Having recently reviewed Paul Goodman: A Reader for Tribune, I was delighted to come across Unblocking the Future in Horatio Morpurgo’s first collection of essays. It examines a key incident in Goodman’s first novel, The Grand Piano (1942), in which a boy cycles through Harlem, intending to ride alongside the Hudson River. He is unwillingly carried along in a stream of traffic on a road network not designed for kids, or anyone else on bikes. The boy, another Horatio, finally swerves off the road to escape and, in doing so, causes a collision between the vehicles behind.
This terrifying fictional episode foretells Goodman’s own theoretical writings about urban space and how it was fast becoming pedestrian-unfriendly. Goodman later explored what this meant to urban citizens – physiologically, psychologically, politically. The title of the essay, while apt for the boy’s predicament as he became road-blocked into the future, also refers to Goodman’s role in the founding of gestalt therapy where the practitioner does not view
the patient as an isolated case but, as with the boy on the bike, as someone
in a complex relationship with her environment.
Morpurgo has cast his net far and wide in these essays, which also cover Samuel Butler or the Art of Being Funny about Religion. Here he reminds us of the young George Orwell’s immersion in Butler. Morpurgo highlights the fact that most biographers, including Christopher Hitchens, overlook this. It is logical, then, for Morpurgo to compare today’s New Atheists – Hitchens being a key member – with Butler’s approach to atheism, which he asserts rests in the camp of humour.
Morpurgo’s grandfather was the publisher Allen Lane, hence the title of this book. We are given an intriguing snapshot of the Penguin pioneer, a man who apparently knew less Greek than his chauffeur. Morpurgo revises the romantic notion that Penguin paperbacks were the reading revolution for the working classes. I was, however, surprised to learn that while Allen was no socialist ideologue, George Bernard Shaw, who was, gave enthusiastic input to the enterprise. Shaw helped Penguin find the direction for which it became known; his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was the first book commissioned by the paperback publisher.
This is a compelling collection of essays from a highly intelligent writer who demonstrates the interconnectedness of his subjects and the contexts in which they lived, the then and the now, and holds a fascinating dialogue between the eras.
