AND ANOTHER THING
Impoverished days ahead if the novel is truly dying
PAUL JOHNSON
Adinner the other night, the convers- ation was about the novel, or rather its demise. It was pronounced dead, kaput, le roman mort. Bad news for me. I rather need novels to get through what Dr Johnson called 'the great vacancies of life'. The epic I can do without. Plays, apart from Shake- speare, I do not need. (Last week I reread Henry IV, Part 2. What brilliance! The Boar's Head scene in Act Two is the best piece of low-life comedy-tragedy ever written.) But novels I love. Hearing my friends, two of them professional writers, list them as an endangered species, I tried to remember what new novels I had read in the past year. I could find only one, Saul Bellow's RaveLstein, his roman-a-clef about Alan Bloom suddenly becoming rich and dying of Aids. But Bellow is old, a lonely stag tossing his antlers in vain in an almost deserted glen. The only other living novelist I relish is Alison Lurie. I think of her as a young woman, which she was when I first met her, a witty white witch from the woods of New England. But she, too, is acquiring the patina of seniority. Oh dear!
So my reading this millennium year has been nostalgic; as No. 10 would call it, back- ward-looking. First, the five Jane Austens I go through every year (Sense and Sensibility I cannot abide; I growl as I pass it on the shelves), plus three new books about the Mistress. She is an obsession with me: the best Christmas or birthday present I can pos- sibly imagine would be a pristine tale from her small white hand. I have made another effort to grapple with George Eliot's Romola, and have again failed. My eyes linger long over Leighton's admirable illus- trations, and then glaze over. But at least I know what it is about, more than can be said for Browning's comparable disaster, his mys- tifying poem Sordello, which I now see has been perversely turned into a key decon- struction text by advanced Eng Lit Crit aca- demics.
Nicholas Nickleby detained me for a time, but only the schoolmastering and acting episodes — Dickens at his youthful best. Ralph Nickleby, however, is an implausible villain; Mrs N and her lunatic lover are bores. The superb new life of George Moore by Adrian Frazier tempted me to try one of his novels again, and I found Esther Waters stood up well — it should be made into a television drama — but others smallish beer. I charged into The Brothers Karamazov, which I first read as a 16-year-old schoolboy, but much of the detail of Dostoevsky's Russia is incom- prehensible, as indeed is Putin's Russia. It is like reading a novel about Martians. I took a dip into Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour and soon found myself reading it all over again. No other storyteller, not even Dickens, gets you so close to the gritty details of Victorian life: the clothes and boots and headgear they wore, their food and how they ate it, their trench-warfare with servants and tradesmen, the grey mornings after the nights before all heightened by the superb grotesqueries of Leech's illustrations. It is Surtees's best effort, because for once he took real trouble, and shows us what a wonderful novelist we might have had.
I have also reread Huckleberry Finn because I wanted to study Mark Twain's vir- tuoso exercise in dialect-writing. He expertly mingles six: the negro speech of Missouri, what he calls 'the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect', the rou- tine Pike County speech and four 'modified varieties' of it. Each jumps out from the page with sharp clarity, as though newly cut with a verbal chisel. The book's effortless-seeming artistry depends heavily on this manipulation of demotic speech. That is all the more strange because many great storytellers have tried dialect and failed lamentably. Kipling's Yorkshiremen, Irish and cockneys are grat- ing (not his Indians, though). Even Dickens slips, outside London. Thackeray rings false in this department. George Eliot manifestly fails, often. Even Hardy is not always good. Trollope is rotten. W.W. Jacobs cannot do the longshoreman's gab he favours, though he was born in Wapping, the son of a wharfinger. One of the few who masters a lingo — Upper-class Twit — is Wodehouse, and that is because he invented it himself: no one ever actually spoke like Bertie Wooster (or like Jeeves, for that matter).
I have also been rereading Mrs Gaskell, whose stock has been rising fast. Cranford I found insufferably snobbish, not in an outra- geous way but in a petty and snivelling fash- ion, so that I gave up in disgust. On the other hand, Wives and Daughters is a masterpiece (the fact that it is unfinished does not mat- ter), one of the most mesmerising of 19th- century novels, true realism without any Zolaesque squalor. In this book she tops Trollope at his best. I wish I could find her letters equally gripping, but they are tittle- tattle, concealing everything. On the other hand, Professor John Chapple of Hull has produced a book about Mrs Gaskell's early years, in Cheshire and Lancashire, which is an enormous quarry of fascinating informa- tion about the people, institutions and hap- penings among whom this woman of genius grew up (it was published by the Manchester University Press in 1997) and opens a win- dow directly on to the life of the 1820s, when her stories first formed in her mind.
I read a good Lawrence story, too, for the first time: The Captain's Doll'. And then I found myself at a big lunch sitting next to a delightful and pretty woman called Frieda. `Are you so named after D.H. Lawrence's wife?' I asked. To my surprise she said, 'Yes.' It turned out she was the only daughter of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, and the legendary Sylvia Plath. Truth is not necessar- ily stranger than fiction but it is usually more interesting. That is why I am more arrested by the knobbly details of George Moore's philandering life — he was the putative father of Nancy Cunard, among other risque claims to fame — than by his dusty novels. A few months ago I bought a complete set of George Orwell's works. I tried to read Burmese Days; failed. The other novels did not work with me either, even Nineteen Eighty-Four, which now seems like damp cardboard. But a new book about Orwell always pounce upon eagerly. It is the same with Henry James, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Connolly, Hemingway.
Backing up the dinner-party obituary of the novel, a writer in the literary section of the Los Angeles Times, which carries some of America's best book reviews, argues that the old-style big novel has been replaced by the huge, well-researched and copiously docu- mented biographies of the great and grotesque now pouring from transatlantic presses — J.P. Morgan and John D. Rocke- feller, William Randolph Hearst, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc. This may well be so, and I am almost content with the swap, for I like such fat tomes about real flesh. But I find I also need the sense of mood and the odd frisson which only imagination can supply. Recently I have devoured again Plain Tales from the Hills, Angus Wilson's glittering `Realpolitik' and his horrifying 'Raspberry Jam', and two female cris de coeur by Chekhov, 'Misfor- tune' and `Agafya'. These are all neat exercis- es in literary ingenuity — and grand enter- tainment. Why are such things not written any more? If the novel is dying or dead, why cannot we at least have more short stories?
Previous page
