Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without Reviews

• 
  Jola

  FIFTY SHADES OF ANNOYANCE
  
  EXPECTATIONS:
  A hilarious and thought-provoking literary jest.
  
  REALITY:
  A heavy-handed and irritating provocation.
  
  CONCLUSION:
  We are not amused.
  In particular, we are not amused by some jokes and metaphors in Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (1967). Three examples to give you a feel of Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne’s sense of humour:
  

  • Whitman is a garrulous old bore.
  • Hopkins’s is the poetry of a mental cripple.
  • Galsworthy appeals to the shallowest emotions, the tears of a spinster at a stranger’s wedding

  
  There are at least fifty reasons why we could do without Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without but let’s limit to ten:
  
  I. A big part of the book was written in unbearably portentous, pseudo-academic style, with Oedipus complex as an overused skeleton key.
  
  II. Although Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne appear to be linguistic purists – for example they are disgusted by Hemingway who omitted an 'l' in sorella – I came across a few typos in their book.
  
  III. I find it strange that none of the three authors discovered a single positive thing in the discussed works.
  
  IV. The foundation of these essays is quite weird: according to the authors, The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying ‘see what a nice person I am’. Well, if we take their philosophy for granted, Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne are not telling us anything about the fifty books; they are saying ‘see what rude people we are’.
  
  V. I doubt if the authors actually read some of the books they smash to pieces, as a few arguments they come up with seem to be just made up to arouse a flutter of excitement. I think that even the readers who detest Jane Eyre will be surprised by the authors’ statement that reading this novel is like gobbling a jarful of schoolgirl stickjaw. So much sweetness in Jane Eyre, really? I dare to differ.
  
  VI. Some opinions are simply dogmatic. No room for discussion left when someone announces: The Bride of Lammermoor is the small heap of sawdust or Wuthering Heights is high old rumbustious nonsense.
  
  VII. The authors frequently judge writers, not their books, for instance, in their opinion, William Faulkner was nothing more than a vain and humourless purveyor of turgid Southern tosh.
  
  VIII. Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without makes you feel uneasy, as if you were witnessing an act of vandalism and could do nothing about it.
  
  IX. Even the title of this book sends arrogant vibes.
  
  X. How come the authors with their know-it-all-about-literature attitude are almost completely forgotten now? Quite contrary to the books they ridiculed.
  
  There were some interesting passages in this collection of essays and I enjoyed looking at the literary canon from a different perspective. Nevertheless, I did not like Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. Of course the authors’ right to genuinely hate the fifty books is undeniable and that is not where the shoe pinches. I just cannot stand unfair generalizations and impertinence, that is all.
  
  
  Jonathan Wolfstenholme
• 
  Jacob

  (Review in progress)
• 
  Elizabeth

  Don't waste your time with this. If you have two neurons to rub together, you'll be better off on your own than following the guidance of the authors of this monstrosity. (See, Brigid? I, too, can be rude and dismissive about a book without actually offering a cogent reason why it's so bad!) For an honest review, read on.
  
  I don't usually mind books that disagree with the masses. I know how difficult it can be to dislike something that is widely held to be classic. (Check out my review of Grapes of Wrath for an example.) And there ARE parts of this book that do that, and that do it well. The chapter on Hamlet, for instance, explains certain areas in which the play doesn't live up to Shakespeare's usual standard of excellence. It doesn't claim that Hamlet is bad, as much as it claims that some other plays are better. Why is this one particular work so highly praised? And, whether you like Hamlet or hate it, their logic makes sense.
  
  Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book does not take the time to present a careful argument for the works the authors are disparaging. In order to justify the lack of quality of an acclaimed work, it is necessary to demonstrate an understanding of that work, and most of the reviews here left me questioning that the authors even understood the point. The argument against The Scarlet Letter, for instance, hinges almost entirely on the assumption both the author and the story's narrator are condoning the harsh judgments of the Puritans and taking their "side" against Hester. The book, then, becomes a celebration of one woman's punishment. This is ridiculous. For one thing, limiting a book—any book—to one single true "meaning" will usually backfire. Basing that one meaning entirely on an imagined view of authorial intent is dangerous, and it assumes that the work of literature can't stand up on its own merit. Furthermore, The Scarlet Letter lends itself to many sympathetic readings of Hester's character. By the end of the novel, Hester has "won": the Puritans don't want her to wear the letter because it shames them, not her; and she has raised her daughter up out of a powerful stigma and set her up as an independent, wealthy, and respected member of society. Different critics have analyzed this book in different ways over the years, but here's a sampling: Feminist critics have interpreted this story as a woman's ultimate triumph over a system that fails to ruin her. Structuralists have compared Hester's honesty, penance, and subsequent redemption to the ruination that Dimmesdale experiences through his silence. Theorists exploring the psychoanalytic elements have reviewed the mother-daughter relationship in all its subtlety. Fifty Works's abrupt dismissal of any complexity that Hawthorne may have shown is puzzling, as is their connection between The Scarlet Letter and married American men today who ogle other women. (How is that relevant?)
  
  I would have thought that the authors of this book simply didn't understand American literature, except that they are just as clueless about English works. Just because something went over their heads doesn't mean it has no value. I was especially disappointed with their dismissal of older works simply on a basis of their age. They seem to dismiss older works as being primitive just because they're old. They don't (or can't) demonstrate how these works miss the mark, but that doesn't stop them from similarly dismissing the people who made these older literary offerings as incapable of understanding complex ideas. Oh, the irony.
• 
  John Pistelli

  My rating:
  3 of 5 stars
  
  I wanted to read this 1967 book after reading about it on
  Anthony's blog, and now, after having it shipped from the obscure storage facility where it resides to my main library, I have. The authors—English writer Brigid Brophy; her husband, the art historian Michael Levey; and the little-known John Osborne ("Assistant Literature Director of the Arts Council in England," says the jacket copy)—set out undo the "injustice done alike to great authors and to the public" when inferior work is passed off as great for no other reason than custom to the unsuspecting pupil. They allow "that about taste there is no absolute arbitrating," but their 50 entries offer reasoned arguments and imply standards immanent to what they regard as the best of the tradition. Furthermore, they pronounce their efforts harmless since they do not "exercise the tyrannical power of the magistrate" who orders obscene materials destroyed. Their avowed iconoclasm is of a purely metaphorical variety. So, confining themselves to the English language—hence they include American but not translated literature ("That is why the Bible is not listed")—and to 50 works, they set out to fulfill Eliot's mandate for criticism (which they do not cite): "the correction of taste."
  
  What do Brophy et al. have against these 50 works? Moreover, can we discern any patterns in their judgments?
  
  The strongest comprehensive argument the authors make in this various book is against revering the old merely because it is old. At the beginning of their entry on the York Mystery Plays (I have never had the pleasure myself, but I think I got the gist from Grant Morrison's neglected
  graphic novel):
  

  Yet too frequently we value the older above the newer for no better apparent reason than that it has lasted longer. This is a peculiar characteristic of the English temperament. How reverently we gaze at any Gothic cathedral: how perplexed and untempted we are by the glitter of Baroque. How stirred by Gregorian chant: how unmoved by the more sophisticated art of Handel. Yet, in the centuries between Gregorian chant and Handel, between Gothic and baroque [sic], the arts of music and architecture made tremendous leaps forward in technique and complexity. It can only be this absurd nostalgia for the remote past, this mindless yearning towards primitivism, towards the time when art was so simple it was not art, which is responsible for the modern interest in and production of the various cycles of mystery plays which flourished in medieval England.

  
  And some of their best polemics are against writers who may possess a certain historical importance, because they were the first to invent a genre or a style, but who are nevertheless by our standards lethally dull (hence their argument that Beowulf is "a fine example of primitive non-art" canonized only to provide "some respectable pseudo-Homeric epic from which to make Northern literature evolve").
  
  I nodded in agreement with their mockery of the pioneering but plodding fiction of Defoe, Fielding, and Scott, fiction so verbosely narrated, so lacking in vivid imagery and drama, that it really is a godawful chore to read. (Really, couldn't we do without the eighteenth-century novel almost in toto, with the possible exceptions of Swift and Sterne [who ought, as Joyce once noted, to have exchanged names]?)
  
  They also assail books that are over-praised but far from their writers' best works, such as Hamlet and The Pickwick Papers. Of the former, they intriguingly note that "the play is the prototype of western literature's most deplorable and most formless form, autobiographical fiction," and call for more study and performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra in lieu of the more famous tragedy (I myself might vote for Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale, but I take the point).
  
  Not only does Brophy—a secularist, humanist, and feminist—argue against the dictation of taste by custom, but she and her collaborators also despise anything that smacks of primitivism or antiquarianism. This is the basis on which they skewer authors as diverse as Spenser, Twain, and Lawrence. This book's artistic touchstones, against which other authors are judged and found wanting, are Donne and Pope in poetry and Austen, Eliot, and James in fiction. (Readers familiar with the history of literary criticism might think they spy the shade of Dr. Leavis hovering between the lines.) In short, they favor the urbane literature of civilization as against the arts of the volk or, even worse, the arts of urbane and civilized writers who don weeds and rags to pretend to be of the volk.
  
  (Politically, this attitude is a double-edge sword: if you apply it to your own tradition, you seem impeccably progressive, but if you apply it to someone else's—especially a tradition that has been oppressed in some way by the West—then you appear to be a condescending imperialist. This apparent contradiction allows us to forget that the primitivist denunciation of European civilization and the white male in the name of primal values was codified in literature and philosophy by European white males.)
  
  Brophy et al.'s anti-primitivism campaign triumphs in this book's single best essay, a funny but judicious demolition of Wordsworth's meretricious doggerel about the daffodils, a poem I have myself always loathed. They use "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" as a case study of Wordsworth's work as a whole, where phony and ill-written anti-intellectual pastoralism alternates with sublime, Latinate, Miltonic rhetoric; this latter strain they view as in line with Wordsworth's actual gift, whereas his Marie-Antoinette-playing-peasant routine they see as both risible and pernicious:
  

  And indeed it in this poem that Wordsworth explicitly enunciates his gospel of philistinism, the great anti-thought trademark he set on English life forever after. He damns 'intellect' as 'meddling,' dismisses the leaves of books as 'barren'….exclaims (could a town councillor voting against a grant for the symphony orchestra have done better?) 'Enough of Science and of Art'….The tragedy of all this is that it's untrue not only to human nature, but to Wordsworth's poetic nature…For the talent Wordsworth mortified and martyred to a doctrinaire simplicity is that of one of English literature's supreme rhetoricians. The reason Wordsworth writes of daffodils and clouds as though he had never really set eyes on either of them is that he is an essentially baroque artist, to whom flowers are invisible unless transmuted into precious metal and to whom clouds are merely what sweep apparitions down on the astounded beholder.

  
  As implied by this critique, in which Wordsworth is praised or damned based on any given poem's distance or proximity to an ideology the authors dislike, a faith that aesthetic and moral judgments can be made in tandem animates this whole book:
  

  For, morality being a mere branch of aesthetics, no book that is morally so warped [as The Pilgrim's Progress] can in any real sense be aesthetically satisfying.

  
  This is a view that has more in common with Wordsworth's dancing heart than with Donne's brain-twisting paradoxes. That art and morals could align so neatly is the perennial dream of Platonists, priests, and politburos, but history gives no evidence in its favor. The moral premises the Homeric epics were based on are long dead, but it seems as if a new translation of the Iliad comes out every year. Someone finds it aesthetically satisfying, since, aside from historical and archaeological interest, there is really no other reason to read it.
  
  The authors' moral judgments lead them astray more than once, as when they derogate Wuthering Heights as "both the first and the meatiest morsel in the long, broad tradition of melodramatic daydreams concocted often by, and always to satisfy the appetites of, women wailing for their demon lovers." While I certainly have no time for that consumerist school of feminism that celebrates whatever bilge teenage girls happen to like just because teenage girls like it, any half-sentient critic should be able to tell the difference between trashy romances and Wuthering Heights, perhaps the most perfectly constructed novel in the language and a brilliant metafictional commentary on the fate of fictional prose narrative itself as it moves from Gothic romance to social realism. Anyway, the authors must have missed the part where Heathcliff cruelly mocks Arabella for mistaking Wuthering Heights for the kind of novel Brophy et al. think it is:
  

  'She abandoned [her home and family] under a delusion,' he answered; 'picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished.'

  
  Jane Eyre is a safer target, of course; whatever the merits of its symbolism and style, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the authors are very funny about the derivative nature of the Gothic elements, showing (but only after quoting a critic on the novel's originality) that Brontë has borrowed a supernatural set-piece whole cloth from Moll Flanders. Yet the authors might have had the decency to mention that Brontë followed Jane Eyre with Villette, a masterful psychological study that is a major advance on the earlier novel—and which absolutely bears comparison with the best of Dickens and Eliot.
  
  The inclusion of American literature was probably a mistake, as these partisans of Henry James (whom I love, by the way) have a tin ear for the main national tradition, as described by Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature:
  

  The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day.

  
  These modern Europeans think extremity a kind of sham, and so they go on funking our great writers. A not totally implausible feminist critique of The Scarlet Letter goes off the rails when, after misjudging the narrator's wry tone, they bizarrely pronounce Hawthorne's historical romance "without irony"—irony might as well have been Hawthorne's middle name! Their assault on Moby-Dick is philistinism itself:
  

  Many novelists have tried to anticipate the critic's task by writing both narrative and a commentary alongside it pointing out the deeper beauties, profundities, and significances of the narrative. Melville alone has supplied the commentary without supplying the narrative.

  
  This reminds me of those one-star Amazon reviews they're always compiling at
  Biblioklept: "Throughout the book, you may read one chapter with some action only to be followed by 5 or 6 chapters of tangents that are not necessary to understand the story."
  
  With Whitman, the limits of their standard midcentury Freudian moralism come to the fore, as they pathologize his poetry as merely an effusion from the closet, while they are scandalized at Faulkner's cynicism and pompositiy (about the latter, they have a point; about the former, they sound merely pious). Their argument against Huckleberry Finn, a flawed novel by any standard, is more compelling ("It is a vision which can be achieved only by that ruthless dishonesty which is the birthright of every sentimentalist") and they score a few good points on Hemingway, mentioning both his debts to Stein and his ingratitude for them, but if Hemingway was overvalued in the midcentury, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that these days it might be worthwhile to recover his virtues. (And why did they excuse Poe from their animadversions—Poe, of whom Harold Bloom commented that he was beloved in France because he benefitted from translation and would further benefit from being translated into English?)
  
  Their distaste for religious art of all sorts is sometimes bracing—they are very funny on Bunyan—but their peremptory dispatch of Hopkins is merely insensitive (in the aesthetic, not the political, sense); read the man's poems aloud and you won't care what he believed. Their pronouncement against Rupert Brooke's patriotic verse is homophobic by contemporary standards—"The moral is plain: Don't go in for flag-waving if you're limp-wristed"—but a serious warning against overcompensating for one's own internalized social shame lurks under the ugly formulation (which reminded me, by the way, of Gore Vidal's quip about George W. Bush: "Give a sissy a gun and he'll kill everything in sight").
  
  We are already doing without many of the book's targets—The Essays of Elia, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Lorna Doone, Esther Waters, South Wind, and more. At least one of the now-rarities they scorn perhaps deserves to be revived: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel-poem Aurora Leigh, now read only by feminist Victorianists. The Victorianisms Brophy et al. mock in it are no less glaring than are their own now obvious twentieth-century biases, and its defense of the modern epic as realist novel is seemingly in line with their own values.
  
  Their dismissal of To the Lighthouse sums up most of this book's themes: they judge Woolf imprecisely poetic when she should be vividly narrative, a primitivist of the commonplace mind rather than an original thinker, and a university-ready digest of better and tougher writing:
  

  To compare the results with James or Proust would only occur to the Eng. Lit. mind, always timid before the vigour of real art and always happiest with genteel diluted versions of it. Virginia Woolf's is a supreme example of the non-art that is at the same time inevitably (for the art v. life dichotomy is a false one) devoid of vitality.

  
  Even those of us who believe in the possibility, however remote, of authoritative aesthetic judgment as opposed to today's soppy populist relativism (which only lines the pockets of the money-men) will have to allow that there are more things in literature than are dreamt of in Brophy and her collaborators' philosophy.
  
  All in all, this book is a fascinating and entertaining curio, as much the limited product of its time it accuses some of its targets of being, but fun and briskly written. It is a minor entry in the tradition of viciously witty and plain-spoken British criticism that runs from from Hazlitt to Wilde and on through such twentieth- and twenty-first century figures as George Orwell, Rebecca West, Christopher Hitchens, and Martin Amis.
  
  Finally, for the curious, here is a photo of the entire table of contents:
  
  
• 
  Christopher (Donut)

  I have not justified my four-star rating. I can't even remember which books are on the list, but while researching that (and let me get back to you..), I did find a contemporary pan, or slating, in the Spectator archives:
  
  ... The authors' depreciations are similarly devoid of critical content. They claim in their `address' to be fighting to challenge, against `the whole weight of received opinion,' the views that `force our children into philistinism.' But Fifty Works—an exhibitionistic pseudo-Shavian joke that has gone absurdly wrong, owing to the authors' humourlessness, casually sketchy knowledge of their subject-matter and refusal to think hard—is in itself aggressively philistine. It is boorishly intolerant without being original or witty; it sets out to destroy `received opinion' without knowing or understanding it; it disguises a set of private prejudices and opinions as a critical view of English Literature; it is ill-mannered and its bad taste is dreary, unredeemed by brilliance or any of the insights of eccentricity. Usually the authors are content with straightforward abuse, couched in hackneyed terms. Whitman is `a garrulous old bore,' in which `le style is undoubtedly l'homme: Favoured adjectives are `stuffiest,' `worthless,' awful' and `unspeakable.'
  
  So check THAT out:
  
  
  http://archive.spectator.co.uk/articl...
  
  As best I can remember, the books on the list broke down fairly evenly into ones I liked, ones I hated, and ones I didn't care about. The concept is a good one. I remember a book of 'least favorite classic albums' called
  Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, in a similar vein.
  
  Thanks to whoever for photographing the table of contents:
  
  
• 
  Tra-Kay

  This book is both hilarious and unfortunately outdated. I had read only about five of the books discussed, and was familiar enough with only about half of the authors to understand the criticisms against them. "The Alchemist" by Ben Jonson, "She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith, etc....what ARE these things?
  
  Yet it's very worth looking up if you don't get what all the fuss is about, or outright despise, an author or work it contains. The humorous criticisms can be great fun even if you love something they've chosen. I laughed out loud upon seeing that the first work listed is Beowulf; I couldn't have been more surprised if they listed Shakespeare himself - and they DO (well, Hamlet, for its disproportionate fame). Criticism of Peter Pan ruffled my feathers, but I survived to tumble into laughter over the brilliant parody of my beloved Virginia Woolf.
  
  Are the authors right about all or most of these things? ~shrugs~ Take care not to either get too riled up about their attacks or to take them too much to heart. They have a curious way of saying things that are both perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant (for example, Woolf's writing is more eloquent and touching than the thoughts of anyone I'VE encountered, even though it may read like "mere" thoughts).
  
  This is above all a comedy book: a way of stickin' it to the droning teachers who made you read what you despised, or an answer to the literary community's adoration of a work you just don't think is that great. As the authors themselves put it, "In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain." If you like a book sincerely, that's really all that matters.
• 
  Lise

  The authors are either very ironic or very stupid.
• 
  C

  I disagree with much of it, but even what I disagree with is hilarious, like reading bad movie reviews or Twitter takedowns of classic literature. Writing in 1967, the authors reserve most of their bile for prudishness (they think Whitman wasn’t gay enough!), which makes a nice counterpart to Batille’s survey of Evil in literature. Their takedown of Wordsworth’s insipid sentimentality is something I’ve been saying since I was forced to endure him at uni and he paled next to Coleridge and Lord Byron.
• 
  Vicki

  Delightfully funny take on many of those books they made us read to get a degree in English.
• 
  Chris

  Funny. Gives you the courage to disagee with the masses and write a book review against-the-grain with amusing style. Wish it could be updated to include modern hyperfiction works such as The Gold***** ... no need to mention any specific ones here.
• 
  Avis Black

  Available at the Internet Archive:
  
  https://archive.org/details/fiftywork...