END of ROUNDED ONE

I have been reading – and much relishing – The Return of the Native. I should prefer to say that I have been re-reading The Return of the Native but, to my shame, it was a Hardy that I had never read, though (I hasten to add) I galloped through most of his great masterpieces when I was young.

Why do I say “to my shame”? Some three years ago, a friend alluded to the book in an email. He didn’t, I think, actually use that phrase that writers (critics especially) are wont to use when making reference to some aspect of a celebrated work of art: “you remember how [as it would be in this case] in The Return of the Native Eustacia … etc” but he may well have written something of the sort. The assumption – assuredly a polite and generous one – is that you of course know the work in question. In replying, I certainly confessed that I had not read the book, “to my shame”. And I determined so to do, though, as you see, I had to get through three years’ worth of other books before I achieved it.

Who of us does not – even if only without revealing it – quietly look down upon someone who has failed to do those things that we consider essential? It might be watching a particular television series or listening to a certain pop group or visiting some well-known venue or event: “Really? You’ve never been to Glastonbury/Wimbledon/The Met/The Yorkshire Moors/The Louvre … ?” After all, it’s only a short step from the disdain that we are apt to feel about any display of what we consider to be ignorance, particularly that kind of ignorance that appears to be the product of prejudice or being a dimwit or just not trying.

This is a curious area of sensibility. I don’t think I would be alone in claiming – or at least affecting – a sense of “shame” about some cultural gap. But it implies that there is almost a moral imperative involved in keeping one’s knowledge of the world and its output in good repair. We’ve all been told that we should read so-and-so or that we ought to hear such-and-such or that this or that is a must-see. The implication is that it is “for our own good”, that we are somehow deprived without this particular cultural input.

Who draws up the prescribed lists of works with which one ought to be familiar? Or rather, whence is the consensus about this derived? I doubt that many of us would feel the need to “confess” that we had never read a particular novel by, say, Bernard Cornwell or Joanna Trollope “to our shame”. Indeed, I wear the fact that I have never seen an episode of Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here as a badge of honour. Not all knowledge – as I am sure I would find myself pointing out to Anne Robinson if I were ever ill-advised enough to go on The Weakest Link – is equally worth having. (And mention of that particular telly quiz reminds me that it furnishes much material for the regular ‘Dumb Britain’ column in Private Eye, precisely because it is perceived that you don’t have to boast much of a cultural education to go on the programme. It is noticeable that foolish answers on University Challenge or The Book Quiz do not find themselves twitted in this column).

Keeping the focus on books, I think those volumes that attract the notion that they ought to have been read by anyone pretending to the status of well-rounded person would be those considered to have what we might call – mindful of the minefield that lurks hereabouts – “literary merit”. Since the notion of elitism went into everyday use some two or three decades ago, it has become difficult to talk about merit, quality, value and other elevated notions without being roundly barracked, with the term ‘snob’ frequently called up as an unanswerable nuclear device. We are no longer allowed to propose – certainly not in a manner that suggests that such an argument is not worth having – that, say, JS Bach might have a bit more to him than does Dizzee Rascal. If on no other count, elevating Bach above Mr Rascal is fraught with suggestions of patriarchy and racism.

Nonetheless, the cultivated know what they know and they are not about to surrender their conviction that a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable person would be more likely to be familiar with Bach or Hardy than with, say, the autobiography of Paul O’Grady, not that the latter lacks for anything in the ability to divert. Diversion is a rather lower aim than erudition, after all.

A week or two ago, we were at a social event – a book launch, as it happens. A woman of our acquaintance also attended with, in tow, both her husband and her mother, neither of whom we had met before. The kind of desultory chat ensued that characterises these events. On our way home, we found that we had each remarked the woman’s declaration that, on a recent holiday in Italy, she and her husband had tasted snails for the first time. (Whether her mother had accompanied them and partaken of this unfamiliar delicacy or whether they had had a consignment of the crustaceans shipped back for her to try in the safety of home we did not register). More to the point, neither of us could fathom the precise spirit in which this intelligence was vouchsafed. Were we to marvel at the couple’s brave leap into an unknown that they imagined we must necessarily share? Or should we smile indulgently upon what they were ruefully offering as their innocent parochiality?

It seems quite plausible that they thought they were being – and that by association we would also find that they were being – pretty outlandish in tucking into snails: so unnatural, so foreign. In their circle, we were tempted to surmise, anything off the beaten track of meat and two veg in front of BBC1 or ITV would be thought to be rather raffish and liable to frighten the horses. To us, however – unbridled citizens of the world that we are, drawing from every well that we encounter with no fear of the consequence – snails were old news in our teens because nothing yet untried stayed untried very long.

So of course a well-rounded person ought to have quaffed snails just as she ought to have read Hardy. Nobody ever got a reputation as a conversationalist or as one who habitually set the dinner table on a roar by running round admitting to the things he has never done. On the other hand, there is very little satisfaction to be had if one only ever encounters people to whom mention of Hardy puts them in mind of “Kiss me, Hardy” or Laurel and Hardy or Jim Hardy of Wells Fargo or Hardy Amies or Jeff Hardy (who, I believe, is an American wrestler). And as a cultivated class of person is as endangered a species as the white rhino, the need for any of us to “keep up” is in any case beginning to be wholly academic.

Next time I read a great novel that I have hitherto unaccountably neglected, I shall almost certainly shut up about it.