Allan Massie

Amanda Craig recently rebuked her fellow novelists for evading the contemporary scene and setting their novels in the past. We should be more like the Victorians, she said, and have the courage to write about our own times. If the novel is to be relevant to readers, it should address today’s issues. Why, she asked, is Hilary Mantel publishing a novel about Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, rather than . . . Well, I don’t recall if she actually suggested an alternative subject, but her point is clear. Writing historical novels is an evasion of the novelist’s duty. Of course Hilary Mantel has written novels set in the here and now, and very good ones.

Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Few would look for what academics might call ‘a gay sub-text’ in the Waverley novels. Nevertheless, writing of the relationship between the two young men who share most of the narrative in Redgauntlet, Professor David Hewitt, editor of the splendid Edinburgh Edition, declares ‘Alan and Darsie are in love with each other. There is absolutely no suggestion of their relationship being physical, but the love is overt.

The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The composer James MacMillan, in a letter published in the Scottish Catholic Observer, expressed regret, but not surprise, that he had never in his youth been pointed in the direction of Robert Burns’s ‘wonderful “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” ’, which he has recently set to music. The consensus that, in his opinion, ‘tries to dismiss Burns’ royalist and Jacobite sympathies . . .

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing.

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’ Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses.

Flying to Athens on one of his last visits to Greece, Simon Gray started reading a novel by C. P. Snow, one of those old orange Penguins. After 50 pages he ‘still had no idea what the story was about’. It seemed foggy, ‘but an odd sort of fog, everything described so clearly, and yet everything obscured … he describes his world without seeing it, almost as if he thinks adjectives are in themselves full of detail and content.’ As for the narrator, Lewis Eliot (‘I suppose he’s a front for old C. P. himself’ — which he undoubtedly was), Simon remarked on his ‘trick of having himself complimented’ by other characters. This is certainly irritating.

Chesterton refuses to go away. You may think he should have done so. Orwell tried to show him the door: Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life … every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan.

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’. His confidence had been high when at work on the novel.

A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). No doubt Lady Hester’s admirers find Kinglake intolerable, but his interview with her is a masterpiece of ironic writing.

Allan Massie on Life & Letters ‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the time anyway, but the question remains a fair one. In his defence, the author of the book in which Hemingway is so portrayed, Stephen Koch, might argue that all these epithets might also be applied to the Hemingway depicted by his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, and by his admiring friend or, in some people’s opinion, sidekick, A. E. Hotchner.

‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp , all the more so because it was the conclusion of Jonathan Sumption’s review in this magazine of John Guy’s book about Thomas and Margaret More; and Jonathan Sumption is not only a Spectator reviewer, but also one of our finest historians.

Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’ A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die for four months I’ll have to find something to write. Any ideas?

Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t pastiche Lowry?’ Crushing criticism; also just. At that time in my writing and drinking life I was in thrall to Malcolm Lowry. So indeed was Anthony and much of our late night/early morning conversation in bars drew heavily on Under the Volcano, often indeed consisted of quotations from the novel. ‘And often the poor guy, he had no socks’ — that sort of thing.

Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this mean that in continuing to try to write novels one is either a decadent, or engaged in energetically flogging a dead horse? Should the novelist apply to himself these lines from one of Pound’s ‘Cantos’: ‘Yuan Yin sat by the roadside pretending to receive wisdom/ And Kung said/ “You old fool, come out of it,/ Get up and do something useful”.

Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description of the method he employed to compile his catalogue, survive today. Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature also tells us that ‘his is the proverbial saying, “mega biblion, mega kakon” ’, which means, if my rusty Greek has not seized up completely, ‘big book, big bad’, a sentiment to which reviewers, confronted by an 800-page biography, may often give wholehearted assent.

At least a couple of times, probably more often, Anthony Burgess declared that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘too well for a novelist’. ‘Sour grapes’ you may say, remembering that in his own novels Burgess often wrote in clumsy and slapdash style, and that he was perhaps himself a better reviewer than novelist. But it wasn’t just sour grapes. There was an argument behind the opinion. He believed that writing a novel ‘should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey’. Compare [he suggested] Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End with Waugh’s Sword of Honour.

A fortnight ago Sam Leith, reviewing Neil Powell’s book on the Amises, father and son, wrote: Powell is insistent — and for all I know dead right, but that’s hardly the point — that Kingsley was a sufferer from depression. Of the last sentence of The Anti-Death League (‘There isn’t anywhere to be.’), he writes: ‘This — the last sentence especially — is the authentic voice of depression, and only a depressive could have written it.’ You may wonder where that untestable assertion gets us. You may indeed, though the answer is pretty obvious: not very far.