The Revolt of the Pendulum (6 page)

Not that Bayley is politically insensitive to the twentieth-century European disaster in its awful multiplicity. Nobody has written better about such an immediate victim as Bruno Schulz, or such
an eventual victim as Paul Celan; and about an exile such as Witold Gombrowicz he gets into the secret of how a modern Pole could echo Conrad by taking his country’s history of dislocation
with him into a world of his own. A pity, here, that Bayley’s piece is mainly about an English translation of Gombrowicz’s pre-war surrealist novel
Ferdydurke
, rather than about
the many wonderful volumes of his
Journal
and
Varia
that until recently were still coming out in French year after year. Holed up in Buenos Aires while his lost homeland went to Hell
two different ways in succession, Gombrowicz lost interest in the Novel, including his own novels, and even lost interest in any form of art: he wanted a formless art, a genre beyond the genres. He
came to think that you could just write, as long as you wrote well enough. It’s a view that Bayley himself exemplifies. His essay about another displaced Polish-speaker, the Lithuanian
Czeslaw Milosz, would be my pick for the most thrilling item in the collection, perhaps the best place to start in a book you can start anywhere. He exults at Milosz’s confident readiness to
work in all the literary fields, as poet, critic, historian and philosopher. ‘By writing in every form, he writes virtually in one: and he instructs in all.’

But poetry is where it starts, even for Milosz. ‘The self in his poetry is not impersonal but effortlessly manifold.’ Poetry is language at its closest to the world, and incorporates
automatically an acceptance that the things of this world are actually there. For Bayley, Barthes’s confident insistence that ‘the fact can only exist linguistically, as a term of
discourse’ is a sign of madness from the one theorist he regards as even half-way sane. He might have quoted T. E. Hulme in rebuttal: ‘Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about
the soul of man.’ Bayley is good about people in clothes. Wordsworth’s poems ‘are like one’s parents’ clothes – always out of fashion.’ But our critic, an
accomplished poet himself when he was young, has the tools of technical analysis to tell you why Wordsworth will always be current, and why Tennyson deservedly became ‘a pop star, one of the
most successful and famous ever.’ Bayley can tell whether his subject poets have the palpable earth for a launch-pad when they lift off for higher realms. That useful emphasis runs out of
road only when he gets to John Ashbery. According to his own principles, Bayley ought to be powerfully delighted by the later Ashbery’s unflagging determination to blend all of
America’s vernacular tones into ‘the natural voice of the contingent present,’ a nice way of describing a slow avalanche of verbal hamburger. But scepticism shines through the
praise. ‘Ashbery in his own way often
sounds
memorable ...’ The italics are a deliberate giveaway. Ashbery is out to mean everything by saying anything, and Bayley clearly
suspects that the attempt is in danger of adding up to nothing, because there is nothing to keep in your head. Finally Bayley believes that all writing should aim to be remembered. It can’t
happen, but the possibility should be there. It is there everywhere in this fabulous flea-market of a book, which might have the additional merit of finally putting an end to the tediously
recurring contention that book reviews should never be collected. Book reviewers who say that are right about themselves, but couldn’t be more wrong about a man like this.

TLS,
May 27, 2005

Postscript

John Bayley was always too modest about his qualifications as a poet. I had read a lot of his criticism before I even found out that he had once written any poetry at all.
One day at lunch Kingsley Amis gave me a copy, which he himself had typed out, of a poem by the young Bayley about
Salammbo.
I found it brilliant: rhythmically stately, packed with meaning,
a lyrical argument of fully mature authority. Plenty of critics have written poetry in their youth but seldom on that level. It was a huge gift to repudiate. Similarly he was too shy about the work
he put into learning to read languages. He should have said outright that he had found time to do so only because he hadn’t wasted time with literary theory. He could also have pointed out
that the London literary world was enfeebled by its provincialism. One of the heroes of my book
Cultural Amnesia
is the above-mentioned Witold Gombrowicz. Only in London would a reviewer
have reinforced his demonstration of my book’s frivolity by jokily supposing that Gombrowicz might be a made-up name, and only in London would a literary editor have let him do it. Gombrowicz
didn’t go through all that, and create so much, in order to have his very existence questioned in the
Sunday Times
Culture section. The Culture section! If Bayley had taken his proper
place as a whip-cracking literary ringmaster, he might have kept the boys up to the mark. But he was too nice for that.

KINGSLEY AND THE WOMEN

In his early role as Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis declared the awkward essence of his personality. ‘I’m the boredom detector.’ That ability, or affliction,
qualified all his other propensities, even the one for multi-targeted amorous desire. In Zachary Leader’s long, thorough and generally judicious new biography, its hero’s spasmodic
quest for emotional satisfaction is rarely out of the picture. The novelist, poet, critic, teacher and bibulous clubman we more or less frequently meet, but the man with sex on his mind we seldom
escape. Journalists understandably find this material an alluring compost in which to burrow.

But even here they tend to miss the spiritual element, signalled by how easily the universal lover – Roger Micheldene in
One Fat Englishman
was one of these, and clearly a disgusted
portrait of his author – could be put off by an ill-considered remark from the object of his quest. In missing that, they miss half the secret: it wasn’t just an itching id that made
him restless. The truly dedicated bedroom operator is seldom daunted by a cliche´ emanating from the mouth he longs to kiss. With Kingsley Amis it was obviously otherwise. A word out of order
from the fair face on the pillow could set him reaching for his trousers soon afterwards. It was touch and go.

The man who feared the dud phrase as he feared the dark night is now beyond the first threat, if not the second. But if he could hear himself being talked about in his absence, he would find, to
his horror, that his very name has become a cause of boredom. Dunces of restricted growth are hopping in a circle around his tomb, singing their tiny songs. One can only hope that this condition
will be temporary. Prominent literary reputations quite commonly lapse for a while after death, but it is mercifully uncommon that a prominent literary reputation should be entirely replaced by
impertinent gossip. Quite a lot of the first reviewers of this book were so caught up in its anti-hero’s supposed moral turpitude that they seemed to forget the extent by which his literary
achievements outstripped their own. The most eminent of them, Professor Carey, seemed to forget that there had been any literary achievements at all.

In his time, Professor Carey had called
Lucky Jim
a funny book; or had at least implied that it was, by saying that its author’s autobiography,
Memoirs
, was his funniest book
since the one that made his name. Professor Carey, a true wit in his own right, is well aware that a funny book is always an achievement. But in his review of this biography – a review that
amounted to placing a corpse under arrest and charging it with a misspent life – no achievements were mentioned. At least that omission left room for a scrupulous and influential critic to
remind himself, at some future time, that there might be beginners listening, and that the starting point of a critical essay should therefore always be the subject’s gifts, and not his
crimes. If the subject did not possess the first, there would be no point discussing the second. One lesser critic – he had initials instead of a Christian name, and I have forgotten his
surname – managed to do even worse than not mention Amis’s work. He presumed, in the yellow light of all this sulphurous information about the author’s moral transgressions, to
reassess the work, pointing out that Amis’s poetry, in particular, was a glacial reflection of his heartless attitude towards women.

This reassessment was so perfectly fatuous that it wasn’t even boring. The general assumption among the reviewers that the man was more real than what he wrote should have been detectable
even by them as the sort of platitude that drove the choleric latter-day Kingers back to a bottle already three-quarters empty: being forced to inhabit a world in which literary journalists could
promulgate such tedious opinions was probably one of the chief reasons that he drank. But it was beyond boring, it was bizarre, to suggest that the cold view of women in some of Amis’s poems
reflected a view that Amis actually held. In the Dai Evans poems, Amis finds Evans reprehensible both in his behaviour and in his mentality. We could tell that just by the way those particular
poems are written, even if there were not so many other poems by the same author (‘A Bookshop Idyll’, for example) to prove that he valued the integrity of women, and that he thought
any man in physical thrall to his mental condition as a roue´ was in no great shape to lead a worthwhile life.

Amis’s poems about sexuality continually reveal that the obligation to behave well, as against the difficulties of doing so posed by a libido about whose power he felt equally obliged to
be realistic, was one of his abiding concerns. Far from being detached from the question of sexual morality, his poetry had almost no other subject. His depth on the matter, and his capacity to
dramatise an inner conflict and make it vivid through his mastery of phrase and rhythm, would have made him, had his friend Philip Larkin never existed, a good contender for the title of the most
accomplished and least self-satisfied poet of his generation. But of course there was a connection there: self-satisfaction can be defeated only by taking thought, and without thought there is no
real technique, only the making of patterns. In Amis’s poetry, for all its formal virtuosity, there is not even one instance of a pattern being made just for the sake of it, and the same
might be said of his best prose. The sure sign of his greatness as a comic writer is that nothing interested him less than mere word-play. If he ever gave into it, it was a sign that he was on the
ropes, and that his peculiar gift for self-examination had been protectively switched off, perhaps through fear of what it might reveal.

Obeying the rule that we should start from the work, we can start at that very point, and observe that at the height of his art he was always worried about himself, and especially on the level
where we might think he was insouciant. In the early part of the book, at Oxford and then in Swansea, we find him chasing women, and frequently catching up with them. In Princeton he caught up with
all of them. If he hadn’t got Hilly pregnant he might not have married her, but having done both those things he found his appetite for further adventure unblunted. The title phrase of
That Uncertain Feeling
was another way of saying that he found it hard to answer for his actions when there were bright and beautiful women around. In academic life they were always around.
Hilly seemed to understand, thereby throwing petrol on the fire. We might disapprove of all this but we should remember that we would have difficulty disapproving as much as he did. It’s a
constant theme of the early novels. In
Lucky Jim
, Bertrand, the high-scoring tail-chaser, is the villain. In
Take a Girl Like You
, Patrick Standish is less repellent than Bertrand but
even more dangerous, because in the end he is capable of taking Jenny’s virginity while she is drunk: i.e. he rapes her. His urge takes over.

Amis spent a lot of time arguing, in both prose and verse, that an urge should never be allowed to do that. He was against the idea of artist’s privileges. He might have been more
persuasive on the subject had he always been able to behave well in real life – although he would have been crucially short of inside information – but here again we have something to
remember. In real life, it wasn’t just a case of him wanting nearly all the women. In the early days, at least, nearly all the women wanted him. He was good looking and he was brilliantly
funny. In Princeton there were academic wives who didn’t realise that they had been married to a bore until they found themselves in cocktail-fuelled colloquy with the visiting genius. Over
they went like nine-pins.

Like most men who have that effect, Amis probably kept a private moral account book in which he gave himself points for all the opportunities he turned down, and used the total to offset how
depressingly often he succumbed. There are all kinds of mental tricks such a man can play, but it would be pharisaical on our part to preach as if we could be sure of being abstemious granted the
same advantages. Nevertheless we can permit ourselves to echo Amis’s belief – evident in all the novels, especially evident in the early novels and vividly evident, throughout his life,
in the poetry – that the ungoverned libido was bound to have a wrecking influence, even if everyone involved had joined the circle by consent. The most startling proof of this attitude is in
The Anti-Death League
, where he gives an otherwise virtuous woman a man’s promiscuity. She does what all men would do if they could, unless they are candidates to join Plato’s
Nocturnal Council. She takes on every man she likes the look of. But in the end she agrees to be rescued. We can deduce that Amis thought she needed rescuing. It was a generous conclusion for Amis
to reach. After all, he didn’t make himself randy, although men who don’t suffer from the same affliction can perhaps be forgiven for assuming, in his case, that a trick of fate was a
human failing.