Ten Years in the Tub (123 page)

I'm happy that I do the job I do, but my bad days irritate the hell out of me—the hours spent playing (currently)
Jelly Defense
, the despair, the occasional petulant act of self-sabotage. What is simultaneously comforting and alarming about
Imagine
is that it turns out I'm doing more or less everything right. These aren't avoidable professional hazards at all, but tools of the trade, at least as essential as a computer. Oh, and 80 percent of writers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop interviewed by a neuroscientist in the early 1980s were properly, formally depressed. Who'd have thought the figure would be as low as that? The depressometer I invented and affixed to the underside of my desk never dips below three digits. I can't imagine that there are many readers of this magazine who won't want to quote great chunks of
Imagine
to a significant other, if only to excuse and explain recent awful behavior.

It would have been interesting to think about David and Caroline Stafford's biography of Lionel Bart,
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T' Be
, in the illuminating light cast by Jonah Lehrer's book. Regular readers, however, will already know that if there is an uninteresting way to think about something, this column will find it, and so I read the two books the other way round. There is an awful lot in the Staffords' book that is relevant to the work of both Jonah Lehrer and Brian Uzzi, however: Bart popped out a couple of moderately successful musicals before writing, with apparently vomitical speed and necessity, the astonishingly successful
Oliver!
in 1960, when he was thirty years old. Uzzi would have fun
Q
-crunching; Bart worked with the same people, mostly associated with the Theatre Royal Stratford East run by the extraordinary Joan Littlewood. Lehrer, meanwhile, would understand the apparent effortlessness of the show's appearance from thin air, its relationship to Bart's tough East End Jewish upbringing, and his eventually ruinous drug use. It's all pretty much downhill after
Oliver!
, though.
Twang!!
—and there is almost certainly a piece of research being conducted on the inverse relationship between exclamation marks and commercial success even as we speak—remains one of the most
famous theatrical disasters of the twentieth century. Its calamitous failure destroyed Bart, not least because he invested past, present, and future earnings from
Oliver!
in it, despite all wise advice to the contrary. Any biography of a minor cultural figure stands or falls on the quality of its supporting roles, and Bart “cast up,” as film people say—filled his life with just about anyone who was alive and talented and interesting in the 1960s. He knew Judy Garland and Noël Coward, the Beatles and the Stones. Michael Caine, Lucien Freud, Cassius Clay. But it was Joan Littlewood, who directed his first hit, the eponymous
Fings…
, whom I wanted to know more about, hence the appearance of her autobiography in the Books Bought list above. A similar, now entirely incomprehensible fascination with Ronald Reagan once led me to buy a book about his years working for General Electric. That book is on the shelves above my bed, so I am reminded of the brevity and idiocy of my enthusiasms every night of the week. I'm sure Joan will go the same way, but look at this:

            
Joan Littlewood ran away to Paris, arriving just in time to enjoy the street riots of 1934, which left 15 dead… London, when she returned, seemed lacklustre, so she decided to go to America. With £9 to her name, fares were a sticking-point, but a few shillings could be saved if she walked to Liverpool, so she did just that… In Manchester, the BBC came to her rescue with an invitation to give a talk about being a lady tramp. There she met a man called Jimmy Miller. They married. Jimmy later changed his name to Ewan MacColl, and wrote “Dirty Old Town” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

And this is all before she began the career for which she became famous, her revolutionary theater work in a disused theater she rented, cleaned up, and fitted herself, where she directed and produced
Oh! What a Lovely War
, and plays by Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney. (Is this all a bit too British? Well, tough. She was a big deal here.)

I am now convinced that every nonfiction book contains one weird fact which you want to put in your pocket and pull out to show friends at every available opportunity. Last year I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to stand on his balcony watching Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz fight; now I learn that
Bart's father may well have been in an internment camp on the Isle of Man with a cranky old geezer who made everyone do the fitness exercises he'd invented, a chap called Joseph Hubertus Pilates. I'd always presumed Pilates was an obscure offshoot of Greek science.

Jess Walter, one of my favorite contemporary American novelists, has written a novel in which you half expect Lionel Bart to turn up at any second.
Oliver!
was written in 1959, in a fishing village in Spain; chunks of
Beautiful Ruins
are set in a fishing village in Italy three years later, and its characters include Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who would almost certainly have met Bart, maybe even attended one of his scary-sounding showbiz parties. I don't think I'm going to tell you what Burton is doing in this book, apart from filming
Cleopatra
; all you need to know is that
Beautiful Ruins
is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year. It jumps between the Italian village and contemporary Hollywood, and there's a long, sad love story in it that reminded me a little bit of
Love in the Time of Cholera
, and it's full of stories, in lots of different forms—pitches for movies, extracts from plays, chunks of fictional memoirs. And just when you're beginning to doubt whether Walter can pull it all together, he hits you with a sucker punch, a long, delirious ending that ties up all the strands while managing to say something about the beauty and brevity of our time on this planet. And if there's nothing in there that you find interesting, then there won't be much else for you in the rest of this magazine. Ever. I re-read Walter's
Citizen Vince
this month, too, for Professional Purposes, and was reminded not only of what a great book it is, funny, clever, and beautifully plotted, but of what a surprising writer Walter is: his last four novels really bear no resemblance to each other, except in their freshness and originality.

Ready Player One
is set in a depressing, brilliantly imagined dystopic future, and though neither Lionel Bart nor Richard Burton would crop up in it, it's absolutely stuffed full of pop-culture references, all of them taken from '80s movies and music. Whenever I have tried to read science fiction before, I have become quite suicidally depressed by my own incomprehension, but I am proud to say that I understood every single word of Ernest Cline's book, and if his publishers want to use that as a blurb, they're welcome.
Ready Player One
is set in 2044. The world's resources have more or less run out, and Wade Watts,
the book's teenage narrator, lives in a trailer park in which trailer has been piled upon trailer to form a teetering tower-block. Watts spends his time, like an awful lot of other people, living virtually. He goes to virtual school, and when he has the virtual money to travel, visits other virtual planets. I am going to stop using the word
virtual
now, but don't forget it, because it's needed to make sense of all other sentences from now on.

The deceased founder of the world (not, like, the actual world), James Halliday, richer than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined, has left his entire fortune to anyone who can solve the impossibly labyrinthine puzzle he has set, a puzzle entirely reliant on an obsessive familiarity with John Hughes movies and Rush concept albums, the stuff that Halliday loved in his youth. Years pass, and most people have given up; then Watts gets a break that gives him a shot at winning the money. The clues and tasks, increasingly more inventive and more difficult, are strewn all over the universe. (Not, you know…)
Ready Player One
is like a computer game, fun and addictive; however, it has the disadvantage of not making you feel sick with self-loathing. Now I have finished it, I will go back to playing
Jelly Defense
on my iPad, which will do the trick. As Jonah Lehrer will tell you, I have no chance of creating a masterpiece to rival
Great Expectations
without it. All these books are wasting my time.

June 2012

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Beginner's Goodbye
—Anne Tyler

     
  
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
—Rebecca Goldstein

     
  
Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World
—Robert Sellers

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
A Giacometti Portrait
—James Lord

     
  
The Submission
—Amy Waldman

     
  
Grace Williams Says It Loud
—Emma Henderson

     
  
Skylark
—Dezsö Kosztolányi