New man of letters
William Scammell
TOO TRUE by Blake Morrison Granta, £9.99, pp. 326 Blake Morrison's career is a standing refutation of John Gross's thesis about the death of the man of letters. Poet, editor, reviewer, journalist, memoirist, broadcaster, `new man', commentator on child abuse, who has served time on the TLS, The Observer, the Independent on Sunday, Granta, British Council tours and dozens of poetry committees, Morrison, like his friend and contemporary Andrew Motion, has inhabited most of the splendours and miseries of New Grub Street, from the literary sweat- shop to the marble halls and munificent cheques of the New Yorker. The success of And when did you last see your father? has taken him out of the editorial trenches and into the sunny uplands of the well-paid freelance. Desmond MacCarthy, Cyril Connolly, Orwell and V.S. Pritchett would recognise a fellow-spirit right away. Too True is a sample of five years' worth of journalism and reviews, mostly revolving around 'non-fiction narrative' — 'the chosen form of a culture of intimacy' — and similar forms of story-telling, and various literary celebrities, from Ted Hughes and Valerie Eliot (eloquently protesting against the lies of Tom and Viv) to Alan Bennett's diary and Angela Carter's giggle.
`Without art, confessionalism is mastur- bation. Only with art does it become empa- thy.' Some kinds of books 'compel us by getting down off their plinths and declaring their modest stature — by being small stories, not tall stories'. `To write about the self's hot flushes, you have to be cold and detached.' Morrison is always intelligent, engaging, readable, and has developed a nice line in gentle aphorism: 'Even in an allegedly "permissive" society someone is always appointed to do the permitting.'
I'm not so sure, however, about the conclusion of his opening piece on what he calls the literature of self-revelation, or 'the erotics of neurotics', as an American critic has called it (which Morrison, fair-minded as ever, quotes against himself). 'In the end, both novels and memoirs have to be judged for their interest as stories. And for that what counts isn't honesty but narrative skill.' Hmmm. Can the two be separated out quite so easily? Technique is a large part of any writer's morality but that in turn is driven by honesty, fidelity, truth to the nerve-endings, isn't it? None of the modernists' celebrated apparatus would be of much use if we weren't convinced by the desolating honesty of The Waste Land, the family rows and subterfuges in Portrait and Ulysses. Conversely, what's wrong with amateur prose and poetry isn't just its clumsiness but its inability to face facts and feelings. So far as I know, and pace all the profundities of the theoreticians on form and content, no one has yet improved on Keats' truth-beauty formulation. If it continues to baffle us, so much the better; it is a baffling subject. It was Morrison's larger-than-life GP father who lit up the pages of And when... ? and he does so again in 'South Pacific' here, a brief but telling account of an early visit to the pictures, and the me films he shot of his children, which Morrison has made over into a video for his widowed mother. There's another excellent piece, perhaps the best in the book, called 'Barnardo Before and After', an account of the children's homes as they were and are, the large, problematical archive, and the fascinating character who was driven to found them. 'In pursuit of truth he sometimes resorted to fiction', that is doctoring photographs of his waifs and strays in order to tug more effectively at the public's purse-strings, exactly as today's advertising agencies do on behalf of Oxfam or Save the Children.
A sort of self-portrait emerges between the lines of all these dips into now- and-then — he revisits old girlfriends, old teachers, his seed-time in the Yorkshire Dales, his university, his sentimental education — from `the rich kid in the rectory' who didn't discover football until he was 11, and the adolescent making out with the au pair, to the young father glued to Penelope Leach's Baby and Child (`She Who Must Be Obeyed') and the literary journalist calmly discussing porn, Angela Carter, Larkin, the Nobel committee's elaborate proceedings, or expertly inter- viewing Ted Hughes and Valerie Eliot, where he manages to remain both polite and probing. Occasionally one grows irritated with the sweet reasonableness, the on-the- other-hands, the anxiety to line up with all that's non-sexist and right-on in the sunny conservatories of Islington and Blackheath. He repeats the nonsensical canard that Larkin's 'Deceptions' is sympathetic to the rapist, for instance, and gets mired in the hopelessly undecidable arguments about cause and effect in the pornography debate, instead of concentrating on what is expressed in the works themselves, as we do in all other sensible discussions of art and entertainment; and seems as accepting of the 'intimidation, violence and vandal- ism' in football as he is scathing of it in other contexts. These are minor quibbles, however, about a polished and professional performance. More worrying is the question of whether he should continue to splash about in the shallows of the higher gossip or save his talents for the long, Joycean haul. Never mind the pram in the hail, what about Bill Buford's Mephistopholean cheque-book? When freelances solve this one we shall know that Utopia has arrived. Or do I mean Arcadia?
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