Penny dreadfuls?
Benny Green
"Literature is a 'luxury," says Chesterton, -fiction is a necessity". If we skate over the gross intellectual deceit of that remark, which attempts to fob us off with the canard that real literature can never be fiction and real fiction can never be literature, we find ourselves on the first page of a scandalously readable analysis of pulp literature. The quotation stands defiant at the masthead of that analysis, a pennon whickering bravely in the cold wind of academic criticism, nudging us constantly into the realisation that for all its blatant falsehood, it contains also a deadly grain of truth. For it has not altogether escaped my notice that there is a comical discrepancy between what we actually do read, between what we consider worthy and what we find rewarding, between what we say we enjoy and what we go on reading over and over again, a difference, as it were, between our literary promise and performance. Why do we read? Certainly not to educate our minds, nor to improve our souls, nor to please Dr Leavis. We read, or we ought to read, for sheer unalloyed pleasure, and we are devious about disclosing our true tastes because we are uneasy about where that pleasure comes from. Usually we end up making weak jokes about it, talking speciously of a bogus category called -good bad books," tiy which we mean books we enjoy but whose literary merits we suspect are negligible. I am not sure what these good-bad books are, but very often when readers shelter behind the term, they are thinking of, say, Trilby, or The Prisoner of Zenda, or Green Mansions, or Random Harvest, books based on a premise patently absurd. We know perfectly well that operatic virtuosity cannot be induced by hypnosis, that Rassendyll's Slovene accent would have given him away within ten seconds, that Rima's treetop life was no more possible than Lord Greystoke's. But we retain a fierce allegiance to such farragos, and knowing they are farragos, become furtive about the lamentable condition of our literary sensibilities.
But suppose. for a moment that literary ,ensibilities do not come into it, that the reason retain Zenda is not because I admire any longer the tubercular flesh of its cadences, but because I once did, in other words, that it is within such texts that my own innocence is enshrined? The constant reader usually discovers that first love is best love, and very often last love too, no matter what his mature judgement might insist to the contrary; it is not literary artifice I am stalking when I seek out Denry Machin but my own lost self. I remember
being puzzled for years that Shaw, who all his life pitched into the military, should have so warmly praised Robert E. Lee—until I realised that reports of Lee's great set-pieces must have been appearing in Irish newspapers when Shaw was seven years old. It is no coincidence that the book which raises these questions is called Boys Will Be Boys, a beautifully balanced piece of work* compiled in exactly the right frame of mind, derisive yet affectionate, perceptive but never pretentious. We see the terrible fate lying in store for the intellectual critic of pulp literature who happens to have no sense of humour, by being reminded that Billy Bunter is a more credible literary creation than George Orwell, who took such exception to him; we are guided gently through the maze. of Sweeny Todd and Sexton Blake and Jack Harkaway and Dick Barton; we wander once more into the forbidden territory of Thomson of Dundee, and we end with a final reassurance from Chesterton on the desirablility of blood and thunder.
As a schoolboy I was familiar with several of the heroes and villains whose motives are so delightfully examined in Boys Will Be Boys, and although I am not one of those guilty readers who feel the need to rig an intellectual case for unintellectual partialities, I find it interesting that the prime philosophic ideas of one epoch contrive to filter down into the pulp literature of the next, that 'Strang the Terribe' was a deft paraphrase for tiny minds of the Noble Savage, that The Wolf of Kabul', in which a tribesman plays the Great Game by wielding a cricket bat, was the last twitch of life from the Clarendon Commission of 1861, that Arnold of Rugby ended as Dr Locke of Greyfriars, that 'The Truth About Wilson' was a witty vulgarisation of 'Back to Methusalah' and 'The Food of the Gods,' and so on. My attachment to such heroes waned on the day 1 heard about the originals; I have, after all, read my Cervantes, and the reader who knows Don Quixote can never again take romantic escapists with quite the old relish.
However, there are those readers who not only never grow up, but have no intention of ever doing so. What would Tolstoy have made of this?
Even now, beyond middle age, I can never walk past, let alone into, the Ritz, Hatchett's or Half Moon Street without vaguely imagining myself to be Bulldog Drummond.
Those words come from a famous monument to callow daydreams in which Richard Usborne twenty years ago celebrated his love for certain fictional groups. But an intriguing thing has happened to his highly readable book' ", In his new introduction, Usborne implies he has brought this material up to date, which is impossible. You can no more modernise John Buchan and Dornford Yates and Bulldog Drummond than you can a covered wagon or a paraffin lamp; the moment you do, they change into something different. What Usborne has done is to bring himself up to date, and he has done this by tempering his asperity towards those who take exception to Drummond's idiotic xenophobia, Yates's superiority complex, Buchan's cold-baths morality. Sensing that the tide of opinion is moving against him, Usborne has trimmed his sails considerably, in the hope that the tiny cockeshell of his literary affections does not get dragged out into the deep waters of social responsibility.
It seems to me that both his original truculence and his later penitence are misplaced. What really renders Drummond and company comical is neither the xenophobia nor the sadism nor the snobbery, but something quite different, something touched on obliquely when Usborne grumbles about Hitchcock's movie amendments to The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which hero and heroine are handcuffed together, so that Robert Donat is obliged to run his hand up Madeleine Carroll's leg every time that lady scratches herself. Well, much as it grieves me to support a wit as elephantine as Hitchcock's. I must say that, with regard to the handcuffs, he improved the story, as anyone must who admits the existence of sex appeal and that ladies are as prone to its magnetism as men are. If Buchan can write of a heroine's fitness that she is "famous for her wind," if he can give us a hero who contemplates the heroine fleeing from the nasty Reds and say, without a trace of conscious irony, "Gad! She's a miler," then he must not complain if posterity's raspberries echo over his tomb. It was because the escapologists of Usborne's pantheon wrote as though the world was a public school where virginity was mysteriously linked to decency, that we have had to endure the equally laughable backlash of Bond's priapic preoccupations, and can savour the wicked revenge on the phoney continence of the cold-bath school of fiction taken by Macdonald Fraser in the Flashman saga. It may well be that the real attraction of those Clubland heroes was that they coped with maturity as though it wasn't there, which is, I fear, the secret wish of a great many of us, as book sales statistics in the last eighty years would seem to show.
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