AND THUS WE come to the crucial question of this book. How, indeed, between the world of phogey, and the world of the Affluent Society, might one manage to live some sort of ordinary, satisfying unaffluent and straightforward kind of life? The problem came to me when I was living in America, and realized I would never make a consumer; and then again back in England, when I realized I would never make a phogey. We will explore a few of the possible solutions in a moment, but let us just look a little more deeply at the problem. For it will be quite apparent to the intelligent reader of this book—like yourself—that if contemporary society was completely unpleasant to live in, nobody would do so. Equally it is clear that, if its diseases and uneases had one simple remedy, there would be a publicity-conscious, semi-fanatical, demonstration-loving protest group, decorated with an icing of distinguished names, to bring it about. So you will not be offered, in these pages, some panacea, some large-scale political or economic solution; rather, perhaps, that typical note of haunting doubt that seems the note of the age.

I have remarked that, while in a traditional society a man must be what he is, in consumer society a man can be what he chooses. This is an existential dilemma, singularly unnerving, since there is no way of knowing which of the many choices on offer is right. This was brought home to me, in a mild way, when, after living for months in the United States in the various possessions I had brought with me from England to defeat the cost of living, I ran out of razor blades, and had to make my way down to the corner drugstore to buy some. The druggist, neat in his white nylon coat, looked out at me over the beachballs and the corn-cob pipes with which, for some reason, is emporium was decorated: ‘For a medium, light, or heavy beard?’ he asked. I stared and said: ‘I don’t know.’ He looked back at me in amazement, or even a kind of awe. ‘Where have you been all these years?’ he asked, ‘What part of the woods are you from?’^*

I thought about the matter, and finally I explained to him that I just didn’t have the technological sophistication to know; I still have to this day the electric razor he went on to sell me. But then I realized that all my life was like that: I had been wandering around the United States in a whirl of consumer confusion. For in America all is the same: martinis come dry, extra dry, or desiccated, with a choice of domestic or foreign gin, an olive or a twist of lemon, and so on, so that by the time you succeed in ordering one you rather wish you had never bothered. This fine grading applies to all things, including refuse—there is trash, and there is garbage, and social obloquy falls on those who fail to understand. ‘What are you, mac, a beatnik?’ my garbage man, before he stopped visiting me altogether, used to ask as I stood there before the pails in my dressing gown, having got the rubbish all wrong again. ‘I’m an Englishman,’ I said. ‘The discerning of difference of kinds and degree has always been the mark of the civilized intelligence,’ he roared at me through the window of his truck as he backed up; and he never came back after that.

And it was brooding on these experiences that I realized that, quite simply, I didn’t have it in me to make a consumer. Every era has its misfits, and clearly I was one of them. I noticed that, for example, when I had to decide whether I wanted a pack of king-size cigarettes, or a packet of ordinary or serf-size cigarettes, my mind had a tendency to shift to a new field of choice altogether—like whether to continue smoking or give up. For all the two-page spreads and the thirty-second commercials, I remained the kind of person who, when asked what brand I wanted, replied ‘Any will do.’ It was not that my attitude was anarchistic, simply confused. It was just that, when I went out, as I now rarely do, to shop a little, and found fifty brands of soap when all I wanted was one, I felt that the choice of two or three would suit me perfectly well, and give me the nice democratic glow of feeling that I lived in a free and open society. The truth, it came to be apparent, was that the role of consumer requires a lifetime of practice and initiation, and that, moreover, unless these initiations had been gone through and assimilated, as in my case they had not, then it was really impossible to make an impression on anyone in America at all. For in this ultimate consumer world the man who does not know what drink he drinks, and why, who does not know what make of car he prefers, and why, who does not know whether he prefers blondes to redheads, or big behinds to little behinds, has—like a savage in an art-gallery—no being at all, no self-appointed identity, no selective mechanisms for giving shape to his life.

In this dilemma, admittedly, everyone was sympathetic, everyone tried to teach me the way of things. Perhaps the first American ceremonial I was invited to, just after my first arrival, was to be picked up by good friends and taken off to the Piggly Wiggly, a supermarket that was roughly the same size as Westminster Abbey, and a good deal more pretentious. From the moment we left the car under the rabbit sign in the carpark, so that we could find it again, and the great glass doors of the premises flew open before my feet without intervention of human agency, I knew I was undergoing a profound educational rite. Commerce went on apace in the vast hall; neighbours chatted together over their laden carts, while their young stole rolls of toilet paper from nearby displays and tried to eat them; all was, in a sense, normal. Over here a chef in a great hat was roasting chicken; there a cook in a check dress was icing cakes; by the doorway a person dressed as an elephant (one assumed it was a person, but it could have been a very clever elephant) was shaking hands with people and talking about collecting books of stamps. Concealed loudspeakers gave off the Bayreuth Festival Company, cavorting lightly with The Ride of the Valkyries; concealed detectives peered out from behind the two-way mirrors on the walls. The aisles of goodies stretched off into the distant haze. I realized I was supposed to buy something.

It was not easy. The shelf in front of me contained small tins labelled Roasted Caterpillar; adjacent to these were Tinned Baby Bees, Fried Grasshoppers, Chocolate Covered Ants, Alligator Soup and a number of other items culled from the insect and reptilian realms. There were mysterious bottles labelled ‘Liquid Smoke’. With a five-dollar food order the supermarket was giving away, entirely free, one piece of a thirty-item set of kitchen tools, or so the microphones announced. Then suddenly I felt that I was at the centre of it all, felt the whole place focused on me, Bayreuth, detectives, elephants, and ants. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have the stamina or motivation for it all; I turned tail, handed over twenty tins of chocolate covered ants, got my free spatula, and ran for the rabbit in the carpark. Mostly after that I shopped at corner groceries, all the time wondering, however, as with a woman one has loved and lost, just what the Piggly Wiggly was giving away now, and to whom. What was missing? Motivation and information: those basic consumer skills. I have been going to America ever since, and I have still not even begun to acquire them.

Not that I am the only one. Some years later, a married man now, my hair cut and the cuffs on my shirt mended for the first time in ten years, I carried my spouse off to America, rented a house, and pointed the way to the kitchen. An hour later she came out, a tear or two in her eyes: ‘I don’t know how to work it,’ she said. And indeed there was everything, in the form of a gadget: a cooker that could pre-set itself, cook the meat while you were out, and, if necessary, go next door to borrow a cup of sugar as well; a blender that turned your tie into a drinkable liquid; an electric shoe-cleaner that ran on its own in the night. All the food was pre-packeted, and labelled ‘Untouched by Human Hand’, though clearly not by the hand of science; curious concessions were made to human intervention, so that the cake-mixes generously permitted you to add one egg to them, or the salad dressings invited the provision of vinegar. Nature, having been taken out, was being put back: the potatoes were being dyed red to give them a more natural colour, and in Baltimore an advertisement for a dairy claimed it to be ‘the dairy with cows.’

It was here, then, that I realized that the new order of society was setting a pace that was beyond me, and that I would need to do something about it, not because the world I had entered was harsh and impossible to live in, but because it in some way was not harsh enough. Was it the phogey in me that made me doubt? And what, if one did not quite wish to live like that, were the alternatives? There were people who protested about all this, but they protested in groups, while I have never found groups of more than two, and they heterosexual, of any interest whatsoever. There was the Beat Generation, a new lifestyle (people no longer have lives, but lifestyles) which protested against the world by not washing, not working, and wearing tattered clothing, things I had been doing for years without knowing that it was a protest at all. There are, however, certain solutions that can be offered, and for the benefit of those who find themselves anxious or somewhat out of tune with things I propose to sum matters up by discussing three of them. These three simple devices are, in order: Voluntary Poverty; Voluntary Provincialism; and Voluntary Agrarianism (or Living With One’s Belly Close To The Soil). One, two, or all three of these may be of some help.

I. VOLUNTARY POVERTY

In a consumer society, the class system must use what tools come to hand, and it becomes a general aim to state one’s role and demonstrate one’s prestige by having many goods and displaying them. This is called Conspicuous Consumption, and what it means is, to put it shortly, that there is no point in having a television set unless you also have an aerial on the roof to show that you have it. It means, too, that if your neighbour does what is now smart and has a carpet in the toilet, he has somehow to get you in there in order for you to see it; this steps up his entertaining. There was a time when the only people one wanted to prove oneself to were those one knew well; and this kind of thing was never a problem. It was enough if nobody save the other two titled families in the district knew that the diamond in your tiara was the biggest ever found; you had played your cards with those who understood the game. But now one’s peers are everybody, and one is expected to prove oneself to strangers.

It is possible, and probably wise, to contract out of this system before it is too late. The answer is in what I have called elsewhere the new Conspicuous Inconsumption, and clearly in such situations it takes on fresh urgency. Have your bathroom taken out and turned into a pigeon-loft, and stake your prestige on a Shakespeare First Folio you have bankrupted your family to buy. Explain to your friends that you have sold your car in order to buy a collection of butterflies. Cultivate an atmosphere of spareness, of austerity, about you—the air of bothering only about essentials. Wear shabby clothes, and dwell in an unlikely house. Confuse people. It may be hard at first, but it shows you are serious, after all.

Voluntary poverty of the sort I have described has in fact been institutionalized by certain professions, where commitment to old-fashioned sorts of value is thought sufficiently pleasant and rewarding to preclude the necessity of offering a substantial remuneration. The teaching, and particularly the academic, profession is of this sort. Since the entrant is clearly a believer in education, culture, discrimination and other liberal values of decreasing social use, he is encouraged to think of himself as marginal to the society by a symbolic poverty enforced by his salary. At the same time, he feels himself to be monastic; he has, that is, given up worldly goods in his retreat from the world. He does his work because he enjoys it, while in the rest of society, it is taken for granted, other people do not work for pleasure but for money. Their pleasure lies in consuming. With voluntary poverty, then, goes voluntary failure, or the enjoyment of one’s uselessness. One group which has taken up the style of poverty and failure (besides, of course, the academic profession) is, as mentioned, the Beat Generation. The ideal of the Beat Generation is to live wholly deviant lives, pursuing deviant arts such as jazz, dope-taking and reading. Both the academic profession and the Beat Generation share a great deal, in situation and in sympathies, with a third deviant group. These are the criminal classes, who are now widely recognized to be in protest against the kind of world in which we live. The intending failure is advised to make his choice, bearing in mind that criminals are under no compulsion to publish.

There is however one important note to add. To suppose that poverty requires less effort or money than wealth, or that failure is simpler than success, is to misunderstand the cardinal rule, which is: In an affluent society, failure is much more difficult than wealth; and it costs just as much.

This observation—acolytes call it, for some reason, Bradbury’s Law—is so evidently true, so clearly right, that it might serve as the moral for life in our modern world. In traditional societies wealth is conspicuous, while no one stands out by his poverty, for that is run-of-the-mill. In the consumer society, poverty is conspicuous. It is thus only in consumer societies that persons can voluntarily choose it—the point being that if you want to be a failure this requires much more dedication and conscious effort than if you want to be successful. And, as I say, this kind of failure is a component of a technologically advanced and rich society; elsewhere it would simply not be noticed. Like voluntary agrarianism, which I deal with later, it is pleasant to live as a peasant, as long as one isn’t.

Failure, then, is harder; it is also more expensive. The reason for this is quite simple—in our time the individual taste and the specialized or cultivated interest, being the whims of a marginal group, are catered for only on occasion. And a taste for the rare is always expensive. The time will come when the man who likes home-baked, wholewheat, brown bread will have to spend most of his income on it, and it will become a craving with him, and also a mark of his status—as once a collection of fine bindings was. Thus already it is very expensive to like good plays, because it is no longer economic to keep local theatres open when they can with ease be replaced by income-producing office blocks; and so the play-lover must go to London, an increasingly expensive business. One has to travel miles to see modern art or to find a bookshop where the bookseller knows something about the books he sells; good design of any sort is expensive—particularly as it usually has to be imported. Since these are the sort of thing our failure is likely to be interested in, and since failure in this context means by definition having essentials other than the essentials of the broad run of society, the failure these days has to have a considerable income and a sharp eye for a bargain. The failure spends just as much money as the successful man, but he has nothing—or, at least, no things—to show for it; just the quality of his own self.

There is, then, room at the bottom. But there is one further disadvantage; and that is that fashion has a way of catching up with you. One has always to keep one step ahead, because once one gets into the fashioncycle one is finished; and this is yet another reason why poverty is costly. The Beat Generation affords another example of this point; here competition now prevails as to who can find the dirtiest sweater, the tightest jeans. Moreover, competition transfers itself to other areas; and instead of the currency of competition being, say, washing-machines it becomes, say, women. I recollect the disastrous case of a friend of mine, a Professional Failure, who bought a television set and, thinking to exclude himself from the competitive system, put it in his bathroom. He is now on the point of selling the thing, at a painful loss, because he has discovered that several of his smart set friends now have television in every room of the house, including the one he has chosen. The lesson is that if one is going in for failure one must go the whole hog. It is no use having anything that can be taken up by others; or chances are it will be. The trouble is that deviance itself is now thoroughly fashionable, and one is hard put to it to plough an individual furrow through the mire.

2. VOLUNTARY PROVINCIALISM

There was a time when everyone used to have to go to London in order to find out what was happening, for London was where it happened. Nowadays, of course, communications insist on telling us, whether we want to know or not, and London comes to you. Moreover, London is not what it was; someone was complaining just the other day that, on returning to London, he found it ‘increasingly brutish’; while one of our leading poets was remarking that he had to go north every so often in order to escape from international nothingness. Personally I incline to the opinion that the English provinces are the only justification for the continued existence of England at all. Of course this view is brash, unfashionable, naïve and, in a word—provincial. This is its attraction. For the provinces grow more and more attractive all the time—because of what they aren’t.

London, and the south generally, is no place for the man who wishes to escape the consumer ethic. The place has a softer, fancier air, all suede shoes and Babycham, in which dalliance grows and keeping up becomes more insistent. It is fancy, fast-talking and smart; it is dapper, gin-drinking and manipulative. People wear shirts with big bold stripes on them; women are somehow a different shape. There are too many estate agents, too many flower-shops, too many beauty parlours; and too many people walking about the streets not doing anything. The people who have work don’t do it; and those who do work hard are doing non-work. It is a civilization of middle-men, people who rub money between their fingers and make it grow. The provinces provide money, intelligence, opinion; what London provides is services … chain stores, television programmes and governmental supervision. The raw material in literary, intellectual and all other spheres originates in the provinces, and is processed in London; when you have a good idea, you bring it to London and there you will find someone who can use it. Southerners wear fancy corsets and bikinis, or hair oil and neckerchiefs and cavalry twill; and their ethic is the ethic of mmm! delicious! The only advice one can offer to the man who seeks to live outside the consumer society is to pack his bags and leave quietly, taking the first train to the north.

For the man who does seek to escape will find that the provinces are, more and more, the north. For the provinces—non-London—are receding all the time. There was a time when Nottingham, say, was outside it all; now all the bookshops have started to close down, the chain stores have ousted the local grocers, wage robberies are all the vogue, and creeping London-ization has taken place. Similarly, we have just been told that London is getting too big, and that employers will have to move their businesses out of London into the provinces; and that Kettering and Wellingborough should be expanded into a sizeable metropolis to take them. But of course this isn’t moving London out to the provinces—it is making more of the provinces into London, which is the modern trend.

The contemporary escaper thus has a very hard time of it. With the provinces retreating further and further, year by year, it is his hard task to retreat with them. A progress report on this year will hardly serve for next year, so fast is the penetration developing. At the moment, it seems fair to say, everything south of Manchester should be regarded as suburban London, with the possible exception of a few elusive enclaves in the far west, like Cornwall and parts of Wales. But, as the bends on the roads are removed and the television signal spreads, doom is on hand for even these places; it’s all becoming Whicker’s World. Who do you know who does not, finally, want to appear in shot on television, back there in the crowd behind the vox-poppings of the latest and most fashionable shop steward, waving away to mum? People talk of a revival of regionalism, and of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and very nice too; but it is all fantasy. We are all part of each other, irretrievably linked together in one electronic and growing web, part of the universal exchange system of the washing-machine, the Mars Bar and the television news. Go to whatever distant, offshore, rocky island you like, and live as you mean to; you won’t be there ten days before the supply boat lands, and out of it will get two camera men, three sound men, a girl with a clapperboard, and a director expert in cinéma vérité, along with an interviewer in a scarf who will explain to you, as he holds out the microphone, that your relationship with the puffins has attracted the interest of the entire nation.

This is because, as we have said, consumer societies do not believe in privacy. There was—or so the phogeys say—a time in England when the freedom of each man to live his own life in his own way was taken for granted; you could do what you wished behind closed doors and, so long as you were not threatening the monarchy or the established church, what you did was found extremely eccentric and therefore quite reasonable. But, if the Englishman’s home was once his castle, it is nowadays expected to be—like all castles—open to the public. In short, then, the taste for retreat, self-enclosure and privacy, for escape from the centre, goes against the prevailing ethic; it becomes extremely difficult, and therefore extremely expensive to indulge. Once there seemed to be space for everyone and everything, almost too much of it; now one has only to see what estate agents charge for a few square feet of it to realize that those days have gone. In these days of intellectual, political and economic oligopoly, the man who tries to flee the centre for the circumference will find few places to go to. For, wherever you find to Get Away From It All, you will find that it has already got there before you. Once abroad provided an answer; now, whenever and wherever you travel abroad, you travel by the horde—on a package arranged by Horde Tours. Discover, at last, that remote South Sea Island you always wanted to take your eight gramophone records to; you will find that the Island of the Month Club has chosen it as their cut-price special. Yes, provincialism is in all right—which is why every contemporary British novel these days is set on a canal bank near Wakefield. But the very fact that they are being written up is a signal of something; the provinces, believe you me, are nowt like what they were.

Which leaves us, finally, with:

3. VOLUNTARY AGRARIANISM

Except, of course, the same rules apply, yet further complicated by the fact that one also has to like the country. The primitive is not to everyone’s taste, as Sigmund Freud once pointed out. But, even if it were, there are in England very few truly primitive corners of the community left, and the real country is very remote indeed. I am speaking, really, of the real country, the country beyond gentleman farmer land. England, as we all know, is full of villages—villages, however, where all the farm-labourers’ dwellings have been converted and have brass carriage-lamps outside the door; villages where the rectory, redundant to ecclesiastical need, has been sold and is now lived in by a nationally known poet famous for taking off his trousers at the Edinburgh Festival; villages where the green has been turned into a roundabout for the articulated lorries thundering through the night en route for the channel ports; villages where the duck on the duckpond has been tied down to stop it escaping back into nature. Nature, indeed, is a place no one can escape to. That classic haunt of solitude is solitary no more. The Lake District is now fuller than Oxford Street tube station, and people for whom a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose is to them come in their thousands, trampling down the primroses. At Thoreau’s Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, you will find notices to trippers, announcing by-laws that firmly forbid all praying and meditation. The countryside everywhere is now filled with people hunting for privacy in very large groups indeed.

As for the old self-sufficient communities, well, these, as we have seen, have all gone by the board. Serfhood may be rewarding, but it is no longer possible. Farming is a way of running a factory in tree-lined surroundings, until you take down the trees. Back to nature is not back to nature at all, but a way of leading an old life in a new sports jacket. There is no means of evading the supermarket or the chain store; 30 m.p.h. signs have been put up on the Isle of Wight to bring the people there the benefit of civilization. Personally I have tried to make my separate peace in the rugged, rural East Riding of Yorkshire, a traditionally neglected area in which there still remain a few people who have not yet been vaccinated, and where the older car drivers still know what to do when attacked by flocks of geese. It still retains something: though most of the locals have theatrical agents and ten screen credits for appearing as extras in wellie-boot dramas of rural life, a few forelocks, meant for touching, are still to be found, and for the moment we still have gothic buses, with pointed roofs designed by Pugin and Ruskin, to pass through the ancient city walls of places like York and Beverley. People don’t talk of London much, mainly because no trains go there—though occasionally a few coaches are sent out from Hull to Doncaster to see if they can get attached to any trains that happen to be coming down from Scotland. The weather is quite different from anywhere else, being imported from Spitzbergen; and there is a sound regional consciousness, probably derived from the conviction that we will be the first to go in the event of nuclear attack, constantly expected from the direction of Lancashire. But everyone knows that everything is at risk. Murmurs have been rife, for the last century or so, of a Humber Bridge that will cross that protective estuary and open us up to poaching from Lincolnshire; already the town of Beverley is being dismantled to let people from the south get through it more quickly on the way to look for the sea, a classically futile human quest.

So voluntary agrarianism, or what some people call living in the country, is likewise not an unambiguous solution—even if you can find any country around to live in. And, if you do, there is no guarantee that it will stay that way, which is why the dedicated countryman is, like the dedicated provincial, in a state of permanent retreat. Yet it is the very sight of someone else retreating that, in the modern world, constitutes a challenge if not an insult to everyone else. Thus, in the part of the world where I live and am foolish here even to mention, villages exist in permanent fear of being described somewhere as ‘Yorkshire’s prettiest village’, or even being put on the ordnance survey map at all. For the world is full of folk poised to act on just such information. Within days, if not hours, they have packed the village main street and are to be heard calling loudly for ice creams and public toilets. Meanwhile others of the party are busy scavenging around to find the most beautifully cultivated rustic garden, in order to deposit in it rusty tin cans and burst mattresses, that necessary equipment without which no trip into the countryside is complete. The alert village watcher will immediately recognize the signs, and know the consequences. Within a week, the Electricity Board will be around with the chain-saws, the County Council will be arriving with the kerbstones and the concrete lamp-standards, and your friendly neighbourhood speculative builder will be along with his pile of bricks and his plans for two hundred bow-fronted semidetached chalet-bungalows. It is already, again, time for the man seeking contemporary survival to pack his spare socks and his paperback copy of The Waste Land into his handwoven briefcase, and light out, a lonely modern hero, for the ever-diminishing and probably completely overcrowded woods.

It cannot be called perfect advice; there is no doubt that contemporary escape has its troubles, illusions and agonies. Still, in modern consumer society, fortunate is that man who has all his chattels to hand, who can manage on his own, who has, in a word, no wants, or Wants. At least he does not need to depend on anyone else—a very necessary thing in a consumer society where the things one cannot do for oneself are always on the increase, while the interest and attention devoted to those things by the people who can actually do them are always on the decrease. (After all, work done well is anti-social because it lasts far too long, and those who are busy consuming have little time to work as well.) No, at least, in poverty, in the provinces, in the country, one stands a chance of finding the old friendliness, the old community sense, the old tough-mindedness mother used to make; and, if not, one can always hang on to the bottled runner-beans till society grinds to a stop. Of course it will be protested, by the doctrinaire, that all this is living in the past, and sentimentalizing it—the classic phogey disease, in fact. The only appropriate answer is to observe that, while the choice is imperfect, it is better to live in the past than to live nowhere at all. Indeed, for present-day man, it is a choice of thoroughly modern significance, and much to be recommended as a very unphogey-ish and forward-looking action indeed. And if anyone points out to you that this is a contradiction, which is actually what it is—well, ask them what could be more contradictory than the land we now live in, England, our England?

^* Actually I’m not from the woods at all.