Q On Reading

On Reading

In the last week I have bought the following books:

A Man's Head, George Simenon

My Friend Maigret, George Simenon

Inspector Cadaver, George Simenon

The Bar on the Seine, George Simenon

Briarpatch, Ross Thomas

The Essential Spike Milligan

Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

George Simenon, David Carter

Charles Bukowski, Howard Sounes

This is an above average week for me but not by much. I've always read
a lot. And since I've been writing, reading has become more like work.
But work I enjoy.

I'm about to start on a new book, writing one I mean. It's going to be
a thriller so hence the number of thrillers I've bought. I figure their
style will just seep into me. Or so I imagine.

In Ross Thomas's Briarpatch man's sister is blown up in big car bomb,
man goes to find out just what the hell is going on. It has a very taut
plot but as it's full of legal wranglings that take place within
Washington it's of no use to me. I just don't have the time to research
a book like this and even if I did it it would sound false. Unless
you're doing sci-fi then write what you know. Or can comfortably make
up.

Simenon, on the other hand, is a find. I remember reading these books
when I was sixteen on the beach in France. As it happens, those were
the days when I had to read lying on my front in case I got an
erection. Not that Simenon would give you one in particular although
his books are full of prostitutes and that might have set me off.

As I said, I was 16 then.

Actually it was the 'The Cement Garden' by Ian McEwan that was the
first book I ever read with an erection in it. (Not only my own.) I was
amazed. I was about 13 I think. The protagonist is helping his dad in
the garden with some cement and then he goes into the toilet to have a
wank. Awesome. What happened to Ian McEwan? I don't read his stuff any
more, it all seems to be about Lords, lawyers, the upper-middle
classes. There's very little wanking in it. I think that's a
loss.

Incidentally it was also in France that I first came across the word
'brothel'. We were travelling with friends on our annual camping
holiday. I remember asking, 'Dad, what's a brothel?' across the wooden
table. I nearly died when he told me. I was a very shy child but I was
glad I found out. I stored it away for later.

That book was by Robert Westall by the way; 'Fathom Five'. Robert
Westall back then was my god. Not only did he write about brothels, he
put some swearing in. These were all good words.

Simenon is reported to have said that he only used 2000 words in his
fiction. 2000 different ones I mean. He wrote and published over 500
books in his lifetime. I like this line from the David Carter book;
'Simenon wrote very little in 1927: only one collection of short
stories and eleven popular pulp novels.'

Simenon tried to get each of his Maigret novels down in 8 days. He
would write about 8000 words a day. Later in his life he claimed in an
interview with Fellini that he had had sex with 2000 women. If you
think about it that's about one woman for each word. I wonder if that's
how he thought about it, tagging each of the women with a word in his
head and then rearranging them to produce each of his wonderful books.
Oh yes, the books are wonderful.

I love pulp. For me it is the most genuine type of fiction. It
foregrounds the story and that, after all, is what you read for. To
find out what happens next.

Every morning on my way to work I walk past an advertising hoarding.
It's one of those where the individual slats of it rotate to reveal
another picture. While it changes I have to wait. I have see what comes
next. 'Midland Mainline - the ?18m refit'. Wonderful.

Dickens had the knack of exploiting this desire for revelation down to
an art. Almost all his books were published on a weekly or a monthly
basis in various periodicals. It was important that each episode finish
on a cliff-hanger so people would buy them again the next week. Often
he used to put in fake endings. For example, at the end of one episode,
'Sadly David Copperfield died' and then at the beginning of the next
episode, 'A miracle! He's alive!' When the books were published in the
complete three volume edition then Dickens would excise these ersatz
endings, and tighten up the whole plot for coherence.

You see, Dickens was a showman, he wanted to entertain, he wanted to
be loved and he was full of fun. He once painted his whole house green
and contrary to Victorian tradition his homes were full of mirrors and
light.

Dickens used to think of his plots while he was out walking. In fact,
he was a walkaholic. Like me. I walk everywhere. I also think about
writing when I walk. I walk at least for two hours every day. I wrote
this whole thing you're reading now in my head this morning. It was
much cleverer then. It had Susan Sontag in it, also W H Auden, Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Balzac,
Zola and a whole heap of Russian novelists. It even had a joke about
Nietzsche in it. I might get on to all that in a minute. Oh yes, and
the whole thing was going to have a voluminous appendix. I was thinking
about 200 books. I might forego on that, after all, it's already 7:30
and I've got to eat.

I love reading about other writers.

Flaubert used to be in agonies over the rhythm of his work. He wanted
it to sound beautiful. It did, in French. I once posed this question to
a diehard Marxist. What does Marxism have to say about beauty?
Maupassant taught himself how to write. Every day for years he would
set himself the task of writing about something, anything, a perfect
description. Rimbaud once used another poet's poems to wipe his arse.
The paper they were written on I guess. Verlaine had a rather bushy
moustache.

One of my favourite writerly stories is about Allen Ginsberg. While
travelling though Italy that future greybeard hippy father of 'Howl'
came across W. H. Auden sitting in a caf? drinking coffee with friends.
Now Ginsberg idolised Auden the way songbirds love Gareth Gates and so
he went up to his hero most vaunted and in introduction of one poet to
another he set about quoting Walt Whitman's, 'Song of Myself'.

Auden's response was, 'Oh, but my dear, that's so wrong, and so
shameless, it's an utterly bad line'. A bit perturbed Ginsberg then
read some of his own poetry to which Auden said it was, 'full of the
poet felling sorry for himself'. Finally and clutching at the straws
that Auden didn't have in his coffee Ginsberg mentioned Shelley. Auden
said he hated Shelley. Ginsberg called Auden and his friends 'a bunch
of shits' and stormed off to Paris.

As he had 'The Naked Lunch' in his luggage thus started the Beat
generation.

I'm with Auden on the Beats. It was all about a lot of self-indulgent
middle-class kids with too big trust-funds feeling sorry for
themselves. However, it has to be said that those guys were the first
to try and engage with mass culture and give it a voice.

But it was all about them. They posited themselves at the centre of
this revolution. It was interpretation rather than engagement.

Now Bukowski he was engaged.

As we seem to be on the subject and as I have recently castigated
McEwan about it, it has to be said that Bukowski wrote quite a lot
about wanking. There is this one story where he's under the bleachers
looking up some girl's skirt and he's masturbating with his friend,
really going for the cream. Later his friend pisses in a milk carton
and puts it in the fridge. Once when Bukowski was giving a reading
William Burroughs was in the next room. Bukowski was asked if he wanted
to meet him. He didn't. But I don't think it was because of the
homophobia he was often accused of. He often said that if ever he was
in prison then he would take up the old 'round-eye' (anal sex) and
Neeli Cherkovski claims that Bukowski once made a pass at him.

Good for you Neeli.

Claims are good things and are writer's bread and butter. It's good to
make things up and it's good to read things that are made up. There's a
fortune in it apparently but very little of it has yet to come my
way.

As far as I can see, even by what I've read over the past few days,
there are many people who make their living by writing and I am not one
of them. Therefore whichever way I judge my life I am a failure.

This is what haunts me, what drives me on. I am a failure.

Spike Milligan was a beautiful man. He was a genius. He was so funny
you could cut your teeth on him. But for large parts of his life he
suffered from depression. He was very sad.

Yet he made people laugh.

I can associate with that.

And so over to you Spike, not with your, 'I told you I was ill' but a
poem, a poem is a good way for us both to end:

'A combustible woman from Thang

Exploded one day with a Bang!

The maid then rushed in

And said with a grin,

'Pardon me, madam - you rang?''