Informant

A friend who has just started business school was shocked to discover how few of his fellow students had seen Oliver Stone’s hymn to the corporate world Wall Street (1987). ‘Some of them had heard of it,’ he said dejectedly, ‘but none of them believed in it.’ The macho romanticism of Gordon Gecko’s maxims that ‘greed is good’ and ‘lunch is for wimps’ has not aged well since its heyday in the 1980s. Three recent best-selling self-help books provide telling examples of the current ambiguous relationship to the daily grind.

Corinne Maier’s Bonjour Paresse (Hello Idleness, 2004) points out the existential angst of being trapped in France’s bureaucratic sprawl and decides, with refreshing resignation, that ‘It’s pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.’ The Bartleby-like response of Maier, a French economist, is to work as little as possible and thus ‘screw the system from within’. Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow (2004) takes a more North American attitude to slowing down, seeking to decelerate only in order to become more productive. Honoré proudly declares that his book has no ‘Luddite calls to overthrow technology and seek a pre-industrial utopia. This is a modern revolution, championed by e-mailing, cellphone-using lovers of sanity.’ Diametrically opposed to this is Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle (2004), in which the editor of The Idler magazine rails against Thomas Edison and, with the impossible nostalgia peculiar to the British, dreams of returning to the days before the Spinning Jenny caught our culture in its loom.

The under-work culture is hardly new. As How To Be Idle illustrates, proponents of the leisurely life range from Lao-Tzu to Dr Johnson. But the culture change suggested in these recent books has never been better encapsulated or more gracefully advanced than in the writings of Jerome K. Jerome, best known for his novel Three Men in a Boat (1889). However, the idling beliefs he mulled into a quasi-philosophy can be seen most clearly in his collections of essays The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1898). Conversational, sentimental and comical, Jerome had a talent for capturing late Victorian ennui with a distinctly modern brand of comic writing: ‘I like work; it fascinates me’, he writes. ‘I can sit and look at it for hours.’

As John Carey points out in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), Jerome’s ability to joke about the customs of the new industrial age was considered radical at the time. Whether discussing the new hobby of bicycling or the novel technology of tinned food, Jerome spoke directly to a newly literate working class or, as the middle-class press labelled them, the ‘Arrys’ and ‘Arriets’ (Jerome was himself labelled ‘Arry K. Arry’). Reading him now, it is not hard to understand what prompted his critics to label his comedy ‘the New Humour’: his picking apart of the foibles of modern life in a manner of mild bemusement bears a close resemblance to the observational comedy of the past decade – in particular, Seinfeld.

However, what sets Jerome apart from the recent spate of books on downshifting is a melancholy fatalism that, at its darkest, asks whether life is worth living at all. The bed, subject of much devoted praise in his writings, can transform itself into a ‘mimic grave’.

A frivolous assault on the charms of babies ends with Jerome pondering the ‘shadowy ships’ that are waiting for ‘this old traveller’.
In his essay The Delights of Slavery (1898) he reaches Nietzschean depths of gloom; ‘off to your schools, little children, and learn to be good little slaves.’
Such pessimism stems from the paradox Jerome perceives at the heart of his theory: that in order to enjoy idling one must work (for ‘idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen’), and yet work is the death of freedom. He describes his audience in heroic terms, ‘fighting the battle of life’, but despite his best efforts he cannot help but be alienated from them. Even his most flippant writings carry within them the knowledge that time’s winged chariot – the idler’s worst enemy – is ever hurrying near. Jerome K. is never far from becoming Joseph K.

The true descendants of Jerome’s idler are surely not the corporate saboteurs of Bonjour Paresse or the earnest calculators of the play/work ratio in In Praise of Slow. Even How To Be Idle does not concern itself with the idler’s fundamental quandary of existence. If we take Jerome’s near-contemporary – the writer Saki – the Victorian idler is transformed into an Edwardian wit, who has replaced the double-edged irreverence for work with a passionless superiority. P.G. Wodehouse, an expert chronicler of the idle life, also erased any touches of morbidity with the clueless jollity at which he was expert. The truth is that Jerome’s slacker sums up the paradox of modern experience – whether we live to work, or work to live, work is an undeniable part of our existence. With this in mind, Jerome could never tear himself away from the fact that the truest manifestation of the idling lifestyle he so desired could only be found in the great idyll of death.