On top of that, I had recently watched a BBC documentary about Ian Hamilton himself, who was a good poet and a great critic, and a mentor to Barnes, Amis, McEwan, and that whole generation of English writers. (There is, by the way, an exceptionally good new BBC cable channel here, BBC4, which shows documentaries of similar merit and obscurity every night of the week.) And I’d met him a couple of times, and really liked him, not least because he wrote an enthusiastic review of my first book. (Did I mention that he was a great critic?) He died a couple of years ago, and I wish I’d known him better.
I still wouldn’t necessarily have tracked down the Lowell biography, however, if I hadn’t spent a weekend near Hay-on-Wye. Hay is a weird town on the border of England and Wales which consists almost entirely of secondhand bookshops—there are forty of ’em, within a few hundred yards of each other—and one of which is an immaculately stocked poetry store. That’s where I found Hamilton’s book, as well as the Penguin Modern Poets collection, purchased because Corso’s lovely “Marriage” was read at a friend’s wedding recently. I bought the Ern Malley book (for a pound, pure maybe-one-day whimsy, doomed to top-shelf oblivion), and a first edition of Something Happened (because it crops up in Dow Mossman’s The Stone Reader), elsewhere in the town. Buying books is what you do in Hay, in the absence of any other options.
Despite all these various auguries, I hadn’t necessarily expected to read every word of the Lowell biography, but Hamilton is such a good writer, and Lowell’s life was so tumultuous, that it was gone in a couple of days, like an Elmore Leonard novel. Sometimes, in the hands of the right person, biographies of relatively minor figures (and Lowell’s influence seems to be receding fast) are especially compelling: they seem to have their times and cultural environments written through them like a stick of rock, in a way that sui generis major figures sometimes don’t. Lowell, it turns out, is the guy you can see just behind Zelig’s shoulder: he corresponded with Eliot, hung out with Jackie and Bobby K., and traveled around with Eugene McCarthy in ’68. He also beat up his own father, had endless strange, possibly sexless extramarital affairs with innumerable young women, and endured terrible periods of psychosis, frequently accompanied by alarming rants about Hitler. In other words, it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!”
And as a bonus, I felt I learned more about the act of creating poetry from this one book than I did in my entire educational career. (A line from a letter Lowell wrote to Randall Jarrell that I shall endeavour to remember: “In prose you have to be interested in what is being said… it’s very exciting for me, like going fishing.”) In the end, the psychotic periods make for a wearying rhythm to the book, and perhaps Hamilton’s criticism of the poems tends to be a little too astringent—the Collected Poems runs to twelve hundred pages, but Hamilton seems to argue that we could live without a good eleven hundred and fifty of them. And this is a poet he clearly loves…
But it’s a great biography, and now I was off on this Hamilton kick. I bought Against Oblivion, his book of little essays about every major twentieth-century poet bar four—Eliot, Auden, Hardy, and Yeats—absent because their work is, in the critic’s view, certain to survive; it’s in the bathroom, and I’ve got through half of it. (Shock news: Grown-up critics think e.e. cummings sucks. I honestly didn’t know. I read him at school, put him in the “good” box, and left him there.) I vaguely remembered the story of Hamilton’s attempt to write a biography of Salinger: it ended up in court, and Salinger actually broke cover to give a deposition to Hamilton’s lawyer. Hamilton admits that Salinger’s victory left gaping holes in the book he wanted to write. He was denied permission to quote from letters that are freely available for inspection in various libraries. I’m still glad I read it, though. I learned things—that you could earn $2,000 for a short story in the 1930s, for example. The stories about Salinger hustling for work, and dining gaily with the Oliviers in London, make one feel almost giddy, so unlikely do they sound now; and when the Hamilton mind goes to work on the stories, it’s something to see.
The realization that you could polish off a major author’s entire oeuvre in less than a week was definitely part of the appeal—you won’t catch Dickens being pushed around like that—but it was still tougher work than I thought it would be. Just about every one of Nine Stories is perfect, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is fresh and funny, but Seymour: An Introduction… Man, I really didn’t want to know about Seymour’s ears. Or his eyes. Or whether he could play sports. The very first time I met him he blew his brains out (in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), so to be brutal, I never really developed as much curiosity about him as Salinger seems to want of me. But whereas I was expecting something light and sweet, I ended up with this queasy sense of the psychodramatic: I knew that I wouldn’t be able to separate the stories from the Story, but I hadn’t expected the author to collude in the confusion. Hamilton is especially good on how Buddy Glass, apparently Salinger’s mouthpiece, creates and perpetuates myths about his alter ego.
I read Pompeii in between Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam… It has to be a rule, I think, that when a family member gives you his new book, you stop what you’re doing and read it. Having a writer for a brother-in-law could have turned out really, really badly. He could have been more or less successful than me. Or he could have written books that I hated, or found impossible to get through. (Imagine if your brother-in-law wrote Finnegans Wake, and you were really busy at work. Or you weren’t really a big reader.) Luckily, his books are great, and a pleasure to read, and despite my trepidation—I couldn’t see how he was going to pull off a thriller which ends with the biggest deus ex machina the world has ever known—this is, I reckon, his best one. Oh, and he read just about every book there is on volcanology and Roman water systems, as well as every word Pliny wrote, so my admiration for my sister has increased even further. Has she been sitting there listening to stuff about Roman water systems for the last three years? I now understand why her favorite film of recent years is Legally Blonde. How could it not be?
I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month—five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: They go up on the shelves straight away (as opposed to onto the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again. (And, before any outraged poets explode, I’d like to point out that I’m one of the seventy-three people in the world who buys poetry.) And anyway, anyone who is even contemplating ploughing straight through over a thousand pages of Lowell’s poetry clearly needs a cable TV subscription, or maybe even some friends, a relationship, and a job. So if it’s OK with you, I’m taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight—and the Heller I’ve read before, years ago, so that’s six and a half out of eight. I make that eighty one and a quarter percent! I am both erudite and financially prudent! I admit it: I haven’t read a book about an Australian literary hoax (which, I repeat, I bought for a quid), and a handful of essays about people like James Wright, Robinson Jeffers, and Norman Cameron. Maybe there are slumbering pockets of ignorance best left undisturbed; no one likes a know-all.
BOOKS BOUGHT: