The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (11 page)

Furthermore, few of my fellow travellers were reading books. Those who were had been canny enough to choose ones with plots: thrillers, true crime, historical romances.
⁴
Plots keep the world out, which under the circumstances – WILL
YOU PLEASE KEEP IT DOWN?! – was not merely justifiable escapism, it was a survival stratagem. If you go and see one of Beckett's plays in a theatre, you sit in a space dedicated to the performance of that piece and assume that the rest of the audience will sit still and keep quiet, which they often, though not infallibly, do. You focus collectively on the words and the manner in which they are delivered. You are in it together. Whereas on a commuter train, though you are physically in it together, you are trying forcefully to pretend otherwise. It is not a crowd in which one disappears but a gang of individuals in noisy denial – tish, honk, bing-bong, WAAAAAAAAAAH.

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think he means you.

To read Beckett, it was obvious that the ideal accompaniment would be silence. But silence was not an option. Over the course of several journeys, I experimented with finding the music on my iPod that would block out extraneous noise, while also feeding into the experience of reading something as intense and cyclical as
The Unnamable
. Vocal music was out; concert orchestras, I discovered, were either too hushed or too bombastic; movie soundtracks were incongruously syrupy or jarringly overdramatic; Eno's
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
, though soothing, did nothing except provide a gentle sound-bed for other people's high-volume phone calls, unsought opinions and mastication. But cometh the hour, cometh the Famous Death Dwarf (© Lester Bangs, circa 1975).

I want you to stop reading for a moment and go and fetch your copy of Lou Reed's
Metal Machine Music
. If you don't have one, please find it on Spotify or YouTube. And when you are ready, turn up the volume, pick up the book, press play and carry on.

No, don't switch it off. I'm here with you. In our left ear or speaker we can hear a thousand bombs exploding, a horrific bombardment of guitar feedback and tape loops, the distant rumble of post-war pop culture being shredded by Messerschmitts and Telecasters. To our right, we can hear much the same, but with someone stabbing at our cochlea with a tiny dentist drill, like a needle or a fencing foil. Maybe you discern what
Rolling Stone
heard in 1975, ‘
the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator
'. After all, this is the fourth-worst album of all time according to
Q Magazine
, ‘
four sides of unlistenable oscillator noise
'. The journalist Lester Bangs, on the other hand, thought of it in these terms: ‘
As classical music it adds nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock'n'roll it's interesting garage electronic rock'n'roll. As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity – a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless
.'

Ok, you can turn it off now. Whatever your verdict on
Metal Machine Music
, it seemed undeniably fit for my short-term purpose, which was the total obliteration of my immediate surroundings – a giant FUCK YOU to the rest of the train. Yes,
MMM
was a hellacious racket but it was
my
hellacious racket. Finally I could hear myself think.

For two weeks, I adhered to a bracing early morning regimen of
Metal Machine Music
via the ears and
The Unnamable
via the eyes. Putting aside whatever psychic damage I might be doing to myself by ingesting two such powerful stimulants simultaneously, the compound was a potent one. It successfully blotted out the carriage. It fed my Ignatian edginess and exasperation, incorporating them into Beckett's stream of imagery and Reed's sluice of noise. I read furiously, head down, teeth clenched, right to the end of the line. However, the treatment must be judged only a partial success. After a fortnight, I had completed the novel, but in a disjointed, belligerent state which only succeeded in blotting out the book too. By the end, I had no real sense of what I had spent two weeks reading.

Technically, I had now finished
The Unnamable
– but only technically. I knew I had entirely failed to connect with it. Usually I found Beckett's work very affecting. Either the book was beyond my capabilities or there was simply no space in my life where I could attempt a book like this. If I could not make it work on the train, where was left? And after all that effort, what was the difference between saying I had read
The Unnamable
, as formerly, and actually having read it, as now? I was better served by what I thought I thought about it beforehand, than by the disillusioning, uncomprehending reality. And what about the Beckett I studied at school or college, did that count? I was aware of having seen
Happy Days
twenty years ago but, save for a mental picture postcard of Billie Whitelaw in a pile of sand, I had forgotten nearly everything about it. My conception of it was shaped more by received academic opinion than a spontaneous reaction, and besides which, I had been nineteen; what I had to say about it would be half-baked at best. Or so I believed as I consigned
The Unnamable
to the shelf once more.

Am I going on? I'll go on.

When Patrick Hamilton was a half-baked young man loose on the streets of London, he fell insanely in love with a prostitute called Lily Connolly. This infatuation drove him to the brink of financial ruin, set him on the road to alcoholism and inspired his fourth novel,
The Midnight Bell
, which was published in 1929 when he was only twenty-four years old. Bob is a well-liked barman at the Midnight Bell, a pub off the Euston Road. He lodges in a room above the pub, along the landing from Ella, the barmaid who is secretly in love with him. But Bob becomes obsessed with Jenny, a West End streetwalker; little by little, and without any sexual intercourse, she parts him from his savings of £80, leaving him broke and almost broken. Around this unhappy trio, Hamilton wrote the novels which would subsequently be collected as
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
:
The Midnight Bell
, then
The Siege of Pleasure
(1932), in which we learn how Jenny fell into prostitution, and finally
The Plains of Cement
(1934), where barmaid Ella is wooed by one of the Midnight Bell regulars, the appalling Mister Ernest Eccles.
⁵

It soon emerged that I had been correct in my long-held supposition that I would enjoy Patrick Hamilton's writing without having read a word of it. In the space of a few pages, I recognised it. It felt comfortable. The inter-war landscape of Lyons Corner Houses and Clapham omnibuses, the seedy London lowlife, the anguished, juvenile passion, the imminence of spiritual and financial damnation, the girls with bobbed hair, all brought back my own teenage literary crushes: Orwell's
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, Greene's
It's a Battlefield
. Hamilton was another burgeoning Marxist but a better – or more bourgeois – craftsman than Robert Tressell. His politics inform the books but do not dictate them. He shows how it is money, or fear of poverty, that underpins the so-called ‘moral choices' his characters have to make, without venturing to propose a political solution directly. Bob's £80 is both a safety net and a stake to which he is tethered; the feckless Jenny, once she has ‘fallen', cannot resist the pull of ‘easy money'; Ella contemplates marriage to Mister Eccles as a way of obtaining financial security for herself and her mother. It was beautifully done.

‘
We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value
,' wrote Charles Arrowby. For the novelist Dan Rhodes,
The Midnight Bell
is a life-like study of boozing (‘
[the book is] sodden with the wonderful, nasty stuff
') and boozers: ‘
My family had a pub for many years, and from an early age I came face to face with the horrors of the habitué. There are few things more soul-destroying than being locked into an early-evening conversation with a barfly who thinks they are funny or clever or, worst of all, “a character”
.' I had been given my copy of
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
by an acquaintance for whom the book was a study in the compulsive madness of addiction, a subject he knew something about. For my part, I looked into these three novels, each successive volume of which I liked more than the one preceding it, and saw my distant younger selves – the boy who worshipped the writers of another era; the cautious adolescent agitator; the demented, jilted Steve Buscemi lookalike, and the reluctant working man.

What was the difference between saying I had read Patrick Hamilton and finally reading him? The answer was pleasure – both the pleasure of recognition and the irresistible pull of the story he told. And therefore I could read him, under siege on a train, without distractions of my own or anyone else's making.

What was really remarkable was how much of my London was in these books. Not just the saloon bars of Soho and Fitzrovia, but Shaftesbury Avenue, Hammersmith Broadway, the garden suburb of Bedford Park, the Great Western Road out past the Hoover Factory, all places I had lived or worked during my fifteen-year stay in the capital. I got drunk here, held down a day job, had my heart broken, fell in love again. This was where I grew up. And although Tina and I had left together, part of me remained here. I finished
Twenty Thousand Streets . . .
, so much of which felt familiar, and thought: perhaps it is time to move on.

On a Sunday morning before Christmas, I caught a train into town and took the bus to Primrose Hill. Climbing to the top, I could see the Post Office Tower, the Snowdon Aviary and a homeless man shaking his fist at someone who was both much taller than him and invisible. It was still early. I planned to walk across the city, down the Euston Road, paying
my respects at the Midnight Bell or a few pubs like it, through the West End, and along the river to Hammersmith or beyond. It was going to take me all day to say goodbye.

For company, I had Samuel Beckett. On my iPod was an audiobook of
The Unnamable
, read by an actor called Sean Barrett. The book ran just under six hours, long enough to carry me from Primrose Hill to Hammersmith. Perhaps it was cheating to listen to something the author intended to be read, but print on paper had not got me very far. I was going to try an alternative route.

As I set off past the zoo and the Roundhouse, along Camden High Street, past where all the record shops used to be, past the market and the Odeon cinema on Parkway, Beckett's words murmured in my ear. They drifted around me, catching my attention, retreating, returning, insinuating themselves into my train of thought. I came here a lot once. We saw Blur at the Electric Ballroom. Compendium, the bookshop, was over there, Burroughs and Bukowski tapes, gone now. The Oxford Arms, that was where I saw Glen Richardson perform his Todd Carty musical. Or was it an opera? On second thoughts, maybe that was the Hen and Chickens. It was all a long time ago. ‘
Some may complain that they cannot understand
The Unnamable,' Beckett's publisher and champion John Calder has written, ‘
but they should ask themselves how well they understand not only their own lives, but what they see when they look out at the world; how they interpret what they see, little of which could be understood anyway; and especially how they think themselves, what makes them think, what they think about and why; and how they separate what they know from everyday events, from what they know from dreams
.'

From Camden onwards, letting
The Unnamable
spool, I traversed not one but three places called London: the city I had lived in for so long; Patrick Hamilton's twenty thousand streets, still humming in my mind; and this unreal city, shaped by memory and daydreams and Beckett's unravelling commentary. After a couple of miles, I had to sit down, not from fatigue but because I was overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. In a pub I did not recognise, somewhere in limbo, I sat and nursed a pint and just listened . . .

‘I hope this preamble will soon come to an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which, little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I'll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time. So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. Is there really nothing new to try?'

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville

and introducing Book Zero,
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown

‘Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But now I leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!'