The Rambler #3 September 2024
Concerning Neo-Egyptian architecture, Graham Greene's writing routine, and humiliation
Notes on places
An avenue in Highgate Cemetery
Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839, one of seven new cemeteries established during the early Victorian period, in what were then outer suburbs of London. Its architect, Stephen Geary, placed the astonishing Egyptian Avenue at the heart of the new cemetery. Today, with its Portland cement discoloured by age and moss, the Avenue’s portal has the decomposing grandeur of some Pharaonic monument. But given the lushness of the encroaching vegetation, it’s a Pharaonic monument somehow transplanted to the tropics. When newly built, freshly painted, and decorated with what a writer of the era (Edward Walford, Old and New London, 1878) called ‘Oriental ornaments’, including a winged serpent, it must have been even more impressive.
Walk through the arch and you’ll find sixteen family vaults, each with shelf space for twelve coffins. And all now neglected and unvisited, the result, I suppose, of family lines dying out. The gently rising Avenue, imbued with melancholy and faded glory, is like a North London Valley of the Kings. Modern eyes, viewing this romantic decay, might imagine it as the backdrop for a period drama or horror movie. Or conjure Cleopatra (in the form of Elizabeth Taylor, circa 1963), being borne down the Avenue on a throne of burnished gold, accompanied by Nubian guards and trumpet blowers…
The Victorians treated the Dead with greater respect and less sentiment than we do. There’s something about this Egyptian pastiche that jars with the Gothic atmosphere of the rest of the cemetery, and with Anglican notions of death and the life to come. It’s too showy, too fanciful, too pagan. It took a long time for the London Cemetery Company to sell off all the vaults and recoup its investment. But if the Avenue was a commercial failure, it remains a stunning imaginative success.
Notes on writing
Time to write
Long ago, when I was young and impressionable, I read a profile of the novelist Graham Greene. His writing routine was mentioned. Greene would write for an hour or so each morning, producing 500 words, and then stop, his day’s work done. After this, he would head out for an apéritif. Now that, I thought, is the life for me. This was when Greene was widely regarded as the greatest living English novelist, a judgement with which I concurred. That he never won the Nobel Prize for Literature says everything that needs to be said about the value of literary prizes. But I digress. The point is, that profile planted a particular idea of the professional writer in my head.
I can’t remember now where I read the Greene profile. It certainly wasn’t in the New Yorker. But Michael Korda, a writer, editor, and friend of Greene’s, wrote a memoir for the New Yorker in 1996 which confirmed the routine. In 1950, the sixteen-year-old Korda was invited to cruise on his uncle’s yacht on the Côte d’Azur, the uncle being Alexander Korda, the film producer. Greene was a member of the cruise party and young Korda observed the great novelist’s writing routine:
An early riser, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather notebook and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempting to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, Graham wrote, over the next hour or so, exactly five hundred words. He counted each word according to some arcane system of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turning to me, said, "That's it, then. Shall we have breakfast?”.
Greene's self-discipline was such that, no matter what, he always stopped at five hundred words, even if it left him in the middle of a sentence. It was as if he brought to writing the precision of a watchmaker, or perhaps it was that in a life full of moral uncertainties and confusion he simply needed one area in which the rules, even if self-imposed, were absolute. Whatever else was going on, his daily writing, like a religious devotion, was sacred and complete. Once the daily penance of five hundred words was achieved, he put the notebook away and didn't think about it again until the next morning. It seemed to me then the ideal way to live—far better than the routine followed by my father, who worked from dawn until late at night at a studio in London and then brought his work home with him.
What a seductive picture of the writer’s life that is — even now, when I am older, have published some books of my own, and know how much time it all really takes. Korda doesn’t say whether he adopted Greene’s method, but it’s a reasonable bet he didn’t. Greene, I think, was exceptionally gifted and his unconscious mind must have been quite the machine, beavering away to such effect that by the time he actually picked up the pen each day, it must have been like taking dictation.
My writing routine is nothing like that. Since I started writing seriously a few years ago, I’ve learnt that the only way for me is to spend time, by which I mean hours, in the chair, eyes on screen, fingers on keyboard. Of course, as someone once said, writing is not typing, but the notion that I could have produced what I have so far by using Greene’s approach is laughable. There are too many false starts, too many wrong directions, too many bum notes.
Of course, when Korda met him, Greene was a writer at the absolute top of his game. Perhaps the years of practice had brought him to the point, where writing, in terms of knowing what he wanted to put into words and how he wanted to express it, really was as effortless as that account makes it seem. I can only dream. It’s the difference between being a concert pianist and a street busker, or an opera star and a karaoke singer.
That said, the further I get into this writing business, the less I resent the hours it takes. It’s about learning a craft, not climbing a mountain or running a race. There is no peak to reach, no tape to break. It’s more like life. You have good days and bad days but you have to keep going. And you have to remember the two things Toby Litt, the writer and teacher, always tells his students:
There are no short cuts. There are no wasted hours.
Notes on reading
On books not read and humiliation
There is a BBC Radio 4 programme called Great Lives in which a celebrity guest chooses a dead person they admire and/or consider significant as the subject. The ‘great life’ is picked over with the help of a so-called expert witness, usually a biographer of the person concerned. It’s a kind of extended discursive obituary and is always entertaining. Back in 2012, the comedian Alexi Sayle picked the Palestinian activist and literary scholar Edward Said as his subject. Sayle called Said ‘very noble and fiercely intelligent’ when explaining his choice. He had once met Said and clearly had a great regard for him.
Said’s most famous book is Orientalism, one of the founding texts of postcolonial studies. At one point, Matthew Parris, the presenter, joshed with Sayle, challenging him to make Orientalism the basis of a comedy sketch. There was some awkward laughter from Sayle and then Parris asked, ‘Have you read the book?’ Sheepishly, Sayle replied, ‘I haven’t, no, but I’ve read commentary on the book, so, er…’ That poignant ‘so, er…’ was left hanging in the studio air and Parris moved swiftly on.
It was an amusing moment, though perhaps not as amusing as it would have been if Sayle had tried to bluff his way through the principal arguments of Orientalism. Of course, there are thousands of unread books in all our lives, but I still find it strange that Sayle hadn’t read Said’s most famous work. Most of us would not think much of a self-professed Beatles fan who had never listened to Rubber Soul.
In his novel Changing Places (I’d like to confirm here and now that I’ve read it), David Lodge invents a parlour game called Humiliation. The idea is to name a literary work that you haven’t read but that you think others may have. You get a point for each person round the table who has indeed read it. Obviously, the better known the work, the more likely it is that others will have read it and the more points you’ll score. But the more points you score, the greater the humiliation. Lodge’s novel is populated by English literature scholars, so when they play the game, the stakes are high.
The climax of one scene occurs when a character, driven by his competitive desire to win the game, names Hamlet as the text he hasn’t read. This, obviously, is a shocking admission for an English professor. When the gossip about it spreads around the campus, it results in him being turned down for a tenured position. Changing Places is a wickedly funny novel.
The gaps in my reading of the canon? They are legion, they are many. To take classic nineteenth-century novels, I‘ve yet to get round to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Middlemarch, and Anna Karenina, though I’ve read other books by Hardy, Eliot, and Tolstoy. But the gaping hole, the yawning abyss, in my reading life is Henry James. I haven’t read a single word of his, though I’ve watched film adaptations and listened to radio adaptations, and enjoyed them. I’m sure I’d like his novels. I think I might even be a James kind of guy. But there always seems to be someone else, some other book, ahead of him in the reading queue. Though now I’ve confessed, I have no option but to remedy this. Who the hell is going to take me seriously as a writer if I haven’t read any Henry James?
[Image of Samuel Palmer’s painting Christian Descending into the Valley of Humiliation, courtesy of the Art Fund.]