Reading ephemera

 “I read newspapers because of an intense desire to get in touch with the world. A day missed in reading gives one a sense of isolation . . .” Anonymous male informant to Mass Observation Project, 1938.

“I read a lot of magazines . . . They’re bright and easy reading, and you can find out lots in them.” Anonymous female informant to Mass Observation Project, 1944.

In his essay “The Uncommon Reader” George Steiner writes of paperbacks,”The paperback is physically ephemeral. To accumulate paperbacks is not to assemble a library.” Fortunately my father died before he could have had the opportunity to add Steiner’s pronouncement to the host of status-anxieties that already surrounded his book purchases and reading. Not only were the bookshelves in our house crammed with hundreds of Penguin paperbacks, but we were awash in a sea of much more ephemeral print in the form of daily, weekly and monthly subscriptions.

For a family of five relying on one teacher’s salary, it now seems to me that an astonishing flow of magazines and newspapers poured into our house. Over a couple of decades there were subscriptions  to a considerable list of publications: The dailies–News Chronicle, the Daily Telegraph, local weekly newspapers, The Cornishman and The West Briton—then other weeklies: Radio Times, The Listener, John Bull, John O’London’s, Punch, Times Educational Supplement, Teacher’s World, Times Literary Supplement, Woman and Woman’s Own, and monthlies: Reader’s Digest, Books and Bookmen, Plays and Players, National Geographic, and The Artist. Add to this the weekly publications for children, the comics, Dandy and Beano, the more educationally-tilted Eagle

and its pallid imitation Girl. There were also short-lived subscriptions to the Children’s Newspaper, still marked in the 1950s by an Imperialist tone mingled with  Christian zeal originating with  its first editor, Arthur Mee, as well as the uninspiring Schoolfriend with its tepid tales of girls’ boarding schools. We read the monthly Collins Magazine, re-named post-Coronation, Young Elizabethan, with much more enthusiasm. Our household must have been a favorite with the local newsagent who made mid-morning deliveries of this substantial order of weeklies and monthlies along with the daily papers. Only the two Sunday papers, The Observer and The Sunday Times were bought separately from a barrow in the town’s centre. The shops, and even the railway station news-stand, remained firmly closed on Sundays, but I began, in my early teens, to make the early morning expedition to buy the Sunday papers—the thick stack of Sunday broadsheets below the main display of the tabloid News of the World and The People with their shrieking 3 inch headlines. If my father disapproved of this breach of Sabbath observance he never mentioned it, though he never bought the Sunday papers himself, and, thinking back, I don’t think he read them when they’d been brought into the house. It could hardly be said that there was any scarcity of print in the house needing to be supplemented by this flood of subscriptions. The tidal flow of all these periodicals poured into a house whose almost every room and hallway was walled with cliffs of print, only waist-high in some rooms, and towering precariously over our heads in others.

Each of these publications was destined for a specific audience in the household. The News Chronicle’s first reader was my grandmother, from whom it would pass to my mother, and then, by the time I was eight or nine, to me. The Telegraph belonged exclusively to my father, although he usually ignored both its news coverage and its editorials, devoting most of his attention to completing the crossword over his tea. John Bull

went first to my grandmother, and thence to others, depending on the current content. When C.S. Forester’s Hornblower stories, already a best-selling book series, were being serialized, the magazine went first to my brother, but usually it would be idly scanned by any of the rest of us, with the exception of my father. Looking back at its covers and contents lists now, I am surprised at how closely it mimicked The Saturday Evening Post in the U.S., both in its style of illustration and in ideological content. Like American magazines of the 1950s, John Bull covers promote a sentimentalized, highly gendered view of middle class life. Here’s father returning home to his aproned wife who’s stirring a pot on the stove while the two children peer into his briefcase in search of the treats it conceals. Here’s a younger version of the same father teaching his nervous wife to drive. Here’s yet another woman taking her driving test, exasperating the male examiner by using the rearview mirror to adjust her make-up. None of us found these depictions of women drivers at all offensive, since to us the woman driver was as rare a phenomenon as a hermit crab or a four-leafed clover. None of our female relatives or neighbours could drive, and the existence of a successful female rally driver in the person of Sheila Van Damm, described within the pages of John Bull, only served to underline a general sense that the woman driver was a freak of nature. The Van Damm family’s ownership of the Windmill Theatre, with its famous nude showgirl “statues,” doubly confirmed Methodist Cornwall’s view that the “Woman at the Wheel” as John Bull titled its feature, should be treated with the utmost suspicion. But John Bull, alongside its more predictable content of popular fiction like Paul Brickhill’s Reach for the Sky, could sometimes contain surprises. An April issue in 1956 published a short story, improbably touted as “heartwarming” by the young Doris Lessing.

Most of the weeklies and monthlies that came into the house mirrored the middlebrow literary tastes that dominated both our own bookshelves and the meagre offerings of the public library. Alan Bennett makes a similar observation in Untold Stories,  “Godfrey Winn, Beverley Nichols, Phyllis Bentley and (even though he would have scorned such company) J.B. Priestley . . .  impinged on our lives as more celebrated literary practitioners, Virginia Woolf say, or Evelyn Waugh never did.”

The mildly literary aspirations of John O’London’s Weekly, despite setting its sights on an audience of lower middle class autodidacts intent on self-improvement, rarely strayed into the territory of High Modernism. As far as my father was concerned the most significant contemporary writers were those whose names occurred most regularly in John O’London’s pages –– Rebecca West, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells and a handful of others. Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett were on his bookshelves, but nothing by Joyce, Lawrence or Woolf. This attachment to the Edwardian realists sprang in part from a belief in “character” as something stable and readily recognizable—the notion that Virginia Woolf so devastatingly derides in her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” that served so effectively to consign Arnold Bennett to the literary scrapheap as far as sophisticated readers were concerned for several decades to come. Woolf’s contempt for Bennett sprang from aesthetic differences, but was also driven by her disdain for the lower-middle class world from which Bennett came and which his characters inhabit. Bloomsbury’s scorn for Bennett and his lower-middle-class yearnings for self-improvement bursts forth in Clive Bell’s description of meeting Bennett in Paris,

“ . . .There we found him, sitting in his little gimcrack apartment, amidst his Empire upholstery from Waring and Gillow, with a concise French dictionary on the table . . . he was the boy from Staffordshire who was making good and in his bowler hat and reach-me-downs he looked the part.”

Small wonder that Bloomsbury’s versions of modernism never appeared on my father’s bookshelves, given that class-based derision was such a spontaneous Bloomsbury reflex and that even his literary heroes were so clearly fingered as beneath its social orbit.

In many respects my father’s reading pattern matches the emerging category of lower-middle-class readers in industrial towns that Arnold Bennett himself had earlier identified in his essay “The Potential Public”—readers known to their neighbours as “great readers” and who yearn for a more ample supply of books than the scanty choice offered in provincial book and stationery shops. John O’London’s catered directly to that yearning, offering its readers, like Bennett’s emerging “Potential Public,” a glimpse of “a contemporary hierarchy of writers.”  Predictably, John O’London’s itself was derided by critics like Q. D. Leavis

who placed it in the lowest class of literary journals where it satisfied “a demand for literary gossip and information about the readableness of books.” While literary gossip would have held little interest for my father, recommendations of “readableness,” untinged by Leavis’s note of scorn for that quality, may have served to help him map out his reading plans. He had, I think, subscribed to the magazine from very nearly its earliest days at the end of the First World War and continued the attachment till it ceased publication in 1954. He was equally devoted to its brief re-incarnation under the editorship of Ernest Kay from 1959 to 1962. Part of John O’London’s continuing appeal probably lay in its regular columns offering prescriptive rules of grammar and usage, evidently sufficiently popular with its audience to spawn various John O’London’s “little books” with such titles as “Is It Good English and Like Matters.”

Both my parents, as well as my grandmother, had an almost infinite appetite for “correctness” in grammar and placed a high value on a wide vocabulary. Even the Reader’s Digest, with its short articles and condensed books scientifically pruned to be accessible to readers with little more than functional literacy, justified its presence in the house with its features “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” and “Towards More Picturesque Speech.” The “Word Power” feature, contributed by Wilfred J. Funk, president of Funk and Wagnalls publishing, took the form of a twenty item quiz whose readers were asked to choose the “nearest in meaning” of a choice of four synonyms. Looking at those columns now, the choice of supposedly vocabulary-enlarging words seems more like a selection aimed at students learning English as a second language.

Many of the columns consist entirely of fairly common words well within the grasp of anyone with a secondary school education. Puzzlingly, Funk offers a pronunciation guide for each word, but no indication of what part of speech it might be—making many items slightly confusing for the reader who’s familiar with the widely differing meanings of a word depending on its part of speech. The “answers” on the following page offer unequivocal explanations of the derivation of each word and a brief usage sample, but no hint of potential shifts in meaning arising from context. True to the family ideology of self-improvement, my grandmother was a keen devotee of the “word power” feature. She would relay its contents to me while I was still barely able to read, and was inclined to subject me to impromptu tests on some of Funk’s selections. No wonder then that she proudly repeated to anyone who would listen that I had once asked her, “Granny, which is worse, a calamity or a catastrophe?” This, probably apocryphal, evidence of linguistic precocity was trotted out for years, to my ever-increasing embarrassment. Reader’s Digest’s vocabulary enlargement offerings were too rudimentary to satisfy my father who accumulated numerous books of popular philology. Ivor Brown’s numerous works on these lines beginning with Mind Your Language (1939) and A Word in Your Ear (1942) were read and re-read.

Like the other literary journalists that my father chose as guides, Brown was dismissive of modernism, confidently dismissing The Waste Land as “balderdash.” Brown is no less judgmental about words themselves. Brown’s musings on selected words are full of pronouncements like, “An ugly word, but expressive,” or “a nice, frank word.” For a timid man like my father, such confident designations must have seemed reassuring.

Some of this intense focus on vocabulary and inordinate pride in signs of verbal mastery sprang from the extreme status anxiety that accompanied the social shifts of the post-war years. The “sniffer dogs of class distinction” as Richard Hoggart called them were out in force, hounding children as avidly as their elders. At eleven I discovered that Reader’s Digest had its uses in the increasingly complicated verbal battlefields. My first term at my new elite school was not going well. English, my one good subject, was rendered as dull and difficult as Latin in the hands of my new form teacher, Miss Matchett [not her real name]. When not parsing sentences according to a set of rules that seemed arbitrary and incomprehensible, we were ploughing through “set books” with an overwhelming sense of coping with a tedious chore. On top of this, my essays came back with C grades Children have a discerning canniness in assessing the adults who have power over their lives even though they may not be able to articulate what they have observed. I somehow guessed that this new teacher had specific notions about the way children were supposed to write that my essays were failing to meet. The Reader’s Digest’s “Towards More Picturesque Speech” provided an easy remedy. My next essay was liberally sprinkled with about half a dozen phrases lifted from that section of the Digest. I remember adding the sickeningly jarring description of oil spills in water puddles as “little dead rainbows” and the strange sense of mental nausea that it induced. I had never heard of plagiarism and, in any case, felt no shame at copying these contemptible little similes, only a sense of disgust at their contrived falsity. A sense of disgust that increased when the essay came back with an A and which was combined with contempt as I began to consider how tone deaf she must be not to detect the jarring tone of these “picturesque” insertions. I might have become a serial plagiarist, sickening myself every week by copying one heavily contrived simile after another into my essays, but I was soon able to heartlessly rejoice when a death in the family sent Miss Matchett back to her family home to take care of her aged father. I quietly celebrated the arrival of Mrs Lieberschutz whose evaluation system called for no such subterfuge and who even seemed to take some pleasure from the books on the curriculum.

It was my grandmother who had initiated the subscription to the Reader’s Digest in the early 1950s. Although it was published as a “British” edition, its content was essentially American –something that my grandmother, who bore a good deal of rancour about the terms of the lend-lease agreement that had provided Britain with essential goods during the war, evidently decided to ignore. Reader’s Digest was the most pointedly ideological of all the cultural products that were beginning to Americanize British working and lower middle class popular culture in the post-war period.  Despite the editorial changes intended to produce a distinct “British” edition, the Digest bore unmistakeable American traits. The “Humor in Uniform” section, for example, was based on a conception of the military as a specialized caste– a notion alien to a post-war Britain whose lore dwelt  on the civilian experience of bombing and negotiation of war time shortages of household needs. Cultural historians like Laurence Cremin have observed that the Digest’s  publisher “reiterated time and again that the foreign editions . . . were instruments for exporting the American values of free enterprise, self-reliance and democracy.”  Probably my grandmother chose to ignore much of the relentless promotion of “American values” because the Digest’s large print made it one of the few publications she could read with ease despite her poor sight and the way its many bite-sized selections could be absorbed between naps.

I was, I think, somewhat ambivalent about the Reader’s Digest from the beginning. On the one hand, there was an alluring mild salaciousness about some of its articles, the account, for example of the last days of a woman prisoner sentenced to death for murder. But to a child, oblivious to the tilt of Cold War politics, the narrative stance of many articles inspired a kind of queasy puzzlement. I couldn’t fathom why the profile of a woman judge in East Germany depicted her as having such a troubled conscience that she needed to dose herself with brandy in order to sleep. And the supposedly comic story of a journalist’s revenge on his irritating Soviet diplomat neighbour  by repeatedly characterizing him in press reports as “pro-Western” seemed mean-spirited somehow, although for reasons I was incapable of identifying. Similarly, the collection of bland domestic anecdotes under the heading “Life’s Like That” seemed a depressing harbinger of what adult life might have in store.