Austerity Britain, part two

Part one is here.

Noel Coward's not the only famous person that turns up in passing. Accounts from Barbara Pym (whose novels all seem to have the feel of this period, with its scrimping and saving), Bill Wyman, George Orwell, James Lees-Milne, Doris Lessing, and others are interwoven with those of the many unknown people, and while their words are accorded no additional status, the very presence of people we already know enlarges and grounds Kynaston's narrative, linking it to the larger, different cultural stories we already associate with them.

For example, an extra layer of irony accrues to the following open letter from Dirk Bogarde to Woman's Own magazine, because he is now generally thought to have been gay, yet in the letter he's setting out the qualities he will require in the girl he marries:

Do not smoke in public.
Do not wear high heels with slacks.
Wear a little skilful make-up.
Never draw attention to yourself in public places by loud laughter, conversation, or clothing.
NEVER try to order a meal from a menu with I am with you.
Never laugh at me in front of my friends.
Never welcome me back in the evening with a smutty face, the smell of cooking in your hair, broken nails, and a whine about the day's trials and difficulties.

It's not unlikely that Bogarde's view is fairly representative of expected gender roles in the period, which seem straightforwardly horrid for women. But Kynaston tends to try to allow issues to retain their complexity and uncertainty, so he follows that letter with a contemporary response from a Woman's Own reader:

After reading Dirk Bogarde's article, I find that I am his ideal woman. The only snag is, I breathe? Do you think it matters?

Then there are the longer passages, interesting simultaneously as human stories and potent glimpses of the times, like this portrait of a fairly high-level official in the Board of Trade, from the memoirs of Roy Denman, at the time a fresh-faced Cambridge grad:

Mr Bacon had a square jaw, keen blue eyes and dressed, unusually for those days, with a certain elegance. These unfortunately were his main qualification for senior office. Before anyone from the outside world came to see him he would get his secretary to stack his desk high with files garnered from obscure cupboards in order to show how busy he was. With a weary sigh, a wave of his hand indicated to his visitor the crushing burden of administration which he daily bore. "These are difficult times," he would say in a resonant voice. "But if we all pull together the country will get through."

That view of the inefficiencies of the old boy network is only amplified by the description by a leading business manager of the "balanced cultivated life" that a high-level manager should lead:

He should have long weekends . . . he should play golf . . . he should garden . . . he should play bridge . . . he should read, he should do something different.

Needless to say, he thought nothing of the sort was necessary for lower-level employees.

And finally, I can't resist sharing this 1950 Mass-Observation report on attitudes toward Americans:

Cordial detestation. (Schoolmaster)

I like their generosity, but I dislike their wealthy condescension. (Forester)

I do not like their habit of preening themselves and their way of life before the world and of giving advice to the rest of us in a somewhat sermonising manner. (Civil servant)

I like them and consider them our absolute friends. They give me the feeling of being able to do anything if they put their mind to it. Nothing would be too big. (Clerk)

Something like horror though that is much too strong a word. Their strident vitality makes me want to shrink into myself. (Vicar)

As individuals charming. As a race "We are it." (Sales organiser)

I dislike their worship of Mammon and hugeness but one must admire their ability and success. (Retired civil servant)

I hate their "high pressure salesman" society. (Hearing aid technician)

I feel that the Americans are rather too big for their boots. (Civil servant)

The Americans are obviously becoming the Master race, whether we like it or not, so let's all begin to hero-worship them. (Designer)

The question seems to have driven the respondents to new heights of linguistic invention: "cordial detestation," "Strident vitality," "shrink into myself"--all unforgettable turns of phrase. Meanwhile, I have no idea what the sales organizer is trying to say, but I'm comfortable guessing that the designer at the end was questioned in a pub, when a few pints had blurred the lines separating sarcasm, irony, and weary cynicism.

Together, all the anecdotes and letters and journal entries and surveys add up to one of the most vivid and engrossing histories I've ever read, almost impossible to put down, even when it comes to detailed sections about labor relations and industrial history (or the mostly incomprehensible notes on cricket). And there's more to look forward to: Kynaston's announced plan is to write three more volumes that will take the story up to the election of Margaret Thatcher--the emotional, if not necessarily the actual, death of the welfare state that we see created in this first volume--under the overall title Tales of a New Jerusalem.

Here's to him having the time and energy to maintain this level of care and craft throughout. If so, he will have created an indispensable document, a true gift both for the English and for us Anglophiles. If we're lucky, someday someone will attempt to do the same for that period of American history.

Austerity Britain, part one

I've written a lot about how much I like history writing that delivers great portraits of historical figures, from the capsule descriptions that pepper C. V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War to Robert Caro's character study of Robert Moses in The Power Broker to the drawn-out examinations of key figures in Taylor Branch's America in the King Years trilogy. A good character-based history makes it impossible for a reader to forget that actual people were involved in these momentous episodes--and that the decisions they made were shaped by their own perspective. It's the opposite of the Tolstoyan view of history as an impersonal force, and it's what I want in historical writing--most of the time.

Nearly as attractive to me, though, is a totally different sort of history, one that is based less on studies of specific people and more on a detailed look at the daily life of a society. What did people eat? How did they get to work? What did they think about that work once they got there? What were their houses like? What did their kids do for fun? That sort of quotidian detail fascinates me, even about relatively recent times--it's a novelist's level of detail, the inessential material that creates the subtle, believable background. A historian who can carefully recreate that lost background, then flesh out the knowledge, opinions, and hopes of the people who lived there, can save the past from both the gloop of nostalgia and the relative abstraction of big-event history and enable a reader to feel the real life of an era.

In his enormous, 630-page Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (2007), which I've referred to already a couple of times in the past week, David Kynaston aims at that level of re-creation. While not shortchanging the truly momentous events of the period--the creation of the welfare state being the greatest one--he wants more than anything to make us understand the details of daily life in the straitened circumstances of post-war Britain. What was it like to continue living under rations after you'd won the war? How did the housing shortage affect growing families? What was it like, on the first day of the National Health Service, to walk out of a doctor's office without paying? What was it like to go to a neighbor's to watch a football match on a tiny new television?

To answer that sort of question, Kynaston most often turns directly to the words of those who lived through the period. He has seemingly read every contemporary diary, memoir, and letter available--from a satisfyingly wide range of class and situation--and he quotes them liberally. He also draws heavily on the fascinating, insightful reports of the government-sponsored Mass-Observation survey, which combined directed questioning with organized eavesdropping; the collected statements Kynaston plucks out of the M-O reports are often strikingly open and honest. He's also good at buttressing his points with polling, economic, and government figures, the hard data providing a foundation for the more personal perspectives.

From the opening chapter's account of the V-E Day Celebrations, which are so closely observed that you share both the early enthusiasm and the later weariness of the participants, through the brutally harsh winter of 1947, worsened by low coal and food rations, to the eve of the Attlee government's fall in 1951, Kynaston absolutely recreates a world, in, it seems, its own voice. It's a stupendous achievement, and one that he manages while never being anything less than engrossing. This is in part because he has a novelist's eye for anecdote--in fact, I was first led to the book through a piece in the Times of London in which Kynaston explained the book's genesis in terms of novels:

I now envisaged the project as owing something to two types of artistic inspiration: the thickly textured panorama of a 19th-century “loose, baggy monster” realist novel, with perhaps a dash of Frith’s Derby Day painting; and the roman-fleuve of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time novels. I wanted to write a rolling narrative in which “high” history jostles with “low”, in which significant events and themes are viewed as much as possible through the prism of the individual witness or participant.

He's done just that, letting us see history through scores of small, human moments--most of them lost until now--that in aggregate tell a larger, more complicated national story.

So he gives us telling asides:

The early council housing was "the Cinderella of the British housing stock;" a broadcaster notes the reinstatement of the perpetually gloomy weather report (which had been suppressed during the war) by announcing "news of an old friend--the large depression;" a porter, soon after the Labour victory in 1945, replies to a snooty public school boy's order to tote his trunk, "No, that sort of thing is all over now;" a woman writes in her diary after a Laurel and Hardy film that "Hardy--the fat one--is revolting;" Noel Coward, resigned to the Labour victory, says, "It may not be a bad idea for the Labour boys to hold the baby. . . . I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable during the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty that it will be so."

The rest, including more stories, tomorrow.

"You learn stuff from books, don't you?"

The uncommonly nice weather defeated my best intentions this weekend, so you'll have to wait a day or two for a full post on David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945-51. But while I was reading outside today, I did come across another passage that makes a nice appendix to Friday's post about the general public's reading habits. One of the many diarists on whom Kynaston draws for his remarkable history, Kenneth Preston, writes about stopping in at a second-hand bookshop in the spring of 1947:

Whilst we were having a look round we heard the voices of two women in a really incredible conversation. One yelled out to another, who was evidently looking at some books, "Nah! then, don't buy all e' booiks." The other said "Nay, we don't read much at our 'ouse." The other replied "No! we don't. I've nivver read a book i'my life." The other said "No! I often wish I'd read a bit more. You learn stuff from books, don't you?" It seems incredible that there could be anyone who had never read a book. The woman who said she hadn't, Kath said, would be over fifty. These are the folk who vote!

Preston, a "middle-aged English teacher" at a good school, reveals his class blinders in the last line, but his earlier surprise isn't that foreign to contemporary discussions of America's reading. And though I know (and, as I noted Friday, ultimately accept) that there are people who never read, I have to admit to sharing some of Preston's shock every time I think about a life without books. All that richness and knowledge, utterly drained away. I suspect that feeling may bear a resemblance to what religious believers feel when they contemplate the life of an atheist--and perhaps I'm just a pessimist, but in neither case do I expect proselytizing to have much long-term effect.

But I hate to close a weekend on a down note--and there's plenty to share from Austerity Britain that's funny and entertaining, even in the midst of rationing, shortages, and weariness. So I'll share a moment Kynaston relates from the spring of 1946, taken from the diary of a middle-aged mother in Surbiton:

"Bananas. Yes, bananas!! The first for 6 yrs. They are Robin's [her son's] really, as they are only allowed for under 18's . . .Robin says the boys are bringing the peel to school & putting it down for others to slip on. The monkeys." Two days later, "Robin came in to room with banana & wanted to know which end to start peeling it from!! . . . We told him from stem end, & later I wondered if that was right."

So much of the texture of daily life under rationing is packed into those couple of sentences--and the fans of classic comedy among you were surely glad to learn that even children who hadn't seen bananas for years knew instantly what to do with the peels. Bertie Wooster (or at least Gussie Fink-Nottle) would be proud. The human spirit, after all, is hard to crush.

'Cos I ain't got no interest in them

One of the first things I read this morning was an article that Leila at Bookshelves of Doom pointed me to that highlighted the dismal results of an AP poll about American reading habits. Twenty-seven percent of adults surveyed, the poll revealed, hadn't read a book in the past year, and the median number of books read overall was four (though the figure jumped to seven when non-readers were excluded). Now, for those of us who love and/or make our living from books, those are unquestionably depressing figures. Though we can take heart from learning the unsurprising news that Democrats and liberals read more than Republicans and conservatives, we also have to worry that older folks read more books than younger people--not a good sign for the future.

But at the same time, it's important to remember that reading has always fought an uphill battle--against illiteracy, poverty, and lack of time long ago, and against long commutes, big-screen TVs, and video games today. Just as there have always been those of us to whom reading is a central part of life, there have also been those who couldn't or wouldn't open a book.

While I do think reading, any sort of reading, is deeply valuable, I've never been a Cynthia-Ozick-style literature-as-medicine sort: I want people reading because they want to read, because they think there may be something in a novel that expands on the movie version, because they're curious about what Grandpa saw in the war, or because Johnny Damon has great hair. Reading that is clearly pitched as a form of self-improvement can too quickly become reading as punishment--an unlikely recipe for the sort of quiet, contemplative inwardness that reading generates at its best. That's not saying that we should be complacent, especially if we hope to make a living from books in thirty years, but at the same time we have to be realistic about the competition for attention that books face--and we can't delude ourselves into thinking that there was ever a golden age when everyone was reading serious books.

I was thinking about all this on the train this morning when I came across a brief note about reading habits in David Kynaston's Austerity Britain. Kynaston reports the results of research in 1947 into reading habits by the government-sponsored public opinion survey group Mass-Observation (an unparalleled source of detailed information about British life in the 1940s). He opens with a result that reading advocates would be happy to elicit today:

"Reading" was given as the favourite hobby by three in ten of the middle class, by two in ten of the skilled working class, and by one in ten of the unskilled.

Though I don't know for sure, I imagine that the number for all categories would be lower today in both the United States and Britain--but when you think of how little was competing for leisure-time attention with books in those days, the figures don't seem quite so daunting. At the same time, almost half the 1947 sample, Kynaston reveals, admitted to never reading books at all; the reasons they gave for not reading, like so many of the verbatim responses collected by Mass-Observation questioners, are fascinating:

None of them subjects is interesting to me. All I like is gangster stories, though there's precious much chance of reading here. Three rooms we got and three kids knocking around. No convenience, no nothing except water. I'm glad to get out of the house I can tell you.

Cos I ain't got no interest in them--they all apparently lead up to the same thing.

I'm not very good at reading, I never was. I've never liked it some'ow.

Too long. I like to get straight into a story. I have started books and I have to read through the first pages two or three time. I like to get stuck straight into a story--there's too much preliminary if you see what I mean.

I find the next-to-last respondent almost unbearably poignant--"some'ow" he doesn't like something he was never good at, that he probably was never taught how to do properly. The respondent who might read gangster stories, were it not for the chaos of the house, could be a contemporary parent--and he reminds me of another Mass-Observation subject Kynaston quotes elsewhere, this one on the subject of religion:

Well, I believe in God, but I can't say I'm religious. You get a bit hasty when you've so many children.

The final respondent, though, I think I could help--I know lots of novels that "get straight into a story," with no messing around. If anyone wants to lend me their time machine, I'll load it up with Lawrence Block novels (and maybe, if I want to really freak him out, some Murakami), pop back to 1947, and drop them off at that guy's local library. Anything I should be sure to bring back?

The past is another country; they do things differently there.

Thanks to Geoff Dyer, today I kept vaguely turning over the idea of someday rereading D. H. Lawrence, despite being fairly confident that the specifics of his personal philosophy--on which the whole of his work is hung--are likely to seem, on being re-encountered in adulthood, rather unconvincing. Then, while I was reading David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 (2007) on the train, I came across the following description of one of the Labour Party's most prominent thinkers of the war years, Evan Durbin:

[Durbin] once remarked that his three greatest pleasures were "food, sleep and sex" but accused D. H. Lawrence of "shallow abstractions" in relation to "freedom in sexual relations."

That is more or less how I remember Lawrence's position, too: a vague positing of sex itself as a primary liberating experience, a crucial step towards a truly free life. Heady stuff at the time, presumably, but quickly sounding silly these days unless taken in small doses.

Ultimately, the problem with Lawrence's novels, from what I remember, is the problem that plagues any writer who knows the way people ought to live: the novel--which as a form thrives on growth, discovery, and above all openness--is warped by the character (or narrative voice) who doesn't need to change, doesn't need to learn, because he already sees through the illusions that bind those around him. Speech and incident become didactic demonstration, drama becomes melodrama, and despite some very powerful passages, the whole is rendered false. In his journal for 1987, Anthony Powell (who, incidentally, agrees with Dyer that Lawrence's letters are great reading) puts it more succinctly:

The reader [is] always, so to speak, tripping over the Lawrence self-image, which at once reduces conviction, much of novel being in any case ludicrously melodramatic.

Powell, who had recently re-read Women in Love, also notes,

Red-hot emotions as usual much overdone, tho' I suppose could be argued people to some extent behave like that nowadays, breaking up marriages because sexual relations not for the moment absolutely ideal. That would, in fact, have greatly disturbed Lawrence himself.

Powell's letting his grouchy conservative side show, but Lawrence isn't the only person who would have been disturbed--and here I return to where I started this post, Austerity Britain, from which learned today that even in 1948, two decades after Lawrence's death, a Gallup poll revealed that only 27 percent of British citizens thought that divorce by simple mutual consent should be allowed. To broaden the picture, Kynaston, as he does throughout the book, turns straight to the actual words of the people, revealing a batch of their responses to related survey question, "How do you feel about divorce?"

It depends on the people. If either is to blame they should have a divorce.

Well, I mean to say, it's a good thing if the couple are unhappy.

No. A man takes a wife for better or worse, doesn't he?

I wouldn't grant divorce. They should get on with it.

I feel very sorry for the kiddies. It's very hard on them but if Mother and Father can't agree it only makes the children suffer worse--they suffer inwardly.

I think it's an awful thing to happen to anyone--everyone turns away from a divorced woman.

Better to divorce than live unhappily.

I don't like the idea of a divorce--all the publicity and scandal.

In some cases, yes. Marriage is a gamble anyway.

Austerity Britain is rich with moments like that, phrases that give such direct, authentic access to the past that they pull you up short. A gamble . . . scandal . . . everyone turns away. Even though at points 1947 can feel very familiar, it was a very different time; a well-crafted work of history, like Kynaston's, works to make sure we never forget that.

And though Powell's probably right that Lawrence would have disapproved of free-and-easy divorce, he surely would have approved of the context in which public opinion was changed and the stigma lost--a gradual but dramatic expansion of an individual's right to freely make decisions about his or her life. That's the side Lawrence was fighting for, after all, and despite his occasional silliness, like everyone who plays a part in shifting the terms of the debate, he deserves to be remembered well for it.

So maybe I will reread The Rainbow someday after all.