BOOKS
From Aspidistra to Juke-Box
By KINGSLEY AMIS T T is a sad fate to be the child of the urban or 'suburban middle classes. As a First or a Fourth are the only dignified kinds of degree to get, so one's upbringing must be conducted either in several establishments with several bathroonis !each or in one with none if it is to distil any glamour-potential. Compared with the upper and lower levels alike—but especially with the lower, to which It has many unlooked-for similarities— the middle stratum is bound to seem drab and glum. Beset by constant anxieties about decorum, it has never devised a traditional way of enjoying itself. Alongside those of the working classes, its fears show up as neurotic, unreal and self- regarding. Among its shrewdest and most cheer- ful members are the man who still likes to be known by his Home Guard rank, the woman who will refer in every conversation to her shopping days in Town with the wife of the local Member. And its heroes, denied alike a brisk introduction to sex behind the coal-tips and a fructifyingly bad time at Eton, may perhaps be forgiven their occasional outbursts of adolescent peevishness.
The above is, I hope, a legitimate reaction to Mr. Richard Hoggart's absorbing and amiable book* on working-class life and culture. Per- sonal experience is at work all the time in his account of mores and mythology among labourers, craftsmen and their families in Leeds and other areas of the industrial North. He draws a detailed picture of a mode of existence that is in itself rich in the concrete and the individual. It is the world of corner-shops and fish-and-chips, whist-drives and bus-outings, pints of mild, packets of fen, and boiled ham for tea at the weekend. Some of the female portraits—the wife endlessly working to keep the household warm, properly fed and out of debt, the widow struggling to bring up three or four young children—and the various evocations of Friday-evening shop- ping or Sunday-morning leisure distil a warmth which cannot fail to engage sympathy, but which might seem more appropriate in autobiography or fiction than in an inquiry avowed to be analytical, even if acknowledged to be amateur and personal. Although Mr. Hoggart is at pains to admit how easily romanticism enters such chronicles as,his, and despite his periodic correc- tives, there are perceptible gaps in his story.
Having preludially blackguarded the middle classes, I may possibly be allowed to wonder whether the present work lays enough stress on what appear, to the outsider, as characteristic * Tim *Uses of LITERACY. By Richard Hoggart. (Chatto and Windus, 25s.) proletarian vices. I do not refer to the bluntness and coarseness for which Mr. Hoggart makes apology : if these qualities are not illusions brought about by variations in class standpoint, they are at any rate below serious notice—`so love does loathe disdainful nicety.' What I am getting at is the serene intolerant complacency manifested by many working-class people, especi- ally older women; the skin-tight armour against any unfamiliar idea. I remember once explaining to a landlady of mine that the sun didn't really put the fire out (it only looked as if it did) and so she could leave off drawing the blinds on a bright autumn afternoon. She heard me out politely, standing by the hearth, then went and drew the blinds as usual, 'just in case.' I would admit that there can be middle-class versions of that kind of thing. And I must certainly add that it has an obverse side which ought to preclude exasperation : the apathy and bewilderment likely to be shown by Working people when they come up against officialdom. Any social worker, children's officer, clinic assistant and so on who reads Mr. Hoggart's book ([ hope all will) will find grounds for exercising the utmost kind- ness and patience in their dealings.
But even on the most unfavourable view there must be ample reason to deplore the spectacle of a way of life, many-sided and involving a delicate system of loyalties, beginning to decay. Welsh Nonconformism, for instance, may enrage or bore unendurably all the way from its emotional barbarities to its attitude to drink and Sunday cinemas, and yet it provided around the chapels a network of personal and social relationships whose loss will be an impoverishment. That loss, together with similar changes in other parts of Great Britain, can be seen as inevitably produced by post-war developments which, since they are accompaniments of an assault on poverty, one would not wish to see undone : if a structure is propped up by unemployment, bad housing and an agonising fear of debt, then we must kick the prop away. But the question which Mr. Hoggart deals with in the second half of his book still requires an answer : what is going to replace the way of life we have been busily undermining? If we can answer that one with certainty (which some will take leave to doubt), then there is a supplementary about whether the emergent system is a good one.
With many qualifications and caveats, notably as regards the resilience of the older working- class culture, Mr. Hpggart's prognosis is pessi- mistic. An examination of tendencies in the popular press, in radio entertainment and in cheap paper-back fiction suggests to him an eventual triumph of prejudice, incuriosity, shallow conformism, sentimentality and the couldn't-care-less attitude. These are grim pre- dictions. A partial restorative might take in the fact that some of these qualities have been endemic at least since the fall of Athens in 404 BC, while others (the too-easy tolerance, for example, which Mr. Hoggart detects) will make a nice change. One could also point to a number of apparent paradoxes as between certain of the coming attitudes, whereby an enjoyment of group values accompanies an increasing isolation, a self-opinionated quality goes hand in hand with a new loss of certainty. And really it is no use quoting George Eliot in order to establish that popular fiction is of humble literary merit. Nor will it quite do to declare that the latter 'must surely' encourage this bad attitude, 'are certainly likely to' have that undesirable effect. Too little is known about how reading fits into the lives of working people—or of any people, come to that.
But the main trouble with Mr. Hoggart's diagnostics is that they are as thin in illustration as his reminiscences are rich. This is partly the result of an absurd decision—on the part of the publishers, I imagine—only to allow invented examples of the less edifying kind of fiction: no such -timidity marked M r. Geoffrey Wagner's valu- able Parade of Pleasure, nor, as far as I know, did any libel actions. However, there is far more to it than that. To talk usefully about anything, from linguistic analysis to rock 'n' roll, it is necessary to see it from the inside, by experience or study. Mr. Hoggart was thus well equipped to describe his early background. But he sees his `mass publications and entertainments' from the outside. He tells us in a note that ballroom dancing is the second largest entertainment in- dustry in the country with its 500-odd ballrooms, but he might never have been in one of them for any sign he gives of understanding the part they play in their patrons' world. His account of modern popular songs is evidently based upon an exiguous, ill-chosen sample and is riddled with precarious intuitions about such imponder- ables as the kind and degree of self-consciousness displayed. He does not know what television programmes are like or how people behave while they watch them; he does not know that Astounding Science Fiction prints some of the best work in its genre despite its name and cover, which are doubtless all he has seen of it; he does not even know that there is more than one kind of comic strip.
One might well, I readily agree, go to one's grave in happy ignorance of all the things I have mentioned: but not if one is going to write a whole book about popular culture. Mr. Hoggart says near the end of his that optimism on this subject is likely to visit those who 'do not really know the material.' So is pessimism, as he has proved. And in his case I should judge it not unlikely that the pessimism preceded the investi- gation and found what it wanted to find, a common sequence of events among amateur investigators. It would be pleasant to say of a book written out of such obvious earnestness and decency of feeling that it represented an achieve- ment, but it is only an attempt.
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