COVER -> DAY ONE
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There is no particular reason to recommend Arnold Bennett among his near contemporaries. He would not, for instance, compare, let alone compare favourably, with, say, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce or even - I wince slightly - Henry James. He might be thought the equal of Galsworthy in range and technique but, even then, not in the management of structure and plot. He does not, then, require that intensity of concentration which can only really be applied in solitude.
Nonetheless, I prefer to read in silence or with instrumental music so I was somewhat put out when my wife wanted to play the video of a movie which commanded huge acclaim when it was released. So it was that I continued to read my Bennett while "Notting Hill" was playing.
I found to my surprise that the plot was so hackneyed and the dialogue so fatuous that it did not disturb my reading at all. The surprise was not at the product itself which is, after all, in a long line of romantic fictions which fuel a variety of fantasies. At least in the 20th Century the variation that they might not live happily ever after has been introduced. What surprised me was the kind of people who praised the production, people with university degrees, in positions of responsibility, people on whom others rely for guidance, moral leadership, rulings on discrimination and good taste.
I pictured Edwardians reading their Bennett of a drizzling Sunday afternoon, puzzling over the contradictions of strong moral codes lived out by morally weak human beings, of the pious and the superior speaking out against mass education, the question of whether alcohol causes misery or whether misery drives people to alcohol. Younger than fifty, I could recognise constitutional niceties, moral dilemmas, turns of phrase, intellectual mannerisms, social norms that no on-line dictionary, no matter how extensive, could now explain to my children in fewer words than the novel itself.
This is not the core of a complaint. Too often those who uphold the virtues of solitary reading, or introversion, of the old works of literature, are not upholding any notion of high mindedness, they are simply indulging in nostalgia. That I should be reading a moderately well written novel of a century ago is a matter of personal choice which I would not even recommend to others. Then again, nor would I recommend Notting Hill to any but the work-benighted who need absolute escape from the drudgery of the global stock exchange, the inexorable cattle prod of the market makers, the torture chamber of the office tower block where 'burn out' is as commonplace as lower back pain was when Bennett wrote.
My purpose is to note how the shape of our intellectual universe has changed. Almost to my own school days the sum of knowledge might be likened to the contents of a very deep but very narrow archeological cross section with Judaeo-Hellenic writing at the bottom and novelists such as those I have referred to near the surface. Now we live in a huge warehouse of knowledge, piled high, sold cheap, valued for its novelty, discarded with hardly a thought, treated as the raw material for a huge variety of temporary intellectual constructions and then re-assembled to meet a different challenge.
In exchange for the long, low intensity intake of the novel, we are now expected to gulp huge volumes of information, process it, synthesise it with our other knowledge, construct the architecture of our approach to the problem in hand and deliver our answer with no pause for reflection.
Although I become more radical as I get older I understand why most people become more conservative. This endless processing without due orientation, without context, without precedents, leads to mistakes being repeated over and over again; it leads one to wonder whether it is worth trying to change anything when the best and widest educated countries of all time commit repeated, identical acts of folly. This state of affairs does not lead me into a campaign to turn back clocks; I do not recognise that the old days were that good and I certainly do not think that the intellectual habits instilled in me will be of much use in the intellectual weather of the 21st Century which is likely to share the unpredictable and violent characteristics of the real weather.
All I ask is that society recognises that it needs some introverts, some historians, some readers of novels in quiet rooms, to keep us from completely losing ourselves in the huge but shallow present. Even after the death of much of what I would characterise as intellectual and social memory, most of us still had corporate memory but even that is now disappearing.
Global corporations maintain in their publicity that employee loyalty gives them a competitive edge and that loyalty is generated by caring for employees but methinks they protest too much. Employee loyalty is valuable but it does not produce the same returns as a quick market flotation. I know people whose sole purpose in life is to develop companies for the sole purpose of selling them; and one of my friends was offered a six figure price for a company which he had not even set up.
It would be false to claim that a preference for solitude over gregariousness is an automatic sign of wisdom or even social utility. The history of philosophy is testimony to the proposition that to think deeply is not necessarily to produce answers which are conducive to the good order and happiness of society but we need philosophers of sorts even if their answers do not help us very much. Equally, we need people who are well enough equipped to contest what philosophers lay down and the counter attack need not be purely philosophical.
Nobody, for instance, reading Bennett could give much credence to the outcries of Nietzsche, yet the tyranny he preached had an easy triumph. Our very ephemerality makes us vulnerable to all manner of hysterias, political, ecological, intellectual and, perhaps above all, spiritual.
Whoever would have thought that millions of educated people would abandon a coherent Christianity in favour of a jumble of new age nostrums? For all its flaws I would place more impartial reliance upon an ancient creed preaching prosperity through deferred gratification than on a theory of wealth based on whether the lid of my toilet is up or down.
Sooner or later we are bound to be assaulted by a politician who, to a greater extent than even Mr. Bush would hazard, will offer plenty without pain and we are set fair to believe him. The shape of our intellectual world is such that increasingly we can only deal with the present. Having lost the past we cannot hope to understand the future. To dismiss us as having short attention spans is to overlook the intensity of what we do in those episodic events but the basic truth of the cliche cannot be denied.
