by Nick Hornby
Every time I read a biography of a novelist, I discover that the novels in question are autobiographical to an almost horrifying degree. In Blake Bailey’s book about Richard Yates, for example, we learn that Yates fictionalized his mother by changing her name from Dookie to Pookie (or perhaps from Pookie to Dookie, I can’t remember now). In Nigel Jones’s Through a Glass Darkly we learn that, like Bob in The Midnight Bell, Patrick Hamilton had a disastrous crush on a prostitute, and that, like Bone in Hangover Square, his obsession with a young actress (Geraldine Fitzgerald, who appeared in Wuthering Heights alongside Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) was deranged, although he stopped short of murdering her. And, of course, like all of his characters, Hamilton was a drunk. I’m sure that a biography of Tolkien would reveal that The Lord of the Rings was autobiographical, too – that Tolkien actually fell down a hole and found a place called Central Earth, where there were a whole bunch of Hobbits. Some people – critics, mostly – would argue that this diminishes the achievement somehow, but it’s the writing that’s hard, not the invention.
See, some of us just don’t come from the right kind of background to be the subject of a literary biography. Hamilton’s father was left a hundred thousand pounds in 1884, and pissed it all away during a lifetime of utter indolence and dissolution; his first wife was a prostitute whom Hamilton Sr imagined he could save from the streets, but the marriage didn’t work out.’Snot fair! Why didn’t my dad ever have a thing with prostitutes? (Note to Believer fact-checker: I’ll give you his number, but I’m not making the call. He’s pretty grouchy at the best of times.)
Jenny, the prostitute in The Midnight Bell, takes centre stage in The Siege of Pleasure, the second novel in the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy. Hamilton was a Marxist for much of his life, and though he ended up voting Conservative, as so many English Marxists did, in his case it was because the Tories hated the Labour Party as much as he did, which at least shows a warped kind of ideological consistency. The Siege of Pleasure is in part a careful, convincing analysis of the economic and social pressures that forced Jenny on to the streets and out of her life below stairs. It’s more fun than this sounds, because Hamilton, who wrote the play Rope, which Hitchcock later filmed, loves his ominous narratives. He’s a sort of urban Hardy: everyone is doomed, right from the first page. Hamilton isolates Jenny’s plight to an evening spent boozing with a tarty friend; she gets plastered, wakes up late in the house of a man she doesn’t know, and fails to turn up at her new job, skivvying for a comically incapable trio of old people. It’s sad, but Hamilton’s laconic narrative voice is always a joy to read, and as a social historian, Hamilton is unbeatable. Who knew that you could get waiter service in pubs in the 1920s? And plates of biscuits? Biscuits! What sort of biscuits? Hamilton doesn’t say.
In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid attempts to grapple with the question that seems constantly to arise in this column, namely, Why bloody bother? Why bother reading the bastards, and why bother writing them? I’m not sure he gets a lot further than I’ve ever managed, but there are some great stats here: Zaid estimates, for example, that it would take us fifteen years simply to read a list of all the books ever published. (‘Author and title’ – he’s very precise. You can, presumably, add on another seven or eight years if you want to know the names of the publishers.) I think he intends to make us despair, but I was actually rather heartened: not only can I now see that it’s possible – I’d be finished some time in my early sixties – but I’m seriously tempted. A good chunk of coming across as educated, after all, is just a matter of knowing who wrote what: someone mentions Patrick Hamilton, and you nod sagely and say, Hangover Square, and that’s usually enough. If I read the list, something might stick in the memory, because God knows that the books themselves don’t.
Zaid’s finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that ‘the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more’.
That’s me! And you, probably! That’s us! ‘Thousands of unread books’! ‘Truly cultured’! Look at this month’s list: Chekhov’s letters, Amis’s letters, Dylan Thomas’s letters… What are the chances of getting through that lot? I’ve started on the Chekhov, but the Amis and the Dylan Thomas have been put straight into their permanent home on the shelves, rather than on to any sort of temporary pending pile. The Dylan Thomas I saw remaindered for fifteen quid (down from fifty) just after I’d read a terrific review of a new Thomas biography in the New Yorker; the Amis letters were a fiver. But as I was finding a home for them in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section (I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey), I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. My music is me, too, of course – but as I only really like rock and roll and its mutations, huge chunks of me – my rarely examined operatic streak, for example – are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children… But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not worth the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?
A selection from
TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY
by PATRICK HAMILTON
The first to enter the Saloon Bar that night was Mr Wall. This was a very sprightly little man, and another habitué. He had a red face, fair hair, twinkling blue eyes, a comic little moustache, and a bowler hat. He was obscurely connected with motors in Great Portland Street, and incorrigible. His incorrigibility was his charm. Indeed, he kept his company perpetually diverted. But this was not because his jokes and innuendoes were good, but because they were so terribly, terribly bad. You couldn’t believe that anyone could behave so badly and awfully, and you loved to hear him exceed himself. Against all your sense of propriety you were obscurely tickled – simply because he was at it again. There was no doing anything with him.
His jokes, like all bad jokes, were mostly tomfooleries with the language. To call, for instance, ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ ‘The Four Horsemen of the Eucalyptus’ was, to him, quite tremendous in its sly and impudent irony. But he was not always as subtle as this. Having a wonderful comic susceptibility to words, and particularly those with as many as, or more than, four syllables in them, he could hardly let any hopeful ones go by without raillery. Thus, if in the course of conversation you happened innocently to employ the word ‘Vocabulary’ he would instantly cry out ‘Oh my word – let’s take a Cab!’ or something like that, and repeat it until you had fully registered it. Or if you said that something was Identical with something else, he would say that So long as there wasn’t a Dent in it, we would be all right. Or if you said that things looked rather Ominous, he would declare that So long as we weren’t all run over by an Omnibus we would be all right. Or if you were so priggishly erudite as to allude to Metaphysics, he would first of all ask you, in a complaining tone, Met What? – and then add consolingly that So long as we Met it Half Way it would be all right. It was a kind of patter in the conditional. Similarly, in his own particular idiom, Martyrs were associated with Tomatoes, Waiters with Hot Potatoes, Cribbage with Cabbage, Salary with Celery (the entire vegetable world was ineffably droll), Suits with Suet, Fiascoes with Fiancées, and the popular wireless genius with Macaroni. He was, perhaps, practically off his head.
‘Well, Bob, my boy,’ he said, rallying, as he came in. ‘How’re you? B an’ B, please, calgirl.’
He employed the popular abbreviation for Bitter and Button mixed, and Ella gave it him, primly and deprecatingly, and took his money.
‘How’re you, Mr Wall?’she said. ‘We haven’t seen you lately.’
‘Oh
, I’m all right. Wotyavin, Bob?’
‘I won’t have nothing to-night, thank you, Mr Wall.’
‘What – You on the Wagon?’
‘Pro Tem,’ said Bob.
‘’Bout time he was,’ said Ella.
At this the door creaked open, and Mr Sounder entered.
‘Ah ha!’said Mr Sounder. ‘The worthy Mr Wall!’
‘Oh ho!’ said Mr Wall. ‘The good Mr Sounder!’ But the two gentlemen looked at each other with a kind of glassy gleam which belied this broad and amicable opening. Indeed, these two were notoriously incapable of hitting it off, and the thwarted condescension of the one, together with the invulnerable impudence of the other, were features of ‘The Midnight Bell’ in the evening.
‘Been writin’ any more letters to those papers of yours, Mr Sounder?’ asked Mr Wall.
‘Not my papers – alas – Mr Wall. Bitter I think, please, Ella.’
‘Wish I owned a paper,’tanyrate,’ said Ella, trying to keep the peace, and she gave him his beer.
‘No…’ said Mr Sounder. ‘As a matter of Absolute Fact, within the last hour I have been in the Throes of Composition.’
‘So long as it ain’t a false position,’said Mr Wall. ‘It’s all right.’
Here both Bob and Ella were seized by that irritating and inexplicable desire to giggle, and showed it on their shamefaced faces: but Mr Sounder ignored the interruption.
‘I have, in fact, brought forth a Sonnet,’ he said.
‘A Sonnet?’ said Bob.
‘Oh,’said Mr Wall. ‘Didn’t know you wore a Bonnet. Glad to hear it.’
‘What’s the subject?’ asked Bob.
(‘You might lend it to me,’ said Mr Wall.)
‘The subject is Evensong in Westminster Abbey,’ said Mr Sounder, suavely, and looked portentously at his beer.
NOVEMBER 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Deception – Philip Roth
Wonder Boys – Michael Chabon
The Essential Tales of Chekhov
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892–1895 – Anton Chekhov
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories – Leo Tolstoy
BOOKS READ:
On and Off the Field – Ed Smith
A Life in Letters – Anton Chekhov
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey – Janet Malcolm
Oh, Play That Thing – Roddy Doyle
I have been meaning to read a book about cricket for a while, with the sole intention of annoying you all. I even toyed with the idea of reading only cricket books this entire month, but then I realized that this would make it too easy for you to skip the whole column; this way, you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle. I’m presuming here that very few of you have ever seen a cricket match, and if you have, you are almost certain to have been both mystified and stupefied: this, after all, is a game that, in its purest form (there are all sorts of cheap-thrills bastardized versions now), lasts for five days and very frequently ends in a draw: five days is not quite long enough to get through everything that needs doing in a cricket match, especially as you can’t play in the rain.
The funny thing is that we actually do like cricket here in England – it’s not some hey-nonny-no phoney heritage thing, like Morris dancing (horrific bearded men with sticks and bells) or cream teas. Thirty or forty years ago it was our equivalent of baseball, an all-consuming summer sport that drove football off the back pages of newspapers completely for three months; now Beckham and the rest of them get the headlines even when they’re lying on Caribbean beaches. But big international matches still sell out, and every now and again the England team starts winning, and we renew our interest.
Ed Smith reminds traditionalists of a time when cricketers were divided into two camps, ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Players’; the former were private-school boys and university graduates from upper-middle-class backgrounds, the latter horny-handed professionals who weren’t even allowed to share a dressing room with their social betters. Smith is a Cambridge graduate who reviews fiction for one of the broadsheet newspapers. He’s also good-looking, well-spoken, articulate, and he has played for England, so perhaps not surprisingly, On and Off the Field, his diary of a season, attracted a fair bit of attention, all of it, as far as I can tell, admiring. Where’s the fairness in that? You’d think that if critics had any use at all, it would be to give our golden boys and girls a fearsome bashing, but of course you can’t even rely on them for that.
To be fair to the critics, Smith didn’t give them much ammunition: On and Off the Field is terrific, exactly the sort of book you want from a professional sportsman but you never get: it’s self-analytical (even if, after the self-analysis, he attributes some of his early-season failure to sheer bad luck), wry and honest. The sports memoir is such a debased form – George Best, the biggest football star of the sixties and seventies, has ‘written’ five autobiographies to date, and he hasn’t kicked a ball for thirty-odd years – but On and Off the Field is different: the photo on the back depicts Smith slumped against a wall, the very epitome of defeated misery. Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this, but Smith is one of the very few capable not only of recognizing this bitter truth, but acknowledging it in print. I know you’re not going to read it. But let’s say I’ve read it on your behalf, and we’ve all enjoyed it.
To my surprise, I managed to read, in its entirety, one of the many books of collected letters I inexplicably bought last month. Why I read it, however, is almost as mysterious as why I bought it in the first place; or rather, I’m not sure why I felt I had to read every word of every letter. After a little while, you get the pattern: letters to his feckless brothers tend to be fiercely admonitory (and therefore fun); letters to his mother and sister tend to be purely domestic, functional and a little on the dull side (‘Tell Arseny to water the birch tree once a week, and the eucalyptus’); letters to his wife, Olga Knipper, are embarrassingly slushy, and the letters he wrote to Alexey Suvorin, his publisher, are the letters I was hoping for when I started the book: they’re the ones where you’re most likely to find something about writing. I should have stuck to the Suvorin letters, but you get addicted to the (mostly sleepy) rhythms of Chekhov’s quotidian life.
Chekhov, as you probably know (I don’t know why, but I always think of you lot knowing everything, pretty much, apart from the rules of cricket), started life as a hack, a journalist who wrote short comic articles for various Russian periodicals while training and then practising as a doctor. And then, in 1886, when he was just beginning to take his writing more seriously, he received the sort of letter most young writers can only dream of getting. Dmitry Grigorovich, a respected older novelist, wrote out of the blue to tell him he was a genius, and he should stop pissing around.
I know from personal experience that these letters have a galvanizing effect at first. But once you’ve had twenty or thirty of them, you start to chuck them straight into the bin once you’ve checked out the signature. I had a rule that I’d only take any notice if the correspondent had a Pulitzer or a Nobel; if you get involved with every two-bit literary legend who wants to be your friend, you’d never get any work done. Some of them can be a real pain. (Salinger? Reclusive? Yeah, I wish.) Anyway, Chekhov’s reply to Grigorovich is every bit as humbled, as sweetly thunderstruck, as you’d want it to be.
‘Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while very few have even heard of “The Wife” or “In the Ravine”,’ says Janet Malcolm in her short, moving, clever book Reading Chekhov. Perhaps this isn’t the right time to talk about what ‘everyone’ means here, although one is entitled to stop and wonder at the world in which our men and women of letters live – not ‘everyone’ has seen a football match or an episode of Seinfeld, let alone a nineteenth-century Russian play. But she’s right, of course, to point out that his stories languish in relative obscurity. In his introduction to th
e Essential Tales, Richard Ford writes about tackling the stories before he was old enough to realize that their plainness was deceptive, and though I hate that ‘writers’ writer’ stuff (after a lifetime of reading, I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time), I can see what he means. When you’re young and pretentious, you want your Greats to come with bells on, otherwise you can’t see what the fuss is about, and there are no bells in those stories.
What’s remarkable about the letters is that the drama hardly comes up at all. Every now and again, Chekhov tells someone that he’s just written a rubbish new play, or that he’s hopeless at the craft. ‘Reading through my newly born play convinces me more than ever that I’m not a playwright,’ he says when writing to Suvorin about The Seagull; Three Sisters is ‘boring, sluggish and awkward’. He’d have been staggered at the way things have turned out. His working life was about prose – and money. He tells just about anyone who’ll listen how much he got for this, and how much they could get for that.
