case it was because the Tories hated the Labor Party as much as he did, which at least shows a warped kind of ideological consistency. The Siege of Pleasure is in part a careful, convincing analysis of the economic and social pressures that forced Jenny onto the streets and out of her life below stairs. It’s more fun than this sounds, because Hamilton, who wrote the play Rope, which Hitchcock later filmed, loves his ominous narratives. He’s a sort of urban Hardy: everyone is doomed, right from the first page. Hamilton isolates Jenny’s plight to an evening spent boozing with a tarty friend; she gets plastered, wakes up late in the house of a man she doesn’t know, and fails to turn up at her new job, skivvying for a comically incapable trio of old people. It’s sad, but Hamilton’s laconic narrative voice is always a joy to read, and as a social historian, Hamilton is unbeatable. Who knew that you could get waiter service in pubs in the 1920s? And plates of biscuits? Biscuits! What sort of biscuits? Hamilton doesn’t say.
In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid attempts to grapple with the question that seems constantly to arise in this column, namely, Why bloody bother? Why bother reading the bastards, and why bother writing them? I’m not sure he gets a lot further than I’ve ever managed, but there are some great stats here: Zaid estimates, for example, that it would take us fifteen years simply to read a list of all the books ever published. (“Author and title”—he’s very precise. You can, presumably, add on another seven or eight years if you want to know the names of the publishers.) I think he intends to make us despair, but I was actually rather heartened: not only can I now see that it’s possible—I’d be finished some time in my early sixties—but I’m seriously tempted. A good chunk of coming across as educated, after all, is just a matter of knowing who wrote what: someone mentions Patrick Hamilton, and you nod sagely and say, Hangover Square, and that’s usually enough. If I read the list, something might stick in the memory, because God knows that the books themselves don’t.
Zaid’s finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that “the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.”
That’s me! And you, probably! That’s us! “Thousands of unread books”! “Truly cultured”! Look at this month’s list: Chekhov’s letters, Amis’s letters, Dylan Thomas’s letters… What are the chances of getting through that lot? I’ve started on the Chekhov, but the Amis and the Dylan Thomas have been put straight into their permanent home on the shelves, rather than onto any sort of temporary pending pile. The Dylan Thomas I saw remaindered for fifteen quid (down from fifty) just after I’d read a terrific review of a new Thomas biography in the New Yorker; the Amis letters were a fiver. But as I was finding a home for them in the Arts and Lit nonfiction section (I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey), I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. My music is me, too, of course—but as I only really like rock and roll and its mutations, huge chunks of me—my rarely examined operatic streak, for example—are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children… But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not worth the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
I have been meaning to read a book about cricket for awhile, with the sole intention of annoying you all. I even toyed with the idea of reading only cricket books this entire month, but then I realized that this would make it too easy for you to skip the whole column; this way, you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle. I’m presuming here that very few of you have ever seen a cricket match, and if you have, you are almost certain to have been both mystified and stupefied: this, after all, is a game which, in its purest form (there are all sorts of cheap-thrills bastardized versions now), lasts for five days and very frequently ends in a tie: five days is not quite long enough to get through everything that needs doing in a cricket match, especially as you can’t play in the rain.
The funny thing is that we actually do like cricket here in England—it’s not some hey-nonny-no phony heritage thing, like Morris dancing (horrific bearded men with sticks and bells), or cream teas. Thirty or forty years ago it was our equivalent of baseball, an all-consuming summer sport that drove football off the back pages of newspapers completely for three months; now Beckham and the rest of them get the headlines even when they’re lying on Caribbean beaches. But big international matches still sell out, and every now and again the England team starts winning, and we renew our interest.
Ed Smith reminds traditionalists of a time when cricketers were divided into two camps, “Gentlemen” and “Players”; the former were private-school boys and university graduates from upper-middle-class backgrounds, the latter horny-handed professionals who weren’t even allowed to share a dressing room with their social betters. Smith is a Cambridge graduate who reviews fiction for one of the broadsheet newspapers. He’s also good-looking, well-spoken, articulate, and
