Zoo in the head

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Penguin: Pighead

Back from a few days in Norfolk, walking the whippet and getting some bits of reading done. This book was in the shop in Holt which I still think of as Gough's, though it has been Simon Finch's for years now.

I have practically zero interest in totemism (though the book is cited by John Berger in Why Look at Animals?): no, this was a purely physical thing. John McConnell's designs for Penguin University Books are always attractive, with the studied utility of the typewriter face and the black background. This one is particularly fine, with the bold yellow line and unobtrusive symmetries (the head is centred on the page; the yellow line runs up to the centre of the lettering). It puts me in mind of the pig's head on a stick in Lord of the Flies, and may have been meant to.

Book published as a Pelican in 1969, reissued in this format in 1973. I paid a fiver; seven or eight quid is standard.

Gold digging

I probably ought to mention that I'm one of the participants in a book seminar over at CrookedTimber, an honour I owe to the remarkable Maria Farrell. We're responding to Glen David Gold's Sunnyside, a book about which I had mixed, or rather chaotic, feelings: it takes in, among other things, American intervention in the Russian civil war, the birth and puppyhood of Rin-Tin-Tin, and Charlie Chaplin's rise to global celebrity. No argument about the brilliance of the parts; it's the whole I have my reservations about. My piece concentrated on Chaplin, a phenomenon who these days seems to be almost always underestimated and condescended to; Glen has understood more about his place in modern culture than most critics have. This was months ago, by the way: now, after almost a year with my whippet, I'd probably have more to say on the many dogs the book contains.

After all this time I'm unsure how well my bit stands up: I'm darn certain that the response to my turmoil Glen has written is more thoughtful and graceful than it merited. My fellow participants (seminarians?) are Stuart Evers and Adam McGovern, with CrookedTimber's John Holbo butting in unofficially: Maria introduces it all here. It might be helpful to look at Chaplin's film Sunnyside - one of his strangest and best - starting here; while you're at it, you may as well try A Dog's Life.

Penguin: Dogs in space

However commonplace the shapes in which it may become incarnate, health always has a strong, attractive influence on man. And the fact is, Niki's story is hardly more than a faithful account of her health. And we are now dealing with a period in Niki's life when the charm of youth reinforced that condition of health which, even by itself, is so seductive; a period, in short, when what pleases us is precisely that quality which is, in reality, still wanting, to wit the imminent perfection of body and mind. The awkward and exaggerated movements which sometimes miss their aim and make us smile; the avid curiosity which sends the nose questing into everything, but ready to be withdrawn with a sneeze of alarm; the awkwardness, clumsiness, excessive freedom sometimes manifest and all symbolic of the strength and suppleness to come - all these things compose a spectacle so reassuring that even experience and embittered age may well see in it a denial of its pessimistic prophesyings.

A thing I didn't expect when we got our dog was how much pleasure and pride I would take in his prowess - his strength and speed and nimbleness, not to mention the joy he radiates when showing them off (Blake: "Exuberance is beauty"); I'm like a dad at sports day. People talk a lot about a dog's mental or emotional qualities (gentleness, loyalty, obedience, or their contraries) but in the end it's mostly a physical thing. Dogs are unselfconscious about their movements, their bodies, to an inhuman degree; perhaps that make us more conscious of those things - filling the gap the dogs have left. In any case, we love them for it. Among people, physical affection - that is, affection for the body, as well as expressed with the body - so often gets muddled up with sex; our love of dogs can be purer than that (but some time we're going to have to talk about J. R. Ackerley).

At the heart of Niki is the most authentic fictional account that I've read of a dog's body, and the effect it has on humans. (The Call of the Wild is good on Buck's transformation from pampered housepet to überwolf, but necessarily over-dramatized.) The book is also a sharp political allegory. It was first published in Hungary in 1956, shortly before the revolution and Soviet intervention, and set a few years before, during the early days of Communist rule. Niki's owners, the Ancsas, are loyal party members, and Mr. Ancsa's enthusiasm for the new state, and for the role he plays as an engineer in its building, is explicitly compared to Niki's enthusiasm for life; the loving discipline they impose on her is contrasted with the harsher, more arbitrary role of the party in their lives:

The abuse of power, baleful vice of kings, leaders, dictators, directors, heads of departments, secretaries, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds, heads of families, pedagogues, elder brothers, of old and young in what authority so-ever, this stench, this sickness, this source of infection, peculiar to man and unknown to any other carnivore, even the bloodiest, this curse and blasphemy, this war and cholera, was a thing unknown in the Ancsas' house. No pointless constraint was placed on Niki's freedom.

Mr. Ancsa vanishes - to prison, his wife eventually discovers. With his departure, Niki's abundant health begins to fade, her decline a commentary on the slow death of her masters' ideals, their hope, and perhaps more than a commentary: dogs take so much of their feeling from us; perhaps the death of hope is what kills Niki.

This is the 1961 Penguin edition (the only one I know of) - drawing by Barry Driscoll. For comparison, here is the cover of the current New York Review Books edition:

Wrong dog - Niki is supposed to be a pure white fox terrier with brown ears - but it gets the spirit rather better than Driscoll, whose drawing is in a tacky English tradition of comically pathetic dogs. Same translation as the Penguin, by Edward Hyams (a very interesting character - novelist, journalist, historian of wine, gardening, political assassination and terrorism, anti-nuclear campaigner, pioneering ecologist. He wrote several books on soil, in particular the failure of fertility: A Prophecy of Famine was co-written with H. J. Massingham, who I'll talk about some time). 

My Penguin copy set me back 99p plus p&p on eBay, which turns out to be a bargain: six or seven quid is usual, and there are sharks out there trying to pretend it's a rarity and charging £15 and up. The NYRB, with an introduction by the excellent George Szirtes, may be better value.

Post dedicated to Tim Dee, who introduced me to Niki, and who had a birthday last week. Many happy etc.

Penguin: Because you're worth it

In the run-up to the royal wedding the Independent published an article by Geoffrey Robertson QC headlined "A manifesto for British republicans". We agree in principle, it's clear; but details of his argument were puzzling. Take Robertson's claim that because the Act of Settlement of 1701 adopts "the feudal principle of primogeniture (inheritance down the male line)" the future Charles III would lose his throne if he had a sex-change operation: leaving aside the slackness of his definition - primogeniture <em>qua se</em> has nothing to do with sex, and feudal systems have been run without it - isn't he just guessing? I'm pretty sure the framers of the act didn't make any specific provision for gender-reassignment, and the question has never been tested in the courts (so far as we know). It seems entirely reasonable that Queen Charlene would be permitted to remain on the throne, on the grounds that birth-sex trumps subsequent alterations.

Robertson also says that "The Act imposes anti-meritocratic race discrimination: no-one unrelated to this German family (the Windsors changed their name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha during the First World War to disguise their familial relationship with the Kaiser) can aspire to the crown". Odd to bring Germanness into the equation, if it's racism we're sweating about, and bizarre to finger the act as "anti-meritocratic" - as if monarchy isn't always and inevitably anti-meritocratic, and as if we were all agreed that meritocracy is a fine thing.

But Michael Young coined the term in a spirit of derisive irony. The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) purports to be a history of Britain in the age of universal education, written with the benefit of hindsight from 2033: by this time the demands of a modern technological economy have led to the breakdown of the old closed shops of family and seniority; intelligence testing has ensured that promotion is conferred on the ablest and hardest-working, and in consequence the nation is run by the people best fitted to run it - a meritocracy. Meanwhile the masses, for the first time in history, are bound to recognize that "they have an inferior status - not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they are inferior". But in spite of its clear justice and efficiency the system suffers strains and discontents; 2,000 shop assistants have smashed a store at Stevenage, an atomic station has been destroyed at South Shields, there has been a walk-out by domestic servants. The author wonders: "Do not the masses, for all their lack of capacity, sometimes behave as though they suffered from a sense of indignity?" A postscript notes that he died in recent disturbances at Peterloo.

The irony is at times too dry, at times clunking. In some respects Young got it wrong. Extrapolating from postwar trends, he saw Britain becoming a kind of social democracy (he was writing in the historical moment depicted in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, when socialism looked more efficient and innovative than capitalism). He saw how important it would become for social and educational outcomes to be describable purely in measurable terms; he didn't realize that this would come to imply that the only outcomes that matter are economic ones. He didn't think comprehensive schools would last (then again, looking at the government's plans to encourage free schools, faith schools and academies, he may have got that one right). Other things he saw icy clear, though: the devaluing of experience, the discarding of the old; the university degree, cuckoo-like, pushing out all other qualifications; and he seems to have grasped the extent to which "social mobility" would be seized on by the political classes.

Suzanne Moore wrote a shrewd and funny piece in the Guardian last month about the absurdity of being lectured on social mobility by the current government, posh boys who started at the top and have been stuck there ever since. But she didn't mention the thing that bothers me: that "social mobility" is a get-out clause for the elite, a way for them to stop worrying about inequality. So long as opportunity exists, however rare, we can blame the poor for their own situation. The division of the poor into "deserving" and "undeserving" had its dark side, but the promise of social mobility allows us to abolish the category of deserving poor altogether - to be poor is now, by definition, to be undeserving. Feudalism had its advantages.

About the cover: 1965 reprint of the 1961 edition, design by Hans Unger (who I've mentioned here and here). The little faceless men must allude to Isotype, the pictorial language developed by the Viennese logical philosopher Otto Neurath. I also have the first American hardback edition, 1959: 

The US version has a black face: Young doesn't mention race even in passing.

 

 

Wow. Just, wow.

Christopher Tayler offers 10 of the weirdest sentences in David Brooks's The Social Animal. The one with most relevance to this blog's areas of interest runs:

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.

But every one of them has something - fallacy, solecism, outright meaninglessness - to marvel at.

Monday morning Penguin: a footnote

First Penguin edition, 1958.

This is another bit of unfinished business: some time back I posted Joe McLaren's cover for a collection of essays by John Berger, published as part of the Penguin Great Ideas series. I mentioned at the time that I thought it was based on Fifties Pelicans; on his flickr stream David Pearson - in overall charge of the Great Ideas covers - confirmed that McLaren was paying tribute to Victor Reinganum.

Reinganum didn't do a vast number of book jackets, though they did include the first editions of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. For Penguin he did Spark's Memento Mori and this book, a drily readable guide to basic geology and palaeontology.

The cover is beautiful, I think; but oh, how quickly science-writing ages: only a brief, non-committal reference to the plausibility of Continental drift; mention of Fred Hoyle, but not the Big Bang - you don't need carbon-dating to place this in the Fifties, which is just as well since carbon dating wasn't available yet. H. H. Swinnerton was a Victorian (born 1875, so 80 when this was first published in 1955), and it shows. His chapter on volcanoes is entitled "Pluto's Portals"; and he ends the book by posing the question "Whither is all this tending?" - "all this" being, broadly, science and technology - and coming up with the answer: "The end cannot be imagined, but so long as Nature continues to hold her child upon her knee he may go forward with hope and confidence." The modern reader may wonder whether Nature has despaired of her child's behaviour and is now trying to slap some manners into him.

This edition crops up pretty often, and you should be able to find a decent example for less than £3: I paid slightly over the odds (£3.70 incl. p&p) on eBay.

 

Monday Penguin: Normal service resumed (?)

This blog has been updated very irregularly in recent months, for reasons you don't need to know; I'm hoping now to get back on to a more regular schedule, thanks to a daily intake of fluoxetine and Cadbury's Creme Eggs (I'm much more embarrassed about the latter).

To mark the relaunch, some unfinished business: appalling Iris Murdoch covers from the mid-Sixties. Lately, I came across a couple more on eBay - almost certainly not worth the money I paid, but not to have bought them would have been to leave an itch unscratched. Behold and marvel:

And when you're feeling strong enough:

The suspicion that Murdoch is being perverted into high-class Mills-and-Boonery is confirmed by the back cover copy: The Unicorn has "the depth and grandeur of some of the greatest of English romantic novels" (only "some of"? How damningly faint); while An Unofficial Rose "is in the great tradition of the English romantic novel; a love story that has not been debased by sentimentality". The whiff of condescension - Clever? Difficult? Dearie me, no - is overpowering.

All the covers in this set were designed by Raymond Hawkey; John Cole took most of the photographs, though An Unofficial Rose is by Adrian Flowers (an interesting footnote on him here).

Setting modesty aside...

...the latest issue of the London Review of Books includes my piece on Dennis Wheatley. Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription paywall, which means that non-subscribers have to go out and buy a copy.

Penguin: Dogface

First Penguin edition, 1966; cover design by C/F/F/G.

A minor by-product of the Cold War was the emergence of brainwashing as a device, or a theme, of literature - the somewhat hyperbolic assumption being that modern psychological techniques made it possible to alter or erase memories, beliefs, an entire personality. O'Brien's interrogation of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was an early instance; in Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity (1955), the members of the Identity Club have the unnerving hobby of picking up passers by and turning them into servants (more on that in a week or two). Other treatments were less concerned with the philosophical implications: an early variation on the theme crops up in Operation Pax (1951), one of Michael Innes's more thrillerish adventures, in which the villain has perfected a means - chemical, I think - of reducing nations to a state of passive subservience; Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1959) revolved around the brainwashing of a platoon of GIs by North Korea, with one of them being turned into a sleeper assassin; and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File (1962): the title is derived from a supposed acronym for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS, and the brainwashing of the narrator is the book's climax. In The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), published after Ian Fleming's death, Bond is brainwashed into trying to assassinate M; but the vogue was already fading.

The Dog It Was that Died was published in 1962, the year of The IPCRESS File and the first film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate. The protagonist is "Roger Farrar", a mildly overweight academic living in Dublin and researching the innocuous topic of the Irish use of the English language; but from the start it's clear that this isn't his real name, that he is on the run from something sinister back in England. In his previous life, Farrar worked at the Institute for Human Relations in Leeds, ostensibly an anodyne academic institution, in fact a government-backed centre for developing techniques to terrorise and control whole populations - brainwashing on the grand scale; now his employer, a fat functionary called Bosenwhite, wants him back.

I bought the book for its cover, not expecting much from the story, but really it's very good. True, the book's grand surprise, saved up for the last page - just who is Bosenwhite's agent in Dublin? - turns out to be no surprise at all; the details of the Institute's work kept too vague to makes Farrar's moral revulsion seem understandable. But many aspects of the book are briliantly done: Farrar's confusion and frustration as he feels his way into the arts of evasion and deceptions; the quaint pace and politeness of Dublin life, presented as an attractive alternative to English utilitarianism; the way Bosenwhite's bureaucratic good manners elide into chuckling sadism; a climactic brainwashing scene. I think I detect the influence of Michael Innes in the way the story combines ingenuity, whimsicality and existential anxiety; but it lacks the silliness and bagginess that often disfigure Innes.

The cover is a little mystifying, but still brilliant. C/F/F/G was Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, which only existed under that name for a few months - Gill went off to America, and in the early Seventies the rest of the gang became the design house Pentagram.

Copies aren't that rare - a decent one should set you back less than a fiver. Mine cost a pound, but that was years ago.