In Defence of Book Snobbery

Matt Haig, a novelist and Twitter personage, recently posted a list of 30 Things to Tell a Book-Snob, to general delight. The consensus was that this was one in the eye for the highbrows, viewed as turtle-necked Martin Amis enthusiasts with thin lips and sneers of cold command. While I applaud much of what Matt says –about the weird privileging of realism and the way literary fiction pretends to itself it isn’t another genre- something about it bothered me.

My first concern is that Matt’s list –ostensibly anti-snob- seems to have a problem with pretension  Now for me, the act of consciously making art is always going to be a pretentious one. Shakespeare, who Matt approvingly cites, would probably have stayed a glove-maker if he hadn’t had the pretension to do otherwise. Matt and I are both Northern writers, and have probably inherited that area’s distrust of the Affected and “Fancy”. But as artists will be called pretentious even if they write like Tony Parsons they may as well embrace it. Would you rather be Oasis, grimly clinging to the mundane, or a dazzling butterfly like David Bowie? Pretension is what art is all about.

A fear –of fanciness, of the highbrow- infects the whole list, despite its many good points. So we are told approvingly that Shakespeare “didn’t go to university”, as if Shakespeare were a bluff Richard Branson type rather than one of the most complex and genuinely snobbish writers in English. We are told that Matt’s attempt at being “highbrow” was unsuccessful as though this were a general rule. There is much talk of magic and wonder and how “many of the greatest writers were children’s writers.” The overall tendency seems to be to that a book should be easily understood by almost anyone who picks it up, and engage the same parts of the mind as a conjuring show. We are told that walls are tyrannous, which seems unfair to the vital role they play in keeping us dry and warm. As an example of the universal artwork, Matt gives us the roof of the Sistine Chapel, which we are told every human being would have the same reaction to. Every human being apart from iconoclastic Protestants, Salafist Muslims and atheists, presumably.

I can’t help feeling this list confuses snobbery, which we can all oppose, with judgement, which we shouldn’t. As readers, unless we are entirely indiscriminate, we form value judgements and preferences, we make decisions. Is this snobbery? Only if we let it be. But to like everything is equivalent to liking nothing.

My main gripe with the list though is that I am unclear who it is targeting. The polo-necked Harold Blooms of this world are a dying breed. I am at the stage of trying to sell a novel myself and thus far no agents have asked me to make it more wilfully un-commercial and complex, less plot driven and “universal”. The non-snobs won- they teamed up with post-modern relativism and market forces and they kicked the highbrows out of town. Richard and Judy triumphed and TS Eliot’s boys took a hell of a kicking. We live in an age where Booker Prize judges calls for zippily accessible “thumping-good-reads”, where preferring James Joyce to JK Rowling is a mark of snobbery and where Kindles let everyone read porn on the tube. In kicking the book snob, Matt’s list kicks a strawman when he’s down.