Blogs are the molehills of literature. As you see from my photo taken in the park yesterday morning, a mole plays havoc with a lawn by leaving little piles of soil as evidence of its nocturnal tunnelling. Nothing infuriates a gardener more. But a child is fascinated; none more so than the child who takes words at face value. Many times I would exploit a grazed knee to gain maximum attention. Then an adult would say, “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” At once a prohibition and an enticement: for here was a hint that molehills could be made into mountains, just as a grazed knee could be turned into melodrama.If the purpose of life is to find your niche and stay there, then let me stay in the lowest foothills. “I would climb the highest mountain”, say the songs—as if an unresponsive sweetheart could be wooed by such means. George Mallory was more honest: “My love, I must bid you farewell, for I am to climb the tallest peak.” “Why, darling, why?” “Because it’s there”. He died in1924, but his mortal remains were not discovered till 1999, not far from the summit of Mount Everest. Why?—because they were there. That was his niche. He found it, and stayed there.
“Small is beautiful”. I recall the moment when I found the book of that name, by EF Schumacher. It takes me back to Goodge Street in 1976, near a place called Nice Irma’s which sold big cushions of rich Indian fabrics, braided and sequined. Entering that shop (next to the bookstore), you were wafted into psychedelic heaven on a fluffy cloud. (Why do I recall that particular detail? It was a small moment, a molehill in the bleak plain of my life at that time. It’s context which adds savour to an experience, or washes all savour away.) Anyhow, I did read it. No mountain was then too high for my ambition—I wished I’d taken the trouble to get in first and write the book myself. This overlooked one obvious fact, that it was all economics, which bores me. Still, if I could have stifled the yawns, I might have written a paragraph like this:
“. . . Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.”
This was not literature. But now I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills and contemplate something which is. I’ve started to read Martin Amis’ novel Money: it soars among the highest in aim and achievement. But I’ll pick something from its low foothills. (If you want a proper review of the book, you could start with this one from Time magazine.) But I just want to extract one thought for closer analysis: the relationship between writer and reader. If you disapprove of Money, or Martin Amis, you’ll sneer at his subject-matter, and the “terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English” (from a Guardian article, via Wikipedia). But a book doesn’t get listed in Time’s 100 best novels since 1922 just for that. A writer doesn’t win the heart of a reader by being clever, but by achieving a mutual embrace with the reader. You and I, if I’m not wasting my time here, are locked in a dance, you in your space-time, I in mine. Through some chemistry of language, we enjoy a prolonged session of intimacy, a coitus of the mind. If the writer touches no ecstasy, what hope for the reader? “No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said the irascible and melancholic Dr Johnson. His attitude explains why no one reads his voluminous literary output today. He ground out his verse-dramas to make a living, but his best fun lay in throwing out opinionated apophthegms at dinner-parties, coffee-houses and taverns. And Boswell had the best times of his life, apart from what was then unmentionable in literature, at Johnson’s side, scribbling notes to be written up later. Centuries afterwards, we ignore Johnson’s writings, but, through Boswell, revere the man.
For me, I can only write when the Muse induces a state of ecstasy: and then I can never convey the feeling. I admire Fernando Pessoa for his Book of Disquiet, whose topics include every mood, every state of boredom, exhaustion, insomnia or alienation. By some verbal alchemy, recklessly stretching the capabilities of language, exploring the furthest reaches of his own singularity, he takes us to a climax of recognition, time and again. How can he do that?
I admire Amis for somewhat similar reasons. As a man, he doesn’t come across as the lovable type—more the moody spoilt genius. His hero in Money is John Self, which you could easily take as a hint that his novel is autobiographical. But no. Martin Amis, novelist, is also a character in the novel, a fictional presentation of its author. Of course, a novelist can split himself into any number of parts, and often does. John Self is a fat ugly cantankerous sick drunken woman-hitting brawling chain-smoking fast-food-guzzling pornography addict. His long “suicide note” is eloquent with verbal dexterity of a kind completely incompatible with the philistine narrator who confesses he never reads books. So we are to imagine Money as the paraphrase of a stream of consciousness which Self feels but cannot put into language. I embrace with glee my chance to live in John Self’s skin with no lasting damage to my own health. I don’t get the hangovers and blackouts, but aspire to a similar eloquence about my own life.
I have to confess that I’m only an eighth of the way through. That’s when I usually feel like writing a review, while it’s fresh and not a blurry memory; when I have just reached base camp and aim to stay there till my reflective self has had time to catch up. I’m open to every impression, not yet parti pris. This is how I like to be, ready to see the universe in a grain of sand. Small is beautiful. I’m not just reading a novel, I’m reaching beyond myself to walk in the shoes of someone I’ll never be, and discover that we are closer in brotherhood than I ever imagined. With a book’s help, I make the discovery, in Walt Whitman’s words, that “I am large, I contain multitudes”. He continues: “I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.” Yeah, me too, on a good day. Here at base-camp, my book is nigh, I can sit on my own threshold, lay my book down on the door-slab whilst I converse with you, my dear.
Who is my neighbour? You: and Amis’s anti-hero who recklessly insults New York cabbies; at any rate one who dreams of getting “a hundred guys” with whom he could “take out all the niggers and PRs [Puerto Ricans] in this fuckin town”. (The cabbie too is my neighbour.) After a brief discussion of the feasibility of this undertaking, our hero asks,
“Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”
“Uh?”
“Kill all the niggers and PRs?”
“They think, you know, you drive a yellow cab,” he said, and raised one limp splayed hand from the wheel, “you must be some kind of a scumbag.”
I sighed and leaned forward. “You know something?” I asked him. “You really are a scumbag. I thought it was just a swearword until you came along. You’re the first real one I’ve met.”
My reader, fellow-blogger, mon semblable—mon frère! I owe you. Thanks for the inspiration. Writing is love. Reading is love. We are large, we contain multitudes. We are molehills, more alive and changeable than those huge old mountains.
Thanks especially to . . .
. . . Cora and also Steve H. who, in his list of “the most overrated of all time”, had this to say about Martin Amis: “I forgot Martin Amis. He’s certainly worse than mediocre; he’s macabre. To me that’s the greatest perversion there is.”
. . . and to Rebb who responded to my mention of the novel thus: “Interesting that you find the book you are currently reading uplifting! It might just depress me.”
