by Nick Hornby
Wodehouse also knew that comic material does not, on its own, suffice; he understood that on top of the comic material one has to overlay comic writing. In other words, however many amusing plot twists involving missing pigs he comes up with, it all comes to nothing if the prose is straight and plain – usually a sure sign that the author has an overwheening and misplaced confidence in the strength of his narrative. This, I’m afraid to say, is where Shakespeare went wrong with his comedies: Rowan Atkinson’s schoolmaster once brilliantly pointed out that they have ‘the joke of someone looking like someone else’, and, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had to sit through one, it’s not really enough for repeated and sustained laughter. Perhaps one of the sharpest analyses of Wodehouse’s genius came from J. B. Priestley, who once referred in a review to the ‘masterfully idiotic phrasemaking’, and this is where one draws the greatest joy from his work now. Lord Emsworth possesses ‘an intelligence about as mean as an intelligence can be without actually being placed under restraint’. A few pages later, ‘his brain, never a strong one, had tottered perceptibly on its throne’. ‘A butler,’ Lord Emsworth’s brother the Hon. Galahad Threepwood muses after he has surprised the hapless Beach, ‘is a butler, and a startled fawn is a startled fawn. He disliked the blend of the two in a single body.’
There is something of this quality in more or less every paragraph as well as the joke of someone looking like someone else. It’s why TV adaptations of Wodehouse’s writing will never work satisfactorily: without the filter of that prose, more or less the entire point is lost. A camera pointing at the antics of jovial halfwits is not the same as Wodehouse describing the antics of jovial halfwits. (This resistance to really successful adaptation, incidentally, is something that Wodehouse shares with Dickens, whose brilliant caricatures can only be diminished by flesh-and-blood actors.)
With the Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings Castle series, Wodehouse created two outstanding series of books – in fact, they are fast approaching an age where they can be described as immortal. I have always had a slight preference for the ‘Blandings’ tales, if only because the third-person voice allows for a wonderful authorial tone – a mix of affected exasperation with, and helpless adoration of, his characters – which is, in Bertie Wooster’s first-person narrative, replaced by a more straightforward buffoonery and partial comprehension. But the truth is that just about everything Wodehouse wrote (and he wrote ninety-six books and 300 short stories, as well as sixteen plays and the lyrics for a couple of dozen musicals) was of a quality unmatched by any other pretender to his throne, because he could turn his incomparable comic prose on with no discernible effort. I will not advance an argument about how he could illuminate the murkier corners of the human condition, or how this novel is a piece of invaluable social history, or how Lord Emsworth’s adoration of his pig is one of the most complex and misunderstood relationships in all of literature, because that would be doing Summer Lightning no favours whatsoever. It is, gloriously, a book about nothing, and all the better for it.
Scenes from Provincial Life
My sister gave me Scenes from Provincial Life for Christmas, possibly in ’82 or ’83. I’d never heard of either the book or its author before that. I don’t know how she came across it, or why she decided I should read it, but it was a smart and very welcome gift; ten years later, when I began to think about writing my first novel, it became clear to me that William Cooper was one of the authors (along with Anne Tyler and Roddy Doyle, among others) who had helped me to think about the kind of fiction I wanted to write. Cooper was certainly one of the authors who helped me to think about the kind of fiction I wanted to read. I was not long out of university, and – like Joe, the narrator of Scenes from Provincial Life – I was teaching in a secondary school. Unlike Joe, however, I didn’t think of myself as a writer yet. (One of the incidental pleasures of Provincial Life is its painful accuracy about a writing career in its infancy – the hope, the despair, the waiting for acceptance letters that never come, the constant vows to give up or to plough on.) I was reading very little, partly because of my workload, and partly because university had dulled my appetite for books. I didn’t want to read the novels I felt I ought to be reading, and nor did I want to give up my pretensions, so as a compromise I just gave up on literature altogether. When I started in on my sister’s Christmas present, I found I couldn’t stop: Cooper’s readability, his attractive, conversational style, helped me to remember why I had enjoyed reading so much in the first place, before lectures and essays destroyed it all.
Don’t just take my word for it, though – I’m not the only person who loves the novel. Scenes from Provincial Life seems to me so simple, lucid, attractive and funny that anyone who finds he can’t read it probably ought to ask himself: ‘Should I be trying to read books at all? Wouldn’t it be better to sit and watch television or something?’ This, I think, is as good a summary of the enduring appeal of this novel as anything I could provide. True, this summary is provided by the author himself, on what would appear to have been a particularly bullish day, but this doesn’t make it wrong. Unless you are one of those people that think a novel can’t be any good unless it makes you weep with the effort of reading it, then Cooper’s refreshingly immodest self-assessment is spot-on.
Scenes from Provincial Life was published in 1950, and served an important function in post-war English literary history: without Cooper’s novel, there may well have been no Lucky Jim, or any of the other fifties and sixties novels that deal with relatively ordinary people in relatively ordinary situations. Making a case for the influence of a particular work of art, however, is never a very persuasive or attractive argument – without Birth of a Nation there may very well have been no Pulp Fiction, but the latter is a lot more fun to watch than the former, and the joy of Cooper’s novel (which, despite bearing all the hallmarks of a debut, wasn’t his first – he’d already written three or four under his real name, Harry Hoff) lies in its readability and freshness. It’s funny and candid and, surprisingly, disorientatingly modern.
It’s impossible to read the opening chapters of this book without thinking of Philip Larkin’s line ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’. We always presume we knew what Larkin meant – but the sexual conduct of Cooper’s characters render the observation meaningless in every way. The novel takes place in 1939, right before the outbreak of war. Joe, the schoolteacher narrator, and his friend Tom share – not altogether peaceably – a weekend cottage in the countryside outside the provincial town where they live and work. (Cooper himself lived and worked in Leicester.) Joe uses the cottage for assignations with his girlfriend Myrtle, and Tom uses it for assignations with his young boyfriend Steve. There is no archaic moral dimension to any of this, and Tom is not tortured by his sexuality. No outrage or even disapproval is expressed at any time, in the narrative or in the dialogue; it’s just how things are. Similarly, there is no sense that the sexual relationship between Joe and Myrtle is in any way illicit. What troubles the narrator is the listlessness of the relationship – should they marry, should they part? – a dilemma which one has seen in fiction before, but rarely in a novel set before the war. And Joe’s relationship with his pupils is bewilderingly contemporary, too. They call him by his first name, and encourage him to climb out of the classroom window so that he can escape the stuffy school air and clear his head. ‘At one period, the upper forms had devoted a few days of their attention to choosing theme songs for members of the staff. I was told that mine was “Anything Goes”; it seemed to me fair,’ Joe tells us, philosophically. His snobbish and unexamined dismissal of ‘the soppy, drawling, baby-talk of the slum areas’ is much more likely to jar our sensibilities than either his professional or his sexual conduct.
No novel set in 1939 could avoid a political dimension, of course, but in Scenes from Provincial Life, the threat of war is brought up organically: the torrent in Europe is funnelled and tamed, and it reaches Joe’s provincial town in much the same way as it would hav
e reached any provincial town in the summer of ’39, as a trickle of intense personal anxiety and distraction. Throughout the book, Joe, Tom and their forbidding older friend Robert (based on the novelist C. P. Snow) talk about emigrating to America – they seem certain that Britain will lose a war, or fail even to fight one. Munich, and Chamberlain’s piece of paper, we are told, was a particularly desperate moment. ‘The essence was that life for us would be insupportable in a totalitarian state. We did not argue very much; it went without saying … We had not the slightest doubt that were some form of authoritarian regime to come to our country we should sooner or later end up in a concentration camp.’ America ends up performing the same sort of function as the farm in Of Mice and Men: it’s a dream and a promise, and the reader knows that the young men at the centre of the narrative will never get there, not least because hindsight tells us they will have to stay and help fight the war – which is, of course, what they wanted to do.
At the end of the novel, Cooper provides us with updates on his characters – the wars they had, the marriages, the careers – as the decade or so between the events the book describes and its publication logically allow him to do. The postscript comes across as a neat – and, yes, very modern – fictional device, but actually Cooper wrote autobiographically in a way that would have surprised even the most literal-minded of readers. Scenes from Metropolitan Life, the sequel to this book, remained unpublished until 1982, for legal reasons: in Metropolitan Life, Joe’s affair with Myrtle continues, but Myrtle is now a married woman, and the real-life Myrtle wasn’t happy. The third book in the series, entitled Scenes from Married Life, wasn’t published until 1961, and there is a suspicion that Cooper’s career was damaged as a result. Scenes from Provincial Life, at least, will live on, I hope. It would be nice to think that its republication could influence a whole new generation of writers. And if you find yourself unable to read it, then you should take its author’s advice, and go and look under your sofa cushions for the remote control immediately.
Ideas for Books
Recently I was talking to a musician friend about why he hadn’t released a song he’d written and recorded with his band. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s somebody’s song. But it sure doesn’t sound like ours.’ I knew exactly what he meant. Part of your job as a writer is to recognize when a story is right for you – when it allows you to explore and express the fullest version of yourself, and whatever talent you might have. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what I would like to write next, and there seems to be no shortage of ideas; unfortunately, most of them aren’t very good. (I know, I know – but you should see the ideas even I won’t go near.) Some of them – fragments of narrative, a sketchy notion of a character – don’t seem to go anywhere, or if they do, they don’t go anywhere I want to go; some of them turn out to be, on closer inspection, ideas that someone else has had ages ago. (A boy with a drum who refuses to grow up! A guy who lives the same day over and over again!) Others seem perfectly sound, but lack a door which would let me in to do what I do, whatever that is. Recently, I had an uncommonly brilliant idea for a short story which would, I later realized, necessitate my having to familiarize myself with all current theories of time. If Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard refuse to ghost the story for me, then I’m in trouble.
The initial narrative idea for A Long Way Down – four strangers meet on the top of a tower block, just as they are about to throw themselves off – came in two stages. I live not far from Archway Bridge, in north London, which attracts jumpers with a terrible frequency, and have often thought about the people who choose to end their lives there; shortly after I’d driven under it, I heard something on Radio 4 about how suicide rates spike on certain dates of the year – Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day in particular. If you were thinking of killing yourself, could you conceivably bump into someone else thinking of doing the same thing at a well-known suicide spot on those nights? And could any such meeting alter the outcome? I started to think about this as a potential novel.
I always spend a long time thinking about the beginning of a book, because if I can see the beginning clearly, then I can trick myself into sitting down at my desk and actually writing the thing. I invented Toppers’ House, the derelict tower block where my characters meet, because a roof gave them less opportunity to escape or hide; Martin and Maureen were the first two characters that came to me, and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on ladders and railings and barbed wire. I knew that I was pushing my luck with the collision of four people, but I felt that if I worked hard to make the four credible, and accentuated the dark comedy of such a premise, then the reader might be prepared to overlook the long odds against its likelihood. None of this felt like the point, though. The point was that this was material I could inhabit and make my own; I could see that it was mine, in the same way that my friend couldn’t see that the song he’d recorded was his. It allowed me to write about things that were on my mind and, crucially, it allowed me a mix of tones – there was room for melancholy and humour, regret and anger, and endless opportunities for bad language. In short, the characters and the situation would enable the fullest possible expression of self.
The question I’ve been asked most on local radio stations over the last year is, ‘A comedy about suicide? Isn’t that a bit, you know, off?’ Well, a book in which nobody kills themselves cannot be a book about suicide, by definition. And I’m not sure the book is a comedy anyway. It contains passages intended to make a reader laugh, but it was not my intention to write a comic novel; I had too much sympathy for the predicaments of my characters to want anyone to laugh at them. I think I wanted to rescue them, to take them out of the dark and lead them towards the light in as unsentimental a fashion as I could manage. There are plenty of books which leave the reader crushed and devoid of all hope; sometimes it can seem as though that’s the whole purpose of the literary novel.
Life Goes On: Richard Billingham
However enthusiastic you feel about ‘Sensation’, much of it is unlikely to detain you for long. I don’t mean that in any pejorative sense, or at least, I don’t think I do: presumably there are critics who would argue that any successful work of art should provoke at least a break in a gallery visitor’s stride, and that therefore works such as Sarah Lucas’s Au naturel (the one with the dirty mattress, and his ’n’ hers melons, bucket, banana and oranges) are comprehensive failures. You see it coming, as it were, from the other side of the room; you snort – with existential and aesthetic despair, if you are Brian Sewell, or with amusement, if you are a normal person – and you move on. I don’t have a problem with that. For a few seconds I loved Au naturel, which means that I loved it more than I have loved other works that demanded much more of me and turned out not to repay the effort.
Even if they do nothing else – although actually they do plenty else – the photographs of Richard Billingham do detain you. You might not want to be detained; you might prefer, when you see his pictures of his battered, bewildered, distressed and alcoholic father Raymond, and of Elizabeth, his enormous, tattooed mother, to wander off and look at something funnier, or more beautiful, or less real (and despite the proliferation of blood and pudenda and intestines elsewhere in ‘Sensation’, nobody could describe the show as sober). But you can’t. Wandering off is simply not an option, not if you have any curiosity at all: there is too much to think about, too much going on, too much narrative.
The first thing to think about is the rights and wrongs of these pictures, because anyone who has ever had parents of any kind, let alone parents like Billingham’s, would wonder whether it were possible to justify snapping their moments of distress and plastering them all over the walls of the Royal Academy. You could argue that Billingham is unfortunate that he is a photographer: the immediacy of his medium seems to expose people in a way that writing never can. Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Blake Morrison, Tim Lott and Kathryn Harrison, among many others, have all displayed and analysed their parents’
crises and failings in recent years, but prose mediates and transforms, creates a distance even while trying to tell you things about a character’s innermost soul. It’s only writing, in other words, whereas photography is real life. But of course that is one of the tricks Billingham plays on you, because part of his art is to strip distance away, to convince you that this is life unmediated – an artistic device in itself.
Spend enough time with these pictures and eventually you realize that their complexity and empathy answers any of the questions you might ask of them and their creator: there’s nothing exploitative going on here. Empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality, however: whatever else it is, Billingham’s work is not sentimental. One of the most striking photographs in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition shows Raymond sitting on the floor by the lavatory, his eyes cast down so that he seems to be in a state of philosophical and weary self-acceptance. His flies are undone, the soles of his trainers are facing the lens; the toilet seat is broken, and some indistinct bodily waste – puke? blood? – is trickling down the outside of the bowl. It was never going to be a pretty picture, but Billingham’s pitiless, neutral gaze doesn’t overweight it, and consequently it is allowed to take its place in the ongoing narrative of his parents’ life together.
It takes some talent, and some nerve, to be able to do this, and it is Billingham’s impeccable judgement that impresses one first of all. It would have been easy for the artist to let these pictures become self-pitying – what sort of childhood and young adulthood is possible in this domestic climate? – but they are not: there is too much tolerance. Nor are they angry, hectoring or loud. Even the pictures depicting violence, a violence born, presumably, out of alcohol and despair, don’t succeed in turning the collection into a campaign about this or a plea to the government for that.
