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

to which I would be expected to adhere. So instead I went with a liberal, left-of-centre position and told myself the half-truth that I had been more militant in my youth and that I had mellowed with age. In this, I was scrupulously in step with my generation, the one which spent thirteen years fretting at the lack of socialism in the New Labour government, yet which had made a journey of its own from youthful idealism to battered pragmatism in the face of political reality, career advancement and the school run.

      With this journey behind me, I found it much harder to read The Communist Manifesto at thirty-seven than I would have done at seventeen, not because its philosophy was difficult to grasp but because it was true to life. The gloomy picture of the world it proposed might have seemed romantic to me then; now it felt dismayingly like the one I actually lived in.

      Prior to The Communist Manifesto, I had read Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Ah, Bukowski. When I was in my early twenties, it seemed like everyone I knew – every male, I should say – read Bukowski. These men of my acquaintance listened to the Go-Betweens, drank Guinness from a straight glass and loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies. From their descriptions of his work and what was good about it, Bukowski sounded like precisely the kind of writer there would be no point in liking if everyone else liked him. So I never bothered.

      All these years later, I had soaked up Post Office in little more than a day. Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a substitute postman and a drunk, gambled and screwed and occasionally made his mail round and then it was over: tick. The style was fragmentary and brutal. I was given to understand his other novels told a similar, if not identical, tale in a similar, if not identical, register. In an inversion of the old saying, when you’d read all Bukowski’s books, you’d read one of them; they were all postcards from the same place, scrawled in a defiantly shaky hand.

      As a book about work, though, Post Office was even bleaker than The Communist Manifesto, which at least offered potential resolution, i.e. total destruction of the apparatus of capital. Henry Chinaski’s solution to the same problem was a cocktail of booze, horses and pussy. It would be nice to think the latter was at least an achievable goal but as Chinaski noted in the first few pages: ‘It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn’t get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn’t.’ And, figuratively at least, this too rang true with the world I found myself living in.

      Work was preying on my mind. I had a good job in a successful business yet every day when I set off for the office, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Sonya’s lamentation from the closing scene of Uncle Vanya.^fn2 And my subconscious seemed to have shuffled Post Office to the top of 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