The Craftsman
Richard Sennett Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 336pp, £25
The sociologist Richard Sennett has a habit of writing the things that we end up talking about years later. The connection between the two appears slight: rarely do you hear the phrase "As Richard Sennett said . . ." (if only it was uttered more often), yet the subjects of his many books have been unerringly prescient.
The Fall of Public Man, written 31 years ago, expressed unease at our withdrawal from communal life into comfortable, sympathy-eroding, private spaces. Next thing you know, Margaret Thatcher was claiming that society didn't exist and Sennett's unease appeared well placed. His last book, Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, preceded the "Respect agenda", though Sennett's interpretation and use of the word was more or less fully at odds with Tony Blair's.
In Respect, Sennett, a promising cello player in his youth, wrote about how he had had to give up his dream of becoming a professional musician after an operation on his hand left him unable to practise. Being unable to fulfil his potential in this area has given him cause to obsess about the importance of having hands to being human. The Craftsman gathers a lifetime's thoughts on the subject into an elegant, densely detailed treatise on manual skill.
When we say that "he works with his hands", we usually conjure an image of an unthinking journeyman with huge, fudgy fingers, not someone who has painstakingly developed a powerful relationship between his hands and brain. Sennett's goal is to remind us that skill - technique, to use his preferred word - is the result of hand and brain informing each other, through repetition and decision-making, to create a unique, solid and easy flow of knowledge between the two. Mastery, in other words.
The high status accorded to master craftsmen in the medieval period was reflected in its institutions. Apprentice goldsmiths were sent to craftsmen on the understanding that their parents would relinquish authority over their children, he writes, "most notably by transferring the right to punish misbehaviour with physical violence". Apprenticeships were long - the final stretch of what Jacob Bronowski called "the long childhood" - but relied on "treating the child as an incipient adult". In so doing, craftsmen conferred dignity and a sense of mission.
Sennett makes exciting connections through the ages and disciplines to show how this attitude atrophied with the onset of mass production, yet persists in small artisanal pockets. He finds hope in the collaborative work of Linux computer programmers, who spend their time problem-solving for the greater good (Linux software is free to use), in protests by National Health Service doctors and nurses against obfuscatory managers, and in architects who recognise that computer-aided design can't account for how people use buildings.
As part of a short chapter on the difficulty of teaching technique through the written word, he shares an extraordinary recipe for stuffed chicken à la Albufera, written by his Iranian night-school cookery teacher, Madame Benshaw: "Your dead child. Prepare him for new life. Fill him with the earth. Be careful! He should not overeat. Put on his golden coat. You bathe him. Warm him but be careful! A child dies from too much sun. Put on his jewels. This is my recipe."
Understandably sent into rapture by this poetic description, Sennett points out that giving your chicken "his golden coat" is far more likely to make you mindful of the taste and appearance of the final dish than simply being told to brown the meat in a pan. Similarly, in the instruction "Put on his jewels", Sennett is reminded that the sauce is meant to embellish, not drown. This, and another section in which a glass-blower gives her account of learning how to make the perfect red wine goblet, makes his point: craftsmanship is the hand and the mind working in conjunction to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.
One caveat is that much of the work reads like the contents of a notebook. For the most part, this is probably intentional - one of Sennett's heroes on the ethics of craftsmanship, John Ruskin, insisted that any finished product should bear signs of the work that went into it - but at other times the manuscript seems barely to have been edited. A sentence about evolution contains the phrase "the brains of apes became larger as their arms hands were used for other purposes". Is this meant to have said "arms and hands", or either "arms" or "hands"? We'll never know.
Such flaws should not detract from the importance of this book. It is an open letter to us all, reminding us that we can shape and craft our own lives, and must not allow wider forces over which we have little control to rob us of that awareness. Our hands can both anoint and kill, but with practice, understanding and the help of others, can be turned away from destructive purpose. Literally, the future is in our hands.
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