Advent 2 Fiction

If you have endured my pergrinations through the blogosphere for any time, you would not expect this year to pass without a reference to the man who, in my scabrous moments, is my favourite author, that old rascal Simon Raven. I am not a great one for re-reading any more than I re-watch many films. These are rules to which there are lots of exceptions. Most particularly I am probably in my fourth joyous saunter through Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence. In mid-ramble I happily let Places Where They Sing entrance me. It is the sixth volume in the sequence.

Raven puts these words in the mouth of Robert Reculver Constable, a priggish don of whom he does not, I judge, wholly approve. Typical of Raven however the sentiments that Constable spouts would find favour with Raven. Nuance is all my dear.

So much for Tom and Daniel. There remains the question of the left-wing joker ... The Rev. Oliver Clewes, the College Chaplain. He is one of those new progressive clerics who hardly seem to believe in God at all and apparently picture Christ as some kind of revolutionary guerilla from South America. As a nominal Christian, Clewes is mistrusted by most of the left, while as a declared socialist he is mistrusted by all of the right. The few people remaining merely despise him as an equivocating opportunist. The one important thing to be said of him, therefore, is that he will discredit whatever cause he may adopt in the eyes of everybody, so that one can only hope he will not support a good one.         

Advent 23

Volume 23 (Vase to Zygo): Venice.

And so we reach the end of the text entries in Dave's Big Book of Knowledge. Tomorrow we have only the Index and Atlas to work from. Don't worry it will all come together seamlessly. Have I ever let you down?

I have never been to Venice but it's on my list this, 'city and seaport of Italy, occupying one of the most remarkable sites in the world'. If the pundits are to be believed I will need to get my skates on as the place is drowning under the twin burdens of climate change and tourism.

the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel

The appearance on page 63 of Venice gives me the opportunity to return you to quite possibly my favourite author, Simon Raven. Evelyn Waugh is demonstrably a better writer but we are talking about my middle-brow prejudices and so Raven gets the prize. He was a dilettante spendthrift who plied his authorial gifts in the service of earning money and his later works betray haste and some laziness. However his ten novel sequence Alms for Oblivion is an underrated and massive fictive achievement. Had my doctorate not been about Shakespeare, I would have chosen Raven as my subject. Anyway in the tenth and final instalment of that roman fleuve, The Survivors, Raven deploys Venice as a magnificent extended metaphor for the dying world of elegance. I was going to quote the final paragraph of the novel here but I will leave it for you to read the entire sequence yourself. You will thank me. Instead I will give you an extract from the brilliant and acerbic Introduction that Raven himself contributed to the 1998 reprint of Alms for Oblivion. I have quoted these lines before in these pages, but, hey ho, it is my blog after all.

The cry, 'If I can't, you mustn't', had some trace of justification, however sullen and unlovely the sound of it. Nowadays we hear instead an even less lovely cry, 'If I don't want to, you mustn't': i.e. 'It is just possible that I am, after all, missing out on something of value which you have been shrewd enought to detect and I haven't, and that wouldn't be fair and equal, now would it?' Once upon a time, however strong and righteous you considered your message, you scorned to become a pest: in 1998, however trivial your grievance, you find yourself encouraged and even 'morally obliged' to become not just a pest but a pestilence.     

Welcome To Hardy Country

It's an indicative confession that this man with a respectable first class degree in English has never before in his sixty years read any Thomas Hardy. This man, the Overgraduate aka Big Fat Pig (though getting slimmer - more of this below) has always struggled with the Victorian novel - loved David Copperfield but couldn't hack the rest of Dickens, fought through Middlemarch through a sense of obligation, etc.

Well anyway shame at this omission has caught up with me and I have pulled from the shelf a three novel collection of Hardy texts which I seem to have acquired for the princely sum of one of your English pounds. The nagging guilt must have acted upon me when I bought it, although I cannot for the life of me remember when that might have been. And now I've started on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, so I intend to finish. It's heavy going particularly as I came to this after the quick pleasure of re-reading Simon Raven's Fielding Gray. However I can see why Hardy has admirers and before we got to Tess's fall (I strongly suspect this will not be the lowest point of her trajectory) I was taken with one of the best descriptions of joyful drunkenness that I have encountered:

The fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait ... Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thought, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Now you have to admit that's rather beautiful.

So I mentioned, did I not, that the Pig is shrinking. He is playing a bit of golf (not too badly as it happens - not well but you know what I mean) and that is a help but more importantly the Pig is regularly gracing the mean streets of Four Oaks in his athletic gear. He is up to ninety minute runs and one hundred and fifty minute cycle rides. There is power to add. Hopefully.

 

Writers Write/ Writers Read/ Kill Your Parents

Any of you who have been with me since the start will recognise these three injunctions as the Imperatives of Marchant delivered as with lapidary permanence by my first creative writing tutor.

I have found the first of these difficult to observe of late, rather feeling that what little I have got to say has already been said. As for the second, well I drift in and out of reading - I'm in one of my good phases at present. I alluded to this in my last entry. Since that entry I have completed Waugh's Men at Arms and have saved the next instalment of Sword of Honour for later, treating myself now to an interval of Simon Raven. I have read and re-read his Alms for Oblivion sequence countless times already - first encountering him from the fiction shelves of Erdington library as a teenager, pointed in the direction of this magnificently louche author by my father. To repeat the most oft-used critical estimation: the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel.

So it is that I am a hundred pages into Friends in Low Places, the second novel of the sequence. In my mind I had thought that this was one of the weaker books of the ten. Either I have hitherto been wrong or the whole shebang is even better than I had thought. Entrancing - no that's not quite the bon mot - let's try raucous and compelling, which is two bons mots. Just writing this piece is making me want to get back to read some more.

There is a temptation to read into the fictional mind of Raven's proto-novelist Fielding Gray something of Raven himself:

But what then? Suppose his work found favour with Somerset and his novels were published by Gregory Stern, suppose, even, that they achieved some measure of public esteem, what was to follow? Would there be anything more to say? Could he face the prospect of carrying on indefinitely with such a career? For did not even the two existing manuscripts pose the question, "While this is quite well done, was there ever, in truth, any real reason for doing it?"

I think we can take it as read that Raven himself would not have set much store by the opinion of a jobbing commercial lawyer but for what it's worth Simon old boy, these novels have been important to me. And here is another sample of why - this is the Marquis Canteloupe's reflection on his first meeting with the gruesome Somerset Lloyd-James:

In short, Somerset Lloyd-James would do. That he was manifestly not only a gentleman but also a howling shit did not deter Canteloupe one iota: for one thing, as he reflected, he was a shit himself, and for another he preferred working with them. For the great thing about shits was that they got on with it (provided the price was right) and didn't ask damn silly questions.

Delicious and so so right, as any honest jobbing commercial lawyer will tell you. Mind you, good luck in finding such a tradesman who is both jobbing and honest.

Away from books and outside on the mean streets of Britain, coronavirus continues to hold us in its invisible grasp. The Prime Minister has gone down with it now, not to mention the heir to the throne. The Roberts household is fine thus far and indeed Big Fat Pig is rather relishing the feeling of virtuousness that comes with regular exercise - two runs this week and an outing on the Precious Bike. All of this the Pig reports to you exactly one calendar month away from his sixtieth anniversary.

The mood of the domestic incarceration we are all enduring is no doubt made lighter by the gorgeous Spring weather we are enjoying. When, as it must, rain keeps us from even the sole exercise excursion we are permitted each day, the national mood may darken. As for how people will feel when we finally emerge blinking into the sunlit uplands of normality is a more troubling question - because then we will survey the full wreckage of our economy. But that is for another day.