Sometimes after I have greatly enjoyed a book by a little-known author, I am tempted to read more from them.  This is almost always a mistake.  I really enjoyed Diana Athill’s story of her big break-up, INSTEAD OF A LETTER, and so threw caution to the winds and purchased STET, the story of her career in publishing.  I should have held on tight to that caution.   I can’t quite tell why it was so dull, as the raw material is promising: plucky young Hungarian (ie Andre Deutsch) and disappointed English debutante create publishing start-up that goes on to big success. 

“The story began with my father telling me: ‘You will have to earn a living.’  He said it to me several times during my childhood (which began in 1917), and the way he said it implied that earning one’s living was not quite natural.”

I wonder if this is part of the problem.  She was not of a class or a gender that ever had to work, so doesn’t seem to regard work as part of her own personal story.  She is bizarrely disconnected from the highs and lows of the journey, and descends to that lowest low of the upper class English memoir, name-dropping.  (Nadir of this style: Antonia Fraser’s horrifying MUST YOU GO: MY LIFE WITH HAROLD PINTER).  I did however find it useful for recommendations on what to read next, and so am picking my way through Deutsh’s back catalogue, finding such gems as the deeply obscure Zimbabwean memoir THE TOE-RAGS.  So that’s something.

The subtitle says it all: “The story of a strange upbringing in Southern Rhodesia.”  Strange it certainly is.  South Rhodesian, not so much – at least today – as Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe.  I would summarise by saying this is basically a story about being a poor white.  But I mean a really poor white.  The author and her siblings grow up in the rurals outside Rusape.  They get close to starving.  Their mother walks out on them when they are in junior school, to run off to Joburg with her husband’s brother.  Now there’s a novel I’d like to read, and I don’t find her behaviour so very indefensible in itself, except she runs off when both her husband and her domestic worker are away.  Luckily the worker comes home early, so the kids end up at the police station rather than the morgue. 

Then its on to their relatively wealthier aunt’s home in Salisbury, and then on to better schooling (at the Convent, my high school), and finally an almost white collar job.  As an adult the author leads a strange social life in Salisbury before the second world war, providing an interesting window into a largely forgotten world.  During the war she marries a soldier on leave who she has known for just nine days, and on this bizarre decision this strange novel ends.  (After all, don’t most women’s stories end with marriage?  What else could there be?) 

I enjoyed this book, both because it is well written, and because it is rare.  If you are a tiny minority from a tiny country it is almost never you read a book by your demographic, but here we are: a book by a white Zimbabwean woman.  Admittedly, the bar is high, as this small group includes Nobel laureate Doris Lessing; but this is a worthy addition.

These are Sedaris’ diaries from 1977 when he is in his early twenties, on through 2002.  What I mostly learnt from them is that you can waste a lot of years on hard drugs and still end up achieving something with your life.  I’m not really sure why I’ve been putting so much effort in.  I also learnt that he had a lot of free time.  It made me reflect on my own life.  He has time to ponder very (and I do mean very) minor events, and write them up to mild comic effect.  Having read quite a lot of his essays, especially in 2011, it’s interesting to see the raw material of his life that he massaged into money.    Here’s an example of what formed the basis of  the SANTALAND DIARIES.  It’s from when he was working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s.  Here’s some men leaving the grotto:

“And, hey, Santa,” one of them said.  “Look after our boys in the Gulf, will you?”  He said it with such gooey poignancy, Santa and I laughed merrily after they’d left.

And here he is working as an entrance elf:

The job amounts to hustling up visitors, and I thought I did a pretty good job.  “Patronize Santa,” I said.  “Behold his chubby majesty.  Santa was born and raised in a small home.  Hail him.  Santa’s patience is beyond your comprehension.  Come test it.”

I tend to love a diary, for the intimacy it gives you with someone else’s life.  These dairies are not like that.  They hold you at arm’s length.  But I didn’t mind.  They were entertaining at a distance, which is quite how I like relationships in real life.

This is a book about a grand passion that goes nowhere. Frederic Moreau is a law student who falls madly in love with a another man’s slightly older wife. He then pines after her for a couple of decades, and when she is finally available, decides she is now too old for him. He tries the law for a while, but then comes into a small fortune after which he rotates variously through arts, journalism, and politics, all with limited commitment. Meanwhile, major historical events are taking place in France: revolutions and so on. He is only tangentially involved.

So by the end of the 500 plus pages, you seem to have got precisely nowhere. At the end he is talking to his high school friend about a silly teenage prank, and the last lines of the book are them agreeing that that was “the best time we ever had”. This an unexpectedly tough ending for a book that covers virtually the whole of someone’s adult life, a life which was apparently – but I guess in the end not really – crammed with incident. It’s pretty harsh.

Many contemporary critics hated the book, finding it meandering and meaningless. Others loved it, such as Theodore Banville who commented that it was’sad, indecisive and mysterious, like life itself, making do with endings all the more terrible in that they are not materially dramatic’. One of his friends wrote to Flaubert to say the book was popular among his generation:

Do you know . . . the great catchphrase of the day? It comes from your book. You say: “THE LAST PAGE OF Sentimental Education!”And you cover your face with your hands.

This tells me Flaubert’s contemporaries were having a lot of issues we could relate to today. It’s focus on a broadly meaningless life, while dressed up like a nineteenth century novel, makes it seem oddly modern.

This is not to say it is not boring. It is kind of boring. However the academic who wrote the introduction feels that that is the point:

Flaubert further complicates his scene by staging a confusing abundance of major characters. The inner circle, the fictional space just around the hero, is crowded with figures whose names we struggle to recall. . . . This is undoubtedly deliberate artistic practice, a trick of composition aptly called de-Balzac-ification. True to his exacting sense of the artistic vocation, insulated from the pressures of the market by his modest private income, Flaubert understood that the serious novel, the art novel, must detach itself from popular taste.

Next time I create something people don’t like, I’m just going to say that I have detached myself from popular taste. That said, in among the meaninglessness and meander, there is lots of lovely writing. Let’s end with this taster, of a life I am so grateful feminism has saved me from:

She was one of those Parisian spinsters who, every evening when they have given their lessons or tried to sell little sketches, or to dispose of poor manuscripts, return to their own homes with mud on their petticoats, make their own dinner, which they eat by themselves, and then, with their soles resting on a foot-warmer, by the light of a filthy lamp, dream of a love, a family, a hearth, wealth—all that they lack. So it was that, like many others, she had hailed in the Revolution the advent of vengeance, and she delivered herself up to a Socialistic propaganda of the most unbridled description.

This book is surprising in its honesty. I find it surprising Athill is willing to be this frank with strangers; and really surprising she is willing to be this honest with herself. She lays down a real challenge to me in how to think about myself, to myself. The book tells the story of a break-up Athill suffered in her early twenties; and in another way, it tells the story of her whole life – because for her this break-up was . . . let’s just say, it was a bad one. And not a couple of weeks of ice-cream in your jammies kind of a bad one. More a twenty years of despair kind of a bad one.

While at University, Athill got engaged to a man she had known since she was fifteen. He went to Egypt for work, while she completed her last year at Oxford. He wrote to her regularly, and warmly, and then one day stopped writing to her. There was total silence for two years, until he wrote formally, asking to be released from their engagement, because he was going to marry someone else. I mean, that’s pretty bad. But for her it was enough to send her into a two decade long tail-spin. Here she is, reflecting on what kept her going:

I believe, however, that I owe to Oxford much of the stability and resilience which enabled me, later, to live through twenty years of unhappiness without coming to dislike life. I already had the advantages of a happy childhood and a naturally equitable disposition, and three years of almost pure enjoyment added to those advantages confirmed in me a bias towards being well-disposed to life without which, lacking faith, lacking intellect, lacking energy, and eventually, lacking confidence in myself, I might have foundered.

And:

Lazy and self-indulgent, I was a lively girl only in my capacity as a female, and once I was wounded in that capacity I became, to face the truth, dull. (Since I believe that any recognition of truth is salutary, this should be a bracing moment, but it does not feel like that: it feels sad.)

See what I mean about a piercing, uncomfortable, honesty? That said, the despair is hard to understand. Perhaps in the 1940s, marriage was just that important to a woman’s esteem. After that thought occurred to me, I thanked god on every page for the luck of being born now.

It’s strange to read about someone who feels she has written off so much of her life. Despite what she says was a lack of interest in a career, she was for many years one of the most important book editors in London. But even this she does not claim as making her life worthwhile:

Eight years younger than myself, my cousin was an exceptionally pretty girl with a haunting personality, so that her life was considerably fuller than mine, and I slid prematurely into an attitude common among good-natured middle-aged women: that of taking so strong an interest in other people’s lives that it largely fills the emptiness of one’s own. I was comfortable in the routine of those years, and when on rare occasions I felt a stab of misery my reaction to it was not revolt against my circumstances but a deliberate attempt to become resigned to them. But to say that satisfying work was something that made me happy – that I could not have done. Something else, occupying only a fraction of each year and appearing to be marginal, made more difference to the colour of my days than did my work. My holidays.

In her forties, she slowly begins to recover. This is in part, as she says above, due to her holidays; in part, I think, because of her work; in part, because she wins a small writing prize, which makes her feel that perhaps after all she is not a failure. And failure she is not. This lady is a lovely, lucid writer. Enjoy these snippets:

After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.

and

. . . the olive is the tree I would choose to keep if I could have only one: for the variety of shape, for the comforting roughness of its bark, for its minnow leaves, dark on top and silver underneath, which cast a shadow more delicately stippled than any other, and for its ancient usefulness, which makes it, like wheat, a symbolic thing.

INSTEAD OF A LETTER is full of these beautifully observed moments, which make you feel as if you have traveled deep inside her head. So much so that if one met her, it would be hard to act appropriately – i.e., like a stranger.

The book is remarkable to read today, but I can only imagine how remarkable it was when it first came out, when the genre of the ‘memoir’ barely existed. Let’s end with a little snippet of her teenage fantasy – can you imagine how this must have knocked their 1940s socks off:

I lay sprawled on the parquet in my sage-green art-silk tunic and bloomer and my salmon-pink lisle stockings, thinking, ‘If a stevedore’ – why a stevedore? I am sure I had never met one – ‘If a stevedore would come and rape me at this minute, I would let him’

The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances.

This is a very un-Graham Greene Graham Greene, which is odd, as it is a pretty famous Graham Greene. It’s got a lot of what you expect: an abortive romance; a middle aged man; obssessive Catholic guilt; and somehow he has tried to mash these elements into a comedy.

Mr Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba who is recruited as a spy by the British government and takes the job for the money. He falsifies reports to the centre, and when this is discovered, it is covered up by the authorities who do not want to be themselves embarrassed. This is I think supposed to be the hilarious and unlikely climax of a rollicking plot. Perhaps in the 1950s, when this was written, it could be read as such. Today it doesn’t seem funny, or even improbable. In the era of Trump it reads like: this is what would probably happen. And also: what is there to laugh in about this? Or course spies are of limited competence. Of course the cnetre has its own political agenda. This is the tragic truth of the world.

In summary, if you’re interested in Graham Greene, start with the classics, on his perennial topics of hearbreak and despair; THE END OF THE AFFAIR or THE HEART OF THE MATTER; let’s avoid OUR MAN IN HAVANA

One sizable subset of books I have read this year is in the category ‘books Jonathan Franzen recommends’, (e.g., the wonderful THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN). DESPERATE CHARACTERS is one of these, an out-of-print rarity that makes you glad Amazon is taking over the world, so you can find it. Here’s Franzen on Fox:

Because the book is not long, and because I’ve now read it half a dozen times, I’m within sight of the point at which every sentence will be highlighted as vital and central. This extraordinary richness is, of course, a testament to Paula Fox’s genius. There’s hardly an extraneous or arbitrary word to be found in the book. Rigor and thematic density of such magnitude don’t happen by accident, and yet it’s almost impossible for a writer to achieve them while relaxing enough to allow the characters to come alive, and yet here the novel is, soaring above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War.

It’s 156 pages of one weekend in one woman’s life. The main action is her getting bitten by a cat. Yet somehow, I agree with Franzen: it’s about so much more, I can’t quite describe it. It’s about middle class guilt; about making a success of marriage; about urban blight; about failure; also, tangentially, about rabies. I can’t pretend Fox doesn’t crush it. Here’s a flavour –

On an old friend:

And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume. He wasn’t a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

. Or this, where the main character is thinking about a man she had an affair with:

She put herself to sleep again, nursing memories of Francis Early, like an old crone with a bit of rag for a baby

. Or here, the family of her caretaker:

Sitting around the kitchen table like collapsed sacks of grain were Mrs Hayes and the three Hayes children

And yet somehow I couldn’t quite enjoy it. Or rather I enjoyed it till page 155 of 156, after which I was like: what? It doesn’t end so much as stop. Someone throws an ink bottle at a wall, and that’s it. It may be that I am intellectually limited and irretrievably ensnared in the Victorians, but I just can’t bear it. I appreciate that this is what real life is like, that nothing resolves, and that this is the very cutting edge of literature, but I just can’t get behind it. I like my novels to at least gently indicate in the direction of meaning. Paula Fox is too tough for that. So I admire it, but somehow I can’t quite like it. And yet I admire it hugely: so much so that the fact that it is out-of-print strikes me as indicative of end-of-days, almost as much as the election of President Trump

I wouldn’t say I am a big thriller reader and yet somehow I am on my way to having read almost all of Levin’s novels. A lot of them have been made into movies, I suspect because they are fantastic as one line pitches: Suburban husbands replace wives with robots; women gives birth to devil; etc. I’ve found he has you turning pages like it’s your job to get the novel read. I can’t say the same for THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL.

The premise is fun in theory SPOILER ALERT with Dr Mengele aiming to produce an army of Hilter clones. See how awesome that is as a one line pitch? And yet somehow it doesn’t quite come off. I thought for a while it was because it was rather dated. And while this is a problem, I’m starting to think it is instead because what we really read thrillers for is not the fright factor, but the fun factor – and this novel is just not very fun. I think this is not Levin’s fault. It’s basically unavoidable, because given the subject matter, the Holocaust is ever present – and that topic is so terrible, and so dark, and so sad, that it is almost impossible to read a book in which it features, and find it fun. In fact, after a while, even though I enjoy an army of thirteen year old Hitlers as much as anyone, I started to find the whole thing in rather bad taste. Somehow that’s just not as much of a problem with satanic babies and robot wives.

I rarely read non-fiction, but this was the ‘one free’ of a ‘buy one get one free’ deal, so here we are.

I am interested generally in revolutions, and this turned out to be an interesting book. Released to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, it tells the story of the year 1917 in Petrograd by means of the diaries and letters of foreign visitors, who were, as the title dramatically tells us “caught in the revolution.” There’s an array of types: diplomats, servants, Emily Pankhurst; hundreds of British governesses, left destitute when their wealthy employers flee, etc. Quite a fair number of visitors however were not “caught in the revolution” but in fact trying to catch it; the town was awash with foreign journalists. As one hilariously put it: “I smell trouble . . . . and thank god I am here to get the photographs of it.”

Interestingly, quite a few of these journalists were women, many of whom sound quite frighteningly badass. One woman reporting was Louise Bryant, a fervent communist who began with divorce and ended with alcoholism via typhus, proving you don’t need to have the vote to have a fantastic time.

I learnt from this book that the revolution had many causes, but that the most pressing one was hunger. Queues for food were days long, in temperatures well below freezing. What surprised me was what caused the hunger:

By February the daily consignment of flour to Petrograd had dropped to just twenty-one wagonloads, instead of the normal 120 needed. . . . Official mismanagement, corruption and wastage of supplies were prodigious, made worse by a crippled rail network that was unable to transport food efficiently from the provinces – where it was still plentiful – to the cities that most needed it. People were incensed to discover that, due to the hikes in the price of oats and hay, much of the black bread – the staple diet of the poor – was being fed to the capital’s 80,000 horses to keep them alive: ‘every horse was eating up the black bread allowance of ten men’. . . . Word spread like wildfire about food going to waste, of ‘millions of pounds of cheap Siberian beef’ being left to rot in railway sidings. Few of the munition-workers, whose wives or children spent more than half their time in the queue before a bread-shop, had not heard of the ‘fish graveyards’ of Astrakhan, where thousands of tons of the spoiled harvest of the Caspian were buried; and all classes had heard of the ‘saccharine rivers’ which travellers had seen flowing from leaky sugar warehouses in the great beet-growing districts of South Russia and Podolia.

I guess I know that famines have generally historically been due to lack of political will to resolve them, rather than a lack of food. Even today, globally we create more food than we need, while people starve in Yemen, but I was amazed to learn that even while the Russian government knew they teetered on the brink they couldn’t get their act together to just get the railroads moving.

It is interesting to read what it was like for the Russians suddenly set free of the Tsar. So little experience did they have of freedom of expression or freedom of association that they had to borrow an English word to describe what they are were now doing: Meetinki. It is wild to imagine what it would be like to finally be free to have an opinion.

Groups of twenty or thirty would spontaneously gather, and then ‘one of the company mounts a stone, or a bench, or a heap of snow and talks his head off, gesticulating wildly. The audience gazes fixedly at the orator and listens in a kind of rapt absorption. As soon as he stops another takes his place and immediately gets the same fervent silence and concentrated attention

As one American diplomat telegraphed President Wilson: “We have here an infant class in the art of being free containing one hundred and seventy million people, and they need to be supplied with kindergarten material.”

Some of what went on was not very kindergarten. There was quite a lot of violence, especially against the Tsarist police, who very much sound like they deserved what was coming to them (i.e., being beaten to death). Weapons were everywhere, as one journalist noted: “Even street urchins seemed to have picked up revolvers, and were blazing away at stray pigeons.” The author, Helen Rappoport, makes free use of some very questionable adjectives, calling violence ‘senseless,’ and damaged imperial decor ‘sad’ which I don’t think the starving would agree it was. That said, I enjoyed it overall and am glad I took a break to read some non-fiction, not least because I shall now sound crushingly well-informed about the Russian revolution when the topic comes up. As obviously I now hope it will. Let me think of how to angle dinner party chit-chat in that direction.

There are very few journalists who can write a good book, and AA Gill is not one of them.

It starts well, with the account of the alcoholism of his 20s. Memoirs of addiction are difficult, being all basically the same story, but he gives his an interesting spin. Here he is on his recovery through William Glasser therapy methods:

Bill Glasser . . . believed that there were five things that people needed in order to function properly, and the first and the greatest of these was love. It wasn’t an original thought. But they don’t tell us this, because frankly no one wants to be told that the answer to everything is love. No one wants the payoff of his tragedy to be the chorus of a pop song.

And there are some nice turns of phrase – here is on his father: “My dad died of Alzheimer’s. I watched him retreat like Napoleon as the frozen winter of the illness buried his memories. He retreated further and further, fighting dogged but ultimately unmemorable rear-guard actions over the remembrances of his life . . . “

But once he is recovered, and himself again, I find I don’t really like that self very much. For a start, he seems to be a kind of pretentious guy. Try this little piece of showing off: “Cookery books are the unconsidered diaries of family life, the everyday history of breakfast, the Veda of lunch, the Decalogue of dinner.” And there’s a lot of this kind of thing: ” . . . the cruet set brought back from honeymoon that sat on a dresser for a lifetime, too silly to use, to fond to throw away, still with the grains of salt that had rested there, the symbol of a friendship and hospitality for a lifetime.”

Worse than this, is its extraordinary insularity. There is a tiny section of North London – a hard core of few hundred people who regard themselves as a sort of intelligentsia – who, like Welsh miners, have heroically resisted globalisation, and a view of their own un-importance in the big world. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO – read in the dark days before this blog was begun – is the summit of this world view, but this one is pretty bad too. There’s also some extraordinarily awkward name-dropping Try this: “Snowdon: old people and fancy bantams. You could never accuse him of snobbery: he treated them both exactly the same. I’m very fond of Tony, but he could be a bugger just for the devilment of it.” It’s that ‘Tony’ that really grates. And don’t even get me started on his mention of snobbery: Gill has a lot to say on this, but I think you have to have been born in England to know what he’s on about – it drips with unacknowledged class anxiety, which, if you weren’t brought up to it, is one part hard to understand and two parts annoying.

I feel bad to pan this book, as I understand AA Gill has recently passed away. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead; but I suppose it’s all right to speak ill of the dead’s book.