Dostoevsky of digression
After more than 1,000 columns, our peerless book critic is finally retiring – to have more time to read! What better way to head off into the sunset than with this sparkling review of a volume on the art of quitting – by an author who’s so fond of straying from the point that Craig calls him the...
Anyone buying this book hoping to find out more about Roger Federer is likely to be disappointed. Federer barely gets a look-in, other than as a symbol of a beautiful career coming to an end. In fact, a lot of the meagre amount of space given over to Federer is concerned with his apparent love of free towels. Over the years, Geoff Dyer has noticed that, at the end of each match, professional tennis players always walk off with their towels.
A wizard of the comic monologue, he riffs on the idea: ‘For the low-ranked or qualifiers getting into a grand slam represents a rare and much-needed towel bonanza, but even the top players make sure, after strapping on their sponsored watches in full view of the television cameras, to scoop up as many towels as possible – the Australian Open ones are particularly desirable – before trudging off the court.
‘Pre-Covid, they would toss their disgusting, sweaty wristbands into the crowd – such largesse! – and occasionally throw in a towel for good measure, but most of the time they’d make their exit looking as if they’ve just finished looting a branch of Bed Bath & Beyond.
‘It’s possible that, after showering, they dump the odd dirty towel in the locker-room laundry basket, but I suspect that they regularly head back to the hotel and then the airport with bags full of towel-swag. They’re multi-millionaires, many of them, but they’ve still got their eye on the main towel chance.’
He goes on to imagine the extension of the winner’s trophy cabinet. ‘Roger and Serena probably have designated towel rooms, maybe even separate towel houses. Like the great aristocratic families who take pains to ensure that generations of offspring will continue to enjoy the unearned benefits of inherited land, the titans of tennis meritocracy bequeath to their children and grandchildren lives freed forever from the realm of towelling necessity.’
I’ve quoted that extract at some length, not only because it shows how funny Dyer is, but also how adept he is at straying from the point. You could even say that the whole point of Geoff Dyer is that he refuses to stick to the point. You think he is writing about one thing, but two paragraphs later he is on to another, then another, then another. But then, like some great magician, he ends on a drum roll, and – hey presto! – these random balls are suspended in mid-air, creating a splendid pattern. Or is the pattern just an illusion?
In one section of this new book he starts by writing about Turner’s painting Regulus, which is of blinding sunlight. Always a fount of knowledge, Dyer informs us that Regulus was a Roman consul who had his eyelids cut off by the Carthaginians, which meant that his eyes were roasted by the sun.
He then goes to view the painting in Tate Britain, and finds it much less spectacular than he had been led to believe. If I might make my own digression, this anticlimax reminds me of the time, in an earlier book, he set off on a trek to see the Northern Lights. After a long flight, a cheerless bus ride, a walk in a temperature of ‘a thousand degrees below zero, not counting the windchill’, and a freezing dogsled ride (‘pure misery’), during the course of which he tumbled off into the snow, he finally glimpsed ‘a suggestion of light in the sky, even if, by any normal definition of the phrase, it was still pitch dark’.
Anyway, after writing about Regulus, he turns his attention to Rain, Steam And Speed, Turner’s famous painting of a steam train shooting across the bridge at Maidenhead. He writes of the impact of the early railways on rural calm, then switches to a rant against our current railway system, ‘carved up into private rail franchises, all in apparent competition with each other to maximise profit commuter dissatisfaction’.
From there he turns to recent depictions of
a post-apocalyptic future in films such as 28 Days Later, noting that their most striking aspect is ‘the way that they always have, even if only briefly, an idyllic quality: no queues at supermarkets, no traffic on motorways or crowds in central London’.
Then he’s off on another sidetrack, writing about railways in Brief Encounter and Anna Karenina, noting that D.H. Lawrence believed that Tolstoy pushed Anna under the train, ‘to punish her for the transgression he had relished’.
Over the next few pages, Dyer writes about the doleful country singer Gillian Welch, the surrealist de Chirico, the old curmudgeon V.S. Naipaul, and – very amusingly – all the classic books he has failed to finish.
Recently, an American magazine criticised him for his inability to stick to the subject, but this is a bit like attacking Fred Astaire for never staying still. Dyer is the Rembrandt of the Red Herring, the Dostoevsky of the Digression, the Shakespeare of the Sidetrack.
Early on, he states that the theme of the book is ‘Things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out’. At the age of 14, he heard that George Best was quitting football. It was, he says,
‘the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing something they loved, the thing that gave their
life meaning’. As a theme, it is certainly wide enough, and deep enough, to sustain a book, and, even as he beetles off in all sorts of other directions, he is careful to keep it bubbling away in the background.
His interests and enthusiasms are extraordinarily broad, ranging from high culture (Nietzsche, Tolstoy) to low culture (Boris Becker, pilfering shampoo from hotel bathrooms) and all points in between.
The hazard of such a broad range is that readers are more interested in the areas they know about than those they don’t. Speaking for myself, I loved everything he said, good and bad, about Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour – ‘it was difficult to tell which song from the back catalogue he was in the process of mauling at any given time’ – but when he strayed too far into the obscure world of jazz heroes such as Art Pepper and John Coltrane, I found my mind wandering. And is it just me, or does he shed his sense of humour and become a bit of a bore – ‘Endless is one of many tracks showing Jarrett’s Standards trio at their matchless best…’ – when he dwells for too long on the jazz greats of yesteryear?
Dyer is at his own matchless best when being transgressive rather than reverential. He abhors the new breed of over-sensitive nature writers and the novels of Anthony Powell (‘on some lowwattage, upper-crust, energy-saving setting, capable of being maintained, with minimum expenditure, over the immense distance of the 12-volume haul’).
My favourite passage in the whole book – I can’t stop reading it out loud to friends – is about the tedium of poetry readings. ‘At any poetry reading, however enjoyable, the words we most look forward to hearing are always the same: “I’ll read two more poems.”… It’s lovely hearing this. You can feel a sigh of relief passing through the audience… After long months in the sea of poetry the shout has gone up from the crow’s nest: “Land!” We’re almost there, we’ve made it, can practically taste the scurvy-healing lager being poured in the bar afterwards.’
Like so much else, this may seem like a deviation from his theme of Last Things, but he manages to swing back on track.
‘Which raises the question,’ he adds, ‘Why did we come if, while being here, we would end up being so preoccupied by no longer being there? Could it be that our deepest desire is for everything to be over with?’ His lifelong theme, he says, is the act of giving up: quitting, ending, tapping out, calling it a day.
Coincidentally, the moment has now come for me to give up this column. After reviewing more than a thousand books on these pages, I plan to take it easy.
How? Silly question: by reading more books, of course.