I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.
Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.
*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse
** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?
So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.
On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.
Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.
*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away
It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.
Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?
Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.
So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)
But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.
Happy New Year! I’ve written before about the way that new decades seem to bring their own distinct identities with them (probably too often; here was I think the most recent time) and as we ascend/descend/just go into 2021 an auspicious anniversary approaches; 30 years since the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s classic novel American Psycho, a book which seemed to set the seal on certain aspects of the 1980s, preserving them in a concentrated form for future… hmm, enjoyment seems the wrong word (but it’s not).
Moral panics (“an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society” is how the internet defines the term) don’t occur very often, though something tells me that in the next few years they may be one of the few areas of growth in the UK, and moral panics about books are even more rare. But American Psycho caused one, and until it was to some extent defused by Mary Harron’s excellent (though necessarily less graphic) 2000 film adaptation* the novel remained (appropriately I guess) a kind of bogeyman, in some countries (still?) only being displayed in shrinkwrap lest an unwary child catch a glimpse of the dangerous words it contains.
*the film managed to avoid great controversy partly I think because it confirmed what many of the book’s defenders had always maintained; that it was (among other things) a satirical black comedy
At the heart of any moral panic there is generally one catalyst, but it usually overlays a more or less complex set of issues. These tend to be fundamental things like; should there be limits to free speech? Should human beings have control over their own bodies whatever the consequences to their health? How much control should parents exercise over their children? Is it important to be able to clearly define individuals within specific traditional pigeonholes and if so, why? Interestingly though, the point of the panic (generally sparked by a newspaper, politician or an interested pressure group) is usually, perhaps always to avoid the discussion of these issues, and instead to simply wish whatever it is – ‘video nasties’, drugs, loud music, raves, books, certain kinds of people – out of existence entirely. The unstated aim is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy; films that aren’t explicit, children that are ‘seen and not heard’, Christian ideas of morality). And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.
Literature and cinema have a special place in the moral panic spectrum, because, unlike, say drugs, prostitution, hoodies or (more ridiculously) ‘happy slapping,’ those defending them (to be fair I don’t think anyone really defended happy slapping) almost always have to use, or at least generally do use, arguments that are unrelated to the charges the accusers make. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is probably the most famously banned book in Britain, but when it was finally un-banned it was because of arguments about the quality of the book. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is indeed an important book, written by an important writer, it is ‘literature’. But, typically, the people who wanted it banned didn’t care about that, didn’t even necessarily dispute it, or disapprove of the acts that were considered so outrageous when described in print. After all, even most Festival of Light type people don’t believe that no-one should ever have sex. Mostly, what they cared about was the actual words used in the book; and, strangely, the words that were considered most offensive in the 1920s (when it was written) and the 1960s (when it was printed legally) are mostly still the same ones that are considered offensive – which is handy for the arbiters of public morality. If your tactic is simply to be outraged, you can count the number of bad words in Lady Chatterley, just as, 30-odd years after that was printed in an unexpurgated edition, critics could count the swearwords in a novel by James Kelman or Irvine Welsh, preventing them from having to address whatever uncomfortable things the books might actually be saying.*
* although swearwords are routinely still censored in print in newspapers (f**k and whatnot), the irony is that this kind of censoring only works for people who already know the words. If you know a word and are offended or horrified by it, but read it with some letters missing, does it become less offensive? Recently I’ve noticed people self-censoring non-swearwords that (I presume) might cause discomfort, such as writing ‘r*pe’, rather than ‘rape’. But a) does the use of the word ‘rape’ itself cause trauma? and b) if it does, does reading it in context as ‘r*pe’ cause less trauma? Because although it’s possible that the word I am assuming is ‘rape’ might be be warning me about ‘rope’ or ‘ripe’ – but rape is the only word that makes logical sense. And seeing that the sentence will only make sense if you understand that “r*pe” is “rape,” is the letter ‘a’ really the problem there? Are the letters “uc” the problem with the word “f**k”? This seems different to me from something like self-censoring a word associated with, say, racial abuse, where the censoree is avoiding an offensive term while also showing that they recognise its offensiveness and are distancing themselves from its casual use. But I am no authority!
What was often lost in the furore surrounding American Psycho is that Ellis’s first two novels, Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) had also been controversial; it’s just that they were controversial in a way that was more comfortable for literary critics and especially for publishers. After all, you don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being young (Ellis was 20 years old when Less Than Zero was published), or in some way terrible. With Less Than Zero, it was as much the described world itself – decadent, affluent, mid-80s consumerist LA with its drugs and excess and callousness – as the behaviour of the protagonists which shocked reviewers. And (which is also true of his second novel The Rules Of Attraction but definitely not American Psycho) the positive reviews selected for quotation for the book’s cover were largely admiring of that excess, in the classic, coolly jaded ‘yes-it’s-all-very-shocking-if-you’re-old-and-shockable’ vein:
This is the novel your mother warned you about. Jim Morrison would be proud (Eve Babitz)
Bret Easton Ellis is undoubtedly the new master of youthful alienation … makes Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation seem like pussies (Emily Prager).
For whatever reason, nobody said that American Psycho made Charles Bukowski or Norman Mailer or even Stephen King seem like “pussies,” even though, in the sense that Prager means it, it certainly does. With The Rules Of Attraction, set in more or less the same social milieu as Less Than Zero, only on a New England College campus, the controversy was again more moral than literary; promiscuous sex! Drugs! These young people are amoral, unpleasant and cynical, why would anybody want to read, let alone write about them? But again, this is the kind of controversy that critics and especially publishers are comfortable with; low level outrage that is shocking enough to attract new readers but not shocking enough to require justification for publishing. This time, the approving review used by the publisher (at least of the UK Picador edition I have) is less gloating and perhaps slightly more defensive – yes he’s young and outrageous but please note that he’s a good writer too – appealing frankly (and I think accurately) to the literary precedent for books like Ellis’s:
Compelling … and sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his (nameless Vanity Fair reviewer).
Interestingly, although Simon & Schuster in the USA sparked and fuelled the controversy of American Psycho by declining to publish it, Ellis’s UK publisher Picador didn’t follow suit, and the blurb and reviews chosen for the first UK paperback edition are instructional; they knew exactly what they had on their hands tabloid-wise, and it’s interesting to look at what the publisher says they are selling:
a bleak, bitter and aversive novel about a world we all recognise but do not wish to face, but also an explosive novel which brilliantly exposes American culture today and finally a black comedy, a disturbing portrait of a madman [strangely archaic phrase that], a subtle send-up of the blatant behaviour of the ‘80s – and a grotesque nightmare of murder and insanity.
It may be all of these things, but the word that, having just re-read the novel, feels at first oddly out of place there is ‘subtle’. American Psycho does not feel subtle. It’s a maximalist (is that a thing?) novel, roughly twice the length of the author’s first two, and perhaps half of that length is made up, in effect, of lists; what – in detail – every major and minor character is wearing when Patrick Bateman (the psycho of the title) encounters them, what kind of hygiene or beauty products characters are using, what food is being eaten and where, detailed analyses of the careers of the narrator’s favourite musical artists.* As mentioned before, until the film adaptation of American Psycho was released, the blackly comic aspect of the book – although explicitly mentioned in the blurb – was mostly overlooked (or outright denied), but one of the things that makes the nasty parts of the book so effective (and they are still bracingly explicit and intense 30 years on) is that they don’t happen until half way through the novel, at which point – if not for the title – the book is to all intents and purposes an immersive dip into the more absurd aspects of New York/Wall Street consumer yuppie culture.
* interestingly and humorously, outside of those few psycho-approved artists (Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins) and current 80s hits (Madonna, INXS), every musical reference Bateman makes – to what is playing on the radio, or in a cab – he gets the artist wrong; when asked towards the end of the novel for the saddest song he knows he names You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Beatles (sic)
What Ellis does – and significantly, it’s what made Less Than Zero such a formidable debut – is to adopt a strangely blank and hypnotic voice (a bit like the famously ‘glazed’ tone used by JG Ballard – about whom more later – in his classic Atrocity Exhibition/High Rise/Crash period), which somehow (I guess this is the subtle part) ends up being the opposite of cold or uninvolving. In The Rules Of Attraction, one of the novel’s protagonists, Sean Bateman (as it turns out, the brother of American Psycho’s Patrick), is a generally unpleasant, amoral, cynical opportunistic drug dealer, but the reader realises (though Sean himself seems not to) that this attitude is at least in part a defence mechanism to protect the more sensitive and romantic aspects of his nature that he would rather not acknowledge. In American Psycho, the reader has direct access to Patrick Bateman’s thoughts and feelings; not just what he really thinks and feels, but also, in some of the book’s stranger moments, what he seems to think he should think and feel. There’s a very odd page-and-a-half long monologue where Bateman lectures a group of friends and acquaintances on a kind of socially responsible, enlightened conservatism that is comically at odds with the reactionary nihilism we usually read in his thoughts:
Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger… Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education… (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.15)
It’s never entirely clear if this is Bateman being funny – he does have a sense of humour, but usually he tells us if he’s making a joke (his jokes are however – importantly – not the funny parts of the novel). Or if it’s his way of making his friends uncomfortable while trying to impress people who aren’t from his social circle, in this case a bohemian couple, which seems quite likely. Or if it’s just anomalous parts of his submerged and fragmenting personality coming through; throughout the book there are moments when we realise that this is, more or less, how he’s perceived by the other characters; the ‘boy next door’, an unusually sensitive and perhaps even shy member of their set, which reaches a comic climax when he leaves a confession of his hideous crimes on the voicemail of another of his interchangeable set of yuppie acquaintances. It’s treated as a not-very-successful joke by the recipient, who like everyone in the book, has trouble differentiating between the people he knows and thinks that Patrick is someone else:
‘come on man, you had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t fully appreciate it…. He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone… Oh yes, ‘chop her up’’ (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.387)
The fact that Bateman is on the surface a normal member of his peer group, and by their standards even a fairly laudable example of the 80s yuppie is of course one of the things that made the book uncomfortable in 1991. A couple of years before American Psycho was published I had read and enjoyed Slob (1987) by Rex Miller. It’s a novel about a grotesque (and unlike Patrick Bateman) grotesque-looking, remorseless, obese sadistic outsider maniac who, having previously been utilised, hopefully improbably, by the government as an assassin in the Vietnam war, returns home and continues his ‘work’. It’s more or less relentless graphic violence and sex (in that order), not really a searing indictment of anything, (although obviously not pro-serial killer either) but as far as I know the publisher had no qualms about publishing it and, far from feeling the need to defend it in the blurb or quotes, took pride in its extremeness; Slob is almost too crudely terrifying to be read… (said Stephen King, quoted on the front cover) But it is too compelling to be put down.
Well yes; Slob is genre fiction after all, and therefore weirdly immune – on an individual level at least* – to the vagaries of the moral panic. It’s a fact that questions like ‘would American Psycho be published today?’ still pop up in newspapers from time to time, while the excesses of gory 80s horror are, if they are still in print, (rightly) still there in bookshops to be read by anyone who wants to do so. And some of those books really are mindlessly violent or repellently misogynistic, without the publisher feeling any particular need to defend them. No shrinkwrap is required, no literary reviewer was disappointed to find that their faith in a promising young writer had been repaid by Slob and nobody (or at least nobody powerful or influential) made to feel uncomfortable by the things it was saying about the country. If it had been written by, say, Jay McInerney and called American Slob perhaps there would have been some concern about teenagers buying it and circulating it among their friends; possibly it would also have sold more copies (though I think it did pretty well); because of course the ultimate irony of any moral panic is that it creates an interest in and appetite for what it condemns. Notoriety is good publicity.
*while it’s rare – though not unheard of – for a single genre book or film to be targeted by a moral panic there is always the chance that the ‘powers that want to be’ will try to remove a whole genre or sub-genre at once as with the UK’s notorious ‘video nasties’ furore. In a way the horror genre is always stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating, positive/negative loop – horror can ‘get away with’ pretty much any kind of extreme and transgressive material it wants to, because that is part of its raison d’etre. On the other hand, it’s very hard for that transgression to have much of a wider impact beyond the horror genre because it’s ‘just’ horror.
The reviews used by Picador on the back cover of American Psycho are as interesting at its blurb. Retraité terrible* Norman Mailer is quoted;
He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much anymore.
Clearly, Mailer had not been ‘forced to look at’ Slob. Or anything by Skipp and Spector, or Clive Barker, or Shaun Hutson (whose Spawn made me feel physically sick on first reading, which American Psycho, presumably because of the influence of Spawn, and lots of other books like Spawn, did not. More about that kind of thing here). That ‘forced’ is fun too; forced how? Because he was paid to review it?
* Vieil homme terrible? if I could speak any French at all I could have made this joke more confidently; in English I’d say something like ‘OAP terrible Norman Mailer’. Which is as good a point as any to mention a particular paternalistic and I think class-based kind of censorship that used to exist in the UK. Several times I’ve come across older books (most recently a book about the historical figure Erzsébet Báthory (the real Hungarian ‘Countess Dracula’) by Valentine Penrose, the wife of surrealist Roland Penrose, that was written in French and translated into English by the wayward Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Translated apart, that is, from any especially salacious parts, which were left in French, presumably so that only well educated British people could be traumatised by them.
(American Psycho is) a very disturbing book, quoth Joe McGinnis, but the author is writing from the deepest, purest motives. Which may be true, but is it relevant? Pan books did not feel the need to reassure readers about Rex Miller’s motives. In fact, Picador, when selling Less Than Zero, chose quotes which actively encouraged the idea that Ellis’s motive with that book was to shock people. But surely if shocking readers is a valid motive (it is) then American Psycho was far more successful even than Less Than Zero? If Bret Easton Ellis’s motives had been to provide the reader with some kind of complicated entertainment, to amuse and entertain and make them think, or if he wanted to lecture them on morality or to disgust and repel them, or even if, as his detractors said, he just got off on writing about violence, sex and Phil Collins, does that change the book itself? These are questions, I’m not sure about the answers.
Although the book contains horrifying scenes, said Nora Rawlinson, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.
This seems fair enough, but it also contains some odd statements; that ‘but neither’ is strange, isn’t it? Being neither ‘pleasure reading’ (whatever that means) nor pornography suggests firstly, that pornography isn’t pleasure reading; maybe not, but what is it then? People seemed to be reading the Fifty Shades… books for some kind of pleasure, which is, believe it or not, not a judgement of the books. And secondly, it suggests that a novel can be read for something other than pleasure – which it obviously can, but a novel, even a polemical novel (and American Psycho isn’t that) still isn’t a lecture. JG Ballard – him again – was less squeamish about what his books were or weren’t, and wrote, for a 1995 edition of his most controversial novel Crash;
I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. (Crash, Vintage books, 1995, p.6).
This – although he later slightly recanted and said that Crash was purely a ‘psychopathic hymn with a point’ – seems to me a more valuable observation than any of those printed on the back cover of my edition of American Psycho. (Interesting but value-free information; Vintage, the publisher of that edition of Crash, was also the publisher that picked up American Psycho in the US after Simon & Schuster refused to print it. And James Spader, who plays a slimy drug dealer in the movie version of Less Than Zero is also in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Connections! But what of them?)
There is more than one way of dealing with a controversial novel; and the fact that Picador was squeamish or at least cautious about the book they were publishing comes through clearly in that careful choice of quotes from positive, but very sober reviews. That several of those quotes are from women is also probably no coincidence; the book was attacked (most visibly by Gloria Steinem) as being misogynistic. And indeed it is, insofar as the narrator and his milieu, and the 1980s, and consumerist capitalist culture are and were. But the book is called American Psycho; not What Bret Easton Ellis Thinks About Women and it seems surprising that, coming just as Gordon Gekko and his ilk seemed like historical figures and the 90s had established its own distinct identity, a very personal satire of the 1980s, written by an author whose earlier work was both a thoughtful product of and also an embodiment of that era (and also not misogynistic), should be taken at something less than face value. Too soon, and too extreme perhaps? But if it had come later it would suggest an absolving clarity that can only come with hindsight, and if it had been less extreme an absolving kind of a shrug; but it is what it is because the 80s were what they were; a kind of wild, extravagant, decadent but above all exclusive party; exhilarating, on the surface, for a while; if you were invited and could afford to attend. In a way, Picador missed a trick; given the book’s pre-publication notoriety, they might have been better to quote from both positive and negative reviews, as Abacus did with Iain Banks’s 1984 debut The Wasp Factory. In both editions that I have owned (a mid 80s paperback and a 2005 reprint), the book has several pages dedicated to reviews which say things like Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish (The Times). Of course, these kinds of reviews are really a selling point, just as, in the 90s, an author being sneered at by Tom Paulin and Allison Pearson on The Late Show was usually a promising sign.
But if, as the positive reviews said, American Psycho isn’t to be read for pleasure then what is it to be read for? Education? Certainly it has – especially over time – gained a kind of educational value as a time capsule or artefact of some aspects of – and the texture of – 80s American culture. But is that what it is for? Or should it be seen as – which Rawlinson’s quote seems to be suggesting – a kind of literary analogue to a something like Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, where the director is saying ‘so you like to watch horror films? You like violence and torture do you? Well here you go. Not very nice is it?’ But that isn’t how American Psycho feels exactly, despite being published at the height of the early 90s serial killer boom (there’s a phrase), a time when Jonathan Demme’s straightforward and well made horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs was somehow elevated to Oscar-worthy, cultural event status; clearly something, like the stench emanating from Dennis Nilsen’s drains, was in the air.
If JG Ballard’s aforementioned 1973 novel Crash was, as Ballard sometimes stated, cautionary as well as pornographic; a novel to be read for (peculiar sexual) pleasure, but also a vision of the future concerning how humanity might be shaped by the very environment it had built to suit its needs and whims; a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape is how he put it in that introduction (Crash, Vintage Books, 1995, p.6), then in American Psycho, it was already too late for caution. This is a historical novel; this, says Ellis, or at least says Patrick Bateman, is what we became in the 80s. In the chapter End of the 1980s, Patrick himself gives us an extremely Ballardian kind of collage:
The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns(…) A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death… Football games flash by, the sound turned off… All summer long Madonna cries out to us “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone…” (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.371)
This is still recognisably the author of Less Than Zero, but where Ellis seemed before to coolly comment on the state of the society he was talking about, here he is immersed in it. As before, the author shows us a group of people who are numb, alienated from the world and from each other, possibly looking for some kind of connection with humanity while also (inadvertently? deliberately?) distancing themselves from the possibility of it. But while outwardly, Bateman prides himself on just this kind of cool detachment, from our position inside his head we can see that however unreliable he is as a narrator (it’s never clear what really does or doesn’t happen, partly because, like everyone else in the book, he can’t really tell one person from another, outside of his closest friends), he is anything but emotionless, but instead a mass of obsessive, raw neuroses, circling endlessly around status, wealth, sex and (increasingly) age; turning 30 is something that would probably fill him with nameless dread, as many things do. Whether or not he really murders anyone (a source of frequent debate, though the publisher’s blurb takes for granted that he does), the title still stands. And it’s an important title too; after all, Robert Bloch’s Psycho was also American, but only because Robert Bloch was. American Psycho is deliberately specific.
I’ve mentioned JG Ballard’s Crash a few times, because for all its differences, it met with a similar response to American Psycho (not least from Ballard’s publisher – had Ballard been a mainstream and not genre author, it would have been an ideal contender for moral panic status. Something similar happened with the movie, where the fact that it was made by director David Cronenberg, maker of legendarily peculiar horror films, to some extent defused the more controversial aspects of the film although the Daily Mail etc tried, bless them). Like American Psycho, Crash‘s mixture of extreme violence and sex remains potent and shocking decades after its original publication. Like American Psycho too, it’s often a funny book, although the humour was not really translated to Cronenberg’s good but oddly restrained film version. Partly the film is less comical because toning down the mayhem (a film that really looked like the book reads would have been banned everywhere in the world) makes it less funny*, but also because robbing the story of its very specific object of obsessive desire, Elizabeth Taylor (presumably because she was still alive at the time; the stuff about Jayne Mansfield is still in the film) makes it less absurdly funny. The film version of American Psycho is still humorous (especially regarding the swapping of business cards), but the novel’s funniest scene, which is also one of its most strangely moving, is not included for – I presume – similarly practical reasons.
*see also Paul Verhoeven’s classic RoboCop, where the cuts administered by the BBFC to some of the more ludicrously violent scenes made what was brutal and blackly funny into something that was just brutal; do these people not want extreme violence to be funny??
Throughout American Psycho, we see Bateman revelling in, and/or boasting about his alienation from the human race, his merciless coldness and basic inhumanity etc etc, but there are several scenes where, against his will, he is forced into some kind of intimacy with another character. Usually it’s Luis Carruthers, a friendly acquaintance who mistakenly believes that Bateman is in love with him and unfortunately reciprocates, or Jean, his secretary who Bateman assumes is in love with him, but whose feelings, we learn, are more complex than Patrick realises. But strangely we see Patrick at his most naked and human and afraid at a U2 concert where, to his alarm, he shares a rare and intense moment of connection with Bono, of all people; the horror. This is not the kind of relationship that Bateman has with the artists he really likes. There is though, an almost equally funny moment in the late chapter Huey Lewis and the News (the last of Patrick’s disarmingly straightforward, cheerful and perceptive rundowns of his favourite artists’ careers) when his veneer of normality starts to crack – as well it might – and he says The album [Small World, 1988] ends with “Slammin’,” which has no words and it’s just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick.
What I have perhaps not stressed enough here is the general sincerity of the book. Some critics felt that Ellis was being sneeringly cold and cynical about the people and lifestyle he portrays, but (to me at least) it doesn’t feel that way, especially compared to his first two novels. Obviously American Psycho isn’t, thankfully, autobiographical in a narrow sense, but Bret Easton Ellis was still – more than ever – concerned with the fate of his ‘lost generation.’ These were successful young American people for whom a whole culture had been built to fulfil their every whim and enrich – albeit at a price – every element of their lives, but which instead seemed only to emphasise its own emptiness. You might think that it’s hard to feel sorry for people who have (in material terms) everything, and you might be right; but these are his people. That the worship of visible success makes anything that isn’t visible success look like abject failure seems like a glib kind of lesson, but it’s only one element of a richly textured, (sometimes literally) tortured and yet funny and readable book. Thirty years on, what’s funnier (in more than one sense) now than it was in 1991 is Patrick Bateman’s Donald Trump obsession – also less of a feature in the film – which, from the perspective of 2021 seems quite surreal but also strangely fitting. American Psycho is, after all, largely Patrick Bateman telling us, based on his experience, how the world works, and sometimes he’s right.
The news that one of your favourite novels is being made into a film or TV show is never straightforwardly pleasurable; yes, there’s an excitement about seeing scenes from the page (and from your own imaginings of them) on screen, but there’s a certain amount of apprehension too. Nobody will look right (at first anyway), they may not sound right, and if you don’t like them you may be stuck with them whenever you re-read the book (especially if you didn’t have a particularly clear image of them in your mind in the first place or if, like me the image you do have often bears strangely little relation to the writer’s actual descriptions). Then there’s the tone and authorial voice/point of view, the inner life of the characters… It’s actually surprising there are any good adaptations of books. But there are many, the best of which (to me at least) are those that capture the essence of the book without necessarily being ‘faithful adaptations’ (Catch-22, Ghost World) or which use the book as a launchpad for the filmmakers’ own ideas (Blade Runner, Jaws). Most adaptations are of course neither of these. Which brings us to the BBC’s ‘not bad’ version of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.
It’s first of all a strange book to have chosen; a black comedy whose fans – as with fans of JG Ballard’s Crash, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – know in advance to expect an approximate, rather than precise rendering of. Decline and Fall is not an extreme book in the graphic sense that those three are, but, like at least two of them, its humour is grounded in its unremitting unpleasantness and in the end it’s a bleak, essentially misanthropic, nihilistic kind of comedy, tellingly completed before Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. For a variety of reasons, though, ‘bleak’ isn’t how the TV version feels.
But before moving on to the show, it’s worth looking at why the book is the way it is. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s an exaggerated reflection of certain aspects of its creator’s personality and an expression of his sense of humour. Even post-conversion, when there is a modicum of compassion for some of the characters in his work, Waugh’s books – with the exception of Brideshead Revisited – are mostly funny but extremely mean-spirited black comedies full of caricatures and snobbishness made extremely funny by his writing style, and in his first few novels that’s pretty much all there is. The surprising depth of feeling in even these books comes from the fact that Waugh allows that his characters – even a relative cipher like Decline and Fall’s bland non-hero Paul Pennyfeather – have human emotions, even if they are rarely respected by others or the author. In Decline and Fall , the snobbishness, misogyny and the – to modern readers – strange treatment of child abuse in which certain pupils seem partly culpable in their encouragement of the paedophile (I hope that most of us would now agree that the victim of child abuse can’t really be complicit in it), can be explained pretty simply: it was the milieu that the young Waugh knew. His education at an all-boys public school and his subsequent university life and work as a teacher in (again) an all-boys public school were overwhelmingly male experiences and child abuse was, if not actually legal or even acceptable, then at least a tacitly accepted if not much written about part of public school life. Nowadays, we might find it odd for a writer to include that kind of thing in a book where the original author’s note reads ‘Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.’ but although the novel was self-consciously outrageous, the aspects that most trouble modern readers; abuse, misogyny, racism, were probably not that much dwelt upon in the late 20s.
The reason that Waugh’s comedies are so rarely successfully adapted into other formats is that their action is farcical, but not complicated. In 1920s comedy, PG Wodehouse is the obvious star, and his work lends itself naturally to stage and television adaptation thanks to his intricate joke-like plots (complete with a punchline at the end). The comedy is there in the story and the writer’s style is the dressing that brings it to life. Waugh’s early plots meanwhile are loosely constructed to non-existent and chaotic and often implausible (yet somehow also more realistic than Wodehouse) and his writing style is everything. It’s a weird, slightly unworkable comparison, but now that I’ve made it; with Wodehouse, his stories are like a kind of pantomime or fairytale, played out by characters the author loves and which are completely ludicrous but make perfect sense on their own terms. With Waugh, it’s often as though a real (perhaps even tragic) story about real people is being told by someone who finds the whole thing funny and has little to no sympathy for the fools and the predicaments they find themselves in. Wodehouse orchestrates the events like a stage director, while Waugh reports them like a condescending gossip. To me, he is the funnier of the two, but his presence is also necessary; if you remove Wodehouse the narrator from his stories, you are left with characters that embody the warmth and silliness of the narrator’s voice, acting out stories which are in themselves funny. If you remove Waugh you are left with people you never really know making fools of themselves in painful ways. If you had never read Waugh but only watched adaptations of his work, one might expect his books to read something like a posh version of Tom Sharpe; which they definitely don’t.
The other main reason that Waugh’s early books are the way they are is because he was part of that couple of generations who lived through the First World War, but who were too young to take part. The impact this had is undeniable and the British literature of the 20s and 30s is filled with very different books by very different writers which nevertheless have various things in common with each other and which I like very much. The early 21st century may be in some ways a far more cynical time than the 1920s, but in effect it is both nicer and nastier. Most of us no longer accept the inequalities of the class system, or discrimination in race and gender. We are also no longer surprised that human beings can slaughter each other in their millions in mechanised ways; but while being used to that idea, it’s also true that, unlike Waugh’s generation, we (at least we in the UK) haven’t had the experience of half of the adult males that were there in our early childhood simply not existing anymore, or living in a country where almost every town and village doesn’t have a monument to those killed in a war we remember. A large part of the literature of the 20s and 30s consists of writers either trying to find meaning in a society whose way of life has been changed forever, whose old beliefs; in religion, in tradition, no longer seem to have any meaning, or of trying simply to escape the realities of modern life altogether. In the mid-to – late 1930s, politics would take centre stage in British literature, but for a period from around 1920 to 1935 the anxieties of the country’s younger writers were revealed in a series of strangely formless but oddly similar novels, which were once labelled ‘futilitarian’.
These are my favourites, might as well do this chronologically…
Aldous Huxley – Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928)
Huxley was in fact slightly older (20 when WW1 broke out, whereas Waugh was only 11) but he could not take part in combat due to his chronically bad eyesight. His early novels (I think Antic Hay is the best) make a very interesting comparison with Waugh’s, because at first they seem fairly similar; modern comedies where the storylines (such as they are) mostly revolve around the social lives of young, wealthy and irresponsible people. But the tone and content is very different. While Waugh was at school during WW1, with not only all the jingoism and propaganda that that entailed, but also the noticeable absence of adult male teachers and role models, for Huxley, WW1 was the period of Bloomsbury (he worked as a farm labourer at Garsington Manor, home of the society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell. For him, social life meant intellectual conversation; the discussion of art and modernism, conscientious objection, philosophy, pacifism. The comedy in novels like Antic Hay comes mainly from his satirical portrayals of the kinds of people he was mixing with but they are funny in both a broad way (the hero Theodore Gumbril’s invention of ‘pneumatic trousers’) and a deeper one (relationships and their difficulties). The main difference from Waugh is that whereas the comedy in a book like Waugh’s Vile Bodies arises from the somewhat desperate attempts of the main characters to have fun in the face of the meaningless void underlying modern life, in Huxley’s works the comedy arises from the characters’ often farcical and pretentious attempts at finding meaning through conversation, art and philosophy. The contrast between Huxley’s novels and an apparently very similar one – Wyndham Lewis’ great satire The Apes of God (1930) is especially striking because the milieu the books are set in almost identical (they knew many of the same people) and because, like Huxley, Wyndham Lewis was not nihilistic. He was however, immensely negative and the fact that he had seen active service in WW1 and was also himself a pioneering artist made him extremely impatient with what he saw as the wishy-washy dilettantism of the Bloomsbury artists and writers and their detachment from real life. The contrast between Antic Hay and The Apes of God is the difference between an affectionate Max Beerbohm cartoon and a merciless James Gillray caricature.
Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930)
What makes these books distinctively post-WW1 is the nihilism at their heart. The younger generation of the 1920s were probably more different from their parents (products of the Victorian era) than any generation before or since (excepting maybe that of the 60s) and the tone of Waugh’s novels is resolutely modern and, despite its insistence on/preoccupation with social class, the feel is one of fragmentation and instability, especially in comparison with pre-War literature. When older people are presented, it is almost always as an archaic survival from a distant era. If the war is mentioned at all, its in an almost nostalgic way by people for whom it was the backdrop of their youth or childhood. The most surprising thing about Waugh’s books is the unexpected poignancy that comes from his mostly unsympathetic handling of his characters; Vile Bodies, probably his most determinedly unpleasant book, is also his funniest (aside from the grotesque later masterpiece The Loved One).
Anthony Powell – Afternoon Men (1931)
Of all the books here, Afternoon Men feels perhaps the least ambitious, but makes me laugh the most. I have read some of Anthony Powell’s other books (and started but not finished his Dance to the Music of Time series), but they just aren’t the same. The story is almost identical to those of Huxley and Waugh – a group of young people meet up socially and drink a lot, have affairs etc – although the social class of Powell’s protagonist William Atwater is lowly enough that he actually has a normal, office-based job – a rarity in any of these books. Atwater’s friends and acquaintances are the usual mixture of bohemian high society people but it is Powell’s abrupt, lightly modernistic writing style and feel for dialogue that makes it work so well:
“’I work in a museum’, said Atwater. He was getting sleepier and felt he ought to say something. He had begun to be depressed.
‘That must be very interesting work, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it really?’
‘I often think of running away to sea.’
‘I think it must be very interesting.’
‘Do you?’
* * * *
‘What about your books?’ Atwater stood up. He could not do all the stuff about the books. He was too sleepy. He said:
‘There are these. And then there are those.’”
(Afternoon Men, p.35-6, 1963 Penguin edition)
As a writer, Powell is far more deadpan and less misanthropic than Waugh, but he creates a similarly poignant effect; it would be quite possible to film this novel and, used verbatim, the dialogue might still be funny, but what essentially makes the book work is the style in which it is written.
Cyril Connolly – The Rock Pool (written 1935. published 1936)
The Rock Pool is the only novel by Connolly – best known as a literary critic – and it is one of my favourite books. Connolly was the same age and (more or less) social class as Evelyn Waugh, and the novel is the portrait of a snobbish young man of means who goes to the French Riviera to observe life in an artist’s colony, with the explicit intention of writing a period piece about the kind of carefree1920s-style life of leisure that no longer existed in the London of the 30s, but might still be going on there. In fact, it isn’t – and instead he finds himself drawn into the lives of the impoverished artists, conmen and bar owners there until it becomes clear that he is not the detached ironic observer he imagined, but has in fact found his niche and his people, whether he wants to have or not. In comparison with Waugh and even Huxley, Connolly is far more sympathetic to his characters and the tone is completely different from Waugh’s slightly contemptuous detachment:
“’Tell me, why do you come here if you are such a snob?’
‘Who said I was a snob?’
‘Why, everybody… I’m sure it must be very amusing.’
He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.”
(The Rock Pool, p.90-91, Penguin edition, 1963)
The fact that The Rock Pool is a product of the mid-30s and not the 20s is part of its charm. While Connolly’s contemporaries and peers were becoming interested in philosophy and science (Huxley), religion (Waugh) or politics and social commentary (George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, WH Auden etc), Connolly accepted, with insight, the aimless, aesthetic worldview of his 20s generation, even as it became obsolete.
Christopher Isherwood – Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)
Isherwood’s first two novels, All The Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) are also relevant here, but Mr Norris… (probably best known, with its semi-sequel Goodbye To Berlin (1939) as being the inspiration for the musical Cabaret) have more in common with the books described above. While both of his earlier books dealt specifically with the generation gap that had resulted from the First World War (and The Memorial is explicitly concerned with the effects of WW1 on British society), Mr Norris is, although very different in tone, essentially similar to The Rock Pool – a comical story about the adventures of a young upper class person out of his element. Although famous for its evocation of the politics and life of late Weimar and early Nazi Berlin, the novels were born from Isherwood’s desire – in 1929/30, rather than the mid-late 30s of the novels – not for any kind of social or political commentary, but to escape the milieu of upper class England and experience the hedonistic lifestyle of Berlin. As with most Waugh and Powell, the book’s main protagonist is less vividly drawn than the more extreme characters who surround him, and in many ways Isherwood accomplishes a kind of heightened, occasionally grotesque realism something like the Neue Sachlichkeit artists (Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Christian Schad etc) who were working in Germany in the same period, and whose paintings have often adorned the covers of his books. The fact that his books are partly autobiographical (and written in the first person, as ‘William Bradshaw’, Isherwood’s own middle names) means there is little of the distancing effect of Waugh and although there is much humour in Isherwood’s early novels, often at the expense of his characters, they are written with a warmth and compassion that makes them translate to the screen without losing too much of the feel of the novel – with the exception of the narrator himself, who suffers by being mostly a nondescript bystander, so that in Cabaret, the Christopher Isherwood/William Bradshaw character has to become the very different Brian Roberts.
oh – not chronological now, but also – Stephen Spender – The Temple (written 1929, published 1988)
While Isherwood was in Berlin with WH Auden, their friend Stephen Spender found his way to Hamburg, seeking not only the hedonistic freedom of Weimar Germany, but also freedom from censorship. As Spender wrote in the introduction to the (very) belated first edition of The Temple, England in 1929 was a country where James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned, as was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. In going to Germany, his motives were at least partly artistic, and as he noted, “The Temple is pre-thirties and pre-political.” The same could be said of all of the novels discussed here. In that sense, The Temple sits strangely, but appropriately, in the company of the books of Waugh, Anthony Powell and co. In comparison with Isherwood’s Berlin stories, Spender’s novel is far more concerned with the inner life of its narrator and his Hamburg is less vividly drawn, but at the same time the book is far more explicit about sex than Isherwood (though to be fair Spender revised The Temple before publication in the 80s so it isn’t clear how much of the explicitness existed in 1929 – enough to prevent it from being published though). It’s a summery, if slightly troubled book, not improved by the author’s retrospective awareness of how fleeting the freedom it describes would be. Also, although Spender was himself far from humourless, there’s an earnest quality that makes the tone of the book unique in this list; it’s far more of a considered portrait of a time, than a story about some young people.
Decline and Fall – the TV show
So, finally – to that TV adaptation of Decline and Fall. It wasn’t actually bad at all (vastly better than the mystifyingly titled 1969 movie adaptation, Decline and Fall…of a Bird Watcher), but despite all the positive reviews it wasn’t (to me anyway) right either; how come? Firstly, the book was published in 1928 and had a contemporary setting. That means that it is now a period piece, which on the screen, gives an instantly distancing effect. The twenties in particular (actually, the twenties and thirties; TV rarely discriminates between the two) has evolved a certain lighthearted and somewhat cosy screen presence on television over the years, from the nostalgic adaptation(s) of Waugh’s very different Brideshead Revisited to gentle Sunday evening drama of The House of Elliot to Jeeves and Wooster and even You Rang M’Lord.
Thanks to these shows and others like them (not to mention films like Bugsy Malone and The Great Gatsby in its various versions) there’s a kind of visual shorthand for the twenties, consisting of; striped blazers, flapper fashions, art deco, the Charleston and hedonistic and/or gormless aristocrats, the fantasy of being independently wealthy, plus the odd Moseley-inspired fascist and monocled lesbian; all of which fits Decline and Fall pretty well, in a superficial kind of way. But while nostalgia is, appropriately, an element in all of the aforementioned programmes (not so much The Great Gatsby, ironic given how the film version traded on the visual aspects of its high society settings etc), it should really have no place in Decline and Fall. Nostalgia can’t help being present though, just through the accumulation of period detail and the kind of broad acting that a comedy set among the upper classes in the 20s seems to require. This broad approach is again fair enough in a way, since Decline and Fall is essentially a novel where the characters are close to being caricatures anyway.
The most obvious place the book differs from the television adaptation is that in the book, the mostly innocent and bland fish-out-of-water main character, Paul Pennyfeather doesn’t have to be – and often isn’t – particularly likeable; the reader doesn’t have to like him or identify with him to find his story funny and anyway, Waugh makes it explicit that we are not seeing Pennyfeather at his best or most typical or indeed in his element at all. Considering the ridiculous (and at times heartbreaking) circumstances he finds himself in, his outbursts of bitterness are surprisingly few and far between. Presenting a not-very-likeable character having misadventures with even less likeable characters is not, however a particularly ratings-grabbing idea, so it’s not surprising the BBC didn’t play it that way. It would never have occurred to me to cast the comedian Jack Whitehall in the leading role, but the hapless/diffident/youthful/naive sides of Pennyfeather’s nature are not that far removed from Whitehall’s usual persona and I don’t mean it as an insult when I say he captures the somewhat one-dimensional, nonentity-like aspect of Pennyfeather quite well.
But, in the bigger picture, the fact that the BBC is spending money on an Evelyn Waugh adaptation at all may not really be a good sign. As Jon Savage wrote in 1986 (re. the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited):
“Waugh’s elevation into legend – as the house god of literary London – has come at the same time as, and may have fuelled, a concerted ideological attack on the social gains of the whole post-war period.” (Jon Savage, Waugh Crimes, The Face, September 1986, in Time Travel – Pop, Media and Sexuality 1976-99, Chatto & Windus 1996, p. 206).
The adaptation of Decline and Fall in 2017 says as much about the current rise of conservatism as the success of Brideshead Revisited did about Margaret Thatcher’s mid 80s, both about the nature of the conservatism itself, and the ways society has changed since the last strengthening of the right. The choice of Brideshead to capture a conservative zeitgeist was an obvious and safe one; Waugh’s least characteristic, if most successful novel, it is (or at least it can be easily adapted as) a straightforward nostalgic paean to/romanticisation of the leisured life of the aristocracy in the pre-WW2 period, the last time they could be seen as the leaders of fashion and in a real sense ‘the ruling class’, with an Empire and subordinate classes to (literally) ‘lord it’ over. Then as now, the appeal of traditional ‘Britishness’ was strong, both with the kind of conservative, older elements in society/in charge and those who see progressiveness only in terms of threatening change/instability. Back in 1986, the ‘golden age’ of Brideshead Revisited was still remembered by the older generations, including many who were still active in the political life of the country.
But although the BBC made a costume drama, perhaps the most conservative television form, and although Waugh was a lifelong conservative and reactionary, Decline and Fall the novel, as discussed above, is hardly conservative at all; it doesn’t stand for anything, and its guiding principle seems to be that people are foolish and stupid and ruin their own lives and the lives of others without caring or even noticing. It’s a book which mostly gets away with its casual misogyny and racism because of its overwhelming misanthropy; if these people are laughable and stupid and ridiculous then at least he doesn’t show us anyone that isn’t; the fact that one of the book’s most likeable comic characters is a teacher who is not only a bad teacher, but a serial child abuser shows just what an odd choice it is for a BBC costume drama. The way the BBC tackled the more problematic aspects says a lot about where society is in 2017. In the novel, the (in modern terminology) paedophile teacher Captain Grimes’ abuse of the children in his care is seen by the other characters as distasteful and disreputable, as well as criminal, but is still seen as something one can be funny about. Somewhat surprisingly, this element made it to the screen more or less untouched, albeit without the flirtatiousness of Grimes’ favourite victim (as we, but not he, would see it), Clutterbuck. It is interesting though, to note that when reviewing the show, the word paedophile has almost always been replaced by the equivalent but somehow less inflammatory word ‘pederast’; somehow enjoying the comical exploits of a fictional paedophile might not be okay. It’s presumably the respectability of the source material (Decline and Fall may be outrageous, but Waugh is a pillar of British literature), the broadness of the comedy and the relative vagueness of the acts that makes it acceptable. And I think that’s right in a way; the element is there in the novel, it’s supposed to be and is uncomfortably funny in the novel (Waugh really was a kind of anti-Wodehouse at that point in his career), even though child abuse itself is obviously not funny. It can be assumed I think that the makers of the programme are not condoning anything, and hand-wringing self-censorship would not make the programme better; but there seems to have been a certain amount of that anyway, as we shall see.
As the misanthropy of the novel is reduced in the TV version largely because of Jack Whitehall’s sympathetic portrayal of Paul Pennyfeather, the misogyny of the book more or less evaporates onscreen, largely because the female characters are no more or less caricatures than the male ones, and are played by real women. In the book, the women are mostly predatory in one way or another and are strictly there to be admired, feared or despised – and the admiration always ends in disillusion. In Waugh’s mature books (even his best ones like A Handful of Dust) it could be argued that this feeling never significantly changes.
Where the BBC seems to have been most squeamish is with the novel’s racism. Although the anti-Welsh feeling made it to the screen more or less unchanged and again, partly neutralised by the fact that almost all of the characters were played so broadly, the episode featuring Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s African-American boyfriend Sebastian “Chokey” Cholmondley is more problematic. In the adaptation, Chiké Okonkwo plays the character exactly as written; he is articulate, urbane and enthusiastic about ecclesiastical architecture; but, when he says in the novel, “You folk think that because we’re coloured we don’t care about nothing but jazz. Why, I’d give all the jazz in the world for just one little stone from one of your cathedrals”, it’s supposed to be funny, not just because of the naivety of the lines, but because they comes from a black character. His entry into the book as Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s companion at the school games sets the tone for the whole episode:
“’I hope you don’t mind my bringing Chokey, Dr Fagan?’ she said. ‘He’s just crazy about sport.’
‘I sure am that,’ said Chokey.
’Dear Mrs Beste-Chetwynde!’ said Dr Fagan; ‘dear, dear Mrs Beste-Chetwynde!’ He pressed her glove, and for a moment was at a loss for words of welcome, for ‘Chokey’, though graceful of bearing and irreproachably dressed, was a Negro.” (Decline and Fall, p. 75)
Throughout the scene that follows, Chokey talks about church architecture, music and his race, and did so in the TV version, but the fact of his articulacy and the idea that his presence among high society people is in itself funny remains inescapable in the novel. Also, what the BBC understandably didn’t include, was the way that almost every other character present comments on Chokey’s presence, or the abusive terms they use when doing so. I’m not sure what else they could have done while remaining at all true to the novel. On the one extreme, removing the single black character from a TV show in the name of not upsetting people with racism would make no sense, and on the other, having Jack Whitehall say, as Paul Pennyfeather does in the novel, “I say Grimes, what d’you suppose the relationship is between Mrs Beste-Chetwynde and that n—–?” would – to say the least – have spoiled the show and made Pennyfeather a less sympathetic character than the BBC want him to be. But possibly they should have?
When writing about Waugh in 1986, Jon Savage wrote;
“It is extremely important that British culture develops a way of addressing the present and the future rather than the past, that recognises our pluralistic, multiracial society and our position, finger-in-the-dyke of trends in world politics” (Time Travel – Pop, Media and Sexuality 1976-99, Chatto & Windus 1996, p. 207)
and that’s still true – indeed, it’s more true now than it was even five years ago. But Decline and Fall isn’t it. Obviously, its anarchic vision isn’t as straightforwardly nostalgic and conservative in 2017 as Brideshead was in the 80s, but that’s partly because popular culture, post-Brass Eye, post-I’m A Celebrity and post-Operation Yew Tree is massively more coarse and more receptive to deliberate bad taste than the 80s was, or the 20s were for that matter. In its concern with period detail and its twee Jeeves and Wooster-ish execution, the makers of Decline and Fall have swapped the viciously funny nihilism of Waugh’s 1920s for a slightly cosy bad taste pantomime world which is equally as uncomfortable in its own very different way and leaves a comparable, but again different funny taste. Still; it wasn’t awful.
Any kind of masochism is (to non-masochists/collaborators) peculiar and difficult to understand; no less so when it is related to music; but I’m going to try to understand it anyway.
I have isolated three main areas which can be loosely classified under the ‘masochistic’ heading, but there may well be more:
1. Self-consciously unpleasant music which is “enjoyed” (or just enjoyed; a subtle but perhaps important difference) for its intentionally unpleasant/disturbing/unsettling or harsh sound
2. Music which is humorously/ironically enjoyed for its perceived awfulness*
3. Non-unpleasant music which is listened to specifically for its upsetting/depressing or negative emotional effect
Uniting all of these is the fact that they are not everyday listening (for me anyway), but in are special music which retains its potency by being indulged in only occasionally and when prepared for the physical (tinnitus) or mental (lachrymose) consequences.
*aka ‘guilty pleasures’ of course; but that is a whole other discussion; if guilt is an appropriate emotion for listening to music it would have to be something a bit less innocuous than I have in mind. ‘Embarrassing pleasures’ would be a more accurate and even more dodgy-sounding description
1. UNPLEASANT NOISES
The first category is very distinct from the other two; not only is the unpleasantness aural (and intentionally unpleasant), it is precisely the nastiness that appeals to the listener. Why that should be is mysterious; I have used the word ‘masochism’ in the title here, but only because everyone knows what it means and because I can’t think of a better term; but neither ‘sexual masochism disorder’, BDSM or so-called non-sexual masochism (“self-defeating personality disorder”) really functions in the same way as listening to, say The Rita (noise artist Sam McKinlay) or Gnaw Their Tongues.
Noise as (anti)music goes back at least as far as the Dada and Futurist movements of the early 20th century (on the left is Luigi Russolo with one of his Futurist instruments), but on the whole (I think) it’s true that the noise that was created, though fascinating to hear, was more about the process of composing and rule-breaking than listening for pleasure. The same may be true of a lot of experimental noise since then, with classic albums such as Yoko Ono’s Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music probably being far more frequently owned than enjoyed. Various musique concréte and other avant garde pieces have the same kind of status, being performed perhaps more for historical/academic (albeit interesting) reasons rather than for the purpose of actual entertainment (which is not of course to say that people aren’t entertained by it).
Noise: So what of semi-musical or non-musical noise like Merzbow or just plain ugly music? It’s hard to say where the appeal lies, but with pure noise it seems to be at least partly visceral. It has an immediate, emotional impact; it has nothing to do with traditional musical qualities such as melody, catchiness or even memorable-ness, since it’s possible to listen to the abstract noise of (for example) Thousands of Dead Gods (2006) by The Rita many times without ever getting used to it. This makes the noise endlessly surprising, alienating or boring, depending on one’s mood. The sense of noise as abstract is reinforced by its context-lessness; typically the artwork for a Merzbow album is as enigmatic and unrevealing as the album within, and occasionally every bit as flatly un-evocative (not a criticism!) as the Merzbow sound itself. Cultural identifiers in pure noise are also minimalist in the extreme; the race, nationality or gender of noise artists tends to be known only insofar as the artist wishes it to be so.
At the same time, a quality that pure noise shares with more traditional music is that it can noticeably affect the mood of the listener, especially when played at a loud volume. Listening to pure noise can be much like watching ‘white noise’ on a TV screen; the endless movement may be random, but the mind will look for patterns and if it doesn’t find them, create them itself; pure noise often feels detailed in a way that very little actual music does. And it is enjoyable (the word covers a wide range of responses here) or unenjoyable (simpler) for as long as it engages the listener.
Ugly Music: What I shall call ugly music is sometimes easier to pin down; it is music, which means it follows certain structural rules which noise ignores, and the listener enjoys it for its ugliness or not at all. It is notable too that artists who aim for ugliness usually attempt the Wagnerian ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’ where everything from the sound to the lyrics to the artwork contributes to the overall effect.
Ugly music probably began in the 60s with some of The Mothers of Invention’s more indigestible experiments (like Absolutely Free, which is perhaps more difficult than truly ugly), Captain Beefheart or the 17 minute churn of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’, but it came into its own in the artistically serious 1970s (see below) and, in a more populist and relatively lighthearted way with the advent of death metal in the 80s, specifically with albums like Reek of Putrefaction (1988) by Carcass. This classic album is ugly not only in the details of the music and presentation, but in the murky muddiness of its sound; a chance element caused by the cheapness of the recording, which makes some of the album sound like two or three different bands immersed in a swamp, simultaneously playing three different songs, When allied with the rasped vocals of Jeff Walker and the ridiculously deep ones of Bill Steer, this churning noise makes for a disorientating but strangely addictive listening experience, which has something to do with the humour of its extremity (lyrical and musical) as well as the pure heaviness.
Back in the 80s, this kind of music had an outsider/snob appeal even within the metal genre. 80s metal (on the whole) strove for clarity and precision; Carcass (emerging from an anarcho-crust/punk background) pushed the boundaries of musical extremity and taste (using the notorious collages of medical photos for their artwork, rather than relatively cuddly horror mascots like Iron Maiden’s Eddie) beyond what the standard fan of Iron Maiden, W.A.S.P., Metallica or even Slayer might find acceptable. To say that death metal is relatively lighthearted is slightly misleading – Carcass’ early music was informed by a radical vegetarian disgust with all things meat-based in quite a serious way – but as a subgenre of a popular youth-focussed music it lacks the gravitas of the kind of music which made the late 70s a darker place to have ears.
By contrast with death metal, the sheer ugliness of early industrial music exemplified by the work of Throbbing Gristle, seems designed not so much to shock or alienate with its extremity, so much as to shock and alienate with its familiarity, kind of a negative mirror image of the almost subliminal ambient music being pioneered around the same time in Eno’s Music For Airports.
By reflecting the greyness of the decaying industrial (edging into post-industrial) landscape and society that produced it, the corporate packaging and document-like title made TG’s debut album The Second Annual Report (1977) a masterpiece of grinding mundane-ness. In its way their music is every bit as evocative of the 1970s as glam or disco, but the way it embodies its era, its brutalist architecture and grey/brown/beige ambience, combats any possible sense of nostalgia. Although it’s easy to say why it’s interesting, liking Throbbing Gristle (as many have done and continue to do) is much harder to explain. The appeal of TG; in effect the appeal of being made to feel uneasy or disgusted, is an odd way to be entertained. On the surface you could say the same about the horror genre in cinema and literature, but Throbbing Gristle’s effect is utterly different from straightforward horror-as-entertainment, feeling (to me anyway) more analogous to the JG Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash than to Stephen King, perhaps because like Ballard, TG’s work had more to do with documenting than it did with entertaining. Although there was undoubtedly an element of confrontation in TGs music (especially in a live setting), as with pure noise, confrontation isn’t the focal point that it becomes in the power electronics of groups like Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jügend who (to some extent) followed on from the early British industrial scene. There is also a more straightforwardly ‘horror noise’ sub-subgenre including bands like Abruptum and the aforementioned Gnaw Their Tongues, whose aim seems to be to engender (with, it must be said, varying degrees of success) extreme anxiety in the listener; significantly different from the almost abstract quality of pure (if harsh) noise artists like Merzbow, easier to understand, but also easier to dismiss as sensationalism.
One of the cumulative effects of abrasive-sounding music has always been to spawn more accessible versions of abrasive-sounding music, in short, to make tunes out of it: noise rock, hardcore punk, death metal, grindcore, grunge, black metal, industrial pop music, techno, trance, drone, shoegaze; all bring a taste of ugliness to the masses in their own way and all are enjoyed, just like traditional pop/rock/soul/country/reggae etc etc etc, by people who like the tunes and like the songs. So they have little part to play in this particular discussion.
2. SO BAD IT’S POSSIBLE TO PRETEND IT’S GOOD
Across all of the arts there are ‘so bad it’s good’ works that appeal on the ironic level of kitsch. These are completely subjective and therefore a bit of a minefield; at what point does listening to something that you personally think is so awful that it’s funny become just listening to it; and is there any difference anyway? Did my teenage self and friends have a different experience listening to an old Shakin’ Stevens tape ‘for a laugh’ than “Shaky”’s actual fans did or do? Well, yes, presumably; they probably don’t laugh as much. Still; it’s all ‘listening with pleasure’ and not only is it subjective, but it’s all about timing. The awfulness of music is as much about the zeitgeist as the popularity of music is; hard to imagine now, but there was a time in the late 80s when listening to Abba (or The Carpenters for that matter) could be enjoyed as revelling in tacky 70s awfulness; but since the early 90s they have been revered by the once-embarrassed media as a great band after all.
Since the 90s in fact, revelling in irony has become so commonplace and mainstream as not to be ironic anymore; at one time including an artist like Tom Jones in the lineup of a major indie rock festival was kind of a hipster joke that the audience was expected to be in on. Since then the line between alternative and mainstream has become blurred, not because mainstream music has become more adventurous, but because ‘alternative’ music became popular and thus blander and more geared towards commercial success and because the mainstream media discovered people they had actually heard of at these oft-derided hippy festivals. The amusingly mainstream guest act at (for example) Glastonbury or T in the Park has almost imperceptibly become the headlining act; no accident, since these artists are usually household names which therefore guarantee ticket sales in a way that even a medium-big indie rock band isn’t.
Nowadays, to have the same kind of kitsch shock value as including Tom Jones in an indie festival once had, you would have to put someone like Gary Glitter or Rolf Harris (an original ironic festival guest, strange to remember) on the stage, doubling the irony and making the whole experience extremely uncomfortable for all concerned. Despite the weird Ballardian/Coum Transmissions echo this experience this might present, it’s probably best not to.
3. NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MISERABLE MUSIC
This category takes it for granted that unhappiness is a form of unpleasantness that is most often avoided; which may not be strictly true – or obviously isn’t, given the endless popularity of tragedies, murder mysteries etc. Still, it’s a basic human truth (I hope) that most people would rather be happy than sad. Most of the time that is; historically, music was most often written for occasions; sad music was required for a funeral, just as weddings demanded happy music. Tudor and baroque music often had mythological, narrative or literary inspiration which dictated the mood of the works. For a court composer to make a cheerful-sounding funeral dirge or a comic opera from a tragic mythological story would be perverse at best and bad workmanship at worst.
In modern popular music there are many kinds of sad songs, but from a personal point of view (narrowing it down to music I actually like) there are two; songs which express the unhappiness of the performer songs (which may or may not be sad in themselves) which make the listener (me) feel unhappy.
Both of these kinds of songs may actually be very pleasant in an aural sense, so only the latter are strictly relevant here. But – outside of the funereal situation mentioned above – why would someone intentionally listen to music that makes them sad?
There are probably as many reasons as there are people, but two big ones: to make you feel better or to make you feel worse.
A lot of interesting research has been carried out on the restorative power of sad music, so I wont say too much about that. The blues (and early country music too) is a classic example – intended not just as an outlet for the woes of the artist her or himself, but as a sharing of universal wretchedness that brings the relief of empathy/recognition – and it does seem to have a regenerative quality (a kind of earthly parallel to the redemptive power of gospel music) that makes it essentially uplifting in all but the most desolate examples.
Music to make you feel worse is more problematic, but wanting to hear sad music that deepens your depression is a fairly common phenomenon, especially among adolescents. The logic of the blues is that something that reflects your mood or encapsulates your own troubles is a kind of comfort, but it’s also true that brooding on one’s unhappiness can deepen that mood; that one can indulge in misery. Why? Because people are strange and self-pity answers some deep-seated psychological need? Perhaps it is a real kind of masochism after all…
A short, personal masochistic playlist
UNPLEASANT (these examples are all undeniably ‘not nice’, but are oddly exhilarating too)
1. Throbbing Gristle – D.o.A.
2. Painkiller – Guts of a Virgin
3. Merzbow – Pulse Demon
4. Mastery – Valis
5. Hijōkaidan – Duo
MUSIC IT HURTS ME (TO VARYING DEGREES) TO LIKE
1. Celine Dion – My Heart Will Go On
2. Samantha Fox – Touch Me
3. Yngwie J Malmsteen’s Rising Force – Now Is The Time
4. Focus – Hocus Pocus
5. Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Dress for Excess
MISERABLE MUSIC FOR WALLOWING IN
1. The Smiths – I Know It’s Over
2. Cranes – Tomorrow’s Tears
3. Daniel Johnston – I Remember Painfully (plus most of Yip/Jump Music)