The Best of the Bookers

I've just started a new project; I plan to read every Booker Prize winner, beginning with the first - P H Newby's Something to Answer For (1969). I see I'm not the first:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/looking_back_at_the_booker_ph.html

This idea has been prompted by Man Booker's announcement that there is to be a competition to choose the best from all 42 winners (there were joint winners in 1974 and 1992).

The radio warned that Newby's book is the only one out of print and would be difficult to obtain. But I had it reserved from Lincolnshire Libraries within 5 minutes of the broadcast, and it sits on my desk as I write.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Iris Murdoch, V S Naipaul, Peter Carey and the like. As for John Berger and Keri Hulme, let's just say that I'm trying not to prejudge.

'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins

[1]

Just after finishing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I happened to watch Elmer Gantry again.

It’s Burt Lancaster’s film, and he plays the role he was born for, but I’ll forbear lyricising about Burt and mention just one scene. This is where Arthur Kennedy, playing once again his cynical, sceptical but decent reporter character, has written an article condemning the hysteria and charlatanism endemic in ‘revivalism’.

In order to get the newspaper to print a retraction and make space available for a rebuttal, Elmer Gantry cross-examines the journalist about his religious beliefs. Kennedy’s character wheedles and prevaricates. He talks about the Bible being ‘beautiful poetry’; he admits how much he would like to believe. To confess to atheism, at that time, in America, was almost unthinkable.

And even today, we are browbeaten into showing respect for religion. On a radio show recently I heard Robert Winston, who professes Judaism, criticising Dawkins for his insulting use of the word ‘delusion’ in the title of this book. As I listened to him, I thought of the line, ‘Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.’

How could this intelligent man, I thought, not just believe, effectively, that there are fairies at the bottom of his garden, but expect other intelligent people to respect that belief? That delusion. That dangerous, dehumanising delusion.

Why is it that we are so careful in this country to understand and placate Muslims? Is it just that we afraid of being murdered? Maybe. But then why are we so concerned with a possibly diseased bullock, considered ‘sacred’ by a bunch of Hindus, who howl with outrage at the sacrilege committed by officials entering a ‘holy shrine’ to cart the damned thing off for slaughter. The man in charge actually took his boots off before entering. Can you believe it?

Can you believe that the case actually got to the Court of Appeal? I doubt if my cat would get the same consideration.

[2]

Dawkins gets the respect thing out of the way early and moves on to ask what people mean when they talk about belief in ‘God’. It’s what I always ask when someone asks me whether I believe in God. Which God? Allah, Jehovah, Pan, Thor? Aphrodite? Maybe I’d get down on my knees for her.

What sort of ‘god’? The clockmaker, the personal interventionist, the omnipresent immanence?

He checks off all the so-called proofs of some sort of god’s existence and easily shows how spurious they all are, before attempting to make some sort of case for the non-existence of God. Proving a negative is not easy at the best of times. So why bother trying, especially when not only is there no evidence for the positive, but we don’t know the nature of that ‘positive’, and it’s of no practical relevance to us anyway?

The answer to that is that the power of theism and its attendant religion is at best a dilution of our greatest talent, namely our reason; and at worst it is a seedbed for fanaticism, obscurantism and murder.

[3]

Dawkins seems to share this view, because not content with making an intellectual case for rejecting theism and embracing atheism, he goes onto the offensive. And he’s quite right to do so. Theists and religionists have had it their own way far too long, with their demands for respect, their indoctrination of children and their all-round bullying.

It’s timely too, when you can’t open a newspaper without seeing the stranglehold of militant Protestants on US politics, murderously militant Islam and the pernicious influence of Catholicism in the Third World.

Dawkins tries to explain the existence of religion in evolutionary terms, as a by-product of some useful mutation, primarily the tendency of children to believe their parents, to whom they are attached for a substantial part of their life. Add to that our inclination to form groups and avoid isolation, and the necessity for some emotional basis for pair-bonding, and it’s not fanciful to see by-products in nationalism, tribalism, religious affiliation (and fanatical support for football teams).

Religion gives us answers, something the human animal yearns for. And it gives us power. Every parent likes to invoke an authority figure to reinforce their own attempts at discipline. For example, ‘Wait till your father gets home,’ or ‘Don’t let that policeman see you.’ God is the best bogeyman you think of.

An issue Dawkins doesn’t address is whether humans have come to a point where evolution is not working any longer, because we are able to interfere with it. Our social morality forbids us, for example, to let the weak die; it also prevents males from distributing their seed as widely as they are programmed to do. At least it tries to.

Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that evolution is a hit-and-miss operation. For every useful mutation or trait-elimination there must be millions of useless or threatening ones. Such as religiosity.

[4]

While Dawkins’ polemic against religion is timely and necessary, he is less than politic in singling out certain moral issues with which to attack it. Abortion, for example. An attack on religion because it often forbids abortion is unlikely to be effective with people like myself who are uneasy about the wholesale termination of pregnancies. My concern has nothing to do with religion. I could argue that we are not giving evolution a chance, when healthy intelligent parents destroy their own genes.

Religion’s frequent prejudice against homosexuality is another of Dawkins’ bêtes noires. While tolerant myself I can easily understand a dislike of the practice in purely non-religious terms. After all, are not homosexuals, like nuns and monks, an evolutionary dead-end?

[5]

I have to say that I found a lot of Dawkins’ scientific explanations difficult to follow. But his final chapter, where he tries to describe the wonder of a mysterious world and the joy of forever discovering more about it without benefit of easy ‘revealed’ explanations, is inspirational.

His book is dedicated to Douglas Adams, with this quotation:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

'Educational Apartheid?'

MY CURRENT READING matter for bus journeys is Violet Bonham Carter’s memoir of Winston Churchill. Lady Violet was a friend of Churchill and, as the daughter of Prime Minister Asquith, knew just about everybody who was anybody at the time.

Apart from having an insider’s view, she brings a good understanding of the issues and intrigues of what were turbulent political times. And she writes extremely well too. In those days people who did write, always wrote well.

I’ve reached the point where Churchill has left the Conservatives and thrown in his lot with the Liberals. His reward after a couple of years is a Cabinet post, namely President of the Board of Trade.

Lady Violet quotes extensively from a speech Churchill always considered one of his best. I particularly like this passage:

‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty [I guess Toryism just wanted things to stay the same]. Socialism would destroy private interest; Liberalism would preserve them . . . by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue it from the trammels of privilege. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual . . . Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man . . .’

THESE WORDS CHIMED with my reaction to an item on the increasingly tabloid Today Programme. The presenter talked of ‘educational apartheid’ in relation to a recent report by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Now, there’s a name that evokes navigation, but whether the CLS knows where it’s going is a moot point.

It has come up with the startling fact that children from ‘disadvantaged’ families get off to a worse educational start then those from ‘privileged’ backgrounds. It seems a bit vague on detail when defining ‘disadvantaged’, which can mean having ill-educated parents, or ‘poor’ parents, whatever that means.

It’s just the way these things are reported that irritates me. For example, this stark division between disadvantaged and privileged – ‘apartheid – as if there’s no gradation between the two. And no mention of the many exceptions, the father who wants his child to do well at school and not spend his life in a routine job; the mother who works to pay for piano lessons. And what about the families which are poor despite being well-educated?

What I dislike most of all, though, is the use of this word ‘privileged’. It’s a loaded word. We are conditioned to believe that privilege is unfair, as indeed it is in so many cases. But it is hardly unfair that one’s parents don’t have a lot of money. Unlucky maybe, but not unfair.

The expression ‘middle-class’ is bandied about more often these days, it seems to me, with all its negative connotations. I’ve never really understood why being middle-class is so despised. In fact, I’ve never really understood exactly what is meant by it. Is it money? So an illiterate plumber on a hundred grand a year qualifies but an unemployed graduate doesn’t? The type of job? So a librarian is in and a Premiership footballer isn’t? Education? Moral standards? Does believing in marital fidelity and opposing divorce make a Roman Catholic bricklayer middle-class? Does the fact that he is a Maoist make a brain surgeon working-class?

IT'S ALL NONSENSE. And so is the insidious campaign to make people feel guilty because they want to improve themselves and the lot of their families. The real division is not between those parents who are privileged and disadvantaged, but between those who care and those who don’t give a damn. People shouldn’t feel bad because they talk to their children as if they are intelligent beings, instead of telling the ‘little ****s to shut the **** up. They shouldn’t be seen as villains because they tell their children that porridge comes from oats or that Paris is the capital of France.

The guilt is on the heads of those who abuse their children with lack of discipline, lack of encouragement, and lack of ambition. Those are the sins which are visited on the children even to the seventh generation. And there’s not a thing the government can do about it.

And now I shall go to the pub and indulge in the appalling middle-class habit of drinking wine and, like a good bourgeois, do the Time crossword.

Sartre

I was listening to Clive James on the radio the other day. He was chatting in his usual witty way about his new book, Cultural Amnesia. Apparently it's a huge doorstop of a volume, containing over a hundred pen-portraits of cultural 'icons' of the last century and a half. It's had mixed reviews. Here, for example, is A N Wilson in The Times.

The criticisms seem to be that the size and breadth of the book disguise its lack of depth. That instead of providing an analysis of the subject’s contribution to life, the universe and everything, he’s too concerned to be funny and follow some stray thought about the person for the fun of seeing where it leads him. A bit like a blog, really.

I cannot say. I do know that it sounds like the kind of book I’d like to dip into. Clive’s last offering, the title of which I’ve forgotten, dealt , at least in part, with the celebrities he interviewed some years back and he offered very funny accounts of his meetings with such as Burt Lancaster, Bob Mitchum ( we were very close) and Peter Sellers. Clive realised that they were all certifiably mad, of course, but writes of them with clear-eyed but sardonic affection.

I quite like Clive James. I know he’s Australian and a bit too concerned to show what a polymath he is, but he’s affable and intelligent, and I’d be quite happy to spend half an hour in his company. What I don’t like about him is that for a fat bloke, ten years older than I am, he seems to have incredible success with women.

Which leads me on to Jean-Paul Sartre (small picture), whom Clive James (and I) believe to be one of the least prepossessing characters of the twentieth century. Another unlikely Casanova, whose technique was probably to persuade young female students that to sleep with him was a sign of their liberation from bourgeois morality. I expect he failed to mention that such behaviour has characterised not only bourgeois, but also aristocratic and proletarian society since the dawn of time.

It’s one of those strange facets of French culture, namely the 'celebritisation' - is that a word? - of the intellectual. I suppose the last celebrity intellectual we had in Britain was Bertrand Russell, another one who powers of logic were so powerful that women had difficulty arguing that their virtue was worth hanging onto. (I’m beginning to think I should take French lessons, do a PhD in philosophy and carry a joke book around with me.)

I seem to be having trouble sticking to the point.

When I first came across Jean-Paul’s ideas, or the ideas that he propagated, I had to agree with him. There’s no God, or at least no transcendent being that we can know or who’s bothered about us. So it follows that there’s no purpose in life and no absolute morality, no meaning and no hope. And no such thing as human nature. We’re on our own. But we are free. ‘Nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free’ is another way of putting it. Or, ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Or, 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. they kill us for their sport.' Am I starting to sound like Clive James yet?

So, we’re full of angst and despair, but we’re free. Now what? J-P’s first advice is good. Don’t flee into the arms of some religion, ideology or morality that gives you a spurious sense of meaning and purpose. That’s what he calls ‘bad faith’. Existence before Essence. ‘What are you going to do now?’ someone once asked Indiana Jones. ‘I don’t know – I’m making this up as I go along,’ he replies. In other words, I, for example, am not a Blogger. I am one who blogs.

But then Sartre loses it. Like Descartes before him, he’s good at clearing away the undergrowth of received opinion and wishful thinking, but then proceeds to build an equally untenable edifice upon it. He advises creating meaning for ourselves by artistic creation and by political engagement, preferably both at the same time. And by political engagement he means embracing every lunatic left-wing cause that offers its ugly charms to him.

Having pontificated at length about intellectual freedom and campaigning against France’s occupation of Algeria, he ends up a fellow-traveller of the Communist Party, one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, justifying the gulags and handing out propaganda tracts on the street for the benefit of the TV cameras.

Sartre was an ugly, mean-spirited little man, who used his intellectual powers to justify his prejudices and bully others into sharing them. He claimed that ‘existentialism is a kind of humanism’, but contributed to some of the greatest inhumanities ever perpetrated. His great rival, Albert Camus (large picture), was another left-winger but he actually liked people and loved life. He was prepared to condemn cruelty and injustice wherever he found it. Individuals before ideology was his mantra.

I read that just before he died in a car crash, Camus wrote to five different women assuring each of his undying devotion. I doubt he was lying to any of them.

Ist Test: Day 2

As I write this England are 435 for 5. They’ve had a fair bit of luck. Collingwood in particular has had at least 3 lives, but has sensibly taken advantage of it. Cook, unfortunately, proved me right soon after the start. Bell is sticking around. It’s about time he came of age. And Matthew Prior is showing why he’s there, and that the selectors know more than I do about these matters.

The West Indies appear to be very poor in the field, with lots of dropped catches and surprising captaincy decisions, such as the delay in taking the new ball.

I heard the last excerpt from John Major’s new book, More Than a Game which he’s been reading on Radio 4 this week. It will be repeated on the BBC Radio website for a week.

Major writes elegantly and intelligently, and, boy, does he love the game.

He spoke this morning of the first-class cricketers who died in the First World War, including Percy Jeeves whose name is reputed to have been borrowed by P G Wodehouse for Bertie Wooster’s valet.

25 overs left. All being well, a declaration soon and a couple of their wickets before dinner.

Adding Joan Ddion to my notebook

It’s a source of great amusement to my drinking companions that, when I arrive in the pub, I go through a ritual of placing on the table, next to my pint, my tobacco tin, my tobacco pouch and my lighter, a pen and a notebook.

For a while some were a little self-conscious when I would suddenly pick up my pen and scribble something, thinking that they were due to be lampooned in this blog for some remark carelessly made. More likely that my mind is rudely elsewhere.

Looking back over the last few days’ notes, I see I have a list of potential winners for The BBC Sports Personality of the Year in December. Good odds should be available, which is why I do not plan to reveal my thoughts more fully. What happened to my vow about premium bonds?

Update: I knew it would happen. I'm too late now

I have a reminder to lend someone my video of Dr Strangelove and check what ‘emo’ music is. There are attempts at solving anagrams from The Times crossword, and words like ‘tenace’ which seem to be the correct solution, but which need to be confirmed. Tenace, by the way, is a kind of card game, I find.

There are opening lines for poems that will probably never be written, such as

‘An empty glass is like a sleeping woman/ Satisfied but empty, smeared, still warm/ and tingling from my thirsty lips’ . . . .I know, don’t say it!

There are observations on people, like the young girl listening while the man with her talks and talks. She is continuously twitching her left foot. Is she nervous? Bored? Is she wondering how to get rid of him? An older couple are sitting in silence. She is drinking coffee; he is nursing half a pint. He is surrounded by shopping bags.

I agree with Joan Didion, who writes in her article ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ that such observations are more about me than those I am observing. I didn’t like the look of that talkative young man and I felt sorry for that shopping-bag bearing old man.

And I’ve made a note of an anecdote Didion tells in her article ‘On Morality’. A boy tells a rabbi, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ To which the rabbi replies, ‘Do you think God cares?’ And I’ve added another piece of Jewish religious wisdom I recall from elsewhere, which sums up the Book of Job.

Job: ‘Why me, Lord?’

The Lord: ‘Why not?’

Joan Didion is a recent discovery, for which I have to thank a friend who loaned me her Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I like her style, conversational, personal, intelligent and self-aware. The way blogs should be.

Red Dust on Green Leaves

Red Dust on Green Leaves
by John Gay (1973)

Liberia

I suppose I first heard of Liberia from ‘The Boy’s Book of Interesting Facts’, or some such title.

I was struck by the fact that the President seemed to have an American name, complete with middle initial, and by its description as a stable African democracy. Even then I knew that to be something unusual in that benighted continent. And when I read that it had begun as a colony for freed American slaves, I even felt proud of the place.

So when it all collapsed into incredibly cruel civil war 30 years ago I felt oddly disappointed. But I soon learned that, while it had been a long time coming, it was all probably inevitable. Because for 150 years Liberia had been divided into two great classes of society – the American descendants, who had always considered themselves superior and civilised, and the indigenous people, who had always been excluded from the democratic process, partly through prejudice, partly through their own reluctance to abandon traditional ways.

Red Dust on the Green Leaves

This book, written just before the troubles and set 30 years earlier, gives, albeit read with hindsight, an inkling of this great divide.

It is the story of twin Kpelle boys, born into a village a long way from the coastal ‘Kwii’, or Westernised Africans and Whites. As they grow up they come to represent the divide in Liberian society, as one learns the lore of the jungle and the other is increasingly attracted by the wonders of the coming world.

The book is not a work of non-fiction, but neither according to the author (an American Episcopalian missionary) is it fiction. The customs of the village, the upbringing of the boys, the attitudes and actions all reflect reality and are brought together to form a narrative.

See this link:


http://www.thewitness.org/agw/gaysliberia.030402.html

The most remarkable thing about the book is that it is written, as it were, ‘from the inside’. The author succeeds admirably in avoiding any judgment or comment or the intrusion of his own culture or beliefs. No doubt he would be the first to acknowledge the contribution her of his research associate, John Kellemu, who may well have travelled the same journey as one of the twins.

We share the ignorance of the new world, established on the coast, which is gradually, inexorably creeping into the jungle and represented by dark references to ‘Firestone’, for example, or ‘The DC’. Nothing is explained. We have to learn as we go the meaning of ‘Kwii’ or guess what is going on with ‘The Forest Thing’ or ‘The Bush School’.

The civilisation of the village is based on tradition and rooted in the various cycles of life, the crops and the seasons, childhood, adulthood and marriage death. But overall it is static and unchanging. Conversation and decisions are made on the basis of proverbs and wisdom received from the ancestors. There is a social hierarchy, roles for men and women, polygamy allowed but checked by poverty. Questioning is discouraged.

Men’s minds are full of superstition, fears of witchcraft and faith in sacrifices, little different from the new faith from over the water. But there is knowledge of the efficacy of plants and herbs for the forest in healing, and harming.

There are rivalries, jealousies and squabbles, betrayals and immorality. But there are also courts, wise counsel and commitment to the village’s way of life.

But things are changing. Men are tempted – or forced - away by the delights of the coast, such as work, women, cheap consumer goods, and in the case of one of the boys, curiosity and ambition.

The book ends with this boy, well-established in school, having turned his back on village life. His twin remains devoted to the traditional ways, learning his trade of blacksmithing and the secrets of the forest. The ending is melancholic and strangely, in view of the author’s profession, holds out little hope.

Update

I'm looking forward to reading Tom Sharpe's The Long Pursuit and The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

In the meantime I'm working my way through Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. I was expecting a work of literary criticism (of formal poetry) but in fact is a manual of prosody. Since I'm still writing that sonnet, I'm picking up a few tips. 'Trochaic substitution', 'pyrrhic substitution', 'the hendecasyllabic pentameter' etc. I've seen them in poems, but didn't know their name. More importantly, I didn't know when to use them. The ear, of course, is the real judge, but often your ear tells you it's wrong and you don't know how to make it right.

* * * *

I heard John Humphreys talking to the Chief Rabbi Jonathan the other day, in the latest of that series of his. In the preliminary discussion, he asked what it was all about. Humphreys replied, 'You have half an hour to convert me to Judaism.'

'Why should I want to do that? Don't you have enough problems already?'

Jack Benny, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen - and now, Jonathan Sacks.