AND ANOTHER THING
What is the real great tradition of the novel? Snobbery
PAUL JOHNSON
Ferdinand Mount, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, has published a spirited defence of his uncle, Anthony Powell, against the charge of being a snob. Such loyalty is commendable. But is it necessary? There is no doubt in my mind that Powell was a snob; sometimes, when discoursing on genealogy, a boring one. But snobbery, or rather the instinct, the capacity to make fine distinctions and illustrate them, and to weigh character in terms of these distinc- tions, which in combination produce snob- bery, were part of his equipment as a novel- ist, probably the most important part. Pow- ell without his snobbery could never have succeeded as a novelist. Indeed I would argue that a degree of snobbery, in one or other of its many manifestations, is essen- tial to novel-writing. All great novelists are, and must be, snobs.
A novelist has to be able to tell a tale, but to be a good one he must also possess the skills of a taxonomist. That is to say he must have the ability to classify human beings into minutely differentiated categories which convey social, moral and aesthetic messages to the reader. It is one way in which charac- ters are brought to life in the mind of the reader, until they cease to be fictions and become real people. This principle applies just as much if not more to minor figures, or mere transients who flit across the pages, as to heroes and heroines, for they have to be treated briefly, and to be real the taxonomy must be exact (and ruthless). When Evelyn Waugh, in one of his war novels, describes soldiers being wearily entrained across Eng- land they knew not whither, and stopping at a junction, he says that 'base little men' served out food and tea from the platform. He need not have mentioned the men at all. But by doing so in the way he did he con- jured up in three words a scene: small con- scripts, not fit for fighting units, or even for regular service as Army Catering Corps cooks, dishing out disgusting viands from some dingy station kitchen to hungry but sneering privates.
Again, when Jane Austen, in skilfully building up her picture of the horrid Mrs Elton, has Emma noting her propensity to refer to her new husband as 'my caro sposo', she is making a point as telling as Mrs Elton's constant references to her brother- in-law's barouche-landau. Caro sposo had been in use among the upper classes: it occurs, for instance, frequently in the vivid letters of Lady Milbanke, the mother of Lady Byron, scribbled before the turn of the century. By the time Emma came to be writ- ten it was passé, a threadbare cliché slither- ing down the social scale. Jane Austen's use of the phrase was an exact stroke of taxo- nomy. It is also snobbery, is it not? Emma, in fact, is a novel about snobbery: the harmless though tiresome snobbery of Emma herself, the despicable snobbery of Mr Elton and his wife and Mrs Churchill, and the heroic, con- structive snobbery of Mr Knightley and Miss Bates — the proper reverence for valid dis- tinctions which Jane Austen saw as part of England's defences, just as much as the `wooden walls' in which her two naval broth- ers kept Bonaparte at bay.
Distinctions reflected in clothes, speech, manners are the basic bricks of a novelist's character-building. They help to supply what Henry James called the 'density' of life. He wrote in 1879 about how difficult it was to write novels about America, so etiolated was it: 'No sovereign, no court, no personal loyal- ty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gen- tlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathe- drals, nor abbeys nor little Norman church- es; no great universities nor public schools . „ no Epsom nor Ascot!' An exaggeration, no doubt, but other American novelists, like Edith Wharton, saw what he meant, making the best available use of what was at hand, as Nathaniel Hawthorne did of New England's sinister historical accretions.
Moreover, American novelists skilfully employed the moral concept of the gentle- man. This was an early Victorian, perhaps pre-Victorian device. Dickens, a snob in all kinds of ways, insisted in his moral taxonomy that his heroes must be gents: Pickwick is, after he ceases to be a mere buffoon, and so are Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and Pip, whose fault is that he lets his snob- bery show. Ralph Nickleby and Steerforth are all the more villainous in that they betrayed their gentlemanly status by despi- cable behaviour towards the weak. But it was Thackeray, rather than Dickens, who raised the concept into a cult, so that it dam- ages its usefulness. Anthony Trollope, his follower, restored a sense of balance, but the notion that the hero, to be morally appropri- ate, must be some sort of gentleman, born, natural or morally self-created, is a central pillar of Trollope's stories. There is a scene at the end of The Last Chronicle of Barset, when the rich Archdeacon Grantley, who has fought against his son marrying the daughter of the impoverished Revd Crawley for more than 800 pages, is reconciled to the match. 'I would that we stood on more equal ground,' says Crawley. The Archdeacon replies, 'We stand on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen.' The genius of American fiction writers in the 20th century was to transform the gentle- man cult into the moral snobbery of heroic behaviour. Scott Fitzgerald and, still more, Ernest Hemingway were the leaders in this endeavour. Moral snobbery was, of course, an old device, constantly used by Mrs Gaskell and periodically — with huge impact by George Eliot. But Hemingway made it into a code of speech, manners, values and thoughts, as well as behaviour, so that those who possess these attributes instantly recog- nise each other with approval. There is per- haps more snobbery in Hemingway than al any other major novelist, and his tricks of taxonomy have passed into the repertoire of writers, not just in America either (think of Camus). We find it in Saul Bellow, who dls' tinguishes with powerful effect between Jew- ish archetypes and their habits, as does, drawing on a different tradition, Isaac Bashevis Singer. There are hilarious varieties of moral-intellectual snobbery in novels t'Y Mary McCarthy and Alison Lurie, And ra Britain that brilliant work Lucky Jim, a mas- terpiece of concealed snobbery, gave an 01" tradition a new intellectual and moral vigour — Amis's son Martin, and countless others, are more the Old Devil's followers than they care to admit. In an irreligious age, moral" intellectual snobbery is a handy creed. You will notice that I have not made some easy points — that Proust, for instance, hailed everywhere, as the 20th century ended, as its greatest novelist, was a consult!' tional, inveterate, unapologetic and shame" less snob of the least attractive kind, the sOcil" ety snob pure and simple. The truth is I uo,.
not need him to make my case. Forms snobbery are essential to the artistic success of Dubliners, Nostromo, Riceyman Steps and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, to mention only four classics, and to the entire oeuvre of1-111xle,Yi Waugh, Compton-Burnett, Virginia Wal" Olivia Manning and many others. AnthonY Powell was a snob — in the great tradition.
Previous page
