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

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’, the manuscript would have stayed sealed in a tin box under Kathleen Noonan’s bed. Richards had been declared bankrupt in 1905 and was certainly no well-heeled Bloomsbury toff; and his cuts were intended to make the story more palatable to readers of popular working-class sagas by the likes of Somerset Maugham or Arnold Bennett, while bringing the book down to a length at which Richards could afford to publish it. The first edition cost a pricey six shillings because, in the words of the writer Travis Elborough, ‘Richards understood that the novel’s authenticity could enhance its cachet amongst reviewers, perhaps especially with the more affluent radicals who would, initially at least, be its main purchasers.’ And when, in 1918, Richards produced the yet-shorter second printing for a shilling, it was partly in response to the pleas of a Glasgow bookseller, whose potential customers included workers at the nearby Clydeside shipyard, an early home of trade union agitation.

      In other words, from the very beginning, as a publisher Grant Richards did his utmost, within the system, to permit some version of Tressell’s text to reach the widest possible readership. No one else would take the risk. He edited it not because he wished to suppress its message of working-class unity but because he sought to disseminate it – and because the book needed an edit. To reach the audience it deserved, from drawing room to factory floor, the novel was too long and repetitive; owing to the well-meaning efforts of those on the Left, arguably it remains so.

      I am not saying one of these accounts is correct and the other incorrect. There is more than one way to look at history, as there is more than one way to interpret a book. As a writer and a liberal I am sentimentally inclined towards the former explanation; I respect the author’s conception of his own work. But a reading of events which follows the money – philosophical rather than dogmatic Marxism – would conclude that the novel owes its national treasure status to the shrewd stewardship of Grant Richards. For forty years, the text which was passed from hand to hand, which spread by word of mouth in mills and workshops and barracks, which was subsequently circulated as agitprop by the nascent British Left, often in tandem with The Communist Manifesto, was Richards’ dramatically shortened version. Only once its place in the hearts of the British public was thus assured could Lawrence & Wishart afford to take the liberty of introducing the much lengthier, purer rendition which is on sale in bookshops today.

      The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists continues to be treasured, regularly making appearances in polls of best-loved British novels. But when we read the book of that title today, we are essentially reading a restored, unedited first draft; and the qualities that still endear it to us – its humour, its passion, its social(ist) conscience – remain so inimitable that they overcome the inevitable drag caused by its size and Tressell’s reluctance to tell his story straightforwardly. I finished it, and admired it, but I felt it would not have made much difference had I started somewhere in the middle, or read my daily fifty pages from wherever the book happened to fall open. Perhaps one day someone might edit it properly – but then perhaps it would lose its power.

      At this point, I should declare an interest. If I seem to be overly concerned with the minutiae of the publishing process it is because I am, in my own way, a scoundrel like Grant Richards. If I am taking this matter of the manuscript rather personally, then I have to confess that it is personal. You may, or may not, know me as the author of two other books, but I’m afraid this is not a case of brotherly solicitude towards a fellow scribbler. If only.

      At the time I was reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and working my way through the List of Betterment, I had a day job, like many writers do. It was this day job which was causing me such anguish and which had thrust these books to front of mind. Was I a plasterer? I was not. A postman? No. My hands were soft and lily-white; the only bags I carried were the ones underneath my eyes. A journalist, then? No.

      I was an editor of books. Several times a week, I commuted to a publishing house in London and sat amidst many piles of paper, more and more each day, and tried to work out which were good and which were bad, which deserved to be published and which consigned to oblivion, which could be saved by judicious editing and which were fit only to be sent to the recycling depot to make yet more manuscripts. I am a writer. Every day, for money, I held the destinies of other writers in my hands. It was a chronic bout of double alienation.

      ‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.’

      Oh Fred, oh Karl. If only it were that simple.

       Book Six

      The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

      (Supplementary Book One – Cooking with Pomiane by Edouard de Pomiane)

      ‘I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad.’

       The Sea, The Sea

      ‘There is no doubt that people in England are becoming much more adventurous in their eating habits, and snails appear quite tame compared with the bumble bees, grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants which I believe are selling well at some of the big stores.’

       Cooking with Pomiane

      How do you go about becoming a writer? I had paper and pencils. I had a notebook for ideas.