In an early poem, ‘Wants’, Larkin spoke of ‘the costly aversion of the eyes away from death’. But the fixed stare is also costly – prohibitive. Halfway through an eight-hour death watch, you stop wanting them to wake up, and start wanting them to sleep for ever: in other words, you wish them gone. The death watch forces this treason on you – you just can’t get out of the way of it…
I watched my little sister die, in the year 2000; and in her case I didn’t have time to wish her gone. Myfanwy was dead within half an hour and I never even knew it. Because she was still breathing, lustily breathing, until the nurse came back in and compassionately pointed to the flat line. Seeing my astonishment, she pointed to the respirator, the machine that was doing Myfanwy’s breathing…So there was my sister, a panting corpse at the age of forty-six. Surely, surely, I could’ve done something about that. Couldn’t I?
Anyway, down with the death watch, to hell with the death watch, death to the death watch.
Bracingly but also demandingly, it turns out that there is a moral order, and that we are moral beings. Our big transgressions of course stay with us, but so do all the little ones. Each of our sins of commission and omission, every instance of cruelty and neglect, every snub – every slight: every brick we’ve ever dropped lands on our own foot, in the end, and goes on smarting till we die.
Now there is the sun, and we can stare at it…Jesus, it looks like a real star, don’t you think? Not the twinkle-twinkle type but a star as it actually is – a steady-state fusion bomb of boiling gas, with in this case a diameter of a million earthling miles. I have the greatest respect for the prince of our solar system, but I’ve never seen it look more like a furious cosmic zit getting ready to burst. And to the eye it’s almost as smooth as glass…There it goes, there it goes. And now it’s gone.
A final piece of vocational advice.
Temperament (as I’ve said) is vital. You need an unusual appetite for solitude, and a strong and durable commitment to the creative form (you have to want to be in it for life). These are qualities that the dedicated reader already has. You will also need this strange affinity with the reader – unendingly complex though almost entirely unconscious. Then there is a fourth element…
One night in my twentieth year Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard and I watched a TV play about a poet. Not a historical poet. It didn’t begin, ‘John Clare grew up in a rural setting’, and then give you a shot of a sheep saying baa. No, the poet was contemporary, and it seemed uncomplainingly minor, getting on in years now, and pottering about in and around his suburban semi-detached. The play was called He Used to Notice Such Things, and it was narrated by the poet’s wife.
‘Cuthbert would take an orange from the fruit bowl and weigh it in his hands and examine the tiny stipples on its surface with a smile of childish wonder.’ That kind of thing. Old Cuthbert was the same in the street, like a medieval village idiot airdropped into a metropolis – utterly confounded by the sight of a bus, a letterbox, a telegraph pole…Jane was quietly sceptical, but Kingsley and I writhed and swore and sneered our way through the whole ninety minutes.
For a long time now I’ve been wanting to get hold of Kingsley’s spirit and say, Dad, I’m sorry about this, but do you remember the TV play about that fucking old fool of a poet? Cuthbert? He Used to Notice Such Things? Well listen. It was trite and corny and thoroughly and comprehensively ballsaching – but it wasn’t wrong. Not wrong. To be a poet, to be a writer, you have to be continuously surprised. You have to have something of the fucking old fool in you.
Borges, in his long conversation with the Paris Review, at one point spoke with bafflement about all the people who simply fail to notice the mystery and glamour of the observable world. In a sentence that stands out for its homeliness, he said, ‘They take it all for granted.’ They accept the face value of things…
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.
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As a counterpoise this too remember. You are a stranger in a strange land – but you come to it with a…
All right. Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was written in a Berlin boarding house, when both the author and the century were about twenty-five. His situation was as follows: having fled the Bolsheviks, he and his Jewish bride now awaited the Nazis (the NSDAP was formed in 1920); his father had been shot dead by a (Russian) fascist in 1922; his mother and his sisters were penniless in Prague. Vladimir was deracinated, declassed, and destitute. And yet Mary bears not the slightest trace of melancholy, let alone alienation or nausée. Indeed, the only angst Nabokov ever suffered from had to do with ‘the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. And his first novel ends with his promise to meet that world with
