Adam Phillips

The name is ordinary, so the book announces itself as a book about no one special; though, of course, when men without qualities become the subjects of novels a certain gravity (if not grace) is conferred on them. But even though Mr Phillips is really a book about its title – and about what names entitle people to – the title has to be read in the light of the book’s epigraph. Taken from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, it plays off, as epigraphs must, the title of the novel against the title that is the source of the quotation: ‘Mr Phillips and the Need for Roots’. Tarquin Winot, the now infamous narrator of Lanchester’s previous novel, The Debt to Pleasure, would have enjoyed the portentous solemnity of the epigraph itself: ‘A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatsoever, but he would have obligations.’ Victor Phillips, the eponymous hero of Lanchester’s new novel, doesn’t think of himself as a man of big themes, and so wouldn’t be drawn either to reading about them, or indeed to mocking them. Whether or not Mr Phillips would have been Simone Weil’s cup of tea – the novel that is, the character certainly wouldn’t have been – her line is there as a guide-line, ushering you into the novel once you’ve got past the title. And Mr Phillips is not demanding as titles go; and as novels go it is exceptionally funny and often astoundingly intelligent – but it is quizzical.’‘

As there’s nothing you can do to a joke to make it funny, except tell it well, the telling of jokes can be a testing time for everyone involved. And once they’ve been told we rarely have conversations about whether or not they have worked. Good art makes us think and talk and write; good jokes just amuse us. Either we get them or we don’t; and when jokes are interpreted they begin to sound like bad jokes. In fact, when it comes to jokes, explanation and understanding are at odds with each other. If you get the joke you can explain it, but explaining a joke rarely makes anyone happy (you couldn’t have a book called ‘The Best Jokes Explained’). So the idea of someone being serious about jokes – wanting something from jokes besides what is patently on offer – is not, in the ordinary way of things, very enticing.’‘

In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ RP. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman.’ Dylan Thomas’s poems, Randall Jarrell wrote in 1940, ‘often mean much less than Crane’s – but when you consider Crane’s meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage’. And whether he was thought to be confused and self-deceiving, or vacuous, or even crazy, Crane was such a troubling figure, both before and after his early death, that people were inclined to describe his poetry in a way that cast aspersions on his character; as though such unapproachable poems could only be approached biographically. Comparing Crane’s ‘epics’ with Zukofsky’s, Hugh Kenner wrote, in his once canonical The Pound Era: ‘The Bridge yields only to nutcrackers, “A” to reading.’ There was certainly something that Crane’s poems wouldn’t let you do to them.’‘

Other people’s mourning – like other people’s sexuality and other people’s religions – is something one has to have a special reason to be interested in. So to write a book, as Leon Wieseltier has done, about the mourning of his father is asking a lot (and to write a book of 585 pages is asking even more). One of the ironies of the so-called mourning process is that it tends to make people even more self-absorbed than they usually are; in need of accomplices, but baffled about what they want from them. In actuality what the mourner wants from other people is so obscure, so confounded that religions are usually still needed to formulate it. Even secular therapies – which are all, one way or another, forms of bereavement counselling – are keen to offer us guidelines about how to do it, and how to know if it isn’t going well. Because mourning can make fundamentalists of us all; because grief (like sexuality) can seem like a cult that could kidnap us, there is always a great deal of social pressure on the grief-stricken to conform, to observe the protocols, to believe in the process (and that it is a process). And so recover sooner rather than later. But what would recovery be, what would have been recovered?’

If we picture the mind as an orifice then we cannot help but wonder what it should be open to and what it should be open for. And how it, or rather we, make such vital decisions. An open mind is not an open door: ‘open-mindedness’ merely describes what is, for some people, a preferred way of discriminating. This openness, once looked into, usually makes us seem rather more like connoisseurs than we might wish: more picky than free. After all, at its most minimal, the open-minded have to know what they must keep out of their minds to keep them open (sexual desire, religion and ideology are the traditional candidates). Religions and therapies help people to close out certain thoughts so they can be open to better ones. An open mind, as Northrop Frye remarked, has to be open at both ends. So when we think of ourselves as open-minded we think of ourselves as open to the right kinds of thing. We have doors in order to be able to close them. Our attention is not so much selective as exclusive.‘