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Overview: It could take you four chapters to get used to the pace of this remarkable book. George Eliot complained about the pace in Fielding, just as today you may find yourself complaining about the pace in George Eliot; but then, each of them had the pace of other times.
Edward Blishen is out of time altogether. He will abandon a narrative so that it becomes a plank stretched out over a void, only to return to it in another chapter. He will move amongst the seven decades of his own life as the fancy takes him, or abruptly shift scenes. This, for example, is Blishen on the way to work one morning. A commuter’s chat – the railway line – under a bridge, the graffiti ‘Piss off Everyone‘ – the BBC – a secretary at the BBC, ‘a young woman delightful for her skirts‘ – the Underground – a fantasy image of the great satirists led by Swift coming down the elevator – an Irish harpist. Put like this it sounds familiar, for this reads like those strange chapter headings in George Borrow.
And just as Borrow is fascinated by Borrow, Blishen is fascinated by Blishen. The man even tells you about his dreams for page after page only to stop: ‘It was the need to pee which awoke me‘. We are then treated to a paragraph about what it is like to pee in old age. This is a very odd book.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Reading it reminds me of a scholarship paper which invited one to submit a critical analysis of a carol, something that completely stumped me. I could have swarmed all over a metaphysical poem, but for something like that, so clear, so uncomplicated, I did not have the kit.
To enjoy Blishen you have to overhaul your kit first. There is no consecutive narrative in the book, except that he goes on holiday to India with his wife, and nothing really happens, except that once he is irritated by a fellow commuter, and in his job as a BBC interviewer comes up against two young producers, one of whom wants him to restrict each interview to 4 minutes 28 seconds. Blishen, who sees an interview as ‘a sort of warm blundering about‘, is much miffed.
The other producer, a woman, wants him to make his trailers sexier, and to introduce a Thomas Hardy biography as ‘the life of the man who never forgot the woman’s body twisting at the end of the rope outside the jail‘. Poor BBC producers, little did they know that soon they would be twisting at the end of a rope in another of Blishen’s autobiographies.
But why, I hear you ask, should we want to read such a book? First, because of its joy in language. This is Blishen on a Sergeant Clinker: ‘He’d drilled us in a persecutory sort of way at the grammar school in the early Thirties, before the new school was built and it’s having a gymnasium made him irrelevant‘. It is the joy in the exact word that keeps the reader on his toes in a way very few modern writers are able to: ‘Mr Trout, a man most deeply banal‘; ‘The charming bewilderment of her fingers‘, as a young woman tries to keep her hair in place: ‘The funerals of lace‘ on women’s dresses in long-ago photographs.
It is the sly adverb: ‘She was theoretically in favour of literature‘. It is the adjective that can stop you in your tracks. At his wedding, Blishen’s mother looks preoccupied: ‘With my sister intending to marry within a month, she was faced, I now understand, with my undiluted father forever and ever’. It doesn’t matter what the man says, so long as he says it like that: the flavour of the individual words stays with you.
You can say of Blishen, as Max Beerbohm said of Brummell, that he looked life straight in the face out of the corners of his eyes. So when Blishen and his wife come on a pair of naked lovers, they wonder how Jane Austen would have reacted to such a scene. He then speculates, amazingly, that George Eliot might have felt quite at home with it. But of course such reflections mean he has deserted the mother love, himself, and so promptly wheels on himself aged 20. What will he have made of it?
An articulate old gentleman talking to himself by his fireside, while the rest of us peer in through the windows and most of the time do not notice the cold.
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