Too True, by Blake Morrison, Granta, 326pp, £9.99 in UK
The Trouble with Money and Other Essays, by Ian Hamilton, Bloomsbury, 360pp, £12.99 in UK
Blake Morrison's collection of essays, Too True, begins with a discussion of autobiography and solipsism, examining the rise of narrative non-fiction or what James Wolcott has called "the erotics of neurotics".
"Too true" was Morrison's father's expression for anything requiring "rueful acknowledgment or cheerful assent": "Horrible weather today: too true . . . Anyone feel like going down the pub?: too true". In this essay, as in the rest of Too True, Morrison blends the personal with the social while addressing the challenges of making a living from his writing.
Morrison's success as a poet, film writer, critic and award-winning autobiographer reads as hard-won, and whether he writes on bicycle thieves, Ted Hughes, elitism in art, or present-day England, he is at centre stage filtering a personal response from everyday, and not so everyday, subjects.
"Bicycle Thieves" is sparked off by the theft of his son's bicycle, supposedly by residents of the nearby Ferrier Estate. It becomes social comment as the middle-class Morrison reflects on the residents of this estate frighteningly close to his own more comfortable suburban surroundings.
"South Pacific" concerns the death and remembrance of his father. Following the funeral, Morrison retrieves a cine-projector and reels, determined to convert them to video for his mother. Convinced that the sight of his younger, smiling father will assuage his mother's grief, he finds that the man who once filmed Blake is himself absent, completely marginal to the action, and now more deeply buried than ever.
Morrison also explores university life in the 1990s through his memories of Nottingham University in the late 1960s. His essay on Dr Barnardo and his charges viewed through the photographs Barnardo had taken for before-and-after promotional shots is utterly engrossing, as is his work on the Nobel Committee, Valerie Eliot (wife of T.S. and guardian of his legend) and Penelope Leach, the child care expert, but they are ultimately poor accompaniments to what Morrison does best - autobiography.
In contrast to Morrison's book, Ian Hamilton's The Trouble with Money and Other Essays shines when he turns his attention to literary subjects. An excellent biographer, Hamilton is the author of In Search of J.D. Salinger and a recent study of Matthew Arnold. His essays on Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, Salman Rushdie and others are electrifying.
Early on, Hamilton was forced to take the "Cobbled Way" to fund his writing career, that is, writing articles for such publications as The Times, the New Yorker, and TLS. After his New Review failed (Hamilton was editor) he had little option. In the lovely, funny "The Trouble with Money", he charts the battle between Mammon and Muses in a time when "insolvency spelt glamour" and caring about a career was deeply uncool.
Hamilton's compromise brought him into contact with such indignities as the American fact-checker. Recounting a trip on the Eurostar for an American publication, and failing to notice any cultural differences between England and France, he takes the trip again, careful to take notes, all the better not to encourage a query such as: "that paragraph in which you say that you could `almost see' a gang of lobsters clawing at your window-pane: do they have lobsters in the English Channel?"
Other essays cover familiar ground. His essays on the changing status of the soccer bore make Nick Hornby sound like a novice. There is an obligatory Diana story and a celebrity interview with Julie Christie.
Hamilton is an economical and funny writer, at his best when articulating the intersection of the writer's life with the writer's work. In this he is similar to Morrison, though less introspective. One thing both understand is that, in D.H. Lawrence's words, "culture has her roots/in the deep dung of cash".
Oonagh Shiel is a librarian and critic