Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (26 page)

So now we move on to
Vox,
a single-issue novel (sex), also a single-mode novel (dialogue), and further disembodied by the fact that the two protagonists never touch or meet, communicating only by party line. The object, the thing, in this case, is the telephone - that friction-

less technology.
Vox
is frictionless too, and thus meets a contemporary demand: it asks nothing of you. Modern tendencies — safe sex, pornography, human dwindling — are present as accepted guests, not as intruders. Sunniness and perversity are smoothly joined in the monotonous vacuum of long-distance.

'Don't let Nick fool you,' Baker's editor has said. 'He wants to be rich and famous.' Perhaps Baker should be grateful that this remark came from his editor rather than from someone really central, like his publicist. In any event, I sat in the audience at the Manhattan Theater Club, where Baker was to read that night, trying not to let Nick fool me. As he loped up on to the stage his neck and knees were bent in what might have been ordeal readiness, or simple height-effacement. And of course he
didn't
read aloud from
Vox
(which would have tested anybody); he read aloud a piece
about
reading aloud.

After handing
Vox
in, Baker explained, he told his publishers that he would not do 'any public performances of any kind'. There was evidently some discussion at Random House, though, because when the proofs arrived Baker saw on the back the following italicised promise: National Author Reading Tour. His stance at the lectern was impressively rigid and spavined, but the performance felt assured and effective. In conclusion Baker offered to field comments on
Vox,
and a tentative Q-and-A session began. Performing writers can usually count on at least one strongminded hold-out in any audience, and finally an elderly lady (a stranger to this author's habitual indirection) came up with: 'How can you ask for questions on it when you haven't read from it? What are we supposed to do?
Guess?'
Baker hesitated. 'This book is in its fifth printing,' he said.
'Someone
is reading it.'

When I breakfasted with him the next morning, before he flew out to Los Angeles, Baker confessed that this unguarded remark had supplied the grist for the previous night's insomnia. He suffers from insomnia, also arthritis, also psoriasis (a link with Updike, who 'had one unfortunate fictional representative
vacuuming out
the bed every morning'). Baker was, in addition, percolating anxiety about his trip to England. 'They're going to be disappointed by Vox. Why should I be there
while
they're being disappointed? Why should I
fly into
disappointment?' And then there were the worries about the presentational style of the British publishers, Granta Books. The subtitle: 'A Novel about Telephone Sex'. The blurb: 'a classic of bedside reading'. The bookshop dump-bin: 'Great Art Or Just A Good Dirty Read?'

Sometimes I think I am not cut out for literature. A true writer would have been much more pleased that a novel as successful as
Vox
was indeed an artistic disappointment. I found I was genuinely sorry as opposed to hypocritically sorry, that the book wasn't better (but its slightness is inbuilt. It has no room to manoeuvre. It has
no prose).
And I certainly didn't care how humble/ambitious/ascetic/greedy Baker 'really' was, because I know that writers are all these things at once; and have to be. The writer may scheme and dream; but the words on the page are always free of calculation. Lingering to chat, and to defend his book, ('I meant it to be human and touching'; 'I like it more than any of the others — I...
love
it'), Baker left for the airport sophisticated-ly and daringly late — and even managed to telephone before embarking, to moderate his mild grumblings about Granta.

This is from
U
and I:

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count. . . The same goes for constitutionally ungross people who push themselves to chime in with something off-color - in choosing to go along they step into a world so saturated with revulsions that its esthetic structure is impossible for them to discern . . .

One would like to apply the above, not so much to
Vox
(where a sortie of this kind is attempted; and nothing much actually happens), but to the standard Baker prose paragraph, where scarily delicate senses are exposed to the Brobdingnag of workaday life. So placed, Baker stares with the clean eyes of a child, and speaks with a child's undesigning but often terrible honesty.

Independent on Sunday, 1992

SHORT STORIES, FROM SCRATCH

In 1
985
I
judged the Whitbread Prize for the best short story by a writer aged between sixteen and twenty-five. My co-judge, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, then edited a selection of the entries (twelve out of 150),
The Whitbread Stories.

The heat was stiffling. Moodly he looked out of his bedroom window. Yes, the day was far too hot to be sleepy. He
had
to chose. To win, to suceed would be incredulous. But to fail, to loose, would be contemptuous!

This string of illiterate cliches is of my own making; but it fairly reflects the style of the least promising entries. Whenever the writing hit this level, I assumed that the story had been submitted in a serendipitous or lucky-dip spirit, like a bingo card. Send the thing in: you might pay that gas bill with the winnings, or settle the rent. Anxiety about the future -the stories' great common theme — had here found its most basic form.

Before one got to the good stuff, of which there was plenty, one had time to be amply scandalised by the lawlessness of the prose. The apostrophe and the hyphen proved to be especially confounding. Many stories featured a
had'nt
or a
ca'nt
in the first sentence; turning with some wariness to the last page, one saw that the writer was still contentedly tapping out his
would'nts
and
wo'nts.
There were similar difficulties with
its
and
it's,
as in
cut it's losses
and
its raining:
and many hybrids along the lines of
no-body, bow ever
and
anymore ('noway,' he growled).
Idiosyncrasies of spelling one tended to overlook (any publisher's reader will tell you that most of our leading writers are afflicted by near-dyslexia). But the aura of an otherwise well-worked paragraph can be instantly frittered away by some callow phoneticism like
pitty (for pitty's sake!), hatered
or
dezire.

It is hard to say whether standards of literacy have actually declined. Certainly a morbid fear of dictionaries would seem to be abroad. What has changed, perhaps, is the attitude to linguistic law. Thirty years ago the would-be writer might at least concede that correctness was something worth aiming at. Now the edifice of syntax is regarded with impatience, almost with aggression. Of course, no new freedom will ever be found by this route. One writer, however, did contrive to create something out of chaos, developing a post-punk anti-style ('a cup of t', and so on) which none the less struck me as distinctly literary. Perhaps the effectiveness of this piece owed a little to chance and will not be repeatable; but it had plenty of sullen power.

The response to language is, as always, an ingredient of something larger. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Tebbit, when they mull over their achievements, can now congratulate themselves on the final destruction of the work ethic which they claim to admire and embody. One would expect, in the closeted thoughts of young people on the brink of adulthood, a good deal of misgiving about the adult dance of work, money, preferment, acquisition. A twinge of alienation in this area seems to me a sign of health. When you are twenty years old, society has a conspiratorial look, as if planned and put together without fair consultation; it feels indifferent, settled, impervious, Then, usually, the money-value takes over and the young person gets on with the job. Judging these stories, and judging by them, I would guess that this process is being quietly yet radically undermined.

Not surprisingly, there were dozens of stories about dossers, tramps, the dole, living on at home (with petulant or depressive parents), stories about looking for jobs and not finding them (there
aren't
any, seems to be the consensus). Not surprisingly, again, there were many ingenuous attempts to celebrate some notion of 'the good life', usually period pieces, with the emphasis on fine clothes, drawing-rooms, sumptuous meals. (One thinks of
Brideshead Revisited,
written in wartime and later denounced by Waugh when he re-read the book 'on a full stomach'). But considered
en masse
the stories give a more pervasive presentiment of disaffection, of wear and tear in the social contract. The idea of work, getting on, becoming adult looks not only distant and improbable; it also looks inane, hostile and accusatory.

There is another anxiety, more insidious and inclusive, and palpable even when it remains unspoken. This is the nuclear anxiety — the unclear anxiety — and it was perhaps expressed least eloquently in the stories that directly addressed it: Oval Office melodramas, superpower countdowns, sagas of life in the post-cataclysmic tundra, and so on. What stays with the reader is not a general uncertainty about future survival so much as a contingency about the present, about time itself. The real singularity or uniqueness of the post-Einsteinian age is the sudden vulnerability of the past as well as the future. Intimations of meaninglessness are consequently that much harder to ignore.

If you ask people what they feel about the Bomb they will often say that they never think about it. I believe them, but there is a sense in which the answer fails to satisfy the question. If you don't think about it, what
do
you do about it? The fact that the planet has a cocked gun in its mouth will inevitably be absorbed in some way - psychologically, physiologically. When we do think about the end of the world, we tell ourselves that at least it hasn't happened yet, that it is not yet a reality. But the threat is a reality; and people react to threats. Clearly there is plenty of reason to start running the damage checks, as these stories haunt-ingly demonstrate. Second-generation post-nuclear, they are habituated to fear; and the present they evoke and describe looks thin, isolated, mysteriously sapped of its essences.

Not that this foreboding was an enemy of good - and vigorous - writing. From the workmanlike to the highly competent, from the merely amiable to the charming, from the glib to the indisputably talented - nearly all the contestants had an experience to transmit and some notion of how it might be turned into art. Obvious literary influences were few, but there were glimpses of an intelligent and humorous post-modernism, a playful awareness of form. Every genre was represented, with the lone exception of the Western. If the stories were rather less literary than some notional bygone equivalent, then this says something apposite about the observed life. It doesn't look very literary out there, not just now.

For me the biggest surprise was how seldom I was bored by these fragments, how little I disliked the work, and how fixedly I followed (practically) every story to the end. Sometimes, of course, one read on out of sheer disbelief at the concerted talentlessness nestling on one's lap. And often, certainly, it was human interest, not literary relish, that compelled one. I was reminded how astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Observer, 1985

PHILIP LARKIN 1922-1985

Philip Larkin was not an inescapable presence in America, as he was in England; and to some extent you can see America's point. His Englishness was so desolate and inhospitable that even the English were scandalised by it. Certainly, you won't find his work on the Personal Growth or Self-Improvement shelves in your local bookstore. 'Get out as early as you can,' as he once put it. 'And don't have any kids yourself.'

All his values and attitudes were utterly, even fanatically 'negative'. He really was 'anti-life' — a condition that many are accused of but few achieve. To put it at its harshest, you could say that there is in his ethos a vein of spiritual poverty, almost of spiritual squalor. Along with John Betjeman, he was England's best-loved postwar poet; but he didn't love postwar England, or anything else. He didn't love - end of story — because love seemed derisory when set against death. The past is past and the future neuter'; 'Life is first boredom, then fear' . . . That these elements should have produced a corpus full of truth, beauty, instruction, delight - and much wincing humour — is one of the many great retrievals wrought by irony. Everything about Larkin rests on irony, that English speciality and vice.

Anti-intellectual, incurious and reactionary ('Oh, I adore Mrs Thatcher'), Larkin was himself an anti-poet. He never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. 'I've never been to America, nor to anywhere else, for that matter.' Asked by an interviewer whether he would like to visit, say, China, he replied, 'I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.' He never read his poems in public, never lectured on poetry, and 'never taught anyone how to write it'. He lived in Hull, which is like living in Akron, Ohio, with the further advantage that it is more or less impossible to get to. His meanness was legendary, and closely connected to the solitude he built around himself. It is said that he never owned more than one kitchen chair, to make sure that no one could stop by for lunch — or, worse, come to stay. Christmas shopping was, for him, 'that annual conversion of one's indifference to others into active hatred'. Sometimes, though, he weakened: