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- Critique<\/a><\/li>\n
- Literature<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
21 May, 2010<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_novel1.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nPoet-novelists or novelist-poets? And does it matter?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t write a novel. You\u2019re a poet. You\u2019re not a novelist.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was some time in the early 1990s or late \u201980s. I was having supper at the Groucho Club with Julian Barnes and his wife, the much-missed, much-loved Pat Kavanagh. We had just dutifully attended (and escaped) the presentation of the Arthur Koestler Awards (for creative convicts) in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields. I mentioned I was contemplating a novel in the near future. Pat\u2019s reaction was pitched somewhere between puzzled and withering. And it was all in incredulous italics: you can\u2019t write a novel.<\/em> Worth it, of course, to watch her lithe eyebrow lift like a snake about to strike.<\/p>\n
Blake Morrison, a client of Pat\u2019s, told me recently that she said the same thing to him. I think it\u2019s true to say that he is now better known as a novelist and memoirist than he is as a poet. Pat\u2019s agency has taken ten per cent of the apparently unthinkable three times now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was genuinely perplexed. As I was also puzzled by a recent email from Martin Amis, informing me that I was now in a very select group of poet-novelists. After all, there is no shortage of poet-novelists. Think of Hardy, Meredith, William Morris, Kipling. Think of Adam Thorpe, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Larkin, Simon Armitage, Updike.<\/p>\n
Updike? Kipling? Updike\u2019s prose is closer to poetry than his poetry \u2014 closer in its care and precision, in its riskiness, in its reach and ambition, in its cadences. The poetry is verse. The two sides of the equation \u2014 poet-novelist \u2014 are not equal. Kipling is another case in point. There are three novels, Kim<\/em>, Captains Courageous <\/em>and The Light that Failed \u2014 <\/em>I discount The Naulakha<\/em>, co-authored with Wolcott Balestier, his brother-in-law \u2014 but Kipling is, if anything, a different hybrid, a poet-short-story-writer. T. S. Eliot thought Kipling\u2019s poetry was verse, in any case. I disagree. Eliot has been misled by Kipling\u2019s radical use of the music hall and dialect-demotic forms whose popularity perhaps conceals Kipling\u2019s perfect ear for prosody, pitch and mimicry, his gift for imagery. The consensus, however, would be that Kipling is a great short story writer and a talented versifier<\/em>. Even I think the stories are superior to the poetry, the equal of Chekhov and better than Maupassant.<\/p>\n
Think of those tennis players flexing lopsided limbs, the playing arm practically prosthetic, a grotesque transplant from some Gog or Magog \u2014 those d\u00e9formations professionelles,<\/em> tumescent forearms wooden with workouts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ideally, we want the perfectly ambidextrous. Like Hardy. Usually, though, one of the arms is a little atrophied. Is Kingsley Amis\u2019s poetry the equal of his novels? Do we think of William Morris as a novelist? Only once upon a time. News from Nowhere <\/em>is nowhere to be seen in the canon of great novels. It is a curio. Primarily, he\u2019s remembered as a poet \u2014 the author of \u201cSir Peter Harpdon\u2019s End\u201d and the incomparable \u201cThe Haystack in the Floods\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And sometimes both the arms are atrophied: John Wain. The body of his work now looks increasingly like a seed potato with curt thalidomide paddles.<\/p>\n
Even Hardy isn\u2019t clear-cut. The Oxford English syllabus has the novels in the Nineteenth Century and the poetry in the Twentieth. The novels are indisputably a significant body of work. Would anyone deny the staying power of The Mayor of Casterbridge<\/em>, Tess of the d\u2019Urbervilles<\/em> and Jude the Obscure<\/em>? The poetry is more problematic. It shares the flaws of the prose \u2014 maladroit lapses and complacent irony \u2014 without any compensating narrative compulsion. And Hardy\u2019s greatest sequence, the dark 1912-13 poems in memory of his first wife, isn\u2019t without its verbal blemishes and ineptitudes (wan wistlessness <\/em>rhyming desperately with listlessness<\/em>).<\/p>\n
Maybe the genuine poet-novelist is rarer than we think.<\/p>\n
In principle, in theory, I have to say why not both?<\/em> After all, in addition to poetry, I\u2019ve written critical prose, libretti and plays (two in verse, one in prose). On the other hand, I wouldn\u2019t claim ambidexterity as a poet-playwright. I\u2019d leave that to Tony Harrison, simply because he\u2019s been more successful in getting his work staged and filmed. But shouldn\u2019t a writer be able to write anything?<\/p>\n
Then you think of James Joyce, a lord of language who could do anything with words, who never committed a sentence to paper without a reason, without re-rehearsing the sequence of syllables. In his memoir, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses<\/em> (Grayson), Frank Budgen recalls how Joyce recited one sentence, a sentence of only nine words from \u201cLestrygonians\u201d, as his full day\u2019s work. It was: \u201cWith hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.\u201d You see, said Joyce, how many different ways that sentence could be arranged. In other words, a boast of verbal attentiveness, of Flaubertian commitment to le mot juste<\/em>. Ezra Pound famously said that poetry should be at least as well written as prose. The implication of the Joyce anecdote is that prose should be at least as well written as poetry \u2014 defined by Coleridge as \u201cthe best words in the best possible order\u201d. Joyce\u2019s finicking with his nine words remind us of Marianne Moore\u2019s dismissive encapsulation of poetry as \u201call this fiddle\u201d.<\/p>\n
Two awkward considerations present themselves \u2014 the failure of Joyce\u2019s poetry, which Pound justly told him to keep in the family Bible, and that nine-word sentence, arranged with advertised care but to no great end. Were that sentence all to survive of Joyce, we wouldn\u2019t be rushing to read him. Joyce isn\u2019t a great poet-novelist. Like Updike, he is mesmerised by the cruder differences between poetry and prose \u2014 rhyme and metre. In poetry, both these great prose writers are deeply traditionalist, complacently copying poetry\u2019s ersatz externals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was almost a decade after that Groucho dinner before I attempted a novel. My notebooks, meanwhile, were full of potential material, things that seemed intrinsically novelistic \u2014 mainly, perhaps, because I couldn\u2019t see a way of using them as poetry. Now I believe that the compulsion to make poetry out of the recalcitrant, the prosaic, the unpoetic, is the best way \u2014 not the easiest way \u2014 to write original poetry. In fact, I would say that difficulty is essential to the creative process. I was drawn to the novel as a form because it was more difficult than poetry. I knew how to write poetry. I didn\u2019t know how to write a novel.<\/p>\n
I had a year\u2019s sabbatical in which to write. Almost six months went by. I edited a couple of issues of my magazine, Aret\u00e9. <\/em>I pursued my academic research. I wrote a talk for a Stephen Spender conference. I spent a lot of my time in the cinema during daylight hours. I had no idea how to deal with the disparate materials I had accumulated. I was demoralised. I went skiing on my own in Canezei. The hotel I stayed in was so spartan that the tiny tablet of soap provided disappeared in a couple of days \u2014 and a replacement was refused by the management. Four days into the holiday, I experienced an epiphany. I thought of a title that would magnetise the heterogeneous raw materials I had haphazardly gathered. I had been foraging for firewood for over ten years. Now I had a match \u2014 a single match, but it was enough to start a blaze. And I didn\u2019t even need to strike it. It was more like spontaneous combustion.<\/p>\n
I began to write as soon as I returned from Italy \u2014 March until mid-June. The pleasures of prose. When you have an idea for a poem, the time between conception and creation can be a couple of hours. Sometimes less. A long poem might take a week. The poet is like an actor performing a play that folds after the first performance. You spend a lot of time \u201cresting\u201d. Writing a novel is like being an actor in a long run. It\u2019s a proper job. You go to the desk every day. You quickly decide on a quota that is natural to you \u2014 in my case, about 500 or 600 words a day. Fewer than 100 words an hour. They quickly pile up.<\/p>\n
There were other rules, too. I didn\u2019t want to write a typical poet\u2019s novel \u2014 short on sex and long on description. I wanted plot and I wanted narrative speed. I didn\u2019t want fine writing for its own sake. My anti-model was the great Nabokov at his median. In a novel like The Gift,<\/em> all the satisfaction is in the sumptuous sentences, the clever conceits, while the narrative sulks, becalmed somewhere in the margins. You couldn\u2019t care less what happens next, because nothing happens next. Except maybe next month. I thought I could learn from the thriller \u2014 without actually reading one, of course.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, I wrote slowly and got through a mass of material. Occasionally, I thought of Virginia Woolf on Dickens: \u201cDickens made his books blaze by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then I had to edit another issue of Aret\u00e9<\/em>. Then term and teaching started again. And the novel became a postponed project for my retirement. I envisioned something the size of Ulysses<\/em> that would keep me out of mischief and see me into the grave. I did nothing to the novel for seven or eight years. Now and again, I would call up the text on my laptop and read a few pages \u2014 easily impressed and quietly confident, even complacent, like a man with a pension, until one day, after a longish interlude, I couldn\u2019t remember the end of one of my two major plot lines. I felt like a man who has hidden his insurance policy from himself. Then the novel definitely became a retirement project.\u00a0 (It\u2019s curious how important it is to many novelists to know how their books will end. William Boyd plans his novels \u2014 all of them brilliantly plotted \u2014 for two years before the actual writing. He says he changes very little. My novel, as it happened, went on after its intended conclusion, like a multiple orgasm, partly because I couldn\u2019t resist the pleasures of plot.)<\/p>\n
I was in Venice for the summer, rereading William Golding for a lecture I had to give at the University of Exeter. For some reason, though I am a great admirer of Golding, I needed a break. In any case, the lecture wasn\u2019t to be delivered for six months. I wrote a couple of poems. Then I thought, why not finish the novel? I invented a new ending to replace the one I had mislaid and I set to work. If you live next to a canal in Venice, as I do, it is like living next to the M25. From 6 am, barges are delivering castles of yoghurt to the sailors at the Arsenale. So it\u2019s early to bed and up betimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u00a0was at the desk by 6.30, writing till 11.30, breaking for lunch, having a siesta, then writing again from 4 till 7.<\/p>\n
There are satisfactions peculiar to the novel. It shares with poetry the pleasure of exactness \u2014 capturing a mood, a facial expression, the way something looks, the qualia<\/em> of experience. It also shares the beauty of getting the language to sing. Your ear doesn\u2019t go deaf just because it\u2019s prose. Think of the opening sentences of Lolita. <\/em>A little scale of musical syllables created from the name, Lo-li-ta. Poetry, however, isn\u2019t anything like so close to fantasy. I think the novelist taps into childhood play, the frame of mind that says, \u201cI\u2019m a policeman, you\u2019re the baddy.\u201d Kids take it from there. They improvise with their imaginations. Novelists are equally primitive, equally sophisticated, when they pretend. All adults know this pleasure, actually, and practise it in sexual fantasy. We know how absorbing that can be. Novelists are releasing the same endorphins. Fiction is a recreational drug. But highly addictive. I\u2019ve written two novels now and I\u2019m planning a third.<\/p>\n
My novelist friends have all been sent proofs of my forthcoming novel. Not my idea. I think Advance Praise is unhelpful. Reviewers like to make up their own minds and resent being coerced. So I discouraged them. So far, only Ian McEwan has responded. I\u2019m not sure what this means. Most likely, the silence is polite and Pat Kavanagh was right after all. I haven\u2019t written a novel. I only think I\u2019ve written a novel.<\/p>\n
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- Literature<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n