by Clive James
Then again, the current issue of the seriously intellectual Australian magazine Quadrant has just carried a disturbing article by a University of Western Australia mathematics teacher recounting how some of his pupils have emerged from the high-school system unscathed by any requirement to do simple mental arithmetic. Equipped with electronic calculators since the cradle, they enter university, and even penetrate as far as the second year of a mathematical subject, unable to multiply 8 by 4 without mechanical assistance. Asked to multiply 4 by 8, they complain about having been set two problems instead of one. Most of these unwitting victims of a permissive non-education will graduate, because there is no machinery by which they can fail, and the machinery which helps them to do their set tasks in arithmetic, the machine that does it all for them, will always be on hand.
Presumably when they move on to become air-traffic controllers or risk-analysts at the nuclear power plant they will still always have calculators in their pockets. But it’s daunting to think of the calculator getting stuck in an air-traffic controller’s pocket when he suddenly needs to figure out roughly how long it will take one blip on the radar screen to coincide with another. One of the many advantages of learning your tables by rote and being able to do mental arithmetic is that you know what order of answer you are after for any given question. If you buy eight dinner plates at four pounds each, the total outlay will be something like thirty pounds, but nothing like three pounds or three hundred pounds, and if the salesperson, staring dimly at the figure beeping up on her till, says the price is thirty-two thousand pounds, you’ll know that you should think twice – that’s two times once – before handing over your credit card.
But without the benefit conferred by a headful of thoroughly memorized relationships, the air-traffic controller will be lost, and eventually some of his pilots will get lost, not to mention their passengers. And if the pressure in the condenser pipe is rising by 4 psi every eight minutes and there are only 32 psi of tolerance left before structural failure, the man at the desk had better realize that he hasn’t got all day before he scrambles the reactor.
These are fantasy scenarios on my part, but Mike Alder, the sardonic mathematics teacher who wrote the article, thinks that the whole of modern society might soon come flickering and fizzing to a halt because the people who make and work the miracle machines can’t add up in their heads. He sounds at least as convincing a doomsayer as those who hold that we’ll end up under twenty feet of water dotted with the corpses of roasted polar bears.
Speaking of which, it almost happened to me on a recent rainy weekend. I was away from my office for most of it. On the Monday I came back to London from Wales in the back of a car. I’m used to being in the back because I don’t drive on the public roads owing to a nervous condition which other drivers contract when they see me coming. But the upside is that I can work. Reading and writing are what I do for a living, and while travelling as a passenger I can do both. I had an article to finish that day for a magazine in Chicago. Drafting the piece in my notebook with a biro, I got most of it done during the trip, which took about three and a half hours. As usual I spent almost no time reflecting that the same journey would have taken Jane Austen more than a week, and that covering the same distance was even slower before the invention of the horse. I took the speed for granted, and if we had been slowed up for an hour by the rain I would have thought that abnormal.
We weren’t. I got to my desk safely by early evening, and I sat down at my computer to begin the task of transforming the draft in my notebook into a document, which I could do the final work on before sending it off by e-mail to Chicago, where it would arrive at the speed of light before close of business in the mid-West. I pressed the button that lights up the screen and nothing happened. Strange, I thought. All the diodes are glowing correctly and I can even hear the thing hum. I poked around among the cables and sockets, testing with my fingertips to make sure everything was a tight fit. It was only then that I noticed the whole thing was wet. I looked up and saw that the rim of one of the recessed light fittings in the ceiling was stained with water. At this point a director of a frat-house comedy would have staged the scene differently. I would have found out that I had my hands in a lake of electricity when I lit up all over with crackling blue cobwebs and was blown backwards into the closet where my roommate was hiding with my naked girlfriend. What happened instead was a mental revelation, much harder to film. I realized that the technology was miles ahead of me. I barely knew how to switch the stricken monster off, and had no idea at all of how to fix it. I thought briefly of aiming my microwave oven at it.
During the rest of that week, before I left for a business visit to Australia, I slowly grasped that I was more helpless than I had ever thought. The hard-drive eventually got saved by my young friend Idris. His principal instrument of salvation was a hairdryer, which personally I thought only one step up from my microwave notion, but Idris knows how a computer works. Since I don’t really know how a hairdryer works, I needed this harsh reminder of just how irreversible the road has become. As the proprietor of a state-of-the-art, multimedia, money-losing website I’m in awe of the new technology, but I’m also in almost complete ignorance of it.
For day after nail-biting day I couldn’t send or receive e-mails. Finally I had to fly to Sydney with no clear idea of whom I was supposed to meet at the other end, because all my schedules were attached to e-mails I couldn’t read. Getting to Australia and back in roughly the time it took Magellan to leave harbour, I regained my office to find a new flood ready to hit my computer – all the e-mails that had piled up in cyberspace over the past fortnight. There were more than a hundred and fifty of them, practically all decorated with that little red exclamation mark that looks like the droppings of an angry sparrow.
Yes, I could have accessed them in my Sydney hotel, but I didn’t know how. I don’t know how to do anything the machine does and there’s a limit to how far I can go back down the one-way path. I can still write an article by hand, but do I really want to copy it onto a typewriter, and then mail the typescript, and then wait? I can’t go back to all that, any more than the young mathematicians can go back to doing arithmetic in their heads, or the young car-thieves can go back to treading on the clutch pedal before shifting the gear-stick, and then – this is the hard part, as I remember – letting the clutch pedal come up slowly while they steadily tread on the accelerator. All too primitive. So we let the machines do it, and more and more they make us feel powerful enough to forget how helpless we really are. Let’s call that a plus.
Postscript
How young do you have to be before you feel that the latest model of the iPhone is not beyond you? You are probably already too old at the age of ten. Having received a new iPhone just before I was due to leave for New York, I looked forward to conducting all my Internet business on it while I was away. Then my secretary told me what it would cost to do so. After I shrieked at her to switch off those functions immediately, she told me that when I was abroad some of the functions, unless I knew exactly how to disable them, would go on racking up costs even if I didn’t use them. Finally I plugged the new phone into its charger – is that the right terminology? – and left it sitting there on the kitchen counter. When I got back from my trip I still left it there. Six months later it is still there. By now it has grown obsolete, after a career of never having been used. Probably I have always had the wrong temperament for advanced technology and should never have fooled with computers at all. Some of the brightest people in my generation won’t touch the things. Neither Les Murray nor Tom Stoppard composes on a computer or can even be contacted through one. It doesn’t seem to slow them down, but I suppose it would be the sheer speed of getting the donkeywork done that I would miss most if I had to go back to carbon paper and stamps.
Nevertheless, though I couldn’t do without the Internet, there are whole sections of it that I avoid from instinct. There is something wrong with Facebook and Twitter. People who t
hink they are that interesting are usually to be avoided, unless they are Stephen Fry. And anyway, my own best sentences and phrases come after long consideration: the last thing I want to do is send out a text version of something I just thought of. Occasionally, when on stage, I think of something nifty on the spur of the moment, and the audience might even seem to enjoy it, but I would still like to keep it for a while before committing it to print. And print, where these machines are concerned, means for ever: unless you can arrange an incandescent death for your hard-drive in an atomic furnace, not even the ‘delete’ button will bury anything you write beyond retrieval. The computer’s insistence on committing the ephemeral to eternity is what makes it an instrument of the devil. And now the same applies to the telephone. The instinct of self-preservation should be enough to make us steer clear of every new breakthrough until it has been proved innocuous. Until then, wiser to assume that a private phone call plugs straight through to a universal broadcasting system and an ineradicable archive. Wiser, indeed, not to say anything to anyone by any means, and live as the Romans did under Tiberius.
HARRY POTTER ENVY
Dates of show: 27 and 29 July 2007
If asked whether I suffer from the condition commonly known as J. K. Rowling Envy, I can’t say no. Like any other writer who is not J. K. Rowling, I can’t say no because my teeth are so tightly gritted in a smile of good sportsmanship that tiny fragments of enamel are given off into the atmosphere, and if I opened my mouth any further a long howl of anguish would be released, tapering into a convulsive whimper, punctuated with deliriously mumbled statistics: 325 million copies; 65 languages; a thousand million dollars; a million billion roubles. Gazillion fantabulon megayen . . .
Yet mine is only a mild expression of J. K. Rowling Envy. Some clinical psychologists insist on referring to J. K. Rowling Envy under its full technical name of invidia rolinosis potteritis but those are the psychologists who get the job of trying to restore sanity to writers who have plunged into a canal with a word processor to weigh them down or who have turned up gibbering at a Harry Potter midnight book launch and thrown themselves on a burning pyre of their own books screaming, ‘What about me?’
As we go to air, the latest, and avowedly the last, of such Harry Potter book-launch events is allegedly retreating into the past. This contention that the Harry Potter continuous book-launch era is now over for ever is one we might well view with scepticism, but let’s suppose for the moment that it’s true, and return to the question of whether a writer should be without J. K. Rowling envy. It seems to me an impossible requirement. As I’ve stated several times in earlier broadcasts, I set out to be positive in this series, but there is such a thing as facing inconvenient truths, and I think we should admit that there is no point in presuming to condemn an envy so deep-seated. The requirement is to control it, not to eliminate it. For any writer of almost any type, there is no prospect of eliminating it: it burns too deep, like a fire in the hold.
You will notice that I say almost any type, so as to allow room for the occasional altruist author who is not out to make a hit. Take Dr Roger Bannister, the man who ran the first four-minute mile. I think of him most mornings when I’m out doing my exercise walk which culminates in a sprint phase of a forty-minute mile. I can remember watching the newsreel when he ran the first four-minute mile and thinking, well, the old country might not have an empire any more but it isn’t finished yet.
But in the long run, if that’s the phrase I’m looking for, it was Bannister’s brain that mattered. Later on he co-authored the standard medical textbook on neurology, which has gone on selling all his life and will probably remain on the medical school curriculum far into the future. The book has sold thousands of copies over the years but he wouldn’t want it to be a bestseller, because for that to happen there would have to be a superfluous supply of neurologists.
In other words, he did it for love. He is not in the business of maximizing his sales, and the same could be said of all other authors who work to satisfy the requirements of a limited market. But most writers of books are out after the biggest share that they can get of an unlimited market, and this is where J. K. Rowling Envy comes in. She’s actually done what every writer dreams of. What every writer dreams of is of everybody reading the book. I speak approximately, of course. I personally don’t read Harry Potter books because I was inoculated, very early in life, against all forms of magic and elfin whimsy, even when convincingly disguised as literature.
I still haven’t forgiven C. S. Lewis for going on all those long walks with J. R. R. Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been even better if C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia. But there is one grown-up member of my family who would regard this opinion as hopelessly restrictive. Having read everything including Tolstoy and Jane Austen, she still has time for elves and wizards, and reads all the Harry Potter books as if they had been designed for adults as well as children.
Perhaps they have. Certainly the total readership for the Potter sequence far exceeds the number of literate young people on earth. JK doesn’t need me reading her too. She’s got the planet, and all its treasure. In getting that, she is also getting the other thing that any writer dreams of. She is getting a torrential stream of income, from royalties beyond the dreams of royalty. Not even the Sultan of Brunei actually makes money on the scale of JK. He accumulates it somehow, but he doesn’t make it. And recently, when his ex-wife went crazy with the credit card and squandered a couple of million quid, he noticed. Judging from his track record, he should never have noticed a little thing like that. This year JK gave at least ten times that much to charity, and we presume it barely dented the bank.
This is hard to take for most writers because most writers don’t even make a living. Although the occasional book of mine does reasonably well – about, say 0.003 on the Rowling scale – I’m always careful not to tell a journalist how many copies it has sold, because the journalist invariably looks unimpressed. Journalists are too used to hearing that Jeffrey Archer or John Grisham sold a million of their latest book in a week. But the average book doesn’t sell even a thousand copies in a year. The average book is lucky to sell a hundred in its lifetime. The average book doesn’t even get published.
Until recent times the average writer could always tell himself that he was suffering for his art and that the blockbuster bestselling author was merely cashing in on a formula. The writer of the serious, sensitive novel that came out, rolled over and sank could always say that John Archer and Jeffrey Grisham were peddling a gimmick, or that the Bond franchise will sell shed-loads anyway, no matter who writes the actual words.
But JK blew that consolation away. She was so obviously working from creative inspiration, and her global audience so obviously loves the stuff. The profile journalists who write about JK’s houses all over the world would dearly like just one of those houses for themselves, but the days are gone when they could delude themselves that a thick volume of chick-lit written a paragraph at a time before breakfast would get them off the piece-work treadmill.
Now they know that they have to come up with something inspired. Inspiration being what they have always been short of, they succumb to such an intensity of J. K. Rowling Envy that they buy a copy of one of her designer evening gowns and stage an imaginary tête-à-tête dinner at home with George Clooney. If the journalist is male, this is likely to cause trouble at work.
If would-be writers aren’t capable of writing a book for its own sake, they shouldn’t be writing at all. I speak as one who would have found it hard to make ends meet as a writer if I had not been wearing another hat in show-business. I can’t honestly whinge about having pushed my pen in vain but if I had done no
thing else except write books I would be raking the leaves on one of JK’s front lawns by now, and glad of the gig. And I’m one of the lucky ones. The thing to grasp is that if you’re getting published at all, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re expressing yourself, and the bookselling business is still willing to take a chance on someone like you. The publishers are still looking for a hit, and one of the reasons they are doing so is JK. No matter what you hear about the depredations of mass merchandizing and the destructive effect of supermarket discounts, her success gives a lease of life to a whole industry.
It also gives a lease of life to the allegedly threatened activity of reading – reading worldwide, in all languages, but especially in English. Which puts Britain back in the middle of the action. It’s another four-minute mile, a flying of the flag for a post-imperial empire in which personal initiative counts for more than social position, a glorious act of individuality. JK might even by a key player in a whole new historical development. What if, by aid of the globalized entertainment industry, the world’s evil could turn into a fictional spectacle in which real people no longer form the cast and almost everything bad that happens happens in a book or on a screen? Would that be trivialization, or the opposite? Either way, it really would be magic, but as countless Harry Potter fans will tell you, magic has already happened seven times. Whether they can live without Harry Potter we will have to find out. Personally I miss Biggles.
Postscript
There must be something to it. Even now that they are adults, my two daughters, who read everything of quality and are not to be fooled by mere fashion, will actually fight to be first with the new Harry Potter book. Perhaps there is more to magic than the spells. Among the best-read men I know, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik both think I must be in the grip of madness when I refuse to rave about Tolkien. They might be right. There is such a thing as a blind spot. I know that I have a blind spot about food, in which I can’t get much interested beyond its function in sustaining life. Yet I have friends who read, and write, books about it. Some of those who write books about it get quite rich, wherein lies the real topic of the above broadcast. In pronouncing the importance of controlling one’s envy for those who sell books in huge numbers, I should have been more clear that everything, in the publishing world, depends on such people. A wise writer in any genre, if he sells merely by the thousand, would do well to spend the late part of each evening on his knees and praying to heaven that his publisher will discover a new Dan Brown.