Culture

Free from the cares of office, Andrew Motion has been busy. In fact, he has been a frenzy of activity. His output on Bob Dylan, Philip Larkin and the like has been well publicised; however, the Motion Report into poetry in schools is less well-known.   I still have dreams about my short-trousered self standing on a flip-lid desk straining to recite some featureless excerpt of Walter de la Mare. Motion agrees that poetry and school often do not mix; he writes in the report’s foreword: ‘Poetry is commonly described as a valuable part of our national life. But by common consent the existing general audience for it is much smaller than it could be, and the enthusiasm for it in schools is less than it should be.

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator: Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences.

'He has no house.' Volislav Jakic's epigraph opens In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut's acclaimed novel. Donne's 'No man is an island' would have served just as well. This is the story of one rootless man, Damon, and his fear of commitment. Ostensibly, travel is Galgut's subject. Hope and desire are thwarted by chance and choice on the road. But, as Galgut is fond of saying, memory is fiction. With the globe at his disposal, Galgut explores how memory is adopted or discarded to mitigate or exaggerate moments of euphoria, grief and regret; and hints at the influence of landscape on memory. Africa - its beauty and squalor, promise and threat - is the book's most visited landscape, inspiring some of the most evocative description of time and place I've ever read.

Christmas publishing stock was in the bookshops for the end of November, so in the absence of material to review, literary editors have roasted the last of their chestnuts with Books of the Year lists. For the most comprehensive list on politics, history, art, and international relations, fiction and poetry, the Economist’s is hard to beat. Jane Shilling’s review of The Memory Chalet in the Telegraph is a tribute to Tony Judt, the historian and philosopher, who died in August. As he struggles to cope with the physical debilitations of motor neurone disease, he creates an intellectual memory bank in a holiday cottage his parents took in the Swiss Alps when he was a boy.

The late twentieth century was blessed with brilliant academic historians whose writing had a common touch; Tony Judt was one of them. Postwar was his crowning achievement. As Europe’s divided halves were conjoined politically and economically after the Cold War, Judt united their conflicted histories. For instance, 1968 was about more than students in Paris and Prague; it was a continental mass of common causes and misunderstandings – a thwarted dash for freedom of expression and thought, from which stronger collective identities must eventually emerge.   He was also an essayist, whose work merited the over-used label of ‘polemic’ – a form that seeks truth in confrontation, not ad hominem for its own sake.

C is a Bildungsroman telling the history of Serge Carrefax, an increasingly unlikable amoral antihero. The novel is divided into four sections covering Serge’s childhood, his adventures during the First World War as a member of the Royal Flying Corps, his misadventures in 1920s London with drugs and chorus-girls (all the bits Bertie Wooster left out), and finally a journey into the tombs of Egypt for the Ministry of Communications. Most Bildungsromans follow their protagonists on a journey of development towards self-knowledge. Serge, however, is on a journey to nowhere. Born in 1898 along with the first experimental radio transmissions, he spends his whole life obsessed with transmission and networks of communication.

I doubt that Philip Larkin has ever been out of fashion, but after the 25th anniversary of his death and the publication of his letters to Monica Jones – beautifully reviewed for the Spectator by Philip Hensher – his star is well and truly back in the ascendant. T.S. Eliot, who was hardly renowned for generosity of spirit, wrote that Larkin made ‘words do what he wanted’ - a singular talent that gave Larkin broad appeal, which, for me, is his greatest strength. From the savage irreverence of This Be The Verse to the delicacy of High Windows, Larkin cuts it with both the intelligentsia and the chatterati. To prove the point, Radio 4 broadcast David Walliams and Andrew Motion waxing on all things Larkin. What’s not to like?

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator: The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean ‘everyone’, or just her agent, publisher and ‘many psychiatrists’?

Last week was Shelley, here’s this week’s Discovering Poetry excerpt: Now I’d be willing to wage at least a fiver that in the last twenty-four hours you passed on the street a nice young couple walking happily hand-in-hand. Nauseating, isn’t it? But also the most natural thing in the world. There seems to me something very touching about such modest affection. Little in itself, but enough to mean the world when done rightly. Between lovers, between a mother and her child, or in the softly squeezed hand of a friend in grief. It’s with this most everyday act of human love that Milton ends Paradise Lost.

Alas, Gordon Brown’s Beyond the Crash was just too late to qualify for this month’s Spectator Book Club book of the month. What a sadness. Instead, I’ve picked a book to inspire goodwill in all men: Lucky Jim. The Spectator originally described Kingsley Amis’ campus classic as ‘that rarest of rare good things, a very funny book’. The general anger that Amis expressed has dissipated into apathy – nowadays it’s the students who feel exercised. But Amis’ craft - the wicked set-pieces, savage wit and his deft prose – remains vivid and modern. Orlando Bird’s piece on Amis’ legacy reminded me of what I’d forgotten of arguably the finest novel ever written by an Amis - let’s have that argument.

A couple of years back, John Carey reviewed a new biography of Kingsley Amis and began with the question that people had been asking for years: why was he so horrible? Amis is regarded as one of a generation of fat philistines, drink-sodden and misanthropic, who made careers of bating Britain’s ‘Trots and leftist shags’. But he was not always so. John Metcalf, reviewing Lucky Jim for the Spectator in 1954, described it as ‘that rarest of rare good things: a very funny book’. ‘Dixon’, he wrote, ‘is completely believable, his predicaments and gaucheries are a part of him, and Mr Amis watches with wide-eyed objectivity’. Lucky Jim, Metcalf concluded, is ‘a very funny, very human novel’.

‘The coalition’s proposal to slash funding for the arts…and humanities risk not just losing a generation of artists, but also a generation of critical and creative thinkers’. So says an indignant Guardian letter buttressed by a shopping list of academics. A familiar clarion call. But surprise, surprise what unites the subjects threatened with impoverishment? Books. It all, in the end, comes back to books. No matter how celebrated the lecturer, no matter how state-of-the-art the facilities, no matter how revolutionary and innovative the course, arts and humanities degrees at least are all about books.      Lectures are little more than a splash and a skim through material, a verbal snifter instead of the readerly gulp.

This article was originally published on the Spectator’s Cappuccino Culture blog. It is republished here because it relates to last week’s episode of the gripping if smaltzy adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the story of one writer’s journey through the twentieth century. The second episode begins with the outbreak of the Second World War, the party interrupted. It airs at 9pm tonight on Channel Four. Without need of an occupation, a small band of the well-born lit up the 1920s with mischief and indolence. The last of their number, Teresa Jungman, died aged 102. Many of the dilettante Bright Young Things went on to ‘Great Things’ – William Walton composed, Cecil Beaton photographed and Rex Whistler painted.