For many years, in my youth, I refused to read Anthony Powell, simply on
account of the way he pronounced his name. “That’s as in Pole, dear boy,” I
imagined the Old Etonian saying chidingly. You cannot be a good proto-commie
and enjoy Anthony Powell, I thought to myself in my frowsy bedsit,
surrounded by garish SWP posters, Tom Robinson records and the collected
works of Marx and Marcuse. You could call it a question of upbringing, I
suppose. Instead, I would sit myself down with Edward Upward’s trilogy The
Spiral Ascent, a hideous and rightly forgotten stab at Marxist literature
that can be read now only as unwitting satire. I either didn’t know or
didn’t care that Upward’s middle name was Falaise, and that he had been
educated at Repton. Maybe I thought Repton was sort of okay, because
Isherwood went there too, and he was a good comrade. I think you should be
allowed a degree of inconsistency, or stupidity, in youth.
It was a long time later that I came to read A Dance to the Music of Time. I
was in my mid- to late twenties, I think, when almost all of my adolescent
ideological misapprehensions had been cast overboard. And I can remember,
halfway through reading the novel in the sequence titled A Question of
Upbringing, flinging it aside and thinking: well, son, you were wrong about
Marxism, nuclear weapons, radical feminism, council house sales, positive
discrimination, Tony Benn, the Soviet Union, Gramsci and Edward Upward, but
by God you were right about Anthony Powell. What ineffectual, pointless
drivel.
Powell’s name came up an awful lot as I importuned a bunch of writers and
hacks about books they had read that now, when mentioned, make the red mist
descend. Books that made them angry just thinking about them; that were once
clotted with extravagant critical praise, like the butter surrounding the
tiny crustaceans in the potted shrimp at White’s club, or that sort of
sprang from the collective consciousness of the metropolitan elite of the
time and that everybody felt they had to read. And that, from either
category, we now realise are close to worthless.
Many mentioned Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and
Carlos Casteneda’s interminable drug-soaked hippie ramblings, which I
thought I was terribly cool to be reading as a kid. Luke Rhinehart’s The
Dice Man scored heavily, too, and the names of Colin Wilson and Mervyn Peake
were invoked with a sort of guttural sneer and one or two expletives on
several occasions. Yet two names kept cropping up when my respondents were
asked for the misbegotten stuff of serious literature, the people who still
today have a reputation: John Fowles and Anthony bloody “Pole”.
This was an interesting, if not entirely scientific, exercise. For many, it
provided the opportunity to wallow in what we might call antinostalgia; the
shaking of the ageing head and the muttered “My God, were we stupid enough
to fall for all that claptrap?”. Like remembering you’d once purchased a
Uriah Heep record, or sported three-button high-waisted Oxford bags with a
cheese-cloth shirt. The columnist Catherine Bennett chose “the entire Virago
imprint”, bemoaning the fact that, for political reasons, she had felt
duty-bound to plough through Rosamund Lehmann and the like when there was
Philip Roth waiting there, unread. James Delingpole struck a chord with “all
magic realists, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez” – there were one or two
votes for Sir Salman, too, especially Midnight’s Children. Meanwhile, the
historian Michael Burleigh suggested all “angry” black novelists (along with
Herbert Marcuse and EP Thompson). Here’s a bunch of stuff we were all told
we had to read by the political and cultural climate of the day; because it
would be good for us and because, way beyond this, it was our responsibility
to start patronising writers from minorities because it was only the
oppressive white male cultural hegemony that kept them in an ethnic- or
gender-defined ghetto.
Well, no. Looking back at Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Rosamund Lehmann, Aphra
Behn, it wasn’t that – it was just good taste that kept those books locked
away. Behn, I remember, was touted by 1980s feminists as the world’s first
novelist and one of the finest; well, try reading Oroonoko and see if you
conclude that it is your ghastly inherent maleness that is provoking tears
of boredom or incredulity to start dripping down your face. Alexander Pope
had the measure of the woman 300 years ago, although I don’t suppose it is
Behn’s fault that, all those years later, she was coopted for political
reasons and waved aloft like a burning bra.
Of the acknowledged greats that cropped up on our list, Henry James took a
kicking from a few quarters; so, too (inexplicably, to my mind) did
Dostoevsky. But much of the bile was reserved for Powell. “What, really – I
mean, really – is the point of A Dance to the Music of Time?” asked Matthew
d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, adding that he found it “stunningly
tedious”. The broadcaster John Humphrys concurred, having confessed to
starting the entire, endless procession of Powell’s life work, but always
giving up by around about chapter five. Me too. Herman Hesse, meanwhile, was
nominated by a good few, including the controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer,
and the broadcaster Andrew Marr (who, incidentally, nominated Don Quixote as
the worst novel ever written).
What draws these nominees together? They perhaps captured a certain spirit of
the age in which they were written, replete with its fashionable literary
conceits, its political leanings (or lack of them), its mannerisms. And this
is what characterises almost all of the books that were nominated. They were
not so much deemed to be shocking at the time, or too difficult, or
experimental – there is no Henry Miller on the list, or Robbe-Grillet, or
Sartre. Instead, they seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably
with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were
published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written
and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with
Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply
evaporates.
Which leads us to the last question: which recently published and acclaimed
books will be seen as similarly purposeless 30 or 40 years from now? Not, I
think, the ones that shocked or disturbed: Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton
Ellis, Martin Amis, Iain Sinclair and so on. Kicking against the pricks
seems to imbue a certain staying power. Nor books that are distinguished by
their weightiness (WG Sebald) or their experimentalism (Ben Marcus). More
likely, it will be those that tick all the right boxes, books that accord so
perfectly with what our civilised, liberal middle class wishes to believe in
that they might almost have been created spontaneously from the collective
willpower. Books that are so terribly of our age, they cannot hope to see
beyond it. The obvious contender here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a
politely written tome of consummate vapidity, from an articulate, photogenic
half-black writer, that tells you, in the end, nothing. Delingpole suggested
a fairly reliable guide, mind: almost any novel that has won the Booker
prize in the past 25 years. Looking down that horrible list, you have to
agree that he has a point. Books chosen by committee that feel as if they
might have been written by committee. As a corollary, we might also ask
which books of the past 40 or 50 years have now been forgotten, but deserve
to be remembered. I’ll start off with almost anything written by David
Storey between 1965 and 1977, Nigel Dennis’s A House in Order and the works
of Heinrich Böll and Vladimir Voinovich.
Now it’s over to you. We have rounded up a selection of the nominations, and
invite readers to pitch in with their own by contributing their suggestions
in the box below.
