So we only have to blush our way through another four months of this before Trump gets booted and hooted out of town on November 9. And then we’ll be able to relax, and look forward to putting the memory (at least) of this tragicomic excruciation further and further behind us.
—————
After lights out…
After lights out Elena said, ‘I stole one of your Valium. In case I fret. About Spats.’
‘About Spats? Not Nigel Farage, not Trump. Spats. Elena, let me put your mind at rest. Spats is as happy as a pig in shit out there. Midnight prowls. Birdlings and baby rabbits to rip apart. We’ll see Spats soon enough.’
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘Mart. I may be wrong, but you seem to have stopped agonising about your book. Is that true too?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I have to own up to something.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘It’s nothing bad. It’s good…Very early on this year I had a kind of…I wasn’t at my desk. I was reading on the sofa. I closed my eyes and imagined a visitor had come to the house. Entirely benign. A gentle ghost – a gentle reader, in fact. And guess who it was. My much younger self, come to me with questions. Only I felt more like a girl this time round. It was like receiving a child of mine. Kind of Nat plus Bobbie.’
‘Jesus Christ. Were you having one of your episodes d’you think?’
‘Probably. Anyway, then I wrote ten pages – fast. Something became undammed. It was me at eighteen, when I used to say to myself, I don’t want to be a writer (or not yet). I want to be a reader. I just want to be a part of it. Humbly resolved, Elena. Devotional. I just wanted to be a part of it.’
‘…Okay. Bye now. D’you realise how early we’ve got to get up? In about half an hour!’ She yawned. ‘Well if you do go crazy, I’ll stand by you. Up to a point.’
‘I know you will, my dearest. Up to a point.’
Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word),
That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I’d be a part of it.
*1 ‘Delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy. Instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights’ (An Essay of Dramatick Poesy). So the pleasure principle had an eloquent champion even then, in 1668.
*2 America flexes its exceptionalism in neglecting to disarm its citizens; in Pinker’s words it has ‘never fully signed on to this clause of the modern social contract’.
*3 Literary history conclusively humbled Clarissa by following it, a year later, with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (and how thuddingly democratic that name must have sounded – cf. Charles Primrose, Tristram Shandy, Peregrine Pickle, Sir Launcelot Greaves)…Fielding was already a committed tormentor of Richardson, whose bestselling first novel, the bourgeois penny-dreadful Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741), was instantly answered by Fielding’s Shamela (a contemptuous parody). But it is the example of Tom Jones, with its easy candour and humour and sexual straightforwardness, that provides the real refutation. In due course the Richardson-type novel (after a nervously extended stay in the genre mocked by Jane Austen and others, that of the Gothic) died out, while the Fielding-type novel, backed up by Don Quixote (thrillingly translated by Tobias Smollett in 1750), went on to constitute fiction in English.
Chapter 4 The Night of Shame
She’s scaring me, Hitch
‘Ah, you’re opening up at last. Go on, Little Keith. Sob it all out.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Whatever else I might like about her, and there’s plenty I like about her, I haven’t got to the end of her physically. There’s still a long way to go.’
‘How’s she managed that? After – after two years…Is it all the purdahs?’
‘They help, I suppose.’ I had never confessed to Christopher about the true extent – and the true durations – of all the purdahs. ‘Have you ever dated a religious chick?’
‘No. Or not knowingly. Of course,’ he said, ‘you’ve dated whole nunneries and priories of religious chicks.’
‘Yeah – there wasn’t any way round it till I was sixteen or seventeen. All my ones were working class or lower middle, and that lot were all religious. Gaw, what you had to go through, to get a kiss on the cheek.’
‘Mm, I’d like God to know before he dies just what a huge geohistorical turn-off he’s been. Think, Little Keith. Not just the prohibitions but the guilt. Think of all the fiascos, all the no-shows, and all the hairtrigger ejaculations. And don’t forget all the consoling handjobs – tearfully aborted for fear of blindness and insanity…’
‘All true, O Hitch. When Dad was a kid the school vicar took them round the chronic ward of a madhouse saying one wank and you’ll be just like them. But every now and then – and you may not know this – every now and then old Nobodaddy bestirs himself and cooks you up…one hell of a fuck.’
‘Really?’ Christopher’s intent look: not so much a frown as a bulging stare. ‘This is a real gap in my religious knowledge. In my RK. Please continue.’
It was seven-fifteen on a Wednesday morning, so we were on the train bound for
