chunky white wastes every night before falling asleep, and before long you become convinced that it’s not really worth reading again until your children are in reform school. My advice, as someone who has been an exhausted parent for seventeen years now, is to stick to the svelte novel—it’s not as if this will lower the quality of your consumption, because you’ve still got a good couple of hundred top, top writers to choose from. Have you read everything by Graham Greene? Or Kurt Vonnegut? Anne Tyler, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Carol Shields, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, H. G. Wells, Ian McEwan? I can’t think of a book much over four hundred pages by any of them. I wouldn’t say that you have to make an exception for Dickens, because we at the Believer don’t think that you have to read anybody—we just think you have to read. It’s just that short Dickens is atypical Dickens—Hard Times, for example, is long on angry satire, short on jokes—and Dickens, as John Carey said in his brilliant little critical study The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination, is “essentially a comic writer.” If you’re going to read him at all, then choose a funny one. Great Expectations is under six hundred pages, and one of the greatest novels ever written, so that’s not a bad place to start.

  Some months ago, I agreed to write an introduction to Our Mutual Friend—eight or nine hundred pages in paperback form, a terrifying two-and-a-half thousand pages on the iPad—and I have been waiting for a gap in the Believer’s monthly schedule before attempting to embark on the long, long road. The recent double issue gave me an eight-week window of opportunity to read Dickens’s last completed novel (only the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood came after it) on top of something else, so I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.

  I first read Our Mutual Friend years and years ago, and didn’t enjoy the experience much, but I was almost certain that the fault was mine rather than the author’s. Something was going on at the time—divorce, illness, a newborn, or one of the other humdrum hazards that turn reading into a chore—and Our Mutual Friend never really started to move in the way that the other big Dickens novels had previously done. (There’s this moment you get a hundred or so pages in, if you’re lucky and sympathetic to Dickens’s narrative style and worldview, when you feel the whole thing judder into life and pick up speed, like a train, or a liner, or some other vehicle whose size and weight make motion seem unlikely.) So I didn’t worry about taking on the commission. I am in reasonable health, my next divorce is at least a year or so away, and I have given up having children, so I was sure that, this time around, I’d see that Our Mutual Friend is right up there with the other good ones—in other words, I was about to read one of the richest, most inventive, funniest, saddest, most energetic novels in literature.

  Two-thirds of the way through, I was having such a hard time that I looked up a couple of contemporary reviews. Henry James thought it “the poorest of Mr Dickens’s works… poor with th
e poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” Dickens’s loyal friend John Forster admits that it “will never rank with his higher efforts.” In other words, everyone knew it was a clunker except me—and even I knew, deep down, given that my first reading had been so arduous. And now, presumably, I have to write an introduction explaining why it’s so great. What’s great is the fifth chapter, an extended piece of comic writing that’s as good as anything I’ve ever read by him. (If you have a copy lying about, start it and end it there, as if it were a Wodehouse short story.) What’s not so great about it is not so easy to convey, because so much of it relates—yes—to length, to the plot’s knotty overcomplications, stretched over hundreds and hundreds of pages. “Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention,” Dickens wrote to Forster sadly, after the first couple of parts had already been published in magazine form, and, as a summation of what’s wrong with the book as a whole, that confession is hard to beat. It’s interesting, I think, that nothing in Our Mutual Friend has wandered out of the pages of the novel and into our lives. There’s no Artful Dodger, Uriah Heep, or Micawber, no Scrooge, no Gradgrind, no “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” no Miss Havisham, no Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. The closest we get is a minor character saying, apropos of another character’s gift for storytelling, that “he do the Police in different voices”—but Dickens needed a little help from Eliot for that particular stab at immortality. As far as I can tell, the novel has recovered from its poor reception, to the extent that it has become one of Dickens’s most studied books, but that, I’m afraid, is no testament to its worth: it has endless themes and images and things to say about greed and poverty and money—in other words, endless material for essays—but none of that makes it any easier to get through. He’ll be back in my life soon enough, but next time I might go for early Dickens, rather than late.