The late sixteenth-century surge in the number of elite visitors to London was associated with attendance at court or Parliament, the pursuit of suits through the central law courts and study at the Inns of Court. The number of students enrolled at the Inns of Court rose rapidly, and Parliament, which was meeting more frequently than it had done since the Reformation Parliament of 1529–36, attracted at least a further 1,000 people. Because legal and political business brought an influx of members of the landed elite to the capital there was a social dimension too as individuals renewed their acquaintanceship with family, friends and associates from other parts of the country. Indeed, so many gentlemen were travelling to and staying in the capital, often for months at a time, that the government became alarmed, worrying lest the distractions would lead them to neglect their public duties and forget their responsibility to provide hospitality. Cavendish was no exception to the trend, spending up to two-thirds of the year in the capital. In the three years 1599–1601 he lodged in London for a recorded total of sixty-two weeks and five days. Cavendish, like others, timed his visits to London to coincide with the law terms, so he usually stayed there between May and early July and from October to the Christmas period and perhaps beyond. If he travelled back to Derbyshire for Christmas, he had returned to the capital by the end of January. Cavendish's long stays in London were not unusual, as the example of Lady Margaret Hoby attests. In her diary she records three visits to London from Hackness Hall in the period October 1600 to March 1605, which lasted five months (8 October 1600–18 March 1601), three months (13 March–30 June 1604: her husband alone) and four months (11 November 1604–7 March 1605).

Accommodation in London

The influx of seasonal visitors like Cavendish put pressure on the available stock of suitable lodgings, a demand that the erection of new housing in the West End partly met. Between October 1586 and 1601 Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, leased a house near Ivy Bridge from Mr Fortescue for a rent that went up from £12 to £15 for a half-year over the course of the fifteen years.

BOOKS ON TOPICS LIKE Milton and Machiavelli, George Eliot and Auguste Comte, Hawthorne and New England transcendentalism fill library shelves. But it is fairly clear that intellectual history can play only a marginal role in literary criticism. After all, poems and novels do not make arguments, nor do they develop and examine concepts logically, nor do they invent or deploy analytic methods, which are the kinds of things that most texts in the intellectual historian's archive do do. This remains true, however much literary texts may be shaped by the concepts around them, however much they may adhere to idea-driven programs.

This structural disjunction between intellectual context and literary work took a new turn when, from the nineteenth century on, advanced intellectual life in the West became routinely housed in universities. After the Second World War, this process intensified as higher education was extended into populations. As a result, when intellectual histories of the postwar period come to be written, they will mainly consist of histories of academic disciplines. At the same time, the old (classically based) “liberal arts” were transformed into what we now call the “humanities,” a transdiscipline under whose shade an extra-mural reading public of university graduates took shape. This public retained some interest in professional scholarship and was able to keep abreast of it in journals like The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, established from the sixties on. More importantly, it appreciated fictions which were themselves shaped by the academic humanities, a genre that I will call “humanities fiction.”

For literature, the academicization of knowledge marked a break in the history of taste. This rupture occurred in Cambridge in the 1920s when, in the wake of T. S. Eliot's pathbreaking literary-critical essays, a small group of professional critics (I.A. Richards, William Empson, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis) developed a mode of criticism which displaced older forms of philology, rhetoric, literary history, and upper-class belle-lettrism (i.e., the amateur, or amateur-seeming, culture of literary appreciation at that time most associated with Bloomsbury). Its primary method, “close reading,” would form the basis of almost all subsequent academic literary pedagogy, if not of scholarship. By the 1970s, when enrollments in English as a proportion of total undergraduate enrollments peaked, a number of factions had appeared within the discipline, each with their own theoretical formulation, method, and (implicitly) cultural-political orientation.

HOW DOES PLAY relate to social order? Cultural and aesthetic theories of play vary significantly in their attempts to answer this question. The gamut runs from theories that equate play with order to approaches that declare play an anarchic, transgressive quality. According to Johan Huizinga, “play creates order, is order.” From his point of view, cultural order originates as play and cannot be distinguished from it. The other extreme is marked by concepts of play that have cropped up in the wake of surrealism and the avant-garde movements: theorists such as Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois associate play with ecstasy, vertiginous intoxication, and an uneconomic excess of expenditure (“dépense”) that disrupts the structures of society and imperils its legal fabric. In between these extreme positions, there are numerous theories that ascribe to play a mediatory function. From their perspective, play either represents a different mode of order, a non-coercive alternative to the repressive order of the state, or it marks a temporary suspension of order that allows for its regeneration. The first variant is exemplified by Friedrich Schiller's famous theory of aesthetic education: Schiller envisages an “aesthetic state” (contrasting with the “dynamic state” on the one hand, the “ethical state” on the other) in which human interaction is modeled on the relationship between players in a game. Victor Turner advocates the second variant: he conceives of play as an indispensable “liminoid” element of society, a ritually sanctioned ludic breakdown of cultural order that serves the purpose of its structural renewal and restabilization.

Since play is intimately linked to concepts of order and disorder, theories of play as well as ludic practices must always engage with questions of social justice and political power, even when they pretend to restrict themselves to the aesthetic dimension of play (such as in Kantian aesthetics). The aesthetics of play necessarily implies an ethics and a politics of play. It is this interrelationship between the ethical and the aesthetic that seems to draw J. M. Coetzee to the ludic sphere. In his thoughts about play he focuses on the point where one “can no longer distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic,” to quote from his correspondence with the American novelist Paul Auster.

ONE OF THE FOUNDING CONCEPTS in modern autobiography is the understanding that autobiographical truth is connected to the ideal of sincerity. So much in modern autobiography has its origins in Rousseau's Confessions, particularly through the idea that autobiographical writing is fundamentally an act of persuasion, one that persuades an audience that it embodies a sincere realization of the self. “Rousseau's interest,” Jean Starobinski has argued, “begins with the question: Why does this inner feeling … not find its echo in the according of immediate recognition?” And Rousseau's text, Starobinski continues, therefore must convey a voice “supple enough and varied enough to tell the diversity, the contradictions, the slight details, the miniscule nuances, the interlocking of tiny perceptions whose tissue constitutes the unique existence of Jean-Jacques.” There is much that distances Rousseau from contemporary autobiographical writing, and there are of course very different ways of interpreting Rousseau's significance as a confessional writer. But the notion that the task of autobiography is to establish a written presence capable of winning recognition as uniquely his or her own finds its equivalent in the injunction repeatedly made by life-writing instructors on MFAs to “find your voice,” to create the persona that is you. As Vivian Gornick explains in The Situation and the Story, a how-to guide that accompanies her MFA course, successful autobiographies derive from “an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight.”

The challenge to this assumption dates back almost as far as the Confessions themselves. Examples of an “other tradition,” to borrow John Ashbery's phrase, that connects autobiographical truth with the capacity to shake off the voice of sincerity and treat the self ironically as a fiction, can be found throughout modern literature, in texts as diverse as Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833) and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist (1916). Indeed, as I will argue, this “other tradition” dates back to what Simon Critchley has defined as the first modern avantgarde, the group of writers and philosophers who gathered at Jena in Germany, including such figures as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and who first articulated the theory of romantic irony.

By ordinary standards horses belonging to the landed elite were cosseted. Grooms looked after them, and when they were stabled they had individual stalls and a nourishing diet. When they were sick or injured the staff took care of them or, if necessary, hired specialists to treat them. On the road, the ostler tended to them overnight, receiving a tip for his services when the cavalcade moved on the following morning. In London, stabling was more rudimentary and harder to find but Cavendish, like other upper-class sojourners in the capital, eased the task by sending surplus horses back home. Nonetheless, even these pampered horses were kept outside grazing on grass for as long as possible to conserve stocks of hay and to reduce expenditure on corn and pulses. As the weather worsened, they were brought into the stables, starting with the more vulnerable foals. In a document of 1708 relating to the Haughton stud (Nottinghamshire) of John Holles, Duke of Newcastle and the husband of Cavendish's great-great-niece Margaret, winter was already drawing in when two of that year's foals were put into the stables. Four other foals and the two yearlings were to be housed ‘as soon as the first Storm comes’, whereas the two- and three-year-olds had to wait until ‘the Winter comes to be very hard’.

Winters could be severe, as in Derbyshire in 1614–15, a time described as the ‘great snowe’ in the accounts. Horses were stabled from 9 October to 26 April, and the accounts report deep snow-drifts throughout the county in January and February. Extra fodder had to be found for all the animals. For instance, servants bought a little stack of hay, better than four loads, to feed the fat oxen and young colts at Pentrich and obtained a further 420 stones of hay from Richard Sutton for £3 10s. In February Parker purchased additional supplies of hay and straw at Tibshelf, and at Stainsby the tenants were given food and drink for carting a hayrick to the mares in the ‘snowe tyme’. At Sutton-in-Ashfield Does earned 3s. for twelve days’ work helping the shepherds to carry hay to the forest for the sheep. The bad weather also upset the annual routine, forcing the ‘Alman’ of Beighton to delay driving the horses to Haddlesey until ‘the great snowe allowed him’.

As Stone argues, the rise in the price of goods produced on estates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries should have encouraged enterprising landowners to resume direct farming. Many did, but not to the same extent as their continental counterparts. One of the select band of the ‘most enterprising and active’ landowners, whom Stone judged did farm their demesnes on a ‘moderate but substantial scale’, was William Cavendish. How did they respond to the challenge? Naturally, like their tenants, they had to pay attention to local climatic, geographical and geological conditions, considerations that influenced the growing trend towards regional specialisation. Nonetheless, because of their status, the size of their households and the composition of the demesnes, as well as the geographical extent of their estates, their perspective was different. Firstly, land on the demesne was more likely to be enclosed, even in areas of open field farming, and this widened the options available to the owner. Secondly, the requirements of the household might induce landowners to pursue a policy of mixed farming on the demesne in order to provide bread-corn and meat. Conversely, a number of individual case studies suggest that large-scale demesne farmers tended to focus on livestock husbandry. In relation to the nature of demesne farming, these elite ‘ranchers’ had to feed exceptionally large households, in which meat consumption loomed large. According to Stone, they required at least 50 beeves and 400–500 muttons a year. Moreover, as they received a good deal of grain in the form of tithes and corn rents, they could reduce the acreage of corn they grew for home consumption, whether as bread-corn or as malted barley. In 1607 Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, received 168 sheep, 386 couples of rabbits and 123 qr of wheat and malt. An added attraction of livestock husbandry in comparison to arable production was the ease with which animals could be transported long distances when bought or sold, or moved around the estate.

Livestock Husbandry

England's traditional export, undyed cloth, made sheep-farming a profitable venture in the sixteenth century, even surviving a crisis in 1551 when debasement of the coinage led to a severe contraction in the overseas market and caused wool prices to tumble.

PROPOSITIONAL, RATIONAL LANGUAGE is often used to form three distinctions between humans and other animals: epistemological, ontological, and normative. It is positioned as the tool of knowing animality, outside of which animals themselves remain mysteries; it is also viewed as the necessary foundation of mindedness, beyond which no conscious mental states can take place; and finally, it is set as the criterion for our moral worth as individuals. Pigs, thereby, are creatures reduced to human lingual descriptions of them, and we cannot know “pigness” directly, via other methods (such as direct, embodied encounters). Due to the absence of language, pigs are also still all too often presumed to lack internal, mental lives, and this again is positioned as a reason for the belief that it is absurd to speak of the “rights of pigs.”

It is these distinctions that The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee perceptively explores and challenges, and in so doing questions also what it is to be a speaking, propositionally thinking human animal. The two stories that The Lives of Animals consist of have been analyzed extensively in animal studies. In this paper, the stories will be treated as criticisms of the above epistemological, ontological, and moral distinctions, and thereby as a commentary on animal philosophy. Following suit, Coetzee and his protagonist Elizabeth Costello are here seen to offer insights into the following question: how does rational language impact how we understand and value other animals?

Epistemological Divides: Can One Know an Ape?

Particularly with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, language became the sole medium that could sustain mindedness. Perhaps the most potent influence behind this turn was Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's early philosophy in his seminal thesis Tractatus famously posited that language forms the limits of one's world. Reality as we know it is constituted via language, for we know it as and through words and syntax. In this ethos, the linguistic turn suggests that concepts and their combinations determine the contents of our beliefs: we have beliefs concerning foxes, because we have the word “fox,” together with a network of further concepts all knitted around it. Language becomes the sole way of knowing or having a world and thereby the medium via which other animals must also be understood.

Blome did recommend the best breeds of saddle horses but assumed that his elite readers would obtain them privately from their peers. These were the horses that most stud owners focused on, a reflection of the iconic appeal of riding on a fine horse and the prestige to be gained from breeding them, as well as the high prices that top-quality specimens commanded. Conversely, the annual cycle of fairs dovetailed neatly into the process of breeding and rearing strong draught horses, whether for the coach or the cart. This ensured that good-quality stock could be obtained there, especially at centres conveniently located to take advantage of the movement of horses around the country. In general, horses were bred in pastoral regions, with the largest being produced in and around the Somerset Levels and the Lincolnshire fens. Some mixed-farming regions, including south Derbyshire and the Southwell area of Nottinghamshire, bred some foals too. However, as agricultural specialisation developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many mixed-farmers, notably in the east Midlands, increasingly bought in colts and geldings to train in the collar on their ploughlands before returning them to local fairs two or three years later as mature draught horses. According to Cavendish's nephew, William Cavendish, the best places to obtain fine coach horses were Market Harborough and Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and Northampton and Rothwell in Northamptonshire.

Caveat Emptor

Although horses were central to the life of early modern England, not all of the many people who needed them could distinguish between a good and a bad animal. For this reason, horse dealers had a particularly poor reputation, attributed to the number of people conned into buying a horse at an excessive price or with hidden defects – or both. Writing to Cavendish's nephew in 1659, Sir Edward Nicholas declared that ‘itt is two professions, a good horse-man and a horse-courser. I pretende to the firste, butt knowe nothinge of the seconde, for Ile cosen no bodye. I onlye take care nott to be cosende, which theye finde I can doe reasonable well att that.’

IN THE FOLLOWING I investigate Coetzee's concept of truth. A valuable lead is given in the recent publication The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015), a record of Coetzee's conversations with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz. In these conversations Coetzee defines the writer's outlook as materially and qualitatively different from that which governs the work of psychotherapy. I consider how the special type of truth Coetzee defends in these exchanges is situated with respect to postmodern consciousness. In Coetzee's understanding of the writer's task, as I go on to argue, the idea of secular confession becomes a pivotal concept in view of problems that weigh upon such consciousness in “the age we live in” (68).

The Question of Truth

“As a genre,” Coetzee observes in his most recent publication The Good Story, “the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not our real lives” (191). He further notes, summarizing the long discussion that has taken place in the volume with his interlocutor, the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz: “And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake” (191). This is the concluding statement of the book. The note of amity struck in these final words belies the differences between the novelist and the psychotherapist that are a feature of these exchanges. Throughout the volume Coetzee holds passionately to the importance of “the one and only truth” (67), a finally unattainable truth about self and being in the world. Kurtz, by contrast, defends—just as tenaciously—what she calls “intersubjective truth,” the notion that truth can appear as an event in the consulting room as patient and therapist work together in a labor directed at its discovery. Coetzee, for his part, cultivates a sense of the transcendent reach of subjective truth in the world, a truth-search that radiates from the personal consciousness of the writer, yet a search at the same time that is in some ways “tragic”: the writer must have a belief in the existence of such a truth to write, but the writer knows at the same time that the results of writing are “not the truth” (76).

Propaganda and poets

Truth is the first casualty of war and it was not surprising that an early step of government was to set up a war propaganda bureau to promote British war aims. Secret conferences were held involving men of letters and poets to see what they could do to underpin the war effort. Housman does not seem to have been recruited; he was not moved to identify himself publicly with pro-war or anti-war groups, or use the war for purposes of self-promotion and self-advancement. It is known that those involved included the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, Laurence Binyon, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, Owen Seaman, H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling.

Nor was Housman signatory to The Writers Manifesto in support of the war published as a letter to The Times by Professor Gilbert Murray on 18 September 1914 and signed by most of the same literary luminaries, Granville Barker, Barrie, Bridges, Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Galsworthy, Hardy, Kipling and Masefield.

Like Housman, neither G.B. Shaw nor W.B. Yeats (both Irishmen) added their names to the manifesto:

Gilbert Murray had been chasing Housman for a decision; Housman wrote on 14 October 1914: ‘I suppose I ought to have written, and I am sorry I gave you the trouble of telegraphing. My chief objection was not to the terms of the manifesto but to signing any manifesto at all.’

It was always unlikely that Housman would lend his hand to the simplifications of war propaganda, or deal in the big words – glory, honour and sacrifice – or evoke other big words – patriotism, religion, empire, chivalry or freedom – in the cause of war; his own knowledge and feel for words was too precise and demanding. He was too concerned with meaning; he was not a man to be seized and motivated by irrational emotions.

January 1933: The Maurice Pollet questionnaire

Richards described the Frenchman Maurice Pollet as ‘an admirer and student’ and his questionnaire as ‘very alarming in its length and in its gimlet qualities’. Pollet had brought it by hand to Richards’ office but Richards, knowing his Housman, had been extremely careful in taking it from him. ‘I have led him to expect no specific answer from you – that is to say, I have not encouraged him to expect too much.’ He made no recommendation on whether Housman should or should not reply. ‘I can smooth the matter out even if you make no reply to him at all. If you do make any kind of reply, I suggest that you should make it through me. I can give him any kind of message. I can, if it is desired, choke him off.’

Knowing of Housman's unwillingness to be interviewed and reluctance to answer personal questions, Richards was mightily surprised by Housman's response. Without further fuss Housman completed the questionnaire and returned it to Richards. ‘I thought that for the sake of posterity I might as well answer some of the young man's questions.’

His attached letter to Pollet gave his justification for answering. ‘As some of the questions which you ask in your flattering curiosity may be asked by future generations, and as many of them can only be answered by me, I make this reply.’ The fact is he replied clearly and fully to biographical questions but dealt less fully with questions relating to his motivation as a poet or meanings and intentions in his poems. He was lifting the veil but again, only slightly. Yet this remains the only occasion on which Housman would ever answer questions as probing as these.

Only one of his answers was demonstrably incorrect; he correctly described his father's family as Lancastrian in origin but his mother's family was not Cornish; they had been East Devonian for generations. On religion he was categoric. ‘I was brought up in the Church of England … which is much the best religion I have ever come across. But Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, which fell into my hands when I was eight, attached my affections to Paganism.

The two products of Housman's life have had very different fates. His great work of textual scholarship like many traditional crafts has become less relevant to life today. Like other scientific research, classical scholarship is prone to being overtaken by new discoveries and re-evaluations. In a book on Propertius published by a Fellow of St Anne's College Oxford in 2001 the name Housman appeared in only six places, and in one note Housman was put firmly in his place, by a woman too. The scholarship, at which he laboured so long and devotedly, was a self-directed vocational impulse. It produced a great contribution to Latin scholarship but was in essence a surrogate life.

Housman's poetry still maintains its position among the most quoted and most remembered poetry in the language. In Yeats’ phrase, it is poetry that has gone ‘into the general memory’ because of its instant accessibility and memorability. Although published in 1896 A Shropshire Lad speaks to the problems of today, speaks eloquently of the painful mutability of human relationships, and speaks in a confronting yet comforting way about the inevitability of death, a subject contemporary man seeks generally to avoid. When he voices his outrage at the laws of God and Man which deny him the freedom to be as he was made, he speaks to one of today's most threatening problems – the still lethal effects of intolerance. Housman's poetry is susceptible and responsive to changes in society and changes in its readers so that in a more tolerant society some of Housman's poems, classified in anthologies as love poems, can be read as they were intended, from man to man.

What of the man and his journey through life, what has that left us? Not wishing to join the herd, unafraid of silence, he is in stark contrast to those who always place themselves centre stage, the extroverts, the energetic communicators, the mere talkers. His brother Laurence remembered him as ‘a shy, proud and reticent character; even to his intimates he was provokingly reserved.’ But Laurence also confessed ‘I myself knew very little of his life in its day-to-day activities.’

1932 could be called the year of the great mystery but it began ordinarily enough. Housman had been approached by the syndics (a committee whose job it was to advise on and approve publications by the Cambridge University Press). They wanted to publish his editio minor of Manilius. All that remained to be done was a short preface, but he had other desiderata: ‘I have ideas of my own about size of page and print and I also want it to be fairly cheap.’ Although meetings were made possible by proximity it took less than a month for war to break out between Housman and the university printers, and for Housman to be complaining to Sydney Roberts, secretary to the Press, that his ‘overpaid underlings refuse to print my apparatus criticus as I wrote it, and insist on running together lines which I carefully separated, as well as certain signs not of a size corresponding to the type size such as that for omega’.

Coincidentally, Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press in Paris had asked to produce a deluxe edition of A Shropshire Lad. Richards described Kahane as ‘a writer of semi-improper novels’ and ‘a publisher of more or less pornographic stuff.’ Housman was clear: ‘You correctly suppose that I will have no more editions de-luxe,’ but ‘talking of pornography, you have been remiss about promising me a sight of Frank Harris's last two volumes, for I understand that there are four in all, and I have only seen two.’

At the end of January, he was empathising with Kate about her husband's death.

Kate had decided to move, possibly to Exmouth. Housman was sympathetic: ‘I hope you are tranquil and not depressed.’