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

by Miller, Andy

  Oh Fred, oh Karl. If only it were that simple.

  Book Six

  The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

  (Supplementary Book One – Cooking with Pomiane by Edouard de Pomiane)

  ‘I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad.’

  The Sea, The Sea

  ‘There is no doubt that people in England are becoming much more adventurous in their eating habits, and snails appear quite tame compared with the bumble bees, grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants which I believe are selling well at some of the big stores.’

  Cooking with Pomiane

  How do you go about becoming a writer? I had paper and pencils. I had a notebook for ideas. I had an Amstrad PCW 9512 word processor. But I did not know anyone who made a living from their writing and I did not know how you went from sitting in front of a blank screen to sipping Bellinis with Jeanette Winterson. So, for rather longer than planned, I got a job in a bookshop. I signed up for six months and stayed for five years.

  To be precise, it was a chain of bookshops. During my time, I worked in three different branches, the last of which was an elegant superstore in a posh quarter of West London. After a couple of years there, I was allowed to run the fiction section on the ground floor, a responsibility I loved. It was a spectacular sight, shelf after shelf of new paperbacks; prize-winners, potboilers, whodunits, whydunits and all points in-between. The manager of the shop took the view that we were the chain’s London flagship store – the managers of the Hampstead and Charing Cross Road stores told their staff the same thing – and therefore we had to offer what he called ‘perfect stock’. ‘Perfect stock’ meant never running out of anything. Woe betide you if, on recommending Robertson Davies to a customer, he went to the shelf and discovered a space where, say, The Lyre of Orpheus should have been. In this atmosphere of edgy competitiveness, good retail sense often took a back seat to hawk-eyed completism. So when the previous incumbent suffered a nervous breakdown and went on semi-permanent sick leave, I had been the obvious candidate to succeed him.

  Every day, I would patrol the fiction bays, roaming up and down with a publishers’ stocklist, hunting out the telltale gaps. In the process, I inadvertently absorbed the names of many authors of whom I had never heard before. I also became familiar with the more obscure corners of the well-known writers’ back catalogue. So, for instance, Muriel Spark became not just the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but also The Public Image, The Takeover and Territorial Rights. I quickly came to know the works of Miss Read, Hubert Selby Jr and Lisa St Aubin de Téran, though only by sight, spine-out. It was here and not at university that I learned all you really needed to appear indisputably bookish, i.e. titles and names. The shop was a finishing school for bullshitters.

  In the never-ending pursuit of ‘perfect stock’, one looked more kindly on those authors whose work did not sell rather than those whose work did. Of these perhaps my favourite was Iris Murdoch. No one ever bought any of her books, except The Sea, The Sea, which had won the Booker Prize in 1978. The popularity of the likes of Virginia Andrews, Louis de Bernières, Jilly Cooper or Robertson Davies posed a persistent threat to 100 per cent coverage. But every time you arrived at the tail-end of ‘M’, stocklist in hand, you could be certain of finding The Black Prince, Henry and Cato, A Severed Head, et al., exactly where you last left them. And this had the notable side-effect of giving you an easy fluency – a superficial depth of knowledge – in Dame Iris’s entire oeuvre.

  I met my future wife in that shop. I also met Morrissey, Dustin Hoffman and Princess Diana.1 And because we were on the publishers’ promotional circuit, I also made the brief acquaintance of a lot of writers, amongst them Iris Murdoch. At a Booker anniversary evening, she gave a reading from The Sea, The Sea to an audience of about two dozen people in front of the gardening books upstairs.2 Dame Iris was petite, with white hair and an impish smile, and she appeared to have come to the reading in her slippers.

  ‘I love your work,’ I told her, which was something one said fairly often to visiting authors but which on this occasion had the merit of being wholly misleading yet completely true.

  All this came back to me as I began The Sea, The Sea. However, these feelings of nostalgia, guilt and remorse – or was it pride? – were soon swept away in a wash of bewilderment. Although the prose was bright and clear, and the scenery reassuringly English and domestic, this was quite the most head-scratching of all the novels I had tried so far. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was one weird book.

  The narrator is a retired theatre director called Charles Arrowby. The story begins just as he has moved from London to a town on the edge of the North Sea, taking up residence in a ramshackle house called Shruff End, where he plans to write his memoirs – the book we are reading – and ‘to repent of a life of egoism . . . I shall abjure magic and become a hermit’. To this end he catalogues, in the fruitiest tones imaginable, his every swim, thought and meal. (‘Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.’) These early pages of The Sea, The Sea were transparent enough. Relocating to the coast in search of a profound life change, making lists of food and drink in fiddle-faddling detail: the man was a buffoon.

  However, the novel soon spins off into a kind of insanity, as Arrowby’s self-obsession runs wild. He sees, or hallucinates, monsters from the deep. He is visited by a succession of friends and associates from London, who come and go seemingly at will. He indulges a renewed passion for his childhood sweetheart Hartley, who coincidentally lives in the nearby town with her husband. Is this really happening or not? The marriage is violent and unhappy, he tells us, but is it? She clearly wants Arrowby to leave them alone. Her adoptive son turns up, just like that. Then, using the son as bait, Arrowby kidnaps her. Meanwhile, he relays all this madness to the reader in a rococo monologue comprised of philosophical aperçus, finely-wrought pen-portraits of the sea, the sea, and periodic descriptions of really horrible meals.

  It was the meals I found most perplexing. As noted earlier, food was not my strong point. I had some enthusiasm for the stuff – it keeps one alive, after all – but little knowledge; I had never really learned to cook properly. So, when presented with some of Arrowby’s more bumptious menus (‘I imagined that the only book I would ever publish would be a cookery book!’), I was at a loss to know what they stood for. Was this fine dining or foul? For example, on page:

  Spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (‘Basil is of course the king of herbs.’)

  Spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill.

  Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in.

  A slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (‘Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.’)

  A bottle of retsina.

  In the spirit of the List of Betterment, as a means of understanding the book, I felt I ought to at least try to establish whether this meal was edible or not. So I rode my bike to the grocery store and filled a basket with these items, brought them home and prepared them to the best of my limited ability. The spaghetti was ok, and the cabbage and corned beef were, well, cabbage and corned beef, but the boiled onion concoction was unspeakable. Thank goodness for the retsina.

  I tried again a couple of days later with a lunch that required a little more planning:

  Lentil soup

  Chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea

  Dried apricots and shortcake biscuits

  A light Beaujolais

  ‘Fresh apricots are best of course,’ notes Arrowby, ‘but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the aprico
t is the king of fruit.’

  I soaked the dried apricots overnight and stewed the apples in tea, as instructed, but the result was neither heavenly nor illuminating – the combination was simply revolting – and once again I got a hangover from downing a bottle of wine at lunchtime. It was a sort of Charles Arrowby drinking game, with additional unpleasant gastric consequences.

  Of course, these experiments were a lark but they were beside the point. They brought me no nearer to divining the meaning of the meals, or for that matter, The Sea, The Sea itself.

  That weekend, we had a visitor to stay, an old friend called Richard. He and Tina had known one another since infant school where, because of an accident of surname, they were allocated desks together. They then had to sit next to one another, day in, day out, for the next nine years. Richard is a hearty individual, whose general bonhomie covers a roving and somewhat intense spirit. Tina is very fond of him; he is tremendous company. He is also a somewhat intense bon viveur, in the sense that he likes to eat well and drink very well – quality in quantity.

  What do you cook the man who eats everything? I considered boiling some onions à la Arrowby in his honour but decided against it. Instead, I did what we always do when Richard visits, which is buy a lot of wine and several extravagant cheeses and let him get on with it.

  We were sitting at the kitchen table, and as I uncorked another bottle, Richard leant back in his chair and pulled a cookbook off the shelves by the window.

  ‘Is this any good?’ he asked, leafing through it. And then, a minute later, ‘God, you really look after your books, don’t you? Ours are always covered in sticky marks. This looks like it hasn’t even been opened.’

  Inadvertently, Richard was onto something. Our cookbooks were in pristine condition because none of them had ever been used. Several years earlier, when Alex was born, I had decided that I would shoulder my new responsibilities by taking care of the cooking. I had bought a juicer and some superior measuring spoons and we started frequenting farmers’ markets and high-class butchers; and of course, I had bought a lot of cookbooks, far more than we needed, most of which stayed permanently on the shelf and made the place look culinary. And it was true that I had learned a few basic dishes, though nothing with any finesse and certainly nothing I could rustle up for a gourmand of Richard’s standing. However, it had not really occurred to me until this moment that my appetite for the trappings of gastronomy, which had felt so genuine, had been little more than another way of going shopping. ‘The heart of a man is hollow and full of ordure,’ writes Pascal in Pensées. Ah well. I was shallow but at least I was consistent.

  ‘Is this any good?’ The uncomplicated, unreflecting answer to Richard’s simple question would be, ‘Yes.’ I had every reason to suppose that it was good, bar personal experience of the book, of which I had almost none. But what could personal experience really add? I lacked the expertise in cookery to make this judgement. In my ignorance, it would be a matter of blurting out whether or not I liked the book, and that was not what was being asked. However, the new-born integrity spawned by the List of Betterment, and the fine wine, was urging me towards a full confession: ‘I don’t know. It was in that list of the greatest cookbooks of all time, you know the one, the grocery store one, a few years ago. I haven’t read it. I haven’t even looked at it. I bought the whole lot and we never use them. I’m a charlatan.’

  ‘Have some more cheese,’ I said instead.

  ‘Well, I thought it was shite,’ said Richard, slipping the book back on the shelf. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

  I told him the truth. I had done very little writing since Alex had been born. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I’m doing this project at the moment with books, I think you’ll like this.’

  ‘Is this that list you mentioned the last time I saw you?’ he said. Mmm, and several times before that.

  ‘Yes, but now I’m actually doing it,’ I said. And I told him about the books I had read so far.

  Richard, ever the perfect guest, listened politely while I expounded on the virtues of this or that book, nodding occasionally to confirm whether he had read it or not. (‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Awful.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Never heard of it.’) When I reached The Sea, The Sea, however, he suddenly sat bolt upright.

  ‘Shit!’ he yelled, the wine sloshing around his glass. ‘I love that book!’

  ‘I, er, I’m not sure I really get it,’ I said.

  ‘Have you finished it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘It’s INCREDIBLE,’ he said, with absolute conviction. And for the next fifteen minutes, he rhapsodised about this intoxicating novel which had so far done little but give me a sore head. As I sat and listened, a bit drunk, what struck me was not his coherent argument regarding the glory of The Sea, The Sea – there was little coherence, he was drunk too – but the joie de vivre that was spilling out of him. Richard is a documentary filmmaker. He has seen some fairly awful sights and regularly encounters the worst of humanity: tyrants, lowlifes, TV executives. But reflecting in the glow of this book he was rejuvenated. You could see him catching his own enthusiasm.

  ‘But the meals, Richard,’ I said. ‘What about the meals?’

  He shouted with laughter. ‘Oh, they’re hilarious,’ he said.

  And, of course, they were. It wasn’t that the meals in The Sea, The Sea were only hilarious, but being given permission to find them hilarious opened the novel for me. Until now it had not occurred to me that I was allowed to find anything in any of these books properly funny rather than ‘witty’ or ‘amusing’ or ‘comic’. I had been reading literature, and literature mistrusts hilarity, reasoning that something that makes you laugh out loud must be making its appeal to a coarser sensibility. Yet The Sea, The Sea, especially in its first few chapters, is brilliantly, mischievously funny. I went back to the beginning and laughed a lot at Charles Arrowby. It felt good to laugh.

  Another thing which made me smile was the discovery that no two commentators seemed to agree about the meals in The Sea, The Sea. A quick Internet search revealed that one newspaper considered them ‘nauseating’, while another preferred ‘parodically rustic’. To one reviewer, they were ‘elaborately described’, to another merely ‘tedious’, to a third ‘delightful’. One website singled out a couple of the dishes as ‘refreshing and organic’; another noted that they were ‘primarily out of tins’. Moreover, an obituary of Dame Iris in the Independent revealed that ‘the disgusting menus were suggested by Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, who would shock people by pretending to find the food perfectly nice’.

  It was liberating to discover there was no right answer: one man’s meat is another’s excuse for eating vegetables. The Sea, The Sea is held together by the personality and preoccupations of its author, more than a consistent application of novelistic good form. It is hilarious. It is also spiritual and sexual, philosophical and frightening. The beautiful thing about it is how it holds more than one meaning within itself, releasing something subtly different to whoever picks it up. ‘We are all such shocking poseurs,’ writes Arrowby, ‘so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.’ Murdoch had taken an ingredient from her own kitchen table, a practical joke, and mixed it in with all her other fascinations – her eccentricity, intelligence and spirit lived on in the book, just as the master lived on in his novel.

  The Sea, The Sea was liberating in a more practical way, too. Having tried my hand at a few of Arrowby’s nastier dishes, I could now see no reason not to attempt some authentic cooking of my own. Perhaps it would be nice to make dinner for my own spouse one evening. But where to start?

  One of the cookbooks I had bought at the height of my folie de cuisine was a 1930s classic called Cooking with Pomiane, by the French chef and epicure Edouard de Pomiane, which was written in a grandiloquent register every bit as fruity as Charles Arrowby’s – except of course that one author was fictional and the other flesh and blood. Take, for example, Arrowby’s
musings on haute cuisine:

  ‘It may be that what really made me see through the false mythology of haute cuisine was not so much restaurants as dinner parties . . . Haute cuisine even inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practise it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure. Food is best eaten among friends who are unmoved by such “social considerations”, or of course best of all alone. I hate the falsity of “grand” dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.’

  This rings true, doesn’t it? Now compare the fictional Arrowby with the historically verifiable figure of Pomiane on the same subject:

  ‘First of all, there are three kinds of guests: 1. Those one is fond of. 2. Those with whom one is obliged to mix. 3. Those whom one detests. For these three very different occasions, one would prepare, respectively, an excellent dinner, a banal meal, or nothing at all, since in the latter case one would buy something ready cooked . . . To make a dinner for people one can’t bear is to try and keep up with the Jones’s, as you say in English. Whatever you do, you are bound to be criticized, so it is better to buy ready cooked food and let the supplier be criticized instead.’

  Well, who could argue with either gentleman, especially when they both expressed themselves with such authority? Actually, doesn’t Pomiane seem a little more fictional than Arrowby, a little more far-fetched? After all, here is a chef of some renown suggesting some guests are only fit for ready meals; Jamie Oliver, in contrast, would feel compelled to knock up a ‘pukka spag bol’ even for his worst enemy.

  ‘For a successful dinner, there should never be more than eight at table. One should prepare only one good dish,’ writes Pomiane. ‘Concentrate all your efforts on the main dish and let it be abundant. Your guests will enjoy a second helping since you will have used all your art in its preparation.’

  I flicked through Cooking with Pomiane, looking for a dish which fulfilled these criteria. There would only be two at table, and one of us did not eat fish, so that ruled out Codling à la Basquaise. How about Poulet Flambé à l’Estragon? Too tricky. Blanquette of Veal? Delicious, but cruel. I finally settled on a markedly Arrowbian recipe for Pork Chops and Rhubarb. Here it is.