True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Anyway. Unfolding from this idea of what an engineer is comes a set of characteristic ways of doing engineering. Technology projects in Britain have tended to be executed by small groups of people, informally organised. They’ve tended to depend on people educating themselves in specialist skills, or picking up their knowledge on the job. They tend to be strong on lateral thinking and improvisation. They often have recourse to brilliant simplifications which let them sidestep around issues that other people are pouring time and money into. At the same time, they are strongly attracted to the notion of the one-off, smooth, bespoke, high-end technological marvel: to building the kinds of machine that promise a technological leap. These last two qualities sound contradictory, but they do go together. The belief in making things cheap because simple, and the desire to build one-off marvels, combine to produce projects in which British engineers try to deliver marvels on budgets so small that no-one else on the planet would even dream of making the attempt.

  And sometimes succeed. As a demonstration of all these qualities operating at once, consider the true story of how British engineers took over motor racing in the 1960s. At the time, the incumbents who dominated Grand Prix were the Italian car companies, and of course Ferrari in particular, which treated racing as an advert for the road-car business and subsidised it accordingly. They had massive investment in design and manufacturing, and they remorselessly produced generation after generation of expensive, ever more powerful engines. Meanwhile, in Britain, a completely different style of race engineering had come out of a pair of clubs founded in the years just after the war for skint racing enthusiasts. The 750 Motor Club taught weekend racers who couldn’t afford a car off the peg to build one from Austin 7 parts, and the 500cc Club specialised in cannibalising motorbike engines. Between them, these two clubs produced a network of homebrew engineers who concentrated on aspects of car design where cleverness without a budget would be rewarded. Eventually, they started getting their hands on good engines – the Coventry Climax (wonderful name) and the first ever Cosworth – but the engines were never the main point. During the era of their breakthrough, British racing cars were characteristically underpowered compared to the competition. Instead the attention went into the dynamics of the vehicles. John and Charles Cooper worked out their thoughts about weight distribution by sketching in chalk on their workshop floor, and moved the engine back behind the driver: their rear-engined cars won their first Grand Prix in 1958. Colin Chapman focused on aerodynamics, and his exploitation of ground effect to stick his Lotuses to the track abruptly produced another paradigm shift. Suddenly cars that neglected the influence of the air they travelled through were as obsolete as front-engined cars. He started winning in 1962. Both times, oblique innovation, smart thinking on a neglected and unprestigious flank, beat superior power and resources. A pissed-off Enzo Ferrari said of the British club constructors (in French, because he was being pissed-off in France), ‘Ils ne sont que des garagistes.’ They’re nothing but a bunch of bloody car mechanics. And from that beginning came a near-total British domination of Formula One that has lasted to the present day. A network of tiny, specialised tuners and component manufacturers in ‘Grand Prix Valley’ in Oxfordshire supply McLaren and so on, lavishly resourced now thanks to sponsorship money and advertising and TV rights. There are people out there whose lives are devoted to getting a single carbon-fibre widget thinner and thinner, lighter and lighter, closer and closer to being a pure streak in space of force-transmission. There’s a critical mass of race-engineering expertise in Britain which makes it difficult for anyone, anywhere in the world to operate at the highest competitive level without coming here. Most of the cars for the roaring, snorting, all-American Champ Cars racing series in the US are actually imported from Lola of Huntingdon.

  On the other hand, look at what there isn’t in Britain. McLaren has a profitable business manufacturing six, eight, ten astonishingly high-specified vehicles a year for Formula One: they make a living from the entertainment value of the highest of automotive high technology. But since Chapman and the Coopers started the winning streak in racing cars, the rest of the British car industry, the part that did mass production, has virtually ceased to exist, at least under British ownership; this during the most explosive growth of car ownership in history. No more Austin, no more Morris; no more Rover, Humber, Hillman, MG, Sunbeam, Wolseley, Riley, Bristol, Alvis, Talbot, Singer, Triumph. Go back to that list of the idiosyncrasies of British engineering. Those technological folkways are in fact symbiotically linked to industrial weaknesses, both as causes and effects. They’re both ways of making the best of a bad job, and also contributing factors in the way things turned out. British boffins partly believe in improvisation because the institutional backup available to them is so feeble. They’re self-taught in specialised skills a lot of the time, because our system of technical education is crap. They resort to lateral thinking because we don’t have an industrial culture that lets us benefit from steady, incremental product improvements. They use personal commitment to get quality control because we’re not good at building it in and making it automatic. And they’re attracted to the task of creating the individual, bespoke marvel because we don’t do very well at turning out anything complicated by the thousand or by the million. As I say, these are symptoms – but in their turn they’re also influences, shaping our future sense of what’s possible and what isn’t.

  We maybe need to be a little bit nastier to ourselves here. Look at the kind of story about British technology that tends to give us a lump in our throats, that moves us, that makes us want to cheer. In fact I’ll tell you one. In the 1950s, Saunders-Roe, the same company on the Isle of Wight that had the contract to build the Black Arrow satellite launcher, designed a rocket-propelled interceptor in answer to a Ministry of Defence request for a plane that could get off the ground fast enough to have a chance at shooting down incoming high-altitude Russian nuclear bombers. What this thing chiefly needed was to be able to climb like a bat out of hell. Saunders-Roe actually constructed two working prototypes. Their SR.53 was a beautiful and terrifying object with stubby little wings, a bit like the X-plane Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in. Since the Russians then switched to missiles as their nuclear delivery system, the mission the plane was intended for stopped making sense, and it wasn’t commissioned. But a couple of years ago I heard the retired engineers who built it give a talk; and they explained that Saunders-Roe ran out of money just before the first prototype was complete. They needed a fire-suppression system, and they also needed a pyrotechnic igniter for the De Havilland Spectre rocket engine. So they took the petty cash and they went to a yachting supplies shop in Cowes. They bought a self-inflating life raft, and they used the little CO2 cylinder it came with for the fire-suppression, and the igniter was a cartridge from a flare gun, stuck in a hole under the tail. It’s crucial here to remember that these people were not amateurs: this was a professional, extremely serious project based on very high-level aerodynamics. And it worked. The cartridge sparked, and the plane performed as specified, roaring 50,000 feet into the stratosphere over Wiltshire in about one minute, and then returned the test pilot to the ground alive and in one piece, reporting that the aircraft was ‘docile and exceedingly pleasant to fly’. When I heard this, I thought: yay! Then I thought, hang on: I’m being moved here because this is a story about success against the odds, and why should a major defence procurement exercise have been this kind of threadbare struggle? Too many charming stories about British technology are like this, when you look closely. We’re in danger of telling ourselves a national story about technology which is a story of only just being able to do things, of teetering desperately on the line between success and failure, and only just managing to fall onto the ‘success’ side by performing an ingenious last-minute backflip. But should we actually want technologies – and this is the implication – technologies which only just work?

  (2004)

  Printed

  From 1
990, when I gave up my day job in publishing, to 2005 when I acquired a new one as a writing teacher, I made most of my living as a book reviewer. The internet had not yet reduced the marginal cost of opinions to zero, and newspapers would pay you well enough for one day’s work to subsidise two or three days on your own project, as long as your overheads were low. But the couple of hundred thousand words of literary journalism I produced are only very lightly represented here.

  This is not because, in Orwell’s words, I was ‘pouring my immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time’. I rather enjoyed being randomly educated by whatever dropped onto the mat in a jiffy bag, though I was glad when I could stop. (As a non-fiction writer, I tended to be sent non-fiction, on subjects which nearly-sorta-kinda abutted on areas I nearly-sorta-kinda knew about: books about the Iranian Revolution, cave-dwelling bacteria, gout, Stonehenge, amateur rocketry, map theft, the genesis of the footnote.)

  Instead, it’s that I was never very good at declaring sufficient independence from the book at hand, and producing something that said what I wanted to say, in a form worth keeping. So the pieces here are those in which I was able, from time to time, to make an accounting with a writer I particularly cared about, or to reflect on the processes of reading and writing themselves.

  HALF IN PRAISE

  One way and another, reading takes up so large a share of my existence that I have to praise it. It is what I know best, it is what I know how to do best, and the riches it brings me are always under my eye, undeniable. I know that the discoveries I make as I read are real and substantial, and so I insist that my switchback progress from left to right, left to right, left to right along lines of printed prose represents a genuine mode of experience whose integrity I have to defend if I’m not to be untrue to the hours and years I’ve spent engaged in it. This makes me, on an instinctive level, reading’s advocate. I’m in favour of it for myself, and I’m in favour of it for other people. Whenever I hear about another child converted by J.K. Rowling to the joys of story, I can’t help but be glad. I know what’s in there, and I want other people to have it too. But over the last few years I have also found, as I tried to explore reading through its role in my own childhood, that there is an ambivalence in my perception of it which demands acknowledgement. Taken seriously, every quality in fiction that makes it powerful seems capable of being taken another way, not as revelation, but as revelation’s cheap substitute. With that doubleness in mind, I found I couldn’t write – or couldn’t only write – a celebration. The best I can do truthfully is a kind of balancing act: half in praise of reading.

  To start with its greatest power: fiction builds bridges between people. To know someone is not a straightforward act. It is to enter into a mutual negotiation, to find a way through the crusts of opacity represented by all their differences from us, and there is always the consideration that a person may not wish to be known. He or she may look back at us and form a judgement in the negative based on whatever degree of success they have had in decoding us. Tact, empathetic imagination, desire and the other tools of connection remain complex things even if they are in successfully workaday operation; even if instinctive, still complex, because of the multiple codes they work on and furnish translations between. Two people can be divided by temperament, by gender, by class, by nationality, by culture, by race, by religion. Fiction has the power to lift our gaze beyond our own particular set of categories, because it preserves those acts of understanding that have succeeded. All but the most consciously momentous conversations vanish into breath and oblivion, but when a fruitful foray across the space between selves is written down, it becomes permanently available. It adds to fiction’s great, cumulative effort to do justice to the selves not our own, in which (as Dorothea famously recognises in Middlemarch) ‘the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference’. So books are tools of understanding. From a book you can borrow percipient powers you lack yourself. You can take up a greater intuition about motive or a more unwavering compassion as if they were prostheses.

  From a book, too, you can learn of people beyond the scope of your single, limited life; people you’d never meet. A book is a great liberator from the tyranny of given circumstances. The propagandists of the Enlightenment said that the free flow of writing would expand human sympathy beyond the local cramps of prejudice and limited vision, out of the choking hands of kings and hierarchs. And they were right: it is an essential function of writing that it widens our vision beyond the evidence of our own senses. William Hazlitt rhapsodised on the free press as the ‘remote but inevitable’ cause of the French Revolution. He said:

  Books alone teach us to judge of truth and good in the abstract: without a knowledge of things at a distance from us, we judge like savages or animals from our senses and appetites alone; but by the aid of books and of an intercourse with the world of ideas, we are purified, raised, ennobled from savages into intellectual and rational beings.

  This is why a novel is often the fastest guide to a country we know nothing about. Read Márquez, and you receive a vivid intelligence of Colombia. Read di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Sciascia’s Day of the Owl, and you take the royal road to knowing Sicily. Not its dimensions, exports, geography, economics, train timetables – though that kind of knowledge accretes from novel-reading with surprising density – but its typical forms of human encounter. The novelist took them for granted, since the novel was written from within the culture it described, yet they are sufficiently explained for the stranger-reader in the process of articulating them on the page.

  What gesture does a Colombian make when inviting you to sit at an empty place at a café table? How does a low-level Sicilian ‘man of respect’ conduct himself when talking to a naively zealous policeman from the north of Italy? The author’s answer reduces the multiple codes of human distance and human difference into coherent story, thus into the single code of written language. Some cultures, some novels, are much harder to enter into than others, but every book can be read by everyone who can read, and there is always some gain in comprehension. Of course you have to bring sufficient emotional experience of your own to the reading. If you’ve never seen a Colombian, or even a café table, you’re OK, but if no-one has ever invited you to sit down your reading will be crippled. Conversely, the more perceptive you are in life, the richer your reading will grow. But the kitty of understandings necessary to crack the code of writing in a minimal way is not large, and you still gain an extraordinarily intimate access to people whose living counterparts would never be transparent to you. You can shadow the thinking of a Berber chieftain, a Japanese department store lady condemned to bow at opening elevator doors, an Appalachian miner, a primary-school teacher in Dundee. You can read them without necessarily having an inkling (fatally textual word) how to ‘read’ them off the page.

  For the other side of fiction’s loan of wisdom is the fact that the knowledge it brings is not necessarily transferrable to the realm of experience. The world is not narrated as you pass along it. Compared to fiction it can seem unlabelled. No authoritative voice tells you what the person you’re talking to is thinking. Consequently, as well as a supplement to our real knowledge of other people, fiction can also offer a substitute. It can be used as an alternative to the work of really knowing people. To a certain kind of reader, like myself, it represents a permanent temptation to bypass the difficult process of getting sustenance from human encounters. After all, you arrive at the same place, don’t you?

  But maybe not. Maybe the means whereby we come to knowledge of other people in the world are indispensable sources of that knowledge’s strength and value. Perhaps the friction of meetings, the meandering development of a friendship, the sudden demolition of a tower of supposition when a misunderstanding is exposed, the resistance of a hostility that won’t diminish, the limited transit through the outworks of a personality permitted by some specific act of trust, love’s opening of the membranes of private memory – perhaps all thes
e textured efforts are more than processes. Perhaps in themselves they constitute a dimension of understanding, because all those negotiations actually map the other self we’re approaching. With each motion they tell us that the other person is there, and how they are there. Some novels do enact this resistant journey to understanding, whose qualities condition the understanding arrived at. Proust wrote characters who have to be attended to at the pace of experience. But it is much more usual for novels to name the difficulty of judging people than actually to recreate it. Most fiction exploits the power to move between selves without any resistance at all, making many characters in turn the centre of perception, laying out many points of view. Long before the reflex shots of cinema, novels could cut like lightning between the marquis looking at the waiter and the waiter looking at the marquis. This is an essential freedom of the form. But again though, it puts it in the power of a reader who is so minded to use novels to circumvent the drudgery (and the reward) of striking out into the world, as we all do in life, from our one centre, our single lifelong point of view.