Radio 4 Open Book: Me on Money in Fiction

The other week I was delighted to take another turn as guest columnist for Radio 4's Open Book with Mariella Frostrup. The theme for my sermon was Money in Fiction - one of the true universal themes. Obviously there are a great many more fine novels, poems and stories on the subject than I could adduce within the slot, but I got a few of my favourites in, as one must. You can listen to the broadcast here by the boon of iPlayer: needless to say, it has a great deal more than me, including the bestselling Paula Hawkins and a discussion of the newly published 'lost' stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But here is the text of Me on Money:

In literary studies, there are two Jane Austens. One, the national treasure, whose romantic plots give us timeless tips on how to make a love-match; the other a clear-eyed analyst of Georgian England, famously acclaimed by Auden for her ability to “[r]eveal so frankly and with such sobriety/The economic basis of society.” Let’s face it – Mr Darcy holds many attractions for Elizabeth Bennett, but a really big one is his ten thousand pounds a year.

Given the centrality of money in our lives, it’s perhaps a wonder there aren’t more novels on the subject. You might say there’s not a lot of poetry in a banknote, or a bank statement. But in the abstract, money undoubtedly has lyrical power. [In his poem Money] Philip Larkin could make his bank balance sound like the Devil in his ear: ‘I am all you never had of goods and sex. / You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ But Larkin knew that voice to be a siren call; and at heart we all know the finest things in life aren’t really for sale.

Of course, it was the “the love of money” that St Paul called “the root of all evil”: not the folding stuff itself, but what we project onto it. For me the most powerful treatment of this theme in fiction is Tolstoy's story The Forged Coupon. A feckless boy hungry for cash scribbles an extra digit onto a government bond of his father’s, then fobs it off for change on a shopkeeper, who, realising he’s been conned, fobs it off again on a firewood seller... and soon a man is in jail – evil begetting evil – dirty money corrupting or cursing everyone it touches. 

If you want a counterblast to Tolstoy’s moral vision – there’s the Russian-American ideologue Ayn Rand, and her influential novel Atlas Shrugged – in which the wealthy Francisco d'Anconia argues that money is actually ‘the barometer of a society's virtue’ – a guarantor that ‘men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.’ That’s not a bad argument for the free market, though Rand spoils it by allowing Francisco to bang away uninterrupted for nearly ten pages.

You find a more artful defence of money in Emile Zola’s great ‘financial crisis’ novel L’Argent, first published in 1891. Its anti-hero, ruthless speculator Aristide Saccard, is a bankrupt who decides to make a new fortune in banking, using other people’s money. We may recognise the type. Yet, through the woman who falls for Saccard, Madame Caroline, Zola dramatises money’s dynamic properties – how speculation can stir the blood of a nation, how enterprise makes things happen. As Saccard’s son tells Madame Caroline, the banker ‘doesn’t love money like a miser. He wishes to make it gush forth on every side...’

In today’s fiction, bankers are not nearly so charismatic, or gushing. John Lanchester’s Capital, set in the wake of the Crash of 2008, shows us a workaday investment banker named Roger, totting up the ‘general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London’, and realising ‘if he didn't get his million-pound bonus he was genuinely at risk of going broke.’ The predicament of being one missed pay-day away from ruin is one that a lot of us can identify with. But for people who are paid fortunes, we tend to be economical with our sympathies.

Charles Dickens understood this – part of why he remains, like Jane Austen, a national treasure. Dickens died a millionaire in today’s money, but he knew poverty. His father did time in debtors prison, inspiring Dickens, famously, to create Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. Micawber knows very well that a man making twenty pounds a year can be happy so long as he spends only nineteen and six – whereas to slip into the red, even by sixpence, is to risk misery. And for most of us still, I daresay, that is the meaning of money.

Politics as Fiction: Making the Best of a Bad Thing

Since I have a bit of previous when it comes to ‘top tens’ I was happy to answer a request from the Nudge book-lovers website for a list of my ten favourite fictional politicians in literature: that rundown is online here, and I daresay it jams in most of what are considered the classics in this field, alongside one or two curios and/or amusements.

I must admit I don’t think I could have made it up to a top fifteen – there’s not an embarrassment of riches in the literary rendering of politics and politicians, unless you’re really keen on varieties of stage villainy writ large across a page. The challenge, as I see it, is how to render accurately both the politician’s trade in all its impossible complexity, and the politician as a realistic human being rather than a straw man ‘leaking sawdust at every pore.’

I don’t believe Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men can be bettered as a poetic vision of politics, how it works, and what it does to us – but I do really love Mishima’s After the Banquet, inter alia for a special insight it shares with Tolstoy’s great novella The False Note, in which the Tsar, wrestling alone with an ethical problem, is shown to realise that:

'he could not give himself up to the demands of the human being because of all the demands that are made on a Tsar from every side; as for admitting that the demands of the human being might be more binding than the demands made on him as a Tsar - he did not have the strength to do that.' 

This, I think, is one of the great dilemmas facing the senior politician, whatever his/her ideological stripe.

My interest in this topic has been sharpened of late since, as mentioned at the head of the top ten, the novel I’m now working is about a senior politician of my invention. As is my wont I’ve been researching the world of the novel as actively as if it were to be a piece of non-fiction, and all of that legwork has been fascinating. Where I am not bound by the Chatham House Rule I hope to share a few odds and sods of that research here as I go along.

Normblog: Tolstoy, The False Note, and the problem of Evil

Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, has since 2003 been fashioning a notable second career for himself as a blogger and tweeter on issues of the day and assorted enthusiasms. A regular feature of the blog is 'Writer's Choice', wherein (as Geras described it for the Guardian) "novelists, poets and other writers have contributed their thoughts on books that have been important to them in one way or another, or books they have simply enjoyed." I am very pleased to say that I am the latest invitee to contribute a screed of this sort to Normblog: my choice was Tolstoy's novella The False Note, also known as The Forged Coupon, and you will find the full essay here. Meantime, a taster:

"I find The False Note an endlessly involving piece, and I feel it ought to be more widely known and celebrated. It is a kind of parable about money (we might better say 'currency') and the problem of evil: how a simple exchange of tainted money introduces a current of malevolence into social relations. Yet it resists a straightforwardly materialist analysis. As the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia read it, Tolstoy exhibits 'a strange conviction that every society creates evil according to some kind of natural secretion, as certain molluscs produce pearls'."

I might have said in the piece - but it was long enough already - that Robert Bresson's masterly 1983 film L'Argent is derived from the first of the two parts of The False Note, the setting transposed to contemporary France. Below, the last movement from L'Argent and the great Bresson in discussion of his work.

High Passions at the Place for Lost Books...

I've been serially unfaithful to this blog over the last few weeks: it's the charm of novelty, I regret to say. The thing with Twitter has been cheap and easy and, in my defence, everybody's doing it... But closer to the Things We Do for Love has been my developing commitment to The Place for Lost Books, the Faber Finds blog. It's certainly more than a one-time thing as far as I'm concerned. That's why I've posted lately on subjects as varied as Tolstoy's eminence, Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood', the eerie appeal of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, and F.R. Leavis's place amid the intellectual feuds of Cambridge English. I consider all this to be meaningful labour, moreover it's an outright pleasure to have a remit to write about such subjects, with the Faber Finds list offering all the riches it does. And I could affirm all of this by appending a picture of George Eliot, say, to this post - bearing in mind that Eliot is one of the few English novelists who might be compared to Tolstoy, and that Leavis wrote with particular distinction on Middlemarch. But instead, I'm going with this pic (above) of the recently deceased and sadly missed Ingrid Pitt, one of whose finest hours came in an otherwise disreputable Hammer Films version of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', of which more in the Le Fanu post above. I'm all for the high road, you understand, but sometimes the low one also gets you there, or thereabouts...

Norman Mailer's Spooky Art

Today, owing to an unfortunate necessity, I had to forsake my desk at home and go work in the local library, only 5 minutes' walk away, but a drag nonetheless. Waiting for some dogged daily newspaper scanner to give up one of the few writing tables with a plug-point adjacent, I wandered around the stacks awhile and was pleased to happen on a copy of Mailer's collection of thoughts on the writing process, The Spooky Art (2003). Browsing through it at least made the waste of time feel a good deal less vexing, even medicinal.

For a while I read from the index back and found Mailer very good on the affinities and disparities of the Russian masters: basically, that Dostoyevsky went down to depths that Tolstoy couldn't penetrate, but lacked Tolstoy’s panoptic sense of perspective and so tended toward hysteria; consequently from Dostoyevsky we come away with memorable individuals, and from Tolstoy entire societies.

Elsewhere: he's generally thoughtful about bad reviews, albeit occasionally desirous of knocking some picky little toerag's roof in.

He's bracingly self-critical about most of the books, as well as his much-advertised personal failings.

He sounds friendly enough about old Gore Vidal, to whom he is undoubtedly superior IMHO.

You get that sense that he wasn't ever as mad about The Executioner's Song as the book's ardent fans, for all that it's so alive to something fundamental in the big centre of American life, just because it was less his invention.

He makes a useful critique of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a self-consciously big and well-upholstered novel that doesn't feel large or truly lived.
He expresses a touching love for the novel on the ground that it is 'the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity - which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment.'
I nodded grimly in reading another version of his view that writers must discipline themselves 'to do a good day's work on a bad day.'

More grim nods when he volunteered that 'working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.'

Then there is the rub: ‘I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn't I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose…’

Still, searching around some reviews tonight I was satisfied that a fair few writers are properly sympathetic to Mailer's readiness to dare and risk failure.

Thomas E. Kennedy: ‘Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.’

Richard Poirier: ‘At his best [Mailer] seeks contamination. He does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the sounds that will give him a measure of what it’s like to be alive in this country.’

Wilfrid Sheed: ‘Mailer follows the Chestertonian principle of exploring the psychosis proper to the group, the identifying madness, and letting it enter him, like an exorcist opening himself to the devil.’

Quite. Like the demon of his last wondrous production The Castle in the Forest, Mailer gave himself the right to inhabit men's minds. Spooky indeed.

Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Debate Continues.

Say what you like about Vanity Fair magazine - that, for instance, it's Hello for people with degrees, or that its left-leaning political coverage might pack more clout if it wasn't swaddled in dime-a-dozen glossy worship of the Rich & Famous - but I have to say that Jim Windolf's blogging piece on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and translations of both plain can't be beat for covering all the key issues in a sharp and serious and amusing manner. Windolf seems to be as interested as I am in Nabokov's famously high-nosed dismissal of Dostoyevsky and all his works.
This was not just a matter of public pronouncement for Nabokov but a stubborn refusal to teach so much as a word of the author of The Brothers Karamazov to his Russian Literature undergraduate students at Cornell University back in the mid-1950s (i.e. when Nabokov was still teaching for his pennies, rather than reclining at ease on royalties from Lolita.) Hard to argue with Nabokov, of course - but, really, this was muleish of him.
The recurrent debate on whether having a favourite between the two Russian masters implies a personality type (or disorder...) feels like mere dinner-party sport to me - certainly not a serious question once one's undergraduate years are past. It seems to me the older you get the more you're bloody grateful to have the pair of them around, if only in spirit on the shelves...