Bolshy
But first let’s go to Wales, which has its own ideas about these things.
Such collapses are a feature of bright working class boys, when thrust into the premier league of scholarship. Emyr Humphreys’s Albie - living in A Toy Epic, but found in many a Valleys town - is the archetypical casualty of rapid promotion. The educationally mobile: speeding down the M4 without a seat-belt: pile up! It is that moment when a powerful but narrow intelligence crashes into subtler, more sophisticated intellects. Groomed by experience, touched up by art and literature, such minds are of a different quality, never met before. Not the osmosis of the classroom - the clever pupil grass soaking up Autumn rain - but grace, manifested in school, alive along the street. These minds don’t just acquire knowledge but seem to know, by instinct, its essence, its nature; less mental calculation, it is divination. Copy down what they’re told? No! They know these things already; as if by magic. Not so much learning as touch, as taste. Poor teachers! A quality of judgement, those clever distinctions; their insights: these boys and girls have a secret path to the unknown. Almost as if...they feel truth. That meltingness of love; cuddling an argument, they caress a concept, stroke their theories. Not so much a mental faculty as an extra sense. Less to think than to breathe thoughts. These characters don't learn ideas, they grow them.
Bright boy is left floundering. And the shock, when always you’ve been the school’s best. This top dog not even keeping up with the pack. The effects can be devastating. Overawed by a sophisticated but shallow mind, Albie doesn’t make it to university. For others the shock comes later, in Oxford or Cambridge or the LSE, when forced to face the limit to their talents. Not the best. A mere commonplace cleverness.
A variation on this theme is described by Lisa Jardine: the stellar pupil, for whom school has always been easy, suddenly finds she has to work at it, and is blocked. For the first time the classroom a strange, forbidding place. Jardine was lucky: a mere blip. Some suffer complete collapse. While others...they drop off the educational ladder, to end up on the margins; the eternal student raging against the world’s injustice, as they surround themselves with coteries of the disgruntled and the lost.
Most do not suffer at all. Accepting the middle-path of moderate achievement, they let go that early promise of stellar breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, the epic insight. Instead they become respected leaders in their field; heads of department, chairs of prestigious committees; it is the honours of eminence and respectability. Gongs not the General Theory of Relativity. The more reflective mourn their loss, but get on with the business at hand, like the famous case of Leslie Stephen, who perhaps couldn’t quite grasp why he wasn’t a Great. For the mere clever, a certain kind of intellectual growth stops. They can accumulate enormous amounts of erudition but, the alchemical element missing, they cannot do extraordinary things to the material; for there is no metamorphosis. Extremely rational, with a marvellous ability to collect and organise ideas and data, they lack the magician’s touch: such characters unable to create ex nihilo. They can think, they can collate, they can summarise and criticise, but, alas, they cannot transform what they receive into the remarkably novel. The mystic insights of a Socrates beyond them; for these come, not from the reasoning faculty, but our metaphysical being; that place where mind and emotion fuse and explode into new life. Great minds feel ideas. And live with them as their own self. Something of the artist about the greats; both thinking with the body.
Academics and artists. It is one way to frame this discussion.
Artists are organisms. A tree spanning out across the landscape. We must use different metaphors for the bog standard smart. By nature they are Cartesian dualists. A bond broken with the body, such minds learn far less from the senses, so don’t mature, evolve. Static and mechanical. A common type: the Xerox machine copying the conventional wisdom. That eternal adolescent forever chasing after the latest thing. Yet while the surface detail changes, that mind remains stubbornly the same. Why our standard smart are apt to get stuck in ruts; old fogeys before their time. Too clever to reach the highest heights, because the intellect is not flexible enough to bend down low to the ground. A sort of mental arthritis. It’s almost as if...as if that very precociousness is an obstacle. I think of a lighthouse protecting itself from the sea’s traffic. That quick intelligence, so quick to acquire its core ideas in youth, now defends them from the passing scene. Such an intelligence builds a walled garden, which it never has to leave. The precocious. An old fable of the hare and tortoise.
Keith Hart doesn’t follow the pattern. Only in his mid-30s does his train hit the buffers. This makes me rethink the model. Are these breakdowns really to do with a particular kind of schooling, and the narrow intelligence it encourages and inculcates? Is there something I’m missing...is Albie’s collapse due to his separation from his mother, with that loss of emotional ballast; a shutting down of the feelings and senses? How much is lost by staring at books all day at a time of such rapid physical growth? Add the break with a working class family, which is wrenching, because the emotional ties so strong; in leaving mother we tear out a part of the self; for, despite the mythology of modern feminism, the working class home is a matriarchal domain, dominated by that powerful figure of (the Welsh) mam. This family its own kingdom. How dare be an exile?
The middle classes are permeable to the outside world; so find it easier to adjust to school, their natural environment. Also, the break comes sooner; the emotions managed at a much younger, less mature, more plastic, age; public school a precocious rite of passage where parents are rapidly replaced by friends and colleagues, even teachers and officials. The emotions transferred to the institution and its inhabitants. By sixteen you’re already on good terms with Mr and Mrs Public Life. In the middle classes education and emotional growth go hand in hand. A marriage almost.
Me? I never walked down the aisle. After a registry office affair, I got a quickie divorce. Like many from the poorer classes I am not comfortable with officialdom. Always one feels there is something crude, formulaic, fixed, inhuman about these places. How can they contain a life in facts, forms, processes....
More complicated with Keith; his family a mix of the classes. So what effect that fusion of class distance and class closeness (though reversing the standard workers’s model)? Was one result a cooling of the emotions, an essential requirement for teenage academic success? Of course, too simple. There’s much we do not know. Alan asks how he got into such a prestigious school, the majority of whose kids where privately coached. The answer is not clear. What did go on in those preparatory years? An extremely smart dad enough? Sheer brilliance alone did the job? Yet, surely, Keith wasn’t the only super-smart kid to have lived in Old Trafford. Why the first to get into Manchester Grammar? What we can say is that mother wasn’t a presence. His father the key figure: cleverness, maths, music, literature; the model of the well-rounded intelligence. Though, as Keith wryly notes, he didn’t learn the old man’s central lesson: to cultivate all these talents but not necessarily be the best at them. No! For this lad it was all or nothing: either first in the race or no race at all. And he was the best, with just the right kind of intelligence to win all the academic games. He could compete with the cleverest of the clever in the subject that tested that cleverness to the max: Classics. A boy going places.
What am I getting at? The passing of exams; that ability to select subjects, to work with teachers; plus a talent to work long and hard on complicated texts; shows a mind perfectly adapted to academia. All goes well. Success is assured. No obstacles on the steps to the top of this Ivory Tower; despite the stereotype of the loud-mouthed rebel from the common lot. Don’t I know the type! But he was lucky. Plenty of other young turks around, who weren’t going to let the old farts keep their thrones. A child of the times he flowed with the times. Easy. Though we have to ask this question: how much of this defiance was fuelled by that narrow, exam-passing mentality; the sort of cleverness that grasps things too quickly? Keith tells a story about Meyer Fortes: he opens up only after they have known each other years; Fortes too deep for that callow cleverness, such a feature of the counter- culture. Keith was lucky in the times. Through sheer number alone, that weight of radical cliché, the youth could dismiss such donnish sophistication as passé. A terrible waste. Which reinforces the weak points of that precocious intellect; more likely than most to stop growing. Early Spring blossoms cut down by the frost of late adolescent contempt. Such a crucial age. Don’t stop the growth! Alas, young cynics love to fill in the windows and doors with bricks and concrete. The mind ceases to be a lighthouse, it becomes a prison. Not to engage with old masters, to face one’s limitations and battle our way through to a new understanding of ourselves and the world...no! We dismiss, contemptuously erase, reject such characters as reactionaries, relics of a dying, a dead, culture. A crime against the self. To blossom we must first suffer the harsh pruning of our youthful branches. How it hurts! Preferred are the comforts of anti-establishment posturing; our weaknesses believed strengths, we go on the attack. So easy.
Nothing to learn from the past. The past, that great smasher-up of the ego, as it rattles conventional thinking, ridicules the reflexes of our youthful naivety, its radical chic. At this age politics is a fashion statement. The young conformists. The past a way to protect our individuality, as - it is the paradox of all crafts and religions - we lose our self to the craft and its material. Alas, by its very nature, this takes years, as we slough off the layers of self to previous centuries. Too long for those going places. And the Sixties was all about getting somewhere very quickly indeed. Sharp elbows were the order of that day: so middle class pushy.... Yes, the times were awash with those bossy bourgeois types who think they know best. Called themselves, radicals, rebels, revolutionaries. You laugh. But then you’ve had decades to grow wise. The past. It makes us doubt ourselves. In the Sixties! with all that ambition, and its intellectual arrogance? Absurd to take a twenty year that seriously. But no, they knew how the world should be run. An attitude that suggests no ritual of rebirth, no rite of passage where, shorn of the ego, we confront our dependence on a culture and embody its profundities. A lesson in humility, as we submit to the society’s metaphysical ideals. Only when destroyed do we grow again. The phoenix tells a harsh tale.
Alan stops the camera: you said the middle classes have their rite of passage when at school. I stop, chew on my pen, stare through the window.... I smile, as I come up with a solution. It is perhaps the peculiar quality of the middle classes that they to go through three rites of passage. The first initiates them into public life. The second is a reaction against that initiation, its too public persona. The third is a preparation for a profession, that final, adult submission to society. The unlucky ones - the drop-outs - never leave the second stage, so get stuck in limbo; a lifetime spent confusing late adolescent angst with individualism and liberty.
Was Keith unlucky with the times? A mind perfectly adapted to the zeitgeist wouldn’t get the kind of radical surgery it needed to chop off that overweening self. A disaster for the creative intellect. Also for society. And for themselves. It wouldn’t have appeared so at the time. Expansion gave the radicals the opportunity to compete on equal terms with the fuddy-duddies; as dons transferred to professorships in the plate-glass universities, the jejune filling up the vacancies. Disguised by the scholarly revolutions of the period - this a golden age for scholarship - such undomesticated radicalism was storing up troubles for the future. Some cat-calling in the audience.... Think about this, my friend: much radicalism is simply an expression of a stage in life, as we seek to create an identity, one which in the West is defined against the society and its traditions. But to be a permanent red? Never to grow up? Mr Hobbes has been waiting to have his say.
...those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation, to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true science are above it. For between the Science, and erroneous Doctrines, Ignorance is in the middle. Naturall sense and imagination, are not subject to absurdity. Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousness of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary.
So much of 1960s radicalism was book learning. Thus the absurdity of the Marxist cult in the age of Keynes. To stay in the Socialist Workers Party until you collect your pension? More cat-calling. My friends, much of what was believed in the Sixties was simply nonsense, because wholly out of books. One reason university expansion, when knowledge worshipped as its own idol. Books no longer the forks and spades helping us dig up the garden of knowledge. No. They were the garden! Books, the ideas they contain, the magic formulas to unlock the secrets of ourselves and society. The cat-calls so loud I can hardly speak.... Friends, friends; surely you remember the 1970s, when Labour activists, mostly graduates, called the Conservatives the stupid party. Only the socialists clever enough to quote theories not win votes.
Let’s not exaggerate the counter-cultural conflict. Little more than a water fight in a swimming pool. After all, these socialists never won an election. Do not mistake the surface for what’s underneath; the radical rhetoric for that bourgeois hand holding the megaphone. Edmund Leach says it well.
‘You think you’re unusual don’t you?’
Keith: ‘yeah.’
‘Well, you’re not. Cambridge is full of bright provincial boys, who are absorbed into the ruling elite, as most toffs don’t have the brains to run things. But me, I am unusual. I am clever and a toff.’
Exactly!
Much of what believed radical, new, counter-cultural, outré, was merely fashion, an industrial product, a mass-media version of the beatnik scene of the 1950s. Busloads of respectable types playing at being rebels. The reason so much feels fake about that time.
Although this is unjust to the times. But then true bohemians are always outsiders; they cannot survive any kind of populism. A mass of conventional types - suitably disguised in kaftan and beads - will smother the eccentric and the miraculous. This mass to create the future. Today we live with the consequences; those bizarre campuses, that run by clerks and managers, encourage an obscene radicalism. Obscene? Think of those masturbatory fantasies of revolution, the porno pics on change, the video nasties pushing ‘progress’. In rubbishing the past, by removing its decencies, they destroy our defences, to give the corporations a free pass into town. The Sixties: it produced the revolutionary bureaucrat and corporate radical; the lords and barons of a new feudal age. The past. One bulwark against the power of the rulers, those most likely to welcome change. Change. The chance to coerce others with a good conscience.
(Here the author would have liked to intrude a page of asterisks. ‘That will not look elegant,’ says the publisher, ‘and for such a frivolous book a want of elegance means death.’
‘Politics,’ the author retorts, ‘are like a stone tied to the neck of literature which, in less than six months, will drown it. Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is ear-splitting and yet lacks point. It does not harmonise with the sound of any instrument. This talk of politics will mortally offend half my readers, and bore the other half, who have already come across far more vigorous and detailed politics in their morning paper.’
‘If you characters don’t talk politics,’ my publisher replies, ‘then they’re no longer Frenchmen of [1968], and your book is no longer a mirror, as you claim...’)
I want to take a break from politics; that funhouse of fanatics, chancers, and hypocrites. We may laugh at young Julien Sorel, but we feel sorry for Madame de Rênal, an innocent who falls into the clutches of a careerist. Christopher Neve invites us to tea.
To look steadily is in itself a profound pleasure. He wanted to make his pictures out of firmly observed shapes, that did not wobble or fade out, and to do this he had to use his eyes in the landscape and not generalize. Looking can be a form of worship and also an exact science. The great thing is to be able to look correctly and with attention, with as much objectivity as possible. This is not only pleasurable as a contemplative process but it also provides the basis for feeling. This may seem obvious, but think how much landscape painting is done from exactly the opposite point of view; a cloud the colour of self-absorption goes over the sun, making it impossible to see anything at all clearly. A landscape coiled and racked by subjectivity has no meaning except as a shattered and imprecise expression of the storms of the psyche. It has no meaning of its own. It can be lit up by the lightening of a jagged insight, but only momentarily. Have you never leaned from an upstairs window and seen a storm at night among mountains? First thing next day you go to investigate objects only glimpsed in a white flicker, to look at them steadily as though you never saw them before or had forgotten them. Aristotle suggested that perfect happiness is ‘some sort of energy of contemplation’, and a considered scrutiny of the natural world produces exactly this. Knowing how to see, how to approach the whole business of seeing, without prejudice or theory or self- consciousness, can be the very basis on which to feel. To look at landscape is to exercise the same perceptiveness as looking at pictures. Accurate observation arouses the imagination. To have these feelings, you do not observe the countryside in a generalised and imprecise way; you study it.
Bye bye: an artist’s reply to the politico. Art, sensitive to atmosphere, imbued with feeling, ambiguous in meaning, needs an active but contemplative passivity, one alive to nuance, sensitive to the odd and unexpected; open to the unknown. Art is frisson, it is superstition; it is worship, of the mystic variety, that dissolves the self into canvas, page, performance. A work of art is metamorphosis, as brushstroke and sentence create their own lives through the medium of the creative intellect. Politics is a religion of a very different sort; that of the Pulpit and Inquisition. Politicians can do immense damage to an artist’s psyche. Not just the obvious: the repression, the slogans, the vacuous rhetoric. There’s the politicos, who are forced to think in crude concepts, exciting the mind-drunk passions. Activity before contemplation. Utility stamping out the uselessness of art. A bully beats up the fragile aesthete. So crude. That’s the word! Politics over-simplifies. Rhetoric before analysis, and what analysis! more a barrister’s brief than a scientist’s experiments. An artist seeks what’s just out of reach. A politico knows it all already. Politics. That bumptious cretin.
The artist is a libertarian. Politics is constraint. A danger for the artist is their attraction to ideologies promising unlimited liberty. A mirage, where destruction is mistaken for freedom. Marxism can destroy the old system, but its replacement is terribly repressive; not just because run by bureaucrats, those tyrants of rule and regulation, but arising out of the very nature of an ideological regime that wants to stuff all of life into a concept. An eagle in a canary’s cage.
The artist suffered an existential crisis in the 20th-century; as seeking a new metaphysics, they found it in intellectual abstractions, suffused with politics. Danger! Danger! So easy for the cartoon concepts of the intellectual and politician to squeeze out those complex meditations on canvas and page. Art no longer a whisper but a shout; the shouting increasing as the concepts are taken up by clerks and curators.
What about those who have the capacity to do original work but are not aware of this tension? They are likely to be torn apart, as the sophistication of their sensibility struggles against the bombast of speech and action. Mind-wrecking antimonies, as they succumb to the activist and commissar.
Something happens in the 1960s. The old cannot absorb the new. Vast changes in size changes all things. With numbers comes a voice, whose platform was the demotic media, where talent from below was making it big in music and film. No longer to be absorbed into a tradition, the young had space to create their own scene. The rebel age! But what happens if the idea of the rebel becomes - to use a word of the period - hegemonic? Won’t strange things happen to that ‘rebel’? An establishment figure...Mr Schloss is excited! He’s jumping up and down! What if, he blurts out, today’s ‘radical’ is a reactionary? Our Leftist an Ubu Roi. Once upon a time the Left didn’t go in for repression, wasn’t so keen on telling people what to do. Once the Left preached happiness!
I reached out and ruffled his hair!
and fill the world with our rays!
Mine is sunlight, your’s are poems—
we’ll set the world ablaze!”
A poet’s idea of the Left.
There are all kinds of Left. But two confront each other on opposite sides of the valley. A ragtag bunch of anarchists on one hill, swinging their fists in the air, are shouting at the sky: give those clouds their freedom! On the opposite slope a professional army is moving down to clear the horizon of its enemies. Before they’re filed to the furnace, I pull out a few photographs from history's forgotten folders: they show a boxing match between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Stalin. Two kinds of Left, two very different sorts of character. The one all fantasy; the other dull routine. The one explores freedom; the other shuts it down. Vlad uses a pen to write poems; the clerk to sign a person’s death warrant. Life’s irony that we call the difficult outsider bolshy, not the bureaucrats of the Soviet state.
Which Left are you on?
A ramshackle man is walking down the street giving out new names to old things. He turns to me, and offers ‘busy’. ‘Busy? what do you mean,’ I say. ‘Busy’s an ideal word for you loafers.’ ‘Loafers! Not me,’ I reply. ‘I work all week.’ ‘I know that work,’ he says: ‘busy!’ I look sheepish, remembering those conversations about Kant when the spreadsheets called. He laughs loud and long. ‘Busy watching the TV. Busy playing golf. Busy on In-ter-net. News is it, or some missis in a bathtub? Busy, an ideal word for loafers.’ Amused at my sad face, he gives the word away for free. ‘The price of that mug! Ha! Ha! Ha!’
Caution.... An obvious effect of the Sixties has been the divorce of radical rhetoric from people’s lives; professors turning Left when swathes of the population stick Right. Most people like Capitalism, they do not hate it; a truth academics find hard to comprehend. Mr Capitalismo gives luxuries to workers that the bourgeoise have long taken for granted. It’s why I wonder about those middle class radicals. Is their Marxism a disguised hatred of the pleb? No no, I’ll leave that for another time. These chaps and chapesses are real rebels for a bit. A bit. But after that youthful afflatus, with its sits-in, demos, boycotts, how many stay true to outsiderdom, live the wild ways of a Marx and Herzen? How many spurn the university, our elite’s training ground? A few. Only the natural outsider, those Dostoevskian devils, are crazy enough to do that. I don’t blame the majority: we all want comfort. And why disown an institution on which your vocation depends? It’s why these radicals (Schloss butts in: these reactionaries) have always stayed on the right side of the bureaucrats; were supine before Thatcher’s assault on the profession. And no doubt why much Leftism has been written in an abstract jargon that even the writer doesn’t understand: no politician to worry about a political manifesto written by Martians. The Left had become but an abstract concept.
So much of 1960s radicalism was a quarrel inside the middle class; particularly acute in the university, one of the more conservative institutions at that time. The result, a seismic shift in the political affiliation of the place, helping to create a new religion in tune with the global marketplace; a kind of radical chic, now common to our museums and galleries, that plays well with an executive class who’d remove all things - culture, customs, religion - that obstaclise profit and market share. Deconstruction and the dollar empty out all cultural forms of their meaning. An executive class, that spends so much time running the corporations, has little energy for art, literature or history. Who better than prof tell them that culture is junk, a mere record of barbarism and prejudice? The leisure class of the old elite, who sought cultivation for its own sake, is long gone. And with its disappearance a restraint on our rulers’s arrogance and rapacity is lost. You think I exaggerate. Call me a polemicist. But have you pondered our elite’s love of ‘change’? When most people want to be left alone. Change. Power draped in the robes of progress and social care. Alessandro Manzoni shouts from his bicycle: good is compulsion. The dirty secret of much radical thought: the desire to lord it over others. Difficult to openly admit this in a society whose legitimacy relies on the voters; so instead our rulers cultivate the belief that we need their help, their expertise, their concern, to live our habitual lives. Yet most of us want to be treated with respect; and helped only when help is needed.
There was once in our village an unpopular policeman and a pickpocket. When I say that the policeman was unpopular I mean that he was far too energetic to be a good village policeman and he was also too thin. Most village policemen are fat large men with red faces who usually have their tunics open and pace steadfastly like comics from a film. They will pass the time of day with the locals, pretend that the bar has actually shut at ten o’clock on the dot, discuss gardening, lean over fences and generally leave the villagers to mind their own business. This particular policeman wasn’t like that at all. First of all he was, as I have said, very thin, and secondly he was determined to clamp down on all crime and thirdly he didn’t want to be outwitted by anyone.
This policeman is an old puritan, who’s left kirk for the cop-shop. A shift replicated across the country, as local authorities took over social responsibilities from the Church. Starting in the 1960s a new class emerged to run the professions of the Welfare State, itself suffering a major shift in emphasis, as the ordinary voter was transformed into a victim; to be looked after and managed by their betters and superiors (experts the technical term).
False consciousness, that designer label of the 1970s. The workers were being conned. Just when my family was enjoying the best of times.... Odd that; that the smart idea was we shouldn’t enjoy Mr Capitalismo’s luxuries. Consumerism a Marxist sin. You’ve guessed! Not the workers but these Left intellectuals suffered from false thinking; as they mistook their own emotional crises, those rebellious urges, that power instinct, for social justice. Marxism a camouflage for middle class angst and self-interest. So much illusion. A cornucopia of myth. The best study Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, a world where middle class professionals pretend to be terrorists. It is a place where ideas and lifestyle part company. It’s why the religion of the universities changed; less to understand a society as to soothe our complicity in its destruction. For by separating concept from life - Marx transformed into a metaphysic - our own corruptions are scrubbed clean: I a good person because I believe in good ideas. To believe is enough. The idea alone to offer the new world of tomorrow. Ah, tomorrow, when revolution sweeps the land of characters like one's self; this the Marxian contradiction, between concept and the person who holds the concept. The result hypocrisy and delusion. In medieval Christianity, a Christian knew the cost of bad behaviour - to spend time in the purgatorial torture chamber - but they insured against prolonged damnation by paying for remission of sins in this life. Our Marxians don’t want to pay a price; they think to get away scot-free. The idea itself to save them.
’Tis however probable, if not certain, that they were, generally speaking, the dupes of their own zeal. Hypocrisy, quite pure and free from fanaticism, is perhaps as rare, as fanaticism, entirely purged from all mixture of hypocrisy. So congenial to the human mind are religious sentiments, that, where the temper is not guarded by a philosophical scepticism, the most cool and determined, it is impossible to counterfeit long those holy fervors, without feeling some share of the assumed warmth: And on the other hand, so precarious and temporary is the operation of these supernatural views, that the religious extasies, if constantly employed, must often be counterfeit, and must ever be warped by those more familiar motives of interest and ambition, which insensibly gain upon the mind. This indeed seems the key to most of the celebrated characters of that age. Equally full of fraud and of ardor, these pious patriots talked perpetually of seeking the Lord, yet still pursued their own purposes; and have left a memorable lesson to posterity, how delusive, how destructive that principle is, by which they were animated.
At times like today we need David Hume, who wrote the great book on false consciousness (he calls it ‘hypocrisy’). His argument: the most zealous fanatics are also the most corrupt of men. Hume thought of religion as a social glue, keeping the polity together. He was wiser than Hobbes, who believed natural reason aided by simple instruction would do the trick. Religion binds, when used wisely by the rulers. Religion tears apart when taken up by extremists and employed in factional fighting. Christianity to serve the community, not rule it. A lesson, alas, the Sixties lot - too busy going places - didn’t have time to learn; it’s why they turned his history upside down; not the fanaticism of religious extremism, but the sobersides of capitalist enterprise, who wanted to run the country like a business, the cause of the carnage. Those who should have known better had forgotten his central lesson: that ‘philosophy’ (what we would call learning) is best kept out of Westminster, which needs be run and understood on its own terms.
Yet Charles was inflexible. In his whole conduct of his affair, there appear no marks of the good sense, with which he was undoubtedly endowed: A lively instance of that species of character, so frequently to be met with; where there are found parts and judgement in every discourse and opinion; in may actions, indiscretion and imprudence. Men’s views of things are the result of their understanding alone: their conduct is regulated by their understanding, their temper and their passions.
Little connection between the quality of a mind and the efficacy of its holder’s actions. Although I’d go further than Hume: the better the mind, the more likely to conflate that understanding with an ability to act; so putting the idea before the event, to mishandle it. The tragedy of Charles I: he was an intellectual. Like his father, but at a lower level of sophistication, he brought ideas into a world where ideas are best kept out. When in politics the concept is apt to be corrupted and abused. The public realm a place not of wise distinctions and profound insights, but cartoons, which inflame the mind not cool it down.
It is noticeable that throughout many fields - literature, sociology, anthropology, politics - the level of abstraction rocketed during the 1960s. From low-rise flats to skyscrapers. It’s what to expect when an intellectual craft is turned into an academic industry. But there’s more to it than that; for why did the abstraction (and the jargon) all point in the same direction: to a radical politics? To free the workers by quoting Althusser and Lacan?
One explanation is linked to university expansion: it is easier to teach large numbers of students ideas than make them learned. Moreover, radical ideas, that enormously simplify the subject, are easier to acquire than long, complicated histories, where contextual realities replace simple moral assertions. Canals are easier to navigate than winding rivers; deltas almost impossible.
There are sociological reasons. Once a social movement is reduced to an idea it ceases to be a threat to social order; the 1960s the moment Marxism became respectable; no bien pensant bourgeois without their Communist Manifesto in briefcase or handbag. This Marxism so twisted out of shape, that today it can be espoused by a corporate elite, who conduct their own class war on the workers, as they seek to remove beliefs and customs that give us meaning and stability. Today Marx’s mates are the rich. We’re living through a Capitalist Revolution, where corporations are our Communist Party, profs its commissars. I quote Sheldon Pollock....
Alan tugs my arm.
I’ve forgotten about Keith. No, no, I’m setting the scene. We must remember, that those who join the Oxbridge class from outside tend to take these things far too seriously. An emotional investment - a legacy of that familial rupture - gives these ideas an edge, a personal meaning, a physical actuality, a literalism, that can cause problems later on; when, ideas to part ways with domestic duties, we suffer an existential choice. Accept the social schizophrenia? Repair the rent to our being?
Stitch together concept and mode of living. Leave them lying apart. It can be an agonising decision, especially for the self-conscious outsider, who has to decide whether or not to conform. Modernity’s rite of passage, which usually occurs in our twenties, when we have both the opportunity and the tools to create our own unique identity. The choice of Paul Gauguin, the emblematic figure of Modern Life, who gave up a fortune and a family to the vision of himself. Of course, for some - the scientists interviewed by Alan - there’s no need for this choice; mind, subject and institution are a perfect fit. It’s not quite the same in the humanities, at least for the scholarly parvenu, where the emotions find it hard to adjust to the restraints of a discipline, its conceptual corsets. The artist is apt to go astray in academia.
The longer a rite of passage is delayed, the harder, more cataclysmic, its consequences.
Keith is a natural. So attuned to academia that even while an undergraduate he reads the runes of employment and promotion: Classics a career dead-end, as too many smart provincial boys compete for a few posts. Better a larger discipline, maybe in the social sciences; a growth subject at this time. But not all is calculation. Anthropology attracts because about life; a meaning-rich subject; and its own religion, despite the scholastic invasion from France. Yet to be fully assimilated into academia, while keeping that link to the individual through participant observation, anthropology still a safe-haven for the prophet and artist. Nor forget chance when it comes to careers. Keith liked a drink with Jack Goody.
We expect something to go wrong, as he switches from a dry technical discipline to one awash with meaning; for surely such an accomplished academic, a complete technician, will flounder in an environment calling for different qualities of mind and body. But no. Keith masters the subject. Honours and prestigious publications are guaranteed.
The first sign that something’s not right: the decision to leave Manchester University. Keith didn’t ditch that student knapsack, with its revolutionary pamphlets. Oh dear, too many bolsheviks in the department. The head reacts by breaking up this band of rebels, by promoting the least brilliant. Repelled by these machinations, Keith applies to America, and books a flight to Yale. This spirit has not been tamed. The rituals of academia yet to cut out Keith’s heart. Goodbye Emyrs Peters!
It’s not just radicals who live the split life. The study a separate room in the house. Though at some level, and in strange ways, the lives of the best scholars do feed into the work, giving it depth and originality. Not so for the second-rate, where all things are extraneous material, used for utilitarian ends; the reason their stuff barely survives its publication. Everywhere we find careerists; those masters of the current language, which they empty of all content. Our man can’t live this divided life. Integration calls. He strives to keep a self intact that his education has tried so hard to fragment.
A big risk moving to the States.
Breakdowns are multi-causal. Confronted with a very different academic culture, one more professional and prosy (as against the aristocratic verbalism of Cambridge) would have been a shock. Suddenly you can’t talk yourself to the front of every scene. A reason. Divorce another. Add the delayed effects of that familial separation: for the first time you are really feeling alone (know it in your vitals). Then bureaucracy, that anathema to the authentic scholar. Rejecting all cant about liberty and Marlon Brando: America is the home of the bureaucrat, the university their finishing school. America’s top colleges the epitome of the fragmented personality, where role is separated from self, idea from life. Cambridge disguised such a rift. Yale got the arc-lights out.
An exile (in more ways that one).
For the exile there is always a crisis; which most surmount; usually with the help of lovers, friends, self-belief or a routine drudgery. In America our man is utterly alone. But I suspect something else: an exile’s best solution to this crisis is to become a technician. Hollow out the self. The emotional aftershocks of that exile, its mental effects, the body’s earthquake, that cultural erasure, are not explored, clearly understood, grappled with, wrestled to the ground. Doubts, tinges of conscience, sleepless nights, afternoons of angst, are silenced in the cacophony of success. Up! Up! Up! Doubt to disappear under the papers, the promotions, the prestige. For a technician such symbols alone do the job. Home at last, the outsider is assimilated.
Meaning, life, all we had, him who inspired and moved,
The artist won’t assimilate. Because meaning oozes out from within. They fulfil the self from the self; their being embodied in the work. For such characters ideas are physical things, an extra limb. Hobbes pops his head over the wall.
By this it appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience only; as Prudence is; but attained by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method.... And whereas Sense and Memory are but knowledge of Fact, which is a thing past, and irrevocable; Science is the knowledge of Consequences and dependence of one fact upon another.... Because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, wee see how to make produce the like effects.
Keith needs more than technical competence, yet the bias of his education is towards the virtuoso technician. Like many scholarship boys to pass exams (or win awards) isn’t enough. They stare at Mistress Meaning through the bedroom window.
Already in East Anglia that itch to perform. Not sufficient to deliver papers to students, he wanted to do stand-up...sorry, to improvise his lectures; turn them into an act, a performance. Dried up at the first attempt. He didn’t give out on Greek just because jobs were few. It was meaning-shallow, an intellectual desert. Anthropology offered a reservoir to swim in.... Once on its banks Audrey Richards sacked the rainclouds: do not to ‘fly before you can walk’. Don’t take the supersonic plane to the big idea; first crawl across the ground, collect those facts. Derive the concept from the material, and, if lucky, you’ll cultivate your own.
Success and meaning; both are important to Keith Hart. Yet this can be difficult in institutions, where utility is the prize, and those most useful are most honoured. Such chaps are guided from the outside. It’s why high-flyers are riddled with cliché, catch the pox of platitude. Campus a breeding ground for the fashionable nonsense that pervades the public realm, for conformity there is rife: hothouses ideal for production-style plants. The comfortably clever learn early it’s better to fit in; the sure way to status and prosperity. It’s why one’s twenties are difficult for an artist, a time when we must think ourselves out of the conventional wisdom, reject much of our what of teachers and friends believe. A lonely time. Moses in his wilderness.
We are told by Alan that Keith could be abrasive. Working class chip? I know it well!
It’s not just meaning, homegrown rather than imported. There is something odd about the artist’s character, marking them out from others. Always taking themselves so damned seriously, even when mucking about. Too self-contained, independent, unpredictable for Organization Man. A smock walks into a room of twin-sets and three-piece suits. Ha! Léger jumps through a skylight, sending my atelier into chaos:
Cinema is thirty years old; it is young, modern, free and has no traditions. This is its strength. It sprouts in every corner of the district.... It is on an equal footing with the street, with life.... It is in shirtsleeves. Mass-produced, ready-made, it is collective.
Odd, in our mass-produced times, where even thought is franchised, that Léger should welcome the production-line. However, the factory doesn't interests him, only its products and their influence, those crazy, spontaneous effects. Spontaneity. A key word for the artist. Léger is telling us why artists were attracted to the street, and went so far Left: at that time it offered freedom; that anarchy of the new, the overwhelming, the uncontrollable; which excited the mind, intoxicated the senses. Timothy Hyman is explicit:
...intensifying his relish for the instability of reality; Plyuskhin’s Garden is a celebration of nature untamed, beyond all control, and it speaks of liberty. Gogol led the artist to a sense of poetic freedom and anti-authoritarian comedy....
Once the Revolution was established these qualities were suppressed by very different personality types.
...Chagall was already under attack [from the communists]....Chagall ‘who had led so hard a combat for Abstraction, for Anarchy, for his Self and his navel’; is accused of descending into ‘petit-bourgeois naturalism’. He has ‘found no place among the Bolsheviks, despite his ultra-revolutionary words and acts’. Chagall’s art ‘signifies objectively a step backwards toward anarchism, and not a step forward toward proletarian realism, towards the organization of reality’.
Don’t these Bolsheviks sound like an HR department? The artist needs liberty, which in the 20th-century was believed to coincide with Left-wing politics; although I suspect the destructive element of the Russian Revolution held the greatest appeal. That loosening up of society, with its wealth of new possibilities, as ideas walked the streets; and where all things could change overnight; buildings to suffer the most astonishing metamorphoses; from palace to hostel, from Jewish mansion into a Yiddish theatre, decorated by Chagall. A revolution changes the landscape, creating a new world of sense, marvellous for the artist. But revolutions cannot last. In brilliant pages Timothy Hyman shows how anarchic characters like Chagall are muscled out by the commissars and party officials of Bolshevik Art. After that first destructive delight, it is the organisers of reality who take charge; stuffing the original and the odd into their filing cabinets. Communist clerks or corporate commissars have little time for the spontaneous, the free.
Working class chip...so close to the irascible artist, and her beef against the world.
Senses as sensitive as a cat’s whiskers. Beings so alive they are battered by society, its utility, its cant, its ballrooms full of bores. This produces its own peculiar dangers: we react by directing our anger out, towards the social field, not channeling it into the work. It’s why artists need so much time alone; solitude to protect the sensibility from a public realm that blunts and frazzles it.
When on one’s own, how turn what is received into poetry?
Meaning (in words, in paint, in notes). Artists have to create a meaning-world from within themselves. Difficult inside an institution; when the free spirit and mental anarchist are not easily contained by its rules and conventions. Internal growth doesn’t respect the restraints, the formulas, the idées reçues, so necessary for any establishment. Plenty of painful adjustments to be made, as we squeeze ourselves into such places. They make us feel odd, estranged, an exile; always to be kicking against the pricks. Onto the attack! This keeps us going! It excites. Yet the psychic costs can be enormous, when isolated, demeaned, rejected. We lose our equanimity; that peace essential for original work. For creation requires a perfect fit with how we live. The emotions to freely run into the work, which requires its own kind of mental relaxation - of grace, of meditation.
The thing that one wants to put as language out there isn’t something that you can simply put there by thinking about it. You have to get yourself into a kind of unrapturous, cool, undisturbed condition in which you are receptive to that which the Muse speaks through you.
These precious emotions shouldn’t be given away free: unleashed in mad fights with authority. In a very real sense we must let the institution go, accept it is an enemy to the self. But here’s the temptation of politics: its false promise of a new world where the artist lives in perfect harmony with his society; the social field some future Arcadia. A delusion. Always we have to go inside, cultivate our garden, fertilise our soil. To release the magic, we must dig up our own plants and herbs.
Meaning is easily accommodated in places like Cambridge and Yale. However, this search for meaning can take many forms; some that fit with the academic life, others which do not. Our man’s instinct is to be a writer (though brilliant at Classics, the English teachers were inspirational at Manchester Grammar). Here we see the possible origins of an existential crisis. Writers have a different sensibility to that of most professors; one more instinctive, fluid, chancy: the writer’s intellect forever dipping into the emotional stream. Now, one of the odd things about Oxbridge is that its verbal culture is highly amenable to such sensibilities. Talk, by its very nature, tends towards improvisation, wit, fancy; with its element of risk; that frisson of performance; and, to return to where I began, it rests - no, it floats! - on the evanescent moment. High table or senior common room, the stage for a born performer, that virtuoso of dialectical repartee. The history of Oxbridge littered with dons who hardly put a thing between hard covers - their brilliancy going into conversation. No wonder! To fix such liveliness on paper, when the academic language is stilted, dull, dead? Keith a natural in such places, finds himself on quite different territory. Did he compensate by putting all his efforts in the lecturing; his stage play? Yet in America the emphasis is on the research programme, the writing. The creative tongue is stifled. A room full of filing cabinets leaves little space for the performing artiste. In Yale Keith confronts his divided self; is forced to choose between two incommensurables: academia or art; industry or craft; the institution or improv. Naturally he cannot decide; for how come down on one side of your being when both demand your full attention? Torn apart by antinomies the body finds refuge in madness.
It is an incredible story. An amazing interview. More powerful than most tragedies.
The breakdown lasts about fifteen years, and includes a return to Cambridge, where he lives for a year on his gambling. What fascinates is that despite the breakdowns (or to be accurate: in-between them) Keith continues to function at an extraordinary high level: brilliant references from America, plus precious gifts of praise from students captivated by his lectures. This man is a performer!
Things are changing.
Though suffering terribly, Keith is growing a new persona, one closer to the creative self, its subconscious, the senses. A self more attuned to feel, to instinct, to taste, is reducing the volume of the analytical intelligence.
We suspect - don’t I know it! - that it was hard to accept a junior position late in life; but such dark thoughts are the black earth of the Ukraine: it’s where the best crops grow. He describes this growth of a new man, how he trains himself to improvise his lectures. From fully prepared script to speaking off the cuff takes eighteen months. It is a fascinating exposition. We are spellbound. While the alchemical secrets of this man’s personality are revealed: although a super-technician, technics alone could never have satisfied him: too much emotion. This man so full of spirit it radiates off the screen. Miraculously a topflight education has not drained him dry. How? A mystery. Something of that original character - the poor boy from Old Trafford - remains; the spontaneity, the feelings, the anger, the abrasiveness not rubbed way by the sandpaper of middle class sociability. Keith has kept his independence from the institution, the home of the bourgeoisie.
You’ve noticed something?
That’s right, the workers are individualists, the professionals communitarians. It’s why so many of the middle class have embraced Socialism: the religion of civil society, where the individual acquiesces to the good of the whole. Hobbes is on the blower:
A fifth Law of Nature, is COMPLEASANCE; that is to say, That every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest. For the understanding whereof, we may consider, that there is in mens aptness to Society; a diversity of Nature, rising from their diversity of Affections....
The middle classes are the pre-eminent Darwinian survivors. Socialism, or at least its 21st- century variant - early on it attracted mavericks - is about getting people to conform. Think of the calls for cancellation, or just how many bourgeois types praise the collective, go gaga over whatever concept conquers the catwalk.
The observers of this Law, may be called SOCIABLE.... The contrary, Stubborn, Insociable, Froward, Intractable.
This Left wants everybody to think the same (else we are stupid, misguided, in error or self-interested). It is another antimony: Keith’s religion crashes against his personality. Hobbes is laughing into my ear.
...not unlike to that we see in stones brought together for building of a Ædifice. For as that stone which by the asperity, and irregularity of Figure, takes more room from others, than it selfe fills; and for the hardness, cannot be easily made plain, and thereby hindereth the building, is by the builders cast away as unprofitable, and troublesome: so also, a man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himself are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passion, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome thereunto.
The artist. Something mad in their refusal to submit to society, to insist on going their own way. Yet most of what an artist thinks is reasonable, when related to their sensibility and talents. It is believed irrational only by those who lack a grasp on the arts. The artist apt to lose themselves in a performance; something that bemuses the philistine, but terrifies a bureaucrat or department head - I have seen the terror in their eyes.
Alan touches by elbow: have I got the wrong Keith Hart?
I’m using my own elastic definition of the artist; as a sort of metaphor, describing a special kind of personality, that may include the Prophet, the Intellectual, the Mystic, the Thinker; also the bohemian and drop-out. Using the word in this sense then, yes, Keith is an artist. No separation of thought from feeling. It is the language of Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleridge, even of David Hume, in the days when, no borders separating art and thought, poems, novels, essays and metaphysics could all be described as belles-lettres. Keith’s instinct is to express his intellect in action: in talk, in lecturing, in shooting the breeze. A performance consumes him: afterwards he’s forgotten what he’s said. It is that moment we surrender to the muse. When an artist performs - on stage, across paper, in the tavern - they are less a person than an event. And sure enough Keith utters an immortal phrase: “I lecture not for knowledge but belief.” Yes! Yes! Man-o-man. Bang! Bang! Bang! An artist needs to create life; raising an audience from its natural passivity, to make it feel. Art is intellectual excitement. It also seeks to save...those who will be saved.
One or t’other. But both? Hard times ahead for Keith Hart. Academics are not expected to be artists, whose genius they love to tame, this their purpose in life. The artist resists, fights back.... It gets worse for Keith; he believes in an egalitarian politics that would not only put an end William Blakes’s war, but remove the artistocrat. More antimonies! This word, spreading like a virus, infects my piece. Blake calls in the doc:[¶53] The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the cause of this life & the source of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage are strong in cunning.
[¶54] Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring; to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
[¶55] But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights.
[¶56] Some will say, ‘Is not God alone the Prolific?’ I answer, ‘God only Acts & Is in existing beings or Men.’
[¶57] These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
[¶58] Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.
[¶73] Opposition is True Friendship.
For Blake the artist must live in creative tension with the priest (bureaucrat, academic, executive). But Keith wants to relax this tension, so extreme within himself as the oppositions accumulate; between the anarchy of the street and the order of home; mom v dad; middle versus working class; rebel against official; freelance thinker agin the managerial university. How resolve? Call in the Kant! who usefully expunged religion from practical life. A move also made by the high officials in the European Union, who have created an odd kind of Socialism, one based on Kantian philosophy not Marxist polemics; and where technics has become a disguised metaphysics. But an artist cannot live easily with the Categorical Imperative; it smothers their life and work. One side of Keith upholds an ethics the other side wants to smash to pieces. And deep inside he must surely feel this.... To believe in ideas that at some level you know are inauthentic. Deep trouble if a serious person.
All artists are serious.
The artist is lucky. Their truths fictions, they actively embrace mythology, and use it to navigate this world. Academics are not so fortunate. Supposed to demythologise, eke out ‘hard’ truths, analyse the facts, those naked bodies of existence, they are materialists to a man and woman. Not the lush valleys of fantasy, but the rocks and scree of mountain ranges. In such desolate territory one is apt to go off one’s head: many an academic believing in crazy ideas - Democracy, Equality, Freedom - they think not myths but theories that correspondent to the actual world (to use Hobbes’s formulation they mistake Reason for Sense and Memory). A very simple idea of truth. Mythographers without knowing it. Hume would call many of them hypocrites: ideas, not integrated into how life is lived, are not understood through their experiences, emerge from their sensibilities. Rather, ideas, after that flush of adolescent fever, exist in a separate mental space. It’s why an academic’s ideas have little purchase on public life. While in the institutions they are used justify or to camouflage one’s interests and actions. In both cases ideas are little more than words.
What happens when we get somebody who is both artist and academic; who needs both material and mythic truth...Blake says it produces the priest. Poetry to become religion. Something of this in Keith. He has an evangelical flavour; which means the ‘religion’ not ‘poetry’ predominates: politics is stronger than the metaphysics. Outer over inner. Though this doesn’t quite fit our man; for when the evangelist enters the pulpit, the individualist is shouting from the pews. Possible to reconcile artist and academic if so evenly balanced? I’m not sure it is. Schopenhauer never had a serious academic post. Nietzsche left the university. Academia made Weber ill. The artist is bound to suffer on campus.
Let’s tell a cruel story.
The first thing she wrote for her school group was a “Suite for Trumpetists and Tromboners’. At the Christmas concert the Headmaster, a business studies graduate, said that it had been ‘very interesting’ to hear it. Then he drew her attention to the printed programme.
‘Eh... should that not be the other way round. Trumpeters and trombonists?’ Catherine had smiled and gone off to praise her players again. About this time Graeme McNicol of the BBC had contacted her again for a strand of programmes to do with music and schools - he’d heard of their brass reputation. She told him of the piece she’d just written. This was enough to tempt the BBC to visit Islay with an outside broadcast unit and record a rehearsal and interviews with pupils and their teacher - a sort of master class, she laughingly called it. They interviewed Catherine by the shore so that the waves would be in the background. Then they broadcast a complete performance of the Suite. Again the headmaster had approached her to correct the title before it went into the Radio Times. He said he was desperately afraid of wrong things like that, emanating from his school, being printed in a magazine which went into most of the homes of Britain.
Miss Art and Mr Education, uneasy passengers on the same train.
The artist sees the world through herself. The work comes out of her guts. It’s why there can be no separation between work and life; the artist in a constant effort to bring all the parts of that self together on canvas or score. They know they are jigsaws! But won’t let the pieces remain scattered around the room. Academics are content to compartmentalise the psyche; which leads to this paradox: though many jibber-jabber about the fragmented self - that cliché of modernity - they are usually the most integrated of souls: their work fitting perfectly into the niche of their lives. Such a separation of ideas and life so natural because at so cool a temperature. So little heat, not enough to boil a kettle. Reflex sociables. Social pressure, the conventions of the day, the pounds, shillings and pence of promotion and prestige, plus the institutional setting, all push prof to separate the idea’s content from the substance of their sensibility. Happy to surrender the subjective to the objective, give themselves up to what is measured and weighed. Blinded by the truths of science, they miss the truths of the self. Feelings believed ignorance and illusion, not enlightenment. And where feelings are recognised they are conceptualised. How they love to turn verbs into concepts, adjectives into abstract nouns.
The 20th-century was a battle between the university army, its tanks running over the plain, and the guerrilla bands of artists, forced to retreat to their mountain fastnesses. Can someone really fight on both sides?
Keith Hart. A parable for our times.
Wow! What an interview. In ten intense, spellbinding minutes we watch the drama of our lives; that moment when the individual confronts the bureaucrat within. Give in? Resist!
The choice is difficult. Yet all have to make this choice. In the passage through school we pick up this alien presence, that clerk who wants to manage our being. For many a character not to despise or reject, but to accept, even celebrate; for he, increasingly a she, is a surefire way to success. In part because easy to fake: we can learn to copy a concept; while translating it from one’s own feelings takes time and craft. This clerk a perfect fit with our bureaucratic age, which turns ideas into labels so as to manage things. How they love their rules and regulations (reason made concrete and literal), which increases everyday, as the social field widens and is more organised. The creative intellect is repelled by such sterility, this cramping of the mind. Poor academic! Having defeated the artist, he was rolled over by the bureaucrat. A tragedy of the times. The freest of places to become the most repressive of institutions; as the universities turn themselves into corporations.
At least with Corpo it makes things; and though it will insist on forcing us to listen to its inane views on life, we can ignore such pop with no cost. But to turn a university into a factory of meaning....
I bumped into a Cretan the other day. Nevertheless, from that I have witnessed, the trend is not a good one. Training on the one hand, ideological conditioning on the other; while the space for the free spirit is pushed out beyond the campus perimeter. Surely better in the old days? Depends what we mean by the old days...those old days, when cap and gown were given up for t-shirt and jeans; a few decades which saw a fruitful tension between knowledge and sensibility; fact and affect; theory and taste; and where technics cavorting with meaningful utterance, the artist lived with like-minded souls.
In Keith the tension is extreme, the balance precarious. Why madness calls.
No surprise that once recovered, Keith distances himself from standard academic practice. He becomes a writer; though of a typically odd sort: some fiction, a memoir; together with an enormous amount of free-form academic prose - to capture the spontaneity of talk?
The ending is a happy one. He finds a new mentor - C.L.R. James - and in an epiphany has vision of existence, which he calls Cubist: the key aspects of his life are seen as a totality but from different perspectives. After a life of fragments this man puts himself together in his own way. At last his emotions, his spirit, his personality, his intellect, can be articulated in a coherent but individual whole. He unknots the tie of that academic style.
In meeting James he meets a woman. And makes perhaps the biggest decision of his life: to reject a prestigious university appointment in the States for love. An institution sacrificed for a human. It is to get his balance right. A profession moulded around his personality. It is to come home, to Old Trafford, where Manchester United sell cheap plonk. Old tensions at last resolved, the past is integrated into the present, which fulfils him at last. Football shares his Parisian desk with Kant.
We have gone far out into deep waters. Swam past the flotsam and jetsam of old wrecks; my old model of psychic collapse, with its femme fatale; its Swinburne, its Oscar Wilde. Yet something of my idea remains: as the lifeboat approaches we see a shadowy figure on its bow; out of the night’s mist, that piercing light-beam, emerging like a figurehead into the harbour...a woman! Keith is saved by a soul-mate. It is she who glues together that divided self. We need to love and be loved. A self never whole until it can look at itself in the mirror of another person.
Where does this story begin? With a young boy’s visit to Cambridge, when he mistakes colleges for churches, and says he wants a school with flying buttresses and a spire. The parents build a myth around this wish. Yet was the boy wrong? Schools are churches, though of a peculiar sort; teaching us to belong to a congregation, a society, the institution, our trans-national globe. It is where we learn to be a citizen, believe in the public realm. But there are some who expect more than this...knowledge itself to be their home; where they build a life around meanings they create for themselves. It is why a terrible loss awaits this boy. Once inside the church he finds the altar removed, the walls whitewashed, the nave turned into a conference centre. God and His heavenly hosts kicked out of the stalls, Bentham and his crew have colonised the chancel. Churches no more.
The prophet Hobbes:
For seeing all formed Religion, is founded at first, upon the faith which a multitude hath in some one person, whom they believe not only to be a wise man, and to labour to procure their happiness, but also to be a holy man, to whom God himselfe vouchsafeth to declare his will supernaturally; It followeth necessarily, when they that have the Government of Religion, shall come to have either the wisedome of those men, their sincerity, or their love suspected; or that they shall be unable to shew any probable token of Divine revelation; that the Religion which they desire to uphold, must be suspected likewise; and (without the fear of the Civill Sword) contradicted and rejected.
The philosopher Blake nods his head. He agrees a religion’s origins are in the imagination. But he chuckles, looks deeper, is profound.
[¶25] The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with God or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adoring them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
[¶26] And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.
[¶27] Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslave’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood:
[¶28] Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
[¶29] And at length they pronounced that the Gods have orderd such things.[¶30] Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
Along with the priests come the bureaucrats; as they must when universities become so important for a society. Time for poetry - the metaphysics of uselessness - to give way to practical concerns and moral imperatives. The artist goes into exile; meaning to be made out in the world. DIY. A wrenching experience. Keith’s tragedy that it didn’t start early enough. Perfectly adapted to the educational system, so comfortable on its examination conveyer-belt, it took too long for his machine to break down. Later, when he picks his own pieces up from the scrapyard, he has the epiphanic insight: God has left the institution. Keith a Darwin who arrived too late, to find the Galapagos Islands bereft of turtles.
Let’s end with Duncan Forbes, who shows just how difficult is this particular enterprise.
Hume, in his History as elsewhere, is a precise thinker, but a notoriously careless writer.
The examples he gives are not convincing. I think Forbes is missing a key feature of the creative mind. Hume a master because he fuses ‘precise’ thinking with a ‘careless’ style (which, to my mind, isn’t careless at all). The academic wants system, rigour, clear definitions, consistent concepts bolted onto a language like girders. Hume is too sophisticated for such (formal) simplicities. His sentences match the history; that incessant movement, with those endless shifts of meaning, of value; and where ideas suddenly turn on their heads - they do handstands! A concept twisting itself around circumstance. So many nuances. So much chaos. Plenty of confusion. History is change, it is event; the historian’s job to capture these changes, describe and analyse those events. Less a scientist than an acrobat. It’s why Hume’s history ends in such extraordinary fashion: Charles I would have been a brilliant king at any other time than when he ruled. This history an odd kind of literature, where arguments take on the role of characters.
To an artist each canvas is a world; where in fixing a moment, an idea, a key feature of the temporal landscape, they also give it life. Hard! Too hard for most academics, who to trap running water freeze it. Feeling against the analytic mind. The poem or the surgeon’s knife.... The artist can make this choice. A difficult balancing act for the scholar. It is to walk along a narrow ridge between two precipices. Easy to slip, to fall, to go cascading down into the depths; especially when some official is shouting at you: look out! Be careful! Come down from there!
Interview: Keith Hart
________________
Notes
The footnotes have proliferated like chicken pox. In applying the nurses’s cream to my text
I removed its spots: no numbers. Instead, you must visit the isolation ward, where you will
find them in various stages of agony. Take gown and mask. Touch with care!
1.‘a trip to Wales’ For a longer stay in the Valleys, my Working Class Highbrow.
2.‘Groomed by experience’ The kind of sensibility that Antonioni portrays in his films and Elizabeth Bowen in her fiction. The overriding feeling is one of ambiguity and doubt: these characters are so smart and sophisticated, so intimately inside a culture that works on nuance and innuendo, that everyone else is excluded, because they miss too much.
3.‘a kind of divination’ Nicely captured by Jon Speelman in his portrait of the chess genius, Mikhail Tal.
4. ‘Poor teachers!’ Alan’s interview with James Mirrlees. For the complicated relationship between teacher and gifted pupil see the vignettes in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes.
5.‘caress a concept’ In that wonderful piece on Tal, Jon Speelman says that to be grandmaster one has to love chess. The same with any craft.
6.‘to breathe thoughts’ I suggest the chief mistake of thinkers like Rousseau and Noam Chomsky is that they project their own quite peculiar characters onto the rest of us - for some children knowledge really is just helping the tree to grow. Alas, for many it is a jug to be filled by someone else.
7.‘to learn ideas’ People close to Chomsky have mentioned that it’s as if he has always known his thoughts, as though born with them. It gives a psychological twist to Plato’s theory that we don’t discover new ideas but resurrect old ones; for some people this appears to be exactly the case, because so much of their thought comes from inside.
8.‘Lisa Jardine’ Interview with Alan.
9.‘coteries of the disgruntled’ The sad fate of Alex in Edgar Reisz’s Die Zweite Heimat. As Olga says: ‘you’re just clever’.
10.‘not suffer at all’ The interviews with John Gray and Stefan Collini in Talking to Thinkers with Johnny Lyons. Though perhaps telling that both in different ways rejected the standard academic model (their style is essayistic) and have been vocal in the political field.
11.‘the epic insight’ See the Bryan Magee quote in my Russian Climate.
12.‘Leslie Stephen’ Stephen’s case is complicated because he clearly was first-rate - a brilliant writer and critic. His mistake: to measure himself against a Hume or Newton.
13.‘Great minds feel ideas’ It is telling that Timothy Hyman talks about seeing a live painting (when he sees it in a gallery). Talk by Timothy Hyman followed by a conversation with Sudhir Patwardhan and Nancy Adajania.
14.‘their own self’ ‘Sometimes so many thoughts occur to me in the morning during an hour in which I am still in bed, that it takes me all morning, and sometimes all day and more, to write them down accurately.’ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography.
15.‘think with the body’ Compare Richard Westfall’s The Life of Isaac Newton with Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
16. ‘Xerox machine’ Yet such characters overwhelm a field. See ESOP Artist Talk Timothy Hyman 2020. Also Alan’s own website for the responses to The Origins of English Individualism.
17.‘eternal adolescent’ For insightful comment on the creative intellect: Andrew Robinson: Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. One of the factors is just how long it takes to come up with original ideas: Robinson argues about ten years. An Einstein or a Satyajit Ray or an Alan Macfarlane are not learning ideas so much as living them; they are part of the bloodstream, the nervous system.
18.‘a walled garden’ The great study: Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter.
19. ‘(the Welsh) mam' For a wonderful portrayal of that break: Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, the second film in the Apu trilogy. In Dostoyevsky’s satire on provincial society, Uncle’s Dream, we see just how strong are the matushkas (Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories). In societies where the home is equally (or more) important than the workplace the wife will apt to dominate.
20. ‘family its own kingdom’ The clash and the wrenching are nicely caught in Grace Notes. Two worlds collide.
21.‘How can they contain’ For the contrast, which is made both stark and entertaining: Sam Selvon, The Housing Lark. Although about the Caribbean experience in Britain, this novel can also be read as a culture clash between the classes (explicit in the Charles Victor figure).
22.’wasn’t a presence’ The indifference of a mother to her son’s schooling: Kate Roberts, Feet in Chains.
23.‘loud-mouthed rebel’ The great portrait: Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black. This type takes on social cachet in the 1950s, largely due to its media creation: Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959. The whole Angry Young Man thing was performative; and I suspect was taken far too seriously by some of those lower class recruits of the 1960s (think of early Dennis Potter).
24.‘late adolescent contempt’ For how precociousness can freeze an intellect, my Ugly Stuff Work, a review of Alasdair’s Gray’s Lanark.
25.‘on the attack’ For just how extreme this could get: Alan’s interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Marxism was used as a weapon to destroy the legitimacy of the older academics. Certainly the way to understand the Marxism of that period. No longer a serious study of society it was a machine-gun on the cultural battlefield of the bourgeoisie, where professional philistines mowed down innocent sophisticates.
26.‘great smasher-up’ Perhaps the best example amongst Alan’s interviewers of the past’s beneficent effects is Quentin Skinner. Surely no accident that he taught in a secondary school at a young age.
27.‘young conformists’ Listen to Timothy Hyman’s comments on art school: ESOP Artist Talk Timothy Hyman 2020.
28.‘intellectual arrogance’ Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet has some insightful chapters. For the reference to old farts and young turks see Stefan Collini: Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics or Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate.
29.‘Absurd’ It is why, for all its brilliance, Lindsay Anderson’s If is a silly film.
30.‘metaphysical ideals’ One advantage of paying respects to the past is that it forces us to confront a self which is in most respects fashioned by the present. To properly learn the past is to pull out a part of the ego.
31.‘we grow again’ Marvellously described in ESOP Artist Talk Timothy Hyman 2020.
32.‘late adolescent angst’ A major theme in 1950s fiction. See my Short Sprint, a review of John Wain’s Hurry on Down. During this decade a zone of freedom opened up between the end of university and the beginning of a middle class career; which could become a trap for those, without talent or purpose, who couldn’t give up this free existence. The rest of one's life now spent trying to live the late adolescent dream, as they slowly sink into loserdom. That’s Dave in Grace Notes.
The irony of individuality is revealed by Hobbes: all individuals are the same; thus the conformity. It is only through industry - what we call culture and civilisation - that we become interesting. Our true individuality - that which makes us different from everybody else - arises out of what we do; the more arcane the pursuit the more unique we are likely to become. Freedom doesn’t create individuals. Only the discipline of a craft can do that.
33. ‘creative intellect’ See Sudden Genius? for just how much nutrition a great mind needs.
34.‘Also for society’ David Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain Now.
35.‘at the time’ Not quite true. See Malcolm Bradbury’s masterpiece, The History Man.
36. ‘undomesticated radicalism’ See David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.
37. ‘in the West’ Though when looked at more closely, it tends to be against a previous generation. Thus much of today’s sex angst is against the sexual liberation of the 1960s.
38. ‘Never to grow up' This is not to condemn all radicals. The serious ones - Herzen, Chomsky, Fassbinder, Herzog - dedicate their life to their beliefs. However, for the majority of ‘radicals’ their ideas are merely decoration.
39.‘those men that take....’ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson, p.106.
40. ‘simply nonsense’ See Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. A demolition job on a book that though written in the 1970s could only have come out of the 1960s: Edward Said’s Orientalism.
41. ‘magic formulas’ It is why Stanislaw Andreski called his classic, Social Sciences as Sorcery.
42.‘swimming pool’ Very clear when we read Keiron Pim’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock n’ Roll Underground and Robert Irwin’s Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties. The counter-culture an affair within the ruling class.
43.‘beatnik scene’ A point strongly made in Memoirs of a Dervish. Although a terrible biography - woefully written by an author who doesn’t understand her subject - Cathy Curtis’s Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter, does describe the outsider life of 1950s America. Radicals from within. Bohemia a mode of being, not a lifestyle or fashion statement. For the longer history: Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. Of course, once the idea was disseminated Bohemian was turned into a lifestyle.
44.‘unjust to the times’ Watch Performance; read Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
45.‘the miraculous’ Frank Zappa’s We’re Only in it for the Money is the best study of the counter culture. See also the revelatory documentary: Frank Zappa.
46.‘obscene radicalism’ For the details and their ironies, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.
47. ‘video nasties’ Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art.
48. ‘a free pass’ Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
49.‘new feudal age’ A good book: David Marquand, The New Reckoning: Capitalism, States, and Citizens. A bad book: Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union.
50. ‘welcome change’ I could choose many examples. I’ll choose just one: Nikki R Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. The historical classic, which is both a warning against radical change and a meditation on its paradoxical benefits, is David Hume’s The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I (with an introduction by Duncan Forbes).
51.‘coerce others’ ‘For the greater and most active part of Mankind, has never hetherto been well contented with the present.’ Leviathan, p.394.
52.‘Here the author....’ Scarlet and Black, pp.384-5.
53. ‘To look steadily....’ Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-century British Painting, pp.86-87. He is writing about William Townsend.
54. ‘art is metamorphosis' Anna Kiff in conversation with Timothy Hyman RA.
55. ‘mind-drunk passions’ A nice little confrontation between artist and bureaucrat can be seen in Talk by Timothy Hyman followed by a conversation with Sudhir Patwardhan and Nancy Adajania. The curator, overly excited by Marxist dialectic, emphases change and dislocation. But very quietly the two artists disagree: this painting is about stability. Though Sudhir Patwardhan adds: I want to add just a little bit of disruption. This the difference between an artist - who works with the subtleties of feeling - and the academic whose material is but the crude concept.
56. ‘uselessness of art’ Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness.
57.‘Politics is constraint’ Leviathan is the great analysis. Hobbes describes it as the conflict between natural right - we as free individuals - and natural law: our need to live together in safety. His work suggests that to concentrate on liberty is to get politics wrong. Thus more the political realm is invaded by the discourse of freedom - that push for individual rights - the more politics contracts, until there is hardly any natural law at all: the regime no longer stable or safe.
58.‘ideological regime’ My (as yet unpublished) Cartoons and Their Concepts: A Novel Anthropology.
59. ‘intellectual abstractions’ Or what Timothy Hyman calls the ‘void’: pure abstraction. The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the 20th-Century. Also Christopher Middleton’s discussion of Mallarmé in Palavers & A Nocturnal Journey: he offered a pure, self- enclosed poetry, free of any reference to the world. My own feeling: these were responses to science and education; where the law, the generalisation, and the idea of the universal, became the benchmarks by which all serious intellectual activity was to be judged. Cartoons and Their Concepts.
60.‘Danger! Danger!’ Another example of artists supporting a religion against their own interests: those who supported the iconoclasts during the Reformation. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born Under Saturn.
61.‘complex meditations’ Cartoons and Their Concepts.
62.‘clerks and curators’ For some of the tensions in modern art, see my Train Them Good.
63. ‘The rebel age' The West has started to take on the model of the underdeveloped countries, like Russia in the 19th-century; when education became a self-conscious instrument of modernisation. The great account is Alexander Herzen’s memoirs (Childhood, Youth and Exile; Ends and Beginnings).
64. ‘preached happiness’ It is why Fiona MacCarthy stresses the libertarian side of William Morris’s Socialism. She rescues him from E.P. Thompson!
65.‘Pretty soon....’ From Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Funny Thing That Happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky in The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt.
66.‘A ramshackle man....’ Paul Schloss, Bolshy.
67. ‘stick Right’ Politics by Other Means. Peter Jenkins, in Mrs Thatcher Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era, writes, correctly, that most of the miners shared Margaret Thatcher’s moral vision. I know from my own family’s history that the extremism of the South Wales Miner’s union - most of the executive were Communist - did not represent the actual beliefs of even the union leaders themselves: the majority were pragmatists, who co-operated with British governments in the post-war closure of many mines.
68.‘a truth academics’ Even sensitive artists get the working-classes wrong. Think of William Morris preaching class war to Northumbrian miners.... They didn’t want Capitalism to end; they weren’t striking to manage the mines themselves; they were on strike because they wanted the mine owners to pay decent wages. Most people are concerned about practical niceties, and have little or no interest in abstract questions of political economy. Because Morris was an artist and honest, he came to recognise this. William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
69. ‘the pleb’ Although I suspect closer to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: the rich merchant educates his children into a higher social category; they imbibing its values, then rebel against the crude materialism of their parents. A nice case study, linking this conflict with the tension between traditionalism and modernity in post-independence India: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Nature of Passion.
70. ‘written by Martians’ I exaggerate? Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal: Intellectual Impostures.
71. ‘an abstract concept’ One way of looking at the Left turn in academia, and the importance of someone like Gramsci in the 1970s, is that it allowed these characters to maintain their beliefs with a good conscience. To believe they were still revolutionaries - by dissing Shakespeare - while contributing to their pension plan. Far better to have recognised their complicity, accepted their role as teachers of an elite. They were (are) fakes. Contrast the welter of false academic ‘radicals’ with the genuine article: Noam Chomsky. He makes a clear distinction between his scholarly and his political work; the latter getting him into trouble, particularly with other academics (when they don’t ignore him).
72. ‘conservative institutions’ For the conservative lifestyle: A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion: British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century. For the culture clash: The Memory Chalet. For just how much the French revolt was linked to lifestyle: Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord. For how Leftism became performance - ‘revolution’ as street theatre - Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.
73.‘energy for art’ Think of both the style and the content of The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits; a self-confessed member of the corporate caste (his phrase).
74. ‘Manzoni shouts’ The Betrothed.
75. ‘There was once....’ Iain Crichton Smith, Jimmy and the Policeman in The Red Door: The Complete English Stories 1949-76.
76.‘betters and superiors’ Anybody who has spent any time with a local authority will know just how obtuse and supercilious are those who manage them. For the complexities of living in a modern world where common sense is no match for corporate manipulation, see Avner Offer: The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950. For the creation of the victim: Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head. A history of the middle class professions is invaluable: Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. He argues that in the 1970s and 80s there was a conflict between the private and public professions, which the private won.
77.‘The Third Generation’ See my Extraordinary Games and Getting Down to Details.
78. ‘scot-free’ This quote is telling: ‘Many of the artists who interest me belong to the growing numbers consciously engaging with ethics and politics. This has been a strong, surprising dynamic among contemporaries since the Seventies at least, and it’s a paradox that the heightened, polemical expectations of artists ...seems to track the surging prices they can command in the contemporary art market.’ Marina Warner, Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art & Artists, p.10.
Also telling is Marina Warner's interpretation, with that resort to ‘paradox’ and ‘contradiction’ to explain the rich's love of ‘radical’ art. This a too generous - dare I say elite? - view. She compares these plutocrats to the medieval aristocrats who paid for indigent monks to pray for them. It is to believe that the wealthy expiate their sins by acquiring this material. No Marina, this art is just rhetoric, the ‘radicalism’ decorative. ‘Radical’ sells well because it produces the frisson of transgression plus the self- satisfaction of thinking you’re a nice person. It also allows a lot untalented hypocrites to make a lot of money. So much of today’s art world is fake. It has been taken over by philistines.
For an accurate view on the art scene, by an outsider (dare I say a true radical?): Timothy Hyman in conversation with Peter Darach.
79.‘’Tis however probable....’ The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, p.503.
80. ‘false consciousness’ Duncan Forbes, in the introduction, agrees.
81.‘do the trick’ For a fuller treatment: Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science; especially chapter 3, Hobbes's changing conception of civil science.
82. ‘the carnage’ The great modern interpretation is Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War. Though using a different set of causal factors, Russell, like Hume, concentrates on the event.
83. ‘out of Westminster’ The rise of the Cambridge School of history. See Quentin Skinner’s interview with Alan: he was reacting to the Marxism of the time.
84.‘Yet Charles’ The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, p.365.
85.‘level of sophistication’ Worse, James I increased the number of intellectuals in public life: ‘James I was arguably the only learned king ever to sit on England’s throne, apart from Alfred, and it was natural that learned clerics were preferred by him. For Lust of Knowing, p.90. Is this the cause of the English Civil War: too many ‘learned clerics’?
86.‘corrupted and abused’ Hobbes's key criticism.
87.‘not of wise distinctions’ Cartoons and Their Concepts.
88.‘abstraction rocketed’ A classic treatment: J.G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought.
89.‘simple moral assertions' Contrast a standard work of history - Jonathan Schneer: The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - with Mark Curtis's, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with RADICAL ISLAM. Those capital letters tell their own story. Schneer offers context and complexity; Curtis a crude debunking of the pop culture of the TV and newspapers. What he writes isn’t wrong; just narrow and limited (though at what point does the narrowness, in distorting the context, turn false?). A moral tract not a history book.
90.‘Canals' An argument of Cartoons and Their Concepts: university education, rather than making the public realm more wise, might be reducing it to stupidity.
91. ‘Communist Manifesto’ Contrast the treatment of most Marxists in the 1960s and since with that meted out to William Morris: he was in danger of being a social outcast. William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
92.‘twisted out of shape' Chomsky, such an acute critic of the Left, has noted the similarities between the Bolshevik Party and the bureaucratic corporation.
93.‘Marx’s mates are the rich' Christianity suffered the same fate when taken over by the ruling elite. The great study: Peter Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.
94.‘Profs its commissars' A revealing book is Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time. It is those who belong to the educational establishment who are most likely to absorb the regime’s values.
95. ‘Sheldon Pollock' ‘Why...should central apparatuses of empire so hospitably embrace those who seek to contest it, and why is it that the empire should all the while be so thoroughly unconcerned? It may be a tired and tiresome issue (a reprise of the 1960s hit “Repressive Desublimation”), but late capitalism’s blithe insouciance towards its unmaskers, its apparently successful domestication of anti-imperialist scholarship and its commodification of oppositional theory are hard to ignore and certainly give pause to those who seriously envision some role for critique in the project of progressive change.’ For Lust of Knowing, p.301.
96.‘Oxbridge class’ The great study is Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black. For an example of the unsophisticated intellectual: John Wallen in Martin Duberman's Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community.
97.‘existential choice’ Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black.
98. ‘Repair the rent’ A Sorel-style character willingly embraces the separation (though finding it almost impossible to control those ‘lower class’ emotions). For the contrast between a believer and a careerist, see that fabulous scene in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, where a local priest is confronted by the Cardinal, a man for whom there is no divide between thought and belief; he lives out his ideas.
A curious work is Black Mountain, whose central theme is a meditation on this split between profession and individual. Black Mountain College an early outlier of what was to become a feature of 1960s campuses: the attempt to fuse institution with being. In essence, the attempt was to turn impersonal institutions into cults. Although Duberman recognises this project failed with Black Mountain College, nevertheless he still believes this attempt at merge is both possible and desirable. It shows the kind of blindness - today perhaps it would be called narcissism - that affects so many of these collectivist junkies, who downplay, even overlook, the coerciveness of such communities, where the charismatic and the crowd dominate.
This turn from academia to therapeutic regime, tells us that something odd happened in the 1960s. It suggests that a large number of people entered university who were not natural scholars, thus unable to lose themselves to the scholarly material, to a craft. Gerald Graff offers an explanation in Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Many of the students weren’t as bookish as before, due to the rise of alternative cultural attractions, such as music, film, TV.
We can’t blame TV for everything! Black Mountain College begins in the 1930s as a serious attempt at creating a community. Although created by a secular charismatic, its roots are surely in older style American universities; those Christian seminaries, not our profit-driven research institution. That original fusion of religion and learning, in what must have been akin to a religious community, may account for the university communes of the 1960s, as therapy becomes the theology of the New Age. Since then it has gone through the organisational machine, to leave us with the universities of today; part training centre, part social services, part political education camp; with scholarship shoved off into an annex.
99.‘Paul Gauguin’ See Georges Boudaille, Gauguin. Typically, a later Thames & Hudson monograph, written by a more academically inclined writer, plays down his decision and its anguish. Belinda Thomson concentrates on how Gauguin presented himself. Text replaces life.
100. ‘more cataclysmic’ Timothy Hyman talks about the difficult twenties, as we deal with the after-effects of the university: each year at the Slade takes three to recover! The problem of those who must create for themselves, find their own voice. ESOP Artist Talk Timothy Hyman 2020.
101.‘smart provincial boys’ An earlier generation, faced with the same problem, studied Arabic: For Lust of Knowing.
102.‘participant observation’ See Keith’s own website for a critique of academia (down at time of writing).
103.‘a separate room’ Far less so with artists. A nice example: Anna Kiff in conversation with Timothy Hyman RA.
104. ‘the best scholars do feed’ Alan is too modest to say so, but he is a wonderful example of this.
105. ‘hard to fragment’ It has become de rigueur to attack Cartesian dualism - though few seem to have actually read much (or any) Descartes. However, most academics embody, through their education and intellectual training, just the kind of mind-body split they think to attack. An odd thing about ideas: often they serve to obscure the reality of the self not elucidate it.
106.‘Marlon Brando’ David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
107. ‘cacophony of success’ Brilliantly described in The Betrothed. The Unnameable - a big bandit - who late in life cannot reconcile his evil actions with his conscience.
108.‘the prestige’ How much of the West’s success is built on this drive to forget one’s own past through the accumulation of present wealth and honours? Our material riches founded on psychic pain.
109.‘Wrong that god....’ From The Farewell, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems & Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger. For the background to this sentiment: M.S. Silk & & J.P. Stern: Nietzsche on Tragedy.
110.‘ideas are physical things’ Perhaps why Ken Kiff photocopied his letters - he seems to have kept everything. For an artist just about all they do is part of the self. Anna Kiff in conversation with Timothy Hyman RA. Tellingly, perhaps, the moderator finds the artist’s behaviour odd.
111.‘By this it appears....’ Leviathan, p.115.
112.‘scholarship boys’ Think of the school inspector in Alun Richard’s, Home to an Empty House.
113. ‘comfortably clever’ Which can create terrible resentment, which I suspect fuels the ‘social critique’. A classic case is Julien Sorel.
114.‘Cinema is thirty years....’ Quoted in Timothy Hyman, The World New Made, p.23.
115.‘intensifying his relish....’ The World New Made, p.41
116.‘Chagall was already....’ The World New Made, p.40 Also his wonderful lecture on Chagall’s engravings for Gogol’s Dead Souls: Towards the Chagall of Dead Souls.
117. ‘frazzles it’ These problems are wonderfully elucidated by Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination.
118.‘idées reçues’ The success of Cambridge is that it has found a way of coping with such characters; its secret the college system, which fragments authority, keeping the bureaucrats in check.
119.‘lose our equanimity’ For interesting insights: Jon Bird and Timothy Hyman in conversation about the art of Leon Golub.
120.‘The thing that one....’ Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal, p.22.
121.‘academic life’ In a recent interview Richard Sennett - one of the sociological greats - says he hates academia: SIAH: Public Life with Richard Sennett.
122.‘Manchester Grammar’ The English teacher influence is common to Alan’s interlocutors.
123. ‘emotional stream’ A distinctive feature of Oxford and Cambridge is just how many such characters they once could contain, from the eccentrics written about by Noel Annan - The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses - to the post-war generation of innovators and oddities mentioned in Alan’s interviews. The American university, with its roots deep in puritan Christianity, appears less open to such personalities (is the American stress on professionalism just another form of puritanism in disguise?).
For just how repressive the American university can be: Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, for when they used to repress socialists; John M. Ellis The Breakdown of Higher Education, which describes today's cancel culture.
124. ‘evanescent moment' In an interview with Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Williams says of Maurice Bowra that he had the kind of humour that was wholly of the moment, and depended on the interaction of two or more people. (Webpage currently down.)
125.‘performing artiste' For the tension between these two kinds of thinking (perhaps being is a better description): Alan’s own Pathways to Creativity.
126.‘students enraptured’ Keith is typically downbeat about the latter: I didn’t have the concentration to do serious research so I thought I’d teach the students.
127. ‘a performer’ See also the references to Keith in Chris Hann’s interview with Alan.
128. ‘analytical intelligence’ One of the best descriptions of the artist’s intellect: Robert Wyatt. He describes making music as being like an animal snuffing around, scrambling about, for notes. Robert Wyatt on Rock Bottom (six parts).
129.‘best crops grow’ A parallel is with Max Weber. For the benefits of his breakdown: Donald G. MacRae: Weber.
130. My Milton Keynes.
131.‘praise the collective’ Yet don't seem to realise how coercive it can be.
132.‘The observers....’ Why the middle classes so sociable? Education. It is because society is, as Hobbes says, a creation of reason and of instruction. The more educated you are - up to a point and then it goes into reverse - the more sociable you are likely to be.
133.‘The observers....’ All the above quotes, Leviathan, pp.209-210.
134.‘consumes him' There is a brilliant description of Goethe in Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal.
135.‘natural passivity’ Think of David Hume’s wry remarks on the puritans’s sermons in The History of Great Britain: James I and Charles I.
136.‘Hard times ahead’ For interesting discussion on the problems: Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal; in particular the emphasis on performance. But beware: I believe Middleton is referring to a different kind of performance - one more self-conscious and controlled - than Keith’s; the showman as opposed to the actor.
137.‘purpose in life’ Think of that obsessional search for influence: the originality of the artist lost amongst a library of reference.
138. ‘The Giants...’ William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Selected Poems, edited by G.E. Bentley, Jr.
139. ‘managerial university' The Fall of the Faculty.
140.‘disguised metaphysics’ Perry Anderson New Old World for a description of the Kantian influence.
141.‘Categorical Imperative’ A most devastating attack on Kantian ethics: Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest. See my Fictions Kill; and One Smile was Enough, It was an Earthquake.
142.‘embrace mythology’ The Last Pre-Raphaelite. Also the brilliant pages on Max Beckmann, in The World New Made.
143.‘Sense and Memory’ A good example of just such academic mythology is C.B. Macpherson’s introduction to Leviathan. His fantasy? A self-conscious and cohesive bourgeois class. He knew even less about English history than Marx. Once the ideological wave subsided, we find the actual picture is almost the reverse of the Marxist fairy tale: John Morrill: Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction. Yet, it was Macpherson's introduction that graced the popular (the Pelican) edition; it might have been the only part of the book most students read.
144.‘camouflage one’s interests’ An example is Eric Bentley riling the older members of staff at Black Mountain College. The resultant dispute was framed in political and pedagogical terms; yet this is clearly a clash of personalities, ages and cultures. Black Mountain.
145. ‘made Weber ill' See my Feel the Thought, a highly critical review of Joachim Radkau’s Max Weber.
146.‘suffer on campus’ Unless there are safety-valves: Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal. 147. ‘The first thing she wrote....’ Grace Notes, pp.100-101.
148.‘all push prof’ There are extraordinary passages in Scarlet and Black. 149.‘mountain fastnesses’ For a different way of putting it: The World New Made.
150. ‘surefire means' The Meritocracy Trap.
151.‘defeated the artist' The repression of bureaucracy is replacing that of religion; which is what we should expect, when function becomes more important than meaning (the essence of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution). For a time the old Christianity held sway, and with the growth of modern capitalism, the sacredness of the human was transferred to the worker, as embodied in Socialism. But this idea is dying, as the process of an institution trumps the individual being.
152. ‘freest of places’ One could argue that universities are naturally intolerant places, and that the freedom of the mid to late 20th-century was an anomaly.
153.‘like-minded souls’ See John Gray’s elegy: Talking to Thinkers with Johnny Lyons.
154.‘madness calls’ A way of looking at the 1960s, its obsession with madness, the popularity of anti-psychiatry, is to see these times as a last stand of resistance before the institution invaded all areas of our lives.
155.‘colonised the chancel' For just how religious and conservative was English Socialism: William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
156.‘For seeing all formed....’ Leviathan, p.179.
157. ‘The ancient Poets....’ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
158.‘DIY’ It is what Richard Sennett recommends, after expressing his disillusionment with academia: SIAH: Public Life with Richard Sennett.
159. ‘Hume.... ‘Duncan Forbes, introduction to The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of Charles I and James I, p.27.
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