Ten Years in the Tub (52 page)

     
  
All the King's Men
—Robert Penn Warren

     
  
Only in London
—Hanan Al-Shaykh

     
  
What Good Are the Arts
?—John Carey

     
  
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
—G. K. Chesterton

I
f, as a recent survey in the UK suggested, most people buy books because they like to be
seen
reading rather than because they actually enjoy it, then I would suggest that you can't beat a collection of letters by an author—and if that author is a poet, then so much the better. The implication is clear: you know the poet's work inside out (indeed, what you're saying is that if you read
his or her entire oeuvre one more time, then the lines would ring round and round in your head like a Kelly Clarkson tune), and you now need something else, something that might help to shed some light on some of the more obscure couplets.

So there I am, reading Larkin's letters every chance I get, and impressing the hell out of anyone who spots me doing so. (Never mind that I never go anywhere, and that therefore the only person likely to spot me doing so is my partner, who at the time I'm most likely to be reading Larkin's letters is very much a sleeping partner.) And what I'm actually reading is stuff like this: “Katherine Mansfield is a cunt.” “I think this [poem] is really bloody cunting fucking good.” “I have just made up a rhyme: After a particularly good game of rugger / A man called me a bugger / Merely because in a loose scrum / I had my cock up his bum.” “Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss: in point of fact I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies and generally misbehaved myself.” And so on. In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it: you look like
un homme ou femme sérieux/sérieuse
, but you feel like a twelve-year-old who's somehow being allowed to read
Playboy
in an English lesson. And what you come to realize is that the lifestyle of a naughty twelve-year-old is enervating to the max, if you're a grown-up; indeed, there are quite a few thirteen-year-olds who would find great chunks of Larkin's correspondence embarrassingly puerile.

The irony is that I was drawn to Larkin's letters through that beautiful poem “Church Going,” which makes a case for the value of churches long after organized religion has lost its appeal and its point: “And that much never can be obsolete / Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.” This last line was quoted in an article I was reading in the
Economist
, of all places, and it struck a post-
Gilead
chord with me, so I reread a few of the poems and then decided that I'd like access to the prose version of the mind that created them. And yes, you can see where Larkin's hunger to become more serious came from; if I had a mouth like that, I'd have wanted to pay frequent visits to God's house, too. Larkin writes brilliantly and enthusiastically about his jazz records, and every now and again there's a peach of a letter about writing:

            
Poetry (at any rate in my case) is like trying to remember a tune you've forgotten. All corrections are attempts to get nearer to the forgotten tune. A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision—lasting one second or less—and he attempts to express the whole of which the vision is a part.

And that's the sort of thing you want, surely, when you wade through a writer's letters. What you end up with, however, is a lot of stuff about farting and wanking. Every now and again you are reminded forcibly that the ability to write fiction or poetry is not necessarily indicative of a particularly refined intelligence, no matter what we'd like to believe; it's a freakish talent, like the ability to bend a ball into the top corner of the goal from a thirty-yard free kick, but no one's interested in reading Thierry Henry's collected letters—no literary critic, anyway. And Thierry would never call Katherine Mansfield a cunt, not least because he's a big fan of the early stories. Anyway, I have given up on Larkin for the moment. The rest of you: stick to the poems.

As nobody noticed, probably, I was barred from the
Believer
again last month, this time for quoting from one of Philip Larkin's letters, more or less accurately—what's a second-person pronoun between friends?—at an editorial meeting. The Polysyllabic Spree, the seventy-eight repellently evangelical young men and women who run the magazine, “couldn't hear the quotation marks,” apparently, and anyway, as they pointed out (somewhat unnecessarily, I felt), I'm no Larkin. So I have a lot of ground to cover here—I have had several Major Reading Experiences over the last couple of months, and I've got to cram them all into a couple of measly pages, all because of those teenage white-robed prudes. Oh, it's not your problem. I'll just get on with it. I know I won't need to tell you anything about Zadie Smith's warm, moving, smart, and thoroughly enjoyable
On Beauty
; Hanan Al-Shaykh was one of the authors I met on a recent trip to Reykjavik, and her lovely novel
Only in London
was a perfect reflection of the woman: surprising, fun, thoughtful.

A disgruntled
Barnesandnoble.com
punter slams Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men:
“Oh well,” says our critic in his one-star review. “At least it was better than the Odyssey.” This means, presumably, that the Odyssey is a no-star book; you have to admire someone prepared to flout conventional
literary wisdom so publicly. I personally don't agree, and for me the Odyssey still has the edge, but Warren's novel seems to have held up pretty well. It's overwritten, here and there—Warren can't see a sunny day without comparing it to a freckly girl wearing a polka-dot dress and new shoes, sitting on a fence clutching a strawberry lollipop and whistling—and at one point, apropos of almost nothing, there's a thirty-page story set during the Civil War which seems to belong to another book altogether. You could be forgiven for thinking that
All the King's Men
could have done with a little more editing, rather than a little less; but the edition I read is a new “restored” edition of the novel, containing a whole bunch of stuff—a hundred pages, apparently—that were omitted from the version originally published. A hundred pages! Oh, dear god. Those of us still prepared to pick up sixty-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winners should be rewarded, not horribly and unfairly punished.