Incendiary Thoughts
Here’s a great article about books that we are told are classics “but all they ignite in us is anger.” It’s lovely to realize that just because some old people tell you that a book is a classic doesn’t mean that you have to like it, or even respect it. It’s okay to think that some “classics” are garbage. Here’s the London Times’ Rod Liddle’s Red-Mist List.
Burning is too good for them
For many years, in my youth, I refused to read Anthony Powell, simply on account of the way he pronounced his name. “That’s as in Pole, dear boy,” I imagined the Old Etonian saying chidingly. You cannot be a good proto-commie and enjoy Anthony Powell, I thought to myself in my frowsy bedsit, surrounded by garish SWP posters, Tom Robinson records and the collected works of Marx and Marcuse. You could call it a question of upbringing, I suppose. Instead, I would sit myself down with Edward Upward’s trilogy The Spiral Ascent, a hideous and rightly forgotten stab at Marxist literature that can be read now only as unwitting satire. I either didn’t know or didn’t care that Upward’s middle name was Falaise, and that he had been educated at Repton. Maybe I thought Repton was sort of okay, because Isherwood went there too, and he was a good comrade. I think you should be allowed a degree of inconsistency, or stupidity, in youth.
It was a long time later that I came to read A Dance to the Music of Time. I was in my mid- to late twenties, I think, when almost all of my adolescent ideological misapprehensions had been cast overboard. And I can remember, halfway through reading the novel in the sequence titled A Question of Upbringing, flinging it aside and thinking: well, son, you were wrong about Marxism, nuclear weapons, radical feminism, council house sales, positive discrimination, Tony Benn, the Soviet Union, Gramsci and Edward Upward, but by God you were right about Anthony Powell. What ineffectual, pointless drivel.
Powell’s name came up an awful lot as I importuned a bunch of writers and hacks about books they had read that now, when mentioned, make the red mist descend. Books that made them angry just thinking about them; that were once clotted with extravagant critical praise, like the butter surrounding the tiny crustaceans in the potted shrimp at White’s club, or that sort of sprang from the collective consciousness of the metropolitan elite of the time and that everybody felt they had to read. And that, from either category, we now realise are close to worthless.
Many mentioned Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Carlos Casteneda’s interminable drug-soaked hippie ramblings, which I thought I was terribly cool to be reading as a kid. Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man scored heavily, too, and the names of Colin Wilson and Mervyn Peake were invoked with a sort of guttural sneer and one or two expletives on several occasions. Yet two names kept cropping up when my respondents were asked for the misbegotten stuff of serious literature, the people who still today have a reputation: John Fowles and Anthony bloody “Pole”.
This was an interesting, if not entirely scientific, exercise. For many, it provided the opportunity to wallow in what we might call antinostalgia; the shaking of the ageing head and the muttered “My God, were we stupid enough to fall for all that claptrap?”. Like remembering you’d once purchased a Uriah Heep record, or sported three-button high-waisted Oxford bags with a cheese-cloth shirt. The columnist Catherine Bennett chose “the entire Virago imprint”, bemoaning the fact that, for political reasons, she had felt duty-bound to plough through Rosamund Lehmann and the like when there was Philip Roth waiting there, unread. James Delingpole struck a chord with “all magic realists, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez” – there were one or two votes for Sir Salman, too, especially Midnight’s Children. Meanwhile, the historian Michael Burleigh suggested all “angry” black novelists (along with Herbert Marcuse and EP Thompson). Here’s a bunch of stuff we were all told we had to read by the political and cultural climate of the day; because it would be good for us and because, way beyond this, it was our responsibility to start patronising writers from minorities because it was only the oppressive white male cultural hegemony that kept them in an ethnic- or gender-defined ghetto.
Well, no. Looking back at Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Rosamund Lehmann, Aphra Behn, it wasn’t that – it was just good taste that kept those books locked away. Behn, I remember, was touted by 1980s feminists as the world’s first novelist and one of the finest; well, try reading Oroonoko and see if you conclude that it is your ghastly inherent maleness that is provoking tears of boredom or incredulity to start dripping down your face. Alexander Pope had the measure of the woman 300 years ago, although I don’t suppose it is Behn’s fault that, all those years later, she was coopted for political reasons and waved aloft like a burning bra.
Of the acknowledged greats that cropped up on our list, Henry James took a kicking from a few quarters; so, too (inexplicably, to my mind) did Dostoevsky. But much of the bile was reserved for Powell. “What, really – I mean, really – is the point of A Dance to the Music of Time?” asked Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, adding that he found it “stunningly tedious”. The broadcaster John Humphrys concurred, having confessed to starting the entire, endless procession of Powell’s life work, but always giving up by around about chapter five. Me too. Herman Hesse, meanwhile, was nominated by a good few, including the controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer, and the broadcaster Andrew Marr (who, incidentally, nominated Don Quixote as the worst novel ever written).
What draws these nominees together? They perhaps captured a certain spirit of the age in which they were written, replete with its fashionable literary conceits, its political leanings (or lack of them), its mannerisms. And this is what characterises almost all of the books that were nominated. They were not so much deemed to be shocking at the time, or too difficult, or experimental – there is no Henry Miller on the list, or Robbe-Grillet, or Sartre. Instead, they seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply evaporates.
Which leads us to the last question: which recently published and acclaimed books will be seen as similarly purposeless 30 or 40 years from now? Not, I think, the ones that shocked or disturbed: Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Iain Sinclair and so on. Kicking against the pricks seems to imbue a certain staying power. Nor books that are distinguished by their weightiness (WG Sebald) or their experimentalism (Ben Marcus). More likely, it will be those that tick all the right boxes, books that accord so perfectly with what our civilised, liberal middle class wishes to believe in that they might almost have been created spontaneously from the collective willpower. Books that are so terribly of our age, they cannot hope to see beyond it. The obvious contender here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a politely written tome of consummate vapidity, from an articulate, photogenic half-black writer, that tells you, in the end, nothing. Delingpole suggested a fairly reliable guide, mind: almost any novel that has won the Booker prize in the past 25 years. Looking down that horrible list, you have to agree that he has a point. Books chosen by committee that feel as if they might have been written by committee. As a corollary, we might also ask which books of the past 40 or 50 years have now been forgotten, but deserve to be remembered. I’ll start off with almost anything written by David Storey between 1965 and 1977, Nigel Dennis’s A House in Order and the works of Heinrich Böll and Vladimir Voinovich.
The article on the page also invites readers to leave their own “red mist list” so I invite you to do the same here. Go ahead, where your English profs can’t hear you.
