The Pleasure Principle

It’s important that each of us assembles a shelf of authors whose work delivers guilt-free, unalloyed pleasure, on demand. They are not necessarily the best writers (though they may be the best of their kind) or even our favorite writers, but the very recollection of their existence, when we are miles or days away from reading them, should inspire a consoling sense of anticipation: “Oh, I must read him again soon!” My shelf is brief and, I notice, exclusively English. I don’t know what to make of this, except that English writers often have a way of being charmingly serious or, perhaps, seriously charming, especially to American readers.

First on the list is P.G. Wodehouse. No writer is funnier and none more gracefully eludes practitioners of explication du texte. Try to gloss a Wodehouse passage, and analysis dissipates like a bucket of steam. Here, chosen at random, is the opening of Chapter 2, Section III, of his 1929 novel, Summer Lightning:

“By the way,” said Ronnie, the flood of eloquence subsiding. “A thought occurs. Have you any notion where we’re headed for?”
“Heaven.”
“I mean at the moment.”
“I supposed you were taking me to tea somewhere.”

Philip Larkin is another, and not just for his poetry. Do yourself a good turn and read his letters and All What Jazz, his collected jazz reviews. Larkin is reliably funny and contrary, full of good sense and no respecter of delicate sensibilities. This is from a letter he wrote to Winifred Bradshaw on Nov. 16, 1976:

“You sound as if you keep busy – or are kept busy – and this keeps misery at bay to some extent. I tend to take to drink in such circumstances (incidentally, Patsy Strang, later Patsy Murphy, is now reputedly an alcoholic in Dublin. Another of my friends has been in hospital for the same thing. So I watch it). And of course work, paradoxically enough, is a comfort. One wakes up wanting to cut one’s throat; one goes to work, & in 15 minutes one wants to cut someone else’s – complete cure!”

Next, of course, is Evelyn Waugh, master of prose and bile. Here is a sample set in Paris from Labels, his first travel book, published in 1930:

“I need hardly say that directly I felt strong enough, which was before noon next day, I left the Crillon for cheaper accommodation. My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls. The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”

I could include others – Anthony Powell, much of Kingsley Amis – but my final exhibit is Henry Green, less known than the others and probably less accessible because of his beautifully modulated, idiosyncratic prose. James Wood has lauded his “gentle comic reticence,” and I rank him among the great novelists of the last century. Here’s a snippet from his second novel, Living, published in 1929:

“Mr Craigan had gone to work when he was nine and every day he had worked though most of daylight till now, when he was going to get old age pension. So you will hear men who have worked like this talk of monotony of their lives, but when they grow to be old they are more glad to have work and this monotony has grown so great that they have forgotten it. Like on a train which goes through night smoothly and at an even pace – so monotony of noise made by the wheels bumping over joints between the rails becomes rhythm – so this monotony of hours grows to be the habit and regulation on which we grow old. And as women who have nits in their hair over a long period collapse when they are killed, feeling so badly removal of that violent irritation which has become stimulus for them, so when men who have worked these regular hours are now deprived of work, so, often, their lives come to be like puddles on the beach where tide no longer reaches.”

Some readers may wonder how such a passage fits my prescription for “guilt-free, unalloyed pleasure,” and I admit the comedy is grimmer than Wodehouse’s and the syntax more demanding. But Green’s prose, once you leap in like an inexperienced dancer and learn to move to his rhythms, is addictive and quite often laugh-out-loud funny. He was the creator of great characters from all classes, each with a patented manner of speaking, and his later novels are composed almost entirely of dialogue (putting him in surprising company: Ivy Compton-Burnett and William Gaddis). Green published nine novels and a memorably elliptical memoir. He brings out my inner proselytizer.