28 Feb 2013 11:34:46
There's a nice quote on the back of this book from a review by Jenny Turner which goes: "I like Richard Sennett in the way some people like Bob Dylan … He has such style and heart." As I said, nice. But those three dots elide these words from the original review: "I know that he writes a lot and that his stuff is uneven, but when he's good he's just so brilliant, and even when he's less brilliant …" You can see why the publishers skipped that bit, but it does give more of the story: which is that Sennett is more or less beyond criticism. A professor of sociology at the LSE, musician, novelist and unapologetic pipe-smoker, he has for 40-odd years been writing learned, lucid books about society: what's wrong with it, and how to make it better. He concentrates on cities and how we live in them; and so, how we live with other people. His writing is like his ideal city: not too formal, approachable, and a pleasant jumble rather than an austere and imposing procession of made-for-purpose edifices. He is the go-to prof when you want someone who can make a jargon-free case against, say, soullessness in urban planning.
Then again, who would be in favour of it these days, apart from a few mad relics from the days of brutalism? There is a problem with Together, in that Sennett's immense frame of reference somehow makes the whole book rather diffuse, and gives us the odd impression that it is in favour of almost everything. If I may borrow a trick of Sennett's and use a small personal anecdote to help put my point across: I was speaking to a friend about this book while reading it, and she asked, quite reasonably: "What's it about?" I found myself rather stumped, and was reduced to murmuring something about how Sennett thinks we should all get along better together, which, last time I checked, was not the most controversial of positions.
The book's subtitle is "the rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation", and it goes back and forth, from ancient Athens to modern New York, from the court of the Sun King to Sennett's grandchildren's school in East London, where the students are obliged to shake hands with each other after playing competitive sports or taking part in an exam. He finds this charming, and useful; but then, a page earlier, he has described David and Victoria Beckham's "christening" of their children at a party of fabulous extravagance, along with the father's now-famous line "I definitely want Brooklyn to be christened, but I don't know into what religion yet", with barely a murmur of disapproval beyond "the priests scorned the Beckhams' attempt to create a ritual for themselves … [they] have a certain psychological truth on their side". Well, indeed. For one thing, whatever you think about priests, you can't deny that there's actually only one religion that you can be christened into.
And yet the book is a pleasure, all the way through – unless you're in the mood to pick a fight with a benign, herbivorous liberalism. His hero and model is Montaigne, and if Sennett is not, like Montaigne, a liberal humanist then he is nothing. Although he was born in a housing project in Chicago, it is no accident that he has made his home in the UK: he praises the way that, over here, we qualify our convictions in conversation with many a "perhaps", "possibly" and "I would have thought" – although this was an impression he formed as a young music student around 50 years ago.
Things have changed a bit, as the opening page makes clear, when a pal of his grandson hijacks the primary school's PA system to play Lily Allen's "Fuck You (Very Much)". (Interestingly, he confines the information that the song is a tirade against the BNP to the endnotes, which are rather hidden away.) But as a gentle plea for the virtues of co-operation, the book enacts his own position, made clear at the end, that humanity will learn to get along in spite of "the existing social order". I really do hope he's right.
