Tag Archives: tradition

book report: Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe

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I’m on an academic-themed novel run at the moment, after Donna Tartt’s Secret History. Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue is, in its way, as concerned with tradition as Tartt’s novel, but has a totally different tone, one of rambunctious satirical comedy. In short, a Cambridge college, Porterhouse, acquires a new Master, who attempts to modernise affairs much to the chagrin of the old dons and staff.

Like all really good, enduring comedies (e.g. Withnail & I), it’s also about something – in this case, the absurdity of tradition and the absurdity of modernity. In our ghastly modern times, it is fashionable to critique tradition by pointing to its silliness & occasional inhumanities, without admitting modernity’s faults (a regulated, inescapable inhumanity, among others). Much of the novel is seen through the eyes of Skullion, a loyal college servant who has overseen decades of tradition.

He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with ‘Message for Dr Messmer’ scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the Nelson with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damn treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s ‘Good morning, Skullion’, Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.

When I think over the past, and what I miss, it is of course the architecture, the ethos of the old scholars (now mostly dead or retired or fired, to make way for the fashionable new academic), but also the people, the type. It once made sense to talk of a “gentleman”, of a man who acts according to a higher standard where it counts. Today, were one to say a coarse TV presenter or a traitor like Tony Blair is “not a gentleman” people would simply jeer. The notion of being a gentleman has been replaced by being a good SJW, a shrieking blue hair with BPD, or a smirking Blairite bureaucrat parroting the latest buzzwords (tolerance, respect, diversity, etc.)

Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. […] He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.

‘What gentlemen?’ the lad had said. ‘A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.’

And Skullion had put down his pint and said, ‘A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.’ Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.

It’s not that the past was perfect, merely that the flipside of pointless snobbery was a reverence for the things that really mattered. And there is something endearing about the snobbery; for example reading this passage in 2020, where every grubby polytechnic calls itself a university, is an amusing experience – it concerns a research graduate called Zipser, with an undergraduate degree from Durham:

The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.

I rather like a world where the University of Durham is regarded as a made-up institution. That’s snobbery done right. Even at my alma mater, which was not Cambridge, there was a pleasant sense of being excluded, by not having gone to one of the very best public schools, not having a Norman family tree, and so on. For me, it was somewhat like going to the theatre and knowing that I would always be in the audience, observing the curious ceremonies of those on stage:

‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality.

Of course all this has been undone now, and the parodic old dons have been replaced by parodic SJW blue hairs and their ilk. For example, the University of Durham’s website is full of such multicultural wonders:

No commentary required.

book report: The Secret History, Donna Tartt

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One of the few hyped modern novels (1992) that didn’t leave me indignant & gasping at how much time and money I’d squandered. I read it in 2005 or so, in one of the darkest times of my life, suffering the most monotonous & meaningless of all office labour for 5 pounds an hour. My fancy education had proven not merely useless but actively counter-productive; as a chap I knew once remarked of himself, “I’m overqualified for everything except the worst jobs.”

It was a propitious time to read Tartt’s novel, about a gifted but impoverished student who goes to a good university (in Styxhexenhammer’s ‘hood, Vermont) and then hustles his way into an exclusive Ancient Greek course and an inner circle of rich, dandified students, one of whom is murdered by the others. This isn’t a spoiler, as the book literally begins:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. 

This is not a whodunnit. It’s more of a whydunnit; and even that can’t really be spoiled: the point of the novel isn’t anything so sensational as murderous motivation; it’s the sense some students have, of being initiated, separated from the lesser man. In this case, the initiation is partly esoteric/magical, with scenes of literally Dionysian ecstasy, and partly that of the good scholar. 

The bland protagonist, a hustling rube from California, inveigles his way into Ancient Greek classes, which are taught by invitation only. His motivation isn’t really clear; he is himself something of a blank, a useful canvas. In the recognisably modern university, the Ancient Greek students stand out; there are five, four men & a woman, all dressed like characters from 1930s Paris. The tutor teaches Ancient Greek for free; he is an unabashed snob who only accepts as students the young, the beautiful, and the rich.

It’s very much a first novel. There were one or two inconsistencies/repetitions which had escaped the editor’s eye (and I got the feeling it had been professionally edited) and in general it betrays a juvenile ignorance of how the world works, of how people work, get paid, pay the rent, survive. But the impression I received in 2005 was confirmed on my 2020 re-reading, that it is a powerful, authentic work; indeed, the “first novel” weaknesses merely make its strengths clearer – unlike most Creative Writing exercises (e.g. everything by Ian McEwan), it’s technically messy but unmistakeably about something, and that something not a theme plucked from The Guardian; it is something personal, an expression of the author’s soul. 

I was pleased to discover that Tartt not only avoids publicity but has an unapologetically formal public persona.

Artifice as an expression of soul. The book has an unmodern sense of things; as with the novels of Thomas Bernhard, The Secret History is both of its time and not; Bernhard feels weirdly timeless and ancient because technology barely exists in his works, or only as a distant prospect (the eventuell airplane flight in Beton) or distant catastrophe (the car crash in Auslöschung), and so with The Secret History.

The Ancient Greek scholars all wear ties and drink fine vintages and gin tonics while reading Plato in the original; they own country mansions and are indifferent to money, not to mention lesser concerns such as eventual employment and a career. They exist in a rarefied world of study and excessive consumption of gin. Dissolute in their personal lives, as scholars they strive to revolt against the modern world, to inhabit the ancient:

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one’s head, it taught one to think in Greek. One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. 

Pur: that one word contains for me that secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. 

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

The Ancient Greek scholars are as it were shipwrecked upon modernity; their wealth permits them a certain liberty, to dress as from a better age, to study a dead language without concern for a future livelihood, to be as the Gospels have it, in the world but not of it. But they are then subject to the laws of their chosen realm, where actions multiplies from action, and all is movement & causation & ultimately violence, always pur of one kind or another. Thus, they murder one of their own, and then fall apart into alcoholic and suicidal purgation. 

All excellence comes of separation. Pure, as suggested by the Greek pur: 

pure (adj.)
c. 1300 (late 12c. as a surname, and Old English had purlamb “lamb without a blemish”), “unmixed,” also “absolutely, entirely,” from Old French pur “pure, simple, absolute, unalloyed,” figuratively “simple, sheer, mere” (12c.), from Latin purus “clean, clear; unmixed; unadorned; chaste, undefiled,” from PIE root *peue- “to purify, cleanse” (source also of Latin putus “clear, pure;” Sanskrit pavate “purifies, cleanses,” putah “pure;” Middle Irish ur “fresh, new;” Old High German fowen “to sift”).

This necessitates not merely separation but hierarchy, order. Before writing this little post, I Googled some reviews, to see if people still esteemed it in the year of Our Lord 2020. On the second page of Google I found this gem:

With some distance now, I know that part of why I disliked the book so much was because of its characters. This was my impression of them: entitled, snobby, privileged to the point of absolute ridiculousness, dramatic, flawed in really boring ways, predictable, and English. I have nothing against the English. It’s just that they weren’t actually English. Sure, the college they all attend is in New England, but NEW England isn’t ENGLAND, okay?! But all the characters wear sport-coats, seem to use phrases like “old boy” and appear to chuckle or glare a lot. They seemed like they themselves were trying to be the characters in Brideshead Revisited.

[…]

All of them were just all so pretentious. They studied Latin and Greek with an eccentric professor who was even worse a snob than the group of friends; they hung around and lounged a lot; and they seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish. 

The Secret History is one of the few books where the reviewers could be read as ancillary characters. The whole point of the novel is to be separated from Becky and Josh, to not have a Twitter account, to not have tattoos, to not have piercings, to not advertise and market oneself, to not look like the aforementioned journalist:

They seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish, quoth the professional, mainstream “writer”; that is entirely the point – the novel is about people who wouldn’t even talk to journalists, let alone tattooed, pierced, fashionable journalists. The point is to submit oneself to study, to form and elegance and restraint, to excellence. One can only imagine the reaction of the novel’s characters, were they to meet the aforementioned journalist, covered with tattoos, studded with metal, shrieking about zir’s mental disorders.

The “Secret History” is not so much that of a group of undergraduates; it is the secret history of Western civilisation, of divine vision & genius, as described by Peter Kingsley. For all the tawdry and revolting manifestations of Western (late) civilisation, it has a secret lineage & secret order. That this book has proven so popular reassures me that many Westerners, however deracinated & debased, lean to the true vein of the West, and will finally reject the poison of modernity, and prefer the true, the beautiful, the good.