Ten Years in the Tub (48 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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Oh the Glory of It All
is a memoir, as those of you who live in the Bay Area may already know; Wilsey was brought up in San Francisco by squillionaire socialites, although after his parents' divorce, the silver spoon wasn't as much use as he might have hoped: his mother devoted her time to saving the world, and dragged Sean off around the world to meet the Pope and various scary old-school Kremlin types; meanwhile his dad married a scary old-school stepmother who treated Wilsey like dirt. (Hey, Dede! You may be a bigshot in a
little bit of San Francisco, but nobody has ever heard of you here in London! Or anywhere else! I'm sorry, but she got me so steamed up that I had to get back at her somehow.) He got chucked out of every school he attended, and ran away from a creepy establishment which didn't allow you to utter the names of rock bands out loud.

American lives seem, from this distance at least, very different from European lives. Look at this: Sean Wilsey's mother was the daughter of an itinerant preacher. She ran away to Dallas to be a model, an escape funded initially by the nickels from her uncle's jukeboxes and peanut machines. She was dragged off to California by her angry family, and while waitressing there she met a U.S. Air Force major who married her on a live national radio programme called
The Bride and Groom
. She split from the major, dated Frank Sinatra for a while, married a couple of other guysâone marriage lasted six months; the other, to the trial lawyer who defended Jack Ruby, lasted three weeks. She got a TV job and she had a fan club. And then she married Sean's dad. We don't do any of that here. We don't have itinerant preachers, or peanut machines, or Sinatra. We are born in, for example, Basingstoke, and then we either stay there, or we move to London. That's probably why we don't write many memoirs.

Timothy B. Tyson's
Blood Done Sign My Name
is a memoir, too, although it's not the peculiarities of his life that Tyson is writing about, but the point at which his experiences intersect with recent American history. Tyson was brought up in Oxford, North Carolina, where his father was the pastor of the Methodist church; in 1970, Robert Teel, the father of one of Tyson's friends, and a couple of other white thugs murdered a young black man, and after the contemptible trial, wherein everyone was found not guilty of everything, there was a race riot, and great chunks of Oxford got torched. Young Tim Tyson grew up to be a professor of Afro-American studies, and
Blood Done Sign My Name
is a perfect reflection of who he is now and where he came from: it's both memoir and social history, and it's riveting. Tyson has a deceptively folksy prose style that leads you to suspect that his book will in part be about the triumph of Civil Rights hope over bitter Southern experience, but it ends with a coda, a visit to a club in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1992 to see Percy Sledge: Tyson's black friend is denied admission. Yes, 1992. Yes, Percy Sledge, the soul singer.

Blood Done Sign My Name
is uncompromisingly tough minded, righteous, and instructive (there is a terrific section unraveling the taboo that surrounded black men sleeping with white women), and it's not about people singing “We Shall Overcome” and holding hands until black and white live together in perfect harmony. On the contrary, Tyson is very good on how the history of the Civil Rights movement is being rewritten daily until it begins to look like the triumph of liberal good sense over prejudice; nothing would have happened, he argues, without things being set on fire. “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it,” says one of the reviews on the back of the book. Well, I have read only one book about the uniquely American struggle for racial equality, and this was it. But I will read another one one day soon: it would seem strange, and perhaps a little perverse, to allow a white man to provide my entire Civil Rights education. I mean no offense to the author of this memorable book, but he'd be the first to admit that Afro-Americans might have something of interest to say on the subject.

I moved house this month and have bought no books at all for the first time since I became a Believer. I have spent hour after hour finding homes for unread novels, biographies, memoirs, and collections of essays, poetry, and letters, and suddenly I can see as never before that we're fine for books at the moment, thanks very much. I came across quite a few of the things that have appeared in the Books Bought column at the top of these pages, and marvelled at my own lack of self-knowledge. When exactly was I going to read Michael B. Oren's no doubt excellent book about the Six-Day War? Or Dylan Thomas's letters? The ways in which a man can kid himself are many and various. Anyway, the football season has restarted, which always reduces book time. Arsenal bought only one player over the summer and sold their captain, so we've got a perilously thin squad, and Chelsea have spent squillions again, andâ¦ The truth is, I'm too worried to begin Hilary Spurling's apparently magnificent biography of Matisse (bought about five years ago, new, in hardback, because I couldn't wait). I won't even be able to think about picking it up until Wenger brings in a new central midfield player. And at the time of writing, there's no sign of that.