"I say, you fellows"
Benny Green
The idea that literature is studied for improvement while books are read for enjoyment is one which lies deep in the puritan soul, and has been propagated by a long succession of erudite critics and novelists possessing every known
literary attribute except readability. Once upon a time the English reading public was small but reasonably philistine; Forster's Education Act of 1870 changed all that, and once literacy became the norm the reading public became vast and resolutely philistine. A survey of our literary habits which I picked up in 1966 in of all places ,a television studio, showed Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley and Agatha Christie heading the Top Twenty in that order; apart from Dickens languishing at number eighteen no real writer was mentioned at all, The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that people like what they read because they read what they like, and that no amount of propagandising on behalf of the lofty inscrutables of the literary marketplace ever does much good.
Certainly it is untrue that a badly written book is necessarily more riveting than a well-written one; The Great Gatsby is infinitely more exciting, even to the reader with no interest in or awareness of style and form, than say, The Valley of the Dolls or The Carpet Baggers.
The subject has been a fashionable one ever since George Orwell lashed out so blindly at Bertie Wooster and Billy Bunter a generation ago, so fashionable indeed that today when an analyst tackles the question, he is likely to find himself crunching underfoot the bleached bones of all the other analysts who have passed that way before him. Patrick Howarth's Play Up and Play the Game, (Eyre Methuen £2.75), for instance, I would be inclined to place somewhere between Richard Usborne's Clubland Heroes and Claud Cockburn's Best Seller, both of which works are immensely readable and neither of which works are immensely readable and neither of which escape the charge of disingenuousness, Usborne's because he careers like a rogue elephant across the thin ice of gentlemanly xenophobic thuggery, Cockburn's because he ignores best sellers like Carnival, Ply Son, My Son and Goodbye Mr. Chipps which do not happen to suit his thesis.
For there has to be a thesis when you write a book about books, and Mr Howarth's is that there existed a popular literature literature a creature called Newbolt, Man, whose code of belief was exemplified by Vitai Lampada. Mr. Howarth is demonstrably correct, and can claim that the commonplaces of his judgements are mitigated by the tidiness with
OpelebtIMA September 8, 1973
which he provides brief biographies of figures like Newbolt whose private circumstances have been either forgotten of never previously discovered. I did not know, for example, that Talbot Baines Reed was a gentlemanwriter whose real income came from printing and typography. And there is your litmus test for Mr Howarth's book. Those who respond with "Talbot Baines who?" can forget the whole business and move on to something else.
I am deeply sorry that Mr Howarth omits reference to Reed's The Willoughby Captains, which I always felt in my proletarian soul was a grander middle-class achievement than The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's; sorrier still that he never took a look at that odd attempt of Reed's to write a semiadult novel, Give a Dog a Bad Name, but inclined to agree with him that the important difference between men like Reed and, say. Frank Richards, is that while Reed was writing for ex-public schoolboys, Richards was creating a fantasy world for working-class lads like me, who thought a latin saw was something you used when making a latin mortice-and-tenon joint.
Richards embodies my chief complaint against the content of Play Up and Play the Game. Incensed as I am that Rudolph Rassendyll, whose patrician nostrils have been snorting the steam of imperial righteousness in the forest at Zenda unabated for eighty years now, gets fobbed off with one page, surprised as I must be that the plot-synopsis of Ernest Raymond's Tell England omits the salient incident of the swimming prize that wa„sn't, astonished as I am that so useful a book as the one Mr Howarth hag written should have been published without an index, I must say that my deepest disappointment is that another excuse to probe the enigmatic figure of Richards has been passed up. For in his comically evasive autobiography, Richards implied that he emerged from a clamshell at the age of seventeen and instantly invented Greyfriars. No parents, no childhood, no education, no relatives, nothing.
Now one of Mr Howarth's most readable assets is his knack of compiling potted biographies of famous men, like Newbolt and Reed, who have become obliterated as people by their fluctuating fortunes as writers. And yet Richards, with his skull-cap, his cats and his latin crosswords, remains a bookish cipher. Taking a leap into murky wa;ers, I would suggest, just for the hell of it, that Richards was a public schoolboy obliged by some family calamity to leave in mid-Livy, and who wrote of what he remembered of his schooldays for the rest of his life, that probably the calamity occurred when he was in the Remove, that the school was somewhere in the south of England, like Greyfriars, and that Richards himself was a modest compromise between Harry Whartion and Frank Nugent. Over to you, Mr Howarth.
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