Nostalgia ain't, etc.

This is the first thing that came up when I typed "nostalgia" into Google's image search.

You might have expected that we'd be cured of purely nostalgic pleasures by now. Digital technology gives us unprecedented access to every the cultural artefacts of the recent past, which means that we no longer have to struggle, as we used to, to remember that song, that film, that book; if we can't hear it/see it/read it instantly, we can order a physical copy which will show up in a few days. The pleasure of unfulfilled yearning is hard to come by, the tickle of returning to the past is had almost too easily.

This ought to put the squeeze on nostalgia.When we can check our memories and assess our youthful tastes, shuddering at how bad they were (and, occasionally, feeling a glow of satisfaction at our shrewdness), it should be easy to stick with the good stuff. I can't see any evidence that this is what happens, though. We still wallow in the mud, over and over again: we watch old editions of Top of the Pops on a Friday night on BBC4 and lap up Tony Orlando and Dawn as eagerly as we do Bowie or the better bits of Roxy Music.

It seems fair to call the pleasure we get from rubbish like Tony Orlando (and from old Carry On films or the Roger Moore Bonds, or — in my case — Marvel comics of the 1970s) "nostalgic", as opposed to aesthetic, since it is tied to memory and divorced from any of the qualities I usually look for in art. But the word hides the problem: in what does this nostalgic pleasure lie? Is it a Proustian thing — does the chorus of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" act as an aide-memoire, calling up by association other memories of the long-ago? Or is it deeper than that: hearing Tony's pleas for his old love to be confirmed, do we slough off our adult carapace of learned tastes and inhibitions, to resemble younger, softer, more instinctive version of ourselves? Neither idea convinces me.

I've been thinking about our relationship to the things we enjoyed when we were young because of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I read the book for the first time when I was 17 or 18; and if you had asked me at any point in the last 35 years what I thought of the book, I would have answered that I liked it a great deal though I could remember little of the plot. In fact, I found on re-reading that I had kept nothing of the plot. At most, I could have called up one or two stray images of women in rooms, a cloud of unhappiness and a grossly simplified version of the central characters' affairs. What's more, I find it hard to understand why my younger self would have liked it. It's one of those books that makes me despair of writing anything worthwhile. I'd class it with Paul Theroux's biography of V. S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow, as a book that is both uncommonly brilliant and hateful — horribly alive to frailties of flesh, of feeling, of intellect; brilliantly in control of the texture of sentence and mercilessly indifferent to the reader's feelings.

What could my virginal, blunt teenage self have got out of a book so subtle, describing feelings and actions so far outside anything I had encountered? The gross facts of the case — which come down to who has or hasn't had sex with whom — are hard enough to glean from the hesitant, recursive, constantly qualified and revised narrative, though everything is clear, more or less, by the end. But the nub of the book is what people feel, and what others guess they feel, and how far apart these two things are; and everything is hedged by denial, conscious or otherwise. When I was 18 I thought life was, not simple, that much I'd worked out, but at least moderately transparent, that we could trace the links between what we say and what we do, what we want and what makes us happy. I think The Good Soldier must have passed me by. Now, 52 and divorced, I know much more about how people lie to themselves or blindfold themselves. And once you've established that stuff, the possibilities of nostalgia have narrowed considerably: the times we were actually happy are not as common as we like to think.

Postscript: Is it possible to think of The Good Soldier as a First World War novel? The beginning of Part II:

The death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904. And then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is the curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is one of those sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless proceedings on the part of a cruel Providence that we call a coincidence. Because it may just as well have been the superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to certain acts, as if she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that the 4th of August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with, she was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that date, in the year 1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in company with a young man called Jimmy. But that was not merely a coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the supposedly damaged heart, was in his delicate way, offering her, in this trip, a birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then, on the 4th of August, 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured her whole life—as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably offering herself a birthday present that morning....

On the 4th of August, 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind—the gale that affected her heart.

And the 4th of August, 1914 is the day that Britain declared war on Germany. If you consider it purely as a novel about a marriage, this looks like a coincidence; but it does describe a decade of wilful ignorance, blundering towards catastrophe. I thought of the punchline of Larkin's "MCMXIV": "Never such innocence again." But Ford would shy away from the sentimentality, and the obviousness.