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571
standing that even the most sympathetic observers from other classes,
like Orwell, had unwittingly sentimentalized its values.
In a way it was bad luck, for us as well as Hoggart, that
The Uses
of Literacy
came out when it did, instead of a few years later, when
the significance of television was clearer, when a relative affluence had,
to an extent undreamable in 1957, filled working-class life with middle–
class properties (appliances, cars, houses, bought on the Never-Never
plan), when England had become at least nominally the center of a
new international life-style whose limits are not those of class or income
but simply of how old one is, or wants to be. In
The Uses of Literacy
Hoggart glanced at the milkbar, jukebox ambiance of working-class
adolescence, but with only a rather sour pity and contempt for its evident
airlessness; still, he can't reasonably be blamed for not guessing - who
did? - that those seedy epheboi were about to impose their musical,
sartorial and linguistic ways on much of the western world, and that
the new culture thus created would extraordinarily complicate the ques–
tions of class definition and media effect he was contemplating.
Hoggart, however, has had more than a decade in which to catch
up, and we now have two volumes of essays, lectures and reviews writ–
ten (mostly) between 1957 and 1968. Their first effect is depressing. As
the dust jackets indicate, Hoggart has in the meantime become a Public
Man, Professor at Birmingham and Director of its Centre for Contem–
porary Cultural Studies, a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,
now Assistant Director-General
of
UNESCO - in short, a man some–
what more in demand than was the staff tutor in Adult Education at
Hull who wrote
The Uses of Literacy.
I don't mean to mock such suc–
cess - Hoggart surely deserves it more than most - but the essays on the
state of society and culture in
Speaking to Each Other
have frequently
the air of having been directed to more or less official occasions that
didn't bring his mind and feelings into ample and subtle enough play.
About Society,
the first of the two volumes, feels especially heavy with
Hoggart's sense of audiences that needed to start at the beginning ; over
and over, in a way that precludes hard-thought detail and the most
interesting kind of complexity, he fills in The Whole Picture - tele–
vision in the sixties, higher education in the sixties, government subsidy
of the arts in the sixties, all those dreary Important Subjects the British
"quality" press is so twitchily addicted to. As a Public Man he must
a sk large questions, and although it's to his credit that he asks them
in hard ways, one does get a little desperate waiting for some
answers,
which never quite arrive. He tells us that the 536 pages of
Speaking to
Each Other
represent only about a third of what he's published
in
the
