A Bit of EngLit

The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002, John Bayley (Duckworth 2005)

I didn’t try this book meaning to sneer at it. Honest. Although I do think that EngLit is a despicable, deplorable and downright disgusting subject, not everyone to study or teach the subject down the decades has been a bad writer and confused thinker. But the chances of finding good writing and clear thinking have got smaller and smaller down those decades. Paradoxically, as more and more women and Scholars of Color have enriched EngLit, standards of intellect and rigor have plummeted rather than soared. I can’t explain why this should be so, but I hoped John Bayley (1925-2015) might have escaped the mysterious deterioration. When this book was published, he was an old white man, not a young Black woman, so I hoped his writing might justify at least a bit of the hype on the back cover: “for decades [Bayley] has been known to readers the world over as perhaps the shrewdest and subtlest of literary critics. … The Power of Delight is a collection sure to become a benchmark of modern criticism.”

My hopes were dashed. Bayley is a bore and a bad writer. His writing isn’t sonorous but somniferous: plodding, platitudinous and prosy:

The act of liking or disliking a novelist can still seem a sudden intimacy: whether or not you get on is your own affair, and as used to be said, there is no accounting for tastes.

But it was not at all untypical of Turgenev.

As a child and young man Orwell had always had a bad chest and was in a condition later to be described by a doctor as pre-tubercular.

And amid the plodding, the platitudes and the prosiness, Bayley makes some big mistakes:

The most memorable scenes in [Nineteen Eighty-Four] are the delight a Victorian “snowstorm” paperweight gives to Winston and his girlfriend, and its destruction by the Thought Police … – “The Last Puritan: George Orwell (1903-1950)”, pgs. 96-7

It’s quite an achievement to misremember what you claim to be “the most memorable scenes” in a novel. First, the paperweight in Nineteen Eighty-Four contains a piece of red coral, not a “snowstorm” scene; second, Winston’s girlfriend Julia never shows any delight in it, only passing interest; third, when a thug under the command of the Thought Police destroys it, Orwell uses the delicacy of the coral to give a special poignancy to the destruction:

There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! – Nineteen Eighty-Four, Book III, ch. 9

Either Bayley hadn’t read the novel for decades or he was getting forgetful: he was over 70 when he misremembered Orwell’s “most memorable scenes” in 2001 for the New York Review of Books. But why didn’t an editor or fact-checker spot the misremembering? Bad stuff.

And besides that cock-up, Bayley proved that Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the only thing by Orwell that he’d long forgotten. In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Orwell condemns “staleness of imagery”, “lack of precision” and clumsy or contradictory metaphors. Here’s a brief example of how Bayley could combine all three with a magisterial hand:

[A]s in the case of D.H. Lawrence, not to mention so many geniuses of the first romantic period, tuberculosis and the arts can go hand in hand and can turn out to be the most productive of bedfellows.

Eh? How on earth can tuberculosis and the arts “go hand in hand”? Tuberculosis is a microbe or a set of symptoms; the arts are a wildly diverse set of cultural activities. But perhaps the mind-boggling task of growing and uniting suitable hands explains why these two entities then became “bedfellows”. They had to sleep off their evolutionary exertions. Sleeping is what bedfellows usually do, after all. But in that case, they’re not being “productive”, are they?

Bad stuff again. Later in the book, Bayley himself writes of “the dull pretentiousness of nine-tenths of the stuff that gets written nowadays about English Literature.” I wouldn’t call him pretentious, but he is dull and he isn’t a good writer. I was surprised to learn that he’d been at Eton, because I would have thought he’d’ve received a rigorous training in logic and language there. Obviously not. But then I can remember being surprised that Michael Holroyd, biographer of Lytton Strachey, had been at Eton too. Like Bayley, Holroyd is a bad and boring writer; like Holroyd’s, Bayley’s flaws seem worse by contrast with the genius of his subjects. I wanted to read and enjoy this book, because Bayley writes about a lot of important and interesting literary figures: everyone from Charles Dickens to Nikolai Gogol by way of Anthony Burgess and John Betjeman. But I couldn’t read it because I couldn’t enjoy the bad and boring writing.

Still, all this confirms my low opinion of EngLit: the rot was obviously there long before women and Scholars of Color parachuted in amid the smoke-and-mirrors being nailed to the mephitic mast of French theory. Success in the humanities, alas, does not depend on being able to write or think well, but on being able to play office politics well. Bayley must have been very good at office politics and at sucking up to the right people. In short, I’m not a Bayley-ver: he was a bore and a bad writer.

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• “Politics and the English Language” (1946) by George Orwell

Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Posturing Proctoglossist — discussion of Terry Eagleton, who makes Bayley read like Orwell

• Mind the Gap — a review of Lytton Strachey: A Biography (1967) by Michael Holroyd

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