Geordie Williamson

As chance would have it, this review was written following the retirement, aged forty-one, of Roger Federer from top-tier competitive tennis. Federer’s decision might be regarded as tricky for Geoff Dyer, since his latest work of essayistic autofiction leans heavily on the notion that while Federer, one of the giants of the sport, is forever about to retire, he never actually does.

John Updike said of his most enduring creation, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, that he was a version of the author who never went to college. Roland Baine, protagonist of Lessons, is something similar: a McEwan that failed. He’s a man whose early gifts aren’t brought to fruition. His closest brush with literary fame is brief: early marriage to a woman who becomes the kind of artist he could never be. Roland does not possess the requisite ruthless ambition; he lacks the splinter of ice in the heart. He’s a sensualist by inclination and passive by nature – a born helpmeet and second stringer who cobbles together a working life as a lounge-bar pianist and part-time tennis instructor.

Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’

A dubious privilege of belonging to Generation X is that your life straddles the period during which the internet went from being science fiction to settled fact of life. Take, for example, Justin Smith, the American-born, University of Paris-based historian of philosophy and science, a professor who turns fifty this year. He started out on dial-up message boards in the 1980s, saw his first HTML web page in the 1990s, and now maintains a well-regarded Substack newsletter, where, in between meditations on the historical ontology of depression and the metaphysics of onomastics, he writes with a subtle eye regarding online culture in all its manifestations.

There really isn’t another biographer like Joseph Frank – nor a biography to place beside his 2,400-page, five-volume life (1976–2002) of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the wildest and most contradictory of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Frank set out in the late 1970s – a time when historically grounded literary scholarship was losing favour in the academy – to fix Dostoevsky (1821–81) in the complex matrices of Russian history, politics, religion, and culture. An author who had been read in the English-speaking world as a hallucinatory thinker, somewhat detached from reality, could now be seen as one fully imbricated in his era and milieu.

Censorship is to culture what war is to demography: it creates absence where presence should be. Christopher Hilliard’s fascinating and deeply informed monograph on the politics of censorship in Britain (and by extension its colonies) from the 1850s to the 1980s is concerned with the many books, magazines, and films that fell afoul of the authorities, from translations of Zola in the wake of the Obscene Publications Act 1857 to the skin mags of the 1970s.

Why ‘burning man’? Because in this immense, obsessive, studiously unkempt work, the biographer brings accelerant to the raging bonfire that is D.H. Lawrence’s reputation and pours it with pyromaniacal glee. Frances Wilson’s new life of the writer stands athwart the accumulated crimes of which Lawrence stands accused – his obstreperousness, his intense and absurd hatreds, his dubious politics, the physical and metaphysical violence he committed against women – and demands a halt to the trial.

Back in my bookselling days during the early noughties, I spent a grey London autumn in the company of W.B. Yeats. My employers were Maggs Bros., an old Quaker firm and the queen’s booksellers, then based in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square: a venue that sounds glamorous but wasn’t, or at least not for me. The job involved much sitting in an underheated basement, beneath windows that offered a glimpse of passing ankles, cataloguing my way through stacks that bulged with a collection of Irish literature, predominantly by or associated with Yeats, assembled with frugal determination and frankly insane completism over decades by an autodidact bus conductor from South London.