*7 I once had a long talk about this with a writer friend who has made notable efforts in the sphere of madness, Patrick McGrath (The Grotesque, Spider, Asylum), at a time when I was wondering how mad I ought to make the anti-hero of my thirteenth novel. The essential difficulty, we agreed, was this: a work of art needs to cohere (‘together’ + ‘to stick’) and organic madness is the sworn enemy of coherence. So the author faces an unfamilar hazard, namely a surfeit of freedom: as in dreams, anything at all can happen…Mad characters, therefore, have to be surrounded – and constantly challenged – by sane characters; madness must never be allowed to take centre stage. So no mad heroes or mad heroines and no mad narrators (of the sort you too often find in the early work of Elena Ferrante). It is like nonsense verse: a very little goes a very long way.
*8 The speaker is Dr Alfred Nash, a character in Kingsley’s novel of 1984, Stanley and the Women. Nash’s monologue was based on, or made possible by, Jim Durham, a learned and literary psychologist and a close family friend…When I was in my early twenties Jim effortlessly cured me of what felt like a serious mental condition – incapacitating panic attacks on the London Underground (‘Just remember’, he said, ‘that no harm can come to you’). And I would have gone to him with the confusions induced by Phoebe Phelps in 2001; but by then he had repatriated himself to Australia, where he runs a psychiatric hospital in Sydney.
*9 Kingsley had an obviously very memorable encounter with somebody who was nothing else but mad: a middle-aged woman on a bus. She was mad, he wrote, mad to the ends of her hair.
How to Write Decorum
We are living, you and I, through a kind of Counter-Enlightenment. Popularly known as ‘populism’, it is a movement supposedly attentive and responsive to ‘the interests and opinions of ordinary people’. Another word for populism is ‘anti-elitism’. Ordinary people know best; crowds are wise. ‘I love the undereducated,’ said Trump at a rally. ‘We’re the really smart ones.’
Every now and then there’s an urge to apply the same emphasis to the arts; and the most vulnerable is literature – literature in prose. To populists, the novel is especially inviting because it is already the most populist of the forms, the most egalitarian and democratic: it asks for no special tools or training. All you need is what everyone automatically has – a ballpoint and a scrap of paper.
So we saw the anti-Great Books movement, the anti-Dead White Males movement, and the like. In Britain twenty years ago there was a movement that called itself the New Simplicity; it was anti-metaphor, anti-polysyllable, anti-adverb, and anti-subordinate clause. The New Simplicity, I thought, was a secular version of the vow of poverty. Or even the vow of silence.
I confess that I don’t understand the impulse (though I can see that it’s entirely sociopolitical and not at all literary). Do you know any reflexive anti-elitists – I don’t mean the bookish types so much as the rank and file?…Fascinating. Are these anti-elitists, I wonder, feeling anti-elitist, feeling anti-expertise, when they go to the doctor? Or when they board a plane? Or when they hire a lawyer – or an electrician or indeed a hairdresser? Show me a sphere where we exalt the ‘ordinary’, the inexpert, the amateurish, the average.
Well, there’s always that leisure-class boondoggle known as fiction. Here the lit-crit sociopoliticians have found an endeavour so unserious that no one need bother about levels of competence. Who listens to literature? Who cares what it says?
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The good reader cares, of course, and listens. And the good reader automatically expects high proficiency – which is achievable by anyone willing to put in the time. It is possible, and pleasurable, to learn more about words and how they go together. If writing is your job, then it’s just a matter of self-respect.
You’re not trying to set yourself up as an exquisite or a mandarin. The modest goal is to leave the reader in as little doubt as possible that you know what you’re doing. As you negotiate this task, you will realise, very early on, that elitism has got to start somewhere. And I think I know just the place.
On the table there are three recent historical studies, all of them by apparently genuine scholars, all of them reviewed at deferential length. The top one (on the American Revolution) tells me, inter alia, that early readers of Jonathan Swift, unused to the genre of satire, must have been ‘gobsmacked’ by A Modest Proposal (which was published in the early eighteenth century); the middle one (on the Third Reich) tells me that Hitler was feeling ‘upbeat’ when he returned to Berlin after a holiday in the Bavarian Alps; the bottom one (on Stalin) tells me that Kaiser Wilhelm I, in delegating foreign affairs to Otto von Bismarck, showed ‘smarts’.
What kind of reader does this kind of writer think he’s pleasing? ‘Smarts’ (for instance) derives from ‘street-smart’, and Kaiser Wilhelm never went near a street in his life; but this writer considers that ‘acuity’, say, or ‘good sense’, would be a wasted opportunity or a missed trick, given the availability of ‘smarts’. I suppose there must be one
