James Wood

If innocence were a family business, a terraced saga like Buddenbrooks, our age would be the sickly generation that abandons the firm and takes up the piano. We would seem to have nothing left in the innocence bank; we are rich on suspicion. In literature, contemporary examples abound. Martin Amis, for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting “Bullshit!” ’‘

In his essay on laughter, Bergson argues that comedy is chastening, not charitable. Laughter is defined by a certain absence of sympathy, a distance and disinterestedness, the philosopher tells us. A world that contained only pure intelligences would probably still include laughter; a world made up of pure emotionalists probably would not. Bergson appears to have been universalising from the example of Molière, and in so doing produces a description of comedy that is mightily contradicted at almost every station of literature. For literature’s greatest category might be precisely one of sympathetic comedy: in particular, that paradoxical shuffle of condescension and affiliation we are made to feel by Bottom the weaver, or Don Quixote, or Uncle Toby, or Zeno, or Pnin. Such characters have busy souls. They are congested by aspiration, an aspiration that outstrips their insight. They claim to know themselves, but their selves are too dispersed to be known. It is we who know them, because we know at least something about them: that they are self-ignorant. They are rich cavities, into which we pour a kindly offering: if we are the only ones who can provide the knowledge they lack about themselves, then we ourselves have become that lack, have become a part of them.

When I was 16 or so, my parents moved to Weardale, a farming area where little villages and farms flock between Durham on the east and Northumberland on the west. The church in the village we lived in was Late Victorian, devoutly ugly, its furnishings as decent and sparse as its congregation, who regularly comprised an ancient churchwarden (the only man) and five or six elderly ladies. I often played the organ, which was a tinny wheezer. It was not a rich village; there were people in it who had never left County Durham, and one set of brothers who had never been on a train. One of the women in the congregation was so tone-deaf that she seemed to speak the hymns rather than sing them; another always mispronounced the word ‘apostolic’ during the recitation of the Creed (‘Holy, catholic and apostolic church’), landing heavily on the second rather than the third syllable. Since there were so few congregants, her stumble tended to put everyone else out, like a lame pall-bearer.‘

Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the confessions, and the betrayals, of words. Of course, much great poetry has not worn this bent gesture, nor do we always want it to, and it can be irritating when Hill’s more pious admirers speak as if verse’s highest theme should be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle. Thomas Mann, like Hill, an artist wary of the claims and capacities of art, lamented that his Doctor Faustus was ‘joylessly earnest, not artistically happy’, and Hill’s two new books certainly tread the gravel of the joyless.‘