American guy

JASPER REES Be Mine

By Richard Ford Bloomsbury £18.99

‘When you’re young, your opponent is the future. But when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past.’

Frank Bascombe came up with that fretful axiom in Independence Day (1995), the second of Richard Ford’s novels featuring Frank as narrator and, perhaps, alter ego.

Middle-aged and thus with no opponent to speak of, back then Frank imagined that when he reached his seventies, he’d be in diapers.

In Be Mine, he’s made it to his dotage and the glad tidings are that he’s still got everything under control down there.

He even boasts of functionality in ‘the erectile department’ – a Vietnamese masseuse called Betty can attest that he is capable of what he calls ‘a frank tumescence’ (a Frank tumescence?) although, the old fool ruefully adds, ‘my nakedness is of little interest to her’.

The sadder news is that Frank is divorced again, his first wife is dead, and their surviving son, Paul – another son died before the start of The Sportswriter (1986) – is also on the way out.

Paul was introduced in Independence Day as an awkward teenager who joined his absentee father on a 4th July bonding trip. At 47, he’s still awkward, and has never found a way of coalescing with the world.

‘He has merely lived the somehow life I and others live,’ muses Frank. (In The Sportswriter, he called this ‘the normal applauseless life of us all’.)

Now the age Frank was in Independence Day, Paul is battling a fast-acting type of motor neurone disease. His father resolves, before Paul’s number is up, to collect him from the vast megalopolitan hospital in Minnesota where he’s been contributing to medical studies and take him on a last wintry road trip, this time to study the physiognomies of democracy at Mount Rushmore in North Dakota. His hunch, a winning one as it turns out, is that the odyssey will appeal to Paul’s enhanced sense of the preposterous.

This often comic elegy is the fifth outing for Frank Bascombe and may be his last. At the rate they come out –every decade or so – the author, now 79, would be close to 90 for the next one.

A picaresque record of American boomerdom, Ford’s run with him has been a more accidental series than John Updike’s with Rabbit Angstrom.

A lapsed writer himself who thinks a lot about the function of literature, Frank even mentions Updike here as the more successful scribbler. Currently on his bedside table is a pocket Heidegger, ‘which puts me dead to sleep in five minutes, and is all I ask of it’.

Be Mine brings us into the Trump era. Not that Frank has much to say about all that chaos. He spies the ‘pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini’ on TV and ‘couldn’t take my eyes off him’, he says. Mainly, though, he has to because ‘when you’re in charge of a failing son, little else goes on’.

His failing son is a startling, even freakish creation. Paul fancies himself a ventriloquist and soothes his angst by listening to Anthony Newley. Chubby and balding in his wheelchair, he resembles ‘a studious Larry Flynt’.

Frank plays along as he always has. ‘You’re fine with everything,’ Paul snaps in one of his less self-absorbed moments. ‘That’s your whole problem.’ (Frank’s daughter is even ruder: ‘You really are an awful man,’ she hisses down the phone. The antipathy is mutual.)

Mostly the two Bascombes communicate through avoidant jokes and encrypted parley, ‘sustained, on-topic converse being simply not our way’. What emerges through the crackle is a moving portrait of a father and a son converging on the edge of the abyss.

Ford has always resisted the idea of Frank as Everyman, although he’s certainly good at taking the national temperature in breezy nonconversations he strikes up with compatriots of every stripe.

He now carries over that resistance to Paul whose decline, he protectively insists, is symptomatic of nothing bigger than itself. To make it stand for America’s moral degeneration ‘seemed to steal his death from him’.

That, in the end, is what Frank Bascombe has been about all along: the individual in pursuit of the particular experience, questing for a happiness over which there is no control.

‘How do we end up where we end up,’ asks Frank, ‘when all our intentions are the best?’

It’s the insoluble riddle at the heart of all these wonderful novels.

Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

Hannibal set off with 60,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry, 37 elephants and a soothsayer called Bogus.

Bernard Levin, Hannibal’s footsteps

She never made the same mistake again. She always made a new mistake instead.

Wendy Cope

At the age of 32, research says, a woman turns into her mother.

Mary Kenny

Silver had the rare ability to be at once enthusiastic and relaxed. Obituary of Jonathan Silver, Salford entrepreneur, Daily Telegraph, 1997

You’re happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person [in a relationship] happy.

Richard Ford

What makes us so sure that men and women are basically attracted to each other? We don’t know any different, that’s all.

Kingsley Amis, Take A Girl Like You

Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

F Scott Fitzgerald

Never put off till tomorrow what you can drink today.

Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

Charles Lamb said he had no literary repugnances and that he could read any book that was a book, excluding Hume and Gibbon.

Mary Clive

Only catastrophe will give us back the fields.

John Betjeman on the growth of cities as a dowager in distress, even when I am not remotely in distress.

The ‘damsel in distress’ syndrome, which forms the basis of every romantic novel and many fairy stories, happens when a man, a supposed knight in shining armour, leaps to aid the woman in trouble.

I realised in those dives in Soho that there is no virtue in work for its own sake.

Jeffrey Bernard

Her method of dealing with wayward human nature when it insisted on obtruding its grossness upon her scheme of life was short and effective: she pretended things were not so and usually, after a time, they were not.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

His prose mixed hard observations with extravagant fancy, without ever losing a grip on either.

George Plimpton on Truman Capote

In the library, he took out several more volumes of Russian memoirs, for he was a great armchair snob, and in his reading could seldom find company too high for him.

Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool

Marijuana will be legal some day because the many law students who now smoke pot will some day become congressmen and legalise it in order to protect themselves.

Lenny Bruce, 1963

Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from all these things.

T S Eliot

genius. This generous offer is usually accompanied by a complete inability to get the device working again.

The urge to help seems to make a man feel like a real man and it goes very deep. Just recently, a guest asked why one of my pictures was on the floor. When I told him it had fallen down, he said instantly, ‘I’ll put it back up for you.’

It doesn’t stop there. Men will often, unasked, proffer financial advice. And of course they are all expert gardeners, telling me what will grow and where, even when they have no gardens of their own.

Damsels in distress

Please, I am begging the men in my life, don’t come charging to my rescue!

Although I have lived on my own and coped reasonably well for over 30 years, I am still seen by male friends and family as a damsel in distress or, more likely, given my age,

To put this into a presentday context, every time I mention to a male visitor that I have a computer, printer or electrical glitch, he offers to fix it for me.

He seems to think that if he frowns and fiddles enough, he will get the thing working and I will be eternally grateful and applaud the wonderful

Small Delights

You open the right end of a pack of tablets and can remove the blister sleeve without negotiating the folded instructions.

GREG JONES, MAIDENHEAD, BERKSHIRE

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

I appreciate their kind intention to help, but it’s odd that I never get such offers from my female visitors. The impulse is firmly attached to the male chromosome.

It is all out of date. These days, the little woman can find detailed instructions for most jobs on YouTube or Google and if they don’t work, she can call in an expert.

LIZ HODGKINSON

FILM HARRY MOUNT MAD ABOUT THE BOY: THE NOËL COWARD STORY (12)

The best insight in this engaging documentary comes from Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan (1904-2003).

Havelock-Allan, who produced Blithe Spirit, In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter, said of Noël Coward (1899-1973) that he was ‘not very secure. His armour is his supersophisticated façade.’

The compelling interviews in the film fit with that insight. How lightning-quick Coward’s mind was. How brilliant the put-downs of David Frost et al. How super-clipped the voice.

He combined syntax, vocabulary and exaggerated facial expressions to sublime comic effect. His Las Vegas accompanist, Peter Matz, particularly admired the small gestures Coward made to show a joke was coming.

But all those characteristics come not from arrogance – as they might at first seem to – but from what Coward called his ‘talent to amuse’, honed with a ferocious work ethic from childhood. As his accompanist Norman Hackforth put it, ‘He wouldn’t suffer anything but perfection.’

The work ethic was powered by a constant feeling that – for all the friendships with the Queen Mother, the great and the good, and for all the success – he was an outsider. At his own admission, he couldn’t write music and could barely read it. He had next to no academic education.

Born into humble circumstances in Teddington, he was in amateur concerts by the age of seven, boosted by his adored mother Violet. His overwhelming sadness at her death in 1954 is touchingly captured in the film.