In My Good Books Read online

  IN MY GOOD BOOKS

  by

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  To

  MY WIFE

  Contents

  PREFACE

  GIBBON AND THE HOME GUARD

  A CONSCRIPT

  A SWISS NOVEL

  THE FIRST DETECTIVE

  GERMINAL

  SOFA AND CHEROOT

  A RUSSIAN BYRON

  A COMIC NOVEL

  A HERO OF OUR OWN TIME

  FAITS DIVERS

  THE CLOWN

  THE NOBODIES

  A VICTORIAN MISALLIANCE

  THE FIRST AND LAST OF HARDY

  A CURATE’S DIARY

  THE GREAT FLUNKEY

  THE SOUTH GOES NORTH

  THE PROXIMITY OF WINE

  AN ANATOMY OF GREATNESS

  THE DEAN

  THE END OF THE GAEL

  THE STEEPLE HOUSE SPIRES

  ONE OF OUR FOUNDERS

  THE AMERICAN PURITAN

  THE QUAKER COQUETTE

  Preface

  If truth is the first casualty in war, the second is the literature of the period, especially the reflective literature. Why this should be so is plain enough. A war anticipates the gradual work of fashion and brings its medical date-stamp heavily down upon every contemporary book. It may be that the stamp will not last and that some books of the last twenty years will recover; but for the moment, they are “pre-war” or “between the wars”—as the saying is—and there is nothing for it but to watch them being trundled off to the sick-bay.

  Two kinds of literature take their place: the topical and the classics. Of these the topical is the unhappier. Nothing dates so quickly as the latest news, and its lack of perspective becomes very soon intolerable. We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.

  That is one reason for reading the great literature of the past. I say “the great literature” not because of its aura of cultural strenuousness, but simply because, in the past, there is only great literature. Only the great stands the racket of time and survives from generation to generation; the rest dies for lack of staying power. But there is a second and painful reason why we should prepare ourselves for reading the great and intimidating masters: very soon there may be nothing else to read. Our contemporaries have almost ceased to write and, even if they begin again, it becomes every week more doubtful whether paper will be found to print them. The works of printers are bombed, books by the thousand are burned in the shops, stocks of paper are destroyed by fire or go to the bottom of the sea. Such incidents—to use the current euphemism for catastrophe—empty the purses of publishers, who may be forgiven for noting that living authors are expensive and that the dead, on the contrary, are cheap. The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the highest society. The conditions of modern journalism obliged us for years to proclaim one book in three a “masterpiece” or “a work of genius” and then, by the time the Blitz began in the autumn of 1940, we discovered our livelihood had gone. There were no more “masterpieces”, there were not even any more books. We found ourselves left with the real masters. The essays in this book, most of which appeared in the New Statesman and Nation in slightly different form and length, describe the reactions of one critic, bookish but uneducated, to this unnerving situation.

  I have said that one of the attractions which the great works of the past have for us is that they offer us the certainty of a completed world, a world finished and gone by. This is, of course, also one of the reasons why the classics repel us. The sentiment was well put by Huckleberry Finn, the patron saint of all lowbrows, who was not interested in the tale of “Moses and the Bulrushers” because “I don’t take no stock of dead people”. He “reckoned” he’d better “light out of the Territory” before Aunt Sally tried to “sivilise” him. “I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Even when we can stand a little more civilisation than Huck Finn cared for, we are likely to ask why on earth, in the twentieth century, we should read Gil Blas, The Ring and the Book or a novel by Benjamin Constant? The answer is that when we make our way through the sometimes old-fashioned curtain of words into the matter of the classics, we find that their serenity and certainty are misleading. The past is not serene. It is turbulent, upside down and unfinished. When we look into the lives of the authors of the great wise (or unwise) books, when we glance at the erratic outline of their times, we find that those men and those times were as uncertain as we are, and the picture they saw was by no means complete to their eyes. They lived—our hackneyed phrase is repeated throughout the history of literature—in “a period of transition”. Every one of them had one foot in the old, the other in the new. If we pick up Gulliver’s Travels again and, making an effort of imagination, pause to regard it as the new book it once was, we can feel it come to life in our hands, raw, unfinished, questioning and restless with its own disturbance. There is Swift at the beginning of modern science, here are we nearly two hundred years later, caught in all the consequences, some of which Swift foresaw. And the Gulliver’s Travels we read will not be the childish abridgment of Lilliput nor the savage tale of the Houyhnhnms only; this time the episode on the island of Laputa, for years considered boring, and generally skipped, will stand out with fresh excitement and meaning.

  What is true of Swift is true of most other classics, when we have rid ourselves of the notion that books are immaculately conceived or inspired and come down from heaven into the heads of writers. Nothing has really damned the classics so thoroughly in the mind of the ordinary reader as the idea that they are “inspired”. A work of art is an act of co-operation, often of reluctant co-operation like an awkward marriage, between an author and the kind of society he lives in. When we know something of the character of this aggravating partner, that which was once stiff and monumental becomes fluid and alive.

  The most satisfying classics at present are those in which the cries of an age are like echoes of our own. In all the literature of the French Revolution, through the Napoleonic wars to the Reform, we find books which seem to be describing our own times. At no other period has Napoleonic literature from the novel of Benjamin Constant to the works of writers as diverse as Erckmann-Chatrian or Cobbett, had the freshness, the significance and pleasure we find in it now. Everything is there from Bloomsbury of the twenties to the recriminations of the thirties and the fighting of this war. We hold up the crystal sphere; we see ourselves in miniature reflection and, perhaps, if our minds are not too literal, we may also see our future. The time of the Civil War offers vaguer but still apposite comparisons. We look back from Hemingway to Defoe, from modern non-attachment to the dynamic quietism of George Fox. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Fielding draws a Fuehrer. I do not suggest that such comparisons will always be found in these essays; but in the numerous cases of wide difference, in Le Sage, Synge or Zola, to take random examples, the differences take on meaning when we turn from literary criticism to a consideration of the social background of the authors. Our pleasure in literature is increased by knowing that a book is the fruit of living in a certain way. The mind of Browning is boring until we consider it as one of the manifestations of the violent Victorian unrest, and a pe
riod piece like The Diary of a Nobody ceases to die of its own triviality when it is related to its period.

  I am an unsystematic reader and the subjects of these essays have been chosen at random. They make no case. The accident of finding an author handy on the shelf has usually decided me. I owe an especial debt to Mr. Raymond Mortimer for his many suggestions. At the end of the book the reader will find a note on where he can pick up the works discussed.

  Gibbon and The Home Guard

  “No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought greater triumphs to England,” writes the historian Green when he comes to the Seven Years War, “but few have had more disastrous beginnings.” To that familiar note we are now inured. Military preparedness appears to be an impossibility in these islands. At the beginning of 1756 there were only three regiments fit for service, and after the collapse of the Duke of Cumberland’s army on the Elbe a year later “a despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair, ‘We are no longer a nation’.” So often has the despondency been paralleled since, and so often survived, that one hesitates to repeat the old, old story for fear of encouraging the gloomy smugness of it once too often. There were 18,000 men waiting to cross the Channel at Quiberon in the summer of 1759, before Admiral Hawke scotched them. But now, in contrast to the despair of two years earlier, “the national spirit most gloriously disproved the charge of effeminacy which, in a popular estimate, had been imputed to the times”.

  Edward Gibbon wrote these words when he looked back upon the military ardour which penetrated to the sleepy hesitations of country life at Buriton, near Petersfield, and which impelled his father to drive both of them into the Militia:

  The country rings around with loud alarms,

  And raw in fields the rude Militia swarms.

  Gibbon remembered his Dryden. Left to himself, removed from his notorious habit of “obeying as a son”, Gibbon (one suspects) would have stayed where he was with his nose in his books and raising an occasional eye to consider and dismiss the prospect of marrying the next imperfect West Sussex lady on the calling list. Perhaps if he had not joined the Home Guard of 1759 Gibbon might have married from lack of having anything else to do, and then—who knows—we might be reading of the Birth and Rise, rather than of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A woman, even one of the West Sussex chatterboxes, might have prevailed against the eighteenth-century taste for ruins. But Gibbon père had always been the decisive partner in the life of Gibbon fils. The father had put his foot down once or twice to some effect already; and having sent the youth to the Continent in order to rid him of Popery, he was equally determined on effacing the Frenchified personality and mind which the young man had brought back in exchange for his religion. Edward Gibbon was to be made into an Englishman, and on June 12th Major and Captain Gibbon received their commissions in the South Battalion of the Hampshires.

  The story of Gibbon’s service with the Militia is well known. It can be read in his Autobiography, in his Journal, and in the various Lives, of which Mr. D. M. Low’s is especially thorough, sympathetic and readable. To the one-time Territorial, the conscript or the Home Guard of today Gibbon’s experiences are amusing, consoling and instructive. The peculiar torments which sting the amateur soldier seem to change very little from age to age. Joining to repel the invader at a moment’s notice, the Gibbons were very soon to find that the Navy had done it for them—Hawke sank the French at Quiberon in the following November—and that their patriotism had led them into the demoralising trap of soldiering without an enemy. Gibbon’s first impression confirmed the remaining lines of Dryden:

  Mouths without hands maintained at vast expense,

  In peace a charge, in war a weak defence.

  Stout once a month they march, a blust’ring band,

  And ever but in times of need at hand.

  This was the more when, issuing on guard,

  Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepar’d,

  Of seeming arms to make a short essay;

  Then hasten to be drunk—the business of the day.

  As a writer, Gibbon found himself in charge of the battalion’s administrative and even literary affairs, which meant mainly conducting the correspondence and piling up the dossier of a row—“passionate and prolix”—a typical military row with a peer about precedence. When the danger of invasion had passed, the Major and the Captain hoped to be allowed to take their duties easily in Petersfield or Alton, but they were caught for two and a half years more and began an unheroic, tedious and often sordid progress round the South of England. Winchester was too near home for discipline; they went to Devon, where they were happy, to Devizes where the habits of the town were riotous—twenty-one courts-martial—to Porchester, where they guarded the French prisoners and many of the men caught fevers or the smallpox in the swampy wildernesses nearby, to Alton, where they entered the camp “indisputably the last and worst”.

  To the Major this was all far less depressing than to the Captain. There was a vein of happy impetuosity and slackness in the Major’s character. He had always been at home in either the highest or the lowest society. He frequently cut parades, and when he did turn up his drill was terrible. Gibbon writes: “We had a most wretched field day. Major, officers and men seemed to try which should do worst.” The Captain did not claim to be perfect: “The battalion was out, officers but no powder. It was the worst field day we had had a good while, the men were very unsteady, the officers very inattentive, and I myself made several mistakes.” Still, there were consolations: “After going through the manual, which they did with great spirit, I put them … thro’ a variety of evolutions…. At the volley I made them recover their arms, not a piece went off.” Edward Gibbon was not one of those lackadaisical literary soldiers who hope their shufflings and errors will be lost in the crowd or that their sporadic brainwaves will impress the command. He was, as always, thorough, industrious and responsible; and some part of his suffering was due to his conscientiousness.

  The qualities we expect of Gibbon are sense, balance and judiciousness. No man is more likely to give a more considered account of his experience, to extract the value from his disappointments, to gather in, perhaps complacently, all the compensations. The plump little man, only five feet high, with the bulging forehead and the bulbous cheeks, gazes like some imperturbable and learned baby at his life and can be trusted to give both sides of the question, if only for the sensuous pleasure of balancing a sentence:

  The loss of so many busy and idle hours was not compensated by any elegant pleasure; and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of our rustic officers who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen. In every state there exists, however, a balance of good and evil. The habits of a sedentary life were usefully broken by the duties of an active profession; in the healthful exercise of the field I hunted with a battalion instead of a pack, and at that time I was ready at any hour of the day or night to fly from quarters to London, from London to quarters on the slightest call of private or regimental business. But my principal obligation to the militia was the making me an Englishman and a soldier. After my foreign education, with my reserved temper, I should long have continued a stranger in my native country, had I not shaken in this various scene of new faces and new friends; had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the operation of our civil and military system. In this peaceful service I imbibed the rudiments of the language and science of tactics which opened a new field of study and observation…. The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers [the reader may smile] has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.

  He took Horace with him on the march and read up the questions of Pagan and Christian theology in his tent. So
oner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

  Gibbon, like Francis Bacon, Swift and Dr. Johnson, is a writer whose experience is digested and set forth like the summing-up of a moral judge. “My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm” … that is not really quite true, as his sudden conversion to Rome, his first meetings with Suzanne Curchod, his occasional feats with the bottle at Lausanne and in the militia seem to show. But if not phlegmatic, he is formal. The truth is that his temper was far more susceptible to style. For him style was the small, ugly man’s form of power. His shocking health as a child and youth, though astonishingly restored when he was sixteen years of age, must have inscribed on his heart and instincts the detachment, the reserve, the innate melancholy of invalid habits. The coldness which is alleged, the tepidity of feeling and the fixed air of priggishness and conceit, are misleading. Really, he is self-contained. In telling his own story he is not recklessly candid, but he is honest to a startling extent, and especially in disclaiming emotions which it is conventional to claim. His formality is comic, even intentionally so at times, and his detachment about himself may, of course, show an unconscionable vanity; but it also indicates the belief that a civilised man is one who ought to be able to stand the display of all the evidence. We think here particularly of his brief comment on Rousseau’s dislike of his character and behaviour: Rousseau, Gibbon mildly remarks, ought not to have passed judgment on a foreigner. (Or did Gibbon mean that a continental enthusiast ought not to pass judgment on an English country gentleman? It is quite likely he did mean this.) Gibbon is not ashamed to record his constant concern about money and property, nor to admit that his father’s recklessness about money alarmed him not only as a son, but as an heir. And after drawing the most gracious portrait of his father, he is careful not to end on the note of filial idolatry or remorse: