Sad to read about the death of John Gross which I somehow missed last year. After buying the OUP book of aphorisms some time after its publication in 1983, I went on to become interested in ethics and, more generally, philosophy. Gross was obviously a fan of the laconic Italian writer, Cesare Pavese and I read This Business of Living with much interest.

On a lighter note, I was interested find this anecdote about JG’s chairmanship of the Booker Prize in 1971:

After the success of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Gross was in demand. In 1971, he chaired the third Booker prize. It was not the happiest of experiences. One of the judges, Malcolm Muggeridge, resigned halfway through because he felt most of the entries were ill-written and pornographic. He was replaced by the critic Philip Toynbee. When time came for the judges – Antonia Fraser, Saul Bellow and John Fowles, in addition to Toynbee and Gross – to decide on a shortlist, a split emerged over whether VS Naipaul’s In a Free State was a full-length novel and therefore eligible. Gross, like Fraser and Toynbee, insisted it was, whereas Bellow and Fowles saw it as stories, albeit linked ones. Gross endeavoured to bring the dissenters on side by circulating a questionnaire. Although both remained vocal in their disagreement – Fowles said afterwards that Gross viewed him as a rogue elephant in the matter – the view of the majority held.

And this touching memorial from his son, Tom Gross:

REMARKS BY TOM GROSS AT THE FUNERAL OF JOHN GROSS

January 14, 2010

My father was an exceptional person. I have known that all my life, of course, but nevertheless I have been taken aback by the outpouring of grief and admiration for him in the last three days, including wonderful letters and emails from all over the world and magnificent tributes in the press on both sides of the Atlantic, and in continental Europe too.

My father had an outstanding intellect. But because of his modesty I hadn’t quite realized to what extent his intellectual prowess went back to his earliest days, until reading some of the tributes this week.

On Wednesday, in The Times, a Mr Derek Taylor wrote a letter to say that he had been at the Perse school in Cambridge with my father. Mr Taylor wrote: “There was a school debate one day in 1946. The speakers were always sixth-formers. But John was 11 at the time and astonished the audience by standing up to make his point, quoting for his purpose the Russian Foreign Minister of 1927. It was a moment not to be forgotten.”

And yesterday in The Times, Gillian Tunkel wrote: “I have never forgotten the comment that John’s English teacher wrote to John’s parents at the end of one of John’s essays when John was 14: ‘I am not sufficiently equipped to mark this!’”

People who didn’t know my father, might have assumed that someone as erudite and bookish as he was, might somehow be deficient in common sense or worldly wisdom. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had unerring judgment and good sense in matters great and small.

He was unfailingly kind and sensitive too. He was always courteous and patient. I’ve never heard him be rude to anyone. He was immensely generous in every way, especially with his time and with his knowledge and advice. He would spend hours on the phone with people he hardly knew who had rung to pick his brain. And, as one of the many friends who have written to me said, he never looked over anyone’s shoulder at a party.

He remained friendly and totally unpompous to the end. Two days before he died, when I was urging the staff at St Mary’s, Paddington to do all they could to comfort him, a West Indian nurse said to me “Oh we all know about Mr Gross. He is the best conversationalist we’ve ever had here”.

My father’s intellect was also in tact until his final days. When he was almost unconscious, one of the doctors said to him: “Mr Gross we are moving you now, from the Samuel Lane ward to the Zachary Cope ward”. And my father, with his eyes still shut, suddenly mumbled “Ahh, Dr Zachary Cope – the famous abdominal expert who wrote an article about Jane Austen’s last illness.”

My father loved London. He delighted in taking visitors round tours of the East End, and literary and other places of interest elsewhere. As one American friend, Roger Kimball, wrote to me yesterday “John knew the city as well as any London taxi-driver – better in fact, because he could not only take you to any address you named but he also knew what had happened there from the time of Julius Caesar until the day before yesterday.”

My father loved literature and theatre, and all things English, but – without being religious – he had an intense sense of Jewishness too, hence his childhood memoir A Double Thread, and his groundbreaking study on the uses and misuses of the character Shylock over the last 400 years.

He also had a very happy temperament and a great zest for life. And because of this, after my sister has spoken and after the rabbi has offered the final prayers in Hebrew and said kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead — as we say goodbye to my father, we will conclude with an uplifting song (Tumbalaika) that my father liked in Yiddish — the other ancient language spoken by Jews of east European origin, the culture, literature and theatre of which my father adored almost as much as he did English literature.

(One of the last lively conversations he had just before Christmas, when he was rushed to hospital by my mother, was to show visitors, with the greatest of pleasure, a rare Yiddish edition of Oscar Wilde.)

Everything will be duller, and sadder without him.

He was also, of course, a fantastic father. I couldn’t have asked for a better father, and I feel privileged to be his son.

So, THE FINKLER QUESTION won the Booker prize for the very amusing Howard Jacobson. I will pick up a copy after finishing the good, but distinctly unfunny DEATH OF A MURDERER.

From a recent interview in The Telegraph:

“I think you have to lack confidence, to have some sense of being not quite at home in the world, to even think of being a writer. If you’re David Beckham and you’re handsome, people love you, you can kick a ball around, you’re not going to think ‘I’d like to write a novel’. What for?”

Quite so.

And this on infidelity (rather more forthcoming than the ‘hesitant’ James Salter):

Infidelity is another recurrent theme. Hasn’t that worried his wives?

“They’d be mad not to wonder. I mean I ruined my first marriage. That wasn’t the ruination of my second marriage. My third wife [De Yong] who has read my novels, naturally wondered what kind of man she has. I’m not my heroes, I have not led the life that they have done. But I led sufficiently an unreliable life to cause people pain. I don’t have any desire left to do any of that.”

Not that Howard should be giving himself too big a pat on the back. It’s got to be a little easier to steer clear of temptation at 68 than it was at 38 – unless you’re a character in one of Philip Roth’s late novels.

Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

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Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.

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An Appraisal – John Updike, Intuitive and Precise, Mapped America’s Mysteries – NYTimes.com

In one of these collections, Mr. Updike summed up his love of his vocation: “From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”

and a journal entry from John Cheever on hearing news of Updike’s demise – Remembering Updike – in The New Yorker.

Review: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon | Books | The Guardian

Dostoevsky sees France as under the sway of its smug, hypocritical bourgeoisie, while England is massive, industrial, infernal, apocalyptic. Its crowds fascinate him, as in this striking portrayal of binge drinking, Victorian-style: “On Saturday nights working men and women celebrate their sabbath all night long, guzzling and drinking like beasts … The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly. Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.”

from a review of of Judith Thurmans’ New Yorker essay on Leni Riefenstahl:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Perhaps Kipling and Claudel, but what if Mohammed Atta had written great short stories?

Celine was a gifted writer, but perhaps his misanthropy means he can’t join the ranks of the great.

Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk

Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.

It sits uncomfortably with me. Why is that? Is it because British philosophers have, for so long, been inching down the blind alley of analytical philosophy, the foundation for our current avoidance of anything that might seem esoteric, or – dare I say it – continental? Or is it because we are force-fed something else in its place: a slick, concise, quick-fix philosophising that’s grounded in fact and not too time-consuming to read? Whatever it is, I’m positive such inert scepticism governs our philosophical and literary judgment in this country. It’s the reason that the recent Booker prize shortlist, which reflects our deeply conservative, philosophy-lite tastes, is such an embarrassing failure.

I first read the work of Simon Critchley when the novelist Tom McCarthy gave me a sneak-preview transcript of their joint New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity (it was announced by the International Necronautical Society [INS] in the Drawing Center, Manhattan on September 25th, 2007). I was immediately hooked when they declared: “For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence … art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

Critchley’s entire oeuvre to date, similarly to the novels of McCarthy, is a call against the stuffy, reductive thinking that has haunted a British establishment that sides with form at all costs. When the Booker prize prize judge and novelist Louise Doughty writes: “The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities – it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character – these are great literary skills,” I begin to understand the kind of Idealism the INS is rallying against.

Critchley’s thinking explores the “circularity of ethical experience” and the motivational forces behind political action – predominantly disappointment, both religious and political, as he argues in Infinitely Demanding. In Things Merely Are he examines the “the situation of the relation of philosophy and poetry” through the work of Wallace Stevens, ultimately arriving at an acceptance of materialism in literature. For Critchley, material reality is a “trauma” that literature must “navigate”, allowing “things to be in their irreducible materiality” – something he has explored himself in a series of experimental writings with McCarthy and the INS.

It is somewhere within the navigation of materiality that I feel the future of the British novel lies. If literature is to evolve in this country it should put aside its traditional empiricism and strive towards radical contemporary philosophies and the esoteric, as far removed from us as they may seem. Sadly, the Booker prize is a reflection of a massive wrong-turn in our literary and philosophical culture. We have ventured no further than a conservative, establishment cul-de-sac of un-acceptance: we simply do not do philosophy that veers away from the tried and tested. We’ve got to get out of the anti-philosophical avenue our wrong-headed literary culture is pursuing.

Critchley is right when he says that all philosophy “begins in disappointment”. It is this same sense of disappointment that should encourage us to explore his work further.

Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy express outrage at being ridiculed and victimised by their nation | Books | The Guardian

Houellebecq also talks for the first time in detail about his parents, answering his mother, who recently published her own book calling him a “stupid little bastard”. 

In a literary scandal that gripped France, she took to the airwaves to heap insults on her son, who she gave to his grandparents to raise when he was a baby.

Houellebecq says he has only ever seen his mother about 15 times, and she conjured up a more radical “wickedness” than the “worst mothers in modern literature”. He said his friends, on reading her attacks against him, asked why she had not simply had an abortion instead of giving birth to him. He calls her an “absolutely egocentric creature, of real although limited intelligence” and says he cannot even manage to hate her.

It might be that never having a mother “reinforces” one, he writes, but in a way that he would not wish on anyone: one can never take love for granted, and one has difficulty believing in it, remaining a kind of “enfant sauvage”, never serene, never tame, “always ready to bite”. He saw his mother’s book and press tour as being the media’s attempt to get at him.

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize – NYTimes.com

Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”