Get off the programme
Bookstores are crammed with self-help books, says Paul Stokes. But the only one worth reading was written 150 years ago — and it is hard to find Last week I found myself in the self-help section of a city centre bookstore. I had expected to be immersed in crime, but the shop had done what all shops seem to do these days once you know where everything is, which is move it all around again.
It being January, I was surrounded by people who clearly meant to be there, and who were really trying to find themselves, with a bit of assistance from titles such as Change Your Life in Seven Days, Awaken the Giant Within and Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade.
Yes, it seems as if there is a self-help book for every one of life’s little inconveniences these days. Fat? No problem, Paul McKenna can make you thin, although I suspect you may have to do your bit by not eating as much and exercising a little more. Feeling a bit dull? Don’t worry, Mind Gym can give your brain a work out. Jellyfish on the attack? Put down that shovel.
Resisting the urge to shout ‘For God’s sake just pull yourself together’, I thought that while I was there I would look for the one book you really would expect to see in such a place: the Victorian classic Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, an international bestseller in its time, and the book which pretty much started the whole thing off in the first place.
But guess what? The one self-help book you can’t find in the self-help section is Self-Help. It wasn’t in philosophy or history either, and no one behind the counter had heard of it. None of the other stores nearby had it in stock — and this in a city only a few miles from the Scottish town of Haddington in which Smiles was born.
It is in print. Oxford University Press brought out a shiny new edition just two years ago and with all the hoop-la that surrounded that relaunch it now sells ... a few hundred a year in Britain. Sales did rise in 2004, so perhaps Smiles is reaping the rewards of the self-help boom which saw online retailer Amazon’s sales of ‘how to’ titles rise by 40 per cent last year, and self-help titles take six of the top 20 slots in its current list of bestsellers. But he has a long way to go to catch up with the likes of Paul McKenna.
I asked the woman at OUP why she thought that Smiles’s sales were not quite up there with those of 29,414 other self-help titles that Amazon now lists on its website. ‘Well, he does demand a little more effort,’ she said. How very old-fashioned.
He demands effort in two ways. First, while the book is easy to read it takes some determination to get all the way through. It is, after all, a compilation of hundreds of mini-biographies drawn together to emphasise the same point: that true success and happiness can be achieved only through hard work, perseverance and self-restraint: that is, the ability to forgo some current pleasure for increased security further on in life. It is repetitious, but that is the point. Getting through it in the first place is good practice for the rigours ahead.
Second — and here he really parts company with the genre to which his book gave its name — he offers no quick fix. His aim instead is to show that many of those people whose lives seem so effortlessly successful in fact owe their success to years of hard work. So he recounts the tales of how Sir Isaac Newton, when asked by what means he had worked out his extraordinary discoveries, replied, ‘By always thinking unto them’, and how Sir Joshua Reynolds, when asked how long it took him to paint a certain picture, replied simply, ‘All my life.’ These days Smiles is dismissed, normally by people who have not read him, as the arch-priest of a selfish, competitive individualism, when he was nothing of the sort. It is not a new problem. Only seven years after he published the book Smiles described the title as ‘unfortunate’ because those who judged the work by it alone had concluded it was ‘the very opposite of what it really is’. In fact Smiles denounced the worship of power, wealth and conspicuous consumption. For him the real aim of life was to develop character, and the true test of character was the manner in which we conduct ourselves towards others.
He attacked the self-centred, get-aheadquick mentality which is exhibited by so many modern self-help books. ‘To regard self-culture ... as a means of getting past others in the world ... is to place it on a very low level,’ he said. ‘To go about whining and bemoaning our pitiful lot because we fail in achieving that success in life ... is the mark of a small, and often of a sour mind.’ With those words Smiles also demonstrates that he had a good idea, some 150 years ago, of where the modern self-help movement is coming from: that is, from an inflated view of our ‘rights’, and specifically our ‘rights’ to instant success and constant happiness. The self-help book today sets out to answer the question ‘Why am I not as successful as I deserve to be?’ Smiles’s book asks the question, ‘What have you done to deserve success?’ Smiles saw that a lot of people then, as today, resented the fact that the Sir Isaacs and the Sir Joshuas were more successful than they, without actually understanding why. ‘Many are apt to feel despondent,’ he wrote, ‘because they do not “get on” in the world so fast as they think they deserve to do. Having planted their acorn, they expect to see it grow into an oak at once.’ Instant oaks are everywhere in today’s self-help books, which is the key to their attractiveness and their lack of success in treating the problems they claim to address. You may have been a feckless loser for 40 years but that’s no problem, we can sort that out in a week. Mental, emotional, physical and financial life in tatters? That we can sort immediately. If only.
Clearly not all self-help books are useless. Prince Harry could have saved everyone a lot of bother if he had received Trinny and Susannah’s What You Wear Can Change Your Life, another of the Amazon top six, in his Christmas stocking.
Doctors in Devon are now prescribing some self-help books to patients complaining of ‘mild depression’. It is better than prescribing Prozac, but not if all people are really doing is whining and bemoaning their not so pitiful lot. Real depression cannot be self-treated with a book.
Life’s a struggle, or, as Smiles himself put it, ‘the battle of life is, in most cases, fought up-hill’. Too many people give up the battle too early, in the same way that we appear to have given up too early on Self-Help.
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