Repulsion

I'm not often so repelled by reading something that I want to write about it. Last weekend I was a bit ill and couldn't face reading anything too demanding so I searched my bookshelves for something diverting and what I came up with was Peter Levi's memoir The Flutes of Autumn. 

If I'd been fitter the very title, not to mention the art work,  might have given me cause to reconsider, but all my senses were a bit blunted. I have to confess I knew very little about Levi except that he had been a Jesuit priest, a poet and a prodigious scribbler. I think I was also aware  he had married Cyril Connolly's widow.

I can  now say that I have precisely two points of sympathetic connection with the man. Firstly he was brought up in suburban Ruislip and it turns out that when I lived there in the early '90s I passed his family home every Saturday  on my way to the supermarket. By that time Ruislip was even more ghastly than he describes it.  Secondly he was on friendly terms with Richard Hughes who I think is  the most underrated English novelists of the 20th century. In all other respects Levi seems like an alien to me. Worse, I couldn't help feel repulsed by the man. 

To me he embodiies the kind of effete, dilettante, Oxford preciousness that was still common in the 1980s. You know, the sort of person that falls into an orgasmic reverie about a decaying oak tree or an ancient ditch and has definite opinions about enigmatic fragments of ancient Greek texts. I think I last  witnessed an example in All Souls about 15 year ago, but then I don't get out  much and there still may be resistant pockets hanging around.