A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  What Hardy's ‘pessimism’ tells us is that we should indeed look at things from all angles. Nor should we flinch from what may seem frightening – our salvation may depend on it. He put this very well in one of his poems:

  If way to the better there be

  It exacts a full look at the worst.

  There may be a better world to come. But we shall never get there unless we make an honest assessment (however painful) of where we are. Pessimistic? No. Realistic? Yes.

  What we think of as progress may not be progress. What we think of as a more efficient world may be a world headed for self-destruction. Hardy's is a pessimistic world view which instructs us to think again about our own world view. And that, very simply, is why we value him as the great writer he is. That and the fact that he writes so well, packaging his pessimism so wonderfully.

  CHAPTER 25

  Dangerous Books

  LITERATURE AND THE CENSOR

  Authorities, everywhere and at every period of history, are always nervous about books, regarding them as naturally subversive and potential dangers to the state. Plato, famously, establishes the security of his ideal Republic by kicking out all the poets.

  And so on through the ages. At the creative edge, where great writers work, there is always the professional hazard of incurring the wrath of those currently in power. We can draw up an impressive list of martyrs to the literary cause. As we saw in Chapter 12, John Bunyan wrote most of his great work, The Pilgrim's Progress, in Bedford prison; earlier, Cervantes too had hit on the idea for Don Quixote while languishing in prison. Daniel Defoe (Chapter 13) stood in the stocks for a satirical poem he wrote (legend has it sympathetic onlookers threw flowers, rather than rotten eggs). In our own time, Salman Rushdie (Chapter 36) spent a decade in safe houses for a satirical novel he dared to write. Alexander Solzhenitsysn composed great works in his head while rotting for eight years in the Soviet Gulag after his arrest in 1945. After the 1660 Restoration, John Milton (Chapter 10) had to go on the run, and his writings were ordered to be burned. It was, of course, Milton who, in his great work on freedom of expression, Areopagitica (1644), proclaimed:

  As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself …

  This is commonly paraphrased as, ‘Where books are burned, men are burned’.

  Different societies come down in different ways on ‘dangerous’ books, as a comparison of France, Russia, the USA, Germany and Britain will illustrate. Each has made war on literature, or imposed restrictions on its freedom, in its own unique way.

  The French way is conditioned by the defining event in the country's history, the Revolution of 1789. The pre-revolutionary government (the Ancient Régime) maintained an iron grip on publication: every book required a ‘privilege’ – state permission – to exist. Unprivileged, ‘under-the-cloak’ works, such as Voltaire's Candide (1759), served the revolutionaries as weapons. More so if they were written abroad by Enlightenment (that is, ‘free-thinking’) writers and, as was Candide, lobbed over the border into France like ideological hand grenades. The novel, whose full title was translated in English as Candide: or, All for the Best, tells the story of a naïve youth who has been brought up to believe everything he is told – exactly the kind of citizen the authorities like to have. Voltaire thought otherwise.

  With the Revolution in France, freedom of expression, and the right to hold any opinion – rights which had so helped the cause – were proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Following Napoleon's takeover France became more restrictive, but always less so than its neighbour and great foe, England.

  In 1857 two works were published in France, their authors being being immediately prosecuted in trials that were to have huge consequences for world literature. Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire's verse collection Les Fleurs du mal (‘The Flowers of Evil’) were accused of ‘outraging public decency’. In Flaubert's case the alleged outrage was that his novel endorsed adultery. The offence in Baudelaire's case is summed up in the provocative title, which of course is exactly what the poet intended. The French phrase is ‘épater le bourgeois’ – ‘scandalise the middle classes’. Flaubert was acquitted. Baudelaire incurred a small fine and six of his poems were banned – otherwise, the book survived.

  The trial of these works (now high classics of French literature) created an open zone for the literature of their country. Writers such as Émile Zola – translations of whose novels were ferociously suppressed in the English-speaking world with punishments of prison sentences – were free to take literature to new places. They did.

  It was freedom for not just French writers. Many British and American authors (D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) published works in Paris, between the two world wars, which were wholly unpublishable in their home countries. James Joyce's Ulysses is a prime example. The novel was first published in book form in Paris in 1922 and, after a trial, eleven years later in the USA (on the perverse legal conclusion that it was ‘emetic’, not ‘erotic’). Britain lifted its ban on Ulysses a few years later, in 1936. It was never actually banned in Ireland. It simply was never available.

  During the Second World War, great French writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet contrived to produce works allegorically attacking the Germans occupying their country – notably Camus's L'Étranger (1942; published in English as The Outsider) and Sartre's Huis Clos (1945; No Exit). Camus's novel, with its title meaning ‘the stranger’ or ‘the foreigner’, can be seen as reflecting the hated foreigners who had taken over his country. Sartre's play has three characters, after death, imprisoned with each other for eternity. Hell, they discover, is ‘other people’. It was written in a different kind of prison: German occupation.

  Traditional Gallic freedoms established themselves after the Second World War. Ironically the liberations in the English-speaking world followed trials, in 1959 and 1960, of a novel that had been published, without protest or scandal, in Paris thirty years earlier – Lady Chatterley's Lover.

  Revolution was late coming to Russia. Nonetheless some of world literature's greatest works were conceived and published under the bureaucratic oppression of the Tsar's censors. Paradoxically – a paradox frequently observed in the history of literature – authors raised their game to evade their bumbling inspectors (a character slyly lampooned in Nikolai Gogol's play The Inspector-General of 1836). Subtlety and indirectness – artfulness, in a word – were employed in their critiques of society. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), for example, three brothers conspire to murder their obnoxious father. What was the Tsar known as to his people? ‘Little Father’. Anton Chekhov's plays similarly, if more nostalgically, chronicle the inner decay of the ruling class. In The Cherry Orchard (1904), the orchards are a symbol of beautiful futility, and they are being felled, making way not for something better, but for a new, uglier world. Chekhov is a master of literary ‘pathos’. Yes, of course things must change: history demands it. But must it be change for the worse?

  With a few textual ammendments, Chekhov's seditious comedies slipped past the Tsar's censors onto the stage. But soon after the Revolution in 1917, for Russian (now ‘Soviet’) authors one censorship was replaced by another, far more oppressive – that of Stalin. It persisted, more or less intensely and with the occasional ‘thaw’, until 1989. Using the devious skills of their predecessors, dissident writers like the poets Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and novelists like Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn contrived to create and (all too occasionally) publish great works under the very nose of the censors. Novels such as Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward (1968; a scathing satire on Stalinism as the tumour at the heart of Russia) were often circulated in ‘samizdat’ – clandestine typewritten form – much, one might recall, as early Christians in Rome kept their seditious manus
cript texts under their cloaks. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1958 and 1970 respectively. Will Russia without such censorship produce as great a literature? It will be interesting to see. It is one of the great literary experiments happening before our eyes today.

  The USA was founded by Puritans who brought with them a reverence for free expression and literacy. It was further enforced in 1787 with the Constitution whose first amendment enshrines freedom of speech in law. That freedom, however, has never been absolute and universal. Over the years the USA, a federation made up of many divergent states, wove a confused patchwork of tolerance and repression. A work of literature could be ‘banned in Boston’ (the phrase became proverbial) but selling like hot cakes in New York. Particularly where public libraries and local educational curricula are concerned, this patchiness (‘community standards’) is still a peculiarly American feature of the American literary environment.

  Authors in Germany historically enjoyed a relatively liberal regime, particularly so in the Weimar Republic of 1919–33. This was when writers like the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, with works such as The Threepenny Opera (from which comes the still popular song ‘Mack the Knife’) could create a uniquely political and revolutionary form of theatre which has left a lasting mark, worldwide. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, repression was tyrannic. The burning of books was as much part of the theatre of Nazism as the Nuremberg Rallies. The aim was to control the ‘mind’ of the population by denying it any sustenance not approved by the Party. It worked too well. No literature of the slightest historical value was produced for a dozen years. Worse still, Hitler's regime left a poisoned bequest when it ended in 1945. After the war, writers such as the novelist Günter Grass had the literary equivalent (as Grass put it) of literary bomb-blast rubble to work with.

  In Britain, until the eighteenth century the control was political, and an arm of the state. A writer who offended could find himself in the Tower of London, without due process of any law, or (like Defoe) consigned by the magistrate to the stocks. Writers were wise to be wary. Shakespeare, for example, sets none of his plays in England of the present day. Why? Because he was not merely a genius, but a careful genius.

  Censorship of the stage, particularly, is a long-running feature in Britain. Why? Because audiences are ‘gatherings’ and can easily become ‘mobs’. Censorship of the theatre remained in place until the 1960s. George Bernard Shaw was in constant battle with the Lord Chamberlain (whose office licensed all drama). Witty ‘Shavian’ plays such as Mrs Warren's Profession (1895), which mischievously portrays a house of ill repute as a legitimate commercial enterprise, had a hard time making it to the public stage. Shaw was a self-proclaimed supporter of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Attempts to stage plays such as Ibsen's Ghosts (which touched on the supremely dangerous topic of venereal disease) provoked scandal and inevitable bannings. Even in the 1950s, first performances of plays such as Samuel's Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Chapter 33) required the Lord Chamberlain's say-so. Small changes were required and duly supplied.

  Britain did not formalise censorship in law until 1857 (the same year that Madame Bovary went on trial in Paris). The first of a series of Obscene Publications Acts that Parliament passed that year was purest British fudge. A work of literature was deemed ‘obscene’ if it tended to ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’. Dickens satirically paraphrased the offence as anything which would ‘call a blush into the cheek of a young person’. Henry James called it ‘the tyranny of the young reader’. Morality – whether prosecuted in court or simply ‘the spirit of the age’ – ruled. Thomas Hardy gave up fiction altogether when in 1895 the Bishop of Wakefield burned his novel, Jude the Obscure (as usual, for condoning adultery), and published only inoffensive poetry for the last thirty years of his life. The ‘corrupt and deprave’ rule made the kind of novel he wanted to write impossible.

  Hardy's disciple, D.H. Lawrence, had the whole first edition of his novel The Rainbow judicially burned in 1915. It contained highly poeticised but wholly inoffensive (to our eyes) descriptions of sex, without a single four-letter word. After the war Lawrence left England, never to return. Those who stayed behind watched their step. E.M. Forster wrote and published many great novels (see Chapter 26). One novel he wrote around 1913, and circulated privately but didn't publish, was Maurice – a work that dealt, frankly, with his own gay sexuality. It would not see the light of print until 1971, after his death, when it had only historical interest.

  Canny British writers and publishers ‘self-censored’, as did Forster. When George Orwell tried to get Animal Farm into print in 1944 he could not find a publisher willing to take on a fable that attacked Britain's wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The whole literary establishment was, Orwell concluded, ‘gutless’. ‘Prudent’ is the word they would have used.

  The climate changed radically with the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, in 1960. In 1959 a new Obscene Publications Act had come in, by which an intrinsically offensive work of literature could be published if it was for the public good: ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’. D.H. Lawrence had died in 1930, but Penguin publishers decided to test the new Act by publishing his novel. It had been written, as Lawrence put it, to ‘hygienise’ literature. Why, the novel asks, cannot we use good old Anglo-Saxon words, rather than Latin euphemisms, for the most important acts of our personal lives? On their side, the prosecution adopted the same line as those French authorities that had hauled Flaubert into court: Lawrence's story of an aristocrat's wife who falls in love with a gamekeeper endorsed adultery. Various ‘expert witnesses’, including respected authors, testified in defence of the publication, and the defence won.

  The fight against the censorshp of literature in the world continues, as every issue of the London-based journal, Index on Censorship, testifies. It is a constant battle. Literature, literary history demonstrates, can do great things under oppression, in chains, or in exile. It can even, like the phoenix, rise from the flames of its own destruction. It is a glorious vindication of the human spirit that it can do so.

  CHAPTER 26

  Empire

  KIPLING, CONRAD AND FORSTER

  The point was made in earlier chapters that great literatures tend to be the product of great nations. Those, that is, which have enlarged their territory by conquest, invasion or, in some cases, downright theft. No subject in literature raises thornier issues than ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ – most particularly the right by which one country claims to own, dominate, plunder, and in some instances destroy another country. Or, as the imperial power may argue, ‘to bring civilisation’.

  Literature's engagement with the subject of the rights and wrongs of empire, is complex, fraught and at times quarrelsome. The nature of that engagement has changed over the last two centuries as the global picture has changed. Literature which is relevant in one period is hopelessly dated in another. No other variety of literature requires knowledge of when it was written, and who for, than this kind of literature.

  It helps to sketch out the big historical picture. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain, a small cluster of islands off the coast of northern Europe, acquired and ruled over an empire which, at its height in the Victorian era, stretched from the meridian line at Greenwich over vast tracts of Africa, to Palestine, the Indian sub-continent, Australasia and Canada. In the eighteenth century the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America was included in that list. Not even ancient Rome could boast about ‘owning’ a larger expanse of Planet Earth than Great Britain.

  By the second half of the twentieth century that empire was virtually gone, with traumatic suddenness. One after another, countries claimed and won independence. The last time Britain fought to defend its overseas territories was in 1982, for a tiny set of islands in the South Atlantic, the Falklands, with its population barely larger than an English village. No epic
s were forthcoming.

  Literature is a sensitive recorder of socio-historical change, registering both the facts of the international world and the nation's complex and fluid responses to those facts as they happen. The British frame of mind, in the high imperial and immediately postimperial phase of the country's history, was touched – as literature reflects – by a fluctuating mixture of pride and shame.

  Let's consider the famous, and in its time much admired, poem by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man's Burden’ (1899). It opens:

  Take up the White Man's burden –

  Send forth the best ye breed –

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives' need;

  To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folk and wild –

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was British but ‘The White Man's Burden’ was addressed specifically to the people of the USA. (Kipling, significantly, had an American wife.) It was inspired by the US suppression of an independence uprising in the Philippines, and its acquisition, in the same period, of Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba. The Philippines campaign was particularly bloody. Up to a quarter of a million Filipinos were estimated to have perished. The white man's burden has always been streaked with red.

  The poem was an immediate hit in the USA, and its title became a proverbial phrase. One still hears it from time to time – usually ironically. As the nineteenth century (‘Britain's Century’) came to an end, Kipling believed the role of supreme world power would pass, as historically it did, to the USA. The twentieth century was destined to be America's. Britain, Kipling fondly anticipated, would be a partner, if a junior partner, with its great ally. The two nations, between them, would run the world as benign masters.