The Times Literary Supplement Dec 11, 2009 No 5567

Stella Tillyard London, sex capital of the world J onathan Benthall Religion goes global Ruth Scurr The Aff . t 's Neckl...

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Stella Tillyard London, sex capital of the world J onathan Benthall Religion goes global Ruth Scurr The Aff . t 's Necklace John Flower Fran

ILS Times House, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 IBS Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected]

ecularism, driven by the scientific worldview, has been in the ascendant in the West for a generation or more. That is changing, with ever greater numbers of people throughout the world professing adherence to one religion or another. But it is not always clear how much this shows a resurgence of faith , the need for shelter from the "hurricane of capitalism", or an investment in a new kind of market. Jonathan Benthall surveys a clutch of recent books that account in different ways for the drift away from , and back to, religion - even if this is only "a quest for what matters". That wouldn't have been enough for Evelyn Waugh, who became a Roman Catholic in 1930 and was one at his death thirty-six years later, in spite of distress over the reforms of Vatican 11. "Pray God I shall never apostatize" (sic), he wrote to Father Martin D' Arcy, SJ, who had converted him and many other intellectual and social eminences between the wars. Richard Harp has looked into Fr D' Arcy's archive, and offers choice morsels of an unpublished memoir and correspondence from Waugh , Dorothy L. Sayers and W. H. Auden. The "open secret" of the inner conflict suffered by another Catholic novelist, Fran~ois Mauriac, is discussed in John Flower' s review of a new biography: the first to address head-on Mauriac ' s homosexuality.

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PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

3

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

6

The ' prebiotic soup', Humanities funding, Immensely learned, etc

HISTORY

8 Stella TilIyard

Amanda Vickery Behind Closed Doors - At home in Georgian England Rachel Stewart The Town House in Georgian London Dan Cruickshank The Secret History of Georgian London

Jonathan Benthall

POEMS

8 Rachel Hadas 28 James Fenton 28 John Fuller

Between Brattleboro and Bellows Falls At the Kerb Two Words

LITERATURE & LITERARY CRITICISM

10 Alastair Fowler

Gerard Kilroy, editor The Epigrams of Sir John Harington Scott L. Newstok Quoting Death in Early Modern England Antal Szerb The Queen's Necklace; Translated by Len Rix

COMMENTARY

13

Peter Marshall Ruth Scurr Richard Harp

Brenda Maddox David Ganz Then and Now ARTS

17 Eric Griffiths Oliver Reynolds

FICTION

19 Paul Binding Adrian Tahourdin Michael Caines Christopher Butler Chloe Campbell

RELIGION

22 Bettina Bildhauer David Bentley Hart Theo Hobson

AJ

A conjuror at the Xmas party - Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the famous friends and converts of Father D' Arcy - whose archive contains unpublished letters from them all Scholars' delight - The end of the Ulysses wars Freelance TLS September 28, 1967 - Climate history Shakespeare and Toneelgroep Amsterdam Roman Tragedies (Barbican Theatre) The Power of Dogii (British Museum; Tokyo National Museum) In the wrong company - Stanley Middleton: A provincial modernist Jean-Philippe Toussaint La Verite sur Marie. Running Away Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt The Most Beautiful Book in the World Eight novellas Georges Simenon Tropic Moon. The Engagement. The Widow Hirsh Sawhney, editor Delhi Noir Brian Murdoch The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe John Milbank The Future of Love - Essays in political theology. Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank The Monstrosity of Christ Jeffrey C. Pugh Religionless Christianity - Dietrich Bonhoeffer in troubled times. Paul D. Janz The Command of Grace - A new theological apologetics

ECONOMICS

26 Howard Davies

Roger Boyes Meltdown Iceland - How the global financial crisis bankrupted an entire country. Armann Thorvaldsson Frozen Assets How I lived Iceland ' s boom and bust

SCIENCE

27 John Godfrey

Nicholas Stern A Blueprint for a Safer Planet - How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity. Anthony Giddens The Politics of Climate Change. WilIiam H. Calvin Global Fever - How to treat climate change. Al Gore Our Choice A plan to solve the climate crisis. David J. C. MacKay Sustainable Energy - Without the hot air

POETRY

28 David Nokes

Peter Pindar Laughing at the King - Selected poems

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS

29 John Flower 32 David Coward

Jean-Luc Barre Fran~ois Mauriac John W. Kiser Commander of the Faithful Fatos Lubonja Second Sentence - Inside the Albanian gulag Phil Baker The Devil Is a Gentleman - The life and times of Dennis Wheatley

Morelle Smith According to one estimate of the numbers of prostitutes who walked its streets, Georgian London was "a heady mixture of 1970s Amsterdam and 1990s Bangkok" , writes Stella Tillyard, who surveys new volumes that reveal, as well as its seamier side, the way that status and gender relations in Georgian England often came down to "carriage and horses carpets and plate". Dennis Wheatley (above) took a more puritan and even Manichaean line, Ronald Hutton tells us: he despised Christianity but instinctively associated sex with the Devil , and the "classic double take" this allowed him in his novels made him a very rich man.

Mike King Postsecularism - The hidden challenge to extremism. Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith, and Revolution - Reflections on the God debate. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge God Is Back - How the global rise of faith is changing the world. Paul Froese The Plot To Kill God - Findings from the Soviet experiment in secularization. Michael Jackson The Palm at the End of the Mind Relatedness, religiosity, and the real

34 Ronald Hutton IN BRIEF

NB

30

August Kleinzahler Music I- LXXIV , et al

35

This week' s contributors, Crossword

36 J. C.

Perambulatory Highgate, McCarthy's typewriter, Laureate Yuletide

Cover picture: Father O' Arcy, 1950 © Norman Parkinson Archive; p2 © TopFoto; p3 © Peter Dejong/AP; pS © Tirn A. Hetherington/Panos; p9 © Stapleton Collection/Bridgernan Art Library; plO © SSPLlGetty Images; pl2 © Bridgeman Art Library; pl3 © Wyndham Lewis/National Portrait Gallery; pl4 © Estate of Henry Lamb/Bridgeman Art Library; piS © Rex Features; pl7 © Donald Cooper; pl9 © The Times Archive; p21 © Alamy; p22 © Dagli Ortiffhe Art Archive; p2S © AKG; p26 © Halldor Kolbein s/AFP/Getty Images; p28 © National Portrait Gallery; p29 © Mary Evans Picture Library; p32 © The Art Archive; p34 © Kobal Collection The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is publi shed weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYI I 101- 31 13. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS DECEMBER II 2009


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Beyond belief In spite of science and secularism, religions are gaining strength - but are they offering more than a 'storm-shutter' or a new global market? ichard Dawkins's heart leaps up as high as any Romantic poet's when he beholds a rainbow. But he has taken issue with Keats 's complaint that when scientists "un weave" a rainbow they spoil it. Mike King in Postsecularism ripostes that Dawkins is trying to "arrogate to science what is the proper domain of a quite different human impulse - the poetic and mystical". The reason why the rainbow moves us is that it is "unexpected, vivid, and set, like music, against the counterpoint of landscape, whether natural or man-made in its specificity". This domain of spirituality, to which belongs our sense of interconnectedness and the "grandeur of life" evoked by the rainbow, is, according to King, autonomous with regard to science. He accepts Stephen Jay Gould's proposition that religion and science are " non-overlapping magisteria", though he would add a third magisterium, that of the arts. He rejects " monoculture of the mind" as symptomatic of both religious fundamentalism and ultra-scientism. All the books under review reflect the withering away of the "secularization thesis" that prevailed in sociology thirty years ago. The first four address the phenomenon of militant atheism, while the fifth, by Michael Jackson, may be seen as an attempt to sidestep the problem formulated by Gould. Mike King's knowledge is impressive, ranging from quantum mechanics to contemporary music, as well as texts arguing for and against religion. He is perhaps at his most original when he applies the Sanskrit terms bhakti, glossed as the devotional spiritual impulse, as opposed to jnani, non-theistic insight, to make comparisons across widely different spiritual traditions, each of which has a mystical virtuosity at its core. Confidence in his familiarity with the Hindu- Buddhist repertoire is sapped, however, by his translation of samsara as "illusion", when its primary meaning is the cycle of reincarnation - on which he has nothing to say. As for Islam, which the reader is led to assume will be treated in some depth, it appears only as refracted through the writings of non-Muslims such as Martin Amis and John Updike. King writes that: "If the New Age represents the nursery slopes of the spiritual life,

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then it is the task for a movement or sensihil-

ity such as postsecularism to encourage the more arduous journey up the mountain". His ambitious intelligence may well gain disciples who will overlook his rather furred-up style. Terry Eagleton is already a cultic leader in literary criticism , though he repudiates the campaign by Matthew Arnold and his successors to turn literature into a surrogate religion. Part of Reason, Faith, and Revolution is a boisterous polemic against an amalgam of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, fused under the insulting sobriquet

JONATHAN BENTHALL Mike King

Paul Froese

POSTSECULARISM The hidden challenge to extremism 324pp. James Clarke. Paperback, £25 (US $52.50). 9780227 172476

THE PLOT TO KILL GOD Findings from the Soviet ex periment in sec ularization 264pp. University of California Press. $55 (paperback, $21 .95); di stributed in the UK by Wiley. £37.95 (paperback, £14.95). 9780520255296

Terry Eagleton REASON , FAITH , AND REVOLUTION Reflection s on the God debate 185pp. Yale University Press. £18.99 (US $25). 9780300151794

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge GOD IS BACK How the global rise of faith is changing the world 352pp. Alien Lane. £25. 9780713999020

"Ditchkins". He has more of a thing about the "doctrinal ferocity" of Dawkins 's promotion of atheism than about the more urbane

Michael Jackson THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND Reiatedness, re ligiosity, and the real 288pp. Duke University Press. $79.95 (paperback, $22.95); di stributed in the UK by Combined Acade mic Publishers. £55 (paperback, £ 14.99). 97808223 4359 2

approach of Hitchens, who was a former political comrade of Eagleton until his defection to the American neoconservatives. Eagleton

08.12.09 Copenhagen Until now, Copenhagen's most famous appearance on the world-historical stage may have been as the location, in 1801, for Lord Nelson's selective blindness when confronted by an order he wished to ignore, The United Nations representatives in the Danish capital this week for the Climate Change Conference are, we are told, faced by enemies more formidable even than

those arrayed against the Baltic fleet, The scientists, politicians, activists and any number of performers and exhibitors (the picture shows a French acrobat, Antoine Lemenestrel, illustrating the perils of rising global temperatures) who are campaigning for a rigorous, binding agreement will not be satisfied if their masters allege that they "really do not see the signal",

TLS DECEMBER I I 2009

yields to none in his denunciation of institutional Christianity and a punitive, vengeful God as a betrayal of Jesus 's championing of the poor and rejected. He passionately restates a leftist Christianity whose acknowledgement of Original Sin leads it to "tragic humanism". Following the philosopher Charles Taylor, Eagleton argues that "Faith" and "Enlightenment" were never simple opposites. Despite bitter memories of his own Irish Catholic schooling, he finds it scandalous that the work of religiously committed people over centuries in alleviating suffering, working for peace and standing up to dictators should be summarily dismissed by out-andout opponents of religion such as Dawkins and Hitchens. He attacks what he sees as a new cultural supremacism emerging from the central liberal ground, based on a naive idea of progress. Above all, he seems determined not to mellow out and settle down. Eagleton's book is based on a series of lectures given at Yale last year, and retains a trace of professorial condescension: he appears to congratulate Jesus when he "takes the point" in John 4: 7- 26 that the adulterous Samaritan woman is leading an unfulfilled life. With a brilliant lecturer's legerdemain , he skates over, rather than trying to explain to sceptics, the paradox that the Christian God, who has made our world "for the fun of it" , loves his creatures " in all their moral squalor" while also making "ruthless demands" of self-sacrifice. For Eagleton, the question of belief in God is badly put: credal statements are performative utterances. Eagleton's view that religious traditions should be honoured extends to the courageous Buddhist monks who stirred consciences over the Vietnam war, and to those who more recently have defied oppressive regimes in Burma and Tibet. While making no concessions to fanatical violence, Eagleton pleads for an understanding of the motivations that underlie Islamist radicalism as a resistance to aggressive Western policies. But his political sensitivity lets him down when he refers to "the Israeli massacres of Palestinians in Jordan in 1971 ", by which he presumably means the Black September of 1970 when King Hussein 's forces , not the Israelis, killed some 3,000 Palestinian insurgents in Jordan.

One of the few straight factual errors I spotted in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge' s God is Back was the misdating of Tennyson's phrase "N ature, red in tooth and claw" as a response to Darwin's The Origin of Species, which it actually preceded by several years. Micklethwait is Editor, and Wooldridge a senior staff member of The Economist, where some of their material was originally published. Admirers of the magazine's taut, disciplined, omniscient house style will not be disappointed. Micklethwait is a Catholic, and Wooldridge an atheist.


4 Accordingly , they express the hope that any biases they bring to their study will cancel each other out. The thrust of their case is simple and strong. The standard view of United States religiosity is that it is exceptionally elevated, by contrast with the drift away from the Churches in the rest of the industrialized world. No, the authors say: "for the first time since the dawn of the modern era, the world seems to be moving decisively in the American rather than the European direction", so that the exception is Europe. American Christianity survived three setbacks in the twentieth century: the split between liberals and fundamentalists; the humiliation of the fundamentalists over "two great demons, drink and Darwin" ; and finally and more subtly, after the Second World War, the "blandification" of religion through the idea of a Judaeo-Christian America in which Protestants, Catholics and Jews were fused in a "triple melting-pot". "American religion returned in the final years of the twentieth century, as ' hot' and as disruptive as it ever had been." However, "global religion is a two-way street, with American-style Christianity spreading to the developing world, and then developing world Christianity returning to America" . China, they confidently predict, is going to be converted. Dwight Moody, the nineteenth-century business-friendly revivalist and hymnodist, was a "harbinger of the future" . Micklethwait and Wooldridge adduce

several reasons for his trend. The United States has embraced pluralism and free choice rather than state fiat. People take cover from the "hurricane of capitalism" under the canopy of religion. "There appears to be an inverse relationship between the generosity of the welfare state and the success of religion: the more generous the secular welfare state, the more it will 'crowd out' religious-based charities and reduce the demand for religion in general." Western Europe's generous welfare provisions make it the exception today - but for how long, as welfare provisions come under pressure? A body of sociological evidence in the United States concludes that religious activity enhances mental and physical wellbeing, reduces criminal deviance and promotes material wealth. But Micklethwait and Wooldridge also recognize that the sword of religion is two-edged. What is true for Poles in Boston is clearly not true for the Israelis and Arabs who share Jerusalem. The authors of God is Back are at their journalistic best in their vivid descriptions of an evangelical house church service in a comfortable apartment in one of Shanghai ' s gated communities, and of a noisy exorcism in Sao Paulo's Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. In their introduction, they commendably admit that statistical evidence, which they make extensive use of, must be handled with circumspection in the field of religious beliefs and practices. But one might go further and argue that, though religion is

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not quite such a sensitive topic for numbercrunching surveys as sexual behaviour, it is at the high end of the sensitivity scale. Since they believe that "the most important development is not quantitative but qualitative", one might have hoped for some use of ethnographic sources - for example, from the collection edited by Fenella Cannell, The Anthropology of Christianity (2006). However, their basic model of religion as a marketplace has considerable power. They cover contemporary Islam in much less depth than Christianity, but their overall conclusion is well argued: that American fear of Muslim expansionism is exaggerated. "Sensible policy" , they write, "should be based on recognizing divisions within the Islamic world rather than turning all Muslims into enemies", and they castigate the George W. Bush administration for not having understood the difference between Shias and Sunnis before the invasion of Iraq (but they do not mention The Economist's support for that invasion). Though this authorial pushmi-pullyu has two heads, they are both steeped in monotheistic assumptions, whereas their subtitle is How the global rise of faith is changing the world. Their heavyweight punch and resources could have been used to even more effect if they had examined these assumptions self-critically. Buddhism is mentioned briefly, as "the religion whose market share has dipped most over the past century" but is now "being drawn into the Americaninspired revival and reshaping of global religion". This may understate the importance of "engaged Buddhism" as a movement with resonance in at least ten Asian countries, and significant appeal among the Euro-American professional classes, where it has the reputation of being a non-aggressive and ecologically sensitive alternative to mainstream Christianity and Islam. The concept of a singular personal God is alien to Buddhism. The social study of religion would look very different if it had started from the baseline of Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism. Militant atheism provokes relatively little hullabaloo in these Asian traditions because of ambiguity as to the objective existence of divine forces. It may be that China will become Christian (as Micklethwait and Wooldridge believe), but there will be vigorous competition from eclectic ideological movements that draw on deeper roots in Chinese national history. Theologians and other serious believers will not be satisfied with a defence of religion that gives priority to its roles either as a storm shutter or as an octane booster for the economy. If Micklethwait and Wooldridge had given more attention to the environmental crisis in their book (where it gets only half a page), they would have had to consider a challenge that all the world religions now face. Each possesses a fund of teaching about the sanctity and beauty of nature that could be drawn on to induce its adherents to accept human responsibility for " sustainable development" - the extremely difficult field of compromise between conservation and wealth creation. Yet in addition to the susceptibility of each of the world religions (even Buddhism at times) to be used to legitimize exclusion and violence, they can also inspire forms of fatalism rather than programmes for action. "Faith-based" environmental and aid


agencies that address these problems are now attracting considerable attention from international policymakers. Monotheistic bias - questioning of which is one of the strong points of King' s Postsecularism - is left unquestioned in Paul Froese's The Plot To Kill God. "Although nontheistic and pantheistic religions still exist", he writes, "'current survey research indicates that belief in monotheism is an omnipresent constant across agrarian, industrial and postindustrial countries" . This is surely not true of the Japanese or the Thais, or of members of the Marwari and other commercial communities in India. However, this quirk does not substantially flaw Froese's exposition, which is, until the last chapter, confined to the ex-Soviet Union, where all the republics were predominantly either Orthodox or Muslim, with the exception of Lithuania (Catholic) and Estonia and Latvia (Protestant and Catholic). In 1925 , the Soviet regime founded the League of Militant Atheists to spread the message that religion was scientifically falsifiable. Militant atheism went as far as exhuming the bodies of Orthodox saints to prove that they were frauds made of wax, while Lenin's embalmed corpse was put on permanent display. The aim of the League was not to allow religious sensibility to dissolve, but to convert the population to a new faith: scientific atheism. Secular ceremonies to mark births, marriages and deaths were instituted, substituting the Soviet state for God. The Russian Church was brutally persecuted until the Second World War. The League functioned until 1941, when Stalin decided that the support of the Russian Church was needed to help defeat Nazi Germany. Repression of religion began again after the war. Froese is an academic sociologist, not an expert on the former Soviet Union, and his strategy is to make use of English-language sources to test six hypotheses about religion in general that underpinned, explicitly or implicitly, the Soviet secularization experiment. These were: that religion is a primitive illusion ; that sacred values and rites have precedence over gods; that religious dignitaries are merely deputies of the temporal power; that religious behaviour is predominantly governed by rational choice; that religion is exclusively concerned with the supernatural; and finally , that market forces constrain Churches just as they do commercial enterprises. Froese reviews all these hypotheses critically, with a personal leaning towards the market model. This divides into the "supplyside" hypothesis, which proposes that religiosity changes to the extent that religious institutions are allowed to and attempt to recruit new members, and the "demand-side" hypothesis: that individuals ' quest for religious meaning and explanation enlarges at times

of disasters and social upheavals. The Soviet regime experimented first with cutting off religious supply, but also proceeded on the demand side to try to modernize the Soviet population and provide them with atheist rituals. The Russian Church refrained from the kind of political challenge to Communism advanced by the Catholic Church in Poland, but was allowed during the perestroika era to reconsolidate its monopoly, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has buttressed still further. Froese wonders why Soviet propagandists


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A building in the mining town ofKoidu, Sierra Leone, damaged during the civil war; 2002 spent so much effort in creating a substitute religion when they could have co-opted an existing one more easily. The history of Soviet Islam in Central Asia was different, in that a working relationship was achieved between Muslims and atheist Communists. The Bol sheviks played on Mu slims' antiimperialist sentiment. A progressive Islamic movement known as Jadidi sm form ed a short-li ved alliance with the Communist Party, but was purged between 1927 and 1939. The government promoted free education and industrialization, and at the same time set out to weaken "religious supply" by eliminating Islamic courts and schools, decreasing the number of active mosques, un veiling women, and encouraging interfaith maniages. Froese' s exposition within the theoretical terms of reference he has set himself is admirabl y meticulou s, but necessaril y somewhat dry as it re lies on secondary sources . By contrast, Michae l Jackson's sixty-one short essays, based on his experiences in disparate geographical settings, are designed to speak to each reader individually like a sophisticated musical composition , rather than advancing a linear argument. Jackson, now a professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School, is a social anthropologist best kno wn for his borro wing of ideas from phenomenology. The settings of hi s narrati ves ra nge fro m industrial socie ties today the Harvard campus, a cafe in Copenhagen through memories of his childhood in New Zealand, to his fi eldwork among the Kuranko of north-eastern Sierra Leone and among Aboriginal s in northern Queensland. In common with a number of other scholars today, Jackson radically questions the definition of religion. "We need" , he suggests, "to approach religiosity without a theological vocabulary, repudiate the notion of religion as a sui generi s phenomenon, and di stance ourselves fro m the assumption of a necessary re lationship between espoused belief and sub-

jecti ve experience" . Re ligion is a quest for "what matters", for the assurance of reality. Rejecting the psychoanalytic view that religiou s experience is grounded in a yearning for reunion with the mother, Jackson prefers to dra w attention to "those critical situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, the limits of our strength where we run up against a brick wall. These cri ses - such as birth , initiation, sickness, bereavement, ex ile - open up "new possibilities of relatedness", and "the human capacity for formin g bonds knows no bounds, encompassing other persons, obj ects, animals, abstract ideas, ideologies, possessions, and even the earth or cosmos": "It would seem that for all human beings, regardless of their world views, it is in border situations when they are sorely tested ... that they are most susceptible to those epiphanies, breakthroughs, conversions, and revelations that are sometimes associated with the divine and sometimes simply taken as evidence of the finitude, uncertainty, and thrownness of human ex istence" . For him, a given interpretative vocabulary is at its most disputable when it appears to pri vilege one way of representing reality by depreciating others. He quotes extensively from a pri vate journal that was kept by Emil y, his mother - a schoolteacher, mother of fi ve and later a proficient painter - during the ten years until her death at the age of eighty-three, and read by him thirteen years after that. Jackson pays tribute to his mother' s resilience and unfailing hopefuln ess in the face of agonizing rheumatoid arthritis throughout all her adult life. "That Emily never invoked God, nor fram ed her exi stential struggle in religious terms, does not mean that her experience was essentially different from those for whom life's intelligibility and ultimate meaning are expressed through the language of a faith." Jackson joins Mike King in his passion for

TLS D EC E M B E R 11 2009

connectedness . His Sierra Leonean friends drive home the conviction that full personhood depends on webs of interdependent relationships, which are so strongly valued in their cultures . "To lose one's sense of connectedness or belonging to something greater than oneself is to risk abandoning one of humanity' s most proven strategies for surviving tragedy .... " However, the building of extraordinary connections requires a prior rupture from mundane ones - as is dramatized in rites of passage such as the initiation of adolescents, or in Jesus's call on his disciples to leave their families. This line of thought might, in other hands, lead to the formul ation of a set of moral and spiritual principles compatible with modern science, free from Eurocentric ass umptions and acceptable across all cultural di vides. But Jackson himself is struck by "the limited extent to which abstract ideas inform our action s, he lp us correct course, or enable us to endure" . The title of his book, borrowed from a late poem by Wall ace Stevens, "Of Mere Being", and illu strated on the cover by a photograph of a Sierra Leonean village, is representative of Jackson' s allusive, sometimes even cryptic sty le. Maybe his chosen format of brief, impressioni stic essays does not give enough breathing space to hi s refl ections either on the writings of Shoah survivors such as Primo Levi, or on the antinomian qualities of recreational drugs . Nevertheless, Jackson' s case that "history, religion , spirituality, culture are shop-worn terms", and should be replaced by "the image of life at the edge of language, a shoreline on which the sea washes ceaselessly", is given substance by his own literary skill. And it is possible to glimpse here the makings of a shared "religious" sensibility that may be fitfull y emerging to unite different peoples and traditions, in ways influenced by, but not entirely decreed by, the gods of the marketplace.

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LONDON, UK BURLlNGTON, USA SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

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Humanities funding Sir, - Everyone agrees it's a bad situation, but whose fault is it? Phi lip Davis (Letters, November 20) blames the scholars themselves; Gordon Campbell (Letters, November 27) and Patrick Lyndon (Letters, December 4) blame the universities. Perhaps some historical background may be helpful. From 1919 to 1988, government respected the autonomy of universities by channelling public funds through the University Grants Committee, which was manned by senior academics but served by Treasury officials. That arm'slength arrangement was unacceptable to Mrs Thatcher' s government. One of her MPs, soon to be Minister for Higher Education, wrote to the TLS about "the apparatus and ethos of the self-regarding academic producer-monopoly", which exemplified "the latent corruptions of the parson's freehold" (Robert J ackson, May 8, 1987). One of her Cabinet ministers told the Independent that "the university sector is, I think, determined to remain as unreformed as possible for as long as possible. Yes, we have a long way to go there" (Norman Tebbit, April 4, 1988). The Education Reform Act of July 1988 replaced the old UGC with a Universities Funding Council, the ancestor of HEFCE. It was deliberately business-oriented, and its chairman announced to the Times Higher Education Supplement that "the decaying parts of the university system are those which lose their contact with the real world: they're really armchair things. [Either] they really are relevant and people support them or else they're not and they fade away" (Lord Chilver, October 14, 1988: his emphasis). He took the view that history students should be paid for by the "museums and theatres" that benefited from their knowledge. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Education was reassuring the Fellows of the British Academy at their annual general meeting that "every civilised society, in order to remain civilised, needs to instil in its citizens the aptitudes and intuitions provided by the humanities" (Kenneth Baker, July 1988). Subsequent governments abandoned the half-baked rhetoric but kept the tight control over university funding, separating teaching from research in a way more appropriate to the sciences than the humanities, and distributing the research element according to the results of the "assessment exercise". The purpose was, and the result has been, to remove universities' autonomy in deciding their priorities. To get their funding, of course they had to subscribe to the values and idioms of their (now much more demanding) paymasters. University

The 'prebiotic soup' Sir, - The resilience of the "prebiotic soup" myth, in spite of torrents of counter-evidence, is truly astonishing. Even professionals such as Stephen Fletcher (Letters, December 4), criticizing Thomas Nagel's recommendation of Signature in the CeLL by Stephen C. Meyer (Books of the Year, November 27), apparently still believe in it. Fletcher asserts that "Natural selection is in fact a chemical process as well as a biological process, and it was operating for about half a billion years before the earliest cellular life forms appear in the fossil record" . Actually the operation of neoDarwinian natural selection depends on the prior existence of entities capable of self-replication. Variants are produced in their genetic material by mutations, the variants are copied by the organism's biochemical machinery, and then natural selection ensures the most " fit" survive. Before the arrival of organisms capable of reproduction, this process could not operate. In the words of the renowned evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms". It follows that, even in principle, some quite different explanation is required to account for the origin of life. Fletcher is pinning his hopes on a supposed RNA world. He tells us: "Indeed, before DNA there was another hereditary system at work, less biologically fit than DNA, most likely RNA (ribonucleic acid)". It is an amusing irony that while castigating students of religion for believing in the supernatural, he

[email protected] offers in its place an entirely imaginary "RNA world" the only support for which is speculation! Intense laboratory research has failed to produce even one nucleotide (RNA component) under geologically plausible conditions. As for the chains of nucleotides required for the RNA world, there are insuperable problems associated with their information content, as well as the chemical selectivity needed for their assembly. Furthermore, the earth's oldest Precambrian rocks show very good evidence that life was present from the start, so the half-billion years Fletcher counts on were actually not available for chemical evolution. Rather than just kowtowing to the creaky naturalist "prebiotic soup" scenario, Meyer engages with the whole range of origin of life problems. Anyone interested in discovering where the evidence leads will find this a fascinating book.

Sir, - Stephen Fletcher objects to my recommending Stephen C. Meyer's Signature in the CeLL in Books of the Year. Fletcher' s statement that "It is hard to imagine Contrary to what he says, I did a worse book" suggests that he has read his book very carefully, more read it. If he has, he knows that it carefully perhaps than he did. All witticisms and resentments incl udes a chapter on "The RN A World" which describes that put aside, my review had a serious hypothesis for the origin of DNA purpose, which I am surprised he at least as fully as the Wikipedia did not see, namely that to argue as article that Fletcher recommends. Marc Fumaroli did - and sincerely Meyer discusses this and other so, I am sure - against the very proposals about the chemical dubious "art system" that thrives precursors of DNA , and argues that today, in the name of a very dubithey all pose similar problems about ous golden age, isn't helpful. how the process could have got PATRICE HIGONNET started. Center for European Studies, The tone of Fletcher' s letter exemHarvard University, Cambridge, plifies the widespread intolerance Massachusetts 02138. of any challenge to the dogma that everything in the world must be -------~-----ultimately explainable by chemistry and physics. There are reasons to doubt this that have nothing to do with theism, beginning with the Sir, - Gaudier-Brzeska's "Hieratic apparent physical irreducibility of Head of Ezra Pound" is described consciousness. Doubts about reduc- by James Hall as "infamous" tive explanations of the origin of (November 13). The OED defines life also do not depend on theism. "infamous" as "Of ill fame or Since I am not tempted to believe in repute; famed or notorious for God, I do not draw Meyer's conclu- badness of any kind; notoriously sions, but the problems he poses evil, wicked, or vile; held in infamy lend support to the view that phys- or public disgrace". Gaudier's ics is not the theory of everything, bust is one of the masterpieces and that more attention should be of twentieth-century art. What given to the possibility of an justification can there be for such expanded conception of the natural unexplained, gratuitous abuse? order.

Infamous?

CLIVE WILMER JOHN C. WALTON School of Chemistry, University of St

THOMAS NAGEL 29 Washington Square,

Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews.

New York 10011.

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managements handle this situation as best they can, but the fact remains that by their nature the humanities are the part of the system most likely to be damaged by its inflexibility. The new "impact" criterion has made matters worse, but there is no point in blaming the universities for it. Their research funding now comes under the aegis of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. One can only hope that Lord Mandelson's department is prepared to recognize that scholarship in the humanities has a value, even if it doesn't make the kind of impact they want. T. P. WISEMAN 22 Hillcrest Park, Exeter.

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'Thalassa' Sir, - John Ridpath (and Steve Mentz, the author of At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean, which Ridpath was reviewing, November

Unis, et meme, a certains egards, ce n'est pas le cas du tout, car depuis toujours les Americains ont un point fixe dans le testament de leurs Fondateurs, et depuis la vie/oire du Sud dans leur guerre civile [my italics] ils ant acquis la certitude inebranlable .

27) ought to know that the Greek word for "the sea" is not "thalassos" but thalassa or, in Attic Greek, thalatta , if only in order to appreciate Ronald Knox's witticism. When asked which of the two forms was to be preferred, Knox is supposed to have replied, "The latter". DAVID SANSONE 1104 Wilshire Court, Champaign, Illinois 61821.

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Lesley Blanch Sir, - The Literary Executors of the Estate of Lesley Blanch (1904-2007) would be grateful to hear from you if you have any letters, drawings, or papers to donate to the Lesley Blanch Archive, eventually to be established at New College, Oxford. Email: [email protected] GEORGIA DE CHAMBERET PO Box 20184, London W I O.

TLS DECEMBER 11 2009

Immensely learned Sir, - "Grotesque failures of taste and mores": I like it. "La beaute est une promesse de bonheur": I love it. Marc Fumaroli's is a typically elegant complaint (Letters, November 27). He writes, he tells us, "pour ses semblables et ses freres". But reviewers, as I now realize, are something else. It wasn't enough, it would seem, that I described Fumaroli as "an elegant and allusive speaker with great personal and lecturing presence", the "author of brilliant works", a "historian of the first rank", or that I described his book as ""impassioned" and "immensely learned". As regards his more specific complaint (about my stating that he seems to think that the South won the American Civil War), I need to remind him of what he wrote on page 613 of his book: C'est beaucoup mains le cas [he's writing, typically again, about a hypothetical European rejection of"J'inculture hypennoderne"] qu'aux Etats-

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

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Watcher Sir, - J. C. thinks that the cockney greeting "watcher" or "wotcha" (NB, December 4) might be "a contraction of 'What you?''', while he cites the author of the new Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, who thinks it could derive from '''What cheer?' (ie, what's new?)" . I always thought that the sense of it in use was, "What are you doing?" or "What are you up to?" with "what are you" contracting to "wotcher", sometimes with a hint of "wotchyer". In 1909, the scandalously under-praised wordsmith Albert Chevalier wrote and sang, '''Wotcher!' all the neighbours cried, / 'Who're yer goin' to meet Bill? / Have yer bought the street, Bill?' / Laugh! I thought I should 'ave died, / Knock'd'em in the Old Kent Road". This chorus is an ironic response to the narrator (Bill) hearing that his missus has inherited a little Donkey shay. MICHAEL ROSEN 49 Parkholme Road , London E8.

HISTORY

8 n the eighteenth century, foreign visitors to England were quick to sense a relationship between architecture, the home and the national character. The English "prefer the most miserable cottage hired in their

I

own name, to more convenient apartments in

another house", wrote the German observer Von Archenholz in 1791, as quoted by Amanda Vickery in Behind Closed Doors. The three books under review here all make this connection between space, architecture, home, goods and identity. In 1780, the redoubtable Dowager Countess of Home, stepping out of her magnificent town house in Portman Square, constructed by James Wyatt in 1772 and sumptuously remodelled by Robert Adam three years later, walked into a neighbourhood that was home to thousands of prostitutes. The finest of London's town houses, in St James's Square, were only yards from King's Place, a street that housed dozens of London 's most expensive prostitutes. In the capital , in the very crucible of modernity, where architecture conferred status, and goods made people who they were, there was no more lucrative chattel than female flesh. London in the eighteenth century had more prostitutes per capita than any other European city. What impact, if any, did the use of prostitutes by husbands, sons, servants and visitors have on the notion of selfhood as inherent in the private and the domestic? How did what people saw or bought on the streets or in bagnios affect what they thought and how they lived within their homes? Was home the more sweet and to be cherished because so many did not have one? Was the sense of self that Vickery writes about, created from what she calls "the universe of possessions", as much defensive as constructive; a shutting out as much as a building within? Might not being "at home" make sense then, and now, if set against what was outside and at variance with the ideas of household and matrimony? These books have the effect of posing uneasy questions. Rachel Stewart, in The Town House in Georgian London, has a sober sense that the town house gained meaning and attraction from its opposite, the country seat. In the period she considers, roughly between the accession of George III in 1760 and the beginning of the long conflict with France after the French Revolution, the town house reached the height of its architectural spread and expression, but it also became the site of longing and opprobrium in equal measure. Stewart' s straightforward and thorough examination of the cultural and architectural history of the town house offers a clear account of a distinctive element of London's built environment, and it also shows that for a small, influential body of people, the development of the town house led to a loosening of bonds with the countryside, with ancestry and dynastic duty, and a new idea of the self as urban , singular and perhaps even modern. The Great Fire saw a shift of domestic architecture away from the City of London in the late seventeenth century; meanwhile the waning power of the Court and the rise in the importance of Parliament and professional politics meant that increasing numbers of aristocrats established town houses in London 's West End. Building spread northwards from the streets around St James's Palace in the first decades of the eighteenth century, and

Double fronts STELLA TILL YARD Amanda Vickery BEHIND CLOSED DOORS At home in Georgian England

382pp. Yale University Press. £18.99 (US $45). 9780300154535

Rachel Stewart THE TOWN HOUSE IN GEORGIAN LONDON 272pp. Yale University Press. £30 (US $65). 9780300 15277 7

Dan Cruickshank THE SECRET HISTORY OF GEORGIAN LONDON 654pp. Random House. £25. 978 I 847945372

by the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the "rage of building" led to extensive development west and north of Cavendish Square (begun 1717) in Marylebone, particularly in Portman Square and in the grid of streets bounded by Oxford Street, the New (now Euston) Road to the north and Portland Place to the east. At the same time, the Bedford Estate was filling in the squares and streets of Bloomsbury, and other isolated developments , such as the Adelphi, south of the Strand, were attracting fashionable tenants. Much of the land was owned by aristocratic families and therefore entailed, or it was in the hands of corporate landowners who developed it to provide a long-term steady income.

As a result most houses were held on leases and building was large-scale and uniform. Despite the development of the "palace front" , which pulled a row of three-bay houses into a single design reminiscent of a grander building, both the basic layout and the external appearance of the town house remained remarkably consistent throughout the eighteenth century. There were occasional grand, "'stand alone" commissions within the architecture of particular squares, Berkeley Square or St James's Square, for instance, and interesting experiments with form such as Robert Taylor's Palladianwindowed house in Soho Square; but the majority of houses had two or three "good" rooms facing the street and a number of smaller rooms at the back, basement kitchens and small gardens or mews behind. Perhaps in part because of this uniformity, great attention was paid to remodelling and fitting up houses; the Adam brothers in particular provided ingenious, elegant and often expensive solutions to the problems of small sites and standard floor plans , with apses and ceilings, wall reliefs and chimney pieces creating integrated neo-classical interiors that made the most of light and space. The transitory nature of the town house, its leasehold status and its interchangeability made it the site of dreams and consumption. Stewart points out that a town house was usually described as belonging to somebody, whereas, in the country, a man and his family were described as pertaining to a particular house or estate. In London people would use their property to define them as they

Between Brattleboro and Bellows Falls Darkness rose as day behind the trees Dwindled, although the occasional metal roof, Mimicking a river or a lake, Might briefly lob back light Until the train sped on And the specious glow was lost. We move past trees And then an open field, then trees again, And day when we emerge Is that much closer to ending: Light has gone down a notch. Change works like that. The pace of decline seems vanishingly slow, But look up: the sky' s darker. Gazing blankly Into the twilit window, I snare a fragment Of conversation floating back from when We still had conversations, Or I thought we did. But the next day It was for you as if that conversation Had never happened. I looked up And saw the sky had changed. RACHEL HADAS


wished.Some of the best town houses were commissioned by widows who had little status in the dynastic realm of the countryside, where they would be relegated to the dower house. In town, they could visit, entertain and feel themselves on an equal footing with their neighbours, and they could spend their money on furnishings and decorative schemes. Not surprisingly, many soon stayed in their much-loved town houses all the year round. By the end of the century the notion of the town house was weakening; aristocratic younger sons, bachelors, spinsters, widows and officers' wives began to live in town permanently. In 1809, when her husband went out to Portugal to command the British Army, Kitty, Lady Wellington, arrived in London and rented Number II Harley Street. She had no house in the country, and neither did her next-door neighbour, Sir William Beechey. The Dowager Duchess of Leinster lived at Number 14 and left town only occasionally for a modest cottage in Wimbledon. For professionals and aristocrats such as these London became, sometimes briefly, often permanently, home. Over time the design of the town house, reduced to two bays and between five and two storeys, became the frustratingly cramped and distinctive style of London building that endured for the next hundred years. The distinction between the town house and town house was anyway blurred, often depending more on who lived there than on any distinctive architectural feature. Many speculatively built three-bay houses were in multiple occupancy from the start, broken up into apartments or inhabited by a family who rented out rooms or whole floors. All around Soho Square, and throughout Marylebone by the mid-eighteenth century, actresses, prostitutes and courtesans lived in small apartments, side by side with aristocratic and professional leaseholders. Vice, as Dan Cruickshank points out in The Secret History of Georgian London, was an all-pervasive part of London life in the eighteenth century, and the profits of vice fuelled the building boom that Stewart describes. Cruickshank' s book is stuffed with welltold histories with vignettes of famous prostitutes, their keepers and their clients; Kitty Fisher, who famously put a bank note on a slice of bread and butter and consumed it because it was insultingly small; Lavinia Fenton who played Polly Peachum in John Gay's Beggar's Opera and went on to become mistress then wife to the Duke of Bolton; Madame Cornelys, who in the 1760s mixed vice and entertainment with profitable results in her masquerades at Carlisle House in Soho Square; libertines like John Wilkes, the Earl of Sandwich, and Sir Francis Dashwood, who created a sexual theme park and c1uh served by prostitutes at his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. All these tales testify to the power and celebrity of a small number of courtesans, and to the atmosphere of tolerance and enjoyment among their wealthy clients in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Cruickshank also writes well on the network of charitable institutions that handled the results of vice, the Foundling Hospital, the Lock Hospital for treating venereal disease and the Magdalen House for penitent prostitutes, founded in 1741 , 1747 and 1758 respectively.

HISTORY

9

"The Unpleasant Rencontre" by Daniel Thomas Egerton; from Fashionable Bores, or, Coolers ill High Life by Peter Quiz (1824) The larger claims Cruickshank makes for the economic importance of vice as an industry remain hard to verify. Modern assessments of the numbers of prostitutes in the mid-eighteenth century, based on admissions to the Magdalen House and the Lock Hospital, suggest a figure of 3,000 common prostitutes at any time, a number that does not include courtesans or kept women. In 1758, however, one writer reckoned there were 62,000, and the police magistrate Patrick Colquhoun calculated in 1795 that London had 50,000 prostitutes, about half of whom sold themselves only occasionally. Those estimates are so different that they call into question Cruickshank' s claim that the sex industry "underpinned the entire expansion of Georgian London", or that its annual gross value in the last quarter of the century was a colossal 20 million guineas. Were prostitutes so ubiquitous in London that they were unremarkable? If there were 25,000 prostitutes in London, say, how many clients might they have had from a male population of about 350,000? However you calculate it, the answer is a great many. Such numbers tell us something about the way in which men saw themselves, but they also prompt a question: why did it change? Cruickshank says that if the figures are valid - and his book tacitly inclines to the upper end of the scale - then London " really was the sex capital not just of England hut of the world" , a heady mixture of 1970s Amsterdam and 1990s Bangkok, with few arrests, fewer convictions and little prudery. Was the home, then, a place of double lives, from which respectable men regularly nipped out for a quick something off the street? Did wives and mothers know and care little? Did the Evangelical revival of the last quarter of the century usher in not just an era of greater restraint and concern but a widespread change in sexual attitudes too ; or did everything simply shift geographically and go underground? We know a good deal about

attitudes to and the practice of adultery in the eighteenth century, but relatively little about what Cruickshank suggests was the purchase of sex on a large scale. If the 3,000 figure is nearer the mark, and was reflected on a smaller scale in provincial cities and towns, then the spinsters and wives of Amanda Vickery ' s book could go about the business of running their households undisturbed by the thought that thousands of women were out on the streets or running and living in bawdy houses and seraglios all around them. In her excellent chapter on bachelor households Vickery says that unmarried men in eighteenth-century England longed for matrimony and that, "far removed from twenty-first century fears that settling down extinguishes virility, establishing a household was believed to give it full rein". If Cruickshank's figures on prostitution are even half-accurate, however, such a cheerful view of men at home needs to be rethought. Behind Closed Doors is not primarily about home, but about homes. Vickery does not, for the most part, write about the elements of private life that went on at home; dying, being born, bringing up children or making love. "This book", she says, "takes the experience of interiors as its subject. It brings hazy background to the fore to examine the determining role of house and home in power and emotion, status and choices." This is difficult to understand, hut what Vickery does illuminate, often brilliantly, always entertainingly and through a myriad of examples from many different people, are the ways in which family and gender relations were played out in Georgian England through the purchase, ordering and consumption of household goods, furniture and luxury items. Vickery tells extremely well the story of the separation of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton in 1764. Once the Duchess had left, and the Duke installed his mistress, the courtesan Nancy Parsons, at the head of his table in Bond Street, the drama of separation

was enacted in negotiations for carriage and horses, for linen, chairs, carpets and plate. The Duchess was very specific about the things she wanted; her status demanded items that demonstrated that, though separated, she was duchess still, and owned the pieces of furniture visitors had seen in her old home. Thus she demands not just any carpet, but "that which is [in] ye India paper room in Bond street" , chairs from the Blue Room and a carriage with the ducal crest to display round town. The Duke was compliant, conceding most of the goods she asked for and writing in farewell, "That you should not suffer in the opinion of the world had been my endeavour, whatever were my private sensations". Goods, and money , were the means of securing honour on both sides, and both sides knew it. Most of the people in Vickery' s book are more humble than this elevated couple, and few had such an array of things through which to transact their relationships. The best chapters in Behind Closed Doors deal with commonplace aspects of decoration and household management, with locks and boxes, accounts, wallpapers and women's handicrafts and with men and women from all over the country and from different walks of life. Vickery cleverly analyses the letter book kept by the wallpaper and decorating firm Joseph Trollope between 1797 and 1808 and shows how clients thought not only about taste and pattern but also about the spaces in which wallpapers were to hang. She points out that most of Trollope's correspondents were men, but that wives often spoke "through" their husbands; husbands wrote and paid the bills but that did not mean by any means that they were any more than partners in the exercise of domestic taste. Trollope's customers were alert to fashion in interiors, aware which patterns denoted neatness, propriety or grandeur and to some extent they knew the symbolic meanings of different colours, by which red was asso-


ciated with grandeur and nobility, green with love and pleasure and blue with faith and sincerity. Perhaps it was not surprising that in a country still self-consciously Protestant, captivated by notions of the pastoral and concerned not to overstep the mark, green was the most popular colour among Trollope's customers, while blue, still associated with the Virgin Mary, was used less often than green or yellow for family rooms and more commonly in passages and servants' halls. Wallpaper constituted one element in what Vickery calls the "framework" of an interior, on which settled "a layer of objects crafted by women". In another fine chapter, Vickery rescues all sorts of female decorative work from the condescension of history and demonstrates that it carried both social value and personal meanings. The practice of shell work or floral illustration, for instance, signalled an interest in polite and fashionable natural science, and female participation in a scientific culture of collecting, classifying and ordering the natural world. Vickery wisely draws back from claiming such handicraft on behalf of any anachronistic conception of art, even for Mary Delany , whose cut-outs and collages were objects of contemporary admiration. The point is, as Vickery says, that "the interior was fashioned as much by its home-made fire screens and chair covers as by mirrors, tables and chairs. . women fahricated the home and built their houses from the inside" . Vickery does not paint an idealizing picture of the sorts of relationships thus constructed in eighteenth-century homes; but her edifice stands beyond and without the world that Cruickshank depicts. She says that, "Behind Closed Doors puts men back by the fireside" , and it does so very well. Yet, while the forms of masculinity that Cruickshank depicts did not necessarily menace the notions of home or the edifices that men and women built there, they certainly place them in a different light.

LITERATURE

10 his indispensable book presents Sir John Harington's Epigrams adequately for the first time, and so unmasks a major new Elizabethan poet. Harington has generally been thought a bit lightweight, but Gerard Kilroy' s edition reveals him to be a serious, dedicated poet using comic masks to disguise his political dissidence, his sympathies divided between the recusants and moderate Protestants, He saw both sides of the Reformation dispute and had friends on both (among recusants Thomas Markham, Edward Sheldon and Sir Thomas Tresham). The stance of a "protesting Catholicke Puritan" (Epigram Ill. 45), which may have avoided some ideological enmities, relegated him to a marginal position at court, but from choice, not failed careerism. He could speak out riskily, being a sort of unlicensed jester to Queen Elizabeth, his godmother, as in the dangerous "Of treason": "Treason doth never prosper? What's the Reason? / For if it prosper none dare call it treason". And we can see that his more usual equability often disguised Erasmian irony. His application for the Archbishopric of Dublin was never going to be successful, but it made a gesture both eirenic and satiric, condemning the Church's hardening divisions. All this becomes obvious, now that we have the complete Epigrams , restored to their original contexts of dedicatory poems and letters. On the basis of the misleading early printed editions, Norman McClure's claims for Harington in 1930 were half-hearted: "No one will contend that Harington's epigrams have any great literary merit; that they are extremely interesting for the light that they throw upon the customs and manners of the time, no one can deny". More recently, however, Harington ' s Ariosto has been edited; his Virgil translation rediscovered and published; and A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax shown to be more than scatological humour. On Kilroy's showing, Harington at last takes his place as the major English epigrammatist between Sir Thomas More and Ben Jonson. Kilroy's chapter on sources and models of imitation places Harington in the long tradition of witty, pointed poems on everyday topics, varying in size from distichs to fifty or more lines. Kilroy rehearses the familiar history of the epigram, reviewing its use, at schools like Harington ' s Eton, in Latin composition and the study of literature, and noticing his profound debts to Martial and to English models such as John Heywood, but his original departure is to stress that Harington ' s most important influences were Erasmus, Alciati and More, with other Latin translators of the Greek Anthology. To see that Harington has the Greek epigram's greater emotional range is a vital insight. But Kilroy might have gone further along this line if he had not ignored almost all the substantial literature on the Renaissance epigram. There is nothing here about the five epigram types - witty sal, bitter fel, sweet me!, sharp acetum and stinkingfoetidus - let alone their mixtures. Nothing about the A nthologia Latina, that invaluable quarry for Jonson and Herrick. And Kilroy lists the editio princeps of the Greek Anthology simply as 1494, the date of the Planudean Anthology: a cut, scrambled, and bowdlerized version concocted around 1301 by the monk Maximus Planudes. The true Greek Anthology -

T

Men of worth ALASTAIR FOWLER Gerard Kilroy, editor THE EPIGRAMS OF SIR JOHN HA RING TON

349pp. Ashgate. £60. 9780754660026 almost unknown until the Palatine Manuscript was rediscovered in 1606 - receives no mention. Following up Steven May' s work in The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1991), Kilroy develops the topic of Harington's " immense versatility" in exploring a wide range of metrical forms. In his Epigrams he mingles Petrarchan patterns with English interlace, and finishes off with rhyming couplets, much as Sir John Davies does in his sonnet-epigrams. In carrying forward the experiments of Wyatt and Surrey, perhaps only Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke show a variety comparable with Harington's. Traditionally, epigrams and emblems were gathered in hundreds: the method of More, of John Heywood who married his niece, and of Henry Constable the Catholic exile; all used epigrams or sonnet-epigrams to give advice to princes. In withstanding tyranny they concealed their opposition under ambiguities of satiric humour. Harington develops their plan of centuries of epigrams into a more elaborate structure, where every tenth poem is a metaphorical "tithe" of religious or ecclesiastical satire:

"Mall", Harington ' s wife Mary, like Epigram Ill. II (after fourteen years of marriage) or Ill.20 bis (accusing her of taking him for granted). But even the domestic group can be deceptive: Epigram Il.IO, "To my dearest a Rule for praying" turns out to deal with the use of religious images. Kilroy includes no consecutive commentary on Harington's text, but his truly wonderful index, together with his review of "Patterns and Sequences" , do much to supply the deficiency. As an example of how this works, take the frequent key name Lynus, tentatively identified here as "perhaps Anthony Munday" the dramatist. This may be right: key names could have multiple references. (The index entries Lepidus and Misacmos both refer to Harington.) For Lynus, however, there is a more obvious candidate. Among his numerous index entries is one to pp52-3, about Harington's convivial epigrams on

I1

Whether it were by chaunce, or els by art You find our vearse in number so well couched That each tenth Stanze may seeme the Parsons part.

Like Jonson, Harington allies himself with "men of worth" against certain others, the most dangerous of them under key names. Sir Waiter Ralegh, " my friend sometimes" but later disapproved of, is disguised as Paul us, the name he bears also in Davies's Epigram 41. Lelia in Harington's Epigram IV.16 was Sir Henry Lee's acknowledged mistress Anne Vavasour, but the poem refers to her earlier, more scandalous liaison with the Earl of Oxford. And Galla is Lady Mary Baker, whose open marriage to Richard Fletcher the Bishop of London was sharply satirized infe! epigrams by Davies. In the sal Epigram IV.62 Harington reports Faustus's report that Galla and Paulus ... under table footed , And Paulus rode that night and was not booted. [ know not what he meanes but God forbid, Chaste dames of wanton guests shold so he rid.

Less conclusively, Kilroy identifies the "Roman lady" of Epigram 1Il.73 as Lady Rich, because she rescued John Bolt from torture when he was arrested for possession of poems by Jesuits. Individually, the manner of such ribald epigrams is not far from Martial's; but Harington's concentration on fewer targets exerts more moral force. Another, more original group are intimate and domestic: their benignity is as far distant from Martial as could be imagined. Their large, generalizing perspective is Horatian rather, or Jonsonian. Some of these address

"Visit ofthe devil to the old man"; from John Harington'sA New Discourse ofa Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis ofAjax friends , neighbours and fellow poets, including Henry Constable and Edmund Spenser "too good (along with ' Sydney, Danieli') to be praised by Lynus" (Epigram Ill.55). This epigram concludes: " So Lynus praises Churchyard in his censure [judgement] / Not Sydney, Daniell, Constable, nor Spensure". So Lynus must be someone who praised Thomas Churchyard but not Spenser. In the index, again, the Churchyard entry refers to Epigram Il.3, where a virtuous and hospitable "Mistress Pen" complains to a "careless Jester" (Harington?), that her guests had outstayed their welcome. Julyan Hicks (formerly Pen ne), mother of Sir Baptist (later Viscount) Hicks and Sir Michael Hicks (secretary to Lord Burleigh) has a separate index entry identifying her as " landlady to Churchyard and Nashe", non-paying guests. Now, when Thomas Nashe quarrelled with his fellow lodger, Churchyard demanded as the price of reconciliation a formal apology (Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets). Nashe was not one of Harington's men of worth: "Greenes and Nashes" figure in his catalogue of abuses (Epigram 1.73), and in "To Dr Harvy of Cam-


bridge" (Epigram Il.67) Nashe is Harvey's "durty foe". Nashe was no friend, either, to Sidney (whose Arcadia he satirized) and Spenser. In Foure Letters Confuted he rejects Harvey ' s attempt at reconciliation: "To make mee a small seeming amendes for the iniuries thou hast done mee, thou reckonst mee up amongst the deare louers and professed sonnes of the Muses, Edmund Spencer, Abraham France, Thomas Watson, Samuell Daniell". Moreover, in Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets (1592) Nashe writes of the "stale vein" of "Sidney, or Spencer". In sum, there can be little doubt that Lynus, who praises Churchyard but not Sidney, Daniel, or Spenser, is Nashe. What most sets Kilroy's Harington apart are the sound decisions it is based on, and the thorough descriptions of manuscripts. McClure disastrously chose to follow Budge's printed text of 1618, a disordered edition of only 346 epigrams omitting most of the religious poems and some of the bawdy ones. Instead, Kilroy establishes his text on the secure basis of three presentation manuscripts annotated by the author. A Folger manuscript (F) containing 406 epigrams arranged in four Books is a scribal copy intended for presentation to Prince Henry. Another scribal copy, a British Library manuscript (BL) , follows the same order as F but contains 409 epigrams, by addition of three items too politically sensitive for F. BL probably became the authoritative version used for copies of extracts: it was Harington's own principal working copy, with autograph revisions and corrections of the numbering. A third copy, a Cambridge University Library manuscript (Cl was a presentation copy made for his mother-in-law Lady Rogers and his wife Mary. It consists of fiftytwo epigrams, forty-one domestic and eleven political, including some so dangerous that they were to be kept locked up "as safe in your loue, as I know you will lay up this booke safe in your Chest". He doubtless had in mind items like Epigram IlI.70 (not in Budge or McClure), dissenting from flattering celebration of Elizabeth's "forty yeares sweet peace and restfull dayes" and urging preachers "rather seeke some words of Commination / For times abounding with abhomination" since " law with lust and rule with rape is yoaked, / And zeale with schisme and Symony is choaked". Harington's plan was to publish different texts for separate readerships. Just as he published his Orlando Furioso and A New Discourse in special large-paper editions annotated for named recipients, so he produced presentation copies of his Epigrams annotated for particular readers. He would not have wished the most subversive epigrams like 1Il.70 and IV.I - to be read by the authorities they satirized. With such a text, an unusually elahorate editorial apparatus is amply justified, so as to make accessible the author's corrections, revisions and alternative versions. At every point, Kilroy explains exactly what we need to know about scribal contexts and probable readerships. He provides tables to facilitate comparison of the various versions and to allow easy conversion of McClure's numbering to Kilroy's. This edition, likely to become standard, will be essential for students of Elizabethan literature and desirable to all those interested in the literary stratagems available to free minds in repressi ve societies.

LITERARY CRITICISM eath and memorialization have in recent years proved fruitful themes for both early modern historians and Renaissance literary critics. What draws them to the topic is its powerful associations with cultural dislocation, and of readaptations in the face of revolutionary change. The Protestant Reformation in England abolished Purgatory, outlawed prayers for departed souls, and tore up the rules for how to speak about the dead. But despite, or perhaps precisely because of these developments, post-Reformation society evinced a profound concern, almost an obsession, with memorializing its deceased members. These transformations can be traced in monumental and ritual forms, but also, crucially, in text, with the emergence of what Scot! L. Newstok identifies in this lively and thought-provoking book as a novel sense of "textualized memory". Newstok plaintively notes that most historians do not read the work of literary scholars; he has scrupulously not repaid us in kind, and his study is thoroughly grounded in the insights of recent scholarship in the social and cultural history of death (albeit that a quotation from the art historian Nigel Llewellyn is erroneously attributed to me). Nonetheless, Newstok' s principal concern is with rhetoric and poetics; indeed with developments in the latter at the expense of the former within a particular field of discourse. That field is occupied by the humble epitaph, apparently less promising territory for the literary scholar than the florid and expansive elegy,

From tomb to tome

D

PETER MARSHALL Scott L. Newstok QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The poetics of epitaphs beyond the tomb

228pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50. 9780230 20325 9

and in the past often simply left to the attention of unsystematic anthologizers (sometimes with comic intent). The distinction between elegy and epitaph is crucial to the purposes of Quoting Death in Early Modern England. Elegies are concerned with the expression, and the imaginative possibilities, of grief and mourning. But an epitaph is essentially " locative", its purpose of identifying the whereabouts of a corpse signalled by its characteristic opening, "Here lies". That "here"-ness is the structuring feature of Newstok's approach, but it is also deeply paradoxical, as the epitaph in the post-Reformation period ceased to be merely an inscription on a tomb but migrated into all kinds of texts, producing what Newstok sees as an "epitaphic saturation" of Elizabethan printed discourses, and a pattern whereby writers "re-cited and re-sited" epitaphs in new contexts. "Here" thus functions as what

linguists would term a "deictic" , a word whose meanings depend entirely on the context of its utterance. With the migration of epitaphs from the tomb to the book, not only was the space of the monumental site reordered textually, but new ways of relating to the dead were made possible. Newstok follows these transfigurations and relocations through a succession of genres. The dislocation of epitaphs from the spatial fixity of the grave was begun, ironically enough, by conservative antiquarians - John Stow, William Camden, John Weaver - who recorded epitaphs owing to their fear that misplaced iconoclastic zeal was threatening the survival of tombs and monumental brasses. It was further facilitated by the Elizabethan chronicle tradition and the production of massive historical works (Holinshed and the like), which Newstok characterizes, with pardonable exaggeration, as compendia of epitaphs. He explores how theorists of poetry, Sidney and Puttenham, were drawn to the epitaph form, and its poetic rather than classically rhetorical power to move and persuade. There is also an intriguing, if rather inconclusive, discussion of Elizabeth 1's curious decision, shortly after her accession, to invoke an imagined epitaph in her response to a parliamentary petition that she should marry: "this shalbe for me sufficient, that a marble stone

11 shall declare that a Quene, having raigned such a time lyved and dyed a virgin". The most satisfying chapter, however, examines the role of epitaph on the Renaissance stage, where a genre traditionally associated with sincerity commingled with one widely suspected of dealing intrinsically with counterfeiting and deceit. Epitaphic forms are regularly found in both comedy and tragedy, but stage epitaphs are almost invariably insincere: deceptions or jokes. Among Shakespeare's characters, Claudio, Leontes and Pericles are all led to believe in the death of a loved one through the medium of an insincere epitaph. Here, Newstok' s characterization of the Renaissance revenger as a "frustrated epitographer" is a sparkling insight, and he supplies a vivid reading of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a play whose plot is driven forwards by a sequence of failed epitaphic statements. Given that Scott Newstok aims not at the study of a particular genre, but of a "citational move" across a whole range of Renaissance texts, his book has an occasionally episodic and disjointed feel. An epilogue providing personal reflections on a crisis of commemoration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina also seems rather forced. Yet this is an ambitious and largely successful study, encouraging us to understand nor merely how Renaissance epitaphs transcended their traditional Christian commemorative functions, but how a variety of concerns with "epitaphic closure" were intimately related to an emergent idea of authorship itself.

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LITERATURE

12 he best introduction to the Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb's history of the scandal that shattered ancien regime France on the eve of the Revolution is his

Joy on the brink

T

own: 1 attempt, within the framework of my tale - a

RUTH SCURR

tale that is both remarkably eventful and yet true to life from beginning to end - to show French society in the age of Louis XVI, along with its literature, prevailing sensibility and notable personalities, and to bring all this together in a living tableau, rich in implication , which provides a picture of the way the French Revolution came about. In terms of form, the book is somewhat experimental, and 1 am naturally curious to see how it will be received

by the public, This explanation of The Queen 's Necklace, which was written between 1941 and 1942, was found among Szerb's papers after his death, aged forty-three, in a labour camp in Balf in 1945. He did not live to see how his "real history" was received by the public. He knew that his scholarly works on World and Hungarian Literature had been banned because he was of Jewish descent, and he saw his last novel, Oliver VII (1942) another profoundly playful meditation on revolution which had to be passed off as a translation from the English of a work by the invented A. H. Redcliff - sink almost without trace. Digging trenches and starving alongside his literary colleagues Gabor Halasz and Gyorgy Sarkozi, Szerb knew he had reached the abyss of European culture. He had foreseen that abyss in his critical appraisal of Aldous Huxley, whom he admired as "the greatest master of modern English prose, possibly the wittiest writer in contemporary literature":

Antal Szerb THE QUEEN ' S NECKLACE Translated by Len Rix 320pp. Push kin Press. Paperback, £9.99. 978 I 90654 808 7

culture, but nostalgia for people and things that "time had simply finished with" . Such nostalgia, Szerb believed, could be awakened in the soul by truly creative art, and this belief was at the heart of his great humanity as a writer and person. Szerb based his narrative on Frantz FunckBrentano's scholarly study of the documentary evidence, L 'Affaire du Collier (1901 , The Affair of the Necklace) , and on a wealth of other historical accounts by Hippolyte Taine, Thomas Carlyle and Stefan Zweig, among others. The famous necklace was made in the decades leading up to the Revolution by two German jewellers living in Paris: Boehmer and Bassenge. Their idea was to construct the most expensive item of jewellery in the world and hope that Louis XV would buy it for his mistress the Comtesse du Barry. Louis XV died before the sale was made, and the jewellers then had to hope that the new King Louis XVI's young Queen would acquire their

and victoriously achieved under cover of her name" . It is Szerb's genius delicately and precisely to reapportion blame where blame was due: among a flamboyant cast of characters who dared to perpetrate serious fraud in the Queen's name and in doing so brought the monarchy itself into disrepute. Szerb introduces his characters one by one, sometimes complaining that they are crowding to get on to the stage. First comes Jeanne, Comtesse de La Motte, who was descended through the Valois bloodline from Henri lI, King of France, 1547-59. Despite the fact that her great-great-grandfather was the son from Henri's liaison with Nicole de Savigny, Jeanne began life as a beggar girl in the village of Passy, outside Paris. Here, aged eight, she stopped the coach of the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, explained her surprising royal provenance, and began her steady ascent, thanks to education , marriage and liaisons of her own, towards the court at Versailles to which she was sure she really belonged. In Jeanne, Szerb recognizes "the declassee: an enemy of the entire social order". She conceived of a plan to become inconceivably rich and efface her shameful childhood by duping the jewellers into believing that Marie Antoinette wanted to purchase their necklace through the intermediary Cardinal Rohan.

Huxley's later writings are infinitely sad. They weigh heavily upon us even by virtue of their tone which is permeated by despair and an utter lack of confidence in the future. The ideas

that Huxley embraced appear at the exhausted end of a civilization, in its final phase. It is

possible that Huxley was ahead of his time in

(

I

,.

/

arriving at the railway terminus of western culture. (History of World Literature, 1941)

Even in his last letter from Balf, Szerb still hoped that the war would end, and he asked his family to "have faith that we shall see each other soon". Afterwards, the bright light of his sensibility was lost in the darkness, but not extinguished. His later writings, unlike Huxley's, refuse despair. Instead Szerb turned his back on present horror and found refuge in history, not because he deferred to it, but because he loved it: "Feelingly, deeply , passionately. The way I love Italy. And tea. And sleep. History is my home". The subject of the French Revolution drew Szerb so deeply that he described it as choosing him, not the other way round; he had heen preparing to write ahout it for years, ever since he dallied " in those beloved haunts of my youth, the great libraries of Paris now closed to me for the indeterminate future". So it was as an exile from the present that Szerb set his mind to understanding how the Revolution came about in 1789. Again, he avoided horror: " no Robespierre, no tumbrils, no guillotine", Szerb's translator, Len Rix, explains. Instead, Szerb found in the ancien regime another "exhausted end of civilization, in its final phase", and he was drawn to it by "inexpressible nostalgia": not nostalgia for the French monarchy, or aristocratic

A fan (1786) depicting characters involved in "the affair ofthe necklace" monstrous creation, which was, Szerb suggests, "more likely to have provoked raw amazement than raptures of delight". In her biography of Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser has argued that the Queen had too much good taste and sense to he attracted by such a purchase at a time when France was at war with Britain over American Independence. " We have more need of a warship than of any such necklace", she declared. Szerb is similarly fair to Marie Antoinette, in contrast to Zweig, whose Marie Antoinette: The portrait of an average woman was a bestseller in the 1930s. Zweig maliciously and contortedly argues that: "Though in all the preposterous intricacies of the necklace affair Marie Antoinette was, in a sense, blameless, she remains blameworthy that so gross a swindle could have been attempted

Rohan was vulnerable to being caught in the snare Jeanne and her accomplices constructed, because he was in love with Marie Antoinette, and wanted to believe she had singled him out for arranging a discreet purchase on her hehalf. Though a man of the Church, Rohan relied for guidance on the magician and Freemason Cagliostro. Szerb points out that all of these characters were waiting for some kind of personal miracle. "The people of the pre-romantic age were every bit as rational as those of the baroque and rococo, but - and this is what was new they also believed in miracles. Or at least they wanted to." The fraud succeeded: Rohan got the necklace from the jewellers on credit and gave it to Jeanne, who he thought would pass it to Marie Antoinette; instead she smashed up the


setting and sold the diamonds separately until suspicions were roused in Paris. Then she sent her husband over to London with a pocket full of diamonds and went shopping on the proceeds: She, the offspring of the Valois, had to this point been nothing more than a damp rocket at the great party, her fuse poisonously fulminating and fuming in torment; now the flame had reached the dry tinder and sent up a shower of sparks scattering flowers and garlands in the sky alongside the slars and all the other glow-

ing rockets. She felt that at last she had found her place in the aristocratic cosmos - and she knew , too, that in due course her fire would

fade, and she would plunge back down into the eternal darkness.

Szerb suggests that Jeanne took a whole regime with her in the trail of her descent. He describes Rohan, summoned to Versailles to explain himself, realizing the terrible deception he had fallen for and walking away through the Hall of Mirrors which seemed to spin in the sunlight "and underfoot, grinding and crackling like shattered glass, the Ancien Regime itself'. Rohan, Jeanne and Cagliostro all ended up in the Bastille awaiting the trial of the century. Szerb quotes adroitly from the contemporary accounts that Madame Campan (Marie Antoinette' s lady-in-waiting) and the Abbe Georgel (the Cardinal's Vicar General) left behind. He also has Goethe's play, Carlyle's narrative, and the reflections of the Brothers Goncourt to hand. Szerb conducts himself on the page as though he were talking genially not only to the reader, but to all the eminent historians and writers who have touched on the Diamond Necklace Affair before him. It is not until close to the end of the story that Szerb introduces the King. Mischievously he claims he would have liked to introduce Louis XVI earlier, centre stage, along with the other dramatis personae, but "the queue of people waiting to come on was rather lengthy, and we feared we might weary the reader who is interested in the ' action " '. In this subtle way Szerb reminds us that the story he has told ends with the King demoted to simple Louis Capet, waiting his turn among other citizens to mount an altogether different stage with a guillotine at the centre of it. He quotes Sainte-Beuve, "On that final day, Marie Antoinette poured out her heart, urging him to die like a king, like a true descendant of Louis XIV. But he had resolved rather to die like a Christian, as his forebear St Louis had done". The Queen 's Necklace is the fourth of Szerb' s books that Len Rix has translated for Pushkin Press. The other three are novels: The Pendragon Legend, Journey by Moonlight and Oliver VII. Rix's hope is that his latest translation will broaden and deepen the anglophone world's understanding of Szerb' s highly original writing. The Queen's Necklace certainly deserves to do that and more: it is a note of compassionate creative joy sounded on the brink of a terrible abyss, echoing down the centuries, and appealing to all who have the strength to turn their backs on despair in celebration of life. There could not be a more beguiling introduction to Szerb' s non-fiction and the good-hearted humanity that all his writing embodies: "My way is to speak as one human being to another, looking to find kindred spirits and good company" .

13

A conjuror at the Xmas party Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the famous friends and converts of Father D' Arcy - whose archive contains unpublished letters from them all ather Martin D'Arcy, S. J., was perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death in 1978, and was an important presence in American academic and social life in the 1950s and 60s as well. Born in 1888 of an Irish Catholic family living in England - with centuries-old roots in both England and Ireland - 0' Arcy enjoyed remarkable fluency in conversation and, according to the testimony of a great many who knew him, was able sympathetically to appreciate the characters of others, including those whose intellectual views were not the same as his own. (When he died, The Times commented that Fr 0' Arcy's delicate regard for others gave him a rare power of intellectual sympathy that was the secret of his great personal charm; while Bertrand Russell once supported 0' Arcy in a radio discussion with the Oxford philosopher and atheist A. J. Ayer - also an admirer of the Jesuit - because of a good turn that 0' Arcy had earlier done him when he was under attack in America.) All of these qualities were combined with the intellectual power and strong character that were so noticeable to his contemporaries. including some of the prominent men and women of letters of mid-twentieth-century England. Examination of the 0' Arcy Collection in the Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus in London, including an extensive unpublished autobiography and unpublished letters from many of the twentieth century's leading literary figures , offers many new insights into the scope and nature of the Jesuit's influence on the intellectuallife of the last century. (All of the quotations below are from these primary sources unless otherwise noted.) Fr 0' Arcy attended Oxford during the First World War and returned there in 1927. He was at this time a member of many learned and religious societies. His autobiography recounts an incident which occurred in London at the Aquinas society, which gave "opportunity to many men and women who had a taste for philosophy and could not penetrate the preserves of the clergy". He says he "heard of' this incident,

F

though 1 was not present when it occurred. Apparently a Fr. Ivo Thomas had been reading a paper. He was a convert, who had gained a I si in Greats and joined the Dominican order. In the audience was Miss Elizabeth Anscomhe,

a very formidable philosopher, though a kind and good friend. She had been a pupil of Wittgenstein and pleased him so much that he chose her to be his literary executor .... Miss Anscombe was not one to treat words superficially or too tolerantly. Now when the discussion of Fr. lvo' s paper started, she stood up and fixing him with a denunciating eye she

declared: "Father Ivo I did not understand one word! " Fr. Ivo did not even look guilty; he just asked amicably, "Which word?" But "the most remarkable of all the Societies

RICHARD HARP in which I played a part" was one which has previously been little heard of in literary history, the Catholic Poetry Society, meeting in London in the I 920s. It did not last very long because Maurice Leahy, its founder, "was a struggling poor teacher, and he had not realized that the note paper and the stamps required for writing to a multitude of people before meetings, cost money, so much money in fact that an appeal had to be made to rescue him from debt". 0 ' Arcy describes one of the final meetings of the society, interesting for its glimpse of one of G.K. Chesterton's well known difficulties with practical life: In his house in South Street he [Lord Tredagar] gave a luncheon to 8 or 9 of the Society. I remember Maurice Leahy, Shane Lesley, G.K. Chesterton and his wife, Lord Alfred Douglas (who had begun one of the verse readings by saying "this was written when I was last in

prison"), Count Plunkett and his wife, a Mr.

Catholic Poetry Society but did attend another group, The Wiseman Society, to which 0' Arcy also belonged. The priest recounts an episode one evening when a speaker had chosen the English press as his topic: Belloc, who was present, rose up to denounce the English Press Lords, expressing his contempt for them, possibly aggravated by a dinner which did not suit him. He told the Society that in Europe the English press was seen by all to be in the gutter and had become an object of derision and scorn. There was a French bishop

present brought by Lady Susan Townley. She persuaded him to rise and say something. In

broken English he managed to say that the English press was thought to be about the best in Europe. Belloc at this muttered to his neigh-

bours, "Clergy? They are so ignorant". At Oxford D'Arcy also, according to H. J. Sire, "joined the university Poetry Society, which was then in a period of exceptional brilliance"; in his autobiography he says that at

Martin Cyril D' Arcy by Wyndham Lewis Clarke and myself. We moved from the dining room upstairs after all that a ban vivant could love had been provided. Chesterton ' s face was

red, and his spirits high (he had a high joyous giggle), when his wife got up and went toward

him. I noticed G.K.'s little blue eyes grow apprehensive for 1 was very near. Mrs. Chester-

ton told him that she had to leave and gave the most minute instructions about where they were to meet later and how to get there. Then

she left for the door and G KC relaxed, but at the door she turned back. Once more the blue eyes were troubled. She said: "1 forgot to give

you the money to get to x's" and she handed him a ten shilling note and watched him put it safely away in his waistcoat pocket. This incident confirmed my belief in the extraordinary

childlike character of Chesterton and his inability to look after himself. Hilaire Belloc was not a member of the

Oxford "there were many of the poets, novelists, and politicians who are now household names - poets such as Wystan Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, [Cecil] Day Lewis .". Auden, he recounts, had started to read chemistry but had changed to English, and "I remember him walking the Parks and very pessimistic about his chances before finals. He had, however, already made his mark as a poet". Spender was already a close friend to Auden and "was less mature at the time with a remarkable lyrical gift. His academic interests then were confined so that he was ill-equipped to do well in examinations which required a wide range of knowledge. Later, Stephen caught up and now is an accepted representative at any national or international gathering of writers". MacNeice had a strangely attractive personality, dark

Irish good looks, elegant and good mannered.


He was the best scholar in the group, getting a first in Mods and Greats with ease and moving to an assistant professorship in classics at Birmingham University. A dark strain of depression and melancholy prevented him from rising to the height he would have attained

with good health and powers undiluted. I had a strong sense of [the] far reaching quality of his mind and of the possibilities of spiritual creativeness.

That the friendship between 0' Arcy and Auden was a warm one is testified to by some of the letters from Auden to the priest, also preserved in the Archives of the British Province. During the Jesuit's visit to the United States in 1940 to help rally support for the British war effort, he gave a lecture in New York which Auden attended, accompanied by a "young man" [Chester Kallman] whom Auden called "the most promising young writer in this country" . The subject of the lecture was eros and agape, the two kinds of love, which was to be the subject of 0' Arcy's most famous book, The Mind and Heart of Love, published in 1945 by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber (and surely an important influence on Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est). Auden was greatly interested in the subject and wrote a careful, detailed letter from his residence at Brooklyn Heights, where he lived from September 1939 to October 1940, saying that "There are a number of points you raised which I want to hear you elaborate some time". Auden was particularly concerned to reconcile eros, erotic love, and agape, or sacrificial love, a reconciliation that 0 ' Arcy attempted in his book. Auden also raises a point about St Thomas Aquinas, about whom 0' Arcy had published a book in 1930: "My knowledge of St. Thomas is unfortunately meager and mostly derived from Dante. Am I wrong in thinking that he was too intellectualist and 'Greek' in his treatment of the Natural and the Rational Will". (This of course was not a criticism of Aquinas that so staunch a Thomist as 0 ' Arcy was likely to accept, although we do not have his response.) The relation between the two kinds of love Auden neatly summed up by saying, "Eros must be transformed, but without Eros, there wouldn't be anything to transform" . Auden added two postscripts, asking, first, why did "Father Gannet introduce you as if you were a conjuror at a Xmas party?" and, second, "Why do all American priests look like policemen?". This letter was written during the time that Auden was contemplating again becoming a Christian. According to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, "in about October 1940, Auden resumed the religious beliefs and practices of his childhood" and the letter does reflect a philosophical and theological seriousness. Carpenter notes that Auden considered "Eros (sexual-romantic love) to be an approach toward Agape, the selfless love of

COMMENTARY

14 God", and that theologically the 1940s were for Auden a "Barthian, neo-Calvinist phase". But in Auden's letter to D'Arcy, at least, there is strong implied criticism of any doctrine that creation is not good. D' Arcy very early recognized the genius of Gerard Manley Hopkins, saying that "I like to think that I had the good fortune [of] being one of the very first to know some of his work and recognize his genius". In the autobiography he dates his interest in his fellow Jesuit to 1907 or 1908 "when I came across extracts from diaries of Fr. Gerard Hopkins published in Letters and Notices a private Journal of the English Jesuits". He says that although he had known many Jesuits at Stonyhurst (the Jesuit school he had attended as a boy) who were old enough to remember Hopkins, out of "diffidence in my judgment I did not dare to put too many questions to anyone of those old enough to have been his contemporaries. What an amount of information I might have gathered!". Nonetheless, he does record two telling anecdotes about Hopkins. One he was told by Fr. Michael Maher, who was the Superior of St Mary's Hall near Stonyhurst where D' Arcy went in 1909 to study philosophy. Fr Maher once knocked on the door of Hopkins's room and "upon hearing a sepulchral 'Come in,' entered to find the room in darkness, and as he grew accustomed to it, he vaguely saw Hopkins lying on the floor composing poetry, so he surmised", in the manner taught, apparently, by the ancient Irish bardic schools.

lished work, as being contrary to good order and discipline." Her finished verses on these two subjects are as follows: OF THE CHURCH OF ROME A Roman Is a follower of the Scarlet Woman; He revels in tortures And the sins of the Borgias.

Evelyn Waugh (1930) by Henry Lamb Another story was told by the "old gardener of St. Mary's Hall who took a great interest in his scholastics": He [the gardener] used to choose work outside

going around and reading in the middle of a

the window of the room where oral examinations were being held, and he judged the success of the examinees by the amount of noise that went on. He asked a scholastic,

study what he called "inscape" at various

"What sort of a man that this Mr. Hopkins was?" The scholastic said he was very nice and was regarded as a bit of a genius. The gardener was surprised for he had seen Fr. Hopkins

path "as if he were a born natural". What had happened was that Hopkins had seen in the sandy pathway the flash of mica and stayed to angles. According to D' Arcy : "Of Fr. Gerard Hopkins it was recorded that he loved spending time with the Jesuit lay brothers especially the Irish ones". At Stonyhurst one of D' Arcy's classmates was Vyvyan Holland, the younger son of Oscar Wilde, and he records the poignant moment of the boy's learning of his father's death: We none of us knew then of his parentage, nor

did Mr. Eastham [schoolmaster]. He told me years later that he had called out some boys, including Holland, for special work during

night studies. Holland did not appear. Mr. Eastham asked him why, and he said that the Rector had sent for him to tell him that his Father had died. "But [thought your father was dead." "So did [," said Holland, "but the Rector has told me he has just died in Paris." At that Mr. Eastham suddenly recalled a photograph in the papers of Oscar Wilde, and saw the resem-

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blance. There was a flurry of correspondence in 1941 between Fr D' Arcy and Dorothy L. Sayers, the Anglican apologist and famous detective novelist. Their joint project involved D' Arcy choosing ancient Christian heresies, familiar and unfamiliar, which Sayers would describe in rhymed verse. D' Arcy said such a work would be a good mnemonic device, as "I long to have all the resounding heresies at my fingers' ends". Historical questions can be looked up in reference manuals. "But when it comes to the heresies, I do want to have a rhyme in my mind which - even for the sake of the name - I could remember. Couldn't you compose some such rhyme? It would be rather fun." Sayers replied to D' Arcy on August I, 1941: "I wish you would not lead me into temptation by proposing attractive occupations which divert me from my proper tasks. To compile a rhymed memoria technica for heresies is obviously irresistible" . Sayers proposed as her verse form a " loose and elastic form of Clerihew as being best adapted for this exacting task". "In a spirit of impartiality", she adds, "I have added rhymes on the Roman and Anglican views of one another. They may be omitted from the pub-


OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND The Church of England Is not a single and Undivided villainy, But a sort of heretical miscellany. Just for good measure she wrote some verses "Of the Lutherans": The doctrine of Luther Is not calculated to act as a soother; He considered Man so utterly depraved That he couldn't please God however well he behaved. In a letter of August 6, 1941 , Dorothy Sayers offered up bits of other verse, suggesting that "The Quietists / Were a sort of pietists" and "the Jansenists look like being difficult; while Huss [sic] Missed the celestial bus seems a little lacking in precision - I mean, it might apply to anybody" . Fr D' Arcy wrote on top of one of the manuscript pages of these verses the reason the proposed book was never published: "The war 1939 spoilt the plan". D' Arcy had a reputation for bringing the famous into the Catholic Church, and none of his converts was better known than Evelyn Waugh. Waugh became a Catholic in 1930 and in 1935 wrote his first overtly Catholic work, a biography of the Elizabethan martyr Edmund Campi on. He dedicated the book to D' Arcy, and said in his preface that it was to him "under God [that] I owe my faith". The D' Arcy Collection contains a letter from the novelist to the priest from , apparently, the summer of 1930, which reads in part: As 1 said when we first met, 1 realize that the

Roman Catholic Church is the only genuine form of Christianity. Also that Christianity is the essential and formative constituent of Western culture. In our conversations and in what 1 have read and heard since 1 have been able to understand a great deal of the dogma and discipline which seemed odd to me before.

But the truth is that I don't feel Christian in an absolute sense. The question seems to be -

must [ wait until [ do feel this - which I suppose is a gift from God which no amount of instruction can give me, or can 1 become a Catholic when 1 am in such an incomplete state as to get the benefit of the sacraments and receive Faith afterwards?

A letter of Waugh's dated September 9, 1965, about another of D' Arcy's visits to America, shows in miniature just how distressed the writer had become over the reforms of Vatican IT and their implementation: "It is very brave of you to go to the U.S.A. where you will be in danger of racial riots. I see the Pope is going too. It would be very amusing if the Black Mahomedans killed him" . Recognizing, perhaps, the bad grace of this comment, he next said, "I am not fit for human company nowadays, deaf and toothless, so I don't suppose we shall meet in this world. The changes in the Church are very painful to me. Pray God I shall never apostatize [sic] but I cling to the Faith despairingly" . An undated letter from Waugh' s wife

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COMMENTARY Laura after his death brings to a poignant close D' Arcy' s correspondence with the famous novelist. She writes from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where "I have come over. . to stay with Teresa [one of her daughters] for a week or two", thanking D' Arcy for the masses that he had said for her husband: "I know you loved Evelyn and that he loved you". She continues: "Evelyn had been unwell for the last two years but mostly with melancholia and not eating but he had seemed slightly better the last 2 months. What he died of was a sudden coronary" . A few days later D' Arcy's longtime Jesuit colleague Fr Philip Caraman wrote to him, saying that at the time of his death Waugh "was reading your latest book with the intention of writing, not a review, but a personal birthday tribute to you in the Sunday Telegraph ; he had the book on the small table beside his arm chair in the sitting room. It would certainly have been a very generous tribute and his way of making amends for his treatment of you at your last meeting". This last remark refers to Waugh's belief that D' Arcy had too readily acquiesced in some of the changes of the Second Vatican Council, although in fact the priest deeply regretted various changes in the liturgy. He lamented in his autobiography, for example, the plainness of a Mass celebrated by Pope Paul VI which he had attended. Tributes came to Fr. D' Arcy from a very wide assortment of figures. In America he was in residence at, among other universities, Georgetown, Cornell, Gonzaga, USC, and Wesleyan, as well as at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and he lectured at Marquette, Notre Dame and Fordham. At Princeton he met Albert Einstein and recorded his impressions in his autobiography: Einstein's face easily broke into a smile, he struck me as gentle and good. He was said to

reject the idea of a personal God but 1 am fairly sure he meant by that the anthropomorphic figure of the Blake pictures - God with a great

beard. He accepted the idea of a spirit of righteousness - and for one who had not fed on the

Gospels that is surely a just paraphrase of what the true idea of God might mean.

And there was praise, too, from those who knew D' Arcy best. Fr. Caraman wrote to D' Arcy on the occasion of his seventieth year as a Jesuit in 1976 that he was a "wonderful friend in moments of trouble, like no one else I have known" . But perhaps the attractiveness of Fr D' Arcy to his literary, philosophical and clerical friends is best summed up in an anecdote told in a letter, held in the Archives of the British Province, by Evelyn Waugh concerning the famous English priest and wit Monsignor Ronald Knox: "Did you know that once when he [Knox] was lamenting the annoyances of his life at the old Palace to Daphne Acton, she said: ' Well, what would make you happy?' and he replied: 'To go for a walk every afternoon with Father D' Arcy"'.

For permission to publish primary material in this article we are grateful to the following: Father Thomas McCoog, Archivum Britannicum Societatis lesu (Martin D 'Arcy), Edward Mendelson (w. H. Auden) © 2004 The Trustees of Anthony Fleming, deceased; David Higham Associates Ltd (Dorothy Sayers), Teresa D'Arms (Evelyn and Laura Waugh).

Scholars' delight he Ulysses war is over. "Like the Cold War, it just petered out", according to Wim Van Mierlo of London University's Institute of English Studies. Anyone who expected battle cries on November 6 at the colloquium on " Ulysses: 25 Years of the Critical and Synoptic Edition", will have been disappointed. At the meeting, called by the IES (increasingly active in Joyce and Yeats research), scholar after scholar heaped praise on Hans WaIter Gabler of the University of Munich, who produced the controversial three-volume edition in 1984. The overall view on November 6 was that "Gabler's is the best edition we have" . It was very different in 1984. The Gabler edition was then welcomed for its groundbreaking editorial method, showing all the alterations made as Ulysses progressed from its beginnings in 1914 to publication in February 1922 and restoring a lost chunk of text that made clear Joyce had intended the "word known to all men" to be "love". But it was also excoriated for errors, misspellings - for example, "Connolly" instead of "Conolly" and what was felt to be an inappropriate Germanic textual approach to an Irish author. The leader of the anti-Gabler forces was a fierce young American Joycean, John Kidd. Kidd publicly accused Gabler of ignoring Joyce's last revisions, of consulting facsimiles rather than original documents, of changing punctuation and spelling according to his own whim and making additional errors. Kidd triumphantly pointed out, for example, that the name of the cricketing hero Captain Buller appeared as "Culler". The battle elevated Kidd to prominence and enabled him to start a James Joyce Center at Boston University. He promised that his own edition with his own corrected text would appear. But at this month ' s Ulysses colloquium, Kidd's name was mentioned only in sympathetic tones. He has parted company with Boston University, which issued a bland administrative statement of how some projects are undertaken which cannot be successfully concluded. The Kidd edition has never appeared. One clear and welcome fact emerged from the colloquium's scholarly deluge. Luca Crispi of the National Library of Ireland reported that the new cache of Joyce material that was opened in 1994, long after the Gabler team did its work, does not alter the critically edited text. What the NU papers reveal, said Crispi , is "Joyce's ever-changing conception of his own work" . They show Joyce composing "textual fragments that he intended to combine in a unified narrative at a later stage". At the same time Joyce was "a poor and unreliable scribe of what he had previously written". In sum , it would seem, when versions of text disagree, it is Joyce's fault. After all , he wrote a good part of Ulysses in the margins of the printers' proofs. (The printers, being French, introduced many errors of their own.) Joyce did do one handwritten copy for typists, bought by a rare book collector in Philadelphia in 1924. But even this, called the Rosenbach manuscript, is not a definitive text. It lacks the twenty-two additional questions and answers that Joyce added to the

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catechetical seventeenth episode, known as "!thaca", which opens: "What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?". The way forward in textual studies of James Joyce will be online. John Lavagnino of King's College London illustrated how displaying texts with variants in different colours and fonts on a screen will allow structures and corrections to be studied as never before. Indeed, one of the novelties of the Gabler edition was its use of computers. Looking back, Gabler (whom the IES has just appointed senior research fellow) said that his 1984 edition was greeted with such astonishment because most Joycean scholars in Britain and the United States were not accustomed to trying to present the text as a cumulative document, a programme of how the text was assembled. This cumulative text is printed on the left-hand pages of the 1,919-page Gabler Ulysses. The right-hand pages contain the reading text and are the basis of later commercial editions of the book. Yet the left-hand pages are the scholars' delight. An Enigma code to the ordinary reader, these identify all the accretions of the the text from fair copy to first edition. They also record all the changes in punctuation, spelling, and positioning of words in the text. Unfortunately, this 1984 three-volume edition with its twin left-hand and right-hand


B100msday centenary celebrations, Dublin, June 16,2004 format is out of print. The Joyce Estate, guided by the author's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, refuses to uphold its share in the copyright for the edition, thus blocking its reprinting. Gabler has, he told the conference, been informed that the grounds for the refusal are purely personal. For everybody else, however, the copyright on Ulysses runs out in 2012 and new editors can be expected to produce their own versions of a book which, despite its difficulty, remains funny and rewarding, and sells in large numbers every year.

BRENDA MADDOX

COMMENTARY

16 n 1885, according to the New English Dictionary, Waiter Skeat, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, had to confront a lexicographical problem, What was he to call the pamphlets which were accumulating in his mail boxes. On August 22, in a letter to the Academy, he noted: " Various terms, such as 'deprint', 'exprint', etc, have been proposed to denote a separately printed copy of a pamphlet .... By comparison with 'offshoot' I think we might use 'offprint' with some hope of expressing what is meant". Skeat was striving to name the copies of articles which scholars were allowed to purchase, or given by grateful publishers, so that they might send their work to interested readers remote from the relevant libraries or unable to subscribe to journals. I have always lived among offprints. These small stapled copies of learned articles were once as common as mobile phones in the republic of letters. As a student, I heard the story of the don who propositioned his pupils by saying "Come up and see my offprints", and I could imagine the delights of those attractive covers: sky-blue, pea-green, a tender pink, a healthy summer tan, seldom reflecting the complexions of the author whose work lay beneath. Sometimes the offprint came naked, with only a staple to hold it together, and a terse dedication to cover its modesty or proclaim its particular identity. But the offprint is nearing extinction, and I should be sorry if its passing were neither lamented nor resisted. The offprint was light: it could be read outdoors, on a bus, in a bathtub, even during a lecture or a department meeting. Most of us do not read learned journals with the devotion assumed by those who seek to measure

(The best I can do by way of translating this is necessarily pretty dire: Don ' t dilly dally on the way / But run with this to Missee / Berthe, spouse of Mr E. Manet / Via Meulan, out at Mezy.) Some of that grace recurs in the dedications of offprints: I have been lucky enough to browse many grey green filing cabinets, most recently in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, that incomparable reminder that the Republic of Letters does exist. Those cabinets contain, among much more, the offprints which the refugee art historian Erwin Panofsky received from Ernst Kantorowicz, and those which the refugee historian Kantorowicz recei ved from Panofsky , and those which each of them received from countless other contemporaries. It is good to be reminded that the same article is never "the same article": in three separate copies, one owner puts a question mark in the margin, another fails to cut the pages, a third underlines eagerly. Latin is the preferred language of dedication: two sets of initials and d.d. and the deed is done, but it is possible to be as fulsome as Mallarme. Kantorowicz dedicates an offprint to Aquilae artis (the Eagle of art) from pullus historiarum (the chicken of histories). When I was a student, "Young Mr Thornton" kept offprints in cardboard boxes at his wonderful bookshop at II Broad Street, Oxford, and one could own articles inscribed by Fraenkel or Momigliano or Trevor-Roper for five shillings. (Mr Thornton could assess a client's wealth at a glance, and rightly operated a sliding scale in the certainty that if you

are allowed to buy what you want in a shop you will keep coming back to buy more.) It was a world guided by Fortune, where curiosity and tenacity were rewarded and where the principle of serendipity found its place: "as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of'. But in Pasteur's famous phrase, "In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind". Offprints can help to prepare such a mind, and it is a cause of sadness that many publishers no longer choose to supply them: certain that the appeal of their journals or collections of papers will gain nothing from friendship. So, in eulogy, a brief death notice for the offprint. The earliest I have found is an account of the "Coins of the Britains and Romans" pp 89-106, from Camden's Britannia in the edition of 1619 inscribed by the author. The OED records the term offprint in 1885, the French Tirage ii part is found in 1866, and the German Separatum started its life as a Latin term. The Royal Society seems to have provided them from its foundation: I should like to have read the Memoire sur un enfant monstrueux by Eustache Marcot, published in the Memoires de la Societe royale de Montpellier in 1716, or John Quincy Adams, The Character of Desdemona in the American Monthly Magazine, March 1836, now bound among other Adams offprints in the Library of Congress, alongside scientific offprints sent to Jefferson. Oh for the days when Presidents translated Horace and wrote essays on Othello. And oh for the Warburg, incomparable library, where each inherited offprint is bound and shelved for the browser and the researcher to find at their fingertips.

happened like this. M. Le Roy Ladurie is an historian of agrarian problems, whose work on the peasants of Languedoc confronted Climate history him constantly with years of crop-failures, We look back to a review by Gavin de Beer of years of plenty, interspersed with priceHistoire du climat depuis l'an mil by increases, famines, and rogations. From this Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. To see the review pageant of calamities and blessings he was led to climb the tree of science and investiinfull, go to www.the-tls.co.uk gate the climates of times past. Systematic lthough the reader would not suspect meteorological records, generally, do not go it from the title-page, the chief actor back farther than the start of the nineteenth in this book is Bacchus, whose bless- century .... M. Ladurie learnt of American ings are sung in the earliest known poem, work on tree-rings, which tell of favourable the Epic of Gilgamesh, where a temple-girl and unfavourable seasons for 1,000 years; gives wine to Engidu: "He became hilarious. but unfortunately Sequoia gigantea does not His heart was full of joy and his face shone." grow in the garrigues near Montpellier. The sacred book of that temple might well Then came the study of glaciers , with their have heen the late William Younger's wonevidence of catastrophic advance from the derful Gods, Men, and Wine, which imparts sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the euphoric mysticism and, like everything invaded pastures, lawsuits, exorcisms by to do with wine and vine, was a labour of bishops, followed by the last 100 years of love. But there is nothing of that in this steady retreat, the whole revealed by descripbook; nor of that epic march which began tions, engravings, and photographs. The great find , however, was the princiwhen Euxenos and his Phocaeans brought ple put forward by A. Angot in 1883, that the divine plant to Massilia and its cultivathe date of the start of the grape-harvest was tion spread fitfully, according to the stop-go policies of Roman emperors, up the RhOne a reliable indicator of the temperature from and Sa6ne, down the Garonne, Loire, and spring to autumn of each year. Then, at the Moselle, and up the Rhine . Musee Calvet at Avignon, M. Ladurie fell Bacchus has gate-crashed into the science on the records which Hyacinthe Chobaut of meteorology, in an unexpected manner. It had collected of these dates from the four-

teenth century .... The result is remarkable. By counting the days before or after September I , the author awards scores to each year. The most surprising omission is that of the principle put forward by John Tyndall 100 years ago, showing that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a "greenhouse effect", because it allows the sun's rays to pass through it and strike the earth, but the earth reflects much of this energy as infrared rays to which carbon dioxide is opaque. The result is accumulation of heat in the atmosphere .... In 1900, ships could come from Spitsbergen for three months of the year; now for seven months. Pack-ice now rarely reaches Iceland, cod fisheries and the belt of cyclones have moved northwards; the average winter temperature in northern Europe has risen by YF. There is more than enough here to explain the change of climate which has resulted in the retreat of glaciers since 1850, and there is sufficient to cause some anxious speculation on the future of mankind, if it should survive either of the two bombs with which it is threatened. If the present rate of production of carbon dioxide goes on accelerating, not only will the energy reserves be used up a million times faster than they were built up, but the "greenhouse effect" might result in melting the existing ice-caps. The level of the sea would then rise more than 100 feet, and London, New York, and Leningrad would be drowned.

I

DAVID GANZ the " impact" of articles. More of us forget whether an article cited a reference correctly, and someti mes we have to reread articles several times to find the forgotten fact. The offprint may be marked, without defacing the book or journal where it first appeared. Better still, the offprint may be corrected. (There is a particular corner of A vernus where those who reprint their articles without corrigenda or addenda are entertained by Mephistopheles or even by Milton ' s Satan.) Those elegant penned alterations, whether remedying typographical errors or inserting a detail spotted after the text had been sent off to an editor, were what gave the offprint its particular cachet. And the arrival of the offprint was a sign of friendship , or at least a sign of recognition. When a pre-eminent German scholar chose to send me an article about the supposed Jewish identity of the most remarkable of early medieval grammarians, I was surprised and flattered. When an elderly friend sent an offprint across an ocean, I was delighted that a long project of research had finally come to fruition, and envious of the ease with which an argument had finally been formulated. A more sensitive scholar reminded me that, in the seventeenth century, Latin elegiacs were composed for autograph albums, and quoted the wonderful verse of Mallarme: Sans t' etendre dans I' herbe verte Na"if distributeur, mets-y Du lien, cours chezMadame Berthe

Manet, par Meulan, a Mezy.

IN NEXT WEEK'S

ILS Clair Wills Ireland's debt to pleasure Frank Whitford Van Gogh, prodigy in paint and words Gordon Turnbull At Dr Johnson' s death bed The TLS Christmas Quiz

TLS September 28 , 1967

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17

A Dutch Shakespeare restores the "scenicke" poetry of the Roman plays

Here is the world elsewhere ERIC GRIFFITHS Shakespeare and Toneelgroep Amsterdam ROMAN TRAGEDIES Barbican Theatre

efore anything happened, a man with side whiskers from the row in front waved indignantly at the set of Roman Tragedies and asked "does that look anything like ancient Rome to you?". The stage was neither covered with obscene graffiti nor ankle-deep in the blood of sacrificial oxen, so the answer was as obvious to me as it was to him. But the outsize desks, the designer foliage and monumental-gemiitlich couches outlined a global, characterless space like an airport lounge, a plausible arena for the executive striding and derelict waiting around which occupy the Romans, whether power brokers or powerbroken, in the tragedies of Coriolanus, illlius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, acutely cut, intelligently re-stitched, and enacted with uplifting power and tenderness over 330 minutes by Toneelgroep Amsterdam. I asked my questioner if he thought Shakespeare's stage had been designed to look the way, in the playwright' s day, they thought ancient Rome had looked. "Well, maybe not" , he replied, "but the actors wore togas, didn't they?". Though I assured him several times they didn't, I don't think he believed me. I spied him later, haranguing some girls about the script - "look, I say either use the original or don ' t use it, simple as that" . The absence of togas and marble which so vexed my neighbour stimulated some commentators to revel in Shakespeare's relevance to themselves, as if he had "only finished writing the plays this morning". Shakespeare wrote no play set amid the Reformed world he lived in; the nearest the careful Bard came to his audience's England was 1534, a lifetime away. Had he been alive today, he probably wouldn't, despite claims from some popularizing academics, have written for East-Enders, though he might have collaborated on Dr Who, intrigued as he was by linguistic and credal time-travelling. If the Roman plays seem as up to date now as when he wrote them, this is because pitifully little has changed since the death of Cleopatra; because we are slow learners, not because he was a prophet eagerly looking forward to us. Then there were those thrilled that spectators were invited to sit among the actors onstage, to buy a drink or a five-bean salad. This prompted several allegorizations, ranging from the fervid notion that the audience becomes "implicated in the action", taking the place of the Roman populace (all the crowd scenes have been cut) to a more coolly postmodernist take on the past as a supermarket aisle where you can safely

B

Left to right: Fred Goessens (Menenius), Roeland Fernhout (Cominius), Fedja van Huet (Coriolanus), Eelco Smits (Sicinius) and Alwin Pulinckx (Brutus) in Coriolanus graze: "you choose the perspective from which you view it". Both interpretations took for granted that the director, Ivo Van Hove, had us twenty-first-century folk principally in mind when he devised his magnificently thoughtful spectacle. This seems a shade selfcentred. He might have been thinking about the public spaces of Rome as it swelled to empire or Shakespeare's stage, on which people who could pay extra occasionally sat so they could be ornaments as well as witnesses of the action; where luliet leant out of her balcony from between a couple of gallants, visibly present but ignored by the fiction, to exchange confidences with Romeo. Van Hove's overhead video screen and ranks of monitors, angled at 90 degrees to eyes viewing from the hall, create depths of visual and ethical field which offer a current equivalent to the transverse sight-lines that result when an acting space is thrust out into the amphitheatre. He creates not what they saw in the 1600s but the conditions under which, according to the structures of Shakespeare' s writing, anything is seen at all, especially in the great sphere of political self-will. This is mise en scene as the unfolding of a transcendental argument about what "perspective" and "choice" might mean. If cultural pundits recognized the rapt spirit of inquiry which informs artistic work of this finesse , they might one day tire of telling us everything is, and has to be, a parable of ourselves. You may, roughly speaking, choose where you stand or sit vis-a-vis Roman Tragedies, but you don't choose what you can see from your point of vantage. That's down to Dutch cunning and the laws of physics. Simulcast video of the acting at times allows a fantasti-

cally ample vision, as if we could see all sides of an encounter or issue, without even having to move round it. Coriolanus turns his back on Volumnia and the stalls while she pleads for Rome - ineffectually, she fears (or says she fears) - but, above them both on a gantry, we see his face and why he refuses to show her his face, worked over as it is by her words, about to give way. This godlike privilege of looking down on a human exchange from two optically incompatible standpoints at one time can be withdrawn as suddenly as it was surprisingly granted. Brutus and Cassius at Philippi sit beneath a grey expanse, which yields them no projection; someone has switched off their horizon. Video feeds the business of the stage in many convergent or refractive ways. At the mention of Coriolanus's son, Virgilia channel-hops to a home movie of a boy with an orange plastic sword, trying his best to be bloodthirsty: what is said cues the image. Conversely, shots ofMichael Phelps winning gold at the Beijing Olympics fill the screens while Cassius decries Caesar's new ascendancy, because the speech about swimming the Tiber has been cut: sports footage replaces the text. The relation between word and stage-picture never collapses into the sheerly illustrative, nor does it stoop to "ironic parallels" of the kind familiar from directors who have had An Idea (usually just the one) about a Shakespeare play. Rather, the videography performs an inventive tango with the script, the point being to make good at every moment the truth of Coriolanus' s insistence "There is a world elsewhere" and at the same time to render that truth frail and precarious, because merely knowing there is


an elsewhere tells you nothing about how to get there. This sharp realization of discrepant simultaneities, of worlds which are worlds apart though also cheek to cheek, is, as Or 10hnson noted, crucial to Shakespeare's "composiexpressing the tions of a distinct kind course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend" (Preface to Shakespeare , 1765). The production's radical fidelity to this insight flowers in the evening' s many novelties which, on consideration, turn out to be rediscoveries of echt Shakespearean quality: jump-cuts between scenes which retrieve an earlier fluency for the stage; rapid delivery and overlapping of speeches given "trippingly on the tongue" , such as Hamlet longed for; varieties of mic'd amplification to split acoustics in tune with the Bard's zigzag between styles - vaulting, grounded, abject. The soundtrack, composed by Eric Sleichim and played by the Bl!ndman percussionists, is another example. It does what music has long done for tragedies - supplies a lyric equanimity within or above the fray , underlines a poignancy when one needs underlining, and so on - but here the musicians too come into play, as the camera, looking past Portia in her worries over Brutus, frames a drummer against a rack of tarn-tarns in his own dimension of intentness, or the eye catches hands poised selectively above a vibraphone while Cleopatra steadies herself towards death, before they come down softly through the dark to hit the spot, like owls. The Dutch group looked pleased and perhaps surprised by the standing ovations the Barbican audience gave them (I can ' t remember the last time I heard such warmth so richly deserved in an English theatre). They may have thought it a stern test to play Shakespeare to his compatriots. But actually " national poet" means "poet subject to the most widespread and tenacious misconceptions because people were put off him by teachers". The classics are, mostly, what grown-ups cannot bear to admit they don ' t understand because it would be disloyal to their school, or to their own sufferings at school. Clinging to togas is one example, and the surtitles for this production are another. I speak feelingly on this topic because I advised on some details of Shakespearean usage in the very last stages of revising the text which, via a LaTeX Beamer and Powerpoint, steered English-speakers through the Dutch they were hearing in performance. We are logistical innocents about the relations between languages and, still more strikingly, about the relations between the written and spoken forms of a single language. There are, for instance, seventy surtitle cues in the first ten minutes of Roman Tragedies, but these translate barely half the number of words the actors say in that time. Critics who thought a policy of "stripping away" the "flowery lan-

ARTS

18 guage" and "ornate words" from Shakespeare had been applied betrayed how vague a reminiscence has taken the place of Shakespeare's writing for them. One commentator noticed only "a few odd phrases here and there" by Shakespeare in the show's last hour, but dozens of the plainest and most piercing lines flash up for those with eyes to see them: "But I will be / A bridegroom in my death" or "The bright day is done, / And we are for the dark". Admittedly, there weren't these helpful forward slashes to stake out the line-endings, but in any case less of Shakespeare is in verse than editors since the eighteenth century have wanted to make out. David Bevington, the best recent editor of Antony and Cleopatra , is right in "rejecting the way editorial tradition has too complacently linked" short phrases "to produce what Too seem to be whole lines of verse often, in my view, the resulting verse is hypermetrical and unconvincing" - an excellent saying, though bad editorial practices die hard, and I count 193 occasions even in Bevington's text of 2005 where verse has crept in through the back -door method of relineating Folio. ore is at issue here than whether Shakespeare could generally be relied on to count correctly up to ten. What has an editor found if he or she discovers a line of verse the 1623 compositors botched into prose? What is the difference for an auditor between hearing ten syllables of prose and ten of verse? Hugh Holland's oily sonnet prefatory to Folio at least has two good words in its title, where he calls Shakespeare a "Scenicke Poet". Scenic poetry consists in patterned varying of the formality of interaction between figures on stage; syllable-count is just one, not very reliable, clue to the temperature of their exchanges, along with other linguistic features, not to mention posture and gait. Scenic poetry is a phenomenon of utterance and as such is always under-described by text as it concerns editors; it sparks between the lines they labour to establish. Take the scene where Cassius and Brutus, quarrelling about logistics, keep their hackles raised and their diction elevated, circling each other and stickling for who did and said what wrong, until Brutus admits "When I spoke that, I was illtempered too" and Cassius relents "Do you confess so much? Give me your hand". (Julius Caesar, 4.3.115-116) At that "you" , Cassius relinquishes the old-style pronouns and morphology which have been his throughout the scene ("If that thou beest a Roman thou lov'dst him better / Than ever thou lov'dst Cassius") and starts talking the early form of modern English which was emerging round Shakespeare as he wrote ("Have you not love enough to bear with me ... ?"). It is as if he had taken the plum out of his mouth and the self-righteous acrimony from his heart. Melting behaviour such as this is one of Shakespeare' s specialities. His

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figures stand on their dignity, talking big, head held high, then they unbend or slip or clamber down to the level of a predicament without lustre, which they may hate to admit but which they actually share. Those for whom poetry is "flowery language" are often hankering after exactly those archaisms which Cassius gives up; they think the language looks fetching with them, like Felicity Kendall wearing a snood in a classic drama. Pope, who had been through Shakespeare' s text as an editor, repairing the ruins of time where he thought he detected them, was savvy about the appeal to readers of musty inflections: "Authors, like Coins, grow dear as they grow old; / It is the rust we value, not the gold" (First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 1737), or, in this case, not the "rust" but the "dost" and the "wast" . Toneelgroep's script modernizes Shakespeare in that it uses current morphology and lexis; the translation back into English follows suit, so, for instance, Cleopatra at 2.2.250 became " sluttish" where she had once been "riggish" . If modernizing Shakespeare is a crime, it is an offence he was the first to commit; the quarter-century of his writing life is an exceptional record of selfrenovation in word- and stage-craft. In Shakespeare, Brutus thinks to justify the assassination: "as he was ambitious, I slew him". The surtitle reads: "as he was ambitious, I killed him". It could probably have stayed at "slew" . Most English-speakers know what it means, but may not know what the playwright meant by it in Brutus' s mouth.

He meant it as a fubsy, suspectable attempt to sound doughty, a seventeenth-century equivalent for the glottal stop affected by our leaders even if they've been to Eton (or E' on). The modern ear hears " slew" as oldfashioned but is likely to mislead itself with the belief that the word was not already mildewed for Shakespeare. Yet though he had been keen on "slew" -ing in his earliest histories, the Bard tired of the word and came to treat it as corny; of its forty appearances on his stage, twenty-nine come before this moment in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare outgrew himself and what he had once thought poetical; we should try to catch up with him. The world' s first surtitle would have been "What's keeping Electra?", as surtitles were born from the exigencies of international theatre in January 1983, for a Canadian Opera production of Richard Strauss's Elektra. Before then, such fiestas as Peter Daubeny's World Theatre seasons (which ran at the Aldwych in the 1960s and 70s) depended on simultaneous translation through tinny ear-pieces, a nightmare shrinkage of the theatre's many voices to the drone of an interpreter. Art sometimes arises strangely out of necessities; surtitles, though in origin mere conveniences, can become things of beauty. When Caesar fatally turns a deaf, high-principled ear to the conspirators ' prayers, Shakespeare finds for him sixteen lines of ravishing self-aggrandizement in which he speaks of himself as remote from what moves lower mortals. At the words "I am constant as the northern star" , his face in

close-up filled the giant screen above the stage - a countenance would-be divine, the polar supervisor of a world which orients itself from him. You heard the life-size actor say " ik ben onverstoorbaar als de poolster zelf', then saw the words stellified into a celestial headline over him, the surtitle becoming a subtitle to the yet more altitudinous projection of the man as a movie icon. It was as if the entire process of theatremaking, from the writing of a script through conning it alone and rehearsing in company how to deliver it back out onto the air of shared attention, had become visible, crystallized into this configuration of utterance and physique. It was a wonder to think all this had arisen from a page, a fragment of which still glowed above the stage. Surtitles can be now what clara lectio used to be: "reading aloud", but also, in this context, reading illuminated as if across a clear night sky. This synergy between visible text and stagepicture reinstates some of what Shakespeare was getting at through his many encounters with "pomp" and its need to take physic for the delusions of magnificence which ceremonial or poeticality can foster. Caesar looks and sounds for a moment larger than life but not, as it turns out, larger than death. His enemies don't see or hear things, especially himself, as he does. When he asks, secure in what he thinks the answer must be, "Wilt thou lift up Olympus?", they do in fact lift him up, move him along and carry him off to die. No catch-phrase or headline can save him.

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rchaeologists use the term "J6mon" (literally: cord-marked) for the period from about 12,000 to 1,000 BC when ceramic artefacts from what is now Japan were decorated by pressing twisted plant fibres into the clay before firing. The most striking objects from the J6mon are dogii: anthropomorphic pieces which vary from thumb-sized pottery scraps dotted with ooh-shaped eyes and mouths to fully detailed figures which stand some eighteen inches high. The Japanese word dogii is made up of the Chinese characters for "earth" and "spirit" and the recent British Museum exhibition The Power of Dogll showed off this compelling mix of the corporeal and the otherworldly to maximum effect. Simon Kane, editor of the fine catalogue, says dogii deserve "a place among the outstanding cultural creations of the prehistoric world". Some would go further. Made by a people without agriculture, metals or writing, the best dogii have the immediacy of impact of fully realized works of art. They are stunning. We can only speculate on their original purpose. Most of the traces of their makers have long since been consumed by Japan ' s acidic soils. We are left with the intuitions of the researcher and the chance finds of the general public. In the 1930s, the archaeologist Yamanouchi Sugao was working on a taxonomy of the various decorative markings that characterize these artefacts and was puzzled as to how they could have been made. During a coffee break at his workbench, he idly rolled a length of spring across some soft clay. The parallel lines thus made suggested the process could be repeated using a natural material such as string or cord. One of the exhibition ' s great treasures is the Chobo-

A

Smiles of prehistory OLIVER REYNOLDS THE POWER OF DOOO British Museum; Tokyo National Museum, from December 15 until February 21 , 20 I 0

naino dogii, a warrior-like figure whose martial stance is not in the least impaired by its lacking arms. After three-and-a-half millennia underground, this was unearthed in 1975 by someone digging up spuds. Today's viewer, faced with such immediately engaging work, runs the risk of overidentification or projection. Looking into the crimped and puckered eyeholes of the Chobonaino dogii, one sees not the ceramic blank left by the potter, but an answering eye. Tatsuo Kobayashi ' s excellent book Jomon Reflections (published in English translation in 2004) shows how the vertiginously distant past can still be approached with tact, hesitation and respect: ... these clay figurines are neither male nor

female, nor do they simply represent a model of the J6mon person, but rather they are images that surpass the realms of gender and shape, and are designed to allow spirits to appear in concrete form.

Yet there are still pieces where the viewer's leap of recognition erases time and space and, as in Philip Larkin ' s "An Arundel Tomb" , "One sees with a sharp, tender shock" . In


looking at the three-inch high "Mother and child dogii" (2,500-1 ,000 BC), one notes that though the woman's head is missing and the arm cradling the child is clumsily done, the tuck of her legs beneath her is awkwardly real. Then, looking more closely, one sees that the lower half of the child ' s face is defined by a curve that is both cartoon-like and universal. The baby is smiling. Japanese aesthetics has long attached a special value to the irregular: the collector of porcelain giving pride of place to a lopsided " moon" jar; the family in a Kawabata novel discussing the misshapen tree in their backyard; or even the massive tic by which Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai periodically hitches and resettles his sword-arm. The individuality of the most striking dogii often derives from a slight asymmetry - of patterning, posture or of the two combined. Thus, in the Chobonaino piece, the head inclines to the left while a decorative tattoolike line runs down the torso in the opposite direction - the beginnings of contrapposto. The Tanabatake " Venus" - billowing with fecundity and found in a burial pit - is a match for her Willendorf rival. Beneath a headpiece in the form of a coiled serpent (a common J6mon fertility symbol), the eternal feminine here is ten inches of clay glittering with mica. The dominance of the inflated curve - pendulous stomach, caisson-like legs and massy buttocks - is set off by the face's abstracted reticence: tilted eye-slits and the mouth ' s lopsided oval. One leg is noticeably shorter than the other. The dogii seems about to step forward (an effect seen in other pieces) and the viewer - subject to the forces of body and spirit, desire and worship - is caught off-balance.

"'(.1~1'1-1

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19

Stanley Middleton: a provincial modernist

In the wrong company hen he died on July 25 , 2009, a week before his ninetieth birthday, Stanley Middleton had forty-four novels to his name. He was late in getting published (A Short Answer appeared in 1958), but went on to produce nearly a novel a year. They are all set in his native Nottingham, called Beechnall, though in his bestknown book, Holiday, which shared the Booker Prize with The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer in 1974, we visit the city through flashbacks in the mind of someone staying in an East Coast resort. Holiday is one of the sequence of novels Middleton published over a twelve-year period, from Cold Gradations (1972) and A Man Made of Smoke (1973) to Entry into Jerusalem (1983) and The Daysman (1984). It forms a body of fiction as truthful in its inquiry into human nature, as well-written and as moving as any in post-war English literature. Middleton 's work has received many generous tributes - from A. S. Byatt, Allan Massie and Alan Brownjohn, among othersand in his home city he always enjoyed a grateful admiration. Yet his novels have largely failed to get the critical attention they deserve, principally because they are placed in the wrong company. Appearing in the wake of John Wain and John Braine, and at the same time as works by Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Keith Waterhouse and David Storey, Middleton's early novels were assumed to share their intention of opening up an English province in fiction. This is not the case. For Middleton, Beechnall is merely the setting for his explorations of human motive and reaction, chosen because he knew the place. Nor is he interested in writing a Bildungsroman, or a family chronicle. Although he shares Storey's feeling for D. H. Lawrence, the clearest influences in Middleton 's fiction , especially in the sequence cited above, are Ivy ComptonBurnett and Henry Green, two novelists whose reputations were high in the 1940s and early 50s, when Middleton, who was born in 1919, came to intellectual maturity. His essentially modernist approach to the novel is apparent from the opening of Cold Gradations, a one-sentence paragraph which is as unassertive as a stage direction: "The old man stood in a garden". It is "a" garden, not "the" garden, because it is not this old man 's, but is part of the neighbourhood of his son ' s "rich man' s house" in Hampshire. We watch him walk ill-at-ease in this strange landscape before, in the next chapter, he returns to the place where he belongs. Again James Mansfield is looking at a garden, but this time it is at the one he owns, seen through the plate-glass window of his Beechnall bungalow. The view it commands - of railway embankments, factories , new housing estates - is quite unlike the serene, cultivated properties in the southern counties, but it suits Mansfield's outlook on life, which has been shaped by such scenery:

W

"Well, boy," Yemon answered, "we're rational human beings, aren't we? But Irene 's furious. She saw your marriage as perfect." He grinned,

PAUL BINDING "Clouds flew but without menace, their shadows sweeping the landscape .... The garden darkened, for brief seconds, burst back into the fickle brightness of sun". The weather complements the vagaries of Mansfield's mood, for he is trying to compose a letter to his aloof, upper-class daughter-in-law, thanking her for a visit he did not enjoy. A widower, a retired grammar school teacher and the recent victim of a heart attack, Mansfield now lives for books and music. He is interrupted in his melancholy musings by an old friend who arrives seeking advice on how to cope with the mentally retarded grandchild who has been foisted on him by his son. In his willingness to be of active help, Mansfield is a familiar Middleton protagonist. The last novel of this sequence, The Daysman, gives us a disconcerting variant of this type in its portrait of the friend in need who becomes convinced of his own virtue and good sense. At the centre of Cold Gradations is the relationship between Mansfield and his son, his only child. David Mansfield is a successful business man, who has married into a semi-aristocratic family. Neither his work nor his home life has quite the solidity it appears to have. David, in many ways a kind and thoughtful man, cannot be wholly blamed for this, although his father considers him to have abandoned the values he was taught. What the novel gradually reveals is that James Mansfield finds the differences between himself and his son (who has been seriously ill) essential to him: The marvellous thing was the life of the man. He lived ; he dazzled with a bursting intelligence; even in thi s quiet invalid's voice there promised another hundred years of power, of

command. Mansfield himself felt livelier, younger on the impact of his son's personality. Now he could argue hi s son's mortality, face

it, because death had nothing to do with this big man, thi s brain, this explosion of life. The ending of Cold Gradations is both shocking and original. David returns from hospital to celebrations, and his father feels "an abundance of pleasure". Then, one paragraph before the novel's final exchange, we are told, in a rare authorial interjection, that shortly after the welcome home David did indeed die, of a thrombosis. "His father saw him once more, in his coffin, handsome as on his wedding day, the dead face proud enough to outface death, last judgement, hell 's legions, God Almighty." After this information, the descriptions of the rejoicing, with the reiterated word "Great", ring hollow. Middleton uses the telling, disruptive penultimate paragraph also to great effect in Changes and Chances (1990) and Toward the Sea (1995). The next novel in the sequence, A Man Made of Smoke, differs from the others in that its protagonist, Jack Riley, remains

with mischief. "Perhaps she thinks Meg'll be back, inflicting herself on us."

Stanley Middleton, December 13, 1974 inside the working class where he was born. Middleton's characters, whatever their background, are generally of the professional class. Their education has shaped their image of themselves and inculcated habits of reflection. Middleton rose to Head of Department at his old Nottingham school, and his fiction is full of teachers and lecturers as well as local businessmen. Riley, however, is a former NCO, promoted to floor manager at a cardboard-box factory where he has worked since leaving the army. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Henry Green of Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), Middleton depends heavily on dialogue. For all his sensitivity to the idioms and rhythm of East Midlands speech, his dialogue, like theirs, is stylized. The characters communicate with one another inside a convention that permits unusual degrees of personal disclosure. Early on in Holiday, in a seaside pub, Edwin Fisher, who is trying to get away from it all , has run into his father-in-law , a Beechnall solicitor. The two have a drink together, and Fisher says: "If I could do anything for her, without going back or saying anything in person, I'd do it." "How' s she managing financially?" "I'm continuing the mortgage and my solicitor's arranging monthly payments." "I'm not acting for her." "I wondered."

"She's an odd kid." They drank in silence now the pub seemed fuller of noise. Fisher set up fresh pints, and sitting said, "D'you know, I'd considered what

I'd say to you if we met."


"Not much fear of that." What we take away from this enables our understanding of the complications that follow. We know about Meg' s demanding personality, the two men's different kinds of self-centredness, the older one's unsatisfactory marriage and his own lazy attitude towards it, as well as Fisher's pride, and we see that all the characters may have sympathetic points. Two other outstanding novels in the sequence, taken together, represent the dominant strands of Middleton's work and are its highest point. His poetic powers prevail in In a Strange Land (1979), while in The Daysman (1984) his depiction of social mores is acute. The imaginative opening of In a Strange Land lyrically evokes a local wood through the perceptions of James Murren, who is led by two schoolboys to their terrible discovery of the corpse of a suicide. Ever afterwards the problem of how to dispose of one's life will be linked in Murren' s mind by his recollection of that winter morning's gloom and the frozen noman's-land of the wood. We feel the difference between Murren and those around him, and his distance from the boys with their deep familiarity with the wood. Murren is an outsider in Beechnall, even if, with his teaching and his musical activities, a reasonably integrated one. His sense of apartness is increased first by contemplation of the suicide, and then by hi s acquaintance with a lonely Polish emigre couple who make him dissatisfied with his daily Beechnall round and inspire him to succeed as a composer. Music was of immense importance to Middleton, and in novel after novel, with great resourcefulness, he expresses this through his characters. While he excels at conveying the otherness of music, the uniqueness of its dictates, he also makes us see it as with Murren - as the only consolation for certain complex psyches. In a Strange Land is not so much "about a musician" as about a man who finds in music the peace for which all of us yearn. The novel's recurring motif, which appears in foreshortened form in A Man Made of Smoke, is of a man finding himself drawn to two very different women. This also informs Ends and Means, The Other Side , Changes and Chances and, with scrupulous subtlety, Toward the Sea. In The Daysman, John Richardson is a head teacher, and an obsessive do-gooder. Even his public role, which makes him an acknowledged moral authority, cannot satisfy him, and he comes to see himself as a secular saint. We are tempted to share this view, for he cares about others, and will go to great lengths to help them. But both Richardson and the reader are disabused only three

20

FICTION

pages from the end of the book. He meets the mother of a girl he has tried to help, and in his vanity thinks she has come to greet him. She soon puts him right: " Who in hell do you think you are? My God, you've got a good opinion of yourself. I wouldn ' t walk across the street to see you" . This might have been a coup de grace, but Richardson ' s carefully built-up resilience protects him. Meanwhile, we are confused by this plain-speaking, since part of us agrees with the mother's opinion. And yet Richardson is not a bad man. The moral problem that he presents is more complicated than that. Behind The Daysman there stand ComptonBurnett's A House and Its Head (I935) and Jane Austen's Emma, with their unflinching treatment of the dangers of power. Middleton ' s best fiction is not only to be found in the sequence I have cited. Harris's Requiem is the equal of any of his later novels, and has a male vigour all its own, and Changes and Chances and Toward the Sea are notably fine . But too often in the work of the last ten years the dialogue is prolix and the preoccupation with the ins and outs of daily life confusing. Yet always in Middleton, there is an apprehension of an agnostic's determination that eternal veri ties must be acknowledged even if not defined. In Changes and Chances , the poet, Stephen Youlgrave, a man in his seventies, quite well known but reclusive, says: I've worked on my poems now for fifty-five, nearly sixty years, on and off, and I've never managed to put down what I'm trying to. I don't mean that my poems, taken separately, fail to say what they set out to. They do, a few of them, satisfactorily and sometimes even surprisingly. But behind these local successes and, 1 guess, failures , there is some sort of central mystery that I have not expressed. And 1 have never been able to explain it, or even approach it very closely with words. It disappears, it dissipates itself, and I'm left longing, dissatisfied with a hole in my writing heart.

In his best novels, Middleton succeeds in depicting this human dilemma. Throughout his working life Middleton was a Shakespeare enthusiast, and his novels show his inwardness with the plays. His characters frequently turn to Shakespeare in bleak or troubling situations that have taken them by surprise. But Middleton's own work most recalls French classical theatre, with its intense, often relentless concentration on human inter-reactions and the patterns they form. Perhaps, for all their bedrock Englishness, this kinship and what it implies about Middleton's outlook may account for the comparative neglect of his deeply felt testimonies to the difficulties of life and to the obligations of facing up to them.

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Storm conditions ean-PhiliPpe Toussaint excels at set pieces. In the middle section of his new novel, La Veritl? sur Marie, he describes the transportation of a thoroughbred, Zahir, back from Asia, where he had been due to run in several prestigious races for which he was later deemed unfit. Over the course of sixty pages, the author describes the attempts by Zahir's Japanese grooms to load him on to a 747 cargo plane at Tokyo airport in a violent thunderstorm. Zahir bolts and disappears into the night. All flights from the airport are immediately grounded. When the horse reappears, his eyes are full of terror and his knee has been gashed open. His owner, Jean-Christophe, manages to calm him down with the help of a blindfold, and Zahir is guided into the hold of the plane. Once in the air, Jean-Christophe, who has no veterinary training, tries to administer first aid by torchlight while his new girlfriend, Marie, sits in darkness on the floor of the plane, surrounded by her 140 kg of luggage. The plane flies into turbulence and the horse becomes frantic again. Although Toussaint reminds us that horses are incapable of vomiting, Zahir - " indifferent to his nature, a traitor to his species" proceeds to do so. It is a gripping, finely controlled piece of writing, distressing in its close focus on the creature's suffering. We do not learn whether Zahir recovers from his ordeal ; his fate is, characteristically, left hanging in the air. Toussaint has described La Verite sur Marie as less a sequel to than an extension of Faire I'amour (2002) and Fuir (2005), the distinction being small but one which hints at the author's disregard for conventional plotting. The story, such as it is, concerns the turbulent affair between the unnamed narrator and Marie, a successful young fashion designer. In Faire I'amour we follow them to Tokyo, where she is due to present her collection, but the slow break-up

J

n the longest of the eight novellas in The Most Beautiful Book in the World, a shop assistant from a small town finally meets her hero, a novelist from Paris, and fluffs her lines. Her silly name, "Odette Toulemonde", which is also the title of the story, comes out as "Dette", and the bemused writer simply signs her copy of his latest work "For Dette" . Embarrassment takes over; only his life is falling apart as hers is erupting with joy, and a whimsically romantic tale ensues. There is little more to it than that, but "Odette Toulemonde" differs from the other seven pieces here in that it has another life, as a film directed by its author, EricEmmanuel Schmitt. The film came before the short story, for, while filming in 2006, Schmitt rediscovered "the joy of clandestine writing" . As in Schmitt's plays, with their carefully conventional stagecraft, the stories here have the clarity of a sequence of well-lit, well-shot scenes. In the first, "Wanda Winnipeg", a rich woman sweeps into a hotel, and the camera lingers on the

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of their relationship leaves her unable to carry on with the show. The tremor-prone city is vividly evoked; its neon-lit soullessness forms an appropriate backdrop to the events described. The novel marks a darkening of mood after the whimsical charm and lightness of earlier works like La Reticence (1991) and Autoportrait (if I' etranger), published in 2000. Fuir (which now appears in a translation by Matthew B. Smith) sees the couple reunited. As the narrator wearily muses, "Would it ever end with Marie?". Having sent him to Shanghai on an unspecified errand, Marie calls him to tell him that her father has died. But instead of flying back to be with her, the hapless narrator (whose motivations are often hard to fathom) stays on for several days and narrowly avoids being sucked into Shanghai's underworld by his local minder. When he does rejoin her on the Mediterranean island of Elba for the funeral, her rejection is shocking. The new novel is made up of three tableaux, the second of which (the episode with Zahir) precedes the first in time. It opens on a stormy August night. Marie has brought the stylishly dressed Jean-Christophe back to her apartment in central Paris. They had met in Tokyo, where he was a guest at another of her fashion shows. At they drunkenly cavort on the bed, Jean-Christophe has a heart attack. In her distress Marie calls the narrator

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD Eight novellas Translated by Alison Anderson I 92pp. Europa Editions. Paperback, £7 .99. 978 I 933372 74 7

trappings of money and power, and on her gorgeous obedient, young male escort. Then we get Wanda's history - Romania to riches via a sexual education in her teens, with the local Lothario. Lothario wants to succeed as an artist, and Wanda, in the moneyed present day, finds a way to repay him by giving him the critical recognition (and the cheques) he craves. The circle is neatly drawn; its pleasure is a cold one. The same qualities appear in the next story, "A Fine Rainy Day", which is about a cynical woman - again, materialistic, successful - who finds her match in a trusting, optimistic man. When he dies, both her old cynical self and the contentedwife act that took over are locked up


at his new girlfriend' s apartment and he arrives as the paramedics are tending to Jean-Christophe. Unable to accompany the married Jean-Christophe to hospital, Marie instead initiates a reconciliation with the narrator - they have not been living together for four months: "Elle ne voulait plus entendre pari er de moi", he had thought, "compris, jamais - basta avec moi maintenant". We still don't know what, if anything, he does for a living, but as a narrator he is ever observant, noticing the pair of elegant Italian shoes Jean-Christophe has left behind, which he describes in loving detail. When, several days later, Marie rings him to tell him that "Jean-Baptiste is dead", he "didn't know what to say, having always thought he was called Jean-Christophe" . As in Running Away, the third part of the book takes us to El ba. One year after her father's death, Marie is tending his empty, overgrown property, with its shrubs and olive groves. The narrator arrives on the island, having not seen her for two months, and hoping to get back together with her: "strange as this may seem, Marie fancied me, she always had". The Jean-Christophe/Baptiste episode is not mentioned: loose ends are never tied up in Toussaint's fiction. The island is beautifully evoked, as are Marie's feelings for the sea. Toussaint creates an atmosphere of calm that leaves the reader unprepared for the forest fire that, in a horrible echo of the Zahir episode, destroys three of Marie's stabled horses - she is presented with the sight of their burnt carcasses draped in white shrouds. Marie remains a mystery: it can ' t be said that we learn "the truth about her" that the book' s title seems to promise. Could it be that Toussaint, in Belgian farceur mode, is having fun at the reader' s expense? Matthew Smith's (American) translation of Fuir, which appears in Dalkey Archive Press's Belgian Literature series, reads well, although Smith might have done better with "Pas sees les portes en verre coulissantes de l'aeroport, ." than simply "On exiting the airport .". Perhaps he was lulled by the deceptively casual style, which makes reading Toussaint's fiction such a pleasure.

behind the pose of a grieving widow. The story's conceit does not quite work, however, and the same goes for the stories that feature, variously, a woman who finds a mysterious stranger in her flat , a cast-off mistress's consolation prize, a forged Picasso, and a woman who changes her hairdresser and discovers her husband ' s secret life. The tale of a beautiful girl who wears no shoes and a bad, besotted actor called Fabio has, of all things, a plot twist at the end. The title story is a concentration-camp narrative from Soviet Siberia, about imprisoned women trying to pass on messages to their daughters. It is more a tribute than a story, and its setting contrasts starkly with the hotels and hair salons of the preceding seven. Schmitt's best-known work is The Visitor (1993) , a play in which Sigmund Freud may or may not find that he has God on his couch. This new translation by Alison Anderson presents its human subjects with an appropriate, idiomatic lucidity. MICHAEL CAINES

FICTION eorges Simeon wrote a number of "romans durs", serious, tough and relentless novels, which turn on crime, usually a murder, but not particularly on its detection. The justice and order which are promised by detectives like Maigret, and which celebrate rational control, are not to be found here. Indeed the plots of these romans durs are difficult to predict; they are narrated in a discontinuous episodic fashion without narrative commentary; and they do not much encourage us, as detective novels do, to bet on our generic sense of the way things are likely to go. Simenon is most interested in the mind and circumstances of the perpetrator. Gendarmes may come in at the end to clear up, but the reader alone knows what actually happened and why. The structure is very like that of Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907). The milieux of these short, economically expressed novels may derive from Zola, but the settings and subject matter - the French colony in Gabon, an intimately small Paris quartier (called Villejuif), and some farm buildings by a canal in the remote French countryside - are plainly given. "Local colour" is frequently ironic as in Tropic Moon: Like the plantation owner last month. Thinking that his cook had tried to poison him, he 'd

G

hung him by his feet over a washtub. From time to time he would lower the cook' s head into the water. Then for more than fifteen

minutes he' d forgotten to pull him out. The cook had died. The trial was still going on. The League of Nations had stepped in. And now another native had been killed. There is no pretence at historical or psychopathological investigation, nor any use of a sophisticated vocabulary. Simenon's direct presentation and minimalized dialogue are like Hemingway 's, and in some ways they anticipate Beckett and Pinter. As in the fiction of Graham Greene, an interest in the indirect presentation of the psychology of almost involuntary, pathological murderers recalls the Expressionist and noir film s of

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140pp. 978 I 59017 III 0 THE ENGAGEMENT Translated by Anna Moschovakis

141pp.978 I 590172285 THE WIDOW Translated by John Petrie

156pp.978 I 590172612 New York Review Books. Paperback, £7.99 each.

the period, and he seems to share Orwell' s acute sense of the smell of poverty. These three novels, written in the 1930s, and in the case of The Widow , finished at "N ieul-sur-Mer, May I 1940", at the time of the retreat from Norway, the building of Auschwitz and the invasion of France, are all fascinatingly evocative of the inter-war period, not least in their emphasis on an all-embracing and interfering sense of a community with a petit-bourgeois tendency to judge and to interfere. Within this context, Simenon ' s protagonists are semi-crazy, and possibly murderous from the start. In The Engagement we have the deeply repressed M Hire, "a short, man, on the fat side, with a curled mustache" , who runs a fraudul ent business, advertised as "eighty to a hundred francs a day for easy work without quitting your job" ; he sells postcards by mail order for 100 francs , ostensibly to be coloured in , and then sold by the buyer for 500 franc s. In The Widow, we have a disoriented and alienated man who, as Paul Theroux points out in his introduction , resembles the hero of Camus's

Simone Signoret and Alain Delon in La VeuveCouderc

L'Etranger; he has spent five years in prison for murder, guiltily aware of the fact that hi s lawyer lied to save him from the death penalty ("Article 314" of the legal code haunts his thoughts), and he ends up living on a farm with a slatternly widow. In Tropic Moon, a man leaves France for Libreville, and thinks that he is now in "the real Africa" , having landed a job in a logging concern. He does the usual things, drinks in a bar, gets fever, travels downriver in a canoe, thinks of his French homeland, and acquires imperialist attitudes towards "blacks" . But Simenon's plot ensures that he returns home an invalid, telling himself that "Africa doesn't exist". The women in these novels are the down-

21 fall of the men ; all convey, with subtle indirection , Simenon's habitual misogyny. They can be sexy (they are often perceived as naked beneath their dresses), but they are variously fatal to the central character's interests. Yet sexual encounters in Simenon don't usually get more than a few lines ; in The Widow they work the plot at greater length. The men have little idea of what is going on. Poor Timar in Africa doesn't see how available to all his lover has been, and so fails to appreciate the nature of her involvement in the legal intrigue surrounding him. Like Jean, the protagonist of The Widow , Simenon has made him a convincing mystery to himself. M Hire (appearing here under the slightly misleading title of The Engagementthe original was ironically entitled Les Fian,ailles de M. Hire) was made into a successful film by Patrice Leconte in 1989. He is suspected of the murder of a woman, and is also trying to get off with Alice; he watches through her window as she undresses, and he fails to grasp the relationship between the two elements. The novel uses the voyeurism of Rear Window, but in reverse. Simenon's precise descriptions of very limited surroundings make these novels seem like film s, but the disadvantage of our encountering them in the cinema, is that their unglamorous heroines and ugly marginal heroes, tend to turn, (as in La Veuve Coudere, 1971), into the likes of Simone Signoret and Alain Delon, who hardly match the squalor of their settings in the way Simenon intends. For his characters are really not exceptional , and it is the twisted and repressed passions and guilts of "ordinary" people, who have suffered a hard and cruel upbringing, that he so convincingly pursues. When they grow up, they get involved in situations in which the timing and the outcome goes wrong. M Hire thought he was going to catch a train. He dies of fright while being rescued from a rooftop, hunted for a crime he did not commit.

----------------------------------------------~,----------------------------------------------

Not quite safe elhi Noir is a collection of fourteen short stories set in Delhi, each one based in a particular area or neighbourhood. By relocating a style that is more commonly connected with mid-twentiethcentury America, to present-day urban India, the material is powerfully invigorated. The ground covered by these stories extends from the cover-up of a government massacre (in Omair Ahmad's private-detective story "Yesterday Man") to a middle-class heroin addict ("How I Lost My Clothes" by Radhika Jha), to a gigolo ring run hy a housewife (Mohan Sikka's "The Railway Aunty"), to a street kid from the city's Inter State Bus Terminal who turns on his Fagin-like mentor ( "S mall Fry" by Meera Nair). Throughout there is that sense of corruption, the cheapness of life, and the impossibility of safety that haunts noir writing. Almost everywhere there are corrupt and brutal policemen, crooked and savage politicians; the idea that nearly everybody is likely to doublecross anyone is a recurrent theme, powerfully expressed in Hirsh Sawhney's "Gautam under a Tree", which creates a

D

CHLOE CAMPBELL Hirsh Sawhney, editor DELHI NOIR 297pp. New York: Akashic Books. Paperback, $15.95. 978 I 93335478 I frightening sense of the unknowability of others. Some stories act as wish-fulfilment revenge fantasies on a theme of police corruption - for example Ruchir Joshi' s " Parking" , or Nalinaksha Bhattacharya's "Hissing Cobras" (which has a moment of female retribution). Bleaker tales suggest the pure impossibility of justice ("Just Another Death" by Hartosh Singh Bal , "The Scam" by Tabish Khair, "The Walls of De lhi" by Uday Prakash). Pulsing through all this is a disquieting sense of sexual voraciousness, both male and female. Irwin Allan Sealy's "Last In, First Out" is one of the more classically noirish tales here, and it is one of the collection's more perfectly executed stories. An account of an

auto rickshaw driver' s attempts to put a stop to a pair of rapists who prowl the forested parkland of the Delhi Ridge at night, it captures the creepy ambiguity of even wellintentioned acts of vigilantism. Sealy's Delhi wide boy is nicely done, down to the deadpan "I was getting nowhere fast", expressed after a small but perfectly rambling bit of dialogue on whether a suspect's suit is "blackish gray" , "grayish black" or "blackish black". While the writing is at moments almost lyrically contemplative, Sealy's command of noir style is demonstrated in this wryly correct use of cliche. Delhi Noir is part of a series of anthologies covering cities, from Dublin to Lagos. The range of the series shows the power of the genre to express the seductiveness and unease of urban life, but this volume both draws on and confronts the genre's promise to revel in the social underside. The appeal of noir is that it makes danger enjoyably safe: reading from the comfort of one's armchair, and protected by the literary safety net of familiar tropes. In reading these stories, however, one fee ls that the net has been cut, as the writing veers into something more disturbing. There is a rawness in the writers' engagement with brutality This is most obvious in Siddharth Chowdhury's "Hostel" ,


which is set in a student dormitory full of desperate young men in thrall to their landlord, a murderous gangster who flaunts his sexual conquests in front of them. In the act of reading the story, one is forced to confront a sense of sickly voyeurism behind this fascination with the social and sexual savagery unleashed by urban dysfunction. The macabre tenor of the writing in Delhi Noir at times subtly deviates from a destylized noir into a kind of contemporary Indian Gothic: there is a touch of Edgar Allan Poe in the deathly lust for so many beautiful women. A strong strand of male sexual hunger and despair merges with class envy to draw a sort of structuralist portrait of violence in stories that despairingly describe the violent psychosexual effects of economic emasculation (particularly in Pal ash Krishna Mehrotra's "Fit of Rage"). The final story, "Cull" by Manjula Padmanabhan , is a dystopian rendering of a future Delhi as a regional megalopolis silently at war with its gigantic, segregated slum belt; more science fiction than noir, it makes a logical conclusion to the anthology. The cumulative effect is a collection which, in all its macabre desolation , conjures a world capital and makes an argument about the effects of extreme inequality and injustice in a gargantuan city.

Religious Studies From Chicago

22

According to Seth

The Unconverted Self Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe Jonathan Boyarin

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Socrates and the Fat Rabbis Daniel Boyarin

SOCItATES .... FAT WitS

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Mad and Divine Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World

Sudhir Kakar

MAD

DIVINE

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Ibn Tufayl's Hayylbn Yaqzan A Philosophical Tale Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by

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Giordano Bruno Philosopher / Heretic

Inzrid D. Rowland

part from their youthful mi sbehaviour, the Bible tell s us very little about the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were made, they sinned, they were expelled from paradi se, had children and died. As in a crime report, the Bible is not interested in what happened after the forbidden fruit, and leaves out most of the detail that was transmitted in other ancient texts, which claimed to have come from Adam and Eve' s son Seth. Although thi s biographical tradition was not included when the canon of the Old Testament was establi shed around AD 100, it remained well known at least until the Reform ation. These non-canonical texts tell an adventurous and suggesti ve story well worth rediscovering. After the Fall , Eve repeatedl y asks Adam to kill her becau se she feels guilty. They decide instead to do penance by standing in the ri vers Jordan and Tigri s for many days without food. Miraculously, the ri vers stop flowing to help them. Lucifer tempts them once more, later explaining that he tried to harm them because God made him worship God 's own image in Adam. The remorseful Eve then walks away to the west on her own, but when she is about to give birth to Cain , she gets the sun, moon and stars to call Adam. The newborn Cain runs and fetches some herbs or reeds for hi s mother. Eve wants Adam to murder Cain because he has nearl y killed her in childbirth, but Adam refu ses, and Cain ends up slayi ng hi s brother Abel. Some 900 years later Adam realizes that he is dying - like birth, this is a new experience in the world. Seth fetches from paradi se some plants for Adam 's grave, which later gro w into the wood for the cross on which C hri st would die (the " Holy Rood", subject of many legends in its own right). Eve dies shortly afterwards, and at her request, Seth writes their life story down both on stone and clay tablets, so that they would survi ve fire and water. T his narrati ve was told and written down throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages in many different versions, and was translated from the Latin into nearl y all the vernacular languages spoken ac ross E urope from Ireland to Hungary, with the notable exception of the Iberian Peninsula. B rian Murdoch has written a comprehensive guide to the extant medieval variants. Previous generations of scholars would have attempted to reconstruct an original or best version of the Latin life story and judged each translation according to its fidelity - a futil e tas k in the face of such a di verse tradition. Murdoch instead takes the " new philological" approac h that is no w quite o ld and establi shed: every variatio n is equall y valid and noteworthy, and the instability of a text over time itself deserves attention. Rather than a Life of Adam and Eve, there are multiple Li ves, and they continue li ving and evolving. Medieval writers were not intent on preserving an orig inal , so much as on making it accessible to their particular audiences, even if that meant adapting the language, style or content of the sources . Like Adam and Eve, the author was dead without even havi ng been born. T he trouble with thi s new philology con-

A

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RELIGION

B E TTINA BILDHAUER Brian Murd o ch TH E A PO C R Y PH A L A D AM AN D E VE I N M E DIE VA L EU ROPE 292 pp. Oxford Uni versity Press. £50 (US $ 110). 978 019 956414 9

A twelfth-century fresco showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Gurk Cathedral, Austria cerns what to do with a text which, like the Life of Adam and Eve, has hundreds of variants. Editing even the most common versions would be a hugely time-co nsuming endeavour resulting in an un wieldy publication. Murdoch' s descripti ve approach, going through the versions one by one, language by language, summarizing each story in its difference from the others, is not very userfri endl y, either. It reads like an immensely erudite introduction to an edition - but without the edition. There is not enough detailed interpretation for those stud ying one or more of the particular versions, and not enough contextualization or reference to topics of wider interest for others. The reader is given little he lp in drawing out trends in the way certain elements of the story change or di sappear. The rudimentary index does not allow those interested in, say, the motif of Adam and Eve' s hair floating on the rivers, or in the different representations of Lucifer, to pick out the relevant passages. Another mi ssed opportunity is the inclusion of pictorial sources. Texts were not necessarily transmitted from one manuscript to another, but oral traditions and other media, especiall y images, influenced the way stories were remembered and altered. Although Murdoch di scusses some manuscript illustrations, there are no reproductions, not even on the cover. A collaborati ve electronic publishing project of the Li ves of Adam and Eve would be able not o nl y to show images, but also to reproduce different vernacular versio ns, with extensive comments. Searches for particular passages or words would be possible, and the different variants could be viewed side by side or individually - techniques to match the "every text is equal" theory. Such a publication might even inspire non-specialists to start their ow n explorations into Adam and Eve's neglected past and the world of medieval storytelling or theology .

The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu TLS D ECEM B E R I1 2 00 9

23

RELIGION

Peace in tillle or more than twenty years now, there has been no more adventurous, eclectic, original or provocative anglophone theologian than John Milbank. These days he occupies a respectable collegiate eyrie at the University of Nottingham , from which he presides - as both proud sire and eminence increasingly grise - over a transnational and rapidly ramifying movement called "Radical Orthodoxy"; but his first major appearance on the intellectual stage in 1990, with the publication of his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond secular reason, signalled something of a tectonic shift in the stable terrain of academic theology. In this sprawling, erudite and rather startling book, Milbank not only casually cast aside the reigning consensus in the field - that theology ought to accommodate itself as cheerfully as possible to the dominant discourses of modernity - but instigated a kind of counterinsurgency. In his reconstruction of the history of the secular age, and in his attempt to expose the secret logic informing it, Milbank persuasively argued that the social principles most of us take for granted today are nothing but the misbegotten offspring of the defective theologies of the late scholastic and early modern periods, and that secu larity itself, far from being some natural human condition that was gradually liberated from the irrational power of the sacred, has been from the first an ideological construct. He also argued that the modern order rests on premisses no less thoroughly metaphysical than those underpinning the older religious order of the West, and that social theory today is often just the sedative propaganda of all the most dehumanizing powers of the modern age: capital, the sovereign state, commodification, individualism, and so on. Thus the "rational neutrality" of secular reason has never been either neutral or, in any special sense, rational. Most provocatively of all, Milbank asserted that the metaphysics informing modernity and (more explicitly) postmodernity is nothing less than an "ontology of violence", which assumes that being itself is a kind of original aggression, barely contained by the secondary but necessary aggressions of political, social and even private life. Milbank's ideas have become so fixed a part of the theological landscape in recent years that it is difficult to recapture a sense of the sheer radicality of that initial challenge to so many of the polite compromises between Christian thought and secu lar reason, or any sense of the astonishment (and indignation) provoked by the buoyant temerity of his proposals. No one else at the time was willing to imagine, with anything like comparable zeal, a different modernity: the Christian modernity that might have been and that might yet be, an entire political and social grammar shaped by an "ontology of peace" that sees all of reality as a divine gift, and therefore as participating in an order of original charity. It was hardly inevitable, therefore, that quite so many young theologians would be drawn to Milbank's vision of things, or that his ideas would become as influential as they have, both within and beyond academia. And yet after two decades, as these two new volumes attest, Milbank is able to speak as one of the

F

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John Milbank

Augustine of Hippo

THE FUTURE OF LOVE Essays in political theology 382pp. Cascade Books. £25. 978 I 60608 1624

ALife HENRY CHADWICK

'Augustine's intellectual development is recounted with clarity and warmth ... Chadwick's deep scholarship is evident throughout this book.' Methodist Recorder 208 pages, Hardback 978-0-19-956830-7, £12.99

Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank THE MONSTROSITY OF CHRIST Paradox or dialectic? Edited by Creston Davis 4 16pp. MIT Press. £ 18.95 (US $27.95). 9780262012713

few recognized and genu inely indispensable voices in the current encounter between theology and the larger world of social, political and ethical thought. For the as yet uninitiated, The Future of Love - a generous collection of essays written between 1986 and 2006 - is by far the more suitable of the two books under review to read first, if only because of its synoptic breadth. The principal concern of these pieces is political (though it is hardly an exclusive concern), and taken together they form a fairly comprehensive survey of the guiding themes of Milbank' s thought on society, economics and community. He is a man of the Left, though of a fairly antique variety, and one that in most of its particulars is not immediately distinguishable from an equally antique style of conservatism. And really, given the heterogeneity of the sources he draws on, ideological label s are probably more distracting than helpful. One might, perhaps, describe his politics as a kind of "subsidiarist socialism", if such a thing is imaginable, infused with liberal dosings of distributism, Catholic social teaching, Marxism, anarchism and a kind of sacral monarchism, all embraced within a broader vision of human solidarity that is at every level sacramental. Milbank's general project in these essays is to try to imagine what it would truly mean to practise a politics that presupposes the real identity of being as such and goodness or peace, or an economics governed by the language of gift rather than that of rational self-interest, or social policy that assumes the inexhaustible power of charity to mediate differences between persons or peoples, precisely because God himself is the infinite plenitude of love in which all things participate. Milbank' s is a politics of original innocence, so to speak, which acknowledges the reality of evil and the limits set to every human endeavour, but which nonetheless regards all sin - all violence, discord and injustice - as an always secondary reality, a parasitic intrusion on a more primordial peace. If it is truly the Christian claim that all that exists, insofar as it exists, is essentially good, and a finite expression of the Good as such, then it must also truly be the case that human desire - social no less than personal - can be governed by the law of charity, and that charity can give real concrete shape to a corporate association of souls with a practical rationality all its own. And, while the full dimensions of such a politics are impossible to describe exhaustively, these essays provide

TLS DECEMBER II 2009

RELIGION FROM OXFORD

Faith and Its Critics A Conversation DAVID FERGUSSON

Based on the Gifford Lectures, Faith and its Critics examines the historical, social, and rhetorical context for the 'new atheism' and establishes a compelling case for the practical and theoretical validity of faith in the contemporary world. 208 pages, Hardback 978-0-19-956938-0, £16.99

John Henry Newman A Biography rAN KER

'the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of Newman available ... a work which invaluably contributes to an historically true and fundamentally honest understanding of one of the great thinkers of our age.' Simon Caldwell, Catholic Herald 784 pages, Hardback 978-0-19-956910-6, £30.00

Why Animal Suffering Matters Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics ANDREW LINZEY

'Unzey's book provides a fine introduction to why animal suffering matters_ It could, and arguably should. be utilised by universities, schools and laypeople alike.' Elisa Aaltola, Times Higher Education 220 pages, Hardback 978-0-19-537977-8, £19.99

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RELIGION

24 a fascinating series of parallel approaches. The Monstrosity of Christ, however, is the volume almost certainly destined to attract more attention, if only because of the combined celebrity of Milbank and S lavoj Zizek. The somewhat unsettling title of the book is borrowed from Hegel and refers principally to the perfect and (in one sense or another) unique coincidence in Christ of the divine and the human . The central question addressed by both thinkers is how this coincidence, and its historical effects, are to be understood: whether as the dialectical event that forever empties the fabulous divine transcendence of pre-Christian myth and metaphysics into the interminable immanence of a truly worldly existence, or as the paradoxical expression in time of a real and eternal divine transcendence in which all the contradictions of finite existence enjoy a "supereminent" harmony. Needless to say, the former course is taken by Zizek; the latter by M ilbank. It is difficult to assess The Monstrosity of Christ. Zizek owns the lion's share of the text, as he gets to state his case twice, in the first and third essays of the book, whi le M ilbank is limited to the admittedly substantial, but nonetheless isolated, second essay. The encounter between the two men is inherently interesting, though, and the points of convergence between them are often as striking as the irreconcilable differences. But any reader with a leaning towards the position of one of the two is likely to find his sympathy somewhat strai ned by the other. Both men tend

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towards the proli x and the hermetic, and each is capable of odd rhetorical mannerisms. If, moreover, one finds Zizek's habitual " method" somewhat tiresome - the vast historical judgements, the spasmodic lurches from one fragment of popular or high cu lture to another, the "daring" extremity of his formulations, the superficial scholarship - then one's patience may not be equal to the longueurs and repetitions of these pages. The terms of the conversation, I think it fair to say, favour M ilbank, simply because the argument he wants to advance can be

Religious Studies

held coherently in at least some possible world. Z izek's argument is a fairly conventional one by now: that Christianity is the ultimate religion precisely because it puts an end to the religious; the death of God upon the cross is the end of any God "beyond" the purely temporal and material play of contingency and difference, and an overcoming of the al ienation between "matter" and " spirit" ; and the final historical vocation of Christianity is an ethics devoid of the metaphysical supports and expectations of the past, coldly committed to particular acts of justice amid the un mediated and unmediable ambiguities of the ever-changing present. Now, as a purely historical observation that Christianity has proved to be the religion most corrosive of religion, and so most subversive of even its own religious expressions - this is all quite harmless. But no ethos can be attached to such an observation. Without the grounds of a genuine affinity between persons, some real shared participation in the ontological Good, all "ethical" commitments are arbitrary, elective and tedious in their obvious untruth. Zizek does attempt to support his case with readings from Christian sources, but here he is simply out of his depth. He offers an interpretation of Christian confessional history - laying out Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholici sm and Protestantism as distinct dialectical stages - which is conceptually and factually absurd. His reading of Meister Eckhart, in which he places great store, is demonstrably false. And , in his

appropriation of G. K. Chesterton - in whose writings he clearly delights - he transforms Chesterton's most interesting paradoxes into dialectical banalities. This is where Milbank's position is unassail ably the stronger of the two. Whether one agrees with him on most points or not, one must at least grant that his understanding of the event of Christ in history preserves both sides of the Christological " monstrosity" in a way that can bear real conceptual and practical fruit. For Milbank, the paradox of the cross is the revelation in time of the real order of being, in which the infinite and the finite are always already reconciled in the mystery of self-outpouring charity; its dynam ic is not that of the exhaustion of transcendence, but the glorious exchange that occurs within a love that at once abases itself and exalts the beloved. Thus, according to Christian belief, all discords, subsisting as they do in the prior harmony of real being, can always be mediated into concord again. Accordingly, one can - at least analogously - possess some real knowledge of others that allows for shared grammars of communion and shared moral structures. From such an ontology, surely a genuine politics can be drawn. Or, if not, then from a Christian standpoint no politics is worth the effort to begin with. In any event, the appearance of these two volumes is a happy occasion . Taken together, they bear plenteous witness to one of the richest and most fascinating theological minds active today.

••• •• ••• • •••• • •••• Seei ng Things

lK! lHflllH If

TARIQ RAMADA

PSALMS

THEIR WAY

III CHRJST

The Theology of Tariq Ramadan

Praying the Psalms in Christ

Seeing Things Their Way

Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans

Rowan Williams

A Catholic Perspective Gregory Baum

Laurence Kriegshauser, O.S.B.

Intellectual History and the Return of Religion

ISBN 978-0-268-03893-9 $25 .00 I £20 .50 paperback

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Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism

Hidden Holiness Michael Plekon FOREWORD BY

"Recent years have seen a great resurgence of interest in the saints-not as legendary heroes or heavenly patrons, but as spiritual companions and models of faithfulness .... [This is] a profound, ecumenically rich reflection on the meaning of sainthood in our time." -ROBERT ELLSBERG,

author of All Saints

~~

Available in the US and its dependencies only

"[D]escribes with great sympathy Ramadan's place as a reformist Muslim who opposes literalists on one side and liberals on the other.... Baum should be admired for his wellmeaning effort to enter into conversation with Ramadan."

-First Things

"Many will profitably read Laurence Kriegshauser, aSB 's Praying the Psalms in Christ from cover to cover, but many more will gratefully consult it for its learned and lection divina exposition."

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Alister Chapman, John Coffey, AND Brad S. Gregory ISBN 978-0-268-02298-3 $38 .00 I £30 .50 paperback

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Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America

Augustine and the Cure of Souls

ED ITED BY

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Frances Hagopian

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Princeton University

a Classical Ideal

Paul R. Kolbet

" In this insightful and lucid study Kolbet leads his readers across the boundaries of ancient philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and theology. He examines the ancient practice of the 'cure of the soul' and charts its Christian appropriation by Augustine."

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St. Michael's College

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Revising

THE

UNIVERSITY

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NOTRE DAME PRESS

25

RELIGION

Prison cell or safe haven? heology needs its saints - Protestant theology too. The foremost Protestant saint of recent times is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was the boy wonder of church opposition to the Nazis before joining the secret service plot to assassinate Hitler, for which he was imprisoned in 1943 and executed in 1945. The books that he wrote before his arrest are earnest, pious, politically engaged and orthodox. But there is a potential problem. In prison he wrote a series of letters and notes which seem to outline a new and unorthodox approach to theology. His theological development was determined by the influence of his elder contemporary Karl Barth, who denounced liberal Protestantism as a flabby bourgeois muddle, and launched a taut new Protestant movement, based in a robust ecclesiology. Young Bonhoeffer concurred, especially when many German theologians fell in with the new Nazi ideology. Of course the Church had to assert its distinctiveness from surrounding culture, since that culture was rotten. But part of Bonhoeffer recoiled from this influence. Once he was imprisoned, another side of him burst forth. He started sketching a total critique of religious subculture. Maybe "religion" is a skin that Christianity must shed, he said, if it is to appeal beyond a small conservative constituency. Maybe, in a world "come of age", Christianity must find an entirely new form , become "religionless". Whatever he meant by this included criticism of institutional orthodoxy, clerical authority and dogmatic theology (including Barth's version). He was suggesting that Protestantism must rethink itself completely. These reflections excited various theologians around 1960, and contributed to a sense of a new liberal dawn for theology. Barth was dismayed: he regretted the publication of Letters and Papers from Prison , calling the work " immature". But he was behind the times - or was he? Soon a massive reaction against theological liberalism began, which is still with us. The alliance of neo-orthodoxy and postmodernism swept all before it. For a while, Bonhoeffer studies went relatively quiet. But theology needs its saints. And so a revisionist reading began, which downplayed his radical-liberal turn - or rather, denied it. Thus Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the practice of nonviolence (2004): "Bonhoeffer' s work from beginning to end was the attempt to reclaim the visibility of the church as the necessary condition for the proclamation of the gospel" . Didn't he become critical of the Church , and in some sense pro-secular? "The exact opposite is the case", Hauerwas contended. "He is insisting that if in fact reality is redeemed by Christ, Christians must claim the center, refusing to use the ' world' s' weakness to make the gospel intelligible." Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in troubled times , by Jeffrey C. Pugh, is part of this revisionist movement. It insists that Bonhoeffer's thought was all of a piece, and devoted to sharpening the witness of the Church, as a community distinct from the world. There is plenty of evidence to this effect from his pre-prison writings, but, as his

T

THEO HOBSON Jeffrey C. Pugh RELlGIONLESS CHRISTIANITY Dietrich Bonhoetfer in troubled times 171 pp. T. & T. Clark. £ 16.99 (US $24.95). 978056703259 1

Paul D. Janz THE COMMAND OF GRACE A new theological apologetics 190pp. T. & T. Clark. £22.99 (US $34.95). 9780567 03359 8

title suggests, Pugh wants to focus on the famous "prison concepts". By "the world come of age", Bonhoeffer meant a culture that had learnt to function without religious explanations or religious authority; he urged that Christians accept this new reality, and learn a new sort of preaching that comes across as good news rather than reactionary negation. Pugh briefly acknowledges this, but then loads "the world come of age" with a more sinister aura: it is modernity at its arrogant, ideological worst, it is the manipulation of rationality by secular power. He uses Bonhoeffer's pre-prison writings to show that he was a critic of such ideologies, which are with us still, and reflected in phenomena such as turbo-capitalism and the War on Terror. "In fact", Pugh suggests, "the ' world come of age' that we are creating is fashioning a fascist architecture of the soul in the service to [sic] abstractions like state and economics that take certain concrete forms , most often secured by violence." Pugh thus twists Bonhoeffer' s phrase away from its original purpose. The phrase "religion less Christianity" is similarly twisted, by the claim that Bonhoeffer's pre-prison writing holds the key to its interpretation. What he really meant to commend, says Pugh, is a Christianity purged of worldly ideology, and purely rooted in "the community of faith". Bonhoeffer "was not able to flesh this out because of his untimely death", but what he meant was that the Eucharist is the antidote to all false ideology: "The religion less Christian becomes at the table of the supper truly catholic, shaped and formed by participation in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ" . In seeking to clean Bonhoeffer up as a neoorthodox fellow traveller, Pugh does shocking violence to his subject. One of Bonhoeffer's most famous prison remarks is central to Paul D. Janz' s thesis in The Command of Grare: A new theologiral apologetics. Just as he was beginning to ponder religionless Christianity, Bonhoeffer sharply distanced himself from Barth's dogmatic approach to theology, which only offered a "positivism of revelation". By this phrase Bonhoeffer seems to have meant an enclosed system, divorced from the world of experience. This is indeed the key fault of Barth's theology, says Janz, who is Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at King's College London. And he argues that all major subsequent trends in theology have echoed it. Theology has become "tauto-theology",

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, London, 1939 meaning that it is complacently tautological , content to recite its own grammar. Theology must snap out of this inward turn; because of the Incarnation, it must look " nowhere else than to the world of real embodied life to engage with the revealed reality of God". It must develop a new apologetic boldness, for "theology in its fullness cannot be something fundamentally or exclusively philological, indeed not even something fundamentally doctrinal". Janz is fully aware of Barth ' s case against apologetics, in the sense of a discourse that tries to persuade us in general terms that religion, abstracted from the specifics of Christianity, might be worth hearing about. Such an approach will distort Christianity on a Procrustean bed of secular reason. What Janz offers is a "theological apologetics" , meaning that it always speaks from within a faith commitment, but also that it is directed outwards; it aims to reflect on God's presence in the world. After much methodological ado, The Command of Grace reflects on the relationship between faith and reason. Barth ' s theology is so hostile to apologetics in principle that it is unable to reflect on this relationship. It declares that faith is a new sort of rationality that responds to the fact of God's self-revelation, and marches swiftly on to the task of expounding the content of faith. But this is evasive of the human context of faith, says Janz: we must reflect on how this alternative perception is acquired. And he proceeds to offer an explanation. Rationality, on his model, is composed of the "cognitive intellect" and the "motive and desiring intellect", which is close to Kant's "practical reason". To think about a glass of water is one thing; to think about a glass of water because you are desperately thirsty is another. The biblical God is only knowable to the latter side of rationality, specifically as a sense of obligation, as the hearing of a command. Cognitive reason takes a back seat, which it finds uncomfortable. It wants to know whether this decision to obey God' s call is justified; but it cannot. All it can do is seek to make sense of the decision that has been made. Janz cites Kierkegaard: revelation is not a conceptual communication but


an "existence communication". This is a good Protestant account of faith and reason, unafraid of sailing close to fideism , and rightly presenting faith as a response to authority. It is just a shame that it is confined to the last section, for only determined readers will make it through the dense verbosity of the first half. This apologetics is unapologetically difficult, reader-unfriendly. Another problem is that Janz repeatedly cites Bonhoeffer, giving the vague impression that his own thesis is in tune with that of the saintly radical , but this is hard to assess, for no clear account of Bonhoeffer's thought is given, and the awkward matter of the prison "turn" is not discussed. Janz' s book is part of a wider project, or movement, called Transformation Theology, involving two other theologians from King's (it seems a belated Protestant response to the mainly Anglo-Catholic Radical Orthodoxy movement). It talks of liberating theology from its abstract dogmatic confines, relating it more fully to the world. If it were serious about this, it would spurn academic discourse in order to tell us, with some urgency, what Christianity is for us today. This is how Protestantism renews itself, at a distance from the academy. And this is now more needful than ever, for the academy has become a sort of safe haven in which Protestantism can eruditely evade the embarrassingly large questions at its core the sort of questions Bonhoeffer asked in that cell.

Nov 2009 • 978-0-674-03555-3 • £18.95

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26

ECONOMICS

Reykjavik, Iceland, November 8, 2008: protesters call for the government to resign and for banks to be more open about the country's financial crisis

Fish stocks up, bank stocks down n the summer of 1973, fresh from university, I was posted to the Foreign Office desk covering the Nordic countries, Austria and the Holy See. It was an eccentric combination, which seemed to derive from a valiant but failed attempt by the personnel department to recall the list of countries then part of the European Free Trade Association. I expected a calm twelve months, before being posted abroad. That comfortable expectation was soon dashed, as the second Cod War between the United Kingdom and Iceland began to escalate when Icelandic gunboats cut the nets of Grimsby trawlers. The Royal Navy was dispatched to interpose itself between the gunboats and the trawlers - a task for which sophisticated frigates were singularly illequipped. The public relations consequences for Britain were predictably negative. The conflict was universally seen as plucky Iceland defending its ancestral fish stocks against an imperialist aggressor. I recalled this experience on a visit to Reykjavik, at the invitation of the Icelandic financial regulators, in January 2005. My hosts smiled indulgently at these reminiscences from a bygone age before Iceland had

the precise terms of cross-border deposit protection schemes in the European Economic Area. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling concluded, on the basis of a conversation with his Icelandic opposite number, that Iceland was about to renege on its undertakings to British depositors, and closed the branches of Icelandic Banks in London, using anti-terrorist legislation, an action which precipitated the collapse of three-quarters of their banking system. The Icelandic government has since released a

widely cited as vivid proof of two contentions. The first is that it is no longer possible for large international banks to be headquartered in small jurisdictions, where the authorities lack the financial weight to provide liquidity to the banking system in times of stress. In early 2008 the total assets of the three banks was almost eleven times the Icelandic GDP. In relation to liabilities of that size, the Governor of the Central Bank, the former Prime Minister David Odsson, was seen in the markets as a man of straw. That contention has obvious consequences for other countries, notably for Ireland and perhaps for both Switzerland and the UK. The scale of the support packages in the latter two countries, though technically sustainable, will put severe pressure on government borrowing in the future. The second contention is that the construction of the European single financial market is fundamentally flawed. As a member of the European Economic Area, Iceland is part of the single market, though of course it is not a member of the European Union. In the EEA a bank authorized in anyone country can transact business in all the others, without reference to the local regulators. Yet there is no central European financial regulator, or

hecome a postmodern economy_ At that time

transcript of the telephone conversation which

fiscal authority with the resources to stand

they could afford to smile. The country was riding high. Icelandic investors were gearing up for an assault on the British high street; their banks were expanding overseas at a great rate. The Kr6na was dramaticall y high. A glimpse at the bill at the Blue Lagoon Resort was more of a shock to the system than the walk across the ice in swimming trunks to a steaming black pool heated by a geyser. Three and a half years later, in October 2008, the two countries were again at odds, this time not over cod but over the more arcane - though equally slippery - subject of

led Darling to this conclusion. It is printed in full in Roger Boyes's book Meltdown Iceland. In detail it does not support the construction Darling put upon it. Both he and Gordon Brown would be unwise to consider Iceland as the location for the long holiday they will deserve after the next general election. Yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Iceland was ultimately unable to deliver support on the scale needed. Liquidity was draining away from the banking system, and the authorities were unable to stem the flow. The Icelandic meltdown has already been

behind a bank subject to a run on its liabilities. This experience has convinced most members of the European Union, though not so far the UK government, of the need for more central authority to oversee the European financial system. It has certainly convinced many people in Iceland that for a country of that scale to run a separate currency and separate monetary policy in today's markets is no longer sustainable, and that they therefore need to join the Euro area. Boyes's account of the meltdown adds colour to this analysis. He sees the long per-

I

HOW ARD DA VIES Roger Boyes MELTDOWN ICELAND How the global financial crisis bankrupted an entire country

246pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £12.99. 978 1 4088 0233 5

Armann Thorvaldsson FROZEN ASSETS How I lived Iceland's boom and bust

266pp. Wiley.£16.99. 9780470749548


sonal dispute between Odsson and .Ion Asgeir Johannesson, the founder of the Baugur group - the most aggressive and acquisitive Icelandic corporation - as central to the tale. Those economists who have published their assessments of the crisis have not so far drawn the same conclusion. Boyes also draws somewhat fanciful , if entertaining, lessons from Iceland's past. Armann Thorvaldsson, a bit-part player as Chief Executive of Kaupthing, Singer and Friedlander, the UK subsidiary of Kaupthing Bank, does not figure in Boyes's tale. Singer and Friedlander was a marginal investment bank in the City of London. Thorvaldsson rightly says that it had long been regarded with some suspicion by the UK Financial Services Authority, before it was taken over by Kaupthing, and that Icelandic management improved both its business and its regulatory compliance. That may be so, though the point is now moot. We shall never know whether the assets they acquired in the boom years would have yielded a respectable long-term return. Thorvaldsson reveals himself to be a man largely preoccupied by childish pranks in the office, and vulgar excess outside it. The bank was involved in successful deals, many of them featuring .lohannesson and the British billionaire Philip Green. But Frozen Assets ultimately reinforces the impression that some very ordinary people earned some very extraordinary rewards in the early years of this century. Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir, the unholy trinity of Icelandic banks, will not be missed, and it will be difficult in future for Icelanders to present themselves as simple, hardy folk struggling to survive on their volcanic rock. A new Icelandic saga which portrays them as victims of unsympathetic Scots is in draft in Reykjavik, but its overseas market will be small.

SCIENCE he argument is still made that humans are not mainly responsible for the disturbing changes that are happening to the climate, but this has become quaint scientifically (even if defenders of the consensus in the University of East Anglia recently embarrassed themselves in their attempts to head off the inquiries of sceptics). It is far from clear, however, whether there is a significant risk that man-made climate change might become irreversible in the foreseeable future , as lames Lovelock (in The Vanishing Face of Gaia , reviewed in the TLS, April 24, 2009) envisages so pessimistically. If Lovelock has exaggerated the threat and there is still time for a solution, it is not at all obvious what would be the most technically efficient means to bring the problem under control. Less clear still is how it will be possible to obtain binding international political agreement on what action to take and when. We are changing the world so that it is becoming far less hospitable for our descendants than it has been for us. We have burnt fossil fuels so fast that carbon dioxide is now acting like a blanket in the atmosphere, increasing the average world temperature. This process began during the Industrial Revolution, but has increased worldwide so that China now emits even more greenhouse gases than does the United States, although much of China's pollution comes from manufacturing products to be exported to the US and to Europe. The increase in average temperature during the past hundred years has occurred at a greater rate than in any previous century. The effects are many, but unevenly spread. Many of the most highly populated parts of the world are not much above sea level. Global warming is causing sea levels to rise partly because water expands as it warms. As the world warms, a lot of ice is already melting, but this is mainly floating on the sea and so the level of the sea does not rise much. As ice on the land, mainly in Greenland and Antarctica, also melts, the sea level will rise and thus flood low-lying land. Mumbai , and much of Bengal, as well as many other lowlying cities and islands will be in danger. This would be the most severe effect of global warming in the medium term. The cost of this will be enormous, in human suffering, and as a cause of conflict, as well as in financial terms. Prompt action to avoid this would be a unique bargain, if the hard details can be agreed legally next year to firm up commitments that should be made at the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen this month. Prevention , as never before, is better than cure. In the run-up to the conference, both rich and poor countries seem to agree that the former will pay for most of the cost of reducing the use of carbon for energy produc-

T

tion. Poor countries are using far less energy

per person than is the developed world. In the long run, rough equality of energy use may be a necessary condition for a solution that is acceptable to all. It seems unlikely, however, that this can be agreed during the present negotiations. If agreement on effective action is long delayed, the problems will be far harder, if not impossible, to resolve. In A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, the economist Nicholas Stern argues for stronger measures to counteract climate change than he did in his review for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2006. Stern now aims for the

Time for answers JOHN GODFREY Nicholas Stern A BLUEPRINT FOR A SAFER PLANET How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity 246pp. Bodley Head. £16.99. 978 I 847920379

Anthony Giddens THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 264pp. Polity. £50 (paperback, £ 12.99). 9780745646930

William H. Calvin GLOBAL FEVER How to treat climate change

337pp. University of Chicago Press. $22.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £11.50. 9780226092046

Al Gore OUR CHOICE A plan to solve the climate crisis

415pp. Bloomsbury. £16.99. 9780747590989

David J. C. MacKay SUSTAINABLE ENERGY Without the hot air

368pp UIT Cambridge. £45 (paperback, £19.99). 9780954452933

stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million , rather than the 550 of his earlier review. This seems to him the best that is politically feasible in the near term, despite the memorandum from a recent meeting of twenty Nobel Laureate scientists calling for a more demanding climate deal. Stern makes a compelling economic case that the cost of inaction would be far higher than the cost of taking measures to prevent world temperatures from rising substantially. He believes that carbon capture and storage is the most urgent of a list of actions that are needed, as about half the world's electricity is still derived from burning coal. Beyond this he thinks that financial help to poorer countries to bring an end to deforestation would constitute good value; as would the sharing of strategies for the cleaner production of energy. His book is written with the clear purpose of guiding the climate conference in Copenhagen this month, and it deserves to be a keystone of any effective agreement that is reached. A nthony Giddens advocates yet more urgent action, but with less optimism. The Politics of Climate Change proposes that individual countries should take policy measures now, with prompt agreements between key nations, above all between the USA and China, rather than wait for the more ponderous UN. He fears that people will not accept the need to bear the cost of action until the climate has deteriorated enough to affect them directly, and that by then it will be too late. The electoral cycle in democracies inevitably leads politicians to concentrate on the problems people face in the short term. Of Stern's

earlier report Giddens writes: "Extraordinarily, there is no mention of politics in Stern's discussion, no analysis of power, or of the tense nature of international relations. It is as if the 'global deal' will be reached as soon as the world sees reason" . Giddens also criticizes the Green political movement's approach to climate change. "Global warming is not simply an extension of more traditional forms of industrial pollution; it is qualitatively different. Scientists, and scientists alone have directed attention to it, since it is not visible in the way London smogs were, or smoke-stack pollution is." He cogently argues that the core meaning of the precautionary principle is "better safe than sorry" but that its opposite, "he who hesitates is lost", is more appropriate for the risktaking that is now essential. We may have to embrace nuclear energy, and wind farms in attractive countryside, even if they are objectionable to many. William H. Calvin, in Global Fever, champions the advantages of geothermal energy; of capturing heat to generate electricity from rocks, mainly granite, about four kilometres below the surface. Over much of the earth, very hot dry rock can be reached by drilling less deeply than is already possible with techniques that are in use for oil extraction. Water would be pumped down one borehole, filter through fractures in the hot rock, and come up at a very high temperature, through a second or third hole drilled nearby. A pilot for this idea is now under planning review in Cornwall, using a novel drilling technique to reach hot granite deep below the surface. The project is for electricity to sell to the national grid, and for spare heat to be free for the local community. Another approach is the use of wave energy to bring cooler water to the surface layer of the ocean from well below it. The uppermost water has already had its nutrients depleted by the recent growth of plankton, so if it is replenished, the marine plant life could become more productive again. This would trap carbon dioxide, so as to counteract global warming. As a bonus, it would also encourage an increase in the quantity of fish that could be caught for human consumption. A hotter earth would mean less reliable agriculture, with greater emphasis needed on plants, rather than farm animals as a source of food. Meat is more extravagant to produce than vegetables from an ecological point of view, and will become increasingly expensive to import as demand in China and elsewhere goes up. Fish and shellfish are the only alternative first-class protein foods and could be available in greater quantity if breeding stocks are allowed to recover from gross over-exploitation. Al Gore's Our Choice is highly political and is bound to divide opinion in the United States. He clearly intended to awaken his domestic public to the importance of present and future change in the climate, and he writes lucidly, with many helpful , and often beautiful , illustrations. He gives a sympathetic account of a wide range of possible renewable power sources, and suggests how they could be integrated by the development


27 of a "smart" grid system. He is clearly sceptical about too much reliance on nuclear power, and is an admirably well-informed advocate for Green environmental options. Gore bravely faces the question of human reproduction. Realizing that an increasing population makes solving the climate problem even more difficult, he recommends the better education of girls; the social and political empowerment of women; the improvement in the chances of a child surviving; and the ability of women to determine the number and spacing of their offspring. He avoids discussion of China's harsh regulation of family size, or of what, less draconian, regulation might be necessary and acceptable. A weakness of this radical approach is that it might well encourage a partisan view of the climate problems in his country. Definitively to lose the support of the political Right would be a major obstacle to general acceptance that these problems are real. Without this acceptance, they cannot be tackled consistently with the changes of government that, in democracies, are inevitable. David l. C. MacKay is a breath of fresh air. His Sustainable Energy is logical , hardheaded and quantitative. It is also a model of clarity and good humour. This book must have been studied closely by Ed Miliband, the Minister for Energy and Climate Change, who has made its author his chief scientific adviser. MacKay gives an assessment of options rather than directly advocating particular action. All the same, the reader is led towards certain conclusions. Although much more renewable energy is essential, it will not be enough for our needs. Wind power will be important but because wind is unreliable, the power must be stored for use when it doesn't blow. Pumping water uphill to store above a dam for later use to generate electricity would solve this problem. Domestic solar panels are worthwhile, but heat pumps to bring low-grade heat into buildings will be more important. We could import electricity in quantity from sunnier places, given cooperation by Libya and Algeria for large areas of solar panels in their deserts. The potential for this is huge, but it would be foolish to rely on it too much. We will in any case need much greater capacity to distribute electricity from a wide range of future sources, as electricity will be the main energy source for transport and heating for the foreseeable future, and demand will inevitably fluctuate. MacKay's argument is that "green" energy will not be enough, and that planning for a roughly tenfold increase in nuclear generation is essential, and should be started promptly. His arithmetic is easy to follow , because he, uniquely, uses the same units consistently, so that different proposals can be understandably compared. Together these hooks outline the known practical means that could be used to limit global heating promptly, in the first instance mainly by cleaning up the continuing use of coal , and by the steadily increasing use of existing alternatives such as nuclear fission; then, in the longer run, by moving beyond this to the exploitation of the virtually unlimited energy to be had from hot rocks, sunlight, wind well offshore, and perhaps also from nuclear fusion. Surely a solution, essential for our continuing life on earth, is not beyond the wit of man, nor even the wealth of nations?

POETRY

28

After the lock, the louse I

DAVID NOKES

n 1937, W. H. Auden was modest about hi s claims to immortality, observing, in hi s Letter to Lord Byron: Parnassus after all is not a mountain Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you; It' s got a park, it' s got a public fountain. The most 1 ask is leave to share a pew

With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do: To pasture my few silly sheep with Dyer

Peter Pindar LAUGHING AT THE KING Selected poems

Edited by Fenella Copplestone 91 pp. Fyfield Books. Paperback, £ 12.95. 978 I 857549379

And picnic on the lower slopes with Prior.

Samuel Cottam and Edwin Bradford, two early twentieth-century homosexual clergymen, whispered occasional verses from their vicarages in the home counties; but in the eighteenth century it wasn't hard to turn out acceptable public verse. We can see this in the works of half the fifty-two poets collected by Johnson for his Lives of the Poets: Hammond, Stepney and Dyer, Pomfret, Yalden and Prior all had their readers at the time. The Fyfield imprint of Carcanet Press has performed acts of literary revivalism for Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith and Thomas Chatterton, and they are followed by the present volume of satires by Peter Pindar. Pindar was the pseudonym of John Wolcot (1738- 1819) who, qualified as doctor and clergyman, served as part of the governor' s retinue in Jamaica, before returning to England and beginning to write satires. He was almost fifty when he published the first Canto of The Lousiad, a mock-heroic poem in the manner of Pope' s Rape of the Lock, lampooning an incident at court when George Ill, discovering a louse on his plate, ordered all the royal cooks to be shaved.

Pindar achieved instant success and continued in the same vein, producing further cantos of The Lousiad and other satires which have the freshness and bite of familiar wit. These were the years of American Independence and of Revolution in France, a time when the King himself was subject to assassination attempts; yet Pindar's tone, though sharp, is benign: the attempt on the King's life, he notes, was only that of "a poor innocent insane woman" who held up "a small Knife" to show him her petition. He makes it clear that we are reading a mock-heroic work by decorating his homely subject with allusions to Homer, Virgil and Pope; not "Arm a virumque cano" but "The Louse I sing" ; not "What dire Offence from am ' rous Causes springs" but, What dire emotions shook the Monarch's soul!

Just like two Billiard-balls his Eyes ' gan roll. The poetry is enlivened by descriptions of relations between the royal family at table and the below-stairs world of cooks, scourers and turnbroches, fifty-one in number, who are all to be shaved in retribution for the

John Wolcot ("Peter Pindar") by Waiter Stephens Lethbridge, 1817 appearance of the offending louse. The king dines on turkey and ham but, down below, both meals and metaphors are humbler: " Such is the sound (the simile' s not weak), / Form ' d by what mortals Bubble call and Squeak" . Pindar adds a footnote, pointing out that his bubble and squeak simile is both

" more natural and more sublime" than Homer' s black-pudding in the Odyssey. Pindar reproduces the "What, what?" trick of speech that served Nigel Hawthorne so well in The Madness of King George, but the most successful piece of mimicry is his exaggerated parody of the accent of Mistress of the Robes, Madame Schwellenberg, whispering to George, "Mine God, Ser, nebber fear" . At the end, the upstart Louse himself rises to address the monarch, apologizing for, but justifying, his unwarranted intrusion; "who's without ambition? / Who does not wish to better his condition?". Pindar certainly bettered his condition with the poem, out-selling most of his contemporaries. His anthology Pindariana, including pastorals and sentimental odes, was printed in a run of 45 ,000; he even tried his hand at a tragedy, The Fall of Portugal, which fortunately remained unacted. His talent remained what it always had been, for poking fun at the royal court. In his Birthday Ode for 1787, he recounts a royal visit to Whitbread's brewery where his detailed knowledge of the king' s questions ("Is there no cheaper stuff? where doth it dwell? / Would not Horse-aloes bitter it as well?") would seem to offer a prescription for later royal tours. The text is nicely printed, but one wonders if there might not have been slightly more annotation. How many people might be expected to know that January 30 was the date of the execution of Charles I? Or that the Calf s Head was the name of a club set up to ridicule his memory? Asked by a lady whether he had been a good subject of George 1II, Pindar is reported to have said he didn ' t know, "but I do know the King has been a devilish good subject for me".

----------------------------------------------------~.-----------------------------------------------------

Two poems in memory ofMick Imlah The poems below appear in the latest issue of Oxford Poetry, which is a memorial issue for Mick Imlah, Poetry editor of the TLS until his death earlier this year. The issue includes previously unpublished poems by Imlah as well as poems and prose by Alan Hollinghurst, James Campbell, Bernard 0 ' Donoghue, Andrew Motion, David Norbrook, Andrew McNeillie and others. (Oxford Poetry, Magdalen College, Oxford OXl 4AU ; or see the link on the TLS website.)

At the Kerb Grief to bestow, where once they bestowed their beauty, Who are these mourners processing to the grave, Each bearing a history like a precious ointment And tender on their sleeves the wounds of love?

Brutal disease has numbered him a victim, As if some unmarked car had appeared one day And snatched him off to torture and confinement, Then dumped him by the kerbside and sped away;

As if they stooped now at the kerb to lift the body, As if they broke the jars and the unguent flowed, Flowed down the sleeves and wounds, ran down the kerbstones, Grief to bestow what beauty once bestowed.

JAMES FENTON

Two Words Every green June you were bound To get your seventy or better. Your body stood sentry, begetter Of deep fours on opponents' ground. Or over frosty turf, squeezed by Your stubborn spent opponents, stopped, Dodged two defenders, dropped Down between wooden posts: try! You were bound to swerve out front, Ever opportune. To see Your round toe out, just so! We Burned to observe your deep dropped punt. Better, words were up your street. Poetry offered you effrontery Of purpose, sunbursts of energy. Poetry swept you off your feet. Doors open. Due events bore us. Beds of roses ; beds of woe. Odds, betted on, prove to be so, Goddesses born to swoon before us.


But now your future refused your quest, Wrote on your body: "Return to Sender." You vowed never to surrender, Never to be repossessed. Not to deny, no, but to defy Stressed underpowered neurones, To defy torture, defy bones Too soon fettered, defy good-bye. Were you owed your needed joy? Too soon your present fortune drowned, Gone now, gone underground, Not now to return, poor hoy. For us, no doubt, our sorrow sends You on, our forerunner. We Utter our tender nonsense, free For now of our own unprosperous ends. Need we protest our story ' s never To be endured or be enjoyed? Two words prove to be destroyed, Two sweet words, now gone for ever.

JOHN FULLER

BIOGRAPHY hile Fran90is Mauriac may at times have been eclipsed by the more fashionable Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Andre Malraux , he has never ceased to provoke interest and to invite analysis. In 1952 he was awarded the Nobel JOHN FLOWER Prize for Literature in recognition of the intense, and often unremittingly bleak, anaJean-Luc Barre lysis of human relationships that he pursued FRAN

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