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Nov. 28th, 2023 10:35 pmI picked up Claud Cockburn's Bestseller: The Books Everyone Read, 1900-1939 at a BPL library sale recently. I was expecting a chatty pop-culture view of some reading trends in the early 20th century, ideally with some interesting social analysis underneath it, but I knew I was really in for a treat when I hit this passage, in which Claud Cockburn argues with a book reviewer who is himself arguing with a book that analyzes early detective fiction:
The writer is concerned to defend the character and reputation of the 'British Middle Classes in the Twenties and Thirties'. I am not here concerned to attack or defend them. If the writer feels that they were 'tolerant, kindly and humane', he is certainly right to say so. There are no absolute standards of tolerance, kindliness and humaneness. If someone else chooses to say that in view of the conditions which the British middle classes condoned or fostered during that period, it would require an abnormally broad interpretation of the terms tolerant, kindly and humane to permit them to qualify for the description, then there is evidence on his side too.
At around this point I actually bothered to look up Claud Cockburn and discovered that a.) he was an extremely prominent British writer for the Daily Worker and b.) George Orwell had torn him to shreds in Homage to Catalonia for various Stalinist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, which, well. I of course am not qualified to weigh in on the various body counts of the various leftist infights of the 1930s, but be that as it may the guy can write and moreover he is having a simply wonderful time gleefully describing the nonsense plots of various popular potboilers (most of which I'd never heard of) and engaging in witty social criticism about what he their popularity suggests about the Vibe of the Times. I particularly enjoy the cottagecore discourse, which reads approximately the same from 1972 as it might today:
Paragot escapes from the 'illusion' of contemporary life on one hand and Bohemian vagabondage on the other to 'reality' and 'truth' of his farm. It would be oafish to enquire how, in his total ignorance of farming methods and technologies, he proposes to make a go of it.
Although I have no desire to read many of the books discussed -- I am more than happy to rely on Cockburn's scathing descriptions of the plot of When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (in which an evil Jewish conspiracy destroys society by planting false evidence that Jesus was a fake) or The Sheik (The Sheik) -- I did actually come out with a short list of things that I'd quite like to read at some point or other. The Riddle of the Sands looks like an extremely fun little espionage thriller that for an extra point of interest also happens to have been written by a prominent Irish nationalist who was executed during the civil war; The Broad Highway is a Regency romance from 1910 about identical twin cousins that sounds like a hoot (Cockburn titled the chapter about this one 'Egads!'); and this description of Beau Geste made me laugh so hard that I really think I've got to read it:
( spoilers for a hundred-year-old book )
The writer is concerned to defend the character and reputation of the 'British Middle Classes in the Twenties and Thirties'. I am not here concerned to attack or defend them. If the writer feels that they were 'tolerant, kindly and humane', he is certainly right to say so. There are no absolute standards of tolerance, kindliness and humaneness. If someone else chooses to say that in view of the conditions which the British middle classes condoned or fostered during that period, it would require an abnormally broad interpretation of the terms tolerant, kindly and humane to permit them to qualify for the description, then there is evidence on his side too.
At around this point I actually bothered to look up Claud Cockburn and discovered that a.) he was an extremely prominent British writer for the Daily Worker and b.) George Orwell had torn him to shreds in Homage to Catalonia for various Stalinist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, which, well. I of course am not qualified to weigh in on the various body counts of the various leftist infights of the 1930s, but be that as it may the guy can write and moreover he is having a simply wonderful time gleefully describing the nonsense plots of various popular potboilers (most of which I'd never heard of) and engaging in witty social criticism about what he their popularity suggests about the Vibe of the Times. I particularly enjoy the cottagecore discourse, which reads approximately the same from 1972 as it might today:
Paragot escapes from the 'illusion' of contemporary life on one hand and Bohemian vagabondage on the other to 'reality' and 'truth' of his farm. It would be oafish to enquire how, in his total ignorance of farming methods and technologies, he proposes to make a go of it.
Although I have no desire to read many of the books discussed -- I am more than happy to rely on Cockburn's scathing descriptions of the plot of When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (in which an evil Jewish conspiracy destroys society by planting false evidence that Jesus was a fake) or The Sheik (The Sheik) -- I did actually come out with a short list of things that I'd quite like to read at some point or other. The Riddle of the Sands looks like an extremely fun little espionage thriller that for an extra point of interest also happens to have been written by a prominent Irish nationalist who was executed during the civil war; The Broad Highway is a Regency romance from 1910 about identical twin cousins that sounds like a hoot (Cockburn titled the chapter about this one 'Egads!'); and this description of Beau Geste made me laugh so hard that I really think I've got to read it:
( spoilers for a hundred-year-old book )
