by
Martin Amis
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Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. ‘I think that’s very unfair’, said Christopher, ‘to Ian Hamilton.’
chuckled at this
In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural and historical strands combined. And one of those strands had to do with religion – or its residue.
speaks to me
To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.
Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:
All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done…[I]n yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
‘It’s the same idea, isn’t it,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘The hidden work of uneventful days.’
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an –ly adverb. The –ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin’s corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational…Was he helped in this – was he somehow ‘swayed on’ – by living a hollow life, ‘a farce’, ‘absurd’, and ‘stuffed full of nothing’? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Yes, and if you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. This is the axis on which the poems rotate. His indignities were his daffodils.
As we take our leave let us recall a very late poem (1979) that captures some of his personal pathos, his muted benignity, and his exquisitely tentative tenderness. One day he was mowing the lawn and ran over a hedgehog in the taller grass. ‘When it happened,’ said Monica, ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it…He started writing about it soon afterwards.’ The result was ‘The Mower’ (closely related, here, to the Reaper), which ends:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Temperament (as I’ve said) is vital. You need an unusual appetite for solitude, and a strong and durable commitment to the creative form (you have to want to be in it for life). These are qualities that the dedicated reader already has. You will also need this strange affinity with the reader – unendingly complex though almost entirely unconscious. Then there is a fourth element…
Borges, in his long conversation with the Paris Review, at one point spoke with bafflement about all the people who simply fail to notice the mystery and glamour of the observable world. In a sentence that stands out for its homeliness, he said, ‘They take it all for granted.’ They accept the face value of things…
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.
All right. Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was written in a Berlin boarding house, when both the author and the century were about twenty-five. His situation was as follows: having fled the Bolsheviks, he and his Jewish bride now awaited the Nazis (the NSDAP was formed in 1920); his father had been shot dead by a (Russian) fascist in 1922; his mother and his sisters were penniless in Prague. Vladimir was deracinated, declassed, and destitute. And yet Mary bears not the slightest trace of melancholy, let alone alienation or nausée. Indeed, the only angst Nabokov ever suffered from had to do with ‘the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. And his first novel ends with his promise to meet that world with ‘a fresh, loving eye’. That’s your situation. You are a stranger in a strange land; but you come to it with a fresh and loving eye.