Satire Gets Some Attention

–Ferdinand Mount is interviewed in a recent edition of The Times newspaper. This is reported by Johanna Thomas-Corr. Here is an excerpt in which Mount discusses his latest novel:

The Pentecost Papers, Mount’s 29th book and 14th novel, is focused on the dark arts of hedge funders. There’s corruption, arson and murder, played out at golf courses and fashion shows, as well as across the burning Brazilian rainforests. It’s navigated by Mount’s baffled narrator and long-term alter ego, Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent for a dying British newspaper, who is permanently out of his depth: “These days even having a dip. corr. on your staff is an anachronism, like still keeping a hatstand in the hall.”

The result is a novel that reads as though PG Wodehouse has penetrated the realm of “hedgies”, with a generous side order of Shakespearean shenanigans (concealed identities, people returning from the dead). You can also see the influence of Evelyn Waugh, whose comic novels satirised a modern world of frenetic activity without real purpose. Mount, recalling his own Fleet Street career throughout the Nineties and Noughties, says: “The whole world seems to have gone skewwhiff and become more like lying journalists in The Daily Beast [from Waugh’s novel Scoop]. Like a freak show. It’s incredibly unsettling. Donald Trump changes his position every day, every hour.”

The novel is also reviewed by Zoe Guttenplan in the current issue of Literary Review. Here’s an extract:

…The novel begins – where else – on the golf course. Our narrator, Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent for a dying newspaper, is interrupted by the large, red-headed Timothy ‘Timbo’ Smith. When Dickie hits an ‘awkward little shot’, Timbo asks if he is feeling stiff. As it happens, Dickie has indeed been suffering such bad back pain – a tedious topic, he admits, and one his wife has banned at home – that when this relative stranger describes himself as a ‘healer’ and offers to have ‘a little go at it’, Dickie is desperate enough to agree. And it works. ‘How do you feel now, Dickie? A bit like after you’ve had a good wank?’ Timbo asks. Yes, agrees the narrator, ‘that was just what I had thought’. From then, despite a fair bit of eyebrow-raising from his wife, Dickie makes regular appointments with Timbo to temporarily cure his back, visiting him in the Mayfair office of a mysterious organisation where he seems to work as a security specialist, a ‘bottle of vino’ tucked under his arm as payment…

Malcolm Forbes has also reviewed it favorably in the 12 July issue of the Daily Telegraph:

…In Mount’s latest novel, his 13th, Dickie [Pentecost] makes a welcome return. The Pentecost Papers is another sharp satire – this time about the ultra-rich – as well as another exuberant caper. Or as Dickie puts it at the outset, it’s “an ill-starred odyssey through an incurably slippery world, and one recorded by several hands – most of them unsteady”…

–As fate would have it, Princeton University Press has just published a hefty book on the history of literary satire. This is entitled State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature and is written by Dan Sperrin. It is reviewed by Colin Burrow in the current issue of London Review of Books (“Let custards quake”). Here are some excerpts:

…Dan Sperrin focuses on political satire, and his book has a scale and chronological range that borders on the exhausting. It begins in Rome, ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It…

…The question ‘What is this satire trying to do?’ also implies that authorial intentions are clear, and that so long as you know enough about the day-to-day politics of the Walpole administration you can pin those intentions down and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists – Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell – had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question ‘What are you trying to do?’ with something like ‘I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too.’ Furthermore, asking the same question of satire that one might ask of a political pamphlet aimed at redressing an immediate political wrong radically restricts the parameters within which satire can operate. It makes satire a mode that addresses a particular moment rather than a mode which might have an afterlife, or even change how people see the world in the longer term. You might say that’s not just a recipe for disappointment with satire, but for missing the point…

Most of the book’s 800 pages seem to be devoted to historic periods when satire flourished. The chapter entitled “Modern Satire” (starting after 1900) is attached as a conclusion and is only about 30 pages long. According to the index, it does contain a discussion of Evelyn Waugh which extends over about 5 pages.

–Finally, the British journal Prospect has posted a detailed article about the recent resurrection of the works of Gertrude Trevelyan who published several novels during the 1930s in Britain only to have them disappear entirely after her wartime death in 1941. See previous post. These were not technically satirical works but some flirted with that genre. The closest equivalent writer to her books was (according to the author of the Prospect article, Oliver Soden) the British novelist Henry Green (aka Henry Yorke). Here are some excerpts from Soden’s article:

…The novel for which she should gain a lasting place in literary history is Two Thousand Million Man-Power. Spanning a period from 1919 to 1936, the book is ostensibly about Robert and Catherine, a young couple, chemist and schoolteacher, attempting life together in a comfortable suburban home and then, as unemployment hits, descending into poverty. The telling of this story alone ought to have put the book in the company of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole or even the first half of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, its exact contemporary (Trevelyan’s book was released, by the same publisher, three months after Orwell’s). But Trevelyan’s ambitions are wider, and the couple’s life, inlaid into a background of news footage, turns and turns within a widening gyre…

The style owes something to the “Aeolus” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (set in newspaper offices, the text broken up with headlines) and even more to John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (1930-36), which includes collages of news clippings and song lyrics. The closest parallel is to Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett (he whom the modernists disdained), in which the life of the eponymous hero suddenly pauses for a page-long intrusion of historical events. But Trevelyan extends the technique into something beyond intermittent bursts of news. Dos Passos’s headlines, through capitalisation and placement, announce themselves as such. Trevelyan’s choric babble is not always from newspapers; she includes fictional creations, other stories, other novels, going on at the same time (“Tom Smith yawning and cursing the alarum in Celestin Road, Brixton, Ted Brown cursing and catching the bus at Peckham Rye, Syd Jones scratching his head in the tube at Uxbridge…”). The novel could so easily have been about Syd Jones, or Tom Smith, or Ted Brown, names of purposefully blanched anonymity…

To read Two Thousand Million Man-Power is to be giddy at the continual overturning and upending of scale, the dilation and contraction of viewpoint, zooming in and out from the specific to the global, through the semi-permeable membrane of semicolon or comma. It is a novel that simultaneously puts a square-inch of life under a microscope and shows the world spinning in space. This bilocation—writing the honeycomb of life and the individual cell at the same time—makes her uniquely able to lay out the plight of the worker bee amid the buzzing colony. For Trevelyan, the world was fast becoming “one huge, senseless machine. Men making it and it making men: little machine-made, swarming men…”. This may be what TS Eliot called “the human engine” that “waits like a taxi throbbing waiting”. But, surprisingly, the neatest literary parallel is an obscure song by Noël Coward called “City”: “Lonely, one among millions, life’s a sad routine… living in shadow, part of a machine… sirens shrieking, progress weaving poor humanity’s pall…”. In Two Thousand Million Man-Power, modern life for the working man, lost amid the screaming hordes, emasculated by technology and industry, is shown and not told, knitted into the book’s technique. It is not a book about the individual versus the world, the regress of the former in the face of the latter’s progress: the prose enacts the dichotomy. The novel is the machine…

The novels vary in quality, her prose is unpolished and readers will be divided as to whether the smudges are strategy or carelessness, her repetitions effectively claustrophobic or merely irritating (Two Thousand Million Man-Power has another of Arnold Bennett’s tics: it hisses with the noise of gas lamps, which are mentioned dozens of times). Some reviewers were unconvinced, finding her work not only aggravating but secondhand, modernism-by-numbers. She made a powerful enemy in the shape of Evelyn Waugh, who dismissed Two Thousand Million Man-Power as “a typical example of sham modernity… with a succession of futile interpolations… shop-soiled stunt-writing”. It is hard for a book to recover from a drubbing such as that…

The review by Waugh appeared in the magazine Night and Day (1 July 1937). The complete Prospect article is available on the internet at this link.

–A new satirical novel has recently been issued in the UK. This is entitled Drayton and Mackenzie and written by Alexander Starritt. It is reviewed in the latest issue of The Spectator by Susie Mesure. Here are the opening paragraphs of her review: