Who Can You Trust?: The Book of the BFI Season

Delighted to report that the BFI Thriller compendium is now for sale in shops and online: another first-rate and very handsome gathering of critical/historical work under the BFI label, assembled by Sight & Sound's James Bell.

It was a pleasure for me to be allotted such generous space in which to discuss what we have learned (after Hofstadter) to call 'the paranoid style in American politics'; and its presence in American cinema from The Manchurian Candidate to The Parallax View, JFK, Syriana etc. With so much to discuss it would have been superfluous for me to cite Norman Mailer's famous contrast, in The Presidential Papers, between the history of politics (‘concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull’) and ‘the dream life of a nation’ (‘a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires.’) But you all know that one, right? The point is that we need, via fiction, to put a foot in that river now and then - remembering all the while that 'paranoia' should not be dismissed, but neither encouraged nor indulged while we're about it.

Arguably I could have used my allocation a bit more shrewdly to permit a discussion of certain famous UK films and TV series on the paranoid theme, most of them hailing from the 1980s when arguments were especially heated on the subject of what a Conservative British state might conceivably do to protect and enhance its status as a nuclear power allied to the USA: I’m thinking of Defence of the Realm, Edge of Darkness, A Very British Coup, Hidden Agenda. Another time, perhaps.

Here’s how my essay, 'Can You Trust The Government?', begins:

Closing his farewell address to parliament as UK Prime Minister in 2007, Tony Blair seized the moment to mount a defence of politics as a vocation. ‘If it is on occasions the place of low skulduggery,’ Blair contended, ‘it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes.’ Where politics has inspired thrilling movies, though, it’s mainly that sense of skulduggery that has interested filmmakers and audiences alike – both groups inclined to suspicion of the powers-that-be, believing, as did Lord Acton, in ‘the certainty of corruption by authority.’

Thus, in the modern political thriller the usual villain is corrupt government, its corridors of power purposely darkened so as to conceal malfeasance from public scrutiny. The ur-plot will involve one law-abiding citizen stumbling on a stray insight into this nefarious world, resolving then to expose the truth, but having to learn fast against a ruthless, hydra-headed adversary. As such the genre relies heavily on the exciting tropes of the detective and the fugitive – elements that might be expected to work against a plausible depiction of real-life politics. 

I've probably argued a few times too many that political thrillers ought at least some of the time to depict elected representatives as human figures, confronting dilemmas, racing against time, conscious of their own failings - rather than, say, malevolent members of an Establishment cabal covertly stitching up the People at any given opportunity. Mailer performed the former function with distinction in his epic novel of the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost. When asked by an interviewer why on earth he would want to humanise such people, Mailer replied, 'They really are pretty awful. But on the other hand, who isn't?’ That’s a wittier way of rephrasing Senator Silas Radcliffe, anti-hero of Henry Adams’ great novel Democracy (1880), who argues, rightly in my view, that ‘no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents.’

It lives...

My new novel is now in 'bound proof' form, as above. It's a fine thing that a publisher does to help raise pre-publication awareness of a title in this way, and hats off to Faber who make, I think, a particular good fist of the process.

Say what you like about Hitchens...

The posthumous intellectual reputation of Christopher Hitchens still comes under regular assault: sometimes ‘more in sorrow than anger’ blah blah, sometimes with the avowed intention of nailing some lasting badge of shame onto his collected writings. No-one can be surprised by this, since he was consistently repudiated by aggrieved ex-co-thinkers of the left while he was alive – a little bit at first because of his loathing for Clinton, then a lot on account of his advocacy for the ousting of Saddam.

Unlike some admirers of Hitchens’ writing I don’t find any of the attacks made on either side of his death to be outrageous, indecent etc. Hitchens could certainly dish it out, and didn’t tarry much if the target of his wrath was recently deceased or clearly en route to the terminus. He seemed to feel these things needed saying regardless, and that it was ‘important to have the right enemies’, which will tend to keep you speaking freely. (Also - does it need saying? - he wasn't right about every last thing, and not everything he wrote was end-to-end brilliant; and if you wrote as much as Hitchens did then there will, and must, be blood.)

Evidently his skin stayed thick and his wit keen during the cancer. Recently I watched an interview he gave to Laurie Taylor for Sky Arts in 2011, in which Taylor put the familiar question of whether Hitchens was bothered about the kind of intellectual company he kept post-Iraq (also, unspoken but clear, whether he missed the warm exchange of fraternal regards with Chomsky, Tariq Ali et al.) ‘It takes a lot to make me cry’, Hitchens shot back, confidently if a tad wearily, before Taylor could complete the thought.

A while back I was given and enjoyed reading Hitchens’ Mortality, the short book of thoughts and notes made as he neared the end. All of it is expressed so candidly, searchingly, elegantly that I would hope to read nothing else of cancer until the great history to come of how its cure was found... (That said, I do wish I could take a razorblade and chop out Mortality’s slack preface by Graydon Carter, who – perhaps imagining himself as generous as was Time to Paul Claudel – describes Hitchens’ opinions on Iraq as ‘curious’, twice in the space of a few pages.)

With Mortality I must also regretfully accept this is the final Hitchens. I have come to terms, too, with a longstanding feeling that after September 11 2001 it just wasn’t – couldn’t be – as much fun to read him as it had been Before. (One more reason to wish Osama Bin Laden a hot place in a dream Hades.) The retooling of Hitchens’ regular Slate column under the banner of 'Fighting Words' only confirmed that he now felt there was only one political issue worth writing (and voting) on. It was needful, and he did it well, though the fierceness of the disagreements on that single issue seemed always to be lagging behind actual conditions ‘on the ground’. After 2001 Hitchens did begin to write more about literature than before, which made for diversity, and was all highly erudite, but not really the thing that had made him a must-read in the journals where I first discovered his stuff...

That’s it, see. When I now sit and conjure up the pleasure of reading Hitchens it’s all from the 1990s: his Nation 'Minority Reports' warning and urging over Bosnia (‘for the last time...’), or even (lest we forget) welcoming a Labour leader he first thought ‘unbearably Lite.’ Or his long LRB essays, bashing Isaiah Berlin over Vietnam or hailing Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. His interviewing Mailer, for that matter, in the New Left Review, and stressing the great man’s adherence to ‘an idea of the Left’ – an effort that now feels like less of the absolute essence.

I suppose what I hate most is starting to sound the slightest bit like George Galloway, who, in one of his attempts to debate Hitchens over Iraq, came out with a notably pathetic sorrow-over-anger spiel lamenting whatever befell the Hitchens he once loved - the guy who had such a store of snappy, quotable, unimprovably moralistic one-liners about (mostly American) political creeps, phonies and psychopaths?

It’s a mawkish tendency in myself, I know. You have to wipe your nose and move on (though not MoveOn.) There needs to be ‘a nuanced goodbye to all that.’

Bookhugger column: "Is There Such a Thing as a Male Book?"

I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...

On Being a Whisky-Drinker

My last birthday was a Big One and so I did rather well for gifts, not least in that I was presented with several very fine bottles of malt whisky over which I crowed for days to anyone who’d listen. In fact more than one friend was moved to remark that he ‘hadn’t known I was such a whisky drinker...’ Well, a bloody good thing too, pal, for if it were more widely known that I favour the amber then I daresay I’d receive a lot more of it on gift-giving occasions (since apparently I’m reckoned to be ‘a bit hard to buy for...’) And if there were racks upon racks of first-rate whisky just lying round my house all the time...? Aw boy, I’d be in trouble then.
Let me say quickly that out of all the malts I choose the Glenlivet, which is certainly not a connoisseur’s pick but one that you could put your house on. I won’t try to describe its complexity on the tongue and in the throat, sadly I’m not that accomplished a writer. I’ll just say that I began drinking it (as I began doing many things) on account of something I read by Norman Mailer – in this case, the early pages of Harlot’s Ghost where retired CIA man Harry Hubbard receives a nocturnal visit from his old spook associate Reed Rosen, offers him a dram and, while pouring, is annoyed to hear Rosen ‘go on about its merits.’ The main point is that Hubbard pours it neat – and ‘screw him if after all that praise he secretly wanted ice...’
The finest, most discerning piece of writing I know about whisky and its ways is Don Paterson’s poem 'A Private Bottling' from the 1997 collection God’s Gift to Women. If you don’t have it, do yourself a favour. The following stave offers only the barest flavour of a poem that concludes magificently with a glass raised in toast 'not to love, or life, or real feeling,/but to their sentimental residue;/to your sweet memory, but not to you...' But just as a passing evocation of the taste of the ambers - it's unimprovable.

O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service
with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc
tap-water picks up at the moon’s eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this...

Gimme Shelter

I’m no right-winger, you understand… (Uh-oh, you might think, there’s a pretty ominous start to a post.) But nor did I consider the ideas of the Right to be axiomatically the Devil’s work. Following the lead of my literary hero Norman Mailer, who famously reckoned himself a ‘left conservative’ I try to use both sides of my head in an argument, and to resist the sanctimony by which some on the Left persuade themselves that all human history is class struggle, one in which they are – axiomatically – on the side of the poor and oppressed, whether or not required to match word by deed.
I can’t say exactly how hard we should be cutting in the light of this grim shortfall between tax revenues and public spending, but – since it seems likely that the cost of housing benefit for people of working age has risen by £5 billion over the past five years, i.e. roughly mapping the hopeless reign of Gordon Brown – then I’m quite sure that reform of housing benefit entitlements along the lines of what the ConDems have proposed is commonsensical and overdue, with a necessary cap on accommodation provided in the private rental market, as opposed to publicly-owned housing. As such, I now seem to be of the party of Max Hastings and the Daily Mail. Eh bien.
I’m quite certain the public purse has to assist key workers to live near their place of work. And people who are put out of work need to be given a hand with their rent for a reasonable period. I’m not some Chinese martinet seeking to cap families at exactly 1 Child. But I absolutely think people should act on their estimate of how many kids ‘they can afford decently to rear’ (cf. Hastings - 'decent' is a favourite Mail word, used as if they invented decency, but there's no reason we should let them own it.) Where six-figure sums have been paid annually to families of 6-8 kids, this was extravagant before and cannot continue. I don’t make light of the fear of mass evictions from Central London: one expects this cut to bite. But however harsh the ‘correction’, I understand there will be an emergency fund for true hardship cases. Otherwise, as Hastings puts it, ‘most of us take for granted the necessity to move home if our circumstances change.’ Indeed we do.
I can’t tell how Ed Miliband’s riposte to Cameron played in the chamber but to me, and to many others, I expect, he sounded just as John Rentoul puts it, conveying “the wrong message to the country, which simply cannot understand why so many billions of taxpayers’ money is poured into such a badly-designed benefit that undermines work incentives, profits landlords and keeps property prices higher than they would otherwise be.”
In other news, I am happily of the same mind as Hastings in respect of Polly Toynbee’s worth as an inverse barometer in any political argument, though he makes his point in a gratuitous manner, marshalling assertions the truth of which I can’t verify:
"There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Polly Toynbee and her kind in their concern for Britain’s underclass, though the charge of champagne socialism sticks pretty hard on anyone who, like herself, owns a villa in Tuscany and educated her children at private schools."
Similarly, readers will know I’m with Hastings on the profoundly annoying Boris Johnson, whose sickly coveting of David Cameron’s job rolls on unabated. Please, someone, tell me London can cough up a better prospect for mayor than the Bounderby-ish Johnson or the alligator-blooded Ken Livingstone.

Cosmopolis (UEA): In academe's grey groves...

Good sport at the UEA Cosmopolis events last Saturday. I enjoyed my platform on fiction and politics with the eminent Giles Foden, chaired with some panache by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What If Latin America Ruled the World? Giles said some especially intriguing things about thinking his way into Idi Amin's head for The Last King of Scotland. At Giles' prompting Oscar tasked both Giles and I to propose how we might fictionalise a) the Israeli Gaza flotilla debacle, and b) the BP oil-spill debacle. (My responses were, a) in the voice of a ghost, or else an IDF soldier slipping down a rope, and b) in the voice of a seagull...) Otherwise, I enjoyed expounding as always, on such beloved subjects as Mailer (his 'left conservatism'), George Steiner (poetry after Auschwitz, and Hitler depicted in his Portage to San Christobal of A.H.), and Brecht (the idea of pageant as 'illuminated history', offering a take on 'the truth behind it all.')
I also ended up chairing a fun session with the film/TV producer Judy Counihan, on the subject of how to pitch one's film script/idea to market, a concern on which I personally have begun to feel the pressing need for advice from someone of Judy's calibre...
Norwich itself struck me as a nice spot on my first visit. UEA is a campus college, and funnily enough I'd never been to a real campus before. But it was all very familiar. As the literary agent and novelist Derek Johns remarked to me and others in surveying its brute-concrete/dry-grassland aspect - 'Y'know, James Lasdun's dad did all of this...'

New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

RTK online column at Bookhugger.co.uk

As of next week I'll be writing a monthly column for the excellent Bookhugger online literary magazine, this to address various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and all what have you. Bookhugger is a splendid platform for book fans, and I'm looking forward to being part of it and having this outlet for expression. In advance of the first column going up I've filled in the site's regular writer's questionnaire, which they call 'The Book That...', a little listing of tomes (Dostoyevsky, Mailer, Mishima et al) that have meant something to me in years gone by, and indeed still do. My responses are here.

Ashamed to Show Oneself: Beauties & Beasts

Yes, Darling Daughter's most recent Disney crush is the rambunctious Beauty and the Beast, and she seems as charmed by it as any of the more obvious Pretty Princess-oriented titles in the Walt canon - which would be a surprise only if one expected a Disney Beast to be genuinely scary, or properly melancholic.
The Disney version clearly owes a visual/poetic debt of sorts to Jean Cocteau's imperishable film of 1946, throughout the making of which Cocteau was tortured by impetigo, eczema, and assorted carbuncles that made him want to hide in the shadows - a punishing and yet fitting mindset for the work he had before him.
Disney stole a few decent strokes from Cocteau but needless to say they jettisoned Cocteau's crowning irony, namely that the restored Prince, in the preening form of Jean Marais, seemed a poor substitute even in Belle's eyes for the majestic, sad, wounded Beast (i.e. Marais under layers of furry make-up.)
What really marks the Disney film as a work of 1991 is how it goes merrily overboard in depicting Belle's boorish and spurned village suitor Gaston as a macho moron (who duly plummets to his death in standard Disney Villain fashion) - whereas the Beast learns how to be an absolute sweetheart, just in time for his revision to human form. John Wayne would not have approved. But then this was the early 1990s, and there was a certain vogue for masculine sensitivity: as John Buffalo Mailer evokes the era to his father Norman in the rambunctious dialogue book The Big Empty, 'Political correctness was at its height and the sensitive ponytailed guy was getting laid more than he should...'

Unquiet Men: Martyn, Mailer, Zevon, Clarke

I've become quite a fan of John Martyn's, albeit very belatedly, since the poor beggar had to die first to stir me out of 25 years of paying the barest attention to his musical gift. What finally grabbed me was BBC4's very fine documentary about Martyn, made in 2003-4, first aired a couple of years ago, but screened again in recent weeks to mark Martyn's passing in February. BBC4, it should be said, have set the bar very high for excellence in the making of docs about rock, and the Martyn film is among the best for the advantage of access to its subject, not least at a time in life when he was about to suffer the amputation of one of his legs. As the doc showed us, 'health problems' dogged Martyn through his life, because he habitually raised hell: he wasn't sufficiently kind to himself, and - though ostensibly genial and lively as a person on top of his creative gifts - he wasn't always kind to others either, including loved ones.

In the doc Ralph McTell spoke feelingly about the emotional content of Martyn's music, and Martyn confirmed the intention, speaking of 'an intrinsic sadness in any creature.' Fine words. But McTell also winced when he referred to some of the things he wished he didn't know about Martyn's personal life, and wasn't going to share with the viewers. And Martyn's ex-wife and collaborator Beverly, mother of his kids, was also on hand to prick the mood of male soulfulness: 'You can sing the blues and make people cry', she remarked with a certain rising anger, 'but it's what you do as a human being that counts.'

Of course, the lives of many eminent creative men are littered with instances of dismal and disreputable behaviour, domestic heartbreak and discord; and critics and biographers tend to require that these be dragged into the complete reckoning of the individual. And readers, listeners, audiences - they, we, want to know this stuff too, understandably. We're only human, right? So are our heroes - human, all too human, whatever their access to higher powers.

Martin Amis once (in the mid-80s) took Norman Mailer to task across a sequence of interviews and reviews, commenting in a dismissive write-up of Peter Manso's brilliant oral history Mailer: His Life and Times that the 'common background noise' of the book during accounts of Mailer's stormy conduct in the 1960s was that of 'screaming children'. Fair comment, maybe. But Amis has surely now lived long enough to realise that judgement of one's fellow practioners in these delicate matters should be exercised with a little sympathy and self-awareness.

Of course, women, ex-wives in particular, can be piercingly acute dissecters of masculine boorishness. As a longterm admirer of Warren Zevon's music, I have never quite gotten over reading Crystal Zevon's oral history I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which she compiled at her ex-husband's request following his death in 2003. I had known Zevon was a very bad drunk during his lowest personal ebb, and yet his gift for a rueful love song and the melancholy beauty of his turn of phrase tended me to see him as a man who had been more often ill-used than using, more hurt than hurting. Well, Crystal's book sure turned my head round on that score, notably from the point where she first describes Warren punching her in the face... She forgave him, at length and over time, and of course the credit and debit sides must be carefully balanced by those who weren't there. But still - talk about a nail in the coffin of the myth of the romantic troubadour...

One of the best insights into this vexed matter of male-female relations as complicated by the call of the creative life came to me back in 1998 when I interviewed the poet Jehane Markham for my book on Alan Clarke, with whom she had a relationship in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage. For Jehane this was a romantic transport that turned sour somewhat once she realised the extent to which Clarke required the company of male friends/accomplices and was unwilling to ever put his work into second place. Moreover, the milieu of Clarkey and his mates was boisterously proletarian, very different to where Jehane came from. She can say the rest in her own words, and I think she sums it up:

"It was old-fashioned, working class, patriarchal, it wasn’t good. And I was a silent woman, a young woman. There was a lot of anger that would come out of Alan, often when he was drunk. So I didn’t enjoy all that, it made my life with Alan quite separate, and that isn’t a good sign. Because if someone is going to be part of your life, you kind of integrate them with your friends and family, and I couldn’t. He did love his work, he was a workaholic, maybe too much so. In my dreams of him he was always working and I would think, ‘I can’t reach him’. When we worked together years later on [the BBC play] Nina, that was resolved. But I think he knew the balance of his life was wrong, he couldn’t get the personal thing right. Obviously, he was very scared of being trapped and contained and held back by a woman or women, he had to be free and unencumbered, and I think that was a battle within him. I don’t know if he regretted that, whether he felt we could have shared a life together while also being independent artists. It’s a lovely idea, but it takes a bit more than wishes, and it wasn’t to be."

Mailer, Freud, Blair/Brown, Philip Collins: Coincidence? I think not

'Coincidence, what do you make of it?' So Tim Madden asks his father Dougy in Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance (a book, you may have guessed, that is rarely far from my thoughts.) In fact, Tim already has a theory on the matter:

'I believe we receive traces of everyone's thoughts... I think when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It's as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate...'

Freud didn't buy coincidence, no sir, but Jung did. Freud thought there was a causal explanation for dual manifestations that we would otherwise see as uncanny: basically a repetition of old mental habits congealed around buried traumas, familiar repressions, always wearily likely to resurface. But Jung defied his former master, arguing that coincidence, 'syncronicity', pointed toward something meaningful - 'big and unexpected', even.

Now, it is no coincidence whatsoever - in fact, a matter of hard causation - when the scholarly think-tanker Philip Collins (pictured), a former habitue of Tony Blair's Downing Street, writes an op-ed piece in the Times strongly critical of Gordon Brown's goverment, and a rash of media comment on said piece breaks out. The Evening Standard reports said piece as news. The Spectator nods its head fiercely in agreement with Collins. For The Independent Jon Cruddas MP rates the Collins critique as a worrying recurrence of scarlet Blairism, never quite brought under control or inoculated against.

What is the substance of said critique? Collins argues that Brown is a creature of obsessive manouevring and positioning rather than of any fixed and worthwhile principle: in short, that he would never espouse 'equality', say, because it's 'good' or 'right' but because it's 'politically useful', and that he thinks of 'crime' as 'a political event rather than an infringement of liberty.' (So much, then, for all that supposed 'integrity' Brown used to wear as lightly as sainthood.) And as a consequence of this obsessive tendency, in light of recent events, Collins believes that "Labour now finds itself just to the left of sensible on everything."

It's scarcely a coincidence of note, given my recent musings, that I should seize on the sight of Philip Collins leaning heavily for his analogy upon the general incorrectness of Freudian theory, which he does like so:

'The strain of repressing the traumatic past - devalued currency, winter of discontent, public spending run riot, the regulatory regime of 1997 - and the task of displacing the present - “it all started in America” - is exhausting [the Brown government's] capacity to act. The only response is a series of dreams as wish-fulfilment - the Prime Minister will become the international sultan of regulation, the economic news will be good by the end of the year. The truth is that Labour was never going to win on the economy. It was just a daydream, on Freud's definition, in which the hero wins out and achieves his heart's desire...'

An instance of the sadness as Collins sees it is that Labour under Brown has 'bogged itself down in guidelines for rhubarb crumble recipes and instructions for playgrounds to be painted' rather than bolder strokes for improving schools. (He invokes the name of the Department for Children, Schools and Families rather as a sort of Grey Lubyanka.) But of what measures would Collins himself approve, were he nearer to the levers? He thinks Michael Gove’s plans to 'free schools from the control of local authorities' are the right idea, because Labour could and should have done it already. More generally he's on the side of 'plans to improve literacy... transfer power to local authorities...reform of policing', all of which seem to his eye to be written off or forgotten. In brief, the small-c-conservative, liberal, pragmatic New Labour project has been spitefully abandoned, and the excuse of the international banking fiasco is no sort of a fig-leaf.

You can sense Collins' special concern over the notion that Labour has wound up chasing the Tories' lead just like an opposition party. For wasn't Blairism about making Labour the natural party of government? It seemed to me at the time that this was attempted mainly by outflanking the Conservatives, triangulating them in Clintonian fashion by adopting any elements of populist good sense that the Opposition managed to display. Has Cameron now triangulated the Blair Project? Collins seems to think he's seized the opportunity:
"[Cameron] says that he wants to give people the power to instigate referendums on, for example, council tax increases. He wants to change the assumption that local authorities should have to beg Whitehall for permission to act. He wants a referendum on elected mayors in the big cities. An imaginative Labour party should be exploring all these ideas."

Too much in there to quibble with, other than to say I'm not much interested in either of those referenda and I don't know enough about how local government does or doesn't work in the shadow of Whitehall. But I'll look forward to the next column on the subject, and finish instead on this business of coincidence. I happen to know Philip Collins a little bit through a mutual friend, just as his predecessor in the post of Blair's chief speechwriter, Peter Hyman, was once my editor at a student newspaper. Coincidentally I ran into Philip late last year at the same hotel to which we'd taken our respective families for a 'weekend break' (though Philip had his laptop with him, such was the workload...) As for Peter, I routinely see him pushing his kids on the swings at the same municipal park to which I take my little girl.

After 10 years of Blair's premiership I daresay we all felt to some extent that we could ventriloquise him a bit, 'do Blair'. I certainly tried my hand at same in Crusaders. Maybe I felt myself sufficiently qualified for such mimicry on account of having spent some time in the company of a couple of the fellows who best received the traces of Tony's thoughts (a la Mailer)and so could put well-minted words directly into his mouth?

Crusaders, The Guardian Book Blog, and the Devouring Vastness of America

An interesting piece on the Guardian Book Blog yesterday by Stuart Evers, on the subject of the common preference of young-ish English readers for fiction written in American... Testing out his own preferences and prejudices, Evers plays an amusing game of compare-and-contrast with two English sentences, to wit:

1. Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy's Diner.
2. Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy's Rolls.

Indeed, one has rather more dynamism than the other, somehow... But a lot of that is to do with the particular American romance of The Road. I remember at least two fine books that I bought as a young man mainly on the strength of their automotive cover imagery (and, ok, the glowing review quotes appended to said covers), namely Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and William Least-Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. (Didion's protagonist always pumped her own gas, just like Evers' 'Mary'...)

Evers also cites yours truly in a kindly fashion near the end of his piece, sticking up for the writing of these isles:

"When I asked Richard T Kelly – whose debut novel, Crusaders, was one of last year's highlights from either side of the Atlantic – about British writers' and critics' relationship with American fiction, he suggested that the days of looking enviously over the pond were coming to an end."

Indeed, I remember saying this to Stuart when I met him after the Writloud event at RADA last summer. Because, as I recall, there were quite a few big novels in English about England last year, and they mostly seemed to get serious consideration and marks for ambition. Meanwhile, the typically near-cuboid size of the so-called Major American Novel has perhaps become a rather self-conscious business over the last 10 or 12 years. I'm all for Moby Dick, for U.S.A., for Harlot's Ghost, which is to set the bar a little high perhaps, but if it's a compendious novel then I expect an expansive subject matter to boot.

John Updike 1932-2009

I have my Dad to thank for the fact that I've managed to read some Updike: a compendium of the Rabbit novels, plus the virtually cuboid reviews-and-essays collection Odd Jobs, are items on his shelves at home, and I ploughed through them all on some vacation past within the last ten years. As such, most of what I've read about Updike in terms of criticism (including the obituaries of the last two weeks) has felt quite familiar. Clearly a brilliant craftsman of mellifluous, well-minted prose; clearly a keen, shrewd, non-doctrinaire eye on American society and its politics; clearly someone who knew (or made it his business to learn) many useful things about the world, and incorporated them artfully into his fiction. And, clearly, someone much preoccupied with women and their most secret places...
Actually, strictly speaking, the first time I read anything of Updike's was by way of the extended extract from one of his lesser-known stories that is quoted, at length and admiringly, by Tim Madden, narrator of Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance. The extract in question is a paean to the poetry and mystery of the female groin, as you might say... I'm coming over bashful here, as Updike clearly never did. But when I think about Updike and my chief feelings about his work and its ambience, the one image that comes to me repeatedly is that of a working man of midlife vintage, looking discreetly but firmly at his neighbour's wife, and - if not entirely coveting her - then certainly giving her provisional marks out of ten, and imagining how he might go about verifying his estimate.
My wife and I were talking about the Updike obituaries in the car the other day, and she mentioned that there was a seeming consensus around the view that post-WWII British fiction had no novelist quite comparable to him. Interesting. Of course the thing with Updike is that he was very clear about his attachment to bourgeois subject matter that might seem overly domestic and common-coin to some sophisticates; and yet clearly he scrutinised it and poeticised it in a style far surpassing most writers' attainments in the same area. Britain, of course, has no end of bourgeois novelists passionately attached to that segment of the class system that best suits them. But the difference here is that Updike's protagonists tended to do regular jobs (often of the sort imagined to induce 'quiet desperation') rather than being, say, writers or academics, which is a depressingly regular occupation for the protagonists of British literary novels. Not that Updike was any sort of 'common man' or fixated on same; but he always seemed happy to have his hands dirty with the raw stuff of life, albeit in a highly elegant sort of a way...

Norman Mailer's Spooky Art

Today, owing to an unfortunate necessity, I had to forsake my desk at home and go work in the local library, only 5 minutes' walk away, but a drag nonetheless. Waiting for some dogged daily newspaper scanner to give up one of the few writing tables with a plug-point adjacent, I wandered around the stacks awhile and was pleased to happen on a copy of Mailer's collection of thoughts on the writing process, The Spooky Art (2003). Browsing through it at least made the waste of time feel a good deal less vexing, even medicinal.

For a while I read from the index back and found Mailer very good on the affinities and disparities of the Russian masters: basically, that Dostoyevsky went down to depths that Tolstoy couldn't penetrate, but lacked Tolstoy’s panoptic sense of perspective and so tended toward hysteria; consequently from Dostoyevsky we come away with memorable individuals, and from Tolstoy entire societies.

Elsewhere: he's generally thoughtful about bad reviews, albeit occasionally desirous of knocking some picky little toerag's roof in.

He's bracingly self-critical about most of the books, as well as his much-advertised personal failings.

He sounds friendly enough about old Gore Vidal, to whom he is undoubtedly superior IMHO.

You get that sense that he wasn't ever as mad about The Executioner's Song as the book's ardent fans, for all that it's so alive to something fundamental in the big centre of American life, just because it was less his invention.

He makes a useful critique of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a self-consciously big and well-upholstered novel that doesn't feel large or truly lived.
He expresses a touching love for the novel on the ground that it is 'the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity - which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment.'
I nodded grimly in reading another version of his view that writers must discipline themselves 'to do a good day's work on a bad day.'

More grim nods when he volunteered that 'working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.'

Then there is the rub: ‘I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn't I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose…’

Still, searching around some reviews tonight I was satisfied that a fair few writers are properly sympathetic to Mailer's readiness to dare and risk failure.

Thomas E. Kennedy: ‘Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.’

Richard Poirier: ‘At his best [Mailer] seeks contamination. He does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the sounds that will give him a measure of what it’s like to be alive in this country.’

Wilfrid Sheed: ‘Mailer follows the Chestertonian principle of exploring the psychosis proper to the group, the identifying madness, and letting it enter him, like an exorcist opening himself to the devil.’

Quite. Like the demon of his last wondrous production The Castle in the Forest, Mailer gave himself the right to inhabit men's minds. Spooky indeed.

Bresson vs Mailer on the Meaning of a Bad Day

For a lot of years, and most especially on days when things aren't going so well for whatever apparent reason, I have treasured this comment of Robert Bresson's from his bracing little book of aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer. To wit:
"These horrible days – when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles – are part of my method of work."
That's the spirit, I've tended to think. Don't fight a prevailing ill wind too hard. Accept that at certain hours the odds just aren't in your favour. Regroup and fight again tomorrow. See it as all part of the process.
But another of my heroes has just made me think again on this matter. Yes, Mailer, and in the course of the Q&A book On God as mentioned below. Insofar as I take the idea of karma seriously, as some objective accounting of our daily bravery and goodness or otherwise, which may have repercussions for us in a life to come as it has from some previous lives - I do so only because of Mailer. He always insisted that something spiritual was at stake in every instant of our lives, however seemingly banal and quotidian. And inevitably this led him to an integrated theory of Bad Days too, to wit:
"Whenever you have a bad day, there’s a lot of reasons for the downer. I can give you twenty causes for such an hour. Some are serious, some are passing. But, no, I won’t let you hide behind the notion that a bad day is no more than a slot on the roulette wheel… Whenever we have an emotion we can’t account for, good or bad, I expect that the root is karmic… Intense and unaccountable emotions can come from one’s karmic past."
So - I'm going to have to think this over anew. Does one give the devil his due if only for 24 hours? Or fight the devil at all times and all costs? Even when having a cup of coffee, or waiting in for a tradesman to call...? Some of Mailer's examples in On God are only marginally less bathetic. But I know what he's driving at.

Norman Mailer: On God

I'm reading this extraordinary book of dialogues between Mailer and his friend the scholar Michael Lennon, recorded in late 2006. They confirm and elaborate upon those spiritual convictions of Mailer's that have always erupted out of individual novels in the past, but which were abundantly present on every page of what turned out to be the last work, The Castle in the Forest. It's all quotable stuff, but this is a particular speculation that I was mentally underlining within moments of first meeting it:
"All right - we are going to be reincarnated. Whether we know what our reincarnation will be, I doubt. I expect it will be full of surprises, most unforeseen. Some, given our vanity, are likely to seem outrageously warped."

Gordon Ramsay: So Macho...

The concept of 'machismo' gets a bad rap in the media, and sometimes in the real world too. For instance I once wrote in a book of Sean Penn's 'authentic machismo', and a (female) newspaper reviewer thought this very notion ludicrous (which made me wonder what her boyfriend/helpmeet reckoned to such views.) I guess that from its Spanish origins to its common English usage machismo just suggests too much in the way of exaggeratedly bumptious behaviour and a chauvinistic sense of entitlement. Obviously there is a portion of personal identity that may be no more than performance and/or masquerade: a fact one expects is understood by all those gay men who affect black leather jackets, and also - one hopes - by some of the rather more slight and unimposing straight guys who affect same.
Still, Norman Mailer fan that I am, I think machismo needs defending now and then, insofar as it can reasonably describe a readiness on the part of certain men to put whatever physical fortitude and strength they are blessed with to good and courageous uses. (To get in harm's way, you could say.) Women are of course entirely capable of the very same solicitude and bravery; one might only suggest that since men tend to be physically larger and more robust then maybe more of an onus falls upon them.
Anyhow... watching Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word last night on Channel 4 I was in no way surprised to see the Great Chef teaching his young son to catch and gut a rabbit, then cooking it in a ragu for the lad and his mates following a back-garden kickabout to which the ex-Ibrox trainee Ramsay contributed keenly. Many people, myself included, love Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen shows for the big and untrammelled manner in which the host expresses himself while urging people to do better than what they're doing. There's something improving about it. The F-Word, though, is a different beast. Watching Ramsay jet-skiing and ice-fishing for his supper, or getting his hands gory with the primary stage of food preparation, is only what we have come to expect and seems authetic to the man. But this apart, the show seems utterly dogged and weirdly compromised by the awful self-adoring celeb guests whom Ramsay is happy to air-kiss (Last night? Kate Garraway, Jesus H...); and the equally awful crowd of general-public would-be food snobs who are encouraged to sound off throughout the show. Clearly the only thing that can stop Ramsay is Ramsay, so he will go his own way; and the foodie world is inevitably bound up with rich people, however they came to be so. But it always feels odd to me that Ramsay's media persona is bound up with being simultaneously a) refreshingly bullshit-free and b) offering further needless exposure to prime bullshitters.