The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ the pile along with The Communist Manifesto and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, suggesting my id urgently required my ego to look into books which might help make sense of this problem of not getting laid, figuratively speaking.

      fn2. ‘Uncle Vanya, we must go on. We’ve no choice! All we can do is go on living … all through the endless days and evenings … we will get through them … whatever fate brings. We’ll work for others until we’re old, there’ll be no rest for us till we die. And when the time comes, we’ll go without complaining and we’ll remember that we wept, and that we suffered, and that life was bitter, but God will take pity on us! …’ Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Act 4.

      I always wanted to copy out this speech in the ‘Further Comments’ box of my annual appraisal form.

      In the event, neither Post Office nor The Communist Manifesto offered much in the way of solace. That said, Post Office was a holiday brochure compared to the toil and hopelessness captured by The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the concluding instalment of this subliminal trilogy. Over the course of 600 pages, it catalogued the indignity of labour in painstaking, crushing detail.

      The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is essential to the history of the British Left, both for what it says and what it symbolises. On the wall of the house in Hastings where it was written, in a flat above a bike shop, there is a blue plaque that states: ‘Robert Noonan, 1870–1911. Author as Robert Tressell of “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, The First Working-Class Novel.’ It is the story of a year in the life of a group of Mugsborough (i.e. Hastings) painters and decorators and their families. They are the philanthropists of the title and their ‘philanthropy’ is ironical; they practically give away their skills and strength to a system that perpetuates their oppression – ‘The Great Money Trick’, as it is memorably laid out in the novel. Into their midst comes Frank Owen, a thinker and a Socialist, who tries to rouse his workmates from their unenlightened torpor. Robert Noonan was an accomplished plasterer and sign-painter, and an enthusiastic member of the Social Democratic Federation (a forerunner of the Labour Party). On Sundays, he was often to be seen preaching the word from a soapbox on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-Sea.

      For the Left, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a totemic document. It dramatises the class conflict of The Communist Manifesto in a domestic setting that is immediately recognisable to millions of working people all over the world. Better than that, it was written by a real painter and decorator – the characters and situations feel authentic because they are authentic. (‘I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of.’) Furthermore, the author was a committed activist who intended his book to ‘indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely – Socialism’. And, fifty years before Coronation Street, Boys from the Blackstuff or The Royle Family, it gave its readers a portrait of working-class life that was compassionate, salty and true. A TUC working group could not have come up with anything more effective.^fn3

      fn3. In fact, the TUC now owns the original handwritten manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It can be browsed in its entirety at www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php.

      However, it isn’t all friendly associations and taproom banter. Tressell’s depiction of human fallibility, greed and treachery is unrelenting. I was particularly fascinated by the personality of the ‘journeyman-prophet’ Frank Owen, who seems to spend most of the novel in a state of perpetual rage and frustration, both at his masters’ deviousness and his workmates’ failure to comprehend ‘The Money Trick’, in spite of his repeated efforts to explain it to them during tea-breaks. If Post Office is an account of the working life of a man without principle, too dazed or apathetic or self-medicated to fundamentally change anything, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists suggests how much worse it is to be a man of principle trapped in the same system, to know with dreadful clarity what is oppressing and wasting you, but to be powerless to do anything about it, except proselytise and wriggle and rant.

      We started well. As I progressed through the novel, though, fifty pages a day, I soon encountered a flaw – the book was obviously far too long. I started reading on a Tuesday; by Friday, nothing had really happened in the plot that had not already happened several times before, most of it on Tuesday. This was alarming, because The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a doorstop and the print was very small. At this rate, I would not be in the clear till the weekend after next. On and on and on it goes. Just like the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, say its admirers; but if I wanted the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, I could get it at work.

      ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is less a bourgeois novel of characters and plot (with the dangers of falsification that plot can entail), than a novel of the continuing processes of working life, its themes and variations.’ This is what was written in the novel’s introduction and perhaps it was true. But it seemed like a handy retrospective gloss to apply to a story that is noticeably repetitive and static, and at times overwrought and hectoring like its hero Frank Owen. Of course, to the true Socialist the novel itself is a suspect item, a bauble of the bourgeoisie which does no more than reflect and reinforce the corrupt values of that class (the true Socialist might, with some justification, point to my mountains of unread books as proof of this phenomenon). Plot is a necessary sacrifice in the struggle to create art that is not compromised by bourgeois sensibilities and modes of expression. Fair enough. But, however noble in intention, this does seem like a sure-fire method of producing a lot of boring novels.^fn4

      fn4. In the late 1960s, the film director Jean-Luc Godard denounced the French film industry as inherently bourgeois and announced that henceforth he would only produce work which conformed to his increasingly Maoist political beliefs. This resulted in several short films that whatever one’s opinion of them as cinematic art – and I think they are pretty wonderful – are unambiguously terrible propaganda. British Sounds, which Godard made around this time for (of all people) London Weekend Television, consists of uninterrupted footage of the deafening production line at Ford’s plant in Dagenham, Essex, a naked woman wandering up and down stairs in a flat, interviews with a group of Ford employees, a generic bunch of hirsute students sitting around and chatting and, finally, a montage sequence of clenched fists punching through paper Union Jack flags. It is laughably pretentious and woefully inscrutable. Had the director been bold enough to screen this for the workers at Dagenham, they would have been more likely to rise up and seize Jean-Luc Godard than the means of production. British Sounds was never broadcast by LWT, but these days you can find most of it on YouTube.

      Noonan’s original manuscript was quarter of a million words long – three times the length of the book you are reading. It was impossible to find anyone willing to publish it in unexpurgated form and Noonan died in 1911 without ever seeing his novel in print. After his death, his daughter Kathleen sold all rights in her father’s work to the publisher Grant Richards for the sum of £25. In 1914, Richards produced a first edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which slashed 100,000 words from the text. It was priced at six shillings, too much for a housepainter to afford. Reviews were mostly very positive. A second edition appeared four years later, retailing at a shilling but shorn of a further 60,000 words. Noonan’s novel was now little more than a third of its intended length. It was not until 1955 that, thanks to the efforts of Hastings Labour Party member Fred Ball, a restored and uncut version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was made available to the general public via the Communist Party publisher Lawrence & Wishart.

      In this version of events, the original publisher Grant Richards seems like a scoundrel. He exploits a dead man’s daughter. He bowdlerises the novel, not once, but twice, despite which it becomes a bestseller. But hold on; if Richards had not recognised the book’s power, describing it as ‘extraordinarily real’ and ‘damnably subversive’, СКАЧАТЬ