Alan Hollinghurst

Poets often mature earlier than novelists; behind the romantic image of young poetic genius lies a clearly identifiable pattern whereby all but the greatest poets write their best work before the age of forty; the novelistic genius, on the other hand, tends to ripen with experience – to accumulate slowly. D.M. Thomas was told at the age of 25 by his ex-tutor John Bayley that he would be a late developer. The truth of Bayley’s remark has been demonstrated by the switch Thomas has made, in his forties, from poetry to prose, and though last month saw the publication of Dreaming in Bronze, a new collection of poems, it is now as a novelist that he will continue to be known most widely. His third and most recent novel, The White Hotel, has been especially successful in America, with the film rights lately sold for half a million dollars.

Michel Tournier’s Gemini was published in France six years ago under the title of Les Météores, but it arrives in this country, in Anne Carter’s convincing and sometimes virtuosic translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less acclaim, and it is not hard to see why: it is the work of a mind expanding under the apparent beneficence of praise, performing with both an obligation to grandeur and a licence to self-indulgence. The grandeur is frequently impressive, the project kept up with remarkable stamina: but the self-indulgence, as well as weakening the structure, also undermines the confidence of the reader. Tournier is not a man to make a point once if he can make it a dozen times, or to use one word if he can use a thousand. Subjected to this immense performance of reiterative loquacity the reader increasingly responds with both ‘I know …’ and ‘What, really, does it mean?’

Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who knew Britten, and then systematically eradicated the element of personality by paraphrasing the recollections in his own words. Only Imogen Holst and Sir Michael Tippett have escaped this platitudinous reworking since their contributions had appeared previously elsewhere, and the effect of their words is of a far higher intensity than that of the others’. The absurd though sympathetic grandeur of Tippett’s style carries a real conviction: ‘The news of Benjamin Britten’s death brought a sense of loss to every musical person of the whole world’; or, ‘a sense of death was sharper still in Death in Venice, the last of all operas.’ This ‘last of all’, however, proves to be a mistranscription of the original article: the proof-reading throughout is slovenly – ironically in a book which repeatedly comments on the punishingly high standards Britten always set himself.

In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked provincial decades one of the engrossing features was the difficulty of love and of communication between generations, even within a family – a problem which threatened, at a local level, the transmission of a sense of history or a justification of the past which Swift so perceptively re-created. At the crisis of the novel, the separate lines of memory and present action converged in the riveting description of a running race in the principal character’s childhood, recalled during his last faltering walk. In Swift’s second novel, Shuttlecock, narratives of two generations are again developed in tandem – but with a more exhibitionistic cleverness; and again the failure, or, at best, distortion, of communication between fathers and children is witness to the compromise of ideals – often an ideal of nature – which should have transmitted themselves in a sense of the past.

By and large we are interested in the thoughts, opinions and intentions of writers we are interested in, and by and large writers are keen to express these things in reviews, essays and memoirs subsidiary to their main work. A critic lurks, an implicit presence, in every creative writer, and though most of them are starved of a Boswell to transcribe and irradiate obiter dicta as facets of the creative life, they are none the less eager to shine their light on their own work. At its best, self-consciousness is forgotten and the act of self-explanation becomes a part of the self-vindication of the work and even of the creative process in general.