Theo Tait

In the mid-August silly season, excitement for bored hacks was provided by a rumour of mysterious origin, about a London bus driver who had received a fortune – the statutory ‘cool million’ – in advances and film rights for his first novel. Although the real advance was soon discovered to be substantially smaller, Brixton bus garage was besieged by reporters and photographers hoping to catch a glimpse of Magnus Mills, perhaps scribbling in the cab of his Routemaster, or discussing Joyce in rhyming slang. We have since been bombarded with features, interviews and increasingly laborious jokes, usually along the lines of Wendy Cope’s poem about men and buses (‘Typical. You wait years for an article about you. Then 20 turn up at once.’) Mills was amazed by the press stereotyping and the media’s apparently inexhaustible appetite for bus-related copy, but has done little to discourage it all. The poker-faced potted biography in his novel, for instance, slyly omits that he has an economics degree and has written regularly for the Independent, concentrating instead on his famous job and previous experiences working ‘with dangerous machinery’.’‘

In his unfortunate account of a Ter Borch brothel scene, Goethe earnestly identifies the leering john as a ‘noble, knightly father’ admonishing his wayward but honourable daughter (the prostitute). The pale mother, he explains, is sipping a glass of wine because she is delicate, and wishes to hide her slight embarrassment: she is, in fact, the procuress, depicted so as to suggest alcoholism and possibly a touch of syphilis. A discussion of Dutch realist painting in Adam Bede is similarly bowdlerised, but tilted towards the poor: Eliot stresses the dignity of the simple people depicted in these ‘faithful pictures of a monotonous, homely existence’. Ever sympathetic, she detects ‘expressions of unmistakable goodwill’ on the gnarled faces of the tipsy guests in peasant wedding scenes, where art historians would probably see emblems of human folly, or the sins of drunkenness. The death of Bergotte in A la recherche does more justice to two of the constant, and sometimes conflicting, preoccupations of 17th-century Dutch art: the representation of life and the omnipresent awareness of death. As Bergotte dies, he is mesmerised by the tiny patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft, which seems to outweigh his life and works in the celestial scales that appear before him. In John Banville’s The Book of Evidence it is an inexplicably entrancing portrait by an anonymous Dutch master which pushes Freddie Montgomery over the edge into homicide. Like Banville, Howard Norman and Katharine Weber write about stealing Dutch paintings, and they share a similar attitude to them. For them, Dutch art represents modesty of subject-matter, and precision – ‘the details’ is a phrase of some importance in both novels, and both are concerned with the ability of the small canvas to transform the large. So far, so George Eliot. But there’s also a hint in both novels of the other side of Dutch art – its preoccupation with death, obsession, loss of proportion.’‘

In the mid-1940s, Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter near the top of his lucrative but precarious line of work: fast, prolific and a consummate professional, he usually wrote at night, often in the bath, fuelled by large doses of Benzedrine. He was also a prominent and outspoken member of the Hollywood Communist Party. In 1947, the House Committee for Un-American Activities began their hearings into ‘Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry’. Trumbo, with nine others, pleaded the First Amendment, ended up with a citation for contempt of Congress and spent slightly less than a year in a Kentucky jail. When he got out, he and the other members of the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted and unable to work in the industry; hundreds more followed in a second wave of hearings. For 13 years Trumbo worked on the black market, uncredited, using various pseudonyms. He wrote the original story for Roman Holiday (1953) and, under the name Robert Rich, earned an Oscar in 1956 for his screenplay The Brave One. He passed on work and encouragement to other victims of the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken.‘

Jason Brown’s sometimes excellent first book is a collection of stories mostly set in and around Portland, Maine. His subject is what Sherwood Anderson, a pioneer of the genre, called the ‘buried lives’ of individuals. His narrators – loners, neglected children, thieves, substance abusers – are isolated, unsuccessful people, longing, more or less consciously, for some kind of wider community. Despite the small scale and determinedly regional focus of his fiction, Brown’s vision – like Anderson’s – is grand, even grandiose. It’s a way of imagining a huge, fluid industrial society.’‘

Even Michael Ondaatje’s most ardent admirers admit that there’s an act of faith involved in reading his work. Words like ‘precious’, ‘portentous’, ‘a struggle’ and ‘slightly implausible’ regularly crop up in even the most enthusiastic reviews – but are then explained away as necessary sacrifices to his higher purpose. His books are designed on grand, operatic lines; and they take everything – from love and death to 1940s pop music and bowling – very, very seriously. As a consequence, they risk pratfalls and sniggers. Is he poetic or ‘poetic’? Are his metaphors daring and striking, or patently absurd? Are his lyrical interludes spellbinding or stultifying? Does he turn out prose of Biblical grandeur or thumping pomposity? Is his narrative technique beautifully oblique and prismatic, or disconnected and frequently preposterous?’‘