Humiliation is a game anyone can play. But watching intellectuals, journalists and politicians having their pretensions laid bare is particularly pleasurable. The humiliation I’m thinking of isn’t evisceration at the hands of a hostile reviewer, nor even a public disembowelling at the hands of a Paxman or Humphrys. It’s an altogether more serious exercise in character-shredding, designed by the novelist David Lodge.
In his campus novel Changing Places, Lodge outlines how to play this most terrifying of parlour games. Each participant has to lay bare their own ignorance by confessing to not having read a particular great work of literature. The player then gets a point for everyone else in the game who has read it. So confessing, for example, that you haven’t got to the end of, or even started, Hamlet, Moby-Dick or Pride and Prejudice will normally inspire not just horror among your better-read friends, it will also rack up the points as each of them rushes to affirm that they have enjoyed every word of the classic in question. The winner, after however many rounds the players can bear to go on, is the contestant who has exposed himself as the worst-read person.
The reason the game works particularly well among academics, journalists and politicos is that it forces them to choose between two powerful, competing impulses in their breasts. The natural desire, among competitive souls who are conditioned to want to outpace the opposition, is to score as many points in any contest as possible. But the only way they can emerge on top is by simultaneously lowering themselves in the eyes of their peers. The game, which Lodge has called a form of “ intellectual strip poker”, is an ideal way of unsettling any overbearing Christmas guests by forcing them to choose between alternative forms of preening.
Humiliation is designed to expose the shallow foundations of the intellectually pretentious. But thinking about the extent of my reading this weekend I realised that what is even more humiliating than the poverty of my “proper” reading (I’ve never really read any classics in French other than the ones by Hergé, I’ve never read any of the great Russian novels, and I’ve never read any American literature before 1900) is my huge failure to keep up with popular literature.
The extent of my estrangement from modern culture was brought home by all the publicity for Sky One’s dramatisation of Terry Pratchett’s The Hogfather last weekend. Pratchett is Britain’s pre-eminent popular novelist and I haven’t read a word by him.
But I’d hate you to think I’m irrationally prejudiced. Stephen King is the world’s most distinguished popular novelist. Until I was forced to read his latest novel (Lisey’s Story) the other month, I hadn’t bothered with a single one of his works either.
But I am genuinely glad that I now have done. Lisey’s Story was an education. To be precise, it was the literary equivalent of borstal. Spending time in King’s world was more painful for me than being trapped alone in one of the pods of the London Eye with a flatulent Appalachian mountain man anxious to re-enact a scene from Deliverance above the flowing waters of the Thames. So no Stephen King, then. But confirmation that my instincts about his work were correct. Any book with the author’s name embossed, or picked out in silver, or with blood, weapons or mythical creatures on the cover, sets my alarm status to critical. And I’ve followed my instincts ever since. So no Isaac Asimov, no Michael Crichton, no Deepak Chopra or Anne McCaffrey. And, for that matter, no Jackie Collins, no Harold Robbins and not even any Wilbur Smith.
And, such is my emotional frigidity, my avoidance of horror extends to real-life versions. I have never read a single, heart-wrenching account of a traumatised childhood of the kind that regularly tops the bestseller lists. I’ve never read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Dave Pelzer’s A Boy Called It, Constance Briscoe’s Ugly or any of their literary competitors. If their authors have managed to do well enough now to get a three-book deal with a top agent my well of sympathy for them is somewhat limited.
And, what’s even worse, I have never read any of the genre-transcending, must-have stocking fillers that fill almost every shelf in the country. No Dangerous Book for Boys. Nothing by Ben Schott. If I want something amusingly slight with only a tangential bearing on ordinary life I can always pop into the House of Commons chamber and listen to the Lib-Dem speeches.
Mine is, I think you’ll agree, a staggering level of ignorance. Although I delude myself that I am engaged with popular culture because I love ITV and Radio 1, the humiliating truth is that my reading betrays me as someone who comes from a different planet (and, no, I haven’t read that one about Men and Women and Venus and Mars either).
But, humiliated as I am, I don’t feel any shame about it. If any reader can make a case for any of the books I’ve so far managed to avoid I’d be interested, but my unerring rule of book-buying is simple. If it makes the top ten bestsellers’ list you can, safely, give it a miss. That may expose me to humiliation, but it’s my recipe for happy reading.
Farewell, brilliant, thoughtful Frank
And of all the bookshelves I’ve seen, those that spoke to me most clearly of a mind open and generous, yet elegant and confident, were those of the great Times and Telegraph journalist Frank Johnson, who died last week.
He was one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever known; a brilliant conversationalist on everything from boxing to the Sykes-Picot agreement, David Mellor to Richard Wagner, low gossip to high politics. He was indifferent to rank or status. He was interested in original and striking thoughts, fresh news and strongly-held views, whatever their provenance. During his editorship of The Spectator he brought on a huge number of younger writers, giving unselfishly of his time and expertise.
Frank was a brilliant writer whose loss we mourn. He will be remembered by a generation of journalists who enjoyed the kindness and thoughtfulness of a hilariously life-enhancing friend.
Christmas turkeys
Things you’d least like to hear this Christmas . . .
“It’s Orange on the phone. They’re offering you an upgrade.”
“We’re worried about food miles, so all the wine’s English.”
“Oh, the paracetamol? I’m afraid I gave the last of the packet to the neighbour. But I think there’s a chemist open in Norwich if you hurry.”
“Thanks for inviting us round. How lovely to see you. I don’t know if you got the message, but Columbus is lactose-intolerant, allergic to wheat, yeast, refined white sugar, all nuts apart from Brazil and any chocolate that is less than 70 per cent cocoa.”
Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath
