by Rick Gekoski
‘Want to know who I am? I’m the guy who had a chance to save this place, only I blew it.’
‘Save what?’
‘ . . . Everything. Everything that counts for anything.’
An investigative journalist by training, Hiaasen has worked since 1985 for The Miami Herald, and writes a regular column which, he acknowledges jauntily, ‘at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida’, including his own bosses. His indignation at the institutionalized desecration of the prelapsarian South Florida landscape is the animating impulse of both his columns and the string of delicious novels that began, in 1986, with Tourist Season. His only regret, he says, is that the books haven’t put tourists off visiting his homeland. He hates tourists as much as he loves South Florida.
The Irish Times review of Double Whammy called it ‘seriously funny’, which ought to have meant both serious and funny – an admirable goal – though it probably didn’t. I enjoyed it so much that I did something I’ve never done before, or since. I went to the excellent Primrose Hill Bookshop and ordered ten copies to give away. My kids each got one, the guys in my office, various friends. I gave Salman Rushdie one, and in exchange for the tip he insisted I read Stephen King.
Stephen King! What an odd notion.
‘He’s terrific!’ Salman said.
The publisher Tom Rosenthal turned down my offer of a copy.
‘Of course I’ve read him,’ he said, ‘he’s a genius. I tried to sign him for Deutsch but my co-publishers let me down, and we lost the deal.’
Hiaasen was clearly serious, but he wasn’t high serious. He was low serious. I preferred that, and it set a sort of example. He seemed to be having fun writing, and all of a sudden I was having fun reading. It had all the freshness of a new experience. Was there something frivolous about the way he wrote, and the way I read him? Absolutely, though by no means entirely. That’s what I yearned for, and what I had been missing, in making reading into my profession. And, yes, I am aware that people don’t have fun in their professions. Do accountants adore all that yummy adding up? Do lawyers love all that obsessive prevaricating? No, most of the ones I know come to dislike it, as I came to dislike the profession of letters. Literature, as taught at universities, has become an institution: syllabus-bound, examination-driven. You get marks for how well you understand Dickens. I gave them. I’d become institutionalized too.
How did all of this happen? I don’t mean: to me. I mean: to us. How did the reading of imaginative literature get hijacked by the pedants? English Literature as a secondary and tertiary subject is now so popular, and seems so natural to us, that we seldom pause to inquire where it came from, and why. We make the assumption that it is as obvious a university subject as history, or classics, much less law, medicine, or engineering. In fact, though, ‘English’ is pretty much a Johnny-come-lately of academic subjects. Curiously little has been written about this, most of it in obscure academic journals that are hard to find, and embarrassing to be seen reading.
The story, once you begin to piece it together, is surprising and revealing. In eighteenth-century England a gentleman studied the classics of Greek and Roman literature, in the original languages. The classics didn’t confer gentility, they confirmed it. If he went to university at all, it was most frequently to become a cleric. It was only in the 1820s that the first university courses in English appeared, at the newly founded University College and King’s College in London. These institutions differed substantially, the former being egalitarian and utilitarian, while King’s was informed by a romantic, neo-Platonic aesthetic, in which the study of English encouraged its students to rise ‘above what is apparent and transitory to what is real and permanent’.
These new educational courses and practices – both utilitarian and transcendental – were soon appropriated by government, and sent to the colonies. If English literature was good for us, surely it would be even better for our overseas subjects, for whom some such civilizing influence was so palpably necessary. Talking to the House of Commons in 1833, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended the conscious propagation and study of ‘that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges . . . And wherever British literature spreads may it be attended by British virtue and British freedom!’ The study of literature, nauseatingly, was both useful and good. It was, of course, particularly good for those who needed to be improved, whether they be on the banks of the Ganges or amongst England’s emerging mercantile classes.
One can feel this spirit pervading the introduction to Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts, published at the same time as the London colleges were being founded, and one of the first anthologies of literature for use at schools. The emerging middle classes, Knox maintained, should use their leisure to peruse ‘polite literature’: ‘Nothing perhaps contributes more to liberalize their minds, and prevent that narrowness which is too often the consequence of a life attached, from the earliest age, to the pursuits of lucre.’ The mere study of ‘English’ thus confirmed its students, either indigenous or foreign, as inferior educational citizens. But it still might confer, if not the class of the classics, at least the saving grace of the vernacular.
English universities were based to a large extent on Germanic models. Disciplines were strictly divided from each other, methods of examination and conferment of degrees were controlled centrally, teachers achieved ranks culminating in professorships, students divided into undergraduate and postgraduate. But if the study of English was the coming thing, there was no clear agreement on how it was to be taught within the structures available. The transition from the reading of books as a polite drawing room activity suitable for young ladies, to an examinable discipline of higher education was a complex and hotly disputed subject during the nineteenth century.
Oxford and Cambridge, typically, had been slow to react to these changes, and only entered the arena once English had established itself, but had yet to find an agreed academic form. Oxbridge didn’t lead the way in this process, but entered at the point at which guidance was sorely needed. The first Oxford Chair of English Literature was established in 1904, though the original Oxford syllabus in English was severely philological and historicist. At Cambridge, though it had been possible to read English as part of the Tripos since 1891, it was impossible to do a single Honours degree in English until 1926, exactly a hundred years after the formation of UCL. The Cambridge degree included an element of practical criticism as well as a paper on ‘Life, Literature and Thought’, and provides the basis of English Studies in the Anglophone world.
This new degree had an evangelical flavour: it aimed to train ‘sensibility’, to promote moral awareness, and to produce a cultural elite of readers who were highly sensitive to the demands not merely of literature, but of the life from which it was drawn and with which it was engaged. The message was explicit: reading literature is good for you, and good for us all. It may not confer gentility, but (as Matthew Arnold observed) it gives a leavening of culture. The great literary models provide instruction and guidance, and may supply that bedrock of value that religion once offered. If Arnold was the priest of this revaluation of the importance of letters, F.R. Leavis was his curate. It is impossible to miss in Leavis’s tone and demeanour the grimly entrenched, almost medical, belief that literature is good for you if you take it in the prescribed texts, forms and doses. Literary criticism, after all, has some of its root structure in Biblical exegesis.
We remember Arnold’s definition of God: ‘There rules an enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness’ and his conclusion: ‘therefore study your Bible and learn to obey this.’ This isn’t much of a formulation (you may as well define soap as the power, not ourselves, that makes for cleanliness) but it points the way: if no longer to the Bible, then at least to Wordsworth, Austen, George Eliot and Lawrence. Study the right texts in the right way and you will become wise. Read English!
; This is an attractive position, and you can see why it became necessary, if the study of English was to shed its historicist and philological biases. But it is also an empirical claim, with a clear implication. If the study of literature conveys wisdom – much less righteousness – then it should follow that proper students of literature are the wisest and best of persons. Yet I have scanned myself in vain for traces of wisdom and exceptional goodness, and wondered whether my former colleagues exhibited these qualities. Certainly the splenetic Leavis was hardly a proper role model for the young and impressionable. (The opposite assertion, that a lifetime study of English makes you worse, seems to me more feasible.)
So by the end of the first hundred years of the teaching of English at universities there was no common understanding of what a course should consist of, no shared methodology, no common teleology. English sat uneasily in that Teutonic structure in which the study of a discipline demanded rigour, accountability, methodological clarity, clear aims and values. By these criteria it was not clear that English was a discipline at all, and it is to this day regarded as a soft option by, say, scientists or mathematicians.
On these grounds, V.S. Naipaul has recently suggested that English should no longer be offered as a university subject, and all English Departments disbanded: ‘I think it would be a great fillip, a great boost to the intellectual life of the country. It would immediately have a great impact. It would release a lot of manpower. They could go and work on the buses and things like that.’ I sometimes argued similarly to my colleagues (who wouldn’t have made good bus conductors) that the ‘common pursuit of true judgement’ of literature, if it is to be enjoyable as well as serious, would better take place in forums like reading groups or adult education courses.
No one listened to me, but when a Nobel Laureate talks like this one assumes that people may pay attention, even when he is notoriously iconoclastic and grumpy, and the potential academic audience famed for not listening. But no debate ensued, and Naipaul’s provocative remarks have by now been pretty much forgotten, if not forgiven.
Had Sir Vidia gone on to say that teaching in an English Department is bad for you, I would have agreed with him. It had stiffened my emotional and intellectual sinews, drained my reservoirs of delight, made me (more) pompous and domineering. ‘Becoming less intelligent’ was an attempt at reforming myself, and I suppose it had to begin with deforming what had preceded: detoxifying, I called it. There was nothing pretty about the process.
One afternoon, playing golf with my friend Simon Grogan, I was having a particularly bad round. On the elevated ninth tee I hit my drive into the lake, teed up another ball, hit that into the lake, teed up another and scuffed it along the ground. It rolled down the gentle slope of the hill and came to rest in a bush about forty feet away.
‘Fuck!’ I screamed. ‘Fucking fuck!’ I took my driver and flung it down the hill. It turned in an ungainly parabola and landed next to the bush where the ball lay.
Simon looked at me disapprovingly. He had no objection to the bad language – which he was rather partial to himself – but throwing clubs was definitely rotten behaviour.
‘You know this project of yours – becoming less intelligent?’ he said, tartly.
‘What? What!’ I started walking down the hill. You don’t talk to a man who is lying five in a bush. It is neither polite nor safe.
‘You could be taking it too far,’ he said, walking quickly ahead to avoid having anything else to do with me.
He was right. You can’t deny who you are, or abandon what you have read and cared about. What I had read defined me, informed my judgements, influenced every moment of who I was and what I did. It is all very well: become less pompous, be less intelligent. But you can’t live by Carl Hiaasen alone. If he is funnier, more enjoyable to read, and more passionately committed than many of our syllabus’s canonic authors, he isn’t as good a writer. That still matters. There is something to be said, after all, for literature.
When I was teaching at Warwick, we used to interview all prospective students. (I gather they no longer have the time or energy to do so.) In answer to my question: ‘Why do you want to read English?’ I would often get some variety of the answer: because I am interested in people, and in how they work. Why, in that case, I would ask, don’t you read psychology? Or history or philosophy or sociology? Surely that is where you learn about people and how they relate to each other? Reading English is for people who care about literature. Not about the truths that literature may reveal (the paraphrases and ‘meanings’) but the literature itself.
I still feel this passionately. We have to preserve some area in which literary language and form and tonality are foregrounded: to preserve the practices and virtues of close reading; to stake out this territory, to define it, and to defend it. To keep our eyes and fingers on the page, warmly. What you then do with these skills, once acquired, is up to you: do ‘readings’ of literary works if and only if you know how to read: do post-structuralist ones, even. I don’t care. It took me a while to reach this position, and when I did I was no longer angry, nor so dismissive of my former incarnation as a university teacher. I believed I had transcended ‘literature’, with the help of Carl Hiaasen, but – what a lovely irony! – it seems that I was wrong, or at least that my concept of ‘literature’ needed refining, not my concept of intelligence. In 1999, the redoubtable literary partnership of Colm Tóibin and Carmen Callil published The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. They included Double Whammy.
17
SPYCATCHER AND THE LOST ARCHIVE OF KIM PHILBY
If I hadn’t been a novelist I would have been a rare book dealer – it’s like a constant treasure hunt.
Graham Greene
I have never read Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, by all accounts a pedestrian tale of life in the security services that gained its fifteen minutes of fame when Mrs Thatcher was foolish enough to ban its importation, upon its overseas publication in 1987, for contravening the Official Secrets Act. The resultant publicity catapulted the book into prominence, and copies were smuggled to the UK from Australia and America in their thousands. Within a year the ban was overturned by the Law Lords, and the book could be assessed for what it really was: a dull and ill-written, self-serving account of a former minor spy.
I have no interest in the world of espionage, all that pretending and betraying, skulking about in trench coats and hats, save for an admiration for the works of John le Carré and Graham Greene, both of whom served in the English secret services. Greene, who maintained a taste for a well-cut trench coat, tended to write his espionage books as a form of relaxation from the more taxing and morally heated novels that explored crises of faith engendered by human frailty.
In the late 1980s I was a regular visitor to Antibes to see Greene (from whom I was buying a number of manuscripts, letters and books), making my living as a full-time rare book dealer. I was happier than I had been for years, my decision to leave Warwick fully vindicated by my new form of life. It hadn’t been a hard decision to leave, it just took a while, and then one day I’d woken up and said to Barbara, ‘I’m going to quit.’
‘I’ve known that for ages,’ she said, ‘it always takes you a long time to recognize what you’ve already decided.’
She was the key, and it wouldn’t have happened without her support. The children were fourteen and eight, and abandoning a safe £15,000 a year for an uncertain future might have looked irresponsible from her point of view.
‘It’s fine,’ she’d reassured me, ‘if we need more money we can always sell the house.’
There was no need. The first year after leaving I made £30,000, and I never made as little as that again. But the business I was doing with Greene was headier than any I’d yet encountered. In his modest flat at La Residence des Fleurs, in Antibes, he pulled manuscript after manuscript off his shelves and out of his bureau: two volumes of travel diaries, five books filled with daily accounts of his dreams over twenty
years, his letters to his mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, and, finally (I had to pick these up in Paris), all of his copies of his own books. I wrote cheque after cheque, to his puzzlement and delight.
‘Surely this is too much! Are you a gambler?’ he asked, after pocketing a cheque for £35,000.
‘Not at all,’ I said. He seemed disappointed. ‘What I am is a poker player.’
He looked puzzled.
‘It’s a matter of skill and reading the odds and the situation,’ I said. ‘I have great customers for this sort of material. I’ll make a very good profit.’
The next time I showed up in Antibes it was in a new white Saab convertible. I filled it up with bibliographic goodies, bid Graham and Yvonne a very fond farewell, set the cruise control on 170 kph, and headed north. After six hours (equals 600 miles) I stopped in Joigny at La Côte Saint-Jacques, a small luxury hotel with a three-star Michelin restaurant, and gave the doorman £20 to carry all of my new books and manuscripts – some ten boxes full – into my suite. I ate and drank exceedingly well – there was a young waitress whose only job was to dispense a variety of chocolate truffles – and then went and wallowed like a pig in books on the floor of my room.
Two months later, the treasures dispersed and the large profit banked, I took the family on a holiday to Block Island, between Long Island and Connecticut, renting a Victorian house so grand that we kept finding tourists walking round it, guide books in hand, under the impression that it was open to the public. I hardly noticed them. I was upstairs, moping about. ‘It will never be that good again,’ I moaned, like a teenager granted five minutes of bliss with Marilyn Monroe.