The current plight of America’s middle classes, a traditionally upwardly mobile and prosperous demographic who now find themselves caught in a mire of repossessions and debt, is not inherently funny. Though try telling that to Jess Walter, whose entertaining fifth novel turns its attentions to the recession-hit American middle.

His self-deprecating, debt-riddled protagonist, Matthew Prior (a name he shares with the seventeenth-century poet of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets) is in trouble precisely because he has done that previously acceptable American thing: followed his dream. Unfortunately for him, his increasingly remote wife Lisa, two children and senile father, that dream involved giving up his job as a business journalist to start poetfolio.com – a financial news site delivering the latest updates in verse.

In case we were ever in any doubt as to the merits of this plan, each chapter starts with and contains examples of his banal lines: ‘Buffeted by fuel costs soaring / and with labor costs surging / Delta and Northwest are exploring / the possibility of merging.’

With six sleep-deprived days to save his house from repossession, all logical solutions seem surreally unfeasible to Matt: ‘This is my life now: set as far back as it will go’. And on a late-night trip to 7/11 he finds himself smoking powerful weed with some kids in his dad-mobile, the Nissan Maxima (which he still owes months of repayments on), and concocting a fuddled and desperate plan to start selling the stuff to his equally disappointed-in-life, but at least employed, friends and enemies. As his paranoid dealer and would-be lawyer Dave explains, Matt has the potential to tap into ‘a demographic we weren’t reaching’.

Illegality aside, it’s not such a terrible business plan, but its implications are worrying – the quality of life Prior has come to expect can no longer be sustained by hardworking all-American values. Something’s got to give. And quite naturally, when a clueless forty-six-year-old man (who thought poetfolio.com was a good idea) tries to make a quick buck on skunk, something does.

Prior is an everyman – kind, normal, misguided – who responds to his difficulties with a sort of crazed somnambulant optimism that makes him consistently likeable. Diverting sub-plots come in the form of his efforts to stop Lisa’s virtual affair with dull but solvent lumber merchant, Chuck, from getting too real; and his senile father’s repetitive thought patterns: “‘You know what I miss?” […] I go with the odds: “Chipped beef?” “Rockford Files,” Dad says.’

The figure of Prior’s dementia-suffering Dad, whilst providing many comic interludes, also serves to highlight the painful reality his son can no longer avoid. Dad worked hard all his life to support his family in a two-bit job at Sears, and now he can’t remember how he lost all his money – for your interest, a stripper called Charity stole his savings and maxed out all his credit options. So, whilst he leers over the twenty-four-hour newsgirls – ‘“God, I wouldn’t mind planting my carrot in that garden”’ – his son is left reflecting on the cruelty of fate:

Should anyone doubt that our miserable time here on Earth is just a sad existential joke […] my father (who is obsessed with sex, like a lot of dementia sufferers) […] recently had ten days of crazy sex with a twenty-two-year-old stripper […] and the poor son-of-a-bitch doesn’t remember a thing about it.

The novel is concerned with loss, not just of the fiscal kind, but by the end, its darker aspects seem to have been neatly tidied away. Not that the finale is unrealistic, more that it feels rushed and, after everything, doesn’t seem all that painful. But the novel is both entertaining and at times darkly amusing as it skilfully dances between class satire, slapstick comedy and a sort of late-developer bildungsroman.

As Johnson said, ‘Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding’. Walter’s funny and bittersweet tale of a family caught up in its own and a nation’s folly is a reminder that many will now have to face an unsweetened reality.

ACG

Being the author of many acclaimed novels and not one afraid to write about key historical figures – A Place of Greater Safety portrayed the French Revolution through the eyes of Robespierre, Desmoulins and Danton – Mantel is hardly a publishing gamble. Still, Wolf Hall blazes with inspiration against a landscape of often safe and/or hopeful fiction choices from British publishers at present.

The novel’s narrative structure mirrors Mantel’s description of Cromwell to the captivated book fair crowd: he was a visionary, but one who understood and was obsessive about detail and therefore could make things happen – ‘and that is very rare, I think’. Similarly Wolf Hall’s narrative faultlessly melds the events of one of English history’s most volatile and significant periods with the heartbeat of individual experience.

Mantel’s motivation, she tells us, are the untold stories. In writing Wolf Hall she explains she was less interested in the pomp and circumstance of power’s façade, than in the shadowy figures dressed in black, whispering, plotting and negotiating in dark corners. This is where real power lies and this novel is all about power.

Initially Cromwell is calculated and calm in his dealings, manoeuvring his way expertly to the heart of the court, making himself indispensable. Machiavellian at work, loving generous and loyal in his domestic life, Cromwell bewitches the reader. But something changes, as it must.

The pivotal moment comes when Cromwell is called for by the king in the middle of the night. Henry, still married to Catherine of Aragon but desperately trying to get the union annulled, has suffered a bad dream in which his dead brother, and Catherine’s former husband, Prince Arthur has appeared to him. He senses the dream is some form of reproach, and he cannot recover his peace. So he has called for Cromwell.

His loyal servant duly and very skilfully comforts the king into believing that the dream is a benign one; he grips ‘the royal person’ firmly by the arm in the king’s own bed chamber as he convinces him it is so. Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is present throughout and when the two are turfed out into the dawn-streaked corridor he remarks, ‘And that hand of yours, to take a grip on circumstance – when you took the king’s arm in your grasp, I winced myself. And Henry, he felt it. […] You are a person of great force of will.’

So the blacksmith’s son can influence the king, is called in the night as the only man who can bring him comfort? The intoxicating nature of power, the arrogance of it, has truly entered his veins and one feels that it is from this point in the narrative that his path to the executioner’s block has begun. But this time, we are on Cromwell’s side.

Great fiction is capable of illuminating hidden stories and telling us something new; Wolf Hall invites us to understand a world that, although we know it from the history books, still seems utterly remote from ours, and it succeeds completely. Its value is not via the clunking connections we can draw between our own politics and Tudor intrigue, or between today’s religious extremists and those Catholics who were prepared to burn at the stake for what they believed. On the contrary, Mantel argues that the past is interesting for its own sake. She seeks to show us that the dead were as real then as we are now, uncertain of what was to come, progressing through time blind, hopeful and anxious.

Mantel took a gamble telling Cromwell’s story through his own beady eyes, to believe she could inhabit Tudor England and King Henry’s court, imagine its historical players and richly draw their inner lives on the page. But like her protagonist-hero her risk is a calculated one due to the powerful intellect that lies behind it, the confidence she must have as a writer. Perhaps she can also inspire writers and publishers to take bigger gambles on ambitious literary fiction.

ACG

Running throughout March, this festival, now in its fourth year, is masterminded by a small and dedicated team – Tom Chivers, Sam Hawkins & Marie McPartline – and since its inception in 2007 the festival has gone from strength to strength.

It officially kicked off on Sunday, but I wended my merry way to the third event of the festival – a Big Bang edition of Robin Ince’s School for Gifted Children.

As the evening’s host, Robin Ince, remarked very early on in the night, if you look up the word cosmology in the dictionary, it means ‘everything’; well, you get what he means… Not an ambitious theme for an evening’s entertainment, then? This brief dash through elementary particle science via the mediums of stand up, song & entertaining talks also took place in St Leonard’s Church with its imposing but refined Palladian structure.

So we were entertained with songs about astrophysics from The Sound of the Ladies’ Martin Austwick, taken on an amusing and nifty dash through the origins of the US space programme by Helen Keen – a surname that suits her well – and treated to an oddly-affecting song about the fourth man on the moon.

And this is the essence of the London Word Festival – unusual connections and unexpected illuminations. You find yourself in a candlelit church of a Thursday evening, the stone arches and impressive stained glass windows almost disappearing in the gloom, half-wondering what you’re doing there as the introductory strains of the Dr Who theme echo out around you (this was a somewhat geeky event and I have to say I wasn’t getting most of the “in” jokes), but you end up experiencing something new and something inspirational.

In my case this occurred with the advent of Professor Brian Cox on to the stage – I’d never heard of him before but I thought he was fantastic. On a huge screen behind him with the lights down low, in a church, he showed us pictures of galaxies billions of years away from us; of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons that has more water underneath its surface than can be found on the whole of the Earth, and therefore suggests life; mentioned that the edge of the observable universe (observable being the key word here) is 46 billion years away; showed us an iridescent image of Saturn’s rings with a tiny star just below – ‘that’s Earth’.

It was magical and he explained it all in such a simple and enthusiastic way, commenting often about how beautiful it all was, how extraordinary, and made a compelling argument for why all that money spent on space exploration is worth it: ‘A physicist is only ever a hydrogen atom away from learning about a hydrogen atom.’ Asking when would you have stopped space exploration in the past? Listing inventions we now take for granted that have come about because of it. He really made the universe seem as if it was perfectly understandable, even to forgetful GCSE science graduates like myself.

Unfortunately at this point I had to leave as, and Professor Cox will know this better than anyone what with the universe’s ever-expanding nature, the world won’t wait, and Betty the schnauzer puppy had to be rescued from her night in alone. So I crept away leaving the audience to enjoy the fun, which included performances from Josie Long and Toby Hadoke. Sorry to have missed the rest of the night, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see. I suggest you all get yourselves along to at least one event at the festival. You won’t be disappointed.

Literary highlights include:

Fri 12 Mar

AVANT! NOIR
Music from Led Bib & Get The Blessing 
Dark fiction from Toby Litt, 
Cathi Unsworth, Courttia Newland
& Ray Banks

Tue 23 Mar

OH, WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD
+ A Pint for the Ghost by Helen Mort

Wed 24 Mar

TIM TURNBULL
+ Laura Dockrill 
+ Luke Kennard 
+ Instructions for Heartbreak 
by Francesca Millican-Slater

The recent news of the death of the reclusive man but enduringly great and globally famous writer JD Salinger, coupled with having just put down Carey’s biography of William Golding and finished AS Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book, meant that the themes running through Alan Bennett’s hugely enjoyable new play at the Lyttleton, The Habit of Art, could not have seemed more relevant when I went to see it the other night. N.B. It’s sold out but you can get £10 tickets in an area called the ‘slips’ – pretty good view and lots of legroom.

The action takes the form of a play within a play, the play within centering on an imagined meeting, twenty-five years after they irrevocably fell out, between WH Auden and Benjamin Britten in the former’s disgracefully messy Oxford rooms where he is wiling away his later years. Entitled Caliban’s Day it portrays the unlikely reunion of the two men and their discussion about creativity, art and the self.

But before you groan at this potentially hackneyed format, wait. Here it is the perfect device and is beautifully used to enliven, illustrate and add comedic value to the play’s central concern: what is the relationship between great art and its creator?

The setting is a rehearsal for Caliban’s Day, dangerously close to its opening night. The actors are getting nervous and difficult, the director – the most powerful figure in any rehearsal room – is conspicuously absent, away on business, and has left instructions to just ‘run it’. The smug but insecure writer of the play, however, is present, much to everyone’s annoyance. The producer, brilliantly played by Frances de la Tour, is the only one keeping the show on track by masterfully keeping all the ‘creative’ and ridiculous male egos in the room in check.

The interplay between realised drama and the rehearsal room is enjoyable and playful. It’s all here: the illusion of theatre; the friction between a writer and the release of his work into the world; the egos of actors and writers, and yet their slavish devotion to their craft; the powerful desire for success and yet disdain and fear of it once it has arrived.

The cast is magnificent featuring the aforementioned de la Tour, Richard Griffiths not overdoing it as the actor who is Auden, and Alex Jennings as the actor playing the uptight Britten.

Ironically in a direct inversion of the historical characters, Bennett makes Griffiths’s actor more conservative, less camp, constantly asking for the more lewd references to be removed, whilst Jennings’s actor character switches effortlessly from his excellent portrayal of the uptight and precise Britten, to camp comments, advising that the rent boy who in the play is visiting the openly lascivious Auden in his rooms should be carrying a shoulder bag for lube, etc, and telling a suspiciously autobiographical story about ‘a friend’ at drama college who became a rent boy to pay the bills.

Bennett purposefully interrupts the flow of the play ‘within’ just at moments when he knows the audience will just be totally absorbed in the conversation between Auden and Britten  – which is most enjoyable. Suddenly you’re snapped back to the rehearsal space as someone forgets what’s next, tells a rude joke or complains about a line. The illusion of art is before us. We may be moved to tears by a actor’s performance, but the chances are they’ll be thinking how badly the thing is written and wondering how the talentless queen, stage left, ever the got the lead role.

The power politics within this theatrical company provides a microcosm of those found in art, and Bennett uses the inter-textual quality of his work to discourse and explore the nature and desire for control and power in art – and, by its very nature, the impossibility of this.

In the play, Auden discusses how he cannot break ‘the habit of art’: he writes every day, but no one wants to read it now; whereas his earlier poems are so well-loved that when he wants to tinker with them he upsets people greatly, as if they own those poems, as if they are no longer his. The narrator in Caliban’s Day is both men’s future biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, who further emphasises this, telling Britten and Auden that they – the public – are all just waiting for you to die so that they can draw a line under you. (For further comedic effect the actor playing the assured pompous narratorial voice of Humphrey, in the rehearsal is comically neurotic, bemoaning the fact that as the narrator, he is just a device, and trying to make the part psychologically convincing… much to everyone’s despair.)

But his presence as the narrator is important: it is natural for the critic and the reader to compartmentalise in order to understand and essentially to control the meaning of a work within their own experience; the author/creator can never be satisfied with this. It is the unresolved struggle between art and audience.

It reminds me of Golding complaining endlessly about Lord of the Flies as the only work he was known for, even though it brought him the fame and money he so wanted, his despair over criticism for his work, the autobiographical themes running so strongly through his work and yet his irritation that anyone should pick up on these; of Salinger: an iconic author locking himself away in New Hampshire apparently driven mad by his own success and the lack of perceived distance available in the world between work and its creator; and Byatt’s eventually heartbreaking story of a son who ultimately becomes a victim of art – used and destroyed by it.

There is a fascinating exchange between Auden and Britten in the play within, adding a further dimension to this idea, where Britten expresses his concern over his planned operatic work of Death in Venice, which, would you believe, is causing a few raised eyebrows amongst the devoted ladies of Snape Maltings back in Suffolk. The conversation gives rise to an even more complex multi-layering – two actors playing two actors playing Auden and Britten discuss a work that is considered an autobiographic account portrayed as fiction in a scene entirely imagined by Bennett.

The divide between self and art is certainly not a simple one – just as everything in The Habit of Art can swerve from the sublime to the ridiculous in an instant. As they argue, Britten is insistent that Mann is the victim of the Apollo-like boy and plans a scene in the opera where Apollo appears … An idea Auden swiftly mocks, saying simply and directly to Britten the man, ‘You just like young boys’ [sic]. But Britten cannot deal with this.

Perhaps it is a comment about the dangers of hiding behind art, however unsubtly, as a way of not coming to terms with oneself by raising desire to a higher echelon of meaning, or perhaps it is suggested as a good way of communicating that desire. I’m not sure.

But the message of both plays is clear: Auden, garrulous, honest, and didactic rambles on to the tightly taciturn Britten – fine, fine, forget what I said, use Apollo, do whatever you have to, but you must go on, you must do whatever it takes to make the opera happen…. You must go on! He shouts it to him down the stairs.

As it happens the imaginary Auden needn’t have worried – the opera opened in Suffolk in June 1973, the same year that Caliban’s Day is set. The habit of art, however painful, is a hard one to break.

Much of my holiday and the weeks since have been spent in reading books, which has been an enjoyable indulgence: James M Cain, Chandler, William Trevor, Edward St Aubyn (which I had to put down very close to the end due to irritation), Erle Stanley Gardner (of course)… and most recently, in fact, now, John Carey’s comprehensive biography of William Golding, which I am reading in anticipation of an event I am due to attend at the Savile Club (of which Golding was a member) where Carey will discuss the book.

I’m very interested to hear him speak about Golding. The book is excellently written giving great insights into Golding’s writing processes…  and unusually for a literary biography one that is oddly encouraging to aspiring writers: Golding’s experiences as an author are defined by early rejection and obscurity until middle age, continuing self-doubt, an openness to editorial suggestions, and Golding’s own changing, unfixed and at times contradictory opinions on his own work. The idea of the ‘author-god’, so endlessly promoted in literary writing, interviews and essays, that omnipresent greater intelligence constantly in control and in understanding of what he/she has written, is writing, will write has no place here… Rather at times Golding hardly seems to know how he has written what he has and what he really meant by it. Surely a good sign when taken in context… ie, that he wrote great novels.

All this is fascinating stuff – not least in the intimate and productive relationship between the writer and his publisher Monteith – and yet despite all this information, to me at least, no clear sense of the man himself seems possible to gain. I don’t know if this is because Carey wisely seeks to use his researched material only – documents, discussions with family and friends, publishing facts – and not to spin his own opinions into his detailed researches, or if Golding was very difficult to pin down as a ‘character’, or even just that Golding had a lack of concern about presenting a coherent picture of himself – perhaps all contribute.

He reads both as a standard character – all the press about the ‘rape’ admission amounts to nothing more than the usual appalling fumblings of the repressed, guilty and sexually unknowledgeable, such as almost any young man of his generation might have experienced, and with this background he is also a misogynist although not one worth worrying in terms of biography – and also as a complex man, an oblique and changeable character. Although his novels are, as Carey makes absolutely clear, often based on autobiographical experiences, it is somehow hard to marry the man he presents with his work despite the clarity of Carey’s writing.

The book has also brought to my attention the large number of books Golding wrote that are not, as far as I know, much read these days. Perhaps this will change. I certainly intend to look up a few and get acquainted with more than my school-time knowledge of Lord of Flies.

Satisfyingly, in retrospect only and certainly not at the time for the struggling, unhappy schoolmaster, this extraordinary first novel was turned down by publisher after publisher, until picked up out of the ‘R’, that is rejects, pile by the bright young publisher, Charles Monteith, who had just been appointed at Faber, and who was to remain Golding’s publisher and friend for the rest of his life.

It’s easy to be blessed with hindsight, but then again it’s so fun to enjoy the comments of the professional reader who rejected the manuscript from this obscure and unpopular school teacher in Salisbury: one Polly Perkins dubbed it an, ‘Absurd and uninteresting fantasy […] A group of children who land in jungle-country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.’

Carey’s book is fairly strictly chronological as it discusses each of Golding’s works and how it was written/the collaborative editorial processes in turn and in order, set against his correspondence with Monteith and others, and details of what was happening in his life – his travels, his drinking, family problems and other gossip and notes.

For example, the account of Golding’s war years in the navy, especially when captaining a LCTR as part of the D-Day landings and the lesser-known Battle of Walcheren are brilliant to read, and at the same time give us a sense that he could put on a show  – his crew remarked that in dangerous situations he used to grin slightly fixedly but show no fear, whilst he admitted to feeling shamefully petrified.

Shame was an emotion Golding was not a stranger to, and came perhaps from his upbringing by his atheist father Alec – a believer who didn’t believe – and who was very morally upright and a rationalist, yet not a contented one. As Golding’s own personal struggles, and his fictional works attest, and as Carey notes in his introduction and constantly refers to, ‘The spiritual and the miraculous, and their collision with science and rationality, were the centre of his creative life’, and had been ever since he was a child.

Also carefully logged in Carey’s account is the divisions Golding created amongst critics: Frank Kermode was an early champion, but almost all struggled with his work initially and the reviews were normally divided with those against quite virulently so. His books with their themes of the darkness of human nature, the breakdown of societies and his tackling of universal themes, uncomfortable ideas and a willingness to experiment always succeeded in upsetting people and perhaps did not seem very English. The bad reviews hurt him much too much, the good ones inflating his ego the opposite way.

Golding’s humble beginnings as the son of a schoolteacher always haunted him, made him feel ashamed, and he hated the class system, actively resenting its social hierarchy – he wrote a review of one book in which he suggested Eton should be by demolished by using TNT. I haven’t got to the end of the book yet (!) but don’t think that Golding ever felt accepted, quite, even when famous and successful – something that many writers profess. He had the quality, most needed by the writer, of feeling himself a permanent outsider, at once enabling him to cast his keen eye upon the world, critically, ruthlessly; and at the same providing endless supplies of self-doubt and lack of self-confidence to keep the creative engine humming, to keep the brain constantly asking questions. He seemed to have that sense of never being comfortable, always questioning himself, structures of society, and belief as absolute or redemptive, yet he wants to believe in something… and he is constantly unsatisfied with what he finds.

ACG

It’s been a really good few months for Pen Pusher since we relaunched the magazine in March ’09… We’ve been selling in shops all round London and have even reached over the pond to our first distributor in New York – McNally Jackson – and are also now being sold in the legendary Shakespeare & Co. We’ve also been accepting submissions online via out account system and it’s fantastic how many of you have signed up for an online account. We should have much more to offer you next year via our website so keep your online eyes peeled…

We are also delighted with the PP ‘Featured Author’ section we began with the relaunch issue, #12. This feature offers writers a chance to showcase an extract from a longer work-in-progress or as-yet unpublished novel. For me as an editor the chance to publish extracts from longer works of fiction has added a totally new dimension to the editing process and the character of the magazine; and for writers it offers a chance to showcase their talents, as well as giving them the possibility to see their work-in-progress in print, which can illuminate aspects of the story/writing process and help them rework or reassess their piece. I think it’s a great way of working more closely with talented writers and we look forward to publishing more extracts next year. Many thanks to the authors whose work we published this year: Pia Chatterjee, author of Unreal City; Susan Barker, author of The Beijing Taxi Driver; and Nikesh Shukla author of Coconut Unlimited. (And you can read Pia in conversation with Essential Writers where she talks about her publication in Pen Pusher here.

We’ve also had three fantastic events to launch issues 12, 13 & 14 featuring some incredible poets and authors & you can remind yourself of some of the action here. Highlights included Hugo Williams and John Hegley at PP12; Roddy Lumsden, Ashna Sarkar and Joe Dunthorne at PP13 & just a few weeks ago at The Castle in Farringdon, readers included Ross Sutherland, Sam Riviere, Dean Wilson and an incredible rabble-rousing performance from Nikesh Shukla.

Favourite new reads of 2009:

Let the Great World Spin by Collum McCann – a brilliant New York novel. Read my review of it at Untitled Books here

Leviathan by Phillip Hoare – bizarrely enjoyable history of the whale that’s also made me want to ready Moby Dick which no one else has ever managed.

The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy provides a hypnotically mundane and fascinating account of Tolstoy’s domestic world and the pain and problems his difficult nature caused – Sofia is exasperating, strong and brilliantly honest.

The Paris Review – all collected volumes and new issues. It’s simple – read everything.

Obsessive reread of the year

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by Salinger – another masterpiece about the Glass family that I have reread a couple more times this year. Slight dream of mine to be in some stuffy New York apartment and offered a Tom Collins.

If you feel like commenting, let us know what your favourite read of 2009 has been.

And, just before PP signs off for the festive season, we’d like to introduce you all to the newest member of the Pen Pusher team – Betty. A polymath with a frighteningly short attention span she’s a myriad of contradictions, but she’s brought some strong ideas to the table – more exercise, more snack breaks and more naps. And she gets through books very quickly, severely damaging my Frank S Pepper 20th Cenutry Quotations and my copy of The Cossacks by Tolstoy in a matter of seconds…

Happy Christmas!!!

The subject matter is nearly almost always ‘I’; and ‘I’ is horribly insecure about the idea of offending anyone, but desperate to show, in a strictly self-deprecating way, its intelligence. It doesn’t leave much room for good writing. Of course, it’s easy to attack this sort of writing, but I just wonder why it is so popular, so prevalent?

In much journalism that isn’t strictly news reporting, the wish to either gloss-over and sentimentalise seems the order of the  day. For example the word ‘humble’ seems very popular at the moment. People seem to be humble about everything; I would suggest it’s a very rare emotion. Or that type of interview with a star, supposedly to bring us closer to them and the opening paragraph contains something like this: ‘In real life she is astonishingly petite, almost doll-like, and her face takes on an angelic quality as she takes tiny sips of her mineral water’. Ad nauseum.

Very few of these ‘commentators’ seem at all interested in other people – I mean in an observant way. Perhaps the way novelists look at people, with the air of devouring their prey: keenly observant, possibly for selfish reasons, but able to look and see clearly all the same. Political correctness and badly concealed status anxiety  cut out sympathy and interest in others which is why this style of writing is so creepy and annoying.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is that I have been reading a lot of Orwell non-fiction recently and enjoying its obvious quality. I know Orwell is an exceptional writer and is far from unbiased in his views, but his journalism/non-fiction writing is so clear, and it very much wants to be clear – that is its raison d’être. It does not sentimentalise in any way though he can’t help but make a good story out of what he sees, most of the time – except when he goes off on Socialist rants, which can get dull. (Having said this, someone just told me that The Road to Wigan Pier is really sentimental … I’ve never read it – is this so?)

In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933),in which Orwell records his time spent as a Paris plongeur at ‘Hotel X’ and then as a tramp in England, hanging out with screevers and staying in spikes, Orwell describes people as clearly as he is able: eccentric, foolish, greedy, stupid, idiotic, funny, kind, essentially good, stoic in their bizarre and minor struggles. He also puts their lives into some context.

This passage is taken from the introduction:

‘The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent […] Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.’ [...] ‘Poverty is what I am writing about […] The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for this reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.’

As a review of the book in The New Yorker aptly put it: ‘The harshness of this book is an expression of its basic sympathy’.  You cannot truly sympathise, observe and comment unless you try as best you can to tell the truth– in this case to look at the sometimes ugly mundanity of poverty and record it.

Whereas some current writing reminds me of one of Orwell’s old tramps: afraid to loiter on any subject too deeply in case it gets moved on or feels compelled to expose itself. Like Paddy, Orwell’s tramping companion for whom ‘two years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly’, who has forgotten what good food tastes like.

In the meantime, though, read Orwell. Penguin are doing a really appealing little volumes of his essays and non-fiction works at the moment.

Of course, Orwell could leave these situations at any time, he was an observer, but he really tried to understand poverty and the less privileged parts of society, and to examine the ideals behind the society he found himself in. Essays like ‘How the Poor Die’, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘The Prevention of Literature’ are all as serious as they sound, though always there is dry wit. And there are more satirical pieces also. In ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ (Orwell at one time reviewed large numbers of books for English publications) he describes a man sitting in a dishevelled state in a chaotic room full of waste paper, unopened packages of books, and final demand bills: ‘He has lost his address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.’

And ‘Bookshops Memories’ – ‘[B]ooks give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.’

Well that’s true enough…

I was thinking this as I emerged, no doubt bleary-eyed, from a morning in Leeds City Library for my lunch break. I didn’t feel at one with the Saturday shoppers, but rather looked upon their seemingly hysterical shopping and socialising with a confused but benevolent eye. Still wrapped in my library cocoon, I viewed everyone curiously, wolfed down my horrible sandwich, and rushed back gratefully to the calm repressive order of la bibliothèque.

After all, that is the appeal of the library – the repression, the rules, the order that is imposed upon you, but which, in reality, you have willingly submitted to. It is for these reasons that it frees up your mind – you don’t feel resentful of the constraint, like you would if you were at school, yet observe the rules carefully and respectfully, and glean enjoyment from doing so.

My two favourite libraries are Leeds City Library and Hornsey Library in Crouch End, London. The former I can’t find out much about, but it is, I would guess, a mid-to-late Victorian civic building that appears subtle in its architecture due to its proximity to the heavy stone wedding cake of Leeds City Hall.

Inside, the most notable features are the beautiful mosaics that cover the main staircases and lower half of the stairwell walls. On the second floor, my favourite spot for working is a huge galleried room which holds a steady peace and offers glimpses out over the city. You hear voices echoing up the stairs and shoes occasionally squeaking down the corridors, sounds which never irritate, but rather comfort. I can happily be ensconced in there for many hours at a time.

Hornsey Library, by contrast, is a sixties north London dream of modernism for nice people. Built between 1963-5 by Ley & Jarvis, it is a flat roofed, concrete-bound, plate-glassed construction, open-plan, full of light, with a grand sweeping staircase as its centrepiece that floats half-elegantly above the fiction section. It’s not so good for working for very long hours, but there is something friendly and calm about the space and you often have good ideas there.

Both libraries have their resident oddballs. I don’t visit Hornsey so much nowadays, but when I went there a lot there was one guy who went round chuckling to himself and saying interesting phrases very loudly. My favourite being when he incanted for about ten minutes ‘Boxing champ; boxing, boxing champ.’ Then moved on to ‘Card sharp, card sharp’ for another ten. I used to write down what he said.

In Leeds there are often what I assume to be obsessive Bible readers on the second floor who pore over the good book and mumble. When I went there a lot there was one man in particular who was always in the same spot. He carried a lot of empty plastic bags around and used to sit hunched over his tome mumbling to himself and never looking up. But when I went over to see what he was reading when he left the room for a moment, it was a book about JRTolkein… so maybe they’re all Middle Earth obsessives?

There is also, without fail, someone slightly pervy in any library worth it’s, er salt. But somehow their perviness seems to take on a quaint charm amidst all of that soothing paper and print. I don’t know if they come in normal, and then the silence and the dust and all those musty pages lining the shelves making the tick of each second seem deliriously long turns them to it, but you often look up from reading your chosen tome to find one of them staring down your top with a conspiratorial yet strangely blank expression. (After all, they don’t want you to remember what they look like when you’re back in the real world.)

& there is something illicit about the library. Surrounded by the safety net of categorizing systems and methodical study or administrative tasks, everything seems to move on a different timescale, as if you have tricked normal life and escaped to a slow moving haven.

I was unaware that Jorge Luis Borges was of the librarian fraternity, but I like his comment, ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library’. To me, especially after eight hours in there, this comment equally suggests that Paradise, like the depiction of Heaven, can be a little too grindingly perfect at times and that after a full day of it you’re ready to talk to all the sinners on the outside again, that is if your mouth can remember how to form words… Or maybe it can help you get it together:

‘I’ve been drunk for about a week now and I thought it might sober me up to sit in the library.’– The Great Gatsby.

I also recommend you take a look at this youtube clip where the Islington librarian discusses Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s defacing of library books – the librarian’s tone is a completely brilliant mix of censure and admiration.

If anyone has particular recommendations for libraries, do comment and let us know where your favourite library is and why… Bit like our My Favourite Bookshop feature, perhaps…? Or good fiction references to libraries… Get in touch!

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth repeating: I really recommend a look at the ‘Literary Review’ pages of Private Eye. Always hilarious, plus these pages provide welcome relief from the acres of literary journalism you can wade through over the course of a week, and it usually hits the nail on the head in a critical sense, especially in its main feature review.

This issue [No.1246] it is Dan Brown who comes in for a friendly if complete drubbing. At one point the article asks: ‘But is the writing really so bad? Brown’s sentences rarely sing, but only a few actually scream in pain.’ And despite his reputation for writing action-driven page-turners, PE’s literary expert also points out that DB’s professor hero Robert Langdon ‘often takes […] two or three pages to walk across a foyer,’ and that ‘At one point, while the lunatic [the bad guy] is escaping across town, cackling evilly, Langdon and other characters stand around talking for several chapters.’ The article concludes cheerfully that the book’s, ‘… lack of sophistication is absolute: it can’t be faked’.

Other highlights include the ‘Books & Bookmen’ column where you can catch up with the publishing world’s latest news… Often very cutting and hilarious, the literary pages do admit when something’s good, and the satire can be absolutely spot on. PP recommends.

It’s an interesting experience sitting behind the table while people come and browse. Rules: don’t stare at them else you’ll make them feel uncomfortable; then again don’t ignore them as it’s rude and also they’re less likely to take an interest. So you generally boil the social interaction down to an enthusiastic smile and ‘Hi’ as they first approach, then you leave them to it, trying to stay alert in case they want to speak to you unexpectedly.

I act in exactly the same way when I go to have a look round at the other stalls – browse, try not to make eye contact, or if you do, only the most fleeting kind if you’re fairly certain you don’t want to buy anything, then smoothly glide on where another couple of sets of expectant eyes greet you from behind a table laden with fanzines, art books, comics and badges. Repeat action until you reach the relative safety of a non-tabled area.

From a certain point of view you could see the publishing fair as one socially awkward situation after another… From the vendor’s point of view, it’s rather like watching animals behind a glass as they react to some unknown quantity that has been placed unexpectedly into their habitat. All are initially curious and at the same time cautious – they want to have a look but not to commit to the act of having a look.

At this year’s P&BD we had some serious speed-readers – Rain Man types, who intensively studied the magazine for about ten minutes before politely returning it to the stand, leaving you with the distinct impression that they had read the whole thing and stored it to memory. Then there were the panic browsers, those who pick up the magazine from a shopping reflex, then realise they’re not interested but give a show of looking through anyway, their brains feverishly flitting through escape routes rather than reading words. There are the purchase bluffers who have an interested read, and then start talking to their companion whilst still holding the magazine, making the stall vendor think – ah ha! possessive of the item – this is a sale, dudes! Then after five minutes of talking to their friend, they put the magazine back with a polite smile. Bah! And of course, every stall holder’s no.1 browser – those who read a few things, admire the design, ask you a few interesting question, then buy a copy to enjoy later! (Or you can just skip to the last part… that’s fine too.)

It’s a funny feeling looking up from the Everyman crossword and seeing four or five people facing in your direction, engrossed in reading, right in front of you. It makes you realise that reading is a private affair, even when done in public, and it’s sort of strange to be given license to stare at people while they’re doing it…

Away from the intense social scrutiny of the publishing fair, you can spy many species of reader around you. The free papers, in particular, reveals your reading personality: some, especially neat and well-turned out girls on their way home from the office, turn the pages very precisely, carefully folding each page down with carefully manicured hands before proceeding to methodically read its contents; or you might, like I do, rush through scouring the page for any titbit of information that immediately takes your interest, looking at the pictures, and then throwing it down feeling slightly travel sick and dissatisfied. Then there is a curious new breed of reader or, I suspect, half-reader: the mp3-er. They sit on a bus or tube listening to music … and apparently reading a novel at the same time… Is this a more highly developed sub-species we haven’t been told about?

But when people read, however they read, if they are able to concentrate fully on the page, their eyes take on a particular look: one that is quite clear, very focused, illuminated by comprehension, but also gives that sense of being a million miles away.

I mentioned the power of paper and through it, reading from the printed page, in my previous blog about William Powers’ essay on paper – ‘Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal’. A brilliant piece, it discusses why paper is still relevant when surely, as Tomorrow’s World no doubt predicted in 1985, we should have discarded paper long ago. We shouldn’t need paper anymore in 2009, the twenty-first century, for goodness sakes! (As well as only needing to take one pill a day for all our meals and nutritional needs, and wearing identical Lycra outfits for no apparent reason.)

In the essay, Powers suggests paper’s slogan could be: ‘Just this one thing’. Doesn’t that just make you feel better already? No messaging, no communication with people, over half of whom you don’t even like, no music, no images, no emails, no updates. Just reading. Aaaaah.

Reading can give us a sense, albeit an illusion, of personal power – not just because knowledge and understanding is power, but because reading a book gives us the power to escape normal life. You can feel as if you have beaten the mundanity of the everyday when you emerge from reading fifty pages, and realise you’ve been completely unaware of what has been happening around you, you have ignored all other distraction and have been taken far, far away – sometimes all the way to Barnet on the 43 bus…

I sometimes find it hard to let go of the intense sense of other reality that a really good novel provides: most memorable recent examples, feeling drunk whilst reading The Sopranos, checking out guys on the Tube as if I was a gay man whilst reading The Swimming-Pool Library, and having to leave American Psycho on a bus because, despite the fact I though it was an incredible book, I also kept imagining my fellow passengers taking out large knives and breaking into acts of extreme violence… and it was starting to bother me.

When a book gets you like that, even if you’re scared, it’s a good feeling – not like when a blast of disturbing imagery in a film freaks you out and you want to turn away. That is just about forgetting and blocking. An engaging, even if disturbing book, is far more powerful than that.

At which point I turn to my favourite of my not especially extensive collection of reference books: 20th Century Quotations – compiled by that quotations hoarder, Mr Frank S Pepper. (Not to be confused with Dr Pepper.) It is a very useful tome as it has most of the famous quotes, along with some very random and often very funny individually collected gems. It is also very simply ordered by subject, and Mr Pepper does not baulk at allowing such subjects as ‘Income Tax’, ‘Chamber Pots’, ‘Virginia Woolf’, and ‘Unemployment’ to be fully explored. Here are some of the gems dear Pepper has collected on the subject of ‘Reading’:

‘I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining that half the novels that are written.’ – Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938.

‘All my good reading, you might say, was done on the toilet.’ – Henry Miller, Black Spring, 1936.

‘I have only read one book in my life and that is White Fang. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.’ – Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit Of Love, 1945.

‘Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.’ Logan Pearsall Smith. Afterthoughts, 1931.

And what must be the hands-down winner, Michael Caine talking in an exclusive interview with Woman’s Own, date unknown (or undisclosed at any rate):

‘I read books like mad, but I am careful not to let anything I read influence me.’

Though perhaps we should end with something a bit better? I think so. I hastily rifle to the ‘Books’ section of Pepper’s tome and find this typically opaque yet enlightening quote from the Notes on Life and Letters by Joseph Conrad, 1921: ‘Books most resemble us in their precarious hold on life.’

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Just a short footnote to John Banville’s comments in the Paris Review, which I quoted, regarding narrative / characterisation & why those who claim their characters just ‘take over’ as they write are to be mistrusted. James Ellroy, also being interviewed by the Paris Review in the current issue, puts a stop to any further speculation on this issue:

‘It’s disingenuous when writers say they have no control over their characters, that they have a life of their own. Here’s what happens: you create the characters rigorously, and make clear choices about their behaviour. You reach junctures in your stories and are confronted with dramatic options. You choose one or the other.’

Don’t think we need to talk about that anymore, then. It’s another great interview, and some classic quotes as you would expect from Ellroy.

My favourite has to be when the interviewer asks him how well read he is. The response is typically direct and hilarious:

‘[…] I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks? I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book and saw that there were six or seven consecutive pages in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant. My name isn’t Juan Ellroy, OK?’

OK.

‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’

Or the ridiculous introduction to Pip on the first page of GE:

‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.’

Phillip Pirrip is thus introduced, one of the great literary creations and most powerful first-person voices. And he is virtually introduced as a joke!
Dickens can tell you everything in a very short few sentences, and almost every sentence is as good as the last. I love this description of Pip’s first visit to Satis House when Miss Havisham asks him to call Estella: ‘To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house, bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost as bad as playing to order. But, she answered at last, and her light came along the dark passage like a star.’
On the same afternoon I read the Dickens article, I read an interesting article about Roald Dahl in the Times and it was asking a similar question: why is Roald Dahl getting more and more popular… shouldn’t he have gone out of date by now? The answer was given that readers – adults and children alike – love the ‘cruelty, misanthropy and mischievous fun’ of Dahl’s storylines and his characters. That rather reminded me of Dickens, and I think there are certain comparisons between the two men’s fearsome energy and aggression both on and off the page, as well as their idiosyncratic styles: you could pick passages from both Dickens and Dahl out of an anonymous literary line-up without too much trouble. The key is their distinctive use of language – their voice – but also their ability to understand their readers perfectly and thus to engage them utterly.
To return to Varese’s reason for reading Dickens, I would turn it on its head. We don’t understand ourselves better by reading Dickens, we read Dickens because he understands us too well. This possibly has the same results as Varese suggests – a greater understanding of humanity’s lot – but to me it’s a necessarily different way of looking at it. And just like Dahl’s Mr and Mrs Twit, the most memorable characters from Dickens are the really bad eggs – 1 out of 10 in the morality stakes – like Uriah Heep and Fagin and Silas Wegg. Do people really like reading these characters because they’re consciously learning something about themselves?
I reread the introduction to an old Penguin edition of Great Expectations by Angus Calder and found some more interesting ideas to the question of what makes Dickens great. Regarding the audacious energy of his prose, and his extensive output Lionel Trilling is quoted as remarking that ‘“the mere record of his conviviality is exhausting”’, and you can feel the energy of Dickens’s pen on paper ricocheting off the pages of his novels. (One thinks, for eg, of the talking chair in The Pickwick Papers! One of my favourite moments.) Calder goes on to mention that Dickens sported ‘flamboyant dress and a hint of vulgarity in his manners, but he had powerful, magnetizing eyes and overwhelming charm.’ In some crude way, that description gets to the heart of his novels. And I love Graham Greene’s insightful comment about Great Expectations; that there is a ‘sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen’, and that the novel is constructed from ‘delicate and exact poetic cadences’.
There is so much to consider in Dickens, and I’m only scratching the surface like a restless child, so I will let George Orwell end, as he more successfully gets to the heart of Dickens’s enduring appeal from his essay on the author: ‘Dickens’s imagination overwhelms everything, like a weed.’