And so they all had a go at it. Of course they did (I fondly imagine them crouched at their desks in the on your marks position, raring to take it on). In the past, they couldn’t write about sex. Now they could. And guess what. They still couldn’t. They were free to write about it, but they couldn’t write about it with the necessary weight, they couldn’t write seriously about it; they couldn’t find – and they still haven’t found – the right voice.*2
It is a startling and baffling lacuna – possibly the strangest of all strange things having to do with literature on the one hand and, on the other hand, life. Physical love is the force that peoples the world; and yet novelists get nowhere with it. They can’t find a tone for the transcendental element, which most of us know to be there. Lawrence spent a very long time trying (a huge fraction of his forty-four years), and he couldn’t find a tone for it either.
The collective failure is complete – and truly abysmal. Dreams are a spume that dances on the surface of a troubled pond or puddle; but sex is oceanic, and covers seven-tenths of the globe. A force so fundamental, so varied, so grand, so rich. And yet its evocation on the page is somehow beyond us.
Writers will just have to grin and bear it, and look for comfort where they may. Well, I suppose it magnifies our respect for the act, the act that peoples the world. It does do that. We can bow with honour to what is ineffable, and follow Dickens to the door. But why can’t we describe it? What makes our hands loth and cold?
Just as human beings are not yet intelligent enough to understand the universe (we are at least six or seven Einsteins distant), we are also not yet sensitive enough to render physical love creatively, on the page. The attempt has been going on for only fifty-odd years, I concede. But the weight of the past is for the time being insurmountable. Centuries of inhibition and euphemism and embarrassment (and furtive chortling) have conspired to keep us underevolved.
So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love – unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex.
Three. Religion. This would include all ideologies, all institutionalised networks of committed belief…
People who talk at any length about dreams, or about sex, will soon find themselves standing alone at the bar. And the same goes for faith.
That outrageous impertinence I served up to Graham Greene – in Paris, if you remember, in the headmasterly mist of greys and greens (and browns) that pervaded his spacious but unairy apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, during a visit-interview-lunch on his eightieth birthday in 1984? It really was outrageous: a comprehensive and quite detailed insult packed into a single sentence. And I swear I never meant it that way…A few minutes after arriving, with a look of sincere friendliness on my face, I said,
‘Now that you’re passing this milestone, your religion must be more of a comfort to you than ever – don’t you find?’
In other words: you’re going to be dead quite soon, so your gullibly self-interested expectation of heavenly reward must be a welcome sedative as you…
Greene took it well, I hasten to repeat – he rose to the occasion. With a marked yodel in his voice he replied,
‘Oh no! Oh no! Your faith weakens as you age. In common with all your other powers.’
Faith as a power (a power that weakens). That’s good.
But to speak truthfully…Reading a Graham Greene ‘theological’ (the Bollywood name for the genre) can be likened to a train journey, a train journey of a curious kind. You have boarded and settled, and with a soft lurch you leave the station; you have opened your book and you’re pretty happy, entering a different mind and a different world, and occasionally glancing out to see a landscape set in motion (and you too are trusting in the impetus of a confident narrative); then, after half an hour or so, with a clack and a clatter the tea trolley enters the compartment and starts to rattle down the aisle.
And by then you may well feel like a cup (and a pause and a think) before going back to Greene’s tale – but that’s the end of your reading experience, because the tea trolley will clack, clatter, and rattle away for the rest of the ride. That tea trolley, in Greene, is religion.
The importation of a completely extraneous value system: the miracles, the conversions, the monotonous negation of free will, the commandments (adulterers must be punished, the apostates must either disintegrate or tremulously ‘return’), the obedience to an inherited architecture of belief (and to a vast cliché), et cetera. In a theological, most crucially, death ceases to be death (it is sapped of its energy and force). No, fiction can’t be doing with religion, because fiction is essentially a temporal and rational form – a social-realist form, as we’ll see.
English literature is imbued with the Bible, and would be unrecognisable if shorn of those rhythms. And all that. But the poem, and not the novel, is the natural home of religion; and the religious poets hovered around the centre of the canon for a millennium. Poetry and religion are in some sense co-eternal, having to do, perhaps, with pre-literate
