For they have maxims, and we have not

Something about this passage, read aloud to me recently by The Wife, seems as relevant now as it likely was in 1860:  

"All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human."

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Penguin 1985 [1860]), 628.

"I think not"

 A striking passage from Iain Banks's last interview:

"I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not."

I think not too.

From "a dash of the Rhine and the Oder" to the "age of passports"

I have, on and off over recent months, been reading J. B. Priestley's 1934 travelogue English Journey.

It's the kind of episodic book that lends itself to returning to bit by bit. Priestley was a somewhat prickly character (I rather doubt that I'd have liked to join him on his travels) and a few of his opinions are pretty offensive (especially with regard to the Irish; I might get round to discussing that at some point).

However, the book is worth reading if only for the glimpses it gives of a 1930s England in the process of transformation; or, to put it more precisely (since all modern societies are always changing to one extent or another) in a particularly interesting historical moment of transformation.

In Priestley's personal perspective, one finds a mixture of ambiguity about the emergent, 'modern', 'Americanised' England (a combination of curiosity, wonder and fear) and a somewhat nostalgic look backward at an England in the process of disappearing.

There's an interesting passage that combines these perspectives, starting with a reflection on Priestley's own youth in Bradford and then using changes in that city to comment on the wider world situation in the 1930s. (I noted a citation of a sentence or two from this passage a few years ago, but it's more interesting in its complete form.)

It's rather long, but I think worth reading.

Bradford was, as Priestley puts it, 'always a city of travellers' affiliated with the worsted industries:

Some of its citizens went regularly to the other side of the globe to buy wool. Others went abroad, from Belgium to China, selling yarn and pieces. They returned to Market Street, the same sturdy Bradfordians, from the ends of the earth. You used to meet men who did not look as if they had ever been further than York or Morecambe, but who actually knew every continental express. They would go away from months, keeping to the most complicated time-tables. When they returned they did not give themselves cosmopolitan airs; it was very dangerous in Bradford to give yourself any airs, except those by tradition associated with solid wool men.

And then there was this curious leaven of intelligent aliens, chiefly German-Jews and mostly affluent. They were so much a part of the place when I was a boy that it never occurred to me to ask why they were there. I saw their outlandish names on office doors, knew that they lived in certain pleasant suburbs, and obscurely felt that they had always been with us and would always remain. That small colony of foreign or mixed Bradfordians produced some men of great distinction, including a famous composer, two renowned painters and a well-known poet. [...]

I can remember when one of the best-known clubs in Bradford was the Schillerverein. And in those days a Londoner was a stranger sight than a German. There was, then, this odd mixture in pre-war Bradford. A dash of the Rhine and the Oder found its way into our grim runnel—"t'mucky beck." Bradford was determinedly Yorkshire and provincial, yet some of its suburbs reached as far as Frankfort and Leipzig. It was odd enough. But it worked.

But the war changed all that. There is hardly a trace now in the city of that German-Jewish invasion. Some of the merchanting houses changed their names and personnel; others went out of business. I liked the city better as it was before, and most of my fellow Bradfordians agree with me. It seems smaller and duller now. I am not suggesting that these German-Jews were better men than we are. The point is that they were different, and brought more to the city than bank drafts and lists of customers. They acted as a leaven, just as a colony of typical West Riding folk would act as a leaven in Munich or Moscow.

These exchanges are good for everybody. Just lately, when we offered hospitality to some distinguished German-Jews who had been exiled by the Nazis, the leader-writers in the cheap Press began yelping again about Keeping the Foreigner Out. Apart from the miserable meanness of the attitude itself—for the great England, the England admired throughout the world, is the England that keeps open house, the refuge of Mazzini, Marx, Lenin—history shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained, just as the countries that have driven out large numbers of its citizens, for racial, religious or political reasons, have always paid dearly for their [in]tolerance.

It is one of the innumerable disadvantages of this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic, this age of passports and visas and quotas, when every country is as difficult to enter or leave as were the Czar's Russia or the Sultan's Turkey before the war, that it is no longer possible for this admirable leavening process to continue.

Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann in association with Victor Gollancz, 1937 [1934]), pp. 160-61.

You find a few nice turns of phrase in this passage that suggest why, apart from the social observations, Priestley is still worth reading.

Julia, She-Wolf of the Anti-Sex League

While browsing through Boing Boing I was struck by this image, a cover from some Signet edition of 1984, which makes Orwell's classic novel of political totalitarianism look more like a 1970s sexploitation film...

Double-plus extraordinary.

Notes from a fairy tale of commerce

One of the things I'm reading at the moment is J. B. Priestley's English Journey. It's curiously out of print (curious, as it's quite a well-known book) but I managed to find a cheap used copy from 1937 which has held up remarkably well.

In any case, I wish I had read this one earlier, as the book is full of excellent writing and quite amusing anecdotes.

I liked, for instance, this, during the opening excursion to Southampton:

The town was making money. At first I felt like a man who had walked into a fairy tale of commerce. The people who jostled me did not looked as if they had just stepped out of an earthly paradise; there was no Utopian bloom upon them; but nevertheless they all seemed well-fed, decently clothed, cheerful, almost gay. The sun beamed upon them, and so did I. Their long street was very pleasant. I noticed that it shared the taste of Fleet Street and the Strand for wine bars. I went into one of these; and it had a surprising succession of Ye Olde panelled rooms, in one of which I drank a shilling glass of moderate sherry and listening  to four citizens talking earnestly about German nudist papers, their supply having recently been cut off by Hitler. Their interest in these papers was genuine but not of a kind to commend itself to the leaders of the nudist movement. (English Journey, London, 1937, p. 13)

One of the other things I'm reading is Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, excerpts from which will also, I believe, be featuring here in the near future.

Dodging, artfully

Via the wonders of social networking I have been informed of an event that I would definitely be attending were I in London tonight: the first screening of the short film 'Fits and Starts of Restlessness' by Tim Shore and Gary Thomas, made in collaboration with our friend, Dr. Heather Shore of Leeds Metropolitan University.

It will be shown with other short films at the BFI (Tuesday, 7 February 2012, NFT 1, at BFI Southbank, seems to be starting at 18:20) as part of the celebrations around Dickens's 200th birthday...which is, in fact, today.

Details on the Birthday event are here.

A brief description:

The title is taken from Dickens’ essay Night Walks, and his description of London has having “expiring fits and starts of restlessness”. The film takes its own night ‘walk’ and traces the path of the lost Fleet River, through the night time streets of Saffron Hill – once the site of a notorious rookery – and where Dickens located Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist.

I haven't seen it yet, but the stills that are available are, I must say, very intriguing.

And since part of the research was related to Heather's excellent book Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London, I'm sure the style is matched with substance.

A brief note on literary violence and shady politics

We're just recently back from a week in snowy, snowy Davos (long story, largely very enjoyable*) and have been making the jarring transition from the holidays back to the workaday world.

But, two things made me very happy today.

First, my contributor copy of J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions was there waiting for me when I arrived at my office. It looks fabulous and is full of interesting essays on a wonderful and much-missed author. My own contribution (the only effort, as far as I know, that anyone has ever made to analyse Ballard's work from the perspective of Norbert Elias's 'civilising process') can be perused in draft form here. Some comments on the conference that spawned it are here and here.

Second, I learned a new and useful German word, halbseiden, which means 'dubious' or 'shady' (and, apparently, in older usage, 'homosexual'). I ran across it in the context of a story about the German president, Christian Wulff, who has gotten into a spot of bother about some (allegedly) questionable loans from friends and a couple of (allegedly) threatening phone calls to the press which has been eagerly reporting on them. (Any possible homosexuality has, so far as I know, remained unrevealed.)

Quite a profitable day, if I do say so myself.

-----

* We can, for example, very much recommend the sauna at this place. And if you feel up to it, a jog around the Davosersee can be very invigorating. And the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Museum has a small but very worthwhile collection. Skiing, you might have noted, is not really our thing....

Vertical violence

Via my friend Chris, I was made aware of a post at Blood & Treasure referring to a new building design that has been unveiled for a planned skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea.

It's referred to as 'The Cloud':

I will leave aside any aesthetic comments (other than WTF!!!! An image of a twin-towered complex exploding...who thought this was a good concept?) and simply use this image as an excuse to note the recent publication of a collection of essays, J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions.

This collection derives from a conference in which I participated some years ago and includes an essay by your humble narrator ('"Going mad is their only way of staying sane": Norbert Elias and the Civilised Violence of J. G. Ballard') on the novels High-Rise  and Super-Cannes.

Whilst wandering around Bloomsbury a few days ago I had the pleasure of discovering this book in one of my favourite London bookshops and finding my essay nestled there among the others.

In academia you have to take your joys where you find them.

I recommend this book for those of you interested in Ballard's writing.

I'm very happy to be among the essays contained within it.

A critical comment

I am rather irritated by Colin Burrow's review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts, his biographical novel of H.G. Wells, in the new LRB (16 June). It is quite obvious that Burrow likes neither novel nor author, but what bugs me most is the way he uses this vehicle to slip in a few other pet hates - from Rebecca West's odd metaphors to popular neuroscience:

[Wells] was very interested in the mechanics of the human brain. Were he alive today, he would be happy to believe that the mind is the same as the brain, and would present TV programmes in which he wired himself up to a brain-scanner in order to show bits of his cortext lighting up when he thought of Rebecca West.

Flippant, dumb and utterly gratuitous.

When words hit the road

I steered the Jensen into the slow lane of the M4, and began to read the route signs welcoming me to the outer London suburbs. Ashford, Staines, Hillingdon - impossible destinations that featured only on the mental maps of desperate marketing men. Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time. How to rouse a dormant people who had everything, who had bought the dreams that money can buy and knew they had found a bargain? (J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come 1)

If you've ever wondered (as I did in my girlish naivety) whether a "Jensen" is a real existing car and not another technological chimera from Ballard's eutopic suburbias, today's Spiegel has a whole photo series of the "Jensen Interceptor III."

Just enjoy the pictures and don't read the text (and don't - DON'T - think about fuel efficiency). According to the comments (I only ever read the comments, really), it's full of unforgiveable mistakes about the intricate inspirational conduits of international auto design.

'As heavy as children but not so tractable'. A reading recommendation

Thanks to the recommendation some months ago from a friend of mine in London -- a remarkably incisive historian of early twentieth century vice and its policing in London -- I have happily discovered the fiction of Patrick Hamilton.

I had not heard of Hamilton before, which at first made me feel rather a philistine (a feeling to which I'm no stranger), but since the edition of one of his works that I immediately bought has no less an authority than Doris Lessing calling him 'a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected' I've decided to not feel so bad about it.

I quickly devoured two novels -- Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude -- and am now nearly finished with the trilogy that made his name, three novels later gathered under the wonderfully evocative title Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

I don't really feel up to a full-on review of the novels, but wanted merely to pass on the recommendation to anyone else who might be interested in Hamilton's detailed characterisation and keen observations about London life in the 1930s, more specifically about a social context involving (for the most part) people who are rather down-at-heel without being really 'poor' and who drink rather a lot. (In any literary history of alcohol and drunkenness, Hamilton should have a place of honour.)

The Twenty Thousand Streets... series focuses on three people whose lives are connected through a pub 'in the vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street' called 'The Midnight Bell': Bob (the waiter), Ella (the barmaid) and Jenny (a prostitute).

The effect of Hamilton's prose is really, I think, something rather cumulative, and it's hard to summarise or provide a single example to express it.

This is not least because part of Hamilton's skill was to get inside the thoughts of his characters and to highlight their uncertainties about what they were experiencing and their constantly changing views of their situations. Characters are continuously misunderstanding each other (and themselves) and their position; or, alternatively, they diagnose their position very well without feeling that they have a way out of it. (This internal psychological perspective is also what makes the recent BBC version of the Twenty Thousand Streets... series, as good as it is, somehow incomplete.)


He also had a knack for efficient though arch descriptions of the fleeting sensations of everyday life. 

And he manages the interesting trick of conveying a certain amount of sympathy and cold-hearted cynicism -- whether serially or simultaneously -- with regard to pretty much all of his characters. 

I thought I'd give a few excerpts from the different stories that make up the trilogy -- which are more descriptive than anything -- and just let them stand as is.

In the first, from 'The Midnight Bell', Bob climbs the stairs to Jenny's room in a dingy house in Bolsover Street, not far, geographically, from Regents Park but a world away in terms of class:

On each landing three different doors led into three different rooms containing three different families. All the doors were closed, but the awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard and sensed. On the first floor a man was reviling a woman, and a child, in another room, screaming. It did this not as though it was being beaten (which it probably was)  but as though it was being put to death. On the second floor someone was playing a harmonica, but in the front room an old woman groaned. You could not imagine what at, unless it was the harmonica. On the third floor two other children were being put to death. You could hardly believe that three children were being put to death, simultaneously, in the same house, at the precise time of your arrival, but there you were. (169-70)

From 'The Siege of Pleasure', in which Jenny (later to become a prostitute after a single evening goes terribly wrong) takes up a new position as a domestic servant:

It mattered not to Jenny, who had weighty work on hand -- that is not to say weighty in the figurative sense of the term -- but work which involved hauling out mighty bedsteads so as to get round and make the bed, dragging out monstrous furniture so as to dust behind it, emptying vast Edwardian basins of their brimming soap-grey lakes, lifting enormous and replenished jugs and lowering them at arm's length slowly lest they smashed the massive crockery, transporting wabbling pails, as heavy as children but not so tractable, down stairs and along passages, and carrying piled trays about in a world wherein practically everything was breakable, and only terrific muscular exertion and an agonized striving after balance could avert the impending crash -- in brief, 'woman's work'. (258)

From the opening passages of 'The Plains of Cement':

Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented 'The Midnight Bell'. This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public houses -- which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses. Nevertheless, a student of the streets, conceiving 'The Midnight Bell' as a nucleus of a London zone less than half a mile in diameter, could not have failed to have been impressed by the stupendous variety of humanity huddled within the region thus isolated by the mind's eye. The respectable, residential precincts of Regent's Park, the barracks and lodging-houses of Albany Street, the grim senility of Munster Square, the commercial fury of the Euston and Tottenham Court Roads, the criminal patches and Belgian penury of Charlotte and Whitfield Streets, that vast palace of pain known as Middlesex Hospital, the motor-salesman's paradise in Great Portland Street, the august solemnity of Portland Place itself -- all these would crowd in upon each other in the microcosm thus discriminated -- a microcosm well-nigh as incongruous and grotesque as any that the searcher might be able to alight upon in the endless plains of cement as his disposal. (344)

(All quotations from Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky [Vintage, 2010]).

(Un)commonplaces

The Wife recently ordered an edition of George Gissing's commonplace book (published in 1962 by the New York Public Library).

It's as delightful as it is diverse.

A few samples of Gissing's musings (with page numbers in parentheses), written between 1887 and 1903:

In youth one marvels that man remains at so low a stage of civilization; in later life one marvels that he has got so far. (25)

In J.S. Mill’s Autobiography, there is no mention whatever of his mother. (37)

A highly comical name, that of the consul Spurius Furius. Livy III. ad init. (41)

How many people can spell the word Eighth? (42)

In France, the accents of ordinary conversation are those which English people reserve for exceptional moments of protest, annoyance, expostulation, & so on. (43)

English police readily display ruffiandom. They fight with individual members of a crowd. Their faces become pale with ferocity, & they make furious rushes, with doubled fists, at this man & that. Remember Picadilly on night before Jubilee. (44)

Dec. 23. ’90. Was awakened this morning at 9.30 by man outside bellowing “Execution of Mrs Pearcy! Scene on the Scaffold! – Paper!” (I suppose the execution was at 8 o’clock, so that the paper must have been got out speedily). Such cries harmonized with the morning; snow lying everywhere, grimy with soot, & a muddy fog obscuring the sky. Yesterday one of the most hideous fogs I ever knew, unintermittent. One might describe the weather, & connect with it reflections on capital punishment. (44)

The one thing which most excites me to irresistible laughter, when I get a good view of it, is the existence of religious prejudice. To think that people will loathe you, because you cannot enter into their way of thought with regard to the Universe! It is far more comical than “You be eternally damned for your theory of Irregular Verbs!” But you must happen to catch it in the right light. (47)

I have never discovered any greater tenderness in women than may be observed in men, but I have often been struck by the superior energy & pertinacity of their hatred. (50)

The best English men & women are the most delightful of human kind. All save the best are endurable only to their intimates. (51)

"The togetherness of modern technology"

As if summoned from a novel by J.G. Ballard: "China traffic jam stretches 'nine days, 100km'"

The title of this post comes from a 1979 Penthouse interview with Ballard on the prescience of science fiction in which he observed:

I suspect it will also turn out to have been extremely accurate in the way in which it is now predicting or anticipating the peculiar affectless quality of life in the 1980s and 90s.

Penthouse: What kind of things?

Ballard: Well, for example the way in which the traditional togetherness of the village is giving way to the inbuilt loneliness of the new high rises, or the peculiar fact that people nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology, and the science fiction writers of the 40s, 50s and 60s picked it out unerringly as being a dominant feature of the future - often without realising what they were doing.

Not that that togetherness is all that cozy, at least going by the Chinese example:

The drivers have complained that locals are over-charging them for food and drink while they are stuck.

Clearly, our Chinese friends have that capitalism thing down pat. Yet, the real traffic jam seems to nevertheless lack, how shall we say, the rampant psychosexual perversion of the Ballardian original.

You can't have everything. 

Why can't you look like a lady for once?

R.I.P. Lynn Redgrave, Georgie Girl:

R.I.P. Alan Sillitoe

When I asked my students in one of my classes last week, not a single one had heard of, let alone read, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

This somewhat disillusioning classroom experience is made all the more poignant by Sillitoe's death. In turn, it also renders the statement by Sillitoe's son that "he hoped his father would be remembered for his contribution to literature" almost ironic. Maybe now I have a sacred duty to keep up the memory, who knows.

The film version of the novel (see update below) might be the best piece of memorabilia, especially as it adds an equally memorable Albert to the unforgettable Alan.



UPDATE: The silly Grauniad copyeditor calls Sillitoe an "author of kitchen sink dramas." So that's what they teach you at Oxbridge! Or are you all just too busy making up your mind whether to support Clegg or Cameron to mind such negligible details?