Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Read online

  ‘Elle avait lu Paul et Virginie, et elle avait rêvé la maisonette de bambous . . .’ The French is a clue, if you didn’t pick it up already in Balzac and George Sand. Elle avait rêvé . . . Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, ‘of love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges . . . gloomy forests, troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, rowing boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the groves, gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs . . . weeping like fountains’. The very stuff of the imagination, members of the jury, the very education of the heart. And her name? And her fate? Emma Bovary, Miss French Provincial Page Turner herself, killed by the non-fulfilment of expectations planted in her heart by literature, choking on her own book-fuelled yearnings, destroyed by the brain-rot which is unchecked reading!

  The next time someone recommends you a book with the promise that you won’t be able to put it down, just murmur ‘Madame Bovary’ and walk away. And the next time you see a person devouring whole chapters on a bus or train, dreaming of rowing boats in the moonlight, and never once loosing their eye from the page, tell them that you are being cruel only to be kind, and put their book down for them.

  Unputdownability is not a virtue in a book. Any book worth reading will have you arguing with it by the bottom of page one, will have you reaching for your pencil and your notebook by page two, or will have you so astonished that you must set it aside every couple of minutes to consider what you’ve read. Anything less is vacancy, not reading. What we call devouring books is no more than that torpor of the mind to which the world has given the name Bovarysme.

  Flaubert was by no means the only novelist to write about the catastrophic effect of novels on readers ill-equipped to handle them. Fear of the disease of reading fuelled the nineteenth-century novel. Northanger Abbey is a relatively frolicsome satire on Gothic reading (and make no mistake, all unchecked reading is Gothic at heart), but by the time we get to Persuasion Jane Austen is in more sombre temper. Anne Elliot’s remonstrance with Captain Benwick in the matter of his incontinent reading, making so bold as to ‘hope he did not always read only poetry’ as it was ‘the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely’, should be an example to us all. Never mind civil liberties. Never mind the reader’s human right to read what and how he likes. If we care for those we love, it is our duty to save them from the perils of vacant irreflectiveness if we can.

  Captain Benwick would have said he was ‘moved’ by what he read. Being ‘moved’ was big in the feeling-drenched late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is back with a vengeance. In the list of popularly inane words we use to describe books, ‘moving’ is second only to ‘readable’, and any civilised country would make calling a book ‘readable’ a capital offence. Readable! The instructions on a sauce bottle are readable! Mein Kampf, when you settle down to it, is readable. But ‘moving’ is more insidious because it makes a heartless brute of those affected otherwise. It also presupposes the desirability of an emotion which most of the time is but a vicarious satisfaction of our own desires – the self walled up in a lonely lodge, weeping like a fountain.

  In our pulpy times, the blurb ‘Didn’t move me at all’ would be praise indeed. Along with ‘I put it down every thirty seconds’. And ‘So good I could barely read it’. Because that surely is the truth of it. When a book is painful it is difficult, not easy to read. The last hours of Mme Bovary are so unremittingly agonising we approach the pages that tell of them with great reluctance. Ditto, in an entirely different spirit, the pages which deliver felicity to Anne Elliot at last. So much happiness, so nearly missed, hurts the heart, and we can barely entertain it.

  Which is more or less how I feel about World Book Day. When books no longer empower thought or sense, we might as well not have them.

  The Twentieth Century? Tosh

  Is it possible that the twentieth century was from start to finish tosh? Forget the wars, the murderous nationalisms brewed in the souls of common men, the even more murderous ideologies brewed in the souls of intellectuals, the mendacities, the invasions, the appropriations, the bombings, the camps, the refugees, the genocides, the casual slaughter not just of others but of our own, the betrayals of every idea worth living by (our fault, yes, for thinking we could live by ideas in the first place), the disappointments, the diseases, the astonishing technological advances which gave us I’m A Celebrity – Fill in the Rest, and the wherewithal to rape by Internet – forget all that, it’s culture I’m thinking about, high culture, the stuff of modernist poets and painters. Is it possible that, viewed culturally, the twentieth century was from start to finish tosh?

  It’s going to the Kirchner exhibition at the Royal Academy that has made me ask this question. I like Kirchner. Sometimes I believe I get German Expressionism, sometimes I don’t – depends how disgusted I am feeling with my fellow men – but Kirchner I go on admiring. He isn’t a towering twentieth-century genius like Picasso, or even, to my mind, a near-towering twentieth-century genius like Beckmann or Dix. But that’s precisely why I like him. He doesn’t quite give the age what the age demanded. He has the decency to go ghostly on it, to let it swallow him at last. Whereas the towering geniuses won’t let go, hanging on in the hope the age will expire before they do. Such sycophantic exponents of the contemporary they are, too, such spaniels to their times, such tireless pleasers. Kirchner, finally, was neither pleased nor pleasing. He painted those women in the streets of Berlin wearing spears for feathers, drew himself into corners, a voyeur in the dark, fetishising breasts and gloves, and let the times bleed him of his vitality. Pity more don’t learn from his example.

  But all that said, it was in the act of entering his milieu that I felt the twentieth century – my century, after all – suddenly turn ridiculous on me. Partly the fault of the gallery notes, I accept. Read notes on gallery walls and you wish you’d never been born. Everything so neat and understood. Every mystery solved. Every inconsistency ironed over. The age, the man: these the ideas in the air, those the painter’s gifts, now behold them hand in hand. And all in that icy academician prose, mirthless, well schooled and well behaved, rendering precise that which was once tumultuous.

  Remember the schoolmistress Miss Peecher in Our Mutual Friend? Schooled and schooling ‘in the light of the latest Gospel according to Monotony’. Miss Peecher whose official residence was furnished with ‘its little windows like the eyes in needles, and its little doors like the covers of school-books’, who ‘could write a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule’. Is it her they call in to cobble the curator’s notes whenever there’s an exhibition in the offing? Probably not. She was buxom and shining, Miss Peecher, and the schoolmistresses who write the little essays we read on every gallery wall the length and breadth of this great art-loving nation are certainly not buxom, neither do they shine. Eaten away with ambition and intellectual obedience they are, black of dress, pale of finger, gaunt of face, swallowers of light not emitters of it, whichever gender they happen to inhabit. But the spirit of Miss Peecher, if not the body, lives on, compressing everything you need to know into a slate-size essay.

  Tough on the twentieth century, I acknowledge, to blame it for the sins of Miss Peecher. It isn’t the age that says of itself such things as ‘only by acting instinctively could one counteract the calculating material values that dominated modern society’. And it certainly wasn’t Kirchner who said of himself that he ‘regarded sex as a vital, liberating force’. But you can’t blame Miss Peecher for all of this either. Even if we ignore the little essays, there, in Kirchner’s chosen subject matter and preoccupations, are the same twentieth-century clichés we encounter whenever we pay homage to modernism.

  You know the ones. Nudism, Russian dance, Japanese theatre, exotic carvings showing African or South Sea Island influences, free love, free sex, more n
udism, nudes in hats, nudes with dressed men, nudes with undressed men, nudes in hats with Russian dancers, cancan dancers either in a line or one at a time, either with pants or without, because the cancan originally blah blah, black women as symbols of primitive sexuality, drugs, alcohol, street walkers under phosphorescent lamps, courtesans in drawing rooms, infidelity, troilism, troilism involving girls a little younger than they ought to be, more nudism, jealousy as pick-me-up, jealousy as depressant, spiritualism, table rapping, table-rapping nudes, bathing, boys bathing, circuses – oh God, circuses! – nudes on horseback, clowns, the artist as clown, the artist as tragic clown . . .

  Must I go on?

  All just routine bohemianism of course, the attempt some of us feel bound to make in every age to break the mould, to live simultaneously within and without society. We do not hold with banking or politics so we embrace nudism and the Japanese theatre. I’m not against it. But we fool ourselves if we think vitalism of whatever sort is any less an orthodoxy than the ones it thumbs its nose at. No sooner do we fight authority than we create another version of it. Our fate: never to be free.

  Already, barely into a new century, we are at it again, only this time our heroes in the struggle against ‘material values’ and the imposition of governmental lies are human rights lawyers, anti-Blairites, marchers, Michael Moore. Myself I’d prefer going nude bathing in a hat or gazing up at cancan dancers (with or without). But that’s just me. Either way, it’s tosh, all of it.

  The Chatfield Pant

  To the growing list of crimes against humanity ascribed to the United States of America, may I add a further? The Chatfield Pant. Let others, more familiar with the Ralph Lauren range of casual clothes for angularly rangy types of all ages, rail against The Keating Pant and The Andrew Pant. I rest my case on The Chatfield Pant.

  That The Chatfield Pant is a traditional, zippered, flat-fronted chino, clean-fitting, classically perpendicular, of a military design, with not too much roominess in the rise, seat and leg, you hardly need me to tell you. Ditto that it comes in navy, nubrick and black, the nubrick winning it hands down for me every time. Whether you do as Ralph Lauren suggests and wear it with an Oxford Blake shirt for ‘pure Polo style’ is a matter entirely for your own conscience, but I wouldn’t have you in my house if you did. Not that you would come if I invited you. If I have never hit it off with people who wear The Chatfield Pant, it must in all honesty be said that they have never hit it off with me.

  All this, of course, is no less true of Ralph Lauren clothes in general. It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I.

  The Chatfield Pant, however, offends against more than mere style. The Chatfield Pant is a language violation of a peculiarly American sort. Why the definite article? When a man goes into his wardrobe to decide how he would like to look, he does not say I think will wear The Levi Jean today, together with The Brogue Shoe, The Pantella Sock and The Silk Tie. Nor will he, I suspect, remember to apply the definite article to The Chatfield Pant once it has passed into his possession. So why the The at the time of marketing?

  Let’s stop beating about the bush. It all comes down to American ignorance of the arts of civilisation. Lacking assurance in such matters as adorning the human body, Americans do one of two things: either they dress like Scotsmen, or they seek refuge in grammar, hoping that the definite article will make them definitive. The two are probably related. Think the malt whisky that calls itself The Macallan. If you have never visited America and would like a picture of the place, picture this – 200 million Americans standing on their tartan carpets (The Tartan), all in The Chatfield Pant, all drinking The Macallan.

  Absurdity piles upon absurdity. Once you employ the definite article, you are lumbered with the singular noun. You cannot, can you, have The Chatfield Pants. But what you sometimes give to grammar, you often take from euphony and sense. A pant is preposterous. Only a nation with no ear would buy a pant. But then only a nation with no ear would study math. There is no point in arguing this. Maths is right, math is wrong. You hear it or you don’t. Your lookout. Ask yourself this question, though: do you really want to follow into war a country that thinks that math sounds right?

  As for the Chatfield element of The Chatfield Pant, I am not able to shed light. I have unearthed a Thomas Chatfield of Ditchling, in Sussex, active in the second half of the fifteenth century, but whether he was active designing flat-fronted chinos with not too much roominess in the rise, I cannot say. The Chatfield family motto – Pro aris et focis – does sound as though it could have something to do with trousers, but it turns out to mean ‘For altars and hearths’, which would have helped us only had we been looking for a maker of candles and fire furniture – The Chatfield Wick, say, or The Chatfield Tong. Pursue it further yourself, if genealogy’s your thing.

  There is evidence that Thomas Chatfield’s descendants made their way to America, and who’s to say they were not the founding fathers of the towns of Chatfield in Arkansas, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas, tight-in-the-rise chino-wearing places without a doubt. My own guess is that Chatfield is meant to sound aristocratic, suggesting Chatsworth, Chatham, chateau and chateaubriand, with a field thrown in for striding through. The usual woeful purloining, in other words – as in American high art, so in American low fashion – of the cultural associations of others.

  Better, anyway, if we must part from America, that we do so over The Chatfield Pant, not its foreign policy. Trust the small things, I say. Burdened with the information that his uncle had murdered his father in order to get into his mother’s pants – pants, note, not pant – Hamlet loses himself in meditation. But let him find Polonius behind the arras, listening in, and he can act swifter than an arrow. Snooping we know what to do with. Murder and incest are more difficult. So goes the world around. In the end, we leave the enormities to God.

  This, in the light of the hysterical abuse being heaped by the day now on America. ‘The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times,’ thunders John Pilger, picking up the vogue for calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi. But then Pilger always was more Timon than Hamlet, his speciality the big crime. Without doubt, Pilger’s apocalyptic prose has served us well in the past; the trouble is, it of necessity grows hungry by what it feeds on. Now a bigger crime, and now a bigger still, until there is no differentiation left.

  Forget the Third Reich. Be guided, rather, by The Chatfield Pant.

  ‘Keep Smiling’ – Franz Kafka

  Of the pains and sorrows incident to the life of man, the publication of a book ought not to be the most excruciating. Since everybody has a book out now – a self-help manual, a children’s book, a self-help manual on the writing of a children’s book, a memoir of the time you tried to write a children’s book, a self-help manual on how to write a memoir of the time you tried to write a children’s book – the anticlimax of publication is common knowledge. But some writers still manage to rise to the occasion. Myself – and if you think this is a roundabout way of announcing the appearance of my new novel, you are right – I find the whole thing hell. Nothing to do with reviews or sales. It’s book-signing that upsets me, not the having to do it but the being unable to do it – the mess I make. I don’t know how other authors fare, but every book I sign I deface.

  My pen is always wrong. Wouldn’t you think I would know by now to be sure I have a decent pen on me? I used to swear by fountain pens, but the last time I used one I leaked all over the title page and in the act of apologising profusely – you know the style: head thrown back, arms waving – I leaked a
ll over the people queuing for my signature. Is there a greater crime an author can commit on publication day than to blot his readers?

  So it’s been a ballpoint ever since. But even ballpoints can smudge. Last week at Hay I smudged about twenty pages. Horrible globules of sticky ballpoint ink on the first and final flourishes of my signature. In panic I tried faking hay fever, hoping that a surreptitious handkerchief would serve as blotting paper, but you soon discover that your readers are no keener on having bits of tissue sticking to their books than they are on your sneezing into them. There might be professions where fans will take anything from their idols, a filthy paper handkerchief included, but novel writing isn’t one of them. Thereafter, whenever a blob or gloop of inky gunk appeared I just smiled and closed the book abruptly. With a bit of luck the pages will have stuck together by now.

  I am also illegible. Other novelists note the time it takes me to finish a signing session, supposing that I must have twice as many readers wanting my book signed as they have. In fact, the length of my queue is to be explained by the number of people coming back a second or a third time to get me to decipher what I wrote for them originally. As if I knew! ‘How do you expect me to remember that?’ I ask them. ‘We’re not asking you to remember,’ they say, ‘we’re just asking you to read it.’ I have to explain to them that I’m a writer not a reader. ‘So what was it you wrote?’ they want to know. ‘I’m the wrong one to ask,’ I tell them, ‘I’m illegible. But it’s probably my name.’