Good writing and bad sex

It has become a habit of lazy book reviewers to throw in a statement that some of the writing in the work under discussion would be a candidate for the Literary Review's Bad Sex In Literature award. What they often mean is that it is badly written from start to finish, including the sex bit, which isn't the same thing. But I'm not sure whether the criticism is entirely justified: there are good reasons why writing about is hard [hur hur hur] - difficult; unintentional humour is one of them.

More generally, though, there is the question of credibility. Novelists can tell me any sort of nonsense about the workings of the Moscow underground system or the administrative records of a police investigation and I will believe them as long as it sound as if they know hwat they are talking about. I've been told that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a completely unreliable guide to motorcycle maintenance. But if someone is writing about an area of which I have experience, I can check whether they are not just plausible but authentic. So a different level of scrutiny is applied.

There is a problem here for the writer writing for the naive reader: it will be assumed that any experience described realistically must be real. Kingsley Amis admits to abandoning a novel with a first-person gay narrator because he didn't want his readers to speculate about the extent to which it was true. This seems a bit bizarre: one assumes that Thomas Harris is not suspected of being, or even wanting to be, a cannibal.

Then there is the question of language. Preferred terminology for body parts depends on the writer's (and reader's) age, gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation etc; use of what seems natural for the writer may have an adverse impact on some of his or her readers. For example, Martin Amis' reputation a a misogynist writer incapable of creating a convincing female character may be partly derived for his preference for terminology which is typically male (it is also partly derived from his inability to create convincing female characters: it is notable that the two most fully realised, Nicola Six in London Fields and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train, are cop-outs because Amis explicitly says that they are 'male' psychologically).

And there is the wider question of the extent to which one wishes to be seen to be writing pornography. Somewhat bizarrely, 40 years after the Chatterley trial, using Lawrence's terms in literature would be seen as rude if no longer shocking. To retreat into medical terminology runs the risk of making the act of love sound as exciting as a computer program. Since sex is 90% imagination and 10% friction [source unknown], most of the time writing is about the quality of the activity as it is experienced, and is as much about emotion and attitude as it is about mechanics. This is I think why so much writing about sex is flagged as being bad, in the sense of pretentious or over-ambitious. Even clever writers like Nick Hornby these days steer clear of anything hinting at high style: simple words in simple order are the norm. Purple prose is something of an endangered species in modern literature (with good reason, of course).

There is a danger, though, that being overcritical of the attempts to address the subject will lead to the easily-swayed from avoiding it altogether, leaving us with a mechanical prudishness at the core of fiction. Sex is important as a way of revealing character and a way of communicating mood, and on the whole writers should be encouraged to attempt its description, even if some are bound to fail.

Kingsley and the Women: review of Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis (Cape, 2006)

Modern biographies thrive on revelation, but there is little that is new in Leader's monumental study. This is hardly surprising, since Amis's life has already been well documented in his 1200-page Letters, edited by Leader, Martin's Experience, his own Memoirs, Eric Jacob's biography, compiled shortly before Amis's death, and in various autobiographical articles, supplementing the fictionalised life traceable in the fiction. Leader discusses the problem, and concludes that there remains something to be said of man and works, mainly because it is now possible to fill out the partial views which KA stamped on accounts of his life.

Thus although in late Amis there is much allusion to Hilly or Hilly-type figures, it is refreshing to hear directly from her descriptions of the chaotic, energetic, doomed marriage of the 1950s (previously she was best represnted as a sort of voice off in the footnotes of the Letters). Similarly Elizabeth Jane Howard emerges with more credit here than Kingsley post-divorce ever allowed her, although Leader seems colder to her than to Hilly.

The book's chapter are arranged chronologically, although the works are dealt with out of sequence. The earliest chapters are the best, telling a relatively unknown story, and expertly sewn together from autobiography, letters, others' testimony, and the two fictional accounts of the period from The Riverside Villas Murder and You Can't Do Both. In later years, domestic drudgery and tedious infidelity takes over, interestingly paralleling the novels but otherwise sparse in incident. Although it is not intended as a critical study (Amis's claim to be a titan of 20th-century literature is assumed), there are perspicuous summaries of most of Amis's works (including a good account of the poetry and high praise for Take a Girl Like You, The Old Devils and The Alteration). At times the pace is breathless: the later years are padded out with accounts of sales fugures and advances, mainly of economic interest, and it is in general hard to establish how well Amis was appreciated by his reviewers and audience.

This breathlessness extends to the larger questions raised by Amis and his politics. Two pages are spent discussing Amis's views on race, which isn't much. It would have been more honest to set out clearly that Amis was, in public writing, anti-racist, outspokenly so, and that there was a tension between this and his views as expressed in conversation or correspondence with his cronies. Similarly, Amis's anti-semitism is shown as mild but definite, despite the fact that well into the 1960s he would treat the prejudice as a sure sign of dullness. Perhaps this is partly a reflection of his experience of ageing as the process by which we turn into our parents. But as Leader does point out on numerous occasions, Amis's political views were emotional and illinformed, unlike his views on literature. But there remains the truth that in later years Amis was as famous for his opinionated journalism as for his more nuanced fiction, and he can hardly complain that he is taken at his word. It is, though, hard to take too much notice of the late 60s hippy-hater who had turned his early 60s Cambridge house into a proto-squat of rolling bacchanalia of sex and drugs.

And what of feminism? Amis lived through the raging sex war of the 70s, taking much of it, with good reason, personally. Looking back now, it is notable that the virtues he praised in women: of straightforwardness, honesty, and disdain for conventional morality, were those advanced by his foes.

Leader's prose is serviceable but indistinctive, giving the frequent quotations from Amis and Larkin a shocking comparative verve. The sad theme running through the second half of the book is the problem of Sally: while Philip and Martin emerged from their disrupted and unconventional childhoods intact, she did not; it is hard to read of her alcoholism and death without asking (as Leader does) who is at fault. Not that this type of question is likely to lead to resolution. It seems hardly necessary to lay this at Amis's door, since Leader shows that he had alaready suffered fear, doubt and remorse about this as about much else. Amis was better at analysing his flaws in his fiction than in correcting them in his life, but that is hardly surprising.

This is not the place to start for those new to Amis: they should read his fiction first, then his Letters. But this account raises a series of questions about the novels, while also showing how the latterday Colonel Blimp had started as a radical who instinctively sided with the unprivileged, the dispossed and the powerless.

On Amises and literature

I have extracted, in advance of its slow demise, posts I made to the Martin Amis discussion board, covering Martin Amis (MA), his father Kingsley (K), Larkin and others.

On Yellow Dog

Topicality is a hardly an issue, except perhaps in the general sense that Amis used to be clearly ahead of the game, with his novels set in a credible near-future, and that since his discovery of nuclear weapons and the millenium (so 90s!) his concerns have been at best contemporary and usually passe.

This is not a trivial point, since it means that we can examine the same world that he describes, and therefore can compare our view with his on an equal footing. The treatment of the tabloid press in YD appeared to me to fail because its depiction moved beyond satire and caricature into sheer fantasy. So, I'm not saying that YD is to be applauded for anticipating current events, I'm saying that it is to be mildly praised for having got its world-view righter than it seemed at the time.

Talking of prescience, Amis (K) in 1959:

Style, a personal style, a distinguished style, usually turns out in practice to mean a high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing, with plenty of rumble and wow from imagery, syntax and diction

("She was a child and I was a child" (review of Lolita) )

Amis pere and fils
To continue the thoughts of father on son, K's view that M's novels were "unreadable" bears some analysis. M (discussing this, in I think, Experience) argues that this is a pose, or a typical response to a new rival or a representative of the younger generation. Well, this is possible, although you have to wonder why someone who reads a lot should have such trouble making it a few pages into a novel by an educated, literate writer

K doesn't just 'not like' Other People: he astutely picks out the inconsistency of the 'amnesia' that makes someone forget what plumbing is but remember what statuary is.

More generally, what K doesn't like is an obstrusive author's style (as noted above) or unreliable narrators. So when he finds M "unreadable" he is probably reacting not to the content but the characteristic authorial voice of "that little prick".


Larkin, MA and modern life

I'm re-reading Larkin's letters; they're a hard slog after Kingsley's, which tend to ignore the weather, his bowel movements, and the quality of the paper. Larkin had a talent for unhappiness: as he said once, 'Depression is to me what daffodils were for Wordsworth'. There is nothing wrong with the intellectual view that this world is all there is, and that most people would do evil out of laziness, but there's no need to be so down about it. Larkin sounds as if he's whingeing, rather than presenting any great analysis: cars cost money; they need to be repaired. well, blow me! Kingsley (no Pollyanna himself, of course) demolishes this approach in Jake's Thing: the dons discuss new chairs and

"then the cost was asked for and given as £125 and all over the room there were wincing noises[...] For a chair! they all kept saying--for a chair? Not quite all. Of course it seems a lot, said Jake to himself, but haven't you noticed that everything seems a lot these days, you fucking old fools? In the end the Domestic Bursar, after he had made it clear that it would be no use going back to the maker and trying to beat him down, was instructed to do just that."

[someone corrected “depression” to “deprivation”]

Well certainly that's what my memory thought-- deprivation sounds a bit grand when it's clear that most of his misery was the result of either dealing with things that are intrinsic to life (illness, loss, tedious practicalities) or his reluctance to surrender his 'freedom' to any of the numerous and overlapping lovers he became entangled with. Deprivation implies something that the world was doing to him, or failing to do: he was one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys who was incapable of enjoying the crumbs of comfort, and then concluded that he warranted no better.

Not that he couldn't write poems, of course, just that his world view and philosophy isn't worthy of serious analysis.


Larkin's "Sunny Prestatyn" of course prefigures MA's laments of the obscenification of everyday life. Written ?1962, published 1964. But Larkin does not imply that this is new or worsening (here: he does in "Going, going": "I thought it would last my time" (1972)): I think he would have said that our world is one in which beauty will be defaced and despoiled rather than appreciated, and this is not because of nuclear weapons or the Holocaust or the year 2000 but because of humanity. So not quite a contemporary hot issue for MA to take up.

I was amused by the band The Jam's album title of 1978 This is the modern world, we're-on-the-ball this-is-how-it-is-now, presumably unaware that according to historians the Modern World started in about 1500 AD, and according to culture critics this is the Post-Modern world!


The future

In a hundred years, will we be living in the Hyper Post Modern world?

Only if 1. we have survived comets, coldwaves, crustshakes and power-downs and 2. the younger generation decides it's worth the trouble to prolong the life of their elders by technology!

Rock stars write

Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star is a classic piece of evidence to prove the uselessness of eyewitnesses: Ian Hunter makes touring with Mott and Bowie as interesting as a saleman's itinerary, without at any point revealing anything about his friends, acquaintances or experiences.


And although Dylan's Chronicles is a different, and much better, sort of thing, it leaves a gaping hole where the "How I wrote my songs, what was in my mind, what I was trying to achieve?" chapter ought to be. He does, however, describe the difficult state of an artist who knows that he has run out of ideas but who nevertheless is impelled to do something, trying a wide range of styles and subjects hoping to hit on one that will reawaken his genius. In such a situation, the brickbats of the critics are almost painless since he already knows that he is producing substandard work not fit to share space with the good stuff; they can't beat him up any more than he's done himself. All he can do is wait and hope for better times. I think that's MA at the moment.


The novelist’s theme

To be fair to MA, he has consistently attempted to play against type by NOT writing about the family and mental life of an Oxford-educated novelist's-son novelist, in deference to that quaint old custom that it is the job of novelists to make stuff up. Well, apart from the Rachel Papers.
And Experience.

And The Information.

Talking of which, whose side is MA on? The first time I read it, I assumed that the author's sympathies lay with fuck-the-audience-I'll-be-complicated-if-I-want Richard, but on re-reading, Richard's preening of himself and abysmally low US sales of his latest novel (whoops) are clearly criticised, while Gwyn, for all his odious 'charm' as a person, is the innocent victim of his audience's enthusiasm. So is MA saying the audience should be courted or ignored as past redemption?


Nick Hornby

The main characters in High Fidelity and About a Boy are actually cleverly presented: I think Hornby deliberately sets up a tension between the usual "Narrator=author=good guy" stance and revealing "unconsciously" that the narrator is not in fact a fount of wisdom or even a very nice person; that, by the end, they have learned some humanity and humility is therefore much more effective than if they had been sensible from the start. High Fidelity, in particular, in its opening stages is breathtaking callous. What Hornby manages to do is to present these characters in a way which retains the reader's instinctive identification with them without limiting the scope for revealing their faults. I would say that he is clearly a sophisticated and thoughtful writer who, by appearing to be matey and simple and obvious, connects with a much wider audience than would be open to someone taking a snootier, flashier, clever-clever, approach. Hornby has problems with plots, though.


The end of The Information

Can anyone tell me what the following bit from the very end of The Information means:

"

Beware the agèd critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy."

I would defend the passage; certainly when read in context it is almost like a benediction, a reminder that life goes on, with its individual struggles with age and death. I would draw a parallel with Thackeray's envoi at the end of Vanity Fair, where he steps out of the story to say [paraphrasing through laziness] "Our little puppet show is over, the puppets are returned to their box, the stalls are packed up. They will be there tomorrow", or with Eliot's Prufrock

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown";

this is a moment when the author is communicating en clair, directly, like the musing in the playground [pp 62-63 of my paperback] which is MA as MA writing direct to the reader.

Flicking through The Information to find that passage, I kept coming across great lines "Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the problems facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s"

====

I have overcome my laziness, and Thackeray's envoi is:

"Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

which certainly resonates with The Information. A final example of stepping out of the narrative is Dylan at the end of "Desolation Row", where, having described the end of the world in Eliot's terms, goes on as author replying to the singer:

"Yes I received you postcard yesterday /
about the time the doorknob broke /
you asked how I was doing /
was that some kind of joke? /
these people that you mention /
I know them, they're quite lame /
I had to rearrange their faces /
and give them all anotehr name /
right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no /
not unless you mail them from Desolation Row".

(someone pointed out that planesaws aren’t what MA means)

I would prefer MA made it up and got it wrong (just like Gwyn Barry he hoped that sounding knowledgeable about carpentry would play well with his readers) than got it right by the sort of research that the reading list at the end of Yellow Dog implies. Truth isn't always stranger than fiction -sometimes it's more boring and less convincing.



MA’s style

The great thing about Mart is his willingness to be a prose poet and stylist.

This is spot on. And while we're on the subject of Larkin, his best novel is the prose poem A Girl in Winter that unobtrusively creates a textured narrative, of 'figures in a landscape'.

What MA gets a lot of stick for is his ambition to write well in a way that demonstrates "this is a piece of fiction. I am writing it for you", while others silently take the line that "this is truth. there is no author" while constructing (of course) an equally inauthentic work. The advantage that these latter have is that they benefit from the approval of the large pool of readers who believe the work is real and do not wish to be reminded that there is an author making it up. Dan Brown can always argue that his novel starts at the title page, and therefore the statement saying that it is based on fact is part of the fiction.


MA’s shopping list

"I'd be happy just to see his shopping lists"

What planet is she on if she thinks a spoilt and bone-idle toss-pot like the boy Mart has ever in his whole 56 years ever set eyes on a shopping list?

Strangely enough, a document has just come to light in the Hofstadter Centre for Literary Archives:



A shopping list for life, by MA (age 16)

1. Height
2. A toothbrush that works
3. Booker Prize
4. Nobel Prize
5. Money
6. Success
7. The Information
8. The respect of my peers
9. The respect of my father
10. The respect of my great friend Julian Barnes

The document has been annotated by a recent hand "3/10, must try harder"


Michael Frayn

I have a soft spot for his 60s novels: there's an excellent parody of Kingsley (Take A Girl Like You era) in The Tin Men - my copy of which has been stolen, the compliment that unscrupulous guests pay to good literature (my Rachel Papers, Dead Babies and first copy of Money went the same way-- noone seems to want to run off with Yellow Dog).



On atheism

There's an interesting interview with Douglas Adams reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt in which he notes that his UK readers greet his atheist views with a shrug, but his US readers are fascinated by them, and he ended up as an atheist icon there. It's disappointing that MA is backtracking to agnostic, but I can only suppose that recent world events (Tsunami, Darfur, 9/11, Rwanda, and the hurricanes) have started to convinced him of the existence of a benevolent creator directing the affairs of men in the best of all possible worlds.


Paul Macartney: songsmith

They had Paul Macartney discussing 'the craft of songwriting' on the BBC Radio Front Row last week. It was heavily trailed with a clip of him explaining how a tune developed, but left it unclear which tune. I didn't find out, because after he'd gone through a couple of his recent songs I turned off. Maybe it was the frog chorus. It would have been good if the interviewer had had the courage to say "Face it, Macca, you haven't written a serious song since 1969. Let's talk about your knack of conjuring melodic whimsy out of nothing rather than the process of creation of masterpieces. 1. Frogs 2. Ebony and ivory 3. Pipes of peace 4. Silly love songs ...




Susie Thomas on London Fields

But the really staggering feature of London Fields is not its narrative ingenuity or its millennial eclipse but the patronising representation of the working class who are, without exception, portrayed as vicious or ridiculous or both.

(emphasis added)

Well, I would except Kim and her mother, who are portrayed as neither.

And there is the point that to call Keith 'working class' is for ST (not MA) to rely on stereotypes and old class structures- MA places Keith as Cheat outside the class system, with only an accidental link to the virtues and practices of working class life as understood by people who, say, actually do some work every now and then and would consider loyalty to their family a vital part of their lives.

And is there not something quite funny in any case in a literary theorist writing an academic papers claiming to have a better and closer understanding of the lives of the poor and dishonest of London than anyone else?