What We Can Know - 9

T he humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter – it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis. But we count ourselves a lucky generation. Together, science and technology (a technology largely devoted to the search for materials or their substitutes) devour most of the meagre feast, and we take the crumbs. But historically, these leftovers are almost sufficient, and we do not cost much anyway. Our major libraries and museums are relatively safe at their various elevations. Everything that ever flowed through the internet is now held centrally in New Lagos and has been well catalogued. Advances in quantum computing and mathematics have cracked open all that was once encrypted. I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

Yes, for now we are safe. Some years ago, as a bunch of ambitious young academics with a project, we fought a battle which, seen through the rosy prism of success, we still love to celebrate. But how self-serving, the bitterness of the opposition, how depressed our spirits were sometimes. We called our dream ‘90–30’ for short. Our plan was to set up a small department nestling in the folds of the Humanities Complex, along one of its shabby and interminable corridors. Our official title: ‘The Literature and History Joint Programme in Postgraduate Studies, 1990 to 2030’. Immediately, our elders, the deans and professors, rejected our proposal. The period was too narrow! The great wars came before and after those forty years! The Inundation had not happened, the internet and the Derangement had hardly begun. The finest literature belonged to the 2050s and 60s as Mabel Fisk established her ascendance. The old professors were jealous, defending their own turfs, anxious to ensure that any extra funding came their way, not ours.

Among much else, they resented our youth, and they were right to. We would never have set this down in our submissions or even admitted it among ourselves, but it was precisely our youth that drew us to the period. What brilliant invention and bone-headed greed. What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humour: people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday; buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides. But they also spelled out the human genome, invented the internet, made a start on AI and placed a beautiful golden telescope a million miles out in space. Then, of course, hardly worth repeating, they watched amazed as the decades sped by and the Derangement gathered pace, the weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike. As science extended its domain, religious belief and conspiracy theories swelled. They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain. We thrill in horror at their feistiness. They were loud, hungry, reckless and free, except for the hundreds of millions they left behind. We longed to study their literature and times with our students. We hoped the kids would share our passion for the furious energy of those times, and that they would throw off their own constraints and the timorous orthodoxies that hobble our institutions.

We had come a long way since our ‘Politics and Literature of the Inundation’. We understood how the departments worked, and how to get round the professors. We knew how to teach. At last, we won through, and every year since it began, ‘90–30’ has been oversubscribed. Other universities have followed us, with variants. Most take the view that 2030–90 at the Pennines Institute covers even greater tragedies and splendours. I never spoke about it while we were fighting our battles, but I intended to write a book about our period on its own terms, not describe it with historical or literary neutrality or through the misty lens of our own regrets. On that, I failed. The regrets were impossible to shift. My ambition, however vague, was to present the times as if I were living them. The sources were rich and diverse, the material was copious. It was while I was preparing the ‘Francis Blundy and his Circle’ seminars that a clearer plan took shape. I would let the poet himself be my vehicle, my vector. I would live with the Blundys, share with them that vital evening and recount the story, the journey through the decades of a lost poem. Where the source material did not exist, surely it was permissible to make educated guesses about the subjective states and lines of thought of people who had died a hundred years ago. Perhaps it was not. I had many changes of mind. Unprofessional to make things up, arid not to. I thought I was set free when a colleague suggested that the full title of our course pointed the way and granted permission. Let history and literature conjoin. Set out the facts, the story as told by the participants. When faced with the essential but undisclosed inner life, invent within the confines of the probable . I thanked him. However, in biography the price of invention is unease, then guilt, amplified in my case by Rose’s scepticism. It was not my business, she insisted, to invent.