by Miller, Andy
The same might be said of the entire list. Because I had already forged a connection, presumed a familiarity, with every title on this piece of paper, they summoned up friends or conversations or specific moments from the past; but what lay behind the titles was a blank, and memories which ought to have cheered me instead induced prickles of embarrassment and even guilt, for they evoked little more than my own insincerity. Finally coming to terms with these books would be like reclaiming these far-flung moments and restoring their fidelity, or simply acknowledging and settling a debt.
I considered myself to be well-read. Could someone honestly call themselves well-read without reading Middlemarch, Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina? Probably not. However, this list was a start. With Middlemarch and The Master and Margarita behind me, it seemed possible that in the next few weeks, all these books could tumble. They would become part of the texture of my life as it was now. Even the thought of it was revitalising; more than that, it was a relief. I could begin to stop pretending.
Marx and Engels, for example. When I was seventeen, our school organised a week-long visit to Berlin. This was several years before the Wall came down. About a dozen sixth-formers made the trip. We stayed at a hotel in the West and at night went out to bars and strip-clubs off the Kurfürstendamm – well, the others did, including the teachers. I was much too puritanical. I stayed in my room and read Brighton Rock.
On two occasions, we crossed over to East Berlin, which I much preferred to the decadent West. Yes, it was dour and repressed – but I was too. I wish I could remember more about these excursions. I can dimly recollect long avenues of shabby apartment blocks lined with identical cars, and shops with sternly rectilinear window displays. Everything looked as though fashion and maintenance had abruptly ceased in the early 1960s, which of course they had.
If you were a tourist, the East German authorities obliged you to change twenty-five Deutsche Marks at the border. You were not permitted to carry this money back to the West at the end of your daytrip. In other words, while you were in East Berlin, you had to find something to spend twenty-five Marks on. In Alexanderplatz, my schoolmates converted their cash into beer and grainy strawberry ices. However, I was captivated by the State-run book and record shop, which had about four Melodiya Beatles and Pink Floyd cassettes for sale, and numerous hardbacks of Karl Marx translated into English. There was nothing modish or faux about these editions. They were big, no-nonsense bricks, with just the title on the dust jacket, bordered by orange stripes along the top and bottom, as though their designer still vaguely recalled a Penguin Library paperback he had seen decades earlier. I bought a copy of Capital and another volume called The Holy Family and smuggled them back home in my suitcase.
I’m sure I believed I might read these hefty Marxist tomes; I certainly did not buy them solely for the effect they might have on my mother. But the effect they did have on my mother was so electric and so immediately gratifying, that thereafter reading them never really entered the picture. There was no need. They were accessories to a half-formed left-wing conception of the world which I had no immediate urge to deepen. Besides, at a recent parents evening my mother had been informed in all seriousness by one teacher that me and my best friend Matthew Freedman were communists, so someone else was doing the work for us. (This notoriety was the result of a General Studies discussion in which we had ventured the heretical proposition that there might be some justification in the then-current Miners’ Strike.)
So twenty years later, when my mother discovered her only son loitering on a city street corner with The Communist Manifesto, it must have seemed, despite his toiling obediently for the capitalist system since graduation, accumulating a significant amount of property, and raising a child along doggedly bourgeois lines, like further evidence of his stubborn refusal to grow up. And – oh, Andrew – who is to say she was wrong?
Of course, then as now, although I was happy to be perceived as a communist, I had no serious yen to be one. This was not from a position of political principle but because of the effort required to first grasp and then assimilate a set of rules to which I would be expected to adhere. So instead I went with a liberal, left-of-centre position and told myself the half-truth that I had been more militant in my youth and that I had mellowed with age. In this, I was scrupulously in step with my generation, the one which spent thirteen years fretting at the lack of socialism in the New Labour government, yet which had made a journey of its own from youthful idealism to battered pragmatism in the face of political reality, career advancement and the school run.
With this journey behind me, I found it much harder to read The Communist Manifesto at thirty-seven than I would have done at seventeen, not because its philosophy was difficult to grasp but because it was true to life. The gloomy picture of the world it proposed might have seemed romantic to me then; now it felt dismayingly like the one I actually lived in.
Prior to The Communist Manifesto, I had read Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Ah, Bukowski. When I was in my early twenties, it seemed like everyone I knew – every male, I should say – read Bukowski. These men of my acquaintance listened to the Go-Betweens, drank Guinness from a straight glass and loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies. From their descriptions of his work and what was good about it, Bukowski sounded like precisely the kind of writer there would be no point in liking if everyone else liked him. So I never bothered.
All these years later, I had soaked up Post Office in little more than a day. Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a substitute postman and a drunk, gambled and screwed and occasionally made his mail round and then it was over: tick. The style was fragmentary and brutal. I was given to understand his other novels told a similar, if not identical, tale in a similar, if not identical, register. In an inversion of the old saying, when you’d read all Bukowski’s books, you’d read one of them; they were all postcards from the same place, scrawled in a defiantly shaky hand.
As a book about work, though, Post Office was even bleaker than The Communist Manifesto, which at least offered potential resolution, i.e. total destruction of the apparatus of capital. Henry Chinaski’s solution to the same problem was a cocktail of booze, horses and pussy. It would be nice to think the latter was at least an achievable goal but as Chinaski noted in the first few pages: ‘It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn’t get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn’t.’ And, figuratively at least, this too rang true with the world I found myself living in.
Work was preying on my mind. I had a good job in a successful business yet every day when I set off for the office, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Sonya’s lamentation from the closing scene of Uncle Vanya.2 And my subconscious seemed to have shuffled Post Office to the top of the pile along with The Communist Manifesto and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, suggesting my id urgently required my ego to look into books which might help make sense of this problem of not getting laid, figuratively speaking.
In the event, neither Post Office nor The Communist Manifesto offered much in the way of solace. That said, Post Office was a holiday brochure compared to the toil and hopelessness captured by The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the concluding instalment of this subliminal trilogy. Over the course of 600 pages, it catalogued the indignity of labour in painstaking, crushing detail.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is essential to the history of the British Left, both for what it says and what it symbolises. On the wall of the house in Hastings where it was written, in a flat above a bike shop, there is a blue plaque that states: ‘Robert Noonan, 1870–1911. Author as Robert Tressell of “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, The First Working-Class Novel.’ It is the story of a year in the life of a group of Mugsborough (i.e. Hastings) painters and decorators and their families. They are the philanthropists of the title and their ‘philanthropy’ is ironical; they practically give away their skills and strength to a system that perpetuates
their oppression – ‘The Great Money Trick’, as it is memorably laid out in the novel. Into their midst comes Frank Owen, a thinker and a Socialist, who tries to rouse his workmates from their unenlightened torpor. Robert Noonan was an accomplished plasterer and sign-painter, and an enthusiastic member of the Social Democratic Federation (a forerunner of the Labour Party). On Sundays, he was often to be seen preaching the word from a soapbox on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
For the Left, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a totemic document. It dramatises the class conflict of The Communist Manifesto in a domestic setting that is immediately recognisable to millions of working people all over the world. Better than that, it was written by a real painter and decorator – the characters and situations feel authentic because they are authentic. (‘I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of.’) Furthermore, the author was a committed activist who intended his book to ‘indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely – Socialism’. And, fifty years before such characters became commonplace on TV, it gave its readers a portrait of working-class life that was compassionate, salty and true. A TUC working group could not have come up with anything more effective.3
However, it isn’t all friendly associations and taproom banter. Tressell’s depiction of human fallibility, greed and treachery is unrelenting. I was particularly fascinated by the personality of the ‘journeyman-prophet’ Frank Owen, who seems to spend most of the novel in a state of perpetual rage and frustration, both at his masters’ deviousness and his workmates’ failure to comprehend ‘The Money Trick’, in spite of his repeated efforts to explain it to them during tea-breaks. If Post Office is an account of the working life of a man without principle, too dazed or apathetic or self-medicated to fundamentally change anything, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists suggests how much worse it is to be a man of principle trapped in the same system, to know with dreadful clarity what is oppressing and wasting you, but to be powerless to do anything about it, except proselytise and wriggle and rant.
We started well. As I progressed through the novel, though, fifty pages a day, I soon encountered a flaw – the book was obviously far too long. I started reading on a Tuesday; by Friday, nothing had really happened in the plot that had not already happened several times before, most of it on Tuesday. This was alarming, because The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a doorstop and the print was very small. At this rate, I would not be in the clear till the weekend after next. On and on and on it goes. Just like the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, say its admirers; but if I wanted the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, I could get it at work.
‘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 i
ts 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.’
