Chapter Twelve What Was Leonard Bast Really Like?

All the centuries-old tensions between the educated classes and the self-educated classes seem to point toward the conclusion that John Carey reaches in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). A blunt populist, Carey argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement was a corrosive hostility toward the common reader. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food.

The intellectuals, Carey argues, had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. By the early twentieth century the Board schools had introduced great literature to the masses, who were buying the shilling classics of Everyman’s Library by the million. Workers and clerks had by no means caught up with the educated classes, but some of them were coming uncomfortably close. Many intellectuals felt threatened by the prospect of a more equal distribution of culture: it is telling that the epithet they loved to spit at the masses was not “uneducated,” but “half-educated.” One could feel a patronizing fondness for the unlettered peasant, but in a society where every man supplies his own philosophy, the philosopher becomes redundant. In 1883 Punch published a stunningly frank expression of these anxieties in the form of a cartoon, “Education’s Frankenstein—A Dream of the Future.” While Board school kids read Ruskin, spout Shakespeare, and sing Wagner, middle-class authors, critics, artists, and lawyers are rendered unemployable and banished to the workhouse. No irony was intended here: the fear was that the 1870 Education Act would succeed in creating an enlightened proletariat.1 The friction between Hannah More and Ann Yearsley was being repeated on a mass scale.

Some modern writers dispensed with the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, often rationalized on eugenic grounds. A more practical means of restoring their elite status was the creation of modernism, a body of literature and art deliberately made too difficult for a general audience. The old autodidacts had built on a foundation of English classics partly because they were so accessible. Robert Collyer grew up in a blacksmith’s home with only a few books—Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Goldsmith’s histories of England and Rome—but their basic language made them easy to absorb and excellent training for a future clergyman. “I think it was then I must have found the germ . . . of my lifelong instinct for the use of simple Saxon words and sentences which has been of some worth to me in the work I was finally called to do.”2 That kind of self-education was possible in the nineteenth century; but in the twentieth, autodidacts discovered that the cultural goalposts had been moved, that a new canon of deliberately difficult literature had been called into existence. The inaccessibility of modernism in effect rendered the common reader illiterate once again, and preserved a body of culture as the exclusive property of a coterie.³

Restricting Literacy

Carey is addressing, then, a question of intellectual property. Who should control access to culture and participate in its creation? If knowledge is power, then power, wealth, and prestige depend on preserving inequalities of knowledge. Anthropologist Mary Douglas notes that the drive to maintain differentials of information is present in all societies: “Ethnography suggests that, left to themselves, regardless of how evenly access to the physical means of production may be distributed, and regardless of free educational opportunities, consumers will tend to create exclusive inner circles controlling access to a certain kind of information.”⁴ Charles Knight missed the mark when he wrote that “knowledge is the common property of the human family—the only property that can be equally divided without injury to the general stock.”⁵ Like all other goods, the market value of knowledge increases with scarcity. We pay investment analysts, art critics, and clairvoyants for unique insights, not to tell us what everyone already knows. This is not to say that universally distributed knowledge is necessarily valueless. If we were all thoroughly trained in French literature or automotive repair, that knowledge would still have use value to us as individuals; but it would have no exchange value in the marketplace, and professors of French and car mechanics would have to enter job retraining programs. Conversely, the exchange value of knowledge can be enhanced by creating artificial scarcities, monopolies, or oligopolies, through such devices as copyright, encryption, and professional accreditation. As Douglas concludes, the rational economic strategy of the information class is “to erect barriers against entry, to consolidate control of opportunities, and to use techniques of exclusion.” Each member of that class must strive to control the discourse, whether it concerns biblical interpretation or women’s fashions or literary theory: “Otherwise, his project to make sense of the universe is jeopardized when rival interpretations gain more currency than his own, and the cues that he uses become useless because others have elaborated a different set and put it into circulation.”⁶

Jack Goody has shown how “restricted literacy” was used to corner the information market in pre-print societies. The limited circulation of the Koran in West Africa, the magic treatises of medieval Europe, the mysterious religious books of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, obscure Pythagorean tracts, Indian gurus claiming special access to spiritual truth, the repudiation of written texts in favor of oral instruction—all are attempts to maintain control over the transmission of knowledge and protect intellectual property.7 In societies that have not yet invented copyright or the footnote, to publish is to perish: unless the dissemination of literature is restricted, anyone can steal it without paying a user’s fee. When India’s Mithila College possessed the only manuscript of Gangesa’s great work of logic, the Chintamani, students were prohibited from copying it—until one of them memorized it and used that knowledge to start a school that effectively competed with Mithila.⁸

In modern societies academics do not hesitate to publish their work, because copyright and rules of citation ensure that they will receive their due professional rewards. But certain kinds of intellectual property are still vulnerable to appropriation. One can copyright literary works but not literary genres: though The Waste Land, Howl, and Of Grammatology are all protected, anyone is free to enter the business of producing vers libre, beat poetry, or deconstructive criticism. Such literature can be protected from imitators, popularizers, critics, and rival schools only through various forms of encryption, such as Latin bibles, Marxist jargon, modernist obscurantism, or postmodernist opacity.

Consumers, however, take a different view of the information marketplace. They prefer to maximize choice and availability, and they will regard claims to special knowledge as an unfair monopolistic practice. The theory of information advanced by Goody and Douglas was in fact laid out much earlier in another anthropological treatise, which was widely read among the British working classes. When Robinson Crusoe learns that Friday worships Benamuckee, a deity who lives in the mountains,

I ask’d him if he ever went thither, to speak to him; he said no, they never went that were young Men; none went thither but the old Men, who he call’d their Oowocakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their Religious, or Clergy, and that they went to say O, (so he called saying Prayers) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said: By this I observ’d, That there is Priestcraft, even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the World; and the Policy of making a secret Religion, in order to preserve the Veneration of the People to the Clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all Religions in the World, even among the most brutish and barbarous Savages.

I endeavour’d to clear up this Fraud, to my Man Friday, and told him, that the Pretence of their old Men going up the Mountains, to say O to their God Benamuckee, was a Cheat, and their bringing Word from thence what he said, was much more so.⁹

Throughout the history of education, Lawrence Stone found the same strategy of intellectual exclusion at work:

It is precisely because education is so powerful a force in preserving existing social distinctions, that change is always a highly explosive political issue, and is always so bitterly resisted and resented. Thus an upper-class of gentry and successful businessmen securely entrenched in classics-based private schools and universities, and consequently enjoying a monopoly of all the key positions in the society (as in England) is unlikely to welcome the extension and improvement of grammar school facilities for the middle class. Similarly, an urban middle class which monopolizes an extensive classics-based lycée system (as in nineteenth-century France) may well not look favourably on an extension of elementary education, and will certainly oppose any integration of that system into its own. Again, a lower middle class of farmers and shopkeepers enjoying the privilege of education in writing and account-keeping (as in eighteenth-century England) is likely to obstruct any improvement in elementary education which would make the poor their equals and competitors.10

One can see that macrohistorical process at work on a microhistorical level in the career of William Gifford (b. 1756). He was apprenticed to a Presbyterian shoemaker who read nothing but religious tracts, all preaching the same dogma, which he used to crushing effect in theological discussions. Armed with Fenning’s dictionary, he knew how to encode information in jargon: “His custom was to fix on any word in common use, and then to get by heart the synonym, or periphrasis by which it was explained in the book; this he constantly substituted for the simple term, and as his opponents were commonly ignorant of his meaning, his victory was complete.” If the shoemaker’s hoard of knowledge capital was meagre, his apprentice had next to none. At this point Gifford had read only some ballads, the black-letter romance Parismus and Parismenus, some odd loose magazines of his mother’s, the Bible (which he studied with his grandmother), and The Imitation of Christ (read to his mother on her deathbed). He then learned algebra by surreptitiously reading Fenning’s textbook: his master’s son owned the book and had deliberately hidden it from him. Gifford still could not afford pen or paper, so he scratched out algebraic problems on odd bits of leather with a blunted awl.

Even at this abysmal level of poverty, Gifford was able to set up as a small-scale intellectual entrepreneur. He began composing occasional verses—to celebrate the painting of an alehouse signboard, for example. His workmates invited him to recite his poems, and sometimes took up collections that earned him as much as 6d. an evening. “To one who had lived so long in the absolute want of money, such a resource seemed a Peruvian mine,” Gifford recalled. His objective in writing poetry was neither truth nor beauty: it was cash, or more precisely, intellectual capital. Everything he earned he reinvested in paper and mathematical texts: “Poetry, even at this time, was no amusement of mine: it was subservient to other purposes; and I only had recourse to it when I wanted money for my mathematical pursuits.”

His master could not have been more antagonized if Gifford had set up a rival shop across the street. The apprentice’s growing intellectual powers presented a real economic threat: the shoemaker once exploded at Gifford “for inadvertently hitching the name of one of his customers into a rhyme.” Gifford tried to conceal his work, without success. The master finally demanded that he surrender his papers, searched his garret, confiscated his books, and warned that any more poetry would bring fearsome consequences. Gifford’s literary career would have been strangled at birth, except for an extraordinary change in his fortunes. A local surgeon recognized his talent and organized a subscription to buy him out of his apprenticeship. He attended Exeter College Oxford and went on to translate Juvenal under the patronage of Earl Grosvenor (pension £400 a year). He became editor of the Anti-Jacobin and first editor of the Quarterly Review (annual salary £1,500, plus two government sinecures worth another £900). As a richly endowed intellectual, he became the most bigoted of Tory critics, notorious for damning any authors who happened to have the wrong politics.11

As Francis Place had learned, it was not prudent for a workingman to know more than his employer. George Smith had mastered algebra and geometry at a Lancastrian model school around 1810: he later worked for a Quaker tanner who was stumped by Euclid and asked him to explain it all. Smith agreed, though he was a bit put out that his employer expected free lessons on his employee’s time. The tanner immediately ran aground on the first proposition of the first book. “I had strange forebodings of our fate with the second proposition,” Smith remembered,

so on the next day I disposed of my dinner as quickly as possible and went to my pupil. As I approached the front of the house I saw him looking out for me with his face pressed against the glass of the window, and before I reached the parlour door I heard him lock it. I turned the knob, but it was fast. I knocked, but got no answer. Euclid, geometry and I were locked out together, and I heard no more from him on the subject.¹²

Until the early nineteenth century, literacy alone had been enough to confer some intellectual distinction. The subsequent expansion of literacy was regarded with apprehension by the educated classes, because it diminished their caste status: a pattern discerned by Alan Richardson among the Romantics¹³ and Patrick Brantlinger among the Victorians.¹⁴ By 1830 G. L. Craik noted that,

Among the highest orders of society, the very cheapness of literary pleasures has probably had the effect of making them to be less in fashion than others of which wealth can command a more exclusive enjoyment. Even such distinction as eminence in intellectual pursuits can confer must be shared with many of obscure birth and low station; and on that account alone has doubtless seemed often the less worthy of ambition to those who were already raised above the crowd by accidents of fortune.15

Another response to the growing numbers of self-educated workers was to ignore their existence. No such characters appear in any English novel before 1880, except Felix Holt and Alton Locke, who are presented as highly exceptional minds among a generally debased proletariat. Workers might be depicted as respectable, impoverished, depraved, eccentric, pitiable, or criminal—but not thoughtful.¹⁶ The stonemason-poet Hugh Miller noted this blind spot as early as 1849. The lower classes, who once entered literature only as buffoons or pastorals, were now indeed playing a wider range of roles:

The reading public are invited to sympathize in the sorrows and trials of aged labourers of an independent spirit, settling down, not without many an unavailing struggle, into dreaded pauperism; overwrought artizans avenging their sufferings upon their wealthy masters; and poor friendless needle-women bearing up long against the evils of incessant toil and extreme privation, but at length sinking into degradation or the grave. We are made acquainted in tales and novels with the machinery and principles of strike-associations and trades’ unions; and introduced to the fire-sides of carriers, publicans, and porters. . . . There is no lack of a hearty sympathy on the part of the writers with the feelings of our humbler people; but we are sensible of a feebleness of conception when they profess to grapple with their intellect.

The works of Robert Burns and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin had portrayed working people with brains, sketching them

in terms very different from what the modern novelist or tale-writer would employ. . . . Were a modern tale-writer to describe a poor weaver, forced by lack of employment to quit his comfortless home, and cast himself with his wife and children upon the cold charity of the world, he might bestow upon him keen sensibilities, a depressing sense of degradation, and a feeling of shame; but his thoughts on the occasion would scarce fail to partake of the poverty of his circumstances. When, however, the weaver Tom tells exactly such a story of himself, not as a piece of fiction, but as a sad truth burnt into his memory, we find the keen sensibility and the sense of shame united to thinking of great power, heightened in effect by no stinted measure of the poetic faculty. Now, from our knowledge of such cases, and from a felt want, in our modern fictitious narratives, of what we shall term the inner life of the working-classes, what we would fain recommend is, that the working-classes should themselves tell their own stories.¹⁷

At the same time and for the same reason, shoemaker-poet John Younger felt compelled to explain in print “how we really subsist, think, feel, and act, in our most circumscribed circumstances, in comparison with the way we have so often been represented in the novels of late years.” He had

to account for, or to make excuse for, one in my circumstances having attempted to write at all, that taste, agreeably to the opinion of many, lying out of the line of a working man’s occupation. Indeed, I have often been censured for it by neighbours, even by some professing themselves scholars, as if I were taking undue indulgence from the bondage of circumstances, or intruding as a poacher upon the manor of their appropriation.18

Thomas Hardy hardly offered more sympathy to Jude Fawley. His efforts to gain admission to Christminster are depicted as an exercise in futility, motivated partly by selfish social ambition, partly by “the modern vice of unrest.” Clearly, he should give up his quest for “special information” and be content with “ordinary knowledge.”¹⁹ A novel with that outlook was bound to be less than inspirational to poor scholars. One Coventry millworker and WEA student claimed that he pushed his son to educate himself for a better life, until one morning the boy was found dead in his room, with a phial of poison beside him and Jude the Obscure under his pillow. He feared he would fail his examinations, and the story apparently deepened his depression.²⁰ Another Cornishman, A. L. Rowse, found that the novel only “increased my growing exasperation with the circumstances of my home-life and with the difficulties, indeed the improbability, of my getting to Oxford”—though he did eventually get there.²¹

While the pursuit of literature was emancipating for autodidacts, they did occasionally notice that they were ignored or reviled by some of their favorite authors. V. S. Pritchett ran up against that in a collection of articles by Marie Corelli:

I read and then stopped in anger. Marie Corelli had insulted me. She was against popular education, against schools, against Public Libraries and said that common people like us made the books dirty because we never washed, and that we infected them with disease. I had never been inside a Public Library but now I decided to go to one. . . . I got out [my notebook] and I wrote my first lines of English prose: hard thoughts about Marie Corelli.²²

Coachman’s daughter Anne Tibble was enraged by The Waste Land, which she read as a scholarship student at a redbrick university:

Eliot’s neurosis of disillusion was horrifying . . . almost utterly invalid. I could even call it evil. . . . I didn’t care whether The Waste Land was an oriental, unsentimental poem taking hope as psycho-neurosis. I only knew that it was almost utterly without feeling for others, therefore invalid. Eliot showed people as ugly, stupid, shabby, vulgarian, squalid, somehow indecent. But people such as some of those in The Waste Land I had been looking at all my life: the “broken fingernails of dirty hands” was meant to repel, to startle readers into seeing working people as rats—slimy, mean, ugly. . . . Weren’t these my father’s and my mother’s hands? Hands therefore of so many like them. The Waste Land marked the beginning of an era of cynicism and disillusion under which we still labour.

The experience of reading it plunged her into depression, but in the late 1920s it was difficult to express her real feelings about one of the greatest living poets. “I was too much a coward and a cretin to say that in my essay,” she later confessed. Instead, she channelled her scholarly energies toward the poetry of John Clare, whose work affirmed the literacy of working people.23

This condescension was not always immediately obvious to autodidacts. They considered themselves respectable and intelligent, so when they came across allusions to the uneducated masses, they might assume that the author had others in mind. Joseph Stamper grew up in a rich Lancashire proletarian culture, where workers organized debating clubs and literary societies in pubs, contributing 2d. or 3d. a week toward the bulk purchase of books. His parents patronized the public library, and his mother made him a lifelong opera fan when she took him to Gounod’s Faust. Young Stamper enjoyed public readings of Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott; and (alongside the Police News and Deadwood Dick) he consumed W. T. Stead’s penny editions of Homer, Pliny, Keats, Longfellow, and Tennyson. Yet in the course of his wide-ranging reading

I came across phrases that puzzled me, such as “sans-culotte”, “shiftless rabble”, “dregs of humanity”, “ignorant masses”. I wondered where all these worthless people lived. I could only think it must be in London or some such place outside my ken. Then one day it dawned on me, these scornful and superior writers were writing about me, and the people who lived in our street. It knocked me sideways for a little time . . . .

Later, while working at a steel foundry, he went to the public library to ask permission to borrow, for study purposes, three nonfiction books at a time (the usual limit was one). The Chief Librarian was skeptical: “Where is the need for study . . . in a steel foundry?” “Thinking to sway him to granting the privilege, I told him I’d had two books published,” Stamper recalled. “It was a false step, I saw his manner harden, accusation swam into his severe eyes. I was an offender against the unwritten law, I had no right to have books published, I was not a member of the book-writing class. He closed the interview . . . .”²⁴

“Nothing angers me more than to hear some critics dismiss millions of people as the great unthinking ‘Admass’, or refer to them with contemptuous arrogance as though they had no more sense or sensitivity than a school of mackerel,” protested Ted Willis (b. 1918), Bakelite moulder and novelist. “Behind the condescension is the presumption that the critic’s own tastes, standards, and way of life are so much more rewarding, so much more elevated and worth while, than those of the man in the street. I must confess that I have not always found this to be so.” As a newsboy he had worked for a newsagent who liked to discuss the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Moral Discourses of Epictetus. With the Labour Party League of Youth he had seen John Gielgud in Julius Caesar at the Old Vic, in the 9d. seats.25

The Insubordination of the Clerks

For a prime example of the attitude that exasperated Ted Willis, one can turn to Virginia Woolf. Introducing a volume of autobiographical essays by members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, she duly praised their passion for self-education. But she was a touch condescending about their literary talents (“This book is not a book”) as well as their undisciplined tastes in reading: “They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like ‘to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s, please,’ and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books—they read with the indiscriminate greed of a hungry appetite, that crams itself with toffee and beef and tarts and vinegar and champagne all in one gulp.”²⁶ One Guildwoman highlighted the cultural chasm separating her from Mrs. Woolf when she described her own bookshelves, crammed with all the standard Victorians: “Nothing modern you see,” she conceded. She had read some contemporary novelists, venturing as far as Conrad and Wells, but “in many cases the characters do not ‘stay with’ me.” Her son made the mistake of presenting her with Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, and compounded it by asking her opinion, “which he got very forcibly.”²⁷ And when Mrs. Woolf later argued (in Three Guineas) that women should refuse to work in munitions factories, Mary Agnes Smith, a weaver who had taken courses with the WEA and Hillcroft College, reminded her that that was not an option for someone on the dole.²⁸

Leonard Woolf shared his wife’s snobberies. He had lived for a time in Ceylon with a magistrate named Dutton, who was reviled by some of the resident Englishmen as “A bloody unwashed Board School bugger, who doesn’t know one end of a woman from the other.” Though a socialist, Woolf cheerfully agreed that “there was some truth in the portrait.” Bad enough that they were professional colleagues, but Dutton had the presumption to write dreadful poetry, play Mozart and musical comedy on the same piano, and read Home University Library books. Of course, Woolf assures us, there is no comparing his own Cambridge education with Dutton’s self-education: “Literature, art, poetry, music, history, mathematics, science were pitchforked into his mind in chaotic incomprehensibility. When later on in Ceylon I became an extremely incompetent shooter of big game and, in cutting up the animals killed by me, saw the disgusting, semi-digested contents of their upper intestines, I was always reminded of the contents of Dutton’s mind.”

Dutton also reminded Woolf of Leonard Bast, the clerk of E. M. Forster’s Howards End.29 For all his gentle liberalism, Forster embraced the class prejudices of modernist intellectuals. Bast is anxious and envious among the rentier intelligentsia, and his attempts to acquire culture are hopeless. Forster frankly stamps him “inferior to most rich people.” He is “not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable.” He plays the piano “badly and vulgarly,” and what is worse, he plays Grieg.³⁰ In literary conversations he is only capable of repeating cant phrases and dropping names. The problem, says Margaret Schlegel, is that “His brain is filled with the husks of books, culture—horrible; we want him to wash out his brain.”³¹ (Note that the term “brainwashing” did not originate in the Korean War.)

Bast is literally crushed and killed by books. He really should have been a mindless shepherd or ploughman like his grandfather. Unfortunately, sighs Forster, rural laborers today are typically “half clodhopper, half board-school prig,” but get rid of that education and “they can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeomen.”³² Of course, they would be mowing hay for Squire Forster, who thinks there is much to be said for “the feudal ownership of land.”³³ Though it is usually read as a critique of the class system, Howards End is fragrant with nostalgia for a rigid social hierarchy. “It is part of the battle against sameness,” Margaret assures us. “Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.” And what advice does she offer Helen about Leonard, the murdered father of her child?

“Forget him.”

“Yes, yes,” says Helen, “but what has Leonard got out of life?”

“Perhaps an adventure,” shrugs Margaret.

“Is that enough?”

“Not for us. But for him.”³⁴

What more does the man want? And that is the last we hear of Leonard Bast.

Forster succumbed to cultural despair after the First World War, which raised both wages and income taxes. “The class to which . . . I belong is sliding into the abyss,” he protested, rather prematurely, in 1919.

A certain amount of precious stuff, a certain tradition of behaviour and culture will perish. . . . At Cambridge scarcely any one takes Classics—it’s all Science. Salaries of Professors and Readers remain stationary while those of boiler-makers, plate rollers go up, are reaching them, passing them. There’s nothing to be done—and as a matter of fact I do record my unenthusiastic vote for Labour, because, for the wrong reasons, it wants some of the right things, and having attained the right things, it may possibly adopt the right reasons. But it’s so puzzling and queer to feel that one’s the last little flower of a vanishing civilisation, so exasperating to know that one doesn’t understand what is happening, so chilling to realise that in the future people probably won’t mind whether they understand or not, and that this attempt to apprehend the universe through the senses and the mind is a luxury the next generation won’t be able to afford.35

He remained convinced that boiler-makers could not use their senses and minds properly, even when his own senses told him otherwise. A year later he spent a weekend in Ramsgate with one of his lovers, a miner named Frank Vicary:

We sat about in shirt sleeves and loafed at street corners talking to other miners, also went to a party where the host (a miner) played Scriabine, Grieg, &tc—with no great charm, but with thunderous execution. I liked the miners personally, but could not see that they were after anything but money of which (if you compare them with the other manual labourers and even make allowance for the special discomfort and risk) they have already their fair share, I think. Sentimentally I am on their side, but my intellect argues that clerks, university teachers &tc, are really the oppressed class today.³⁶

Forster evidently forgot what he had written in the first sentence while he was writing the second. Obviously, the miners were after something other than money—modern music, for example. Though Forster had a number of working-class lovers, he consistently chose men who were his intellectual inferiors, and then sneered at their insensitivity: “Imaginative passion, love, doesn’t exist in the lower classes.”³⁷ He could only deal comfortably with them on a feudal basis, as peasants to be patronized. In that spirit he set up Frank Vicary as a Gloucestershire farmer. After the venture failed Forster admitted that it was a self-serving fantasy: he imagined himself “toddling there in old age, looked after by the robust and grateful lower classes.”³⁸ Yet he was horrified by a very successful effort to send millions of city workers back to the land—as dreadful suburbanites rather than picturesque yeomen. In a 1946 broadcast talk he complained that an unspoilt area around Stevenage was to be the site of a satellite town: “Meteorite town would be a better name. It has fallen out of a blue sky.” He knew this was Leonard Bast’s chance to escape his slum flat, assuming he had not been rendered homeless by the Luftwaffe. “I think of working-class friends in north London who have to bring up four children in two rooms, and many are even worse off than that. But I cannot equate the problem.”³⁹ (Perhaps he was going to say “I cannot connect.”)

But was Leonard Bast so culturally impoverished? Was the character Forster created an authentic representation of that vast and growing army of Edwardian clerks? For an answer, we can look to the memoirs left by young men who were born into the working classes around 1890, attended Board schools, read cheap editions of the classics, enjoyed 2s. concerts, and took one step up the social ladder into the lower reaches of the middle class. The contrast is astonishing. Those of us who only know Leonard Bast from Howards End would scarcely recognize the man in his self-portrait.

Forster could not believe that a clerk might be genuinely thrilled by literature. (That prejudice is not dead among academics even today.) Aping his betters, Bast pathetically grinds away at his Ruskin and puts in time at concerts. They mean nothing to him, yet he is always hoping for a “sudden conversion, a belief . . . which is particularly attractive to a half-baked mind. . . . Of a heritage that may expand gradually he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.”40 Yet that is precisely how Culture came to autodidacts: their memoirs commonly climax with The Book That Made All The Difference. For the leisured classes, a gradually expanding intellect is certainly a preferable approach to learning, but the self-educated have only limited time to make up enormous gaps. They must move more quickly, they have hungrier minds, and they will passionately embrace any book that opens up a new intellectual landscape. For W. J. Brown (b. 1894), a plumber’s son, the epiphany happened around age ten, when an elderly sea captain at Margate allowed him to use his personal library. “It wasn’t an incident,” Brown explained

It was, in an almost religious sense, an “experience”. . . . Consciousness does not expand slowly and regularly, but, as it seems to me, in great leaps. The mind forms a certain conception of the world it lives in. . . . Then one comes across a fresh writer—ancient or modern—or a new acquaintance—and suddenly there is a vast expansion of consciousness, a lifting of the mind to a new level, . . . a thrill beyond description, . . . a moment of triumphant ecstasy. So with my admission into the world of books.⁴¹

The author most likely to produce that kind of inspiration was, sure enough, John Ruskin. Forster considered him hopelessly irrelevant to Bast’s mean little life, but if the clerk had been allowed to speak for himself, he might have been surprisingly eloquent:

. . . here was another valiant, another innovator, another pioneer, staking out new claims for individual identity. The fact of Ruskin’s gallant and successful defence of Turner the great landscape painter, and his still more valiant stand against the orthodox economists, cast a spell over me which was irresistible. . . . To read Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, The Crown of Wild Olives, was a kind of aesthetic intoxication. It was an experience in which the glamour of his rich literary style held sway over the critical sense. He says things with a beauty that enamours the mind of the idea that they must be true. No one—it appeared to me—ever laid out the long passages of prose with a nearer approach to those subtle delicacies of structure, the balancings and castings forward and glancings back by which musicians take and keep the ear. He had that singular gift of writing audibly. As one reads some of his sentences, the lips moved to frame the words they seemed to set to sound. Some of those sentences have a sheer sensuous loveliness that almost silences the mind’s demand for intellectual significance; like that most beautiful passage written late in life and beginning: “morning breaks, as I write, over these Coniston hills”, which in its pensive and mournful lustre is as glorious as a great painting or a great song. . . . He takes us out on a day’s journey from the dusty towns, and shows our affinity with the flowing stream, and excites our soul to commune with the rustling leaves. . . . Ruskin strenuously combated the tendency to confine art to within its own domain. This art prophet looked at art as a philosopher, not merely as an art critic. He saw how art is inextricably bound up with all phases of human life. . . . The longer he lived the farther he was carried away from the conception of art as a something to be confined within stereotyped borders; to be nurtured to appeal to certain specified tastes. . . . Art must justify itself by human service. . . . We are left to choose as to whether art is to be confined to the whim and caprice of the connoisseur; to while away the time of the merely indolent; to serve the purpose of a merely aesthetic taste; or whether it shall be used as a vehicle for the purpose of educating, elevating, and ennobling human character.42

The actual author was Chester Armstrong (b. 1868), a checkweighman in a Northumberland mining village. The lesson he derived from Ruskin strikingly resembles the message of Howards End: a rejection of the rentier aestheticism of the Schlegel sisters for an art that is connected with philosophy, connected with social service, connected with men and women of all classes, connected with life itself. Perhaps Forster’s real anxiety was that Bast would find nothing new in Howards End—that clerks could discover on their own much the same truths in the Everyman Unto This Last.

In 1906 the first Labour MPs cited Ruskin, more often than anyone else, as the author who had moulded their minds. Will Crooks quoted him in support of old age pensions,⁴³ while Unto This Last inspired F. W. Jowett to agitate for improved primary education.⁴⁴ Oldham millworker J. R. Clynes, the future lord privy seal, spent 1s. he could ill afford for a secondhand copy of The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

How that book enthralled me with the great beauty of its style! For even then, when I was not yet eighteen years of age, the suggestiveness of sound, the grace and nobility of phrase with which these authors clothed their thoughts, impressed me far more deeply than did the thoughts themselves. . . . For many weeks I read and re-read this one book, and so illumining was the love I held for it that, before I had perused it the third time, its every subtlety of meaning was as much my own intimate possession as a young lover’s memory of his virgin kiss is his. . . . To this day that one volume of Ruskin’s is the dearest book in all English literature to me!45

The intellectual awakening of one Beeston engineer (b. 1893) took place when his father-in-law, a trade unionist, presented him with Unto This Last and The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Up until this moment his reading had been limited to penny dreadfuls, his father’s newspaper, and a Sunday school prize biography of Abraham Lincoln, but now

Ruskin began to implant in my mind a positive philosophy, the virtue of work, the need for a new standard of values, that man is a creative being, hammered in subsequently by the thoughts of Benedetto Croce, digested at Ruskin College. I became an honest seeker after truth rather than a rebel with a chip on his shoulder, and one with a growing appetite for reading and for study opportunities.⁴⁶

A lab assistant (b. c. 1872) could not afford Unto This Last, but found it such “a revelation” that he copied it out and bound it by hand.⁴⁷ As late as 1950, Roger Dataller overheard two steelworkers discussing Ruskin on a South Yorkshire bus.⁴⁸ One silk millworker quoted Ruskin’s preface to The Story of Ida to legitimize the whole project of working-class autobiography: “The lives we need to have written for us are of the people whom the world has not thought of, far less heard of, who are yet doing most of its work, and of whom we can best learn how it can best be done.”⁴⁹

For autodidacts, almost any one of the English classics could produce that kind of epiphany—but not usually anything modernist. W. J. Brown was introduced to literature by Robinson Crusoe, She, The Last of the Mohicans, and Around the World in Eighty Days, and he never moved far beyond that level. He tried The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, but found them too depressing, perhaps because his life was anything but Dostoevskian.⁵⁰

Brown worked as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank at West Kensington for something under 15s. a week. Modernist texts, from Howards End to Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, have consistently depicted the clerk as a prisoner, trapped in a suffocating office and a mind-killing job. The clerks themselves, however, offer a radically different portrayal of Edwardian office life. A surprising number of them found their careers intellectually stimulating. Granted, we are relying here on autobiographical evidence, which may be untypical. No doubt there were thousands of clerks whose brains were numbed by years of desk work, and therefore lacked the energy for memoir-writing or any other creative activity. Those clerks who did leave behind literary works probably also had the drive and imagination to rise above the kind of office routine that would have anaesthetized others. One correspondent to T. P.’s Weekly, a penny literary review for self-improvers, inspected several branches of his bank and reported that “practically every bank clerk” read the paper; while another letter to the editor complained that many of his fellow bank clerks were interested in nothing but sports, crime news, and perhaps a popular novel.51 We can conclude that many Edwardian clerks were intellectuals: their memoirs are simply too numerous and too enthusiastic to dismiss entirely. The authors were not isolated or alienated: they depict themselves as part of a large and lively community of philosopher-accountants. Along with schoolteaching and journalism, clerical work attracted the brightest Board school graduates, if only because no better careers were yet open to them. Already, the best minds were being skimmed off the working classes and concentrated in offices, where they often achieved a critical intellectual mass.

W. J. Brown, for example, would arise early each morning, study for an hour, row a bit on the lake in Battersea Park, breakfast at 8:00 a.m., take a brisk forty-minute walk to work, and do his routine but painless job from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Then, after tea, he would enjoy “five glorious hours of freedom” reading Darwin, Huxley, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam at the Battersea Public Library: “I had then, I think, the happiest days of my life.” Brown worked in a huge room with 200 other boy clerks. That recalls the opening scene of Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment, which conjures up the darkest nightmare of the twentieth-century intellectual: the fear of submergence in a mass of unthinking humanity. But working-class writers usually felt quite at home in that situation. As Brown put it,

I had the elementary schoolboy’s love of crowds, the slum kid’s love of the prolific life of the mass. And here I was back in the mass . . . . There was no rule against talking, and as, after a while, the work itself could be done mechanically, without engaging more than a fraction of one’s conscious mind, conversation went on all the day long. Two hundred boys, coming from many different parts of the country, freely intermingling, exchanging experiences and ideas with each other, can act as a tremendous educational force one upon the other. We discussed, argued, and disputed interminably; approving, questioning and debating every proposition under the sun, and in the process adding enormously to our stock of ideas and knowledge.⁵²

The West Kensington Post Office Savings Bank was Brown’s university, and his Oxford Union as well, for his debating skills won him recognition among his fellow boy clerks. He organized 3,000 of them into a union, persuaded a Royal Commission to redress some of their grievances, and went on to become an important trade unionist and Labour MP.⁵³ No wonder Brown failed to appreciate Dostoevsky. He much preferred the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Another boy clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank confirmed that it was not difficult to “do more than an hour’s work in an hour, and then surreptitiously read a study book or a novel. Kindly bosses generally winked at this proceeding.” In a few years he had worked through all of Carlyle (“even his indigestible Frederick the Great, and that twice”) and advanced to the Second Division of the Civil Service, which,

in unexpected ways, . . . led to a fuller life. No one who has not lived the life of a young man in a big office can realize how intensely the life can be led. True, there are hours of dull work, though even that can be mitigated by devising rapid methods of doing it. But there is the association of a number of young and eager minds, all reaching out in different directions, a number of characters in the shaping, all experimenting.

A coworker was familiar with the art galleries of Europe, as well as French and Italian literature:

It was a pleasure to listen to his talk and I am sure I sucked in more knowledge than any professor at a university could have imparted. No doubt it was less perfectly digested, but it was his, acquired by himself and poured out like a fresh and untroubled spring.

There were many readers amongst us. We philosophised, we talked history and politics and literature and were altogether gloriously uplifted.

There was a certain quota of mindless routine,

but most of us had two halves to our brains. One went on rapidly calculating, or directing the hand in its writing, while the other launched out on the splendid adventures of the mind. I myself could cast up long columns of figures, or rather cast them down, which is a quicker method, with perfect accuracy, and talk incessantly with my neighbour about Oliver Cromwell or Mahomet. Most of us had this capacity in greater or less degree, and the quicker workers often lent a hand to the slower. It was a good life, though exasperating at times.54

V. S. Pritchett found the same adventure of the mind as an office boy for a leather factory. He relished the disinterested intellectual pleasure of learning the business, much as Defoe had in The Complete English Tradesman. And far from stifling his dreams of becoming a writer, his work brought him into contact with customers and workers who had serious literary interests:

There was the tycoon with his Flaubert—whom I did not read for years—there was Beale, the leather dresser, who recited Shakespeare at length, as we went through the skivers on the top floor; there was Egan, our foreman, . . . who, in between calling orders to the men and going over his weighing slips, would chat to me about Dickens and Thackeray. . . . There was a leather belting manufacturer who introduced me to literary criticism.55

One of the most successful of the intellectual clerks was Joseph Toole (b. 1887), the son of a Salford tramworker, who became a Labour MP and Lord Mayor of Manchester. After a miserable Catholic school education (“merely instruction classes with a view to one’s later removal to a factory or any blind-alley job”) periodic unemployment allowed him to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw, Wells, and of course John Ruskin, without suffering any of Leonard Bast’s literary indigestion. Quite the opposite: “Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody’s business to put the matter right.” His mates, who saw no value in the great books, accepted the status quo “as God-given and never to be altered. Fatalism run riot.”

Toole found liberation in the insurance business. “This was the period when the fortunes of most of the large insurance companies were laid,” he later recalled, “and the offices were keen to find any man who could use a pen, tell a plausible story, look presentable, work well, and was all the better if he had the confidence of his neighbours.” Moreover, “No job a man can undertake will give him the same insight into the everyday life of the common people as does the insurance business,” which offered an unequaled education in economics and sociology. Toole hated squeezing premiums out of poor clients, hated the constant pressure to round up new customers, but otherwise “I had a good time in the insurance world. In no time promotion came my way, but the great feature about the work was that you were not tied to a clock or the buzzer of the workshop. The liberty it gave one presented wonderful chances to study, either by delving into books or attending at the theatre and improving one’s mind.” Toole enjoyed productions of Sudermann, Galsworthy, Shaw, Stanley Houghton, and Harold Brighouse at Miss Horniman’s Repertory Company. He even saw private subscription performances of Ibsen plays that had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. Though doing well in the insurance business, he was not uncritical of capitalism: for a time he read Marx and joined the Social Democratic Federation.⁵⁶

In the same city, Neville Cardus was equally enjoying his work as a junior clerk for a marine insurance agent. He scented nautical romance in the phrase he copied out in every policy: “ . . . of the seas, storms, floods, pirates, jettison, letters of marque.” Nominally the office hours were 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., but often there was not much work, so he read at his desk or escaped to the Manchester Reference Library. For Cardus, whose clerk’s salary never rose above £1 a week, Manchester was a city of inexhaustible cultural riches. One could attend a new Galsworthy play on Monday, a Brodsky Quartet concert on Tuesday, see the French actress Réjane at a Wednesday matinée, the Hallé Orchestra on Thursday, and on Friday Ibsen’s Ghosts.57 He met with friends at a Lyons café for poached eggs on toast and tea (6d.) and argued passionately over

Elgar, Shaw, Wells, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strauss, Debussy, the French Impressionists; our first tastes of Stendahl, the de Goncourts, J-K Huysmans—these last were rather late reaching England, or at any rate, Manchester; then, before our sight had become accustomed to the fresh vista, the Russians swept down on us—Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tchekov, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the ballet. It was a renaissance; the twentieth century opened on a full and flowing sea; thus we emerged from the Victorian Age.

There were not enough hours to the day for a young man. We never went straight home after a new play by Shaw, after Gerontius, after the A flat symphony, after Kreisler had played the Elgar violin concerto for the first time, after Tristan, after Strauss’s Salome with Aino Akté in it. We walked the city streets; we talked and talked . . ., not to air our economic grievances, not to “spout” politics and discontent, but to relieve the ferment of our minds or emotions after the impact of Man and Superman, Elektra, Riders to the Sea, Pélleas and Mélisande, Scheherazade, Prince Igor.⁵⁸

Why isn’t there a scene like that in Howards End? Thomas Burke, who grew up in poverty in Poplar, hated the condescension of “sleekly prosperous West End novelists” toward East Enders. As he wrote in 1932, “One of our ‘intellectual’ novelists recorded recently, with a note of wonder, that on his visiting a Whitechapel home the daughters of the house were reading Marcel Proust and a volume of Tchekov’s comedies. Why the wonder?” Burke pointed to the Bethnal Green and Whitechapel Art Galleries, the well-used public libraries, the proliferating literary circles, and the popular concerts at the People’s Palace.⁵⁹

Forster’s novel stands in a long tradition of anti-urbanism in English literature, traced by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City. In Q. D. Leavis one sees the same nostalgia for the rural dialects recorded by Hardy and George Bourne, coupled with denunciations of “the suburban idiom spoken around us and used by journalists.”⁶⁰ But it was not a tradition that extended to the working-class intelligentsia. Eager for self-education, they embraced the brilliance of metropolitan life. Where a middle-class intellectual might feel engulfed and oppressed by the urban masses, the same crowds could be endlessly stimulating to proletarian writers, many of whom were refugees from the provinces. “Wonderful London! What a school for learning! What a field for training! What a sphere for service!” sang printer William Lax (b. 1868), brought up in a small Lancashire mining village.⁶¹ Why, asked Thomas Burke, had no English composer attempted to capture the spirit of a city crowd, as Massenet did in “Southern Town”? “I do not want the flowery mead or the tree-covered lane or the insect-ridden glade—at least, not for long,” he protested, “and I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood. Give me six o’clock in the evening and a walk from the City to Oxford Circus, through the soft Spring or the darkling Autumn, with festive feet whispering all around you, and your heart filled with that grey-green romance which is London.”62

V. S. Pritchett enjoyed nothing more than errands to exotic Bermondsey:

I had a special pleasure in the rank places like those tunnels and vaults under the railway: the smells above all made me feel importantly a part of this working London. Names like Wilde’s Rents, Cherry Garden Street, Jamaica Road, Dockhead and Pickle Herring Street excited and my journeys were not simply street journeys to me: they were like crossing the desert, finding the source of the Niger. London was not a city; it was a foreign country as strange as India.⁶³

Chaim Lewis found that his small Jewish neighborhood in Soho “seemed to grow up with me and keep pace with my own expanding interests. It was as though my awakening senses had set the sleeping neighbourhood throbbing by its ears. It rose to greet and nourish each new interest,” as when he discovered the bookshops of Charing Cross Road. Forster was certain that Leonard Bast would be better off as a peasant, but Lewis knew that “Only the multilateral life of a city’s centre can rise to the occasion of an adolescence.”⁶⁴ V. W. Garratt, who migrated to London from Birmingham after the First World War, immersed himself in the “brotherhood of books” at the British Museum. Far from T. S. Eliot’s city of faceless masses, London offered ordinary people unequaled scope for identity and liberty:

From the moment I entered it it became my spiritual home. The splendid paradox of sharing its surging life and law and order, with a fuller sense of one’s individuality and freedom than is to be gained in the smallest village, gives it an atmosphere from which no provincial visitor can ever escape. Enter London with a friendly heart and the way is open for it to be friendly to you. No other city shows such good manners, and whether you want to draw on the knowledge of a bus conductor or on the patience and goodwill of the multifarious drivers on the road, you will get what you want without fuss or excitement. And where else can you find such large-hearted tolerance of freaks and foibles that help to make up its cosmopolitan life? Individuality can spread its plumage without public restraint and you can as well stand on your head in the Strand as use it to express an opinion without the danger of having it knocked off. Wherever I live I shall be a naturalized Londoner to the end of my days.⁶⁵

Frederick Rogers (b. 1846), the East End bookbinder, felt as keenly as Jude Fawley the sense of being a “trespasser” in Oxford. But he was not envious, because “London and its opportunities were educating me as universities do other men.” It too had dreamy spires: as a sandwich-boy he had found shelter in historic churches, which “became centres of historical knowledge to me as I grew older.” Later, he made good use of the Guildhall Library and the University Extension movement, studying history, English literature, and enough physiology to publish an article in a medical journal. At Toynbee Hall he joined a Shakespeare class and organized an Elizabethan Society.66 “In modern London a navvy’s lot is not so much worse than a millionaire’s,” observed William Margrie (b. 1877), a Camberwell paperhanger. “The navvy can feast his eyes on the world’s masterpieces at the National Gallery, Hampton Court, Tate Gallery, and Dulwich. He can obtain Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, Milton, Dickens, Scott for a few shillings, or read them in the public library for nothing. He can enjoy grand opera and Shakespeare at the Old Vic for sixpence. London is a perpetual feast of architecture, and that costs nothing at all.”⁶⁷ Printer’s apprentice T. A. Jackson found the cityscape saturated with literary allusions:

To walk Fleet Street and to explore the Temple was to live again in the Fortunes of Nigel—was not I, too, a London apprentice as was jolly Jan Vin?—or in Pendennis, or more sombrely, in Bleak House. The street and alleyway names took on the life of the novels and the novels took on the life and movement of the streets. And the river beyond, with ships visible from Blackfriars and beyond the Southwark and London Bridge . . . was near enough to the veritable ocean to add its confirmation to Marryat, Smollett, and Defoe. There were still coffee-houses, so-called, sufficiently like those of the Spectator to bring its pages back to life, and to receive from those pages their benediction of grace.⁶⁸

There were female Basts as well, though opportunities for young women only really opened up during the manpower shortages of the First World War. On 18s. a week Stella Davies paid 12s. for room and board in the southern suburbs of Manchester, 3d. for her National Insurance premium, “and managed to have a very good time indeed with the remaining five and ninepence.” She attended free organ recitals at the Town Hall and concerts at the University Settlement in Ancoats. For 6d. she could get standing room at the Hallé Orchestra or gallery seats at Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre.⁶⁹ Baker’s daughter Edna Bold (b. 1904) found Manchester’s “Lowryesque townscape” more stultifying, but she attended a vast range of cultural events: midday concerts at Houldsworth Hall and opera conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, as well as public lectures on lexicography, More’s Utopia, educational reform, “Russia before the Revolution,” art appreciation, and “Modern Woman.”⁷⁰ Raised by a Lancashire farm worker, Margaret Penn (b. 1896) was thrilled to emigrate to Edwardian London and work in a grim bookstore accounting office. The pay was miserable, but she enjoyed the attention of the otherwise all-male staff, attended meetings of the Fabian Society and the Women’s Social and Political Union, was invited to bohemian parties and the Cafe Royal, even modeled for artist Nina Hamnett.71

“I’m so fed up with reading and hearing about the doleful thirties,” Elizabeth Ring protested in 1975. “Looking back on that time, . . . I am reaffirmed in my belief that every poor person should live in London. . . . We had the cultural world on our doorstep.” Starting at age eight, she attended free concerts at Northampton Institute, Grotrian Hall, and Wigmore Hall. From its 1931 opening she saw opera and ballet three times a week at Sadler’s Wells, in the wildly appreciative 6d. gallery. “We had no technical knowledge, no discrimination, nothing by which to judge these young dancers,” she admitted, “but we felt that something wonderful had happened in Islington, and we were prepared to become hysterical in support of it. The Sadler’s Wells wasn’t just a theatre to my generation, it was more a way of life.” There was also outdoor Shakespeare and ballet in Regent’s Park, Prom Concerts at Queen’s Hall, and Gielgud’s Hamlet on twofers. Her father, an unskilled laborer, periodically disappeared on sexual escapades, but between times he took her to see The Beggar’s Opera and introduced her to the work of Bernard Shaw. She summed it up by quoting the philosopher-longshoreman Eric Hoffer: “It is in the city that man became human. In the crowded, stinking little streets. No noble conception, no great idea, was conceived outside a city.”⁷²

The Bridge

Modernists were not always insensitive to the wonders of mass urban life (one thinks of Mrs. Dalloway) but they rarely had anything positive to say about the suburbs. John Carey has analyzed that phobia in some depth.⁷³ While millions, in Britain and the United States, voted with their mortgages for suburban villas, the university-educated intelligentsia looked on in horror. Matthew Arnold set the tone with his classic dismissal of commuters shuttling endlessly “from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell.”⁷⁴ In The Waste Land, the army of clerks trudging toward London Bridge Station are the living dead:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

What is remarkable is how many plebeian writers seized on that passage and insisted that Eliot had it all wrong. As an office boy V. S. Pritchett went home each night from that station, and found truth and beauty in the porters’ announcements:

To myself, at that age, all places I did not know, seemed romantic and the lists of names were, if not Miltonic, at any rate as evocative as those names with which the Georgian poets filled up their lines. I would stare admiringly, even enviously, at the porter who would have to chant the long line to Bexley Heath; or the man who, beginning with the blunt and challenging football names of Charlton and Woolwich would go on to comic Plumstead and then flow forward over his long list till his voice fell to the finality of Greenhythe, Northfleet and Gravesend; or the softer tones of St. Johns, Lewisham, and Blackheath. And to stir us up were the powerful trains—travelling to distances that seemed as remote as Istanbul to me—expresses that went to Margate, Herne Bay, Rochester and Chatham. I saw nothing dingy in this. The pleasure of my life as an office boy lay in being one of the London crowd and I actually enjoyed standing in a compartment packed with fifteen people on my way to Bromley North.75

Thomas Burke went so far as to write a travelog of the London suburbs, places

that every good Londoner, and every student of the human heart, should visit. You go and stare at some crumbling pile made by some predatory prelate some five hundred years ago, and from your rubber-necking you offer yourself some manufactured thrill. It’s all wrong. The true thrill should come when you look at the new suburb and its half-built roads and houses, and remember that Mr. Wilkinson has taken that little house which still wants windows and is not yet connected to the main drainage, and is waiting to take his bride into it; that there they will begin their married life, and there will the young Wilkinsons be born. . . . To ignore such places as these is to mark yourself Philistine.⁷⁶

In what was supposed to be a cultural wasteland, Burke found an array of literary societies attended by clerks, shop assistants, and workers. True, like Leonard Bast, these people often resorted to “the worn platitudes upon the worn novelists and essayists, the cobbled summaries of the messages of the philosophers, the solemn introductions to the beauties of established poets. But to the pupils and teachers alike,” Burke reminds us, “these things are shockingly new.”⁷⁷

Over the Bridge, the title of Richard Church’s autobiography, not only alludes to Eliot: it reminds us to consider which end of the bridge we are entering. For a metropolitan intellectual, it may be the portal of a suburban Hades. For Church (b. 1893), educated and raised in south London (as for Alfred Kazin, born on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge), it was the high road to literary success. Here was a Leonard Bast who bought Ruskin’s Lectures on Architecture and Painting when it was first published in Everyman’s Library (1907) and, contra Forster, found it an “explosive” revelation. His parents never purchased a book, but a few years later, with his first wage packet of 15s., he bought Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in the World’s Classics edition. A postman’s son, Church remembered his inner-suburban world as warm and secure, “a pocket of civilisation utterly quiet and self-sufficient.”⁷⁸ He once entertained adolescent dreams of becoming a “mephistophelean” artist, “ready to claim a larger authority over my fellow-creatures, over circumstances kind or averse, over the very laws of right and wrong,” but that was not to be. Though he won a scholarship to Camberwell Art School, his father pressured him to give it up and sit for the Civil Service exam. Church dreaded the day he had to report for work at the Land Registry, which he imagined to be something out of Bleak House.

He was gratefully surprised to discover that the living death of clerkdom was more a literary cliché than a reality: “The multitudes of cultured men whom I met in the Civil Service, friends, advisers, monitors, served me in those first years in lieu of a university, helping me to educate myself, to enlarge my range of mind and experience, and finally supporting me in the heady and dangerous adventure of commencing author.” Church rose every morning at 5 a.m., read until 7 a.m., clocked in at the office from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., did a bit more reading on His Majesty’s time, was home again by 5 p.m., and continued to read until midnight. He attended lunch-hour organ recitals at St. Clement Dane’s on The Strand. He could stand and read in bookshops as long as he occasionally bought a shilling classic. He transferred to the Custom House in Billingsgate Market, where his colleagues up to the rank of director supported his work in poetry. One officer subsidized his first book of verse; another gave him Marlowe’s plays for his twenty-first birthday. The offices were just below Eliot’s London Bridge. Far from being a wasteland, they provided Church with the raw material for his first novel, The Porch (1937), which won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize.79 He had no reason to envy Oxbridge, because the Civil Service offered a livelier literary milieu:

The ghosts of Charles Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, Anthony Trollope, and Austin Dobson still haunted its corridors. A living novelist lurked in its inner shrine, the Treasury, and a young poet in the Board of Trade, both of them later to rise to eminence in the hierarchy of the administration. Dramatic critics, black-and-white artists, longshore writers, roosted in the Government departments, pretending to ignore the larger reputations which they were making in the outside world. Indeed the Civil Sevice was recognised as a shelter for younger sons, cranks, eccentrics, misfits, and persons with a vocation; members incapable of holding their own, and unwilling to compete, in an increasingly commercial and industrial world. . . . Painters, musicians, fellow-poets, revealed themselves [in the Custom House canteen], and I had to exert myself to debate with them to justify my curiously isolated manias, to display and protect my juvenile verse-making. These contests and encouragement heaped fuel on my inward fire.

Returning late from these lunchtime symposia, he would be reprimanded by the Deputy Chief Analyst, only to discover that the supervisor was solidly grounded in rationalist philosophy and eighteenth-century French and English literature. Like Trollope, Church found that compiling bureaucratic reports “was good technical training for a young writer. It taught me verbal concision and precision, a fundamental virtue in a poet. The necessary impersonality and objective accuracy were health-giving antidotes to the flamboyance and self-concern with which most young poets set off on the career which in the long run must consume them.” In his extramural lectures on literature, Israel Gollancz once challenged his students to compose a sonnet in the style of Milton: he awarded the prize to Richard Church.

There lay the strength and the weakness in his poetry: it read too much like Milton. Following Lessing’s Laokoon and Schopenhauer’s The Art of Literature, Church had firmly conservative views “about the relationship between the arts and where the frontiers between them should stand. As I consider what has happened in music, painting, sculpture, and letters since Mallarmé and his followers broke down those fences, I think it may be fortunate that I fixed my prejudices, as a practitioner, thus early in life, upon the resolution never to force words to forsake meaning, in the effort to imitate the possibilities of music or paint.” Modernists had made poetry “an esoteric game with verbal symbols,” when its real mission should be “the improvement of human society.” Modernist pessimism was being forged in 1917, the darkest phase of the war, but at the time, Church remembered, “I was especially active and burning with hope.” In that year he published his first volume of verse which, thanks to the wartime poetry boom, sold out. He conducted his own experiments in vers libre which T. S. Eliot published at Faber and Faber, yet Church always found Eliot’s poems “too dialectical and loaded with learning. The fact that I have said so, in the press, from time to time over the past thirty-five years, has done me no good amongst the fashionable younger critics.” Though he liked Eliot as a friend,

I have distrusted the Montparnasse influence in his verse and doctrine, his sponsoring, even out of loyalty, of the writings of Ezra Pound. The dreadful self-consciousness of so many déraciné Americans, aping the hyper-civilized European decadents, has always given me the sensation of being in the presence of death, of flowers withered because the plant has been torn from its taproot in a native soil. Even the novels of Henry James have for me this dessicated atrophy, unsimple and pretentious.

Church was a populist who aimed to broadcast culture as widely as possible. He hailed the radio for whetting the public appetite for museums, books, and classical records: “The awakening has been a powerful renaissance, as effective as that which followed the dispersal of the libraries of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century.” His literary tastes were, in a word, proletarian, derived largely from the old Clarion, which published his first verses. “I saw art as I saw religion, from a non-conformist point of view,” he explained. “Both these vast fields of consciousness were, for me, prospects of worship, of adoration, before the living manifest of Nature, and of the Christ who first touched my eyes when I was a child of ten years.” For him, as for Leonard Bast, literature was a matter of “revelation,” an intensely personal response not subject to “the claims and disciplines of authority, especially academic authority.”

Belletrist Augustine Birrell taught him that a truly literate person must have a library of at least 2,000 volumes, and “that a part of literary education was to sit surrounded by one’s books, absorbing them through one’s skin, as sun-starved aspirants to health absorb ultra-violet rays from a lamp.” Of course, the 2,000 volumes had to be classics. Church was taken aback when someone asked if he read contemporary authors. (“That was a novel idea. I felt that it was a step downwards.”) His was an Everyman’s Library definition of literature. Twenty of his own books would be published by the Dent firm, which later employed him as poetry editor. One of his discoveries was Dylan Thomas, who privately libeled Church as “a cliché-riddled humbug and pie-fingering hack.” The realization that Leonard Bast had become an important literary gatekeeper may have been too much for Thomas to bear.80

By Office Boys for Office Boys

Richard Church and Neville Cardus were among the many clerical and distributive workers who frankly confessed to improving their minds during office hours. As a £1-a-week warehouse clerk in the early 1920s, H. E. Bates spent most of the workday with Conrad, Hardy, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.⁸¹ Shop boys who worked for newsagents or lending libraries enjoyed tremendous opportunities for self-education.⁸² As a 10s.-a-week office boy in a Clydeside shipyard, John Macadam (b. 1903) felt “vastly overpaid” and profoundly bored, but on errands he could escape to the public library to read travels and biographies. Later, as an apprentice plater, he would sometimes “slip into a quiet corner of a hold somewhere and scribble away in grubby little notebooks.” He even tried to write an industrial novel, inspired by Maxim Gorky. He was thrilled when the Greenock Telegraph published a sketch he had written about a tinkers’ encampment, which proved to be his entrée into journalism. Macadam lived near Colin Milne, literary editor of the Glasgow Evening Citizen, and regarded him with the same awe that Leonard Bast felt for the Schlegels: “Somehow he seemed a daily visitor from a world I vaguely felt to be delectable but closed to me.” In fact the class barrier, though quite real, was permeable at that point: on Milne’s recommendation the Citizen hired Macadam as a telephone boy. “What a jolly, exciting world I found myself in, a strange free world full of bawling, Rabelaisian men who smoked long pipes and laughed a lot and cursed us with tremendous oaths when we were slow or slipshod.” From there Macadam was propelled into a thrilling journalistic career: reviewing Anna Pavlova, writing up Jacob Epstein, discussing pugilism with Bernard Shaw.⁸³

Forster hardly knew or cared for that world of telegrams and laughter. He depicts Bast as a man hopelessly trapped in his cubicle, capable of doing only one specialized kind of insurance work. When he loses that job, he inevitably and helplessly plummets into destitution. But why not try his hand as a writer? Margaret Schlegel does detect something of the poet in him, but she is certain that if he put his thoughts on paper—if he ever presumed to compete with E. M. Forster—“it would be loathesome stuff.”84

Even if it were, it probably could have found a publisher. Opportunities for freelance writers were growing explosively. The Newspaper Press Directory listed 2,531 magazines published in 1903, four times as many as in 1875.⁸⁵ The census recorded 687 authors, editors, and journalists in 1861, leaping to 3,434 in 1881 and 13,786 by 1911.⁸⁶ The “New Journalism”, the cheap papers that proliferated from the 1880s onwards, was dismissed by Forster and other intellectuals as the “gutter press”.⁸⁷ Lord Salisbury’s oft-quoted sneer—“Written by office boys for office boys”—accurately summed up a revolutionary social fact: journalism had opened an escape hatch for Board school graduates with a literary flair. With no special training, Neville Cardus could become music critic for the Manchester Guardian. Tramp seaman J. E. Patterson explained how he made an easy transition to “literary tramp,” contributing to about fifty periodicals and newspapers, “from half-crown reviews to half-penny ‘dailies’ and boys’ papers.” During an earlier stint as an underworked law clerk he mastered Greek, Celtic, and German literature in translation at the Cardiff Public Library. With those slender credentials he became “a critic of drama, edited an illustrated journal, and reviewed general literature for three of the principal ones of those days.”⁸⁸

Thomas Burke paid for Queen’s Hall concerts by writing for Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, a deliciously vulgar comic paper. Professional authors warned that he could never succeed as a writer without connections, and referred him to Gissing’s New Grub Street. But Burke found that, with no connections at all, he could easily pick up an odd guinea placing a sketch or a short story. Gissing’s complaints about literary hackwork utterly baffled Burke, who found scribbling in a garret a wonderful liberation from the thrall of clerkdom.

Burke conceded that most popular periodicals had low literary standards, but that allowed anyone with a limited education to take up journalism.⁸⁹ One example was Patrick MacGill (b. 1890), son of an illiterate Donegal peasant. After leaving school at age ten, he picked potatoes and worked as a navvy. He read virtually nothing, not even the daily papers until, working on the rail line, he happened to pick up some poetry written on a page from an exercise book. Somehow it spoke to him, and he began to read “ravenously.” He brought Sartor Resartus, Sesame and Lilies, and Montaigne’s essays to work. Les Misérables reduced him to tears, though he found Das Kapital less affecting. Each payday he set aside a few shillings to buy secondhand books, which after a month’s use were almost illegible with rust, grease, and dirt. He fervently embraced the great books as his own:

For me has Homer sung of wars,

 Aeschylus wrote and Plato thought

 Has Dante loved and Darwin wrought,

And Galileo watched the stars.

His reading inspired him to write poetry, solely for the enjoyment of his workmates. When a fellow navvy was killed in a work accident, MacGill scribbled an account on a bit of tea-paper, with no thought of publishing it. He was about to toss it away when he noticed a page of the Dawn, a 1⁄ d. London newspaper, which had been used to wrap beef. Though he had never heard of the paper, he scrounged up a filthy envelope and sent off his story. The editor printed it and offered two guineas for his next article. His workmates were astonished, impressed, and amused to learn that one could earn so much simply by writing. MacGill soon had a regular job with the Dawn at £2 a week, and went on to become a popular novelist.90

Thomas Thompson (b. 1880) managed to write his way out of the mills of Lancashire, starting with gossipy paragraphs for local newspapers at a half-crown apiece. He discovered “easy money” when the Cotton Factory Times paid him 7s. 6d. for a column, and was thrilled to get 26s. from the Sunday Chronicle for a humorous story. “Provided one has talent there is an expanding market,” he affirmed in 1940. “For the writer new avenues open out. He may write short stories and articles, novels or other books; he may, if he is commercially minded, write advertisements, and if he is versatile he may find more than just adventure in the theatre, in writing for radio, and in writing for the films.”⁹¹ At age thirteen Robert Clough (b. c. 1910) found work with the North Mail measuring the length of local news items, to ensure that the stringers (some of them Durham colliers) were paid their 1d. a line. He was soon reporting on his own village to several local papers, earning more than the 5s. a week he was paid at his day job. From there he ascended to the pinnacle of Newcastle journalism. In retrospect, Clough did not regret missing his chance for a grammar school scholarship.

Extended years at school may have qualified me for no more than an uncongenial job at some clerk’s desk, thus denying me fifty engrossing years in newspapers. . . . It was once no novelty for the office boy to be seated in due course at the boardroom table. Now [1970s] it is unlikely that a boy who has known only the village school, and consequently is unable to parade academic honours, will easily gatecrash the certificated queue at the personnel officer’s door.⁹²

In this context, it is tremendously significant that so many late Victorian popular papers sponsored essay contests. For slum children with some writing talent, these offered the essential first rung up the ladder of literary success. Lancashire journalist Allen Clarke (b. 1863), the son of a Bolton textile worker, avidly read his father’s paperback editions of Shakespeare and ploughed through the literature section (Chaucer, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Pope, Chatterton, Goldsmith, Byron, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt) of the public library. With that preparation, he was winning prizes for poems in London papers by age thirteen. In 1881 he bought the first issue of Tit-Bits, where he began publishing verses and humorous sketches, and then went on to found and edit several Lancashire journals.93 The first literary prizes won by Neil Bell (b. 1887), a Southwold boatbuilder’s son, included a fountain pen, a bronze medallion, a multibladed knife, and a parrot. (Within a week this parrot had ceased to be, but Bell sold the cage for 5s.) When Yes and No offered a prize for a true travel story, he fabricated (and partly plagiarized) something about an escapade in southern Italy and won half a guinea. He sent children’s verses to Chatterbox for 7s. 6d., published light verse in London Opinion for a half-guinea, and was ecstatic when he broke into the highbrow English Review with a fake-Shakespearean sonnet. In 1912 he was earning almost £5 a week from writing and schoolteaching. By 1955 he had published about eighty books, mostly novels and children’s stories, and was earning nearly £2,000 a year from writing alone.⁹⁴

The growth of popular journalism, public libraries, and Board schools in the late nineteenth century all conspired to create an office-boy intelligentsia paralleling—and often opposing—the modernist intelligentsia. A representative figure of the former was A. E. Coppard (b. 1878), a laundrywoman’s son who grew up in dire poverty, left school at nine, ascended the ranks of clerkdom, and became (at age forty) a professional author. At fourteen he was still enjoying Deadeye Dick, by twenty he was reading Henry James and had submitted a poem to the Yellow Book. He secured a literary education at the Brighton Public Library, and as a professional runner he used prize money to buy Hardy’s poems, Shakespeare, Mackail’s translation of The Odyssey, and William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. In an undemanding job (at 12s. a week) he read on company time, though there was a row when his supervisor found Jude the Obscure on his desk. Not until he was thirty, and moved to Oxford, did he know anyone except his wife with whom he could intelligently discuss literature. Yet he never felt the lack, because his outsider position offered him complete intellectual freedom:

In the pursuit of culture and understanding of literature I had no tutor or mentor or fellow-seeker after such righteousness. I had continued to follow my instinct. What else could I have done? There were no night schools or evening classes for my purpose, I had to find my own way and my instinct seldom misled me. Certainly I was never bored, I have never in my life experienced that so common malaise. Nobody could order me to study some book because it was renowned or esteemed: I was not set to prepare any papers for scholarly or examination reasons on subjects that were of no interest to me; I obeyed no alien direction, my own was good enough always. Assiduously I kept to my instinctive channel and was never conscious of a lack of benevolent guidance. I felt no want of assistance or instruction from anybody and always wanted to be alone in this. I was not thwarted by our family poverty, poverty was the environment I had been born into and I had an admirable adaptability . . . . Such preparation of course left me undisciplined, self-willed, opinionated, and intolerant, but I suppose it nourished whatever spark of original talent I had.

His instincts directed him to the standard poets, but not modern verse which depended on “the omission of the capital letters from the beginnings of each line and of poetry from whatever remained.” His artistic tastes stopped at the borders of Bloomsbury. He felt an aversion toward Cézanne, “contempt” for Van Gogh, and “comfortably allergic . . . to the art in general that has proliferated by a sort of artificial insemination since the First World War.” Duncan Grant was “no good,” nor did he care for the criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. For a time he was a neighbor of Lady Ottoline Morrell: “Most of her followers scared me as a bunch of Bloomsbury assumers. By assumers I mean a ceaseless chatterer who takes it for granted that you understand what he is talking about.” Living near Oxford, he retraced the steps of Jude Fawley. It was not that he felt inferior among the undergraduates, several of whom (Aldous Huxley, Harold Laski, L. P. Hartley, J. B. S. Haldane) he counted as acquaintances. But his literary ambitions were driven by “a deepening feeling of friendly rivalry with them.” Coppard was a populist who enjoyed producing a works magazine because “it deepened my awareness of many mundane matters. Most of the men were friends with me, I played football in their team, went to their annual beanfeasts—roast goose and barrels of ale at some far-off country inn—I knew a good deal of their domestic affairs.” Though he published a couple of poems in Eliot’s Egoist, he put in a

plea against authority and expertise for the good average man who feels a response to art or any other forms of Kultur, but having no time to spare for study and instruction is content with what he likes and rejoices when he finds it for himself. The artist, the poet, the musician, are creating precisely for him and not to please other artists, poets, and musicians; nor do they ever labour to satisfy, as is often urged, simply the souls of their artistic selves. . . . As a “young man mad about poetry” I did not feel at all out of place in a commercial office chiefly concerned, as mine was, with iron-founding and the casting of street lampposts for the City of Wolverhampton. Nor did I experience—perhaps I ought to have done—any of the “square peg in a round hole phases” supposed to be inevitable in such cases. I liked the hole! I fitted it well and enjoyed office work.95

The Better Hole

Not only was Leonard Bast becoming an author: he was outselling E. M. Forster. Howard Spring’s My Son, My Son! (1938) sold 750,000 copies and was translated into several languages. His Fame Is the Spur (1940), a fictional treatment of the temptation and damnation of Ramsay MacDonald, was made into a major motion picture. Spring was the son of a Cardiff gardener who bought his children secondhand copies of Tom Jones and Swiss Family Robinson, and read aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Charles Dickens. (“My father abhorred rubbish.”) Spring failed his scholarship examination and left school at twelve,⁹⁶ but he had a second chance at a literary career as a newspaper office boy. His job was to cull racing tips from the major London and provincial papers for reprinting in the South Wales Echo, after which he was free to peruse their literary pages:

I read them all, and, almost from infancy, was steeped to the eyebrows in information about books. Nothing that was to do with books seemed to me in those days to be unimportant. That the Cardiff Times was publishing as a serial story Mr. Max Pemberton’s Beatrice of Venice presented itself as an event of importance; and I could have enumerated then, though my mind has since happily unburdened itself, the titles of works by such improbable authors as David Christie Murray, Mrs. Caffyn, and Maclaren Cobban. From these groundlings to the stars: Wells and Bennett, Henry James, Conrad and Hardy, scarcely a novel was published that I did not know from its reviews, scarcely a review was written that I did not cut out and file.97

He launched himself as a writer when he produced a school story (borrowing freely from Talbot Baines Reed) and placed it with a new boys’ weekly. To his amazement, he received £1 12s. 6d. for two evenings of easy work.⁹⁸ Spring would become an arbiter of middlebrow taste, succeeding Arnold Bennett and J. B. Priestley as book reviewer for the Evening Standard. His model was Bennett, “a man who got on with writing his books instead of bothering his friends with long explanations about why he was not at the moment getting on with the writing of the books which he was going to get on with.” As a popular author, Spring resented the modernist assumption that literary quality necessarily had an inverse relationship to sales: “For myself, I think that in the immortality stakes Ulysses hasn’t a dog’s chance with Kipps, or Orlando with The Old Wives’ Tale.” And who, he asked in 1941, was “to blame for the inertia, the sloth and the blindness that made contemptible the decades between the wars,” when aesthetes couldn’t be bothered with the problem of mass unemployment? The guilty man was Lytton Strachey:

Look at the celebrated portrait of him by Henry Lamb: the dry, dessicated, juiceless, cynical man whose very contact is enough to freeze all generous emotion and immobilise all noble endeavour. And we took him to our hearts! He bowled over our idols, and we applauded him. He jeered at nobility, pretending it was humbug, and we said: “Yes, of course it is humbug.” Florence Nightingale, Arnold of Rugby, anyone who had opposed endeavour to sluggishness, faith to despair, was an appropriate butt of his harsh, despairing and faithless creed. He raised the banner of negation, and we were all ready to enlist beneath it. A war had been won, or so we thought, and peace was here; and what was a man to do with peace save enjoy the plenty that proverbially accompanies it? . . . The Rhondda was a long way to the west and Jarrow a long way to the north. They need not disturb us. The great thing was that here, at last, was Peace, and this time we were going to keep it. Therefore, away with all talk of endeavour, ardour, endurance; away with eminent Victorian virtues.99

These cultural tensions are symmetrically illustrated in the careers of two coalfield intellectuals, South Wales politician Aneurin Bevan and South Yorkshire novelist Roger Dataller. They began at opposite poles on the populist–elitist spectrum, then immersed themselves in (respectively) haute bohemian and autodidact milieux, until they eventually reversed their starting positions.

It is not difficult to understand Bevan’s voracious hunger for books. His father was a quintessential miner-autodidact. Though his mother learned to read and write in school, she had ten children and became illiterate (“As the children came there was far too much to do. . . . I lost the knack”). Their son consequently burrowed through the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute Library, and acquired his characteristically grandiose vocabulary through close study of Roget’s Thesaurus. “The relevance of what we were reading to our own industrial and political experience had all the impact of a divine revelation,” he proclaimed, though his tastes inclined toward abstract philosophy. When he chaired the Tredegar Library Committee, £60 of its £300 acquisitions budget was delegated to a colliery repairman to buy philosophy books. Bevan could quote Nietzsche, discuss F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, and deeply impress an Oxford tutor with his critique of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. He became the most confrontational figure in the Labour Party leadership, particularly on the cultural front, where he liked to challenge professors and intellectuals on their own turf. “The people are excluded from forming judgement on various matters of public interest on the ground that expert knowledge is required, and that of course the people cannot possess,” he protested in 1938. “The debunking of the expert is an important stage in the history of democratic communities because democracy involves the assertion of the common against the special interest. . . . The first weapon in the worker’s armoury must be a strongly developed bump of irreverence. He must insist on the secular nature of all knowledge.”

The elite classes, then, maintained their prestige through the conspicuous display of intellectual wealth as well as material goods. If that sounds Veblenesque, Bevan was in fact deeply influenced by The Theory of the Leisure Class.¹⁰⁰ Yet as his political career progressed, he developed a taste for another kind of conspicuous consumption. He loved hobnobbing at the Cafe Royal with bohemian artists like Jacob Epstein, Matthew Smith, and Michael Ayrton. He increasingly saw himself as a natural aristocrat, inspired by the Uruguayan philosopher José Enrique Rodó, who combined economic egalitarianism with intellectual elitism. Rodó warned that mass education in the United States had produced “a sort of universal semi-culture and a profound indifference to the higher. . . . The levelling by the middle classes tends . . . to plane down what little remains of intelligentsia: the flowers are mown by the machine when the weeds remain.” He feared “that abominable brutality of the majority which despises the greater moral benefits of liberty and annuls in public opinion all respect for the dignity of the individual.” Given his thumpingly proclaimed faith in the wisdom of the common man, it seems odd that Bevan would enjoy quoting Rodó to his dinner guests: the Rodó who feared that democracy would abolish the “legitimate superiorities” of Carlylean heroism. “All in civilisation that is more than material excellence, economic prosperity,” wrote Rodó, “is a height that will be levelled when moral authority is given to the average mind.”101

This fear of “middlebrow” culture has been endemic in the modern intellectual left, which has generally despised the cultural classlessness of the United States. Bevan lived comfortably with the contradiction, just as he had no difficulty dining at the Cafe Royal and drinking Lord Beaverbrook’s champagne while he vilified capitalists. It drove Brendan Bracken beyond all endurance: “You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin!” he exploded. Bevan coolly explained that he was simply engaging Tories on their own ground, but less educated members of his own party felt (with some justification) that he was talking down to them with all those words culled from the thesaurus. Another drawback, as one biographer notes, is that after a flaming youth of intense self-education, Bevan appears to have ceased reading books and fallen back on quoting Rodó, until by the 1950s his socialist thinking had become ossified and sterile.¹⁰²

While Bevan was moving up and out of autodidact culture, Roger Dataller passed him in the opposite direction. In the early 1920s Dataller was reading Osbert Sitwell in the pits and, with the encouragement and advice of John Middleton Murry, complaining that his mates were wretched philistines. None of them, apparently, had heard of Debussy, Picasso, Chaliapin, or J. M. Synge. Stuck in the “sepulchral hole” of a mining town, he compared himself to Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol. “All my life I have been bound within the turgid flow of mediocrity,” he sighed. “What a twist of fate it is to find yourself a time-keeper, when you want to be an artist with a flowing tie, a broad-brimmed sombrero, and a villa in Capri.” Dataller wrote off his neighbors as reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls—though he admitted that “we haven’t gone even half-way to meet the people of our acquaintance.”¹⁰³

When he did meet them, as a WEA instructor, he was stunned by their energy for learning. The students, “including a mother with her baby, are intellectually eager to sit upon hard benches for three hours of torrid sunshine, in order that they may listen to a lecture on ‘Modern Tendencies in Industry.’” Granted, one could not assume any knowledge on their part: “It is not unusual to meet a collier very fierce for learning, but whose study has been gravely warped by lack of direction. Single-track education, if you like—sometimes a passionate knowledge of Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Burns, or Milton, and little else.” But there was no denying the passion. After class, one student would follow Dataller on a four-mile bus ride all the way to the railway station, just to continue the discussion.¹⁰⁴ As Dataller became more thoroughly integrated into this community of students, he found it ever harder to maintain the pose of an alienated intellectual. By 1932 the typical working-class couple seemed much more likeable, even if they were indifferent to the WEA:

Spruce and tidy—he with clean pocket handkerchief, she with her shopping basket and air of modest efficiency—they take their seats in the bus for the weekly jaunt into town. There is something so inoffensive and fundamentally decent about them. And a vast indignation arises against the legion of scamps and curs that would endeavour to trade upon that decency. . . . And yet, in another mood and moment, as one remembers their indifference to great issues, their mental lethargy, their unabashed credulity, one finds oneself in an attitude of unutterable disgust. We bring the whole heritage of culture, in fee for the asking, and lay it at their feet. They are not interested. We introduce those figures who alone make human history of real significance, and without a “by your leave” they stream away for intimate communion with Jean Harlow or with Wallace Beery. . . . “The people, sir? The people is a great beast!” . . . Please hand me my Carlyle.105

Dataller taught “modern fiction”—which, in WEA classes, meant Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells, and Conrad. He also tried out Woolf, Joyce, and Hemingway with his students, but they preferred Dickens and Trollope for their ability to tell a straightforward story. When introduced to Auden and Eliot, “their attitude was that if a poet took little trouble to make himself understood, he must not complain of comparative neglect. They felt there was an obligation in the artist as well as in the reader.” By 1934 Dataller was growing tired of seeing the label “very good but very difficult” inevitably attached to modernist literature: it was like “saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people cannot eat it.” Tolstoy had proclaimed that true art must produce unity of feeling among an audience, and in Dataller’s classroom only a few literary episodes (none of them modernist) passed that test: Sophia pulling Mr. Povey’s tooth in The Old Wives’ Tale, the meeting of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick, Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi, the fight and wedding scenes in The History of Mr. Polly, Artemus Ward’s The Shakers and Prince of Wales, A Christmas Carol, the storm in David Copperfield, the trial in The Pickwick Papers, J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, and Shakespearean tragedy. He was ever more infuriated by Mrs. Woolf ’s serene confidence that literary genius could not arise from the working classes. What about Burns and Sean O’Casey? Among his students Dataller saw plenty of potential talent, most of it stifled for lack of an outlet.¹⁰⁶

He also noticed a refreshing lack of deference. Much as the workingman valued education, he was not afraid to deflate academics. “Like Mark Twain, he will poke an irreverent finger at the antics of philosophers and scholars no less than at those of Kings and Emperors . . . and he holds tightly to his bosom that precious thing of which he will not allow the sophists to cheat him, the validity of his own experience.” Supported by this earthy self-confidence, students disregarded jargon that would either exclude them from the discussion or force them to engage the issue only on the instructor’s terms. In their essays, they aimed at

the elimination as far as possible of aesthetic terms, or definitions which in the opinion of the essayist (being a man of action first and of thought afterwards!) tend to obscure the issue upon which he is writing. “Classical” and “Romantic” movements may be fully outlined within the syllabus; but once a deferential gesture has been made to the tutor’s requirements, let us get down (it would seem) to the pertinent business of the evening! What kind of a man was Wordsworth, and what impelled him to turn from Revolution to Reaction? What kind of a man was Byron? Did he become a rebel because he comprehended injustice, or merely because poor, he became neglected, and lame, the object of female commiseration? Was Shelley really a revolutionary? And if so, why did he elect to live in Italy instead of with the liberty lads of England? The same shrewd, commonsensical sort of question, not labels and classification (necessary for working purposes though these may be), but an ardent student inquiry, pouring into, and bursting through, the flimsily constructed framework.

In a word, the student with a point of view!107

By 1940 Dataller had completed the transition to populism, repudiating the modernists he had taught and admired only a few years before. Now he clearly sided with Mr. Bennett against Mrs. Woolf. Now he blamed “clique and coterie” for boosting the “sterile obscurantism” of James Joyce. Now he was ready to argue that Charles Dickens, though out of fashion among modernist critics, in fact passed the only true test of literary greatness—borrowings from the public library.¹⁰⁸

What if the modernists had shared Dataller’s willingness to meet his audience halfway? In Who Paid for Modernism?, Joyce Wexler recently argued that, contrary to “the myth of the suffering artist,” there was a substantial potential audience for the work of Joyce and Lawrence. In their later careers, however, they wrote increasingly obscure books for private publishers and a coterie readership. Had they heeded the advice of their editors and submitted to the disciplines of the literary marketplace, they might have produced more structured and accessible work: another Sons and Lovers rather than The Plumed Serpent, another Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man instead of Finnegans Wake. Thus Wexler answers her own question: “Authors paid for modernism by giving up the wide audience their ambition desired and their talent deserved.”¹⁰⁹ The success of Arnold Bennett in explaining highbrow literature to general readers suggests that she may have a point. Even a remote Cumberland village in the 1920s was not impervious to modernism. When Edward Short was growing up in Warcop, one of the local residents was artist Donald Wood, who actually deigned to explain contemporary art to country folk.

Whenever he was spotted a crowd of children and old men assembled behind him and watched every stroke, commenting among themselves, often in a highly critical way and in loud whispers. But we soon discovered that neither our presence nor our comments worried him in the slightest or made him self-conscious, indeed he seemed to enjoy having an audience for he was a young man of great good humour, enthusiasm and modesty. Neither criticism nor acclaim put him off. He would chat with us as he painted and ask our views on his work. . . . Looking back, I do believe he taught us to see the village with different eyes, to see forms and colours that, before his coming, we had never noticed. To us trees had always been green, sheep white and water blue. In our paintings at school, where quite progressive, indeed almost avant-garde methods, were used in teaching art, strange new colours, purple trees, green sheep, orange water began to appear. Donald . . . was transforming our powers of observation and our ability to record what we saw, and—more important—what we felt about what we saw.110

The plebeian intellectual was likely to remain a populist as long as he belonged to a circle of other plebeian intellectuals. The mutual improvement societies, the WEA, or even a gang of like-minded clerks could offer such a congenial cultural home. Those who failed to find such a home—or who chose to avoid it—were liable to gravitate toward the more exclusive orbit of modernism. Leicester bottlewasher Tom Barclay was just such a marginal figure, forever scolding the proletariat for preferring Ethel M. Dell and Tarzan of the Apes to Eugene O’Neill and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He felt more rapport with the middle-class Fabian socialists, and like them he dismissed the working classes as beer-sodden and petit bourgeois. He liked to quote Bernard Shaw to the effect that “if it were not for the working man we would have had Socialism established long ago.”¹¹¹

An important base for the populist intelligentsia was Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and the affiliated Clarion Scouts, which offered a refuge for Edwin Muir (b. 1887) when he held down a depressing job as a Glasgow clerk at 16s. a week. Blatchford’s hearty socialism allowed Muir to idealize the uncouth workers at his beer-bottling plant: “I no longer saw them as they were, but as they would be when the society of which I dreamed was realized. . . . For the first time in my life I began to like ordinary vulgar people, because in my eyes they were no longer ordinary or vulgar, since I saw in them shoots of the glory they would possess when all men and women were free and equal.” Those charitable impulses, however, gave way to sour irony when he turned to the Nietzschean elitism of the New Age, A. R. Orage’s high bohemian weekly:

Reading it gave me a feeling of superiority which was certainly not good for me; I can still remember with some embarrassment a phrase of the editor to the effect that the paper was “written by gentlemen for gentlemen.” But it stimulated my mind. It also sharpened my contempt for sentimentality, since, except for Orage’s own political and literary notes, the tone of the paper was crushingly superior and exclusive, and some of the contemporary writers for whom I was in danger of contracting an admiration were treated there with surprising rudeness. On the strength of this I acquired a taste for condemnation to which I had no right, and when any of my friends came to see me, filled with enthusiasm for some new book, I could crush him with a few words, though his enthusiasm was genuine and my condemnation borrowed.

Muir still belonged to the Clarion Scouts, but now he gravitated to a clique within that organization known as “the intellectuals.” Its members were drawn mostly from the no-man’s-land between the working and lower-middle classes: teachers, clerks, salespeople, government employees, engineers. They disdained “the superstitions of the mob”:

We followed the literary and intellectual development of the time, discovering such writers as Bergson, Sorel, Havelock Ellis, Galsworthy, Conrad, E. M. Forster, Joyce and Lawrence, the last two being contributed by me, for I had seen them mentioned in the New Age by Ezra Pound. . . .

It was the first time I had listened to or taken part in intelligent conversation. Up to now my mental life had been quite solitary, and though I was always reading and discovering new books to read, there was no one to whom I could talk of them. I lived two lives, a quite private life of intellectual discovery, and another in which the name of a book never escaped my lips and I was careful to behave like everybody else. Now that I could speak and listen freely I was filled with a deep sense of relief and gratitude.

But he was also succumbing to intellectual arrogance, fed by an intense study of Nietzsche:

The idea of a transvaluation of all values intoxicated me with a feeling of false power. I, a poor clerk in a beer-bottling factory, adopted the creed of aristocracy, and, happy until now to be an Orkney man somewhat lost in Glasgow, I began to regard myself, somewhat tentatively, as a “good European.” I was repelled by many things that I read, such as the counsel to give “the bungled and botched” a push if I found them going downhill, instead of trying to help them. My Socialism and my Nietzscheanism were quite incompatible, but I refused to recognize it. I did not reflect that if Christianity was a “slave morality” I was one of the slaves who benefited by it, and that I could make no pretension to belong to the “master class.” But I had no ability and no wish to criticize Nietzsche’s ideas, since they gave me exactly what I wanted: a last desperate foothold on my dying dream of the future. My heart swelled when I read, “Become what thou art,” and “Man is something that must be surpassed,” and “What does not kill me strengthens me.” Yet it swelled coldly; my brain was on fire, but my natural happiness was slipping away from me. . . . I tried, when I came to Nietzsche’s last works, The Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo, to ignore the fact that they were tinged with madness. . . . I adopted the watchword of “intellectual honesty,” and in its name committed every conceivable sin against honesty of feeling and honesty in the mere perception of the world with which I daily came into contact. Actually, although I did not know it, my Nietzscheanism was what psychologists call a “compensation.” I could not face my life as it was, and so I took refuge in the fantasy of the Superman. Already I was beginning to see that my job was at the mercy of any chance; yet I could look forward only to the life of a clerk; and when I thought that I might grow middle-aged and round-backed and grey at that work I was overcome with dejection.

In fact, a wave of dismissals at his company impelled him to find another clerical job in a bone factory, which cloaked the town with the stench of rotting flesh. There his only intellectual companion was a fellow clerk and New Age reader, who professed to be a friend of the workers but “never referred to them except in abusive terms, and pounced on sentimentality as if it were a deadlier enemy than Capitalism itself.” In that waste land, Muir began writing “lonely, ironic, slightly corpse-like poems.”112 The New Age printed them, along with some aphorisms he later published in book form as We Moderns:

 Art is at the present day far too easy of comprehension, far too obvious. Our immediate task should be to make it difficult, the concern of a dedicated few. Thus only shall we win back reverence for it . . . . A democratic familiarity with it—such as exists among the middle classes, not among the working classes, in whom reverence is not yet dead—is an abomination. . . .

The cult of the average man . . . is nothing but the exaltation of men at the expense of Man. In due time all ideals perish, only an aspiration towards averageness remains, and equality is everywhere enthroned. . . . Well, we must weigh men again; we must deny equality; we must affirm aristocracy. . . .

How unhappy must all those poor mortals be who are not poets! . . . Cloddish and fragmentary, they are scarcely human, these poor mortals.

All this came from a crofter’s son, who was not above taunting proletarian writer Patrick MacGill:

Sure, Patrick, ne’er were style and matter knit

More trim than yours: here is the proof of it.

Your theme’s a navvy posing in a hovel,

And ’tis quite clear you scribble with a shovel.

His greatest contempt was reserved for Arnold Bennett, for finding the stuff of literature in the Potteries:

Why, pray, so garrulous of wood and leather,

Eating, the clock, the bathroom, and the weather?

Why on existence do you always dwell?

Is it because you’ve naught of Life to tell?113

If that seems to be a four-line summary of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which was published some years later, perhaps Mrs. Woolf was elaborating what had already become commonplace among the modernist intelligentsia. (As a poet, Muir would be discovered by the Woolfs and published by their Hogarth Press.)¹¹⁴

Those pretensions could indeed offer compensation for isolated and marginal plebeian intellectuals: for example, a Nietzschean milkman in Glasgow, who lived in a filthy room with hordes of books and worked for an unsanitary milk company. “He was in no movement and had a supreme distaste for all,” recalled a coworker. “He was completely contemptuous of the masses, to whom he used to refer in the sneering phrase of the Master as ‘the dear people.’”¹¹⁵ Inspired by New Age Nietzscheanism Hugh MacDiarmid, a poet hovering precariously between the educated classes and the destitute classes, became a self-described “intellectual snob of the worst description.” He applauded the 1911 anti-Jewish riots in South Wales, denounced Robert Burns for preaching democracy and brotherhood, called for “a Scottish Fascism,” and complimented the Soviet secret police (“What maitters ’t wha we kill . . .?”). The Scotland he grew up in still had a strong autodidact tradition, which MacDiarmid preferred to ignore. He despised the Shetland Islanders, among whom he lived for a time, and yearned to get back to “civilized people” in Edinburgh or Glasgow—though at times he denied that there were civilized people in Glasgow. He professed to enjoy “the company of quite illiterate people” as well as the creators of “difficult high-brow literature” like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, “but never half-educated mediocrities!” As John Carey might have predicted, his bitterest fulminations were reserved for those who took popular courses in English literature: “third-hand and fourth-hand generalities . . . a stock of details swept up by the industrious housemaids of literature.” In the course of an erratic literary career, he reassured himself by quoting Pound (“A nation which does not feed its best writers is a mere barbarian dung heap”) and Kierkegaard (“The literary and social and political situation requires an exceptional individual—the question is whether there is anyone in this realm who is fitted for this task except me”). A founder of the Scottish National Party, he was the kind of ultranationalist who denounces nearly all of his countrymen as sellouts: “I am speaking for Scotland in a way which few men, if any, have ever been qualified to speak.” Later, he found in the Communist Party the same assurance that he belonged to a vanguard elite: “Here lies your secret, O Lenin—No’ in the majority will that accepts the result . . . .”

MacDiarmid conceded that it was not easy to “reconcile my use of a linguistic medium utterly unintelligible to ‘the mob’, and my highbrowism generally, with my Communism—the extremes of High Tory and Communist meeting.” It was in fact a kind of shabby intellectual gentility, desperately striving to distinguish itself from the masses. This insecure elitism may explain why he could quote, in almost the same breath, Lenin on the true Marxist intellect and Clive Bell on the awfulness of best-sellers; why he supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; why he recognized a kindred spirit in Malcolm X, and teamed up with him in a televised Oxford Union debate; why neither his Scottish separatism nor his Communism made him averse to accepting a Civil List Pension from the king. His memoirs were mostly given over to name-dropping, quoting favorable reviews, and explaining his own failures as a refusal to run with the herd. When the masses occasionally came into his line of vision, he either extolled them in the abstract or vilified them in reality. The son of a 37s.-a-week postman, he cultivated “eutrephelia, well-bred arrogance—the over-weening blue eye arched in the bony face. . . . That is how I reconcile my highbrowism and my Communism.”116

Cultural Triage

In the first half of the twentieth century, then, two rival intelligentsias squared off against each other, competing for audiences and prestige. One was middle-class, university-educated and modernist, supported largely by patronage and private incomes; the other was based in the working and clerking classes, mainly Board school graduates and the self-educated, more classical in their tastes, but fearlessly engaged in popular journalism and the literary marketplace. One appealed to an elite audience; the other wrote best-sellers and feature films. One was inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the other Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin. One read and wrote for the New Age and New Statesman, the other T. P.’s Weekly and John o’ London’s. The labels that they adopted (or were forced upon them) were “highbrow” and “middlebrow.” Until about 1950 the highbrows could reasonably claim to be beleaguered and misunderstood in a culture dominated by middlebrows. But thereafter government patronage, the BBC, and the expansion of higher education gradually created a mass audience for Forster, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Joyce, and the entire Bloomsbury group. They were canonized in the university curriculum, while the counterintelligentsia of Arnold Bennett, Neville Cardus, Ethel Mannin, Richard Church, A. E. Coppard, V. S. Pritchett, Thomas Burke, and Howard Spring is mostly ignored even by academic specialists. If they treat middlebrow culture at all, they usually dismiss it as superficial and middle-class,¹¹⁷ and to a considerable extent it was. But it was also the direct descendant of Victorian self-improvement, produced for and by thinking people with working-class roots. In the second half of the century, with the decay of the autodidact tradition, the decline of the industrial working class, and the opposition of an increasingly popular and confident modernist culture, middlebrow culture would lose its audience and disappear.

In her essay “Middlebrow” Virginia Woolf formulated a general theory of cultural stratification that concisely explains the tensions generated by the rise of Leonard Bast.118 For the past two centuries, intellectuals in the West have generally sorted culture into three bins,¹¹⁹ and Mrs. Woolf followed this pattern. At the top, naturally, is the “highbrow,” defined simply as a member of the thinking classes: “He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.” Conversely, the “lowbrow is . . . of course a man or woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life.” In other words, he belongs to the nonthinking classes, though in fairness Mrs. Woolf includes in this category admirals and duchesses as well as miners, cooks, and clerks. Lowbrow culture is now usually called, less pejoratively, “popular culture” or “folk culture.” Far from disparaging it, intellectuals have usually admired popular culture as earthy, authentic, indigenous, unselfconscious, vital, traditional, natural, free of the taint of commercialism, a source of inspiration for high art. Why, protested Mrs. Woolf, does the press perpetuate the myth that highbrows disdain lowbrows, “when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and the other side of the other!” Lowbrows provide the two essentials every highbrow needs: subject matter and an audience.

You have only to stroll along The Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them—to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done.

As long as these two castes remain in their proper stations, where one produces culture while the other consumes it, there is a happy equilibrium. T. S. Eliot had no objection to proletarian culture within a strict social hierarchy: he was genuinely fond of the lowbrow antics of Groucho Marx and music hall star Marie Lloyd. Trouble arises only with the intrusion of a third cultural stratum, which has been called by various names, all of them derogatory: “bourgeois,” “petit bourgeois,” “mass culture,” “midcult,” “admass,” “suburban,” “middle-class,” “middlebrow.”¹²⁰ From Ortega, Pound, and Eliot on the political right to Adorno, Marcuse, the Leavises, and Dwight MacDonald on the left, modernist intellectuals shared an obsessive loathing of middlebrows. Mrs. Woolf defines them as lowbrows who invade the territory of highbrows, practicing authorship without a license. They occupy a dubious place in the class system, “betwixt and between,” confusing neat intellectual hierarchies. They are promiscuously democratic, associating on equal terms with both lowbrows and highbrows. They pursue, “rather nastily, . . . money, fame, power, or prestige”—unlike highbrows. Where highbrows embrace the avant-garde (“to buy living art requires living taste”), middlebrows prefer “bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass,” a clear dig at Everyman’s Library and at the parlors of the self-improving working classes. But middlebrows are a menace primarily because they poach on the reading audiences that highbrows once considered their own:

I often ask my friends the lowbrows, over our muffins and honey, why it is that while we, the highbrows, never buy a middlebrow book, or go to a middlebrow lecture, or read, unless we are paid for doing so, a middlebrow review, they, on the contrary, take these middlebrow activities so seriously? . . .

To all this the lowbrows reply—but I cannot imitate their style of talking—that they consider themselves to be common people without education. It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach them culture. And after all, the lowbrows continue, middlebrows, like other people, have to make money. There must be money in teaching and in writing books about Shakespeare. We all have to earn our livings nowadays, my friends the lowbrows tell me.

Mrs. Woolf did not dispute that. “Even those of us whose Aunts came a cropper riding in India and left them an income of four hundred and fifty pounds, now reduced, thanks to the war and other luxuries, to little more than two hundred odd, even we have to do that.” Rentier modernists were no longer completely insulated from the literary marketplace, where they had to compete with more popular authors. Modernists could carve out a market niche among sophisticated readers and earn a modestly good living writing for them. But among the larger public of common readers, they could not compete with populist authors, nor could they come close to the stupendous royalties of an Arnold Bennett. Mrs. Woolf worried that prosperous middlebrows might move into Bloomsbury, drive up the rents, and force her out—an anxiety that afflicts every artist living in a bohemian quarter.

Journalists who wrote low literature were less of a problem for highbrows, since they offered no direct competition for readers. But middlebrow authors like Bennett had an appalling habit of writing clear across the intellectual spectrum. V. W. Garratt, a former factory worker, pursued what he called a “Jekyll and Hyde” literary career, producing articles for the sophisticated English Review and the downmarket John Bull, on topics ranging from Mayan sculpture to association football. A poet himself, he enjoyed hearing Ezra Pound and Harold Munro read their work at the Poetry Bookshop, but he was also a freelance journalist, always looking to spin the raw stuff of human interest into saleable copy. As Garratt explained it, “Fleet Street has always had a soft heart for the ‘gate-crasher’ who has something to offer,”121 but cultural gatekeepers were scandalized. Q. D. Leavis looked back to a golden Elizabethan age when “the masses were receiving their amusement from above (instead of being specially catered for by journalists, film-directors, and popular novelists, as they are now).”122

One cannot help but think that the impoverishment and death of Leonard Bast represent wish fulfillment on the author’s part, disposing of yet another aspiring middlebrow. The unpleasant reality was that clerks belonged to a rising and increasingly articulate class. Of course they were vulnerable to economic downturns, when some clerks were, like Bast, precipitated into poverty. The autobiographies discussed here are admittedly Dick Whittington stories, written by the exceptionally successful. Still, clerkdom was a growth industry that offered social mobility, expanding job opportunities, and rising salaries. Of 388 clerks marrying in inner London parishes between 1898 and 1903, 42.8 percent had working-class fathers. Commercial, bank, and insurance clerks accounted for 3.8 percent of male workers over age fifteen by 1911, up from 0.7 percent in 1851. Insurance clerks in particular tended to enjoy good pay, relatively high prestige, and an open path for promotion to managerial positions.¹²³ Someone like Bast, at the beginning of his career, would have a meagre wage; but unlike the Schlegel sisters, he could look forward to a sharply rising earnings curve. One sample of ten insurance clerks, earning an average of £121 a year in 1890, were making £423 by 1914—enough to afford a comfortable suburban home, a couple of full-time servants, and private schools for their children.¹²⁴ Compare that with Virginia Woolf ’s private income of under £400;¹²⁵ Forster’s inheritance of £8,000 probably earned even less. And Everyman’s Library was promising those clerks a complete literary education for £50. Economically as well as culturally, the clerks were breathing down the necks of the rentier intellectuals. The latter could only preserve their cultural prestige by creating a new literature inaccessible to Board school graduates.

Meanwhile, a similar transition was under way in the United States. Once middlebrow culture began to flourish, modernism was created to distance intellectuals from the increasingly educated public. Among professors of American literature, the old popular canon of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Holmes was superseded by Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, and Poe. The former had been taught by an older generation of generalists, the latter were promoted by younger academics who had received more specialized training as Americanists. Their modern canon, as Richard Brodhead observes, served “to underwrite their own new cultural authority. If there is anything the second or modern American canon is that the first or genteel canon was not, it is difficult. (The substitution of Dickinson for Longfellow is symptomatic.) This version of our literature requires the aid of expert assistance to bring it home to the common mind—and so helps support the value of expertise more generally.”¹²⁶

In Britain, T. S. Eliot drew that line when he taught extension courses in English and French literature during the First World War. The students were interested though passive, and Eliot acknowledged that they were doing their best, given the difficulty of the syllabus and wartime conditions. Privately, he wrote that “These people are the most hopeful sign in England, to me.” But when he publicly addressed a modernist audience, he assumed more snobbish airs. In the April 1918 Egoist he wrote off Alice Meynell’s middlebrow Hearts of Controversy as “what a University Extension audience would like; but it is not criticism.” In “The Function of Criticism” he would be even more arrogant: “I have had some experience of Extension lecturing, and I have found only two ways of leading any pupils to like anything with the right liking: to present them with a selection of the simpler kind of facts about a work—its conditions, its settings, its genesis—or else to spring the work on them in such a way that they were not prepared to be prejudiced against it.”127

The office-boy intelligentsia could not flourish in that climate. Neville Cardus had little in common with the next generation of anxiously modern critics: “The mandarins, as though to assure us or themselves that they were not things of the past, frisked about with the very latest in verse, prose, atonalism and surrealism, like so many old bucks ogling desperately the contemporary scene.”¹²⁸ For his own cohort, criticism was a matter of describing one’s own electric (if naive) response to the arts, without fretting too much about “bourgeois escapism.” But once university men entered journalism, he felt elbowed out by a “fashionable Bloomsbury-Chelsea highbrowism which does not understand that genius is a miracle to be revered whether in fashion or not.”¹²⁹ Richard Church had always been committed “to accuracy, to a reverence for tradition and an avoidance of eccentricity. . . . Poetry, and indeed all art, should in its first purpose be a communication, as direct and simple as possible.” This straightforwardness “made my work uninteresting to experimentalists, and those critics who have fostered the fashion for puerilism and obscurity in the arts and literature during the second quarter of the twentieth century.” The problem with accessibility is that there is no profit in it for the intelligentsia: “It . . . leaves the critics nothing to say.”¹³⁰

The modernists used difficulty to fence off and protect literary property. In 1914 Ezra Pound proclaimed that the old aristocracies of blood and business were about to be supplanted by “the aristocracy of the arts.” This new elite, he argued with breathtaking frankness, should be no less cynical in gulling the ignorant masses: “Modern civilisation has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control. . . . And the public will do well to resent these ‘new’ kinds of art.”¹³¹ Pound coined the term “Imagist” as a kind of brand name for modern poetry,¹³² but he soon saw a problem in his marketing strategy: if the point of Imagist poetry was to overawe the masses, what was to prevent them from learning the trick of it and producing their own? Amy Lowell considered copyrighting the name “Imagist” to keep out inferior imitators, but intellectual property law has never permitted a poet to register his movement as a trademark. Sure enough, by 1917 Eliot was complaining that “now it is possible to print free verse (second, third, or tenth-rate) in almost any American magazine.”¹³³

The irony is that this hostility to the masses was a response to an increasingly sophisticated audience. If most American magazines were printing free verse, America could hardly have been the philistine wasteland portrayed by Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken. In fact the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic was becoming more affluent and more educated. That growing audience could support an ever-expanding corps of writers, artists, critics, and academics. That growing body of intellectuals could, in turn, become more specialized: they could earn a living by rejecting the mass audience and writing for coteries of sophisticated readers. The modernists were among the first authors to carve out that market niche, and to secure it they had to become ever more innovative, complex, and difficult—partly to frustrate imitators, partly to appeal to the exclusivity of their readers. That is why mass education, even mass higher education, never produces a “common culture,” however noble that dream may be. Whenever the masses are educated up to a given level of culture, elite audiences and intellectuals will have already pressed on to the next and more challenging level.

The BBC’s Third Programme, founded in 1946, illustrates that process. The company had successfully offered the general public classical music and quality newscasts, along with lighter programing, but Virginia Woolf disdained this mix as the quintessence of middlebrow. The BBC, she snorted, really stood for “the Betwixt and Between Company.”134 The Third Programme was created as a closed shop for intellectuals, which would deliberately exclude the self-educated. The company’s Director-General William Haley, backed by BBC governors Harold Nicholson and Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, was determined not to compromise with public taste as, he believed, his predecessors had. He publicly identified his target as “the alert and receptive listener, the listener who is willing first of all to make an effort in selection and then to meet the performer half-way by giving his whole attention to what is being broadcast.” An internal memo, however, defined the audience more selectively: it was “already aware of artistic experience and will include persons of taste and intelligence, and of education. . . . The programme need not cultivate any other audience, and material that is unlikely to interest such listeners should be excluded.” In 1949 Harman Grisewood, second controller of the Third Programme, was still more elitist: his aim was not to bring culture to the masses (the objective of Matthew Arnold and John Reith) but to exclude them, to appeal to the already educated while making no concessions to “aspirants.” George Barnes and John Morris, the first and third controllers, had both been educated at Bloomsbury’s nursery, King’s College Cambridge; Barnes was a friend of Forster and a disciple of Keynes.

In its first week, the Third Programme made clear that there would be no concessions. It broadcast complete productions of Shaw’s Man and Superman, Milton’s Comus, and Sartre’s Huis Clos. Interludes between programs were filled with readings from Henry James selected by Desmond MacCarthy. What is amazing is that the channel managed to attract as many as 7 percent of evening listeners, a third of them working-class. During those first weeks, 19 percent of working-class listeners found the Third Programme “very attractive” or “moderately attractive,” compared with 55 percent of the lower-middle class and 70 percent of the upper-middle class.135 By 1949, 21 percent of the working class at least sometimes listened in, compared with 63 percent of middle-class and artisan households.¹³⁶

Radio Times published letters from its proletarian fans. “Many of my work-mates who have never seen the inside of a university common room were introduced to the higher aspects of literature, music and philosophy,” wrote a Glasgow ironmoulder. BBC producers knew that there was a still larger potential audience of “aspirants” who would “prefer the Third Programme to be a little more on familiar ground. After all, we are not all University Students,” explained one unemployed miner. The self-educated pleaded for study guides and background information that might help them digest a heavy diet of high culture, but the BBC sternly rejected “dilution,” “hearing aids,” or (Haley’s word) “crutches.”¹³⁷

Notwithstanding Mrs. Woolf, the great virtue of betwixt and between programming was that it inevitably exposed all listeners to a certain amount of high culture. Chaim Bermant recalled that “in the days before good music was segregated from bad”—before the Third Programme—he could turn on the radio in search of a dance band and stumble across a symphony orchestra. His father’s only encounter with classical music happened when, “switching on too early for the news, he heard a snatch of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and remarked: Dos is doch fun himmel—but this is from heaven!”¹³⁸

That opportunity was lost with the increasing specialization of cultural life, which appears to be a pervasive secular trend in modern societies. Something similar happened to the theater around 1900, when the common Victorian audience for Shakespeare divided between sophisticated drama and the movies. By the late 1950s art critic Harold Rosenberg recognized that this process of cultural segregation was unstoppable. Mass education had produced the “inexorable liquidation of the proletariat into the intellectual caste.” As this educated class grew, it inevitably subdivided into increasingly specialized professions, artistic movements, schools of psychology, theories of literary criticism. In order to be taken seriously, each of these subgroups developed a distinctive jargon: “The more incomprehensible this lingo is to outsiders, the more thoroughly it identifies the profession as such and elevates it out of the reach of mere amateurs and craftsmen. The continued use of Latin by the medical profession appears as simple-minded compared to what newer professions have been able to accomplish in ‘English’.” Rosenberg saw that “The segregation of occupations within the mazes of their technical systems increasingly demolishes the old mental cohesions of class.” That, he argued, is why Leninism had failed to take root in the most economically developed societies. (It might also help to explain why Leninism crumbled when professional specialization developed in Communist societies.) Each profession—whether Freudian, Beat, feminist, or deconstructionist—claims to have an ideology that explains the human condition. Each proclaims itself a “vanguard” (“a word that turns up everywhere,” Rosenberg noted, though today “cutting-edge” is preferred). And each profession uses its private language and theories to criticize other professions, in an endless competition for prestige and economic rewards.

Always working against this “Balkanization” are the popularizers, the cultural “middlemen” who explain the professions to the general public. Because they cut through jargon, popularizers tend to deglamorize intellectual “vanguards” and effectively steal their intellectual property: why should a mass audience struggle with highbrow culture when middlebrow commentaries are more readable? Rosenberg recognized that the “alienation of the artist,” academics’ contempt for colleagues who write for “the general reader,” the loathing of couturiers for retailers who copy and mass-market their designs, are all of a piece. For them, popularization is theft, “a work totally taken away from its creator and totally falsified.”139

The problem is still more acute at the start of the twenty-first century, when laborers in the avant-garde must continually accelerate cultural innovation to keep up with demand. The rentier intelligentsia is gone, but its functions have been taken over by tenured professors. Their incomes are equally secure, but they earn less than Leonard Bast, who has become a middle-management insurance executive. Worse, he is now thoroughly familiar with modernism. He was assigned A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in college, he works in a Corbusier-style office building, he assumes that a modern painting ought to look like a Jackson Pollock. He may well know E. M. Forster, whose audience has grown exponentially with each generation. Howards End sold just under 10,000 copies in its first three years, A Passage to India only 23,000 in twelve years; but sales of the first Penguin editions were 250,000 and 300,000 respectively,¹⁴⁰ and the film versions were seen by millions.

When modernism became mass culture, the avant-garde had to move on to something more modern still—postmodernism, which strove to recapture the opacity and difficulty that once cloaked modernism. Postmodernists reproduced Mrs. Woolf ’s cultural triage, with some necessary updating. In their hierarchy, the highbrows were postmodernists themselves. (Of course they avoided the term “highbrow,” preferring to speak of “high theory”). Like earlier generations of highbrows, they admired and patronized “popular culture,” though now they meant television, rock, and hip-hop rather than peasant verse or folk music. The canon of literary classics—now including the modernist classics—in turn became middlebrow culture. In the age of Penguin Books and mass higher education, Shakespeare, Melville, and Lawrence were devalued by overproduction: too many people had read them and too many academics had written about them. Therefore the advanced intelligentsia had to relocate once again, like a genteel household that moves to ever more remote suburbs, to escape the crowds of the encroaching inner city.