I’ve read a handful of books by Philip K Dick, the author with the name most likely to make schoolboys snigger*. He’s terrific, but I know he wrote so much that the quality must be variable; and any time I look out more, reliable sources always seem to recommend the ones I already know. The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Ubik. What I definitely thought I knew was that his non-science fiction wasn’t worth bothering with. Then that young turk Scott Pack came along and recommended this book, boldly suggesting that “anyone who has read and enjoyed the novels of Richard Yates would love Confessions Of A Crap Artist.” Challenge accepted.

Confessions of a Crap Artist was written in 1959 but not published until 1975, when Dick had made his name: he wrote a number of non-SF novels, and this was the only one published in his lifetime. It nonetheless retains the recurring theme of his better known books, questioning the nature of reality. The whole book purports to be the work of its main character, so the title page in my 2005 Gollancz edition looks like this:

Philip K. Dick

CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST

- Jack Isidore
(of Seville, Calif.)

A Chronicle of Verified Scientific Fact
1945-1959

This may be important, for reasons which will become clear. The story is narrated initially by Jack Isidore, the ‘crap artist’ whose grip on reality is tenuous: he believes in civilizations living inside the Earth, that sunlight has weight, that World War 2 began in 1941 when America joined, and seems unsure whether he lives in the 1950s or on the brink of the fourth millennium. Dick uses some lazy novelist’s shorthand to denote Isidore’s cookie-cutter dorkishness and distance from ‘decent’ society: porn; dandruff; BO; comics (I know, I know; don’t write in). His mundane job as a tyre regroover seems to exemplify his sociopathic values:

When I get done regrooving a tire, it doesn’t look hand-done by any means. It looks exactly the way it would look if a machine had done it, and, for a regroover, that’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.

Quickly the narrative gives way to the other characters, and what appears to be the story proper gets under way. This is why Scott Pack invokes Richard Yates: it’s unhappy families all the way. Jack, following a brush with the law, is forced to move in with his sister Fay and her husband Charley, who have problems of their own. Charley’s a violent thug - but who wouldn’t be, faced with Fay’s contrary selfishness? She makes perverse demands on Charley, nagging him to do housework and then accusing him of being unmanly when he agrees; money runs through her hands like water; and she adopts a unique brand of motherly love for her two children:

A child is a filthy amoral animal, without instincts of sense, that fouls its own nest if given a chance. Offhand I can’t think of any redeeming features in a child, except that as long as it is small it can be kicked around.

How much of this is characterisation, and how much Dick’s bitterness (the character of Fay is reportedly based on Dick’s first wife), is difficult to know, but it certainly makes for lively friction between Charley, Fay and Jack. The rift is deepened when Fay befriends a new couple in the town, Nat and Gwen Anteil, whom she finds irresistible because of their beauty: inevitable developments follow.

The book lacks Yates’s clear-eyed honesty - often it feels Dick is forcing the nastiness - and certainly his elegant prose, but I can see the similarities in subject matter. The family are forced together through social pressures which existed in the 1950s, which they are simultaneously trying to escape, and in the challenge to reality of Jack’s world view, and Charley’s misanthropy, I saw elements of Patricia Highsmith too.

The story kicks along at a fair pace, and Dick is brave enough to give a dramatic conclusion earlier than we expect (and it’s tense and gripping), leaving 50 pages for the consequences to play themselves out. It’s extraordinary and refreshing to see a writer so well known in one genre, take on another and give it such a good going over.

My main concern was with the integrity of the story: that title page I quoted above suggests that the whole book - Jack’s narrative, Fay’s narrative, even the third person viewpoint which tells Charley’s and Nat’s stories - is the creation of Jack, his “confessions”. This ties in with an element of the plotline, where Jack writes down an account of Fay’s secret indiscretions and presents it to Charley, but if it is really all Jack’s invention then doesn’t the whole story become fluid and meaningless? Perhaps I’m seeing what’s not really there, doubting the reality presented to me: must be reading too much Philip K Dick.

* after Fanny Burney

As usual there are three stages in getting to read this book: wanting to, acquiring, and actually beginning. I wanted to read it when it was published, partly because I’d heard of the author but didion’t know much about her, and partly because I loved the way the cover of the hardback expressed the subject of the book - Didion’s grief over the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne - so cleverly and movingly.

But I didn’t buy it until last year, when the less beautiful paperback was on sale for half price in a local bookshop’s closing down sale. And there it sat on my shelves until the book came back into the limelight recently, with its theatrical production in London as a monologue starring Vanessa Redgrave. Depressing really to think how many factors must coalesce just to get me to read one book. How many others are going to the wall just because Vanessa Redgrave hasn’t got her finger out?

Didion tells us:

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed [John's death], weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of the words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

There is no impenetrable polish in The Year of Magical Thinking, which often seems not so much an investigation of grief as an expression of it. Didion wrote it in the months which ended the first year of her life without Dunne, when the wound was still open. In the course of the book, Didion goes through several of the known stages of grief, beginning with denial: she throws out Dunne’s clothes but keeps his shoes because “he would need shoes if he was to return.” When she is given his personal possessions by the hospital, she organises the banknotes in the wallet in with her own, in order of denomination: “I remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling things.”

There’s a sense that we are spying on someone vulnerable: Didion’s intelligence and the fact that she chose to write and publish the book do not cloud the clear feeling that even as the book ends, this is a woman who is far from through with the grieving process. Near the end she acknowledges this: “the craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none.” Indeed she finds that she does not want to enter a recovery process, because

my image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even ‘mudgy’, softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him.

In that sense, the book is an attempt to cheat this softening of the edges of memory, to fix in place forever the bright unignorable moments from his sudden silence as Didion was making dinner (”John was talking, then he wasn’t”) through to the dash to hospital by ambulance, where two people go in and one person comes out.

There is a complicating factor in all this, which is that at the time Dunne died and Didion was beginning to grieve, their adopted - only - daughter, Quintana, was in a coma in hospital. (On the night of Dunne’s death they had just returned from visiting her.) Didion writes a lot - too much - about Quintana’s illness through the course of the book, and these seem like a distraction. Then I learned that, after the book was completed but a few weeks before it was published, Quintana died also. The obsessive recounting of her illness now seems like the sort of foreshadowing which she discusses in Dunne’s case: she interprets various innocuous comments made by him in the days before his death as intimations of mortality on his part. Again these are presented straight-faced, and it’s hard to know whether Didion is knowingly acknowledging her own grief-stricken blindness, or just in a muddle in the middle of it.

One quote on the cover of the book suggests that it will “maybe comfort anyone who has lost forever the one they loved.” I doubt that, but it may provide understanding to those, like me, who have been lucky enough not to undergo - yet - even the ‘normal’ grief of losing parents, let alone a partner or a child. The Year of Magical Thinking cannot necessarily help that process, but it can warn the unwary up-front of the sort of ‘temporary madness’ that can arise, and that can be endured.

Curiously, what the book left me with most was a desire to read not only some of Didion’s other books, but also Dunne’s novels: both their books are quoted in excerpts throughout The Year of Magical Thinking, as it becomes as much a memoir of two writers’ lives together as it does of the survival of one. Titles like Playland were familiar to me already, and now I want to know more. And what greater purpose could this book serve than to enable Dunne - to enable any writer - to live again in the minds of others, who read his books long after his death?

Beryl Bainbridge - the ‘Booker Bridesmaid’, shortlisted five times but never a winner - is an author whose books I always want to love. About ten years ago I read a couple of her early novels - The Bottle Factory Outing was one - and I remember failing to get through two of her (then) latest titles, Every Man For Himself and Master Georgie. It was as though there was a sheet of glass between her writing and my reading: I could see what she was doing, but couldn’t make contact. Like Margaret Atwood, only shorter. Then I saw a copy of Young Adolf in my local charity shop, and thought I should give her another go.

Young Adolf [1978] was Bainbridge’s first foray into the type of historical fiction which has now become her speciality: reimaginings and extrapolations of real events. In this case, however, the event is putative only. Bridget Hitler - a name not easily forgotten - lived in Liverpool with her husband Alois (Adolf’s half-brother), and in her memoirs, she told of Adolf Hitler’s stay with them in 1912-13, when he was in his early 20s. Whether this really happened is unknown, but it didn’t stop Bainbridge from using it as a springboard for a diverting piece of fiction.

It’s a title that will carry a lot ahead of it, and rather like Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist, it seems certain to bring about equal forces of attraction and repulsion in the bookshop browser. In that sense it has a knowing quality - you cannot write a book and call it Young Adolf and expect people to approach it without preconceptions - but I am quite sure Bainbridge wrote it with the best intentions, of intellectual curiosity and a desire to show that fiction can explore truth even where historically the facts are not known.

In the novel Adolf - one of the curious sensations the reader is going to have to get used to is being on first name terms with Hitler, if only to distinguish him from his half-brother Alois - is little more than a youth, weedy and feckless, “looking as though a good wash would kill him.” His arrival in Liverpool is the result of stealing the passage money which Alois had meant for their sister Angela, and pretty soon it’s clear that the whole Hitler clan is touched with undesirable qualities. Their father, ‘Old Man Hitler’ is a brutal thug, and Alois himself is not above a little unbalanced behaviour:

Once, before the birth of darling Pat, Alois had won on the National at Aintree and had taken [Bridget] to Monte Carlo for a holiday. His restaurant in Dale Street had been doing moderately well. He was pleased at the thought of his coming child. Strolling along the road above the bay he had been full of good humour, idly swinging his stick and murmuring on his his expansive way about the vastness of the sky above, the smoothness of the Mediterranean below. She was so accustomed to his chatter that she hardly distinguished his words from the droning of the bees in the wild flowers that grew beside the path. Turning to her, he had inquired: ‘What colour, do you suppose, is the sea?’ ‘Why, blue,’ she had answered. ‘Why, blue,’ he had mimicked, and squeezing her arm viciously had shouted: ‘The water is a composite of white and blue and green. It is a reflection of the earth and the sky, you docile bitch.’ For several days after this correction he had ignored her. She sat alone in their hotel room, with its view of the absorbent sea, and looked at her bruised arm in the dressing table mirror. Had he cared to ask, she could have told Alois, without stammering, that her skin in one particular patch above the elbow was turning black and blue, ringed with a faint tinge of mauve.

However the general tone of the book is comic, as Adolf struggles to find his feet and friendship in Liverpool, and exhibits paranoia in fear of a bearded man he believes to be pursuing him. Bainbridge is shrewd enough to limit his anti-Semitism to one outburst, so it cleverly seems an aberration rather than a defining characteristic (and indeed his best friend, Mr Meyer the landlord, is Jewish). However she can’t resist a couple of nuggets of dramatic irony, which sit uneasily and show too much of the novelist’s hand:
Mary O’Leary, another tenant in the building, gives Adolf a length of linen to make himself some clothes (”‘Brown?’ Bridget said dubiously. ‘It’s an odd colour for a shirt’”); and at a hostel, when he is assigned a number rather than a name, Adolf

longed to make a scene, to insist they brand these same numbers on his forehead or his wrist, thus drawing attention to their own lack of humanity.

Geddit? Bainbridge writes well, and in this case undoubtedly the presence of real people as characters gives the book an added weight which its often whimsical tone and brevity wouldn’t otherwise have. Whether that’s enough, however, I’m unsure, and I can’t say I’ll be rushing back to Bainbridge unless I see another of her titles for a knock-down price in a charity shop (though of course I’m always open to recommendations). A word of warning: the back cover blurb in the edition I read (pictured above) gives away the glib but neat last line of the book. Could have saved 218 pages then!

When Muriel Spark was mentioned in recent comments on this blog, I realised how long it is since I read anything by her. A few years ago, I worked my way through most of her novels, and probably overdosed. I found her brilliant but frustrating, her fiction paradoxically crystal clear but at times as hard to grasp as fog. She has a coolness toward her characters - and the reader - which wouldn’t appeal to everyone. But there were so many great things - the bold opening move of having a character in her debut, The Comforters, know that she was in a novel; the prescient portrayal of a celebrity age in The Public Image; the sharp-edged and brutal novella The Driver’s Seat; and that’s not to mention her justly famous titles such as Memento Mori or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - that it was impossible not to keep coming back for more.

So I fished out Loitering with Intent from my shelves, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981 and reissued last year as a Virago Modern Classic, with a jaunty cover illustration and paper so cheap and thin that the book weighs no more than an airmail letter.

In common with most of Spark’s later books, Loitering with Intent is - comparatively - gentler and warmer than her earlier titles, but retains their cleverness. In its knowing play with notions of the role of the author and the sources of fiction, it’s much more modern than its quaint setting suggests. It’s set, in fact, in 1950 - “one day in the middle of the twentieth century” - the year in which Spark was first published, in a short story competition in The Observer. It’s personalised by having, unusually for Spark, a first person narrator who is working on her first novel; and so the encouragement to associate character with author is all the stronger.

The narrator is Fleur Talbot, her novel is Warrender Chase, and to support herself as she writes she takes a job as secretary to the Autobiographical Association.

‘You could write your autobiography,’ I said. ‘You could join the Autobiographical Association where the members write their true life stories and have them put away for seventy years so that no living person will be offended.’

The Association is run by Sir Quentin Oliver, and Fleur quickly comes to suspect him of foul play against his vulnerable members. Furthemore, she is alarmed to discover that her novel seems to be coming to life.

In my febrile state of creativity I saw before my eyes how Sir Quentin was revealing himself chapter by chapter to be a type and consummation of Warrender Chase, my character. I could see that the members of the Autobiographical Association were about to become his victims, psychological Jack the Ripper as he was.

The scene is set for a farcical tale of detection, betrayal and missing manuscripts. Readers like me, who are almost as interested in the process of how a book comes to be as they are in books themselves, will be delighted by the scenes dealing with the writing process, publishing contracts and the dismal lot that is an author’s. Spark, in Fleur’s voice, also gives us some insight into what she knows to be criticisms - and strengths - of her own fiction:

I knew I wasn’t helping the reader to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think. … I never described, in my book, what Warrender’s motives were. I simply showed the effect of his words, his hints. … When I first started writing people used to say my novels were exaggerated. They never were exaggerated, merely aspects of realism.

It is these ‘aspects of realism’ which can be so foxing in Spark’s spiky fiction. The space left where other authors would indicate motive or tell the reader what to think, gives the book, like her others, a clearness and breathability which enables it to respond quite differently to each reader’s approach. “Complete frankness,” Fleur observes, “is not a quality that favours art.”

Cat’s Cradle was the first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, probably 15 or more years ago. It inspired me to read everything else he wrote, and as I worked my way through his output, I omnivorously ignored advice that his later work wasn’t really worth the bother. It turns out that advice was wise (though I’m still glad I found out for myself). So if you’re a Vonnegut virgin, and more susceptible to advice than I was, my tip would be to read all his books from the 1950s and 60s (particularly the likes of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night), approach the 1970s books with caution, and forget the stuff from the 80s and beyond. There are a few anomalies: Galápagos (1985) is interesting; I think of his last novel, 1997’s Timequake, as a bit of a return to form; and I am possibly the only Vonnegut fan who has never been able to get on with his most famous and acclaimed book, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

I reread Cat’s Cradle this week as it’s just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic - and not before time - with an incomprehensible but rather beautiful cover, an introduction by Benjamin Kunkel, and a terrific author photo I hadn’t seen before which for once doesn’t make Vonnegut look like a bag lady. It was published in 1963, which places it squarely in Vonnegut’s great period. On rereading it, I was relieved to find the theory holds: it’s a masterpiece of Vonnegut’s seductive, clear-eyed whimsy, and possibly his best book.

‘All right,’ said Dr Breed. ‘Listen carefully. Here we go.’

There’s a lot going on in Cat’s Cradle - easily too much for its skimpy length and truncated chapters (127 of them in 200 pages). Characters teem through the thing, ideas come and go, and the world ends: it’s a pocket epic, as indicated by the opening line, delivered with a wink: “Call me Jonah.” The narrator, whose name in fact is John, is a journalist who begins his journey by wanting to write a book about the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and ends it in a quite unexpected and worthless position of power.

There’s a lot going on, but it ultimately comes down to science and religion. Vonnegut was president of the American Humanist Association, who nonetheless felt that faith was too “important and honourable” to lose. In Cat’s Cradle it may seem unexpected, coming from a non-believer, that science is a source of destruction and religion one of consolation, but this is Vonnegut’s traditional portrayal of people as beings who will mess everything up given the chance. “My god - life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

John becomes interested in Franklin Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atom bomb, and follows Hoenikker’s children to the island of San Lorenzo. He becomes a Bokononist, the religion founded by Bokonon (real name Lionel Boyd Johnson) on San Lorenzo as a response to the awful reality of life there:

When it became clear that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

Bokononism is unique among religions in that it knows it’s false, but the curious thing is that its rituals work, and its precepts often make sense. It is ubiquitous on the island, yet outlawed, punishable by death through impalement on a large hook (”‘If I am ever put to death on the hook,’ Bokonon warns us, ‘expect a very human performance’”). Vonnegut’s humanism crosses barriers of rationalism and irrationalism. “Science is magic that works,” says the dying president of San Lorenzo, urging his successor to pursue and kill Bokonon. But one page later he is accepting the last rites of Bokononism, delivered by a man who calls himself “a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it’s unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.”

Throughout the book people exhibit the human need to belong, whether to a religion, geographical origins, or what Bokonon calls a karass, an association of two or more people whose fates will be flung together for reasons unclear to them. It’s a routine theme of Vonnegut’s, and is dealt with less sentimentally here than in later work like Slapstick. Vonnegut’s deep pessimism about humanity (”She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for all mankind”) is tempered - or in some ways enhanced - by his absurdist wit.

‘The trouble with the world was,’ she continued hesitatingly, ‘that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.’

‘He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,’ the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. ‘Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?’

‘I missed that,’ I murmured.

‘I saw that,’ said Sandra. ‘About two days ago.’

‘That’s right,’ said the bartender.

‘What is the secret of life?’ I asked.

‘I forget,’ said Sandra.

‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found out something about protein.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sandra. ‘That’s it.’

Cat’s Cradle is full of lively and deathly humour, and even the author himself is not above having fun poked at his vocation, as when characters discuss the possibility of a writer’s strike.

‘I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.’

‘I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…’

‘And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?’ I demanded.

There are also some evergreen words on the US (”The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. …American foreign policy should recognise hate rather than imagine love. Americans are hated a lot of places. People are hated a lot of places. Americans, in being hated, are simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and they are foolish to think that they should somehow be exempted from that penalty”).

I said there was a lot going on in Cat’s Cradle, and I see I have written quite a lot and haven’t even mentioned ice-nine, the deadly substance which is central to the book, or the meaning of the title (”See the cat? See the cradle?”), or granfalloons, or the epigraph from the Books of Bokonon (”Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy”), or the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy, or the slaves who were executed in public “for sub-standard zeal”. Busy, busy, busy. So in 1963 at least, we can be grateful that Vonnegut, unlike Bokonon, listened to his own advice, as expressed by the man who was horrified by the idea of the writers’ strike:

For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!

When usually the prospect of reading a complete book of stories by the same author fills me with apathy, I’m not sure why I continue to be attracted to the collections of Stefan Zweig, published in the UK by Pushkin Press. This volume includes two stories I’ve already read, ‘The Invisible Collection’ and ‘Buchmendel’: frankly, to have already got two-fifths of a book under my belt before I’d even begun must have been a factor.

An image like the one on the cover appears in the third story, ‘The Fowler Snared’.

From time to time came a meteor, like one of these stars loosened from the firmament and plunging athwart the night sky; downwards into the dark, into the valleys, on to the hills, or into the distant water, driven by a blind force as our lives are driven into the abysses of unknown destinies.

‘Lives … driven into the abysses of unknown destinies’ are a feature of many of Zweig’s stories, though really it’s not so much the destiny which interests him - often the tale will end just as the life is opening up to new possibilities, and the reader must imagine those for himself - as the ‘blind force’ which drives them. But if this suggests a fatalism in his characters, that would not be quite true.

In the title story ‘Fantastic Night’ (1922) - the longest in the collection at 54 pages - the central character, typically for Zweig, is at one remove from us, his story told through the framing device of the narrator being given a bundle of papers which contain the text. Again typically for Zweig, we are then given a detailed and emotive account of the man’s spiritual awakening, which “has become the pivot on which my whole existence turns.” Before this ‘fantastic night’ he was a successful but empty man of 36 with independent income and no real concerns.

I did not lack for success with women, and here too, with the secret collector’s urge which in a way indicates a lack of real involvement, I chalked up many memorable and precious hours of varied experience. In this field I gradually moved from being a mere sensualist to the status of a knowledgeable connoisseur. … But nothing stirred, I felt as if I were made of glass, with the world outside shining through me and never lingering within…

What changes his life is a day at the races, where a minor lapse of morality gives vent to such feelings of vigour and life when he cheats to win that “I felt myself, desiccated as I was, suddenly flowering again.” This leads to “the pull of criminality” and later to “the frenzied enchantment of gambling for the second time in twelve hours, but this time for the highest of stakes, for my whole comfortable existence, even my life.” Zweig takes his time over this development, and it’s tempting to yell Get on with it! as he gives us a moment-by-moment account of our man’s growth. Yet his triumph in ‘Fantastic Night’ is twofold. First, to reach one of his usual fine epiphanies at the end of the story and make us realise it could not have been told any more briefly without losing its cumulative power; and second, to seemingly leave the story open-ended until we return to the framing introduction and discover we already know the character’s fate from the outset as surely and as subtly as we do with Mrs Richard F Schiller’s in Lolita, and that the end loops back to the beginning in a highly satisfying way.

Elsewhere I read that the second story in this volume, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ (1922), was one of Zweig’s finest moments. I don’t know about that, but it does have one remarkable quality in a story - yet again - of constantly heightened emotion and passionate expression, which is to make the most interesting character the one who never speaks, to whom the story is addressed. This is a writer of Zweig’s age and nationality, who receives a letter from a woman who turns out to have adored him all her life.

Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be.

There are dramatic developments, but all along the most interesting question from the reader’s point of view is: how is the writer - who has chosen to share this letter with us - feeling about it? Wondering whether we will ever find out is the greatest pleasure of all.

This volume is essential for any Zweig fan, or indeed any admirer of strongly driven stories of unrequited love and metaphysical frenzy - which almost goes without saying as I had already recommended the last two stories here (’The Invisible Collection’ and ‘Buchmendel’) in their stand-alone edition. The final story here that was new to me is the ten-page short ‘The Fowler Snared,’ where Zweig plays with the notion of fiction and the responsibility of the author to his characters. One character has no interest in such things:

The fancies of fiction… do they not fade after a time, do they not perish in twenty, fifty or a hundred years?

Yes they do, but this one - first published in 1906 - looks like surviving a little longer yet.

When I belatedly discovered James Salter last year, I adored his novel Light Years so much that I knew not only that I would have to read everything he’s written, but that I had to take my time doing so. His output, in 82 years and counting, comprises just five novels, two collections of stories and a memoir. Fortunately in the UK most of these books were reissued last year, with his most recent (if that’s the term: it was published in 1979) novel Solo Faces to be reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic later this year. Just his second novel Cassada and his first story collection Dusk are out of print. Anyway, I’ve restrained myself for almost a year now, so time to indulge with his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), shown here in the typically uninspiring cover of the 2007 Picador reissue. (I much prefer the more colourful US cover.)

My original intention was to read all Salter’s fiction before Burning the Days, as I knew he would have a lot to say about his work within these pages. I was wrong: of the six books he had published when this was written, only A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years are referred to more than once. A couple aren’t mentioned by name at all, including his fine debut The Hunters. So in the end I am pleased I read this book now: it avoids building up yet further expectation in my mind, and therefore being even more disappointed by it than I was.

The problem is that despite Salter having had an interesting life by anyone’s standards - privileged upbringing, fighter pilot, screenwriter, ‘interesting’ relationships - the book to me was for the majority frankly dull. Most of the first half, outside his childhood, is taken up with his time as a pilot, which for my money is far more interestingly covered in his autobiographical novel The Hunters. But this is a book of recall - its subtitle is Recollection - and Salter says that Light Years was inspired by Jean Renoir’s “The only things that are important in life are those you remember.” So he writes well about the cruel selectiveness of memory.

Families of no importance - so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.

Or here, when meeting his old teacher. There’s no suggestion in the book that Salter has lost his way with language:

I meant him to see that his faith in me had been confirmed, but I am not sure what he saw - his smile was one of not quite remembering. His children had replaced me and life now crowded in. As if the school years had been a vine and something cut them and they fell.

In the second half, after too much flightiness, we’re back to earth, with some memories of writers such as Irwin Shaw (er, which one was he again?) and Hemingway. Nonetheless I keep wanting him to get to his own books: is it unnatural for me to want a writer’s memoir to be more or less a director’s commentary on each of his works? But they come only in a fifty-page burst at the end which almost justifies - or at least is cause for forgiveness of - everything that went before. Perhaps Salter sees his novels as only a small aspect of his life (he certainly hasn’t spent the majority of his time writing them). But at the same time he’s primarily known for being a novelist, isn’t he? And “there is your life as you know it and also as others know it, perhaps incorrectly, but to which some importance must be attached. It is difficult to realize that you are observed from a number of points and the sum of them has validity.”

Another area where Salter hasn’t lost his touch, or at least his habit, is in his love of female sexuality, which he tempered to mostly successful ends in A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years. The matched sensations of physical arousal and existential yearning were well evoked in those books (particularly in Viri’s affair with Kaya Doutreau in Light Years), and here he gives us, for example, a portrait of John Huston’s mistress which you can practically taste.

Ilena may have been her name or it may have been the name she simply wore like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. … It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.

Salter’s - one thing I learned is that that’s not his real name: he’s Horowitz - great subject is success; other writers prefer failure. He says, “Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past.” The horrible conclusion for me from Burning the Days - published in 1997 when he was 72 - so far is that as a writer, Salter’s great moments may be behind him. Which is not to make those moments any less great.

What more is there to wish than to be remembered? To go on living in the narrative of others?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly may recognise this book; it was recommended by Patrick McGrath in the interview I posted with him recently. I had (just about) heard of Nigel Balchin before this: there’s a battered copy of his novel A Way Through the Woods in my local Waterstone’s, under its film-tie-in title of Separate Lies. It’s been there so long it feels like an old friend. A little further investigation shows Balchin was the author also of The Small Back Room, made into a 1949 film by the great Powell & Pressburger (though one of their lesser works).  Hazel, who commented on this blog, showed that it was an older generation who were most familiar with Balchin, and a thorough piece by Clive James in 1974 - a few years after Balchin’s death - found his best known books then ’still selling well’.  Sadly, thirty-odd years later, his best known contribution to our current culture is probably that, as an employee of confectioners Rowntree, he is credited with inventing the bubbles in the Aero bar, and the Kit-Kat.

In reading Darkness Falls from the Air (1942), an immediate problem of expectations arises. The book comes strongly recommended by a favourite author - and haven’t I been let down in that regard before? (Martin Amis, I can never love Nabokov or Bellow as much as you do.  But then, who can?) In particular, McGrath describes the book as having “the most perfect ending of any story I’ve ever read.” Well, apart from the fact that I would apply that particular epithet to McGrath’s own Dr Haggard’s Disease, this is practically a disappointment waiting to happen.

Our narrator is Bill Sarratt, a civil servant with an unfaithful wife and a extraordinary degree of coolness toward the bombing of London during the Blitz (”They seemed to be dropping a hell of a lot of stuff - far more than earlier in the evening.  I heard several sticks of three land, and once two fell close enough to leave me waiting for the third with a lot of interest”).  His wife’s lover, Stephen, tries to match him for cynicism.

Marcia and Stephen turned up about five minutes after I got there.  I thought they made a pretty pair, and didn’t much like it.  Marcia was all smoothed out and sparkling like women are after that sort of thing, and Stephen was looking big and handsome and haunted and so like a creative artist that you wouldn’t have thought he’d have the nerve to go around looking like that.  They were very much together, and I felt like a stockbroker uncle taking the engaged couple out.

I said, ‘I’ve ordered you some smoked salmon honey, right?’

‘Lovely,’ said Marcia.  ‘Bloody day?’

‘Average,’ I said.  ‘I think I may commit suicide soon.’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Stephen.  ‘I thought of it first.  Besides, why worry?  If you wait a week or two you’ll probably be killed anyhow.’  He drank some sherry and looked haunted.

The sense of ironic detachment even extends to Sarratt’s apparent acceptance of Marcia’s lover.  The chaos of wartime seems to be reflected in his psychology: all bets are off, normal rules of engagement are suspended.  The wit comes so thick and fast (”I tell you about my bomb?” says the proprietor of the local Italian restaurant.  “No.  And you aren’t going to now,” replies Sarratt.  “Otherwise I shall show you my operation”) that we know it must be covering over something else.  “I do loathe this facetiousness of yours,” Stephen tells Sarratt at one point.  “Why do you do it?  It’s horrible.  It’s macabre.”  But the trace of something that lies beneath shows when Marcia and Sarratt do have an argument - about Stephen - and they still “hung on to each other” while there were “occasional bumps going on outside.”  The word ‘outside’ - making a unit out of Sarratt and Marcia, pitting them against the world instead of against one another - is the first sign of a chink in his armour.

When he’s not pretending not to care about his wife and her lover, Sarratt is faced with a working day as tangled as his personal life.  At his job in the Civil Service, his time is taken up working on nebulous projects which never come to fruition, while bureaucratic doubletalk and pointless personnel shifts bring to mind the satire of Yes Minister.  And the mess of ineffectual government recalls the line in Fawlty Towers: ”How did they ever win the war?”  It’s easy to forget on reading it now that at the time of publication, nobody knew how the war was going to end, which makes Balchin’s willingness to give his character such an insouciant attitude to the German bombings all the more bold.

Fred Giles came in and said one of the messengers had been killed in last night’s raid, plus wife, plus son, plus daughter, plus son-in-law.  They were in an Anderson.  It was a direct hit.  Fred said, ‘Somebody was going to start a fund for the family and then they found there wasn’t any family.’

This knowing take on the British stiff upper lip and muddling through, studded almost sickeningly with ice cold bons mots, can only go so far without becoming tiresome, and at 200 pages Darkness Falls from the Air doesn’t outstay its welcome.  By the now-legendary ending (”It seemed to me that the thing wasn’t as over as it ought to have been”), we have seen another side not only of Sarratt but of Balchin: the tension in the closing scenes was recognisably from the same hand as the nerve-shattering bomb-disposal sequence in the film of The Small Back Room.

There’s even room for optimism of a sort, though it’s typical of this tricky and intricate novel that you have to fight your way through a lot of cool wit and understated tragedy to find it.

If it came to that I was in a better temper myself.  The sun was shining and altogether it looked like being one of the better days.  I felt that one of the better days was due anyhow.

*

Postscript: If the above hasn’t persuaded you to try this fine novel, then let Patrick McGrath himself have a go.  Be warned though that he loves that ending so much, he can’t resist giving it away.

I’m a real sucker for reissues of old books, particularly when they have lovely covers. Vintage Classics in the UK were just such an example: I’d never have discovered Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow or Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt if it hadn’t been for their striking, elegant, timeless - Classic! - design. Then someone at Vintage suffered a head injury and decided to ditch that design after just three years. The new look has a vivid red spine, more flexibility in the cover design, and the colossally boneheaded policy of replacing the author’s forename with the word VINTAGE on every cover. VINTAGE AUSTEN. VINTAGE McEWAN. Geddit? Except as well as being gimmicky, it’s frustrating when the author is less well-known. The Aerodrome by VINTAGE WARNER, anyone? (Rex, it turns out.) Or how about this: Appointment in Samarra by VINTAGE O’HARA: that’s John to you and me.

I was sure I’d heard of John O’Hara before anyway. Wasn’t he one of those New York poets? Actually no: I was conflating John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. My boycott of the new Vintage Classics (and just when Random House were beginning to feel the pinch too!) had to end when I saw this title being reissued earlier this month: I’d read somewhere recently, as an aside in an article about Brian Moore I think, that Appointment in Samarra (1934) was one of the ‘great short novels’ of the 20th century. Sold.

The title comes from an Arabic fable, retold by Somerset Maugham in his 1933 play Sheppey (either O’Hara already knew it, or he was a fast worker). It’s worth quoting here in full, as it forms the epigraph to the novel - and frankly it has a laconic quality that the book fairly lacks.

Death Speaks:

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

So by extrapolation an ‘appointment in Samarra’ is a date with death, and it comes as little surprise when the blurb tells us that O’Hara’s novel charts “the rapid decline and fall of Julian English.” In fact the decline is and is not rapid: O’Hara spends so much time detailing the lives of others that the sense of progress in Julian’s demise is choppy, and so when it does come it seems too sudden.

At the same time this digression into the history and sensibilities of every passing character is virtuosity of a sort, and there’s a Yatesian quality to O’Hara’s unflinching - some might say cruel - eye:

Constance Walker, the little fool, was not wearing her glasses again, as if everyone in the club didn’t know she couldn’t see across the table without them. She was known on the stag line as a girl who would give you a dance; she was at Smith, and was a good student. She had a lovely figure, especially her breasts, and she was a passionate little thing who wasn’t homely but was plain and, if she only knew it, didn’t look well without her glasses. She was so eager to please that when a young man would cut in on her, he got the full benefit of her breasts and the rest of her body. The young men were fond of saying, before leaving to cut in on Constance, “Guess I’ll go get a work-out.” The curious thing about her was that four of the young men had had work-outs with her off the dance floor, and as a result Constance was not a virgin; yet the young men felt so ashamed of themselves for yielding to a lure that they could not understand, in a girl who was accepted as not attractive, that they never exchanged information as to Constance Walker’s sex life, and she was reputed to be chaste.

This sort of solipsistic (”We begin our story in the head of…”) character demolition runs through the book: author and characters seem to share the same misanthropy. Which takes us back to the loose centre of the book, Julian English, a successful young man in the prosperous town of Gibbsville, who is slowly filling with rancour and bitterness. He comes to realise that he is surrounded by

terrible people, who didn’t have to do anything to make them terrible, but were just terrible people. Of course, they usually did do something, but they didn’t have to.

We can’t quite work out what Julian’s employer Harry Reilly has done to make him so terrible in his eyes, but whatever it was, it earns Harry the insult of a drink thrown in his face, a rash and meaningless act which Julian will spend the rest of the book trying to recover from. Julian becomes aware of Harry’s power in the small community, and the only perverse good that comes out of the situation is that now Julian, like Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, has something to feel guilty about:

Julian … felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment. He knew he was in for it.

However as mentioned before, the process of his decline is uneven, and punctuated too heavily with other character portraits. O’Hara’s characters occupy the same country - and years - as Fitzgerald’s, but are a few rungs further down the social ladder, with an associated edginess and lack of certainty in their lives. The dialogue that spits between mismatched couples and fairweather friends is well done, and there’s something admirable in O’Hara’s attempt to keep so many plates spinning. It’s this quality which breaks the flow of the story, and makes it seem much longer than its 250 pages. It seems terrible to say it of such a well written book, but as ‘great short novels’ of the 20th century go, it doesn’t half seem to drag at times.

The cover of Born Yesterday quotes novelist David Peace calling Burn “the best British writer there is.” Peace and Burn have a certain sensibility in common so we might expect some bias, but even so, at times I would agree with him. Burn’s relentless pursuit of the centre of “the psychopathology of fame” over the last couple of decades has given us some wonderful, overlooked books. His debut novel Alma Cogan (1991) took a subtle look at the tabloid iconography of Myra Hindley while Rupert Thomson was still in short trousers. His last book Best and Edwards was my favourite read of 2006, bringing an exceptional literary intelligence to twin tragic tales of the other end of celebrity: a book about football which even a soccerphobe like me could love. So when I heard that he was going to be taking the major news events of 2007 and making a novel out of them, I was hyperventilating with anticipation. My usual trawls of eBay, publisher’s publicists and elsewhere at the start of the year for an advance copy proved fruitless; no wonder, as it turns out Burn only started writing it at Christmas, and finished just six weeks before publication, in mid-February. A novel in six weeks? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Iain Banks. Oh dear.

Here’s the news: it’s not a novel. There is no overall storyline, and no invention at all so far as I could tell (even the joining character, ‘he’, turns out to be Burn himself, researching the book). Stylistically it’s indistinguishable from Best and Edwards, which means it has a ruminative air, circling its subject matter with facts and implications, and always returning to Burn’s bête noire: the public appetite for pointless fame, the media happy to feed it, and the effect it has on consumer and consumed.

Also like Best and Edwards, Born Yesterday is not ashamed to admit when someone else has said something better than Burn could - or before he could - and the book is rich with aphorisms from reliable sources:

There are really two kinds of life, notes the American writer James Salter. There is the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Salter joins J.G. Ballard, Philip Larkin, George Steiner, John McGahern, and names new to me, all with something to say on this psychopathology which so fascinates Burn (and me, otherwise why would I be writing this?). Howard Singerman: “The collective memory of any recent generation has now become the individual memory of each of its members, for the things that carry the memory are marked not by the privacy, the specificity and insignificance of Proust’s madeleine, but precisely by their publicness and their claim to significance.”

But where does this leave the meat of Burn’s book, the news stories and people we think we know from the current affairs of the past summer, as we wait patiently for him to transform their base stuff into art? It doesn’t happen, quite. The main players are Tony Blair as he hands over his premiership to Gordon Brown (with his “folded Shar Pei features”), the bombers of Glasgow airport and instantaneous media hero John Smeaton, and Kate and Gerry McCann, parents of Madeleine McCann “who vanished into folklore and common fame” on holiday in Portugal.

Burn treads carefully with the last, justifying their inclusion in the book on the basis that their media story is one of manipulation at both ends - and I bet he wishes he’d held the deadline back a few weeks to cover the McCanns’ libel victory against Express newspapers - for reasons fair and foul. It’s also clear he couldn’t resist it because of the parallels of the McCann story to some of the content of his 1995 novel Fullalove, which he explicitly reminds us of (to be fair, most of us probably needed reminding), as well as some inconsequential connections with other elements of the book (Proust/madeleine, defective eye/Gordon Brown).

There’s the odd bit of flashy prose which is even more reminiscent of Fullalove, when Burn engages with the garish elements of urban modernity (”…on the top of the number 19, gazing out of the tagged, hazed window, catching the effervescent blue of the digitised sign on the side of the bus occasionally bubbling up against shop window displays and stretches of marble curtain-walling…”), and the fiction comes really only when he extrapolates into the lives of people he sees, such as the woman in the supermarket buying “a slippery stack of New!, Now, Star and other junk magazines” and an addict’s supply of chocolate bars:

this innocent but potentially sordid transaction - the basement living room, the gorging, the trips to the bathroom, back to New! and EastEnders; a woman scoring her drug of choice at the local Tesco.

Again the most succinct summing up of the problem with the sort of fame we are now exposed to, comes from another writer, this time Thomas de Zengotita. It could equally apply to the benighted state of our bookstores, where actress-slash-model-turned-author gets more shelf space and print coverage than fine writers like Burn.

Real heroes today must become stars if they are to exist in public culture at all. That is, they must perform. But as soon as they do that, they can’t compete with real stars - who are performers.