Dark and Bright

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Charles Oman, David M. Perry, Edward Gibbon, Henry David Thoreau, Kenneth Clark, Matthew Gabriele, Richard Overy, Sir Edward Grey, Thomas Hobbes, William Ker

When, late last year, I was reading The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry, I was very discontented with the book, as I said in my summary of the year’s reading. I felt I was being shortchanged: it was poorly written and it felt poorly argued. For instance, it was obvious, from the title onwards, that the book had been written in opposition to the notion of the Dark Ages, yet it never once discussed the idea of the Dark Ages. So it was only today, reading a book about the interwar years (The Morbid Age by Richard Overy), that I discovered that The Dark Ages as a name for the late-classical and early-medieval period is only common in anglophone historiography. The term was, apparently, first used in Henry Hallam’s History of England in 1837, but it only really became a commonplace at the end of that century when it was used as the title of two popular works, one by Oxford professor Sir Charles Oman in 1893, and one by the philologist William Ker in 1904. Overy does not (at least so far as I have got) make the connection, but I wonder if this apocalyptic sense that the end of a civilisation is marked by a descent into darkness lay behind Sir Edward Grey’s famous remark to the journalist, John Alfred Spender, on the evening of 3rd August 1914, the day before war was declared: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Overy also notes something that you would look for in vain in Gabriele and Perry’s book: that most historians today have been trying to “consign the Dark Ages to the historical waste-paper basket”. After all, one wouldn’t want to get the impression that Gabriele and Perry aren’t actually breaking new ground.

My problem with all this is that, at no point, is it clear what is meant by “Dark”, or, indeed, what is meant by “Bright”. In fact, The Bright Ages opens with an account of a church at Ravenna which is lovingly described in terms of the way gold and mosaics are used in such a way as to catch and refract the light, so you might be forgiven for thinking that “Bright Ages” means they had light. Wow, I’d never have guessed. Were the dark ages dark because, in Edward Grey’s terms, someone had turned out all the lamps?

But Overy’s account of the origins of the term “Dark Ages” sheds light on the question (if you’ll pardon the expression). The way British historians, or more precisely English historians, who grew up in the great days of Victoria’s empire regarded the matter, the dark ages began when the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain. From the perspective of one great empire looking back upon another. the retreat from Britain was the end of empire. The fact that the Roman Empire, in one form or another, continued for more than 1,000 years after this moment is irrelevant. To the Victorian imperialists, Britain’s empire was the natural and inevitable successor to Rome. The two empires were seen in the same light: as the bringers of civilisation, as the guarantors of order and rationality, as the creators of laws and mighty buildings and great armies. All who fall under the sway of such an empire should be grateful for all the glories that it brings to them. And so the retreat of that empire could only mean an end to glory, an end to civilisation.

Oh the imperialists knew – for they had all read Gibbon – that the Roman empire had survived long after the retreat from Britain. But they also knew, thanks to Gibbon, that those long ages were a decline, a fall. Besides, how could an empire truly be great if it had abandoned Britain? And because they looked at the Roman Empire and saw Britain, just as they looked at the British Empire and saw Rome, so they shuddered at the thought of all the glories of empire being lost. Surely that must be the end of civilisation, for without the wise rule, the imperial might, the laws and arts and social organisation imposed by empire how could civilisation survive? There could only be darkness.

And so we believed, right up through my school years and beyond. I remember when my own doubts about this dominant narrative first began to develop. It was in 1969, when I was watching the first episode of Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. Here was the period of darkness, of the uncivilised, between the death of one civilisation and the (literal) rebirth of civilisation with the renaissance. And yet, we were seeing exquisite carvings in wood and ivory, complex narratives carved into stone monoliths, gloriously illustrated manuscripts, magnificent buildings that employed extraordinary technological innovations like arches, spires and flying buttresses, all the invention of these supposedly uncivilised ages. It seemed to me that to dismiss the makers of these artworks as uncivilised was stupid. And wasn’t this also the age of Beowulf, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which I read not long after) and the medieval Mystery Plays which fed directly into the theatrical flowering of the later Tudor period. Maybe Gabriele and Perry weren’t too wide of the mark by beginning with that church in Ravenna.

By what measure, then, was this a “dark” age? Was it dark in the same way that a black hole is black, that light could not escape from it. But that late-classical, early-medieval period is not exactly a mystery, and wasn’t even when Hallam coined the term “Dark Ages”. For goodness sake, between 1776 and 1789 Edward Gibbon had published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes, the vast majority of which is concerned precisely with this period of supposed darkness. There is plenty of light flooding out from those centuries in the form of chronicles and sagas and romances and church records and manor rolls and accounts left by travellers and inscriptions and all sorts of other ways that people found to tell the story of their lives and times. There is plenty of primary material to draw upon, enough at least for us to relate the lives of named individuals with at least as much detail and reliability as we relate the lives of figures from classical history.

Well then, is “dark” perhaps a moral judgement? Was this just a particularly nasty and brutish time? Perhaps, but then, when isn’t? “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire and in the time of Henry David Thoreau just as much as they did under the Anglo-Saxon kings or under Charlemagne. Life is as likely to be “nasty, brutish and short”, in Thomas Hobbes’s term, in medieval Italy or in Victorian London. And yes, the so-called dark ages were times of frequent and brutal warfare, but again, when isn’t? The century and a bit of the Hundred Years War probably had fewer casualties in total than the four years of the Great War. And while early medieval war leaders weren’t particularly careful with the lives of non-combatants that got in their way, and there were plenty of massacres of Moslems during the various crusades, and of Jews in, for instance, medieval York, you’d still have to go a bit to match the sheer brutality of the Armenian genocide, the holocaust, the Soviet famines, or China’s Cultural Revolution in our so much more civilised 20th century.

Dark, then, in the sense of a lack of learning? Not really. The Athenian age of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle didn’t really survive the emergence of the Roman Empire, but that doesn’t mean that philosophy disappeared. In the same way, the early-modern philosophical flowering of Descartes and Hobbes and Locke didn’t continue at the same intensity as the 17th century reached its end. There was learning during the early-medieval, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, so it was no more an intellectual wasteland than any other period. The influence of the church was stultifying, but there have always been orthodoxies (Stalinist Russia, Maoist China) to there is nothing uniquely “dark” in that. And besides, the ideas of Greek science and philosophy survived and were developed in the Moslem world, and filtered through into Christian Europe throughout the period; it wasn’t a sudden flood of new learning that came in with the Renaissance.

Or does “dark” just represent the absence of empire? So it would seem.

Love and Death

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Christopher Lee, David Kynaston, George Harrison, Ian Fleming, James Bond, John Higgs, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Pete Best, Ringo Starr, Stu Sutcliffe, The Beatles, Tony Sheridan

In the most recent part of his major postwar history of Britain, On the Cusp, David Kynaston notes that on Friday, 5th October 1962, (which is, incidentally, not quite two weeks after my tenth birthday) two significant cultural events occurred. “Love Me Do”, the first single by The Beatles, and Dr No, the first film in the James Bond franchise, were both released. Actually, neither of those statements is quite correct. The Beatles, then consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best, had earlier recorded a single, “My Bonnie”, as the backing group for Tony Sheridan while they were in Hamburg, the single was released and largely unnoticed in 1961; and and a television dramatisation of Casino Royale had been broadcast on American television in 1954 with Barry Nelson playing Bond. But in essence it is true: “Love Me Do” was the first Beatles recording with Ringo Starr, and Dr No was the first James Bond feature film.

For Kynaston, the events of 5th October 1962 effectively provide the climax for his book. But for John Higgs, it is the starting point. The full title of Higgs’s book, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche, pretty well sums up everything in this work. Neither of these beginnings were particularly auspicious. The Beatles had been turned down by most British record labels, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether a band that had a cult following among Liverpool teenagers could turn that popularity into national success, especially when you consider, as one producer told them while rejecting the band, that guitar bands were already a thing of the past. And the James Bond novels had not exactly been setting the literary world alight since Ian Fleming started churning them out in 1953. As one critic rather waspishly but accurately declared, they were about sex, snobbery and sadism, and it was only when President Kennedy declared that he enjoyed them that they began to sell in significant numbers, which is what prompted one film company to take a chance on filming Dr No. If the dice had fallen only slightly differently, 5th October 1962 would have been just another blustery and unmemorable day.

As it was, however, the two works released on that day changed the British cultural landscape forever, and continue to have a profound effect. Consider, 58 years after the death of Bond’s creator, how many column inches are being taken up with arguments about who might take on the role for the next film in the sequence. Consider, 52 years after the Beatles disbanded, how much screen time was taken up showing and reshowing Paul McCartney’s headline performance at last year’s Glastonbury Festival (and, too late for the book, of course, as I write this The Guardian is reporting that the National Portrait Gallery is about to host an exhibition of photographs of the Beatles taken by Paul McCartney in 1963-64). They are still, you might say, in our ears and in our eyes.

Given the subject matter, Higgs inevitably has to deal with the cultural impact of his two subjects. But he does so without much obvious enthusiasm, and nothing much in the way of a critical vocabulary. He tends to deal in broad generalisations: X is now generally regarded as one of the weakest films in the franchise, Y is still loved by fans today. It tells you nothing.

But Higgs has a different subject in mind. He wants to present Bond and the Beatles as representatives of two conflicting aspects of the British psyche. The Beatles represent love, Bond stands for death. It’s okay as far as it goes. There’s an interesting thesis to be wrung out of this, but I don’t think Higgs does the wringing. The book is facile: I kept thinking that’s the kind of thing I might write if I had a thorough knowledge of the Beatles and the James Bond films, and I had done a little dipping into popular books on social history and psychology. It’s readable, it holds together, it keeps hammering home its central idea, but it never feels like you are getting below the surface.

Mostly he wants us to believe that Bond and the Beatles are two sides of the same coin. So there is never a chapter about the Beatles that passes without some reference to Bond; there is never a chapter about Bond that passes without some reference to the Beatles. He makes great and repeated play of the fact that Help! was the Beatles playing at James Bond, and the fact that Paul McCartney recorded the theme of a Bond film. But mostly these cross-references seem like little more than coincidences (Christopher Lee being a Bond villain and appearing on the cover of Band on the Run generates a whole chapter), or the sort of cross-contamination that is probably inevitable in a relatively small cultural pool. All too often I felt that the link he was trying to make between the two was awkward and forced: yes you might suggest that the Beatles doing this echoes Bond doing that, but I can, without effort, think of a dozen other cultural echoes that are clearer and more pertinent.

We are left with a slight popular book that is entertaining in its way, though I doubt that anyone with more than a scanty knowledge of either Bond or the Beatles would be surprised by anything they encountered here. There is something worth exploring here, but it needs a better, deeper, more thoroughly researched book than this one.

Memories of a year I’d rather forget

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books of the year, Maureen Kincaid Speller

Well I suppose there’s one bright thought: 2023 cannot be worse than 2022. Frankly, when you have experienced the death of the one person who means more to you than anyone else ever could, it is hard to imagine how things might go further downhill from there. The great demons of our existential despair – death, disease, destitution – seem pretty tame in comparison to the psychic pain I have endured, and continue to endure. I mourn Maureen, and I will surely do so for the rest of my life, but at the same time, to honour her memory, to honour everything that our life together meant to us both, I have to start finding some way back into life. At the moment – baby steps – I am doing that mostly through small routines, small habits.

One such fairly meaningless little habit that I have maintained every year for longer than I care to count, is my New Year practice of recording all of my reading and writing of the previous twelve months. Even this bears testimony to the wretched character of the year. 2020 and 2021, the years of pandemic and lockdown and the psychological dis-ease that swept over us all, had seen the number of books I read fall off a cliff. From well over 70 books read in 2019 (a fairly typical year), the number plunged to less than 60 in 2020, and less than 40 in 2021. 2022 was supposed to be different, in earnest of which I set out to write here about every single book I finished, a practice I was able to maintain until March.

But the world changes in a moment, a second can mark the irreparable transition from one reality into another. One morning in March Maureen turned her head and there was a sharp crack in the neck. That was the first indication we had of the cancer that had already spread from her breast to her bones and her liver. The next six months was a descent into hell, hopes raised and dashed, cancer retreating and returning, other infections cruelly weakening her so that by the end she was too weak to take the chemotherapy that might have extended her life. She died in September, and during that stretch from Spring to Autumn I continued to read, but not much and it was an almost insuperable labour, and though I dutifully noted each title as I finished it, there are books in there that I barely remember. And since then, the final quarter of the year? I have continued to struggle with reading. I have written reviews, most of which are quite substantial (though I can make no claims for their quality), but it is only now, in the last week or so of the year, that I am beginning to rediscover how to read for pleasure.

So this year the total of books finished is roughly the same as last year, though the bulk of that reading came in those first three months when the world still seemed normal.

In some ways, I suppose, it should have been a triumphant year. I actually had two books published, which hasn’t happened before and is unlikely ever to happen again. Yet when they did appear, I barely even noticed. The first, Brian W. Aldiss, part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series from University of Illinois Press, arrived during the period when Maureen was at home, in a hospital bed set up in the dining room. I was expecting this one to be controversial, it offers a measured take on his work, praising some and criticising others, and I anticipated that the Aldiss acolytes would condemn the fact that it did not offer unalloyed praise. As it was, the response has been more positive than I predicted, though I was struck by the fact that the two reviews by women that I have seen both pick up on what I call his “priapic masculinity”. One of those reviews, by the way, appeared in the TLS, the first time I’ve been reviewed there which was quite a thrill, though by the time that appeared Maureen was in a care home and I wasn’t really paying that much attention. The second book, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion, part of the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon series, arrived when Maureen was in the care home, though I was able to show it to her. Anecdotally it seems to be quite well received, but I’ve seen no reviews so far. And frankly I wasn’t in any sort of state where I could do anything to promote it. I was proud of the book when I wrote it, now it’s just too associated with a bad time.

And that was nearly the sum total of my writing to appear this year. The only review published was this one, written in 2021; none of the things I’ve written this year have so far appeared. There was one essay I put on this blog, “A Taxonomy of Reviewing“, which was something that had been on my mind for a long time. For a while it seemed to attract some attention, but as is the way of things it has since faded from view.

As for my reading, well, as I say, it started optimistically enough …

1: Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton, an account of the division of Berlin after the Second World War, leading up to the Berlin Airlift. I wrote about it here.

2: April in Spain by John Banville, another of his crime novels that would, until recently, have appeared under the Benjamin Black name. I wrote about it here.

3: The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee, a curious but rather charming historical novel about New York that I wrote about here.

4: On the Cusp by David Kynaston, the latest volume in his magisterial Tales of New Jerusalem sequence, though this one concentrates on just a few months in one year, 1962. It was the year I was ten, as I say here.

5: The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan. In previous iterations if this post I would highlight in bold those books that seemed to me particularly significant. It didn’t seem appropriate this year, but any other time this would certainly have been in bold, as I say here.

6: I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes, which I wrote about here.

7: Maigret by Georges Simenon, which I also wrote about here.

8: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is one of those big, important books whose importance is not one whit diminished by the fact that I don’t always agree with it. I wrote about it here, and also here.

9: Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve. I’ve been finding myself returning again and again to an interest in art, particularly 20th century British art, and this is one of the best books I’ve encountered on the subject, as I explain here.

10: Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon.

11: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan. The second of her books I read this year, and the second that would have been shown in bold in another time. I wrote about it here, but this was where the world went wrong. Everything read after this point was intermittent, and I was able to write about none of them (except for those, later in the year, where I produced reviews).

12: The Cellars of the Majestic by Georges Simenon.

13: The Judge’s House by Georges Simenon.

14: Signed, Picpus by Georges Simenon. While Maureen was increasingly unwell at home, but before she went into hospital for the first time, I would often read to her. What I read was these four Maigret novels, from Cecile is Dead to Signed, Picpus. Now, I remember nothing about them, I could not distinguish one from the other to save my life. We enjoyed them at the time, that is all I know.

15: Witcraft by Jonathan Ree. I referenced this book in the second piece I wrote about The Dawn of Everything, and said I would write at length about the book later. That, now, is not going to happen. But anyone with an interest in the history of British philosophy should read this book, it is endlessly fascinating.

16: Home is the Hunter by Helen MacInnes. This is, so far as I am aware, the only play that Helen MacInnes wrote, and the only thing not set in the contemporary or near-contemporary world. It is, in fact, a comedy that usurps the common story told of the return of Odysseus to Ithaka, and it played with time sufficiently for me to suggest to John Clute that I write an entry on it for the SF Encyclopedia.

17: The Schirmer Inheritance by Eric Ambler. No, sorry, my mind is a blank. I like Ambler and I’m pretty sure I enjoyed this when I read it, but I have no memory of the story whatsoever.

18: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr. Was this the one set on Cuba? These are good books, well written, tightly plotted, it seems wrong that this has so thoroughly and so quickly fled my memory.

19: Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon. By now, Maureen was in hospital, and as it turned out I wouldn’t read to her again. She had already read this, so I picked it up in order to keep up with the series. Not one of the really good ones, I’m afraid.

20: American Stutter 2019-2021 by Steve Erickson. Maureen gave me this, not quite the last book she gave me but close. It is Erickson, of course I was eager to read it, and it is typically excellent, an idiosyncratic personal account of the politics at the end of the Trump era. I wish I had read it in better circumstances, I would have had so much more to say.

21: Checkmate to Murder by E.C.R. Lorac. Maureen came across this somehow, and I read it out of curiosity. Lorac (a pseudonym, it will surprise you to learn) wrote a whole string of crime novels around mid-century. A number of them have been republished by the British Library, I’m not sure I would have bothered. The writing is pedestrian and the plotting lame.

22: The China Governess by Marjory Allingham. To make up for the dull taste left by Lorac, I turned back to Allingham. This is another of her stories set in a small social circle, this time one with money. It is not among her best, I think, but it is so much more satisfying than the Lorac.

23: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. During the weeks when she was at home during the summer, Maureen got all of the Night Watch novels that we didn’t already have. She really enjoyed them, and at her insistence I tried this one. I can appreciate why people like them, but it doesn’t really work for me. But that is something I have found with practically everything by Pratchett that I’ve read. I can sit back and recognise how good they are technically, but I’ve never really been able to immerse myself in them.

24: The Club by Leo Damrosch. The Club was a prototypical gentleman’s club founded in 1764, mainly as a device to lift Samuel Johnson out of one of his depressions and which continued for several decades. It’s members included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joseph Banks and others. In other words, it is a remarkable cross-section of the literary and political world of the late 18th century. A fascinating subject for a book, you might think, and that is indeed what this volume purports to be. Except it isn’t. Damrosch uses the Club as an excuse for one more book about Dr Johnson and James Boswell (who wasn’t even invited to join the Club until nearly ten years after it was founded). There are rather grudging chapters that divert our attention to others – Reynolds, Garrick, Gibbon – but he quickly get back to telling us about Johnson and Boswell. Indeed most of the book hardly even mentions the Club. The style is journalistic, not always convincing, and mostly concerns the individual endeavours of the various members while telling us next to nothing about how the Club operated and any sense of collective endeavour associated with it. It is a big, well-reviewed and ultimately disappointing book.

25: While We Still Live by Helen MacInnes. Maureen had been giving me a MacInnes book every birthday and Christmas for some years, and she had completed the set, in a uniform Titan edition, just before she fell ill. This one was an early novel written during the war about Polish resistance to the initial Nazi invasion. It had been initially published as While Still We Live, a line from the Polish national anthem. I first encountered it, back in the 70s, as The Unconquerable. The latest Titan reprint has opted for a slightly distorted and clumsier version of the original title. It is the longest book she wrote, and you can tell it’s early (the immediacy of the parts of the book set just before the invasion make me wonder if it wasn’t the first thing she tried to write, a novel perhaps put aside for what would be her first published novel, Above Suspicion), it reads like an apprentice work, over-long, unsteady in its pacing, and definitely getting more dramatic as it progresses.

26: Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest. I reviewed this, and conducted a parallel interview with Chris, for Interzone. I’m not sure when it is due to appear, but I certainly haven’t seen it yet.

27: Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis. Around the time I started reading this, Maureen had been rushed back into hospital with pneumonia; by the time I finished she was being transferred to the care home where she would spend the last weeks of her life. Not ideal circumstances for reading about someone I consider a comic genius. But this is certainly an excellent biography.

28: Space for Peace by Richard Howard. Throughout those last weeks, whenever I needed to leave Maureen’s room while she was attended by the care assistants or the psychiatrist or the doctor or what have you, I would be sitting in the lounge making notes about this book, and the next one on the list, for reviews that were already over-due. This is a book about Bob Shaw and James White, considering them more from the perspective of Irish literature than British science fiction. An interesting take, if not always convincing. I reviewed it for Foundation.

29: The Rise of the Cyberzines by Mike Ashley. This was the book I was reading when she died. It is the final volume in Ashley’s five-volume history of sf magazines. I have issues with the whole series, and this volume exemplifies them all. It is valuable as a data set and terrible as a history. But I had the chance to express all that in a long review for SF Studies.

30: Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes.

31: The Hidden Target by Helen MacInnes. The last two Helen MacInnes novels that Maureen had collected for me, and basically all that I was capable of reading in the weeks immediately after her death. They are both relatively late works, so not novels I had encountered during my binge-reading of MacInnes back in the early 70s, but they are both good examples of her style.

32: The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith. I suppose this is where I, very tentatively, started reading for pleasure again. But it was tentative and, with the exception of a couple of review books, my taste led me instinctively to non-fiction. This is one of those areas of 20th century history that I have found myself coming back to again and again, often in very different aspects. I first got interested in the Cold War through my interest in espionage, but that led me to deception, and through that to the way culture was was shaped, sometimes deliberately, by government agencies and by those things that were commanding popular attention. Hence Louis Menand’s The Free World, which I read last year. This feels like something of a companion volume, a look at the Cold War years from a psychological perspective. It is particularly interesting in its discussions of the way both East and West consistently misread the fears and intentions of the other side. There were occasions when you sense that if one side or the other had only begun to pay attention to what was motivating the other side there wouldn’t have been a Cold War at all.

33: Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson. Let me explain: I really like Hutch’s writing, and the Fractured Europe sequence is, I believe, one of the most important text’s in contemporary science fiction. And this late addition to the sequence is, in some ways, one of the best. So it will demonstrate something of my mental state when I say that I began reading this in the middle of October (probably around the time of the funeral), and only finished it late in November. Yet in some ways I felt I was racing through it, I was so caught up in the story. I reviewed the novel for Locus.

34: The World Set Free by H.G. Wells. Another review, this one for the BSFA.

35: The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. In a sense this doesn’t belong on the list since I didn’t actually finish it. My copy of the book (an American first edition hardcover) turned out to have a signature missing, 16 pages absent from the book, which meant I was lacking the majority of the last chapter and the opening of the Epilogue. But by the time I discovered this, I had so many arguments and frustrations with the book that I couldn’t be arsed to contact the publisher for a complete edition. In a sense this is trying to do for medieval history what The Dawn of Everything was doing for ancient history: challenging accepted views and suggesting that we need to look at the so-called Dark Ages with new eyes. Now I am up for this approach, I am very sympathetic to the aim of this book, but … and it is a very, very big BUT … it is so clumsily done. They don’t spell out the analyses they are arguing against, and they counter these analyses with broad generalisations rather than well presented research. The quality of the writing is – shall we be polite – poor. And all too often I found myself unconvinced by arguments I wanted to believe. What they are arguing in this book is, I think, correct, it’s just that we need a far more thorough and systematic presentation of that argument.

36: The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture by Mark Bould. The title is almost longer than the book, which is very short, really just an extended essay. It is also the best thing I have read by Mark, and I was crying out for more, more, more. At some point during the last months of her life, Maureen read this and raved about it, and she was right. I have a feeling that ideas from this book will pervade my thinking for some time to come.

37: Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism and all that Jazz by Kevin Jackson. The last book of the year, finished in the early evening of the last day of the year, and the first of my Christmas presents to myself. We seek patterns, it’s one of the ways we try to make sense of the world, and one of the patterns we look for is a starting point. In truth, to say X began then is usually wrong, things tend to evolve over time, but there are moments when things seem to come together in a significant way. The windy October day in 1962, for instance, when the first Bond movie and the first Beatles single were released on the same day. Or, 40 years earlier, when Modernism took root. Oh Modernism wasn’t born in 1922, there are traces of it back into the previous century, and the First World War played a major part in its development, but 1922 was the year it all seemed to come together, forging a way into public consciousness and creating a template that others would follow. 1922 was the year when Ulysses by James Joyce, “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence, Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence were all published, when the BBC was founded and broadcast radio began, when Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago and became a star, when the Irish Free State was formed and the civil war began and W.B. Yeats became an Irish Senator, when Andre Breton began the movement that would become surrealism, and more and more and more. This book is a day-by-day record of that year: it is light, engaging, opinionated, sometimes wrong (the hero of Agatha Christie’s second novel was not “Hercules Poirot”), often funny, and always readable. I’m a sucker for the sorts of coincidences that turn up on every page, and boy did 1922 seem to attract coincidences, a century later we have seen nothing on a par with the intellectual and creative ferment of that year.

And that is it. 2022 is over, 2023 has now begun. And speaking personally it could not possibly be as bad as last year. So we head on into the sunrise and try to be optimistic.

In the beginning

Tags

Adam Smith, David Graeber, David Hume, David Wengrow, Francis Bacon, George Berkley, J-J. Rousseau, John Locke, Jonathan Ree, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

Let me cast my mind back a few weeks to when I was reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I persist in thinking that this is a fine and important book, despite the comment my post attracted (which I deleted) from some right-wing troll whose main beef with the book seemed to be that Graeber had written an article saying that the pandemic should be the springboard for a major change in society. Yes, well, I happen to agree with Graeber on that, and I remain unutterably sad and angry at the speed with which our serially incompetent politicians set the new normal as being exactly like the old normal, except worse.

Anyway, that aside, I said at the time that the book was at its best when it was raising doubts and questions and hesitations, and at its worst when it was being every bit as dogmatic as the people it criticised. One of the problems I couldn’t articulate came right at the start of the book, their particular origin story, if you like. They started with European Enlightenment ideas about the origins of society building on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes (“nasty, brutish, and short”) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“noble savage”). These ideas became a fixed view of how society developed that continue to plague theoretical work in anthropology and archaeology to this day.

Now, that last part may well be true, and the legacy of Hobbesian and Rousseauvian thought may be as toxic as they say. But I felt dissatisfied with their characterisation of Hobbes and Rousseau and their contemporaries without quite being able to put my finger on why.

However, I am currently reading Witcraft by Jonathan Rée. This is a big, marvellous, contextualizing history of philosophy in Britain from Bacon to Wittgenstein, and I really wish I had had the book 50 years ago when I was trying to study philosophy, it would have made a lot of sense of a lot of things. I will be writing about the book at greater length at some point, but that may be some months away; I’m only 200 pages into the book and I feel like I’ve barely begun.

The point is that I am currently revisiting a period in philosophy that was at the core of one of the first courses I took: the period from John Locke through George Berkley to David Hume and Adam Smith, essentially the period when British epistemology really took shape. One of the things that Rée makes clear is the historical perspective in this new philosophy that began with Bacon. There is a consistent quest to get to the origin of everything. It is there in Descarte’s cogito ergo sum, the attempt to strip away everything to get to the origin of our being; Locke was building on a similar idea with his tabula rasa, the proposal that our mind is a blank slate until experience starts to give us the wherewithal from which to build ideas.

Reading this, revisiting these ideas, I suddenly realized why I had been discontent with the first chapter of The Dawn of Everything. In anthropological and archaeological terms it may have been a perfectly fair reading, not so much of Hobbes and Rousseau but of the aftermath of their work. But in philosophical terms it was wide of the mark. What they were doing was part of the philosophical movement of the time. The quest for the origin of human identity, marked by the cogito and the tabula rasa, but common to most philosophical writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, was commonly extended to all aspects of human life. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke effectively extended the idea of the tabula rasa, the blank starting point upon which everything learned has to be written, to human society. Hobbes was doing the same; his “nasty, brutish and short” characterization of early humanity is like the Cartesian cogito: stripping back all the accretions of modern life in order to identify what, at base, is human society. The images of early human society – hunter-gatherer becoming herder becoming farmer becoming city dweller – that you find in Hume and Smith as well as Hobbes and Rousseau, was a thought experiment. It wasn’t, this is how things started, so much as, this is what you are left with when you strip away what we know as civilization. Just as, for Descartes and for Locke, the mind is empty until it is filled, so society is empty until it is filled.

This is what Hobbes and Rousseau were writing about. They were not laying out a plan for how the evolution of society had to happen, they were presenting a schema for examining what lay under the political nature of their contemporary English and French society. If subsequent anthropologists and archaeologists took this as a plan for how the past actually worked, they were wrong; and if Graeber and Wengrow thought this was what Hobbes and Rousseau thought they were doing, then they were wrong also.

People are Strange

Tags

David Graeber, David Wengrow, J-J. Rousseau, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

What do we have in common? We are living beings, with a measure of self awareness (most of us). We have a head, trunk, four limbs (most of us). We have language (most of us), though the languages are so diverse that they are generally mutually incomprehensible. Does any of that make us alike? Politically, culturally, socially, we are individuals; our tastes and interests and inclinations may overlap with other individuals, but rarely align exactly. We do not agree. On anything.

And we know this. It is built in to the way we operate. Politically, democracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed we wouldn’t need to vote on things. Politically, autocracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed one strong leader wouldn’t need to impose his will on the masses. Hell, the fact that we have politics at all is built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed, we wouldn’t need politics.

And everything else that goes to make us social animals, everything that shapes the world we have made, we ways we choose to live our lives, is built upon a foundation of disagreement, difference, strangeness. Laws, fashion, architecture, advertising, religion, art, language, cuisine – all are marks of difference. Where there is unity, it is imposed, it is artificial, or it is temporary.

This is what Thomas Hobbes meant when he insisted that, before the advent of government, people lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. He was wrong, of course. He was looking at the past through too narrow a focus, imagining that without the imposed artificial unity of “government” other kinds of unity, of social cohesion, were not possible. And as for the kind of top-down, autocratic government he favoured, the less said the better. But for now let us just consider that nasty, brutish and short remark: because this remark still tends to shape the way we consider the distant (and sometimes not-so-distant) past.

We are civilized. Our immediate ancestors were slightly less civilized, or at least enjoyed the fruits of a slightly less civilized political, social and cultural landscape. Our more distant ancestors were quite a bit less civilized. And the earliest ancestors we might choose to contemplate were little better than brutes. Civilization is evolutionary, everything is getting better and better. Everything was always and inevitably building towards the top of the heap where we now find ourselves. Think of it the way Victorians saw Britain as the crowning glory, the natural and indisputable end point of our evolution from Darwin’s apes.

And civilization is technological. The waymarkers on our social and cultural ascent are the inventions we made along the way: fire and agriculture and writing and gunpowder and the printing press and the internet. Look how much stuff we have now; we must be so much better than those who don’t have all this stuff. We forget that the ancient Greeks had steam power, they just didn’t see any use for it other than magically opening and closing temple doors; the Incas had the wheel, there are any number of them on exquisitely made children’s toys throughout the Andes, they just didn’t use them for transport. Stuff doesn’t really measure much, it’s just more and more things we can use or not as we see fit.

We are different. We do things differently, we think differently, we have different goals and different ways for reaching those goals. So why do we assume that human society has followed exactly the same evolutionary path wherever it has developed? It’s the story you get time and time again, there are nuances, variations, depending on which historians you read, but it’s a pretty simple story: first there were hunter-gatherers, then we invented agriculture, then cities developed, and from these grew states, and voila, here we all are today. And as a corollary, those societies that we encounter, in Amazonia or Central Africa, that are still basically hunter-gatherers, are clearly more primitive. It’s why Europeans felt justified in displacing Native Americans: they didn’t have cities, so they are clearly not as civilized as us. It’s why Israelis feel confident in displacing Arabs from their lands, because Arab agriculture is less developed. Its why logging companies feel confident in displacing nomadic societies in the Amazon, because the company is feeding the ever-hungry maw of a far more advanced society. And in Africa, Australia, across Asia the evolutionary tale is just a slightly more sophisticated version of might is right.

And yet … If our civilization has reached an evolutionary peak, why are we so dissatisfied? Why do we feel we have lost something: freedom, perhaps? Why do we feel inequality is growing?

This last question is the starting point for what I feel may be one of the most important books I’ve read in an awful long time: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

(One qualification: when I say “important” I emphatically do not mean that I think it is always right, that I agree with it. Indeed the whole point of the book is to make us question, to say, in the words of the old song, “It ain’t necessarily so”. And that applies to the book itself. When it raises questions, I applaud wholeheartedly; when it, very occasionally, makes dogmatic statements, I hesitate, I think “hold on, maybe not”. To give one, relatively minor, example: when discussing the so-called agricultural revolution, they mention an idea that one researcher has proposed, that wheat domesticated humankind. This they dismiss, quite airily, on the grounds that it takes human intentionality to domesticate anything. Yet I read this passage soon after watching a David Attenborough documentary in which he showed leafcutter ants in the jungle removing a particular type of leaf and carrying them to an underground fungus. The fungus rewarded the ants by secreting a liquor which the ants relished. When the fungus wants a different type of leaf, it changes the liquor, which cues the ants to seek out a different tree. Now it is not clear whether the fungus has domesticated the ants to fetch the leaves it craves, or the ants have domesticated the fungus to give off the liquor they crave, but it is clear that some sort of cross-species domestication has happened here without the necessity for any human intentionality. So, on reading that passage in the book my immediate reaction was to cry: “No!” But that is the beauty and the importance of the book: it is about questioning, about not accepting received ideas, and that includes questioning the book itself.)

So Graeber and Wengrow begin with a question about inequality. They trace this back to the Enlightenment, that curious moment in European history when ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state, about liberty, and about the relationship between the wellbeing of the individual and the growth of technology, all changed. It is a period whose origins can be traced back to the new philosophy of people like Descartes and Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, but which really came into its own during the 18th century leading up to the French and American revolutions, both of which owe their impetus and their guiding spirit to Enlightenment thinking. The ideas about liberty and inequality that emerged in this period seem to be connected to ideas that came into Europe through contact with certain Native American peoples. Graeber and Wengrow specifically concentrate on Kandiaronk, a Huron-Wendat leader whose ideas were disseminated through Europe at this time. But the Enlightenment response to these ideas, particularly as they were expressed by people like Rousseau, tended to suggest the superiority of the European over the “noble savage”; and these ideas informed, and continue to inform, the standard archaeological and anthropological response to the past. The record of the past is of interest in how it grew into modern European civilization; and to the extent that it doesn’t do that, then either the interpretation is wrong or the facts are of no interest. It is quite disturbing how many eminent scholars right up to the present day are quoted expressing exactly that notion.

The problem is that more and more archaeological and anthropological discoveries seem to contradict the standard narratives. But these are two fields that tend to be very focussed on their particular areas. An archaeologist working in Mesopotamia is unlikely to be very aware of anthropological findings from Meso-America. So discoveries that reinforce each other, or that contradict each other, aren’t always noticed. And when they are noticed, the author is likely to be dismissed as a crank. Graeber and Wengrow therefore began this enterprise simply as a way of drawing together theories and discoveries from across the board to satisfy their own curiosity; it only gradually turned from that into the book I have just read.

And it does represent a radical revision of everything I thought I knew about the past. For instance, there is an idea they call “schismogenesis” which suggests that social structures are deliberately set in place as the opposite of what a neighbouring society has adopted. Thus on the west coast of North America there were slave-holding societies bordering societies that emphasised the freedom of every individual member; it isn’t clear which came first, but it seems that one society was deliberately set up because of distaste for the way the other society operated. This is something that contradicts the standard anthropological narrative that societies emerge in response to circumstances rather than as a result of deliberate intent by its members.

Another standard narrative has it that the move to agriculture leads to hierarchies as people are in a position to accumulate wealth and hence power, which in turn leads to the growth of cities. But there are a host of discoveries that contradict each and every one of the assumptions in this narrative. Including evidence of societies that tried agriculture and abandoned it to return to hunter-gathering, and cities that seem unconnected with either hierarchies or agriculture. Patriarchy comes off particularly badly in this book (and they don’t even mention recent discoveries of warrior burials where the warrior in question is a woman). Minoan Crete, for example, has no signs of defensive walls around its cities, unlike the near-contemporary Mycenaean society in mainland Greece. The murals in places like Knossos show bare-breasted women, but naked men, and the women are invariably shown larger than the men. In any other society of a similar vintage, murals that show large male figures are universally considered to be showing kings or other important leaders; so there is no reason to assume the same is not the case in Knossos. And the so-called throne room at Knossos is arranged not for kingly display but as a council chamber where everyone can see everyone else. Meanwhile analysis of the goods Crete is known to have traded with Egypt and the Near East tend to heavily feature things like cosmetics. All the evidence seems to point to Minoan Crete being a peaceful, female led society. But its not the only one, there are similar findings in North America and Mesopotamia among others.

And there is so much more. Too much, almost; there were moments when I was losing track of all that was going on. Cities that seem to be structured on egalitarian lines, with all homes the same and with no palaces or temples. The notion of play-kings, which I found enchanting but I’m not sure I understood it fully. Societies that moved between settled and nomadic depending on the season, and had different leaders and different laws for each situation. Societies in which the king had absolutely no authority. Societies in which captives were either adopted into the tribe or killed gruesomely depending on whim. And more and more and more.

The book is rich, wonderful, questioning, unsettling. Apparently, before David Graeber’s death, it was intended that this would be the first part of a trilogy. We can only hope that David Wengrow has enough material to continue with the project.

A taxonomy of reviewing

Tags

Anthony Burgess, Christopher Priest, Iain Banks, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Holdstock

In the last few years, I have written a series of short articles for Foundation, and a pair of articles for Focus, all on the subject of reviewing. And yet I still don’t feel I’ve got anywhere near to the heart of the matter. Part of the problem is that we have no clear language with which to talk about reviewing. What’s the difference between a review and criticism? Where do you draw the line between review, review essay, and critical essay? Is criticism, by definition, negative? Is a bad review the same as a negative review? We have no generally agreed upon way of answering any of these questions, and any general writing about reviewing is liable to get hijacked by trying to define terms.

I keep worrying away at the issue, without really getting anywhere. And yet there is a dearth of writing about criticism. So, I’ve started going back in my mind to the basics. What follows is a first shot at a list of the sorts of things we talk about when we talk about reviewing. I suspect it is not comprehensive. I also suspect that a lot of people will disagree with a lot of my characterisations. But if this is anything it is just the start of something that needs to be much bigger.

I’m going to start with what may be the most controversial statement of all: reviewing refers to any piece of writing about a text that isn’t written by the author of the text itself. (Sorry, bit of jargon in there: by “text” I mean any created work, whether it is a story, a book, a play, a film or whatever. I tend to write criticism about books, so my automatic inclination would have been to say: “a review is any piece of writing about a book that isn’t written by the author of the book itself”, but that excludes all sorts of other creative endeavours that can be reviewed. So, I used “text” as a catch-all term. But you begin to see the problem here.) I know that, for instance, Anthony Burgess once pseudonymously reviewed one of his own novels. It’s misleading, but I think in the long run I would not count that as a genuine review (it is more in the nature of a joke or a jeu d’esprit, but that is not to say that jokiness has no part in a genuine review). On the other hand, Christopher Priest once reviewed a book by Nicholas Ruddick about Christopher Priest; this does indeed count as a review, and a valuable one at that, because of the privileged information it contained.

Therefore, if I write about something that I haven’t myself written, then I am engaged in reviewing. Note that in this definition I say nothing about length, purpose, or critical content. All those things are important, but they can muddy the water, and what I am trying to do here is start from absolute basics (“I think, therefore I am”), and we can bring these other factors into the picture as that picture begins to develop.

By this broad, loose definition, reviewing can cover anything from a blurb to a monograph. And that’s fair enough, because these are all ways we have of writing about creative texts. They are not all critical ways, they are not all analytical, they are not all objective, but they are all to some degree an outside eye upon the text in question.

Let me start with the issue of purpose, because there is little in the way of specialist language involved here, but at the same time how we regard the purpose of a piece of writing can have a profound effect upon how we regard that writing.

Thus, we might write in order to announce the text. This is reviewing as a branch of publicity or advertising, its primary purpose is to let an assumed audience know that the text is available for them to consume. It is the sort of thing you are most likely to encounter in a blurb, in a catalogue (which often just reproduces the blurb, or, more likely, the blurb on the book just repeats what has already appeared in the publisher’s catalogue), or in a capsule review (some of which also do little more than reproduce the blurb).

In their purest form, such announcements contain no evaluative language whatsoever. But more often than not they overlap with writing to extol the text; that is, the writing of largely uncritical praise that is designed primarily to excite the audience about a new text. Again, this is writing more akin to advertising and publicity than it is to criticism, and is generally found in blurbs and capsules. (A blurb might, occasionally, offer a more measured view of the text. Probably the most famous example of this is the first UK paperback of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, which gathered a number of the most biting attacks that the novel had received. But this is rare, and is almost invariably the result of a careful calculation by the relevant publicity departments about how to best reach the intended audience for the work.) When we encounter such over-enthusiastic writing in a blurb we learn to take it with a pinch of salt; it also appears in some reviews, where it is generally a sign of a less experienced or less than competent reviewer.

This approach to extolling the text rather than evaluating it is also often associated with that curious phenomenon of the modern internet age, the cover reveal, the book blog, or what I have recently seen referred to as the “book influencer”. It may be unfair to tar all who indulge in these activities with the same brush, but that recent coinage, book influencer, suggests that this is how they are viewed by the publishing industry: an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department who can be relied on to manufacture uncritical excitement for the next product. But I suspect that the purpose of the writing here is slightly different: to express a personal relationship with the text. And this is something that you find in many forms of writing, from the book blog up to and including the critical essay. The text is something to be discussed not objectively, but subjectively, almost intimately. This expression of a relationship can take several forms. For instance, some seem to consider that liking a text is the equivalent of being best friends with the author; while for others, the text in question has had some profound, life-changing effect upon their private life. The common factor is that judgement is suspended in favour of personal preference: you have to read this book simply because it meant so much to me. Done well, such relationship writing can be engaging or even thrilling to read, though it is not always the most reliable way to judge a text.

Almost the polar opposite of this approach is what is, or at least what used to be, the standard form of review writing: evaluation. At its simplest, the writer who ends a capsule review saying: “Buy this book!” or, “Avoid like the plague!”, is evaluating the text. That is, they are standing back from the text to consider how it stands up against some critical standard. What that standard is might not be entirely clear, there are times when you just have to take it on trust. But any act of evaluation is a step away from taking the text on its own terms.

However, simple declarative statements – this is a good book, this is a bad film – are not very satisfactory for the reader, and, from experience, I can say that they are not very satisfactory for the writer either. What is needed is the next step: analysis. Evaluation can come in a capsule review, but analysis requires something a little longer (length is not the defining characteristic of different types of review, but it is a factor in what the review can achieve). Analysis is understanding why you have arrived at a particular evaluation, why you think the text is a good book or a bad film, and then conveying that explanation in what you write.

Of course, analysis is never simple, and those of us who have gone that route have found it to be a very slippery slope indeed. Because it is rarely as easy as saying that this text is good because of X, or bad because of Y. Indeed, the more carefully you look at any text to answer, to your own satisfaction, why you actually like it, the more things you are going to find. It can quickly get to the stage where not finding a complex multiplicity of things to consider counts against the text: it is too simplistic to be truly satisfying. That confusing multiplicity of things to consider will, in the end, get in the way of evaluation. If you determine that elements A, B and C are done well, but elements X, Y and Z are done poorly, how can you decide whether, on the whole, the text is good or bad?

All too often, reviewing is considered to be a simple matter of making a judgement. But the more you get into reviewing, the more you realize that making a judgement is a very small part of the job of reviewing. Evaluation and analysis are both acts of comparison, but the more analytic you become, the more you realize that what is being compared and how it is being compared are fundamental to your own understanding of the text being reviewed, and therefore to your readers’ understanding. This leads, inevitably, to context. Again, while not invariable, this does tend to require more space than the types of writing we’ve considered to this point. Context, of course, can mean many things. It can be as simple as comparing the text to previous things by the same author, or you may look at how it fits with other works on the same topic, or other works from the same period. You may even fit the text into a broader artistic context: the art and literature of the Civil War, film and writing in the Great Depression, artists respond to the Cold War, that sort of thing.

By examining a text within a particular context, you are starting to do something more than evaluate, analyse, and review. It is somewhere in here, for instance, that reviewing tends to give way to criticism, though you won’t find anyone able to pinpoint exactly where that change might occur. What you are doing (another inescapable jargon term) is offering a particular reading of the text. Reading, in this sense, is a curious term. It is not an impersonal, objective review (to the extent that any review can be entirely objective), but neither is it subjective in the same way that relationship writing is subjective. When you offer a reading of a text you are not saying that this is the single and definitive way to approach that text. Indeed, to offer a reading is implicitly to acknowledge that there may be multiple other readings, each of which may be valid in its own way. What you are saying is that when I see this, and this, and this, in the text, bearing in mind such and such a context, I am led to interpret it this way. This is how the text seems to make sense to me.

Another way of interpreting reading in this sense, therefore, is understanding. This is what tends to be going on in most long-form writing about texts. Long form because it inevitably involves a deep dive into the text itself, considering things like word choice, sequence of events, the way characters are presented, etc, while at the same time producing a broad sweep of all sorts of other things that might impinge upon the text, from contemporary politics to the state of scientific knowledge. None of this can be done briefly, which is why this type of writing tends to be the preserve of the long critical essay or, more often, the monograph. And the purpose of such writing is not to extol the text, or to judge it, but simply to explain it. By this I mean explain it to the writer; the critic is trying to understand why the text is structured the way it is, why that structure works or does not work, and why the critic responds to it the way they do.

All of these terms – announce, extol, relationship, evaluation, analysis, context, reading, and understanding – help to explain why people might write about a text. The list is probably not exhaustive, but it does serve as a series of way stations we might notice as we turn to consider how people write about a text. For want of a better identifier I have subsumed all of what follows under the term “reviewing”, but this is reviewing in the very broadest sense. Basically, whenever someone sets out to write about a text there are at least as many ways to do it as there are reasons for what they do. The list that follows is roughly arranged in order of ascending size from shortest to longest, but length itself is no determinant of how a piece of writing should be categorized. There are overlaps in both length and approach between each of these types of writing, and in several cases the differences between two entries on the list are so imprecise that it is impossible to say where the line can be drawn, or even whether it should be drawn. Again, this list is surely not exhaustive, but it is intended to help find a starting point for any informed discussion of criticism and reviewing.

Let me start with what is probably the most questionable item on this list: the blurb. How can I justify including this among the extended family of reviewing? But a blurb is designed to encapsulate a book, to draw attention to its most salient features, and to explain why a potential reader would be well advised to pick the book up. And those are all characteristics that we will encounter again and again in this list. By blurb, I mean a short piece of writing, generally no more than around 100-200 words, that appears on the dustjacket of a hardback book or the back cover of a paperback. Pretty much the same text will have appeared in the publisher’s catalogue, and will also appear on Amazon and other bookselling sites. (There are equivalents for other forms of text, on the back of a DVD box, on Spotify, on the label beside a painting in a museum, but blurbs on books is probably the form we are most familiar with.) Blurbs will often be accompanied by quotations, either solicited from friendly authors or pulled from early reviews (I’ll come back to this later), but these are not part of the blurb as such.

I have written a few blurbs in my time, and believe me it is not an easy thing to do. I know some publishers try to save time and/or money by getting the author to produce their own blurb: this is not a wise decision. If you could sum up your book enticingly in 200 words, you wouldn’t have needed to write 200 pages. It takes distance from the text to be able to pick out something so immediately engaging that by the time the reader opens the book to page one they are already committed to reading it. It is advertising copy, therefore, but it still requires a degree of objective appreciation of the text.

When I say that the blurb is the shortest item on this list, that is not always the case. The capsule review, also sometimes referred to as the notice, can be shorter. When I used to write for the late, lamented Good Book Guide, I had no more than 50 words per book. Most capsule reviews you come across these days are in the form of round-up reviews, where the reviewer is given a set number of words to cover five or ten new books, usually in a given category. The Guardian, for instance, has monthly round-ups of science fiction and of crime fiction. There is enough flexibility in this format for the reviewer to make some over-arching judgement, and more attention might be paid to the better works on the list while others may receive little more than a sentence or two. For me, the archetype for the capsule review is at the back of the New Yorker, where there are four unsigned reviews in a single column. It is easy to quarrel with these very brief reviews, but they are a model for how to give just enough detail to convey a sense of the book and still provide some evaluation.

As a way of moving on to the next category, this is a story I have told many times, but it bears repeating. I was at a launch party for a book and was introduced to the head of the publishing house. As a way of making conversation, he asked what I did, and I said I was a reviewer. Where? I gave a list of rather prestigious print publications: Interzone, Foundation, TLS, that sort of thing. I could see his eyes glazing over. Someone else approached. What do you do? I’m a book blogger. And the publishing head honcho literally turned his back on me. There was a time when reviewing would have aroused more interest, but now it is the immediacy and the (presumed) uncriticality of book blogging that gets attention. Because this can be used, this is an unpaid adjunct to the publicity department.

I don’t want to call this category book blogging because that is too broad a term. I have a blog where I sometimes write about the books I read, though I don’t consider myself a “book-blogger”. I think the term I came across recently (I’m not sure, now, where I found it or how much currency it has) is a better fit: book influencer. There are all sorts of blogs, vlogs, YouTube channels and the like out there where “influencers” spend all their time spreading the word to their followers about everything from fashion to holiday destinations to investment opportunities. Book influencers make books just one more commodity to be exploited in this way. The ideal, for influencers, is to make the audience excited about each new product, and not to ask too many questions about it. It is to greet each book with squee and to treat something as mundane as the revelation of the cover of a forthcoming book as if it were of world-shattering importance. There is no distance, no objectivity; it is advertising by enthusiasm alone. There is something almost incoherent about the worst examples of this (and it is a model still so new that it tends to be judged by its worst examples), which seems to me to be a very strange way of responding to a literary text.

The broader term, book blogger, of course, covers the influencers, but also a much wider territory from the capsule to the critical essay. In fact, it is a category defined not by its content but by its medium. So, when I heard that one blogger had allegedly said that they made sure that every single review they published carried at least one pull quote that the publisher could use to advertise the book, I knew that this person was admitting that what they wrote contained no critical judgement of value but was simply unpaid advertising. But I also knew that the same could have been said by writers of print only reviews. It is a dishonest way of writing about books (at least the blurb writers and influencers are honest about the intent of what they are doing), but it is a dishonesty you could find in every branch of reviewing. I have had occasional quotations lifted out of my reviews to appear in advertising, but the lines were never intended for that purpose, and in fact were not ones I would have expected to be used that way. To try and produce such lines deliberately and consistently in every single review can only do damage to the way you write about books in general.

Which brings us to the heart of this taxonomy: the review. Okay, I said at the start that reviewing covered any piece of writing about a text. In broad terms, and given how loosely we use the language, that is the case. But we also use review much more narrowly to mean a particular type of critical writing about a text. In general, what we call a review is a flexible enough definition to hide a multitude of sins. So, let us begin by saying that a review (in this sense) is a piece of writing devoted to one specific text. It is generally critical writing; that is, it tends to evaluate the work, and will usually provide enough analysis to support that evaluation. Where the text is fictional, then a plot summary is common; however, those reviews that rely excessively, or even totally, on plot summaries are generally less satisfactory, not least because they move the review closer to advertising. In terms of length, a review will sit somewhere between a capsule and a critical essay, but with quite a bit of overlap at either end of the scale. We might say they could be anywhere from around 200 words to around 2,000 words, though on average, depending on the venue, they tend to fall in the 400-500 word range or the 1,200-1,500 word range.

While this might serve as a template for a review, however, there are considerable variations (I’ve written reviews up to 5,000 words, for instance). The venue where the review is to appear might well have word limits, of course (when I’ve written for the Times Literary Supplement they tended to ask for around 800 words, while Strange Horizons tends to prefer around 1,500), but the text being reviewed will also affect the length. I’ve reviewed books where it has been a struggle to find as many as 1,000 words to say about it, and others where 2,000-3,000 words feels like I’m not doing it full justice.

Also, there are different types of review. What I have described here might be taken as the standard: a relatively concise critical appreciation of a single work. But you might also be writing about several different works in a review column, which is a sort of grown-up version of the round-up mentioned earlier. As with a round-up, you would have a certain number of words in order to write about a certain number of texts. There would be flexibility within this, so that some texts might receive more attention than others. And there is also the flexibility to provide either an overall critical judgement, or to make a judgement on each book in turn.

On the other hand, if you are reviewing a single text and find that 2,000 words or so doesn’t do it justice, then what you are writing may well be considered a review-essay. I recently wrote a review of around 1,500 words, but when I submitted the review I mentioned that I had enough notes to at least double that word length. I got an email in reply saying, effectively, go for it. The revised piece finally came in at around 5,000 words. To my mind it is still a review, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of one particular work, but the length alone makes me think it should probably be classed as a review-essay. But the distinction is, at best, fuzzy.

If it is hard to say where a review turns into a review-essay, it is even harder to distinguish between a review-essay and a critical essay. In fact, in many cases I think they are just two names for the same thing. Consider it as a spectrum: the majority of the spectrum, the middle ground, is where review-essay and critical essay overlap. But at one end, where review-essay shades into review, the term critical essay doesn’t really apply; while at the other end, where critical essay shades into academic writing, the term review-essay doesn’t really apply.

For me, a critical essay tends not to focus on one individual text, but rather looks more at context. This may mean the essay considers a body of work, a particular theme, a certain period, or some other idea. Therefore, any individual text is of interest more for how it relates to other texts than for how it achieves its own peculiar effects, but again this is not a hard and fast distinction. As I’ve noted before, venue may have a lot to do with where the writing sits on this spectrum. A journal like Science Fiction Studies, for example, divides its contents into three main groups, essays, review-essays, and reviews. Here, the review-essay is a slightly longer form of the review, but is not necessarily much shorter than any of the critical essays. And while the essays tend to be more thematic in structure, they are quite likely to deal with just one work; the difference between essay and review essay, then, tends to be that the review-essay addresses a recently-published book, while the essays turn to a somewhat older work. A review or review-essay, therefore, implies an immediacy in looking at something hot off the presses; while a critical essay implies a temporal distance, a cooler appraisal.

Should a critical essay be written for a book rather than a journal, it may well be referred to as a chapter. There is really no substantial difference other than venue.

The sorts of essays I’ve been talking about are likely to find their way into such (relatively) popular magazines as the Times Literary Supplement of the New York Review of Books, but they are probably most readily found in academic journals and books. For that reason, they can merge into critical theory. I’m inclined not to include critical theory as part of my excessively broad understanding of “reviewing”, because in the main it is not writing about texts, but rather writing about how texts are written about. I’m open to persuasion on this, and this paragraph is included as a marker on that score, but at the moment I’m not inclined to take this already overlong essay down that particular rabbit hole.

There is one more category to be included in this catalogue of how people write about texts, and that is the monograph. Monograph is just a fancy way of saying a book-length work by (usually) a single author on a single subject. Within the terms of this taxonomy, that single subject may be a creator’s entire body of work, but it may also be a single text. I am at the moment engaged in writing a short book about Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (when finished, my text is likely to come in at close to half the length of Holdstock’s original novel). Again, this is only a difference in length from the critical essay, though the various chapters of the monograph may well come across as a series of interconnected essays.

So, writing about a text can be done at any length from 100 words or so to 100,000 words or so. The infinite gradations between these two extremes tend to come under a whole string of different names, but the differences are not always readily apparent, and there is so much overlap along the way that the different terms can bring confusion rather than clarity.

There were a few other confusing terms I wanted to consider in this taxonomy. The first of which is criticism itself. The reason I called this a taxonomy of reviewing rather than a taxonomy of criticism is because of the problems with that word. In popular parlance, criticism doesn’t just have a negative connotation, it is actively antagonistic: to be criticised is to be attacked. In terms of reviewing, however, criticism is a much more neutral term. Criticising a work may involve both praising it and decrying it. But nobody outside what I suppose we might term the reviewing fraternity really grasps this nuanced difference. They may recognise that a film critic or a literary critic is concerned with looking at both good and bad within their chosen remit, but the practice of criticism continues to be negative. That’s why I wish we had another word for criticism. I am happy to include the word “critic” in my email address, but when asked what I do I invariably say I review books. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can entirely escape the word “criticism”, so we need to use it with care, wearisome as that may be.

I have sometimes wondered whether the practice of criticism derived in some way from the study of moral philosophy. Certainly, as critics we are very free with words like “good” and “bad”. But we must be wary of the fact that these, too, are ambiguous terms. What do we mean by good? Morally uplifting? Well achieved? Satisfying? A particularly fine example of its type? Some or all of these at the same time? And when we identify a particular piece of writing as a bad review, do we mean a review that is overall critical (that word, again) of the text in question? Or do we mean a notably poor example of a review, regardless of the text in question? We use good and bad liberally, indeed carelessly, to mean all of these things, often at the same time.

One of the things we look for as critics is the quality of the writing. How clearly concepts are expressed. How succinctly complex ideas are put across to a non-specialist audience. And yet the language of criticism itself is so full of ambivalence, so open to myriad different interpretations, that it sometimes seems impossible to write criticism clearly and succinctly. That’s why, whenever I write about reviewing or criticism, I feel that the language is working against me. I can write criticism in plain English with no problem, yet the moment I write about criticism every word seems to be freighted with ambiguity. Can I talk about analysing and contextualizing as though they are the same thing? Is there any relevant difference between a review and a critical essay? What on earth do I mean by saying something is good? These are words we use all the time, but we use them badly(?) because we never stop to think what the words are saying. And if we can’t be precise in our language, if we can’t disentangle words so that their meaning is clear to a lay audience, is it possible to write about criticism at all?

Whereof one cannot speak

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A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Charles Sanders Peirce, David Edmonds, Ernst Cassirer, G.E. Moore, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, Jenny Uglow, John Dewey, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, Kurt Godel, Louis Menand, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Moritz Schlick, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Otto Neurath, Plato, Rene Descartes, Rudolf Carnap, Samuel R. Delany, Stuart Jeffries, Susan Haack, Walter Benjamin, William James, Wolfram Eilenberger

For the few brief, interminable weeks between the last of our A-Level exams and the end of the school year, we were still required to go into school every day. There was nothing for us to do, no lessons, no activities, but we were there. We spent our lunchtimes at the local pub, where the teachers discretely ignored us except to maybe tap a watch when it was time to get back to school. Other than that, I spent most of my time in the school library, reading. That was when I first read The Lord of the Rings. More importantly, because our history teacher had once told us Plato’s allegory of the cave, that was when I decided to read Plato. I read several of the Penguin Classics at that time, starting with the collection of short dialogues gathered as The Last Days of Socrates. It changed my life.

I had already been applying to universities to study history, but when I got to the New University of Ulster I found that I was able to take one or two modules in a different subject. So, with Plato still fresh in my mind, I took Introductory Philosophy. This turned out to be a brisk canter through epistemology from Descartes, via Locke and Russell, to Wittgenstein and analytical philosophy. Even before the end of the module I’d applied to change my major to philosophy. Not possible, I’d already done too much history, but I could do a joint degree in philosophy and history.

This was the early 70s, the emphasis, certainly at NUU and at Warwick where I did a postgrad year, was heavily on Anglo-Saxon philosophy, notably empiricism and particularly linguistic philosophy from the later Wittgenstein. I did some courses on ethics, which I found interesting but oddly unsatisfying, and formal logic which I enjoyed but having never been a mathematician the closer the two disciplines converged the more I was out of my depth. But my real interest, and the dominant line of thought at both universities, was around the old questions: what is real, what is true, how do we know there’s a world out there, what do we mean by …

Not my copy, but in pretty much exactly the same condition.

All of this was enduringly fascinating, and almost entirely anglophone: I read Ayer and Russell and Austen and Peirce and Quine and Kuhn and Popper, with brief asides to Frege and Carnap, but most of all I read Wittgenstein. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus blew me away, and then I discovered Philosophical Investigations which came to dominate my thinking in ways I never anticipated. What was then rather airily dismissed as “Continental Philosophy” practically never crossed my horizon. Kant’s Prolegomena came into one of my ethics classes, and I did a course on the Critique of Pure Reason (the margins in my copy of the book are filled with tiny pencil scribbles pointing out how wrong Kant was), but other than that, nothing. Once or twice, in the university library or bookstore, I would glance at one or other of the great tomes of continental philosophy, Being and Time or Being and Nothingness, but invariably gave up within a page or two. I did not then, and do not now, have a great deal of patience for metaphysics, and those books struck me as unreadable nonsense.

The one bit of continental philosophy we were aware of was the Vienna Circle, though we knew of them en masse rather than individually. It was years later before I discovered, for example, that Carnap was a member of the Circle, and that Gödel was associated with them. What the Vienna Circle actually thought we encountered almost entirely through A.J. Ayer, not the most reliable of sources. And though they regarded their own work as logical empiricism (which would have made their work a pretty good fit for my own interests), they were termed, largely thanks to Ayer, I suspect, logical positivists. Let’s face it, simple positivism is a fairly easy position to undermine, particularly when you’ve encountered Popper’s falsifiability.

My tutor at Warwick was Susan Haack, even then a very big name in logic, and at one point I produced an essay for her which she regarded as so good she was going to footnote it in her next book. (Did she do so? I’ve no idea, I never saw that book.) Unfortunately the external examiner wasn’t of like mind (for reasons I’ve long suspected might be partly political) so I missed out on the MA by a whisker, and at that point left philosophy behind me. Or I thought I did, at least I stopped keeping up with the subject. But at this time I was already into science fiction, and I wrote what would have been my first piece for a fanzine about Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. It wasn’t used, but in the next issue of the fanzine the editor included a note which rather dismissively said that he’d received a review of Triton which said it was all about philosophy. I don’t think that’s actually what I said, but the piece has long since vanished so I can’t be sure. But the editor’s response made me think, for the first time, that philosophy and reviewing weren’t actually all that far apart. So when I did seriously start writing reviews a year or so later, I found my years of study had a use after all.

If I thought I had left philosophy behind, it would also be true to say that philosophy hadn’t actually left me behind. I kept encountering bits of philosophy all over the place, often in reviews or essays in the TLS or LRB, and I also kept recognising echoes of the philosophy I had learned peeping out of the things I wrote. But I wasn’t actually reading philosophy.

Except that a few years ago I came across a book called The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. Nowadays, we’d probably call it a group biography, but at the time it was presented as a cultural history; I’m not sure there is any difference between the terms. Menand told the interconnected stories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, in effect, though it is not spelled out as such, telling the story of American pragmatic philosophy. It is a wonderful, fascinating book and to an extent reawakened my interest in pragmatism; though to be honest I’d never been that convinced by the pragmatics, and was more interested in the book as a history of ideas.

Other group biographies began to turn up, usually presenting the history of ideas as the story of the people who were central to the development and propagation of those ideas. The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow about the congeries of scientists and industrialists in the late-18th century Midlands is one of the best of the type; Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries about the Frankfurt School is one of the densest and, in the end I think, least satisfying. It was after reading Grand Hotel Abyss that I said there really ought to be a group biography of the Vienna Circle. No sooner said than done: I spent part of my holiday reading exactly that book, The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds. And, as is the way of these things, you wait for one book and two come along at the same time, because also on holiday I read Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger. Time of the Magicians isn’t about the Vienna Circle, though its members do appear, but it tells the story of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin, which means that it overlaps with both The Murder of Professor Schlick and Grand Hotel Abyss.

I want to say here and now, in case it doesn’t become crystal clear later on, that these two books are already set fair to be my top two books of the year.

Let’s get the murder out of the way first. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was shot and killed by a deranged former student. The right wing press in Austria defended the student on the grounds that Schlick, though not Jewish himself, had been promulgating Jewish ideas. And when, a couple of years later, Germany annexed Austria, the student walked free. Meanwhile, the other philosophers who had belonged to the Vienna Circle, that Schlick had headed since the end of the First World War, all had to find ways of fleeing the country. They ended up scattered in Britain, across America, and in Australia, so the cohesive unity that had been the Vienna Circle was broken. That is the fervid political atmosphere against which the story of the Vienna Circle is played out.

But the intellectual atmosphere of the time was no less fervid. The Circle had formed in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, largely at the instigation of Otto Neurath, and they met every week for the next decade and a half, to discuss philosophical issues of the day and also to try to ensure that the madness of war that had killed many thousands and torn their country apart would not recur. In philosophical terms, they saw the enemy as metaphysics, and they wanted to advocate a rational, scientific, empirical approach that would institute a rational, scientific, empirical society in which war would be unthinkable. There was, in short, a very political issue underlying their abstract philosophical musings. Particularly as the empiricism they advocated was associated with Jews (Einstein for one), while the dominant philosophical approach in Germany, from Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger, concentrated on phenomenology and metaphysics. I don’t think, until Schlick was murdered, that the Vienna Circle had any appreciation of the political overtones of their thinking (well, Neurath did, but I’m not sure about the others), but they were increasingly at odds with the intellectual climate of their time and place.

Then, in 1922, Wittgenstein published the Tractatus, and set the Vienna Circle ablaze. Here was the book that said everything they believed in. Or at least, so they thought. Nobody at university told me that the Vienna Circle was inspired by Wittgenstein; it would have spoiled the dominant narrative, that they were on the wrong side of philosophical history, and Wittgenstein was the one who done them in. Actually, the interpretation of the Tractatus that I was taught was pretty damn close to the Vienna Circle’s interpretation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t Wittgenstein’s own interpretation. They (and we) saw Wittgenstein as an anti-metaphysician: metaphysics cannot be expressed in the language of logic, so it is not worth saying. But Wittgenstein saw himself as paving the way for metaphysics: it is worth saying precisely because it cannot be expressed in the language of logic. (I derive this interpretation from both The Murder of Professor Schlick and Time of the Magicians, so I assume this is now the standard reading of the Tractatus, but that wasn’t what I was taught, so it came as something of a shock to discover this position being clearly laid out in both these books.)

I wish I had had one or both of these books when I was studying philosophy. It is not just that complex arguments are laid out clearly and effectively (I even feel like I’m starting to grasp something of what Heidegger was on about), it is that the cultural context makes sense of the way a lot of these arguments developed. For example, I realise that much of what I was taught, many of the approaches to problems that I adopted as my own, were lifted straight from the Vienna Circle, including many of the same mistakes needless to say. And yet the overall tone of what I was taught was that the Vienna Circle was wrong. And where we were taught stuff that came straight from the Circle – Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, for instance, which became one of the touchstones I returned to again and again – there was no reference to the fact that this came from the Circle.

At least I knew about the Vienna Circle. Because I did no Continental Philosophy, I knew nothing of the other great development in philosophy that was going on at exactly the same time as the Vienna Circle was meeting. This other strand came to a head at Davos in 1929. Davos was famous for hosting philosophical conferences, before it became famous for hosting economic conferences, and the highlight of the 1929 conference was a debate between Cassirer and Heidegger in which Heidegger, at least by his own reckoning, trounced Cassirer. Now Cassirer is probably not one of the names to conjure with in the history of philosophy, he was rather a bland, middle class suburbanite really. He did some interesting work, particularly in the area of myth, but he was never the sort to set the world on fire. But earlier in 1929 he had made an impassioned speech in defence of democracy. Heidegger, on the other hand, was everything Cassirer was not: a fire raiser, magnetic, idiosyncratic, and decidedly not a democrat. He was also not a particularly nice man, happy to betray his own mentors in order to secure his own advancement, and he joined the Nazi Party not out of necessity to preserve his own position, but out of conviction. This, and the fact that he had been briefly Hannah Arendt’s lover, was all I really knew of Heidegger before I read Time of the Magicians; well, that and the fact that he wrote some of the most turgid and impenetrable prose known to humankind. The debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, therefore, became in retrospect a battle for the soul of German philosophy, one in which the metaphysics of Nazism emerged victorious.

In the decade covered by Eilenberger’s book, both Cassirer and Heidegger were part of the German academic establishment, professors at universities. Neither Wittgenstein nor Benjamin was a full-time academic (not for want of trying on Benjamin’s part). Neither was at Davos, neither took any part in these soul-stirring debates, but both were refining their thinking in ways that would shape the intellectual world that was emerging. Wittgenstein didn’t even have a PhD at this point. He had studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge before the First World War (Edmonds implies that ever after Russell had a sort of philosophical inferiority complex because of Wittgenstein, which is believable and not believable at the same time). When the war began, Wittgenstein had returned home to fight in the Austrian army, and began to write the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while a prisoner of war. Because he believed that the Tractatus was the absolute last word in philosophy (if nothing else, he was an arrogant sod; no wonder when he returned to Cambridge in 1929 that John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Well, God has arrived”) he saw no point in continuing to do philosophy and got a job as a teacher in a small rural school. He wasn’t very good at it, and ended up moving from school to school several times over the next few years. Then he worked briefly as an architect to help design a new house for his sister (he was a multimillionaire who had given away all his money, but the family still tended to look after him). Meanwhile, his book had been published to a weird mixture of acclaim and bemusement. He was persuaded to meet several members of the Vienna Circle and was frustrated by the fact that, by his lights, they were dramatically misinterpreting what he wrote. But this prompted him to start rethinking his ideas (the Blue and Brown Books would start to be written around this time, preparing the way for the Philosophical Investigations that would be published posthumously), and at the end of the decade he allowed himself to be tempted back to Cambridge. Here Russell and his fellows connived to give Wittgenstein a PhD, so he could be awarded a grant and a permanent position; the thesis was the Tractatus, the oral exam was conducted by Russell and G.E. Moore, and it ended with Wittgenstein telling them, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”

Meanwhile, Benjamin was scrabbling a living writing reviews, begging for loans, chasing all sorts of academic positions and then screwing up every opportunity he was given. Though as the decade ended the Frankfurt School was getting started, and Benjamin would at last find a sort of intellectual home if not an actual home. One of the fascinating things about Eilenberger’s book is the structure: he takes us roughly year-by-year through the 1920s, and in each chapter deals in turn with his four principals. But this allows him to do a lot of comparing and contrasting with often surprising results. He traces out a mass of complex interconnections between the ideas of the four philosophers, the similarity in their approach to metaphysics taken by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the way Benjamin’s thinking intersects with Wittgenstein’s, and so on. For what is essentially a popular book, there is a lot of complex work going on so that ideas keep arising and shifting and showing themselves in unexpected lights. Between the two of them, these books lay out a vivid map of philosophical thought between the two world wars, a time when philosophy was at its most austere and challenging, and yet they keep everything crystal clear. These are two books that will, I suspect, shape my own thinking for some time to come.

And now, surely, it is time for a book about the Cambridge School of Philosophy …

Unenlightened

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Ritchie Robertson

Working my way through Ritchie Robertson’s dense but wonderful account of The Enlightenment and I am struck by two words. The words recur throughout the book (as far as I have got), sounding like a tocsin proclaiming not the achievements of the Enlightenment, but its purpose, its aspirations.

Those two words are “happiness” and “tolerance”. And I realised that they have all but disappeared from public discourse these days.

Happiness crops up in that great Enlightenment document, the US Declaration of Independence, which asserts that the purpose of independence is the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That line gets quoted a lot, but the emphasis is always on life and liberty, although these have been strangely distorted by politicians of all parties. Happiness, as a national aspiration, is forgotten.

When did you last hear a politician of any stripe talk about happiness? Come to that, when did you last hear anyone talking in public about happiness? When, many decades ago, I studied philosophy, I don’t recall happiness cropping up in any of the contemporary moral or political philosophy I encountered. I don’t know if it is any different now, but I doubt it. We don’t hear church leaders talk about happiness, or educators, university administrators, local councillors.

Now, admittedly, business leaders talk all the time about “keeping the customer happy”, but in this instance happiness is more of a sedative than anything else. As long as “they” are happy with what we give them, then “we” can do what we want, make any profit we desire. This is not an aspiration to spread happiness but to keep the lid on dissent. The word crops up in entertainment, also, but to much the same effect: consumers of entertainment are just one more type of customer to be kept placated.

When did happiness stop being an aspiration beyond the private sphere? It is not as if we have achieved national happiness, which might mean it could safely be forgotten as we move on to other things. Far from it. And besides, happiness en masse is probably unachievable, it must remain an aspiration. But surely it is a worthwhile aspiration, something we should desire for ourselves, our neighbours, our fellow citizens. And as such, surely, it is something that those who set out to be our leaders should hold up as their goal, their shining city on the hill? But they don’t, do they, none of them. Politics, business, religion, none of them any more have any real interest in making life tolerable for the masses, for their constituents, their customers, their followers. That’s not cost effective, is it, it’s not worth the effort. As a polity we have gone beyond the tolerable, the goal now is control, power, the certainty of being returned to lucrative positions time after time.

And the way to secure that certainty, that lucre, is to scrap the tolerable, the tolerant. Doubt, fear, enmity, are the great agents of control. In advertising, we were taught that the two great ways to sell anything are greed and fear. And it works: you make people fearful and they are in your pocket forever.

Which is almost certainly why that other great enlightenment word, tolerance, is no longer heard. Tolerance is wonderful for helping people get along with each other, for spreading communal happiness; it is not so good for securing control. Voltaire said that tolerance was the hallmark of humanity, but humanity doesn’t rank very highly in public discourse any more, does it, because it really isn’t that useful, at least not if you are looking down from a position of authority.

The Enlightenment was not necessarily a good time to live. It was intellectually exciting, but for most people it was poor, miserable, disease-ridden and uncertain. There were wars, there were revolutions, there was persecution. Enlightenment was limited to the way a few people were thinking about their world, though those thinkers did very slowly manage to achieve some advances that bettered the lot of most people. But I can’t help thinking that right now we are in desperate need of a new Enlightenment, where the aspirations for happiness and tolerance become once more a way that people think about the world.

In Pink

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Clement Attlee, D.J. Taylor, George Orwell, Katherine Burdekin, Neville Chamberlain, Ramsey McDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Victor Gollancz, Winston Churchill

Sometimes, the most unlikely of sources can make you see something that has been staring you in the face forever and has just passed you by.

I am continuing my intermittent read of The Prose Factory by D.J. Taylor, and his chapter on the 1930s is, predictably, all about left wing literary movements. It is a reasonably fair account, I think, given that I suspect Taylor’s own political inclinations are centre-right and he doesn’t come across as at all sympathetic to Marxist views. But he manages to connect a few things that I hadn’t really connected before.

Let me try and put this into chronological order. In 1929, the Wall Street Crash had sent the Western economies spinning into the Great Depression. In May of that year, the Labour Party under Ramsey MacDonald had come out ahead in one of the tightest of elections and formed a minority government. That is not the most stable situation for dealing with the economic shocks that were to come over the next couple of years. So, in 1931, MacDonald entered into coalition with the Tories as the National Government, which won an overwhelming victory in the 1931 election. The National Government held something over 500 seats in Parliament, the only opposition being provided by a small group of rebel Labour MPs. Despite the National Government being theoretically a coalition, it was overwhelmingly dominated by the Conservative Party, with the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, taking over as Prime Minister in 1935.

What this meant (and the connection that Taylor spelled out for me) was that the left had no political voice, just at the start of a decade that was filled with causes for which the left needed to be heard. And so the left started to turn to extra-parliamentary ways of making their views known. Thus you got things like the hunger marches, which had been occurring intermittently since the start of the century, but which now became much larger and more frequent. One march from Scotland brought 100,000 people to Hyde Park in 1932. These marches were often organised by the communist party, and so were just as often brutally put down by the authorities. The communist party was also behind the large numbers of working class young men who travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans (there were some British volunteers who fought for Franco, but they were neither so numerous or so well organized as those who fought against him).

But this activism also had a more intellectual underpinning, provided by the spread of the Workers’ Educational Association, which had been formed at the beginning of the century but which was at its largest and most successful during the 1930s. And also by the totally unexpected success of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which aimed to break even with 2,500 members but had over 40,000 within the first year. The club would make books more widely available and far cheaper than usual, and published works ranging from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier to Murray Constantine (Katherine Burdekin)’s Swastika Night; books that brought home again and again the social conditions and political enemies that those on the left were up against. There were Right and Centre Book Clubs, but these had neither the reach nor the effect of the Left Book Club.

With the sense of community and purpose provided by the likes of the hunger marches and the Spanish Civil War, and the spread of ideas promulgated through bodies such as the WEA and the Left Book Club, the left found a powerful and often working class voice throughout the 1930s, just at the time when they had no voice in government.

The National Government shed all pretence and became a straightforward Conservative government under Baldwin, as it remained under his two successors, Neville Chamberlain (from 1937) and Winston Churchill (from 1940). Under Churchill, and with a war to fight, the government again became a coalition National Government, but again it was predominantly Tory. After Baldwin’s election of 1935, there was no general election until 1945, when it was generally assumed that the great wartime leader, Churchill, would sweep back into power. It was a shock, therefore, when Clem Attlee won an overwhelming victory for Labour. But it perhaps shouldn’t have been, because that victory was the fruit of all those years during the 1930s when the left had been deprived of a political voice and so had found new ways to make their voice heard. The Attlee victory, if you like, was a direct consequence of Victor Gollancz creating the Left Book Club, which had, after all, published a book by one C.R. Attlee.

Modernisms

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Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?