The Empty Room

 By tomorrow morning this room will be empty. In readiness for its complete refurbishment, I've moved four bookcases worth of books to other rooms. By the time the computer is in the kitchen there won't be a room in the house that isn't full. Except this one, the latest stage of this ongoing updating programme which nobody would say isn't due.

It might not have been a thousand books I moved elsewhere. The three shelves of the glass-fronted bookcase were doubled-up, mostly slim volumes by the poets who haven't qualified for their own shelf - like Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, etc. have - so maybe there were 800, many of them representing short-lived enthusiasms or maybe even disappointments but one never knows when one might have a reason to read Frank O'Hara, Hart Crane or have a better look at Peter Didsbury one day. It has served to make the point that I don't need to buy books at the rate I once did, though. 

There is nothing new waiting to be read and no time to acquire such a thing before I go away for a few days, though, so it's a good thing I'll be busy. Perhaps I'll find a couple of poets and a novel to take with me to re-read on the trains.

Paul Alexander's biography of J.D. Salinger made the point more than once that he wasn't a particularly convincing recluse and could be thought to have kept media speculation about him alive by tempting them with such things as the abortive plan plan to publish Hapworth 16, 1924. He was quite insistent that he wanted to be left alone but not as good at it as Thomas Pynchon. It's a long, bleak journey into themselves that such artists undertake, though. Clearly not easy to live with and the acerbic tone of so many of his goddamn characters apparently coming naturally to him, there is something of the Michael Jackson neverland fascination with childhood about him which might seem all sweetness and light to them but is treated with increasingly deep, dark suspicion by now.

He might well have been one of those artists who never recovered from their first, great masterpiece and produced pale imitations of it from thereon in. I don't know. I'd like to think there's plenty in it but the Zen and the selfishness and maybe the inability to move on become the point. Art that exists on the brink of unworldliness risks becoming little more than a session in the psychiatrist's chair but Salinger doesn't let that worry him, it's implicit in his writing all the time.

It's not only Phil Spector, Rosemary Tonks and Michael Jackson that, in their different ways, disdain the world. There's a second biography of George Orwell by D.J. Taylor, as if his first had left unfinished business. Another brilliant writer whose work was a paragon example but who, by this account and others, was an appalling human being. At least it makes the point more convincingly than ever, as per Larkin, Hardy and others, that the artist and their art are not the same thing and one can admire one without the other.

I dare say there are even more who are very fine people but whose work isn't up to much.