A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  The group's principal propagandist was Lytton Strachey. It was he who proclaimed their founding principle: that they were not, repeat not, Victorians (even though all of them had been born and raised during that monarch's long reign). For the Bloomsbury Group the ‘Eminent Victorians’, as Strachey sneeringly labelled them in his famous book of that title, existed only to be mocked and repudiated. But, most importantly, got out of the way.

  The Bloomsberries regarded the First World War as the death throes of Victorianism. It was tragic that so many millions had to die, but it was ‘closure’ and made it possible for literature and the world of ideas to have a wholly new start.

  What, then, did ‘Bloomsbury’ stand for? ‘Civilisation’, they might have replied. ‘Liberalism’ might well have been another answer. They subscribed to a philosophy that originated with John Stuart Mill and was reformulated by the Cambridge philosopher, G.E. Moore. Essentially its basic idea was that you were free to do anything so long as it did not damage, or infringe upon, the equivalent freedoms of some other person. It's a beautiful principle, but extremely hard to put into practice. Some would say impossible.

  Woolf's life was a mixture of privilege (there was always a servant to clean that room of her own – the servant's interesting biography was published in 2010) and chronic mental suffering. She was born the daughter of a distinguished man of letters, Leslie Stephen, and his equally cultivated wife. The young Virginia Stephen was brought up in fine London houses in the area around London's Bloomsbury Square in central London. That particular square is one of the beauties of the city. Woolf particularly loved it on rainy days when, as she put it, the black, sinuous trunks of the trees looked like ‘wet seals’. Bloomsbury itself is also the centre of London's intellectual powerhouse, containing as it does a number of university colleges, the British Museum and, in Woolf's day, a cluster of major publishing houses.

  Woolf did not attend university and did not need to. She came into adulthood extraordinarily well read, and well connected with the finest minds of her time. She was writing almost as soon as she could hold a pen in her hand. But even in her childhood it was observed that her mind was troubled. She had her first nervous breakdown when she was just thirteen. Such breakdowns would happen again during her life – finally, fatally.

  Aged thirty she made a marriage of mutual convenience with the social thinker (another Bloomsberry) Leonard Woolf. As part of their liberalism the group tolerated previously prohibited kinds of human relationship. Forster and Keynes were gay (at a period when it was criminal). Woolf's passion was reserved for her samesex relationship with Vita Sackville-West – a fellow writer and creative gardener at her fine country home at Sissinghurst, in Kent. The Bloomsbury Group believed that ‘art’ could be applied to everything in life – even horticulture.

  The relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West was no secret, even to their respective, and similarly open-minded, husbands. It is commemorated in one of Woolf's finest, and most readable works, Orlando, a fantasy biography of Vita's family over the centuries with a central character whose sex changes with passing lifetimes. Sackville-West's son, Nigel, called it ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’. It was not addressed to Leonard.

  Independence was all-important to Woolf – with regards to conventional morality, social restrictions, and the London literary world. She and her husband founded the Hogarth Press publishing firm in 1917, its offices a stone's throw from Bloomsbury Square. She could now write and publish as she pleased. She had begun publishing full-length fiction in 1915 with The Voyage Out. Thereafter novels came at regular intervals. They were subtly imbued with her feminist principles but, above all, they were ‘experimental’, doing things that were new in English literature. The technique with which her writing is most famously linked has been called (not by her) ‘stream of consciousness’.

  This is how she described it in an essay of 1925 (‘gig lamps’ are the headlights on a horse-drawn carriage illuminated at night):

  Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

  Capturing that ‘halo’ was Woolf's major endeavour in fiction. Note how she does it in the wonderful opening of her novel, Mrs Dalloway. It's the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the middle-aged wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, who has planned a party that evening. She is setting out from her house near the Houses of Parliament, alongside chiming Big Ben, to collect some summer flowers to decorate her living room. It is a lovely June morning and she is waiting to cross the road. She feels strangely happy, having just recovered from a life-threatening bout of influenza. A neighbour passes her as she stands at the side of one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, but she doesn't notice him:

  She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in West-minster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

  For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street.

  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 Jewish, both were left-wing – were prominent on the Gestapo death lists and both had prudently made suicide plans. Virginia, who had recently suffered a crippling nervous breakdown and feared permanent 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

  Brave New Worlds

  UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

  ‘Utopia’ is an Ancient Greek word meaning, literally, ‘good place’. If you had used it in conversation with, say, Sophocles or Homer, however, they might well have looked at you oddly. The word was invented by an Englishman, Sir Thomas More, in the sixteenth century as the title of a story that pictured a world in which everything was perfect. The fact that More had his head chopped off a few years later for questioning Henry VIII's marriage arrangements suggests that the England he was living in was something
less than perfect.

  Literature has the godlike ability, simply using the faculty of the imagination, to create whole worlds. It's helpful to think of putting those worlds on a line, with ‘realism’ at one end and ‘fantasy’ at the other. The closer a literary world is to the author's, the more ‘realistic’ the work of literature is. Pride and Prejudice depicts a world which, it's safe to presume, was very like the one in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Conan the Barbarian envisages a world that is entirely different from the seedy 1930s Texas backwater where the author Robert E. Howard fantasised his superhero, and the ‘Cimmeria’ where Conan performs his superheroics.

  Utopias tend, like Conan, to cluster at the ‘fantasy’ end of the line for the very good reason that there has never yet been a perfect society or anything approaching one. Some writers think we are progressing, however gradually, towards that perfection. Their utopias are ‘prophetic’. A good example is H.G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Wells believed that the extraordinary leaps forward in technology that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw would bring about ‘technotopia’. A lot of science fiction has been written on that theme.

  Others think we are moving away from realising a better world than the one in which we now live. In the nineteenth century there was a yearning for a romanticised medievalism which had been lost to urbanisation and the Industrial Revolution. These back-to-simplicity utopias are nostalgic. One of the most famous, and influential, was Looking Backward (1887) by Edward Bellamy. A short-lived American ‘People's Party’ founded itself on Bellamy's principles.

  Whether looking backwards or forwards, all societies have a grand vision of what is, was, or will be their ‘good place’. In ancient Greece, Plato's Republic imagined a perfect city in which everything would be rationally arranged with ‘philosopher kings’, like Plato himself, in charge. In societies where Judaeo-Christianity is dominant, images of biblical Eden (in the past) and Heaven (in the future) tend to inspire and colour literature's utopian visions. In ancient Rome it was ‘Elysium’ (that is, the ‘Elysian fields’ – a perfect natural world). In Muslim societies, Paradise. For the Vikings, it was Valhalla, a home of great heroes, celebrating their feats in battle. Communism believed, following Marx, that there would come, in the distant future, what he called the ‘withering away of the state’ and a condition of perfect social equality among men.

  These belief systems have all, in their different ways, inspired authors to create imaginary worlds – humanity's ‘happy ending’. But the big problem with literary utopias (and More's is no exception) is that they tend to be yawn-inducingly dull. Literature is most readable when it adopts a critical, sceptical or downright quarrelsome position. What is called the ‘dystopian’ view of things makes for livelier reading, and more provocative thinking about past, present and future societies. The point can be made by looking at some of the more famous literary dystopias which, if you haven't read them yet, are certainly worth seeking out.

  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has a teasing title. It's the temperature at which printed paper spontaneously bursts into flame (a metaphor, you might think, for literature itself ). Bradbury wrote it in 1953. He was inspired to do so by the arrival of television as a mass medium. As Bradbury saw it, TV's rise was the death of the book.

  Bradbury thought this was a very bad thing. Books, he believed, made people think. They were stimulating. The television set did the opposite. It was a narcotic. And, sinisterly, television made possible a power over the population that no dictator had previously enjoyed – a ‘soft tyranny’. Universal mind control.

  The hero of Fahrenheit 451 is a ‘fireman’ whose job is not to put out fires but to burn any surviving books. (Bradbury was clearly inspired by the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s.) While at work the hero casually picks up a book from a bonfire he has been sent out to start and becomes thereafter, a reader and a rebel. He ends a refugee in the woods, where a likeminded community memorise great works of literature and become themselves living books. Their flame will burn on – perhaps.

  What is fascinating about Fahrenheit 451 is that like other great dystopian literature it is both right and wrong. Bradbury's pessimism about TV is plainly wrong-headed. TV has enriched, not impoverished, culture. Bradbury's dystopian alarm is one of many illustrations of the mixed feelings that society always has about new technologies. The computer, for example, has revolutionised contemporary life, for the better most of us would say. But in dystopian fantasy films like The Terminator, the computer ‘Skynet’ is visualised as mankind's mortal enemy. Cavemen doubtless felt the same about fire. ‘Good servant, bad master’, as the proverb puts it.

  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 belonging to their assigned upper or lower class and the whole population 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 of Shakespeare's plays to read. This new world is not for him. He rebels, and is destroyed. The brave new world goes on as ‘happily’ as before. It doesn't need noble savages or Shakespeare.

  As with Bradbury, Huxley is both right and wrong in his predictions. There is no likelihood, if one looks at human history, that Brave New World's stable world-state could ever happen. It's way off the fantasy end of the scale. But Huxley's forecast that biological intervention could transform society in worrying ways is amazingly prophetic. The human genome map, IVF (it means, literally, fertilising ‘in glass’), and other new biotechnologies make the ‘babies in bottles’ scenario entirely plausible. It is now quite within human reach to ‘make’ humans, as Huxley predicted humans one day would. What brave new world will humankind make with that power?

  The most argued-over dystopia of the last fifty years is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It was published in 1985 when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. He was in power, some thought, because of crucial support from the ‘religious right’ – Christian fundamentalists. This is the starting point for Atwood's feminist-futurist dystopia.

  The Handmaid's Tale is set in a post-nuclear-war late twentieth-century. Fundamentalist Christians have taken over the United States which they have renamed the Republic
of Gilead. African Americans (‘Children of Ham’) have been disposed of. Women are again in their subordinate place. At the same time, male and female fertility has declined disastrously. The few women who can bear children are designated ‘handmaids’ – breeders, at the disposal of men. Gileadian handmaids have no rights, no social life and are given the chattel-name ‘Of[their owner]’. The heroine is Offred (‘property of Fred’). She was captured with her husband and child trying to escape to liberal Canada (a small chauvinism: Atwood is Canadian). Offred is allocated to a powerful male called ‘the Commander’. The novel ends with Offred seeming to make her escape from captivity, although it is written so that we cannot be entirely sure that she will succeed.

  It's easy to pooh-pooh Atwood's grim prophecy. From 2009 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 dystopia 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 movement 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.