A Few of My Favourite Things / Features / Untitled Books

My strong emotions which I'd learned to view as an affliction Judy seemed to think might be the making of me and we've been pretty thick, in my mind, ever since.

A Few of My Favourite Things

Every so often SUSIE BOYT finds a book that fills her with passion and kindles a sense of kinship between her and the author. From Henry James' In the Cage to Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, these are the books that inspire hero worship and drive her to write.

For Katrina, a divorced suburban matronly soothing sexpot with see-saw self esteem, her romance with the celebrated polymath Victor Wulpy is almost a full time job. This is a delightfully acute investigation of what it is to be the escort of a ‘great man.’

In his Reflections on Contemporary Poetry (iv) in The Egoist (1919) T S Eliot described a certain sort of love one writer can feel for another. 'This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence.'

In my new book I have given a strenuous account of how these feelings affect me in regard to my heroine Judy Garland, whom I've idolised since childhood. A hypersensitive girl, of some girth, dwarfed by the strength of my own feelings, I was astounded when I heard Garland sing on screen for the first time. There was an instant smash of recognition, permission, validation and fellow feeling between us. My strong emotions which I'd learned to view as an affliction Judy seemed to think might be the making of me - it was a wonderful idea - and we've been pretty thick, in my mind, ever since.

There are a few writers, a few books that make me feel this emergency, this crisis which is as good a crisis as saving someone's life is or having your stitches removed. This sensation, when finishing a verse or a chapter, can take you in one of two ways. Sometimes you race immediately to the next chapter of the book and the next and the next and nothing could make you not, or, equally, this feeling can cause you to cast the book to one side and feverishly pick up your own pen.

The books, stories and poems that make me feel this way I re-read all the time, aware that I am squandering the chance of new works, but this wastefulness feels luxurious, correct. I return again and again to these sets of characters with their manias, their jokes and their extreme states of mind. I once glimpsed the Oxford English professor Emrys Jones pause outside the lecture theatre, close his eyes, take a series of rapid breaths, make some fleet hand and foot movements to rev himself up and then dart into the room and deliver a spectacular talk on Christopher Marlowe. I hope these books have a similar effect on me. I read and absorb writing of the highest calibre, fancying that I enter the acute and fragile psyche of the author, of the author's characters and we move along together for a certain space of time and my excitement builds and builds then I let go, I'm on my own and I begin my own work.

The heroine of In the Cage by Henry James - a London telegram girl who takes down the flagrant communications of the local Mayfair clientele - never fails to excite and inspire me. Her preoccupation with her favourite customer, Captain Everard, whose intimate affairs she half knows and aids, is an obsession of the highest order. Her obsessive nature is immaculate, artistic and astounding, quite the best thing about her. It is treated by its creator with a great deal of dignity and respect. James's telegram girl's husbandry of her obsession is fierce and wild. She ennobles and blames the Captain in turn, both delighted and aghast at his continual excesses. Her hero-worship has three axes as all good crazes have: Her, Him and It -the obsession, but it's a good triangle, as eternal in its way as any other. The girl in the story is soon to embark on marriage and suburbia with a certain Mr Mudge. This obsession is part of that journey, a final, brutal, saving, transitional fiesta.

As I examine the girl's obsession in my mind, I often picture the physically diffident Henry James wondering, a little, what it might be like to be the object of a stranger's romantic fascination. I sometimes watch James experience himself as though viewed with the same levels of scrutiny that he habitually brought into his relations with other people. It's a captivating vision.

John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs with their mixture of exuberance, misery, delicate sensibility and ogreishness is always at my side and always makes me want to write myself. His poetry has a very sincere waywardness to it, combining an acute delicacy of instinct with despair, huge amounts of learning and a humorous bravado. I love him and it.

There is an impressive emotional brio to the 77 Dream Songs, as the poet takes his inner world and slaps himself in the face with it repeatedly. (When I read it I feel half Florence Nightingale, half Mae West.) At the same time he displays the same sort of grandness of interest in himself that other great poets reserved for important classical and biblical epic themes. Yet his writing always maintains a striking note of humility. How does he do that?

The main achievement of the 77 Dream Songs is that the self that Berryman gives us again and again is completely interesting. The heart that is plumbed is made of such fine stuff, and he's so intelligent and funny that he always leaves us longing to know him better.

I like to read 'What kind of Day Did You Have?' a very long short story from Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth collection about once a month, as it's so exhilarating. For Katrina, a divorced suburban matronly soothing sexpot with see-saw self esteem, her romance with the celebrated polymath Victor Wulpy is almost a full time job. This is a delightfully acute investigation of what it is to be the escort of a 'great man.' Wherein lies the glamour of these world class thinkers who require a great deal of satisfaction for the little they give? Men who flinch and shudder at bad style in speech and make you miss the divorce court's hearing with the custody psychiatrist, for the second time? Wulpy's pillow talk is better, even, than his internationally acclaimed lecture series and Katrina takes great comfort from this. Katrina's orchestrated sensuality, her common sense, her inner hysteria, her spiteful sister, mysterious unfathomable children, dependable, gun-loaded neighbourhood lieutenant and the central gigantic, drooping figure that is Victor Wulpy, all make selfishness seem so vivid and vital and appealing. There is more life in this story than a shelf full of novels. You can feel yourself improve as a writer by reading it even once.

The hero of Hangover Square, George Henry Bone, is a tortured soul of the most lovable kind. I like to wander in his neighbourhood when I am lost for words myself. His instincts are so delicate and feminine. His is a generous nature, but when his heart fixes on the wrong thing there's simply no hope. His adventures bring out the consoling side of my personality; it's easily done. I often read this book at moments of transition, there is something very startling about its atmosphere, the squalor for instance is beautifully almost lovingly rendered. The dim world of Earls Court boarding house life, between the wars, enthrals and motivates, even as its characters despair and decline.

The Other Garden and Collected Stories by Francis Wyndham is a new discovery. I read it recently in bed in a hotel in New York and loved it enough to squander the shimmering city that lay beyond my windows for hours. It contains a world that seems vastly superior to the actual one, or at least it makes you think it does. The moment I finished the first story I began the second draft of the novel I'm writing. My favourite tale is 'The Ground Hostess' a charming account of a young man's highly eccentric behaviour following the death of his mother. To protect himself from the heavy solicitousness of his two best friends he invents twin romances for himself, one with a lady called Linda and one with a fellow named Tone. These tales are both sophisticated and big-hearted, fragile and defiant.

All these works I love contain high cheer and misery in equal measure, giving the impression oddly, as Judy Garland does, that cheer and misery are almost as good as each other, certainly of equal value, practically the same in a way. There's something in that that makes me want to write myself. It's a lovely feeling.

Thursday, 2 October, 2008