by D J Enright
Stand up anyone who hasn’t written a book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes … You, go to the bottom of the class!
‘A survey reveals that nose-picking, burping and passing wind in public are now commonplace.’ Another small belated consequence of the death of God. Once there was only one real, big celebrity; now we have thousands of tiny ones. The same is true of role models, or ‘icons’.
Happy those early days, when … when oral sex meant a messy, foreign, slightly absurd, teeth-clashing version of kissing. Or at worst talking dirty.
A Frenchman is brought in to rescue the Millennium Dome (impossible task for any mere human), an American to resuscitate the London Underground, a Swedish coach to revive English football. What do we offer in return? An eight-year-old girl comes from the Ivory Coast in hopes of a better life in this country, and is tortured to death.
‘Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti …’ It is amply attested to that old people are convinced things are getting worse all the time. On top of this predisposition, it is perfectly possible that some things are getting worse all the time. For one thing, there are more things all the time, or more things are brought to our tremulous attention.
In times past (which one certainly wouldn’t want to praise unduly), things went unspoken, were left unsaid, there weren’t so many words around. (There was no incessantly chattering television, among other things.) ‘Having words’ meant that the grown-ups were fighting – something kids used to dread. And no doubt still do, although quite a few of them have only one parent.
To be not without honour in one’s home town! Some while ago a kindly resident of Leamington Spa sent me a cutting from the local freesheet, The Observer, hoping it would amuse me: ‘As you see, we have not forgotten you, but we haven’t quite remembered you either.’ The cutting concerned the building which once housed my old school and is now being sold off. ‘Famous past pupils,’ the item read, ‘include inventor of the jet engine Sir Frank Whittle and poet B. J. Enfield.’
Amusing? I am no longer sure. The May 2002 issue of The Oldie prints a letter from a Canadian reader laying into the magazine’s columnist, Enfield Snr (father of Harry Enfield, a television comedian). Halfway through the diatribe, ‘Enfield’ mutates abruptly: ‘Enright comes across as a very unpleasant man indeed, and I think he should take his gutter journalism elsewhere.’ The letter writer must have been blinded by rage. (Or could he conceivably have been out to kill two birds with one stone?) Someone at The Oldie was thoughtful enough to insert ‘[sic]’ after ‘Enright’, but not everybody understands what sic in square brackets betokens.
My horoscope, given to benign protectiveness against a hostile world, has gone over the top. ‘The reason you can’t do certain things is because those things are of no importance.’ Can they all be of no importance, those many things, steadily increasing in number, I can’t do? All I need to do, it emerges, is be true to my ‘essential nature’. Which is to be unable to do certain things, like dress myself without help.
Somebody loves me, though. British Telecommunications is offering to convert my existing phone line into two high-speed digital lines. Just the thing if ‘you want to access the Internet and use the fax or make phone calls at the same time’. Forget that fifteen minutes of fame – here’s a whole lifetime of importance. Moreover, American Express remind me that they have written to me in the past, inviting me to become a Cardmember. ‘Usually I wouldn’t follow up such an invitation in this way,’ the Director of Membership declares, ‘but I feel that you may be an exception. You see, we’d like you to apply for Cardmembership.’ So much so that they have prepared a short application form which requires little more than my signature. ‘If you are too busy or occupied to complete lengthy forms, you are precisely the sort of person for whom the American Express Card was designed.’ It is also designed for ‘those at a stage in their life when they expect efficiency, respect and a willingness to please’. How enormously gratifying!
Should the application form fall into the hands of someone not named thereon, obviously it is not valid. Such persons should call Customer Services for an application of their own. This takes some of the gilt off the gingerbread. As does a little lapse in efficiency: ‘Staement queries will be answered immediatly, no matter what time of day or night.’ A couple of sics in square brackets called for.
Matthew Arnold spoke of those ‘who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light’. An excellent definition of humanist criticism, one might say: in some respects, to some extent, describing the intentions of book reviewers in the media and of others down to – or up to – the composers of jacket blurbs (unprincipled as these individuals often are, in a good sense as well as a bad). Also, negatively, an account of what goes on in some university departments of English, among the cliques of the harsh and abstract, the professionally cultivated and exclusive.
One may suspect a persistent – if attemptedly hidden – discomfort: among academics more than a few would prefer in their heart of hearts (can’t come much closer to humanism than that) to be humanistic, if claim is to be laid to some sort of faith, by choice a vague or mild-mannered one, calling for no more approval or disapproval than they and their acquaintances for the larger part entertain without thinking. For instance, when they sit down with a book in the evenings, maybe a book they are reviewing for the relatively popular press, for that real though elusive figure, the common or general reader.
Of course sweetness and light will have to go – or at least scurry into the background – for there is a limit to one’s daring. Bitter and dark are our watchwords, not without reason. Humanism must accommodate a deal of inhumanity. Hence one of the charms of literary theory, which far more smoothly averts its gaze from discreditable practices. In fact the question doesn’t arise: for all the tough talk, ‘theory’ is another Phantom Aesthetic State.
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But this is best left to those who know – and know all the better because they have a life elsewhere: above all, academics who teach ‘theory’ or at least make knowledgeable and qualified obeisance to it, and also happen to be successful satirical novelists. And foremost among these gifted persons is (as I write, alas, was) Malcolm Bradbury. ‘Double agents’ we might call them, or if this sounds inaptly sensational, they might be seen as having their cake and eating it, an achievement that demands an outstanding degree of smartness. Sir Malcolm, be it noted, founded a celebrated creative writing department in the University of East Anglia, thus promoting the birth of numerous authors rather than plotting the Death of the Author.
I begin to grow confused already, so allow me to quote the fictional young hero of Bradbury’s egregiously artful and crafty novel, Doctor Criminale, as he muses on his undergraduate years at, so it happens, the non-fictional University of Sussex. ‘It was the Age of Deconstruction, and how, there on the green Sussex chalk downs, we deconstructed. Junior interrogators, literary commissars, we deconstructed everything: author, text, reader, language, discourse, life itself. No task was too small, no piece of writing below suspicion. We demythologized, we demystified. We dehegemonized, we decanonized. We dephallicized, we depatriarchalized; we decoded, we de-canted, we defamed, we de-manned.’ The upshot was that he no longer liked writers or their work. His education ‘had proved to me conclusively that all literature had been written by the wrong people, of the wrong class, race and gender, for entirely the wrong reasons’. All this de-molition in three short years of de-learning.
To which I would append the more sombre and weightier words of Elaine Showalter (London Review of Books, i November 2001), to the effect that the habit of expressing ideas in a highly conventional idiom – or jargon – rules out the ability to write with clarity and force, and even to hold opinions at all. �
�Graduate students are trained to write the received English of the academy and learn to suppress whatever flair, individuality and humour they had when they arrived.’
Postmodern: the very description of nullity, of the indisputably indescribable. All it suggests, if that isn’t putting it too strongly, is that something comes after something else – as indeed most things do. And, as if expressly so designed, the clean contrary of Arnold’s programme.
On a more mundane level: ‘What everyone has in them, these days,’ Martin Amis writes in Experience (2000), ‘is not a novel but a memoir.’ And ‘The present phase of Western literature is inescapably one of “higher autobiography”, intensely self-inspecting … No more stories: the author is increasingly committed to the private being.’ The way things are going – higher autobiography? – before long every author will bear the pen-name Will Self.
We tend to believe what we read – despite proud protestations to the contrary – at any rate when the subject is one we know little or nothing about. Odd, that when the subject happens to be something we do know about, we often come on quite amazing inaccuracies.
On the front page of the Daily Telegraph Arts and Books section, Paul McCartney, interviewed by Roger McGough about his book of poems, says that his English teacher at A-level, ‘a lovely man’, ‘had studied under F. R. Leavis at Oxford’. That’s funny. I studied under Leavis, at Cambridge.
The story in Francis King’s autobiography of how I smashed down a door in some foreigners’ club in Tokyo and was consequently kicked out of Japan (such a pity!) after only a year there. Now this story, a total fabrication, has resurfaced in an important-sounding compilation entitled Japan Experiences: Fifty Years, One Hundred Views, published by the Japan Society. This is a subject I know – or would know – something about, and it never happened. I didn’t smash any door, nor would the university I taught at worry much if I had; I completed my three-year contract in reasonably good shape, and was invited to renew it.
No one will believe King’s story, says the editor of Japan Experiences breezily, a former British ambassador to the country, when I remonstrate. A truly diplomatic response; but Borges was nearer the mark in claiming there is no one who is not credulous outside his own area of knowledge.
Dreamt a truly happy dream: the Inland Revenue had sent me a repayment order for £110. The pleasure this gave went on and on in the dream. When I checked the following morning I found that the actual sum, received three weeks earlier, was £111.98. Pretty close.
In age there is more rejoicing over a refund of £110 or so from the Inland Revenue than over a publisher’s advance of £250,000 or more. Well, more chance of rejoicing.
‘The conquest was a technical conquest,’ said the critic Herbert Howarth of Eliot’s poetry back in 1965. ‘But one result of technical conquests is likely to be that the technician inculcates his views with his craft.’ ‘Female smells in shuttered rooms’: one of the poetic ‘Observations’, this may have affected the beguiled youthful reader as fresh and indefinably stirring, but later came to indicate something rancid in writer and reader. (A contrast with the sparkling lines nearby about the roses having ‘the look of flowers that are looked at’.) More distasteful, more often quoted (does it make us feel special?) is the arrant generalization, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ True, reality has murdered so many of them. More humane, kinder to humanity, is Milosz’s drawing back in a late poem: ‘Yet like others I repeat the socially acceptable words,/ for I do not feel authorized/ to reveal a truth too cruel for the human heart.’
But then, ‘If Eliot wished to live quietly, succeeding in avoiding notice, living and partly living, without making his life a continual allegory, then he had a right to. There was pain, there was dignity, finally there was happiness. Let it go at that.’ There is no decently dismissing this delicate summing-up, by Philip Larkin in a review of Peter Ackroyd’s life of Eliot. There are realities humankind shouldn’t be expected to bear, whether for the greater refinement of the soul or the production of great poetry.
In spite of some widely reported instances to the contrary, and thin, embarrassed and petulant sounds from one corner of the Zeitgeist, it is probable that the vast and unreported majority of mothers do care for their offspring, and care passionately. What prompted this risky speculation (who am I to talk, etc.?) was reading about a kind of antelope, Antilocapra, whose preternatural shyness and swiftness of flight testify to a time when predators were exceptionally menacing. As also does the dams’ habit of eating the faeces of their young and drinking their urine, so as not to leave any betraying smells behind.
One may for some time have suspected that in the sphere of literature quality was a discredited concept. Now Professor Catherine Belsey of the University of Wales, Cardiff, has confirmed this in the plainest and most peremptory fashion. To the question What is the future of English Studies? Does it have a future?, she replies: ‘I’m sure it has an enormous future, especially since the old canonized literary model has been diffused into a much wider study of cultural texts. Because we no longer ask, as our first question, how good a work is, but instead what it can tell us about the culture that produced it, we now have a great many new texts to read.’
That’s to say, literature doesn’t matter. The interview is printed in the Autumn 2001 issue of Literature Matters, the newsletter of the British Council’s Literature Department, edited by Hilary Jenkins, the Council’s Education Manager, who conducted the interview with Professor Belsey.
What does matter is our old friend ‘theory’. Do you think everyone has accepted the inevitability of theory now? ‘Certainly in this country the young feel that they need to draw on theory to read well. What we call theory is in the end an account of the relationship between human beings and language, and so between a reader and a text.’ Can you see what might come after theory? ‘In a way, if theory is about how we read, it’s hard to imagine a world without it.’ (Go on!)
Later in the interview Hilary Jenkins asks the Professor how she would describe the relationship between writers and critics. ‘I think they might be well advised to pursue their own trajectories and ignore each other … Book reviewing is the last resort of the value judgement. And too often the criteria of judgement seem to boil down to whether the book would be a good read on a train journey. Plot, character, suspense, structure, and whether its heart’s in the right place: the values, in fact, of the nineteenth-century novel.’ (Good heavens, we can’t have that sort of thing going on!) Then a confusingly worded question, Do you think writers confuse critics and academics? ‘I understand that confusion. We academics are too willing to get on the committees that award prizes. We should not be making judgements about contemporary writers …’
Finally, How do we raise the social profile of English Studies? ‘We need to get on TV. I’ve been unearthing feminine images of Hamlet in the nineteenth century. The material would make great television, but how do I start publicizing it? We need a committee, structures, strategies. Would this come within the remit of the British Council, I wonder?’ (Suddenly the unworldly Professor needs a committee. As for the British Council, one wonders what does or rather what doesn’t come within its remit.)
The back page of the periodical bears the usual health warning: ‘The views expressed in articles are not necessarily those of the British Council’, but was the British Council under any necessity to print this shameful, shameless, self-regarding tosh? (Not to mention dereliction of – absurd notion – duty.) In a halfway sane world vacancies would be arising in the staff of the University of Wales and the British Council. We must content ourselves with the thought that those whom a nerveless intelligentsia is disinclined to judge should be left to condemn themselves. Except that in this postmodern or whatever age there is no such culpable behaviour as self-condemnation.
In Mind the Gaffe, R. L. Trask’s new guide to (or against) common errors in English, we are urged not to confuse the words ‘principal’ and ‘principle’. Profes
sor Trask tells us that he has just seen a document from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals in Britain ‘in which the phrase “principle applicant” occurs more than forty times’. This, he concludes, ‘is deeply embarrassing’. It certainly ought to be.
In the year 2000 the Department of Education destroyed 48,000 posters distributed nationwide to promote literacy classes, because of spelling mistakes, ‘vocabluary’ and ‘though’ (for ‘through’). This was worse than embarrassing since the reprinted posters cost £7,000 of public money. The Department chiefs, too important to concern themselves with niceties, cast the blame on illiterate proofreaders.
Or their secretaries. In September 2001 a careers website reported that no customers seeking this employment contrived to misspell it in fifteen different ways, including ‘securtery’, ‘sacratery’ and ‘secretie’.
The Do-Not Press describes one of its books as ‘a dark noir mystery’. Foreign expressions confer a certain cachet or prestige, but should always be accompanied by a plain honest English equivalent. ‘The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur’: President Bush is supposed to have said this to Mr Blair regarding the decline of the French economy. (Are these Bushisms authentic or the work of hostile – or, come to that, friendly – spin-doctors?)
I have just heard tell of a bilingual wedding invitation, the English version ending with RSVP, the French with the words ‘Réponse souhaitée’.
Some relief from one’s petty anxieties (should one address her as Doctor or Mrs or Ms? How does one pronounce that Tamil name?) comes from hearing of the agonizing dilemmas faced by other people. A busy Welsh banker living in Amsterdam has acquired an English butler to look after his domestic affairs. Everyone in Amsterdam speaks English, and the banker, though he has learnt Dutch, never uses it. His butler doesn’t speak Dutch at all well, and the banker is thinking of paying for him to have lessons in the language. Is this the correct thing to do?