Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online Page B

Connolly attempts to isolate the qualities that make a book last for ten years.
    Over the decades since its publication, Enemies of Promise has been reduced pretty much to one line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” which is possibly why I was never previously very interested inreading it. What are you supposed to do if the pram in the hall is already there? You could move it out into the garden, I suppose, if you have a garden, or get rid of it and carry the little bastards everywhere, but maybe I’m being too literal-minded.
    Enemies of Promise is about a lot more than the damaging effects of domesticity, however; it’s also about prose style, and the perils of success, and journalism, and politics. Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. (Ironically, the copy I found on the shelf belongs to one of the mothers of my children. I wonder if she knew, when she bought it twenty years ago, that she would one day partially destroy a literary career? Connolly would probably argue that she did. He generally takes a pretty dim view of women, who “make crippling demands on [a writer’s] time and money, especially if they set their hearts on his popular success.” Bless ’em, eh? I’m presuming, as Connolly does, that you’re a man. What would a woman be doing reading a literary magazine anyway?)
    Connolly spends the first part of the book dividing writers into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular. (He is crankily thorough in this division, by the way. He even goes through the big books of the twenties year by year, and marks them with a V or an M: “1929—H. Green, Living (V); W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (M); Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (V); Lawrence, Pansies (V); Joyce, Fragments of a Work in Progress (M),” and so on. One hesitates to point it out—it’s too late now—but shouldn’t Connolly have been getting on with his writing, rather than fiddling around with lists? That’s one of your enemies, right there.) And then, having thus divided, he spends a lot of time despairing of both camps. “The Mandarin style… is beloved of literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the title of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.” (Yay, Cyril! Way to go!) Meanwhile, “According to Gide, a good writer should navigate against the current; the practitioners in the new vernacular are swimming with it; the familiarities of the advertisements in the morning paper, the matey leaders in the Daily Express , the blather of the film critics, the wisecracks of the newsreel commentators, the know-all autobiographies of political reporters, the thrillers and ’teccies… areall swimming with it too.” (Cyril, you utter ass . You think Hemingway wrote like that lot? Have another look, mate.) Incidentally, the “know-all autobiographies of political reporters”—that was a whole genre in the nineteen-thirties? Boy.
    The invention of paperbacks, around the time Connolly was writing Enemies of Promise , changed everything. Connolly’s ten-year question could fill a book in 1938 because the answer was genuinely complicated then; books really could sit out the vicissitudes of fashion on library shelves, and then dust themselves off and climb back down into readers’ laps. Paperbacks and chain bookstores mean that a contemporary version of Enemies of Promise would consist of one simple and uninteresting question: “Well, did it sell in its first year?” My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply