Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

I actually finished this book almost two months ago, but tackling the review for it was more difficult than I thought it would be. Partly because of the book’s length and scope, but also because it’s tricky to review an autobiography without simply summarising the author’s life. I think I’ve done well enough out of this one, for the most part.

Autobiography by Bertrand Russell

Mathematician, philosopher, social reformer, conscientious objector, writer, lecturer, anti-nuclear protestor — Bertrand Russell’s life is remarkably difficult to summarise in a few words, not least because it spanned nearly a century of constant political and social change. His grandfather was Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, two-time Whig prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century and a son of one of the most well-connected aristocratic families in Britain. His parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, held radical views on atheism, birth control, and other moral values which were not far short of a scandal in the socially conservative late Victorian era. This mixture of orthodox and unorthodox influences formed the background of young Bertrand Russell’s life, and at times appeared to surface in the few scandals he managed to produce alongside his publications and lecture tours.

Russell’s parents died early in his childhood, and he and his older brother Frank were raised at their grandparents’ estate in Richmond Park. Like many well-to-do young men of his age, he was educated at home by a series of tutors, who encouraged his natural aptitude for the study of mathematics. Yet Russell also spent much of his adolescence fighting off depression, worries about his sexual desires and the loss of his religious faith, and suicidal thoughts — indeed, he admits that the thought of not being able to learn more mathematics was one of the few things that kept him from taking his own life. He passed the entrance examinations for Cambridge and began to work on mathematics at Trinity College, soon expanding his work into philosophy and eventually taking a philosophy fellowship at Trinity shortly after he graduated. The connections between mathematics, logic, and philosophy formed the basis of much of Russell’s work for the rest of his life, and his influence appears in the writings of later logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers such as Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even after he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his elder brother in the early 1930s, he carried on much as before, though he wryly notes in the autobiography that he found the title occasionally useful for securing hotel rooms. He published numerous essays, articles, and works of short fiction; worked on sweeping surveys of the history of social thought and Western philosophy; and maintained an exhausting lecture circuit. And in 1950, his contributions to ‘humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’ were considered of sufficient merit to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Apart from his academic career, Russell became more and more involved in political and social causes as he grew older. He was an active participant in the markedly unpopular pacifist and conscientious objection movement during World War I, a cause that alienated him from formerly close friends and colleagues and eventually ended in a six-month stretch of imprisonment in 1918. He was interested in the mechanics of socialism and communism, though he became one of the more strident critics of the Soviet Union, something which did not endear him to other left-leaning associates like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He was an advocate of women’s suffrage, contraception, sex education, and homosexuality and divorce law reform, all of which feature prominently in the pages of his autobiography — particularly in the sections in which he frankly and unashamedly describes the ups and downs of his various marriages (a total of four, of which three ended in separation and divorce) and occasional affairs with other women. After World War II, he became associated with the world government and nuclear disarmament movements. In 1957, at the age of 85, he served as the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and participated in marches and demonstrations for several years afterwards. Well into his 90s, he worked on his autobiography, and continued to write public letters and editorials almost up until the day of his death in early February 1970, at age 98.

Covering more than 700 pages, Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography is an expansive text that is as much a work of social history as it is an individual’s life story. Each chapter contains a selection of personal letters, notes, and short articles that round out the written recollections. Although Russell writes engagingly of his adventures and travels, and is willing to admit his own faults and failings in retrospect, he does not always come across as an easy person to know or to live with — as a friend and colleague, he could be warm and disapproving, generous and chill, caring and frustrating by turns. Yet the book quite clearly presents the human being behind the careful mathematician, introspective philosopher, and active elder statesman, a life lived fully and as best as anyone might be able to live. In the end, it is unsurprising that Russell would preface the account of his life by saying, ‘This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.‘

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.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Slipping this in a little late for a Sunday. I have a few other books I could add to my review list of other books on witchcraft, though I don’t happen to have any of them to hand at the moment. Possible notes for a future set of reviews, once I clear out a bit more of my existing backlog.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Mention ‘Salem’ nowadays, and the first thing that tends to come to mind is ‘witchcraft’. In the early months of 1692 (actually the later months of 1691, by the old Julian calendar), a small group of girls and young women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement at Salem Village fell ill with a number of strange ailments. When the local physician was called in to look at them, he speculated that the illnesses were not natural and might have been caused by bewitchment…a diagnosis that was later to prove fatal for the 14 women and 5 men who would be hanged for maleficium, the practice of diabolic magic intended to bring harm to others. Several other accused witches died in prison without ever coming to trial, dozens of men and women (and even children as young as four or five) were arrested or fled the colony to avoid arrest, and still more bowed to outside pressure and confessed to being witches, implicating neighbours and family members in the process. Not even the wealthy and powerful of the colony were completely immune to being ‘cried out on’ as witches, a most unusual circumstance in the days when the most commonly accepted profile of a possible witch was a poor to middling older woman who had neither the friends nor the financial wherewithal to preserve her good name. The Salem outbreak was the largest of its kind in New England, and the records kept on the accusations and trials have been relatively well-preserved, making the study of the Salem witchcraft cases both popular and constantly open to new, revisionist perspectives — most of which attempt to make sense of why a few random accusations spread into a full-on outbreak.

Mary Beth Norton approaches the trials from a slightly different angle than previous works. Most books about the trials tend to focus on social aspects of the accusers, the accused and the accusations; why certain people were accused and others not, why certain people confessed or refused to confess, why the most powerful people in the colony were so willing to believe that Satan could be thoroughly bent on the destruction of the Massachusetts colony. Norton’s premise is less centred on social history than it is on politicial and military history. She argues that the Salem witch-trials cannot be studied without extensive reference to the ongoing wars between the settlers and the Indian population of New England, particularly the Wabanaki tribe of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In her closely-argued book, she draws connections between the Indian wars and the effect the wars had on many of the key players in the trials. The connections might be a little hard to follow (or credit) at first, but as Norton lays out and piles up the evidence, her conclusions seem very reasonable. What’s more, they take social history to a new level by showing how closely-knit the communities of settlers were, and how children and younger adults were often easily manipulated to settle long-standing grudges between their elders.

One important caveat, first and foremost: To get the most out of Norton’s research, it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with some of the primary participants in the Salem witch trials. Anyone who has read or seen Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will know of condemned witches John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, as well as the awful death of Martha’s husband Giles Corey, who refused to consent to a trial and was pressed to death with heavy weights in accordance with current English law. The names of Abigail Williams, Ann Puttnam and Mercy Lewis — three of the ‘afflicted girls’ — also appear frequently in the text, for they and their relatives were instrumental in the spread of accusations. There are several good general books on the trials that would work as an introduction, and reading one or two of those before looking at Norton’s work is likely to make Norton’s analysis and conclusions a good deal easier to follow. (I consider myself fairly well-acquainted with the standard literature on the trials, and I still had to stop and go back in a few places to ensure that I hadn’t missed something crucial in Norton’s dense narrative.)

That said, Norton’s book is a superb addition to the existing literature, exploring a side of the trials that has only been vaguely considered in the past. Granted, there are times when some of her arguments seem a little too tenuous, and she has a habit of making conjectures which she feels are warranted but which I feel make for awkward reading. But In the Devil’s Snare is one of the better books available about the Salem outbreak and the history of witchcraft in colonial New England, if nothing else for the extensive footnotes and solid historiography that underpins the text.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

One of my side interests in history is the history of witchcraft persecutions in Europe and North America. I have a few other books that I may end up re-reading and reviewing, but at the moment they don’t quite justify a separate category for this blog. Perhaps they will, one day.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

The first edition of Witchcraft in Europe was a collection of translated primary sources dating from A.D. 1100 to 1600, the span of time which saw the rise of executions for heresy and witchcraft by Europe’s church-based inquisitors and secular authorities. The second edition greatly expands on the first one, including not only new documents from a wider range of sources but also relevant bibliographical citations from contemporary historical scholarship on the witch-craze. And the result is a very hefty volume, chock-full of snippets from both religious and secular authors — all of which form an interesting picture of how the ‘authorities’ regarded the strange phenomenon of ordinary men and women who appeared to be in league with the Devil.

The texts one might expect to find in a book like this are, of course, included. There is a long set of passages from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), one of the ‘classic’ instructional texts used by the authorities who presided over the trials. Other familiar works, like Cotton Mather’s ‘A Discourse on Witches’ and Nicholas Remy’s Demonaltry present contemporary opinions on witches and their practices, often in lurid detail. There are accounts of trials and confessions and executions, extensive scholarly debates on what exactly constituted ‘witchcraft’ and what distinguished witches from heretics, and several illustrations of paintings and woodblock prints that show popular conceptions of the diabolical pacts made by fallen women. Yet Witchcraft in Europe also shows the other side of the argument, with selections from works like Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (On the Illusions of the Demons), Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft and Fredrich Spee’s Cautio criminalis, which illustrate the strong doubts and misgivings that more than a few individuals had about whether witches even existed. And conveniently, every single text in the book has a short editorial passage before it that explains the context of the text and gives some useful biographical or historical information about its author.

I know that this book is used as a base text in many university courses that spend some time discussing witchcraft, and it’s fairly easy to see why. As a comprehensive selection of texts, I can’t think of a better individual book. If Witchcraft in Europe ever goes into a third edition, I have a feeling I’ll probably end up buying it as well.

The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Doubling up on two of Freud’s works here. It’s quite interesting to read the full text of these works after having read bits and selections of them in various school texts over the years. (Even if some people think Freud is an utter miseryguts no matter what work of his you happen to be reading.)

The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) in 1927, after he had spent several years considering the idea of religion from a psychoanalytic perspective. He had examined religion from a more anthropological perspective in his work Totem and Taboo (1913), looking at possible connections between the beliefs of aboriginal socities and the influence that these beliefs may have had on the construction of religious ideas in the history of human civilisation. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud turns his earlier thoughts into a more systemic study of the role of religion in human behaviour and shaping the human experience, particularly with regard to how religious belief influences and regulates human behaviour.

Freud describes religion as an ‘illusion’ — in other words, a belief that is grounded in personal wish and desire. (Illusions are not necessarily false, he points out, but they are nonetheless grounded in wish and intended to fulfil a personal need.) As Freud sees it, ‘It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.‘ He regards the illusion of religion as a creation of man’s unconscious desire for a protecting, guiding father-figure and as a social construct designed to curb the destructive instincts that would make civilised society untenable (such as cannibalism and incest). And though Freud does not advocate an absolute, wholesale jettisoning of the entire structure of the civilisation that currently rests upon a religious base, he claims that human beings are nonetheless capable of moving beyond this infantile kind of wish-fulfilment and towards a more mature and scientific understand of the universe and our place within it.

The Future of an Illusion is a very Freudian book; that is, it is very much a piece of self-analysis, a little like listening to someone who is a bit too fond of the sound of his or her own voice. He contradicts several of his own initial assertions, particularly towards the end of the book, and even someone who isn’t especially ‘religious’ (as Freud would define it) would be quick to point out Freud’s analysis is based more in his anthropological studies and his experience with psychoanalysing patients whose internal struggles with religious beliefs might have contributed to their troubled mental and emotional states. As a book, it is a very good indication of Freud’s personal opinions on religion and its role as the illusion that helps to underpin civilisation. As a treatise in favour of atheism and scientific rationalism…well, I can think of a few other authors I’d rather read on this subject. (Bertrand Russell, for one.)

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

The title of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is a little tricky to translate idiomatically from German. A more literal translation of the title might be “The Uneasiness in Culture” or “The Discomfort in Culture”, but flipping the order of the words places more of the emphasis on the source of the uneasiness — culture, or as it might also be translated, civilisation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s attempt to address the tensions that he sees between the instincts and impulses of the individual and the greater conformity required by civilisation. One of the most basic instincts present in human beings is aggression, an instinct that by its very nature is destabilising and impulsive and (in a word) antisocial. Coping with, controlling, or redirecting this aggressive instinct is vital to forming relationships with other human beings — indeed, doing so mitigates one of the three aspects of the human condition that Freud believes prevent individuals from being happy (the other two being exposure to the external world [i.e., weather and nature] and the fraility of the human body against aging, injury, and disease). The individual connection to this civilising force is not always very strong — as evidenced, for instance, by the number of people who will violate society’s norms if they think they can get away with it. Yet the human mind has come up with a means of internally enforcing civilisation: the power of guilt, which is controlled by an aspect of personality that Freud calls the super-ego.

According to Freud, the constant conflict between instinct and the super-ego is responsible for much of the discontent in man’s relationship to civilisation. One of the greatest societal tensions, he says, comes from civilisation’s deeply misguided commandment to ‘love your brother as you love yourself’ — a demand that not only contradicts our fundamental instincts of aggression, but also tends to be extremely difficult to put into actual practice. And when the super-ego chides us for failing to live up to these internalised expectations…well, Freud based quite a lot of his psychology on what can happen when individuals are unwilling or unable to reconcile instinct with the demands of society.

There are other side arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents, further thoughts on the often strained relationship between the individual and society. It is worth remembering that Freud wrote this book in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time of great social instability in the wake of the Great War that would eventually lead to the series of historical events that ended with Freud fleeing his native Austria for England in mid-1938, where he died in September 1939. Even if Freud’s primarily psychological and rather pessimistic interpretation is no longer as influential as it was in his day, Civilization and Its Discontents provides a fairly concise summary of Freud’s thinking on the relationship between individual and society and the relative thinness of the veneer that provides the gloss we call modern civilisation.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

A few months ago, I was doing a bit of reading on the shaky financial status of British East India Company in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Intriguing subject, but somewhat out of my usual areas of research interest, and so I was glad to have this book to look to when I needed to check a few day-to-day details about what it meant to be involved in merchant shipping in that particular time period.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

From what I can tell, most of the fictional accounts of life on the seas in the Age of Sail tends to focus on two perspectives: pirates and navies. The careers of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey make for good sea-tales, as do the adventure stories of pirates and privateers on the high seas, where everyone is out for a good fight and a well-taken prize. Merchant shipping, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have as much of the romance and glamour associated with navies and pirates. As such, a history book that focuses specifically on merchant shipping — whether of one or two ships owned by a single small-businessman to the vast fleets operated and administered by the powerful Dutch, French, and British East India Companies — doesn’t seem as easy to come by. Merchant shipping shared many aspects of lifestyle with the different navies or famous pirates, but there were also some noted and notable differences to consider. In this case, Peter Earle’s brief but detailed Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 provides a sound introduction to the workaday life of the men who all but created the concept of international trade.

The book covers the many different facets of a typical merchant sailor’s life, with chapters that examine the routine (the daily workload and general prospects for advancement) and the basic financial (possessions and general wealth) aspects to the more extraordinary situations (shipwrecks, punishments, mutinies, and court trials) that a sailor might face. Earle draws mostly on the primary sources of trial records from the Admiralty courts, as well as various logs and journals and accounts of the day. One such set of accounts is the Lloyd’s List, by now one of the world’s oldest continuously-running journals (dating back to 1734), which features shipping news and other market information of interest to the merchants, traders, brokers, and insurance underwriters who frequented Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London. As such, Earle is able to examine the relationships amongst members of the crew and between the crew and the officers — mainly because important and enlightening information tends to come out in the middle of court case testimonies. The chapters are short and straightforward, generally free of nautical slang and jargon and quite accessible even to those who have only a basic knowledge of seafaring life.

One aspect of this book that I found particularly interesting but rather understated was the differences between general trading ships and slaving ships. I think Earle could possibly have looked into slaving ships in more depth, perhaps even devoting a specific chapter just to the social history of life aboard a slaving ship during the various stages of its route. The history of merchant shipping in the late seventeeth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries really can’t be studied without looking at the slave trade, and I think Earle’s book is at a bit of a disadvantage for not devoting more time or page-space to looking at it. It isn’t a disadvantage that truly detracts from the book, but I do think that the book really would have benefitted from a study of that particular aspect of trade in human cargo. In general, though, Sailors does just what it sets out to do, and the information within on the social history of English merchant shipping might easily appeal to anyone interested in a more rounded picture of life at sea the Age of Sail.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti

I always enjoy a good social history book, one that doesn’t necessary focus on political squabblings or the usual things that the standard historical survey books tend to cover. This one was a bit pricey when I bought it, but I think it was decent value for the cost.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti (translated by Allan Cameron)

Raffaela Sarti’s book is translated from the original Italian, so it’s no surprise that the greater part of her research centres on the home life of Italian families throughout the time period her book covers. But Italy certainly doesn’t dominate the text — there is quite a lot of truly valuable and interesting information on the development of family structure and family life from the end of the Renaissance period through the beginning of the industrial age. Sarti touches on all the topics one might expect from a survey book: clothing, food and dietary patterns, the changing position and status of children and women in the European family, the effects of exploration of the New World on European daily life, and any number of other aspects of day-to-day existence in different regions of Europe.

Quite a few of the facts and anecdotes in the text seem almost meant for good dinner-table conversation, such as the intriguingly misogynistic reason why male cooks were vastly preferred over female cooks in most wealthy European families of the period (’Everyone knows that generally the dirtiest man is cleaner than the cleanest woman’, according to 17th-century author Francesco Tanara of Bologna’s book The City-Dweller’s Organization of a Villa). There are also any number of facts that probably shouldn’t be mentioned at table, however; certain Basque peoples believed that only mature and virile men should be allowed to participate in the process of cheese-making, since they thought that the procession of human reproduction involved a ‘coagulation’ of male seed and female menses in the womb, just as rennet coagulates milk to make cheese. Anecdotes such as these highlight Sarti’s central and rather broad thesis, which emphasises the roles played by production, consumption, and reproduction in the maintenance of European family life. Even if Sarti’s thesis seems to be a little too broad at times, the span of the survey nonetheless allows the reader to take in a wider picture of domestic life, rather than forcing the focus of the book into an overly narrow set of conclusions.

Regrettably, one of my first impressions of my edition of the book was the sheer number of typographical errors included in the pages. I can’t tell whether I’ve become more irritated by them of late or whether I’m simply noticing them more often, but I’ve also become far less forgiving of them — especially in the paperback edition of a translated book. (Thankfully, Sarti has assembled a Web page for the errata.) But I only mention them because they are a minor but noticeable distraction from what is otherwise a very good translation of a fine study in social history.

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

Running into a few Internet troubles with my laptop really ought to have made me more productive — less time wasted browsing for books I can’t exactly afford on Amazon.co.uk and from the London Review of Books shop, right?

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

At the end of World War II, one theme was very much on the minds of the people of Great Britain, from political and military leaders to old age pensioners: never again. Never again should the world have to suffer through another war like the one that had just ended. Never again should dictators-in-the-making be able to take advantage of mass unemployment that left millions of able-bodied men out of work, unable to support themselves or their families. Never again should the sick be unable to obtain medical treatment for lack of money to pay for it, or lack of doctors available to treat them. Never again should children go seriously malnourished or ill-educated, never again should working men and women have to live in shacks patched together from the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Even though food and other consumer goods were still being rationed, and the British military was spread out all over the world, Clement Attlee’s Labour Government (elected by a landslide on 5 July 1945) was determined to put Britain back together again and, in the words of William Blake, build a new Jerusalem on the Labour Party’s socialist principles. The British experience, from everyday domestic life to complicated questions of international relations, in the early postwar years is the focus of Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945-51.

I’ve written glowing reviews of several other books by Peter Hennessy, including The Secret State and The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. He’s certainly one of my favourite historians of any age and period, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading any number of books and articles he’s written over the years. But Never Again, I regret to say, was a very disappointing book. In addition to the often startlingly clunky writing, the narrative had a tendency to feel disorganised and uneven, lurching along as ideas and themes were picked up for brief periods of time and then discarded. Even the sections that contain some noteworthy quotations and little-known bits of intriguing historical information have to contend with sentences such as the following: ‘Since the final end of Empire in the 1960s, the economic historians have discovered a rich seam of retrospection as they mercilessly subject this kaleidoscopic phenomenon to the spartan rigours of cost-benefit analysis.‘ Granted, this book was first written and published back in the early 1990s, but surely another readthrough would’ve flagged sentences like that one for deletion, or possibly even revision.

Authorial voice is a difficult thing to find when writing history, especially when writing for an audience that is not necessarily a specialist audience already acquainted with most of the material. When done well, it produces the kind of history book that simply immerses the reader in the time period and subject to hand. When done less than well, it makes reading a struggle and finishing a chore. As I see it, Never Again mainly has its problems in the authorial voice — the unevenness of the narrative, leaping from topic to topic and from casual conversational or anecdotal style to professorial lecturing tone without a lot of apparent thought put into smoothing the transition, makes it jarring and occasionally difficult to follow. I suppose I keep stressing my disappointment because I know that Hennessy is more than capable of drafting a truly well-written history book. I already own the next volume in this series; I’ll have to see if that one has more of the Hennessy style that I’ve grown to enjoy.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

A bit of humour for this Sunday’s posting — not exactly social satire, unless you think that bad Victorian-era writing satirises itself. In this case, it might just qualify as such.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

The word ‘Victorian’ can be and is often used as something of a perjorative term, with the meaning ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘prudish’. It’s safe to say that there’s a good reason for doing so at times, especially in connection with clothing styles, moral instruction, or anything related to Oscar Wilde. Victorian cautionary tales for children are as grim and ghoulish as the more traditional fairy-tales, always reminding the young that death is an ever-present part of life and that wicked boys and girls are always punished severely (and good isn’t always rewarded in equal measure). So in that respect, it may not be so surprising that a Victorian children’s book that talks about the various peoples of the world would be long on criticism and short on pleasantness.

This is where Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer’s books come in: three books, to be precise, all written in the mid-nineteenth century. Each book purports to be a guide to the different countries of the world and the people who inhabit those countries (one book deals with Europe, one with Africa and Asia, and one with the Americas and Australia), and Mrs Mortimer manages to find some kind of fault with just about everything and everyone. Each description of a country comes complete with a slew of disapproving comments. Norway might be a beautiful country, with kind and good-hearted and honest people, but ‘The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness‘. Amsterdam is noteworthy mostly because ‘there is no city in which there is so much danger of being drowned, because it is full of canals‘. The Irish are (horror!) Roman Catholic, which is ‘a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind‘. When Greeks are unhappy, they are known to ‘scream like babies‘. Mrs Mortimer doesn’t even have many kind words for her own countrymen, though she does take pains to remind her young and impressionable readers of a very simple thing: ‘What country do you love best? Your own country. I know you do‘. Not surprising, considering her overwhelmingly negative opinions on the various bits of Europe that aren’t England proper.

The world outside of Europe is really far worse, though, in her eyes. Most of Africa can be written off as a land of ignorant savages, nasty cannibals, and Mohammedians who read a very wicked book that is made of evil stories and lies. Australia is full of convicts and colonists, of course. The people of Siam resemble the people of Burma, ‘but they are much worse-looking‘. The Chinese are elegant people, but are quite mad. In North America, Washington, DC, is ‘one of the most desolate cities in the world‘ — and most Americans keep slaves, which is an abominable sin. The list goes on and on, to the point where you almost can’t decide whether to laugh at her opinions or bang your head against a wall to get her prissy, disdainful tones out of your ears.

Why is this book worthy of a read-through, then? Well, for starters, Mrs Mortimer wrote the book without ever having left England and with only a limited knowledge of England itself. All of her opinions came from other works and from a mass of different sources — one look at her writings gives a hint as to how respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen of the day looked at other countries within the comforting blanket of the waxing British Empire. Her books went through several editions in her lifetime, and it’s safe to say that Mrs Mortimer’s bad-tempered guides to the Victorian world had a marked influence on young children’s first impressions of other lands and other people. Echoes of her sentiments appear even today in classical stereotypes of ‘foreigners’. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to go back and see where and how certain stereotypes have been reinforced over the years…and with Todd Pruzan’s careful editing of these mostly-forgotten children’s books, it’s possible to look at the world through a decidedly ‘Victorian’ lens.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

This book has been defying my attempts to write a review it for the better part of a month and a half — but I think I’ve managed to emerge victorious at last.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

It’s a longstanding cliché that there are only really a handful of basic plots in the entire canon of Western literature. The cliché is so cliché that it’s somehow gone past cliché and come right out the other side in the form of a 700-plus-page analytical study by former Spectator columnist and Private Eye founder Christopher Booker. Booker suggests that storytelling serves to pass along moral lessons and models from the older generation to their children and successors, and as a result the basic lessons have coalesced over time into seven basic symbolic ‘plots’ that have formed the primary model for storytelling into the present day. These seven plots are as follows:

(1) Overcoming the Monster — Stories like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films, where a hero must defeat a monster and restore order to a world that has been threatened by the monster’s presence.
(2) Rags to Riches — These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, David Copperfield, and the Horatio Alger novels.
(3) The Quest — A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds, and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey is a classic example of this kind of story.
(4) Voyage and Return — Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more.
(5) Comedy — Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace.
(6) Tragedy — As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident.
(7) Rebirth — The stories of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world.

Within these basic plots are smaller ‘metaplots’ that outline the general structure of these stories. Booker further identifies ‘dark’ versions of these basic plots, ones in which the happy ending is never achieved even though the characters go through all of the stages in the underlying metaplot. There are also a handful of other, smaller plots that are often incorporated into these larger overarching plots, such as the ‘Rebellion’ plot or the ‘Mystery’ plot. Booker looks at both plots and characters, identifying heroes and heroines and the figures who both help them (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Good Mother, the Companion) and hinder them (e.g., the Dark Rival or Alter-Ego, the Temptress, the Tyrant). If many of these character figures sound like basic story archetypes…well, Booker says, that’s because they are. And he’s dedicated the entire book to determining and explaining how these combinations of plots and characters come together to create some of most well-known (and dare I say, archetypical) stories in the literary canon.

I’ve read quite a few reviews of The Seven Basic Plots, and most of them seem to say some variation on the same theme: The first 300 pages or so are great, but the book goes rapidly downhill from there. These negative reviews touch on the primary trouble with the The Seven Basic Plots. When a particular story does not seem to fit into the established patterns of Booker’s Jungian worldview, his seven basic plots, he immediately declares that the story is irrevocably flawed, defective, or otherwise a perversion of how stories ought to be. As a result, a significant portion of the literature written since about 1800 falls into this flawed or defective category — including stories such as Moby-Dick (because we don’t know whether the real Monster to be overcome in the story is the white whale or Captain Ahab) and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (because he regards the main character, Julien Sorel, as little more than a portrait of egotistical cruelty and selfish ambition for fame and glory). Not even The Lord of the Rings, one of the stories that Booker points to as the ultimate example of his basic plot archetypes, is free from imperfections: Frodo remains an incomplete character because he never finds the feminine half that he needs to become a whole character. In cruder terms, he doesn’t ‘get the girl’, and therefore can never be complete, so he has to sail away as an incomplete and unresolved main character. Booker also has a disturbing prediliction to blame the author’s background for the flaws of his (or, on very rare occasions, her) stories — usually, in true Jungian fashion, by hinting at unresolved mother issues or sexual identity woes. Very rarely does he attempt to look at the story itself or attempt to understand why the author chose to break away from these archetypes. Without them, the author is flawed and the story is flawed, and as a result there is little room for debate.

It’s really a shame that Booker’s methodology falls apart through his sheer insistence on clinging to Jung. It would’ve been a far more fascinating study to explore why certain stories rebel against or subvert these archetypes, and how this deliberate rebellion or subversion makes these stories all the more powerful for the reader as a result. His writing style is an absolute model of clarity and careful word choice, making The Seven Basic Plots seem far less unwieldy for the general reader than its physical bulk might suggest. In the end, Booker’s magnum opus is certainly worth exploring by those who take an interest in the history of storytelling and in the underlying themes that define so many of our best-loved tales. I’m glad that I read it, in the end.