Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

Introduction

I WAS TAUGHT HOW to read novels and poems by a brilliant poststructuralist critic called Stephen Heath. I have an image in my mind of Dr Heath holding a sheet of paper – the hallowed ‘text’ – very close to his eyes, the physical proximity somehow the symbolic embodiment of his scrutinising avidity, while he threw out his favourite question about a paragraph or stanza: ‘what’s at stake in this passage?’ He meant something more specific, professionalised and narrow than the colloquial usage would generally imply. He meant something like: what is the dilemma of meaning in this passage? What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature? How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions? Dr Heath was appraising literature as Freud might have studied one of his patients, where ‘What is at stake for you in being here?’ did not mean ‘What is at stake for you in wanting to get healthy or happy?’ but almost the opposite: ‘What is at stake for you in maintaining your chronic unhappiness?’ The enquiry is suspicious, though not necessarily hostile.

This way of reading could broadly be called deconstructive. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrays them: they say one thing but mean another thing. Their own figures of speech (metaphors, images, figurative turns of phrase) are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. The critic can unravel – deconstruct – a text by reading it as one might read a Freudian slip. And just as an awareness of how people unconsciously defend and betray themselves enriches our ability to comprehend them, so a similar awareness enriches our comprehension of a piece of literature. Instead of agreeing with people’s self-assessments, we learn how to read them in a stealthy and contrary manner, brushing them against their own grain. At university, I began to understand that a poem or novel might be self-divided, that its intentions might be beautifully lucid but its deepest motivations helplessly contradictory. Indeed, deconstruction tends to specialise in – perhaps over-emphasise – the ways in which texts contradict themselves: how, say, The Tempest is at once anti-colonialist in aspiration and colonialist in assumption; or how Jane Austen’s novels are both proto-feminist and patriarchally structured; or how the great novels of adultery, like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and Effi Briest, dream of female transgression but simultaneously enforce punishment for that transgression. Critical intelligence is made more complex and sophisticated by an awareness that literature is an always-frail ideological achievement, only ever a sentence away from dissolution. My own reading of literature was permanently altered by this new understanding, and my critical instincts (especially when teaching) are still often deconstructive.

But alongside Dr Heath’s question lies the looser, perhaps more generous usage preferred by writers and interested readers. When a book reviewer, or someone in a creative writing workshop, or a fellow author complains, ‘I just couldn’t see what was at stake in the book’, or ‘I see that this issue matters to the writer, but she didn’t manage to make me feel that it was at stake in the novel’, a different statement is also being made about meaning. The common implication here is that meaning has to be earned, that a novel or poem creates the aesthetic environment of its importance. A novel in which the stakes are felt to be too low is one that has failed to make a case for its seriousness. Writers are fond of the idea of earned stakes and unearned stakes; a book that hasn’t earned its effects doesn’t deserve any success.

I’m struck by the differences between these two usages. Both are central to their relative critical discourses; each is close to the other and yet also quite far apart. In Stakes¹ (let’s call it), the text’s success is suspiciously scanned, with the expectation, perhaps hope, that the piece of literature under scrutiny will turn out to be productively unsuccessful. In Stakes², the text’s success is anxiously searched for, with the assumption that the piece of literature’s lack of success cannot be productive for reading, but simply renders the book not worth picking up. The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. Stakes¹ presumes incoherence; Stakes² roots for coherence. Both modes are interestingly narrow, and their narrowness mirrors each other. Not to think about literature evaluatively is not to think like a writer – it cuts literature off from the instincts and ambitions of the very people who created it. But to think only in terms of evaluation, in terms of craft and technique – to think only of literature as a settled achievement – favours those categories at the expense of many different kinds of reading (chiefly, the great interest of reading literature as an always unsettled achievement). To read only suspiciously (Stakes¹) is to risk becoming a cynical detective of the word; to read only evaluatively (Stakes²) is to risk becoming a naïf of meaning, a connoisseur of local effects, someone who brings the standards of a professional guild to bear on the wide, unprofessional drama of meaning.

Alas, each kind of reading tends to exclude the other. Formal academic study of modern literature began around the start of the twentieth century. But of course, for centuries before that, literary criticism existed outside the academy, practiced as literature by writers. In English alone, that tradition is a very rich one, and includes – to name just a few – Johnson, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Orwell, Jarrell, Hardwick, Pritchett, Sontag. One of the moving things about Coleridge’s extraordinary book Biographia Literaria (the book that coins the term ‘practical criticism’, which in turn became the watchword of academic close reading) is that what he is most earnestly trying to do – amidst the crazy theorising and neologising and channelling of Fichte – is to convince his readers, through a series of passionately detailed close readings, that his friend and literary competitor William Wordsworth is England’s greatest poet. That is what is at stake for Coleridge. It’s one writer speaking about and to another.

This writerly critical tradition continues to flourish, both in and outside the academy. Of course, nowadays even non-academic literary criticism (I mean criticism written for a general audience) has been shaped and influenced by formal literary study. Many writers have studied literature at university, academics and writers teach together, attend conferences and festivals together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (think of Coetzee’s fiction and academic post-colonialist discourse, Don DeLillo’s fiction and academic postmodern critique, Toni Morrison’s fiction and academic critiques of race). The rise and steady institutionalisation of academic literary criticism means that the long tradition of literary criticism is now really two traditions, the academic (Stakes¹) and the literary-journalistic (Stakes²), which sometimes flow into each other but more often away from each other. Too often, Stakes¹ imagines itself in competition with, disdainful of, or simply inhabiting a different realm from Stakes², and vice versa.

This book gathers essays and reviews written over the last twenty years. Most of them are long book reviews, published for a general audience in general-interest magazines or literary journals (The New Republic, The New Yorker and the London Review of Books). These pieces belong to the journalistic or writerly critical tradition that comes before and comes after the academic critical tradition; they are marked by that academic tradition but are also trying to do something distinct from it. I like the idea of a criticism that tries to do three things at once: speaks about fiction as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and appeal, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back towards the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there, mindful that the traffic between inside and outside the academy naturally goes both ways. Edmund Wilson stole the phrase ‘triple thinker’ from one of Flaubert’s letters, and I want to steal it from Wilson. Such a threefold critic – writerly, journalistic, scholarly – would ideally be doing this kind of triple thinking; that, at least, has been my aspiration over the last twenty years, and probably since 1988, when I wrote my first review for the Guardian. Which is to say, in this book you’ll encounter a criticism interested in both kinds of ‘what’s at stake?’ questions; I think that Stakes¹ and Stakes² have no need to look down their noses at each other.

What, ideally, does this kind of triple thinking look like? In his essay ‘Music Discomposed’, the philosopher Stanley Cavell says that the critic’s first gesture is: ‘You have to hear it.’ Why, he asks, do you have to hear it? Because, he says, with a deliberate risk of tautology, ‘if I don’t hear it, I don’t know it’, and works of art are ‘objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing’. And again, at the further risk of excessive simplicity and tautology, Cavell writes: ‘what I see is that (pointing to the object). But for that to communicate you have to see it too. Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it.’

I like this emphasis. When I write about a novel or a writer, I am essentially bearing witness. I’m describing an experience and trying to stimulate in the reader an experience of that experience. Henry James called the critic’s task ‘heroically vicarious’. Most of the time it feels pretty unheroic, to be honest; but it certainly feels vicarious. It’s like playing, to a friend, a piece of music you really love. There is that moment when you stand next to this person, hopeful and intense as you anxiously scan your friend’s face, to see if he or she is hearing the same thing you heard. How thrilling it is when the confirmation arrives; and how easily disappointed one can be (though we all learn to hide it) when the friend turns after a minute or two and says, ‘You can turn it off, this isn’t doing much for me.’

You are trying to get the listener to hear (or see) the same thing as you, to have the same kind of experience. Criticism is just such an adventure in sameness. The journalistic review-essay differs from the academic essay in the amount and quality of this sameness, the amount and quality of Cavellian ‘pointing at the artwork’ that has to be done. After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it. The analogy is less ‘You have to hear it’ than ‘Listen, I have to play it for you on the piano.’ This re-voicing takes the form, overwhelmingly in book reviews, of paraphrase and quotation. It’s disdained as ‘plot summary’ and often it’s done carelessly, so poorly that it is no re-voicing at all. But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative’.

This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny. Sometimes all we remember of a teacher is a voice, and that is as it should be. Academic criticism is wary of what used to be called ‘the heresy of paraphrase’. The very thing that makes a review or essay into a vital narrative is discouraged in academic writing. We warn students – for perfectly good reasons – to avoid merely retelling or rephrasing the contents of a book. If you catch yourself doing that, we tell them, you’re probably not doing criticism, you’re not being analytical enough. But we should encourage students to do it better, for there is a quality of implicit intelligence in subtle paraphrase that is itself an act of analysis. And besides, doesn’t much academic avoidance of paraphrase have to do, really, with anxiety or snobbery? Scholars don’t want to be caught in the act of primacy when they are supposed to have read the book a thousand times; God forbid that anyone should think we are encountering a text for the first time! Of course we all remember the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the twists and turns of Waverley or Vanity Fair or Under the Volcano! Don’t we? Yet the journalistic review is an act of primacy; to paraphrase is to dare a kind of innocence; subtle paraphrase is a kind of wise unlearning. And paraphrase is witness.

I have called this kind of critical re-telling a way of writing through books, not just about them.¹ This writing-through is often achieved by using the language of metaphor and simile that literature itself uses. It involves a recognition that literary criticism is unique because one has the privilege of performing it in the same medium one is describing. When Coleridge writes of Swift that ‘he had the soul of Rabelais but dwelling in a dry place’, or when Henry James says that Balzac was so devoted to his work that he became a kind of ‘Benedictine of the actual’ (a phrase he liked so much he plagiarised himself and also applied to Flaubert); when Pritchett laments that Ford Madox Ford never fell into that ‘determined stupor’ out of which great artistic work comes; when Woolf complains that E. M. Forster is too anxious a narrator, too keen to interrupt his characters, ‘like a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room’ – these writers are producing images that are qualitatively indistinguishable from the metaphors and similes in their so-called ‘creative’ work. They are speaking to literature in its own language, a large part of which is metaphorical.

So we perform. And we perform in proximity, exulting in the fact that, dolphin-like, we are swimming in the element that nourishes us. Our prose is our connection to the work of art we are re-voicing. Art critics, music critics, dance critics – to change the metaphor – have to board the boat unnaturally or a little awkwardly, from the front or the bow; we get to board the boat ideally, as one should, from the side, amidships. We write as if we expect to be read; we write like the roses Eliot describes in ‘Burnt Norton’ – roses ‘that had the look of flowers that are looked at’.

The philosopher Ted Cohen, in his book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, quotes from a paper written in 1949, by another philosopher, Arnold Isenberg. That paper was called ‘Critical Communication’. According to Cohen, Isenberg undermines the common notion that by describing an artwork, the critic is producing a reason in support of his or her value judgement. It’s not about producing reasons, says Isenberg. All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work. This way, in Isenberg’s phrase, the critic can achieve a ‘sameness of vision’ in his or her audience (i.e. a sameness of vision between audience and critic). Ted Cohen goes on to point out that this is actually a brilliant description of the use of metaphor: ‘When your metaphor is X is Y you are hoping that I will see X as you do, namely as Y, and, most likely, although your proximate aim is to get me to see X in this way, your ultimate wish is that I will feel about X as you do.’ So the critical act is a metaphorical act. For Cohen, identification with someone or something else is essentially metaphorical. The critic says, in effect, ‘I will work to enable you to see the text as I do’, and does so by enacting a sameness of vision, which is an act of figurative identification – because it is as if the critic were saying, ‘I will get you to agree with me that the tiles on that roof over there look just like an armadillo’s back; I will get you to see those roof tiles as I see them’ (or whatever simile one has in mind). All I would add to Cohen’s commentary is that if this ‘sameness of vision’ is effectively metaphorical, then the language of metaphor – the writer-critic’s own use of metaphor – must be the embodied language of that process, the very enactment of it: a sameness of vision which is in some ways a sameness of writing.

In that spirit, I’ll close with two examples of sameness of vision, sameness of writing. The first is from Virginia Woolf’s biography of the art critic and curator Roger Fry; the other from my own experience. Woolf describes hearing Roger Fry give a public lecture in London – a stiff, formal affair, with the critic in evening dress and holding a long pointer.

All that he had done again and again in his books. But here there was a difference. As the next slide slid over the sheet there was a pause. He gazed afresh at the picture. And then in a flash he found the word he wanted; he added on the spur of the moment what he had just seen as if for the first time. That, perhaps, was the secret of his hold over his audience. They could see the sensation strike and form; he could lay bare the very moment of perception. So with pauses and spurts the world of spiritual reality emerged in slide after slide – in Poussin, in Chardin, in Rembrandt, in Cézanne – in its uplands and its lowlands, all connected, all somehow made whole and entire, upon the great screen in the Queen’s Hall. And finally the lecturer, after looking long through his spectacles, came to a pause. He was pointing to a late work by Cézanne, and he was baffled. He shook his head; his stick rested on the floor. It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable. And so instead of saying, ‘Next slide,’ he bowed, and the audience emptied itself into Langham Place.

For two hours they had been looking at pictures. But they had seen one of which the lecturer himself was unconscious – the outline of the man against the screen, an ascetic figure in evening dress who paused and pondered, and then raised his stick and pointed. That was a picture that would remain in memory together with the rest, a rough sketch that would serve many of the audience in years to come as the portrait of a great critic, a man of profound sensibility but of exacting honesty, who, when reason could penetrate no further, broke off; but was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there.

It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate creation (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’). Fry ‘found the word he wanted’, but Woolf, using narrative much as she does in To the Lighthouse, withholds from us what that word exactly was; slowly, gradually, ‘found the word he wanted’ cedes to wordless humility and the fierce but unuttered conviction that ‘what he saw was there’: a movement whereby the audience began to experience what Fry saw.

A few years ago, I was in Edinburgh, and went with my father to hear the pianist Alfred Brendel give an illustrated talk about Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. We were late, and arrived at the hall breathless and sweaty. But all was serene inside. Brendel sat at a table, with a concert grand piano behind him. He talked – or mumbled, rather – from his lecture notes, peering down at his text through thick spectacles. He had a strong Austrian accent, unaffected by decades of living in England. Every so often he would turn to the piano to play a few bars, as illustration. But something remarkable occurred when he quoted: even to play a short phrase, he became not a quoter but a performer, not merely a critic but an artist-critic: physically, he had to enter the trance-like state in which he performs whole concerts (his customary shudderings, phantom mastication, closed eyes, swooning and tilting); he could not blandly quote the music, in the way that you might read a line from French without bothering to put on the ‘proper’ French accent. He had to become, as it were, French. In this sense, he could not quote. He could only recreate; which is to say, he could only create. It was intensely frustrating to hear, again and again, three bars of the most beautiful Beethoven, perfectly performed, only to have them break off and be replaced by the pianist’s inaudible Viennese mumbling. Play on, play on, don’t talk! I soundlessly urged. The mumbling quickly became of no interest or importance; I was living for the next pianistic performance, I wanted to swing from beauty to beauty, high above the dun currents of the prosaic. His ‘quotes’ overwhelmed his commentary; he was approaching Walter Benjamin’s idea of a book entirely made of quotations.

Perhaps the analogy with literary criticism is not quite perfect, because the literary critic lacks this precise ability to inflect his chosen quotes as the musician performs his. But let Brendel’s wordy mumbling stand for a kind of literary criticism condemned to exteriority, a writing-about rather than a writing-through the text, a flat commentary, banished from the heart of the creative. And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is a writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.

Listen, I have to play it for you on the piano.

2019

The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon

I HAD A TRADITIONAL musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town. I was sent off to an ancient piano teacher with the requisite halitosis, who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps; I added the trumpet a few years later and had lessons with a younger, cheerier man, who told me that the best way to make the instrument ‘sound’ was to imagine spitting paper pellets down the mouthpiece at the school bully. I sang daily in the cathedral choir, an excellent grounding in sight-reading and performance. I still play the piano and the trumpet.

But what I really wanted to do, as a little boy, was play the drums, and of those different ways of making music, only playing the drums still makes me feel like a little boy. A friend’s older brother had a drum kit, and as a twelve-year-old I gawped at the spangled shells of wood and skin, and plotted how I might get to hit them, and make a lot of noise. It wouldn’t be easy. My parents had no time for ‘all that thumping about’, and the prim world of ecclesiastical and classical music, which meant so much to me, detested rock. But I waited until the drums’ owner was off at school and sneaked into the attic, where they gleamed, fabulously inert, and over the next few years I taught myself how to play them. Sitting behind the drums was also like a fantasy of driving (the other great prepubescent ambition), with my feet established on two pedals, bass drum and hi-hat, and the willing dials staring back at me like a blank dashboard …

Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood. Music makes us want to dance, to register rhythm on and with our bodies. So the drummer and the conductor are the luckiest of all musicians, because they are closest to dancing. And in drumming, how childishly close the connection is between the dancer and the dance! When you blow down an oboe, say, or pull a bow across a string, an infinitesimal, barely perceptible hesitation – the hesitation of vibration – separates the act and the sound; for trumpeters, the simple voicing of a quiet middle C is more fraught than very complex passages, because that brass tube can be sluggish in its obedience. But when a drummer needs to make a drum sound, he just … hits it. The stick or hand comes down, and the skin bellows. The narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, a pianist crazed with dreams of genius and obsessed with Glenn Gould, expresses the impossible longing to become the piano, to be at one with it. When you play the drums, you are the drums.

The drummer who was the drums, when I was a boy, was the Who’s Keith Moon, though he was already dead by the time I first heard him. He was the drums not because he was the most technically accomplished of drummers, but because his many-armed, joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming. He was pure, irresponsible, restless childishness. At the end of early Who concerts, as Pete Townshend smashed his guitar, Moon would kick his drums and stand on them and hurl them around the stage, and this seems a logical extension not only of the basic premise of drumming, which is to hit things, but an inevitable extension of Moon’s drumming, which was to hit things exuberantly. In the band’s very early days, the managers of clubs would complain to Townshend about his drummer. We like you guys, they would say, but get rid of that madman on the drums, he’s too loud. To which Moon succinctly replied: ‘I can’t play quiet, I’m a rock drummer.’

The Who had extraordinary rhythmic vitality, and it died when Keith Moon died, on 7 September 1978. I had hardly ever heard any rock music when I first listened to albums like Quadrophenia and Who’s Next. My notion of musical volume and power was inevitably circumscribed by my fairly sheltered, austerely Christian upbringing – I got off on classical or churchy things like the brassy last bars of William Walton’s First Symphony, or the chromatic last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata, or the way the choir bursts in at the start of Handel’s anthem Zadok the Priest, or the thundering thirty-two-foot bass pipes of Durham Cathedral’s organ, and the way the echo, at the end of a piece, took seven seconds to dissolve in that huge building. Those are not to be despised, but nothing had prepared me for the ferocious energy of the Who. The music enacted the mod rebellion of its lyrics: ‘Hope I die before I get old’; ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’; ‘Dressed right, for a beach fight’; ‘There’s a millionaire above you, / And you’re under his suspicion’. Pete Townshend’s hard, tense suspended chords seem to scour the air around them; Roger Daltrey’s singing was a young man’s fighting swagger, an incitement to some kind of crime; John Entwistle’s incessantly mobile bass playing was like someone running away from the scene of the crime; and Keith Moon’s drumming, in its inspired vandalism, was the crime itself.

Most rock drummers, even very good and inventive ones, are timekeepers. There is a space for a fill or a roll at the end of a musical phrase, but the beat has primacy over the curlicues. In a regular 4/4 bar, the bass drum sounds the first beat, the snare the second, the bass drum again hits the third (often with two eighth notes at this point), and then the snare hits the bar’s final beat. This results in the familiar ‘boom-DA, boom-boom-DA’ sound of most rock drumming. A standard-issue drummer, playing along, say, to the Beatles’ ‘Carry That Weight’, would keep his 4/4 beat steady through the line ‘Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time’, until the natural break, which comes at the end of the phrase, where, just after the word ‘time’, a wordless, two-beat half-bar readies itself for the repeated chorus. In that half-bar, there might be space for a quick roll, or a roll and a triplet, or something fancy with snare and hi-hat – really, any variety of filler. The filler is the fun stuff, and it could be said, without much exaggeration, that nearly all the fun stuff in drumming takes place in those two empty beats between the end of a phrase and the start of another. Ringo Starr, who interpreted his role fairly modestly, does nothing much in that two-beat space: mostly, he just provides eight even, straightforward sixteenth notes (da-da-da-da / da-da-da-da). In a good cover version of the song, Phil Collins, an extremely sophisticated drummer who was never a modest performer with Genesis, does a tight six-stroke roll that begins with featherlight delicacy on a tom-tom and ends more firmly on his snare, before going back to the beat. But whatever their stylistic differences, the modest and the sophisticated drummer share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat, and a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. The difference is just that the sophisticated drummer is much more often in time-out, and is always busily showing off to the rest of the class while he is there.

Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming, because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff. The first principle of Moon’s drumming was that drummers do not exist to keep the beat. He did keep the beat, of course, and very well, but he did it by every method except the traditional one. Drumming is repetition, as is rock music generally, and Moon clearly found repetition dull. So he played the drums like no one else – and not even like himself. I mean that no two bars of Moon’s playing ever sound the same; he is in revolt against consistency, he is always vandalising repetition. Everyone else in the band gets to improvise, so why should the drummer be nothing more than a condemned metronome? He saw himself as a soloist playing with an ensemble of other soloists. It follows from this that the drummer will be playing a line of music, just as, say, the guitarist does, with undulations and crescendos and leaps. It further follows that the snare drum and the bass drum, traditionally the ball and chain of rhythmic imprisonment, are no more interesting than any of the other drums in the kit; and that you will need lots of those other drums. Lots and lots. By the mid-1970s, when Moon’s kit was said to be ‘the biggest in the world’ – and what a deliciously absurd conceit, anyway! – he had two bass drums and at least twelve tom-toms, arrayed in stacks like squadrons of spotlights; he looked like a cheerful boy who had built elaborate fortifications for the sole purpose of destroying them. But he needed all those drums, as a flute needs all its stops or a harp its strings, so that his tremendous bubbling cascades, his liquid journeys, could be voiced: he needed not to run out of drums as he ran around them.

Average musical performance, like athletic prowess and viticulture – and perhaps novel-writing? – has probably improved in the last century. Nowadays, more and more pianists can brilliantly run off some Chopin or Rachmaninov in a concert hall, and the guy at the local drum shop is probably technically more adept than Keith Moon was. YouTube, which is a kind of permanent Special Olympics for show-offs, is full of young men wreaking double-jointed virtuosity on fabulously complex drum kits rigged up like artillery ranges. But so what? They can also backflip into their jeans from great heights and parkour across Paris. Moon disliked drum solos and did not perform them; the only one I have seen is pretty bad, a piece of anti-performance art – Moon sloppy and mindless, apparently drunk or stoned or both, and almost collapsing into the drums while he pounds them like pillows. He may have lacked the control necessary to sustain a long, complex solo; more likely, he needed the kinetic adventures of the Who to provoke him into his own. His cheerful way of conceding this was his celebrated remark that ‘I’m the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world’. Which was also a way of saying, ‘I’m the best Who-style drummer in the world.’

Keith Moon-style drumming is a lucky combination of the artful and artless. To begin at the beginning: his drums always sounded good. He hit them nice and hard, and tuned the bigger tom-toms low (not for him the little eunuch toms of Kenney Jones, who palely succeeded him in the Who, after Moon’s death). He kept his snare pretty ‘dry’. This isn’t a small thing. The talentless three-piece jazz combo at your local hotel ballroom – dinner-jacketed old-timers hacking through the old favourites – almost certainly features a so-called drummer whose sticks are used so lightly that they barely embarrass the skins, and whose snare – wet, buzzy, loose – sounds like a repeated sneeze. A good dry snare, properly struck, is a bark, a crack, a report. How a drummer hits the snare, and how it sounds, can determine a band’s entire dynamic. Groups like Supertramp and the Eagles seem soft, in large part, because the snare is so drippy and mildly used (and not just because elves are apparently squeezing the singers’ testicles).

There are three great albums by the Who, and these are also the three greatest Moon records: Live at Leeds (1970), a recording of an explosive concert at Leeds University on 14 February 1970, generally considered one of the greatest live albums in rock; Who’s Next (1971), the most famous Who album; and Quadrophenia (1973), a kind of successor to Tommy, a ‘rock opera’ that nostalgically celebrates the 1960s mod culture that had provoked and nourished the band in its earlier days. On these are such songs as ‘Substitute’, ‘My Generation’, ‘See Me, Feel Me/Listening to You’, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Bargain’, ‘The Song Is Over’, ‘The Real Me’, ‘5.15’, ‘Sea and Sand’ and ‘Love, Reign o’er Me’. There is no great difference between the live concert recordings and the studio songs – all of them are full of improvisation and structured anarchy, fluffs and misses; all of them seem to have the rushed gratitude of something achieved only once. From which emerges the second great principle of Moon’s drumming: namely, that one is always performing, not recording, and that making mistakes is simply part of the locomotion of vitality. (In the wonderful song ‘The Dirty Jobs’, on Quadrophenia, you can hear Moon accidentally knock his sticks together three separate times while travelling around the kit. Most drummers would be horrified to be caught out on tape like this.)

For Moon, this vitality meant trying to shape oneself to the changing dynamics of the music, listening as much to the percussive deviations of the bass line as to the steady, obvious line of the lead singer. As a result, it is impossible to separate him from the music the Who made. The story goes that, in 1968, Jimmy Page wanted John Entwistle on bass and Keith Moon on drums for his new band; and, as sensational as this group might have been, it would not have sounded like either Led Zeppelin or the Who. If Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, were substituted for Moon on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, the song would lose half its passionate propulsion, half its wild excess; if Moon sat in for Bonham on ‘Good Times, Bad Times’, the tight stability of that piece would instantly evaporate.

Bonham’s drumming sounds as if he has thought about phrasing; he never overreaches himself, because he seems to have so perfectly measured the relationship between rhythmic order and rhythmic deviation: his superb but tightly limited breaks on the snare, and his famously rapid double strokes on the bass drum, are constantly played against the unvarying solidity of his hi-hat, which keeps a steady single beat throughout the bars. (In a standard 4/4 bar, the hi-hat sounds the four whole beats, or perhaps sounds eight beats in eighth notes.) That is the ‘Bonham sound’, heard in the celebrated long solo – one of devilish complexity – in ‘Moby Dick’, on the live album The Song Remains the Same. Everything is judged, and rightly placed: astonishing order. Moon’s drumming, by contrast, is about putting things in the wrong place: the appearance of astonishing disorder. You can copy Bonham exactly; but to copy Moon would be to bottle his spilling energy, which is much harder.

The third great Moon principle, of packing as much as possible into a single bar of music, produces the extraordinary variety of his playing. He seems to be hungrily reaching for everything at once. Take, for instance, the bass drum and the cymbal. Generally speaking, drummers strike these with respectable monotony. You hit the crash cymbal at the end of a drum roll, as a flourish, but also as a kind of announcement that time-out has, boringly enough, ended, and that the beat must go back to work. Moon does something strange with both instruments. He tends to ‘ride’ his bass drum: he keeps his foot hovering over the bass drum pedal as a nervous driver might keep a foot on a brake, and strikes the drum often, sometimes continuously throughout a bar. When he breaks to do a roll around the toms, he will keep the bass drum going simultaneously, so that the effect is of two drummers playing together. Meanwhile, he delights in hitting his cymbals as often as humanly possible, and off the beat – just before or after the logical moment – rather as jazz and big-band drummers do. The effect of all these cymbals being struck is of someone shouting out at unexpected moments while waiting in line – a yammer of exclamation marks. (Whereas his habit of entering a song by first crashing a cymbal and then ripping around the kit is like someone bursting into a quiet room and shouting: ‘I’m here!’)

So alive and free is this drumming that one tends to emphasise its exuberance at the expense of its complexity. But the playing on songs like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ or ‘Bargain’ or ‘Love, Reign o’er Me’ or ‘The Song Is Over’ is extremely complex: in addition to the intricate cymbal work, Moon is constantly flicking off little triplets (sometimes on the toms, but sometimes with his feet, by playing the two bass drums together); using a technique known as the paradiddle to play one tom against another; and doing press rolls and double-stroke rolls (methods by which, essentially, you bounce the sticks on the drum to get them to strike faster notes), and irregular flams on the snare drum (a flam involves hitting the drum with the two sticks not simultaneously but slightly staggered, and results in a sound more like ‘blat’ than ‘that’). New technology allows listeners to isolate a song’s individual players, and the astonishing isolated drum tracks from ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ can be found on YouTube. On ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, the drumming is staggeringly vital, with Moon at once rhythmically tight and massively spontaneous. On both that song and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever attempted in ordinary rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment.

For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. (You can encounter such sentences in Lawrence’s prose, in Bellow’s, sometimes in David Foster Wallace’s.) Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body forgets itself, surrenders its awful self-consciousness. I taught myself the drums, but for years I was so busy being a good boy that I lacked the courage to own any drums. One could timidly admit to playing them, only if that meant that one never actually played them. At school, I did play in a rock band, but I kept the fact very quiet. The kids I played rock music with did not overlap with the world of classical music. Drumming was a notional add-on, a supplement to the playing of ‘proper’ instruments, a merely licensed rebellion. At school, the classical music path was the scholastic path. Choir school was like being at conservatory – daily rehearsal and performance. And then, later, as a teenager, to work hard at the piano, to sing in the choir, to play the trumpet in a youth orchestra, to pass exams in music theory, to study sonata form in Beethoven, to sit for a music scholarship, to talk to one’s parents about Bach (or even, daringly, the Beatles!), to see the London Symphony Orchestra at the Albert Hall, even just to fall asleep during Aida – all this was approved, was part of being a good student. Nowadays, I see schoolkids bustling along the pavement, their large instrument cases strapped to them like diligent coffins, and I know their weight of obedience. Happy obedience, too: that cello or French horn brings lasting joy, and a repertoire more demanding and subtle than rock music’s. But fuck the laudable ideologies, as Roth’s Mickey Sabbath puts it: subtlety is not rebellion, and subtlety is not freedom, and sometimes it is rebellious freedom that one wants, and only rock music can deliver it. And sometimes one despises oneself, in near middle age, for still being such a merely good