LITMIR.BIZ

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pomposity. Whenever he wrote to complain to publishers, or agents, or even printers—and he complained a lot, not least because he got through a large number of publishers, agents, and printers—he was never backwards in coming forwards, as we say here, and he included the same self-promoting line again and again. “In reviewing my novel Albert Angelo, the Sunday Times described me as ‘one of the best writers we’ve got,’ and the Irish Times called the book ‘a masterpiece’ and put me in the same class as Joyce and Beckett,” he wrote to Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, demanding to know why he wasn’t interested in paperback rights. “The Sunday Times called me ‘one of the best writers we’ve got’, and the Irish Times called the book a masterpiece and put me in the same class as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett,” he wrote to his foreign rights agent, demanding to know why there had been no Italian publication of his first novel. “You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke,” he wrote to Thomas Wallace of Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, Inc. after Wallace had turned him down. (Maybe Coe should write a version of the same letter, if you ignorant unliterary Americans still refuse to publish his book.) “For your information, Albert Angelo was reviewed by the Sunday Times here as by ‘one of the best writers we’ve got,’ and the Irish Times called the book a masterpiece and put me in the same class as Joyce and Beckett.” And then, finally and gloriously:

       …The Sunday Times called me ‘one of the best writers we’ve got,’ and the Irish Times called the book a masterpiece, and compared me with Joyce and Beckett.

       However, it seems that I am to be denied the opportunity of a most profound and enormous experience: of being present with my wife Virginia when our first child is born at your hospital on or about July 24th…

      This last letter was to the Chief Obstetrician of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, after Johnson had discovered that it was not the hospital’s policy to allow fathers to attend a birth. It’s the “However” kicking off the second paragraph that’s such a brilliant touch, drawing attention as it does to the absurdity of the contradiction. “I can understand you keeping out the riff-raff, your Flemings and your Amises and the rest of the what-happened-next brigade,” it implies. “But surely you’ll make an exception for a genius?” In the end, it’s just another variation on “Don’t you know who I am?”—which in Johnson’s case was an even more unfortunate question than it normally is. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now.

      Johnson had nothing but contempt for the enduring influence of Dickens and the Victorian novel; strange, then, that in the end he should remind one of nobody so much as the utilitarian school inspector in the opening scene of Hard Times. Here’s the school inspector: “I’ll explain to you… why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact?… Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste is only another name for Fact.” And here’s Johnson: “Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.” Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I’m glad that they both lost the cultural Cold War: there’s room for them all in our world, but there’s no room for Mystic River in theirs. And what kind of world would that be?

       September 2004

      BOOKS BOUGHT:

       20,000 Streets Under the Sky—Patrick Hamilton

       Unnamed Literary Novel—Anonymous

       The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1

       Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton—Nigel Jones

      BOOKS READ:

       The Midnight Bell—Patrick Hamilton

       Blockbuster—Tom Shone

       We’re in Trouble—Chris Coake

       Literary novel (unfinished)

       Biography (unfinished)

      Twelve months! A whole year! I don’t think I’ve ever held down a job for this long. And I have to say that when I first met the Polysyllabic Spree, the eighty-four chillingly ecstatic young men and women who run this magazine, I really couldn’t imagine contributing one column, let alone a dozen. The Spree all live together in Believer Towers, high up in the hills somewhere; they spend their days reading Montaigne’s essays aloud to each other (and laughing ostentatiously at the funny bits), shooting at people who own TV sets, and mourning the deaths of every single writer since the Gawain-Poet, in chronological order. When I first met them, they’d got up to Gerard Manley Hopkins. (They seemed particularly cut up about him. It may have been the Jesuit thing, kindred spirits and all that.) I was impressed by their seriousness and their progressive sexual relationships, but they really didn’t seem like my kind of people.

      And yet here we are, still. I’m beginning to see through the white robes to the people beneath, as it were, and they’re really not so bad, once you get past the incense, the vegan food, and the communal showers. They’ve definitely taught me things: they’ve taught me, for example, that there is very little point in persisting with a book that isn’t working for me, and even less point in writing about it. In snarky old England, we’re used to working the other way around—we only finish books that aren’t working for us, and those are definitely the only ones we write about. Anyway, as a consequence, my reading has become more focused and less chancy, and I no longer choose novels that I know in advance will make me groan, snort, and guffaw.

      I still make mistakes, though, despite the four-hundred-page manual they make you read before you can contribute to this magazine, and I made two in the last four weeks. The biography I abandoned was of a major cultural figure of the twentieth century—he died less than forty years ago—so when you see, in the opening chapter, the parentheses “(1782–1860)” after a name, it’s really only natural that you become a little disheartened: you’re a long, long way from the action. I made it through to the subject’s birth, but then got irritated by a long-winded

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