The Altar of the Dead by Van Wyck Brooks

[In her bibliographical note to American Humor ( 1931) Constance Rourke wrote that The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925)  ‘proved highly stimulating, even though the present conclusion that the international scene is a natural and even traditional subject is at variance with that of Brooks.’ James is no less an American nor are his characters less American for living in Europe. He is ‘a man of his native soil’ as much as any other American writer, and his work reflects that with the ‘supreme excellence’, in Rourke’s estimation, perhaps as the result of the distance he obtained by living in Europe. As it turned out his apprehensions, misgivings and disillusionment landed with equal force on both continents. Has America itself ever satisfactorily settled the problem of its own deracination? Follows cut-up of Brooks’ 8^th Chapter.] *

‘The old England that an American loves was rapidly passing into history. Nothing was left but little sorts of sets’ [Henry James thinks late in his life,] yet from the first there had been discordant notes in the harmony. Disconcerting had been the moment when, years before, James had encountered face to face the poet he had earliest known and best loved. Tennyson had not been Tennysonian. Fine, fine, fine he had supposed the laureate would be, fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse which had appealed all along by its most inward principle to his taste. He had never dreamed of a growling Tennyson, a swarthy, scraggy berserk, with a rustic accent, whose talk ran upon port wine and tobacco . . .Tennyson had not been Tennyson . . .Had England proved to be altogether English? Had not Europe itself positively ceased to be European? . . .One couldn’t, to be sure, press the point too far.  .  .

In 1899, after he had retired to Rye, he wrote to a friend:’ I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which have ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of ’cry’ in all that life compared to the almost total absence of ‘wool’. By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have away of seeming at last to end in smoke –while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time.’ But long before this he had begun to complain of his predicament: more and more frequent, in his letters and stories, had been his protests against ‘the vast English Philistine mob,’ against ‘that perfection of promptitude that makes the motions of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep.’ In a letter to Norton in 1886 he expressed the same opinion of the English upper class as that which he had put into the mouth of the Princess Casamassima: ‘the condition of that body seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution – minus cleverness and conversation; or perhaps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.’ He had found is fellow-writers in Paris ‘ignorant, corrupt and complacent’; and now, in England, these great people –they were doing, on every hand, things that one mustn’t do if one is to remain great, if one is to retain the grand glamor of one’s greatness. ‘Gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and skepticism, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse’- so they were, so they seemed, at least in one’s darker moments . . . ‘That was the real  tragedy of the master’s life,’ says Mr. Hueffer. ‘He had found English people who were just people singularly nasty.’


For behind this façade of an aging man of the world there was a child hidden, a Puritan child . . .


James himself tells us that the material for his portraits of misunderstood authors as was drawn from the depths of his own experience; and what a comment they are upon the unspoken bitterness of his own disenchantment! London, England, Europe, where he had supposed that the great were always great, the  honorable were always honored, that the fine was always perceived and the noble invariably appreciated! Alas, for that superstitious valuation of the Old World against which he had fought a losing battle! ‘Bottomless vulgarity’! It has come to nothing less. . .He had toiled up the rocky slope of the British Olympus, and he had arrived at twilight and found the gods nodding on their dilapidated thrones. Ha, that wondrous fairy-tale of his youth- the Europe of the Americans It had flown away as a dream, as a vision of the night.


Was it possible – could he himself have survived in America? If he had stayed, if he had gone back, and if . . .What mightn’t he have done with people he would have really understood, people he could have approached en maître, whose thoughts would have been his thoughts, whose feelings would have been his feelings, whose desires would have been the desires of his own flesh and blood? If he hadn’t been on the defensive as regards his opinions and enjoyments? If he had been able to live without pomp and circumstance to back him, with mystery and ceremony to protect him? If he had been able to read the universe into his own country as Balzac had read it into France?

Well, his life had been conditioned and related and involves – it had been, so to say, fatalized . . . and yet. There was William James, perpetually urging him to come home . . . if he wanted some ‘real, roomy, rustic happiness’  . . .with a woodpile as large as an ordinary house and a hearth four feet wide and the American sun flooding the floor . . . at Tamworth Iron Works. That was just it: Tamworth Iron Works. You could feel the rust on your fingers, and the weeds and the litter and the dilapidation – and the roominess, for that matter, and the rusticity, and the bare pine boards, and that everlasting, that absolutely empty, that positively terrifying forest, and the bouncing, bustling promiscuity of the whole business. One had to face facts . . . And yet, when, one didn’t face facts, when one didn’t come up to the surface and glare about but just drifted, allowed the stream to carry one  along, down there, among the seaweed, where the light was so ambiguous, one saw, felt, heard- yes, one heard something, a knock of an old vagrant question. “A man always pays, in one way or another, for expatriation, for detachment from his plain primary heritage.’


One might certainly over-estimate the intensity with which James consciously entertained any such thoughts as these. At this very moment he was remarking, in a paper on Henry Harland, that the time had come for ‘looking more closely into the old notion that, to have a quality of his own, a writer must needs draw his sap from the soil of his origin.’  But how much of the will to believe in his own destiny, how much of the unconscious pragmatism which he said he had always practiced, what an immense need of self-justification had obliterated from his sight the instinctive beliefs and desires and misgivings that carried I on their drama in the depths of his soul!. . . .


Henry James never satisfactorily settled the problem of his own deracination.



* ‘In every attempted resuscitation of an old author,’ James writes in The Works of Epictetus’, one of two things is either expressly or tacitly claimed for him. He is conceived to possess an historical or an intrinsic interest. He is introduced to us either as a phenomena, an object worthy of study in connection with a particular phase of civilization, or as a teacher, an object worthy of study in himself, independently of time or place.’ Here we study Van Wyks Brooks in connection with a phase of American history.

The Dream of Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

This is not a novel. It has too much to explain to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindered by others. Best to call this a fairytale, then –though it really happened, or something like it. And not just any fairytale, but specifically a Russian fairy tale, to go alongside the stories of Baba Yaga and the Glass Mountain that Afanaseyev the folklorist collected when he rode over the black earth of Russia, under its wide sky, in thee nineteenth century.

Where Western tales begin by shifting us to another time – ‘Once upon a time’ they say, meaning elsewhere, meaning then rather than now – Russian skazki made an adjustment of place. ‘In a certain land’, they start; or, ‘In  the three-time-ninth kingdom . . .’ Meaning elsewhere, meaning rather than here. Yet these elsewhere are always recognizable as home. In the distance will always be a wood-walled town where the churches have onion domes. The ruler will always be a Tsar, Ivan or Vladimir. The earth is always black. The shy is always wide. It’s Russia, always Russia, the dear dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe which is as large as all Europe put together. And, also, it isn’t. It is story Russia, not real Russia; a place never quite in perfect overlap with the daylight country of the same name. It is as near to it as a wish is to reality, and as far away too. For the tales supplied what the real country lacked, when villagers were telling them, and Afanaseyev was writing them down.


Real Russian fields grew soggy crops of buckwheat and rye. Story Russia had magic tablecloths serving feasts without end. Real Russia’s roads were mud and ruts. Story Russia abounded in tools of joyful velocity: flying carpets, genies of the rushing air, horses that scarcely bent the grass they galloped on. Real Russia fixed its people in sluggish immobility. Story Russia sent its lively boys to seek the Firebird or to woo the Sun Maiden. The stories dreamed away reality’s defects. They made promises good enough to last for one evening in the firelight; promises which the teller and the hearers knew could come true only in the version of home where the broke-backed trestle over the stream at the village’s ends became ‘a bridge of white hazelwood with oaken planks, spread with purple cloths and nailed with copper nails’. Only in the wish country, the dream country. Only in the twenty-seventh kingdom.


In the twentieth century, Russians stopped telling skazki. And at the same time, they were told that the skazki were coming true. The stories’ name for a magic carpet, samolet, ‘self-flyer’, had already become the ordinary Russian word for an aeroplane. Now voices from the radio and the movies screen and television began to promise that the magic tablecloth amobranka, ‘self-victualler’, would soon follow after. ‘In our day,’ Nikita Krushchev told a crowd in the Lenin Stadium of Moscow on 29 September 1959, ‘the dreams mankind cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into reality by man’s own hands.’ He meant, above all, the skazki’s dreams of abundance. Humanity’s  ancient condition of scarcity was going to end, imminently. Everyone was going to climb the cabbage stalk, scramble through the hole in the sky, and arrive in the land where millstones revolved all by themselves. “Whenever they gave a turn, a cake and a slice of bread with butter and sour cream appeared, and on the top of them, a pot of gruel.’ Now, instead of being imagined compensation for an empty belly, the sour cream and the butter were truly going to flow.


And of course, Krushchev was right. This is exactly what did happened in thhe twentieth century, for hundreds of millions of people. There is indeed more food, and more kinds of food, in one ordinary supermarket of the present day, than in any of the old hungry dreams, dreamed in Russia or elsewhere. But Krushchev believed that the plenty of the stories was coming in Soviet Russia, and coming because of something that the Soviet Union possessed and the hungry lands of capitalism lacked: the planned economy. Because the whole system of production and distribution in the USSR was owned by the state, because all Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’, it could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, the most lavish fulfillment of human needs. Therefore it would easily out-produce the wasteful chaos of the marketplace. Planning would be the USSR’s own self-turning millstone, its own self-victualling tablecloth.


This Russian fairytale began to be told in the decade of the famine before the Second World War, and it lasted officially until Communism fell. Hardly anyone believed it, by the end. In practice, from the late 1960s on all that the Soviet regime aspired to do was to provide a pacifying minimum of consumer goods to the inhabitants of the vast shoddy apartment buildings ringing every Soviet City. But once upon a time the story of red plenty had been serious: an attempt to beat capitalism on its own terms, and to make Soviet citizens the richest people in the world. For a short time, it even looked – and not just to Nikita Krushchev- as if the story might be coming true, Intelligence was invested in it, as well as foolishness: a generation’s hopes, and a generation’s intellectual gifts, and a tyranny’s guilty wish for a happy ending. This book is about that moment. It is about the cleverish version of that idea, the most subtle of the Soviet attempts to pull a working samobranka out of the dream country. It is about the adventures of the idea red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.


But it is not a history. It is not a novel. It is itself a fairytale; and like a fairytale it is wishful, irresponsible, not to be relied on. The notes at the back indicate where to story it tells depends on invention, where the explanation depends on lies. Remember, as you read, that this story does not take place in the literal, historical Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but only in some nearby kingdom; as near to it as wishes are to reality, and also as faraway.

What's Fair About That by Adam Swift

Social Mobility and Its Enemies 
by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.
Pelican, 272 pp., £8.99, September 2018, 978 0 241 31702 0

Social Mobility and Education in Britain 
by Erzsébet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.99, December 2018, 978 1 108 46821 3

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged 
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison.
Policy, 224 pp., £9.99, January, 978 1 4473 3610 5

Social​ mobility has something to do with society and something to do with movement. It refers to changes of position in social – rather than, say, geographical – space. Inter-generational social mobility concerns changes between parents and children. After that, things get controversial. Most sociologists would agree that the issue is movement within, rather than movement of, society. Suppose everybody’s real income doubles: everyone is better off, ‘society’ has moved forwards. No sociologist thinks that tells us anything about mobility, though some economists do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.
There are deeper disagreements over how to understand and measure the ‘social positions’ that people are – or aren’t – moving between. All mobility research is interested in the association between origins and destinations, and in the mechanisms generating that association, but there are different ways of defining those origins and destinations. Some researchers divide people into discrete social classes based on their occupations, then look at the probabilities of moving from one class to another. Others look at people’s places in the distribution of a continuous variable, such as income, then work out, for example, how many make it from the bottom to the top quartile. Debate between these two camps has always been lively, as have disputes, among advocates of class analysis, about how best to construct a class scheme.


These disputes took on a new significance in 2005 when a report on income mobility, co-authored by Machin, made the news. Not only was the UK alongside the US at the bottom of international league tables but things were getting worse. Comparing cohorts born just 12 years apart – in 1958 and 1970 – the study found a sharp increase in the association between parents’ and children’s income. Responding to the increasingly prevalent view that Britain had a serious mobility problem, David Cameron’s coalition government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to the professions – but the commission’s analyses and recommendations as a whole were much more extensive, including work on low pay and access to housing. No wonder the government took no notice. In 2017, Milburn and the commission’s few remaining members resigned en masse, citing lack of progress.


The​ sociologist John Goldthorpe has spent almost fifty years developing and championing his version of the class analysis approach. It has become the international norm in sociological research and is the basis of the categorisation used by the UK’s Office for National Statistics. Jobs are characterised according to their employment relations. Employers, the self-employed and employees are differentiated, with the last (and much the largest) group subdivided according to contractual status. Zero-hours contracts are an extreme case of the commodification of labour already implicit in working for a wage; salaried professionals and managers are in a ‘service relationship’ which typically gives them more security and better prospects. Find out someone’s occupation and their parents’ occupations when they were young, and you know whether they have been mobile between social classes and, if so, in what direction. Up, down or sideways? (Some classes are not hierarchically ordered. The child of a garage owner who becomes a library assistant has gone from Class 4 to Class 3, but that’s a horizontal shift.) Do that for lots of people and you can work out mobility rates and discover patterns. Do it for people born at different times, or in different countries, and you uncover variations in those rates and patterns. Add in more information about, say, educational qualifications or cognitive ability, and you get a handle on the processes generating these variations.


Erzsébet Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s Social Mobility and Education in Britain tells a very different story from the conventional wisdom rehearsed in Major and Machin’s chatty Pelican book. Elegantly organising many years of empirical research, it shows that the UK should be placed mid-table in the international rankings of social mobility, and that there has been no reduction during the postwar period. Their dissenting account derives mainly from their distinctive way of understanding what social mobility is. They pull no punches in their critique of income mobility research in general, and of the 2005 study in particular. Survey respondents can only guess about the income coming into the home when they were children and are less willing to answer questions about income than about jobs. In any case, class position gives a better overall sense of an individual’s place in the distribution of advantage: two people may currently be earning the same but their ‘social position’ will vary greatly depending on whether or not they are stably employed and have a reasonable expectation of career progression. But Bukodi and Goldthorpe are even more scornful of politicians and media commentators, who simply do not understand what they are talking about when they talk about mobility.


Here are three kinds of mobility to consider. A measure of total mobility tells us simply how much movement there is, i.e. how many people end up somewhere different from where they started from. The direction of movement is irrelevant; what counts is that they are moving. It’s hard to see what would be good about higher rates of social mobility if that meant only that more people were moving down, so those keen on increased mobility are usually thinking about upward mobility. What they want is more people moving up and/or fewer people moving down. That isn’t a silly thing to want, and sometimes it’s what we get. On Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s account, the ‘Golden Age’ of social mobility consisted in the expansion of the ‘room at the top’ (as per John Braine’s 1957 novel): the postwar increase in the proportion of better jobs, which constituted an upgrading of the class structure. As the number of wage-earning working-class positions decreased compared to salaried positions, there was indeed an increase in absolute upward mobility.


The third kind of social mobility, relative mobility, is better described as social fluidity or openness. To know how fluid a society is we need to set aside the changing shape of the class structure, and focus instead on movement within that structure. Measures of relative mobility compare the mobility chances of people from different origins, thus telling us about the way chances are distributed. That is what we should be interested in if we care about equality of opportunity. And as far as that is concerned, Bukodi and Goldthorpe show that things are no worse, and no better, than they were in the Golden Age. Compared to those from lower origins, the odds continue to be stacked in favour of the advantaged. What has changed is the balance between upward and downward mobility. Changes in the shape of the class structure mean that, overall, more people are moving down, and fewer are moving up. That’s partly because the upgrading of the class structure has slowed down, and partly because the more people there are starting out from higher positions, the more people there are at risk of falling to lower ones.


Politicians are keen on people moving up: they talk as if they are all for removing the obstacles that prevent children from lower origins climbing the social ladder. But they daren’t mention those moving down. That’s unfortunate, since lack of downward mobility is one of the barriers to upward mobility. (Goldthorpe tells a nice story about a Cabinet Office seminar at which one of Blair’s chief political advisers protested: ‘But Tony can’t possibly go to the country on a platform of increasing downward mobility!’) In the effort to address equality of opportunity, the silence around downward mobility has always been a problem. Given a set of outcomes – of destinations – for which people are, in effect, competing, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or even a social scientist, to see that the situation is zero-sum: the only way to improve the chances of those whose prospects are worse than average is to reduce the chances of those whose are better than average. (Italics mine)



In the postwar period when the structure of class positions – the outcomes that opportunities are opportunities for – was improving, this mattered less, or at least the injustice was less apparent. Lots of people were moving up, fewer were moving down, so there was little obvious cause for complaint. Even those who weren’t moving up could expect to live better, longer lives than their parents had; the social ladder was really an escalator. So attention was diverted away from the persistently unequal distribution of mobility chances: it wasn’t salient how few people from higher origins were moving down. Today, for many, the escalator has ground to a halt, or even gone into reverse. To increase upward mobility from here there are only two options: create again more room at the top for people to move into, or weaken the mechanisms by which better-off parents can protect their children from moving down. We need more of the better jobs and/or less hoarding of the opportunities to get them.


Education might seem the way to kill two birds with one stone. By investing in human capital we can build a highly skilled labour force that will bring top-end jobs to the UK. And by expanding the provision of education we can spread to the many opportunities previously available only to the few. (Hence New Labour’s target of getting 50 per cent of young people into higher education.) Bukodi and Goldthorpe are scathing on both fronts. As far as increasing the number of good jobs is concerned, newly industrialising countries, especially in Asia, can supply highly skilled labour at lower cost, and in any case the real problem is creating the demand for that labour. Rather than upgrading the class structure, a more qualified workforce increasingly means an overqualified workforce. And when it comes to widening opportunities, what matters isn’t people’s absolute level of education, which has indeed become less tightly linked to their class origins, but their educational qualifications relative to others. Education is, in large part, a positional good: what counts is one’s place in the distribution. Measured that way – the way that employers and parents tend to see it – there has been no change in the association between children’s origins and their educational qualifications. Educational expansion has had no impact on more advantaged parents’ capacity to secure for their children a higher place in the queue.


Education, which promised to be the solvent that would loosen the class structure, has become an effective means of preserving it. The idea of opening things up by widening access to education and allocating jobs ‘meritocratically’ (i.e. on the basis of qualifications) is attractive. But it underestimates the extent to which inequalities between children’s class origins are inequalities precisely in parents’ capacity to use education to preserve their children’s class position – to ‘play the education game’. Indeed, the whole idea of accepting inequalities of outcome, whether as desirable or simply as inevitable, and focusing instead on equalizing opportunities, neglects the obvious point that parents’ outcomes are children’s starting-points. Mobility researchers disagree about a lot, but it is common ground that the best way to increase movement between rungs on the ladder is to reduce the distance between them.


As long as the mechanisms by which people end up in social positions are gameable – unlike, say, lotteries – advantaged parents are always going to be well placed to succeed in their aim of protecting their children from downward mobility. That’s partly because their advantage consists in possessing relevant resources – such as money, security and time – and partly because they’re going to have, and be primed to transfer to their children, whatever characteristics gained them their advantage in the first place. If they’re lucky, they may not even need to think or act strategically; the reproduction of social inequality happens automatically, as it were. Unimpeachable intrafamilial interactions with no ulterior motive can be a perfectly efficient means of conferring the prized qualities. Some parents read their children bedtime stories because they want to give them the best start in life. Others confer the same advantages, by the same means, for other reasons.

Where ​ Bukodi and Goldthorpe crunch big numbers and emphasize the ‘rational choice’ mechanisms that generate patterns of social (im)mobility across society as a whole, Friedman and Laurison’s The Class Ceiling, a largely qualitative study of patterns of recruitment and promotion in elite professions, nicely lays bare the micro-processes, often unconscious, by which privileged backgrounds convert into higher earnings. Given the bigger picture, one can query Friedman and Laurison’s preoccupation with relatively small inequalities between those who are doing very well – or, as in the case of actors and people working in TV, have knowingly chosen high-risk jobs in glamorous fields. (Those in elite occupations from working-class origins earn, on average, £6400 less than colleagues from more privileged backgrounds; some of that is explained by different educational credentials, sorting into particular jobs or firms and a London effect.) But their interviews and analyses, and especially their rich discussion of the ways in which embodied cultural capital – the ‘self-presentational baggage of a privileged class origin’ – is performed as and taken for ‘merit’, do as much as Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods (2003) to empirically vindicate Bourdieu’s theoretical approach to questions of social reproduction.


Friedman and Laurison are well aware of the familiar processes by which origins affect destinations. They know that people’s educational qualifications are strongly influenced by parental resources, and are particularly interesting on their interviewees’ reluctance to acknowledge that their ability to take risks, or even to live where they want to work, depend on their access to ‘the bank of mum and dad’. (We shouldn’t take all talk of risk at face value: those who embark on ‘risky’ careers with access to family resources are rarely facing anything like the same probabilities of genuinely bad outcomes as those without.) But Friedman and Laurison’s most valuable contribution is the light they shed on the more insidious forms of advantage that those from privileged backgrounds bring to the world of work, and the ways in which those forms of advantage are ‘recognised’ as ‘merits’ that deserve reward. What counts as ‘fitting in’ – the qualities needed to form good relationships with clients, the conversational modes available when chatting with colleagues, appropriate forms of dress – varies hugely between different fields. Accountants who want to become partners need qualities different from TV executives who want to become commissioners. The Class Ceiling is fun to read partly because it confirms stereotypes about those differences. But it also brings out the common mechanisms behind the variety: homophily, unconscious bias, and indeed stereotyping itself. ‘Confidence’ is essentially a matter of being au fait with the right moves in the relevant context. And there is in many elite professions a collectively understood self-image that is, in effect, an image of the privileged, so that ‘classed performances masquerade as objective “merit”.’ Thus cultural and social reproduction tend to coincide.


The Class Ceiling is full of interesting angles, such as the suggestion that research should distinguish more systematically between ‘technical’ and ‘embodied’ forms of cultural capital. In fields where there are agreed standards of technical expertise – architecture, for example – fitting in and confidence matter less: actually knowing what you’re doing counts for more. Class origins make less difference to pay, and those from lower origins feel more comfortable and are less likely to avoid ambitious career trajectories. In other fields, by contrast, what constitutes professional expertise is more up for grabs, leaving plenty of room for embodied cultural capital to plug the uncertainty gap. Here Friedman and Laurison emphasise the importance of the capacity to bullshit or schmooze. I especially enjoyed two moments from the world of TV production. A senior figure defends as relevant to job performance the same ability to engage in highbrow cultural theorising that some of his junior colleagues dismiss as ‘pointless intellectual grandstanding’. And a TV commissioner whose professional success depended on learning and deploying the art of cultural mimicry suspects that he has reached his limit, both professionally and socially: ‘I don’t go to the parties, the clubs, and there’s part of me that thinks actually ... they’re all cunts,’ he told Friedman and Laurison, and laughed.


From ​ the perspective of social justice, social mobility is both important and overrated. It is unjust that children’s social origins exert such a strong influence on their destinations but, in austerity Britain, the increasing numbers who grow up in poverty, or who can find only badly paid work on zero-hours contracts, face bigger problems than a lack of opportunity to ascend to a higher class. What really matters, here and now, is the absolute position of those at the bottom, not their chances – let alone their relative chances – of moving up and out. That wouldn’t be true if those at the bottom deserved to be there, and those who moved up deserved better lives than them, but – as Hayek and Rawls agree – it’s hard to take that view seriously.


The mobility paradigm invites normative confusion between different values. Fairness, on the one hand: similarly able and motivated individuals should face a level playing-field and enjoy equal chances of success (and failure). Efficiency, on the other: it’s socially wasteful not to exploit the ‘pool of ability’, so the right – i.e. the genuinely meritorious – people should reach the right jobs, rather than being kept out of them by the less meritorious from more advantaged origins. Those two ideas are usually seen as complementary, and in various ways all three books slide between them. But why is it any ‘fairer’ for high-potential, low-origin children to get better jobs or have better lives than low-potential, low-origin children – or low-potential, high-origin children, for that matter? Imagine you’re the parent of two children: one sails through school and university and into a good job; the other has learning difficulties and struggles to make ends meet. What’s fair about that?


Preoccupation with the class-biased processes by which the wrong people arrive in different social positions can make it seem as if the goal should be simply to replace those processes with genuinely meritocratic ones. That may indeed be a good move, for reasons of efficiency, but it’s hard to see how it would achieve anything like fairness. To do that, the distribution of rewards itself would need to be challenged, not simply the ways by which people find their place in the distribution. Mobility researchers risk putting the cart before the horse: inequality between destinations comes into their story as an obstacle to more equal chances of mobility, not as a problem in its own right.


We do very little to prevent well-off parents doing what they can to protect their children from downward mobility or, indeed, to help their children climb as high as they can. We tend to think that’s part of a parent’s job. Robin Cook’s memoir repeats a story told by a journalist to Roy Hattersley. Tony Blair, asked why he had sent his son Euan to the Oratory, despite the inevitable political flak, said: ‘Look at Harold Wilson’s children.’ The journalist demurred: one of Wilson’s sons had become a headmaster, the other a university professor. Blair replied that he certainly hoped his children would do better than that. Since we hardly try to block that kind of conscious, strategic engineering, it isn’t surprising that we decline to intervene in the more informal, intrafamilial interactions by which cultural capital is transmitted from parents to children. There are strong ‘family values’ reasons not to police the telling of bedtime stories, chatting about current affairs, or the sharing of cultural enthusiasms. Although those reasons don’t obviously – I’d say they obviously don’t – imply a similar freedom when it comes to decisions about schooling, or about many of the other ways in which parents intend to benefit their children, most people take a different view.

Suppose inequalities between top and bottom were less outrageous. Suppose the processes by which people found their place in the distribution of burdens and benefits could be justified. Or if those things seem too much to ask for, suppose simply that positions at the bottom weren’t so bad. Then, perhaps, we might condemn parents who seek to bestow unfair advantages on their children. Doubtless, even now, some overdo it, exceeding any plausible prerogative to favor their own. But, given the outcomes to which we collectively acquiesce, and the levels of uncertainty involved, it isn’t hard to excuse many of those who – deliberately or otherwise – contribute to current patterns of social mobility. They hoard opportunities; you don’t make the rules; I love my children.

LRB Volume 42 Number 2 23 January 2020

Round Up by Constance Rourke

[ A thread which winds through her entire work- like the old traces through the wilderness in the pioneering days- through the ‘forest’ of the satire, parody, fable, allegory, theatrics and burlesques of American humor- is ‘the argument we have with ourselves themselves’: unavailing attempts to master the circumstance of defeat and break through to a fresh lease on life and to achieve a subtler wisdom than is contained in the purely retrospective view expressed in the trifecta of the Yankee, Backwoodsman and Negro character types and their various composites; to find  human warmth pressed towards emotion fully expressed in a dramatic, tragic form. Only Henry James comes close, by examining the American character in Europe only , with starts and intimations by various authors such as Sinclair Lewis and later-day poets. The concluding paragraphs of her masterpiece follows.]


Humor has been the fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. It’s objective – the unconscious objective of a disunited people – has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type. But a society has not been palpably defined either in life or in literature. If literature is a gauge, only among expatriates has its strong semblance existed, without genuine roots, and mixed with the tragic. The other social semblance which has come into common view is that of Main Street.


Nor has a single unmistakable type emerged; the American character is still split into many characters. The comic upset has often relaxed rigidities which might have been more significant if taut; individualism has sometimes seemed to wear away under a prolonged common laughter. The solvent of humor has often become a jaded formula, the comic rebound automatic – ‘laff that off’ – so that only the uneasy habit of laughter appears, with an acute sensitivity and insecurity beneath it as though too much has been laughed away. Whole phases of comedy have become empty; the comic rejoinder has become every man’s tool. From the comic the American has often moved to a cult of the comic. But a characteristic humor has emerged, quiet, explosive, competitive, often grounded in good humor, still theatrical  at bottom and full of large fantasy. The note of triumph has diminished as the decades have proved that the land is not altogether an Eden and that defeat is a common human portion. Humor has moved into more difficult areas and has embraced a subtler range of feeling; exaltation of the common American as a national type has been deflated. Yet what must still be called a folk strain has been dominant; perhaps is still  uppermost; the great onset of a Negro art, the influence of Negro music, and popular responses to the more primitive aspects of Negro expression suggest that the older absorption in such elements is unbroken. If the American character is split and many-sided at least a large and shadowy outline has been drawn by the many ventures in comedy.

A consistent native tradition has been formed, spreading over the country, surviving cleavages and dispersals, often growing underground but rising to the surface like some rough vine. This ruthless effort has produced poetry, not only in the sense that primitive concepts are often poetic, but keeping the poetics strain as a dominant strain. Not the realistic sense, which might have been expected of a people who call themselves practical, but the poetic sense of life and of character has prevailed. With all the hasty experiment this tradition  has revealed beauty, and wry engaging human twists. It has used subtle idioms, like the quieter  Yankee idiom; it has contained the dynamic serenity of Whitman and the sensitive discovering genius of Henry James. With all the explosions its key has often remained low; this tradition has shown an effect of reserve, as if in immediate expression and in its larger elements something were withheld, to be drawn upon again. It has produced two major pattern, the rhapsodic and the understated, whose outline may be terraced through the many sequences of popular comedy and through American literature; regional at first, they have passed beyond the regional.

Clear courses have been drawn, yet these have been full of vagaries that come from complex experiment. New themes have often been upturned and penetrated only in part. The epical promised has never been completely fulfilled. Though extravagance has been a major element in all American comedy, though extravagance may have its incomparable uses with flights and inclusions denied the more equable view, the extravagant vein in American humor has reached no ultimate expression. The comedy of Rabelais provides a gauge, or that of Ulysses. On the other hand little equability has appeared, only a few aspects of social comedy; and emotion remains, as earlier, submerged, or shaded and subtle and indwelling. T. S. Eliot has voiced an insistent mood.

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon gray and smoky, evening yellow and rose,
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
While the smoke coming down above the housetops,
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand .  .  .

Set against this self-consciousness and disillusionment are further primitive elements in American life, showing themselves in the continuance of the cults, in lodges, parades, masquerades, as in earlier years, in shouts like “Hallelujah! I’m a bum!” and in a simple persistent self-portraiture not unlike that to which the American was first given. He still envisages himself as an innocent in relation to other peoples; he showed the enduring conviction during the Great War. He is still given to the rhapsody, the monologue, the tales, in life as in literature. Of late has come one of those absorptions in homely retrospect to which the American minds has periodically been devoted; common and comic characters, pioneers, orators, evangelists, hoboes, hold-up men, have come to the fore with a storm of old story and song, often engaging the same Americans who turn to Eliot or Robinson or Henry James.


These oddly matched aspects of the American character are often at variance. Together or separated, they have found no full and complete expression. Who can say what will bring fulfillment? If it comes it may be conditioned by many undetermined elements in the national life and character, by outside impingement even- since Americans are acutely aware of these like that which weighed heavily in earlier years, the burden of British opinion. Its effects are are still not altogether resolves; it has been noted that the sharp critiques offered in an earlier day by visiting foreigner  are now defined by Americans, often as though they had merely borrowed the attitude. The involvement with the older countries is genuine, and the task looms for literature of absorbing traditions of the older world as part of the natural American heritage. The alliances must be instinctive or the fabric will be seamy. In general the American creative mind has leaked the patience and humility to acquire them, or it has been fearful of alienation from Americans sources.


Against full use of the native tradition many factors are set. That nomadic strain which has run through all American life, deeply influencing the American character, is now accented by the conditions of American life, and the native character seems to grow more generalized, less specifically American. Within the space of a lifetime Henry James saw something of a kind happen; in later year he remarked of the heroine of Pandora’s Box that she could no longer ‘pass for quaint or fresh or for exclusively native to any one tract of Anglo-Saxon soil.’  Yet the main outline of the American character still persist; American types can be found far from their native habitat and unmistakable in outline, the homeless Yankee in Nebraska or frontiersmen in Monte Carlo, and others  who may show an erosion due to alien places so that the original grain has grown dim, but who show that grain.


For the creative writer the major problem seems to be to know the patternings of the grain; and these can hardly be discovered without understanding of the many sequences of the American tradition on the popular side as well a on purely literary levels. The writer may know, as Eliot said, ‘the mind of his own country – a minds which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.’ A favored explanation for the slow and spare development of the arts in America has lain in the stress upon the forces of materialism. But these have existed in every civilization; they have even at times seemed to assist in the processes of art. The American failure to value the productions of the artist has likewise been cited; but the artist often seems a less of critical persuasion  and sympathy than an unstudied association with his natural inheritance. Many artists have worked surely well with little encouragement; few have worked without a rich traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn.


The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition – many of them still buried- belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light. In the end he may use native sources as a point of radical departure; he may seldom be intent  upon early material; but he will discover a relationship with the many streams of native character and feeling. The single writer- the single production - will no longer stand solitary or aggressive but within a natural sequence.