The Height of High Culture

[Note: this is a rewrite of a lengthy post from a few years ago, which I wanted to revisit. Come back later if TL;DR is an issue for you. Nice pictures, though!]

Recently, I saw this picked out as a pull quote in an article by Edmund White: "In the nineteen-fifties, high culture was forbiddingly high. Learning to be gay felt not unrelated to learning to be cultured." (New Yorker, 25 June 2018).

It had never occurred to me that it was necessary to learn how to be gay, or that it was a difficult enterprise to get right, although, obviously, illegality and profound social disapproval must have made negotiating yourself a place within a maligned and secretive sexual subculture a much tougher proposition back in the 1950s than it is now. Also, no doubt what one learned to be back then was not always in line with what one had hoped for or expected. I wouldn't presume to know about that, but making a link between "learning to be gay" and "learning to be cultured" is intriguing: I suspect very few of us born in the 1950s or later have ever really felt the coercive pressure to conform – to do the necessary homework, to lose your regional accent, to wear the right clothes, to make the appropriate lifestyle choices – that used to be the high price of entry to "high culture".

I became acutely aware of this recently, when pointing out to an old schoolfriend that most, if not all, of our most influential teachers were not only dead, but had also died relatively young, a decade or so younger, in fact, than we ourselves are now, at 64. It struck me that, despite living longer, I would never be as "cultured" as they had been – that is, as intimately knowledgeable about and conversant with the established touchstones of serious literature, classical music, and art – simply because I had never felt any compelling need to be.

Why not? Mainly because the boundaries of what now counts as "culture" have been relaxed and extended so far that any canon of essential cultural knowledge and "required reading" is all but impossible to agree upon or define. There is no longer any High Culture Club with narrow, elevated membership requirements and an inflexible dress code. The word "culture" itself has lost much of its meaning along with its exclusivity; there is simply too much one could know about to justify mocking or excluding anyone for not knowing any one particular thing, or even whole genres. It's OK to say, "I just don't like jazz fusion": nobody will mind, much, although you might run the risk of some well-meaning enthusiast trying to turn you on. In fact, never to have listened to, say, The Dark Side of the Moon is probably more eyebrow-raising today than never to have heard The Magic Flute. But, even in the late 1960s, our teachers went to great lengths to ensure that we know-nothing cultural neophytes had at least heard of the latter, as they scattered little cultural cues into our lessons – mentioning in passing as self-evident facts, for example, the supreme greatness of Beethoven's late quartets or Jane Austen's Emma – most of which have stayed with me my entire life, and most of which I have entirely disregarded. I have never read Emma, and probably never will.

Don't misunderstand me. I regard myself, with some justification, as a "cultured" person, insofar as that still means anything; perhaps it's better to say that I would like to think that I am the audience today's artists, curators, and enablers have in mind, and whose informed attention they are seeking. I am also, in my own small way, something of a player. If anything, I am actually more actively engaged than my teachers, with their firmly-drawn, unchallenged boundaries between "high" and "low" that amounted to little more than 57 varieties of snobbery. I suppose the crucial difference is that, for us, "culture" is not the one-size-fits-all straitjacket it once was; we are free to assemble our own pick'n'mix outfits, however casual, tasteless, or bizarre. Check it out! But has something important nevertheless been lost in this wholesale casualization, and might that be the ability to cope with and enjoy depth and difficulty? If something is not to our taste, or too demanding, do we move on too quickly to something else, rather than persevere with it?

I have often had the feeling that I and my contemporaries experienced the very last gasp of an older England. Behind us, it seems, certain immemorial doors were being firmly and finally closed. Take the teaching of Latin in state secondary schools. Like generations of grammar-school pupils before us, we were drilled in Latin from the age of eleven. Conjugations of verbs, declensions of nouns... We chanted them aloud together in class in the time-honoured fashion. Amo, amas, amat...  Dominus, domine, dominum... O, lord! O, table! [1] But, times were changing. By the time we reached the run-up to our O-level exams in 1968, it was decided the teaching of Latin would be discontinued. We had become a comprehensive school, and Latin was considered too difficult for a non-selective intake. It had finally become irrelevant and unnecessary.

Now, in those days, although the compulsory requirement had been abandoned in 1960, it was still felt that your chances of entering Oxford or Cambridge universities were far greater if you had passed O-level Latin. There was also a residual sense that any candidate for admission into the higher echelons of the national life ought to know some Latin. So the abandonment of the subject was, in effect, a declaration that pupils from this school would probably no longer be aspiring to Oxbridge entrance, or to any serious social mobility. That immemorial door was creaking shut.

Remarkably, the response of a couple of teachers was to put a foot in the door. They took a small group of potential Oxbridge candidates, about eight of us as I recall, and got us up to O-level standard by giving intensive extra-curricular sessions in our lunch hour. It worked: every single one of us passed, a year early, all with the top grade. It was almost certainly an unnecessary effort – we'll never know – but I have always been grateful for that last chance to slip under the barrier and jump aboard the last carriage on the last classics train just as it was leaving the station. It was a third class carriage, of course: the possession of a little elementary Latin and no Greek at all does not make you a classicist. But then neither was William Shakespeare, according to Ben Jonson, with his "small Latin and less Greek"; so the seats may have been hard but the company was good.

The possession of "small Latin" is certainly enough you help you appreciate the special place the classics once held in elite western culture. The ability to recognise and respond to lines from Homer or a poem by Catullus has acted for centuries as a combined shibboleth, letter of introduction, and secret handshake. Amusingly, but not untypically, in 1940 a certain lance-corporal Enoch Powell [2] – a grammar-school boy from Birmingham – was selected for officer training when he answered the question of a Brigadier, inspecting the army kitchen where Powell was working, with an apt Greek proverb. More famously, Patrick Leigh Fermor, having abducted General Kreipe, the German commander on Crete during WW2, found common ground with the general in an ode by Horace which they both knew by heart. I suppose the contemporary equivalent would be something like finding a shared love of Joni Mitchell or the films of the Coen Brothers; by no means lesser things, and rather easier for me to imagine (I have never knowingly read any Horace). But, at the same time, however difficult these outstanding contemporary achievements may have been to create, it has to be conceded that they are relatively easy to consume and appreciate. The asymmetry between creator and audience is exaggerated in a consumer culture: we are required to admire, and to buy, and to queue for tickets, but not expected to participate. Or, where participation is seen as a Good Thing – for example, in the interests of "diversity" – then levels of difficulty and expectation are quietly and patronisingly reduced. All must have prizes! [3]

It is important to disentangle the element of social class from any perspective that sees an alignment between "difficulty" and "culture", hard as that is. Intelligence, ability, talent, and ambition are not restricted to the wealthy and privileged. Does this really need saying? And yet, despite the popularising efforts of dons like Mary Beard at Cambridge, the study of Latin has expired at state schools, and is now pretty much the preserve of the privately-educated (Ancient Greek, of course, was hardly ever taught outside of private schools). Similarly, music and art are rarely taught in our state schools at any level beyond the facile splashing and bashing of "self-expression". If we expect little of children, we will get even less. Even subjects as crucial to our civilisation as mathematics and science have been reduced to a level where universities are obliged to run remedial courses if first-year students are to cope with undiluted higher-level studies. Calculus? Too difficult, and not needed in order to be a diligent employee! Besides, find me a teacher prepared to work in the state sector who can teach it... It is simply misguided, to put it mildly, that "hard" subjects, like luxury goods, should only be available to those who can afford to buy them. But have too many of us unwittingly colluded in this outcome, by rejecting the "challenging" as elitist and outmoded?

True, in an increasingly flattened and broadened culture, even those who can afford to study difficult but "useless" things may find these increasingly devalued as cultural capital. In a world that speaks English universally, why would a native speaker bother to learn foreign languages? Equipped with a smartphone, why trouble yourself with mental arithmetic, or memorising phone numbers, or learning to read a map? Clearly, you don't need to study composition or even play an instrument to make music, and you don't need to study life-drawing or art history to make art. There are apps and backroom nerds that will do all that for you; so long as you look the part, prepare to reap your easy-come, easy-go celebrity!

But: maybe coming to terms with these "difficult" things has broader benefits, in the same way as taking regular exercise, eating well, or getting enough sleep do. And might there be a connection here between the lack of invested effort, quick and easy rewards, and the fact that popular music has been stuck in a self-consuming feedback loop for the last 30 years, or that art schools have similarly found themselves trapped for decades in a conceptual hall of mirrors? Or, worst of all, that ever greater numbers of children are learning, not how to "be" anything, but merely how to spend as many waking hours as possible gazing passively into a screen, keeping up with friends who are not friends, and being policed into conformity with a reality that is not actually happening anywhere.

Perhaps, after all, I should find the time and make the effort to read some Jane Austen, and maybe even tackle Emma. A long time ago, in a world very different to this, someone once told me that it's as good as it gets. Even if I hate it, at least I'll have rejoined an ongoing conversation that is, in the end, all that a culture is.

1. For some reason "mensa" (table) was traditionally used as the primary exemplar of a Latin 1st declension noun, resulting in the unsettling example of the vocative case (the case used when directly addressing a person or object), "O table".
2. For non-Brits and younger readers: The late Enoch Powell holds a special place in British culture, as the most egregious example of right-wing Toryism and the links between narrowly-defined cultural capital and racism (his lurid 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech about the imagined perils of immigration in Britain managed to make a bridge between the Aeneid and the worst kind of British thuggery and intolerance).
3. "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!" The Dodo's verdict in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.