graham greene – Mark Bould

Reading The Great Writers, part five

Lurching towards, but not quite achieving, a conclusion
But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…

As I mentioned right at the start, this year – by chance – I read two of them, so Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) are quickly disposed of. See – I’m moving right along. (I’d intended to read all of Mansfield’s short fiction this year, but Clarice Lispector shoved her aside and got right up in my face demanding attention. Maybe next year.) Two others, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Kipling’s Kim (1900–1) I read as background for writing about the ongoing perpetuation of colonial adventure fiction narratives in Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Handbook (2012).

Which leaves 22 titles, five of which I’m surprised by.

Anthology of Fear collects twenty ghost stories originally published between 1824–1914. I have no memory of this book being in the series; if it had been, I would have read it. I can only return to the anomaly of a partwork magazine having 54 rather than 52 issues. Did I miss bonus issues? Did they have to adjust the length of the year to make up for an excess of Daylight Saving or something?

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
This is utterly mystifying to me. I read Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907) for the first time in my mid-teens, and was completely swept away by the latter. It is one of the few occasions I recall being utterly gripped by suspense (was it Stevie who got blown up?). Although Conrad’s posthumously published unfinished final novel was called Suspense (1925), I’m pretty certain he had little actual interest in suspense and that I was applying the wrong reading protocols, but everyone should have that intense an experience the first time they read Conrad. At university, I also read Nostromo (1904) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and since then Almayer’s Folly (1895) and The Inheritors (1901), co-written with Ford Madox Ford. Which is an embarrassingly short list for someone who’s spent 40 years thinking of himself as a Conrad admirer. So maybe it’s not so utterly mystifying after all. Maybe it’s time to bring the others into the rotation – one a year and I’ll be done by the time I’m 70.

(The only other time I can recall being caught up by that kind of suspense was reading Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Could the mysterious helper-figure be Captain Nemo? Surely not, but what if it is?)

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
This is nearly as mysterious. I did not read Eliot until university, when I was blown away by Middlemarch (1871) and only a little less by Daniel Deronda (1876). But then I read nothing else by her for decades. In the last few years, she has been in the rotation: Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), The Lifted Veil (1859) and a re-read of Middlemarch. So I am kind of halfway there.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
I’m not a fan but I do I find her I-know-best philanthropic condescension of the working class and her terror of organised labour almost as hilarious as it is painful as it is fascinating. I first read Mary Barton (1848) as very distant background for a piece I wrote about Gwyneth Jones in 2005. Gwyneth once described sf as ‘the green lung of the city of science’ so I started thinking about the industrial/rural hinterlands of Manchester, where she was born and grew up and where Gaskell lived, and went looking for representations of that landscape. I’m pretty certain I also read North and South (1854–5) for the same reason so I have no idea why I didn’t also read Cranford.

More recently, I read Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) because it is about whaling. Only it isn’t. Not really.

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1906–21)
A decade or more ago, I bought my housemate the DVD boxset of the 1967 BBC adaptation. It was unexpectedly compelling. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 26-episode series is the way it manages to utterly transform your feelings towards Soames Forsyte, from despising him for his marital rape of Irene to the moment when you realise (many episodes later) that he has become far-and-away the most sympathetic character amongst all these dreadful people. I immediately wanted to see whether (and how) Galsworthy pulls it off. Every second-hand omnibus volume of the much longer The Forsyte Chronicles has since sat in a box unread.

Which leaves 17 titles. Some are easy to explain.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
I have read just under half of Dickens’s novels, some of them more than once: The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–8), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860–1), Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; with the Leon Garfield conclusion). Mostly, it has been for purposes of study. My least favourite module at university was the compulsory (!) ‘Dickens and Wordsworth’ – it was the only one for which I did not receive a first class grade and I hated it so much I’ve always been quite pleased with that.

Drood I read on my own recognisance, back in my teens, because I’d heard there was spontaneous human combustion in it! Simpler times. (And as a kid, I’d loved Leon Garfield’s Smith (1967) and Black Jack (1968)).

Bleak House I read about a decade ago. My partner, who likes Dickens but no one’s perfect, had to go back to the States for a couple of months, so she bought me a copy to read, a chapter a day, while she was away. In return, I gave her Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) – remember, I’m given to big romantic gestures.

She’s never quite forgiven me for sending her off on her own with such a devastating book; and I’ve never forgiven her for giving me a book in which the most interesting character, the London fog, turns out to be just a fucking metaphor.

She so got the better part of that deal.

Of them all, Hard Times is the one I came closest to liking. Not just because it’s short, although that helps, but because the weekly publishing schedule completed screwed with Dickens’ rhythms and forced him into producing something interestingly different.

So the reason I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities is that I really don’t like Dickens. He’s such a chore, even when he is not literally so.

The reason I have not read the following three books is their authors’ close association – in my head, if not necessarily in reality – with Dickens:

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) – although I did recently crack and read The Moonstone (1868) and The Frozen Deep (1874) and am prepared to forgive Collins his real or imagined association with Dickens,

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
While I’m not convinced of its genius, I have read The Turn of the Screw (1898) maybe half a dozen times, most recently this summer as background for that chapter on horror and class with which these musings began. I quite liked Washington Square (1880) and The Bostonians (1886) – which were on my American Lit module and all right as far that kind of realist novel goes. So I was quite looking forward to reading more by him on The Novel module. So naïve! What Maisie Knew (1897) was a baffling mess: not that I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, but that he should botch it so very badly. Maybe, I thought, The Ambassadors (1903) would be better. Quit laughing at the back.

The Ambassadors seminar was one of those excruciating ordeals. Clearly no one else had read it. Years later, I discovered from his own confession that that included the tutor.

There is not a barge pole long enough with which not to touch Henry James again.

DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
That bleeding module on The Novel. They also made us read Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). I hated the whole night-blooming tumescent bunch of them.

I’d already read The Fox (1923) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) at secondary school, but not ‘the Other Stories’, so by the end of the sixth/final post you will appreciate how fucking virtuous I am being by not lying about it here.

EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
I’ve only read two things by Forster, but I have read both of them several times: ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), which seems a little less remarkable with each go, and the first two-thirds of the first chapter of A Passage to India, which is so fucking irritating I can’t ever get any further than that. Does this make me a bad person? Perhaps. Does it make me want to try something else by him instead? Hell, no.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
I guess I’m still suffering Red Pony trauma after all these years, although I did read Of Mice and Men (1937) for my brother’s CSE coursework. I’ve had a copy of In Dubious Battle (1936) lying around unread since I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles (2009), intended as background for the Matewan chapter. And I’ve been to Tortilla Flat, the oldest operating stagecoach town in Arizona, but have not read Tortilla Flat (1935), and not just because it isn’t actually set there (which doesn’t stop them selling copies).

Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
I very occasionally pick up something by Greene – Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958) – and like all right-minded folk prefer his ‘entertainments’ to his ‘novels’. I guess I’ll get to this one eventually, or maybe not, who knows, but I do have a copy of The Ministry of Fear (1943) kicking around somewhere, so I should read that first.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
I loved about two-thirds of The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the admittedly not-great To Have and To Have Not (1937). I loved the first half of A Farewell to Arms (1929), and the first quarter of The Sun Also Rises (1926). I do not love the law of diminishing returns.

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
Late in my teens, I got myself a dirt cheap, second hand, almost complete, 20-or-so-volume hardback edition of the complete Waverley novels. Faded blue, well musty and water stained, it looked grand all lined up on a shelf. Proper handsome. Never read a one of them. Years later, for something or other I was writing (thinking about historical narrative for the John Sayles book?), I read, I think, Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and one other – I cannot remember which for they all made very little impression on me.

I sometimes ponder reading The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) since I have a fond attachment to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the first opera I ever saw, and when my partner was living in Manchester I was sometimes tempted by Peveril of the Peak (1823) since it shared its name with our favourite city centre pub, but on the other hand it is Scott’s longest novel…

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
I’ve read Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) and bear their author no ill-will so I really cannot explain not having read this as well.

Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
I’ve read Seven Days in New Crete/Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) and bear its author ill-will so that’s that cleared that up.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
I’m not American, so it just really doesn’t loom that large. (Also male, so ditto.)

W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
I’m British, but it just really doesn’t loom that large.

HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
I’m as surprised as you to see Bates considered a ‘great writer’. But since I’ve not read anything by him, who am I to say.

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
Towards the end of 1981, the whole world it seemed was a-flutter over Granada’s 11-part TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1945). Desperate for cultural capital, I tuned in faithfully each week on the black-and-white 12-inch portable upstairs (no one else in the house was remotely interested so no chance of seeing it on the 24-inch black-and-white in the living room). But try as I might, I simply could not figure out what all the fuss was about. Sometime the following year, I got hold of the library’s tie-in (but fancy B-format) paperback and made my way through the dreadful thing. Utterly lamentable stuff.

But someone somewhere recommended the Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61) – probably Anthony Burgess, who lists it and Brideshead in his Ninety-nine novels – as the culmination of the mature Waugh. That might be true since it is certainly long and tiresome.

There was a copy of Scoop (1938) lying around in the book cupboard at the back of our sixth-form English classroom which, bored one day, I picked up (the book, not the cupboard). It rises at times to the mildly amusing. In 1990, BBC2’s Moviedrome season, hosted by Alex Cox, screened Tony Richardson’s 1965 adaptation of The Loved One (1948), which was all right (though I’d much rather Luis Buñuel or especially Elaine May had succeeded in making their versions), which led me to give Waugh one last go.

Bottom line: no fucking way is Evelyn Waugh a great writer.

Here endeth the sound and the fury; tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon anyway) to see if it signifies anything.

Reading The Great Writers, part six

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

Random relevant covid-19 reading: Graham Green and Henry Kuttner (and CL Moore)

A couple of short old novels randomly plucked from boxes where they’ve languished unread for decades suddenly have things to say about social distancing, contact and the legacy of these pandemic times.

From Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951):

She stood up abruptly and said, ‘Let’s go,’ and was suddenly taken with a fit of coughing. It seemed to big a cough for her small bdy: her forehead sweated with its expulsion. […] I moved towards her […]. ‘Sarah,’ I said. She turned her head sharply away, as though she were looking to see if anyone were coming, to see if there was time . . . but when she turned again the cough took her. She doubled up in the doorway and coughed and coughed. Her eyes were red with it. In her fur coat she looked like a small animal cornered.
‘I’m sorry.’
I said with bitterness, as though I had been robbed of something, ‘That needs attending to.’
‘It’s only a cough.’ She held her hand out and said ‘Good-bye – Maurice.’ The name was like an insult. I said ‘Good-bye’, but didn’t take her hand.

fury Some 700 years later, on human-colonised Venus, in Henry Kuttner’s Fury (1950, co-written with uncredited CL Moore):

He clasped his hands before him and bowed slightly in the semi-oriental gesture of greeting that had for so long replaced the handshake.

The City in Fiction and Film, week 16: JG Ballard’s High-Rise, chapters 1-9

70256 Week 15

This week we began to work on JG Ballard’s High-Rise (1975; all quotations from pictured edition, London: HarperCollins, 2006), reading the first nine chapters and also watching William Klein’s Le couple témoin/The Model Couple (1977).

We began with some context, outlining the scale and nature of house-building and redevelopment in the UK in the postwar years, drawing largely on John Grindrod’s Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain (2013) and Lynsley Hansley’s Estates: An Intimate History (2008).

There was already a housing shortage in the UK between World Wars. The promise to ensure that soldiers returned from WWI to a land fit for heroes (and thus stave off socialism) was never met – construction rates were too low and often the wrong kind of housing was being built in pursuit of the rather different goal of making private profit (Paul Rotha’s documentary Land of Promise (1946) is the classic film account of this issue and its history). During the war years of 1939-45 the UK population grew by one million per year – and during the same period four million homes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair by bombing (completely undoing the interwar construction efforts and significantly reducing housing stock in relation to total population).

Aneurin Bevan, the minister responsible for housing in the post-WWII Labour government, set a target of 300,000 new council houses per year – but rarely managed more than 200,000 – because the houses were to be spacious (90 square metres), brick-built with gardens. For him, such decent houses were not to be restricted to the privately-owning middle classes – they should be available to the working class, rented at lower than market rates from local councils. (One policy proposal considered but sadly never pursued was buying out all private landlords, thus monopolising the rental market and keeping down the cost of housing.)

When a succession of Conservative governments took office (from late 1951-64), they took up the challenge of 300,000 new houses per year – and succeeded in meeting the target. But they did so by reducing the size of the houses (70 square metres) and shifting from brick construction to speedier (but less durable) prefabricated structures, with no guarantee of gardens. And there was a shift to building blocks of flats rather than houses because they were cheaper and quicker to throw up from prefabricated materials. Ironically, because these blocks were typically set in parkland of some sort, the same number of people could have been housed in the same space with terraced housing.

In High-Rise, Ballard is fully aware of the economics determining such constructions:

All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occupants. (52)

Why were the blocks typically surrounded by parkland? Partly, it seems to be the influence of Le Corbusier, whose unrealised ville contemporaine (1922) plan to build 24 60-storey cruciform high-rise skyscrapers in which three million people would live and work did so. Ballard does not pursue the scale of this scheme – Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971) comes closer – but he does draw on Le Corbusier in other ways.

Le Corbusier advocated five principles when designing apartment blocks:

1 Lift the structure off the ground on reinforced concrete stilts (pilotis), enabling
2 a free façade (non-supporting exterior walls to allow the architecture freedom in his design) and
3 an open floor plan (interior could be configured without having to worry about supporting walls).
4 The free façade enables ribbon windows so as to provide clear views of surrounding gardens.
5 A roof garden compensates for the ground area covered by the building.

These principles are evident in his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, often described as resembling a moored ocean liner, contains 337 apartments, with a floor halfway up the block devoted to public amenities, and a roof garden. It is also raised up on pilotis. It became a location of pilgrimage and an object to copy for a generation or two of architects, including many of those planning housing developments for British councils. It also provides the design for Ballard’s own high-rise (it even stands on pilotis, ‘concrete legs’ (19)), one of five spaced equidistantly on the eastern edge of an under-construction square mile development in London’s docklands (in this, the novel is proleptic of material we studied way back in week one of the module, The Long Good Friday and London’s Overthrow – as well as of what has actually happened to such spaces since Ballard wrote the novel).

The other context I introduced was about Ballard himself: his centrality to New Wave sf of the 1960s and 1970s; his early novels refiguring the conventions of disaster fiction, such The Drowned World (1962), which also introduce surrealistic images into narratives indebted to writer like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene; the thematic trilogy, including Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974), which concludes with High-Rise; the autobiographical fictions and the more mainstream respectability that came with Empire of the Sun (1984); and the return of his late novels, Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), to transformations in bourgeois living environments.

Turning to the novel, we began by thinking about the names and characteristics of the three narrators, each of whom is associated with one of the three classes that emerge among the middle class residents of the building.

From the lower levels, Richard Wilder – physical, aspirational – he is the wildest and most overtly violent of the three and a frequent adulterer whose wife calls him Dick.

From the mid-levels, Robert Laing, whose name echoes that of the unorthodox psychiatrist RD Laing (1927-89), who saw mental illness as a product of social environments rather than as some kind of inward-driven deformation of the self, and who considered patients’ descriptions of their responses to their environments as valid in themselves rather than as symptoms of Freudian disorder. Opposed to use of antipsychotics to treat mental illness, he favoured recreational drug use and believed that mental illness could be a kind of transformative, shamanic experience. He also promoted primal scream therapy – most of the inhabitants of Ballard’s building seem to go through some version of it – and rebirthing therapy – foreshadowed for Robert Laing when he is surrounded by the threatening guests at the cocktail party to which he is not invited, with the whole novel constituting a kind of rebirthing for him.

From the very top floor, the architect of the building, Anthony Royal – a royal, the king of the place. Recently injured in a car accident, he suffers from a disability – and wears a distinctive costume – that makes him come across, one of the class suggested, like a Bond villain. Which enabled me to go, ah, funny you should say that…

I have long wondered whether having the architect of the building live in the penthouse was inspired by the fact that Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger lived for two months in an apartment on the top floor of Poplar’s 26-storey Balfron Tower (built 1965-67), which he had designed. He and his wife are said to have thrown cocktail parties to meet the other residents and learn their thoughts about his design so that he could incorporate criticisms and suggestions in his later building, such as the neighbouring 11-storey Carradale House (built 1967-70). Back in the 1930s, Goldfinger had been responsible for the demolition of some cottages in Hampstead to make way for three new houses, in one of which he would live. Ian Fleming was among those protesting the demolition. Twenty years later, Fleming would name a James Bond novel – and villain – after the architect. Ernő Goldfinger threatened to sue over Auric Goldfinger, to which Fleming reputedly responded, Okay, I’ll just rename him Goldprick. Ernő decided not to pursue the case.

Next we took a look at the opening paragraph, detailing how the design of Ballard’s building displays the influence of Le Corbusier and, in particular, Unité d’Habitation, and then looking at how it introduces patterns of imagery that will recur throughout the novel.

a post-apocalyptic sensibility that also suggests a descent into primitivism – Laing is calmly eating a dog (cf. Harlan Ellison’s New Wave story ‘A Boy and His Dog’ (1969) and LQ Jones’s 1975 film adaptation), and the building’s exterior is described as a cliff-face (cf. Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), possibly the first novel about skyscraper living, complete with domestic violence and an Oedipal struggle)
conflict – confrontation, violence and war imagery (there are skirmish grounds, raiding parties, provocations, retaliations, a buffer state, an interregnum, etc, but also some specifically WWII images – Royal’s ‘personal Dunkirk’ (69) and also, more ambiguously, the Blitz: a voice ‘calm and matter-of-fact, like that of a civilian in a war-torn city dealing with yet another air-raid’ (60) and, during the first blackout, the darkness providing conditions not just of sexual peril but also of consensual sexual adventuring (20))
the embrace of isolation, anonymity and alienation
apartments as prison cells (later, there will be news of a prison breakout (30), Wilder will be involved in filming a prison strike (42, 44), and his wife, Helen, will blandly observe that his desire to film in the apartment block will produce just ‘another prison documentary’ (45)) – this introduces the idea of the apartment block as what Erving Goffman called a total institution, like prisons and asylums (two of the psychosociologsist in Le couple témoin previously worked in an asylum) and even ocean liners (to which Unité d’Habitation has often been compared)

We then looked at the next section of the opening chapter (7-11), in which we learned more about the structure of the building and the docklands development of which it is a part, and the feelings it induces as a tripartite class structure begins to emerge among its bourgeois inhabitants. Highlights include:

indifference, giddiness, exhilaration, insomnia and, especially among female residents, boredom and nomadism; these troubling sensations will later develop into rifts that some think foreshadow or imply the mutation of the residents into a posthuman species (35–6; a similar idea is mooted in Silverberg’s The World Inside)
Steele’s anal obsession with garbage chutes
bigotry – people begin to talk dismissively and angrily about other floors as groups to be denigrated, abhorred (14, 24, 38) – Steele will compare ninth floor residents to ‘a traditionally feckless band of migrant workers’ (25), and the intensity of these emerging prejudices will be compared directly to ‘racial prejudice’ (32)
the relationship to London – which is somehow distanced in both space and time, a past of ‘crowded streets, traffic hold-ups, rush-hour journeys on the Underground’ (9), while the building belongs to an emerging future; in Ballard’s descriptions, time is transformed into space and vice versa
a grand Ballardian simile connecting the psychological to the urban, with a vague gesture to TS Eliot (he does this sort of thing a lot – never quite makes sense yet seems to imply immensities): ‘the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (9)
the contradictions of the building – Laing’s sister says: ‘You could be alone here, in an empty building … Besides, it’s full of the kind of people you ought to meet’ (10); Laing will soon appreciate the way the place enables both proximity and distance, providing a neutral background for his potential affair with Charlotte, although he immediately questions whether this is really the case (16) – this idea is developed further when they do first have sex (38)
the ways in which the building design encourages its inhabitants to turn inwards, away from the city but also from each other

The_Model_Couple-652984484-large We closed with a brief discussion of Le couple témoin, William Klein’s film about an average couple who win a competition to live as test subjects in a new urban development – the experiment is ostensibly concerned with designing apartments to ensure that they meet the needs of such a couple, but it clearly is more concerned with engineering their consent and subservience. The psychosociologist experimenters – themselves hardly rational – subject Jean-Michel and Claudine to an array of absurd tests, frequently bullying and brow-beating them, passive-aggressively consulting at them, reinforcing the most conservative of gender roles. The tests become increasingly irrational and arbitrary – authority being exercised because it is authority, not for any greater end. As funding for the experiment withers, and viewing figures for the Big Brother-like media coverage slump, so a group of child and teen revolutionaries are hired to stage a hostage-taking…

Recommended critical reading
AlSayyas, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London: Routledge, 2006. See chapter 7 “The Modernity of the Sophisticate and the Misfit: The City through Different Eyes.”
Baxter, Jeanette. J.G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2009.
Colombino, Laura. “The House as SKIN: J. G. Ballard, Existentialism and Archigram’s Mini-Environments.” European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 21–31.
Delville, Michel. J.G. Ballard. Plymouth: Northcote, 1998.
Duff, Kim. Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space: After Thatcher. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 52–86
Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Grindrod, John. Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain. London: Old Street, 2013.
Groes, Sebastian. The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. 67–93
Hansley, Lynsley. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta, 2008.
Matthews, Graham. “Consumerism’s Endgame: Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard’s Late Fiction.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 122–39.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008. See chapter 8. “The City as Queer Playground.”
Siegel, Allen. “After the Sixties: Changing Paradigms in the Representation of Urban Space.” Screening the City. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. London: Verso, 2003. 137–159.
Shiel, Mark. “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and American Cinema in the 1970s.” Screening the City. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. London: Verso, 2003. 160 – 179.

Recommended reading
High-Rise is part of a thematic trilogy, including Ballard’s most challenging novel, Crash (1973), and Concrete Island (1974). Ballard’s ‘late fiction’ returns to similar material but relocated to gated suburban communities in Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006).
1970s British novels of urban decay include Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Zoe Fairbairns’s Benefits (1979).

Recommended viewing
Ben Wheatley’s High Rise (2015) adapts Ballard’s novel.
Modern city living deranges or makes miserable in Repulsion (Polanski 1965), Shivers (Cronenberg 1975), Crash (Cronenberg 1996) and Happiness (Solondz 1998).
Films about the decay of urban centres include Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger 1969), Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971) and Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet 1975).

The City in Fiction and Film, week 9: The Secret Agent, part one

week 8

We started this week with the material on the Situationists and the dérive that we did not have time to cover last week, before turning to the first half of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) – which to be honest I was a little anxious about, given the events in Beirut and Paris last weekend – and a very quick discussion of The Third Man (Carol Reed UK 1949), which we watched in the morning.

The Situationist International (SI) was a group of primarily Paris-based anti-Stalinist Marxists influenced by Dada and Surrealism, which existed from 1957-1972. Their key theoretical activity was to develop Marx’s ideas on alienation and commodity fetishism, broadly arguing that capitalism had become so extensive and intensive that life was no longer experienced directly but through commodities; and that it was necessary to find ways to shatter the commodified spectacle of everyday life. They brilliantly and correctly called for automation to be developed not so as to maximise profit but so as to liberate everyone into lives of freedom and leisure and creativity. And of greater relevance here, they developed a number of theorised practices or ways of critically intervening in the city, including détournement – turning the spectacle against itself through pranks, culture jamming, reality hacks – and such psychogeographical experiments as the dérive.

Differing from the journey (which has a clear destination) and the stroll (which is typically aimless), the dérive is concerned with movement through urban space with a kind of double-consciousness. On the one hand, it is about allowing the ‘attractions of the terrain and the encounters’ found there to organise your movement and experience of the varying ambiances of the city space. On the other hand, it requires a conscious attention to the effects this drifting and these shifting environments have on you. The dérive is both planned – you know your starting point, who your companions (if any) might be, you do not have a specific destination but you do have a broad aim – and unplanned, since you cannot know in advance precisely where your feet will be drawn and who/what you might meet. It can seem random, but the structures of the city also play a determining role, deliberately and accidentally guiding you through its ‘constant currents, fixed points and vortexes’ – physical routes and barriers, but also psychological ones. (It is instructive that Abdelhafid Khattib, the Algerian Arab who was part of the SI and one of the early psychogeographical experimenters was arrested by the police for activities his white French colleagues could undertake unchallenged.)

Returning briefly to Cleo from 5 to 7, we could see ways in which Cleo – who last week we considered as a potential flâneuse – might be thought of as underaking a dérive, more obviously in the second half of the film when an overheard conversation in a café reminds her of her friend, the model Dorothée, which leads her through different aspects of and locations in Paris and various unanticipated encounters. (We will return to some of these issues in a couple of weeks when we focus on Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (De Sica Italy 1948).)

But this was obviously the point to clumsily segue into a brief introduction to Joseph Conrad, sketching in some biography, his early association with Impressionism (see the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)), his omnivorous consumption and reworking of raw materials (autobiography, people he met, fiction he read – which lead to charges of plagiarism in Poland – and real news events – including the French anarchist Martial Bourdin’s presumed attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory on 15 February 1894, which inspired The Secret Agent).

Conrad is typically considered one of the first British modernist novelists, particularly in regard to his ironic style and the sense of scepticism, melancholy, pessimism, constraint and doom that looms over his fiction (putting him somewhere between Dostoevsky and Kafka).

To help establish this mood or tone, we took a look at this fabulous passage in a letter he wrote to Cunninghame Graham in December 1897 (if I was the kind of person who sent out a family newsletter with Xmas cards, I would be tempted to adopt this). Conrad says that the universe

evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.” Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident –and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. … it is what it is – and it is indestructible!

It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters.

(Which always makes me think of The Clangers – and of that moment of sheer existential terror when the fabric of the universe rips apart in that episode of Button Moon. (I am so street! I am so down with the kids!))

In Conrad’s own description of the origins of the novel he describes how

the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was enough room there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.

And our treatment of the city in the novel will largely focus on this depiction of London as a monstrous, indifferent and cruel place; as a dark grave in which its inhabitants are buried; as an exemplar of modern anonymity; as claustral and carceral; as somewhere that blurs the distinction between home and work; as an amoral structure inhabited by spectral, untethered characters trapped in death-in-life existences; as a place of darkness, secrecy, mechanisation, hierarchy and control.

[Page references are to the current Penguin Classics edition.]

The first passage we looked at, though, was the one in which Mr Vladimir outlines his rationale for targeting the Greenwich Observatory in the faked anarchist bomb outrage. He begins by dismissing the assassination of a head of state, because such actions are now so commonplace that they are no longer spectacular enough. Attacking churches would just muddy the waters with claims that such attacks are religiously motivated; attacking a theatre or restaurant would be passed off as a ‘non-political passion: the exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social revenge’ (26). Of the latter two options, Vladimir notes – with a timeliness the students also noted – that ‘every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away’ (26).

Instead, Vladimir favours an attack that defies such easy narrativisation – it must be something so irrational-seeming as to defy our capacity to explain it away. You could attack art – plant a bomb in the National Gallery – but the only people who would cause a fuss would be ‘artists – art critics and such like – people of no account’ (26). But if you could find a way to attack science – ‘any imbecile with an income believes in that. … They believe that in some mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity’ (26-7). And if you could find away to attack the purest, most abstract-seeming of science – ‘if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics’ (27) – it would be so ‘incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable’ as to be ‘truly terrifying’ (27).

Attacking the Greenwich Observatory is not just an attack on astronomy, the next best option after maths, but also on the global order. It is an attack on the Greenwich meridian, on the military and commercial imperial web imposed upon the world. It is an attack on the seat of power.

And it is a plan conceived from the lofty view, the god’s-eye perspective, we discussed last week in relation to the de Certeau observing New York from the top of the World Trade Centre. The remainder of Conrad’s novel is set down on street level, in the grubby poetry written by his characters transiting through, and pausing to rest in, the city.

Next we took a look at the way in which Conrad depicts the anarchists: the fat, pasty, wheezing, resigned martyr, Michaelis; the grim, giggling, toothless, balding, goateed, dry-throated, deformed-handed, malevolent-eyed Karl Yundt, whose ‘worn-out passion’ resembles ‘in its impotent fierceness the excitement of a senile sensualist’ (34); and the ethnically ambiguous Comrade Ossipon, who has a ‘flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type’ and ‘almond-shaped eyes’ that leer ‘languidly’ (35).

Conrad’s descriptions draw upon cultural codes, familiar from popular fiction, yellow journalism and elsewhere, to construct images of unsavouriness and thus to link physical appearance to morality. This is not restricted to the anarchists; later, he describes Sir Ethelred, the government minister, in similarly grotesque terms. Indeed, most – if not all – of the characters in the novel are grotesques. They are the undead adrift in the city, trapped and deformed (physically and morally) by it.

At the end of the section in chapter 3 when the anarchists are described, Ossipon finds the idiot-boy Stevie obsessively drawing, as is his wont, circles. Alluding to Lombroso’s pseudo-science of ‘criminal anthropology’, Ossipon describes young Stevie as a perfect example of degeneracy. Verloc seems sceptical.

It is a curious moment. Conrad seems to be declaring that it is erroneous to make categorical judgments based on appearances even as he relies on his readers doing precisely that. Characters are trapped by their appearances into playing certain roles, just as the city entraps them, constraining and channelling them, serving them up to their fates.

We will return to the novel next week.

In closing, we had a very few minutes to talk about The Third Man. It is set in post-war Vienna, a city which was divided until 1955 into four zones, each governed by a different Allied nation (UK, US, France, USSR), with the international zone in the centre governed by all four powers. As with The Secret Agent, it makes apparent the complex governance structures of a particular which, as in M, is doubled by an underground that seeks to evade those overlapping, panoptical administrative structures. These representations can also help us begin to see the structuration of all cities.

Looking backward, the famous scene on top of the Ferris wheel, in which Harry Lime (Orson Welles) tries to persuade Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) of the statistical insignificance of individuals so as to justify his own monstrous crimes, recalls the view from atop the World Trade Centre that de Certeau talks about. Looking forward, it is a film set amid the rubble – a Trümmerfilm. It signals the ongoing presence of trauma and the urgent need for reconstruction that we will consider in relation to Bicycle Thieves and Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius UK 1949) before the end of this semester, and which will inform our study of Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard France/Italy 1965), Le couple témoin/The Model Couple (William Klein 1977) and JG Ballard’s High Rise (1975) next semester.

week 10

Recommended critical reading
Anderegg, Michael A. “Conrad and Hitchcock: The Secret Agent Inspires Sabotage.” Literature/Film Quarterly 3.3 (1975): 215–25.
Bernstein, Stephen. “Politics, Modernity and Domesticity: The Gothicism of Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” CLIO 32.3 (2003): 285–301.
Harrington, Ellen Burton. “The Anarchist’s Wife: Joseph Conrad’s Debt to Sensation Fiction in The Secret Agent.” Conradiana 36.1–2 (2004): 51–63.
Kim, Sung Ryol. “Violence, Irony and Laughter: The Narrator in The Secret Agent.” Conradiana 35.1–2 (2003): 75–97.
Leitch, Thomas. “Murderous Victims in The Secret Agent and Sabotage.” Literature/Film Quarterly 14.1 (1986): 64–8.
Mathews, Cristina. “‘The Manner of Exploding’: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Men at Home.” Conradiana 42.3 (2010): 17–44.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008. See chapter 5, “The City in Ruins and the Divided City: Berlin, Belfast, and Beirut.”
Shaffer, Brian W. “‘The Commerce of Shady Wares’: Politics and Pornography in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” ELH 62.2 (1995): 443–66.
Sinowitz, Michael. “Graham Greene’s and Carol Reed’s The Third Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 53.3 (2007): 405–33.
Stape, J.H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Recommended reading
Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1991) is often seen as a companion novel to Secret Agent.
Novels of urban underworlds include Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (1925), Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) and The Third Man (1950), Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City (1938), Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953) and Hubert Selby, Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964).
The criminalisation of sexual dissidence led to an often autobiographical fiction of queer underworlds and marginal urban existence, including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), John Rechy’s City of Night (1963), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Alan Hollinghhurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) and Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin (1995).

Recommended viewing
Conrad’s novel was filmed as Sabotage (Hitchcock 1936), which we will watch next week, and The Secret Agent (Hampton 1996).
Ambiguous underworlds appear in a vast array of films, including The Informer (Ford 1935), Pépé le moko (Duvivier 1937), Brighton Rock (Boulting 1947), The Blue Lamp (Dearden 1950), Night and the City (Dassin 1950), A Generation (Wajda 1955), Canal (Wajda 1957), Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda 1958), À bout de soufflé (Godard 1960), Hell is a City (Guest 1960), The Yards (Gray 2000), We Own the Night (Gray 2007) and Killing Them Softly (Dominik 2012).
Films about marginalised urban sexualities include Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger 1969), Working Girls (Borden 1986), Paris is Burning (Livingstone 1990), Young Soul Rebels (Julien 1991), The Wedding Banquet (Lee 1993), Exotica (Egoyan 1994), Beautiful Thing (MacDonald 1996), Nowhere (Araki 1997), Fucking Åmål/Show Me Love (Moodysson 1998) and Mysterious Skin (Araki 2004).