17 August/18 August 2019 ★ FT Weekend 9Books
I
n May 1958A Taste of Honeypre-
miered at the avant-garde Theatre
Workshop in London’s Stratford
East. No one involved in the pro-
duction knew how it would be
received. The theatre manager, Gerry
Raffles, warned the leads to “to be ready
to run”if the audience turned abusive
when they took their curtain call.
Now recognised as a classic of the Brit-
ish genre that came to be known as
kitchen-sink realism, the play was the
work of Shelagh Delaney, the 19-year-
old daughter of a Salford bus driver, and
it told a story from the world she had
grown up in: Jo is a working-class teen-
ager who has a charged relationship
withher promiscuous single mother.
The younger woman finds herself preg-
nant after an affair with a black sailor,
and rails against her situation before
eventually finding solace in her friend-
ship with Geof, a gay art student who
offers her and the baby a home.
Rather than being disgusted, the audi-
ence loved it. There were full housesevery night and Delaney was catapulted
into the limelight. “This is not so much
dramaturgy as anthropology, demon-
strated by a genuine cannibal,” wrote
Alan Brien in The Spectator. The
Observer’s Kenneth Tynan, while not-
ing the play’s flaws,described the teen-
age playwright as “a portent”.
This is where Celia Brayfield and
Selina Todd each begin their excellent
new books. “A story of slums, sexual
politics and race relations,” Delaney’s
play “caught Britain on the cusp of
change”, writes Todd inTastes of Honey.Todd engagingly tells Delaney’s story,
shedding light on the ambition of a fasci-
nating woman behind the self-mytho-
logising (born Sheila Mary Delaney, she
changed her name to the more “exotic”
Shelagh when she sent the manuscript
of the play to Joan Littlewood, Theatre
Workshop’s director). She details how
Delaney’s authentic depiction of work-
ing-class life influenced many younger
writers and artists (from Morrissey
through Andrea Dunbar and Jeanette
Winterson, to Maxine Peake).
Brayfield’s equallyilluminating book
homes in on the late 1950s and early
1960s, revealing that Delaney wasn’t the
only one showing that female experi-
ence was about more than just falling in
love. Hot on her heelscame Edna
O’Brien (The Country Girls), Lynne Reid
Banks (The L-Shaped Room), Charlotte
Bingham (Coronet Among the Weeds),
Nell Dunn (Up the JunctionandPoor
Cow), Virginia Ironside (Chelsea Bird)
and Margaret Forster (Georgy Girl). “Not
since the Brontës had a group of writersbeen united by such a burning need to
tell the truth about what it was like to be
a girl,” Brayfield contends.
Yet unlike their male peers, no one
was drawing parallels between these
women’s works, nor were they con-
sciously in conversation with one
another. (They did sometimes cross
paths: Dunn and O’Brien lived on the
same street and remain friendsto d ay.
Bingham and Ironside both grew up on
the borders of Chelsea, though their
families moved in different circles —
Ironside’s parents had metat the Cen-
tral School of Arts and Crafts, while
Bingham’s father was the 7th Baron
Clanmorris and worked for MI5.)
So why haven’t we heard about the
Angry Young Women Writers? Well, as
Brayfield argues, not everyone recog-
nised that these works were “coming-of-
age stories in which young women were
seeking identity and testing societal
expectations”.
There were also effortsto undermine
their creative integrity. Some had their
writing dismissed as autobiography — a
fate women writers still suffer today —
while what others wrote was considered
too authentic. Dunn’s books, for exam-
ple, were often derided as reportage
rather than fiction, with her “acute ear
for dialogue” and episodic structure
“turned against her”. Brayfield, how-
ever, offers us perceptive analysis of the
writingand ratifies these women’s posi-
tion in the canon in the process. Perfect
companion volumes,Tastes of Honey
andRebel Writersmake for entertaining,
edifying and important reading.Rebel Writers:
The Accidental Feminists
by Celia Brayfield
Bloomsbury Caravel £19.99, 272 pagesTastes of Honey:
The Making of Shelagh Delaney
and a Cultural Revolution
by Selina Todd
Chatto & Windus £18.99, 304 pagesShelagh Delaney with actors Clifton Jones and Murray Melvin backstage at the premiere of ‘A Taste of Honey’ in 1958
Getty ImagesA taste of sisterhood
We hear of the 1950s Angry Young Men — at last,
saysLucy Scholes, we get to hear about the women
Unsocial media
A millennial account of digital life delivers some
unexpected insights, writesTanjil RashidA
s The New Yorker’s
professional millen-
nial, the journalist Jia
Tolentino has
refreshed the pages of
a venerable old magazine with sal-
utary essays animated by the zeit-
geist. She reports from the
trenches of today’s gender wars.
She applies sharp, interpretive
powers to the ephemera of pop
culture. By some strange literary
photosynthesis, these transient
subjects bloom into writing that is
hardy and perennial, capable of
outlasting the fleeting moments
that sprouted it.
That is the achievement of her
fine new book,Trick Mirror, a col-
lection of essays rooted in her jour-
nalism. In the main, Tolentino
writes either for or about the inter-
net (usually both).
So it’s a slight departure to move
from such digital genres as the up-
close-and-personal essay, or the
woke hot-take, to the musty book-
form. Few digital writers manage
the transition.
Tolentino’s success lies in yoking
together the contemporary and
the classical. From social media to
the gig economy, she writes about
modern mores with studied hip-
ness. She favours first-person nar-
ration over the scrupulous detach-
ment of traditional New Yorker
reporting. An alumna of the spiky,
“supposedly feminist” websiteJez-
ebel, her writing remains impres-
sionistic and intimate.
But unlike her gratuitously
oversharing peers, Tolentino
adheres to a rigorously classical
method. The point is to immerse
the reader in the contradictions of
her own self and to “suspend [her]
desire for a conclusion”.
This is how the “essai”form
was originally conceived, as a
“trying out” of ideas, a space for
ambivalent self-expression in
contrast to the shrill certainties
prevailing online.The internet’s degraded dis-
course is Tolentino’s major
theme. She decries how “making a
righteous political statement has
come to seem like a political good
in itself.” But rather than just
exposing the virtue-signalling of
others (which she does do), she
also confesses the self-serving
motives behindher own insta-
grams from a pro-migrant demo.
Tolentino’s other concern is
feminism in its “market-friendly”
form, “a politics built aroundget-
ting and spending money” that
valorises #girlbosses and the She-
E-O over collective action. At odds
with the millions of women“lean-
ing in”on Facebook executive
Sheryl Sandberg’s advice, Tolen-
tino is more radical than the mil-
lennial women she advocates
for. Many have drunk the Kool-
Aid, and are content in their “co-
working spaces”, accompanied by
ping pong tables and beer trolleys
designed to keep them there late
into the night.
Kool-Aid isn’t Tolentino’s liba-
tion of choice. She is progressive,
but sceptical about progress. She
wonders “how everything got so
intimately terrible”. Her digital
declinism seems conservative, as
do her prescriptions. Society must
demonstrate more “culpability”,
which sounds a lot like “responsi-
bility”, with undertones of
“shame”. Deploring the “moneti-
sation of the self”, she reiterates a
medieval consternation: the sell-
ing of the soul.
Self-conscious about her “carp-
ing”, Tolentino places herself in a
tradition that began with Socrates
lamenting the rise of literacy.
That’s a gripe we only remember
because Plato wrote it down, and
there’s a similar irony with Tolen-
tino, whose critique of the internet
owes its existence to the online
platforms that made her a star.
The internet, then, isn’t all bad.
But for Tolentino, it will always
be “this feverish, electric unlivable
hell”. Here she unmistakably ech-
oes Saul Bellow’s condemnation of
a world overheated by opinion as
“the moronic inferno”. Tolentino
may not like to be in the company
of that alleged misogynist, but it
feels like feminism’s final frontier
that Jia and her jeremiads should
join Socrates and Bellow and all
the other old men who, seeing the
future, prophesied doom.Trick Mirror:
Reflections
on Self-
Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Random House
$26/ Fourth
Estate £14.99
320 pagesB
eethoven makes his audiences
political. In 1824, at the pre-
miere of his Ninth Symphony,
the Viennese — usually a
reserved bunch — gave the
performance five standing ovations.
Only the Austrian emperor (who typi-
cally got three) enjoyed this sort of adu-
lation. Fearful of subversion, a pan-
icked police commissioner had to shush
them into silence.
Two centuries on, little has changed.
Last month, as the same symphony’s
“Ode to Joy” theme drifted up from the
floor of the European Parliament, newly
elected MEPs from the UK’sBrexit party
turned their backs in defiance, appar-
ently disgusted by an “anthem” that cel-
ebrates togetherness and tolerance. A
week later, Brexit enthusiasts in
Gloucester threatened to boycott the
Three Choirs Festival for programming
the Ninth — a work now tainted by
Eurofederalism — because they deemed
it inappropriate for “an area that voted
overwhelmingly for Brexit”.
Beethoven’s music has always influ-
enced politics — but how exactly did pol-
itics influence his music? John Clubbe is
unequivocal: Beethoven was “a true heir
of the French Revolution”.
This is a biography of the composer as
political activist. We meet a boy born in
the sleepy Rhineland town of Bonn in
1770, imbibing a heady cocktail of fra-
ternal, egalitarian ideals under the tute-
lage of Enlightenment radicals; we join
him on his journey to Vienna in 1792,
where he claims to contract the “fever of
revolution”; we see him gesturing
towards Liberty Trees — potent symbols
of the revolution — in official portraits;
and in later life, we find him hunched
over his piano, moulding his lifelong
love of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode” to free-
dom into his Ninth Symphony.This is the basis of the Beethoven
Myth — a product of centuries of books
and recordings that have turned one
man into an otherworldly genius:
Beethoven, the tousle-haired titan who
pledged to “seize Fate” (by which he
meant the tragedy of his deafness) “by
the throat”; Beethoven, the self-made
man who frequently infuriated his toff-
ish patrons by telling them to get
stuffed. For readers unacquainted with
this myth,Beethoven: The Relentless Rev-
olutionaryis the ideal introduction.
Unfortunately, that’s about all it is.
Clubbe shuns musicological analysis,
so he has to rely on Beethoven’s “social
and political thinking” to make his
case. Sadly,Beethoven was not in fact
that much of a social and political
thinker. He specialised in banal com-
plaint letters, directed mainly at his
long-suffering publishers. Would theyChorus of approval
Genius, yes. Tortured, yes.
But was Beethoven a politicalsubversive?Rhys Jonesfinds
many questions unansweredBeethoven:
The Relentless
Revolutionary
by John Clubbe
WW Norton £30
512 pages“At a time when Conservative prime
minister Harold Macmillan was claim-
ing people ‘had never had it so good’,
reactions to the play exposed a deep
social chasm.” Brayfield beginsRebel
Writers—a group biography of seven
unwitting “cultural crusaders”, women
“unknowingly laying the foundations of
second-wave feminism” — with the
assertion that Delaney’s play “redefined
women’s writing in Britain”.
The Angry Young Men had already
stormed the barricades of the literary
establishment — take John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger(1956), John Braine’s
Room at the Top(1957) and Alan Sillitoe’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958) — but the women in their works
were unsympathetically drawn, sink-
bound baby-making machines who held
back the restless anti-heroes. As Todd
points out, Delaney was “the first post-
war playwright to suggest that these
women had minds and desires of their
own, a radical proposal in the fifties”.
Not only that, but Delaney made the
spiky, complicated relationship between
mother and daughter the focal point of
her play rather than either of her char-
acters’ romantic entanglements. This,
Todd argues, was groundbreaking for an
era during which marriage was still con-
sidered “the bedrock of society and the
pinnacle of women’s dreams”.Newly elected
MEPs from the
Brexit party
turning their
backs in July
during the
playing of
Beethoven’s
‘Ode to Joy’ at
the European
Parliament
ReutersBeethoven:
The Relentless
Revolutionary
by John Clubbe
WW Norton £
512 pagesI
n the spring of 1945, Germany was
awash withrumour. Following the
final performance of the Berlin
Philharmonic, whispers circulated
of Hitler Youth being stationed at
building exits with basket offerings of
cyanide capsules for concert-goers.
Rumours swirled of a “hell machine”, a
chugging, monstrous mincer used by
the enemy to grind human bodies. Fear
loomed ever-present and palpable. In
recounting the desperate atmospherein
the final days of the second world war,
Florian Huber describes the envy with
which the living eyed the dead.
The woeful pursuit of finality is the
focus ofPromise Me You’ll Shoot YourselfPromise Me You’ll Shoot YourselfPromise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself.
The title foreshadows an under-repre-
sented history that is equal parts terrify-
ing and tragic, and delivers on both
counts. While Huber touches on the sui-
cides of Hitler and the Nazi elite, he
focuses primarily on the little-known
epidemic of suicides of German civilians
brought on by rumour, propaganda, fear
of retaliatory violence and lost hope for
the future. The exact number of suicides
is incalculable, but through gruesome
examples, Huber conveys the enormity
of the dreadful phenomenon.
A bestseller in Germany, the book is
presented in four parts with Part I,Four
Days in Demmin, being the standout.
Imogen Taylor delivers a vividtrans-
lation of the carefully researched work,
bringing to life examples both sincere
and senseless: Russian soldiers so des-
perate and ignorant that they drank
bottles of cologne; a 64-year-old woman
violated in the street in front of her fam-
ily; a chilling final diary entry — “Only a
little while longer, then it will be over,
forever!”
Criminologists refer to undocu-
mented incidents as “the dark figure”.
The most tragic “dark figures”aretheyoung. Accounts of toddler murder-
suicides carried out by German parents
present a black hole ofhopelessness.
Huber tells of residents positioning the
bodies of dead children with legs sticking
out of the earth to ward off soldiers for-
aging for valuables. A suicide pledge
between a father and daughter inspired
the book’s title. Visions of the dead will
also forever hauntthe innocent youths
who witnessed the scenes: one man,
Karl, can “still see those people hanging
in the trees when he shut his eyes”.The book touches on the crisis of con-
science whenrural Germans learnt the
true nature of the crimes committed by
the Reich. Also mentioned is the notion
of lost honour and its place in Nazi ideo-
logy — a teacher in Berlin tells a class of
young girls that if they are dishonoured,
they have no choice but to die.
Amid the nearly unbearable dark-
ness, Huber injects notes of hope: find-
ing allies in strangers; accounts of
enemy soldiers bandaging carved wrists
and rescuing those who attempted to
drown; a young woman who, at the final
moment, clings to life instead of death.
Illuminating yet haunting, Huber’s
study offers an uncommon portrait of
Hitler’s barbaric reach to manipulate
and massacre, reminding us of the well-
known and tragic conclusion — amid the
days of the Third Reich, human suffer-
ing emerged the victor.Ruta Sepetys is the author of
‘Salt to the Sea’ (Penguin)German requiem
What happens when all is lost?
Ruta Sepetyson a sobering
study of the wave of suicides
that swept a defeated ReichPromise Me
You’ll Shoot
Yourself:
The Downfall
of Ordinary
Germans, 1945
by Florian Huber,
translated by
Imogen Taylor
Allen Lane £20,
304 pagesPromise Me
You’ll Shoot
Yourself:
The Downfall
of Ordinary
Germans, 1945
by Florian Huber,
translated by
Imogen Taylor
Allen Lane £20,
304 pagestake this sonata off his hands? Where
was the money they owed him?
“Beethoven wanted his music to help
bring about a world renewed,” pro-
claims Clubbe. Perhaps. But often he
simply wanted to pay the rent.
Proof comes to us second-hand, from
acolytes and groupies, or in observ-
ations written decades after his death,
when it was fashionable to trumpet the
composer’s revolutionary credentials.
Clubbe never establishes what exactly
he means by “revolutionary”. Some-
times it relates to the ideals of the
French Revolution; sometimes it simply
means musically innovative.
How is the Third (theEroica) Sym-
phony — an undeniably innovative
work — a “revolutionary symphony” if
it was written with Napoleon in mind, a
man who infamously took power in
1799 by declaring “the revolution is fin-
ished”? And what about the patriotic
songs that Beethoven wrotefor the Aus-
trian troops heading off to fight the
French? Those anti-revolutionary tub-
thumpers are irrelevant because
Beethoven approached them “with little
enthusiasm”. Really? How does Clubbe
know? At no point does the composer
provide corroboration. Yet apparently
Beethoven “regarded them as insignifi-
cant”. Such conclusions owe more to
mind-reading than biography.Delaney and other women
writers were ‘cultural
crusaders’... ‘unknowinglylaying the foundations of
second-wave feminism’РЕ
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