aldous huxley – Mark Bould

Reading The Great Writers, part two

A shorter middle bit
Of the 54 titles in The Great Writers series, I had, it turned out, already read 15.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
One advantage of aspirational Protestant parents convinced of the value of reading is that abridged and unabridged Pilgrim’s Progresses are put in front of you before you are ten years old.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
In the first year of junior school, our teacher (Mrs Eaton) would end every day by reading a few pages of Alice in Wonderland to us (I remember someone spotting the caterpillar in the famous illustration was, it transpires famously, the wrong colour). But that was way too slow a pace for impatient little me, so I got a copy of it (and Through the Looking Glass (1871)) out of the village library.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
I got an abridged paperback version in a red leatherette-effect cover from Trago Mills in the mid-70s (also The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)) but have no idea (in either case) when in the intervening years I first read it unabridged. But I do remember already having experienced that feeling of relief when you finally get through the Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan and wash ashore in the Land of the Houyhnhnms (even if I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to pronounce it).

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Again, I remember an abridged version (and of Dracula (1897) in the same imprint) in the mid- 70s. Sadly, though, I remember nothing about their undoubtedly cheap and nasty bindings – or, in either case, of when in the intervening years I first read the book proper.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes courtesy of Basil Rathbone and, especially, Nigel Bruce, whose mere presence in a film still cheers me up. I remember seeing The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and the way too-scary The Scarlet Claw (1944) and being terrified by the Creeper in The Pearl of Death (1944), presumably all part of a late-70s early evening weekday season on BBC2. Somehow there was a copy of Hound in the junior school library, and then around the turn of the decade I got one of those cheap hardback omnibus editions of all the Holmes stories and novels as an Xmas gift, which I devoured.

In fact, I loved Holmes so much back then that one day in 1985 I feigned illness so I could stay home from school to finish reading Cay Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984), which I’d started the night before (it was probably my first brush with Fu Manchu outside of those Christopher Lee films), and the following year I stayed up late watching Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper/Freemasons in Murder By Decree (Clark 1979) rather than revising for the next morning’s Biology O-level exam.

HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
In the first term of my final year at junior school, I read an extract (the protagonist diving underwater to escape the Martian heat rat) for a comprehension exercise – and raced to the school library. But it only had a copy of The Invisible Man (1897); my memory is of a paperback tie-in with the 1975 TV series – just a picture of David McCallum on the cover – but as there was a novelisation of the pilot episode by Michael Jahn I now wonder if I read both and have jumbled them up.

The village library didn’t have a copy of War of the Worlds, either, but Xmas was not far off. Nor was my Jeff Wayne album tie-in copy (which finally fell apart about a decade ago.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
I seem to have gone through a nautical phase in the late 70s. Possibly because of Gulliver’s Travels, the Frankenstein frame story, Ursula K Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea (which I did not like and tbh still don’t) or Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875) – both of which I’d read in bowdlerised abridged versions – or RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), the first chapter of which I doggedly read half a dozen times as a child, without ever getting any further. But it was more likely because of Willard Price’s Southsea Adventure (1952), Underwater Adventure (1954), Whale Adventure (1960) and Diving Adventure (1969), from a series which briefly, but only temporarily, took that special place in my heart reserved for The Three Investigators (1964–87) series, which had already dislodged Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (1942–63) and Adventure (1944–55) series (I never could stand The Secret Seven (1949–63)).

But, my god, the black spot! That really put the willies up me.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s–1840s)
I asked for a big paperback omnibus of Poe for my fourteenth birthday (it contained everything except Eureka), and then worked through it a story, poem or chapter of Pym per day (for years, the only bit of Pym I could actually remember was the great big disappearing dog). But it is only since I had a panic attack during an MRI scan in 2020 that I have developed claustrophobia. And although I have never had a nightmare about being buried alive, I did later that year wake up screaming from a dream in which I was trapped in a small space below deck, in full costume, with Ridley Scott filming me as the lead in his grittily realistic live-action Captain Pugwash reboot. I wish I was making this up, but I am also pretty impressed at myself that I don’t have to.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
We’d read an abridged version of A Christmas Carol in at secondary school, and I was so offended at being deemed incapable of reading the full text that I got it out of the school library. I think it must have been in the second year, because I had a very combative relationship with our English teacher that year. We got off to a bad start when she selected John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (1933) for us to read as a class. Everyone hated it (which in retrospect I realise was probably just me and a couple of other little gobshites who joined in). We protested so much, she dropped it and picked something else for us to read. I forget what, but we were heady with victory and could smell blood.

Sometime around then I got into a stupid row with her, which she ended (or so she thought) by saying ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you read Ulysses?’.

So I got a copy out of the Central Library and did just that. One chapter per day for two-and-a-half weeks, understanding almost none of it. Once I was done, I took it into class, dropped it casually on my desk and asked if she had any other recommendations.

I was fourteen. Forty years later, I am still appalled at what an awful little shit I was.

It is also very difficult to reconcile these memories with the crippling shyness from which I suffered, the frequent terror of speaking, the incomprehension of other people, who were all so fucking weird – either terrifyingly random or so predictable they were even scarier. But I was also a cheeky little bugger, with a tendency to brinksmanship and a self-destructive edge.

The former would probably now be considered social anxiety and fortunately have some apparatus of understanding and support. But alongside the latter, I am more inclined to think of it as class anxiety. The terror of social mobility, of transclass social non-reproduction. Plus puberty.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
I know I had already read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1945) because my brother, a couple of years older than me, was doing his CSEs in 1983 and he bribed and/or bullied me into writing his English Literature coursework essays for him. I remember him being annoyed at having to copy them out long-hand so no one could prove he had cheated. But later he was so delighted to have outwitted his Secondary Modern, which had been so quick to (mis)judge his abilities. Not that this triumph necessarily proved them wrong.

Somewhere in that confluence of events, I read Huxley – probably just to make a smart aside in one of those essays, a foible I still have.

Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) and Island (1962) would have followed in pretty short order, and I remember the this-is-not-a-sequel disappointment of Brave New World Revisited (1958). Thanks to an Orwell essay, I’d have read Zamyatin’s We (1924) around the same time, which quickly led me to his The Dragon and Other Stories (coll.1966) and Islanders and The Fisher of Men (coll.1984), which in turn got me to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) not long after.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
My posh mate Rob was reading one of the Tales, I forget which, for his A-level English, so I picked up a cheap complete Tales and slowly worked my way through it over a couple of years. This long slow read led to a classic autodidact’s lack-of-cultural-capital moment when I was interviewed at Oxford University (the first and possibly still the only pupil from my Comprehensive ever to even apply to Oxford or Cambridge). Asked what I was reading that was not on my A-level syllabus, I mentioned I had recently completed the Tales. Surprised, the interviewer asked whether I was reading it in translation or in ‘Middle English’. I had never even heard of ‘Middle English’ and had no idea how to reply, so he filled the awkward silence by lecturing me, a state school upstart, on how I could not claim to have read Chaucer if I was only reading a translation. His disdain was palpable; I withered beneath it. The interview ground to a halt. I was not offered a place at that College.

However, I had read Chaucer in Middle English! And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And Pearl. And Sir Orfeo.

I’m pretty sure this is a case of biting off my own nose to spite my face when I’d rather be punching his, but because of that wanker’s class contempt, I have never voluntarily read any other Middle English, not even Piers Plowman (just a couple of shorter poems I was obliged to read in our first-year survey course at university).

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
This is one of those books I saw in Penguin but picked up in a cheaper US paperback (with yellow edges) at my local independent bookstore, In Other Words, on Mutley Plain in Plymouth. Which was also where I bought Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, The Essential James Joyce (containing Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (19116) and excerpts from Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)) and the three omnibus editions of Chandler novels I still have. It was also where I bought my girlfriend Jane a copy of Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (1984), the sequel to Sisterhood is Powerful (1970). I have always been given to big romantic gestures.

I spent a lot of time in that shop. It was a haven during some confusing times. They were always welcoming and kind. And once they noticed how careful I was with books, and how unable to afford them, they were fine with me popping in on my way home from school and reading books in half-hour chunks without buying them. At Xmas, they would give me mulled wine, even though I was clearly underage. It was also one of the places where I started to piece together a political education by reading – The Communist Manifesto, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Mutual Aid, Bakunin on Anarchism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, A Room of One’s Own, The Dialectic of Sex, The Female Eunuch, Intercourse, The Wretched of the Earth, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, goodness knows what else – but also just as much by enjoying their generosity, conviviality, community.

Mind you, all I can really remember of Far From the Madding Crowd is finding Bathsheba Everdene really irritating – oh, and the bit about punching holes in sheep to let out trapped wind.

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Wuthering Heights was one of our lower-Sixth A-level texts, and I remember being really angry at the implausibility of Nelly being able to witness certain events. I was so furious – don’t ask me to explain the logic, presumably something to do with narrative perspective – that I was driven by rage to read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and then (obvs) John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (1930–6). I was clearly broken in some way, and not merely in terms of the unthinking misogyny clearly underpinning such a response.

I’d been reading and protesting my way into socialism and anti-racism, and had been hanging out with a bunch of self-proclaimed anarchists from Plymouth Polytechnic. They knew a student I knew from my parent’s church, and had seen me in her company somewhere, so assumed I was way older than actually I was. (Reader, I did not disabuse them.) But any feminist education would still have been a year or so in the future, courtesy of Jane.

I broke with those anarchists over their refusal to do anything in support of the great miners’ strike. There were really just middle-class wankers who liked to sound radical while smoking dope. Jane was a much better influence.

Oh, and I long since changed my mind about Wuthering Heights (it is probably now my favourite Bronte novel, so much more bonkers than anything her sisters ever ventured) and am less convinced of Brunner’s genius (though I still read him, most recently The Great Steamboat Race (1983)), but remain steadfast, forty years later, in my opinion that The 42^nd Parallel is the best volume of Dos Passos’s trilogy (it provided, along with a quote from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks and another from Billy Zane, an epigraph to my The Cinema of John Sayles: A Lone Star (2009)).

William Shakespeare, Comedies and Tragedies (1590s–1610s)
I have no idea which plays were in these volumes. But in 1986, The Oxford Shakespeare was published and I got a hardback copy as some kind of come-on from a postal book club (I think – I can’t imagine being able to afford it otherwise). But like Ulysses and The Canterbury Tales, I worked through it steadily, a play a week, then some poems until I was done.

In 1991, I took that volume into my finals exam on Shakespeare; it was an open-book exam, and we were supposed to leave our copies of individual plays behind to be checked for notes, but the invigilator took one look at this immense pristine tome I’d lugged up to campus and said not to bother as no one in their right mind deface it by writing notes in it.

But what, you are undoubtedly thinking, of the other 39 titles?

Reading The Great Writers, part three

Reading The Great Writers, part one

The lrb; or long, redundant beginning

This spring and summer, I spent several months reading for and writing a chapter on ‘Class and Horror’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Horror. It was the first time I’ve dived deep into critical/theoretical work on class for probably the best part of twenty years. One key shift is the now general acceptance of the need to incorporate Bourdieu (or Bourdieu-like) work into models of class, which meant I found myself thinking a lot more about social and cultural capital. The other key trend was hardly new: marginalising/excluding Marxist traditions of work on economic class, often in favour of Weberian or neo-Weberian approaches, which is odd given how very little Weber actually said about class, but also for other very obvious reasons not remotely odd.

I also found myself baffled (i.e., not remotely baffled but fascinated) by social scientists who present social mobility as an absolutely incontrovertible good (even if the only argument they can muster is that it improves GDP) but are at the same time appalled by the notion of absolute social mobility. Even though it is the obvious end-point of their social mobility enthusiasm, they devote absolutely no words/time/energy to imagining what meaningful equality might look like. Instead, they just brandish terrifying (that is, hilariously clichéd) images of totalitarian states. Harrison Bergeron, eat your heart out! It’s almost as if their main interest is maintaining a slightly tweaked and marginally more palatable status quo (and securing future research income streams from similarly committed funding bodies).

Anyway, the point is, I found myself engaged in autobiographical ponderings about social capital, cultural capital and autodidactism.

I come from a dirt-poor West Midlands working-class family. I was born in Staffordshire but we moved to Devon when I was four years old, which further limited the already negligible social capital to be derived from my now attenuated extended kinship network.

My parents were Methodists (which is why I have absolutely no idea how to gamble although I did, after no struggle whatsoever, overcome teetotalism). And they were aspirational, at least to the extent of wanting a better life for me and my brother and of taking on a crippling mortgage to own a home rather than rent a house (they were so ripe, sadly, for Thatcher). Their new circle of church friends – middle class folks from the wealthier parts of the village – obviously lived in a different world to us and, despite many kindnesses, were defensive of their relative privilege. While my dad left school aged 15 and with no qualifications, they were mostly graduates from middle class families. Thus they had higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital, the latter of which was often deployed against my ‘uneducated’ dad. Especially when he did things like trying seriously to discuss with them that bit in Acts about the early church sharing all things in common. They were really not up for that! (In this mid-1970s context, my dad was quite radical in trying to square a Co-op/Labour upbringing with the evangelicalism into which he had fallen, which was only just then turning from a vaguely countercultural centrism to the pronounced right-wing attitudes that now define it – and which shifted my parents’ politics: they cried when Callaghan lost in 1979 but have voted Conservative ever since, albeit with growing disillusionment over the last decade of unignorable Tory corruption and incompetence.)

So I grew up with no economic capital to speak of, and very little social or cultural capital. But my parents’ aspirationalism bought into the post-war promise of social mobility (I am old enough to have benefitted from those limited openings, which have in real terms been whittled down to nothing since the 1980s) and thus they insisted on the importance of education and of reading. However, the latter, amply supported by school and especially public libraries, took place in something of a vacuum: limited cultural capital meant I had little idea of what to read.

Which I only really began to realise in my mid-teens, thanks to Rob. An extremely middle class friend met through church stuff, he was a couple of years older than me, went to a grammar school and was the most flamboyantly camp person I’d ever met: he ‘simply adored Dickens’ and, he declared, flaunting a Penguin paperback of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was ‘reading the Russians now’. How did he know about these things? They were simply part of the atmosphere in which he grew up, at home and in school. (He urged Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) on me, and something green-covered from Grove Press, but it only very slowly dawned on me that this was a kind of courtship: that he was using books – and cultural capital – to hit on me. Last I heard of him, he moved to South Africa at the turn of the 90s to become a croupier at – unforgivably – Sun City.)

In the absence of such social and institutional networks for inheriting the kinds of cultural capital Rob enjoyed, the only real alternative for me was autodidactism, with all its perils and pitfalls – and potentials for embarrassment: at some point in my mid-teens I asked Plymouth Central Library if they had a copy of ‘Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) – I’d read, rather than heard, about it somewhere so only knew how to pronounce one of those five words. (It took a couple of decades before I could start to enjoy mispronouncing ‘archipelago’ as if it were a kind of sausage.)

Plymouth Central Library, the location of my chipolata embarrassment

Autodidactism took many forms:

Discovering Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) and trying with the aid of the library to work through its list of titles. A quick google of the contents page shows there there are still forty-odd of them I’ve not read. Andrea remains constantly appalled at me for never having read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), as now does my mate Dan since she blabbed to him this summer. But I did finally read Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1952) last year in Brazil in the old densely-packed A-format paperback that had travelled tens of thousands of miles in my luggage over the years as my emergency back-up should I be ever stranded in an airport or train station with nothing to read.
Watching The Great Philosophers (1987) on TV and reading Brian Magee’s book version and then finally finishing that copy of Betrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I’d got bogged down in a couple of years earlier.
Randomly picking up second-hand Penguin classics (or the usually cheaper imported American paperbacks of the same titles).
Seeing a Vincent Price movie and setting out to read all of Poe.
Hearing Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness so starting to read Conrad.
Watching The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), reading Malcolm Bradbury’s book version and turning them into reading lists….

Lists. All the time lists. And following up those leads in libraries and second-hand bookstores. (New books were things you received as gifts.)

Just in case any of this makes me sound adorably (or agonisingly or absurdly) precocious (or dunderheaded), let me be clear: I had not exactly left childish things behind.

I still regularly re-read my full set of The Incredible Hulk Weekly and my stack of movie novelisations (though some passages in Arthur Byron Cover’s Flash Gordon (1980) were definitely not intended for the younger reader).

And although I stopped buying second-hand Doctor Who novelisations with number 68, Terrance Dicks’s An Unearthly Child (1981), I carried on rereading my until-then complete set. And reading the new ones until, I think, number 113, Terence Dudley’s Black Orchid (1986), even though that entailed humiliating returns to the kids’ section of the library I’d eagerly abandoned half a dozen years earlier (and even though I’d freakishly stumbled upon, read and had the veil of illusion torn away by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), the first proper academic book I’d encountered).

I was also, like every adolescent male I knew, although perhaps more assiduously, reading James Herbert and Richard Allen and Sven Hassel, and exercising an even less discerning penchant for Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (1981–82) novels and Guy N. Smith (probably more for the knee-tremblers in alleys and doorways than the slime beasts and giant crabs). I’d given up on Agatha Christie after reading all the Marples I could find (I never liked Poirot) but was starting to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett by about 1983. I discovered Mick Norman and Mick Farren, as well as Michael Moorcock (except Elric, could never get into Elric) and grumpy oddball Peter Van Greenaway. Curiously, although my mate Stewart was a huge fan, I never got into Stephen King, and I still find his fiction utterly unengaging. But I did get totally into JRR Tolkien in 1980. And out again completely by 1984 or thereabouts, after many re-reads, even of the appendices and The Silmarillion (1977). I gave up on David Eddings and Raymond Feist by 1985, the year I also ditched Frank Herbert: I was sufficiently loyal to slog through Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) but had been bored since at least God Emperor of Dune (1981). But the overlapping and intertwined story of my autodidactic route through sf and fantasy – similarly thrilling-yet-full-of-pathos – is something for another day.

Such omnivorous reading – more accurately described, in my case at least, as flailing around – is I think, characteristic of the autodidact. (By chance this morning, I read Michael Moorcock’s 2011 memoir-essay ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’ and recognised a little something of my own childhood in his ‘I learned from reading and not knowing what was respectable literature and what was not. I read everything.’) But it also resembles the ability to access both high and low culture now often attributed to middle class privilege, so perhaps this is not a story of autodidactism and cultural capital after all, but of ‘How I Became A Class Traitor’.

My local library was located just across the park on the top floor of Pounds House

The strange thing is, the sense of being an autodidact has never gone away, even though I’ve been in formal education, as student or teacher, every year since the age of five. Apart, that is, from 1987–88, when I took a year off between A-levels and university (because I was so disgusted by what I witnessed during my Oxford interview, but that too is another story). For about 14 months, I toiled as a motor insurance claims handler for the Co-op Insurance Service and the Cornish Mutual Association. I was less than mediocre. I never got beyond processing windscreen claims, and every day I hated that my job mostly consisted of getting claimants to use language that implied their broken windscreen was made of toughened rather than laminated glass, which meant they were liable for the cost of the replacement’s upgrade in quality, even if there hadn’t actually been one (not that this was how my role was described to me). As careers go, it was clearly not for me.

And all these years later, I still don’t drive. Which would have probably undermined my prospects for advancement.

Around that time, Marshall Cavendish published the Great Writers partwork. It was an image-heavy magazine, with broad brush historical context and biographical commentary on that issue’s author(s), accompanied by a hardback edition of a novel or collection or other book-length work. The books came, with no apparent rhyme or reason, in red, navy blue, bright blue, black, brown or green covers. Each bore a vaguely illustrative image and ever so slightly embossed fancy gold writing. They were cheaply produced in Spain. I can’t remember whether it was published weekly for a year or fortnightly for two (either way, there seems to have been 54, rather than 52, issues). I purchased it – but did not read it – diligently.

The magazines and later the books were discarded years ago, during the many moves between rented accommodation familiar to any student and early career academic. But by chance this year I read two of the books included in the series for the first time – Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) – which started me wondering how many of the 54 volumes I’d actually read during the intervening 35 years.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is the complete list of The Great Writers (not in order of publication). As you will see, ‘greatness’ is largely a function of having been dead long enough for your work to be in the public domain (although that does not explain the Bates, Forster, Greene, Hemingway, Huxley, Maugham, Steinbeck, Waugh, Wells or Woolf titles).

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1794)
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (probably just The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1)
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories (1920)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s/1840s)
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
William Shakespeare, Comedies (1590s–1600s)
William Shakespeare, Tragedies (1590s–1600s)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Anthology of Romantic Poets (early 1800s)
Anthology of the War Poets (1914–8)
Anthology of Fear (twenty ghost stories from 1824–1914)

I had, it turned out, already read 15 of them…

Reading The Great Writers, part two

The City in Fiction and Film, week 14

Farenheit451 This week we continued our exploration of the US postwar suburbs (see week 13), reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and watching Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Siegel 1956). Both texts were framed in relation to the period’s culture of affluence and anxiety.

But first we began by placing Bradbury’s novel in relation to genre – specifically the interweaving traditions of utopia/anti-utopia, utopia/dystopia and US magazine sf.

Thomas More coined ‘Utopia’ 500 years ago this year. When spoken aloud, the first syllable is a Latin pun on ou which means no and eu which means good (and topos means place) – so utopia means ‘no place’ but also suggests ‘good place’. Utopia has come to be understood as a description of an imaginary world organised according to a better principle than our own, and to frequently involve not-always-gripping systematic descriptions of economic, social and technical arrangements. We discussed the efflorescence of utopian fiction in the wake of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), and mentioned such key utopian authors as William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson. We also noted the relative scarcity of utopian worlds in cinema – Just Imagine (Butler 1930), Things to Come (Menzies 1936) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise 1979) being potential examples, but all of them also demonstrating potentially negative elements and being susceptible to against-the-grain readings.

This led us to anti-utopias – texts that are in more or less explicit dialogue with someone else’s utopian vision, exposing its darker, oppressive elements. William Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, which we read last semester, is a kind of compendium anti-utopia, while novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) are – among other things – direct responses to the utopian vision of HG Wells, drawing out its more totalitarian elements, as does Metropolis (Lang 1927).

During the 20th century, however, the explicit anti-utopia has given way to the proliferation of dystopias (dys + topia = bad place), dark, often satirical exaggerations of the worst aspects of our world. The dystopia emphasises bad aspects of our own world so as to make them more obvious (in this, they parallel the suburban world of All That Heaven Allows). The dystopia is not an explicit critique of the utopia, but a depiction of a world worse than our own – usually totalitarian, bureaucratic, brutal, dehumanising, and sometimes post-apocalyptic. Between us, we concocted a list of novels and films, including:

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)
Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (1953)
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962), filmed as Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971)
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) filmed as Blade Runner (Scott 1982)
Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! (1966), filmed as Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973)
Punishment Park (Watkins 1971)
THX 1138 (Lucas 1971)
Rollerball (Jewison 1975)
Mad Max (Miller 1979)
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Brazil (Gilliam 1985)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), film (Schlöndorff 1990)
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (1988–9), film: (McTeigue 2006)
Robocop (Verhoeven 1987)
PD James, The Children of Men (1992), filmed: (Cuarón 2006)
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), filmed: (Romanek 2010)
Gamer (Neveldine+Taylor 2009)
Moon (Jones 2009)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games novels (2008-2010), filmed: Ross and Lawrence 2012-15)
Dredd (Travis 2012), based on Judge Dredd strip (1979–)
Elysium (Blomkamp 2013)

The widespread usage of dystopia and the relative decline of the utopia/anti-utopia tradition has led to an increased use of the eutopia (a term which makes linguistic sense as the opposite of dystopia) to describe imagined worlds that in some ways are better than ours, if still far from perfect. The eutopia imagines a better world, using its differences to indicate the shortcomings of our own world.

Both eutopia and dystopia are, in different ways, about the possibility of change.

We then turned to consider Ray Bradbury in the context of American sf in the 1950s. From the late 1930s, American magazine sf had been dominated by Astounding, edited by John W. Campbell. It was not the best-paying venue, but thanks to the galvanising effect Campbell – and his key authors, such as Robert A Heinlein and Isaac Asimov – had had on the field, it was the most respected and prestigious. That situation began to change after the war, particularly with the launch of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, both of which could be characterised as being more literary, as being more interested such things as characterisation, atmosphere, slicker prose and satirical humour. Bradbury could not sell to Campbell, but published in wide range of sf magazines as well as in prestigious non-genre venues, such as Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post.

The reason for his failure with Campbell and success elsewhere has been attributed – by Brian Aldiss? – to him writing science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction (which we might more generously describe as writing non-Campbellian science fiction). Bradbury was championed by critics such as Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis who, although they occasionally wrote and edited sf, were not sf writers per se. Within the genre community, such writers/editors/critics as James Blish and Damon Knight tended to be more ambivalent – caught between what they saw as Bradbury’ ‘poetic’ writing/ higher literary standards and his apparently blissful ignorance of science.

This ambivalence was mirrored by a number of the class, who found aspects of the novel quite compelling while also being frustrated by the ‘vagueness’ of its world-building. (I am not sure ‘vagueness’ is quite the right term, since it implies there is something that Bradbury should be doing rather than thinking about his preference for imagery over concrete images – and it might also indicate a relative lack of familiarity with sf’s specific reading protocols, which often require the reader to collaborate in building the world from the smallest of hints.)

In considering Fahrenheit 451 as an exaggerated dystopian version of the suburbs it is perhaps useful briefly to put aside its most obvious and striking feature – firemen now burn books – and instead think about the other features of its imagined world, all of which resonate strongly with the affluence and anxieties outlined last week:

the overwhelming impact of mass media, on everything from the design of houses (no front porches, replace windows with TV screens, etc) to the fabric of domestic life, which is organised around consumption and pseudo-participation, and dominates social occasions
the alienation from other human beings, from nature, from meaningful labour
the reliance on tranquillisers, sleeping and other medication
the frequency of divorces and the virtual exile of children
women’s rejection of pregnancy and natural childbirth (cast as a negative, although Shulamith Firestone and others would see this as a positive)
juvenile delinquents racing cars around night-time streets, dying in crashes and aiming for pedestrians
how commonplace deliberate suicides and accidental overdoses have become
the absence of an urban centre (there is one, but the emphasis throughout is on seemingly endless suburbs)
really long billboards because everyone drives so fast
the degradation of language
the constant sound of military jets and the ultimate outbreak of the fourth nuclear war since the 1960s
the near-universal and – it is made clear – willing abandonment of books and reading
the only very occasional spectacle of state power when books are burned

We also thought about the ways in which Bradbury’s prose and imagery are ‘simple’ or ‘child-like’ – the way the novel seems to be the product of a pre-pubertal imagination. This led us in two directions.

First, there are the distinctly Oedipal elements of the novel. While its depiction of women is broadly misogynistic, this is especially focused on Mildred Montag. Cast as a simple-minded and anxious nag, she also comes across as a cold and distant mother figure to her husband, who often seems like a boy in quest of a father figure (Granger replacing Faber replacing Beatty). Mildred is early on associated with the kind of marble figure you might find on a mausoleum – remember the suburban fireplace in All that Heaven Allows – and when Montag turns the flamethrower on their twin beds (after all, there is no reason for mummy and daddy to share a bed, is there?), they ‘went up in a great simmering whisper, with more heat and passion and light than he would have supposed them to contain’ (151).

There is also something just a little bit queer about Montag’s relationship with Faber, the older, educated man who first picked Montag up in a public park, slipping him his phone number even though he knew it would put him in the fireman’s power. Faber maintains this role of mentor, and shares a strange intimacy with the Montag through the earbug the younger man wears so they can always be together.

The second direction in which this sense of Bradbury’s simplicity went was thinking about the imagery he uses. The opening page introduces, among other images, the series of oppositions between black and white: firemen are always associated with blackness, and sometimes Bradbury seems almost to recognise a racial dimension; readers and women are associated with whiteness, although sometimes this whiteness is sepulchral (Mildred) or diseased (Faber). There is also animal and other nature imagery. Sparks become fireflies, books become pigeons. Later, books will rain down around Montag like pigeons, and he will be infected, losing control over his impulses, his hands becoming like ferrets whose antics he can only observe (this sense of alienation from his self culminates in him watching his own pursuit on television, which ends with his capture being faked). As with the bizarre fantasy about the barn in the final section of the novel, there is a nostalgic current underpinning the animal imagery – making manifest the natural world that the suburban sprawl roots up, tears down, eradicates. The imagery haunts the denatured suburb, reminding us of what has been lost and is constantly being thrown away.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers shares many of these concerns. While its mood of paranoia might lend credence to the commonplace notion that the film is somehow about fears of communist infiltration, there is in fact little in the film to support reading it that way (just a few years earlier the emotionless nature of the pods would have been projected onto Nazis rather than Commies, primarily as a denial of the profound conformism in American life and in a consumer culture). Similarly, it is not especially easy to read the film as being about fears of racial passing or queer passing, although they too might be argued – the film is certainly about ensuring difference does not intrude onto this white suburban small town. This difference takes the form of two childless, sexually active recent divorcees – former sweethearts and possibly lovers – finding themselves thrown together, and everyone around them assuming they will become involved with each other again (while elsewhere, Oedipal anxieties take the form of children thinking there parents are not their parents). It is a film obsessed with sex – Miles makes constant innuendoes and hits on women all the time; he races over to Becky’s house in his pyjamas (don’t ask what her house is doing in his pyjamas) in the middle of the night and sweeps her off to his house, where the next morning she is wearing some of his clothes and cooking him breakfast, and Jack Belicec seems to assume this is post-coital. There is Becky’s summer dress, which miraculously stays up while emphasising her breasts, and Miles’s ultimate declaration that he did not know the real meaning of fear until he kissed her. Against all this sex is cast not only the asexual reproduction of the pod people but also the mechanical reproduction of commodities and the replacement of culture (a live band) by its simulacrum (the juke box).

And, as that penultimate hurried paragraph suggests, we ran out of time. Next week, Alphaville (Godard 1965).

Week 15

Recommended critical reading
AlSayyas, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London: Routledge, 2006. See chapter 9, “Exurban Postmodernity: Utopia, Simulacra and Hyper-reality.”
Biskind, Peter. Seeing is Believing How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. London: Pluto, 1983. 102–59.
Bould, Mark. “Burning Too: Consuming Fahrenheit 451.” Literature and the Visual Media. Ed. David Seed. Woodbridge: DS Brewer, 2005. 96–122.
Grant, Barry Keith. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. London: BFI, 2010.
McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “‘To build a mirror factory’: The Mirror and Self-Examination in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39.3 (1998): 282–7.
Seed, David. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
–. “The Flight from the Good Life: Fahrenheit 451 in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias.” Journal of American Studies 28.2 (1994): 22–40.
Whalen, Tom. “The Consequences of Passivity: Re-evaluating Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35.3 (2007): 181–90.

Recommended reading
E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) anticipates surburban consumerist isolation.
Suburbia became a regular setting for postwar sf: Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) and “The Pedestrian” (1951), Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950), Frederik Pohl’s “The Midas Plague” (1954), Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959) and Pamela Zoline’s “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967).
Examples of suburban horror include Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978) and M. John Harrison’s subtler “The Incalling” (1978) and The Course of the Heart (1991).

Recommended viewing
Bradbury’s novel was filmed by French New Wave director François Truffaut as Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Other sf and fantasy films depicting the dissatisfactions of suburban living include Invaders from Mars (Menzies 1953), Forbidden Planet (Wilcox 1956), The Stepford Wives (Forbes 1975), E.T. – The Extra-terrestrial (Spielberg 1982), Poltergeist (Hooper 1982), Parents (Balaban 1989), Edward Scissorhands (Burton 1990), Pleasantville (Ross 1998), The Truman Show (Weir 1998) and Donnie Darko (Kelly 2001).