Don't judge a book by its author

Spectator

13 hours ago

I am entombed, like Edgar Allan Poe's prematurely buried man, listening through headphones to a contemporary Russian fugue for organ and bagpipes. I had asked for a soothing Schubert prelude, but the radiologist couldn't lay hands on one. The headphones have no volume control I can locate – only on and off, and off will expose me to the diabolic clang of magnetic resonance. Hell will be an eternity inside an MRI machine, praying for deafness. There is a little sponge ball I can press if I can take it no longer. I give it 17 minutes, then press. Shame overwhelms me. I overhear the radiologists whisper: 'So it works then.' Which means that in the time they've had this machine I am the first person to beg to be released. From now on I will be referred to in letters that go back and forth between specialist and doctor as a person of a nervous disposition. No procedure will go ahead without a Tahitian nurse holding my hand. To be clear, there isn't very much wrong with me. But we live in 'better to be safe than sorry' times. And I'd be a fool to decline a Tahitian nurse.
I meet my wife at Tate Britain to see the Edward Burra show. There's nothing like art to take you out of yourself and Burra's work in particular has a vibrancy that must make any hypochondriac ashamed, as he suffered rheumatoid arthritis and much else all his life, but still travelled and painted voluminously. Most people, and that includes me, know of Burra primarily as the painter of sailors lounging louchely in a Marseilles bar and Harlem jazzmen whose vitality very nearly errs on the side of the picturesque (see Edward Said's petulant classic Orientalism for why appreciation of other cultures is condescending). So this grand show is a chance to get to know an unjustly neglected artist. He is frequently compared with the likes of Hogarth and George Grosz, but for all its piquancy and irony, his work is too generously amused to be satirical. His subject is the pleasure people take in dressing up, misbehaving, showing off, dancing, making music, looking for sex. Because his invalidism made painting at an easel too difficult, he most commonly worked on a flat desk or table, his favoured medium being the watercolour, to which he brought an intensity we normally associate with oils. This somewhat distanced way of working might explain why the carnival excess he painted excited neither scorn nor covetousness in him. There is a participation which we might call the participation of seeing and remembering, which is more than enough for an artist. Burra looked and, in the looking, lived.
In a podiatrist's waiting room – preparing myself mentally for a scan on an ingrowing toenail – I read a report of the Nobel Prize winner and academic Abdulrazak Gurnah telling an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that he can no longer read V.S. Naipaul or Philip Roth or Saul Bellow because he finds their ideas on race and women objectionable. 'This guy is nasty,' he says of Roth, 'and I can't read that.' My toe throbs. I don't know what the 'that' is that Professor Gurnah can't read but the remedy is simple. Don't read it: read the books instead. Literature is not a compendium of writers' fatuous or otherwise unappealing pronouncements – which is why, though I find what the Professor says breathtakingly obtuse, I might one day read his books. Not him. His books.
Seeing me agitated, a nurse comes in to hold my hand. I ask if she can stay awhile. My eye has just lit upon that Prince of Sanctimony Jonathon Porritt saying he is proud to have been arrested in Parliament Square the other week for opposing genocide. Which is a lie. He was arrested for showing support for the proscribed group Palestine Action. But being arrested for opposing genocide, even though it isn't and he wasn't, is a grander martyrdom. I turn to the nurse. There are undoubtedly terrible things going on out there, I say, without having to lie about their nature; I can tell you what genocide actually is if you have a spare couple of days. She looks concerned for me and calls another nurse. Now I have one in each hand.
When I mention to my sister – the warrior of the family – that I couldn't last the distance in the MRI machine, she tells me that our mother also once pressed the little escape ball. Among all my other faults, I have been a bad son. I should have been there to hold her hand.