Ten Years in the Tub (47 page)

October 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
None

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
—Timothy B. Tyson

     
  
Candide
—Voltaire

     
  
Oh the Glory of It All
—Sean Wilsey

I
want to take back some things I said last month. Or rather, I don't so much want to take them back as to modify my tone, which is a pretty poor show, considering that writing, especially writing a column, is all about tone: what I'm essentially saying is, don't read last month's column, because it was all wrong. I was way too defensive, I see now, about my relative lack of literary consumption (two books, for the benefit of those of you who are too busy busy busy to retain the minutiae of my reading life from one month to the next). Shamefully—oh, god, it's all coming back to me now—I tried to blame it on all sorts of things, including the London bombs, but the truth is that two books in a month isn't so bad. There are lots of people who don't get through two books a month. And anyway, what would happen if I had read no books? Obviously, I'd lose this job (although that's assuming one of the Spree noticed). But apart from that? What would happen if I read no books ever? Let's imagine someone who reads no books ever but polishes off every word of the
New Yorker
, the
Economist
, and their broadsheet newspaper of choice: well, this imaginary person would do more reading than me, because that's got to be a couple of hundred thousand words a week, and would also be a lot smarter than me, if you use that rather limited definition of smart which involves knowing stuff about stuff. The
New Yorker
has humor in it and also provides an introduction to contemporary fiction and poetry. So the only major food group not covered is starch: in other words, the classics. And what would happen if we never read the classics? There
comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like
Candide
or they're a few letters short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy.

I picked up
Candide
because my publishers sent me a cute new edition, and though that in itself wouldn't have persuaded me, I flicked through it and discovered it was only ninety pages long. Ninety pages! Who knew, apart from all of you, and everybody else? A ninety-page classic is the Holy Grail of this column, and when the Holy Grail is pushed through your letter box, you don't put it on a shelf to gather dust. (Or maybe that's exactly what you'd do with the Holy Grail. Is it ornamental? Has anyone ever seen it?) Anyway, I have now read
Candide
. That's another one chalked off. And boy, does Voltaire really have it in for Leibnizian philosophy! Whoo-hoo! Now, there's a justification for reading
Candide
right there. Many of you will have been living, like Leibniz, in the deluded belief that all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds (because you believe that God would have created nothing but the best), but I have read Voltaire, and I can now see that this is a preposterous notion that brings only despair. And it's not only Leibniz who comes in for a kicking, either. Oh, no. Corneille, the Jesuits, Racine, the Abbé Gauchat, Rousseau… Just about everyone you've ever wanted to see lampooned in a short novel gets what's coming to them. You lot are probably all familiar with the Abbé Gauchat, the Theatines, the Jansenists, and the literary criticism of Élie-Catherine Fréron, but I'm afraid I found myself flicking frantically between the text and the footnotes at the end; I was unhappily reminded of the time I had to spend at school reading Alexander Pope's equally mordant attacks on poetasters and so forth. Literary types will tell you that underneath all the contemporary references, you will recognize yourselves and your world, but it's not true, of course. If it's this world you're after, the one we actually live in, you're better off with Irvine Welsh or Thomas Harris.

The trouble with
Candide
is that it's one of those books that we've all read, whether we've read it or not (cf.
Animal Farm, 1984, Gulliver's Travels, Lord of the Flies
). The meat was picked off it and thrown to the crowd in the eighteenth
century, and… I'll abandon this metaphor here, because I suspect that it must inevitably conclude with digestive systems and the consumption of ancient excrement. The point is that we are familiar with silly old Dr. Pangloss, just as we know that some animals are more equal than others. Satires and allegories tend to have been decoded long before we ever get to them, which renders them somewhat redundant, it seems to me.
Panglossian
is the sort of word you might find from time to time in the
Economist
and the
New Yorker
, and in any case, if ever anyone lived in an age that had no need for a savage debunking of optimism, it is us. We believe that everything everywhere is awful, all the time. In fact, Voltaire was one of the people who first pointed it out, and he was so successful that we find ourselves in desperate need of a Pangloss in our lives. Bitter footnote: just after I'd finished my cute hardback, I found an old paperback copy on my shelves (unread, obviously): a hundred and thirty pages. Oh, the pain! I'd never have read—or paid, as you have to think of it in this case—three figures. I was tricked, swindled and cheated by my own publishers, who clearly scrunched everything up a bit to dupe the innocent and the ill read.

Book length, like time, is an abstract concept. Sean Wilsey's
Oh the Glory of It All
is a good four times the length of
Candide
, and I enjoyed it probably four times as much, even though all book logic suggests that the reverse might have been the case. I'm sure young Sean would be the first to admit that there's some sag around the middle, but like many of us, it's lovable even at its saggiest point. And also, you never once have to laugh at the pomposities of the French Academies of the eighteenth century, a prerequisite, I now understand, for any book. (In fact, publishers should use that as a blurb. “You never once have to laugh at the pomposities of the French Academies of the eighteenth century!” I'd buy any book that had that on the cover.)