Ten Years in the Tub (93 page)

     
  
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
—Elif Batuman

     
  
Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared
—Andrew Brown

     
  
Some of
Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough, Prepared for the Ethical Union—
Mass Observation

S
o this last month, I went to the Oscars. I went to the Oscars as a
nominee
, I should stress (apparently in underlined italics), not as some loser, even though that, ironically, was what I became during the ceremony, by virtue of the archaic and almost certainly corrupt academy voting process. And my task now is to find a way of making the inclusion of that piece of information look relevant to a column about my reading life, rather than gratuitous and self-congratulatory. And I think I can do it, too: it strikes me that just about every book I've read in the past few weeks could be categorized as anti-Oscar.
Austerity
Britain
? That one's pretty obvious. Both words in that title are antithetical to everything that happens in Hollywood during awards season. You're unlikely to catch a CAA agent in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont reading Andrew Brown's thoughtful, occasionally pained book about his complicated relationship with Sweden; Elif Batuman's funny, original
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
is populated by people who spend their entire lives thinking about, say, the short stories of Isaac Babel, rather than Jennifer Aniston's career. (I'm not saying that one mental occupation is superior to the other, but they're certainly different, possibly even oppositional.) And even Patti Smith's memoir, which could have been glamorous and starry, is as much about Genet and Blake as it is about rock and roll, and is suffused with a sense of purpose and an authenticity absent even from independent cinema. Oh, and no fiction at all, which has got to be significant in some way, no? If you want to ward off corruption, then surely the best way to do it is to sit by a swimming pool and read a chapter about Britain's postwar housing crisis. It worked for me, anyway. I can exclusively reveal that if you sit by a swimming pool in L.A., wearing swimming shorts and reading David Kynaston, then Hollywood starlets leave you alone.

Finishing
Austerity Britain
was indisputably my major achievement of the month, more satisfying, even, than sitting in a plush seat and applauding for three and a half hours while other people collected statuettes. A month ago I had read less than a third of the book, yet it was already becoming apparent that Kynaston's research, the eccentric depth and breadth of it, was going to provide more pleasure than one had any right to expect; there were occasions during the last few hundred pages when it made me laugh. At one point, Kynaston quotes a 1948 press release from the chairman of Hoover, and adds in a helpful parenthetical that it was “probably written for him by a young Muriel Spark.” The joy that extra information brings is undeniable, but, once you get to know Kynaston, you will come to recognize the pain and frustration hidden in that word
probably:
how many hours of his life, you wonder, were spent trying to remove it?

While I was reading about the birth of our National Health Service, President Obama was winning his battle to extend health care in America;
it's salutary, then, to listen to the recollections of the doctors who treated working-class Britons in those early days. “I certainly found when the Health Service started on the 5th July '48 that for the first six months I had as many as twenty or thirty ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions—I mean, of that twenty or thirty there would be at least ten who had complete prolapse of their womb, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.” Some 8 million pairs of free spectacles were provided in the first year, as well as countless false teeth. It's not that people were dying without free health care; it's that their quality of life was extraordinarily, needlessly low. Before the NHS, we were fumbling around halfblind, unable to chew, and swaddled in giant homemade sanitary napkins; is it possible that in twenty-first-century America, the poor are doing the same? Two of the most distinctive looks in rock and roll were provided by the NHS, by the way. John Lennon's specs of choice were the 422 Panto Round Oval; meanwhile, Elvis Costello favored the 524 Contour. What, you think David Kynaston would have failed to provide the serial numbers? Panto Round Oval, by the way, would be a pretty cool name for a band. Be my guest, but thank me in the acknowledgments.

My parents were in their twenties during the period covered in
Austerity Britain
, and it's easy to see why they and their generation went crazy when we asked for the simplest things—new hi-fis, chopper bikes, Yes triple-albums—when we were in our teens. They weren't lying; they really didn't have stuff like that when they were young. Some 35 percent of urban households didn't have a fixed bath; nearly 20 percent didn't have exclusive access to a toilet. One of the many people whose diaries provide Kynaston with the backbone to this book describes her father traveling from Leicester to west London, a distance of over a hundred miles, to watch the 1949 FA Cup Final, the equivalent of the Super Bowl back then. He didn't go all that way because he had a ticket for the game; it was just that he'd been invited to watch a friend's nine-inch black and white television. We stayed in the Beverly Wilshire for the Oscars, thank you for asking. It was OK.

I haven't read
Puzzled People
, the Mass Observation book published in 1947 about contemporary attitudes to spirituality, all the way through. (As I
explained last month—please keep up—Mass Observation was a sociological experiment in which several hundred people were asked to keep diaries, and, occasionally, to answer questionnaires; the results have provided historians, including David Kynaston, with a unique source of information.) And you don't need to read the whole thing, anyway. The oblique first-person responses to metaphysical matters are ideal, if you have a spare moment to dabble in some found poetry—and who doesn't, really?—much as the surreality of the Clinton/Lewinsky testimony led to the brilliant little book
Poetry Under Oath
a few years back. (“I don't know / That I said that / I don't / I don't remember / What I said / And I don't remember / To whom I said it.”) Here are a couple I made at home:

            
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

            
Now you've caught me.

            
I've no idea.

            
My life's all work

            
And having babies.

            
Well, I think we're all cogs

            
Of one big machine.

            
What I'm wondering is,

            
What is the machine for?

            
That's your query.

            
JESUS

            
I wouldn't mind

            
Being like Him

            
But he was too good.

            
Didn't he say

            
“Be ye perfect”

            
Or something like that?

            
Well,

            
That's just

            
Ridiculous

I bought
Fishing in Utopia
because I found myself in a small and clearly struggling independent village-bookshop, and I was desperate to give the proprietor some money, but it was a struggle to find anything that I could imagine myself reading, among all the cookbooks and local histories. And sometimes imagination is enough. Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having—a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say, but
Fishing in Utopia
—quirky, obviously smart, quiet, and contemplative—is exactly the sort of thing I was going to pick up when I became someone else. By reading it now, I have got ahead of myself; I suspect that the vulgarity of awards season propelled me into my own future.