Inside Story (9780593318300)

to the tautened needs and nerves of his loved ones, more specifically to intercede in a row between his son and his second wife (in itself a most difficult position); the row was logistical (to do with Alexander having to foreshorten his stay), and it was unrestrained. Don’t forget that they, we, had had eighteen months of this, Blue (much the most proximate), Alexander, and I too. None of us were really ourselves: we were all someone else. And Christopher mediating and moderating, and turning aside now and then to get on with the business of being very ill. Meanwhile I sat silent in the corner with my suitcase and my plane ticket, feeling strange, feeling strange to the world. That was also actual.

What wasn’t actual was this: the room was full of flies.

All the way back to Brooklyn – all the way, from the hospital cab rank to the blue front door of 22 Strong Place – the usually reliable narrator, Martin, tried to make sense of his hallucination: a trick of the ear as well as the eye, for the flies thronged like bumblebees, as fat, as hairy, and also as noisy, purring, fizzing, sizzling. In his imagination and in his novels flies had always represented necrosis: little skull and crossbones, little gasmasked survivalists, little flecks of death – little shiteaters, little admirers of trash, wounds, battlegrounds, killing fields, abattoirs, carrion, blood, and mire.

Watch the vermin swarm for long enough, stand among them for long enough when they swarm (I used to do this in our Brooklyn woodshed), and you feel in their triumphal excitement the undoing of the whole moral order…In demonology the little flecks of death owe fealty to the Seventh Prince of Hell, who excites lust in priests, who excites jealousies and murders in cities, who excites in nations love of war – Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.

^*1 In the context of premature mortality, all talk of earning this or deserving that, all talk of justice and injustice, is understandable but delusive self-pity, which Christopher instantly recognised: that same paragraph ends, ‘To the dumb question, “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?’…Larkin never grasped this and never got beyond it. ‘I really feel’, he maintained, in the last paragraph of the last letter he ever wrote, ‘[that] this year has been more than I deserve.’

^*2 ‘To say the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back.’

^*3 I had recently read Philip Caputo’s famous Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, published in 1977 (when PTSD was first recognised and described). After nearly a year of front-line combat, Caputo rises from his cot on ‘a quiet day, one of those days when it was difficult to believe there was a war on. Yet my sensations were those of a man actually under fire…Psychologically, I had never felt worse…a feeling of being afraid when there was no reason to be’; and of dissociation (sometimes known as ‘doubling’) – a feeling of being there and also not being there.

^*4 There was nothing blithe or heedless about it. ‘Oh, man. I’m living in a world of pain,’ he said when I reached him on the phone, in the late 1990s, during an intense but transient furore. While never, ever admitting he was wrong, Christopher suffered quietly but sharply for his errancies. Above all, naturally, he was tormented by the proliferating disaster of Iraq – a neocon experiment that he supported (no, championed) from the standpoint of the hard left…

How to Write The Uses of Variety

I’ll be in London all next week, as I’m sure I told you. Well, mostly to see my eldest daughter Bobbie and her clan – her husband Mathew and their little boy and their little girl – my pretty grandchildren…I’m also due to have an audience, over afternoon tea, with Phoebe Phelps. Now I haven’t seen Phoebe for thirty years. All this was brokered by the niece, Maud. Who seems to confine herself to briskly merciless hints. For instance she casually mentioned that Phoebe never goes out. Outside. She never goes outside…

Nothing can prepare you in any way for that kind of meeting. Certainly not literature, which is curiously incapable of helping you through the critical events of an average span (for example, the deaths of parents). I suppose the lesson is that you have to enter into it and see for yourself…At Larkin’s funeral my father talked of ‘the terrible effects of time on everything we have and are’. So I’m expecting some of that, vivified and enriched by the fact that she and I were lovers for five years, in our prime and in our pomp. Our meeting impends before me like the worst kind of medical examination. Which it is, in a sort of sense. An hour with Doctor Time.

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Now…Oh before I forget – a few words about paragraph size.

Many eminent writers don’t seem to sense that paragraphs are aesthetic units; so they’ll give you a short one, then a long one, then a very long one, then a medium one, then another medium one, then a short one, then a very short one, etc. Paragraphs should be aware of their immediate neighbours, and should show it by observing a flexible uniformity of length: usually medium, though retaining the right to become uniformly long or uniformly short as you vary the rhythm of the chapter. Going from short to long (and back again) resembles a change of gear. Long paragraphs are for the freeway, short paragraphs for city traffic.

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‘There is only one school of writing,’ said Nabokov, ‘that of talent.’ And talent can’t be