Mind your language
A.L. KENNEDY was on the wireless again the other day complaining about being a writer. Well, who said she was a writer?
I only ask because last year I tried to read a very small book by her, even tak- ing it to the quiet of the North Riding. It was, I was sorry to discover, tremen- dously annoying, partly because she kept going on about being a writer. The subject was meant to be Bullfighting (Yellow Jersey Press, £10). By page 91 she is still asking, `Why am I in Madrid?' You think it cannot get any worse; but on page 92 it does, when she starts about the man in her life.
I am not saying that it is impossible successfully to write about writing, about one's own feelings, and constant- ly to apostrophise the reader. But it is very difficult. The three characteristics I have just mentioned are meant to be typical of modernism, though they are present in Tristram Shandy, in much mediaeval writing and in some classical prose. To pull them off now, however, you need to have the sympathy of the reader. It became clear to me that A.L. Kennedy had lost mine early on when she describes a contemplated attempt at suicide and I found that I did not care much one way or another whether she jumped, if only she would just get on. 'As a former author and former sui- cide,' she tells us on page seven, 'hon- esty's about all I have left.' That is not enough.
Naturally, all I had to do was to turn to another book. I did, eventually, to The Folks that Live on the Hill. Kingsley Amis is also sometimes what critics call self-indulgent. But his authorial voice does gain my sympathy. Otherwise the following sentence, which I enjoyed, would fail: 'A coffee shop where you could sit outside if you felt all right about having a mass of heavy traffic accelerate past you twice a minute from four yards off.'
And here is Amis almost parodying his own enjoyment in constructing the awkward pattern of ordinary dialogue: 'We do quite enough we know the rea- sons for without having to start worry- ing about what we do that we don't know the reasons for.'
A.L. Kennedy is right if she means that a writer observes, as though she were an outsider, her own experiences. But she need not keep buttonholing the reader and telling her so.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
