Culture

In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, newly arrived in Britain, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. His sharp eye captured both a society in turmoil and one imbued with immense postwar promise. He combined critical distance with an innate, almost American optimism. Nearly three decades later this sequel, as its title implies, is far less optimistic. Hodgson would certainly agree with Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and Attorney-General, John Mitchell, who said, on his way to gaol, ‘This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognise it.

W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone concluded that the Golden Dawn was a fraud. When I was doing a night class on Yeats in Leicester in 1948, I remember our professor, Philip Collins, explaining that we simply had to accept that the great poet was also a credulous idiot, the only extenuating circumstance being that he wanted to believe such rubbish because it gave him ‘material for poetry’. Yeats himself would have rejected this with fury. And The Place of Enchantment offers much support for his view.

It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense research a marvellous, immense narrative. Its ultimately stupendous effect is down to the fact that Isherwood, whatever his failings and limitations, was simply there when it counted; old enough to understand the Great War, there at the Opernplatz when the Nazis burnt Heinrich Heine’s work, and there in San Francisco for the summer of love and the birth of personal liberation mythologies.

In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise in the Gulf War of 1991 and the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq in order to present ‘an objective record of a cross-section of the intellectual community’, which embraces both Jilly Cooper and Lord Skidelsky, by canvassing its opinions. The word ‘community’ is revealing. Writers are, like theatre ‘luvvies’, most comfortable with their own kind, including the dead.

I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who spent most of his life in Cornwall among the artists of St Ives, but I hear his voice in my head saying, ‘Tell them about the poems’. So I will. Graham’s are the most talkative poems of the 20th century. They talk to the reader, to friends (dead and alive), to his wife, to himself (or selves), to the muse, to silence, to the alphabet and, perhaps most importantly, to language itself. Here he is in ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ talking to his dead artist friend: This is only a note To say how sorry I am You died. and to his wife, Nessie: Are you asleep I say Into the back of your neck For you not to hear me.

When I interviewed him about his novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath described himself as a ‘psychological novelist’, adding that he would be ‘very happy to spend the next 30 years working through different species of madness’. That was eight years ago, and he seems to be keeping to schedule. Asylum and then Dr Haggard’s Disease were richly praised for their portrayals of dangerous obsession and the loss of sanity. This new novel examines the maddening effect of life in the tropics on two volatile artists and their godforsaken daughters.