Reading The Great Writers, part three
Another shorter middle bit
While my experience of reading The Great Writers’ novels had always been a little marred by their layout and print, something far worse awaited at university.
Condescension.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
This was the very first novel we were required to read on my degree (and one of the very small number by women). I had not read anything quite like it before. Despite my forays into ‘literature’ and ‘literary fiction’, I still mostly read genre fiction. I got through a lot of those 180ish-page sf paperbacks, often at a rate of one or more per day, so I was not at all used to having to keep track of large numbers of characters and their relationships with each other. I remember breaking off after several chapters to jot down their names and draw a diagram mapping how they connected to each other.
I remember a fellow student getting a glimpse of it and laughing.
But mostly I remember being the only student in the seminar without a brand-new Penguin Classic, and the looks on (some of) their faces when they saw my manifestly cheap ‘fancy’ hardback. It was that Oxford interview all over again.
When I was growing up, Plymouth was one of just a handful of places that still retained the 11+ exam, the already archaic post-war system for streaming pre-adolescent children into secondary education at technical schools, secondary moderns or grammar schools. It pretended to neutrality but was really a system for maintaining economic and social class hierarchies while allowing limited social mobility for the ‘worthy’ few. We moved to Plymouth right at the end of 1979 and I started my half year at Hyde Park Juniors on the January day the rest of the class were taking the second part of the 11+. So a couple of months later, after which most school places in the city had already been assigned, I had to take an alternative exam. The outcome was I had done well enough to go to a grammar school but there were no places available, so I could either
- commute to the anomalous Southway Comprehensive (which also was not quite a comprehensive, either, since it streamed some subjects) on the northern edge of the city; or
- apply for a scholarship to Plymouth College, the public (i.e., private) school less than a ten-minute walk from home, not quite opposite my junior school.
No way was I going endure being patronised and mocked as a scholarship boy!
By not going there or to Oxford, I really thought I’d dodged the bullet of class condescension.
After that Austen seminar, I went back to my room in Mansfield Hall and looked at the reading list we’d been sent in advance and at the shelf of books I’d brought with me. Every one of them was second-hand, and most of them editions which were less than infra dig (a phrase I’d never encountered before, let alone heard being bandied about, and had to look up in a dictionary). And some of them were so embarrassingly bulky and mouldering that I went scouring Reading’s second-hand bookstores for replacements, which of course meant it would probably have been cheaper to buy new editions in the first place.
Anyway, Austen. Took me a while to get it. But then quickly became quite fascinated and read all the novels – except, for some reason, Northanger Abbey (1817), which I only got to maybe five years ago. Predictably, I guess, sarky Emma (1815) was my favourite, but I’ve only ever re-read Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), both for things I was writing. Maybe when I’m through (re)reading the Brontes (and George Eliot), I’ll move Austen into the rotation.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
What can I say? It is an absolute monster of a book. I fell in love immediately. So much so that my first tattoo was very nearly the Penguin edition barcode on the back of my neck. (Again, I wish I was making this up but am also quite delighted by my own ridiculousness. And both relieved and saddened that I never managed to scrape together the cash.)
For my first essay on my American Literature module – which anthology-wise was thoroughly Norton not Heath, so Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, early Henry James and our token woman, Emily Dickinson – I decided to develop an angle on Moby-Dick by holding it up alongside Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which I also read for the first time. Quite why I thought Moby-Dick could not sustain a 1500-word critical treatment on its own, I have no idea. Maybe Melville’s encyclopedism was contagious.
I read Moby-Dick half a dozen times over the next decade, a couple of them for teaching. After my MA at Warwick, I returned to Reading for my PhD and a couple of years in a row I taught the same American literature module – literally the same, completely unchanged – I’d studied five or six years earlier. Each time, at some point in the first seminar, I advised the class that it was a really big book but they would only need to read so many pages per day to have it under their belts by the time we got to the two weeks we would spend on it. And each week, I updated the increasing page-count if they were to start from that day. Of the 25 students I taught over those two years, not one of them took my advice. But more than half skipped class during the Moby-Dick fortnight… Their loss.
A few years ago, we went to Inverness for our Xmas/New Year’s break, and I decided to read Moby-Dick for the first time in at least 20 years. Once again, I was utterly smitten. Fortunately, it was fucking freezing outside, and the days were much shorter that far north, so my partner didn’t really mind that I basically sat and read it in 4-or-more-hour chunks.
At the start of lockdown, I decided to read all of Melville. Breezed through Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), both of which I’d previously read and this time liked even more. And I finally got through Mardi (1849), which had defeated me several times before, and which this time broke me of Melville for a while. However, I’m determined to bring him into the rotation – Redburn (1849) is cued up for 2024, which means I should get to my Moby-Dick reward-read around 2030 or 2031 (depending on what I do about the short stories and poetry). I seriously cannot wait. Such are the schemes of mice and men.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
I must have read a version adapted for younger readers at some point, because parts of it were already familiar. I have not reread it since I taught it in 1996 at Exeter University on an American Literature survey course which was very Heath, not Norton, in its orientation. I feel no particular desire to read it again.
Except.
How the hell you abridge Huckleberry Finn. Surely, I can’t be daft enough to track down a children’s version and read it alongside the complete text.
Reader, that’s precisely how daft I can be.
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
We read this on the Literature, Film and Television module alongside the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford. The one good thing about Fitzgerald’s novel is that it is quicker to read than it is to sit through the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford.
And it turns out, a quarter century later, quicker to read than to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So that’s two good things.
But it is even quicker to watch Elliot Nugent’s 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, which regardless of the liberties it takes with the novel, but also mostly because of them, makes it way better than Fitzgerald’s effort.
Which is to say, I not only don’t like the novel – the ash heaps and big googly eyes are fine – but am mystified by its critical standing. It’s right down there with JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1945–6) and that whiny little fuck Holden Caulfield, the literati’s Danny Rand.
However, being a dutiful student, I also read Tender is the Night (1934) and re-watched the 1985 BBC mini-series adaptation – I saw the initial broadcast of it because of: a) flailing around re. cultural capital, but also really b) Peter Strauss (i.e., Wolff aka Spacehunter, of Adventures in the Forbidden Zone fame) was in it.
I’d found a cheap paperback Gatsby to switch in for my Great Writers version but did not keep it once we were done with Finals. Of course, a few years later I found myself teaching on an updated version of that module, and equally inevitably, the one bit that had been kept unchanged was the block on Fitzgerald. His estate has made a (very small) fortune from me, and I resent that.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Our 18th Century Literature module was an intoxicating brew of bawdiness, wit, humanism, misanthropy, scepticism, formal experimentation, moralising, mockery of moralising, refusal to moralise, baby-farming and horse-people. Fortunately John Dryden died in 1700, so there was Alexander Pope instead, with The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728). There was Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) and Gulliver – so I finally learned how to pronounce Houyhnhnms. And for novels, there was Tom Jones, which I liked most of all, with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) a close second and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) some way back in third place. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), trailing the field by quite a distance, was in danger of being lapped. Which makes it all the odder that rather than reading Fielding’s brief spoof, Shamela (1741), or any of his other novels, I voluntarily ploughed through Richardson’s breezeblock response to Fielding, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and his other doorstop, Clarissa (1748). Of them, I remember nothing beside their immensity.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Our module on The Novel gave us Austen, George Eliot, later Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence and Hardy. See, I told you it was a devotedly Leavisite department! (Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence will return in part five.) I found Tess a bit meh, not Far From the Madding Crowd meh, but meh nonetheless. Jude the Obscure (1894–5) seemed stronger, undoubtedly because Jude’s struggle for and with social mobility struck a chord. Also, pig pizzles being lobbed over hedges always puts me in a cheery mood. But it was The Woodlanders (1887) that won me to Hardy’s corner. That and him not being James or Lawrence. (I eventually got to write about The Woodlanders in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture – alongside Groot, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, because I’m nothing if not classy.)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
This wasn’t actually on my degree. It’s best shot was the Modernism module but, although that somehow (and somewhy) devoted two weeks to Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), there was only room for one woman, which was Woolf, represented by one novel, which was Mrs Dalloway (1925), but I liked it so much I read Lighthouse and The Waves (1931), too.
And that was it. My degree was over. More house moves – Plymouth, Coventry, Reading, Reading, Reading, Exeter, Exeter, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, Bristol – and my parents wanting to reclaim some space in their own house (the nerve!) and somewhere in all of that The Great Writers (and many other books) found their way to charity shops.
But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…
Which I realise is not much of a cliffhanger, but it’s the best I can muster right now.
Mark Bould 