The Literary Life and Fish and Chips
5 February 1990, Monday, Ampthill
‘..what I think I really wanted was some evidence that one didn’t have to lead a “literary” life – belong to a ghetto of “creativity”. That one could live as one pleased, and not be shamefaced in the glare of renown (if it ever came) at being an insurance man1 or a woman who’d moved to Brazil and played samba records instead of discussing X’s latest volume2. It was heartening that the best poets had this freedom…
It was du côté de chez Elizabeth, though, that I saw the daily life that took my fancy even more; with its kind of random Chekhovian surface, open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. I could see how close that life was to her poems, how much the life and the poems gave to one another…’
James Merrill, ‘An Interview with JD McClatchy’, Recitative (1986, North Point Press), p78.
After doing some preliminary packing, packing usually takes me two to three days and has been known to take two to three weeks, this is largely due to the selection, deselection and reselection of which tapes I’m going to pack, I went into Bedford, returned some CDs to Bedford library, dropped off some stamps and coins at Oxfam, and wandered around the usual triangle of Bus Station, Our Price and the Library.
For lunch I had a Mexican Flavour instant soup, a cheese and pickle sandwich, a sardine and salad cream sandwich, some cottage cheese with tuna and ‘crisp vegetables’ in and two pickled onions3. Sadly there were no crisps. In the afternoon I had six biscuits, three coffees and fed the birds the two peanut butter sandwiches that I did not eat on my coach journey down having, instead, I’d eaten Fish and Chips in a motorway café, a ‘Little Chef’4.
The fish was nothing like fish in fish and chips should be and the chips were nothing like chips in fish and chips should be, i.e., the fish should be soggy with oils and the chips should be crisp on the outside, too hot to hold or eat without juggling them down the throat and white and flaky on the inside5. This is the kind of subject Orwell took. As He Pleased. I have lost about ¼ of a stone in Glasgow. I’m approx. 12 ½ stone now. This is due to missing meals, small breakfasts and miles and miles of walking.
Tried phoning Mark in the evening but there was no reply. Perhaps his family was at church.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Toby had written an extended essay on Stevens whilst at university, and has written dozens of Stevens-like poems. Stevens is a favourite Anxiety of Influence example of Harold Bloom, who sees him as engaged in a crushing struggle with Milton and Keats.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). What a wonderful poet.
Before going to America, and since seeing The Smiths at Leicester de Montfort Hall on their Meat is Murder tour (1 April 1985), young-Toby has been a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish — usually boil-in-the-bag. (He hasn’t yet heard the word pescatarian.) However, when he reaches Memphis, midway between West and East coasts, he is met at the Greyhound Bus Station by his father’s good friend, Lamar. Lamar straight off announces, ‘Hey, I’m going to take you to the best ribs in town.’ Although young-Toby has made it veggie through all the diners and truckstops of California, Oregon, Washington State, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, he says, ‘Um, great.’ After this sticky-fingered evening, confronted by what looks like a delicious cracked-open human chest cavity, he goes back to semi-veggie, but the absolute ban on meat has been broken. Once he arrives in Czechoslovakia, it very soon becomes plain that — especially during winter — vegetarianism isn’t an option. As a non-meat option, restaurants will offer him only zelí (sauerkraut) and salát (grated cabbage in sugar water, as far as Toby can tell) and Russki salát (something like a home made Heinz sandwich spread, often containing ham). The Czechs will seem to view vegetarians a little as they do the Hare Krishnas — the first vegetarian cookbook and the Hare Krishnas arriving on the streets of Prague at almost exactly the same time.
Wow. I really did put Little Chef in inverted commas. Quel snob.
Toby’s taste in fish and chips has not changed.