Oliver Kamm

"Textification", I ask you

The Independent reports on "a scheme which claims to promote understanding of English literature's classics via the mobile phone":

The project will send text message quotations and plot summaries of seven works, from Milton's Paradise Lost to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, to mobile phones to act as an aide-memoire for undergraduates. The mobile phone company behind the scheme yesterday denied it was guilty of a poetry-crushing gimmick. Instead, Dot mobile, a service for students, pointed out that its messages were devised by the media-savvy academic, John Sutherland, emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London.

I gave my views on this in a discussion with media-savvy academic John Sutherland on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. It's the segment at 8.22am, and will be on the programme's web site just till tomorrow.

The mobile phone company's spokesman declares in a press release:

We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy.'

Where a charge is denied even before anyone has had the oportunity to make it, it's a fairly reliable indicator that somewhere down the line are the stirrings of conscience, or at least of embarrassment.

UPDATE: The recording has now been replaced on the BBC web site by today's programme, but my comments are in this report.

Hitchens on Pinter

Christopher Hitchens, in today's Wall Street Journal (link requires subscription), terms the award of a Nobel to Harold Pinter "a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque":

The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature -- two matters that ought to concern all serious people -- the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool's-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Hitchens believes Pinter has produced nothing worth noticing since the 1960s, which is a little harsh. The poetry is dismal and the politics vile, but the screenplays up until the execrable film version of Margaret Atwood's fine novel The Handmaid's Tale are spare and consistently good (especially The French Lieutenant's Woman and the little-noticed Turtle Diary, based on Russell Hoban's novel). Hitchens also castigates last year's winner, Elfriede Jelinek, as a mediocre Austrian Stalinist, which is not harsh at all.

Those Nobel Laureates

Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein is my choice for next year's literature prize:

If my ludicrous, crass, offensive, second-rate, obscure-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness poem had been written not by me but by a modern giant of the literary scene such as Harold Pinter, it would be taken seriously as an important statement. This is fortunate, in the circumstances, because it was. The great man published the poem Democracy in 2003. It is a Pinter, not a Finkelstein, original, I’m pleased to say.

It is no pain to say that Pinter's prize is well-deserved, though. Unpleasant men with bizarre opinions sometimes do write great drama. And Pinter is a less appalling man and a greater dramatist than Brecht. He is a vastly more important writer than last year's winner, Elfriede Jelinek, who is well-served in English by her translator Michael Hulse but whose pretentiousness towards the subject ought to win her the Literary Review 'Bad Sex Award'. There are far greater Austrian writers, never mind international ones, who have never been mentioned as candidates for the Nobel Prize (notably the late Thomas Bernhard).

A triumph tragically overstated

This column appeared in The Times on 7 July, and I have delayed posting it.

FOR THE PAST two months, enthusiastic audiences and critical superlatives have crowded the Lyric Theatre in London for a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Even the Telegraph critic Charles Spencer, a Miller sceptic, “watched it transfixed, totally overwhelmed by the classic tragic emotions of terror and pity”.

I watched it in some physical pain owing to the volume at which all of the leads shouted most of the lines. That was not their fault. Brian Dennehy, as Willy Loman, whose dreams founder on harsh American commercialism, and Clare Higgins, as his wife, Linda, give powerful performances. Their roles need to be bellowed for the same reason platform oratory needs to be declaimed. In Miller’s depiction of the corrosiveness of American society, no nuance is acknowledged and no spark of individuality intrudes. The play fails as tragedy not because Willy is a struggling bourgeois rather than a man of stature, but because he lacks the element of choice. He is a victim, not an anti-hero. Death of a Salesman is not drama, but tract — pedestrian, one-dimensional and finally bathetic.

On his death last February, Miller was fêted as 20th-century America’s greatest dramatist. Some of his lesser-known works, such as the television screenplay Playing for Time and the novella Plain Girl, are deft and poignant. But there is a disconcerting desperation in the hyperbole of his advocates (one director of Death of a Salesman, Michael Rudman, absurdly called it “arguably the greatest play ever written”), perhaps aware that wooden allegory and hectoring political earnestness are an insubstantial foundation for literary greatness.

History, too, has not been kind to Miller’s idées fixes. The Crucible, written in response to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying, and likening America’s postwar anti-communist investigations to the Salem witch trials, is a laboured caricature of a more subtle reality. We now know, from the Venona decrypts of Soviet intelligence traffic, that Julius Rosenberg was guilty as charged of heading a Soviet atomic espionage ring.

Miller’s biographer, Martin Gottfried, notes in perplexity that to his final decade Miller “could be commonly identified not as the author of Death of a Salesman but as the man who had married Marilyn Monroe”. That is no conundrum: Marilyn was the greater artist.

Shakespeare again

Despite their professed radical sympathies, the "cultural materialists" who believe the notion of literature is illusory have little in common with an older tradition of left-wing thought. This is from the only full-length biography of the Trinidadian Marxist thinker, inspiration for 'black consciousness' and author of the finest book on cricket ever written, C.L.R. James, C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and World Revolution, by Farrukh Dondy (2001, p. 102):

One of the persistent myths thrown up by the Black Power movement and by a particularly pernicious and ignorant stream of 'black studies' was that Shakespeare, being one of the iconic white male figures of literature, was a racist, an anti-semite, and various other things. In Britain this reactionary ideology took the form of patois poetry in the sixties and seventies, offered nor simply as developments in pop but as political challenges to Shakespeare or Keats.

The idea of 'relevance' was taken up by a section of school teachers and editors who argued for the poets of the English canon to be replaced with the verse of Maya Angelou and with other poets who wrote in West Indian dialects, the Jamaican or Trinidadian patois.

This was a view from which CLR profoundly dissented. To him Shakespeare and Keats stood for the expression of civilising value, the centre of the cultural endeavour of humanity to which he belonged.

Dhondy illustrates his point with an account of a meeting he attended at James's flat in Brixton, in south London. A young poet from Jamaica called Michael Smith is being followed by a television crew for an arts programme, and Smith ('Mikey') expounds his grass-roots revolutionary stance ("the illiterate, suffering genius who knows no language but the spontaneous revelations of his verse") to James:

CLR... seems determined to extract some clarity from Mikey and refuses to bolster the falsehood he believes him to be creating. The game is blown wide open when, with a sneer, Mikey alludes to "Shak-uss-peeree. Or whatever he is called." A sneer too far. The old man calls him to order.

"Now hold on. I have lived most of my life in the Caribbean. I know Jamaica and Jamaican people, and I have never heard Shakespeare's name pronounced like that."

He refuses to let Mikey wear ignorance on his sleeve as a badge of rebellion. It's the wrong kind of rebellion.

The lesson still needs expounding. If you look at the Amazon page I have linked to, you find this comment (taken from the book's dust-jacket) in the synopsis (emphasis added):

CLR James was a Marxist philosopher, intent on paper at least on world revolution. But later in life, he rejected the incendiary rhetoric of his youth. He was an unabashed elitist, but at the same time fought discrimination of any sort.

The invocation of 'elitism' refers, and can only refer, to James's belief in the civilising value of art. That is not elitism; it is a recognition of objective standards of aesthetic excellence. Elitism, on the contrary, is the denigration of art and its consequent maintenance as the preserve of an affluent and educated minority. Elitism is, in fact, the characteristic of those supposedly radical theorists who elevate 'cultural studies' over art, music and literature.

What is . . . the "battle of Will"?

This column appears in The Times today.

LAST week The Times Higher Education Supplement published a scathing attack on the state of Shakespearean appreciation. Tom McAlindon, a professor of English literature at Hull University, noted that a battle had long been fought over Shakespeare’s soul. The protagonists were “politicised, theory-driven radicals” and those they dubbed liberal humanist critics. What concerns McAlindon is that the radicals have become the Shakespeare establishment.

McAlindon cited the case of Kate McLuskie, the new director of Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute. Professor McLuskie has never published a book on Shakespeare; her best-known work is an essay called "The Patriarchal Bard", which dissects Shakespeare’s alleged misogyny.

The radicals see criticism as a vehicle of social change. McAlindon is contemptuous. He accuses them of “frequently showing an astonishing disregard for the basic principles of scholarly inquiry and textual analysis”.

Henry Kissinger once observed that the bitterness of academic politics is inversely related to the importance of the issues at stake. The “Battle of Will for the Bard’s Soul”, as the THES headlined it, refutes him. The invective is intense because the issues matter. They concern not only the role in our culture of the pre-eminent figure of English literature, but what it is to read books at all.

The radical critics, who style themselves cultural materialists, seek to reveal the ways in which Shakespeare has been used politically (or as two of them put it, “to explore the ideological functions of texts at various historical junctures” – cultural materialists tend to talk like this). They maintain that Shakespeare has been taught in schools to “adjust young people to an unjust social order”. Having exposed those assumptions, they are free to present their own readings mercifully shorn of oppressive ideologies. One example is an article entitled “How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist”.

By such means, the radicals argue, readers of Shakespeare can experience “the transgressive pleasure of critique” — which I think means the satisfaction gained from smuggling political certitudes into the messy business of making aesthetic judgements. The problem is that the transgressive pleasure of critique is not most people’s idea of fun, and is not the pleasure that most lovers of literature gain from reading.

Literature provides insights into the human condition in a way that no political treatise can match. Shakespeare’s greatness lies not in a gift for memorable phrase but in his matchless exploration of enduring human concerns that are not tied to a particular era or social system. A literary establishment that fails to convey that, fails altogether.

UPDATE: Tom McAlindon has recently published a fine collection of essays on Shakespeare (and one on Christopher Marlowe) with the equally-splendid title Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. His case is that:

The assumptions and intentions of radical criticism have led inevitably and demonstrably to a deterioration in standards of analysis, investigation, and interpretation in Shakespeare studies.

Unfortunately this is true, and unlike his antagonists McAlindon argues the point with a close attention to Shakespeare's text. Also much to be recommended is his Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos, in which he expounds the exploration in the tragedies of "a transhistorical model of human and universal nature".

Kate McLuskie's essay 'The Patriarchal Bard' is included in the collection Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. The book is in effect a manifesto for the tendencies McAlindon attacks. Sinfield is also the author of 'How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist', cited above; it is included in the collection Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1996).

More broadly than on Shakespeare alone, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1982) has become an astonishingly popular manifesto of radical theory (known generically as Cultural Studies). Eagleton maintains that the concept of literature divorced from other social and cultural phenomena is illusory. He argues this case on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of a point made by John M. Ellis, a scholar of German literature, in his Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (1974). Ellis observes, with an understatement that makes his exasperation all the more evident, in his magificent lament on Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of Humanities (1997, pp. 43-4):

[Eagleton] begins by citing and building upon someone else's analysis of how literature should be defined, citing it with evident approval, but he misunderstands that analysis and its conclusions. What he then erects upon this foundation shows that he has not grasped the nature of the issues that arise in a definition. I make this judgment with some confidence, for the analysis Eagleton makes the basis of his argument was my own.

Between them, Ellis and McAlindon make the most powerful defence to have been published in recent years of literature, the humanities and indeed the very notion of Western civilisation.

Foot on Shelley

This is my last comment, for a while at least, on Paul Foot. It deals with his venture in literary criticism, Red Shelley - a subject that I touched on only briefly in my general post assessing Foot's work. I give it a separate post, for the book needs to be considered in context in order to appreciate how misconceived it is.

For a number of commentators on Foot's writings, Red Shelley represents a bravely heterodox work. Here, again, is Nick Cohen:

Red Shelley, published in 1980, remains one of the finest interventions in literary criticism of our time. Shelley, another revolutionary who came from the establishment, was a comrade. Foot rescued his reputation from the critics and syllabus setters who sought to portray him as a love poet and showed him to be what he was, a poet of rebellion.

This is certainly what Foot liked to believe. Appropriating Shelley as a precursor for the socialist tradition, he claimed that the poet had been subjected to 'a hundred castrated editions' that threw out the politics. And he saw his task as:

... restor[ing] to Shelley the political ideas without which his poetry loses its magic, its music and its meaning. I want to pass on Shelley's political enthusiasms to today's socialists, radicals and feminists.

The trouble is that Foot's picture of Shelley criticism isn't even a caricature so much as a fallacy. The political issues that concerned Shelley have lost their salience, but critics do acknowledge the centrality of his political ideas. Foot is not even a pioneer in claiming Shelley for his own form of politics. There is a cottage industry in claiming Shelley for diverse radical political traditions: I have on my shelves one particularly ambitious attempt called Shelley and Non-Violence, written by a radical pacifist of the Students for a Democratic Society a generation ago. ("In the nonviolent philosophies of Shelley and Gandhi, Truth is God and Love is God." This may be meaningless mush, but the author, one Art Young, at least gives a more faithful account than Foot of Shelley's ideas on political violence.)

But Shelley's political ideas debilitate many of the larger-scale works. Foot is so busy hurling imprecations at those he considers reactionaries, that it doesn't occur to him that editors of Shelley may be engaged in something other than censorship of radical politics. He declaims that 'the castration of Shelley at British places of learning has not been confined to rowing oafs' - but fails to draw the inference that there may in that case be some problem with his own understanding of the critics.

The case against Shelley has never been better put than by his contemporary, William Hazlitt. Foot cites Hazlitt's radical judgements on politics approvingly, but apparently (for they are nowhere mentioned in the book) he is unfamiliar with Hazlitt's observations on Shelley. In his review of Shelley's volume of Posthumous Poems, in the Edinburgh journal in 1824, Hazlitt noted:

[Shelley] has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most.... but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system.... The success of his writings is therefore in general in inverse ratio to the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon and outstripped his powers of execution.... he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy.

Ever since Hazlitt, critics have maintained that Shelley's poetry is undermined by its lack of metaphors adequate to expounding a complex philosophical scheme. So far from 'castrating' Shelley by ignoring or denouncing his political ideas, this criticism treats the political ideas as central. That indeed is the problem with the large-scale poetry (though not the smaller-scale works, as Hazlitt notes). Characteristically, Foot can't believe there is a genuine issue of literary criticism here. He says of the critic F.R. Leavis:

His objection to Shelley was not, as he pretended, purely literary. It was political. And because his criticism refuses, in the name of literary objectivity, to engage Shelley in the real argument which Leavis had with him, it is criticism by subterfuge.

This is a nice illustration of what makes Red Shelley such a bad book. Failing to grasp the literary objections to Shelley's more ambitious work, Foot imagines a political sub-text where none exists, even accusing those he disagrees with of 'subterfuge' in conveying their opinions. The irony is that Foot himself 'refuses to engage Shelley' in textual exegesis. In my main post on Foot's work I alluded to what I believe to be his serious misreading of Shelley's most celebrated achievement, Prometheus Unbound. To Foot, the poem has a central and, to him, congenial purpose:

Reform, the poem concludes, is impossible without revolution.

He bases this judgement on an allegorical interpretation of the role of Jupiter's vanquisher, Demogorgon, whom Foot identifies as the masses:

Who was Demogorgon? One answer, a very obvious one which is often overlooked, is that he was who his name said he was. Shelley was always making up names from Greek words. Demos in Greek means the people; gorgon, the monster. Demorgon is the 'people-monster'.

In case it isn't obvious enough, Foot also cites (following, but not crediting, E.P.Thompson) a radical paper started in 1818 called Gorgon. The trouble is that this idea is nothing like as obvious as Foot makes out. Prometheus is generally held to be a symbol of the poet or intellectual; in his prose works written at the same time, Shelley depicts the masses as having exactly the opposite effect on the reforming zeal of the poets, 'the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. As he wrote to the novelist Thomas Love Peacock in August 1819, political reform should be driven by those in the higher orders, lest it lead to anarchy and thence despotism. Foot has no real evidence for his thesis (which is not to say that it must therefore be wrong), but that isn't the main objection to the way he treats the poem: rather, by fitting the poem to his own political scheme, he attributes to it a dramatic quality that it doesn't possess, and overlooks the significance of Prometheus's curse and recantation.

My objection to Red Shelley is not primarily to its interpretations, few of which are as forced as this one. Rather it is the idle accusation of censorship levelled at those who take Shelley a lot more seriously as a poet than Foot himself does. Poetry is a medium, not an instrument, of ideas. If your interest in poetry is the cogency of the ideas, then you might as well be reading prose.

Poetry, please

I'm clearly lagging on this story, as I have only now discovered that The Standard published a poem by Paul Marsden MP earlier this week. As it was taken from Marsden's web site and read out in the House of Commons, I think we can take it that it's intended for public consumption. It is entitled 'She came in the night', and here it is in full:

She came in the night,

Dark hair, alive billowing as a trapped kite

Marching forward, confident and right,

Her hips swaying and her red lips tight

Then that smile so devastating in its might,

Tongue rippling across teeth so white.

Breasts rising as I feel the urge to bite.

Eyes stalking its prey, she's relishing the fight.

Who would mess with this amazing sight?

In awe of womanhood so sexual and bright,

A wondrous sweet smell exacerbates my plight,

Arching her back, stretched to its full height,

I am captured forever, dazzled by feminine light.

As she came in the night.

I prefer a more Skeltonian metre. I call this poem 'Paul Marsden MP':

His poetry's a fright.

The man can't write.

In skilful diction he is light,

And emotionally trite.

That's right.

The merits of G.K. Chesterton

A friend, Hilary Wade, has posted a terrific comment disagreeing with my comments about conservatism and the literary detective. She says:

Well, it looks like nobody else is going to say it, so I guess it's up to me. Despite the best efforts of yourself and Martin Gardner, I have to tell you that there is not, repeat not, going to be a mass G.K. Chesterton revival. It isn't going to happen. And the reason for this is that Chesterton is not, in fact, an outstanding prose writer. First-rate thinker, yes, okay, but absolutely not a first-rate writer. His style may be compared, as indeed I think it has been by Max Beerbohm, to "death by a thousand blows, not one of which quite hits the nail on the head." It's intrusive, didactic and overwritten. Consider if you will the following passage from "the Blue Cross":

"The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking out across the valley, Valentin behold the thing which he sought."

Martin Gardner thinks this sentence is "arresting" and "beautifully worded." Well, Mr Gardner is a terrific maths writer, but before passing judgments like this he really ought to check out Chesterton's exact contemporary Saki, whose treatment of a parallel scene shows up Chesterton's shortcomings for exactly what they are:

"A dwindling rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing. Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running."
(Gabriel-Ernest)

Chesterton's schtick was to take Wildean paradox and level it at the lazy moralisers of his day - which is why his essay on Job is so sympathetic - and it's a great technique, works well on the Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's not quite the same thing as literature.

Another thing you've done is to accuse Agatha Christie of snobbery, as if this was somehow a literary defect. I'd say that actually a measure of snobbery in one form or another is more or less a prerequisite for writing good dialogue. Look at Alan Bennett. Well, look at Jane Austen, for that matter. Chesterton wasn't a snob, ergo he can't write dialogue. There's no nuance there, no insecurity. His characters don't converse, they lurch violently from one declamatory attitude to another. A typical piece of Chesterton business would go something like (I extemporise) '"But don't you see," cried out Father Brown in a sudden burst of desperate exultation,"it's all wrong."' The cumulative effect of this kind of thing is to leave the casual reader with the feeling that Father Brown's more excitable conversations are conducted in a series of hysterical shrieks.

And as for any suggestion that the Father Brown plots are varied, pfaugh. I once had an idea for a spoof Father Brown story that encapsulates every single real story in the canon. A horrible murder has been committed. The only four possible suspects are Cardinal Salvador Torturossa, Seamus "Psych" O'Path, Joey "the Shrimp" Gamberetti and the Revered Theophilius Thorogood, rector of Little St Mary's-near-the-Windle. "The answer is obvious," said Father Brown after a brief pause. "It was the Reverend Mr Thorogood. He's the only one who isn't a Catholic."

I agree with Hilary that snobbery (which I accused Agatha Christie of) has no bearing on literary merit, and that Chesterton's paradoxes become wearisome because so obviously contrived. I'd also agree that the Father Brown stories don't work as detective stories. Their resolution, which always involves insight into the human soul, sometimes requires inherently unlikely events (as in The Hammer of God) or, inexcusably in a detective story, information known to Father Brown but not to the reader (The Honour of Israel Gow).

But I disagree that Chesterton is a mediocre writer and a first-rate thinker. It's the other way round. He's a great writer with, in temporal matters at least, absurd ideas.

I know that many Christians, especially Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics, find Chesterton's religious apologetics valuable. They don't convince me, but theology - except where it relates to political issues or culture - isn't a subject for this blog. On politics, economics and social issues, the best that can be said about him is that while he was usually wrong, he was generally not as egregiously so as many other literary figures between the wars.

The late and brilliant Marxist theorist Paul Hirst wrote an illuminating book called Associative Democracy a decade ago that resurrected some little-known parts of English political thought. The book notes that:

Britain in the early twentieth century was particularly rich in attempts to find a 'third way' between the collectivism of state socialism and the unbridled egoism of laissez faire.

Hirst mentions Bertrand Russell's Roads to Freedom (1918), which advocated English Guild Socialism; the Arts and Crafts Movement, which posed co-operative colonies of artisans as an alternative to large-scale industry; A.J. Penty's The Restoration of the Guild System; and Chesterton, Belloc and the Distributists, who:

... argued that the prevention of poverty and the preservation of freedom could be assured only by the most widespread distribution of productive property possible, especially the land.

These neglected predecessors of the elusive Third Way maintained that workers' livelihoods were threatened by both collectivist planning, which would destroy political liberty in the attempt to cure poverty, and modern industry based on specialisation, which by severing the workman from the land deprived him of the means of an independent living. This concern about the threat to small communities is a continual theme of Chesterton's novels (notably The Napoleon of Notting Hill).

It's almost entirely nonsense. An advanced economy that provides its citizens with material advantages is liberating, not stultifying, because it enhances our ability to choose the good for ourselves. Chesterton didn't see the point at all. He was able to dismiss this process of bettering the lot of the people in the extraordinarily glib terms of a man unused to physical drudgery (in What's Wrong With the World):

Certainly we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels systems, specialities, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern.

The best case you can make for this type of sentiment is that at least it didn't degenerate, in Chesterton's case, into romanticising 'blood and soil' as certain other literary figures did. There is an absence of the suspicion for the masses, and for democracy, that you frequently find among other Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic writers of the time (T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, most obviously).

There is fortunately little in Chesterton about agriculture other than a vague affection. In fact, the novels show a deeper tie to the suburbs. John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) notes the intellectuals' scorn for the suburbs as the home of the mentally impoverished. Yet Chesterton's greatest novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, is set in a suburb, Saffron Park, which Chesterton presents as beautiful - 'as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset'. In it, the poet Gabriel Syme maintains to Lucian Gregory (who suffers from the totalitarian temptation of wishing to 'destroy the world if I could') the poetical qualities of - of all things - the underground railway.

Even then, Chesterton was himself touched by the totalitarian temptation. He visited Mussolini in the 1920s and came back - stupidly, inexcusably - enamoured. He wrote a terrifically silly book entitled The Resurrection of Rome, in which he had kind things to say about Fascist syndicalism, which he preferred to capitalism. Again, the best case you can make is that he was ignorant rather than malign. But he still sits in that repellent tradition of public figures who admired totalitarianism either of the Right, such as Ezra Pound, or of Soviet Communism (H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and the rest who travelled to the Potemkin Villages and came back with glowing accounts of happy and fulfilled proletarians).

One of the wisest judgements on Chesterton comes from a fine book, now some 30 years old, by John Gross entitled The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Gross says:

Chesterton's hatred of capitalism and his dread of the monolithic state were the generous responses of a man who saw the sickness of his society far more clearly than the ordinary Liberal and felt it more deeply than the self-confident Fabian social engineers. Unfortunately, though, a sense of outrage often proved as bad a counsellor in his case as it had in Carlyle's. His diatribes against usury and corruption were those of a man on the edge of hysteria; his anti-Semitism was an illness.

Chesterton was, unlike Thomas Carlyle as an old man (who stood at the gates of the Rothschilds estate hurling antisemitic imprecations), a man of generous spirit. But even once you've discounted the dark aspects that Gross mentions, you're left with an economic populism that is culpably naive, ignoring the role of the price mechanism and creating an image of Merrie England that never existed.

There is much that's worth reading in Chesterton. There's little, outside the quality of the prose and the love of literature, that can be learned from him in the realm of ideas.