'Halfway' by Cecil Roberts

A few weeks ago, I was in Bromley House Library’s Thoroton Room doing some research and making notes from a pile of books. I took a break to browse the shelves behind me, the Local History Collection. My attention was caught by five volumes of autobiography by Cecil Roberts – a name I had encountered in articles about Nottingham’s literary heritage. Roberts was a famous, bestselling novelist in his day, but his star faded in later life and he is now largely forgotten today. I pulled the first volume, The Growing Boy (1967), off the shelf and looked at the introduction, which opens with Roberts explaining he had previously written an autobiography at age 35 – halfway through his biblically-allotted threescore and ten – and is now returning to the genre in his 70s.

I have had a very intense and reflective few years, and am approaching 35. Events from the past few years – including bereavement, burnout, hospitalisation, surgery, and more – meant I have been reflecting on my own life, making sense of it, reevaluating it, chronicling it via journaling, and thinking of writing it up as a memoir, to make sense of it for myself if nothing else. As I read Roberts recall his first autobiography, I felt as though his ghost had rested his hand on my shoulder, understood what I was feeling, and was offering support, advising me to read his Halfway (1931). But it wasn’t here. It was not alongside the later five volumes.

I went downstairs to the library reception to check the catalogue. There was a copy! In a different part of the library! Bromley House has a very old fashioned cataloguing system which pre-dates Dewey, so this sort of thing is normal. I jotted down the shelfmark and went to find it: up in the library’s attic. I followed the shelfmarks to where it should be; but, no, it’s not there; instead, a different book with that shelfmark. Where is it? I feel Roberts’ presence again, and there is more than an offer of mentorship now: he wants me to right a wrong.

I return to the library reception, and inform the staff that a book is missing or misplaced. After a bit of investigation, they discovered there had been a typo in the Halfway shelfmark when the catalogue was digitised. It has been corrected now, and with the correct shelfmark I am able to locate Halfway in another part of the attic. The book is falling apart: the front and back boards are both attached by carpet tape, the spine is crumbling and splitting down the middle: as I read over the following weeks, the spine would fall apart a little more each time. A crack at the bottom of spine grew, extending almost all the way to top, like a progress bar tracking my reading.

Inside, the due date slip warns the prospective borrower that THIS BOOK IS IN DEMAND. Roberts was from Nottingham, and may have had some interaction with the library, or at least was known by many of its members. Halfway had fifty borrowers between 1931-36, one each in 1945 and ‘51, two in ‘67, one in ‘97, and now me, in 2026. Almost thirty years after the last borrower, who was thirty years after the one before. Will this book be waiting another thirty years after me before it is borrowed again?

Roberts opens Halfway by describing Venice, where he celebrated his 35th birthday. From there, he jumps back to his early 20s, when he left the civil service to embark on a literary career, jumps further back to gloss over his childhood with a speed suggesting it was uncomfortable to write about. He mentions attending the Mundella School, which is not far from where I live: it is now closed and converted into apartments. The narrative jumps around in time, mixing personal history and amusing anecdote in a way that feels like it doesn’t know where it’s going, as though Roberts was writing what came to mind and hadn’t managed to organise his thoughts on his life. I could relate.

(Later, I returned to The Growing Boy and, in chapter titled ‘Tragedy’, learnt about his father’s death when he was a young teenager. Evidently this was still a very raw experience for him at the time of writing Halfway.)

And then we come to the Great War, during which he was a war correspondent. The chapters on his wartime experiences are strange, only occasionally touching on his own life and often diverting to generalities about the war. There is a sense he doesn’t know how to write about it, how to make sense of it. Some passages stand out, where you get a glimpse of the emotional toll. After the war, he attempted university but soon left: he describes a vast chasm in experience between himself and the younger students who had not been to war. It sounds like a trauma response, the young students reminding him of what has been lost.

Travelogue and anecdote make up the bulk of the autobiography. He describes various holidays and lecture tours; some chapters are simply descriptions of famous and/or interesting people he has been friends with. There is very little reflection on his own growth as a writer or as a person. His inner world comes across as extremely shallow… but there is the occasional diamond in the rough, passages which stand out and linger in the mind. I would share these with friends, referring to Halfway as ‘the book from the ghost in the library’.

Some passages hint at homosexual love affairs and hook-ups: according to Wikipedia (which cites the autobiography of Frances Henry King, another novelist largely forgotten today), in private Roberts would boast about his many, and famous, male lovers. The real Cecil Roberts is hidden behind a mask of conventionality, only occasionally slipping out through hint and innuendo.

‘Nowhere in this autobiography have I betrayed a confidence, or imposed upon hospitality received. I have nothing but contempt for the writer of the chronique scandaleuse or the purveyor of indiscretions.’

‘The real, the intense life of each of us can never be written. The whole of this autobiography is as nothing in comparison with the heart’s journey. Strange peaks stand forth from the mist of years, a voice here, a look there, the line of a neck, the shape of a hand. In one furtive act the starved years may rebel, the imprisoned spirit beat through the bars of convention.’

When describing his work life, he emphasises his productivity and effort rather than his growth in the craft. Given the amount of space devoted to describing his holidays, you could easily get the impression those holidays occupied most of his time, rather than being memorable breaks from the grind. The most interesting chapter is probably the one about his time as editor of local paper The Nottingham Journal, which provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the newspaper industry in the 1920s. The workload eventually led him to burnout and convalescence, and he resolved to leave journalism behind. When I look back on my own life leading up to burnout, my work-life is a constant blur of activity, the details smeared and lost: no time to think properly or let things settle into your memory: just doing, doing, doing.

While on holiday in France, Roberts nearly died of a car crash: his friend was overconfidently speeding, and crashed them into a gate.

‘Had a bar of iron been six inches lower I should not have seen this, my thirty-fifth year.’

The book closes by bringing us back to the beginning: setting off to Venice, everything he encounters brings back memories, making him melancholic and reflective. Everything a trauma trigger. An overwhelming kaleidoscope of feeling and memory. Friends and acquaintances are brought to mind. The name Barrett is on an advert: he knew a Barrett at school: ‘Alive or dead? Dead probably; the war cut a swathe through our youth.’ The leather of a handbag reminds him of a wallet he bought for a friend: he died in the war, a bullet piercing both wallet and John’s heart. A Harrods advert recalls his school uniform. The shape of a window ‘makes me twelve again’. As he voyages to Venice, the book ends and comes full circle: we understand he needed to write Halfway to make sense of his life in the wake of burnout, car crash, and confronting mortality.

As an autobiography, Halfway is deeply flawed and often dull, but I can see how it meant so much to Roberts to try to make sense of his life, to sort through the overwhelming barrage of memories that swirled in his head. I could relate intensely, and felt a deep connection with him across time: Cecil became like both a friend and an encouraging mentor to me. This little-known, little-remembered book became one of the most meaningful and personal reading experiences I have ever had. Such can be the magic of a library, where you can make friends across time and a ghost can become a mentor.

'The Big Time' by Fritz Lieber

 

'The Big Time' is a locked-room mystery set in a recuperation station outside the universe, where soldiers from across time rest between missions. The soldiers - including a tentacular alien, a Roman Centurion, a British Tommy, a Nazi officer, and others - have all been recruited to fight a universe-spanning, time-spanning war between two mysterious factions who repeatedly rewrite history to try to ensure their own far-future cosmic dominance. Sounds awesome!

My understanding was that it was an influential classic of the Change War trope. Now I've read it, I wouldn't use the word 'classic': the novel has aged extremely poorly, and while there are certainly things to like, these are the mainly on the ideas front rather than the execution. As a piece of post-WW2 pacifist fiction, it contains some interesting reflections on the nature and futility of war, but the overall package feels very wooden and awkward. Unfortunately, unless you are interested in the history and development of the Change War trope, I would advise against reading this old novel.

I received a battered 1961 Ace paperback edition of 'The Big Time' with a funky cover from a friend. As I read, my old paperback was coming apart in my hands. First the front cover fell off, and I took to using it as a bookmark. Then, the back cover fell off. I started imagining the old book just wanted to be read one more time in its old life, and I felt sorry for it. I wonder how many people had read this copy before the covers finally gave way in my hands, perhaps thought it was mind-blowingly inventive in its first decades of life. I'm going to repair the cover with Sellotape as best I can and then donate the book to a local charity shop, hopefully it will find a reader who enjoys it more than I did.

Following this short, interesting, but unsatisfying foray into the Change War trope, I think it is probably about time for me to read 'This Is How You Lose The Time War', published 61 years after 'The Big Time'.

'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind serves as an introduction to moral psychology, in particular to the theories favoured by, and personally developed by, the author. The book's narrative thrust is the author's personal hero's journey through academia. He relates how his understanding of the topic grew over the years, from his time as a student through to carrying out the research that led to the Moral Foundations theory. This is a very effective mechanism for introducing all the various concepts to the reader, naturally building on what came before, and the autobiographical elements give you a personal connection with the author-protagonist. The narrative sweeps you along, you share his joy at learning more at each step of the journey, and cheer on as the quest continues. Haidt's intuitionist theories are also very compelling, and do provide a good framework for understanding people of various political and religious persuasions. It's an excellent example of how to communicate ideas from academia to a lay audience.

 That being said, there's plenty to criticise in Haidt's theory and conclusions. The central metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider irritated me. The elephant represents your emotional intuition, whereas the rider is your reasoning. The elephant does most of the work and movement, with the rider having little influence over where it goes: your emotions make most of your decisions, and your reasoning goes along with it, making up post-hoc justifications to rationalise the decision after the fact. This is a useful metaphor, but throughout I couldn't help thinking of real-world elephant riding, where the elephant has been brutalised into submission to make it passive enough to ride. 

The 'Emotions First' approach also provides an easy built-in method for dismissing Haidt's critics: their elephants have recoiled, and their riders are rushing to come up with justifications to rationalise this response. Haidt does not discuss criticisms of his theory from other academics; instead, the theory forms the conclusion of his hero's journey: now he can return to the real world to share his wisdom and save American politics.

According to Haidt, a big part of the motivation behind his research and this book was frustration over the Democrats not connecting with voters, and a desire to understand conservative moralities that were extremely alien to him as a student at a very liberal university. Having gone on his hero's journey, Haidt is now an Enlightened Centrist who sees the merits and flaws of both sides: he sees morality for what it is, not for what it should be. In the book, he is presenting a descriptive theory of morality, which ostensibly avoids any judgment on what is actually good and moral. However, he does make these kind of judgments throughout, while also claiming not to.

He tries his best to be a both-sidesing critic of both liberals and conservatives, but the way he writes about the two camps is very different. An early chapter describes a visit to India, during which he began to see beauty in a society built on a deeply religious and socially conservative morality; many passages display a deeply orientalist romanticism, and elements of this romanticism are carried forward into descriptions of American conservatism. He writes with anthropological fascination of conservatives, but with a weary tiredness about liberals. As an ex-liberal, he is not excited or interested in liberal morality: he is familiar with and bored with it; he associates it with his own immaturity, and thus his criticisms of liberalism are couched with the cringe adults feel looking back on their younger selves.

This is not to say that his criticisms of liberalism are not valid, especially those about how a lot of liberals refuse to understand conservatives. This is a very real issue which prevents liberal criticisms of conservative positions getting through. A few years ago I read Margaret Thatcher's books, which I found a very useful and enlightening experience, enabling me to understand and critique her actual motivations and goals, rather than those of the demonic caricature presented in left-wing media. I remember discussing this with a friend who said, "But I don't want to give those views legitimacy by trying to understand their motivations."

Compared to other factors, Haidt places more blame on liberals refusing to understand conservatives for the extreme polarisation of American politics. The book was first published in 2012, and this is one of many of Haidt's opinions which has aged poorly over the subsequent decade. Evidently, despite the success and popularity of 'The Righteous Mind', it has failed to undo the polarisation he was decrying a decade ago, and the various culture wars over 'wokeness' have taken that polarisation to obscene new highs. In 2024, Haidt's soft criticisms of conservatives now read as extremely cowardly.

The book is also in part a response to the New Atheists, and this is another aspect which has aged less well. The New Atheists were in vogue when it was first published, but popular culture has now moved on considerably. He defends religion as a means of social and moral cohesion, and decries what he calls 'the Rationalist Delusion'. I enjoyed his argument in favour of evolutionary group selection via religions, and this aspect of the book nicely synergizes with Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, which looks at modern neo-religious movements through a similar lens to Haidt, and fills a large gap in his analysis.

Despite these flaws, and others not described here, I do actually very much recommend the book. The Moral Foundations Theory is a useful if imperfect descriptive model to help you understand different moralities, like the similarly useful but imperfect Political Compass. The narrative sweeps you along like a rousing adventure; it's a great example of a non-fiction book that takes you on a ride and makes you feel like you've learnt a lot. After the initial exhilaration fades, the flaws become more obvious the more you think about it, but not so much that I wouldn't recommend it to others.