Headaches at Home

An expat, more English than the English, returns to Blighty and finds it changed. How he rages! A world has been lost. A man from Ceylon comes to study at Imperial HQ; but finds it an odd, an incomprehensible, an alienating place. It is what happens when you step out of a textbook and walk into the street. Overseas or Brit-born, no matter, neither are happy in this country. Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer. In the 1950s, Empire arrives home and novels must give way to real life.

__________

J.W.Denham. A solid, old-fashioned name; the two initials two columns supporting a pediment; together they form a portico, the grand entrance to a modest establishment; less a man than a public authority, whose position is more important than his person. J.W.Denham. An institution not a name. We think of an ironmongers in Saffron Walden.

A boring chap, crumbling into middle age, with just enough vitality to animate a semi-detached house and a small family - this is how we picture him. Ovaltine and telly at evening’s end, certainly not Earl Grey and Euripides (despite his cultural pretension). That sense of failure, bad dreams over what might have been, the life he never had; haven’t we heard it many times before? The middle age of the middle class a conveyer belt of gripe. A moderate success. Wasn’t he promised more? Life was there to conquer! Oh, you ask, he could have been a hero? We think not. That future always an impossible dream. What about him, you press, doesn’t he know this? No! He never asks the question about his own vital spirits - does he have any? On and on he whines, while watching the gameshows and nature programmes on the TV. If he had a wife she’d be on anti-depressants; the only way to carry the weight of his banality.

I’m telling this story mainly for my own benefit. I want to clarify in my own mind the nature of the mess that so many people seem to be in nowadays. I lack the mental equipment and the training and the terminology to say whether the mess is social or religious or moral, but the mess is certainly there, certainly in England, and probably in the Celtic fringe and all over Europe and the Americas too.

So earnest. So sincere. Plod plod plod plod plod…what we surmise is proving true. A dull chap. A familiar story. The world moving too fast for this man’s age-sodden thoughts. J.W.Denham is trying to understand the times with an outlook acquired in his adolescence. A familiar picture, seen so many times: ancient junks grounded on the beach of mental obsolescence. How they prattle on about moral turpitude in a smoke-infested pub, dissing a country they can’t see through the frosted glass and dirty windows. As if all perfect in their decade. We rush past them. They turn and growl. But youth has no time for such geriatrics with their mental arthritis: “We’re the young ones now you old tosser. Piss off and get out of my space.” The chair topples over, J.W. falls to the floor, his beer following him…. “Look at farty-chops. Pissed yerself stupid you barmy sod. Ha! Ha! Ha!” 

I’m in a position to smell the putridity of the mess more than those who have never really been expatriated from it - the good little people who, with their television, strikes, football pools and Daily Mirror, have everything they want except death - because I only spend about four months in England every two years now, and I get the stench sharp in my nostrils (widened by warm air) as soon as I land and for about six weeks after that. Then, gradually, the corruption creeps up, like fog round the boat-train, and, yawning over the television in the front room of my father’s semi-detached, arriving at the pub sometimes five minutes before opening-time, I can feel damnation being broken in like a pair of shoes, myself becoming a citizen of the mess, and I’m only saved by having to get on the B.O.A.C. plane at London Airport or, which shortens my stay in England, taking the P. and O. - Canton, Carthage, Corfu - from Southampton. 

An exotic ‘ironmonger’. J.W.Denham defies our imagination. He works in Japan (for a trading company), reads Trollope and knows his Shakespeare; he also has a fine line in invective, and a knack for the resonant phrase; at times this man sounds like Anthony Burgess, what with those arcane words (steatopygous) and the literary references.1 A little incongruous for a businessman? Or more cultivated in those days?

The language of this diatribe is in excess of what it attacks. Closer to a religious rant, a sermon on the country’s soul, than cultural critique. What have these Brits done to suffer such hell-fire words? To cuddle up with the Devil for reading The Daily Mirror? To suffer purgatory for watching television? The football pools a Satanic treat? Come on Denham! Hardly up there with the great crimes of humanity. No. These are cultural prejudices, not examples of immoral behaviour, and tell us much about J.W.Denham, who appears to lack the intellectual resources to live with pop.

He believes he is railing against a mental lethargy, stimulated (!) by the popular press and the TV. It is a reaction against the passive consumption of mass entertainment, of which he himself is becoming a victim, whilst he lives in England. A superior sort of attitude, one common amongst those sharing a similar sensibility with those they condemn. Such characters - they look out never in - always stress the moral dimension, from which, of course, they are exempt. In truth, such moral incendiarism is but a child playing with fireworks…it is a projection of their own weak will; an inability to rise above their times. Only someone attracted to the telly will despise others for watching it. Their own shame is what they can’t handle.

This is 1950s Britain, Mr Class forever popping his head around the door. The examples Denham gives are working class pursuits; these Devil’s disciples work down the mines and live in council houses…England in decline because the scum of the earth are taking over; although our hero has a specific concern - the cultural life of the nation is overrun by oicks. Working class entertainment is taking over the show, and is colonising the middle class mind. There is some truth here; TV is a demotic medium. But we must make a distinction between a cultural tendency and individual psychology. Little of Denham’s critique has to do with art and literature; rarefied pursuits that only ever interest a minority; that bunch of lunatics - aesthetes, bohemians, artists - who live on society’s fringes. For these loons it is a given that most people are philistine; indeed, the bourgeoise never more philistine than when talking about Art (always the capital letter).2 Denham isn’t a member of this band of crazies. A typical bourgeois, he is concerned with the public prominence of Art in the national consciousness. This is Culture chat not aesthetics; J.W. a spokesman for those bourgeois who go to concerts, read the literature supplements in the qualities, and visit art galleries, but for whom Paul Klee, James Joyce and John Cage are little more than names; designer labels to pin on one’s off-the-peg conversation, usually at a dinner party, where we don't discuss artists and philosophers but regurge the latest opinion pieces on Art and Thought. For such characters Culture is primarily a social event and a status symbol; the reason they’re so fragile about it. These psychic houses have little mental foundation. Or to keep to the imperial theme: a poorly armed settler colony is constantly threatened by the natives…in one scene Denham gives up reading Trollope to watch a television programme. Sad sap shame. Popular entertainment is so distasteful to J.W because he is so easily distracted by it. Sharing the mental aptitudes of those they coruscate, such characters can only differentiate themselves through the virulence of their abuse. Moral superiority and the illusion of cultural refinement is how to protect one’s self from the teeming hordes within. There is also fear. Denham is afraid of sliding into the great mass of the British public; for without artificial aids - exile in his case - he has neither the talents nor the will to remain culturally aloof; our hero terrified that one day his mirror will show not a middling but a lowbrow…to stay in Britain is to lose what little culture he has acquired.3

Denham’s attack on England is a camouflage behind which he hides own mediocrity, successfully disguised until now by his life in Japan. The very existence of an expatriate adds layers of rich decoration even to the most prosaic of personalities; J.W.Denham a more interesting person simply for living in the East. Nevertheless, Plod Plod is never far away; here he’s given a piquant twist: added to the usual deleterious effects of middle age, the moaning after a lost time, is the lost exoticism of Asia, inevitably this exaggerates the dullness of a nondescript town. Our man, lacking the zest to rise above his environment, can only condemn it for his own failings; England to blame not himself.

A general failing of the bourgeoisie, who, trained to succeed in the public realm, must define themselves through it, is that they become dependent on it’s beliefs and practices for their own values and ideas; I only good, alive, exciting, interesting, if my society (or the zeitgeist) is also these things. Yet fulfilment, especially in the arts and of the mind, where we grow our own thoughts and sensibility, requires much avoidance of the social sphere: we have to reject - even better: ignore - most of its influence. We create our own little worlds to live in.4

In Britain Denham is forced to confront himself. Will he recognise his limitations, his weakness, his inability to stand against the crowd? Hell he will! Better to hide such fragility behind these moral attacks, lose himself to righteous opprobrium. Read James Joyce? Hell no! He broods on a couple where the wife swaps sexual partners. But even moaners are on to something. Such risky behaviour destroys the marriage; her husband runs off into a disastrous affair with a young woman. Do not play with matrimony, it can only lead to evil; this is Denham’s motto. However, once in Japan he has no inhibitions about shagging prostitutes and living with a paid hostess. In the East you do things differently.

Is Denham a hypocrite? Such words, because they are filled with a reductive moralism, are too simple to describe his character. For a start he is single, and therefore can rightly argue that different rules apply. But it is deeper than this. The Christian mythology still  retains its hold in a world where a new morality has arisen, modelled on consumption. In J.W.’s mental universe marriage has a metaphysical meaning that transcends its dictionary definition; marriage a religious concept signifying a social order based on a union that commits people to an idea above themselves. In the married state we sacrifice our animal nature to an ideal; such a sacrifice ennobling us. Alice Winterbottom, in sleeping with other men, commits sacrilege, and loses her soul, so bringing the chaos of nature into human affairs. Denham’s narrative is his attempt to understand why this has occurred.

Something has gone wrong in the society.

He offers no analysis. The closest J.W. comes to an explanation is the rising power of women, who now lord it over their men - Alice her husband, Imogen all males (until she is beaten up), even the English whore who takes Denham’s money without rendering him a sexual service. When women dominate, chaos follows…for they are the symbolic carriers of that wild nature.

Time for Anthony Burgess to peep over his narrator’s shoulder, stretch his arms to either side of his man, and type a few paragraphs on myth.

To equate adultery with the state of England suggests the country has failed to live up to its (patriarchal) ideals, and is fading back into barbarism. It is a return to the atmosphere of The Long Day Wanes, Burgess’s trilogy on the end of empire in old Malay; but now seen from inside the empire’s headquarters. Here, though, the hero wants an answer: why are things going wrong? The 1950s a time of the consumer revolution is also the moment Britain lost its power: are they connected? Denham is no historian, there is no discussion of imperial overstretch; the costs of war; the difficulties of running empires on commercial lines; the American take out of our colonial possessions…. The hard work of analysis is replaced by intellectual and moral reflexes; thus the idea that individuals are debauched; or the absinthe of myth which inebriates the imagination; our hero drunk on the Elizabethan era. Sober in Osaka he grew fat on his fictions of English life. On return he finds but titbits of what he has imagined. Perhaps he’s right, England may be in decline; yet most of his criticisms are the prejudices of an expat unable to reconcile his illusions and his freebooting life in the East with the bourgeois banalities of a typical English town. The easy sex and otherness of Japan are harder to find in England, unless you take the kind of risks that are beyond a respectable man like J.W.Denham.5 How different his life in the 1850s? Working in the East India Company for sure, but hardly one of the Empire’s daredevils. So easy to conflate a romantic image of the past with one’s own idealised character. But the past is always different to what we think, while ourselves…time-travel to any period and we remain essentially the same; Denham all too Denham. J.W. is no intellectual. He has few adventurous qualities. A sad suck gent, who has been lucky to find an empire to work in. With empire’s end he must live on his own limited resources. That wonderful double bed, its Chinese coverings, its silk sheets, now but a single cot, covered with rough cotton…narrow views of a narrow man. Arthur Seaton has a very different take on this decade.6

In clear-sighted moments Denham is aware of his failings. At novel’s end he reflects.…

I read through the first fascicle again. Smug, wordy, pretentious, but let it stand. Let it all stand, we’re not here for entertainment.

The narrator suggests that he’s made up scenes to justify his belief that adultery wrecks the good society. Our hero, adrift in a changing world, is not certain about himself or the realities, because so much of what thinks is a fiction. The problem of the exile, whether in place or in time: we are apt to live too much on our own resources; and thus, in this vast new ocean, we stick to our tiny rock, that imagined past, where everything was different, harder, clearer, surer, better. Compared to such fantasies England is lost; Arthur no longer a mythic king but a question on a quiz show…back in the old country not even the myths can hold out! 

J.W.Denham is a blowback from the collapse of empire; the imperial servants, returning to Britain, unable to either recognise or accept a place that is smaller and tattier than their fictions, that imagined home. And yet Denham also speaks the truth. Great Britain was in decline; America, Russia, those greedy monsters, and even little Germany and France, were gobbling up our power. In was in the 1950s that the Yanks stole our ‘Great’; ‘Britain’ naked without it. Of course, such relative economic and political decline is distinct from moral decay, but how easy to confuse the two, especially when one is attached to the old moral code that was visibly crumbling (the 1960s began in the 1950s).7

Denham himself is an interesting historical artefact for the serious historian; his character an insight into the political history of the next fifty years. How much of the rhetoric of British decline arose from the dissolution of empire? How much of that rhetoric was fuelled by disgruntled expats and their descendants?8 J.W.Denham suggests quite a lot. An officer class returns home to find the natives in charge: the welfare state, bothersome unions, that tat called popular entertainment, an infection of the mind, each in their own way are taking down the rulers.9 Despite earlier rumblings, after the First World War, and during Auden's ‘low dishonest decade’, it is in the 1950s when cultural elitism suffers an earthquake; the moment when pop sends shock waves through the classical canon.10 These concerns of culture intimate with middle class unease about their status and authority; and all wrapped up in a moral parcel soon to be undone by their children, who threw away such fancy packaging (authenticity became the word of the hour). Bourgeois fragility. No wonder these characters wanted to keep up appearances.11 In the former colonial class, who once ruled kingdoms not just managed factories and offices, the reaction is likely to have been harder, more extreme.

A certain idea about Britain has been lost. What’s left is a fiction, in which not even a fantasist like Denham can believe.

How much of that last episode you believed, I don’t know and don’t care. Of this final episode you’ll believe less, of that I’m certain, but please don’t begrudge poor old whining Denham, back in Tokyo, his modicum of fantasy. Besides, I’m doing a certain homiletic good in showing - with however fictitious an example - that rewards come to those who never sin against stability, who don’t play around with the fire of marriage, whose life and marriage are both solid and secure and not without excitement and interest, chiefly because their work means something to the community and to themselves.

The book’s structure is odd. Has our dull hero and his colourful author, far more imaginative and self-reflexively playful, fallen out? What begins as a social satire, a condition of England novel, turns into a farce when Mr Raj arrives from Ceylon.12 Mr Raj is a highly intelligent Tamil who attaches himself to Denham, and then takes over the Midland suburb where he has come to study for his degree. His subject social science, he is researching a dissertation on Popular Notions of Racial Differentiation in Britain, a vacuous piece of work. Mr Raj represents a different kind of assault on the new England. This is the outsider who, because he only half-understands what he experiences, is too critical of what he sees. Speaking the Queen’s English better than many locals Mr Raj has no ear or eye for the nuances of social life, those meanings that rely on jokes, oblique references (cultural and traditional), colloquialisms, gesture, emphasis and tone. He is apt to devalue what he doesn't grasp, this country’s customs.13 Even friendly overtures can be deemed acrimonious; the aggression of playful chaff misinterpreted as attack. To ‘knock’ somebody often a way to include them within the social group - your defining characteristic used both as the butt of jokes and a way into belonging; think of the Welshman who’s Taffy to his mates.14 To belong to a group we first have to be battered into its shape. So easy, especially for a foreigner, to find this offensive (and there is a fine line between banter that includes and banter that excludes).15 Alas for Mr Raj his understanding of England is crude and one-dimensional - that concentration on race - and is not helped by that social science degree, which tends towards formula and caricature.16 So confident about his own intellect Mr Raj lacks the humility to learn, the cause of some terrible social blunders, producing abuse and worse. Such reactions are, for Mr Raj, signs of racism and data to put into his thesis. Of course not wholly wrong, but his views are hopelessly one-sided; a few elements of truth twisted into a “scientific” fiction about the racial hatred of the English. Life is not so simple. Much has to do with character. Lacking sensitivity to the local culture, he unintentionally offends his interlocutors, then compounds the offence by refusing to acknowledge his mistakes. Ignorant of the finer shades of meaning, disdainful of the people he meets, and over-confident about his own powers, he causes all sorts of problems, such as his lacklustre care of Denham’s father - he feeds him too much curry, and invites his friends around to practice traditional Indian medicine, rather than call the GP. The results are alarming.  

In a strange way Mr Raj behaves like a typical Englishman abroad (do we seek the type in class and education rather than in nationality?).

Mr Raj dominates the novel, with his dynamism and charisma, such attractive qualities; it is why he can both stir up these suburbanites and be accepted by them; so much so, that when talking about immigrants they do not include him in this category - regarded as a friend they do not see his colour. But despite this robust individualism Mr Raj is a limited and narrow person (most charismatic people are). He is a racist - particularly against black Africans and West Indians but also against English whites, for whom he has an undercurrent of animosity. Mr Raj can only comprehend England from the perspective of social science, a supremely reductive subject, prone to ideological prejudice and cliché. He embodies a cluster of ideas that were to become powerful in the next decade, when middle class students sought to use their education to overturn their parent’s world, believed outmoded and authoritarian. In retrospect, we see that the great expansion of sociology in the 1960s was one of the mechanisms by which an old culture was delegitimated; the preference for an ideologically explicit intellectual framework preferred to an older social system moulded around an homogenous elite, and relying on custom and unwritten codes of behaviour, learned from experience. The very crudity of the critical attack - its essential stupidity - the reason for its success. Mr Raj a wonderful parody of this academic atomic bomb.

‘My work continues, and in a questionnaire I have given to people to fill in I have asked many relevant questions about people’s ideas of race and what are the important differences between the races of the world, and so on. Various people I have asked to fill in this form have been insulting, but I am now proof against insults, Mr Denham, normally asking these questionnaires to be filled in in quiet places, such as public lavatories, where insults can be swiftly and painfully dealt with, though with no animosity. Lately I have found the gun I borrowed useful too, though still it has not been loaded, and at empty pistol-point some people in lavatories or in lighted doorways have been asked, or indeed persuaded, to give honest answers to the questions I ask. Thus scholarship is able to proceed, and difficulties must be smoothed out as best they can…’

This social scientist a bank robber stealing the secret thoughts of a nation’s citizens. There is a wonderful absurdity about such larceny: the ideas he steals are completely worthless, because most of his interviewees have no experience of another race (unlike Denham, his friend). Mr Raj is merely recording the clichés printed in the newspapers.17 Indeed, his own experience contradicts his thesis, for when he gets to know the locals his racial characteristics are ignored. There is a vast difference between asking strangers “naked” questions about race and living amongst them in a companionable way; the latter clothing our language in a rich and allusive vernacular, tailored towards individuals. His questions are a form of aggression - so alienating as to feel like an interrogation - and may in fact be creating the racism he seeks to record: his very questions demand it. At base Mr Raj is confusing a people’s distrust of aliens with racism, two quite distinct attitudes; the former natural and socially ubiquitous, and relatively plastic - an outsider is usually accepted if and when they fit in with the prevailing mores. Race hate is an abstract quality - people hate the category - and is easily manipulated by journalists, demagogues and social scientists, though far harder to maintain in personal relationships. Mr Raj, oblivious to his own abrasive and overbearing character, one impervious to influence, cannot see how his personality affects a person’s attitude towards him, and thus towards all foreigners, whose representative he has de facto become. It is also the problem of the undergraduate, overconfident about what they have learnt. Mr Raj, like many students, already knows how the world works; his dissertation to prove his ignorance true.

After the farce the fantasy…. 

The last third of the book reads like a bestseller, the plot that of a crime story. Denham himself remarks: this is hard to believe. This narrative craziness is an acting out, surely, of his central fear: popular culture.18 Thus Denham befriends a French starlet, and is interviewed on television…no conquest could be more complete. A novel kidnapping, the capture of high culture by mass entertainment, literature (literally) transformed into pulp fiction; until rescued by real life, when Denham tries to convince himself he could marry an old poet’s young daughter.

It’s one interpretation. Another relates to the divided self of our hero. J.W.Denham’s England is a fiction, about which he can suspend disbelief only for as long as he lives in the Far East. When in England such invention cannot be kept up, too many ugly facts sneak in, peer through the window, knock on his flimsy door…thus his diatribes and depression. A breakdown looms, as the mind is no longer able to police the border line between fact and fantasy. Then Mr Raj arrives! (The East returns). And Denham’s life and mind implodes as England and abroad, fact and fantasy, reality and imagination, mix and merge and combust. Poof! A quiet suburb suffers the rampages of a Hollywood studio. The pulp fiction may be not a true account of what happened, but it does describe a culture cracking up inside this man’s crazy mind. Denham fits neatly with the times. In the late 1950s England started to experience a cultural meltdown, as the governing beliefs - the Whig imperialism - that had sustained its elite for over two centuries collapsed, under the pressures of Suez, international competition, and a culturally more equalitarian society. Denham is drowning in a strange sea.19 His England is no more, and he is partly responsible - no individual can abstract themselves from their times - for it was he who brought Mr Raj to this suburb and introduced him to Alice Winterbottom, who rejects the advances of a man who feels himself irresistible to women…honour. Pride. Amour propre. Time for Rider H. Haggard to take over the typewriter…. It is one way to explain this novel. The mad plot is Denham’s mad mind, a record of his own disintegrating identity so intimate with an idea of England, itself crumpling under the weight of the real. Poor J.W.! He tells a story about the local landlord finding an original folio of Shakespeare: only Elizabethan fantasies are left from the times of England’s greatness.  

A sorry tale. J.W.Denham, having lost his culture, is adrift on fictions that he cannot control; their cartoon characters and supercharged plots - beautiful actresses, guns, killings, sexual assault - sending him to insanity. They also indicate a man of middlebrow talent (despite his literary references). Denham an ordinary bourgeois (with a few exotic trimmings) who uses his few ideas to protect himself against a world that has vanished (if it ever existed). Like many such characters, he is not interested in analysing the causes - despite his peremptory a ‘right to an answer’ - but obsesses about secondary features, like the new pop, an obvious case of decline. But isn't this trivial you say? Not if you don’t have the resources to defend yourself from tat. A particular kind of middle class - educated to a high standard of literacy, with a passing acquaintance with the classics - is on the way out: their minds not strong enough to defeat the television set. A terrible demise, as one’s self image dissolves before one’s eyes: you see it in the mirror of the blank screen. Bound to drive you mental.

Review: The Right to an Answer20

__________

1. The problem of style in a nutshell. The more a writer has style the more we are aware of the author’s persona, which can crowd out his characters. It is why a lack of style might be useful in a novel….

2. For some wonderful Flaubertian commentary on the bourgeoisie: Francis Steegmuller: Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait. For a satire on the aesthetes, bohemians, artists: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. An interest in literature and the arts does not necessarily elevate or enliven.

3. A marvellous vignette in Sentimental Education: one of the characters shaves his temples to appear highbrow.

4. See Andy Friend, John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace.  I suspect it is easier in painting than writing.

5. For a different character in a very different milieu: David Litvinoff in the London underworld: Keiron Pim, Jumpin’ Jack Flash.

6. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

7. Robert Irwin, Memoirs of Sufi Dervish.

8. The reverse can also be true. Nick Sargent, in Nina Bawden’s Tortoise by Candlelight, never wanted to leave Africa, and misses it. How much did these characters want to recreate the multi-culture of empire inside the home country, or tried to find an alternative in the EEC?

9. Not necessarily class snobbery. Arthur Seaton is also against the TV set. For the background to his attitude: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. The new pop was a thinning out of an older, distinctively working class popular entertainment, richer, both in language and in individual participation.

10. In literature it is the rise of the Angry Young Men; although this was a wholly media creation: Hugh Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959.

11. Nicely described through the persona of Harold Macmillan, in Richard Davenport-Hines, The Macmillans. The same author’s An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, offers additional insights, both into the decade and its sudden dissolution.

12. In his autobiography, Burgess says that once popped into his head this character took over. Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess. How much is Mr Raj a dream of imperial loss (and return)? If we can’t live in Malay, Ceylon, Kenya, we can at least imagine living with these exotic locals at home.

13. Compare with the colonial officers who thought Indian customs barbaric.

14. Marvellously described in Tim Parks’s A Season in Verona.  I was on the train the other day, where a bunch of lads where fooling around. One of the lads was jokingly called ‘ethnic’; a form of inclusion.

15. Such banter is close to an initiation rite in a craft: think of the master and apprentice in Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo. These jokes are meant to hurt. They reduce you a little (or a lot), rubbing off some of our ego’s edges, so that we can fit into the tradition (or group). Of course, the further you originally are from the ‘corporate’ mentality the more aggressive will be the banter…it is here where initiation can tip into abuse.

16. Burgess is satirising a new academic trend.

17. In Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners the newspapers are more prejudiced than the people who read them.

18. Compare with what happens to Enderby when he is taken out into the world (the Enderby trilogy). Once the hero leaves the safety of his closed world he loses control of it. A parable of the artist and writer in the modern society, and one that seems central to Louis MacNeice’s early work: Collected Poems.

19. A Conrad character transplanted from the colonies to the mother country.

20. You want an answer?

To understand what Denham is going through we have to read the historians and political scientists. There is David Marquand, his Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy and Mammon’s Kingdom. While a different kind of analysis is offered by Susan Strange in Casino Capitalism. Writing about the City of London, she is actually describing a much wider shift in the national culture, one that was insular and homogeneous, yet also self-policing and therefore relatively stable and safe.

The principle of functional separation was also applied by the British to their financial institutions…Under such a system it was not necessary for the Bank of England to keep under constant supervision all the activities of the various institutions. It could leave disciplinary action to the autonomous self-regularity councils who had a strong collective interest in hanging on to their power and privilege and in being seen to be resolute in punishing offenders against the professional rules. Doctors were fairly often struck often; lawyers debarred. Stockbrokers were hammered and could never again practice their profession. So long as state employment of the professionals and government participation in the markets was limited, the system worked comparatively smoothy and economically. All that the monetary authority had to do was to monitor trends in the markets, both at home and (after the First World War) in New York, and the major European financial centres. It did not need detailed and up-to-the-minute information on the day-to-day operations of each of the banks. The slightest hint or nudge by the central bank to the operators produced self-interested responses. Yet, for such a system to work reliably, the circle of banks had to be small and closely tied to the central bank by social as well as functional links. Individual responsibility had to be clear and unequivocal. And the authority had to be impartial and rather indifferent to the fortunes of any individual bank or banker in the system.

In the 1960s, the British State intruded as never before into the peacetime economy; while there was an explosion of individualistic philosophy, its target an institutional culture that appeared “indifferent” to individuals, but which in fact was remarkably responsive towards them - at least when inside the institutional magic circle. The result, a liberalism that concerned itself with concrete people was replaced by ideologies - the New Left and the New Right - that while talking up the individual believed in abstractions that dehumanised her. (Very clear in a thinker like Foucault: see J.G. Merquior, Foucault.)

A sense of the individual was being lost. Suddenly it could feel our lives were no longer under our control. Wouldn’t this drive you crazy?

Other things Denham misses….

Britain from some point in the 1950s could no longer remain an island; it was economically too weak to do so. What followed was an invasion - American industry and culture, the Empire migrating to the centre, European cars and consumer goods. In attempting to deal with these changes the British State destroyed the old society which had made it such a success in the 19th-century, but which had become too conservative to adapt quickly and flexibly to the post-war world. For a man of the British past all of this would be disorientating.