Higher educationReviewPeter Ackroyd argues that immigration - of people, ideas, styles - is the key to Englishness in his idiosyncratic yet deeply political survey, AlbionAlbion: The Origins of the English Imagination
by Peter Ackroyd
516pp, Chatto, £25
At first glance, Peter Ackroyd writing on the middle ages is about as plausible as Will Self publishing a biography of Chaucer or Irvine Welsh issuing a scholarly monograph on The Dream of the Rood. He seems too modern, too urban, too camp and cosy to want to wander the whale-roads with Beowulf or rough it with the pilgrims to Canterbury. How could the devotee of that strenuously postmodernist poet JH Prynne and the author of Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag come to feel a spiritual kinship with the Anglo-Saxons?
But the sequence of authors celebrated in Ackroyd's novels and biographies - Pound, Eliot, Wilde, Dickens, Chatterton, Blake, Milton, Thomas More - has followed a steady progression backwards through time. And for all the rationalist sophistication of his intelligence, he has long been drawn to darker forces in the cultural psyche - whether the mystic lines along which Hawksmoor built his churches or the apocalyptic visions of Blake. His last book, London: The Biography, was less a guide to the modern capital than a paean to its sacred nooks. And his new one follows a similar journey, back towards the primal ooze from which English poetry, fiction, art, architecture and music have sprung.
What's modern about the Anglo-Saxons doesn't concern him; what's Anglo-Saxon about the moderns does. He begins with the image of a tree, as revered by the druids, and watches it growing through English culture - Milton's monumental oak, John Clare's elms, the great horse-chestnut in Jane Eyre. Other national emblems follow: stone crosses, rolling hills, illuminated manuscripts, breaking waves, sleeping giants. The message is one of continuity, the ruling motif a circle. How it was in 900 is how it still is, more or less: "a native spirit persists through time and circumstance".
Books about the Englishness of the English have a habit of turning ugly. They emphasise the earthiness and muscularity of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and deplore as weak and "unnatural" any attempt to import the soft, decadent fluency of the Italians or the French. Ackroyd sounds a worryingly xenophobic note when he reminds us that "no other European nation has kept its boundaries intact over so many centuries", as though unbreachability might be the clue to our uniqueness. In fact, his conclusion is almost the opposite.
It isn't our resistance to foreign influences that makes us English, he argues, but our ability to assimilate them: "Englishness is the principle of appropriation." We're a "mungrell" nation - hybrid, heterogenous, adaptive, accumulative, eclectic. Forget blood or genes. National traits come with the territory. The common ground we have is the ground itself. Placism, not racism, should be the slogan.
Many of the English continuities which Ackroyd identifies are those which Defoe, Cobbett, Engels, Orwell, Pevsner and other guides to the national character have identified too. In temperament, we tend to be melancholy (perhaps because of the damp climate). When we express ourselves, we prefer miniaturism and understatement, irony and self-deprecation. Our narratives "abandon the messy complications of love or sentiment in favour of action or spectacle". Our humour is bawdy and farcical. We're pragmatists, empirical, distrustful of theory (Dr Johnson kicking that stone to refute Berkeley). The local and circumstantial move us, but not the universal or high-flown. We're good at portrait-painting and biography. We love our gardens. Shakespeare is our greatest writer. No surprises there.
More original is the emphasis on our spirituality. England is a land of ghosts, Ackroyd says, and rather than condemn our spirit of antiquarianism as unhealthy (all that poking about in ruins, all that reverence for the olde worlde, all those ghost stories), he sees it as radical, a way of reconnecting with pristine energies.
Despite our practicality, we're also a nation of dreamers ("English is the language of vision"), with a tradition not only of seers and recusants but of fairies and elves. Perhaps it's the Celtic influence, he suggests, or the foggy climate, or being an island. Apropos the last, he quotes a letter from a 12th-century French cleric, which argues that because the English are surrounded by water "unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds". Whatever the source of our visions, they're important to Ackroyd - and proof that the English imagination, so often caricatured as plodding, is, well, imaginative.
Our language is another hybrid. Instead of purity of diction, Ackroyd celebrates promiscuity, the absorption into English of Celtic, Scandinavian, Norse, Latin and French. He reinterprets the dark ages as a period of enlightened scholarship and literacy, when Englishmen looked to Europe for knowledge of themselves.
King Alfred is seen setting an example in the ninth century, by himself translating or commissioning others to translate "books which are necessary for all men to know". The various translators of the Bible - Wycliff, Tyndale, the 50 scholars who worked on the King James version - are similarly commended for importing idioms from Greek and Hebrew ("rise and shine", "sour grapes", "the skin of my teeth", and so on) and giving them proverbial life in English. The global status of the English language is due to this "extraordinary adaptive ability".
Our art and literature, likewise, owe as much to outside influence as indigenous genius. Ackroyd quotes Christopher Wren: "Our English Artists are dull enough at Inventions but when once a foreigne patterne is sett, they imitate so well that commonly they exceed the originall." We exceed, or succeed, in part by mixing high and low, in defiance of classical unities.
From the Mystery plays to Jacobean theatre to Dickens to music-hall, Ackroyd traces this same bold "mingle-mangle" - and behind it discerns an egalitarian, democratic spirit, an instinct for social levelling. Shakespeare is the greatest mixer of them all.
London is similarly heterogenous. It's the place where contraries meet, with (as Dickens put it) "...Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence... all treading on each other and crowding together". Ackroyd makes passing note of a specific London style - cynical, aggressive, gossipy, fashion-driven, sensationalist, caricatural. But London is also the home of visionaries (Langland, Milton, Blake, Turner) and he stresses its contiguity with the rest of the nation.
He seems more comfortable writing about it than he does the provinces, and omits to discuss any rift between capital and countryside, let alone between social classes. But he can't be accused of ignoring the north: Bede (Jarrow), Caedmon (Whitby), Rolle (Pickering), the Brontës (Haworth) and Wordsworth (Grasmere) loom large, and the last name on his prefatory roll-call of English talents is David Hockney (Bradford).
The status of this list is hard to fathom. Inclusion on it doesn't guarantee discussion in the text (there's nothing about Hockney, or about Frank Auerbach, Bridget Riley and Howard Hodgkin, who precede him). But omission doesn't preclude an appearance: Larkin and Hughes get a mention, though Auden is the youngest writer listed; ditto Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès, though no composer after Benjamin Britten makes the cut. Perhaps the list is simply there to provoke. But it's not contentious in the way that Harold Bloom's list of canonical western writers is contentious. It seems oddly dutiful and sensible.
Good sense isn't what readers look for in Ackroyd, and it's his digressions and speculative quirks which produce the liveliest writing here. One section considers the place of women in England before the Norman conquest, arguing that they were far more secure and powerful then than subsequently - they had the right to walk out of an unsatisfactory marriage, for instance - and suggesting that "the visionary fervour of Mary Wollstonecraft, or of Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, was perhaps in part inspired by latent folk-memories from the time of the Anglo-Saxons".
Another section finds examples of cross-dressing in English churches, theatres, pubs and and protest movements, and contrasts our tolerance of sexual deviance with the censoriousness of the French, where the penalty for transvestism was public burning.
Having to canter briskly through 1,200 years of Eng Lit makes Ackroyd strangely impersonal at times, but personal allusions are smuggled in. One chapter is called "English Music", the title of one of his novels. Another is headed "Prolix and Prolific", and though notionally about Browne and Burton it too seems self-referential. This, after all, is the 10th book which Ackroyd has published since 1992. In total, they amount to 3,500 pages: an average of 350 pages a year. To produce a page a day for a decade might not seem excessive, but writers also need time to research, and Albion doesn't skimp on research any more than London, Dickens or Blake did. Ackroyd's output makes Anthony Burgess look as niggardly as Philip Larkin.
Inevitably, he has his toshy moments. To say that Shakespeare "comes upon felicities in the most sublime combinations of words" is to say nothing, floridly. Some of the generalisations on the national character are dodgy, too. As he admits, "certain qualities defined here as peculiarly English are not uniquely so", and it will be an unusual reader of Albion who doesn't exclaim at some point "But surely that's more Russian?" (or German or Scandinavian or French). "England is a land of dreams"; and other lands aren't? The English see themselves as God's elect nation; and other nations don't?
Yet Ackroyd does say something vitally important about England - that it "relies upon constant immigration, of people or ideas or styles, in order to survive". In doing so, he restores to the word "English" an inclusiveness it hasn't had for years. He's the least political of men. Yet in its idiosyncratic fashion this is a deeply political book.
· Blake Morrison's Things My Mother Never Told Me is published by Chatto
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