Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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alt=""/> Eats, Shoots and Leaves—Lynn Truss
BOOKS READ:
My first book was published just over eleven years ago and remains in print, and though I observed the anniversary with only a modest celebration (a black-tie dinner for forty of my closest friends, many of whom were kind enough to read out the speeches I had prepared for them), I can now see that I should have made more of a fuss: in Enemies of Promise, which was written in 1938, the critic Cyril Connolly attempts to isolate the qualities that make a book last for ten years.
Over the decades since its publication, Enemies of Promise has been reduced pretty much to one line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” which is possibly why I was never previously very interested in reading it. What are you supposed to do if the pram in the hall is already there? You could move it out into the garden, I suppose, if you have a garden, or get rid of it and carry the little bastards everywhere, but maybe I’m being too literal-minded.
Enemies of Promise is about a lot more than the damaging effects of domesticity, however; it’s also about prose style, and the perils of success, and journalism, and politics. Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. (Ironically, the copy I found on the shelf belongs to one of the mothers of my children. I wonder if she knew, when she bought it twenty years ago, that she would one day partially destroy a literary career? Connolly would probably argue that she did. He generally takes a pretty dim view of women, who “make crippling demands on [a writer’s] time and money, especially if they set their hearts on his popular success.” Bless ’em, eh? I’m presuming, as Connolly does, that you’re a man. What would a woman be doing reading a literary magazine anyway?)
Connolly spends the first part of the book dividing writers into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular. (He is crankily thorough in this division, by the way. He even goes through the big books of the twenties year by year, and marks them with a V or an M: “1929—H. Green, Living (V); W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (M); Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (V); Lawrence, Pansies (V); Joyce, Fragments of a Work in Progress (M),” and so on. One hesitates to point it out—it’s too late now—but shouldn’t Connolly have been getting on with his writing, rather than fiddling around with lists? That’s one of your enemies, right there.) And then, having thus divided, he spends a lot of time despairing of both camps. “The Mandarin style… is beloved of literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the title of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.” (Yay, Cyril! Way to go!) Meanwhile, “According to Gide, a good writer should navigate against the current; the practitioners in the new vernacular are swimming with it; the familiarities of the advertisements in the morning paper, the matey leaders in the Daily Express, the blather of the film critics, the wisecracks of the newsreel commentators, the know-all autobiographies of political reporters, the thrillers and ’teccies… are all swimming with it too.” (Cyril, you utter ass. You think Hemingway wrote like that lot? Have another look, mate.) Incidentally, the “know-all autobiographies of political reporters”—that was a whole genre in the nineteen-thirties? Boy.
The invention of paperbacks, around the time Connolly was writing Enemies of Promise, changed everything. Connolly’s ten-year question could fill a book in 1938 because the answer was genuinely complicated then; books really could sit out the vicissitudes of fashion on library shelves, and then dust themselves off and climb back down into readers’ laps. Paperbacks and chain bookstores mean that a contemporary version of Enemies of Promise would consist of one simple and uninteresting question: “Well, did it sell in its first year?” My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then. They might have passed all the Connolly tests, but they’re dead in the water anyway.
You end up muttering back at just about every ornately constructed pensée that Connolly utters, but that’s one of the joys of this book. At one point, he strings together a few sentences by Hemingway, Isherwood, and Orwell in an attempt to prove that their prose styles are indistinguishable. But the point, surely, is that though you can make Connolly’s sentence-by-sentence case easily enough, you’d never confuse a book by Orwell with a book by Hemingway—and that’s what they were doing, writing books. Look, here’s a plain, flat, vernacular sentence:
So I bought a little city (it was Galveston, Texas) and told everybody that nobody had to move, we were going to do it just gradually, very relaxed, no big changes overnight.
This is the tremendous first line of Donald Barthelme’s story “I Bought a Little City” (V); one fears that Connolly might have spent a lot of time looking at the finger, and ignored what it was pointing at. (“See, he bought a whole city, Cyril! Galveston, Texas! Oh, forget it.”) The vernacular turned out to be far more adaptable than Connolly could have predicted.
Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature—match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. (M) or (V)? Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was PG Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here; Connolly is sniffy about him several times over the course of Enemies of Promise, and presumes that his stuff won’t last five minutes, but he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
The Polysyllabic Spree, the twelve terrifyingly beatific young men and woman who run this magazine, have been quiet of late—they