Classic Books: The Remains of the Day

This is probably the most memorable of the novels I studied at postgraduate level. It is the most well executed example I know of a book where almost all of the action takes place underneath the surface. At first reading it’s banal, but every line crackles with significance.

Mr Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, takes a brief motoring holiday through the Home Counties. He narrates as though speaking to a fellow professional of the time, and assumes that you share his knowledge and general opinions: ‘How often have you known it…’ ‘You will understand…’ ‘You will not dispute, I presume…’ It could be a monograph for the Hayes Society, that society of butlers with which Stevens is in such intellectual conflict.  

Long chunks of the narrative are filled with Stevens’s opinions on aspects of his profession, such as the importance of good silver polishing, the best way of serving at table when only two diners are present; and most of all, what makes a great butler. This could potentially make for a very boring read, and my tutor Michael Schmidt said that Stevens is a very dull narrator. I disagree. Stevens is not a dull narrator. His pedantry and preconceptions lead to many light moments, some laugh-out-loud funny (as when he considers escaping the attentions of Miss Kenton by climbing out of the French windows) others more subtle.

It would be so easy, though, for Stevens to have become a stock comic butler, but Ishiguro ensures that he never does. He gives the butler many human touches: Stevens enjoys the odd pint of beer or cider, and likes trashy novels as well as travelogues of the English countryside. It’s these little details that make him more real, and give his story the power to move us.

Another way in which Stevens differs from stereotype is his attitude towards his profession. Right at the beginning, he tells us that ‘there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition merely for its own sake.’ Stevens sees himself as a moderniser. His father’s generation viewed the world as a ladder, with the great aristocratic families at the top; one’s objective as a butler should be to work for the richest, most powerful family in the land, getting as high up the ziggurat as one can.  

Stevens, however, sees the world as a wheel: at the centre of this wheel are the people guiding the progress of humankind, who aren’t necessarily the people with the most distinguished aristocratic pedigree. There’s a moral dimension. ‘It would have been seen as a far worthier calling to serve a gentleman such as Mr George Ketteridge,’ Stevens tells us, ‘who, however humble his beginnings, has made an undeniable contribution to the future well-being of the empire, than any gentleman, however aristocratic his origin, who idled away his time in clubs or on golf courses.’ To serve such a gentleman is to ’serve humanity.’

A running joke throughout The Remains of the Day is Stevens’s attempts to come to terms with the new phenomenon of ‘bantering’. Accustomed to treating his superiors with politeness, Stevens has to reconsider when the landlord of his local tells him that ‘were he an American bartender, he would not be chatting to us in that friendly, but ever-courteous manner of his, but instead would be assaulting us with crude references to our vices and failings, calling us drunks and all manner of such names, in order to fulfill the role expected of him by his customers.’ Stevens tries many times to formulate a ’bantering remark’ only to be met with confusion. The joke will come to have a poignant significance, as you’ll see.

He motors out into a world that has undergone profound changes since Stevens’s heyday at Darlington Hall. Stevens himself, with his cast-off suits and his flawless Queen’s English, stands out in the provincial south, whose locals react to him with reverence and bemusement. Although Stevens is vocal and prolix about his thirty-year service to Lord Darlington in his narrative, he is cagey when people ask him about the man. It’s clear that Darlington is one of many aristocrats whose reputation was blackened by the war. Stevens, in his prose, acts like a harrassed spokesman for a dodgy multinational on this subject: but his repeated justifications, both of Darlington and his long service to the lord, can’t obscure the fact that Darlington was at best a fool and at worst a sympathiser of Nazism. Darlington is at the hub of the wheel: but he is turning it backwards.

Throughout the novel, Stevens defines what makes a great butler as a quality of dignity, and muses on what this ‘dignity’ might comprise. There is his classic, perhaps apocryphal story of the butler of the colonies who calmly and unseen shoots a tiger that has crept into the house and then has a discreet word with the master: ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.’ There is the example of Stevens himself, who reacts to his father’s death with unblinking professionalism; the old man expires during a busy social occasion at the Hall, where (as always) events of global significance are taking place. Stevens defines dignity as the ‘ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits’; the professional self will be discarded only when the butler is ‘entirely alone.’ (Of course, we’ve looked at professional ‘doubling’ before.)

Not all of Stevens’s ideas are wrong, there is something that separates the gentleman from the mere human male. But writers studying the will to dominate must also understand the will to submit. It’s not only guns and secret police that keep the dictatorship in power. It’s something that gives us the glow we get from doing even the lowliest professional job for the most corrupt company. It’s the tragedy of The Remains of the Day that Stevens gives in entirely to this instinct for submission – at the expense of far more important things.

Stevens continually dismisses the prospect of a relationship with his housekeeper, Miss Kenton. There’s a very moving scene where Stevens and Kenton discuss the case of a couple of staff who have run away from Darlington Hall to get married. Speaking of the errant maid, Miss Kenton says: ‘So many young women like her throw away their chances, and for what?’ The parallel with Stevens is clear: he’s committed the much more dubious choice of throwing away his and Miss Kenton’s chance of love for the sake of his career. When, at the end of the book, Miss Kenton wonders aloud what kind of ‘life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens’ it causes Stevens to finally make explicit what has always been under the surface: ‘Indeed – and why should I not admit it? – at that moment, my heart was breaking.’ Michael Schmidt compares this moment to that in Austen’s Emma when Emma Woodhouse realises that she has sacrificed her happiness for other people’s.

The final blow for Stevens comes with his encounter with Harry Smith, a democratic socialist who challenges the butler’s idea of dignity: ‘If Hitler had had things his way, we’d just be slaves now. The whole world would be a few masters and millions upon millions of slaves. And I don’t need to remind anyone here, there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave.’ Later, discussing Lord Darlington with an outsider for the first time, Stevens says of his old master that at least he made his own mistakes: ‘I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?’ In this moment of despair, you nevertheless get the sense that Stevens has learned something: it’s too late of course, but perhaps late is always better than never.

The Great Silence

My review of Juliet Nicolson’s compelling social history is now available at 3:AM.

The Importance of Indiscretion

I first came across Tom Driberg in his fictionalised cameo of Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm. His classic 1960s London crime novel introduces Lord Teddy Thursby, a hard-living peer who becomes involved with the gangster Harry Starks. At first the two hit it off – ‘His strong-arm stuff can get him respect,’ Thursby says, ‘but friends like me can get him respectability’ – but the lord soon becomes dragged into Starks’s crimes. The first hint that Thursby is out of his depth comes when Driberg, with whom he enjoys a cross-party friendship, warns: ‘Be careful, Teddy.’ It jolts him. ‘Driberg urging caution is not a good sign.’

There are passages in The Long Firm that read like homage to Francis Wheen’s remarkable biography of Driberg: the letter from Thursby’s wife demanding recompense for their sham marriage is in parts word for word the same as a letter written to Driberg from his enstranged companion. The story of ‘Chips’ Channon, with a wink and nudge, showing the new MPs where the Westminster toilets are (‘the most important rooms’) appears in both books.

Wheen’s biography is as warm and vivid as his book on Marx and his social histories, but there is a fresh, raw quality to the writing that you don’t see in his later works. It’s a tone that allows him to do justice to the life. Radical Labour MP Tom Driberg won a scholarship to Oxford and wrote prolific amounts of journalism before going into politics. The cliche of someone having a ‘ringside seat of history’ seems true of Driberg. Wheen takes us through the party decade of the 1920s right up to Swinging London.

Though he was a hedonist and gossip columnist, Driberg’s life wasn’t all vile bodies and bright young things. Like many people in the late 1930s, he wasn’t convinced that there would be a war, but unlike many observers of the time he was able to recognise the threat of fascism. It was an isolated position to be in at a time when much of the ruling class approved of the European dictators, the Daily Mail screamed ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ and Chamberlain’s appeasement policies were widely admired. Returning from the Spanish Civil War when it was clear that the republicans would be defeated, Driberg was disgusted at having to cover a celebration of Franco’s victory thrown by the general’s apologists and supporters at Queen’s Hall.

Franco was described at the meeting as ‘Our generalissimo’, ‘A military officer as honest and patriotic as any anywhere’, ‘Our ruler and guide’ and ‘The heaven-sent chieftain’. The only moment Tom enjoyed was when a meek little man stood up and asked quietly: ‘Might a member of the public denounce you as traitors?’ The answer was no: the revellers shouted ‘Throw him out!’, and out he went.  

Later, Driberg saw Buchenwald.

He was never popular with the establishment. On his death, the rightwing press smeared him as a KGB spy. Obituaries made a great deal of his sexual promiscuity. As a gay man Driberg had to deal with a society that had criminalised his love life, but he managed to enjoy rich, varied and constant liaisons despite the dangers of the time. The Torygraph’s Paul Johnson wondered, if Driberg had to be gay, why he had to be so proud about it. Gay people worthy of respect were ‘those pathetic figures, like the late E. M. Forster, for whom homosexuality was a lifelong burden and shame, and who agonised about its moral consequences.’

At this point you have to shake your head and remind yourself this was only about thirty years ago. Johnson then compared the Good Homosexual, E. M. Forster, with the Bad Homosexual, Tom Driberg:

From first to last, Driberg was a homosexual philanderer of a most pertinacious and indefatigable kind, wholly shameless, without the smallest scruple or remorse, utterly regardless of the feelings of or consequences to his partners, determined on the crudest and most frequent form of carnal satisfaction to the exclusion of any other consideration whatever: a Queers’ Casanova.

Wheen could have gone on to point out that Johnson reflected attitudes of the time. Even the supporters of legalising homosexuality argued that it was an inferior, evil thing: why add to the miseries of gays by persecuting them through the courts? Peter Tatchell remembered that ”The tone of the parliamentary debate alternated between vicious homophobia on one side and patronising, apologetic tolerance on the other.’ Geraldine Bedell in the Observer has an illuminating piece about the 1967 debate:

No one mentioned equality or love. The consistent position was that homosexuals were pitiful and in need of Christian compassion. [Leo] Abse argues now that much of this was tactical. ‘The thrust of all the arguments we put to get it was, ‘Look, these people, these gays, poor gays, they can’t have a wife, they can’t have children, it’s a terrible life. You are happy family men. You’ve got everything. Have some charity.’ Nobody knew better than I what bloody nonsense that was.

The attitude of the reformists was: okay, we will give you equality, but you must remember that your sexuality is essentially evil, and you must hate yourself for it for the rest of your days. Driberg broke the rules: ‘the wearisomely persistent rightwing misconception’ that ’socialists ought never to enjoy themselves’.

The conventional wisdom was that it was okay to be a deviant or an outsider, as long as one does not enjoy it. You can see the echoes of this sinister fallacy in the debate on ’New Atheism’.

The Great Underground Myth: Why Self Publishing Doesn’t Work

My editor at 3:AM, Andrew Gallix, asked me to write a longer piece about self publishing based on this post. Here’s the result.

Update: The author Henry Baum has written a response.

The Manufacture Of Outrage

The self-appointed guardians of speaking truth to power have hosted a long piece by reporter Jonathan Cook, who compares the recent Medialens book with journalist Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News. Naturally (it would not have been published on the site otherwise) Cook raves about the two Davids’ masterpiece of conspiratorial binary thinking while dumping on Davies’s reality-based look at how the media works.

Don’t read Cook’s entire piece, it is tedious beyond belief, but in it he does make one interesting point about this year’s expenses scandal. Here it is:

It is interesting that the revelations about the British MPs emerged in the immediate wake of a far more important scandal involving the banks’ extortion of western governments to save themselves from liquidation, and the later feathering of their own nests from public finances. Whether it was the goal or not, the trickle of reports of parliamentary graft over several months very effectively distracted attention in Britain both from the banks’ shocking behaviour and forestalled a tentative debate about the profound crisis facing corporate capitalism. 

In addition, a Chomskian might suspect that the timing of the attack on our elected representatives, using information leaked to the establishment’s favourite newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, had a beneficial consequence for the embattled finance sector. With their own integrity in question, British MPs and ministers lost the moral high ground and with it any hope, admittedly already feeble, of turning on the bankers. With the parliamentary system in crisis, the banking system faced little threat of significant reform, which would have required an unprecedented assertion of political will. 

Even efforts to make the banks more accountable lost momentum during this period. In fact, while our elected representatives were being flayed by the media, the bankers quietly went back to business as normal. By personalising the issue of graft and directing popular anger at a few individuals – at first, the most visible bankers and then many MPs – the economic system itself was given a reprieve from a serious debate about its merits and failings.

This does make a certain amount of sense to me. The spectacle of a wealthy elite being bailed out by the public after gambling the future of the economy on other people’s money looked like becoming a catalyst for real democratic reform of capitalism. Then came the Torygraph’s revelations – and the public and commentariat, stampeding with anger about Fred the Shred and the con of the free market, obediently turned round and stampeded in the opposite direction. Relatively minor public sector graft has overshadowed the greater crimes of the banks.

The expenses scandal could have broken at any time. Lembit Opik MP claimed in the Observer that ‘The expenses system was set up as a salary substitute. MPs were told that overtly.’ Welcome to human nature! (We always say we want our politicians to be human – yet we hate it, when they are.) Even the worst offenders, like David Wiltshire MP, have ripped off very little compared to the Telegraph’s owners, a pair of reclusive twins who live on a tax haven so they don’t have to contribute to a society their newspaper purports to represent.

There was a lot of big talk about cracking down on bonuses and tax havens when the markets fell. But now the champagne pyramids are back up in Square Mile bars and, at least in this country, populist reforms have been quietly forgotten. It’s business as usual, except it’s on your tab. It will be business as usual until the next huge disaster.

What does this tell us about the press? Chomsky said the role of the media was to manufacture consent. In the UK, it looks more like the manufacture of outrage.

King of the Novel

My review of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is now available at 3:AM.

The Future Of Self Publishing

Big news in publishing this week is that US mainstream publisher Harlequin has launched a self-publishing imprint called Harlequin Horizons. If you’re not familiar with the exciting new paradigm of self-publishing, the way it works is that authors pay a publisher to produce their books, regardless of quality. In this case, aspiring writers will be paying a large corporation to produce their books.

Some of you might be wondering how this is different from vanity publishing. The answer is: ‘It just is’.

Jane Smith has written a couple of fine posts about Harlequin’s idea; she has also looked at the first tentative alliances between corporate and vanity publishing (vanity publishing is useful to suits out to make a profit, for all kinds of reasons).

She has also recommended the best comment I’ve seen on the whole self-publishing idea. It’s from a writer called Stacia Kane and derives from a earlier post of Kane’s. Read it all. It really could be the last word on the whole mess. 

When self-publishing becomes the only option, only the rich will be able to publish. When publishers can make more money taking cash from aspiring writers than by selling books to the public, writers and readers both suffer. Writers who can’t afford to publish will be lost, or we’ll have to go back to the 18th century model and whore ourselves out to rich ‘patrons’ who might agree to pay for our publishing—not pay us, but pay to produce the books themselves.

Imagine a world where the only books on the shelves are those written by people with enough money to pay to have them published. Very little quality control, no attention paid to whether or not the book is actually worthwhile. How much fun will reading be then?

We’d have books written exclusively by those who could afford it. Much like in the 18th century, when so many books were diaries of some peeress’s trip through Europe with titles like, ‘My Gleanings.’…  I know I can’t wait for a world where books written by those from other cultures have no chance to be translated into English and released here, when we become even more ignorant of the lives of those in the world outside because there’s no way to get their books in front of English-speaking audiences. Oh, and of course, given that self-published books tend to be much more expensive, thanks to POD technology, I can’t wait for a world when reading and books are even less available to the poor. When they don’t have the same opportunities thanks to their inability to get hold of books.

Oh, what’s that you say? Oh, right. The internet will provide all of that. Of course. Because I know when I want something to read I’d much rather spend hours and hours slogging around online looking for something decent than just go to a bookstore. I know people who can’t afford books totally have the money for laptops and ereaders and the internet. So in seeking to democratize literature, what you are actually doing is STEALING IT from those less fortunate than you.

We’d also have a lot more unreadable books. I’m sorry, but it’s true. For every excellent work of self-published fiction–and they are out there, make no mistake–and for every one that’s not bad, just not terribly polished or professional or interesting, there are dozens of horrible ones. Really.

Let’s not forget that the way most people learn proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling isn’t through school. I mean, we do learn those things at school, but we develop those skills by reading. So you tell me, how literate will we be as a society when there are no professionally written books? When there are no people to judge if a work is even readable or not before it gets published? When anything goes? Would you like to go back to the middle ages, when words were just spelled however they sounded? Because I wouldn’t.

The idea of self-publishing as a new, democratic, egalitarian model is one of the greatest underground publishing myths of our time.

Bad Penny Blues

My review of Cathi Unsworth’s London noir novel is now available at 3:AM.

Monkey Tennis

‘It had to be a two-word pitch,’ Steve Coogan said, ‘that created an immediate visual image.’ He’s talking about the classic Alan Partridge scene in which the TV presenter, down on his luck and living in a TravelTavern, meets with BBC commissioning editor Tony Hayers with the aim of securing a second series of his chat show. After Hayers tells him straight out that this won’t happen, Alan produces a dossier of ideas for potential programmes that get weaker and sillier as he works his way down the list. An increasingly amused and bewildered Hayers turns down all these ideas as well. In panicky desperation, Alan pushes the folder to one side and starts pitching new titles off the top of his head. Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank, Inner City Sumo (‘If you don’t do it, Sky will’) A Partridge Amongst the Pigeons - all are rejected by Hayers. Finally, Alan gathers his thoughts and manages to summon up one final pitch: ‘Monkey Tennis?’

It’s a classic scene, one that still makes me smile when I think about it. Still, that icon of Middle England may have (needless to say) the last laugh. This week’s Popbitch features a list of real life upcoming TV shows. It may be bullshit, a mistake or a parody but somehow I doubt it. Here they are:

‘Maggot’s on a Mission’ - Maggot from Goldie Lookin’ Chain tackles environmental myths, dressed in a furry green suit.

‘Muslim Driving School’ – Hilarious tales of Muslim women learning to drive.

‘A Band For Britain’ - Sue Perkins gets to recruit a brass band!

‘Alan Yentob on Las Vegas’ - Cerebral BBC arts commentator wants a free trip to Las Vegas. Sorry, is obviously the right person to analyse Sin City.

Finally, there’s apparently going to be a reality show called ‘Clink Cuisine’ featuring cooking in prison – which was the exact title for one of Alan’s risible ideas. Apparently BBC One Controller Peter Fincham once quipped that he had ‘always said quite a few of those shows would have been commissioned’.

Cultural Advancements Make Benefit Glorious City Manchester

Kate Feld links, with justifiable triumphalism, to a Guardian piece by Jerome de Groot that raves about Manchester’s thriving litscene. Universities have brought in talented names and developed strong creative writing courses with public debates and functions. Workshops and literary magazines have flourished like bindweed. But that’s only part of the picture: ’live and grassroots writing is where Manchester really comes into its own.’

The many writing movements in the city support speakeasies, literary salons, readings, musical events, open mic evenings, online publishing, poetry slams; there is a thriving magazine and blog scene (as the Guide observed back in 2007). The city’s literati are young, hip and hungry, and writing in an enviably diverse range of styles and media. I’ve seen short stories told by Powerpoint, cabaret and performance poetry in abandoned mills. There are radical left newsgroups and resident dreamers writing Rainy City Stories; hip-hop performers and buskers and surrealist novelists and women’s writing groups and multiple festivals and DJs and art car boot sales and exciting venues. There are excellent Manchester magazines and journals like if p then q, Transmission, Geeek, and the Manchester Review, mixing Manchester-based writing with international authors, commentators and artists.

Our city is well known for ridiculous hype but for once the hype has substance. Trust me on this.

I’m a Londoner by birth and a Mancunian by adoption. The litscene is a hundred times bigger and better than it was when I first started following it five years or so ago. The Arts Council funded, box-ticking, hoop-jumping hack slams have vanished. They have been replaced by strong and diverse nights run by intelligent, creative artists and promoters who aren’t afraid to say something serious. As a result attendance is higher and wider. The contemporary complaint about modern spoken word nights is that the venue is too small. The room is like a Glasto moshpit and chairs are lost on the three-second rule. The nights are long and intoxicated and people attend for pleasure, not duty or networking.

The people who made this possible are too legion to list. Few receive assistance from the Arts Council or any body like it. I’ll name just one: the phenomenal John G Hall.

Of course it’s not all perfect, there are duds, creeps and morons in Manchester’s litscene just like in any other place. But things are better here than I’ve ever known them.

Occasionally I feel this weird obligation to move to London. Then I remember the Cornerhouse, the cosmopolitan spine, the Fallowfield Loop in its early evening gold. And, do you know, the smoke feels a little less like the place I was born.

City of Manchester: all the other cities have inferior potassium