mary shelley – 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

RIP John Hurt

article-2508559-19758e8e00000578-312_306x423 [Something written pseudonymously about John Hurt for a 50th anniversary feature on Doctor Who. I have no idea by who.]

He is the one who comes between. The one we did not know was there. The one who does not count (or, at least, was not counted). Even his costume, part-McGann/part-Eccleston and bridging between them both, is interstitial, not really his own. He is the not-Doctor who says ‘no more’. As Matt Smith’s Doctor explains: ‘I said he was me, I never said he was the Doctor. … The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose, … it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one who broke the promise’ – and what he did to end the Time War, destroying Gallifrey and billions of Time Lords, he did ‘not [do] in the name of the Doctor’.

It now seems inevitable that sooner or later John Hurt would play the Doctor, and that when he did it would be this particular Doctor – the War Doctor – or someone like him. The one who can bear it no longer. The one who must face a Kobayashi Maru moment that is no mere test or simulation, and which cannot, Kirk-like, be glibly cheated.[1] It is not just that Hurt, the oldest actor to play the role, has been around even longer than the series,[2] and thus can bring a sense of perspective to the more infantile, gurning, gesticulatory, timey-wimey shenanigans of the relaunched series, to its peacock displays of masculinity, its violence and all the snogging. Although, edging his sorrow with an impish despair at the younger men playing his older self, he does.

Nor is just that Hurt’s sf credentials are impeccable, although they are. In Contact (Zemeckis US 1997), he portrays the billionaire funding the first contact mission as an Arthur C. Clarke lookalike, and more recently he raised Hellboy (Ron Perlman) from a pup for Guillermo del Toro. Haggard and squalid in Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-four (UK 1984), his is the definitive screen Winston Smith; but one can easily imagine him taking a role in Equals, the Kristen Stewart-starring ‘epic love story’ adaptation of Orwell’s novel with which we are currently threatened, just so he can suffer again and suffer some more. It would not be the first time Hurt returned for a further dose of agony and anguish, reprising tragedy as farce. After all, his is the chest from which the alien chestburster first burst, and then again in Spaceballs (Brooks US 1987).

And it this capacity for suffering, and for provoking our sympathy, that is the key to Hurt’s persona and to his casting as the Doctor, and as this particular Doctor; that, and his aura of jaded sexual dissidence – he is, do not forget, Caligula in I, Claudius (UK 1976) – that often also leads to suffering.

He is Max, the heroin addict stuck in a Turkish hellhole prison in Midnight Express (Parker UK/US 1978) but in Love and Death on Long Island (Kwietniowski UK/Canada 1997), he is Giles De’Ath – a reclusive, modernity-hating author who stumbles into a cinema hoping for an E.M. Forster adaptation and instead gets Hotpants College II and is smitten with its star, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley). He is John Merrick in The Elephant Man (Lynch US 1980), disfigured, despised and turned into a sideshow freak. Yet he is also The Countess in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Van Sant US 1993), sagely noting, ‘All of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian Countess into a white, middle class, Baptist family in Mississippi, and you’ll see what I mean’. In 10 Rillington Place (Fleischer UK 1971), he is the ill-educated Timothy Evans, framed and executed for murders committed by serial killer John Christie (Richard Attenborough). In Scandal (Caton-Jones UK 1989), he is Stephen Ward, the procurer at the heart of the Profumo affair, who is abandoned by his Establishment friends, scapegoated and driven to suicide (or possibly murdered by MI5). But he is also the fabulous flaming Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (UK 1975), produced by Doctor Who’s very own Verity Lambert, and in An Englishman in New York (UK 2009).[3] He is the fearfully haunted Parkin in Whistle and I’ll Come to You (UK 2010) and the ailing vampire Christopher Marlowe in Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch UK/Germany/France/Cyprus/US 2013), but he is also the world-weary assassin in The Hit (Frears UK 1984) and, in a neat reversal, Britain’s fascist dictator, the Big Brother to Evey’s (Natalie Portman) Winston Smith, in V for Vendetta (McTeigue US/UK/Germany 2005).

And in Frankenstein Unbound (Corman US 1990), he is Dr Joe Buchanan, the inventor of an ultimate weapon that tears holes in time and space. It casts him back to the very birth of sf, to the Villa Diodati in 1817, but in an alternative history in which Mary Shelley is writing up a factual account, not a novel, of the Frankenstein affair. And then he travels forward into a future in which his superweapon has destroyed humankind.

He has done all this before. No wonder the War Doctor’s weary mantra is ‘no more, no more’. You can hear his exhaustion ground deep in that gravelly voice.

‘I’ve been fighting this war for a long time, I’ve lost the right to be the Doctor’, he tells the sentient ultimate weapon as he prepares to use it, knowing that his punishment will be to survive genociding his own people. But Hurt has suffered – has hurt – for so long, who else had the right to be the War Doctor?

Notes
[1] Although, being a Steven Moffat episode, actually it can. The scenario can be gamed, and what was written in stone can be rewritten, while handy amnesia also leaves continuity pretty much intact.
[2] Already a stage actor, his first television appearance was in an episode of Probation Officer (UK 1959–62) broadcast two years before ‘An Unearthly Child’.
[3] Sadly, he is also Kerwin, the gay cop teamed with Ryan O’Neal in the alleged comedy Partners (Burrows US 1982).

William Godwin’s Things As They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams

Back in the mists of time, around a decade ago, there was a plan for an ever-expanding online collection of short critical essays on key works of the fantastic. The plan fizzled and died, but not before I wrote nine pieces for it (which I just found). This is another of them.

Originally published: 1794
Edition used: Caleb Williams (Penguin, 1988) edited and introduced by Maurice Hindle

Of humble origin, Caleb Williams, orphaned at the age of 18, is taken into the household of the local squire, Ferdinando Falkland. One day, he stumbles upon his master behaving in a secretive manner; on perceiving Caleb, Falkland becomes violent. Falkland’s steward explains the curious chain of circumstances that saw Falkland recently accused of murder and then vindicated, after which his personality underwent a profound change. Caleb begins to suspect Falkland is actually guilty of the murder and let others be executed for his crime. Falkland eventually confesses to Caleb, secure that no one will believe a servant over his master. When Caleb tries to flee the tyranny with which Falkland circumscribes his daily existence, he is framed for robbery. Awaiting trial, Caleb escapes, and from that moment on his life becomes a miserable series of disguises and upheavals as Falkland’s agents dog his steps, never allowing him to settle.

Things As They Are is an intriguing test case for where the boundaries of the fantastic lie. A ‘political Gothic’, there is nothing of the fantastic in it – not even of the apparently supernatural that is later revealed to have a mundane explanation. M John Harrison argues that the problem with much sf is that it has become addicted to the mediating metaphor – the whole paraphernalia of future societies, other worlds, monsters and spaceships, and the grab-bag of technical and rhetorical tools – rather than deploying such image-furniture and techniques to establish a metaphoric relationship between text and world. Much the same can be seen to happen in the flowering of the Gothic in the second half of the 18th century and its subsequent permutations.

While the Gothic imagined terrible incarcerations in crumbling vaults and subterranean dungeons, Godwin turned to the reality of the contemporary judicial and penal systems as described in The Malefactor’s Register; or the Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (1779) and Howard’s 1777 report on The State of Prisons, and as witnessed on visiting Newgate prison and in the treatment of fellow radicals such as Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot.

While the Gothic generally used such torments to thrill its readers with the depiction of sensibilities under distress, Godwin – who was not above such things – also turned his Gothic imagination to an elaboration of the prison as a model of the social world.

While much Gothic fiction can be read as a kind of sadomasochistic proto-feminist expression of the internalisation of particular historical restrictions on female experience, Caleb stands as a kind of typical subject for whom the whole world is carceral.[i] The ‘paranoid’ depiction of society as a prison-house becomes an important fantastic metaphor in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken/Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (1924), Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess/The Trial (1925), B Traven’s The Death Ship (1934), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Samuel Beckett’s Le Depeupleur/The Lost Ones (1971), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), throughout Philip K Dick’s work and in countless other fantastic and dystopian fictions.

But at what point does one judge the metaphor to have become sufficiently concretised in the diegetic world to make it a fantastic world?[ii]

One particular moment is worth considering in this light. Hiding out in London, Caleb encounters a hawker peddling a fictionalised account of his life:

Here you have the MOST WONDERFUL AND SURPRISING HISTORY AND MIRACULOUS ADVENTURES OF CALEB WILLIAMS: you are informed how he first robbed, and then brought false accusations against his master; as also of his attempting divers times to break out of prison, till at last he effected his escape in the most wonderful and uncredible manner; as also of his travelling the kingdom in various disguises, and the robberies he committed with a most desperate and daring gang of thieves; and of his coming up to London, where it is supposed he now lies concealed; with a true and faithful copy of the hue and cry printed and published by one of his Majesty’s most principal secretaries of state, offering a reward of one hundred guineas for apprehending him. All for the price of one halfpenny. (278)

Robbed of his liberty, Caleb is now stripped of his identity as other characters take this popular account for the truth about him. And it does indeed contain some superficial truths – he has escaped prison, been sheltered by a gang of thieves (although committing no crimes himself), become expert at disguise and made his way to London – but not the truth, especially not what has forced him into this behaviour. But this virtual self becomes a doppelganger, permitting him no rest, even as Falkland’s exercise of arbitrary power takes on a life of its own separate from and outside of his control. Elsewhere, much is made of the difference of justice as it exists on paper and as it is experienced by those subjected to its institutional practices – a long time before Borges or Baudrillard, Godwin observes not only the distinction between map and territory but also the supersession of the territory by the map.

Ultimately, even if Caleb’s misadventures are not judged to be fantastical, they nonetheless pose important questions about how we conceptualise fantasy. If M John Harrison’s Things That Never Happen (2004) collects the fiction of a fantasist working to strip the fantasy out of fantasy, Godwin’s Things As They Are seems to tackle the same problem from the other side.

It should also be noted that Caleb provides a template of sorts for the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) – Shelley was, of course, Godwin’s daughter – and that like Shelley’s novel Things As They Are cries out for queer reading.

The other eight entries I wrote were:
Voltaire, Candide
de Maistre, Voyage Around My Chamber
France, Thais
London, The Iron Heel
Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+
Smith, The Skylark of Space
Schuyler, Black No More
Sturgeon, Venus Plus X

Notes
[i]
This is not to imply that female characters cannot be typical subjects, nor that male experience should be normalised as in anyway typical.
[ii]
Things As They Are bears some obvious similarities to such noirish crime movies as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy 1932) and The Big Clock (Farrow 1948), itself a possible prototype for Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977); and a similar question about the boundaries of fantasies is posed by the heady and tortured prose typical of Cornell Woolrich’s crime fiction.

Johnny Storm in a Teacup: The New Fantastic Four

To be honest, I’d forgotten there was a new Fantastic Four movie coming out until the trailer appeared yesterday.

My memory was lagging behind in other ways, too. For the life of me I could not figure out why they’d cast Michael B. Jordan as Ben Grimm/The Thing.

I mean, he’s so skinny.

My mistake. They’ve actually cast Jamie Bell, and I’m good with that.¹ Jordan is playing Johnny Storm/Human Torch. There was, tediously and of course and now dimly remembered, some kerfuffle about the casting of an actor of colour in a role of pallor. The usual racist bullshit tweeting and trolling. It seemed to die down pretty quickly, especially after Jordan, caught off guard, snapped back ‘You’ll all come see it anyway’. Which is not quite a Neil Patrick Harris well, duh moment, but not bad on the fly.

My confusion about who was cast as who does actually make a kind of sense. Because the Thing – although perhaps not quite as obviously as The Hulk – was always one Marvel’s black buck stereotype superheroes.

The Hulk is inspired by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Hyde is clearly racialised in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel from 1886, and even more so in the 1932 adaptation starring Fredric March, in which Hyde clearly signifies some kind of simian negritude. (It is always worth remembering that the multiple trials of the Scottsboro boys – a case more typical than exceptional – were dragging on through the first half of the 1930s, even as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, King Kong, James Whale’s Frankenstein, Erle C Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls and other fantastical American racial fantasies were appearing in cinemas.)

The Thing builds more obviously on the combination of buck stereotype and proletarian image with which Whale imbues Mary Shelley’s creation (building on her description of Frankenstein’s apocalyptic vision of his creations breeding and producing a new posthuman race that will displace aristocratic privilege and white hegemony) and which he explicitly and sympathetically develops in Showboat when Paul Robeson sings ‘Ol’ Man River’.

Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon is a close relation. The appearance of this archaic fishman can easily be interpreted in terms of racist caricatures of African/Afrodiasporic peoples. Something of his melancholy aquatic courtship of Kay, her whiteness emphasised by her dazzling white swimsuit, is carried forward into the sequence in The Fantastic Four (2005) when Ben’s engagement is called off. The racist imagery of the black buck as sexual monster/monstrously sexual it evokes – his finger is just so big he can’t get it into the tight little engagement ring – falls somewhere between unfortunate and hilarious.

And of course, early in his comics career Luke Cage, Power Man – later spoofed, a little unfairly, by Milestone Comics as Buck Wild, Mercenary Man – subbed for the Thing in the Fantastic Four, and soon after had his own side adventure in Latveria with Doctor Doom.

So like I said, my confusion makes a kind of sense. But nonetheless, I am curious about my own unreflective assumption that Jordan was playing the Thing, while also profoundly untroubled by him playing Johnny Storm, a character with plenty of potential (as Chris Evans showed, albeit whitely) to be just another ‘one of those Tom Slick brothers that think you can get by on good looks, a wink and a smile’ (as Black Dynamite‘s Gloria might put it).

The one thing I dread however – partly because over the years I have seen so much awkward, straight-to-video exposition justifying Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Belgian accent to American ears – is the painful scene explaining how come Johnny’s sister, Sue, is white.

I mean, deep down there is a part of me that does actually want to see it, and be appalled by it. But we really could do without it.

It’s not like this is Pleasantville out here.

1
Someone somewhere please, in an alternate universe if not this one, cast him in the other FF franchise, post-Paul Walker, to take up the whiteboy slack alongside Lucas Black.