Philip Hensher

One of the most striking, and lowering, aspects of lockdown has been the deprivation of human exchange, and especially conversation. We can talk to our immediate families but not properly to a wider range of humanity. The Zoom chat, with so many ordinary conversational features removed, is not the same thing at all. Conversation is fundamental to what we think of as our being, and I don’t believe we could go on long without it.In view of how vital it seems to be, it’s strange that we rarely consider it seriously. About its main substance — the words used — we make all sorts of assumptions, many of which turn out to be wrong.

We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research off your own bat it meant a trip to the public library — and perhaps filling out a form for an inter-library loan. Or you could try your luck in a bookshop, new or secondhand. The whole process took a long time, and most people stayed within their professional competence or enthusiasm, frankly admitting to ignorance outside those limits. It was the age of the specialist, memorably captured by Michael Frayn in Donkeys’ Years and the character of Kenneth Snell: Take me, for instance.

In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust now, as the days stretch ahead and the horizons shrink to an hour’s walk a day, when is it going to happen? But it seems much more likely that reading is going to contract, and the most you’ll realistically manage is a short story a day. Fortunately, some of the greatest literature of the last couple of centuries has come in the shape of the short story. Here are nine long-standing favourites of mine that manage to repay repeated re-reading — the definition of a classic. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is one of those classics that most people think they know but which infallibly surprises.

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before the first world war. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought in 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a group of individuals from larger society with a wall and a controlling mechanism, all sorts of interesting facts about the way people interact become apparent. Convents, hospitals, asylums, schools, universities and prisons all serve the purpose. But different nations tend to prefer one sort of institution over another. It’s a curious fact that where the British will enter into a novel of school life with gusto, Americans show a distinct preference for writing about prisons.

Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man. How to identify yourself to a potential partner? A confession might bring the police; dressing and carrying yourself in distinctive ways will invite ridicule or violence in the street. The solution is this: you casually remark to a stranger that the pub you are both in is ‘naff’. He looks up, and before you know it, you’re talking like this: ‘Pauline? Can’t swing a cat but hit a cove. She’s had nanti bully fake. Dyed her riah, her end’s a right mess.’ ‘Nanti bona. I hope she vaggeried straight to the crimper.’ ‘Well that’s where she’d been. The palone tried to give her an Irish. Moultee palaver.

I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others. For many opera-goers, an interventionist or bold visual approach to an opera is automatically a bad thing, and (I guess) a lot of the musicians involved are visually somewhat conservative. The ludicrous 1980s Met Ring cycle, designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen to follow every one of Wagner’s demands, was driven by musicians.

Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English composer who worked within established forms —symphonies, oratorios, string quartets, piano sonatas — to startlingly new effect. But his innovation was not just as a composer. He was also a political and social radical, embedded in Trotskyite, pacifist and gay rights ideas. The newness made itself known in a long attempt to find novel ways of living. Oliver Soden’s biography feels like an attempt to answer a series of questions. How, in the 20th century, should a creative artist live? Or be a pacifist? Or a homosexual? The answers were sometimes wrong; the music could be disastrously unsuccessful.

Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation in the German-speaking lands, Otto Wagner, could create his entire oeuvre without venturing outside the city limits of Vienna. Gropius found himself thrust into one unprecedented role after another, uprooted and exiled repeatedly. His work was carried out wherever he landed — in Germany, England or America. Despite the huge disruptions of history, he displayed extraordinary single-mindedness. From the 1914 Fagus factory onwards, his buildings argued for the modernist position of function over ornament. By the time of his death, in America, the vast majority of practising architects, if not the public, were converted to his position.