The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

by Miller, Andy

  3 pork chops

  A bundle of rhubarb

  1oz butter

  2 lumps of sugar

  ‘Serve the chops surrounded by rhubarb purée. This is a very good dish,’ wrote Pomiane. We both liked pork chops, and also rhubarb, though not necessarily on the same plate at the same time. Obviously the meal needed to be prepared in abundance, as there was nothing in the recipe to indicate that anything should be served alongside these two elements – potatoes or green beans or whatnot – which was presumably why Pomiane had added that reassuring final sentence. Nothing more was needed than the rhubarb and the chops.3

  I called Tina at work. ‘I’m cooking dinner tonight,’ I said. ‘Something special.’

  ‘Right,’ said Tina, with flawless equanimity.

  Later, after I had put Alex to bed and we had read We’re Going on a Bear Hunt together (‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’), I came downstairs and began the pre-prandial routine. I laid the table. I uncorked the wine. I diced an entire sheaf of rhubarb. Then I set to work.

  ‘Don’t come in!’ I called, when I heard the front door. Things were not going well.

  Finally, forty minutes later than planned, a cloud of oily smoke hanging over the kitchen, extractor fan roaring at full power, the work surface strewn with dirty utensils, I was ready to dish up. Tina sat down. On her plate lay a lightly burnt pork chop and a dribbly slick of bright pink rhubarb.

  ‘What is this?’ she said.

  ‘This is a very good dish,’ I replied.

  ‘Potatoes? Or . . . ?’

  ‘No, this is it.’ The rhubarb glistened unappetisingly in the half-light. ‘There’s plenty more. I used all my art in its preparation.’

  ‘I know you and Richard liked that Iris Murdoch book,’ said Tina, lifting her fork. ‘But I have been at work all day. Next time, would you cook something real?’

  It did not seem like the right moment to correct my wife’s mistake. We ate the Pomiane supper. Actually, it wasn’t bad. But no one came back for a second helping.

  The difference between the real and the imagined experience was one of the motifs of Iris Murdoch’s writing – pork chops and rhubarb as opposed to chipolatas and boiled onions. How can we always distinguish between the two when all we have to rely on is our own unreliable perception? Which dish is ‘disgusting’ and which is ‘parodically rustic’? Neither? Both? We are on our own. In order to puzzle it out, all we have to go on is our accumulated knowledge and our shared experience – and maybe a good book.

  So that Sunday, putting aside childish things and cracking open the cookbook Richard had taken off the shelf the previous weekend, I cooked Sunday lunch, in the course of which, for the very first time, I roasted a chicken. And although it was rather dry and the gravy was only Bisto, we told one another it was superb, because it was. The book was called Roast Chicken and Other Stories.

  Betterment was proving to be transferable.

  Books Seven to Nine

  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

  The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

  Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton

  ‘Ignatius quickly cleared the desk by brushing the magazine articles and Big Chief tablets smartly to the floor with one sweep of his paws. He placed a new looseleaf folder before him and printed slowly on its rough cover with a red crayon THE JOURNAL OF A WORKING BOY, OR, UP FROM SLOTH.’

  A Confederacy of Dunces

  ‘Bob was not susceptible to the faintest glimmering of the fact that the people he was passing in the street really existed. He observed their faces, he even caught their eyes, but he had no notion of their entity other than as inexplicable objects moving about in that vast disporting-place of his own soul – London.’

  The Midnight Bell, from Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

  ‘A great gulp of stinking air and off we go, we’ll be back in a second. Forward! That’s soon said. But where is forward?’

  The Unnamable

  Half a dozen titles into the List of Betterment and a pattern was emerging. I would start on a book; after a spell of bafflement or boredom, steady persistence would start to pay off, giving way after several days to hard-won but tangible pleasure, which in turn spread into a blush of accomplishment, at the end of which: . However, book number seven bucked that trend. I blushed almost from the first page.

  A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the great American cult novels of the last fifty years. It was published in 1980, a decade after the suicide of its author, John Kennedy Toole, known to his friends and family as Ken. ‘Every reviewer has loved it. For once, everyone is right,’ wrote Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone magazine. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.

  The hero of A Confederacy of Dunces is the unsavoury figure of Ignatius J. Reilly, a pompous, overweight, flatulent malcontent in a green hunting cap who, at the age of thirty, is still living at home in New Orleans with his drunkard mother. He scorns popular culture; his preferred reading is Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Ignatius is a slob who has never been in paid employment; when he masturbates, he does so to childhood memories of Rex, ‘the large and devoted collie that had been his pet when he was in high school’. He is devious, arrogant and self-obsessed. Essentially, he suffers from a terrible superiority complex.

  In what I am sure must be a coincidence, many of the people I know who count A Confederacy of Dunces amongst their favourite books are writers. A Confederacy of Dunces is exquisitely constructed and stylistically extraordinary; it is also consumed with bitterness and a misanthropic loathing of the world and everything in it. Furthermore, its author killed himself owing to the indifference of publishers, which confirms the sustaining notion that the few publishers who aren’t bastards are idiots and vice versa. Toole can also be praised uninhibitedly by other writers because he is dead and safely in the ground. As I say, a coincidence.

  Ignatius’s trial in the novel is to get a job – ‘UP FROM SLOTH’, as he writes on the front of his journal. He goes to work in a pants factory. He pushes a hot dog cart, gulping down the weenies as he goes. Ken Toole did both these jobs. He also lived at home with his mother and believed he was a genius. If Ignatius Jacques Reilly is a self-portrait by John Kennedy Toole, it is a vicious and eviscerating one. It is also stupendously funny. I have never read such an accurate description of the inner life of the writer, made mountainous flesh. What is Anthony Horowitz really like, people want to know. Nigel Slater? Lionel Shriver? Rachel Cusk? To which the answer is: really, most writers are like Ignatius J. Reilly but some are more successful than others at disguising it. I am no exception.

  Of course, loudly admiring A Confederacy of Dunces did not make me a proper writer, just as running into a burning building does not make you a fireman. But, as one with Ignatian tendencies, I could relate to it, which was not always the case with the great cult books. In Britain, we probably read more American cult writing than that of any other country, including our own (the same is true of film but not of music); Salinger, Kerouac, Thompson and so forth, coming over here, snatching our kids, on heroin. As a teenager, I skipped a lot of these products of the US counterculture. My heroes were Graham Greene, George Orwell and Philip Larkin, none of whom were very rock’n’roll nor, it must be observed, particularly nice people. But I was English; as the singer of C86 indie band the Bodines said in the NME, he could identify more with Billy Liar than Rebel Without a Cause.1

  My favourite book at this time was Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. To a boy from the suburbs, its portrait of London was kaleidoscopic and exciting. It made me feel like my life was going to be an adventure. I had not read it for years. I needed to read it again.

  I moved to London from Brighton in 1991 to be with a girlfriend who was to undergo major heart surgery. She came through the operation safely and promptly dumped me for a male nurse she had met on the cardiac ward. I was devastated. This unhappy expe
rience brought to mind Graham Greene’s short story about a boy whose father is killed when a pig falls on top of him, and who then spends the rest of his life trying to tell people about this tragedy without making them laugh. And a fat f**king comfort it was too.

  In Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the young hero Anthony sings joyfully of his arrival in the metropolis – ‘There’s no place like London!’ The word peals off Anthony’s tongue like the chime of a bell. This is how I imagined I would feel on the day I made it to the city. Instead, I lurched onto the stage of my new home like the Demon Barber himself, red-eyed and murderous, the voice inside my head clanging ominously:

  ‘There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit

  And the vermin of the world inhabit it,

  And its morals aren’t worth what a pig could spit,

  And it goes by the name of London.’

  You get the idea. Unhappily for me, I looked nothing like Johnny Depp in the film. Around this time, I had grown a goatee beard, which lent me an uncanny resemblance to the actor Steve Buscemi in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, aka Mr Pink – a fine actor but no matinée idol. Nevertheless, for about a year I found it difficult to walk down the street or go to the pub without passers-by turning their heads: ‘Excuse me, are you . . . ?’ Thank God no one had cameras on their phones in those days. Or phones.2

  Fig. 5: Portrait of an artist’s impression of someone who looked a bit like the artist as a young man.

  (birthday card from Julian Cope)

  After this uncertain start, however, I soon came to love living in London. I was single and I knew nobody beyond work. On a day off, I could step outside my front door and not meet anyone I knew all day, which was bliss. I went to gigs in Camden and record shops in Soho. I joined the early morning queues on the South Bank for tickets to the theatre. I hung around the Tate in Pimlico and Sir John Soane’s Museum in Holborn. I went to readings in the Charing Cross Road and Sunday morning film screenings in Leicester Square. I drank beer at book launches in Bloomsbury and pubs in Fitzrovia, Earls Court, Dalston, Hampstead and Clapham. I passed out on the Tube and woke up at Heathrow or Arnos Grove with no money for a cab. Occasionally, I got lucky with girls from Crouch End, Kentish Town or the King’s Road who may, or may not, have seen Reservoir Dogs. The postcode was unimportant; it was all terrific.

  For a while, London belonged to me. However, I never really belonged to London. At heart I remained an incomer, a day-tripper from Metroland. And when, fifteen years later, we finally moved out to the coast, I realised I had been waiting to leave from day one, and my residency in the capital had been a protracted blip – a bliiiiip, if you like. I felt calmer as a visitor, a spectator, restored to my suburban self. But I missed the Rough Trade shop, museums and good pubs – and the option of the Rough Trade shop, museums and good pubs – and my new hometown by the sea could feel small and close. Soon, I was always bumping into people I knew. I missed disappearing into the crowd. The break with London was not proving to be a clean one.3

  However, the commute was looking up. For a year, it had been dead time, a three-hour return trip to London to earn money to pay for the train fares to continue making the trips to London to earn the money, etc., etc. Something to be endured. But thanks to the List of Betterment, it had become the highlight of the day. What I was really buying with my weekly ticket, I belatedly realised, were between twelve and fifteen hours of doing whatever I wanted, circumscribed by the regulations of Southeastern Trains. And what I wanted to do, with increasing determination, was read. I looked forward to my days in town, to climbing aboard the 6.44, because I knew I would achieve something before the working day had even begun. By the time I arrived at my office, two hours and fifty or more pages further on, I was energised, fortified, fit to deal with the multiplying piles of paper.

  I was now on to The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. As I said earlier, Beckett was an exception on the list. I had seen or studied the plays Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Krapp’s Last Tape, so I knew what to expect: an existential babble, a screed of desolation, a few music hall jokes. The Unnamable is not a long novel but I anticipated it would be as dense and diffuse as much of Beckett’s writing, so I had reduced the daily target to just ten pages – ten pages that I knew would require sustained focus and reflection. And this was where my troubles began.

  Do not attempt The Unnamable on any form of public transport or in any kind of public space or anywhere where there is any kind of human distraction, such as the tish-tish-tish of crappy white earbuds, a wailing baby, the post-pub drone of football bores, the honking of a comedy ringtone, the repetitive strain of the slow-rolling refreshments trolley – TEAS! COFFEES! LIGHT SNACKS! – or the snoring of the occupant of the seat next to yours: the combined cretinous cacophony of a contemporary confederacy of dunces. (‘Oh, my God!’ Ignatius bellowed. ‘No! I told you before. I am not a fellow traveler.’)

  Furthermore, few of my fellow travellers were reading books. Those who were had been canny enough to choose ones with plots: thrillers, true crime, historical romances.4 Plots keep the world out, which under the circumstances – WILL YOU PLEASE KEEP IT DOWN?! – was not merely justifiable escapism, it was a survival stratagem. If you go and see one of Beckett’s plays in a theatre, you sit in a space dedicated to the performance of that piece and assume that the rest of the audience will sit still and keep quiet, which they often, though not infallibly, do. You focus collectively on the words and the manner in which they are delivered. You are in it together. Whereas on a commuter train, though you are physically in it together, you are trying forcefully to pretend otherwise. It is not a crowd in which one disappears but a gang of individuals in noisy denial – tish, honk, bing-bong, WAAAAAAAAAAH.

  Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think he means you.

  To read Beckett, it was obvious that the ideal accompaniment would be silence. But silence was not an option. Over the course of several journeys, I experimented with finding the music on my iPod that would block out extraneous noise, while also feeding into the experience of reading something as intense and cyclical as The Unnamable. Vocal music was out; concert orchestras, I discovered, were either too hushed or too bombastic; movie soundtracks were incongruously syrupy or jarringly overdramatic; Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, though soothing, did nothing except provide a gentle sound-bed for other people’s high-volume phone calls, unsought opinions and mastication. But cometh the hour, cometh the Famous Death Dwarf (© Lester Bangs, circa 1975).

  I want you to stop reading for a moment and go and fetch your copy of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. If you don’t have one, please find it on Spotify or YouTube. And when you are ready, turn up the volume, pick up the book, press play and carry on.

  No, don’t switch it off. I’m here with you. In our left ear or speaker we can hear a thousand bombs exploding, a horrific bombardment of guitar feedback and tape loops, the distant rumble of post-war pop culture being shredded by Messerschmitts and Telecasters. To our right, we can hear much the same, but with someone stabbing at our cochlea with a tiny dentist drill, like a needle or a fencing foil. Maybe you discern what Rolling Stone heard in 1975, ‘the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator’. After all, this is the fourth-worst album of all time according to Q Magazine, ‘four sides of unlistenable oscillator noise’. The journalist Lester Bangs, on the other hand, thought of it in these terms: ‘As classical music it adds nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock’n’roll it’s interesting garage electronic rock’n’roll. As a statement it’s great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity – a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless.’

  Ok, you can turn it off now. Whatever your verdict on Metal Machine Music, it seemed undeniably fit for my short-term purpose, which was the total obliteration of my immediate surroundings – a giant FUCK YOU to the rest of the train. Yes, MMM was a hellacious
racket but it was my hellacious racket. Finally I could hear myself think.

  For two weeks, I adhered to a bracing early morning regimen of Metal Machine Music via the ears and The Unnamable via the eyes. Putting aside whatever psychic damage I might be doing to myself by ingesting two such powerful stimulants simultaneously, the compound was a potent one. It successfully blotted out the carriage. It fed my Ignatian edginess and exasperation, incorporating them into Beckett’s stream of imagery and Reed’s sluice of noise. I read furiously, head down, teeth clenched, right to the end of the line. However, the treatment must be judged only a partial success. After a fortnight, I had completed the novel, but in a disjointed, belligerent state which only succeeded in blotting out the book too. By the end, I had no real sense of what I had spent two weeks reading.

  Technically, I had now finished The Unnamable – but only technically. I knew I had entirely failed to connect with it. Usually I found Beckett’s work very affecting. Either the book was beyond my capabilities or there was simply no space in my life where I could attempt a book like this. If I could not make it work on the train, where was left? And after all that effort, what was the difference between saying I had read The Unnamable, as formerly, and actually having read it, as now? I was better served by what I thought I thought about it beforehand, than by the disillusioning, uncomprehending reality. And what about the Beckett I studied at school or college, did that count? I was aware of having seen Happy Days twenty years ago but, save for a mental picture postcard of Billie Whitelaw in a pile of sand, I had forgotten nearly everything about it. My conception of it was shaped more by received academic opinion than a spontaneous reaction, and besides which, I had been nineteen; what I had to say about it would be half-baked at best. Or so I believed as I consigned The Unnamable to the shelf once more.