*9 Phoebe’s interest in Larkin – mainly human interest – had been stirred by a TV rerun of an interview, in black and white, with John Betjeman. I watched it at Hereford Road, with Phoebe looking doubtfully over my shoulder.
*10 And Phoebe, philosophically, saw eye to eye with this poem. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ describes a ‘frail travelling coincidence’. The poet is taking the train from the north of England to the capital on Whit Sunday, the Christian festival of early summer, traditionally a propitious time for marriage. And ‘[a]ll down the line / Fresh couples climbed aboard’. The eighth and final stanza ends when the train is approaching a London ‘spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts stacked like squares of wheat’. And here it comes: ‘We slowed again, / And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled / A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’ That isolating scepticism about love and marriage, in the face of time, was part of an inner argument that Larkin often gave voice to, but never as tellingly as here: the arrows of desire, as the poet sees it, are doomed to deliquesce in impotence and tedium – becoming as dull as rain. Phoebe was in profound sympathy with such a view. So it wasn’t the paraphrasable content of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ that provoked Phoebe’s humph; it must have been the form itself, he thought – the poetic form…The actual practitioners they were always running into socially (James Fenton, Craig Raine, Peter Porter, Ian Hamilton) she regarded quizzically, suspiciously; and whenever I talked about poetry she looked at me as if I was nuts. This would be explained, or roughly accounted for, in 1978.
*11 Bob was Robert Conquest (1917–2015), poet, critic, and historian – specifically a Sovietologist, best known for The Great Terror (on the purges of 1937–8) and The Harvest of Sorrow (on Collectivisation, and the terror-famine of 1932–3).
Guideline The Novel Moves On
What’s the difference between a story and a plot? you ask.
According to E. M. Forster (whom Jane used to refer to by his middle name, as did everyone who knew him), ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story, but ‘the king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Not so, Edward, not so, Morgan! ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is still a story. To mutate into a plot, a story needs a further element – easily supplied, here, by a comma and an adverb.
The king died, and then the queen died, ostensibly of grief is a plot. Or a hook. Plots demand constant attention, but a good hook can stand alone and untouched, like an anchor, and keep things fixed and stable in any weather. Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered.
Those amiably vague remarks about the king and the queen come from Forster’s stimulating little book, Aspects of the Novel, which appeared in 1927. At that time it went without saying, in polite society, that plots – and hooks – were beneath the dignity of serious writers, and that the Great Tradition consisted of stories: long stories. ‘Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story,’ wrote Forster; and it is probably his most-quoted line (apart from ‘Only connect!’)…He died, aged ninety-one, in 1970, when the novel, the Forsterian novel, so sane, so orderly, was in quiet retreat. Because the literary vanguard was starting to say, No – oh God, no – the novel doesn’t tell a story. Because times have changed.
As early as 1973 Anthony Burgess was floating the notion that there are, in fact, two types of novelist, which he called type ‘A’ and type ‘B’. ‘A’ novelists were interested in narrative, character, motivation, and psychological insight, said Burgess, while ‘B’ novelists were interested above all in language – in the play of words.
That statement seemed precipitate back then, but within a few years it was no more than a fair description of the status quo. While the ‘A’ novelists were carrying on as normal, the ‘B’ novelists (who had long been hazy presences on the fringe) were suddenly everywhere, composing novels as structureless as alphabet soup and as wayward as schizophrenia.
We saw novels that did without paragraph breaks or punctuation, or did without monosyllables, or polysyllables, or common nouns or verbs or adjectives; one assiduous daredevil thought it worth putting together a prose epic that did without the letter e. There was also much stream of consciousness, much self-referential friskiness, and – in a broad variety of styles and registers – much overwriting.
The surge in experimentalism ran alongside the sexual revolution, and sprang from the same collective eureka: the unsuspected flimsiness of certain venerable prohibitions. As it turned out, the ‘language’ novelists slowly peaked and then slowly plunged, and the whole thrust was over in two generations…So the stream of consciousness – to take the least attractive innovation – raved and mumbled on for sixty years; looking back, reading back, one is amazed it lasted sixty minutes. Nowadays, anyway, the ‘B’ novel is dead.*1
Detectable too has been a reordering of the relationship between writer and reader (in the plainest of times a relationship of inexhaustible complexity and depth). ‘We like difficult books,’ littérateurs used to claim; and this supposed preference turned
