*7 I naturally had an encyclopedic knowledge of drunkards and drunkenness. ‘Now and then’, wrote my father in his Memoirs, ‘I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.’ In addition, Myfanwy, my little sister, would drink herself to death (2000); and so would Robinson, my most long-established friend (2002). By then I felt I could add a modest corollary to Saul’s Law. Consciousness is terrible; and tomorrow, moreover, is neither here nor there, because tomorrow, for drunkards, doesn’t exist. There: consciousness is terrible, and tomorrow is crap. Suicides, on the whole, climactically subscribe to both propositions. John Berryman, a suicide, wrote about the struggle to forgive his father, another suicide, and recalled the ‘frantic passage’ of Berryman Sr, ‘when he could not live / an instant longer’ (The Dream Songs)…My brother Nicolas and I were teetotal until our early twenties – because we associated alcohol with louts, hooligans, and tramps. This was unaccountable. We grew up in literary bohemia. Why didn’t we associate alcohol with all the poets, novelists, playwrights, and critics we saw every other day, slurring, weeping, singing, declaring war, professing love, and falling crunchily down the stairs?
*8 Later I regaled Julia with the following quote. The country ‘takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness and despair of these martyrs…So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either.” ’ And Julia understood.
*9 For Roth in his comic novels drunkenness is a goy thing, an Irish thing (the owner, Peter Langan, would be very much on the premises, would be fatally in situ, when he burnt his house down in 1988), a Polack thing – those people, as Alexander Portnoy puts it, whose names ‘are all X’s and Y’s’.
*10 The Nobel Prize, first awarded in 1901, gives us a useful index. Twenty-two per cent of its recipients are Jewish; and Jews comprise just 2 per cent of the world population.
*11 ‘An illiterate, underbred book…the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.’ This was a diary entry, admittedly, and not a published statement – but still. ‘A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’, she says elsewhere: and this is at least fleetingly sane. When she returns to the pimples motif, though, she writes: ‘the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges’. I wonder if Woolf was slightly thrown by the fact that Ulysses is, among its other strengths, a masterpiece of anti-anti-Semitism.
*12 ‘Richmond’, I now know, was an Anglicisation of ‘Ryczke’ (pronounced Rich-ke). Thirty-four years later Theo would publish Konin: A Quest, his reconstruction (through oral testimony) of the Polish shtetl of that name. Konin, the Ryczkes’ home town, was wiped off the map by the Germans in 1939.
*13 My father’s anti-Semitism was of course reflexive and non-visceral, and far less insistent than the anti-Semitism of Virginia Woolf. It belonged, not to the drawing room, but to the parlour or the lounge: it was in origin suburban and lower middle class. That it was inherited and largely unexamined was shameful enough, I think; but Kingsley seemed to accept it as you would a birthmark. It was mild and idle, and had no public aspect. When he went into print on the matter he knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘Anti-Semitism in any form’, he wrote in a letter to the Spectator the following year (1962), ‘must be combated’, ‘including the fashionable one of anti-anti-anti-Semitism’. Nietzsche coined ‘anti-anti-Semitism’, which was his own position, just as Hitchens’s Communism (seemingly) resolved itself into ‘anti-anti-Communism’.
Guideline Things Fiction Can’t Do
Before we go on to the next chapter do you mind if we take a short break? I want a rest, just now, from ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ (Yeats). My conscience, when I train it on Phoebe, is reasonably clear, but it’s still a – she’s a –
Oh quiet, Spats. Stop it at once. Excuse me, I’ll have to attend to him for a moment, and while I’m at it I’ll make some more tea…Oh that’s very thoughtful of you. Thanks. Yes, black, please. No sugar.
…Anyway I want to go on for a while about the things fiction can’t do – and its blindspots are in themselves illuminating. I’ll have to generalise with some shamelessness, as usual, so bear in mind that a generalisation, in these pages, isn’t meant to have the force of an axiom; it merely draws notice to a marked tendency. And it follows that a generalisation is not dismayed by the unearthing of one or two exceptions – or one or two thousand exceptions.
It is sometimes said that Coleridge (d. 1834) was the last man to have read everything. But not even a veteran mythomaniac would dare to claim that title in 2016, no, not even the studious Mr Trump. Thus the blandest possible generalisation must now coexist with an unknowable multitude of anomalies. So let’s forget about the anomalies
