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My complaint is that there are not enough novels worth reading, especially of recent vintage. Jorrocks used to say, after he had demolished his dinner, ‘I fill up the chinks with cheese.’ Most of my reading is meaty stuff for my work (I am engaged with Jung on the Book of Job, and a new biography of Julius Caesar) but I need to fill chinks with fiction. When I first came to London in the mid-Fifties, new novels of quality were in plentiful supply. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and ‘Uncle Tony’ produced them not exactly regularly but from time to time. And there were others like L.P. Hartley, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, François Mauriac and even Ernest Hemingway, who was still in reliable action. In addition, there were first-rate women storytellers: Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rosamond Lehmann, the young and ravishing Edna O’Brien, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Rose Macaulay and half a dozen others in full spate.
Today, I am novel-starved. True, there is Vikram Seth, but my appetite for subcontinental peculiarities is not insatiable. Then again there is Tom Wolfe, but Manhattan engages my heart only on occasions. The writer who spans the Atlantic most successfully is Alison Lurie (ever read her Foreign Affairs? That is the kind of novel I need), but there is no one in London to match her. I decided long since that the entire school of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Salmonella Rushdie is not for me: I want not just cleverness but a story and characters. And I want to read about my world or one I can enter pleasurably (like Jane Austen’s). That is why the new Russian fiction writers, of whom there are a number, one or two really gifted, do not meet my needs. The other week I found myself sitting at supper next to someone called Zadie Smith. I thought her rather snooty, to be honest, but gave a novel of hers a try. Alas! I do not want to dwell in the world of multicultural, multisexual squatters, speaking a difficult argot, thinking alien and (to me) nasty thoughts. So I soon gave up. But I try, I do try, as Archie Rice says. This week I will read Imperium, a new story about Rome, by Robert Harris, which he has kindly sent me. And I beg readers who have discovered something good to let me know.
Then there are golden, or more likely grimy, oldies. First and foremost the Big Six, of course. There are certain novels I like to read every two years or so: Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, Cranford, Vanity Fair and Madame Bovary. I have started to reread Trollope again, having a complete set, but his energetic laziness often irritates me; ditto Balzac, with poor translations adding another minefield of dissatisfaction. There are now only six novels of Dickens I can reread, and four of Conrad. Tolstoy and Proust any day but only in bits. Hardy is too painful and Dostoevsky fills me with fury. There is a passage in Waugh’s Diaries in which he says, ‘Thank God I have saved Henry James for my old age!’ But that is the last we hear of it. I have tried James again and again, but the sheer lack of action, and the endless ratiocination, or rather pondering, fills me with weariness. For me, only the two long stories, The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, actually work. I agree with the waiter from the Reform Club whom I met 50 years ago and who had served James: ‘He was a nice and kindly gentleman, sir, but when giving an order he took a very long time to tell you what to bring.’
There is a plan to reissue all J.B. Priestley’s fiction, beginning with Bright Day, a first-class story. That is good news. I intend to reread The Good Companions, and Angel Pavement, which I have never read. (But I would welcome still more his collected essays, some of which I published.) Others on my list are Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, The Old Wives’ Tale and his masterpiece Riceyman Steps. His friend Beaverbrook said to me, ‘I admired Arnold as much as I have ever admired any man. But I did not like his stories. Always about dirty people.’ I see his point. One needs a certain congenial milieu. And an attractive period. Thus I know the Somerville and Ross stories almost by heart, and Joyce’s Dubliners is the best volume of shorts ever put together. But both deal with Ireland in that enthralling twilight before 1914. I could no more read a story about Charles Haughey’s Ireland than settle down happily to squatting in Islington, or to Finnegans Wake come to think of it. I like to feel the author is making an effort to please me. On the one occasion I talked to Hemingway he said, ‘I never tried so hard to get the reader on my side as with A Farewell to Arms.’ ‘And succeeded, sir!’ ‘You bet your life I did.’ No harm in a writer boasting — if there’s something to boast about.
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