Culture

Television and film are popular mediums. Poetry has never been popular. This is Sam Weller’s father in Pickwick Papers, when he discovers his son writing a valentine, alarmed it might be poetry: Poetry’s unnat’tral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. In 1994, I made a short film about Kipling. The director, Tony Cash, a man with a first-class Oxford degree in Russian, objected to a two-second reference to Aristotle’s ‘pity and terror’ in my script. ‘If you mention Aristotle, they [the TV audience] will think you’re an arsehole or an idiot.’ Until then, I didn’t realise Channel 4 viewers had such a strong antipathy to Aristotle.

I tried to dislike the writing of Sally Rooney. But I failed. I retain some resistance to Sally Rooney the cultural phenomenon, because this is largely about television adaptations of her books, which can only accentuate the negatives. I have an old-fashioned view of these things: only literature can represent a glamorous world with nuance, real satire, barbed detachment; the interiority of writer and reader is a counterweight to the allure of worldly things.  The adaptation of her first novel, Conversations With Friends, which begins this weekend, is unlikely to challenge my view. It might, for example, attempt to show that Nick is vain and selfish as well as handsome and amazing at sex, but handsome and amazing at sex will win.