Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Fall 2024

Books read:

• A Northern Wind: Britain 1962–65—David Kynaston
• Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”—Warren Zanes
• Ongoingness: The End of a Diary—Sarah Manguso
• Liars—Sarah Manguso
• 300 Arguments—Sarah Manguso

Books bought:

• Ongoingness: The End of a Diary—Sarah Manguso
• 300 Arguments—Sarah Manguso
• Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor—Roger Lewis
• The Ladies’ Paradise—Émile Zola
• Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse—Sarah Harkness
• You Could Make This Place Beautiful—Maggie Smith

On the evening of Wednesday, September 25, 1963, there was chaos outside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway, London. “Men, all men… were spilling into the road and blocking the traffic, with people waiting for the doors to open,” said a contemporary eyewitness. The occasion was the publication of a government report by Lord Denning, and people (men, anyway) were eager to get hold of it.

As far as I know, such a hunger for a sober, legalistic, and cogent contemplation of recent current events has never been repeated in the UK. But the men, all men, were queueing in the hopes of getting their hands on what used to be known as a dirty book. Lord Denning was reporting on the Profumo affair, the biggest British scandal of the early ’60s. John Profumo, a government minister, had conducted an adulterous affair with Christine Keeler, a beautiful young woman and former topless model who also had links to an attaché at the Soviet embassy: sex and possible espionage around the time that the first James Bond movies were being released. The report went on sale at 12:30 a.m. Four thousand copies were sold in the first hour, one hundred thousand copies in the first week. The first to get his hands on the Denning Report was an Oxford undergraduate, who bought eight copies. (One man in the queue, interviewed by a TV reporter, claimed he was there because he was a great admirer of Lord Denning.)

Another young man, fourteen-year-old Laurence Marks, who went on to be a celebrated television writer, had a quick flick through a friend’s copy in his school biology class. He saw that Keeler was described as a “call girl” but didn’t get to read much more. He didn’t know what a call girl was, so he asked his history teacher. “He whacks me round the head and asks me where I heard that expression? I tell him in the Denning Report and he whacks me round the head for a second time.” The next day, Marks got to have a proper perusal, after handing over a chocolate bar for the privilege, and felt ripped off. “I take it to the library… but there’s nothing sexy in it at all… Who cares ‘Where lies responsibility?’ I want to know all about what Christine Keeler did and how she did it and to who.”

This all comes from A Northern Wind: Britain 1962–65, the latest volume in David Kynaston’s magnificent postwar history of England. I have read over three thousand pages of it so far, and anxiously await the next volume. As Kynaston points out, the Profumo affair was a significant moment in British social history: it spelled the beginning of the end of deference, for a start. Profumo had lied both to the public and to the prime minister about his relationship with Keeler, and the patrician hypocrisy of the Conservative government engendered a contempt that has never really gone away. I am too young to remember Profumo, and that is a claim I am increasingly unable to make about anything much, but it’s a scandal that has been explored in many ways since (in the British movie Scandal, for example, and the more recent British limited series The Trial of Christine Keeler). But I do remember the British, probably universal, hunger for dirty books. For most people in the 1960s and 1970s, pornography could be found, if you were lucky, only in the pages of bestsellers, in the odd paragraph here and there in The Godfather, or in an Arthur Hailey novel.

My father, meanwhile, was one of the enthusiastic consumers of long-banned works of fiction that were suddenly for sale after the loosening of censorship. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, freely available after one of the most hilarious trials in British history, sold three million copies in the first couple of years after its 1960 republication; in 1964, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill, became generally available, and that, too, sold millions of copies. I saw both paperbacks stashed away in our house. Whatever happened to the dirty book? I haven’t looked, but is there really anything racier on the internet than an eighteenth-century novel? It’s hard to imagine. We like to describe the first half of the 1960s as “more innocent times,” but really, it’s just that the technology wasn’t available. I speak as someone who was briefly the center of attention at school because I found folded-up instructions for condom use on the pavement. Classmates borrowed them. Anyway, the promise of the Denning Report, and the way Laurence Marks was repeatedly beaten around the head by a teacher, unlocked happy memories.

I have said this before when writing about books in Kynaston’s series, but I am not going to try and sell you A Northern Wind, dear Believer reader. If you are going to dig into Kynaston, then you probably need to start at the beginning, with Austerity Britain, 1945–51—and I know you won’t, if you write poems and teach in Berkeley, California, and sing in a folk-rock band, as I suspect you do. The northern wind he’s referring to is the one that blew in a prime minister from Yorkshire and a pop group from Liverpool, and finally Kynaston reaches my childhood, citing names and events I dimly remember. I didn’t think he would ever get there: Kynaston seems to have been trying to prove Zeno’s paradox, the one where you halve the distance to your destination each time you move, meaning you never get there. There are twelve years covered in the first two volumes: six years in each. Then five years in the third, and just one in the fourth (On The Cusp: Days of ’62). We’re now back up to three years. As far as I am concerned, he can write as many volumes as he wants. His ambition, his staggering research, and his interest in absolutely anything that creates the life and mood of a country are matched only by Robert Caro’s.

I am sure Warren Zanes will forgive me if I say that Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” is not quite as ambitious, covering as it does one album in the career of a veteran musician—and a bashed-out, homemade acoustic album at that. But it’s the one Springsteen album about which there is no real debate. Snooty rock critics have poked fun at what they see as Born to Run’s overblown Romanticism, and at the stadium-rock beefiness of Born in the U.S.A., but Nebraska is always given a free pass, and has been influential for generation after generation of rock, folk, and country musicians. “I think Nebraska was the big bang of the indie rock that was about making shit alone in your bedroom,” the National’s Matt Berninger tells Zanes. (Go to your nearest streaming service and listen to the National’s gorgeous cover of “Mansion on the Hill.”)

Nebraska could just as easily have been a career-breaker. It didn’t sound like any of Springsteen’s other records—no E Street Band, no drums, nothing apart from voice, harmonica, and guitar, and it came after Springsteen’s first Billboard chart hit, “Hungry Heart.” Nebraska could have driven them all away, and Born in the U.S.A., which took him from stardom to superstardom, was nearly complete. Instead he stepped back and made a set of haunting songs that drew inspiration from the art-rock band Suicide, Flannery O’Connor, and Terrence Malick, who wouldn’t sell out a basketball arena playing on a triple bill. I loved Deliver Me from Nowhere, as I love all thoughtful, well-written books about the specifics of creativity, but if you’re not a Springsteenian, you might need more persuasion to read it than I have the room or strength to offer. After the Kynaston, that’s strike two. I promise you, I get no enjoyment from recommending books I know you won’t pick up.

But here comes the home run: Sarah Manguso’s novel Liars, and her two slim volumes of nonfiction (although that’s a reductive description of writing that’s one part aphoristic, one part poetic, one part stand-up), Ongoingness and 300 Arguments, which I discovered only after devouring her fiction. 300 Arguments is smart, astute, confessional, and fun. “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” she says two-thirds of the way through, and that’s an accurate characterization of what this is: a novel with all the boring exposition left out. “I look at young people and marvel at their ignorance of what’s coming, and the old people look at me”; “Why should I leave instructions? The ashes will be my family’s, not mine, the scattering their mnemonic for the idea of me.” (I have thought a version of that myself, although less eloquently: “Why do I have to choose my own fucking funeral music? They can choose it for me. What songs do they have that will bring back a fond memory? I won’t be there to listen.”) Like 300 Arguments, Ongoingness is arranged as a kind of prose poem, three or four paragraphs per page, each containing a separate thought. But it’s not the form that is interesting. Ongoingness is a journal with the life parts left out. Or observations on a journal. Or an attempt to stop time. It’s actually rather hard to describe, but it is a beautiful book, one of those books that you have to own (or force upon people) simply because it is so singular. You won’t have anything quite like it on your shelves. But it’s not the form that is interesting. Manguso has, as she tells us in the opening line, kept a diary for twenty-five years, and it is, or was, when she wrote Ongoingness, eight hundred thousand words long. In the subsequent pages of this book, none of which is her actual diary, she articulates the urge, and laments the things that aren’t in it: “Despite my continuous effort… I knew I couldn’t replicate my whole life in language. I knew that most of it would follow my body into oblivion. From the beginning, I knew the diary wasn’t working, but I couldn’t stop writing. I couldn’t think of any other way to avoid getting lost in time.” Manguso revises her diary too, “during the day, days later, sometimes years later.” The only way I can do justice to Ongoingness is by replicating the whole book in language, because every page contains something you want to quote, or memorize, and every page contains something wise, fresh, and funny. It covers marriage, sex, motherhood, friendship, all through the prism of memory, or half memory. I have read it twice and bought it three times, and—well, I now keep it in a place where I see it often.

Liars, her new novel, is something else again, a howl of ferocious rage about marriage and its injustices and iniquities, especially if you are a woman, and especially if you are a woman artist. It contains echoes of the little nonfiction books. It, too, is written in compulsively edible chunks, but more than that, how could you not hear those echoes, seeing as the little books are about everything? Jane, the first-person narrator, and her husband, John, are both creative types—Jane is a writer, and John is a photographer, an artist, and a filmmaker. They meet in the conventional way, and John has some baggage from a previous relationship, and sometimes he gets blackout drunk, but they marry, and they have sex a lot, and eventually they have a child, and then things start to unravel. You’re probably thinking, I’ve got all this at home. Why would I want to read about it? Because it’s brilliant, that’s why—more insightful and honest than you or anyone else is prepared to be about their own sorry story, and fueled by an understandable, believable animus that leaves you breathless.

I can imagine that more than one reader of this magazine is in the same line of work as their spouse, and will wince at the articulation of the (usually) unspoken rivalries and envies. But when John is drawn into a different world—the world of artistic entrepreneurship, which involves money and business meetings in far-flung places—the novel becomes an examination of time: Which parent is entitled to it? The one making the money? The one whose schedule is inflexibly tied to those of other people? The one who has to leave the house to work? As anyone who works at home and has a family knows, work time is soft time: if there’s a child care crisis, it goes. This can cause rancor, which is never articulated calmly but is always blurted out in the middle of an argument. I have never seen anyone examine this in fiction, I think. And of course marriage can be all about imbalance when you are trying not to be blown away by the hurricane of life with a young family—which is, of course, the very time when you need to be as balanced as possible. All I can say is that if you have a domestic life involving more than just yourself, you need to read Liars. I suspect a lot of people do.

Maybe Manguso makes up for my David Kynaston obsession. He has just published a very interesting-looking book called Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic. Benaud, as I’m sure you already know, was the Australian cricket captain for the classic 1961 Ashes series. I’m looking forward to it. I look forward even more to enthusing about it at length in the next issue. See you then! Preorder your next copy of The Believer now!