Peter van Greenaway – Mark Bould

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

Contact (Robert Zemeckis 1997)

A70-9170 Last week I was invited to introduce a screening of Contact – a film I had seen twice in twenty years and then saw twice in the same week – as part of this series at Bristol Cathedral. (The last film I saw there was The Medusa Touch (1978), which was partly filmed in the cathedral. They sat us in rows where, in the film, the ceiling collapses on people sat in rows.) This did not seem quite the right place to detail the film’s profound intellectual dishonesty, so this, more or less, is what I said:

When we think of science fiction, if we strip away all the space battles, alien monsters and big explosions, it might seem that we would be left with a genre that is profoundly secular and materialist, free from any concern with the supernatural or the spiritual. But sf is also part of our wider culture; it plays off it and builds on it in all kinds of ways.

Indeed, Adam Roberts, in his The History of Science Fiction (2006) argues that one of the sources – or perhaps an early manifesation – of sf is a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological debate, primarily Catholic but also taken up by Protestants, on the plurality of worlds. Could there be other worlds inhabited by other beings like us? Were they fallen races? Did Christ have to die again for each of them?

As Roberts writes, ‘unsupported by scriptural authority, the very notion of other inhabited worlds flirts with heresy, which lends the topic a dangerous flavour for more than 100 years’ (50). Both Johannes Kepler and Cyrano de Bergerac wrote fiction in which the Moon is inhabited – but chose not to have these tales publish while they were still alive. Palingenius – real name Pietro Angelo Manzoli – was less careful. As Roberts states, in his ‘speculative cosmology … Zodiacus Vitae (‘Living Zodiac’), originally published in Italy in 1537’, Palingenius pointed out that some people considered every bright star to be a world, and supposes that their inhabitants count our dark planet as the least among all the heavenly bodies. Despite his circumspection in attributing such ideas to others, he was ‘classified as a heretic of the highest class in the Papal Index’ (50).

Leap forward into 20^th century sf, and the same sort of questions are explored in CS Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelendra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945), books I find hateful – the more mean-spirited they become, the worse the quality of the writing (and thinking). American writers also explore such questions, as in James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958), Harry Harrison’s ‘The Streets of Ashkelon’ (1962) and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998).

In a rather different vein – weirder and more horrific – HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories of the 1920s and 1930s create a thoroughly non-supernatural universe the age and immensity of which renders alien species as kinds of mad, diseased gods.

Perhaps more interesting as a backdrop for Carl Sagan’s work is a tradition of atheist but nonetheless religious sf. Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker (1937) is overwhelmed with awe at the unbelievably vast magnitudes – both space and time – of the universe, itself just one cosmos among many, that in the end novel it copes with the sublime by imagining a kind of prime creative energy or force. Stapledon’s his successor in this tradition is of course Arthur C Clarke, especially in Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), both of which are set in quite rigorously material universes, but in which the possibility of transcendence remains – albeit as an evolutionary experience cast in in quasi-spiritual terms. (Clarke’s 2001 provides Sagan with the notion of hyperspace or wormhole travel as a kind of massive interstellar railway system; in the later stages of the film, John Hurt’s character increasingly resembles Clarke.) Stanley Kubrick’s film version of 2001 (1968) is much more oblique and ambiguous, skipping exposition in favour of a kind of overwhelming sensory experience – which Robert Zemickis’s Contact (1997) also attempts – as did films such as The Black Hole (1979) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) before it. But all of them lack Kubrick’s cool, misanthropic tone – unsurprising with Zemeckis, who is kind of a Spielberg discovery.

Sagan’s own position seems to lie somewhere between Kubrick’s film and Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation of his novel. In 1995, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan said that

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

He would describe himself not as an atheist but as an agnostic. In a 1981 interview collected in Conversations with Carl Sagan (2006), he said that

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

In his novel Contact (1985), protagonist Ellie Arroway makes the same point when questioned about her religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

In one of my favourite passages, as she is driving through the early morning desert, her headlights sweeping ahead of her, she notices rabbits gathering on either side of the road. As each one in turn is hit by the beam of light, it stands up on its hind legs and watches until the light has past. This has obvious resonances with her team of radio astronomers – and by extension, the whole human race – picking up the alien transmission. But but she also explicitly wonders if, in that moment, each rabbit is having a religious experience.

It is one of many moments in the novel where religion, spirituality and awe are probed from various directions.

And it is worth recalling that the novel itself expresses grave concern – omitted from the film – with the growing power of varieties of dispensationalist, prosperity-gospel Protestant fundamentalism, whose influence of American public life – and the practice of science – has only increased since then.

A few words about the film Contact.

In 1979, the production company Casablanca Pictures commissioned Sagan, who had recently won a non-fiction Pulitzer for The Dragons of Eden (1977) to develop a story for them to film. He was the most famous astronomer, possibly the most famous scientist, in America at that time, even though he had yet to make the PBS series Cosmos (1980). By the end of 1980, he and his co-author Anne Druyan had completed a 100 page story treatment. (Druyan was an author, who had also headed part of the NASA project about the golden discs of sound recordings that were attached to Voyager 1 and 2, in which Sagan was also involved, having previously designed the plaque for Pioneer. They married in 1981, his third and final wife, and she co-authored his later non-fiction books. She appears very briefly in the film on an episode of Crossfire debating Rob Lowe, who seems to be in the film for no reason other than to be pretty. Which is kind of his career.)

Casablanca took the project to Warner Bros, where it go stuck in development hell. So Sagan and Druyan wrote the novel (the extent of her involvement remains unclear; he alone is credited as the author). It attracted a $2 million dollar advance from Simon & Schuster, and became a best seller, selling 1.7 million copies in its first two years. This led to renewed interest in the film. Roland Joffe, fresh from Best Director Oscar nominations for The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), was initially attached to direct. When he dropped out and it was offered to Robert Zemeckis, who turned it down, then to George Miller, who had just made Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Miller was fired because he was taking so long, and it was offered to Zemeckis again, who this time accepted, having recently wrapped up the Back to the Future trilogy (1989, 1990) and Forrest Gump (1994), for which he’d won best director Oscar. Gump seems to have inspired the use of digitally altered footage of Bill Clinton (after Sidney Poitier turned down the role President) – footage which includes his serendipitous August 7 1996 press conference about the announcement that an Antarctic meteorite – almost certainly from Mars – seemed to contain microfossils of bacteria

Sagan died in December 1996, while Contact was still in production. Released the following June, it is dedicated to him.

Before we start, just a few words of warning. If there are any Matthew McConaughey fans here tonight, be aware you have to wait a full and seventeen and a half minutes for him to get his shirt off.

If it is any consolation, the first several of those endless, utterly unconscionable minutes contain what was in 1997 the longest continuous CGI sequence in film – a record it held for seven years.

It is, I know, no consolation (sotto voce: But such is the nature of the universe.)