On the Obstructions of Learning

 Perhaps it’s the bookish element of my digital footprint, but I keep getting recommended videos and articles about the declining state of literacy in the world, even if what is usually meant by ‘the world’ is just the US. There’s a journalist called James Marriott who is banging that drum for British publications and predicting that we are entering a post-literate society and that democracy, stability and all the things we take as the bedrock of our current social and political lives will shortly wither away.

It’s often smart phones which are given the blame for this decline in literacy, along with ipad kids, streaming services and particularly tik-tok. The idea is, that human attention is a finite resource and adults and children alike are allowing theirs to frittered away on short form content and algorithmically generated slop. Then there’s all the kerfuffle about ‘AI’, that people can have articles and posts written for them without ever having to engage their brains at all.

I have to admit, I’m not thrilled about AI, and have seen a difference in the children I teach over the past (almost) twenty years. There are some children so stimulated by the online world that there seems to be absolutely nothing in the real world that interests, excites or engages them. It’s a dispiriting thing to see. Yet I don’t think we are in some terrible intellectual apocalypse and every new way of transmitting information has brought doom-spouting sandwich board men. There were outcries when televisions entered houses, when indexes were introduced to books and Socrates never used the new-fangled technology of writing because it impeded the memory. 

What’s more, people always have a sense that they haven’t learned as much as they would like, that they are inhibiting their mental potential. Samuel Johnson wrote his own article about this problem in the 2nd of February 1760, where he talks about how the young and eager are “diligent in the pursuit of knowledge; but the progress of life very often produces laxity and indifference.” He goes into reasons why this might be.

First, he looks at the idea that learning is never enough, that someone who begins to learn is quickly overwhelmed by how much more could be learned and so gives up. None of us will ever know everything about even a narrowly focused area of study, that there is always more to learn and that we just burn out from it. He thinks this is a poor argument. He sees learning as similar to virtue, that we never regret the learning we have had, even if we stop learning, we will always wish we had learned more.

He says that it’s more likely that people learn less as they get older because there are so many other things to do. Life has too many responsibilities to just sit and learn and every hour we meditate on something interesting is seen as an hour robbed from a more productive occupation or the company of friends and family. He also acknowledges that “sprightly and luxurious pleasures” are simply more appealing than quiet contemplation. This is the commonly spouted ‘dopamine argument’, that a few quick scrolls on a phone are a more accessible and immediate pleasure than wrestling with some big book, and that after the stresses and toils of a day at work are far easier to slip into.

His big obstruction to learning is, a little surprisingly, books. He says there are too many of them and that too many of them are merely okay or worse. Books quote other books, tell the same stories, use the same examples and that “few writers afford any novelty, or what little they add to the general stock of learning, is so buried in the mass of general notions, that like silver mingled with the ore of lead, it is too little to pay for the labour of separation”.

I’m reading a book like that at the moment. There are elements of silver, but there is so much lead ore around it, that the book has become a chore. One I am too stubborn to quit. So instead of putting the book down and picking one up I enjoy more, I do other things instead - which means I am yoked to this dull book even longer. Last night I went to bed an hour than I usually would, because I’d read the book for half an hour and simply couldn’t be bothered to read any more. As a result, I woke up an hour earlier than usual and threw my whole day out of whack.

There’s a comfort in reading Samuel Johnson talk about all the easier pleasures that distract us from the more wholesome stuff, it’s a common human experience and no different now than it was then. I think the James Marriotts of this world can relax a little, we’ve always been a little bit lazy with out pleasures - and there’s nothing terrible in that. 

 

Review: The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

 I picked up Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors as a good ‘dippy-inny’ book while I was backstage, performing in a play. The chapters were short and self contained and I didn’t need to keep any plot in my head as I went out on stage and performed the plot there. I was interested in the topic, and I have fond memories of Fowler as the writer of Roofworld and Calabash. 

Of the 99 authors listed, I’ve read 9 of them and own books by another 5. It was interesting reading about the authors I did know well because we have quite different views on them. In the section on Dino Buzzati, he never named The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Italy. His under appreciated pick for TH White was Goodbye Victoria, with Mistress Masham’s Repose getting only a little nod at the end. There were some authors I didn’t recognise I had read till he mentioned the book’s title, things like Mr Gay’s London, and Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day. 

Of the authors I hadn’t heard of (or had vaguely heard of) the entries were really interesting. There are all sorts of potted biographies in here of all sorts of intriguing lives. Some very good sounding people, some absolute horrors. I didn’t realise Pierre Boule wrote e Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes, nor did I know the man playing Private Godfrey was an author who’d fought in both world wars.

Many of the books and authors appealed to me but I made a note of the ones that jumped the highest. Alexander Baron seems a very interesting writer and I’ll be seeking out King Dido in particular. Then there’s John Collier’s His Monkey Wife: Or, I married a chimp, which wins on title alone. 

This is an entertaining book, featuring lots of peculiar potted histories and intriguing books. It’s a good read by itself and a finger pointing at interesting reads in the future.

Review: Dr Johnson's Lichfield by Mary Alden Hopkins

 My copy of Mary Alden Hopkins’s Dr Johnson’s Lichfield looks like a fairly sedate affair, possibly even a little bit dry, but perfect for getting myself back into eighteenth century Lichfield as I return to writing my novel in Samuel Johnson’s little brother (as I’ve had a little time off writing it). 

It starts fairly calmly, with a huge list of acknowledgements, with one of the first being to Percy Laithwaite, the man who wrote the surprisingly entertaining history of Lichfield’s Conduit Lands Trust - possibly the most entertaining book about a civil authority/charity that could be written. Then follows the gossipiest timeline I have ever seen in front of a historical book. Yes, there are entries for births and deaths, but most detail strange affairs, scandals and relationships and this timeline suggests the sudden turn the book will make after a few chapters.

For a while, it’s a book about Lichfield in the time of Samuel Johnson, beginning with a potted history of the city, a little about the social and economic make-up of the place, told with a visual eyes and a tendency to fantasise about the fantastic costumes everyone was probably wearing. However, it soon leaves Samuel Johnson as he leaves Lichfield and becomes a full-on soap opera about the lives of those in Lichfield’s Cathedral Close. Albert Square and Coronation Street have nothing on this sedate corner of ecclesiastical housing, and Hopkins loves every detail of it. 

The first mini-history of Lichfield was very interesting, especially its founding myth of the cathedral being built on the site of a huge Roman massacre of Christians. Johnson himself believed this myth, believing that the ‘Lich’ of Lichfield came from the same ‘lich’ in ‘lichgate’ and meant death.  Then there was the founding of the Cathedral by St Chad (a name to conjure with), the Maryan martyrs in the Market Square, the three attacks on the Cathedral Close during the English Civil War and the leader of the Parliamentarians being killed by a deaf-dumb sniper - and you get a real sense of the local stories and legend that the Johnson boys would have grown up in. 

There’s a lot of weight given to David Garrick and Samuel Johnson being invited to the Walmisleys  - how it was a singular honour for a town kid and a garrison kid to be invited to the close. Hopkins notes the apparent coldness in the Johnson home but doesn’t attribute it to lack of love. In comparing the noisy conviviality of the Garricks she says, “there may have been no more love in the Garrick family than the Johnson, but their love was more articulate.” She doesn’t have much to say about Nathaniel, nothing except to suggest that he may have been a “problem son”.

Hopkins is great about Tetty though. She really brings out how pretty Tetty must have been, with her baby soft hair and general soft features, of how she was witty and gave as good as she got, how she was a good listener. It’s very much the picture of Tetty I want to include in my book. She also points out that the Porters were related to Dr Hunter, and suggests Samuel Johnson’s relationship with him may have affected the family’s acceptance of him. Personally, I think it’s a stretch, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Then Samuel Johnson leaves the book until the last two chapters and Hopkins talks about what she really wanted to, Anna Seward, the younger Lichfield set and all the crazy love lives. When I went to the Dr Johnson Reading Circle’s discussion of Wits and Wives with Kate Chisholm, she said she specifically didn’t choose to write about Anna Seward because she found her annoying. Hopkins reveals and revels in how annoying she could be. Full of passion and self-belief, Anna Seward seems like a truly exhausting person, but someone who made things happen around her - and was reliably expected to blab to everyone else also.

There was Seward’s near miss with a man called Taylor. She was all set to marry him but her family cooled things down a bit and Taylor married another woman. However, Seward started receiving messages from Taylor’s new wife which showed that Taylor still loved Anna more, and what’s more, that his wife had a thing for Anna also. When Taylor died, she moved into Lichfield as a devoted follower of Anna. Then there was her thing for the Vicar Choral, Saville. Although they claimed a never-consummated love, it was enough to make his wife kick him out into a small house next door, where they mooned at each other for years and years.

There’s the story of John Andre and Honora Sneyd, a story known by “every schoolchild” according to Hopkins.. I hadn’t heard of it. He loved her, she tolerated him but the families never really came together, so he went to America, where he was hanged as a British spy and turned into a tragic figure by Anna Seward. Honora later married Richard Edgeworth, who first entered Lichfield on a self-designed one-wheeled carriage, where he’d come to visit Erasmus Darwin.

Other visitors to Erasmus Darwin was Thomas Day, who was a massive twat and I don’t wish to go more into him than that.

Even the bit players in the book, like Dr Vyse had crazy stories where he was engaged to Sophia Streatfield (the long-necked woman who caught Thrale’s eye) and engaged to marry her. The only thing was, he was married, so he engaged to marry her immediately after his wife died. When she did, he ditched her and married someone else.

To say this book on the history of eighteenth century Lichfield devolves into a gossipy series of crazy romances is true, but it is much more entertaining for it. I loved it.  

Review: Lives of Houses edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

 This book seems made for me right now. I am a (struggling) writer who spent the last year finding, buying and doing up the house that I hope will become my perfect little writer’s nest. I’ve visited many house museums over the years, spent ten years regularly visiting one (Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square) and spent four years volunteering there. Houses have been on my mind.

This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.

Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle. 

Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it. 

The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.

The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.

There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.

So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital.