It is also very nicely made. Manchester is made to look vibrant. The Peak District scene is beautiful. Some of the scenes are almost shot in the classical style: the camera unflinchingly picks a position in the room and lets the action unfold. The vulgarity of the modern world is filmed with love and becomes part of the whole atmosphere of charm. When they cut, it has real impact.

Rom-com is one of my favourite genres but so few of them are worth re-watching. Finding Emily I would happily see again, and if I have time I might go back to see it on the big screen once more. There are homage-references to Romeo and Juliet, including Claire Danes’ wings, When Harry Met Sally, and a broader tradition of British films like Notting Hill. It also put me in mind of Juno.

So many people in this film are hollow, fake, or just plain nuts. And it is all turned to gentle comedy. The villains of the piece are all perfectly humiliated, but in a nice way. The satire of podcasters is delicious; the cynicism about psychology is perfect; and the crazy lefties are hilarious. The clothing and appearance choices are a big part of the comic effect. Love wins in the end, as you already know. Romantic common-sense triumphs over the bloodless, contorted, naive, and blind yammerings of everyone and everything else.

The decline of young people reading English Literature in favour of Psychology is hardly a reason for intellectual laments, but it is surely a tragedy on the personal level for a whole generation to prefer these half-truths to authentic poetry and this film knows it. (No spoilers, but wait for the scene where she presents her thesis.) Man cannot live on theories and (made up) empirics alone. The hero writes his own songs. I hope everyone sees this film.

Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is.

HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—

OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.

HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.

OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.

OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.

Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.

But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.

I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.

From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.

OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.

HENSHER: A lot.

OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.

HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.

OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.

HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.

OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.

HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.

OLIVER: Yes.

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz, and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front.

Philip, hello.

PHILIP HENSHER: Hello, Henry.

Novels Are for Everyone

OLIVER: Now, to begin with, tell me about your grandmothers.

HENSHER: Oh, okay. Yes, well, I finished the book because—I kept my story out of it, largely. I thought that I should go back to a time when everybody read novels. It wasn’t a specialist interest as it seems to be turning into. And I thought I would talk about my two grandmothers, both of whom left school when they were 14. They worked in very ordinary and hard jobs in factories all their lives, and they were passionate readers of novels.

My paternal grandmother loved Dickens. She had a complete set of Dickens, which, I’ve discovered after some research, was issued as an offer by the Daily Express sometime in the 1930s. I’ve still got it, actually. I’m going to go and get a sample volume. It’s terribly cheaply produced.

OLIVER: Oh, I’ve got that set. That’s great, yes.

HENSHER: Yes. The publisher is otherwise only noted as a printer. The typeface is absolutely tiny.

OLIVER: It’s painful.

HENSHER: It’s painful to read. But she had it. She loved Dickens.

My maternal grandmother, I don’t have any of her books, I’m afraid. I would say that she loved stories of family lives, of people interacting with each other. She loved Catherine Cookson, a now slightly forgotten popular novelist of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But she read an enormous amount. I mean, she must have read one or two novels a week, every week of her life.

I think that the thing that has disappeared since my grandmothers’ generation is the idea that everybody can read novels. They speak to everybody. They explore every part of life, potentially.

What seems to be happening now, and I greatly regret it, is that it’s passing into the property of expensively educated people, people who have gone to private schools, perhaps, have certainly gone to university. And the sort of reader like my grandmother, who read Bleak House with a lot of pleasure, seems to be disappearing.

So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, to make the case for how wonderfully enjoyable novels are. They’re not a duty, or they shouldn’t be a duty. They should just be founded in pleasure, however complex that pleasure might be. And I wanted to finish the book by citing my two grandmothers, who were such great readers.

OLIVER: And as well as inheriting that reading culture from them, you got a lot of that at your school, didn’t you?

HENSHER: Yes, I suppose I did. I think that it’s hard for me to say because I was in at the beginning of a sort of curriculum change, where there was an idea that we ought to give the kids things that are relevant or are going to appeal to their social concerns. So, I mean, this is going back to the very early 1980s. My set novel for A-level was The Grapes of Wrath, a classic tale of victimhood, really. Classic approved message.

And the thing was, I think what started me off as a passionate reader of novels was a sort of rebellious turn away from that sort of thing. I read Jane Austen off my own bat. I read a lot of Dickens before I left school—things that we weren’t taught at all. And that’s always been the sort of reader that I am, saying, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be reading this,” you know? “It’s not on the curriculum.”

Parliament and Thatcher

OLIVER: What was it like working in the House of Commons?

HENSHER: It was fine. [laughter] It was a very unusual experience. I don’t think it was a job that most people would’ve known existed. When people said to me, “Well, what do you actually do?” I used to say, “Well, you know the guys with wigs who sit in front of the Speaker? They’re my bosses.” And it was a strange, ritualistic experience, and you were physically in the middle of all these political dramas.

When I started work, I started work in the House of Commons the beginning of September—this is September 1990. And six weeks later, there was all the drama of Mrs. Thatcher being thrown out, which I saw physically very close up. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You weren’t aware of what really was going on, but you were there. And Mrs. Thatcher swept past you at crisis moments.

And that’s a very seductive place to be as a baby novelist, because novels are very often told by people occupying minor positions about the lives of the great. There’s a mid-20th-century novelist called Alfred Duggan who made a career out of writing historical novels of the lives of Roman emperors as told by their servants.

And I think that, actually, the novel that I eventually wrote about the fall of Mrs. Thatcher, Kitchen Venom, which has just been rereleased 30 years later by an American publisher, McNally Editions, as a neglected classic—I think that was very much one of those books. Somebody who saw these vast and world-changing events physically close up without really being an insider at all.

OLIVER: Do you think you’re more conservative than most other novelists today? Small c conservative. Or big c.

HENSHER: No, I don’t—I think that I’ve never been someone who fits in with the on dit, as it were. I don’t think that I’m particularly bothered about what people think of what I might think. One of the least effective arguments to change somebody’s mind, it always seems to me, is to say, “But most people think . . .” Most people are wrong about things.

So yes, I do think that actually having a close connection with political figures—after Mrs Thatcher, I did get to know some cabinet ministers, mostly, for one historical reason or another, Conservative cabinet ministers. And then coming out from spending the day with them and going to some book launch in the ’90s and having to listen to some member of the lumpen intelligentsia say, “Oh, these people are so evil.” I’m just going, you know, “Save the word for someone else.”

So yes, I think that I have a kind of interest in some things that most literary people just aren’t interested in at all. And I think I’ve come to conclusions of my own about some burning contemporary issues. I don’t think of myself as conservative. I think of myself as a 19th-century liberal. But then again, I also think of Mrs. Thatcher as a 19th-century liberal.

OLIVER: I was going to say.

HENSHER: [laughs] I don’t know where that leaves you.

OLIVER: I was very struck in, I think it’s something you wrote or an interview you gave, where you said that you were at a comprehensive school in Sheffield. And contrary to what we think was going on at the time, actually you had teachers who were quite pleased about Mrs. Thatcher getting elected. And in the age of bell-bottoms, people were going to Mahler concerts all the time. On that front, you have a different view of the way England was, as it were.

HENSHER: Yes. It’s partly true that those people have been flattened out of history. Eight years before the miners’ strike, for instance, when Mrs. Thatcher did come to lead the Conservative Party, it wasn’t actually apparent to most people that she was the embodiment of all evil. And I think that people realized that something must be done.

There’s a lot of retrospective reimagining of these things. I think the absolutely classic example is Mrs. Thatcher taking free milk away from, I think, seven to elevens. And this is always presented as a gesture of sheer evil. But I can tell you, as one of the children who drank the official milk, it was absolutely disgusting. It was delivered at 7:00 a.m., and then it sat there in the sun for four hours in the summer, and it was absolutely undrinkable. Nobody drank it. Absolutely nobody drank it. It was a complete waste of money.

There might have been some point in giving people free milk in the 1940s when there was rationing, but by the 1970s, what was the point in the government buying you milk? It was frankly the job of your parents to buy milk. But we’re returning to that position. And people seem to be assuming it’s the job of the government to buy your children breakfast these days, but what do I know?

Things changed later on, I would say. The mood in the North certainly altered when people saw that the economic basis of subsidy was going to be taken away and that the coal mines would close down, the steel industry would close down, and it would take a long time for these things to turn round. And I understand why people feel that, but it’s completely wrong to project that backwards into the 1970s.

The 18th-Century Battleground

OLIVER: Now, you did your PhD about the 18th century. Why do you think that century is so much less popular than the 19th century, which seems to get all the attention? But in fact, the 18th century is in a way a much richer, more diverse period, aesthetically.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t really know, actually, because I got to the end of my PhD and I got my PhD, and after that, I have to say it took me a while to get back to it. It is interesting because it is the battleground between what people used to think literature ought to be, which was firmly rooted in the classics, and a sort of vernacular, raucous, popular form that’s based in shocking things like the lives of criminals, pornography even. Rather extraordinary books explaining how people ought to behave to get on in society, how they should write letters.

So it’s a battleground between Alexander Pope, who I must say I do love, but a very kind of classical, perfect, absolutely glass-like surface; and then, people like Defoe, whose sentences just run on in a kind of chaotic way. It can’t have been very obvious which of them was going to triumph, really. Whether it was going to be the epic poem in rhyming couplets, after Virgil, or whether it was going to be a 300-page scandalous narrative about a prostitute in London today. Or rather, the answer would’ve been obvious, but it would’ve been obvious and wrong. So, there you go.

So yes, it is interesting. It is interesting. I think for me, the 19th century is more interesting simply because of the sheer abundance of material. There are plenty of books in the 18th century, but not the kind of colossal tidal wave of thousands and thousands of novels coming out, sometimes nearly a thousand novels in a single year as the tide rolls on. And that, as anyone who reads my book will appreciate, is actually the thing that I really love: a lot of books turning up.

OLIVER: Did you study with John Mullan for that PhD?

HENSHER: No. I knew him a little bit. He was a fellow in the college where I did it, and I used to pass the time of day with him in the courtyard. But no, I had a succession of supervisors, but not him.

Judging the Booker

OLIVER: I see. Now, you also judged the Booker Prize. How did that change your understanding of the way the literary world really works, as it were?

HENSHER: Well, I quite enjoyed judging the Booker Prize. It’s a very unusual experience because it’s the only experience you’re ever going to have of reading a lot of novels that are published at the same time. Even as books are being published, all sorts of filtering mechanisms are usually taking place.

With that, I think I read 140, 150 novels, all of which were published in 2001. And when you do that, you see all sorts of tendencies that you hadn’t really suspected. I remember that year, the thing that was extraordinarily common, to the point of being maybe a third or even 40 percent of the books submitted, were novels with a dual time scheme, where in the present day a woman is working in a library and she finds a box, and it’s the love letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then back to Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m making it up. I can’t remember.

And I think the novels that kicked that off are certainly some very good novels. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust in the 1970s, or later on, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and Antonia Byatt’s Possession. But the sheer number that were imitating that structure was really extraordinary.

The later insight that I had into a predominant obsession was when I judged the Giller Prize in Canada, and again, it was about 120, 130 novels. And this was about 10 years ago now. And it was predominantly tales by second-generation immigrants of historical stories of their parents’ country of origin. There were a lot of those, and I think that’s an admirable thing, so long as it doesn’t overrun the rights of Bangladeshis, say, still living in Bangladesh to write their own stories which will be heard.

It’s an interesting thing, judging a big literary prize. I was very skeptical about the value of them. But that year, judging the Booker, I think we did a much better job than a lot of juries have done. We not only shortlisted Ian McEwan for his best novel, Peter Carey for his best novel, but Andrew Miller, excellent novel, Ali Smith’s first novel, and who were the other two? Oh, David Mitchell’s second novel, and Rachel Seiffert, a very talented novelist with a brilliant novel.

Novels vs. Sport

OLIVER: How many novels do you read in an ordinary week?

HENSHER: Oh, no idea. Three, four, five, something like that.

OLIVER: So you’re spending an awful lot of your time reading novels.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t know about that. [laughter] I’d say I’m probably reading a novel three or four hours a day, something like that. I am a pathologically fast reader. I don’t want to go into it too much because it does sound insane.

Remember that I’ve often wondered why someone like me manages to read so many books by most people’s standards. And I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because I have absolutely no interest in sport whatsoever. And it’s surprising the number of people who—I mean, if you watch a football match, even if you watch it at home without the trouble of getting on a train and going there, a football match is 90 minutes, but there’s half an hour in the middle; two hours.

There’s an hour of disquisition before; that’s three hours. And there’s an hour afterwards; that’s four hours. Well, in four hours I can read a novel by Graham Greene. That’s not a challenge. And I think that if you completely remove that from your life then, yes, you can get through a lot of novels, particularly if, like me, you absolutely love novels. It’s never been anything but a sheer pleasure.

Well, actually, I won’t say never because there were one or two months, writing this book, when I knew I was going to have to get over a personal distaste and read a very prolific novelist in bulk who I knew I couldn’t stand. I’m not going to say who they were; it’s not fair. But I think you might be able to guess a couple of them.

OLIVER: Did you know V.S. Naipaul?

HENSHER: A little, yes.

OLIVER: What was he like?

HENSHER: If you said the right thing to him, he would respond intelligently and interestingly. If you weren’t scared of him, that was better. I would guess that when he first met you, if he knew who you are by repute, as he happened to do with me because I was a book reviewer, he would say something borderline insulting. And if you absolutely didn’t react to that, if you just kind of carried on talking to him in a respectful and interested way, then things were fine. Things were absolutely fine.

Also, I think he was just a deeply interesting human being who had the knack, when he was bored, of saying something that would kick up a bit of a fuss. And I associate with that. I would say that many of my best friends are very much like that, just saying things to kick up a fuss. I wasn’t any more than someone who just met him a handful of times. But I had the utmost respect for him, and I still do.

OLIVER: Yes, he’s one of the great writers in English, I think.

HENSHER: Yes, I agree.

Dominance of the Novel

OLIVER: Why is the novel so dominant as a literary form?

HENSHER: What, now? Is it?

OLIVER: Well, there is no longer the same kind of reach or popularity for—there’s no Addison, there’s no poet, there’s no . . . To me it seems like, for the common reader, as it were, it’s all novels with a few other things. Whereas in the 18th century, it was lots of everything.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to talk down my beloved form. It does seem to me that memoirs are very largely where it’s at. Novels, to a very marked degree, get noticed much more if people can spin them as in some way memoiristic. And that’s not a criticism at all.

I was just thinking about this reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M. And I think Rachel is one of the authors with the best chance of being read in 50 or 100 years’ time. I do think she’s an absolutely marvelous novelist. But there’s no question that there’s more of a buzz around her when you can say, “Oh, well, this novel is based on her friendship with Emma Thompson,” or whoever the actress was—I’ve already forgotten—or “She’s written a book about this and this. It’s all based in her real life.”

Those things have a tendency of fading away, but I think that it only seems to get through to people when we’re talking about, “Is this real?” Like that guy that killed himself last week, is his memoir—I mean, if he’d written a novel to be published by Simon & Schuster, would we be talking about it to the same degree? It’s not in the situation as the sonnet cycle. People are still reading novels, but I don’t know that it’s as dominant as all that.

If it was, “Why was it dominant? Why was the novel form dominant?” I think actually it’s to do with the omniscient voice. I think, from the beginning, the novel could go anywhere. It could take the reader by the hand, could lead them into places that they would never in a million years go. And from the invention of the railways—people commented about this a lot at the time—people were no longer limited to seeing their own class. They would be waiting on a railway station, and every class of society, it seemed, would be waiting there.

But the challenges of a simple reader in finding out about the upper classes that they’d glimpse in these situations, or indeed a curious upper-class reader in finding out about the lives of the very poor carrying a chicken to market in a third-class carriage, in real life, that would be pretty limited. The novel could take you anywhere it wanted to go, and that, I think, is really never going to go away.

I can see, even now, publishers are sharpening their claws, and they want to leap on any really talented novelist of, say, transgender lives now. They probably weren’t very interested in that or hadn’t thought about it until 20 years ago. Now it seems like a very current thing, and they’re interested. They’ve been very interested for some time in Black British authors as well. They’re not people who are trying to find a voice for those communities, necessarily, but probably just as powerfully finding an audience who wants to find out about the community without having to say, “Well, this is going to be our documentary discovery.” You can just imagine what it’s like, and that’s good enough.

But who knows why things come into fashion, why they dominate, and why they disappear? The epic poem was the dominant form of the 17th century, and no one’s really written one for about 300 years now.

On Rachel Cusk

OLIVER: Who are the other best living British novelists?

HENSHER: Oh, no, don’t tempt me.

OLIVER: No, you’re not, no?

HENSHER: No, I’m not going to be tempted.

OLIVER: Can you give your argument for Rachel Cusk? Because I think she’s dreadful.

HENSHER: Do you?

OLIVER: Yes, I think it’s very boring. I find the Outline trilogy quite unreadable, actually.

HENSHER: Oh, okay.

OLIVER: On the first page, I thought, “Wow, this is so exciting. She’s doing something really new.” And by halfway through the first book, I thought, “Well, it’s over. She’s done everything it can do. I can’t take it anymore.”

HENSHER: I think that what will keep her going is the unfailing beauty of her sentences. I think she has cadences like no other writer. That keeps people going. And what I really love about some of her books is that they are literally about nothing. I think The Country Life is an absolutely superb book, but what’s it about, really? A girl goes to the country and falls out with her family. It’s absolutely great.

Yes, what is it? What are they about? I mean, but that’s the thing. I don’t think that you really find what’s wonderful about novels by saying, “What are they about?” I thought the trilogy was just a wonderful bit of thread-spinning. And maybe it’s just me, but those novels that consist of the gathering of one story after another, sometimes never coming to a conclusion, they work such a spell.

And that’s true about, not a novel, but One Thousand and One Nights; The Canterbury Tales; Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; or in the same category, Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, which I think is the great American novel of the last 50 years. And it’s exactly that. It’s a series of stories being told as one person tries to pitch a movie to another. It’s absolutely glorious. And I think that the Cusk trilogy is very much like that.

Long before Rachel’s trilogy, I did have this plan to write a novel of storytelling, and it was going to be called Tales from the Pit. And actually, I signed a contract for it, and it was going to be stories told from one orchestral musician to another during the interminable performances of some long-running opera or other. But the thing that stopped me from writing it was that I discovered that Berlioz, the great composer and great writer, had written a book very similar, called Les soirées de l’orchestre. And I thought, “No, I’m not going to outdo Berlioz.”

On Literary Critics

OLIVER: Who are the critics from whom you have learnt the most?

HENSHER: Peter Garside, the great Regency critic. J. M. S. Tompkins, who wrote a superb book about 100 years ago about the popular novel after 1770 to about 1820. That’s a superb book. John Sutherland I think is really good. I love his books solving problems in novels. George Saintsbury, end-of-the-19th-century critic who had the principle, “Read everything.” And I think that his books about the novel in particular are really—they can’t be improved on. He was just so well read.

OLIVER: Yes. What about more modern critics? That sort of ends a long time ago.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know that there are any critics writing—I mean, I don’t describe myself as a critic. I’m just a book reviewer.

OLIVER: Leavis, Carey, Hermione Lee?

HENSHER: Oh, yes. I think Hermione is really a great biographer, and her life of Virginia Woolf was very good. Her life of Penelope Fitzgerald was better, and her life of Anita Brookner is exemplary. It really is.

OLIVER: But the Fitzgerald book has no religion.

HENSHER: Yes. I probably didn’t notice that.

OLIVER: Penelope Fitzgerald, she never talks about it, but it’s all about God. And the book is quite secular and feminist in a way that I felt was perhaps more Hermione Lee than Penelope Fitzgerald, you know?

HENSHER: Yes, that’s a very good point. It’s not something that I really pay attention to. You could make the case that there are all sorts of private parts of people’s lives that are just closed to the investigator. Very few literary biographers talk seriously about sexual relations or about money, for instance. I don’t really see why religion shouldn’t be different. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that.

Critics—I can’t stand Leavis. I think he’s wrong about everything. I do think he’s wrong about everything, and I don’t know what he means when he says, “This is life-enhancing.” I was like, “What does that mean,” you know? What does it mean? And people in Cambridge were always saying, “What does that sentence mean?” Who knows? Boy. And I think they must have said it to Leavis about five times a day. Who else? Suggest some names to me.

OLIVER: I thought John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.

HENSHER: Yes, John Carey. Yes, that is a proper—

OLIVER: It’s a great book.

HENSHER: That’s a proper game changer, actually. And I don’t see how you could disprove it. He’s wrong—

OLIVER: And the Dickens book, The Violent Effigy.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s brilliant. He’s occasionally just wrong, but he’s wrong in interesting ways. The Thackeray book writes off some great novels, in my view. The Intellectuals and the Masses, he’s just wrong about George Moore. But on the whole, yes, he’s a very good thing.

Of course, John Carey was the last generation of critics to have a proper training in textual bibliography. So his editions of Milton, and especially the brilliant edition of the James Hogg Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, they are a very good preparation for going through a work of literature and talking about every word of that work of literature.

Two Thousand Novels

OLIVER: You read 2,000 novels in order to write your history of the novel.

HENSHER: Oh, a lot more than that.

OLIVER: Okay.

HENSHER: A lot more than that. There’s 2,000 novels that are talked about.

OLIVER: In the bibliography.

HENSHER: There are a lot more novels that I just didn’t put in.

OLIVER: Where did you get them all? You must have had trouble finding some of them.

HENSHER: It’s much easier now than it used to be. There’s Gutenberg, of course. There’s this wonderful publisher—I want to get to the bottom of it—an online publisher that will sell you the collected—what’s it called? I don’t know—will sell you the collected works of some very minor novelists for like 1.99. A couple weeks ago, I just bought all the novels of Rhoda Broughton for 1.99. So that was very useful.

And there are various other online sources. There’s the London Library, of course, for physical copies, which they still have a surprising number of things. They had a copy, for instance, of the very last three-volume novel to be published, which is a novel by George Gissing’s brother, Algernon. I can’t tell you how bad it is. Oh, god, it’s absolutely atrocious. Anyway, they had a copy. So, yes, you sort of gather them here and there.

I knew that a novel was seriously obscure when neither Gutenberg nor the HathiTrust websites or anybody else could come up with a copy. There’s a novel from the 1790s that crops up in a lot of bibliographies and general surveys of 1790s novels by Charlotte Palmer. She’s a woman called Charlotte Palmer. I don’t know anything about her at all. And it’s called It Is and It Is Not a Novel. It sounds fascinating, but I did notice that it’s suddenly referred to for the first time in a study of 2013, and every single reference since then more or less repeats what that first commentator has said.

I couldn’t find a copy of it myself in any of the sources, and I did wonder. Jane Austen was a very keen reader of women writers of that period, and I did think, “Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have heard of this writer and her book, because there’s a character in Jane Austen called Charlotte Palmer.” She wouldn’t have done that if she’d made that connection. It would be like giving a character the name Fanny Burney. So I’m sure that it does exist somewhere, but I couldn’t track it down.

OLIVER: And you excluded Ulysses.

HENSHER: Yes. That was a really difficult one. I tormented myself over Ulysses, and I could justify including Joyce. Firstly, he always had a British passport. He never had an Irish passport or anything else, so you could base it on that.

On the other hand, it was published in Paris. I do talk a little bit about Portrait of the Artist, which was published in London. It was published in Paris, and he never lived in Britain after leaving Ireland when it was still part of Britain. So, I mean, I couldn’t not mention it at all.

But I thought in the end, just from a literary politics sort of standpoint, I thought if I put Ulysses in, describing it as an example of the novel in Britain, that would kick off a fuss that I didn’t feel passionate about defending. Oddly enough, I would’ve been more tempted to include Finnegans Wake, which I’m passionately fond of and which was, of course, published by Faber and Faber in 1939. But it made no sense to leave Ulysses out and include Finnegans Wake.

Where the borders were drawn, who to include and who to leave out, it wasn’t an easy decision. And on the whole, I did include people rather than exclude them. But Joyce is such a national figure in Ireland that I did think there would be a bit of a row if I started claiming him as a British novelist.

On Penelope Fitzgerald

OLIVER: You have a very nice suggestion in the back of the book for a Library of Britain, which would be a bit like the Library of America, but obviously we have a lot more to publish here.

HENSHER: Yes, it would obviously be a lot better. [laughter]

OLIVER: But I think you left Penelope Fitzgerald off your list of the people who should be first in line.

HENSHER: Oh, did I? Oh, that wasn’t deliberate. What a disaster.

OLIVER: I wondered. I thought this must be—

HENSHER: Oh, no, that was a cock-up.

OLIVER: So you do want her in.

HENSHER: Oh, yes. Yes, definitely. And the biographies as well.

OLIVER: Because I think she’s a great genius. Oh, the biographies are amazing, yes.

HENSHER: Yes. Penelope was the last person in my life who I’ve been scared of. I’m not scared of many people, and probably in my adult life on the fingers of one hand, really. But Penelope, I was scared of, and I do not know why. I do not know why, because she was always unfailingly polite and civil. She just had a sort of level stare as though she was kind of assessing you, and she might at any point say something that you would carry with yourself for the rest of your life shuddering.

And she never did. She never did. She was extremely nice, but I don’t know. There was something very odd about Penelope. It was as if—do you know that description of the Greek Alexandrian poet Cavafy, that he was a gentleman that stood at right angles to the universe? She was like that. You met her at a party, and she’d stand there. She looked very much like the White Queen in Alice. She always had a kind of Sainsbury’s plastic bag by the side of her, and she just seemed kind of detached from the party and from everyone.

I think she liked solitude. I don’t think the impression that she didn’t quite want to be there was at all false. She was a one-off, Penelope, I think. And I know that people who worked with her—we shared an editor at one point, and she was one of those authors that inspired huge amounts of loyalty. I think the biographies are, in a way, even stranger than—The Knox Brothers, and the Charlotte Mew biography is incredible.

OLIVER: It’s crazy.

HENSHER: It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible. I wish she’d—there were a couple of biographies that she wanted to write and didn’t. She was going to write a biography of L. P. Hartley and gave it up because she discovered too much about L. P. Hartley’s sex life, and Leslie Hartley’s sister was still alive. She dropped that.

And I think there was talk of a biography of M. R. James. The very last thing that Penelope published, almost, I have a responsibility for because Penguin Classics—Penguin Modern Classics, probably—were going to bring out a selection of M. R. James’s short stories. And they asked me to write the introduction to them, and I said, “I will write the introduction to them, but only if Penelope refuses to.” So they went to Penelope, and she said yes. And I’m very proud of that.

OLIVER: Yes, that’s a great piece of writing as well. Right, I’m going to read out a quote from your book.

HENSHER: Oh, Lord.

Novel-Reading and Morality

OLIVER: Here we go. Quote: “If you had read more than one novel with attention, it would be impossible to bring a machete down upon the face of another human being without guessing what it would be like to be behind that face as the blade fell upon it. You would not do it.” End quote. Now, we just know that that’s not true, isn’t it? A lot of awful people have read novels and continued to do their thing.

HENSHER: Well, I think those people are celebrities in the world of psychology. Isn’t it interesting that concentration camp guards read Hölderlin’s poems? They’re extreme cases. Overwhelmingly, there is not much overlap between habitual readers of novels and the sort of people who carry machetes in the streets of London. That’s definitely the case. I think that’s beyond arguing.

It might be the case that it’s not 100 percent cure. You can’t guarantee that if somebody has read Great Expectations with attention and love, that they won’t go out afterwards and say, “All right, I’ve done that. He gets off with Estelle”—or alternatively, “He doesn’t get off with Estelle,” according to which ending you read—“Now I’m going to go and chop some bugger’s head off with my machete.” Well, it’s conceivable, I suppose, but it’s very, very unlikely.

And I don’t know what better protection we have against the idea that the next generation is going to be more prone to violence. If we could persuade everybody to read and engage with novels, then that would be a very, very good protection against the spread of violence. I’m sure that’s right.

OLIVER: So you do think that the novel is causing the moral improvement somehow? It’s not just that civilized people, as it were, enjoy novels. There is some mechanism of change there?

HENSHER: Yes, and by moral improvement, I mean the simple act of imagining what it’s like to be somebody else. Not necessarily to pass judgment on those people, but to imagine what it’s like to live another life. And that’s the beginning of the human imagination, I think.

Effects of Patronage on the Novel

OLIVER: One of the main arguments of the book is that patrons, as you call them, had too much control over the novel, how it was priced, what form it took, whether it could talk about naughty things, et cetera. But the thing I actually enjoyed most about your book was, you were very good at showing how diverse and innovative the form has been, and how quickly and how cleverly novelists have responded to every new set of conditions, set of constraints.

Isn’t the truth somewhere between these two, that the patrons are also responding to real-world conditions, what the public will and won’t stick? The mothers have never wanted the daughters to read books, so the books have to get around that somehow. Isn’t everyone reacting to the real world, as it were? And the cold, dead hand of the patron isn’t gripping quite as tightly as that, maybe.

HENSHER: Well, I think that the argument is not that patrons exert too much power, but where they do exert too much power, it has, on the whole, a bad influence on the contents of the book. And patrons always assume that the readership is a uniform thing, that because they and their—Mudie in the 19th century, his 30,000 subscribers—because they wanted to read heartwarming tales in which nobody ever committed adultery, that nobody did.

Now, clearly that was completely wrong because when George Moore in the 1880s wrote a marvelous novel called A Mummer’s Wife, about a woman who runs off with her lover and becomes an alcoholic among a lot of actors—glorious, and they priced it at sixpence—Mudie’s turned it down flat, of course, because “No one’s going to read this book. Oh, our people don’t want to read it.”

Well, he was completely wrong. It went into six editions in two years priced at sixpence. And that actually has gone on. In the 1950s, Kingsley Amis was persuaded by his editor to take a word—I don’t know what it was, maybe it was the word bugger—out of a novel because they said, “The Boots Lending Library won’t buy it.”

Now, I suspect that 10 years later, Kingsley Amis would have said, “Well, stuff Boots Lending Library; I’m going to sell to people who do want to read it.” Because only five years after he was told that, Penguin published Lady Chatterley’s Lover after a very useful—useful from the point of view of publicity—obscenity trial. I have no idea whether Boots Library took Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I rather suspect not. But it sold hundreds of thousands within days, and quite right too.

The thing is that there may be a readership that likes one sort of novel, but there’s also a sort of readership that likes another sort of novel, and patrons never want to admit that.

Your second point, about the way that novels reach out to new areas, it’s absolutely true. And it’s quite striking, the sort of novels that very effectively reach out to explore unfamiliar bits of society. For instance, the working-class novels of the 1890s, which are often horrifically violent—Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, I think one of the great 19th-century novels, but there’s no doubt there’s bits in it that have to be read with great revulsion. That was against everything that people thought the novel ought to be doing.

Even if something was a bit less specific, if it was about a new or unfamiliar minority, then it could go against the patron’s power. There’s a very good example of a novel by the Jewish novelist Julia Frankau called Dr. Phillips. And it was one of the most enjoyable discoveries of my reading. It’s a story of murder and adultery in the upper-class Maida Vale Jewish Victorian life. I absolutely adored it. And the patrons wouldn’t have touched it. They thought, “Oh, no one’s going to read this.”

But the novel is always going to give opportunities to people from communities that haven’t had their voices heard. Women, from the start, could write and publish novels when they couldn’t become doctors or lawyers or politicians. And people from ethnic minorities are heard surprisingly early in the history, and it’s because readers wanted to hear about something new.

And I think that’s an absolutely thrilling development. And it’s nothing to do with patrons either. It’s invariably publishers who just think, “Well, let’s try this thing out. Let’s see whether we can find readership for what it’s like to live on a remote farm in Africa.” Or going back to the 1880s, “Let’s see if our readers want to find out what it’s like to be a new immigrant off this boat called the Windrush.” One of the great novels of the 20th century emerged, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

It’s always out of some sort of commercial desire just to try something out and see if there are readers there. It’s a very effective mechanism for broadening participation in society, I think.

The Role of Ideas

OLIVER: What about the role of ideas? Isn’t there an essential place for philosophy, theology, economics, all these other disciplines? The development of the novel is inseparable from these things. Not just people like George Eliot and Jane Austen, but there are ideas in every book, aren’t there?

HENSHER: Well, I think there are assumptions in every book. It depends what you mean by an idea, really. If you mean a philosophical proposition, then I would say no. There’s also the problem that an idea, the justifiable quality of an idea, whether it’s a good idea or whether it’s a truthful idea, whether that has an impact on the quality of a novel. And it’s quite hard to see that a novel that we agree with is necessarily going to be a better novel than a novel that’s talking total nonsense from the ideas point of view.

I think that there is a place for the proper Cambridge idea of a novel, a Cambridge idea of an idea in a novel. But I don’t think it’s essential. I’ve been thinking about this since we had this discussion at that conference. And I think that my main feeling about it is that we ought to admire novels for doing well what only the novel can do well. Those things are to sketch out lives, individual lives, however eccentric or idiosyncratic, to create the illusion of human beings, to listen to and convey the speech of individuals, and not necessarily to do what other forms of writing can do much better, which is to set out a case for one idea or another.

Now, of course, that’s oversimplifying the whole thing. But I must say that I can think of novels that I absolutely love, that no doubt have some kind of idea or assumption running through them. But I don’t know that’s really what I or anybody else reads a novel for. I mean, what are the ideas—I’m just looking at the shelf in front of me. What are the ideas in The Diary of a Nobody? Without a doubt, one of the greatest novels in British literature. What is the idea of The Diary of a Nobody?

OLIVER: I think that novel is premised on a very clear and simple set of ideas about the British class system, and about what is acceptable to mock and what is acceptable to be the butt of satire. That novel now, in a way, isn’t funny anymore because it’s too mean. It’s too cruel.

HENSHER: Are you kidding me? Seriously?

OLIVER: I find the first half funny, and by the end of it, I just think, “There’s nothing actually wrong with this guy. Gosh.”

HENSHER: No, there’s nothing wrong with him at all.

OLIVER: It’s unbearable how mean they’re being to him.

HENSHER: It’s absolutely adorable. Come on, Charles Pooter painting his bath red. [laughter] His son deciding that he’s going to call himself Lupin.

OLIVER: Yes, but it’s not purely observational. It is what gives it its coherence and its organization. I mean, that is a very condensed novel. It’s a remarkable achievement technically, to do so much in so little space. And that is because it is organized around a certain set of ideas about the British class system, which are largely no longer real.

HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—

OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.

HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.

OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.

OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.

Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.

But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.

I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.

From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.

OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.

HENSHER: A lot.

OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.

HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.

OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.

HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.

OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.

HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.

OLIVER: Yes.

HENSHER: Henry, I don’t think we’re going to agree on this. [laughter] I don’t think we’re going to agree on this. But if I want to read a book that sets out ideas, I do—I’m not a complete empty-headed flibbertigibbet. The other day I was reading one of my favorite books of ideas, which is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

And I do think that books of ideas have their place. And it’s tempting to think, “Oh, I could transfer the insights of Erving Goffman into a fictional drama.” But you couldn’t. You absolutely couldn’t. It would rely much more on peculiar objects and observations that aren’t laden with propositions.

The Best English Novels for Beginners

OLIVER: One of the questions I get asked most often is from people who have not been bookish people. They’re more on the science or practical side. They haven’t read great novels since they were at school, and they want a list of five great English novels to get started. What’s your list?

HENSHER: Vanity Fair never failed. The Old Wives’ Tale never failed. An Evelyn Waugh. Which Evelyn Waugh? I think Put Out More Flags, actually, because it’s such a brilliantly funny novel. It’s a very strange novel. But it’s about a particular historical situation, which is often a kind of temptation.

What else? I’m only recommending novels by men because I think it’s men who have this problem, and I think that asking them straight off to read a particular feminine take on the world, sometimes you do hit just a blank wall. But I do think that they will get round to Mansfield Park or Daniel Deronda, my favorite Eliot.

I think I would also suggest The Lonely Londoners, the Sam Selvon. I do think it’s the most enchanting exercise in voice. And, how many is that? Is that four or five?

OLIVER: I think that’s four.

HENSHER: Oh, what am I going to do, then? Oh, you’ve got to have a Dickens. Bleak House. I think actually there’s a fallacy in people recommending novels to reluctant readers, which is, they always suggest something kind of easily digestible. But I think the way forward is to give something at its most intense and concentrated and just see if that counts. “This is what the novel really is like.”

Oh, I know the other one. I mentioned it earlier, the James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oh my god, that’s a fantastic novel. I really do think that’s good. Yes.

OLIVER: And can you do the same for children’s books?

HENSHER: No.

OLIVER: Fair enough.

HENSHER: No, I’m 61 years old. “Would you like to read this book, little—?” No, no, no, thank you.

Quick-Fire Questions

OLIVER: Let’s do a quick-fire round. I say the name of a novelist, and you give us your opinion. Short form.

HENSHER: Oh, gosh. Oh, terrifying.

OLIVER: That’s all right. You’ll do very well. Arnold Bennett.

HENSHER: Underrated. Marvelous.

OLIVER: Where should we start? And how good—

HENSHER: The Old Wives’ Tale. No, or The Card. The Card is a glorious novel. It’s absolutely ludicrous; it’s fantastic. The Old Wives’ Tale is, I think, the greatest French novel in English. It’s magnificent.

OLIVER: When you say underrated, how good is he?

HENSHER: Oh, top 20. Top 20 writers in English.

OLIVER: Iris Murdoch.

HENSHER: She’s out of fashion at the moment, very much out of fashion at the moment, I think for reasons that were out of her control. It’s impossible to tell at this point what is going to happen to a novelist like that. Is she going to carry on declining and drift out of our interest in the way that the novels of William De Morgan did? Or is she going to reach a bottom and then slide upwards?

I must say that I loved Iris’s novels to an incredible degree when I was 17. I could read them all day long. I think I must have read every single one of Iris Murdoch’s novels between the ages of 17 and 20. And the moment when I came to London and saw Iris at a literary party was one of the most overwhelming of my life.

What happened—weirdly, it was at a party in a secondhand bookshop in Clapham Old Town. Doesn’t exist anymore. And she was just standing there looking around with great empty eyes. And then Woodrow Wyatt tottered in in a very noisy way and said, “Iris, Iris, what are we doing here? What is this place? What are we doing?” It was very strange.

OLIVER: Walter Scott.

HENSHER: The creation is immense. The achievement is overwhelming. And towards the end of the 19th century, a reaction set in, which was so powerful that it defined many of Scott’s most characteristic stylistic features as the embodiment of bad writing. It’s not his fault. I myself, I admit to sharing in that reaction. And he comes to me in flashes of sublimity. I think the first chapter of The Heart of Midlothian is one of the most impressive pieces of writing of the century.

He did so much good for literature that it’s hard to be dismissive about him altogether, and I wouldn’t want to be. On the other hand, stylistically, he’s so out of tune with what we regard as good writing that I thought in the end it would just ring a completely false note if I pretended that I didn’t have problems with the style. So, you know, he’s in a particular historical position. We’re in a particular historical position. Who knows what that tells you about either of us, really?

OLIVER: Alan Hollinghurst.

HENSHER: Oh, who is my best friend, so yes, of course he’s marvelous.

OLIVER: Which one do you recommend?

HENSHER: I absolutely love The Stranger’s Child. I think that’s such an innovative novel, and it’s so clever and funny. But they’re all simply marvelous. He’s a marvelous novelist.

OLIVER: That’s the one I’m always pushing on people. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful.

HENSHER: Yes.

OLIVER: It’s clever. It’s really wonderful.

HENSHER: So clever. You’re not going to trap me into saying rude things about darling Alan.

Various Elizabeths

OLIVER: No, no traps. No traps. Elizabeth Taylor.

HENSHER: Great novelist. Great novelist. And central to her time in a way that I don’t think anyone really appreciated until some time after she died. After she died, some organization or other gave her a posthumous award for a lifetime’s achievement, and her husband, John, went to collect it. And he said in his acceptance speech, “What a shame you couldn’t have said this while she was alive.” And it was absolutely right.

As a handler of technical material, I don’t think there’s a novelist in the 20th century to surpass her. Just the way in which characters are introduced and interact, how the plot proceeds, the evocation of place, it is just the most extravagantly perfect technical handling.

She’s the novelist who, more than anything, I show to my students in Bath Spa. And it is astonishing how if you give them a page of Elizabeth Taylor, almost chosen at random, you can go through it inch by inch, word by word, and just emerge at the end absolutely astonished by the expertise of the handling. I think she’s an absolutely marvelous novelist.

OLIVER: Elizabeth Bowen.

HENSHER: I think she went off. But those novels from To the North certainly to The Death of the Heart, and maybe even The Heat of the Day, are absolutely thrilling. Psychologically, she’s an absolute whiz at seeing people, seeing into people’s minds. She’s better at children than almost anybody, and there are a lot of people writing about childhood in the 1930s.

The Death of the Heart, I think, is her best novel, though The House in Paris runs it pretty close. The middle section, where the young heroine goes to the seaside to stay with a family that she doesn’t really know and is followed by her cad of a boyfriend, is an absolutely stunning survey of uncertain behavior. And it’s rarer than you think, actually, novelists writing about people behaving uncertainly for reasons that they don’t quite understand.

The Heat of the Day, it has superb things in it, but I would say that it falls slight victim to the tendency of the time to think that novelists ought to write about serious subjects of contemporary concern. Novels of ideas, Henry, I’m sorry to say. And she just wasn’t that sort of novelist. When she’s doing two people lying on the grass just talking about nothing much, it’s marvelous. But when you creak it up into this plot about someone’s a spy and—oh, Elizabeth, don’t do it to me. Anyway, but that’s just me. A lot of people absolutely love The Heat of the Day.

OLIVER: Elizabeth Jenkins, Bowen’s great friend.

HENSHER: My knowledge of Elizabeth Jenkins that I can produce at short notice is The Tortoise and the Hare. And I think a lot of the same things that I said about Elizabeth Taylor are the same. It’s a lovely classical style.

I’ve often given people to look at the first page of The Tortoise and the Hare. I think it slightly suffers from the title, which makes the narrative seem a bit predetermined, but that’s a minor sin. I would love to read some more Elizabeth Jenkins, actually. I know I read another one or two some time ago, but I’ve completely forgotten what they were called, so don’t test me.

OLIVER: The best ones are Dr. Gully, Honey, and Brightness, after The Tortoise and the Hare.

HENSHER: Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. I’ve got a bit of an allergy—you’re going to disprove this immediately. I’ve got a bit of an allergy to novels, like Twitter profiles, which include the word doctor. [laughter]

OLIVER: It’s only called that because it’s a historical novel.

HENSHER: Yes, they are putting me off.

OLIVER: Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough.

HENSHER: I love Trollope, but I must say that when I reach out for Doctor Thorne, my hand—

OLIVER: It’s not the best.

HENSHER: I don’t know why. Why is it?

OLIVER: Because relative to what actually happens, it’s too long, and so you have to get through a lot of stuff that doesn’t really do anything for the novel.

HENSHER: No, I mean why is it the title that includes the word doctor is so off-putting?

OLIVER: Oh, that I can’t help you with.

HENSHER: No, I can’t help. Yes, I’m going to investigate to see if I can think of a novel with doctor in it.

OLIVER: Jenkins is another one who’s a superb biographer.

HENSHER: Oh, yes.

OLIVER: Her Jane Austen biography is amazing, really beautiful. Really incredible.

HENSHER: Okay. All right. Okay.

More Novelists

OLIVER: Martin Amis.

HENSHER: Yes, I think he is great. I do think he was wonderful. There are some later novels where he slightly fell down because he wanted to say something solemn about a major political situation. But he went on being a very good novelist a lot longer than people assume. I remember when The Pregnant Widow came out, and I think The Pregnant Widow is an absolutely enchanting novel. It’s just full of regret and grown-up thoughts, and, oh, I absolutely loved it.

Oh, my Lord, you should have seen the reviews that it got. I think word just got round among young people that Martin was no good anymore. He’s got the thing that his father had, of a brilliant ear for dialogue, and much more than his father, but sharing some of the same qualities. He had the air of being able to write a sentence that readers would remember. I’m sure that most people who like Martin Amis, if you said to them, “Give us a sentence from Martin Amis,” they’d be able to come up with one.

OLIVER: And lastly, Jilly Cooper.

HENSHER: Oh, yes. Do you know, people always roll their eyes when I say I don’t see why Jilly Cooper shouldn’t be the novelist from our time that survives in posterity. She’s got a lot of the qualities that actually make for a good prospect of survival. Her characters sound distinct. You always know who’s speaking. It’s got a good social range. It’s not about two retired actors sitting in a bedsit in Kentish Town. They’re funny, which is always good. People love them.

The first of the series of her long books—not the 1970s romances, though those are very enjoyable too—the earliest of them, Riders, published in 1986, never gone out of print. Now, there’s not many novels from 1986 that are still going strong with large readership. They had large readerships even before the television drama. That’s not the only reason. So I think, yes, I’d put my money on Jilly Cooper still to be read in 100 years’ time, ahead of Julian Barnes.

Final Thoughts

OLIVER: Last two questions. How do you think AI will change the novel?

HENSHER: No idea. Absolutely no idea. I think that novel has found ways to take advantage of technology and change in society before. It will do so again. I’m a novelist myself, but my practice has been long formed. I don’t think that I’m the person to ask this about.

What you want to do is ask somebody like the brilliant student that I was just talking to, who’s 22 years old, a student of mine who has been thinking about AI since he started his undergraduate degree. Those people, they will have it in their bones, and they will master it, I’m convinced. But my answer is worth less than nothing.

OLIVER: What will you do next?

HENSHER: Oh, I’ve retired. That’s it. That’s it. Glorious. I’m very happy.

OLIVER: You’re not going to set up the Library of Britain?

HENSHER: No, no, I couldn’t run that. Someone else can do that. No. I mean, it’d be nice if anyone took it seriously.

OLIVER: I think it’s a great idea.

HENSHER: Yes, I think it’s a great idea. I wouldn’t have put it—but no, I’m going to retire now. I’ve spent 30 years publishing novels, and there’s 12 novels, 2 volumes of short stories, and finishing with a history of my art form. I think that sounds like a nice, shapely career.

I don’t want to be writing novels about my idea of what the kids are like when I’m 75. I think that’s absolutely a fatal idea. [laughter] Of course, I’m just saying that, and you never know when something’s going to tempt. But at the moment, I think I’m going to retire.

OLIVER: Very good. Philip Hensher, thank you very much.

HENSHER: Pleasure. Thank you, Henry.

When the band is rehearsing on the train, the band leader snaps put a little heat under it. That’s exactly what this film does in every scene. It’s full of winks and nods and glances; people are always screeching cars round corners, sneaking out of windows, swinging with the band, or heeling it from the mob; there are dancing girls, spinning basses, screaming whistles, flasks of bourbon, and glittering jewels. This is everything a movie ought to be. Goose it up a little the band leader demands. Oh did they and how.

And boy does Billy Wilder know how to frame a scene. So much is happening in every shot. You get the fullest possible sense of the life of the film. It all fits, a careful composition, and yet it feels organic and natural. The clarinets and the mobsters are all lined up as elegantly as swans. The dancers move through the picture like the music of the spheres. The whole thing has a perfect quality, as if any little change in the shot would ruin the piece.

Surely it would be possible to write commentary about it all. But why? Why spoil the bloom of one of the great comedies? What’s needed is appreciation, a full-throated demand that you get yourself down to the cinema right now. Don’t you want to see beauty and genius and Jack Lemmon in a dress running from a gangster with a gun? Who can see Some Like It Hot and not feel young again, not fall in love with Marilyn again, not tap their foot or swing in time? This is the way comedy overwhelms. We know the tragic and profound in the way it makes us chill and prickle; we know the joy of the comic as it gives us a flush of spring and the urge to wiggle.

It is all well and good to think of films like this as fun and only fun, but fun is the life force underneath it all, and if you’re feeling the approach of autumn in the creak of your knee or the lag in your head, get yourself a shot of the good stuff. Go and see it while it is on the big screen. This is art. This is the golden age. And it’s as fresh as the day they made it. I don’t care what it takes. Skip work. Go alone if you have to. All the joy that film can bring, and yours for $12.

In the novel, a comedy about the downfall of a family of Irish landowners, Edgeworth doesn’t just lightly reference economics. Large chunks were clearly built around Smith’s foundational 1776 text “The Wealth of Nations.” Edgeworth was writing about price setting, monopolies, productive land management — ideas that preoccupied the early economists. Economics was in the very title: Smith had called irrationally high land charges “racked rent.”

I wondered if anyone else had noticed. A search through academic journals showed that a specialized few had clocked Edgeworth’s contribution. The economic historian William Henderson once called “Castle Rackrent” a “literary extension” of Smith’s work, arguing that it had “extended the influence” of early economics by inspiring other writers to apply its theories to the social sphere. Other academics, including Susan Manly at the University of St. Andrews, had also written about Edgeworth’s heavy use of economics.

That is Jeanna Smialek writing in the New York Times with an extract of her new book The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics. I must confess that even though I am very interested in the interaction of Smith’s work with that of the novelists’, I do not find Castle Rackrent much fun, though perhaps a re-read will cure me of that feeling. The whole piece is fascinating and I hope to read and review her book soon.

There was, however, an obvious barrier to bringing avant-garde philosophical and scientific ideas to the masses. They could be complicated and difficult to understand. The Edgeworth pair noted that it could be useful “to mix some political & commercial knowledge with fictions that amuse the fancy.” In fact, this was something Edgeworth had already begun to do.

Edgeworth was embarking on a project that was larger than her own oeuvre. She began to coach other literary women on how to include economics in their work. She struck up a close friendship with Jane Marcet, a London socialite who had already written a primer on chemistry, and the two women corresponded about economic topics. When Marcet wrote what could be considered the first textbook on economics, Edgeworth gave her extensive notes on the rough draft.

Here is Smialek’s book. A trade book about Smith’s influence on novelists should be written about Jane Austen too of course…

Who, then, is the unhappy consciousness in our analogy? I would suggest it is the writer of autofiction. In a 2014 essay describing the emerging popularity of autofiction in Anglophone writing, Jonathan Sturgeon lists three defining features of the genre: conscious play with the factual and the fictional; the belief in the immanently fictional character of the self; and a narrative that accounts for its own production, usually by telling us how the author-narrator came to be the self who wrote and published it. According to Frank Guan and Christian Lorentzen, what distinguishes this genre from earlier Künstlerromane are the economic conditions of twenty-first-century publishing. In this interpretation, autofiction is ‘a sort of aesthetic edition of careerism’ (Guan), a symptom of the fact that a writer’s job ‘has ceased to be distinguished from self-promotion’ (Lorenzten). Autofiction writers, in other words, are memoirists who have had to become their own ghostwriters. The prevailing affects on display in the genre are akin to those that Hegel delineated for the unhappy consciousness: anomie, impotence, masochism, anhedonia.

It is therefore fitting, even logical, that Life of M, the new novel by Rachel Cusk, one of the authors most associated with the Anglophone autofiction boom, should be narrated by a would-be ghostwriter. In Life of M, the autofictional ‘game or conceit’ is announced straight out of the gate. The first paragraph reads, in full: ‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.’ Bookended by a chapter describing the genesis of this ‘project’ and one describing its ultimate failure, most of Cusk’s novel toggles between what appear to be scenes from M’s life and what appear to be scenes from that of the narrator. Cusk gives each of these sections its own focalization. The first and last chapters are narrated in the first-person singular, M’s chapters are narrated in the close third person and – picking up from where she left off in her previous novel Parade (2024) – Cusk narrates the remaining chapters in the first-person plural. With the exception of the final scene, in which the ghostwriter shows M what they have written, the drama of the novel arises from the question of how much overlap exists between the ‘I’ narrator and the ‘we’ narrator – and how reliable their descriptions of M actually are.

Read the whole thing here.

Here I bring in a new tranche of data: short stories. Over the last few months, with Claude Code, I gathered data for 211 literary magazines, spanning 1841–2026, which amounts to more than 289,000 stories and 63,000 authors. Some of this data—especially twentieth-century pulps and slicks—is drawn from the Fiction Magazine Index, a crowdsourced project created by William G. Contento and edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne. Nora Shaalan provided the foundation for the New Yorker data.

According to this data, women have more than tripled their share of the short stories in these 211 magazines. Women outpublished men in the mid-nineteenth century, underwent a precipitous decline in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, hovered around 20% from the 1910s through the 1970s, before climbing decade-by-decade, only exceeding men in the 2020s, for the first time in 150 years at 54.6%.

Dan’s results roughly match the pattern of a study published in 2019. So men are being published less but that means men and women are now at about parity. As he writes,

Fiction in the US has undergone a tremendous demographic transformation in the last fifty years. Men have lost a lot of ground, which women have gained. But the way some commentators have written about it, you’d think men are, as the New York Times headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up.

Read the whole thing. I still don’t think this “matters” in any literary sense, but for those who care, these numbers should be taken account of.

A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

Where Have All the Literary Men Gone?

Are literary men disappearing? Some have been saying. As publishing’s cultural status and financial prospects have declined, men—per Sarah Brouillette’s astute analysis—have left, and women have taken control of the industry…

Read more

12 days ago · 2 likes · Dan Sinykin

George Orwell’s son has criticised the decision to drop his father’s Down and Out in Paris and London from an A-level English course and introduce a feminist account of his mother’s life.

Orwell’s 1933 memoir has been removed from the English language and literature syllabus by Cambridge OCR, and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, a controversial biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, has been added from next year. The book is a complex examination of O’Shaughnessy’s life. Its depiction of Orwell as a “sadistic and misogynistic” man, whose infidelity and behaviour ruined her life, has sparked heated debate among Orwell scholars.

That is from the Observer, who think it beneath them to link to the syllabus in question. If you look at the actual OCR English Language and Literature syllabus, the problem is worse than it looks. The syllabus already included books by Alexander Masters and Bill Bryson. It will now include writers like Tara Westover and Ana Kinsella. Other components allow the teaching of Ian McEwan instead of Jane Eyre and Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson. Yes, you read that correctly. Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson.

The problem is not that Wifedom is “replacing” Orwell, but that the whole syllabus is stupid either way.

I objected to Wifedom when it was published. It is simply inaccurate. It is the sort of book that sounds credible until you start looking up the footnotes, which often simply aren’t there. When they do exist, they aren’t reliable. From my review.

Funder writes that “clearly” Eileen had told the vicar to remove the word “obey” from the wedding vows. Orwell said that other parts of the service were missed out too. I was intrigued—did Eileen ask for these other things to be removed? What were they? I looked for the source. No footnote. Eileen’s previous biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes this same claim, referencing Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker. But Bowker has assumed this is what Eileen did. “Eileen, it seems, had arranged with John Woods to omit at least one of the vows...” He also has no source.

So perhaps Eileen arranged it, perhaps the vicar fumbled, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But this trail of speculation has been written up as near-fact. Apparently many suffragettes removed “obey”—if that’s the cause of this speculation, then tell me! Add it as useful context! But don’t just interpose your assumptions like this.

I hope this is going to be the object of study. Wifedom is there to teach “how the writers create the voice of their subject(s)” after all. But it is nonetheless an unworthy book. Can we doubt it was chosen for ideological reasons? We all know that choosing Carol Ann Duffy is cheating the child of their chance to study Emily Dickinson. This is like not teaching long division or natural selection; nor is it like teaching the order of Battle at Trafalgar.1

We also know that they don’t need to be taught Carol Ann Duffy. In a discussion of what an English syllabus should be, C.S. Lewis explained why it wouldn’t incorporate modern work. (The whole book is good value.)

The first thing to do, obviously, is to cut off some years from this end. The reasons for choosing this end are, I suppose, obvious. In the first place, we naturally wish to help the students in studying those parts of the subject where we have most help to give and they need help most. On recent and contemporary literature their need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose. Again, things are understood by what precedes them rather than by what follows them.

I happened to read The World’s Wife when I was seventeen, on the advice of a wonderful teacher from the girls’ school over the road—she also recommended some Bach concertos—but it would have been unthinkable for that book to be on a syllabus, both to me and to the teacher who recommended it. (I was given William Golding for the modern text. We also read Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer—and, alas, Scott Fitzgerald.) There is a great difference between a book worth reading (for whatever reason) and a book worth putting on a syllabus. It is that distinction which the philistine supremacy always wants to erode.

Some pupils come from schools and families where Dickinson and Shakespeare will be available to them in other ways. Some do not. Some children are still reading as much as children ever did. Some are not. Some children will inherit the great tradition of English Literature whatever decisions are made by the people who set the syllabus. Some will not.

Some children will not suffer this opportunity cost very much. Some will pay the full price of it. It is the latter who suffer the most from these decisions.

Life of M works on the conceit that the narrator is writing M’s autobiography, and making it all up. In the opening, M finds this amusing. At the end, she is hurt by all the falsities, but also by the way the book makes her seem like she “lacks humanity.” Lacking humanity, of course, is Cusk’s core theme, and her project as a novelist has been to deny or diminish the idea of character. So the book makes a neat loop around the idea that there is no-one there, whether the book was “real” or “made up”, about who the narrator could write. Whether she based it on “fact” or, as they claim in the final pages, invented it, all comes to the same thing.

M is presented as a hollow, almost fake, person, only ever acting her life. She is truly alive when acting and really acting in her personal life. Early on, she is presented as living in a doll’s house of fame, and this image is echoed many many times later on. Her house, enormous and empty. When people take pictures of her in public, it is like she is in a zoo. And so on. These images are also used of the narrator, who refers to themself as “we” (meaning they and their partner), apart from the opening and ending when they are “I”. The parallel is so thoroughly established it becomes dull. We are all trapped in the performances of our lives.

Life of M is part of a genre that sees biography, autobiography, and fiction as mergeable. This genre contains books like Orlando, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Quest for Corvo, Biography of X, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Whereas those books generally take the view of their subjects as mysterious and multifaceted, Life of M takes the opposed view: mysterious because empty. This is not, however, a study of fame, per se, but of how anyone maintains individual identity and integrity.

At the end, the narrator says that when M finds out her friend’s painting sold for millions of dollars, she was astonished. She admired this friend’s integrity, a quality that she “experiences as a kind of absence within herself… like a vital organ that was removed early on.” Alas, she could have achieved her status and kept her integrity, she now realises, but “her life has not been her own.”

This is the refrain of the book. Cusk’s familiar complaints about parenthood are a core part of the theme, but so are many other complaints. The difference is that whereas most things are “a role like any other”, parenthood is a “sacrifice”, a word the narrator repeats. This is the great weakness of Life of M. The attempt to produce an experimental narrative about auto-fiction and the nature of the self fails because of the book’s philosophical incoherence. Who is being sacrificed, on this book’s terms? From who is the vital organ of integrity missing? Why is M able to feel so angry about her presentation, if there is no-one there and never was? It seems plausible that Cusk’s narrator thinks we are all subsumed into the system which could be broken free of, but that would take a lot more establishing than is achieved.

Cusk’s own narrator demonstrates this confusion:

Concentration is like a white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time. One part rises while the other remains below. When our children were born they presented the greatest possible threat to our concentration. We could no longer access the white field because we could not forget them: our bodies wouldn’t allow it. To learn that this was not the case for men diminished men forever in our eyes. Yet it was we, at the time, who seemed to have been diminished.

Our children grow up, knowing or not knowing about our sacrifice. Some of them don’t care to know. Others are more willing, dimly perceiving that they may find themselves making the same sacrifice one day and wishing to remain informed. For a while we railed about the injustice of it all, as though our existence were a game in which someone had suddenly changed the rules halfway through. Then we stopped caring about it, about the rules. Perhaps, like so much of what we have seen in life, what looked like rules were not rules at all.

Who is “we” here? There is a modern idiom that implies a split self—I need to move my body—which has no basis in any philosophical or metaphysical claims. Cusk’s narrator uses this idiom several times: at the airport, people “will proceed in shameful stockinged feet to have their bodies scanned”; at the end, the narrator says “it was this abandonment of myself that helped me.” It is not clear what theory, if any, of the self the narrator has, proposes, or relies upon. This is pure idiomatic writing, without any deeper thought to sustain it. The narrator is similarly casual about philosophy when they say: “Her objectivity in the face of desire is the philosophical product of her fame.” God only knows what philosophical means in this sentence.

Cusk’s reliance on idiom is part of the general method of her narration. Like the recent novel The Ten Year Affair, her narrator doesn’t use the free indirect style to bring characters’ thoughts into the narrative, but to introduce external ideas. This is an inversion of free indirect style—ventriloquising discourse from outside the novel, which is relevant to the characters, rather than ventriloquising discourse from inside the characters that is relevant to the novel.

This is most apparent in Cusk’s use of idiom. The private school M’s children attend has “an air of commerce about it” and the parents, rather than picking children up in the car “attend on foot”. Here it is possible that Cusk is ironising people who do not appear directly in the novel—we don’t really see, hear, or know any of the parents directly—but they are satirised nonetheless by their idiom. But when the narrator writes that children grow up either knowing or not knowing about their parents’ “sacrifice” while the parents “railed about the injustice of it all” it seems more likely that these idioms are simply the way the narrator talks—a means of flattening the voice down to someone undistinguished, unindividualized, a cliche. It is a North London, soft-left, liberal literati vision of life. Just as M is a hollow person in a doll’s house life, so is the narrator. Thus when the narrator says M reads the newspapers as a way of “retaining contact with reality” the irony serves them both simultaneously.

This parallel is drawn most clearly in the way the scene is set: life is like a movie, as we are told more than once. The most frequent opening for a section is the phrase “It is…”. So: “It is a boat…”; “It is outside on the terrace…”; “It is a brasserie…”; “It is a meeting room…”. This is part of the “screenwriting” that is used to make life and movies become less and less distinguishable. “The elevator doors slide open and reveal M” reads like a screenplay direction. There are whole sections that are like this.

In the middle of the book, a section about death exposes the mismatch between “film reality” and “lived experience”. Echoes of Dante, the Book of Common Prayer, Exodus, and Philip Larkin are simple and obvious enough (intentionally so, presumably, as part of making the passage filmic while using the familiar idioms the rest of the narrative relies upon). But the real purpose of the passage, I think, is to contrast descriptions of the bin men as they might appear in a film (flourish, fan out, choreographed, wheeling, gilding, vigorous and graceful). This ekphrasis is a contrast to the falsity of modern art, discussed near the end of the book. There is something real about the bin men which the movies obscure, hence the anger one character expresses to M that we all live like we are in movies now, partly because of actors like her.

In the midst of our lives we sometimes wake in the darkness and hear the sound of our own heart thudding in our ears. There is a moment of blank emptiness before the memory of who we are and of all we have done and have yet to do slowly begins to fill us.

The waste collectors come early, before it is even light. In their big truck they rampage noisily through the dark streets, pausing at each building in turn. Two men drive while the others ride on the back. At each stop they hop off before the truck has fully come to a halt. They aren’t trying to save time: this flourish is something they are offering to themselves. They fan out over the street in the darkness and perform a choreographed routine, some wheeling the plastic municipal bins out into the road while others attach them to the truck’s rear forks. The forks lift and upend the bins over the belly of the truck then jerkily set them back down, empty. The street lamps rain their yellow haze over the truck and over the men and the municipal bins, gilding their movements; overhead the sky begins to lighten to a deep and jewel-like blue. The men return the bins to the foot of the building. They do this slightly carelessly, for the bins are now light. Ahead of them on each road the heavy waiting bins are neatly aligned while behind them the empty bins are all askew, like the discarded shells of things whose meat has been taken. The men wear high-visibility jackets. They are vigorous and graceful as they ride the truck through the dark dawn, their bodies erect, their faces lifted to the air. Their high spirits seem to derive from the prosaic honesty of their occupation. When they go on strike the city is rapidly crippled. It sits stewing in its own mess, helpless. The men obtain a certain dignity from this fact.

The noise of the truck fills our room as it passes in the darkness. It is a diabolical sound of shrieking metal and grinding gears, of shouts and the violent sounds of impact. There is nowhere in the city where this noise can be escaped. It comes to each place in turn like an angel of death. Sometimes it is comforting and sometimes it is maddening. The sound of our own heart thudding in the dark silence is neither of those things.

And you see at the end of the passage how the perspective shifts. No more filmic grace and choreography. As “We” listens to the bin collectors it is diabolical, violent, noise. The implicit image of death from the start of the passage is made clunkingly obvious. This move from image to sound, in order to effect a sense of contrast, is a classic technique of the movies, so the artifice of living as if we were in a film is even unavoidable in this novel.

Life of M may be trying to achieve a meta-joke, as Laura Miller suggested in Slate, about the nature of fame and personhood. If, as rumour suggests M is Natalie Portman, she is presumably in on the con. The whole point is that M is no-one, not even to herself.

The final sentence in Life of M is so bizarre and disorienting it throws even these revelations into chaos. As the writer departs, M stops her at the door, announcing there’s something she’s always wanted to ask her. Then M smiles “warmly and almost goofily,” and says, “This might sound stupid, but I’ve been wondering. Are you a guy or a girl?” Since Rachel Cusk is quite obviously the latter, what can this possibly mean? Only that Cusk is screwing with us and perhaps suggesting that not only is M not Natalie Portman, but the narrator isn’t even Cusk.

Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.

It may of course be the case that Cusk did base this book on Portman and has added a further layer to her joke. There is a very funny moment when one of the narrator’s friends thinks she may have depression, but she also read that so many people are taking anti-depressants these days that they are in the water. And thus the “integrity of her depression may have been compromised.” So it is with Life of M: there is so much of this sort of thing “in the water” that the integrity of knowing “who the book is about” may be compromised. Critics beware. The contortions of what is a movie and what is real life become irresolvable, as Cusk intends.

But that rather seems to be as much as the book is about. If you believe that the novel has run its course, that making people up is embarrassing, and all that jazz, then you will perhaps find this impressive. It is, however, not a very original joke to fill a whole novel. Perhaps inevitably, the broader intellectual discussion within Life of M is all rather lame. M’s freedom to pass through an airport is contrasted to the way ordinary people in the queue are “powerless”, “stripped of their goods”, moved forward in their “shameful stockinged feet.” Now, this is done to ironise M, who likens this to scenes of “displacement and persecution”. But the words are all the narrator’s. This is not free indirect style. And the narrator goes on to say that M has known others who renounce privilege and “seek the powerlessness of the ordinary.” Perhaps the aim is to reveal the trap of fame, but the doll’s house imagery has done that. Perhaps the aim is to ironise M, or the narrator, or both, but the language is, as elsewhere, more of the normal idiom that feels like it is being brought in from other discourse. That is the inevitable risk of writing two such characterless characters: like Outline, it means Life of M too often feels like a lecture or an op-ed about familiar themes in familiar language.

The narrator says things like, “We think again of the fact that nature has no nationality. Is that why it is doomed?” An unnamed character says, “Families are networks of social control, programmed to extinguish individuality.” Both come from a similar ideological background and are expressed in a recognizable idiom. Both make relatively little sense. Nations can die! Some of them are dying right now. Families are not programmed. Who or what does Cusk (or her narrator) think did the programming? That is another lazy idiom that skates over the real arguments.

Assume that this is all done as part of the presentation of the characters: the need for these sentences is still a problem. There is no individuality, nothing distinguishing (this is just how the characters talk in Life of M), nor are these issues especially pertinent to the plot. They are here only as part of the general ideology that all the characters seem to share. The book simply feels unable to get beyond this sort of editorialising. To actually overcome the idea of an authentic self, Cusk would have to go beyond the thinking of these idioms.

Life of M is so committed to its uncharacterful characters that everyone is simply an expression of a familiar perspective that belongs outside the novel. There is no narrative ambivalence: Cusk is dictating a worldview through a narrative. It is readable, and interesting enough to write a long review about—but even at 185 not-very-long pages, it is longer than it ought to be.

Cusk is an unavoidable novelist. She has a great capacity for technical control: Life of M is almost word-perfect at maintaining its style. The problem is that the style isn’t really about anything. The more philosophical the book sounds, the emptier the prose becomes. It is left feeling like a clever trick, not really up to the standards of the genre it hopes to join.

Anyway, the point of telling you about ‘Skindle’ is to illustrate one of the ways in which literary memory works. Some time after I had made-up the story, I began to introduce the children to books like The Hobbit and Narnia. I only read The Hobbit when I was about fourteen, but I read Narnia when I was seven and it was a deep obsession. I remember vividly the day my father brought home a wooden box, with a latticed lid, that contained Turkish delight—real, authentic Turkish delight, not just the stuff you get in the supermarket. It was a gift from a client, which to childish ears sounded like it must be the real stuff from far away places.

At the sight of the box, and the revelation of its contents—I was allowed a piece as a treat, even though I had got out of bed to come and see the treasure—I truly felt that I was experiencing a part of Narnia. Standing there with the Turkish delight in my mouth was just like Edmund eating the sweets in the woods. There was no wardrobe I could walk through, no coats or snow or Lantern Waste, but there was Turkish delight. Narnia was real in that cube of sweetness.

This, along with most of what happens in The Magician’s Nephew (simply the best children’s book ever written), and a vague sense of the great excitement of The Last Battle (I can see the battle now, faintly, still), was how I remembered Narnia as an adult. My old copies had many crease marks that suggested many readings, and some scenes, like the sacrifice of Aslan, I could recall in great detail—the mice!; but a good deal of the books had left me. My children enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but were not, then, interested in going further. (Things have changed, thank goodness.) So I re-read some of the books on my own.

Prince Caspian came back to me all in a great whoosh! as I realised that I did of course remember the ruins of Cair Paravel, the old armour, the trees, the magic potion. How could I have thought I had forgotten all of this? With every page I got the feeling that I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. And then I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This time, I got much less of a sense that, yes, of course, I had always known this. Instead, I was shocked to find that some parts of ‘Skindle’ were obviously similar to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The plot of ‘Skindle’ is simple. The city of Ludabek has been unbothered by dragons for many years. But now, in the distance, smoke is seen coming from the mountain. A ship is being prepared to undergo an expedition to keep Ludabek safe. Two children, Jenny and Marcus, wish to become stow-aways on this voyage. Their grandfather is a mage, the only one allowed to live in the city which is hostile to magic. They have discovered their innate abilities (which their mother wishes to deny or ignore). Their grandfather gives them a book of magic to help them on their journey. During the voyage, once they have been discovered and accommodated, Jenny realises her book has been stolen. Marcus’s powers are less in the line of casting spells and more trance-like. On one of his trance-walks he ends up in a mysterious corridor of the ship, at the end of which is a locked door. They both go back to this door and get inside and find their book.

As I told all this to my children, I could see it all very clearly. I didn’t do a very good job of describing it to them as I imagined it, but in my mind it was all quite particular. And when I turned to the passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy goes upstairs to find the Magician’s book, although the details were not exactly the same (no bearded mirror in my story), this was what I had come up with in ‘Skindle’. I was not inventing that story so much as half-remembering and then repurposing another story, one I once knew very well. (Other elements of the story are like this. Some of it is reminiscent of The Hobbit, for example.)

This was a very different shock of recognition. I did not feel, when I read that section, that oh yes I had known this all along; instead, I felt a sort of alienated recognition—oh yes, this is the origin of my own story, though I would never have realised I’d known it without telling that tale first.

There are three forms of memory here: explicit (remembering specifics like Turkish delight in the snow; Polly and Digory in the wood between the worlds); implicit (reading Caspian and remembering it as I read it); and submerged (I only know I remember it, because it came out in a new, comparable form). Lewis gives a good critical account of the way fiction works like this in the passage of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are discussing.

On the next page she came to a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit”. The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I’ll read it over again.”

But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn’t turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.

“Oh, what a shame!” said Lucy. “I did so want to read it again. Well, at least, I must remember it. Let’s see ... it was about ... about ... oh dear, it’s all fading away again. And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can’t remember and what shall I do?”

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.

It was Lewis’s gift to combine the abilities of the fiction writer and the critic, and this is an exemplary passage of that combination. It charts the way we read immersively as children and then forget. Lucy is first “living in the story as if it were real” and then “she never could remember”, even though every good story she then reads reminds her of what she has forgotten.

What can “reminding” mean here? Clearly it is not explicit memory, but it seems like implicit memory. If Lucy were ever able to get back to the story and to read it again, she would say on every page I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. But Lewis also implies that Lucy has submerged memory of that story. She is very often recognising it without realising she is realising. Just as I drew on my “memory” of this passage when I “invented” my story, so Lucy will draw on it when she finds something enjoyable in a generic, archetypal manner. All those stories later on that seem to have familiar elements also have roots—it is just that those roots are submerged too deep for Lucy ever to see them again or even to remember they are there.

Literature and language are forms of submerged memory. We do not need to write stories to be part of this history. It is part of all our writing and speaking. The whole job of a scholar like Lewis was to try to unsubmerge the literary past, knowing full well the job could never be fully done. It was a belief within the Inkling circle that language was its own form of submerged memory, as discussed in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction.

What makes Lewis and his circle so continuously interesting today is that they recognised this conflict and worked within it. They discovered how to allow submerged memory to work undisturbed in fiction while they were working to discover it in criticism. Lewis’s genius was to do both in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader without letting one interfere with the other.

In fiction, submerged memory is highly productive. But it presents a dilemma for criticism.

Criticism, of course, wishes to be explicit. Critics are adept at finding parallels, however aware of them the writer may have been or professed to be. It is widely assumed that the work of criticism is to bring things into the light. The act of writing criticism often brings up some implicit memory—ah, this is just like that bit of Hamlet—which are made explicit. In general, submerged memory is to be avoided. Critics must recognise their sources and influences. Great artists steal, but critics are not (usually) great artists. Coleridge stole and he was a great critic, but that was not a case of submerged memory.

Submerged memory is impossible to avoid, but to replicate a previous work would be taboo. So often, what we write and read and admire in criticism will have its origin in some equivalent of Lucy and the Magician’s book. The impulse, and indeed the professional requirement, is often to flatten this—to strive to recognise it, to put it in familiar terms, to give a citation. (To make it dull.) And anyway, submerged memories cannot be cited. The critical task is then to find these echoes in other people’s work and call them a failing, or to use them as a recourse for further criticism, thus turning usually productive submerged memory into the imitative explicit memories that produce dull work. The Critical Dilemma is that submerged memory is essential to good writing, though critics must often live in denial of this fact.

One result of this Dilemma is the critical-scholarly divide. Scholarship is supposed to show its working and sources, to place itself clearly within the lineage of previous work, and to make the new and marginal contribution clear. Scholarship is a form of knowledge. Criticism is a form of argument. It might place itself against other criticism, but not to make a new contribution clear. Rather, criticism is a more personal, ideological, or impressionistic response. The critic is not obliged in the same way as the scholar, but they are supposed to observe some of the same rules.

But the best criticism, or at least the criticism that has been held to be canonical by common readers—a tradition that would include Lewis—doesn’t fuss about the submerged problem. The best critical writing is often the result of such memory. In ‘Art as Technique’, Shklovsky railed against “habitualisation”, the unthinking perception we have of the world that needs shocking awake so we can see afresh. But Shklovsky’s idea was not original. He later discovered that people like Novalis had written about it. (As had others like Browning, and, indeed, Samuel Johnson.) This is the perfect example of submerged memory. Shklovsky is unlikely to have made an independent discovery. The idea is so pervasive in different forms across the history of literature that he will have been working from forgotten memories. He was working from a Magician’s book. Had he realised this, gone to the sources, and cited them, his essay would have been smaller, less exciting, less original, less idiosyncratic. Submerged memories force invention whereas explicit ones incentivise copying or marginal contributions.

When I “wrote” ‘Skindle’, I had no conscious idea about its influences, just as Shklovsky had no conscious idea about Novalis. The submerged nature of the influence forced a newness to the story: we cannot go back and read the Magician’s book, we can only recreate it in new forms. In Shklovsky’s case it was very new indeed, as it was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a book we have to assume is also subject to a forgotten story Lewis once read in his own Magician’s book. To make this explicit would be to risk fashionable imitation rather than to do something new.

The aim of this sort of criticism ought to be to write freely, directly, and in the understanding that some of what you produce—indeed, quite a lot of it—can only be inventive, original, or interesting because it is a half-remembered instance of something else, some long forgotten story you are always remembering without realising. As Johnson wrote in the Dictionary, invention not only means ‘producing something new’ but ‘discovery’. It is in this way, as Lewis showed in his passage above, that literature teaches us how to read it, even when we think we are inventing it in bed one morning while our children quietly chew their bagels.

Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect—in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe—in still other words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.

A little later, Bennett writes:

And, my dear sir, perhaps you happen to be an estate agent’s clerk, and you hate the arts, and you want to foster your immortal soul, and you can’t be interested in your business because it’s so humdrum.

Nothing is humdrum.

The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown in an estate agent’s office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd’s Bush! And you say that isn’t picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life?

You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the longest absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will admit that in an estate agent’s clerk I have not chosen an example that specially favours my theories.

You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance (disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot’s “Lombard Street”? Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.

He goes on to advise that Novels are excluded from “serious reading”, a sentiment many people will object too but which is worth taking seriously. (Previously discussed here.) Instead, he wishes for people to read poetry.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

I am currently working through Pope’s Iliad, rather intermittently because of travel and other things. It is one of the major neglected works of English Literature and reading one book in the morning before anything else makes that day a good one.

Bennett’s whole essay is well worthwhile and is not very long.

One of the other great works of this sort is J.S. Mill’s November 1868 letter to Florence May, which I reproduce here, without endorsing his selection—or ordering—of the works of literature.

Dear Madam—

I am very glad to find that you enjoy Buckle’s History, & I suppose from what you say, that you would like to enter into a course of reading that would be a good preparation for historical & social philosophy.

Something must depend in this course on the number of hours you can give to reading every day, & on the quickness with which you are in the habit of reading. But in any case I would strongly recommend three things. First, to read every book (with few & special exceptions) straight through from the title page to the last word. 2. To read a fixed number of pages of such reading as is taken for work, every day. I do not recommend hours, but 20, 50, or 100 pages. To read the working reading of the day as early as circumstances will admit in the day: but never, unless on some very rare exceptions, to go to sleep without having read it. 3. To fix so small a quantity of reading for work, as shall never be a burden, nor weary the mind, nor interfere inconveniently with other occupations; & to fill in the many gaps of time which will be left unoccupied by this rule, with light reading, amusing & agreeable, which has the advantage of being attractive when you are tired, of being able to put aside for days together when you are otherwise occupied, & which at the same time if well chosen may end by filling the mind with a fund of valuable knowledge as to the habits & ideas of past times & foreign countries.

I recommend, therefore, dividing your reading into four courses, which sh^d be carried on simultaneously: the first two of them to consist of books, some small portion of which sh^d be read invariably every day, & every word of which sh^d be read steadily through. The third course sh^d consist of books from which you can select portions if you like, which are comparatively light reading, but which sh^d be read because they are standard books the knowledge of which is necessary to any thorough knowledge of the progress of the human mind & of the history of manners. These need not be read every day if time is wanting, yet it might be a good rule to read some of them every day whenever there is time before taking up the still lighter or more exciting literature of the 4^th course.

The fourth course sh^d consist of those chefs d’œuvre of literature which are sure to be interesting, as well as of whatever modern books you find tempting & agreeable without fatiguing the mind. For I think it of great value to acquire a habit of constant reading in order to acquire in time the power of reading quickly, & I am convinced that this cannot be done with safety to the health of those who eschew light literature. To those who mean to spend their life in study, light literature is a necessary relief, while as I have already said, it is by no means without good results. I think that in it newspapers magazines & reviews may be very usefully included, if you find them agreeable reading; but even the most valuable articles in periodical publications ought to be read for pleasure, & not as part of the work of the day, because they do not fit in to a steady course of reading.

I inclose a list of books for the four courses, which I have put in the order in which I think it would be good to read them. The first course sh^d have the freshest part of the day, as it requires thought; & the two first courses sh^d if possible be read in the order in which I have put them down. The last two need not necessarily be read in this order, but it is very desirable that in reading them you sh^d ascertain & [note in?] your own mind while reading, the date at which they were written, so as to observe as you read the changes of ideas & manners.

I have not put down any books in any foreign language, because unless there is any foreign language you read with as much pleasure & fluency as English, I think it waste of time at present to read its literature. But if there is any such language, it would be well to let me know, because in that case I could perhaps point out useful books in each course to read in it, supplying some want which cannot be supplied in English.

I

Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge

Berkeley’s Three Dialogues

Berkeley’s Essay on Vision

Hume’s Essays concerning Human Understanding

Brown’s Lectures on the Human Mind

Mill’s System of Logic

James Mill’s Analysis of the Human Mind

Bain’s Senses and the Intellect

Bain’s Emotions and the Will

Bain’s Study of Character

H. Spencer’s Principles of Psychology

II

Grote’s History of Greece

Hooke’s Roman History

Plutarch’s Lives

Merivale’s History of the Roman Empire

Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

Hume’s History of England

Hallam’s Middle Ages

Macaulay’s History of England

[James] Stephen’s Lectures on the History of France

Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella

Robertson’s Charles V

Robertson’s America

Motley’s United Netherlands

Schiller’s Thirty Years War translated

III

Spenser’s Poems

Massinger’s Plays

Bacon’s Essays

Milton Paradise Lost, Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, Penseroso, Sonnets

Dryden’s Poems—Æneid

Pope’s Poems—Iliad & Odyssey

Spectator

Clarissa Harlowe

Sir Charles Grandison

Rasselas

Rambler

Goldsmith’s Poems

Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World

Gray’s Poems

Cowper’s Poems

Ellis’s Early English Prose Romances

Sydney’s Arcadia

Coleridge

Wordsworth

Shelley

Keats

IV

Shakespeare

Don Quixote

Gil Blas

Fielding’s Novels

Vicar of Wakefield

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey

Percy’s Reliques of Early English Poetry

Lamb’s Selections from the Dramatists

Mrs Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho

Mrs Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest

Miss Austen’s Novels—Sense and Sensibility Pride and Prejudice &c.

Scott’s Poems

Scott’s Novels

Most people aren’t going to read The Golden Bowl. Henry James’s last completed novel is long and difficult, exemplifying his late style, in which his sentences can become discombobulatingly convoluted. It is the sort of thing that gets James a bad name as a stultified hippopotamus of a writer, expounding and confounding his readers with sentences that seem as impenetrable and interminable as the rambling conversation of a dull and supercilious old man. Earlier James novels and stories—such as, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady—are more focussed on action and events, and are written in a plainer, more “readable,” style. Next to these, The Golden Bowl can feel like it was written by a different person—, a more pompous, irascible writer.

So why am I writing about The Golden Bowl? Because Literature is read in the spirit of ambition, not acceptance. And The Golden Bowl, is quite simply one of the best novels written in English. It is, as Gore Vidal says, “ambitiously divine.” It is about as close an examination of the psychology and inner lives of four people as it is possible for a novel to make. The action is not so much greater than that of an ordinary novel, but the amount of unfolding of the characters’ inner lives is very much greater. One of the characters in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You called it a “juicy” book, which is exactly right. The Golden Bowl provides us with an extraordinary amount of information about what everyone thinks and feels, consciously and unconsciously, about the events of the book.

There is a strange and splendid beauty to James’s difficult prose. Ezra Pound was right to say that James’s late, elaborate style was in fact concise. James’s closeness to his characters, and the great precision of his style means, as Pound says, that he says more in a page than many other more “direct” writers would get into a chapter. It is frequently marvellous what James can make a sentence do. One must read The Golden Bowl slowly.

All of this means that James can turn a simple story of love and betrayal,—a story of how rich people who collect nice objects have a distorted view of human relationships, which is a theme he had handled many times before—into an odyssean story, a great quest of the psychological and romantic lives of four ordinary people. The Golden Bowl is full of questing references, from the Golden Isles (the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology) to people who are looking for each other at a moment of high tension being described as going in quest of each other.

It might seem flatly obtuse to call the The Golden Bowl a quest. These people walk the park and stroll the grounds and pace the drawing room. But The Golden Bowl has the quality of a High Romance, in which his coiled prose creates a shimmering effect, as if we are reading a novel that aims not at verisimilitude, but a marvellous tale.

The rest is not online yet but will be quite soon (I think), or you can order an issue for $7.95.

Ever since its rather dull beginning on Robinson Crusoe’s island, the British novel has been a means of holding up the mirror not to nature but to the British idea of civilization. That is why Jane Austen is beloved the world over. She is as English as blushing roses and clotted cream—exemplary of Englishness. She knows how civilization works in the drawing room and the drapier, what ideas and beliefs it relies upon, what pains and pity it takes to raise a young woman of good morals as well as good manners. As much as the philosophers and economists, theoretical thinkers of civilization, Austen saw the usually unseen mechanisms of social life.

So did all the great novelists. From the emotive nationalism of Walter Scott to the romping picaresque of Henry Fielding to the austere psychology of Henry James, the novelists have shown us what it takes to create and preserve a culture. This is one of the primary functions of literature in a great civilization. The Greeks had Homer, the Romans Virgil. For many years, the English had their poets. It was once unthinkable that the scions of English national life had not got Shakespeare close in their heart. Alas, no more. But they still, just about, read novels. A great nation cannot long survive without a vision of greatness and a vision of itself. It is largely from the novelists that we get that vision now, to whatever extent that we do still get it from literature.

We might think that our elites are less dedicated novel readers than once they were. The days of Harold MacMillan and Alec Guinness reading Trollope with monastic devotion are gone. Instead, we have the proud philistinism of Truss and Starmer. But it is not so long since the days when John Major spoke feelingly of his love of Trollope. Tony Blair loved Ivanhoe. The archetypal literary MP, long associated with figures like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, has more recently been alive in Frank Field, Alan Johnson, Rory Stewart. I have seen Michael Gove light up in discussions about fiction. Nicola Sturgeon is now a fiction reviewer. On Desert Island Discs Kemi Badenoch chose Vanity Fair, Ed Miliband chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Theresa May chose Pride and Prejudice.

We are long past the days when every home had, as well as a Bible and a Shakespeare, editions of English classics like Johnson and Addison. But are we past the days when the novelists are still afforded their corner of the house? Visit the homes of even the least literary lawyers and civil servants and you are still likely to see at least a few novels on the shelves. I was once friends with an old lady who broke out into great smiles when she talked about Surtees. A friend recently told me about her grandmother (who left school at fourteen) who remembers Jane Austen’s birthday every year. No-one needs to be told about the popularity of Middlemarch. P.G. Wodehouse remains untouchably popular with readers of all stripes. The good old London Library has a wealth of novels—and it was not unusual to find that obscure titles had been checked out. During the pandemic, sales of the great novels were reportedly high. Watching Netflix has taken over from fiction-reading, but not entirely.

There is a long history of this affection for novel reading. People went simply wild for Pamela and Clarissa, in a way that we cannot quite conceive without referring to Sally Rooney. Writers like Dickens and Trollope became newly popular during the Second World War. Night after night, as the bombs fell on London, the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, separated from his evacuated family, sat in Buckingham Palace reading the Chronicles of Barsetshire and Palliser. (And indeed all of Trollope’s other novels, which he owned in pocket editions.) Jane Austen’s fame grew in the nineteenth century as readers declared that her books made them feel they really had spent time with the characters. Many of Dickens’ early readers were illiterate listeners. Jonathan Rose has documented working-class movements that organised themselves to read classic literature. Long gone are the days of the Boots Lending Library or the naming of towns and roads after Walter Scott’s novels, but this sense of affection remains, as seen in the continued success of the Persephone, Virago, and Penguin classics series, the many film and television adaptations of Victorian writers, and podcasts like Backlisted.

Above all, what displaced the novel from the heart of English life was radio and television, and then the internet. In the 1860s J.S. Mill, advising a young woman on her ambitions to read the great works told her to work to a set number of pages of the hard stuff (philosophy) in the mornings when her mind was fresh, and to pursue the “lighter literature” of novels in the evenings, not merely for pleasure, but to keep her reading stamina well trained, and to become conversant with the history of manners and culture. A good deal of that young lady’s time would now be given to Netflix and HBO. To bring up a child as a reader today requires hard limits on screen-time of all descriptions.

And the novelists are adapting to the screen, which is the global home of Jane Austen. I sat next to a data center programme manager on a flight to New York recently. After we discussed data centers, he asked me what I do. Oh I love Jane Austen he told me. And he knows her through the movies. His favourite is Laurence Olivier. Just as The Odyssey recently sold a million copies because of the new Christopher Nolan film, so many of the British novelists will be known around the world because of adaptations. New technology took away the mass audience for reading—the novel will never be central to our culture again; we cannot go back to 1852—but it is also a new way for novels to find audiences. The novelists’ influence is still strong.

The novel is sometimes imagined as a bulwark against that sort of cultural change, a refuge from (or resistance to) the dominance of commerce and technology. One of the pleasures of Philip Hensher’s new A History of the Novel in Britain is his alertness to the role of economics in the development of the novel. As well as the expected history of novelists and their work, Hensher provides an account of the commercial factors that changed the form and content of novels, such as the role of cheap printing in serialization and magazines in the golden age of genre stories. Chief among the “patrons” who, according to Hensher, have done more harm than good, was Charles Mudie, who set-up Mudie’s Lending Library in 1842, and was, largely, responsible for phenomena such as the three-volume novel and sexual censoriousness that shaped the novel for the rest of the century. Of course, a lot of this comes down to public taste. Kingsley Amis records in his memoirs being told to tone-down a swear word in his second novel, otherwise he would lose the Boots Lending Library purchase of 2,000 copies. Amis made the correction. That was in 1955, a long time after Mudie. The British public had reticent taste, not just the “patrons”. The British idea of civilization was not only created by the novelists, but recorded by them in form and content, in absence as well as presence.

As a novelist himself, Hensher is especially alert to the way writers record modern speech. My favourite example, perhaps because it is so much of my own time, comes right at the end, when he quotes Zadie Smith (who he rightly calls “a gifted listener”): “Jones give it a rest. I’m having a fucking debate. Hifan, what school you at now, mate?” People did speak like that when I was young. Reading that line now, I can hear the intonations of year 2000. Hensher’s whole history is full of these little noticings; quotation is the primary critical faculty, and in the hands of an astute novelist, it works slightly differently than it does for a critic, though in what precise way is hard to say: Hensher has a professional respect for many of the writers he discusses here, and that gives the book a singular pleasure.

Hensher is enjoyably provocative and idiosyncratic. These really are his own opinions, based on a tremendous amount of reading and a long-developed critical faculty. Amelia is said to be a very good novel (a proposition which I find extraordinary). He is very hard on Walter Scott, regarding him as more or less a bad writer and not much more. (But who cannot love Ivanhoe?) Surtees is praised to the hills. The Sacred Fount is claimed as the most difficult novel in the language, ahead of Finnegans Wake (an intriguing claim). Wodehouse is proposed as Modernism’s greatest legacy, perhaps the most enjoyable section of the book. Agatha Christie gets light, but critically astute, praise.

Christie is one of Hensher’s blind spots. Christie is a bizarre author to disdain. He isn’t crass about it, but it cannot be right to say that her novels are “a pure game, with strict rules” in which “Psychological investigation is reduced to nothing.” It is true that “a room in an English country house is plunged into impenetrable darkness at 6.30 p.m. during British Summer Time by the lights being turned off” but Jane Austen put apple blossom on the trees at the wrong time of year and Shakespeare allowed Romans to wear spectacles. Hensher slips into the mistake of judging her as the sort of novelist she is not. I no longer find it possible to read Christie, having inhaled so many of them in earlier years, but a great deal of respect ought to be owed to her achievements, both as a writer and commercially. She is one of the most read, most loved, and most accomplished British writers, even if what she wrote was not literature.

In general, though, Hensher brings a liberal and catholic attitude to his project. This is the novel in Britain, not the British novel, and so writers like Christine Brooke-Rose are included, and attention is given to the post-war writers in Britain who worked in other languages. (I have not read Brooke-Rose.) The history of the novel includes diversity of genre as well as social status, gender, or ethnicity of the writer. In true liberal fashion, Hensher puts this diversity to no political end, but merely uses it as a methodology for his narrative. It also allows him to poke some of the shibboleths of literary attitudes.

In a splendid passage about Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Hensher points out how absurd it is that Woolf—daughter of perhaps the most influential editor of his day who was related to Thackeray and a Duchess—is often called an “outsider”, while Arnold Bennett, who never lost his provincial accent, is thought of as “establishment”. Woolf, Hensher points out, believed champagne was opened with a corkscrew, whereas Bennett made and spent an awful lot of money. (Woolf relied on a small private income, before her books and the Hogarth Press started earning.) Still, Hensher is able to offer high praise to Woolf’s fiction (though he hates The Waves), and sees her merits, while also seeing the strength of Carey’s argument in The Intellectuals and the Masses. So many critics play the game of equanimity in order to be able to revert to the pre-ordained political conclusion all the more plausibly. Hensher declines this sort of bluster and makes authentic judgements.

This is a plausible approach because Hensher has read an awful lot and he is careful not to cite novels he hasn’t read, or to footnote what he has and has not read. (The bibliography is fifty pages long.) This is a vast history of the British novel, not a popular account of the canon with some context. Alice Thomas Ellis is a familiar name to even a moderately well-read person in the British novel, but Lady Florence Dixie is not. He has endured more Charlotte Yonge than I was able to, and more Margaret Oliphant than I thought was humanly possible. Writers like Eliza Haywood are given sensible treatment, as are Victorian writers who only attract minority followings like George Meredith. He spans the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to the work of John le Carré.

The strength of Hensher’s interests and the fact of his knowledge coming from his life as a writer makes the book compelling on its own terms. He has an assured and simple tone, which is flexible enough to sustain such a large project without ever going stale or lapsing into critical complacency. Both in his novels and his Spectator criticism, Hensher shows a more conservative disposition than many other writers, and this is put to witty effect at several moments.

Just as a modern-day prize committee would never reward a novel that chose to inhabit the point of view of a Brexit supporter, or even a Conservative voter, with any sympathy, so the mere fact of Mudie’s regime of patronage warned publishers away from novels that fell short of an ideal standard of morality.

He is, unlike some of the scholarly histories of the novel, capable of being direct and succinct. “Austen’s characters speak in astonishingly direct ways”, he tells us, arguing that her “virtuosity in rendering speech” is the key to her great superiority above the other writers of her time. It is in his constant antagonism to the novel and its enemies—be they overbearing patrons or fussy moralists who fretted that novels were degrading—that Hensher’s clipped judgements are most enjoyable.

An analysis of the contents of ten very humble lending libraries in London in 1838 is of great interest, not just for the analysis of what ordinary readers were borrowing and reading, but for the attitudes of the statisticians. In declining numbers of copies (from 1,008 per category to 10), they run:

Novels of the lowest character, being chiefly imitations of Fashionable novels… Fashionable novels…Novels by Walter Scott, and novels in imitation of him…Novels by Captain Marryat, Cooper, Washington Irving… Miscellaneous Old Books… Romances, Castle of Otranto…Voyages, Travels…Novels by Miss Edgeworth, and Moral and Religious Novels… Novels by Theodore Hook, Lytton Bulwer… Lord Byron’s works, Smollet’s d[itt]o, Fielding’s d[itt]o… Works of Good Character, Dr Johnson, Goldsmith… Books decidedly bad.

We will not waste time on these commentators, except to note they have registered one of the great moments in literary culture, from consumption by an elite with money and time, to a universal culture of considerable sophistication. As this culture of universal consumption took hold, and anyone could find a novel they could enjoy, it created one of the most glorious phenomena in world history: the British novel from the 1830s to the First World War.

You will notice that Hensher is not afraid to draw the line at a provocative point. It would be no fun were he not willing to draw such lines. It is not quite as provoking as when Elizabeth Jenkins wrote that the great age of the English novel came to an end in 1870, with the death of Dickens, which excludes Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy. But both views represent the sort of idiosyncratic taste that is essential to a working novelist. What motivates Hensher is what has motivated so many readers and writers of novels. Jonathan Rose has documented the ways Victorian readers responded to literature: valuable and fascinating as his work is, the novelists themselves are another source of that information, as in this extract from Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour.

Lily went flicking through one book after another, but listlessly; for the choosing of the book brought the thought of the quiet evening when she would read it. The books themselves with their thick greasy boards sickened her, but gave escape into the land of the living. ‘Audley Court’, she read, ‘lay low down in a hollow, rich with fine, old timber and fertile pastures.’ In the spell of these words she sank deeply as if under an anaesthetic, away from empty and makeshift reality: she went down willingly and pleasurably, relinquishing with eagerness the gritty irritations of the harbour streets, the smell of fish, the dusty shops with their cast off clothes and furniture.1

Taylor is, unsurprisingly, one of the novelists Hensher admires, and a sign that his tastes, while they may not be exactly those of most readers, will be sympathetic with many modern novel readers, among whom Taylor, and her ilk, remain remarkably popular. It would be unfair to compare her to other novelists, or to lump her in with the “feminine middlebrow”, a category that under-describes all its contents, especially Taylor. Hensher provides a characteristically succinct and insightful summation:

They are novels of consistent classical purity of expression, taking immense care with the establishment of character, setting, motive, and plausible psychology; something of the same quality can be seen in other novels of the period, such as Elizabeth Jenkins’ fine The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), but Taylor’s work sustains that to an unusual extent. Like other novelists of decorum, she found chaotic and subversive presences very useful; she is probably the last serious novelist in English to be actively and consistently interested in the views of servants…

Naturally, I am prejudiced in favour of Hensher as he can see the value of Jenkins, which even specialists in this period almost never do, but he is certainly right to point out how “central to the literature of her time” Taylor was, much more so than was realised at the time by her publishers, though surely a whole book could be made of the anecdotes behind publishers’ misapprehensions, such as Muriel Spark’s comment that she didn’t think her publisher, Harold MacMillan, understood her books.

What I missed most was the presence of ideas. You will not get much in the Ian Watt line. Everything Hensher writes is perfectly sensible, but to my sensibility it leaves an absence. When he does draw parallels they are intriguing. The emergence of Richardson from the conduct books of the early eighteenth century is well-handled, for example, but the first thing I shall read on Hensher’s recommendation is probably Class by Jilly Cooper, which Hensher says is essential to read along side Alice Thomas Ellis. He also calls Cooper “the sort of excellent novelist that Q. D. Leavis taught the aspiring intelligentsia to despise.” So perhaps I shall try Riders.

Every novel is a novel of ideas, not in the sense of being a novel that explicates and sermonises but in the deeper, broader sense that nothing can be written that is not founded on some belief, some worldview, some ideology, or some instinctive understanding. Hensher did not need to expand his view to the relationship between Jane Austen and the Enlightenment or Charles Dickens and the utilitarians to give this vision of the novel its due place. He might have given more space to the Ruskinian and Christian ideas in Penelope Fitzgerald (an author who I would have given more space and more praise) for example. I proposed this vision of the novel as inherently a form of ideas to Hensher at a Civic Future event this summer and we disagreed quite straightforwardly. To my mind, to conceive of The Portrait of a Lady as a novel without a set of ideas at its heart is hardly to conceive of it at all. To Hensher, my perspective was unthinkable. Ideas are not as absent from this account. He identifies Wells’ “principle… that the impossible fact convinces if it is surrounded by a mass of objectively plausible, even banal, properties.” But overall it felt to me like some of the most exciting aspects of fiction—its ability to work not just as a means of examining moral problems but intellectual and social problems of all sorts, as a partner to philosophy—were given less space than they deserve.

As I said before, what makes this book worthwhile and fascinating is Hensher’s personal approach, wide reading, and professional novelist’s disposition. It will surely remain as the standard popular account for a long time to come. The novel is not only the major literary form of modern times, it is practically the only form many readers now care about, including professional readers, and as it continues to adapt to its relegated but important position, Hensher’s book will be a provocative and useful guide to anyone who wants to know more.

The heart of Hensher’s account is that the novel is adaptable, constantly trying new things in response to changes in copyright law, book pricing, implicit censorship, swelling and shrinking audiences, fashionable beliefs among the literary elite (this is why he thinks so many novels in the late twentieth century were so short), and, most of all, reactions to the novels of the immediate past.

As the screen gives way to AI, we will be living through a new period of change akin to the radio or the printing press, a whole new set of mediums will emerge, a new way of spending time, a wholly different balance of modes of entertainment and intellectual engagement will become normal. Shakespeare required indoor theatre. Dickens needed serial publishing. Hollywood needed celluloid. Likewise, whatever new conditions AI provides may lead to new forms of cultural creation. This may or may not lead to a new burst of life for the novel, but it need not be the death of the novel. Whether AI becomes a new medium of fiction, a spur to new innovations in human writing, takes the place of “conduct books” and philosophical inspiration, or is merely the foil against which many writers define themselves, we do not yet know. But we can be sure the novel has a future.

That is why, although it was sensible of Hensher to stop his account in the year 2000, claiming the usual critical difficulty of not being able to properly assess modern work, a long essay with his views of the modern (and future) novel would be a suitable epilogue—perhaps he shall publish one elsewhere. It is still the case that writers like Emma Cline, Sally Rooney, and Kiran Desai achieve large readerships and occupy a significant place in modern culture. Perhaps it is less true of British writers, or of writers in Britain, but the cultural commotion caused by writers like Houellebecq is not yet a dead force in the world.

It is more and more true that what we all thought was normal life is gone and never coming back. Whether that drives us to read once a year or once a day, whether we read for pleasure, escape, intellectual stimulation, cultural and historical curiosity, or all of those things, whether we read novels the way we go to the gym or the way we eat cake, they will still be an irreplaceable, incommensurable, irreducible part of living. Just this week, I saw a video go viral of a young woman finishing a novel as an airplane landed. She was sobbing. Nothing works quite like a novel.

Philip Hensher’s new A History of the Novel in Britain

Copenhagen is an excellent city for this sort of architectural pleasure. There are wonderful Dutch gables all over the place here. (The Dutch gable originated in Flanders but is the work of this whole region.) I won’t rank them, but the one I loved the most was on Kronburg Castle in Helsingør, about an hour north of Copenhagen. I am only an amateur architecture enthusiast, so I can offer little more than pictures and enthusiasm. But look at the finials, scrolls, the way the gable banks the left tower, the constant musical patter of squares and pediments, shrinking and expanding across the building. Doesn’t it just send your imagination spinning?

And he is a close-by view of a small two-sided gable.

In the town, we found this pair of stepped gables. The one on the left has obvious parallels with the style of Grundtvig’s Church. (I went back there today: pictures of the inside of the church below.)

Here’s another example of the same style.

And here is the train station.

I love the plainness of this one. So many buildings are designed to look nice as part of a street, but the lovely plain design here makes it a beautiful accompaniment to the sky.

Back in Copenhagen, you can see this sort of thing on the old Stock Exchange,

on churches,

and on homes.

Alas, much of central Copenhagen is littered with truly ugly buildings. You can see here how the vertical-line style has been bastardized into something international and intimidating. It’s like a villainous headquarters. But this is a good place to see clearly the continuities and discontinuities between modernism and the past.

The decline is painfully obvious where old commercial architecture is seen next to its modern inheritors.

So many shared features, so little shared beauty. Same below.

They even had the audacity to put this

opposite this!

Ghastly. They tell me they all quite like this one, but really—come on… it’s an affront.

Compared to this? Be serious.

Sometimes the contrast is so obvious it hurts.

All the architects will tell me I am wrong, but if that black box is architecture, I’m a banana. This is beauty.

And this.

And this. (Ah! I really love this one.)

And this.

Do we need to continue? Like, do we prefer this?

or this?

This tower is superb.

Here are the plainest gables I enjoyed.

And here’s an elephant.

And a three-story square bay, for those who enjoy such things.

I’ll finish with my favourite place here, the interior of Grundtvig’s Church. This was perhaps my most intense architectural experience since going to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Annunciation Orthodox Greek Church.

What makes this more attractive than most Modernism (especially of the International School variety) is the use of bricks. This is an expressionist building and retains a lot of the liveliness that modernism is felt to lack. This combination of new style and old form, of new ideas in old materials, is, I think, the secret to the future of aesthetics. We cannot go back to art deco or neo-classical or Queen Anne Style or whatever other period we find attractive. We cannot undo the modern. But we can make the new old and old new.

The church is set in the middle of a quadrangle of houses. Copenhagen is generally a lovely city for looking at Dutch gables and the stepped arches of the church are very nicely echoed around the courtyard.

The circular window here not only parallels the arches but it links back to the bricked-in rose window on the west front of the church.

Which itself works with the concentric arches and the horn-spiral door handles. And see how the bricks of the arch resolve into the diagonals of the door. From the bottom to the top, this church is reaching upwards and outwards, and the bricks are part of that reaching. The material is not surface style: it is integral to the idea of the building.

Grundtvig’s Church reminds me of the Minster Building in London, which is modern gothic in polished granite. As I wrote for The Critic a few years ago,

Something must be done about the future. We cannot carry on as we are. We can’t keep everything and we can’t go back. Architecture has declined from the controversial to the ignorable. The modern box style that is now perpetrated everywhere like an unstoppable glitch is good for building nothing more than cheap hotels. Our skyscrapers are a pathetic exercise in using silly shapes. But rather than ask for revivals of styles past and wish away the modern, as if architecture were a fairytale and the past weren’t as mishmashed as the present, I contemplate the Minster Building, whose jagged gothic points arise in polished postmodern granite. It marries old and modern to make something strangely compelling; it is curiously in keeping with the madcap gabled gothic office round the corner on Eastcheap. Unlike the boxes, the Minster Building has style. Like St Mary Aldermary, those fantastic towers keep an almost musical presence in my imagination.

The idea of a building has to live in its materials and Minster’s granite is as enchanting as Aldermary’s white stone. (How much more sympathetic would we find the Barbican if it was faced in Portland stone?) What we find attractive in the buildings of the past is the proper unity between the idea of the building and its materials, whereas so much of modernism is dominated by the materials. It takes someone like Frank Lloyd Wright to use concrete with real imagination. Plenty of buildings that looked modern without looking modernist are good examples of this marriage of idea and material, like the Weston Library. It’s also why the extension to the National Gallery looks so splendid (Mies van der Rohe glass wall aside, yeugh).

The new aesthetics doesn’t have to be a new Bauhaus. It could be a new modernist gothic, a new way of putting the new-old idea into the right new-old material.

Humans are also part of nature as well as separate from nature, and literature is also part of life as well as relational to it. This is obvious in the case of realism. David Copperfield blacked bottles just as Charles Dickens did. It is obvious in the view of poetry as “overheard” expression. George Herbert’s poems are George Herbert’s prayers. It is obvious too in the performance of literature: in theatres and courts and sitting rooms. Even when literature “lies” it is part of life as well as relational to it: we live the poem and the prayer as we read them. When literature represents it does so as part of the flow of life, like a photograph on a wall, or the ornaments that we live with.

Is there some third thing that literature is that is not universal or particular but simply part of life? Literature might be always mingled, not universal through particularity, but universal and particular simultaneously: a compound not a mirror.

If so, literature is part of the compound, not just in the receipt but in the making. Homer, Beowulf, Cervantes all had a quality of being drawn from life and simultaneously part of how living happened.

We do not ask, while we are living, whether we are living particularly or universally. The question “Is the love I am feeling right now particular or universal or both?” makes no sense. Not because love is obviously both, but because as soon as we ask the question we are no longer in the feeling but making commentary about it, the way Samuel Pepys had to stop living to write his diary, but also had to live always partially distracted so that he could write his diary afterward. Likewise to some novelists everything is copy. Boswell is unthinkable without this realisation.

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Think of life as a game we have to play. To play is to continue (or modify) the game. Literature is a new move in the game, a new way of living. Literature is always part of the game, part of life. We either adapt it to the rules of our ongoing games, or we join in with the original sport as best we can.

The only thing I have seen like this is the opening scene of The Love Bug (a film I feel that I saw dozens of times as a child) which features cars bang, smash, clang, and boom into each other against a soundtrack that has elements of pageant, waltz, and a day at the races. When you see cars constantly colliding and overturning to the tune of the Die Fledermaus Overture, you cannot fail to feel giddy. It is like the great joy of watching Tom and Jerry making sword-play with conductor’s batons. Farce is part of the beauty of life.

Naturally, the music that opened the demolition derby in Prince William County (which someone told me is the largest demolition derby in Virginia), was the American National Anthem, sung by the Miss Congeniality of the Pageant, complete with her sash. We all stood. Most put their hands on their hearts. She belted it out very nicely indeed and I felt the power of that place and that crowd and the spirit of American patriotism. Damn right this is the land of the free. Long may it remain so.

For the derby itself, no music was needed. Under the beautiful spacious sky, the only accompaniment we required was the smell of the gasoline and the roar of the crowd. Before the cars started, the volunteer firefighters got into their fireproof clothing and laid out their car cutters and extinguishers. The bleachers had been filling up for half-an-hour. Many of the attendees were carrying what looked like half-gallon containers of Pepsi and pints of lemonade.

They were as attentive and well-behaved as a theatre crowd. More so, in fact, because they only cheered and applauded the really worthwhile smash, not like those villains in the modern theatre stalls who give every mediocre performance from a television star a standing ovation. They ought to come down to a derby and see how a real audience behaves. These people were waiting for the really good stuff before they cheered.

The mood of the country often seems rather dour and anxious in the newspapers. Here were the Americans who know how to have a good time. If one driver bent another’s front wheel, boy did the crowd make him feel like a king. And quite right too. It’s a muddy and narrow arena. You have to time that hit quite carefully.

During the round for young drivers (so young they have to have their father with them in the car: it was funny watching the dads jabbing their fingers, hurrying their boys to make a hit), the crowd gave them every bit of enthusiasm they gave to the others. And well deserved too. Those lads made some great strikes.

Eight drivers entered the last round. There were smashed bonnets, lost bumpers. Tires came off. Suspension springs were pronging out of the open backs of cars. Flames came out of the exhaust pipe that sticks up out of the engine. At one point, after a particularly good smash, a bonnet bumped open as a cloud of steam came billowing out of an engine. And on a beautiful warm summer evening, the air was full of the hot smell of gasoline and burning engine.

It would be easy to see this as crass, aggressive, part of the culture that serves to encourage the worst traits of this country. Certainly it is noisy and smelly. What I saw was organized sport: red flags, judicious oversight, warnings of penalties for dangerous hits, and a crowd that wanted to see a really well-targeted whack on the front axle or a sharp bit of reversing to throw the other fellow off track.

I was going to make a joke about how apt a contest like this is, given the state of American driving. But why joke? I wouldn’t be brave enough to take part.

As the defeated cars were carried off by fork-lifts, the gentle crowd applauded the tournament fighters. Decency accompanied the danger and aggression. It might have elements of farce and vulgarity, but the demolition derby is a part of what makes America civilized. I shall go again.

But his proposal goes further. If the music of Vaughan Williams and Britten could continue generating royalties to support our arts scene in perpetuity, why not apply the same treatment to other British cultural giants whose copyrights expire in the next couple of decades? He cites as examples such figures as CS Lewis (out of copyright in 2034), Ian Fleming (2035), Noël Coward (2044), JRR Tolkien (2044) and Agatha Christie (2047).

If the policy was extended to these authors, the royalties under discussion would, of course, be quite large. Britten’s estate generates slightly less than £2 million a year for the Britten Pears Arts charity. Amazon paid $250 million for the most recent adaptation of Tolkien. Under the proposal, this money would be given to an “independently governed ‘cultural endowment fund’”.

The perpetual copyright of Peter Pan is given as precedent. And Peter Pan is the best argument in favour of this sort of policy. A permanent funding arrangement for the Great Ormond Street hospital is clearly a public good. (Although even school productions need a licence and/or have to fundraise for the hospital.) But this is a unique case: the copyright is on a single, not a whole body of work. It is not obvious that things will work the same way when the rules are extended. And not every charity is as worthy as a children’s hospital.

Also, J.M. Barrie gifted Great Ormond Street Hospital the copyright thanks to the play’s obvious relevance to their work. In this proposal, it is author’s estates and bureaucrats who make the decisions, not authors themselves, which raises a moral problem: who are we to take this work for our own purposes, rather than allowing it to become public?

It is not clear whether Njoku-Goodwin is proposing a Peter Pan-type revenue-entitlement or a more general copyright with veto power. In either one, there would be negative secondary consequences, either higher costs to producers or a right of veto over further use. Both would be a tax on future creativity. Even under the Peter Pan model, the new bureaucracies will be incentivised to increase their revenue. Open the door once, and the issue is open forever…

Morrison’s endorsement leaves these economic problems aside. No mention is made of the problems of incentives, efficiency, deadweight loss, or distortionary effects. And it is assumed that the bureaucracy and charities involved will all make the best use of the money.

Copyright is supposed to provide an incentive for creation. If an author can be ripped-off within weeks or months of publishing, it disincentivizes writing. We are long past that point. Copyright is now often controlled by grandchildren, trusts, publishers, or estates, who did nothing to create the work. Copyright held by them does not help to create any new works of art. That won’t change by adding bureaucrats to the list.

Profit motive is an important motive for the distribution of art. Expired copyright allowed many cheap editions like Dover Thrift, and websites like Project Gutenberg, to exist. Readers have a choice of editions thanks to the expiration of copyright. Sherlock Holmes has become a whole culture, from Basil Rathbone movies to the Enola Holmes books and adaptations. Under this proposal, less work of that nature would exist as it would be controlled by the “fund”.

Instead, people will have to go to the works that are allowed to go into the public domain, as the protected work will be more expensive to produce. This means fewer performances at higher prices. Getting the new extended copyright status will involve lobbying and politics. Unlike the open market, where competition between different recordings and editions takes place, it will be a closed-door process. Charities will want to secure this revenue, and will lobby for it.

Worst of all, the costs of this scheme are divorced from the people involved. Morrison says that the estates will surely opt-in because they would lose revenue anyway. Good for them! It is the future publishers, film-makers, and orchestras who will be paying the extra costs. And that means the readers, listeners, and watchers—you and me. The idea that this “cost taxpayers nothing” is a selective and misleading perspective. When a work of art enters the public domain it is exactly that, public. And it is the public that pays when the work comes at a higher cost.

Morrison calls the idea of the public domain a “gentlemanly notion.” Like so many journalists, he sees this from the perspective of companies: “A striking feature of Njoku-Goodwin’s scheme is that copyright would be deployed for the public good, rather than to line corporate or private pockets.” But why is it better for that money to go to the bureaucrats who will work for this ‘cultural endowment fund’? In 2024, the Financial Times reported that “the median salary of a chief executive at the largest 100 UK charities was £175,000.” Does that count as “pocket-lining”? The real question is about the best way to fund charities and incentivize artistic production, which is not answered by these accusations.

Better charitable funding in the UK can be achieved without creating problems for the arts. Changes to the tax system would be a better solution. The Times recently published an article about how this can be done. They report that charitable donations get more generous tax-breaks in the USA than in the UK. And “public donations make up 2 per cent of GDP in the US, but about 0.6 to 0.8 per cent in the UK”. A simple change to the tax system—less GiftAid, more income tax deductibility—would increase the amount Brits give to charity with less bureaucracy and without distorting the culture market.

Schemes like this make everyone involved feel good. Who wants to write articles against the idea of charitable giving? But the UK has far too much of this sort of thing in the first place. Instead of setting up new schemes and organisations, it would be better for everyone to simplify the system instead. We need copyright that works for the real-world, not for Neverland.

Some notes from @patrickc talk on New Aesthetics yesterday with @lukeburgis:

- People miss that many architectural movements post-1930 had the stated goal of destroying beauty
- Beauty is a bearer asset. It's not a layer or a facade
- There are degrees of objective beauty. Most would agree Toledo, Spain > Toledo, Ohio
- One measure of how beauty has lagged...there used to be far more agreement across social classes about what's beautiful. The disparity today is huge
- The Brown Decades post civil war were underrated for beauty. Despite the depressive backdrop, great work got made ie. Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park
- From 1870-1920, the US undisputedly produced the best architecture in the world
- Like all tortured philosophers of our time, he's too become conspiratorial around the question, "WTF happened in 1971?"
- International architecture might be the first legible form of the new aesthetics. Iranian brick movement, Scandinavian revival, work coming out of Latin America and Spain
- Loss of the sacred is one reason progress in the world of atoms is so slow
- "Can anyone name a great piece of artwork made by AI yet?" *ducks*
- Germany is an interesting case study on aesthetics. They invented the discipline itself (Baumgarten coined "aesthetics" in 1750), dominated classical music and philosophy, gave us the Bauhaus, Braun, and the Dieter Rams design language. But they've never produced great food. Why? Maybe they simply have never cared enough. Maybe it was never the priority.
- As Stripe has increased its emphasis on beauty (Stripe Press and other initiatives) and it's become a cultural value the team rises to maintain
- THERE IS SO MUCH LATENT DEMAND FOR BEAUTY. IT'S TIME TO UNCORK IT.

Pecan pie, served hot, à la mode, in a diner that looks older than my grandmother—that’s luxury, that’s life in the movies, that’s America. Apple crumble is for weekends, Sunday lunch, something you make at home. Whoever heard of a restaurant serving apple crumble like the ladies of the village used to make it? By contrast, pecan pie is for everyone, every day, whenever you feel like it. No Englishman ever asked a friend if they wanted to go for a serving of crumble the way Americans go out for coffee and a slice of pie.

We were in a diner in Bethesda, complete with the original fixtures and fittings, surrounded by people eating country fried steak, chicken tenders, and pancakes for lunch, with a jukebox at the table that no longer plays, and those Maxwell House coffee pots that are found in the old diners that have seen generations come and go. The wooden booths are reminiscent of the origins of fast food and diners: the railway carriage restaurant. They are reminiscent, too, of church pews. All along 16th Street NW, which you drive out of DC to get up to this corner of Maryland, there are the sort of churches that made America: large, level, open, well-lit, from the Protestant tradition where everyone is on a level. Diners are still, just about, America’s secular churches. Every man is a success in a diner: equal among eaters.

When I went to New York for work, and regretted the lack of time to do anything real, I got up early, went to a quiet diner run by a wizened old man on Second Avenue, and read the New York Times with my refill. In Boston, more than a decade ago, we walked through the ice-cold air to find the diner we were recommended. Police officers were eating muffins and everyone had those characteristic blue-and-white coffee cups. In Wisconsin, I travelled from Milwaukee to Madison to Taliesin, and whenever I could, I went to a diner. Whatever else we remember of America, we will always remember the Gettysburg Family Restaurant.

If there is a “real America” (though why Manhattan and the DMV are not always considered to be the “real America” is beyond me: if these are not the heart of a certain idea of America, with their (what?) twenty-million people, I cannot think what is), you will find it in these diners. Blue jeans, tattoos, happy children, friendly-busy waiters and waitresses, laminated menus, eggs any way you like ’em, a waffle on the side, families out for lunch, locals, road trippers, everything all day, the dignity of a booth no matter how little you have to spend, coffee you don’t have to wait for, period crockery, the hum of conversation and the clang of the kitchen, paying the cashier at the register, blueberry pie, peanut soup, maple bacon, the good old American hamburger, side salads, fried cheese, baked chicken, any combination you want, daily specials, and everything just like mother used to make it. America the way we remember her, the way we imagine her, the way she still sometimes can be.

And hot pecan pie, à la mode: a small plate of delight for anyone with $4.

Bowen’s solemn attentiveness to things is almost religious, but on the other hand she’s wry and realistic, full of the comedy and irony of those same things. In its stretch of expression and penetration of thought, Bowen’s writing seems to me as rare as Henry James’s; the ambition of her novels and stories is like his too. As with James, her intelligence can’t be separated from her sensuous apprehension. Her work reassures the reader that life is as intricate, and amusing, and profound, as she makes it out in her sentences.

From this piece by Tessa Hadley in The Times. Perhaps we should say she’s as good as James at his best. When he is dull, he is very very dull, but when he is good he’s extraordinary.