Literal snobbery

“I didn’t mean death
The abstract reaper
But the stalactite melting:
Life’s time-keeper...”
From The Songs of Gutta Percha by Bachchoo
I suppose if I had a trumpet I’d be tempted to blow it, though this is universally regarded as not quite in the best of taste. The trumpets of others ought to ring out on one’s behalf and their hautboys (love that spelling!) herald one’s arrival, pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise.

If one ignores the fact of whose lips are on the trumpet’s mouthpiece, it remains true that writers must be compared, one against the other. It is part of the process of making a literature. It is, in an age which asserts that all values are relative, a difficult thing to say. Even so, I was once asked to think of a single important thing that university education had taught me and I said it was that one poem is better than another.
It took some growing up to absorb that as a self-evident and paradoxically arguable truth. I didn’t just mean poems — I meant novels, travelogues, plays and all the stuff we call “literature”. The very label begs definition and I don’t think a succinct or static one exists, even though we may all agree that Batman or Bond may contain more superficial excitement than say the dilemmas of a Prince of Denmark. And then perhaps agree that those dilemmas are more rewarding. One would be called upon to define “reward” and, though it can be done, I believe it will beg further definitions.
The process of such definition with practical examples becomes the stuff of criticism whose first task is elucidation, comparison and ranking.
These conclusions, clichés perhaps, were I assure you, hard won. My reading in my childhood and through my teenage years was random, undirected and pretty voracious. I didn’t lead a particularly lonely or sedentary life and there was plenty of loafing about with gangs in Pune through school and college. A very few of this teenage crowd belonged to a decrepit old library on what was then East Street, called the Albert Edward Institute. Its clientele consisted mostly of old men, the Prufrocks of Pune, who wore the bottoms of their trousers rolled and needed thick leather belts to keep their trousers in gathers round their waists. They sat in the reading room which was no more than two wooden tables and chairs or on two creaking, cane easy-chairs on the verandas reading the daily papers.
An equally pretentious friend and I paid the monthly rupee subscription to join the borrowing library and take away the works of, among others, Marie Corelli, Paul de Cock, Thomas Hardy, Eric Linklater, Charles Dickens and many more.
We read their works compulsively, in a point-scoring task to get through the whole shelf — not with appropriate absorption and admiration, but with the determination to have done with it, like some Japanese tourists on sight-seeing foreign tours.
My friend and I would boastfully compare the quantities we had read. We had no way of comparing or estimating quality. For us Marie Corelli, who started one of her novels with the intriguing sentences “I, one Fabio Romani am dead! Dead and yet alive...” was as good or bad as Thomas Hardy or Dickens.
I can’t pretend that there was no discrimination or snobbery about our reading. We assumed without question that the fare of the Albert Edward Institute was sui generis superior to that of the Punjab Book Exchange (PBE) on Mahatma Gandhi Road from which others of our friends borrowed their reading. The PBE had titles such as Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Totem and Taboo by Freud in its showcase window, but its shelves in the shop were full of “Western” novels with titles such as Gunsmoke Gold. Behind the beaded curtain there were even more esoteric titles to be borrowed at a slightly higher price — The Nun’s Delight and Confessions of a Russian Princess among others.
Obviously, we readers of Marie Corelli felt superior to those who lived imaginatively in the worlds of cowboy violence and mild or grievous pornography.
In the bookcase in the front room at home, among other things. were collections of Readers’ Digests, Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth, the Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry and several titles by Kahlil Gibran. To me they were all “literature”.
The first critical admonition I ever came across was my mother encouraging me not to read the American comics that I and my friends bought and passed around. They were all sorts, from Classics Illustrated to Archie and Veronica, The Fox and the Crow and diverse cowboy series such as Gabby Hayes, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy. My sister and I were not in any way forbidden to read them, but were encouraged to widen our tastes to prose unassisted by pictures, even if it was only Just William or Enid Blyton.
The culture of the British university to which I subsequently came, and the distinct hierarchy of taste that it favoured and religiously engendered wasn’t exactly a shock, but it was new. And it was deeply enticing. Here was F.R. Leavis telling the world that literature had replaced religion and had to be relied upon to furnish civilisation with the moral, emotional, intellectual and practical possibilities, with all their infinite nuances, of life. To read was not enough. If that which had been written had this overweening task, then there had to be a system of discrimination. Examine the words, criticise the mechanisms, breadth, appeal and felicities or otherwise of a work. Through this process would emerge various definitions of truth and beauty. Leavis went a bit further. He actually wrote essays and then books to say which novelists and poets were better than others and why. The judgements could never be final — literature and writing were not to be diminished to the status of Top of the Pops. Criticism was always to be “Yes, but...” or “Yes, and...”
So, apart from the question of who blows the trumpet, it shouldn’t shock or bewilder the reading public if a writer says that he doesn’t judge any woman writer to be his equal. Such a statement should be taken not as an outrage but as a challenge to compare the historical and social contexts, the subtlety, the accuracy and breadth of characterisation, the freshness and penetration of insight in the works of, say, George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) and that of the writer who makes the claim. (No women novelists were injured during the writing of this column)