Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (68 page)

The focus of her attention was ‘the best-seller’ and why best-sellers are never regarded as great literature. Her early chapters were based on a questionnaire sent to best-selling authors, but were overshallowed by the rest of the book, which was historical, describing the rise of the fiction-reading public in Britain. Leavis noted how in Elizabethan times the most popular form of culture was music; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Puritan conscience maintained a canon of literature that was designed to be uplifting, a reflection of the fact that, at the least, the established church put ‘a scholar and a gentleman in every parish’ who helped to lead taste. The changes that followed all stemmed from one thing: the growth in and changes to journalism. In the late eighteenth century, with the growth in popularity of periodicals like the
Tatler
and the
Spectator,
the reading of fiction quadrupled. This change, Leavis says, was so rapid that standards fell; novelists wrote more quickly to meet the expanding demand, producing inferior works. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the demand for novels written in serial form meant that novelists were forced to write more quickly still, in instalments, where each instalment had to end in as sensational a way as possible. Standards still fell further. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the rotary press and the modern newspaper – and Lord Northcliffe and his
Daily Mail
in particular – standards fell yet again under the rubric ‘Give the public what it wants.’ By stages, Leavis said, the novel acquired a standing and then lost it; where once it had been a highbrow exploration of man’s essential ethical nature, it had since fallen a long way, step by step, to become mere storytelling. By the end of her book, Leavis had quite abandoned her anthropological stance and her scientific impartiality.
Fiction and the Reading Public
ends up as an angry work, angry with Lord Northcliffe in particular.
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The book did, however, offer some clues as to the success of Allen Lane and Penguin Books. Several of the authors Leavis mentions – Hemingway, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc – were included in the early lists. Hemingway, she said, glorified the ‘regular man,’ the figure set up by journalists in opposition to the highbrow; Chesterton and Belloc used a prose that, though more polished than journalism, was recognisably of that genre, carefully crafted to make no intellectual demands on the reader.
⁷⁵
This was not entirely fair on Lane. His lists were a mix, and with some of his other titles he did try to raise people’s horizons. For example, the second ten Penguins were better than the first ten: Norman Douglas’s
South Wind,
W. H. Hudson’s
Purple Land,
Dashiell Hammett’s
Thin Man,
Vita Sackville-West’s
Edwardians,
and Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon.
In May 1937 Lane launched the Pelican imprint, and it was this range
of nonfiction books that may have brought him his greatest triumph.
⁷⁶
It was the 1930s, and something was clearly wrong with Western capitalism, or the Western system.
⁷⁷
Pelican
actually started after Allen had been sent one of George Bernard Shaw’s notorious postcards, in the summer of 1936. Shaw’s message was that he liked the first Penguins, and he recommended Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s
Worst Journey in the World
as a ‘distinguished addition.’ Lane had already dismissed that very tide on the grounds that, at sixpence a book, it was far too long to make a profit. And so, when he replied to Shaw, he was careful to make no promises, but he did say that what he really wanted was Shaw’s own
Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism.
Shaw simply replied: ‘How much?’
⁷⁸
With Shaw on board, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, G. D. H. Cole, and Leonard Woolley soon followed. As this list shows, Penguin moved into science immediately and took a predominantly left-of-centre view of the world. But by now, 1937, the world was turning darker, and to adjust, Lane introduced a third innovation: the
Penguin Special.
⁷⁹
The first was
Germany Puts the Clock Back,
which came out in November 1937, written by the opinionated American journalist Edgar Mowrer. The tone of the text was polemical, but also relevant to its success was the fact that the book had been quickly produced to address a specific predicament. This note of urgency was new, making Penguin Specials feel different from the traditional, leisured manner of the book trade. Before the outbreak of war, Penguin produced thirty-six specials, among them
Blackmail or War?, China Struggles for Unity, The Air Defence of Britain, Europe and the Czechs, Between Two Wars?, Our Food Problem,
and
Poland
(the latter released only two months before Hitler’s invasion).
⁸⁰

Allen Lane, and Penguin, were often too left-wing for many. But commercially speaking, the great majority of titles were a success, selling on average 40,000 but with the political specials reaching six figures.
⁸¹
And in a way, Queenie Leavis had been confounded. There might not be much of a taste, by her standards, for serious fiction, but there was a healthy demand for serious
books.
It was, as no one needed to be reminded, a serious time.

Clive Bell, the artist, was in no doubt about the cleverest man he had ever met: John Maynard Keynes. Many people shared Bell’s view, and it is not hard to see why. Keynes’s Political Economy Club, which met in King’s College, Cambridge, attracted the cleverest students and economists from all over the world. Nor did it hurt Keynes’s reputation that he had made himself comfortably rich by a number of ventures in the City of London, a display of practical economics rare in an academic. Since publication of
The Economic Consequences of the Peace,
Keynes had been in an anomalous position. So far as the establishment was concerned, he was an outsider, but as part of the Bloomsbury group he was by no means invisible. He continued to correct politicians, criticising Winston Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, in 1925 for the return to the gold standard at $4.86 to the pound, which in Keynes’s view made it about 10 percent overvalued.
⁸²
He also foresaw that as a result of the mines of the Ruhr being allowed back into production in 1924, coal prices
would drop significantly, leading to the conditions in Britain which provoked the General Strike of 1926.
⁸³

Being right did not make Keynes popular. But he refused to hold his tongue. Following the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression that followed, when unemployment rose to nearly 25 percent in the United States and 33 percent in areas of Europe, and when no fewer than 9,000 banks failed in America, most economists at the time believed that the correct course of action was no action.
⁸⁴
Conventional wisdom held that depressions were ‘therapeutic,’ that they ‘squeezed out’ the inefficiency and waste that had accumulated in a nation’s economy like poison; to interfere with that natural economic homeopathy risked inflation. Keynes thought this was nonsense. Worse, given the hardship caused by mass unemployment, it was immoral nonsense. Traditional economists based their views of inaction on Say’s law of markets, after Jean-Baptiste Say, the nineteenth-century French economist. Say’s law maintained that the general overproduction of goods was impossible, as was general unemployment, because men produced goods only in order to enjoy the consumption of other goods. Every increase in investment was soon followed by an increase in demand. Savings were likewise used by the banks to fund loans for investments, so there was no real difference between spending and saving. Such unemployment as arose was temporary, soon rectified, or voluntary, when people took time off to enjoy their earnings.
⁸⁵

Keynes was not the only one to point out that in the 1930s the system had produced a situation in which unemployment was not only widespread but involuntary, and far from temporary. His radical observation was that people do not spend every increase in income they receive. They spend more, but they hold back some. This may not seem very significant, but Keynes saw that it had a domino effect whereby businessmen would not spend all their profits in investment: as a result the system outlined by Say would gradually slow down and, eventually, stop. This had three effects: first, that an economy depended as much on people’s
perceptions
of what was about to happen as on what actually happened; second, that an economy could achieve stability with a significant measure of unemployment within it, with all the social damage that followed; and third, that investment was the key matter. This led to his crucial insight, that if private investment wasn’t happening, the state should intervene, using government credits, and manipulation of interest rates, to create jobs. Whether these jobs were useful (building roads) or merely wasteful didn’t really matter: they provided cash that would be spent in real ways, generating income for others, which would then be passed on.
⁸⁶

Keynes was still outside the heart of the British establishment, and it would need another war to bring him in from the cold. He had always been a ‘practical visionary,’ but others refused to recognise that.
⁸⁷
Ironically, the first place Keynes’s policies were tried was in Nazi Germany. From the moment he assumed office in 1933, Hitler behaved almost like the perfect Keynesian, building railways, roads, canals, and other public projects, while implementing strict exchange controls that prevented Germans sending their money abroad and forced them to buy domestic products. Unemployment was abolished
inside two years, and prices and wages began to rise in tandem.
⁸⁸
Germany, however, didn’t count for many people. The horror of Hitler prevented them giving him credit for anything. In 1933, on a visit to Washington, Keynes tried to interest Franklin D. Roosevelt in his ideas, but the new president, preoccupied with his own New Deal, did not fully engage with Keynes, or Keynesianism. After this failure, Keynes decided to write a book in the hope of gaining a wider audience for his ideas.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
appeared in 1936. For some economists, it was sensational, and merited comparison with Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
(1776) and Marx’s
Capital
of 1867. For others, Keynes’s radicalism was every bit as odious as Marx’s, and maybe more dangerous, because it stood a greater chance of working.
⁸⁹
To begin with, the book had a bigger practical effect in America than in Britain. The universities there took up
The General Theory,
and then it spread to Washington. J. K. Galbraith remembers that ‘on Thursday and Friday nights in the New Deal years the Federal Express out of Boston to Washington would be half-filled with Harvard faculty members, old and young. All were on the way to impart wisdom to the New Deal. After
The General Theory
was published, the wisdom that the younger economists sought to impart was that of Keynes.’
⁹⁰

In 1937, a few months after Keynes’s book was published, it seemed that the depression was easing, and signs of recovery were at last showing themselves. Unemployment was still high, but production and prices were at least creeping up. No sooner had these green shoots begun to appear than the classical economists came out of hibernation, arguing that federal spending be cut and taxes raised, to balance the budget. Immediately, the recovery slowed, stopped, and then reversed itself. Gross national product (GNP) fell from $91 billion to $85 billion, and private investment halved.
⁹¹
It is not often that nature offers a natural laboratory to test hypotheses, but this time it did.
⁹²
War was now not far away. When hostilities began in Europe, unemployment in the United States was still at 17 percent, and the depression was a decade old. World War II would remove unemployment from the American scene for generations and herald what has aptly been called the Age of Keynes.

The essence of the 1930s as a grey, menacing time is nowhere more contradicted than in the work – and words – of Cole Porter. Queenie Leavis and her husband might lament the influence of mass culture on the general quality of thought (and their pessimism would be echoed time and again in the years to follow), but once in a while, individuals of near-genius have produced popular art, and in music, Porter stands out. Although he continued to produce good work up to 1955 (in
Silk Stockings),
the 1930s were his decade.
⁹³
Porter’s oeuvre in the 1930s included ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ ‘Night and Day,’ ‘Just One of Those Things,’ ‘In the Still of the Night,’ ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin,’ ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Easy to Love,’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’:

Porter’s work suffered when a horse fell on him in 1937, crushing both legs, and he became a semi-invalid, but until then his sophistication and cleverness were only part of his genius. His topical eye for detail was second to none, even Audenesque, according to Graham Greene.
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