In a recent interview in Poetry Nation Review, Philip Hobsbaum said that the greatest man he had ever met was Frank Leavis. There was something so sweetly anachronistic about this assertion that I was reminded of the lost decades in which one might have had a hat to doff to it. Today, no pundit seems more terminally dated than Dr Leavis, with his notions of the "common pursuit" of valid judgements in literature and, by extension, in life. We are all swing-wing pluralists now. We wallow in a publicity-led media world in which the notion of one book being better than another is either na?ve or elitist, unless it means that it sells more widely or at a higher price. Our fin de si?cle is a hierarchy of preferences, not of values. Punctuation and grammar are dusty relics and nothing that anyone writes is wrong, only different (which is better, as long as you don't mean morally better).
Curiously enough, the paladins of "The Culture" cannot quite abandon the notion of ranking, any more than the government can quite give up lordliness, even if it wants to "modernise" the House of Lords by substituting placemen for those dignified by the accident of birth. Perhaps the top prize in the lottery will soon include a dukedom. Why not? In the literary world we have a surfeit of awards which seem to certify the winners who then (very often) become the judges who beckon others to their rank. The self-promoting are themselves promoters, pursuing domination over artists where they cannot pretend to art. Bill Buford was the first post-modern opportunist in this style: by acquiring Granta and setting himself up as the selector of the Best of British, he turned writing into a sport where he was the manager who said-or did not say-"The lad done good," which, he made clear, implied adopting a style of play subservient to the gaffer's requirements.
Making lists has become one more way in which the ambitious can establish themselves as arbiters of elegance. What is advanced is not the cause of art but the fame of the selectors. The latest artful instance of self-importance is the list of "seminal artistic works of the 20th century," drawn up by the usual people who can afford the time and crave the bench, Chief Justice Malcolm Bradbury presiding.
The wetness of the qualifying adjective, seminal, is suited to the times. It avoids the question of worth in favour of progenitive puissance and renders the judges more or less immune to judgement. (Less, in my opinion, because even eclecticism can involve stupid or ignorant choices.) As an example of their parochial triviality, they choose Harold Pinter's The Caretaker but neglect Ionesco, whose Theatre of the Absurd supplied the semen which fertilised Harold's and many other eggheads. They put Ezra Pound's sprawling The Cantos (awful warnings against poetic elephantiasis) in the same category as Cavafy's single poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, when the whole of Cavafy's oeuvre merits inclusion. Lorca's The Poet in New York is a piece of cosmopolitan ostentation by comparison with Blood Wedding. Toadying to the feminists, they choose Sylvia Plath's Ariel (who cares to remember much about it?-except that she hated daddy whom she called a Nazi because he died on her) and ignore Ginsberg, Berryman and Bob Dylan. They include John Updike's post-Euphuistic Couples and omit Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon; they give two thumbs up to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, when On the Town was far more important to the history of the cinema (as were On the Waterfront and Odd Man Out or Cocteau's Orph?e, which helped to generate The Seventh Seal). The presence of A bout de souffle and the omission of L'Avventura show how little the panel knew about anything except what was expected of it: obvious surprises. Rear Window was a dud Hitchcock; a better choice, if Hitch must be included, would be Strangers on a Train. For Whom the Bell Tolls was a great title, but A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway's best novel, even if In Our Time was his most influential work.
It is odd, in an exercise prompted by the BBC, that not a single television nor radio programme makes the list, even though the innovative drama documentary Cathy Come Home was at least as influential as Snow White. The Goon Show spawned a shoal of comic inventions, while Orson Welles's radio version of the War of the Worlds was crucial to the development of radio drama and "factual" news programmes. And since when did Stanislavsky become the author of A Month in the Country? Here is an example of the now pandemic disease of directors supplanting the author. How nice that it is Turgenev who gets bumped off the credits for his own play; Ivan always was a softy, and notoriously slow in the seminal department.
Surely I am taking a parlour game too seriously. After all, Bradbury, Byatt and company knew that they were being naughty and, pluckily at their age, provocative. I am sorry, but what matters about the rented bigwigs' larky choices is the contempt they display for the audience. They are dons who have turned their backs on education and who no longer dare to be intelligent or accurate or-absit omen-highbrow in patronising the public.
in the literary world, the most obvious and regular opportunity for self-importance is the choice of Books of the Year. I have long contributed to such listings, so I shall not pretend that it is easy to avoid favouring one's friends or choosing the last recent book which one found tolerable. The lists are recommendations, not final judgements on the basis of all the annual evidence. More often than not, one is reminded of Byron's banker-poet friend, Samuel Rogers, who used to say that as soon as he heard of a good new book he rushed out and bought an old one.
Nevertheless, there is a temptation to take certain critics' choices seriously, especially when they are backed with strenuous sententiousness. How can one fail to feel intellectually dowdy at not yet having read a novel recommended by Lady Antonia Fraser and George Steiner and Neal Ascherson? It was in a spirit of humility that I ordered a copy of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, as translated by Carol Brown Janeway (perfectly competently, or at least grammatically). It was also solemnly saluted by Jorge Semprun (whose experience of the savage politics of the century gives his endorsement a certain gravity) and deemed "superb" by Le Monde. Ruth Rendell promises "a very fine novel, as far above a holocaust genre" (excuse me?) "as Crime and Punishment is above the average thriller" (she ought to know); "a sensitive, daring, deeply moving" (ah! that touch of adjectival originality) "book about the tragic results of fear and the redemptive power of understanding."
The Reader turns out to be a short novel (brevity usually commends itself to those in a hurry to endorse new work) and its donn?e, like its style, is very simple. A Bildungsroman of stunted growth, its first person narrator is the son of a lawyer (its author is a lawyer) who grows up in postwar Germany. When he is 15 (always a dangerously sensitive age for Thomas Mann's countrymen), he is taken ill on the way to school, outside some low-price housing. His vomit is sluiced away by a woman called Hanna who calls him "kid" and, when she sees him crying, takes him in her arms.
...I could feel her breasts against my chest. I smelled the sourness of my own breath and felt a sudden sweat as she held me, and didn't know where to look. I stopped crying.
You can pretty well guess what's coming; and it comes. When young Michael recovers from his hepatitis, he goes to the building on Bahnhofstrasse to thank the breasty woman with flowers. When she offers to walk him home, she has to change her clothes-and guess what. Here's what:
I waited in the hall while she changed her clothes in the kitchen. The door was open a crack. She took off the smock and stood there in a bright green petticoat. Two stockings were hanging over the back of the chair. Picking one up, she gathered it into a roll using one hand, then the other, then balanced on one leg as she rested the heel of her other foot against her knee, leaned forward, slipped the rolled-up stocking over her toes, put her foot on the chair as she smoothed the stocking up over her calf, knee, and thigh, then bent to one side as she fastened the stocking to the garter belt... As she was reaching for the other stocking, she paused, turned towards the door and looked straight at me. I can't describe what kind of look it was-surprised, sceptical, knowing, reproachful. I turned red. For a fraction of a second I stood there, my face burning. Then I couldn't take it any more. I fled out of the flat, down the stairs, and into the street.
This is a passage from a novel of just over 200 short pages. In one predictable image after another, we are invited to share an adolescent's first vision of a woman putting on her stockings. The description is banal, and so is his response. The scene is trite but promising: what it promises is further slo-mo accounts of Hanna's anatomy and young Michael's initiation into it. And that is exactly what we get. On his next visit, he has some comic difficulties with the coal scuttle while replenishing Hanna's home fire, and gets so dirty that he has to have a bath in her bath. After which, what? You've guessed again: Hanna comes with a towel and says "Come" as she wraps him in it, "...from head to foot" (sweet details!), and rubs him dry. Then... are you ready for this?
...she let the towel fall to the floor. I didn't dare move. She came so close to me that I
could feel her breasts against my back and her stomach against my behind. She was naked too. She put her arms around me, one hand on my chest and the other on my erection.
"That's why you're here!"
Can you fill in the next few paragraphs? Believe me, you can. Michael now finds himself in love with Hanna, who is considerably older than he, but not old. I feel no great outrage when I read or see pornography and I was not scandalised by the adolescent activities of young Michael: better to go into Hanna than into the Hitler Youth, as his father might have done (but didn't, it seems-he turns out to be a solemnly moral old stick). What is shocking in The Reader is the almost comic absence of any specific detail; there is not one description which is not platitudinous.
I cannot claim that Schlink did not experience everything which is depicted in The Reader. The whole story may be completely true; it is still false, as fiction. As a work of the literary imagination, it is trivial, catchpenny and witless. Its source may be "genuine," but its models are German sex films and those countless stories of the young man and the older woman with which continental fiction is crammed. At the best, there is a whiff of Alberto Moravia, but none of his humour, none of that sense of inhabited place which renders the prostitute in La Romana so memorable and which makes Gli Indifferenti as seminal a novel as any parochial panel might ignore in favour of The Waves, which I love(d), but whose showy surf I cannot prefer to, say, Svevo's Confessions of Zeno or even to Maugham's Of Human Bondage.
Why is Schlink's novel called The Reader? It recalls a neat film, with the divine Miou-Miou, called La Lectrice, but Michael's readings are given to only one audience: Hanna. She likes his voice; she envies his education; he satisfies her first physically and then with Emilia Galotti and stuff in that classy range. This simple lady, who works as a tram conductor, also asks to hear the Odyssey and "the speeches against Cataline (sic)" in the original languages. Does she want to better herself or what? She gives Michael a sexual education and, after tutorials, he comes back with Hemingway and Homer. Hanna soon becomes a critic and calls out "Unbelievable," quite as if she were reading The Reader.
Why does Hanna so much like having Michael read to her? Yes, you can guess: despite the enviable scholastic system which turned out Heidegger and Himmler, she never learnt to read. Imagine! Born in 1922, she is a working class girl who never enjoyed the full benefits of the Third Reich.
The first part of Michael's story ends when Hanna abruptly resigns from being a tram conductor and disappears. The next Michael hears of her, his innocent mistress has been arraigned as a war criminal. Some insistent victims, who "by rights" (the narrator tells us) ought to be dead, have filed a suit against her and other SS ladies who were guards at Auschwitz and on the death marches which followed the Russian advances towards the camp.
At the outbreak of the war, it seems, Hanna was so badly needed for factory work that no one ever noticed that she was illiterate. At Siemens (a magisterial novelistic touch, that, to specify employers who actually exist), she was so industrious that she was offered promotion to foreman. It was then, in the autumn of 1943, that she dumped electrical assembly and joined the SS, with the "tragic" result that she selected victims for the gas chambers, but only-it turns out-after doing what she could to keep them in her personal custody for as long as possible, during which time she fed them and, it seems, had sex with them, so that they could have something nice to remember while they choked to death. The girl is some kind of a saint, right? (Lord Longford would be in for her like that!) And now the bastards are putting her on trial because she helped to murder people.
Michael, whose marriage has foundered as a result of his surreptitious memories of and longing for his initiatrix, attends the court as a legally-informed observer. Hanna proves incapable of cunning-or prudence. The gallantly uncomplaining scapegoat of the other women in the dock, she soon confesses to being the author of a "report" which admits that a number of death marchers were locked into a church when allied bombers came over. The church burned and the guards did not unlock the doors to let the prisoners out (the two surviving witnesses, who "by rights" should have died, got lucky in the organ loft).
When Hanna is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, Michael feels that she has been victimised. Over the years, he sends her tapes of his readings, though he cannot summon up the humanity, or the love or lust, actually to visit her. On the eve of her parole, Hanna hangs herself, leaving Michael with feelings of inadequacy and an opportunity for moral musings about the fugitive nature of history and rubbish of that familiar kind.
By the same token, readers of The Reader are supposed, by Rendell and other experts in blood sports, to have gained important insights into love, horror, mercy, ambivalence and understanding. Who would still dare to insist that the novel is confected junk from beginning to end? OK, I would. Even if every incident described is part of the author's autobiography, this is neither a true book nor a work of art. Fiction is not a form of heightened transcript; novels cannot be validated by sincerity (not that I am imputing anything so jejune to this book). Schlink's sly performance reeks of contrivance, special pleading, Germanic self-pity and-as Larry Durrell's Scobie would say-"la grande bogue."
Consider one simple, crucial element in the story, the idea that Hanna "joined the SS" to conceal her illiteracy. The organisation may have been short of men, as it was of humanity, but are we seriously to believe that Hanna could have been recruited without so much as filling in an entry form? Did she have no period of written work-an essaylet on consciencelessness perhaps-before going to whip up the inmates at Auschwitz? The premise of the entire book-the innocence of Nazism's rank and file-is an insolent imposture. Note the clumsy subtlety which turns the women for whose deaths Hanna is convicted into victims of an allied air raid (the RAF couldn't hit the camps, or the railway lines which served them, but they managed to destroy churches). You can hear the slop of the same old whitewash, accompanied by a chorus of "We are all guilty." It needs no Orwellian wit to respond "And some of you are a lot guiltier than we are."
If space allowed, I could discourse on the manipulative falseness of a novel without novelty, honour or invention. The Reader lacks even the solemn phoniness of the moral debate in Sophie's Choice or the candid calculation of Spielberg's Schindler's List. It confuses writing fiction with telling lies and selling fakes. The come-buy-me froth of sexuality (straight and lesbian) covers a confection whose "seriousness" could be read as of a piece with that of Nazi apologists and historical revisionists. Schlink pretends to be a novelist just as his voyeurism pretends to look at moral issues.
As for those who recommended The Reader, they can always claim that they are entitled to their opinions. So they are, so they are. But if they have the right to enthuse, others have the duty to denounce their want of literary taste. It is for this reason that Hobsbaum's nostalgia for Leavis seemed so pertinent. Perhaps, after all, it does make sense to maintain that there can-and should-be standards in literature and that it is possible-and urgent-not to defer to reckless relativists and by-line hogs. No one could recommend The Reader without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil. Such are today's guiding lights. Shame on them.
