Books We Could Do Without
Anthony Burgess rejects a negative trend in literary criticism.
Dazed magazine (formerly known as Dazed & Confused) has published a list of books that are said to be ‘dating red flags’. Their journalist writes: ‘Our literary tastes — and, maybe more importantly, the way we interpret literature — can reveal a lot about our character.’ Presented with don’t-take-us-seriously irony, the list aims to set boundaries around what it is ‘acceptable’ reading. The idea that certain books should be avoided because they are dangerous or corrupting seems to be an oddly persistent one.
Perhaps this form of anti-criticism is a symptom of the clickbait age, when controversial articles are designed to drive advertising revenue and stimulate engagement — but it is not a new phenomenon. In 1967, Anthony Burgess reviewed a book titled Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, co-written by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne. The book is a sort of negative inversion of Burgess’s own Ninety-Nine Novels. Instead of recommending novels with enthusiasm, it attempts to narrow the canon of writing in English by urging readers to avoid certain books.
In their introduction, Brophy, Levey and Osborne attack people who actually enjoy literature. They complain that ‘the critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying “see what a nice person I am”.’ Burgess’s reviews are always intelligent and illuminating, but the idea of encouraging people to read less was anathema to him. His review of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without illustrates this point:
See what a nice person I am: I’ve been trying to find in this book the properties of an idiosyncratic profession of faith and unfaith. We’re being told what dislike and, on the margin, like, and the telling is half-disguised as the showier sort of WEA [Workers’ Educational Association] teaching. But it is really an inept kind of con-trick, based on irrational appeals to rationality, pushed along with sneers, dirty sniggers, snobbishness. I’ve never in all my reading encountered such bloody arrogance.
Not such a nice person after all, you may think. If we apply this criticism to the current crop of articles about ‘unacceptable’ books, it hits multiple targets — the protective shield of ironic deployment (sneers and sniggers), the creation of a hierarchy of taste (snobbishness), and the lack of self-reflection (arrogance). Burgess’s review anticipates other modern-day considerations in the economics of writing: the need for clicks and the desire for a viral hit. What we now call ‘the drive for engagement’ is identified by Burgess as ‘a hunger for notoriety’. He puts it like this:
Like children, they have shown off, and the showing-off has provoked attention. They have even angered a number of people, and anger, like sexual desire, can be flattering to its object. What they regard as iconoclasm can also be seen as the indiscriminate destructiveness of infants who will do anything to get notice.
The prevalence of this kind of literary criticism in the 58 years since Burgess was writing in 1967 has given readers a kind of anti-canon of the ‘red flag’ novels that come up repeatedly. Among them we find Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, or Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon — novels which are said to be too long, too difficult, or too masculine. There is also Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a novel about a sexual deviant, hence probably a perverted book. Unsurprisingly, A Clockwork Orange is often mentioned in such lists for being violent, and therefore only to be read by psychopaths. You don’t have to like these books, but to dismiss them out of hand is the work of lazy and unserious critics.
It is worth looking at some of the books included on Brophy, Levey and Osborne’s list. Beowulf is the first entry, closely followed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. From the nineteenth century, novels such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick are damned; and, from the twentieth century, we are told to do without To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
This is not a fun list, intended to stimulate debate. Brophy, Levey and Osborne often try to annihilate both the creative work and the characters of particular authors. The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, often viewed as inspiring the modernists with his linguistic innovations, are derided as the work of ‘a mental cripple’; Ben Jonson is accused of being ‘the great Elizabethan non-poet’; and The Pilgrim’s Progress is condemned as ‘a monstrous tract.’ These pronouncements are, to Burgess, ‘half-literate and more than half-ignorant pseudo-criticism.’ He goes on to say that the three co-authors ‘subscribe to the heresy of subjectivism: literature is not there to modify your (mainly irrational) convictions but to confirm them.’ The absurdity and arbitrariness of this kind of criticism is highlighted by Burgess when he imagines a similar book about art:
If we can have Hamlet and Lorna Doone in the same gallery we can also have ‘The Last Watch of Hero’ [by Frederic Lord Leighton] and the Botticelli Venus. Hogarth will be rejected because he ate too much beef (or accepted because his dog is in the forefront of his self-portrait?)
Today, when novels are often caricatured and stripped of their subtlety in order to validate a bogus cultural argument — namely that books which are not enjoyed by the list-makers should not be read by anyone — resistance to this sort of criticism seems more important than ever. People do not need excuses not to read, and for personal literary preferences to be seen as indicative of virtue, or moral failing, is misguided gatekeeping. Perhaps we should follow Burgess’s lead when encountering books that we don’t enjoy:
When I don’t like a writer my first instinct is the look for the fault in myself. I don’t like Jane Austen, though many people do: this must be a failure in my own temperament.
Find out more
Read The Ink Trade, a selection of Anthony Burgess’s literary journalism (affiliate link).
Read The Devil Prefers Mozart, a collection of Anthony Burgess’s essays on music (affiliate link).
Buying books from the Burgess Foundation’s affiliate bookshop (powered by Bookshop.org) supports our charitable work.
The Burgess Foundation’s Ninety-Nine Novels podcast celebrates a diverse range of fiction with curiosity and enthusiasm. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or start here with the first episode:
I suspect that these days the fact I have a basement lined with bookshelves (all of them overflowing), would itself put off the readers of Dazed, never mind which titles are amongst them. I choose to see that as their loss rather than mine.
"When I don’t like a writer my first instinct is the look for the fault in myself." A sensible approach, but it occurs to me that I must be full of faults, as my attempts to read modern literary fiction are often unsuccessful. Perhaps, as with music, we reach an age after which no new books are likely to please as the old ones did?