Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is.
HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—
OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.
HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.
OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.
HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.
OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.
HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.
Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.
But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.
I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.
From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.
OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.
HENSHER: A lot.
OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.
HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.
OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.
HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.
OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.
HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.
OLIVER: Yes.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz, and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front.
Philip, hello.
PHILIP HENSHER: Hello, Henry.
Novels Are for Everyone
OLIVER: Now, to begin with, tell me about your grandmothers.
HENSHER: Oh, okay. Yes, well, I finished the book because—I kept my story out of it, largely. I thought that I should go back to a time when everybody read novels. It wasn’t a specialist interest as it seems to be turning into. And I thought I would talk about my two grandmothers, both of whom left school when they were 14. They worked in very ordinary and hard jobs in factories all their lives, and they were passionate readers of novels.
My paternal grandmother loved Dickens. She had a complete set of Dickens, which, I’ve discovered after some research, was issued as an offer by the Daily Express sometime in the 1930s. I’ve still got it, actually. I’m going to go and get a sample volume. It’s terribly cheaply produced.
OLIVER: Oh, I’ve got that set. That’s great, yes.
HENSHER: Yes. The publisher is otherwise only noted as a printer. The typeface is absolutely tiny.
OLIVER: It’s painful.
HENSHER: It’s painful to read. But she had it. She loved Dickens.
My maternal grandmother, I don’t have any of her books, I’m afraid. I would say that she loved stories of family lives, of people interacting with each other. She loved Catherine Cookson, a now slightly forgotten popular novelist of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But she read an enormous amount. I mean, she must have read one or two novels a week, every week of her life.
I think that the thing that has disappeared since my grandmothers’ generation is the idea that everybody can read novels. They speak to everybody. They explore every part of life, potentially.
What seems to be happening now, and I greatly regret it, is that it’s passing into the property of expensively educated people, people who have gone to private schools, perhaps, have certainly gone to university. And the sort of reader like my grandmother, who read Bleak House with a lot of pleasure, seems to be disappearing.
So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, to make the case for how wonderfully enjoyable novels are. They’re not a duty, or they shouldn’t be a duty. They should just be founded in pleasure, however complex that pleasure might be. And I wanted to finish the book by citing my two grandmothers, who were such great readers.
OLIVER: And as well as inheriting that reading culture from them, you got a lot of that at your school, didn’t you?
HENSHER: Yes, I suppose I did. I think that it’s hard for me to say because I was in at the beginning of a sort of curriculum change, where there was an idea that we ought to give the kids things that are relevant or are going to appeal to their social concerns. So, I mean, this is going back to the very early 1980s. My set novel for A-level was The Grapes of Wrath, a classic tale of victimhood, really. Classic approved message.
And the thing was, I think what started me off as a passionate reader of novels was a sort of rebellious turn away from that sort of thing. I read Jane Austen off my own bat. I read a lot of Dickens before I left school—things that we weren’t taught at all. And that’s always been the sort of reader that I am, saying, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be reading this,” you know? “It’s not on the curriculum.”
Parliament and Thatcher
OLIVER: What was it like working in the House of Commons?
HENSHER: It was fine. [laughter] It was a very unusual experience. I don’t think it was a job that most people would’ve known existed. When people said to me, “Well, what do you actually do?” I used to say, “Well, you know the guys with wigs who sit in front of the Speaker? They’re my bosses.” And it was a strange, ritualistic experience, and you were physically in the middle of all these political dramas.
When I started work, I started work in the House of Commons the beginning of September—this is September 1990. And six weeks later, there was all the drama of Mrs. Thatcher being thrown out, which I saw physically very close up. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You weren’t aware of what really w…
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