Postcard from Mephistopheles
(from Goethe's Faust, remembered from German A-Level, 1972)
The first weeks of a new year are a suitable time for self-reflection, even if those of us who blog might seem to be doing little else for the rest of the year, too. Advice on leading a better, healthier, more successful life seems to be everywhere, but is mainly offered by the sort of semi-celebrity whose too-white teeth and addiction to "life hacks" instantly make me distrust anything they might have to say. Particularly if it has anything to do with alleviating the stress and unhappiness brought about by trying so hard to succeed and get ahead in whatever competitive game it is they imagine themselves to be playing. We rarely hear tips from the sort of quietly sane people who have arrived at a contented compromise with life, and in particular those people who have not been made unhappy or embittered by failing to measure up to some unrealistic metric of "success", whether self-imposed or the result of fashionable media-pressure. For most of us, a new year is just that: a date in the calendar with no particular magical resonance. When we wish each other a "Happy New Year!" it is in the understanding that everyone will have had highs and lows in the preceding 365 days, and will have them again in the next 365, but that it is not an unrealistic hope that these will average out into a state approximating "happiness". What, you want more than that?
Despite the witless urgings of "follow your dream" fantasists, for most people the pursuit of celebrity-scale "success" is not a question that has ever arisen. School does a pretty thorough job of squashing any illusions a child might have about their abilities and relative brain-power, swiftly followed by the ritual humiliations of working life. Pick that warehouse parcel, stack those supermarket shelves, work that call-centre headset! But the feeling that one might be cut out for better things is nonetheless not uncommon. It's one of the mixed blessings of the post-1945 settlements in Britain that the former reservoir of frustrated talent in working-class communities was drained by the opening of channels of opportunity previously kept firmly shut, such as – but not only – free access to secondary and higher education. It's a mixed blessing because – excellent as social mobility and meritocracy are (or, increasingly, would be) – much of the former progress of working people had been down to the efforts of precisely the sort of folk whom education and opportunity tend to remove from positions of community influence and solidarity.
Exhibit A has to be Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", a poem once so well-known that, like Hamlet, it seems to have been entirely constructed out of quotations. I can never read lines like
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.
without thinking of an Alan Johnson rising through the Post Office trade union ranks or a Tony Iommi plugging in a cheap guitar in a back bedroom. Post-war opportunities came thick and fast for those with the inclination and ability to take them, although always seasoned with a massive handful of luck. "Right place, right face, right time", and all that.
But for every stellar career there have always been a thousand that faltered, fizzled, or fell to earth. Exhibit B, I suppose, has to be that sad symphony of self-pity, Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. But the realisation that you are not, or are not going to be the person you had imagined should never be characterised as "failure" if it has been a realistic revision of expectation, a putting away of childish things, and a strategic withdrawal in the face of unfavourable odds. For anyone cursed with talents but blessed with a counter-balancing sense of social obligation (or indeed of self-preservation), the attractions of a life spent on the road, climbing the proverbial greasy pole, or plugging away at yet another unpublished novel quickly fade before the more benign prospect of an ordinarily successful adult life of family, friends, and a quietly useful contribution to the smooth running of society; followed, if you're very lucky, by a decent, index-linked pension. Result!
So I have a question for some of those taciturn workaday sages who give every appearance of being well-adjusted to life in 2024. It is not, "Does taking a daily ice-bath enhance your well-being and attention span?" Neither is it, "Do you really need to go to the gym every morning? Or at all?" It is this: "So when was it that you realised you couldn't or shouldn't become who you thought you were going to be?"
If I may be allowed the honour of counting myself among those who have made that crucial recalibration of their expectations (if only temporarily for blogging purposes), in my case it was during the summer of 1977. (What follows is purely self-indulgent autobiographical reflection, lacking any self-improving life-hacks, so you can skip the next five paragraphs, if that won't be of interest to you).
In October 1976 I arrived as a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, to study for a master's degree in Comparative Literature. I suppose at the time I was still at least 90% committed to the idea of myself as a literary academic. I had initially signed up and been awarded funding for a three-year research degree at Oxford, pretty much as a reflex follow-on from my undergraduate years. But I had come to be interested in the new areas of study grouped under the blanket term "theory" that were emerging then, and realised that somewhere like lively, cross-disciplinary UEA was the place to go if I really wanted to find out what was going on rather than conservative Oxford, which was still stuck in the literary worldview of the 1960s. People thought I had made an odd choice, but it seemed pretty sound to me.
Stuck out on a campus on the outskirts of Norwich – a city pretty much on the edge of the known universe – with my future life-partner away backpacking somewhere in South America and with few other distractions, that year was the most serious spell of actual academic study I have ever engaged in, certainly in comparison with the idle, permanent essay-crisis mode of my three undergraduate years. It was fun, it was intense, it was challenging. At the end of the year I was awarded a distinction (no, really), but rejected the offer to stay on for a doctorate with an "adjunct" teaching role. I had decided, to the surprise and indeed the disbelief and derision of some, to become an academic librarian. Another odd choice, perhaps.
But it was one of the better decisions in my life: I had realised that, yes, this new "theory" stuff was interesting, but, no, I didn't want to spend my life pursuing it. This was mainly the result of the dawning self-knowledge that I simply didn't have the personality to be a professional scholar; I find things deeply interesting for a while, a year or so at the most, then move on. But there was also the insight (one that has proved prescient) that, if this was really the way things were going to go, then literary study was about to embark on a self-destructive collapse into irrelevance. To put it another way, it seemed to me that we were busily investigating multiple ways to saw off the branch we had been sitting on so comfortably for fifty years; I decided to climb down carefully to a more solid lower branch rather than fall.
It did take a few years for my self-image to adjust, but it wasn't as if I'd decided to become a plumber or to raise goats on a smallholding. I liked universities as an environment, loved accumulating the broad but shallow knowledge-base that is the stock-in-trade of an academic librarian, and the role seemed like a good-enough fit, at least until I had become the prize-winning literary author I realised I had really wanted to be all along. Duh, of course! How could I have forgotten? But, above all, what I wanted was to keep my evenings and weekends free for activities that had always been very close to my heart, but which had necessarily been side-lined during the years of earning my academic credentials. There was writing, of course, but also making pictures, and – finally! – simply reading for its own sake: I can still recall the feeling of absolute liberation when I was finally free to read whatever I wanted, without any need to make notes, analyse, extract quotations, or write essays. I had never before read so much for pleasure as I did in those years of the late 1970s. And let it be said, just as an aside, that "people reading for pleasure" is the whole point – the true subject matter – when it comes to literary study and, in the end, the only justification for studying novels, plays, and poetry for examination purposes. Something it is easy to forget (or even come to denigrate) when you're a professional literary scholar.
But, hey, listen, whatever did happen to that prize-winning fiction you were going to write, I pretend to hear you ask, as if you were a character in a prize-winning novel? Well, you would need to put that same question to me once more: that is, when did you realise for the second time that you couldn't or shouldn't become who you thought you were going to be? But the truth is that some self-knowledge only comes gradually, in stages. It's so easy to keep moving the same pencilled-in personal goal or ambition down the "to-do" list for decades – that's what "New Year's resolutions" are for, isn't it? – until "this year" becomes a way of saying "never". But I know you're too polite to ask me about that.
If you read a few biographies of major figures in our culture, you will probably conclude that many, if not most were unhappy, driven monsters of ego, who left a trail of emotional and financial wreckage in their wake: great books, wonderful paintings, truly terrible people. Which is why, I suggest, those who have arrived at that happy compromise – the ones who have not been embittered by not measuring up to some foolish and ever-receding measure of "success", who have made a realistic revision of expectation, put away childish things, and conducted a strategic withdrawal in the face of unfavourable odds – are the real successes in life. In fact, "they" are most of us, even if we don't always realise it: the engaged citizens, the hobbyists, the readers, the willing tax-payers, the adequate parents, the caring friends, and the paying audiences.
So, well done, us! Never mind those attention-seeking, applause-hungry freaks up on the stage, let's turn the spotlight on the audience, please, and have everybody take a bow. New year, same old you... But in a good way. So, for whatever it's worth, let's all exchange with each other our sincere but silent best wishes for the coming year. You never know, despite everything, it might even turn out to be an exceptionally happy one for some of us. Sometimes it does, mostly it doesn't. What, you wanted more than that? Dream on...
"Whatever we were to each other, that we are still"
