Speaking volumes
Martin SEYMOUR-SMITH
Speaking to Each Other. Vol I: About Society; Vol 2: About Literature Richard Hoggart (Chatto and Windus 30s and 35s respectively) Richard Hoggart has written, in The Uses of Literacy, the most articulate, loving, critical and sensitive non-fictional account of the working classes that we have. It was a book justly praised; it is still highly relevant. His earlier book, on Auden, was less good. It demonstrated, like his essay on the same subject reprinted in this collection, that Hog- gart is much less interesting as a literary critic when he lacks an immediate sociolo- gical context. Auden's own merits apart, Hoggart's reasons for admiring him seem strained; he is distinctly uneasy in expound- ing Auden's latter-day concern with what may fairly be called Kierkegaardian Angli- canism; this does not have a real presence— at least, certainly not in Hoggart's unhappy essay.
But I do not mean to imply that the 'sociological' essays in this large collection— the fruit of some ten years of lecturing, broadcasting, article-writing and reviewing —are superior to the 'literary' ones. Never less than adequate, Hoggart is at his con- siderable best where cultural and literary concerns interlock. Then there is not a critic like him today. He lacks Orwell's imagination, the driving edge of his black pessimism—although he does have, of course, more understanding of the working classes than Orwell could ever attain—but
this is the only modern writer with whom he may be compared.
He himself says of Orwell that it is 'a temper of heart and mind that we must respond to . . . In trying to define that temper briefly we find ourselves using. . . old-fashioned phrases. We say, for example, that he stood for common decency, and though that phrase is difficult to define and often woolly, with Orwell it indicated a hope which he tried to embody in action ...' Within his greater limitations, these words may truthfully be applied to Hoggart: his work is in itself a definition of a certain kind of decency. And, oddly enough, he resembles Orwell in that, although more learned and better read, his remarks on 'classic' authors frequently have an honest clumsiness—it is a quality that puts the high gloss of some academic critical writing to shame.
Probably the most brilliant and penetrat- ing essay in these books, and it is certainly one in which culture (in the broadest sense) and literature (of a sort) meet, is 'The Dance of the long-legged Fly: on Tom Wolfe's prose'. The Wolfe meant is not of course the novelist who died young, but the swinging journalist who—as Hoggart beautifully points out—is so afraid of being old. Here the square teacher completely outwits, not only by shrewd analysis but also by praise where it is due, the with-it operator. He is able to do this because he can take in so much more; he can show the frantic anxiety behind Wolfe's 'poise', and the puer- ile horror of age, the immaturity, the models for all the tricks of style. Yet he does not need to be pejorative, for he can explain so much more effectively.
Hoggart is good, too, on Marshall Mac- Luhan. drawing attention to his scattiness, his not self-acknowledged disowning of the 'slightly Arnoldian note' of his earlier work, and the manner in which awkward questions are left hanging—almost as if the wonderful electronic machines will dispose of the awkwardness. There are some critic- isms that he does not make or discuss, chiefly that of the extent to which Mac- Luhan's (improbable) Catholicism and his emergence as a major exhibitionist a la Muggeridge have distorted his actual mes- sage (or massage). But this is a psychologic- ally oriented approach, rather than the sociological kind Hoggart favours—and, to be fair, is best at. Nevertheless, to use one of his own phrases, what Hoggart needs to do. I think, is to read more psychology to counter-balance his sociology. It would make him into an even better critic.
There are two general reasons why he is already good. The first is his humanity: whether you agree with him or not, you know that his effort is towards that same decency which he rightly attributes to Orwell. The second reason is that he makes his readers acutely aware that they are experiencing a transition from one kind of culture to another. One feels that kindliness blended with optimism sometimes prevents him from expressing his opinions on the mass media and the people who run them. But then not many of these essays are later than 1966, and some are much earlier.
Naturally, since Hoggart was a member of the Pilkington Committee, there is a good deal about broadcasting—including a superb and prophetic demonstration (1964) of the nastiness as well as the silliness of what he calls the 'new populists', the middle-class people who want to keep public entertain- ment 'clean'—and a certain proportion of it is faintly hopeful. It is not necessary to guess what he would say now—or to wonder what he would think about the announcer, on what is still just the Third Programme, who decided on the evening of 3 March to spell out the word 'Ulysses' for us. A sign of things to come? Or that have gone?
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