Ten Years in the Tub (53 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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You may well already have read
All the King's Men
; you will, therefore, be familiar with Willie Stark, Penn's central character, a demagogic Southern politician whose rise and demise deliberately recalls that of Huey Long. Me, I've just read a book about someone called Willie Talosâthe name Warren originally wanted until he was talked out of it by his editor. I think the editor was right; as Joyce Carol Oates said in her
NYRB
piece about the restored edition, “âTalos' is a showy, pretentious, rather silly name in the âStephen Dedalus' tradition, while âWillie Stark' is effective without being an outright nudge in the ribs.” But even that, I don't think, is the point; the point is that Willie Stark is now the character's name, whatever the author intended all those years ago, and whichever name is better is a moot point. I feel as though I've just read a book about David Copperbottom or Holden Calderwood or Jay Gatsbergen. You can't mess around with that stuff, surely? These people exist independently of the books, nowâI have, I now realize, seen countless references to Willie Stark in reviews and magazine articles, but as the book isn't widely known or read here in the UK, I had no idea that was who I was reading about until after I'd finished.

Talos was, apparently, the guardian of Crete, who threw boulders at people attempting to land on the island; he was also a mechanical man attendant on the Knight of Justice in Spenser's
Faerie Queene
. These are both very good
reasons why Talos is a very bad name for a Southern American politician, I would have thought, and I can imagine that a good editor would have made the same arguments. Noel Polk, who put this new edition together, is of the opinion that Warren was badly served by the editing process; in a reply to Joyce Carol Oates's piece, he claims that “many of us are interested in more than a good read,” and that he knows, and Oates doesn't, “how often well-intentioned commercial editors have altered novels for the worse.” If I were Robert Penn Warren's editor, I'd point to a Pulitzer Prize and sixty years in print as all the vindication I needed; we will never know whether Polk's version would ever have endured anywhere near as well. There is even the possibility, of course, that if Warren had had his way in 1947, there would have been no interest in any kind of edition in the twenty-first century. I can see that scholars might want to compare and contrast, but I notice on Amazon that the long 'un I read now has a movie tie-in cover. Caveat emptor.

I reread John Lukacs's little book on what turned out to be the biggest decision of the twentieth centuryânamely, Churchill's decision not to seek terms with Hitler in May 1940âbecause I found it on my bookshelf and realized that the only thing I could remember was Churchill deciding not to seek terms with Hitler in 1940. And I kind of knew that bit before I read it. So this time, I'm going to make a few notes that help make it all stickâit's great, having this column, because I keep the magazines, but I'd probably lose a notebook. Excuse me a moment. Norway defeat brings down Chamberlain; C becomes PM 5/10/1940. Early unpopularity of C in his own partyâ“blood, sweat, toil, and tears” speech didn't go down wellâ“gangsters” + “rogue elephant.” Churchill v HALIFAX. Churchill and Lloyd Georgeâwanted him in the Cabinet because LG admired Hitler, who might appoint him if and whenâ¦ Dunkirk: feared max 50,000 evacuatedâin the end over 338,000.

Thanks. That'll really help.

Lukacs's book is completely gripping, clear, and informative, and corroborates a theory I've been developing recently: the less there is to say about something, the more opaque the writing tends to be. In other words, you hardly ever come across an unreadable book on World War II, but pick up a book on, I don't know, the films of Russ Meyer, and you'll be rereading the same
impossible sentence about poststructuralist auteurism three hundred times. People have to overcompensate, you see. And
Five Days in London
also helped give a context for Philip Larkin's early letters, too. Here's Larkin, in 1942: “If there is any new life in the world today, it is in Germany.” “Germany will win this war like a dose of salts” (1940). “And I agree we don't deserve to win” (1942). Lukacs points out that there was a grudging admiration for Hitler's Germany in Britain: we were clapped-out, the old order, whereas Germany was thrusting, energetic, modern. And he also notes that it was the intellectualsâand I suppose Larkin must be categorized thus, despite the fartingâwho were most prone to defeatism. Ha! That's the Spree, right there. They're very brave when it comes to suspending innocent columnists. But you wait until someone (and my money is on the French) lands on the West Coast. You won't see them for dust.

And the coveted “Stuff I've Been Reading: Stuff That Stayed Read” award for the nonfiction book of 2005 goes toâ¦ John Carey, for
What Good Are the Arts
? It's rare, I think, for a writer, maybe for anyone, to feel that he's just read a book that absolutely expresses who he or she is, and what he or she believes, while at the same time recognizing that he or she could not have written any of it. But Carey's bookâwhich in its first two chapters answers the questions “What is a work of art?” and “Is high art superior?”âis my new bible, replacing my previous bible, Carey's
The Intellectuals and the Masses
. I couldn't have written it because Iâand I'm not alone, by any meansâdo not have Carey's breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles, from Kant onwards.
What Good Are the Arts
? is a very wise book, and a very funny book, but beyond even these virtues, it's a very humane, inclusive, and empathetic book: as we all know, it's impossible to talk about “high” art without insulting the poor, or the young, or those without a university degree, or those who have no taste for, or interest in, Western culture. Carey's approach to the whole sorry mess is the only one that makes any sense. Indeed, while reading it, you become increasingly amazed at the muddle that apparently intelligent people have got themselves into when they
attempt to define the importance ofâand the superiority ofâ“high” culture.

Just after I'd finished it, and I was looking at the world through Carey's eyes, the winner of the 2005 Booker Prize claimed that at least his was a “proper” bookâas if
Green Eggs and Ham
or
Bridget Jones's Diary
weren't proper books. And then, a few days later, the
Guardian
's art correspondent launched an astonishing attack on the popular British artist Jack Vettriano: “Vettriano is not even an artist.” (No, he's just someone who paints pictures and sells them. What do you call those people again?) “He just happens to be popular, with âordinary people'â¦ I'm not arguing with you, I'm telling youâ¦ Some things about art are true, and some are falseâall of which was easier to explain before we decided popularity was the litmus test of aesthetic achievementâ¦”

Oh, man. That's got it all. This is not the time or the place to unravel the snobbery and the unexamined assumptions contained in those few lines; it's easier just to say that nothing about art is true, and nothing is false. And if that's scary, then I'm sorry, but you have to get over it and move on.

I read G. K. Chesterton's
The Man Who Was Thursday
because (
a
) I'd never read a word by Chesterton and (
b
) because I'd decided that from now on I'd only read stuff that John Carey recommends (in his useful little book
Pure Pleasure
). And it was pretty good, although I think that younger readers might get a little frustrated with the plotting. I don't want to give too much away. But say you were an
x
, and you believed that a group of seven people were all not
x
s but
y
s. And then you discovered that the first of these seven was actually an
x
, too. And then you found out the same thing about the second, and then the third. Wouldn't you start to get the idea? Yes, well. Anyway, I can't say anything else about it now other than that it's a novel that fundamentally believes in the decency and the wisdom of us all, and you don't find too many of those. John Carey has now made me buy a book by Kipling, and I didn't think anyone would ever manage that.