‘He do the Police in different voices’

In Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time recently someone remarked that the constant unannounced shifts of apparent speaker in The Waste Land make it read like the script for a radio play (a genre not yet invented in 1922).

The general idea that’s regularly put forward about the changing and indeterminate voice in modernist literary works is that it reflects the nature of experience in the new world of modernity, particularly after the First World War. We’d lost the Victorian sense of the security and stability of self and world and now experienced ourselves as constituted by the confusing diversity of discourses that passed through us.

I've never quite recognised that account of our experience. I don’t think I've ever experienced myself as an unstable assemblage of discourses; at the most I sometimes find my ‘inner speech’ incorporating quotes or enacting some style I've picked up from a speaker or writer. Certainly, it took me well into adulthood to arrive at a stable way of speaking – which accent was me, what register – but it was never as if there was no originating centre. It may actually be the case that in some sense we’re made out of the discourses we live amongst, but I never experienced myself like that.

Is the difference between Eliot and me simply that nearly a century has passed since 1922 and that by now we’re used to modernity with its cacophony of voices and its loss of a dominant authoritative voice – the confident enunciator we meet in the sentences of Victorian prose? Very obviously, with the 20th century intellectuals did experience a profound change of ambience: ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. Authoritative discourse no longer had its source in one ruling class but was dispersed – Bakhtin’s heteroglossia; one discourse was always ironised by juxtaposition with another. So writers’ sentences were less inclined to comport themselves as pronouncements of the last word and more inclined to be expressions of ‘what I'm thinking at the moment’ or presentations of possibly thinkable thoughts to which the author is making no definite commitment and in which only tentative illocutionary force is invested: i.e. the guy isn’t actually going to so far as himself saying what his sentences are saying.

Here’s the contrast as described by Bonamee Dobree in 1934 (Modern Prose Style). He quotes a ‘typical piece of nineteenth-century prose’ and says that

‘in its way it is excellent. But the rhythms and inflections are quite different from those of today: it consists, not of thoughts closely followed, not of ideas suggested, but of utterances, of pronouncements….we have the end-stopped phrase: there is a door banged at the end of each, and we feel as though we were on parade receiving orders.’ (225)

l like what Dobree says about what’s going on here (220-21):

‘To say, then, that the hall-mark of good modern prose style is an essential fidelity does not imply that writers of previous generations were charlatans and liars, only that they owed fidelity to other things. And it is here that the spirit of our age imposes itself upon our style. All the previous ages whose writers have been quoted or referred to here had something they could take for granted, and it never occurred to the older writers that they could not take themselves for granted. We can be sure of nothing; our civilization is threatened, even the simplest things we live by: we are on the verge of amazing changes. In our present confusion our only hope is to be scrupulously honest with ourselves, so honest as to doubt our own minds and the conclusions they arrive at. Most of us have ceased to believe, except provisionally, in truths, and we feel that what is important is not so much truth as the way our minds move towards truths. Therefore, to quote M. Cocteau again, 'Form must be the form of the mind. Not a way of saying things, but of thinking them. Perhaps that Is why we nowadays instinctively mistrust any one who pontificates: and, as a matter of experience, if we examine the writings of the pontificators, people skilled in 'a way of saying things', we invariably find that their style is bad, that falsity has crept in somewhere. The writer is not being faithful to the movement of his mind; he is taking things for granted, and he fills us of to-day with uneasiness.

‘We have, then, to judge of the integrity of a modern writer by this sense of himself that we feel he has. If we are to respond, he must (we suppose) be aware of himself as something a little uncertain in this shifting universe: he also is part of the material which he has to treat with respect: he must listen to himself, so to speak, to hear what he has to say. He must not pre- judge, or force an issue: we must be able to imagine that he is talking to himself. In no other way can he achieve a style, which is the sound of his voice, which is the man himself.’

Well, by the time we get to my generation we’ve got used to being sure of nothing – we’ve never known any other condition. So it’s understandable that we don’t identify with the sense of shock, disorientation and confusion that early modernist works are held to express.

On the other hand, it may be that those works aren’t expressing states of mind so much representing the state of the world, that they’re not saying the mind is made up of fragments but asserting that art must now, like our world, be made out of fragments, including, for Eliot, the usable remains of older cultures.

One result is works of wonderful beauty. The quotes from former ages in Eliot, and in Pound’s Cantos, glow like jewels set in drab material. The lines are enhanced by being lifted from their original contexts and stripped of their enunciatory function: we’re enabled to contemplate them as objects in their own right.

What it takes to run a good school

Some English schools that had, for whatever reason, experienced disastrous decline in performance have been taken over from their local education authorities and handed to other bodies to be given a fresh start and run as ‘academies’. These academies seem quite diverse, as do the outfits that run them. In some, perhaps most, business has the dominant say: a firm or group of businesses, for instance, might form a trust, provide some of the finance, appoint the head and determine the general character and strategy of the school.

The headteacher is likely to be chosen for being the sort of good manager or leader that businesses respect: one who motivates staff, gives all concerned a sense of having a stake, keeps standards high. In schools that were formerly run down, dispirited and out of control, this sort of new management, when it works, must bring huge relief and hope. In academies that set out to improve the education of children in the poorest and most disadvantaged areas, the importance of that transformation can’t be underestimated. Whether it really takes removal from local democratic control to achieve such change is a contentious issue but not the one that’s concerning me here.

Some academies seem to be doing well under that type of headteacher. In the end, though, that business model of leadership, motivation, purposefulness, determination and so on surely can’t be enough. Schools are about forming persons, and specifically their minds – what they know, how they think, their command of the public discourses of learning. They effect this formation by managing the students' encounters and interactions with knowledge, with the developed intellectual culture of the society and a wide range of its products. Learners have to be induced to move into difficult, strenuous engagement with the academic and arts disciplines; the scope of their knowledge, thinking and response has to be expanded out of all recognition and way beyond what would come about through ordinary exposure to life, television and the internet. School students need to develop along routes that can potentially lead to their being educated and cultured, to use the latter word in the unembarrassed way that, say, Russians do: the resources of intellectual culture – its habits and its knowledge – have to get internalised.

This must mean that besides a generically ‘motivating’ management, schools need intellectual leadership. I don’t know if the head himself or herself has to fill that role, but key teachers if not all teachers need to be philosophers. They need to have thought deeply about the purposes of education and what it is to acquire ease and familiarity within the main arts, science, social science and mathematical disciplines, what’s involved in the transition from being a kid on the street to someone who begins to be a mathematician or classical musician or historian, or at least who reads widely by choice and habitually has recourse to writing as a diverse means of expression, thought, discovery and invention.

Schools won’t get there simply by having some sort of generic ‘high standards’ for behaviour, attitude and assiduity, or even just an unspecified belief in the children (‘Yes, you can’) -- and then, for ‘content’, simply trusting to the government-provided programmes of studying and testing; they need to know what they’re doing in a deeper sense and to engage seriously with the nature of academic knowledge. The teachers need to be educated and cultured people with a desire to induct the young into the worlds in which they lead their own intellectual lives.

To resume

Now, what was I saying? I've been in Brittany for a month, no internet except occasional sessions with coffee in Bar le Roulis, Esquibien, facing the ocean, the ferry pulling out to Ile de Sein, the vast empty beach with greater black back gulls, hikers on the coast path…

Just in case you find that my ideas have radically changed over that interval, you might need to know about my reading:

Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist
Muriel Spark, The Abbess of Crewe (hilarious)
Tommy Steele, Bermondsey Boy
Amos Oz, A Song of Love and Darkness
Alan First, Night Soldiers (spies, 1930s, Le Carré-like, good book for long car ferry journeys)
Douglas Dunn, Selected Poems
Seth, George Sprott 1894-1975, a picture novella – big lovely present, thick card covers, 36 x 30 cm
Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, another memoir (like Steele)
For my French, a policier by Joseph Bialot – good for idiomatic dialogue, though I rapidly tire of crime fiction and haven’t bothered to finish it.

I won’t list the ones I took but didn’t read. I might have if it had rained a lot but the weather was either hot and lovely, too hot or just nice and great for walking the coast path, with occasional showers, mainly at night. The Finistere type of landscape is called la lande, translated ‘moor’: gorse, bracken, bramble, broom, heather, honeysuckle, ivy, with deer, rabbits, hawks, meadow pipits and swallows. My ideal house would have swallows to sharpen my sense of the onset of spring and winter because they are wonderful birds to watch.

The books that most unexpectedly impressed me was Tommy Steele’s autobiography. I read it because my research into the history of Walworth or Mina Road School relates to Bermondsey and Southwark at the time Tommy was living there. Bermondsey Boy was well written, funny, interesting and moving – I ended up liking and respecting the guy: he’s decent, talented in pursuits outside show business, intelligent – and literate because he missed a lot of (sec mod) school through illnesses and instead read because there was nothing else to do in hospital, indiscriminately and voraciously, almost like Amos Oz as a kid. Kenneth Allsop in The Angry Decade (1958) thought Tommy Steele was a healthy development after the charts had been dominated by American singers.

Might write more about one or two of the books now I'm back in business and things are quieter, it being late July.

Now I've got all my photos to go through and all those taken by the people who were with me and have posted them on PhotoBox.

Helvetica and theatre

Sitting at the computer writing blog stuff is a fine occupation when you’re not doing a lot of sitting at the computer otherwise, writing or preparing for writing (e.g. reading and analysing and making notes). But that’s what I have been doing because of the history research I'm involved in -- hence my recent poor showing here.

However.

I started a posting a few weeks ago saying that I'd been to the National Theatre – to see not a play (God, no) but an exhibition of James Ravilious’s photographs. Ravilious deserves a serious entry in himself but the point I wanted to make was about the National Theatre, that I've always felt a lack of affection for it and that part of the reason is its use of Helvetica as the house typeface. That link is to something I wrote about Helvetica before (right, when I was properly fulfilling my responsibilities as a blogger).


In that context I find Helvetica cold and corporate, inimical to thoughts of theatre’s excess. On the posters round the theatre and in tube stations and in the pages of the season’s programme booklet, all the different plays are announced in the same font of the same size, though differing in colour, alignment and orientation. The scheme evokes some bureaucrat’s masterplan: category Programme, subcategory Plays, item Individual Play. It’s not appropriate and smacks of executives and NHS hospital signs (they aren’t Helvetica but evoke the same spirit).

It’s a handsome typeface, of course, no doubt about it and it looks good against brutalist architecture.

But it doesn’t go with thoughts of the subtle variation of plays with their delicacies and crudenesses and wildnesses, where the spirit of buttoned-up self-satisfied Helveticaness is just one pole amongst the many that are set in dynamic tension. (That’s if you can have more than two poles.)

I suppose when Helvetica was first devised and issued it was exhilarating and Bauhausy. But by now it’s been tainted, like so many good modern things, through its Cold War appropriation by American capitalism. I think.

Constructivists at Tate Modern

Two Russian Constructivists, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova: the show ends this week, belatedly got there yesterday and now wish I had time to return for a longer look at some of the individual works.

Primarily painters, they were doing abstract works, including lovely drawings and linocuts, from the early days of the Revolution in 1917. What struck me in this exhibition, as in so many that show avant-garde artists who had theories, is what the captions and explanations never explain.

The blurbs – and the artists in the quotes – spell out is their ideas on what should go in a picture and what it should try to do in a technical sense: Rodchenko and Popova set out to be like engineers, ‘arranging materials scientifically and objectively, and producing art works as rationally as any other manufactured object’ (exhibition leaflet), banning representation, emphasising line over colour and texture. They talked about how lines meet, about how shapes interact with each other, how dynamism is created.

But for what? What was the whole enterprise for?

At one level it was to contribute to a new society, and in this respect the work seems heroic. Not only were their ways of working admirable (men and women were equally valued as artists; they contributed to the design of useful objects like textiles, packaging and buildings such as workers’ clubs), but one can imagine how important it would be in a revolution to promote a taste for new styles and a rejection of the hangovers of the earlier society as stuffy, reactionary and hideous.

But about straight works of art, especially paintings: what is a painting supposed to do when a viewer confronts it – or indeed when the painter is painting it? What is it that’s being made and what sort of happening is it that what is made induces?

In the absence of any clear answers from the artists (and the explanations of artists in general tend to be incoherent; I haven’t studied these two), we have the works to go by. My sense is that the pictures draw you into a parallel universe in which stuff goes on: relationships can be tracked, gentle transitions and abrupt changes happen, echoes and contrasts impress themselves. What for? No point in asking. These things exist; they are no more for anything than a tree is or a person’s unselfconscious smile or posture. They demand to be acknowledged as things that now exist and once didn’t and to be examined and explored like any other interesting and intricate thing that exists in the world. What’s especially mysterious about them is that they’re produced by deliberate human activity, yet their relationship to the person ‘behind’ them is unfathomable.

And in my theorising about art (and music), that’s as far as I can ever get. Ideas about expression, for instance, while relevant – there’s obviously something in them – never seem to explain the form taken by this work as opposed to works in general.

As for the experience of Rodchenko’s and Popova’s works? Abstract, striking, vigorous, exciting, intriguing and engaging to explore and get inside; and – I'm reduced to this – ravishingly beautiful.

More trees

Descending from Box Hill (see last posting) and White Hill into Mickleham, English oaks at their best. For me this is classic countryside as I've always imagined it.

Trees on Box Hill

Reading Oliver Rackham has made trees more interesting. On the heavily wooded Box Hill, which I went up the other day, fallen trees had been left lying and not cleared away. (The pics look much better if you click them.)

Rackham’s right. They grow again from the upturned root.

On that chalk hill a typical underside looks like this – it’s surprising how shallow tree roots often are:


But looking along the length of the fallen trunk the root mass seems like the source of whole new thicket.



David Hockney was sad recently on returning to a small beech wood in East Yorkshire that he regularly painted to find it had been felled by the owner .

Hockney saw this as a permanent loss to the landscape. But one of Rackham’s most insistent points (one also made by some respondents to the article) was that you don’t destroy a wood by chopping it down; only by grubbing out the roots. Provided you keep deer away, fresh shoots grow from the stumps and in a few years you have another wood. Indeed, most woods until a few generations ago were regularly felled because the main need was for the smaller growth that was used for firewood, poles and fencing. This was coppicing (see John Medway's blog on this).

Then the trees were allowed to grow again. Only certain trees were managed for their timber; that is, the mature trunks and branches that provided material for construction (furniture, buildings, carts etc.). The language made a clear distinction between timber and the smaller, more consumable wood that came from the younger growth.

I'm not sure if this is the wood in question – but it’s certainly the artist:

[source]

Hockney, of course, went to Bradford Grammar School, but that’s another story.