What is it with certain names in the catalogue of our culture, that they should throb and flicker with such a radioactive glow of impressiveness? That was the question put to me a couple of years ago by my friend Hubert van den Bergh, before he reeled off a list of further names that invariably sent a frisson of fear pulsing through him every time he came across them. I responded with a cry of, "I feel exactly the same way!" We embraced then and may both have sobbed a little. It can be tough to be fazed by Foucault and stymied by Sontag.
After we had regained our sangfroid, we resolved to compile a list of these names, find out something about each of them, and write up our discoveries into a book. We had only one criterion, which was that every name included had to be one that made us personally feel uneasy, unquiet or queasy – in most cases because we knew literally nothing about the person in question.
Contrary to our expectations the research turned out to be a blast. This was partly because we kept stumbling on such terrific stories about many of these characters, which helped to humanise them. Did you know, for example, that the reformer Martin Luther rescued his future wife from a nunnery, concealed among some barrels of herring? (Did she still retain that fishy aroma on their wedding night?) Or that the painter Wassily Kandinsky invented abstract art after his pixieish girlfriend, Gabriele Munter, displayed one of his pictures the wrong way up? (The great man dropped to his knees and wept.) Or that the poet TS Eliot added that second initial to his name because, otherwise, it would have spelt “toilet” backwards?
But there’s more to How To Sound Cultured than this. It offers too – or so we hope – an entertaining introduction to some of the most brilliant, resilient, rambunctious and, in more than a few cases, morally disreputable characters to have stalked the pages of history (the playwright August Strindberg ticks all those boxes). And it can be used not only as a manual of how readers might toss these names casually into any conversation (every entry begins with a helpful “usage note”), but also as a guide to that testing question of which names are best to drop, and which are arguably not so good.
Here, as a foretaste, are five of my personal favourites, followed by some that might be best avoided.
FIVE OF THE BEST
Paul Eluard, poet (1895-1952)
In the light of the recent attacks in Paris, the simple message of the ode Liberté, by the poet and Resistance fighter Paul Eluard, has taken on a new resonance. “On my schoolbooks, / On my desk, on the trees, / On the sand, on the snow, / I write your name.” And so on. During the second World War, RAF pilots judged this passionate poem to be so inspiring that they dropped copies of it onto Nazi-occupied France, in the hope of boosting morale.
Lee Miller, photographer (1907-1977)
Beautiful as well as gifted, Lee Miller started out as a photographer’s model, then took up the camera herself. Following the Allied army into Berlin at the end of the second World War, she had herself snapped, stark naked, in Adolf Hitler’s bath, her muddy boots disdainfully discarded on the bathroom floor. The unforgettable image has been interpreted by some as an emblem of the triumph of culture over barbarism.
Samuel Beckett, playwright (1906-1989)
What a man! A novelist and poet, as well as a playwright, he chose to write in French, which wasn’t his mother tongue, so he wouldn’t get carried away and use flowery language. (Score extra points when mentioning his most famous play, Waiting For Godot, by referring to it by its original French title, En Attendant Godot.) As if this wasn’t enough, Beckett carries the distinction of being the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. He played a couple of games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire as a left-arm medium-pace bowler.
Frank Gehry, architect (b.1929)
If you think architecture is boring, read on, because Frank Gehry might just change your mind. As the most cursory of Google Images searches will reveal, his buildings look crazed, as if they were the creation of a mad alien, or they tilt and list, as if on the point of collapse. But at the same time, they achieve a kind of beauty that is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Check out his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which is perhaps the best-known example of his work.
Thomas Piketty, economist (b.1971)
Over the summer, Ed Miliband, who was then the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, was often heard to claim that he was “in the middle” of reading Capital in the 21st Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty. History doesn’t relate if Miliband ever finished reading the 700-page book, but no matter. You’re on safe ground, too, if you claim you’re “in the middle of it”. Piketty’s central argument is that unless the state intervenes, the gap between rich and poor will inevitably continue to widen.
FIVE OF THE WORST
Oscar Wilde, playwright (1854-1900)
The wonderful Wilde has been so often quoted, by so many people, that it’s now a cliche to quote him at all.
Albert Einstein, physicist (1879-1955)
Like Wilde, Einstein is a bit “obvious”. (Ditto, I’m sorry to say, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce.) Also it might be best to avoid almost any conversation about nuclear physics, quantum mechanics or special relativity, for fear of getting in over your head.
Ezra Pound, poet (1885-1972)
This American poet is regarded as one of the fathers of literary modernism. But you should be wary of expressing too much admiration for the great man, since he ended his life as a sweating, swearing, swivel-eyed Fascist and anti-Semite.
Stephen Hawking, physicist (b.1942)
Since Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for his brilliant turn as Professor Hawking in The Theory of Everything, the latter name has become a bit of an obvious one to drop. Give it a few years. (And see also the second caveat under Einstein.)
Arthur Rimbaud, poet (1854-1891)
Some people seem to think that, if you’re a genius, it doesn’t much matter if you’re also an absolute bastard. But Rimbaud took it too far. The decadent French poet once defecated on a table merely because he was bored, and on another occasion he spiked someone’s drink with sulphuric acid for a laugh. A very nasty piece of work.
How to Sound Cultured: Master the 250 Names that Intellectuals Love to Drop Into Conversation by Thomas W Hodgkinson and Hubert van den Bergh is out now, Icon Books, £12.99
