Latest Readings

by Clive James

  Latest Readings

  Clive James

  Latest Readings

  Copyright © 2015 by Clive James.

  All rights reserved.

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  Set in Fournier type by Integrated Publishing Solutions,

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958943

  ISBN 978-0-300-21319-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK

  cras mihi

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Hemingway in the Beginning

  Revisiting Conrad

  Novels in Sequence

  Patrick O’Brian and His Salty Hero

  War Leader

  Sebald and the Battle in the Air

  Phantom Flying Saucer

  Under Western Eyes

  Anthony Powell, Time Lord

  Treasuring Osbert Lancaster

  American Power

  Kipling and the Widow-maker

  Speer in Spandau

  Shakespeare and Johnson

  Naipaul’s Nastiness

  Movie Books

  Women in Hollywood

  Extra Shelves

  Always Philip Larkin

  Villa America

  Angles on Hitler

  Stephen Edgar, Australian Ace

  John Howard Extends His Reign

  Hemingway at the End

  On Wit

  Richard Wilbur’s Precept

  When Creation Is Perverse

  Conrad’s Greatest Victory

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  MY THANKS TO Prue Shaw, David Free, Claerwen James, and Deirdre Serjeantson for reading the manuscript. The last two I hold responsible for getting me hooked on Patrick O’Brian. Thinking I already knew something, I was always reminded that there was more to know when I conversed with Michael Tanner over coffee after one of our many chance encounters at Hugh’s bookstall in the Market Square of Cambridge. Finally I should thank Hugh himself, a quiet man who patiently listened when I extolled the virtues of Flann O’Brien. Meanwhile, Hugh was quietly assessing whether I had enough strength to take a vast book of Modigliani’s drawings home by taxi, or whether he should deliver it himself at the end of the day.

  Latest Readings

  Introduction

  WHEN I EMERGED from hospital in early 2010 with a certificate to say that I had a case of leukemia to go with my wrecked lungs, I could hear the clock ticking, and I wondered whether it was worth reading anything both new and substantial, or even rereading something substantial that I already knew about. Poetry, yes: I was putting the finishing touches to my Poetry Notebook, and there were still some more notes demanding to be added. But even the slightest book of prose looked like a big thing that I might not have time to get through. The cure for that attitude was Boswell’s Life of Johnson. After reading the whole masterpiece with delight—I had read bits of it before, but I could now see that it needs to be taken complete—I resolved to get back to Johnson himself later.

  In view of the fact that I was once again on my feet, instead of flat on my back, the concept of “later” suddenly seemed less quixotic than realistic. If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do. My family’s plans for my remaining years of existence included extracting me from my place of work in London and installing my library in a house of its own in Cambridge. In this house I would live, read, and perhaps even write. The move took what seemed like years. About half my books had to be sold off just to create some breathing space. What was left filled the specially built shelves to the limit. I made a vow to myself and all concerned that my book-buying days were over. But with the renewed urge to read, I found, came a renewed urge to buy. In recent years the number of secondhand bookshops in Cambridge has been drastically reduced. Most of the trade has moved online. But the Oxfam shops, somehow free from the killingly high levels of rent, were still worth visiting on those occasions when I could summon the strength to limp the half-mile into town. And always, in the Market Square, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, there was Hugh’s bookstall, known to its devotees both literary and academic as one of the great bookstalls on earth.

  As the laid-out stock is sold off during the day, the gaps are filled with yet more books from Hugh’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of substantial hardbacks and paperbacks. Hugh doesn’t say much, but those in the know tell me that he scores all this mouthwatering stuff at car boot sales. I suppose that the original owners of the books have died off, and their families have put the books back into the economy in the simplest way possible. As I was scheduled to die off myself, even if I did not precisely know when, it was madness to start making small piles of books on Hugh’s stall that I wanted to take home. But the madness was divine. Even if I already had the book, he might have a handier edition; and often they were titles that I had once owned but lost along the way; and most often of all they were books that I had never owned before but now realized I ought to possess. Somewhere in there was an itching sense of duty. The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

  But these and similar philosophical principles will be treated from time to time throughout this volume. Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick the book up. The books I already had in the house presumably once generated the same sort of charge when I contemplated buying them. Now there they were, still in their thousands despite the recent winnowing. I roamed slowly among them: old purchases begging to be read again even as the new purchases came in at the rate of one plastic shopping bag full every week. Insanity, insanity. Or, as Johnson might have said, vanity, vanity.

  Johnson, who often convicted himself of indolence, might possibly have approved my plan for the organization of this volume: there isn’t one. It just sort of happened, and for several years I had been occupied with what might well have been my last readings before Yale kindly got the idea of asking me to compose a little book about whatever books I had been reading lately. Even after the request came, I went on reading in no particular order, mixing books of obvious seriousness with books of seeming triviality; as I always have, in the belief that culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity, and sometimes you will find things out from fans and buffs that you won’t from a tenured professor. Thus there were heavy books about Washington that taught me about American politics, but also featherweight books about Hollywood that taught me about American cultural imperialism: which is, after all, the branch of American global dominance that actually works, however much the rest of us might fret.

  I also mixed books I had read before with books I ought not to have neglected. The second category, I found, tended to absorb the first; because if I had first read a book long enough ago, it seeme
d brand new when I came to it again. I suppose the big find, among those books truly new to me, was Olivia Manning’s set of two trilogies; and the shock of pleasure that her writings delivered to me is recorded here with due prominence. But it was almost as much of a revelation, after more than fifty years, to rediscover Joseph Conrad. My reconquista of his works is spread throughout this book because that was the way it happened: I didn’t revisit his major novels in a bunch, I tried to space them out, mainly because I was trying to stop. Time felt precious and I would have preferred to spend less of it with him, but he wouldn’t let me go.

  I might say the same of Ernest Hemingway; and at this point I really did have a dramatic order in mind while I wrote my text; I wanted him young and infinitely promising in my overture, and disintegrating in my finale. It seemed fair. Much of the damage that led to his terrible end he had inflicted on himself. And he seemed such a conspicuous example of how the gift of life, and the gift of talent, can be abused. Perhaps I was becoming Puritanical in my old age—dotards often do—but I disapproved of his recklessness, while attempting to register the undoubted fact that I would not have disapproved so much if he had not been such a mighty figure. He haunts this book, as Dr. Johnson does. But so do they all, the writers. Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.

  Hemingway in the Beginning

  I LAST READ The Sun Also Rises long enough ago to have forgotten all but the odd detail. But the sharpness of the details I remembered—the chestnut trees of Paris, the running of the bulls in Pamplona—was a sufficient reminder that the book had always struck me as fresh and vivid, the perfect expression of a young writer getting into his proper stride. When I first read it I was a young writer myself, and scarcely into my stride at all. I remember that the book filled me with envy.

  Reading it once again, and at the end of my own career, I am less envious—clearly Hemingway’s own personality had always scared him into suicidal excess—but still enchanted by a prose style that gave us such a vivid semblance of simplicity. All too often he overdoes the repetitions in those dialogue passages where the speakers seem mainly intent on echoing each other’s phrases. Worse, when they get drunk they start echoing themselves. But even with that irritating trick, he occasionally gets it so right that you laugh. Mike, the most consistently drunk of all the book’s drunkards, is funny the second time that he says the old lady’s bags fell on him: funny because he first said it only a few seconds before, and has either forgotten he did so or is under the impression that nobody understood him. It is just the way that young, inexperienced drinkers speak when they are plastered. I used to do it myself, fifty years ago.

  In the book, scarcely anybody is old enough to have a past. They live in the present moment because they are young, and have to. So they pretend to be experienced. The central figure, Jake Barnes, has the author’s past, except that Jake’s past is not a lie. He might be the author’s self-image, and not least because he lives in a state of permanent sexual frustration. Certainly Hemingway was always made nervous by women, although he was so attractive in his looks and energy that almost any woman he wanted would come to him like a mosquito to naked skin. Jake’s impotence even in the presence of the beautiful English aristocratic wildcat Lady Brett Ashley no doubt dramatizes the author’s wishes along with his troubles. (In real life, on one of his first trips to Pamplona, Hemingway, with his first wife Hadley looking on, paid attention to Lady Duff Twysden and had a fistfight with his Jewish acquaintance Harold Loeb because Loeb had been successful with her.) But Jake is more physically damaged than mentally. The physical damage—its nature is never quite specified, although later on, in real life, Hemingway spoke of an amputation—has been acquired during the war when he was flying on the southern front. As a consequence, Jake and Brett are in a condition of lusting after each other without being able to do anything about it. The possibility of Jake’s being able to do something less than complete for Brett but still significant is not canvassed, except in a single enigmatic passage in the book when the two of them seem to have attained just enough satisfaction to make them more frustrated than ever.

  Today’s reader might judge that to be a failure of the author’s imagination. But there is no failure of the imagination in Hemingway’s making Jake into a war pilot. It is exactly the kind of thing that Hemingway liked to imagine, in the same way he imagined himself to be a champion boxer, even on the day when Morley Callaghan knocked him down. (Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris is another book I must read again.) Hemingway’s war service, though earthbound, was dangerous enough to get him badly wounded, but he lied even about that, dramatizing, at every retelling, the action he had seen and even the wounds he had received. Later on, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway made the hero a warrior so damaged that the nymphlike nurse Catherine seems to be bringing him back from the dead. But already, in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway had done better than that: or, if you like, worse. Creating the self-projected character of the noble and stoically frustrated Jake, Hemingway not only gave himself extra wounds. He gave himself wings.

  He was not alone in painting a picture of himself as the ace flyer. William Faulkner was prone to doing the same, until he was caught at it. Faulkner could actually fly but he never flew in combat, although he allowed people to think he had. Hemingway was forever leaving room for you to think things. During World War II, in which he let it be known that he had personally liberated Paris, he did brave deeds that those responsible for the safety of the people around him devoutly wished that he would desist from doing. Most of the warlike tasks that he set for himself were more than half-crazy, but he always left room, in the telling, for his readers and listeners to believe that his follies had been a strategically important part of the Allied war effort. You would swear that he had arm-wrestled German submarines into submission.

  In real life, many writers are liars. Perhaps, when starting off, they all are: no real story is ever as neat as the writer tells it. Politicians with a tendency to self-glorifying exaggeration usually get caught early and are advised by their handlers to cut it out, so that Hillary Clinton doesn’t land more than once in Sarajevo “under sniper fire,” and Joe Biden, who once expanded his every experience into an act of heroism, eventually learns to feign veracity. But writers have to advise themselves. In World War II the poet James Dickey was the navigator of a P-61 Black Widow night fighter operating in the Pacific. You would think that such a service record would be romantic enough, but he used to improve his past by hinting that he had been in on the missions to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Unfortunately this self-serving legend—he was a man who needed more guilt than he deserved—got into his work, and even when he had a fact to convey he would pump it up so as to increase his own significance. Hemingway suffered from the same disease. Having noticed how the narrative charm of a seemingly objective style would put a gloss on reality automatically, he habitually trod on the accelerator instead of the brake. As a result, much of his later work was ruined. He overstated even the understatements. But with The Sun Also Rises he was still testing his power to enchant.

  There is not much that is enchanting about his treatment of Robert Cohn, which must have sounded anti-Semitic even at the time, one would have thought. Nor is there anything enchanting about his repeated use of the word “nigger,” but that’s a problem for teachers and publishers, many of whom are African Americans but seem not to object much, as if—and this is true—Hemingway’s little novel, which is really only an extended novella, was a thing of its time. Whether it is also a thing for eternity is debatable. Certainly it continues to count in my own eternity, but that will soon come to an end. In the short time I have left for reading, however, I am very glad to have found occasion for hearing once again how Jake and Brett adored each other in th
at strange, mannered, yet somehow sensual dialogue, as if a phrase could be a caress. The book is a metaphorical triumph, and all while having scarcely a single metaphor in it, or even a simile. In fact only once does Hemingway say that something is like something else. In Jake’s mind, Brett’s lovely figure has the curves of a racing yacht’s hull. Our minds might tell us that a woman whose figure reminded us of a boat would be an awkward proposition, but our hearts are already captured.

  Revisiting Conrad

  AMONG THE DISADVANTAGES of COPD, which used to be called emphysema, is a susceptibility to chest infections. Despite one’s daily intake of antibiotics, different bacteria keep arriving from all directions, eager to squat. One day I was checking in at the hospital for a routine clinic, and my temperature was deemed to be too high for me to go home. I spent ten days in the pulmonary ward, while the fever turned into pneumonia. A flood of intravenous antibiotics eventually got on top of it, but meanwhile the problem of boredom loomed. I staved it off by rereading Lord Jim, a copy of which, along with the usual epics about swords and dragons, was on the library cart which a very sweet and obviously fulfilled senior female volunteer was wheeling around the wards. More than half a century ago Lord Jim had been one of the set novels for my first-year English class at Sydney University, and I remembered it as a boring book. I suppose I had a plan to stave off one kind of boredom with another, as a kind of inoculation.

  On the strength of this long-delayed second reading, the book struck me as no more exciting than it had once seemed, but a lot more interesting. I had long known Conrad to be a great writer: on the strength of Under Western Eyes alone, he would have to be ranked high among those English writers—well, Polish writers resident in England—who, dealing with eastern Europe, analyzed the struggle between the imbecility of autocracy and the imbecility of revolution. But on the strength of my earlier memories, I didn’t see Lord Jim as part of that international historical picture. Now, reading a few pages at a time as I lay fitfully on a sweat-soaked sheet while my fever refused to break, I could see that I had been laughably wrong about Conrad’s most famous book for the whole of my reading life. An international historical picture is exactly what it exemplifies.