Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed (edited by Peter Davison)

A few years ago, Penguin Press released a series of four books that each take one of George Orwell’s works and place it in the context of selected letters, articles, essays written by Orwell which relate to the subject of the book. I’ve split this review of the four books into two parts, with this one focusing on Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed.

Orwell in Spain

The central text in Orwell in Spain is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his time as a volunteer soldier in Barcelona and the Catalan area of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party’s contingent, a group of two dozen or so British volunteers who were allied with the Workers’ Part of Marxism Unification (given as POUM, the Spanish-language abbreviation, in the text). Orwell sent several months in the front line and was finally invalided away from the front when he was shot in the neck — the bullet just barely missed his carotid artery, and the only lasting effect of the wound was a paralysis of one of his vocal cords. (People often told him how lucky he was to have survived, but Orwell usually responded by saying something to the effect of how it would have been even luckier not to have been shot in the first place.) Even after being invalided away from the front, Orwell’s troubles were merely beginning. He was very nearly arrested for being part of a militia that had been declared ‘illegal’ by the anti-Franco forces — the Spanish Communist Party was in the sway of the Soviet Union and was attempting to eradicate rival communist and anarchist groups — and he and his wife Eileen (who had accompanied him) had to flee Spain only a few steps ahead of the Spanish police.

The Spanish Civil War is a very confusing period of 20th-century history, and Orwell was writing for an audience which often had only the most general knowledge of what was going on in Spain at the time. But as the letters and articles emphasise, Orwell’s intent in writing Homage to Catalonia was not merely to denounce Franco and the Fascists, but to criticise the Communist forces in Spain for what he saw as their betrayal of the working classes AND to castigate the press (particularly the English leftist press) for its refusal to entertain any possibility that the Spanish Communists and their Soviet allies could be just as guilty of betrayal and deceit as the monarchists and the Fascists. Orwell’s experiences in Spain also had a direct influence on the writing of 1984. On a personal level he was very concerned with the case of Georges Kopp, a fellow soldier and friend who had been imprisoned by the Spanish police, tortured in an attempt to get him to sign a false confession, and subjected to a special type of punishment which involved being locked in a confined space with a horde of large rats. On a literary level, Orwell’s writings on the Spanish Civil War reveal some of the ideas that would later end up in books like 1984 — one example being the famous ‘two and two are five’ equation that would become so crucial to Winston Smith’s fate in that particular book.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

The central story in this collection is Down and Out in Paris and London, a predominantly autobiographical account of Orwell’s time ’slumming it’ as a restaurant dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and a tramp in London in the mid-1930s. The book is a grim account of a grim life, as Orwell describes in great detail the backbreaking labour and low wages of the staff at a fashionable hotel and his struggles in a small cafe — and includes stomach-turning accounts of the utter filthiness of the kitchens in which he worked. The writings that deal with his time in as a tramp in London and the Home Counties are equally grim, presenting a grinding, depressing life of poverty and homelessness in the capital city that still bears a strong resemblance to conditions that exist today. His criticisms of charitable organisations and city-run lodging houses for the poor and indigent are particularly trenchant, and remain so 70 years later.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a fascinating read in its own right, but this volume also contains some of Orwell’s articles, essays, and reviews on popular subjects of the time. He analysed boys’ school stories (such as the Greyfriairs stories that feature Billy Bunter), compared British detective fiction to American ‘pulp mags’, and examined the political leanings of the serial novels published in women’s magazines. There are also a few essays about Orwell’s other ’slumming journeys’, including one where he joined a group of East End residents who travelled out of London to pick hops for a fortnight and another where he attempted to get himself sentenced to prison for drunk and disorderly conduct. In general, the material collected in Orwell and the Dispossessed focuses on the author’s observations of those who for one reason or another are deprived of choices in their own lives and societies — with subjects as diverse as the poor of India and Morocco, British schoolchildren, and the unfairly persecuted P.G. Wodehouse. And although the theme of this volume is not quite as solid and unified as that of Orwell and Spain, the compilation is a good collection of some of Orwell’s nonfiction writing.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Since the book is so large, there really isn’t a good way to review all of its contents without going on for pages. More’s the pity, in a way.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, this fairly impressive tome represents just about all of C.S. Lewis’s religious essays and sermons, various short academic pieces, and other stories and story fragments. The Amazon.co.uk review of this edition lists the writings that were not included in this book, and it is disappointing to know that so far it is still not possible to obtain a complete collection of Lewis’s writings — not in the same way that it is theoretically possible to obtain the full twenty-volume set of George Orwell’s books, essays, journalistic works and letters (edited by Peter Davison), for example. But now that the third and final volume of Lewis’s collected letters has been released, it’s worth mentioning this essay collection as a fairly useful attempt at compiling many writings that have been scattered across a number of different books and their reorganised reprints.

The essay collection is organised in eleven sections by general topic: ‘Aspects of Faith’, ‘English and Literature’, ‘The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers’, ‘Letters’, and others. There’s a section devoted to several of Lewis’s short stories, including the manuscript pages of ‘The Dark Tower’, an unfinished science-fiction/fantasy piece featuring Edwin Ransom of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I found the section on writing and other writers quite interesting, because it includes Lewis’s thoughts on the work of his contemporaries — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for instance, as well as short pieces about George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. Lewis’s poems ought to have been included as well; it isn’t as if they would take up that much more room, and they would have been a welcome addition to this collection. But for the most part, the essay collection serves as an impressive display of Lewis’s prolific output over the years.

Anyone who is interested in looking for a nice solid edition of the general bulk of Lewis’s non-fiction and collected shorter fiction works would welcome this volume. It is by no means fully comprehensive, as mentioned above, but it is certainly more comprehensive than just about any other edition currently available on the market. And because Lewis’s writings have been printed and reprinted and shuffled between new compilations over the years, it’s nice to have the better part of his writings available in one hefty volume — at least, until someone actually does us all the favour of producing a more complete compilation.

Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn

Been quite a while since my last update — I’m finally back from travelling and I’m still attempting to sort out my research notes from the trip. I’ll start up my reviews once more, and possibly start adding more information about the various directions my research may be taking in the near future.

Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn

Tony Benn is and was a prolific diarist — eight volumes in total, I believe. But a diary can only tell so much, and in this instance Dare to Be a Daniel is less of a diary and more of a series of collected thoughts on his life. Benn divides this particular book into three sections: one where he considers the values that have shaped his religious beliefs, one where he reminisces about his young life and his relationships with his family and his late wife Caroline, and one where he recounts some of his thoughts on political and social themes and connects them to the influence that his family had has on him through the years.

The first two parts of Dare to Be a Daniel are reflective, almost conversational in tone. He sticks to more of a memoir style, though it often has a pace that feels more like a transcript of something said to a live audience. The third section, a group of essays and speeches, have quite a different tone to them. It would be easy to gloss over the ideas he sets out by saying ‘Yes, well, he’s just an unreconstructed Old Labourite who never got over the entirety of the 1980s’. It is true that his particular political opinions come out very strongly in the text: anti-EU (though to be fair, not entirely anti-European), anti-New Labour, anti-WTO and IMF and multinational corporations…and so on, in much the same fashion. But he puts his views forward in such a way that only an exceptionally lazy critic could simply dismiss them offhand without actually wanting to get up and try to refute him point by point.

I suppose that those who do not happen to share Mr Benn’s personal political views are not likely to find Dare to Be a Daniel worthy of reading. That’s much the case for most any politician’s collected writings, really. But Mr Benn’s longstanding place in the history of postwar British politics makes him one of those individuals who ought to be read more widely, in my opinion.

In conclusion, a personal story about this book: When Dare to Be a Daniel first came out, I went to Hatchards during a book signing session to pick up a copy. As I was standing in the queue, Mr Benn was talking with a woman who was browsing nearby, both of them commenting on whatever Tony Blair had been up to most recently. He signed a book without entirely paying attention to it and handed it to his publicist. She looked down at it, blinked, and handed it back to him with an uncertain look on her face. It turned out that instead of signing the book ‘Tony Benn’, he had written ‘Tony Blair‘. Benn made a mock-horrified face at first, but soon started laughing at the mix-up — he even mentioned that he occasionally gets mail forwarded from Number 10 Downing Street that has been addressed to him as ‘Prime Minister Tony Benn’. (Readers of this post will be allowed to make up their own minds about whether that thought is cheering or terrifying.) That said, I collected my copy, got his signature, and carried off my prize. I do wonder what happened to that mis-signed book, though — if I’d had an ounce of sense at the time, I should’ve offered money for it on the spot. It would’ve been quite a collector’s item.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

I picked up this book from the sale table at The Strand bookshop in New York City a few weeks ago, gleefully carrying it off for nearly a quarter of its regular retail price. An excellent find, I must say.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

The UK General Election of May 2005 was, in the observant words of Labour MP Tony Wright (Cannock Chase), ‘the election that nobody really wanted to have — not the politicians, not the media, and certainly not the electorate’. People knew that it was coming, and for the most part there was sense of resignation at what the expected outcome would be. The Labour Party would get a sharp kick in the polls (so to speak), but not really enough to completely wipe out its majority. Some seats would change hands, some MPs (almost certainly including John Prescott) would say or do things that would come back to haunt them at some point down the line, one or two constituencies would have particularly nasty campaign battles that would dominate the national news for the better part of the run-up to the election itself. And though all of these things certainly did happen, the ‘expected events’ seemed to blur together — which meant that some of the more interesting (from a political historian’s perspective) aspects of the 2005 election often happened to be overlooked.

Election synopsis books are becoming increasingly popular in the publishing business; for the 2005 General Election, I can think of at least three books I might turn to for analysis of the parties, the polls, the campaigns, and the final results. Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 would probably not have been the first book I’d have thought of, but after reading it there’s no doubt that it is a worthy addition to include with longstanding publications such as Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler’s British General Election series. The contributing authors have provided a set of fine essays on what one might consider the usual topics — the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat election campaigns; special points of interest regarding the election campaigns and outcomes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and reports on the influence of the Internet and the mainstream media outlets during the campaign. The book also has a dozen tidy and well-laid-out single-page summaries of some of the more notable election results, such as George Galloway’s upset victory over sitting Labour MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble losing his seat in Upper Bann, and the late Peter Law’s protest against Labour’s all-women shortlist in Blaenau Gwent. In addition to the usual facts and figures, the book contains a reflective essay by the abovementioned Labour MP Tony Wright, providing one sitting MP’s thoughts and feelings about what it was like to be on the ground during the campaign.

Having had a little bit of experience on the ground myself at the 2005 General Election (I spent Election Night at the BBC Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, watching the results come in until the wee hours of the morning), I found Geddes and Tonge’s book to be quite fascinating. I’m not really much of a psephologist — statistics aren’t my forte, even when it comes to statistical analysis of elections — but the book is written in such a way as to be accessible to an audience that is interested in elections at a bit of a distance, away from the immediacy of the media hype and the nonstop bickering of the candidates. Even if, as the book suggests, it didn’t entirely seem as if ‘Britain’ collectively decided much of anything in May 2005 (except perhaps that Tony Blair’s days in Downing Street were numbered), this retrospective looks at some of the decisions made during the election and draws some thoughtful conclusions about the state of British politics going into Labour’s historic third term.

Travels in Hyperreality, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, and On Literature by Umberto Eco

For today, here’s a handful of short reviews — three collections of essays and other short pieces by Umberto Eco, Italian professor of semiotics and author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco (1990)

The essays and pieces in Travels in Hyperreality often focus on Eco’s chosen field of semiotics, the study of signs and the ways in which meanings are made and understood through the use of signs and symbols. The ‘hyperreality’ that Eco refers to in the title essay is not exactly easy to explain, but in a way it can best be described by the figures in a wax museum: everything is made to be as life-like and realistic as possible, but done so in a way that the human eye and human brain cannot truly accept those wax figures as anything but fake. The long title essay looks at the hyperreality of wax museums, ‘Old West’ tourist towns, and Disneyland — in short, of many tourist attractions in America — with an intriguing academic detachment borne of many years of looking at how we as human beings define our reality.

The essays of Travels in Hyperreality were mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’re definitely dated by the examples he uses and the references he makes. Eco wonders in one essay what kind of reaction would result from an attack on a major sports field in the middle of a football game — it’s clear that the essay was written several years before the murder of the Israeli atheletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Readers who have little patience for Marxist interpretations of society might find certain essays problematic in that regard. But Travels in Hyperreality is for the most part just that: a collection of travels and accompanying observations about reality and about the aspects of life, both good and bad, that seem to be a little too real for comfort at times.

How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco (1994)

This book is a selection of various humourous essays and short story fragments written by Eco over the years, collected here in book form. The title essay opens the book, and in it Eco relates an odd tale of his attempts to keep a piece of fresh salmon in the mini-bar refrigerator of his London hotel room during a short stay in the city. (Not only was the attempt unsuccessful, but he also ended up with a staggering bill for all of the alcohol and beverages and nibbles he had to remove from the refrigerator in order to stuff the salmon into it each day — and he gained a bit of reputation amongst the hotel staff for extreme overindulging.) Most of the other essays are similar in tone, filled with wry observations on travel, modern technology, the weirdness of other human beings, and the busyness of everyday life in general. With subjects ranging from ‘How to Replace a Driver’s License’ (in Italy, apparently, this is almost an impossible feat) to ‘How to Buy Gadgets’ (a must-read for anyone who has boggled over a Sharper Image catalogue or one of those magazines found in the seat-pockets on airplanes), plus a few articles that are wicked parodies of nonsensical academic jargon and bureaucratese, there’s enough variety in the book to ensure that no one theme is repeated to the point of wearing out.

How to Travel with a Salmon is, I think, a very good short introduction to Eco’s brisk and clever writing style and his sense of sly and subtle humour. It definitely made me laugh out loud in places, and I spent much of the rest of the book trying and failing to keep a straight face. It’s also a very good travel book, since the essays are short enough to be read in little chunks and funny enough to be a welcome distraction from whatever craziness happens to be plaguing your immediate surroundings.

On Literature by Umberto Eco (2005)

Another collection of writings by Eco, all of a more literary and/or scholarly bent. Most of them were given as talks or written as papers for conferences, and the array of subject matter is extremely broad and…I think ‘erudite’ is probably the best word for it. There are essays about the literary style of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, observations on the use of style and symbolism in different authors’ works, an interesting essay which attempts to evaluate ideas of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ literature, and a rather critical one about the wit of Oscar Wilde (he doesn’t dislike Wilde’s aphorisms per se, but considers them more shallow and superficial than most people tend to think). More than a few of the essays, I freely admit, go over my head — primarily because in them Eco is discussing or making references to books I have not actually read or even heard of before. But they do pique my interest in the books he happens to be talking about, so perhaps one of these days I will come back to my copy of On Literature and find that something he’s written makes more sense to me at that point then it does right now.

One of the most interesting essays in this collection — my favourite, in fact — explains how he writes, or how he worked to develop the ideas for the works that he’s best known for writing (The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum in particular). The amount of time and effort Eco puts into his work really shows when he explains how he crafts his stories. One point in particular worth mentioning is how he tends to write dialogue in relation to time — if two people were walking down a corridor having a conversation, he says, and the conversation had to finish before they reached the end of the corridor, then he (as author) would have to figure out the length of the corridor so that he could time the length of the conversation in his head and adjust his characters’ walking speed accordingly. It’s this kind of detail that really make his work stand out. Speaking as someone who enjoys finding out what makes authors tick, it’s a pleasure to see in this collection of essays that Eco is also very much interested in learning about authors and the things that make them tick.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

Dipping into the ‘wide high-table λόγος of St. C.S. Lewis’s Church’, as Betjeman so sardonically put it once upon a time. I’ve a few reviews of his other works that will have to go up here at some point, but this book really needs to stand by itself.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

It’s common enough to talk about ‘good books’ and ‘bad books’, and yet the definition of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a book has as many variations as there are readers. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was a runaway bestseller, but bring it up in conversation and you might well be scoffed at for even mentioning that kind of paperback junk food. Harold Bloom has made a name for himself declaring that Stephen King’s books (and most any other work of so-called popular fiction) are beneath contempt and beyond the pale for those who consider themselves to be ’serious’ readers. And the ‘adult’ UK editions of Harry Potter, intended for those who are shy about being seen on Tube or train with the brightly-coloured covers of the regular books, would seem to indicate that the sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ extends into children’s literature as well. It is the question of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ books that C.S. Lewis addresses in his short work An Experiment in Criticism: he looks at how people judge the literary value of a given book, examining in particular how (in his opinion) most judgements focus too much on the book itself and not on the way in which the book is read.

An Experiment in Criticism, at first, seems designed to make the curious reader wince within the first five pages. From the start, Lewis draws a very sharp line between the ‘literary’ and the ‘unliterary’ reader, and deliberately places the literary reader in a kind of close-knit elite. He soon identifies the kind of books that the unliterary reader is likely to read, if indeed that reader even picks up a book at all: romance-laden short stories in women’s magazines or sensationalist adventure novels, for instance. Unliterary readers will almost never read a book again if they’ve read it once before. They turn to reading as a last resort — to help them sleep at night, or to pass time on a long journey, or simply to kill time before something else happens. Most of all, the unliterary reader almost never talks about the book afterwards, except to pass some sort of superficial judgement on it: ‘I liked it’ or ‘It was boring’. But Lewis does not suggest that unliterary readers are unliterary because they look at books from this perspective — rather, he believes that unliterary readers do not look at books from any other perspective. His interest lies more in how literary readers look at books, and how their particular prejudices influence how books are appraised and either praised or condemned.

For instance, science fiction and fantasy are two genres that tend to be dismissed by literary readers as poorly written escapist tripe, or in general as stories meant only for children (and therefore ‘childish’ or otherwise unsuitable for a serious reader). Lewis suggests that the literary reader should only use ‘childish’ in this derogatory sense to mean behaviours and attitudes that are or should be left behind in childhood. In this sense, throwing a temper tantrum when frustrated or angry is childish; enjoying engaging, powerful, and well-written fantasy stories, regardless of their popularity or trendiness, is not. An Experiment in Criticism, in this regard, takes a step back from specific criticism and looks at the critics themselves, picking apart how and why people judge books and looking more closely at the superficial judgements that literary readers are themselves capable of making about certain books and those who read them.

Fans of C.S. Lewis’s writings will quite possibly get a good deal of enjoyment out of An Experiment in Criticism, I think, if they are willing to overlook some of his more prickly (and, I will admit, condescending) moments. But the point of the book is not so much to pass a lasting and final judgement on how books ought to be criticised. It is an experiment in literary criticism — and in that sense, it throws out a number of intriguing ideas and serves as a starting point to open the subject to a much wider debate.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

I may actually make a post that isn’t a review one of these days, but at the moment I doubt that anyone wants to read my ramblings about the Liberal Democrats’ leadership race. So I’ll set that aside for now in favour of something a little less topical.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

The Age of Enlightenment is a name commonly given to the philosophical and intellectual movements in Europe and in the American colonies during the eighteenth (and early seventeenth) century. A list of contributors to the ‘Enlightenment’ would have to include a remarkably diverse group of thinkers and writers who debated any number of philosophical, political, and social topics, many of whom disagreed vehemently with the writings of others. Whether it’s the pamphlets of Thomas Paine or the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft denouncing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women or Edmund Burke ‘reflecting’ on the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason or the sheer prolific fury of just about anything written by Voltaire, the Enlightenment writers put their emphasis on reason, rational thought, scientific analysis, and the study of natural law in relation to the individual and society. The idea was to move away from irrationality and superstition (which some of these writers, though by no means all of them, attributed in part to the tyranny of organised religions) and towards a more unified framework for how the world operated. This intellectual framework helped form the basis for classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalistic thought — and by extension, formed the philosophical underpinnings of the American and French Revolutions.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader is a set of texts taken from the writings of the Enlightenment’s most notable philosophers, grouped by subject and topic and pulled together into a single volume. The texts chosen for this portable edition are, I’d have to say, a fairly good selection. All of the big names of the time period are there — Locke and Rousseau and Hume take up a decent amount of space, and the selections are usually long enough to provide a taste of the topic without taking up too much room. The idea in a book like this is to give the casual reader a sense of how each of these writers wrote and what they wrote about. For example, if you’ve ever wondered whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth reading, then the selection provided in the Portable Enlightenment Reader may give you a sense of whether you think you’d like to try to tackle his prose.

Not all of the selections are weighty philosophical treatises or explorations of history. There’s a downright smutty snippet from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a work of erotic fiction billed as the memoirs of a ‘woman of pleasure’ — indicative of the interest that the Enlightenment writers took in the definition, understanding, and pursuit of pleasure. There are some noteworthy perspectives on the early women’s rights movement, including a short passage written by Thomas Paine that reflects on the unfortunate state of women as he saw it. The tail end of the Enlightenment saw some consideration on the nature of the slave trade and the position of the ‘Negro race’ (as many writers called it) with respect to white Europeans. The book as a whole is meant for dabbling — a means of tempting the appetite, as it were. Now that I know where to start from, the Portable Enlightenment Reader has given me a solid basis for continuing my reading of the works of writers who helped shape Western thought at a crucial moment in Western history.

Writing Home and Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

It seems that the playwright and author Alan Bennett has a new novella out: The Uncommon Reader. So before I purchase it, I thought I’d post my reviews of two of his collected prose writings. In a forthcoming review, I’ll post my review of his play (and now film) The History Boys.

Writing Home by Alan Bennett

The writings and reminiscences in Writing Home form a fairly motley collection. The book includes his diaries (which are not so much ‘diaries’ as they are collected thoughts and musings) from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, prefaces to printed editions of his plays (including The Madness of George III and An Englishman Abroad), and various reviews and other writings collected for the first time. One of the most interesting selections in this collection is ‘The Lady in the Van’, a short story based on the life of an somewhat unbalanced elderly lady who lived in a van parked opposite Bennett’s house in Camden Town. But all in all, Writing Home is a book of observations, some of which reflect on the past and some of which dwell on the present…but all of which are a treat to read.

Bennett’s eye for the absurd and his love of the English language make Writing Home a fine book to have in those moments when you’re looking for something to read that’s light and yet satisfying. It isn’t the sort of book that you’d rave about to all of your friends and try to convince complete strangers to buy; it’s the sort of book that you keep with you and pick up occasionally, flipping through it and reading a selection or two before putting it down and puttering off to do something else. Like the other books in this set of reviews, I don’t recommend reading through it all at once. It’s meant to be read in small chunks, and then re-read in different chunks. Or at least, that’s how I found that the book read best.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

In Untold Stories, Bennett has pulled together another selection of writings and speeches that pick up where Writing Home left off — the materials in this book cover the years from around 1995 to 2004. Some of the untold stories in the book come from Bennett’s past and family life. There’s a quiet, sympathetic pen-portrait of his extended family, weaving in stories of a grandfather whose suicide was hushed up by his children, and his mother’s sisters and their lives in and out of the dingy Leeds community where they (and he) grew up. He writes about his mother’s struggles with depression and later with dementia, and the patient care and concern that his usually undemonstrative father showed in those dark times. Some of the other stories are about himself as a young man, uncertain of nearly everything including his sexuality and his religious faith. Included in Untold Stories are the diary selections that were printed every year in the London Review of Books, his reflections on the past year. And also included in the book is a lengthy account of his experience undergoing treatment for bowel cancer, which was diagnosed in 1997 and which until now he has been reluctant to discuss.

Not all of the stories in the book are so intimately personal. There is an interesting account of the writing and production of The History Boys, his most recent play (which I had the good fortune to see at the National Theatre, and which was made into an excellent film). There are a number of amusing anecdotes featuring the actors he has known and worked with, including Dame Thora Hird, Sir Alec Guinness, and Dame Maggie Smith. Untold Stories is a pleasing blend of Bennett’s personal and professional life, all written about with the same deft touch and careful feel for language that makes his writing a delight to read.

The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

Doubling up on the reviews again, with two books by American historian and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter.

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It in 1948, combining twelve interlinked essays about the development of American history and politics from the early days of the Republic to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He focused on key political figures in the context of their time — and in many ways used the book as an attempt to move away from the standard image of American history as a political tradition based on pure democratic ideals.

Looking over the book for reviewing purposes, I found myself wishing that I’d had this book when I was first examining aspects of American history in school. It is a nice compact introduction to some basic historical themes, ones that tend to be glossed over by standard history textbooks because of lack of space. Hofstadter does manage to avoid the temptation to be overly whiggish in his interpretation of how American politics has changed in the years since 1776. He stresses the effect of pragmatism on decision-making, doing his best to present a more realistic picture of different political climates and the men who came to exemplify their political eras. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover — Hofstadter does his best to put them into the context of their times instead of setting them apart (or ignoring them completely in favour of broader economic-based arguments about history). He doesn’t actively set out to deconstruct or destroy the various myths about the Founding Fathers or Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. Rather, he carefully picks and teases them apart, separating individual strands of historical argument before setting them out as neatly as he can.

In general, I don’t think that The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It is meant to be read as a be-all, end-all history text. Certainly, it ignores the history of the American public in favour of a far more top-down approach to American political philosophies. But as far as introductory texts go, though it’s well-written and for the most part concise. Quite a lot of American history texts don’t even manage that much. A book worth examining, at any rate, and I’m glad I picked it up when I did.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

When I first read this book, it took me several weeks to figure out the best way to approach it with reviewing in mind. It’s no secret that Hofstadter’s book is meant to be controversial — it was controversial when it won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, and many of the statements he makes in it have attracted supporters and detractors ever since. And while the very title might be enough to put some off reading it, I found it intriguing enough to pick it up and see if Hofstadter’s conclusions still hold true thirty years later.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life seeks to uncover the origins of some of the anti-intellectual attitudes that Hofstadter believed were severely damaging American society. He points to McCarthyism, to the Soviet Union’s advances in mathematics and science, to perjorative slang terms like ‘egghead’, and to the presidential victory of Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson as possible examples of an unconscious, pervasive anti-intellectual sentiment in American life. In searching for the roots of this anti-intellectualism, Hofstadter goes back to the earliest years of the American colonies, and traces a path through the decades — from the evangelical religious movements (the ‘Great Awakenings’, as they tend to be called) in the colonial times through the Jacksonian egalitarianism of the pre-Civil War years, from the rise of the business culture in the end of the 19th century through the progressive attitudes toward public education in the early years of the 20th century. And one of the conclusions he draws in his book is that current (for his day) expressions of intellectualism like the ‘beat’ culture appear to be a kind of twisted, angry response to mainstream America’s attempts to thwart its individual intellectuals at every turn.

This book falls into a category I’ve come to appreciate in the last few years — books whose arguments you might not wholly accept, but which you should read anyway. I’m not so certain I agree with some of Hofstadter’s arguments, but his historical exploration of the roots of anti-intellectualism was rather ground-breaking for his time. It turned quite a lot of conventionally received wisdom on its head, and in many ways the examples and arguments that Hofstadter puts forward are still points of debate in this day and age. I think it bears a second reading to see if my thoughts have changed since I last looked at it a few months ago, but I’ll certainly look forward to reading it over again.