The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (8 page)

‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
is less a bourgeois novel of characters and plot (with the dangers of falsification that plot can entail), than a novel of the continuing processes of working life, its themes and variations
.' This is what was written in the novel's introduction and perhaps it was true. But it seemed like a handy retrospective gloss to apply to a story that is noticeably repetitive and static, and at times overwrought and hectoring like its hero Frank Owen. Of course, to the true Socialist the novel itself is a suspect item, a bauble of the bourgeoisie which does no more than reflect and reinforce the corrupt values of that class (the true Socialist might, with some justification, point to my mountains of unread books as proof of this phenomenon). Plot is a necessary sacrifice in the struggle to create art that is not compromised by bourgeois sensibilities and modes of expression. Fair enough. But, however noble in intention, this does seem like a sure-fire method of producing a lot of boring novels.
⁴

Noonan's original manuscript was a quarter of a million words long – three times the length of the book you are reading. It was impossible to find anyone willing to publish it in unexpurgated form and Noonan died in 1911 without ever seeing his novel in print. After his death, his daughter Kathleen sold all rights in her father's work to the publisher Grant Richards for the sum of £25. In 1914, Richards produced a first edition of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,
which slashed 100,000 words from the text. It was priced at six shillings, too much for a housepainter to afford. Reviews were mostly very positive. A second edition appeared four years later, retailing at a shilling but shorn of a further 60,000 words. Noonan's novel was now little more than a third of its intended length. It was not until 1955 that, thanks to the efforts of Hastings Labour Party member Fred Ball, a restored and uncut version of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
was made available to the general public via the Communist Party publisher Lawrence & Wishart.

In this version of events, the original publisher Grant Richards seems like a scoundrel. He exploits a dead man's daughter. He bowdlerises the novel, not once, but twice, despite which it becomes a bestseller. But hold on; if Richards had not recognised the book's power, describing it as ‘extraordinarily real' and ‘damnably subversive', the manuscript would have stayed sealed in a tin box under Kathleen Noonan's bed. Richards had been declared bankrupt in 1905 and was certainly no well-heeled Bloomsbury toff; and his cuts were intended to make the story more palatable to readers of popular working-class sagas by the likes of Somerset Maugham or Arnold Bennett, while bringing the book down to a length at which Richards could afford to publish it. The first edition cost a pricey six shillings because, in the words of the writer Travis Elborough, ‘
Richards understood that the novel's authenticity could enhance its cachet amongst reviewers, perhaps especially with the more affluent radicals who would, initially at least, be its main purchasers
.' And when, in 1918, Richards produced the yet-shorter second printing for a shilling, it was partly in response to the pleas of a Glasgow bookseller, whose potential customers included workers at the nearby Clydeside shipyard, an early home of trade union agitation.

In other words, from the very beginning, as a publisher Grant Richards did his utmost, within the system, to permit some version of Tressell's text to reach the widest possible readership. No one else would take the risk. He edited it not because he wished to suppress its message of working-class unity but because he sought to disseminate it – and because the book needed an edit. To reach the audience it deserved, from drawing room to factory floor, the novel was too long and repetitive; owing to the well-meaning efforts of those on the Left, arguably it remains so.

I am not saying one of these accounts is correct and the other incorrect. There is more than one way to look at history, as there is more than one way to interpret a book. As a writer and a liberal I am sentimentally inclined towards the former explanation; I respect the author's conception of his own work. But a reading of events which follows the money – philosophical rather than dogmatic Marxism – would conclude that the novel owes its national treasure status to the shrewd stewardship of Grant Richards. For forty years, the text which was passed from hand to hand, which spread by word of mouth in mills and workshops and barracks, which was subsequently circulated as agitprop by the nascent British Left, often in tandem with
The Communist Manifesto
, was Richards' dramatically shortened version. Only once its place in the hearts of the British public was thus assured could Lawrence & Wishart afford to take the liberty of introducing the much lengthier, purer rendition which is on sale in bookshops today.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
continues to be treasured, regularly making appearances in polls of best-loved British novels. But when we read the book of that title today, we are essentially reading a restored, unedited first draft; and the qualities that still endear it to us – its humour, its passion, its social(ist) conscience – remain so inimitable that they overcome the inevitable drag caused by its size and Tressell's reluctance to tell his story straightforwardly. I finished it, and admired it, but I felt it would not have made much difference had I started somewhere in the middle, or read my daily fifty pages from wherever the book happened to fall open. Perhaps one day someone might edit it properly –
but then perhaps it would lose its power.

At this point, I should declare an interest. If I seem to be overly concerned with the minutiae of the publishing process it is because I am, in my own way, a scoundrel like Grant Richards. If I am taking this matter of the manuscript rather personally, then I have to confess that it is personal. You may, or may not, know me as the author of two other books, but I'm afraid this is not a case of brotherly solicitude towards a fellow scribbler. If only.

At the time I was reading
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
, and working my way through the List of Betterment, I had a day job, like many writers do. It was this day job which was causing me such anguish and which had thrust these books to front of mind. Was I a plasterer? I was not. A postman? No. My hands were soft and lily-white; the only bags I carried were the ones underneath my eyes. A journalist, then? No.

I was an editor of books. Several times a week, I commuted to a publishing house in London and sat amidst many piles of paper, more and more each day, and tried to work out which were good and which were bad, which deserved to be published and which consigned to oblivion, which could be saved by judicious editing and which were fit only to be sent to the recycling depot to make yet more manuscripts. I am a writer. Every day, for money, I held the destinies of other writers in my hands. It was a chronic bout of double alienation.

‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.'

Oh Fred, oh Karl. If only it were that simple.

The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch

(Supplementary Book One –
Cooking with Pomiane
by Edouard de Pomiane)

‘I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad.'

The Sea, The Sea

‘There is no doubt that people in England are becoming much more adventurous in their eating habits, and snails appear quite tame compared with the bumble bees, grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants which I believe are selling well at some of the big stores.'

Cooking with Pomiane

How do you go about becoming a writer? I had paper and pencils. I had a notebook for ideas. I had an Amstrad PCW 9512 word processor. But I did not know anyone who made a living from their writing and I did not know how you went from sitting in front of a blank screen to sipping Bellinis with Jeanette Winterson. So, for rather longer than planned, I got a job in a bookshop. I signed up for six months and stayed for five years.

To be precise, it was a chain of bookshops. During my time, I worked in three different branches, the last of which was an elegant superstore in a posh quarter of West London. After a couple of years there, I was allowed to run the fiction section on the ground floor, a responsibility I loved. It was a spectacular sight, shelf after shelf of new paperbacks; prize-winners, potboilers, whodunits, whydunits and all points in-between. The manager of the shop took the view that we were the chain's London flagship store – the managers of the Hampstead and Charing Cross Road stores told their staff the same thing – and therefore we had to offer what he called ‘perfect stock'. ‘Perfect stock' meant never running out of
anything. Woe betide you if, on recommending Robertson Davies to a customer, he went to the shelf and discovered a space where, say,
The Lyre of Orpheus
should have been. In this atmosphere of edgy competitiveness, good retail sense often took a back seat to hawk-eyed completism. So when the previous incumbent suffered a nervous breakdown and went on semi-permanent sick leave, I had been the obvious candidate to succeed him.

Every day, I would patrol the fiction bays, roaming up and down with a publishers' stocklist, hunting out the telltale gaps. In the process, I inadvertently absorbed the names of many authors of whom I had never heard before. I also became familiar with the more obscure corners of the well-known writers' back catalogue. So, for instance, Muriel Spark became not just the author of
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, but also
The Public Image, The Takeover
and
Territorial Rights
. I quickly came to know the works of Miss Read, Hubert Selby Jr and Lisa St Aubin de Téran, though only by sight, spine-out. It was here and not at university that I learned all you really needed to appear indisputably bookish, i.e. titles and names. The shop was a finishing school for bullshitters.

In the never-ending pursuit of ‘perfect stock', one looked more kindly on those authors whose work did not sell rather than those whose work did. Of these perhaps my favourite was Iris Murdoch. No one ever bought any of her books, except
The Sea, The Sea
, which had won the Booker Prize in 1978. The popularity of the likes of Virginia Andrews, Louis de Bernières, Jilly Cooper or Robertson Davies posed a persistent threat to 100 per cent coverage. But every time you arrived at the tail-end of ‘M', stocklist in hand, you could be certain of finding
The Black Prince, Henry and Cato, A Severed Head, et al.
, exactly where you last left them. And this had the notable side-effect of giving you an easy fluency – a superficial depth of knowledge – in Dame Iris's entire oeuvre.

I met my future wife in that shop. I also met Morrissey, Dustin Hoffman and Princess Diana.
¹
And because we were on the publishers' promotional circuit, I also made the brief acquaintance of a lot of writers, amongst them Iris Murdoch. At a Booker anniversary evening, she gave a reading from
The Sea, The Sea
to an audience of about two dozen people in front of the gardening books upstairs.
²
Dame Iris was petite, with white hair and an impish smile, and she appeared to have come to the reading in her slippers.

‘I love your work,' I told her, which was something one said fairly often to visiting authors but which on this occasion had the merit of being wholly misleading yet completely true.

All this came back to me as I began
The Sea, The Sea
. However, these feelings of nostalgia, guilt and remorse – or was it pride? – were soon swept away in a wash of bewilderment. Although the prose was bright and clear, and the scenery reassuringly English and domestic, this was quite the most head-scratching of all the novels I had tried so far. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was one weird book.

The narrator is a retired theatre director called Charles Arrowby. The story begins just as he has moved from London to a town on the edge of the North Sea, taking up residence in a ramshackle house called Shruff End, where he plans to write
his memoirs – the book we are reading – and ‘
to repent of a life of egoism . . . I shall abjure magic and become a hermit
'. To this end he catalogues, in the fruitiest tones imaginable, his every swim, thought and meal. (‘
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies
.') These early pages of
The Sea, The Sea
were transparent enough. Relocating to the coast in search of a profound life change, making lists of food and drink in fiddle-faddling detail: the man was a buffoon.

However, the novel soon spins off into a kind of insanity, as Arrowby's self-obsession runs wild. He sees, or hallucinates, monsters from the deep. He is visited by a succession of friends and associates from London, who come and go seemingly at will. He indulges a renewed passion for his childhood sweetheart Hartley, who coincidentally lives in the nearby town with her husband. Is this really happening or not? The marriage is violent and unhappy, he tells us, but is it? She clearly wants Arrowby to leave them alone. Her adoptive son turns up, just like that. Then, using the son as bait, Arrowby kidnaps her. Meanwhile, he relays all this madness to the reader in a rococo monologue comprised of philosophical
aperçus
, finely-wrought pen-portraits of the sea, the sea, and periodic descriptions of really horrible meals.

It was the meals I found most perplexing. As noted earlier, food was not my strong point. I had some enthusiasm for the stuff – it keeps one alive, after all – but little knowledge; I had never really learned to cook properly. So, when presented with some of Arrowby's more bumptious menus (‘
I imagined that the only book I would ever publish would be a cookery book
!'), I was at a loss to know what they stood for. Was this fine dining or foul? For example, on
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