A Little History of Literature PDF
A Little History of Literature PDF
A Little History of Literature PDF
JOHN
SUTHERLAND
Literature
A LITTLE
HISTORY
of
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1 What is Literature? 1
2 Fabulous Beginnings 7
Myth
3 Writing for Nations 13
Epic
4 Being Human 20
Tragedy
5 English Tales 26
Chaucer
6 Theatre on the Street 33
The Mystery Plays
7 The Bard 40
Shakespeare
8 The Book of Books 47
The King James Bible
9 Minds Unchained 54
The Metaphysicals
10 Nations Rise 61
Milton and Spenser
11 Who ‘Owns’ Literature? 68
Printing, Publishing and Copyright
vi contents
Index 267
chapter 1
What is Literature?
Imagine that, like Robinson Crusoe, you are marooned for the
rest of your days on a desert island. What one book would you
most want to have with you? That is a question asked on one of
the longest-running and most-loved programmes on BBC radio,
Desert Island Discs. Broadcast also on the BBC’s World Service, it is
listened to across the globe.
The question is one of two that are put to that week’s guest, after
we have heard snatches of the eight pieces of music they would
take to the island. The castaway is allowed one luxury – what
will it be? Answers are usually very ingenious: at least a couple of
guests have chosen cyanide pills, for instance, and another chose
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Then they are
asked which book they would like, in addition to the Bible (or any
other equivalent religious volume) and the works of Shakespeare,
which are already on the island – presumably left by the previous
occupant, who chose the pill.
I’ve listened to the programme for fifty years now (it’s been
running since 1942) and much more often than not, the guest
2 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
There have been those, from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato
onwards, who believe that the charms of literature and its spin-
off forms (theatre, epic and lyric in Plato’s day) are dangerous
– particularly for the young. Literature distracts us from the real
business of living. It traffics in falsehoods – beautiful falsehoods, it
is true, but for that reason all the more dangerous. The emotions
inspired by great literature, if you agree with Plato, cloud clear
thinking. How can you think seriously about the problems of
educating children if your eyes are bleary with tears after reading
Dickens’s description of the death of angelic Little Nell? And
without clear thinking, Plato believed, society was in peril. Give
that child Euclid’s Geometry to read in bed at night, not Aesop’s
animal fable about Androcles and the Lion. But, of course, neither
life nor human beings are like that. Aesop’s fables had already been
teaching Plato’s contemporaries important lessons – and delighting
them, into the bargain – for two hundred years, and two and a half
millennia later they do the same for us today.
How best, then, to describe literature? At its basic level, it is
a collection of unique combinations of twenty-six small black
6 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Fabulous Beginnings
Myth
deaths and casualties caused by the First World War just a few years
later. Why had people never forgotten the shipwreck? The answer
may well be in the name of the vessel: Titanic.
In ancient myth, the Titans were a tribe of giant gods. Their
parents were the earth and sky and they were the first race on
earth to have human form. After a long time enjoying their
status as the most powerful species on earth, the Titans found
themselves locked in a ten-year war with a new race of gods who
had reached an even higher stage of evolution than they had.
Although the Titans were giants possessed of gigantic strength,
that was pretty well all they had: brute force. This new race, the
Olympians, had much more: intelligence, beauty and skill. They
were, essentially, more like humans (like us, we might think)
than forces of nature.
Despite their massive strength, the Titans, as the myth goes, went
under. Their defeat is the subject of one of the greatest narrative
poems in the English language, John Keats’s Hyperion, which he
wrote around 1818. In the poem, the Titan Oceanus contemplates
his conquering successor, Neptune, who has replaced him as God
of the Sea, and realises that:
The White Star Line vessel that went to the bottom of the ocean
in April 1912 was named the Titanic – accompanied by the ritual
bottle of champagne cracked across its bow, itself a mythic act
called ‘libation’ – because it was one of the largest, fastest, most
powerful vessels ever destined to cross the Atlantic. It was thought
to be unsinkable. But those who named it must have felt a certain
12 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
The word ‘epic’ is used widely but very loosely nowadays. In the
newspaper I’ve just put down, for example, I find a soccer match
(one of the very few, alas, in which an English team has won a
major sporting title) described as an ‘epic struggle’. But in terms of
literature, ‘epic’ has, when properly applied, an anything but loose
meaning. It describes a very select, very ancient, set of texts that
carry values which are ‘heroic’ in tone (‘heroic’ being another word
we tend to use too loosely). They show mankind, we may say, at
its most manly. (The gender bias in that remark is, unfortunately,
appropriate: an ‘epic heroine’ is almost always a contradiction in
terms.)
When we think seriously about epics we encounter an intriguing
question. If this is such great literature, why don’t we write it any
more? Why have we not done so (successfully, at least) for many
centuries now? The word is still with us; the literature, for some
reason, isn’t.
The most venerable epic that has survived through the ages
is Gilgamesh, whose origins can be traced back to 2000 bc. The
14 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
of them. In the Trojan War, one nation must burn. It will be the
‘topless towers of Ilium’ (as the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher
Marlowe put it): Troy goes up in flames so that Greece can rise
to greatness from its ashes. Had it been the other way around,
world history would have been very different. We would have had
no Greek tragedy; some would say, no democracy (a Greek word)
either. Our whole ‘philosophy of life’ would have been different.
Homer’s sequel to the Iliad, the Odyssey, is more mythic than
the preceding epic story. As we saw in Chapter 2, over ten eventful
years the Greek hero Odysseus returns from the Trojan War to his
minor kingdom, Ithaca. On his journey, after escaping from the
one-eyed giant Polyphemus, he and his crew are stranded on an
island where the beautiful sorceress Circe tries to cast spells over
them, and are threatened by the sea-monsters Scylla and Charybdis.
Finally Odysseus contrives to make it back to Ithaca and save his
own marriage to the ever-faithful Penelope. Stability (after much
slaughter) is restored. Civilisation can grow. Empires can rise. That
is a dominant theme of Homer’s two epics.
The Iliad and Odyssey remain the most readable (and filmable) of
stories. But at their centre, these epic narratives look at how ancient
Greece – what we like to call the cradle of modern democracy,
our world – came into being. Epics are the offspring of ‘noble and
puissant [powerful] nations’, as the poet John Milton called them.
(Milton is the author of what many see as the last great epic in
British Literature, Paradise Lost, composed in the mid-seventeenth
century when Britain itself was becoming ‘puissant’ – a world
power. See Chapter 10.)
Could Luxembourg, or the Principality of Monaco, however
gifted its authors, host an epic? Could the multinational European
Union have one? Such states can create literature, great literature,
even. But they cannot create epic literature. When the Nobel Prize-
winning novelist Saul Bellow asked his insulting question, ‘Where
is the Zulu Tolstoy, where is the Papuan Proust?’ he was, essentially,
making the point that only great civilisations have great literature.
And only the greatest of those great nations possess epics. Great
world power is at their centre.
18 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia)
Odyssey (ancient Greece)
Mahābhārata (India)
Aeneid (ancient Rome)
Beowulf (England)
La Chanson de Roland (France)
El Cantar de Mio Cid (Spain)
Nibelungenlied (Germany)
La Divina Commedia (Italy)
Os Lusíadas (Portugal)
Saul Bellow’s own nation, the USA, is missing from the list. Should
it be included? No nation has been more powerful. But historically
speaking, the United States is a young country – juvenile in
comparison with Greece, or Britain (which once owned a
considerable part of it). Its frontier struggles, as modern American
civilisation spread westward, can be seen as having inspired some
versions of epic, in the form of the films of D.W. Griffith (Birth
of a Nation, 1915) and westerns (John Wayne and Clint Eastwood
are undeniably ‘heroic’ cowboys). Some have argued that Herman
Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851), which recounts Captain Ahab’s
doomed quest for the (mythic?) white whale, is not merely ‘the
Great American Novel’ but ‘the American Epic’. In modern polls
George Lucas’s Star Wars film series is often voted the great modern
epic. But what we see here is less actual epics than the aching sense
that the USA may have come too late on the world-scene ever to
have one. A real one, that is. It still tries.
Traditionally, literary epic has four elements: it is long, heroic,
nationalistic and – in its purest literary form – poetic. Panegyrics
(extended hymns of praise) and lament (songs of sadness) are main
ingredients. The first half of Beowulf is an extended celebration of
the youthful hero’s prowess in defeating Grendel and his mother.
The second half laments Beowulf ’s death, in old age, having
w r i t i n g f o r n at i o n s 19
Being Human
Tragedy
other man, not knowing that he is his father, Laius. It’s road rage, a
heat-of-the-moment deed.
Oedipus continues his journey to Thebes, unaware of what
lies in wait for him. First is the Sphinx, a monster that lives on a
mountain and is terrorising the city. The Sphinx poses a riddle
to every traveller to Thebes. If they cannot answer correctly, they
die. The riddle is: ‘What walks on four feet in the morning, two
in the afternoon and three at night?’ Oedipus answers correctly,
the first person ever to do so: it is ‘man’. The baby crawls on all
fours. The adult walks on two legs. The old man walks with a stick.
The Sphinx kills itself. A grateful Thebes elects Oedipus their
king. Once crowned, Oedipus consolidates his hold on the throne
by marrying the mysteriously widowed Queen Jocasta. They are
unaware, both of them, what has happened to Laius and the awful
thing they are doing.
Oedipus proves to be a good king, a good husband, and a good
father to the children he and Jocasta have. But, years later, a terrible
and mysterious plague afflicts Thebes. Thousands die. Crops fail.
Women cannot bear children. This is the point at which Sophocles’
play begins. There is, clearly, another curse on the city. Why? A
blind soothsayer, Tiresias, reveals the awful truth. The gods are
punishing the city for Oedipus’s crimes of patricide (killing his
father) and incest (marrying his mother). The horrible details are
finally disclosed. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus blinds himself with
his wife’s brooch-pins. He lives what remains of his life as a beggar,
the lowest of the low in Thebes, attended in his wretchedness by his
faithful daughter, Antigone.
To return to the question with which we started, what makes
Oedipus Rex tragic, as opposed to merely horrible? Why is the
death and suffering of all those unidentified Thebans not more
tragic than the story of a single man who survives, albeit disabled
and broken in spirit?
These questions were addressed by one of the greatest of literary
critics, Aristotle, another ancient Greek. His study of tragedy –
specifically Oedipus Rex – is called the Poetics. The title does not
mean that Aristotle is exclusively concerned with poetry (although
being human 23
Oedipus Rex and many of its translations are written in verse) but
with what one could call the mechanics of literature: how it works.
Aristotle sets out to answer that question, using Oedipus Rex as one
of his main examples.
Aristotle begins with an illuminating paradox. Imagine, for
example, the following. You meet a friend who is just coming
out of a theatre showing Shakespeare’s King Lear (a play strongly
resembling Oedipus Rex). ‘Did you enjoy it?’ you ask. ‘Yes,’ she says,
‘I’ve never enjoyed a play so much in my whole life.’ ‘You cold-
hearted thing!’ you retort. ‘You enjoy the spectacle of one old man
being tormented to death by his devilish daughters, another old
man being blinded on stage. You tell me you enjoyed that? Perhaps
you should go to a bullfight next time.’
It’s nonsense, of course. Aristotle makes the point that it is not
what is depicted in tragedy (the story) which affects us, and gives
us aesthetic pleasure, but how it is depicted (the plot). What we
enjoy (and it’s quite correct to use the word) in King Lear is not the
cruelty, but the art, the ‘representation’ (Aristotle calls it ‘imitation’,
mimesis).
Aristotle helps us understand what it is that makes a play
like Oedipus Rex work as tragedy. Take that word ‘accident’. In
tragedy, we are led to understand as the play progresses, there
are no accidents. It is all foretold – which is why oracles and
soothsayers are so central to the action. Everything fits and falls
into place. We may not see that at the time, but we will later. As
Aristotle puts it, when we see a tragedy acted the events should
strike us as ‘necessary and probable’ as they unfold. What happens
in tragedy must happen. But actually seeing what lies behind the
unfolding of the predestined course of events is, typically, too much
for flesh and blood to bear. When Oedipus sees how things have
worked out, because, he now understands, they had to work out
that way, he fulfils another of the soothsayer’s claims – that he is
(metaphorically) blind – by literally blinding himself. Humankind
cannot bear too much reality.
With Aristotle’s assistance we can take apart Sophocles’ perfectly
constructed tragedy, as a mechanic might dismantle an automobile
24 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
tragedy like King Lear or Oedipus Rex, performed well. The mood
will be sober, reflective – people will be in a sense exhausted by
what they have seen on stage. But also strangely elevated, as if they
had gone through something like a religious experience.
We don’t have to take everything Aristotle says as critical gospel
– let’s say he gives us a toolkit. But why does Oedipus Rex still work
for us, separated as we are by all those centuries? We don’t, for
example, agree for a minute with Aristotle’s social views on slaves
and women, or his political views that only kings, queens and the
nobility matter in the history of nations.
There are two plausible answers. One is that the play is so
wonderfully well constructed. It is a thing of aesthetic beauty – like
the Parthenon, or the Taj Mahal or a Da Vinci painting. Secondly,
although the store of human knowledge has expanded hugely, life
and the human condition are still very mysterious to the thinking
person. Tragedy confronts that mystery, examines the big questions:
What is life all about? What makes us human? In its aims, tragedy
is the most ambitious of literary genres. Aristotle has no doubt that
it is, as he tells us, the ‘noblest’.
chapter 5
English Tales
Chaucer
‘English’ that had happened, but ‘England’ itself. The British Isles
were conquered by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. ‘The
Conqueror’, as he is called, brought with him the apparatus of
what we recognise as the modern state. The Normans continued
the unification of the land they had invaded, installing an official
language, a system of common law, coinage, a class system,
Parliament, London as the capital city, and other institutions,
many of which have come down to us today. Chaucer was this
new England’s pioneer author, and his English was the London
dialect. One can still hear the old rhythms and vocabularies of
Anglo-Saxon literature, even in his verse, but it is subterranean,
like a drumbeat reaching us from vibrations in the ground.
So who was this man? He was born Geoffroy de Chaucer, his
family name derived from the French chausseur, or ‘shoemaker’.
The family had, over the centuries, risen well above the cobbler
level and their Norman-French origins. In Geoffrey’s time they had
connections with, and received favours from, the court. Luckily,
under Edward III the country was more or less at peace – although
occasional forays were made into France, now a foe with whom
England would be at odds for 500 years. Geoffrey’s father was in the
import/export wine trade. This line of work meant intimate contact
with continental Europe, whose literatures (well ahead of England’s
at the time) would later be drawn on extensively by Geoffrey.
Chaucer may have officially or unofficially attended one of
the great universities or he may have received his impressive
education from home tutors. We don’t know. What is clear is
that he came into manhood extraordinarily well read and fluent
in several languages. As a young man he craved adventure and
embarked on a military career. (One of his two great poems,
Troilus and Criseyde, is set in the background of the greatest war
in literature – that between the Greeks and Trojans.) In France
the young English soldier was taken prisoner and ransomed. In
later life his favourite thinker was the Roman poet Boethius who
wrote his great treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy, in prison.
Chaucer translated it from the original Latin, partly via a French
version, into English, and absorbed its thinking, particularly on
e n g l i s h ta l e s 29
the first tale-teller, is the Knight. His tale, set in ancient Greece,
steeped in the codes of courtly love and Boethius’s ideas about
patiently suffering all misfortune, is appropriately ‘chivalrous’ –
that is, knightly. It is followed, almost immediately, by a fabliau, or
bawdy tale, told by the Miller. The love he chronicles, about an old
carpenter, his young wife, and some mischievous young men, is
anything but courtly. Texts of The Canterbury Tales were routinely
censored for young readers until well into the twentieth century
(including my own school copy, as I still, somewhat resentfully,
recall).
Many changes are rung throughout the two-dozen tales,
concluding, appropriately, with a high-minded and earnest sermon
by the Parson, after which the reader can depart in peace and
having been thoroughly entertained. Dryden was right. All life is
there. Our life as well.
chapter 6
beds. (Taxes were imposed by the guilds as well as the town au-
thorities. It’s a little in-joke.)
Some of the mystery plays that have come down to us, like the
Second Shepherds’ Play, are as great, in their way, as anything in the
history of British drama. But most of the mystery-play material is,
for the modern playgoer, of more historical than literary interest.
Nonetheless, it has huge significance. It reminds us where theatre
started and what fuels its lasting appeal. Even today, although we
no longer have to stand out in the street to enjoy it, drama is ‘com-
munity’ literature. Literature of the people.
chapter 7
The Bard
Shakespeare
Any poll to decide the greatest writer in the English language would
come up with the same result. No contest. But how did Shakespeare
come to be so? A simple question, but it admits of no simple answer.
Some of the best literary-critical minds in history (not to say
generations of theatre-goers) have tried, but no one has been able
to explain convincingly how an early school-leaver, the son of a
high-street tradesman, born and brought up in the backwater of
Stratford-upon-Avon, whose principal interest in his career seems
to have been gathering enough money to retire, became the great-
est writer the English-speaking world has known, and, many argue,
ever will know.
We shall never be able to ‘explain’ Shakespeare and it’s foolish to
try. But we can certainly appreciate his achievement and – although
the picture is infuriatingly incomplete – we can trace the outline of
his life for any hints it might give as to what made him the greatest
writer in the English language.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born some six years into
the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The England he grew up in was
t h e ba r d 41
still in the throes of the turmoil left by the reign of the previous
monarch, Mary I, nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’. Under her it had been
dangerous to be Protestant, under Elizabeth it was dangerous to be
Catholic. Shakespeare, like others in his family, cautiously walked
a tightrope between the two faiths (although some people want to
claim him as a lifelong secret Catholic). He kept strictly off the sub-
ject of religion in his drama. It was literally a burning topic – say the
wrong thing and you could burn at the stake.
At the centre of this burning issue was the question of who
would succeed to the throne. As Shakespeare entered the dramatic
profession, Elizabeth, born in 1533, was an ageing monarch. The
Virgin Queen had no heir elect nor even a clearly apparent heir. A
vacuum in the succession was dangerous. Every thinking person
in the country asked themselves the question, ‘What comes after
Queen Elizabeth?’
The most significant political question in much of Shakespeare’s
drama (particularly in the history plays) is: ‘What is the best way to
replace one king (or, in Cleopatra’s case, queen) with another?’ Dif-
ferent answers are examined in different plays: secret assassination
(Hamlet); public assassination (Julius Caesar); civil war (the Henry
VI plays); forced abdication (Richard II); usurpation (Richard
III); legitimate bloodline succession (Henry V). It was a problem
Shakespeare wrestled with until his last play (as we think it is),
Henry VIII. England itself would wrestle with the problem a lot
longer and would undergo the horrors of a civil war while trying to
find a way through.
Shakespeare’s father was a moderately prosperous glove-maker
and alderman in Stratford. He was probably more inclined to
Catholicism than his son. William’s mother, Mary, was higher-born
than her husband. She, we may assume, planted a desire to rise in
the world in the mind of her clever son. Young William attended
the Stratford grammar school. Ben Jonson, a fellow dramatist (and
friend) famously cracked that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and
less Greek’. But by our standards he was formidably well educated.
He left school in his teens and for a year or two probably
worked for his father. He may have been arrested for poaching.
42 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
than the KJB and more up-to-date in their vocabulary. But the KJB,
uniquely, is the one version that has universally been valued for its
expression. And that expression – even more than Shakespeare’s –
has soaked into our own expression and, it could be argued, even
our ways of thinking.
What is meant by the ‘literary quality’ of the KJB is easier shown
than described. Compare the following lines – they are among the
best known in the New Testament and come from the Lord’s Prayer,
as set down by Matthew. The first is from the KJB, the second from
one of the most recent American translations of the Gospels.
And it was not, despite the title of the book, King James. Who that
author was we shall come to in a moment.
The publication of the King James Bible in English was moti-
vated principally by politics. It would, James hoped, consolidate
the Reformation – England’s break-away from the Roman Catholic
Church – by supplying a core text for Protestant worship that was
starkly different from Rome’s Latin Bible and religious service. It
would stabilise the country while asserting its independence from
the Pope. It would be the ‘English’ Bible, and in the best English
that England could manage.
Before the sixteenth century, the Bible was only available in Latin.
Most Christians had to take what they were told on trust. Martin
Luther, who published the first reliable vernacular (meaning in the
language of the people) version of the New Testament in Germany
in 1522, believed that the Bible should be the property of all men
and women. Trust God, not the self-appointed ‘interpreters’ of
God, he argued. It was revolutionary stuff.
English translations followed Luther’s initiative. The most
significant, and by far the most literary, was that of William Tyndale
(c. 1491–1536) from 1525 onwards. ‘Tyndale’s Bible’ comprised the
New Testament and the first five books of the Old Testament (the
so-called Pentateuch). God’s word, Tyndale believed, like Luther,
should be understandable by every English man and woman. It
was, at the time, as radical an idea in England as it had been in
Germany.
Who was this man, William Tyndale? Little is known of his
early life. Even his surname is uncertain; he sometimes appears
in documents as ‘Hichens’. He attended Oxford University and,
on graduating in 1512, enrolled to do advanced study in religious
studies, supporting himself as a private tutor. But from the outset
of his career William Tyndale was driven by two much higher
aspirations – both mortally dangerous at the time. In the 1520s,
England was still a Catholic country, with Henry VIII at its head.
But Tyndale was committed to defying Rome, and everything
associated with Roman Catholicism: ‘papistry’, as it was called. He
yearned to translate the scriptures into English, his native tongue.
50 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
His aim, he said, was that even the ploughman should have access
to God’s word in ploughman’s English.
In 1524, Tyndale went to Germany. He may have met his
mentor, Luther – it’s nice to think he did. Over the next few years,
in Flanders, he worked on his translation of the Bible direct from
the Hebrew and Greek sources. Copies of his New Testament were
the first to be shipped to England, and circulated widely despite
the authorities’ attempts to destroy them. He fell out with Henry
VIII on the issue of the King’s divorce, but returning to his home
country was never advisable – it would probably endanger his life.
In Europe, his activities drew the attention of the fiercely anti-
Protestant Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Never one to make
things easy for himself, he also fell out with the local authorities
in Flanders. He was betrayed, arrested, and imprisoned in the
castle of Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, on vague charges of heresy.
The account of his trial and death is given in the propagandistic,
but nearly contemporary, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). It is
extraordinarily moving, and powerful evidence of how an author,
like Tyndale, would go to the stake for what he believed in and what
he had written.
What John Foxe tells us is that ‘Master Tyndale’ was offered a law-
yer to defend him. He refused, saying he would defend himself, in
his own language. Those of his captors who had conversed with him
and heard him pray were of the belief ‘that if he were not a good
Christian man, they knew not whom they might take to be one’. He
is said to have converted not merely his keeper, but his keeper’s wife
and daughter, to his new idea of what religion was, and should be.
William Tyndale would never get a fair trial, and was given no
opportunity to argue his case. Charles V simply ordered that the
troublesome fellow be executed. This, he instructed, should be
done in the cruel fashion laid down for heretics: burning alive at
the stake. The sentence was carried out at Vilvoorde in October
1536. Humanely (in the unspeakably brutal circumstances), and
in defiance of the emperor’s command, his executors strangled
Tyndale before his body was burned, to spare him pain. His last
words on earth, reportedly, were: ‘Lord, open the King of England’s
the book of books 51
eyes.’ Henry VIII’s eyes never were opened. He never could stand
those who opposed his marital arrangements.
Henry VIII, in his momentous break with Rome, had meanwhile
commanded the preparation of a Great Bible in English, and allowed
the Tyndale Bible to form the backbone of the text. Between this
first English Bible and the KJB of 1611, there intervened the reign
of the fanatically Catholic Mary I, who proscribed such Protestant
texts as heretical. The five years of Mary’s rule (1553–58) ushered
in a new period of religious terror. When the accession of Elizabeth
saw a return to Protestantism, English translations, including
Tyndale’s, were again tolerated.
Elizabeth’s successor, James, who ruled Scotland as James
VI before becoming King James I of England, had long wanted
to authorise a new, official English Bible. The increasingly
powerful, and politically disobedient, Puritan sect also called
for a translation without the inaccuracies they had found
in previous versions. James outlined his great project at the
Hampton Court Conference of 1604. It was made clear from the
first that the eventual authorised version would not belong to
any sect, denomination, elite or special interest group (certainly
not to William Tyndale) but would be the property of the king,
the head of the established church. It would forge a link between
earthly and spiritual power, politics and religion, while splitting
England, forever, from Rome’s authority. In short, it would make
the monarch’s hold on the throne more secure. To this day newly
‘authorised’ versions of the Bible in Britain may be printed only
by licence of the English Crown.
The Authorised Version was the work of six learned companies,
combining the expertise of some fifty scholars. Despite this
amassed brainpower – more of an army than a committee – it
has been estimated that 80 per cent of the King James version is
verbally unaltered from Tyndale’s translation of eighty years earlier.
A comparison of the opening lines of Genesis, first as translated by
Tyndale, and then as they appear in the KJB, will make the point
obvious:
52 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
In our respect for the Authorised Version – the only truly great
work of literature in English for which we can thank a king – we
should never forget William Tyndale. He is an author of equal
standing, one might claim, with the greatest in his language. And
that does not exclude Shakespeare.
chapter 9
Minds Unchained
The Metaphysicals
Proud’ in which the poet defiantly asserts that the true Christian
need not fear death, but should confront it as an enemy to be fought
and defeated. This is how the poem (fourteen lines long, like most
sonnets) opens:
‘Thou’ and ‘thee’ sound old-fashioned now, but back then they
were informal ways of addressing someone of lesser standing than
yourself, like a child or servant; ‘you’ was used more formally. Here,
then, these words indicate disrespect. It is a confrontational open-
ing challenge – come on and fight me, then, if you think you’re
so tough – which hinges, as does much of Donne’s poetry, on a
paradox, something that means two things simultaneously. Here
the paradox is that those whom death ‘thinks’ it kills actually go on
to eternal life. Death, as we would say, is a loser, and always will be.
Donne also hoped to be remembered for his sermons and sol-
emn meditations on religious subjects. Brilliantly written as they are,
few people nowadays read them in their entirety, although parts of
the sermons can be read for pure literary pleasure. (Donne, however,
would probably be angry that we were treating his work in this way.)
The following wonderfully long, looping sentence from his ‘Medita-
tion XVII’ is a good example of Donne taking a religious truth and
expressing it in a way that hits home as only truly great literature can.
(I’ve kept the original spelling here which, I think, adds to the effect.)
Everyone will die: there is no way out of this world alive. Yet we
should see it not as a personal tragedy, but something that connects
us, intimately, with the fate of every other person on earth. Put that
way, as I’ve put it, it’s trite. As Donne puts it, it’s wonderful.
Great as the religious verse and prose is, it is the early Songs
and Sonnets, written in Donne’s wild youth, which have been
most influential and are nowadays most often included in
anthologies. They were originally circulated in manuscript form
for the enjoyment of a small group of similarly clever, intellectually
daring friends. Donne’s was a highly refined branch of poetry. It
is challenging – at times fearsomely so. Modern readers may feel
at times that they are not reading the poems, but solving difficult
puzzles. Approached in the right way, that adds to the pleasure.
The Metaphysicals were deeply learned but, above all, ‘witty’.
Wit – meaning smartness – was the essence of their project. And
none of the group was wittier than John Donne. The device they
most valued was what they called the ‘conceit’ – the daring idea or
‘concept’ that no one had ever come up with before. Often these
conceits bordered on the extravagantly far-fetched. As always in lit-
erature it’s something easier demonstrated than described. A prime
example is Donne’s short poem ‘The Flea’, written, we assume, in
his youth:
What is the poet getting at here? One must unravel the poem a bit
to solve the puzzle. The unnamed young lady to whom the poem
is being addressed is, we gather, stubbornly resisting the poet’s
urgent overtures that she surrender to him. For his part, the poet
is using all the resources of his poetry as an instrument of winning
her over.
Donne asks what their coming together would mean, and ex-
plains it by the insignificance of a flea. A tiny thing. Nothing of
minds unchained 57
Nations Rise
Milton and Spenser
‘He for God only, she for God in him’ is the line modern readers
most often gag on. Illustrators have followed Milton’s cue and
traditionally show the couple (with the obligatory fig leaves) with
Adam looking up, reverently, to heaven, and Eve gazing, adoringly,
66 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
at his face as he does so. But later in the poem Eve rebels against
this ‘absolute’ wifely submission. She insists on going off on her
own to tend the Garden in Eden. Her domestic rebellion renders
her vulnerable, of course, to the seductions of wily Satan (now
in the form of a serpent) who persuades her, as a further act of
independence, to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Another bone of contention is the ‘English’ that Milton created
for his poem. It is heavily, at times overpoweringly, ‘Latinised’ – it’s
almost as if he never could shake off the intention of writing the
poem in the antique language. The following, from Book VII, de-
scribing Eden’s vegetation, is a good example of Miltonic diction:
poem that his purpose is to make his readers better Christians, or,
at least, better-informed Christians. Who knows? He may have
succeeded with some readers in his uplifting religious mission. But
the central achievement of Paradise Lost has been very different,
and wholly literary. It pointed to ways in which literature in English,
and poets writing in English, could develop. It laid a foundation.
And that foundation was a literature which, henceforth, would
be independently English. English in subject and English in
expression.
chapter 11
The book you are holding in your hand at the moment is not a
work of literature, but let’s take it as a handy example. I wrote it.
My name is there on the title page, and in the copyright line. So
it’s ‘my’ (John Sutherland’s) book. Does that mean, though, that I
‘own’ the book in your hand? No, it doesn’t – the physical copies are
not mine. If you bought it, it’s yours. But suppose someone broke
into my house while I was writing this book, stole my computer,
found the text of what I was writing and published it under their
own name. What would happen? Provided I could prove that the
original work was mine, I could sue the thief for infringement of
copyright – for copying my original work without my permission
and passing it off as his own (an offence known as ‘plagiarism’).
From its beginning in the eighteenth century, modern
copyright law has developed alongside the increasing availability
of literary works in new formats. It has continually had to adapt
to keep up with new technologies, including film adaptations in
the twentieth century (Chapter 32) and, today, the challenge of
e-books and the internet (Chapter 40). But in essence, copyright
w h o ‘ o w n s ’ l i t e r at u r e ? 69
has always meant just that: ‘the right to copy’. As the copyright
owner of what you are reading right now, I have granted Yale
University Press the exclusive right to publish it in the form of
this book.
We talk about a ‘work of literature’ because it is the result – in
very real terms – of the author’s toil. Then, publishers talk about
each of the works in their catalogue as a ‘title’: the word ‘title’ means
ownership. Finally, when the books have been produced for sale,
they are individual ‘copies’: you have in your hand a copy of my
work. Each party ‘owns’ the work in a different way. Imagine a party
of book-lovers. The host, pointing to his groaning shelves, proudly
exclaims, ‘Look at my books!’ An author, scanning the shelves, says
jubilantly, ‘I see you’ve got one of my books – did you enjoy it?’
A publisher, also inspecting the books, says ‘I’m very glad to see
you’ve got so many of our books on the shelf ’. They are all right, in
a sense: the host owns the physical objects, the publisher the par-
ticular format, and the author the original words. And it points to
the many different people and processes involved in getting a book
written, published and sold nowadays.
This little book’s life began when I signed a contract with Yale
University Press, granting them the right to publish my text as a
book. Once my manuscript was delivered to them satisfactorily,
they paid to have it edited, designed, typeset, printed, bound be-
tween hard covers, and stored, prior to sale, in a warehouse. The
publishers paid for all those individual processes, and they now
own the physical books. Next, the books are distributed, principally
to various retailers – physical shops and electronic sellers – and
libraries. The physical books now belong to them. Finally, you, the
customer, bought this Little History of Literature and took it home.
(Or if you borrowed it from the library you will have to return it
there.) Today, the publishing of books is usually carried out by a
company quite separate from the printers and the booksellers. But
up until the nineteenth century, publishing and printing was main-
ly arranged by booksellers.
From the earliest period of known history, it took thousands of
years, and an awful lot of literature, before any laws were devised to
70 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
regulate what went on, and to protect the various parties’ interests.
And it was only when those laws came into being that a coherent
industry – with machinery and ways of commercially distributing
literary products – could be developed and that ‘literature’ – as op-
posed to a miscellaneous bundle of texts, oral tales and ballads –
could be fully and properly developed.
The framework of laws and commerce within which literature
is now created depended on a number of earlier things happen-
ing. Writing, literacy and educational institutions were necessary to
create a market. Another necessary prior event was the shift from
scrolls – which great ancient libraries such as the one at Alexandria
contained – to what is called the ‘codex’, a book with cut, numbered
pages, like the one you’re reading. (Caudex is Latin for a block of
wood; the plural is codices.)
The manuscript, or handwritten codex, originated in classical
Rome, like the word itself. It’s thought that it was invented because
persecuted Christians, whose faith (unlike that of the pagan Ro-
mans) had a sacred book – the gospels – at its centre, needed texts
they could keep hidden from prying eyes. A codex was smaller and
easier to secrete than a large scroll.
Creating an early manuscript codex required huge manual labour
– taking years, in some cases, if it was illustrated, or illuminated,
or handsomely bound – by highly skilled copyists who were often
artists rather than craftsmen. Many of those codices which have
survived in our great libraries were manufactured as single luxury
items, commissioned by a rich owner or institution (the monarch,
the church, monasteries, noblemen). The workshops in which
they were produced were called scriptoria, writing factories. It’s
estimated that the total number of works of literature that were
readily available to the educated bookworm up to the fifteenth
century, was less than a thousand or two. Chaucer’s Clerk in The
Canterbury Tales, for example, is regarded by his fellow pilgrims as
phenomenally well read, yet he owns only half a dozen books.
This book scarcity meant that many more people had books
read to them than they read, or possessed, themselves. A famous
nineteenth-century painting shows Chaucer, fifty years before the
w h o ‘ o w n s ’ l i t e r at u r e ? 71
Bible in your hand you would be hard put to say whether it was
written or printed. The difference was that Gutenberg’s workshop,
in Mainz, Germany, could turn out a thousand bibles in the time it
took a scriptorium to produce one.
It was a breakthrough but it brought with it a new set of prob-
lems – the most urgent being our old friend, ownership. One of
the first books printed in England was Caxton’s 1476 edition of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (good choice) which he sold from his
little stall outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The great poet was no longer
around to give his permission, but even if he had still been alive,
Caxton would not have had to pay Geoffrey Chaucer a penny out
of the profits of his printing enterprise.
For the next 200 years it was copycat heaven in the book trade.
Some legal mechanism to control the ‘right to copy’ was required,
particularly in London which was swelling with large numbers
of consumers: a ‘reading public’. It was the London booksellers
(as mentioned above, they also often doubled as publishers, with
printing machinery in the back of the shop) who brought pressure
to bear on Parliament to frame laws that would regulate the book
business.
In 1710 Parliament came up with a wonderfully sophisticated
piece of legislation – known as the ‘Statute of Anne’ – which had
the clear intention of ‘the Encouragement of Learning’. The pre-
amble reads:
The previous chapter explored the roots of the modern novel. Now
we come to what may be called the plant’s first ripe fruit. Daniel Defoe
(1660–1731), the author of Robinson Crusoe, is the generally agreed
starting point of the genre in England. In the early and middle years
of the eighteenth century, with Defoe and other writers like Samuel
Richardson, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne,
we can see the modern novel emerging from the primal soup of the
many kinds of tale-telling that humanity has always gone in for.
A trigger for all this was needed. Why did what we (but not
they) call the ‘novel’, the ‘new thing’, emerge at this particular time
and in this particular place (London)? The answer is that the rise of
the novel took place at the same time and in the same place as the
rise of capitalism. Different as these two things may seem, they are
intimately connected.
Put it this way. Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his island,
making his fortune by his own efforts, is a new (novel) kind of
man for a new (novel) kind of economic system. Economists have
frequently used him as what they call ‘homo economicus’: economic
t r av e l l e r s ’ ta l l ta l e s 83
It reads like ‘the real thing’. The story of a man called Crusoe, for-
merly Kreutzner.
t r av e l l e r s ’ ta l l ta l e s 85
How to Read
Dr Johnson
Literature, as we have seen, goes as far back (via epic and myth)
as humanity itself. Samuel Johnson is the first great critic of English
literature and he, like the ‘discipline’ he represents, came much later
in the day when the machineries of literary production had reached
an advanced historical stage. Dr Johnson is very much a product of
the eighteenth century – an age which prided itself on its social so-
phistication and ‘polish’. Literary people of that century liked to see
themselves as ‘Augustans’ – named after the high-point of classical
Roman culture under the ‘golden age’ of the Emperor Augustus,
whose achievements they aimed to copy. It was in the eighteenth
century that our great institutions (Parliament, the monarchy, the
universities, business, the press) took on their modern form. And,
among all that, what we now call the ‘book world’ came into being.
Johnson would, in his glory years, rule over that book world. One
of his other names was ‘the Great Cham’ (cham being another word
for ‘khan’, or ‘king’).
We know Johnson very well as a person. He was the subject of
a biography (itself a fine work of literature) written by his young
friend and disciple, James Boswell (1740–95). From Boswell’s pages
an endearing and vivid portrait emerges. Consider, for example,
Boswell’s recollection of his first meeting with the great man, tuck-
ing into his dinner like a wild animal:
His looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when
in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least atten-
tion to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite,
which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that
while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and
generally a strong perspiration was visible.
The two men went on consume two bottles of port wine at their
first meeting. Lifelong friendship proceeded from that merry
point.
Samuel Johnson was born in a small provincial town, Lichfield,
the child of a bookseller (of rather advanced years for the trials of
fatherhood). As a boy he suffered from a disease called scrofula,
90 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
all). But, despite his depressed view of things, he believed that life
should be lived with courage, as he lived his.
For all his many achievements, it is as a literary critic that
Johnson is most revered. As a critic he brought two things to the
understanding and appreciation of literature. One is ‘order’, the
other ‘common sense’. His common sense is legendary. It is vividly
depicted in a conversation which he had with Boswell, while
walking, on the then fashionable view (put into circulation by the
philosopher Bishop Berkeley) that matter does not exist and that
everything in the universe is ‘merely ideal’. Imaginary. Boswell
observed that, logically, the theory could not be refuted. Johnson
responded by violently kicking a large stone which stood in their
way and exclaiming, equally violently, ‘I refute it thus!’
He adopted the same common-sense attitude in his literary
judgements. He loved, said Johnson, to ‘concur with the common
reader’. It is not the least attractive thing about him that he never
talks down to us. It’s also interesting to note that – an unusual thing
among literary critics – he had great respect for young minds. In
another conversation, Boswell asked what Johnson (the former
schoolmaster) thought were the best subjects for children to learn
first. Johnson’s reply was that it did not matter: ‘Sir, while you are
considering which of two things you should teach your child first,
another boy has learnt them both.’
Johnson’s most enduring achievement is the order and
manageable shape he brought to the appreciation of literature. It
took the form of two vast monumental works: his Dictionary and his
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. Approached by a group
of booksellers, he embarked on the research for his Dictionary in
1745 – still unaided by any patron, and single-handed. It would
take him ten years to complete and would ruin what was left of his
eyesight. On its completion he was awarded a government pension
of £300 a year – appropriately, since the dictionary was a service to
the English nation and people.
When it was published the two-volume Dictionary was the size
of a small coffee table. It is famous for the eccentricity and wit of
many of its definitions (for example: ‘Patron. Commonly a wretch
92 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’). But the
underlying principle was more ambitious, something indicated by
the full description given on the title page:
Johnson did not merely offer ‘definitions’, he traced how the mean-
ings of words evolved over time and how they contain within them-
selves all sorts of ambiguities and multiple meanings according to
where, when and how they were used. He demonstrated this com-
plexity with some 150,000 historical examples.
Take an example from the very ‘best’ writer of all, and the text
that so struck the nine-year-old Samuel. In Hamlet, as the drowned
Ophelia is being buried, Gertrude throws something into the open
grave, with the comment ‘Sweets to the sweet. Farewell!’ But what is
she throwing? Chocolates? Biscuits? Sugar cubes? No, fresh flowers.
For the Elizabethans, the adjective ‘sweet’ primarily indicated what
one could smell with the nose, not what one could taste with the
tongue, which is how we generally use it now. This earlier usage,
among others, is the kind of thing recorded by Johnson. The
major point Johnson makes in the Dictionary is that language –
particularly the language writers use – cannot be set in stone. It is a
living, organic, ever-changing thing.
Johnson’s other magnum opus (great work) is his Lives of the
Most Eminent English Poets, published in 1779–81. Again, the title
page is illuminating:
the worthwhile from the less than worthwhile. There are, in the
vaults of Britain’s and America’s great national libraries, many mil-
lions of books which classify as ‘Literature’. How, in the limited time
available to us in a human lifetime, should we choose what is worth
reading? Critical assistance can supply a ‘curriculum’ (what is pre-
scribed for us to read at school) and a ‘canon’ – the best of the best.
But does this mean that we should always agree with literary
critics – submit, meekly, to their authority? Certainly not. Imagine
a classroom of thirty students tackling an algebra equation. How-
ever difficult the sum there will be one correct answer. Imagine,
however, an English lesson being asked ‘What is Hamlet, the play,
about?’ There should be a whole range of different answers, from
‘The best way to appoint a king’ to ‘In what circumstances is suicide
a proper decision?’ It would be a disaster if every member of the
class simply parrotted what someone else had said or thought.
There is a complicated line from taking literary criticism on
board, weighing it, and then going on to form your own opinions.
Johnson understood that. Literary works, he once said, must be
batted about like shuttlecocks in a game of badminton. The last thing
one wants is consensus. We can even disagree with Johnson himself.
He revered Shakespeare and edited the plays (editing is one of the
most useful things a literary critic can do). Johnson believed that
Shakespeare was a genius. It was Johnson’s admiration, expressed
everywhere in his edition of and commentary on Shakespeare,
which established him as the greatest of the nation’s writers. But he
also believed that the author of Hamlet often lacked sophistication
and polish – he was sometimes ‘untutored’, even primitive. He
lacked something that Johnson and his contemporaries valued
above all things: ‘decorum’. Shakespeare’s work was the result of
the uncultivated age in which he lived. Most of us would strongly
disagree. That is a privilege that Johnson, the most generous and
open-minded of literary critics, allows us. He gives us the tools to
make up our own minds.
chapter 15
Romantic Revolutionaries
Burns, a farmer, had cut into a field-mouse’s nest with his plough.
Looking down on the life he has wrecked he reflects:
The ‘beastie’ is not just a little rodent, but, like Burns himself, a
fellow victim of ‘social’ injustice – ‘me, thy poor, earth-born com-
panion /An’ fellow-mortal!’ And Burns’s use of Lowland Scottish
dialect makes the added point that the language of the people, not
the ‘King’s English’, represents the heart of the Scottish nation.
Walter Scott’s first and most influential novel is Waverley (1814).
At its centre is the 1745 uprising in which an army of Highland
rebels, under the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward Stuart, swept
down victoriously through Scotland into the north of England,
intent on reclaiming the British throne. If they had succeeded, they
would have wholly changed the history of the United Kingdom.
Scott himself was staunchly Unionist, believing in the partnership
of Scotland and England, and he had mixed feelings about ‘Bonnie
Prince Charlie’. He was, the novelist said, in his head a Hanoverian (a
supporter of the English king, George II) and in his heart a Jacobite
(a supporter of the Scottish Pretender). But what is significant
in Waverley is that Scott portrayed ‘the ’45’ as less a war of failed
conquest – between two powers of more or less equal standing –
than a failed revolution. Or, put another way, a clash of ideologies.
The most powerful revolutionary statement among the
British Romantics is Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
98 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
disciples. Not for him mooning over the damp northern English
hills. Scott, and his Edinburgh clique, hated the ‘Cockney Poet’
Keats and his patron, Leigh Hunt. None of the poets of the time
seem to have registered the existence of (as we now think) one of
the greatest of their number, William Blake (1757–1827). Some
of Blake’s magnificently illustrated volumes – made and written
by himself – sold barely in double figures in his lifetime. His
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, infused as they are with his
idiosyncratic views on life and religion, are now everywhere read,
studied and enjoyed. No other writer, of any period, so effectively
combined the visual with the textual. Blake’s poems (like ‘The
Tyger’) are things we ‘look at’ as much as read.
Despite these personal differences, rivalries and blind spots, the
Romantics joined their creative force in a massive redefinition of
what literature was and what it could do outside its merely literary
environment – how it could change society and even, as the more
optimistic of the Romantics thought, the world. ‘Revolution’ is
not an overstatement. The movement burned too hot to last long.
Effectively it was burned out in Britain by the time of Scott’s death
in 1832 and the country’s own ‘quiet’ political revolution, the First
Reform Bill. But Romanticism changed, forever, the ways in which
literature was written and read. It bequeathed to the writers who
came after, and who cared to use it, a new power. Not bright stars,
but burning stars.
chapter 16
It has taken a long time for us to realise that Jane Austen (1775–
1817) is one of the great English-language novelists. One of the
reasons we can overlook her is that the world of her fiction is (there
is no other word) small. And, to the superficial eye, the big question
posed in each of her six novels – ‘Who will the heroine marry?’ –
looks, if not similarly small, something less than earth-shatteringly
important. We are not, it is clear, in the same league as Tolstoy’s
War and Peace (even though virtually all of Austen’s fiction was
actually written in wartime – the longest war that modern Britain
had ever fought).
In a letter written in 1816, Austen likened her novels, with her
characteristic irony, to miniature paintings: ‘the little bit (two inches
wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’. Charlotte
Brontë took up the same image, but much more critically:
Austen travelled very little in her life. Nor do her heroines travel
much. The family spent some time in Bath, the Regency spa-town
and marriage market, a place Austen seems to have disliked. She
visited London but never lived there, and it figures little in her writ-
ing; usually, as in Sense and Sensibility, as a place it’s good to get
away from. The ‘home counties’ – principally Hampshire – were
her home ground. It’s quaint to be told that she had a strong loyalty
to the local cricket team, the ‘Gentlemen of Hampshire’.
An attractive woman, one gathers (no reliable portrait of her
survives), she is known to have had an offer of marriage. She
accepted, but then withdrew her consent the next morning. She
never did marry, although all her novels are centrally concerned
with her heroines’ courtship problems. Austen’s motives for
remaining single can only be guessed at. Whatever those motives
might have been, lovers of her work may be grateful that she
changed her mind on that fateful night in 1802. A wife and mother
would have had less time to produce the six novels on which her
reputation rests. She died that most pitied object in her fiction: an
old maid.
Old, though, is the wrong word. Austen was only forty-one at
the time of her death. As with so much in her life, we don’t know
what disease killed her. But it was not sudden, and her last novels
were composed in growing physical weakness through her final ill-
ness. An understandable darkness tinges her last complete work,
Persuasion. In the ending to that novel, one can almost feel the pen
drooping with exhaustion on the paper. She did not live to revise it
to her satisfaction.
The Austen heroine invariably has both a suitable and an un-
suitable suitor. Will Emma Woodhouse marry Frank Churchill or
consent to become the wife of the older, duller Mr Knightley? Will
Elizabeth Bennet mend her family’s fortunes by accepting the offer
of the Revd Mr Collins, or stick to her guns and (after some heavy
counter-fire from Lady Catherine de Bourgh) become Mrs Darcy?
Will Marianne succumb to the Byronic Willoughby or discover
the attractions of the dull, but worthy, Colonel Brandon with his
flannel waistcoat (he is middle-aged and feels the cold)? All the
104 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
novels end with a peal of church bells, the right choice having been
made.
Famously Jane Austen never goes beyond what a ‘lady’ would
decently know. (‘By a Lady’ is the description under the title of her
anonymously published first novel, Sense and Sensibility.) There
are many men in her novels but she never depicts males in con-
versation together without a lady present and listening. There are
few truly grand aristocrats – exceptions are Sir Thomas Bertram
in Mansfield Park and Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, but neither
of them stands high in the register of peers of the realm. Equally,
there are no working-class characters in the foreground of her nov-
els. Shabby-genteel is as far down the social scale as we go in Jane
Austen’s world. There are, of course, servants everywhere. Some of
their names (James the coachman in Emma, for example) we know.
But life below stairs is another, unvisited world in Austen’s fiction.
Occasionally we get glimpses of a harder world than the novels
choose to dwell on. In Emma Jane Fairfax finds herself in a cruel
dilemma. Penniless, but talented, she must make her own way in
the world. Marriage would be a solution but the man she loves (and
who may have taken cruel advantage of her) seems more interested
in rich Emma Woodhouse. The only means by which Jane can sup-
port herself is by becoming a governess – earning barely enough
to live on and enduring the humiliating household status of ‘upper
servant’. She describes applying for such positions as being like a
slave on the auction block. Charlotte Brontë would make a novel,
Jane Eyre, out of this scenario. For Jane Austen it is a sideline to the
main plot, which she chooses not to go too far into, other than to
draw the reader’s attention to Jane’s plight.
One can rack up any number of things that Jane Austen’s novels
don’t do. She lived and wrote through some of the greatest historical
upheavals the world had known – the American and French
revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. Sailors (she had brothers
in the Navy) and military men (Colonel Brandon in Sense and
Sensibility, for example, and the naval hero Frederick Wentworth
in Persuasion) make an appearance in her narratives, but only as
eligible or ineligible suitors for the heroines. If Horatio Nelson
the sharpest mind 105
live one’s life. We could also cite her wit, her tolerant observation of
human foibles, and her sympathy.
There are few more artful plot-wrights than Austen. It is hard
for her fans to remember their first readings of the novels, be-
cause they know them so well. ‘Janeites’, as her devout followers are
called, take it on themselves to re-read the six novels every year like
holy writ. But for first-time readers especially, her novels are page-
turners, masterly in their winding up of suspense. Will Emma (or
Elizabeth, or Catherine, or Elinor) do the right thing? The reader is
on tenterhooks until almost the last chapter.
No writer uses her prose instrument more skilfully than Austen.
Moreover she has the knack of making us, her readers, use our own
skill-set to the limits of our ability, and beyond what we normally
trouble to do. Take, as an example, the opening of Emma:
obstinacy – lead them into life’s difficulties and dangers. Put another
way, they make mistakes which they pay for. Out of the resulting
stress and suffering they emerge as ‘adult’, morally mature. What
Austen’s novels tell us is that in order to live properly, you have
first to have lived. Life is an education for life. Here again (as with
the skills mentioned above) Austen has been seen as the pioneer in
what is called the ‘Great Tradition’ of English fiction – a line that
runs through George Eliot, the Brontës (despite Charlotte’s moans),
Dickens, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence. All take their starting
point from the modest lady writing in a rectory in Hampshire who
understood the world more than the world gave her credit for.
Austen’s fiction demonstrates, supremely well, that a literary
work need not be large to be great. And what can two inches of
ivory contain? Everything worth writing about, if the brush and the
surface are in the hands of a genius.
chapter 17
women who could read, even if they could not write proficiently,
or were not encouraged to – there were few opportunities for them
to exercise their skills in the outside world. They represented a
reading public relatively unexploited until this date. Attractive
reading matter for the woman reader of the time arrived in the
form of fiction. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa
(1747–48) – runaway bestsellers in the mid-eighteenth century
– were clearly targeted at women like the heroines themselves:
young, decent, middle-class, virtuous, waiting for marriage, or
already married. Richardson’s great adversary, and the satiriser
of his fiction, Henry Fielding, just as clearly targeted young men
with the bawdy tale of Tom Jones (1749). Young men were another
section of the diversifying reading public, with its own particular
tastes and preferences.
Fiction for women, by women, about women took root in this
period. It was significant in all sorts of ways. The modern critic
Elaine Showalter calls the novels written at this time and later ‘a
literature of their own’: a way in which women could converse at a
time when their access to the outside world, and their opportuni-
ties to assemble (other than in church, and in church-related ac-
tivities), were limited. The novel was one of the foundation stones
of what would later evolve as feminism. (Chapter 29 takes up this
point.)
There was, however, a major drawback: the educational deficit.
To rise above the levels of literacy prescribed for most of their sex,
women needed an unusually well-stocked library of books in the
house, and parents or guardians interested in their intellect. The
Brontës (Chapter 19) and Jane Austen (Chapter 16) had that good
luck, as did a few women readers of literature. Most did not. Even
in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf ’s tract for the intellectual
liberation of women, A Room of One’s Own (1929), opens with
the description of her being denied entrance to a library at the
University of Cambridge. She is not, a Fellow informs her, a fellow.
It’s a symbolic scene. She does not belong in the reading world
of men (‘yet’, one should add). The first two women’s colleges at
Cambridge were opened in the late nineteenth century and it was
110 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
not until well after Woolf ’s death that the college on whose steps
she was standing admitted women students.
George Eliot (real name Mary Anne Evans) was allowed, as a little
girl, the free run of the library of a nearby country house, where
her father was a land agent. She had no more than a sound school
education. By a heroic course of self-instruction, and with the
help of friends, she taught herself German and began her writing
career as a translator of complicated works of theology and philos-
ophy. She became one of the first women ‘higher journalists’ of her
time. Few, of either sex, ranked higher. When, in her late thirties,
she turned to fiction (using a male pseudonym) with Adam Bede
(1859), she was already a self-made woman – an ‘autodidact’ and
a ‘blue stocking’, as women who dared to educate themselves were
called. Few could do what she did. Eliot saw the kind of fiction that
the bulk of her sex consumed and did not like it one bit: ‘silly novels
by lady novelists’, she called it. There were, of course, silly novels for
men as well. But men’s access to the treasure house of very un-silly
literature was less restricted than women’s. The situation changed,
slowly. In modern times, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Atwood, Joyce
Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and A.S. Byatt, have all been university
teachers, the cleverest going. Their reading public tends to be well
educated, and with as many, or more, women readers as men. In
this respect, the reading public has evened out.
At any point in history, and from whatever angle we look at
it, however, the ‘reading public’ is not monolithic like a football
crowd. In our own day, it is more like a kind of mosaic – a lot of
small reading publics, loosely strung together. This point can be
illustrated by dropping into any large bookshop. Wander through
and you will find different ‘category areas’ (genres) with different
kinds of books. Customers know what they like, and whether they
want to choose within Teen Fiction or Classic Fiction or Gay and
Erotic Fiction or Romantic Fiction or Horror or Crime Fiction or
Children’s Literature.
Somewhere – usually in some unfrequented corner – there
will be a section devoted to Poetry. It will not, for a certainty,
attract the same potential consumers as are sniffing interestedly
b o o k s f o r yo u 111
The Giant
Dickens
Few people would disagree with the idea that Charles Dickens
(1812–70) is the finest British novelist ever to have put pen to paper.
‘A no-brainer’, we might say. ‘The Inimitable’, as he nicknamed
himself (even he thought he was peerlessly superb), would have
flashed an angry look at the impertinence of even thinking, let
alone asking, such a question.
What other novelist has had his image on both a banknote
and a postage stamp? What other novelist has had his work so
often adapted for large and small screen? What other Victorian
novelist still sells a million copies of his works every year? In the
2012 celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth, both the
Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that
Dickens was a writer of Shakespearean stature. Who will argue
with them?
But what precisely is it in Dickens’s novels which merits the
supreme and universal praise he receives? It’s a tricky question,
requiring a whole range of answers. And over the years those
answers have changed. If, for example, you had asked one of
the giant 115
literature, Dickens did not just write great fiction, he made great
fiction, by other hands, possible.
A second reason for Dickens’s greatness is that he was the first
novelist not merely to make children the heroes and heroines
of his fiction (as in Oliver Twist) but also to make his reader
appreciate how vulnerable and easily bruised the child is, and
how unlike an adult’s is the child’s-eye view of the world. When
he was still a young man, anticipating that his would not be a long
life (it wasn’t), he chose his close friend John Forster to be his
biographer. To Forster Dickens entrusted a few sheets of paper
describing what he called ‘the secret agony of my soul’. These
described Dickens’s own acute sufferings as a child. His father,
an admiralty clerk, could never manage money and ended up in
the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison. This was the setting of Little
Dorrit, a location familiar to Dickens as an eleven-year-old boy.
While his father languished behind bars, he was put to work
sticking labels on jars of boot-blacking in a rat-infested factory
on the Thames, for just six shillings a week. It was brutal but,
more than anything, it was the shame that scorched him. The
scars never healed. The cleverest of boys, Dickens never got the
education his cleverness deserved. His schooling was grossly
disturbed and it finished when he was fifteen. That shame too
was a burden. He was routinely dismissed as ‘low’ and ‘vulgar’ by
contemporaries, even in his obituary in The Times. Underlying
Dickens’s central concern with children is the belief that they are
not merely little adults but have something that all adults should
aspire to repossess. Dickens (who wrote a Life of Christ for his
own children) was a firm believer in Jesus’s dictum, ‘Except ye
become as children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’.
In fact, Dickens’s early life was a heroic feat of self-education
and self-improvement. He got work as an office clerk, learned
shorthand, and was taken on as a journalist reporting on House
of Commons debates. He was to become a mirror of his changing
age – the third reason we consider him a great writer. No novelist
has been more sensitive to his own times than Dickens. Histori-
cally his was a period of explosive growth in London. The city was
118 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Life in Literature
The Brontës
we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there;
our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chil-
blains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irri-
tation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet
inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff
toes into my shoes in the morning.
After typhoid swept through the school, closing it, their father
took over his three surviving daughters’ education and tutored
them at home, exceptionally well. For these five years – probably
the happiest years of their lives – the sisters were free to rummage
at will throughout the well-stocked parsonage library. They were
stimulated by the books they found – Scott’s romances and Byron’s
poems, notably.
Around 1826, the three young sisters, together with Branwell,
began secretively to write long serials, in tiny, almost illegible
script, about imaginary worlds. This ‘web of childhood’ was
initially inspired by games with Branwell’s toy soldiers. The
narratives ranged as far abroad as Africa, featuring Napoleonic and
Wellingtonian heroes. The super-heroism of the characters in the
imaginary Angria and Gondal filtered through in the later novels
to such characters as Edward Rochester and, most glamorously,
Heathcliff, that hero composed – as was his name (forename or
surname?) – of the two hardest, least human elements in Emily’s
beloved moorland landscape.
Once grown up, what should unusually clever young women
like the Brontë sisters do? Marry, of course. When their father died
they would be penniless. The few portraits and a single photograph
(of Charlotte) that survive confirm they were physically attractive.
There were young, eligible clergyman in plenty for them to choose
l i f e i n l i t e r at u r e 125
from. But the sisters wanted more than marriage. Charlotte, for
example, is known to have turned down early offers. They could,
they resolved, pass on the home schooling their father had passed
on to them. All three girls became governesses: Emily and
Charlotte briefly and unhappily, Anne for longer and more long-
sufferingly.
In 1842, Emily and Charlotte went off to Brussels, to work, as
student teachers, in an exclusive boarding school for girls, with the
aim of mastering French. It would help them, they believed, set up
a school of their own one day. In Brussels, Emily was chronically
unhappy away from Yorkshire and the moors. She, like Heathcliff
and Cathy, loved ‘wilderness’. One of the fascinating moments in
Wuthering Heights is when the young Cathy and Heathcliff com-
pare their favourite summer days. For her it is when the clouds
scud across the sky, driven by the wind, and the land is dappled. For
him it is still, sultry, cloudless days. That is not an episode we would
find in Charlotte’s fiction.
Emily left Brussels to return to Haworth as soon as she decently
could. The foreign place held nothing for her. Charlotte stayed
another year. Disastrously for herself, but happily for literature,
she fell madly in love with the principal of the school, Constantin
Héger. He behaved well. She, consumed by passion, behaved, if
not quite badly, then rather recklessly. Héger was the great love of
her life. It was not to be, but nonetheless that wretched experience
forms the stuff of the novels to come – Rochester’s teasing, cat-
and-mouse games with his governess, for example, in Jane Eyre.
In Villette (1853), Héger appears, more realistically, as the man
Lucy Snowe loves while working as a student teacher in a Brussels
boarding school. The autobiographical element is heightened by
both novels being written by the heroines in first-person narrative
(‘I’ narrative) form. Rarely has an unhappy love affair produced
greater fiction. And knowing what lay behind these novels helps us
as readers to appreciate that greatness.
After Brussels the three women found themselves reunited at
Haworth. They were now in their twenties. Neither governessing
nor Belgium had worked. But apparently they were still unwilling
126 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Let’s play some literary hide and seek. Where is the child hiding in
Hamlet? Where are the little ones in Beowulf? Pride and Prejudice
was, in 2012, voted the most influential novel in the English
language. Where are the children in Austen’s story about the Bennet
family? Come out, come out, wherever you are! You’ll seek in vain.
If, for the traditional parent, the ideal child was ‘seen and not
heard’, in the long history of literature the child was, for centuries,
neither seen nor heard. They are, of course, there, but they are in-
visible.
Children’s literature – in the double sense of books for children,
and books about children – emerged as a distinct category of
fiction in the nineteenth century. The new interest in ‘the child’
as something worth writing about and for can be credited to two
leading spirits of the Romantic movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and William Wordsworth. In Rousseau’s Émile (1762) – a manual
for the ideal education of the child – and Wordsworth’s long auto-
biographical poem The Prelude in the following century, childhood
is the period of life which ‘makes’ us. As Wordsworth put it: ‘The
under the blankets 129
child is father of the man’. Not on the sidelines, but at the centre of
the human condition.
Wordsworth’s cult of the child had two sides to it. One was that
childhood experience was ‘formative’ (it could also be traumatic –
‘deformative’). In The Prelude (and childhood is a prelude to adult-
hood) he argues that it is in childhood that our relationship with
the world around us is established. In the poet’s own case it was in
childhood that his intimate relationship with nature was forged.
The other aspect was Wordsworth’s religious belief that the
child, having been most recently in the company of God, was a
‘purer’ being than the grown-up person. This belief is proclaimed
in his poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. We come into the
world, the poem asserts, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, which are gradu-
ally dispersed as the years pass. Conventionally the term ‘growing
up’ suggests addition: we become stronger, more knowledgeable,
more skilled. It is not (in Britain or America) until we reach a cer-
tain age, when we are ‘mature’ enough, that we can see some films,
drink alcohol, drive a car, marry or vote in public elections. Word-
sworth saw it differently. Growing up was not gaining something,
but losing something much more important.
As we saw in Chapter 18, Wordsworth’s heir in terms of a shared
belief in childhood’s primacy in human existence is – who else?
– Charles Dickens. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (written in
his mid-twenties, in 1837–38), he attacks new legislation, recently
introduced, which made it more painful for the poor to rely on
public aid – in order to motivate the ‘idle’ members of society
to find useful employment and get off the municipal payroll.
It’s one of the recurrent swings in political thinking about the
‘welfare state’.
How, though, does Dickens frame his critique of cruel Britain?
By following the ‘progress’ of a young child from orphan to
‘workhouse boy’, to under-age chimney sweep, and – finally – to
apprentice criminal. You want to know why your society is as it
is? Look at how you treat your children. ‘As the twig is bent, so the
tree is shaped’, as they would have said. Dickens believed that his
own character as a man and an artist had been formed by what had
130 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Flowers of Decadence
Wilde, Baudelaire, Proust and Whitman
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of
fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh
with the crowd.
flowers of decadence 139
What had happened was that, stimulated by that taste, the whole of
his life was flooding back into his mind. All that mattered now was
to get it on paper.
Proust’s novel is a life’s work. Nothing of great moment happens
in the life it records (as the above passage implies) but Proust’s
art creates out of ‘himself ’ one of the great monuments of world
literature. Proust and Wilde knew each other and in his exile the
French author went out of his way to be kind to his disgraced fellow
author. Remembrance of Things Past is the kind of novel Wilde
might himself have written (and comes close to sketching in De
Profundis) had he been spared prison and given years in which
to continue as ‘Oscar’ rather than Prisoner C.3.3. The Decadent
movement came and went, and left behind it flowers as well as
decay.
chapter 22
Poets Laureate
Tennyson
The poet. What images does the little word call up? Like me, per-
haps, your mind’s eye pictures a man with blazing eyes, a far-away
look, flowing hair, clad in loose garb. Or a woman, standing on a
rock, or some other eminence, gazing into the far distance. Cloud,
sea, wind and storm are in the air. Both figures are solitary. ‘Lonely’
as Wordsworth put it, ‘as a cloud’.
There may be an aura of madness – the Romans called it ‘furor
poeticus’. Many of our greatest poets (John Clare and Ezra Pound,
to take two of the very greatest) actually spent portions of their
lives in mental institutions. Many contemporary writers spend
more time on the psychoanalyst’s couch than in the literary agent’s
office.
The critic Edmund Wilson borrowed an image from antiquity to
describe the poet. He was, said Wilson, like Philoctetes in the Iliad.
Philoctetes was the greatest archer in the world. His bow could win
wars. Things were going badly for the Greeks at the siege of Troy.
They needed Philoctetes. But they had banished him to an island.
Why? Because he had a wound that stank so much no one could
142 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Unusual for his times, Tennyson lived to over eighty, two decades
longer than Dickens, five decades longer than Keats. What might
they have done with those Tennysonian years?
Tennyson published his first volume of poems when he was
just twenty-two. It contained what are still many of his best-
known lyrics, such as ‘Mariana’. Alfred regarded himself at this
period as very much a Romantic poet – the heir to Keats. But
Romanticism, as a vital literary movement, had faded by the
1830s. No one wanted warmed-over Keats. There ensued a long
fallow period in his career – the ‘lost decade’, critics call it. It was
a period in the wilderness. He broke out of this paralysis and in
1850, aged forty-one, produced the most famous poem of the
Victorian period – In Memoriam A.H.H. It was inspired by the
death of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, with whom, it
is speculated, his relationship was so intense it might have been
sexual. It probably wasn’t, but intense, in the kind of ‘manly’ way
approved by Victorians, it certainly was.
The poem is made up of short lyrics, chronicling seventeen
years of bereavement. The Victorians mourned the death of a loved
one for a full year – in dark clothes, and with black edged note-
paper; women wore veils and specially sombre personal jewellery.
In this mournful poem Tennyson meditated on the problems that
most tormented his age. Religious doubt afflicted the second half
of the nineteenth century like a moral disease. Tennyson was af-
flicted even more than most. If there was a heaven, why did we
not rejoice when someone dear to us died and went there? They
were going to a better place. But In Memoriam remains essentially
a poem about personal grief. And finally, the poem concludes, de-
spite all the pain, ‘ ’Tis better to have loved and lost /Than never
to have loved at all’. Who, having lost a loved one, would wish they
had never existed?
Queen Victoria lost her beloved consort, Albert, to typhoid,
in 1861. She wore ‘widow’s weeds’ until the end of her life forty
years later. She confided that she found great consolation in Mr
Tennyson’s elegy for his dead friend, and on the strength of it the
two, poet and queen, became mutual admirers. Tennyson was not
p o e t s l au r e at e 145
poles to die Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and richer, from his verse, than
any poet in the annals of English literature.
Did he sell out, or was it a finely judged balancing act? Many
who care about poetry see a Victorian contemporary, Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844–89), as a ‘truer’ kind of poet. Hopkins was
a Jesuit priest who wrote poetry in what little spare time he had.
It has been said that his only connection with Victorian England
was that he drew breath in it. Hopkins admired Tennyson, but he
felt his poetry was what he called ‘Parnassian’ (Parnassus being the
poets’ mountain in ancient Greece). Bluntly, he felt that Tennyson
had surrendered too much by ‘going public’. Hopkins himself
would rather have died than publish a poem like In Memoriam for
any man or woman in the street to pore over his grief.
Hopkins burned many of his highly experimental poems. His
so-called ‘terrible sonnets’, in which he struggled with religious
doubt, are intensely private. He probably never intended anyone
other than his closest friend, Robert Bridges, to see them. Bridges
(destined, ironically, to become poet laureate himself in 1913)
decided, almost thirty years later, to publish the poems Hopkins
had entrusted to him. They are regarded as pioneer works of what
would, a few years after his death, be called modernism, and change
the course of English poetry.
So who, then, was the truer poet, ‘public’ Tennyson or ‘private’
Hopkins? Poetry has always been able to find room for both kinds.
chapter 23
New Lands
America and the American Voice
reading public in the world. But the literature that originated in the
United States was somewhat stunted by the country’s refusal (in the
name of ‘free trade’) to sign up to international copyright regulation
until 1891. Before that date, works published in Britain could be
published in America, without any payment to the author. Writers
like Sir Walter Scott and Dickens were ‘pirated’ in huge quantity and
at budget prices. It fostered American literacy but it handicapped
the local product. Why pay for some promising young writer when
you could get Pickwick Papers free? (American plundering of his
work drove Dickens to apoplectic rage – he got his own back in the
American chapters of his novel Martin Chuzzlewit.)
This is not to say that there was no homegrown American litera-
ture at this time. The ‘great war’, according to no less an admirer than
Abraham Lincoln himself, was started by Harriet Beecher Stowe
with her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). It sold by the
million in the troubled mid-nineteenth century and, if it is not true
that it started a war, it did change the public mind.
A powerful, unique and self-defining impulse in American litera-
ture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the ‘frontier thesis’ –
the idea that the essential quality and worth of Americanness is most
clearly demonstrated in the struggle to push civilisation westward,
from ‘shining sea to shining sea’. James Fenimore Cooper, author
of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is one of the early writers who
chronicled the great push west. Virtually every cowboy novel and
film springs from the same ‘frontier thesis’ root. Where civilisation
meets savagery (at it crudest, paleface meeting redskin) is where
true American grit is displayed. Or so the myth goes.
The western is one of the few genres one cannot credit to the
author Edgar Allan Poe, father of science fiction, ‘horror’ and
the detective story, notably ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (the
orang-utan did it). Along with the idea of ‘genre’ it was in America
that, in 1891, the first bestseller list was established. Eight of the
top ten bestsellers on the first all-fiction list were novels by Eng-
lish hands. It settled down, with an ever more prominent American
content, after the literary world came to terms with international
copyright regulation.
new lands 151
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the
name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.
lover? No, it’s her little dog. A dog’s fidelity, she thinks, is so much
nobler than a human’s. And then the dog explains:
from being peasants. And, indeed, Hardy soared far above the social
level into which he was born. He died an honoured ‘Grand Old Man’
of English literature, his ashes laid alongside the greats in Poets’
Corner in Westminster Abbey. His heart was buried separately, in his
beloved Dorset, alongside the graves of the peasants he wrote about.
Even those whose careers were not as starry as Hardy’s could ex-
pect to rise, and to enjoy a more comfortable life than their parents.
The mid-Victorian, when Hardy was growing up, had clean water,
macadamised (tarred) roads, a network of new railway lines and a
better school education, culminating in the Education Acts of the
1870s, which ensured schooling for every child to the age of twelve,
or thirteen in Scotland. There was social mobility. Dickens’s career,
for instance, is one of rags to riches and eternal fame. He could not
have done it a hundred years earlier. He would have died, unknown
to posterity, in rags.
But there were flies in the Victorian ointment. The south-
western counties of Hardy’s ‘Wessex’ were still, in the early 1800s,
the ‘bread basket’ of England and the region prospered on the
cereals it supplied to the nation. Then in 1846 came the repeal of
the so-called Corn Laws. What that meant was international free
trade. Wheat and other cereal crops could now be imported more
cheaply from abroad. The region Hardy was born in, and loved,
entered a long economic depression from which it has never en-
tirely recovered. That depression infected Hardy and every word
he wrote.
There were other flies in the ointment. Hardy felt the stuffing
had been knocked out of ‘his’ world by a book published when he
was nineteen years old: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859),
with its closely-argued case for evolution. The British had always
believed that theirs was ‘a nation under God’ but what if there was
no God up there? Or it was not the benevolent God described in
Genesis but a mysterious ‘life force’ with no particular interest in
the human race? What if the system of belief on which the whole of
life used to be based was simply not true?
Hardy was persuaded by Darwin, but it hurt him. He pictured
his hurt beautifully. An architect by early training, he loved old
158 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
on the face of it, making the world a better place and dragging Wes-
sex into the nineteenth century.
The Industrial Revolution was indeed a wonderful thing. But,
Hardy believed, mankind should not be too complacent about
it. Nature might well take her revenge. This warning is given in
the poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. (Hardy loved grand
words, but ‘The Crunch of the Two’ would probably not have
had the same titular punch.) As we saw in Chapter 2, the Titanic
ocean liner was one of the proudest industrial achievements, and
greatest disasters, of the century. As the poem puts it:
Reading the poem, one wonders what icebergs are growing for us,
in our world. Were he alive today Hardy would, for a certainty,
direct his ‘pessimistic’ gaze at climate change, overpopulation, the
clash of civilisations – those things which, in our constitutional
optimism, we prefer not to think about.
What Hardy’s ‘pessimism’ tells us is that we should indeed look
at things from all angles. Nor should we flinch from what may seem
frightening – our salvation may depend on it. He put this very well
in one of his poems:
There may be a better world to come. But we shall never get there
unless we make an honest assessment (however painful) of where
we are. Pessimistic? No. Realistic? Yes.
What we think of as progress may not be progress. What
we think of as a more efficient world may be a world headed
for self-destruction. Hardy’s is a pessimistic world view which
instructs us to think again about our own world view. And that,
very simply, is why we value him as the great writer he is. That
160 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Dangerous Books
Literature and the Censor
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man
kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a
good book, kills reason itself …
ing world followed trials, in 1959 and 1960, of a novel that had been
published, without protest or scandal, in Paris thirty years earlier
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Revolution was late coming to Russia. Nonetheless some of world
literature’s greatest works were conceived and published under the
bureaucratic oppression of the Tsar’s censors. Paradoxically – a
paradox frequently observed in the history of literature – authors
raised their game to evade their bumbling inspectors (a character
slyly lampooned in Nikolai Gogol’s play The Inspector-General of
1836). Subtlety and indirectness – artfulness, in a word – were em-
ployed in their critiques of society. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel
The Brothers Karamazov (1880), for example, three brothers con-
spire to murder their obnoxious father. What was the Tsar known
as to his people? ‘Little Father’. Anton Chekhov’s plays similarly, if
more nostalgically, chronicle the inner decay of the ruling class. In
The Cherry Orchard (1904), the orchards are a symbol of beautiful
futility, and they are being felled, making way not for something
better, but for a new, uglier world. Chekhov is a master of literary
‘pathos’. Yes, of course things must change: history demands it. But
must it be change for the worse?
With a few textual ammendments, Chekhov’s seditious comedies
slipped past the Tsar’s censors onto the stage. But soon after the
Revolution in 1917, for Russian (now ‘Soviet’) authors one censorship
was replaced by another, far more oppressive – that of Stalin. It
persisted, more or less intensely and with the occasional ‘thaw’,
until 1989. Using the devious skills of their predecessors, dissident
writers like the poets Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko
and novelists like Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn
contrived to create and (all too occasionally) publish great works
under the very nose of the censors. Novels such as Solzhenitsyn’s
Cancer Ward (1968; a scathing satire on Stalinism as the tumour at
the heart of Russia) were often circulated in ‘samizdat’ – clandestine
typewritten form – much, one might recall, as early Christians in
Rome kept their seditious manuscript texts under their cloaks.
Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were both awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature, in 1958 and 1970 respectively. Will Russia without such
da n g e r o u s b o o k s 165
Empire
Kipling, Conrad and Forster
The point was made in earlier chapters that great literatures tend to
be the product of great nations. Those, that is, which have enlarged
their territory by conquest, invasion or, in some cases, downright
theft. No subject in literature raises thornier issues than ‘empire’
and ‘imperialism’ – most particularly the right by which one
country claims to own, dominate, plunder, and in some instances
destroy another country. Or, as the imperial power may argue, ‘to
bring civilisation’.
Literature’s engagement with the subject of the rights and wrongs
of empire, is complex, fraught and at times quarrelsome. The na-
ture of that engagement has changed over the last two centuries as
the global picture has changed. Literature which is relevant in one
period is hopelessly dated in another. No other variety of literature
requires knowledge of when it was written, and who for, than this
kind of literature.
It helps to sketch out the big historical picture. During the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain, a small cluster of islands
off the coast of northern Europe, acquired and ruled over an empire
empire 169
which, at its height in the Victorian era, stretched from the meridian
line at Greenwich over vast tracts of Africa, to Palestine, the Indian
sub-continent, Australasia and Canada. In the eighteenth century the
thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America
was included in that list. Not even ancient Rome could boast about
‘owning’ a larger expanse of Planet Earth than Great Britain.
By the second half of the twentieth century that empire was
virtually gone, with traumatic suddenness. One after another,
countries claimed and won independence. The last time Britain
fought to defend its overseas territories was in 1982, for a tiny set
of islands in the South Atlantic, the Falklands, with its population
barely larger than an English village. No epics were forthcoming.
Literature is a sensitive recorder of socio-historical change, reg-
istering both the facts of the international world and the nation’s
complex and fluid responses to those facts as they happen. The
British frame of mind, in the high imperial and immediately post-
imperial phase of the country’s history, was touched – as literature
reflects – by a fluctuating mixture of pride and shame.
Let’s consider the famous, and in its time much admired, poem
by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899). It opens:
Klein (renamed ‘Kurtz’ in the novel: klein means ‘small’, and kurz
means ‘short’ in German). For a few months Conrad – a man of
decency, if not entirely immune from the racial prejudices of his
age and class – was in the service of a colonial agency that Europe
should, forever, be ashamed of: the Société Anonyme Belge pour
le Commerce du Haut-Congo.
The so-called Congo Free State had been founded in 1885 by
Belgium, one of the smaller European imperial nations. ‘Free’
meant free to plunder. King Leopold II farmed out the million
square miles his country ‘owned’ to whatever firm would pay most.
What the purchaser did thereafter with their colonial leasehold was
entirely up to them. The result was what has been called the first
genocide of the modern era. Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble
for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.
The river voyage had a profound influence on Conrad: ‘Before
the Congo I was a mere animal’, he later said. It took eight years
for the ‘horror’ (a key word in the novel) to settle sufficiently in
his mind for him to write Heart of Darkness. The story is simple.
Marlow (Conrad’s hero-narrator in a number of his novels) enter-
tains some friends, as the sun sinks over the yardarm, on his boat,
the Nellie, bobbing sedately in the mouth of the Thames. Look-
ing down towards London, in a momentary lull in conversation, he
muses: ‘This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He is
thinking of the Romans and ancient Britain. Behind every empire,
we apprehend, lies crime.
Marlow goes on to recall a command he had in his early thirties.
He was recruited in Brussels (a ‘whitened sepulchre’ of a city) to go
on a mission in Africa (the heart-shaped ‘dark’ continent) up the
Congo to the heart of the Belgian colony, where a station manager,
Kurtz, had gone crazy in the process of harvesting elephant ivory.
(Ivory was in huge demand in Europe and America to make things
like billiard balls and piano keys.) The voyage is one that takes
Marlow into the dark truth of things – capitalism, human nature,
himself and, most importantly, the nature of empire.
Loyal (in a sense) to his adoptive country, Conrad maintains that
Belgian imperialism is crueller and more rapacious than its British
172 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
empire 173
Whitman was gay, as was Forster. At the core of Forster’s novel, the
relationship between a male British schoolteacher and a Muslim
doctor is intense, verging, the novel hints, on passionate. But, as
Kipling had written: ‘East is East and West is West, and never the
twain shall meet.’
Forster found his novel almost impossible to finish. No ending
seemed ‘right’. It was not because of any writing block. What Forster
was up against was the fact that fiction, by its nature, cannot ‘solve’
the problems of empire. A Passage to India ends inconclusively,
but with fine artistic effect, with the two men who can never come
together, becoming ‘welded’, as Whitman puts it. They are last seen
riding horses across the monsoon-soaked Indian landscape:
But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth
didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass
single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds,
the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued
from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said
in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not
there.’
Doomed Anthems
The War Poets
War and poetry have always gone hand in hand. The first great
work of poetry that has come down to us, the Iliad, is about nations
in conflict. War figures in most of Shakespeare’s plays which are not
comedies (and it comes up in some of them, too). One of the most
graphic descriptions of the ‘horrors of war’ (as the Spanish artist
Goya called it) is to be found in Julius Caesar:
It’s a noble sentiment, made all the nobler by what we know of its
author. Brooke was a very handsome young man and bisexual.
He was close to E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and other
‘Bloomsberries’ (Chapter 29). He was a gifted poet, but compared
with Wilfred Owen he was more traditional in technique. So was
his patriotism traditional. He volunteered on the outbreak of
war, although somewhat overage, and died in the first year of the
conflict of an infected mosquito bite, not an enemy bullet. He is
indeed buried in a ‘foreign field’, the Greek island of Skyros.
Brooke’s poem was instantly taken up by the war propaganda
180 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
1922, Aaron’s Rod, assert the need to ‘get up and leave’. The great
tree of life (‘Ygraddisil’) was, Lawrence believed, dead in England.
He himself left the ‘waste land’ in which he had been born, the
child of a miner, to find what he was looking for in life elsewhere.
He was, he said, a ‘savage pilgrim’.
Now let’s consider the two 1922 masterpieces after which, truly,
literature would never be the same again. The Waste Land, as its
title proclaims, starts in a barren place, at a bleak time (the ‘cruel-
lest month’, Eliot calls it). The task the poem sets itself is explained
in an essay Eliot published a few months earlier, ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’. In it Eliot lays out the problem: how to mend a
broken culture. It wasn’t a case of simply sticking the leaves back
on the tree. Some new ‘modern’ living form had to be found, us-
ing the materials – damaged and fragmented as they now were –
bequeathed by the past (‘tradition’). How Eliot’s poem goes about
the task of ‘putting it all together again’ is illustrated in the section
called ‘The Burial of the Dead’, which regards London Bridge, in
winter, on a foggy, cold morning. ‘Unreal City’, says the observer,
adding: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ What is
described is an everyday scene: commuters streaming from the
railway terminus across the Thames to their offices in the City (the
financial hub of the world), to make the great machine of global
capitalism work. They are, most of them, ‘clerks’, in the bowler hat,
brolly and briefcase garb of their profession. A dark tide on a dark
morning. But the exclamation ‘Unreal City’ is, as the well-read
reader was intended to notice, an echo of Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Seven
Old Men’, in Les Fleurs du mal:
The workers in Eliot’s poem are the ‘living dead’. The theme is
intensified by the last line: ‘… death had undone so many’. It is a
direct quote from Dante’s amazed response to the crowds of dead
people he saw on his visit to Hell, in his poem Inferno: ‘I had not
thought death had undone so many’, says Dante, looking at the
186 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
the USA it was slightly earlier.) Even then, insultingly, only women
over thirty were allowed to vote, being considered too emotionally
unstable to handle the responsibility until that age. For the record,
Virginia Woolf was twenty-eight years old in 1910. Not yet ready
to put her ‘X’ on the ballot paper – or so the man’s world thought.
We cannot seriously discuss Woolf without bringing into the
picture two other elements. One, already mentioned, is the Blooms-
bury Group in the 1920s. The other is the great reformation in criti-
cal thinking about literature which came about with the emergence
of the ‘Women’s Movement’ in the mid-1960s, which took her up
as a figurehead writer. It did wonders for her sales. During her life-
time, Woolf ’s works sold only in the hundreds. Had she not owned
the firm that printed them (the Hogarth Press), she might well have
had difficulty getting even those hundreds published. Her work is
now everywhere available in hundreds of thousands of copies and
everywhere, in the English-speaking world, studied.
It goes well beyond sales figures. Feminist criticism has been
especially instrumental in altering the way we now read and value
Woolf ’s works. She herself wrote what became one of the founding
texts of literary feminism, A Room of One’s Own (1929). In this
treatise she argues that women need their own space, and money,
in order to create literature. They can’t reasonably do it on the
kitchen table, after they’ve cooked the evening meal for the man of
the house and the children have been safely put to bed. (This is how
the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, known as ‘Mrs Gaskell’,
wrote her fiction. No one nowadays, incidentally, calls our author
‘Mrs Woolf ’.) A Room of One’s Own is infused with flaming anger,
and a determination that the sheer unfairness of the inequalities
which have unbalanced literature for thousands of years must be
put right. The woman’s voice must no longer be silenced. This is
how Woolf puts it:
Who else can one think of who would write so elaborately about
waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross a street? It is, of course,
exactly what is happening in Clarissa’s head, and momentarily that
of her neighbour (there are ‘streams’ of consciousness). Note how
the narrative line jumps here and there, following the movements
of a mind in motion. Is Clarissa thinking in words, in images, or
something that blends the two? What is the interplay between
memory (things that happened twenty years ago) and the moment’s
sense impressions (the booming of Big Ben)?
Not much ever ‘happens’ in Woolf ’s narratives. That’s not the
point. Mrs Dalloway’s big event is nothing special – just another
party with dull politicians. The novel To the Lighthouse (1927), her
greatest work, centres on a family (clearly the Stephen family, in
the author’s girlhood) enjoying their summer holiday at the coast.
They plan a trip by boat to a lighthouse. It never quite takes place.
Her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), is, as the title suggests,
about waiting for something to start.
That final novel was written in the early months of the Second
World War. The next ‘act’ Woolf thought, could well be disaster for
her and her husband (they had no children). It was feared in spring
1941 that Germany, which had overrun France with no difficulty,
could soon invade and conquer Britain. The Woolfs – he was Jew-
ish, both were left-wing – were prominent on the Gestapo death
194 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
lists and both had prudently made suicide plans. Virginia, who had
recently suffered a crippling nervous breakdown and feared per-
manent madness, went to a river near where they were living in
Sussex, loaded her coat pockets with stones, and drowned herself
on 28 March 1941.
England would survive to produce, as a nation, more literature.
Its greatest woman novelist of the modernist period would not.
chapter 30
But Bradbury is 100 per cent right in his analysis of how the
most effective modern tyranny works. It doesn’t have to chop off
heads with a guillotine, or exterminate (‘purge’) whole classes of
people, as did Stalin and Hitler. It can work, just as well, by thought
control.
The title of this chapter – ‘Brave New Worlds ’ – echoes Miranda’s
exclamation when she sees Ferdinand and his young companions
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Miranda has been brought up on an
island where the only other human being is her aged father. When
she sees handsome young men, of noble character, like Ferdinand,
she jumps to the conclusion that in the outside world everyone is
handsome, young and noble. If only.
Aldous Huxley took Miranda’s ‘brave new world’ as the title of
his dystopia, which, although published in 1932, remains much
read today. The narrative is set 2,000 years hence. According to
the calendar of that time it is ‘AF632’: AF stands for ‘After Ford’
and, simultaneously, ‘After Freud’. What if human beings could be
mass-produced in the same way that Henry Ford mass-produced
his Model T automobiles – by assembly line? The psychiatrist
Sigmund Freud argued that most human neurosis originated in
emotional conflicts in the family – what if the nuclear family could
be replaced? Huxley came up with the idea of ‘ectogenesis’: babies
in bottles, produced in ‘hatcheries’ (factories), like Model T cars,
needing no parents other than a team of white-coated laboratory
technicians.
The result is a perfectly stable society, every member belong-
ing to their assigned upper or lower class and the whole popula-
tion kept artificially happy with a mass-distributed tranquilliser
(‘soma’). There is no politics. No war. No religion. No disease. No
hunger. No poverty. No unemployment (Huxley, remember, was
writing in the Great Depression of the 1930s). And, above all, no
books or literature.
Brave New World creates the vision of a utopia, but not one that
most of us would want to live in, comfortable as it is. Enter John
Savage (the name recalls Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’) who has been
brought up on an American Indian reservation with only a copy
b r av e n e w wo r l d s 199
there has been a ‘son of Ham’ in the White House and you would be
brave or stupid to dare to call Michelle Obama (or Hillary Clinton,
come to that) her husband’s ‘handmaid’. But parts of Atwood’s dys-
topia ring very true – the recurrent attempts of religious pressure
groups in America to control the reproductive rights of women,
for instance. Those rights were largely won by the feminist move-
ment which began to assert itself by Atwood’s own generation, in
the mid-1960s. The question raised by Atwood is as relevant today
as it was a quarter of a century ago, and for that reason her novel
still resonates.
The most influential dystopia of our time has been George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. So influential, in fact, it has added at
least one word to our language: ‘Orwellian’. The novel was conceived
in 1948 and, some would say, is as much about that period as the
then-distant year of the title. Britain had emerged from the Second
World War exhausted and impoverished. No end was in sight – it
would be austerity for ever.
But Orwell had bigger targets in view. The war had been fought
against ‘totalitarian’ states (Germany, Italy, Japan) and their all-
powerful dictators. The allies who emerged victorious were
‘democratic states’. Their major eastern partner, the USSR, however,
was as totalitarian a state as pre-war Germany itself. While the war
was going on, that did not matter. He would make an alliance with
the Devil, said Churchill, if Lucifer was anti-Hitler. But what about
afterwards?
Orwell prophesied that Soviet-style dictatorship and a global
balance of co-existing totalitarian superpowers was the shape of
things to come. In the novel, Britain is ‘Airstrip One’, a province
in the ‘Oceania’ superpower. It is under the total domination of
a Stalin-like dictator (even down to the famed moustache) – ‘Big
Brother’ – who may or may not exist. Orwell’s original title for the
novel was ‘The Last Man in Europe’. The last man is the novel’s
hero, Winston Smith, who is destined to be liquidated after he has
been ‘re-educated’. The state is all-powerful and always will be,
forever more.
b r av e n e w wo r l d s 201
Boxes of Tricks
complex narratives
Fiction can do many things other than entertain. It can, for ex-
ample, instruct. What many of us know about science might have
come from reading science fiction. Fiction can enlighten and
change minds – as Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed America’s thinking
about slavery. Fiction can popularise the central ideas of a politi-
cal party: what is now the central belief of British Conservatism
was worked out in a series of novels by Benjamin Disraeli in the
1840s. Fiction can, if targeted the right way, bring about urgent
social reform. In the early twentieth century Upton Sinclair’s
novel The Jungle (1906) about the horrors of the meat-processing
industry brought about legislation. In innumerable other ways,
fiction can do things that go well beyond keeping the reader
turning the pages before they catch their plane or turn off the
bedside lamp.
When Anthony Trollope was asked what good all his novels did
(he published close on fifty of them), the great Victorian novelist
replied that they instructed young ladies how to receive proposals
of marriage from the men who loved them. On the face of it, Trol-
b ox e s o f t r i c k s 203
he has used up most of his novel. And so it goes. He has fallen at the
first fence. He concludes, ruefully:
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time
twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the
middle of my third volume [it was originally published in twelve
volumes] – and no farther than to my first day’s life – ’tis demon-
strative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life
to write just now, than when I first set out.
In other words, Tristram is living his life 364 times faster than he
can record his life. He will never catch up.
The problem played with so wittily by Sterne (how to pack
everything necessary into the novel for the journey it’s about to
take when you have ten times more clothes than suitcases) has
never been solved. Nor does Sterne himself try to solve it. What
he does is to play entertaining games with the impossibilities, for
our amusement. Other novelists, of loftier artistic ambition, devise
schemes of selection, symbolism, compression, organisation and
representation to get round the problem of ‘how to get everything
in the suitcase’. It all adds up to the art of fiction – more properly,
the artifice of fiction. And that, of course, is the point Sterne is
making.
This chapter is called ‘Boxes of Tricks’. Let’s look at a selection of
the fictional toys that novelists have offered for our pleasure, and
to tease our reading brains. We can start with another basic prob-
lem. Narrative presumes a narrator, the ‘teller of the tale’. Who is it?
The author? Sometimes it seems to be, sometimes it clearly isn’t.
Sometimes we are left uncertain. Jane Eyre is not Charlotte Brontë,
for example, but there seem to be clear connections, biographically
and psychologically, between author and heroine.
But what about a modern novel like J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973)
in which the main character is called James Ballard, who happens
to be a man with a wholly sinister interest in car accidents and the
unpleasant things they do to human flesh? Is this a confession of
some sort? No. It’s the author playing a very sophisticated literary
b ox e s o f t r i c k s 205
game not ‘with’, but ‘against’ the reader. It’s rather like two friends
playing a competitive game of chess.
Ballard’s most famous work of fiction (thanks, largely, to Steven
Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film), is Empire of the Sun (1984). It’s
about a little boy who gets separated from his parents in Shanghai,
on the outbreak of World War Two, and finds himself in an intern-
ment camp whose horrors will form (deform?) his personality for
the rest of his life. The hero is called ‘James’, and James’s experiences
match exactly those of James Ballard as recorded in the author’s
autobiography. So is it fiction? Are we in a ‘James = James’ situa-
tion? Yes and no. Don’t even try to work it out, the novel implies.
Just take it in.
In his novel Lunar Park (2005), Bret Easton Ellis goes even fur-
ther, with a hero called Bret Easton Ellis (a very depraved fellow, as
it happens) who is pursued by the serial sex-killer of Bret Easton El-
lis’s earlier, very notorious novel, American Psycho. (Got it? Neither
did I.) Ellis elaborates the trickery by having Ellis (in the novel) be
married to a (fictional) film star called Jayne Dennis, for whom he
created a straight-faced, apparently real-life website which many
readers were taken in by. Martin Amis performs the same trick, just
as cunningly, in his novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984) in which
the hero (called John Self) makes friends with Martin Amis who
warns him, as a friend, that if Self carries on as he is, he’s going to
come to a very bad end. Probably suicide.
Several authors over the years have narrated their novels through
the eyes of a dog. Julian Barnes goes one better by having the first
chapter of his novel (so to call it) A History Of The World in 10½
Chapters (1989) narrated by a woodworm on Noah’s ark. It gets zanier.
Novelists are nowadays expert mechanics of the machine
they are working with. They love to take it apart and put it back
together again in many different ways. Sometimes they leave the
job of putting things back together to the reader. John Fowles, for
example, in his neo-Victorian but ‘new wave’ novel, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), offers the reader three different
endings. Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1980),
offers ten different openings to the narrative, testing how nimble
206 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
her life, she had, two centuries after her death, reached an audience
of tens of millions? Or would she see it as a violation and crossly
respond: ‘Leave my novels alone, Sirs!’ And what would the owner
of the time machine, H.G. Wells, think of the three films (and in-
numerable spin-offs) inspired by his 1890s short tale about time
travel? Would he say, ‘The future has arrived’, or ‘That is not what
I meant at all’?
‘Adaptation’ is, simply, what happens when literature is recycled
in a technology other than that in which it was originated (which
is usually print). The word often preferred nowadays is ‘versioning’.
One sees many such fruitful versionings in literary history. Looking
back at earlier chapters, we could argue that the Bible was ‘adapted’
by the horse-and-cart transport system in the street theatre of
the mystery plays. It drove Dickens crazy that there were a dozen
stage adaptations of Oliver Twist running in competition with his
printed novel, from whose producers he received not a penny. ‘We
are merely “adapting” you, Mr Dickens’, the theatrical pirates might
have responded. Grand opera adapted (‘versioned’) classic literary
texts for wholly non-literary consumption – for example, Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor (based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of
Lammermoor) and Verdi’s Otello (based on Shakespeare’s Othello).
One could go on. Adaptation as big business began at the turn
of the twentieth century, which saw the arrival of the most effective
adaptational machine of all: the moving picture. The ‘dream that
kicks’, as it’s been called. From the first, cinema swallowed down
and spat out vast amounts of literary source-material for the
millions of movie-goers it catered for. To take one example of
many, in 1897, Bram Stoker, the stage manager of the great actor
Henry Irving, decided to write a Gothic romance about blood-
sucking vampires and Transylvania. He had never visited the place
but he had read some interesting books about it. The vampire
was common enough in folklore and there had been some down-
market Gothic romances. Stoker’s novel Dracula did not do all that
well until it was adapted as a film, Nosferatu, in 1930. Since then
over a hundred Dracula films have been made (the actors Bela
Lugosi and Christopher Lee are the most famous to have played
210 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Thomas Bertram, going off to put things right in the family’s sugar
plantations in the West Indies. The 1999 film version of Austen’s
novel, directed by Patricia Rozema, highlighted the likelihood
that Mansfield Park’s prosperity came from slave labour and
exploitation. ‘Behind every great fortune’, said the French novelist
Balzac, ‘lies a crime’. Behind elegant, refined, quintessentially
‘English’ Mansfield Park lay a crime against humanity, it could be
argued, and Rozema’s film did just that. It was controversial thesis,
but again, the film complicated our response to the original novel,
and in an illuminating way. (What is that noise we hear? Miss
Austen spinning in her grave in Winchester Cathedral.)
Let’s look at another couple of Austen fantasias. In the 2008
TV series, Lost in Austen, the young heroine, Amanda Price, finds
herself transported back in time to the world of Pride and Prejudice
and gets tangled, romantically and hilariously, in the relationship
between Elizabeth and Darcy. It was done with a light touch
(which, one suspects, might have charmed Austen), confident that
everyone watching knows the novel.
Lost in Austen’s literary game-playing drew on the fanfic
vogue on the internet. The website ‘The Republic of Pemberley’,
for example, invites ‘Janeites’ (as lovers of Austen are called) to
come up with alternative and supplementary narratives for their
beloved novels (such as, what will the Darcy marriage be like?). But
underlying Lost in Austen is a more serious question: How relevant,
across the centuries, are the novels to the lives (specifically love-
lives) we nowadays live? The same question underlies that most far-
fetched, and utterly delightful, transposition of Emma Woodhouse
to the dilemmas of the Southern Californian ‘valley girl’ in the 1995
film, Clueless. What, this comedy asks, is ‘universal and timeless’ in
Austen?
A central question in the process of literary adaptation is whether
it is a service (as I think the above examples are) or a disservice
to the text in question. In 1939 the Samuel Goldwyn company
produced an immensely popular Hollywood film version of
Wuthering Heights. It starred, as Heathcliff, the greatest stage actor
of the time, Laurence Olivier, whose performance is regarded as a
212 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
classic. But the film cut out great swathes of the original narrative
and pasted a happy ending on to Brontë’s story. Unquestionably
the film inspired many to return to the original text to discover the
real thing but, for the greater number who had not read and never
would read the novel, was this not a cheapening of great literature?
A disservice? ‘Fidelity’, one concludes, is as tricky in art as it is in
our love-lives.
In the same year, 1939, MGM brought out, with huge fanfare,
the film Gone with the Wind (GWTW to its millions of fans). It’s
often voted the greatest film of all time. In commercial terms it was,
and still is, one of the biggest ever money-spinners. It was based on
a novel by Margaret Mitchell which had been published three years
earlier – the only novel this very private woman ever published.
There is a romantic story behind it. Mitchell was born in 1900 and
brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a family who had lived there
for generations. There were old citizens in the town who could
remember the Civil War, which the South had lost calamitously.
There were even more Atlantans who could remember the grim
aftermath of ‘Reconstruction’, as it was called.
Margaret was a young journalist. She broke her ankle at work, and
while laid up in bed began writing a ‘Civil War novel’. Her husband
brought her the necessary research materials, and she polished off
the work in a few months before she got back on her feet. Once
recovered, she left the manuscript in a cupboard for six years.
There it might have remained had Mitchell not been assigned to
show a publisher round her town in 1935. He was scouting for new
material and, when she mentioned her novel in passing, persuaded
her to let him see the dilapidated manuscript. Gone with the Wind
was accepted instantly and rushed out, with mammoth publicity. It
was a runaway bestseller under the slogan ‘One million Americans
can’t be wrong. Read Gone with the Wind!’ The novel stayed at the
top of the bestseller list for two years and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Mitchell sold the film rights to MGM for $50,000 and Gone with
the Wind was adapted, using the new process of Technicolor, by
David O. Selznick. It starred Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.
Even though it remains a very popular work of fiction, for every
o f f t h e pa g e 213
Absurd Existences
Kafka, Camus, Beckett and Pinter
It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep
snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness sur-
rounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the
large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that
leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the
seeming emptiness.
and the village. Fog, darkness and snow shroud the Castle. Is there
anything in front of K. at all but ‘emptiness’? We never know where
he has come from, nor why he has come. He will never reach the
Castle. He cannot even be sure it is there, but it is where he is going.
Kafka, who wrote in German, lived his life in utter literary
obscurity. He worked, for as long as his delicate health allowed,
in a state insurance office in his native city, Prague. (He was good
at the job, reportedly.) He had studied law but was, by profession,
a bureaucrat. He had tormented relations with women and his
family. He died before his genius could fully flower, and was for
decades after his death merely an obscure footnote in the history of
German-language literature.
It was not until the 1930s, well after his death, that translations
of his works (The Castle was the first) began to appear in English.
They inspired some writers, but mystified most readers. He was
resurrected as a major literary force after the Second World War,
not in Prague, London or New York, but Paris.
Kafka was installed as a patriarchal figure in the 1940s French
Existentialists’ godless universe. It was their philosophy that trig-
gered the ‘Kafka Revolution’ in the 1960s when everybody dis-
covered the world was either Orwellian or Kafkaesque or possibly
both. Kafka no longer mystified, he explained. His time had come.
Albert Camus’s opening proposition in his best-known essay,
‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, is that ‘There is but one truly serious philo-
sophical problem and that is suicide’. It echoes Kafka’s bleak apho-
rism: ‘A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish
to die.’ Why not, when life is pointless? Camus’s essay pictures the
human condition in the mythical figure Sisyphus, doomed for eter-
nity to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to fall down again. Pointless.
Only two responses are feasible in the face of man’s Sisyphean fate:
suicide or rebellion. Camus appended a long note – ‘Hope and the
Absurd in the Works of Franz Kafka’– to his Sisyphus essay, com-
memorating the writer to whose influence he was indebted.
Kafka’s influence is evident in Camus’s fictional masterpiece The
Outsider, written and published under Nazi occupation censorship.
The action is set in Algiers, nominally part of Metropolitan France.
absurd existences 217
of hell. American theatre, we may say, found its own way to speak
about ‘meaninglessness’.
There are innumerable things to wonder at in the literature of
the twentieth century. But not the least of its wonders is that an
unimportant clerk, writing in a European backwater, with no desire
to be read should, so long after his death, rise as one of the giants of
world literature. Franz Kafka would, of course, have dismissed our
marvelling attention, and despised us for it.
chapter 34
The less joyful among us might be inclined to think that the great-
est poetry springs not from high spirits, but low. Think, by con-
trast, of the figure of the poet in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Chap-
ter 28). Tiresias is an onlooker on life, doomed never to die but to
grow forever older. He has outlived sex (he is androgynous – both
male and female). He has seen everything, in its full dreariness,
and is doomed to see it over and over again. There is not much
t h e p o e t ry o f b r e a k d o w n 223
joy in Eliot’s image of the poet. The implication is: such is life. But
while most people (as Eliot put it in another poem) cannot bear
very much reality, it is the duty of poets to face it.
The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud thought that great art was born
of neurosis, not psychic ‘normality’ (if such a thing exists). It could
be compared to the irritant grit in the oyster’s shell which produces
the pearl. This belief has inspired many poets of the last half-
century to investigate, rather than try to escape, what Wordsworth
called ‘despondency and madness’, to drill down through the layers
of pearl to find the speck of creative grit at the centre.
These explorers of breakdown (‘crack-up’, as the novelist F.
Scott Fitzgerald termed it) consciously transgressed what Eliot
laid down as a golden rule for poetry: that ‘the more perfect the
artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates’. Impersonality was the fil-
ter through which poetry should be delivered, the author of The
Waste Land believed. W.B. Yeats prescribed something along the
same lines – namely that the poet must write from behind a mask
or ‘persona’ (an assumed personality). He must keep himself out
of it. Or become what in Latin is called an ‘alter ego’ – an ‘oth-
er self ’. The most basic mistake in poetry (particularly modern
poetry) is to assume the speaker is the poet. It is also the most
commonly-made mistake.
‘The man (or woman) who suffers’ – that is, the poet’s own self –
is wilfully the subject of the connoisseurs of breakdown who came
to prominence in the late twentieth century. This is poetry without
persona. Robert Lowell (1917–77) was an acknowledged pioneer in
this exciting, new and dangerous field. One of his very best poems is
‘Waking in the Blue’ (an aubade, or dawn poem). It records the begin-
ning of his (not some Tiresias figure’s, or a persona’s, but Robert Traill
Spence Lowell IV’s) day in a closed ward of a New England lunatic
asylum. The poem opens with a night nurse, a Boston University stu-
dent. He has been studying one of his textbooks, and is now doing his
patrol of the ward before clocking off. He has been reading, dozily, The
Meaning of Meaning by I.A. Richards – a critic who, like Eliot, encour-
aged absolute impersonality in poetry. It’s an ironic inclusion, because
224 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
The razors are locked, because none of the patients can be trusted
not to kill themselves with ones that are open.
Another of Lowell’s poems is called, simply, ‘Man and Wife’.
A dashingly handsome and wholly unstable man, Lowell went
through three marriages, all of which broke up messily. The poem
begins with the married couple lying in bed in the morning. The
rising sun (it’s another aubade) bathes them in garish red sunlight.
They are calm because they have taken Miltowns a heavy-duty
tranquilliser. This is not, we understand, a joyous couple who have
enjoyed a romantic night together, but a man and wife on the brink
of painful separation. Red, here, is the colour of anger, violence,
hate. The drug is the only thing keeping them together.
Lowell taught an inspirational creative writing class at
Boston University (where the ‘Waking in the Blue’ night attendant
is a student). One of his most distinguished pupils was the poet
Sylvia Plath (1932–63). Her poetry, particularly the extraordinary
group she wrote in the period after her traumatic separation from
her husband and just before her suicide, take Lowell’s ideas about
what he called ‘life studies’ to more of an extreme than even he
did. Typical is her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, written in her last months.
It opens:
the pain within. On the other side are those who believe that
action and engagement with the external world, and on what
Gunn called ‘fighting terms’, are the proper route. There is
searing, powerful poetry to be found on either side, but, it has
to be said, little joy among the connoisseurs of breakdown.
chapter 35
Colourful Cultures
Literature and Race
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed
by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and
summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
extract his ‘pound of flesh’ (a phrase which has entered into com-
mon usage), usually tilts the balance towards anti-Semitism. But
Shakespeare, we say by way of apology, was no more prejudiced
than most in his time and probably less so than many. True, but it
is still uneasy-making.
Dickens’s Fagin in Oliver Twist shows its author as panderiing
to gross racial stereotypes – no defence holds up. In later life he re-
gretted Fagin and made changes when the novel was reprinted. He
also made amends by introducing a saintly Jewish character into
one of his last novels (Riah, in Our Mutual Friend). However, Fagin
remains for many readers unforgiveable, even in soft-centred films
and musical adaptations such as Oliver!.
One of the angriest rows in the last few years has been over the
head of the dead poet, T.S. Eliot. It was spearheaded by a polemical
book by the critic (and lawyer) Anthony Julius who used as evidence
remarks made by Eliot in early lectures (later suppressed) and lines
in the poems to argue that the poet was anti-Semitic. The evidence
is, many objective commentators contend, inconclusive. Eliot has
been as fiercely defended as he has been denounced. But the dust
kicked up by the row has not yet settled and probably never will.
A useful starting point in thinking about all this is to acknowl-
edge that literature is one of the few places that race is openly dis-
cussed, and where the rawest issues it raises are made accessible for
debate and quarrel. It’s a place where society can work out its atti-
tudes. Most of us would see this as a good thing, whatever our per-
sonal opinions or sensitivities, and whatever feathers are ruffled.
Take, as an example of literature going where other forms of dis-
course fear to tread, Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain (2000).
The hero is a Classics professor, of advanced years and the highest
reputation, at a distinguished university. He is Jewish. He innocent-
ly ‘mis-speaks’ in class, offending two African American students,
and is instructed by a college tribunal to attend a course of ‘sensi-
tivity training’. He refuses, on principle, and resigns. It eventually
emerges that he is not Jewish after all, but African American. He
had hidden his real identity because that was the only way he could,
at that time, make a career in higher education. The alternative was
230 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
is a quotation from the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats). It first came out in
1958, in Britain. His later works were all first published in Britain or
the USA. In later life, Achebe’s main employment was in American
universities. Derek Walcott, the most distinguished of post-colonial
poets, was also employed in a prestigious American university for
most of his career. Can fiction – or poetry – so rooted, or authors so
salaried, be truly independent? Or are there still colonial shackles
clanking in the background?
The USA is where the most interesting literature centred on ra-
cial themes is happening. The classic text is Ralph Waldo Ellison’s
Invisible Man (1952). Unlike his fellow African Americans, James
Baldwin and Richard Wright, Ellison wrote not realism but alle-
gory; his fiction is playful in method, but deadly serious in content.
He initially planned a short novel and in 1947 published what re-
mains a core element of Invisible Man, ‘A Battle Royal’, in which,
for the entertainment of jeering white men, black men are stripped
naked, blindfolded, and made to fight each other in a boxing ring
for sham prizes. As eventually published, the novel hinges on an-
other conceit: ‘I am an invisible man … I am invisible, understand,
simply because people refuse to see me.’ The USA, the novel says,
has ‘solved’ its racial problem by wilful blindness.
Invisible Man is a jazz novel. Ellison loved the improvisational
freedom of the great African American art form – one of the few
freedoms his people could lay claim to. Louis Armstrong’s ‘(What
Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?’ haunts the novel like a theme
song. As its lyrics lament:
The jazz Ellison loved was ‘traditional’ New Orleans jazz (hence
Louis Armstrong). He disliked Swing and ‘modern’ jazz, think-
ing them ‘too white’. The jazz that most influences Morrison is the
ultra-improvisational, post-modernist Free-Form jazz that Ornette
Coleman pioneered in the 1960s.
In general terms one could argue that in Britain (in its literature
at least) there has been a kind of ‘blending’ – a dissolving of racial
difference. Toni Morrison has insisted on maintaining angry
difference. This anger is at its hottest in her early novel, Tar Baby
(1981), in which a character concludes: ‘White folks and black
folks should not sit down and eat together or do any of those
personal things in life.’ At a conference at that time, Morrison
herself roundly declared: ‘At no moment in my life have I ever
felt as though I was an American. At no moment.’ In later years,
particularly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993,
her comments about race have softened, but never to the point that
she regards herself as ‘American’ rather than ‘African American’.
An angry sense of racial separation burns in all her work.
The endeavour of most politicians and, indeed, most citizens in
the USA is to bring about a condition of enlightened colour-blind-
ness. To rise, that is, above the racial division which has caused
the country so much pain, and historically cost it so much blood.
American literature and its figurehead writer, Morrison, have de-
clined to buy into this. They have used, and still use, the division to
explore black identity creatively. To dive into it, that is, rather than
float above and forget it.
We find a distinct African American presence nowadays in such
literary enclaves as ‘private eye’ detective fiction. The career of
Walter Mosley’s black hero, Easy Rawlins, is chronicled in a series of
novels, beginning with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), which, in their
background, chronicle the history of race relations in Los Angeles.
Chester Himes did the same for New York, with his Harlem Cycle
series of the 1950s and 1960s (which he began writing in prison,
234 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f l i t e r at u r e
Magical Realisms
Borges, Grass, Rushdie and Márquez
ship he was persecuted and ended his life in exile. Allegory – not
saying exactly what he meant – was his preferred literary mode.
It is, if not magic realism, as close as makes no difference. One of
Saramago’s finest works, The Cave (2000), fantasises an unnamed
state dominated by a vast central building. It is a futuristic image
of mature capitalism. In the basement of this building is the cave
described by Plato, emblematic of the human condition in which
chained spectators are destined to see nothing but shadows of the
real world projected on the wall. Those unreliable, flickering im-
ages are all we have. And in that cave, for Saramago, is where the
novelist must work.
As we saw earlier, the most powerful energies within magic
realism have been generated by countries in Central and South
America. Alongside Borges at the head of this group is Gabriel
García Márquez and a novel which, alongside Midnight’s Children, is
regarded as the undisputed masterpiece of the genre: One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967). It has a bafflingly shifting narrative, which
moves discontinuously through historical time and space.
The novel is set in an imaginary small Colombian town called
Macondo and is as much about Márquez’s native country as
Midnight’s Children is about India, The Tin Drum is about Germany,
or The Cave is about Portugal. Macondo contains all Colombia
within itself: it is a ‘city of mirrors’. In a flickering series of scenes,
we see flashes of the key moments in the country’s history: civil
wars, political conflict, the arrival of railways and industrialisation,
the oppressive relationship with the USA. Everything is crystallised
into a single glittering literary object. The novel is as politically
engaged as literature can be, yet remains a supreme artifice.
Magic realism flared up, brilliantly, for a few decades at the turn
of the century. It would seem now to have had its day, but history
will record it as one of literature’s great days.
chapter 37
Republic of Letters
Literature Without Borders
the words mean. Literature can’t. Take away the words and there’s
nothing there. Literature has traditionally been stopped at the
border, where language changes. Only a tiny quantity of foreign
literature ever makes it across the translation barrier.
Translation (the word literally means ‘carrying across’) is
cumbersome and often inefficient. Ask who are the most important
writers of the twentieth century and Kafka’s name will certainly
come up. But the first English translation of a Kafka novel (an
incomplete text) was not available until ten years after his death.
Kafka’s major works had to wait even longer, and some important
languages of the world are still awaiting translations. It’s not merely
a time-lag. However skilful the translator, and despite the fact that
translations can greatly increase an author’s income and renown,
translation is inherently flawed. Anthony Burgess – both a writer
and a linguist – wrote that ‘Translation is not a matter of words
only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture’. Often
attributed to the American poet Robert Frost is the wise comment,
‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’.
It matters less, of course, for popular literature, where the finer
points of translation are less important for the reader, who merely
wants to turn the pages and enjoy. ‘Scandi-noir’, as it’s called – novels
that have followed in the wake of Stieg Larsson’s 2005 international
bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – can survive leaden
translation, just as the hugely popular Scandinavian TV thrillers
can survive their clunky subtitles. Where simple page-turners are
involved, fine prose is irrelevant. Functional prose will do very well.
Sadly, in one respect translation is an ever-decreasing problem
for world literature. Linguists inform us that a language ‘dies’ every
two weeks; their little literatures of the past, and more poignantly
the future, die with them. In the modern era, English has followed
world power and is now the ‘world language’ – as dominant as
Latin was 2,000 years ago. The fact that the nineteenth century
was ‘Britain’s century’, and the twentieth was ‘America’s century’,
has meant dominance by two world powers separated, as George
Bernard Shaw put it, ‘by a common language’. The twenty-first
century may well change that.
republic of letters 247
Guilty Pleasures
Bestsellers and Potboilers
on the table. This can work in mysterious ways. Ever since T.S. Eliot
was instrumental in founding the firm Faber & Faber in 1929, it
has been the most respected publisher of poetry in the English-
speaking world. To have its imprint on your volume is, for a poet,
the seal of highest achievement. In recent decades the finances of
Faber have been helped to stay robustly healthy by – what? Sales of
The Waste Land, or the works of Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin? No.
Most prosperously, it is said, by subsidiary rights revenue from Cats,
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running musical stage adaptation of
Eliot’s extended joke in verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. No
one would call anything that T.S. Eliot put into print ‘low’ (or, perish
the thought, ‘crud’). But his Practical Cats is not what has made him,
by general agreement, the most important poet of his century.
If we are being open-minded it makes more sense to call what
isn’t ‘high’ (or ‘classic’, ‘canonical’ or ‘quality’) literature ‘popular’
rather than ‘crud’. ‘Popular’ implies ‘of the people’ – that is, not of
institutions like the Church, the universities or the government.
The fifteenth-century mystery plays (Chapter 6) were popular;
the Bible, in Latin at that time, was institutional. We still have
institutionally-prescribed literature, forcibly studied at school,
college and university.
The novel is the popular genre par excellence. When it hits the
mark it has always stimulated ‘uncritical’ consumption. We can
see this from the genre’s earliest days. When Samuel Richardson
published Pamela (1740), his chronicle of a pretty maid-servant
persecuted by her lecherous employer, it triggered a ‘mania’ –
particularly among women readers of the time. When Sir Walter
Scott published one of his novels, there are accounts of purchasers
besieging bookshops and tearing the brown paper off the volume
to start reading the story in the street. We have seen any number of
such ‘reader stampedes’ all the way to the publication of the seven
volumes of the Harry Potter series – each of which became a kind
of national holiday as purchasers, dressed as wizards, queued up all
night outside bookshops. They were not doing so because the book
had been well reviewed in that week’s Times Literary Supplement or
was on the A-level syllabus.
g u i lt y p l e a s u r e s 251
Who’s Best?
Prizes, Festivals and Reading Groups
There have always been prizes for the highest literary achievement,
from the ancient world’s laurel-leaf crown to the ‘biggest ever’
advances which (lucky) modern authors receive. ‘Laureateships’
are prizes of a kind. Tennyson’s forty-two-year tenure of the post
of British poet laureate (Chapter 22) confirmed his supremacy in
the world of poetry, as did the peerage, and the state funeral (in all
but name), which a grateful Queen and nation awarded him on his
death in 1892.
But systematically organised literary prizes – delivering a jury’s
verdict that this or that is the best novel, poetry collection or play,
or recognising a lifetime’s literary achievement – is very much a
twentieth-century phenomenon, and of our time. The first such
prize to be founded in France, the Goncourt, was awarded in 1903,
and the UK and USA followed suit in 1919 and 1921 respectively.
Since then, literary prize-giving has grown explosively. It has
become like the proverbial Christmas party gift, cynics say: every-
one must have one. There are now many hundreds of literary prizes
that authors can compete directly for – or be entered for, usually
who’s best? 255
ing on the Booker panel, the long list, the short list, all culminate
in a night of banqueting, TV coverage, suspense and, usually, fierce
debate. A lot of novels, in the process, are bought and consumed. Is
literature’s contemporary prize-culture a good thing? Most would
say it is: if only that it gets literature read. But we should see it as
part of what is a changed, and fast-changing, literature scene.
Another twentieth-century novelty is the ever-expanding
number of book and literary festivals which began in the period
after the Second World War. These events, large and small, bring
together congregations of book lovers, and in their genteel way they
have become the pop concerts of literature. En masse, these fans
make their preferences felt to authors, who meet their readers face
to face, and to publishers, who pay very close attention to what is
selling in the now traditional ‘book tent’. Call it a meeting of minds.
Even more recent is the explosive growth of local reading groups,
in which like-minded book lovers get together to discuss a series of
books they have chosen for themselves. There is nothing overtly
educational or self-improving about these groups. There are no
fees, no regulations – just a sharing of critical views on literature
which is thought to be worth a read, and some lively discussion.
Again, minds meet – always a good thing where literature is con-
cerned.
Reading groups have changed the way we talk about literature and
have opened up new lines of communication between producers
and consumers. Many publishers nowadays package their fiction
and poetry for reading groups, with explanatory author interviews
and questionnaires. They are democratic in spirit. There is no top-
down instruction: it’s more bottom-up, and selections are more
likely to be titles chosen from ‘Oprah’s picks’ than the book that
has got appreciative reviews in the New York Review of Books, the
London Review of Books or Le Monde. Reading groups help to keep
reading alive and pleasurable. And without that, literature itself
would die.
chapter 40
Beethoven, Ludwig van 222 Byron, Lord 96, 100, 134, 143
Behn, Aphra 75, 79–81, 147
Bellamy, Edward 196 Calvino, Italo 205–6
Bellow, Saul 17–18 Cameron, James 10
Beloved 230 Camus, Albert 163, 216–17
Beowulf 14–16, 18–19, 27, 128, 265 Cancer Ward 164
Berger, John 258 Candide 162
Berkeley, Bishop 91 canon 47, 93, 256, 262
Berryman, John 147 The Canterbury Tales 27–32, 70,
Between the Acts 193–4 72
Beyoncé 253 The Caretaker 218
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure 208 Carroll, Lewis 4, 130–1
Birth of a Nation (film) 18 Carter, Angela 237
Blake, William 65, 100 The Castle 215–16
Bleak House 116, 118–19 The Catcher in the Rye 153
Boccaccio, Giovanni 29, 75–7 Cats (musical) 250
Boethius 28–9, 32 The Cave 240
Booker Prize 231, 237, 249, 255, Caxton, William 71–2, 74
258–9 censorship 32, 57, 73, 79, 132, 161–7,
Borges, Jorge Luis 236–8 216, 239
Boswell, James 89, 91 Cervantes, Miguel de 75, 77–8, 161
Bowie, David 111 Chandler, Raymond 153
Bradbury, Ray 197–8, 201 La Chanson de Roland 18
Bradstreet, Anne 147–8 ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
Branagh, Kenneth 263 145, 177
Brave New World 198–9, 245, 264 Charles I (King) 65, 79
Brawne, Fanny 94–5 Charles II (King) 64, 79–80
‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor)
180–1 50
Brecht, Bertolt 165 Chatterton, Thomas 222
The Bride of Lammermoor 209 Chaucer, Geoffrey 26–32, 62, 70–2,
Bridges, Robert 146, 187 76, 154–5
Bright Star (film) 94 Chekhov, Anton 164
‘Bright Star’ (poem) 94 The Cherry Orchard 164
Brod, Max 214 Christie, Agatha 111
Brontë, Anne 121–7 A Christmas Carol 119
Brontë, Branwell 121–7 ‘Church Going’ 225
Brontë, Charlotte 101–2, 107, 109, Churchill, Winston 180, 200
121–7, 130, 204 City of Glass 206
Brontë, Emily 121–7, 190, 211–12 Clare, John 141
Brontë, Patrick 121–7 Clarissa 109
Brooke, Rupert 179–80, 190 Clinton, Hillary 200
The Brothers Karamazov 164 Clueless (film) 211
Brown, Dan 249, 252 Coleman, Ornette 233
Bunyan, John 75, 78–9, 161 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34,
Burgess, Anthony 246 99–100, 222
Burns, Robert 97, 222 Collins, Wilkie 116
Byatt, A.S. 110, 235 Conan the Barbarian 195–6
index 269
James I (King) 44, 47–53 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
James, E.L. 249 3–5
James, Henry 81, 107, 151, 166 Little Dorrit 116–17
Jane Eyre 102, 104, 123–6, 130, 204 Lives of the Most Eminent English
Jazz 232–3 Poets 91–3
Johnson, B.S. 207 Lloyd, David 264
Johnson, Samuel 46, 57, 88–93, Long Day’s Journey into Night
154–5, 249 219–20
Jonson, Ben 41, 256 Look Back in Anger 219
Joyce, James 163, 183–7 Looking Backward 196
Jude the Obscure 130, 166 Lord of the Flies 130, 173
Julius, Anthony 229 The Lord of the Rings 130–1, 264
Julius Caesar 41, 44, 175 Lost in Austen (TV series) 211
The Jungle 202 Lowell, Robert 151, 223–4
Lucas, George 18
Kafka, Franz 214–20, 246 Lucia di Lammermoor (opera) 209
Keats, John 11, 94–5, 99–100, 144, Lugosi, Bela 209
178 Lunar Park 205
Kermode, Frank 8 Luther, Martin 49–50
Keynes, John Maynard 190–1 Lyrical Ballads 98, 253
Khomeini, Ayatollah 239
Kim 170 Macbeth 44–6
King, Stephen 251 Madame Bovary 162–3, 166
The King James Bible 47–53 The Magic Toyshop 237
King Lear 23, 45–6, 154 Mahābhārata 18
Kipling, Rudyard 169–70, 173 Malamud, Bernard 151
Kreugar, Ivar 257 ‘Man and Wife’ 224
‘Kubla Khan’ 99 Man Booker Prize 258–9
‘Manhattan Streets I Saunter’d,
Labyrinths 237 Pondering’ 139
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 164, 167 Mann, Thomas 239
‘Lady Lazarus’ 224–5 Mansfield Park 104–5, 210–11
Lane, Allen 249 Mantel, Hilary 249, 263
languages 246–7 Marconi, Guglielmo 245
Larkin, Philip 225–6, 247, 250 ‘Mariana’ 144
Larsson, Stieg 246 Marlowe, Christopher 17, 42
The Last of the Mohicans 150, 210 Márquez, Gabriel García 236
Later Poems (Yeats) 183 Martin Chuzzlewit 118, 150
Lawrence, D.H. 79, 107, 130, 163, Mary I (Queen) 41, 51
166–7, 184–5, 235 Maurice 166–7
Laxness, Halldór 241–2 McEwan, Ian 235
The Lay of the Last Minstrel 142 McKellen, Ian 34
Leigh, Vivien 212 McLuhan, Marshall 263
Leopold II (King) 171 Measure for Measure 45
Lewis, C.S. 4 Meditation XVII (Donne) 55–6
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Melville, Herman 18, 149
Shandy, Gentleman 203–4 The Merchant of Venice 44, 228–9
Lincoln, Abraham (President) 150, 230 ‘The Metamorphosis’ 214–15
272 index
The Pilgrim’s Progress 75, 78–9, 161 Roth, Philip 151, 229–30
Pinter, Harold 217–18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 128
Pirandello, Luigi 218 Rowling, J.K. 132–3, 210, 244, 250
Plath, Sylvia 151, 224–5 Rushdie, Salman 161, 173, 231, 236–9
Plato 5, 161, 196, 240 Sackville-West, Vita 191–2
Poe, Edgar Allan 150, 255 Salinger, J.D. 153
Poetics 22–5, 33 Saramago, José 239–40
Porter, Cole 253 Sartre, Jean-Paul 163, 217, 236
Porter, Katherine Anne 151 Sassoon, Siegfried 176–8
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Schiller, Johann 222, 239
Man 184 Scott, Paul 173
post-modernism 151, 203, 206, 233 Scott, Walter 97, 100, 143, 150, 209,
Pound, Ezra 141, 151, 187 250, 255
The Prelude 128–9, 142 Second Shepherds’ Play 36–8
Pride and Prejudice 102, 128, 195, The Secret Agent 257
208–9 Selznick, David O. 212
Prix Goncourt 254, 257–8 Sense and Sensibility 103–4
Proust, Marcel 139–40 Seuss, Dr 132
Pullman, Philip 131 Sexton, Anne 226
Pratchett, Terry 131 Shakespeare, Hamnet 42, 45
Pulitzer Prize 212, 255 Shakespeare, William 23, 36, 40–6,
Pye, Henry 143 47, 53, 62, 79, 154–5, 165, 175,
Pynchon, Thomas 206–7 244, 248, 256
The Shape of Things to Come 196
Rabelais, François 75–7 Shaw, George Bernard 147, 166, 182
The Rainbow 166 Shelley, Percy 95, 99
The Raj Quartet 173 Showalter, Elaine 109
Raleigh, Sir Walter 62 Shriver, Lionel 130
Rasselas 90 Sidney, Sir Philip 96
realism 84, 195, 232, 235, 239 Silas Marner 78
Remarque, Erich Maria 176 Sinclair, Upton 202
Remembrance of Things Past 139–40 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 247
The Republic 196 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
‘Resolution and Independence’ 9, 26–7
221–2, 225 Six Characters in Search of an Author
Richard II 45 218
Richard III 33–4, 41, 44 Smith, Zadie 231
Richards, I.A. 223 ‘The Soldier’ 179–80
Richardson, Samuel 82, 109, 250 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 161, 164,
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere 257
98 Songs and Sonnets (Donne) 56–8
Robinson Crusoe 1, 2, 80, 82–7 Songs of Innocence and Experience
Romanticism 95–6, 98, 99–100, 100
105, 128, 144 Sons and Lovers 130
A Room of One’s Own 109–10, 189 Sophocles 20–5
Rosenberg, Isaac 180–1 Southey, Robert 99, 130, 143
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Spender, Stephen 226
Dead 218 Spenser, Edmund 61–3
274 index