Meditations on work

I have to apologise for not having posted for a couple of weeks. I've been reflecting on the many benefits of voluntary unemployment (note: these do not include so-called unemployment benefits, as it seems the G-men don't take kindly to the 'voluntary' part). More broadly I've been thinking about work and whether this temporary hiatus could be used to realise some of my creative ambitions. I've always suspected that real creativity might be a convenient way out of work; though of course I realise that realising it involves a lot of work. Nevertheless a lot of writers see themselves at odds with the world and values of conventional employment. Not least Philip Larkin (again), whose poem 'Toads' articulates my latent suspicions:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Why can't I? Lots of other people seem to. Indeed corporate gurus argue that creativity is the capital of the twenty-first century (like it wasn't in every other one.)

Then there's Thomas Hardy, Larkin's antecedent, whose philosophical approach I used to justify  frequent bouts of inertia when studying:

"It is no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the active, the rapid, the people of such splendid momentum that before they can see where they are they have got elsewhere,  have been surprised to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for discharging their active labours has been that of postponing them indefinitely."

Although the older I get the more I have to admit that indefinite postponement might yield profundities, but rarely results.

Then there's Hilaire Belloc, who said he "never put pen to paper without wishing that I had inherited an enormous fortune, in which case you may be very certain that I should never have put pen to paper."

So is writing a way of working, or of not working? If I didn't have to work (a euphemistic way of describing my current status), would I want to write? Or is the dream of writing only one of the humours I indulge while reluctantly pursuing my more active labours?

I'll keep you posted.

The Other Side

Skipping across the Atlantic for a time, though staying in the twentieth century, here's a snippet of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. The Great Gatsby pretty consistently gets in among top 100s, and is regularly offered as the greatest novel of its century. I frankly don't see what all the fuss is about, but the other Fitzgeralds I've read give indications of a supremely gifted writer. I love the blend of lyricism with cynicism, particularly in his semi-autobiographical Tender is the Night. This Side of Paradise is less lyrical and more satirical, but it moves along with a kind of assurance and invention that I find very pleasing. I especially liked this departure from the conventional:

Amory's point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:

1. The fundamental Amory.


2. Amory plus Beatrice.


3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
   Then St. Regis' had pulled him to pieces and started him over again:


4. Amory plus St. Regis'.


5. Amory plus St. Regis' plus Princeton.
   That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:


6. The fundamental Amory.

I haven't finished it yet, so look out for future posts on this one.

Larkin and Lucky Jim

In the interview I mentioned, Larkin is asked about his connection with Kingsley Amis, and in particular with Amis' early and hilarious academic spoof Lucky Jim (which I've just reread for about the fifth time). Apparently the novel is thought to be based on Larkin's experience as much as Amis', and Larkin certainly read drafts and made suggestions.

I first read this novel on my first trip to England, in the week following my first academic conference. The resemblance of some of the eccentric, bewildered and priggish caricatures in the book to some of the scholars I had just met was startling. I was about two years into my PhD at that stage, and Dixon's experiences struck forcibly home. His compound of unease and contempt was familiar, likewise his sense that real and worthwhile academic work was no doubt being carried on somewhere by someone, but certainly not by him or anyone he knew.

Throughout my varied and unglamorous academic career, I've cherished this novel and returned to it often for reassurance and private sneering. I think it has a special resonance for anyone in (or out) of academic circles, but I'm sure its comedy has a more universal appeal. I still chuckle over sentences like this:

“Dixon had been expecting a silver-bells laugh from Margaret to follow this remark, but it was still hard to bear when it came.” 

“Where was he going to find this supplementary pabulum? The only answer to this question seemed to be Yes, that's right, where?” 

The real joy of the book is in Dixon's inner monologue, and the contrast between how he acts and how he wants to act. While engaged in pleasant back-and-forth with his imbecile boss, here's what's going on in his mind:

“He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper. Thinking of this, he smiled dreamily...” 

Your person, your place

Philip Larkin has, I think, antecendents in the nineteenth century, in writers like Hardy and Swinburne, but he's deeply modern as well, in that bleak, self-pitying, tragic-banal kind of way. This rare interview in the Paris Review in 1982 gives an insight into his character (he was a crabby librarian), and it concludes with this interesting reflection on poetry:  

“You must realize I’ve never had ‘ideas’ about poetry. To me it’s always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs—wanting to create, to justify, to praise, to explain, to externalize, depending on the circumstances. And I’ve never been much interested in other people’s poetry—one reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.”

Places, Loved Ones

No, I have never found
The place where one could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met my special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary
Or the girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.

Eyre(s) apparent

Musing upon Jane Eyre led me to muse upon some of the ‘intertextualities’ (for want of a smaller word) that the novel has attracted since it was first published in 1847. Of course the most famous is Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea; and at this point I have to confess that I read post-colonial texts because I ought to not because I want to.  Is that a horrible thing to say? Part of me cherishes a fondness still for dear old snobby, wry, admittedly quite brutally repressive Englishness. In a writer like Bronte, I slide over the racist traces with a kind of tender diffidence; there are much less forgivable writers, whose racism, sexism or other failings are not atoned for by largeness of heart, beauty and poetry. 

Then there's Jasper Fforde. I thought The Eyre Affair had some interesting ideas, but on the whole I found it shoddy. One can't build a whole novel, much less a parallel world, on one slender conceit.

And then there's this gorgeous sketch from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie:

Customer: Did you write this?
Shopkeep: Jane Eyre. No, that was Charlotte Bronte.
C: Right. Well I'd like to see her then please.
S: I'm afraid she's no longer with us.
C: Oh? Indeed? I can hardly say I'm surprised.

Watch the whole thing here.