Inspiring Older Readers
Magic Moments by John Sutherland
Sutherland is an interesting and (always) combative literary critic and academic who has made something of a career out of speculative literary imaginings - Is Heathcliff a Murderer?; Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?; More Puzzles in Classic Fiction, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?; Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction – and book-centred memoirs like The Boy Who Loved Books. This latter category includes this one, Magic Moments which he subtitles ‘life-changing encounters with books, film, music…’.
In the short epilogue to the book, Sutherland usefully sums-up the central purpose of this particular endeavour:
“I have never been a methodical – or shrewd – collector; any more than my reading has ever been organised…But there were thousands of books which had passed my way and somehow stuck; they were, I liked to think, my personal archaeology.”
Starting from the age of five and his discovery of Tarzan, Sutherland takes us year by year through to the age of 21 by way of the key books that mark out his reading path. But, it’s important to say, this isn’t just a descriptive list of his favourite, influential reads – the books act as jumping off points for speculations about art, politics, philosophy and life in general.
I think it’s fair to say that you can read this book it two different ways – sequentially as you might any other memoir and trace the development and influences as the years slip by. Or, you can dip into the book as almost a series of free-standing essays that can be appreciated in almost any order and in any chronological sequence. I opted for the former and, as a consequence, I was forced to the conclusion that there were quite a lot assessments of books, authors and movies I didn’t agree with and I couldn’t escape the feeling that Sutherland has some literary axes to grind. Of course, you don’t read this kind of thing for objectivity and disagreement is fine but it sometimes betrays such a difference in world view between him as author and me as reader that I personally increasingly found myself bridling.
The saving grace for me was that he’s never anything less than entertaining and none of his episodes or essays outstay their welcome. He’s also ingenious in using specific books as springboards for much wider speculations. Sutherland is, unaccountably as far as I’m concerned, deeply wedded to Victorian literature and has a particular penchant for Trollope and so you’d naturally imagine that his tastes run to the rather conservative and fuddy-duddy – and in some ways that’s true – but he also has a broad streak of iconoclasm in his make-up. He seems to revel in a sort of anti-intellectualism that I found irritating and populist; for example he lauds the work of the execrable cod-supernatural specialist, Dennis Wheatley and does so at the expense of the more cerebral Aldous Huxley:
"Who, in a pinch, would you trust? A man-of-the-world London wine merchant or a myopic Oxford intellectual?"
The answer, possibly neither, is the obvious one as far as I’m concerned but certainly not Mr Wheatley and his horrible bibulous, sexist tripe.
I very much enjoyed his run-in with Richard Hoggart whose The Uses of Literacy he acknowledges as both seminally influential and ultimately elitist and wrong-headed. Hoggart clearly didn’t think much of Sutherland either and was sweepingly dismissive of two of his former pupil’s books that he was given to review:
“My third book…was read by him for publication. He condemned it, with the remark…that ‘UCL smart-aleckiness had never been to his taste’….A later effort..was reviewed, harshly by Hoggart in The Listener, with the dismissive remark that the book was like a glossy plastic pack of disposable razors. Sharp, perhaps; but worth spending time on? No. Read, toss, forget and move on to something more worthwhile.”
I have to say that I’ve got quite a lot of sympathy with Hoggart’s opinion……..
Terry Potter
August 2019