In The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) Ben Lerner reflects on the enduring prestige of poetry and the widespread popular belief that poets have a purchase, however slight, on immortality. Further, that to be a published poet is to have one’s humanity objectively endorsed, if only by a handful of readers, many of whom are likely to be fellow poets. He argues that all poems are essentially exercises in failure because no amount of virtuosity can overcome the fact that (as he puts it) “poetry isn’t hard. It’s impossible”, and this is because the “abstract potential” of a poem is compromised the moment it becomes part of the world, a betrayal of the original impulse to write. All poets are destined to fail, and to fail as a poet is to fail not only artistically but also existentially. The stakes, in fact, are high.

In 1965, at the age of 27, the impecunious poet Ian Hamilton joined the Times Literary Supplement as a part-time “Special Writer”, later becoming the Poetry and Fiction Editor. During his eight years in the job he became embroiled in a fraught episode in our cultural history, the so-called “poetry wars”.

Hamilton had already made his mark as founder and editor of The Review, (1962-72) a poetry magazine much admired for its sharp, provocative criticism. The target was poetic mediocrity and the approach was quite merciless; one debut collection was briskly despatched as “toweringly pretentious, intricately boring and painstakingly derivative”.

He championed poetry that combined emotional intensity and intellectual precision, insisting that the perfect poem should contain “the maximum amount of suffering [and] the maximum amount of control”. Poems like his own, many of which are about his father’s death from cancer when Hamilton was a boy, or about his first wife’s severe mental illness. Here is “Awakening”:

Your head, so sick, is leaning against mine,
So sensible. You can’t remember
Why you’re here, nor do you recognise
These helping hands.
My love.
The world encircles us. We’re losing ground.

Hamilton’s voice is quiet, precise, tender and unconsoling—few poets could write like this, though many tried. Clive James, a regular contributor to The Review, observed in the final issue that Hamilton’s less-talented followers tended to produce:

. . . a new strain of super-resistant sub-microscopic bacterial poem that can bore you to death without showing you anything to fight against. Committing no blunders, such poems can’t be criticised.

Other poems certainly could be. Hamilton had been appalled when Penguin published The Mersey Sound (1967) featuring the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, and even more appalled when the anthology sold more than half a million copies. We may detect an unpleasant whiff of elitism, protectionism and chauvinism in this reaction. Hamilton, who came from an unprivileged background, was a graduate of Keble College Oxford and the pop culture poems he derided were mostly by working-class writers who had attended art school rather than a university (McGough was the exception, having studied at Hull). Their work was unschooled and artless and, insisted admirers, all the better for it, more authentic. Clive James, noting this cultural shift, observed to Hamilton: “It’s better to be a half-witted Liverpudlian with a bedside manner than a mandarin with a sneer.”

Acomparable shift had already taken place in fiction following the critic Cyril Connolly’s complaint in 1955 that the English novel was characterised by three “colossal, almost irremediable” defects: thinness of material, poverty of style and lack of power. All three, he argued, arose from the fact that most published authors came from what he called (anticipating James) the mandarin class—a narrow social stratum with little experience of life beyond public school, Oxbridge and a few years’ professional dalliance in London or the provinces.

Things had changed by the end of that decade with the appearance of an all-male cohort of working-class writers with Northern roots, notably John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow. A briefly reinvigorated British cinema brought these new writers to a mass audience through a succession of gritty screen adaptations which, like their source novels, reflected rather than promoted social change, but these changes were profound and, it seemed at the time, durable. British poetry had to wait a decade for a similar change to take place.

Hamilton’s debut collection The Visit was published by Faber in 1970, a slim volume of 33 short poems, representing around half of the modest total he would publish in his lifetime. They are all memorable. This is “Newscast”:

The Vietnam war drags on
In one corner of our living-room.
The conversation turns
To take it in.
Our smoking heads
Drift back to us
From the grey fires of South-east Asia.

Subtle and unsettling, this snags and haunts the imagination, capturing a time and a mood with minimum fuss or apparent effort. The quality of Hamilton’s poetry has never been in any doubt, but his role as an influential gatekeeper was already looking less assured. He said at the time:

Most of what is out there today isn’t really poetry . . . It might be a form of writing that is engaging and sharp and entertaining, but it is not poetry. It’s important to make these distinctions.

But these were the very distinctions that were being swept away. Long-held critical assumptions supporting such distinctions were looking shaky; an unbridgeable chasm was forming between the kind of poetry approved by Hamilton and what was circulating in the mainstream.

Hamilton found himself increasingly out of step with the times and cast as a reactionary figure, although his position strikes one as more stoical than elitist. He saw something he truly cared about and fully understood, something at which he was preternaturally gifted and to which he had dedicated much of his life, successfully appropriated by (as he saw it) the untalented, the incompetent and the rowdy. The battle had been lost, although the war was far from over.

In 1971, a large number of poets associated with the country-wide British Poetry Revival (BPR), chief among them Eric Mottram, Bob Cobbing and Jeff Nuttall, became members of the Poetry Society, a rather stuffy organisation founded in 1909 and traditionally hostile to modernist poetry. Following elections, the radical anarcho-modernists took over, transforming the Society’s run-down Earl’s Court premises into a counter-cultural hub, subsidised by an increasingly alarmed and embarrassed Arts Council of Great Britain.

The BPR was in part a reaction to the conservative leanings of the “Movement” poets such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings and Thom Gunn, who featured in the influential anthology New Lines (1956) edited by Robert Conquest. They and the other contributors, all Oxbridge graduates, differed enormously as poets but had in common a general rejection of modernism and the experimental, and what they saw as the rhetorical excesses of 1940s poets, particularly the compacted obscurities of Dylan Thomas. White, middle class, mostly heterosexual, Europhobic, unsentimental but nostalgic, they strike the modern reader as cultural Brexiteers avant la lettre. BPR poets, on the other hand, were united in their commitment to the European avant-garde while influenced by earlier British modernists such as David Jones and Basil Bunting. (For a detailed and scholarly history of the period, Poetry Wars by Peter Barry is recommended.)

The battles between the establishment and the Poetry Society revolutionaries  were conducted through editorials, correspondence, at public readings and private meetings. There were rancorous exchanges at boozy gatherings in smoke-filled rooms (the majority of BPR poets were male), insults were flung, reputations trashed, friendships broken, bitter feuds initiated and conscientiously maintained. One observer compared the goings-on to “a knife-fight in a phone booth”.

With Mottram installed as editor, the Society’s magazine Poetry Review immediately became a showcase for BPR writers, to the dismay of many traditionalist subscribers. A snapshot of what was going on in Earl’s Court can be found in testimony given by an anonymous Poetry Society staff member to the 1976 Witt Report (the Arts Council’s investigation into the organisation), cited by Barry:

She said she did not know Jeff Nuttall very well, but when he had given a reading at the Society she had found broken eggs on the rostrum next morning, a tin of golden syrup underneath the piano, with a doll stuck in the syrup and there was talcum powder everywhere. Mr Nuttall had also run around in his underwear. There were only twelve people at the reading.

While siding with the Hamilton line on poetry I find the chaotic energy of the insurgents irresistible. I would have enjoyed Nuttall’s messy, subversive, Dada-inspired performance, like watching Vic and Bob host Antiques Roadshow.

Hamilton’s disenchantment with contemporary poetry informed plans for his last magazine The New Review (1974-1979), which would focus less exclusively on verse. A glossy monthly publication with the highest production values and a dazzling roster of contributors, it was a lavishly-funded establishment flagship that was despised by its many vocal critics. That it ran for five years is a tribute to the editor’s commitment because, like its predecessor, The New Review had its own destruction built in. The whole project was doomed from the outset because Arts Council grants, although generous, were payable in arrears only after each issue appeared, which meant the publication was permanently mired in debt. With bailiffs thronging the staircase at the Greek Street offices, Hamilton struggled valiantly to keep things afloat through what he later described as the “trashy years”, recalling “the raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love-affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty”. Clowns to the left of him; brokers to the right—there he stood, stuck in the middle.

The Society radicals were eventually ousted (or, in their view, staged a principled walk-out) in March 1977 and for the next 30 years or so mainstream English poetry would remain predominantly non-experimental and anti-modernist. A victory, of sorts, for the establishment. Mottram and his colleagues are still largely excluded from accounts of the period. But they cannot be entirely written off because, although the modernist tendency was certainly sidelined, subsequent decades saw the emergence of new generations of experimental poets with their roots in the dissident modernism of 1970s Earl’s Court.

Neither the conservative nor the radical poets of the 1970s were endorsed or promoted in the influential Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982; edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison, both New Review alumni), and this seemed to draw a line under the conflict. You might say the Hamilton side won the war but lost the peace, and that’s no bad thing. In the late ’80s and early ’90s a series of anthologies prompted fresh interest in the Revival poets, and increasing attention was paid to neglected British modernists. Among the most noteworthy publications to reflect the current pluralist landscape is Identity Parade (2010), an anthology edited by the late Roddy Lumsden, featuring 85 British and Irish poets and—perhaps for the first time, and significantly—more women than men. This volume supports a view that the future of adventurous anglophone poetry rests largely in the hands of the marginal, non-native, non-establishment outsiders who are radically reimagining what forms poetry can take.

Despite well-meaning claims by many, poetry is not for everyone. But it certainly can be for anyone, and today there are fewer barriers, if any, to sharing new work with readers—the internet has no critical gatekeepers. Instagram versifiers with millions of followers don’t snag my interest, but the contemporary spectrum can accommodate Rupi Kaur, J.H. Prynne and everybody in between.

The same divisions that led to the poetry wars resurface every few years, as yet another youngish combative poet claims that they “ruffle a few feathers” in the “poetry establishment” by not conforming to a supposed set of conservative values, values which they aim to overthrow before, in due course, becoming the establishment themselves. But the fight has gone out of both sides, if there really are sides any more. There’s a general acceptance that serious poetry is a broad church, although the clergy may sometimes outnumber the congregation.

Ian Hamilton died in 2001 and his posthumous reputation as a poet seems secure, with a definitive Collected Poems (2009) edited by Alan Jenkins and a forthcoming Collected Prose. There’s a fine website (www.ianhamilton.org) confirming his achievements. He has never failed as a poet, although he is no longer a charismatic cultural influencer, no longer the guv’nor of Greek Street, and he appears to have no literary heirs. He stands alone, missed, admired and respected, a school of one. 

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In short, where the reception of Proust is concerned, the English have form. It would be a truth pretty well universally acknowledged that À la recherche du temps perdu is a “masterpiece” were, for example, it not for the undiluted nonsense of Evelyn Waugh. In a letter to John Betjeman, he wrote of Proust, “the chap was plain barmy”. His barminess, Waugh maintained, consisted in being constitutionally unable or wilfully refusing to narrate things in the right order. In another letter, joshing with Nancy Mitford, Waugh casts the barmy chap as a lamebrain simpleton: “I am reading Proust for the first time—in English of course—and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time.” Proust suffered from all manner of ailments, but dyschronometria certainly wasn’t one of them. The challenge here lies in swallowing one’s astonishment at the number of times Brideshead Revisited has been described as “Proustian” without throwing up.

There have of course been notable and even noble exceptions. Eton and Oxford educated, but wonderfully impervious to the narcissistic strain of English exceptionalism, Anthony Powell was a confessed disciple. One’s heart goes out to Cyril Connolly: “I tried to talk like Proust, think like Proust, and write like Proust, and had to destroy it all later.” In the early years of English fandom, there was a lot of epiphanic swooning over madeleines (in the draft manuscript it was originally a biscotte, while Proust himself much preferred croissants). But there was also a class aspect to this, bound up with notions of “good taste”. Virginia Woolf’s adulation of an exquisitely refined Proust had in part to do with her supercilious detestation of that disgustingly vulgar James Joyce (“a self-taught workingman” and “ultimately nauseating”). I wonder what Woolf made of Albertine’s “casser . . . le pot” or the audible grunts of the coupling of Charlus and Jupien alongside the masturbating Leopold Bloom.

And then there is that later English Proust, the one allegedly good for your mental health. I can well imagine Proust laughing out loud at the tale of a student friend of mine whose cure for chronic insomnia wasn’t Proust’s (a cocktail of drugs which came close to killing him), but Proust: the first page of the Recherche, itself about falling asleep and waking up, was enough to send him off.

On the other hand, I very much doubt that Proust would have been well disposed to How Proust Can Change Your Life, the point of which can only be that the Recherche is best understood as a contribution to the genre of the self-help manual. Proust falling out of his bed in the cork-lined room when presented with the notion that he might be of some use in couple-therapy, as the author of a primer on “how to be happy in love” is one thing. But an irrecoverable loss of the will to live would surely have been the response to the suggestion that his book could plausibly be read as offering a lesson in “how to suffer successfully”. Alas, this sort of thing still clings to the reception of Proust, including the reception of the most recent incarnation of English Proust, the ambitious and admirable BBC radio adaptation broadcast last year

Adaptation confronts its makers with the risky business of abbreviation. Prima facie, compressed Proust is not just a problem but a contradiction in terms. From story to syntax, Proust’s is an art of expansion, detour and return that locks the reader into the repeated experience of forgetting and remembering, losing and (re)finding—the very things the novel is fundamentally about. Yet only the purist intent on putting adaptation out of business is going to use this as a sort of veto. Ellipsis (a figure often used by Proust himself) is simply an unavoidable function of the conventions of the adapting medium. For example, the only film maker who aimed at doing the whole thing on screen was Joseph Losey, an ambition sadly unfulfilled because the funding wasn’t there. What remains of the project is the screenplay by Harold Pinter (described as a million and a half words brought down to 455 shots). It is a brilliant mosaic of fragments as well as a miracle of reduction to a form of Pinteresque dialogue, but with the inevitable question: is this Pinterised Proust, and, if so, what do we feel about such a creature?

The 2019 BBC radio adaptation is also a reduction, in the form of a radio play in ten parts with a voice-over narrator. It is an example of what in broadcasting parlance is now called the Long Listen, a niche marketing term, but which here also expresses solidarity with a higher cause, as a gesture on behalf of what Proust’s great work asks of its reader: to find time for his intricate exploration of time. “Who has the time to sit down and read Proust cover to cover?” is the question put by the adaptation’s director, Celia de Wolff. It is a fair question, though whether what she calls “event radio” provides what she also terms “something comprehensive” depends on what you mean by the latter. Where the plot of the Recherche is concerned, what we get is basically a structured anthology of the key stages and turning-points in the story of a young man exiting boyhood, embarking on a “search”, and who, after multiple digressions and much delay, completes the quest in the equation of the “true life” with the discovery of the artistic vocation. In short, a skeletal narrative compendium which effectively places the work in a tradition to which it indubitably belongs—that of the European Bildungsroman, the genre of the “initiation” novel, but with most of the detours excised.

However, the play’s the thing, and it’s thus best to look beyond the bare bones of story line to the real core of the production: the dramatic personae and the acting. The cast itself is stellar and the quality of the acting for the most part excellent. The Proust snobs are terrific, with a scintillating Oriane de Guermantes and a hilarious Madame Verdurin, along with a magnificently pompous Norpois. Simon Russell Beale’s rendering of Charlus (sometimes called Proust’s Falstaff; the analogy has its limits) is stupendous. On first appearance there is an alarming hint of English sitcom bonhomie but it’s a false alarm. Beale gives us the full-works Charlus: amiable, witty, seductive, outrageous, haughty, abject, demented, and finally broken. It’s an unforgettable performance, climaxing in the at once affecting and absurd roll-call of the now dead gents and aristos who have cropped up here and there throughout the course of the novel: “Hannibal de Bréaute, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!” Doudeauville? It’s the name of a town and an erstwhile ancestral estate, but you have to believe this one came to Proust while in dodoland.

The elephant in the room is of course that artistically difficult and complicated beast: the Narrator who is also a character evolving in the time of the narrative. The character “Marcel” (a naming that opens a whole can of worms) is divided between two actors, the boy Marcel and the older narrator. The former is unfortunately all too often stamped with (ha!) a Brideshead inflection; the childhood world of Combray is a cosseted one, but the boy didn’t attend Eton. The latter falls to one of our greatest living actors, Derek Jacobi, who brings his hugely versatile gifts to bear on two key dimensions of the narrating voice: rhythm and register. The key challenge is Proust’s notoriously elaborate syntax. Jacobi provides a master class in how to navigate these hypotactic structures. First comes rhythmic modulation as “melody” (what Proust called “the melody of the song beneath the words”). But there is also something else, linked to Proust’s life-long breathing difficulties. Walter Benjamin shrewdly observed that “asthma became part of his art . . . Proust’s syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces his fear of suffering”. Benjamin’s point is that as we read we hear someone listening to himself breathing as he writes and sometimes pausing for breath. Jacobi gives a hint of this with beautifully placed mini-hesitations. It qualifies as one of the finest tributes a practising artist could pay to another.

With a work like Proust’s, “adaptation”, however carefully it combines the inventive and the sensitive, will always be a problem. Yet, when all is said and done, and given the constraints, this is a signal achievement, an authentic and valuable contribution to the story of “English Proust”. Where there is genuine cause not just for lament but for outright lamentation is the spectacle of the commentariat reaching yet again for therapeutic Proust. One reviewer saw fit to consult a specialist in “psychology” assuring us of the incomparable benefits to be had from the interaction of “epic audio” and “neural response”. But the specialist then ups the ante with the claim that there is greater “richness to a voice than there is to plain text”. This would have bemused Proust, who wrote ardently of silent reading as what brings us to “the threshold of spiritual life”. Whatever the neural benefits of listening, the passive consumption of the latter is no match for the more arduous but rewarding challenge of reading. Recall the Gallimard ad for its collection of the classics, the poster featuring a young woman lost in the Recherche and with the caption: “Soyez jeune, lisez la Pléiade”. The clue is in the word “lisez”.

In the meantime, as counter measures to what in another connection Samuel  Beckett termed “pitiless therapeutic bombardment”, there’s always the Monty Python “All-England Summarise Proust Competition”, that gloriously anarchic parody, the Recherche as if edited by an English Ubu Roi. Or if your thing for stress relief is a short, sharp shock to the neural pathways, we can go all in, with a Proust in the service of English poetry. When in 2015 Al Johnson (some call him Boris) announced his intention of becoming an MP again, writer Nick Tyrone marked the moment with a poem organised around four basic components: Johnson’s statement of intent to run; a substantial chunk of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech; a list of “10 top things to do in London”, and—the jewel in the crown—“a random section of text from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu”. But if this is all too much, calmer shores beckon courtesy of Proust himself. I began my listening Odyssey by doing what Proust famously describes in the very first sentence of his novel: I went to bed early.

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The Concept of Anxiety is one of Kierkegaard’s most notoriously difficult books. Often paired with an equally demanding later work, The Sickness Unto Death, together they show how feelings of anxiety and despair point towards nothing less than an account of the self and human freedom. Here, I want to draw out just one key theme: the distinction Kierkegaard draws between fear and anxiety (Angest, sometimes translated as “dread”). Fear is of something specific: that approaching bear; those cancer test results; whether you are targeted in your employer’s upcoming redundancy exercise. Anxiety pertains to something unspecific: a feeling of unease lacking a determinate object. Kierkegaard (or his pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis) compares it to dizziness, “the dizziness of freedom”; the paralysing potential of gazing into the abyss of possibility. The paralysing element is captured in Vigilius’s memorable claim that anxiety “can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream”.

What is the relevance of this to Covid-19? At first glance, we might think that the natural reaction to the coronavirus is fear. Isn’t Covid-19, and our worry about it, absolutely something specific? We’ve been worrying about catching it, and if we catch it, either dying of it ourselves, or passing it on to someone, perhaps someone we know and love, who may be more likely to die of it than we are.

But as time moves on, our fears have perhaps morphed into anxieties. Beyond the tragedy of the death toll, our concerns are now increasingly moving to worries about the economic consequences (very much including their impact on public health). You might fear the loss of your job; whether, post-furlough, there will be any job for you to come back to. But suppose your fears are realised. Your reaction to the job loss may not be simply to seek out an identical role in a different company. You may now start to wonder whether more of the same is really what you want or need. And this lack of orientation may be experienced more as Kierkegaard describes anxiety: as simultaneously repelling and attracting. On the one hand, you are disoriented: the certainties of everyday life are no longer there. On the other, you are faced with a whole range of possibilities that previously you had not seriously considered as possibilities. Welcome to the world of anxiety, which is the human condition: the dizzying effects of freedom. As Vigilius puts it, anxiety is “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”: a desire for what one fears and a fear of what one desires. Yet, Vigilius claims, to learn to be anxious in the right way is a task for every individual as part of the process of becoming a self.

Freedom and necessity are two of a trio of poles that The Sickness Unto Death considers to be at the heart of what makes up the human self. The others are the finite and the infinite; and the temporal and the eternal. Some of Kierkegaard’s reflections on time also seem pertinent to our current situation.

It has frequently been observed that time feels different in lockdown. Not just in the obvious sense—avoiding the two-hour commute as we work from home—but in the sense that the everyday distinctions many had taken for granted—the distinctions between work and home time—have for many become more blurred. Now that the office is the living room, leaving work stuff at work—both physically and mentally—becomes harder.

Some of Kierkegaard’s richest reflections on our relationship to time are to be found in a text much less famous than The Sickness Unto Death, namely his discourses on the lilies of the field and the birds of the air mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel. Kierkegaard returns time and again to Matthew 6: 24-34, Jesus’s advice not to worry about the future. Urging us to turn our attention to the birds of the air, who neither sow, reap or gather into barns, and yet are fed; and the lilies of the field, who neither work or spin, yet are clothed in glory, we are urged to “seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness”, and not to worry about tomorrow, for each day has enough trouble of its own. “What is anxiety?”, Kierkegaard asks in his Christian Discourses. His succinct reply: “It is the next day.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Kierkegaard’s reflections on what it means for the lily and the bird to be our “teachers” is that, in embodying what it means “to be today”, they manifest joy; a joy through which it is said to be possible to transcend worry. How is “to be today” an expression of joy, and how does this differ from what is usually meant by
“living for today”? After all, Kierkegaard’s “aesthete”—the unnamed young man known only as “A” in his early work Either/Or—recommends and seems to embody a kind of “living for the moment”, deliberately avoiding commitments such as friendship, marriage and useful career, and the responsibilities that go with them. Urging his readers to cultivate their imagination and focus on the entirely arbitrary, he “enjoys something entirely accidental” and “regards the whole of existence from this standpoint”. All this in order to avoid his greatest fear: boredom, the “root of all evil”.

And one of the key lessons of Either/Or is typically taken to be that this is precisely how not to live. For all his intelligence, the aesthete is a dilettante who views life in terms of entertaining possibilities to be savoured, not ideals or projects to be pursued. Lacking a goal for his life, he is on most readings the embodiment of the despairing emptiness that we are supposed to come to see as lying at the heart of even the most sophisticated kind of “live for the present” hedonism. As his older friend Judge Vilhelm puts it, “Your mind draws up a hundred plans, everything is prepared for the assault. Should it fail in one direction, instantly your well-nigh diabolical dialectic is ready to explain that away as a necessary part of the new plan of operation. You hover constantly over yourself . . .” What Kierkegaard calls the ethical life—and which is typically seen as an advance on the aesthetic life—has commitment to tasks, projects and ideals at its core. So what is he getting at by associating “to be today” with genuine joy?

The answer might be seen in the difference between what the philosopher Kieran Setiya, in his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, calls telic and atelic activities. Telic activities—from the Greek telos, for goal or purpose—are at the heart of so much of what we do, small and large. Driving home from work; taking the kids to football practice; building a house; writing a book. To say nothing of reaping, sowing and gathering into barns. The value of each is perceived in terms of the completion of the goal. But to the extent that the purpose I have found in life has been in the writing of my book, or the building of my house, this means that the very completion of this task threatens me with a loss of meaning. Even if the activity is valuable, and I find its completion fulfilling, deriving a sense of achievement from it, I’ve got the problem: when it’s over, what next?

In attempting to answer that question, I seek to fill that gap with another project, such that life becomes just a series of projects, both personal and professional. Fulfilment lies either in the past or the future. The realisation, on some level, that this is what is happening to us is what gives rise to many a “midlife crisis”. Despite the name, such a crisis can arise at any stage of life. But there is something persuasive about Setiya’s suggestion that it is in midlife that our over-dependence upon telic activities is most likely to become apparent, as many long-term goals either prove to be impossible or are achieved (and so, what next?).

Contrast this with atelic activities: those in which the value inheres not in their completion. Relaxing with family and friends; listening to—or, better still, playing—music; reading for pleasure. This has been one major feature of the lockdown: the distinction between those who have been appreciating such opportunities, and those who can’t wait for all this to be over. The key lesson is that the activities we love need not be projects; atelic thinking is a way of getting beyond project-thinking.

Consider walking. Since moving to Sydney, my wife and I have become big fans of bush-walks in the Blue Mountains—the perfect “social distancing” exercise. I particularly love circular bush-walks. Unlike a trip from A to B, the great joy of this is that it proves a direct challenge to telic thinking. Yes, there is an end destination—but the end destination is precisely the same point as the start, so that anyone who thought that the purpose of the exercise was to get back to where you started would have missed the point. Or consider gardening. The skilled gardener knows that there is no end point, since she is working with raw material that is evolving beyond her control, not least owing to the changes in the seasons. Atelic thinking finds value and meaning in the process, rather than the project. But this is not a distinction between work and leisure (the fabled “work-life balance”). Kierkegaard claims that work—if viewed with what we are here labelling an atelic attitude—can itself be a source of this “joy”.

Is part of what the lilies and birds teach us that we should try to shift from a purely telic attitude towards a more atelic one? This need not mean replacing the activities themselves, but our attitude towards them. Don’t blame your particular goals, but the fact you are goal-fixated. A focus on process rather than projects can help move us beyond the debilitating self-absorption that, for Kierkegaard, is at the heart of so many human worries. This self-absorption in turn stems from the spirit of unproductive comparison that is the key message of his parable of the “worried lily”. Its contented life is disrupted by a bird who sows the seeds of the lily’s destruction by comparing it to other, more beautiful lilies, and encouraging it to want to be moved; uprooted, which leads to its demise. In human terms, the pride and envy shown by the lily arises from stressing the diversity that results from comparison (status anxiety?) more than our common humanity. This points towards a humility of a certain sort. Not of self-abasement, or of ranking oneself low, but the kind of humility that is about getting beyond dwelling upon ourselves, such that our attention is directed outwardly towards other people and things of value in the world. In a memorable image in the Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard compares the person who lives absorbed in “today” with the rower who makes progress by turning his back on the direction of travel. In this way, the person with an atelic attitude turns her back on future-oriented worry. So perhaps it’s time to get out into the garden.

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W.H. Hudson is now largely forgotten but, in his day, he was famous as a naturalist and novelist. His legacy in his native Argentina—where he is known as Guillermo Enrique Hudson—is as a founder of ornithology with his Birds of La Plata, and as the author of an autobiography, Far Away and Long Ago. When he died in London in 1922, at the height of his fame, the Times obituary wrote that he was “unsurpassed as an English writer on nature” and referred to him as the latest in a line of great naturalist writers such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both of whom had explored South America. The bird sanctuary in Hyde Park, with its stone memorial carved by Jacob Epstein, commemorates Hudson; he was a leading light of the RSPB in its early years.

Born in Argentina in 1841 to parents who had emigrated there from New England, Hudson worked there as a gaucho and self-taught ornithologist until he left his birthplace for good. On arriving in England at the age of 32, he wrote fiction and published countless nature sketches that were collected into books to earn his living. He became very popular around the First World War and his nature sketches were read in the trenches.

As rural England was lost for good to industrialisation he knew that urban life lacked what he loved most, a feeling for the freedom of an untamed nature. Hudson roamed Southern England all his summers, staying in peasant cottages and boarding houses, and interacting with life beyond the towns. Every winter he would return to his turret in Paddington and write about what he had witnessed from notes taken on the spot; he could write ten pages about a raven or a sparrow. But what made his reputation was that he viewed everything through a foreigner’s lens. Curiously he had learned about English nature through his reading of unfashionable poets while growing up in Argentina. Hudson rarely mentioned that he was Argentine-born and underwent the sternest of tasks in Victorian England of starting from the bottom as a penniless outsider, but by the end of his life he had attained sufficient fame as a writer not to have to worry about money.

He viewed his life in his turret in Paddington—where he lived with his wife Emily, an opera singer who was also his former landlady—akin to being locked up in a “prison”. He always preferred the rural to the urban, the wilderness to the city, but he sought the former in the latter. He wrote to escape from the grime and the dirt. I realise today that it is as if he was writing for this future in which we too are confined.

William Henry Hudson: Common birds can express an “overflowing” of life

Hudson’s best work derived from his ability to view reality as if for the first time, like a child. He endeavoured, in his prose, to keep in touch with that emotional jolt. He wrote slowly, with much correction and to deadlines, and kept his prose rhythmical and simple.

As I sit in a communal garden in London at sunset and listen to more familiar, supposedly less exotic, birds, I recall Hudson’s Birds in London. In one of its essays on sparrows, which for Hudson stood for wild nature in an urban wasteland, he wrote, “it is always possible to find something fresh to say of a bird of so versatile a mind”.  When I first read this, I was surprised not only by that word “fresh” but by the notion that a sparrow has a “mind”. Hudson praises this humble little bird for “its greater intelligence” and “individual character”. He found that, despite their ubiquity, “the individual sparrow is little known to us”. Here was Hudson looking at a common bird as if for the first time.

He was especially interested in the gatherings of the birds that Londoners then called “a sparrows’ chapel”. They congregate in a tree or hedge after a rain shower or at sunset and “their chorus of ringing chirruping sounds has an exceedingly pleasant effect; for although compared with the warblers’ singing it may be a somewhat rude music, by contrast with the noise of traffic and raucous cries from human throats it is very bright and glad and even beautiful, voicing a wild, happy life”.

All passerines—the order includes more than half of the different species of birds—have a habit of concert singing at sunset and expressing that “overflowing” of life that Hudson sought. There is no need to hanker for the exotic—the common birds around you can provide the thrill of untamed wilderness. Hudson suggests that really listening is to escape your worrying mind by concentrating on the emotion you feel when a bird sings. It is to range beyond yourself and self-absorption. When he was writing about the birds he knew as a young man in Argentina, he could hear over 240 bird calls in his mind. Bird music seemed lodged in a different area of his brain. Each time he heard a bird sing, it renewed his store of primitive bird song.

He described a starling’s song thus: “the airy whistle, the various chirp, the clink-clink as of a cracked bell, the low chatter of mixed harsh and musical sounds, the kissing and finger-cracking and those long metallic notes”. He said that however familiar one may be with the starlings, “you cannot listen to one of their choirs without hearing some new sound”.  I have listened carefully to the rich variety of sounds they make and it is as if the songs of ten birds come out of a single throat.

To sit and listen to any birdsong is to meditate on the wildness of birds. If you mix the songs of birds you might hear in London—robins, blackbirds, thrush, crows, ravens and green parakeets—is it so different to that astonishing wall of sound I once heard when listening to the dawn chorus on an estancia in Argentina? Hudson teaches us that bird song is a medicine that restores freedom and wildness to our minds. Even the “croaking carrion crow” and the screech of the green parakeet, so seemingly unmelodious, bring this “medicine” to our ears.

I have another vivid memory from Argentina, of the green parakeets—cotorras—on a small estancia in the pampas where they built hanging nests from tall eucalyptus trees. These social birds would chatter so loudly that conversation was impossible outside. They are considered a pest in Argentina and pest controllers come with long sticks which they light at the tip to torch these drooping, communal nests, but the birds come back and rebuild and torment those who haven’t learnt how to listen. What Hudson taught me, after 30 years of reading and writing about him, is that there is no such thing as bad birdsong. That loud constant chatter, where the parakeets communicate to each other, is music to the ears, albeit atonal song.

Birds are the true “savages”, as Hudson wrote of the raucous crows. Any bird, be it a duck flying past with whistling wings or a blackbird singing on a treetop, can transport you “into the midst of a wild and solitary nature”.

To re-contact with this wild nature, I take a walk towards Wimbledon Common, as my daily exercise. There is a pond in a small green with tall trees, reached by a footpath, and there I watch two moorhens who have built their nest in the middle of this pond with five chicks. One of the adults makes clucking sounds, moves its head up and down and feeds in the edges of a pond. This glimpse of an alien life integrates me momentarily with wild nature. It reminds me of another passage in Birds in London in which Hudson describes some unusual behaviour he observed at a pond in West London:

This moorhen was quietly feeding on the margin [of the pond], but became greatly excited on the appearance, a little distance away, of a second bird. Lowering its head, it made a little rush at, or towards, the new-comer, then stopped and went quietly back; then made a second little charge, and again walked back. Finally it began to walk backwards, with slow, measured steps, towards the other bird, displaying, as it advanced, or retrograded, its open white tail, at the same time glancing over its shoulder as if to observe the effect on its neighbour of this new mode of motion. Whether this demonstration meant anger, or love, or mere fun, I cannot say.

It confirmed his belief—and perhaps mine too—that “the birdwatcher’s life is an endless succession of surprises”.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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Despite all Russell’s protestations, Wittgenstein did go to Norway to live alone. He found rooms in a village called Skjolden at the end of the Sognefjord, a very remote spot indeed, where he remained until the summer of 1914. He remembered those eight months of solitude as, philosophically, the most productive time of his life. “Then, my mind was on fire,” he would later say to friends.

As emerges from the letters he wrote to Russell, Wittgenstein spent his time in Norway thinking about two things: philosophical problems, especially those that arose from logic, and himself. For Wittgenstein, these were not separate subjects; they were two sides of the same coin. One of his earliest intellectual influences had been Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, in which Weininger says: “logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.” Throughout his life, Wittgenstein focused—with a remarkable intensity—on two things: thinking clearly and being a decent human being. Russell remembers that Wittgenstein would “pace up and down my room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence”. Once, Russell asked: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” “Both,” Wittgenstein replied, and continued his pacing.

A view that Wittgenstein seems to have acquired from Weininger is that the only worthwhile goal in life is to devote oneself to producing works of genius. He once told Russell an anecdote about Beethoven: how a friend described going to Beethoven’s door and hearing him “cursing, howling and singing” over his new fugue. After an hour, Beethoven came to the door, “looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage”. That, Wittgenstein told Russell, is the sort of man to be.

In Wittgenstein’s case, the great work in question was not a piece of music but a work of philosophy, one that would solve all philosophical problems. When Wittgenstein met Russell, he had not undertaken any formal study of philosophy. He was a student at Manchester, pursuing research in aeronautics, having previously studied engineering at Berlin. After reading Russell’s book, The Principles of Mathematics, however, philosophical problems, in the words of his sister Hermine, “became such an obsession with him, and took hold of him so completely against his will, that he suffered terribly, feeling torn between conflicting vocations”. Finally in October 1911, apparently on the spur of the moment, he caught the train to Cambridge and went straight to Russell’s rooms. Russell was at the time having tea with his friend C.K. Ogden, when, as he put it in a letter to his lover Ottoline Morrell, “an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering at Charlottenburg, but during his course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me.”

To begin with, Russell was unsure whether Wittgenstein was a genius or a lunatic; but by the New Year of 1912, he was convinced he was the former. In the summer of that year, Hermine came to Cambridge and was told by Russell: “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”

At the age of 23, Wittgenstein had a mission, a duty, to produce a work of philosophy that would redirect the entire subject. With this went a parallel mission: to perfect himself. Weininger had written that it was a duty of a genius to realise his highest self: “Not his empirical self, not the weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature.”

Wittgenstein once said that, though he had no religious beliefs, he couldn’t help approaching problems “from a religious point of view”. At the centre of that point of view was the importance of not losing one’s soul. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” was one of his favourite texts. He once remarked to Russell how few people there are who do not lose their soul. Russell replied that, in his view, it depended on “having a large purpose that one is true to”. Wittgenstein responded that it rather depended more on suffering and the power to endure it. In Vienna he had seen a play called Die Kreuzelschreiber by Ludwig Anzengruber in which a character expressed a thought that had made a deep impression on him. The thought was that, no matter what happened in the world, nothing could happen to him. He was independent of fate and circumstances.

This provides a clue as to why solitude was important to Wittgenstein. It was a way of ensuring that he did not lose his soul, that he remained free from and independent of the pettiness, meanness and bad faith of which the world is full. Wittgenstein, like a medieval saint, took great steps to keep his life unencumbered by material things. He inherited a vast fortune from his father, but he gave it away. He never owned a house and for most of his life lived in sparsely furnished, small, but exceptionally clean rooms.

In the summer of 1913, he took a holiday in Norway with his friend David Pinsent. From the diary that Pinsent kept at the time, it appears that Wittgenstein spent most of his time working on philosophy, determined to live up to Russell’s exalted expectations of him. He became haunted by the thought that his work would come to nothing. “I very often now,” he wrote to Russell, “have the indescribable feeling as though my work was all sure to be lost entirely in some way or other.” Pinsent describes him as being “morbidly afraid” of dying before he could finish his work. He made Russell promise to publish what he had written if he should die.

It was on his return to Cambridge from this holiday that he announced to Russell his plan of returning to Norway alone to finish his work. Before he departed, Russell made him dictate what he had done so far to a typist. This has now been published as “Notes on Logic”, the earliest surviving piece of writing by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein believed that all philosophical problems arose from a misunderstanding of logic, and that, therefore, a correct understanding of logic would clear up the entire subject. Achieving such an understanding was what he devoted himself to in his Norwegian solitude.

His letters to Russell from Norway are full of detailed and technical remarks about his developing thoughts on logic, and also expressions of personal angst. “Deep inside me,” he wrote, “there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person . . . Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time—but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

In March 1914, the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore came to Skjolden to visit Wittgenstein. The latter had told him that his work on logic was “very nearly done” and was evidently keen to discuss it. Moore stayed for two weeks, during which Wittgenstein dictated a new set of notes which expressed his new ideas. At the centre of these was a distinction between saying and showing that Wittgenstein considered the key idea of his work, the one that finally revealed the nature of logic. Logical propositions, such as tautologies (which are necessarily true) and contradictions (which are necessarily false) do not say anything, but they show something, namely, “the logical properties of language and therefore of the Universe”. The breakthrough, then, consists of seeing that logic is “ineffable”. It cannot be put into words. To understand why not, one needs to understand the nature of language, which is what Wittgenstein set out to do in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Towards the end of his stay in Skjolden, Wittgenstein, evidently craving even greater solitude, made arrangements for a house to be built for him in an extraordinary position, high up on a hillside overlooking the village. The site was inaccessible by road. To get to it, one had to row from Skjolden across Lake Eidsvatnet. It was, Wittgenstein told Russell gleefully, “miles from anyone”.

It was there that he hoped to finish his book, but, in the summer of 1914, before the house was finished, he returned to Vienna. The outbreak of the First World War prevented him from returning to Norway and instead he volunteered for the Austrian army. His motive for doing so seems to be connected with his desire to “turn into a different person”. In 1912, he had read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which, he told Russell, “does me a lot of good”. In the book, James discusses the spiritual value of facing death. “No matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be,” he writes, “if he be willing to face death, and still more if he suffer it in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.” From the diaries that he kept during the war, we can see that Wittgenstein yearned for such consecration. The first time he glimpsed the Russian enemy, he wrote, “Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.”

As it happened, Wittgenstein did undergo a “variety of religious experience” during the war. In Galicia, he entered a bookshop, where he could find only one book: Leo Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. He bought it and read it over and over again. To his comrades he became known as “the man with the gospels”. It provided him with the inspiration he needed to adopt the attitude of the character in Die Kreuzelschreiber that had so impressed him. “Don’t be dependent on the external world,” he urged himself in his diary, “and then you have no fear of what happens in it.” He also urged himself to be independent of people. Salvation would come through solitude.

He carried on writing philosophy during the war. For the first two years, he wrote almost entirely on logic, but then in 1916, when he was serving on the Russian Front, his technical reflections are interrupted by the questions about God. The distinction he had made between saying and showing was now extended by him to religion, aesthetics, ethics, and the meaning of life. All of these subjects, like logic, lay beyond the sayable.

Wittgenstein finished Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus towards the end of the First World War, and it was finally published in 1921. It is unusual in both form and content. It is written, not in consecutive prose but in numbered propositions, and it contains a unique blend of technical logic and mysticism. In its preface Wittgenstein announces that the book “finally solves” the problems of philosophy, a view he was to abandon a few years later. Nobody else has been tempted to adopt that view, but it is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important works of philosophy ever published. It is, however, difficult to interpret and has been understood in a wide variety of different ways. Bearing in mind its genesis in self-imposed isolation, perhaps the most poignant way of characterising it lies in Ernest Gellner’s description, “a poem to solitude”.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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The passage that the Greenes chose to anthologise came from the beginning of Greenmantle, the second of the Hannay books, which was published in 1916, the year after The Thirty-Nine Steps. And it is these early Hannay thrillers which have given John Buchan a lasting reputation as a writer of spy stories, even though Hannay was a rank and reluctant amateur and never a professional like John Le Carré’s George Smiley. According to the American academic, LeRoy L. Panek, the modern espionage novel “simply would not have developed along the same lines without him”.

Strangely, Buchan knew little about spying when he wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. What knowledge he had acquired before 1917 was largely gleaned from bumping up against intelligence officers during the Boer War, when he was
working as a colonial administrator for Lord Milner; most particularly, he knew and admired the multi-lingual Lieutenant Edmund Ironside (later Field Marshal the Lord Ironside), and always maintained that he had partly based Richard Hannay on him.

However, in early 1917, after a stint as a war correspondent and chronicler, he was appointed Director of Information, in charge of propaganda, which in those days meant the dissemination of information about the Allied objectives and achievements to neutral and allied countries, a necessarily clandestine operation. In the course of his work, he came to know much more about British intelligence, even though he was plainly never a spymaster. (He was far too busy sending Paul Nash to paint whatever he saw on the Ypres Salient.)  Certainly, when researching my biography of my grandfather, I found allusions in correspondence to meetings with Major-General Sir George Macdonogh, Director of Military Intelligence, although frustratingly there were never reports of what was said. Buchan was ever after extremely discreet about his wartime work, but something of what he knew about codes and cyphers can be read in a gripping short story, “The Post”, not published until many years after his death, but which appeared, in a thoroughly watered-down form, as The Loathly Opposite, in his story collection, The Runagates Club (1928). The Post tells the tale of a codebreaker, who goes to the wire (the title is a racing term) to crack a seemingly impossible cypher, giving vital details of German dispositions in Palestine in September 1918, and almost cracking up himself in the process. I suspect, but it can only be a suspicion, that The Post was written for Buchan’s own amusement soon after the war and he never felt it right that he should expose his inside knowledge so obviously to public view.

In 1932, however, he wrote a novel, A Prince of the Captivity, in which the hero—a man recently released from prison, having taken the rap for a crime his wife had committed—becomes an undercover agent in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. No one who reads it can be left in any doubt that Buchan knew pretty clearly how that system worked.

My grandfather took up thriller writing because he had always enjoyed reading what he called “shockers” and was frustrated that, in the Edwardian age, they were not very good. Even William le Queux suffered from churning out too much of the stuff, at a rate of eight novels a year. Buchan admired The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903), which fed British paranoia about a possible German invasion, and The Thirty-Nine Steps was undoubtedly influenced by it; in plot, that is, but, mercifully, not in mind-numbing detail about sailing boats, tides and currents. I believe that he was most influenced, in his mystery fiction at least, by Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad.

The dust-jacket of the first edition of “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (©Kenneth Hiller)

Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps in six weeks in the latter months of 1914, when sick in bed with a duodenal ulcer and unfit for military service. Even such a slim novel, only 245 pages long in the first edition, exhibits the rich hinterland of this Scottish son of the manse, especially his early grounding in the Bible, the classics and Scottish literature; these fostered a wonderfully spare, attractive style, with occasional parallelism derived from the Psalms. The book’s enormous success was immediate, and its breakneck pace and Everyman hero were especially valued by hard-pressed soldiers in the trenches. It made Buchan so much money that he committed himself to writing a mystery or historical novel every year from 1920 until he went to Canada in 1935 as Governor-General.

However, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, and the immense success of his 1935 film, The Thirty-Nine Steps has proved to be a great granite edifice, blocking the view and preventing readers from seeing just how extraordinarily versatile a writer Buchan was.

As well as spy novels, he wrote straight adventure stories for adults and children, supernatural novels, historical fiction, short stories in several genres, war poetry, journalism, biographies, literary and political essays, works of political thought and a legal textbook. The commercial world loves to pigeon-hole a writer, of course, and Buchan, the literary editor and director of a publishing company, knew that very well, but he rarely suppressed the impulse to please himself.  Here is part of the wry dedication to “A young gentleman of Eton College” at the beginning of The Three Hostages:

HONOURED SIR, On your last birthday a well-meaning godfather presented you with a volume of mine, since you had been heard on occasion to express approval of my works. The book dealt with a somewhat arid branch of historical research, and it did not please you. You wrote to me, I remember, complaining that I had “let you down,” and summoning me, as I valued your respect, to “pull myself together.” In particular you demanded to hear more of the doings of Richard Hannay, a gentleman for whom you professed a liking . . .

“Arid” (in fact, anything but) branches of historical research included serious biographies—of Scott, Montrose, and Cromwell, in particular. Montrose won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and Sir Walter Scott was reckoned by G.M. Trevelyan, no mean stylist himself and a pre-eminent historian, to be the best single-volume of biography in the English language. Buchan derived the most satisfaction writing historical fiction, for he had a rare capacity to imagine landscapes as they would have looked in earlier centuries, and people them with credible characters. Notable are The Blanket of the Dark, Midwinter and, his own favourite, Witch Wood, which he wrote at the same time as Montrose, and in which the great Captain-General has a walk-on part. 

Buchan’s rich hinterland derived not only from his rigorous education and Scottish upbringing at the end of the 19th century, but from the extraordinary variety of occupations he pursued, at one time or another. He was, inter alia, scholar, bibliophile, journalist, barrister, colonial administrator, publisher, war correspondent, head of propaganda, deputy chairman of Reuters, Member of Parliament, and finally Governor-General of Canada. His leisure was as active as his working life: mountaineering, thirty-mile walks on a Sunday afternoon, fly-fishing and bird-watching.

These activities fostered such a catholicity of tastes that there were far too many holes for the pigeons. But, although his preoccupations were disparate, his views on life were settled, which give his works an unexpected unity. He was a convinced Christian, a conservative and unionist in politics, a lover of his country, an eternal optimist and a deep believer in the essential quality of people of every kind. He once wrote: “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” In a time of pessimism and world-weariness, that phrase has the same effect on me as a glass of champagne, drunk very quickly. And I imagine that is why, despite some dated preoccupations and language here and there in his works, many people still derive so much pleasure from reading him.

“Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan” by Ursula Buchan is published by Bloomsbury, £25; paperback, £10.99

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. . . the true historical feeling, the mortal life of an historical nation, generation linked to generation by faith, freedom, heraldry and ancestral fame.

In On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), the reader is startled by what might seem to be an example of extraordinary—and by modern standards dangerous—prescience:

That erection of a temporal monarch under the pretence of a spiritual authority, which was not possible in Christendom but by the extinction or entrancement of the spirit of Christianity, was effected in full by Mahomet, to the establishment of the most extensive and complete despotism that ever warred against civilisation and the interests of humanity.

But he also set out, with penetrating insight and in a style that impresses and delights, the crucial role of the church in our society. Coleridge, whom John Stuart Mill hailed as “the seminal mind of the century”, believed it impossible to conceive a man without the idea of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful and the infinite. Take those qualities away and we are left with the mere appearance of a human being, a creature baser than the brutest beast.

A Tory in the old sense, a patriot, of the land, Coleridge believed in our need for:

A permanent, nationalised learned order, a national clerisy or church as an essential element of a rightly-constituted nation, without which it wants alike for its permanence and progression; and for which neither tract societies not conventicles, nor Lancastrian schools, nor mechanics’ institutions, nor lecture bazaars under the absurd name of universities, nor all those collectively, could be a substitute. For they are all marked with the same asterisk of spuriousness, show the same distemper-spot on the front, that they are useless medicines for morbid symptoms that help to feed and continue the disease.

He saw a clear function for the clergy:

To every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilisation; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, around which the capabilities of the place may crystallise and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite; yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation.

Coleridge had read thoroughly the Anglican divines of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially Richard Hooker and Law, and his model of a parson was a man such as George Herbert:

The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a family man whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him a frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage.

The crucial distinction is between what Coleridge calls permanence—the land—and what is progressive: the arts and sciences and the mercantile interests. Both permanence and progression are required in a healthy nation. As the poet and translator C.H. Sisson comments:

Any political unity worth maintaining, or which is anyway to be maintained at all, must contain a principle of foresight and continuity which goes beyond the next series of trade figures; and it will be the foresight of care rather than calculation.

It is the parson who has a foot in what is permanent and in what is progressive from which he derives his foresight of care. For Coleridge, the clergyman is the instrument of both permanence and progression. He loosens up, as it were, the permanence and anchors what is progressive in what abides. The revenues of the church belong in some sense to every family that may have a member educated for, or marrying into, the church. The parish, as both a physical and a spiritual entity, is in fact the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulated, belonging to everyone in it and connecting each person with everyone else by means of its historical purposes and its pastoral and social practices.

It might be said that 19th-century England is a faraway country of which we know little; but the issues raised in On the Constitution of the Church and State reverberate still. 

In our secularised society, the idea of the national church has lost all intelligibility. What then is the position of the theological rump among our secularised clerisy? There are three possibilities. We can sit in isolation in some recess of the national structure, such as are provided by the voluntary societies, waiting for better times. We can let our taste for having an ecclesiastical club carry us into one or other of those international gangs of opinion; perhaps that which has its headquarters in Rome. This option is realised whenever an Anglican priest jumps ship and joins the Roman Catholic Ordinariate. Coleridge gives us to understand that any such choice is a political one. We can stay and fight our corner, struggling for an intelligibility which might, and will if our concern is for truth, come again.

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As I had the honour of living in the same house, 142, Strand, with George Eliot for about two years, between 1851 and 1854, I may perhaps be allowed to correct an impression which Mr Cross’s book may possibly produce on its readers. To put it very briefly, I think he has made her too “respectable”. She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which was to me the most attractive. She told me that it was worthwhile to undertake all the labour of learning French if it resulted in nothing more than reading one book—Rousseau’s Confessions.

So which is she: morally earnest author, or the woman with the glint of modernity in her eye (Rousseau talks of his sexual pleasure when beaten as a child)? She is both, of course. George Eliot, the pseudonym taken by Mary Ann Evans, was absolutely concerned with the moral, though never as a standard bearer of Victorian values; she was also a realist, intent on the empirical business of what went on in our complicated psyches. Above all, Eliot wanted her readers to attain a greater understanding of one another; and in our polarised times, her mission, so clearly promoted in her novels, makes Eliot seem ever more relevant.

Eliot’s psychological acuity means that her portrayals of women, at which she excelled, have a continued freshness. (Intriguingly, Eliot would not have called herself an advocate of change for women; yet her novels are brilliantly diagnostic of women’s situation.)

In The Mill on The Floss, written in 1860 when Eliot was becoming famous, the child Maggie adores and wants to please her older brother Tom. But she is cleverer than Tom, too, and in that fascinatingly simple, neat nucleus lies the seed of the book’s main conflict. As she grows up, Maggie’s wishes are out of step with her brother’s and the world’s; but even as she flouts them she is conflicted. Almost as much as she needs her own fulfilment, she needs her brother’s love and approval. The sexual politics underpinning Mill are clear, but that statement gives no feel or flavour of this passionate and quasi-autobiographical novel, where the feelings of Maggie as child and young woman are so vividly lived, and where the small-town world of St Ogg’s, with its array of disapproving, hilarious, and utterly convincing aunts and uncles, comes to life in pitch-perfect detail.

If in Mill Eliot inverts the received wisdom of the day, giving the brains to the girl and not the boy, in Daniel Deronda Eliot addresses the nature-nurture debate full on. Nature has endowed the heroine, Gwendolen, with beauty, brains and energy, but nurture is another story. Overindulged by her mother, flattered by everyone, admiration has become her source of happiness—she knows triumph when it is present, feels disturbed when it is not. Scarcely interested in love, she is an isolated narcissist. It is an original and modern portrait of female-as-object, whose pleasures and inclinations have been accordingly determined.

Middlemarch, though, remains many people’s favourite Eliot novel. A rich, humorous, moving portrait of provincial life, it begins with two protagonists, Dorothea and Lydgate, on the threshold of matrimony. Dorothea, who wants to be more than a wife and mother in life, mistakes marriage to the scholar Casaubon for a vocation that will open the divine doors of knowledge and culture to her. Lydgate opts for the pretty, mindless and ruthless Rosamund, and suffers the consequences. Both choose blindly, investing their prospective partners with non-existent attributes.

Perception—how we see each other— is one of Eliot’s key themes. Or rather, how we don’t see each other:

At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and be lauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions.

We are all a bit like Dorothea and Lydgate, Eliot argues: seeing others according to our preconceived ideas about them.Yet even though it is hard to see and know other people, there is an imperative to do so. Take the following famous passage from Middlemarch:

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest . . .

Eliot the author is speaking directly to the reader, as she often did; insisting that we re-enter Dorothea’s marriage, but from the other door, so to speak. And why was this so important to Eliot? Why does it matter to understand another person’s experience? In Daniel Deronda Eliot’s intention was not just to write about the Jewish people’s homelessness; she wanted readers to overcome their anti-semitic prejudice, through the act of fictional identification with her noble Jewish characters. Through the magical proxy living offered by the story, we could understand what it was like to belong to this other race.

In our divided times, with nationalism on the rise, this could hardly be more relevant. Eliot’s mission is potentially radical, whether about race or simply another person. She detested the gossipy, indignant swell of righteous judgment—especially the collective judgments of society. She would have hated our feeding frenzies and trial by media.

As attitudes and beliefs increasingly divide us, Eliot’s case for heightened understanding is powerful. But it is worth remembering, too, her humanity in the simplest sense. She believed the better side of human nature could always be stirred with the right encouragement. Our comforted experience in reading Eliot is perhaps connected to this. As she says, unwittingly describing the effect of her own fiction on readers:

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

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Where is the Friend I seek where’er I’m going?
At break of dawn my need for him is growing.
At night he is not there to still my yearning.My heart is burning.

The love of the poet’s Friend is in the air which he breathes; his voice is heard “where summer breezes quiver”; and the last stanza exclaims:

Oh when such beauty everywhere is showing,
In every aspect of creation glowing,
How bright must be the source of this reflection!
What pure perfection!

The traces of the Deity invoked in this passionate declaration are printed everywhere in nature, but He is also withdrawn, hidden, a transcendent Being immanent but not directly encountered—in short, a God lost to modern man.

In the beginning, the gods walked with men on earth; their voices were as  clearly heard as the Hebrew God’s voice was audible to Adam and Eve walking in the garden. Then, for anthropological or psychological reasons which are obscure, the relationship changed. The first chapter of God’s disappearance from the world is recounted by Julian Jaynes in his controversial (and catchily-titled) book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. According to him, the process began as early as the 13th century BC in Assyria, from which period we read the engraved lines: “My god has forsaken me and disappeared . . . my god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand, nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side.” The seventh-century BC epic of Gilgamesh records the celestialisation of once-earthly gods. Ziggurats which had formerly been designed as a terrestrial home for the gods became pedestals to facilitate their hoped-for return from heaven. From here to the Book of Psalms is no great journey; many of these are saturated with the psalmist’s hankering after a departed God: “Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.”

This first loss was followed by a much later and more familiar one. For even if the gods had long since retreated into transcendent spaces, sacred texts, and promises the fulfilment of which were indefinitely postponed, mankind continued to adopt rituals and forms of worship which cohered around what was considered to be an authentic core of belief. This state of affairs lasted until a succession of blows brought the ages of faith towards a close: the destruction of the Aristotelian view of the cosmos, the Renaissance’s emphasis on the centrality of the human person, the elevation of reason in the Enlightenment, and the rise of a form of scientific inquiry seen as antithetic to religion, culminating in the shattering revelations of Darwinism. Ten years or so before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Matthew Arnold had already stood on Dover Beach and heard the melancholy withdrawing roar as the tide went out on the Sea of Faith.

Even so, the Christian religion continued through much of the 20th century to provide structures, narratives, communities and rituals to the countries of Western Europe. In Britain, all the principal events of its calendar (not just two) were acknowledged: within living memory, many newspapers elected not to publish a Good Friday edition; some schools observed holidays on Ascension Day. Churchmen remained figures of authority: they could debate with members of Monty Python on whether Life of Brian was offensive to believers, and evidently assumed the support of a large part of their audience. Indeed, the fact that following its release in 1979 the film was shunned by broadcasters and banned by several councils points to a continuing recognition (now accorded only to Islam) that religious belief deserved respect if not protection.

In the present era, however, atheists and agnostics swarm over the public arena, and to practise the Christian religion is to invite contempt. Those for whom the religious dimension in life remains important creep about like Old Narnians during the minority of Prince Caspian. More damaging even than the disdain of ardent secularists is the ignorance and indifference of the generations who have grown up in an age when captions in art galleries have to explain who St Mark was and what an Evangelist might be. Religion generally plays no more part in the existence of millennials than sexual recreation featured in the life of the young Philip Larkin, who memorably said that he grew up to regard it as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog-dancing.

In Believing in Film, Mark Le Fanu begins and ends with thought-provoking essays, the first of which sketches certain aspects of the cultural retreat of religion, while the second in laconic terms describes his own “conversion” (the term is used reluctantly and the inverted commas are his). His point of departure is to sketch the falling-off in religion as the “paramount driving force” in European civilisation after the age of Dante and the great cathedrals. By the time one reaches the strikingly irreligious canon of Shakespeare, whose most powerful literary and philosophical influences were Seneca, Montaigne and Machiavelli, the change is incontestable. Le Fanu points out that Donne’s sermons in the early 17th century were already highlighting the implausibility of Christian fundamentals; and while the great artists of the 16th and 17th centuries were masters in both sacred and profane idioms, the retreat of religious themes in painting was obvious and irreversible.

By the Romantic era, the game was up. Le Fanu correctly identifies the centrality of Wagner, whose music dramas in some instances inflect a Christian element, but only do so in pursuit of a larger aim, which was nothing less than the usurpation of religion by art. As the composer wrote: “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.” Le Fanu might also have quoted Novalis: “Whoever feels unhappy in this world, whoever fails to find what he seeks—then let him enter the world of books, art and nature, this eternal domain which is both ancient and modern simultaneously, and let him live there in this secret church of a better world. There he will surely find a lover and a friend, a fatherland and a God.” And so on to the present day—via theatre which places an apparent ban on the availability of metaphysical consolation, the arrival of modernism (of post-modernism it is unnecessary to speak) and to the final breakdown in representative forms, so that the possibility of making a statement of value or of beauty, which might be thought a precondition to any form of religious utterance, is excluded almost as a matter of logic. We have arrived in the atonal and atheistic cacophany of the present.

But of course, the truth is more complicated and more interesting than that. Religion has enjoyed what Le Fanu calls a “long and prosperous afterlife in culture”, and nowhere more absorbingly than in film. Like Wordsworth, whose intimations of immortality dwindled as he grew to adulthood, we must “rather find strength in what remains behind”. As to what that remnant is, we can at the very least identify the palpable Absence, which R.S. Thomas referred to in his poem of that name:

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply.

The substance of Believing in Film is an auteurist, country-by-country survey of the place of the Christian religion among the output of European directors during the golden age of art cinema from the time of World War II up to the end of the 1980s. The author’s criterion for inclusion is not that a film should exhibit or that a director should possess faith, but only that the film should evidence a sympathy for Christianity and a talent for understanding its inner workings, even when criticising its pretensions. One of the pleasures of tourism for the thinking traveller is the appreciation of different European countries’ attitudes to what remains of their religion, and that pleasure is replicated and enhanced in this book by the author’s understated and sensitive discussion of favourite films, based on a life-time of critical discernment. For Le Fanu is one of those nuanced and thoughtful people who, while rejecting extremes, is not embarrassed to confess that he remains open to the still-living truths of Christianity. This is not simply a process of equipping oneself to understand what he calls “the faith and spirituality of our ancestors, who are still attached to us by invisible but unbreakable filaments”, important as that is.

Victor Sjostrom in Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”, 1957 (©Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo)

What more the religious life consists in, the author does not define (beyond saying that he has changed his opinions on crucial metaphysical questions; and that the one way in which not to read the scriptures is literally). It may be that    everything that has to do with Christianity can only be understood poetically, as he tentatively suggests. Another possibility is that, in order to follow the inclination to acknowledge God, it is not necessary (or possible) to posit beliefs in the form of truth-propositions about Him, of the sort that we use in our daily lives, for God is encountered, not defined. However these difficult thoughts are expressed, it is important that there should be articulate spokesmen for the condition of devout and attentive scepticism, a recognition of the place of mystery and the importance of the religious dimension in a fulfilled life, and an eschewal of the shrill dogmatism urged from either end of the spectrum. Perhaps, like the country parson depicted in Bernanos’s novel and Bresson’s film Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest),  we can end in no other way than by uttering what Le Fanu calls the exquisite cadence “Tout est grâce.”

Even so, it is thought-provoking to reflect that this is a book written by a man in his sixties about an era of film-making falling rapidly into the distant past. Will films be made about rural priests or communities of nuns 50 years hence? And how will spectators of the future view them, if they are? Will it be with the sympathetic understanding invited by authors such as Le Fanu or directors like Tarkovsky, Zanussi, Rossellini and Bergman—or will it rather be with the detached curiosity about the lives of alien species which we bring to bear on television’s latest nature programmes? If this is what the future holds, what shall we put in religion’s place? If nothing, how shall we bear the loss; and if, as many suppose, we can easily do so, what sort of people will we have become?

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It has been ever thus since the advent of mechanised printing and the nationwide distribution of news across the rail network. Before the mid-19th century, those who enjoyed celebrity status such as actors, authors and artists were judged purely on the work they chose to put before their admirers. The advent of the mass media changed everything.

Among those who were set on holding back the tide of popular journalism was William Makepeace Thackeray. The author of Vanity Fair was at the height of his powers when he came up against what he regarded as an unwarranted intrusion on his privacy.

The perpetrator was Edmund Yates, a rising star of the gossip columns that were proving to be the biggest draw for readers of society journals. Images of the young Yates are at odds with the typical Victorian portrayal of a literary gent. Not for him the sombre look of a man of letters. Instead the wicked smile, the twinkle in the eye suggests a loveable rogue which is precisely what he set out to be. Yates loved an argument and revelled in controversy.

In 1856, he was in serious trouble when he quoted a “usually accurate source” claiming that William Palmer, doctor, gambler and convicted murderer, had bought stable secrets from employees of Lord Derby, the doyen of the racing fraternity. Only a grovelling apology saved Yates from a spell in prison. Thereafter, he was marked as a chancer, one who broke the boundaries of Victorian propriety.

His chief sources of gossip were the dining clubs and drinking dens frequented by the bookish fraternity. He and his fellow journalists had only to stand and listen for juicy titbits of copy to flow their way. Indeed, Yates’s regular column in the Illustrated Times was called “Lounger in the Clubs”.

His encounter with Thackeray took place at the Garrick Club, then housed in a converted hotel in King Street, Covent Garden but already a prestigious club for literary and theatre people. Thackeray was one of the leading members. So too was Charles Dickens.

Inclined to take himself rather too seriously, Thackeray was a big man in all senses. By his own estimation a cultural giant used to having the last word, he was also tall, well over six feet, with a broadening waistband to match. Like many larger-than-life personalities, Thackeray was sensitive. While he felt free to say whatever he liked about others, he reacted badly to adverse criticism. He was happiest in a closed circle of best buddies—at the Punch round table, for example, or at the Garrick, “the dearest of places” as he liked to call it. Both were havens in the rough, tough world of publishing. But both were threatened by the likes of Yates.

At a Garrick committee meeting on April 17, 1858 the subject of confidentiality was top of the agenda. While there is no detailed record, we do know that Dickens attended and it is a fair assumption that Thackeray, incensed by recent leakages, had his views represented. In any event, a notice went up warning members that the affairs of the club were not to be shared with the press.

Yates, one of the youngest members, was certainly among those targeted. But the young man on the make was not easily deterred. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if he did take the notice seriously, it was within narrow limits. He felt no restraint in writing about public figures who happened to be Garrick members though this is precisely what Thackeray had in mind when he talked about the exclusive nature of club conviviality.

Oblivious to the danger signals, Yates launched off on a new venture with a
feature  for Town Talk, the latest periodical to titivate the public appetite. His subject was “the celebrated novelist” William Makepeace Thackeray.

Yates judged Thackeray to be a “cool, suave, well-bred gentleman” whose “biting wit” disguised a vulnerable personality. His manner, said Yates, “was cold and uninviting. Praise was lavished on Vanity Fair, the product of a “great genius”, and The Newcomes, “perhaps the best of all Thackeray’s books”. However, The Virginians “lacks interest and plot and is proportionally unsuccessful”. Fair comment, we might say.

But then the tone sharpened, the result, it has been suggested, of Yates having to deliver late copy in a hurry. Whatever the reason, in so many words Yates accused Thackeray of “cutting his cloak according to his cloth”. By this he meant that while the author was happy to snuggle up to fashionable society at home, he reversed his position when he was out of sight and mind touring America. Unkind perhaps but again not entirely unjustified. Thackeray made much of his living parodying the society of which he longed to be part. The coup de grâce was to conclude that Thackeray’s popularity was on the wane. “There is a want of heart in all he writes,” said Yates, “which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm.”

Thackeray’s anger at this put-down was all the greater for knowing that Yates was an adoring fan of his deadly rival Dickens. Just a few days before the Thackeray piece appeared in Town Talk, Yates had enthused over Dickens’s talents as an actor, mimic and public speaker. Though unspoken, the comparison between Dickens and Thackeray was all too apparent. Thackeray was a rotten speaker, liable to freeze at critical moments. He was best in small groups where his wit could flourish.

Ignoring the advice of friends, Thackeray over-reacted to Yates. A stinging rebuke accused his tormentor of basing his article on what he had heard in the Garrick. Yates was told bluntly to “refrain from printing comments upon my private conversations . . . [to] forego discussions, however blundering, upon my private affairs and . . . henceforth to consider every question of my personal truth and sincerity as quite out of the province of your criticism”.

What on earth was Thackeray on about? Yates had made no intrusion on Thackeray’s privacy and there was nothing to suggest that he had betrayed confidences shared in the Garrick. But there was more to it than this: Yates was simply not the sort of person Thackeray wanted to see in his club. Over-familiar, never knowing when he was not wanted, unable to take a hint, Yates, according to Thackeray, was a social climber with no claim to distinction. How dare he criticise his betters! The chance to take him down a peg was too good to miss.

Yates was inclined to respond flippantly, reminding Thackeray of the many occasions he had caused upset with his caricatures. But then he too over-reacted. He sought advice from Charles Dickens.

Dickens was godfather to one of his children. Though not a regular contributor to Dickens’s journal Household Words, Yates was part of the informal collective known as Dickens’s Young Men, where he rubbed shoulders with other combative journalists.

While conceding that the Town Talk piece was in “bad taste”, Dickens could not resist having a dig at Thackeray. He had several reasons to be angry with his fellow writer. He despised pomposity and he believed Thackeray to be exceedingly pompous. Although Thackeray liked to think he was a hero to the rising generation—Pendennis, the story of a young writer making his way in London society, was an inspiration to aspiring authors—he did not seek the company of his juniors, while Dickens was happiest when surrounded by embryonic talent. Moreover, his sympathy was with the underdog.

But his animosity towards Thackeray went much deeper. In the throes of a breakup of his marriage, he blamed Thackeray for siding with his wife, Catherine, mother of his 10 children, and for spreading rumours about his relationship with an 18-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.

The rumours had a firm foundation. Dickens was behaving disgracefully in his increasingly desperate efforts to extricate himself from a loveless marriage, accusing Catherine of neglecting her maternal duties and suggesting that she was mentally unstable, a candidate for admission to an asylum. The recent discovery of letters in which Catherine gives her side of the story, confirm what has long been suspected­—that Catherine was the victim not the cause of Dickens’s emotional crisis. Moreover, the claim that his relationship with Ellen Ternan was purely platonic beggars belief.

So it was that Dickens, with his judgment impaired by family turmoil, was a poor counsellor to Yates. He urged his young protégé to raise the stakes with a summary rejection of what he called a “curiously bitter outburst of personal feeling”. Thackeray’s complaints were dismissed as “slanderous and untrue”.

What next? From Thackeray’s corner there was one obvious means of retaliation. The dispute was to be referred to the Garrick committee. A special meeting was called for June 26 to “take Mr Thackeray’s complaint into consideration”.

Yates asked for a postponement to give him time to prepare a defence. When this was refused, he wrote again with Dickens leaning over his shoulder, to question the right of the club to intervene in what was essentially a private dispute. But, the committee was on a roll. Yates had to apologise unreservedly to Thackeray. When he refused, a general meeting of the club was called for July 10.

Literary giant who reacted badly to criticism: William Makepeace Thackeray, by Samuel Laurence, c.1864

At this critical point we might pause to ask why, in all conscience, the Garrick establishment was prepared, even eager, to risk adverse publicity and ridicule over such a trivial matter. Fear of the thin end of the wedge comes to mind. We know enough of the double standards in the upper reaches of Victorian society to recognise the terror of exposure threatened by the popular press.

With much to hide, Thackeray was well aware of the risks. In a misspent youth he chose to forget, he had worked his way through an inherited fortune while, along the way, contracting a dose of gonorrhoea. Like Dickens and so many others of their generation, the young Thackeray had been ill-prepared for marriage. He had set out to find an attractive, intelligent lover who would settle for a relationship dictated by his self-centred terms.

It was an impossible dream. The 18-year-old Isabella Shaw was unable to cope with a husband who “gets up early, works all day and . . . then gads of an evening”. After the birth of their third daughter (the middle one died in infancy), Isabella succumbed to what was almost certainly severe post-natal depression, aggravated by some form of autism.

In the days before any sort of mental illness was properly diagnosed, let alone treated, Thackeray resorted to various quack remedies without giving much of himself to solving the problem. In 1840, on a trip to Ireland, Isabella threw herself over the side of the boat. Her rescue, after 20 minutes in the water, led to drastic “cures” with the possibility, seriously considered by Thackeray, of putting his wife into an asylum.

We might wonder at this tendency of frustrated artists to resort to such extreme measures. It tells us something of the Victorian male arrogance that it could be assumed that discord between spouses should be settled by incarceration of the wife, often on the say-so of doctors who made up the rules of diagnosis to suit the paying client.

But Thackeray drew back from having Isabella certified, in part because it was too expensive. Instead, she was packed off to the care of a Mrs Bakewell in Camberwell. This cost Thackeray a modest £2 a week at a time when he earned around £5,000 a year.

With the children sent to live with Thackeray’s doting mother, the now-famous writer was soon able to put Isabella out of his mind. He became, in his words, “a widower with a wife alive”. If this was not enough food for sensationalism, there were rumours of an affair with Charlotte Brönte, who paid tribute to Thackeray in the second edition of Jane Eyre, a novel which featured a heroine who discovers that her prospective husband has a mad wife.

There can be little doubt that Thackeray’s fight with Yates was a blow against all gossips. Yates just happened to be first in the firing line. It is also a reasonable assumption that there were those on the Garrick committee and in the membership at large who, in supporting Thackeray, thought, “There but for the grace of God . . .”

That Dickens was not of that number says much about the contrast between the two star writers. The author of The Pickwick Papers relied on his enormous popularity with his readers and on his reputation as a public performer, to quash rumours. To his surprise, his appeals for sympathy and respect for his privacy were counter-productive. The more he spoke out, the greater the public interest in his affairs and the more widespread the rumours, including that of an improper relationship with his sister-in-law which, if proved, could have landed him in prison for incest. Whatever his own tribulations, Dickens stuck by his view that the Garrick affair was a trivial side issue.

Thackeray chose to be abroad when the Special General Meeting was held on July 10. Close on half the membership attended. Letters were read from Thackeray (sanctimonious in tone) and from Yates who repeated his offer to apologise to the club but not to Thackeray. Dickens, along with his friend Wilkie Collins, spoke up on behalf of Yates. Thackeray’s supporters included Anthony Trollope who described Yates as “a literary gutter scraper”.

The vote went in favour of Thackeray by 70 to 46 with 11 abstentions. Yates had 10 days to reflect. A failure to apologise would lead to expulsion. That is what happened, though not before lawyers were called in on both sides. At this point, Dickens pulled the rug. If the case went to court he would have to appear as a witness. This was the last thing he wanted. If Yates had relied on the backing of his illustrious friend, he was disappointed.

Instead, Dickens wrote Thackeray a pacifying letter which Thackeray promptly shared with the Garrick committee to show that Dickens was at the root of all the trouble. The rift between the two authors was now wider than ever. Dickens resigned from the committee and later from the club.

But Thackeray’s Pyrrhic victory over Yates came back to haunt him for the rest of his short life. With Yates snapping at his heels Thackeray snarled back only to be told by friends that by taking Yates seriously he was making himself look ridiculous. As his daughter recorded, “Everybody has been bullying him over his susceptibility.”

As for Yates, expulsion from the Garrick questioned his right to call himself a gentleman. But he soon bounced back. Like so many of his kind, he thrived on controversy, being welcomed in high society by the very people who complained bitterly at journalistic intrusion on their lives. Even a four-month prison sentence for criminal libel did little to dent his popularity. Appointed European correspondent of the New York Herald at the princely sum of £1,200 a year, he set up his own periodical, The World, which could boast George Bernard Shaw as art and music critic.

It was not until 1863, five years after the Garrick Affair, that Thackeray and Dickens managed to shake hands, some say on the steps of the Athenaeum, others that the encounter was at Drury Lane Theatre. In any event, neither said more than a few curt words. There was no further opportunity to achieve a reconciliation. Overweight and short of breath, a prodigious eater and drinker, Thackeray died on Christmas Eve 1863, aged 52, of a burst blood vessel in his brain.

What then are we to make of the Garrick Affair? With hindsight, it seems like a lot of fuss over very little, though literary critics and biographers disagree. One Thackeray admirer calls the Town Talk article a “vicious attack”, which suggests she has never read it. Another biographer describes Isabella as “hopelessly insane”. Really? Yates is too easily dismissed as a mediocre talent.

However, the fear of private conversations entering the public domain was real enough. As the editor of the Literary Gazette commented, “As political gossip oozes out of the Carlton and Reform, so theatrical gossip oozes out of the Garrick.” Literary gossip too, he might have added.

Dickens and Thackeray were among the first to face up to the contradictions inherent in modern celebrity. They enjoyed their fame while resisting journalistic probing into matters they considered to be off the record. But it was the inside story that appealed to readers of the public prints. For journalists who endeavoured to satisfy the popular taste, gossip was golden. Those who had something to hide were bound to be vulnerable. Thackeray and Dickens were assuredly of that number.

The lesson, as true now as it was then, is for those who are offended by press attention to think carefully before reacting. To protest too much is to invite further speculation. A story greeted in silence will soon die of inertia. The public memory is remarkably short.

“Men of Letters: The Story of Garrick Writers” by Barry Turner is available from the Garrick Club, £25. To purchase a copy, please contact the Secretary, Garrick Club, 15 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9AY;  office@garrickclub.co.uk

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