Ten Years in the Tub (114 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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“Some of America's best featuresâthe belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual toleranceâcan, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex,” Perel says in a chapter entitled Democracy Versus Hot Sex. At the time of writing, Michele Bachmann has just announced her candidacy for the presidency, and another assumption I have made about you is that very few of you vote Republican. I don't think Esther Perel is encouraging you to do so, although if the unthinkable happens and Bachmann wins, there may well be some consolations, from the sound of it. (None of this applies to the British, of course, who live in a class-ridden monarchy, and as a consequence have hot sex every single day of their lives.)

My only complaint about this engaging and thoughtful book is that its author uses the word
vanilla
pejoratively too often, as a synonym for
bland, dull, safe
. This usage, I think, must stem from vanilla ice cream, which, typically, tastes of nothing and is certainly the unthinkable option if you're in an ice-cream establishment that offers scores of varieties. The flavor of the vanilla pod itself, however, is sophisticated, seductive, subtle. Have you tried the Body Shop Vanilla Shower Gel? I don't want to write advertising copy for multinational companiesânot for free, anywayâbut Body Shop Vanilla, it seems to me, is much more suggestive of deviance and light bondage than it is of the missionary position. And, guys, if you use that, could you credit the
Believer
? And also chuck them a few quid? Thanks.

I bought a couple of the books on the lists above after coming across a
top-five that Woody Allen put together for the
Guardian
. I had never heard of Machado de Assis, and I probably wouldn't have thought of reading a biography of Elia Kazan had it not been for Allen's recommendation, but Richard Schickel's book chimed with the mood created by
Ball of Fire
, Stefan Kanfer's terrifically entertaining book about Lucille Ball, which I read recently.

Kazan, as you may or may not know, was the brilliant director of
On the Waterfront
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
. But he is now remembered almost as clearly because he chose to testify against former colleagues in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)âin 1952. Schickel begins his book, electrifyingly and provocatively, by coming out swinging on Kazan's behalf. I had never come across anyone attempting to do this before, and as a consequence I had always presumed that those who named names could safely be written off; god knows there are few enough examples of moral choices that are straightforwardly good or bad, and I had always valued the decision of Kazan and others as one of those that one didn't have to think about: they were wrong, full stop, and we are thus free to condemn them as viciously and as cheerfully as we want.

Yes, well. It turns out that it wasn't quite like that. Schickel's arguments are complicated and detailed, and I don't have the space to do them justice here, but then, complication and detail are precisely what have been lacking ever since the 1950s. Schickel describes the campaign against Kazan as “a typical Stalinist tacticâseize the high, easy-to-understand moral ground, then try to crush nuanced opposition to that position through simplifying sloganeering.” I suspect that I'm not the only one who liked the look of that easy-to-understand moral ground, and there is a part of me that is actually irritated to discover that it's not as comfortable as it appeared. Schickel's jabs at the kidneyâif that is where our fuzzy sense of morality is storedâare telling and sharp: naming names would have been fine if the names named had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party; there were lots of other, more-democratic leftist organizations that liberals could have signed up for; there were public protests against the Gulags as early as 1931, and there was really no excuse for those who defended Stalin in the 1950s; much of the outrage directed against Kazan was entirely synthetic. Rod Steiger, who appeared in
On the Waterfront
and
was loudly and angrily opposed to the idea of Kazan receiving an honorary Oscar in 1999, told a reporter from
Time
that Kazan “was our father and he fucked us”; Schickel points out that the fucking was done well over a year before
On the Waterfront
started shootingâin other words, Steiger's moral objections came to the surface painfully slowly, and well after one of the most celebrated performances of his film career was safely in the can.

It was Dalton Trumbo, one of the writers blacklisted as a result of HUAC, who ended up making the best case for Kazan. The kind of person who testified, he said, was “a man who has left the CP to avoid constant attempts to meddle with the ideological content of his writingâ¦ a person whose disagreement with the CP had turned to forthright hostility and who, when the crunch came, saw no reason to sacrifice his career in defence of the rights of people he now hatedâ¦” All I want is one simple article of faith that is even less complicated than it looks. Is that too much to ask?

There is a lot more to Kazan than all this, of course. He directed the first production of
Death of a Salesman
, as well as the stage version of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, worked with Arthur Miller on several other occasions, slept with Monroe and Vivien Leigh, made
East of Eden
, and wrote a novel that sold four million copies in the U.S.âKazan had a pretty impressive twentieth century. I wish Schickel's book had been just that little bit more gossipy, not just because gossip is fun, but because Kazan's relentless womanizing, it seems to me, needed some kind of explanation or context. Schickel's refusal to discuss Kazan's domestic arrangements seems indulgent, rather than high-minded; Kazan is given a guys-will-be-guys (or, perhaps, great-artists-will-be-great-artists) free pass that I don't think anyone ever really earns. From the index: “Kazan, Molly Day Thacher (first wife) husband's affairs and, 94â95, 388â89, 404.” They were married for thirty years.

Philip Roth was recently quoted as saying that he doesn't read fiction anymore. “I wised up,” he told an interviewer in the
Financial Times
. We all have moments like this: I have vowed, at various points, never to read any more novels, and books about sport, and thrillers where kids get murdered, and music biographies; but none of these decisions ever holds for very long. Moods change, tastes reassert themselves, and a great book always shakes off its genre
and its subject matter anyway, although I fear that the desire to read about the dismemberment of children and young women may have left me forever. I'm not sure wisdom has much to do with any of this, and I'd hate for Roth's words to be given extra weight just because of his age, his accomplishments, and the veneration he inspires. I don't know if it's ever very wise to give up on Dickens. In my experience, a sudden panic about my own ignorance is followed firstly by the desperate desire to read nonfiction, and then, usually very swiftly, by a realization that any nonfiction reading I do is going to be hopelessly inadequate and partial. If I knew I was going to die next week, then I'd definitely be keen to read up on facts about the afterlife; in the absence of any really authoritative books on this subject, however (no recommendations, please), then I think I'd rather read great fiction, something that shoots for and maybe even hits the moon, than a history of the House of Bourbon.

It is, perhaps, a little unfair to ask Eleanor Henderson to provide a philosophical justification for an entire art form, especially as
Ten Thousand Saints
is her first novel, but she does a pretty good job anyway. She moves in extraordinarily close to her young protagonists, participants in the New York straight-edge punk scene of the 1980s, and in doing so taught me a lot of things I didn't know. (Straight-edge was never much of a thing in England, where sobriety is seen as a moral failing by all ages and tribes.) The big draw here, though, is Henderson's writing, which is warm, engaged, and precise; I don't think I have ever come across a gritty urban novel that is as uninterested in finding a prose style to complement its subject. That's a good thing, by the way.
Ten Thousand Saints
is the offspring of Lester Bangs and Anne Tyler, and who wouldn't want to read that baby?

Per Petterson's beautiful, truthful
Out Stealing Horses
seems to me a pretty good example of the sort of thing that nonfiction can never accomplish. It's about aging and childhood, memory and family, and it has things to say on these subjects. That Petterson can accomplish this while providing an ornate, time-shifting narrative that includesâspoiler alert and hopeless volte-face, all at the same timeâdead children seems to me the reason why we should never stop reading novels, however old and wise we are.