Desert Island Books

Jerry: You're on a desert island; which five books do you take?
George: I gotta read five books??

Among the books you like, which ones transcend mere enjoyment to become enduringly enjoyable, instructive, refreshing, edifying, necessary?  The question needn't prompt an actual list, but it ought to prompt thinking about what we read and why. Apart from the obvious ones like the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer,  I would want some poetry, probably an anthology; a loved children's story; a work of philosophy (Pascal? Augustine?); and the rest fiction.

I've met people for whom fiction would be the first thing they'd jettison when the boat starts to go down. They'd consider it supremely unnecessary. I think that's why we need it so much. It's the sublimely unnecessary grace of ordinary life; the magic lantern that makes long sunscorched days endurable; the mirror that shows us at once what is and is not there. If you're stuck on a desert island, a mirror is a terrifically handy thing to have.

The age of metrics

I heard Anand Giridharadas talking about the age of metrics, in which our increasing use of computers is gradually digitising our minds. He makes the very good point that in this age, where anything can be proved with metrics, everything must be justified metrically, so things that have not traditionally been quantifiable, such as the arts and humanities, have now to come up with numbers to justify continued support. In his own research field of politics, the influence of metrics brings greater rigour but at the price of having less to say about the world's big questions. The biggest losers in this intellectual economy are the most intuitive or unquantifiable disciplines, into which category literature neatly falls. 

This misplaced emphasis on numbers has been evident in English departments for some time, especially in the ludicrous exercise of measuring viability by numbers of publications, which every teacher and scholar of literature knows is bunk but none is in a position to defy. What I find most interesting is that not only the mode but the message of much literature is opposed to quantification. The whole idea of recording human experience in words rather than in numbers has bypassed the funders, managers and assessors of research excellence, who have no clue and no interest in the content of the research they fund, manage and assess. (Incidentally, in the 1980s with the early ascendency of computers, a trend emerged in which literature was analysed numerically, using new technology to measure the use of images and rhymes and so establish meaning. It wasn't long before everybody realised how silly this was, and went back to the more intuitive and intellectually supple methods of analysis, what Monica Fludernik has called “the creative endowment of significance.”)

An article in this weekend's Canberra Times made the same point in discussing Gordon Brown's proposal to slash hundreds of millions from universities in the UK. I find this decision, undoubtedly based on metrics, short-sighted in the extreme.  Apart from beggaring belief, it raises the basic question, do we want to have a civilisation or don't we? In a civilisation, like the one we're in the process of digitising, the most civilised and civilising things are often the least measurable.

Meditations on work

I have to apologise for not having posted for a couple of weeks. I've been reflecting on the many benefits of voluntary unemployment (note: these do not include so-called unemployment benefits, as it seems the G-men don't take kindly to the 'voluntary' part). More broadly I've been thinking about work and whether this temporary hiatus could be used to realise some of my creative ambitions. I've always suspected that real creativity might be a convenient way out of work; though of course I realise that realising it involves a lot of work. Nevertheless a lot of writers see themselves at odds with the world and values of conventional employment. Not least Philip Larkin (again), whose poem 'Toads' articulates my latent suspicions:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Why can't I? Lots of other people seem to. Indeed corporate gurus argue that creativity is the capital of the twenty-first century (like it wasn't in every other one.)

Then there's Thomas Hardy, Larkin's antecedent, whose philosophical approach I used to justify  frequent bouts of inertia when studying:

"It is no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the active, the rapid, the people of such splendid momentum that before they can see where they are they have got elsewhere,  have been surprised to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for discharging their active labours has been that of postponing them indefinitely."

Although the older I get the more I have to admit that indefinite postponement might yield profundities, but rarely results.

Then there's Hilaire Belloc, who said he "never put pen to paper without wishing that I had inherited an enormous fortune, in which case you may be very certain that I should never have put pen to paper."

So is writing a way of working, or of not working? If I didn't have to work (a euphemistic way of describing my current status), would I want to write? Or is the dream of writing only one of the humours I indulge while reluctantly pursuing my more active labours?

I'll keep you posted.

The Other Side

Skipping across the Atlantic for a time, though staying in the twentieth century, here's a snippet of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. The Great Gatsby pretty consistently gets in among top 100s, and is regularly offered as the greatest novel of its century. I frankly don't see what all the fuss is about, but the other Fitzgeralds I've read give indications of a supremely gifted writer. I love the blend of lyricism with cynicism, particularly in his semi-autobiographical Tender is the Night. This Side of Paradise is less lyrical and more satirical, but it moves along with a kind of assurance and invention that I find very pleasing. I especially liked this departure from the conventional:

Amory's point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:

1. The fundamental Amory.


2. Amory plus Beatrice.


3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
   Then St. Regis' had pulled him to pieces and started him over again:


4. Amory plus St. Regis'.


5. Amory plus St. Regis' plus Princeton.
   That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:


6. The fundamental Amory.

I haven't finished it yet, so look out for future posts on this one.

Larkin and Lucky Jim

In the interview I mentioned, Larkin is asked about his connection with Kingsley Amis, and in particular with Amis' early and hilarious academic spoof Lucky Jim (which I've just reread for about the fifth time). Apparently the novel is thought to be based on Larkin's experience as much as Amis', and Larkin certainly read drafts and made suggestions.

I first read this novel on my first trip to England, in the week following my first academic conference. The resemblance of some of the eccentric, bewildered and priggish caricatures in the book to some of the scholars I had just met was startling. I was about two years into my PhD at that stage, and Dixon's experiences struck forcibly home. His compound of unease and contempt was familiar, likewise his sense that real and worthwhile academic work was no doubt being carried on somewhere by someone, but certainly not by him or anyone he knew.

Throughout my varied and unglamorous academic career, I've cherished this novel and returned to it often for reassurance and private sneering. I think it has a special resonance for anyone in (or out) of academic circles, but I'm sure its comedy has a more universal appeal. I still chuckle over sentences like this:

“Dixon had been expecting a silver-bells laugh from Margaret to follow this remark, but it was still hard to bear when it came.” 

“Where was he going to find this supplementary pabulum? The only answer to this question seemed to be Yes, that's right, where?” 

The real joy of the book is in Dixon's inner monologue, and the contrast between how he acts and how he wants to act. While engaged in pleasant back-and-forth with his imbecile boss, here's what's going on in his mind:

“He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper. Thinking of this, he smiled dreamily...”