Oliver Kamm

Brecht and Hook

I omitted to comment last week on an article by Nick Cohen in The Observer about Bertolt Brecht. Nick rightly terms Brecht "a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism".

I've written about Brecht here. The writer I'd compare him to is Maxim Gorky: an author of a handful of outstanding works that transcend the limitations of his politics, but whose writing as a body is corrupted by an absolutist and fanatical ideology.

Note in particular the illuminating anecdote at the end of Nick's article about a meeting (the third and last) between Brecht and the American philosopher Sidney Hook in New York in 1935. Hook undemonstratively showed Brecht the door when Brecht unabashedly defended the Moscow trials and the purges. The story comes from Hook's memoirs, Out of Step, 1987, p. 493. (Hook had first recounted this story in print in an article entitled "A Recollection of Bertolt Brecht", in The New Leader, 10 October 1960.)

I tried recently to introduce readers of "Comment is Free" to the political significance of Sidney Hook, but without great hopes of success. I commend his plain speaking and anti-totalitarianism to my readers.

Hook was never a member of the Communist Party, but he was at one time a fellow traveller. In the 1932 presidential election he supported the Communist candidature of William Z. Foster sooner than vote for FDR. While he became one of the most effective and learned opponents of Communism, Hook never abandoned his socialism. Thirty years later, he declined to support LBJ against the Republican Barry Goldwater, and instead voted in the 1964 presidential election for Eric Hass, the candidate of the minuscule Marxist Socialist Labor Party. Towards the end of his life, when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan, Hook summarised his domestic political philosophy this way: "I am an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax, a secular humanist, and a firm supporter of freedom of choice with respect to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and other domestic measures to which [Reagan] is opposed."

For what my views are worth: I am a reconstructed believer in the welfare state as well as a supporter of the principle of progressive taxation; and I do not support voluntary euthanasia. I also lack a sense of humour sufficiently wry to call myself a socialist. It strikes me as an immense historical hindrance to the cause of the Left in the UK that its dominant party never - or at least, not until Tony Blair - saw the need to revise its ideological premises in the way that the German Social Democrats did in the late 1950s. And while well able to see that socialism was a defunct ideology that breathed its last in the financial crises of the early Mitterrand administration, Blair advanced as its alternative the essentially empty notion of a Third Way between the market and a command economy. But once you make allowance for Hook's idiosyncrasy in keeping alive the label of socialism, his approach to politics is, in my view, one for our age, as it was for his.

Writers and politics

Salman Rushdie has a letter in The Guardian today in which he declares it "bizarre and untruthful to say that I have a 'fondness for the Pentagon's politics'". The charge was made in in Saturday's paper by Terry Eagleton, who lamented: "For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." Eagleton's is a ludicrous remark that exemplifies the man's incapacity as a critic. The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions.

But while I pay tribute to Rushdie's courage over two decades and particular dignity in recent weeks, I direct your attention also to an accompanying letter from one M. Schachter: "Many people from eastern Europe remember Hugh MacDiarmid much less fondly than Terry Eagleton, as the man who reacted to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 not by leaving but rejoining the Communist party."

Yes, Eagleton really did eulogise the old fraud, describing him as "the great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid [who] died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended". Conservative government, to Eagleton, was a "dark night"; Soviet tanks don't warrant a mention against such a nightmare. The best description of MacDiarmid I have come across was Kingsley Amis's, when he referred in a review to "vole-faced, red-shirted Hugh MacDiarmid, arguably (as one tribute has it) the greatest Scottish poet since William McGonagall, inferior to him only in sense of irony". (The reference is cited in a footnote in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, 2000, p. 817.)

Substantiating Amis's judgement is the work of a moment. My copy of the selected poems (I've never run to more than that) of MacDiarmid includes the execrable "First Hymn to Lenin", published in 1931, which assures the dead tyrant: "Christ's cited no' by chance or juist because/ You mark the greatest turnin'-point since him/ But that your main redress has lain where he's/ Least use - fulfillin' his sayin' lang kep dim/ That whasae followed him things o' like natur'/ 'Ud dae - and greater!"

"Relevance", again

A few weeks ago I commented on an unfortunate gentleman called Jonah Albert. Mr Albert is a curatorial fellow at the National Gallery. He is unfortunate despite having an interesting job, because he is clueless about the function of art. Here is what he said in an article in The Observer:

You don't need a black face in a painting for it to hold stories relevant to black people. The paintings in the National Gallery deal with major life themes: love, loss, death, jealousy, betrayal, war, peace, power and many more ideas, all of which are just as relevant to black people as anyone else.

How fortunate that these "major life themes" are relevant to black people, then, because if they weren't then black people wouldn't be able to appreciate art, would they? Or to put it another way, Mr Albert ought already to have lost his job for an article so obtuse, patronising and demonstrative of his professional incompetence.

Unfortunately, he is not alone in this type of thing. There are teachers of English Literature who judge Shakespeare on similar criteria. The BBC reports:

Teachers have steered the Shakespeare curriculum for younger pupils in England away from Othello and Henry IV Part I in favour of lighter texts. After a poll, plays set for 13 and 14-year-olds in England could include Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Othello did not make the list because more than half of those questioned said the themes of sexual jealousy and racism were not suitable for that age. Teachers say the exam system impedes the enjoyment of Shakespeare anyway.

The BBC report (which is, incidentally, particularly badly written - note the common but crass use of "could" instead of "might") states further:

The idea of including Othello prompted the most objections - with 55% saying it was not suitable. Many teachers said the play should be kept for A-level study and that the themes were "too mature and sensitive for this age group". The report said: "Many stated that the topic of racism was not appropriate for Key Stage 3 study and the theme of sexual jealousy was widely felt to be beyond the experience of Year 9 children."

Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that adolescents of 13 and 14 haven't experienced sexual jealousy and might be bewildered by Iago's malevolent imagery of "an old black ram ... tupping your white ewe". Ought they not to learn about such common and destructive sentiments before they enter adulthood? But here I am accepting the utilitarian notions of the "teachers" who responded to the survey: we must teach what is relevant. That is an appalling notion. Literature gains its force not in describing a world we already know, but in illuminating enduring human concerns. Great writers see more and better than the rest of us. We gain experience through their art; we do not (or ought not to) fit the art to match our own experience. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought not to be teaching.

Our Angry Brigade

This one really is, I hope, the last word for some time on the inflammatory interventions - not only in foreign policy - of the multiculturalist Left and Right as symbolised by Ken Livingstone and the absurd Dinesh D'Souza. But one of my correspondents has proposed, in response to such forces, an "Angry Brigade" - of word alone, naturally - named for Voltaire. I warm to this idea. To that end, I proffer as our slogan an observation of a great rationalist, from the Idées républicaines: "Dans une république digne de ce nom, la liberté de publier ses pensées est le droit naturel du citoyen." (In a republic worthy of its name, the liberty to publish one's thoughts is the natural right of the citizen.)

That right is not to be traded off against the preferences of opinion-formers and lobbyists. In particular, those who advance such pernicious absurdities as that "urgent action needs to be taken to stop the demonisation of faith and belief communities" need to be rebuffed - and not temperately, either.

Shakespeare fallacies

I posted a comment a fortnight ago on the diaries of the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It took particular issue with an argument by Stephen Pollard that knowing biographical details of a composer may be valuable in helping us interpret the art. I maintain that knowing about an artist's life may tell us something about the stimulus to his work, but it tells us nothing about the art itself. To interpret a symphony, novel, painting or other work we have only the material the artist has given us. It is a fallacy - the "Intentional Fallacy" - to suppose that extraneous information about an artist's intentions yields insights into the art itself.

The Times carries today an instance of a fallacy that is almost the exact reverse of the one that invokes biographical details to interpret an artist's work:

SHAKESPEARE must have travelled in Italy, according to research that challenges claims that his plays set in that country are littered with mistakes.

Scholars have long criticised the plays as being flawed in their geographic and cultural details. However, research from America claims that the author of 13 plays set in Italy, including Romeo and Juliet, had an intimate knowledge of the geography, politics, people and customs of the country, which could not have been picked up secondhand from books or tavern gossip.

The author referred to, Richard Roe, is described as a "retired lawyer and Shakespeare scholar from Pasadena, California", whose conclusion is derived from "decades of research".

It is conceivable that a work of art might yield reliable information about historical events. Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Troy, sought to establish the reliability of Homer's Illiad on that principle. But it is a fallacy to infer from a work of art biographical details of the artist that are otherwise unknown. More than any other writer in English, Shakespeare is vulnerable to this treatment, first because of his literary stature and secondly because of the paucity of biographical information we have about him. Art is the work of imagination. The reference in King Lear to "these late eclipses in the sun" doesn't allow us to infer that the play was written shortly after a lunar eclipse. Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining an eclipse without having to be prompted by seeing one.

I choose that example deliberately, because the most extreme advocates of this bogus pseudo-biographical approach to literature do in fact argue it. They are the cranks who believe that the works of Shakespeare display such breeding and knowledge that they could not have been written by the actor from Stratford and must have been written instead by a nobleman using a nom de plume. The most favoured candidate among these conspiracy theorists (which is what they are) is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As de Vere died some years before the usual dating of Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, his enthusiasts try to establish an alternative chronology for the writing of the plays. If they can find an eclipse visible from England in the late 16th century, then - ergo - they find the approximate date for the writing of King Lear. The kindest thing one can say is that this is a monument to misplaced ingenuity.

I haven't read Mr Roe's work, which I believe is as yet unpublished. But I am mightily suspicious that he is presenting his thesis - as the Times report doesn't disclose - under the auspices of an organisation called the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, a venerable body concerned to "seek, and if possible establish, the truth concerning the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems". (The snobs - I prefer this term to their favoured titles of "Oxfordians" or "Baconians" - take a supposed intimate knowledge of Italy as evidence that the plays must have been written by a well travelled nobleman or high official rather than a jobbing actor.)

The amateur who labours while scorned by orthodox scholarship is occasionally vindicated, but more often he is scorned for justifiable reasons. I will make an educated guess that this particular retired lawyer will nowhere in his research deal with the conundrum that Old Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice, has a horse - in Venice - and that Milan is described in The Two Gentlemen of Verona as a port city. Shakespeare was notoriously hazy about his historical and geographical details. As the author of one study of Shakespeare and Italy, Murray J. Levith (Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays, 1989, p. 90) has noted:

One doesn't always ask Shakespeare for perfectly credible plots, and one needn't ask him for perfectly accurate settings. After all, any dramatist's stock-in-trade is to create believable illusions, sometimes from minimal suggestion.... It doesn't really matter if Shakespeare's Italy was 'discovered', if Shakespeare was an Italian traveller. If he were, though, we haven't been able to find his footprints.

Nor, I predict, has the lawyer from Pasadena.

UPDATE: What a howler. In citing the "late eclipses in the sun" referred to by Shakespeare, I did it from memory and initially published this post with the wrong reference, indeed the wrong tragedy altogether. The line comes from King Lear, of course, and is spoken by Gloucester in the second scene of the first act. I have corrected this monumental error. My point that advocates of the notion that the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare use this and other references to establish an alternative chronology for the plays is however correct. The founding text of this crank notion, entitled (note the inverted commas) "Shakespeare" Identified, was published in 1920, and the wonder of technology now allows users of the Internet to read it. The author was a Gateshead schoolmaster whose name was - joy of joys - J. Thomas Looney. Apparently Looney resisted entreaties to write under a pseudonym. (He insisted his was a distinguished old Manx name that should be pronounced 'Loney'.) I don't recommend you read this farrago of nonsense, but the preface does nicely indicate the way the monomaniac thinks. Looney states:

THE solution to the Shakespeare problem, which it is the purpose of the following pages to unfold, was worked out whilst the Great European War was in progress; and my wish was to give the matter full publicity immediately upon the cessation of hostilities. As this was found to be impracticable, steps had to be taken, both to ensure that the results achieved should not be lost, and also to safeguard what I believed to be my priority of discovery. With these objects, an announcement of the mere fact of the discovery, omitting all details, was made in November, 1918, to Sir Frederick Kenyon, Librarian of the British Museum, and he very readily undertook to receive, unofficially, a sealed envelope containing a statement on the subject. As more than a year has passed since the deposition was made, and as no one else has come forward with the same solution, the question of priority is not likely now to arise, and therefore, with the publication of the present work, the purpose of the deposited document naturally lapses.

Looney was seriously worried that someone would come up with the theory that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare before he did. He should have been reassured that in the annals of crankery, his name lives still.

Why Grass deserves to have his writing hurled back in his face

This article appears in The Times today.

“THIRTY-FIVE years after Auschwitz,” wrote the novelist Günter Grass in 1979, “the problem confronting Germans is once more: what shall we tell our children?” The answer, in the case of his own war record, turns out to have been “an artfully filleted account”. Grass caused a storm this week after belatedly disclosing that in 1944 he had joined the Waffen SS.

Grass is a significant writer, best known for his novels depicting the effects of Nazism on individual lives. His Danzig trilogy, starting with The Tin Drum (1959), secured his reputation. With the novelists Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson, he represented a German cultural rebirth, escaping the mediocrity of the early postwar years and reflecting caustically but subtly on the country’s recent past. His work is far from unremittingly serious, however. The Flounder (1977), alluding to the Grimm fable The Fisherman and his Wife, incorporates the Absurd style in depicting the trial of a talking fish.

Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. There have been calls this week for it to be revoked. That is unlikely to happen. Grass is, on literary merit, unquestionably a more deserving recipient than many laureates living or dead. The 2004 winner, an orthodox communist of meagre talent called Elfriede Jelinek, is not even a leading writer in her native Austria. Who now has heard of, let alone read, the forgettable novels of China by Pearl S. Buck, winner in 1938? Nor are meretricious political acts a disbarment to literary fame. Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel laureate, was so obsequious an admirer of Stalin that, as Chile’s Consul-General in Mexico in 1940, he conspired in the murder of Trotsky.

Yet for all this, Grass’s fall from grace is a case apart that tells us much about modern Germany. He made his revelation in an interview timed for the release of his memoirs. He has since explained: “I sensed this stigma, and I saw it as a stigma for 60 years and tried to draw the proper consequences. That shaped my later behaviour as an author and a citizen.”

Perhaps Grass believed that this would be taken as dignified contrition. If so, he will have been disappointed. Even his biographer declared his dismay. Lech Walesa, another famous son of Gdansk (known as Danzig when Grass was born there in 1927), called on him to give up his honorary citizenship of the city.

It is not just the fact of SS membership. Grass was a very young recruit, and most who joined the SS at that stage of the war were conscripts rather than ideologues. What was culpable in his confession was the date of it. It has taken more than 60 years for Grass to tell the truth. It will not do to say that his voice of conscience and literary stature transcend his tarnished authority. As a writer and commentator, Grass has spent his adult life calling his countrymen to account and atone for Germany’s past. The charge of hypocrisy sticks.

Even that is not the worst of it. Grass has deployed his themes of guilt and moral reckoning for partisan political causes. To be sure, he never expounded the nonsense that saw in Germany’s response to leftist terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s an intimation of Nazi repression. When the New Left concluded that anti-fascism implied opposition to the state of Israel, Grass cautioned presciently that a historically rootless “anti-imperialism” might become a force for “ anti-Judaism”. But he has never shrunk from drawing tendentious analogies between Germany’s Nazi past and its postwar policies.

During the controversy over Nato’s deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles to counter Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces in the early 1980s, Grass asserted a “right to resist” born of the memory of German acquiescence to Hitler’s legal seizure of power. The resistance he envisaged was not violent, but it included a general strike: industrial militancy to thwart the policies of a democratic government. There is no great difference, he declared, “ between the cynical disregard of the basic ethical values by the ill-famed Wannsee Conference, which decreed the ‘final solution’, and the cynicism that in our own day produces war games simulating nuclear combat with projections of here fifty, there eighty million dead”.

Here is the reason Grass’s discourse on the Nazi past — “to keep the wound open”, as he put it — should be thrown back in his face. Modern Germany was created out of Roosevelt and Churchill’s insistence on “unconditional surrender”. From the ruins of barbarism emerged a state that, for all its flaws, approaches a modern miracle. German conservatism abandoned authoritarianism and nationalism. German social democracy recognised the threat to freedom from Soviet communism. Both wings of politics fashioned a “militant democracy” resolved to defend itself from extremism. Anchored in the liberal West and the transatlantic alliance, Germany has faced and confounded totalitarianism rather than, as it once did, exemplifying it.

Grass’s voice of conscience has increasingly been less about “keeping the wound open” than deploying it as a rhetorical device to denounce the foreign policy and alliances that have preserved postwar Germany as a free and civilised nation. The voice will remain, bombastic and querulous — but deservedly and definitively discredited.

UPDATE: The novelist John Irving laments in The Guardian "all this bitching in Germany about when Grass chose to reveal his Waffen SS enlistment as a teenager!", and declares: "Grass remains a hero to me, both as a writer and as a moral compass; his courage, both as a writer and as a citizen of Germany, is exemplary - a courage heightened, not lessened, by his most recent revelation." Irving's vapid article thereby rather spectacularly misses the point of the criticisms. Friendship may be a virtue, but obtuseness is not.

... but before I go

Relax: this is my only encore. I've only just noticed that I unwittingly provided the raw material with which a writer for the Financial Times, Chris Wilkinson, was able to fashion a straw man in an article yesterday (online only with a subscription) entitled "A paradoxical playwright: Bertolt Brecht was a willing apologist for Stalin's tyranny. But does that devalue his art?":

It is true that, in private, Brecht's views on Stalin were considerably more ambiguous [than suggested by his welcome for Soviet tanks in East Berlin in 1953]. But this hasn't prevented a string of critics from lining up clutching hammers and sickles to beat him with. The latest of these is the journalist Oliver Kamm. Writing in The Times earlier this year, he described Brecht as "a big propagandist for . . . an orthodox communism that followed every twist of Stalin's whims"....

It is impossible to dismiss Brecht's political opinions when looking at his work in the way we might dismiss, say, Pirandello's fascism. Pirandello's views had little bearing on his plays, whereas with Brecht, as the scholar John Willett has pointed out, "no creative artist's politics were ever less independent of his work".

But equally, we should not confine ourselves to the "you're either with us or you're with the Stalinists" mentality of some critics. If Brecht's Marxism forced him, in life, into a polarised world view that necessitated his support of a red-tinted tyranny, in his art it provided an ideal base for him to explore the moral ambiguities that arise in the conflict between an individual and his social conditions....

Kamm condemns Brecht for producing "an exhortatory theatre that mirrored [his] corrosive political obsessions". But even Kamm concedes that some of his plays are actually quite good. He cites The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage as plays that "transcend [Brecht's] political vision to speak to the human condition". But this is to miss the point. Brecht's broader political outlook meant precisely that the "human condition" was inseparable from the material conditions in which the individual lived.

1. I have yet to meet anyone who believes the human condition is separable from the material conditions in which it is lived. If it were, then it wouldn't be the human condition but something altogether more ethereal.

2. Of course Brecht's repugnant politics do not devalue his art. Aesthetic criteria are independent of political judgements. A good writer can use politics to illuminate deeper and more enduring issues, as Brecht did at his best. A bad writer will use his politics to shroud his literary shortcomings. The realist novels of Theodore Dreiser are a pre-eminent example of this latter tendency from the 1930s, the painfully didactic plays of Trevor Griffiths (consider his 1970s period piece The Party, in which a fictionalised Gerry Healy has a starring role) a more recent one. Brecht at his worst was like that.

3. But if a theatre critic is going to venture a political judgement, he'd better get it right. What can Wilkinson mean by (emphasis added) "Brecht's Marxism [that] forced him, in life, into a polarised world view that necessitated his support of a red-tinted tyranny"? Why would Marxism, or a polarised world view, force him into any such thing? Coincidentally, in my article that Wilkinson cites, I referred to a contemporary Marxist whose political writings I am intellectually indebted to, and who treated Brecht with due respect:

The philosopher Sidney Hook recorded in his memoirs that Brecht, when visiting him in New York in 1935, had remarked of the victims of Stalin’s show trials: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook gave him his hat and coat, and showed him the door.

Brecht was - like Maxim Gorky - an appalling man who wrote a few great works of political literature and theatre. This doesn't seem to me a particularly contentious or incomprehensible point, even if it's a morally uncomfortable one.

The uses of euphemism

George Orwell wrote of the tendency whereby "political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness". As we're on the subject of the Socialist Workers' Party - a modern instance of a minority Marxist tendency to cross over to the unabashedly racist politics of the far-Right - I can give a predictable example from this week's edition of the party's newspaper. One Mike Haynes writes about the playwright Maxim Gorky, and concludes:

Gorky did not see that the poverty forced on Russia’s masses by Stalin undercut any real possibility of change. In 1932 Stalin invited him back again [from exile in Italy]. He returned to Russia for the last time. Now the regime was able to use him as a propaganda weapon. In private Gorky’s doubts began to grow, but by then it was too late. He was trapped intellectually and politically.

Gorky really is a substantial figure of European literature. His autobiographical writings, his play The Lower Depths and his novel Mother are in particular outstanding works. But that doesn't mean it's legitimate to bury Gorky's political record in evasions of his culpability as a propagandist for Stalin.

I'd recommend in this context a book called Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal, 1998, by Cynthia A. Ruder. Belomor was the abbreviated name for the Baltic-White Sea Canal. It was a garguantuan, brutal and - as it turned out - almost entirely useless project of Stalin's that was begun in 1930 and built by slave-labour. Ruder's book gives not only the history of this grotesque project but an account of the literary works written to celebrate it. She remarks (p. xi): "Foremost among these is The History of the Construction of Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal, a volume notorious in the annals of Russian literary history...." Gorky was one of three editors of this book, which, astonishngly, celebrated Belomor as a humanitarian achievement. In his outstanding biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003, p. 106), Simon Sebag Montefiore records that of 170,000 workers who began construction of the canal, 25,000 died within the first 18 months.

Those who were "trapped" in this hell-on-earth were the slave-labourers hacking out solid rock. But if you're hacking out an article for Socialist Worker, your sympathies are liable to be otherwise engaged.

"The flourishing of the intelligentsia"

Writing in The New Statesman, Terry Eagleton pronounces upon the resilience of the intelligentsia:

Raymond Williams once remarked that the only sure thing about the organic society was that it had always gone, and the same applies to the flourishing of the intelligentsia. Michel Foucault proclaimed the passing of the classical, Sartrean type of intellectual, one who pronounced authoritatively on everything from aesthetics to politics as the very voice of truth and justice. With the death of grand narratives, he considered, these hubristic creatures would need to draw in their horns and think small. Yet despite Foucault's strictures, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and Julia Kristeva continued to operate in this public space, as though they had never heard that it had been closed down.

No one could accuse Eagleton of reticence in pronouncing on 'everything from aesthetics to politics as the very voice of truth and justice', especially as he's done it from so many different and incompatible standpoints. (Connoisseurs of fringe groups will recall his ill-fated venture from the 1960s, called Slant, to establish a revolutionary voice of Roman Catholicism.)

But you'd gain a greater insight into the type of intellectual of whom Eagleton speaks, and have a lot more fun in the process, by jettisoning this week's Statesman and reading this instead. I promise you won't regret it. (Originally published in Scribner's Magazine in 1911, it was collected in Edith Wharton's 1916 volume Xingu and Other Stories, which has unfortunately been out of print for many years.)

Find some room for Mr Bloom

Apologies for the lack of posts this week, and particularly for not covering yet the pressing issue of free speech and intolerance, on which my views are entirely in accord with Andrew Sullivan's. I'll come back to it next week.

This article, on a more parochial but far from trivial issue, appears in The Times today.

THIS WEEK the Royal Society of Literature asked various authors for their top ten recommended books for schoolchildren. Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, generated some derision for a list that included Ulysses and The Waste Land. Yet while Professor Motion’s choices are ambitious, they are not absurd. His aversion to the idea that great literature is “elitist” is right, and ought to be asserted against some of his fellow authors.

The reason that Ulysses is unlikely to appeal to a child is that it works by allusion rather than narrative. But so does Through The Looking-Glass, which we think nothing of giving to children. The notion that Alice is merely a “sort of thing” in the Red King’s dream alludes to longstanding debates in metaphysics. Moreover, Professor Motion recommended Ulysses not in isolation but alongside Homer’s Odyssey.

Philip Pullman and J.K Rowling also recommended works that stretch the reader while being compelling stories, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. Unfortunately their contributions are where the wisdom of the exercise ended.

According to the RSL, some authors declined to take part on the ground that “children’s characters were so different that it wouldn’t be right to dictate to them”. Nick Hornby worried that “any kind of prescription of this kind [sic] is extremely problematic”. The poet Wendy Cope ventured truism and non sequitur: “There are children who love reading and there are people who go right through life without ever finishing a book.”

The novelist Ben Okri suggested that books were a sorry substitute for real life: “Read the world. It is the most mysterious book of all.”

In short, there are prominent and prize-winning authors who are incompetent to deal with children and do not understand what books are for. The power of literature lies not in its faithfulness of description of a world that readers are familiar with, but in its illumination of enduring human concerns.

Good writers retain popularity not because of arbitrary pedagogical preference but because they see more, and better. The notion that children on a stereotypical inner-city council estate would fail, because of their background, to be enriched by Dickens or Defoe is worse than an impoverishment of the imagination. It is snobbery.