My list of [mostly] outsider literature, (which started here and concludes, for paying subscribers, here), continues…
36: Hesse, Herman. Steppenwolf. ‘In earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for.’ One of the first, great outsider novels (Notes from the Underground preceded it), although the final surrealist section is a self-indulgent cop-out. Colin Wilson makes the point that Hesse didn’t ever really solve the riddle of life that obsessed him, but for posing it, and for entertaining us with the problem of being caught up in it, Hesse deserves his pillow in the palace.
37: Hoban, Rusell. Riddley Walker. Post-apocalyptic wasteland tale set in my neighbourhood. Close to my heart, obviously, although, without wanting to give it away too much, I don’t agree with the implications of the finale.
38: Holt, John. Teach Your Own. ‘A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is a shame, disgrace, a crime. Unlike her elders, she is not concerned with protecting herself against everything that is not easy and familiar.’ How and why to home-school which, having had a little to do with home-schooling, I know is very difficult. With enough fellow families however, in a homeschooling network, it can and must be done.
39: Hughes, Ted. The Hawk in the Rain. Effortless at height hangs his still eye, His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet, Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges. Apparently Hughes was so handsome that women would throw up when they saw him.
40: Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Just a gripping story, dotted with acute observations on the human condition. Don’t watch the musical, or that toothless BBC version that came out recently (only the lead was well cast), just sit down for a couple of months in total absorption (feel free to skip the dull history bits). Also Victor Hugo could fit an entire orange in his mouth.
41: Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Actually I prefer The Perennial Philosophy and his fascinating essays. I don’t think Huxley was much of a story-teller. Like Orwell, he’s rather dry as novelist, just too much of a intellect. Brave New World is still a nightmarish vision of the present though.
42: Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis / Deschooling Society / Disabling Professions. ‘When cities are built around vehicles, they devalue human feet; when hospitals draft all those who are in critical condition, they impose on society a new form of dying; intensive education turns autodidacts into unemployables, intensive agriculture destroys the subsistence farmer, public fora dominated by privately-owned news-media slowly denigrate speech and the deployment of police undermines the community’s self-control. The malignant spread of medicine has comparable results: it turns mutual care and self-medication into misdemeanours or felonies’. Everyone should read Illich — the greatest thinker of the twentieth century — or at least have an understanding of his ideas on the paralysing effects of medicine, high-speed transport, excessive energy, schooling, gender, scarcity and what we call ‘life’. I’ve noticed that a lot of middle-class support for Illich has a curious tendency to eviscerate the core of his teachings, ignore his Christian mysticism (and his superb book on Gender) and focus on secondary matters. Look twice if a fashionable author describes himself as a fan, because a mark of Illich’s genius, like genius generally, is that it is pretty much always out of fashion. Some people find Illich’s style rather forbidding. I don’t, but I can understand. If you find him hard going I recommend David Cayley’s superb overview; Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (although you might want to skip the early part of his life, which is of more interest to Christians I’d say).
43: Jansson, Tove. The Moomin Series. The greatest children’s books of all time. See Layla Abdulrahim’s superb Children’ Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation for a guide to why, and why Winnie the Pooh and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are so damned creepy.
44: Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. ‘A celebration of the freak, the prestidigitator, the human anomaly.’ There’s a woman here, for example, Thea Alba — The Woman With Ten Brains — who could attach ten bits of chalk to her fingers and write ten different words at the same time. Honest! Very funny photos too. Do take a look at Jay’s work with cards while you’re at it — a 90s BBC documentary is my favourite, but there have been a few since then — for he was a true magician, a man who could turn the world inside out.
45: Jacobsen, Peter Jens. Niels Lyhne. A series of insights into the futile and tragic side of human-love, presented in long, voluptuous metaphors. Very little dialogue, no drama as such, rather one astonishing image after another of a heart dying, dying, dying… dead. Proust lite, if that appeals.
46: Johnstone, Keith. Impro. ‘Suppose an eight-year-old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It'll be perceived as 'childish' and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he's fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears 'sensitive' or 'witty' or 'tough' or 'intelligent' according to the image he's trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we'd be able to see what his talents really were.’ A masterpiece of psychological joy (except for the useless and rather creepy stuff at the end on masks), and one of the seminal books of my life, although I did a course with Johnstone which was dreadfully disappointing. He just told anecdotes for three days.
47: Kaczynski, Ted. Technological Slavery. Ted Kaczynski, if you don’t know, was a maths genius who went to live by himself in the remote rural Montana, read Ellul, Mumford and Illich, developed a hatred for industrial technology, started sending bombs to academics involved with modern technology, became the FBI’s most wanted man (dubbed ‘The Unabomber’), sent a manifesto (Industrial Society and Its Future) to the the New York Times promising to desist if they published it (which they did, along with the Washington Post), the manifesto was identified by his brother and Kaczynski was arrested and banged up for four thousand lifetimes. The manifesto itself is brilliant. Hardly a literary masterpiece, but a near-faultless critique of modern technological civilisation. When I say ‘near faultless’, actually there is an entire ‘half’ of the modern malaise which Kaczynski fails to address, which I outline here, and which probably accounts for his chilling insensitivity.
48: Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Not terribly gripping, Kafka, I think, and his stories are as hermetically sealed from sensate reality as the characters within them, but, along with 1984, Brave New World and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Castle is one of the four prophecies of the modern dystopia we ‘live’ in. As Walter Benjamin said of him, ‘the experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with,’ which is to say; schizoid insanity. The broken, unresolved narratives (The Castle is unfinished — yet one hardly notices), the nightmarish happenings blandly accepted, the way people and gestures come out of and return to nowhere, the sickly, sordid, disorienting setting that seems to float in a contextless nightmare; all the same but ever shifting, the emphasis on the frozen image, the overall hopelessness and heaviness… all this speaks of and to the modern mind, but not, alas, to the timeless heart.
49: Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. No, don’t read this! It’s an extremely unpleasant experience; ‘as if an old bony hand is screwing your brain out of your skull’ as Musil put it; much like the feeling you used to have in school when the Maths teacher rumbled past your comprehension leaving you frustrated, lost, angry and alone. The subject matter is amazingly difficult, Kant does no favours to the reader, he gives no examples, he uses the same absurd technical term in different senses, there are massive, labyrinthine sentences that pile clause upon clause, the whole thing is organised into a mind-boggling structure (‘architectronic’ he calls it), and oh God is it dry. An 800 page slog which takes at least a couple of months, doing little else but reading it, to understand; and then only in parts.
Speaking for myself, I’ve wrestled some wonderful truths from this book; but I can’t claim to have grasped the whole thing, for the simple reason it can’t be grasped. So why is it here? Because, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘before Kant we were in time, after Kant, time was in us.’ He was the most important thinker to appear in Western philosophy, even if he arrived at his mindblowing conclusions through the most insanely circuitous route, even seemed to draw them, I think, reluctantly and even if, in his horrendous, bodiless abstraction (Lawrence called him ‘the beastly Kant’) he opened the door unto worlds of philosophical verbiage. Walter Kaufmann makes the case that Kant (and the obscurantist literature he gave birth to; Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Lacan, Žižek) resorts to obscurity to conceal the fact certainty, necessity and completeness cannot, as he believes, be achieved in the intellect.1 This is why labouring to understand the most difficult passages of Kant, as with the work of all obfuscators, rarely repays the effort.
In any case, you’d be better off reading Schopenhauer, who tidied up Kant’s ideas, refused to flinch from their nutty implications, was infinitely clearer, and far more interesting. If you still want to give Kant a go, start with his easier and kind of simplified introduction, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, then read the Critique (the Cambridge translations) hand-in-hand with H.J.Paton’s guide to the first half of the critique which (unlike Kemp-Smith’s more famous commentary) is a masterpiece of clarity and sensitivity. Also recommended for nutters ready to cross, in Paton’s word, ‘the Arabian desert’ of the Critique, is A Kant Dictionary by Howard Caygill, as is the Routledge guide by Gardner.
50: Kierkegaard, Søren. The Essential Kierkegaard. ‘My principle thought was that, those of our time, because of so much knowledge, have forgotten what it is to exist, and the meaning of inwardness… Knowledge has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.’2 I’ve chosen this excellent greatest hits album because it’s the best way into the breadth of the great Dane’s mind, which could veer off into long, tortuous digressions, dropping it’s jewels along the long journey it took into profound (albeit anguished) recesses of the human spirit. After this I’d recommend Either/Or, The Present Age, The Sickness Unto Death, the sublime Works of Love and, if you’ve got the time and the patience, Kierkegaard’s most influential and most difficult book, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, full of obscure longueurs, but offering if not a devastating then an intuitively convincing attack on the flimsy foundations of positivism, objectivism and scientism. Kierkegaard’s enquiries into the unthinkable nature of the individual and the absurdities and paradoxes the soul must confront were certainly flawed—his anti-social quietism and over-attachment to Christianity were, as Adorno realised, reactionary and short-sighted—but, as Wittgenstein understood, Kierkegaard was (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche excepted) ‘by far the most profound’ thinker of the [nineteenth] century. Wittgenstein concluded, correctly, that Kierkegaard, dear Kierkegaard, ‘was a saint.’ At the very least he was virtually alone among philosophers in addressing the sweetness of life as it is actually lived; ‘When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.’
51: Kenkō, Yoshida. Essays in Idleness (aka The Harvest of Leisure). There was once a monk, in ancient Japan, who only ate radishes. Everyone mocked him, and called him ‘The Radish Monk’, but he continued eating radishes. He said that radishes gave him everything he needed, and that he’d tried other foods, but ‘Radishes are enough for me.’ One day, while the monk was out, two robbers, who had been waiting in the bushes outside his house, ran in to ransack his house. As they approached the veranda two ferocious warriors emerged, clad in full shogun armour, screaming and sawing the air with their swords. The robbers ran off, terrified, past the monk who, just then, was returning. ‘What’s this? What happened?’ asked the monk to the warriors who were now standing guard over his front gate. ‘We are your radishes,’ they said, ‘and we are returning your loyalty to us.’ Whereupon they turned back into radishes. Fascinating 14th century blog. Very short essays about a massive range of subjects and lots of little parables and stories — many of which are delightfully, immortally surreal. The mix of the familiar, the human and the alien is compelling. Also superb, although sparser, more melancholy and more centred on gentle contemplation, is the Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei, which Penguin lashed together with The Harvest of Leisure.
52: Krishnamurti, Jiddu. The Impossible Question / Krishnamurti, U.G. The Mystique of Enlightenment Or The Krishnamurti Reader or pretty much anything from Jiddu. It’s all the same from J. Krishnamurti — and yet, somehow never repeated. His essential point is that the mind can never solve its own problems, but the ways he unpicks this observation and applies it to the problems that mind does create, doesn’t seem to get old… That said, I’ve put the two ‘murtis’ together here, because UG is very much an antidote to JK, indeed to the whole spiritual tradition such people represent, slaying sacred cows like some kind of mad spiritual butcher. Enlightenment? Bullshit. God? Bullshit. Love? Bullshit. Meditation? Bullshit!!! As with many teachers and teachings one has to climb a mountain before one can enjoy the summit. The Western mind prefers to get a cable car and then finds, when it gets up there, that it is cold, lonely and insane.
53: Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich. Mutual Aid. Flawed, like so much anarchist writing, by its Enlightenment-influenced secularity and its dread focus on work (although Kropotkin criticised Marx’s labour theory of value) — anarchism is really a complete philosophy of living, embracing the heights, the depths and the widths, not just social organisation. Still, Mutual Aid, Kropotkin’s answer to capitalist-friendly Darwinism (and socialist statism), emphasising ‘survival of the cooperative’, is an anarchist masterpiece. The Conquest of Bread is good too.
54: Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. D.H.Lawrence, that ‘animal with a sort of sixth sense’ was, without question, our greatest novelist and essayist. If, like me, you find the characterless, void of modernist writing suffocating, you might like to know that one author (T.S.Eliot was another) was able to to get beneath character to an actually existing, and quite miraculous, meaning. Scratch beneath Beckett, or Joyce, and your hand pokes through into thin air. Look under the surface of Lawrence, and worlds upon worlds of strange truth reveal themselves. His first great novel, Sons and Lovers, still had one foot in the real world, and is the most approachable of his books. After this, with The Rainbow and Women in Love, he let go of the character that modern readers need to get a hold of a story, which makes reading them a challenge, but in return they — like so many of his extraordinary essays and short stories — take the reader into the underworld that connects us all.
55: Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching (trans. Ellen Chen). ‘Both praise and blame cause concern, / For they bring people hope and fear. / The object of hope and fear is the self / For, without self, to whom may fortune and disaster occur?.’ More than a masterpiece; endlessly revelatory. The most succinct account of the ‘law of heaven and earth’ ever written. Quite a scholarly translation this. There are others more immediately readable, but do your research, as some are (at least according to Chen’s convincing account) downright deceptive.
56: Lee, Laurie. Cider With Rosie. ‘She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws.’ Gorgeous evocation of a lost rural world, an England that, in some dim sense, I believe will one day return. Also excellent As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Lee was a gentle English Kerouac.
57: Lee, Richard and Daly, Richard. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers. One of a large number of fascinating and instructive accounts of how primal folk live. I also recommend The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, Affluence Without Abundance by James Suzman, In Search of the Primitive by Stanley Diamond, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. Kelly, The Forest People by Colin Turnball, Pre-Conquest Consciousness by E. Richard Sorensen and The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Sahlins.
58: Lermentov, Mikhail. A Hero of Our Time. A book about an absolute bastard. Strange how many of these there are; or not strange at all, as I explain in, How to Be Unlikeable.
59: Levi, Primo. If This is a Man. The greatest holocaust account. Appalling, but Levi’s revelation of humanity, even in actual hell, is a gift to the world. Equally fascinating and inspiring is the companion story The Truce, covering Levi’s long, long journey back home from Auschwitz. This is one of those books that you can give to pretty much anyone on earth, say ‘read that’, and they’ll consume the whole thing in a few days.
60: Lichtenberg. The Waste Books. ‘There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points ‘born’ and ‘died’ further away from one another… The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be…’ What? You’ve never heard of Lichtenberg? The compiler of books and books of fascinating, strange and acute philosophical aphorisms, beloved by Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Einstein? Oh dear oh dear. Off you go! Actually there’s nonsense here, as you would expect from such personal stuff, but, like other early masters of the art of epigram, many gleamful gems which gather in brightness as the books progress and as Lichtenberg aged. Another great aphorist of around the same time was François de La Rochefoucauld whose incredibly cynical ‘Maxims’ on love and self love from one of the darkest periods in human history (the Enlightenment) are well worth a read. Contains such classics as ‘The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves’. Finally, a word for the outstanding Faber Book of Aphorisms, edited by W.H. Auden (do try and get the original book design though, from back when Faber produced really beautiful books).
61: Long, Barry. Making Love. Barry Long said some bizarre things, declared himself ‘Guru of the West’, had an alarmingly strident style and, at one point, had a relationship with five beautiful women — but don’t let that put you off! Some of the things he says, particularly in Making Love, Meditation: A Foundation Course and Only Fear Dies were staggeringly original, perceptive and psychologically penetrating. I’ve spent many extraordinary hours in Barry Long’s company. I wrote an eulogy on Long in my collection of essays, Ad Radicem.
62: Mamet, David. A Whore’s Profession. Mamet turned into a grim reactionary, albeit quite a funny one, but around the time these essays were written he was alive to the ‘dreamlife of the world’, wrote some lovely accounts of his early life and, if you’re into writing, some superb technical treatises on the art of film. I also recommend his True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, which is somewhat one-sided — in his zeal to strip acting of self-absorption he tends to miss a few subtle qualities that actors must divine to do their job — but he sweeps artistic bullshit away with stark panache.
63: Marx, Karl. Capital. I suppose it’s not surprising that Marx got himself his own ism, not to mention all those stone reproductions of his colossal head. We who stand against the system will forever be in debt to his unbelievably astute observations about the nature of the modern world, many of which stand independently of his hard (in both senses of the word) theoretical structures. His penetrating analysis of alienation in the modern world, his unpicking of the subtleties of capitalist exploitation, his recognition of how much of our instincts and opportunities are shaped by material conditions, and the almost awe-inspiring moral indignation that fuelled all of this are impossible to gainsay, or to escape. That said, Marx took some of his best ideas from the Anarchist Proudhon, he was wrong about labour (actually energy is the origin of value in the economy), his pitiful bourgeois morality, his distrust of the peasantry and the working class and, of course, his intensely statist and technophilic communism—his state capitalism—are just all forms of oppression, as is his silly determinism, which nobody but lunatic rationalists of the professional class can possibly accept.
Capital, once you’ve got through the first unnecessarily complicated and boring chapters, is a surprisingly engaging read, with some immortal passages of breathtaking incisiveness. Generally, I find certain strands of Marxist scholarship more interesting than Marx himself though. Fromm, for example, or Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital or Harry Braverman’s superb Labor and Monopoly Capital are Marxist classics, and essential reading for criticising capitalism, but you’d be better off reading George Woodcock’s Anarchism for a history of more sensible (if tragically incomplete) solutions. Read my wildly popular critique of Marxism here.
64: Mascaro, Juan (trans.). The Upanishads. ‘In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as the Upanishads’ wrote Schopenhauer. It’s a bit repetitive, which is to be expected, given that it was transmitted orally, and there are some weird stories, but many bellymind treasures herein. ‘You cannot see That which is the Seer of seeing; you cannot hear That which is the Hearer of hearing; you cannot think of That which is the Thinker of thought; you cannot know That which is the Knower of knowledge. This is your Self, that is within all; everything else but This is perishable.’
65: Matsuo, Bashō. On Love and Barley (trans. Stryk, Lucien). ‘About the pine, learn from the pine; About the reed, learn from the reed.’
66: Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. I read Moby Dick a long, long time ago, when I was twenty five and sick and miserable in Indonesia. Melville’s immense soul kept me tethered to humanity and surrendered to my fate. His fate was to be ignored while he was alive and then to have his gorgeous, meaty style, and biblical syntax emulated by every ‘serious’ American author of ‘muscular prose’ for the next thousand years (the execrable Cormac McCarthy, for example). Melville’s earlier tales of derring do, Typee and Omoo are also fantastic reads, and more accessible, and I’m a big fan of his later short stories, Bartleby, Billy Budd and Cock-a-Doodle-Do! But nothing in American literature beats Moby Dick for depth, for grandeur and, the vital quality against which the inhuman rage of Ahab’s battle is measured, humanity. It’s the sweetness and innocence of Ishmail that anchors the tempest-tossed bark to the human heart which rises up in triumphant joy to his famous refrain; ‘I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.’ Me too Ishmail, me too.
67: Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Maroussi. ‘I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener’s imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end.’ Miller’s work overflows with joy before the storm, or, as Orwell, a great admirer, put it, ‘fiddling while Rome burns, but, unlike everyone else, facing the flames.’ His eloquence can be simply miraculous; where did that word come from? But the real beauty of it all is that it serves the miraculous, the reader can feel that there is something real and impossible behind it all, and that feeling is worth… well, all the rest of it. Miller had, on balance, a terrible attitude to women and sex. There’s some fun there (although we don’t tend to laugh at Miller himself very much), but not a lot of tenderness, and his lapses into truly heartless vulgarity are really impossible to forgive — no wonder feminism would have nothing to do with him. He was also, as Orwell pointed out, without real imagination and, particularly in his later years, when he became part of the literary establishment he still affected to spurn, given to frothy, florid flights of fancy with, actually, very little content. He was also profoundly self-centred; yes, what great man isn’t? but nobody in Miller’s books cares, thinks or talks about anyone else, which starts to drain. But and yet and still. It cannot be denied that Miller’s torch burned brighter than that of just about every other author of the twentieth century, and it still illuminates. I’ve chosen The Colossus of Maroussi because of all his books the light of this one is warm, gold, serene, a gorgeous September of the soul.
Part 3, for Paying Subscribers, here (part 1 was here).
Kaufmann’s criticism of Heidegger is also funny. Kaufmann, materialist that he is, is in no position to recognise any ineffable truths that Heidegger did manage to give a confused, elitist, obscurantist and fanatically ethno-centric voice to. Nevertheless, Kaufmann’s critique of the Nazi philosopher is to the point:
An author who wished to spark endless discussions about words, and specifically about his own terminology, could hardly have improved on Heidegger... What has been chattered and scribbled about in the wake of [Being and Time] is not whether Heidegger’s descriptions, interpretations, and implicit claims are true but rather his terms and locutions. In short, the discussion has been about words—words, words.
The first half of this quote is from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the second from The Present Age.