Is there anything more tedious than the literary love affair, or indeed, if one is not personally involved, the very notion of a love affair at all? Is it not rather odd in this age of High Rationalism that people should still take the thing seriously, never mind make such a dreary and prolonged fuss of something so transitory, illusory and pointless?
I am not talking of the admirable and enviable flings of the free and youthful, which deserve to be celebrated, but are usually too fleeting and glorious (and busy) to catch in print. With a few notable exceptions, the literary "love affair" is an irritatingly vague, coy, contradictory and pretentious pairing of words, usually glorifying nothing more than a piece of brief, underhand, guilt-ridden, secretive, grubby, childish and quite frequently sleazy carry-on among supposedly grown-up people.
There must be many ordinary readers who are driven to despair not merely by the ill-thought-out phrase itself, but by the emphasis on the seriously unbalanced pseudo-spiritual-emotional condition ("being in love", whatever that may mean) it is popularly thought to indicate.
And yet serious writers and commentators continue to thoughtlessly use this sloppy shorthand. Everywhere we turn in the world of modern literature we are offensively greeted with news of yet another book/poem wallowing publicly in the self-regarding grotesquerie of a supposed love affair. It is enough to drive one to drink were one not already gratefully arrived there.
Very recently, great swathes of newsprint have been devoted to Graham Greene's book, The End of the Affair - or rather, to the actual affair which inspired the novel. The excuse in this case is the imminent release of Neil Jordan's new film of the book, but the focus in print (and on television) has been on the affair itself, with writers (some of whom clearly have not read the book) salivating over the 13-year relationship which Graham Greene had with Catherine Walston, a married mother of five when it all began.
Who cares? Presumably, those writers and amateur psychologists who imagine a writer's private life is of more interest and consequence than his literary output, and the readers who foolishly imagine they learn something important about a writer from the numerous trembling analyses provided: in short, the army of literary voyeurs and speculators, and in Graham Greene's case those strange people who take extra pleasure from the fact that Walston's husband turned a blind eye to the affair.
Well ho, hum.
Meanwhile, the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry was awarded last Monday to Hugo Williams for his autobiographical collection of poems, Billy's Rain, some of which I have since read. According to the Times, the elegiac poems of his collection trace the course of (yet another) love affair - "its complications, obsessions, evasions, secret joys and emotional pitfalls."
Complications, obsessions, evasions - please, spare us. We get all that at home. Let secret joys, for the love of God, stay secret. And if you have any pride at all, Hugh, or concern for readers' well-being, in future please keep your emotional pitfalls to yourself. The notion that poetry is a suitable vehicle for the public display of such private matters is what has kept poetry in the literary ghetto for so long, at the expense of genuine poetry (the definition of which will have to wait for another day).
When the book was published, Hugo Williams coyly said that "my wife is the only person I've ever really loved", but Hermione failed to turn up at the launch - not too surprisingly, since Billy's Rain charts an affair between Williams and someone called Carolyn, indulged in seven years ago. Here are two lines: the hair on the back of my neck stands up/ as I catch her smell for a second.
As his wife perceptively remarked to Williams after reading the book, which appears to be full of such dull lines, "Five years' work, eh?"
Irritatingly, Williams, a part-time journalist, is on record as saying that "writing poetry taught me how to write journalism, because it taught me to put myself in the position of the reader." The implication is that he has learned to take a detached tone, when in reality, his rather creepy fauxnaif meanderings are geared towards dragging the reader into a highly personal, private world, and one that should have remained so. It is not enough to have indulged in the private affair and then to have made it public, no matter who is hurt or embarrassed, but the reader has to be made part of it, too. Excuse me while I shower.