LONDON LETTER MAY 2014

I have always been rather snobbish about the short story, short stories being all very well but the novel being the real deal. This is possibly an Anglo Saxon prejudice, in Russia, for example, the short story is celebrated as an art form in its own right. In Chekhov the Russians possess arguably the greatest short story writer of all time. Indeed in Russia he is more celebrated as a short story writer than playwright.

My prejudice however is also a consequence of not being able to completely fall into a short story, the relationship being too brief. What I want from fiction is to become wholly absorbed in another reality and there have been only two short stories that have managed that, Death in Venice and The Great Gatsby, though the latter is more of a novella than short story. Death in Venice must surely rank as one of the greatest short stories ever written, though now is overshadowed by the film. If you have seen the film I challenge you to read the story without hearing the sound of Mahler’s 5^th symphony. I can testify that this actually accentuates the poignancy of the story adding to the unbearable melancholy that permeates the tale of a man’s approaching death.

Will Self, the British novelist, recently announced the death of the serious novel, I remain unperturbed, such pronouncements have been made before and by weightier individuals than Mr Self. This does not of course mean that the statement is untrue, merely that I would want more evidence before believing it.

These reflections come about as a consequence of my own recent difficulties in reading fiction, I start novels but often do not finish them. I suspect a variety of reasons for this but one result has been that I have started reading more short stories, in particular Guy de Maupassant.

Maupassant’s portraits of French society, from Norman peasants to the Parisian petty bourgeois in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, whilst feeling extremely contemporary in their description of an essentially transient futility often experienced in life also have that romantic aura of a world now disappeared. The alluring nostalgia of the costume drama.

As I have mentioned before I am ill read[1] and was somehow gratified to hear that I share this poverty with Alan Bennett the English playwright. He makes the confession in a BBC interview on the occasion of his 80^th birthday. He also confessed to preferring American novelists to British, a prejudice I share. He mentions Philip Roth, a writer I also admire. It is difficult to conceive of a British writer composing something like The Human Stain, one of Roth’s best novels. It is something to do with the immense panorama of American life.

I am a great admirer of Bennett, who at times has threatened not only to become ‘a national treasure’ but of being reduced to a particular tone of voice, shy, diffident, quintessentially English and of course Northern. Some think Bennett to be working class but as his father owned a butchers shop it would be more accurate to say that his family occupied the lowest rung of the middle class. It was a social class in England trapped by being neither fully one thing nor the other, not fully working class, certainly not bourgeois. My own background is a little different but in some ways close enough to Bennett’s for me to be able to fully recognise and identify with the references. Indeed my mother came from a middle class family in Liverpool definitely in the bourgeois camp. But, in that awful phrase from another age, she married beneath her. My father hailing from the heart of working class Belfast. They met as a consequence of the war, a time when the hitherto stable class structure in Britain was given a good shake up, before being restored to ‘normal’.

Alan Bennett

The working class community I grew up in I thought would last forever, it seemed so solid, so static, so inert. Yet looking back I can see what changes were already eating away at its fabric.[2] That fabric a complex pattern of assumptions, prejudices, and values, some undetectable to someone not growing up in that culture.
The emotional range was limited, but complex, my parents and the parents of my friends grew up in a time when emotions were best kept subdued. My own parents sharing with Bennett’s an exaggerated concern with the opinions of others.

As I say the community I grew up in, and it was a community though the idea never occurred to me at the time, was stable and offered a rich enough framework within which to develop. Though to me it felt claustrophobic and embarrassingly philistine. I longed to live somewhere cosmopolitan and sophisticated and after a fashion I got my wish; only to find that, as someone who affects to write, the material of my childhood and youth to be far richer than my experiences in cosmopolitan London. This kind of thing being one of those jokes that life enjoys playing on you.

Summer seems to have arrived early and at 8:00 a.m. it is already warm. Sunshine changes everything particularly when combined with intense heat. I have just been reading a short article on Albert Camus, who was born and brought up in Algeria, Camus was a pied-noir, an ethnic Frenchman living in French Algeria. It strikes me that a book like The Stranger only really belongs in a warm climate.

Heat produces two major moods in me, either happiness or melancholy neither predictable. When looking back on recent years when I spent the whole summer in the heat of the Bulgarian sunshine, plastic beach sandals resting on sand and a cold beer on the beach bar table, what I enjoyed most was a sort of warm, intensely philosophical melancholy.

With only a year to go until the general election, less to the Scottish referendum, politics feels volatile and fluid, though I find too much to be depressing in the news to want to fully engage. Parochially and internationally the forces of reaction seem to be gaining ground, not least in the Ukraine. I have switched off a little, pre-occupied assisting the facilitation of a citizen journalism class and teaching a couple of history modules.

Now to shower and shave and take a walk down to Earls Court in the sunshine.

AT May 2014

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[1] Not to be confused with widely read. I have read a great deal but my reading has been random and undisciplined.

[2] Most notably ‘the right to buy.’ This steadily broke up cohesive communities in better quality social housing and eroded working class solidarity. Which, of course, it was intended to do.

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