A Little History of Literature (24 page)

Hardy was persuaded by Darwin, but it hurt him. He pictured his hurt beautifully. An architect by early training, he loved old
churches but he saw himself having to listen to the hymns (which he also loved) from outside the church walls. He could not enter, in good faith, because Darwin had destroyed that faith. He was, as he put it, like a bird singing forever outside, unable to join the ‘bright believing band’ inside the comforting church walls.

For Victorians, the Darwinian contradiction of what most of them had so profoundly believed was painful in ways that we, who have lived with it for 150 years, find hard to imagine. Hardy's literature (and the world-view which sustains it) is an expression of that Victorian pain, beautifully crafted into prose and verse.

Hardy also had his doubts about ‘progress’, particularly the advances brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Did the railways, roads and (after the 1840s) telegraph – the ‘networking’ of Britain – mean everything was better in every region? Hardy doubted that optimistic view of history. The character of the wonderfully diverse regions of the British Isles, with their individual accents, rituals, myths and customs – everything that makes ‘a way of life’ – was being merged into a bland national unity. His term ‘Wessex’ (Anglo-Saxon in origin) is a kind of protest. He would not call the region where he was brought up ‘south-west England’. Wessex was distinct – its own kingdom.

Hardy's first Wessex novel,
Under the Greenwood Tree
(1872), is a critique of what was commonly thought of as ‘improvement’. The novel describes the replacement of the church orchestras, in which local parishioners played instruments (you can still see the galleries in old places of worship). The orchestras were replaced by harmoniums – vulgar instruments, but new-fangled. Progress. But was it?

The downside of industrial progress is given its most vivid description in
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
. In the early sections of the novel the milkmaid heroine is as much part of the natural order of things as the grass that grows in the fields. Then comes the steam-powered combine harvester. Tess, working as it chuffs its way through the harvest fields, is no more than a human cog in the machine. ‘Progress’, Hardy argues, can destroy. As the novel shows, Tess is progressively uprooted and displaced by the forces that are,
on the face of it, making the world a better place and dragging Wessex into the nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution was indeed a wonderful thing. But, Hardy believed, mankind should not be too complacent about it. Nature might well take her revenge. This warning is given in the poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. (Hardy loved grand words, but ‘The Crunch of the Two’ would probably not have had the same titular punch.) As we saw in Chapter 2, the
Titanic
ocean liner was one of the proudest industrial achievements, and greatest disasters, of the century. As the poem puts it:

Reading the poem, one wonders what icebergs are growing for us, in our world. Were he alive today Hardy would, for a certainty, direct his ‘pessimistic’ gaze at climate change, overpopulation, the clash of civilisations – those things which, in our constitutional optimism, we prefer not to think about.

What Hardy's ‘pessimism’ tells us is that we should indeed look at things from all angles. Nor should we flinch from what may seem frightening – our salvation may depend on it. He put this very well in one of his poems:

There may be a better world to come. But we shall never get there unless we make an honest assessment (however painful) of where we are. Pessimistic? No. Realistic? Yes.

What we think of as progress may not be progress. What we think of as a more efficient world may be a world headed for self-destruction. Hardy's is a pessimistic world view which instructs us to think again about our own world view. And that, very simply, is why we value him as the great writer he is. That
and the fact that he writes so well, packaging his pessimism so wonderfully.

CHAPTER
25

Dangerous Books

L
ITERATURE AND THE
C
ENSOR

Authorities, everywhere and at every period of history, are always nervous about books, regarding them as naturally subversive and potential dangers to the state. Plato, famously, establishes the security of his ideal Republic by kicking out all the poets.

And so on through the ages. At the creative edge, where great writers work, there is always the professional hazard of incurring the wrath of those currently in power. We can draw up an impressive list of martyrs to the literary cause. As we saw in Chapter 12, John Bunyan wrote most of his great work,
The Pilgrim's Progress
, in Bedford prison; earlier, Cervantes too had hit on the idea for
Don Quixote
while languishing in prison. Daniel Defoe (Chapter 13) stood in the stocks for a satirical poem he wrote (legend has it sympathetic onlookers threw flowers, rather than rotten eggs). In our own time, Salman Rushdie (Chapter 36) spent a decade in safe houses for a satirical novel he dared to write. Alexander Solzhenitsysn composed great works in his head while rotting for eight years in the Soviet Gulag after his arrest in 1945.
After the 1660 Restoration, John Milton (Chapter 10) had to go on the run, and his writings were ordered to be burned. It was, of course, Milton who, in his great work on freedom of expression,
Areopagitica
(1644), proclaimed:

This is commonly paraphrased as, ‘Where books are burned, men are burned’.

Different societies come down in different ways on ‘dangerous’ books, as a comparison of France, Russia, the USA, Germany and Britain will illustrate. Each has made war on literature, or imposed restrictions on its freedom, in its own unique way.

The French way is conditioned by the defining event in the country's history, the Revolution of 1789. The pre-revolutionary government (the
Ancient Régime
) maintained an iron grip on publication: every book required a ‘privilege’ – state permission – to exist. Unprivileged, ‘under-the-cloak’ works, such as Voltaire's
Candide
(1759), served the revolutionaries as weapons. More so if they were written abroad by Enlightenment (that is, ‘free-thinking’) writers and, as was
Candide
, lobbed over the border into France like ideological hand grenades. The novel, whose full title was translated in English as
Candide: or, All for the Best
, tells the story of a naïve youth who has been brought up to believe everything he is told – exactly the kind of citizen the authorities like to have. Voltaire thought otherwise.

With the Revolution in France, freedom of expression, and the right to hold any opinion – rights which had so helped the cause – were proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Following Napoleon's takeover France became more restrictive, but always less so than its neighbour and great foe, England.

In 1857 two works were published in France, their authors being being immediately prosecuted in trials that were to have huge
consequences for world literature. Gustave Flaubert's novel
Madame Bovary
and Charles Baudelaire's verse collection
Les Fleurs du mal
(‘The Flowers of Evil’) were accused of ‘outraging public decency’. In Flaubert's case the alleged outrage was that his novel endorsed adultery. The offence in Baudelaire's case is summed up in the provocative title, which of course is exactly what the poet intended. The French phrase is ‘
épater le bourgeois
’ – ‘scandalise the middle classes’. Flaubert was acquitted. Baudelaire incurred a small fine and six of his poems were banned – otherwise, the book survived.

The trial of these works (now high classics of French literature) created an open zone for the literature of their country. Writers such as Émile Zola – translations of whose novels were ferociously suppressed in the English-speaking world with punishments of prison sentences – were free to take literature to new places. They did.

It was freedom for not just French writers. Many British and American authors (D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) published works in Paris, between the two world wars, which were wholly unpublishable in their home countries. James Joyce's
Ulysses
is a prime example. The novel was first published in book form in Paris in 1922 and, after a trial, eleven years later in the USA (on the perverse legal conclusion that it was ‘emetic’, not ‘erotic’). Britain lifted its ban on
Ulysses
a few years later, in 1936. It was never actually banned in Ireland. It simply was never available.

During the Second World War, great French writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet contrived to produce works allegorically attacking the Germans occupying their country – notably Camus's
L'Étranger
(1942; published in English as
The Outsider
) and Sartre's
Huis Clos
(1945;
No Exit
). Camus's novel, with its title meaning ‘the stranger’ or ‘the foreigner’, can be seen as reflecting the hated foreigners who had taken over his country. Sartre's play has three characters, after death, imprisoned with each other for eternity. Hell, they discover, is ‘other people’. It was written in a different kind of prison: German occupation.

Traditional Gallic freedoms established themselves after the Second World War. Ironically the liberations in the English-speaking
world followed trials, in 1959 and 1960, of a novel that had been published, without protest or scandal, in Paris thirty years earlier –
Lady Chatterley's Lover
.

Revolution was late coming to Russia. Nonetheless some of world literature's greatest works were conceived and published under the bureaucratic oppression of the Tsar's censors. Paradoxically – a paradox frequently observed in the history of literature – authors raised their game to evade their bumbling inspectors (a character slyly lampooned in Nikolai Gogol's play
The Inspector-General
of 1836). Subtlety and indirectness – artfulness, in a word – were employed in their critiques of society. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880), for example, three brothers conspire to murder their obnoxious father. What was the Tsar known as to his people? ‘Little Father’. Anton Chekhov's plays similarly, if more nostalgically, chronicle the inner decay of the ruling class. In
The Cherry Orchard
(1904), the orchards are a symbol of beautiful futility, and they are being felled, making way not for something better, but for a new, uglier world. Chekhov is a master of literary ‘pathos’. Yes, of course things must change: history demands it. But must it be change for the worse?

With a few textual ammendments, Chekhov's seditious comedies slipped past the Tsar's censors onto the stage. But soon after the Revolution in 1917, for Russian (now ‘Soviet’) authors one censorship was replaced by another, far more oppressive – that of Stalin. It persisted, more or less intensely and with the occasional ‘thaw’, until 1989. Using the devious skills of their predecessors, dissident writers like the poets Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and novelists like Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn contrived to create and (all too occasionally) publish great works under the very nose of the censors. Novels such as Solzhenitsyn's
Cancer Ward
(1968; a scathing satire on Stalinism as the tumour at the heart of Russia) were often circulated in ‘samizdat’ – clandestine typewritten form – much, one might recall, as early Christians in Rome kept their seditious manuscript texts under their cloaks. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1958 and 1970 respectively. Will Russia without such
censorship produce as great a literature? It will be interesting to see. It is one of the great literary experiments happening before our eyes today.

The USA was founded by Puritans who brought with them a reverence for free expression and literacy. It was further enforced in 1787 with the Constitution whose first amendment enshrines freedom of speech in law. That freedom, however, has never been absolute and universal. Over the years the USA, a federation made up of many divergent states, wove a confused patchwork of tolerance and repression. A work of literature could be ‘banned in Boston’ (the phrase became proverbial) but selling like hot cakes in New York. Particularly where public libraries and local educational curricula are concerned, this patchiness (‘community standards’) is still a peculiarly American feature of the American literary environment.