In David Lodge’s Changing Places a group of drunken English lecturers play a game called Humiliation, where they own up to the books they’ve never read. The winner is the visiting American professor, Howard Ringbaum, who admits he has survived thus far without getting beyond the first line of Hamlet (“Who’s there?”). It’s as if an Archbishop had announced his ignorance of the Bible, and Ringbaum is promptly sacked. I never think of the wretched Ringbaum without feeling shifty. Who doesn’t have yawning gaps in their learning just waiting to be exposed? I confess that I’ve not read all of Proust, much of Dante’s Inferno, or any of Finnegans Wake, those backbones of Western culture. They are the companions of a lifetime, and I’m halfway through my earthly course already without having felt their power. Have I left it too late? And why stop with the masterpieces I’ve never read – what about those I’ve never written? The thrillers, the children’s books for the eight-to-12-year-old market, the series of novels I once planned which define the condition of the postmodern, post-divorce, pre-menopausal woman, all unstarted because I haven’t the faintest idea how to write anything apart from biographies. I can’t even record my family history because I don’t know the first thing about my own family, such as my great-grandmother’s maiden name. I could write a food column if I could find a voice that wasn’t an abject imitation of Nigel Slater.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 06:58:05 +0000
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