Give Thanks For Never-Was

I was sorry to read of the recent death of Pierre Rouve, the Bulgaria-born liberal intellectual, interpreter, broadcaster, diplomat, art critic, lecturer, and - not least - bon viveur. (His London studio in Markham Square was, as one commentator remarked, "a short drink from his house").

Rouve was a brilliant broadcaster on cultural and social issues, but by all accounts his best writing was spoken, mostly in pubs and clubs and at smoke-filled dinner parties in his Chelsea home. He had the ability to compose fully-formed paragraphs, even monographs, while on his feet.

One obituarist wrote as follows: "I shall never forget one occasion at King's College, London, after someone had given a prepared lecture on some topic or other, when Rouve stood up from the floor and made a critique of the lecture which left lesser mortals breathless. Oh, the unwritten books!"

Well, I shall never forget the occasion either, since I was (you will have guessed) the "someone" who gave the prepared lecture on "some topic or other". I can hardly be considered responsible for the obituarist's memory lapse, but the "some topic or other" on which I lectured was consciousness and the origin of thought, my rationalist theory tested regularly against experimental results and clinical data, and in which I took issue with both empiricists and externalists, arguing that perception is cognitive, constructive and proposition-like. Despite M Rouve's florid and rather self-aggrandising critique from the floor, it was my talk which the chairman described as "marvellously nuanced". I note the obituarist forgot to mention that too.

However, we will let it pass. I am more interested in the fellow's reference to unwritten books. The more of these we have (or haven't, actually), the better. The more bad books that are published, the more attractive the notion of the unwritten book becomes. Indeed, the reputation of someone like Pierre Rouve might, for all we know, have diminished rather than grown if all his potential books actually came to be written.

Anyone who doubts this might usefully look at the case of Harold Brodkey, America's most famous unread writer, who died in 1996. For over 20 years, Brodkey had been working on a presumed epic of Moby Dick proportions, a Great American Novel to beat all others. Now and then, to excite the appetite of readers, a 30-page fragment would be published in The New Yorker (where his early stories appeared), sometimes to a mixed reception. But when The Runaway Soul was finally published in 1991, it was a damp squib, leaving critics baffled and disappointed. As for Brodkey himself, life before publication of this book had been glorious. For years, he was feted throughout the US, living on what one critic described as "a crescendo of unwitnessed promise". But after publication, and the disappointing response, Brodkey faded mentally and physically. Sadly, he contracted AIDS, and his literary swansong was an essay on death which, ironically, was well-received. Very recently, Fourth Estate has published a posthumous collection of Brodkey's stories (The World is the Home of Love and Death). So far the critical reaction has been muted.

Brodkey has always come in for strong criticism principally because of the excesses of his style, his alleged monomania, his dictatorial approach and his obsession with descriptive detail. He was interested, as one writer said, in conveying to the reader a grotesque minuteness: "If that involved 30 pages on the exact tonalities of his mother's speech . . . then so be it."

Let us be careful then, and by all means praise people for their (well-written) books, but praise them even more if they remain unwritten. We must be deeply thankful too for many thousands of unwritten poems, never-to-befinished plays and even the numerous damnably-clever newspaper articles withheld for whatever reason at the last moment. Nor is this a philosophy that should be confined to literature. Let us offer up thanks at this appropriate time of year for all the things that might, for all we know, have brought us more grief than joy (in that elongated amble, the long run). I am thinking of thwarted desire, unfulfilled fantasy, frustrated longing, faded expectation, tattered hopes and unanswered prayers: the missed job, the stifled project, the lost investment opportunity, the unconsummated love affair, the unborn child, the wished-for house, the road not taken, the drink not drunk, the almost was, the nearly did and the never would; and all the other innumerable unlit hopes, moment-shining aspirations, dimmed dreams and prematurely quenched flames of the might-have-been.

Times Square will resume on Thursday, January 7th