Difficult and Bad

The discomfort that results from belonging to two different worlds, worlds so far separated from each other that they seem irreconcilable, and yet which coexist in everything that you are.

– Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims

In the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, I read the poet Rae Armantrout talk about her work in relation to abstraction and clarity. She says that ‘clarity need not be equivalent to readability. How readable is the world?’

In the publishing industry, 'accessible' and 'academic' are functionally coded to mean 'good' and 'bad'. The idea of clarity, or how readable, how narratively legible, how ‘readerly’ something is, is situated as a marker of quality. I love publishing and have been making books for my whole adult life. I started putting together zines of poetry and art while I was an undergraduate at Goldsmiths university. The material poverty of myself and my fellow students was, at the time, just another constraint to play within. How much paper and resources could we steal from the university? I didn’t realise at the time that I was working within a history of independent bookmaking that is renegade, on the margins, and politically engaged, not least because of its emergence out of a material constraint.

Making books and how to steal from the institution was a precious learning curve. So too, for different reasons, were my surroundings at Goldsmiths. When I left the village I had grown up in to go to university, I socialised with those whose parents were not cleaners or shop workers, as mine were. I had a vague idea that a professional life existed somewhere, but my perspective was limited by my surroundings. There was a tacit acceptance that most people worked as cleaners or stacked shelves in supermarkets – therefore at university, I would find much of the same. Didier Eribon evaluates this boundaried class perspective and the rupture when it is broken in his totemic memoir Returning to Reims:

It was as if the barrier between social worlds was utterly impermeable. The boundaries that divide these worlds help define within each of them radically different ways of perceiving what it is possible to be or to become, of perceiving what is possible to aspire to or not. People know that things are different elsewhere, but that seems part of a far off and inaccessible universe . . . Only if you actually manage to move from one side of the border to the other, as happened in my case, can you get out from under the implacable logic of all those things that go without saying in order to perceive the terrible injustice of this unequal distribution of prospects and possibilities. 

I had made the initial steps of breaching the barrier and borders of my class when I became the first person in my family to attend any kind of schooling past fourteen. At Goldsmiths, I did not meet the children of cleaners or shop workers. I met the children of landlords, the children of airline pilots, and actual princesses, the children of executives at mega pharmaceutical companies, people so wealthy they owned their own charities. I met the children of TV personalities and doctors, barons and writers; I was thrown into the deep end of a reality that had previously only been a ‘far off and inaccessible’ universe, as Eribon terms it. 

I continued to make books throughout my twenties, within various precarious living situations, becoming more and more aware of the significance of someone like me entering a professional space made up of those who were seemingly trained to be there. In professional publishing, there is a framework of manner and intonation that you can’t quite understand unless you’ve been privy to it from a formative age, and it is a structure born of and for those who have been privately educated or attended Oxbridge or a Russell Group university. One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working class person moving into educated and middle class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.

~

Yet my working-class dad is still the person who reads more than anyone I know. He gives himself a summer to read War and Peace, and then all the books around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. When I was younger, he read books to my sister and I every night. I grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees, in Latin, that he’d taught himself over years as an amateur naturalist, botanist, ornithologist. He used to volunteer to count rare birds for the RSPB. He has an unembarrassed fanaticism and faith in the idea of learning and education – in people he considers ‘cultured’ – and books. He talks often and wistfully about wishing for a large desk with numerous dictionaries and thesauruses so he can ‘cross reference’ his books. My father is, at the time of writing, eighty years old and working as a cleaner for two different organisations. He cleans offices most nights and spends his weekends cleaning holiday cottages in Cornwall.

My father has not always been a cleaner. He has worked variously as a farmer, bread van driver, shop worker, shop manager, and gardener. Around this working life, he has dedicated himself to self-initiated learning, because a formal education was not available to him. He didn’t own a passport until he was 79, and he has never once considered his working life as an impediment to his thinking, reading, or learning. If anything, these contexts have fuelled him. Like most auto-didacts, his learning and specialisms have been led by intuition, association, and joy. What is offered in the footnotes of the book he’s currently reading? What has he been able to pick up at the library or local bookstore? What does he learn from the people he cleans for, from their extensive libraries? As soon as I was able to, I started sending books home to him that I thought he’d enjoy. And like most auto-didacts, he reads everything I send. He does not discriminate and has no institutional or hierarchised training in him that means he believes any book or writer is not for him.
 

I find many mainstream or popular accounts of working-class life difficult to relate to, or unrealistic, because of the paradox that exists in my father. A working-class man, born to farmers, deprived of any significant or structured education, who has educated himself independently for no other reason than a deep-seated curiosity and desire to learn. To acknowledge and display the above anecdote(s) are perhaps to use the expectations of my father’s class and work for emotional or intellectual effect, as though he is an anomaly, when I know him not to be, which is a depressing indication of what the intellectual expectations of the working classes are. Even, perhaps, what I expect of the people in my family and communities: that cleaners, dinner ladies, checkout workers, etc., might not be readers. And as much as arts council slogans and generous community initiatives try to tell me otherwise, I know these expectations exist because it is something vocally reinforced to me as I move around the professional world in which I work. That as a person with a job situated in the arts in which I am paid for my labour, I have succeeded or even had to excel to get where I am today considering (in spite of?) my background, as if having a paid job in the industry I have chosen to work in – because it is within a space not associated with the working classes – completes the untethering from my origins I must have spent my life working towards. And, as a bonus, that this is a cause for celebration. The insinuation is, I have escaped (I would like to talk more on the idea of working in the arts as a gift, choice, or prize, but don’t have the space here). By positioning my own entry into the cultured middle classes as someone who has excelled, a discrepancy is born between myself and my origins, as someone who has broken a class boundary, when in reality I don’t believe this to be a possibility anymore. And when I say ‘anymore’, I don’t mean that ‘moving class’ was once a possibility, now impossible, thanks to the governance of the last decade (although the three mandates of Conservative power have certainly worsened things on multiple fronts), but instead that whereas I once believed this to be possible, through experience I now know it not to be.

~

To return to publishing, there is a deep-seated, complex, and classist anti-intellectualism that pervades the UK that fears difference, difficulty, and experimentation. I find this anti-intellectualism most prominently in middle-class surrounds, an outlook that fears or ignores (or doesn’t believe in) the working reader, like my father, who is hungry to think critically and with complexity. Nowhere is this proven to me more than those coded binaries in contemporary publishing of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of ‘accessible’ vs ‘difficult’ work, something that I believe to be directly linked to the class discrepancy in the publishing industry and the creation of a mythos of what the ‘general reader’ can tolerate, driven by incalculably Oxbridge educated, middle- and upper- class people who insist on diluting intellectual publishing.

 

A common note in acquisition meetings at publishing houses is that a book is too ‘academic’, that the audience for a work ‘doesn’t exist’. That a book does not know ‘how to be marketed’. I have found that these books, usually the more formally innovative and boundary pushing works, to be authored by historically marginalised writers, who, now and in the recent past, are simultaneously cynically and vampirically exploited for their identities. There’s now a vulture-like focus on ‘discovering’ these authors, who  fit the ‘accessible’ (read ‘good’) bill – working class writers, black and brown writers, writers in precarious circumstances, trans and queer writers.

I read a submission by an author who was working class and wrote beautifully, with a plain and stark economy, of things anticipated of a working-class life: violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, evocatively, cleverly and sparsely told. The agent tagged the document saying that ‘individuals from the same background as this author rarely publish books’, implying this as a selling point or USP. It also said to me: if you are working class, there’s a path for you to publish your work in larger publishing houses. It is preferable that you talk plainly (simply, concisely) about the material connotations of poverty that are expected, recognisable, entertaining, morally assuaging, and marketable for the middle classes who will be profiting from your doing so, either by publishing your story or consuming it.  

This path also makes concessions to an imagined audience who ‘might not otherwise understand’ the book they’re reading. The publishing industry is built on cobwebby and arcane rules. There is a pervading, top-down and patronising mythos of the ‘general public’ or ‘general reader’ – an idea peddled about who can tolerate what under the premise that general audiences aren’t able to manage complicated concepts, formally or linguistically innovative books, or other challenging works, precedents for what is deemed to be accessible set by the middle-class anti-intellectuals that decide it. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy was a seminal work that ripped through these expectations. Lynsey Hanley, in her startling introduction, describes how Hoggart saw this oncoming homogenisation of literature:

He saw where class divisions could arise, based more on notions of taste and receptiveness to a certain kind of bold, simplified marketeers appeal… he saw how snobbery could become institutionalised, rather than banished, by popular cultural products … which sought to not to stretch newly literate minds but to cater to their existing likes and dislikes. 

Hanley goes on to describe these arbiters of taste as ‘classless’. Anyone who is working class knows what that means. 


In Dan Fox’s Pretentiousness, he interrogates this specific kind of middle-class anti-intellectual streak, claiming that ‘anti-intellectualism is a kind of snobbery … The anti-intellectual is often anxious not to be marked as part of an educated elite.’

This dumbing down that he deems ‘Prolier-than-thou’, is ‘insidious’ because it ‘simply reaffirms class prejudice’. While not only being a patronising way of setting terms and expectations from working-class writers, it is also an attempt at class-parody. The Guardian’s reporting on an LSE study from 2021 claimed that 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class, and that a quarter of these people – whose parents worked in professional jobs – also identified as working class. This imposition of the accessible, the ‘good’, could be a way for middle-class publishers to live what they believe to be their meritocratic truth. When asked about who is allowed to call themselves working or middle class now, I feel confused about where I sit. I don’t believe I am working class anymore, but feel limbo-stuck, unable to return, and prevented from being where I thought I was supposed to be. I did not transcend my class, I just complicated it.   

~

Independent, small publishers and presses have been doing the work for innovative and working-class writers for years, but outside of and usually unrecognised by the demands of an industry that – and here we come back to clarity – otherwise flattens literary complexity for this idea of what is clear, plain, ‘easily understood’. The unspoken line in the above agent’s pitch is that these kinds of writers haven’t been historically published ‘by us’. In the poet Ian Patterson’s review of Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, he talks about a new crop of writers working in ‘experimental fiction’, including Claire-Louise Bennett and Eimear McBride, who orbit conversations about working class writing and whom, Patterson notes, are both published by independent presses. And Ann Quin is relevant here. According to Jennifer Hodgson in a beautiful introduction to The Unmapped Country, Quin was a writer who was ‘restless’, drawn to experiences of ‘difference, extremity and disorientation’, whose stories and fragments are murky, voyeuristic and formally off-kilter, filled with sudden blazes of intensity, occult images and erotic artifice’. Quin’s financial precarity often accompanies discussion of her work. As Hodgson writes, she ‘was of a rare breed in British writing: experimental, working class and a woman’, clarifying that she was ‘perpetually broke.’ 

Patterson places Quin’s experimentation in another context, stating that those most interested in the kind of work she was writing at the time were ‘mostly poets… with a vision of poetry that was opposed to the limited horizons of the Movement poets… open to the influence of Europeans, especially the surrealists and Paul Celan.’ He notes that Quin’s writing sits most easily within an internationalist framework, and that she was critical of what he terms ‘English narrowness’ and, quoting her, its ‘safe comfortable rituals, the monotony that keeps the fantasies moving’. In this way, we can think of innovative writers with immediate material constraints, like Quin, neglected for years and then ‘rediscovered’ – but always on the peripheries – as telling us more about this narrow idea of accessibility in British publishing; it feeds into or perhaps helps support a particular sense of English patriotism and parochialism that, island-like, fears and makes monsters of the other. 

There is much scholarship on how formal innovation can be born from circumstance. Material poverty, in Quin’s case, perhaps shaped her freewheeling collages. I also think of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, the Chinese-American poet of curated fragmentation and long line philosophy, with poems often interrupted by the daily caring responsibilities in her life. Or Bernadette Mayer’s seminal long poem Midwinter Day, a book partly made up of a woman’s intellectual musings while preparing her children’s dinner. Megan Simpson, writing about Berssenbrugge’s work, said that:

Some attention has also been given to the poetic practices of women writers, beginning with claims first made in the late 1970s … that innovated textual strategies such as fragmentation and disjunction can be traced to the frequent interruptions and distractions to which many women writers – especially those with children – experience. 

~

 

A friend described my experience of class as ‘whiplash’. I had begun my life in working class communities and had been catapulted into the middle and upper classes on account of the kind of life I was interested in; one in books. I would also say that I was part of the education drive under Tony Blair’s government, a deranged moment in time for many reasons, but that there was a sense in the air that social mobility was possible was probably the main reason I continued my education.

Another friend at a different time told me my experience of class would of course be distorted, I had chosen to work in the culture industry in the UK, an industry full of the wealthy. What did I expect? As if to say – this world isn’t and was never for you. More than this, I was choosing to work in the way that I wanted, with uncompromising literary texts, with work that is difficult, ‘academic’, or within a lineage of formalised education – or if we’re working with the codes I am used to in mainstream publishing, what is ‘bad’. The contradictions abound.

~

I grew up under my dad’s belief and his word that my education would be the most important thing for my life. That if I educated myself, I had chances at a better life, chances that he never had. I was a pretentious and well-read child, bullied at school for my pretensions, had the vague idea that committing myself to study (which at the time, nebulously meant to read books) would ‘pay off’ in the long run but with no defined idea of what that pay off would be, or how long the run. I note that this idea of a better life was always material, not cultural. We were always able to find ways to educate ourselves, but there was the belief this would, somehow, miraculously, have a financial pay off too.

As I child, I listened to my dad, and believed all he said was true. Now as an adult, I am affirmed in the part about getting an education being one of the most important things of my life – but the idea that it would give me a better material life has not yet been proved. I instead dwell between worlds, those of my working-class origins, and the educated middle, upper and professional classes I find myself among. I rarely if ever meet anyone like me in the rooms I stand in.

I believe the conditions and expectations of being working class are intellectually weaponised against us. When I am in receipt of the comment that I’ve done well to be where I am in life, when all I did was complete a degree, attain a professional job I’ve held for twelve years in which I sit behind a desk and edit, I know what is codified in those comments. You, or people like you, are not supposed to be here. I want a democratisation of and access to cultured space to be the most normal, uncelebrated thing in the world, something feeling more and more estranged from my hopes as the UK government continues its assault on learning for learning’s sake, let alone cultivating the space to be made for complexity, difficulty, and strangeness. 

Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland and God Complex, both published by Faber. She works as an editor and lecturer in London. 

Return To Issue